The church of the household

Preface

HE Church, in the dogmatic sense, is "a congregation of faithful men in which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly administered/' This is the visible Church. It should be catholic— national — municipal ; able by the gentle forces of its own mere being to assert itself in the hearts of all men. And in the history of the world, banded by defences of external authority, it seemed at one time to realize the dream of early saints, and to sit the Queen of Nations. That vision has vanished from the face of the earth. Who, with his Bible alone in his hand, could determine whether it is ever again to be seen in this world ? Certainly it will not be in our time. Meanwhile the entire Christian world is agitated by the methods in which men would restore this visible unity. Externally it has degenerated into a ceaseless wrangling and struggle of sects, and divisions of the organic body.

This unity is twofold— that of a kingdom which is within— that of an organic, visible body, which is without. For the inner kingdom there is hope. Each man sees his own way to it. Each division of the common body iv

PEE FACE.

has its own interpretation of it. Of all others, the object of reverence with us — after the strong intention of the individual to seek the two virtues of piety and purity, is that which finds its round of graces and gifts in the family. It works from within outward. It begins with the heart and purifies the believer after the ideal of Christ in his relations to the members of his own home. It leaves him at his entrance on the street, a fully taught Christian, to show to other men and other families, the virtues and the manhood which he first learned within doors. The pool is formed by the rivulets which have been flowing from all the homes around. The parish church is the result of the truest and purest pieties which men have found within their households.

Two ideas are met with as to the use and importance of religion. One commands the popular vote — the idea, that by either priest or preacher alone, (and they differ rather as to the manner of the communication, than as to the fact of it), the divine grace comes to the individual. It is represented as something superadded to nature — something objective, something to be had in this, and in no other way. It must come by the hand of the sacramentalist or by the tongue of the exhorter — either as a compendious regeneration, or a stupendous and quasi-miraculous conversion. It is not enough to point to either of these parties, the duty of the lowest of the servants of God — the power by authority to stand as a sign-post, a divinely appointed one, if you will, but one that is useful to point out to a traveller the way — leaving the traveller to walk in it, by such power as God has given him ; but the signgiver must be of the last necessity, to communicate that strength, to insure that walking, and to substitute his gifts of profession for the only thing which at last endures

PREFACE.

v and avails — character. Religion is a superadded somewhat. It is an opus operatum, whether from priest or preacher. The world has grown above the one scheme. It is fast outgrowing the other.

The other and truer thought looks to the kingdom of God as always in its permanent forces within — something which enters into man as light into a dark room, removing the blackness and gloom, scattering the birds of evil omen, and the vile, insect, passion-idols, bringing in a truer life and a better hope— something, if superadded, yet absorbed and made identical with the recipient. In such a thought of religion all outer means are of avail only as they kindle the ray-power in the soul ; as they, by a second birth as against evil, give the soul its power over itself, and develope the real manhood of the Christian.

These varying notions of the Christian system run into three channels. One, of God's work as only within, so as to deny any use of the means of grace. This is the Quakerism of widely different sects— the indifferentist on the one side, and the evangelical school on the other. Character is absorbed by the latter in election. The man is hidden under the robe of imputed righteousness.

The second school look to a charmed circle of Church rites, now, lowly bowing to the usages of an ignorance which has had its day and done its work ; anon desiring the glittering bubble of some metaphysical ideal, as superstitious and more ephemeral than the other. All the way down to the backslider and the modern half-believer, character loses itself in the forms of profession.

The third — and in the service of it, we offer the following Discourses— accepts the ordinances as in their way necessary to an end in the change of the mm— and necessary no longer. It holds that the one Sacrament which

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PBEFACE.

underlies all Missions, which requires the actual hand of another man to baptize all creatures, and saves Christianity from degenerating into a mere philosophy, is passed by and forgotten * in the very sealing of a contingent covenant between the creature and his God. So the Church utters the sound warning before the recipient turns from the font : 4 6 Remember always that baptism represents unto us our profession, which is to follow Christ — be made like unto Him, to die to sin, and rise again unto righteousness. " The other Sacrament, which brings all men to an equality and destroys all human castes, whether of religion or race, forms the golden clue to the history of our present civilization. The priest is in this view like the High Priest of our profession, armed with power to bless, only, as like his Master he becomes the least of all and the servant of all. The Church is a divinely constituted means to the end of a sanctified manhood. Salvation is now found in being saved from that which de-humanizes man. The conscience, as it is developed under the daily life in the relations of the family, by the power of an endless life, shown by the Son of Man, is supreme. God is in us to will and to do — and the man willing and doing, is anointed with an unction from above. The household is the first Church, on whose vigor and purity all sodalities and voluntary societies depend ; and by reflection from it, are more or less true to the idea of Christ.

