The atheism of the heart : and other sermons

Table Of Contents

PACIE

The Atheism of the Heart. ... i

The Revelation of the Father. . . 21 The Gospel After Man, and the Gospel

II. Revelation Of The Father

John xiv: 8, 9. — "Philip saith unto Him, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip ? He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father. And how sayest thou, then, show us the Father?"

There are those who try to make themselves believe that the moral greatness ; that the supernatural attributes and works ; what they are pleased to call the pretensions of the Man Christ Jesus, were an after thought of His disciples ; like the after glow of the sun when it has set ; that they came to be believed, only after He was no longer in the world ; that He never had any such conception of Himself*; that He never made any such claims for Himself. Just the contrary of this is true. Though He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not ; though " He came unto His own, and His own received Him not yet His disciples never set a higher value upon Him after His death, than He did upon Himself while living. They came slowly to understand the dimensions of His words. Death indeed interpreted many things which He had spoken. Death always does. Christ's death was the key to His life ; no man can understand His life, without looking at it in the light of His death.

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

The thing that Philip wanted, is the thing that we all want. We want the Father. We want to be shown the Father. That sufficeth us, and nothing else does. And here is where all human religions fail. They do not show us the Father ; they can not show us the Father. The Father is not in them. The Father can not be found there. Brahmanism is a vast spiritual pantheism ; God in all spirit, and yet God nowhere to be found. It finds nothing but God in the Universe. But He can not be worshipped because He is unknown. The moment we think we know Him, we have proof we know Him not. The only God of Buddhism is a man who has passed through endless transmigrations until he has reached the throne of the Universe ; and we never can follow him unless we think ourselves into thought-dust ; into nonentity, nothingness. In Confucianism a personal God is unknown. Worship is directed not to God, but to antiquity, to ancestors ; to the dead, who have gone down into silence. In the Zend Avesta of the Persians, we have two gods engaged in an irrepressible conflict, like light and darkness in the world of Nature. And so we might go through the whole list, Egyptian, Grecian, Roman. In no religion of man can we find God the Father. But this Jesus of Nazareth says, " He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father." He is not only found, He is revealed ; He is not only revealed, He is seen of men.

It is this which Christ claims that He makes ; nay, better, that He is, which I want you to study with me this morning.

I. I want to call your attention to this idea of fatherhood in God. It is the Christian idea. God is the

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

Father of man's spirit. How unlike the pagan idea of climbing up ? God made man's body out of the dust ; but He gave him a spiritual nature from His own. The first function was a creative one. The second was creative and paternal in one ! When He breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul, God exercised toward man's spirit the paternal function. This is the very essence of fatherhood ; to create a being in one's own likeness. We talk about the figurative language of the Bible. We talk about the anthropological methods of the Bible. But really, the Bible uses language literally, and we use it figuratively. The things of the Bible are the real things, and we compare them to things which are only shadows. The Saviour teaches us to pray, " Our Father which art in Heaven." Who ever had a father on earth who deserved to be called father as God does ? God's fatherhood of man is the archetype ; and the fatherhood of us who are fathers on earth, is the type. Jesus says of Himself, "I am that Bread of Life ; I am that Bread which came down from Heaven." Which bread is the best entitled to be the archetype, the bread which is for the body ; the bread which perisheth, for the body which perisheth, or the living Bread which feeds the deathless image of God ? Well might Jesus say, " I am that Bread of Life." As compared with Him, what is this that we call the staff of life, on which we lean for three score years and ten ? There is a staff of life on which the soul may lean forever.

The trouble with us in looking at spirritual things is, that we guage everything from the earth. We impart all the imperfections of our fatherhood to the fatherhood of God, and then say : " This is the true fatherhood ; this

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

is the archetype. God will feel so, and so ; God will do so, and so ; because He is a Father, as we are fathers." God's fatherhood is perfect, and our fatherhood is imperfect. Whatever we see to be the fatherhood of God, that ought our fatherhood to be. What our fatherhood is, is no exact prophecy as to the fatherhood of God. I mean by this, that we can understand God not by bringing His fatherhood down to the level of our fatherhood ; but by making our fatherhood a suggestion, an intimation, a hint as to what God's fatherhood is ; remembering always, that He is infinite, and we are finite ; that He is perfect, and we are imperfect ; that He is holy and we are sinful. There are a great many people who are not filial to God's fatherhood, and therefore not in sympathy with it ; who want to deduce that fatherhood from their own. Things must be equal to the same things before they can be equal to each other. You must be like God, before your fatherhood can be like God's fatherhood.

