Part 7

"It was here that Elmslie first unfolded his marvellous powers as a speaker. At the University I had been a member of the Dialectic, where there were one or two fine speakers. One of them was more fluent and agreeable to listen to than any one I have ever heard since; another—long ago, alas! gone over to the majority—spoke with a freer play of mere intellectual force than even Elmslie possessed. But I had never before, and have never since, heard speaking which, taken all in all, quite came up to that to which Elmslie treated us Friday after Friday. The combination of powers was the marvel of it—the knowledge, the clearness of exposition, the fecundity of ideas, the telling force with which he put his points, the play of fancy, the exuberant wit and humour, the tenderness and pathos into which he could glide for a moment if it invited him; there was no resource which he had not at perfect command. Yet it was entirely without display; he was always perfectly natural and familiar. He never won a triumph which humiliated any one; and, whilst others by expounding the same free views excited bitter feelings of opposition, he had the gift of saying the most revolutionary things in such a way that no one was hurt; his weapon, though it cut deep, having the marvellous property of diffusing an anæsthetic on the wound it made.

"If it is necessary to throw some shade into a picture so bright, I should say that in those days his speaking had one defect: while he had always complete mastery of his subject, he rarely made the impression that the subject had complete mastery of him. He could play with it so easily, and he could play so easily with his audience, that, as part of the audience, you felt that you were not quite sure whether he was giving you all his mind or only as much of it as he considered good for you. He had not yet been gripped so tightly by the realities of life as he was later, when his sense of the wrong and misery of the world transformed his eloquence into an irresistible stream of passion and made him the most earnest and whole-hearted of comforters. As yet the bantering, laughing element was in excess; and he did not always remember where to draw the line in the _abandon_ of animal spirits. I used to wonder how it would do when he was settled as the moderator of a session of 'douce' Scotch elders.

"But to us at the time it was splendid. It was in one of our sessions that Dr. Blaikie founded the College dinner, which has since proved so valuable an institution, bringing all the students together daily in a social capacity; and any day you could have told where Elmslie was seated at the table by the explosions of laughter rising in that quarter all through the meal. Men strove to sit near him, and he diffused a glow up and down, his budget of stories never getting exhausted or his flow of spirits flagging. I well remember a speech he made at the close of the first session during which the dinner existed, to thank Professor Blaikie for his efforts on behalf of the students and congratulate him on the success of his experiment. It was, perhaps, the most remarkable of all Elmslie's speeches. Professors and students alike were simply convulsed with laughter, and one explosion followed another, till the assembly was literally dissolved; yet under all the nonsense there was capital sense, and the duty which he had undertaken could not have been more gracefully or completely discharged.

"On the serious side of college life he was equally a leader. His enormous influence over his fellow-students was uniformly pure and elevating; and in confidential hours, when conversation went down to the depths of experience, it was easy to see that his life, which was so gay and exuberant on the surface, was deeply rooted in loyalty to Christ. He threw himself heartily into the work of the Missionary Society in the Cowgate and the High Street. We began one winter to speak in the open air, but none of us were successful till we brought down Murray, who afterwards also went to the English Presbyterian Church and finished his career even sooner than Elmslie. Murray was no scholar, but in ten minutes he had a crowd round him extending halfway across the street, while we could never attract more than forty or fifty. It was a lesson which we often afterwards discussed with no small astonishment.

"I remember an incident of the Mission which Elmslie used to tell with great gusto. He was addressing the Children's Church on the story of Samson and the lion, when, observing that the children were not attending, he, instead of saying that the lion roared, emitted as near an approach to the roar itself as he could command. Instantly there was breathless attention; and when, after pausing long enough to allow for the full effect, he was about to proceed, a little girl cried out anxiously, 'O sir, do it again!' On another occasion he stopped to reprove rather sharply a boy who was very restless, when a companion, springing up, told him with great solemnity that he ought not to speak so to this boy, because he was deaf and dumb. Taken completely aback, Elmslie began humbly to apologise, when the whole class burst out into a shout of laughter at the skill with which he had been taken in. The boy could both hear and speak.

"After he went south I saw him very seldom. Once he caught me in London and took me out to preach at Willesden, where I was immensely impressed with his hold on the people and the extent of the field of influence he had opened up. Like his other friends, I was very impatient for some literary production worthy of his genius, and, when the brilliant tract on Renan appeared, I took the liberty of writing him urgently on the subject. It was always my hope that before very long we should be able to entice him back across the Border, to adorn a chair in one of our colleges. I did not hear of his illness till you wrote me that he was just dying. 'God moves in a mysterious way.' I have no hesitation in saying that Elmslie was by far the most brilliant man I have ever known, and there was never a human being more lovable. He seemed to be the man we needed most; but it is little we know; the Master must have had need of him elsewhere.

