to the ambitious and successful statesman who says, "Youth is folly, manhood is struggle, old age regret"; to one of our most brilliant women of genius in our own generation, wife of a still more brilliant husband, who cries, "I married for ambition, and I am miserable."
Surely there is some tragic mismanagement of the great business of living here. Oh, brother, is it true of you, that after all the painful years happiness is not yours? You have no meat, no food on which the heart feeds, no green pasture in the soul, no table in the wilderness, and the last gray day draws near and will find you still hungering for what life Has never given you.
Learn, then, that Christ knows more about the proper management of your life than you do. "Cast your net on the right side of the ship,"
speaks that quiet Voice from the sh.o.r.e. And you know what happened.
And it is so still. Just because Christ stands among the common things of life, He knows most about life, and, above all, He knows where the golden fruit of happiness is found and where the secret wells of peace.
And to some of us whom G.o.d has called to be fishers of men the issue is yet more solemn. We have the boat and the nets, all this elaborate organization of the Church, but have we caught anything this year?
Where is the draft of fishes? Where are the men and women saved by our triumphant effort? I will make my humble confession this morning, that for five-and-twenty years I have cast the net, but only lately have I found the right side of the ship; only lately have I discovered how easy it is to get the great draft of fishes by simply going to work in Christ"s way. I do not believe in the indifference of the ma.s.ses in religion; the indifference is not in the ma.s.ses, but in the churches. You will never catch many fish if you stand upon the sh.o.r.e of cold respectability and wait for them to come; launch out into the deep and you will find them. Go for them--that is Christ"s method.
Compel them to come in, for remember Christ"s ideal was, as Bishop Lightfoot so n.o.bly put it, "the universal compulsion of the souls of men." And if your experience is like mine, you will find that there is strangely little compulsion needed to bring men and women to Christ.
I stood but lately in a house where fifty fallen women lived; I went there to rescue three of its unhappy inmates. When the moment came to take these three women from their life of sin, their comrades lined the pa.s.sage to shake my hand; there were tears and prayers, and messages like these, "Be good. You"ll be a good woman," "We wish we had your chance"; and these poor souls in their inferno wished me "a happy New-year." Compulsion! There was small need for compulsion there! I believe I could have rescued all of these fifty women at one stroke had I known where to take them. But to the shame of the Free Churches in London I confess that, with the exception of the Wesleyans and the Salvation Army, I do not know a single Free Church Rescue Home in London. And I put it to you this morning whether you can any longer tolerate that omission? I ask you whether you really want a great draft of fishes, for you can have them if you want them. Christ knows the business better than you do; and if you will come out of the cloister of the church and seek the people in His spirit, I promise you that very soon you will not be able to drag the net for the mult.i.tude of fishes.
IV. "And Jesus said unto them, Come and dine."
Dine on what? Not the fish which they had caught. They had caught one hundred and fifty-three great fishes; but notice Christ"s fire was kindled before they came. Christ"s fish was already laid thereon, and all they had to do was to come and dine. It is all you have to do, all the churches have to do. Did not Christ so put it in the parable of the Great Supper?--"Come, for all things are ready." Is not the last word of Scripture the great invitation?--"The Spirit and the Bride say, Come, and whosoever will, let him come, and take of the water of life freely." Many a church can not say to a hungry world, "Come and dine," because it will not let Christ prepare the meal. It will not live in His spirit, it has no real faith in His gospel, it does not understand that its true strength is not in elaborate organization or worship, but in simple reliance on His grace. And so there is the table covered with elaborate confections, which are not bread, and when it says, "Come and dine," men will not come, for they know that there is nothing there for them. Let Christ prepare the meal and all is different then. When He says, "Come and dine," there is "enough for each, enough for all, enough for evermore." And as Jesus spoke, I think there flashed upon the memory of these men the scene when Jesus fed the five thousand, and by that memory they knew their Jesus. No one else ever spoke like that, with such certainty and such authority.
And the same Voice speaks even now to your hunger-bitten soul, to your famished heart, "Come and dine."
