Chapter II: Part 2

You do not need to make a boast of this, or it will lose all its power; but do it because you cannot help doing it. Your neighbor will say, "There is something in that." And when you come to the borders of the grave--he was there once, and you heard how he shrieked, and how frightened he was--give him your hand, and say to him, "Ah! I have a Christ that will do to die by; I have a religion that will make me sing in the night." Let me hear how you can sing, "Victory, victory, victory!" through Him that loved you. I tell you, we may preach fifty thousand sermons to prove the gospel, but we shall not prove it half so well as you will through singing in the night. Keep a cheerful frame; keep a happy heart; keep a contented spirit; keep your eye up, and your heart aloft, and you prove Christianity better than all the Butlers, and all the wise men that ever lived. Give them the analogy of a holy life, and then you will prove religion to them; give them, the evidence of internal piety, developed externally, and you will give the best possible proof of Christianity.

POTTER

MEMORIAL DISCOURSE ON PHILLIPS BROOKS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Henry Codman Potter was born at Schenectady, New York, in 1834, and was graduated from the Theological Seminary of Virginia in 1857. He was appointed rector of Grace Protestant Episcopal Church, New York, in 1868, and was coadjutor to his uncle, Horatio Potter, from 1883 to 1887, when he was made Bishop of the Diocese of New York. He won considerable distinction as a clear-cut and eloquent speaker. He dealt in pulpit and on platform, with many public questions, such as temperance, capital and labor, civic righteousness, and the purifying of East Side slum life. He advocated personal freedom, and invariably spoke with authority. He was particularly happy as an after-dinner speaker. He died in 1908.

POTTER

1834--1908

MEMORIAL DISCOURSE ON PHILLIPS BROOKS[1]

[Footnote 1: Reprinted by permission of Bishop Henry C. Potter and The Century Company, publishers of "The Scholar and the State."]

_It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life_.--John vi., 63.

He who stops over-long in the mere mechanism of religion is verily missing that for which religion stands. Here, indeed, it must be owned is, if not our greatest danger, one of the greatest. All life is full of that strange want of intellectual and moral perspective which fails to see how secondary, after all, are means to ends; and how he only has truly apprehended the office of religion who has learned, when undertaking in any wise to present it or represent it, to hold fast to that which is the one central thought and fact of all: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."

And this brings me--in how real and vivid a way I am sure you must feel as keenly as I--face to face with him of whom I am set to speak to-day.

Never before in the history, not only of our communion, but of any or all communions, has the departure of a religious teacher been more widely noted and deplored than in the case of him of whom this Commonwealth and this diocese have been bereaved. Never before, surely, in case of any man whom we can recall, has the sense of loss and bereavement been more distinctly a personal one,--extending to multitudes in two hemispheres who did not know him, who had never seen or heard him, and yet to whom he had revealed himself in such real and helpful ways.

It has followed, inevitably, from this, that that strong tide of profound feeling has found expression in many and most unusual forms, and it will be among the most interesting tasks of the future biographer of the late Bishop of Massachusetts to take note of these various memorials and to trace in them the secret of his unique power and influence.

But just because they have, so many of them, in such remarkable variety and from sources so diverse, been written or spoken, and no less because a memoir of Phillips Brooks is already undertaken by hands preeminently designated for that purpose, I may wisely here confine myself to another and very different task. I shall not attempt, therefore, even the merest outline of a biographical review. I shall not undertake to analyze, nor, save incidentally, even to refer to, the influences and inheritances that wrought in the mind and upon the life of your late friend and teacher. I shall still less attempt to discover the open secret of his rare and unique charm and attractiveness as a man; and I shall least of all endeavor to forecast the place which history will give to him among the leaders and builders of our age. Brief as was his ministry in his higher office, and to our view all too soon ended, I shall be content to speak of him as a bishop,--of his divine right, as I profoundly believe, to a place in the episcopate, and of the preeminent value of his distinctive and incomparable witness to the highest aim and purpose of that office.

And first of all let me say a word in regard to the way in which he came to it. When chosen to the episcopate of this diocese, your late bishop had already, at least once, as we all know, declined the office. It was well known to those who knew him best that, as he had viewed it for a large part of his ministry, it was a work for which he had no especial sympathy either as to its tasks, or, as he had understood them, its opportunities.

But the time undoubtedly came when, as to this, he modified his earlier opinions; and the time came too, as I am most glad to think, when he was led to feel that if he were called to such an office he might find in it an opportunity for widening his own sympathies and for estimating more justly those with whom previously he had believed himself to have little in common.

