"Howbeit if ye fulfil the royal law, according to the Scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well."—St. James ii. 8.
What St. James calls the Royal Law, is mentioned as far back as the time of Moses. It is one of the two commands to which our Lord gave new incidence, into which He put fresh meaning.
There has been, I hardly need remind you, endless debate about the source of some of Christ's most characteristic sayings. Was He original in His teaching, as we use the word, or was He eclectic, gathering together the most luminous things that had been said? Jewish scholars, as we might expect, have not been slow to point out that many of the sayings attributed to Jesus, and certainly many of His ideas, are to be found in the old Rabbinical writings; that many of His highest truths had been announced by saints and seers of His race long before He came.
We need not question that there is truth in this representation. But we must question the inference from these words, "long before He came." For time has known no such solitude. He, which is, and was, and is to come, has ever been in the world teaching men how to pray, inspiring them what to say. He had taught "them of old time." "Before Abraham was," He says, "I am." And St. John tells us that "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not." Originality is no mere traffic with words however skilfully manipulated. There is a language of God transcending all words, and intelligible only when we meet Him spirit to spirit in the secret places of His eternity.
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Observe the setting of this admonition when first given: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." This word "neighbour" connoted something that was a distinct advance in the upward trend of the race. It did, at any rate, a little to lift the Israelite out of himself into the lives of others. But it meant to him, at the most, only those who were of the same tribe or nation. In the fulness of time—when the world was ready—Jesus took up His own word spoken through Moses, and limited in its interpretation by the moral intelligence of that day; took up His own word, and made it co-extensive with humanity.
This is what I mean by a language of God transcending all speech. "You have been told," says Jesus, "to love your neighbour"; and to the question, "Who is my neighbour?" He makes the answer reach out to its full circumference—"Thy neighbour is he or she who bears thy nature." By the law which declares that God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth, the physical unity of the race is implied; so by the operation of the law of love the moral unity, or, what we now call the "solidarity of humanity," is intended.
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And I hardly need point out, that it is this little wordasin the text which gives us pause. Is it possible, then, to bring down this command and incarnate it in our daily life? It does not say, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour with certain arbitrary qualifications of thy own." It evidently means what it says: "Thou shalt love thy neighbouras thyself." Is it possible to do it? And many of us are ready to answer, It is not. Either there has been some mistake in the way it is reported, we tell ourselves, or it is useless to try to fulfil it with such natures as ours in such a world as this.
Put it in this way: granted we loved others as we love ourselves—this should be good and pleasant for those who possessed our love, if it had genuine strength in it. Granted, again, we had the fulness of the strong love of others, that should be helpful to us. If we may condition the Royal Law in some such manner as this, "Love them who love us;" or, "love them who are worthy of our love," the difficulty is obviously lessened, if not in fact removed. But such a limit, while it might amount to prudence, would not reach up to beatitude. "If ye love them who love you, what do ye more than others?" "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." But who is thy neighbour? And Jesus answers, "thy neighbour is he who bears thy nature." This is iteration, but I venture it because I want us to confront the real insistence of this text. They who share our nature may be, and often are, those who hate us with or without a cause. There are people who perpetuate an existence on others which is little better than a moral and physical calamity. To tell us to tolerate them, not to speak about loving them, is like telling us to attempt the impossible. And yet Jesus did not forget these people when He said: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them who despitefully use you and persecute you."
We, then, who say we accept Christ's teaching must accept it. This is one of the places where we cannot escape behind some ingenuity of exegesis or manipulation of text. The command is plain. We can take it or leave it. One thing we cannot do, we cannot re-write it. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." As thyself. If this but fixes a hard standard; or simply indicates the measurement of neighbourly love, then we may almost as well close the discussion—its practical attainment is out of our reach.
But, as some one has very wisely said: "Love of self must become a medium before it becomes a measure." [1] In other words, we cannot love our neighbour as we ought until we love ourselves as we should. Out of love of self "flow the ingredients which must enter into neighbour love."
The text, then, lays down a twofold obligation: to cultivate a right love of self, and to translate this love of self into love for others.
As touching the first part of this obligation, it is useless to ask what it is in our neighbour we are to love as ourselves, until we know what it is in ourselves we are to love. In what sense is a man to love himself? Because there is a radical difference between self-love as taught and practised in the world, and the love of self sanctioned and regulated by the Royal Law. Love of self is a right anxiety to secure the things we need in this world. It is based upon the principle that life is not to be unclothed but clothed upon. The fact that we are in the world and have to fulfil its desired ends should carry with it reverence for our manhood, and the demand for space to work out its full equation. While the Apostle Paul was always ready to subject his rights to the law of love, he was equally careful to assert that they were his rights before he yielded them. In his care for the weak brethren, he did not become a weak brother. One of the first things we have to learn, is how to take wise care of ourselves; and then, step by step, a true life is a growth in the knowledge of how so to take care of ourselves as to promote the best interests of others. In this matter of a right love of self, the point of transition at which it passes into beneficence is the victory over a self-love which is selfishness. It is really the basal principle of moral government in the world.
But when this is said, the surest and simplest answer to the question, What is it in ourselves we are to love? is to say—We are to love that which God loves in us. And what does God love in us? From all we know of the divine nature as revealed in Jesus Christ, we are surely right in thinking that God loves in us what is most like Himself. No man can stand at Calvary reverently and thoughtfully for five minutes without being impressed with the truth of a wondrous self-sacrifice. I met with a remark lately in a story I was reading which fastened itself on my mind. It was made by a poor, toiling woman who had scarcely sufficient means to keep body and soul together: "I never, somehow," she said, "seem to think a thing is mine until I have given it away."
This is the spirit that God loves, a spirit ever getting further away from "miserable aims that end with self." God loves in us the self-mastery that scorns to compromise with self-indulgence. God loves in us that which cannot find its true home in the things seen and temporal, but must ever soar out to the things unseen and eternal; the things that live in and wait upon the earnest man and after which he must ceaselessly aspire. God loves in us the strenuous effort which proceeds from the conviction that there is sacred power in every life which must not be wasted in "egotistical pride, or in a narrowing self-love." From instinct, from the moral consciousness, from the Scriptures—these we know to be representative of the things that God loves. And we know we are right in loving in ourselves what God loves in us. We also know that no man can wisely love himself until he knows the purifying power of a love that is divine.