V. "Then Jesus taketh bread and giveth them, and fish likewise."
There is no mistaking the act; it was a sacramental act. Here, upon the lake sh.o.r.e, without a church, without an altar, the true feast of the Lord was observed. For what does the Holy Supper, which is the bond and seal of the Church"s fellowship, stand for, if it is not for this, the sanctification of the common life? Bread and wine, the commonest of all foods to an Oriental, are elements indeed, because they are necessary to the most elementary form of physical life, things used daily in the humblest home. By linking Himself imperishably with these commonest elements of life, Christ makes it impossible to forget Him. Once more the thought shines clear, Jesus among the common things of life.
And then there comes one last touch in the beautiful story. While these things happened, the day was breaking. Is there one of us long tossed on sunless seas of doubt, long conscious of failure and disappointment in life? Are there those of us whose sorrow lies deeper than that which is personal--sorrow over our failure in Christ"s work, pain over a life"s ministry for Christ that has known no victorious evangel? Turn your eyes from that barren sea to Him who stands upon the sh.o.r.e; He shall yet make you a fisher of men. Turn your eyes from that bleak, dark sea of wasted effort where you have fared so ill; it is always dark till Jesus comes, it is always light when He has come.
There is a new day breaking for the churches--a day of widespread evangelistic triumphs that shall eclipse all the greatest triumphs of the past, if we will but go back to Christ"s school and learn of Him how to save the people. And to each of us He says to-day: "I am the living bread; I am the bread of life come down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever." "Come and dine." Will you come?
SMITH
a.s.sURANCE IN G.o.d
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, divine, educator and author, was born at Calcutta in 1856, and educated at New College, Edinburgh, Scotland. He is at present professor of Old Testament Language, Literature and Theology in the United Free Church College, Glasgow. He is author of "The Historical Geography of the Holy Land," "Jerusalem, the Topography, Economics and History from the Earliest Time to A.D. 70" (1908). He is generally regarded as one of the most gifted preachers of Scotland.
SMITH
Born in 1856
a.s.sURANCE IN G.o.d
_Preserve me, O G.o.d._--Psalm xvi., 16.
The psalmist lived in a period when belief in the reality of many G.o.ds was still strong, and when a man who would follow the one true G.o.d had to prefer to do so against the attractions of other deities and against the convictions of a great number of his fellow countrymen that these deities were living and powerful. That stage of religion is so distant from ourselves that we may imagine the psalmist"s example to be of no practical value for our faith, yet in such an imagination we should be very much mistaken indeed, for, to begin with, consider how much you and I to-day owe to those believers who so many centuries ago rejected all the G.o.ds that offered themselves to the hearts of men except the true G.o.d, and who chose to cleave to Him alone with all that pa.s.sionate loyalty which breathes through these verses. But for them you and I could not be standing where we are in religion to-day.
As the eleventh of Hebrews reminds us, we are the spiritual heir of such believers. It is to their struggles and their faith and their victories that we greatly owe it that we have been born into an atmosphere in which no religious belief is possible to us save in one G.o.d who is Spirit and Righteousness and all Truth.
That, then, was the great choice that the psalmist"s faith was turning to--a choice that was no mere a.s.sent to a creed that had been fought for and established by previous generations of believers. It was the man"s own proving of things unseen and his own preference of those against the crowd and a system of things seen, palpable, and very powerful in their attraction for the senses of humanity. But we are not to suppose that the rival deities, from which this man turned to the unseen G.o.d, were to his mind or to the mind of his day the heap of dead and ugly idols which we know them to be. They were not dead things that he could kick away with his feet that these believers had to reject when they sought the living G.o.d, but things which he and his contemporaries felt to be alive and powerful; powerful alike in their seduction and in their vengeance. They were believed to be identical, as you know, with the forces of nature; they were supposed to be indispensable to the welfare of the individual and of society, and they were fanatically supported at the time by the ma.s.s of this man"s own countrymen; so that to break from them in those days meant to abandon ancient opinions and habits, to resist many pleasant and natural temptations and to incur the hostility, as was believed, of the powers of nature, to break with customs and with rites that had fortified and consoled the individual heart for generations and been the support and sanction of society and of the state as well. Yet this man did it. From all that living crowd and system, from all those visible temptations and terrors he turned to the unseen, fully conscious of his danger, for he opens his Psalm with a great cry, "Preserve me, preserve me, O G.o.d!" but yet deliberately, and with all his heart: "I have said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord." I have no goodness, no happiness, that is outside Thee or outside the saints that are in the land, "the excellent in whom is all my delight." Here we touch another great characteristic of all true faith which is full of example to ourselves. It is remarkable how, when a man really turns to G.o.d, he turns to G.o.d"s people as well, and how he includes them in the loyalty and in the devotion which he feels toward his Redeemer.
