The religion of hope

Preface

'THHE sermons contained in this volume were not composed with reference to any unity of plan. They have been selected from the accumulated product of thirteen years of labor. The earhest was written in 1880, the latest in 1893. All were preached during my ministry of eight and a half years in Boston, and all but two were written in that period. All, of course, have been subjected to revision, but not to such revision as to change their essential form and substance. Thus they truly reflect the attitude of my mind and heart toward the fundamental truths of Christianity during the larger part of my service as a Christian minister; and they show that the note of hopefulness has been, throughout, a dominant note. In arranging these sermons for publication, I have not followed the chronological order, but viii Preface.

rather have sought to put them in something Hke a logical sequence. They begin with hope, and end with heaven. A considerable number have been printed in periodicals, one of them two or three times. They are now presented to the public in permanent form mainly in response to many requests both of former parishioners and of others, and with the earnest wish that they may bear a heartening message to some of those who have found, or would find, in the Christian hope the great solace for their afflictions and the unwasting inspiration for their endeavors.

PHILIP STAFFORD MOXOM.

Contents

Page

I. Christianity the Religion of Hope . . 13

II. The Love of God 37

I. Christianity The Religion Of Hope

Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, in the power of the Holy Spirit. — Rom. xv. 13.

/CHRISTIANITY is pre-eminently the religion ^-^ of hope. Its chief message to the world is the declaration of God's good-will toward men, and its chief expression is Jesus of Nazareth, whom God anointed " with the Holy Spirit and with power; who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil ; for God was with him."

In forming our judgment of Christianity, we must discriminate between what is accidental and transient on the one hand, and what is essential and permanent on the other. The discriminating process must be carried, not only through all the organizations and institutions and theories and history that are generally designated by the term " Christian," but also through the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. In these Scriptures we find a revelation of God which surpasses all others in clearness and fulness. This is not the only revelation of God, for there are also divine revelations in the order of nature, and in the constitution and history of man. These, from one point of view, are preparatory, logically, if not always chronologically, for the revelation in the Bible; from another point of view, they both supplement and confirm that revelation. By virtue of his spiritual nature, man has a capacity for knowing God, and to this capacity there has always been a corresponding communication. Were it not for the subjective capacity, there could be no objective revelation.

The Biblical revelation is historical and progressive, exhibiting a distinct advance from the naive monotheism of Abraham and Moses, with its predominant anthropomorphic elements, to the purer and loftier monotheism of the eighth century prophets ; and there is a still greater advance from the monotheism of the prophets to the profound spiritual theism of Jesus.

Because revelation is progressive, corresponding to man's growing power of apprehension, and depending upon it, there are many features of the revelatory process that are incidental and transient. Learning is, in part, a process of discarding. Low ideas of the divine nature are continually replaced by higher. New points of view necessitate an abandonment of the old. Imperfect symbols are dropped, as their defects become apparent, and better symbols take their place. For example, as I have suggested, the later prophets, — Micah, the two Isaiahs, Jeremiah, and others, — in their conception of the Deity, show great progress beyond the conception which was attained even by the best minds of the times of the Exodus and the Judges, or even by the earlier prophets, — Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha; while Jesus occupies a far higher level of spiritual view than that of the prophets, and his thought has a larger spiritual content than theirs.

This progress is not in any sense artificial, nor is it a mere order of sequence; it is vital and experimental, and has an indestructible continuity. In the advance much is left behind, but something is steadily carried forward. The new is, in a true sense, the out-growth of the old. The plant is the evolution of the seed, but the process of development is also a process of incrementation.

In order, therefore, to get a true and adequate idea of the Biblical revelation of God, we must take our stand on the highest point reached in the revelatory process which has record in the Bible, and that is the personality and teachings of Jesus Christ. From this point we may trace the slowly ascending and slowly brightening path that leads up from the Mosaic age to the time when Jesus, comprehending at once the essential nature of God and the manner and form in which that nature is most perfectly revealed to man, said : ** God is spirit," and " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Manifestly, to take our position at any point in the process of Biblical revelation short of the summit on which Jesus stands, and to say of the view obtainable from that point, •* This is the true vision of God," is to misunderstand and to misrepresent the Bible.

The same is true with respect to the idea of Christianity which we are to derive from the record of the revelation that rises to culminating expression in the Son of God. No book of the Bible, preceding the Gospels, truly represents or defines Christianity. Only in Him of whose spirit Christianity is the efifluence do we find a true exponent of what essential Christianity is.