If now I may assume that this exposition of the text shows the ground, and defines the sphere of a right love of self, I may further say that the Royal Law does not require us to love in others what it does not permit us to love in ourselves. And we do well to be clear about this. Many of us stumble over this text because, not getting at its true inwardness, we have an uneasy feeling that it carries us too far. Others try to work up an artificial sentiment, and profess to exercise a charity which is not theirs to extend.
Here is a man, let us say, who calls himself a religious man, who yet notoriously is a mean and shabby creature. I once heard this man, well placed and prosperous, boast of having that day become richer by some twelve hundred pounds through an oversight of a solicitor in winding up the affairs of a late client. I afterwards learned that the mistake was at the expense of a widow and her young children, who, because of it, were brought within very measurable distance of want. Must my love for my neighbour include one callous enough, not only to do a thing like that, but to boast about it? Must it annex the whole low plane of such a squalid disposition? God forbid. What I hope I should hate in myself I am not asked to love in another. If a man is base and unworthy we are to recognize the fact, however ugly; we are to look the devil in him in the face, and say it is the devil.
But, on the other side, Christianity admonishes us that our judgments of our neighbours are neither infallible nor final. It has been well pointed out, that if we "have found any part of the secret of God's mercy shown to us, we shall not find it hard to believe in God's mercy for our neighbours." To realize that the essential thing the Redeemer saw in us and deemed it worth dying for, He sees in them, will help us, however weary at times in their service, not to weary of it.
In this command, then, we have the ground and motive for the sacrifice of each for the good of all. We see that it is possible to love our neighbour in the sense we are to love ourselves. We see that the command which, on the surface of it, seems to urge an unattainable experience, is, in truth, what St. James calls it, the Royal Law that binds us together not only as neighbours, but as children of the same All-Father.
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Should any one ask, "Who does it?" I answer, That is not the question. To deny that we can love our neighbour in this sense is to deny that we can love ourselves. Yet I know what fate, especially for young men, may lurk in this cold, faithless question. And I want it to be understood, that my single aim in this address—the reason why I have wrestled at this length for the meaning of the passage before us—is to show, thatwhether we choose to do it or not, it can be done. I affirm that this text is a simple statement of the principle of the only rational, helpful life man can live. And to prevail upon you to admit this, would be to accomplish much. To accept it as the truth, that you can love your neighbour as yourself, is to win intellectual confidence in the service which your day demands of you. It is to take the sting of death out of the old evil question: "Who does it?" Once recognize that Christ asks for nothing impossible, when He gave a new and ever-abiding authority to this ancient precept, and the question will not be, Who does it? Rather will it be, Who can afford not to do it? For not to do it is selfishness, and selfishness is self-defeat. He who exists only for himself, exists only to injure himself. It is the fashion now to get rid of a judgment to come by telling us that we are our own judgment here. The latter part of the statement is not the whole truth, but there is truth in it. The strain brings out the strength there is, but shirk it and we have weakness. Do as we like rather than do as we ought, and the price must be paid in loss of manhood. Everything we gain for selfishness we must steal from ourselves.
"Ah me," said Goethe once, "that the yonder is never here." Go deep enough into every wrong and sin and you find at its root this selfishness. So many of us degrade life into a heartless scramble. We fight each other because each man, dissatisfied himself, is convinced that his neighbour is getting more than his share. It may be doubted whether there has ever been a day in the Western world when more people were dominated by the conviction that gain is godliness. So many about us have virtually ceased to put their trust in anything about which they cannot lace their fingers. With them, dreamers about anything else are cranks, and martyrs for anything else are nuisances. And this reacts upon such apology as they have for more serious thinking. We seem in many ways to be returning to the pagan condition when judgment was not feared and spiritual influences were unfelt. In novel, drama, and much that passes for science, we have the monotonous iteration that man is the creature of blind chance under an indifferent sky.
But this, thank God, is not the whole story. There is another and brighter side. If we take a very subdued estimate of our modern day and world, I am yet persuaded that never were the saving ideas of the Saviour more potent, never have His high aspirations been more ardently welcomed or more strenuously followed than they are now.
Past all human speculations about Christ, men hopelessly divided in creed are yet getting nearer to what He lived believing and died believing. In the weariness of so much of the modern world, and in the hopelessness of its outlook, I see an age ready to receive anew the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I see a temper ready to grasp with fresh earnestness the thoughts of the "Living Lord and Supreme Teacher of our race." Men to-day are dreaming like dreams as shone before the souls of the ancient prophets, and in the visions of men who have wrought for human progress since the first days even until now. Waking dreams of a new and diviner order of society. A state marked by righteousness, peace, and happiness for the whole people; the golden age, when man, knowing what it is in himself he ought to love, loves that in his neighbour as in himself.
And Christianity, which came into the world to fulfil these heaven-born dreams, is being openly challenged as never before to substantiate them.
In the larger aims of our spiritual ideals the "yonder is never here," nor, indeed, can it be. There must always be above us something better than our best. When we cease to make progress we die, and that, in the language of Scripture, is the second death.
If, therefore, the searching demand of the text confronts us with the weakness of our nature, we need not wonder and we need not be discouraged. It is the purpose it has in view. "It discloses an ideal, and it reveals an end." If in seeking to realize the ideal and gain the end we are forced to know how insufficient we are in our own strength—this, I repeat, is the end it seeks to accomplish in us and for us. Until our life is in Christ linked on to God, we cannot love our neighbour as we ought, because we have not the higher power to love ourselves as we should.
But the power is offered us. And it is for you young men to lay fast hold of it, and accept the world's challenge in a way it has never been handled and faced before. "Do not talk about the things you believe," says the world to us who name the name of Christ; "convince me that you believe by what you do." And this is said, not from an indifference to dogma, as some would have us think. It means that a man's beliefs are between himself and God. It is what comes out of his belief, that can be reckoned with amid the forces of our everyday life.
