Sermons and songs of Christian life

Front matter

LIB RMLJ OF CONGRESS.

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Preface

The discourses comprised in this volume have been selected with special reference to those days observed by the Christian Church in commemoration of the fundamental facts of the Gospel history, and to the Christian life and experience which grow from a living apprehension of the system of truth which rests upon them. I do not regard it as the province of the Sermon to go behind the facts themselves, or try to prove them. That belongs to works of another kind. The Sermon assumes them as premises acknowledged by the congregation, and prophesies from them, but in such wise and with such applications to the wants of the human heart, as to complement the historical evidence with the clearest spiritual vision and the most assured experience of Christian believers. This in itself is evidence, and without it the historical facts are of little avail, and finally lose their hold, even upon the intellect, notwithstanding the completeness of the historic demonstration.

In our church service the Sermon consummates in the hymn, or sacred song, which makes the heart lyrical with Jthe truth it sets forth. The idea that

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the sentiment which inspires the hymn is a hindrance to exact criticism, or the clearest and truest interpretation of the record, I resist as false in theory, and proved abundantly so in practice. A plodding criticism keeps close to the earth, and fails to see the significance of some of the most large and positive affirmations of the Gospel narrative, and so pares them away and reduces the whole Christian Revelation within the compass of our earthly vision. The best and most trustworthy historians are men who have enough of the imaginative faculty to reproduce the past as it really lived ; and the best commentators have been men whose intuitions were large and deep enough to bring them into some correspondency with the Mind that inspired the letter, so that they may not merely dig over the surface of the letter itself.

Without claiming these qualifications, I would only say that I had written at different times several lyrical pieces which were afloat in collections of hymns, or in periodicals, sometimes altered and mutilated. I have brought them together in this volume, some of them revised and amended, some of them simply restored, and I have added others not before published. As they are more or less adapted to the subjects of the discourses, and help to give the truths which they handle a fullness of utterance, I have interspersed them, like the hymns in the Sunday Service, though some of them are lyrics rather than hymns. The song, or hymn, should be a summing up

PREFACE. • Vll

of the sermon, helping us to take home its truth, and so carry it with us as to fill our daily life with its melodies. I hesitated long in regard to some of these songs, because they are flavored so much with personal experience ; but this is true of most of the hymns that speak to the condition of others, and as best advised, I concluded to put them in, trusting to the large indulgence of my readers.

The Sermons were written, not for the press, but the pulpit, and are given mainly as they were delivered. I should revise them a good deal more if I sought to reduce them to the standard of classical taste, but I believe in that way they would lose in point and directness ; and so I dismiss them as they are, hoping they will find a response in the hearts of some readers worthy of the themes which they set forth.

I believe every Christian should have church relations, and be faithful to them, and I have always studied to render faithful service to the denomination where a good Providence placed me ; not by trying to conform to the average opinions which may be current among them to-day, but by trying to grasp and bring forth anew the vital truths essential alike to individual progress and denominational life. For when brought face to face with the central truths of Christianity, the idea of sect merges in the larger conception of the Church Universal, with Christ for its living Head and daily inspiration. I believe the

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best service which any man can render his denomination is to help on a consummation like this ; and this I would do in perfect loyalty to the branch of the Church to which it is my privilege to belong, and as some return for the large freedom of opinion and utterance which they have vouchsafed and defended. The time I believe is not far off when there is to be larger freedom in every branch of the Christian Zion for the treatment and readjustment of the great truths of Religion, and that this freedom is to consummate, not in new divisions, but in broader and warmer fellowship, and a more perfect and comprehending unity. For it will be a unity not imposed from without, but a growth within, from more intelligent convictions and the deeper inspirations of the Spirit which comes through these convictions themselves. E. H. S.

Contents

SERMONS.

PAGE

I. The Cloud of Witnesses i

II. One Mediator

(CHRISTMAS EVE.)

I Timothy ii. 6. There is one God and one Mediator between God and me?i^ the man Christ Jesus.

THE word here rendered " Mediator " means one who comes between two parties, and, . in the more specific Christian sense of the word, between two parties to reconcile them and make peace between them. It presupposes a state of emnity and warfare, so that an old commentator does no more than justice to the original when he renders — There is one God, and one peace-maker between God and man.