It was the inevitable condition of his strong and deep convictions that he should not always or easily understand or make due allowance for men of different opinions. It was--God and you will bear me witness that this is true!--one of the noblest characteristics of his fifteen months' episcopate that, as a bishop, men's rightful liberty of opinion found in him not only a large and generous tolerance, but a most beautiful and gracious acceptance. He seized, instantly and easily, that which will be forever the highest conception of the episcopate in its relations whether to the clergy or the laity, its paternal and fraternal character; and his "sweet reasonableness," both as a father and as a brother, shone through all that he was and did.

For one, I greatly love to remember this,--that when the time came he himself, with the simple naturalness which marked all that he did, was brought to reconsider his earlier attitude toward the episcopal office, and to express with characteristic candor his readiness to take up its work if he should be chosen to it; he turned to his new, and to him most strange, task with a supreme desire to do it in a loving and whole-hearted way, and to make it helpful to every man, woman, and child with whom he came in contact. What could have been more like him than that, in that last address which he delivered to the choir-boys at Newton, he should have said to them, "When you meet me let me know that you know me." Another might easily have been misunderstood in asking those whom he might by chance encounter to salute him; but he knew, and the boys knew, what he had in mind,--how he and they were all striving to serve one Master, and how each--he most surely as much as they--was to gain strength and cheer from mutual recognition in the spirit of a common brotherhood.

And thus it was always; and this it was that allied itself so naturally to that which was his never-ceasing endeavor--to lift all men everywhere to that which was, with him, the highest conception of his office, whether as a preacher or as a bishop,--the conception of God as a Father, and of the brotherhood of all men as mutually related in Him.

In an address which he delivered during the last General Convention in Baltimore to the students of Johns Hopkins University, he spoke substantially these words:

"In trying to win a man to a better life, show him not the
evil but the nobleness of his nature. Lead him to enthusiastic
contemplations of humanity;"

in its perfection, and when he asks, 'Why, if this is so, do not I have this life?'--then project on the background of his enthusiasm his own life; say to him, 'Because you are a liar, because you blind your soul with licentiousness, shame is born,--but not a shame of despair. It is soon changed to joy. Christianity becomes an opportunity, a high privilege, the means of attaining to the most exalted ideal--and the only means.'

"Herein must lie all real power; herein lay Christ's power, that he appreciated the beauty and richness of humanity, that it is very near the Infinite, very near to God. These two facts--we are the children of God, and God is our Father--make us look very differently at ourselves, very differently at our neighbors, very differently at God. We should be surprized, not at our good deeds, but at our bad ones. We should expect good as more likely to occur than evil; we should believe that our best moments are our truest. I was once talking with an acquaintance about whose religious position I knew nothing, and he exprest a very hopeful opinion in regard to a matter about which I was myself very doubtful.

"'Why, I said to him, 'You are an optimist.'

"'Of course I am an optimist,' he replied, because I am a Christian.'

"I felt that as a reproof. The Christian must be an optimist."

Men and brethren, I set these words over against those of his Master with which I began, and the two in essence are one. "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." There is a life nobler and diviner than any that we have dreamed of. To the poorest and meanest of us, as to the best and most richly-dowered, it is alike open. To turn toward it, to reach up after it, to believe in its ever-recurring nearness, and to glorify God in attaining to it, this is the calling of a human soul.

Now then, what, I ask you, is all the rest of religion worth in comparison with this?--not what is it worth in itself, but what is its place relatively to this? This, I maintain, is the supreme question for the episcopate, as it ought to be the supreme question with the ministry of any and every order. And therefore it is, I affirm, that, in bringing into the episcopate with such unique vividness and power this conception of his office, your bishop rendered to his order and to the Church of God everywhere a service so transcendent. A most gifted and sympathetic observer of our departed brother's character and influence has said of him, contrasting him with the power of institution, "His life will always suggest the importance of the influence of the individual man as compared with institutional Christianity."

In one sense, undoubtedly, this is true; but I should prefer to say that his life-work will always show the large and helpful influence of a great soul upon institutional Christianity. It is a superficial and unphilosophical temperament that disparages institutions; for institutions are only another name for that organized force and life by which God rules the world. But it is undoubtedly and profoundly true that you no sooner have an institution, whether in society, in politics, or in religion, than you are threatened with the danger that the institution may first exaggerate itself and then harden and stiffen into a machine; and that in the realm of religion, preeminently, those whose office it should be to quicken and infuse it with new life should themselves come at last to "worship the net and the drag." And just here you find in the history of religion in all ages the place of the prophet and the seer. He is to pierce through the fabric of the visible structure to that soul of things for which it stands. When, in Isaiah, the Holy Ghost commands the prophet, "Lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid: say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!" it is not alone, you see, his voice that lie is to lift up. No, no! It is the vision of the unseen and divine. "Say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!"

