The Double Cause

“And his name through faith in his name hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know.” — ACTS iii. 16.

A LAME beggar had sat for years at the gate of the Temple in Jerusalem, and all the people knew him well. He was part of their city landscape. They knew him as they knew the carved columns of the Temple doorway. One day Peter and John, two disciples of the Christ who had been lately crucified, had come that way and cured the beggar’s lameness. The people were full of interest and excitement, and part of their excitement evidently came from the fact that the man who had been cured was one whom they all knew so well. The miracle had been worked on most familiar material. Not some strange, mysterious flesh and bone which might be different from their own had been submitted to the Healer’s power; but this notorious cripple of Jerusalem, this beggar of the Temple, “whom ye see and know,” — it was his stiff and crooked joints that had been loosened and straightened; it was his feet and ankle-bones that had received strength. We can almost see his old companions gathering around him and handling him and feeling the power which l68 THE DOUBLE CAUSE

always belongs to the familiar and commonplace when it is touched by the mysterious and supernatural.

The mysterious is always thus peculiarly impressive when it comes in connection with what we know most intimately. The moonlight is most weird and solemn when it shines into the room where every chair and table is well known, or when it makes strange the garden in whose well-known paths you have walked all day. The great man is most impressive and mysterious when he comes into your common room and sits among your homely furniture. In a somewhat different way this was what forced the reality of Christ’s wonderful nature and works upon the people who had known His person since He was a boy. ‘Ye both know me and ye know whence I am,” He cried. It was by hands that they had touched that the wondrous works were done. Out of a face whose every feature they knew the strange light shone.

I want to study with you this afternoon the story of the lame man’s cure at Jerusalem. And first of all let us fill ourselves with this reality which it possessed for those who saw it first. The divine power which had touched him was all the more unmistakable and all the more wonderful because it had shown itself not on some supernal, transcendental substance, but on the dull, sordid flesh of this poor, well-known beggar. At the same time his sordid flesh had shown its inherent sacred ness in being able to answer to the touch of Christ’s apostles. So the great works of God’s Spirit become real to us because they touch and change our common lives, and our common lives become sacred because they can be touched by God’s Spirit.

The cure of the cripple, as St. Peter tells it to the people, is the work of a double cause. He says that the name of Jesus, that is, of course, the power of Jesus, has made the man whole through faith in His name, — that is, in His power. This faith may be the faith of the disciples who had wrought the cure, or of the lame man who had been cured. In either case, as you see, the cause is double. There is the power of Christ and then there is the condition, whether of the disciples or the cripple, which gave the power of Christ a chance to work. “His name through faith in His name,” — these two together make the total cause as the result of which the rescued beggar is even now making the temple ring with his joy as he goes walking and leaping and praising God. Neither part of the double cause could have been left out, — the exterior force or the interior condition, the objective or the subjective, the name of the powerful Christ or the faith of the obedient cripple. Either of them would have been useless without the other. As the result of the two together, there stands the cripple cured.

The philosophy which is involved here is perfectly familiar. Its illustrations are constantly occurring. Indeed, we may take exactly this formula which St. Peter uses and employ its form to describe any one of the changes which may take place in the condition of a man or of the human race. “His name through faith in His name has made this man whole,” says Peter. How shall I tell the story of an ignorant child who by long study has developed into wisdom? Is there not there again the outward force made effective through a personal condition, until the result is a new quality or nature in the human being? The outward force is truth, all alive and seeking for its own expansion. The personal condition is study or devoted intelligence, and the result is in the educated man. Truth through the study of truth hath made this man wise.

And so all the loveliness of nature, finding its way in through man’s power of loving nature, creates all that delight in nature and absorption of her loveliness which constitute the artistic life. Beauty through man’s sense of beauty makes this man fine and rich and strong. So a commandment which is totally outside of our life, possessing us through our obedience to it, makes then a conduct which is truly our own. Commandment through obedience to commandment makes us just and kind. The commandment might thunder from the skies for ever, but, unobeyed by us, it would leave us when its thunders ceased just as it found us when they began. So a great man set before our admiration makes us like himself. A great man through admiration of his greatness makes us great.

