Living Epistles
“Ye are our epistle,... known and read of all men.” — II. CORINTHIANS iii. 2.
“To be is more than to seem,” — so runs the substance of many maxims which are faithfully taught to the young as they go forth into life, and with which we both rebuke ourselves and console ourselves as need requires. No doubt the substance of such maxims is absolutely true. No doubt it is desirable that they should be constantly repeated. The condition of a nature, not the impression which the nature makes on other people, is the thing of primary importance, the thing on which attention must be fastened.
And yet such maxims do not tell all the truth. Always subordinate to our Being, our Seeming has its true importance. What we are in ourselves comes first; then what we are in relation to, in influence upon, our fellow-creatures demands its measure of regard. The outward movement, the expression of that which is essential, is too universal not to require our thought. The shining of the sun, the flowing of the river, the singing of the birds, fill the whole natural world with utterance.
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In ordinary human life action stands waiting at the gates of every thought and of every spiritual condition, to make proclamation of it and to carry it forth in visible result.
When we come to the Supreme Being, it is truest there. God is and God speaks. Creation was His utterance. “I Am,” He calls Himself in His divine content. And yet, “Hear, O Israel,” He cries; “His goings forth have been of old, from everlasting.” Never a time in all the past eternity when that which supremely Is has not spoken and sent Himself abroad.
All this comes up to us when we hear St. Paul talking about his epistles. He is so absolutely healthy, so absolutely true, that the necessity of utterance is immediate and strong in him. As soon as he believes he speaks. He is incapable of the selfishness or the affectation which would shut his thought up in himself. So he tells it, with a human impulse; and to Corinth and Ephesus and Philippi and Rome his letters go abroad. The letter was not then what it is now. To write a letter then was a more serious thing than it has since become. Letters were then more rare and stately. But the impulse which sent them was the same. The thousand million letters which in a single year go flying through our post-offices, — what are they but the utterance of man’s necessity of expression. It is in man’s nature. Because it is in his nature it has embodied itself in his habits — the necessity of utterance.
Sometimes we wonder whether the cheap postage ii2 LIVING EPISTLES
and the hourly mails are good. We let ourselves imagine the enormous frivolity, the enormous sordidness, the enormous vice, which run in the channels of the post-offices through the land; and then we shudder and draw to ourselves pictures of a life of self-control and self-containment, developing its own thoughts and growing in the quiet richness of itself. But we know that we are wrong. Better too much utterance than too much repression. The thing you consciously refuse to tell lies like a burden on your life. Withheld knowledge is a dull, heavy weight. It lies in the doorway out of which it ought to pass, and hinders the natural exits and entrances. And so the cheap postage and the multitude of post-offices are good, in spite of the foolishness and viciousness to which they offer easy circulation.
Everything which is true and vital was in Christ and in the beginnings of His Gospel and this epistle. Impulse unmistakably is there. He wrote, indeed, no letters. There is no sign that what now occupies so large a part of the lives of many men, the putting of pen to paper, ever came into His life at all. But He was always seeking utterance. From the time He bursts from the home-life at Nazareth until He leaves His last message in the ears of His apostles on the Mount of Olives, He is always sending forth that Self of His which was not for Itself but for the world. “Go ye and teach all nations,” — so at the last He gave His own spirit, His own conception of what the work of life under the Gospel was, to His disciples.
How those disciples took it up we know full well. They never for an instant had the idea that any truth they learned or any achievement which they made was for themselves alone. All the selfish luxury of spiritual life they never dreamed of. The spring poured out its streams immediately. The star was radiant on the instant that it caught the sun.
We cannot doubt, indeed, that in the lives of the apostles there were some deep, rich moments in which their souls dwelt in contented wonder and rapture on the love and greatness of their Lord. Between the hurried journeys, or when the crowd of suppliants for help had ceased for a few moments, or when the prison gates were shut at night, there must have come moments when they sat, as it were, hand in hand with Jesus, and dwelt in pure delight upon the friendship which was between their souls and His.
And yet, even then, the Christ whom they communed with was the whole world’s Christ. The walls within which they sat and which grew bright with the assurance of His presence, grew also, with that brightness, transparent, and let them see the waiting humanity outside. And so, out of the chambers of their rapture came the rich letters which have been the treasure of the Christian world. It is not evident of even one of those letters that it looked beyond the occasion for which it first was written. St. Paul had his word to say to Rome or Corinth, and he sat in his cell or in his inn and wrote it with all its loving messages, with all its personal touches; and some traveller who happened to be going that way put it in his satchel; and by and by it was read iii LIVING EPISTLES
in some upper chamber where the little company of the disciples met. It was kept sacred. It was held close to the disciples’ hearts. Every word in it was weighed and studied; and by and by when St. Paul was gone, and they could see his face no longer, it and the other Epistles which he had written to other churches were brought together and became his perpetual utterance to all the Christian ages, — a true part of the Bible, the world’s Book. It was his uttered faith. In it he tells you and me to-day, as he told them, about his Saviour, his conversion, his faith, his heaven.
