The pattern in the Mount, and other sermons

Contents

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I. — The Pattern in the Mount, i

II.— Human Spirit and Divine Inspiration, . 17

I. The Pattern In The Mount

" Look that thou make them after the pattern that was showed thee in the mount." — Ex. xxv. 40.

THIS occurs in the course of a lesson that the Lord was giving Moses on architecture. The tabernacle was not yet built. This lesson had primary reference to the tabernacle and its furniture. Moses when he went down from God on Sinai knew what he was going to build and how he was going to build it. The tabernacle was with him already a fact, a mental fact — as real a thing to him then, I suppose, as it was afterward when it stood out upon the plain a palpable affair of rams' skins, goats' hair, and shittimwood. The thought of a thing, the conception of it, is its first half and largest half. It is easier to pour in the molten iron than to make in the sand the mould into which it is to be poured. In the idea, the tabernacle was already finished and furnished. He had now only to go on and set up upon the ground in forms of wood, linen, and metal, the structure that in his mind was already forecast and divinely complete.

This will yield two or three lessons that will serve us practically. I want, in the first place, to say something generally about plan and pattern and purpose — " Look that thou make them after the pattern that was showed thee in the mount. " It is not so clear how God drew for Moses the design and workingplans for the tabernacle. The story only lets us know that he went down from God with a definite notion of what was to be done and how he was to do it. He did nothing till his plan was clear and ripe. He did not go to work at random and let a purpose develop from experiment. He planned from his work, and worked from his plan. This lets me say something broadly about plans, and about plans of life. As I look through Scripture I discover that the men who did the best work and the most of it, first wrought out in thought what they were afterward going to work out in act and word. Noah, Moses, Solomon, Jesus, the Baptist, Paul, are examples in point. The Creator himself wrought out first His creative designs. In that sense the world is as old as God. When at the end of the first week He said, "All very good," He meant by it that things had now become in fact what they had first and forever been in idea. " Let us make man in our image," permits us to overhear God drafting His design of the man that was to be. All good work is the execution of plan, somebody's plan.

Nothing, perhaps, comes nearer God's workmanship in this respect than art ; hence our habit of speaking of the creations of art. The painter puts on canvas what has first been a live fact in his own thought. Beauty is prior to the brush. Canvas is the convenience of the layman, not the exigency of the artist. Paint is the accident of beauty, not its substance. I want we should be familiar with the fact that reality is prior to the shows it makes of itself, whether in fine twined linen, brick, or pigment. The painter works from his pattern. The more complete the inner picture, the more perfect may be the outer. In other arts it is so. Music is the expression in score and in sound of a prior music that has no relation to ear or staff. Raphael's picture represents St. Cecilia as entranced by the music that is inaudible. Every musician, so far forth, must first be a St. Cecilia. The modern architect, like the one on Sinai, sees the building he is going to construct before the timber has been cut or the ground broken. Gerard von Rile, six hundred years ago, saw the cathedral which has just been completed beside the Rhine at Cologne. Slowly since the year 1200, German artisans have been copying into stone Von Rile's thought, working from his plan, and the cathedral is perfect to-day because it was perfect then.

All that God does is in prosecution of a plan, an eternal idea come to utterance. The tree ripens to the grade of a purpose that was ripe before the tree, and before the Third Day. It is all one whether we say that the plan is deposited in the seed, or that God builds the plant each moment against the pattern of His thought, as the mason lays bricks close to the plumb-line. It all sums up into the same result. There are no planless seeds, no purposeless scions. They follow a plan. Nature works from a copy.