Everywhere, you see, it is the same. Some power outside ourselves unites itself with some disposition in ourselves, and so the changes in our natures come. I suppose there is no exception to the rule. I suppose no change in our natures, in what we really are, ever comes by those natures simply working on themselves, untouched by any outside force. Certainly the other statement is true. Certainly no outside force can change us until it has made itself a confederate in some will or act of our own. It is true even of our physical life. The most pestilential wind might blow across our faces and no more make disease in us than it makes disease in a statue, if it did not find in us living men and women some responsive possibility which it does not find in the dead stone. And the most life-giving gales might breathe their freshness on our lips, and make no more life in us than they make in the dead corpse, if it were not that they met in us the possibility of living and gave their strength to us through it. The vital forces of the world through our power of liv ing make us live.

If I might dwell yet for a few moments on the illustrations of our truth, it is set forth very vividly in all the best efforts which men make to help their fellow-men. How often the experiment of man to help his fellow-man has failed, however earnestly and generously made! Here is the help abundantly, on one side, — money, knowledge, sympathy, hopefulness, — all that makes life rich. There, on the other side, is need, — a poor, crushed, broken life which wants these all. How often the effort to give them all has failed! How often help has come like the shower from the heavens, and rolled off helplessly from the hard surface of the life on which it fell! Charity, simple charity, the mere giving of what one has to another man, does not make that other man rich. There must be generous taking as well as generous giving. There must be a sympathetic soil to receive as well as a sympathetic rain to fall. And so our wiser charity is led to anxious thought about the character of the men and women upon whom benefactions are bestowed — perfectly sure that both sides must work together or only the most superficial good is done. Sympathy through the sympathetic reception of sympathy has made this poor man rich, this dreary house warm and full of comfort, this coward brave, this weak man strong. So only can the story of a complete charity be told. But it is time now to have done with illustrations. Out of them all our truth stands clear. In every one of the instances which I have quoted, two things, the outward force and the personal disposition or readiness to receive, obey, and use the force, unite to bring the final result. The truth which issues from such an assemblage of instances must be the old, ever-new truth of how human nature and the world in which it lives belong together and correspond to one another. One thought of the world simply coordinates man with all its ordinary products. The world has made him as it has made the elm-tree and the elephant, and he is no more in it than all the rest. Another thought of the world makes it and its processes quite insignificant as regards humanity. He is so totally, so absolutely, its superior, so different from it in origin and nature, so exclusively the child of God, that he has nothing to do with the world except to rule it and to use it. It can have no power over him. The thought of our verse, the Christian thought, is different from either. Man and the world belong together. They are different in dignity, in origin, in nature. They are two and not one, and yet they are two which make one; for every result which is ultimately produced in man comes from the working of some external force with and through the cooperating will of man. Take man out of the world and you leave it full of forces which will find no worthy material to work upon. Take the world away from man and you leave him with plenty of capacities, but with no force to stir them into motion. Put man and the world — by which I mean everything outside of the personal human life — together, and then you have the total cause from which the whole result proceeds. Man as the appropriator and applier of forces through his human will and nature — that is the truth of this verse of St. Peter.

I said it was the Christian truth. Christ made these certain things evident, — I am sure that if you think over His teachings and His influence you will see how they all certainly came forth from Him. He made it evident: (i) That the great purpose of everything which was at work in the world was to make man a better man, that human character was the only worthy result to which all earthly forces were directed. (2) That human nature, or character, needs all the forces from outside itself, whether they be the forces of the world around it but outside itself, or the sublime forces and influences which come direct from God. Human character, or nature, cannot perfect itself. (3) That the world’s forces come to human character only through the submission of the human will. These three things Christ made evident. They constitute the soul and heart of His religion. And these three truths are in the teaching of Peter, that it is the name of Jesus through the faith in Jesus which has made the lame man whole.