How far we may have been faithful to this idea, the reader will judge for himself. We have not aimed so much at developing a system — as in defining the family ties and relations, under this leading idea. It may be easy to find faults and flaws. It may be as easy to accept

* 4 ' Forgetting those things that are behind/ ' — St. Paul.

PREFACE.

vii the hints which are cast out, as leading one to a sounder view of the life we are living. God was once manifest in the flesh, as Jesus revealed to others the Divine in His own soul. He may be manifest in the family life now, as purifying the hearts of many men and leading them to a deeper unity of character, than sacramentarian or preacher can offer. Unity was once in Christ as light is in the fullorbed moon. It shines for us now over the troubled waters in a line of light crinkling and flashing on multitudinous surfaces of little waves, little churchlets and sects, all the way back through the darkness of earth to its primal source. May such light and such proofs of unity abound in many homes, and commend and ratify the Church of the Household.

May the Spirit of holiness so mingle in the homes of those who listened patiently to these discourses, and of all others who give them a kindly thought, that it may reveal Christ in them, and fit their occupants, by imitation of Him, to meet His and our Father in peace.

" The outward form is not the whole, But every part is moulded To image forth an inward soul, That dimly is unfolded."

Contents

CHAPTER PAGS

i. — Home, The First Covenant ... i

ii. — Home, under the Old Covenant . .18 m. — The Home of Jesus . . . . 35

I. Home, The First Covenant

"For he looked for a city which hath foundations , builder and maker is God." — Hebrews xi. 10.

BRAHAM was a representative man. In nothing was he more so, in my opinion, than in this fact, which is here recorded : in his always seeking for a home. I propose his example to you at this time, as thus seeking that which, for wise ends, in the great lesson of God's revelation, he never found on earth. He never found it. He ran the two things of heaven and home into one, by the very fact of his disappointment.

I. Let us catch the meaning of this writer, in the text. He knew his meaning well. He has in mind, as I read his words, some of the profoundest truths

THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD.

of life. He says, " By faith? Just for the once, think of this faith of his as you think of that boy of yours who has gone out to California, to seek his fortune. He has gone in some sort of faith, I take it. As he grows homesick for all the softening influences which he has left behind him, he has some sort of belief that upholds him in his loneliness. Say, it is nothing more than to make money to come home again. He thinks of somebody that stands behind the money, to make it worth the sacrifice of his best days in a far-off land, among strangers. Ah ! these hearts of ours are not cut out in cardboard patterns that you can draw ink-lines across them, and keep all the agitations of any one passion in one particular spot, away from all the rest. He will make money, but he carries with him whither he goes, the passions and hopes of his life here. Soft dreams of a nobler future, that may be his reward, will stir him in the loneliest ranch, in the wildest sierra ; and he will claim that he is digging the hot earth for some treasures that are more precious to him than ingots of gold and silver. Now mark, I am not saying that Abraham had any of these ordinary, carnal notions. The dry polemists have set tied it, that it is too undignified for any one to have so much of the milk of ordinary human nature about him, if his name occurs in the Bible. We will leave him to himself, as having only great thoughts of the Nicene creed and the Saybrook platform : discussing, as he went, only the doctrines of imputed right-

HOME, THE FIB ST COVENANT.

eousness and the like. I asked you to accept our own boy, from whom we parted, with a heart-break, as having a faith of his own, on quite a lower plane, it is true, but still something like his.