With such examples of pattern and purpose before us, I want to go on and say that there are at least three advantages that come from having a plan in our life and work, and working and living from that plan. One is, that in an open field and with a long prospect our purposes will lay themselves out in a larger and wiser proportion than when framed at close quarters and at the dictation of momentary impulse. Men do better things and work at a higher level when they coolly determine what they are going to do, than when they let daily circumstances determine it for them piecemeal. It is safer to work by calculation than by caprice, and if it is not one it will be the other. A man is better and wiser in the long reach of his thought than in the short reach. A poor penman will make a long stroke more gracefully than he will a short one. We think better long thoughts and purposes than short ones. We can more easily take our direction to the next village when we are on the hill than down in the hollow. Men get lost in the woods because there is no room for a long look. We substitute by the sun or the compass. The captain brings his ship to Liverpool in less time by having the whole course settled at the outset than by settling a little of it every day. A man's longest purposes will be his best purposes. It is true, life is short and uncertain ; but it is better to live on the short arc of a large circle, than to describe the whole circumference of a small circle. Better be Von Rile and see only the first stones laid of a cathedral that will be by and by the glory of a continent, than to design and build the whole of a house that you will yourself have to see repaired and replaced. The ocean pilot sets the prow for an unseen port. Laboring toward distant aims sets the mind in a higher key, and puts us at our best. If a man builds a lighthouse from a plan, he will construct it high and strong enough to answer the purpose of a beacon when the storm is beating and the breakers dashing ; otherwise he will equal it only to calm weather and still seas. We are certain to get lost amid the little circumstances of every day. No act, however long, is safe that does not match a thought that is still longer. The intricate details of living will confuse and mislead, unless we keep to the pathway of long meridian lines. Immediate results are meagre results. The men who are doing most for their own day are such as are working toward an aim that is a score or a century of years away. In the days of American slavery the poor fugitive reached liberty by walking toward the stars.

Not only shall we think wiser and grander purposes when we mature them in advance ; there is also a solidifying and invigorating power in a long purpose clearly defined. You can generally tell from a man's gait whether he has a purpose. Plan intensifies. Pursuance of a purpose makes our work solid and consecutive. Plan concentrates energies as a burningglass does sunbeams. Shiftlessness is mostly only another name for aimlessness. Purpose directs energy, and purpose makes . energy. When we see the target we stretch the bow. Light in the eye is tension in the arm. We can, because we think we can. Power is with a good deal of accuracy measured by purpose. A man may draw inspiration from the grandeur of his own aims, as a fire-fly shapes its flight by its own flashes. To-morrow will depend upon to-day : yet at the same time to-day in a sense depends upon to-morrow. What to-morrow is in my purpose, to-day will to some extent be in my act. In architecture the spire is anticipated in the foundation, and so determines the foundation. It is very slovenly living that is not controlled by anticipation as well as by memory. We can not do to-morrow's work to-day, but we can have to-day's work

THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. y

shaped and buttressed by what we are intending to do to-morrow. In a life which has meaning in it, past and future sustain each other. In an arch the stones on this side are kept in place by the stones on the other. When we step upon a bridge we are upheld as well by the abutment at the farther end as by that at the hither end. We have to acknowledge that our plans do often get thwarted, but, if you will interpret the words carefully, there is not so much hazard in framing long purposes as short ones. The longer will be less endangered by opposing circumstances. It is something in this respect as it is with a long keel at sea, which will easily cut the waves by which a shorter craft would be foundered.

Then, in the next place, knowing with definiteness what we are attempting to do is a moral safeguard. Purposelessness is the fruitful mother of crime. Not purposing to do something that is good is practically equivalent to a purpose to do what is bad. Adam fell when he had nothing particular to do ; and the first step in the scheme of redemption was to set him at work. When men live only in conference with circumstances lying next them, they lose their bearings. To draw another illustration from the sea. When a vessel is lying-to, the man at the wheel will seek to avoid drifting by at least holding the ship's prow toward port. The house that was empty, say the Scriptures, immediately became the domicile of eight devils. Satan recruits his ranks from vagrants. The tropics will yield more crime to the square mile than the temperate zones. The less we are pampered by nature, the stauncher we are in our health and our morals. The kingdom of heaven is more accessible to a busy man, and a man with a long thought and purpose. We are overworked? Better overworked than underworked. Emptiness is full of Satan. Swift water is sweet water. The velocity with which a ball is shot keeps it from the ground. Electricity will keep to the wire till it reaches a break in the wire. Labor is the handmaid of religion. Purpose is what gives life a meaning. We need to preach a doctrine of works not only, but a doctrine of work. Paul taught both. The men that were called to the apostleship, so far as we know, were laborers. It has been so in all times and in all kinds of apostleship. A drifting boat always drifts down-stream.