One of the most touching things in human fatherhood is the sense of inadequacy to all the wants which our children need to have supplied. We can feed them, and clothe them. We can teach them to speak and to walk. We can not meet all the demands of fatherhood to them. We are very imperfect patterns of fatherhood. We all have to tell our children, like the crawfish in the fable, not to walk as we walk. They are sick ; the flush comes to their little cheeks ; their little lips parch for want of inward, not outward moisture ; there is such furnace heat within them ; they wilt like little rose-buds ; they die. How often they look up imploringly to us for relief. We have no relief for them. We want to save them, but we can not. They grow up to be young men ; some infernal

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

appetite gets possession of them ; fed by these licensed drinking -places out of which this Government gets one fifth of its revenue. Once our streets were red with the blood of the slave ; so red, that only blood could wash it out ; now they are red with the blood of the drunkard, 1 and drunkard's wives and widows. We want to save them, but we can not. We are so limited in our powers ; we are so involved in their weaknesses and miseries ourselves. Our fatherhood is a fatherhood of weaknesses and limitations ; of time and sense ; God's fatherhood is a fatherhood of the spirit ; has to do with shaping and moulding the spirit into His own likeness ; and has to do with the world where the spirit has its eternal home.

People sometimes want to know why, if the Bible is inspired, it does not reveal material truth, as well as moral and spiritual. It is answer enough, to say, that if material truth had been revealed, it would have resulted in the mental stagnation ; in dwarfing the intellect, and retarding the progress of the human family. God sharpens the wits of His creatures on His problems in Nature ; just as we sharpen a knife on a stone. This theory of evolution is only another whetstone. Besides, material truth can be discovered ; moral and spiritual truth except so far as witnessed to us within, which is revelation, has to be revealed. And only the pure in heart can find it then. But the answer most appropriate in this connection, is this: Man may know all material truth and not recognize and be loyal to God's fatherhood; be just as much in the Arctic exile of unbelief, as though he knew nothing. For, knowing all material truth and not knowing God's fatherhood, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know it. God's fatherhood to him is the great secret

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

of the Universe. It is the science of all sciences. Therefore God has undertaken to make a revelation of this fatherhood in Jesus Christ His Son. And when humanity has recognized this secret, it will be prepared to put all things under its feet.

You remember those beautiful lines of Whittier, ''The Prayer of Agassiz," at the opening of his scientific school on the island of Pennikese. After describing the scene and the circumstances the Poet goes on :

" Said the master to the youth : We have come in search of truth ; Trying with uncertain keys, door by door of mysteries ; We are reaching through His laws, to the garment-hem of Cause : Him, the endless, unbegun, the unnamable, the one Light of all our light the source ; life of life, and force of force : As with fingers of the blind, we are groping here to find What the hieroglyphics mean of the unseen in the seen ; What the thought which underlies Nature's masking and disguise ; What it is, that hides beneath blight and bloom, and birth and death ;

By past efforts unavailing, doubt and error, loss and failing, Of our weakness made aware; on the threshhold of our task, Let us light and guidance ask ; let us pause in silent prayer."

