We have studied the teachings of science concerning man and his environment, let us turn now to the teachings of the Bible. And though eight chapters have been devoted to the teachings of science, and only one to the teachings of the Bible, it is not because I underestimate the importance of the latter. It is more difficult to clearly discover just what are the teachings of Nature in science. The lesson is written in a language foreign to most of us, and one requiring careful study; and yet once deciphered it is clear. Science attains the laws of Nature by the study of animal and human history. But this record is a history of continually closer conformity to environment on the part of all advancing forms. The animal kingdom is the clay which is turned, as Job says, to the seal of environment, and it makes little difference whether we study the seal or the impression; we shall read the same sentence. Environment has stamped its laws on the very structure of man’s body and mind. And the old biblical writers read these laws, guided by God’s Spirit, in their own hearts, and in those of their neighbors, and in their national history, as the record of God’s working, and gave us concrete examples of the results of obedience and disobedience. Hence the teaching of the Bible is always clear and unmistakable.

The Bible treats of three subjects Nature, Man, and God and the relations of each of these to the others. I have tried to present to you in the first chapter the biblical conception of Nature and its relation to God. In its relation to man it is his manifestation to us, and, in its widest sense, the sum of the means and modes through which he develops, aids, and educates us. And in this conception I find science to be strictly in accord with scripture.

Now what is the scriptural idea of man? Man interests us especially in three aspects. He is a corporeal being; he is an intellectual being; he is a moral being, with feelings, will, and personality.

Man’s body. Plato considered the body as a source of evil and a hindrance to all higher life. And Plato was by no means alone in this. The Bible takes a very different view. Neglect of the body is always rebuked. The only place, so far as I can find, where the body is called vile is where it is compared with the glorious body into which it is to be transformed. “Your bodies,” writes Paul to the Corinthians, “are members of Christ,” “temples of the Holy Ghost.” But the Bible teaches that the body is to be the servant, not the ruler, of the spirit. “I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection,” continues Paul. Here again science is strictly in accord with scripture.

Man is an intellectual being. I need not quote the praises of knowledge in the Old Testament. They must be fresh in your mind. But the practical Peter writes, “giving all diligence add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge.” And Paul prays that the love of the Ephesians may “abound more and more in knowledge and in all judgment.” But the important knowledge is the knowledge of God, and of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Master. And similarly science emphasizes that the chief end of all knowledge is that we should know the environment to which we are to conform. Knowledge is useful to strengthen and clarify the mind, that it may see and conform to truth and God: and if it fails to become a means to conformity, it has failed of the chief, and practically the only, end for which it was intended. We are to come “in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” But knowledge which only puffs up and distracts the mind from the great aims and ends which it should serve is rebuked with equal emphasis by the Bible and by science.

I would not claim that we have set too high a value upon knowledge, perhaps we cannot; but there is something far higher on which we are inclined to set far too low a value. This is righteousness and love; and true wisdom is knowledge permeated, vivified, and transfigured by devotion to these higher ends. And in this highest realm of the mind feeling and will rule conjointly. Love is a feeling which always will and must find its way to activity through the will, and it is an activity of the will roused by the very deepest feeling, inspired by a worthy object. If you try to divorce them, both die. Hence Paul can say, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.” And John goes, if possible, even farther and says, “Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love.” And this sort of love bears and believes and hopes and endures, and never fails. And for this reason the Bible lays such tremendous emphasis on the heart, not as the centre of emotion alone, but as the seat of will as well. And science points to the same end, though she sees it afar off.

And what of God? God is a Spirit, Creator, Author, and Finisher of all things, and filling all. But while omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, these are not the characteristics emphasized in the Bible. He is righteous. “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” is the grand question of the father of the faithful. And when Moses prays God to show him his glory, God answers, “I will make all my goodness pass before thee.” He is the “refuge of Israel,” the “everlasting arms” underneath them, pitying them “as a father pitieth his children.” And in the New Testament we are bidden to pray to our Father, who is love, and whose temple is the heart of whosoever will receive him. Truly a very personal being.

