The Spiritual Man .... " but He That Is Spiritual Judgeth All Things, Yet He Himself Is Judged of No Man." —

“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” — i CORINTHIANS ii. 15.

ST. PAUL is always aware of two kinds of men: one of them he calls the natural man and the other the spiritual man. He sees them living together in every group, in every family, in every church; and the general aspect of the world becomes to him most interesting because these two kinds of men are always mingled in it.

Indeed, the mingling of the natural and spiritual men in the world seems quite as universal and fundamental a fact as the mingling of the higher and lower elements in nature. The two in some degree correspond and illustrate each other. In nature there is a constant penetration of the grosser and coarser by the subtler and finer parts. The grosser portion presents itself immediately to our sight; the subtler part eludes us, and only gradually do we find out that in it the real depth and richness of power lies. The black, dead clod is found to be all teeming with the powers of growth. The heavy cloud is packed with electricity. Heat lies latent everywhere, and the atoms of the most solid things are in perpetual change. Everywhere behind the surfaces of living things lurks the great mystery oi life.

Perhaps the most delightful feeling which the great discoveries of modern times have brought with them is that which comes with this ever-increasing knowledge of how a higher spirit works in every thing. Dead matter is not dead, because it is capable of such a marvellously intimate reception of life. There is a natural and there is a spiritual; and the natural is fed and fired by the spiritual always. Each owes the other a debt. The natural would be heavy and base without the spiritual to inspire it. The spiritual would be weak and wasted without the natural for it to manifest itself through. The two together make complete nature.

It is the same thing in the great world of man. The natural and spiritual are there. The grosser part (do we not know it?) is in the men whose lives and thoughts are occupied with material affairs. The men who deal with the outsides of things, the men who carry on business, the men who administer the details of government, the men who manage social life, the men who study the material world and write the chronicles of history, — such men as these are what St. Paul means when he talks about the natural man. They are not wicked. God forbid! They are to the whole world of human nature what the black earth and the brown rocks are to the whole substance of the globe. But, just as through the rocks and earth run subtle forces which redeem them, so in among the masses of the natural men are scattered men of fire, men of imagination, men of unselfish charity, men of enthusiasm, men of religion, men who know and love the purposes and spiritual ends of business and government and society and science. These men are what Jesus told his disciples that they were: “The light of the world “; “The salt of the earth.” Think what a dreary place the world would be without them. Think how flat history would lie if there were not always these buoyant and aspiring elements in it, lifting it, making manifest its principles, showing how it belongs to God. Think what your own little circle would be if there were not among its natural men some spiritual manhood. It may be a child, it may be a strong woman, it may be a brave, unpractical, protesting man, it may be a quiet dreamer; whoever it is, it is a being with a poet’s soul, for this is the poets’s office always — to live in and to make powerfully manifest the heart of things, their inner principles and diviner purposes.

If in these words I have made clear the difference between the natural and spiritual man, then our next step must be to see how they both co-exist in every full human creature. Just as the entire earth comprises both the earthy clod and the living principle which pervades it, so every true man has both the natural and spiritual manhood in himself. What I was saying just now may have sounded like invidious discrimination; I may have seemed to be declaring some doctrine of a spiritual aristocracy, a lofty and superior caste, made out of finer clay than the ordinary men about them. Such doctrines have been preached. Such claims have been made. But always they have proved how wrong and false they were by the way in which the self styled aristocracy grew foolish and lost its insight; while out of the mass of men whom it dared to call base and sordid came by and by some prophet’s voice, full of spiritual meaning and revelation. The real connective of such thoughts lies in the deep but simple truth that every full man carries in himself both the natural and spiritual manhood. We all have our coarser and our finer parts. There can be no mischief in the claim that the little kingdom of every man’s life should be an aristocracy, and that the best part of us and not the worst part of us should rule.

