Confessing Christ

Front matter

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A MANUAL FOR INQUIRERS IN RELIGION.

BY

Preface

This little manual has been prepared more in reference to the congregation of which the author is pastor, and to the community in the region where he resides, than to the public at large. He has intended it to meet a want which the living voice is not adequate to supply; and he hopes by means of it to speak where the living voice cannot go, and to continue speaking when the living voice shall speak no more. Other works in the same department no doubt possess far greater merit than this ; but the fact is obvious that they cannot be made to circulate in proportion to the need of them. And, constituted as the minds of men are, one witness will be listened to with attention while another is disregarded ; and testivi

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mony from one source will exercise an influence while that from another will produce no impression. Some whom the writer wishes to serve will read this treatise because the writer wrote it, and this, perhaps, is a sufficient apology for publishing it.

The aim in composing it has been to adhere strictly to the teachings of the Bible, and to depict religion as it lies as a fact in human experience and practice, in precisely the form in which it is portrayed in the pattern given by God in his Word. Fidelity here, it is hoped, may gain for it such a blessing from the Holy Spirit as may make it the means of guiding some perplexed inquirer into the way of life.

Natchez Parsonage, September 1, 1880.

Contents

Chat. I. — Reasons for Confessing Christ, 9 II. — Necessity of Effort in Religion, 32

III. — Source of the Knowledge of Religion, . . . .46

IV. — The Connection of Christ with Religion, 59

Chapter I. Reasons For Confessing Christ

Interpreting the phrase " Confessing Christ." as signifying the adopting and practicing of the true religion, my object in the remarks which immediately follow, will be to persuade men to become religious, by confessing Christ. Where the idea of religion presented in the Bible is taken as the proper and authentic index of it (as is the case generally, where the Bible is known), there will be found a large proportion of persons who in their honest moments will confess, "we are not religious." By this confession it is admitted, first, that there is such an interest or object as religion proposed to the consideration and acceptance of men; and secondly, that these persons, for some reason, have failed to consider and accept it. This failure — this lack of a personal concern in religion I wish to show— is both an error to be corrected and a fault to be abandoned. To each one of these individuals joining in the confession, " we are not religious/' I wish to address the injunction, " you ought to be religious." No matter what the obligations of others of your species may or may not be, I make the affirmation to you particularly — the solitary reader whose eye is now upon these words — u you ought to be religious." And for these reasons : —

I

You are precisely the party upon whom religion lays its claim, and the whole weight of its claim. Whatever religion means or includes attaches to you, as directly and completely as though you were the only being in the universe besides God. And this is so, simply because the nature of the relation in which you stand to God makes it so. God is a unit, existing and acting wholly — that is, with all the authority and all the force which belong to him

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as God — in reference to every other being for whom he exists, and upon whom he acts. Every such being can say, " He is my God ; he is all that the term God means to me." And on the other hand, each man is a unit, a several and independent being. He would be himself wholly, if he were alone in the world. At his coming into the world he is distinguishable from all beings who have existed in the past, or who now exist. All that can be predicated of man can be predicated of him. All the obligations which belong to man belong to him. No association with his species, no merging of himself in the mass of his kind, can divest him of the wholeness of his being, or of the wholeness of his responsibility. When death comes it is the unit who dies. There can be no companionship, no diffusion of self, in that solemn procedure. The isolation in which man goes out of the world is felt by every spectator ; the wholeness with which he dies is understood by the bereaved hearts of surviving friends. Now, between these units there lies a relation which brings God, in his completeness, into contact with man, in his completeness. The requisitions which God, under this relation, imposes upon man, rest, in all their entireness. upon you. the individual. The obligations that man is under to God, by reason of this relation, attach in all their extent to you. the individual. Religion is merely the due recognition by you of these requisitions and obligations. You cannot say it does not concern you. for you are the very being to whom it addresses itself. Tou cannot say it concerns you only remotely, or partially, for upon you solely, as if you were the centre, it rests the whole circle of its claims. The relation between you and God places you and him together in an association as close, and in a solitude as awful, as that in which Moses stood when God met him amidst the rocks of Horeb, and covers you with a duty as direct as that with which he was charged. To be religious is to fulfill this duty ; and the burden of it will rest upon you as long as you and God continue to be what you are. There is no evading it while two such units are standing in such a relation to each other. It began with your being; it has run parallel with your life; it

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will attend you in death ; it will go with you into eternity. Surely it is worth while for you to be assured that this relation is a propitious one ! Surely it becomes you to consider the question, What is it to be religious ?

