Sermons on faith, hope, and love, with Horæ homileticæ.

Preface

THE prospect is not exhilarating to him who puts forth a volume of sermons. Nobody reads sermons. A few copies sent to one's friends are sacredly preserved with uncut leaves. They disappear in the limbo of dead things. But this, though taken for granted, is not quite true of published sermons like those of Frederick W. Robertson and Phillips Brooks. Few volumes of an earnest sort are more read than these. And does any one read books that have nothing in them? Sermons must take their chance with essays, poems, histories, scientific works, and all other forms of literature. Yet it has been denied by critics that sermons deserve a place in literature at all ; that their object is to move men to immediate action, and they have no relation to past or future, but only to the present. Having done their work they are, like spent shot, worthless. The feeling that produced them has passed away and cannot be repeated. But if music, which is feeling, can still awaken feeling, and vi Preface.

speech, which is thought, can still arouse thought, and motives which move the will can be brought to bear again and again on the mind to impel it to act, then sermons are not spent forces, but they gather up and conserve spiritual power for use. The very beginnings of the German language and literature were in the translations and homilies which Charlemagne caused to be made by the Church for the people. The sermons of the great English divines such as Wy cliff, Latimer, Taylor, South, Hall, Robertson, Newman, and Liddon, if they were expunged from English literature, would cause an irreparable loss. Sermons occupy, it may be a small, but a high place in the house of literature, like the chapel through whose windows a celestial light shines. Sermons, even the humblest of them, speak to the ever-recurring wants and hopes of man, and to that which is divine in him. They have in them a breath of eternal life. Every true preacher has a new intuition of religion and Christianity. A sermon which is fit to be heard is fit to be read. The lightning may not strike in the same place, but from the same cloud may come forth electric power. A sincere word of God honestly spoken is never lost, and does not return entirely void to Him who sent it.

By way of introduction, I would speak briefly of a beloved teacher who was a representative of the

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best Christian philosophy of Germany, of which Schleiermacher was the originator, though drawn perhaps more distantly from the older " Theologia Germanica," — a theology that approaches truth from the right side, from the side of God, one might say, apprehending divine things in the way in which they can alone be apprehended, not primarily through the understanding, which is a subordinate factor, but through the spiritual capacity, by the higher reason and discernment there are in faith, hope, and love ; the theology of Saint John and Saint Paul, in which the freedom of the human will — a truth of priceless value and expressing one of the highest prerogatives in man — is not, after all, the fundamental axiom of theology, but rather the freedom of God's loving will is this ; in which theory there is a large idea of God that is not based on the limitations of the human mind, or the conception, as it were, of a child, but which begins in God and ends in God, and whose language is, " For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord ; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."

Though sometimes forgetful of this divine philosophy and carried away by pride of opinion, I nevertheless obtained rest in this spiritual or divine viii Preface.

conception of Christianity, so that I have not been very seriously troubled by the changing phases of theological strife, the apparent antagonisms of reason and faith, the conflict between science and revelation, or " the discovery of the uniform laws of phenomena as disproving the supernatural facts of revelation," the progress of the .higher criticism in its relation to inspiration, the bold yet believing speculations of the " new theology " following the track of Maurice and Robertson, the fresh redaction of the books of Scripture, nor the subtle speculations of modern materialistic philosophy; for I seem to have gained a foothold in spiritual truth firmer and farther in than these controversies reach. My obligations to Neander as a teacher, early begun, cannot be sufficiently acknowledged. It was in the last years of his life I attended his lectures, and was admitted to the more intimate home-circle of friends in which he was wont to meet his youthful disciples in a spirit of loving familiarity. He brought his pupils into a very close sympathy with himself, — into the true bond of Christian love. He gave them freely the results of his profoundest thinking. There was something, too, in the subjective character and richness of German thought, as contrasted with much of the barren metaphysics of the English inductive method, that attracted me. Since those

Preface. ix

student years, the more careful reading of Neander's works strengthened in me the estimation which both he and Schleiermacher placed upon feeling and life in Christian philosophy, — that the Christian is he who has the spirit of Christ. All truth was centred in the divine person of Christ. From him a new life emanated and was communicated to men, not springing from human reason but from the "Spirit of Christ," — a supernatural power working in humanity through faith in Christ, not miraculously but naturally, as life works in the physical universe, and according to the conditions and laws of that divine life. The mystery and yet truth of this spiritual life in and through Christ, surpassing knowledge, as all that is divine does, powerfully impressed me ; and it seemed to be the best existent expression of that Johannean theology in which the highest thought and truest love which there are in Christianity might find room.

