Chapter 6

Especial preparation of this kind is necessary for the prosecution of great enterprises. We are reminded of this if we observe what followed the all-night of prayer of the Lord Jesus,--how, when it was day, He called unto Him His twelve apostles, and with them went down into the plain to heal diseases and them that were vexed with unclean spirits. Napoleon leaves his army, as they near the Russian frontier, and spurs his horse until at last in solitary contemplation he sees before him the river that separates him from the country that he is going to invade: a striking picture, made more so by the thought of the luckless termination of the enterprise. And some of us, whom God will call to great enterprises for Him that will not end in failure, will know what it is to make a similar solitary advance; and in silent waiting upon God to watch Him unroll before us the map of our journey, telling us what we must do and what we must suffer for Him: and the silence makes us strong when the voice of God has broken in upon it. And we will not marvel if to us, as to Saul of Tarsus, the answer to the question, "What wilt thou have me to do?" should come in the form, "I will shew him how great things he must suffer"; for our thoughts will turn again to Him who said, "Rise and let us be going" from the solitude of the upper room to the deeper retirement of the olive grove; who went a little farther, even from those He loved most, as He prayed, "Not My will but Thine be done"; and then took His way alone, and yet not alone, to be the Redeemer and Reviver of the souls of men.

XII

TESTS OF FAITH, LOVE, AND RIGHTNESS

What are the experimental bases of our Christianity? and whereby shall we know that we are of the truth and assure our hearts before Him?

Our answers to such questions may appear discouraging, but it is far better that we should experience discouragement (not that we would really wish to say a word to throw back the weakest believer from his faith), than that we should attempt to fill ourselves with the formulas that the Pharisees do eat.

Some time ago, in discussing the definite points and peculiar characteristics of Christian life and experiences, we took as a comparison the changes of state in a material body, from solid to liquid, and from liquid to gaseous. We observed that, just as in nature the most important practical and theoretical investigations were made upon bodies in the neighbourhood of those points where they undergo a change of state, so it is also true in the world of grace that our most valuable observations and inquiries relate to certain critical points in the life--as conversion and sanctification; points which may sometimes, like the freezing and boiling points of a material substance, approach almost, if not quite, to coincidence, but which, like them, may be very widely separated.

Suppose, then, to resume our figure, we were to propose to ourselves the question, "How shall I know whether a body near the melting point has passed from the solid to the liquid state?" In some cases it would be extremely easy to give an answer: with ice, under ordinary circumstances, we should simply say that it becomes mobile; the word of the Supreme Law having gone forth, the waters flow. But our test would not do for all liquids, because there are some that do not answer readily to it, but are extremely sluggish in the neighbourhood of their melting points, so that they seem almost solid even when liquid. We are obliged, then, to look for a better test, and we should probably observe that the most convenient would be found in the fact that an addition of heat produces a change in temperature in a body that has passed its melting point. Place a thermometer in melting snow, it marks zero until the snow is really melted, and after that it rises.

Now, in a similar manner, we should find that many of the tests popularly applied to discriminate spiritual life, are only partially accurate; and since our method is a purely experimental one, we ought to see that we apply proper methods of inquiry in an accurate manner.

Our question, then, is, "Whereby shall we know that we are of the truth?" and we shall probably look to Scripture for an answer. Indeed, there is a School which tells us positively that we must try the condition in which we are by the statements of Scripture, holding up the Word of Life as a mirror before our lives, so that we may compare the reflection with the Divine characteristics.

And provided this method be honestly applied, and not by the mere selection of pet texts, it is probable that it is a correct one. We will, then, take the 1st Epistle of John, in which we find the most definite assertions about personal experience, and try ourselves by it.

First of all, there is the simple and beautiful statement, "Beloved, now are we the children of God"; most of us would quote it freely; but our scientific method would at least require that we should harmonise the supposed fact with the asserted consequences, "Therefore the world knoweth us not, even as it knew Him not"; and if we find that the world smiles on us in a way that it did not upon our Lord, then we must either conclude (i.) that we were mistaken in the fact, or (ii.) that while the word _we_ in the first part of the sentence is capable of extension, the _us_ in the second is restricted in its reference to St. John and the despised and rejected people with him--with, perhaps, a possible reference to subsequent isolated instances, down to the Salvation Army, and a few more in our own day!

