Visions and Tasks

“TFfcite Peter thought on the vision, the Spirit said unto him, Behold, three men seek thee.” — ACTS x. 19.

THESE words recall to many of you a most familiar picture, for the story of St. Peter’s vision is one of those passages of the New Testament which have almost become the proverbs of mankind. Peter had been sitting on the top of Simon’s house at Jaffa, and there had been shown to him the sight of the great sheet full of all living beasts, of which he had been bidden to take and eat. And when he hesitated, you remember Jiow a voice had spoken to him, and rebuked the narrow punctiliousness with which he drew distinctions, and thought some of God’s creatures clean and others unclean. He was sitting there, pondering this vision, “doubting in himself what the vision which he had seen should mean.” A new idea had come to him. He saw it very vaguely; and its developments, what it would lead to if he followed it out, he could not see at all. It was all abstract and impalpable. It just bewildered and eluded him. But as he sat there, steps were heard below, and to his mind the Spirit spoke, saying,

Visions and Tu

‘•Three men are asking 1 the

servants of Cornelius, the (icntile, coining to ask him to vi.-it tin ir master. Their visit gave him iinmediately the chance to put in action the idea which had possessed him. Our verse shows him then standing between the vision and its application. On the one side of him was the mysterious sheet full of the multitude of beasts; on the other side were the three men who needed just the principle which the sheet-full of beasts involved. It was a critical moment. The question was whether the vision could pass through Peter to the three men and Cornelius. When on the morrow he “went away with them,” the question was decided, and the idea and its appropriate duty had joined hands.

Man standing between his visions and his tasks — that is the subject of our verse then. That is our subject for this morning. It is the place where certain men are often called upon peculiarly to stand; and in some degree it is the place in -which all men are standing always. For every man has visions, glimpses clearer or duller, now bright and beautiful, now clouded and obscure, of what is absolutely and abstractly true; and every man also has pressing on him the warm, clear lives of fellow-men. I In TO is the world of truths on one side, and there is the world of men upon the other. Betw. -n the tw<> stands man; and these two worlds, if man is what lie ought to be, mset through his nature.

Think of an instance, and you will see what I moan. II« n- an- you. a thoughtful, meditative man.

You have been pondering and studying. Some how it has become clear to you, let us say, that there is a God. The supernatural behind the natural, the will behind all forces, has revealed itself to you. For the moment, it is enough for you just to know that mighty truth. Turning it this way and that, you think in one view and another how mighty it is. But very soon, if you are a true man, your nature begins to hear and feel a stir upon the other side of it. Under the windows which look towards the world, the tumult of the needy life of your fellow-men comes rising up to you. Perhaps it is more definite than that, and certain special fellow-men come, with footsteps which you can hear, up to your hearts’ doors and knock. At first their coming seems to be only an intrusion. Why can they not leave you alone with your great idea? What right have they to claim a share of the sunshine in which you are sitting? But by-and-by you see more wisely. You begin to wonder whether their coming on this side of you is not the true correlative and correspondent of the coming of the vision on the other side of you. You begin to feel that the practical life may be needed to complete the meditative life. If you open the door to your intrusive fellow-men you find that it indeed is so. Your idea of God falling upon the many mirrors of their various needs and natures, gains new interpretations and illuminations. Their human hearts get hold of the reality of God, which they never could have found out for themselves, through

>/is and Tasks.

your l.eli.-t’ in it. And your own lit-, open on l.oth

ndea, on thifl ode to the vision, and <>n that side to

th. men, grows rich and sacred as being the room in which that most deep and interest in — transaction which the world can witness, the meeting of truth with tin- human mind, takes place.

Truth is vague and helpless until men believe it. M< n are weak and frivolous till they believe in truth. To furnish truth to the believing heart, and to furnish believing hearts to truth, certainly there is no nobler office for a human life than that; and the doc trine which I want to preach to you to-day is that the human life or human nature is so made as to fulfil just that office. How can we better tell the story of you who first believe in God yourself and then an; drawn out to make your fellow-men believe in Him. and in making them believe in Him find your own belief grow steadier and clearer — how shall we better depict this human life which never learns anything without hearing other human lives clamoring to share the blessings of its knowledge than by recurring to the story of Peter, to whom,” as he thought on t lievision, the Spirit said, Behold three men seek t i

It is illustrated, this central and critical position in which a man may stand, by the way in which tinartist stands between the whole world of beautiful ideas and the hard world of matter, in which these ideas at last find their expression through him. The artist dreams his dream, and as he thinks upon tinvision, the Spirit says, Behold the marble seeks 1 1 and instantly the chisel is in his hand and the work of carving has begun. Ideas would hover like a great vague cloud over a world all hard and gross and meaningless, if it were not for man who brings the fire down and makes the whole of nature significant and vocal. If civilization has changed the face of nature, and out of rocks and trees built monuments and cities, the whole long history is but the. record of the meeting within the transmitting intelligence of man of the abstract idea with the adaptable material.