We do not yet, however, come to the full thought of the original word. These analogies from human affairs only help us a little to climb up to the great doctrine involved. A man who goes between two hostile armies and negotiates a peace, represents very dimly and remotely the Divine Mediation in Jesus Christ. On the Divine side this does not represent the fact at all. For God has no hostility towards his creatures ; the enmity is all on one side, and the fearful chasm and antagonism between the Divine nature and human nature do not require any treaty-making or going between, that God may understand us, and be made placable towards us. The thing needed is not an arbitrator to settle disputed points, but a channel rather through which the Divine life and energy can flow. Suppose this Mediator, then, not merely to come between the two parties, but to embody the whole spirit and moral power of the rightful one, — that these possess Him, and clothe Him with their majesty and grace, — that thus He comes to the hostile party on their own ground and among their own camp-fires, and dissolves their hatred beneath the touches of his own spirit, and that then they throw down their arms and strike their banners and say we are reconciled and we will rebel no more. This will give more completely the burden of the text, "there is one God and one Peace-maker between God and man." He is peace-maker in that he opens between both the streams and courses through which the Divine Peace flows to man and reconciles him, so to say, under the Omnipotence of the Divine Love.

The prime necessity of a Mediator is not because God needs to be appeased or reconciled, but because He does require means and instrumentalities to reach the lowest of his children. Think of the distance between the Infinite God and finite and feeble man ! He cannot come to us in his unveiled and eternal essence, for then we should drop senseless into the deeps of his own absolute Being. So He veils that essence and accommodates it to the state of all the creatures He' has made. It were not enough, again, that God come to us through the motions of his Spirit within us. We are sinful, sensuous, dark, liable all the while to mistake God's motions within us, in our own noxious, smouldering passions. There must be, then, not only the light within — there must also be the light without and above ; there must be the objective manifestation of the Deity.

But observe, again, what an emphasis Paul lays on this oneness of the mediatorial office. There can be only one mediator even as there can be only one God. Indeed he puts one as the correlate of the other. For he means to say, There is only one God and only one peace-maker between God and man. How and why this is so we shall see by drawing out the three propositions involved in the text, and see at the same time the amplitude and grandeur of this fundamental truth of the New Testament.

There must be one mediator. v

And he must be a man.

And a man in the supreme sense — the man Christ Jesus.

There is only one — but why not ? Why not make all things the media through which God comes to man, — all nature, all good men, all spirits and angels ? Is not the whole universe a system of mediation through which God seeks to impart Himself to his children ? Does He not come in the springtime, in the May-flowers that open their eyes upon us out of his own gentleness and beauty ? And does He not speak out of his majesty in the thunder and the storm ? Does He not come to us out of every pure heart and all pure lips that have a gospel to tell us ? And does He not come in the angels that guard us and encamp round about us ?

Yes ; but does He come in these or in all together in the sense asserted by the text ; not only as mediators, but as peace-givers ? Are these the channels through which the Divine Peace-giver comes in to wash the cells of the heart and cool the fever of heart and brain. That nature is no such mediation as this, is obvious enough if you will look at the facts of the case and not take the dreams of sentimentalists for realities. Nature is no direct and perfect medium of the Divine character and essence. It is an exhibition to us, doubtless, in a lower degree of God's ideals of the good, the perfect, and the fair, but an exhibition as well of the condition and moods of sinful and imperfect men. All that man is casts its shadow on the dial-plate of nature, — a shadow sometimes most portentous and baleful. Convulsions, storms, deformities, miasmas, disease, death, corruption, — these are all involved in the processes of nature, these come in as contrasts to the peace and the paler beauty which are also there. Nature

OXE MEDIATOR. 23

is the thought of God, say some of the scientists. But God's thought about what, and under what conditions ?

It is God's thought obscured and dimmed and inverted sometimes ere it gets to its ultimations in the material universe. Do you suppose He would create the wolves, the tigers, the vermin, and the reptiles, the noisome things that swarm into life, as the exhibition of his thoughts ? Even the clear skies with drought and frost, May mornings with east winds, winter with its damps and chills, are hardly the supreme beauty unveiled and clear, but struggling rather through media that obscure it. Any one of you can imagine a fairer nature than the one we have. Everything indicates that nature in its completeness is not so much the highest ideal of God as the reflection and representation of man, — all that is good in him and all that is bad copied out of him ; both heaven and hell painted on the canvas that hangs around him, and showing him the grace and sweetness of the one and the deformities and stormful agencies of the other. Hence nature alone, since the world began, never has been any such mediation as yields God to man in his supreme perfections, but dimmed by the medium itself.