If there be any young man here that is doing nothing in particular, and with no particular purpose, the chances are as ten to one that he is settling toward the bad. It is the principle of the bicycle that it is kept erect by its velocity. Men who know no Scripture but " let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," are the men that fill our penitentiaries. Young aimlessness is the seminary of old iniquity. Even the Gospel is more readily embraced by a man that is busy. It was when Peter was fishing that he heard the Lord, and followed Him ; and so his companions. Paul found it easier to start a church in Thessalonica than at Athens. He made it his rule to preach where something was going on, and pushed for live centres and busy people. A cord gives out no music except when it is strained. So in our modern congregations the hard-worked men, as a rule, make the best hearers. Employment, therefore, is a subsidiary means of salvation, because it stimulates to purpose. Out of 904 convicts received at the Michigan State prison in the three years ending 1880, 822 (91 per cent.) were unskilled laborers — had never been taught how to work. Such facts challenge the attention of the Church as well as of the political economists. Character, purpose, and apprenticeship will never get far apart from each other whether among immigrants or native population.

But Moses not only approached his work with a purpose and a pattern, but brought down his pattern from on high. This is our second lesson : " Look that thou make them after the pattern that was showed thee in the mount. " This teaches that there are celestial ways of doing earthly things, and that human success consists in getting into the secrecies of God's mind and working in the direction of His method. Human success is a quotation from overhead. Men are enriched with presentiments of the way God would work if placed in our stead. These

IO THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT.

presentiments we call ideals. Human soil is marked with divine foot-prints. An ideal is a pattern shown to us in the mount. Ideals we do not make. We discover, not invent them. " In the mount," we reach after them and ascend to them. They are a continuous firmament that overarches us, but a clouded firmament that yields itself to us only in broken hints.

There is a good deal in this matter of ideals. While we are looking so intently on the ground in these days, many things overhead are slipping our vision. Sometime we are going to know that we lived closer to the unseen than we ever would or dared suspect. Hints and flashes fall athwart us that we do not make and that we can not explain. In our ideals there is something we have never put in them. They are as real as the sky, and as certainly overspan all experience as the sky overspans the ground. We can not reach them any more than we can the firmament, but everything measures its length against them as things mundane measure themselves against the firmament. And so our ideals are never filled, never satisfied. We always find faults in the sweetest song, flaws in the choicest poem, blemishes in the finest architecture, frailties in the most perfect human life. Have we ever given to this our careful regard? We have criteria of power, beauty, and purity that surpass all we have seen in others or felt in ourselves. What is the explanation of these criteria? Whence have come to us our ideals ? Whose authorship are they ? We watch Moses coming down from the mountain with his scheme of a tabernacle and we ask him where he acquired his scheme. And we hear the Lord saying unto him,." Look that thou make them according to the pattern that was shown thee in the mount. "

Have we lived so long, and has it never occurred to us to wonder what it is against which we measure all we see and do ? We have never seen a thing that was perfect. What use have we then for the word " perfect," and what do we mean by calling this and that imperfect ? What is that perfect against which we measure the imperfect and find it imperfect ? It is a fair question, and you will have to go into the mount with Moses before you can answer it. You draw a circle and say it is not a perfect circle. And it is not. The perfect circle has not been drawn. It is not in nature to disclose it, nor in art to produce it. How does it come that you talk so familiarly about the imperfect circle as though you knew the perfect and had seen it, or felt it, or applied it as a criterion to such as are imperfect ? And how about the perfect v life? Have you discovered it? How about the perfect man ? Have you seen him ? And yet you say of this man that he is not perfect, and of that act that it is not perfect. And what is the sense of it if there is not some sky purer than the ground, some mountain higher than the plain, down from which the unmade criterion, the unmeasured pattern has slipped ?

There is nothing in which men have so much faith as in their ideals, and there is nothing whose validity it is so impossible to demonstrate. You can reach the sky with your staff as easily as you can reach the ideal with your logic. We need to think up into this matter carefully. There is something in Moses having a pattern given him in the mount that he brought down with him into the plain that never ceases to have significance to us. We are close to the edge here of the things which are unseen and eternal. Men can talk materialism fluently with their lips at the very moment that there are great solid masses of Platonism lodged in their hearts. Laws, also, we do not make ; we find them. Moral laws are exactly as much beyond the reach of our manufacture as physical ones. Truth we can not enact one whit more than we can gravity.

