Brotherhood in Christ

“/Simon, called Peter, and Andrew his brother, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother.” — MATTHEW x. 2.

IN the list of the apostles of Jesus there are two pairs of brothers. We cannot tell, of course, what were the reasons which directed the Master’s choice among the fishermen of Galilee of those who were to preach his Gospel and to be the first pastors of hie Church; but certainly it is significant and suggestive that twice in the small number of the twelve it should have happened that the natural tie of brotherhood was emphasized by a common call to the new life and a common work in the same service. It suggests the relationship which may exist between our common human kinships and those loftier and diviner influences which are always seeking admission to the life of man.

Simon and Andrew, James and John — they had grown up together in their simple homes beside the Sea of Galilee, passing on from childhood into youth, from youth into manhood, under the same influences, keeping, as brothers will keep, that open between their lives which came of the same early memories. You know how brothers, however far they drift apart, have always doors between their lives which keep them in communication. The doors may be long blocked up with the great burdens of later life which have been piled against them; the locks may have grown rusty and the keys may have been lost; yet still the doors are there, and the wall never is quite as thick and solid as are the walls which divide other lives. The doors may still some day be opened, and even while they remain closed, there come sounds through them of what is being done upon the other side. Surely such relations, never completely closed, existing between human creatures all over the world, must have something to do with the diffusion through human life of any great influence of thought or feeling.

The world is covered with a network of brother hoods. The first and simplest relationships run on and out in every direction, and multiply themselves till hardly any man stands entirely alone. This network of brotherhoods, like every evident fact of life, sets us to asking three questions — first, what is its immediate cause? second, what is its direct result? and third, what is its final reason? These are the three questions which the thoughtful man asks about every fact.

And with relation to this fact the answer to the first two questions is very plain. The cause of this interwoven network, this reticulation of life with life, is the whole system of nature by which each human being takes its start from another human being, and is kept, for a time at least, in associations of company anil dependence with the being from whom it sprang and with the other beings who have the same source with it. And the direct result of such relationships is also plain. They are full of mutual helpfulness and pleasure. As to the third question, the answer is not so entirely clear and certain. But, as we watch and think, it seems to me that we are at least led to wonder whether one final cause or purpose of this interlacing of life with life, by natural and indissoluble kinships, may not be just this, the providing, as it were, of open communications, of a system of shafts or channels piercing this human mass in every direction, crossing and recrossing one another, through which those higher influences, which ought to reach every corner, and every individual of the great structural humanity, may be freely carried everywhere, and no most remote or insignificant atom of the mass be totally and necessarily untouched.

We have only, 1 think, to picture to ourselves what would be the case if there were no such great system of natural relationships covering the earth, somewhere in which every human being found his place; and then we see how reasonable it is to think that the great system which actually does exist, may ‘have been created for this purpose which I have described. Suppose that every human being stood alone. Suppose that every atom, however it may have come into existence, lay next, indeed, to other atoms, but with no lines of brotherhood or any natural relationship between them. Can we not feel at once how different the world would be? Every truth or power which was to fill the mass would have to be communicated separately by a special act to every particle. Some little transmission there might be from surface to surface, but none from heart to heart, of these atoms which were strung upon no cords of brotherhood. If the whole mass of mankind were to be infused with the knowledge of God’s existence, ev ery separate man would have to be convinced with his own evidence, and the evidence which persuaded his brethren would have no convincingness for him. I can imagine only one result. Good influence, right thought, true feeling would seem almost of necessity to be obliged to lie in pools here and there upon the great expanse of human life, wherever it found the most sensitive and susceptible minds; great districts of humanity being totally tmreached, instead of the great broad fields, being watered through and through. Truth would flash here and there from a splendid diamond nature on which it chanced to strike, and be but one thin ray of intense light. It could not be a suffused radiance varying always in depth and richness, but lighting every man and carried everywhere along the atmosphere in which all priests kept brotherhood with one another.

Our truth is this then — that the natural relations which exist between man and man, the relations of brotherhood, sisterhood, parenthood, childhood, and all the other kinships of mankind, have one at least of their purposes, and one of their most eacred purposes, in this — that they an- tiod’s great BV along whose lines He means to diffuse his truth ami influence through the world. They area structure of channels, honeycombing the mass of human life, along which the water of life may flow. Look at Christ’s Incarnation. In Him we know that <!<>«! came into the world. And see how it was that God, in Him, appealed to and diffused Himself through human life. He sets himself right into the midst of a human family. First out through that sacred channel which lies forever open between a mother and her child, a channel through which the currents which flow motherwards are no less strong than the currents which flow childwards, through that channel first his influence flows, and flows so spontaneously that it flows even while it is yet unconscious of it self. His mother is his first disciple — his first Christian. Then it is evident, from what the very fragmentary records tell us, that his power found out the other open channels which connect a man’s life with his brothers’ lives, and flowed in them. ‘• Neither did his brethren believe on him,” we read at fust, as if their unbelief in him was strongest because his appeal to them had been the closest and most urgent. But by-and-by the “Lord’s brethren” sta n d 1 1 i -I i among his disciples, as if when they did believe in him their belief was the most natural and real of all. Around his cross more than one of the mourner.- of his kindred. Is it not evident that the great system of the universal brotherhood in which all men are children of the same Father, was reached lpv the power of the Son of God through the smaller system which had its centre in the household of the carpenter?

