How Many Loaves Have Ye?

“And Jesus said unto them, How many loaves have ye?”•»*- MATT. xv. 34.

IT was one of the miracles of Jesus in which His nature was seen most interestingly. A multitude of people had followed him into the country, anxious to hear Him preach, some of them also needing and expecting that He would cure their sicknesses. They had lingered with Him for three days, not finding it in their hearts to leave Him and return, until their food was all exhausted and they were in wretched plight. Then Jesus declared His pity for them and consulted with His disciples. “I have compassion on the multitude,” He said, “because they continue with Me now three days and have nothing to eat, and I will not send them away fasting lest they faint in the way.” And His disciples reminded Him how impossible it was to buy any food off in the desert where they were; and then Jesus, intending to relieve the people’s wants by extraordinary power, turned to His disciples and asked them how many loaves of bread they had. They told Him seven, and a few little fishes. And He took the little which they had and blessed it, and it became under His blessing abundant for the supply of all the crowd.

Such is the story. The need of the great, hungry host before Him touches the Lord and makes Him use His power to relieve them. But what is striking in the narrative is this, that when Jesus is moved by their suffering, He is moved in all His nature. Every part of Him is stirred. Not merely His emotions and His impulses, so that He is eager to relieve at once the wretchedness which looks up to Him out of their famished eyes, but His wisdom is stirred. All the principles of His life start into action together, all His care and pity. His care and pity for the soul as well as for the body move at once. It is this completeness of His nature, the way in which it is all one, and works and lives as one, that makes Him often so very different from us. Our lives are disjointed. One part of us works at a time. It is hard for us to be brave and prudent together; hard for us to be liberal and just at the same time. Our sympathy is excited, and we help a man often in a way that does more harm than good, because we help with only one hand, with only half our nature; with our pity but not with our wisdom; with care for his hunger but with no care for his self-respect and manliness. But when Christ helps a man His whole nature in complete balance moves upon that other life. He feels all its claims and needs in their just proportion. So He meets Nicodemus in the midnight chamber, and the young man who comes to Him in the temple, and Thomas after the resurrection.

Now in this miracle of Jesus which I have recalled to you there is a meeting of generosity and frugality which is striking and suggestive. These two things do meet indeed with us. We try to be generous and frugal at the same time, but the result in us is mean.

We try to give and yet to save. We try to satisfy the instinct which makes us want to aid our brethren, and at the same time not to disappoint the instinct which makes us want to save and spare the things we have. But the result in us is mean. When Christ unites generosity and frugality the result in Him is noble. We feel His pity and care for the poor people a great deal more when we see Him take the wretched little stock of food which they possessed into His hands and make that the basis of His bounty, than if with an easy sweep of His hand He had bid the skies open and rain manna and quails once more upon the hungry host. His generosity is emphasized for us by its frugal methods, and His frugality is dignified by its generous purpose.

But surely the act is a very striking one. Here was He who could do everything. What hindered Him from sweeping the loaves they had aside and, by a superb exercise of power, bidding the very desert where they stood burst into a wilderness of fruits, break its hard ground with orchard trees all grown and laden, with streams of sweet water running down between them. But no! He brings out the poor remnant which was so little and so miserable that they had thought nothing of it. He has to ask for it. They do not offer it. He says “How many loaves have ye?” and they seem to answer “Here is this, but what is this good for?” Then He takes that and multiplies it into all they need. It seems as if there were two principles here, so fundamental that the divine power of Jesus worked by them almost of necessity, so important that they must be made prominent even in all His impetuous eagerness to help those starving men. The first is the principle of continuity, that what is to be must come out of what has been, that new things must come to be by an enlargement, a development, a change and growth of old things; and the second is the principle of economy, that nothing however little or poor is to be wasted. They are two simple principles. I want to trace with you to-day the way in which they run through many departments of life. But notice, first, how clearly they stand out here in the miracle.

