On the Social Life of Man

MAN TRAVELLER in the Old World is deeply

interested in seeing what are the most complete embodiments of themselves which the different struggles of human nature in thought and devotion, have left in art. I remember well the impression of contrast which I received from two when I saw them for the first time, many years ago. In one of the most rich and beautiful of European galleries hangs Raphael’s greatest Madonna, called the Madonna of St. Sixtus. Among the dreary sands at the edge of the Egyptian desert, under the shadow of the Pyramids, stands the mighty Sphinx, the work of unknown hands, so calm and so eternal in its solitude that it is hard to think of it as the work of human hands at all; as true a part of the great earth, it seems, as any mountain that pierces upward from its bosom. These two suggest comparisons which are certainly not fancies. They are the two great expressions, in art, of the two religions, — the religion of the East and of the West. Fatalism and Providence they seem to mean. Both have recognized the feminine nature of the religious instinct, for each is a woman. Both have tried to express a union of humanity with something which is its superior; but one has joined it only to the superior strength of the animal, while the other has filled it with the superior spirituality of a divine nature. One unites wisdom and power, and claims man’s homage for that conjunction. The other combines wisdom and love, and says, “Worship this.” The Sphinx has life in her human face written into a riddle, a puzzle,a mocking bewilderment. The Virgin’s face is full of a mystery we cannot fathom, but it unfolds to us a thousand of the mysteries of life. It does not mock, but blesses us. The Egyptian woman is alone amid her sands, to be worshipped, not loved. The Christian woman has her child clasped in her arms, enters into the societies and sympathies of men, and claims no worship except love.

It is in this last difference — the difference between the solitude of one and the companionship of the other — that we feel, I think, most distinctly how different is the Christianity of the picture from the sublime paganism of the statue. - The picture is Christian, because it is so truly human. It has not lost humanity in trying to interpret Deity. It invites, entices, wins the soul of the man who studies it. It folds itself about his life with a kindred life. It wants him. It seeks him. It is not satisfied till it has found him. Then, as if it were satisfied, there seems to come a new depth in its color, a new sweetness in its celestial light.

I am to speak to you to-day of the way in which the influence of Jesus enters into the social life of man. I have been led to this remembrance of what we may almost call the constructive power in a great work of Christian art. It is positive, and finds and fastens the relationship of human souls to the Divine soul,and so of human souls to one another. As I began to write this lecture, in the midst of the Christmas days, I could not help feeling how the same idea was present in that ever-vivid scene of Bethlehem, which shines in the simple and inspired words of the first chapters of the Gospels with a clearness and a depth that the pencil of Raphael could never give. A father, a mother, and a child are there. No religion which began like that could ever loseitscharacter. The first unit of human life, the soul, is there in the new-born personality of the childhood. But the second unit of human life, the family, is just as truly there in the familiar relation of husband and wife, and the sacred, eternal mystery of motherhood. He who would know the whole about this Jesus must learn not merely what his own soul will grow to be, but likewise what new life the presence of Jesus in the midst of it will give to this the primal typal group of human life and to all the other groups, the larger families which this one represents. Let me define, then, in a few words, what I want to do to-day. It is to show how the idea of Jesus is the constructive power of the social life of man in all its various degrees. That idea we saw in our last lecture was the sonship of man to God, revealed in the sonship to God of Jesus

Christ himself. All that He had to show man He had first in Himself; and it was by the development in men’s sight of His own gradually conscious life that He revealed to men all that they might become. If this be true, then it is by a study of the social life of Jesus, by seeing how His experience from the very beginning opened into successive relationships, and claimed for itself larger and yet larger intercourses, that we can get His true idea of how the relationships and intercourses of all men ought to be built, how that idea of the Divine Father may become the shaping and cohesive power of them all. This makes the duty that lies before us once more a Biblical study. In those old stories of the Gospels lies our material. Every one of those stories is the idea of Jesus flashed from a new side of His jewel life. All that the fatherhood of God may be to any of His children it was first and perfectly to that only-begotten Son. If we can see what He was among his fellow-men and what His life among them was to Him, we shall have the key to all the mysteries and problems of our own social life.

In the first place, then, the social life of Jesus underwent the natural and human progress and change from an instinctive impulse to a deliberate and reasonable conduct. He would have been no true child and man, He would have been a human monster, if it had not been so. I think that it is a most happy sign of the healthy reality which the life of Jesus is gaining in men’s thoughts in these our modern days, that this idea of the development of his consciousness, the gradual growth into the knowledge and the use of His own nature, is no longer an idea that bewilders and shocks the believer in the Lord’s divinity. It is felt to be a necessary part of the belief in His humanity. Two centuries, perhaps one century, ago, I think that Christ was far less real to men than He is now. However it may have been with the last century, the century before the last was a religious age. But its religion had grown strangely impersonal. It believed doctrines far more than it believed in the Son of Man. The seventeenth century believed the divinity of Christ, but its belief in the divine Christ was weak, and the belief in the human Christ

a was wellnigh lost, and with this loss I cannot but feel that we must in some way connect the dislike of Christmas and its observance which then arose, and which is but just now passing entirely away. It had its local causes, which account for it, no doubt. But the whole idea of childhood, with its necessary concomitant idea of growth, was a bewilderment and almost an offence to that theology whose Christ was a mysterious and unaccountable being, a true spiritual Melchisedec, without vivid and real human associations, without age, without realized locality, a dogma, a creed, a fulfilment of prophecy, an adjustment of relations, not a man. It is because Jesus to-day is intensely real, intensely human to us, that we welcome and do not dread the truth of increase and development from babyhood to the full strength and stature of a man.

And nowhere is this clearer or more beautiful than in that feature of His life which we have to-day to study. The social life of Christ was first an instinct. The child clasped His tiny arms about His mother’s neck, or laid His little hand into the strong hand of Joseph, as they walked on the long road to Egypt, with the same simple desire to utter love and to find love which is the first sign of Life akin to their own that millions of parents’ hearts have leaped to recognize in their first-born. Nay, he but little understands the dignity and unity of all God’s vast creation who is offended or distressed when he is told that in the Lord of Life these primal affections were of the same sort with those which make the beauty of the life of the beings which are less than man. Even the dog, the bird, the lion, know these first instincts of companionship which found their consummate exhibition upon earth when the Son of Mary clung toa human mother with a human love. That instinctive character never passed out of the relationships of Christ. When He bade the disciples go with Him to the mountain of transfiguration or to the garden of the agony, beneath every design of their enlargement or enlightenment, who does not feel beating the simple human desire for company in the supremely triumphant or supremely terrible moments of life? When He looks at His disciples, as the multitude are leaving Him, and asks them, “Will ye also go away?” or when these same disciples forsake Him and flee upon the night of trial, below the sorrow that He feels for their defection as a sign of their unworthiness, who does not hear the poor heart cry out with that same dread of being left alone which the forlorn wretch in his prison feels as the cell door clashes to between him and humanity? We must start with this instinct, and always this instinct must remain, felt like the beating heart which makes it live, underneath all the fuller understanding of itself into which the companionship of Christ, his social life, may grow. But such a growing understanding comes. As Jesus develops into manhood, the idea of His existence grows and rounds itself to clearness. By and by He is full of the consciousness that He is the Son of God, and that through His sonship this world-full of men is to learn that they are God’s sons and are to be brought back to their Father. And when He had been filled with that idea, then the instinct which had already drawn Him to his brethren found its interpretation. He knew why He sought them.