And if we look at Christ’s larger method, at the way in which his work went on after it had gone beyond that earliest stage among his personal kindred, the same thing still appears. His truth ran abroad in the channels which were made by the natural relations of mankind. It was a fulfilment of the method of the Old Testament, in which again and again the Jew was commanded concerning the words which God had spoken unto him: “Thou shalt teach them tmto thy children.” So Jesus makes the father’s faith a reason for the sick child’s restoral to health; so he fills the home at Bethany with his pervading presence; so he sends the recovered lunatic of Gadara back to his home, to spread among his friends the story of his healing. So he bids his disciples make way for the mothers bringing him their children; so he finds in household life an image of the Everlasting Father’s willingness to hear his people’s prayer. True, he is always recognizing that the ultimate power of his religion is individual. He declares that some times, in its assertion of itself, it will break up family life and set the son at variance against the father, and the daughter against her mother. But all that is expressly declared to be unnatural. It is the rending of a family life which is not worthy of the great influence which it has to transmit. It is the bursting of a channel which has grown too weak to carry the tides of the religious life. The whole great t’ Christianity, with its family Sacrament of Baptism: with its family conception of the government of God; with its Table of the Lord; with its OTMCCS, which are all transfigurations of the family all’cctionR; this Christianity began by using, and has always used, the network of natural brotherhood which it found enveloping the earth as a means for the diffusion of its truth and power. Its Christ is no philosopher, dropping seed-thoifghts into single hearts, thinking only of individual character, or at most only of artificial combinations, of states built up elaborately and with complicated laws. He is the Son of Man, entering into the heart of the humanity to which he intrinsically belongs, beating his truth into its life-blood and making his power run in the channels of its primitive affections.

It is not only Christianity, nor only religion, that thus makes use of the network of natural relationship with which the earth is covered. Every high er and more spiritual influence, every interest which claims more of man than his mere physical appetites, avails itself of this same first fact of related human life, this fact that no man stands alone, but each is bound by some kind of kinship in with all the rest This is the way in which knowledge spreads its. -If. Along the lines which tie the father to the child, and the older to the younger brother, runs the communication of facts and the contagion of the enthusiasm of learning. Taste spreads itself through a family circle as the sun spreads its light through an atmosphere where every particle is brother to every other.

Patriotism is not a fire which each new citizen has to go and light for himself at the central altar of his country’s principles. It is caught in the warm air of loyal homes. It kindles unconsciously where hearts lie close together in the first relationships of man. Suppose that some new truth came to-day to take possession of humanity; suppose that some great practical philosophy desired to occupy the world; can we imagine for it any practicable way but this, that it should spread along these lines which it would find already marked out for it, the lines in which influence is used to run, the lines which God’s hands have hollowed from life to life, from soul to soul?

And now if we have seen the principle, let us ask ourselves what its results will be. If religion spreads itself among mankind along the lines of man’s natural affections and relationship, the results which we may look for will, I think, be two. First, the exaltation and refinement of those affections and relationship, themselves; and, second, the. simplifying and humanizing of religion.

We all know how the natural relations between human creatures all have their downward as well as their upward tendency, their animal as well as their spiritual side. The lusts of Power and Pride and Cruelty and Passion all come in to make foul and mean that which ought to be pure and high. What is there that can keep the purity and loftiness of domestic life? What is there that can preserve the color and glory of the family, like the perpetual consriousness, running through all tin- open channels of its life, that they an- L.-in 11SI-.(1 to convey tin- truth and power of God? Tin- father who counts liin. one link in the ever developing perpetuation of truth among mankind, handing on to his children what has been already handed down to him; the brother who without struggle or effort feels all that he believes flowing through this life into the open life of the brother by his side; are not these the men in whom brotherhood and fatherhood keep their true dignity and never grow base, jealous, tawdry or tyrannical? Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use. The relations of kinship are no exception to this rule. It is when, underneath the pleasant courtesies and intimacies of the home, there is all the time going on a diffusion and distribution of religion, of the highest motives and the highest thoughts; it is then that the home beams, even on the surface of its life, with its richest beauty.

