Dr. Deems' sermons. Forty-eight discourses ...

Preface

When the Church of the Strangers moved into the edifice furnished by the munificence of the late 'Cornelius Vanderbilt, Esq., a few zealous parishioners brought out in beautiful style the sermons delivered by the pastor on the first forty-eight Sunday mornings in which he officiated. It was no affected modesty which led me to feel that the sermons were hardly worth the pains thus kindly taken. But some of them were repreached by special request : some before colleges and elsewhere : some were reprinted in various periodicals. A very large edition of a selection from these discourses appeared in London and found their way through Great Britain. Many pleasant incidents have become known, showing that they have been instructive to some and comforting to others in various parts of the world. Since they have been out of print, applications for copies have shown that they were not entirely forgotten. Messrs. Funk and Wagnalls are very apt to know where there is a market, if there be one, and to make a market where there is none. Naturally a man who preaches earnestly what he cordially believes, is gratified when his congregation is enlarged. This new edition goes forth with most sincere prayer that it may be abundantly blessed as it travels on its mission.

Charles F. Deems.

Church of the Strangers,

New York, id October, 1885.

I

Contents

PAGE

1. Christianity confronting Frivolous Skepticism, - - Acts, xxvi. 25, 7

2. Are Christians Narrow? l Cor. ii. 2, 14

II

" FOR I DETERMINED NOT TO KNOW ANYTHING AMONG YOU, SAVE JESUS CHRIST, AND HIM CRUCIFIED." — I COR. II. 2.

Last Sunday we discussed the question whether the charge of insanity could be established against Christians. This text leads us to examine the question whether Christianity has the tendency to make men narrow in any department of character. Paul is a representative Christian as well as a representative preacher. He preached to the Corinthians all that had done him any good, and all he knew that would do them good. That was the crucified Jesus Christ.

At the first announcement, this seems a narrow basis on which to erect a private character and a public life. But Paul deliberately adopted it. In his case it succeeded. He believed it must succeed in every case. So, he determined not to know anything among his brethren "save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." To a Greek, occupied with his philosophies, to a Roman, taken up with his politics, it must have seemed absurd to have only one subject of thought and only one theme of discourse, and that the character and supposed offices of a man who had died shamefully on a cross. Even now, the superficial scientists and the engrossed materialists of this age regard the whole system of Christianity as a narrow theory, and the whole matter of preaching as a very small affair, and both as standing in contrast with what they would be pleased to have considered as the liberal arts.

Does the history of the mental development and practical life of Paul, or any other Christian, confirm that view ?

Before proceeding to the direct investigation of that question, let us remind ourselves of certain things grafted in the history of mind. It has been known that men have attempted to liberalize themselves by dipping into all the arts and sciences, having a little or much knowledge in every possible department, keeping the Admirable Crichton for their model. It is fair to admit that such persons have become most pleasant society men, have been agreeable and entertaining, and have made some figure while they lasted. But how long did they last ? What is the size of their figure and the weight of their influence a century after death ? Compare them with the men who have each taken some great field of intellectual labor and devoted their lives to it, and how small they seem. Compare this Admirable Crichton, just mentioned, with Copernicus, for instance. At seventeen years of age, the former is reputed to have mastered the whole circle of the sciences, to have been able to speak and write in ten different languages. He excelled in painting and fencing, in riding and dancing, in vocal and instrumental music. He had the most extraordinary strength and beauty. Before he was twenty he challenged the learned men of Europe to dispute with him in twelve different languages, on " any science, art, discipline, or faculty." He bore off the palm in this extraordinary trial. Many other things are told of this wonderful Scotchman, many being undoubtedly fabulous, but all showing the great variety of his attainments. But was he a great character ?

Almost twenty years before he was born there died in Prussia a simple-hearted Christian recluse, the astronomer Copernicus. In early life he conceived the idea of a new theory of the universe, the very opposite of that which had prevailed for twenty centuries. To the demonstration of the sun-center theory of the solar system as opposed to the earth-center, this student, who went into society simply to preach and practise medicine among the poor, and who regarded general conversation a waste of time, devoted forty years of his life. In science, he determined to know nothing but the center of the system. He discovered and demonstrated it, and died with the last page of his book fresh from the press. But he had turned the whole current of human thought, he had revolutionized science, and there is not a living man on earth to-day who does not reap the fruit of that forty years' devotion to one thought. From his labors men have been able to make navigation a wider science and a safer art, and thus build up such cities as London and New York. But what has Crichton done for the world ? His life perished like a splendid rainbow, while that of the one-ideaed Copernicus fell on all fields like fructifying showers.

