BY JOHN A. BROADUS, D.D., LL.D.,
PROFESSOR IN THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, LOUISVILLE, KY.
FIFTH EDITION.
Fleming B. Revell
NEW YORK : 12 BIBLE HOUSE, ASTOR PLACE.
CHICAGO : 148 AND 150 MADISON STREET
publisher of Evangelical literature
Copyright, 1886, BT H. M. WHEATON ft Oo.
Jas B. RODGERS PRINTING CO.
52 and 54 N. Sixth Street,
Philadelphia, PA.
TO THE HON. J. L. M. CURRY, LL.D.,
UNITED STATES MINISTER TO SPAIN.
I send across the sea a slight token of our friendship. You have often shown that a man of the highest gifts as a public speaker may give to less favored men an interested and sympathetic attention. May you long live to serve your generation by the will of God.
With cordial affection,
J. A. B.
PREFACE.
SOME of these sermons have been published in periodicals, or printed for private distribution; others are now for the first time in print. Nearly all were taken down by stenographers, whether for a periodical or for the preacher.
In revising, it has not usually seemed best to remove the colloquial phrases, and the occasional breaks in construction, which naturally mark freely spoken discourse. "Where necessary in order to account for illustrations or other allusions in a sermon or address, the occasion of its delivery has been stated in a note. Several of the sermons have been preached to a good many churches; and persons who remember well in that line may be interested in noticing differences, sometimes numerous and considerable, due to altered circumstances or the preacher's varying moods.
Some of the addresses are quite familiar in tone; others were made on a dignified or solemn occasion.
Everything in the volume that is not of quite recent origin, has been carefully revised. The task has awakened a thousand precious memories of those among whom I have gone preaching the gospel. I pray God's blessing upon them all; and his blessing upon these printed discourses, that they may do some good.
CONTENTS.
(At the dedication of the Second Baptist Church in St. Louis.) God Is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth. JOHN iv. 24
II. SOME LAWS OF SPIRITUAL WORK.
One soweth, and another reapeth. Others have labored, and ye are entered into their labor. JOHN iv. 34-38 26
III. THE HABIT OF THANKFULNESS.
In everything give thanks. 1 THESS. v. 18 15
Ask, and it shall be given yon. MATT. vii. 7 57
V. HE EVER LIVETH TO INTERCEDE.
Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. HEB. vii. 25 70
VI. LET US HAVE PEACE WITH GOD.
Being therefore justified by faith, let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. ROM. v. 1 85
VII. HOW THE GOSPEL MAKES MEN HOLY.
O wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death ? I thank God through Jesiu Christ our Lord. ROM. vli. 24, 25 97
VIII. INTENSE CONCERN FOR THE SALVATION OF OTHERS.
For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren. ROM. ix. 3 . . .110
Mary, the mother of Jesus ACTS i. 14 124
X. THE APOSTLE PAUL AS A PREACHER.
(Preached when chaplain to the Univertity of Virginia.)
Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ. EPH. iii. 8 . 139
And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 2 TIM. iii. 15 168
XII. ON READING THE BIBLE BY BOOKS.
Address before the International Convention of Young Men's Christian Associations at Cleveland, Ohio, 1881 167
(Sermon before the Baptitt Society for Ministerial Education in Jffiuouri.) Give diligence to present thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, handling aright the word of truth. 2 TIM. ii. 15 . . 198
XIV. AMERICAN BAPTIST MINISTRY IN A.D. 1774.
Address at the opening 1 of a session of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 216
XV. COLLEGE EDUCATION FOR MEN OF BUSINESS . . . 248
Address before the Society of Alumni of the University of Virginia . . 268
Broadus SAA: 01 Worship
God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. John 4:24.
JESUS was tired. The little that we know of the history just before, yet enables us to see cause why He should have been tired.
He had been, for long months, engaged in active efforts to save men's souls to lift men out of their sluggishness and worldliness toward God. That is hard work for mind and heart. And he had been at work among many who were hostile. The disciples of John were some of them envious that their master was decreasing and another was increasing, though John said it was right and good; and when the Pharisees heard that Jesus was now making and baptizing more disciples than John, they were jealous. They made it needful that he should withdraw from Judea, as so often during his brief ministry he had to withdraw from the jealousy of his enemies or the fanaticism of his friends, and seek a new field. Worn out and perhaps sad at heart, the Redeemer sat alone by Jacob's well.
At the dedication of the Second Baptist Church in St. Louis, 1879.
Our artists owe us yet two companion pictures, the one of Jesus, as the disciples saw him when they turned back to look, on their way to buy food, as he sat and rested, leaning with limbs relaxed, with face weary, yet gentle; and the other of Jesus as they found him when they came back, sitting up now with an animated look on his face, busily, eagerly talking.
Ah! there was an opening to do good, and he who "went about doing good" would give up even his needed rest, and often did, we know, to do good to the least and the lowest. The disciples wondered not that he was ready to do good; they had seen that often already. They wondered that he was talking with a woman, for that was contrary to the dignity of a man according to the ideas of that time and country, to be seen talking with a woman in public. They wondered; they knew not yet what manner of spirit they were of, that they had to deal with high saving truths that break through all weak conventionalities.
They would have wondered more if they had known what he knew full well, that it was a woman of bad character; and yet he saw in her potencies for good, and he did win her that day to faith in the Messiah who had come, and sent her forth to tell others to come and see "a man who had told her all things whatsoever she did."
But she shrank in the process. Beautiful and wonderful it is to see how admirably our Lord led the casual conversation with a stranger so as to introduce the profoundest spiritual truths.
My Christian friends, let me not fail to point your attention to this. I know no art of social life more needful to be cultivated in our time and country than the art of skilfully introducing religion into general conversation. It is a difficult task. It requires tact and skill to do this in such a way as to accomplish much good and no harm; but it is worth all your efforts. Old and young, men and women, yea shall I say it? especially young ladies, who are Christians, with that control which young ladies have in our American society, need to cultivate few things so much as just that power which the Saviour here showed. Oh!
beautiful, blessed example of Jesus! How it shines more and more as we study and strive to imitate it!
And not only did he lead on toward religious truth, but he knew how, in a quiet, skilful way, to awaken her consciousness to a realization of her sinfulness, so that she might come near to spiritual truth. She shrank from it, I said, as people will often shrink from us when we try to bring truth home to their souls. She shrank, and while not wishing to turn the conversation entirely away from religious things, she would turn it away to something not so uncomfortably close, and so she asked him about a great question much discussed.
" Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers did worship in this mountain," and right up the steep slopes of Mount Gerizim she would point to the mount high above them, where were the ruins of the old temple of the Samaritans, destroyed a century and a half before. " Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. O prophet, which is it?" Again the Redeemer, while he answers her question, will turn it away from all matters of form and outward service, and strike deep by a blow into the spiritual heart of things.
" Woman, believe me, the hour is coming, when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father." He will not fail to imply in passing that Jerusalem had been the right place. " Ye worship that which ye know not. We worship that which we know, for salvation is from the Jews " he only mentions that in passing " but the hour cometh and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such doth the Father seek to be his worshippers."
Only spiritual worship will be acceptable to God; this is what he seeks, and, more than that, this is what the very nature of the case requires. " For God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."
I wish to speak of the worship of God, and I shall ask two very simple questions about it, and try to some little extent to answer each of them.
Why should we worship God? How should we worship God?.
I. A man might well draw back and fear to say one word as to reasons why we should worship God. Oh!
how high, and wide, and deep, that theme! And yet it may be useful just to remind you of some things included in these expressions. Why ought we to worship God? Because it is due to him; and because it is good for us.
(1.) That we should render to God worship is due to him. My dear friends, if we were but unconcerned spectators of the glorious God and his wonderful works, it ought to draw out our hearts to admiration and adoration and loving worship. The German philosopher, Kant, probably the greatest philosopher of modern times, said: " There are two things that always awaken in me, when I contemplate them, the sentiment of the sublime. They are the starry heavens and the moral nature of man." Oh! God made them both, and all there is of the sublime in either or in both is but a dim, poor reflection of the glory of Him who made them.
Whatever there is in this world that is suited to lift up men's souls at all ought to lift them towards God.
Robert Hall said that the idea of God subordinates to itself all that is great, borrows splendor from all that is fair, and sits enthroned on the riches of the universe.
More than that is true. I repeat, all that exalts our souls ought to lift them up toward God. Especially ought we to adore the holiness of God.
O sinful human beings, still you know that holiness is the crown of existence. There is not a human heart that does not somehow, sometimes love goodness. Find me the most wicked man in all your great city, and there are times when that man admires goodness.
Yea, I imagine there are times when he hopes that somehow or other he may yet be good himself. When a man we love has died, we are prone to exaggerate in our funeral discourse, in our inscriptions on tomb-stones and the like to exaggerate what? We seldom exaggerate much in speaking of a man's talents, or learning, or possessions, or influence, but we are always ready to exaggerate his goodness. We want to make the best of the man in that solemn hour. We feel that goodness is the great thing, for a human being when he has gone out of our view into the world unseen. And what is it that the Scriptures teach us is one of the great themes of the high worship of God, where worship is perfect? Long ago a prophet saw the Lord seated high on a throne in the temple, with flowing robes of majesty, and on either side adoring seraphs did bend and worship, and oh!
what was it that was the theme of their worship? Was it God's power? Was it God's wisdom? You know what they said "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory." And there do come times, O my friends, to you and me, though we lift not holy hands, for we are sinful, though we dwell among a people of unclean lips, there come times to you and me when we want to adore the holiness of God.
And then think of his love and mercy! If you were only unconcerned spectators I said think of his love and mercy!
He hates sin. We know not how to hate sin as the holy God must hate it. And yet how he loves the sinner! How he yearns over the sinful! How he longs to save him! Oh, heaven and earth, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever will have it so, might through him be saved.
I know where that great provision, that mighty mercy is adored. I know from God's word that those high and glorious ones, who know far more than we do of the glorious attributes of the Creator and the wide wonders of his works, when they have sung their highest song of praise for God's character and for creation, will then strike a higher note as they sing the praises of redemption, for holiness and redemption are the great themes which the Scriptures make known to us of the worship in heaven. John saw in his vision how the four living creatures, representing the powers of nature, and the four and twenty elders, representing the saved of God, bowed in worship, and how a wide and encircling host of angels caught the sound, and how it spread wider still, till in all the universe it rolls, " Salvation and honor and glory and power be unto him that sitteth on the throne and unto the Lamb forever and ever."
Holiness and redemption! We ought to adore if we had nothing to do with it, for we have a moral nature to appreciate it. And oh! are we unconcerned spectators?
That most wonderful manifestation of God's mercy and love has been made towards us. And, if the angels find their highest theme of praise in what the gracious God has done for us, how ought we to feel about it? Yea, there is a sense in which, amid the infirmities of earth, we can pay God a worship that the angels cannot themselves offer.
" Earth has a joy unknown in heaven; The new-born bliss of sins forgiven."
And sinful beings here may strike, out of grateful hearts for sins forgiven, a note of praise to God that shall pierce through all the high anthems of the skies and enter into the ear of the Lord God of Hosts.
(2.) But I said we ought to worship God, not only because it is due to Him, but because it is good for us.
Only the worship of God can satisfy, O my friends, the highest and noblest aspirations of our natures.
When anything lifts us up, then we want God as the climax of our exalted thought, and our thought itself is imperfect without it. If you will look, as I looked this morning, in the early light, upon the glory of the autumn woods, faded now, yet still bright, and so beautiful; if you gaze upon the splendor, as you will do when this service is ended, of the nightly skies; if you stand in awe before the great mountains, snow-clad and towering, before Hermon, before the wonderful mountains of our own wonderful West; if you go and gaze in the silence of night upon the rush of your own imperial river, or stand by the sea-shore, and hear the mighty waters rolling evermore, there swells in the breast something that wants God for its crown and for its completeness. There are aspirations in these strange natures of ours that only God can satisfy. Our thinking is a mutilated fragment without God, and our hearts can never rest unless they rest in God.
And worship, oh, how it can soothe! Yea, sometimes worship alone can soothe our sorrows and our anxieties.
There come times with all of us when everything else does fail us; there come times when we go to speak with sorrowing friends and feel that all other themes are weak and vain. You, wicked man yonder you have gone sometimes to visit a friend that was in great distress, who had lost a dear child, it may be, or husband or wife; and as you have sat down by your friend and wanted to say something comforting, you have felt that everything else was vain but to point the poor sorrowing heart to God; and you felt ashamed of yourself that you did not dare to do that. How often have devout hearts found comfort in sorrow, found support in anxiety, by the worship of God; by the thought of submission to God and trust in God; a belief that God knows what he is doing; that God sees the end from the beginning; that God makes " all things work together for good to those that love him!"
And I add that the worship of God nourishes the deepest root of morality individual and social. Morality cannot live upon mere ideas of expediency and utility. We have some philosophers in our day (and they show abilities and earnestness that command our respect, though they may seem to us to go so sadly and so far astray) who have persuaded themselves, alas! that Christianity must be flung aside; that belief in God even must be abandoned; but they are beginning to recognize the necessity for trying to tell the world what they are going to put in place of that, for the conservation of individual and social morality; and so the great English philosopher of the present time tells us in a recent work, and the gifted author of " Theophrastus Such," who is one of his followers, has told us, that natural sympathy will lead us to recognize that we owe duties to others as well as ourselves. Natural sympathy is going to do that. Ah, I trow not. Sometimes it will, if there be something mightier that can help. Often natural sympathy will fail. The root of morality is the sentiment of moral obligation. What does it mean when your little child first begins to say " I ought to do this " and I ought not to do that?" What does it mean? " I ought."
The beasts around us are some of them very intelligent.
They seem to think in a crude fashion. They seem to reason in a rudimentary way. Our intellect is not peculiar to us. They have something of it, but they show no sign of having the rudiments of the notion that " I ought " and " I ought not." It is the glory of man.
It marks him in the image of the spiritual one that made him. And what is to nourish and keep alive and make strong that sentiment of moral obligation in our souls, unless it be the recognition of the fact that there is a God who gave us this high, moral, spiritual being; who made us for himself; to whom we belong, because he made us, and because he made us to love him until the sentiment of obligation to him shall nourish in us the feeling of obligation to our fellow-men, who, like us, are made in his image.
But we are told that there is going to be a moral interregnum shortly; that so many cultivated men in England and in some parts of our country are rejecting all religion; that now there is danger that society will suffer until the new ideas can work themselves into popular favor. Yes, indeed, society would suffer but for one thing, and that is that still there are and still there will be not a few among the cultivated, and many, thank God! among those who are not blessed with cultivation, who hold fast their faith in the only true God and in Jesus Christ whom he has sent, and that will conserve society and hold up the very men who fancy they can do without Christianity.
For this reason, if there were no other, it would be worth while to build great and noble churches in our great cities, as we build monuments for other things to remind men of grand events and heroic deeds; so that if churches were never entered, they would be worth building as memorials, as reminders of God and eternity.
Amid the homes of wealth and luxury, amid the splendid centres of commerce, and amid, alas! the palaces of vice, our churches stand serene and still, pointing up, like the Christian's hope, toward heaven. The thoughtless, the wayward, worldly and wicked will sometimes look as they pass, and as from the monuments over some heroic dead man, they catch a moment's impression for good, so from the church edifice itself they will catch a momentary impression of higher things, and be at least a little restrained from what is wrong and a little incited towards what is right.
And that is but the least of it. The great nourisher of morality in the individual and the community is not the mere outward symbol; it is the worship that is paid within. But I shall say no more on this theme. All that I can say is weak, poor and vain. How can a man tell the reasons why we should worship God? They are as high as heaven, as wide as the world, as vast as the universe'; all existence and all conception everything is a reason why we should worship God; and I turn to the other question, to which the text especially points.
II. How should we worship God? I wish here to speak only of that line of thought which the text presents, How shall we worship God with spiritual worship?
The spiritual worship the text points out to us is essentially independent of localities. Time was when it was not so: when the best worship that was to be expected in the world depended upon holy places and impressive rites. In the childhood of the race these ideas were necessary, but Christianity came as the maturity of revealed religion, and declared that those ideas should prevail no longer; /that true Christian spiritual worship is essentially independent of localities.), My friends, under the Christian system you cannot make holy places; you cannot make a holy house. We speak very naturally and properly enough, if with due limitation, in the language of the Old Testament, about our places of worship, but we ought to remember constantly the limitations. You cannot consecrate a building in the light of Christianity. You can dedicate the building; you can set it apart to be used only for the worship of God; but you cannot make the house a holy house; it is an idea foreign to the intense spirituality which Jesus has taught us belongs to the Christian idea of worship. Why, then, one might say, why should we have houses of worship? not merely because if there is to be the worship of assemblies at all, with all the strange power that sympathy gives to aggregated worship, then there must be places of assembly; bat because these soon become associated with the solemn worship we hold in them and sacred by their associations, and if we do not disturb those associations, if from the places where we are wont to hold solemn worship, we keep carefully away all that tends to violate those associations, they grow in power upon us; they do not make the place holy, but they make it easier by force of association and of beneficent habit for us to have holy thoughts and to pay holy worship in the place where we have often paid it before. So we can see why it is fit to set apart places of worship, houses of worship for God, though they be not in themselves holy, though spiritual worship is independent of locality.
Let us rise to a broader view of the matter. Spiritual worship must subordinate' all these externals.
Can you listen a few minutes while I offer a plain, unadorned, unimpassioned statement about this really practical matter, surely suitable to our circumstances, worthy to be discussed; for there are many extremes about it among men, and though you may not go with my thought, it may help you to think the matter through for yourself. I say, then, on the one hand, spiritual worship must have its externals. For while we are spiritual, like God, we are something else also.
We have a material nature, and we are all closely linked and inter-dependent and acting upon each other continually. It is idle, then, to think that our worship will be all that it is capable of becoming if we try to keep it exclusively spiritual and give it no outward expression at all. When you try to pray in private by your own bed-side, alone with your beating heart and your God, you mistake if you try to pray without couching your thought and feeling in words. We need the force of expression, though we utter not the words. We need to have the words in order to give clearness and form to our thought and our sentiment; and it is good, even when alone, in low, solemn tones to speak aloud one's private prayer, for that seems somehow, by a law of our nature, to make deeper the feeling which we thus outwardly express; and if we do so even in private prayer, how much more is it necessarily true in public worship!
We must have expression then for our worship, that there may be sympathy expression that shall awaken and command sympathy. We must use the language of imagination and passion as in the Scriptures. The Scriptures are full of the language of imagination and passion language that is meant to stir the souls of men. And when we sing, sing in the simplest and plainest way, if you please we are yet striving to use that as one of the externals of spiritual worship. We need it. We must have externals. Why, then a man might ask, and men often have asked why not have anything and everything that will contribute at all to help the expression and cherish the devout feeling?
Why not have everything in architecture, everything in painting and statuary, everything in special garments, in solemn processions, in significant posture? Why not anything and everything that may at all help as an external expression of devout feeling? Let us consider this, I pray you. I said spiritual worship must have its externals, and now I repeat that it must subordinate those externals; whatever externals it cannot subordinate it must discard, and the externals it does employ it must employ needfully. There are some things that awaken in some men a sort of fictitious, quasi-devout feeling, which you never would think of recommending as aids to devotion. Some persons when they use opium have a dreamy sort of devoutness, and some persons, even when they become drunk, show a morbid sort of religion. Yet who would think of saying that these are acts that help to devotion? But there are feelings that are right in themselves and noble in their place that do in some cases help to promote devotional feeling. The husband and wife, when they bow down with their children by their sides to pray together, and then, rising up, look lovingly into each other's eyes, find their devout feeling towards God heightened by their love for each other and their children. I can fancy that the young man and maiden who both fear God and have learned to love each other may sometimes feel their devout sentiments truly heightened by this new, strange and beautiful affection which they have learned to feel for each other. That is so sometimes, and yet everybody sees that to recommend that as an avowed and systematic thing to be used as a help to devotion would be out of the question. Not everything, then, that may promote devotion is to be regularly used for this purpose.
There are some things that look as if they were necessary, are very often recommended as helpful, and often employed as helps, that turn out to be dangerous and erroneous. Why can't we use pictures and statuary as helps to devotion? Why can't we employ them as proper means of making the thought of our Saviour near and dear to us? Well, in all the ages of the world, the heathen have tried this. An educated young Hindoo, some years ago, educated in England, wrote an essay in which he complained bitterly that the Hindoos were accused of worshipping images, and quoted Cowper's beautiful poem entitled, "My Mother's Picture:"
"O, that those lips had language!
Years have passed since thee I saw."
And he says, the picture of the poet's mother brought close and made real the thought of one long dead. That is the way, he said, that we use images. But that is not the way that the great mass of men use images in worship. They have often meant that at the outset; but how soon it degenerated and was degraded, and these things that were meant as helps to worship dragged down the aspirations of human hearts, instead of lifting them up! But, it seems to me, if I were to employ such helps in our time, persuading myself that they would be good, that I should feel it was wise to go back to the old ten commandments that we teach our children to repeat, and cut out the second commandment, that expressly forbids the use of graven images, because it necessarily leads to idolatry. I should cut that out. You can inquire, if you are curious to do so and I say it in no unkindness you can inquire whether those Christians in our own time and country who employ pictures and statuary to-day as helps to devotion have mutilated the ten commandments. They were obliged to leave out that which their little children would say was forbidding what they do.
Aye, the world has tried that experiment widely and in every way, and it is found that though you might think that pictures and statuary would be helps to devotion, they turn out to be hurtful. They may help a few; they harm many. They may do a little good; they do much evil.
But there are some of these things which we must have to some extent, church buildings, architecture, music, cultivated eloquence. How about these? We are obliged to have these. We must have the rude and coarse, if we have not the refined and elegant; and just what we may have in this respect why, it depends, of course, upon what we have been accustomed to in our homes, our places of public assembly, our halls of justice. That which is natural, needful and good for some would utterly distract the attention of others. Take a man from the most ignorant rural region, utterly unused to such things, and place him in this house next Sunday morning, and his attention would be utterly distracted by the architectural beauties of the place and the strange power of the music, and he would be scarcely able to have any other thought. These things would be hurtful to him; but to those who have been used to them and who, in their own houses, have been accustomed to elegance and beauty, or in the homes of others they sometimes enter, or in the great places of public assembly in the cities where they live, these things need not be hurtful to them. They may be helpful to them. Ah, my friends, they need to be used by us all with caution and with earnest efforts to make them helpful to devotion, or they will drag down our attention to themselves. Often it is so. You go home with your children, talking only about the beauty of your house of worship or the beauty of the music, and how soon your children will come to think and feel that that is all there is to come to church for, and how many there are who do thus think and feel. '
It is easy to talk nonsense on the subject of church music. It is very difficult to talk wisely. But I think we sometimes forget in our time that there is a distinction between secular and sacred music. I have seen places where they did not seem to know there was such a distinction. They seem to have obliterated it by using so much purely secular music in sacred worship.
It is a distinction not easy to define, I know, but easy enough to comprehend on the part of one who is cultivated and has an ear for music and a heart for devotion. It is a distinction that ought always to be needfully regarded. Our beautiful church music I delight in. I have sat here this afternoon and evening, and it has done me good to listen to it; but we must learn to use it as a help to devotion, or else we are using it wrong, and it will do us harm. We must not only cultivate the use and enjoyment of artistic music for the sake of enjoyment, but what is far more than enjoyment, we must cultivate the power of making it a help to religious worship. We must learn to do that, or we must refuse to have it. There is danger here. My friends, you should rejoice in the high privileges of cultivated society and refined homes, beautiful places of worship, glorious sounds of music and a lofty style of eloquence; but there is danger for you. I have heard people say sometimes: "I don't believe in the religion of the negroes. I go to the place of worship of the negroes, and I find they work themselves into a mere animal excitement. They sway their bodies, and parade around the room, and shake hands, and shout, and embrace each other; and work up mere animal excitement; but there is no religion in that." Oh, you child of culture! Go to your beautiful place of worship, with its dim, religious light, its pealing organ, its highly cultivated gentleman, trained in elegant literature to speak in a beautiful style, as he ought to do, and you may have excited in you a mere Eesthetic sentiment which may have no more real worship in it than the poor negro's animal excitement. But, thank God! they sometimes really have a genuine religion about it, as genuine as yours.
There is danger there, but my friends there is always danger, and we must learn to discard that which we cannot subordinate to spiritual worship, learn to use heedfully, with constant effort for ourselves and for our families and for our friends to use that which it is right to use, that it may help and not hinder. I pray you, then, do not go to asking people to come just to see your beautiful house of worship or to listen to your noble music. Some will come for that reason alone, and you cannot help it. But do not encourage such a thought.
Talk about worship. Talk about these externals as helps to the solemn worship of God. Try to take that view of it. Try to make other people take that view of it. Be afraid for yourselves, and try to speak of it for its own sake and not for the sake of the Eesthetic gratification it may give.
And now, my brethren, can you listen a few moments longer to some closing words? Worship: spiritual worship. I think that in most of our churches our churches that have no set ritual, no fixed form of worship there is a disposition to underrate the importance of public worship; to think only of the preaching.
1 notice that in those churches, not only our own, but those like it that have no special form of worship, they always give notice for preaching and not for worship, they only talk about the preacher and not the worship.
They seem to think it makes little difference if they are too late for worship, provided they are there in time for the sermon. I notice that many preachers seem to give their whole thought to their sermon, and think nothing of preparing themselves for that high task, that solemn, responsible undertaking, to try to lift up the hearts of a great assembly in prayer to God. What I wish to say is, wherever that may be true, let us consider whether we ought not to take more interest in our worship, in the reading of God's word for devotional impression, in solemn, sacred song and in humble prayer to God, in which we wish the hearts of the whole assembly to rise and melt together. It is true that we must have a care how we cultivate variety here, for the hearts of men seem to take delight in something of routine in their worship; they are rested if they know what comes next; they are harassed often if they are frequently disappointed and something quite unexpected comes in.
We must keep our variety within limits, but within limits we must cultivate variety. I believe there should be more attention paid to making our worship varied in its interest than is usually the case; and then, oh, my brethren, something far more important for the preacher and people is this we must put heart into our worship.
We must not care merely to hear a man preach. I do not wish you to think less of preaching, but more of the other. We must put heart into our worship. Even the sermon is a two-sided thing one side of it is part of our worship so far as it causes devotional feeling and lifts up the heart towards God, though on its other side of instruction and exhortation it is distinct from worship.
Now, I say we must put heart in our worship. Do not venture to come to this beautiful place of worship, or whatever place of worship you attend, and just sit languidly down to see if the choir can stir you or to see if the preacher can stir you. Oh! stir up your own souls.
It is your solemn duty when you go to engage with others in the worship of God it is your duty to yourself, it is your duty to others, it is your duty to the pastor who wishes to lead your worship, it is your duty to God, who wants the hearts of men, and who will have nothing but their hearts. I know how we feel. Worn by a week's toil, languid on the Lord's day through lack of our customary excitement, we go and take our places, jaded and dull, and we are tempted to think, " Now I will see whether the services can make any impression on me; whether the preacher can get hold of me I hope they may," and we sit passive to wait and see. Oh, let us not dare thus to deal with the solemnity of the worship of God.
My brethren, if we learn to worship aright, there will be beautiful and blessed consequences. It will bring far more of good to our own souls. It will make worship far more impressive to our children. Haven't you observed that it is getting to be one of the questions of our day how the Sunday-school children are to be drawn to our public worship? We are often told that the preacher must try to make his sermon more attractive to children, and so he must. But let us also make our worship more impressive, and make our children feel that it is their duty to worship God, and try to bring them under the influence of this worship. I heard last week in Washington one of the foremost Sunday-school laborers of this country, a Methodist minister, make this statement in private. He said: " Of late I have been telling the people everywhere, if your children cannot do both, cannot go to Sunday-school and go to the public worship also, keep them away from the Sunday-school, for they must go to the public worship." You may call that an extravagant statement. I am not sure that it is extravagant, but I am sure of this, that we need not merely to try to make our preaching attract children, but to try to make the worship so solemn, so real, so genuine, so earnest, that those strange little earnest hearts of our children will feel that there is something there that strikes to their souls.
And if you have true, fervent worship of God, the stranger that comes into your place of worship will feel it too. Have you not noticed when you go into some houses how quickly you perceive that you are in an atmosphere of hospitality and genuine kindness? There may be no parade, no speech-making. Yet in some places you may feel it, you feel it in the atmosphere, you feel it at once in your soul; you see a place where they are kindly and loving. So it ought to be, that when a man comes into your place of worship he shall very soon feel a something that pervades the atmosphere he breathes, from the look of the people, from the solemn stillness, from the unaffected earnestness he shall feel that these people are genuine, solemn worshippers of God. When he feels that, he will conclude that God is with you of a truth and there will be power to move his soul in your solemn worship.
Now, my brethren, in this beautiful house which you have built for the worship of God, and are now dedicating to His worship, oh, may there be much of real spiritual worship. When your hearts are full sometimes and you come and try to throw your souls into God's worship, may you be moved and melted; when you are sorely tempted sometimes and, coming to the house of God, try to lift your heart to Him in prayer, may you get good from the wise and loving words of the man you love to see stand before you as your pastor.
As your children grow up by your side and learn to delight with you in coming to the house of God in company, oh, may you be permitted to see more and more of them gladly coming to tell what great things God has done for their souls, and gladly coming to put on Christ by baptism. And not only the children of your households, but strangers within your gates. How soon they will be pouring into this great city from the far East and the wonderful West, from all the North and all the South, and from beyond the sea! How they will, in these coming years, pour into this imperial, central city, with its vast possibilities that swell the souls of your business men, and that ought to swell the souls of your religious men. May the stranger within your gates learn here to love your Saviour and rejoice here to proclaim that love, and rise from the liquid grave to walk in newness of life. And again and again, as you gather for that simplest of all ceremonies, as it is the most solemn, which Jesus himself appointed, in all simplicity taking bread and wine in remembrance of him, may he who sees men's hearts, see always that your hearts are towards him in godly sincerity. And when offerings are asked here may they be offerings given as a part of the worship of God, offerings that come from your hearts, offerings that are accepted by him who wants the heart, offerings that are worthy of this beautiful home of your church life, and worthy to follow the gifts wherewith you have erected it. And time and again may there go forth those who have learned to worship here like successive swarms from fruitful hives to carry the same spirit of worship elsewhere, here and there, in great and growing and needy cities.
Yes, and when the young of your households begin to link those households more closely than ever together, and on the bright bridal day the brilliant procession comes sweeping up the aisle and all men's hearts are glad; may they always come reverently in the fear of the God they have here learned to worship. And O, mortal men and women, who have united to build high and glorious piles that will stand when you are gone, when in the hour of your departure from the works of your hands, and from the worship that you have loved on earth, and slow and solemn up the aisle they bear the casket that holds all that is left to earth of you, and behind come sad-faced men and sobbing women, and while the solemn music sounds through all these vaults and your pastor rises, struggling to control his own sorrow for the death of one he loved so well O, may it be true, in that hour which is coming may you begin from this night so to live that it shall then be true, that the mourners of that hour may sorrow here, not as those who have no hope, and that the men and women who honor you, and have gathered to pay honor to your memory, may feel like saying in simple sincerity as they look upon your coffin, " the memory of the just is blessed; let me die the death of the righteous and let my last end be like his." O begin to-day, God help you to begin from this hour of entrance into your new place of worship so to live that all this may be true when you pass away.
But one more thought. There will never be any perfect worship in this house. When was there ever any perfect worship? Once there was. There was a little obscure village; the military history of the country does not mention it; the older sacred writings do not. It was a despised village, and there was a lowly mechanic, who spent his early life in that village quietly, unpretending and unnoticed, and who used to go on the Sabbath day to the synagogue. He paid perfect worship.
Oh, glorious, beautiful spectacle! He paid perfect worship, but since his day there has never been any perfect worship in this world. Shall there be any perfect worship for us then, dear hearers, who sometimes aspire towards God and long to worship him in true spirituality, but never find the full attainment? God be thanked, we have hope of that higher and better life where we shall worship without effort and without imperfection. And God help us that we may strive to worship here with all our hearts, in the hope that at last we shall worship perfectly there.
Broadus SAA: 02 Some Laws of Spiritual Work
But he said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not. The disciples therefore said one to another, Hath any man brought him aught to eat? Jesus saith unto them. My meal is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work. Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest? Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are while already unto harvest. He that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal; that he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. For herein is the saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye have not labored: others have labored, and ye are entered into their labor. John iv. 32-38.
THE disciples must have been very much astonished at the change which they observed in the Master's appearance. They left him, when they went away to a neighboring city to buy food, reclining beside Jacob's well, quite worn out with the fatigue of their journey, following upon the fatigues of long spiritual labors.
And here now he is sitting up, his face is animated, his eyes kindled. He has been at work again. Presently they ask him to partake of the food which they had brought, and his answer surprised them: " I have food to eat that ye know not." They looked around, and saw nobody; the woman to whom he had been speaking was gone, and they said: " Has any one brought him something to eat?" Jesus answered, "My food is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work." And then, with this thought of work, he changes the image to sowing and reaping, and bids them go forth to the harvest.
* Washington Avenue Baptist Church, Brooklyn, 1884.
Now, from this passage with its images, I have wished to discourse upon some laws of spiritual work, as here set forth. For we are beginning to see, in our time, that there are laws in the spiritual sphere as truly as in the mental and in the physical spheres. What are the laws of spiritual work which the Saviour here indicates? I name four, I. Spiritual work is refreshing to soul and body.
"My food is," said the tired, hungry one, who had aroused himself, " to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work." We all know the power of the body over the mind, and we all know, I trust, the power of the mind over the body; how any animating theme can kindle the mind until the wearied body will be stirred to new activities; until the man will forget that he was tired, because of that in which he is interested. But it must be something that does deeply interest the mind. And so there is suggested to us the thought that we ought to learn to love spiritual work.
If we love spiritual work it will kindle our souls; it will even give health and vigor to our bodies. There are some well-meaning, but good-for-nothing, professed Christians in our time, who would have better health of mind and even better health of body, if they would do more religious work and be good for something in their day and generation.
How shall we learn to love religious work so that it may kindle and refresh us? Old Daniel Sharp, who was a famous Baptist minister in Boston years ago, used to be very fond of repeating, " The only way to learn to preach is to -preach." Certainly, the only way to learn to do anything is to do the thing. The only way to learn to do spiritual work is to do spiritual work, the only way to learn to love spiritual work is to keep doing it until we gain pleasure from the doing; until we discern rewards in connection with the doing; and to cherish all the sentiments which will awaken in us that " enthusiasm of humanity " which it was Jesus that introduced among men; and to love the souls of our fellow-men, to love the wandering, misguided lives, to love the suffering and sinning all around us with such an impassioned love that it shall be a delight to us to do them good and to try to save them from death. Then that will refresh both mind and body.
II. There are seasons in the spiritual sphere sowing seasons and reaping seasons, just as there are in farming.
" Say not ye,'' said Jesus, "there are yet four months and then cometh the harvest? " that is to say, it was four months from that time till the harvest. They sowed their wheat in December; they began to reap it in April. " Say not ye, there are four months, and then cometh the harvest? behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." In the spiritual sphere it was a harvest time then, and they were bidden to go forth and reap the harvest that waved white and perishing. We can see, as we look back, that the ends of all the ages had now come to that time; that the long course of providential preparation, dimly outlined in the Old Testament, had led to the state of things that then prevailed; that the fulness of the times had come, when God sent forth his Son to teach men and to atone for men, and to rise again and come forth as their Saviour, and that his servants should go forth in his name.
And the like has been true in many other seasons of Christianity; there have been great reaping times, when men have harvested the fruits which come from the seed scattered by others long before.
I persuade myself that such a time will be seen ere long in the world again. I think that the young who are here present to-day though they may forget the preacher and his prediction will live to see the time when there will be a great season of harvest that will astonish mankind. In the great heathen world I think it will be true that the labors of our missionaries are preparing the way, and that in the course of divine providence the same providence that overruled the history of Egypt and Assyria and Greece and Rome the greatest nations of Asia are now becoming rapidly prepared to receive a new faith. They say, who live there and ought to know, that there is a wonderful breaking up of religious opinion in all Hindostan, with its two hundred and fifty millions of people five times as many, almost, as in our great country that they are learning to let go their old faiths, and that the time must soon come when, in sheer bewilderment and blindness, as it were, men will search round for something else to look upon, something else to lay hold upon. It is a sad thing to see great nations of mankind surrendered to utter unbelief, but it has often proven the preparation for their accepting a true and mighty and blessed faith. I think one can see, in the marvellous changes which are going on in Japan, a preparation for like effects there; and as Japan is, for the civilized world, the gateway into China, and our missionaries are already at work there and great changes are taking place there, so it is quite possible that even in one or two generations there will be a wide spread of Christianity in that wonderful nation of mankind. God grant that it may be so!
I think the same thing is going to happen in our own country. We have been living in a time of eclipse, so to speak, of late years, but I think another reaction will come. Some of us can remember that thirty or forty years ago there was almost no avowed infidelity in this country. There was not a publisher in New York, who had any respect for himself and any large hope of success, that would have had a book with one page of avowed unbelief in it on his shelves. How different it is now!
We have been passing, as I said, through a reaction.
In the early part of this century our whole country was honeycombed with infidelity. It was ten times worse than it is to-day. But in 1825, 1830, 1840, 1850, there were wide spread changes, revivals; and a great many men were brought into our churches who had not the root of the matter in them, and a lax discipline and a low state of religious living became, alas! too common, and we have been reaping the bitter fruits. Alas! how often it has happened that some man has become notorious in the newspapers as a defaulter, or a criminal in some other way, and we have been compelled to read the added statement, that he was a member of such and such a church, was a Sunday-school superintendent, teacher, or what not. How often it has happened!
This has been one of many causes I cannot stop now to analyze and point out, but they can be analyzed and pointed out of such widespread unbelief of late years.
But it cannot last. There never was such activity in the Christian world; and if our earnest Christian people stand firm, if they practice in all directions that earnestness of Christian purpose, if they try to maintain the truth of the gospel and live up to it in their own lives, and lift up their prayer to God for his blessing, there will come another great sweeping reaction. It is as sure to come as there is logic in history or in human nature.
It is as sure to come as there is truth in the promises of God's word. O, may many of you live to see that day and rejoice at its coming!
The same thing is true in individual churches, that there are seasons of sowing and reaping. It has to be so. We sometimes say we do not believe in the revival idea; we think there ought to be revival in the church all the time. If you mean that we ought always to be seeking for spiritual fruits, always aiming at spiritual advancement, it is true. But if you mean that you expect that piety will go on with even current in the church, that there will be just as much sowing and reaping at any one time as at any other, then you will certainly be disappointed. That is not the law of human nature. That is not possible in the world. Periodicity pervades the universe. Periodicity controls the life of all individuals, shows itself in the operations of our minds. Periodicity necessarily appears in the spiritual sphere also. People have their ups and downs. They ought to strive against falling low. They ought not to be content with growing cold. They ought to seek to maintain good health of body all the while, but it will not be always equally good; and good health of mind and soul all the time, but it will not be always equally good. They ought to be seeking to reap a harvest of spiritual good among those around them all the while; but they will have seasons which are rather of sowing, and other seasons which will be rather of reaping. O! do you want to see a great season of harvest among your own congregation? And do you not know, brethren, as well as the preacher can tell you, what is necessary in order that you may see it? What are the conditions but deepened spiritual life in your own individual souls, stronger spiritual examples set forth in your lives, more earnest spirituality in your homes, a truer standard in your business and social relations to mankind, more of heartfelt prayer for God's blessing, and more untiring and patient and persevering effort, in season and out of season, to bring others to seek their salvation?
III. Spiritual work links the workers in unity.
"Herein is the saying true," said Jesus; "one soweth, and another reapeth. Other men have labored, and ye are entered into their labors." The prophets, centuries before, had been preparing for that day, and the forerunner had been preparing for that day, and the labors of Jesus himself in his early ministry 'had been preparing the way, and now the disciples could look around them upon fields where, from the sowing of others, there were opportunities for them to reap.
" Other men have labored, and ye are entered into their labors. One soweth, and another reapeth." That is the law everywhere; it is true of all the higher work of humanity, "One soweth, and another reapeth;" and our labors link us into unity. It is true of human knowledge. How little has any one individual of mankind been able to find out beyond what the world has known before! Even the great minds that stand like mountain peaks as we look back over the history of human thought, when we come to look into it, do really but uplift the thought that is all around them; else they themselves could not have risen. It is true in practical inventions. We pride ourselves on the fact that ours is an age of such wonderful practical inventions; we sometimes persuade ourselves that we must be the most intelligent generation of mankind that ever lived, past all comparison; that no other race, no other century, has such wonderful things to boast of. How much of it do we owe to the men of the past! Every practical invention of to-day has been rendered possible by what seemed to us the feeble attainments of other centuries, by the patient investigation of the men who, in many cases, have passed away and been forgotten.
We stand upon the shoulders of the past, and rejoice in our possessions, and boast; and when we grow conceited and proud of it, we are like a little boy lifted by his father's supporting arms, and standing on his father's shoulders, and clapping his hands above his father's head, and saying, in childish glee, " I am taller than pana!" A childish conclusion, to be sure. We stand upon the shoulders of the past, and thereby we are lifted up in all the higher work of mankind; and we ought to be grateful to the past, and mindful of our duty to the future; for the time will come when men will look back upon our inventions, our slow travel, our wonderful ignorance of the power of physical forces and the adaptations of them to physical advancement, and smile at the childishness with which, in the fag end of the nineteenth century, we boasted of ourselves and our time.
And now it is not strange that this same thing should be true of spiritual work. When you undertake to do some good in a great city like this, you might sit down and say, " What can I do with all this mass of vice and sin?" But you do not have to work alone. You can associate yourselves with other workers, in a church, with various organizations of workers, and thereby re-enforce your own exertions; you can feel that you are a working force, and you can feel that you are a part of a mighty force of workers, of your own name and other Christian names. Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, and are trying to do good in his name! And it will cheer our hearts to remember that wide over the land and over the world are unnumbered millions of workers of the army to which we belong.
They tell us that the International Sunday-school lessons which most of us study every Sunday, are actually studied now every Lord's day by at least ten millions of people, all studying on the same day the same portion of the Bible. That is but one fact to remind us that we are members of a great spiritual host, doing a great work in the world.
And not merely are there many cotemporaries with whom we are linked in unity, but we are in unity with the past; other men have labored and we have entered into their labors. All the good that all the devout women and all the zealous men of past ages have been doing has come down to us, opening the way for us to do good. And not merely with the past, but we are linked with the laborers of the future. They may hear our names or they may hear them not. We may perish from all memory of mankind, but our work will not perish, for he that doeth the will of God abideth forever, and if we are engaged in his work, we link ourselves to his permanency and his almightiness, and our work will go down to help the men who are to come after.
The same thing is true here, also, in the individual church; one soweth and another reapeth. A pastor seldom gathers half as much fruit from the seed of his own sowing as he gathers from the seed that others have sown. And there will come some man here God grant, it may be soon, and wisely, and well who will gather seed from the sowing of the venerable pastor so well and worthily beloved in years ago, seed from the sowing of the energetic pastor of recent years, and O my soul, he may gather some harvest, even from the seed scattered in the brief fleeting interim of this summer. We put all our work together. We sink our work in the one great common work. We scatter seed for God and for souls, and we leave it to God's own care and blessing. One soweth, and another reapeth.