Over and over again that voice breaks in upon the slumbrous torpor of Israel and smites the dead souls of priests and people alike. Now it is a Balaam, now it is an Elijah, a David, an Isaiah, a John the Baptist, a Paul the Apostle, a Peter the Hermit, a Savonarola, a Huss, a Whitefield, a Wesley, a Frederick Maurice, a Frederick Robertson, a Phillips Brooks.

Do not mistake me. I do not say that there were not many others. But these names are typical, and that for which they stand cannot easily be mistaken. I affirm without qualification that, in that gift of vision and of exaltation for which they stand, they stand for the highest and the best,--that one thing for which the Church of God most of all stands, and of which so long as it is the Church Militant it will most of all stand in need: to know that the end of all its mechanisms and ministries is to impart life, and that nothing which obscures or loses sight of the eternal source of life can regenerate or quicken;--to teach men to cry out, with St. Augustine, "_Fecisti nos ad te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te_": Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is unquiet until its rests in Thee,--this however, as any one may be tempted to fence and juggle with the fact, is the truth on which all the rest depends.

Unfortunately it is a truth which there is much in the tasks and engagements of the episcopate to obscure. A bishop is preeminently, at any rate in the popular conception of him, an administrator; and howsoever wide of the mark this popular conception may be from the essential idea of the office, it must be owned that there is much in a bishop's work in our day to limit his activities, and therefore his influence, within such a sphere.

To recognize his prophetic office as giving expression to that mission of the Holy Ghost of which he is preeminently the representative, to illustrate it upon a wider instead of a narrower field, to recognize and seize the greater opportunities for its exercise, to be indeed "a leader and commander" to the people, not by means of the petty mechanisms of officialism, but by the strong, strenuous, and unwearied proclamation of the truth; under all conditions to make the occasion somehow a stepping-stone to that mount of vision from which men may see God and righteousness and become sensible of the nearness of both to themselves,--this, I think you will agree with me, is no unworthy use of the loftiest calling and the loftiest gifts.

And such a use was his. A bishop-elect, walking with him one day in the country, was speaking, with not unnatural shrinking and hesitancy, of the new work toward which he was soon to turn his face, and said among other things, "I have a great dread, in the Episcopate, of perfunctoriness. In the administration, especially, of confirmation, it seems almost impossible, in connection with its constant repetition, to avoid it."

He was silent a moment, and then said, "I do not think that it need be so. The office indeed is the same. But every class is different; and then--think what it is to them! It seems to me that that thought can never cease to move one."

What a clear insight the answer gave to his own ministry. One turns back to his first sermon, that evening when, with his fellow-student in Virginia, he walked across the fields to the log-cabin where, not yet in holy orders, he preached it, and where afterward he ministered with such swiftly increasing power to a handful of negro servants. "It was an utter failure," he said afterward. Yes, perhaps; but all through the failure he struggled to give expression to that of which his soul was full; and I do not doubt that even then they who heard him somehow understood him. We pass from those first words to the last,--those of which I spoke a moment ago,--the address to the choir-boys at Newton,--was there ever such, an address to choir-boys before? He knew little or nothing about the science of music, and with characteristic candor he at once said so. But he passed quickly from the music to those incomparable words of which the music was the mere vehicle and vesture. He bade the lads to whom he spoke think of those who, long ago and all the ages down, had sung that matchless Psalter,--of the boys and men of other times, and what it had meant to them. And then, as he looked into their fresh young faces and saw the long vista of life stretching out before them, he bade them think of that larger and fuller meaning which was to come into those Psalms of David, when he,--was there some prophetic sense of how soon with him the end would be?--when he and such as he had passed away,--what new doors were to open, what deeper meanings were to be discerned, what nobler opportunities were to dawn, as the years hastened swiftly on toward their august and glorious consummation! How it all lifts us up as we read it, and how like it was to that "one sermon" which he forever preached!

And in saying so I do not forget what that was which some men said was missing in it. His, they tell us--who hold some dry and formalized statement of the truth so close to the eye that it obscures all larger vision of it,--his, they tell us, was an "invertebrate theology." Of what he was and spoke, such a criticism is as if one said of the wind, that divinely appointed symbol of the Holy Ghost, "it has no spine nor ribs."

A spine and ribs are very necessary things; but we bury them as so much chalk and lime when once the breath has gone out of them! In the beginning we read, "And the Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."