It was for the self-indulgence of His own consciousness, and it was for the enlightenment of theirs. By and by, if I ask why Jesus shrinks from solitude, and craves to have John and James and Peter with him, I find myself able to say, I find myself compelled to say, something more than just that such is His healthy human instinct. I recognize that He is deliberately seeking two things there: first, the self-knowledge of His own sonship to God; and, second, the enlightenment of these men’s consciousness to know that they are the sons of God. I see the sun break in with a triumphant burst of light upon a chamber set with countless jewels, but which has thus far been wholly shut up in the dark. There isa double joy, I think, in the great heart of the sunlight as, almost with a shout that one can hear, it floods the opened chamber with itself. First, it finds new interpretation of itself, it finds itself, as it were, in the new stories of its glory which the jewels tell, as, one by one, they burn under its touch; and, second, it feels every jewel quiver under its fiery hand with the transporting discovery of its own nature. I see a good man, long o shut out from human company, come among his brethren with a leap and burst almost like the sunshine, he casts his solitude behind him and flings himself into their sympathies and hopes. I let the explanation of it at first rest in the mere unexplained instinct of humanity; but when I come to analyze his motive to its elements, I know that it must be made up of these two impulses, the desire of self-knowledge and the desire of illuminating others, the desire of burning and the desire of shining, which are the two strong, ineradicable passions of the soul. The man goes into the multitude that he may find himself and that he may declare them to themselves. All human society which has not these impulses more or less consciously within it is but the herding of animals for the mere fear of being alone or the mere joy of being together.

All this is illustrated with great clearness in that event which has a profound interest as marking the first recorded time when Jesus ever deliberately and of His own accord sought the society of His fellow-men. He lingered behind the group into which the mere circumstances of

His life had cast Him, and for Himself He sought the venerable doctorsin the Temple. What took Him there? To find Himself and to show them to themselves. The two great, everlasting human impulses, the impulse of the student seeking to know himself, and the impulse of the missionary seeking to enlighten men, — these two,

which partial men call inconsistent and incom-’

patible with one another, burned with a single flame — the first no doubt the brightest, but yet incapable of being separated from the other — in the soul of Jesus, as, among His brethren, He began to “be about His Father’s business.”

In general, then, the social nature of man is the provision at once for his most complete self-consciousness and for his fullest activity and efficiency. It was by losing His life in the multitude and mass of lives, in the body of the humanity to which He belonged, that Jesus at once found His own life and found the lives of the lost whom He had come to seek. At the very outset He bore witness that not in absolute singleness, not in elemental unity and perfect solitude of being, is the highest existence to be

j found. He recognized at once in man that multiplicity and power of relationship within the unit of humanity which makes the richness of our human life. If it be so, as we believe it is, that in the constitution of humanity we have the fairest written analogue and picture of the Divine existence, then shall we not say that the human Christ gave us, in the value which He set on human relationships, in His social thought of man, an insight into the essentialness and value of that social thought of God which we call the doctrine of the Trinity? May it not be that only by multiplicity and interior self-relationship can Divinity have the completest self-consciousness and energy? Surely, the reverent and thoughtful eye must see some such meaning when Jesus Himself makes the eternal companionship of the life of Deity the pattern and picture of the best society of the souls of earth, and breathes out to His Father these deep and wondrous words, “As thou Father art in Me and I in Thee, that they all may be one in Us.”

Let us pass on now to examine in more detail the social life of Jesus as it is written in the Gospels, and to see, if we can, what suggestions come from it to throw light upon the true methods of all social living. It naturally divides itself into the three sections into which all our relations to our fellow-men fall; and in that division it will be natural for us to consider it. I shall speak first of the natural relationships of Jesus with individuals; and then of His relation to the group of disciples which was the rudimentary church; and then of His relation to His country. The — purely social, the ecclesiastical, and the patriotic life demand our study.

Every now and then there are flashes of light upon the Gospel page which let us see what a bright, sunny, sympathetic life the Savior lived, — how perfectly free from harshness and asceticism was that character which, at the same time, carried a sweet and gentle seriousness and a robust earnestness with it wherever it went. “The son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” So Jesus Himself described one day the current impression that His life made upon the people of Jerusalem.

The words are like an instantaneous photograph of that far distant time. Where one’s enemies find chance to taunt, one’s friends almost always find occasion to be puzzled. In those words we can see friends and enemies alike busied with the strange life of Jesus, and only gradually finding out that it was they who were strange, and not He, — gradually coming first to feel and then to understand that this life of His, so bright and yet so serious, so individual and yet so social, had reached completely what their lives were only crudely struggling after. The same feeling broke forth upon another day. Jesus was supping at a “great feast” in the house of Levi, — no sumptuous Venetian banquet, such as the great master’s hand has painted, but a half-barbaric scene of profuse hospitality which merely told the host’s good-will, — and the Pharisees looked on and said, “Why do the disciples of John fast, and likewise the disciples of the Pharisees, but thine eat and drink?” They hated John the Baptist, but they understood him. They found him in the same region of spiritual endeavor in which they lived themselves. They recognized in him the same desire to realize individual responsibility and the seriousness of life by isolation, by surrender, by cutting off everything which by completing life should confuse it. Jesus had pushed on where they could not follow Him. He had gone into the very heart of the society where men lose their individuality to find His, and into the very centre of that world where seriousness is ordinarily lost, to find there the true solemnity of living.

For always there are these three possible stages in every advancing moral and spiritual life. There is, first, safety in simplicity; and, second, the loss of self in complication; and then, at last, the higher self-possession in a symmetrical and harmonized multiplicity. They are the stages which are represented by childhood and young manhood and middle life, in every complete career. The child, with his simple, serene, uncomplicated thought of life, seems master of himself; the young man, tossed like a helpless swimmer in the midst of the billowy world, has lost himself; the man of middle age, who has reached the profoundest faiths and principles of living, has found himself, and lives in a steady self-possession which is to the child’s security like the noonday to the dawn. Now the Pharisees were children. They were afraid of life. They wanted to perpetuate childhood by keeping it out of the power of life. John Baptist’s disciples, too, were children; only the difference was that their great master knew that the true childhood does not last, but turns to something greater. He sent his disciples forth into life, — the life of exposure, and so the life of true attainment, — when he pointed them to Jesus and said, “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world,’ — not merely stifles them and keeps them down, but “taketh them away.”