Now the Bible rises here indefinitely above anything that mere natural science can describe. But can the ultimate “Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness” and unselfishness, of whose presence in environment science assures us, be ever better described than by these words concerning the “Father of our spirits?”

And an infinitely wise, good, and loving being will have fixed modes of working; for “with him is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” Thus only can man trust and know him. The old Stoic philosopher tells us “everything has two handles, and can be carried by one of them, but not by the other.” So with God’s laws. Many seem to look upon them as a hindrance and limitation to him in carrying out his righteous and loving will toward man. But they are really the modes or means of his working, which he uses with such regularity and consistency that we can always rely upon them and him. The pure river of the water of life proceedeth from the throne of God and of the Lamb.

If I am lying ill waiting anxiously for the physician I can think of this great city as a mass of blocks of houses separating him from me. But the houses have been arranged in blocks so as to leave free streets, along which he can travel the more quickly. And God’s laws are not blocks, but thoroughfares, planned that the angels of his mercy may fly swiftly to our aid. We are prone to forget that these laws are expressly made for your and my benefit, as well as that of all beings, that we may be righteous and unselfish. And this is one ground of the apostle’s faith that “all things work together for good to them that love God.” And in the Apocalypse the earth helps the woman. It must be so.

But what if you or I try to block the thoroughfare? What would happen to us if we tried to stop bare-handed the current of a huge dynamo, or to hold back the torrent of Niagara? Nothing but death can result. And what if I stem myself against the “river of the water of life, proceeding from the throne of God,” and try to turn it aside or hold it back from men perishing of thirst? And that is just what sin is, even if done carelessly or thoughtlessly; for men have no right to be careless and thoughtless about some things. “The wages of sin is death;” physical death for breaking physical law, and spiritual death for breaking spiritual law. How can it be otherwise? The wages are fairly earned. The hardest doctrine for a scientific man to believe is that there can be any forgiveness of such sin as the heedless, ungrateful breaking of such wise and beneficent laws of a loving Father. And yet my earthly father has had to forgive me a host of times during my boyhood. Perhaps I can hope the same from God; I take his word for it.

But if you or I think that it is safe to trifle with God’s laws, we are terribly mistaken. The Lord proclaimed himself to Moses as “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” But someone will say, This is terrible. It is terrible; but the question is, Does the Bible speak the truth about nature? Is nature a “fairy godmother,” or does she bring men up with sternness and inflict suffering upon the innocent children, if necessary, lest they copy after their sinful parents? Do the children of the defaulter and drunkard and debauchee suffer because of the sins of their father, or do they not? If the blessings won by parental virtue go down to the thousandth generation, must not the evil consequences of sin go down to the third or fourth?

That we are not under the law, but under grace, does not mean, as some seem to think, that it is safe to sin. Otherwise the forgiveness of God becomes the lowest form of indulgence slanderously attributed to the Church of Rome. We gain freedom from law as well as penalty only by obedience. The artist can safely forget the laws and rules of his art only when by long obedience and practice he obeys them unconsciously. We seem to be threatened with a belief that God will never punish sin in one who has professed Christianity. This view cheapens sin and makes pardon worthless, it takes the iron out of the blood, and the backbone out of all our religion and ethics. It ruins Christians and disgraces Christianity. We sometimes seem to think that our nation or church or denomination is so important to the carrying on of God’s work that he cannot afford to let any evil befall us, whatever we may do or be.

“Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, and princes of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment and pervert all equity. They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the Lord and say, Is not the Lord among us? none evil can come upon us. Therefore shall Zion for your sake be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest.” That was plain preaching, and the people did not like it. They would not like it any better to-day; it would come too near the truth.