Upon Neander, as a prepared instrument, the mind of Germany slowly revolved from almost utter negation into spiritual Christianity. He left his impress upon the thought not only of Germany but England and America, by introducing his philosophy, not antagonistically, but by indirection, and through a deeper interpretation of the divine will in the history and facts of human consciousx Preface.

ness. His was a philosophy of humanity as moulded through the ages under the silent shaping influences of the divine spirit. His own personal history was an epitome of the real history of the Christian church. Brought out of Judaism through Platonism he emerged into the clear light of spiritual Christianity, made more rich as well as more humble by his profound experience. His philosophy was essentially of the school of Plato, and, as to that, of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, — the ideal philosophy of a self-evidencing intuition or consciousness of truth dwelling in the " eternal idea," the pure reason, which in these philosophers, and especially in Kant, whose philosophy had so deep an ethical basis, came so near to the teachings of the New Testament, but which, in Neander, was transformed into and came to be identical with the real, the divine, and the divinely practical, by the power of faith in the Son and in the Spirit. He himself lived in the region of ideas, and in the contemplation of the love of God, and he was a very child in the wisdom of this world ; yet his rare sagacity in divine things was so penetrating that, while unconscious of it, he became a guide and light to myriads of other seekers after truth.

To the sermons that follow, which are not intended to provoke criticism but rather to provoke

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to good works and faith, hope, and love, I have added, as a second part of the volume, under the title of " Horae Homileticae," some articles first published in the " Homiletic Review " during the years 1886 and 1887, and which are brief familiar answers to questions sent by young preachers ; and this might be regarded by students as forming a supplement to a work entitled " Homiletics," published by me in 1881.

Contents

Chapter Page

I. The Power of Evil Overcome .... 3

II. Faith's Confession 21

I. ®f>e ^otocr of <£fcil Overcome

THE POWER OF EVIL OVERCOME.

And the last state of that man is worse than the first. — Matt, xii., part of verse 45.

I^HE dramatic poet Lessing, in his broad and beautiful love of humanity, wrote : " No man is all inhuman ; " and yet there have been men who have seemed to reach, even in this life, an absolutely dehumanized state, unloving and unloved. The older a man grows, if a bad man, the worse he grows ; and the text but affirms the fact that there is a last and worse state of the mind that continues under the influence of evil ; implying also, God be praised, that there is a first and better state, an essential nobility, a divine worth, in the human soul, hard to be destroyed, and making it difficult for the soul to be brought, through sin, into the last and worse power of evil here and hereafter. I do not know what may come hereafter, but we may reasonably suppose, judging from this

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life, that in the future the mind continues to go on in the way it has marked out for itself by a natural law of deterioration, when it is not bent upon an upward higher grade, unless, indeed, God in His infinite love give it a new chance or power of recovery, in which the divine principle in man may free itself from evil in some new state or stage of existence; and yet, whatever our larger Christian hope — and it can be but hope — may be on this point, that lies in God's hands and not ours, and belongs to the unrevealed mysteries of the future state ; while still the eternal struggle of the soul with evil goes on, and is nobler than any drama that the highest genius ever conceived.

In the parable of our Lord of which the text forms the concluding words, the spirit of evil is represented as stealing into the soul like a thief at night, yet finding no rest, affinity, or comfort therein ; for he is an enemy, and sin is alien to the human mind, and there is in the soul too much that reminds of God who made it in His image; a haunting spirit that whispers, " Forbear ! this dwelling is God's, and its true Master will at some time return to take possession of it."

Even the singular phrase, " findeth it empty, swept, and garnished," though it might bear a different interpretation, may possibly indicate or suggest something kept for a higher purpose, or for a pure inhabitant temporarily absent but to whom it belongs, and which if empty of the divine presence has every intention of a holy dwelling, or temple, with apartments swept and garnished for the inhabitation and service of God. In the clear intellect, warm affections, generous susceptibilities, and lofty reason, the courage, hope, honor, self-sacrifice, the noble though negative virtues of an undebased nature, there is something divine which is capable, for a time at least, of baffling the hostile approaches of positive evil. The lovely habits of devotion, loyalty, obedience, and truth which go with one, Christianly reared, perhaps far into life, keep the mind pure and swept of the corruption of depraved inclinations, and adorned, like the carved frieze of a Greek temple, with heroic thoughts and deeds.