Do you know that I think that to have discovered that God is, and that He can answer prayer ; that His secret is with them that fear Him ; and that in the study of material truth, the truest scientist is ready to put his hand into the hand of God, and say, "Father, lead on !" is a thing of greater dignity and worth ; a thing more acceptable to the Father of his spirit, than the richest scientific results of this man's magnificent life? What Longfellow wrote on his fiftieth birthday, has been the key of all his scientific studies :

" It was fifty years ago, in the pleasant month of May, In the beautiful Pays de Vaud, a child in its cradle lay. And Nature, the old nurse, took the child upon her knee,

S

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

2 7

Saying, ' Here is a story book, thy Father has written for thee.' • Come wander with me,' she said, ' into regions yet untrod, And read wha* is still yet unread in the manuscript of God.' "

The Bible holds steadfast to one idea : The revelation of God's fatherhood to the spirit of man ; to man in his essential part. Said the Saviour, before leaving His disciples : " I will not leave you comfortless." It might have been translated, " I will not leave you orphans:" that is, comfortless, as to the fatherhood of God, for this is the source of all our discomfort. This is the great loss with the orphan ; not that he has no friend, but that he has no father. And this war does, and this the sale of intoxicating liquor does : It makes children fatherless. And fatherless children are children who in losing a father have lost the hint which they need, as to God's fatherhood. You remember a father do you? The slaveholder's rebellion did not gather your father in the harvest of death, where men were mowed down like the grass, before you had learned to prattle his name ? Your father has not been crushed by the whiskey Juggernaut, whose priests contribute one fifth' of its revenue to the General Government, for the privilege of making little boys and girls fatherless. Well, thank God for that. Do you remember some one, great, strong, hearty ; the man who earned your bread by the sweat of his brow ; the man who brought home to you and your brothers and sisters, his arms full of good things • that cheered the heart of your mother, into whose lap you would all climb up together, and nestle like birds in a nest; who was as tender as he was strong and true ; whose great heart all your successes gladdened ; who saw you grow up to young manhood or womanhood, with a father's pride,

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

and when the time came for you to go forth to do battle for yourself, who amid the mingled sunshine and rain of his tears, sent you forth with a father's blessing and the blessing of Heaven ; who was always ready with his counsel, and sympathy, and help, until the day when a shock went through you as though you had been shot, and you heard of his death ; and you were fatherless ! That was your father upon earth. You sprang from his loins. You bear his name. If you ever are anything, or do anything in the world, you owe it largely to him ; it will be largely because you have been true to his aspirations for you.

Now Jesus takes all these home ideas and asks you to transfer them to God ; to drop all that is imperfect and sinful, as Elijah did his earthly mantle when translated. What this father has been to you at his best in the lower sphere of time and sense, God is to you at His best in the higher sphere of things not seen and eternal. As to temporal things, your earthly father was wiser than you : as to spiritual things so is your Heavenly Father. This Bible is your Father's book. He has written here the wisest things, the most precious things, the sweetest things concerning you, which He ever thought. Open it anywhere, and you can see that He has never lost you out of His mind. If you are sinning against Him, He teaches you that sin is your worst enemy, and that He is ready to forgive you ; that you can not go on in sin without doing the worst thing possible for yourself; without putting yourself under penalty of His most righteous laws ; without grieving Him to the heart, because you banish yourself forever from his presence and His love. He is all the time working to gather you to His

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

2 9 heart as your earthly father used to do. If you have sought His forgiveness, how full His word is of promise to you ! And when you go forth to duties or dangers, how He covers you with his wing !

II. There are certain characteractics of this fatherhood of God, as the Saviour has revealed it, which will repay us for a closer analysis.

1. I want you to notice, that it is the fatherhood of a spirit to a spirit. I have already suggested this : but it will bear unfolding. In the kingdom of Nature everything is material ; in the kingdom of God everything is spiritual. God is honored by the material structure of a creation which obeys His material laws. When He made this earth, He said of it, " It is very good!" And He wrote His autograph under it. In His spiritual kingdom He is honored in the same way : by the obedience of spiritual laws. The word by which the Lord Jesus introduced Himself as the revealer of the Father, was this : " Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared me ;" Then said I, " Lo, I Come ! (in the volume of the Book it is written of me,) " I delight to do thy will, O God." The Father, then, is a Being with a will in reference to His children. He has prepared a body for us ; earthly investiture in which we are spectacles to the angels. And when He finds a child of His in this earthly investiture who does His will, He says to him : " This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased !" He witnesses with his spirit, that he is born of God.