Is it not true that such a principle as this really points out what ought to be the wide range of thought and study for all earnest men? One man says, “Study nature and let man alone; science and not metaphysics ought to be your task.” Another man says, “No, let nature go and study man; science is godless and profane. It is metaphysics that gives light.” One theologian concentrates his thought on God, and treats man as if he were dead material. Another theologian fastens all his thought on man, as if in understanding him all problems would be solved. But if the soul of man is ultimately saved by great, strong forces of the universe, — all crowding in through the door of man’s assent, eager to work upon man’s spiritual life, — then certainly no region of heaven or earth, no truth which it is possible to know of man or God, can be left out by him who wishes to be completely “wise unto salvation.” It is foolish and weak to think of the study of objective fact, or of the inner nature of man, as if either of them could take the other’s place and make it useless; since it is fact and power through the human reception of fact and power that completes the human life.

Apply all this to practical religion. How hard it seems for many men, for many whole churches and whole ages, to keep the symmetry and completeness of the great spiritual processes by which the world is gradually being saved! What is it to you that the Church offers her sacraments, that the Bible lies open with its story of Christ, that the Incarnation is, indeed, a veritable fact in history — nay, that God lives in heaven and in the earth and everywhere? What is all that to you? Just exactly what it is to the chamber that the sunlight is pouring down upon the window-pane; just exactly what it is to the mill-wheel that the water is rushing down the flume; just exactly what it is to the ship that the wind is blowing from the west — everything, if your nature and life are ready to receive them. Nothing whatever, if the great powers of the Church and the Bible and Christ and God find nothing in you which opens to them as they lay their majestic power against your life.

A ship lies close beside a rock here on our coast. Some day the west wind blows. It comes fresh from the prairies and the mountains, and it is eager for the ocean which it loves. It blows on ship and rock alike. Why is it that two weeks from now the ship is riding in the fragrant sunshine of some Mediterranean bay, while the rock alongside of which it lay stands still, bruised and beaten by our cruel seas? Two men of you years ago were touched alike by God, — why is it that to-day one is rich in the memory of years of godliness, years in which he knows that he has been trying to do good unselfishly to God’s children for their Father’s sake, and the other has nothing but a life of unspiritual selfishness to remember? Is the Bible a power? Some men have held that it is, with a completeness which has seemed almost to lodge the power in the very print and paper of the Book itself. If you were to read it, even mechanically, it would save you. If you opened it, even at random, it would guide you. Are the Sacraments powerful? Surely they are; and so to a baptism which meant no consecration men have brought their children, and to a communion in which there was no spirituality men have come themselves; and they have gone away from one or the other thinking that something really had been done. Is the name of Jesus mighty? Yes, indeed; and so men say it like a charm. Is God great and awful? Surely He is; and so men rattle profanely through unmeaning and half-articulated oaths. In every case the blunder is the same. It is giving to the half the power and virtue which belong only to the whole. The Bible believed in and obeyed — that is, the Bible plus belief and obedience — that is power. God loved and honored — that is, the name of God surrounded with the reverence and the affection of the devoted soul, — that is strength for restraint and inspiration. The west wind plus the ship’s nature makes the power of the voyage. The ground’s richness plus the seed’s fertility — that, no less than that — makes the tree!

We all remember how, in the first chapters of Genesis, all the beasts are brought to Adam to know what he would call them. They went out from him by and by, bearing names which he had given them. Not till their lives had touched his life were they complete and ready for their full careers. It always seems to me as if there could be no test more sure of what kind of a man that first man was than we should get if we could see into his heart as he stands there in the Garden, and know whether that submission of all the creatures made him proud or humble. Did it make him proud? Did he see them depart after his naming of them, saying over to himself, “Behold, they are all mine and all this world exists for me!” If so, he was but a poor creature, and all the misery which has come since in his race might have been prophesied. But did it make him humble? As he saw them go, did he become aware of what a great and awful thing it was to be the centre of so much life, and feel his terrible unfitness for it, and cry out for strength? If so, then he was strong, and all the good strength which manhood has displayed since then was there in its germ in that humility. Always men’s qualities are shown by whether their powers and privileges make them proud or make them humble.

