A present Heaven

Front matter

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.

I volume. i6mo. $ i.oo.

Contents

PAGB

I. Introduction . . . . . . i

II. The Gospel received Partially . . 32

Introduction

'VERY man that cometh to God, darkly as he may feel after, and imperfectly as he may find Him, comes to Him under the twofold conviction upon which the Apostle bases the existence of Faith itself; he must be persuaded "that God is, and that He is the rewarder of such as diligently seek Him," — a testimony which the Psalmist confirms even in transposing it, when he declares, " Verily there is a reward for the righteous, doubtless there is a God that judgeth the earth." Thus all approaches to the Supreme Being, howsoever warped by error or superstition, possess something of the nature of true religion (re-allegiance), because they testify to man's belief in a power raised above humanity, yet still cognizant of its actions and influenced by its dispositions. And while the human spirit has proved itself unable without supernatural

1 A help to " retain God " within it, while it has so often lost the object of faith, it has ever kept within it an instinct, witnessing to its capacity for access to the Divine, and reaching out after a bond that may place it in an assured mutual relation with that to which it aspires. Natural religion, and all that goes to make it up, prayer, propitiatory and deprecatory offerings, a life spent in accordance with what is believed to be the Divine pleasure, is the witness on man's part to his desire for reciprocal communion with that, which, though unseen, he feels to be above, around, within him. Revealed Religion is God's acknowledgment of this inward instinct, to which it restores its true object, and shows how that object may be alone apprehended.

I, saith Christ Jesus, am the Way. Revelation is the coming forth of the Father to meet His Son, while He is a great way off; it is as the spirit of God moving upon the darkened surface of man's heart and intellect, and saying, " Let there be light." For no man hath yet by searching found out God ; no wish, no yearning of the human breast, however mighty, could have brought down Christ from above ; no effort, no agony of the human mind could (as some deem) have raised Him up from the depths of individual consciousness. Our God is one that hideth Himself. The field of grace is one with treasure hid within it, a treasure to which grace itself must guide us, or God, though indeed He is not far from any one of us, is among us as One whom we know not. We need a Divine science ; a knowledge, as regards spiritual things, to be attained only by the aid of an Appointed Interpreter, Revelation, standing between the human soul and God, just as natural science stands between man and nature, enabling him to understand, to enjoy, yea, to overcome, that which without this blessed intervention would have remained a barren mystery.

Through Science, which is but, to speak plainly, a familiar acquaintance with the things which immediately surround us, man, in material things, has not so much made as found himself rich ; year after year he goes on enriching himself more amply with the * blessings of Earth's breast, the fair and fruitful surface, and with the blessings of her womb, the precious things shut within the ancient mountains, and hidden within the lasting hills. And yet, while the aspect of social life is changed, and its comforts and resources increased a thousand-fold, all things, none the less, continue as, in the words of Scripture, " they have been from the begin-

* Gen. xlix. 25.

ning " ; no fresh blood has been poured within our outward system, no new energies, no super* added forces, are at work within it ; the secret of the change is a simple one, — while Nature has remained the same, man has learnt to know her better. Silence has been broken up, and separation. He has begun to question this mute companion, dumb, it was supposed, from her birth, and has received for answer a world, growing wider and richer with every year that rolls.

And when I consider this, and remember that our Father, unlike the patriarchal one, has more than one blessing for His children ; when I begin to compare His two great kingdoms with each other, and remember that in each we have a goodly heritage, in each a Friend, the Steward and Dispenser of God's mysteries, rich in knowledge, in wisdom, and in counsel, I long that we, and all with whom we are joint possessors and inheritors, should set ourselves to inquire into the secrets of grace as diligently as our age is penetrating into those of nature. These, it is true, are not to be won, like material acquisitions, by mere 'effort and labor, yet it was a wise man who told us, that " labor was profitable for all things" And in this great spiritual aim, the work, as the Apostle emphatically expresses it, of our salvation, I often think we lose much, bypursuing it after vague and fanciful processes of our own devising, rather than by a diligent application of the method provided for us by God Himself. Like professed treasure-seekers, we search about under the guidance of some dream or impulse, instead of seeking for our wealth where God has placed it, in the natural riches of the soil. And in this region it is our own fault if we proceed uncertainly. God has been pleased to leave us, as it were, to guess at the economy of His outward Providence ; through patient investigation, experiment, and inference, we have to wring out Nature's secrets from her apparently reluctant grasp, but it is far otherwise with His revealed economy of grace. Here we are no longer workers in the dark, who must compare and question, examining every step as we go along, and asking of it with anxiety, " Whither will this conduct us?"