I should follow precisely the same line of argument touching the mediation of good men. None are good enough to stand between me and the supreme excellency without refracting it, or, worse yet, casting their shadow instead of transmitting the light Saints, philanthropists, and martyrs are mediators to us in a quite inferior sense, and as such we thank God that He raises them up. They come between God and the fallen and the lost ; they bring precious gifts from Him ; they bring kindly sympathies, holy charities, words of cheer. The Divine Grace sometimes gets reflected from them in its sweeter charms. But they too are sinful like you and me, and they are no such peace-makers between God and the sinner as the text describes. They are no such channels as God yields Himself through, in the tidal fullness of his renewing love. They have struggled with sin like the rest of us, and are struggling yet ; yea, they have felt precisely the need which the text indicates — and they feel it now — the- need of one peace-maker between God and man, through whom the Divine peace itself shall come like a river and make human nature at one with the Divine. There is the mediation of angels, the " cloud of witnesses " I have just described, the heavens that bend near us and out of which the heavenly peace comes down into our hearts. But at the head of this witness-train, as you remember, is " Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant," made objectively to the Church and the world the revelation of the Divine attributes and the impersonation of the eternal love so that the ministry of angels is in no danger of becoming a mere spiritism taking sides with our selfish passions or wildering fancies, but is merged and included in the higher and broader ministries of the Son of God.

Only one mediator, and he is human. And why must he be a man ? Simply because God is human and nothing else than humanity can transmit Him as He is. This grand truth of the humanity of God, rightly discriminated and apprehended, is one of the most precious and vital in all the treasury of the Gospel. It is opposed to two specious and besetting errors, that God is an impassive force somewhere at the centre of things, whence this great mechanism of worlds grew out by spontaneous evolution, — and it is opposed to the more hideous notion that He is an arbitrary sovereign. In the place of either it brings out the doctrine that God is a being who like us has feelings, desires, yearnings, yea wants, for He wants to impart his own peace, and gain from his creatures some returns for his infinite love. Open your Bible and see how directly you are drawn away from the old stoicism that God reposes on the peaks of eternity cold and serene, leaving the world with their mean affairs to inferior deities. In the Bible we read of Divine humanities, Divine griefs and sorrows, as if the Divine sympathies ran down through all sensitive beings and felt every pulse of woe in his universe. I cannot see the Scripture or the reason of the proposition which some of our theologians have striven to make good — that God is incapable of suffering. As if that were perfection ! What would you think of a man who sought to become perfect by becoming impassive and turning himself into stone ? As man becomes better and more godlike he becomes more susceptible to the sorrows of his fellows, and makes their griefs his griefs, and in this very susceptibility he ascends to a bliss altogether more sacred and plenary than these men of wood and granite, that never suffer at all. And whence does all this susceptibility come to us ? It comes out of the heart of God. It is a trait of the Divine Nature transcribed into man. It tells us that there are sufferings which are Divine ; and that the more our natures become open to them the more we become changed into the likeness of our glorious original. Thus we speak of the Divine Compassion, and that means suffering with another, so that in our spontaneous speech we belie our wretched pagan theologies. And as if description by words were not enough, St. John in apocalyptic vision looks away up to the throne of God and what does he see there ? Not an arbitrary sovereign clothed in pomp and terror, not the lightnings out of the storm-clouds, not the show of magnificence affected by earthly sovereigns — but right in the midst of the throne, as it were getting sight of the Heart of God, a lamb as it had bee7i slain — the wounded love of the Creator himself, as if there was a Calvary not in Palestine alone but away in the Heart of God, where we crucify Him by our disobedience every day.

This being so, how plain it becomes that only Humanity can mediate between man and the Divine Essence. Nature is competent to evolve his power and magnificence ; we feel that sensibly enough when she crushes us like insects out of her way, or brushes us by the hundred into her great gulfstream, but in all her gamut she has not a single tone that is human or which can give us one lisp of the humanity of God. Nature in her impotency and her failure, man in his most urgent wants, point alike to this grand necessity, that there shall be a mediator, and that that mediator shall be a man.