But others seem to think that God is too kind, not to say good-natured, to allow his children to suffer for their sins. This is part of a creed, unconsciously very widely held to-day, that comfort, not character, is the chief end of life. Now if God is too kind to allow his children to suffer some of the natural consequences of sin, he is not a really kind and loving father, he is spoiling his children. Salvation is soundness, sanity, health; just as holiness is wholeness, escape from the disease, and not merely from the consequences of sin. A physician, unless a quack, never promises relief from a deep-seated disease without any pain or discomfort. And if the disease is the result of indulgence, he warns us that relapse into indulgence will bring a worse recurrence of the pain. Perhaps, after all, Socrates was not so far from right when he maintained that if a man had sinned the best and only thing for him is to suffer for it. “God the Lord will speak peace unto his people, and to his saints: but let them not turn again to folly.” And our Lord says, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” If we would be great in the kingdom of heaven we must do and teach the commandments. One of the best lessons that the clergy can learn from science is that law and penalty are not things of the past. They are eternal facts; and if so, ought sometimes to be at least mentioned from the pulpit as well as remembered in the pew.

But if God is a person striving to communicate with man, and if man is a person intended to conform to environment by becoming like God, what is more probable from the scientific stand-point than that God should seek and find some means of making himself clearly known to man in some personal way? I do not see how any scientific man who believes in a personal God can avoid asking this question. And is there any more natural solution of the question than that given in the Bible? “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” “God, who spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his son.” Philip says, “Lord, show us the Father and it sufficeth us.” Jesus saith unto him, “Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou shew us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in me? the words that I say unto you I speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth his works.”

“And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”

Something more is needed than light. We need more light and knowledge of our duty; we need vastly more the will-power to do it. I know how I ought to live; I do not live thus. What I need is not a teacher, but power to become a son of God. “I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”

This is the terrible question. How is it to be answered? Let us remember our illustration of the change wrought in that panic-stricken army before Winchester by the appearance of Sheridan. What these men needed was not information. No plan of battle reported as sure of success by trustworthy and competent witnesses, and forwarded from the greatest leader could have stayed that rout. What they needed was Sheridan and the magnetic power of his personality. This is the strange power of all great leaders of men, whether orators, statesmen, or generals. It is intellect acting on and through intellect, but it is also vastly more; it is will acting on will. The leader does not merely instruct others, he inspires them, puts himself into them, and makes them heroes like himself.

Now something like this, but vastly grander and deeper, seems to me to have been the work of our Lord. Read John’s gospel and see how it is interpenetrated with the idea of the new life to be gained by contact with our Lord, and how this forms the foundation of his hope and claim to give men this new life by drawing them to himself. And Peter says that it was impossible for the Prince of Life to be holden of death, for he was the centre and source from which not only new thoughts and purposes, but new will and life was to stream out into the souls of men. This power of our Lord may have been miraculous and supernatural in degree; I feel assured that it was not unnatural in kind and mode of action.

And here, young men, pardon a personal word about your preaching. You will need to preach many sermons of warning against, and denunciation of, sin; many of instruction in duty. The Bible is a store-house of instruction and men need it, and you must make it clear to them. All this is good and necessary, but it is not enough. Learn from the experience of the greatest preacher, perhaps, who ever lived.

Paul, the greatest philosopher of ancient times, came to Athens. You can well imagine how he had waited and longed for the opportunity to speak in this home of philosophy and intellectual life. Now he was to speak, not to uncultured barbarians, but to men who could understand and appreciate his best thoughts. He preached in Athens the grandest sermon, as far as argument is concerned, ever uttered. I doubt if ever a sermon of Paul’s accomplished less. He could not even rouse a healthy opposition. The idea of a new god, Jesus, and a new goddess, the Resurrection, rather tickled the Athenian fancy. He left them, and, in deep dejection, went down to Corinth. There he determined to know only “Christ and him crucified,” and thus preaching in material, vicious Corinth he founded a church.

Some of you will go through the same experience. You will preach to cultured and intelligent audiences, and they will listen courteously and eagerly as long as you tell them something new, and do not ask them to do anything. The only possible way of reaching Athenian intellect or Corinthian materialism and vice is by preaching Christ, “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” And you will reach more Corinthians than Athenians.