It may be an old legend and a childish myth that the Decalogue, like the pattern of the tabernacle, was given in the mountain. But if there were no such story in Scripture, we should have to invent some such story now for convenience of statement, if nothing more. When we have said that right and wrong are not things that a man, or any number of men, can invent, we have said for substance all that the Bible has to say about God, Moses, and the two tables. The best things are not dug from the ground, nor framed in a cabinet-shop. The best way to outgrow materialism is to look overhead and draw deep draughts from out the clear. We see, not make. The best thinking is only successful getting into the track worn by the thoughts of God. The wisest man we are not afraid to criticise, for there is a wiser than the wisest and a better than the best. We can all look higher than we can any of us go. I can not make my conscience say " yes " or " no." My conscience reaches as much higher than I as Sinai slopes up higher than Arabia. Conscience is individualized Sinai — the little mount where patterns get shown to me from God ; and I would as soon think of apologizing for this mode of representation as of buttressing the granite pile on which God met Moses, and no sooner. Consciousness of God precedes consciousness of ourselves. The mountains make pictures against the background of the sky. My sin is the black spot which my bad act makes, seen against the disk of the Sun of Righteousness. Hence religion and sin come and go together.

Our thoughts are at home among the stars even while our feet sink deeply into the sand. The soul is by nature Platonic and Pauline. Plato's "idea" answers to Paul's things unseen and words unutterable.

The Greek word for man seems to mean " the upward looking one." There is more in the air than in the dirt. The first circle is the eye ; the next the heavens. The eye matches the vaulted blue. The patterns are shown in the mount ; and it is the gist of life to shape those patterns into forms of wood, brass, gold, and behavior. Architecture grows from a heavenly datum ; so music, painting, and character. The problem of life is to make the ideal real, and convert the divine at the summit of the mountain into the human at its base. Prophecy consists in catching the best of God's thoughts and telling them. The scientist is prophet when he spells out a new word of God in the air or on the ground. Mind watches for the Everlasting. Christ pointed to the lilies and the sparrows, and David to the clouds and constellations.

Laws of nature are God's thoughts thinking themselves out in the orbits and the tides. We are idealists. Feeling goes deeper than thinking. Wonder is prophetic. The philosophy of dirt will be no match for the idealism of the Nazarene and the Tarsan. Half of New York stood out in the rain all Evacuation Day for the sake of an idea. Materialism has a heavy stint before it even in New York City. Man is in God's image. It is not easily forgotten. The old echoes are long in dying. Even the coin with which the drunkard pays for his cups has a church creed

THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT.

IS stamped upon it. " See that thou make them after the pattern that was showed thee in the mount/' That command comprises all commands. It enjoins it upon us to make the ideal real ; to be men in a divine way. Once it has been done : in Galilee. The ideal and the real meet in Jesus. He could say, " Follow me." " Be ye therefore perfect/' He said to the men about Him. " Looking unto Jesus/' wrote the apostle.

Moses copied from the pattern seen in the mount. We have to build not a tabernacle, but a life and a character. For our convenience pattern has become person. Our model is the perfect man Jesus. How much interval is there between me and what the perfect man would be, and do, in my circumstances ? Apply it to purpose. Put in your place, what ends would the perfect man pursue ? What are you aiming for more than for anything else ? Is it an ideal aim? Phrase it differently; was your aim Christ's aim? Put the perfect man in your place to-day, would your aim be his aim ? Because it is difficult to be perfect, have we concluded that it is not feasible to try to be perfect ? Does our Christianity at all consist in this, that we have turned ourselves to God's grace because we do not like God's model? The tabernacle in the plain, the pattern on the mount. When I look at my own heart, my friends, I am afraid we have, a good many of us, been different from Christ so long that we are growing reconciled to the idea of not becoming increasingly like Him. Be careful not to measure yourself against your neighbor. Call no man master. One is your Master, even Christ.

II. Human Spirit And Divine Inspira- Tion

" There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding'' — Job xxxii. 8.

YOU will appreciate upon the instant, I am sure, the closeness with which the two clauses of our text are related, and the fitness with which the first stands as introduction to the second. " There is a spirit in man, and the in-.s^zW/-ing (inspiration) of the Almighty giveth them understanding/' The two words " spirit " and " inspiration " are of course only different forms of the same word, and the spirit in man is that capacity in him which enables him to become the recipient of the Almighty's inspiriting. It is so much ability on man's part to receive a divine inbreathing set over against the power there is on God's part to communicate a divine inbreathing. " There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding."

The fact that the Scriptures, and we in imitation of the Scriptures, use the word spirit to designate now some capacity inhering in us, and now some faculty exercised by God, only shows that there is between God and man some ground that is common to the two, a meeting -place. The spirit in man is that special apartment of his nature which has been contrived and fitted for personal intercourse between him and God, as in the Jewish temple the Holy of Holies was chosen and arranged to be just such a meetingplace between Jehovah and the High-Priest.

