The Accumulation of Faith

“Bthold, He smote the rock, that the waters gushed out, and the streams overflowed. Can He give bread also? Can He give flesh for His people?” — PSALM lxxviii. 20.

BELIEF in God is such a large action of our human nature, and appears in such a multitude of ways, that unbelief also, its opposite, must have many forms. God is so vast, and for man to lay hold on Him is so complete an action, that it is no wonder if that hold may fail at any one of many points; and no two unbelievers, as no two believers, can be perfectly alike. In the Psalm from which I take my text the singer is telling the old story of the national history of the Jews. All the escape from Egypt and the journey through the desert is recounted; and in this twentieth verse the peevish and complaining Israelites are heard in the wilderness, doubting whether God, although he had done much for them, can still supply the new needs which are coming into sight. “Yea they spake against God; they said, Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?” And then — to quote the Prayer Book version of the Psalm — “He smote the stony rock indeed that the water gushed out and the streams flowed withal; but can He give bread also, or provide flesh for His people?” You see what kind of unbelief is here. It does not deny the past fact. It acknowledges that God has done one miracle of mercy.

But in that miracle it finds no such revelation of God Himself and His perpetual character and love as gives assurance that He will again be powerful and merciful. These Israelites have no accumulated faith. They are just where they were before the last miracle relieved them. That miracle stands wholly by itself. It does not promise or imply another. The old bright scene conies up before them; the sparkling water tumbling out of the hard, sunburnt stone. They revel in the recollection; but then they turn back to their present hunger, and the chance of bread and flesh seems only the more desperate because of the mocking and tantalizing remembrance of the water from the rock.

The power of accumulation of life differs extremely in different men. Some men gather living force, wisdom, faith, out of every experience. Other men leave the whole experience behind them and carry out with them nothing but the barren recollection of it. And the difference, when we examine it, depends on this; on whether the man has any conception of a continuous unbroken principle or personal association running through life, and bringing out of each experience its soul and essence to be perpetually kept. It is something like this. Two fields of wholly different soils lie side by side. Neither is mingled with the other. The traveller who simply tramps across them leaves one behind him as he climbs the stile and enters on the other as a wholly new experience. But let a stream flow through them and it binds their life together. It takes the essence out of the soil of the first and mixes it with the soil of the second. The second not merely remembers the first as something that lies next to it, something that it has seen across the wall. It receives that first field into itself and modifies its own life by its presence through the ministry of that stream, which is common to them both. Now so it is, it seems to me, with some event of your earlier life. You look back to something which happened to you or which you did when you were fifteen years old. That event may be to you to-day a mere recollection, merely a relic which stays in your memory; or it may be the source of a power which pervades your life. What will decide which it shall be? Will it not depend upon whether you understand that event and see in it the exhibition of principles in whose power you are still living; or whether it is merely an accident, unintelligible, with no perceptible cause, with no reasonable explanation? A living principle, a deep continuous conviction of the meaning of life, is the stream that makes the new fields gather and keep the richness of the old. Suppose you had a sickness ten years ago. If you understand what it was that cured you, then the memory of that sickness is a power, and you see a new sickness of the same sort coming with less fear. Suppose you escaped in some great business crisis five years ago. If your escape seems to you a lucky accident, you tremble when you see a new business crisis coming, for it is not likely that such a lucky accident can happen twice. “I escaped once,” you say; “but I cannot hope to get off safe again.” But if you know how you escaped; if that old struggle was to you a revelation of great perpetual principles that rule the business world and which, as a new need of them occurs, come back to you familiarly, then the old recollection is a power. Filled with its inspiration you go on bravely to meet the now intelligible danger. Or if you are a public man, and it seems to you nothing but a series of happy chances that the country has thus far weathered the storms and kept off the rocks that have beset her voyage through the century, then no wonder that you look forward with dread and feel that it is only a question of time how soon she goes to pieces. But if you have studied your country’s past history deeply and wisely enough to see that in every emergency it has been her essential principles that have saved her, then you are able to look all coming dangers in the face and devote yourself not to planning how you and your fellow voyagers can be saved from the wreck when the ship has gone to ruin; but how the ship can be kept most purely and directly in the power of those first essential principles on which her safety in any emergency must rely and which, if they can have free play, will always save her.

