The imperial Christ

Front matter

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Contents

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Biographical Introduction vii

I. The First Christian Duty. An Advent Sermon 1

I. The First Christian Duty

AN ADVENT SERMON.

The Lord is at hand. — Phil. iv. 5.

Behold I stand at the door and knock. — Rev. iii. 20.

To-day stands in the calendar of the Christian year as the first Sunday in Advent. That calendar, older than the divisions of Protestantism, older than Protestanism itself, older than the schism between Rome and Constantinople, belongs to all Christendom, which, dating its era from him, ought to divide its year also with reference to Jesus, who has been exalted to the right hand of Him who sits upon the circle of the heavens and rules the seasons. It is therefore rightly called not so much an ecclesiastical as a Christian calendar, as this is the Christian era. Between the church, as representing ecclesiastical dogmas and systems, and the personal empire of Jesus Christ the distinction must sometimes be emphasized.

Facts indeed compel attention to it. A German student recently hired himself to work in a factory, that he might learn the secret of tl^at social democracy which is so widespread among the workingmen of Germany. He reported that more universal and more significant than the political ideas and aims of these men were two things : a profound disbelief in the church and in Christianity, as represented by the church, and a profound faith in Jesus and admiration amounting to adoration of him, as the head man of the race. And this same thing is to a lesser extent coming to pass among us ; and at least it is not the worst that could happen, for the only thing which has become so identified with us as to be essential to the coming of the kingdom of God and man in this world is the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. Let all else go, so that men's minds continue to revolve with the years about Jesus, and the empire of redemption will move on apace.

We hear of the secularization of Christmas. God hasten the secularization of the whole year in similar fashion ! It is the substitution of a genuine for a false sanctity ; of sacredness for sacerdotalism. When it has completed itself, we shall see the new Jerusalem come down from God out of heaven. The world has begun to look to Jesus, to seek to embody his spirit once a year, at the anniversary of his birth. But let it follow him through the year. Let it listen to the Sermon on the Mount.

Let it stand with him at Bethsaida. Let it go out with him to Cesarea Philippi. Let it march behind him up the gorge from Jericho to Jerusalem amazed and silent, saying, " Let us go that we may die with him." Let it witness his simple yet eloquent triumphal progress mingled with tears over the sinful, the apostate city. Let it sit down at the memorial supper. Let it watch with him in Gethsemane. Let it see the traitor's kiss. Let it follow into the hall of Caiaphas, and stand with the crowd outside the tribunal of Pilate. Let it travel the Via Dolorosa, and stand by the cross and hear the prayer, " Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do." Let it view the empty tomb, and celebrate the Easter gladness over him whose relation to the world, whatever it may be, has transcended that of a mere posthumous influence. Let the breath of spring come to it with pentecostal grace, and the vision of a Triune Glory open to it as the scales fall from its eyes ; and then let it ripen through the rest of the year as through the summer which this sun of righteousness has brought, and by the time it has waked up to the anticipation of another Christmas season will it not also, if it has improved its opportunity, find for that new Christmas a new meaning ?

It should be the effort of us all to pursue some such course as this, to seek to learn of Jesus in the spirit of Jesus himself, to strip away such over-

4 THE IMPERIAL CUBIST.

growths of pious but often discredited opinion as have concealed him. Each year we should seek to come around to the starting-place with some new treasure. And this is about the starting-place. Here we begin to prepare for the Christmas season. The distinctive characteristic of this season is that it has come within the sphere of influence of Christmas. As the old almanac w r ould say, " At about this time begin to look out for Christmas gifts." And children and elders alike are prompt to take the advice. Find out what is uppermost in any child's mind, and it is probably Christmas. Learn what parents are thinking of, and it is probably how to make the most of Christmas. The shop counters are already beginning to groan and the clerks to groan with them. If Birnam Wood be not come to Dunsinane, the young green forests have already for weeks been traveling in procession through our street on their way* to city homes. Christmas is not far off ; and the new year begins with Christmas.

But this coming Christmas cannot be last year's Christmas. It is the Confucian, not the Christian, era, whose years are circles. The years of Jesus are spiral curves like the whorls of a climbing millennium plant. His is the era, not of machinery, but of life. We do not come around to where we started from. A year with Jesus cannot leave us where it found us. And it is to this fact that this season ought especially to compel attention. This

THE FIB ST CHRISTIAN DUTY.