You place in cold sheet one of the loftiest passages of a great composer before a man sensitive to music, but who does not know one note from the other, and he looks at it with indifference. You put the sheet before a gifted organist seated at his instrument; and as the melody rolls forth in swells of power, then in cadences of persuasive pathos, the indifference of the man vanishes as he catches his breath like a sob, and feels a prayer he cannot speak. We say we believe in Christ, and men turn aside with indifference. We live Christ, and men love Him. It is common enough to find this indifference about religion, and a marked want of what I have called intellectual confidence in Christianity as we preach it from the pulpit. But I have never yet found a man infidel to the fruits of its spirit, which are, love, peace, goodness, a living faith, and a genuine self-sacrifice. Before men can be expected to become Christ-like, they must know what Christ is like, and how far are we prepared to put our lives before men as an answer to the question: "What think ye of Christ?"
Preach Christ by living Christ. "All men," says the Koran, "are commanded by the Saint." And no man ever casts the wealth of his life and the crown of his devotion at the feet of Jesus without "quickening the earth with a diviner life, and uplifting it with a new courage." One of the most brilliant of the eighteenth-century poets said: "The lapse of time changes all but man, who ever has been, and ever will be, just what he is." Which means that man is by make incurably selfish. This is a lie. And it is the worst kind of lying, for it represents not only the inability to find good in man, but the inability to believe that there is good to be found. My own stand is where thought and experience have forced me. From human nature left to itself I hope for nothing; with that nature remade in Christ I despair of nothing. It all turns on the remake. And it can be remade: "As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become sons of God: who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."
Let us, therefore, by divine grace, refashion our lives on the mighty principle of divine love. And let us settle it as one of the truths never to be questioned, that nothing is worthy to be called love that cannot be affirmed of God. We know what God loves; or we know enough for the practical ordering of our daily life. Let us love in ourselves what God loves in us. This will include for ourselves and others all things which are good for us to have and enjoy; and because it will exclude all things that are narrow, mean, and selfish, it will go far to raise the world to a power of a new day. Then, through hearts and homes, through Churches and societies, the Royal Law, made royal life, will solve the problem of the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. It will become the touch of omnipotence that casts out of our life the unworthy, by bringing in the opposite virtues, resolving all into character which shall transform mankind into one realm over which the right and the might of Christ shall at last prevail—
"From creed and scheme the light goes out,The saintly fact survives,The Blessed Master who can doubt,Revealed in human lives?"
[1] Two or three sentences in this chapter are memorized from a sermon I heard years ago, preached by Rev. H. E. Michie, M.A., of Stonehaven.
"He is despised and rejected of men."—Isaiah liii. 3.
Some two or three years ago the picture, "He was despised and rejected," by Sigismund Göetze, was on view in Glasgow. In this address I shall try to tell you something about the impression it made on me; and the reason will be given at the end why I include it in this series. Some of you may have seen the picture; others may have read or heard about it.
The conception of it appears to have formed itself in the mind of the artist out of what ordinarily is a very commonplace circumstance. He had attended a Sunday service at St. Paul's Cathedral, and heard a sermon that made a deep impression upon him; which found his higher being with something like the touch of an immortal influence. He thought within himself: "What a real difference a word like this must make in the thoughts and life of those who have been privileged to listen to it. Never again, surely, can they be as though they had not heard it." It was a message, so he felt, to shake men, to arouse them, and make them turn on one another and cry: "Men and brethren, what must we do?"
Under the impact of his own emotions and sensitive to his surroundings, he was eager at the close of the service to share with others what he virtually demanded they should impart to him. But he was grievously disappointed. Not a word did he hear, not a look did he see on the face of a departing worshipper which so much as betrayed the transient emotion stirred by dream or romance. If they had listened to the discourse, they had evidently forgotten what they had been at no pains to remember. No new experience befell this man of artistic and impulsive temperament. I heard a sermon a short time ago preached in a seaside church, which deeply moved me; a sermon I was thankful to have heard, and the like of which I would walk a long way to hear again. As I stood outside the building waiting for a friend, the congregation came out, and I heard the usual interchange of verbal nothings. The only reference I did hear to the service was from a well-dressed young man to a girl by his side, and this is what he said: "A long-winded fellow, that; let us go on the parade." The remark did not unduly surprise me. "I wonder," said a man to me lately, "why some people go to a place of worship at all; they appear to be as indifferent to what is said, sung, or prayed, as the dog that barks is indifferent about the dog-star." In every congregation of fair size there is a strange mixture. But it always includes those whose attention and evident interest do something to compensate for others who show neither. There are elect souls who hear the Word and receive it. You may not trace the fact by what they say, but you know it by the holiness of helpfulness, which radiates from them like light, and is made by them as an atmosphere. God has not ordained the foolishness of preaching—which does not mean foolish preaching—to thin out in the miserable anti-climax of a remark like that of the young man I have just quoted. Fortunately, however, our artist had not sufficient experience of the conventional congregation at a place of worship to have become philosophic about it—which usually amounts to indifference. Judging others by what he himself felt, he thought they must be equally moved. But instead of having received the preached Word, there was nothing, so far as he could discern, to indicate that they had even heard it, while there was much to lead to the conclusion that they had not. Hence he resolved to repeat the sermon through the translation of his art. They should, if he could accomplish it, receive through the eyes what they would not hear with the ears.
Something like this, we are told, was the genesis of this picture, with its central Figure of the Crucified One close by an ancient altar, yet immediately outside a modern building called a Christian church. There He stands unregarded and silent, but so far as His anguish speaks the eternal Passion of God, while there stream past Him the clearly-defined types of a twentieth-century multitude—each, with one doubtful exception, as indifferent about who, and whence, and why He is, as if He were one of the stone pillars that support the vestibule of the temple dedicated to His worship. Poverty sits at His very feet and it is not even curious; fashion and vice, toil and sport, science and ruin, culture and ignorance, want and opulence pass by, and do not so much as despise and reject Him—for that at least would argue some form of interest. It is the indifference which, as Confucius says, is the "night of the mind—night without a star." I need not linger over the types. You may see them any day in a characteristic London throng; you may see them in a less emphasized form in a city like Glasgow. If I may make one reference to them, let it be where the artist attempts to represent the attitude of the Churches to the Man of Sorrows. We have, for example, a high ecclesiastic in one of the sacerdotal communions, and by his side there is some order of Nonconformist minister. The latter is evidently in earnest, not to entreat the attention of the crowd to Him whom they pass by, but to convict his companion of error out of their commonly-received Scriptures. And the great ecclesiastic, sleek, debonair, and well preserved, has a bored look on his capacious face which says: "My dear good man, why excite yourself? I readily make you a present of your contention. You take your truth and I will keep my position. As we can settle nothing but ourselves, why not settle ourselves as comfortably as we can?"