But to return from our illustration to our truth. There are some moments in life when this position of man, as standing between the visions which he has seen and his fellow-men on whom he is to bring them into power, is peculiarly manifest. There are perhaps some young men here to-day who stands just at one of those moments now. When any process of education has been finished, when the college doors have just dismissed their graduate, when the professional student stands upon the brink of the troubled waters of his profession with the calm scholar-days behind him, when the young minister is just feeling the hands of ordination on his bowed head, in all these days how real this sense of the two worlds between which he stands is to any truly thoughtful man. Between the silence and the stir, between the calm accumulation and the active employment of his truth, the young man stands with a strange consciousness which is never so vividly repeated at any other moment of his life. The two worlds, one on each side of him, re ceive illumination from each other, and this illumination is sent back and forth through him. Truth r seemed HO sacred as when h«- comes in sight of its true uses; and the world never seemed so well Avortli living for as when lie sees how much it needs his truth. Sad is the lot, sad is tin- nature of any man who can pass through such a moment and not be solemnized and exalted by it. Sad is the man who can graduate from college and go out into the world, and think of his education only as a drudgery from which he has at last escaped, or as an equipment with which he is to earn his daily bread.

Sad is the lot and nature of any man who sees his youth fading back behind him, finds himself growing out of the specially vision-seeing period of life, and counts his visions as they fade, mere pleasant recollections, or, it may be, things to laugh at and to be ashamed of. Sometimes you see a happy man, of whom, as he grows older, nothing of that kind is true. A man we see sometimes who, as he comes to middle-life, finds his immediate enthusiastic sight of ideal things grown dull; that is the almost necessary condition of his ripening life. He does not spring as quickly as he once did to seize each newly offered hope for man. A thousand disenchantment! have made him serious and sober. He looks hack, and the glow and sparkle which he once saw in life he sees no longer. He wonders at his recollection of himself, and asks how it is possible that life ever should have seemed to him as he remembers that it did seem. But the fact that it really did once seem so to him is his most valued certainty. He would not part with that assurance for anything. All the hard work that he does now is done in the strength and light of that remembered enthusiasm. To have been born into the world as he is now; never to have had any years in which the sky seemed brighter and the fields greener, and man more noble, and the world more hopeful than they seem to-day, would make all life for him another and a drearier thing. Every day the dreams of his boyhood, which seem dead, are really the live inspirations of his life. To such a man there surely came, some day or other in the past, a Peter-hour, a time at which the visions of his youth and the hard work of his manhood met and knew each other. From that time on the power of his vision passed into his work; and now, as, with his calm, dry face, seeming so unemotional, so unmoved, he goes about his labor, doing his duty and serving his generation, it is really the fire of his youth which no longer blazes, but still burns within him that makes the active power of that dry, prudent, conscientious, useful man. Peter plodding over the dusty hills to reach Cornelius, may seem to have lost the glory which was on his face while he sat and thought upon the vision, and caught glimpses of the essential nobleness of man — but the vision was at the soul of his journey all the time, and was what made his journey different from that of any peddler whom he met upon the road.

One longs to speak to men whom the hard work and dry details of life are just claiming, as they are leaving their youth In-hind and passing into middle life, “ion may expect to grow less enlhusiastic and excited. Do not be surprised at that. But in the meet ing of the facts of life with those accumulated convictions which must be the real In art of any true enthusiast, you ought to be growing more and more earnest the longer that you live. There are; whose fruit does not ripen till their leaves have fallen; but we are sure that the ripe fruit does not lauh at the fallen leaves whose strength it has drawn out into its own perfected shape and color. If you do not see the visions which you saw when you were a boy, that does not prove that the vision was not true. That boy’s belief that man is essentially noble, and the world is full of hope, is as genuinely a part of y< mr total life as this man’s experience that men will cheat, and that the world’s great wheels move very slowly. The emotions grow less eager and excited, but the convictions ought to be growing always stronger — as the kernel ripens in the withering shell. Believe in man with all your childhood’s confidence, while you work for man with all a man’s prudence and circumspection. Such union of energy and wisdom makes the completest character, and the most pow erful life.