His confidence and the sensitiveness of his faith in and toward G.o.d become almost an equal confidence and an equal sensitiveness toward his fellow believers. So it is throughout Scripture; you remember that other psalmist who tells us how he had been tempted to doubt G.o.d"s providence and G.o.d"s power to help the good man--"does G.o.d know and is there knowledge in the Most High? Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain and washed my hands in innocency." The psalmist immediately adds: "If I had spoken thus, behold I had dealt treacherously with the generation of G.o.d"s children." If I had spoken thus, denying G.o.d, I had dealt treacherously with the generation of G.o.d"s children.
Unbelief toward G.o.d meant to him treason toward G.o.d"s people; and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews affirms the same double character of true faith when he emphasizes just these two points in the faith of Moses: "choosing to suffer affliction with the people of G.o.d," and "enduring as seeing Him who is invisible," and G.o.d Himself through Jesus Christ has accepted this partnership of His people in our loyalty--"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me." I do not believe in the full faith of any man who does not extend the loyalty he professes to G.o.d to G.o.d"s people as well, who does not feel as sensitive to his brethren on earth as he does to his Father in heaven, who does not practise piety toward the Church as he does toward her Head, or find in her fellowship and her service a joy and a gladness which is one with his deep joy in G.o.d, his Redeemer. Nay, is it not just in loving people who are still imperfect, often disappointing, and far from their ideal it may be, that in our relations to them we are to find the greater proof and test of our religious faith? In these days such a duty is unfortunately more complicated than with the psalmist. The lines between G.o.d"s Church and the world is not so clear as it was to him, and the Church is divided into many and often hostile factions.
All the more it becomes the test of our religion if our hearts feel and rejoice in the fellowship of G.o.d"s simpler and more needy and more devoted believers, however unattractive they may otherwise be.
Consider the way in which the psalmist reached this pure faith in G.o.d and in His people. A factor in the process was distaste for the ugly rites of idolatry--"Their drink-offerings of blood will I not offer."
Idolatry always develops a loathsome ritual. Sometimes it is cruel and sometimes it is horribly unclean, but it always debases the worshiper"s mind, confuses his conscience, and hampers his freedom and energy by the burdensome ceremonies it imposes upon them. Standing afar off from them as we do, and knowing that there is no heathen religion but has something good in it, we are apt to think that it does not in the least matter how crude or how material a nation"s faith be if only it be faith in something more powerful than themselves, if it satisfy their consciences and have some influence in disciplining society and helping the individual to control himself.
But you have only to see idolatry at work, and at work with the habits of ages upon it, to recognize how terrible it can be in its identification of sheer filth and cruelty with the interests of religion, and how it at once demoralizes and paralyzes its adherents.
To see it thus is to understand the pa.s.sionate horror of these words: "Their drink-offering of blood will I not offer."
It is, however, no mere recoil from the immoral which started the spring of this psalmists"s faith in G.o.d. That faith was formed on personal experience of G.o.d Himself. In simple but pregnant phrases the psalmist tells us how sure he has become, first, of G.o.d"s providence in his life; secondly, of G.o.d"s intimate communion with his soul. G.o.d, he says, had been everything in his life. One does not know whether the psalmist was a prosperous man or a poor one; the inference that he was prosperous and rich has sometimes been drawn, but wrongly drawn, from one of the verses of the Psalm. His indifference to that is clear, but what he did have he knew he had from G.o.d. G.o.d, he says, is all his happiness and all his strength--"The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup; thou maintainest my lot." Whether poor or prosperous he could say: "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage." Now that a.s.surance of divine leading is not a.n.a.lyzable, but we know that it does grow up solid and sure in the experience of simple men who have put their trust in G.o.d, who have felt life to be a commission from Him and who have done their duty obeying His call. With such men "all things work together for good." Tho life about them shake and darken, they feel their own solidity and have light enough to read the future. Tho stript and stark, they feel the Lord Himself to be the portion of their inheritance and of their cup. The portion of my inheritance the Lord is, i.e., the little bit of land that fell to each Israelite as his share in the promised inheritance of the nation. "The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance," as we might say in our Scotch language, "The Lord is my croft and my cup," so they find in Him all the ground and the freedom they need to do their work, fulfil their relationships, and develop their manhood.