" By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed ; and he went out, not knowing whither he went" I seem to feel like being heretical to the orthodox belief, in which I was brought up, and to think that the writer is somehow thinking of the day when he once felt his own heart swelling in his bosom, as he saw the blue mountains of the Taurus range sinking out of his sight, and turned to hide the tear that would rise, as he looked forward toward the Syrian shores, with a heavy heart. True he was not going quite ignorant of "the whither he was bound ;" but he, as every man almost in the world, was seeking his fortune. He knew he was to meet his father's friend, the great Gamaliel, and to sit at his feet He was turning his face towards the sacred home of his race, and the temple of his God. But he never would have written these words if he had not known what it was to have that heart-sink at going he knew not whither. It is, I think, a beautiful thought that he has caught in the brief record of the life of the man Abraham. It throws the shadow of his grand life far down the centuries. It seizes the faith on its side of nature. We all hear that same call that God made to him. We too have God about us. Mean though our lives may seem,

God is in them. We thought of anything else than of using the example of the patriarch for our common purposes, when we made our start. But, it is the glory of this book, that it finds us out at every turn. Just as in nature, God here is always better than we think Him ; always doing us good. So — and would that we might realize it always — so here, the very foundation stone of a true faith was placed, in the history of a man doing just what we all have done or have to do in our turn ; to lift a loving mother's arms from our neck and hear the last counsels of a wise father, to leave the restingplaces of childhood, and listen to the voice that calls to all the manhood that is in us, and go forth to seek a city that hath foundations.* He proceeds: " By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise : for he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." I like the change of the word, that occurs in this passage. In the book of Genesis, it is always i a land/ that is promised to Abraham. God always speaks to him of 1 a land that I will shew thee.' The nearest approach to a city, is the old-time habit of pious men, that when he thinks he has reached it, he builds an altar,

* " The family bond, though a conquest won by culture over the rudimentary state of man, and slowly, precariously acquired, has yet become a sure, solid, and sacred part of the constitution of human nature."— Mattheiv Arnold, God and the Bible, pp. 145-155.

HOME, THE FIRST COVENANT.

and offers a sacrifice to Jehovah.* He and his children were always ' heirs of a promise and none the less always wanderers from place to place : always seeking and never finding a home. As in childhood, we fancy a chase of the ever retreating rainbow, to find the fairy's bag of gold which lies at its foot ; so they are seen always pursuing a vision, which is never quite attained, on the earth. It is on this disappointment, this " aching void " that this same writer builds an argument for the necessity of a fulfilment of the divine promise, somewhere. As it was not fulfilled here, then where was it ? Faith in a good God said promptly, in an immortal life. " These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them,f and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things, by their actions declare plainly, that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better, that is an heavenly : wherefore God is not ashamed to be called

* On reaching Sichem, in consequence of a vision confirming him in possession of the land, he built the first altar [Gen. xii. 6). Again another, between Bethel and Hai, (v. 8,) and a third at Hebron, (xiii. 1 8,) near which most of his life was passed.

f Hebrews xi. 13-16. Embraced them, ddrtatfa/uevoi. The word is emphatic. Salutantes (Vulgate). Wordsworth explains it by jactare oscula (Tacitus,*) or basia (Juvenal,) to throw kisses towards one. It signifies the strongest natural yearning.

their God: for He hath prepared them a city." What to them looking forward to the future, seemed to be a country, or patria, i. e. y a father-land ; to the Apostle, living so long after, was plainly a city, and as the event showed, the eternal city of the saints, whose builder and maker is God. It is to my mind a noble thought, which is contained in this passage of the Epistle to the Hebrews ; that the first great faith, that was destined to be the very protoplasm of all the future revelation, to lift men to the heights of religion, should be established by the providence of God, in the love of home * All sects and scholars claim Abraham as the father of the faithful. I point you to this peculiarity of his faith. It was the faith in a home, that was to be his by promise. If the promise was never to be realized in this life, if he was to have here no continuing city, it is perhaps none the less a striking similitude to our own truest hopes. They are all the better for us, when they are gained, if they are found to have been too bright to be realities here. The passion which springs up in a true heart for a home ' eternal in the heavens/ where there are no sorrowful defects, no sickness nor partings to wring the soul, may be the richest gift of divine grace to those who have been most faithful

" He (Abraham) is not an ecclesiastic, not an ascetic, not even a learned sage, but a chief, a shepherd, a warrior ; full of all the affections and interests of a family, and household, and wealth, and power ; and for this very reason the first true type of the religious man, the first representative of the whole Church of God."— Dean Stanley, Hist. Jewish Church, Sect. i t p. 2 j>.

HOME, THE FIRST COVENANT.

and most successful in their daily duties here. The best home may make us 6 home- sick' for a better life.