Nowhere is Jesus satisfied until He himself has reached, and till He has led His disciples on towards, this third region of completed character, and made them possess themselves, not in solitude, where character would be so much easier and so much more imperfect, but in contact with the world. I know that we lose much of the beauty of His treatment, both of Himself and of His servants, when we feel about in its clear depths for conscious and definite intentions. I know that He, above’all men, did what He did because He was what He was, — from a deeper necessity than any deliberate persuasion that His disciples needed this or that teaching at this or that special time. But still, as we formulate the impulses of nature into the laws of nature, and find reasons, which the winds and suns do not care themselves to know, why they should blow and shine just as we feel and see them, — reasons true, though not the truest or the deepest, — so we may dare to say about the acts of Jesus, “He must have done this act for this,” if we can only keep the deeper knowledge that He did every act just as He did it because He was Jesus, and could not do it otherwise. Using such reverent liberty, I think we may love to study the way in which He opened every social event into its deeper meaning, so that the men who were in danger of losing themselves in the crowd might really find themselves, might enter into a self-possession there which they could not attain in solitude. Let us look at a few.

Jesus went one day to a marriage feast at the little town of Cana. Why did He go? I know no reason except that for which we go to where our friends are happy, — to make them know that we are glad because of their happiness. When He came there, the rooms were full of men and women, all vividly conscious that they belonged to one another. Husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, all degrees of kinship, all kinds of cousins, all feeling their common blood upon this family holiday. To Him, the grave, strong, sweet-faced man who stood among them, so familiar yet so strange, they were His Father’s children. They had forgotten that. They were so absorbed in their brotherhoods that they had forgotten their Father. The miracle which Jesus did was like the opening of a window upward, so that that truth shone down upon them. They were giving one another bread and meat in token of their brotherhood. Suddenly Jesus spoke to the water in the jars, and there was wine before them, so suddenly, so mysteriously, so apart from any ministry which they were doing to each other, that they looked into one another’s faces g2 The Influence of Fesus

and felt divinity. They said, “Our Father must be here. We are not only brothers, we are children. Let us remember that.” And each remembered it the better because he did not drink the mysterious wine alone, but saw his brethren drinking it beside him. Each found himself the child of God more easily because of the fragment of the universal family in which the wonder and awakening came to him.

Or turn again to one of the scenes of which I spoke in the last lecture. Jesus went once to supper in a ruler’s house. Again the consciousness of brotherhood lay like a rich atmosphere through the great, softly lighted hall. While they are eating, behold a poor creature comes creeping in, and casts herself at the feet of the honored Guest, and begins (what other words can describe it except those dear words of the story?) to “wash His feet with her tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His feet and anointed them with the ointment.” Jesus looked up, and with clear, brave, simple words told the perplexed company that she was one of them, able to love, able to trust, able to be forgiven. What then? All these are privileges and powers of childhood knowing a fatherhood above it. The guests listened; and as when a group of men, — all prosperous, all respectable, brothers to one another, — talking together, see suddenly among them one, their brother too, but poor, sick, wretched, pitiable, and then their thoughts turn back to the house where they all were children, and the father who was father to them all; as the very sight of inequality compels the simple sense of brotherhood to complete itself with the memory of fatherhood; so, when Jesus lifted this poor creature up and said, as He looked round upon the upright, reputable men, “This is your sister,’ the brotherhood that filled the hall warmed with the deeper memory of fatherhood, and the guests found their childhood to God in the strange society of the noblest of His sons and the most degraded of His daughters.

There was one house where Jesus went very often, — the cottage of Mary and Martha and Lazarus at Bethany. There He lived not merely a social but a domestic life, — not merely a life of society, but a life of home. In that house, brotherhood and sisterhood bloomed into such perfect flower that it has been fragrant and beautiful to all the generations. They were religious people. No doubt each of them in solitude strove after and found the fatherhood of God. But we can well imagine that when they were together it was their brotherhood and sisterhood that was most prominent. And what did Jesus do for them? Silver and gold, like His disciple, He had none; but such as He had, His own supreme consciousness, such as He was, He gave to them. One day He told the anxious elder sister that there was a “better part” in life than the most faithful work for the comfort of brother and of sister. He taught her His own lesson, that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God his Father. On another solemn day He allowed the household life to feel the shock of death and to be broken, in order that He might call upon His Father and their Father to restore it by what was like to a new birth. And as the coming of a child into a household breaks open its narrowness to let in the broad thought of God, so the brotherhood and sisterhood of Bethany must have been deepened and filled with the consciousness of sonship and daughtership, whenever that boy-man — young forever with something of the perpetual youth of those who have passed through the grave and come out in the timeless life beyond — went about among them.

I turn to one scene more. Jesus was teaching one day in the Temple, doing His Father’s business, and some one told Him that far off, on the outside of the crowd, His mother and His brothers were waiting to talk with Him. He paused perhaps a moment, as if pondering whether He should leave His work, and then, just, it seems to me, as if He stooped down and took hold of the human relationship which had been offered Him, and turned it over to show men its diviner side, He looked around and said, “Who are My mother and My brethren?” And then, stretching out His hand to His disciples, “These are My mother and My brethren.” It was as if He said, “Motherhood and brotherhood are true and real only within the fatherhood of God. Whenever that common fatherhood is real, there is a true relationship to which the tender associations of earthly kinship are in themselves inferior. The earthly kinships are the symbol of this celestial reality. The beauty of the household is in the reality, not in the symbol. The symbol and the reality belong together. My brothers and My mother after the flesh do represent to Me, as no other beings can, the dear fatherhood of God, the relations of eternity. But sometimes the symbol must wait, lest it hinder instead of helping the reality.” Therefore, Mary waited while Jesus went on and preached to those whom He claimed as “brother and sister and mother,’ because they were doing the will of His Father which was in heaven.

All these are illustrations. In every one of them, I take it, the meaning is the same. Jesus begins with the individual. He always does. His first and deepest touches are upon the single soul. Before all social life there is the personal consciousness and its mysterious private relations to the Father from whom it came. The father cannot teach his boy so early that God shall not have taught him first. The mother cannot drop such soft, unconscious influence into her child’s soul that it shall not find the soul itself already full of the influence of God. In the individual experience man’s life always begins. But there are some things of the individual life which the individual cannot get save in the company of fellow-men. There are some parts of his own true life always in his brethren’s keeping, for which he must go to them. That the individual may find and be his own truest and fullest self, Jesus, his Master, leads him to his fellows, The wedding guest at Cana, the Pharisee at Levi’s table, the sisters with their restored brother, the brothers of the Lord in the house - of the carpenter, — all, just as soon as Jesus sanctified and blessed the society in which they lived, saw coming to them as it were out of the heart of that society a selfhood which no solitary contemplation could have gained. Each of them found his Father among his brethren, — reached God through the revelation of other human

lives.