The very idea of a Revelation precludes, on the part of those who accept it as such, the possibility of uncertainty or hesitation ; for if we believe the Gospel to be indeed from God, we find all that it demands of us, whether by way of fact or precept, lying within the compass of two grand yet simple words, — Acceptance and Obedience. We must accept the Gospel, inasmuch as it makes us aware of all that the Almighty is to us ; we must obey it, inasmuch as it declares to us all that He would have us to be to Him.

This seems a very simple, even obvious position, but if granted, it leads on to a question of vital interest. Is the Gospel of Redemption thus accepted among us, not simply believed as a fact, but believed in as a power, an efficacy, a virtue? received not merely as a standard for doctrine and a rule of conduct, but as that which it declares itself to be, a principle having " life in itself," and the ability to impart the life which it possesses ? Let us a little consider the Gospel under what may be termed its sacramental character, as being the means by which the life that is in Christ is conveyed within the soul. To the faithful receiver the outward letter of Scripture is but the sheath or vehicle of the incorruptible " Word," by which, as the Apostle testifies,* we are born again unto God. To receive it, therefore, simply as a revelation of God's will, a record of His dealings, a book of laws and statutes and commands, is much the same thing as if, living in the days when He of whom it testifies dwelt among us in the flesh, we had received Him as Moses or Elias, or as one of the

* 1 Peter i. 23.

prophets, a Teacher sent from God to declare unto men His will. The reception which endues " with power to become the sons of God," is that which recognizes a higher mission, which is able to discern that the Gospel of Salvation, in placing the human soul in union with its Maker and Redeemer and Sanctifier, supplies in this union the spring of action, while it proclaims, as did the Law, its appointed rule. What we need here is a wise simplicity, a childlike literal spirit, loving and bold enough to take God at His own word, and to appropriate Him in all for which that word is our warrant ; but instead of lifting up our gates, and setting the doors of our souls more wide that this King of Glory may come in, instead of expanding to meet the breadth and fulness of the Gospel, we show a disposition rather to contract it to fit our own narrow standard. Then,* because we bring no more vessels to hold it, the oil of Divine grace is stayed. But we seem in general so little conscious of this, our imperfect reception of the truths upon which our salvation rests, that, even in most deeply deploring our deficiencies towards God, we fail to appreciate their true origin, and make a subject of regretful wonder of what a more correct estimate of our

* St. Augustine.

revealed relations with the Almighty would place in the light of a simple necessity. We urge this question upon others in the way . of remonstrance, upon ourselves in the way of selfcondemnation ; the preacher asks of his people, the Christian of his heart, Why does the general standard of our practice fall so far below the mark of our high calling, as set before us in Scripture ?

And to this there comes one answer, sorrowful and self-upbraiding, — " We fail because we do not obey the Gospel"; while there remains a far truer, far deeper witness and accusation written up against us, — that we could see how plainly ! — " We fail because we do not believe it." "I believed," said the Psalmist, "and therefore have I spoken"; because we believe, and according to the measure, strength, and fulness of our belief, will we, as Christians, speak and act and live. As " the stream can ascend no higher than its fountain," so it is in vain to try to live up to the Gospel until we (to speak familiarly) believe up to it. And this brings me to the question I have been so long anxious to consider, Do we — I speak of those who are Christians in more than in name and outward profession — so believe it ? Do we even know enough of its Divine nature and efficacy to see that each one of the complaints so commonly heard among us, whether of poverty, of weakness, of incapacity to serve and love our Father who is in Heaven, is at the same time a confession of unbelief in that Gospel in which God has been pleased to make Himself our own ? For in the things which concern salvation, to believe is to have. Faith is not only a spiritual insight, but a realizing appropriating faculty, through which God, and with Him, in the words of the Apostle, " all things, become ours"; for all that God is in Himself, righteousness and wisdom and strength, He becomes unto us through Faith. Acceptance of the Gospel, that is, of the exceeding great and precious promises through which we become partakers of the Divine Nature, places us in direct union with God, — the strength, fulness, and intimacy of this union is maintained by faith, and must exist in exact proportion to its measure ; and thus, in the words of Scripture, all things become possible to those that believe, through the power of Him to whom belief unites them. Yet that we have still much to learn in this matter is betrayed by another sentiment, often heard among us under variously modified forms of expression. " Why," it is asked, " so much anxiety about points of doctrine, when it is the devotion of the heart and the practice of the life upon which God has made salvation to depend ? It is these which constitute the Christian." y