I enjoy sometimes the thought, that in music, for instance, it is better to have the taste so cultivated, that no performance here can ever again satisfy it ; that the best that can be done for us, is to have it suggest for us the unending, because the exhaustless, song of Moses and the Lamb, in which the refined ear of the perfect saint shall hear every line of individual rejoicing and praise, as if sung in solo, and also have with it the swell of the full anthem, in which the roll of the planets shall be the undertone, and the innumerable hosts of exulting saints the tireless chorus. Is it not so ? Is not the strongest testimony to our immortality, to be recognized in this power to feel ' a void, the earth can never fill ? '

We are all able to feel the truth of the text : " He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." In other words, he was always seeking to realize the common dream of us all alike, a home. Year after year, the man grew older in the search of it. The days of his early vigor passed away, and it was not realized. He remonstrated with God, and said to him, in almost a bitter cry of his heart : " This Eleazar of Damascus is my heir." Then Isaac was given to him. " Ah ! " he says, " the vision is now come true." But God again came to him and tried him terribly. As the angel caught his hand, the aged servant of God

THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD.

saw the meaning of his whole life, saw the end of all true faith, saw the day of Christ and was glad.* As the dreams of a home here on earth at last passed from before his eyes, the golden walls of the New Jerusalem rose on his sight. He thus becomes the example of all who have \ the like faith with Father Abraham/

II. What then is this vision ? what is home, to a true man ?

Two sets of ideas call themselves our religion : one, the notion that all daily and common things are too mean and vulgar to be considered in thinking of God. It is the rough distinction of religions and secular. The other, that religion is in all mean and common things, a3 well as in the highest ; that faith is not having dreams of pure intellect in certain historical channels, so much as in having a faith, which lets nothing be common or profane. One sort is like Peter, too pious to eat in his hunger, the objects placed before him, ' abundantly to enjoy/ but remonstrating with the Almighty : " I have never eaten anything common or unclean/' The petulant creature is for the time more pious than the Creator. The other sort of religion is in sympathy with the voice that said to the scrupulous Jew, " What God hath cleansed, that call not t hou common/' On e set of thoughts puts a man's

* " The union of parental love with the total denial of self, is held up in both cases (Christ's death and the offering of Isaac) as the highest model of human, and therefore as the shadow of Divine Love. 'Sacrifice,' is rejected, but « to do Thy will, O God,' is accepted."- Dean Stanley, Hist, of Jewish Church, Sect. xi. p. 5 6.

HOME, THE FIB ST COVENANT.

religion in something outside of his daily work. The other finds in his home the sacred altar, at which the real sacrifices of life are always being offered ; where the real growth in grace is to be sought.

Home is the resting-place of the heart. It lies so exactly in the lines of all religious thought, that a man is bound to make it more or less one with his religion. The ancients had their household gods. We Christians talk of the domestic altar. There are certain convictions, which make Home the first of all temples to us. It is the original of the idea of a Church. God's people are his household.*

The parish is the collection of all the families of a place. They are banded in one covenant, for certain purposes, and they meet for worship at certain times. But all the time and for all purposes they are in the covenant of Home. As the rills of the mountain steal out of every grassy nook, from every little dell and ravine in the side of it, and at last appear as a river in the valley, so the greatest nations and the purest churches are the sum of all the home-life of the people. The river may be clear as the Saco, or discolored as the sluggish Santee — it is always what the inland influences have made it. The Church is what the home-life of the individuals, in their families, will make it. Of course there may be exceptional features in it. There may be homes, in which every thing is out of place and discordant ; the father's influence invaded by some stranger ; the mother's gen -

* itarpid, Eph. in. 15. oikbioi, Eph. ii. 19. Gal. vi. 10.

tie word of no power ; the rights of the elder children, kept in constant jeopardy and dispute ; and all done, under a plea of religion.