But there is also a prophetic element in the Biblical revelation of God. What Jesus gives to the world is not simply another and higher stage in the revelatory process than that which is given successively by patriarchs and prophets. The singularity of his communication is partly in this, that his revelation of the Father is not only complementary to all preceding revelation, but it is also prophetic and ideal. The value of the New Testament is chiefly in the fact that it is far more than a high-water mark of the generic spiritual perception of men. It sets a standard toward which the world still strives, and communicates a thought which the world has not yet wholly grasped. The spiritual progress of so much of humanity as has come within the circle of Biblical communication is a progress, not beyond the point reached in the New Testament, but toward that point, that prophetic revelation which Jesus, the chiefest of all the prophets, or speakers for God, both gave and was. All the advance of philosophical thought toward the true and perfect idea of God has been an advance toward the thought of Jesus. All the progress of that spiritual life which is the expression of spiritual thought is a progress toward the life of Him w^io *' came from God and went to God," the " Son of Man," who was yet " the only begotten Son of God."

So, too, and necessarily, there is a prophetic and ideal element in the idea of Christianity which Jesus gives. The religious thought and life of to-day are far higher and purer than the religious thought and life of the early Christian centuries. This is a truth which no careful student of Christian history will for a moment deny. Both the intellectual apprehension and the practical application of Christian principles are broader and juster and more thoroughgoing to-day than at any time in the past. Yet, when we succeed in clearly discriminating essential Christianity from all that is incidental and adventitious; when we carry this process not only through historical and institutional Christianity, but even through the New Testament, until we discover the fundamental and enduring elements of the Christianity which Jesus embodied in his person and manifested in his action and expressed in his authenticated teachings, — we can understand the real meaning of Lessing's extravagant, yet not altogether untrue saying: '' The religion of Christianity has been on trial eighteen hundred years ; the religion of Christ is yet to be tried." We shall understand also, and approve, the statement of Principal Fairbairn, that true Christianity " is an ideal for the whole of humanity, and a great method for its realization." The revelation which Jesus makes of the divine interest in man, and the divine purpose to be realized in man, discloses also the forces and motives by which man is to achieve a spiritual destiny in the unfolding of the kingdom of God.

The fundamental element in the Christianity of Jesus is the love of God for humanity. This love lies at the base of all supernatural manifestations, is the law of all providential discipline, the spring of all ethics, and the ground of all hopes. No communication takes rank with this communication. No principle limits or conditions this principle. As high as heaven, as deep as hell, as wide as space, is this fact which Jesus utters and embodies, — the love of God for men. Essential Christianity is the declaration and concrete expression of this love through the archetypal divine sonship and self-sacrifice of Jesus. All the forces that work for human salvation, in the widest sense, flow out of this elemental fact thus expressed in a unique yet universally related and all-relating personality. The revelation which Jesus makes of divine Fatherhood and human sonship discloses the ideal toward the full realization of which the moral and spiritual hfe of man is a progress. This divine-human relation involves in itself the perfect good of the individual man and the perfect good of mankind. On the fundamental fact of man's moral relation to God, a relation exhibited and confirmed by the Christ, rests every principle, and out of it rises every force of that great upward movement of humanity to which history, with increasing clearness, bears witness. All that is best in our individual characters, as well as in our social morals, our sciences, arts, industries, politics, and religions, has its primal spring in that relation. Ignorant as he may be blind and bestial as he often is, man nevertheless is the child of God ; therefore he is the object of the divine love, the subject of the divine tuition and discipline, and, in the attainment of his true destiny, the fulfilment of the divine purpose. The revelation of God's attitude toward man and of man's true relation to God, which Jesus makes, involves all that is essential in his teaching and in his experience. It involves the cross, not as a necessary material fact, but as a symbol of spiritual fact, — the fact of supreme self-sacrifice for moral ends.

There is much of form and organization and theory that has got itself named Christian, which, at the best, sustains but a loose and accidental relation to essential Christianity. There is much also which essential Christianity has created as instrument for the realization of its ends. All this, for the present, may be left aside. Nor is it necessary here to attempt a detailed elucidation of the spiritual contents of essential Christianity, either as doctrine or as life. A single point now claims attention. Christianity as a revelation of divine Fatherhood and human sonship, and of divine love seeking the full realization of truth and love in human experience and character and destiny, is pre-eminently a religion of hope.