There are two ideas which belong to the notion of vast power in our crude conceptions of it. One is spasmodicalness and the other is waste. It is strange how both of these ideas appear in all men’s first conceptions of the supernatural and of omnipotence. The first notions of a Deity are of One who is above all law and order and economy. Let the poor be niggardly, a slave to rules, counting over his little stock, squeezing every penny that he pays; but let the All-Powerful be open-handed, counting as nothing what other beings must save, originating life whenever life is needed, full of an easy spontaneity, flinging the miracles of creation everywhere. But it is striking to see how as men go on and learn more of God, these ideas which were at first cast almost indignantly out of their conception of Him, gradually come back and are set in the place of highest honor. It is God’s highest glory that He is a God of law. Continuousness is the crown of His gov ernment. That He brings every future out of some past is the charm of all His government. That He lets nothing go to waste is the highest perfection of His boundless resource. This is the highest knowledge of God. Continuity and economy are His solemn footprints by which we trace His presence in our world. The need of evolution, the necessity that everything which is to be should come out of something which has been before, and the abhorrence of waste, — continuity and economy, — these are the proof-marks of Divinity.

Let us remember, first, how these two principles are stamped on all the operations of nature. We are all learning more and more, to some people’s dismay, to other people’s joy and inspiration, how nature loves to develop, how rare the acts of real creation are. The farmer goes and stands among rich western fields, and they cry out to him. “Give us seed and we will give you back a harvest that shall bewilder you with its immensity. There is no end to what we can do if you give us seed, but without seed we can do nothing.” You go to Nature and say, “Feed me or I shall starve;” and her question comes back to you, “How many loaves have you? Give me something to begin with, however little it may be.” Drop the old remnants of a past life into the ever fruitful soil, and all the possibilities of new life open. The spring-time finds last summer’s roots still remaining in the ground, and quickens them to life again, and multiplies them into a richer summer still. Ingenious Nature finds a germ wherever it is dropped; but without the germ she will do nothing. Mere spontaneity she disowns and disproves more and more. Think what a place the world would be to live in if this were not so, if nature were a wizard, fitful and whimsical, doing her wonders in no sequel or connection with each other, with her pets and favorites, instead of being, as she is, a mother with her great, wise, reasonable laws of the house which press alike on all hef children, which no one of the children thinks of seeing changed or violated. That is what makes the world such a good home for man to dwell in, his school room and his home at once. If anywhere in all the world it were on certain record, past all doubt, that just one solitary field, hidden away in some remote valley, had burst into a harvest of corn without a seed of corn having been sown in it by design or accident, that one freak of spontaneousness must work great harm among mankind. Men enough there are who would make that fact their one fact in natural science, and, disregarding the million fields which gave no harvest except in answer to seed, would go looking for the second field that was to give its crop for nothing; as when one man has found a pot of gold, a hundred more forget that gold, by the world’s great general law, is earned, not found, and so go digging where they have buried nothing, seeking a prize that is not there. It is the continuity of life, the continuity of nature, that is our salvation. “Nothing from nothing” is the first law of her household, and her dullest children must learn it, for it is written on the walls that shelter them, on the ground they tread, on the table from which they eat, and on the tools with which they work.

And her law of economy is just as clear. Profusion, but no waste; this is the lesson that nature reads us everywhere. The dead leaves of this autumn are worked into next year’s soil. The little stream that has watered the greenness of many meadows goes afterwards to do duty in the great sea: The vast surrounding atmosphere is made efficient over and over again for the breath of living men. Everywhere profusion, but no waste. For men who need to be trained to reasonableness and care, God has built just the home they needed for their training, and sent us to live in this star which shines among His other stars steadily and soberly with its double light of continuity and economy.