Then Paul may have been right, on correct

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knowledge of the laws of thought, in selecting one single topic for study and preaching. He was not naturally a broad man ; rather narrow. His Pharisaic education had still more contracted him. He was of the "straitest sect" of the narrowest school of the most illiberal nation. He grew to be the deepest philosopher, the broadest humanitarian, the most practical business man, and most tender, happy, loving, and beloved man of his generation, and of his generation exerted the greatest influence on all succeeding times.

Such, my brethren, I hold to be the effect of devotion to the knowledge of " Jesus Christ, and Him crucified," on any human soul. And these are just the elements of character which every man should desire to have developed in himself. It may do us good to take up these several topics and see, if we can, how it comes to pass that a profound, devoted, affectionate study of Jesus, in His character and offices, has this effect on the human character.

I. God begat men with a desire to know. He could not be God if there was anything He did not know. We are sure that we are His children, because we inherit from Him a desire to know everything. If we were not finite we should know everything. As it is. all the best of the Father's children are perpetually engaged in seeking to know the fixed causes of the constantly changing phenomena of the universe, and to bring into a system all this knowledge, and to reduce this system to the last possible simplicity of unity. And this we call philosophy.

The study of Jesus led Paul, and, dear brethren, will lead you and me, into the perception that the spiritual underlies all the physical, that the material is only the expression of the ideal, that there is a soul to the universe. It is in seeking to explain the existence of such a being as Jesus of Nazareth, and such a life as His, that we come to the underlying basis of the spiritual world. Matter could not do it all. Now, it is so that all questions of bodily and mental health and disease, of the moral forces of the universe, of the social questions of human life, of development and progress, are concerned with Jesus more than with any other one person or subject known to men. We begin to get at a rational cause for the existence of the universe at all. It is not, then, eternal. It was not, then, made for pomp, as a vain and ambitious emperor might on a plain create a crowded capital, splendid with palaces and magnificent with parks. It had a cause. That cause was spiritual. The universe, then, is not an end. It is a means. It is the material for the realization of thought, the field for the operation of moral and spiritual forces. There begins to be the dawn of science. We are no longer to be mere empirics. The material is visible. The spiritual is unseen. The material changes. The spiritual is fixed. The material passes away. The spiritual is eternal. We are getting at causes. We are finding sufficient causes, commensurate with the effects and with probable original intentions on the part of the Great Creator. We are beginning to find a basis for our physical science. The spiritual and the material are not two parallel currents running side by side ; they make one. The natural cannot exist without the spiritual, and the spiritual demands the natural. Nature and supernature are the outside and the inside of the universe. The deity, the godness, of God necessitated the things that have length, breadth, and thickness.

We are now pushing forward and down and up in philosophy. We are simplifying, we are unifying. We have found causes. We have found One Cause. We have found a simple conception of the Creator bursting into myriads of splendid worlds. We can read the physical world aright only as we connect it with the spiritual. There was no astronomical science fit to be called such until such humble and wise and patient Christians as Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler and Newton, with their hearts in their brains and their brains in their eyes and their eyes straining after God, found the ponderous orbs floating on the bosom of the Creator asrichly-freighted ships on an immeasurable sea. And now, in geology, chemistry, physiology, or any other branch of science, no man is a discoverer, no man is an enthusiastic teacher, who does not perform his experiments as a saint prays, and does not connect every atom of matter with the pulsations of the spiritual world.

The same is true of the department of intellectual science. There is a cosmical science, There is a metacosmical, if my learned hearers will permit me humbly to suggest a word which is not yet, I believe, in the dictionary, to suggest that which traces all the products and harmony of the universe to the first principles in the mind of God, as metaphysical science traces all kinds of knowledge to their first principles in the constitution of the mind of man. We have unified the cause : is the end one ? All the efforts of the human intellect, thus far, have gravitated toward the oneness of beginning and

Are Christians Narrow ?

the oneness of end. For what, not as an originating cause simply but also as a finality, was all this universe of worlds and men created? "For Him," said Paul, speaking of Jesus.