Advent season, therefore, has a double anticipation. It anticipates both the coming again of the Christmas season and the fulfillment of that phase of which last Christmas was the beginning. Among the early disciples of Jesus, I think it was this latter anticipation which was most active. They lived continually under the sense of an incomplete era. Something was impending which was sure to happen some day, and might happen any day. This expectation they had from plain intimations of Jesus, whose own superb faith in his personal relationship to the world took the form of an anticipation of a second appearance. And this second appearance of Jesus was seen, both by himself and by them, to be a logical consequence of the place which he had won in their hearts, and was winning in the world. Each year as they rehearsed at length the events of his life and death and resurrection, and the descent of his spirit, and the starting in its power of his redemptive movement, they realized more and more that something was wanting to complete the cycle, so that their anticipation of the recurrence of the anniversary of his birth was swallowed up in the larger anticipation of his return in glory. And this season, therefore, became not so much the herald of Christmas as the herald of the second coming of the Christ, the second Christmas. This expectation has always held captive the minds of those who have fixed their loyalty to Jesus. The immeasurable possibilities of the movement which he launched, compared with its actual visible achievement, have made men feel that somewhere must be forming a reservoir of spiritual force which may at any moment revolutionize the world. The officials of the United States Geological Survey declare that the Wasatch Mountain range, which overhangs Salt Lake City, is gradually rising, and that the movement is registered, in its relation to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, by a series of earthquakes which occur when the strain at any place becomes too great to endure longer, and a fracture of the rock occurs, forming long precipitous " faults " which are only gradually obliterated by climatic influences. And they have warned the people of Salt Lake City that they are living on the spot where the next earthquake is now already overdue, so that they need not be surprised at a terrible convulsion which, when it does come, will come without an instant's warning. And the longer it is delayed the more awful it will be, and the more sudden. It may not occur in five hundred years, but it may occur to-day ; and no argument for continued delay can be made from past delay. This is the prediction, not of charlatans, but of plain matter of fact scientific students, who are experts in this department of knowledge.

Speaking as one whom circumstances and special pursuits have made something of an expert in the science of spiritual movements and potencies, I here declare that a similar movement has been going on, until so much amassed Christ-energy is in existence, in a form capable of instantaneous transformation from potential to actual, that, scientifically speaking, there is enough tension to produce such a moral and spiritual convulsion between now and Christmas as history has never seen, though poets and prophets have always dreamed of it. Neither is any improbability to be argued from the fact that it has not come before. It is certain to happen some time, and the longer it is delayed the greater becomes the strain, and hence the more likely it is to be of sudden and unexpected occurrence. I reiterate it, — speaking as a scientific student on the basis of a knowledge of contemporary history, and not as a fanatic or an ignorant twister of texts, — that this is to be expected. And I invite attention to the fact that within the past few years this same thing has received more frequent utterance from the mouths of sober and weighty witnesses than in all recent times. It is not long since Dr. Dale, of Birmingham, one of the leading ministers and public men of England, said that he felt assured that " there would shortly be such a display of the Saviour's power through the church upon the world outside as had not been seen since the day of Pentecost." The new heavens and the new earth may come convulsively and at once, and the Lord descend from heaven with a shout. And the next Christmas may see it. God hasten it in his day !