The same truth appears in the use which God makes of men in the world. One of the most interesting studies of history is to see how unspasmodic is the appearance of great men. They are not accidents. Their lives are not isolated unaccountable meteors. However little it may be seen at the time of their lives, those who live after them, and look back over the ranges of history, can see that the heroes and great men are the culmination and result of processes. The times in which they live, the smaller men who have gone before them, are necessary to make them what they come to be. If it were not so, such lives might be expected to start forth indiscriminately everywhere, in all ages alike, in all stages and kinds of civilization. But barbarism is a flat level of monotony; and certain artificial periods of culture are barren of all greatness. The personal element in the hero must be recognized. No age or circumstances can make a great man of a little one. But still all history bears witness that when God means to make a great man, He puts the circumstances of the world and the lives of lesser men under tribute. He does not fling His hero like an aerolite out of the sky. He bids him grow .Like an oak out of the earth. All earnest, pure, unselfish, faithful men who have lived their obscure lives well, have helped to make him. God has let none of them be wasted. A thousand unrecorded patriots helped to make Washington; a thousand lovers of liberty contributed to Lincoln. It is the continuity and economy of human life. The great feast grows out of the few loaves and fishes. And any man who in his small degree is living like the child of God, has a right to all the comfort of knowing that God will not let his life be lost, but will use it in the making of some great child of God, as he used centuries of Jewish lives, prophets, priests, patriots, kings, peasants, women, chil dren, to make the human life of His Incarnate Son.

The same is true of truths, as well as of men. All the history of the progress of men’s thought bears witness that when God wants to give men knowledge which they have not had before, He always opens it to them out of something which they have already known. There is no such thing as the dropping of a great truth any more than of a great man, suddenly, ready-made, out of the sky. “How is it with Revelation? How is it with Christianity?” you say. There, more than any where, it certainly is true that God works continuously and economically. What does Judaism mean? When God wanted to give the world the truth of Christ, He took that Hebrew nation which had some truth, truth of the right sort, though it was very meagre and in sufficient, and mixed up with other things which were not true; He took that truth and brought Christianity out of that. And so when He has wanted to bring His Christianity, His highest truth, into any new region, He has always made it appear as the fulfilment, the completion, of what the people of that region knew already. Paul stands upon Mars’ Hill at Athens, and wants to show those people Christ. How does he begin? He takes what he finds there. He points to their altar to the unknown god, and says, “Him whom ye ignorantly worship I declare to you.” He opens the books of their own writers and finds there his text, “As certain of your own poets have said.” Out of their bit of truth he opens the rich completeness of the truth he has to tell. Is it not just exactly the miracle of Christ? Paul comes and says to Athens, “How many loaves have you?” and they say, “Seven, and a few little fishes. We believe in God; we believe in responsibility; we believe in man’s childhood to God; we believe in worship.” And there, upon the Areopagus, Paul did what His Master did long before, by the Sea of Galilee; “He took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and brake them and gave to the multitude; and they did all eat and were filled.”

And so it always is. There is a doctrine which we hear from time to time, that it is not the amount of truth which a man knows, but his earnestness in holding what he does know; not his opinions, but his sincerity in holding his opinions, which is of value. That seems to me after all to be probably only a clumsy way of getting hold of this idea, that God always brings new truth out of old truth, and so that whoever has any bit of truth and really holds it fast is within the possibility of all the truth that God can give to man. There is no spontaneous generation of truth. “To him that hath shall be given.” It seems to me that there is a great deal of light here of just the sort which a great many people need now. Men look around them and they say that old systems of religious thought are changing. Certainly they are. They always have been changing. There never was a time when they stood still. There is no delusion about history more complete than to suppose that there has ever been a time when, from year to year and over a large body of mankind, religious ideas have been fixed and permanent and unanimously held. No man can put his finger upon such a period. They have always been changing as they are to-day. But this has been always true, that the new idea has always been born of the old, that when men have advanced to higher truth it has been from the basis of the truth which they have held already. It has been not by flinging their net out into the heavens in hopes to catch a star, but by digging deeper into the substance of the earth on which they stood, and finding there a root. And that is what we have to look for in the future. You and I cling to the old historic statements of our faith. We hold fast by the old historic church as it appears to-day. What is our feeling as we hold fast there? Is it that the church to-day knows all the truth which man will ever know? Is it that the religious conceptions which prevail to-day will never change? A man must be deaf to the voices of the history behind him, blind to the signs of times around him, before he can think that. We stand expecting change and progress, new truth, new light. But we stand here in the historic church, in the historic truth, because we believe that the new truth must come out of this old truth, the perfect truth out of this partial truth, some day. We keep close to the seven loaves because we believe that when the multitude is fed it will be with an abundance blessed by God out of this, which, however meagre, is still real.