And if in every man, so in every action: there are both the natural and the spiritual elements when it is perfectly performed. Not merely in the highest as we call them, not merely in worshipping and teaching and healing, — not merely in the singing of poems and the building of cities, but also in the making of bargains, and the travelling of journeys, and the clasping of hands, and the playing of games — if each of these is done as completely as it may be done — there are a natural action and a spiritual action present together. The natural action is the formal deed; the spiritual action is the motive out of which it springs and the affection which is its soul.

How life starts into new vitality when the spiritual act completes the natural action! Often, as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual. Material development goes far in advance of education, of philanthropy, or of religion. It builds a splendid structure which the higher activities of man are afterward to occupy and to inspire. Is not this really the condition of the world to-day? The eager enterprise which has possessed the earth for all these centuries has created this noble, this wonderful civilization. Commerce, war, government, art, learning, social refinement, and luxury — they have all contributed, and here it stands. How wonderful it is, with its great columns driven deep in the unchanging rock, with its flashing pinnacles reaching to the sky, with the exquisiteness of beauty filling all its courts! What is it that it needs? What is it that our civilization needs? for surely it needs something. Surely it almost begins to weary of its own splendor and completeness, as if, without something else which they have not they were incomplete and unsatisfying, almost ugly and tawdry things. What is it that our civilization needs to-day? Is it not a spiritual man? Is it not a worthy occupant of this world wide palace, a man who shall value and seek after character above everything, who shall honor and rank men by the standards of character and by no other?

Think what our civilization would be with such a manhood occupying it. Think what our business streets would be if they were all alive, as this or that office in them is now alive, with the enthusiasm of charity, — our railroads laden with men and women bound on benevolent and lofty errands, our tele graphs flashing finer and more sacred messages, our systems of government purged of selfishness, our beautiful houses filled with beautiful lives! “A dream! a dream!” we say; but, if it could be more than a dream, is it not the thing we want, is it not the thing which we must have before the world with its vast civilization can really be a sight to satisfy the eye of God or of a truly godly man?

May we not say again that the same is true of the condition of every man which is true of the condition of the world? You and I also have our natural side in advance of our spiritual side. What we need is that our natural part should be overtaken and occupied and inspired by a completer spiritual life. When that shall come, all our faculties, all our dexterities, all our leanings, will be filled with and used by the most sacred purposes. Our powers will be radiant with unselfishness. The powers themselves will be more perfect under the power of such occupation, — we shall see farther and run faster and learn more richly; but the great difference will be that the powers, great or small, will all be obedient to the spiritual purposes within them, and transparent with their light. Humility, purity, devoutness, simplicity, unselfishness, — these will be the characteristic qualities of the powerful man. Are they the characteristic qualities of the powerful man to-day? Are not rather their very opposites?

I wish that I could make you feel that I am thinking not of a few choice men for whom these lofty spiritual things are possible; I am thinking of all men, — absolutely and literally of all men. It is as true of the lounger at the street corner, of the

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wretched tippler in the grog-shop, of the fashionable idler in society, as it is of the earnest reformer or the high-souled saint, that there is in him somewhere a true spiritual man which, if it could awaken, must occupy and rule his life.

What can awaken it? We must not go on longer thinking about spirituality, talking about it as we have been talking, as if it were a subtle something, a sort of substance or element or quality, like heat or electricity, which exists in a greater or less degree in connection with other elements or qualities in human nature. Spirituality is God. To be spiritual is to be in communion, in communication, with God, who is the Source and Father of all spirits. When we say that every man has in him a true spiritual element, what we really mean is that every man is a child of God. The awakening of the spiritual element in any man is just his coming to know, and acting on the knowledge, that he is the child of God. And who shall teach him that?

Ah, there we come home immediately to Christ. He is the Revelation. Therefore, it is through Him that God enters into the soul. And how through Him? Under the most simple and universal of all laws: it is through obedience to Him. This law runs everywhere. To get the good out of any being you must obey that being; you must do his will. If you obey Christ, then, He will reveal God to you. The spiritual side of your life will awaken, and you will be the spiritual man.