II

The relation between you and God being of this direct and absolute sort it is evident that the not acknowledging of it by you must be a positive wrong to God. In other words, the absence of religion is positive irreligion. This alternative you adopt, as long as you decline or delay to adopt religion. For the absence of religion is practically a disowning by you of all the obligations which are involved in the relation in which you stand to God. It is saying to him, "Thou art not my God." This is clearly irreligion. It is something more than "being nothing," or occupying a position of indifference. You refuse to render to God what is required of you by the very relation under which you exist. This cannot be right ; and what is not right is wrong. There is no

EEASOXS FOR middle ground between these points. You cannot escape the charge of being positively irreligious by appealing to the respectful phrases in which you are accustomed to speak of God and religion ; nor by making promises to yourself or others that at some future day you will acknowledge God and embrace religion. These phrases and promises do not alter the fact, that what God requires you do not render ; and that thus far in your career you have been leading a positively irreligious life ; and that under cover of these phrases and promises you are now resolving to persist in leading such a life. This conclusion is one which you cannot contemplate with satisfaction. You are startled by the enunciation of it. You had persuaded yourself that though you were not religious you were still not irreligious. But it is apparent that you have been deluding yourself. While you have been crying "peace, peace/"' to yourself, you find that your actual position has been one of " enmity with God." It is a guilty position, and you need to abandon it ; and to do this you must become religious.

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III

The motive to this is heightened by the reflection that the position you occupy is one in which you are exposed to the displeasure, or to what the Bible calls " the wrath/' of God. By that very relation under which you are placed to God, and which you have heretofore disowned, he is required, unless he would disown it too (which would be to violate truth), to notice and mark your defection as a wrong. He must discriminate between the man who acknowledges his obligations to him and the man who does not. He must distinguish, both in his judgment and in his conduct, the man who does right from the man who does wrong. If one is an object of his favor the other must be an object of his displeasure. The decisions in the mind of God, as to the moral character of human acts, must contain in them an element of approbation or disapprobation ; and these must express themselves by a corresponding method of dealing with these acts. To be living in irreligion, therefore, is to be living under the frown, the condemnation, of

God. Painful as this doctrine is. it must be a truth if the doctrine of God's existence is a truth. Is this a condition with which vou ought to be content ? Is there not something infinitely alarming in the thought that vou are standing in immediate contact — and all alone too in your responsibility — with that God who is "angry with the wicked every day"? Does not common sense — instinct, even— say that you ought to fly from such a position ? You can do this only by becoming religious.

IV

Tour need of religion, and the fault you are committing in neglecting it. have probably often been brought to your notice by the experiences through which you have passed in life. Critical periods have occurred in which you have been forced to carry your thoughts outside of the present world, and to seek some thing in the way of aid. protection, or satisfaction which the present world could not furnish you. Under an overpowering sense of impotency you have involuntarily lifted the cry. 6: Lord, save ; 1

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perish !" " 0 Lord, I am oppressed ; undertake for me !" At the threshold of some momentous enterprise you have been arrested by the reflection, "the conditions of success here spread out far beyond my capacity to comprehend or control them. My resources cannot guarantee the end I seek. There is a place here for the favor, the guidance, the blessing of God." Religious faith and hope fit into such exigencies, just as trust in the God of Israel was needed to supplement the weakness of David in his contest with Goliath. It is a serious moment, for instance, when the young man quits the parents' roof to embark singlehanded in the strua^le of life. The burden which drives sleep from his pillow, on the night before his departure from his home, is something which only the invisible hand of God can lift from his heart. You have, at times when life seemed peculiarly attractive and the future was arrayed in the most enchanting hues, been suddenly brought by sickness to the verge of death ; or you have seen death overtake some one in your circumstances. Such an anomaly has made life fade into an illusion. The ground