So you must all be judged — if you believe what I am preaching to you this afternoon — by the impression which it makes upon your soul. I have dared to tell the young man here that the Bible, the Church, the ever-pleading Christ, nay, God Him self, wait for his call before, with all their power, they can save his soul. He can say, “Go,” or “Come.” It is an awful power. Does it make him who possesses it bold or humble? If it makes him proud, it shows how weak he is. If it makes him humble, if the sense of what a Guest it is who stands at his door, unwilling — nay, in some true sense, unable — to enter until he shall bid the bolt fly back, — if all this makes him cry out with fear at himself lest he should be unfit for such responsibility; if, seeing the full depth of meaning in the words which tell that only to the “pure in heart” can come the real blessedness of knowing God, he feels how powerless he is to keep his own heart pure and cries out to God Himself to do it, — “‘Make me a clean heart, O God! ‘O God, who wilt not enter into me unless I am such that I can receive Thee, oh, make me such that I can receive Thy life!” — if such humility as that possesses him, then how great he is, and what a great life opens before him! Oh, how true it is that the completest humility of man has always come, must always come, by man’s knowing the greatness of his nature and his privileges!

Another value of the truth I have been preaching lies in the great hope which it unfolds to the imagination of the soul that holds it. If there were needed no cooperation of the consenting soul to the power of Christ, then Christ must have done long ago the work which He proposed to do for man. No obstacle existing, He must have pressed on at once to the entire fulfilment of His love. He would not have delayed. And then — why, then, it must be that this which we see now in ourselves and in the world is all. There would remain no hope of more beyond. Can we think that without a sad sinking of the heart? What, is this all? This half way life — this mixture of the baser with the better way in everything — this selfishness, this sluggishness, this sensuality, this wearisome yielding to temptation only to repent and struggle upward for a moment and then fall again — is this all? Has Christ done His work in us?

But if the other thought is true, if Christ’s work is not done in us, but only just begun; and if it lingers not because He is reluctant, but because, needing our cooperation, it can be done only so fast and so far as we receive it and allow it, — then, with all our humiliation there certainly comes hope. All the unknown things which Christ will do for us so soon as we are ready; all the great revelations which He has to make to us so soon as we can see them, — all these lie open wide before us. To him who thoroughly believes this truth it seems as if a voice were ever crying in those words which Jesus spoke so often to the crowds in Palestine, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Perhaps no ear does hear the special message; perhaps no intelligence is yet fine and pure and clear enough to take the truth which yet some day the whole world shall know. But the cry has hope in all the humiliation that it brings. Agnosticism says,” We do not know, and because we do not know we must give up the hope of ever knowing.” Our truth says, “We do not know, but the hindrance in us is not essential and perpetual. It is incidental and may be temporary. Let us be better and humbler and more unselfish and more spiritual, and we j/z«//see.” And so our very ignorance becomes the power of a better life.

And certainly our truth gives very interesting value to the daily incidents and little things of life.

If there is really waiting, behind the door of our reluctance and incompetency, a vast, deep wealth of blessing, of character, of knowledge, which might be ours if only there were broken down this wall of hindrance between us and it, then how important and significant everything must be which shakes that wall of hindrance and tends at all to its dislodgment. Every least incident of life may have this value. Every largest incident of life is really insignificant unless it has this value in some degree. The change from wealth to poverty or from poverty to wealth, from sickness to health or from health to sickness, the forming or the breaking of a friendship, the undertaking or the finishing of a task, — all of these are no more than the mere changes of the wind unless somehow they give occasion to such changes in our dispositions that some of the great abundance of truth and goodness, some of the great abundance of God which is waiting outside our lives, can enter in.