Did I say, God hasten his day ? "Who are ye that desire the day of the Lord ? TVho am I that desire it ? " The day of the Lord shall be darkness and not light." Ah, it is a great and terrible day when the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood. It will be a day of judgment and heart searching. It will be a day of decision, instant decision, with no more time for procrastination. It is not for me to threaten, but it is my duty to warn solemnly that this impending Christ-crisis is one which, when it comes, is to be dreaded as well as hoped for. The truth is that Jesus is not only the world's Saviour, but we believe that he is to be its Judo;e. We forget that in these days; we forget that the Christ-movement is one which concerns men as free moral agents, responsible for what they do, and the choices which they make or neglect to make. Though the dignity of manhood has been vindicated through the deification of a man, through the revelation of the divine son ship of humanity, we forget that with this dignity comes the possibility of irretrievable ruin as well as of eternal salvation and success. Such a possibility is inseparable from the new idea of the worth of manhood. The dogma of universal salvation is the counterpart, as it was the outgrowth, of the old hyper-Calvinism, which affirmed that God, out of his eternal purpose and for the mere good pleasure of his will, chose some to everlasting life, and passed by others, thus dooming them to death. As against this the early Universalists not unaptly declared that, if the question of salvation was determined solely by the will of God, then it was incredible that any should be lost. That is so, and if we were shut up to that alternative we must be Universalists. But not being so shut up, we say that God is determined because of his love to save all men ; but we cannot say that God can save all men. We are the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be when we have worked out our destiny in either good or ill. The possibility of eternal success involves that of awful failure. The issue, therefore, concerning the Christ-crisis is one of eternal life and eternal death. We must not belittle it. It is a crisis.

But as we are accustomed to say that society is the individual writ large, so this crisis is equally for the individual and for society ; and though the social crisis may not come this year, the individual crisis may come to many, and will almost certainly come to some. And since I cannot speak at length of both, it is to the individual Christ-crisis I wish to call especial attention this morning. Every year is a critical year. And precisely the same crisis is never twice repeated. Since last Christmas a new issue has been preparing for each of us to meet. I have chosen these two texts because they together cover the ground, both as to the fact and the manner of the fact, of Jesus' relation to most of us. He is at hand, he is confronting us. And within the year he has been drawing nearer and nearer to many. They cannot begin another Christmas in anything like the same attitude with regard to him as that of last Christmas. His voice has become more audible. His claims upon them have become more urgent, his right to them has become more plain. The excuses which formerly expressed their unwillingness to admit him to their hearts have ceased to satisfy their consciences ; the intellectual obstacles and skepticisms have either been removed, or have shrunken in importance ; and their need of him has been revealed to them more than before. They can see more plainly than ever before how much better off they would have been had they yielded to him a year ago. They see how evil habit has been growing and gaining hold upon them, how the world has encroached upon them ; how much easier it is to put sacred things out of mind than it was a year ago ; how much more difficult to compel their attention to the things of Christ. As they look back, too, they see that probably never so often before in their lives have they resisted the spirit of Jesus as during the past year ; never so often and so strongly have they held on to self against him. And so they have been subjected to a strain which either gradually or suddenly is to place them in a new relation to him.

This pressure of Jesus upon them is all the more irresistible in the long run because it is the pressure of love. Jesus comes to them with the importunity and the respectfulness of love. He does not force himself into their lives against their wills. He knows, and they know the moment that they come to consider it, that into their lives he must come, if they are to be redeemed ; that the whole sum of redeeming agency in the world has come to be represented by him ; that to shut him and that spirit which proceeds from him out of their lives is to shut out salvation, to empty life of all sacredness and prepare a vacuum which shall invite all evil. But he comes pleading to be admitted. The idea of soliciting love in the relation of Jehovah to Israel took hold of the prophets very early. It was a very remarkable idea for their age, a great stroke of originality. They dwelt upon the thought of a God who loved his people so tenderly and generously that he could not do violence to their own free choice, and hence he plead with them for the privilege of blessing them. The early disciples, remembering the gentleness of Jesus and the manner in which his love had won its way into their own hearts, conceived of him as succeeding to this characteristic of the Jehovah of the prophets, and knocking at the door of all hearts. Thus the prime characteristic of that Christ-spirit, of which they were the first channels, was its pleading love. It won men. Those

12 THE IMPERIAL CHRIST r

who were dominated by the spirit were dominated by love. The literature of the spirit was surcharged with love. The hymns and ritual of the church were redolent of divine love. The atmosphere of the meetings of the early Christians was an atmosphere of a love so divine that it simply puzzled their contemporaries. "When the time came for them to bear testimony with their blood, the marvel of the world was how a poo r crucified peasant could have so won the love of strong men and weak women that they would die for him. So love became a potency again in the world's history, and pure love has been one of the chief history-makers ever since.