It is, however, with the psalmist"s second reason for his faith we have most to do. "I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel: my reins also instruct me in the night seasons." This man held close communion with G.o.d. Is it not great to find the testimony of a brother man coming down all through those ages, from that dim and distant past, clear and sure as to this, that he had G.o.d"s counsel and that G.o.d kept communion with him? G.o.d had spoken to this man and shown him His will. Yes, he had received what we call inspiration and revelation, and had proved the truth of these in his life. They had led and they had lifted him. Nor had they come to him as many men falsely suppose revelation and inspiration exclusively have come to mankind, by means, namely, that were extraordinary and miraculous. The psalmist tells us of no vision of angels, of no voice from heaven. The Lord had not appeared to him in dreams nor by any marvelous signs; on the other hand, he tells us simply that the divine counsel of which he was so sure, and which he pa.s.ses on to us, came to him through the workings of his inner spiritual life. That is what he means by the emphatic statement "yea, my reins instruct me in the night seasons,"
which he adds parallel with the thought, "I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel." According to the primitive physiology of this man"s nation and times, the reins of a man fulfil the same intellectual function which we, with our larger knowledge, know are discharged by the brain. This was how G.o.d"s revelation came to this brother of ours, through the working of his mind and conscience, but it was in the night seasons that they worked, not in the day and in the sunshine, but in the night when a man is left to himself with only this advantage to his thought: that like the blind he is yet undistracted by the influences which are seen. When he lies down he thinks soberly and quietly about himself and about life and about G.o.d, and about the great hidden future that is waiting for him. He was communing with G.o.d, who had made his brain and used it as an instrument of revelation. In these thoughts G.o.d was communing with man through his reason and through his conscience. You and I are always contrasting G.o.d"s providence and His grace. We are always attempting to oppose reason and revelation; to this man they were one. G.o.d"s great grace had come to him through G.o.d"s own providence, and G.o.d"s revelation was ministered to him through the reason with which he had endowed the creature He had made in His own image. This psalmist"s chief and practical help to us men and women today is that he became sure of G.o.d not because of any miracle or supernatural sign, on his report of which we might be content indolently to rest our faith, but in G.o.d"s own providence in his life and in G.o.d"s quiet communion with him through the organs G.o.d Himself has created in every one of us. For all time, whether before or after Christ, these are the chief grounds and foundations of faith in G.o.d. So it was in the Old Testament--"stand in awe and sin not," "commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still," "be still and know that I am G.o.d." So with Christ, "for the kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation, but the kingdom of heaven is within you," and so with Paul, "the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of G.o.d, and if children then heirs, heirs of G.o.d and joint heirs with Christ." "For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, ... that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with might by his spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, to the end that ye being rooted and grounded in love may come to apprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height and to know the love of Christ."