The spirit in man is to the great inbreathing of God what the lungs are to the circumambient air. It is to the down-falling light from God what the eye is to the splendors of the earth and the sky. It is the element of our being that establishes in us religious possibilities. It is what sets us in any kind of appreciative relation to God, as it is the ear only that sets us in any kind of appreciative relation to tone. The religious susceptibility and faculty is in this way as much a part of us as is the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the reflective mind, and the sympathetic heart. It is no more optional with us to decide for ourselves whether the religious functions of our nature shall be exercised, and the spirit that is in us be inclined toward God in devout receptivity, and bowed before Him in reverent worship, than it is optional with us to decide for ourselves whether we will bare our souls to the baptism of beautiful sights and sounds with which the grounds and heavens are fraught, or to the truths and sentiments and passions of the generation in whose midst we have our habitation and our life. " There is a spirit in man," and, like every other instinct of our being, it stands to us authoritatively, and lays its mandate upon us imperiously. We are religious by nature.

And it is just this faculty divinely wrought upon, and this string divinely played upon, that really composes the strength and tenacity of our religious convictions. The deep secret of our belief in God is not that we have been taught to believe in Him, nor that nicely assorted arguments have wrought upon us logically ; just as we believe in a sun shining in the sky, because we feel the visual organ energized by a power that is felt to be not of us, but to impinge upon us from without, so we believe in God because there are ceaseless stirrings and whisperings wrought in the spirit-chamber of the soul by influences that we know are not of us.

Perhaps if we thought more about inspiration as it is presented for our consideration in this thirty-second of Job we should be in better condition to deal with the problems connected with the inspired character of the Holy Word. The inspiration of the Almighty, as this text sets it before our regards, has to do, in a purely general way, witfi God's own personal communication of Himself to us, and, at the spirit-point of our being, imparting unto us the energies of His own wisdom, holiness, and power. It is not our concern to understand how this is done. It is more incumbent upon us that we bring ourselves to realize that it is in God's order of things that it should be done, and in man's disturbance of divine arrangement that it is so feebly and so interruptedly done. It does not lie along the track of Biblical teaching that we should allow to the prophets, apostles, and olden saints of God any monopoly of inspiration. There is always the possibility of beauty where there is an unsealed human eye ; of music, where there is an unstopped human ear ; and of inspiration, where there is a receptive human spirit, a spirit standing before God like a flower that waits to have its petals written upon with a heavenly pencil of light ; lying before God like a harp-string that waits to be stirred into trembling and quickened into song. No man can have studied his own character attentively, or regarded his own achievements meditatively, without realizing that unless there is something entered into him that is not originally of him, his most conspicuous traits are the languor of his moral life, and the poverty and insipidity of that life's exterior fruitage. And so the first office-work of inspiration is to create in us fresh personal vigor, and new spiritual animation. We work at our own characters as a painter works at his canvas, and a sculptor at his marble. It

HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRA TION. . 2 1 k

does not pay. It is only painted canvas and elaborated marble when it is done. It does not breathe. It shows no pulse-beat. Character can not be constructed. It can not be put together. It needs first of all a principle that is animated, and one, therefore, that is animating. It wants an impulse more glowing, determined, and passionate than anything we are possessed of naturally. It is all a mistake that we can not be good and manly without being scrupulously and studiously good. There is too much mechanism about our virtue. It is rather a fine criticism that is passed by a modern admirer of Shakespeare, when he writes of him : " We never see Shakespeare's characters hanging over their virtues, or nursing and cosseting them, as if they were specially tender of them, and fearful lest they might catch cold." And the same thought works itself out in all variety of fine expression and deep suggestion in Pauline exhortations to high Christian living and doing. We need nothing so much as a determining life-force at the core of character, and impulse from out the very soul of God, that shall hold us in its warm, steady, and irresistible grip, and impel us with a momentum that has the very pressure of Jehovah in it. And all of this is a draft upon the divine inspiration. It is exactly as much inspiration as the power John had to write the fourth gospel, or Isaiah to compose the fifty-third chapter of his prophecy seven hundred years before Calvary. If we have attained to a live manliness, and a heart so fed from out the veins of the divine life that the throbbings of our heart synchronize with the throbbings of God's heart, we are in no danger.