There would, indeed, appear to be in the history of the soul a certain period of equipoise, like a calm stream whose strong currents have not yet begun to flow and swirl, a time when evil has not obtained the decided impulse and upper hand, and, indeed, ought never to obtain it; and such a period, in most instances, is youth, when the beautiful image of God has not yet been swept out of the mind, and the blight of evil has not spread over the nature and destroyed the hopes of better things, when the powers of goodness are active,

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the power of choice between good and evil more evenly balanced, and it can by no means be said that the man is given up to the control of evil. And, it may be, since evil is ever opposed to and wars against good and is intent upon its destruction, the more beautiful these natural qualities of the mind, that is a child of God, the more intense will be the attraction to the active energy of evil, as Satan beheld from afar the " green earth " and its two inhabitants, and their innocent happiness awoke in him a fierce desire to wreck that paradisaic happiness ; and this leads us to consider one obvious lesson of the parable, which is, the great peril of admitting into the mind or the thought any evil influence whatever, even the smallest and meanest.

In the spiritual world there is evil, which is the corollary or opposing principle of good, as there is darkness as well as light in the natural world. The law of contrast produces strong effects in nature, and what would be the power of the most lovely and ethereal landscape were it not for the dark foreground, the dim middle distance, and the magical play of light and shade !

The origin of evil may be an insoluble problem; but the beginning of evil in a human heart is a much more practical question. The original trend of human nature towards evil (now counteracted in

The Power of Evil Overcome. y

Christ), and the actual admission of evil into the mind, are two different things, and our responsibilities in regard to the two widely differ. I once, indeed, heard a preacher say that he hoped he had sincerely repented of Adam's transgression ; but as there is so much that is real in sinful humanity, I could not follow him in this transcendental confession.

Evil does not enter a man's heart without the heart's consent, although it be the consent of one who feels his feebleness to expel the evil, and it may be that the power of God can alone enable a man to do this, as the apostle John says, " he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not ; " God is always present to aid us, but the temptability of the mind is a tremendous fact, and through how many avenues it is exposed to temptation, and perhaps the mind that thinks itself entirely safe from temptation is the most exposed to its sudden assault.

Whenever evil enters a man it is because the man leaves some avenue open to evil, and his own will aids its approach or yields the fastening by want of carefulness, or by complicity with the active principle of temptation. Temptation reaches the soul through the natural desires, in themselves good ; and a man must overcome the temptation by the recognition of God in his lowest as well as highest desires, letting them never become self-centred or selfish, so that the tempter may find "nothing," no assailable point in him; while it is through some such natural inlet, or susceptibility, that the temptation becomes what the Scriptures call an " evil lust," a wrong desire, the indulgence of which is sin. A man sins when " he is led away of his own lusts and enticed." These are the evil spirits that tempt a man. Through the natural part of the house the door of entrance is opened into the most inner and spiritual portion. But evil, by the parable, has already entered, because the will, being enticed, has yielded to the solicitation of natural desire thus clothed in the form of good.

When a man yields to temptation he begins immediately to search out some good motive for the evil act, and pays this tribute to his moral nature. For example, he knows as a child of God, that whoever loves the praise of men more than the praise of God would fall from heaven like lightning by as inevitable a law of gravitation as that which rules the stars ; therefore (arguing with himself) he will strive to hold the praise of men subservient or subordinate to the praise of God ; he will cultivate his powers in order to glorify God in them ; he will show his superiority to others so that he may honor God who has given him this superiority to his fellows ; he will cause men to admire his intellect, that he may better command their respect, and he will create a brilliant reputation so that he may obtain power, the dominion of the world, in order to employ it for good ends. In this way the Saviour was audaciously assailed by the Tempter in the wilderness — a most subtle temptation to which intellectual men are specially exposed, and may serve as a supreme example of temptations of this class, and of their mode of reaching and overthrowing sometimes the finest minds. Edward Irving, in a letter to a friend, described this species of temptation, and it would surely have been well if both he and Thomas Carlyle, to whom he writes, had given diligent heed to it. He says, —