"Believe me yours most truly, "JAMES STALKER."

SERMONS.

I.

_CHRIST AT THE DOOR._

"Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me."—REV. iii. 20.

God is close to us. Every moment of our life He is doing countless things in us and around us. If a man were to do these things we should see him with our eyes, we could touch him with our hands; we should not fail to observe his presence. Because we cannot see God with our bodily eye, or grasp Him with our hand, we forget His working, we lose sight of His nearness.

When you were children, some time or other, I suppose, in your young lives, you got hold of a flower-seed, and planted it in a pot of moist earth, and set it in the sunniest corner of your room. Morning after morning, when you awoke, you ran to see if the flower had begun to grow. At last your eagerness was rewarded by the sight of some tiny leaves which had sprung up during one night. Then the stalk appeared, frail and tender, and then more leaves, and buds, and branchlets, till at length there stood, blooming before you, a fair and fragrant flower.

Who made it? Somebody worked to produce that flower. It could not make itself. The dead earth could not shape that lovely leaf; the bright sunshine could not paint those tendrils. A deep-thinking man, when he sees these wonderful things, must ask himself, Who fashioned them? Not the sunshine nor the air, but God, if there is a God, willed that that plant should grow. God toiled to make the plant—in your room, at your side.

At this moment, in your breast, your heart is beating. All your life it has gone on beating. It is not you who sustain its motion. Even when you forget it, when you are asleep, its pulsations do not cease. Somebody works to keep your heart beating. God, who is the foundation of all life, out of whose loving heart it streams, and back to whom it must return, has to remember your heart.

But God comes still nearer to you. Do you remember a time in your life when, in your inmost heart, that hidden, secret chamber where you dream your dreams, and love your loves, and pour out your sorrows all alone, you felt a strange influence? It was a vague unrest, a great self-weariness. It was as if all brightness, hope, and satisfaction had gone from your life, and had left behind them, in departing, a sick, wistful longing to find something new, something brighter, better, and more noble than you yet had known. It was as if you could hear voices calling, and your heart moved within you, as if some new friend might be there. Do you know what that was? It was God. It was the great Heart that made your heart, longing and pleading to have it for His own. "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me." Do you believe that? You, men and women, who love your Bible, and are angry if any man seems to speak against it, or throw doubt upon one jot or tittle of its letter, have you ever thought what that means if it is true? Ay! it stands written there, and you have read it a hundred times, and think you believe it; but do you indeed know what it means? It means that God, the Eternal, Infinite, Almighty God, who wields these worlds of shining stars, and keeps them in their mighty courses; that God, the Spotless, the Holy, the Stainless, cares with a great longing to have the heart and love of _you_; you, who are no saint; you, the most commonplace and lowly, the most insignificant and sinful of men. Is that easy to believe? Is it easy to believe that God would miss something if your heart never went out in tender affection and adoration towards Him; that He should take pains and trouble to get Himself into your poor, battered heart—that heart which is so filled with sordid cares as to how you may make a living, and the envyings and strivings which accompany; in which such sinful, base, and vicious thoughts too often dwell? Is it possible that the great, holy God wishes to get in there?

It is not easy to believe it. One of the greatest religious thinkers who ever lived, by the confession of believers and unbelievers alike; a man who laboured so much under the effort to find out God, and became so absorbed in the quest, that the name of "God-intoxicated" was applied to him; a man who conceived more than any one else of the grandeur and transcendency of God, till he found this poor world of ours and the whole universe fade into insignificance before the thought of Him; this man, this great philosopher, Spinoza, said, "A man should love God with his whole being, but he must not expect God to love him in return." And the bible says, "We love Him, because He first loved us." Which is true?

There are two things, I think, which make it hard to believe that we can be of consequence to God—that God holds each one of us in a separate thought of knowledge, sympathy, and Fatherly affection. One of them is this: How is it possible for God to do it? Think of the myriads of men and women on this world of ours, and the possibility of this universe teeming with countless creatures of God's creative power and Fatherly love. How is it possible that God should know each one of us, and love us each one? God, so omnipotent, so transcendent, so almighty! But the very thing that makes the difficulty to our reason seems to me the very thing that should undo it. If God were not so great, then I could not have the hope that I was something to Him _by myself_.