For a moment suppose Paul mistaken in the centei, you must perceive how grandly he grew in all his intellectual and spiritual proportions upon discovering that there was a center, whether Jesus was that center or not. He was to physical and metaphysical, to cosmical and metacosmical science, what Copernicus was to astronomy. He simplified and unified. We have not yet found the center of the physical universe ; but we have found and demonstrated that there is a center to every system, that that center is moving around some other center, and we believe that there is one last, supreme, unmovable point, measurelessly far from our world, around which all worlds revolve. The man who shall skill to determine that exact spot shall wear the last, the grandest starry crown among the princes in the Court of Astronomy. Paul did more. Jesus was to him what an upheaved section of the earth is to the geologist, showing all the strata of the earth's crust. He saw the strata of the universe in Jesus. To know Him, in all He was and in all He did, would be to know the whole material universe. Science has no other basis so broad, philosophy has no other element so simplifying and unifying all the works of God. "The heavens declare the glory of God," but that glory "shines in the face of Jesus." For all that work which found its consummation on the cross of Christ all the other works of God were wrought. Believing and teaching this, Paul became the philosopher who lifted a light which is now the central splendor of all human intellectual efforts and results.

2. This study of the crucified Jesus enlarged Paul, as it will enlarge you, my brother, into a broad, intelligent humanitarian. Recollect the age in which he lived, and the nation from whom he sprung. It was not an age of humanity. Indeed, never had our race right views of the value of humanity before Jesus came.

Greek culture had, it is true, brought about a respect for the possibilities of the body in the direction of symmetry, and of the intellect, in the development of the aesthetic or taste side of human nature.

Roman culture had done nothing humanitarian. It is true that some one tells the story, that when the famous verse of Terence, " I am a man, and nothing human I regard as foreign to myself," was repeated in the theater, it was received with a burst of applause by the Roman audience; but that always seemed to me the expression of startled surprise at such a conception, rather than the shout of brother-hearts for that same multitude would sit in the amphi theater and see a hundred brawny fellow-me' "slaughtered to make a Roman holiday," th< very women never wincing at sight of atrocities which should have made the Emperor faint That very Emperor would sit upraised, and without a pang, receive the partings of the gladiators as they turned their faces to his throne and said: " Ccesar, morituri te salutant " Caesar, those about to die, salute you !" It was not man as man who had claims on their hearts. Romans were something, men nothing.

Of all the people the Jews were the least humane. Jews were something, men nothing, Samaritans dogs, and Romans wild beasts. They would never respond to any generous sentiment founded on the brotherhood of man. It was to be characteristic of Messiah's reign that then the Jews should put their heels on the necks of the nations. Jesus incensed his nation by lifting all men to the same plane of favor in the sight of the Heavenly Father, and making the individual man the most precious of all the precious things of earth.

Paul believed that Jesus Christ, by the grace of God, tasted death for every man. He believed that He was Christ, the Anointed, because He had received a setting-apart for this very purpose. He believed that He rightly bore the name " Jesus," because He should be the world's Saviour ; Saviour not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles. There is no view of humanity which so makes every man precious to every other man, as the doctrine that the Eternal God became flesh, that the Deity was incarnated, that love prompted this advent and this investment of the Godhead with Manhood, and that love found its last greatest expression in a voluntary suffering and self-sacrifice, made for every man, in which every man had an interest, and which, somehow, should bring good to every man. Fact or fable, it is the most stimulating and most noble and most broad of all propositions. It takes in all there is of God and all there is of Man. It binds all parts in one. It is to the heart of man what the doctrine of universal gravitation is to his intellect. The latter is the simplifying, unifying scientific idea of the head, the other ^is the simplifying, unifying, harmonious sentiment of the heart. They are counterparts. All the atoms of the whole material world rush toward one another, because they rush toward the centra. All the individual

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hearts of our whole humanity rush toward one another just as all feel the attraction of the Loving, Crucified One.

Point me to any other basis of philanthrophy which is equal to that. Why should I love all men ? Some of thern are hateful enough, and some of them hate me : why should I love them all? If you tell me, Because God made us all; then I reply, So did He make horses and dogs; and I know some horses and dogs that seem to have more sense and better temper than some men and women. There must be some deeper and stronger reason than that, some bond of love that is strong. Here it is supplied. Jesus is the very highest possible conception of complete and perfect manhood. He is the brother of each and every man equally. In His life and death each man has precisely the same interest as every other man. What makes me at all an interesting object in the universe ? It is not mere existence and individuality and identity. It is that I am personally born of God, His son, and am loved by Him and am capable of feeling and returning that love. Jesus taught me that. Jesus established for me the brotherhood of man by notifying to me the Fatherhood of God. What He has done for me, Jesus has equally done for each other member of my race.

