On the Moral Life of Man

Hat is the power of Christianity over man, — its source, its character, its issue? This is the question which I wish to study with you in these four lectures which I have been invited to deliver. But it is necessary at the outset that I should indicate the limits within which I wish to work. All that the subject, as I have stated it, would include, not four nor forty lectures could undertake to treat.

I have been led, then, to think of Christianity, and to speak of it, — at least in these lectures, — not as a system of doctrine, but as a personal force, behind which and in which there lies one great inspiring idea, which it is the work of the personal force to impress upon the life of man, with which the personal force is always struggling to fill mankind. The personal force is the nature of Jesus, full of humanity, full of divinity, and powerful with a love for man which combines in itself every element that enters into love of the completest kind. The inspiring idea is the fatherhood of God, and the childhood of every man to Him. Upon the race and upon the individual, Jesus is always bringing into more and more perfect revelation the certain truth that man, and every man, is the child of God. This is the sum of the work of the Incarnation. A hundred other statements regarding it, regarding Him who was incarnate, are true; but all statements concerning Him hold their truth within this truth, — that Jesus came to restore the fact of God’s fatherhood to man’s knowledge, and to its central place of power over man’s life. Jesus is mysteriously the Word of God made flesh. He is the worker of amazing miracles upon the bodies and the souls of men. He is the convincer of sin. He is the Savior by suffering. But behind all these, as the purpose for which He is all these, He is the redeemer of man into the fatherhood of God. It would be deeply interesting to dwell on any one of these special aspects of His wondrous life; but when we want to gather into one great comprehensive statement the purpose for which Jesus lived, and the power which His life has had over the lives of men, we must seize His great idea and find His power there. For every man’s power is his idea multiplied by and projected through his personality. The special actions which he does are only the points at which his power shows itself, — the tips of his powerful life, where its magnetic force is manifested, but not where it is created. And so the power of Jesus is the idea of Jesus multiplied and projected through the person of Jesus. His power is not in the miracles that He did, not even in the marvellous nature which He bore, but in the great truth, the primal and final fact of all the universe, so far as man has any part in it, which the whole nature of the Savior uttered, and with whose splendor every miraculous touch of that nature on the world, or on man’s body or man’s soul, burst forth into light.

I have said already what that idea is, — the relation of childhood and fatherhood between man and God. Man is the child of God by nature. He is ignorant and rebellious, — the prodi- gal child of God; but his ignorance and rebellion never break that first relationship. It is always a child ignorant of his Father; always a child rebellious against his Father. That is what makes the tragedy of human history, and always prevents human sin from becoming an insignificant and squalid thing. To reassert the fatherhood and childhood as an unlost truth, and to re-establish its power as the central fact of life; to tell men that they were, and to make them actually be, the sons of God, — that was the purpose of the coming of Jesus, and the shaping power of His life.

Of course it is not possible to speak of such an idea — which is indeed the idea of the universe — as if it were a message intrusted to the Son of God when He came to be the Savior of mankind. It was not only something which He knew and taught; it was something which He was: No other truth ever so inspires a merely human teacher, so fills his whole life with itself, so comes to be not merely the creed which his lips declare but the life which his whole living utters, as this truth of man’s childhood to God. And in

Him who was at once the manifested God and the completion of humanity, the idea and the person are so mingled that we cannot separate them. He is the truth, and whoever receives Him becomes the son of God.

As I read the Gospels and see what Jesus is trying to do with men, it seems to me as if this, truth that man is the child of God were to him, in a certain genuine sense, a final truth, — a truth beyond which the soul cannot or at least need not go, — a truth which, if it could be really laid upon the soul, would bring its own evidence and its own interpretation. It is indeed capable of being analyzed. It may be resolved into the several elements which make up its meaning. It includes the notions of a common nature between the Father and the son, of a spontaneous affection of the Father, of an essential obligation of the son, and of a possibility of the son’s unlimited growth into the Father’s likeness. All these are present, are assumed in every declaration of man’s sonship to God which Jesus ever makes. But He does not unfold them and define them. It seems to Him as if, when He says to any human creature, “You are God’s child,” all these included truths revealed themselves to the soul in such degree as his spiritual nature was then able to receive them. It seems to Him as if when He says to a sinner, forgetful of his sonship, “Rise up and be God’s child,” all these included truths came in with their own power to restore his life. He always treats the truth of Fatherhood as the best children of the best earthly fathers treat it, not ignorant of the elemental truths of which it is composed, but best satisfied to let it rest in its own unity, as if any analysis must disturb its beauty and its power.

It is more important than we often think, that we should grasp the general idea, the general purpose, of the life of Jesus. The Gospels become to us a new book when we no longer read them merely as the anecdotes of the life of one who, with a great, kind heart, went through the world promiscuously doing good as opportunities occurred to Him. The drifting and haphazard currents gather themselves together, and we are borne on with the full and enthusiastic impulse of a great river which knows itself and knows

the sea it seeks. And when the ruling idea is this which fills the life of Jesus, it is doubly true that only by clearly seizing it can we get at the heart and meaning of His life. For it is not only an idea; it is a religious inspiration. It is not only the food of the mind; it is the fire of the soul. In all its human uses, the idea of fatherhood comes nearer to being a religious idea than that of any other human relationship. And when we catch sight of it as the expression of man’s relationship to God, it has all that mysterious and beautiful mingling of the most vast and awful with the most near and personal and urgent, all that vagueness which we know includes definiteness, all that definiteness not excluding vagueness, which is the very essence of religious impressiveness. And when we think of it as the idea of Jesus, it must always have this special beauty connected with it, that Jesus must have grown up into the apprehension of it as He grew into the consciousness of His own life. He must have become aware that all men were God’s sons, and felt the desire to tell them so

and make their sonship a reality, kindling like fire within Him, just in proportion as He came to know, softly and gradually, under the skies of Galilee and the roof of the carpenter, the deep — and absorbing mystery that He himself was the Son of God.