I would that men might understand that invitation from the Christian Church to-day. It is not as the present possessor of all truth that she invites men to her household. She must not claim that. Men will discover that her claim is false if she does. But it is as the possessor of truth out of which God will call, nay is forever calling new truth, that she summons men not merely to a present which she offers, but to a future in which she believes. The church is progressive by her very essence. The church is man occupied by Christ. And since Christ cannot at once occupy man completely, and cannot be satisfied until He has occupied man completely, the church must make progress. If she ceases to advance she dies. Only in all her progress she believes in the continuity and economy of God. She looks for the truth which she is to know to come out of the truth which she knows already; and she is sure that no duty done or light attained in any most obscure corner of her life is wasted, but helps to the perfect duty and the perfect light that are to be. That is why in her is the true home for the man who most hopes and prays for the progress of mankind.

To every man who has advanced or who hopes that he may advance to higher, fuller, truer views of Christian truth, I think that this lesson of the loaves has something very plain to say. I see a man who thinks differently to-day from the way in which he thought ten years ago. He knows more truth. He is sure that God has given him new knowledge. How shall that man look back to what he used to know, to his old creed? Surely he may, with all rejoicing for the fuller light to which he has been brought, own the half-light in which he used to walk, and honor it. He may remember with reverence how through some most imperfect conception of truth, which he could not possibly hold now, he came into the larger knowledge where he now finds his joy. Out of the notions which are dead now, he has drawn the life by which he lives. I think it is always a shame for a man to abuse any creed out of which he has passed into what he holds to be a truer creed. When he held that old creed he was either sincere or insincere. If he was insincere, let him abuse himself and not the creed which, whatever was its power or its weakness, could do nothing for a man like him. If he was sincere, let him know that much of the good faith with which he holds his new dear truth comes from the training of that old devotion. No, if God has led you to see truth which once you did not see, and to reject as error what once you thought was true, do not try to signalize your new allegiance by defaming your old master. The man who thinks to make much of the fuller truth to which he has come, by upbraiding the partial truth through which he came to it, is a poor creature. If I met a Mohammedan who had turned Christian, I would not like to hear him revile Mohammedanism. If I talk with a man from some other communion who has come into our church, I think the less and not the more of his churchmanship if he is always ready to defame the mother that bore him. If you are a more liberal believer than you used to be, the best proof that you can give of it will be in gratefully honoring the narrower creed in which you lived and by whose power you grew up and passed on.

Such is the message of our story to the man who has already advanced to larger truth than he once held. And when he turns from looking back and still looks forward, when he hopes still to advance, then it has something else to say to him. It bids him hold fast all the truth that he has learned, to hold it all the faster because he knows it is not final. The preciousness of every particle of truth! That is the lesson. If one gives me a diamond to carry across the sea, I may estimate its value and know just how much poorer I shall be and the world will be if I let it drop into the water and it sinks to the bottom. But if one gives me a seed of some new fruit to bring to this new land, I look at it with awe. It is mysteriously valuable. I cannot tell what preciousness is in it. Harvests on harvests, food for whole generations, are shut up in its little bulk. There always must be a difference as to the essential value set on truth, between him who thinks that truth is final and him who thinks that truth is germinal, between him who thinks it a diamond and him who thinks it a seed. It is a great mistake to think that a man will value a truth more if you teach him that it is the end of truth, than if you teach him that it is only the beginning. Nathanael clings all the more closely to the certainty that Jesus saw him under the fig-tree, because of the promise that he shall “see greater things than these.” In the name of all you hope to know, cling close to what you know already. Make much of it, live up to it, count it very precious, hold it fast in the bosom of a loving life. Bring what you have and put it reverently into the Master’s hands that He may make it more. It is not good for any man to let the vastness of unknown truth make him disparage the little that he knows. It is good for him to count his little precious because it is of the same kind with, and may introduce him to, the greater after which he aspires.