I have been wandering a little from my subject. The power of man to stand between al»traet truth upon the one side and the concrete facts of life upon the other, comes from the co-existence in his human nature of two different powers, without the possession of both of which no man possesses a complete humanity. One of these powers is the power of knowing, and the other is the power of loving. I ask you to give to both of the words their fullest meaning, and then how rich the nature grows which has them both — this human nature, which is not truly human if either of them be left out. The power of knowing, however the knowledge may be sought or won, whether by patient study or quick-leaping intuition, including imagination and all the poetic power, faith, trust in authority, the faculty of getting wisdom by experience, everything by which the human nature comes into direct relationship to truth, and tries to learn, and in any degree, succeeds in knowing — that is one necessary element of manhood. And the other is Love, the power of sympathetic intercourse with things and people, the power to be touched by the personal nature with which we have to do — love therefore, including hate, for hate is only the reverse utterance of love, the negative expression of the soul’s affection; to hate anything is vehemently to love its opposite. Love thus, as the whole element of personal affection and relationship of every sort, this too is necessary, in order that a man may really be a man. These two together must be in all men. Not merely in the greatest men. It is not a question of greatness, but of genuineness and completeness. Just as the same chemical elements must be in a raindrop that are in Niagara, and, if they are, then the raindrop is as truly water as the cataract; so the power of learning truth and the power of loving man must be in you or me, as well as in Shakspeare or Socrates; and if they are, io Visions and Tasks.

then we are as genuinely and completely men as Socrates and Shakspeara

From this it will immediately fellow, that the n perfectly these two constituents of human nature meet, the more absolutely they are proportioned to each Other, and the more completely they are blended, so much the more ready will the human nature he for the fulfilment of every function of humanity. And if, as we have seen, one of the loftiest functions of humanity is to stand between the absolute truth and the world’s needs, and to transmit the one in such way that it can really reach and help tho other, then it will also follow that the more perfectly the knowing faculty and the loving faculty meet in any man, the more that man’s life will become a transmitter and interpreter of truth to other men.

That sounds like a dry inference; but it is one of which our own dearest experiences have borne to all of us most precious testimony. If you look back to the men who have taught you most, and in the fuller light where you now stand, study their character”, you will surely find that the real secret of their power lay here, in the harmonious blending of the knowing and the loving powers in their nature; in the opening of their nature on both sidep, so that truth entered in freely here and you entered in fiv«-ly there, and you and truth met, as it were, familiarly in the hospitality of their great characters. The man who has only the knowing power active, lets truth in, but it finds no man to feed. The man who has only the loving power active, lets man in, but he

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finds no truth to feed on. The real teacher welcomes both.

You know this in all who are really teachers. It is most clear of all in that highest of all the teacherships which the world has to show, which comes with its blessing to the beginning of every human life which is not by special misfortune poorer than it ought to be. Ask where a mother’s power lies, and surely the answer must be that no being like the true mother stands between visions of the highest truths on one side, and a human soul on the other, and offers a nature in which the knowing power and the lov ing power are kneaded and moulded together into a perfect oneness, into a sacred and pure transparency for the transmission of the first facts of the universe, and God and Life to the intelligence of her child, who lives in her knowledge by her love. The purest mingling of all elements into one character and nature which we can ever see, is in the Christian mother, in whom the knowledge of all that she knows and the love which she feels for her child, make not two natures, as they often do in men, in fathers, but perfectly and absolutely one. She values knowledge not for its own sake, but for her child. She loves him not with the mere animal fondness with which the brute mother loves her child, but as the utterance and revelation of every truth to her. Thus her love and her intelligence are blended perfectly; and the result is that which we know, the wonderful power of the mother’s life to bring the deepest, highest, farthest truths, and win for them their first entrance into tin- nature of her child.