It is not my purpose to prove here that this which I have given is a true statement of the idea of Jesus. As He stands there in the broad sunlight of the Gospels, as His clear words come down to us through the atmosphere of centuries which His spirit has purified, I do not see how any one can have a doubt of what He means by standing there, what the purpose of His life is as He himself conceives it. If any man had a doubt, I should only want to open the Gospels with him at four most solemn places. Here is the consummate teaching of Jesus. In His favorite form of parable, with the widest gaze across the vast field of man, with the most profound — and sad and hopeful sympathy with human life, He tells His story of the Prodigal Son. It is the everlasting picture of the double possibilities of man, — obedience and disobedience. The old parable of Eden, the present mystery of your life and mine, the far-off Judgment Day, and the great White Throne, are all gathered in together and are lying in the crystal depths of that story. And lo! these two possibilities live in the house of one great Fatherhood. “A certain man had two sons,’ and from the embrace of that father’s love neither of the two sons ever departs. Or, if this seems too metaphorical to be the revelation of Christ’s idea of man, turn to another scene, and hear Him teaching all men to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” Not only the needy child, who is going in a moment to beg for his - daily bread, but the sinful child, whose lip is already trembling with the prayer to be forgiven, begins his petition with the claim of the son upon the father. In that idea alone the possibility and privilege of prayer grow clear. Or, still more solemn in its special circumstances, there is the scene beside the tomb from which He has just risen, when He draws back the curtain, and with one word proclaims His life and His disciples’ life together. “I ascend unto my Father and to your Father,’ He declares. And when He has ascended, and years have passed away, and all that He did and was have grown familiar to the disciple who loved Him most and. knew Him best; when that disciple sums up all his conception of the life of Jesus, what he says is only this: “To as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.” Surely, we cannot be wrong if we say positively — that to Christ himself the truth that man was God’s child by nature was the great fact of man’s existence; and the desire that man might be God’s child in reality was the motive of His own life and work.

I have dwelt long upon this opening explanation. But I must leave it now. My design, in these lectures, is to try to show how this idea of Jesus, inspiring and presented through his personality, becomes the shaping power of men’s lives. I want to trace its presence in all of the higher regions of man’s life. I want to see how it influences man’s doing of duty, and his relation to his fellow-men, and his acceptance of pain or pleasure, and his treatment of his own intellectual powers. These are my four lectures.

Man in his various life, touched and influenced and shaped and led by the Fatherhood of God, revealed and renewed to him by Jesus. To-day I shall speak of man’s moral life. The second lecture will be of the child of God in all his social existence. The next lecture will treat of his relation to enjoyment and suffering, which are the right hand and the left hand of the same Father. And in the last lecture I shall speak of that life of the intellect in which man is most ready to forget his Father, or to think that his Father has nothing that he can do for him. They will be Biblical studies; for I shall look solely to what Jesus, the revealer of the Father, did for men in the few years of which the Gospels tell, in order to find the types of what it is His perpetual effort and wish to do. I dare to hope, as the result of all our studies, that we may be helped somewhat in that which I think we all find the hardest and most hopeless work of all our lives, — the effort to keep our highest ideas and our commonest occupations in constant and healthy contact with each other.

Forgive me one word more. It gives me also pleasure to believe that the subject which I have chosen is one which would not have been unwelcome to my dear friend of years ago, whose honored name this lectureship bears, and in whose behalf I shall in some sort speak. For, of the men whom I have known, there has been none whose daily moral life, whose association with his fellow-men, whose meeting of the joy and pain of living, and whose ways of thought and study, have been more in the power of the idea of Jesus, more inspired by his Lord’s revelation that he was, more obedient and trustful to his Lord’s authority in order that he might become, the son of God.

The manifestation of God’s fatherhood which was made in Jesus is the shaping power of Christian morals, — that which makes the morality of Christian life distinct and different from any other that the world has seen. In what does that difference consist? In two things, as it seems to me: First, in the complete combination of pattern and power in the source from which the morality proceeds; and, second, in the combination of reason and authority in the basis upon which the morality is constantly recognized as resting. These are the two great characteristics of family morality, of that rectitude and goodness which grow up in the child as he lives in his father’s house, sheltered by and fed out of his father’s character. Think of them both for a moment. Where, except in that primal type

of human influence and benefaction, the human; family, do the pattern of goodness and the power of goodness meet in such perfect unity? Elsewhere there may stand up models of excellence, but they are distant and cold. They do not carry in themselves their own enforcement. They are not clothed with the impressiveness of a deep natural affection. Elsewhere than in the home there may be very winning persuasions to goodness; but nowhere so perfectly as in the home does the persuasive appeal come from the mouth of the very goodness which is the natural pattern of the life which it tries to win. The good father at once shows goodness as no other being can show it to the child, and likewise invites him to it with an influence that no other being can possess. And, besides this, the child, when he has come to goodness like his father’s by obedience to his father, finds himself unable to tell whether the good life which he tries to live is something which holds him by its own inherent fascination, or something to which he submits in willing acceptance of his father’s will. The essential and the arbitrary blend, and are lost in one another. The child’s nature bears witness to its oneness with the father’s nature by the way in which it makes its own choices those duties which come to it in the first place as the father’s mandates.

Now these two qualities, shadowed forth in every true home, come to their completeness in the home of God, the home of man in God, which is Christianity. It will be interesting, I hope, to follow this truth out in some detail; but first we can see, perhaps, how true it is, if we turn suddenly to our Gospels and open them at once at what is, after all, the great text-book of Christian morals, the code of Christian life, the correspondent and fulfilment in the New Testament of the Ten Commandments in the Old. I mean the Sermon on the Mount. To that discourse let us give a few moments’ study. In the late summer, Jesus is coming home from one of his teaching-tours in Galilee, and in the evening he and the company that follow him approach Capernaum. They will not enter the city till to-morrow morning.. To-night the people sleep around the foot of a great hill that rises near the town. But Jesus, that he may be more alone, climbs higher, and spends the night in prayer and meditation. Out of this solitude, out of this mysterious communion with His Father, in which He has, as it were, refilled Himself with the assurance that the human is son to the Divine, He comes when morning breaks, and, gathering His disciples around Him, He speaks to them, and the multitude who have thronged about Him, the Sermon on the Mount, which is written in three chapters of St. Matthew’s Gospel. I do not see how any one who reads it carefully can fail to feel that in that sermon we have what is essentially a unit, — one single, separate discourse of Jesus. It has no rhetorical order or progress. It does not move in any argumentative development. We have but to feel ourselves back into the bright air and sunshine of that fresh morning far away in Galilee, with the sweet distraction of the early birds filling the air, and the soft, dreamy faces of the Galilean peasants making the listening group, in order to become aware how perfectly impossible it was that the discourse should move to any such measure as might have become the lecture-room of a new Rabbi. It has its unity in its controlling purpose. It is one by the life-blood of the one idea which beats through it, and which those ready and responsive peasant natures feel. And what is that idea? Neander calls the Sermon on the Mount “the Magna Charta of the kingdom of God.” It is a fine phrase, and in one sense it - is completely true. But really the idea of God which fills the great discourse is not the idea of king, but the idea of father. No doubt the two, in their original use and in the loftiest use of them, when, as in the loftiest use of all words, they refresh the lost memory of their origin, are really one. The king was originally father. The Basileia was a family. It belonged to the king, as the family belongs to the father, by right of blood. It was not like the Turannis, which implied a usurpation, an unnatural and cruel thing. Kingship included the three essential ideas of fatherhood, which, as I reminded you, are oneness of nature, natural impulse of obedience, and the obligation of loving care. The noblest heathen always felt all this; and Zeus is either king of gods and men, or father of gods and men, — as if the two names meant the selfsame thing. But yet the two words always tended to drift apart. Lordship and command belonged to kingship; love and care belonged to fatherhood. What we really have, then, in the Sermon on the Mount, what gives it its great, everlasting value, is the passing over of kingship into fatherhood; or, if you please to put it so, the opening and — deepening of kingship till it reveals the fatherhood which lies folded at the heart of it. This, I am sure, is the key of the Sermon on the Mount which alone can unlock its meaning. Men have often pointed out how largely its