Is that a theory or is it a fact? It is a fact, my friends! Plenty of men I have known who have studied Christ and yet remained unspiritual. They have turned His words this way and that; they have dissected the history of His religion; they have been wise theologians sometimes; but it has all been as if they studied physics or astronomy. But never has a man tried to obey Christ and not been lifted into spirituality. It cannot be otherwise. You cannot step abroad into the sunlight and yet breathe the damp air of the prison or the mine. When Christ is always bidding those who would obey Him to love God, to love their fellow-men, to live for eternity, it is impossible for any man to obey Him and yet be earthly, selfish, and short-sighted.

It would make one impatient, if it did not make one sad, to see how unreasonable men can be about this thing. One of you young men sees a comrade whom he honestly admires. That comrade lives a higher life than his. Where he is coarse that other man is fine; where he is weak that other man is strong. You would expect — what? Why, certainly, that, honoring that other man’s life, he would begin to live that life himself. Instead of that you see him going on in his own life unchanged. He lives basely and he praises goodness both at once. And when you ask him for some sort of explanation, he declares: “Oh, this man has a religious nature! I have not.” A religious nature! It is as if the jewel lying dark in the shadow looked out upon its brother jewel blazing in the sun, and said: “Oh, he has a brilliant nature. He is made to blaze and burn.” Go forth, O darkened jewel; go forth into the sun light. Give the sun a chance to find the power of brilliancy which is in you. Do not dare to say you cannot shine until first you have put yourself where shining is a possibility! And so one wants to say to the young man who thinks he was not made to be religious:” Try to do what Jesus Christ wants you to do; try to do His will and see what happens.” Very slowly it may be, breaking out with great difficulty through the crust that lies above it, still the spiritual sense must stir, the spiritual man must come out to the light and know himself. That is the new birth which Jesus promised, whose unexpected richness has taken by surprise so many souls.

You know how Christ is always saying to people in the Gospels, “Follow me!” What does He mean? It is not that He wants a mighty company for the glory to Himself that it would bring; it is simply that He sees that if men follow Him, then He can give them God. He knows a power of receiving God which He longs to bring forth in them. So He calls to men one after another through the Gospels, “Follow me.”

And so He calls to us. It is the sum of His religion. If we can follow Him, we shall grow spiritual. Then how strong and safe we are! Age and trouble and death cannot touch us any more than the spear can wound the air. He who lives in the spirit never grows old. The outward man perishes, but the inward man has a perpetual youth; and sorrow only touches the spiritual life with a more mellow happiness, and death only opens wide the door through which it passes into perfect union with God.

But it is time to pass on from this attempt to describe what is the spiritual man, and see what is meant by St. Paul’s statement of the functions which belong to him. “He that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” Judgment and independence — those are the rights of spiritual manhood.

Think first of judgment. The impulse to form judgments is almost irresistible, and yet Jesus says, “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged,” accompanying His injunction with almost a threat. And we ourselves are always hesitating between our duty of judging and our other hardly less imperative duty of not judging. We ought to discriminate between our fellow-men, and yet who are we that we should pronounce upon our brethren? May not the solution of the seeming contradiction lie in St. Paul’s words? It is not that we must not judge, but we must judge with the right faculty; the right part of us must judge. Here is some man who stands before the world, — what shall I think of him? But before that comes the other question:” With what shall I think of him? What faculty shall I bring to bear upon him? Shall I judge him merely with my eyes and my aesthetic sense, and see whether he is beautiful? Shall I judge him with my social instinct, and see whether he is pleasant company? Shall I judge him with my commercial skill, and see whether he is growing rich? Shall I judge him by my sensibility to other men’s judgments, and test whether he is popular? Shall I test him by my knowledge, and see whether he is learned? All of these are judgments about the man. If I take them for judgments

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of the man, deciding what he really is (as men are always taking them), I am all wrong. Nothing but the part of me which is spiritual can judge that, — can judge him. That part of me fixes its eye upon character, discerns motives. That is the only true judge.