The New Testament tells us of Jesus that 1 1« .is full of Grace and Truth. Grace and Truth! These are exactly the two elements of which we have been speaking, and it must have been in the JM-I •!»•< -t ing of those two elements in him that Jlis mediatorship, His power to transmute the everlasting truths of God into the immediate help of needy men consisted. He was no rapt self-centered student of the abstract truth; nor was he the merely ready sentimental pitier of the woes of men. But in His whole nainro there was finely wrought and combined the union of the abstract and eternal with the special arid the personal, which made it possible for him, without an effort, to come down from the mountain where he had been glorified with the light of God, and take up instantly the cure of the poor lunatic in the valley; or to descend from the hill where he had been praying, to save his disciples half-shipwrecked on the lake; or to turn his back on the comforting angels of Gethsemane, that he might give himself into the hands of the soldiers who were to lead him to the cross. “While he thought upon the vision, the Spirit said unto him, Behold three men seek thee.” Can any words more typically tell the life of Christ than those!

It is a truth which we have all learned from some experience through which we have been led, that any great experience, seriously and greatly met and passed through, makes the man who has passed through it always afterwards a purer medium through which the highest truth may shine on other men. Have you not seen it? Here is some man whom you have known long. You have seemed to have reached the end of all that it is possible for you to get from him, all that it is possible for him to do for you. Nothing has come through him from behind to you. You have seen him. You have seen a sort of glint or glimmer of reflection of God’s light upon the surface of His life, as the sun might be reflected on a plate of steel. But nothing of God or God’s truth has come through him to you as the sun shines through a lens of glass, pouring its increased intensity upon the wood it sets in flame.

But some day you meet that man, and he is altered. Tenderer, warmer, richer, he seems to be full of truths and revelations which he easily pours out to you. Now you not merely see him; you see through him to things behind. As you talk with him, as you look into his face, you see with new surprising clearness what God is, what man is, what a great thing it is to live, what a great thing it is to die, how mysterious and pathetic are sorrow and happiness, and fear and hope. You cannot begin to tell the change by merely thinking that the man has learned some new facts and is telling them to you, as a book might tell them from its printed page. The very substance of the man is altered, so that he stands between the eternal truths and you no longer as a screen, which shuts them from your sight, but as an atmosphere through which they come to you all radiant. You ask what has come to him, and you hear (if you are m-ar enough I’m- him to t<-ll you hi.s most s; history), of some profound experience. He has passed through an overwhelming sorrow. He has stood upon the brink of some tremendous danger. He has spent a day and a night in the deep of some bewildering doubt. He has been overmastered by some sudden joy. It may have been one of these or another. The result has been in such a change of the very substance of the nature, that, whereas bef TO it was all thick and muddy, so that whatever light fell upon it was either cast aside or else absorbed into it and lost, now it makes truth first visible, and then clear and convincing to the fellow-men who see truth through it.

And when you try to analyze this change, do you not find that it consists in an impregnation of the nature which has had this new experience with two forces — one a love for truth, the other a love for man? and it is in the perfect combination of these two in any life that the clarifying of that life into a power of transmission and irradiation truly lies. What man goes worthily through sorrow and does not come out hating shams and pretences, hungering for truth; and also full of sympathy for his i’ 1- low-man whose capacity for suffering has been revealed to him by his own. It is the perfect blending of those two constituents in the new nature of your tried and patient friend which have iiv«in him this wondrous power of showing God and truth to you.

What man goes bravely and faithfully through doubt and does not bring out a soul to which truth seems to be infinitely precious, and the human soul the most mysterious, sacred thing in all the world. Out of the union of those two persuasions has come the prophetship of this life which now you cannot look at without seeing the infinite behind it made clear by it.

Surely, if we can believe this, then the way in which God lets his children encounter great, and sometimes terrible, experiences is not entirely inexplicable. Surely if these souls which now are deep in sorrow, or are being cast up and down and back and forth in doubt, are being thus annealed and purified that they may come to be revealers, mediators between God and their fellow-men, then into our wonder at the existence of doubt and sorrow in God’s world there comes a little ray of light. Who would not bear anything that could refine his life into fitness for such a privilege as that?