Let these be illustrations, and now turn and think of God. He is the great first principle. He is the underpower, the abiding base and background of our human life. His will, uttering His nature, is the stream that flows from field to field of our existence and binds them all together. The things that have to do with Him must have to do with one another. Now, once again, some thing came to you twenty years ago, something very rich and beautiful, something which has made life bright and wonderful ever since. It may have been your birth; perhaps you are only twenty years old. Life began for you twenty years back. It may have been a great affection. It may have been a great new truth. It may have been the sight of a character which revealed the possibilities of humanity to you, Whatever it was, th great question about that acquisition to-day is, Do you indeed know that God gave it to you? As you feel it, do you feel, down through it, God? Does it reveal, has it all along through these years been revealing, God to you? You know that I mean something more by this than merely whether you have learned to say piously about it, “It is God’s gift.” I mean this, Has its value for you become lodged in this, that it is a token of God’s love for you and a revelation of His nature; just as the picture on your walls, which a friend gave you years ago, shines with the perpetual brightness of his kindness and his taste. The Jews, you know, in our verse said, “He,” that is God, “He smote the stony rock indeed, and the water gushed out;” but really they did not completely know and believe that He, that God, had done it. They did not know and believe it so that with the memory of it GOD came up in their remembrance and filled their life. If that had been, they could not have asked any question about any future manifestation of His power. This is the question then, Does the joy of living which makes you rejoice that you were born; does the joy of thinking, the joy of honoring your humanity as some great man exhibits it to you; does each of these joys reveal God to you? If it does, it becomes a fountain of faith. If it does not, it be comes only a beautiful memory. There is all that difference. It is the difference between a thicket of ferns lovely with their exquisite leafage, and another thicket up into which gushes and wells perpetually the cool water from the exhaustless cisterns underneath for the refreshment of thirsty men.

The unbelief then of which we have to speak is one which so fails to find in the past events of life a revelation of God, that those past events have no strength or divine assurance to give to the new problems and emergencies of life as they arise. This kind of unbelief, I think we shall see, is very constant. See how it comes in to break up the unity of life. A boy passes through his boyhood. It is full of happiness and a boy’s healthy pleasure. Happy at home, happy in the playground, happy at school, those bright and breezy years slip by. When they are gone the boy stands on the brink of manhood and looks over into the untrodden years. Are the problems, the difficulties, the temptations which he sees there, just what they would be if he had not already passed through boyhood? Certainly not, if boyhood has given him anything of a real faith in God. Certainly not, if all these happinesses which have come to him are recognized as God’s gifts, and if through the gifts he has known God the Giver. Then, though he must leave the gifts behind, he carries the Giver with him into the manhood that he is entering. That is the true unity of life. It is the unity of a long journey in which, though the quick railroad is constantly compelling you to leave each new scene behind you, the wise kind company of the friend whom you are travelling with, and who in each new scene has had the chance to show you some thing new of his wisdom and kindness, has been continually with you and bound the long journey into a unit. This is the sort of life that Wordsworth was imagining when he sang: —

“The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”

We can see how this must come when underneath the habits of any period of life we recognize and find the revelation of God. The habits are rigid, uniform and untransferable. But God is infinitely various. His great arms can hold the infant like a mother, and build a strong wall about the mature man who is fighting the noonday fight of life, and lay the bridge of sunset over which the old man’s feet may walk serenely into the eternal day. If the issue of any period of life is merely certain habits, we must lay them aside as we go on. If the issue of any period of life is a certainty of God, that we may freely carry over for the enrichment of the new; just as the clothes which you wore when you were a boy you have outgrown, but the health which filled you then is in you now.