" I could wish that your mind were less anxious for the distinction of being enrolled among those whom this world has crowned, than among those whom God has crowned. Two things must be kept in view in judging men's worth — first the power they have, and then what use they turn it to. You and I agree when we meet a person of intellectual power, but you do not go so far as I in exacting from him a good use of his power. I demand that he should not rule over others by the use of his power. I do not wish his gifts to be turned to the aggrandizement of their possessor, for he does not possess them by virtue of himself, but of God. Keep away from these two things, — the tyrannous sway of others and the i o Sermons.

deification of your own intellect. Then I would have the mind turned to the discovery of truth, and to the undeceiving of men in error in order to lead them into the way of their well-being. And finally, which should have been first or rather which should be the moving principle of the whole, to do supreme honor to God who made the mind. Find, I entreat you, people of this kind ; love them, be like them, and God will enrol you among them. How few I find who can stand the temptation of high talents. They cry out against kings for their arbitrary tempers ; but I think men of talents are more arbitrary. Nothing can overcome the tempter but the power and grace that are in that gospel of Jesus Christ who through the brightness of his Father's glory and the express image of His person, and speaking as no man spake, took upon Him the form of a servant. Therefore God highly exalted Him, and hath given Him a name above every name, and He will also exalt all who like Christ use their gifts for the service of God and their fellow-men."

But there are infinitely more ignoble spirits than intellectual ambition, such as the spirits of falsehood, irreverence, impurity, intemperance — the demon of drink that has crept in and overthrown many a noble mind — and other evil spirits like them that seek admission to the soul, and yet the same stealthiness, the same speciousness, is seen in them all, as the orator or writer, sometimes for base ends, uses arguments addressed to goodness itself, and supposes that in disparaging the character or motives of perhaps a better man than himself, he is serving the cause of truth, and doing his part in bringing down false pretensions and lowering false pride, until envy, which is hate, gains a firm foothold in his heart, and opens it to every tyrannous injustice. 1 And he too who has given way to the working of the covetous spirit, and who is tightening his grip upon the property that God has freely given him for good uses, who is calling his property his own with emphasis, he has begun the process of arguing down his conscience by many a prudential reason and economic precept. It is " the little one," as he is called in the story of Sintram, who leads the strong man, the belted knight, to the depths astray.

The spirit of evil thus goes softly about the dwelling of the soul, seeking some unguarded place, some weak point, for every nature is assailed at its point of greatest tension. But the wary process does not endure, and it is quite unnecessary that it should last long, since the

1 " There is no vice so simple but assumes

Some marks of virtue on his outward part."

Merchant of Venice, iii. 2.

Machiavelli, in " The Prince," reaches a sublime strain of rhetoric in behalf of virtue, and seems sincerely to desire the welfare and unity of Italy, while insinuating the basest methods of political conduct.

nature is growing less and less conscious of the treacherous deceit played upon it, and more and more hopelessly prepared for a deeper reign of evil in its full scope.

And we have now reached the chief and most fearful lesson of the parable, which is the truth that it sets forth in such significant terms, of the multiplying nature of evil when it has once obtained foothold in the mind. It is as if the Lord of spirits, both good and bad, had drawn the curtain and given us a glimpse into the depths of the spiritual nature, and shown us something of its secret workings, in order to put us on our guard and bid us be watchful. The evil spirit who has thus reconnoitred the soul like a burglar, who has entered it and taken note of its treasures, and left its defiling touch upon all within, has done its work thus far quietly and without outward manifestation of the injury that has been accomplished. It has aroused no great apprehension, has produced no moral convulsion, has awakened perhaps no active opposition, and now feels more sure that the mischief is done, and that the essential if not actual conquest of the mind is achieved. It is satisfied. It can now even leave the soul for a while in its state of unconscious security; and this may be the soul of one who stands high among those who know him ; who is still shapely, tall, and flourishing though the tree has begun to grow rotten ; who is esteemed for every excellence, and who also may suppose himself to be a good man ; but the spirit of evil, you may notice, now calls the soul its own; and it says " I will return unto my house whence I came out." Tt goes forth without anxiety about the fact of ownership, to search in all the dry and accursed places of earth for its companions, in order to return and make final abode within the soul. " Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there ; and the last state of that man is worse than the first."