Or, taking another simple assertion, "We know that we have passed (crossed over, transmigrated) from death unto life." We use the words to convince people of the definite nature of conversion; we say it is as real as a passage from death to life, and as truly marked; it is the advent of a new life in the soul. But can we honestly go on to base the assertion on the fact of our own love to men, to--souls? Would we venture to stand or fall by this test, "I have loved, I love," and not be afraid that our good angels would rise up to bear witness against us as we said it?

A third passage comes before us; for some one will say, "We believe, and is it not written that he that believeth hath everlasting life?" and may we not rest upon the assurance conveyed by the present tense of the verb employed?

Without going at present into the consideration of this passage from the Gospel, let us say, roughly, that the test of the existence of a spiritual life presented by St. John in the Epistle is of a threefold character: it is--

([Greek: alpha]) A test of faith: he that believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.

([Greek: beta]) A test of love: he that loveth is born of God.

([Greek: gamma]) A test of righteousness: every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him.

And if these are true criteria of the life within us, each of these statements, with its necessary consequences, may be predicated of that soul in which the Heavenly Life has been brought forth.

For instance: we must not take ([Greek: alpha]) and reject ([Greek: beta]) and ([Greek: gamma]); nor must we disregard the consequences which are a necessary part of our experimental verifications.

Of these three passages we should most probably elect to be tried by ([Greek: alpha]); for it is comparatively easy for us, especially at the present day, to hold to an intellectual assent to a proposition. In fact the difficulty is that the sieve is too wide; for almost every one believes that Jesus is the Christ. It must be evident then that we have misunderstood the text or omitted the consequences which follow from it. Now the continuation of the statement is that whatsoever is in this holy birth has victory over the world; and if we apply the test of an overcoming life to our supposed faith, things look very different. Discouraged, we pass on to the second criterion; if not by faith, let us be judged by love.

Since we all of us love something and some persons, we shall perhaps find ourselves safe under this test.

But, upon examination, we perceive that he does not simply mean love of God, or love of Jesus, or a merely selective human love; but love of the brethren and of the children of God in a universal manner. He twists it backwards and forwards, saying at one moment, "He that loveth God, let him love his brother also"; at another, "If he love not his brother whom he hath seen, how _can_ he love God whom he hath not seen"? and again, "By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God," and, breaking off abruptly, "when we love God, and keep His commandments." Certainly if love is universal and coincident with obedience, we shall scarcely be able to face this test.

So we pass on to the third criterion--that of righteousness; and here, perhaps, we may expect some help, knowing how careful the Lord is to judge us by the light we have, how generously He measures every effort after holiness, and blesses every pang of the spiritual hunger. We may not be able to grasp the creeds which others recite so fluently; we may not be able to give easy expression to the affections which thrill within us; may, perhaps, wonder if we love at all; but at least we can say this,--we want to be right. But then we are confronted with the difficulty that what God means is not that we should want to be right, but that we should be right. He explains and characterises the spiritual birth by the words of the Apostle, "He that doeth righteousness is righteous even as Christ is righteous." "He that is born of God doth not sin." "Every one that is born of Him sinneth not." It almost seems as if the Apostle of Love had been remetamorphosed into the Son of Thunder, and were calling down fire from heaven upon us to devour us. And do not let us say that this is merely St. John's extravagant way of preaching holiness; for it is the language in which the teachers of the time generally held and transmitted the Christian doctrine. Thus Ignatius, writing to the Ephesians, adopts the three tests of faith and love and righteousness: "No man professing the faith sinneth; nor does he who professeth love, hate; the tree is known by its fruits; so, likewise, those who profess to be Christ's shall be seen from their deeds."

And Polycarp presents the life-criteria in the same manner: "You shall be built up in the faith which is given to you: before which is love to God and to Christ and to the neighbour; for he who has love is far from all sin." And so we might multiply instances.

What shall we then say: Is a new Sinai set up on the square of the New Jerusalem? or is it a sense of good things not seen as yet that makes us cry, "Search me, O God; ... and see if there be any lack of faith or love or righteousness in me, and lead me in the way everlasting"?

XIII

THE ETERNAL IDEA

"See that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed thee in the Mount."--HEB. viii. 5.