And this is so not merely as one passes from youth to age, but also as one sees any new occupation or duty opening before him. You have been in one business and you are going into another. You have weighed all the chances. You have used all the discretion and judgment that you possess. You believe that you are fit for the larger work. And yet, as you sit thinking it over the night before the new shop is to be opened and the new advertisement is to stand in the papers, you are full of your misgivings. Shall I succeed? Am I not leaving a certainty for an uncertainty? I know that God has prospered me thus far, but will He, can He, help me here? And then, just in proportion to the purity and absoluteness of your confidence that it has really been God who has helped you, and the simplicity and completeness with which you resolve that, in the new business as in the old, you will be His obedient servant and put no obstacle in the way of His helping you still, just in proportion to your faith and consecration, will be the courage with which you see the dawn of the new day that is to bring to you the untried task.

Take one step more. Suppose a human soul looking out into the mysterious and unrevealed experiences of the everlasting world. The window of death is wide open, and the shivering soul stands up before it and looks through and sees eternity. No wonder that it trembles. The warm, bright, familiar room of earthly life, where it has dwelt so long, lies there behind it; and before it, outside the window, the vast, dim, path less, unknown world of immortality. How shall the soul carry with it the sense of safety and assurance in God, which it has won within His earthly care, forth into this unknown, untrodden vastness whither it now must go? Only in one way; only by deepening as deeply as possible its assurance that it is God — not accident, not its own ingenuity, not its brethren’s kindness — that it is God who has made this earthly life so rich and happy. God is too vast, too infinite for earth. He is too vast for time, and needs eternity. Wrapped into Him the soul may be not merely resigned; it may be even impatient to explore those larger regions where the power which has made itself known to it here shall be able to display to it all the completeness of its nature and its love. As the child of the sailor may wish to go to sea that he may see the father whom he believes in do his supreme work in fighting with the midnight hurricane; as the child of the soldier may wish to see his father on the battle-field; and the child of the statesman may wish to see his father in the senate; so the child of

God may wish for eternity, sure that there upon the vaster fields he shall see vaster exhibitions of that power and grace which he has learned completely to believe in here.

And yet here, I think, if a man does really know that God is giving him more and more revelations of Him self every day, increasing his faith by all the various treatments of his life, all that is necessary for him is that he should simply accept that constant growth in faith, rejoice each day in the new certainty of God which is being gathered and stored within him, and not look forward, not even ask himself how he will meet the large demands of death and immortality when they shall come. He may be sure that when they come this strength of faith which now is being stored within him will come forth abundantly equal to the need. So a soul need not even think of death if only life is filling it with a profound and certain consciousness of God. The ship in the still river, while its builder is stowing and packing away the strength of oak and iron into her growing sides, knows nothing about the tempests of the mid-Atlantic; but when she comes out there and the tempest smites her, she is ready. So shall we best be ready for eternity, and for death which is the entrance to eternity, not by thinking of either, but by letting life fill us with the faith of God.

There is one great and perpetual illustration of the truth which we are studying in the history of the Christian church and of religious thought. There the kind of unbelief of which I have spoken is continually coming out. It is often very strong in men who think them selves supremely faithful, very champions of the faith.