My brethren, there is nothing like Christianity to individualize mankind. It was Christianity that taught us to appreciate the individuality of men, "Every man must give account of himself unto God." Men were no longer to lose themselves in the state, as classical antiquity taught them to do, but to stand out in their separate personality and individual responsibility and individual rights and duties. But at the same time much of what we can do that is best in the world we must do by close connection and interaction one with another. Let us rejoice to act through others. Priscilla and Aquila! what a power they were for early Christianity when they took that eloquent young Alexandrian Apollos and taught him in private the way of God more perfectly! Priscilla, that devout woman, stood, in fact, before delighted assemblies in Corinth and spoke to them the perfect way of God through the eloquent man whom she had taught. And how often does the Sunday-school teacher, who labored long and, as the world might have thought, fruitlessly, with her little naughty boys and girls, become in future times a great power for good in the world through one or other of them! The teacher has to sink himself in his pupils: never mind if he sinks all out of the world's sight, provided he can make his mark upon them and prepare them for greater usefulness, can put into them some good spirit, and send them forth to do the work which to him personally is denied. Here lies the great power of Christian women. There is much they can do personally, with their own voice and their own action, but there is more they can do by that wondrous influence which men vainly strive to depict, that influence over son and brother and husband and friend whereby all the strength and power of the man is softened and guided and sobered and made wiser through the. blessed influence of the woman. God be thanked that we can not only do good in our individual efforts, but we can do good through others! Let us cultivate this, let us delight in this, that we can labor through others. Whenever your pastor may stand before the gathered assembly he can speak with more power because of you, if you do your duty to him and through him.
May I mention some of the ways in which we may help our pastor? I speak as one who at home sits for the most part, a private member of the church in the pew, toiling all the week, and often unable to preach on Sunday, and yet as one whose heart is all in sympathy with the pastor's heart, and perhaps a little better able than common to sympathize with both sides. We can help him to draw a congregation. You know we always say now-a-days, that it is very important to get a man who can draw a congregation. So it is, though it is very important to consider what he draws them there for, and what he does with them after he gets them there; and sometimes it does seem to me that it would be better for some people to remain not drawn than to be drawn merely to hear and to witness that which does them harm rather than good. But we do want a man who can draw a congregation; and we can help our pastto draw a congregation. How? "Well, by taking care that we are always drawn ourselves, by occupying our own place, sometimes when we do not feel like it, on Sunday evening; because it is our duty to our pastor, our duty to the congregation, and our duty to the world. And we can do something to bring others. I recall a story, that a few years after the war (which is the great chronological epoch in a large part of our country), at the White Sulphur Springs, in Virginia, was a venerable man at whom all the people looked with profound admiration, whose name was Robert E.
Lee. He was a devout Episcopalian. One day a Presbyterian minister came to preach in the ball-room, according to custom, and he told me this story. He noticed that General Lee, who was a very particular man about all the proprieties of life, came in late, and he thought it was rather strange. He learned afterwards that the General had waited until all the people who were likely to attend the service had entered the room, and then he walked very quietly around in the corridors and parlors, and out under the trees, and wherever he saw a man or two standing he would go up and say gently: " We are going to have divine service this morning in the ball-room; won't you come? "And they all went. To me it was very touching that that grand old man, whose name was known all over the world and before whom all the people wanted to bow, should so quietly go around, and for a minister of another denomination also, and persuade them to go.
Should not we take means to help our pastor to draw a congregation? And when he begins to preach, cannot we help him to preach? Demosthenes is reported to have said (and he ought to have known something about it), that eloquence lies as much in the ear as in the tongue. Everybody who can speak effectively knows that the power of speaking depends very largely upon the way it is heard, upon the sympathy which one succeeds in gaining from those he addresses. If I were asked what is the first thing in effective preaching, I should say, sympathy; and what is the second thing, I should say, sympathy; and what is the third thing, sympathy. We should give our pastor sympathy when he preaches. Sometimes one good listener can make a good sermon; but ah! sometimes one listener who does not care much about the gospel can put the sermon all out of harmony. The soul of a man who can speak effectively is a very sensitive soul, easily repelled and chilled by what is unfavorable, and easily helped by the manifestation of simple and unpretentious sympathy.
How can we help our pastor? We can help him by talking about what he says; not talking about the performance and about the performer, and all that, which, if it is appropriate anywhere, is surely all inappropriate when we turn away from the solemn worship of God, and from listening to sermons intended to do us good but talking about the thoughts that he has given us, recalling them sometimes to one who has heard them like ourselves, repeating them sometimes to some one who has not had the opportunity of hearing them. Thus may we multiply whatever good thoughts the preacher is able to present, and keep them alive in our own minds and the minds of fellow-Christians. Will you pardon an illustration here, even if it be a personal one?
Last year in a city in Texas, I was told of the desire on the part of a lady for conversation, and when we met by arrangement she came in widow's weeds, with a little boy of ten or twelve years old, and began to tell this story: Her husband was once a student at the University of Virginia, when the person she was talking to was the chaplain there, more than twenty-five years ago.
He was of a Presbyterian family from Alabama, and said he never got acquainted with the chaplain, for the students were numerous, but that he heard the preaching a great deal, and in consequence of it, by God's blessing upon it, he was led to take hold as a Christian, and went home and joined the church of his parents.
After the war he married this lady, and a few years ago he passed away. She said he was in the habit, before she knew him, she learned, of talking often in the family about things he used to hear the preacher say; the preacher's words had gotten to be household words in the family. And then when they were married he taught some of them to her, and was often repeating things he used to hear the preacher say. Since he died she had been teaching them to the little boy the preacher's words. The heart of the preacher might well melt in his bosom at the story. To think -that your poor words, which you yourself had wholly forgotten, which you could never have imagined had vitality enough for that, had been repeated among strangers, had been repeated by the young man to his mother, repeated by the young widow to the child your poor words, thus mighty because they were God's truth you were trying to speak and because you had humbly sought God's blessing! And through all the years it went on, and the man knew not, for more than a quarter of a century, of all that story. Ah, we never know when we are doing good. Sometimes we may think we are going to do great things, and so far as can ever be ascertained, we do nothing; and sometimes when we think we have done nothing, yet, by the blessing of God, some truth has been lodged in a mind here and there, to bear fruit after many days.
How can we help our pastor? We can furnish him illustrations. Mr. Spurgeon tells us that he requests his teachers, and his wife, and various other friends to hunt up illustrations for him. He asks them, whenever they have come across anything in reading or in conversation that strikes them as good, to write it down and let him have it, and whenever he sees a fit opportunity he makes a point of it. We can all furnish our pastors with illustrations. In that very way, perhaps, we might give a preacher many things that would be useful to him. In other ways we can all do so. Ah, when the preacher tells how it ought to be, if you can sometimes humbly testify, in the next meeting on Tuesday or Friday evening, how it has been in your experience, you are illustrating for the preacher. When the preacher tells what Christianity can do for people, if your life illustrates it for all around, there is a power that no speech can ever have. There remains a fourth law of spiritual work.
IV. Spiritual work has rich rewards: "And he that reapeth receiveth wages," saith Jesus, " and gathereth fruit unto life eternal." Spiritual work has rich rewards. It has the reward of success. It is not in vain to try to do good to the souls of men through the truth of God and seeking his grace. Sometimes you may feel as if you were standing at the foot of a precipice a thousand feet high and trying to spring to its summit, and were all powerless. Sometimes you may feel as if you had flung your words against a stone wall and made no impression at all. Sometimes you may go away all ashamed of what you have said in public or in private.
But there was never a word spoken that uttered God's truth and sought God's blessing, that was spoken in vain. Somehow it does good to somebody, it does good at some time or other; it shall be known in earth or in heaven that it did do good. Comfort your hearts with these words: It is not in vain to try to do good. You may say, " I have not the lips of the eloquent, the tongue of the learned, how can I talk?" There is many a minister who is eloquent and has preached to gathered congregations, who could tell you that he knows of many more instances in which his private words have been blest to individuals than he knows of in his public discourses. I knew of a girl who had been so afflicted that she could not leave her couch for years, who had to be lifted constantly poor, helpless creature! but who would talk to those who came into her room about her joy in God, and would persuade them to seek the consolations of the gospel, and many were benefited and would bring their friends to her, till after a while they brought them from adjoining counties, that she, the poor, helpless girl, might influence them; at length she even began to write letters to people far away, and that girl's sick-bed became a centre of blessing to people throughout a whole region. We talk about doing nothing in the world. Ah, if our hearts were in it! we do not know what we can do. That tiger in the cage has been there since he was a baby tiger, and does not know that he could burst those bars if he were but to exert his strength. O the untried strength in all our churches, and the good that the people could do if we would only try, and keep trying, and pray for God's blessing. t My friends, you cannot save your soul as a solitary, and you ought not to be content to go alone into the paradise of God. We shall best promote our own piety when we are trying to save others. We shall be most helpful to ourselves when we are most helpful to those around us. Many of you have found it so; and all of you may find it so, again and again, with repetitions that shall pass all human telling. " For he that watereth shall be watered also again."
Spiritual work shall also be rewarded in the Lord of the harvest's commendation and welcome. Ah, he. will know which was the sowing and which was the reaping. The world may not know; we may never hear; but 4& will know which was the sowing and which was the reaping, and who jaded to do good and thought he had not done it, and who was sad and bowed down with the thought of being utterly unable to be useful, and yet was useful.
He will know, he will reward even the desire of the heart, which there was no opportunity to carry out. lie will reward the emotion that trembled on the lip and could find no utterance. He will reward David for wanting to build the temple as we" as Solomon for building it. He will reward all that we do, and all that we try to do, and all that we wish to do. O blessed God! he will be your reward and mine, forever and forever.
Broadus SAA: 03 The Habit of Thankfulness
In everything give thanks. 1 Thess. 5: 18.
WE hear a great deal said about habits. But it nearly always means bad habits. Why should we not think and speak much about good habits? They are as real, and almost as great, a power for good as bad habits are for evil. We do our work largely by the aid of habit. How much this helps one in playing on an instrument, or writing on a type-writer. Through many a familiar conjunction of notes or of letters the fingers fly with the very smallest amount of attention and exertion. Many a man who is growing old will every day get through an amount of work that surprises his friends, and it is possible because he works in the lines of lifelong habit. Besides, the only possible way to keep out bad habits is to form good habits. By a necessity of our nature, whatever is frequently and at all regularly done becomes habitual. If a man has been the slave of evil habits, and wishes to be permanently free, he must proceed by systematic and persevering effort to establish corresponding good habits. The education of our children, both at school and at home, the self-education of our own early life, consists mainly in the formation of intellectual and moral habits. I think we ought to talk more upon this subject, in public and in private upon the power and blessing of good habits. And the theme of this discourse will be, the habit of thankfulness to God.
I. Consider the value of the habit of thankfulness.
It tends to quell repining. We are all prone, especially in certain moods, to complain of our lot. Every one of us has at some time or other imagined, and perhaps declared, that he has a particularly hard time in this world. It is to be hoped that in other moods we are heartily ashamed of ourselves for such repining. But how prevent its recurrence? A most valuable help will be the habit of thankfulness to God. Then if a fretful, repining spirit begins to arise, just in the middle, perhaps, of some complaining sentence, we shall suddenly change to an expression of thankfulness and perhaps end with laughing at ourselves for the folly of such repining.
It tends to enhance enjoyment. We all know that when we receive a gift, with any true sentiment and any suitable expression of thankfulness, the reaction of gratitude augments our gratification.
It serves to soothe distress. Persons who are greatly afflicted, and not wont to be thankful, sometimes find the memory of past joys only an aggravation of present sorrow. Far otherwise with one who has learned to be habitually thankful. For him the recollection of happier hours is still a comfort.
It helps to allay anxiety. Did you ever notice what the apostle says to the Philippians? " In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus." Notice carefully that we are to prevent anxiety by prayer as to the future with thanksgiving for the past.
It cannot fail to deepen penitence. " The goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance." When we are fully in the habit of thankfully observing and recalling the loving kindnesses and tender mercies of our heavenly Father, this will make us perceive more clearly, and lament more earnestly, the evil of sin against him; and what is more, this will strengthen us to turn from our sins to his blessed service.
It has as one necessary effect to brighten hope. " I love to think on mercies past, And future good implore,"
is a very natural conjunction of ideas. If we have been wont to set up Ebenezers upon our path of life, then every glance backward along these mile-stones of God's mercy will help us to look forward with more of humble hope.
It serves to strengthen for endurance and exertien.
We all know how much more easily and effectively they work who work cheerfully; and the very nutriment of cheerfulness is found in thankfulness as to the past and hope as to the future.
If this habit of thankfulness to God is so valuable, it is certainly worth our while to consider, II. Occasions of habitual thankfulness. It is obvious that these are numerous and various beyond description. But we may find profit in summing them all up under two heads.
1. We should be thankful to God for everything that is pleasant. No one will dispute that proposition in theory, whatever may be our practice. The apostle James tells us that " every good gift and every perfect boon is from above, coming down from the Father of lights." We have so much occasion to speak about the religious benefits of affliction, to dwell on the blessed consolations of Christian piety amid the sorrows of life, that we are in danger of overlooking the other side.
It is a religious duty to enjoy to the utmost every rightful pleasure of earthly existence. He who gave us these bodies, so "fearfully and wonderfully made,"
who created us in his own image, with spirits of such keen appetency and longing aspiration, desires that we should find life a pleasure. As already intimated, we work best at what we enjoy. It is highly important that the young should enjoy what they are studying; and while this may, to some extent, be accomplished by giving them studies they fancy, it is also possible that by well guided efforts they should learn to relish studies to which they were at first disinclined. I sometimes hear young married people say, " We are going to housekeeping, and then we can have what we like."
I sometimes feel at liberty to reply, " Yes, to a certain extent you may; but what is far more important and interesting, you will be apt to like what you have." To have what we like is for the most part an impossible dream of human life; to like what we have is a possibility,. and not only a duty, but a high privilege.
2. We should be thankful to God for everything that is painful. Well, that may seem to be stating the matter too strongly. We can help ourselves by noticing that whatever may be possible iii that direction, the apostle has not in the text enjoined quite so much as the phrase just used would propose. He does not say, "for everything give thanks," though that might be enjoined; he says, " in everything give thanks." Now that, surely, need not seem impossible.
We may always be thankful that the situation is no worse. The old negro's philosophy was wise and good, " Bress de Lord, 'taint no wuss." We always deserve that it should be worse, no matter how sorrowful may be the actual situation. We can never allow ourselves to question that with some persons it has been worse.
Let us always bless the Lord, that but for his special mercies it would be worse with us to-day. I recall an unpublished anecdote of President Madison, told to me in the region where he lived and died. It may be mentioned, by the way, that Mr. Madison was a v rarely excellent and blameless man. His biographer told me that, notwithstanding all the political conflicts of a life so long and so distinguished, he found no indication that Mr. Madison's private character had ever been in the slightest degree assailed an example which it would perhaps be difficult to parallel. In his old age the venerable ex-President suffered from many diseases, took a variety of medicines and contrived to live notwithstanding. An old friend from the adjoining county of Albemarle sent him a box of vegetable pills of his own production, and begged to be informed whether they did not help him. In due time came back one of those carefully-written and often felicitous notes for which Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson were both famous, to somewhat the following effect: " My dear friend. I thank you very much for the box of pills.
I have taken them all; and while I cannot say that I am better since taking them, it is quite possible that I might have been worse if I had not taken them, and so I beg you to accept my sincere acknowledgments."
Really, my friends, this is not a mere pleasantry.
There is always something, known or unknown, but for which our condition might have been worse, and at the very least, that something constitutes an occasion for gratitude. Whatever we may have lost, there is always something left.
As already observed, our present sufferings may well set in brighter relief the remembered happiness of other days. And though men are prone to make this an occasion of repining, yet it ought to be an occasion of thankfulness. Not long ago a young husband spoke to me, with bitter sorrow, about the death of his wife. I suggested that he might well be thankful for having lived several happy years in the most intimate companionship with one so lovely; and that in coming years, when the blessed alchemy of memory should make her character seem all-perfect in his eyes, he might well find pathetic and ineffable pleasure in the memory of that early time. We all know how to repeat, amid sorrowful recollections, those words of Tennyson, " O, death in life, the days that are no more! " But it is surely possible so to cherish blessed and inspiring memories as to invert the line, and say, " O, life in death, the days that are no more! "
There is a still more important view of this matter.
It has become a blessed commonplace of Christian philosophy that our sufferings may, through the grace of God, be the means of improving our character. Such a result is by no means a matter of course. Sufferings may be so borne, with such bitter repining and selfish brooding, as greatly to damage character. But the Scriptures assure us that devout souls may regard affliction as but a loving Father's chastisement, meant for their highest good. In all the ages there has never been a pious life that did not share this experience. To be exempt from it would, as the Bible expressly declares, give clear proof that we are not children of God at all. Many of us could testify to-day, if it were appropriate, that the sorrows of life have by God's blessing done us good. All of us have occasion to lay more thoroughly to heart the lessons of affliction. And oh! if we do ever climb the shining hills of glory, and look back with clearer vision upon the strangely mingled joys and sorrows of this earthly life, then how deeply grateful we shall be for those very afflictions, which at the time we find it so hard to endure. If we believe this to be true, and it is a belief clearly founded on Scripture, then can we not contrive, even amid the severest sufferings, to be thankful for the lessons of sorrow, for the benefits of affliction?
Remember, too, how our seasons of affliction make real to us the blessed thought of Divine compassion and sympathy. When you look with parental anguish upon your own suffering child, then you know, as never before, the meaning of those words, " Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him." When you find the trials of life hard to bear, then it becomes unspeakably sweet to remember that our high priest can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, having been " in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." Thus affliction brings to the devout mind blessed views of the Divine character which otherwise we should never fully gain.
" Then sorrow, touched by thee, grows bright With more than rapture's ray; As darkness shows us worlds of light We never saw by day."
Besides all this, remember that the sufferings of this present life will but enhance, by their contrast, the blessed exemptions of the life to come. A thousand times have I remembered the text of my first funeral sermon, " And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away." These are the present things now all around us and within us; but the time is coming when they will be the former things, quite passed away. You know the use which skilful composers make of discords in music.
The free use of them is among the characteristics of Wagner; but they are often found in our simplest tunes for public worship. The jarring discord is solved, and makes more sweet the harmony into which it passes.
And oh! the time is coming when all the pains and pangs of this present life will seem to have been only " a brief discordant prelude to an everlasting harmony."
My friends, are you optimists or pessimists? Let me explain to the children what those words mean. The Latin word optimus means best, and pessimus means Avorst. So an Optimist is one who maintains that this is the best possible world; and a Pessimist, that it is the worst possible world. Now which are you, an optimist or a pessimist? For my part, I am neither. Surely no man can really imagine that this is the best possible world, save in some brief moment of dreamy forgetfulness. And as to thinking it the worst possible world, well, a person would have to be uncommonly well off who could afford to think that. I read, some time ago, a biography of Arthur Schopenhauer, the celebrated German pessimist. I was not surprised to find that his father left him an independent fortune, and he had no painful bodily diseases. He could afford to spend his time in trying to persuade everybody to be miserable, in building pessimistic theories. But most of us have so many real toils and troubles that we are instinctively driven to search for the bright side of life, to seek all possible consolation and cheer. Agassiz had " no time to make money;" and few of us will ever have time to be pessimists.. No, we cannot begin to say with Pope, " Whatever is, is right;" nor yet to reverse it, " Whatever is, is wrong." But whether poetical or not, it will be a very true and valuable saying if we read, " Whatever is, you must make the best of it." And just in proportion as we strive to make the best of everything, we shall find it practicable to carry out the apostle's injunction, " In everything give thanks."
The greatest of early Christian preachers, perhaps the greatest in all Christian history, was Chrysostom. His motto was, " Glory to God for all things." He probably derived it from the story of Job, which was his favorite subject of devout meditation, and is mentioned in a large proportion of his eloquent sermons. You might fancy that it was easy for the young man to say, " Glory to God for all things," when he was growing up in Antioch, the idol of his widowed mother, with ample means, and the finest instructors of the age* You might think it easy to say this when he was a famous preacher, in Antioch, and afterwards in Constantinople, when ten thousand people crowded the great churches to hear him; though such a preacher could not fail to suffer profoundly through compassion for the perishing, and anxious effort to reclaim the wandering, and sympathy for all the distressed, as well as with many a pang of grief and shame that he did not preach better. But Chrysostom continued to say this, when the Court at Constantinople turned against him, when the wicked Empress became his enemy, and compassed his banishment again and again. When his friends would go to far Armenia and visit him in exile, he would say to them, " Glory to God for all things." When he was sent to more distant and inhospitable regions, so as to be out of reach of such pious sitting, his letters were apt to end, " Glory to God for all things." And when the soldiers were dragging him through winter snows, and, utterly worn out, he begged to be taken into a little way-side church that he might die, his last words, as he lay on the cold stone floor, were, " Glory to God for all things."
III. How may the habit of thankfulness be formed and maintained? Well, how do we form other habits?
If you wish to establish the habit of doing a certain thing you take pains to do that thing, upon every possible occasion, and to avoid everything inconsistent therewith.
Now, then, if you wish to form the habit of thankfulness, just begin by being thankful not next year, but to-night; not for some great event or experience, but for whatever has just occurred, whatever has been pleasant, yes, and we did say, for whatever has been painful. You certainly can find some special occasion for thanksgiving this very night. And then go on searching for matter of gratitude, and just continuing to be thankful, hour by hour, day by day. Thus the habit will be formed, by a very law of our nature.
But remember that good habits cannot be maintained without attention. They require a certain self-control, a studious self-constraint. Is not the habit of thankfulness worth taking pains to maintain? The older persons present remember Ole Bull, the celebrated violinist.
I once dined in company with him, and in an hour's conversation across the table found him a man of generous soul, full of noble impulses and beautiful enthusiasms, and rich with the experience of wide travel. And I was greatly interested in a remark of his which is recorded in the recent biography: " When I stop practicing one day, I see the difference; when I stop two days, my friends see the difference; when I stop a week, everybody sees the difference." Here was a man who had cultivated a wonderful natural gift, by lifelong labor, until, as a performer upon the finest of instruments, he was probably the foremost man of his time ~'T and yet he could not afford to stop practicing for a single week, or even for a single day. " They do it for an earthly crown; but we for a heavenly." Christian brethren, shall we shrink from incessant vigilance and perpetual effort to keep up the habit of thankfulness to God?
I see many young persons present this evening. Will not some of you at once begin the thoughtful exercise of continual thankfulness? Will you not think over it, pray over it, labor to establish and maintain so beautiful and blessed a habit? Ah, what a help it will be to you amid all the struggles of youth and all the sorrows of age! And in far-coming years, when you are gray, when the preacher of this hour has long been forgotten, let us hope that you will still be gladly recommending to the young around you the Habit of Thankfulness.
Broadus SAA: 04 Ask and it shall be given you.
Ask and it shall be given you. Matthew vii. 7.
ONE thing is certain, the Lord Jesus Christ believed in prayer. It is no new thing to find some persons who question the reality of prayer. There have always been such persons; but the Lord Jesus Christ believed in it. He showed his belief by often teaching us that we ought to pray, by assuring us that prayer will be heard, and by praying much himself. When a person, profoundly sincere and highly intelligent, frequently urges others to do a certain thing, and frequently does it himself, we are sure that he believes in it; so, whenever a man undertakes to say that prayer is not a reality, it ought to be distinctly borne in mind that he flings away the authority of Jesus Christ; that he arrays himself openly and hopelessly against the whole genius of the Christian religion, against the plainest teachings and constant practice of its founder.
We ought always to see where we are and to see what is the meaning of this or that position.
I do not know whether it is worth while, in passing, even for a moment, to recall the sensation of a few years ago on this subject, and remark upon it. I suppose that the idea of what they used to call a prayer test in the newspapers is plainly enough a thing improper and impossible. It is improper, because to ask Christians to confine their prayers to one side of a hospital, and pray not at all for the unhappy sufferers on the other side, is to ask a thing out of the question a refined species of cruelty to be practiced by those who believe in prayer. It is. improper, too, because it proposes that we should try experiments upon God. They did sometimes try that sort of thing upon Jesus Christ, and he invariably refused to submit to it. He wrought wonders and signs beyond number when he thought proper; but when they demanded a sign according to what they thought proper, he never granted it. For us to do this that is proposed would be just that which they did. And besides being improper, it is also impossible. We do not believe that prayer now works miracles. It is not the idea at all that prayer operates with respect to physical fixed forces otherwise than in accordance with physical laws. And so if you suppose prayer to be answered in such a case, it could only be in concurrence with proper physical conditions. Then the unbeliever would say at once that this is not a result of prayer. Such a test is impossible unless prayer works miracles, and no one who understands the matter would suppose that to be the idea. Is it not true, then plain enough now as we look back upon it that the great newspaper sensation of a few years since was a thing improper and a thing impossible?
But for us who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, it comes back to this, that our yearning after God and that disposition to cry out to him for mercy and help, which is no invention of theological thinkers, which is the natural product of the human heart and the natural expression of human need and dependence, has the high sanction of the Founder of Christianity. He believed in prayer; he taught us to pray; he said: "Ask, and it shall be given."
And notice how often he has repeated it. One might say that that one word was enough; one might say that all human hearts ought to fasten on that one utterance, and feed themselves on it, and rejoice in its assurances.
But he said it three times: " Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." As if not content with that, he repeats it three times again, in the form of an assurance that so it always is. " For every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it is opened." And even after that he goes on to argue it by a most cogent argument and affecting appeal. Why this multiplied repetition and assurance?
Ah! my friends and brethren, he knew very well how imperfectly we believe in prayer; how difficult it is for us to treat prayer as a reality, and he wanted to help us. He condescends to our infirmity, and again and again, in multiplied forms of expression, he would assure us that if we ask, we shall receive. You know how prone we are to make prayer degenerate into an outward thing. A little child needs to be constantly reminded by its mother that it must not just say prayers, but must mean what it is saying. And we, with all our intelligence and culture, are apt to make our public and private prayer a mere outward thing.
How hard it is for us also, when we try to pray, to realize what we are doing! I remember being once deeply impressed with this thought when present at an institution for the deaf and dumb. After some teaching had been done, one of the principal instructors proceeded to give them a little address on religion, we were told, and then he called upon them to pray. The whole room was still. He stood with reverent face and slowly moved his hands and arms in the signs which they understood, and they sat before him with distended, gazing eyes, and the room grew still as with the stillness of death. I said to myself I could hear my heart beat I said " This is praying." Not a word spoken, but this was praying, praying without any of the forms to which we are accustomed. The eyes were wide open, not a sound was heard, and yet human souls were entering into communion with the Father of all spirits. I went away with a profounder sense than ever before of the distinction between the mere outward form and means of prayer, and the inner spirit which is prayer. Now, our Saviour knows that it is hard for us to realize what we do when we are trying to pray.
He also knows how prone we are to be discouraged in our attempts to pray; when we try experiments upon prayer, and get out of heart, and quit. As a man who is endeavoring to effect some invention, and has given all his labor and used all his materials, hoping that he will get the result, when he fails, gives over the experiment, so, how often do we make a mere half-hearted experiment of praying for a certain blessing upon ourselves and others, and when it does not come, we are tempted to give it up as a failure! The Saviour knows how impatient we are that the blessing shall come quickly, and therefore cautions us not to faint when we do not receive it on the instant. We may not receive it in the form we looked for. It may come in a form so different that we shall scarcely recognize it as what we asked for; and so he gives us his assurance and seeks to build up confidence in our hearts that praying is a reality, that prayer is a power.
And now notice the affecting appeal our Lord proceeds to make an appeal which those of us who are parents will feel in all its fullness, but which all of us can feel more or less because all of us know something of the affection of our own parents. " What man is there of you a mere man who, if his son ask for bread, will he give him a stone?" Will he give him something that looks like bread, but which is worthless? " Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?" something that looks like a fish but which is poisonous and deadly?
Will he mock his child's petition by giving him something like what he asked for, but that would be useless and harmful? And if ye who are evil, with all the imperfections of your sinful humanity, if ye know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give good things to them that ask him. It is not an argument merely, as I used to think it was it is not an argument merely as to willingness to give. It is an argument as to wisdom in giving. If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children. The parent might make a mistake himself and give a stone for bread, or a serpent for a fish; as a rule, parents do not do, this; and if even ye, in your ignorance, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him! It does at times happen that when our children ask for bread we do give them a stone; sometimes, alas! when they ask for a fish we give them a serpent. We do this because we make sad mistakes. How many parents think they are giving their children something good when they are giving them that which is useless or hurtful, as if they should give them a poisonous serpent that would sting them to death, though they do not know it! Often, too, we are ignorant, slothful or even selfish, and when the child asks, we won't take the pains to judge carefully, and when the child entreats again and again, we weakly yield. But if even we who are ignorant, heedless, selfish, know how to give good gifts, how much more will our Heavenly Father give good gifts to them that ask him, for he never makes mistakes and never neglects! How beautiful that old saying, "He is too wise to err, and too good to be unkind!" He never makes mistakes in listening to our requests. He is never too busy to attend to our wishes. And the very thought of his being unkind is intolerable.
So, then, our Father is not only willing to give, he is wise in giving. That is the point, and just there lies one of the greatest privileges the Scriptures open up to us, in the assurance that God will give wisely, and this involves withholding where he shall see that withholding is better. That is the sweetest privilege of prayer. For if God should give to you and me an unlimited promise of earthly good for the asking, the more we know ourselves and the more we understand human nature and human life, the more afraid we should be that we might ask for things which would be harmful. Have you not often asked God for something which you have lived to find out would have been a curse to you? Have you not often entreated God to spare you something which it turned out to be a blessing to you that he did not spare?
Have you not learned more and more how little you could rely upon your judgment as to what was really best? So I say in that case the wisest and best people would be the slowest to ask, and people would pray less in proportion as they are better fitted to receive. But, as God is wise in giving, we may ask without fear. If we ask for something that we think is good and he sees it is evil, we may be sure that he will not grant it. If we ask for what is really good, he will do for us either what we ask or something which he sees to be better than what we asked. And so I repeat that this is a part of the privilege of prayer.
One Sunday afternoon, now many years ago, I remember to have been sitting in a darkened room with the body of a little child; and in the room was a little boy ten or twelve years of age, one of those strange, thoughtful children that startle us so by asking questions that sink down deep into the mysteries of human life.
After a long silence the boy spoke, and said, " Uncle, I should like to ask you something." " Well." " Does not the Bible say that whatever we ask God, he will do for us?" "Yes." "Well, I did ask him to spare my little cousin's life I did ask him and he did not do it.
I asked him and I don't know what to think about it."
Ah! I thought, as we sat in the darkened room, how far down the child is going already into the sorrowful depths of the human heart! The answer I made was something like this: " You know that if your father should send you off to boarding-school, and were to tell you in parting that whatever you wanted you must write to him" and you should have it; and if you were to write to your father, on the strength of that promise, for something that was not right for him to give, or was not really best for you, your father would be very sure not to give it to you, and if he did not give it to you, would you think he had broken his promise?" The child heaved a sigh and said, " Yes; I think I see how it is.' 1 And my friends, the more you reflect upon it, the more comfort there is in that thought, that, in answering our prayer for temporal good, our Heavenly Father will give wisely, and so will even refuse our prayer when He sees that something else is better.
This remarkable encouragement to prayer occurs towards the close of the Sermon on the Mount. Some of the commentators think there is no connection between it and the discourse that precedes; but it seems to me that the connection is plain. "Ask, and ye shall receive," explains what he had been saying a little before. He said: "Judge not, that you be not judged;"
and what good man ever heard that read, or read it himself, without smitings of heart? It is one of the commonest things, this business of harsh judgment of others, and it is very difficult for us to avoid it. We are so ready, the most thoughtful and purest of us, so ready to be hard upon others and easy upon ourselves, when we ought to reverse that proceeding. "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Then, as you read along, behold you find something that seems to present a new and opposite difficulty. " Give not that which is holy to the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." The purport of this is somewhat obscure; but one thing is clearly involved. We must know the character of those with whom we have intercourse, and deal with them accordingly; and yet we must not judge harshly. We must refrain from judgment, and at the same time must keep our own eyes open and know men. Now, when you put those things together, you say, Ah! who is sufficient for these things?
Who can go through life, knowing the folly of men, understanding their wiles and their weaknesses, and yet not judging his fellow-men in an unkindly spirit? But he who enjoins these two difficult and seemingly antagonistic precepts immediately afterwards says: " Ask, and it shall be given you." Hard it is for us to do such things as these; but "ask, and it shall be given you."
Again, if you go a little further back in the discourse, you will find he urges upon us not to be anxious about temporal good, not to be anxious about food and raiment, not to be anxious about to-morrow; and those who most earnestly try to follow that know best how hard it is to obey the command. Ah, as the responsibilities of life thicken around us, and there come to be others concerned in our action, it grows all the harder to restrain ourselves from anxiety about human affairs.
In fact, we are obliged to look sharply to the future and plan for it, even for the far distant future. And yet here is Jesus Christ telling us not to be anxious about temporal good, not to be anxious about the future, but to put our trust in God's providence and to seek God's righteousness, and then there shall come a blessing upon our planning and exertion, and we need not be anxious. It is so hard, you say, for a man to go on amid grave responsibilities, and yet to restrain himself from this anxiety, so hard; but he who urged this upon us did not cease speaking before he said: " Ask, and it shall be given you."
Yet again, going further back in the discourse, you find that we must seek ever, and not be content without, a higher spiritual morality than that of the Scribes and Pharisees. Now, the Scribes and Pharisees, so far as outward proprieties of life are concerned, were eminently good men; and yet he tells us we must be better than they were. We must not only be outwardly good, but within we must be pure from sin. We must not only have the outward appearance of chastity, but he tells us that there may be in a lustful look the essential element, and therefore the guilt, of unchastity. We are not only to restrain ourselves from external wrongdoing, but govern our thoughts and desires, and control our whole inner being, and make the world within us conform to the spirit of the teachings of Christ.
And you say: " O, how difficult, how difficult!" Yes, difficult; but he who enjoined this upon us did not cease to speak on that same occasion till he had said, "Ask, and it shall be given you."
So, then, my hearers, let us learn to put the precepts of Christ along with Christ's invitation to seek help from on high. He who gave these stringent commands gave us encouragement to come and ask for help, the help of his grace, the help of his Holy Spirit. " How much more," as our Lord expressed it on another occasion, " will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him."
My friends, why do you not pray? Are you ashamed to pray? There are people not ashamed to be practicing vice, not ashamed to be heard speaking blasphemy, but ashamed to have it known that they pray. There are people that are too proud to bow their knees before the Lord God. There are people that think somehow it is beneath their dignity to pray. Are you ashamed to pray?
The poet Coleridge wrote something in his youth which made light of prayer; but, in his later years, he called a friend to him one day and referred to what he had written and published, and said, "It was all folly," and then he said in earnest tones, " The very noblest possible exercise of the human mind is prayer." Is it not so?
When men in all the loftiness of intellect look deepest into the spaces of the universe and widest into its wonders; when men, in the might of administrative talent, make it their ruling thought to control whole nations and the age they live in; when men govern great assemblies and sway them as the wind sways the harvest grain, even then it is all a little thing compared to the nobleness of the exercise of the human mind in prayer, wherein a human being, high or low, rich or poor, elevates his thought into communion with the thought of God, lifts up his spirit into fellowship with the Father of Spirits.
There was a man that trod the earth once who was superior to all men in holiness and wisdom, who lived all his life on earth without sin. He so wise and good, loved to pray, and are you ashamed to pray?
My hearers, why do you not all pray? God knows whether you do or not, and you know. Are you afraid to pray? Well a man might be, when he thinks of all his sinfulness, when he remembers all the wicked things that he has done that men know of, and all the wicked things he has thought that men know not of, but God must know; when he sees he has not half confidence in the God he thinks of praying to. But there is a name we may plead; there is an intercessor we may lean on; there is a Holy Spirit to help our infirmities in praying.
O! sinful and troubled soul of man, you need not be afraid to pray! If you come in the name of Jesus Christ, you may come boldly to the throne of grace. If you come leaning on the Spirit's help, you may come assured that your request will be granted.
My hearers, why do you not pray? Have you no need to pray? Is there no good thing that God can give, and that you need? No earthly good for yourself or others, about which you had better be asking the Giver of every good and perfect gift? No spiritual good? Have you no sins to be forgiven? Have you no weakness to be helped, no temptations to struggle against? Have you no troubles? O child of man, child of sin and sorrow, living in the strange world we are called to inhabit, have you no need to pray to your Father and your God? Why do you not pray?
My friends, let us make it a practical lesson for us all.
Christian people, begin to pray more. Fathers of families, if you have neglected to pray with your families, begin now at once. If you have been negligent in public or private prayer, renew your petitions with earnestness. O, troubled one, shrinking away from the Saviour, remember that he said, " Ask and it shall be given you." And, if there is somebody here this evening that has not prayed for months, that has not prayed for years; if there is some man that has not prayed since the time long ago when he prayed by his mother's knee, and who all these years has been slighting God's word and rejecting God's invitation; O soul, O fellow-sinner, will you not to-night take Jesus' word home to your heart, and begin to find in your experience what some like you have found, that you have but to ask and it shall be given?
Broadus SAA: 05 He ever liveth to intercede
Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them Heb. 7:25.
YEARS ago, in the city of Philadelphia, I went to hear an eminent musician. He played with genius and skill some magnificent music, but the pieces were nearly all new to me, and, as often happens in such cases, it required so much effort to comprehend the idea of the piece, that I could but partially enjoy its beauty.
At length, upon being loudly applauded, the musician returned, and seating himself at the instrument, struck out in full tones the opening notes of " Home, Sweet Home." I shall never forget while I live the thrill that passed through the audience. I seemed to feel that it was approaching me, seemed to feel when it reached and embraced me. That was a theme that all could comprehend, and rich for us all in a thousand delightful suggestions and associations; and, strangers as we were, the hearts of the vast assembly seemed melted into one as we listened to those swelling tones. My brethren, I wish it might always be so with us when one begins to speak to us of Jesus. There is many a subject of public discourse that well deserves our attention. Especially the topics drawn from the Bible and usually presented from the pulpit are all important and should all be interesting. Whatever pertains to God and his providence, to his gracious dealings with man in the past, and his purposes of mercy for the future, whatever to the condition and wants of our race as sinful and immortal, should awaken our minds and impress our hearts. Difficult and mysterious as some of these topics are, they are useful; and if we resist the temptation to wander into speculation or descend into secularity, they will give us pleasure and do us good. But Jesus it is a theme which all alike can understand, in which all alike are profoundly concerned, a theme associated with all the sweetest recollections of our spiritual life, with all the brightest hopes of our immortal future.
Ah! we are perishing and helpless sinners, and it ought to thrill through our very hearts, to link us in living sympathy, and kindle our souls into a glow of love and joy to hear of Jesus, our divine, our loving, our precious Saviour. It ought to be not mere poetry, but the true expression of genuine feeling, when we sing, "Jesus, I love thy charming name;
'Tis music to mine ear; Fain would I sound it out so loud That earth and heaven might hear."
And my text to-day treats of Jesus.
The Jewish Christians to whom this Epistle was addressed were strongly urged, both in the way of persecution and persuasion, to apostatize from Christianity, and return to Judaism. Among the arguments employed for this purpose, it was urged that Christianity had no priesthood, no sacrifice or temple, and so was really no religion at all. The inspired writer of this Epistle meets these arguments, and, in fact, turns them into proofs of the superiority of Christianity. Thus, in regard to the priesthood, he shows that Christianity has a priest, a great High-Priest, immensely superior to the Levitical priesthood. His office is held forever.
He has offered, once for all, the wonderful sacrifice of himself, which is forever sufficient. He has passed through the heavens into the true sanctuary, bearing his own precious, atoning blood. Then Christianity is superior in this, as in other respects, to Judaism, that is, to the Mosaic dispensation if regarded as complete in itself, and designed to be permanent; and so the sacred writer urges his brethren not to apostatize, interspersing everywhere throughout his arguments the most earnest exhortations to hold fast their profession, the most solemn warnings of the guilt and ruin of apostasy.
And for us as well as for them, grievous is the guilt and hopeless the ruin of abandoning the gospel of Christ, our sole hope of salvation.
One of the points he makes to prove this superiority of Christ and Christianity, is that from which the text is an inference. The Levitical priesthood was held by many persons in succession, "because that by death they were hindered from continuing; " but Jesus, " because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.
"Wherefore he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them." The phrase translated " to the uttermost " signifies "perfectly," " completely; "he can save completely, can complete the salvation of them that come unto God through him. And the thought of the text is that he is able to complete their salvation, because he ever lives to intercede for them.
Perhaps we are accustomed to look too exclusively to the Saviour's atoning death, not dwelling as we should upon the idea of his interceding life. See how the apostle speaks in Romans: " For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life." And again: " Christ Jesus that died, yea rather that was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us." He who loved us and gave himself for us ever liveth to accomplish the objects for which he died; as the mediatorial priest, he is ever interceding for the salvation of them that come unto God through him; as the mediatorial king, having all authority given unto him in heaven and earth, he controls all things so as to carry forward to completion the work of their salvation.
My brethren, it is just such a Saviour that we need.
From the first moment when we approach God through him, onward through life, and in a certain just sense onward without end, we continually need God's mercy and grace for the Saviour's sake. If we dwell on this, we shall be better prepared to rejoice that our great High Priest ever lives to intercede for us, and thus can complete our salvation.
1. We are tempted. And what hope have we of conquering temptation, save " through him that loved us?"
Remember what our Lord said to his disciples, with regard to the sore temptations that would soon befall them: " Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you as wheat; but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not." As Satan is described as seeking permission from that Sovereign Kuler, without whose permission all his might and his malice are powerless, to tempt Job with peculiar trials, in the hope that he could bring him to renounce the 'Lord, so here as to the disciples. " Satan asked to have you " and the term, as well as the connection, shows that he was permitted to have them, u that he might sift you as wheat." Jesus himself is represented by John the Baptist as engaged in a similar process: " Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing-floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."
But how different is the object in the two cases! Satan sifts with the hope of showing that all is really worthless, fit only for destruction. Jesus sifts in order to separate the precious from the vile, and preserve the pure wheat for the garner of heaven. And often what Satan meant as a sifting for evil is overruled by the stronger power so as to be for good.
How was it with Peter? The Saviour said: " But I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not; "and though his faith mournfully gave way, it did not utterly give out. I am not excusing Peter at all. We may be sure he never forgave himself. It was a sad and shameful fall; but Jesus had made supplication for him; and how different the result in his case from that of Judas. He, too, was one of those whom Satan obtained to sift them, and the result proved him to be all that Satan could wish. When he saw the consequences of his horrid crime, and had time to reflect upon it, he was sorry; but it was not the tender grief of a truly penitent heart which would have brought him back with humble submission it was the sorrow of the world that worketh death it was remorse that drove him headlong into self-destruction. But Peter when the cock crowed after his third denial of his Lord and that injured one turned and looked upon him Peter went out and wept bitterly, with the sorrow " that worketh repentance unto salvation," the sorrow of a deeply humble and really loving heart. There was a great change from that time in Peter, for the Lord had prayed for him, and Divine grace not only preserved him from utter spiritual ruin, but overruled his own dreadful wickedness to his spiritual good.
Observe with what special emphasis the Saviour's intercession for the tempted is spoken of in this Epistle.