There is no evidence, I say, that St. Paul anticipated this. If he should come back here to-day, and go to that Book and turn its pages, and read his Epistles in this modern language of a world of whose existence he was ignorant, he might be surprised. “Here is what I wrote from my dungeon in Rome to the Ephesians, “he would say; or, “I remember when I wrote from Athens, after I came back from Mars Hill, these words to my good friends at Thessalonica. “They would come back to him as a man remembers what he has sent out from him self, and what so truly is himself that it never ceases to be his; and he recognizes it and claims it when he sees it again. ‘’Paul’s Epistles,” he would see them called, and he would gladly own them; but they would almost seem to be claiming and borrowing the title from other utterances of his to which he had himself long ago given that name.
For here, in our text, St. Paul uses a word with which the world has been long familiar, but uses it of something different from that to which it has been commonly applied. “Paul’s Epistles,” we say; and instantly we think of these well-known letters which are in the Bible. But they are not what St. Paul himself had in his mind, at least not in these words. His epistles, as he thinks of them, are men. “Ye are our epistles,” he declares. It was not upon paper but upon souls, on characters and not upon waxen tablets, that he meant to inscribe the messages he had to give.
Let us see what this striking idea of St. Paul involves. In the first place it is certainly suggestive with regard to the nature of the message with which his Epistles were entrusted; for the character of a communication must always dictate and decree the nature of the medium through which it shall be communicated.
This law is universal, and its applications and developments are full of interest. In literature it is the source of all that we call “style.” The common thought must clothe itself in plain and homely and familiar words. The grander and loftier conception creates for itself a worthy vesture and moves in the glory of some picturesque and stately phrase. Some things can be fitly told only in verse, others only in prose, and by and by you pass beyond what language has the power to express at all.
What is the meaning of music and of art? There is that which the instrument can tell which, after the instrument has ceased, you know has been said to you, of which you are sure that while you sat and listened it was becoming your possession, yet which n6 LIVING EPISTLES
you are powerless to give an account of in any words that are any way adequate or fit.
Other messages come to you through the marble or the canvas, and others still through nature, which is God’s Art — His great orchestral multitudinous unity of voices which speak, to ears attuned to listen, things which they alone can hear. And within the region of each special art there are adaptations. The drum and bugle may give out the wild and stirring summons to the battle. The stately organ and subtle violin or harp must lend their voices for the richer and more pathetic stories which the soul can hear. There is that which you must carve in ivory and that which you must hew in granite. Wax can not bring the revelation which can shine forth from marble. The true artist is he in whom the feeling of the fitness of message and medium for one another is perfect. For the message is dumb without its true medium of expression, and the medium without its worthy message is insignificant and weak. Therein — in those two truths — lies the secret of the failure of all that tries to be art and is not, the secret of the success of all that is finally and truly art.
We can well see where such a principle will make its highest exhibition. The highest and finest element in the world’s life is human nature. Therefore it will be through the medium of human natures that the loftiest and completest revelations will be given. That which could not be spoken in words, nor breathed through music, nor intimated in the subtle harmonies of nature, nor painted on canvas, nor cast in bronze, will be told, where only it can be told, in man. A human life will be God’s voice to utter His divinest truth. This is what made the Incarnation. “God, who, at sundry times and in divers manners, spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son”: so speaks the opening verse of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The highest humanity must bring the highest message of Divinity.
When people talk, as they sometimes do, about not needing Christ, about the gospel of nature being enough for them, about the woods and the ocean and the stars bringing them all the truth their souls require, — here is their fallacy. The tidings which the stars and trees bring are good and inspiring. They soothe us in our tumult; sometimes, though not so often, they inspire us in our sluggishness; but, because of the essential limitations of their own nature, there are truths they cannot tell, there are inspirations which they cannot bring. Let me sit in the coolness of the woods and listen to all that the winds can say; and when they have said everything that they can, they leave the centre of my soul a-hungered. Then there must come some finer medium, able to transmit a finer music. Come, then, O Christ! with Thy humanity, able to tell of my dignity, my sin, my hope, my sonship; able to say to me as Thou hast said to such multitudes of Thy Father’s children: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” Here is the perpetual necessity of Jesus Christ, whom no nature-gospel can supersede or make unnecessary.