Is it not a fact that it is precisely a weak, uncultured, low, and undeveloped intellect that finds it difficult to give attention to a great mass of details, holding each apart, and doing justice to each? Precisely as you rise in the scale of intellect and mental power, that capacity increases quite incalculably. It is the great genius of a general who not merely directs his army as a mass, but holds it at every point, knows the value of every unit of force at his command, follows the movement of each squadron, troop, and even of each single individual, and precisely by this faculty is able to overthrow the enemy and lead the army to victory.

You have listened to a beautiful oratorio, where scores of instruments and hundreds of voices were all blended together in one tide of magnificent harmony. How is it possible for a small intellect to keep them thus in unison? It requires a master-mind in music to do this—one that is fully conscious of the value of each string and voice, and who can therefore combine them all in glorious harmony. And God is almighty; it is nothing to Him that He is far away from you; you, a speck of dust upon this world. It is precisely because I believe in God's omnipotence that I can believe that He cares for each separate creature He has made.

But then there is another question. Even if God can love each one of us, apart from all the rest, with an individual, personal, watchful kindness, what right have we to think that He should care to do it? Once again, that difficulty need but be faced, and you discover that it is a delusive spectre and empty of reality.

Is it likely that God should miss the love of me, His creature?

Turn to the early chapters of Genesis, and read the story they have to tell you. They tell you how through measureless periods of time, in the fields of infinite space, the great God built up our world; first the stone foundations, layer upon layer; above that, the strata of mineral wealth, to be used hereafter, clothing the surface of it with a verdant soil. Out of the mineral world he evolved the nutritive, vegetable world, out of vegetable life the higher creation of animal life, and out of that emerges man, standing on the summit of God's great toil and building, with eyes that see, ears that hear, and mind that can understand, answering to the call of God, interpreting all the wisdom, patience, beauty, and love in that mighty labour of creation, and saying, "Father, I adore Thee." Do you think that man, then, His last crowning work of creation, is nothing to God? What should you say of one who spent years and years, and sank uncounted capital, upon a great mass of wonderfully contrived machinery, to produce some beautiful fabric of beneficence to mankind, and when it was produced turned away and left it all? You would call such a one a fool, and mad.

God made this world, and spent toil and industry in making the heart of man, and keeping it conscious of Him, capable of loving Him. And do you mean to tell me that God does not care for human love? It is impossible. There is no God at all, or the Gospel is true. He does miss it when your heart does not bend to Him. The supreme gladness we can give our Maker is the simple, sincere adoration of our poor human hearts.

There is a picture that paints the idea of my text. It says, to those who look at it, what I could not say in many paragraphs. A cottage neglected, falling into ruin, is shown in the picture. In front of the window tall thistles spring up, and long grass waves on the pathway, leading to the door overgrown with moss. In front of that fast-closed door a tall and stately figure stands, with a face that tells of toil and long, weary waiting, and with a hand uplifted to knock. It is Christ, the Son of God, seeking to get into our sinful hearts. Is it true that there can be a man or woman who refuses to admit so fair a guest, so great and good a friend? It must be true. "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me."

But you think you can justify yourself. You say to me, "I feel it were a mad, foolish thing to refuse to admit to my own, if it be true, the loving heart of God, and a thing altogether unjustifiable. You say He comes and knocks at our hearts—that He calls and asks us to let Him in. No; many have called at the door of my heart, but I never knew Christ to call or knock. If ever He had, I think I should have let Him in." I believe you speak the truth, but I am certain that Christ has been to your heart.

Let me speak plainly to you. There may be various reasons why you have failed to detect His presence. Perchance your life has not been so good as even common morality would have made it, and now your heart is a very dreary place, filled with painful memories. Perhaps you are always outside, gadding about, and do not like to dwell alone in your heart and think; and so when Christ knocks and calls He finds empty rooms; or if even you are there you are not there alone, but you have filled its chambers with a noisy, revelling company and din. The call has reached you as a dim, half-heard, strange sound, which moved you half pleasantly and half with pain. You turned in your heart and listened for an instant, but there was something in the sound too painful, and you plunged back again into revelry and mirth. You did not know that it was God, the very heart of God, that had knocked and called.