In a higher degree than ever any other teacher personally represented what he taught, Jesus personally represented and embodied essential Christianity. It never should be forgotten that Christianity is fundamentally a spirit and method of life. It is not primarily a church, nor a ritual, nor a theology, nor even a religion, but a life from God and in God, which has its supreme embodiment in Jesus Christ. It is far more than a system of ethics or an ethical regimen. As far as mere ethical principles are concerned, there is little in it that is original; though the moment we consider the question of moral motives, the originality of

Jesus' method vividly appears. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find any precept in the Gospels which, in some form, had not been given to men before. Indeed, the great doctrines of the unity of God, the Divine Providence over earthly affairs, the Fatherhood of God, the ubiquity of the Divine Spirit, the mercifulness of God to sinners, man's duty of repentance and faith toward God and charity toward his fellow-man, and the hope of immortality, all had found expression in some form before Jesus came. But the full significance of truth expressed in a life the world had not seen until Jesus came. What men had apprehended only in detached fragments of spiritual truth and beauty, and, for the most part, in the form of precept or proposition, Jesus exhibited in the harmony and completeness of a living embodiment. Thus embodied, all truths took on a new meaning, or rather, now first disclosed their real meaning. To see one who loved God with all his heart and soul and mind and strength, and his neighbor as himself, made the old precept a new communication. To see in the clear face of the Son the unmarred reflection of the perfect Father made the revelation of God a new revelation. To see faith and obedience and holy love perfectly realized in a human life was to have a new sense of what faith and obedience and love are. In Jesus all the scattered rays of truth were gathered up into the glowing and dynamic centre of a divinely human personality. He justified, therefore, as well as inspired, the testimony that, " God having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in a Son."

Jesus Christ, then, in his person and teaching and deeds, is the Gospel, — the good tidings of God to men. His function, as well as his person, is thus, in a true sense, unique. Neither prophet nor apostle, neither Isaiah nor Paul, but Jesus only, adequately expresses and defines essential Christianity. The real progress of Christian thought is advance in power to understand and interpret Jesus. A book may be exhausted, for the capacity of " the letter" is limited ; but a personality — such a personality — is inexhaustible. " The letter " is form, and easily becomes fetters ; ** the spirit" is life, and has no bounds. Men are perpetually trying to put Christianity into dogmatic systems, which they label Calvinism and Arminianism, Old Theology and New Theology ; but they are perpetually baffled by the fact that Christianity, as the effluence of the living Christ, overflows all boundaries, transcends all forms, and convicts all definitions of inadequacy and error. Everything is transitory save the spirit. Jesus, as the revelation of God and the manifestation of the love of God realized and individualized in the spirit of man, is the secret of the power which

Christianity possesses of perpetually renewing itself. Institutions, theories, and forms become decadent and effete. Then men say, Christianity is moribund-, but while they are brooding over the death of a faith, behold ! that faith is rising in fresh power, putting forth new energies and creating new instruments to serve its ends.

A clear apprehension of Christianity as a spirit of life, having its supreme manifestation in the Son of God, makes argument to prove that it is a religion of hope seem almost superfluous.

But let us proceed to explicate this truth somewhat in detail. The message of Jesus to the world was one of hope, for it was a message of salvation. He declared that " God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever trusteth in him might not perish but have life eternal," and he presented himself as the expression of this love and the executor of this purpose. He took to himself, as definitive of his mission, in a broader sense than the prophet understood, the words of the Isaiah of the exile :

" The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor :

He has sent me to proclahn release to the captives,

And recovering of sight to the blind,

To set at liberty them that are bruised,

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

He came not to rebuke men, but to enlighten them. His message was one of cheer, not one

24 TJie Religion of Hope.

of condemnation : " For God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should be saved through him." His words were continually provocative of hope. His ministry of healing was, in a large, sweet way, illustrative and symbolical. His practical helpfulness reinforced his declarations of divine' purpose in a manner that men could feel and understand. From the earliest times men were more ready to credit God with the purpose of smiting than they were to believe in his disposition to heal. Jesus declared the love of God to men, and, avowedly fulfilling the will of God, put the message into a palpable gift of health to diseased and tormented bodies. Thus he dissolved that ignorant fear of God which was a main hindrance to the reception of his message. He declared the law of love between man and man, and illustrated the declaration by his invincible goodness and his utter unselfishness in helping the needy of every class. Thus he dissolved the antagonisms that thrust men apart and made them mutual hurters instead of mutual helpers of one another. He uttered and embodied the divine principle of love which is at once the motive of true worship and the law of right action. This was lifting life to a new level. His purpose was but dimly apprehended then, and is far from being clearly apprehended even now. Still, despite their little apprehension of Jesus, many of those among whom he lived and taught awoke to a new hope, and the impulse of that hope created the new hfe which dates from the resurrection of Jesus.