EE A SONS FOR which seemed so firm has opened under your feet. " Something more than this I need/' has been your solemn thought. " Something which shall make life independent of death — something which shall protect these aspirings within me from this cruel extinction." That something is religion. You have committed errors in judgment and in practice. You have had occasion often to charge yourself with folly ; and worse than this, with sin. The reviews which conscience has obliged you to make of passages in your life, have filled you with compunction and remorse. The fruits of transgression have been found to be bitter; and under the revulsion produced by their bitterness, you have turned with loathing from your vicious indulgences, and have been able, only by a sort of violence imposed upon your mind, to resort to them again. Now in all these phenomena, with some or all of which you are familiar, you have the protests which your nature is always uttering against a life of irreligion. They show that the policy which reveals, at every summing up of its results, so large a column of pains and losses, must be radically

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wrong. They are the monitors that God has stationed in the soul, to remind you of your fatal dereliction in forsaking him. They are the voices with which heavenly wisdom pursues her erring child, crying in his ears at every step, "All they that hate me love death !"

V

To neglect or abjure religion is to set yourself in opposition to all that is distinctive of true manhood. Manhood is a term which we use with an excessive complacency, to distinguish the species to which we belong from brutehood. Manhood arrayed against religion is simply self-degradation, or rather self-annihilation. For religion is the very inspiration out of which manhood is born. It keeps guard over the elements which compose it; it protects them and cherishes them as the priest does the holy fire. To banish from the mind and the life the idea of God — for instance — to extinguish all recognition of him, and of the relations under which you are placed towards him — to divorce yourself entirely from the influences which a faith in him must exercise

UFASOXS FOE over a rational nature, is to recede, by a fearful lapse, from manhood to brutehood. It is, in effect, to put yourself upon a level with the beasts which perish. To depreciate religion is, in some respects, the basest and the unmanliest act of which a man can be guilty. It is to be disloyal to that which puts the crown upon his nature. It is to resist the attraction which draws him upward to his true proportions ; and it is to yield to a gravitation which tends clownward to the grossness of an indefinite sensuality. It is the precise function of religion to make man godly, or, in his measure, godlike ; and when possessed in a genuine form, it achieves illustriously this result. Humanity is indebted to it for the proper conception of goodness and nobleness ; and there is not a good or noble feature in humanity which it does not encourage and cultivate. You cannot maintain the attitude of an irreligious man, therefore, without laying yourself open to the charge of being; a traitor to the manhood of your species, and of defaming the honor of a benefactor whose good name deserves to be held more sacred than that of a parent.

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VI

It is religion alone which gives to the present life the properties which make it a substantial and valid thing. Without this, it is an aimless dream : it is a perpetual revolution in a circle, reaching no definite end. You enter the world a naked infant : and you go out of it as naked as you entered it. Has what lies between these points amounted to what can be pronounced, in any fair judgment, a consummation or success ? In ordinary cases, at least, we must surely answer, no. It is the plainest of all truths that a man s life, so far as this world is concerned, is never done. Whatever he has wrought it into or wrought out of it. there is something alwavs to be added to his work. If he gains wealth, he has acquired also an appetite for gaining it. which will force him to keep on gaining it. Or. if he escapes contracting the covetous habit, and. as he calls it. retires for the enjoyment of his gains, he must stand guard over his treasures with a vigilance which allows him no rest. And at last he must pass them over to other hands at death, with no assurance that all he gained will not be squandered, and all that he achieved undone, by those who come after hint. Whatever is made by man can be unmade : and requires to be perpetually made over again, as it were, or it will become, by the mere force of decay, unmade. Never till life has been linked to an object outside of it and above it : never, till by religion it has been taught to terminate upon God. and become a co-living and a co-working with him. can it promise to itself any issue which may be said to give it completeness. This endless circling around a beaten path, like the caged animal, without a real finality in life, can be avoided only by attaching life to Grod as its supreme end. This is done by making it the business of life to please him : and by giving the precedence in the whole scheme of life to the relations which bind the individual to him. "When you have identified yourself with God. you are independent of the conditions in which you may find yourself in the present world. Be they what they may. if through them you are securing to yourself the favor of God. accomplishing his will, maintaining fellowship

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with him, your life can never be an abortion. It must be an ever-advancing success — a "light shining more and more unto the perfect day." For if God is yours, it is certain " all things are yours."