" The tree is known by its fruits " ; most truly so, — but it depends for the maintenance of those fruits, yea, even for its own existence, upon its* root in the soil beneath. The Christian life is judged of (and this with the strictest propriety) by that part of it which is seen, but it depends upon the part of it which is unseen for the hold which it takes and keeps upon God ; and to look for works, or the blossoming and expansion of God within the life, without Faith, by means of which the soul is rooted and grounded in Him, is as little rational, that is, as little in accordance with things in their true relation to each other, as it would be to look in any simply natural operation for an effect detached from its producing cause. Faith is

* It is interesting, by way of illustration, to compare what Lord Bacon tells us of natural growth, " that every vegetable swells and throws out its constituent parts towards the circumference, both upwards and downwards, and there is no difference between the roots and branches, except that the root is buried in the earth, and the branches are exposed to the air and sun," (Novum Organum, book ii.,) with what Baxter says of progress in spiritual life, " I know that every man must grow as trees do, downwards and upwards at once, and that the roots increase as the bulk and branches do."

the Law, upon whose actuating energy God has made the life which we have in Him to depend ; and we can no more detach what we do in our lives from what we are in our souls, than we can separate heat or light from their essential principles, or expect to enjoy either in the absence of the conditions in which their existence is involved. The disciples showed they were aware of this by that remarkable answer, when enjoined by their Master to the practice of forgiveness, " Lord, increase our faith" ; we might have expected, when a moral duty difficult to the natural man was in question, the words w r ould have been " increase our charity"; but in the conviction that obedience was only practicable through a strength and virtue that did not reside in themselves, their prayer was for an increase of the faculty through which alone the Divine aid can be made available by the soul, and effectual to the supplying of all its wants. We also confess that all our sufficiency is of God, that without Him it is impossible to please Him. I long, therefore, to see Christians, in a deep realization of this acknowledged dependence, begin to take up the Gospel under its true and living aspect, as the means whereby our Creator has been pleased to impart, not advice and instruction only, but

Himself unto His creatures ; and before we can do this, we have need to look a little more closely into what Doddridge calls the God-ward side of our covenant.

I think we lose much, from beginning, as you express it in one of your letters, our religion at the wrong end, concerning ourselves first, and principally, with the idea of what we are or ought to be to God, without sufficiently considering the converse, what He is to us. " Acquaint thyself," saith one of old, " with God, and be at peace"; and the Apostle, speaking by the same Spirit, tells of a Knowledge through which grace and peace are multiplied. Yet how little careful are we to attain to this knowledge, how little zealous to advance in it, how little, judging from the modes in which we are accustomed to express ourselves, do we, even in a speculative sense, know about the work of our redemption and sanctification, those great things which God has done for us already, wherein it becomes us to rejoice !

How few among us, with the beloved Apostle* and his faithful and accepted converts, seem to be persuaded of the love and good-will that God hath to us, His children, reconciled in Christ ! Even our best books and preachers

* 1 John iv. 16.

dwell so little upon the glad tidings * in their fulness, that I feel justified in asserting that a Christian speaking among Christians can scarcely employ the language which Scripture authorizes the Redeemed of the Lord to use, or express an interest in the hopes which it has made the heritage of every sincere believer, without appearing to set forth some strange thing. If he should venture to speak of a reconciled Father, a living Saviour, an actual Sanctifier, a present Heaven, and to speak of all these as being his own, it will be at the risk of being set down by his hearers as enthusiastic, possibly as presumptuous ; and this, because the grounds of his confidence will be in so far mistaken that he will be supposed to be resting upon some particular claim to God's favor as an individual, instead of simply asserting his title to that its manifest declaration, in which all his brethren share. Yet he boasts of no more direct assurance of pardon than that for which Scripture gives him warrant in the revelation of a Saviour's death ; he asks for no sign or token of personal acceptance, having in this matter no other anxiety than to secure his interest in the already given manifestation of His Father's love, the Christ, who is, if they will so have it, both " His and theirs."

* Note A.