And all along since then there have been messengers of God into whom the same divine breath has been, as it were, without measure breathed, and who have been the quickeners and inspirers of their fellows. Nothing less than this can explain that wholly exceptional and yet consistent influence which he whom we mourn gave forth. It was not confined or limited by merely personal or physical conditions, but breathed with equal and quickening power through all that he taught and wrote. There were multitudes who never saw or heard him, but by whom nevertheless he was as intimately known and understood as if he had been their daily companion.

Never was there an instance which more truly fulfilled the saying, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." They reached down to the inmost need of empty and aching hearts and answered it. They spoke to that in the most sin-stained and wayward soul which is, after all, the image of the invisible God,--spoke to it, touched it, constrained it. "What has this fine-bred Boston scholar," plain men asked, when he bade him come to us and preach in our Trinity--"what has such an one to say to the business men of Wall Street?" But when he came, straightway every man found out that he had indeed something to say to him,--a word of power, a word of hope, a word of enduring joy and strength!

A kindred thinker of large vision and rare insight, New England born and nurtured like himself, speaking of him not long after his death, said:

"There are three forms pertaining to the Christian truths: they
are true as facts, they are true as doctrines intellectually
apprehended, they are true as spiritual experiences to be
realized. Bishop Brooks struck directly for the last. In the
spirit he found the truth; and only as he could get it into a
spiritual form did he conceive it to have power.

"It was because he assumed the facts as true in the main, refusing
to insist on petty accuracy, and passed by doctrinal forms
concerning which there might be great divergence of opinion, and
carried his thought on into the world of spirit, that he won so
great a hearing and such conviction of belief. For it is the
spirit that gives common standing-ground; it says substantially
the same thing in all men. Speak as a spirit to the spiritual
nature of men, and they will respond, because in the spirit they
draw near to their common source and to the world to which all
belong.

"It was because he dealt with this common factor of the human and
the divine nature that he was too positive and practical. In the
spirit it is all yea and amen; there is no negative; in the New
Jerusalem there is no night. We can describe this feature of his
ministry by words from, one of his own sermons: 'It has always
been through men of belief, not unbelief, that power from God has
poured into man. It is not the discriminating critic, but he whose
beating, throbbing life offers itself a channel for the divine
force,--he is the man through, whom the world grows rich, and whom
it remembers, remembers with perpetual thanksgiving.'"

And shall not you who are here to-day thank God that such a man was, tho for so brief a space, your bishop? Some there were, you remember, who thought that those greater spiritual gifts of his would unfit him for the business of practical affairs. "A bishop's daily round," they said, "his endless correspondence, his hurried journeyings, his weight of anxious cares, the misadventures of other men, ever returning to plague him,--how can he bring himself to stoop and deal with these?"

But as in so much else that was transcendent in him, how little here, too, his critics understood him! No more pathetic proof of this has come to light than in that testimony of one among you who, as his private secretary, stood in closest and most intimate relations to him. What a story that is which he has given to us of a great soul--faithful always in the greatest? Yes, but no less faithful in the least. There seems a strange, almost grotesque impossibility in the thought that such an one should ever have come to be regarded as "a stickler for the canons."

But we look a little deeper than the surface, and all that is incongruous straightway disappears. His was the realm of a divine order,--his was the office of his Lord's servant. God had called him. He had put him where he was. He had set his Church to be His witness in the world, and in it, all His children, the greatest with the least, to walk in ways of reverent appointment. Those ways might irk and cramp him sometimes. They did: he might speak of them with sharp impatience and seeming disesteem sometimes. He did that too, now and then,--for he was human like the rest of us! But mark you this, my brothers, for, in an age which, under one figment or another, whether of more ancient or more modern license, is an age of much self-will,--we shall do well to remember it,--his was a life of orderly and consistent obedience to rule. He kept to the Church's plain and stately ways: kept to them and prized them too.

But all the while he held his soul wide open to the vision of his Lord! Up out of a routine that seemed to others that did not know or could not understand him, and who vouchsafed to him much condescending compassion for a bondage which he never felt, and of which in vain they strove to persuade him to complain,--up out of the narrower round in which so faithfully he walked, from time to time he climbed, and came back bathed in a heavenly light, with lips aglow with heavenly fire. The Spirit had spoken to him, and so he spoke to us. "The flesh profiteth nothing: it is the spirit that quickeneth. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."

And so we thank God not alone for his message, but that it was given to him to speak it as a bishop in the Church of God. We thank God that in a generation that so greatly needs to cry, as our _Te Deum_ teaches us, "Govern us and lift us up!" he was given to the Church not alone to rule but to uplift.