This is the fundamental truth out of which comes the regulative law of Jesus about social life. Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it not to lose, but to find himself. The ancient society, the heathen society of to-day, whether in some savage island or in some fashionable parlor, is ready always to sacrifice the personal nature, the individual soul. As if society itself were an object worthy of perfecting for its own value, it overwhelms individual character and pitilessly sees lives lost in its great whirlpool. I think the great charge that Jesus, if He spoke to-day, would bring against our modern social life, our present society, as it in large part exists, would be this: He would see its impurity; He would recognize the falseness that pervades it; He would turn away from its sordidness with disappointment; but, most of all, He would miss in it that power to cultivate the personal life of the individual by the revelation of the divine side of human existence which is everywhere His ideal of social living. It is not always so. ‘There are small groups of men gathered on such high ground that each of them becomes aware of himself, of his capacities and duties, in the association with his brethren. Especially there are friendships, the sympathetic meeting of man and man, in which each knows himself as he could not in solitude. But our ordinary life with one another, what, in the language of the world, we call soczety, has so left and lost the spontaneousness of natural impulse and so failed to attain the highest conception of itself as the family of God, it so hangs fast in the dull middle regions of conventional propriety and selfish expediency, that it becomes not the fountain, but the grave, of individuality. Men go to it to escape themselves. Men dread it, as they grow older, for younger men, because its influences seem to be fatal to original and positive character. Men flee to solitude to recruit their personality. Nowhere do we find on earth that picture of society reconstructed by the idea of Jesus, society around the throne of God, which shines out upon: us from the mysterious promises of the Apocalypse; the glory of which society is to be this, — that while the souls stand in their vast choruses of hundreds of thousands, and all chant the same anthems and all work together in the same transcendent duties, yet each bears the sacred name written on the flesh of his own forehead, and carries in

his hand a white stone, on which is written a new

name which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. It is individuality emphasized by company, and not lost in it, because the atmosphere in which the company is met is the idea of Jesus, which is the fatherhood of God.

And here we come where we can understand some other things which the great Teacher said, which, if they stood alone, would puzzle us hopelessly. Here He is, in His mountain sermon, telling of what is to be the issue of His work. It is almost as if He spoke in reverie. He hardly seems to. be speaking to the people, or to be conscious of them. He seems to be reading for the -

first time a page of the future which has never opened to Him before; or to be rereading one which, however often He may read it, is forever new and wonderful. “Think not that lam come to send peace on the earth,’ He says; “I came not to send peace, butasword. ForIam come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law: and a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” And at another time, when He looked around, and saw a superficial multitude following Him, He seemed seized with that desire which many a true man has felt, to test and sift the allegiance that seemed to be gathering only too easily. He paused and turned, and stopped the crowd that - was pursuing Him, and He cried out across their heads, so that the farthest heard Him, “If any man come to Me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, he cannot be My disciple.” There is almost defiance in the words. But they seem to me to be like so many words of Jesus which we cannot understand if we think of Him only as a teacher, only as a giver of lessons to men whom He counted His pupils. We must think of Jesus as a soul, undergoing experiences, living a life all through those years, or else the Gospels are a very dead and barren book. And if we have known what it is to look forward and see, with terror which yet is glorified by hope, that the great purpose on which our heart is set is to be won only by first casting it, with seeming recklessness, away, — if, for instance, we have seen that we must lay the foundations of a boy’s true faith upon the very ruins of what he has been calling his creed; if the reformer, full of the visions of a bright, free, happy land, knows often that he must take the firebrand and set the land on fire before he can begin his work; if every one of us has had to disturb the unreal quiet of what called itself a friendship in order that we might be deeply and truly a friend to some heart which he coveted, — if all these are familiar things, then we can understand how the Rebuilder of human life about the fatherhood of God dwelt with pathetic certainty upon the destruction that must come before that construction could begin. The more intensely He knew the preciousness of the end, the more necessary and the more terrible became theseeming sacrifice of that end over which He must go to reach it. The more He gloried with His heart full of the memories of heaven, in the prospect of the re-established family of God, where each child should find his own distinctive

childhood in the common filial life of all, so much the more He saw with sadness, but with certainty, that the merely human groupings of men, in which each man lost his own true self among his brethren, must be broken up. The more He longed to see the Temple full of consecrated worshippers, the more ruthlessly He drove out the barterers and hucksters who had monopolized its courts.

The key, then, to all Christ’s treatment of man’s social life lies here, — in the constant desire to foster the consciousness of divine sonship by intercourse with those who are fellow-sons of the same Father. And here we see what is meant by the constant alternation, the effort after balance, as it were, between society and solitude, first in the life of Jesus himself, and then in the life which He enjoined on His disciples. Think over some of the purely solitary moments which Jesus passed. No sooner was His work fairly begun, no sooner was He completely consecrated to it, than the Spirit, His Spirit, took Him away from the company of His home, and the solitude of the Temptation followed. The need of realizing

Himself had come. He must struggle into the knowledge of what it meant to be in the world. He must meet the devil of doubt and of despair. It is a most mysterious event, but its mystery is of that sort which becomes more and more mysterious to us, not because it is so unlike, but because it is so like, what goes on in our own careers. That is always the most wonderful sort of mystery. Jesus, there in the desert, shakes His life free, as it were, from the shell of childhood, and thereby, for the first time, takes possession of the perfectly childlike soul. Heisa man,and the secret which manhood whispers into His ear in that moment of initiation, — a secret not new and yet forever new, because it is infinite, — is simply that God is His Father. Care, obedience, trust, the holding back of the life until the Father bids it go, the sending forth of the life wherever the Father demands it, — these, which are the elements of conscious childhood, Jesus took up there in the desert. That totality of life, that unity of it in a single conception and a single use, which often afterwards cameso grandly from His lips, — it must have been there in the desert that He came to know it first.

All that was done in solitude. And then, when the idea is there, when the core and centre of life has been set, He comes down, and instantly He draws near to men and draws men to Him. About that core, both for its own satisfaction and safety and for the blessing of the lives He summons, He must group the souls into a society. He sees Simon Peter and Andrew, and they are no sooner with Him than James and John are beckoned with a bright gesture or challenged with a ringing word from their half-mended nets; and then, with them around Him, He plunges into populous Galilee, and all its villages begin to know His face and watch for His coming, and make their contribution to His company. Solitude makes the consciousness; society develops, multiplies, and confirms it. That which would have remained only a quality in Him, if He had stayed in the desert, becomes a life when He goes forth into the world. What Goethe wisely says of all men does not lose its truth when we are thinking of the Son of Man: “A talent shapes itself in stillness, but a character in the tumult of the world.” This is Christ’s balance between solitude and society.