I must not linger longer upon the application of our story to the matter of belief and truth. More interesting still are the ways in which it applies to character, and especially to the religious life. In all training of character the law of continuity and economy must be supreme. We often do not think so. We are ready to fancy that character can be spasmodic, a thing of constant new creations, of abrupt and sudden changes. I think that is the idea with which almost all people start in life. By and by, as life goes on, and they find that character does not change but perpetuates itself, they are very apt to turn to the other extreme and to believe that character once fixed is fixed forever, and so to settle into hopelessness. Hosts of young men are reckless because they believe that by and by they can be what they will. Hosts of old men are hopeless because it seems impossible that they can ever be any thing but what they are. But both are wrong. Not lawlessness, and not slavish subjection to law, is the system under which we live. Progress and growth; but growth from old conditions, progress from the basis of the old life; this is our law. A man comes to you and says, “I have always been a bad man, and I never can be anything else.” You answer him, if you are a true servant of Christ, “Poor soul, you little know the hope for all of us which is in Him who can make all things new.” Another man comes and says, “I have been a bad man, but I am going to break with all my past, to live as if it all had never been, to be throughout another man.” Again you must reply, “Poor soul, that too is impossible. Be as different as you will, you must be the same man still. Your future must come out of your past. Your old failures, your old hopes, your old resolutions, your old shames, these cannot all be wasted. They can be wonderfully transformed, but they cannot be thrown away.” The good man stands at last, the true man, fed with truth and glorifying God in daily action. But he learns more and more that he is the same with the old man whose memory he hates. He has been made anew, but it is the old humanity out of which the new life has been evoked. Is not this what many a poor creature needs to know? You understand that you are wicked. You understand what it is to be good. But the gulf between is dreadful and impassable. What is there in you that can grow into that? Nothing, nothing, that can grow into that of its own strength. You must go on forever, and be forever what you are, unless some higher power touches you. But none the less is it true that when that higher power touches you it must make what you are to be out of what you are already. The development out of the old still needs the mightier force. Evolution is not atheism. God must do what must be done, but God will do it. God will make you good, by sending His light and love into this past of yours and giving all that there is good in it its true development and consecration.

How natural this method is. How necessarily any one who tries to do the work of God falls into God’s ways of doing it. Never are you so near to God as when you try to help some miserable sinner to a better life. And how instinctively you take God’s method then. Here is a poor outcast with a wretched, wicked, it may be a hideous life. How will you go to work to lift that wretchedness? Will you not try to find something in all that life that you can speak to, something that you can cultivate and make to grow? You find perhaps some one affection. The mother’s love is left when everything else seems to have gone in brutishness. The power to feel a kindness is still there when the power to feel a blow has long since died. The sensitiveness to the cry of need is still alive when the ear can no longer hear the calls and threats of duty. Shame lingers where ambition has departed. To these you speak. Over the life of each poor outcast you let your hands wander till, in the midst of all the death, they find one spot which, however feebly, trembles with life. You can do nothing till you have found that. When you have found that, everything is possible. 0 my dear friends, if you have not learned it, this is the lesson you must learn. If you are moved with a vague desire to help men be better men, you must know that you can do it not by belaboring the evil but by training the good that there is in them. If you could kill all a man’s sins you would only make him a less bad man. You would not make him a better man. That you could make him only by developing his goodness. So imitate your Lord. When you stand face to face with a hungry-eyed creature whom you want to feed with better life, be sure that you imitate your Lord. Be sure that you begin by asking him “How many loaves have you, my poor friend? What can you give me to begin with? What has God done for you already? Show me your best, and we will pray to God together that as you put it into His hands He will bless it and multiply it, till your whole life is fed with the grace which is all His but which He has made yours by bidding it work upon the substance of what He had given you already.”

