Part 19

Finally, from the second narrative see what it is to be with Christ and how those who inwardly are not against are by His own verdict on His side. And, first of all, note the error into which the disciples fell. Very like the conduct of the Pharisees is theirs. They find a man doing good in Christ's name. He is not all he should be, not one of them, and not a constant pupil of Christ's. But instead of seeking to draw him to more perfect light, they intolerantly forbid him to do the good he was doing. So mistaken an action must have come from a wrongness of heart. They, too, fell before that evil, monopolising tendency that grudges to another God's gifts which we possess. It was a cruel thing to the man, a harmful thing, and might have turned him from Christ. Let us take the lesson to ourselves. Let us beware of refusing to allow good in those who differ from us; let us beware of rashly judging those who are not just the same as we. Harm—grave harm—is often done by treating imperfect, immature followers of our Master as if they had neither part nor lot with Him. But mark how this man was with Christ; only, remember, he is not an example of what we should be, rather he is a specimen of one just over the borderland: but over. It was not intellectual orthodoxy; not a perfect knowledge of God's mysteries that he possessed. He was very ignorant about God, about Christ. He did but know a little of the power of Christ and His majestic character and stupendous work. Yet so far as his knowledge went of Christ he had received it gladly. He rejoiced in the power of the Saviour's name to cast out devils, to cure the troubled ones. He did the good he knew. He acted up to his light. In his measure he gave glory and reverence and obedience to the Saviour. He was working for good and mercy and truth and God in the world. Thus he was not against Christ in these his aims, and so was for the Lord. It is only of those who are not against Christ in _this_ sense that He says they are on His side.

Friends, there is warning and comfort in that. Warning there is, for, mark, that vain dream is dispelled which would read Christ's words as meaning that if only you do not oppose Him actively you are to be counted on His side. No! if that is your position, you are not for Him; you must be against Him: for passivity, neutrality is impossible.

Comfort there is, on the other hand, to you who feel yourselves very feeble, very imperfect; to you who find it hard to understand; to you who fear you are mistaken about many things. Ah! men may condemn you; the disciples may dissuade you from taking His name and counting yourself His, but do not fear. If you do, as far as you see how, strive to do the good He has taught you; if you do, it may be afar off, follow in His footsteps; if you have learned to find in Him in any degree a power that helps you to cast out the evil spirits in your soul and in the hearts of men: be sure that though you may not follow with other disciples, though you may be very deficient, very immature, a very unworthy servant—be sure that, nevertheless, you are not against, but for Him, and that in the end of the days He will not forbid you to claim His name, but will acknowledge you for His own.

XIII.

_THE PROPHECY OF NATURE._

"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet."—PSALM viii. 3-6.

"But now we see not yet all things put under Him."—HEB. ii. 8.

The Eighth Psalm is a very striking one. It lifts the mind of the reader to a lofty height where he seems to have soared above sin and sorrow. It exults in man's greatness and Nature's grandeur. It is not Hebrew and theocratic, but human and universal. What it says is said of man as man; of man as he ought to be, was meant to be, may be. The subject is Humanity.

The New Testament writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes what is said in this psalm to be true of Christ, and he thinks that he has a right to find in the words a prophecy of Christ's coming. If you read the psalm without thinking of what is said in the Epistle you would not immediately apply it to Christ. How, then, is there a real connection between this old Hebrew utterance and the coming of our Lord?

It is a fact that the patriarchs expected the coming of some great and wonderful blessing in the future, and it is a fact that in the coming of Christ a gift came to men in the lines of anticipated blessing; but far greater than they ever dreamed of.

Reflecting on those predictions and anticipations of future blessing, might there not be in the very structure of the world, of the material universe itself, in the course of events as they have fallen out in history, something to lead men to expect the advent of their Christ? God makes His plans looking, as a wise man looks, to the end. We should expect, then, in all the foundation-laying, that that was provided for and expected which should be the crown of all.