Each makes the other necessary. With us they often lose this value, because they are not set in any relation to each other. Solitude is barren, and so society is frivolous. Solitude creates noconsciousness for society to ripen. Solitude is like an unfertile seed, and society is like an unplanted ground. Each craves the other, not because it wants its complement, but because it is tired of itself and longs to change.

I think there is something exquisitely beautiful in the unerring play of this balance in the life of Jesus. Not more surely does the night open into day than solitude fulfils itself with company. Once and again He goes apart into a mountain and prays by Himself all night. Noone is there but Him and God. The silence is like heaven about Him. But as the morning comes a new need certainly comes with it. No longer loneliness, but company; not solitude, but voices; and so the earliest light finds Him among the crowd of His disciples choosing His twelve apostles, or walking across the boisterous waters of Gennesaret to join His toiling servants in their boat. Everybody must have felt how the two needs tremble in response to one another in the intense atmosphere of that vivid night before His crucifixion. It seems as if He took great deep draughts of the idea of His life, of the fatherhood of His Father, as if it entered by great waves into His soul, and as if each wave so overwhelmed the soul it filled that He needed to reassure and recover Himself in the familiar company of His disciples. First there is the long conversation of the Supper. Then comes the terrible solitude of the Garden of Gethsemane. Again and again the Sufferer comes wandering back to where the tired and unconscious men are lying. It is as one who was passing through some deep experience might go into the chamber where a child was sleeping and find relief when the burden of the solitary crisis was too great to bear. Then, as the Lord’s career sweeps more and more into that channel where it must run alone, where none can share it, how, still, the craving for society seems to beat responsive to every new throb of suffering! He turns and looks at Peter; He would almost open his heart to Pilate; He looks back and tells the women who follow him to Calvary about the future of the beloved land that murdered Him; and at last, even upon the cross, He has mercy to give to the robber at His side, and care still for His mother and the disciple whom He loved. Every moment of deepening communion with His Father has its corresponding moment of sympathy with His brother men. The two halves of the great heart die together as they have lived together. The balance trembles more and more lightly as the life beats lower, but it trembles still even to the last, and Jesus ceases to love only when He ceases to live.

And this same poise and mutual supply which was between society and solitude in the life of Jesus Himself He was always trying to establish in the lives of those whom He taught. One day He cured a man of lunacy. It was a deep mystery to the poor creature. He wanted to go with Jesus, to leave his house and friends and country, to hide his life under the shelter of this power of God, and to study it forever. Jesus quietly lays the finger of His authority upon the other scale and says, “Go home to thy friends.”

Another day He raises a dead girl to life, and, just as the glad father and mother and all the eager friends are rushing forth into the street to tell their joy and wonder, He lifts his finger and says, “See that no man knows it!” And so it is always with the separate scholars of His school. Peter wants to stay upon the mountain of transfiguration, and his Master leads him down among the needs of men, to where the poor boy with the unclean spirit is foaming and raving at the mountain’s foot. Nicodemus sits with Him in the midnight chamber. The next time we see him he is saying a timid word for the Lord in the Sanhedrim. The woman of Sychar fulfils the quiet conversation at the well by the impetuous seeking of the men whom she knew in the city, that they might be the sharers of her joy. Everywhere the solitary completes itself in the social. Solitude shapes and colors the precious forms of character which then the furnace of society burns to solidity and brilliancy and permanence.

I am often struck by seeing how the loftiness of the life of Jesus altogether escaped the perplexity of many of the questions with which our lives are troubled, as the eagle flying through the sky is not worried how to cross the rivers. We debate whether self-culture or our brethren’s service is the true purpose of our life. We vacillate aimlessly. Now we shut ourselves up and meditate and try to grow. Now we rush forth and make the wide world ring with what we call our work. The two so often have no connection with each other. We are so apt to live two lives. But Jesus knows but one. All culture of His soul is part of our salvation. All doing of His work is ripening His nature. Jesus in the still night far off upon a solitary hill-top, Jesus in broad daylight dragged by a hooting mob from Pilate’s judgment-seat to Calvary, both of them are Jesus saving the world; both of them are Jesus living His life. And not until our brawling ceases and the champion of each side of the question rounds his truth with his adversary’s truth which he has been denouncing, not until the apostle of self-culture knows that no man can come to his best by selfishness, and the apostle of usefulness knows that no man can

do much for other men who is not much himself, — not until then shall men have fairly started on the broad road to the completeness of God their Father in the footsteps of the Son of Man.

It remains only to speak of one or two of the special exhibitions of the social life of Jesus in illustration of what I have been saying. One of the most interesting is His treatment of men in classes. It is always saved from the extravagance and grotesqueness into which the emphasis of class lines tends to run by the strong value of the individual life which lay at the bottom of His consciousness. Indeed, I think that as one reads that interesting story of how the various groups of men came up to John the Baptist and received his teaching about their special duties, first “the people,’ then “the publicans,” and then “the soldiers,’ one feels how different that is from anything in the life of Jesus. He deals, indeed, with the great classes into which men were divided in His time. He was known as the friend of publicans, He cried aloud before the multitude, “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees,” but He. was no partisan of wealth nor any more of poverty; whoever listened to Him - could not help feeling that in His view the class was good or bad only as it made the individual good or bad, and that no class condition could overrule the essential condition of the personal souls within it. Here is where all party spirit shows its viciousness. Here is where all socialism shows its weakness. Here is where all the weak idolatry of organic methods fails. It loses sight of the final unit in its watch over some of the accidental and temporary combinations of mankind. The final unit is the man. And that unit of value was never out of the soul of Jesus. After the day when He told them the story which they never could forget, of how there was a man with a hundred sheep and how one of them wandered from the flock and got astray among the hills, and of how the shepherd left all the rest and went and found that one and came down out of the hills singing, with the rescued sheep across his shoulders,

after that keynote of the preciousness of the individual had been struck, it never ceased to be heard through everything that Jesus said and did. When He sat at rich men’s tables His proud hosts knew that it was not because they were rich but because they were men that He had come to them. When He entered poor men’s huts they knew that it was not their poverty but their manhood that He honored. And that which, on the whole, has kept Christianity from becoming the religion of any class as against other classes, that which has always made it able, just when it seemed on the point of lending itself to such monopoly, to break out of the grasp of those who would put it to such partisan and partial use, has been the healthy and ineradicable individualism which is at its heart. Men cry to-day, “Christianity is the religion of the rich and comfortable,” and while they speak their cry is drowned in the rush of the poor, the hungry, and the wretched to some common men’s revival. They cry again, “The Christian belief belongs to the ignorant,’ and lo, the wisest thought of the world comes back again as it is ever coming to the mystery of Christ and of His treatment of the soul of man. It is not that they have mistaken the class to

which they should assign the Christian faith.