As Englishmen and Protestants we love our Bibles, we are zealous for them, if not always with a zeal according to knowledge, — also jealous for them, inclined to resent every attempt to restrict the circulation of Scripture, or to explain away its peculiarities ; so that I dare the more strongly take up my protest against an unauthorized yet generally current version, passed about among us from lip to lip, without question or challenge, than which I dare venture to assert no published version of Scripture, however mutilated and imperfect, ever fell so lamentably short of the original. It is in the very nature of error to be at once vague and subtle ; to insinuate, and, as it were, incorporate itself wherever it can find entrance, yet all the while to assume no tangible form wherein it may be detected. Therefore I would that it were possible to arrest, and, so to speak, condense this pseudo-Gospel ; to bid it stand side by side with the true one, that we may see what a shrunken, diminished thing it looks, and learn how far, in favor of these cisterns of our own which can hold no water, we have departed from those living fountains, the lively oracles of God.

We have fallen, as a people, into a low and limited view of God's inner dispensation of grace, akin, little as we may ourselves suspect it, to the Rationalistic interpretation of His outward polity. God's Word in the one case, as God's work in the other, is toned down and diluted until few of its distinctive and essential features remain. There is a practical as well as a speculative unbelief, and it is this which we have suffered to creep over us. In ordinary society — I speak boldly, and yet I hope without offence — there are few who deny the Gospel to be true, perhaps fewer still who believe it to be efficient. To explain myself further, — we confess the Gospel to be from God, we give in our adhesion to the facts that it records, but when we come to the effectual working of this Gospel, to the actual living consequences of those recorded facts, there is an evident stopping short, a "limiting" of God akin to that of the Israelites,* and arising from the self-same source, a dulness and slowness of heart to believe the great things which He has done for our souls, and is even now doing in them. And while I am writing these words, slowness of heart, I am reminded that it may be advisable to point out the distinction between what I am now contending for, the simple recognition of Gospel truth, and its spiritual reception, which

* Ps. lxxviii. 41.

is in itself salvation. This last claims the consent of the heart as well as of the intellect, and, like all things born, brought up, and nourished * there, it does not develop its full strength and perfection in a moment ; we may follow our Lord for years, and find, as the disciples did, that He has still " many things " left to tell us, for these things of God are notf taken and shown to us by Him who has received that office, all at once ; yea, even in the end we shall discover that to understand this Gospel in its breadth and depth and height and fulness, is at the same time to appreciate that which the Apostle tells us passes our present knowledge, — the Love which ascended up on high and brought down this gift for us men that the Lord our God might dwell among us. To see God as He is, is the satisfying portion of the blessed in heaven, and this, to know Him as He is, is the privilege of the faithful upon earth, — one to be attained only through that " unction from the Holy One by which we understand all things," — a Divine intuition, imparted in most cases slowly, and in all, I think, gradually.

Therefore you will perceive that what I am now saying to myself and others, is not so much "let us know these things," as "let us learn

* Note B. | John xvi. 15.

them." If we would be " taught of God," let us place ourselves under the tutelage He has appointed. The Spirit speaks unto us by the Word ; faith comes by hearing. It is precisely this hearing, which, according to what I shall venture to call a common-sense view of our religion, I now claim for the Gospel. I demand for it, as I might do in behalf of any merely natural system, that it should be allowed to speak for itself, and accepted (if accepted at all) as that which it is self-declared to be. All that I would say is this, if God has spoken to man, it must be to some clear and evident purpose, and in a way to render that purpose availing. His speaking must be, not in word only, but in power. Let us see, then, that we turn not in any wise away from Him that speaketh. If this message be indeed from our Father, our part as wise and obedient children is a simple one, — to believe what He says, to take what He gives, — simple, but who shall say that it is easy ! Hard, rather, through its very simplicity, to man's erring spirit, prompt ever to limit, to transfer, and modify the plainest statement of Scripture, eager to behold, eager even to endure, some great thing, solicitous to ask, What shall we do to work the works of God? forgetful of that full and final answer, This is the work

B of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.

Yet except we become as little children, we -shall in no case enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and it is in a spirit emulous of that which in childhood receives so much, because it receives so literally, that I would fain approach some of the traditions most generally received among us, and compare them with that Gospel of everlasting Truth which, in such measure as they obtain ground, they go far to render of none effect.