And not any or every man, but the man Christ Jesus ; a man whose nature opens both ways — up to God on the Divine side, and down to the lowest of us on the human ; not some tall angel talking to us from a distance out of the porches of heaven, but some one clothed in our nature, touching the earth in its lowest place of evil and darkness, and at the same time touching the inmost heaven where all the Divine scenery lay upon his soul ; not sinful humanity, that cuts off the light rather than transmits it, but one supremely perfect, through whose translucency the whole Divine Nature is imaged forth. " Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in me ? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself, but the Father that dwelleth in me He doeth the works." " I in them and they in me, that they also may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that thou hast sent me." " All things are delivered unto me of my Father, and no man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him. Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." These proofs and illustrations show yet more openly the Divine burden of truth which the text brings home to us, — one God and one peace-maker between God- and men, the man Christ Jesus.

And what is the peace from God which comes through this mediation ?

First we say, peace of mind, rest from those tossings of controversy for which there is no umpire or final appeal. " Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am." Human reason, after its guessings and roamings from sect to sect, yearns for a Lord and a Master, not to crush it down but to take it up, weak, bewildered, and weary, and fold it in that Divine Reason whence alone it borrows vigor and illumination. Here is rest from the trials of faith, peace from the j anglings of sect, assurance after the twilight gleams of our own intuitions. If you have been through the circuit of guess-work after truth, and like the man lost in boundless woods, come back at evening to the spot you left in the morning, you will find how sweet is the intellectual repose in the Reason of God or the Word made flesh. " I have wandered long and far," says one of these men, " but have not found the rest which you say is to be obtained. I have interrogated my own soul, but it answers not. I have gazed upon nature, but its many voices speak no articulate language to me ; and more especially when I gaze on the bright page of the midnight heavens, those orbs gleam upon me with so cold a light and amid a silence so portentous, that I am terrified with the spectacle of the infinite solitude." To the intellect weary with its wanderings, and with no God-ward determinations, appeals the doctrine of one God and one peace-maker between God and man. I do not mean by this that repose in the Christian atonement, or faith in the Christian revelation, forbids or supersedes investigation, doubt, denial, and the most careful balancing of evidence. No ; doubt if you must, deny if you must, weigh the arguments in the nicest intellectual scales. The clearest affirmation comes after doubt ; but alas for the inquiries that end in nothing ; alas for the search after truth that goes down in darkness ; alas for the gropings after God that diverge away from Him till He is out of sight and out of hearing ; and because the greatest and best minds in all the Christian centuries have used the highest faculties of reason and investigation till doubt has melted away in the broader illuminations of the Word, I urge with renewed confidence the claim of the one peace-maker between God and men.

Peace to the heart consumed with its fevers, lacerated with its passions, wounded in its deepest sympathies and affections, tainted with the poison of self-love, till touched and pervaded with the love of God. And it is not touched and pervaded with the love of God while He is far off in the eternal abyss ; or a sovereign enforcing arbitrary decrees only for his own solitary glory. But through this mediation He does open the channels for our hearts to go up to Him and the Divine heart to throb down to us and fill this great chasm in the soul, this want of some object worthy of its immortal desires and endless aspirations.

Peace to the conscience. What anxiety, what weariness in endless self-analysis, in always looking into ourselves ; in trying to take ourselves to pieces and put ourselves together again as they do watches that will not keep time. This is what some people call self-culture, and it is a kind of culture which too much followed is sure to end in self-bewilderments and self-disgusts. How unsatisfying this kind of self-culture, at least to a spiritual nature quick and intuitive ! Do your best, and it is not God's best, and the accuser has you in his eye and follows you with equal steps and corners you up and goads and worries you. Acting from ourselves only we do nothing that satisfies us and always carry about the

ONE MEDIATOR. 3 I

burden of a tormenting self-consciousness. And you rest from this by passing over through the Christ to Him who takes the work upon Himself in the sovereign mouldings of the Divine grace.

Peace after storms ; for in the one Mediator are solved those mysteries of life and death that perplex and trouble us. For He turns upon them the light of immortality and shows the end they are working out ; and seen thus they are like the crests of the waves when kissed by the breaking sunbeams and sinking into calm. And so for the mind and the heart and the conscience, and for the events that bear us onward, " There is one peace-maker between God and men — the man Christ Jesus."