According to the artist, each in his own way is in the crowd and of it. It is anything and everything except the Crucified One, as in St. Paul's it was anything and everything except the message spoken to those who, having ears, heard not. How do we explain it, then, from his point of view, that this stream of people, representative of a widespread society, is utterly indifferent to that Figure so pathetic in its loneliness, so tragic in its appeal, and almost aggressive in its sorrow? It is possible that not a type on the canvas is to be interpreted as quite ignorant of the letter of the claims made for Him who is yet the Object of the world's indifference. There is a sense in which it is true that Christ was never better known than He is in your day and mine. We have the well-authenticated Scriptures which testify of Him. We are more sure that we possess many of His sayings than we are sure that the writings known as Shakespeare's plays were written by a man called William Shakespeare. In these Scriptures He is reported to have said:
"Before Abraham was, I am." And in another word, that falls like a beam of light on everything He did and said, He tells us that "the Son of Man is come to seek and to save the lost." We have the key-word of the Father's message to the race in the wondrous declaration that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
We have a mighty Christian literature which, if it be evolved out of a myth, resolves itself into a miracle. We have the fact that never before was Christ so admired, so much quoted, and so generally applauded as He is at the opening of the twentieth century. We have accredited thinkers who reject, as they think, all dogmatic theologies about Christ, and yet tell us that the spirit which Christ incarnated in His words and actions reveals a God humanity cannot improve upon. We have, moreover, an army of men who are set apart by training, and what they believe to be their "calling," to preach Christ by precept, and to teach Him by a life derived, as they declare, from Him whom they preach and teach. And amid many failures, and motives of the earth earthy, these men do not all fail, nor do they all live by bread alone. Was there no place in that canvas-crowd for one of those devoted men who, ill-paid, half-starved, and overwrought, toil night and day in that most awful work on this earth, the attempt to rescue and raise the lapsed masses of our large populations? Was there no room for the man who penalizes body and soul to straining-point for words and thoughts that shall inspire and hearten men to steer their lives by the higher stars, those eternal principles of truth and right? Was there no room for a woman of the Salvation Army who is out of some hideous slum for a moment's breathing, before returning to it with a great self-renouncing life of love and healing?
But take the picture as the artist's impression of the ail-but universal indifference about Him who is yet declared to be the soul and centre of our Scriptures, our creeds, and our religious life, and how do we explain it? Or if we put the artist's impression aside, and on our own account face the truth which, for the purposes of constructive art, he may have exaggerated, is there any less need that we should ask: Why is Christ despised and rejected of men? Why is it that they do not come unto Him that they may have life? The answers are legion. To my thinking, they resolve themselves into practically one. Before we can know Christ, before we can understand Christ, before we can come to Christ, we must come to ourselves. And not a face on that crowded canvas suggests a hope that he, or she, had taken an honest step in this all-determining direction. Before I can look to Christ as my Saviour I must know that I need a Saviour. Before I can realize my need of salvation from sin I must realize that I am a sinner. So much, if not all, turns there. It is not every man who feels that he is a sinner because he talks about being one. But let him feel it, and out of the knowledge will come his saving health, or the death that dies.
It is declared to be the work of the Holy Spirit to convince men of sin, and the unbelief growing out of sin. Analyse the causes of indifference about the things that belong to our peace, and you find that for the most part they resolve themselves into sin, and the unbelief that follows sin, as consequence comes out of cause. I know with what impatience the world turns from what is called the evangelical teaching about the nature and effects of sin. And we need not go outside the Church to find the same impatience, not to say contempt. We have in our pulpits men who represent sin to us as good in the making. It is in some sense a necessary means to an end. They speak of arrested development, of defect of will, of inheritances and surroundings, of a vacancy as yet unfilled by virtue. It is hard to think that people held by a half-sceptical pantheism, and the relativity of evil, have ever been face to face with the awful deeps and disobediences of their own heart, or have felt the hot breath of the devil on their own cheek. If we have any worth-discerning faculty, we know when a man is handling certain subjects whether he knows what he is talking about; whether or not, to use an expressive colloquialism, "he has been there." No man who with the eyes of the soul has looked down that awful cleft that separates between the carnal mind and the holy will of God, can use words here under the wasting impression that he knows things. If Christ only died to save us from something which, after all, is only good in the making, then the Cross of Calvary is the supreme irony of time. We shall never find a Saviour by the road that, at the most, leads but to a martyr.
Here is a man—and he is not an imaginary case—who is married, and has young people growing up in the home. He is wealthy, with a reputable position in society. But there is a sinister something in the background of his life, and he sets himself to do what he knows full well is an irreparable wrong to an inexperienced and defenceless creature. He makes no fight against the wicked prompting, and does the hurt which if another man were to do to one of his own family he would willingly shoot him dead. And say when the hurt is done, a searchlight—he knows not whence it comes—is flashed across his soul and he sees himself as he is, a base scoundrel before God and man, will it help him to think of his sin as good in the making? For whatever he may become, he has done his part to damn another. And let his conscience become, as it can become, and woe to him if it do not become, as real as the wicked thing he has done, and his first and devastating question will be, not can God forgive him, but can he ever forgive himself? Let his one hope come to be in some means of expiation, which can give him a degree of rest from the sin by paying what he can of its wages, and he will begin to realize what is meant, not by the remission of the consequences of sin, but by the remission of sin. He will know the need, where the need is agony, which God in Christ has met for us, and which, had He not met, would have left the need something greater than God Himself. It is when a man must have peace with himself or die to all that is immortal in him—it is then I will trust him never again to pass by with unconcern the anguish of Him who bore our sin in His own body on the tree.