The unreality of conversion! The inability of a man to realize that he can be the subject of such a change, can enter upon such a new life as he hears other men describe! Surely you recognize that unreality. Where does it come from? Is it not largely from the fact that men do not understand this truth of the continuity and economy of grace. This is the fundamental truth about conversion. Not to sweep the old manhood off and make a new one in its place; but to make a new manhood out of the old one, that is what God’s Spirit is always trying to do. If I could picture God’s Spirit coming for the first time to a soul; if I could forget that all our descriptions of the Spirit coming to the soul of man are figures, because God’s Spirit has been with every soul from its first moment; if I could picture God’s Spirit coming for the first time to your soul, I can imagine only one beginning of His work. “How many loaves have you?” “What is there for me to go to work on here?” An honorable love of truth, an unswerving business faithfulness, a keen, quick sensitiveness to the rights of others, a tender pity which leaps up at the sight of suffering. The Spirit finds these there. These, and what are they? They are not religion. 0, no! surely they are not. More and more clear, I think, it grows that they are not. More and more distinctly over our human life, with all its best affections, hangs the serene heaven of the divine life, the heaven of the love of God into which our human affections must enter before they become religious, into which they cannot enter till they have been born again. No! These which the Spirit finds in you are not religion. Never let yourself think that they are, and so depreciate and disregard the work which the Spirit has to do in you. They are not religion; but they are the material of the religious life. They are the part of your nature in which you may become religious. They are the stone in your nature out of which the temple may be built. When the temple is built out of that native stone, no less wonderful, indispensable, and gracious will appear the skill of the Architect, without whom it never could have been; yet still the temple, standing there with its divine strength and beauty of tower and pinnacle, will be real to you, will be your temple while it is God’s, because of the nativeness of the stone from which God made it. The love of truth, touched by God, has been lifted into a sublime aspiration after Him. The business faithfulness has been transfigured into the patient doing of His will. The regard for the rights of others has been exalted into a passionate desire that every man should have the chance to do, and be his best. And pity for men’s sorrows has been changed into a lofty honor for man’s value as the son of God in Christ. How shall we tell what has come to pass? Let us take St. Peter’s great words, “Until the day dawn and the day-star arise in your hearts.” The coming of God’s Spirit is the rising of the sun. The world is a new world when the sun has arisen. Light and life filling it everywhere proclaim how new it is. But the sunrise needs a world already there to shine upon, and it is out of the same old mountains and valleys which have been dreary in the darkness that it makes its miracles of light.

That is conversion. Would that men might learn it, so that it need not seem so unnatural to them, so that it need not seem so impossible for them. And the same is true about every progress of the Christian soul to the higher and higher, even to the highest Christian life. Continuity and economy; these are the laws of Him who is leading us, the Captain of our salvation. He always binds the future to the past, and He wastes nothing. 0, there are some here who want to get away from all their past; who, if they could, would fain begin all over again. Their life with Christ seems one long failure. But you must learn, you must let God teach you, that the only way to get rid of your past is to get a future out of it. God will waste nothing. There is something in your past, something, even if it only be the sin of which you have repented, which, if you can put into the Savior’s hands, will be a new life for you. Doubt that; doubt that God in all these years has given you something through which He may give you vastly more if you will let Him, and what reasonable conception have you left of God? I think it is a dreadful thing to hear a man or woman say, “I have been a Christian, I have tried to serve God for such and such a number of years, and it has been all a mistake.” 0, how little they know God, to think it could have been a mistake! It is as much a wrong to the honor of God to disown what He has done for us, as to disown what He has done for any other man; and yet we very often call it humility.

We want to honor our own present as the material

for a possible future. In order that we may honor it we

must know how Christ honors it. He honors it for

what it can produce in His hands. He honors it as a seed. I think sometimes of how, if the Lord had preached to men who were mostly farmers instead of shepherds, He would have made them another parable. Instead of the lost sheep on the mountains, He would have told of the lost seed on the barn floor. Instead of the love that sought the wanderer and brought it to the fold, He would have wonderfully pictured the love that found the trampled grain, with all its power of life, and buried it in the rich ground.

“How many loaves have you?” It is the Lord’s first question; and the hands of those who really want His help, search their robes to see what they have hidden there. One brings his joy; another brings his pain; another brings his helpless desire; another brings his poor resolution; another has nothing to bring except just his sorrow that he has nothing. It is a poor collection; only seven loaves, and a few little fishes; but it is enough. His blessing falls upon them, and they come back to the souls which gave them up to Him, multiplied into the means of healthy, holy, happy life.

May God help us all, every day of our lives, to come to Christ just as we are, that He may make us more and more just what we ought to be.