VII

The apparent extinction of being which occurs at death, leaves the question open as to whether that extinction is limited to the life of the body or whether it is absolute, involving a literal and total end of being. The impossibility of making an affirmative answer to that question must always be an element of disquietude in the breast of an irreligious man. He may say "there is no hereafter, no judgment, no retribution," but he never can be entirely at ease under this assumption, for he knows it is only an assumption. The mere saying of a thing does not prove it. At death, you reach the end of a pathway which, to an extent, has been familiar to you. You have walked hitherto in a certain measure of light. The light leaves you here, and your next step is a leap in the dark. This is what a wise man will, if possible, avoid. If he can get a light from any quarter to guide him in that leap he will do it. Without it he must regard death with serious apprehension. Hence the fear of it is natural to man. and has the effect to keep him "all his life-time in bondage." Religion professes to be able to give him the light he needs in this critical juncture. Multitudes who have accepted its ministry attest that it does give it; that it gives it. first, in the clear testimony it bears to the fact of a continued existence beyond death ; second, in the definite intelligence it conveys of a possible state of immortal blessedness, of which that existence may be constituted; and third, in the explicit announcement it makes of the terms upon which this possible state may be made actual. The evidence upon which this light has been commended to the faith of men has been sufficient to satisfy innumerable departing souls that it is a true light and not an illusion. Trusting to it they have passed tranquilly, even triumphantly, into the dark abyss. Death has been robbed by it of its sting, and the grave of its victory. Surely, the grounds upon which such

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a confidence rests are worth considering ! Surely, the conclusion to which they conduct us. if they can be rationally accepted, is such a sublime mastery over man's last and greatest enemy, that every poor trembling bondsman to the fear of death may well covet the comfort of it.

VIII

Religion solves the question what is happiness, and guides the mind in the pursuit of it. It offers happiness under the genuine form of it — that of peace. It makes it reside in certain permanent elements, and not in frames of occasional excitement. It represents it as rest, not the exhilaration or intoxication of pleasure. It lays a good foundation for this state, and then maintains it by constant and adequate supports. It establishes peace within the soul by introducing concord among its affections and passions, through the regulating power of one imperial sentiment, love to God ; by adjusting it to the relations in which the individual is placed to God, to his fellow man. and to the facts of providence ; by allaying its cravings ;

by offering it all wholesome gratifications in the present world ; by mingling with these a sense of God's approbation and good will (without which there can be no true peace) ; and by planting within it the hope of eternal glory as a counterpoise to all the natural disturbances and disappointments to which it may be subjected. You can test this matter by an appeal to the experience of all really religious men. In no case, they will tell you, have they sacrificed any legitimate worldly good by their religion ; they have enjoyed forms of good unknown to a worldly life ; and in the end they have died, rejoicing in the grace of God, which made them and has kept them religious men. One thing they will emphatically declare, that whatever cost in the way of self-denial there has been in a religious life, it has been infinitely less than the cost which the sinner pays for the privilege of leading an irreligious life.

IX

Religion is commended to all right-minded persons by the fact that it converts that influ-

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ence with which every man is charged, into a beneficent power in the world. You are leaving the impression of yourself, whether you mean it or not, upon some other being or beings ; and that impression will come more from what you are than from what you sat/. This is eminently true of persons associated under the domestic relations. So naturally are children expected to resemble their parents in character that, where there is any marked departure from this law, we say of the exceptional party, he cannot be the child of such parents. A consistent religious life cannot fail to exert an influence. It is a light in the house, it is leaven in the community ; and this influence will be on the side of all that is good. You are bestowing almost all possible benefits in one when you succeed by your influence in inducing a neighbor to adopt religion. And equally comprehensive on the side of evil is the influence of an irreligious life. Somebody, by your malign attraction, will be drawn away into courses of error and sin; perhaps into extremes of depravity from which you yourself turn with disgust. You gave the erring soul its original direction : and under the propulsion of your influence it has gone down to its depths of corruption. The remembrances of a useless life furnish a painful retrospect ; but those of a life spent in diffusing a positively pernicious influence may fill your dyinghour with remorse, and will follow you with their torments to eternity.