CHRISTMAS SONG.

Calm on the listening ear of night

Come heaven's melodious strains, Where wild Judasa stretches forth

Her silver mantled plains ; Celestial choirs from courts above

Shed sacred glories there, And angels, with their sparkling lyres,

Make music on the air.

The answering hills of Palestine

Send back the glad reply, And greet from all their holy heights

The Day-Spring from on high ; O'er the blue depths of Galilee,

There comes a holier calm, And Sharon waves, in solemn praise,

Her silent groves of palm.

" Glory to God ! " The lofty strain The realm of ether fills, How sweeps the song of solemn joy O'er Judah's sacred hills !

" Glory to God ! " The sounding skies

Loud with their anthems ring,

" Peace on the earth ; good will to men

From heaven's Eternal King."

Light on thy hills, Jerusalem !

The Saviour now is born, And bright on Bethlehem's joyous plains

Breaks the first Christmas morn, And brightly on Moriah's brow

Crowned with her temple spires, Which first proclaim the new-born light,

Clothed with its orient fires.

This day shall Christian tongues be mute,

And Christian hearts be cold ?

Oh, catch the anthem that from heaven

O'er Judah's mountains rolled, When burst upon that listening night

The high and solemn lay : " Glory to God, on earth be peace," Salvation comes to-day !

III. The Will-power

(A SERMON IN LENT.)

Luke xxii. 42. Not my will but thine.

THE days preceding the crucifixion of Christ were the season during which He walked in the shadow of death. The shadow began to fold Him in as He came down from the Mount of Transfiguration ; and soon after commenced his last journey to Jerusalem. The whole twelve are with Him now, and He announces to them plainly that He is going up to be crucified. They fall behind in amazement and fear, for the dread shadow comes over them now for the first time. Gethsemane, however, is the place where the shadow falls thick and heavy. Unbelievers are fond of contrasting the anguish of Jesus at this time with the bravery and firmness with which other martrys have met the same extremity. They little know through what struggle those other martyrs emerged into the light. It is not merely the shadow of physical death that falls upon Jesus now. The scene in Gethsemane gives us a view of that struggle in its final consummation which takes place in all good men who get the victory, and which is intense and profound in all natures which are themselves profound and great. Small or shallow natures know little or nothing about it. But in great ones there is a descent into the depths of weakness ere there is a rise to the sublimest heights of power. You must look a little farther on if you would see of what all this scene in Gethsemane was the preparation and the prelude. Afterward He says, " All power is given me both in heaven and on the earth." And again, " O fools and slow of heart to believe ; ought not Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into his glory ? " Weakness, prostration, prone on the earth to the verge of annihilation — this is the scene in Gethsemane. Power described in terms of exaltation and omnipotence — this is the scene forty days afterwards.

These days, when the death-shadow rested upon the Saviour, the older churches observe as the days of Lent, and we are in the midst of them now. In those churches they are days of fasting, in which the usual pleasures of life are postponed, the churches are draped in mourning and dirges are sung in place of anthems. I doubt not that those who observe these rites in good faith, are helped by them and brought into more living sympathy with a suffering Redeemer. What we need supremely is, not sentiment, but such sympathy with Him at the trial hour as will render to us its meaning, so that the same strength shall become ours in the time of need. This is all gathered up and expressed in the prayer — Not as I will, but as thou wilt. It is the absorption of the human will in the Divine, and for this comes down the strengthening angel. For this are all our Lenten days of humiliation, and they do nothing for us except as the prayer goes up out of our weakness and gets its answer. This, however, leads us into the heart of a great subject. There are two- phases of character which appear under the full operation of the Gospel upon the human heart. They seem at first inconsistent, antagonistic, and wholly irreconcilable. First, there is weakness, humility, non-resistance, turning both cheeks to the smiter ; what seems often to a man of the world pusilanimity and cowardice. The Gospel requires of him who receives it to give up his own will. Hence self-abasement, humiliation, and self-surrender are reckoned among the Christian virtues, and hence the apparent weakness it produces as the lion-heart is tamed and made a lamb.

Then again the Gospel in the person of its believers is mighty and aggressive ; and one man clothed in its full power becomes more invincible than an army with banners. Non-resistance, weakness, humiliation disappear, and a single man or a single woman becomes so strong that the forces of an empire may beat against them in vain.