Far above all considerations of what any man is, or has been, or may become, is this crowning fact, that for that man the Son of God lived and died on earth. This is Paul's reason for adding and emphasizing the phrase "and Him crucified." It was not simply the teaching and miracle-working Jesus whom he had determined to know, but the Jesus who was capable of giving love's supreme proof to the world in His voluntary self-offering, a propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world. Now, no matter how bad any man may be, Jesus knew it all, and loved him and died for him.

It is on God's philanthropy I must found mine : otherwise it will be most defective. Such, history shows, is the philanthropy which does not come from the knowledge of Christ crucified. The class A will kill the class B out of "philanthropy" to the class C. It will always be found that this is a false philanthropy. There is another motive : for philanthropy is love to man as man, irrespective of opinions and qualities ; and the class B are men as much as the class C. Paul was lifted to that broad love for man, by refusing to know among his brethren anything except their relation to Him who had loved them and given himself for them, the Just for the unjust, to bring them to God. The more he knew of that love the more a humanitarian he became, until the distinction between Jew and Gentile, between Greek and barbarian, between bond and free, between male and female, lost itself in the great fact of Man, in the great fact that Man was the object of the love of the Heavenly Father as taught by the dying Redeemer.

3. At first sight it might seem strange that devoting one's self to the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, should make practical business-men more than any other culture ; and yet, in fact, it is so : and if, in fact, it be so, we must suppose that there is a reason for it in the nature of things. Let us see if we can find the reason.

We shall find great diversity of opinion as to what constitutes a good practical business-man. He is not such certainly who does not in the beginning set before himself distinctly an end worth the devotion of his life, — nor he who does not use the methods reasonably adapted to the gaining of that end, — nor he who does not push his work by sustained efforts to its legitimate conclusion, — nor he who does not promote the general weal in gaining his own ends. Some of you are great merchants, a few of world-wide fame. I appeal to you : is not that last statement correct ? However great energies a man may have, if he throw them upon the market pell-mell, pushing the world all around him, stirring things with a promiscuous rush, he certainly cannot be called a practical business-man. He is a steamer of great power, but rudderless. He is consigned and steered to no port. Nor, if a man shall have set his aims and determined his ends, is he a practical business-man if he vaguely hopes they will accomplish themselves or come to pass without the use of those methods which men know will produce such results. He is a dreamer, who counts his gold only in visions. Nor, if a man show great strength and sagacity by fits and starts, is he a practical business-man. He is spasmodic. He affects his connections as a locomotive does the passengers in the train when it takes them forward by jerks and strains. Nor, if a man gain his ends, and leave commercial circles and the general community no better, but rather worse, for his operations, is he a good practical business-man. He is an acute, selfish, perhaps successful operator: that is all.

Out of all these classes does a knowledge of Jesus, and Him crucified, lift business-men. They no longer set their aims to be the mere accumulation of money as an end. It is to them a means. They watch its growth and study its

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capabilities. The highest end of life is to live nobly and usefully — nobly, at least, if not usefully. If money have any power to increase a man's nobility, they study that and seek to employ it on themselves and their children. They, therefore, never become slaves to business, but keep business servant to all the highest interests of themselves and their children. Believing in a spiritual world, in the superiority of that to the material world, and yet greatly and rightly valuing the material world for its uses ; believing in the love of God for him and his fellow-men, and that business is one of God's shuttles wherewith He weaves the web of brotherhood ; having no purely personal ends to subserve, his passions are calm, he can do work for the Master with all his powers unperturbed. He can never fail, in the worst sense of that frightful word.

The knowledge of Christ crucified lifts all men in the love of a Christian business-man. He knows that no matter how many millions he might accumulate, if he left society injured by his operations, he should not be accounted a good practical business-man. No trade is good which does not profit both buyer and seller. The world has not gained by a transaction in which one is enriched by the impoverishment of another. And " God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son." ■ And Christians must so love the world. And this love for " the world" gives broadest, largest, deepest views of all the world's interests, and widens the range of vision of the Christian business- man.

Then, there is another view. This crucified Jesus "brought life and immortality to light." All life is made more practical. We are not groping in the dark any longer. We see just what we are to live for. All life is also made more grand by being set with immortality in the light. Our dirtiest shops and busiest countinghouses and most important banks become grandly solemn when we reflect that these transactions have no "clearing-house" in the grave, but go forward into eternity ; that every act of business will be busy forever, modifying all things, everywhere, perpetually. No man can afford to "fool" with business whose knowledge of the crucified Christ has given him assurance of his own immortality.