separate precepts can be matched out of other codes; as if. the substance and power of a moral law lay in its commandments, and did not really rest in the conception of the commander which breathed through it and gave it life.

Here, then, is what the Sermon on the Mount really means. And, in conformity with this, all through it there are strung those two great combinations which I spoke of, — the combination of pattern and power, the combination of reason and authority. The pattern is a personal nature, ultimate and absolute, behind which it is impossible to go. The good is good because it is like Him. The bad is bad because it is unlike Him. There is no other standard in the whole discourse than that. It is assumed that a man may know God and then that he wants nothing more, that in God he has the perfect test and

touchstone of all life. “Be ye therefore peris in heaven is perfect.” “Love your enemies,

feet,” Jesus says, “even as your Father which

bless them that curse you”; and why? “That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.” “Seekye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” What do these words mean, On the Moral Life of Man. 29

that close like a great choral amen the sweet and rhythmical injunctions to a divine carelessness? “Take no thought for your life.” “Lay not up treasures on the earth.” “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink.” Let all things go. Only, — and then the words seem to concentrate out of their easy carelessness into a deep intensity that is all the more intense by contrast, — only, “seek God’s righteousness, seek to be righteous like Him, with that divine capacity of likeness which is in you, as His children, and then everything else shall follow as it may.” These are no solitary texts. They are only special words in which the whole current of the sermon flashes up into peculiar distinctness, as a wave flashes on the bosom of a stream and shows which way the stream is running.

And as the Father is the standard of the moral life that is enforced, so it is from Him and from His fatherhood that the whole power comes by which that standard is to be pursued and finally attained. There is nothing abstract and cold. Everything shines and burns with

30 ) The Inftuence of Fesus

personal affection. I am to be good like my Father; I am to be good because of my Father; like His character, because of His love. “If ye forgive men their trespasses, then your Heavenly Father will forgive you.” “Swear not by heaven, for it is God’s throne, nor by earth, for it 4g His footstool.” “Let your light shine before men, that they may glorify your Father which is in heaven.” “Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of God.” These, again, are not exceptional or accidental words. They are the flashes on the stream which flows the other way to meet the stream from God to man which we were just now tracing. Already it is true, as by and by an Apostle will declare, that “of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things.” The pattern descends from the Father to the Son. The responsive likeness goes back from the Son to the Father; and both because they are Father and Son to one another. It is all full of the spirit of spontaneousness, It is “the Magna Charta of the kingdom of God,” indeed. But the picture fails if we think of the reluctant king upon the plain at Runnymede with his stern barons compelling him to give what he gave only with hatred and rage. Rather it seems to be the prophecy and anticipation of that heavenly plain where the celestial King in the mystic picture of the Revelation gives Himself ungrudgingly to His beloved, whose natures, perfectly redeemed by Him and conformed to His, can take Him perfectly; where “the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters,” — the anticipation of that and the memory and completion of the garden at the other end of human history, where the Father walked with his children in their first innocence.

Along with this combination the Sermon on the Mount always keeps the other, — the combination of reason and authority, or of essentialness and arbitrariness, which is characteristic of the child’s obedience to the father. I must not dwell on this, but I am sure that all of us have felt, as we have read those sacred chapters of St. Matthew, how exquisitely these two lights play through them and harmonize with one another, — the light that comes to any duty from the command of God that we should do it, and the light which the same duty wins because we ourselves perceive that it is the right thing to do. The essence of every beatitude is in the human heart, and yet the human heart loves to hear the utterance of the beatitudes from the mouth of God as if they were His arbitrary enactments. I know by that of the nature of God which is in me as His child, that they which hunger and thirst after righteousness shall certainly be filled. I am sure by that subtle knowledge of Him which the child must have of the Father, that He could not leave a really longing soul unsatisfied in all His world. That importunate happiness, eager to give itself away, must pour itself into every ready life. But yet I accept the utterance which Jesus makes of that which I already knew, as a genuine revelation. The instinct of my wakened childhood rests upon the strong confirmation of the Father’s uttered word. This runs through all the great discourse. I leave it with you to trace it there. Only I want you to notice that this interplay of essentialness and arbitrariness is exactly what characterizes every true home life, where the children learn truth and receive commandments from their father. The ,child’s partial and growing perception that -it must be so, chimes and harmonizes with the father’s distinct injunction that it shall be so.

I am sure that when the listening repose of the multitude was broken as the sermon closed, and, like a melted stream, the crowd flowed away into the city, the people carried something more with them than a few handfuls of good precepts. I think that they went silently, or with few words, with something of exaltation and wonder at themselves in their faces, They had been taught that they were God’s children. One who was evidently God’s Son Himself had told them so. He had bidden them, as God’s children, at once to see duty with something of His own immediateness of perception, and also to hear Him announcing it to them out of a Father’s lips. Duty, the thing they ought to do, had shone for them that morning at once with its own essential sweetness and with the illumination of their Father’s will. No wonder that as they walked together they said to one another, “He speaks to us with authority. It is not like the

Scribes.”