Sometimes we look at the Lamb of God without feeling that we are sinners, and then we have a thousand difficult questions to ask. At other times the burden of sin is so heavy upon us, we see the sinfulness of sin so vividly, that we get away from the mere accident of place and time as far as it relates to sin, we see sin as God saw it, and must ever see it—then it is we look to the Crucified One. "When I feel myself in my heart of hearts a sinner," I once heard Dr. Parker say, "a trespasser against God's law and God's love; when I feel that a thought may overwhelm me in destruction, that a secret, unexpressed desire may shut me out of heaven and make me glad to go to hell to be away from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne—then when I am told that Jesus Christ was wounded for my transgressions, that upon Him was laid the chastisement of my peace, I press my way through all the difficulties and say: If I perish I will pray and perish at the Cross; for if this be not sufficient, it hath not entered into the heart of man to solve the problem of human depravity, and the human consciousness of sin."
I am not seeking to explain or defend what I am saying. I may try to make it a little more clear before I close. For the moment I am putting before you what I believe to be the truth of very truth. To some I may be speaking in an unknown tongue, but not to all. If there is one here who, with some years behind him, has ever been in serious conference with himself, he knows that there is something radically wrong with himself, which calls for something he is powerless to supply. He knows that the springs of his being have been poisoned, and he has no detergent to make them sweet. It is the fashion in our day to speak of the old description of "hell-deserving sinner" as marred by exaggeration, if not to say morbid. I do not fall into that fashion, for it expresses just what I am—a hell-deserving sinner. When the great Puritan, John Newton, saw a man taken out to be hanged, he said: "But for the grace of God there goes John Newton." It is when the true idea of sin is realized under the convincing power of the Holy Spirit, that the "necessity of the sacrificial work of Christ will be felt, understood, and become the one foundation of human hope."
Do you say that you have felt nothing of this convicting and convincing power? Then I ask: Have you ever passed through an hour of serious inquest with your own soul? Have you ever tried to know yourself even as you are known? The debate cannot be all on one side. A man only knows that he is ignorant through the need of a knowledge he has not got. Before I can persuade you that Christ is your Saviour, you must realize that it is a Saviour you need. Before you can start out for Christ you must come to yourself. And while men make a mock of sin, while they regard it as a matter of indifference, or profess to explain it away under the terms of science and philosophy, we need not wonder that they have so little faith in higher things. We need go no further for an explanation of the thoughtless unbelief which is eating its way like a festering sore to the heart of our modern world. If the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life sum up the totality of our being here, why should that crowd on the artist's canvas be represented as moved by an anguish that touches no chord in its soul; which is, indeed, foreign to its every thought, sympathy, and pursuit? So long as men are indifferent about the very question, Why that anguish? vain is the appeal, "To you is it nothing your Saviour should die?" So long as men are utterly unconcerned about the fact, and nature, and effects of moral evil, then selfishness will remain for men the only recognized law of self-preservation.
And here is where I come into line with the practical side of the Christian evangel. The Cross of Christ is no arbitrary arrangement. It is not the expedient of a system cunningly devised by priest, theologian, or Church. It is the grimmest, sanest, divinest thing ever set up in this human world. The Cross is symbol of the only Power that can enter the lists against selfishness, and enter to throw it. And let me plead with you to think about this: every wrong in the world has selfishness, if not for its root, yet at its root. Cast out the selfishness which is sin, and you cast out the first and the last thing that stands between us and the new heaven and the new earth. Think of this, and you will better understand the anguish of Him who carries the sorrow, and is wounded in the wounds made by man's inhumanity to man. Refuse to think of it, and cease to wonder why countless thousands mourn; why the strong oppress the weak; why might is worshipped as right; why men seem to fear nothing but the hell of not making money. Think of it, and cease to wonder why men's bodies and souls are sacrificed in what is little better than a murderous struggle to exist; why one man has so much more than he earns, and others earn so much more than they have. Think of it and cease to wonder why our age is distinguished by a bad pre-eminence of restlessness, by feverishness, a panting for excitement, and a poisonous atmosphere of pessimism.
The Cross of Christ means the life that lives in unselfish service as against the selfishness that is death and defeat. It means not only individuals and Churches, but the race, redeemed and lifted from the dark and narrow life of self, into the life and light of the kingdom of God. Can we wonder, then, that the rejection of the Cross blasts our beliefs in everything divine and hopeful, and is accompanied everywhere by a "melancholy introspection and lack-lustre view of human life?" Recall then in this connection what I have said about sin, and the relation of Christ's death to the forgiveness of sin. What I am saying now does not include all that is implied in that relation; but see in it what I have just put before you, and you will realize that I am not talking in mere morbid terms, nor in those of theology except so far as it is the theology of life. Long as men are willingly in their sin—which means selfishness in all its deadly forms—can we wonder at the unbelief portrayed on that canvas? Can we marvel why the Christ is still despised and rejected?
It may be asked, and justly, what are the professed followers of Christ doing to convince men of their need of Him as their Saviour; to convince them by lives that are the evidence of triumph over sin? What are Christian people, what are the Churches doing to fight down the wrongs, the hurtful conditions, the curse-centres that degrade men, keep them ignorant, and as by a satanic ingenuity hide the real Christ from those who most need to find Him, and are the least able to oppose the things that make Him so misunderstood and even unknown? How far are we responsible, not only for the deliberately cultivated wickedness of men who choose evil as their good, but for the indifference that passes by only because our lives have never compelled its attention? The Church is a Church but to the extent that it is the organic expression of Christ's life, the visible Body of His soul. What, I ask in all faithfulness, are we doing to make real and living to men the presence of a Lord who is ever suffering in their sin and for it? The artist was well inspired to give his picture a twentieth-century setting. What an amount of grim Calvary there is in Glasgow every day under the shadow of our Churches; ah! and behind the sanction of their power. That is the word that should smite us; it is the word that must be said—behind the sanction of their power.
The world would begin to see Christ, if we ourselves would see Him crucified, not merely in the remote Palestine of the first century, but, I say once more, in this Glasgow of to-day. In the foul slum, in the haunt of shame, in the abode of crime and wretchedness, in the places where children are robbed of their birthright before they know what things mean; in the sweater's den, in the heartless side of business competition, in the drink hells, in frivolous pursuits and brainless amusements, in the insolence of wealth, and the sullenness of poverty—in every place or thing where despite is done to the Divine Humanity. Let us feel that whatever wrong is done to a single human being, throughout the world-wide family of man, is literally done to Jesus Christ, and we shall better understand that central Figure in the artist's picture. Let us see Christ crucified in whatever evil is done, in whatever good is left undone that we could do, and sin will become to us not a term only, not a thing to be excused and explained away, but a real and tremendous horror. We shall feel it to be what it is, a stab struck at the living heart of Jesus Christ. As it has been truly said: "Fellowship with Christ's sufferings will become less of a mystical phrase, and more of a vital fact."