Their mistake has been in giving it to any class. It belongs to the individual. It always has its eye fastened on him. One of the noblest functions of Christianity in the world is to lie behind the class crystallizations of mankind, like a solvent into which they shall return and blend with one another, to crystallize, no doubt, again, but always to be reminded that the classes into which they crystallize are lesser facts than the manhood into which they are repeatedly dissolved.

We must put here, no doubt, the deep interest with which Jesus looked always at the young. He was talking of deep and difficult things, and through the crowd there came a little company of women bringing their children for Him to bless. Instantly He turned aside from the grown men and women, and, waving His disciples’ interference back, His hands were on the little wondering creatures’ heads. And when a young man came with a puzzled question, the teller of the story years afterwards remembered the look which was in the eyes of Jesus as He answered him. “Jesus beholding him loved him,’ Mark writes. In both these stories, and perhaps still more in the way in which He surrounded Himself with that garland of vigor and enthusiasm, the cluster of young men whom He called His disciples, everywhere there is the value set on youth. And youth is the period of individual life, of individual hope. Class life has not begun. The child of the king and the child of the beggar will play together if no older wisdom or folly interferes. Nay, the queen who will not let the beggar’s fingers touch her robe will take the beggar’s baby in her arms and clasp it to her bosom. He who touches a child of any class touches, as it were, the undivided humanity, and his touch may be felt anywhere through all its classifications. He who speaks to the infant speaks to mankind behind the Babel of its divisions. No wonder that Socrates was accused at Athens that he corrupted the youth. No wonder that Jesus said of little children, “Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”

Another interesting point in the social life of Jesus is His courtesy. There is, perhaps, no part of our life that is so unreal and unsatisfactory, none of which we find it so hard to give an account to ourselves, as the courtesy which we pay to one another. And there is none which, in the life of Jesus, is more thoroughly satisfactory and perfect. I find the secret of it in the clear perception and value of the personal life behind the class condition of which we have just been speaking. True courtesy gets its essence from honor of the individual, while it gets its special form from consideration of the class condition. I may be just as courteous to the beggar as to the king, but I do not treat them both alike. Now, when Jesus met the woman of Samaria at the well He honored her; He valued and reverenced her soul. When He met Pontius Pilate, He honored him. When He dealt day after day with the ripening treachery of Judas Iscariot, He honored him. When He found John the Baptist making the door ready through which He was to enter on His work, He honored him. The spiritual nature, the special humanity, of each of them seemed to Him, not in any mere fiction but in simple truth, to be a beautiful and precious thing. His honors for that was the soul of His courteousness. And then the special words He said, whether of sympathy or of rebuke, might be just what the special occasion bade them be. Different as they were, they were all courteous alike because of this personal honor and value that filled them all. There is no complete courtesy that has not such a soul and such a body, — a soul of honor for the individual, living in and uttering itself through the intelligent recognition of the class condition.

Or, look at the way in which this principle governs all the treatment by Jesus of the hard question of privilege. Privilege, which is a pervading, obstinate fact in the world, becomes an exasperating fact from the crude confusion of personal nature with official life or accidental circumstances. Let the two be finely and constantly discriminated, and privilege. loses the largest part of its obnoxiousness, — loses all its obnoxiousness for the best and noblest men, Perhaps this discrimination was never more finely or clearly made than on that day when, after one of the discussions with the rulers of the people, in which they had tried to browbeat Him with the authority of their position, Jesus quietly turned to the multitude and His disciples and said to them, “The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do, but do not ye after their works.” I can easily conceive of how the scales may have dropped from the eyes of some ingenuous Jew as he listened to those words. Behold, it was possible to own and recognize these men’s position, and yet not be obliged to call them good when they were bad, or great when they were little. Behold, one might keep his own intellect and conscience true, and yet not seize the sword to destroy all present social order. Behold, one might obey present authority, and yet be expectant of the coming day when only the best should rule. To the listener who heard all that in the words of Jesus, the privilege of the Scribes and Pharisees was no longer an exasperation. His hate and envy of them turned to pity. There might be other men not morally within the sound of the Lord’s voice, who would still be jealous of the soft cushions and the pompous words of the men who sat in Moses’s seat; but they were only Scribes and Pharisees out of office emulating the vices of the Scribes and Pharisees who happened to be in.

As Jesus in His earthly life was always feeding His human nature out of the Divine nature on which it rested in mysterious unity, so were His special judgments always drawing largeness and truth from the simple and eternal principles which lay below them in His consciousness. This was the secret both of His boldness and His prudence. Indeed, I think that we can hardly speak of Jesus as either bold or prudent in the way in which we speak of other men. The region of principles, of absolute righteousness and truth, lies above the consciousness of prudence and of boldness; and it was in that region that He lived and moved. An illustration of this is found in His dealing with yet another of the perplexing questions of men’s social life. They brought to Him, one morning in the Temple, the poor shame-stricken creature whom they had arrested in adultery. And Jesus, no doubt seeing first that He had touched her conscience, bade her go free and live a better life, in a way that must have seemed, even to thoughtful and sympathetic Jews, to open the door to dangerous license in family life and personal chastity. Then, when perhaps this impression was still fresh in the minds of men, there came another morning. Jesus was in Judea again. And one day His old enemies, the Pharisees, remembering, perhaps, what He had said to the wretched woman, began to ask Him about marriage and divorce. And then Jesus amazed them with the lofty stringency of His ideas. He went back beyond Moses. What Moses had allowed He would allow no longer. ‘ Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another,” He declares, “committeth adultery.” But along with His decree comes the deep principle on which it is based, — “Have ye not read that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female?” It all goes back to the creation. It is part of the birthright of man from the hand of his Father, this right of the wife to the husband and of the husband to

the wife. It is no mere arrangement for the good order of society. It is in the very nature of the children of God. It is in this fundamentalness of its character that the secret of His large treatment of it lay. If it had been an arbitrary rule of society, it could not have been trifled with. A single indulgence would have scattered it forever. But an essential principle has flexibility which an arbitrary rule cannot have. A mere rule-maker can have no personal considerations, But God, in whom all principles reside, from whom they all proceed, finds room for personal discrimination and education within the application of His principles. It is the depth of His government that makes the specialness of His government. It is because His government comes out of the profoundest secrets of His character, that it is able to adapt itself to all the individual peculiarities of our lives. Who can say how this truth may affect that seeming conflict between the law of God and the mercy of God which has driven men to shape for themselves such strange and artificial doctrines of atonement? And it is in the wonderful combination of the vast and transcendental with the minute and the familiar in Him who was both “conceived of the Holy Ghost” and also “born of the Virgin Mary,” that the fitness of the Savior not merely for the rescue of the soul, but for the

salvation of society, is found.