I had meant to speak of several of the special visions which, through the soul that is prepared for such an office, become transformed into influence and blessing to mankind. I can only indicate them in the slightest way. Suppose that God has let you see His goodness. A strong, unalterable persuasion that God is merciful and kind has been poured onto your life, into your mind. That fact itself, once known, absorbs your contemplation. If you and God were all the universe, the knowledge of His goodness would be everything to you. You would sit lonely in the empty world and fill your soul with ^a/inon the brightness of that truth. So you do sit to-day, as if you and God were indeed alone, and no one in the universe except you two. And thru, as you sit so, there comes some sort of appeal from f.-llow-incn. The three men are down at the door while you arc dreaming on the housetop. Your child comes to you with some childish joy and wants its explanati« pn; some puzzled neighbor cries across to you, from his life to yours, and wants to know if you have any clue to all this snarl of living. Somehow the cry awakens you, and you go down and put your truth into your brother’s hands. At first it seems almost a profanation. The truth is so sacred and seems so thoroughly your own. But as you give it to your brother, new lights come out in it. For God to be good means something more when the goodness turns to new forms of blessing in the new need of this new life. 0 you who think you know that God is merciful because of the mercy which He has shewed to you, be sure there is a richness in your truth which you have not reached yet, which you will never reach until you let Him make your life the interpreter of His goodness to some other soul!

Or again perhaps the truth which you have learned, the vision which you have seen, is the sinfulness of sin — what a terrible thing it is for any child of God to disobey his Father. Overwhelmed with that knowledge, you sit and brood upon your sad t I think that all religious history bears witness that that conviction, if it remains purely a personal truth of our own life, certainly grows tyrannical and morbid and brings despair. As soon as it becomes a stimulus, inspiring us to go and help our brethren escape out of their sin, it becomes salutary and blessed. If I knew any soul to-day, haggard and weary with its consciousness of sin and danger, I think that what I would try to do to help it would be this — make it see in its own sinfulness the revelation of the sinfulness of all the world; then let it forget its own sinfulness and keep only the impulse that must come out of its sight of how horrible the world’s sin is; then let it go, full of that impulse, and try to save the world. So it must find its own salvation.

So of the truth of immortality. Not as a personal privilege of mine, but as a token of the greatness and worth of the human soul, making every service which I can render to it more imperious and delightful — so do I come to understand the fact that man never dies with the fullest faith.

So of such a truth as the Trinity. Not as a puzzle or a satisfaction of the intellect, but as an expression of the manifold helpfulness with which the divine nature offers itself to the human, so it will be to me the richest and the holiest creed.

There are no limits to our doctrine. Every truth which it is possible for man to know it is good for him to know with reference to his brother men. Only in that way is the truth which he knows kept at its loftiest and purest. This is the daily meaning which I want to find in the picture of Peter sitting

IH ion- his vision, on the house-top and the three men knocking in the street below.

Theip is a danger, which we all recognize, of selfishness in our religion. It comes in various forms. It makes one man say: “lam content, for I himseen the Lord.” To that man the great host of his fellow-men who need his Lord as much as he, are nothing. He will leave them unheard in the street and sit within, wrapped in the complacency of his assured salvation. Another man says, “What business is it of any one except myself if I close my eyes and do not see the Lord? Does it hurt any one but me? Who has a right to interfere or urge me?” To both of these men is there not a message in the story of Peter which we have been studying this morning? To the first man it says: The seeing of your own vision is but half, and half without the other half grows weak and perishes. Your religion, kept solely for yourself, will certainly decay. Up, up, and go abroad and find the men who need your Christ, to whom you can bring Him, in giving Him to whom alone you can make your own faith in Him complete and strong.

To the other man it says, Indeed it is the business of other men than you, it is the whole world’s business whether or not you are a Christian! Indeed it does rob other souls than yours, if you will not live spiritually and see the truth which God is showing to your soul. If there are men whom, being your self a Christian, you might bring to Christ, then you rob not only yourself but. them, if you refuse to come to Christ. The window which makes itself dark, darkens not merely itself, but also all the room into which the light might have shone through it.

I dare to hope that some generous nature may feel this appeal. Be spiritual, be religious, come to Christ. Cast off your sins, not for yourself, but for some soul which possibly may learn from you, what it could not learn in any other way, how good and strong and forgiving is the sinner’s God.

It is a terrible thing to have seen the vision, and to be so wrapped up in its contemplation as not to hear the knock of needy hands upon our doors.

It is a terrible thing to hear the knock and have no vision to declare to the poor knocker.

But there is no greater happiness in all the world than for a man to love Christ for the mercy Christ has shown his soul, and then to open his whole heart outward arid help to save his brethren’s souls with the same salvation in which he rejoices for himself. May none of us go through life so poor as never to have known that happiness.