The Christian church lives through one period of her career; she conquers the enemies that meet her there; she makes the hard rock yield her water; she keeps herself alive and feeds her children. Then she passes on into another period with its new needs, its call for other methods and for other miracles; and always there is a spirit in the church which trembles and has not learned, from the way in which God has cared for His church in the past, that He, the same God, is able to take care of her in the future also. This is the fault of all retrospective Christianity, of all Christianity which is anxious to abide in the old days, to fight over and over again the battles of the past, and to ignore or to avoid the modern battles, the special difficulties which the faith of Christ is called upon to meet in our own times. This is the fault of all the Christianity which is panic stricken before the enemies which it sees that faith in Christ must certainly be called upon to meet in the near future. I think I hear the voices of that panic from many quarters now. “He smote the stony rock indeed, and the water gushed out, but can He give bread also, and pro vide flesh for His people?” He answered the scepticism of the old centuries, but can He answer the subtler, finer sceptics of to-day? He overcame the worldliriess of the eighteenth century, but can He conquer the materialism of the nineteenth? He saved His church when she was persecuted with fire and the rack; can He save her also when she is tempted with the corruptions of prosperity and fashion? He stood by her in the days when Luther lifted up his voice for spiritual truth; will He stand by her also now when it is evident that not Luther nor any other reformer has fathomed the truth of Christ completely, or brought the last message from the lips of God? Will He stand by her still as she in all humility tries to learn yet more truth and, by an inevitable necessity, by a necessity that she cannot escape and must expect to encounter, meets in the at tempt to learn profounder truth the danger of profounder error? These are the questions that one hears. According to the answers which men and churches give to them they go forward hopefully or go back timidly. The man who sees in all the history of the Christian church one great assurance that Christ is always with His people, and will always help any soul which reverently and really wants to know deeper things concerning Him, and will lead it through many blunders and errors into truth, — that man goes forward. The man who sees in the history of the Christian church only the record that in the primitive ages, or in the reformation ages, Christ let His people see certain truths concerning Him and His ways, — that man goes back, lives in what seemed to him the finished revelation of those days, tries, by the imitation of their habits and the constant repetition of their phrases, to keep himself in their shadow; deserts his own age, in which God seems to him to be less present and less real, and lives among dead issues in which he knows was once a living fire. But oh, if God is not really a living God in the world to-day, we have no God. How little it would be — nay, truly it would be nothing to you and me, called, driven as we are to meet the hard temptations, to answer the hard questions of this very present day — to know that once a God had answered other questions and made men conquerors over other temptations in other days. Only when all I read about that presence of His life among our human lives makes me know Him and, making me know Him, makes me absolutely certain that He is such that on to the very end no servant of His can meet a temptation which He can help His servant to subdue and the help not be given; no disciple

of His can ask a question which it is possible for Him to answer and the answer be withheld; only when the old history of all the Christian ages opens its heart to rne and gives me an assurance such as this, only then have I attained to its true use and its richest blessing. With such a power as this, not merely the men of the past with whom I agree, but the men from whom I most profoundly differ, help me. It is not their opinions which I adopt; it is their spirit; it is the presence of God’s Spirit in and with their spirits that makes me glad and hopeful. I may see, I do see, a hundred times, how it was that, even with God’s Spirit in them, they came only to partial truth, to truth mixed and clouded with mistake. So while I am made hopeful of God’s presence, I am made also conscious of my own responsibility, and watchful over the condition of the mind into which I bid that Spirit welcome. Alas if it were not so. Alas for us if we were compelled to assent to all the theology of Calvin or of Channing, be fore we could thank Christ for the guidance which His Spirit gave both to Calvin and to Channing in their search for truth, and gather from it strong assurance that His spirit would help us too. Forever the past of the church is to us but a great curiosity-shop, into which we go to steal a bit of bric-a-brac which suits our fancy and which we can stick up incongruously in our modern homes, unless out of it all there issues one grreat assurance that Christ has always been with every soul which would receive Him; in different ways according to each soul’s circumstances and nature; in different degrees according to each soul’s receptivity; but that always and everywhere He has given Himself to every soul that would receive Him and that therefore, if we will re ceive Him, He will give Himself to us. “When we gather from it that assurance, the past of the church becomes to us the fountain of strength and the oracle of truth.