The Incarnation, then, is the supreme assertion n8 LIVING EPISTLES
that only through the highest medium, which is humanity, can the highest messages be given to man kind. The same assertion is always being made in smaller ways. One of the most subtle of communications which ever demands to be made, is the essential nature of a period or of an institution. What was the spirit of the fifteenth century? What was the intrinsic quality of its life? How shall I know? I read its books, and my mind gets some sort of hard, cold picture. I gather up its events, and some sort of lifeless map unfolds before me. I watch its art, I listen to its music, I see its implements of liv ing, and I catch something of the movement and aroma of its life. But if, out of its millions of graves, some one characteristic man should shake off the dust of death and come among us, all vital with the vitality of four hundred years ago, should we not have something which no page of Dante, no canvas of Raphael, no marble of Michael Angelo could tell? All the lost standards of life — the prejudices, the hopes, the fears, the sense of honor and disgrace, the aspirations, the fallacies, the good and bad, the virtues and the sins of the dead past — would live in him. Through him the heart of the departed century would speak yet to all the ages till the end of time — if he could live so long.
Perhaps that makes the argument too grand and distant. Think how to-day, and in the commonest life, messages are flying back and forth from life to life, keeping the whole of the world of men tremulous and quivering with endless communication. How did you know what courage was? Who told you what it was to value truth, and how did the message come from him to you? Where did the sunrise get its freshness and the sunset its glory? Ask yourself, and you will see that it is through humanity; through what men have made of them and they have made of men; through the utterances by which humanity has given an expression of them that even the most external facts of the material world may be said to have attained their truest manifestation and to have gained by them their deepest influence. And all which comes from behind nature, all which comes from God — as everything does finally — must come through man if it would come at its best. For then it comes through like to like. No foreign element intrudes or intervenes. It is like welding gold to gold with gold, when God sends messages to man through man. For God and man belong together, and all else in the wide world is foreign to the unity they make.
And now, are we not ready to come to St. Paul’s idea about his Corinthians? The principle, which I have taken so long to define and illustrate, never found a more perfect illustration than in him and them. “Ye are my Epistle,” he declares. He had something to give the people of Corinth — what was it? His Christ, — the power of the living and dying and eternal life of his divine Master. He wanted to give that to Corinth — how should he do it? Should he write it in a book and send it there? I can imagine him writing and writing, and then, just about to send it, stopping and reading what he had written and saying to himself, “No! It is not there. I have not put it, I cannot put it, in the page. It is too fine. It is too subtle. It is too divine.” He realizes that he might go or send a man to write on every wall in Corinth in golden letters, “The Cross is powerful”; yet he has not written the Power of the Cross. That is unwritable in letters.
What then? He takes a Corinthian, a true man of Corinth; he unwraps all the unreality in which he is enveloped and gets at his heart; he takes off circumstance after circumstance till he comes to the real man; and then he writes the tidings which he has to tell on that. Right on that living, quivering humanity, right on that human heart all tremulous and sensitive with hopes and fears, he writes the story of the Cross. Into its horror and its exultation he inscribes the fearful glory of that tragedy which saved the world. And, when he has made it part of the man’s very life, so that, living at his heart, it shines in his eyes and trembles in his voice and throbs out of him in every movement that he makes; — then Paul says to him, “Now go! You are my epistle.”
And the man goes, with the writing of Paul throbbing, burning in him. He travels eagerly with his burning heart until he comes to the great city. He goes up and down in Corinth. He turns from the great streets into the little alleys. He stops at the doors of houses. He sits down in people’s rooms. He does the business of a Corinth man. And every where, with every movement, there beats out from him this with which his heart is full and fiery — the Power of the Cross. He may say almost nothing; but you cannot look at him without seeing in him the struggle to subdue himself and sacrifice himself for his brethren, for the love of Christ, the Crucified. Now, is not the work done, or at least begun? What the page or the painted wall could not tell, what no voice or trumpet could have uttered, be hold! here it is written into a man so that other men, seeing it, must understand. “You are my epistle, known and read of all men!”