"To you is it nothing, all ye that pass by?" As I sat and looked at that picture, this was the question that oppressed my thoughts. And then the further question forced itself—Why, in so many cases, and to all human seeming, is it just that—nothing? It is not enough to talk of sin, and unbelief, and indifference, outside our life: they are real enough, but do they suggest no responsibility on our part? Let it be a call to prayer, an incentive to unceasing watchfulness lest one should be passing by because there is nothing in us which constrains him, or persuades her, to look and be saved, to look and live.
I said at the opening of this address that I would tell you later why I include it in this series. I am not sure that I can keep my word. What has been said will glance from your mind unless you have, like Luther, and for the same reason, wrestled with the question: "How shall a man be just with God?" But assuming that as yet this is outside your experience, still you know the difference between what may but arbitrarily be called sin, and sin that is what it is called. Believe me when I say that the first, and worst, and nearest of all problems for each man of us, and for societies, is the fact of sin; and that with it no one deals, or can deal, save Him upon whom the chastisement of our peace was laid, and with whose stripes we are healed. What is the exact relation between the death of Christ and the forgiveness of sin no one can tell us; but that there is a relation charged with redeeming power is not a theory about Christianity—it is Christianity.
I read some time ago that a "Van Missioner," who was preaching Unitarianism in the villages of Hampshire, found himself at one of them interrupted by a number of farm labourers, who began to sing—
"What can wash away my sin?Nothing but the blood of Jesus!What can make me whole again?Nothing but the blood of Jesus.It washes white as snow,No other fount I know."
To the modern enlightenment which patronizes Jesus as a teacher and rejects Christ as a Saviour, the theology, or sentiment, in these lines is not so much crude as grotesque. At the best it is but curiously reminiscent of the ignorance of a by-gone day. Doubtless this well-meaning man had much to say worth hearing; but he was talking in the name of religion, and to these villagers there was in it the lack of the one thing, which is the lack of all. Theology apart, these simple folk found in these crude lines the heart of saving truth. It is my conviction that they were right. In this conviction I live, and in it, by God's grace, I trust I may die and live again.
"I do not despise Jesus: with all that is best in me do I reverence Him as one of the world's supreme teachers; but I cannot regard Him as more than that," said a friend to me after reading over the manuscript of this address. "And yet," he added quietly, "if there is anything in Christianity which distinguishes it from any other great religion, it must be near to the place you have been trying to get at."
"What must I do to be saved?"—Acts xvi. 30.
"If any man will do his will, he shall know."—St. John vii. 17.
"When I was well into my teens," said a very intelligent woman to me some time ago, "and for long after I had left them, I listened to preachers and preaching; and such powers as I had I put into my listening, for I wanted to get at something I could hold for sure and real in the promises of religion. I was told Sunday by Sunday to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, to trust in Him, and commit to His keeping my soul's welfare. And as far as I knew what belief meant I believed; and tried to persuade myself that I was trusting Christ. But I was not conscious that it made any real difference in my life; that it gave me anything I had not before. Hence I gradually came to the conclusion that either the preachers could not tell me what it was on which I had specifically to lay hold, or it was useless for me to prosecute my attempt to grasp it."
This woman said what many think, who are as yet within listening distance of our pulpits. They want to understand what they must do and believe, to lay hold of that which can make a difference in their life; which can find in it, or bring into it, something that answers in very truth to what the Bible calls "the power of God unto salvation."
It is, surely, a reasonable thing to ask. As religious teachers we can have no right to plead with people to believe what we are not prepared to help them to understand. Some of you may have reason, as you think, to endorse this woman's testimony as a fair statement of your own experience. Can I help you? Most gladly will I do so if I can.
One thing should be said, as I come closer to the attempt. If you are really anxious to find help, guard against mistaken impressions of what that help should be, or can be. In religion, as in all the deeper places of human life, one great teacher is experience; and you can neither anticipate nor rush experience. A mother says in answer to certain questions of her child: "Wait until you are older and you will find out." That, to the child, is no answer at all; but, while the child is a child, it is the only answer there is.
Divine truth is infallible; but, as it has often been pointed out, there is no human infallible apprehension of divine truth. We have to admit that there may be, and indeed must be, many phases and aspects of saving truth which we cannot comprehend. There are others, again, of which we get only distant and fugitive glimpses as we study the Word of God. But we shall also admit, that these higher reaches of truth are not those alone on which our faith is called to repose. It may seem to many of you, that in my treatment of the subject now before us, I overlook much that is essential to the Christian doctrine of salvation. I may even seem to eliminate the supernatural element from it. A little thought, however, should correct the latter impression. In passing I have only to say, that I am not trying to exhaust this theme, but simply to give it a setting which, I venture to think, is worth consideration.
"What must I do to be saved?"—a question which may be put in two very different states of moral being. It may be asked in a temper merely curious and academic; or it may, as in the case of the text, voice a profound sense of need. If we would be saved, we must realize that we need to be saved. It was when the prodigal "came to himself" that he said: "I will arise and go to my father."
We are to be saved from what? and into what are we to be saved? In other words, not only must old things pass away, but all things must become new. From what, I repeat, are we to be saved? There is but one answer to the question: We are to be saved from sin by being delivered from the power of evil; and sin is the wilful assertion of our self-will against the holy will of God. The sense of sin may vary in different people; it may vary with the moods of the same personal experience. There are people who appear to be quite callous about the evil within them and the evil they do. But just as our moral nature is educated, just as we grow in sympathy with the divine will, do we become increasingly sensitive to the distance there is between what we are, and do, and the holiness of Him who is a consuming fire. We feel that the Apostle was neither morbid, nor did he exaggerate the actual situation when he cried: "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
It has been said that the "only way to be saved from sin is to cease to sin." And it is true that a man cannot, at the same time, sin in any given direction, and cease from that sin. But it is also true that he may cease from sin in the sense of not doing certain things, and yet be the greater sinner in the sight of God, because of the motive which acts as his deterrent or restraining force. I have seen men repent of their sin, as the process was called, when I have had no faith in it whatever. They were not repenting of their sin, but lamenting the cost of its indulgence.