The seven spirits mentioned have been supposed by some fanciful commentators to mean the seven cardinal sins as they were called in the Middle Ages; but this is unimportant. It is sufficient for us to recognize the force of the truth veiled in parable, that evil multiplies itself, and that its increase is both certain and rapid. How terrible have been the manifestations in our times of the collapse of business integrity and the ruin of moral character ! These falls have shaken society like the fall of great towers at midnight in a beleaguered city. There may be often a very quick outward development of the subjective power of evil which has been working a long time unseen. When the time comes for it to do so, the tree falls with a crash. When the time comes for it to do so, the hidden evil assumes a kind of conscious energy defiantly manifesting its latent might, and multiplying itself with amazing rapidity.

In the nature of the mind there is found this law of the multiplication of spiritual force. The soul has a continuous organic life binding together its beginning and end, and carrying the past along with it as its life goes on. It not only loses nothing out of it, but it evolves a new and stronger life from within. The activity of spirit, as spirit, and the power of causation given it, increase its volume of force and its range of activity. If, therefore, any particular germ or form of evil be lodged in the spiritual life, its forces instantly take it up, assimilate it into its own life, and develop unlimitedly along with its own immortal powers whatever power this germ of evil contains.

The laws of the mind constructed for progress, for a beautiful and strong development in all good, for perfection, when turned to evil, are in the same manner active in an evil direction, and working to strengthen a sinful life. Let sin, for instance, take possession of the reason. The reasoning powers continue their natural development but in the service of error. To doubt, which sometimes is a healthful exception to spiritual insensibility and a sign of better life, will, if unaccompanied by the genuine striving after truth, become a diseased principle of the mind, until there is an active law of death working in the whole nature. After a time such a mind cannot look fairly at truth, but instinctively seeks for its opposite, so that as the Bible says " it cannot believe ; " and this is simply -because the reason throws its energies in the work of convincing itself of the truth of untruth, instead of the truth of truth. And as of the reason so, above all, of the imagination, which is the reproductive and miracle-working faculty.

The identical principle in the mind which makes a man a good writer, or mathematician, or linguist, or machinist, or builder, or farmer, or merchant, will also make him a successful and accomplished evil-doer. He deals with the same spiritual energies. One must destroy the soul before he can check its progress and limit the power of evil once taken into it.

This truth of the multiplying power of evil upon which I have been commenting, not certainly for my pleasure, is shown again in the fact of the close relationship of all evil qualities and powers to one another, — that these are found in groups and families; and that as virtues are the richly clustering fruits of one Divine spirit, so sins have one source, the spirit of evil. They lie near one another. Let, for example, the sin dwelt upon so much in the

New Testament, of unbelief, reign in a heart, this will bring into the heart the related sins of selfrighteousness, superiority to the divine law, and license to do evil only partially restrained by the fear of man and public sentiment The Sadducees were never far from the Pharisees, and they are rarely mentioned apart. When the hypocrisy and covetousness of the one were manifested, it was soon followed by the denial of the other in respect of the reality of divine things, of right and wrong, of the resurrection and immortality. The one spirit multiplies into eight — eight more powerful spirits.

Man cannot deal with spiritual evil and expect to use it as his instrument. Evil will prove itself stronger than he. It will multiply its powers too fast for him to control ; it will spread its net-work of strong alliances ; it will extend its bounds of confederacy among the mighty principalities and powers of evil against whom all human effort is futile.

Finally, the only safe way of dealing with the great and terrible power of evil, and of overcoming it, is to live in the joyful and glorious faith that the soul and the universe belong to God, that to Him is the power, the dominion, the glory forever, and that He is mightier than evil and will triumph over it in the day of conflict. In the light of this blessed truth the reformer Zwingli showed him-

The Power of Evil Overcome. i self superior even to Luther, for while Luther " wrestled in agony of soul with the powers of darkness, Zwingli looked calmly above to the Divine and all-embracing Love, under which the whole creation rests in trust " and hope of complete victory through Christ. " The fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness." The very end of the work of Christ is goodness ; it is to make good men. In this consists the goodness, or the innocence, of the Christian mind, which is not the innocence of a child, or of the total ignorance of evil ; nor is it the innocence of perfect holiness ; but it is the mind that " thinketh no evil," from whose inmost depths malice, falsehood, pride, hate, and the principle of evil as a ruling principle has been expelled, and the spirit of love, the spirit of Christ, has been breathed into the soul and animates it in every part, thought, and action ; and such a mind understands the force of the great working principle of a Christian life — " Be not overcome of evil but overcome evil with good." Thus may we all be preserved from the terrible power of evil !