The persons therein addressed were, as we have seen, peculiarly and sorely tempted tempted even to forsake Christianity, through which alone they could find salvation; apart from which " there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversary." The Jewish high priest, being taken from among men, " could bear gently with the ignorant and erring, for that he himself also was compassed with infirmity." So our great High Priest took upon him human nature partly for this very reason, that he might sympathize with the tempted, and that we might feel sure he does sympathize. " Wherefore in all things it behooved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
For in that he himself hath suffered, being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted." And it is because of his atoning sacrifice and sympathizing intercession that we are urged to hold fast our profession as Christians, and encouraged to come to God with entire confidence. This is done in words that have been very dear to tempted hearts in every age since the holy man of God spake them as he was moved by the Holy Ghost.
" Having, then, a great High Priest who hath passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us THEREFORE draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need."
Ah! mighty, to the most favored, are the temptations of life. Many belong to all periods; others mark some special season. Many are " common to man; " others belong to some particular condition or calling. " The heart knoweth its own bitterness; " yea, and its own trials, and its own weakness. Be this our support our Saviour lives, he sympathizes with us, he intercedes for us; let us draw near unto God through him, unto God who has said, " As thy days, so shall thy strength be."
" The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose, I will not, I will not desert to its foes; That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, I'll never, no never, no never forsake."
2. But many times, sad as is the confession, we yield to temptation, we sin; and " the soul that sinneth, it shall die." Must we then despair? Must the hopes we had cherished be abandoned, and this new sin be the terror of our souls? Listen! The apostle John wrote an Epistle for the express purpose of restraining his brethren from sin; yet he does not cut off those who are conscious they have sinned from the hope of forgiveness and salvation. He says: " My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye may not sin. And if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous; and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world."
Now we know what an advocate was, according to the usages of the Roman law, and is among ourselves, viz., one who undertakes the management of another's case in court, and pleads his cause. So Jesus is our Advocate with the Father. But, as in other cases where spiritual things are illustrated by temporal, the analogy is not perfect; there are differences. Our advocate does not argue that we are innocent, but confessing our guilt, pleads for mercy to us; and he does not present our merits as a reason why mercy should be shown us, but his merits. " He is the propitiation for our sins." His atoning death does, as it were, render God propitious, or favorable to sinners. Not that God is unwilling to show favor to poor sinners, and only prevailed on to do so by the death and intercession of his Son. Oh no! far from it. " Herein is love," says John in the same Epistle, " not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." It was because God loved us, and wanted us to be saved, that he devised this way of saving us. And God is made propitious, favorable to us, not when he is made willing to save, but when it is made right that he should save us, and therefore we need not die, but may have everlasting life. When a sinner is pardoned, simply for the sake of the atoning and interceding Saviour, there is in that no encouragement to God's creatures to sin, as if it were a little thing and could be readily passed over, but a most solemn and impressive exhibition of the dreadful evil of sin, since it was only through the atonement and intercession of the only-begotten Son of God that any sinner could be forgiven an exhibition ft once of God's love to the perishing, and of his justice, that " will by no means clear the guilty."
Bearing in mind the difference between the pleading of our great Advocate and any parallel which human affairs presents, we may look at a story of Grecian history, which has been often used to illustrate the Saviour's intercession. The poet Eschylus had incurred the displeasure of the Athenians. He was on trial before the great popular tribunal, consisting of many hundreds of citizens, and was about to be condemned. But Eschylus had a brother, who had lost an arm in battle in the great battle of Salamis, where the Greeks fought for their existence against the Persian aggressors.
This brother came into the court, and did not speak words of entreaty, but letting fall his mantle, he showed the stump of his arm, lost in his country's defense, and there stood until the Athenians relented, and Eschylus was suffered to go free. So, my brethren, imperfect and unworthy as is the illustration, so we may conceive that when we are about to be condemned, and justly condemned for our sins, our glorious Brother stands up in our behalf, and does not need to speak a word, but only to show where he was wounded on the cross " Five bleeding wounds he bears, Received on Calvary; They pour effectual prayers, They strongly speak for me; 'Forgive him, O forgive,' they cry, ' Nor let that ransomed sinner die! ' "Here, then, is hope for us. " If any man sin," much as he ought to deplore it, he need not despair. Our Advocate with the Father ever liveth to make intercession for them that come unto God through him, and through him we may find mercy. And here is no encouragement to sin, but the very contrary. If we truly trust in, truly love our interceding Lord, we shall be supremely anxious for his dear sake to turn from sin, to live for him who died for us; yea, who ever lives as our Saviour.
3. This suggests another respect in which is seen our need of our Lord's perpetual intercession. We make such slow progress in attaining holiness, which is the noblest thing men can aspire to holiness, " without which no man shall see the Lord.'' Many a Christian, as he sorrowfully sees how often he yields to temptation, how his character breaks down afresh where he thought it. had grown most firm, is at times inclined to think it impossible that he should ever become really holy. But remember how Jesus prayed the night before his atoning death, " Sanctify them in the truth; thy word is truth." " I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil." Think you that he, who ever lives to intercede for his people, does not still pray this prayer, that they may be sanctified and kept from the evil? Do you doubt that he prays for them still, as he did when on earth? His people's wants have not changed, and as for him, he is "the same yesterday and to-day and forever." Find me a young man far from his home whose mother used to pray for him when they were together, and try to make him believe that she does not pray for him still. " No, no," he would say, " if she is living, she prays for me."
Brethren, he who prays for us " ever lives." When the Jews gathered at the temple on the great day of atonement, and the high priest went into the holy of'
holies to pray for the people and himself, did the people doubt whether he was praying? Why, for that very purpose he had withdrawn from their view. So for that very purpose our High Priest has entered " not into a holy place made with hands, like in pattern to the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear before the face of God for us." And do not say that the Jewish high priest was absent but a few minutes, Awhile it is long since Jesus went away. On the scale of the ages it is but a little while since he entered the heavenly sanctuary, having " been once offered to bear the sins of many," and any moment he may " appear a second time apart from sin unto salvation." Let us be sure that while absent he perpetually carries on his work of intercession.
Think of him, then, as still praying, " Sanctify them in the truth. Keep them from the evil." In all our disheartening failures to keep good resolutions, even when we may be tempted to think it scarce worth while for us to try to be holy, let us remember that Jesus prays for us, and, " forgetting the things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, let us press toward the mark." Ah! brethren, though it might often seem to us the bitterest irony now for a man to call you and me the saints of the Lord, yet, if indeed we are in Christ, and thus are new creatures, we have but to trust in his intercession for the sanctifying Spirit, and earnestly strive to " grow in grace," and we shall make progress; yea, sadly imperfect as is now our conformity to the Saviour's beautiful image, " we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." O burdened spirit, crying, " Wretched man that I am^ who shall deliver me from the body of this death? " be sure to add, " I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord." The Saviour will continue to intercede, the Spirit will help your infirmities, and you shall at last be pure from sin, and safe from temptation to sin, a saint of the Lord forever.
4. When we are in sorrow it is a blessed thing that Jesus ever lives to pray for us. He was himself while on earth, "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief."
And he showed the truest, tenderest sympathy with the sorrows of others. Who does not think at once of that touching scene at Bethany? " Jesus wept," in affection for the departed, in sympathy with the bereaved. And presently, standing by the tomb, he said, " Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me." Then he had been praying, asking that he might be 1 able to raise Lazarus from the dead. We do not expect him now to pray that miracles may be wrought in behalf of the bereaved. We do dbt expect him now to give back the buried brother to his sisters, or to the widowed mother her only son. But shall it not be a consolation to us all in our afflictions, to feel assured that he now intercedes for us; that now, too, the Father hears him, and that by the gracious influences of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, this affliction shall work for us glory?
And though we cannot now see his tears, nor hear his loving voice, as did the mourners at Bethany, neither do we need to send a messenger many miles, and wait, day after day, and go forth into the suburbs to meet him; he is everywhere alike near, and ever ready to pray for us to his Father and our Father, to his God and our God.
5. When we come to die he is " alive forevermore."
One of his servants, when near to death, saw " heaven opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God," where he represents and intercedes for his people. And so in departing he committed his spirit to him, as now exalted and glorious, and ready to receive it. And so, amid all the cruel injustice and suffering, he was calm and forgiving. And so, though they were stoning him to death, " he fell asleep." O, whenever you are called to die, brother, and however, whether among loving friends in your pleasant home, or far away in loneliness and want, whether with ample forewarning or in the suddenness of a moment, think of your interceding Saviour standing on the right hand of God, and say, " Lord Jesus, receive my spirit' and you too shall fall asleep.
6. Even this is not the end of his work for his people. There shall be a " redemption of the body." Many have been sad in the last twenty years, because the bodies of their loved ones lie so far away, lie perhaps undistinguished among the huge masses of the unnamed dead. But he who receives the departing spirit to himself will also care for the mouldering body. His resurrection is a pledge of the glorious resurrection of his people. " If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also who through Jesus have fallen asleep, will God bring with him." " Who shall fashion anew the body of pur humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory." Then, the spirit reunited with the risen and glorified body, " so shall we ever be with the Lord."
And he who saved them will be ever living to keep them safe, unto all eternity.
My friends, how shall we think of Jesus? What conception shall we cherish of him whom, " having not seen, we love," who ever liveth to intercede for us?
Many centuries ago, on the eastern slope of Mount Olivet, towards Bethany, twelve men stood together, one talking to the others. Presently he lifted up his hands and blessed them; and with hands still uplifted, and words of blessing still lingering on his lips, he was parted from them and rose toward heaven, till a cloud received him out of their sight. Years passed, and one of the eleven was an exile on a lonely island. It was the Lord's day, and he was in the Spirit. Hearing behind him a mighty voice that seemed to call him, he turned, and lo! one like unto the Son of Man it was the Saviour who had been parted from him long years before. He was arrayed in robes of majesty, and girt about with a golden girdle; his whole head shone white as snow with celestial glory; his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and his voice as the voice of many waters; and his countenance as the sun shineth in his strength. Yes, the feet that once wearily trod the dusty roads of Judea now shone like molten brass.
The eyes that were full of tears as he gazed upon doomed Jerusalem now gleamed as a flame of fire. The countenance that writhed in agony as he lay prostrate on his face in the garden, that was streaked with the blood that fell from his thorn-pierced brow, was now as the sun shineth in his strength. And the voice as the voice of many waters it was the same voice that in gentleness and love had so often encouraged the sinful and sorrowing to draw near it is the same voice that now calls us to come unto God through him, and declares that he is able to save us completely, since he ever lives to intercede for us. O, my hearer, slight all the sounds of earth, all the voices of the universe; be deaf to the thunder's mighty tones, and stand careless amid "the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds" but O, slight not the loving voice of Jesus.
Broadus SAA: 06 Let us have peace with God
Therefore being justified by faith, let us have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 5: 1.
IT is nearly four centuries ago now, that a young professor from the north of Germany went to Rome. He was a man of considerable learning and versatile mind.
Yet he did not go to Rome to survey the remains of antiquity or the treasures of modern art. He went to Rome because he was in trouble about his sins and could find no peace. Having been educated to regard Rome as the centre of the Christian world, he thought he would go to the heart of things and see what he could there find.
He had reflected somewhat at home, and had talked with other men more advanced than himself, on the thought that the just shall live by faith; but still that thought had never taken hold of him. We read some of you remember the story quite well how one day, according to the strange ideas that prevailed and still prevail at Rome, he went climbing up a stairway on his knees, pausing to pray on every step, to see if that would not help him about his sins. Then, as he climbed slowly up, he seemed to hear a voice echoing down the stairway, " The just shall live by faith; the just shall live by faith." And so he left alone his dead works, he arose from his knees and went down the stairway to his home to think about that great saying: "The just shall live by faith."
It is no wonder that with such an experience, and such a nature, Martin Luther should have lived to shake the Christian world with the thought that justification by faith is the great doctrine of Christianity, " the article of a standing or a falling church." It is no wonder that John Wesley, rising up with living earnestness, when England was covered with a pall of spiritual death, should have revived the same thought justification by faith.
Yet it is not true that the doctrine of justification by faith is all of the Gospel. It is true that the doctrine of justification by faith is simply one of the several ways by which the Gospel takes hold of men. You do not hear anything of that doctrine in the Epistles of John. He has another way of presenting the Gospel salvation, namely, that we must love Christ, and be like him, and obey him. I think sometimes that Martin Luther made the world somewhat one-sided by his doctrine of justification by faith; that the great mass of the Protestant world are inclined to suppose there is no other way of looking on the Gospel. There are very likely some here to-day who would be more impressed by John's way of presenting the matter; but probably the majority would be more impressed by Paul's way, and it is our business to present now this and now that, to present first one side and then the other. So we have here before us to-day Paul's great doctrine of justification by faith, in perhaps one of his most striking statements, "Therefore, being justified by faith, let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."
My friends, we talk and hear about these Gospel truths, and repeat these Scripture words, and never stop to ask ourselves whether we have a clear idea of what is meant. What does Paul mean, when he talks about being justified? There has been a great deal of misapprehension as to his meaning. Martin Luther was all wrong in his early life, because he had been reared up in the idea that a justified man means simply a just man, a good man, and that he could not account himself justified or hope for salvation until he was a thoroughly good man.
Now, the Latin word from which we borrow our word " justified" does mean to make just, and as the Romanists use the Latin, their error is natural. But Paul's Greek word means not to make just, but to regard as just, to treat as just. That is a very important difference, not to make just, but to regard and treat as just. How would God treat you, if you were a righteous man; if you had, through all your life, faithfully performed all your duties, conforming to all your relations to your fellow- beings, how would he regard you and treat you?
He would look upon you with complacency. He would smile on you as one that was in his sight pleasing.
He would bless you as long as you lived in this world, and, when you were done with this world, he would delight to take you home to his bosom, in another world, because you would deserve it. And now as God would treat a man who was just because he deserved it, so the Gospel proposes to treat men who are not just and who do not deserve it, if they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. He will treat them as just, though they are not just, if they believe in Christ; that is to say, he will look upon them with his favor; he will smile upon them in his love; he will bless them with every good as long as they live, and when they die he will delight to take them home to his own bosom, though they never deserved it, through his Son, Jesus Christ.
That is what Paul means by justification. And when Martin Luther found that out he found peace. This Epistle to the Romans had always stopped his progress when reading the New Testament. He would read, in the Latin version, "For therein is revealed the justice of God/' and he felt in his heart that God's justice must condemn him. But now he came to see what was really meant by the righteousness of God, the righteousness which God provides and bestows on the believer in Jesus. A sinful man, an undeserving man, may get God Almighty's forgiveness and favor and love, may be regarded with complacency and delight, though he does not deserve it, if he believes in the Lord Jesus Christ.
That is justification by faith.
It is one thing to take hold of this matter in the way of doctrinal conception and expression, and of course, God be thanked! it is another thing to receive it in the heart. There are many people who get hold of it all in the heart with trust and peace that never have a correct conception of it as a doctrine. Yet I suppose it is worth while that we should endeavor to see these things clearly. Other things being equal, they will be the holiest and most useful Christians who have the clearest perception of the great facts and truths of the Gospel. So I recommend to you that whenever any one tries to explain to you one of these great doctrinal truths, you shall listen with fixed attention and see if you cannot get a clearer view of the Gospel teachings on that subject, for it will do you good.
Now let us come to the second thought here, viz., being justified by faith. A man might say, if God proposes to deal with those who are not just, as if they were, why does he condition it upon their believing the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Why cannot God proclaim a universal amnesty at once, and be done with it, to all his sinful, weak children, and treat them all as if they were just, without their believing? I don't think this is hard to see. God does not merely propose to deal with us for the time being as if we were just, but he proposes in the end to make us actually just. It would be an unsatisfactory salvation to a right-minded man if God proposed merely to exempt us from the consequences of our sins and not to deliver us from our sins. You do not want merely to escape punishment for sin without ever becoming good; you want to be righteous and holy; you want to be delivered from sin itself as well as from the consequences of sin. And this Gospel, which begins by its proclamation that God is willing to treat men as just, although they are not just, does not stop there. It proposes to be the means by which God will take hold of men's characters and make them just, make them holy. You may, for the moment, conceive of such a thing as -that God should make a proclamation of universal amnesty, and treat all men as if they were just; but that would not make them any better. The Gospel is not merely to deliver us from the consequences of sin, but to deliver us from the power of sin. You can conceive of an amnesty as to the consequences of sin, which should extend to persons that will not even believe there is such an amnesty; but you cannot see how the Gospel is to have any power in delivering us from the dominion of sin, unless we believe the Gospel.
It can do so only through belief. Therefore it is not possible that a man should be justified without belief.
I think it is useful that we should thus try to see that this is not a matter of mere arbitrary appointment on the part of the Sovereign Power of the Universe, but that the condition is necessary that it cannot be otherwise. "Being justified by faith," it reads; and we cannot be justified without faith, because the same Gospel is also to take hold of us and make us just.
And now, some one who feels a little freshened interest in this subject, some man who has never got hold of the Gospel faith says to himself: " I wonder if the preacher is going to explain to me what believing is, what faith is. I never heard any one succeed in explaining faith." Well, if you will pardon me, the best explanation of faith I ever heard was given by a negro preacher in Virginia. As the story was told me, one Sunday afternoon, a few years ago, some of them were lying on the ground together, and one of them spoke and said, " Uncle Reuben, can you explain this: Faith in de Lord, and faith in dedebbil." "To be sure I can. There is two things: in de fust place, faith in de Lord, and then faith in de debbil. Now, in the fust place, fustly, there is faith. What is faith? What is faith? Why, faith is jes faith. Faith ain't nothing less than faith. Faith ain't nothing more than faith. Faith is jes faith now I done splain it." Really, that man was right, there is nothing to explain. Faith is as simple a conception as the human mind can have. How, then, can you explain faith? You are neither able to analyze it into parts, nor can you find anything simpler with which to compare it. So* also as to some other things, that are perfectly easy and natural in practical exercise, and cannot be explained. What is love? Well, I won't go into an elaborate metaphysical definition of love, but if I wanted a child to love me, I should try to exhibit myself in such a character to him and act in such ways that the little child would see in me something to love, and would feel like loving. There would then be no need of an explanation of what love is Did you ever hear a satisfactory definition of laughter? If you wanted to make a man laugh, would you attempt to define laughter to him? You might possibly succeed in making a laughable definition; but otherwise definitions won't make a man laugh. You would simply say or do something ludicrous, and he would laugh readily enough if he was so disposed; and if the man be not in a mood for laughing, all your explanations are utterly useless.
And so what is faith? There is nothing to explain.
Everybody knows what faith is. If you want to induce a man to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you must hold up the Lord to him in his true character, and then, if he is in a mood to believe, he will believe, and if he is disinclined to belief, all your explanations will be fruitless. The practical result may even be obstructed by attempts to explain. What is faith? You know what faith is. Every one knows.
Well, then, a man might say, " If you mean by faith in the Lord, the simple idea of believing what the Scripture says concerning him, the idea of believing its teachings about the Lord Jesus Christ to be true, if that is what faith means, then all of us are believers, all have faith." I am afraid not. I am afraid there are some here who have not faith. Has a man faith in the Lord Jesus Christ who simply does not disbelieve in him?
I may not deny that what the Gospel says is true, but is that believing? Yonder sits a gentleman; suppose some one should come hastily up the aisle, calling his name, and say, " Your house is afire." The gentleman sits perfectly quiet and looks unconcerned, as people so often do when listening to preaching. The man repeats it: "I say your house is afire.". But still he sits in his place. Some one near him says, " You hear what that man says. Do you believe it?" "Yes, I believe it,"
he carelessly replies, and does not stir. You would all say, " The man is insane, or certainly he does not believe it; for if he did, he would not sit perfectly still and remain perfectly unconcerned." Even so when the preacher speaks of sin and guilt and ruin, of God's wrath and the fire that is not quenched; or when he stands with joyful face and proclaims to his hearers that for their sin and ruin there is a Saviour; and they say they believe, and yet look as if it were of no concern to them at all, at all; then I say they do not believe it the thing is not possible. They may not disbelieve it; they may not care to make an attempt to overturn it; they may be in a sort of negative mood; but they do not believe it. With that statement I suppose there are a great many of us who concur and who will at once say, "Often I fear that I do not really believe it. If I did believe it, the Gospel would have more power over my heart and more power over my life than it does have.
And what, oh, what shall I do? " The preacher has to remind you of that father to whom the Saviour came when the disciples had tried in vain to heal his suffering child. Jesus said to him: " All things are possible to him that believeth;" and he replied: " I believe; help thou my unbelief." That should be your cry: " I believe; help thou my unbelief." The man would not deny that he believed, and yet felt bound to add that he knew he did not believe as he ought to. Now the comfort is, that he who sees all hearts accepted that man's confessedly imperfect faith, and granted his request. That has often been the preacher's comfort as he uttered the same cry, "I believe; help thou my unbelief;" and God give it as a comfort to you! But do not content yourself with such a state of things, with any such feeble, half-way believing. Nay, let us cherish all that tends to strengthen our faith in the Gospel; let us read the Word of God, praying that we may be able to believe; let us say from day to day, as the disciples said: " Lord, increase our faith."
The text proceeds: " Therefore, being justified by faith, let us have peace with God." Instead of the declaration, " We have peace with God," the best authorities for the text make it an exhortation, " Let us have peace with God; " and so the Revised Version reads. Some critics admit that the documents require us so to read, but say that they can see no propriety in an exhortation at this point that it seems much more appropriate to understand the apostle as asserting a fact.
Yet I think we can see moaning and fitness in the text as corrected: "Being justified by faith, let us have peace with God."
Let us have peace with God, notwithstanding our unworthiness. My friends, we cannot have peace with God so long as we cling to the notion that we are going to deserve it. Just there is the difficulty with many of those who are trying to be at peace with God. They have been clinging to the thought that they must first become worthy, and then become reconciled to God; and they will have to see more clearly that they must come to Christ in order that, being reconciled, they may be made good, may become worthy. We may say there are two conceivable ways to have peace with God. It is conceivable to have peace with God through our worthiness, and it is conceivable and also practicable to have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, though we be unworthy. Then let us have peace with him, although so unworthy, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Again, let us have peace with God, though we are still sinful and unholy, though we know we come far short in character and in life of what God's children ought to be. We must be, ought to be, intensely dissatisfied with ourselves; but let us be satisfied with our Saviour, and have peace with God through him; not content with the idea of remaining such as we are, but, seeing that the same Gospel which offers us forgiveness and acceptance offers us also a genuine renewal through our Lord Jesus Christ, and promises that finally we shall be made holy, as God is holy, shall indeed be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. Let us rejoice in the gracious promise of that perfect life, and, while seeking to be what we ought to be, let us have peace with God. Our sanctification is still sadly imperfect the best of us well know that, and probably the best of us feel it most deeply; but, if we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, our justification is perfect. We can never be more justified than we are now justified, though we shall be more and more made holy as long as we live, and at last made perfectly holy as we pass into the perfect world. My brethren, do think more and talk more of that. It is an intensely practical matter, not only for your comfort but for the strength of your life. If we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, although we are painfully conscious that we are far from being in character and life what we ought to be, yet, through the perfect justification which we have at once, we shall in the end by his grace be made perfectly holy.
Let us have peace with God, though we have perpetual conflict with sin. What a singular idea! Peace with God, and yet conflict, yes, perpetual conflict, with a thousand forms of temptation to sin, temptations springing from our fellow-men, and temptations springing from spiritual tempters perpetual conflict, and yet peace with God. Is not that conceivable? Is not that possible? In this conflict we are on the Lord's side; in this conflict the Lord is on our side; and so, though the battle must be waged against every form of sin, we may have peace with God.
And finally, let us have peace with God though he leaves us to suffer a thousand forms of distress and trial.
" Let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom also we have had our access by faith into this grace wherein we stand: and let us rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but let us also rejoice in our tribulations; knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, proving; and proving, hope; and hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Ghost which was given unto us." Surely man may have peace with God, though he be left to suffer. For none of these things can separate us from God's love.
Who shall separate us from Christ's love? " For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities nor powers, neither things present nor things to come, neither height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." When we are in.
trouble, let us take fast hold upon that great thought, that trouble does not divide us from the love of God. Yea, God's peace can conquer trouble, and guard us, as in a fortress, against its assaults. " In nothing be anxious; but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus."
Broadus SAA: 07 How the Gospel makes men Holy
O wretched man that lam! who shall deliver me out of the body o f this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Bom. 7: 24, 25.
language is intensely passionate, " O wretched -*- man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? " Then with the sudden transition of passion, " I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
"How shall I be good?" is a question that used sometimes to rise in your mind when you were a child, sometimes when nobody would imagine you were thinking of such things as that. " How shall I get to be good." And it is a question which, amid all the commotion of this runaway life of ours, comes back to us very often, comes back even to people whom you would not suppose to be thinking of such things at all. The grossly wicked men, the men vho are the slaves of vice, many of them, perhaps all of them, have their moments when there is a sort of longing that rises in their souls to be good, and when the hope rel urns, indestructible, that somehow or other they will get to be good after all. It became a sort of jest a few years ago, I know, to speak of " the wickedest man in New York," but -I wonder sometimes if the wickedest man whoever he might happen to be, considered as God considers does not sometimes want to be good.
For many of us it has been much more than a vague longing that comes back again and again. It has been an earnest effort, sometimes a fearful struggle, when we have been trying to be good, and we have wondered whether something would not come in the course of the varied experiences of life, that would render it easier for us to conquer in this struggle, easier to become good.
As a man lives on, he cannot help thinking it is so hard now he cannot help thinking it will become easier to be good. And when changes occur in his outward life he hopes now to find it easier. He sets up a new home, it may be, and has a vague feeling that there he will be able to be good. He marries a pious woman, may be, and although he may not say a word about it, he has a sort of notion that perhaps that will be blessed to him, and he will become pious too. He loses a parent whom he leaned on, maybe he loses a little child that lay in his bosom, and amid the strange feelings that rise up then, and which he would not tell any one about, he thinks, " Now surely I shall become good." And so, as the experiences of life come and go, men still hope to be good. Who is there here to-day that does not hope to be good? Who is there here to-day that at this solemn moment, when we are thinking about the soul and its immortality, does not feel that to be good is the loftiest human aspiration and the best earthly attainment? O tell me, do you not feel it?
Now I have something to say about this great question; not to cite my own experience nor to give my own ideas, but I want to get your attention fixed on the apostle Paul's account of this matter, including some details of his own experience about it. Let us see how he treats the question. Here, in the Epistle to the Romans, the early chapters of the Epistle are occupied with what we call justification by faith, telling how, by believing in Jesus Christ, a man may be justified that is, may be regarded and treated in the sight of God's law as if he were a just man. And then the next question that will arise to any reflecting mind, and which the apostle at once thought of, is, Ah! but how does this bear on the matter of making a man good, in his real personal character? It looks at first like a sort of legal fiction, the idea of considering a man as just in the sight of God's law, though he is not just, because of Jesus Christ in whom he believes. And then remains the question how a man is to be made righteous in his own character, how he is to be made holy. Many persons say that this is the weak point of the Gospel, that the Gospel tends to lessen the inducements to seek personal holiness, by undertaking to make a man just simply upon believing, by offering him amnesty. They talk as if the Gospel offer of free pardon for somebody else's sake, yea, and of title to everlasting life for somebody else's sake, were an encouragement to do wrong. There are many men holding the subject at arm's length who maintain that the Gospel tends to prevent us from trying to do right by thus offering salvation gratuitously.
Now the apostle Paul goes on to show in the first place the absurdity of such an idea; to show that when men talk as if it were a small thing to believe in Jesus Christ the Lord, they don't understand what they are talking about. He shows by several different illustrative arguments that if a man believes in Jesus Christ, that means something; that it means a power in his life, that it involves a change in his inner character. He says first that if we are believers, we are dead to sin and have risen to a new life. He reminds his readers that this great thought was symbolized by that affecting ceremony in which they entered upon the professed life of a Christian. " Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized unto Jesus Christ were baptized unto his death? "Our baptism referred to Jesus Christ, and don't you know that it referred especially to his death and resurrection? " That like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." Do you not know that your baptism, at the outset of your Christian life, meant that you had died to sin and risen up from a grave like the symbolic grave in the waters, and that you were henceforth to walk in newness of life?
Then he takes a second illustration. We were slaves to sin; but now, by believing in Jesus Christ, we have changed masters; we have become, so "to speak, the slaves of holiness, the slaves, as it were, of God. We have a new Master, and we shall render service to him.
If a man is a believer, it means something. It means that he has changed masters. And yet again he says the case is like that of a woman whose husband died, and who is now married to a new husband; the children she now bears are no longer the children of the old husband, but of the new. If we are believers, we are indeed dead to the law; but we are married to Christ, and the fruit of our life is to be borne to him.
So, then, if anybody ever tells you that this Gospel of free grace is an encouragement to men to do wrong, tell him it cannot be so for a man who believes this Gospel, for that means something.
But the apostle by no means stops at that. Not only is it absurd to say that salvation by grace will encourage a man to do wrong, but justification by faith, salvation by grace, furnishes the only way in which a man can really become holy. The apostle shows this negatively and then positively. In this remarkable passage in the seventh chapter of Romans, over which so many religious controversies have been waged, and over which what is ten thousand times better than religious controversies have bent many troubled, yet trusting hearts as they found themselves exactly portrayed in this passage the apostle first points out what is the best that the law can do to make a man holy.
What is the best that a man can do in the way of becoming holy, by just trying to do right, simply trying, in his own strength, to do what he learns from God's law to be right? There are people who are trying to do that, some of them honest in it, some of them very earnest. They have got their notion as to what is right, and are trying to do right. Some of them look in the word of God; they push aside what they call its mysteries and all matters pertaining to doctrine, and take out of it only its rules of right, and they say: "Now I am trying to live according to these rules of right."
What is the best they can do? Here is the apostle's answer.
In the first place, he says, God's law, which is holy and just and good, will make a man see how bad he is.
The child yonder will perhaps know what is meant by a plummet, and may have seen a man building on a wall and hanging down his plummet to see if his wall was perpendicular. "And judgment I have set to the line, and righteousness to the plummet." God's word applied to a man's life will help him to see whether he has been upright. Or the law of God is like a carpenter's straight edge, and, laid on his character, will enable him to see where his character deviates from rectitude. Ah, me! whosoever will honestly apply this test, the result will be a deep and painful consciousness that he does not come up to it.
But more than that happens. By the strange perversity of human nature, through the terrible sinfulness of sin, God's law not only makes us see how bad we are, but actually makes us worse. This is the thought that startles us here. God's law makes us worse instead of making us better. It stimulates sinful ness by restraint. Have you not often observed how restraint stimulates men to act contrary to it? Not long ago a lad of my acquaintance was talked to by his father about smoking, with an earnest request that he would not form the habit. Afterwards he said to his mother, " I am so glad that papa did not say I must not smoke, for if he had said I must not smoke, I could not have kept from it, but he simply said he wished I would not; I am so glad." There was a great deal of human nature in that.
There is a story of an old woman in one of the German towns who had lived to be seventy years old with out going outside the ancient wall of the city. The fact was told to the Grand Duke, who sent the old lady word that he wished the fact to go down to history and begged she would be sure and not go out during the rest of her life. You may know what would happen. She got to thinking about it, and in a short time she went out. But, alas! not merely in ludicrous ways does this propensity of ours show itself, but in terrible earnest.
The more a man knows something is wrong, sometimes the more it seems he cannot help doing it. If you should go into a darkened room, that had long been shut up, and with a broom should begin to clean it out, there might be a nest of vipers in one corner lying still in the darkness, but when you disturbed them they would thrust out their forked tongues and hiss and threaten to destroy you. So when God's law comes with its demand upon us to clean out the sin from our souls, how our sinful propensities, that were asleep maybe, will wake up and threaten us! The apostle says, "I was alive without the law once I thought I was leading a true spiritual life and that I was a good man but when the commandment came to me, sin revived (came to life again), and I died. I saw that all my spirituality was nothing, I was not a good man at all."
Is this the fault of the law of God? Paul says, No; the law of God is all right; the commandment of God is holy and just and good the law is just as good as it can be, it is God's own law. It is not the fault of the law, it is the fault of sin. And this shows what a terrible thing sin is, that it takes the very rule of God that is given to direct our life, and perverts it into the occasion of doing worse " that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful." Ah, when God has reached down to this sin-ruined world of ours and given his own rule of what is right, men take that and pervert it and become worse than they would have been without it. Does not sin thus show itself to be exceeding sinful? So the result is that man finds in himself a struggle which the apostle himself describes; there rise up desires to do right, and then there arise sinful dispositions, contrary to God's law; and these stimulate one another until sometimes his whole bosom is a battle-field.
Ah! the battle-fields in human bosoms! Do you know what it means? Don't you know? That is what the apostle proceeds to describe. "What I want to do,"
he says, " I do not do, and what I don't want to do I keep doing. I am fighting against myself; there are good tendencies in me, but there are evil tendencies in me, and I war, and I struggle, and I wrestle O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? " That is the climax; that is the highest that ever soul of man reached on earth in trying to be good in his own strength to come up to such an intensity of fearful, painful struggle that he would cry out in the agony of utmost desperation, " O wretched, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me? " Does any one sit coolly here to-day and say there is a touch of extravagance there? Well, it is the apostle's extravagance. And oh, the more a man strives to be what he ought to be, while losing sight of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the more he will find himself in sympathy with that wild, passionate cry of a struggling, tortured soul.
There has been a good deal of controversy between what are called Calvinists and what are called Arminians, as to whether this passage I have just been speaking of gives the experience of a renewed man or of an unrenewed man. I think the truth is, as some recent writers have been showing, that it does not really give either, but gives the experience of any man, either renewed or unrenewed, who is looking to the law to make him holy.
Renewed men often fall back upon that. They lose the firm hold on justification by faith, and they get to thinking to save themselves, to make themselves holy by their own merit. Then no wonder they fall down in despondency and almost in despair. Unrenewed men, on the other hand, are often trying to do right according to what they see to be right according to their own knowledge of God's word. And any man who tries to be holy in his own strength, this is his experience. Such a conflict there is in the bosoms of men, and of the best men, yea, a battle-field in every bosom here on earth.
Nowhere is sin completely triumphant, and nowhere, yet, has holiness completely triumphed. But, oh! the difference between those beaten back on the field of battle, beaten back and ever back, who can see no hope of aught but destruction, unless something strange they cannot anticipate should occur, and those who triumphantly rely on the help of God, and are certain of success. O the difference! And so Paul breaks forth, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
Let us then turn to the other thought of the apostle, as to what the gospel can do towards making a man holy.
He makes three points about this.
First, the gospel sets a man free from condemnation, because of his past sin. " There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." The first thought of a man who begins to think of leading a new life is, " What am I to do with all these sins I have already committed? " But the gospel of Jesus Christ frees us from the guilt of sin, from condemnation because of our sin. There is now no condemnation. The gospel comes to the ruined debtor to pay all his debts in a moment; it comes to the prisoner to break the bonds that bound him and to open the doors of his prison and set him free.
And then, in the next place, the gospel comes with a new moral power. The apostle speaks of a third law that comes in like a reinforcement: " But the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath emancipated me from the law of sin and death." This new reinforcing power is the Spirit of God. He calls it the law of the Spirit.
The law of God and the law in our members are in fierce conflict, and there comes a new moral power to give us the victory. My brethren, we do not preach as much as we ought, nor think half as much as we ought, about the Spirit of God. I do not want you to talk less or think less of the atoning death, or the interceding life, or the tender sympathy, or the beautiful example, or the divine power of the divine Redeemer; not less of that, but more of the Spirit of God. Why, Jesus himself said a very remarkable thing about the Holy Spirit when he was just taking leave of the disciples. On that night he said: "Nevertheless, I tell you the truth."
Now, when a dignified, self-respecting person condescends to say: " I am telling you the truth," there must be some very special occasion for it. He knew he was about to say something hard for them to believe, " Nevertheless, I tell you the truth; it is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come to you." He himself says you are better off as it is with the Holy Spirit, the great Counsellor and Guide and Comforter, in his special mission, than if he had not come, and Jesus himself were still on earth. Think of that; cherish the Spirit's mission; pray, above all things, when you pray, that your Heavenly Father will give the Holy Spirit to you, that you may be strengthened. I say again, we think too little about that great idea and element of the gospel. We go struggling on, forgetting that mighty reinforcement that our gracious God offers us in our life's battle, "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus." The next time you are specially tempted cry out mightily for the help of the Spirit of God. And when you are despondent, and fancy you can never get to be what your soul longs for, remember what the Spirit of God can make out of even such materials as your character and your life.
One more point. The apostle mentions a new and mighty incentive which the Gospel presents, when he says, a little further on: " For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God." My friends, there are four ways in which it is conceivable that a man should serve God. One of them is practically impossible, that you should serve God with fear and trembling as a subject serves a tyrant. There are people who'look upon God in the light of a despot; but they cannot really serve him thus. Again, are we to serve God as a poor, cowering slave serves a hard master, from fear of punishment? Nay, no man would truly serve God, simply from fear that God would punish him if he did not. The third way a man may conceivably serve God is in the hope that he will reward him. But nobody would ever truly serve God, if it were simply and alone from a desire of reward, not even from a desire to reach the blessed heaven. The other way to serve God, of which the apostle speaks, is to serve him out of filial love; to serve him, not as the subject serves a tyrant, not as the servant his master, not as a hireling for pay, but to serve him as a loving son serves a kind father, out of filial love. That is the great idea which Christianity brought into the world on this subject. That is the new motive which Jesus Christ brings to bear on the souls of men, to try to do right out of filial love to their Father. And so Paul proceeds to speak of the " Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father."
The apostle's heart is very tender here. He has been depicting those terrible struggles which he himself had had in other days with his own sinful propensities; his heart is now very tender, and so he falls back upon his mother tongue. He is writing in Greek; but he uses the Aramaic word, Abba. If you were talking French or German, and were beginning to speak of things that very much touched your heart; if you began, for instance, to speak of your dead mother, whose very name makes you quiver, you would not then speak in French or German; you would not say mother in French or German; you would use the word you used when a child. So the apostle here uses the Aramaic language he had spoken in childhood: " the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba." This is what he used to say when he was a boy, and he translates it afterwards, " Abba, Father."
I met a young man not long ago, a friend of mine, who told me his father had recently died, and a little after.his wife's father. My young friend was talking about it until he could not talk. He broke down with emotion as he told me how lonely he felt now that both were gone and he had no one to lean on, no one to look up to.
Even some old men, when they get into trouble, think about the father they used to go to, and say, " I wish I could ask him what he thinks about the matter." The Scriptures take hold of that thought and tell us we are not to look to God simply as a master who will punish, not merely as one who will reward, but to look to God as our Father, Father, Father in heaven.
So, then, if a man looks to the law to make him holy, the highest result will be a cry of anguish, " Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me? " But turning to the gospel, he sees hope of being delivered and becoming holy, and may say, " I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord."
Broadus SAA: 08 Intense Concern for the Salvation of Others
For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren. Romans ix: 3.
THIS is known to students of the Scriptures as one of the passages which are commonly accounted difficult, one of the hard places. A preacher would not be likely to take such a passage as his text, unless he supposed it possible to present a simple and natural explanation of it, and to draw from it as thus explained some useful, practical lessons. Before I try to do this, it may be allowable to offer two or three hints as to the course we ought to pursue in studying the difficult passages of Scripture, hints that would, indeed, apply to all our Scriptural studies.
My first hint would be this: Be willing to let the Scripture mean what it wants to mean. You may say, " that, of course," but it is very far from being a matter of course. Be willing to let the Scripture mean what it wants to mean. We come to it knowing beforehand what things we like and what things we dislike, and if we find in the passage something not in accordance with the ideas we have been reared in, or that now have possession of our minds, we say, " Well, of course it can't mean that," and then we begin to search for some other meaning. The plainer the passage, the harder to find anything else than what is plainly meant, and so we go off and say, " What a difficult passage of Scripture!" Has not that often happened to you? It has happened to me. I have waked up to find, after long years of study, that something I always thought was a very hard passage was plain enough, only I had never been willing to allow it to mean what it wished to mean.
My second hint would be: Take good account of the connection. We are peculiarly prone to neglect the connection in dealing with Scripture, because we have the Bible printed most unfortunately, I think in little scraps of broken sentences, set before us as if they were separate paragraphs which is not done in any other book in the world and broken up also in larger portions which are called chapters, where the connection is often completely severed, and yet we cannot help imagining there must be a new subject at the beginning of a new chapter.
Moreover, we are accustomed to hear short passages taken as texts, and too often interpreted without regard to the connection. The connection is sometimes the entire book. I doubt if there is one sentence in the epistle to the Hebrews, and there are very few in the epistle to the Romans, which can be really understood without taking account of the whole epistle. But often the connection is only some sentences before and after. Now, if you consider the connection, it is wonderful how it will help you to understand a difficult passage. You go above the difficult place; you launch on the stream above, and come floating down, and your boat is borne over the rocks. If you cannot determine the precise meaning of the words, you will see what is the general thought of the passage as a whole, and that is the main consideration.
The last hint I shall mention is, that we must take good account of the state of the writer's mind, when he says these things. What is he thinking about? What is he aiming at? How is he feeling, when he uses this language? I am sure, if any of you have tried it, you will find that the more care you exercise, when reading the Scriptures, in trying to enter into sympathy with the thought and feeling of the sacred writer, the better you will be prepared to see what he really means.
Now, all these hints I have ventured to offer are of importance to us in studying the text: " I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren."
Observe he does not say " I wish." Not he. He could not say that. But he almost says it. The original could not be better translated in any other words than those used in our version. The apostle seems to be like one who is on the point of saying something wrong. He rushes, as it were, towards the brink of saying that he wishes to be accursed for his brethren, only he does not say it stopping on the brink because it would be wrong, because his devout heart would shrink back from the idea of being accursed from Christ, even for his brethren. Now, why does the inspired apostle use this strange language? Why does Paul almost say a terrible thing, so terrible that many people, as they come upon it, and begin to inquire into the meaning, all out of sympathy with the passion of the writer, imagine that they must explain it away that it must be impossible for him to approach even to the brink of saying what would be so dreadful.
The epistle to the Romans is taken up in its doctrinal portion with the great thought of justification by faith, that men are justified simply by believing in Jesus. The apostle discusses that in the first five chapters. We had a text from that portion some Sundays ago. Then, in the next three chapters he discusses the bearing of this justification by faith upon the matter of sanctification, showing how it works in helping us to be good.
We had a text from that portion not long ago. In three more chapters he now discusses the bearing of justification by faith upon the privileges of the Jews. The Jews considered themselves far superior, in point of religion, to any nation in the world, and they would begin to see at once that if the apostle's doctrine be true, and a man is accepted through simple faith in Jesus Christ, then a Gentile might exercise that as well as a Jew, and so a Gentile would be as good as a Jew. We cannot imagine how they would shrink back from any doctrine with such a conclusion, that a Gentile is as good as a Jew. We do not know of any national or race prejudices in our time that are so strong as the prejudices then existing between Jew and Gentile. They would especially dislike such teaching from Paul the apostle.
They would say he is a renegade himself to the religion of his fathers. He is a traitor to his people. They were indignant at the idea of his saying that a Gentile could be saved as well as a Jew. When Paul said, the following spring, in his address at Jerusalem, that Jesus had told him to go to the Gentiles, they broke out in rage, and he had to be saved by the Roman garrison.