We must do more than cease to do evil things only because evil has its price; we must learn to do well by learning to love all that is meant by well. There is no escape from evil except through love of good. The Christian salvation, which means the saving of the whole self-hood of man, is a positive thing from its inception into its endless development. Where it is repression it is that there may be expression. This, I imagine, is what Robert L. Stevenson must have meant when he said "We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not doing right." Christ, he contends, "would never hear of negative morality; 'thou shalt' was ever His word, with which He superseded, 'thou shalt not.'" According to Stevenson—I do not say he is right, but I do quote his words as worth attention—we are not damned so much for yielding to evil, as for not getting into our life its oppositive virtue; some content vital enough to cast out the evil, and to keep it out. To go on fighting some besetting sin is only to repeat, for the most part, an experience many of us know but too well. It almost invariably ends one way. In weariness and despair we ask: "Why should we war with evil? It is more than our test, it is our fate; let us take what sweet we can before it becomes all bitter." Which is but another way of saying: "Evil, be thou my good."
Mark well, then, our next step. It is not enough to tell us that we must conquer the wrong by doing the right. The question is this: Is there any power, anything in what is called saving grace, which is adequate to the struggle on our part, and which appropriated can make us, to use the Apostle's description, "more than conquerors"?
There is; and I will try, first, to tell you what it is, and, secondly, how we may realize it. It is—call it by what name we may for the moment—that which casts out the mean, the ignoble, and the selfish, by filling out life with the great, the noble, and the unselfish. It is, in a word, the salvation which means the "highest character and blessedness, which we, individually and collectively, are capable of reaching and realizing." Let us, then, call it what it is—the power of God unto salvation. And how are we to get it into our possession? The answer is, it needs no getting in. Potentially it is there. "The kingdom of God is within you," says Jesus, and it is ours to bring it out in all its actual reality. It is the greater which includes the less, of the gracious possessions God has put in our being, and of which we know so little because we do not work these inward mines: "Work out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in you."
Some one makes a great inventor say: "Anybody might have done it, but the secret came to me." Do you believe the first part of this statement? Would you hold me true in saying that anybody might have anticipated the discovery of wireless telegraphy? There are times when the world appears to halt for want of some new thing, or for want of some one to put new meaning into the old. And when the fulness of time has come, the secret, which has been sleeping through centuries of men, awakes in a man. He is the chosen of Providence to deliver unto us that which he also has received.
What is true of a few in the endowment of what we call genius, may be true of us all in the power of God unto salvation. When we were "made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth," the Maker of us all put a part of Himself into the mysterious substance. "Let each man," says Browning, "think himself a thought, an act, a breath of God." There is evil in our nature; but evil can mar us only so far as we allow it to become sin. It is in victory over evil that we find character and make. There is evil in our nature, but there is also a germ of God which He can touch into immortality and glorify with the very splendour of His own image and being. When that germ is quickened into life, we are, in the language of theology, converted; as it develops and becomes the more life and the fuller, we are, in the same language, sanctified and made meet for the Master's use.
Is there anything mysterious in this; anything we may not understand? Christ did not think so, if we may judge from His conversation with Nicodemus. "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." Our Lord, if I understand Him aright, tells this master of Israel that there is nothing more wonderful about this new birth than there is about a new affection or a new love. And what cannot love do? No one enters our life except through love. They may influence it profoundly, but that of itself gives no admittance to the heart. What, I ask again, cannot love do? Have we never known lives changed, and indeed transformed by a new affection? I have seen love work miracles; and so far from not believing in such miracles within their sphere, I believe in nothing else. But does that which wakes love put it there? Is some new thing added to life? Rather let us say that it is life coming to its own; just finding what was already there. This may be what the Psalmist means when he speaks of deep calling to deep. The deep in man answers to the deep of attraction which appeals to it. If man was conceived in the image of God, then God is immanent in man. This is not to say that this immanence is equal to, or implies the whole content of what is known as Christian salvation. It is true that the "eye and the brain must be there before the light can be perceived or any object interpreted." But it has been pointed out with equal truth that the "eye would be useless did not the light come to it, and that the brain would have nothing to work on, were not objects from without brought for our perception." [1] Which means that immanence alone would be powerless apart from some transcendent influence. Unless this be so, what are we to say of the multitudes which sit in darkness and the shadow of death? Our salvation is in the answer of the life immanent to the life transcendent, and the connecting and combining power is the Holy Spirit.
But what, in the next place, is our part in this matter? How is this power to come? How, to use a better term, are we to realize it? Have we to wait for something, or have we to do something to make it a real experience?
A youth, let us say, or a girl, is beginning to learn music, to play the violin or the piano. At first it is drudgery, and its immediate results are a trial unto all that are in the house. The parent or teacher says: "Persevere, obey instructions, and as you pass through routine into the soul, the task will soon be lost in the pleasure." The beginner may not believe it; but granted the facility is there, and determination to bend to the task of learning, and the reward comes. That which is within is brought out, and by the only way it can be brought out: "Stir up the gift that is in thee."
This hints to us the answer to the question, Have we to do something that salvation may become a known and felt reality? We have to do something. We haveto do, as we are told by Him who only can tell us what it is we have to do: "Will to do the will," says the Christ, "and ye shall know." And if we are really seeking a basis of assurance in His saving power, we ought surely to take Him at His word, when He tells us how to find it. It is not first through assured belief that we become sure of Christ, it is by doing Christ's will that we become sure of our belief. Have we to explain to a child the mechanism of its limbs before it can attempt to walk? The impulse comes, and the child walks, that is all. But the child has to walk to know that it can walk.
But what, you ask me, are we to say about sudden conversions, of which we once heard so much, and which we are still taught to seek and expect? What, I ask you, about those sudden flashes of insight which at times seem to reveal in a moment a way out of difficulties which for years we have sought in vain? A man told me lately about a period in his life when through drink and betting he was reduced from a prosperous man to a wreck in body and means. "I was down," he said, "low as a human creature could get in this world." He was converted to God, and from the very hour his change came, he declared that his craving for drink, and mania for gambling, dropped out of his being, as a piece of dead matter falls away from a living organism. And there are such cases, thank God, but we must not make our teaching about them misleading by making it despotic. As in the instances of sudden insight, we do not because we dare not say they are general, deny that they occur. The soul-development on its immortal side is, for the most part, gradual and slow. The life-faculty is there, but it often means hard work, patient waiting, and great faith, to realize its presence and bring out its power.