And, as the home, pervaded by this diffusion of religion, comes to its best beauty, so religion too is at its best, when it is flowing through the channels which were made for it to run in. Religion, we know, is apt to grow unhunuin. Either vaguely speculative, or hardly dogmatic, or fantastically formal, it loses the fulness and completeness, the healthiness and entire vitality which are the conditions of its best work. And the more solitary you make religion, the more it becomes in danger of such degenerations. It is in its contact with the healthy relations of human life that religion keeps its own true healthiness. It is as given from the father to the son, that religion truly reveals its authority and beneficence. It is as passing from brother to brother, along the channels of their commonest intercourse, that religion loses its cloudiness and becomes full of sincerity, honesty and common sense. Wherever religion deserts these primary and perpetual channels and becomes monastic, the brooding solitary experience of single souls, transmitting itself through the artificial relationships of priest and penitent, instead of through the normal relationships of life, in every such case religion becomes fantastic and diseased. It is the tendency of the unnatural associations of man kind to sacrifice the individual to the community. It is the privilege of the natural relationships of man, at once to secure social life and to foster individuality. That is the invariable difference between the companionship of the cloister and the companionship of the family. Religion, as it flows through one, grows complicated and unhealthy. Religion flowing through the other, gains ever new simplicity and health.

I know, my dear friends, well enough, that when I talk thus 1 am talking ideally. I am talking of these first relations of men to one another as they are when they are at their best. They are not always so. And when they fail of their best it is always true that the very quality in them which made them capable of special good, makes them the means of greatest evil. I have spoken of the way in which the net-

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work of natural affection, stretched all over the earth, may carry everywhere the truth and power of Christ. But you know well enough that every channel which is made to carry good influence, may be taken possession of by wickedness and made its instrument. The pipes which were laid to bring pure water into the city may bring in corruption. The veins which ought to run cool with the blood of health may be turned into rivers of fire and fever. The great system of popular education which ought to fill the land with sound learning, may be itself the means by which ignorance and error may be carried into countless homes. And so it is with all that other system of which I have been speaking. Through the same natural affections by which religion ought to be spread abroad, it is possible enough that infidelity, and vice, and worldliness may get a prevalence which they could gain in no other way. What is it that perpetuates the blighting influence of fashion? What are the channels through which are spread abroad, all over a community, the false standard of wealth, the base idea of manliness which poisons countless hearts? Are they not the same God-created channels through which the holiest influences were meant to flow? “Simon, called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James, the son of Zebedee, and John his brother.” Many and many a time their brotherhood is the power of a common curse, instead of a common blessing. Many and many a home there is to-day where fatherhood and childhood, brotherhood and sisterhood, the self same channels still through which God meant that truth and righteousness should flow, are bearing pollution to innocent hearts, and temptation to weak hearts, and discouragement to sad hearts; pain instead of joy, hopelessness instead of hope.

I know all this. Who can live in the midst of this network of brotherhood and not know it? But yet all this misuse and perversion of the principle only makes the principle more plain. Every sight of corruption running freely through the channels which connect life with life, only shows how open those channels are, and makes an earnest man more anxious to rescue them for their best use.

What shall we do then? What shall you do, who feel with every breath you draw how other lives are living in open communication with yours, how their very life-bloods flow together in one common system? What shall you do, who are anxious that what is best in each should come to all the rest; that you should be able to give to your brethren the faith which is so strong in your own heart, and get from them the faith by which they live? What shall you parents do, who want to make your children love the Lord you love? What shall you brothers do, who want to make your brothers know the truth you know? What can you do to make the channels of your fam ily life and of your natural relationship to one an other, carry the influences which you want to give, and bring back to you the influences which you want to receive? It is not hard to tell, although it may be very hard to do. First, you can try to keep the whole character of your intercourses fine, and pure, and high. Look into countless families that v<»u know — perhaps if I dared I might even bid some of you look into your own — and ask your; -It wlu-tlit-r, supposing some one member of that family t< 1 pu t nil y religious, the atmosphere of the home is lofty enough and pure enough to furnish the proper medium l»y which that one member’s religion may freely pass in to the lives of all rest. Fire will leap through h« air; and the most deep of all emotions, the most of all desires, the emotion of the love of God, t!; sire to serve and know Christ, will pass most readily from heart to heart where all emotion is pure and lofty, and where all desiris unselfish and enthusiastic. But in homes where all the air is full of selfishness, where the whole tone is sordid, where every member is jealously watching that no other gets ad vantage over him, where brotherhood means suspicion, and fatherhood petty tyranny, and childhood restless impatience to be free, what chance is there for the divine fire of the higher life to leap through a heavy atmosphere like that? “I have been a Christian all these years; and look at my children — not one Christian among them all;” so the perplexed, appointed father or mother talks. But when you open the door of that household’s history, you feel the son of the failure in an instant. As the door o]>« -us there comes pouring out on you a turbid wrangle of family quarrels, or a chatter of perpetual frivolity, or perhaps, what perhaps is worst of all, a great, dull, heavy cloud of well-fed stupidity, and ignorance mental stagnation, which is all that family life within those walls has ever meant. Through such a darkness as that, what wonder that the little candle-light of the father’s or the mother’s piety, weak enough it self, has never had the strength to pierce. No! The first thing to be done, in order that the natural relationships may be made the channel for religious influence, is that they should be kept pure with unselfishness, and open with intelligence, and fine with sympathy. Then when any religious influence seeks to pass from life to life, it will find already built a channel that is worthy of it and fit to carry it.