The apostle knew how intensely they would dislike this idea, and so he wanted to assure them in entering upon this topic the bearing of justification by faith upon the privileges of the Jews he wanted to assure them that he loved his own people, and although he is bound to acknowledge, -as he is going to acknowledge, that the great mass of his people are rejecting the Messiah, while Gentiles all around are believing unto salvation, yet he acknowledges this with inexpressible pain and grief.
That is the way he feels. That is what he wants to impress upon them. He sees what is coming for his nation. This epistle was written twelve years before the destruction of Jerusalem, and only eight years before the war that led to that destruction. The apostle saw that soon their hot fanaticism would break out in desperate rebellion against the Roman authority, and sooner or later they must be crushed out and ground to atoms.
Here was a man who saw that his own nation, his own race, bound to him not merely by nationality in the ordinary sense, but by ties of blood through long and pure descent, was going to ruin. His race alone of all the great races of the earth can trace their history back to a historic ancestor; for all the other peoples find their ancestry lost in darkness, but the Jews could go back in history to their common father. His race had great and glorious deeds connected with its history in the past, and had yet more glorious promises for the future in connection with the Messiah. And this man, who loved his people, who loved them so intensely that when the Lord appeared to him in a vision, and said, " Go preach to the heathen," he remonstrated and did not want to obey, and had to be driven by persecution, clearly sees that the Jewish nation is about to perish. Not only does he see that national destruction awaits them, but he sees that the great mass of them are slighting their own Messiah, now that he is come, are rejecting the salvation that is in him alone, and plunging madly into the darkness of eternity. He feels all that. And listen how he speaks, in introducing this subject, " I say the truth in Christ I lie not." A man of self-respect never condescends to assure people that he is telling the truth and not lying, unless there is some extraordinary reason for it. " I say the truth in Christ I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh; who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh the Messiah came, who is over all, God blessed forever." You see that ordinary language does not suffice to express his emotion. In his swelling passion of soul he rushes to the very brink of saying what would be wrong to say, and shrinks back from saying it. That seems to me to be the plain meaning of the passage, and all that is necessary to understand it is sympathy with the sacred writer's state of mind.
Now, as thus explained, the passage t is rich in instruction. I shall only gather out three or four of its lessons, all of which connect themselves with one thought: intense concern for the salvation of others.
1. And first. Concern for the salvation of others is naturally enhanced by patriotism. If a man feels at all as a Christian ought to feel in the way of desire for the salvation of all his fellow-men, through common human sympathies and common wants and destinies, then he will naturally feel more of such concern for those who are allied to him by ties of nationality; dear to him through feelings of patriotism his own people. And all the more if they are also dear to him by ties of personal affection if they live in his own locality, if they share all his peculiar interest*, his difficulties, his joys.
Still more if they are his friends, and most of all if they are his kindred. All the reasons we have for desiring the salvation of mankind at large exist in such cases, and then all these additional reasons enhance the concern we naturally feel for their salvation. My friends, not only Paul felt thus, but he who stood on Olivet and looked out on the splendid capital of his country, which he knew was doomed to destruction, shall we not suppose that he felt some peculiar interest in his own people?
Why not?
2. Again. Concern for the salvation of others is not prevented by a belief in what we call the doctrines of grace; is not prevented by believing in divine sovereignty, and predestination and election. Many persons intensely dislike the ideas which are expressed by these phrases. Many persons shrink away from ever accepting them, because those ideas are in their minds associated with the notion of stolid indifference. They say if predestination be true, then it follows that a man cannot do anything for his own salvation; that if he is to be saved he will be saved, and he has nothing to do with it, and need not care, nor need any one else care.
Now, this does not at all follow, and I will prove that it does not follow, by the fact that Paul himself, the great oracle of this doctrine in the Scripture, has uttered these words of burning passionate concern for the salvation of others, so close by the passages in which he has taught the doctrines in question. Look back from the text, run back a few sentences and you will find the very passage upon which many stumble: " Moreover, whom he did predestinate" there are people who shudder at the very words " them he also called, and whom he called, them he also justified; and whom he justified, them he also glorified." Just a little while after he uttered those words from which men want to infer that the man who believes it need not feel concerned for his salvation or the salvation of others, just a little after, came the passionate words of the text. Nor is that all, for you will find just following the text, where he speaks of Esau and Jacob, that God made a difference between them before they were born, and where he says of Pharaoh that God raised him up that he might show his power in him, and that God's name might be declared throughout all the earth. " Therefore he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth." Some good people fairly shiver at the inference, which seems to them to be inevitable from such language as that.
But I say the inference must be wrong, for the inspired man who uttered this language, only a few moments before had uttered these words of the text.
And whenever you find your heart or the heart of your friend inclined to shrink away from these great teachings of divine Scripture concerning sovereignty and predestination, then I pray you make no argument about it, but turn to this language of concern for the salvation of others, so intensely passionate that men wonder and think surely it cannot mean what it says. The trouble is in this and many cases that we draw unwarranted inferences from the teachings of the Bible, and then cast all the odium of those inferences upon the truths from which we draw them. Now, I say that whatever be true, for or against the apostle's doctrines of predestination and divine sovereignty in salvation, it is not true that they will make a man careless as to his own salvation or that of others; seeing that they had no such effect on Paul himself, but right in between these two great passages come the wonderful words of the text.
3. The third lesson is, that concern for the salvation of others will sometimes rise to intense passion. The Apostle Paul is not always saying, " Woe is me if I preach not the gospel." He said that under certain circumstances. Nor does he anywhere else use such an expression as this of the text. So, as I said, concern for the salvation of others will sometimes rise to intense passion.
And more generally, let us say, piety has elements of passionate feeling. I suppose that piety is threefold, there is thought, and feeling, and action. Different persons are inclined to prefer one or the other of these three, according to their own natural constitution, their education, prejudices, etc.; but all three are necessary to a symmetrical Christian character and Christian life.
Some persons will say, if you talk with them, "O, I do love Christian thought I love to hear a preacher who presents to me inspiring thoughts, especially if there is some new thought." And then some of them are carried away with the idea that they want modern thought, as they call it, instead of Scripture. But meantime it is true that we also need feeling. A man who finds himself inclined to prefer what he calls thought in connection with Christianity, and to neglect Christian feeling and Christian action, ought to see to it lest his character be deformed because wanting in essential elements, and ought to cultivate in himself a regard for feeling and for action. Many cultivated people in our time, as they look with ill-concealed disgust upon the poor negroes, with their wild passionate way of expressing religious feeling, had better see to it lest they themselves be ruinously lacking in the element which appears in the blacks to be too exclusive. Then there are those who care nothing about anything but feeling. They say, " I love to hear a man that makes me feel." * Their danger is that they will not know what they are feeling about, because it is not Scripture truths that make them feel, and such feeling will not lead to pious action.
Emotion in religion is proper and necessary, and I do not condemn those who value it highly; but such persons must see to it that they have truth, which is the circulating life-blood of piety, and that their feelings shall lead to corresponding earnest and intense activity; for emotion about religion, as in anything else, if it does not express itself in activity, will not only be worthless, but will injure the character. Others there are who talk of nothing but action, work, work. Now, work is a noble word, but the danger of these persons is, that they will forget to love Christian truth and to cultivate Christian feeling.
The same thing is true as to bodies of men. You can easily think of a great religious denomination in our country, who care mainly for thought, instruction, knowledge. A noble idea it is, but possibly their danger may be that they will underrate Christian feeling. You can very easily think of another powerful and useful denomination of Christians whose great idea is feeling. Everything is made to contribute to working up emotion, and their danger is that they will neglect the importance of holding truth, even if they do not neglect the importance of activity.
The same thing is also true about certain periods of Christian history. You can find periods when all the Christian world seemed devoted to the idea of doctrine, when men disputed through a lifetime about the doctrines of Christianity, when all the great divisions of the time centred themselves upon the difference between two words of Scripture. You can find other periods where Christianity seemed to run altogether into mystical feeling; when good people gave themselves up to solitary lives, or retired to the privacy of their homes, and thought that all that could be done was to try to cultivate Christian sentiment in private. And ours is an age which runs towards activity. The Christian idea now is work. I thank God that we live in such an age.
It is good to live in a time when the idea is to work. It is a noble privilege to live in such a period. But our danger is that we shall not care for Christian truth, and that in our fancied superiority to all mere emotion 'we shall shrink away from those great sentiments, that passionate Christian feeling, which alone will stir us up to intense, loving and persevering Christian activity.
4. One more lesson. Concern for the salvation of others, such as Paul here expresses, must have had some good ground in the nature of things. Ah! my friends, you cannot tell me that the man who wrote those words thought that everybody was going to be saved at last.
If he did not believe in divine mercy and divine love; if he did not believe in the salvation that is in Jesus Christ in the glory and the power of his grace, and his everlasting intercession then who ever did? He did believe in these. And yet do you think a man could have felt that passionate distress to which he here gives such strong utterance, if he had thought, as so many well-meaning people think now-a-days, that God is so good and merciful, that somehow or other, may be not at first when they die, but sometime or other, it will be well with everybody at last? Paul did not think so. He could not have thought so. And I venture to say Jesus Christ did not think so. If we are determined that we will cling to certain ideas, because they suit our natural feeling, then I am persuaded we must turn our back upon the authority of the word of God. There must be some ground for such concern as Paul felt. I shrink from telling what it is. I think of the awful terms which the Scriptures themselves sometimes employ, the images of horror, the words of everlasting fire and I do not wish here and now to speak of them.
But there must be some ground for this passionate concern for men's salvation which Paul expresses. And if men ought to feel so, and if devout people do feel so with reference to others, then tell me how those others ought to feel as regards themselves? My friends, who do not care anything about your souls, you must be madmen and irresponsible, or else you ought to care.
I humbly confess to-day, in behalf of my Christian hearers, that we do not feel on this subject as we ought to feel. It is only now and then that we catch glimpses of the reality. " Life is oft so like a dream, we know not where we are," and we do not realize things, and so we do not feel the concern we ought to feel. We are wanting in our duty to you in this respect. And yet you do not know how much concern we do feel. Many and many a time have persons who are here to-day, when they found themselves in the presence of those they loved, wanted to say something, their very life has trembled with the desire to say something, and they have shrunk back. May be they were afraid they would meet no sympathy. This may have been true in some cases. And yet, my brethren, I suspect it has sometimes happened that you shrank from speaking when that very one you loved was secretly wishing that you would speak, but from a like shrinking to yours, perhaps from a fear that you would suppose he cared more than he did, or from a strange sensitiveness with regard to the feelings that lie deepest in our hearts, would offer you no encouragement. But I venture to say to such as are not Christians, there are those that do feel a deep yearning, an unutterable concern sometimes for your salvation, and O, my friends, you ought to feel concern for yourselves.
Broadus SAA: 09 The Mother of Jesus
Mary, the mother of Jesus. Acts I: 14.
THERE is a well-known tendency of human thought to oscillate from one extreme to another. I think this tendency was exhibited in several points of what we call the Protestant Reformation. In certain important respects, we are all agreed that there was a real and thorough reformation. In certain other respects most of us think it was a very partial reformation. And there are yet several other respects in which it was a violent reaction from one extreme to the opposite extreme. It appears to me that this has been the case as regards the position of Protestants toward the mother of Jesus.
The Romanists, we may say without uncharitableness, have come very near making her an object of worship.
Their theologians make nice distinctions on the subject, but practically, for the ignorant mass, she is really an object of worship, a sort of goddess. The Protestant mind, starting back in horror from that terrible idolatry, has seemed to shrink sensitively away from ever saying a word or ever thinking for a moment about the mother of Jesus.
It is all natural enough, the growth of what we consider to be the grave Romanist error about Mary. The association? connected with all those who followed Jesus would naturally have caused the early Christians to feel a peculiar interest in her, as they ought to have done.
And then the feeling which rapidly grew up, of a desire for human mediation between us and God between us*, and the Saviour himself and which led, in the course of the centuries, to praying to the saints for their mediation, would naturally cause the mother of Jesus to be regarded as the most influential of all these interceding saints. Moreover, the Roman Church, with that talent for governing which has characterized the Roman people through all their history, readily adapted itself to the tastes of mankind, to the tendencies of human nature in general, and to the special usages of the old Pagan Romans, introducing, for example, a number of festivals, so that there would be something corresponding to the ancient festivals to please the people. And as all Pagan nations had their female deities, there naturally arose a feeling which made the mother of Jesus a sort of female divinity. Then, when art came into use in the churches, when they introduced image worship, there was nothing more natural than that the mother and the babe in her arms should be the chosen subject of artistic representation in places of worship; that the great artists of Italy should not only find this most popular and remunerative for their pencil, but most pleasing for themselves. So galleries were filled with many charming delineations of the Virgin and child. I suppose, also, that the spirit of chivalry in the Middle Ages may have had something to do with this. There was then a high, romantic sentiment towards woman as such, and this may have caused Mary to be regarded as the representative woman, that romance added itself to devotion. For these and other causes it has come to pass that not only in the Roman Church, but in the Greek and Armenian and Coptic Churches, and all through the East, they talk a great deal more about Mary than about her son. I have at home a great collection of Latin hymns of the Middle Ages, made by a German scholar, in which there are three times as many about Mary as about Jesus and the apostles all put together.
Now, I say the Protestant mind has violently reacted from all this, and it is not strange that we should shrink shuddering from what is practical idolatry, no matter how skillfully explained away. But isn't it a pity that we should go to the opposite extreme as regards the mother of our Lord? Let us look, then, at what the Scriptures teach. It was said to her by the angel, "Blessed art thou among women," and she said, "Henceforth all generations shall call me blessed."
There is no ground there for worship. " Blessed among women," Elizabeth was called, and Jael, who killed Sisera. The meaning of Mary's own saying is, all generations shall call me happy, shall felicitate me, shall recognize that my position is a happy one. There is no foundation for calling her " the Blessed Virgin Mary," as an act of worship, but there is a foundation for taking peculiar interest in what the Scriptures teach concerning her. It is not much that they do teach, and doubtless that is well, for otherwise it would have been perverted in the interest of that semi-idolatry we have been speaking about; but from what they do teach we may draw some useful lessons, and may, at the same time, get some interesting views of her son, who is, O
wonder of wonders! our Divine Redeemer.
1. First recall Mary's early life. Now, I could bring you some so-called manuals about the Blessed Virgin Mary, which would give you a great mass of detail about her early life, but unfortunately they are all late tradition; in fact, they are all pure fiction, and without the advantage of being well invented. They are commonly dull and stupid. But when we look to the Scriptures themselves, some things we do know about her early life. We know that instead of being at a convent at Jerusalem, as the silly traditions say, she lived at the little town of Nazareth.
This village, nestling down in its deep and retired valley, is never mentioned in the Old Testament, and even Josephus, who writes about a dozen places within a few miles of it, never speaks of Nazareth. It was an insignificant and quite out of the way place, far from the bustling, noisy world. Yet here Mary was to rear the appointed Saviour of men. Out of silence and obscurity was to come in the appointed time the Saviour of mankind.
Nor must you suppose it was a desirable community to live in. Those who wrestle with the giant vices that gather in great cities often dream that in a quiet little retired village it would be easy to do right but Arcadian, (simplicity and purity is seldom anything more than a dream.) Those people of Nazareth were singularly bad. '
They showed towards Jesus himself a rudeness and ferocity to which we know of no parallel in his ministry. They rejected him rudely. They tried to take his life. And one of whom Jesus said that he was an Israelite in whom there was no guile, and who lived in a neighboring village, asked in astonishment, " Can anything good come out of Nazareth? " It was a bad place. And Mary lived among those rude people of Nazareth.
Besides knowing the place of her abode, we know of Mary that she was familiar with Scripture. For when the great time in her life came, and, inspired, she burst out into praise, almost every expression she uses is from the Old Testament. Her whole mind and heart were full of the sacred writings, so that their language came spontaneously to her lips. That is an important point; she was familiar with the Scriptures.
2. In the next place, think of Mary's belief and rejoicing. There came to her the most wonderful promise that ever was made on earth, and the most incredible.
It seemed at first blush to be impossible, and the question she asked concerning it touched that very point.
She said: " How can these things be? " It is in that respect we see an instructive difference between Mary and Zachariah. Zachariah said: " How shall I know this, seeing I am an old man and my wife is old?" He speaks as a man not disposed to believe and who insists upon having better proof. But Mary speaks as one who is disposed to believe, and asks only to have an apparent impossibility removed, that she may believe.
You see here two types of character, two states of mind, such as often exist with us in relation to the Scriptures.
There are people that present their difficulties in such a way as to show plainly that they are like Zachariah; they don't much want to believe, and they insist on their difficulties and cherish them, and are not anxious you should remove them. There are others who have sore difficulty in the way of believing, so that we owe them our tender respect and sympathy, who are asking only that they may get rid of what seems to them to stand in the way, so that they may believe. God be gracious to all such! God help them out of their trouble! Mary believed, not " because it was impossible," as a Latin Father once rhetorically said;' she believed notwithstanding it seemed impossible, because it was expressly ascribed to the power of God. " The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee." And Mary said: " Behold the hand-maid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." We do not want to believe a thing that is impossible, but, like Mary, we have to believe what includes many elements that are incomprehensible. In the nature of things it must be so. There was much that Mary could not understand, and as the years came and went she did not understand them still.
When the shepherds came after the babe had been actually born, and reported what the angels had said, we are told that Mary " kept all these things and pondered them in her heart." She could not know the meaning.
When Simeon, in the Temple, said such wonderful things about the child, we read that Mary and Joseph wondered about all these things that were told concerning him; and when the child showed such extraordinary knowledge at twelve years of age, we are told that Mary and Joseph were amazed. It was necessary that they should not understand it. If the reality as to what it was had forced itself upon them, it would have been impossible that they should have lived under the same roof. So Mrs. Browning makes her say, " Bright angels, move not! lest ye stir the cloud Betwixt my soul and his futurity I I must not die, with mother's work to do, And could not live and see."
In the very idea of an incarnation there are necessarily many things incomprehensible. My friends, if you take this Bible, which comes so strangely home to all our spiritual wants, which, in all seasons of conscious spiritual weakness, offers the very strength we need, which affords us that help against sin which is not found anywhere else in this world this Bible, which the more progress we make in trying to do right, seems the more sweetly adapted to all our spiritual wants if you take this Bible, you find that it reveals an incarnation, and that this, from the necessity of the case, involves many things that seem almost impossible. There must be ever so many allusions to things in which we can make no progress at all, as to comprehending their nature. We are in Mary's position. "We are Hot expected to believe an impossibility, but warranted and bound to believe an assured fact, notwithstanding there be many things about it whose nature we cannot possibly comprehend.
It seems that this distinction might have value to any one troubled about these problems, and anxious to receive the truth.
Notice, fnrther, that Mary, in believing, rejoices. She said: " My soul doth magnify the Lord; from henceforth all generations shall call me happy." It was a wonderful thing, that young girl, the child of poverty, in that little out of the way village, daring to say that all coming generations should know of her and call her happy; but she said it, because God had promised. She said it with no idea of personal merit, with no thought of personal pride, but because God had promised. If one of you should stand here by my side, and we two should, with the most genuine humility in our power, say we think we are children of God, we hope we shall be blessed forever in Heaven, we are confident we shall dwell amid the purity and glory of the better world, there are some people ready enough I know not that there are such here present, but you find cases of that sort everywhere there are some people ready enough to say: " You think a great deal of yourselves; you count yourselves favorites of heaven," and all that.
Yet, in fact, the profession would be made not in self complacency, but in simple, humble reliance on a divine promise. And why should not a human heart trust a divine promise, as then, so now and henceforward and for ever more, and trusting a divine promise, rejoice in a divine hope?
3. In the third place, think of Mary training her child.
We know something of the nature of that training. We have read of young Timothy, that from a child he knew the Holy Scripture that his mother and grandmother had taught him, and had learned to share the faith that was in them. That is a picture we may transfer to the humble home of the carpenter in Nazareth. That child needed to be trained. Do we not read that he grew in wisdom and stature? If he increased in wisdom, there was need of education. We find that the mother trusted him almost without bound. And we know that he was really what children so often imagine themselves to be, wiser than his parents. Yet, he went down with them and was subject to them. The human mind has to grow. If there was a real incarnation, the human mind had to grow. It needed to be developed. There was room for education. There was demand for it. Yea, and he himself, toward the close of his ministry, must have meant the same thing as to the capacity of the human mind to contain knowledge, when he said: "Of that day and hour knoweth no man, not even the angels in heaven, nor even the Son, but the Father only." The human mind cannot know all things. And our Lord's human mind could not hold all knowledge. Such is the declaration of the record, that his mind grew in wisdom as his body grew in stature, and Mary was the mother that trained him. It seems idle sometimes for a poor toiling mother to indulge in the romantic ideas which poets and novelists write about a mother's high mission; and yet it is good for such a one, amid trial and sacrifice and suffering and struggles, to remember, and comfort herself in remembering, that hers is a high mission. After all, the noblest thing that is done in this world is when a mother does in truth and wisdom and fear of God train up a child. Let us all stand back in her presence. Let us call upon all men whose aspirations are the highest, whose work is the noblest, to stand aside and acknowledge cheerfully, "Hers is the best work, hers is the no blest work done in the world." And if that be the case, it must be a work of sacrifice and suffering, for there is nothing good ever done on earth save with sacrifice. Let the toiling mother solace herself with the thought that all motherhood has been dignified and made sublime by the young mother in the little town of Galilee, who was training in an humble home that child that was to be the Saviour of the world and the glory of the universe.
It was a unique task no doubt, and yet I say it has ennobled all motherhood, and any struggling, sorrowing mother may take comfort in the thought that she is engaged in a like good work. Blessed be God! what mother here knows of the high possibilities that are before her child? What Christian mother can fail to know of that supreme possibility, that blessed certainty, that she trains up a spirit immortal when she brings up a child in the fear of the Lord.
But, now, please observe that Mary must have trained this child in the knowledge of God's word. My friends who are parents, we abuse everything; and so we abuse the benefits of the Sunday-school. There is grievous danger that we parents shall turn over to the Sunday-school our parental duty of training our children in God's word. It is one of the perils of our time. Though we have those in the Sunday-school to help us in the task, and ought to be heartily thankful for their help, yet the work is ours nonetheless, and the work will, for the most part, remain undone unless we do it the work of training our children in the knowledge of God's word.
Let us train them to look at God's word as the guide of their life. I read somewhere of a mother whose husband was a grossly wicked man, who used to cry out against all things religious, and declared that he believed not in God; yet she reared up a number of children by his side, and they all became Christians. Some friend asked if she would tell how she managed this. She said, " I never set my word against their father's, but when he says anything against God's service, I hunt up a passage and say, ' Your father says so and so, but here is what your heavenly Father says/ and then I read it to them."
That was all the secret she had, but what a blessed secret!
Parents, learn to have the Scriptures on your tongue's end for the benefit of your children. Good old John Wesley was a trifle superstitious, after the fashion of his time, when he used to open the Bible at random and make use of whatever text he happened first to light upon. Far better than that is it for us to have the mind so full of the Scriptures, their teachings so familiar to our thought, that whenever we need one of them it will come by natural association of ideas. And so Mr. Moody has taught all of us that if we can get some happy quotation of Scripture, it will be worth more than all our wisdom in explaining a difficulty to an inquirer.
4. I pass on to say a word as to a later point in Mary's history. She seems to have unwarrantably interfered in the ministry of her son. At the wedding at Cana she suggested for him a course of action, and he said: " Woman, what have I to do with thee," or rather "What have we to do with each other?" There was nothing harsh in this, but there was an intimation that they had entered into new relations, that he who had been to her as a child to its mother could not be controlled by her in his public action, and she must draw back. A year or two later, when Jesus was teaching all the morning in a crowded house, and there were so many questions to be answered that they had not time for the mid-day meal, we read that "his friends" went forth to seize him, for they said, " he is beside himself." Now, put the Gospel histories together, and it appears that those friends were his mother and his brothers; and when they sent him a message over the heads of the crowd in the house, that his mother and brothers were without and wanted to see him, the answer, too, is very remarkable. He said: " Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? " And he looked around in a circle upon those that sat about him and said: " Behold my mother and my brothers; for whosoever shall do the will of God, he is my brother, and sister, and mother." His kindred were seeking to interfere with his work, and said he was beside himself. No wonder men call Christian earnestness fanaticism. Jesus himself, the founder of it all they said he was crazy. His own mother and his brothers said this because he was in earnest. What a comfort there is for all of us in the application he made of their request: "Whosoever shall do the will of my Father in Heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother." How does a man love his brother?
Think of the warm affection with which a man cherishes his brother. Then think of the tenderness with which a manly nature loves a sister. Then add to these, yea, compass them all around with the love that a real man has for his mother a love that will ever grow as he grows older and now consider. Jesus has said it may include you and me, with all our unworthiness "Whosoever shall do the will of God is as dear to me as brother, and sister, and mother." The Scriptures contain many wonderful things, but what more wonderful than those words?
5. There is one other theme, of which I know not how to speak Mary at the cross. Description is here dumb. Imagination stands in mute wonder. There are many points of view from which to look at the cross, and one not the least instructive, no doubt, would be to try to place yourself in imagination beside that sorrowing mother, through whose heart now according to old Simeon's prediction long before a sword was passing, a sword of cruel suffering and death. You would remember how suffering is the inevitable consequence of sin in this world, how suffering was the necessary condition of human salvation, even that poor mother's suffering as she looked upon her atoning son. Then remember how out of his death came life again, and out of that sorrow came springing joy. I cannot speak of that; who can? But you might sit down sometime and think it all over. Try to stand beside the mother at the cross, try to imagine how she felt, and try, also, to imagine how he felt towards her; for amid all the strange sorrow of that dark hour, he that was dying thought of his widowed mother, and felt, as every true man feels, that he must make some provision for her future. Yea, amid that great event of the universe, with that darkness settling down upon all his soul as the sin-bearer, he made provision for his widowed mother. Yet, what a simple provision it was! He had a loving friend, and to him he said: " Take her; do you be her son and she will be your mother," and that was all.
6. And now, finally, think a moment of Mary in heaven. If ever there comes a pang to the glorified ones, methinks Mary must look down with unutterable grief upon the thousands and millions that almost worship her instead of worshiping her son, the Saviour.
" centuries That roll, in vision, your futurities My future grave athwart, Whose murmurs seem to reach me while I keep Watch o'er this sleep, Say of me as the Heavenly said ' Thou art The blessedest of women! ' blessedest, Not holiest, not noblest no high name, Whose height misplaced may pierce me like a shame, When I sit meek in heaven! "
MRS. BROWNING, The True Mary.
It is not unnatural, it is because they have forgotten that he, the divine one, is himself human. The human heart longs after human sympathy, and the consciences of guilty men make them wish for a human mediator between themselves and the God they shrink from. Luther tells us that in youth, with his Romish education, he was afraid of Christ. He never heard a word said about Christ, save as the babe in the mother's arms, or the sacrifice on the cross, or the Judge in the last day. His idea was that he must call upon the saints, and especially upon the Virgin Mary, to pity him and intercede for him with Christ. When people have such views of Christ, no wonder they seek some human mediator. The only cure for it all is to know that Christ the divine was truly human, that Mary was no more truly human than was Jesus, the Son of Mary. Truly divine and also truly human, he is able to sympathize with us in our infirmities, to lay a hand of love and pity upon our poor sinful heads, and yet, with the other hand, to lay hold upon the very pillars of God's throne, and to be our Advocate with the Father, our one Mediator, all the Mediator we need or should desire. O Jesus, son of Mary, and yet Son of God, before the mystery of thine Incarnation we bow, and trusting in the mystery of thine intercession, we pray thee make us, make us, wholly thine!
Broadus SAA: 10 The Apostle Payl as a Preacher
Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the. unsearchable riches of Christ. Eph. 3: 8.
"NUMEROUS as were the functions of the Apostle Paul, he was, most of all things, a preacher of the gospel. The fact is prominent in his history, and was deeply felt by himself. Everything, with him, was made subordinate to this vocation. His whole life was wrapped up in it. Though often sad and weary, and not unfrequently (it would seem) desponding, he never turned aside from this great work. When difficulties and dangers gathered around, when foes were threatening and timid friends entreating, he could say, " But none of these things move me; neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God."
* Sermon as chaplain to the University of Virginia, May, 1857.
Printed in pamphlet form at the request of many students and of the professors.
And Paul was the greatest of all preachers. Of course, we omit from the comparison him who spake " as never man spake." There was in his preaching such a continual self-assertion, such a sublime and holy egotism, that in this, as in every other respect, his character is unique and peculiar, and we never think of comparing him with any mere man.
There have been many gifted men, gifted by nature and grace, who have devoted themselves to the work of the ministry; God be thanked for them all, and God grant that there may be many more hereafter! but in the estimation of every one who diligently studies his character and history, Paul must stand, among all preachers, unrivalled and alone. Thoroughly to analyze his great powers is a task for which I have no talent, and my hearers, under present circumstances, would perhaps have little inclination. I mean only to present some points in connection with Paul as a preacher, the consideration of which I trust may be blessed to our benefit.
1. The first of these points is 'mentioned mainly because of its relation to what will follow. It is the remarkable adaptation of his preaching to the particular audience. He has himself stated the principle upon which he acted in seeking this adaptation: " I am made all things to all men." This saying has come to be grossly perverted, being constantly applied as a reproach to the fickle and time-serving. The apostle has just before said what perfectly explains it: "To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews;...
to them that are without law, as without law... that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some." He elsewhere declares the same principle 3 regulating his general conduct: " Even as I please all men in all things, that they might be saved."
We have striking illustrations of this, in some of his recorded discourses.
At Antioch, in Pisidia, he preached first in the synagogue, to Jews and proselytes. Here he conformed, as did Stephen in his address before the Sanhedrin, to the Jewish custom of commencing with a sketch of the national history. This would conciliate his audience, by bringing to mind facts of which they were all proud, and in which he and they had a common interest; and from one point or another of that history the speaker could easily and gracefully turn, as did Paul on this occasion, to the subject on which he wished to dwell.
The promised seed of David he declared was come in the person of Jesus. He pointed out the fact that the condemnation, death and resurrection of Jesus were in fulfilment of prophecies which they all believed. He proclaimed to them through Jesus the forgiveness of sins, and that complete justification, to the believer, which could not be obtained through the law of Moses.
He warned them not to neglect this proclamation, in language quoted from a prophet. All is from the Jewish point of view, and after the Jewish method; to the Jews he became as a Jew, that he might gain the Jews; and thus regarded, nothing could be more felicitous than the conduct of this address.
At Lystra, when he had wrought a miracle of healing, and the astonished and ignorant pagans were about to offer sacrifice to him and Barnabas, as being "the gods come down in the likeness of men," he spoke, to restrain them, a few words which contained the simplest truths of natural religion: " Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein: who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways: nevertheless, he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness." These truths were obviously appropriate to the occasion, and we learn that they sufficed to accomplish the apostle's object. But it is stated, concerning the same visit to Lystra, that "there they preached the Gospel," and that when he had been stoned, "the disciples stood round about him." We see then that his general preaching at that place was by no means confined to natural religion.
At Athens, every one has been struck by the skill with which he sought to avoid offending the prejudices or violating the laws of his hearers. He began by complimenting them as in all respects an uncommonly religious people. He availed himself of an altar " to the unknown god," to speak of the true God without incurring the penalty denounced against the introduction of new deities. In a few brief sentences, he assailed, pointedly but courteously, several leading errors which prevailed among the Athenians, particularly their idolatry and their proud conceit of distinct national origin.
He quoted, not inspired Hebrew prophets, but a sentiment found in the writings of two Greek poets, one of them from his native Cilicia. And he carefully delayed to the close his declaration of the fact, so important, yet so likely to be rejected, that Christ had been raised from the dead. Was ever any discourse more skilfully adapted?
So, when standing before Felix, he did not directly denounce the tyrant's vices, for of course he would not have been heard for a moment, but he dwelt upon the opposite virtues. To a wicked man he spoke of righteousness; to an incontinent man, of self-control; to an unjust earthly judge, of the judgment to come.
A similar skill in adaptation, and care to conciliate, is observable in the Apostle's letters. You can form a tolerably complete idea of the history and present condition of a Church, or of the character and circumstances of an individual, from his letters to such an individual or Church. And you see everywhere how observant he is of all courtesies and charities, how careful first to commend what he can in those who must on other accounts be censured, how anxious to win and save even amid his severest rebukes.
The limit to this desire to please, the Apostle has clearly defined; as when he reminds the Thessalonians that he had not practiced any trickery in preaching, nor used flattering words, nor sought glory of men; "but as we were allowed of God to be put in trust with the gospel, even so we speak; not as pleasing men, but God, which trieth our hearts." However great his disposition to conciliate, he would not sacrifice principle would never offend God, to please men.
Now, with all this variety of adaptation to particular hearers, connect 2. His adhering constantly to the great central truths of the gospel. That cross, in which alone he "gloried,"
which alone he " determined to know," is always before his mind. Widely as he ranges over the fields of truth and duty, he never loses sight of that grand central object; never ceases to feel himself in its presence.
Every doctrine, and every precept, is presented in such a way that we feel it to have relation to the atoning work of our Saviour. For instance, servants are urged to be honest and obedient, " that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things." Husbands are exhorted to " love their wives, even as Christ also loved the Church;" and wives to "submit themselves unto their own husbands, as unto the Lord; for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church." When pressing upon the Corinthians the duty of giving for the relief of their poor brethren, he adds, "Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift."
The example of Paul in this respect is not always followed. In seeking for adaptation, how often do men fail to adhere to these same great truths? Very anxious to make the sermon appropriate to the occasion, accommodated to the prejudices, or suited to the taste of the audience, they neglect to have it present the essence of the gospel to have it full of those truths which relate to sin and salvation. How much preaching, by able and earnest men, is thus comparatively lost, as to all the most important ends of preaching the gospel! Those men, and classes of men, who have been eminently useful as ministers, in actually converting sinners and building up believers, have been remarkable for constantly reiterating, in however various connections, and with whatever freshness of illustration, the same fundamental, saving truths. A glance at the history of the most successful preachers would show this to be true.
It is true now of all the really useful among " revival preachers;" and of many a plain man, whose extraordinary success it is difficult to account for, until we observe the constant recurrence in his discourses of the truths which belong to salvation. Surely the most gifted and cultivated ought to imitate this excellent peculiarity; surely right-minded hearers ought to prefer and encourage it. Let the preacher, like Paul, adapt, conciliate, please; but let him, also like Paul, bring everything into relation to our Lord and Saviour, for otherwise he is not preaching the gospel at all.
3. Observe, again, the Apostle's simplicity and directness in presenting the truth. Every one is familiar with his defence, in the beginning of the first letter to the Corinthians, of his course in this particular. We know how he was complained of for the plainness of his mode of preaching, and how he resisted all the pressure, and would not practice the artificial rhetoric which was then fashionable.
Indeed, we are unwilling to think of him as acting otherwise. Whether we consider Paul's personal character, or the fact of his inspiration, it is felt to be inappropriate and unworthy that he should be searching after mere prettinesses, should be seeking to heighten the simple loveliness of heavenly truth, by the meretricious adornments of a would-be eloquence. And there is significance in this strong, instinctive feeling. If it would have been wrong for Paul, how is it right for others, who, though humble and uninspired, are yet proclaiming the same divinely-given truths, and should be keeping in view the same sublime object, to save men's souls?
At the same time, all know that the Apostle's speaking and writing possess much of real beauty. It need not be misunderstood if we say that Paul is an eminent example of the right use of imagination. Among his remarkable combination of mental qualities, it is clear that he possessed imagination of a high order. It is not shown by elaborate and multiplied figures for mere ornament. Occasionally we meet with an unobtrusive image of exquisite beauty; as when, in the address at Athens, he represents men as groping in their blindness after an object that is near: "That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us." But his power of imagination is seen mainly in the shaping of his thoughts in general; in the clear and delicate outline given to each particular thought, whether argument or precept, as it came moulded from his mind. It is in the same way that we find the finest imagination employed by all the men who have been most truly eloquent, by Demosthenes and Daniel Webster, by Chrysostom and Robert Hall. They could not have been eloquent without possessing this faculty in an eminent degree; but they have used it, not to send off mere fireworks of fancy, but to heat into a glow the solid body of their thought. The beautiful is thus by no means abjured, but subordinated. The gratification of our aesthetic sensibilities may render great service, as auxiliary to the instruction, conviction, persuasion, which are the great objects of preaching the gospel; but it must always be held auxiliary. The poet and the novelist aim to please, and incidentally to instruct; the preacher to do men good, and to please only as contributing to this higher end.
I have a practical object in saying all this, which may justify what would else be perhaps out of place. Not a little of the preaching done by good men is weighed down by rhetoric, falsely so-called. The evil is widespread and well known. Its existence and continuance are not wholly due directly to those who preach, but result in some measure from the wrong taste of the people. The preacher is very naturally led astray by this.
He sees that the people for a time flock to hear, and loudly praise, those who speak in this fashion. He cannot do them good by his preaching unless they will hear him. It seems necessary to yield to what appears to be the popular taste, though known to be false. Especially where one possesses more imagination than sober judgment, such a process of reasoning is very likely to convince him. Some little allowance, therefore, may commonly "be made for those who show this ambitiousness of style, this effort after eloquence.
The evil must be corrected, partly by preachers themselves; but those among them who perceive and deplore it, are able to accomplish comparatively little except in their own case. It is so easy to break the force of the most unanswerable argument, coming from them, by a sarcasm, as that they only oppose that style of preaching of which they do not happen to be masters. The cure must come mainly from intelligent men who are not preachers. They can powerfully influence public sentiment, and they ought to speak their mind. There can be no question as to what all such men think on the subject, but they are often restrained from strongly expressing their opinion by a false delicacy, a mistaken respect for the ministerial office. In our age and country the relation of preacher and hearers must be freely discussed, like everything else. And the half-cultivated are everywhere doing this. The merits, not so much of different modes of preaching as of different preachers, form a prominent topic of conversation in many circles.
That bad taste which forms the most erroneous opinions on the subject is also boldest in expressing them. Thus the evil is greatly augmented by loud voices of praise or blame. Cultivated men must exert themselves to correct it, though the task should sometimes painfully conflict with their reverence for the sacred office. They must freely commend or condemn, not only general methods, but individual examples. I call upon those who have, and those who soon will have, influence over public opinion, as they value God's great appointed means of converting the world, to do what they can towards correcting the popular taste; to take every opportunity and means of showing the people what good taste requires, what alone is appropriate to the most solemn of all earthly positions, that of the man who stands up to preach the gospel.
4. Observe, in the next place, the Apostle's tenderness as a preacher. Hear him speaking of false professors: " For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ." Hear his farewell words to the elders of the Church at Ephesus: " And remember, that by the space of three years, I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears'' What a scene was that this great and inspired man, speaking to the people both " publicly and from house to house,"
warning them with tears; telling them of God's amazing love, and his tremendous wrath; of their guilt, their helpless condemnation, and the one way of salvation. Christians, too, he warned of the false teachers that should enter from without, like grievous wolves into the fold, and that should rise up among themselves; and he would weep as he entreated them to hold fast the truth as it is in Jesus, to adorn their profession, to live for the salvation of men and the glory of God.
Thus, night and day for three years, he ceased not to warn every one with tears.
And why should not Paul weep? and every preacher and every Christian weep? See the condition of our fellow-men, our friends, our kindred, as depicted, not by our wild fancy or morbid fears, but by the calm teachings of the Word of God. They are "condemned already," " the wrath of God abideth on them," their " steps take hold on hell." Can we half realize what is meant by these fearful sayings, and not weep? But worse. We tell them of the Saviour, who died that we might live, and who ever lives to save; we tell them of free pardon, of full salvation, to every penitent believer in him; of his redeeming love, his gracious invitations and precious promises. We tell of eternal bliss and eternal woe, of their own imminent and increasing danger.
We urge all that is terrible in God's wrath, all that is moving in his mercy. And they listen as calmly, they turn away as unconcerned, as though it were all a trifle or a dream. O, where is our pity, where our love, that we do not weep tears of blood? that we do not say with the Psalmist, u Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy law?"
It is well that the gospel induces tenderness, since the preacher has to speak such awful truths. It is no light thing to look into the eyes of one you know, and respect, and love, and charge him with being a vile sinner charge selfishness, and pride, and pervading ungodliness, upon what he accounts his best actions; to warn him of the wrath to come; to bid him tremble lest he receive deserved damnation, and reflect now what will be his unavailing remorse if " in hell he should lift up his eyes, being in torment." It is well that the gospel, which, along with its promise of salvation to the believer, requires us to say, " He that believeth not shall be damned," should also inspire that feeling of tenderness with which the painful duty ought to be performed.
But let us look again at the Apostle's tears. Why should Paul weep as he warned? He feared that his warning might be in vain; and often it was in vain.
With all his abilities and inspiration, men often heard without heeding; and all his exhortations in many cases failed to restrain even professed believers from shameful sin, from utter apostasy. Need we be surprised that the same thing happens now?
5. The remaining point of which I would speak is, the disadvantages under which Paul labored. This greatest of all preachers appears to have had some serious physical disqualification. Let us consider the evidence of this fact, and the lesson it teaches.
In the second letter to the Corinthians, he quotes the disparaging language of his enemies: " For his letters (say they) are weighty and powerful; but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible." Making allowance for the exaggerations of a hostile spirit, it is yet plain, even from this, that his presence was not commanding, not impressive, but rather the opposite.
In the course of his letter to the Galatians, he seeks to revive their personal affection for himself (which the Judaizing teachers had endeavored to destroy), by reminding them of the time when he commenced his labors among them. Notice his language: " Ye know how, through infirmity of the flesh, I preached the gospel unto you at the first." The word through must be here taken to mean on account of the original naturally conveys this sense, and will hardly bear another so that we understand him to say: " Ye know how, on account of bodily infirmity, I preached the gospel to you at the first." When he first arrived in Galatia, he did not propose to tarry there; but some bodily infirmity making it necessary to remain, he began to preach the gospel to them. He adds: " And my temptation (trial) which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus." The physical affection before mentioned, he here calls his trial.
He had evidently feared that on account of this physical trial they would contemptuously reject him and his message; and he sets in strong contrast with that expectation the fact that they had received him with the greatest possible respect and reverence.
In Second Corinthians, again, he speaks of certain remarkable visions with which he had been favored, above fourteen years before, which would be soon after his conversion, adding: " And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure."
Nothing could be better calculated to humble a preacher, in danger of being elated on account of his extraordinary privileges, than to suffer from some grievous bodily affection some marked distortion, it may be, of form or feature which destroyed all impressiveness of appearance, which made him continually fear lest men should "despise" and "reject" him. If it were a mental defect, or a fault of character, he might hope in some measure to correct it. But this physical disqualification, which he is utterly unable to remedy, must be a constant source of distress and humiliation. The apostle deeply felt it, and prayed earnestly for the removal of the affection. " For this cause I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness." The distressing disadvantage was not removed. He was taught that under all disadvantages Divine grace would be sufficient to uphold and prosper him, for the strength of the Lord attains its perfect manifestation when exercised through feeble instruments. And he had learned by this time to endure patiently his infirmity, as useful for his own humbling; yea, he had learned to exult in it, as conclusively showing that his great successes were due to no human influence, but to Divine power. "Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in mine infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then am I strong."