I must not linger on this hurried study of the Sermon on the Mount. I have dwelt thus long upon it because, as it is the longest and most deliberate statement of moral duty in the Gospels, I wanted to show how it was all pervaded by and ‘built about the idea of Jesus. Let us go on now to see how that idea pervades likewise all His treatment of the men and women whom His life

touched. It is the idea of a divine fatherhood, of a natural belonging of every man’s soul in

goodness, of wickedness as an exile, an unnatural, unfilial state of life, and of the return to goodness as the coming back to a homeland which the soul recognizes as it enters into it and claims as its true place. I think that this idea of morals at once outgoes and comprehends the various theories of moral life which men have framed and set in opposition to each other. If in the family the child’s instinct of childhood unites in itself the perception of his own best good with the consciousness of obligation to his Father’s will, then in the world, turned by Christ’s revelation

to one mighty family, the utilitarian and the intuitional theories of duty may blend in harmony, and the soul serving God as its Father may live under the combined power of the two.

But, not to dwell on this, the idea of Jesus applied to men’s moral life must include two things, — a revelation of the moral standard, and a revelation of the moral motive. Let us take these in their order.

And first, the moral standard. What is it? What am I to be conformed to as the work of moral improvement goes on in me? There may be various answers. One man may say, “To this law,’ holding up a scroll of precepts. “That is to be your goal. When you obey those, the work is done.” Another man says, “To this person,’ pointing to some one, human or divine, whose life is moving along outside of mine, — a pattern, a model, which I am to emulate as a candle measures its twinkling light against a star. Now the answer of Jesus is different from both of these, I think. “You are to be like your Father,’ He declares; “but it is in the fact that He is your Father and that you are His child that the possibility of likeness lies, and that the kind of possible likeness is decreed. You are to be like Him, as the child is like the father, by the attainment of that echo of the father’s nature which is the child’s essential heritage. You are to be like Him by coming to that expression of Him which is the true idea of your

child-life. You are to fulfil the unfulfilled pro- —

gramme of your own life, which is involved in the fact that you are the child of God. You are to become ‘like your Father, fulfilling the injunction of the Sermon on the Mount by ‘com- — ing to yourself, so realizing the picture of the

parable of the Prodigal Son.”

Is there here an intelligible and practicable moral standard? Man is to return into the idea of his own life as the son of God. He is to be equal to his own conception, as that conception is written in the nature of the Holy Being from whom he

came and to whom he belongs. At least, that is —

a standard whose perpetual presence shaped our Lord’s treatment of the men and women whom He was trying to restore. Note this in several particulars. First, look at the combination of

sternness and kindliness, of mercy and severity, which appears wherever Jesus touches a sinner’s life. One day they brought to Him a woman taken in the act of sin. Their stern, hard faces — the faces of the Scribes and Pharisees — glared at their victim, and then turned away from her to Him from whom they claimed her condemnation. “Moses in the Law commanded us that such should be stoned,” they said. It was purely the reference to a law, to the appraisal of a sin by its assigned, appointed penalty. There is no thought of her, no consideration of what she is, or of what she possibly may be. It is only the sin, the law, and Moses, the appraiser of sins and laws by the standards of an absolute justice that is as impersonal and as free from obtrusive sympathies as the stars or winds. Then Jesus turns and looks around upon them all. He lets a silence fall through the great temple while He stoops and seems to write upon the ground. It is as if He wanted a gap, a blank of stillness, to come between their view about it all and His. Then He speaks: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” Do you not see the difference? Everything is personal. It is not “such as she,’ it is she. They are not mere mechanical executors of a written law; they are men who cannot escape personal judgments them- selves. They have something to do with her besides to stone her. They are partners in sin. They are beings with the same obligations, the same temptations, the same history of failure. The whole pulsates with personality. And when, after the Scribes and Pharisees have crept away, He turns to the woman and says, “I do not condemn thee: go, and sin no more,” — along with a deep and terrible sense of how dreadfully she had sinned, along with the most complete self-condemnation, there must have come into the poor creature’s heart a vision of the power of not sinning which was in her, in which she thenceforth could believe because He believed in it, and in the conscious possession of which she knew herself to be, in the first unlost but long unseen idea and deepest truth of her existence, the child of God. Or think about the other woman, who came creeping in, with her box of ointment, to anoint the feet of Jesus as He sat supping with the

Pharisee. The same contrast of treatment shines out there. The shocked and scandalized Pharisee cries out, “This man ought to have known who and what manner of woman this is!” It is “what manner of woman.” She is one of a class. She is a kind of being, not a being, not one live, loving, despairing woman. But Jesus begins to speak, and instantly there she is! No longer this “manner of woman,” but “this woman.” And then her story comes, — the story of her love for her rescuer, and of her humble and absorbing and self-forgetful desire to do something for Him; the story of her tears and kisses on His feet, and the spilt ointment whose fragrance yet filled the room. And it is told so that the most supercilious guests turn with a wondering recognition of a true human life among them; told so that the poor woman herself, while she cowered with shame and glowed with love, must have thrilled through and through with selfrecognition, with a knowledge of herself wholly new but perfectly certain and clear; told so that no figure of woman’s nature anywhere in history stands more clearly before the eyes of men to-day. And it is her possibility, undestroyed by all her sin; it is her power of loving the manifestation of God, — the power by which she may rise out of her sin and be what she was made to be, — it is this that He touches by His words and calls forth into life, and by its new life saves her soul, which seemed to be lost and dead.

In both these stories see the severity and see the gentleness! There is no making light of sin; there is no cruelty to the sinner. These two hands, one strong with stern holiness, the other gentle with sympathy, untwist the cords that bind the soul, and set it free to be itself. The rebuked sin becomes itself the impulse that sends the soul away from its sin into the revealed possibility of goodness. And these two hands they are which always Christ has used to rescue men’s souls. The perfect severity of holiness and the perfect tenderness of love, which blend nowhere but in the thought of the ideal family, blend perfectly in the moral method of the Son of God seeking His brethren.