Certainly, it is the only judge that any action which is worth the doing, any action which has loftiness or meaning in it, has much thought of or regard for. You do some little trivial thing, some one of the small actions of society, and you are anxious to know what the lower and smaller parts of your brethren will think about it. Will it please or offend their taste? Will it help or hurt their liking for you? But when you do some moral act, some act which has a true character in it and is really you, these little questions fade away. If men praise your action for its beauty, you resent it! If men say it will make you rich or honored, you turn aside from them and will not listen. Only when some man who evidently values goodness for its goodness calmly says: “The deed is good. Whether it brings wealth or poverty, whether it brings repute or scorn, the deed is good,” then you are satisfied. Here is a judge who has a right to judge men, a judge whom no man can resent.

It is none the less true if the judgment is a condemnation, — if the man who is spiritual says, “The deed is bad,” and not, “The deed is good.” Have you never seen a group of boys submitting to the judgment of one comrade who, quietly living in the midst of them, was purer, braver, and loftier in his standards than the rest of them? They may have wished he was away, — very often people do not like the judges whom they most respect. They may have resented something which seemed arrogant about his goodness, but it was his arrogance and not his goodness that they resented. And all the time he judged them. He unmasked them to themselves, and with a wonderful meekness they acknowledged his judgment, and owned themselves for what they really were before the standards which his life made clear.

And many a group of men is just the same. “Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?” wrote Paul to the Corinthians and the saints, — by which is meant just exactly this: the men who are spiritual, the men who believe in things unseen, the men who care for character, do judge the world to day. Let a bad man stand up in the community, and however he is praised and imitated and promoted by all sorts of men, he is aware and all the community is aware that he is being judged by a quiet, patient, earnest body of men, who, going their way through the familiar tasks of life, are all the while filling the air with loftier standards. The bad man may not see them, but he knows that they are there. His very bravado and bluster often mean how perfectly he is aware of them. He knows how helpless his ordinary acts are in their presence. And, wrap the adulation of his own friends and sycophants about him as closely as he will, he never can shut out this judgment of the spiritual man.

And here comes in again the truth of which I have already spoken, that every man has the power of the spiritual manhood in himself, as well as close around him. The felt judgment of the men of higher standards wakens the higher standard in the man’s own heart. Oh, self-reproach is far more common than we think! Many a man whom, in our easy confidence that we know each other, we call reckless or hardened, is really being judged all the while by his own spiritual self, is standing and trembling before the judgment-seat of his own better nature.

Put these two things together, and have you not got the Judgment Day? Already through the thick cloud of daily incidents we can see the Great White Throne. Already in the remonstrances of a man’s own conscience, stirred to life by the protesting witness of the goodness in whose presence he lives, there is heard the thunder of the eternal verdict.

And then go higher still. Instead of the weak spirituality of the best men the world can show, let us see God, the Father of all spiritual life, God the Holy Spirit; and instead of the feeble appeal which the best man’s goodness can make to his brother’s conscience, let us hear the arraignment of the child by the Father, let us think of the terrible awakening of the child’s reproachful better nature when he stands in the full presence of his Father’s grieved and wounded righteousness and love, — think all that, and have you not the Judgment Day? No man can tell us its geography, — where in the universe that mysterious valley of Jehosaphat may be, that valley of decision where the “multitudes, multitudes” shall be gathered, — but it will be wherever God in His

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perfect spirituality draws back the veil and looks full in the face of His assembled world. I believe there shall be something corresponding to the scenic picture which the Scriptures draw, but the essence of it must be in the eternal right and power which spirituality has to judge unspirituality. The essence of it is already wherever the spiritual is judging the unspiritual in any little judgment-seat on earth.

