The Pacific coast pulpit

Front matter

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

V

Introduction

There are two things the same everywhere, in London and New York, in Boston and San Francisco, — the human heart and the Word of God. And when these two are properly brought together, the same result everywhere follows. We do not meet a different race of men on the Pacific Coast, nor do we need a special Bible for California. Both these are stereotyped. We have no call to tamper with the plates.

The circumstances and accidents of society, however, vary in varying times and places. There is a time current and place current characteristic of this Coast, which must be taken into practical account by the preacher. Custom does not keep the ministry here. There is no premium on the profession of Christianity. A man's position in business, or politics, a woman's position in society, is not materially affected by attendance or non-attendance at church.

The sun shines, and the rain falls ; the spring in matchless beauty, and the autumn in marvelous plenty, come down on both alike, and God does not settle his accounts on the first of each October out here. Life seems prosperous without religion, and

there is a tacit conviction cherished by many that religion is not so important but that one can get along very well without it in California.

It is not infidelity, there is not much of that here ; infidelity requires a more earnest soil than we yet have. It is not agnosticism ; God is acknowledged and believed in and believed to govern, good-naturedly withal. It is not any form of active antagonism to Christ and Christianity, but a contented indifferentism, a modern Athenianism, — ' i We will hear thee again on this matter," while they go back to the market-place.

This condition can be successfully met only by an evangelical, orthodox gospel. It is sometimes thought that the demands of the gospel must be modified and its warnings softened in such a country as this. No greater mistake can be made. The theology which would prevail must be an out-and-out theology. The usual compromises which have dulled the conscience of those in older communities opposed to an evangelical gospel are not equally successful here. Here, unless a man has real religion, he sees no necessity for professing or supporting the outward appearance of one. The West is conservative in theology, not because its ministers are ignorant of the scholastic issues of the day, but because they daily meet not a speculative, but a practical philosophy of life, and have to meet it, not with the "perhaps" of a possible interpreta-

INTRODUCTION. vii tion, but with the ' ' Thus saith the Lord " of a positive conviction. Any indefiniteness or uncertainty is discovered and resented first by the people, who leave the guesser with the remark that they have guesses enough of their own.

Nor does sensationalism, commonly understood, avail in the community. There is already so much genuine, untrammeled sensationalism in business, in society, and in the newspaper, that people coming to church pray to be delivered from it, knowing well its hollowness. The big drum has never been successfully beat for any length of time out here. The drum and the drummer have appeared occasionally in each of the denominations, but after a brief performance they have been excused.

The truth as it is in Christ, preached in knowledge, in sympathy, and in love, will accomplish here what it has accomplished elsewhere, — the conversion and sanctification of men, and nothing else will. Robt. Mackenzie.

San Francisco, Cat., October, i£pj.

Contents

The Incarnate Word i

Rev. John Q. Adams.

Rev. Arthur J. Brown.

I

In further studying this question, consider in the first place, that the history of religious thought shows nothing more clearly than this ; that men everywhere, in all conditions of society, and under all forms of religious belief, have felt the necessity of a mediator to stand between them and the Most High God. They have called Him by different names, but they have felt that He must be in some sense Deity incarnate, the divine and human in one person.

We do not dispute with those who assert that other religions have had their incarnations. It is what ought to have been expected, if Jesus Christ is the answer of heaven to the cry of earth. This admitted fact is an argument for the Christian truth. A solid foundation is thus furnished for the belief that the idea so universal has been realized in a fact \ the actual union of God and man in one person. The heathen religions have the idea ; the Christian religion alone has the reality. Every one who has a conscience has the ideal of a perfect man. He wants a model, and he creates one, but he wants more than this, — even the reality. That is given him in Jesus Christ, and nowhere else.

THE INCARNATE WORD.

It is to be remembered in this connection that within the historical period these heathen incarnations, so-called, have tended to greater definiteness. The less clear and certain have been succeeded by the more positive and definite. Then, if we go back to the earliest records, into the prehistoric period, we seem to find clearer ideas on this matter than in history's morning. In other words, men worked from light into darkness, and then from the darkness toward the light again, in their thinking on this matter. But at the best these are only ' ' disfigured incarnations. " Still they represent a trend of thought, a cry of the soul, that, if human nature be not a lie, must find its answer somewhere. The conclusion is certainly warranted from all this that there must be some grand necessity in human nature demanding such a manifestation, or it would not have been universally craved.

It is difficult to understand how any one after comparing these alleged incarnations with the Biblical, Christian conception, can honestly assert that the latter has grown out of the former. This, as is well known, is often the dogmatic assertion of certain would-be theologians in these days. But such a theory utterly fails to account for what is distinctive in the Christian idea, for that which separates it by an immeasurable distance from any other supposed incarnation. Thus the Christian

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idea itself may be brought forward as a further element in the proof of the fact. Whence this idea, so holy, so entirely separated from everything that is coarse, low, degrading, unworthy of God or man, which mars the world's thinking elsewhere on this subject, if the incarnation of Jesus Christ as a fact is not the foundation of the idea, if the fact does not answer to the idea as the original to its shadow ? Moreover Christianity teaches an incarnation in order to a redemption, and thus is absolutely separated from other religious systems and from philosophical teachings on this matter.

It follows from this universal want and this Christian answer to it, that the man who attempts to change the thinking that has ruled the world for many centuries, must have something like in kind to offer, or there is little hope of his success. Kant says somewhere : " Facts without ideas are blind, and ideas without facts are empty." The world has written in the past, and is writing to-day, its condemnation — because it has found them empty — upon many a scheme without facts offered it in place of that Manger and that Cross. And the attempt to resolve the incarnation of Jesus Christ into the idea of God in humanity, God in nature, God in everything, is putting emptiness in place of the Divine fullness. A personal God-man, manifested in historic time, alone answers the universal cry. The heart of man demands it. The only

THE INCARNATE WORD.

way to be rid of it is to educate him out of it, and in this process you have crushed out some of his noblest and holiest aspirations, dwarfed and crippled his soul.

Still further confirmation of the necessity for a mediator is given by those who reject, sometimes with contempt, the Christian idea and fact. "Human struggle, " says Weiss, ' ' has ever been a struggle toward an incarnation ; " and in saying this he considers he has set aside any necessity for the Incarnation. But that struggle is hopeless, and has no promise of success, if it was not ended when the angel chorus announced the birth of Christ our Lord. ' ' The Infinite Mother, " says Theodore Parker, ' ' spreads wide her arms to fold us to that universal breast, and is ready to inspire your soul. " — Sermons of Religion, p. 392. Here we have a God-woman ! Figurative language has gone mad, but the heart has simply cried out for what the head had denied it.

Will not God help in this struggle ? Will He not answer this cry ? Will He not meet this universal want ? Is it not a fitting place for God to intervene ? If not, then our holiest aspirations only mock us, the heart of man has cruelly deceived him, and in place of a fact there is only emptiness. ' ' I need a God," a pagan of old is reported as saying, "who can speak to me and lead me." Has He come ? or look we for another ?

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