[2] It has been said that modern psychology confirms scientifically this method of seeking and finding the truth. It teaches that action has often to precede thought and feeling. If this is the word of psychology, it is really in accord with the method of Jesus. Practically all His teaching is addressed, not so much to the intellect or to the emotions, but to the will. He does not put doing and believing in opposition; in actual life they are really indistinguishable parts of a healthy spiritual growth. But our Lord does put doing before knowing, as He puts religion before theology, and life before the understanding of life. His unmistakable object is to constrain men to take action, rather than to wait for emotion, or even for intellectual confidence and conviction.
As a matter of experience, we find at every turn on the road of life we have to do things we do not want to do, to secure the things we want to have. Necessity does not humour us, and that is the reason the world owes so much to necessity. We may be very "superior" about dogmatism in theology, but well for us that dogmatism will have no such nonsense in life. It is just doing the duty that tasks us most, whatever our feeling about it, which makes the difference between the worthy and the unworthy in character; between the numerals and the ciphers in the human world. It is doing, not what we would, but as we ought which changes reluctance into interest, and the sense of futility into the joy of achievement. It is doing what we know to be true which illumines its ever-lasting significance. "You could write stories which people would read," said Lecky repeatedly to George Eliot. She did not believe him, and, strange as it may seem, she had almost a morbid shrinking from making the attempt. But she did make it, and we know with what results. The attempt to write a story had not only to precede the belief that she could write one, it had to reveal the gift.
And so Jesus, who came to manifest God, says to you and me: My brother, My sister, there is that in you which, brought out and cultivated, can achieve in you the highest order and quality of life in this world, and fit you for whatever environment lies beyond. Believe me. Just take me at my word when I say to you, will to do my will, and doing it you shall come to love it—and that is to be saved; for it is to be at one with the Father in me. Leave your past, however unworthy it may be. What I have done and suffered for you has atoned for all. Do your part, and you, too, shall testify: "I live, and yet not I, but Christ that liveth in Me."
This, then, is my position; and whether or not it answer to fact and to Scripture, I leave with your judgment. I ought to have accomplished something if I have made myself understood. It probably overlooks much that many of you hold to be integral to the nature and meaning of salvation. I have only to repeat, that what has been advanced is a setting of this great subject; and I venture to urge it upon your consideration. It now remains for me to notice very briefly one or two further questions as I draw to a close.
What, I may be asked, are we expected, as young people, to understand about the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity as necessary to an intelligent religious faith? And what about feeling or emotion, which is usually represented as a vital part of the driving power of Christian life and conduct? Well, speaking for myself, I make no pretension to the lofty disregard of doctrine which in so many quarters seems to be regarded as the hall-mark of enlightened thinking. We do well to beware of a so-called "breadth," which is but a pet euphemism for thinness.
But after all, we can hold a thing for true, and yet find no explanation of it which quite satisfies us. Theories about the heavens have come and gone, but the stars remain. Christ was, before creeds gathered about Him; and it is because He is, that men must formulate doctrine to explain Him. I have long had the conviction that in religion nothing really matters but the Spirit of Christ. This is not to say that if we have, or claim to have, the Spirit of Christ, it makes no difference whether we do, or do not, believe in the "historical Christ." To my thinking such a position is nonsense. We may as well talk about an effect without a cause. Spirit must needs clothe itself with body. The "external may come in at different points of the process, but the internal without the external cannot exist." I am simply saying, that everything we need to know in a general sense about Christian doctrine becomes intelligible and reasonable, not when we approach Christ through our doubts and difficulties about doctrines, but our doubts and difficulties through Christ. In Him is life, and the life is the light of men. I care not for the moment what dogmas about Christ you accept or reject; I ask you to think, and then say, what heaven worth entering, of state or place, could close against us, were we in the Spirit of Christ walking in the footsteps of Christ?
Then about feeling: Is there one of us who can say, that he, or she, has never had the impulse that should lead to Christian decision? Long as we make it possible for God to appeal to us, He will find His own way. From Him is the impulse, whichever way it comes, but it is ours to put it in practice. But just as we do not wait for feeling to take us out to earn our bread, and keep a roof over our head, so it is a far nobler thing to turn to God from a sense of duty, and conscience, and spiritual need, than it is to depend upon feeling to make us do, what not to do, with or without feeling, is our loss and our shame.
Do not wait for feeling. Begin your part in the work of your own salvation. If feeling carry you into decision, and it sometimes does, well and good. But for one case where feeling leads to decision there are probably a score where feeling must be made by what follows decision. Take care of doing, and feeling will take care of itself; and as we rejoice in its inspiration, we shall realize that, perhaps for the most part, it can come no other way. To have the joy of doing good, we must do good. We cannot have the tonic and bracing sense of vigour by saying we will climb the mountain. It is when we have scaled its heights that we have the experience of a new physical creation.
Why wait, then, for what is waiting for us? The Divine Spirit is universal and infinite. It is the mother-soul of the universe, with eternal power and sweetness and beauty, and glory, shining down upon all men, stimulating them to be nobler, to go up higher. And when we accept the influence of the Holy Spirit seeking the divine in us, and co-operate with it, we have found the answer to the question: What must I do to be saved?
Does any one say, I ask again, that he has never had this impulse? As truly can he say that he has never felt the sun. Let him take heed. The sun sets, and it is night. There can be a night of the soul—the darkest, blackest, most hopeless night of all.
"He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." To be saved is to live; and only to the life above us can the life within us respond. Out of Christ we do not live; we but exist. And existence at its highest estate has no power inherent in it to cast out the selfishness and death that build a hell's despair, in what might be the kingdom of heaven in our human life and world. Do we want to be saved? Do we desire life? Then pray, and begin at once to do what our heart and conscience tell us the Christ would have us do. Will to do the will, and doing it we shall enter, gradually at first, and then with more royal progress and joy unspeakable, into the truth of His word: "Because I live, ye shall live also."
[1] Rev. W. L. Walker.
[2] Dr. Lyman Abbot.