Is there not in creation an aspect of things which makes men think that there is something great and grand in store for their race? The writer of this psalm conceived his poem as he stood in the open fields and looked up into the solemn sky, and watched the unhasting and untiring motion of the shining stars—worlds upon worlds burning and throbbing in the abyss of space. Away from the hum and tumult of men, no one can look at those hosts of silent stars without a subdued and awed sense of the mystery of being, of the infinite possibilities that the universe discloses. The star-studded heaven at night makes a man irresistibly think of God. It makes a man think, too, of himself. The silence, the shining, the mystery and the solemnity of the starry heavens make a man's beating, living life, as it were, become heard. A man is intensely conscious of himself. That is exactly what passed through the heart of this writer. It was not he who chose to have these thoughts, no more than it is our wish to have these thoughts. God was playing upon the strings of this man's heart—more directly, more rigorously in him, but just as He plays upon the strings of your own when you have had great solemn thoughts of God on a dark night, beneath the burning stars. The man's thoughts went up, and then they went down into himself, when he looked up into heaven, when he saw the moon and the stars, when he realised all their wondrous being, the regularity, the order, the vastness, the distance; then he thought of God, and God became great and grand and majestic, and then he burst out, "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth!" That is what he said. Then he looked into himself, his own conscious life, met its failure, and his first thought was of his own terrible pettiness. In the face of these countless worlds revolving in the far heaven, "what is man?" And then there came another thought to him: "And yet how great is man!" That mighty moon, millions of times vaster than man, does not know its own shining, its lustre, its own motions, its majesty. It is blind, and deaf, and dumb, and insensate, and man sees it and wonders at it, measures and weighs it, and understands its nature; and so man in all his meanness, in all his smallness, in all his weakness, in all the fragility of his life, is greater far than sun and moon and stars, and all revolving worlds. How little is man—and yet how great, O God! Here down below on earth man watches the stars, and up in heaven God watches them too. Man thinks, God thinks; man creates, God creates; man loves, God loves; so little, so great, and yet so like; Father and child, the One so grand, the other so insignificant.

Then he turned to the earth on which he stood, and with a grandeur of soul he recognised man's position on earth sharing the likeness of God, gifted with God's power of thought and of plan, of will and of love; man stands lord of all lower things that have been made, king and ruler with power to control, with mastery to move them, he is lord and master over all their ways, uncontrolled by aught, undismayed by aught, king, god of earth: "Thou hast made him ruler over all the works of Thy hands."

Is it not a grand poem, that? If I could read to you the best poems written in other lands by men of other days, by men of other faiths, if I could compare the thoughts of this psalm with other thoughts of God's plan and of man's position, you would understand what I mean when I say the psalm is grand, the psalm is a revelation of man and of God.

If I had the capacity or the time to try and show you how these thoughts about God and about Nature and about man, give man all the dignity, all the elevation of character, all the powers and abilities to shape and fashion the world he is in, one could not but wonder at the grandeur of that psalm. The faith about God, and the faith about man's destiny written down in that psalm—that faith is the Magna Charta of humanity that has emancipated men from the slavery to sun, moon and stars, and all the powers of Nature.

The psalm is a true conception of man's relation—upwards to God, and downwards to Nature. It has been perfectly described by a German commentator as a poetical echo of creation! A psalm, a poem, such as this flings a spell about you. You forget actualities. It is so good, it seems so true, it is so human, it is so living, you yield your soul to it, you are filled with its glow and joyfulness, you are warmed with its strength and triumph. You hail it;—and then you begin to think, you look round, and what do you see? Mankind lord over lower things, yourself lord over your own body, master of your appetites? Your neighbours kings? The best of men enslaved! Bound down by the greed of gain! So that the nobler powers of mind and body, and soul, are degraded and cramped in them—men and women slaves of superstition, slaves of prodigies and foolish fancies wrought into their very nature.

"We see not yet all things put under him." If exultation was the mood made by the picture of the psalm, depression is the mood made by the picture of mankind; and are we to end with that? No. The writer to the Hebrews has given us the key by which we can unlock the secret, and have confidence in the triumph of man's better nature, and hope for a better future.

Let us look a little deeper into things, let us do men justice. Has man ever acquiesced in his sinful, sorrowful slavery? Never. It is always under protest that he regards it. It is always with a sense of fallen greatness. It is always with discontent. It is always with an unconquerable conviction that man was made for something better. Proof, do you want? Why is it when you read a story of heroic generosity, like that of the captain who gave away his own life for that of a wretched boy the other day, that you feel life to be worth living? What is the meaning of that sense of grandeur, of greatness, of triumph, that comes over you? How is it? What is it? When you see a brave deed of self-denial; at another time, when we hear of a cruel, mean deed done—how do we feel towards each? Are we all bad? If that were our natural lot we should acquiesce in the evil deed, we should have no shock, no surprise; instead of that there is a sense of surprise, and revolt. There is an error somewhere—a disaster, a calamity. It is a sin—sin—a thing that robs us of our heavenly nature. Do we recognise it as a part of human nature? No. Sin is unnatural, sin is horrible. That is the meaning of the death scene in Macbeth. A knock at the door reveals to the murderer the distance his crime has set between him and the simple ordinary life of man. Sin is something unnatural, it is a calamity, an intrusion, it ought not to be there. Fellowship with God! Impossible to us! Why? Because we were never meant to have it? No. If there be a God at all, if He made this world, if He made men to think, and feel and understand, then God meant the world to be like a written book that should speak of Him. Why does not all Nature so speak to man? Because we have sinned, because we have lost the lineage, because we are not like Christ, the sinless Son: to Him the lilies had the touch of God on them, the birds in every song proclaimed His praise.