All men appreciate the great advantage, to a preacher as to any other public speaker, of a commanding and engaging appearance. We feel the effect of it, as soon as such a man arises to address us. And if the speaker's presence be not merely unattractive, but painfully and ridiculously peculiar, it inevitably diminishes the impressiveness of what he may say. Yet, be it well observed, and forever remembered, that the most useful preacher that ever lived, was in this respect signally lacking. God's strength is indeed made perfect in weakness. Let the man who truly desires to preach the gospel, and who mourns that he does not possess those physical gifts which seem almost indispensable to eloquence, take to himself with humble joy that blessed assurance, "My grace is sufficient for thee."
My hearers, one word more. The same glorious gospel which Paul preached has been handed down to us.
However feebly presented, it is "the power of God unto salvation, to every one that believeth." Paul felt him self but a vessel of clay, bearing the precious treasure of the gospel. That same precious treasure is offered to you. O, reject it not I beseech you I warn you. O, believe on that Saviour, whose ministers labor awhile, and one after another pass away, but who is himself "the same, yesterday, and to-day, and forever."
Broadus SAA: 11 The Holy Scriptures
And that from a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 2 Tim. 3: 15.*
WHATEVER we may say, it is to be admitted that there are wide and potent differences among the races of mankind. The Galatians who received Paul so joyfully, with such impulsive affection, and a few years afterward had turned away from him, were the same Gauls whom Caesar described not long before, the same as the Gallic races of mankind to-day, impulsive and changeable: and no small part of what we prize most in our civilization is to be discerned in our German forefathers, as Tacitus describes them in a beautiful little treatise he wrote about the manners, customs and character of the Germans. Many other elements of our civilization, the things that contribute most to make our life desirable, come to us from the great classic nations of antiquity. Grecian philosophy, Grecian art, Grecian poetry and eloquence, have made their mark on all that we delight in; Roman law and the Roman genius for government have much to do with what is best in our law and government. And yet, when you have made allowance for all these, ample and cordial allowance for race characteristics, and for the effect of all that is Grecian and all that is Roman, who can deny that a large part of what we prize most and enjoy most in our life of to-day has not been explained from any of those sources that it comes from the Bible, that it comes from Christianity? There are many men who think they are now so refined that they have gotten above Christianity, and yet it is Christianity that gave them the said refinement. Now, if all this is true, it ought never to be out of place nor beyond our sympathies to speak of the Bible the Bible that has done so much for all that we like best in our homes, our social life, our public institutions the Bible that has been the comfort and joy of many of those we have loved best in other days the Bible that is the brightest hope of many of us for time and for eternity the Bible that gives the only well-founded hope for mortal, and yet immortal man, in regard to the great future.
* The author has quite a different sermon from the same text, entitled, " Three Questions as to the Bible," published in tract form by the American Baptist Publication Society, Philadelphia.
" Thou hast known the holy Scriptures." That did not mean the same thing for Timothy, exactly, as for us. It meant our Old Testament; for of course when Timothy was a child the New Testament was not yet in existence. How do I know that it meant our Old Testament? How do I know that our Old Testament is a book of Divine origin? Is there any way to prove that, which is not dependent upon scholarship, which can be easily stated? apart, I mean, from its internal evidence of its own inspiration through its wisdom, power, and blessing. I know it in this way. The term " Scripture " or " Scriptures " was in our Lord's time a technical term, just as it is among us. When a man among the Jews spoke of the " Scripture," when Jesus said, " The Scripture cannot be broken," everybody understood that it meant a certain well-known and well-defined collection of sacred writings known to all his hearers. Jesus and His Apostles have testified that the " Scriptures " are divine. Now do I know what writings they were?
Yes; I know from outside sources, very varied and ample. I know from the great Jewish historian and scholar, Josephus, who expressed himself very distinctly as to the sacred books of the Jews, and declares that no man would venture to add to the number or to take away from them. I know from the Jewish writings of a later period, embodying their traditions of the New Testament time and of earlier times, the Talmud, in which the collection of sacred writings described is precisely our Hebrew Old Testament, neither more nor less. I know from Christian writers of the second century and of the third century, who made it a specialty in Palestine itself to ascertain what were the sacred books of the Jews in the time of Christ, and who definitely stated the result to be our Old Testament. Now I am not pinning my faith to the Jews and saying that these books were divine because the Jews thought so.
I am trying to ascertain what books they were which Jesus and the Apostles declared to be divine, and I learn beyond a doubt that the Jews who heard them understood, without fail and without exception, that it meant precisely what we call the Old Testament. That is a clear statement of the matter, which cannot be gainsaid and which leaves no occasion for doubt. A man may say, " Well, I find a good many things in the Old Testament that I don't see any use in, that I don't see the good of, some things that I object to." But hold! The founder of Christianity and his inspired Apostles have spoken about them, and whether you understand everything in the Old Testament or not, they have declared that the Scripture cannot be broken; that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable; that the holy Scriptures (the Old Testament) are " able to make wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus."
There is a great deal of wisdom in this world. It is wonderful that mankind, considering how foolish they are, should be so wise; and oh! it is wonderful that mankind, considering how wise they are, should be so foolish. There is a great deal of wisdom in the world; wisdom that commands the admiration of all who are fitted to appreciate it. Men are so wise about their business affairs! Just look at the great business schemes, the grand business combinations! How easily men discern the new openings for business which new inventions and discoveries offer to them! How clearly we ordinary people see, after a while, what some extraordinary man saw years before, and seized upon it and made himself one of the great business men of the time by his wisdom! I was reading, only yesterday, the life of Sir Moses Montefiore, embracing something of the life of the first great English Rothschild, and was reminded how wise those men were in understanding their times at the beginning of the century, during the Napoleonic wars, in seeing deeper into the probabilities than even great statesmen saw. There is a great deal of wisdom in the world; and this makes it all the sadder to think how few, comparatively, seem to be wise unto salvation. Nay, these wonderful human endowments and energies of ours seem often to be directed toward wisdom unto sin. Men take their splendid powers and prostitute them in the service of wickedness.
The longing to know evil is so intense in human nature! What is that early story in the dim light of the first history of mankind? We do not know much about it. We can ask a thousand questions about it that no one can answer. But this much we see clearly, A fair woman in a beautiful garden, gazing upon a tree and its fruit, and the thought suggested that it is a tree to be desired to make one wise; eat of that, and they will be independent of God, they will be themselves as God, knowing good and evil for themselves good and evil and not having to ask Him for guidance. She takes and eats, and gives to her husband, and he eats in flat, bold defiance of the great Father's prohibition.
Then their eyes were opened opened unto sin, opened unto shame. And ever since why, it is just wonderful to watch your own children and see how early they show a keen relish for knowing about wrong things; how they will get off with some villainous servant or off with some bad schoolmate, and get themselves told a lot of things that it would be so much better for them never to hear of. They do so want to know the bad things!
The growing boys are so curious about places that are characteristically places of evil. Wise unto sin! There are a great many thiugs it is better never ' to know.
There are things about which ignorance is bliss; yea, and ignorance is wisdom. There are things of which those who know least are the wisest people, and those who know most are the most foolish people. It is a matter to be thankful for, and in a good sense proud of, if a man can say, that as to the popular forms of outbreaking vice he never knew anything about them; that he never entered a place of debauchery; that he does not know the names of the instruments of gaming; that he does not know the taste of intoxicating liquors.
Happy the man who can humbly declare to a friend such blessed ignorance, such wise ignorance as that.
While men are so busy in being wise unto sin, how desirable, surely, that we should be wise unto salvation!
My friends, let us wake up a little. We sleep, we dream along through life. We say, " O yes, yes, I believe that there is another life, a future." You believe it is eternal? u Yes, I believe it is an eternal life."
And you believe in God? " Yes, I believe in God."
And you believe in Jesus Christ? " Well, yes; I suppose that is all so." And yet, living in this brief, fleeting, uncertain life, in this strange world, and admitting all these things to be true, and not wise unto salvation, and not praying to be wise unto salvation!
" The holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus." That is the way in which they do it through faith which is in Christ Jesus: for the holy Scriptures of the Old Testament are never half understood except as they are seen in the light of Christ Jesus. They all pointed forward to Christ Jesus; they all found their fulfillment, the key of their interpretation, in Christ Jesus. The Old Testament history is not merely a history of some wandering patriarchs and of a strange, wayward people of wonderful powers and wonderful propensities to evil. It is not merely a history of Israel.
The Old Testament is a history of redemption/of God's mightiness and mercies, and of a chosen nation, all along toward the promised, long-looked-for time when God's Son should come to be the Saviour of mankind.
We cannot understand the Old Testament, except we read it in its bearing upon Christ, as fulfilled in him.
I remember once a neighboring professor sent us invitations to his house for a summer evening, saying that he had a century plant which seemed about to bloom, and asking us to come and watch with them till it blossomed. It was a delightful occasion, you may fancy.
With music and conversation we passed on through the pleasant summer evening hours, on till past midnight.
Then we gathered around and gazed upon the plain, wonderful thing that had lived longer than any of us had lived, and now, for the first time, was about to blossom for the admiration of beholders. And oh! I think sometimes that Jesus Christ was the blossoming Century Plant, the beauteous Millennium Flower. All the long story of Israel meant him; and if you do find many things in the Old Testament that you do not see the meaning of, remember that they all pointed forward toward him.
Then, besides, the Scriptures not only have to be understood through him, but they make us wise unto salvation only through faith in him; because if we do not believe what the Scriptures say concerning him, how can they have their full power over us? They have a certain power. Just as the moon, when it is eclipsed, yet has some light shining upon it, reflected from the atmosphere of the earth, so the people, who do not themselves believe in the Scriptures, and do not believe in Christ Jesus with living faith, get much benefit reflected from the Christian people around them, and the Christian homes in which they grew up, and the Christian atmosphere they breathe; but they never get the full benefit which the Bible is able to give, except through personal faith in Christ Jesus. Ah! that dark lie in the garden would never have brought its baneful results for our race of mortals, if our first mother had not believed it.
A lie rejected is powerless; a lie believed is ruin. And so truth rejected cannot have its full effect upon us.
How can we get the benefit of Scripture if we do not believe in Him who is the centre and the heart and the essence and the life of Scripture, even Christ Jesus?
There is another line of thought here: " And that from a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus." Happy Timothy! His mother and his grandmother had shown an unfeigned faith, to which the Apostle himself testified. From a child they had trained him to know the holy Scriptures; and in his early youth he had met the blessed Apostle and learned from him the faith which is in Christ Jesus, and thus had become wise unto salvation. Happy Timothy! Happy, every growing child that has devout people around to point it toward the knowledge of God's Word. My friends, we who are growing old, what do we live for in this world, but for the young who are growing up around us? What would be the use of life to us, if it were not in the hope of making the life of those whom God hath given us, and those who spring up under our view, brighter and better and purer, and worthier? We ought not to think it a small matter to train the growing children in our homes, in the Sunday-school, as we meet them in society, wherever we can reach them by our influence to know the holy Scriptures. You are not doing enough if you merely tell your children sometimes, " You ought to read the Bible,"
and perhaps scold a little because the child does not read the Bible; that is not half enough. Ah! we ought to set the child an example of reading the Bible, as some of us neglect to do. We ought to make the children see, by our own daily assiduity, our own living interest, that we believe in reading the Bible and get good out of it.
We ought to talk about what is in the Bible; we ought to point out to the child this or the other- portion that is suited to his age and character and wants. We ought to talk to the child about what he is reading, to show him the application of this or that text to his daily life.
Out of the abundance of a heart that is full of the knowledge of God's Word, our mouth ought to speak often in the conversation of the family, so as to make the child feel that the Bible has gone into our soul, and that it shows itself in the glance of our eye and in the tone of our voice and in the tenor of our life. Are there many of us that do that? Dear children! there come times when our hearts grow soft and tender toward them, and we feel that we could die for them if that would do them any good; and yet here is something by which we could promote their highest, noblest, eternal welfare, and we do not have the time! Happy Timothy, who, ere he became grown, learned the faith which is in Christ'
Jesus. Happy every one who from a child has known the holy Scriptures, has learned early and God be thanked! the earlier the better to give the young heart lo Christ Jesus and dedicate the young life to His blessed service, and now is going on, trying to persuade others k) love and serve Him too.
But ah! there are many who from a child have known the holy Scriptures, and now are passing on into mature life, wise about a great many earthly things; and some of them are gray-headed and wrinkled, and some of them tottering towards the end not yet, oh, not yet wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus! There are many peculiar circumstances about growing old: the parents gone, long ago; maybe the brothers and sisters all gone, and one stands alone, like some pine smitten of the lightning in the field alone of what was once the family circle; and the friends of youth most of them gone, alas! and some of them estranged, and others so far away; new things growing up, like the bushes growing around an old pine tree, that are not akin to it; new features, new interests, new pursuits; and he who grows old finds it hard to interest himself in these things and feel the spring and buoyancy and the sweetness of life as he felt it in other days.
Alas for a man who from a child has known the holy Scriptures, and now is growing old, and has not become wise unto salvation! Alas for a man who can bear, like Atlas, the burdens of the world's affairs in the maturity of his strength and his wisdom, and who is neglecting to be wise unto salvation! Ah! if I speak to any one such person in middle life, or growing old, might I persuade him to say this day, out of an honest and humble heart, " O Jesus, of whom my mother taught me in my childhood, take me now to be Thine! "And alas! that there are so many, even in our own country, which delights to call itself Christian, who from childhood have not known the holy Scriptures; that in this, which is in some respects the brightest land of earth, and in some respects the foremost nation of earth, there are some children who do not know the looks of the outside of a Bible! They are growing up in homes where no Bible was ever seen; and there are plenty of such homes. Ought it not to be a pleasure to us to try to spread the Bible among our fellow-men? One will say, many copies are destroyed and many copies are slighted. Certainly: not every venture in business pays. There has to be a head in the books of every establishment for loss as well as for profits. There are many blossoms on the tree that bring no fruit, and many seeds fall into the ground that spring not up; but that does not prevent us from planting nor hinder us from gathering. Grant that some copies will perish, and many copies will be slighted: yet scatter the Bible, and many will read it, and not a few, by the blessing of God's grace, will thereby become wise unto salvation. It is hard sometimes to tell what is the greatest privilege of earthly life, but it does seem that just the greatest privilege of earthly life is to give to some fellow-creature the blessed Word of God, and then to try, by loving speech and living example, to bring home to the heart and conscience of those whom we can reach, the truths it contains. If we do love the Bible ourselves (and many of us do), then ought not such to delight in scattering the Bible among others? If some of us know too well that we are but poor sticks of Christians at best, and that we do not love the Bible as we ought, and do not live by it as we ought, yet shall we not at least feel, " Now here is something that I can do; here is something that I will do. I do not treat the Bible rightly myself, but I will gladly give the Bible to every one, high and low, rich and poor, in all the land, in all the world, whom I can help." O that it may be true of your children and mine, of your acquaintance and mine, that we have done them some good in bringing them to a knowledge of the holy Scriptures, and that they have all been brought, by God's grace, to the blessedness of being wise unto salvation.
Broadus SAA: 12 On Reading the Bible by Books
THE main support of all individual Christian life, the main-spring of all high Christian work, must be the truth of God. Truth is the life-blood of piety. Truth is always more potent and more precious when we draw it ourselves out of the Bible. I rode out yesterday afternoon with a kind friend among the glories of the famous avenue of Cleveland, and then away into the beautiful country region which they hope is to be Cleveland Park some day, until we passed presently a little fountain where the water, coming fresh and sweet and bright, was bursting from the hillside. The water we drink in the houses here from the lake is delightful, but there it was a fountain. There is nothing like drinking water out of a fountain. And I remembered what my Lord Bacon has said: " Truth from any other source is like water from a cistern; but truth drawn out of the Bible is like drinking water from a fountain, immediately where it springeth." Ah, this Christian work we have to-day in the world will be wise and strong and mighty just in proportion, other things being equal, as
it is directed and controlled and inspired by what we draw ourselves out of the Word of God! I have come to speak to people who want to study the Bible, who do study the Bible, who love the Bible, and would fain love it more and know it better. I am not to speak to Biblical scholars, though such are present, no doubt; I am not to speak to persons of great leisure, who can spend hours every day over their Bible; but to busy workers, most of them busy with the ordinary pursuits of human life, in their homes or places of business, and all of them busy, I have no doubt, in the varied work of Christian people in the world, and they wish to know how busy people, often interrupted in their daily reading of the Bible, and often limited for time, can make the most of this daily reading. Therefore, they will be willing, perhaps, to listen.
* Address before the International Convention of Young Men's Christian Associations at Cleveland, Ohio, May 25, 1881. This maybe had (with some additional analyses of books) in tract form from the International Committee, Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue, New York City.
I am to undertake, by request, to set forth one of the many ways of reading the Bible, which I think may have special advantages, which is often too much neglected, and which may contribute to give us intellectual interest in the Bible, and to make its study spiritually profitable. I want your kind aid in doing this, my friends. I am going to speak of an intensely practical matter in as thoroughly practical a manner as I know how, and when I am done, I shall be exceedingly glad if one and another of you will ask me questions about the subject, or about anything that has been said.
The Bible is one book; but the Bible is many books.
It is an interesting subject of reflection to look back upon the process by which men ceased calling it books and began to think of it as a book. You know that the Greek name for Bible, Ta Hagia Biblia, means the sacred books; and when they borrowed the Greek term into the Latin Biblia Sacra, it was still plural the Sacred Books. How has that Biblia come to be a singular word in our language? When the various writings of inspired men had all been completed and began to be thought of as one collection, complete in itself, and when men began to know that singular and beautiful harmony which pervades so wonderfully all this great collection of books, written by so many men, through so many long centuries, perceiving that it was not only a complete collection of books, but that they were all in perfect harmony with each other, then the idea grew upon the Christian mind that this was really one book. A very noble thought that is, to be cherished and made plain to each successive generation the internal harmony of all these various writings of inspired men.
But then we must not forget that, after all, it is many books. They were written separately; they were most of them published separately; they were originally read separately from each other; they had a separate character, a substantially separate meaning and value, a practical influence over those who read them, and they ought to behead as separate books.
Then each one of them must be read as a whole if we would understand them well. You cannot understand any book if you read it only by fragments I mean the first time you read it. A cultivated gentleman of this city remarked at dinner to-day that he was reading for the third time that beautiful book of piety, " The Memorials of a Quiet Life," reading it for the third time, fifteen minutes of every day, he said. That is very well when he is reading it for the third time; but if he had read it fifteen minutes of every day the first time, he could not have entered so fully into the meaning of the book. The celebrated John Locke has a saying on this subject in the preface to his commentary on the Epistles of Paul. He said he had found from his experience that in order to understand one of the Epistles of Paul, it will not do to take it in fragments. Why, suppose (the philosopher goes en) that a man has received a letter from an absent friend, whom he loves very much a letter full of valuable instruction to him, and that he reads a page to-day and then lays it down; the next day he, takes another page and begins at the beginning of the second page, and does not notice much what was at the end of the first page; the third day he begins at the top of the third page and reads that. How much will he know about the letter when he is done. He tells you, perhaps, " I have been reading a letter from So-and-so a letter full of valuable instruction," and you ask him what it is about; he does not quite know what it is about, and no wonder, with such a process of reading.
You must take the Epistles, says Locke, as you would take any other letter. You must take them each as a whole, and sit down and read each from beginning to end, and see what it is about. And then, if it is very valuable, you will take it afterwards in parts, not necessarily in pages, but in parts according to the subject of which it treats, and you will see what it says about this subject, and what it says about that subject, etc. That seems to be very plain common sense, and yet what a pity that the idea has not struck more widely into the minds of the Christian world!
Will you pardon a little personal reminiscence? I think that those who grow old ought to take occasion to bear their humble personal testimony to the way in which good is sometimes done for and through young men. It is a long time ago now I am almost afraid to tell you how long ago that I was a college student at the University of Virginia. One day, coming home from a lecture, Dr. McGuffey, Professor of Moral Philosophy, speaking to a student who was contemplating the ministry, said, " I want you to get Home's Introduction, and hunt up a paragraph quoted there from John Locke about the importance of reading the Bible, a book at a time, taking each book as a whole. Now, be sure to get it, and read it." The young man got it, and read it, and the thought went into his heart of reading the Bible in that way, and took hold upon him; and in order to show the impression that was made, he must mention as result that a few years later, by a series of Sunday night sermons on the life and writings of the Apostle Paul, before Conybeare and Howson were heard of in the world, treating each epistle as a whole, in the place where it occurred in the history, he crowded the aisles and crowded the doors of the church and built a new church; and a few years later still, another result was that the young man was drawn very reluctantly from the pastoral work he loved, and will always love better than anything else in this world, to be a teacher of others in this same work; and the man cannot tell to-day, as he looks back, how much of the direction his life has taken is due to the recommendation the professor gave to his student, as they walked home from the lecture.
Oh, ye people that have to do with the world's young men, you never know what some little word you speak is going to do in shaping the whole character and controlling the whole life of the man who walks by your side!
But I wish not to argue this matter, but to offer some practical illustrations of it. Let us just take up together, now, some books of the Bible, and by your very kind permission, I will address myself to the average reader, the person of average intelligence.
Take the First Book of Samuel. You want to read that book through at a sitting. How long will it take you? Forty-five or fifty minutes. Read it as you would read a Sunday-school book that one of your children brought home from Sunday-school, right straight through before you rise. Say to yourself, " What is this book about?" You find it is about Samuel, and presently it passes on to tell about Saul. Samuel continues to be his contemporary. After awhile young David comes into the history, and it goes on so till Samuel passes away and you reach the death of Saul with the end of the book. So that book has treated about Samuel, Saul and David, and you have got some idea of the general history of each of these persons, up to the death of Saul, and the time when you know that David succeeded him. Then you go to reading it again, the next day we will suppose, for you are a busy person. You take the book the next day, begin at the beginning and say, " Well now, the first part of this book is about Samuel. Let me look over it here, and see into what portions of Samuel's life it divides itself." You see pretty soon that you have first an account of Samuel's birth and childhood; secondly, you have an account of Samuel's active life as ruler of Israel; and then, thirdly, you have an account of Samuel's old age, when he had anointed Saul as King of Israel, and lived on as Saul's prophet, and finally came in contact with the youth of David. Those are the three periods of Samuel's history presented his youth, his active life as ruler, and his old age as a prophet. You take up the account of his youth, and you purpose to read as much as you can of that for this first reading. Now the best way would be to read the book three times, if you are patient enough. I know this is a terribly impatient age, and I am afraid you will not do that. I am afraid you will wish to make only two readings of the book, and we will suppose that you adopt that course, although the other is better. While you are reading this life of Samuel, then, in its several portions, you will be studying Samuel's character as a prophet, a ruler and a good man. You will be paying some attention to Samuel's mission and office in the unfolding of the history of the people of Israel; for he occupies a very unique and interesting position. You will at the same time be attending, paragraph by paragraph, without bothering yourself much about chapters, to the practical lessons which are presented to you.
" What is there here for me to imitate? What is there here for me to learn? What is there in this trait of Samuel's character, what in this experience of Samuel's life, that I ought especially to lay to heart? " You are now getting the lessons out of one portion of the life, but with a reference to the other portion, taking it all as a whole. When you have completed the life of Samuel in that way, you pass to the life of Saul. You find you have Saul's early years and Saul's later history as a division into two parts. Perhaps you mark down on a bit of paper with a pencil, or you mark down on the fly-leaf of your Bible itself, the divisions in this way. Then you take one after another and study them.
And so with the history of David as it comes in; the struggles of David's early years; then passing as you would have to do into the other book, Second Samuel, the history of David's prosperity in middle life, and finally, the history of his sore adversities in his later years. You will thus see how the struggles of his early years prepared him for his day of prosperity, and how the sins of his day of prosperity brought on his adversity and bitter sorrow, and you begin to take David's life as a whole, and see the connection of the different parts of it see how the different traits of character, good and evil, come out one after another, and apply each, one after the other, to yourself. Now, I suppose that this would be a much wiser way of reading the First Book of Samuel, than just to read one or two chapters to-day, and the next day begin to read at the next chapter, and not stop to see what there is in the former, which is the way (present company, of course, excepted!) a great many people read their Bible.
But let us turn to another kind of book. Take one of the Epistles of Paul. You will find that the books of the Bible must be treated, for our purpose, in a great variety of ways, according to their peculiar character.
Take, now, the First Epistle to the Corinthians. We will suppose that you sit down and read it straight through, and just let the chapters go. What are the chapters, and who was the chapter-maker? Not the inspired writer, as everybody knows. Chapters and verses are convenient enough, provided we use them as servants and do not allow them to be masters. You read it straight through and see what it is all about, and you will find as you read that Epistle that it treats of a number of entirely distinct subjects. They have nothing to do with each other so far as you can see. You take your pencil and mark them down as you go along. You find there are four chapters for the chapter-maker made but one grave mistake in that epistle, which is saying a good deal to his credit, more than can be said in other places there are four chapters which treat of the divisions among the Corinthians, and the fact that they made these divisions with reference to the several preachers.
This leads Paul to speak of his own way of preaching.
He would not accommodate himself to their notions of preaching, a lesson which preachers sometimes have to remember in this cranky world. Then you find two chapters in which he speaks of special evils that existed among them evils of licentiousness, and evils of getting their personal difficulties settled by heathen judges, instead of getting them settled by their own brethren for the honor of Christianity. He said, in the first place, that they ought not to have personal difficulties to settle, and, in the next place, if they had them, they ought to get them settled by their own brethren and not go to the heathen for it.
Then you find the seventh chapter treats of questions pertaining to marriage, about which they had written inquiring of the apostle. Then you go on and you will see that chapter 8, 9 and 10 talk about the question of eating meat which had been offered to idols. That was a grave practical question among them, far graver than many questions that we dispute about now-a-days, though to us it is dead and gone, just as many of our questions of dispute will be dead and gone in the coming centuries, and men will wonder what in the world made those good people of the nineteenth century spend so much time over matters that will seem to them of no consequence whatever. Those three chapters treat of the eating of meat offered to idols, and in connection with that the apostle indicates the right course by the course that he pursued. By the way, let me mention what his argument is there. It is familiar to most of you. He says: "Now grant that this meat offered to idols is not different from any other meat. The idols are nothing, and the meat is just the same as it was before it was laid on the altar. Yet if your weak brother cannot get over the old idolatrous associations, cannot eat it without a revival of the old reverence for the idol, and without its carrying him back to sin, oh! had you not better let it alone, even if it is innocent for you, for the sake of your brother?" And I think sometimes, Oh! that we could content ourselves with that principle in regard to some practical questions of to-day that argument which our fathers employed about the use of intoxicating drinks, for instance; grant that it may be innocent for you, yet if it leads your brother into sin, cannot you let it alone for your brother's sake? "Then besides," the apostle says, "you had better not be too sure that this thing is innocent for you, for, before you know it, it may get you into trouble too." That is what I should call "A calm view of Temperance." But this by the way.
Then, to proceed with the Epistle, you find that chapters 11 to 14 treat of abuses that had arisen at Corinth in connection with their public worship. A variety of abuses are mentioned. Most of them refer to the disorderly conduct of their public worship, when ever so many of them would want to speak at once, and they would not sit down as gracefully as I saw gentlemen do this afternoon in the social meeting. They would go on talking together, and were not willing to give up to each other. Some of them were proud that they had special gifts, and others jealous because they did not have the like, and the apostle tells them that all this must be managed in decency and in order, and that Christian love is a far brighter, sweeter, nobler thing than all the special gifts. Just here please let the chapters alone, for what you call the 13th chapter of I. Corinthians comes right in as a part of his teaching about this matter of the displaying of gifts, the ambition, the jealousy, etc, and you have no business reading the first portion of that chapter without noticing how it links on with what precedes at the end of the twelfth chapter, and without noticing how the end of it is connected with the chapter that follows. It blazes like a diamond on the bosom of Scripture, but then it fastens Scripture together.
The fifteenth chapter of I. Corinthians treats of the Resurrection, and the sixteenth contains some practical information, etc.
Now you have half a dozen entirely distinct subjects here. You have observed that, and you have marked it down. Then you take the subjects up one at a time, and study them.
You will find some other epistles in which you cannot make that sort of absolute division this topic, and then another topic, and then a third topic but the writer goes from one thing to another, and then perhaps comes back to the first subject. Still, in a good many of those cases, you can find that there is some one thought that is the keynote to the whole. Take the Epistle to the Philippians, for example. It is quite short; you can read it all through in less than half an hour. You ask yourself, What is this all about? What is the main idea here? for you perceive that you have not here several topics, as in First Corinthians. The main idea, however, is Christian joy.
"Rejoice in the Lord." Wonderful idea, when you remember that the man who wrote the letter to the Philippians was a prisoner chained, his life subject to the caprice of the most terrific tyrant the world has ever seen. And he was writing to a church poor and persecuted, which had sore trials awaiting it in the future.
Yet, in the midst of all this, Paul writes to his persecuted brethren, and the key-note of what he says is, " Rejoice in the Lord." It is true that, in the middle of the Epistle, he apologizes for saying it so often. He says, " To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous." He thought it might be grievous to them.
Before he gets through with it he says it two or three times more, and at the end he breaks forth, "Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice!" Our beloved brother Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, was yet a man of like passions with ourselves, and as our Saviour himself showed humanness none the less genuine because so blended with the Divine nature, in the unity of his one person, and that humanness of his sweetly draws us toward the Divine; so it is with the humanness of the sacred writings too, and we may feel the touch of human thinking, and the glow of human feeling, and not lose at all our reverence for the divinity that is in it all.
What is the key-note of the Epistle to the Ephesians?
It is the unity of Christians. The dispute of many years whether the Gentiles should become Jews is not ended, but the apostle urges that the Christians are one, Jew or Gentile. That was the widest idea that ever existed among Christians in this world. None of our divisions of sect, of country or of race is half so hard to overcome as was that question of the junction of Jewish Christian and Gentile Christian, and the apostle's great thought in that Epistle is that all are one in Christ Jesus. The Epistle was intended apparently to be sent around as a sort of circular letter to many churches, but that is the key-note. I do not say that everything in Ephesians is about unity directly and immediately, and if you get hold of that idea, the danger is that you will carry it too far, and will find it in many places where it is not. At least, if you do not, brethren of the laity, you will be wiser than brethren of the ministry often are.
But you will find another kind of books. We are supposing you are examining for yourself. Of course, it will be very convenient if you get some of the works which give analyses of the books of the Bible, and tell the topics they treat of. That is helpful, especially helpful in enabling one at the outset to see how to take hold of the matter. But, oh, it is so much better to have a little rude analysis you have made yourself; because that treats of the thing the way it looks to your mind, and you are able with that, though it may not be half so good as one you may find in the work of another, to get more of the sacred thought which this book suggests to your own mind. In many of these sacred books you cannot find one key-note, nor a division into separate topics, but you will find some subject that pervades the whole and gives unity to it in some other way.
Let us take the great Epistle to the Romans. Some people think the Epistle to the Romans is tremendously hard to understand. I remember a time when I found it right hard to believe. I used to say that certain portions of it were the most difficult writing I knew of in any language that is the way young fellows talk, you know, and sometimes old fellows have not gotten over it. I used to say that certain portions of it were surpassingly obscure. And why? It seems to me now and I mention it because the thought may be worth considering that there never would have been any great difficulty in seeing what the apostle meant to say, if I had only been willing to let him alone and let him say what he wanted to say. But I had my own notions as to what ought to be said on that subject, and what ought not to be said, and you see the plainer he was in saying what he wanted and what I did not want, the harder I found it to make him mean something else.
You find at once, as you read this Epistle rapidly through, that it breaks into two parts. Eleven chapters contain doctrinal arguments and instruction and then five chapters treat of practical matters only slightly connected with the doctrinal matters. The first eleven doctrinal chapters treat of justification by faith, and the first three of them give the whole substance of this doctrine.
They show that the Gospel reveals the righteousness of God, which is by faith, and then they show why men need justification by faith because they cannot find justification in any other way their works will condemn them, and if they find it at all, it must be by faith. This takes up the first and second chapters and a part of the third, and then the remainder of the third chapter tells about this provision which God has made for justification by faith, and how beautifully this provision works to take all the pride out of repentant souls and humble them into receiving the great salvation that God gives. The fourth and fifth chapters only give further illustration of justification by faith. They say that Abraham himself was really justified by faith (one whole chapter is given to this), and that this matter of our being justified through the effect of Christ's work of salvation is only paralleled by the effect of Adam's sin upon his posterity. This takes a great part of the fifth chapter. These are mere illustrations, you see, from the case of Abraham and from the effect of Adam's sin illustrations of the idea of our being justified through faith in the Saviour. Then you come to chapters 6, 7 and 8. You find that they treat of justification by faith from another point of view, viz.: In its bearings on the work of making men holy, i. e, of sanctification. Then the next three chapters are on the privileges of the Jews and Gentiles. So you see that the Epistle divides into different departments of the one topic, and after you have read it through several times, and tried to find out the line of thought in it, and been willing to let the apostle mean what he wants to mean, whether you like it or not, I think you will find that the subjects considered are not so very difficult. Of course, there are questions we can ask about them at once that nobody can answer, but we must content ourselves with what is taught us.
Take another kind of book: The Epistle to the Hebrews. There you find there is a line of argument, and one set of practical applications that runs through the whole letter, so that there are not half a dozen sentences in the Epistle which you can properly understand without reference to the entire thought of it as a whole. You must have that before your mind all the time. Now what is the practical object of this Epistle? Well, after trying persecution upon the Hebrew Christians, they tried argument, and persuasion; they used cunningly devised reasoning against Christianity. You can see it yourself, if you look at the Epistle and think about it. They said, We used to think that your Christianity was only one form of Judaism; but since you seem to have got the idea of cutting loose from Judaism and setting up your Christianity as a religion by itself, why, don't you see that it is no religion, that it is entirely inferior to the religion of our fathers? You had better give it up, and come back and be Jews and nothing but Jews. The religion of our fathers was given through the holy angels at Mount Sinai. Are you going to turn away from it?
The religion of- our fathers was given through the great and revered Moses. Are you going to abandon Moses?
The religion of our fathers is a religion, with its magnificent temple, its smoking altars, its sacrifices, its incense, its robed priesthood, its splendid ritual. The religion of our fathers is a religion indeed! And what is your Christianity, if it is to set up for itself? Hadn't you better abandon Christianity? And the sacred writer replies, Nay! I will take their own arguments, and turn them all against them. He says, " The religion of our fathers was given through the angels at Mount Sinai, but Christianity was given through the Son of God, and as the Son of God is revealed in the Old Testament to be incomparably superior to the angels, so is Christianity superior to Judaism. The religion of our fathers was given through the great and revered Moses, but Moses was only, as it is said in Deuteronomy, a faithful servant in all the house, and the founder of Christianity is above him as the son of the household is above the servant. The religion of our fathers has its outward forms of worship, but they are only the pictures of the realities in the glorious world beyond those clouds through which our great High Priest passed, like the Jewish high priest through the vail of the temple, where lies the true Holy of Holies in the other world.
And thither he has gone, bearing not the blood of bulls and goats, but his own precious blood, offered not every year, but once for all, and all sufficient, and there he stands, not for a little time while they wait without till he appears again, but there he ever liveth interceding for them that come to God through him, and so is able to save to the uttermost." Don't you see that he takes every one of their own arguments and turns them right against them to show the superiority of Christianity?
And the practical bearing of it, all the time, is, Therefore don't abandon Christianity and go back to be a mere Jew; don't give up your faith in Christianity; see the evils of unbelief and apostasy. As I said, there is hardly a sentence in the whole Epistle, the full purport of which can be understood unless you bear in mind its relation to this line of argument.
Let me give another illustration in that direction. I think in practical experience one of the hardest books in the Bible to treat as a whole, is the book of Job. Yet I do not think it very difficult to get the general outline of the book if you address yourself to that task, provided you will not allow the beautiful poetic phraseology to prevent you from seeing the line of thought. You see that in the first place you have the prosperity of Job described, and then the sore trials that were allowed to come upon him. How sore they were, and how he stood all the trials! Then you have his friends coming to him and treating him better than people among us sometimes treat their friends who are in affliction. For they go and talk them half to death, and Job's friends sat how many days and nights was it? before they even spoke a word; and then they go to talking about him.
The theme of their talk is one of the greatest subjects of sorrowful human thought in all the ages of the world. What is the meaning of sore afflictions when God lets them come upon men? It is a question that has not been answered yet one of the questions the full answer to which, if it ever enters into finite minds, must be reserved for the better light of the better world.
But how much light is given upon it in that book? You see that these friends of Job are mistaken on this subject, and they say many things about it that are not strictly true. They are said from a perverse point of view and with a mistaken idea of the matter. I have heard people quote sayings of those men as sayings of Scripture, when it ought to be understood that the Scripture says that those friends of Job said certain things on that occasion, and how far they are exactly right will have to be judged by looking at the book as a whole, and cannot be judged otherwise. Now take one man at a time and ask, what does he say? And then how does Job reply to him? You will find that at first they take hold of the subject delicately. They say, "The Almighty is just; he prospers all good men; he never sends sore trials upon a man unless that man has deserved it." They do not say yet, " You have deserved all these sore afflictions." They hint it. And then Job begins to reply; he gets warm with the argument; he sees what they are hinting at; he says: " I have not committed any enormous sins, greater than men around me, to bring on me these great afflictions." Then they come squarely to the point and say, " Oh, Job, yon had better confess it. The Almighty has found you out.
"We never knew that you were a very bad man; we thought you were a very good man. Everybody thought so; but the Almighty has laid his finger upon you, and that shows that you have committed great sins, and you had better confess them now, and maybe you will be forgiven." Job warms still more; he lifts his hand to high heaven, and says: " God knows that I have not committed any such great sins as you speak of at all.
Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might get away from you who will not do me justice, and do not understand me. Before him I could argue my case."
And so the discussion goes on, in an extremely interesting way, the great thought being, whether great sufferings do prove that a person has been guilty of extraordinary sins. Then a young man comes in, and it is a lesson which old men would do well to lay to heart the young man talks more wisely than all the old men had done, though he does not explain the matter yet; still he says: "Ah, the Almighty is greater than we, and we must not expect to understand all about him; we must try to submit ourselves to his ways, even though we do not understand them." And then Jehovah himself appears.
I remember how, when I was a lad, I was first reading the book of Job, with some help in getting the idea, and when I reached this point my heart took a leap. I said: " Now Jehovah himself appears, and he will clear the whole matter up." But he does not; he simply says: "Who are you? What are you talking about?
What do you know? What power have you? What wisdom have you to survey the universe and compass eternity? Why should you expect to understand everything? Remember how great am I and remember how little are you, and bow yourselves in humility, even where you cannot understand." And oh! friends and brethren, amid all our wide, wild questionings in life and rightful questions too, if they are not mad the loftiest knowledge in human life is to learn how to be willing, when we cannot understand Jehovah's ways, to bow to Jehovah's will, and put our sole trust in him.
There is only one more book that I shall mention for illustration. Do you read the book of Revelation in your family much? Do you preach about it much in your pulpit? I do not know whether to hope that you do or do not, because a great deal of the preaching about this book, and writing about it that I have come in contact with, would better have been let alone, according to my judgment; but the greatest evil that happens about it is, that a great many good people are led to neglect the book of Revelation. I asked a very able minister once, " Do you pay much attention to the book of Revelation?" He said, " No. I have no opinion of these calculations of prophecy, that have been made a hundred times over, and a hundred times over have turned out failures. I don't believe those men know anything about it, and I am sure I don't.
And so I think I had better read somewhere else."
Meantime, get your little child to say, if your child has heard the Bible read much, whereabouts you shall read the next time, and see if the child does not say, " Please turn over there to that last part and read that again."
There is much in the book of Revelation that takes hold upon children. Allow me to mention a personal reminiscence of something that touched me very much.
Years ago, when my family included servants, I used to try very hard to get the servants and the children interested in the family worship. I tried the parables; I tried the life of our Lord; I tried many other parts of the Bible; sometimes they were interested, and sometimes not, and at length it occurred to me, " Now I will see if they will not be interested in the Revelation, that contains so much beautiful imagery." So I began, and I found that the servants and the children were very much interested for several days. I tried to explain a little, and I could do that very well for the first few chapters about the churches, etc, and could explain the scene of worship in heaven in the fourth and fifth chapters.
Then we got on into the opening of the seals and the sounding of the trumpets, and I stopped explaining, for a reason that you can perhaps conjecture. But I did not stop reading. They told me to go on with it. They all seemed to be interested. At length, after many days, we were far over in the middle of Revelation, and I was reading some of that splendid, solemn, impressive imagery that is there presented like the unrolling of a mighty panorama, scene after scene of wonder and power, and struggle and conflict, and hope and promise and one day as I was reading I looked up through my tears and all the circle, from the aged grandmother down to the little child, were in tears too. You may say we did not know exactly what it was about. Yes, we did.
It was about God about God looking down on this world of ours, about the sorrows and struggles of this human life and the fact that God sees it all, is watching and controlling it all.
I have mentioned this for a purpose. I beseech you, read the book of Revelation. If you have no definite views as to the predictive portions of the book (and I have not, I confess), let them alone, but read for the sake of practical instruction; that the book may bring Jesus, the exalted Redeemer, close to you; that it may make clear to you the idea that heaven is the headquarters of the Christian, from which the angels come as messengers to bring the word of command, and carry back word as to what is going on in this battlefield of life. The book of Revelation tells us that these sorrows, temptations and trials are to end at last in complete victory, and in everlasting peace and joy. And to get sentiments like these, oh ye cultivated men and women, in this cultivated age of ours to get tender, devoted, loving sentiments like these deeply impressed upon loving hearts, is worth all culture that falls short of them.
Now, I have just two or three remarks to make in conclusion. If we read the Bible by books, first taking each book as a whole, then seeing how it is divided up, then taking the several divisions and treating them, and so coming down to details, we shall learn in that way, and learn for ourselves how to interpret the several parts of Scripture with reference to their connection. Everybody will agree that you ought to look at the connection of a passage of Scripture. I remember one day my father said he did not like to find fault with preachers, but he wished some of them would pay more attention to the connection of the text, as the preacher that morning did not do. I suppose they have grown wiser since that day, and always do pay attention to the connection now.
But in talking about it my father said, " Now, I can prove to you out of the Bible it was an illustration to a little child that there is no God." He got his Bible, opened it to a certain place, put his finger down and said, " Come here and read; " and the boy read, " There is no God," and it began with a capital T, too, as if it were a complete sentence. Then my father lifted his finger and said, "How is that? 'The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.' " " Now," he said, " don't you see, you must always attend to the connection."
That was a very simple lesson, certainly. What is the connection of a passage of Scripture? Only the other part of the sentence? Well, there are preachers sometimes who do not attend even to the other part of the sentence, and it may be true of some other persons besides preachers.
But is that all the connection, only a sentence before or after a particular passage you are considering? Sometimes that is all, but in other cases it is a page or two that is the connection, and, as I have said, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in the book of Job, it is the whole book that is the connection; you cannot be sure that you are getting the precise point of view and the real meaning of any one of the sentences, unless you take it as a part of the whole, and with reference to the whole line of thought and practical design. You see how important it is that we should learn to study every particular expression of Scripture in its connection. It is a very beautiful thing to pick out the passages of Scripture that treat of some particular subject, as you can do with the help of a concordance, and put them together in a mosaic. It is like taking many pebbles and combining them, as the Romans were fond of doing, into a mosaic. That is a very delightful thing, only be sure about your material. Take care that you see where these things come from, and that you have got them right. No man would be so unwise as to take out of the Epistle of Paul, " A man is justified by faith without the works of the law,"
and then take a fragment out of James, " We know that a man is justified by works and not by faith only," and lay those two together and say, " How beautiful is the harmony of Scripture! " We know we must see what Paul was talking about and to whom he was talking, and to what sort of persons James was talking, and what he was talking at, in order to judge what each meant by this particular form of expression; we dare not put those two passages side by side and neglect the connection. Now in many other cases the difficulty and danger are not so obvious, but they may be just as real.