When we speak of a pattern, we generally understand by it some temporary or partial representation of an idea that is to be or has been realised--such as the plan of a house, or the mould of a casting, or, to take a more definite illustration, like the little silver models of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, or the carved wooden lions which are sold in the shops in the neighbourhood of the Lion Monument at Lucerne. In these last two instances we see that the greater is made the pattern of the less; and it is important for us to remember this; we are not to suppose that God showed to Moses a diminutive tabernacle, a sort of doll's house, in accordance with which he was to construct his house of skins, or that He impressed upon him the nature of the priestly and sacrificial worship by altars and offerings of a lower degree, of small quantities. It is more like what Philo explained it to be, that the outer world is fashioned upon the model of the World of Ideas whose centre is the Divine Word; or like Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence, by which we may learn

Cup, column, candlestick, All temporal things related royally, And patterns of what shall be in the Mount.

But, to get a more simple and exact idea, let us observe the means which those who have studied the heavens have taken to illustrate astronomical facts. There is an astronomical toy called the orrery, which can be made, by proper mechanism, to represent, with tolerable accuracy, the actual motions of the planets in their orbits, and which can serve to illustrate the phenomena which from time to time occur in the heavens. Now the tabernacle of Moses is precisely like this; it is a religious orrery, a means of representing religious truths and bringing home religious facts to the consciousness of those who are unable to study the skies and the lunar and planetary theories for themselves. But no one who wishes to be a real astronomer would be content with winding up the orrery and watching the balls go round; he would know that the heavens must be studied for themselves, if one was ever to understand them accurately: and no one who wishes to be more than moderately religious can remain satisfied with the meagre assistance obtained by ritual and externalism.

We observe, too, that no one who wished to chronicle fresh facts would go to the orrery to learn them. He would, for instance, turn his spectroscope on the sun, and not on the great ball which represents it in the mechanism, if he wanted to determine the constituents of that great luminary. And let us remember that we shall never get at any fresh religious truth by means of ritual; the proper destination of all orreries, religious or otherwise, is the museum. But meanwhile the heavens still go round, which are the work of Thy fingers; and the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained, can still be studied, even when all the imitations of the universe have been swept away. We desire for ourselves an emancipation from all that is merely traditional in the religious life; we would refer back our lives to the original thought of God concerning them. Our life needs emendation, which can only take place satisfactorily by reference to the original design. We are often perplexed in our study of Scripture, by various readings and incorrect texts, and we wish that we could attain to something like the possession of an exact copy, if it were only of a single gospel. We read of Tischendorf finding the precious Codex in the monastery on Mount Sinai, and cannot forbear wishing that, perhaps, in some of the waste places of the East, there might be found a copy, not of the fourth or fifth century, but, if possible, of the first.

Suppose, for example, that a copy of the Gospel of St. Matthew, signed with his own hand, should come into our possession, in which it should be stated that "I, Matthew, sometime a tax-gatherer for the Romans, and now a collector of dues for the Almighty, and one of them that are set to ask, 'How much owest thou unto my Lord?' have written this book, by the aid of the Holy Spirit; wherein may be heard many voices of the Lord; and lo! some of them have already come to pass, and the rest must shortly be done. And may the peace of him that wrote this book abide also with them that read." The supposition is not so very absurd, and if it could be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the learned (a people hard to persuade) that the Book and the hand were genuine, what a number of questions would be settled. An end would be made of all glosses and emendations of the text over which there have been so many disputes, and there would be an excision of all parts that have been added by later hands.

But we must admit that the corruptions of the sacred text are insignificant in comparison with the deviations that we find in our own lives from the original thought of God concerning us. Registered and chronicled in heaven is the mind and will of our Father about us; registered and chronicled also are the defects which have marred the handiwork of God in the soul. We do not always set out with the intention of spoiling our souls, and of keeping them from being holy books, in which he that runs may read; but as a matter of fact what self writes in the margin soon creeps into the text; and what we write between the lines soon becomes a part of the manuscript.

Let who says The soul's a clean white paper, rather say A palimpsest, a prophet's holograph, Defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's-- . . . . . . . we may discern perhaps Some upstroke of an Alpha and Omega Expressing the Old Scripture.

But if we are to undergo a real emendation, it must be by detecting something more than an upstroke of the Divine Will; it must be by reference to the original plan of God, and by a surrender to the same.

In the chapels at the back of the choir of Cologne Cathedral are preserved the original parchments on which are drawn the plan of the great minster. All the centuries through which this building has been raising, the men that have been working at it have had in reverence the original thoughts of the master-minds at the first: and those who have been chosen to the superintendence of the work have been men who were reckoned the most conversant with the laws of the Gothic architecture. One can imagine that Archbishop Englebert sleeps the more softly in his silver shrine because of the completed work of to-day. So we speak and think of a great stone-temple, the working out of an idea whose details were at first but scantily given, carried out in ages during which the master-minds that planned it could no more be consulted.