What bishop is there who may not wisely seek to be like him by drawing forever on those fires of the Holy Ghost that set his lips aflame? Nay, what soul among us all is there that may not wisely seek to ascend up into that upper realm in which he walked, and by whose mighty airs his soul was filled? Unto the almighty and ever-living God we yield most high praise and hearty thanks for the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all His saints who have been the chosen vessels of His grace and the lights of the world in their several generations; but here and to-day especially for his servant, Phillips Brooks, some time of this Commonwealth and this diocese, true prophet, true priest, true bishop, to the glory of God the Father.

ABBOTT

THE DIVINITY IN HUMANITY

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Lyman Abbott was born at Roxbury, Mass., in 1835. As successor to Henry Ward Beecher, at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, he ministered with great spiritual power until 1898, when he resigned his pastorate to devote his entire time to _The Outlook_, of which he was, and still is, the editor. Dr. Abbott's conception of the minister's work is briefly summed up in his own words:

"Whenever a minister forgets the splendid message of pardon, peace and power based on faith in Jesus Christ as God manifest in the flesh, whenever for this message he substitutes literary lectures, critical essays, sociological disquisitions, theological controversies, or even ethical interpretations of the universal conscience, whenever, in other words, he ceases to be a Christian preacher and becomes a lyceum or seminary lecturer, he divests himself of that which in all ages of the world has been the power of the Christian ministry, and will be its power so long as men have sins to be forgiven, temptations to conquer, and sorrows to be assuaged."

ABBOTT

BORN IN 1835

THE DIVINITY IN HUMANITY

_Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God_?--John X., 34-36.

The context and argument is this: Jesus Christ has declared that He will give unto His sheep eternal life; and that no one can pluck them out of His hand, because He and His Father are one; and the Father who gives these sheep to His care and keeping is greater than all the forces that are leagued against them. Thereat the Jews took up stones against Him, saying: "Being a man thou makest thyself equal with God." And Christ answers with our text. He refers them back to the Old Testament, which, He says, declares of the judges of Israel, of the men to whom the inspiration of God came, that they are divine. "Why, then," He says, "do you accuse Me of blasphemy because I claim divinity?" It is impossible to consider this a mere play upon the word; that Christ uses the word God in one sense in one paragraph and in another sense in the paragraph immediately following. It is impossible to conceive that this is a kind of sacred pun. No, no; the argument is clear and unmistakable. According to your Old Testament scripture, He says, the men in whom and to whom and through whom the power and grace of God are manifested are themselves the partakers of the divine nature. If that is so, if the men of the olden times, patriarchs and prophets, through whom the divine nature was manifested--if they are divine, do not accuse me of blasphemy because I claim for Myself divinity. If in this message, on the one hand, Christ claims kinship with God, on the other He lifts the whole of humanity up with Him and makes the claim for them. The religion of the Old Testament and the New Testament, the religion of Christianity and of Judaism, is a religion of faith in God. But it is not less truly a religion of faith in man, and of faith in man because man is a child of God. And the one faith would be utterly useless without the other. For faith in God is effective because it is accompanied with faith in man as the child of God.

And in this faith in man is the inspiration of all human progress. _Faith_ in man, I say. Faith sees something which the eye does not see. Faith sees something which the reason does not perceive. Faith is not irrational, but it perceives a transcendent truth, over beyond that which the sense perceives. Faith is always intermixed with hope and with a great expectation, either with a hope because it sees something which is not yet but will be, or else with a hope because it sees something which is not yet seen but will be seen. Faith in a man is not a belief that man is to-day a great, noble character, but it is a perception in man of dormant possibilities of greatness and nobility which time and God will develop. It is only the man who has faith in man who can really interpret man. It is faith in man that gives us all true human insight. The difference between a photograph and a portrait is this: the photograph gives the outward feature, and stops there; and most of us, when we stand in a photograph saloon to have our picture taken, hide our soul away. The artist sees the soul behind the man, knows him, understands something of his nature, and paints the soul that looks out through the eyes. He sees in the man something which the sun does not exhibit, and makes that something shine on the canvas. The artist in literature sees an ideal humanity, and interprets it. Realism in literature does not portray the real man. Anthony Trollope pictures the Englishman as he is to-day, and society as any man may take it with a kodak; but Dickens gives Toby Veck and Tiny Tim; George Eliot, Adam Bede and Dinah Morris. Men say that no such boy ever lived as MacDonald has portrayed in Sir Gibbie. In every street Arab is a possible Sir Gibbie; and MacDonald has seen the possible and shown us what Christianity may make out of a street Arab. In this perception of a possible in man lies the spirit of all progress in science. The man of practical science laughs at the notion of an iron railway on which steam cars shall travel faster than English coaches. But the man of faith in men, who believes that it is in the power of men to dominate the powers of nature, builds the road. The man of practical science laughs at the notion that we can reach up our hands into the clouds and draw down the lightning. But Franklin does it. The man of faith is sometimes mistaken, but he is always experimenting, because he always believes that man to-morrow will be more than man is to-day or was yesterday. And all progress in civilization has its secret in this great faith in man as a being that has a mastery, not yet interpreted, not yet understood, not yet comprehended in its fulness, over all the powers of nature.