People sometimes come to a minister in trouble of mind, and say, " they want to become Christians ; they know they never can be happy, unless they are Christians." Probe them a little, and you will find their pres-

3°

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

ent uneasiness arises from the consciousness that they are about to do something wrong. They want to become Christians to get rid of their wretchedness ; but they do not want to give up the wrong thing that makes them wretched. It is like taking a dead watch to a jeweller and telling him to put it in good running order without taking it to pieces and cleaning it. People go to the doctor, and say, "Get me well; but I must have my brandy every day, or my tobacco every day." Just so, they come to the minister, saying, " Make me a Christian, but I must do this thing, or that thing, which I know to be a dishonor to myself and a dishonor to God." There is no power in the Universe that can make such a person a Christian. As Christ has revealed Him, God is a spirit, and a Christian is one who has the spirit of Christ with reference to God's will ; who says to the Father : 1 'Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not. But a body hast thou prepared me ;" and who adds, "Lo, I come! I delight to do thy will, O God;" in a word, who uses this life as a convenience, an opportunity to do the will of God.

Says Carlyle in his Essay on Voltaire : "It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence which has had a commencement, will never through all ages, were he the very meanest of us, have an end ! What is done, is done ■ and has already blended itself with the boundless, everliving, everworking Universe ; and will also, work there, for good or for evil, openly or secretly throughout all time. But the life of every man is as the well-spring of a stream, whose small beginnings are indeed, plain to all, but whose ulterior course and destination, as it winds through the expanses of infinite years, only the Omniscient can discern. Will it mingle with neighboring rivulets, as a tributary, or receive them as a sovereign ? Is it to be a nameless brook, and will its tiny waters, among millions of other brooks and rills increase the current of some world -river? Or, is it to be itself a Rhene or a Danau, whose goings forth are to the uttermost lands, its flood an everlasting boundary-line on the globe itself; the bulwark and highway of whole kingdoms and continents ? We know not. Only, in either case, we know its path is to the great ocean ; its waters, were they but a handful, are here ; and can not be annihilated, or permently held back. As little can we prognosticate with any certainty the future influences from the present aspects of an individual. What was it to the Pharaohs of Egypt in that old era, if Jethro the Midianitish priest and grazier accepted the Hebrew outlaw as his herdsman ? Yet the Pharaohs, with all their chariots of war are buried deep in the wrecks of time ; and that Moses still lives, not among his own tribe only, but in the hearts and daily business of all civilized nations. Nay, to take an infinitely higher instance ; who has ever forgotten those lines of Tacitus, inserted as a small transitory, altogether trifling circumstance in the history of such a potentate as Nero ? To us, it is the most earnest, sad and sternly significant passage that we know to exist in writing : "To quiet this rumor — that he had fired the city himself — Nero charged with the crime and punished with the most unheard of severities, that class, hated for their general wickedness, whom the vulgar call Christian. The originator of that name was one Christ, who in the reign of Tiberius, suffered death by sentence of the Pro-

• s

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

curator, Pontius Pilate. The baneful superstition thereby repressed for a time, again broke out, not only over Judea, the native soil of that mischief, but in the city also, where from every side all atrocious and abominable things collect and flourish. Tacitus was the wisest, most penetrating man of his generation ; and to such depth, and no deeper, had he seen into this transaction ; the most important that has occurred, or can occur in the annals of mankind."

The will of God, so far as His creatures are concerned, relates to character ; relates to the purpose, the motive. The outward vocation which a man chooses, is a secondary thing, provided that in it, he seeks to do the will of God. Nero might have been a Christian, and so might Pontius Pilate. " God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him, must worship Him in spirit and in truth." It is just as true of service, as of worship. And when God says " Let us make a new creature on the earth ; let us introduce a new individual ; the thing for such a creature to do, is to put himself into spiritual communication with God, by asking the question, " Lord what wilt thou have me to do ?" Thus his life becomes spiritual ; not a mere outward thing, which when you have seen the outside, you know the whole of it. But a life in which pulses the heart-beat of the Father, because we seek to do His will among men. I do not regard that spiritual merely, which relates to prayer and worship. Prayer and worship help us to spirituality of life. We need them for spirituality of life. Moses was told to put his shoes off his feet, in presence ot the burning bush, because it was holy ground. It is holy ground everywhere. It is holy ground in your nursery, my Christian sister.