I have dwelt so very long upon the influence of Jesus upon the general social life of man, that not many moments are left to speak of His life in the Church and in the State, which were parts of the subject that I undertook to treat. But not many moments are needed for the little that I want to say on each. I am not called upon to write an ecclesiastical or a political treatise. I only want to try to see, according to the simple picture which the Gospel gives us, how these two great organisms which have so filled history with their power, the Church and the State, looked in the eyes and stood forth in the words of the deep, transparent man of Judea and Galilee whose influence we have been endeavoring to feel.

Of the Church of Jesus I think we never cease to be surprised when we see, as we read the Gospels with eyes out of which the mist of ecclesiastical history has been wiped, how naturally and simply and artlessly it was the expression of the life of Jesus. I wish that I could tell the story with as entire an absence of the institutional and magical and artificial air which the subsequent centuries have breathed around it as it has while it lies shining there in that unconscious and immortal story.

The great French writer who has told the story of the life of Jesus has at least revived for us one picture which we had almost lost behind the curtaining mists of the long Christian history. He has shown us the Master walking with His group of disciples along the borders of Gennesaret, now lingering in a little village, now traversing a field of corn, now pausing on the high bluff beyond Capernaum that overlooks the lake, now sitting in the boat and talking to His friends while they were fishing. A curious picture the Frenchman has made out of the scene. It is partly an idyl of careless peasants, partly a conclave of conspirators, partly a sym-

posium of philosophers. It is half Arcadia and half the Agora of Athens. But through all the confused conception this at least is kept, — a clear, fresh sense of personal companionship, of a group gathered and held about a personal centre, and gradually becoming fired with the idea with which that central life was burning, until, regenerated by that idea itself, the group” became the regenerating power of the world. If we look simply at the transparent story of the Gospels, that picture gives us, beyond all doubt, the cradle, the cell-life, of the Christian Church. The history is full of human nature. The opening life of Jesus was full of His consciousness that He was the Son of God. The ambition of which His soul was full was the desire to let men know that they, too, were the sons of God, and to rescue them into the full enjoyment of their sonship. That desire gave to the young man’s opening life a relationship to all humanity. All these men about Him were His unconscious brethren, the unconscious children of the Father in whose life all His life was bound up. I can think of the boy Jesus, as this consciousness

grew in Him, going from day to day with deepening awe about the streets of the Galilean village which was His world. The men who laid their hands upon His head, the women who chattered to Him with their motherly good-will, the boys and girls He played with, — it was dawning upon Him that these were all children of His Father. But by and by, out of the multitude, began to gather about Him those in whom this consciousness of His awoke some kindred - consciousness. A young man here, a woman there, sometimes a very child, with a child’s insight and a child’s strange outlook, — all these began to find themselves interpreted in Him. Their deepest questions of their own life found some answer in what they saw Him being every day. The process was miraculous, was a wonder, not in its kind, but in its degree, — in the depth to which it opened their souls and filled their doubts with light. First came the mere attraction of His presence and His person. Then it was found that this attraction had its source in a nature which they gradually came to know. Then the sight of this nature became a revela-

126 The Influence of Sesustion of their own possibilities; a new life for themselves, like His life, opened to them. Then there gradually shone out from this revelation its central idea, that which made their possibility possible, that in whose full realization their possibility should be perfectly attained. They were the sons of God; and then every kindness, every self-sacrifice, every devotion of His life with them, softened their lives more deeply with love, for the more and more complete reception of this transforming idea into their heart of hearts. This little group of people, who had more or less thoroughly learned what Jesus was revealing every day, made up the slowly compacted company of the disciples. It seemed as if it were going to stop there, perhaps. If it had, there would have been only another sect added to the many sects of religionists that filled the world. But what came next? One morning, after Jesus had been praying on a mountain by Himself all night, as soon as it was day, “He called unto Him His disciples, and of them He chose twelve whom also He named apostles.” Out of the heart of the discipleship comes the

apostleship. Out of the centre of the learning comes the transmission. The inward tendency reacts into the outward tendency. The idea of Jesus, which has been revealing itself to a few and enshrining itself in their experience, reclaims its essential universalness; and the best of the learners are the first to be sent forth into the world, which is the true partner in all that they have found. Jesus says to the most earnest of them all, “I will give unto thee the key of the kingdom of heaven.” He touches their experience, and bids them remember all that they have learned. “Ye are witnesses of these things,” He declares. Some outward force gave sign of the idea they carried. “He gave them power over unclean spirits.” All these things surrounded them with certain personal importance. But after all it was only the necessary pulsing forth of that which had been gathered inward for the outward spring. It was He that really went forth, and His going forth was the going forth of the Father whose revelation He was. “He that receiveth you receiveth Me, and He that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me.”

It is interesting to see how deep this relationship between discipleship and apostleship lies. It bears witness at once that the influence of Jesus is based upon and fed from a personal idea, and also that it belongs to all the world. By and by the outgoing Christian life began to draw in upon itself again. The dogmatic ages came. The apostles were again disciples. Then, once again, there came the expansive impulse. The later missionary work began. The newly elaborated doctrine, the deepened knowledge of God the Father in Christ the Son, reached out and craved to fill the world. It is the history of all life, this history of the Christian Church. The knowing of Jesus and the telling of Jesus minister to and succeed each other, — the scholar life and the missionary life, the inward and the outward movement, the systole and diastole of the Great Heart which beats eternally with the idea of Jesus.

Let us dwell with what interest and delight we will upon the rich history of the Church which has come since, the germ and essence of — it all is in that body of disciples bound to each other by the revelation of their human sonship to the Father. Itisa family picture. The Lord’s Supper realized in the simplest way as the Father’s table is its transparent sacrament. I would let a man forget, or never know, all about councils and bishops, all about corruptions and reformations, all about creeds and confessions. If he kept that picture, he would know the open secret of the Christian Church. He would keep these truths which are the great saving truths of ecclesiastical history, again and again submerged in the waves of angry times, but forever reappearing in their power, — the truth that the ministry of the Church is not distinct from and above the Church, but is only the Church itself in its utterance, doing and saying representatively what all the Church in all its membership has the right and the duty to say and do; and the truth that, as an elect body, the Church is but.the type of the complete humanity, — elect, not that it may be saved out of the world, but that the world may be saved by its witness and specimen of what the whole world is in its idea. It is the sons of the Father who have learned their sonship through the Son crying to all the family of God, and bearing witness that to be a son of man is to be a child of the Almighty.