So often, when a man with his concordance is picking out passages that all contain a certain word or refer to a certain subject, and laying them all together in a beautiful picture to please the eye, it is as if he made a mosaic in this fashion: Here is a pebble and there is a diamond; here is a crumb of sugar and there is a flower bulb; and those make a mosaic, do they? A mosaic is a beautiful thing, but your materials must be harmonious.
You must know where these things come from. You must understand their connection, or else you will break living things all to pieces, in order to build up the dead fragments into a dead thing.
Then another remark. Each of these sacred books has its special aim and practical value, and we ought to try to get the practical impression that each of them is designed to make. For instance, each of the Gospels presents certain aspects of the life, character and work of our Lord. Those aspects are often overstated in the books about them, but you can catch the matter practically. Next year when we shall all be studying the Gospel of Mark, in Sunday-School lessons, the attention of half the Christian world will be turned to those particular aspects of the life, character and teachings of Jesus which are presented in that Gospel. You read one Gospel to see how that presents Jesus, and each of the other Gospels to see how it presents him, and if you have done that and then try to blend them all together in your loving faith, and reverence and humble desire to live like him, God being your helper, and to bring others with you to follow him too, you have made the most beautiful harmony of the Gospels that ever is made in this world. So as to other portions of the Scripture. "We ought to get the devout and practical inspiration which each particular book is designed to give, and these, one after another, will unite themselves together in the symmetry of a complete Christian character, and the fulness and power of a true Christian life.
It is not an accident, brethren, that in this age, in which infidelity has anew become blatant and arrogant, the Bible is more studied than ever it was before. It is not an accident that there is a new demand, throughout the Christian world, springing up for Biblical, expository preaching. There has not been such a desire outside of Scotland, the great and noble home of expository preaching, for many generations. It is not an accident that these Bible-readings, which have done so much in our time, and will do so much, have become popular just now. People don't know about believing the preacher nowadays, and a great many people don't know about acknowledging the authority of a church as they once did; but the people who come to hear the gospel, if you bring them something right out of the Bible, not a broken, dead fragment, but a part of the living whole, full of the true, divine life, and show them its meaning as God has taught it, and lay that meaning, explained, upon their hearts and their lives, the people everywhere respond to that; they like it; they feel that that is good. It is not an accident that in a time when infidelity is so bold and noisy, there has come this revived love of Bible-study and Bible-preaching, Bible-readings, Bible-classes and Bible-work in general.
They say that the cultivated mind of the age has had enough of the Bible. Does it look as though people had stopped reading the Bible? You see men in the streetcars reading the New Testament. When I passed through Cincinnati on Monday, I ran to a book-store to get a copy of the Revised New Testament, and I saw a man buy, before my eyes, the last copy they had, out of a thousand sold over the counter that morning. God be thanked for this revived demand for it. But, oh, men and brethren, we do not read the Bible as we ought to read. It is easier to eulogize the Bible than to love it.
It is as easy to praise as it is for some poor, silly opposer to make sport of the Bible. Dr. Johnson said that a man of real wit would be ashamed to make jests about the Bible, because it is too easy to do. It is just as easy to eulogize the Bible and then to neglect it.
I have spoken with the hope that I might by God's blessing awaken in some of you at least a greater desire to read the Bible attentively, and I pray God that we may all turn away' with an earnest promise in our own souls, before him who knows the heart, that in the remainder of our lives we will try to love his word more, to read it more wisely, and to live more according to its blessed teachings.
If anybody wishes to ask questions about these matters, and you are willing to listen a few minutes, I shall be glad to answer them if I can.
Q. You spoke of analyses. What analyses would you recommend?
A. The analyses which are contained in Home's Introduction are very good for this purpose. It is an old book which can be picked up anywhere. The analyses in Angus's Bible Hand-book are short and very good for this purpose.
Q,. If a person has read the Bible through two or three times, and has a general idea of it, would you advise his stopping that plan, arid spending the time on separate books?
A. The best of all ways, of course, would be to read the Bible in three different ways at once, if a man had time for it to read very rapidly through the Bible once or twice a year, also read some books carefully, and daily some small portions as a part of private devotions. But I should say that most persons would find it better, instead of continuing to read it through in the way you mention, to take a book and study in the way I have indicated.
Q. What book would you advise a young convert to begin with?
A. Well, that would depend upon his previous Bible knowledge and general intelligence. But I think that there is nothing so important for the young Christian as to read the story of Jesus himself as told in the Gospels.
The whole thought and feeling of our time seems to gather itself about the idea of Jesus. That is the citadel of the Scriptures for attack and defence, and that is the heart of the Scriptures for love. I should say to the young convert, " Read the Gospel of Mark; then read Matthew, Luke and John."
Q. Would you advise haste in going from one book to another before you have got the best judgment ou one?
A. It would depend upon your knowledge of Scripture whether you should go rapidly. It would depend upon your own staying qualities, too.
Q. If you wanted to impress a skeptical man, who was seeking sincerely for light, with the inward truth of the Scripture, what book would you advise him to begin with?
A. Oh, I should give him the Gospels, and tell him, " Try to get near to Jesus Christ; try as you read it to seem to be looking at him and listening to him."
Q. Would you advise the reading of books of the New Testament and books of the Old together for the light they throw on one another?
A. That is very desirable sometimes. Leviticus and Hebrews may be read together very profitably; or Matthew and Isaiah. There are different expedients that each person will discover and adopt according to his own judgment and advantages.
Q. Do you recommend the use of the marginal references?
A. They are very desirable indeed, provided you pay attention to the connection which you find referred to.
You must not take them as scraps, and put them where they are cited as if they belonged there. You must remember where they do belong.
Q. What brief word of counsel would you give in regard to the use of commentaries?
A. Well, it would be this: Be sure you get the very best commentaries there are; for there are commentaries and commentaries.
Q. Will you please recommend one?
A. Well, that is a very hard thing to do here. Use your commentaries all that you can, provided you do not read them instead of reading the sacred text. Head the Bible itself in its own connection, and commentaries to help. I remember a singing-master from whom I took lessons when a lad. When the ladies would not beat time, he used to stop and say, " Why don't you beat time? Ladies, if you can't sing and beat time both, stop singing and beat time." If you can't read the Bible and commentaries both, let commentaries alone.
Q. Would you advise the marking of Bibles?
A. Yes; mark them in every way.
Q. Would you not advise much prayer and communion with God in the study of the Bible, in order to a better understanding of it?
A. Oh, assuredly I should advise prayer and communion with God. I ought not to have taken that for granted. I blame myself that I did not say that. We ought to pray to God every time, for that is the heart of the matter.
Q. A young man asked me to ask you, how should we learn to love the study of the Bible?
A. Well, that is a good question; but, like a good many others of the wisest questions, the answer cuts deep. To love the reading of the Bible more, we v must love him more of whom it tells us. And then, by reading the Bible more, we shall learn to love him more.
And then, by trying to live the way the Bible 'tells us to live, we shall read it with more satisfaction and understanding. For if any man is willing to do the will of God, he will know concerning the doctrine.
Q. Would you advise regular hours for Bible study?
A. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Regular hours for reading the Bible, and irregular ones to boot. It depends upon your mode of life what hour is to be chosen.
Q. Would you recommend the morning hour rather than the evening?
A. That depends upon whether you are an early riser. I do not think you can lay down any law in regard to that matter. Everybody must find out for himself what his circumstances and his habits will allow him to do most profitably.
Broadus SAA: 13 Ministerial Education
Give diligence to present thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, handling aright the word of truth.
2 Timothy 2: 14.
I WISH first to indicate some of the leading thoughts in this passage of Scripture, in the second chapter of second Timothy, beginning at the 14th verse. The apostle is speaking to Timothy, not only with reference to his own duty, but to the qualifications of the men who are to be selected as ministers of the gospel, and whom he must instruct. Addressing Timothy himself, he says: " Give diligence to present thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed."
The image is obvious to all. A minister of the gospel is compared to a mechanic, a skilled workman, a man who has stood the test and is approved, and then his skill in his work is shown by the added phrase, " a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, handling aright the word of truth." The term means literally " cutting straight,"
as you read in the margin. Perhaps the phrase came from the idea of a carpenter cutting a straight line with his saw; possibly from Paul's early trade. It required a very skillful workman to cut straight with scissors Sermon before the Missouri Baptist Educational Society, at Liberty, Mo. (the seat of Wm. Jewell College), in 1881.
the rough hair cloth of which they made the Cilician tents. Whatever be its origin, the term denotes, in a general way, skillful work a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, cutting straight, handling aright the word of truth. A skilled workman is the minister. Then the apostle proceeds to indicate for Timothy himself, and for the faithful men to whom these things are to be committed that they may teach others also, the importance of knowing how to avoid seductive and ruinous errors.
He says of these, " charge them that {hey strive not about words," mere logomachies, " to no profit. Shun the profane babblings." Presently he mentions examples, Hymenseus and Philetus, who had thought that the resurrection was a mere spiritual resurrection and past already, and had overthrown the faith of some, and Timothy and the other ministers must know how to shun these hurtful errors. If they do so, they shall be like the gold or silver vessels, honored in the Master's house. Another point about them is that they must not be given to mere babbling. " Foolish and ignorant questionings refuse, knowing that they gender strifes."
The word is literally "fightings" or "battles," and the Lord's servant must not strive, must not be a fighter.
In another sense, of course, we all know that the Scriptures teach that we must fight, but you see what is meant here. It is so easy for a man to be a fighting minister!
Some men are fighting ministers for the very reason that they have not what the apostle here enjoined. The Lord's servant must not be a fighter, but must "be gentle, apt to teach, forbearing in meekness, correcting them that oppose themselves." Many a man is a fighting preacher because he does not know how to do anything else. It requires some wisdom and some skill to teach aptly, to correct with gentleness and meekness the errors of those who oppose themselves, and try to win them to the truth; but just to fight requires no skill at all.
You see, then, this passage presents very varied qualifications for the minister of the gospel spiritual and mental qualifications combined. Of the mental qualifications, you see that it indicates some that belong to men by nature and others that come by cultivation; and as to the qualifications that come from cultivation acquired skill these come partly in the actual exercise of the duties of the minister, but they may come all the better if there be special early training for it. Take the image of the mechanic. " The only way to learn to preach is to preach," the fathers used to say. Certainly.
The only way to learn to saw is to saw, or to learn how to make horse-shoes is to make them. At the same time, it is the experience of mankind that while some men take up these pursuits and acquire some skill merely from their practice, yet it is usually better for a man who proposes to be a mechanic, to work in his early attempts under the guidance and with the correction and encouragement of those who are far ahead of him in experience; and if men have found that so in all the mechanical arts, why should we be surprised to find it so in the great work of life of which the apostle speaks? " A workman that needeth not to be ashamed."
Our passage, then, brings before us the great subject of the qualifications and the training of ministers of the gospel. Where do we stand to-day, my brethren, as to ministerial education? What is the duty of to-day in regard to it? As to our past, there is in it much to be thankful for, and of course much to lament. I believe, for my part, that the theory of the Baptist churches as to the ministry of the gospel is a right theory, substantially.
That theory has always been that the ministry of the gospel ought not to be restricted to men who have been over a certain fixed course of mental training in order to it, but that every one should be encouraged to preach who feels moved to preach, and whom the churches are willing to hear. At the same time, it has always been the theory that every minister of the gospel should seek to be a competent and enlightened man in general, and in particular that he must be a man who has sound views of the teaching of the Scriptures, and knows how to explain them to others. Our brethren have never held that it was a good thing for a minister to be ignorant, but they have held that it was not a disqualification for a minister to be destitute of this or that particular kind of mental training, provided only that he had some power to preach, and people were willing to hear him. That theory I think is right. It is what the Scriptures enjoin. It is what was true of the early teachers of the gospel not only the inspired men, but others. It has been an absolute necessity for this new country of ours.
I have profound respect for the ministry of the Presbyterian and Episcopal brethren, for instance, but I wonder sometimes what in the world would have become of the masses of the people in America if all the religious persuasions had done as they have done with reference to the ministry. They have had for themselves a cultivated ministry, in general, and they have had all the benefit of this select and exclusive arrangement as to the ministry, and some of them all the pride of it which is natural. But if it hadn't been for the great Methodist and great Baptist bodies, and some others like them, who have encouraged men to preach that were destitute of this artificial course of training, what in the world would have become of the masses of the people? It has been bad enough as it was; it would have been flat ruin if all denominations in our new country, where most of' the lawyers and most of the doctors have been men without any special training, had insisted that it should be otherwise with the ministry.
I am not ashamed, therefore, of the fact that I belong to a body of Christians which has a great number of comparatively uneducated ministers. I think that in our past this has been unavoidable. I think it has been a necessary part of trying to see the gospel as it is and do our duty to the people among whom we were cast. But things are changing. Oh, how fast they change! A man who comes from my part of the world to this, finds that all his knowledge of geography has vanished. He does not know anything about the country at all.
States that were thought new when some of us can remember, are old States now, and all around me I hear people talk of "going West," which seems strange to me. Things are changing, changing fast as to education, and we must change with them, and if our Baptist churches have not wisdom to see that the conditions which justified our past as to our ministry are changing and rapidly ceasing to justify them, then they will pay the penalty of their lack of wisdom. It may be that we have gone too far even in the past, and that some are going too far now in encouraging the entrance of men into the ministry who are unfitted for it; some unfitted by their grievous ignorance, and others still more ruinously unfitted I pray you agree with me in the statement by their lack of sense. For I can find you ignorant men who ruin the Queen's English and yet have sense and character and have done great good; and I can find you men that can speak passable English enough, and even prate about the learned languages, but from sheer weakness and silliness have always been a disgrace to the ministry. It may be that some of us are going too fast now, in some parts of the country, towards the opposite extreme inclining too much to take up the other idea, that all ministers ought to have a certain artificially-fixed kind and grade of preparation for their work. It may be, my brethren, that in connection with institutions of learning we are somewhat prone to go from the one extreme to the other; and if that be so, we ought to look the danger in the face and guard against it.
What I wish to speak of, then, is our present duty as to ministerial education. And I have three points of remark about it.
first, Ministerial education must go hand in hand with general education. It ought to keep in advance; but it cannot be, as a general thing, far in advance of the education of the people. They must go together.
Why, with our free system of choice, you cannot get the churches to prefer a well-educated man, unless they have some education themselves. A man who has been reared among intelligent people and has been well educated, and who then goes to preach among the very ignorant, is startled to find how prejudiced they are against his ideas and against him. You will pardon a very homely illustration of it, egotistical in addition.
I remember to have had the honor, twelve or fifteen years ago, to be elected pastor of a very large country church in Upper South Carolina the largest country congregation I ever saw where there were many noble people, too; but they had just been gathered in by hundreds, by good men, and never taught from the pulpit that there were any Christian duties to perform. At the end of a year of earnest attempt to preach there, with many encouraging results, I had the cheering intelligence that a good sister in the neighborhood had said, with reference to the justly beloved old man who had preceded me, that she "had rather hear dear old Uncle Toll give out one verse of a hime than to hear that 'ar Greenville preacher go through a whole sarmon." You will pardon me, for I wanted to illustrate the fact that ignorance, like a shell-fish, secretes a coating of prejudice that hardens all around it. If you could make all your ministers educated, as long as the mass of people are comparatively uneducated, they would often not want them. So the two must go together.
Moreover, it is a thing very easy to happen, and which sometimes does happen with all our precautions against it, that a certain class of men are educated away from the people. It is not true of the highest class of men.
The highest class of men, whatever they may learn, will not forget the language of the people, and will not fail to be able to bring all their highest efforts in reach of common minds. But it is true of some men of very respectable ability that, struggling themselves after what they call " education/' they get away from all sympathy with the common mind. They don't know how to talk to the people. This happens with some, not from lack of intelligence of some kinds; it is from lack of imagination, from lack of intellectual sympathy with other minds, from lack of the power to comprehend the way that people in general look at things. I have known men very noble men in all their aims and aspirations, and men very wise in some respects who could not get hold of the people at all, because they didn't know how people in general think about things, and couldn't present things as the people have to see them. And then I suppose it must be admitted that sometimes a man who is educated away from the people thereby shows his essential lack of sense.
Here is another difficulty. Our ministers can seldom receive their boyhood education with a view to the ministry. They are usually called into that work when they have about reached young manhood; and if now they are to be educated, all the education of their boyhood must have been such as they have obtained without reference to the ministry. As long as people in general have but little of education nothing beyond elementary instruction so long will most of the young men who come into the ministry and wish to prepare for it have, for their earlier boyhood training, only what is to be had among the people at large. I speak of one of the most familiar painfully familiar phenomena to all who are called to instruct young ministers. What a common thing to see a fine young man under this disadvantage! You can see it in his eye that he is a man.
You can see it in his tones that he wants to make the best of himself. You can see how he works; but there are the disadvantages of his comparative lack of training in his boyhood, and how to overcome them is the question. Many men never can fully overcome them, and they are humiliated sometimes because they cannot spell. Only some people can spell the English language, I believe. It is a torture and an outrage upon human nature that ought not to be perpetrated many generations longer, that people should be required to spell the English language as it now stands. I say, then, that if our ministers are to have earlier education boyhood education of a valuable kind, they must obtain it without reference to the ministry, and so there must be facilities for this among the people at large. I wished to explain how it is that ministerial education ranks itself necessarily with the general -education of the people, and the experience of our churches has shown the fact. Almost every institution of learning that our Baptist people in America have founded has been founded with special reference to the ministry of the gospel; but then they have found that they must associate this with the education of others also. One of the wants of to-day is high-schools that shall be preparing our half-grown youths for whatever they are to do in the world, and then as many of them as are afterwards called into the ministry of the gospel will have the benefit of these schools; high-schools whether they are to be supported by the public at large or founded by Christian people, is a question of locality and circumstances high-schools that will forbear to call themselves colleges; that will not attempt to take upon themselves the functions of colleges; that will consent to do the humble, but so needful work of giving really thorough instruction in the elements of knowledge, and if they must add some other things for those pupils who will study there alone and will never go to college, they should still give to these mainly the thorough training in the elements of knowledge; high-schools that will teach history for I find more fault with my pupils from lack of knowledge of history than almost anything else; for how can a man know anything unless he knows history? high-schools which shall give thorough training in English composition, so that people can speak and write decently their own language; which for those who wish to study the classic languages, shall teach the elements of those languages. President Wayland used to say I am using familiar incidents for my purpose that there must be a mystery about Greek grammar.
" For," he said, " a boy learns Greek grammar at the common school. Then he goes to the academy, and learns Greek grammar; then at college Greek grammar again, and then to the theological seminary, and still he must learn Greek grammar. There must be something very mysterious about Greek grammar." If there were only high-schools in which the teachers were willing to teach Greek grammar to those who are attempting to learn it, I know a certain class of men who come a little later on in our ordinary processes of education, who would have much occasion to thank the teachers of the high-school.
This, then, is my first point of remark, that ministerial education must go hand in hand with general education; therefore people who are specially interested in the education of the ministry must be equally interested in the education of the people; and our colleges need few things so much to-day as the help of high schools that shall prepare young men to enter college with a due knowledge of the elements of education.
My second point is this Ministerial education must not be cannot be the same for all. Let us not go from one extreme to the other. There are differences that are felt, and what are you going to do about them? You have no power to coerce your young men. Some of them don't feel that they need this; how can you make them feel it. There are wide differences in circumstances.
Some men are called into the gospel ministry comparatively late in life, and we must not get away from that good idea of our fathers that this is the right thing. Some of the noblest ministers of the past have entered on the work of preaching when they were of middle age, but not a few of us are getting towards the idea that every minister must go through a certain artificial course of training, fixed exactly, and have even thought that the idea of a man's entering the ministry at middle age must be discarded. Many enter the ministry somewhat late in life, and are so embarrassed by their domestic relations that, for an extended course, they are without the necessary means. Then there are differences in men's natural mental structure which make it unwise that you should carry them all through the same process of education. There are men who would really be hampered by an attempt to make scholars of them. I have known far away from here, of course ministers of the gospel who really were worse for having learned Latin, because they wasted their time in attempts to do that which they never did do successfully, or they were conceited with the notion that they knew something which they really did not know, and there is an old saying, which you must pardon again, that " there's no fool like a fool that knows Latin."
So, then, I insist upon it that we Baptist people, in trying to elevate our ministry, must not go from the extreme to which our churches once inclined towards the other extreme. If we do, we shall be false to all our history; we shall be false to what we conceive to be the teaching of the gospel; we shall be recreant to the demands of the approaching future. My brethren, we must not have some artificial notion of education, and allow it to be converted into a mechanical process, which is always the tendency. People talk as if educating a man was just taking him through a certain fixed machine, all men through the same machine, and coming out at the same point with the same training.
That is false to all the prodigious variety in the faculties and tendencies of mankind. We must constantly guard against the tendency to make education, in all its departments and in all our institutions, a mechanical process, instead of a process of growth and the training of a living thing. Every body who knows anything about teaching knows that the main thing in all our early instruction is not knowledge, but discipline, and yet how constantly people are overlooking this! You ask the ordinary average person what children go to school for, and he will tell you that they go there to get a knowledge of certain things. That is not the main thing. The main thing is the discipline of mind, as every body who will think about it must perceive. When a young man goes out, after his course of training in a carpenter's shop do you inquire how many tools he has, or whether he has a lot of lumber ready to make up? You inquire whether he has learned his trade and knows how to handle tools and work the material that he will get as he needs it.
The analogy is not perfect, I know, because in the training of the mind that which we use in the training becomes tools and materials for the work of the future, and we have in this to combine the acquisition of materials with the discipline of our faculties and the acquirement of skill. But while we combine them we must beware of confounding them, as men are prone to do.
Come now to my third point Our institutions for ministerial education^ or, more generally, our institutions of higher education, must be greatly improved without delay. There are no men who feel that so much as the men who have been struggling on amid a thousand difficulties, and have often done very noble work, and brought about, by God's blessing, quite good results, amid all their disadvantages. If you knew, as I could tell it, of the sore struggles through which many of our professors have passed, called to attempt three times as much in teaching as one man can possibly do to his own satisfaction, and yet how, under all these burdens, they have put forth their utmost power and have done good work I think you would find it a theme for pathetic reflection. Our institutions need more instructors, in order that the work may be divided out, in order that each man may have the opportunity to devote himself to certain things and know them thoroughly, and work at them with the intense delight that comes to a man when he feels that he is making progress in the subject he loves. The tendency of our time is to specializing knowledge, as every one knows. I have a friend, a geologist, who gained his professorship in one of our leading American institutions by the fact that he was not only a geologist, but had confined himself to the department of geology which pertains to fossils and, among fossils, to fossil botany. And so by working at fossil botany he has gained a name in Germany and a noble place at home. This illustrates the tendency of all knowledge now. Men have to work more and more within narrow limits, if they are to make progress in these times or even to keep up with the progress that others are making; and so, in order that our professors may become "specialists" in our colleges the only thing that can be satisfactory we must have more professors. This is a crying need of the present time.
And they must have more time in order to be better prepared. If you expect your professor in a college to meet classes three or four hours a day like a school-master, how can he lecture? How can he come with his mind all full of one theme, and all the reserved nerve force of his body and energy of his soul gathered up and concentrated upon one burning hour, in which he will carry home his subject to the hearts of those who hear him, and kindle in them that glowing enthusiasm which is the joy of a young man, and will be the inspiration of his life? Your hard-worked professor may kill himself in the effort to do that, but he cannot do justice to himself nor to his pupils nor to his Master nor to you.
And we must have professors who are better paid, so that they shall have the means of commanding comforts? without intense solicitude about it; so that they shall be able to live fitly in the better society of their community without finding it a burden; so that they may give their undivided energies to their duties.
Well, you see the absolute necessity that follows.
Our institutions must be better endowed. They must be far more largely endowed. We must get hold of many of these people of ours who mean right, but who are not informed in this respect, and we must widen out their minds like the broad Mississippi Valley, to see the greatness of education, that they may give largely. Some of our brethren think that they have large notions already of what institutions of learning ought to be, but they have only begun to see, and it is our duty to hold up a high standard, and spread out a broad view of what these institutions must be made. The endowment of institutions of learning is a thing needed for the sake of the poor. There are many who fancy that somehow these colleges and universities are gotten up for the benefit of the rich; but it is not so. They are for the benefit of the poor, and I speak for the poor. As for the rich, they do not need any word from me. Here, for instance, is a man who wants education, and firstclass education. He must go to a great city to find that, if there are no endowed institutions. He could find that nowhere but in a large city. If the professors are to be supported by the tuition, that tuition must be very high, and if the student is to have three or four teachers of eminent talents, he will have to pay three or four hundred dollars in tuition. The son of a rich man can do that, but what is to become of the son of a poor man?
The institutions of learning come in to open their halls free of rent. The chief support of those professors will be from the endowment, and the man who is comparatively poor can thus obtain the benefit of contact with master minds, and instruction from men of high talents, which would otherwise be for him absolutely impossible.
It is for the poor, I say, that our institutions are endowed. When you go to a rich man say, " Do your duty as one whom God has blessed with riches, and endow an institution for the sake of the poor all around you," and you may add, " Maybe your own son, that goes there from the home of his wealth and with all the benefits around him of ample means, will learn to study from some of those poor young fellows, his associates, who make him work by showing him what it is for a man to work." Last February I was a great deal in contact for some weeks with eminent men of business, and there came to me this thought about our institutions of learning, which you may have for what it is worth. When we go to a man of means and ask him to give largely for the endowment of an institution of learning, we are not begging. I protest I am no beggar. When I go to a rich man and say, " Come help us, won't you, in this enterprise," I present to him a joint-stock concern, a very popular idea now-a-days, an investment which will yield him large dividends, and which will last a long time. I say, "Here are our men who have given their whole lives to the work of instruction. They have toiled early and late through long years to qualify themselves for teaching certain things, and they are willing to put their lives into this not simply a little of what they are, but all of what they are they will put into it, and the very fortunes of their families. Now, if you will put some money into it, then you and they will be in a joint-stock company, and you will be doing together what you cannot do without them, and what they cannot do without you, but together you will be doing a work that will bless humanity. They are no more dependent on you than you are on them, but you will be brothers united in a common work and receiving results in common." I think that is the right view of the matter, and that there are great-hearted men of wealth who would rejoice in the idea that they were investing in that which would yield large dividends to them and the world and which would last through long ages. For there are no investments in the civilized world so permanent as investments in institutions of education and religion. The old universities of Italy and of France and of England have lived eight or nine centuries have lived through all changes, through all revolutions of governments, through all upheavals of society, and there they are to-day. No revolutionist has ever dared to attack them. No new government has ever done aught but wish them well and perchance help them on. A man who wants to put money which God has enabled him to gather where it will last when he is gone, doing the work that he has chosen for it in the long centuries to come, must choose a mode of investment in some institution of education or religion; and if it be combined, an institution of education and of religion, of course all the better.
Now, my brethren ministers and laymen, men and women we must take hold of such thoughts as these, which would come to any of us upon reflection, and go among our people and stir their souls with the thought of the opportunity there is for them, the many to give a little, but especially the few to give much, for it is only from the large gifts of the few that institutions of education have received ample endowment; to stir their souls to see what God gives them opportunity to do, and what God's high providence sends down, like the sunbeams out of heaven, for a direction to them. Not all rich people are selfish or mean; not many rich people are narrow-minded or ignorant; but they are busy busy with their own affairs, burdened with their own great burdens and somebody must go and tell them of these openings for investing money, better than they can invest it anywhere else in all this world, for the highest good of man and for the highest glory of Christ.
are few things so advantageous, in the detailed study of history, as to establish ourselves at some definite point of the past, and look carefully around, until all that lies within the horizon of that time is thoroughly known. The period just named for this purpose is of peculiar interest to American citizens, as lying at the threshold of American independence, and also to Baptists, for then our brethren were just drawing near the end of their struggles and sufferings, and preparing the way for more joyous and prosperous work in a new and blessed day of freedom. The limits of a lecture will of course not allow any general study of that grand epoch. Even confining ourselves to the one theme of the Baptist ministry at that time, we shall be able only to glance rapidly along the outlines of this single department in the wide field of view.
It requires a great effort of imagination to go back one hundred years. In 1774 there was nothing of our present magnificent country but the thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coast, from New Hampshire to Georgia. In many of these, as we look back, we see that only the eastern part of the territory is settled, even in Public lecture in opening the session of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, then at Greenville, S. C, September 1, 1874.
Broadus SAA: 14 The American Baptist Ministry of AD 1774
There are few things so advantageous, in the detailed study of history, as to establish ourselves at some definite point of the past, and look carefully around, until all that lies within the horizon of that time is thoroughly known. The period just named for this purpose is of peculiar interest to American citizens, as lying at the threshold of American independence, and also to Baptists, for then our brethren were just drawing near the end of their struggles and sufferings, and preparing the way for more joyous and prosperous work in a new and blessed day of freedom. The limits of a lecture will of course not allow any general study of that grand epoch. Even confining ourselves to the one theme of the Baptist ministry at that time, we shall be able only to glance rapidly along the outlines of this single department in the wide field of view.
It requires a great effort of imagination to go back one hundred years. In 1774 there was nothing of our present magnificent country but the thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coast, from New Hampshire to Georgia. In many of these, as we look back, we see that only the eastern part of the territory is settled, even in Public lecture in opening the session of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, then at Greenville, S. C, September 1, 1874.
Pennsylvania and Virginia hardly one-half, and in New York and Georgia, only the southeastern corner. The first feeble settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee are but a few years old. There has been in the colonies great political discontent for some fourteen years, particularly manifested in Massachusetts and Virginia, which has grown into a widespread opposition to the home government. The " Boston tea party " occurred last winter, December, 1773. The first Continental Congress is to meet in Philadelphia three days hence, September 4, 1774. The colonists intend to maintain their rights by force if necessary; but very few are as yet looking forward to independence. The Virginians have been engaged all summer in a great Indian war, which will end a few weeks hence with the " bloodiest and most decisive " of all the Indian battles at the mouth of Kanawha.
Let us now survey the leading Baptist ministers of the several groups of colonies. Many able and useful men have long ere this passed- away. In the previous century Hansard Knollys and Roger Williams were Baptist preachers in New England within less than twenty years after the landing of the Pilgrims, and John Clark founded the church at Newport in 1644, only twenty-four years after the landing. Still others were coming over from England and Wales, and by the end of the seventeenth century there were seventeen American Baptist churches in existence, situated chiefly in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, but several of them in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and one in Charleston, S. C.
Passing to the eighteenth century, we find that Elisha Callender, a graduate of Harvard College and a pastor beloved by all denominations in Boston, died in 1738, which is thirty-six years ago. A few years afterwards died Valentine Wightman, a man of marked ability and extensive attainments, who founded many churches in Connecticut. And still earlier in the century was Abel Morgan, who came over from Wales to Philadelphia in 1711, and was greatly respected for his ministerial knowledge, zeal and usefulness, until his death in 1722.
These three Morgan, Callender and Wightman are all that we have time to glance at of the departed worthies, though various other good ministers of the time are known to history.
Coming to those who are still alive in 1774, we must look first at leading ministers who are by this time growing old, or already widely known those who belong mainly or largely to the past.
A number of these are found in New England. Timothy Wightman succeeded his father, Valentine Wightman, in Groton, Conn, and though a man of less power than his father, has been very devout and useful, and has brought his church into a very healthy condition, with repeated revivals. He is now fifty-five years old, and is greatly beloved and full of pastoral work. Gardiner Thurston, of Rhode Island, is a little younger, and has spent all his life at Newport. He was not educated at college, but has always had a great thirst for knowledge, and been very diligent both in general and in theological studies. At first assistant to an aged pastor for eleven years, and giving part of his time to business for a support, he afterward succeeded him and has for fifteen years been full pastor and entirely supported by the church.
He is a charming man in private intercourse, and in preaching is not only interesting and instructive, but pathetic and solemn, and plainly depends much on the special support and blessing of the Holy Spirit. In Massachusetts is the famous Isaac Backus, now fifty years old, and in the fulness of his powers. Reared a Congregationalist in Connecticut, and converted during the " Great Awakening," produced by the preaching of Whitefield and others, he presently went off with the Separatists or New Light Congregationalists, who contended for a converted membership and strict discipline, and for an internal call to the ministry. After preaching some years in this connection he became a Baptist, and at length pastor of a new Baptist church in Middleborough, Mass, in which position he has now remained for eighteen years. Two years ago he -was chosen agent for the Baptist churches in Massachusetts, to labor for securing religious liberty, and has done the work with great zeal and ability, corresponding with the English Baptists on the subject, and also corresponding with the patriotic Samuel Adams, as the Virginia Baptists are doing with Jefferson and Madison. He will shortly be in like manner appointed agent to attend the Continental Congress, which is about to meet in Philadelphia. Mr. Backus has already published several sermons and a number of pamphlets on questions of Scripture doctrine or of religious liberty. And he has been busily collecting materials for a history of the Baptists in New England, the first volume of which will be ready in two or three years. Very diligent and painstaking in the collection of materials and laborious in general, his writings are full of reliable information and vigorous argument, though somewhat deficient in literary finish. He is a man of powerful physique, strengthened by early work on a farm and by much travelling on horseback. His commanding appearance, deep-toned voice, grave argumentative style, earnest and masterful nature and fervent piety make him, though not exactly an attractive, yet a highly impressive preacher. And, altogether, he is at this time probably the most influential Baptist minister in New England. Fifteen years later he will spend six months in Virginia and North Carolina, strengthening the churches. While passing over various others, we must not fail to notice Noah Alden, of Massachusetts, now forty-nine years old, who was originally a Congregationalist, but has been for nineteen years a Baptist minister, greatly respected for his wisdom in regard to politics as well as religion, and very useful in his pastoral work.
These are the older men among the leading Baptist ministers of New England at the time of which we speak, Wightman, Thurston, Backus, Alden. Several others are younger, though already well known and influential. Foremost among them are Manning and Stillman.
James Manning was born in New Jersey thirty-six years ago, attended the famous Baptist School at Hopewell, N. J, conducted by Rev. Isaac Eaton especially " for the education of youth for the ministry," and graduated with the highest honors at Princeton College.
He speedily grew very popular as a preacher, and before long became pastor at Warren, Rhode Island. Here he was the most active person in founding, just ten years ago, Rhode Island College, which in a few years was removed to Providence, and is destined at a later period to be known as Brown University. Of this first Baptist College in America Mr. Manning was made President and Professor of Languages, and he and the college have already gained a warm place in the affections of the people of Providence and of the Baptists of all the colonies.
Samuel Stillman, a native of Philadelphia, was brought by his parents to Charleston, S. C, when eleven years old, and converted under the ministry of Rev.
Oliver Hart, of whom we shall hereafter speak. He received a classical education from Mr. Rind, " a teacher of some celebrity " in Charleston, and then spent a year in studying theology with the assistance of his pastor, Mr. Hart. He began to preach in Charleston sixteen years ago, and settled first on James Island; but his lungs becoming diseased, he went to New Jersey as a better climate. After preaching there two years he visited Boston, where he was at first assistant in the Second Church, and soon afterwards, nine years ago, was made pastor of the First Baptist Church. Here he rapidly sprang into great popularity and influence. His preaching is attended for the sake of its eloquence by men having little sympathy with his thoroughly evangelical doctrines, including prominent lawyers and politicians.
Highly cultivated and careful in preparation, he yet often indulges in " sudden bursts " of unpremeditated, impassioned eloquence, and constantly makes free use of anecdote and other illustration. His religious visits are valued and solicited by persons of all denominations.
He is also taking an active part in the support and management of Rhode Island College, and in all the work of the Baptists of New England, and has already published quite a number of excellent sermons. He is now thirty-seven years old. Universally admired and beloved, full of ministerial work in public and in private, in his own church and elsewhere, deeply devout and richly blessed, we shall find in all this survey no Baptist pastorate so truly brilliant as that of Samuel Stillman in Boston. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the age in question presents a more popular preacher of any denomination in America.
Hezekiah Smith, by birth a New Yorker, was educated, like Manning, at Hopewell School and Princeton College. After graduating, he traveled South for his health, and was ordained in Charleston, S. C. After preaching a while in the Pedee country, with great acceptance, he returned northward, went to New England, and finally built up a new and strong Baptist Church at Haverhill, Mass, of which for the last eight or nine years he has been the beloved pastor. He has also made numerous preaching tours as far north as Maine, and his dignified, solemn, truly eloquent preaching everywhere makes a great impression. He maintains an affectionate correspondence with Oliver Hart and other brethren in South Carolina. He is now thirty-seven years old, about the same age as Manning and Stillman.
There is little time to speak of Samuel Shepard, who was a young Congregationalist physician in New Hampshire, but was converted to Baptist views by reading a tract found at the house of one of his patients; and soon beginning to preach, founded three new churches in New Hampshire, and three years ago became their pastor. Nor of John Davis, the younger of that name, a native of Delaware, prepared at Hopewell School, and graduated at the College of Philadelphia, and after some years made pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Boston a man remarkable for learning, abilities and usefulness, cut down by death two years ago, when but thirty-five years old.
Leaving New England, we come to the Middle Colonies. Of the older men who are still living three or four must be mentioned.
Ebenezer Kinnersley, an Englishman by birth, and brought to this country in childhood by his father (himself also a Baptist minister), is now sixty-seven years old, and has spent his life in and about Philadelphia.
Never engaging much in preaching, he has been otherwise a very distinguished man, both as a zealous coworker with Franklin in discovering the properties of what they call the Electric Fire, and as the highly popular professor of English and Oratory in the University of Pennsylvania. He has delivered scientific lectures in the chief cities, which attracted great attention. In 1772, two years ago, he resigned his chair in the college, and retired to the country in feeble health. Abel Morgan, Jr, nephew to the older minister of that name, whom we mentioned, was born in a Welsh settlement in Delaware. After his ordination he came with a company of Baptists to South Carolina, and " was a constituent member of a church called Welsh Neck, in 1736."
Returning, he became pastor in Middletown, New Jersey, and has now been there for thirty-five years. He never married, giving as a reason the wish that " none of his attention and attendance might be taken off" from his mother, who lived with him more than thirty years, and died only three years ago. His learning is really extensive, and he is especially skillful in disputation.
Years ago he had a public debate on Infant Baptism with Rev. Samuel Finley, afterwards President of Princeton College. It was Mr. Finley that proposed the discussion, and as he afterwards printed a pamphlet, Mr. Morgan replied, and each of them replied again.
These were probably the first works issued in the New World in vindication of the baptism of believers only, and they are said to show decided ability and good learning. Though now sixty-one years old, Mr. Morgan is still a very laborious and useful minister. John Gano, born in New Jersey forty-seven years ago of a Huguenot family, after determining to preach, spent two or three years in studies preparatory to that work, meantime frequently preaching, even before he was licensed.
In response to earnest requests from the South for ministerial help he was induced, twenty years ago, to come southward, and traveled extensively. In Charleston he preached in Mr. Hart's pulpit in the presence of a brilliant audience, including twelve ministers, one of them being George Whitefield, and for a moment (as he has recorded) felt the fear of man, but soon remembered that he "had none to fear and obey but the Lord." Two years later he made another tour to the South, and settled for two years in North Carolina, but being driven out by the Cherokee Indians, returned North, and for a while preached alternately in Philadelphia and New York. Twelve years ago a church was at last organized in New York, and Mr. Gano became its pastor, in which position his labors have been gre*atly blessed. A small man, yet of manly presence and commanding voice, of good mind, respectable attainments and deep feeling, he is a highly popular and effective preacher.
It is worth while to notice how late the Baptists were in establishing themselves in New York City. They organized a church in Boston in 1664; in Charleston, S. C, 1683; in Philadelphia, 1698; in New York no permanent church was formed till 1762.*
Somewhat older than Gano is Morgan Edwards, a native of Wales, a preacher from his sixteenth year, and educated in the Baptist Seminary at Bristol, England. After preaching a number of years in England and Ireland, he was sent to America thirteen years ago by the famous Dr. Gill, in response to a request from the Baptist Church at Philadelphia that he would send them a pastor. The story is that in writing to Dr. Gill the church " required so many accomplishments " in a pastor, that the old gentleman told them he did not know that he "could find a man in England who would answer their description," but that Mr. Morgan Edwards " came the nearest of any that could be obtained."
After remaining eleven years in Philadelphia, he removed, two years since, to Newark, N. J. Mr. Edwards is a man of genius and scholarship. His Greek Testament is " his favorite companion" and he has also a good knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, being accustomed to say that the Greek and Hebrew are " the two eyes of a minister," while his extensive travels and wide general reading have contributed to make him a very interesting man, both in public and private. He has thus far published three sermons and a History of the Baptists in Pennsylvania, besides collecting much material for other works; and he is very careful and critical in respect to English style.
* There was preaching in New York as early as 1669, and a little church appears to. have been formed there by Valentine Wightman about 1714, but it was afterwards dissolved.
Besides these four older men in the Middle Colonies Kinnersley, Morgan, Gano and Edwards we must notice two who are somewhat younger, but prominent and promising both of them named Jones.
Samuel Jones is a native of Wales, but was brought to this country in infancy. His father, himself a pastor in Pennsylvania, and a man of wealth, was determined to give his son a thorough education, and accordingly Samuel was graduated A.M. of the College of Philadelphia in 1762. For the last eleven years he has been pastor of a church near Philadelphia, and also occupied in teaching, being very successful and highly honored in both vocations. By his excellent judgment and remarkable self-control he is particularly useful in meetings of the Philadelphia Association, and other ecclesiastical assemblies. This is noteworthy, for successful preachers much oftener possess fervor and fire than sound judgment and equanimity. David Jones was born and reared in Delaware, and educated at Mr. Eaton's Hopewell School in New Jersey, where he says he " learned Latin and Greek." Having determined to become a minister, he went, thirteen years ago, to Middletown to study divinity with his kinsman, Abel Morgan. For the last eight years he has been pastor in Monmouth County, N. J, but two or three years ago made three different journeys to the distant country about and beyond the Ohio River, preaching to the Indians, though without much effect. At the time of which we speak he is full of zeal for the political rights of the Colonies, as are the Baptist preachers everywhere, with rare exceptions. Some years ago he made a visit to New York City, and had an amusing experience which may help to show how scarce were our brethren in that place, When I first came to New York [so he is said to have told the story] I landed in the morning, and thought I would try if I could find any Baptists. I wandered up and down, looking at the place and the people, and wondering who of all the people I met might be Baptists. At length I saw an old man, with a red cap on his head, sitting on the porch of a respectable-looking house. Ah, thought I, now this is one of the old residents, who knows all about the city; this is the man to inquire of. I approached him, and said: " Good afternoon, sir. Can you tell me where any Baptists live in this city.?"
"Hey?" said the deaf old Gothamite, with his hand to his ear.
Raising my voice, I shouted: " Can you tell me, sir, where I can find any Baptists in this place?" "Baptists, Baptists,"
said the old man musing, as if ransacking all the corners of his memory; " Baptists! I really don't know as I ever heard of anybody of that occupation in these parts!"
We now leave the Middle Colonies, and come to speak of some leading ministers in the Southern Colonies, from Maryland to Georgia.