So, then, while we see that all things are not put under man, we see plainly that God meant it otherwise, and that God made man to be lord of creation. What God does not wish is hardly likely to stand. If man has missed being what he was meant for, there is good possibility that he may regain it. If God be love, there is certainty. I enter a master-painter's studio, and I see upon his easel a spoiled picture. I can see the majesty of the design, the beauty of the ideal, but from some defect in the pigment or flaw in the canvas, it has gone wrong; it is blurred and dim and spoiled. But not so to himself; that man will not allow the disaster to prevent him creating in visible form the vision of beauty that once charmed his heart. The man would not be a man of will and determination if he allowed the disaster to hinder him in his purpose. God is unchangeable. God is God.

Man is not what God made him for; man is not what God made him to be; and God is God. His purpose may lapse for a little, His designs may be delayed on the way, but if the beginning points to the grand end, that end will be reached. God meant it. God means it. God shall do it.

We stand farther on along the track of God's providential dealings with men. We see more than the writer to the Hebrews saw. He, too, remembered that psalm when he described man as he ought to be. Why did he still let it live and exist as a thing that is true? He could wait. What was he waiting for? And what were the singers thinking of as they chanted that psalm? They thought of a good time coming, they thought not the less of the disaster, they thought of God redeeming men, of God causing a Man to be born who should be a Deliverer, they thought of Him reaching out hands of help to all who came to Him, and the writer to the Hebrews writes truly when he says that that is prophesied of Christ. It is a prediction of His coming. God cannot be foiled. Man is not yet what God created him to be, the crown of all the earth-creation, but in the divine heart and mind there has been that vision—man wanting but little of exaltation to be next to God—man the lord of all—and the writer to the Hebrews was able to say, "God has achieved it; in Christ, crowned King and Lord of all creation, the psalm is fulfilled."

What depth of meaning and of wonder, of future joy and triumph, there is in that feeling he has of Christ as the Flower and Fruit of God's design in all creation! What depth of meaning there may be I do not dare to fathom, of good to all mankind; but this I will think,—that in the end of time when all things have been summed up and restored in Jesus Christ, when God shall have gathered together in one the broken threads, when the whole creation that with man groaneth until now, shall be delivered from its bondage—God will be seen not to have failed. What future revelation of grandeur, and of Divine goodness, and of redemption beyond our utmost thoughts, there may be, I do not think we were meant to know. I do not think we should dare to dogmatise; but we were meant to have our eyes drawn away to that glorious, radiant, splendrous future, and we are bidden there to see all God's loving pity and wise provision for us. Ah! God is working; He is creating, loving; He is providing, planning; He is redeeming creation, gathering together into one grand whole a restored humanity and a ransomed creation; and all mysteriously and strangely wrought into a great unity with Christ, and through Christ, with God.

XIV.

_CHRISTIAN GIVING._

PREACHED IN WILLESDEN PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEPTEMBER 24TH, 1882.

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord."—1 COR. xv. 55-8.

"Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I have given order to the churches of Galatia, even so do ye. Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come. And when I come, whomsoever ye shall approve by your letters, them will I send to bring your liberality unto Jerusalem."—1 COR. xvi. 1-3.

I have read this passage for one single purpose; it is to draw your attention to the singular way in which St. Paul passes from the doctrine of the Resurrection to the practical duty of Christian giving. It almost startles us, who have not quite St. Paul's way of thinking about collections, to hear him pass from that triumphant apostrophe of death, "O death, where is thy sting?" to "Now concerning the collection."