What Jesus did, he does still. The material circumstances of his ministry, for example, his works of healing, as to their form, are incidental. In essence, the ministry of Jesus continues ; and not as the prolonged impression of historic events simply, but as the ever fresh impression of his spiritual force — his transcendent personality. Treating his life historically, we must say " he was," and *' he did"; but treating his life on the higher plane of his essential mission to the w^orld, we instinctively drop the past tense. The Christ belongs to all time, and is the contemporary of every age. His message is not a mere reminiscence of a past event; it is a vital communication of the present and dateless gospel of God.

The world has greatly changed in the nearly two millenniums that have passed since Jesus of Nazareth began his ministry in Palestine, but it has not lost its essential relation to him. He is more familiar to the general mind, but he is still pre-eminent. His teaching is better understood, but its force is still unexhausted. Man is less abject and bestial, less ignorant and superstitious than he was, but he is still dependent upon " our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." In a true sense, then, what Jesus did, he still does; only, the scope of his ministry ever widens as man's capacity to understand and appreciate that ministry increases.

Jesus' message of hope to men was not simply a promise, of *' something better by and by," — that is, in eternity, conceived as a condition of being to be entered upon by mankind collectively at the end of time. He did not say, ** Life is evil and irremediable here and now, but in the hereafter it will be wholly good." He had little to say of the hereafter, in the sense in which that term is commonly used. He said enough. He gave the fruitful germs of thought that grow with the growth of man's spirit into ever enlarging spiritual conceptions of humanity's future. But he did not speak as fully and as explicitly of the hereafter as many have supposed. The promise of " the better by and by" which men needed to hear was implicitly in all his teaching, but the pledge of its fulfilment was to be found in a bettered present. If the seed of the better age is not in to-day, its flower and fruit will not appear in the distant to-morrow. Jesus did not leave men in their misery simply enriched by a hope. He began in their minds and hearts the process which, making the present better, brightens all the future. Man himself must be improved if there is to be any permanent improvement of his environment. Civilization is first subjective. Jesus gave to men a revelation of God that awakened trust in the divine goodness. This trust was itself at once a ground and spring of hope and a powerful motive to righteousness. To deepen one's faith in the good is to generate rational hope and to elevate character. He taught men the meaning of love and planted in them the root of that divine affection which must grow from heart to heart until all humanity is bound in indissoluble, holy brotherhood. The man who loves to-day, even feebly, gives promise in himself of the day when men will love their neighbors as themselves. What Jesus did/^r man was, most of all, what he did iji man, and in man he began the process of which " the new heaven and the new earth " will be the natural and divinely ordained culmination. The leaven in the meal is the finest symbol of Christ's method. The spirit works within, and from within outward.

The character of Jesus' work in man is the best answer to the pessimism of much '' Christian theology," as well as of unchristian philosophy. He gave to human life an impulse toward the good that strengthens and broadens with every passing century. In giving that impulse he discloses at once both the actual and the ideal of human life from the moral point of view. What life is, he shows less by any denunciation of evil than by the light which he sheds upon it from the height of his own excellence. His pure spirit inevitably reveals and condemns the grossness and sordidness of men. His utter truth exposes and judges their deep insincerities. His absolute goodness unmasks and rebukes their multiform selfishness. No words can represent the deformities and deficiencies of man's life from a moral point of view so vividly as those appear in the light of Jesus' character. This disclosure of the actual he made, and this disclosure he still makes. ^ To-day, as truly as when he walked in Judea, he la3^s bare the sin and folly of men. Uttering no audible word, he stands in our market-places and shows the immoralities and selfishness of our trade; he stands in our churches and uncovers our miserable insincerities and slavish idolatries. When we look at him with honest, open eyes, our conceit shrivels, and our petty proprieties and conventional moralities refuse longer to hide from us our real defects and positive sins. This disclosure Jesus inevitably makes, because in him is the reality of truth and righteousness.