G.o.d"s guidance of his life, first of all, produces in a man a great sense of stability. "I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand I shall not be moved." He who has found G.o.d so careful of him, he whom G.o.d hath regarded as worth speaking to and counseling and disciplining, will be certain that he shall endure, provided he is sure of his own loyalty. The life so loved of G.o.d, so provided for, and in such close communion with the Eternal is not, can not be the creature of the day, and this a.s.surance stands firm in face of even death and the horrible corruption of the body. The psalmist refuses to believe that he is to dwell in the horrible under-world forever--either himself or any of G.o.d"s believers. "Thou must not, thou wilt not leave my soul in sheol, thou must not, thou wilt not suffer thy loved ones to see the pit." To this man it is incredible, and our hearts bear witness to the truth if we have had any experience of G.o.d"s blessing and guidance. To this man it is incredible that the life G.o.d has cared for and guided and spoken to and brought into such intimate communion with himself can find its end in death. Those whom G.o.d has loyally loved and who have loyally loved G.o.d--for this word badly translated "holy" in the psalms really has that actual significance--those whom G.o.d has loyally loved and who have loyally loved G.o.d shall never die. As He lives so shall they; they shall never be absent from His presence. Be the future unknown and unknowable, be we ourselves incapable of conceiving the processes by which this mortal shall put on immortality, or where heaven is, or what eternity can possibly be to those who have never lived outside time, yet that future is secure and its immortal character is indubitable--where G.o.d is there shall His servants be, and because He is there their life shall be peace and joy, and because He is eternal it shall last forevermore. That thought is the whole of the hope and argument. We are a.s.sured of the future life because we have known G.o.d, and as we have found Him to be true to us and proved ourselves true to Him.
GUNSAULUS
THE BIBLE VS. INFIDELITY
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Frank Wakely Gunsaulus was born at Chesterville, Ohio, in 1856. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1875. For some years he was pastor of Plymouth Church, Chicago, and since 1899 pastor of Central Church, Chicago. He is also president of the Armour Inst.i.tute of Technology. He is a fascinating speaker, having a clear, resonant voice, and a dignified presence. His mind is a storehouse of the best literature, and his English style is noteworthy for its purity and richness. He is the author of several books and is in popular demand as a lecturer.
GUNSAULUS
Born in 1856
THE BIBLE VS. INFIDELITY[1]
[Footnote 1: Preached as an impromptu reply to R.G. Ingersoll. Printed from an unrevised stenographic report.]
_There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification_.--I Cor. xiv., 10.
Ours is a voiceful era. Perhaps, as the ages come and go and man"s life grows richer, its questions more restless for answer, its moral supports called upon to bear heavier interests of faith, its enterprises more often and searchingly compelled to defend themselves, the voices of time will be increasingly potent and worthy of his attention. A singularly suggestive collection of messages fills the air today, and all of these voices speak of one theme--the Bible.
Anarchy, which is always atheistic, holds its converse in the places of evil which this book"s message would close forever; the foes of that civilization builded on its laws and stimulated by its hopes asks us to condemn it as worthy only of caricature, vituperation, and hate.
Let us find a path of duty today, not refusing to listen to any of these voices, but asking that other voices also may help us to the truth.
The preacher"s message is a book called the Bible. That is only the literary form of his message--telling its history. Even that form, which is much less divine as paper and ink are less lofty in the scale than humanity, has worked wonders. To-day, the Bible offers the nineteenth-century infidel as testimony of the influence it has. It has force enough to make infidelity preach tearfully and well about man, woman, and child. Skepticism did not do so well until the Bible came. The Bible has furnished the eloquence of infidelity with such a man as Shakespeare to talk about; no student of literature could imagine Shakespeare without the Bible and the Bible"s influence upon him as he created his dreams. It furnished an Abraham Lincoln for an orator to compare favorably with incomplete ideas of Almighty G.o.d; but it seems to have been unable to show the critic that Christian ideas of Almighty G.o.d made Lincoln so love the Lord"s Prayer that he wanted a church builded with this as its creed. It would seem that any general denunciation or humorous caricature of a book which has worked such an amazing effect in literature as has the Bible would be tempered by some recognition of the fact that these other minds--poets, orators, sages, and scientists--have found illumination and help in its pages. Liberal Christianity will be intellectually broad. Certainly the greatest of modern pagans, Goethe, will not be accused of favoritism toward the Bible, yet he said: "I esteem the gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth from them the reflected splendor of a sublimity, proceeding from the person of Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the divine could ever have manifested upon earth." The Earl of Rochester saw that the only liberalism which objects to the Bible, in its true uses, is the liberalism of licentiousness; and he left this saying: "A bad heart is the great argument against this holy book." And Faraday, weeping, said: "Why will people go astray when they have this blest book to guide them?"