X

The facilities for becoming religious have probably been so numerous and so accessible in your case that nothing but a criminal and violent perverseness can account for your lack of religion. Nothing less can be said of you, under the circumstances, than that you belong to that class of persons who have refused to come to the light because they love the darkness rather than the light. Conceive of the difference, in point of religious advantages, between you and the heathen man ; and yet 5 so far as the symptoms of spiritual life are concerned, you are no better than he. He is more gross than you, of course, in his manner of life.

or in the way in which he carries out his principles ; but those principles are not essentially different from yours. As God does not determine for either of you the kind of life yon lead, you each determine this for yourselves. His way leads to a savage self-indulgence ; yours to a civilized, perhaps a refined, one. There is an excuse for him, as he has had no higher law than that of nature. You have had the testimony of revealed truth to enlighten and instruct you; you have had the history of the people whom God chose to he his witnesses, in the Old Testament, and the history of Jesus Christ, " who was the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person," in the New Testament. You have had the institutions of the church, with its ordinances, and the examples of godly men as " living epistles," to teach you the way of duty and of salvation. In the Law and in the Gospel God has been perpetually addressing to you his commands and his persuasions ; so that in the clay of judgment there will be the same startling contrast between your case and that of the heathen man as the Saviour declares there

REASONS FuR will be between that of Tyre and that of Capernaum. To remain irreligious, in your circumstances, is deliberately to choose death instead of life.

XI

These reasons, while serving to show the obligation which rests upon you to embrace religion, go further, and require you to embrace it without delav. Their force does not depend in any degree upon the conditions of any particular period of life : they cover in their scope all periods of life. The aged sinner, whose day of grace is visibly nearing its end, may be urged to seize, with a special earnestness, his short opportunity to embrace it; but he ought none the less to have embraced it before. The obligation attaches to you as a rational being — a man. It is an incident of your nature, not of your circumstances. Your neglect of it thus far has been a loss which you never can repair. To defer it further is only further to trifle with conscience, presume upon God, and imperil your soul. All irreligious living is a perversion of the gift of

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life, and should never have been indulged for a moment. By all the responsibility which is involved in the possession of such a gift, you are enjoined to begin at once a religious life.

" Seek ye the Lord while he may be found; call ye upon him while he is near." Isa. 55 : 6.

"Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread ? and your labor for that which satisfieth not ? Hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness." Isa. 55 : 2.

" The Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say. Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.'' Rev. 22 : 17.

" How far may we go on in sin ?

How long will God forbear ?

Where does hope end. and where begin

The confines of despair ?

An answer from the skies is sent :

Ye that from God depart.

While it is called To-daj repent,

And harden not jour heart."

Chapter II. Necessity Of Effort In Religion

The levity with which the confession, "I am not religious/' is too often made, gives way, sometimes, to the sobriety which admits, " I ought to be religious." For reasons such as I have stated in the previous chapter, or on other grounds more special and personal, the ordinary insensibility of men to the subject of religion is sufficiently disturbed to make them uneasy in their conscious lack of it, and to awaken in their hearts, at least, a vague desire to possess it. This latter state of mind, if properly entertained, makes the subject of it an inquirer. His position is like that of a person making a journey, who has suffered himself to be so beguiled by the attractions of the country through which he has been passing as to have lost sight of his object, and to have wandered indefinitely from the right way. He is reminded of his fault by noticing the deepening

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shadows of the declining day, and by the dreariness which gathers over the scene in which he finds himself. He is bewildered ; he is alarmed. The point to which he was destined, and where his interests lie, must be reached, and reached without delay. But where is it? In what direction? What path' will surely conduct him to it ? Serious, anxious questions like these must occupy his mind. His effort to retrace his steps must begin in a process of inquiry. Could the reader whom I am addressing realize that in rejecting religion hitherto, he has been thus — and more fearfully — going astray, he would, with equal earnestness, pause, cast his eyes around the horizon, and ask the questions, What is this religion which I have so recklessly overlooked ? In what quarter, by what means, shall I find it ? Admitting candidly that he is not a religious man, and yet convinced that he ought to be one, the only consistent course for him to pursue is to do, in the case of religion, what he would clo in the case of any other object which he did not possess, but believed that he ought to possess, viz., try to acquire it. And his trying will commence when he begins honestly to