Sermons Preached in English Churches

The elements which make a perfect work are two — a perfect workman, and a perfect pattern. A perfect workman must have perfect faithfulness and perfect skill; and so, to make any accomplishment entirely complete, faithfulness and skill must join in the fulfilment of the perfect plan. It is very much like the casting of some great work in metal. There is skill in the mixing of the elements. Faithfulness is like the pervading heat which keeps the whole mass fluid. But the plan or pattern of the work is like the mould into which the well-mixed and molten metal must be poured, that it may get form and value, and not remain a merely shapeless mass.

There are, then, two great reasons why men’s

1 Preached at St. Botolph’s Church, Boston, Lincolnshire, Sunday morning, 2d July 1S82; and at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, London, Sunday morning, 20th May 18S3.

2 B works are failures: one is the lack of the personal qualities of faithfulness and skill in the worker; the other is the absence of a pattern, or the presence of a wrong pattern, in which the faithfulness and skill take shape. The first kind of failure is common enough. Plenty of people there are who, with most perfect plans of life, are so unfaithful or unskilful that their lives come to nothing. But the second kind of failure also is abundant. The world is full of men who, with great faithfulness and skill are doing little, because the plan, the standard, the pattern of their life is weak or wrong. To them, and of them, let me speak to-day, using for my text these words out of the old Epistle to the Hebrews: “Sec that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount.”

The warning had been given to Moses when he was about to make the Tabernacle. The leader of the Jews was full of faithfulness, and all the skill of all the people was at his command. He could make what he would; but never in all the world before had there been such a tabernacle as he was now to build. There was no precedent or accepted rule. And so we read in Kxodus that God called him up into a high mountain, and there, in some mysterious way, He gave His servant a description of the Tabernacle which He wanted him to build. He showed it to him in elaborate detail, and when, upon the seventh day, Moses came down from Mount Sinai, the unbuilt Tabernacle was already in existence in his mind, as it had been already before in existence in the mind of God. Not yet had it any material existence; but its idea was there. It was not visible or tangible. The gold, the silver, and the brass, the blue and purple and scarlet, the fine linen and goats’ hair, the rams’ skins dyed red, the brilliant lamps and carved cherubs shone as yet in no earthly sunshine; the fragrance of the spices floated on no earthly air; the curtains waved in no terrestrial breezes; the stakes which held the structure had been driven in no field of our common ground; it was not yet in being as a material fact, a bright, strange apparition, such as by and by moved with the host of the Israelites and filled the tribes of their enemies with wonder. But yet, in a true sense, it was — it had existence, when God had opened the chamber of His will in which the idea of the unbuilt Tabernacle already stood complete, and showed it to His servant. All that afterwards took place, all the slow building of the Tabernacle by the offerings of the people, was but the transference from the region of ideas to the region of realities of that which existed already in the mind of God.

We have only to enlarge the conception which is in this story and to make it general, and we come at once to one of the loftiest and most inspiring thoughts of human life. As the old Tabernacle, before it was built, existed in the mind of God, so all the unborn things of life, the things which are to make the future, are already living in their perfect ideas in Him, and when the future comes, its task will be to match those divine ideas with their material realities, to translate into the visible and tangible shapes of terrestrial life the facts which already have existence in the perfect mind. Surely in the very statement of such a thought of life there is something which ennobles and dignifies our living. It takes something of this dreadful extemporaneousness and supcrficialness and incoherence out of our life. The things which come to pass here in the world arc not mere volunteer efforts of man’s enterprise, not self-contained ventures which are responsible to nothing and to no one but themselves. For each of them there is an idea present already in the thought of God, a pattern of what each in its purest perfection is capable of being. Out of the desire to realise that idea must come the highest inspiration. In the degree to which it. has realised that idea must be the standard of judgment of every work of man. To-day begins a baby’s life.

A child is born into the world this Sunday morning. What shall we say about that child’s unlived life? No man can tell what it will be. Its lessons are unlearned, its tasks untried, its discoveries unmade, its loves unloved, its growth entirely ungrown, as the little new-born problem lies unsolved on this the first day of its life. Is that all? Is there nowhere in the universe any picture of what that child’s life ought to be, and may be? Surely there is. If God is that child’s Father, then in the Father’s mind, in God’s mind, there must surely be a picture of what that child with his peculiar faculties and nature may become in the completeness of his life. Years hence, when that baby of to-day has grown to be the man of forty, the real question of his life will be, what? Not the questions which his fellow-citizens of that remote day will be asking, What reputation has he won? What money has he earned? Not even, What learning has he gained? But, How far has he been able to translate into the visible and tangible realities of a life that idea which was in God’s mind on that day in the old year when he was born? How does the tabernacle which he has built correspond with the pattern which is in the mount? Ah, somewhere in the universe of God, dear friends — if not among our brethren beside us, if not by our own hearts — somewhere in the universe, that question is being asked to-day of every one of us who has grown up and left his youth behind him. Moses may, if he will, go on and build a tabernacle to suit himself, and as its self-willed architecture rises, the people may gather around it and call it wonderful, and praise the builder’s genius, but God’s eye is judging it all the time simply by one standard, simply by its conformity or non-conformity to the pattern which, long before the hewing of the first beam or the weaving of the first curtain, existed in the mount.

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