In Charleston, S. C, we find, as already several times mentioned, Oliver Hart, who is now fifty-one years of age. He was born and reared in Pennsylvania, and when a young man often listened with great profit to Whitefield. Ordained at the age of twenty-six, he heard " the loud call for ministers in the Southern Colonies,"
and coming South, found the church at Charleston vacant, and becoming their pastor twenty-four years ago, has, in that position, been highly respected and widely useful. He takes an active part as a citizen in the movements for the maintenance of colonial rights and liberties, but does not "mix politics with the gospel, nor desert the duties of his station to pursue them."
We are to think of him as a man of tall and graceful figure, with a pleasing countenance and voice, and while not exactly eloquent, yet an exceedingly instructive and impressive preacher. Though not bred in college, he has been a diligent student of the classics and of physical science, and has been the instructor in general learning and in theology of several other ministers, among them Samuel Stillman. Of these, Stillman and some others were furnished with the means of support by the "Religious Society" which Mr. Hart organized in Charleston nineteen years ago (1755) for this purpose.
Shubael Stearns and Daniel Marshall were intimately associated in North Carolina, and are naturally spoken of together, though the former died three years ago.
Shubael Stearns was born in Boston in 1706, and under the influence of the Great Awakening, attached himself, in 1745, to the Congregationalist Separates, or New Lights, and began to preach. In 1751 he became a Baptist, in Connecticut, and after two or three years more, longing to carry the gospel to more destitute regions, he came, with a small colony of brethren, to Berkeley County, Va. Here he was joined by Daniel Marshall, who was of the same age with him, and had also been a Congregationalist and a Separate in Connecticut. Believing that the second coming of Christ was certainly at hand, Marshall and others sold or abandoned their property, and hastening with destitute families to the head-waters of the Susquehanna, began to labor for the conversion of the Mohawk Indians.
After eighteen months he was driven away by an Indian war, and went to Berkeley Co, Va, where, finding a Baptist Church, he examined and adopted their views about 1754. He had married, while in Connecticut, the sister of Shubael Stearns, and the two became associated in Virginia, and soon sought together a still more destitute region in North Carolina, not far from Greensboro. Here they and their little colony taught the necessity of the new birth and the consciousness of conversion, with all the excited manner and holy whine, and the nervous trembling and wild screams among their hearers, which characterized the Congregationalist Separates in Connecticut. Though at first much ridiculed, they soon had great success, building up two churches of five hundred and six hundred members.
Retaining their New England name of Separates, they called themselves " Separate Baptists," and these spread rapidly into Virginia and into Georgia, though destined, when their enthusiastic excesses should have been cooled down, to be absorbed, before the end of the eighteenth century, into the body of regular Baptists. Stearns died in North Carolina; but Marshall, ever looking out for new fields, came, after a few years, to Lexington District, in South Carolina, where he built up a church, and finally, three years before the time of which we speak, removed to Georgia, not far from Augusta, where he has already formed a considerable church.
Among the unusual customs of the Separates, both Congregationalist and Baptist, was the practice of public prayer and exhortation by women; and in these exercises Marshall's wife is said to have been wonderfully impressive.
In one of his preaching tours, from North Carolina back into Southern Virginia, sixteen years ago, Daniel Marshall baptized Colonel Samuel Harriss, of Pittsylvania. This gentleman had a good social position, holding numerous civil and ecclesiastical offices, and possessing some wealth. He at once threw himself earnestly, with serious pecuniary sacrifices, into the work of preaching, and in the course of these sixteen years has made preaching journeys through a great part of Virginia as well as portions of North Carolina. His overwhelming earnestness and wonderful pathos produced so great an effect that highly judicious men declared that even Whitefield did not surpass him in addressing the heart. He has also taken an active part in Baptist efforts to secure religious freedom, none the less that he himself has been shamefully persecuted for preaching in Culpeper and Orange. He is a favorite presiding officer in the associations and other business meetings of the Separate Baptists, and in this very year, 1774, these enthusiasts having concluded that the office of apostle ought to be perpetual, Samuel Harriss and two others have been elected and solemnly set apart as apostles, an office which will be silently abandoned by all concerned the following year. Such a transient notion is but a spot on the sun of his noble Christian character and life. He is now fifty years old.
There are other well-known men in Virginia at the time in question of whom it would be pleasant to speak, such as David Thomas, forty-two years old, a Pennsylvanian, educated at Hopewell School, and removing when still young to Virginia, where he has been very useful; but we must pass them by, as we have passed by many good men in other colonies. In Maryland we find John Davis, the older of that name, fifty-three years old, another Pennsylvanian, who removed eighteen years ago to Maryland, and has built up a strong country church. There is as yet no Baptist Church in Baltimore.
It must have been noticed that with the single exception of Samuel Harriss, all the older ministers we have mentioned as particularly distinguished in the Southern colonies came originally from the North. When the early Baptist settlers came over from England and Wales, the English went chiefly, for reasons not hard to discern, to New England, and the Welsh chiefly to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Next to these the colony to which Baptists earliest came, in considerable number was South Carolina, and here the number was small compared with New England and the Middle Colonies. Thus the Baptists were at first far more numerous at the North than at the South, and naturally produced a larger number of ministers. Besides, there were already more general opportunities for education in the Northern Colonies, so that ministers from that region were more likely to become distinguished. And furthermore, the work of Whitefield and others awoke the slumbering Congregationalists of New England, and brought out the enthusiastic Separates, many of whom became Baptists, and traveled southward, in a missionary spirit, to supply the destitution. These considerations will help to account for the fact mentioned. And already, in 1774, if we look at the younger men just coming forward and giving especial promise of usefulness, we shall see a very large number in the Southern Colonies. Some of these young men we must briefly notice.
William Fristoe, hardly thirty years old, is already famous in Virginia, with many seals to his ministry, and in this year is chosen moderator of the great Ketocton Association. " Swearing Jack Waller," thirty-three years old, once a dissipated young man of good family, and a persecutor of the Baptists, was converted and baptized seven years ago, and some time after was long imprisoned for preaching. He blazes with unquenchable zeal, and turns many to righteousness in his native State, and has doubtless little idea that he will be buried in Abbeville District, South Carolina. James Ireland, aged twenty-six, a Scotch school-master in Northern Virginia, and very wicked, was in a singular manner convicted and converted, and five years ago was baptized by Samuel Harriss, and beginning to preach
AMERICAN BAPTIST MINISTRY OF A.D. 1774. 2", with great zeal and effect, was soon after seized and imprisoned at Culpeper Court-House, where his enemies tried to blow up his room in the jail with gunpowder, and to suffocate him with fumes of sulphur, all for preaching the gospel; and he retaliated simply by preaching through the jail window to the people who would gather around. He is now at liberty and zealously at work. William Marshall, of Fauquier, now thirty-nine years old, was converted six years ago.
Being of an influential family, and having been a conspicuous man of fashion, it made a great noise when he became a Baptist preacher, and the crowds who came to hear him have always been deeply impressed, and great numbers of them converted. He has a young nephew, John Marshall, who will in coming years be Chief Justice of a new nation. Lewis Lunsford, near Fredericksburg, is only twenty-two years old, but began to preach five years ago, being called " the wonderful boy,"
and his preaching attended by great crowds. With all this, and while he must have been conscious of possessing extraordinary talents, he has not been spoiled, but is full of humility and devotion. But the time would fail to tell of Picket, Conner, Williams, Taylor, the brothers Craig, Courtenay, Koontz, Garnett, Webber, and many more of these promising young men, who have, in 1774, recently entered upon the ministry in Virginia.
We know of similar men in South Carolina and Georgia. Edmund Botsford, a young English soldier, came to Charleston some years ago, was converted under the ministry of Oliver Hart, and for the last three years has been preaching with great acceptance in the south western part of the State, until in May, 1774, he moved across into Georgia, whence we know that he will, after some years, return to spend his useful life in South Carolina. Richard Furman, clarum et venerabile nomen, is now nineteen years old. His father, a surveyor at the High Hills of Santee, has carefully taught him mathematics and the Bible. Uncommonly mature in intellect and piety, he began to preach at the age of sixteen.
Some youths of the same age tried all the arts of insulting ridicule, but without seeming to move him at all; his father earnestly strove to dissuade him, being anxious that he should become a lawyer, and fearful that he was carried away by temporary excitement; but he respectfully urged an irresistible feeling of duty. Soon invitations came to visit destitute places in the country around, and he has been preaching far and near. Tall and handsome, serious and dignified even in youth, his grave and impressive eloquence commands the attention of young and old, and men can see that he will be a prince and a great man in Israel. Abraham Marshall, son of the Daniel Marshall we spoke of, is living with his father in Georgia, aged twenty-six, and has been preaching several years. His educational advantages were confined to forty days at an "old field school; " but his native gifts of mind, his athletic frame and noble voice, his knowledge of the Bible and of the human heart, make him a highly effective and promising young preacher.
In Philadelphia we find William Rogers, a native of Newport and graduate of Rhode Island College, who began to preach three years ago, and for two years has been pastor of the Philadelphia Church a young man of fine gifts and culture, and refined manners, very useful as a preacher, and destined to distinction as a professor. Burgess Allison, of New Jersey, has been preaching, in fact, though not formally, since the age of sixteen, and now, at twenty-one, is studying classics and theology with Dr. Samuel Jones, near Philadelphia.
He is fond of music and painting, and has great mechanical ingenuity, and with his singular good sense is likely to turn out a useful preacher and teacher, and a distinguished man of science. Thomas Ustick, a native of New York, is also twenty-one years old, was baptized at thirteen, and graduated at Rhode Island College, has been teaching school in New York and studying for the ministry, and in this year has begun to preach. Modest, gentle, devoted and diligent, he promises to be very useful.
In New England, likewise, we hear of several very promising young men. Silas Burrows, of Connecticut, has been preaching nine years. Without much education, he is a man of good sense and the deepest feeling, and is wonderfully gifted in prayer and exhortation.
Charles Thompson, a native of New Jersey, belonged to the first graduating class of Rhode Island College, five years ago, and for the past four years has been pastor at Warren, R. I. Vigorous in intellect, and very diligent in study, with a fine figure and magnificent voice, full of tender pathos and of lofty passion, and devoted to his work, he is a young man of mark. His classmate at college, William Williams, of Welsh descent, was baptized three years ago by Thompson, at Warren, and licensed to preach, and in connection with the ministry will become famous in Massachusetts as a teacher.
It has seemed a long list, of older and middle-aged and young Baptist ministers, who were living in 1774.
Yet it has been made short by reluctantly omitting names well worthy to be known and honored.
And there are youths who have not yet entered the ministry, but will one day be heard of. John Leland, twenty-one years old, was baptized in June, in Massachusetts. Thomas Baldwin, of the same age, is living in Connecticut, a diligent student, but not yet a Christian. Silas Mercer, in Georgia, is twenty-nine years old; originally an Episcopalian, he has become a Baptist in sentiment, but will not be baptized until next year.
Henry Holcombe is a boy of twelve years, and his father has recently removed with him from Virginia to South Carolina. Jonathan Maxcy is six years old, in Massachusetts, a very precocious child, who will not die early. Robert B. Semple is five years old, in King and Queen. Andrew Broaddus is four years old, in Caroline County, Va, and his father, a zealous member of the Establishment, designs that his son shall be a clergyman.
Glance a moment, too, across the water. Whitefield died four years ago. Wesley, though over seventy, has many years of work in him still. Of the English Baptists, Dr. Gill, the great Talmudical scholar, author of a giant commentary on the whole Bible, an elaborate Systematic Theology and many other works, and yet all his life a hard-working pastor, died three years since in London. Robert Robinson, at the age of twenty-nine, is already a well-known author, an omnivorous reader, and a highly popular preacher under the shadow of the University of Cambridge. Stennett and Beddorne, authors of so many excellent hymns, are in their prime.
Andrew Fuller is twenty years old, having been baptized at sixteen, and after several years of providential leading towards the ministry, has just begun to preach regularly. Robert Hall, son of an able and honored minister of the same name, is ten years old, and loves, when out of school, to read over and over again such books as Edwards on the Will and Butler's Analogy.
Let us now single out for brief observation some points in the opinions and practices of American Baptist ministers in 1774.
1. These men felt themselves inwardly called to the ministry. Some of them indulged wildly enthusiastic notions as to the nature and evidences of this call, but at bottom it was a thoroughly correct conception which prevailed among them. And on this account it is not well to speak of the ministry as a profession. One ought not to choose the ministry at all as he might choose to be a lawyer, physician, teacher or editor, but it ought to be entered upon from a sense of duty to God and man. We are not claiming any special sanctity for the pursuit itself as compared with the professions, but only urging the importance of carefully avoiding the notion that to enter upon the ministry is merely " making choice of a profession."
2. They endured great hardships in the prosecution of their work. Frequent and immensely long journeys on horseback, through thinly-settled districts, devoid of comforts, were taken by almost all the pastors in their evangelizing labors, and burning zeal often impelled them to severer toils than they were able to bear. Besides, there was not seldom persecution, involving indignities, discomforts and sometimes positive sufferings. Many of us are familiar with the story of such persecutions in Virginia; but they began far earlier in Massachusetts, and were violent there at the time of which we speak, the Cavalier and the Puritan establishments being equally harsh and cruel. The Baptists are one of the few religious denominations that have never persecuted.
We cannot say they have been personally too good, seeing that some of them have shown great bitterness towards other religionists and even towards their own brethren who differed from them; but their immemorial principle of opposition to all union of church and state has. always made it impossible that they should persecute. In so doing they would at once cease to be Baptists.
These hardships, from persecution and from ministerial labor, often told upon health. Many suppose that the frequent deaths from paralysis, for instance, are a peculiarity of pur times. But among the men we have been speaking of it is mentioned that Backus, Alden, Gano, Harriss, Stillman and Manning all died of paralytic affections. True, these had all passed through the long agony of the Revolution.
3. Many of our brethren of that day erred about ministerial support. What they called the "hireling ministry " of the establishments was an abomination to them, and they frequently went to the opposite extreme, some of them even proclaiming that they wished no contributions for their support; and not being wise enough to see and explain, like the apostle Paul, the difference between the course which for temporary reasons they pursued, and the general right of ministers to be supported.
Their undiscriniinating teachings were but too acceptable to human selfishness, and left deep-rooted errors which we are still toiling to eradicate.
4. Our ministers, in 1774, were in general heartily in favor of ministerial education, and many of them were themselves highly educated men. This last had been true from the beginning. Hansard Knollys and Roger Williams had both been clergymen of the Church of England, and educated at the English universities, anjl John Clarke was a diligent student of the original Scriptures. In the eighteenth century Elisha Callender was a graduate of Harvard, Samuel Jones and the younger John Davis of the College of Philadelphia, President Manning and Hezekiah Smith, of Princeton, and Charles Thompson, William Williams, Thomas Ustick and William Rogers, of Rhode Island College. A number of others, though not college graduates, were diligent students and really well educated; for example, Valentine Wightman, Thurston, Kinnersley, Gano, Abel Morgan (senior and junior), Morgan Edwards, David Jones, David Thomas, Oliver Hart, Stillman and Furman, several of whom were eminent for their general and theological attainments and teachers of others. The only men we have spoken of who became leading ministers without being what we might fairly call educated, were Isaac Backus and Silas Barrows, Shubael StearnSj Daniel Marshall and his son Abraham, Samuel Harriss and some of the younger men in Virginia, and Edmund Botsford; and some of these were highly intelligent and well-informed. Great interest was also shown in institutions for higher education. An English Baptist merchant, Thomas Hollis, gave a large donation to Harvard College to found a professorship, about 1720. Besides the famous Hopewell School in New Jersey, established by Isaac Eaton with express reference to the preparation of young men for the ministry, and which we have had occasion to mention so often, several high schools, conducted by Baptists, are known to us as in existence at the time. Rhode Island College (Brown University), established in 1764, awakened the liveliest interest among the Baptists everywhere. The Pennsylvanians, in fact, claimed to have originated the movement. The college was located in Rhode Island because there only was there absolute religious liberty. It received contributions of money, soon after its establishment, from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as from New England and the Middle Colonies. We find the associations also early expressing interest in ministerial education. At the Philadelphia Association, in 1722, "it was proposed by the churches to make inquiry among themselves if they have any young persons hopeful for the ministry and inclinable for learning, and if they have to give notice of it to Mr. Abel Morgan, that he might recommend such to the academy, on Mr. Hollis his account." Mr. Hollis, besides endowing the professorship in Harvard, had apparently authorized Abel Morgan to send young men preparing for the ministry to the academy in Philadelphia, and look to him for the money. The association wished to co-operate in this, and the rather quaint phrase of their minutes is worth remembering, " Any young persons hopeful for the ministry and inclinable for learning." In 1756 the Charleston Association, South Carolina, recommended that the churches raise " a fund to furnish suitable candidates for the ministry with a competent share of learning." And we have seen that in the previous year, 1755, a society had been formed for that purpose by the church in Charleston, which aided Stillman, Botsford and others in pursuing studies for the ministry, Oliver Hart being their instructor in theology.
But while in so many ways showing that they valued, and striving to promote, the education of the ministry, our brethren were never disposed to confine the office to those who had passed through any specified course of study. They believed that God calls men to become preachers who have not had, cannot obtain, opportunities of regular preparatory education; and that the only test which the churches ought to apply is the practical one suggested by the apostle's expression, "apt to teach."
At the same time, they generally maintained that every minister ought to gain all the knowledge he can. But a hundred years ago there was among the Baptists in some quarters a disposition to underrate general education in ministers, arising principally from two causes. First, the Congregational and Episcopal establishments had both shown a strong tendency to treat a course of education as not only an indispensable, but the only requisite preparation for preaching, many of their ministers making no pretension to an inward call, and some of them not even to personal piety. The Congregationalist Separates and the Baptists, opposing themselves strongly to this, naturally tended toward the opposite extreme, making piety and the inward call everything, and caring little for the general and theological education which was associated in their minds with so many unspiritual, and not a few immoral, clergymen. Secondly, the country was new; the people themselves were in general quite uneducated, sympathizing most strongly with preachers who were but little superior to themselves in general culture; and many of those among them who were efficient in other intellectual callings were self-taught men.
These last considerations, to some extent, still hold good in large portions of our country. The masses are still comparatively ignorant, and men who are even partially educated must take great care or they will fail to have the complete sympathy of this important class of their hearers. Alas! for the education, of ministers of Jesus if it ceases to be true that the common people hear them gladly. And in a country where so many of the ablest and most successful statesmen, lawyers, physicians, teachers, journalists have had no regular education, there is a great want of propriety in requiring that no one shall be a preacher who has not gone through a certain fixed course of study. But it is proper to insist that every minister, as well as every other who aspires to instruct his fellow- men, must in youth and in age be a learner, a diligent student.
One thing our brethren have always expected and required, that the minister, whatever else he knows or does not know, shall study the Bible. To explain and impress the teachings of the Bible is his great business.
It is very desirable for the lawyer to know classics and history, but necessary that he know law. It is highly useful for the physician to know psychology, but indispensable to know medicine. The teacher of mathematics is much profited by classical training; but he can do nothing unless he is acquainted with mathematics. And so the minister of the gospel will find all knowledge useful, and general training of mind eminently desirable; but the Bible he must know. And how much it means to know the Bible!
Let us add that a large proportion of these ministers were highly educated in another sense: they had the spirit, habits and manners of gentlemen. If it is not important for a preacher and pastor to be a gentleman, for whom is it important? It is, in this respect, a great privilege to have been reared in refined homes. But as Henry Clay and others of our American statesmen, so have many of our ministers shown that a man may come up from very inferior advantages, and by force of native delicacy and generosity of feeling, and by diligent use of the best social opportunities, may become a noble gentleman.
5. Finally, notice the character of their preaching.
It was eminently Biblical. Whether learned in other things or not, they all, as we have said, tried to know the Bible. Those ignorant of Hebrew and Greek were yet most diligent, loving and life-long students of the English Bible. And some who had read few other books were yet " mighty in the Scriptures," often teaching opposers the truth of the old adage: " Beware of the man of one book." They were familiar with the text of Scripture, able to turn to any passage they wanted without a concordance, committing to memory long passages, and some of them whole books of the Bible. It is an abuse of our multiplied helps if we fail to gain like loving familiarity with the sacred < text. There is point in the words of an Elizabethan poet, I would I were an excellent divine, That had the Bible at my fingers' ends;
That men might hear out of this mouth of mine How God doth make his enemies his friends.
And the preachers of whom we speak used their ready knowledge of Scripture in this way, both publicly and privately, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear. " May it please your worship," said an irate lawyer in Virginia, " these men are great disturbers of the peace; they cannot meet a man on the road but what they ram a text of Scripture down his throat."
Their preaching was also eminently doctrinal. The great Scripture doctrines of depravity, atonement and regeneration were almost unknown to many of their hearers, and disputed by many others. And so the preacher felt called continually to preach these and the related doctrines, proving and enforcing them by liberal quotations from the text of Scripture. Whenever men cease to preach these great doctrines of the Bible, drawing them directly from the fountain head, believing something definite, knowing what they believe and why they believe it, and how to prove it from the Inspired Word, then the pulpit soon loses its power. Their preaching was, at the same time, eminently experimental. It was very common for the preacher to tell the exercises of his mind at the time of his conversion. When modestly and wisely done, as it has been done by Bunyan, Augustine, Paul, this can never fail to be full of interest and impressiveness. The Washingtonian temperance speakers carried too far their narratives of a drunkard's experience, and so may our old preachers have sometimes gone too far with their experience-telling; but the thing is natural and lawful, and is mighty, if fitly managed.
As to their manner of preaching, but little need be said. They had all the methods of preparation and delivery which we have, and differed about them as we do. Some of them, particularly of those who traveled widely and preached much in the open air and chiefly, it would appear, among the Separates acquired certain offensive mannerisms of delivery, the most striking of which was a peculiarity of tone, commonly called the " holy whine," which may still be heard in some very ignorant preachers in certain parts of the country. This unpleasing and, to some persons, very ridiculous practice had a natural origin. When men spoke to crowds in the open air, on a high key, with great excitement for a long time, the over-strained voice would relieve itself by rising and falling, as a person tired of standing will frequently change position. This soon became a habit with such men, and then would be imitated by others, being regarded as the appropriate expression of excited feeling. The same causes produce the same sing-song tone in the loud cries of street-vendors in our cities. But the whine of the preacher, associated for many ignorant hearers with seasons of impassioned appeal from the pulpit, and of deep feeling on their own part, has become a musical accompaniment which gratifies and impresses them, and, like a tune we remember from childhood, revives " the memory of joys that are past, pleasant and mournful." Why should we wonder at all this? Extremes meet. What is the intoning, which modern ritualists in this country so much admire, but just another species of holy whine, originating long centuries ago in very similar natural causes to those just stated, and impressive to some people now by reason of its association with what is old and venerable in devotion? If any one doubts that it is the same thing, let him hear the intoning in the Armenian Convent Church at Jerusalem.
It suffices to add that the preachers of that day depended much on the aid of the Holy Spirit to give them liberty in speaking, and the hearts of their hearers.
Some of them carried this to an enthusiastic extreme.
But every truth is perverted by somebody. And it is a great fundamental truth, to which we must cling, that God will help us in preaching and himself " giveth the increase."
The American Baptist ministers of one hundred years ago labored not in vain. The denomination was growing rapidly in the years before the Revolution, and it has continued to grow. In 1774 the total membership of Baptist churches throughout the colonies is estimated to have been not more than (30,000) thirty thousand, and many think this estimate too high. Thus the membership was less than one per cent, of the population. In 1884 we had in the United States of regular Baptists, exclusive of cognate outlying bodies, at least (2,500,000) two million five hundred thousand members, which is nearly five per cent, of the population. More than onehalf of our present population is of German, Irish, French, Italian or Spanish descent, and thus originally altogether averse to any such opinions as ours; there has been no Baptist immigration except from England and Wales, and to a small extent from Scotland; yet in the face of all this we have an increase in our membership from one per cent, to five per cent, of the population, and the persons more attached to the Baptists than any other persuasion must be from one-fifth to one-fourth of the entire population. This shows that the work of our fathers' hands has been blessed.
And yet how many of these church members are comparatively useless. And throughout the country what growing masses of noisy infidelity what a spread of irreligion and corrupted Christianity, of immorality and vice, of political corruption and social pollution! Not only the example of the past age, but the pressing needs of our own age, call us to diligent, self-denying, devoted labor. And are we ambitious? Do we ask whether a hundred years to come men will be searching our history, repeating our names, rejoicing in our work? It matters little, for " they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." Nay, it matters not at all, if only we can hear at last that thrilling word, " Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
Broadus SAA: 15 College Education for Men of Business
THOSE sprightly, growing boys of yours, what are you going to do about their education? Let us think a little upon that question. Even if your mind is partly made up, there is no harm in listening to the notions of a man who has spent his life as an educator; of course you will decide for yourself all the same.
You have been looking about for now a good many years, and have pretty much concluded that it is desirable for those who are to be professional men to go to college. But your son will not enter a profession; he is going to spend his life in business. I ask, HOW DO YOU KNOW?
You may have a very definite purpose on the subject, and so may he; but how can you be sure? Inquire concerning the men who have succeeded well in the several professions, and it will be very curious to see how small, a proportion of them, at the age of sixteen or eighteen, had any notion of spending their lives in the professions they finally adopted. Parents and teachers ofter err egregiously in their judgment as to what a youth was born for. It is said, that when Mr. Moody first spoke in a prayer-meeting, his pastor advised him not to attempt that again, as he had evidently no talent for public speaking; and now, let the crowds that hear his preaching tell, and the thousands of converts.
And the lad himself will often err likewise. At one period of my own boyhood I read Cooper's novels, of which my father was very fond, until I became enamored of Indian life, and fully resolved that so soon as I became " a man," I would go to the Missouri Territory (as they used to call it), among the Blackfoot Indians, get to be a great hunter and fighter, marry a squaw, the daughter of an old chief, and succeed him as chief of the tribe, and live and die in paint and feathers. Would any sensible father and mother have said, The boy has got his head on that; it shows the native bent of his genius, and so there is no use in sending him to boarding-school? How do you know, then, and how does your son know, though he may have no such silly fancies as the boy just mentioned, what is his destined calling for life? And especially is this true as to the ministry of the gospel. If a man must be divinely called to this work, that will often happen much later in life than the proper time for entering college.
I am very glad you hold that the professional men of the future ought, in general, to be thoroughly educated.
Even in the past, the most eminent men have much more frequently had this advantage than most persons imagine. Of the leading Baptist ministers in America a hundred years ago, quite a number had been to college, and nearly all the rest were laborious students. Or take our statesmen. America has been the Paradise of what we call self-made men. In every calling such men came to the front, and in politics there was long a decided advantage in being a self-made man. The fraction of Americans who have been to college is extremely small; how large, in comparison, is the fraction of leading statesmen who were college bred, even in this "new country," with a prejudice in favor of the other class. Look at Congress, or the Legislature of this State, at any time during the last hundred years, or at the present day, and the comparison of these two fractions will be very suggestive. And then we must stop calling ours a new country. Things are rapidly changing. In medicine and law it will, in less than fifty years, be required by public opinion here, as it is now in Europe, that the acceptable practitioner shall have a good general education and a thorough training in his profession. The editorial profession, which is looming up into such importance, greatly needs thorough education, in order to breadth of view and sympathy with all truth, in order to correct handling of the ten thousand subjects which journalists have to treat, and in order that they may cease butchering the English language and shocking literary taste in the frightful fashion to which, with few exceptions, they are now accustomed. And teachers, what profession is more important than this?
What greater need is there among us except the need of Christian morality than of really well-qualified teachers? Everybody believes in schools for children.
But education has to work from above downwards.
Where shall we get educated teachers, unless people more generally send their sons to our higher schools?
As to our ministers, I think the Baptists have been quite right in encouraging some uneducated men to preach. It was a necessity, else the masses would never have been reached; for well-educated men were too few, and the illiterate could often command a fuller sympathy. A like necessity will still exist, but it will be constantly diminishing. An increasingly large proportion of our ministers must be thoroughly educated men, or Baptists will not keep pace with the times.
But, coming back to your son, SUPPOSE HE DOES
spend his life as a man of business, an agriculturist, merchant, manufacture^ or the like. I earnestly urge that in such a business life, higher education, or what we commonly call college education, will be of great advantage to him. So many doubt this, deny, even ridicule the idea, that I beg your special attention.
Good and generous men, all over the land, are even giving their money to endow colleges to educate other people's sons, and then entirely failing to send their own sons to them. Now, I think, there is no little popular error about this something we call education, partly due to the wrong methods pursued and wrong ideas put forth by some professed educators. Pray consider, then, WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?
This term is generally used among us in quite too narrow a sense. Thus, we hear a great deal about "educated men" and "self-educated men." But, in one sense, every man is self-educated who is ever really educated at all. It is only in the voluntary exertion of his mental powers that he gains development and discipline of these powers. John Randolph said: " Put a blockhead through college, and the more books you pile on his head the bigger blockhead he will be." A man has to educate himself, no matter how numerous and advantageous his helps. And then, in another sense, no man is self-educated. Even those who never have a teacher, if they really become educated men, have been educated by books (teachers who, being dead, yet speak), by the men with whom they converse, by the events which lead them to think, which draw out their powers into active exercise, by the ideas which are abroad in the atmosphere of their time. There is, then, no such broad difference between- the educated and the self-educated as many suppose.
Now, when can we say that one is an educated man?
My answer would make something like the following points: 1. An educated man is one whose mind is widened out, so that he can take broad views, instead of being narrow-minded; so that he can see the different sides of a question, or at least can know that all questions have different sides. 2. An educated man is one who has the power of patient thinking; who can fasten his mind on a subject, and hold it there while he pleases; who can keep looking at a subject till he sees into it and sees through it. If anybody imagines it easy to think, in this steady way, he has not tried it much. f 3. Again, an educated man is one who has sound judgment, who knows how to reason to right conclusions, and so to argue -as to convince others that he is right. 4. And finally not to speak now of imagination and taste, important as they are an educated man is one who can express his thoughts clearly and forcibly. Now, if this be a roughly correct description of an educated man, there are many among us who deserve that name, though they never went to college, and some of them went little to school. Look at our really successful business men. You will find that in most cases their minds are widened, so that they can take broad views. How grandly comprehensive are often the views of a great planter, merchant, manufacturer or railroad man! Also, that they can keep thinking of a subject till they see into it; that they can judge soundly, and reason and argue, reaching just conclusions themselves, and convincing others that they are right; and that they have command of clear and forcible expression. These, then, are really educated men.
But notice. They gain this education, in the school of life, very slowly in most cases, and usually cannot be called educated in this sense, until they have reached or passed middle age. Now is it possible to select certain branches of knowledge, and combine them into such an apparatus of mental training, that, by putting our young men through this, we can, to a great extent, anticipate the discipline which would be slowly gained in the school of life, can give to the young man of twenty-one or twenty-five much of that accuracy of thought, soundness of judgment and command of expression, which otherwise he would not have till he reaches fifty or more? Of course this cannot be wholly done, for some kinds of mental training can be gained only by experience and by slow degrees; but can it be done to a considerable extent? Wide and varied experiment has shown that it can be. And precisely this is the main object of all wise educational processes. The knowledge gained may or may not be directly useful in subsequent life: the main thing is to educate, to give the young man, in a few years, much of that development and strengthening and discipline of his principal faculties, that use of himself, which, otherwise, he would have only when almost an old man. And remember that if, in certain respects, we cannot anticipate the lessons of the school of life, in other respects we can prepare the young man to learn those lessons to better purpose than would otherwise, for him, have been possible.
See, then, how unwise people are when they keep asking: " What good will Latin and Astronomy and Metaphysics do a business man?" and keep saying that our youth must study only those branches of knowledge that will be "useful." What can be so useful to a young man as to improve his sense, to give him greater power of thinking closely and soundly, and of making other people think as he thinks, and do what he wants them to do? You wish your son to be a practical man; but you do not want him to spend his life as simply a day-laborer. Well, if he is to rise above this, is to acquire property and control the labor of others for his advantage, it must be done by sense. Not even industry and saving ways will suffice, unless he can see into things, judge wisely about complicated questions and talk sensibly to those with whom he deals. No doubt these powers depend partly on natural endowment; but, then, they can be greatly improved by education, and I insist that to improve them is the main object of all wise educational processes. In fact, the method of education is even more important than the material. A superior teacher could, to a great extent, educate a superior pupil with almost any branch of knowledge. But certain subjects, suitably combined, are found to have much greater educating power than others, and on this principle we select and recommend. If some of them are also of practical utility, that is, of course, very desirable. But, in very important respects, the mind may be better enlarged, invigorated, disciplined by subjects of study which have little to do with practical life; and I repeat that the effect on the mind itself is the principal matter.
RESULTS OF SUCCESS IN BUSINESS.
Besides, you do not simply wish your son to prosper in business, to accumulate property. Think of the good he is to get from his business success. He will wish to have a home, a bright and sweet home. Wealth alone cannot make this. I am not speaking now of the one thing that is needful, but consider how much culture contributes to the happiness and highest well-being of a growing family. Almost every man who has financial prosperity aspires to this. Some succeed, notwithstanding the lack of early advantages, but very few under such circumstances attain true and high culture. Many a worthy gentleman of middle age, fondly watching his growing children, and longing to inspire them with a relish for the delights of history, poetry, and popular science, to see them bathe their young minds in the sweet waters of literature, resolves winter after winter that he will read upon certain subjects buys a number of books, begins, and next summer remembers that he has done almost nothing, and mourns, again and again, that he did not acquire reading habits, and a basis of literary knowledge, in his youth. And sooth to say, many of our girls are now receiving a fairly good education, and women are so quick in picking up and turning to account a knowledge of general literature, that our young men must get a better education than has been common, or they will in many cases find themselves unpleasantly inferior to their wives.
Still further, as to your son, think of the good he is to do in life. Success in business will give him influence in some respects, but how much more influential he will be, and how much more useful as a member of society, if he had in youth a good education. You have known here and there a man prosperous, intelligent and of high character, who in a country neighborhood or a village was worth as much as a school he seemed to lift up the whole community. In our current politics one of the great wants is that of intelligent leading citizens.
There is much humbug now-a-days about reading and writing. Some of our new-light philosophers seem to think that if we can only teach everybody to read and write, then the masses will always vote wisely and do right. But what do they read? The fact is, the masses need, and always have, leaders, to tell them what to do; and the only question is whether they shall be led by low demagogues, or persons not much wiser than themselves, or on the other hand by men worthy to lead, qualified to lead wisely. So, too, in our churches, the most crying need at present is for an educated membership.
We have heard a great deal about educating our ministers, but educated private members, of both sexes, are just as necessary. These, where they do exist, give interest to Sunday-schools and prayer-meetings, diffuse correct ideas of Christian benevolence, and give sympathetic appreciation and moral support to an intelligent and active pastor. These can meet in conversation the subtle infidelity which is spreading its poison through all our society, which the pastor often declines to preach against lest he merely advertise instead of curing, and which is seldom mentioned to him in private because its advocates in general do not really wish to have their errors corrected. O how much we need a larger number of thoroughly educated and truly devoted men and women in all the churches!
DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF HIGHER EDUCATION.
You say you are willing to send the boys to school, and want the teacher to do the best he can for them; but, when they are pretty nearly grown, you find they generally want to go into business, and you think they are about right go to school while they are boys, and get to work as soon as they are men. But consider.
We have agreed, have we not, that the mental conditions most important for business success are breadth of view, power of patient thinking, sound judgment. And I have insisted that the great object of wise schemes of education is to train the mind in these respects. Now, these powers cannot be trained till a person is nearly grown, for the excellent reason that not until then have they any considerable natural development. In a little child, the leading faculty is imagination, and the chief means of teaching it is story-telling. Everything must be put into that form, or, at least, must be sweetened with a story. If we do not tell the children stories, they will make some for themselves and tell them to each other. At the age of ten or twelve, the leading faculty is memory. That is the time to store the mind with knowledge of facts, explaining where it is not too difficult, but aiming chiefly to lodge the facts themselves permanently in the memory. But judgment, in any high and broad sense, analysis, generalization, abstract thinking, reasoning, these are, as a rule, not much developed until the age of eighteen or twenty. Of course, then, it is not until that age, as a rule, that we can begin to give those high mental powers any effective training.
A great many efforts have been made of late years to have boys anticipate the studies proper only to comparative maturity. Children of a dozen years are found toiling over Evidences of Christianity, Rhetoric, English Syntax subjects which they cannot possibly understand. All this is a grievous mistake, though it is a well-meant effort to supply a felt want. These things ought to be learned, and others of the same sort; but they can be learned, not at the beginning, but only towards the end of "the teens." Now see what happens. Our boys and girls go to school, and perhaps learn well, during the period when memory predominates, get a useful knowledge of facts (though this might be much better managed than it commonly is), but just when they reach the age at which we could begin to give them education in the highest, broadest sense education that would really prepare them for the duties of life they break away; the boys plunge head foremost into business, and the girls well, they quit school!
Here is an evil most lamentable and wide-spread. Who trains horses that way, or builds houses, or railways, or raises crops laboring a long time with the mere preparations, and stopping short just at the time when the consummation of the undertaking comes within reach?
What we call " higher education " is really the most practical part of the whole process; and yet our restless youths and our thoughtless parents neglect it, just because, forsooth, they are so anxious to be practical.
But, you ask, do we expect all the young men of the country to go to school until they are twenty-five years old? No, and we do not expect all the young men of the country to be highly successful in business, or highly influential and useful, as citizens or as Christians. Higher education is, of course, not possible for all. Besides, if college studies now keep many till the age of twentyfive, this is usually because our preparatory schools and our general methods of training children have been, for the most part, so poor and unsatisfactory. When better ideas are diffused throughout society, when a larger number of good teachers are trained, and more good schools are established, then most of our competent young men will be able to complete a fair course of higher education by the time they are twenty-one or twenty-two.
You remind me of another difficulty, that there is need of some early training for business itself. Certainly, one who is to be a farmer ought to work on a farm in his early teens, watching every detail with a boy's sharp observation, and learning how to do all kinds of worlf himself; and he who is to be a merchant ought, while still a boy, to hop counters and tie bundles, to keep accounts, and observe the quality of goods and the tastes of customers. But this can be managed by putting such boys to work on Saturdays and in the greater part of vacation; and perhaps, also, it might be well, somewhere between thirteen and seventeen, to keep them at home a year, and make them buckle down to steady labor. I could tell you of men eminently successful in their callings, who were trained in just this way, with advantage to their health, and certainly no damage to their mental improvement.
And yet another difficulty occurs to you. It doesn't look reasonable that young fellows so different in turn of mind, and in their proposed callings, as the students of a college are, should all be put through exactly the same course of study. But remember, that the object is to develop and discipline faculties which all intelligent youths possess to some considerable extent, and which have to be exercised in all callings alike. Special training for particular pursuits may be distinct, going on partly at the same time with, and partly subsequent to, this general training, which will contribute to success in any kind of work. Besides, most of our colleges are beginning to provide for a change of the course, by making certain studies elective, or even by making the whole course elective, so that the studies of each youth may be more or less adapted to his peculiarities of mind, preparation, or destined pursuit.
OBJECTIONS TO COLLEGE LIFE.
But there is no use in talking, you say, about your son's going to college. It is too expensive you can't afford it. Colleges are just intended for rich men's sons, or those that get their money easy in some way; you made your money by hard work, and can't afford to spend it so fast.
Why, the very object of college endowments is to cheapen education, for the sake of those who are not rich. If your son were to get instruction from a single v one of these select professors, with his talents and high scholarship, it would cost him twice as much a year as his entire college fees. Rich men could employ several such instructors if they chose, but you and I could not. And if our sons can have the privilege of being taught by these professors, it is for the reason that a large part of their support is drawn from endowment; and usually it is a support most meagre and unworthy, when we consider their choice abilities and severe labors.
In fact, college education is one of the cheapest things in the country; and we who are comparatively poor get a great bargain in it, a first-rate article for one-third the cost.
Ah! but you didn't so much mean the tuition; it is the other expenses. Yes, and you begin with counting all that is spent for clothing, and forget that the fellow would spend money for clothes if he stayed at home.
If it be said that at home he would only need a JVUH'URD GOLLtGL Llbnwi Sunday suit, and could wear plain and cheap clothes all the week, I answer, so he can at college. If a student's general appearance and personal habits are good, if his hair and his hands, his boots and his linen, are always scrupulously clean, and the rest of his clothing, however cheap and even coarse, is well brushed and free from stains and spots, then, with good manners, he will be accounted a thoroughly genteel young man, by all those whose opinion is worth regarding, young ladies included. Forty years ago, two young men entered the University of Virginia, paying their way with money saved from teaching, and during the first winter wearing plain jeans coats all the week, among those aristocratic and dressy youngsters from the Cotton States.
Both found hearty welcome in the professors' families, and formed choice friendships among the students, besides gaining unsurpassed academic honors; and one of them is now a distinguished educator in Virginia. And to-day there are students in great number at our colleges who spend scarcely a cent more on their clothing than they would do in a country home, and yet make a good appearance, and are respected and well received in society.
As to the board, it is already very cheap at many colleges, and can be made cheaper still, if students choose to abstain from mere luxuries, and set their heads on economizing. A rapid and salutary change is going on in many parts of the country. It used to be the case that college fashions were mainly set by rich fellows, who went to college simply as a thing proper for a gentleman's son to do, and consequently others were ashamed to show their poverty by living plainly. I hope to see the day when, as in the German cities, a student can live on as few cents a day as he pleases, and it will be nobody's business; when not only those of moderate means, like your son, but the very poor, can work their way, by hard struggles and various helps and God's favor, through a college course. So it was centuries ago in Europe; so it is now in Scotland, in Germany, and to some extent in New England. The present head of one of our most important Baptist institutions stated in my presence that at one period of his student life he lived on bread and molasses for a considerable time.
Kingman Nott, when at the academy, lived on bread and milk, and when prices rose, then on bread and water, and bought them with money made by sawing wood.
Some English noblemen are remembered in history only by the fact that, when students at Oxford, they got their boots blacked by a charity student, named George Whitefield. Ho, for the poor young men! Look them out; call them forth where they have brains, and are cherishing vague, wild longings after an education which seems far on the other side of an impassable gulf; help them if you can, show them how to help themselves, and stir in them by encouragement that high resolution, which in the young and gifted laughs at impossibilities, and conquers the world.
But after all, your son is not utterly poor; and when you come to think of it, college education may be so managed as not to be very expensive.. If, through his own good sense and your good influence, he is disposed to economy, he will assuredly find plenty of students at the present day to keep him company, and students who stand high both in the lecture-room and in society. If once you made up your mind that it was really and exceedingly desirable for him to go to college, you know very well that you could manage to provide the means.
And how else, O thoughtful and loving father, can you use the same amount of money so much for his advantage? Pray, think that over. A college education, or a thousand dollars, in land or goods or cash which would be most profitable to him as he enters upon active life?
There is another class of objections which some make.
I know not whether you agree with them.