This seeming incongruity in the Epistle, and in the Church's work, is not confined to the Bible or to the Church; it runs all through life. Man has a poor, fleshly body, needing food, and drink, and sleep, and nursing; and he has an immortal soul. Say what you will, we cannot deny that the body is there; and I do not think we shall ever come to deny that the soul is there too, and will live, so long as goodness, tenderness, and devotion, and truth, and being last. Life has got into it; and the material framework which carries that soul-man's life corresponds to himself. In our homes, in our national life, in our business life there is the strangest intermingling of tragedy and comedy, of what is reverent and sacred, and what is most secular, and common, and mean. You cannot divorce the two. You may dislike the commonplace, and the mean, and the material; but if you hope to preserve the region of the spiritual and the sympathy of the good, that you can only do by preserving the body; they are gone when you forget the body.

What is it that is the brightest, heavenliest thing in the whole earth? It is love. No amount of mere common propriety, in the humblest action, will make up for the absence of that which comes out in a sudden tear or looks out in a sweet smile. We all know it, however earthly and material we are. But what I have to say is this: Look at that sacred thing, that love, which is almost too refined to put its hands on the soiling things of earth; what do you find it doing? Nursing at the sick bed, doing tasks that are repulsive, planning, with all kinds of material medicaments, and helps, and reliefs, to ease bodily pain. Now, it is easily possible for a coarse heart and poor bodily eyes to be in the midst of all that is sacred, and secular too, and to call it all common, and poor, and mean. It needs a quick, warm heart, and it needs almost, I may say, some imagination, some touch of a fine fancy, something of that Divine power which comes of tender affection and love, to do such acts for God.

In the life of Christ's spiritual family, which we call "the Church" (and by calling it "the Church" so often put it clean away out of all control of common sense and of affection), the very same law holds. The Church is worth nothing if it is not lit up and warmed with heavenly devotion to Jesus Christ. It may look solemn at the Communion-table; but it is not worth having if it does not reach men's hearts with fingers which squeeze out their hardness, and make them penitent for their sins; it is not worth having if it has not God, and Christ, and the life of the soul all throbbing through it. And yet it has a body, and material buildings, and expenses to maintain its earthly fabric and framework; and the spiritual life and the spiritual love that will have nought to do with these "cares of all the Churches," which Paul, the greatest preacher and Apostle, carried, or with collections and planning for the maintenance of preachers, thereby destroy themselves. If we try to put away that, and say, "It is not spiritual," or "It is a low thing," we are simply committing suicide of the religious life. It cannot live without that. Christ Himself had to plan how His preachers were to be maintained; and He spoke a great word when He said that they were to go and live on those who could not preach; not taking it as charity—never!—but taking it as a helpful service, which, combined with their searching of the Divine Word, should make it triumph in the world. "He that receiveth" into his house—maintaining him, that he may preach—"a preacher" (that is the meaning of "a prophet"), "in the name of a preacher"—not because he brings honour to the house, and because he is a great man, but because he is a man who is converting souls, a man that takes God at His word, and prays, and preaches unto men—will have the same "reward" in heaven, Christ providing for the spiritual wants and for the bodily wants of the preacher, and for his maintenance. And so, if once we lived in good earnest into that real, loving, great, broad thought of the actual life of Christ, we should not feel any surprise when we read how St. Paul passes from the great triumph of the doctrine of the Resurrection to the enforcement of Christian liberality.

Now I am going to spend the time at my disposal this morning in a very practical way. I hardly think that it needed that introduction to justify this use of the time at a Sunday morning's service; still, possibly, what has been said may be of use, not so much as a justification, but just as a preparation. I think that these things are for you. The subject is not a mere question of Church business; it is not a mere question, either, of interest to the men whose minds have a little of the statesman in them, and who consider the problems of Church government and Church management, as well as of national government and management; but I will say that it is a subject which ought to have a thorough interest to every one of you. I have been led to take it as my subject this morning because I was sent, a fortnight ago, by our Synod, as a deputy to one of our largest Presbyteries in the North, in order that I might interest congregations there in our Church's financial system of maintaining the preaching of the Gospel throughout this country; and I had the feeling, when I was doing it, and I had the assurance from those whom I visited, that it did them good. I have thought, therefore, that it might do my people good. Moreover, I had this feeling about the very strong and plain things that I said to them, that I should hardly be an honest man if I did not care openly to say the same things to my own people. Nay, I was led in some things to speak of my congregation, and what they had done not only for their minister, but for all the schemes of the Church, as an example; and therefore I feel my honour somewhat pledged that our congregation should not only do well, as it has done, but should do better. I say these things that I may have your sympathy in what I am going on to explain and to say to you.