Sometimes we hear good men complaining that goodness is so powerless; the effort to do right and to keep a pure soul and to live by highest standards is dishonored and despised, we hear. All such complaints are utterly unworthy of the good man. There is nothing more refreshing and magnificent in the whole world than the satisfied good man, the man who lives to do right, who is entirely above such weak complaints and never dreams of making them. In the first place he is too busy, too perpetually occupied with the enthusiastic struggle of his life, to think whether he is powerful or not. He is a being in himself, and if he can so bear this life of his that God shall see it and approve it, and be able to fill it with Himself, he must be satisfied. But then, if he does lift up his eyes and look about, he cannot count himself powerless. Rather he is overwhelmed and oppressed by the power that he carries. For is he not the judge of all things? O my dear friends, it must be that a truly spiritual man has nothing to complain of in the world! It is not that he must struggle on in misery and contempt until he gets to heaven, and only there be happy and content, but now, here, all that is best in life is

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his. Let him not degrade the high dignity of his lot, nor make it less tempting to other men by talking of its sacrifices or disgraces. He that is spiritual is already the king of the world.

One other declaration the apostle makes about the spiritual man, which we must not entirely neglect to speak of. “He that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” The spiritual man, while he stands judging by the highest standards whether men and things and institutions are good or bad, is all the while himself based on a foundation of his own which does not move with the perpetual changes of the things about him. I feel a truth in those words the moment they are spoken. Think of the man whom I have tried to picture, who stands in the centre of a group or a community and makes the men and things about him know whether they are good or bad. Where do his standards come from? Does he get them out of the community which he is afterward to judge by them? That would be very insignificant. Not many days would his fellow-men consent to be judged by him, if that were so. Such judges there are, men who pretend to do nothing more than just to reflect back on their brethren the standards of life which have first been caught from them. But the true spiritual judge of men, whom men acknowledge, — we immediately feel something quite different concerning him, — he stands on a footing of his own. He tests the currents of his race or of his time, because, while he stands in the midst of his race or of his time, he is not drifting with it. His foundations are his own; and while the waves that pass by him take their bearings and measure their speed by him, they never dream of moving him at their will. He may move with them, he may even use them in his movement, as the steamship uses the waves on which it floats, but they do not give it its direction or its speed. He judgeth all men; yet himself is judged of no man!

Such men there always are, — alas for the world if they should ever fail! The greatest of such men was Jesus. “The Father hath committed all judgment unto the Son,” He said. Wherever rnn touched His life they were judged instantly. It was as if an object of indistinguishable color floated out into the sunlight, and at once knew itself and showed to all who looked on what its color was. John, Peter, Nicodemus, Herod, Judas, Andrew, the nameless centurion, the nameless young noble man, — how we see instantly what they are when they touch Jesus! He judges them all, and yet what one of them judges Him? He goes apart from them all when the day is done, and climbs up the hill and lays His soul upon the soul of His Father, and so, alone, is judged.

Oh, there is a real consciousness in all of us that no man is really strong unless this which is true of Jesus is also true of him. In our imperfectness it may be true of part of us, and not true of the whole. There may be one side of my being in which I do accept and depend upon the judgments of my fellow-men; while, at the same time, on another side, I insist on coming to absolute righteousness and

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absolute truth and being judged by them alone. On this second side only am I strong. On this second side only will my brethren really feel that I am strong, and make me their judge. There only am I really spiritual, and so there only can it be possible for me to judge all things.

What will be the temper of the man who thus stands on his own convictions and judges his fellow-men? Will he be arrogant and intolerant? Not if he is really spiritual; for, as I said before, all spirituality is God. He who is really spiritual makes himsejf but the channel through which God can declare Himself. The judgment, when it comes, is not his, but God’s. He must be humble, for he has laid himself low that God may flow over his life into these other lives. And he must be full of sympathy, because where any part of God can flow, the whole of God will flow, and “God is Love.” Humility and sympathy must fill the strong judgments of the man who judges all things because he is spiritual.

And so it all comes to this, — that if you and I can really give ourselves to God and be made His men in Jesus Christ, then we shall attain to that which we dream of, which we desire, but which so often seems very far away. We shall be able to understand and help our fellow-men without being their slaves. In very virtue of our freedom, we shall be able to understand them, and reveal them to them selves, and help them. And there is nothing better, nothing happier in the world than that. May we be made fit for it by being made God’s men in Christ!