And yet when a greater and more perfect tabernacle is in building, not planned of mortal thought, and whose stones were too heavy to be moved by mortal hands, how little reference there is to the plan of the Founder, how few that are desirous of living according to the counsel and will of God, and to see in that will, not a mere legal skeleton of the structure, but a pattern, good and acceptable and perfect, with no detail wanting for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Alas! that our lives should be lived so much at random instead of being so fashioned that it might be said over the completed structure at the last, "Whose architect and craftsman is God." In Christianity the ideal is to be the actual: there is to be no "shooting at the moon, because by that means you reach higher than by aiming at a tree" (a very doubtful statement even in mechanics); what God wants us to be that we must be; and if He says, "Be ye perfect," then let us go on to perfection and reach it. The Christian is called upon by his Master to live out and actualise God's ideal thought concerning him. Upon the map of his life is already marked out the road by which he is to reach the heavenly city; if, at least, he reaches it, as God intends, by the shortest way. There are no roundabout roads marked on the map in the Mount, and yet the Divine Plan of our life will be found inclusive of the minutest necessary details, just as an Ordnance map will tell you each feature of interest and importance as you go from place to place. It is of the utmost importance that we should take counsel's opinion about our lives, and that we should pray, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" that we should, if need be, weep much, until the Lamb shall take off the seals from that book of life, which, in the archives of the celestial city, is entitled "The Life of ---- taken from the Pattern in the Mount"; that we should learn to conform ourselves to the Divine original, just as a manuscript, however deformed by glosses and traditions, is accurately and certainly emended by the discovery of the original text; that we should know, in some sense, as Christ did, whence we come and whither we go; that, as He said, we also might feel that for this end we were born and for this purpose we came into the world, that we might bear witness to the truth; that, with Him, too, we might in some measure be able to say, "The son can do nothing but what he seeth the Father do"; and that at our ending it might be said, "He lived out the secret thought and counsel of the Almighty."

But in thinking of the pattern in the Mount as a pattern of life, it is important for us to see that, in the first instance, this thought was presented to us in connection with that side of life which we call worship; for there was to be a sanctuary made, etc., nor must we omit to get, with regard to our worship, a glimpse into the thought of God beforehand, consulting the oracle in advance as did men in the old days. We may not take voyage without the very best map that can be had, lest we make shipwreck; nor, because we have not taken pains to obtain the map, may we content ourselves with creeping round shores that we know we ought to leave.

We must not separate the life from the worship; in fact they are one: we learn that from the description of the ceaseless adoration of those nearest the throne; they rest not day nor night saying, "Holy, holy, holy." Are we to suppose from this that their existence is occupied in the mere repetition of an everlasting Trisagion; or that, as Beecher once said, "they stand like wax candles round the throne, uttering an occasional Hallelujah"? Is it not rather God's way of showing us how He is unceasingly glorified in those who live nearest Him, whose lives worship Him?

The worship must be continuous with the life. I have a thermometer which has become perfectly useless because the air has broken up the continuity of the alcohol; it is worth next to nothing as an index of temperature. And little can we learn from any soul in which the continuity of the religious life is broken, and which has become life streaked with worship.

Now let us learn one or two of the characteristics of a pure life-worship.

Out of the worship according to the pattern in the Mount all respectability has been differentiated: the Christian religion will not hold caste in solution; it precipitates it to the bottom; its founder died the death of a slave; how could they give the slave a back seat after that? On the contrary, they gloried in the name; Paul, a slave and an apostle; a slave, and so eligible for the honour of crucifixion; an apostle, and so sent with the good news of life. Respect of persons holds not in heaven; none there will criticise the clay out of which the first raiment of your soul was made. What need is there, then, that we should leave off holding the faith of our Lord Jesus, with respect of persons (there are few churches where the ministers dare to preach on such a text as that). Let us have done with such classifications. In Jesus Christ there is neither barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, town nor university, but Christ is all, and in all.

We know, too, that the life-worship to which God calls us consists in abandonment and surrender to an animating, impelling spirit. "The Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy, and thou shalt be turned into another man. And it shall be, when these signs are come upon thee, that thou shalt do as occasion serve thee, for the Lord is with thee." "Whither the Spirit was to go, thither was their spirit to go." The highest life is one in which we realise not merely surrender to the Divine Will, but harmony with it, so that the rails on which the life moves, the human and Divine wills, become strictly parallel.