They say that at college the young man is very apt to form vicious habits and evil companionships. Now I have spent most of my active life in connection with, or in the immediate vicinity of colleges, and I beg to express the full conviction that a young man is safer, as to companionships and temptations to vice, in any good college than in the average home. Of course, there are a few exceptional homes; I speak of the average, of the general rule. Some young men will get into bad courses wherever they may be. All the good influences at college cannot prevent it nor, if they stay at home, can father and mother and sister and pastor and sweetheart, all combined, keep them out of bad company and vicious practices. But in general, I repeat it earnestly, the morals of the average student are safer at, a well conducted college than at home. Some think this might be so if the college were at a retired village, but not when it is in a city: they tremble to think of the temptations of a city. But really there are no colleges now at retired villages. The railways that bring the students can bring all the apparatus of vice, and keep the students in easy and speedy communication with the cities themselves. Well may we tremble at the temptations to which our boys are now everywhere exposed; but when they are nearly grown, repression and seclusion are no longer possible; we must try to train them to sound principles and right habits from childhood, foster in them vivid recollections of a home where they are loved and prayed for, and let them fight their battle.
Remember, too, that if they may meet evil companions at college, they will assuredly meet many among the noblest young men of the land, who will set them an example qf true manhood and gentlemanly bearing, and draw them, if they be worthy and willing, into the bonds of high and inspiring friendship.
Others are afraid the young fellow will come home with "city airs." Perhaps he may, if he was born a simpleton, in which case I do not urge sending him to college. But if he has good sense, he will only get something of refinement, of graceful bearing and social ease, and power of agreeably entertaining others will become more of a gentleman in his manners and tone; and will not that be an advantage to him?
A grave objection with many excellent people, and one having the appearance of good ground, is that if you give young men a college education, they will "get above business;" they will want to engage in one of the "professions. Now, something of this sort has frequently happened; but there are several things to be considered about it. Sometimes the young man is right in turning away from what he and his friends had contemplated; for he has become intelligently conscious of being better suited to some other pursuit. In other cases, it is the effect of those wrong notions of which we have been speaking, and which I hope you will use your influence to correct; he thinks, as so many do, that college education is of no use to a business man, and perhaps foolishly imagines business pursuits to be less honorable and less worthy of his intelligence and cultivation than some profession. But the principal reason for such occurrences is that we have hitherto had a very inadequate supply of well-educated teachers and other professional men; the young man sees this, and his sense of the value of education makes him seek more directly to propagate it. When high cultivation becomes more common, and correct ideas more generally diffused, this evil will be, for the most part, corrected.
"But suppose my son doesn't want to go to college, what then?" If he needs it, if you see that he would be greatly profited by it, what is your duty? Argue with him, I should say, exhort him, plead with him, and if he is still unwilling, make him ^o. What, you cannot control a boy of sixteen or eighteen! Then you haven't trained him properly, and it is all the more important that you should get some professors to help you train him, before it is too late. Yes, make him go.
And the time shall be when he will come to you, in your old age, or perhaps come and stand by your grave, and tell his gratitude that you did not leave him to the follies of his youth; that by all the power of parental love and parental authority you constrained him to that which has been such a blessing to him through life. Oh! the dear memories thai come up in saying this of a father who did not need to constrain, but who broke up a pleasant home, and spent his last years in most uncongenial employment and amid pecuniary losses, solely that his son might receive the education for which he had not dared to hope. How that son thanks him more and more every year how he thanks God for such a wise and noble father.
Broadus SAA: 16 Education in Athens
THERE is nothing more natural or appropriate, at these annual meetings, than that our thoughts should mainly dwell upon topics connected with education. Not only must the very atmosphere we breathe, all the associations of the place and the occasion, recall the lively interest which years ago we felt in this subject, but our experience amid the activities of life must be continually impressing us more deeply with the importance of obtaining the most thorough mental culture and the most complete mental furniture. And if gratefully recognizing the benefits received from our own early training, we cannot but desire that others may enjoy yet more abundant privileges. We gather again, those who have wandered farthest and those who have remained nearest, around the domestic hearth; we look with pride upon these younger brothers who fill now the places that once were ours, and far from feeling any jealousy of their perhaps superior attainments, far from cherishing any aristocratic notion of rights of primogeniture in education, we can heartily wish that, as is wont to happen in this democratic and growing country, our cherishing mother may be able to provide the best advantages for her younger sons. Whatever, then, is related to education in general, whatever promises to cast the least ray of light upon the higher education among ourselves, as it is and as it ought to be, can hardly fail, I have thought, to be for us a welcome theme.
* Address before the Society of Alumni of the University of Virginia, 1856.
Now the educational methods and machinery of cultivated modern nations have received large attention, since they furnish illustrative examples which are most nearly parallel and models which are most easily imitated. But it has appeared to me that something at least might be learned from considering the methods employed and the material possessed among the foremost nations of antiquity. A very little reflection sufficed to show that one particular people of the ancient world afford not only what is most interesting, but almost all that can be instructive; and for the sake of definiteness, it seemed best to confine the view to a single leading city and a comparatively limited period.
I propose to speak, therefore, of the higher education in Athens during the period of its greatest prosperity, say the century from about 450 to about 350 B. C. It is a very brief, and I know a very imperfect account, which alone I can expect to give; but I have hoped it would possess some interest, and might perhaps suggest some profitable reflection.
A problem presents itself here for our solution. The Greeks, and especially the Athenians of this age, have left monuments of mental power which the world can never cease to admire. Though ignorance may sometimes sneer, and self-complacent modernism may sometimes assail, yet one need not be a mere praiser of the past to assert that the productions of the Athenian mind have hardly ever been surpassed, and not very often been equalled, by the noblest kindred works of modern times. Whence came this wonderful power?
What was there, in the influences to which they were subjected, corresponding to these great results? Now if a distinction be made between what we call education in the technical sense and those more general influences which accomplish so much in developing the mind and directing as well as stimulating its activity, then it is to be observed that these last were perhaps more potent among the Athenians than any other nation of the world. If there be an exception, it is in our own people; and, indeed, the most superficial observer must always be struck by the numerous points of resemblance, in this respect, between the Athenians and ourselves. It is very difficult, in either case, fully to estimate the powerful effect of the influences in question. The peculiar genius of the race its enthusiasm, its restless activity, its self-reliance must form an important element. The working of their democratic institutions, the fact that every citizen, besides frequently attending the popular assembly and having a voice in the direction of national affairs, so as to feel the dignity and responsibility of his position, was called to take part very largely in the administration of justice, sitting frequently in the immense juries of from five to fifteen hundred, and required, whenever a cause of his own was on trial, to appear not simply by counsel) but in his own person, and plead for himself, all this would be an element of almost incalculable importance. And the circumstances of the age were not onlyfavorable, but stimulating. Commerce and tribute, during the years which mainly gave character to this period, filled Athens with wealth, so that men possessed the leisure and the means necessary to intellectual pursuits. The yet fresh memories of that great struggle, in which their fathers had shown such bravery in battle and such heroical fortitude in suffering, in order to maintain their liberties against the terrible power of the Persian j the frequent successes and then maddening losses, and the final and almost hopeless ruin which made up the history of the Peloponnesian war; the anxiety and strife connected with the Theban and Macedonian supremacy, these made it throughout an age of excitement. But after making the largest allowance for the unusual power of these general influences, one cannot resist the conviction, that there must have been something in their education, strictly so called, corresponding to the wonderful excellence of their intellectual achievements. We must look into the facts, so far as they have come down to us, in order to ascertain whether this conviction is just.
If one should begin by examining the scattered extant allusions to elementary education in Athens, he must be struck by the extraordinary attention which was bestowed upon the subject, and the very general acquaintance, among the citizens, with the elements of knowledge. Great philosophers constantly interested themselves in devising plans for the better conduct of elementary instruction. Schools for the young were always established by private enterprise, but there were special laws having reference to them, even from the time of Solon, and special supervisors for their control, appointed by the State. We read in Plutarch's Themistocles, that when the women and children of Athens fled to Trcezene at the time of the Persian invasion, a part of the hospitality with which they were entertained was, that the Trcezenians paid persons to teach the children. If the story can be relied on, it certainly affords a very remarkable proof of the interest felt, by the exiles and their hosts, in the constant instruction of the young.
And, this being the case, one is not surprised to find that at the period of which we speak, a very large proportion of the citizens, in the proper sense of that term, appear to have been able to read and write. To notice no other evidence, the fact is proven by the introduction, as early as 510 B.C, of the remarkable institution known as the Ostracism. It would have been folly to resort to a secret ballot, in order temporarily to banish one or the other of two powerful political rivals and thus secure political tranquillity, if any large number of the citizens had been dependent upon others to prepare their ballots, and thus liable to be imposed upon by designing partisans.
With reference now to the higher education, there are two departments of inquiry, the supply of instructors, and the material of instruction.
Of instructors, we have reason to believe that there was a much larger number than the cursory reader of Greek history and literature might suppose. There were many included under the general name of philosophers. Among these, every one will think of Socrates and Plato, as belonging to this age. Though the former never constituted regular classes, yet we know that young men were accustomed to attach themselves to him, and to follow his daily wanderings in the agora and the gymnasium, conversing with him themselves, and listening to his conversations with others; so that besides the general influence he exerted, in awakening and stimulating the minds of almost the entire community, there was always a circle of those who might be considered, in a strict sense, his pupils in philosophy.
Plato held conversations and lectures in the Academy, to which all could listen who chose. We read of him as on one occasion delivering a lecture in the Peiraeeus on the Good; and one is more sorry than surprised to find that his audience gradually wasted away tho philosopher had chosen a subject too abstract for the popular taste. In addition to these public labors, he had a band of disciples who regularly assembled in his own garden at Colon us, there to partake of a frugal meal, and discourse together on subjects of philosophy. There are other famous philosophers of this age, who resided at Athens, and taught their peculiar opinions. Anaxagoras is stated to have been the instructor of Euripides and Pericles, and many others of the most eminent men of the time. Zeno of Elea is recorded to have spent some years in Athens, unfolding the doctrines of his philosophy to such men as Pericles and Callias, from the latter of whom he received for his instructions a large sum of money, and also to the youthful Socrates.
The accomplished and excellent Democritus would seem to have sojourned there a while, and even casual intercourse for a limited period with a man of his extraordinary attainments and beautiful character, must have been a means of marked improvement to the rising young men of the day. And may we not take it for granted that there were many others, citizens and strangers, addicted to philosophical studies, and accustomed to give at least informal instruction to the young, whose names have not come down to us? They who have lived in history were the men of originality, the men of splendid powers, the men who introduced new doctrines in philosophy, or wrote valuable treatises on opinions already current; must there not have been a much more numerous class, just one degree inferior, who were well acquainted with all the teachings of the different schools, perhaps warmly attached to the doctrines of the Ionian school of Pythagoras or the Eleatics, and anxious to win over every young man of promise to their own opinions? These would often give far more information as to the true nature and extent of the various systems than the more original thinkers, who would commonly allude to the tenets of their predecessors, as Socrates does to those of Anaxagoras, only for purposes of refutation or ridicule. Thus we may see that the class called philosophers formed a numerous corps, so to speak, of able and active instructors.
Again, there were many persons who made teaching their occupation. A man who had gained some reputation, perhaps, as master of an elementary school, or had become specially fond of a particular subject, would undertake to give instruction to young men, separately or in classes. We find incidental allusions to some of these, as teachers of music (in the modern sense), of geometry, of oratory, <&c. It is plain from the manner of allusion that they were numerous; but only one here and there is known to posterity, from his good fortune in having some pupil who became famous. As many an humble English clergyman has a name in history from his being the early tutor of a great statesman, as a plain New England schoolmaster will be remembered because of his connection with Webster, so there is now and then to be found, from among the old Athenian instructors, some name which had floated down the allengulfing tide of time only because attached to the ever-buoyant, imperishable names of Pericles or Plato, of Aristotle or Demosthenes. It is a thought not strange to the bosom of any reflecting instructor, a thought tending to humility, and yet to honest pride in the true power of his calling, that centuries to come men may recognize as his chief claim to their gratitude, the influence he exerted upon another; yea, that highly and deservedly honored as he is now, posterity may remember him at all, only for having been the teacher of one who sits now, a modest lad, scarce noticed among his pupils.
Perhaps the most influential of these professional teachers, and certainly those who have the largest place in history, are the so-called Sophists. Among the numerous instances in which recent historical research has overturned received opinions, there are few more striking than the inquiry which Mr. Grote has made, in his unrivalled history, into the true character of these celebrated men; and it may not be amiss to state the conclusions he has reached and the outline of his argument. Doubtless, in attacking the popular notion, he has gone somewhat to the other extreme. We have more than one remarkable case of this among the distinguished historians of the present generation. Ever since the days of Niebuht it has been the fashion to assail all established historical opinions; and wherever plausible grounds can be found for questioning, there at once to reject. Pleased at detecting the errors of ancient authorities, many a writer seeins to forget that himself can err in the conclusions drawn from their statements; delighted to expose the prejudiced views of previous historians, he may yield, half unconsciously, to prejudices of his own. When weary of the misrepresentation and general injustice which so frequently attach to contemporaneous judgments, we often console ourselves by thinking of the future, and " the impartial voice of history."
Yet it is but a poor approximation to impartiality that is ever actually found. No achromatic arrangement has been devised, whereby the historian, as he looks into the distant past, may be able to see things precisely in their true colors.
But to return. The term sophist, which is for us so opprobrious, and which from the days of Plato began to be confined to a particular set of men, originally denoted, in the general and honorable sense, a wise man, a man of talent. It was applied to poets and statesmen, and constantly used by Herodotus in speaking of the " seven sages." But where general ignorance prevails, there will always be a secret dislike to the few men of superior attainments and abilities, which gradually becomes more decided till it is avowed. Thus by degrees there came to be associated with the term sophist, a certain invidious feeling. Then other words, such as philosopher, were preferred for the good sense, and sophist became the stock term of reproach applied to any person, who possessed acknowledged power and was eminent as a teacher, but for whatever reason was personally unpopular. Thus Aristophanes, in the " Clouds,"
called Socrates a sophist; and in a subsequent age, "Timon, who bitterly satirized all the philosophers, designated them all, including Plato and Aristotle, by the general name of sophists." Now Socrates, and still more Plato, greatly disliking the eminent professional teachers of their time, have succeeded, by their justly powerful influence, in fastening upon them this odious name. The cause of their dislike was two-fold. The men in question taught for pay. Of course, those of them who became most celebrated would at times receive high pay; and in some cases they went from one city to another, where there was a prospect of obtaining large sums for their instructions. The result would be, that these ablest men commonly taught only the wealthy.
All this was extremely repugnant to the notions of the two great philosophers. Socrates held that the relation between preceptor and pupil must be like that of intimate friends, or even of lovers; and that this could not possibly be the case, unless the instruction were gratuitous. With our modern ideas and experience, we should of course utterly dissent from this philosophic fancy.
True, there is still a certain unwillingness to see men receive for the duties of this profession a compensation at all approaching to equality with that which the same ability and attainment and devotion might secure in some other calling; but we do not require them to teach altogether for love. We do not expect a profound and accomplished man, every day and all the day long, to leave his home to Xantippean care, and, poorly clad and with scanty fare, to wander among the people, giving instruction to all who might desire it. Not even to escape the horrors of a home like that of Socrates, nor to have the exquisite pleasure of proving other people less wise than themselves, could men be expected to lead such a life of privation and penury. In this respect, then, the prejudice against the teachers called Sophists, was certainly unjust.
The other ground of dislike was the peculiar character of their teachings, as contrasted with those of Plato and his great master. Socrates was a moral reformer, Plato a splendid social theorizer, proposing to re-model society altogether; while the persons they stigmatize undertook merely to prepare young men for performing their duties as citizens, for achieving success and reputation in Athens as it was. How much soever we may admire the doctrines of the philosophers, we cannot account the latter to have been in itself an unworthy task. There is no proof that the ethical precepts they inculcated were immoral; all the fragments which remain are of an opposite tendency. By the discipline they gave, and the knowledge they imparted, their pupils acquired a power which certainly could be used for maintaining the wrong as well as the right; but in cases where such perversion occurred, it was no more an argument against their teachers, than was the misconduct of Alcibiades a proof, as so strenuously urged, of some corrupting tendency in the teachings of Socrates. It may be that in training the young men for skill in discussion and effective oratory, they sometimes adopted the mistaken plan of teaching them to defend the weaker side and argue in favor of what was known to be untrue; but it caunot be shown that their instructions had any direct and purposed tendency to confound moral distinctions. The accusation that their pupils were trained to " make the worse appear the better reason," from which especially has come the modern use of the word sophist, was made also against Socrates, and as he himself remarks, was the charge constantly made against persons devoted to philosophy. And whatever reproach may attach to a readiness to defend either side of a cause, it must be borne by one of the most learned and honored professions of both ancient and modern times.
It may be concluded, then, that we have no evidence that there was anything corrupting in the influence of these much-abused men. And certainly the general effect of their instructions was very great. Thoroughly acquainted with all the learning of the age, devoting all their energies to the instruction, for the time being, of a few select individuals, Protagoras, Gorgias and their compeers were educators of no mean order. As to public speaking, some of them appear to have taught the analysis of a discourse into its parts, with various practical rules for the proper management of each; and tdiis was a great advance upon all previous treatment, and a necessary preparation for the work of the great master of rhetoric. And they could add to their precept the example of an elaborate and ornate style of oratory which was not without its power, and for a time became very popular. Bad taste in this respect was perhaps the greatest fault of their teachings. Such a style was the very opposite of that beautiful simplicity and directness, that absence of all artificial ornament, for which Aristotle contended, which Demosthenes so strikingly exemplified, and which forms the chief charm of all the better Grecian literature.
Upon the whole, it must be evident that, at the period of which we speak, Athens abounded in men who occupied themselves as instructors in the higher education.
Indeed, we know that from every part of Greece and the colonies, men of ability and ambition flocked to this great city, where their literary tastes would find sympathy and their labors reward, and the approbation of whose citizens would constitute the highest meed of fame. We learn, too, that men were accustomed to send their sons from distant cities to Athens to be educated; so that already the city began to be, what in the age of Cicero it had fully become, the University of the World.
The places at which instruction was commonly given were peculiar. When the hour of noon was fully past, and the business of the agora completed, almost all the men of leisure in the city might have been seen taking their way without the walls, to one or another of the three great Gymnasia. Some of these went to the bath, others to participate in, or witness, the gymnastic exercises, while many others tarried in the peristyle. This outer court of the Gymnasium consisted of a spacious lawn surrounded by buildings. On three of its sides were arcades with large halls, many of them open to the sky, and having stone benches, running along the walls, or arranged in a semi-circular form. In these numerous public halls, men would seat themselves for conversation, and here might be found many a philosopher or professor, with a band of pupils around him, and perhaps a crowd of listeners near, engaged in earnest dialogue or lecture. When weary of formal lectureroom instruction they would wander forth among the shade-trees of the lawn, conversing still upon the subject which had occupied them before. Socrates, if we may judge from his general course, probably frequented all the gymnasia in turn; though there appears to have been some one place where he was most commonly to be found, and which Aristophanes humorously called Socrates' thinking-shop. Two of the great gymnasia have become famous as the chosen resort of Plato and of Aristotle; and every little palaestra seems to have been employed for the same purpose, and often appropriated by some particular instructor. Besides, teachers of every class frequently gathered their pupils and friends at their own houses, or at the residence of some person of literary tastes, and there spout the hours in familiar conversation and at times in regular instruction.
But what formed the subject of these conversations and lectures? What educational material did the Greeks of this age possess? What progress had they already made in the several departments of knowledge?
To this inquiry we turn. Instead of pausing to explain the peculiar phraseology which they employed, it will be more convenient to use the modern sub-divisions and terms.
With the most remarkable properties of Numbers, and the processes which admit of being performed upon them, the Greeks of this period had made considerable acquaintance. The fanciful theory of Pythagoras and his followers, that all things have their origin in numerical relations, that every physical existence and every mental attribute is due to some combination of numbers, would naturally lead them to investigate in that direction with the greatest diligence. Besides those several operations which lie at the foundation of arithmetic, they seem to have possessed methods of extracting the square and cube root, and to have been familiar with the theory of arithmetical and geometrical proportions and progressions. The elements of arithmetic were carefully taught in the schools for boys; and its higher questions appear to have awakened interest and received large attention among the most cultivated men.
Of Geometry they knew much more. Every one is aware that our modern treatises on synthetic geometry contain, to say the least, no very great improvements upon the work of an old Greek. It is true that Euclid wrote considerably later than the period we are contemplating (for it is now settled that he was a different person from Euclides of Megara, the pupil of Socrates), but we might be sure, from the very nature of the case, that a treatise so complete as his Elements cannot have been the creation of a single mind. And in fact there is abundant evidence that Geometry had been largely studied from the earliest times, especially from the time of Pythagoras, and that enough was known before the days of Plato to prepare for his reputed discovery of some of the properties of the conic sections. Somewhat earlier than the middle of the fifth century B.C. (460) we read of a systematic treatise on Geometry, prepared by Hippocrates of Chios, and similar works are ascribed to later authors. Plato insisted very much on the importance of this science, not only for practical, but for educational purposes, and (according to the familiar story) refused to admit any one into the inner circle of his philosophical pupils, who was not a Geometer. When in his old age he was invited to visit and instruct the younger Dionysius at Syracuse, he set the monarch his first lessons in Geometry. Thus it appears, that during this age geometrical studies were pursued with great zeal, and rapid advances were continually made even in the higher departments of the science, while there existed compends for elementary instruction.
Astronomy had likewise become a favorite subject.
There is no good reason to doubt the truth of the story that Thales predicted an eclipse of the sun; of course it must have been by some empirical method. In the sixth century B.C, the age of Anaximander, there are said to have been instruments for determining the time of solstices and equinoxes; and as early as 432 B.C. the golden period was devised by Meton. They had divided the visible heavens into constellations, and marked out a Zodiac, which is still retained. Accurate observations upon the motions of the planets, though five of them were so familiarly known, do not seem to have been made till a somewhat later period. But already there were distinguished Geometers who taught something of astronomy, and whose instructions came to be in great request; and many minds were busy with astronomical inquiries. The clear atmosphere of Attica was very favorable for watching the heavenly bodies; and one or another of the surrounding mountains might well serve, as Lycabettus was used by Meton, for an observatory. In other branches of Physical Science very little was known that we should account satisfactory or valuable. A spirit of inquiry had been awakened, and miscellaneous observations were made in every direction, which doubtless aided in furnishing material for the numerous and valuable works of Aristotle upon physical subjects, as, for instance, upon Natural History. When we find the persons composing the so-called Ionian school, from Thales to Anaxagoras and onward, spoken of as natural philosophers, we must understand little more than that they occupied themselves with general physical speculations. Universal science had not yet been divided into various distinct departments; indeed, the making of such a division would require no small previous knowledge, even as one who is preparing a discourse has gone far towards mastering his subject when he has fairly marked out its natural divisions. Looking at the universe as a whole, and influenced by that desire for unity, which finds its true satisfaction in the idea of a great First Cause, the earlier Greek philosophers were constantly seeking some simple primordial principle, which would account for the origin of all existing things. When some of them taught that this principle is one of the more subtile forms of matter, as water or air or fire, it was not pure a priori speculation; but they seem to have always observed at least a small number of facts, and upon these built their theory.* So that we have here only an extreme result of that tendency to hasty generalization, and then unwarranted inference, which, in some departments of physical science, is not wholly restrained, even amid the correct principles and careful researches of our own day. And while these theories were, in many respects, absurd and utterly fruitless, and served to divert attention from that accurate and patient observation which alone can lead to any correct acquaintance with the material world, yet they were by no means without value as a sort of mental gymnastics.
We have thus entered upon the Greek Philosophy.
Of course, no more can be attempted, in speaking of this great subject, than to call attention to its extent and value, as being indeed the chief material of Athenian education. It is a well-known matter of dispute how far the Greeks were indebted for their philosophy to the Orientals. Ritter contends, with great earnestness and force, that it originated almost entirely among themselves. Coleridge used to declare that he could not believe it was otherwise. Admitting, however, what seems at least probable, that a certain influence was exerted by Oriental ideas, both in the rise of Greek speculation, and subsequently through particular men, as Pythagoras and Plato, yet certainly their philosophy was their own, in the sense that it had a regular development, in accordance with the genius of the people and their general progress. Even in the pre-Socratic philosophy we find an orderly succession of doctrines, either by natural development or the antagonism of reaction, corresponding precisely with the alternations of philosophic opinion in all subsequent ages. There was ultra-sensationalism and ultra-idealism, with various attempts to combine the two. There was a school recognizing an imperfect sort of theism; another, with teachings more or less distinctly atheistic, and more than one whose tendencies were decidedly to pantheism.
* At the present day (A.D. 1886) even the most rapid sketch would make some mention of Democritus and his atomic theory, to which attention has of late been anew directed.
Whatever value, then, as an instrument of education, is assigned to modern speculation, belongs likewise, in no small measure, to even this earlier philosophy of the Greeks, presenting, as it did, the same subjects of investigation and essentially the same systems of belief, though with a much less extensive development, and in a much less perfect form. And it was not only valuable, but attractive. The men of that time were largely occupied, as philosophers have always been, with the interesting task of exposing the erroneousness and absurdity of opposite opinions, and this with no lack of the most pungent personality. The fact, too, that these speculations were so much at variance with prevailing opinions, would lead men not only to make acquaintance with them, but, when they possessed any plausibility at all, to investigate them with a sharp and searching attention. So great is the power of paradox in stimulating inquiry, that we have seen eminent instructors at times cast their ideas into a purposely paradoxical form, with the design of breaking up settled prejudices and arousing to examination. Now, when a young Greek, accustomed to those old legendary notions, which vaguely described all things as the offspring of certain imaginary persons, was made acquainted with the doctrines held by one or another of the early schools of philosophy, when he heard, for instance, of some original substance and of impersonal forces, as accounting for all existences, he would almost certainly be led into curious inquiry and earnest reflection; and when these speculations came to be denounced and persecuted as impious, that would only give them an additional charm. Is there not in these considerations sufficient explanation of the fact that the doctrines referred to were through life eagerly studied by such a man as Pericles, and sufficient reason to believe that they largely contributed to the expansion and discipline of his great mind? That the philosophical teachings of Socrates and his illustrious pupil were immensely valuable for purposes of education will be recognized at once and by all. Let it only be observed that their most profound and difficult speculations possessed always some element suited to awaken the liveliest interest. They taught political and social philosophy to young men whose special ambition, in most cases, was for political advancement, and for whom these subjects formed a part, so to speak, of professional study.
Their ethical and aBsthetic inquiries were often made to spring from some actual occurrence or real object, which seemed to render them living questions. And every one who has read Plato will remember the vivacity of manner with which Socrates is represented as discussing the most abstruse subjects, and the familiar, quaint, even whimsical character of many of his illustrations. A delight in abstract inquiries, a love of dialectical investigation for its own sake as well as for its fruits, a consequent sharpening of all the mental powers, and a general elevation of spirit at least in some degree commensurate with the ennobling tendency of the doctrines themselves, must have been derived from any careful study of the Socratic and Platonic philosophy. Every well-informed man has doubtless already as exalted an idea of its educational influence upon that and all subsequent ages as any attempted estimate could possibly give.
There were other subjects to which much time was devoted among the Athenians, and from which they cannot have failed to derive large benefit. We have, however, no very definite information concerning the extent to which these were made matter of systematic instruction by the teachers of young men. They studied their own noble literature. In the elementary schools, a large portion of their time was occupied in committing to memory the writings of the great poets, epic, lyric and dramatic; so that we read of young men who were able to repeat the entire Iliad and the like.
There is a well-known and touching story, that when the Athenian soldiers taken captive at Syracuse in the year 413 B.C. were sold into slavery, many of them gained the favor of their masters, and some their liberty, by repeating large portions of the dramas of Euripides, who was very popular in Sicily, and that several of these lived to thank the great poet on their return to Athens. Besides the obvious improvement of memory and refinement of taste, this exercise at school formed a means of acquiring that accuracy and elegance of pronunciation which the Athenians so rigidly required, and which, in the Greek language, must have been so difficult. It prepared them also for the introduction and appreciation of those felicitous quotations from the older poets which so abound in the orators and philosophers. But these early lessons were not all; in some cases, at least, lectures on literature were delivered by the higher instructors. Hippias is represented by Plato as lecturing to crowded audiences on Homer and various other poets, giving much archaeological information which might illustrate those old writers, presenting critical estimates of the comparative value of different poems and of the character of the Homeric heroes. It seems reasonable to conclude that the practice was not unusual. The benefit derived from these lectures would be greatly augmented by the fact that every man who heard them had a familiar previous acquaintance with the literature which formed their subject. Add to all this the general effect of reading and of the drama, and it cannot be questioned that here was a most important means of education. Even so much as then existed of that glorious literature, whose thoughts of power and forms of beauty still afford valuable discipline and abiding delight to all civilized nations, must have been far more influential among a people who could perfectly sympathize with its inner spirit, a people familiar with the scenes it depicted and for whom it possessed the peculiar charm that always attaches to our national history and our native tongue.
Much attention was also given to the arts. Almost every Athenian youth learned something of the graphic arts and of music, and a philosophy of each was already recognized. Phidias, Parrhasius and others established canons in their several departments of art, and musical science, both in its physical and metaphysical relations, was largely studied. Aristotle has left us an elaborate argument on the importance of a practical acquaintance with these subjects, which in his day were beginning to be neglected. He says, for example, that taking the very lowest view, these accomplishments are a source of exceeding pleasure to ourselves and others, and that it should be a part of education to fit men not only for the proper pursuit of business, but also for the becoming enjoyment of leisure. One might recall, in connection with this, a saying of Pericles, in the remarkable funeral oration. He accounts it one of the peculiar glories of Athens that their laws provide for such frequent intermissions of care, by means of numerous and elegant recreations, whose daily delight charms melancholy away. Another point of the philosopher's argument is that rhythm and harmony tend to regulate and refine the mind, while the graphic arts lead us up to the contemplation of beauty, as letters to the contemplation of truth. The example of the Greeks, it may be remarked, will go very far to show that the study and practice of music, which among ourselves is so commonly neglected and so often despised, is not incompatible, to say the least, with profound wisdom or with practical fitness for the business of life.
We see, then, that however limited in comparison with the attainments of modern times, the field of acquired knowledge was really of great extent. With a considerable amount of Mathematics and Astronomy, and an active interest in the investigation of these and numerous kindred subjects, with Philosophy in all its divisions and Art in all its branches, and with an already valuable Literature, there was material for a course of instruction protracted through many years.
If, now, we combine with this result the conclusion previously reached as to the abundant supply of instructors, I think it will sufficiently appear that the Athenians of the age in question possessed such facilities for enlarged and thorough education as may account for the extraordinary degree, not only of mental power, but of mental discipline, which is so manifest in their history and remaining works. It would hardly be extravagant to assert, that in real training of mind, in mastery of principles and knowledge of men, in capacity for every form of mental effort, from the most refined speculation to the conduct of affairs, they were as highly educated a people as the world has yet seen.
The subject I have endeavored thus summarily to present might suggest a variety of reflections bearing upon our own educational interests. To a few of these I shall now alfude.
Instruction among the Athenians was chiefly oral.
Books they had, but they were rare and costly. Much of their reading was with the peculiar disadvantages as well as peculiar benefits of using borrowed books. It was a matter of necessity that they should occupy themselves mainly with oral discussion. The multiplication of books and their cheapness has perhaps been the chief cause of that entirely opposite practice which now so largely prevails. Of course it is not necessary to discuss the merits of the two methods in this presence.
The prominence of lecturing, in every department of the University, has beyond question contributed not a little to its success, stimulating to that sharpened attention in the lecture-room which intelligent visitors have so often remarked, and leading to a thorough comprehension of general principles on the part of students, while it almost necessitates laborious personal study, year after year, on the part of those who teach. One is surprised to find it said, by persons elsewhere who still hold to the opposite course, that this method proposes to throw away text-books altogether, when a judicious combination of the two is constantly advocated and attempted, a combination varying in the relative proportion of its elements according to the nature of the particular subject. Nor is it less strange to hear it urged, that the method is appropriate only for those who have decided maturity of mind, since a brief experiment would suffice to show that nowhere more than in elementary schools is oral instruction profitable and necessary. One might be inclined at times to suspect that a latent dread of the labor it requires is the true ground of opposition, did not the high character for ability and faithfulness of some who oppose, render the supposition inadmissible. Moreover, the Athenians derived much of their knowledge from free conversation, not only between an instructor and his pupils, but in the social intercourse of cultivated men in general. Every one has observed the lack of this at the present day, particularly in our own country. Between the Professor and his class, it is, perhaps, mainly impracticable, and the great advantages of our modern institutions must make compensation. In general society the growing infrequency of intercourse for conversation upon elevated topics appears to result from several causes. We live in an age of feverish activity and incessant toil, when all leisure is apt to be reckoned loss. New and attractive books and periodicals constantly accumulate upon the table and engross every moment that can be snatched from pressing duties. Mingling little together, and with an ever-widening literature in the several professions and in the various departments of knowledge, our better reading is less and less in the same direction. Already there is often little common ground save politics and general news.
The whole tendency is to a diminution of that intellectual sympathy which ought to subsist among men of cultivation, however diverse their callings. Even if we looked to nothing beyond obtaining valuable information, surely there is more to be learned from conversation with intelligent friends than from the hurried reading of every ephemeral publication which obtrudes itself upon our notice. Another cause is, that a higher morality forbids the excesses which have so commonly been connected with the intercourse of literary men. Certainly we had better isolate ourselves completely than revive the scenes of the Greek symposion or the English club; but it would be humiliating to acknowledge that excessive animal indulgence is indispensable to elevated intellectual communion. It may be said that the whole matter will regulate itself aright; but I may at least solicit your reflection, whether some remedy cannot be found for what does appear to be an evil.
The educational history we have been surveying suggests also the important fact that true education is not necessarily associated with vast acquirements. The famous saying of Macaulay that a modern school-girl knows more of Geography than Strabo, is in one sense true, but in another and higher sense it hides a dangerous error; for he who would measure education must not forget that it has three dimensions, and be sure to take account of its depth. There is hardly any lesson which our age needs to impress upon itself more constantly than that thoroughness is not to be sacrificed to extensive attainment. We remember, gentlemen, those of us particularly who were deficient in early advantages, the delusive hope of boyhood, that there would come a time when we should have read all books, and become masters of all knowledge. "We learned long ago that this can never be; yet often one re-awakes to fresh disappointment, and finds that he has been dreaming that sweet dream of childhood still. It is painful to think that we must live on and die, and leave many a wide field of human knowledge untraversed and unknown. This longing to learn everything is in itself a noble element of our nature, and leads to noble results; but it requires to be checked by the stern voice of duty.
It is this feeling, combined with an indolent preference of that which is comparatively easy, that induces some persons to spend their lives in skimming the surface of every science and all literature, nowhere pausing for thorough examination. It is this that produces the popular admiration of men who have the reputation of omnivorous reading, while they may not be, in any just sense of the term, scholars. And in no respect are its effects more likely to be injurious than upon the interests of the higher education. Students, where there is liberty of choice, are constantly disposed to attempt more than within the time assigned they can properly accomplish; professors have to struggle continually against a desire to make their course uaiduly extensive; while cultivated and enthusiastic spectators, who have forgotten their experience in the one capacity and are perhaps destitute of experience in the other, impressed with the value of some branch of a subject which is not included, call, and call with forcible argument and eloquent appeal, for enlargement. Now, when it is urged that additional studies shall be pursued in additional time, no lover of knowledge can fail to give a hearty approbation. When it is proposed to crowd other subjects into the same already crowded space, the project is very questionable. When it is desired that we shall seek some vague general benefit, in such a condition of things as to involve, whether that be the intention or not, a sacrifice of thorough study, any such scheme deserves to be resisted, firmly and forever.
In endeavoring to give a valuable course of instruction in any department of knowledge, the instructor must always keep in view three objects; and where the subject is unprofessional, and he is confined within such narrow limits as the present spirit and customs of our people impose, they ought to be held, if I correctly judge, in the following order of relative importance, first, to secure mental training; second, to awaken a love for the subject, which may lead the student to prosecute it hereafter; last and least, to furnish information. In teaching, for instance, one of the ancient languages, to those who cannot yet be induced to give to it more than a limited time, to make the student acquainted with whatever valuable truths the literature of that language contains, though very desirable in itself, must certainly be reckoned of inferior importance. If this were the principal object, there would be much force in the argument often urged against all study of those languages, that translations would suffice. The question then is, Which will accomplish most in the way of mental culture and in awakening a relish for the classics, to spend the time which can be commanded in reading as widely as possible, though with a very imperfect knowledge of the language itself, or to make an accurate and philosophical acquaintance with the language the primary object it being remembered that in order to this no small amount of reading is necessary, and that so much at least of the literature is read with a tolerably thorough comprehension and just appreciation? As to intellectual training, no one will question that the latter method is more useful. I think it can easily be shown that the same thing is true where some do question it, as to the cultivation of taste.
If you should go with some young friend to a gallery of art, having but a comparatively short time at your disposal, and desiring to procure him the largest amount of benefit and enjoyment, your course, if unreflecting as the mass of men, would probably be to carry him through a rapid survey of numerous works, telling him the names of the great artists, and pointing out their most celebrated productions, and giving him all the critical common- places of would-be connoisseurs. Your friend would go away little inclined to come again, and with scarcely anything of real benefit, but marvellously prepared to shine in a certain kind of society by a display of his remarkable familiarity with matters of art.
But if you select a considerable number of the finest works and fix his attention upon these till he shall, to some extent, drink in their deep inner significance and beauty, he will turn away, not imagining that he knows much, but with some true culture of taste, with a heightened love of the beautiful, and probably with a strong desire to visit again the spot where he found so much of genuine improvement and serene delight. Even so, if we desire nothing more than the ability to make large talk concerning even the most unfamiliar classic authors, and to ornament our pages with a plentiful sprinkling of classic allusion and quotation, then it will suffice to run rapidly over many works and read treatises on Greek and Roman Literature. But if we desire that true cultivation of taste, the faculty of taste, which the classics are capable of affording, we must study at least some works with such a patient attention as shall at length issue in appreciative contemplation and in sympathy with their peculiar genius. And let it not be objected that in order to this appreciation there is no need of critical study, as the great scholars of two centuries ago entered most fully into the classical spirit, while they knew very little of what we call philology. The objector appears to forget that condition which I have repeatedly mentioned, and which, however deplorable, can be corrected only by very slow degrees, the lack of time. Milton and the other great scholars of his age spent a large portion of their lives in reading Latin and Greek authors, becoming almost as familiar with those * languages, particularly the former, as with English itself. Thus they were brought into sympathy with the genius of the classic languages, precisely as in the case of their native tongue, by the gradual effect of this exceeding familiarity. Very similar, though within narrower limits, seems to be the plan pursued in England now. By an almost exclusive devotion during many years, their classical scholars attain to an extremely accurate and familiar knowledge of the languages, learning to feel the force of their idiom, not by philosophical examination, but by an immense amount of practical drilling.
It might appear presumptuous to say that, even for them, a larger infusion of philosophy would augment the benefit their system already confers. It is sufficient to say that, among us, such a course as that pursued by Milton or by the modern English scholars is at present utterly impracticable. If we would, with far less time at command, still attain to the privilege of communion with the very spirit of classical literature, our best, if not our only method, is by critical, philological study.
For it must be remembered that philology includes not only the anatomy, but the physiology of language not merely the study of etymological formations, to the beginner often so repulsive, to the proficient so interesting, but of the precise significance of peculiar modes of expression, with the exact meaning and force of particles, and the relations of these to the inner life and informing spirit of the language. Is it not obvious that this affords the best possible means of entering into the genius of a literature, and securing a genuine culture, not only of intellect, but of taste? * We are all agreed, gentlemen let it be distinctly understood that it is desirable our young men should read the classics far more widely than they have ever done, and that, in order to this, as well as on other accounts, they should come to the university later, and remain longer, than is their wont. For the attainment of such a result, let us exert our united influence of every kind and in every place. For the rest, the standard of graduation in this department has been slowly rising with almost every year; the amount of reading necessary to a degree is already great; we may expect that this standard will continue to be elevated, and the requisite reading to be widened, as rapidly as the time students can be induced to give will possibly permit. Thus may they secure * The polemical position here assumed in defending Dr. Gessner Harrison's methods will be found to have been lomewhat modified in the memorial which follows.
the largest intellectual and sesthetical cultivation now, and thus, precisely as fast as our people shall be prepared for it, the course of -classical instruction, while never ceasing to be thorough, may be indefinitely extended. Shall not such a plan, with all its valuable results in the past and all its promise for the future, receive general approbation? Or shall we ask that our young men may spend the time they now devote to the classics in somewhat more extensive and far more imperfect reading, when, if there is force in the brief argument we have considered, the consequence will be a positive diminution, not only of intellectual improvement, but of that very aesthetical culture which all consider important, and which some reckon paramount?
That is the practical question upon which alone, so far as I know, there is any difference of opinion; and to the many among us who have some tolerable acquaintance with the subject, the decision of that question may be cheerfully committed.
One or two other topics of remark suggest themselves, which I shall only indicate.
The Greeks were in many respects pioneers of knowledge. Many subjects, particularly of mathematical and physical science, which for us involve no difficulty because their nature has been fully explained, were for them problems calling forth the mightiest energies, and demanding the most protracted application.
Is it not true that strength of mind is still best attained, not by confining ourselves to those regions in which all difficulties have been removed by others' toil, but by approaching the boundaries of knowledge, and striving to extend its domain? It is sometimes lamented as a deplorable fatality that men cannot be restrained from laboring still at questions which the experience of ages appears to prove to be insoluble. Yet even though the effort should continue to be fruitless, is not that struggling effort itself a gain, because producing such vigor of intellect as nothing but pioneering work could ever give. It would be a fact worth considering, if it is true, that the unconquerable tendency of which men complain is in reality singularly fortunate; that where we often find disappointment and despair, there too we find the largest real benefit.
The thorough education of the period we have been considering did not prepare the Greeks for producing an epic poetry which should rival the creations of a past age. The greatly improved educational resources of subsequent centuries could never re-animate the decaying spirit of Grecian literature. There are influences at work among men far mightier than what we call education. It is not in the power of systems of instruction to reproduce the literary types of a remote time or a distant people. Nor is this at all to be regretted, where, in place of extinct forms, there is something equally valuable. Why need the Athenians of the age of Pericles lament that there was no new Homer, when they had the immortal dramatists? Why complain, a few generations later, that no other Socrates or Pericles arose, when Aristotle and Demosthenes were there? So with our own country. If the condition and character of the nation have directed the attention of our ablest minds to politics, is it nothing that we have produced a political literature such as the world never witnessed before? Why lament that the mighty governing forces of social progress have appointed our people no different work, if they have performed with unequalled success the task that was set them? Have we not reason here to be satisfied with what our father<ccomplished, and be hopeful for our own future? A
v no man ever forget that it is the business of educa-'tion merely to give a harmonious development and thorough discipline to the powers of the national mind, not so much attempting any particular bias, as leaving it for the irresistible tendencies of the age to determine in what direction those powers shall be exerted.
And now gentlemen, let us unite in the desire that on this, as on every occasion of our annual assembling, we may turn away profoundly impressed with the duties we personally owe to the cause of education and to this University. It is pleasant to see so many of our number in high places here, of instruction and of control.
It is cheering to hope that zeal tempered with prudence, and the spirit of progress chastened by conservatism, are to render truly illustrious this dynasty of the Alumni. But it is in the power of us all so to cherish the spirit of letters, so to prove the value of the training here received, that this noble Institution, which made us proud and happy in younger years by the bestowal of her unrivalled honors, may, at least to some extent, receive honor in return from the achievements of our ripened manhood and our advancing age.