It was just such culture that made Paul one of the most practical of men. Full of business, never idle, never hurried, "the care of all the churches" on him, study and trouble and work always pressing, he succeeded in organizing Christian societies whose existence has long since closed, but whose influence will go on forever.

So, dear brethren, those men who make a business of their religion and a religion of their business, not regarding the up-town church as the only place for religion and the down-town store as the only place for business, — these men, by the knowledge of the crucified Jesus, become the greatest, the best, the most practical business-men. This text, " ! determine to know nothing among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified," is as good a motto for your counting-house as for my study, for the merchants as for the preachers.

4. Lastly. It was this knowledge which made Paul a tender, happy man, loving and beloved in his generation. Paul does not seem to have been an amiable man naturally. He was rather hard in the grain of his character. His education had not mended that. And in reading his history and his works, one can scarcely refrain from feeling that he had, early in life, been unfortunately and uncongenially married, although if that was the fact, it is obscured in the narrative. From being the hard, ambitious student of Gamaliel, and instrument of the Sanhedrin, how tender he became ! How he loved his friends and the churches and the world ! The cross had softened him. If Jesus was the Christ, anointed for the world, how the Father must love the whole family. If Jesus went to crucifixion, humbling himself even to the death of the cross, how tenderly would Paul's eyes look upon all who were subjects of such human and celestial love. He did not preach the Gospel on a cold sense of duty. He loved to proclaim Jesus. He worked for a support when it was necessary, that he might have this blessed privilege. He magnified his office. He was all the sweeter for being so strong. Those natures that are sweetish are not quite sweet ; but when great, grave, powerful men, carrying weights, working prodigiously for the accomplishment of great results, — when they are tender, gentle, and good, how sweet is their heroic tenderness, gentleness, and goodness !

Such was Paul. His love begat love. Read the salutations in his letters. See what friends he made. In Corinth there were Stephanas and Fortunatus and Achaiacus; — and there were Tychichus, a brother beloved ; and the slave Onesimus, "a faithful and beloved brother;" and his owner, Philemon, a dearly beloved fellowlaborer ; and Aristarchus, Paul's fellow-prisoner ; and Mark, Barnabas's nephew ; and Epaphras of Colosse ; and Luke, the beloved physician ; and Nymphas, who had a church in his house ; and Aquila and his wife Priscilla ; and the whole family of Onesiphorus, at Rome, who were not ashamed of Paul's chains, but sought him out

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and refreshed him with their ministration ; and the beloved Apphia ; and Phebe, " our sister, a servant of the church at Cenchrea ; " and Andronicus and Junia ; and Amplias and Urbane and Strachys, the household of Aristobulus and Narcissus; and Rufus, "chosen in the Lord," whose mother Paul tenderly calls his ; and TryphenaandTryphosa; andPersis; and the company of Asyncritus, Plegan, Hermas, Patrolus, and Hermes ; andPhilologus, withjulia; and Timothy, his son in the Gospel ; and Marcus, with his sister Olympas ; and Epenetus — all beloved, all named in his epistles, with others whose names have perhaps escaped me, but who are written in the Book of Life and in the heart of Paul : men, women, and children, people of rank, and of low life, slaves and their owners, learned and illiterate, what an array of friends whom Paul had learned to love, and who had learned to love him.

And now, dear brethren, consider this case. Here was a man born in a province, taught in a sectarian school, reared under every political and ecclesiastical influence calculated to cramp and embitter him, driven from his own people at last and killed by their conquerors after years of persecution. This man became a profound philosopher, a wide and consistent philanthropist, a man of great practical business capabilities, and a tender, noble gentleman, by dropping his ecclesiasticism, turning from all the philosophies which at his time were considered liberalizing, and devoting himself in thought and affection and life to the study, the love, the worship, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. No other culture ever made such results. Will you now dare tell me that Christianity is not liberal, that Christians are narrow, that the religion we preach to you is in the way of human progress or individual advancement ? Will you content yourself with any smaller results when these are at your command ? Will you desire your ministers to find other themes, when Jesus crucified touches all that is important in heaven and earth ? What else should we preach Vhan what we know ? Remember that not a solitary worker in society during the past thousand years has set humanity forward an inch who has not, like Paul, determined to know nothing among men except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. Whatsoever knowledge or work does not lead us to this knowledge, will prove worthless to our souls, and perish. Other knowledge may vanish away, but the knowledge of Jesus endures forever. Therefore the Great Master himself has taught us that this is perpetual life, to know God and Him whom God hath sent. Life to the brain, life to the heart, life to the life, there is no knowledge like knowing the Crucified.