The church spire is nothing, after all, but the elevated and prolonged house-roof. And so the battlemented city wall is but the enlargement and solidification of the simple fence that encloses the familiar homestead. If the idea of Jesus is the constructive power of the Christian Church, it lies no less at the heart of the whole conception of the State as He conceived it. Jesus was a patriot. That sentiment which makes so much of the poetry of the earth — the love of men for their native land — was. very strong in His bosom. With our modern, half-personal, unlocalized ideas of Jesus, it must always be striking — sometimes it is startling — to remember that there was one little district of a few miles square upon the surface of this earth which was That little group of hills with the quiet valleys among them which

known as “His own country.’

lies between Nazareth and the Sea of Tiberias He loved as we love the streets or farms where we were born. And not very far off to the southward lay the great.city of His race, where His feet never seemed to enter except solemnly, and over which He wept with a lamentation that is the type and pattern of every sincerest patriot’s most loving and unselfish sorrow for his sinful land. And the great indignation with which Jesus lashes the Scribes and Pharisees has its primary meaning in that same passionate remonstrance which the heart of every patriot utters when the land he loves is so ruled by bad hands that he cannot give his love free utterance in approbation and support, but is compelled, perhaps, to work against his country because he must work for righteousness. No one who reads the Gospels can miss these simple, recognizable signs of the true patriotism of Jesus. But why is it that His patriotism is a part of His life to which we least often turn? It is not only that He lived a larger life and did a larger work, which has far outreached the Jewish people and touched us with its influence. There is something in the quality of His patriotism which is peculiar, which separates it from the patriotism of the Athenian or the Roman. What is that quality? It is the constant predominance of the sonship to God over the sonship to David in his consciousness, making him always eager for the land of David, because of the interests of God which it enshrined. This is a distinct and definite quality when it appears in a man’s patriotism. It makes his patriotism fine and lofty above the measure of the common patriotic feeling of mankind. It makes the patriot’s relation to his land very like the man’s relation to his body. The man loves his body. He works for it by natural impulse. He is not always thinking of the soul which the body contains, and which gives to it its value. And yet it always is the soul which makes the body worthy of his care and work. The body without the soul — the poor dead corpse, or the beautiful or powerful structure of an idiot — is dreadful. No man can work with healthy joy for them. And so it is, as Jesus reveals and illustrates it to us, with reference to a man’s relation to his country. A true man’s patriotic impulse is spontaneous, It springs up without thought. No conscious calculation makes me love the hills and valleys, the streets and houses, of the land where I was born. But yet, unless I know of something underneath all this, Iam not satisfied. My patriotism lives and flutters as a sentiment unless I know that the land I love is really making, by its constant life, a contribution to the righteousness and progress of the world. When I know that, then I set my patriotic impulse free to act. My land becomes to me merely the special spot where I am placed to labor for the universal spiritual benefit of man. Then the old Psalmist’s words become real to me; and as I live my life of citizen or public officer, as I take my office or cast my vote or pay my tax, I say with David, “Because of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek to do thee good.” Such was the perpetual, self-limited character of the love of Jesus for His native land.

I know that here is the essence of what most men, as they look at history, are apt to dread to-day, — of a theocracy, of a religious State and of a State religion. If this which I have said be true, — if the State and its machineries be valuable to the Christian patriot, as His State was valuable to Jesus, because of the spiritual interests which they enshrine, because of the family life of man with God which they represent, — then why should he not ask that the State should manifest its spiritual function to the fullest degree by becoming distinctively and openly the minister of Christ? Why should he not ask that Christianity, as he conceives it and as it seems to him to be unspeakably important, should be taught in the State schools? Nay, why should he not ask that only men distinctively and positively Christian in belief and life should be intrusted with the conduct of the nation? How can he live, how can he be a patriot, in any Jand which is as purely secular in its administration as all our lands are growing more and more to be? It is an urgent question. We can only find its answer, I think, in two considerations which no man can ignore. One is that the ideas and methods of spiritual men, and even of Christian men, are so divergent from one another that it is only on the broadest basis of the most general purposes of spiritual life that they can meet,

—not in their special methods or their special creeds, but only in the desire and assertion of righteousness and truth to which all their methods and their creeds belong. The other consideration is that, even were all spiritual men at one, they still might doubt whether it would be well to make the government of their land the agent and maintainer of their faith, Any machinery of government which men have yet devised is too coarse and clumsy for so delicate a task as the inculcation and encouragement of faith. Government works by compulsion; faith, by inspirations. Government lays its hand on actions; faith nestles into unseen affections. Government estimates appearances; faith looks only at realities. And so government, though all the land were unanimously and harmoniously Christian, would still be a poor minister of Christianity. These are the considerations which make the Christian man consent to live in a State whose chosen policy is secular, and yet lets him feel that there are unowned spiritual influences and powers in her to which he may rejoice to lend his aid.

Let these considerations pass away, let all the spiritual desire and aspiration of the land be fused into a perfect unanimity of thought and action, and let some new finer machinery of governmental action be devised or developed which shall be capable of spiritual uses; and then theocracy, a religious State, a State religion, a national creed, a Christian public education, a divine responsibility in every officer, — all these would be not merely conceivable, they would be the only methods which the Christianized State could think of for a moment. There could be nothing secular in such a heavenly community as that. Only it would be altered utterly from what we see now. It would be the New Jerusalem for which we hope, and not the old earthly city which we know so well. At present we can only keep it constantly before our eyes and always proclaim it as the true ideal. We can, and I think we ought to, earnestly assert, when men praise it most loudly, that secularism, however we may accept it cheerfully, as the only expedient for the present time, is not the highest nor the eternal type of government. We may

- strive, by that devotion to the spiritual element in national life which even pure secularity of public methods still leaves possible, to hasten - the day, which must come if Christ be what we know He is, when the idea of Jesus shall be the shaping and moving power of the Christian State; and among the happy sons of God the Son of God shall evidently reign, as the old phrase describes, “King of nations as King of saints.”

I must not even stop to gather into a summary what I have said to-night. I have spoken of the principles which underlay and gave form and color to the whole social life which Jesus lived; and then specially His life with His disciples and His life with His nation. Those principles were always the same. Jesus the Friend, the Teacher, the Patriot, is always first Jesus the Son of God.

The social influence of Jesus all issues from the fatherhood of God which He reveals, and into which He claims God’s children. By it the family, the Church, the State, exist. It is the power of construction and reform and education.

As it is realized in each, the life of each becomes exalted and inspired. It makes all history divine. And even the world that is not yet becomes intelligible when we can look through the glowing window of the revelation and see the idea of Jesus still the constructive power of the society of heaven. “I looked,” says John, “and lo! a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with Him an hundred and forty and four thousand having His Father’s name written in their foreheads.”