Again, I think that this same idea appears in the way in which Jesus uses self-sacrifice, — that er On the Moral Life of Man. AI

instrument which all the moral disciplines that the world has seen have always used, but of which He always seems to make a higher and peculiar use. One kind of moral training uses self-sacrifice as punishment. Because you have done so much which you ought not to have done, therefore you shall surrender so much which it would give you pleasure to possess. Another uses self-sacrifice as an expression of the essential badness of the thing surrendered. Because the earth is inherently, intrinsically wicked, therefore come away from it and be separate. Because the body is accursed, therefore pluck out thy right eye, cut off thy right hand. But to Jesus self-sacrifice always is a means of freedom. That is what always gives to the self-denials which He demands a triumphant and enthusiastic air. Not because you have not deserved to enjoy it, not because it is wicked to enjoy it, but because there is another enjoyment more worthy of your nature, for which the native appetite shall show itself in you the moment that you really lay hold of it, therefore let this first inferior enjoyment go; and by this conception of the purpose of self-sacrifice, Christ’s law and limit of self-sacrifice is always settled. One day a young man came to Jesus. He had seen some glimpse of Jesus’s idea. He dreamed that he I might be a son of God. ‘What shall I do that I may reach eternal life?” he said. And Jesus lifted His finger and pointed out to him the long line of milestones that marked the way to his celestial aspiration, — humanity, purity, honesty, brotherly love. They did not satisfy the youth. He knew them all, and yet he did not get at what he wanted, what he dreamed of. “All these have I done. What lack I yet?” His soul was like a boat tied fast, but tied with a long rope. It was able to struggle up the channel, past headland and light and buoy that marked the way; but always something held it back from perfectly laying itself at rest beside the golden shore. “What lack I yet? What lack I yet?” And then said Jesus, “Go and sell all that thou hast, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” He did not say, “You do not deserve wealth.” He did not say, “It is wicked to be rich.” He only said, “You will be free if you are poor, and then I can lead you to the Father, in whom you shall find yourself.” He went back, past the buoys and headlands, down the bay to where the rope was tied, and cut the boat loose from its anchorage. The sadness with which the young man went away

“one would fain believe was the sadness of the

rescued slave, who misses and mourns for the familiar fetter, even while his heart begins already to open to the embrace of the new life of liberty that spreads bewilderingly, almost awfully before him.

I mention only one more indication of the fact that the standard which the morality of Jesus sets up is something far more intimate than a law of abstract right and wrong, or the example of a person between whom and us there is no essential and indestructible relationship. It is found in the vehement and passionate reaction which his teachings and rebukes excited. Jesus went about the cities which lined the upper shores of the Sea of Galilee. He told the people of their sins. He offered them the new life of obedience toHim. Instantly there was an outbreak. They did not just ignore Him. He did not merely seem to them an enthusiast, whom they could brush aside out of the reality that filled their practical life. They were betrayed into that last rage which no man feels until he is fighting with the highest idea of himself, the last and most desperate battle of the human soul. Jesus sees this, and there is pity burning through and under His indignation as He cries, ‘“Thou Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be cast down to hell.” It is the heaven where Capernaum be- * longs that makes the tragedy of the hell which she chooses. And so, when the Gadarenes begged the intrusive miracle-worker to depart out of their coasts; or when the congregation of the synagogue at Nazareth sprang up in rage when Jesus preached to them; or when the cry of blasphemy arose at the sight of the divine power that was in Him passing beyond the work of healing lameness, and beginning to claim its holier and dearer privilege of forgiving sins; or when, unseen, unheard, in many a brooding heart and many a suspicious whisper that vented its querulous maliciousness in the country lanes and

ib cottages, or in the palaces or hovels of Jerusalem, the tide of hatred slowly gathered which broke out at last with “Crucify him! crucify him!” before Pilate’s judgment seat, and raged in taunts and jeers around the cross, — through all these scenes there is no sufficient explanation of it all, until you get down to that seat wherein the deepest power of mortification and of rage resides, a wounded and wronged conscience. It was the national consciousness which, under that strange mingling of nationality and individuality which was the very genius of Judaism, meant likewise the consciousness of every man, the consciousness that the people was the people of God, that every man in it was the son of God, — it was this consciousness, summoned to life by the presence among them of the Son of God, that rose and beat against the low conditions of the life under which they had buried it, and made the tempest whose hoarse tumult we hear everywhere behind the gentle voice of Jesus as we open the Gospel doors.

This, then, I take to be the beginning of the Gospel of the Son of God. It is the renewal

of the divine consciousness in every man as the

standard by which he is to be judged. And the

power of that renewal is the Incarnation. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”; and, “to as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.” This is surely the moral power of that which Jesus, when He talks with Nicodemus, calls the “being born again.” The Pharisee wonders. It seems to him as if the new-found Rabbi told him something unnatural, something against the course of nature. It seems to be a going back. “Cana man enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” And Jesus answers: “Yes, it is a going back, only back much farther than you think, — much farther than the mother’s womb.

It must be a birth from heaven, taking you back

into heaven again. It must be a birth from God, restoring in you the first idea of your existence, that you are His child. You can enter into the kingdom of heaven only as, beneath all its

obscurations and accumulated hindrances, that

idea is stirred to life, and you are born at once )

out of the highest heights of God and into the deepest depths of yourself.”

Surely such an idea of man makes abundantly simple that which has often seemed so hard to understand. I mean the way in which righteousness and men’s struggles to be good have always refused to be confined to the limits of any specific culture or even to those who knew the name of Christ. Everywhere throughout the world, everywhere throughout the ages, men have sought holiness. The best and noblest men everywhere have always been true seekers after God. That is inexplicable if Christianity is a new power, a new gift to the faculties of man, nay, as it often seems to be stated, a new set of faculties in man which he has not possessed before. But how entirely explicable, how natural, it is, if what the Incarnation did was to redeem men into what was their original and undestroyed nature and privilege! What wonder that the hidden sonship should have been forever flashing forth wherever the crust of earthliness and sensuality and selfishness was thinnest! How divinely, as the dream and hope of all the best souls that had ever lived, as “the desire of all nations,” comes at last the Son of God “to take away sin by the sacrifice of Himself,’ by wondrous and unutterable pain so to make manifest the love of God that man’s selfishness might be broken into fragments, and the divine idea of humanity which had flashed forth through cracks should glow in one unhindered glory over all the redeemed life of man.