Again, your life may have been very respectable, but very light and frivolous, engrossed in earthly affairs; and Christ has come, and you did not know it. For He comes in such simple, human guise. You remember when He came on earth the poor Jews did not know Him for more than the carpenter's son. He comes like that to you and me. He takes a human hand, and with its fingers knocks, but all you see and recognise is the human touch. You do not see the heart Divine that touches you through it with an appealing thrill.

Thank God, there are so many good mothers in this world. Thank God for the little children, and the lads and maidens here, whom a mother's memory follows like a very angel, often after she herself has gone. You remember that Sabbath evening custom when you and the little ones knelt at your mother's knee, and she told you the stories of the Bible; and the last one was always about the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who came to the world with such a great heart of love, who knew no sin at all, who was so good to women and children and the very worst of broken-hearted sinners, and whom men with hard hearts and cruel hands took and crucified; oh, such a death of pain for _you_! till you could almost see His face on the cross. And your mother's voice had got so low and reverent that it felt as if some one else was in the room, and your young child's heart grew so soft and loving to that Christ that died for you. Yes, He was there. Did you take Him quite inside? Or if you took Him in for a little while did you let Him go again, when your heart grew colder? Oh, young men and maidens who had a mother like that, remember her, and take that Christ into your hearts!

Some of you can remember a time when you had grown many years older, and perhaps had memories you would not like your mother to know of. And God struck you down with a great illness, and for a long time you were at the point of death. But at last the crisis was past, and you woke out of unconsciousness, brought back to life again, weak as a little child. All the din and turmoil of your manhood's life seemed to have faded in the distance, and once again you became as a little child. Do you remember how you felt when you turned that corner between life and death? Somehow, old memories came back to you—perhaps because your body was so weak—the memory of old days, of the father and mother, and the church in the country, and of all the things that were said and done. And then there came a wish that many things in your later life had never been done by you; a strange, solemn sense that there is a God; and into your heart a feeling of repentance for the past, and a wish to do better in the future. And you were so tired, and wished for a friend to speak to you in these words: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Afterwards you got stronger and said, "Perhaps it was only weakness." But I tell you it was the living, loving Christ, seeking to get into your heart.

I cannot stop to enumerate the countless knocks and calls that come to all of us, in those strange aspirations that come with the secret, tender affections, the dreams of love and truth. For God's sake, never be ashamed of them, and be true to the dreams of your youth. Do not think that Christ is part of a creed only, or belongs only to church and Sunday. No, Christ is in everything holy, everything pure, everything loving, and everything that draws your heart. I would have you understand that Christ works to get into your heart, and not into your head. There is plenty of time for the latter after He has once secured possession of your heart and life. Into the homeliest chamber of your heart, too, not into a state apartment, opened only on occasions of ceremony, He seeks to come, that He may stay with you and sup with you, and be with you in your home. There are some people who think this would be treating Him with very scanty respect, and so they think they must take a nook of their heart, like a piece of consecrated ground, and keep Him there, and only visit it on Sunday. No; Christ wants to come into your life and mind. Take Him to your office, and consult Him about your business; your affairs will not be managed with less skill and wisdom, but perhaps more honourably. Take Him to the fireside, where you plan your plans and dream your dreams, and make out a future for your little boys. He loved little ones on earth, and do you think He has lost that love in heaven?

Take Him into your heart to overcome the evil passions and habits, the things you would be ashamed to own to the most loving earthly friend, which you are fighting in God's name and cannot conquer by yourself. You say, "Tell us how we can do it. He is so very good, we fain would have Christ in our heart, but it seems so difficult when our heart is so unworthy." No, it is so easy—and yet so difficult to describe in words. The moment you have done it you wonder that you ever asked how it must be done.

I can tell you some things like it. You know what it is for a great grief to come into your heart, the first great disappointment in love, in friendship or ambition. You did not see it enter with your eyes, but you knew it had got in, for it changed everything, throwing a dark, cold shadow over all your life. Some of you know what it is for a real, true joy to get into your heart. Some of you, fathers and mothers, know what it is for a very true friend to get there. You hardly know how it happened, but one came right in to the inmost being of your life, and ere you knew it, you would be nothing without him—without him loving you. Love was all joy and happiness, and has stayed there ever since. It has made you different; you have learned to love the things he loves, and the love and knowledge have brought peace.

It is just like that when you take Christ into your heart. Go to the Gospels, you who feel the want of a friend like that, and read what He said to poor weeping men and women, till you feel the breath of His love encircle you, till your heart goes out to Him, and you will be vexed to grieve Him, and want to please Him; and you will think as He thinks, and love men as He loves.