Indeed, may I not suggest the fear that it is too much the case in the majority of our homes. Is it not true that we seldom think of home as the true place for the education of the conscience ? But I repeat the remark, that as the homes are, in the main, such will be the Church. This community is in some things priest-ridden. Not in the old fashions nor by those calling themselves priests. But the want of the old arts does not remove the evil. So long as the main religion of a community is held to be any one act, or set of acts, in which the family can take no part, so long as the deep convictions of the soul by which it draws near to God, and in consequence of which it begins to live, are matters of ecclesiastical influence, independent of the voices of the family life, just so long, will it be true that we are, in a mild sense, priest-ridden. Your child of fifteen or twenty years of age goes out of a morning, according to this scheme of doctrine, a woe-inheriting sinner. He or she comes in at night, a soul at peace with God; converted, a " professor of religion," washed in the fountain of redemption and forever saved. Now what have you to do with such change ? What has the family ? Nothing at all. You have been loving the child with all a father's love, or a mother's watchful tenderness — you have been educating it, as you supposed, with some sort of a scriptural promise, that if you brought it up

HOME, THE FIRST COVENANT,

I I in the way it should go, it would never leave it. But you find that such thoughts are all the " filthy rags of self-righteousness/' Your child's whole education, in the most important part of it, in the hope of acceptance with God, from which all moral conduct flows, has been taken out of your hands, and given into the hand of its religious teacher. It has ' joined the church/ not as a consequence of its regular life from infancy ; not as a consequence of its moral education, as you have been leading it, but in spite of it. There is this immense break in our lives. Yea ! and men love to have it so.*

Now, I ask it in sober sadness, is this necessary ? Is it the will of God ? Is it the faith of father Abraham, and of every other Bible-saint ? I think not. There is no power in the Church to come between the father and the child, that can in any way impair the unity of the education of the family. The first covenant is the home covenant. The first church that a man joins is the home church. He is born into a family, whose high-priest is consecrated, by a rite as holy as ever fell on human head. The approval of high heaven was given to Abraham ; because "he would command his children after him. ,, God, who loved him, left him under the tutelage of his own parents, until he had become a full-grown man. Then again he did not call him finally, until his father had died. But it is hardly necessary to multi-

* I am a believer in the fact of conversion, as given in Scripture,

as the exception^ and in the Catechism, as the rule.

ply instances out of the Bible. It is written, in my way of reading it, on another scheme of life from ours. In the Bible, as in nature, home is the first church of the infant; the passage from it to any other, is by rule natural and easy.

III. Let me show my meaning from the Prayer-book. We bring a child to the font to be baptized. There we confess, that it is ' by nature born in sin, and a child of wrath/ Pass, just now, what we mean by this language; it surely allows the need of some compensating blessing, to be sought in this way. Now a common sense of justice tells us, that if God, by any means, has held the infant responsible for the condition in which it is born ; he surely, if he has any confidence in a mother's love, to say nothing now of a father's, he surely will allow some way to set off against its condition by nature, some covenant state that may save our precious theology. Otherwise this happens. You are members of a church, into which you cannot bring your young children. You are in the fold. They are in the world. You are saved by a grace that has no room for them. And, to pass by all the rest, I emphasize this thought. You cut across all the natural powers of love in the family. How can you talk to your child of the duties of life? It is in 'the gall of bitterness/ If there is a break as wide as this between you, your hands cannot repair it; your tiny arms can never reach across its gloomy depths. What is a home where the father is obliged to pray always for the

HOME, THE FIBST COVENANT.

future religious change of those he loves best? — where, in all the family life, at the morning prayers, at the daily question of duty, at the evening hour of separation, or in the dark days of sickness, there is always this fearful under-consciousness such a one has of a wily inherited disease in the blood. It is an awful gulf, between the members of the same household ! They may not often speak of it ; but it is never forgotten. How can it be ? They live on the edge of a precipice, where the cliffs go down sheer ten thousand feet, and the rocks below are " heaped with the damn'd like pebbles. " Of all the home-band the little infants seem the most in peril : and reverend scribes stand ever by, to see that no weak mother, like that one of old Greece, shall bare her white bosom and recall her child from the dangerous edge, by the un-orthodox instincts of nature. This scheme has been tested in this community lately. Now for awhile true religion has to fear the .reaction. Every one of us has a personal interest in it. And in the interest of the truth, I recall you to the picture of the faith of the first of the leaders of the religious thought of the world. The older covenants held all the children in their sacred circle. That religion is the safest that begins with honoring home. The eloquent tongue of the appointed preacher in the church can open to us the knowledge of sacred things. It can never take the place of the father's authority. " The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge," says Solomon ; and it begins in the instruc-