The Church is led into new ways of work and wor ship. The State adopts new policies. Society puts on new manners. Nay, even the Faith asserts her doctrines in new forms. And yet in all of them there must be continuity and unity. The Church, the State, Society, the Faith, they are not perishing, and new churches, states, societies, faiths, taking their places every year. They are the same continuously. How can one know this and understand it? Only by apprehending the spiritual power which is the soul of each, and seeing how that remains the same through everything. It is like the freedom which a workman gains when he has mastered the principles of the trade he is engaged in. So long as he is only familiar with its methods and its tools he is slavish and uniform. He cannot imagine the thing that he does being done in any but one way. Those who are doing his thing in other ways than his seem to him not to be doing it. But as soon as he has grasped its principle he is flexible and free. He values not the method but the thing; and then there is true unity between him and all others who, in most distant times and places, are doing what it is the business of his life to do. Every man’s business, whatever it be, becomes a liberal education to him just as soon and just as far as he lives not in its methods but in its principles. Now God is the principle which underlies all this business of human living. The methods of living are manifold. The principle of life is one. The man who lives in the methods loses the freedom and the unity of life. The man who lives in the principle, in loving, grateful, obedient communion with God, grows free with a divine liberty, and is a true brother of all the working children of God throughout the ages and throughout the world.

In the few moments which remain, let me try to come close to your personal religious life and see how there the unbelief of which we have been speaking is always trying to creep in. You look back over the years in which you have been trying to serve your Savior, and what do you see? Many a temptation conquered by His strength; many a sin forgiven and turned by gratitude for His forgiveness into an inspiration; many a hard crisis where Christ your Lord has been all sufficient for you. Why is it that to-day, in your present temptation, in your present need, you feel so little sure of Him? A new desert opening before you frightens you even while you remember with thanks giving how He led you through the old. The thanks giving dies away upon your lips for the past mercy as you come in sight of the new emergency for the brave meeting of which it would seem as if that past mercy ought to have fitted you completely. “He smote the stony rock indeed, that the water gushed out and the streams flowed withal.” There, as brightly as if you still were revelling in their refreshment, the fresh springs sparkle and sing before your recollection. “But,” and then you turn to the hunger and weariness that seem to be awaiting you; “but, can He give bread also, or pro vide flesh for His people?” 0, to how many souls all that has come with a terrible surprise and disappointment! They thought that they were ready for any thing. They thought that out of all the rich blessing of the past they had gathered a strength that nothing could break down, a courage that nothing could dismay. But now they stand in front of the new temptation or the new pain and tremble like children, just as if they had never seen a temptation or a pain before. What does it mean? It must mean that out of the old mercy they had not gathered God. They have come out of it with thankfulness for release, with soberness, with hope, with joy; but they have not brought a deep and abiding fellowship with Christ, a firm, immovable confidence that they are His and He is theirs, to take with them into the midst of the new need which they have reached. If their terror, as the new trial comes, means anything more than that instinctive shrinking from pain which is part of our very physical humanity and which has no taint of spiritual weakness in it, this must be what it means. There is such a difference between coming out of sorrow thankful for relief, and coming out of sorrow full of sympathy with and trust in Him who has released us. Nine lepers hurry off to show themselves with their white skins to the priest. One leper only waits to cast himself at the feet of Jesus and worship Him. Tell me, will not those nine be different from that one if ever a new disease should fall upon them all?

Let that one leper be the type of the soul to whom the whole blessedness of a blessing from Christ has come. Not only the health but the Healer he delights in. Not only the salvation but the Savior is his glory and his joy. Such souls there are. I know that some of yours are such; souls to which all the deliverances and the educations that have filled their past lives are precious, not merely for the safety and the instruction which they have brought, but far more for the personal knowledge of the Deliverer and the Teacher which has been won in them, and in whose strength the soul looks on and faces all that the future has to bring without a fear. “He smote the stony rock and the water gushed out. Therefore I know He can give me bread and flesh; He will give me bread and flesh if bread and flesh are what I ought to have.”

So to the soul that finds in all life new and ever deeper knowledge of Christ, the Lord of Life, life is for ever accumulating. Every passing event gets a noble value from the assurance that it gives us of God. This is the only real transfiguration of the dusty road, of the monotony and routine of living. It is all bright and beautiful if, in it all, God is giving us that certainty of Himself, by which we shall be fit to meet everything that we shall have to meet in this world and the world to come.