Consider how much of your own life during the past year has been love-life : how much of what you have done has been won from you by love, — the love you bear to others, the love they bear to you, the love they bear to one another. Take an inventory of your possessions, of all that is of value to you, and eliminate from all these values that which love has in one way or other put into them. How much of them would be left ? Value, we all know, is subjective in its determination. And the most important, the fundamental subjectivity which gives value to things, which makes the values we all so much cherish, is love. And all this love, when once we come to analyze it, to find the secret of it, — all this is owing to Jesus, not only as having originated with him nearly two thousand years ago, but because the person of Jesus stands related to it daily.

Therein lies the significance of the declaration with which the early apostles founded the kingdom of Jesus, — that his relation to that kingdom transcends that of a posthumous influence. As the theologians would say, he is not only a first cause, but also an immanent cause. Wherever in the course of history the personality of Jesus has been lost sight of, the love which he brought into life has been presently lost out of it again. We may call it mysterious, and try either to believe it or to disbelieve it because it is mysterious, according to our preconceptions ', but it is a fact of history that, wherever loyalty to Jesus cherishes him as though he were a present living person, there love enriches life ; and wherever it fails to do this, these riches take to themselves wings. In this historical fact is justified to us that instinctive feeling of the child and of the child-side of man, that the love of Jesus is soliciting us all the while, as truly as it yearned over and won the hearts of his first disciples. All this transcendent part which love plays in life is the way in which the Master solicits permission to come into our lives. And during the past year this solicitation has gone on more and more with us all. Many have yielded, and have said that this source, this immanent present cause of all that makes life sweet, shall no longer be compelled to pour his blessings into their lives from outside themselves, but that he shall come in and occupy the throne which he deserves to occupy. Others have held him off, cherishing and enjoying the blessedness of life of which he is the creator, bathing deep in the fountains of pure affection, but postponing the day when the source of all pure affection shall be within them.

And now another Christmas is drawing near, and we are again to join in the celebration of the birth of Jesus, for we all go as far as that ; that fact is the meaning of the secularization of Christmas. But we know that Jesus was born a King. The whole course of events which gave the world a Jewish Messiah was working toward a royal personage. He would not have been equal to the causes which produced him had he not been a King. If we celebrate his birth, we celebrate the birth of a King — of our King. This King grew to be a man, and as a man he has asked and is asking our loyalty and our love. If I celebrate his birth, how can I refuse to enthrone his manhood ? Let me think of this. It is less than a month until that season which all the world, myself included, has agreed to celebrate as sacred. If I, knowing his claims as distinctly as I do know them, hearing the pleadings of his love as I hear them, presume to go on and again celebrate his birth, does not my action, if this is all of it, partake somewhat of a mockery ? Had I better not be frank like Herod, and send out and slay the child Jesus, if I propose to pass through that season again without admitting the man Jesus to rule over me? It is a serious question, this, how we who are still shutting Jesus out of our hearts are to approach this Christmas season. That it is a holy season the world has agreed ; that he who treads its courts should do so with clean feet, with innocent heart, with pure purpose, is a fair corollary. How qan I, who for a year have been consciously and purposely putting off the day when Jesus shall be let into my heart to rule there, — how can I without inconsistency so much as buy a toy for my child in the name of Christmas ? I glory in the so-called secularization of Christmas, because, when the world keeps Christmas, it acknowledges the kingship of Jesus, it follows the star of Bethlehem, it puts itself where at length it can be brought to face the issue of the enthronement of Jesus in its heart. I am glad that you kept Christmas last year, because you therein confessed that Jesus was born King. But meanwhile you have seen him become a man, assume the authority of a King, rise in some sense at least, and ascend to the Father. You have felt the pleadings of his love, you have acknowledged that he ought to be enthroned in your life. Now I challenge you in his name : how dare you, until you have enthroned him, celebrate in any way another Christmas ?

I do not ask you to hold my conception concerning Jesus, to affirm my dogma, or understand my philosophy. It is of small importance that one be nominally orthodox. I only ask that yon follow out the logic of your own attitude, that you so secularize the whole of your life, as you have secularized, by sanctifying, this part of it.

Let us pray.

O Lord Jesus Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee ; grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

II. The Expectancy Of Faith

AN ADVENT SERMON.

Be patient therefore, brethren, until the coming- of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, being- patient over it, until it receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient ; stablish your hearts : for the coming of the Lord is at hand. — James v. 7, 8.