As such a picture grows clear before us, does it not impress us with the lofty privilege of the man to whom it was thus given not merely to carry but to be the Letter of the great Apostle? He was not simply to find his way to some official of the little church at Corinth, and deliver his missive and then go his way. He was the missive. Every deed he did was a new letter on the page. It was not some thing which men could rob him of, or that he could lose. He could lose it only when he lost himself. He could cease to be an epistle of St. Paul only when that heart on which, into which the truth of Paul was written, ceased to beat. And just then, even when it ceased to beat, it might with its last quiver utter its message more powerfully than ever, even under the torturing knife. As the English Queen bade her people know that when they opened her heart they would find there her lost fortress, so might St. Paul’s “epistle” bid his tormentors understand that he would never be such an utterance of the truth as just when they were killing him for the truth’s sake.
O my dear friends, have you any conception of a life like that? Is there any great Gospel of which you are an epistle? If men cut deep into your heart, would any truth burst out from it like a fountain? If not, you do not know what it is to live. If not, there is something preposterous in your going about lamenting the monotony and uninterestingness of life. What do you know of life? Life does not begin with a man till he is filled with the truth which it is the necessity and joy of his existence to utter on every side. It is life indeed when that has come. Then, what you are proclaims the truth which you believe. Men catch the voice — the loud voice of your silent being — as you go along the street. Yours is the glorious privilege to make the truth seem more true, to make the lie seem more false, by the way you live. That is to be an epistle of God!
Again: the essential character of the religion of Christ is involved, I think, in these words of St. Paul and the truth which they express. The Christian faith is evidently something which must find its expression and utterance in men. It is a power whose manifestation must be in personal life. It is not something you can write out fully in a book. It is something which must be lived out in a life. Its Bible is, what? Not a system of doctrines, not a system of laws, but a clear glass through which is seen a Person. You must judge whether you have really appropriated the Religion of Christ and the Religion of the Bible by this test. What is it that you think of when you think of spreading your faith? Is it the promulgation of ideas, such as may be written on paper and proved by argument? or is it the awakening of new spiritual life by the touch of the power which has entered into and become your self? The first is the notion of carrying an epistle. The second is the notion of being an epistle. The first has but reached the form of our divine faith; the second is dealing with its soul. Every word of Christ breathes with the spirit of the second.
Again: here is the real truth about the Christian Church. We are told that the Church came before the Bible. Of course it did. Not merely it came, but it must have come, before the Bible. It was not merely an historical event; it was a philosophical necessity. It must be so in every soul. We must remember what the Church really is: a group and a succession of living souls. Through them first the new religion must have gone abroad. You cannot picture Christ sitting down and sending abroad tracts which with cold written words should make the world discern in Him its Master. Rather we see how He must stand, as He does stand, there on the Mount of Olives, just ready Himself to reascend into the heavens, and fling out of His lifted hand live lives of living men into the air like birds, which flying east and west and north and south should carry Him abroad throughout the ages and the world. ‘’You are my epistles,” we can hear Him say. The Church was then and there immediately. It was there in that group of believers, eager to spread abroad the power of their faith. The Bible only came by and by, as an attempt to perpetuate the personal testimony of those believers 124 LIVING EPISTLES
when they should be no more on earth, and to extend it into regions where their feet and faces could not go. Still and forever the Church is the great Christian power, and the epistles of the Lord are human hearts.
I do not plead that you should always be looking outward and thinking what is to be the effect of your life on other lives. The greatest power often comes by forgetting power, and doing the present task, and being the present character; often by the immediate sacrifice of power which other men are seeking. But the two do not really come into conflict with each other. To be our best for the great general good, — that is the union of the two; that is the true solution of their seeming discord.
All this seems to me to be necessarily involved in the metaphor to which our study of this morning has been given. St. Paul’s epistles — the living men whom he filled with his truth — must have had two consciousnesses: one of his finger writing upon them, the other of the great world for which the message was written, to which it must be carried. The graving finger and the waiting world together enriched and solemnized their life. They were not two influences, but one.
We are all Christ’s epistles, and we also must have two consciousnesses. Now, it is He, our Master, writing upon us; in at the very depth of our hearts we feel His graving finger. He presses His standards and His love into the very substance of our souls. He writes Himself on us. And then, when we are all possessed with the great richness of this experience, then, hark! a voice is in our ears. The world is calling to us: “O Soul, O Christian, that is not for you alone. It is for us as well. Come, O epistle of the Lord, and tell us what He has told you!”
There is no conflict, no struggle. We are what God has made us for the world of God. The hearts on which He has written His truth and love are too sacred for their own sole possession. Let who will come and read them. O brethren, may God make us such that it may be nothing but good for men to read us, what we are, down to the very depths!