But while he thus discloses the actual, he also discloses the possible, — the ideal. What he is in spirit shows men what they may be. His stainless purity, his boundless charity, his invulnerable sweetness and patience, his unbroken, intimate communion with the Father, his loftiness of mind, his perfect righteousness, his wonderful peace — that peace which we so admire and covet and yet so piteously fail to attain — that peace which, when every one else was torn by passion, or fretted by care, or shaken by fear, or harassed by doubt, enveloped him in an atmosphere of beautiful holy

CJiristianity the Religion of Hope. 29

calm, — all this reveals to us our possible attainments as children of God. This disclosure to us of human excellence kindles hope in our hearts, and hope passes into aspiration and impulse. " Looking unto Jesus " becomes a striving toward " the perfect man, . . . the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." All spiritual progress in the individual life witnesses to the presence and illustrates the power of the hope that Jesus awakens.

But the ideal disclosed is more than an ideal of individual life. There is a great prophetical suggestiveness in the life and teaching of Jesus. In himself he prophesies, not only the coming man, but also the coming order, the coming reign of love, the coming health of the world, and the coming peace. The ideal is not sharply defined in words. It is hinted, rather, and the hints, at first vague, grow clearer and clearer with the growth of men in power to see and to lay hold of the spiritual meaning and ends of life. Explicitly, Jesus did speak of the kingdom of God; but the conception was too great to be grasped at once, as it is too expansive to be exhausted at any point in subsequent history. But it was definite enough to constitute an ideal grand and sweet, if vague; and from that ideal sprang the hope which works perpetually toward a higher civic and economic organization of human society, and purer government, and larger liberty.

So, in this twofold disclosure of the actual and the ideal, Jesus begets hope in man's heart. Indeed, the very disclosure of the actual and the possible, in connection with each other, generates in man the unquenchable desire to pass from the one to the other. Hope is the reaching forward of the soul from the actual to the ideal. St. Paul significantly said : ** We are saved by hope."

But the self-revelation which Jesus gives, — the exhibition of himself as the Son of Man and the Son of God, — in his function of lover and Saviour of the world, is central, because the highest power among men is personal. It is not the touch of precepts or ideas or theories, but the touch of a personality, that moves us, that imparts the vital impulse. The love of Christ, the love which he wakens in our hearts, is the great spring of hope, because that love makes us sharers in his aspirations, his ideals, his faith, and his enterprise. That love binds us to him in his entire mission. Amidst a world seemingly tottering to its ruin, he stood and saw the salvation of the world and the triumph of good — saw it through the shadow of the cross that fell darkly athwart his path. Surrendering himself to the sharpness and apparent utter defeat of death, even while dying he triumphed in the vision of a completed redemption. Loving him, man shares in his power of forecast and triumphant anticipation. Under the influence of this transcendent personality, man strives to realize in himself and in the world the ends toward which Jesus wrought, and so becomes missionary and martyr of the gospel. Hope passes from a sentiment into a principle. It incorporates itself into character. It becomes an element of righteousness because it is rooted in the soul's faith in God, and conviction of the reality and permanence of the good.

This hope, which Jesus awakens and continually nourishes, is the pledge of the salvation of the world. It is a spring of spiritual energy beneath all our Christian institutions and organizations ; and, vitalizing missionary enterprise, transforms it from a perfunctory or selfish propagandism into a confident and enthusiastic service of love to humanity. Often repudiated in theories of human life, and denied in the actions of men, and dishonored by feeble utterances in the creeds of the church, it persists in all hearts that Jesus has touched and quickened into the life of the spirit. In some form it is the real force of human progress. It is the silent but most true witness to the divinity that shapes- the course of human history, and to the divine origin and immortality of the human soul. In "the hope of the gospel," that gospel which Jesus embodies and perpetually imparts, the salvation of the world is already prophetically achieved ; and the Christian sings with a victor's confidence: —

" I feel the earth move sunward, I join the great march onward, And take by faith while living My freehold of thanksgiving."

Hope, then, is not a matter of mere sentiment, or of a happy temperament. It is allied, not with weakness, but with strength ; not with baseless speculation, but with firm grasp of fundamental truth ; not with fond and foolish fancy, but with solidest loyalty to righteousness ; not with easy credulousness, but with most strenuous and most reasonable faith in God. To hope for the final and absolute supremacy of goodness is among the finest and most rational exercises of Christian virtue. It is doubt that is weakness; it is pessimism that is the real denial of the Christian faith. It is want of large, tenacious, and invincible hope that often turns the nominal Church of Christ into a half-hearted army, feebly fighting a battle of which defeat is a foregone and accepted conclusion.