There is not one word of the argument for righteousness on abstract principles, or on the ground of its utility, in all the Gospels. Jesus and Socrates are absolutely incomparable. They start from different points. They journey by different roads. They come in sight of one another when their separate journeys mount to their highest elevations. They travel in the same direction, but they do not travel together. The one reveals; the other argues. And it is certainly true of Jesus that the Christian’s eagerness to show that all good and all methods for all good were embodied in Him has obscured the definite and single method which He did use to bring men into the service of duty. “Iam the Son of God,” He said. “Yet I am one with you. You, too, are the sons of God. His image, all blurred and stained, is in you. Let me set it free, restore it, redeem it; and then you shall live by the law of your own renewed wills. The pattern shall be in your hearts when those hearts once more are pure. The image of God, manifest first in Me, and from Me reawakened in your own filial consciousness, — that is the pattern of your life, the standard of your duty.”

And so we are ready now for the second point of which I wished to speak. Nothing is so imperfect, nothing, indeed, is so melancholy, so tragical, as a pattern set before a man which he has no power to attain. It is like a boat at sea with the best compass in the world on board, but neither oars nor sails. The faithful needle tells its story; there is no doubt which way we ought to sail; but there we lie, tossing up and down, without progress, or drifted only by the stupid sea on which we float. Along with the revelation of the Divine pattern in Christ finding its echo in the people’s selves to whom He spoke, there must have come some motive, some stimulus to

follow and attain the pattern which He set; and a that, the more we read the Gospels, it grows evident to us was just as simple and just as peculiarly His own as was the setting up of the pattern. The motive, too, was wholly personal, and was all based upon man’s filialness. It was purely and solely the elevation to its highest power of that same force which, in the human family, causes the father’s life to be repeated in the child’s. We call it love; but we must remember that full love always has two elements, and we must be sure that we keep both of them in our thought when we speak of the power by which the human life is shaped into the image of the Divine. Love is at once admiration and affection. We often separate the two. We talk of loving some poor creature in whom there is nothing admirable. We talk of loving some cold statue which makes no appeal to our affection. But really these are only mangled parts of love. True love, complete love, finely combines a pure, unselfish perception of the essential quality of a character with a warm personal gratitude for what that character bestows on us. The perception of absolute quality saves it from foolish

fondness, and the gratitude rescues it from being the mere dilettanteism of the connoisseur. It is a love like this which makes the power of Christian morals. Look,- for instance, at that great event in which the whole life and work of the Savior found its completion. I mean His crucifixion. I do not speak now of the essential mystery which is in that wonderful event. I count alike foolish and short-sighted the two men, both of whom try to eliminate and scatter the mysteriousness of the cross of Christ, one of them by saying that there is no peculiar and special character in that strange and single death, the other by dissecting its power into its elements and trying to account for all its force. I know that the death of the beggar, the death of the baby, has in it a mystery of force which no wisest man can comprehend. I know that He whose life was one with the baby’s and the beggar’s, and yet infinitely deeper, vaster, must have had a mystery in His death over which eternity shall keep guard, husbanding its treasures, and giving them forth to the eternally ripening soul as it shall need and shall be able to receive them. He who tells me that he will read to me now the mystery of the death of Jesus, shuts my ears with his very offer. I will not let him tear for me the mystery of the dawn which no hand can hasten as it slowly brightens to the full morning. And so it is not of the essential mystery of Christ’s powerful death, but of its immediate moral power that I speak. It is the great renewing spectacle of human life. When men look at it, there comes up out of their hearts the pattern of divinity which is there, their sonship to the Holy One; and to attain that holiness, to realize it perfectly, becomes the passion of their lives. And it is love for the Sufferer which makes that passion, — love with its two perfect elements perfectly combined. It is admiration for what He is doing, the unselfishness, the heroism, the godlike patience. And it is gratitude because He is doing it for us. It is these two that blend into the passionate devotion with which a man, in the great phrase of the Gospels, “follows after Christ,’ — seeks, that is, with his own essential sonship, to realize in himself the sonship of the Son of God.

Qne loves to think, nay, one rejoices to be sure, that under all the most artificial — shall we not say under all the most fantastic? — theories which men have framed and held concerning the power of the death of Jesus, this sweet and reasonable influence proceeding from it has always done its blessed work. With silent, soft, and mighty pressure, the sight of the Sufferer’s holiness and the gratitude for the Sufferer’s pity, as one complete power, one perfect love, has drawn the depths of men’s lives on to the nature of the Sufferer, and there their oneness to Him has become known to them, and they, in and through Him, have been renewed into the image of their Father and His Father. The robber who was crucified with Him felt that power first. It was a baptism of blood, and the power which our baptisms re-echo found its first utterance in him. “Being by nature born in sin-and the child of wrath,” there by the fellowship of suffering, there by the power of love, in which admiration and gratitude met, he was made the “child of grace.”

Let us trace now, if I have defined it clearly, some of the qualities which this inherent character of the Christian impulse imprints upon the Christian morality. And first of all I name that union of discontent and hope which, in the first disciples, and in all who have followed in their footsteps, has always marked the progress of the Christian’s moral life. Remember one more scene in the rich Gospels. It is once more the Sea of Galilee. Simon Peter, — that transparent nature in whom we are able to trace, as in the simplest organism, those changes and reactions which become obscure and hard to trace in structures that are more complete and complicated, — Simon Peter has Jesus in his little fishing-boat. And this time it is by some exhibition of His power, by some wonderful draught of fishes in the before empty net, that the personality of the Master has been pressed close upon His disciple. And then Peter breaks out. Prostrate at Jesus’s knees, “Depart from me,” he cries, “for I ama sinful man, O Lord!” Despondency, almost despair, a deep sight into his own heart, a bitter sense of contrast with the nature which the touch of miracle, like a flash of lightning, had made clear to him, — all this is in those passionate and hurried words. But what comes next? “When they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all and followed Him.” Peter and all the rest! Not only all the rest, but Peter! With the imploring cry, “Depart!” yet on his lips, he follows Him whom he had begged to go away. It was the power of love overwhelming the sense of unworthiness, and filling him with hope. It was the noble, beautiful inconsequence and inconsistence of a great nature all in tumult, which never felt the attraction of holiness so irresistibly as when it seemed altogether beyond his reach, and never so knew how unholy he was as at the very moment when the power of holiness was making him its slave and chaining him, a willing follower and servant, to the feet of the Holy One. Nothing but personal love can hold and harmonize that inconsistency. Only in the com- plete devotion of a soul that sees in the appar- — ently unattainable that which it knows, by a. sense beyond all reason, by a movement of its own profoundest consciousness, that it can and

must attain, — nothing but that could have made strength out of such weakness, and hope out of

the very substance of despair.