This touches the work that we try to do for our fellow-men, and often redeems its superficialness and insignificance. Often it must seem as if the mere exertion to make your child or your neighbor more comfortable were a very little thing. It is worth doing, for comfort is better than discomfort, and the affection which you show is well worth testifying. But if it can be more than that, — if, by the kind act, and still more by the echo which your act brings of the Divine goodness, you can open the life of your neighbor or your child to some inflow of the great goodness and truth which is all ready to invade it, — then surely it is more than worth the doing; it is worth the sacrifice of one’s own will and pleasure, it is worth the consecration of one’s life to do!

Little, sometimes, must it seem to the devoted worker for the poor merely to improve the dwelling where the poor man lives, — to win, perhaps, and perhaps not to win, his gratitude because his windows catch a brighter sunshine and his rooms are open to a healthier air, — little to build the gallery and open it freely to all who will come and gaze, however ignorantly, on its pictures, — little to shut a drinking shop here and there and save one wretched family from blows and starvation, — little any of these things must seem sometimes in them selves, but if they stand any chance of opening the wretched, poverty-hardened life to visions and companionships, to knowledge of God, to perceptions, however dim at first, of the divine influences which the soul of man was made to feel, — then surely they carry their own inspiration with them, and it is no wonder that the choicest men and women will so freely give their time, their thought, their sympathy, and their means to works like these.

St. Paul’s sublimest, most pathetic picture is perhaps that in the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, in which he talks about the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together until now, waiting for the adoption, the redemption, of our body. Think what that means! The world centres in and depends on man. It is what he makes it. And man is capable of being possessed by God, filled with His Spirit, echoing His character. Only the hindrance of man’s own unwillingness and incompleteness delays God’s occupation of his life. Behold, then, the whole creation stands by and waits! Its perfectness depends on man’s. When will he let God do for him all that God wants to do, and so become the worthy centre of a new life for all the world? The whole creation groaneth and travaileth. The very hills and trees cry out in discontent; the very beasts are eager and impatient, wanting a nobler master, a master who shall more realize himself and his own capacity of being filled with God. Am I talking too large? Am I bidding you to listen to a voice of creation which is too diffused and vague for you to hear. Then hear your own creation; hear the little circle of life by which you are immediately surrounded. Let your family, your shop, your school, your farm, your house, your garden, cry out to you in remonstrance against everything low and sensual and ungodlike in the life you live. Let them tell you how much finer and loftier they would become if you were all that you might be. It is not for yourself alone, — that were too selfish, — your whole creation groaneth and travaileth, waiting for your adoption, waiting for you to begin to live,^and to go on and live completely the life of a child of God.

May I ask you to remember the course by which our thoughts have been travelling this afternoon? We saw the universal necessity that for any true change in man there must be a double cause. His own disposition must work with the force external to himself, which sought to change him. We saw how even Christ owned this necessity, and allowed His disciple to declare that it was only through faith in His name that His all-saving name could save the world. Then we saw in what profoundly interesting and critical position this put man, standing, with his power of believing or of disbelieving, between God and God’s truth and God’s blessing on the one side, and his own life and the world’s life — so empty in themselves, so gloriously full when they are filled with God — upon the other.

Only one word more needs to be said. That name which is nothing to us unless we believe in it, has its own blessed power to tempt our belief. Thank God! — His mercy does not stand afar off waiting for us to take it. It presses itself upon us. The Guest whose coming-in is salvation not merely stands at the door, but knocks. All that is true and need not, must not, be forgotten. And yet still — still, here we stand, each with the last responsibility of his own life.

Who would be rid of that responsibility? Who would not humbly, earnestly claim — after God has done all that God can do — after Christ with all His wondrous love and patience and suffering has made His approaches to the soul, and waits and listens for the soul’s reception — who would not claim then the soul’s own right and duty itself to open wide the door, and say to the waiting Saviour and Master, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus!” and hear the certain answer, “Lo, I come!”