Now, is there any ground or basis for this faith in man? Have we a right to believe that man is more than he seems to be, as we can see him in the street to-day? Have we a right to build our institutions and fabrics on this belief? Have we a right to think that man can govern himself, or must we go back and say with Carlyle and Ruskin and Voltaire that the great body of men are incompetent to govern themselves, and a few wise rulers must govern them? Have we a right to believe that all the progress that has thus far been made in science is but an augury of progress far greater, reaching into the illimitable? Have we a right to say that these portraits of a possible humanity, this Portia, this Toby Veck, this Tiny Tim, this ideal man and woman, are real men and real women in possibility, if not in the actualities of life? Or are we to think of them as simply phantasmagoria hung up for the delectation of a passing moment? The Bible makes answer to that question,--the Bible preeminently, but the great poets and the great prophets of all religions; the Bible, because the poets and the prophets of the Bible transcend the poets and the prophets of all other religions. And that declaration is that man is made in the image of God, and that God dwells in man and is coming to the manifestation of Himself in growing, developing, redeemed humanity. Our Bible starts out with the declaration that God made man in His own image. The poets take the idea up. MacDonald tells us in that beautiful poem of his, that the babe came through the blue sky and got the blue of his eyes as he came; Wordsworth, that the child's imaginings are the recollected glory of a heavenly home; and the author of the first chapter of Genesis, that God breathed his own breath into the nostrils of man and made him in the image of God. All fancy, all imaginings? But, my dear friends, there is a truth in fancy as well as in science. We need not believe that this aspiration that shows itself in the pure mind of a little child is a trailing glory that he has brought with him from some pre-existent state. We need not think that it is physiological fact that the sky colored the eyes of the babe as the babe came through. Nor need we suppose that man was a clay image into which God breathed a physical breath, so animating him. But beyond all this imagery is the vision of the poet. God in man; a divine life throbbing in humanity; man the offspring of God; man coming forth from the eternal and going forth into the eternal.

This is the starting-point of the Bible. Starting with this, it goes on with declaration after declaration based on this fundamental doctrine that man and God in their essential moral attributes have the same nature. It is human experience which is used to interpret divine experience. According to pagan thought, God speaks to men through movements of the stars, through all external phenomena, through even entrails of animals. Seldom so in the Bible, save as when the wise men followed the star, and then that they might come to a divine humanity. In the Old Testament God speaks in human experience, through human experience, about human experience, to typify and interpret and explain Himself. God is like a shepherd that shepherds his flock. God is like a king that rules in justice. He is like the father that provides for his children. He is like the mother that comforts the weeping child. All the experiences of humanity are taken in turn and attributed to God. The hopes, the fears, the sorrows, the joys, the very things which we call faults in men--so strong and courageous are the old prophets in this fundamental faith of theirs that man and God are alike--the very things we call faults in men are attributed to the Almighty. He is declared to hate, to be wrathful, to be angry, to be jealous; because, at the root, every fault is a virtue set amiss; and the very faults of men have in them something that interprets the power and will of God, as the very faults of a boy interpret the virtues of his father. All through the Old Testament God manifests Himself through human experience. He speaks in the hearts of men; He dwells in the experience of men; He interprets Himself through the life of men; and, finally, when this one selected nation which has a genius for spiritual truth has been so far educated that there is no danger that it will go back and worship man, that it will become a mere hero-worshiper, when it has been so far educated that there is no danger of that, then Jesus Christ comes into the world--God manifests Himself in human life.