But there is something more definite than that. It is a very wide law and a very beautiful one, that the best way to make a thing fit for the use for which it was first made is to put it to that use. The best way to make the dusty trumpet clear is to blow music through it. The best way to make the sluggish mind capable of thinking is to think with it. And so the best way to make the natural relationships capable of carrying religious influence is to give them religious influences to carry,, so strong and ardent that they shall force and burn their own way through whatever artificial obstructions may have stopped up the channel through which they were meant to go. Again I hear a Christian parent complaining that his religion has not told upon his children to make them Christians; but, when I ask, I find that there never has been one direct effort to make it tell; never, in all the years while they have lived together, one word or act, which definitely and specifically, tried to send the go Brotherhood in Christ.

fat JUT’S religion through the open channel that

In -tween them, from tin- lather’s life into the child’s.

v tiling else, every other truth and interest treasure, has been offered and urged over and over again, but not one word or act has ever urged or offered religion.

I know what will be said at once, and J think I understand it. I know how often it is hardest to speak about the most sacred things to those who are the nearest and the dearest to us. I understand that shrinking which keeps the brother’s lips closed from urging on his own brother the truth and the persuasion which he will urge freely enough on any other man. The glib and ready Sunday-school teacher goes from his class to his home, and in the presence of his own children he is silent as a stone. In that phenomenon, which is so familiar and often so perplexing, I think we can see the mixture of two feelings, one of which is bad, the other good. The Lad feeling is the sense of shame which cornes when we think of pressing the love of God and the service of Christ upon the minds and consciences of those who are always living with us, and who know what poor, weak, wicked and unfaithful things our own lives are. The good reason for our silence is more snLtle. It is, I think, the feeling which comes to us almost everywhere, but Comes to us most strongly in the presence of those whose hearts lie nearest to our own, that for the conveyance of the most t?a influences words are the most clumsy and un factory of means; that life is the only testimony by which the power of Christ in one man’s heart can thoroughly bear its witness to the heart of any other man. It is natural enough that this consciousness should be most clear and strong just where the possibility of heart bearing direct testimony to heart becomes most evident, in the home where hearts ought to lie nearest and openest to one another. I know how these two reasons, and perhaps some others, make it very hard sometimes for the father to talk to his child, or for the brother to talk to his brother, about the most sacred things. And yet I know how often just one word is needed to break through the obstruction and reserve, and let all the wealth of God’s grace which has been gathering in one humbly consecrated heart, pour forth into another which is waiting empty and hungry all the time. At least we are all bound to be sure that it is something nobler than mere pride or shame that is keeping us from saying to our brother what may be his word of life.

But, after all, the word is only one method; the simplest, the most immediate, the most natural, but not the only nor .the richest method by which men send influence forth to their brethren. If, honestly, the urgent word does not seem to be the true way to reach the lives which God has set the closest to our own, the truth remains that he who really seeks to send abroad the Gospel, and who lives that Gospel in the centre of some one of the networks of brotherhood with which God has covered the earth, and who cares for other souls beside his own. and

92 Brotherhood in Christ.

is on the watch for every feather with which the arrow of his influence can possibly lpe win<-<l, will surely find the ways he seeks, however impossible it is to tell before what they will be; and cannot fail to discover at last that God has blessed through him the lives which are no less dear to him than his own.

With that assurance, full of responsibility and full also of encouraging hope, I leave the truth which I have tried to preach to you. Go to your homes and question them! O Zebedee! 0 mother of Zebedee’s children! ask yourselves whether your household is kept open by pure, refined, unselfish, elevated living, by a continual sense of God, by ever present prayer, so that the best of light and strength which God has given to any one tends freely to become the strength and light of all. Why are John and James so often not together in the company of Christ? What does it mean that so often Simon Peter lingers in darkness, while Andrew is in the full sunshine of the Master’s service? Go home and question your household life about these things, and claim for your home that blessing for which God made our homes; the blessing of persuasive grace; the blessing of a brotherhood and sisterhood in the divine life, ever echoing and fulfilling the brotherhoods and sis t«-rhoods which make the richness and beauty of our human living; and ever picturing and anticipating the perfect brotherhoods and sisterhoods in the great world-family of God.