But before I quit this introductory view of my subject, a sense of its unspeakable importance impels me to linger yet awhile upon the threshold, and to repeat my intimate conviction that we shall find, so we do but pierce deep enough, that inward decay and outward disorder — all things which, whether in the heart or in the community, spring up to trouble and defile — hold by one common root, — Unbelief in God's Word and in His Work. There is a breaking in and a going out among us, only to be remedied by our taking up our true position, — that of a people who have the Lord for their God ; and to this end we must, in the words of the hundredth Psalm, be sure that the Lord He is God, and be or make ourselves equally sure that we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand. We must, now that the Patriarch's dream has become the Christian's reality, set our feet firmly upon this the lowest round of the golden ladder that reaches even unto Heaven. We must take the first step, first. There is a significance in the very placing of these clauses of the petition our Lord left us, " Thy kingdom come ; Thy will be done." God's kingdom must be established within the soul before His Will can be fulfilled in the life ; and it is from our imperfect realization of this truth that so many are weak and sickly among us, and so many sleep the sleep of Formalism, that brother of spiritual Death, from which it is scarcely to be distinguished. We mourn over a Christianity as far degenerated from its primitive Type, " the tree planted by the rivers of waters," as if it had been (as in Chinese gardening) dwarfed and dwindled of set purpose, without seeming aware of the presence of the cold underlying subsoil through which this result has bqen effected. Yet to lament over deficiency and decay is at the same time to acknowledge that such is in great part voluntary ; it is to confess that we have cut ourselves off from Him, the source and spring of life and fulness, who has provided for the abundant* watering of His garden.

* Eccl"" xxiv. 31.

God, in revealing Himself to us in His Son, in communicating Himself to us through His Spirit, has placed us in a wide and wealthyplace ; in this land there is no straitness, neither scarceness ; here we may eat bread and drink water to the full, and find honey even in the stony rock of tribulation. Why are we then a feeble people, — feeble though numerous ? ready to exclaim, when we read of those who have gone before us in God's faith and fear, " There were giants in the land in those days " ; instead of asking why those days should in any respect be different from these present ones, when God, now as then the Strength of His people, remains the same and changes not. If He has in any degree ceased to work mighty works in and for us, must not this cessation arise from that which of old restrained Him ? Because of unbelief, " He did not there many mighty works " ; nay, one Gospel, going further, emphatically declares that He could not, " because of unbelief." And if the arm of the Lord be not more openly revealed among us, may it not be because His report, God's own report of His own dealings, has not been believed ? Instead of lamenting our degeneracy from God's saints and chosen ones under either Covenant, let us rather examine ourselves to see whether we are really in that Faith which was once delivered to them, and through which they, out of weakness being made strong, " obtained promises," and wrought the marvels recorded of them. These were men of like passions and infirmities with ourselves, only differing from us according to the measure and proportion of their faith. They lived under no clearer dispensation, they enjoyed no fuller privileges, than are and must remain our own, so long as that Word endures, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world" ; and there is, therefore, no need, whatever we of ourselves may choose to imagine, that we should come behind them in any spiritual grace or gift. To do the first Works, we have but to return to the first Love, we have but to seek the first Faith ; and to this end we must lay to our souls this counsel given by the Spirit to a Church that, declining in belief, had declined in strength and energy, " Remember, therefore, how thou hast received and heard."

The Covenant, like the commandment, is "exceeding broad"; close and intimate, wide and reaching even unto Heaven, are the relations in which it binds man with his Maker and Redeemer, yet it enters not into man's unrenewed heart to receive the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. So that believers have need to say with Achsa, " Thou hast given me a south land, give me also springs of water." God is not the author of confusion, yet over how many of our thoughts about Him — alike over our ideas of what He is to us, and what He would have us be to Him — does confusion still reign ! Viewing the Gospel under its perceptive aspect, our popular theory appears to set the character, which it is its object to mould, before us, just as a work of confessedly unapproachable excellence is placed before a youthful artist. It is a magnificent outline, an admirable ideal, which our Master has set before us to contemplate, but the excellence of which He never expects us to attain. This, indeed, is an acknowledged impossibility; we must do as well as we can, but need not even aim at a close resemblance. So much for our work ; in that which we are to be towards God, He does not, it seems, mean us to be that which He tells us to be. And even thus with our Faith ; in that which God is to us, we are not to expect Him to be that which He has promised to be. We are to believe in the Promise, God's Word, otherwise we shall not be Christians ; but we are not to look for its performance, the Work that He doeth upon earth, or we shall be enthusiasts, expecting what we shall never meet with. What does this mean? Even that we think our God to be altogether such a one as we are ourselves, — asking for what He does not expect to receive, promising what He does not intend to bestow ; yet