Who, then, is Jesus Christ? Let John tell us. The Oriental world was puzzled about the question of the origin of evil. They said, in brief, a good God cannot make a bad world. Out of a good God, therefore, there have emanated other gods, and out of these gods other gods, until at last there came to be imperfect gods or bad gods. And the world was made, some of them said, partly by a good god and partly by a bad one; and others by an imperfect god who was an emanation of the perfect one. Of these emanations one was Life, another was Light, another was the Word. And John, writing in the age of Oriental philosophy, uses the phraseology of Oriental philosophy in order that he might tell mankind who and what Jesus Christ is. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God." God never was an abstraction; from the very beginning He was a speaking God, a living God, a manifesting God, a forth-putting God. "The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. And this Word became flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth." Let me put this into modern language. What is it but this? From eternity God has been a manifesting God. When the fulness of time came, God, that He might manifest Himself to His children, came into a human life and dwelt in a human life. He that had spoken here through one prophet, there through another prophet; He that had sent one message in this direction and another in that; He that had spoken through signs and tokens, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says, in divers manners and in fragmentary utterances--when the fulness of time had come, He spoke in one perfect human life, taking entire possession of it and making it His own, that He might manifest Himself in terms of human experience to humanity. Or turn to Paul and let me read you this declaration; "Let this mind be in you which was also in Jesus Christ; who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of man, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." What is this, again, but the same declaration? God desiring to show Himself to humanity, entered into one human life, became subject to human conditions, shared the weakness, the wants, the ignorance of humanity, entered into and was identified with one human life.

Do I say, then, that Jesus Christ was a man like other men? No. But I do say that in their essential qualities God and man are identical, and God entered into humanity that He might show to humanity what He is. I do say, not that Jesus Christ was a man like other men, but that other men may become like Jesus Christ. I hold a bulb in my one hand and a tulip in my other. Will any man say to me, this beautiful flower with all its rich coloring is like this bulb? Oh, no! But let the sun of God shine long enough on this bulb, put it where it belongs, subject it to the conditions of life, and this bulb will become like this flower. Man is made in the image of God. All that is in man that is not in God's image does not belong to man's nature. Natural depravity? There is no natural depravity. Depravity is unnatural. Depravity is contra-natural. It is against the whole law of man's being. It is never wrong for any creature God has made to act out the nature which God endowed him with. It is not wicked for a tiger to be ravening. It is not wicked for a snake to be sinuous. It is wicked for man to be ravening or sinuous, because it is against the divine nature that God has put in man. He made man for better things.

God made man in His own image, God coming through successive stages, manifesting Himself in successive relations of Himself in human experience, God at last disclosing Himself in one pure, sinless, typical man in order that man through that humanity might know who and what God is--and is that the end? Oh, no! That is the beginning, only the beginning. For what did God come in Christ? Simply to show Himself? Here is a hospital--all manner of sick; the paralytic, the fever-stricken, the consumptive. Is it good news to these hospital bedridden ones if an athlete come in and show them his life, his muscles, the purity of his lungs, the health of his constitution, and then goes out? But if he comes in and says, "My friends, if you will follow my directions I will put into you consumptive ones some of the strength of my lungs, into you fever-stricken ones some of the purity of my blood; into you paralytic ones some of the sinew and muscle I possess--you can become like me," then there is good news in the message. If God came into the world simply to tell us what God is and what the ideal of humanity is, the gospel would be the saddest message that could be conceived, as delivered to the human race. It would add gloom to the gloom, darkness to the darkness, chains to the chains, despair to despair. He comes not merely to show divinity to us, but to impart divinity to us; rather, to evolve the latent divinity which He first implanted in us. As God has entered into Christ, He will enter into me. Christ says to me: As I am patient, you can become patient; as I am strong, you can become strong; as I am pure, you can become pure; as I am the Son of God, you can become the Son of God. Therefore His message is the gospel that it is.

Christ is not a man like other men. I can find in the biography of Jesus no trace of sin. In every other biography, oh, how many traces! There is no trace of repentance. The Hebrew Psalmist laments his iniquity. Paul confesses himself to be the chief of sinners. Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Edwards--go where I will, in the biography of all the saints there are signs of sin and iniquity. Never a trace of repentance or confession in Christ. In all others we see a struggle after God. "My heart panteth after thee, as the hart panteth after water-brooks." "I count not myself to have attained, but, forgetting those things that are behind, I press forward toward the mark." Never in the written biography of Christ a trace of that aspiration after something not yet reached. On the contrary, a great peace and a great possession. He says: I have come full of life. I have come to give life. This sinless Christ comes that He may give to us that which He Himself possesses; that He may take the sin out of our lives and sorrow out of our hearts, and for the yearning desire give a great, great peace. I have come, He says, that you might have life. How much, Lord and Master? Life more abundantly. What kind of life, Lord and Master? Eternal life. Has He come with that great life of His to give a little and then stop? Nay, to give all to every one that every one will take.