*

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

" Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings has God perfected praise." It is holy ground where we break our daily bread in presence of our children. It is holy ground, the pathway we take to our daily business. It is holy ground in your grocery store. It may be like the walk to Emmaus. It is holy ground wherever one who is the temple of the Holy Ghost may journey or abide. And whatever he does, he may make holy service. As George Herbert quaintly expresses it :

" Teach me, my God and king, in all things thee to see : And what I do in anything, to do it as for thee. All may of thee partake ; nothing can be so mean Which with this tincture, for thy sake, will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause, makes drudgery divine :

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine."

If God's fatherhood is spiritual, our sonship must also be spiritual. A father who is a Spirit, will find His lineaments in the spirits of His sons. If we have no spiritual likeness to God, we have no likeness worthy of the name. I know it is the fashion of these days to trace every mental and spiritual process to the animal nature ; and so to drive God out of His peculiar kingdom. But, I claim, that God wants us to use this material structure in which we walk about ; this world, in which we find ourselves ; our powers of speech and action ; our accomplishments and accumulations ; all that is outward ; as the expression of that which is inward ; and that only so far forth, as it is this expression, as it is spiritual, is it real in His sight.

2. I want you to notice, that as Jesus Christ has revealed the fatherhood of God, it is a fatherhood of truth. It is spiritual ; it is inward ; but it is, also truthful. If you do

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

not know the truth about a thing, you do not know anything about it.

Did you ever think of it, that truth is the light of the moral world ? is the medium, and the only medium, in which we can see moral and spiritual things at all. Speculation gives no more light than a firefly. This moment, you think you have him, and the next moment, he is elsewhere. These men, who think they have some new light, which the Bible has not given, remind me of a boy with a firefly under a tumbler. You can not see his light, unless you put out all other light. And, when you wake up in the morning, and look at your prisoner, he is dead. The Saviour says of Himself, as the revealer of the Father : "I am the Light of the world !" The eye is the organ, by which we avail ourselves of the natural light of the world ; but, the eye is not the light, and cannot furnish the light ; and can see, only in the light which God furnishes. We have a spiritual organ, which corresponds to the eye ; but, it furnishes no light. It can see in God's light. All God's children see in His light. They love His truth ; they believe in His truth j they proclaim His truth. They are not, all the time, trying to prove His truth, untrue. The Saviour has Himself applied this test : " Every one that doeth evil, hateth the light ; neither cometh to the light ; lest his deeds should be reproved. But, he that doeth truth, cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made* manifest that they are wrought in God." By light here, He means moral and spiritual truth. Truth, like light, not only reveals things ; but reveals them in their relations. Indeed, knowing the relations of things, is the only way to know the things themselves. You get up suddenly in the

REVELATION OF THE FATHER.

night. In your half-awake bewilderment, your hands strike against the door. There are three doors in the room. Which door is it ? Unless you know which door it is, you cannot know where you are. The door may lead you into a wardrobe ; into another room, upon the same level • or to the head of a stairway. It is not enough to know that you are at a door. Which door is it ? You must know things in their relations, or you do not know them.

When Jesus comes here to reveal the Father, He comes to let in light upon your relations to the Father, and my relations to the Father. To tell me that there is an infinite Being, who is the Father of my spirit ; and that He would have me love Him ; does not reveal Him ; unless I am also told His estimate of my relation to Him. The fatherhood of God is full of blessedness and promise, to the spirit that is filial. Fatherhood and sonship are complements : loving fatherhood, obedient sonship. I may stand, you may stand in the shadow of God's love : for, all true love casts a shadow. If love approves, by the same law it disapproves. When the sun is rising-, it casts shadows westward ; when it is setting, it casts shadows eastward. Falling on the very same objects, it casts shadows in opposite directions, because they have changed their relation to the sun. The sun has not changed. The earth has wheeled another half of her portion toward the sun, that it may be warmed in his rays. You remember what the Apostle James says about " the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." If it were possible for a man to keep changing his position on the earth, so that it should always be night where he was, it would be no fault of the sun. His dark-