But the end of all things is at hand : be ye therefore of sound mind, and be sober unto prayer : above all things being fervent in your love among yourselves ; for love covereth a multitude of sins : using hospitality one to another -without murmuring : according as each hath received a gift, ministering it among yourselves, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God ; if any man speaketh, speaking as it were oracles of God ; if any man ministereth, ministering as of the strength which God supplieth : that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, whose is the glory and the dominion for ever and ever. Amen. — 1 Peter iv. 7-11.

These two pieces of writing, so similar in substance and in tone, were written by men of quite diverse temperaments and histories, concerning the event toward which the minds of all the earlydisciples of Jesus were firmly set. To this expectation they had come by good right as his disciples ; for he had himself never wavered in his belief that he was about to stand to the world in a relationship in which no other man had ever stood, or could ever stand after him. It is a remarkable fact that, in spite of his strong conviction on this point, he was under no illusions as to his ignorance concerning the when or the how of its coming to pass. He made no pretension in that direction. Predictions founded upon insight into his own character and his relations to God and men he could make. Predictions dependent upon foreknowledge of the accidents of history and of human caprice he was too sane to undertake. These things, he said, belonged to the Inscrutable Father. Yet while he could not foretell times or seasons, he encouraged his followers to watch for the signs of the new era, intimating that he who could observe the operations and learn the laws of life and growth might anticipate that era, as he might anticipate summer by the blossoming of the fig-tree.

It is unnecessary to say to a congregation of thoughtful people in these days, that we are to look for the secret of this expectation of Jesus and his disciples concerning his future relation to the world, in his character, and in the relation to history in which he was believed by himself and them to stand. It was too vital a belief, and held too large a place in their scheme of life, to be dependent upon any mere tradition of words of his. The cardinal faiths of the first disciples were grounded less upon what he had said than upon what they knew him to be. His words are recorded less for their own sake than to portray his character as it appeared to those who had been acquainted with him. Sometimes but the slightest foundation appears in his recorded sayings for their teachings concerning him, and yet the portrait they have drawn shows how these doctrines must have been inferred. Frequently his own sayings concerning himself have the marks of incidental and partial self-revelations of a profounder self-knowledge. Compared with what he has turned out to be, his claims for himself have an air of modesty and reserve. When he spoke he spoke truth ; but far more than that, he was the truth.

Now the expectation, both of Jesus himself and of his first disciples, that he should one day occupy to the world a distinctively new and vastly more vital relationship than anything then in sight, was an expectation based directly upon a perception by himself, and more dimly by them, of what sort of character he was, and what a pivotal position he held in human history. He had at the beginning of his public career measured himself against the world as he found it, and he knew then that either he was a failure, and such a failure as to discredit the whole course of history, whose occurrence in the universe was a disgrace to its God, or else the world must be revolutionized through him, and must accept him as henceforth its moral and historical centre. His faith in God and in himself,

20 THE IMPERIAL C HEIST.

as what he knew himself to be, left him no alternative but to predict such a revolution. As to his disciples, they knew that he had come into their lives, and had turned them so completely about, had made such new men of them, that he was henceforth literally more to them than the whole world, and they were compelled, upon the basis of their personal experience with him, to assert that in so far as the world had not yet experienced a like change, it must do so. To do less than to affirm this would seem to them to be infidelity to him. No disciple of Jesus who had any realization of the change which had come to his own life, and who was in healthy touch with the e very-day life of the world, could fail to expect the world to be correspondingly changed. The only way in which to cherish the sense of personal experience of newness of life through Jesus, without expecting the world also to have a similar experience, is to regard one's self as living in a hopeless and hostile environment, from which he anticipates a speedy removal. When the church gave up the hope of any early conquest of the world by Jesus, vital piety was able to maintain itself only by the cultivation of a morbid longing for the things beyond death, — by other-worldliness. It was then that " being a Christian " came to mean being " prepared to die." It is true that the faith of Christ involves a confidence in the things beyond this life, and cannot continue to exist unless it has such a message of hope. It involves this, however, not because of the hopelessness of the conquest of this world by Jesus, but because of the assurance that this world not only belongs by right to him, but shall actually be his.