Again, I think that Christ’s whole use of punishments and threats is characteristic of the idea on which His whole moral treatment of humanity proceeds. A tyrant uses threats and punishments for restriction, desiring to repress that which is mischievous and bad. A parent, if he is truly parental, and not at all tyrannical, uses threats and punishments as means of revelation and enfranchisement, that he may set free for their own higher action a knowledge and ability which is held in prison. The blows of one are struck to bind the fetters tight; the other’s blows are struck to loose the fetters, that the limbs’ native powers may go free. What are the blows of Jesus? He sends out His disciples to do His work, to preach His gospel; and He declares to them what shall be the penalty of unfaithfulness and partial, compromising consecration. “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it.” But instantly, — part of the same verse, — before He takes His breath, He cries, “He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.” The threat is nothing to Him. He does not care to inspire fear unless, startled and stirred by danger, the men to whom He speaks can be made to tremble down so deep that the capacity of being all that He wants them to be shall wake out of its slumber and stand upon its feet, and, shaking the very thought of fear away, go forth to a duty which has its only inspiration in the consciousness of privilege and in the thought of blessing. He always shakes the sleepy soul, not as the jailer, who rouses the wretch upon his execution morning, to lead him to his death, but as the watchman, who puts the sword into the drowsy soldier’s hand that he may go and fight his battle. It is as a revelation of blessing by the dreadfulness of its opposite. It is as the golden medal shown on its reverse, with all its deep depressions only indicating the promontories of happiness and goodness which its true face contains. It is thus that Jesus always threatens men with punishment. The tutor of a French prince, I have read, used to tie a rod to the child’s sash when he had deserved to be punished for a fault. It was an appeal to his princeliness. It was the suggestion and reminder of how a prince ought to behave. It was an appeal to his native nobility, and not to his fear of pain. It seems to me as if every threatening of Christ were an appeal to the native princeliness of man, to his royal nature as the son of the King of kings, a sacred being to whom sin is eternally unnatural and punishment a dreadful anomaly and shame.

And yet again I find the same meaning in the wise and measured use which Jesus always makes of the machinery of duty and of the forms of righteousness in their relation to the impulse of duty and the purpose of righteousness. These last are never for a moment lost from sight. The kingliness of the impulse, the subordination of the instrument and the form, are never allowed to become obscure. An abandonment of all forms and outward instruments is very easy. A true adjustment of them to the unseen purposes which they subserve is as rare as it is hard, as hard as it is rare. It is in the healthiest and truest family life that their balance is most perfectly preserved. And when the Lord insists on celebrating His profound spiritual consecration by being baptized in Jordan; when, in His kingliness, He does not refuse to pay His tribute; when He sends the poor leper, who is already cured, to get his warrant of restored health from the priest; when He bids His disciples observe and do whatsoever the Pharisees who sit in Moses’s seat shall bid them do, — in all these cases it is the law of the family life which He is laying down to them, the law which reaches back to the fact, but yet does not neglect the method, and through the form tries to shape the substance for its maturer life. It is the perfection of that instinct with which the dying Socrates, having left his rich legacy of spiritual teaching to his scholars, with his last breath bids them not forget the cock for Aésculapius, which was the formal type and expression of his piety.

I have only one more suggestion to offer on this head. There are words of Jesus, here and there, in which He distinctly sets His own faithfulness as the type and inspiration of the faithfulness which He expects of His disciples. Listen to the solemnity which is in His voice as, at the table of the Last Supper, He looks up into His Father’s face and prays for these, His brethren: “As Thou has sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world. Sanctify them through Thy truth.” Or, just before, looking directly into the disciples’ eyes, “This is my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you.” And yet again, “I in them and Thou in Me, that they all may be one in Us,” Who can read words like these and not catch sight of what it was that was to fill these disciples’ lives with energy, and ‘to be the atmosphere wherein their new goodness should get all its growth? God’s fatherhood to them made visible in Christ, His Son; their sonship to God made visible in Christ, their brother. It was as if, at the beginning of all the ages down which their Christian life has run, they lay, like Jacob on the night when he went out to his new life from his father’s house, and to them, as to him, a ladder seemed to stretch up into heaven, and the angels of God ascended and descended on it, — the angels of duty bringing God’s strength to men, and carrying men’s obedience to God, on the ladder of the fatherhood and sonship that bound the heavens to the earth, set up in the new Beth-el, the new House of God, which was the life of Jesus.

It only remains that we should point out what must be some of the perpetual marks of a morality which is the outgrowth of such a faith as ours. Those marks belong to the Christian morality of all times. They are not separable from it. When we look into the future and see the goodness of humanity developing within the idea of Jesus, we must expect to see a greater and greater prominence of those marks in it. When we seek our own moral development from Him, we must look for it in the only kind which His method can bestow.

The first mark will be the prominence of what we may call the duties of sentiment. “Thou shalt love the Lord.” “Thou shalt love thy brother.” Thou shalt love. The duty of loving, — there is nothing of that in the codes of abstract duty. It is impossible to exclude that from its fundamental place in the system of duty whose constant spring is in the fatherhood of

God. But evidently this quality, this exaltation of the duty of sentiment over the duty of action, which makes the action valuable simply as an utterance of the sentiment, — this is a most important quality. It cannot be ignored. It gives the color and tone to all the morality which it pervades. It exposes that morality, no doubt, at the outset, to the charge and the danger of weakness and sentimentality, but in the end it gives it a buoyancy and elasticity and perpetual vitality which prophesy for it a permanence as endless as the Being in whose love it lives is everlasting; and so it is the one morality for which we can predict no end. Of this quality in duty it is no Christian’s place to be ashamed or afraid. None of us may melt it away or sink it out of sight. In its prominence lies the soul of the duty that we do. We may not try to make that duty cold and soulless which has its true being in the central commandment which is its living soul, — “Thou shalt love.” Another mark of the Christian morality, the morality whose root is in the sonship of the soul to God, is the harmony with which it holds the absoluteness of goodness and the various responsibilities of men, It is full of discriminations which yet never tamper with the unchangeable sanctity of righteousness. As in the parable of Him from whom it all proceeds, so, in the life which that parable describes, the different talents of different servants are fully taken into the account. Duty is measured by chance, and yet the essential idea of duty is never weakened. I am bound to do less than you, but I am just as severely bound to do my little as you are to do your much. Where else could those ideas be kept in perfect harmony and peace, neither of them hurting the other, but within the larger idea of fatherhood? In what group could the child take his little task, fitted to his little hands, and do it, with the entire conviction that he must do it, and, nevertheless, not vexed nor bewildered by the sight of tasks a thousand times greater than his own being done close by his side; and, at the same time, the great man, the hero, dedicate himself to his vast work with no sense of oppression or injustice, nor with any feeling of superiority or pride, — in what group could these two faithful souls work on, in such difference and yet in such identity, but in a family where every child has his own special duty, great or small, clothed with the absoluteness of the Fatherhood which is over all? Where, but in the family idea of man, can these two necessary conceptions of the difference of duties and the absoluteness of duty meet in perfect peace?