I marvel to find Christian men denying that Christ is the type and manifestation and revelation of the possible divinity in universal humanity. It is written all over the Bible. What says Christ Himself? I have come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly. As the Father has sent Me into the world, even so I send you into the world. You shall be My disciples. You shall learn of Me. You shall be My followers, and tread where I have trod. You shall take up My cross, and suffer as I have suffered. The secret of My life shall be the secret of your life. Ye shall be in Me. I will abide with you. Ye shall be as a branch grafted on the vine, drawing the same life as I have, as out of My very veins. As the Father was in Me, so I and My Father will come and abide in you. He breathes upon the disciples and tells them to receive the Spirit that was in Him; and in His last prayer He prays that they may share His glory, that they may be one with the Father, as He is one with the Father. Paul takes up the same refrain and repeats it over and over again. Righteousness in man is the righteousness of God, God's own righteousness coming out of God's heart into human hearts. Ye shall be partakers of the divine nature. Ye shall be joint heirs with the Lord Jesus Christ, inheriting all that Christ inherited from His Father. Ye shall have the same spirit that was in Christ. Metaphor and trope and figure are exhausted in the endeavor of the apostle to set forth this sublime truth. Christ is the servant of God. We are the servants of God. He is the Son of God. We are the sons of God. He is the light of the world. We are the lights of the world. He is a priest forever. We are priests perpetually serving in His temple. He is the one eternal sacrifice. We are to present our bodies a living sacrifice before God. He is dead. We are to die with Him. He has risen. We are to rise with Him. Already we sit in the heavenly place with Christ Jesus. We are changed from glory to glory into His image. We are predestined to be conformed to that image. We are bid to pray that we may be rooted and grounded in Christ, and that with Him, we may be filled with all the fulness of God.

Do I say, then, that I am equal to Christ? Or that I shall ever become equal to Christ? No! Let me try to make this plain to the child, and then the rest will perhaps understand it. Here is a great man. He is a great statesman. He is a great poet. He is a great orator. He is a great philosopher. He is a great general. He is Bismarck and Gladstone and Dante and Napoleon and Raphael and Plato all combined in one. And he has children, and this boy is a statesman, and this boy is a general, and this boy is an orator, and this boy is a poet, and this boy is an artist. No one of them comprizes all the genius that was in his father, but each one has one quality of that father, and all the boys together reflect their father's nature. No, I shall never be equal to Christ. But according to the measure of my own capacity, I may reflect even here and now something of Christ and be really Christ-like.

Christ is my Master. I acknowledge no other Master than Him. I wish to follow where He leads. I gladly believe whatever He says. And I have no other ambition--oh, I wish it were true that I never had any other ambition!--than to be like Him. But He is my Master because He bids me follow where He leads, because He gives what I can take, because He promised what He will yet fulfil. I believe in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is the center of my faith, as He is the center and source of my life. But I do not believe in the medieval formula that Jesus Christ is God and man mysteriously joined together, because to believe that would be to leave me both without an ideal of man which I might follow, and without a manifestation of God to which I might cling. In my country home two Christians quarreled. An atheist went to them and said to one of them, "Your Christ said, 'Forgive all your enemies and love one another.'" "Yes," he said, "Christ was divine. He could. I cannot." But there was nothing of moral virtue that God wrought in Christ that He cannot work in you and me if we give Him time enough. And, on the other hand, this separation of "God" and "man" in Christ denies the real manifestation of God to man. Jesus called His disciples to watch while He wrestled with agony in Gethsemane, and Dean Alford, speaking on Gethsemane, says this was the manifestation in Christ of human weakness. No! no! A thousand times, No! It is the glorious manifestation of that sympathy in God which wants the sympathy of the feeblest of His followers, as the mother wants the sympathy and love of the babe on her lap. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Only we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." There are two things we do not know. Genius is always a mystery, spiritual genius the greatest mystery of genius, and Christ the greatest mystery of all. We do not know what we shall be, any more than one who never had seen a garden could guess what the mold would be when the spring had finished its work. Those are two things we do not know. But there are two things we do know. We shall be like Him, and when we are like Him, we shall see Him as He is. We shall be like no imagination of Him, no deteriorated or imperfect conception of Him; but when we come to see Him in all the regal splendor of His character, with all the love, all the justice, all the purity, all the divine glory which is adumbrated and shadowed here because our eyes could not look upon it and still live--when we come to see Him in all the glory of that divine character, we shall be like Him--_we shall be like Him_.

BROOKS

THE PRIDE OF LIFE

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE