The Old-New and the New-Old

“But these things have I told you that, when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them.” — JOHN xvi. 4.

JESUS CHRIST is just upon the point of leaving His disciples. He has but a few more days to spend with them, a few more words to speak to them. And so, as He sits gazing into their faces, He is moved to tell them what has been the whole method of His teaching of them. He tells them that He has always had this hour in His sight, that always, when He has been speaking to them, it has been not simply the present moment of which He has been thinking, and which He has been trying to feed with truth; He has also had the future in His mind. He has been storing in the granaries of their nature provision for the wants which were to be developed in far distant days.

The disciples must have been deeply impressed and touched by those words of their Master. They must have felt their whole nature taken up into His hands. Their future needs must have grown real to their anticipation when they heard their Lord say that He had been providing for those needs. And the warm sense of His affection, of how entirely He loved them, must have filled their souls with strength and comfort. For there is no proof and sign of love like this which, in its own extremity of suffering, forgets itself and takes care that those whom it loves shall not suffer because of its departure from them; and goes to its martyrdom making each footprint of its agony a well out of which they may drink.

It was the token of Christ’s thoughtfulness for them that must have touched them. No benefaction touches us deeply which has not the idea of thoughtfulness pervading it. That is the reason why we are not touched and grateful at the beneficence of nature, save in a figure. The sky has not treasured its rain because we are going to need it by and by, nor stored its sunshine because it foresees that the earth will lie naked and shivering when February comes. Law cannot win our gratitude, however it may stir our admiration and our gladness. But God foresees our need, and stocks the world for its supply. “Thou hast prepared a table before me,” says David. It is the preparation more than the table that draws His soul to God. And so, even more than the truth He had laid up for them, the fact that He had laid up truth for them was what impressed the disciples with the love of Christ.

But when we look at what Christ had actually done, we are impressed with the wisdom and the depth of His treatment of His servants. It is in deed the method which all wise and loving education naturally takes. It makes the difference between the teaching which is hard and meagre and the other teaching which is rich and sympathetic. A master orders his servant to do a certain task, and he gives him just the instruction which that task requires. But a father educates his son, and he stores away into that unconscious nature a hundred things which his experience has taught him that the boy’s advancing experience will by and by require. A worthy teacher deals worthily with his scholar; and it is like the fitting out of a ship in some southern harbor for the voyage which she is to make in arctic seas. She lies there in the sunshine at the hospitable wharf, with the warm atmosphere about her, every thing bright and open and summerlike; and men are bringing on board great casks of provisions and bales of thick warm clothing. They are making her walls thick and her doors close, to keep out cold which as yet she has never felt. They are strengthening her sides for the assaults of icy seas of which she has not dreamed. Long months the stores of clothing and of food will lie in the darkness of her hold. She will sail forth, and for a time it will appear as if there were no use for such strange provision. But at last the day will come, among the icebergs, close to the pole, when she will need them all; and then they will come forth to bear their blessed testimony to the wise care which filled the ship’s hold with them on the June day when she was loaded. So does the teacher tell his pupil things of which the pupil sees not now the meaning or the use, that, when the time of need shall come, he may remember that his teacher told him of them. Every now and then we hear from parents and from teachers talk which we cannot help thinking foolish and shortsighted. “Let us teach children,” so it runs, “nothing which they cannot immediately understand.” If we really mean by ‘* understanding” the clear and immediate apprehension of the truth and all that it involves, then surely such words describe a very meagre education, and one that provides only for a very monotonous and narrow life. The ship which men load thus must sail forever in the zone where it was freighted. If it cross the circle and sail into another zone, its food will spoil and its crew will lie shivering and frozen on its decks. If you say, “My child has never yet met sorrow, and so I will not tell him what the sources of consolation are; he has not met temptation, and so I cannot inspire him with the thought of the sinfulness of sin; he is not sensible of the attraction of study, and I must not tell him of the duty of study; he has never asked for truth, and so I will teach him no creed” — do you not see how meagre all this makes your relationship to him? Do you not see how suspiciously it keeps you standing over him, determining that he shall have no food until the appetite cries out for it? Do you not see how it loses for him all that crowding and tempting forth of appetite which comes from the sense of carrying untasted food stored in the bosom of his life? Do you not see how it limits your opportunity of help to him and leaves the long future, when you may be gone out of his sight, beyond the chance of any such ministry as your love craves to give him?

Rather, tell your child or your scholar the very best you know; tell it as simply, in as true relation to his intrinsic nature as you can; tell him of Christ in all the richness of His love; so you will be feeding him for days which shall not dawn for long years yet. Put the whole seed of truth into him, and as his ship sails on from zone to zone, each new zone will call out its new growth to greet it. The deck will be always bright with flowers, always opening anew in each new climate out of seed which you planted against that hour. So let your scholar or your child sail forth out of your schoolroom or your home, carrying in him unknown strength and character which shall unfold for the supply of emergencies of which as yet he has not dreamed.

But when, in a more deliberate way, we take the words of Jesus Christ which declare this truth, and find in them His statement of the whole method of His religion, it is necessary for us to join with them some other words of His. “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world,” He said. These two utterances, together, seem to include the whole system of the perpetuation and development of the Christian Faith. See how they co-operate with one another. Jesus says that He has sown in His disciples’ hearts truths which the coming experiences and emergencies of life are to unfold. He says also that He Himself will be forever present to preside over the unfolding of those truths. He stores His Church with all that it is going to need. Yet He does not send it forth out of His hands, to have no more personal connection with Him, but He goes with it to make the truth which, in the days of each new need, it brings out of its treasuries, fresh and vital with Himself.

Behold the completeness and proportion of that picture! Here is an historic faith which yet is always full of spontaneity! Its historic character gives it solidity and continual identity. Its spontaneity makes it the new faith of each succeeding age. It is a faith which may picture itself under the metaphor of a rock or under the metaphor of a fountain. Some men, in Christian history, thinking of Christianity only as an historical religion, have made it hard and stiff and formal, a thing of traditions and of precedents, to be unearthed out of patristic books and to be cultivated by the preservation of old ceremonies. Other men, scarcely recognizing the historical nature of Christianity at all, have made it a thing of immediate inspiration. The present Christ was everything, the historic Christ was almost nothing. Their religion might be almost said to perish and be born anew each instant.

It is the glory of the New Testament pictures of these two utterances of Jesus, that they preserve the strength and escape the weakness of each of these two ideas by blending them with one another. The Churchman and the Quaker meet in the full Christian of those wide, wise pages. The thing which the Church is to-day, it has been potentially from the beginning, and yet it becomes this to-day by the immediate power of a present Christ. Like the tree which had all the luxuriance of this sweet and gorgeous springtime in the seed which the farmer planted who died fifty years ago, and yet which blossomed this spring because spring had come and this May’s sun had shone; so the Church and the Faith, historic and spontaneous at once, have in them, as they present themselves to-day, the power of the Christ who spoke by the side of the sea of Tiberias words which His disciples then only half-understood, and also the power of the Christ who to-day feeds them with His ever-living love, His ever-timely wisdom.

Of course all this is true not only of the historic faith, but it is true of all life, for all life is historic. “De nihilo nihil” — there is no life upon the earth to-day that has not come of previous life. To feel the beating of that previous life, to recognize as elements in what is done to-day the force of things, known or unknown, which were done years and years ago, — that is the historic spirit. No institution of the present, however it may seem to have sprung yesterday out of the soil, no life, however it may seem to be free from every bondage of the past, is capable of being understood without the activity of that historic spirit.

And yet that spirit alone can never read the entire secret, or account for all the power of any institution or life. Everything is historic, but nothing is entirely historical. Everything that truly lives, lives now. There is a living power, a power of life, which now vitalizes that which has come down of the past, and makes it a true being of the actual present.

Here is an act which some man — he may have been a ruler playing with the fates of empires, he may have been a farmer doing the springtime ploughing in his field — here is an act which some man has done this week. How shall I study it? How shall I understand it? What shall it mean to me? Most impressive is it if I think of it historically. I see the far-off centuries converging on this momentary action. I hear the sweep of distant forces crowding onward through forgotten periods to in sure that this thing shall be done. I see men of long-vanished times and of mysterious races planning for — they know not what, but really to make this possible. Then, coming nearer, I see the recognizable play of cause and effect, effect and cause, each cause issuing as effect, each effect turning into cause. I hear the click and clank of the machinery from which at last issues this event.

All that is wonderfully interesting and impressive; and yet how I have failed to tell the story of the action, if this is all I have to say! To leave out all the tale of present energy and purpose; not to observe nor to describe the stream of living power in the statesman’s or the peasant’s nature which plays on all this historical machinery and makes it live; to let go all the personality and spontaneity of will; — that would be the grossest blunder. It would be the blunder of a pedant, and a pedant’s blunders always are the worst blunders. To misread the working of present, vital force is bad; to deny present working force is infinitely worse, for it degrades the world to a machine.

The truth is that the vital power of present men and present motives is what keeps the world alive to-day. Living desires of living souls, the wishes, the determinations of men to do and be things here and now, — these are what constitute the world’s vitality. History accounts for the forms of their activity, but the springs of their activity are in themselves. All history might be abolished; all that is in man by inheritance might be eliminated and cast out; man might stand as fresh and new as if he were an Adam of yesterday, with no garden, no fall, no experience behind him; and he would live — clumsily, awkwardly, but he would live. He would begin to make history, for history is the utterance of life, afterwards becoming the feeder and teacher of life; but it is never the creator of life, and so it is always the inferior of those fresh currents of vitality which are forever issuing new and original from the fountain of God, and flowing through the vital channels of men’s wills.

“There is nothing new under the sun” is a true but also shallow proverb. “Everything under the sun is new” is vastly truer and profounder. In the meeting of the two proverbs, in the combination of them as the account of life, lies the meeting of the historic and the spontaneous consciousness of man.

You remember how Tennyson nobly sings:

Love thou thy land with love far brought

From out the storied past, but used

Within the present, and transfused Through distant times by power of thought.

There is the true spirit of history. The storied past opens her gates and out of them comes the great caravan bringing its precious freight of rich associations, noble deeds, and truths wrought out in the experiences of other days. The caravan slowly winds over the desert of the centuries until it enters the city of our present life. Then down from the camels’ backs come the rich and fragrant bales. They are torn open by the eager hands of present needs. Their contents are seized for present use. Thought transforms them into shapes in which the future is to use them. And by and by we load the camels once again, to travel on over new deserts to new cities of the still distant times, bearing the treasures of history made richer by the free uses of spontaneous life to which they have been freely put.

Such is all life — an Adam ever being born, an image ever being formed out of the dusty past, but made a true existence in the present by the direct inspiration of the living God.

And now, to return and consider the position of our Christian Faith. Christianity is an historical religion. Think what its great creed is, which we say together Sunday after Sunday. It is a recital of history. It is the epic of a human life. Something which actually happened, some one who actually lived, — it is in these that we believe. True, those historical events and that historic Person were the utterances on the theatre of human life of everlasting principles, of truths and forces which had been real in the universe eternally. That Christ was the Everlasting Son of the Father. His sacrifice was the utterance of an Eternal Love. His Resurrection was the triumph of the Essential Principle of Life. Behind His history, as behind all history, there lay those first and fundamental truths which must be true before anything can happen in the world. But none the less the manifestation of those eternal truths and natures in Christ, and the events that came in their developments, were epochs in the history of man, producing new results and starting new processes. If a child’s life, touching the earth like a feather, cannot be laid upon our planet without changing its equilibrium and making life here different from what it had been before, surely the life of Jesus Christ, the exhibition of God’s nature in the life of man, must have opened new sources of power, and altered every life of man which should be lived upon the earth forever.

This is what we mean when we say that Christianity is an historical religion. Do you, a total stranger to our faith, ask what our faith is? We must first of all draw back a curtain; we must show you a Person, walking in certain fields still extant in the world’s geography, treading on pavements which we still may tread, toiling up mountains and over plains where our feet still may struggle in their weariness — this Person at a certain recognizable time, a certain date, doing certain recorded acts, living a certain life, — Him we must point out to you and say: “He is our religion. That Christ is Christianity.”

But then, when this bewilders you, when you seem to find it all so remote and long ago, when the historicalness of it all seems to take it outside of all your present needs, then is the time to tell you how the historic Christ is a perpetual Presence among mankind, making His own record a living Power. The Christ of history becomes the Christ of the soul. The story becomes quickened by the actual presence of Him of whom the story tells. It is so wonderful! It is as if while I read the record of what the martyrs did, the very martyrs themselves were here looking me in the face, firing me with their actual enthusiasm, each of them, as he pointed to the picture of a deed, saying: “Yes, I did that by the power of God; and you can do it, too, for God is your God as truly as He was mine.” How the two elements would work together! How the old past would live with the new present! How the power of history, and the power of an immediate inspiration, would minister to one another!

Now, that is the feeblest picture of the way in which, in Christianity, the historic Christ and the ever-present Christ become one power for the salvation of the soul. “I am he that liveth and was dead, and lo! I am alive for evermore.” So Christ described Himself to John in Patmos. The “was dead” is history. Back comes the well-remembered scene of Calvary and the tomb in the garden. All the distinct facts that happened there come back, and “Lo, I am alive for evermore,” makes those facts new, present realities to the soul which needs the assurance of the love, and the example of the patience, which were stored away in them centuries ago. The Christian reads his Bible, and the Christ beside him and the Christ within him make clear to him the soul of the Christ who walks and works and suffers in these blessed pages. That is the meeting in oneness of the historic and the eternal Christ. The Christian presses the Bible to his heart, and deep utterances all his own, utterances of love and help and wisdom which have been kept in that Bible for him, unread by any other of the millions who have pressed it to their hearts, come forth at the summons of his Christ who lives in his soul, and give themselves at last to him for whom they have been waiting all these years.

To keep either one of the two aspects of our faith alone breaks its completeness, and so makes it weak. Some men and some ages have thought almost solely of its historic character. They have spent their devotion in the worship of its sacred places. They have sent Crusades for the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre. They have travelled in long pilgrimages, that they might touch the ground on which the blessed feet of Christ trod. They have made the preservation of the forms of the earliest Church the object of their toils and prayers. They have clung to first statements of truth as if there were no living Spirit of Truth among men to-day. On the other hand, there have been ages and men to whom the historic character of Christianity has meant very little. To them the great Christian religion has found its only sanction in the present needs and instincts of the human soul. Christ has by them been hardly thought of as an actual being who once lived on earth. He has become a world-pervading Spirit, a name for all the upward forces of the soul of man, a dear conception of the present God.

We can see the danger of hardness and formalism which must beset the first kind of men and ages. We can see the danger of vagueness and subjectivity which must beset the others. And we are right. The first men and ages have become hard and formal. The others have become vague and subjective. But the true faith has the defects and vices of neither, because it has the truth and excellence of both. It is sharp, clear, definite, objective; and yet is free and fresh and spiritual and different and new for every soul. Its Christ is there in Palestine, and yet here in the soul. He is all the more there because He is here, and all the more here because He is there. The inner pilgrimages, the visits of the weakened will for the recovery from its weakness to the holy places in the soul where Christ abides, are all the more vivid and real because of that voice which cries down out of history from the last day, that great day of the Feast, when a visible Saviour stood in the old Hebrew Temple and cried, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” And those venerable spots in Palestine are and have ever been the inspiration of mankind, because each new soul, as it became conscious of itself, found their spiritual geography repeated in itself, and all that once took place there taking place again and forever upon its little stage.

This is the complete Christianity. Let us beware lest in our lives it lose either of its two parts, and become incomplete. Let the voice, which summons us to be Christians, call us with both of these inspiring tones.” Come to Christ! “let it say; and let the Christ to whom it summons us be both the Christ of history and the Christ forever manifest and powerful in the soul of man. Come to Him who lived in the blessed story of the Gospels. Come, and as truly as if you were Peter or John, make yourself His disciple and follower. Come to His mangercradle, and adore the mystery of God made man. Come walk with Him and hear His teaching. Come to His Cross, and feel the rich power of the perfect Sacrifice. Do this really and definitely, so that when men ask you, when you ask yourself, “Who is your Master?” your glowing face shall turn, your eager finger shall point there, to the Man of the days in Palestine, to the summit of history where stand the shining feet of the Incarnate God.

And yet, let the cry, “Come to Christ,” keeping this meaning, be to you also the summons to a present Righteousness and Love, to an immediate Divinity here at your side, here in your heart, whom you may hear speak words of loving wisdom which were never spoken to any ear before; let it be your Christ, who is the utterance of God’s Love calling you and of your possibility of holiness. Let it be your Christ, to whom you come in answer to an invitation, in the claiming of a privilege, that is all your own.

Let us come back for a moment to where we began. Jesus Christ is taking leave of His disciples, and He says: “I have told you the truth. All the truth which you and they who come after you are to need forever, I have given you.” And the disciples sit silent and awed, as men who hold mysterious, unopened treasures in their hands. And then Christ goes on: “Not yet do you know, not yet can you know, all the rich meaning of what I have given you; but when the time shall come, then I will be with you, and we together will open these closed words of mine, and then all that is in them shall be yours.’*

Can we conceive a nobler, a more inspiring or gracious programme for human history than that? As the years have gone by, as again and again “the time has come,” and the Christian world, the Christian Church, has “remembered that its Master told it of these things,” and has seen the covering drawn back and the deeper meaning of some word of His made plain, and has known that it was by His present spirit that His historic word was being illuminated, has not His promise been fulfilled?

What “times shall come” in the future, who shall dare to say? We only know that the full time, the whole time, has not come yet. What light shall stream out of God’s word, richening and deepening all the light that it has shown before; what the old ever-new story of the Gospels may have to say to the new needs of the men and the society and the nations which are yet to be, no man can presume to say. The new-old Christ in the old-new world ! — can we not hear Him saying, as He repeats His precious truths: “These things have I told you, that ye may remember that I told you of them.”

This makes the unity of the succeeding generations. To each of them the ever-present Christ opens something more of that treasury of truth and life which was enfolded in His historic Incarnation.

They are one with each other — the fathers, the medievalists, the reformers — in their common loyalty to the Incarnate Lord and Master; while each lives his own life in that degree of the truth of the Lord and Master which has been made known to him.

And as between the ages, so between contemporary men. To each different soul among us different “time” has come, and with each “time” its own enlightenment. And yet all the enlightenments are broken lights of the “Light which lighteth every man.” Shall we not all be one in Him, however each “cannot but speak those things which he hath heard and seen “?

There is no other name under heaven given among men, whereby we can be saved, but the name of Jesus Christ. And yet each man is saved by Christ with his own appropriate salvation. Let us give ourselves to the eternal Christ, and then wait working, and work waiting, till, little by little, but ever more and more, He shall show us of His truth and lead us at last into whatever chamber of His righteousness He has made ready for our eternal home.