I note again, as a characteristic of the morality of sonship, the way in which it secures humility by aspiration and not by depression, How to secure humility is the hard problem of all systems ’ of duty. He who does work, just in proportion to the faithfulness with which he does it, is always in danger of self-conceit. Very often men seem to have given up the problem in despair, and they lavish unstinted praise upon the vigorous, effective worker without any qualifying blame of the arrogance with which he flaunts the duty that he does in the world’s face. “The only way to make him humble,” they would seem to say, “would be to make him idle. Let him stop doing duty and then, indeed, he might stop boasting. His arrogance is only the necessary price that the

world and he pay for his faithfulness.” To such a problem the Christian morality brings its vast conception of the universe. Above each man it sets

the infinite life. The identity of nature between

that life and his, while it enables him to emulate

that life, compels him, also, to compare himself

with it. The more zealously he aspires to imitate it, the more clearly he must encounter the comparison. The higher he climbs the mountain, the more he learns how the high mountain is past his climbing. It is the oneness of the soul’s life with God’s life that at once makes us try to be like Him and brings forth our unlikeness to Him. It is the source at once of aspiration and humility. The more aspiration, the more humility. Humility comes by aspiration. If, in all Christian history, it has been the souls which most looked up that were the humblest souls; if to-day the rescue of a soul from foolish pride must be not by a depreciation of present attainment, but by opening more and more the vastness of the future possibility; if the Christian man keeps his soul full of the sense of littleness, even in all his hardest work for Christ, not by denying his own stature, but by standing up at his whole height, and then looking up in love and awe and seeing God tower into infinitude above him, — certainly all this stamps the morality which is wrought out within the idea of Jesus with this singular excellence, that it has solved the problem of faithfulness and pride, and made possible humility by aspiration. And yet, once more, the morality of Jesus involves the only true secret of courage and of the freedom that comes of courage. More and more we come to see that courage is a positive thing. It is not simply the absence of fear. To be brave is not merely not to be afraid. Courage is that compactness and clear coherence of all a man’s faculties and powers which makes his manhood a single operative unit in the world. That is the reason why narrowness of thought and life often brings a kind of courage, and why, as men’s range of thought enlarges and their relations with their fellowmen increase, there often comes a strange timidity. The bigot is often very brave. He is held fast unto a unit, and possesses himself completely in his own selfishness. For such a bravery as that the man and the world both pay very dear. But when the grasp that holds a man and his powers is not his self-consciousness but his obedience to his Father, when loyalty to Him surrounds and aggregates the man’s capacities, so that, held in His hand, the man feels his distinctiveness, his distinctive duty, his distinctive privilege, then you have reached the truth of which the bigot’s courage was the imitation. Then you have secured courage, not by the limitation, but by the enlargement of the life. Then the dependence upon God makes the independence of man in which are liberty and courage, The man’s own personality is found only in the household of his Father, and only in the finding of his personality does he come to absolute freedom and perfect fearlessness,

- May I take a moment now before I close to recapitulate the points along the journey which we have travelled together to-night? We found the family character of Christian duty — the way in which it gathered its source out of the essential sonship of man to God — $indicated in the meeting, first, of the pattern of righteousness and the power of righteousness; and, second, of reasonableness and authority in all the duty which the New Testament enjoins. This I tried to show you in the text-book of duty, the Sermon on the Mount.

Then I tried to show where the moral standard was put by Jesus. It is in the heart of every son of God made conscious of his sonship by the Son of God, who is Jesus.

Then we traced the nature of this standard as it was actually shown, first, in the combination of severity and goodness in the treatment of man by Jesus; second, in the character of His teaching about self-sacrifice; and third, in the vehement opposition and hatred which His life excited.

At the same time we saw that while this standard came to its full manifestation in Christianity, it had been struggling for utterance through all the religious life of man.

Passing, then, from the standard of morals to the motive of morals as Jesus established it, it seemed to be love, justly and fully composed of its two elements of admiring appreciation and personal gratitude.

The working of this motive we saw, first, in the play of discontent and hope which characterizes all the moral life of Christianity; second, in the use which Jesus makes of threats and punishments; third, in the relation which He establishes between forms and methods on the one hand and impulses and purposes upon the other; and, fourth, in His distinct embrace of all motive within His own person.

And last of all I tried to show how Christian morality, as the result of all that I had pointed out before, was marked supremely by the duties of sentiment, by combination of absoluteness and breadth with personal definiteness, by the effort to secure humility through aspiration, and by the courage which is born of obedience.

I know full well how lightly I have travelled over such vast, rich ground, and how much of its riches I have left ungathered. I can only hope that I have shown some thoughtful people where the riches lie, that they may go themselves and gather them.

It was in His sonship to God that the secret of the holiness of Jesus lay. His Father’s business was the sum of all His life. He knew no motive except that which was summed up in the gratitude of His great prayer: “Father, I have glorified Thee on the earth: I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do.” The model and the impulse of all duty He carried in His own filial heart, which was forever bearing witness to Him of His Father’s perfectness. His incarnate days, with all their common duties held and illuminated in that high consciousness of sonship, must have been one with the eternity of the past and the eternity that was to be. Duty must have been its own revealer and its own reward. Liberty must have been sublimely consistent with the most scrupulous obedience. The doing right and the being right must have been like the sunshine and the sun. And what duty was to our Master it shall be to us just as soon as we are filled with His idea, just as soon as His spirit bears witness with our spirits that we too are the sons of God.