You may preach sermons full of the grandest philosophy and theology, and of the highest, most exact, science; you may chain men by your logic, thrill them by your rhetoric, and move them to tears by your eloquence, and they will go home as dead and cold as they came. What they need is power, life. But preach “Christ and him crucified” not merely dead two thousand years ago but risen and alive for evermore, and with us to the end of the world, the grandest, most heroic, divinest helper who ever stood by a man, one all-powerful to help and who never forsakes, and every one of your hearers who is not dead to truth will catch the life, and go home alive and not alone.

So long as we preach a dead Christ we shall have a dead church, as hopeless as the apostles were before the resurrection. “But now is Christ risen from the dead,” “alive for evermore.” See how Paul and Peter and John, and doubtless all the others, talked with him and he with them, after he was taken from them, and you have found the secret of their power, and of that of all the great Christian heroes and martyrs who could truly say, Lord Jesus, we understand each other. Better yet, prove by experience that it is possible for every one of us.

And our Lord and Master is the connecting link between God and man, through whom God’s own Holy Spirit is poured like a mighty flood into the hearts and lives of men, transfiguring them and filling them with the divine power. This is the biblical idea of Christianity; man, through Christ, flooded and permeated and interpenetrated with the Holy Spirit of God. And thus Paul is dead and yet alive, but fully possessed and dominated by the spirit of Christ. Alive as never before, and yet his every thought, word, and deed is really that of his great leader. Can you talk of self-denial to such a Christian? He had forgotten that such a man as Saul of Tarsus or Paul ever existed; he lives only in his Master’s work, and is transfigured by it. This, and nothing less, is Christianity, and this is the very highest and grandest heroism. Paul conquers Europe single-handed, alone he stands before Caesar’s tribunal, and yet he is never alone; and from the gloom of the Mammertine dungeon he sends back a shout of triumph. And Peter walks steadily, cheerfully, and unflinchingly, in the footsteps of his Master to share his cross.

Let us, before leaving this topic, notice carefully just what religion, and especially Christianity, is not.

1. It is not merely opinion or intellectual belief in a creed. This may be good, or even necessary, but it is not religion. “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe and tremble.” We speak with pride, sometimes, of our puissant Christendom, so industrious, so intelligent, so moral, with its ubiquitous commerce, its adorning arts, its halls of learning, its happy firesides, and its noble charities. And yet what is our vaunted Christendom but a vast assemblage of believing but disobedient men? Said William Law to John Wesley, “The head can as easily amuse itself with a living and justifying faith in the blood of Jesus as with any other notion.” The most sacred duty may degenerate into a dogma, asking only to be believed. “I go, sir,” answered the son in the parable, “but went not.”

2. It is not mere feeling. It is neither hope of heaven’s joy, nor fear of hell’s misery. It may rightly include these, but it is vastly more and higher. It is neither ecstasy nor remorse. The most resolutely impenitent sinner can shout “Hallelujah,” and “Woe is me,” as loudly as any saint. Now feeling is of vast importance. It stands close to the will and stimulates it, but it is not conformity. The will must be aroused to a robust life.

3. Christianity is these and a great deal more. Mere belief would make religion a mere theology. Mere emotion would make it mere excitement. The true divine idea of it is a life; doing his will, not indolently sighing to do it, and then lamenting that we do it not; but the thing itself in actual achievement, from day to day, from month to month, from year to year. Thus religion rises on us in its own imperial majesty. It is no mere delight of the understanding in the doctrines of our faith; no mere excitement of the sensibilities, now harrowed by fear, and now jubilant in hope; but a warfare and a work, a warfare against sin, and a work with God. Religion is not an entertainment, but a service. We are to set before us the perfect standard, and then struggle to shape our lives to it. Personal sanctity must be made a business of.

A little more than thirty years ago a regiment was sent home from the Army of the Potomac to enforce the draft after the riots in this city. Some of you may picture to yourselves a thousand men with silk banners and gold lace and bright uniforms, resplendent in the sunshine. You could not make a worse mistake.

First in that gray early morning came two old flags, so torn by shot and shell that there was hardly enough left of them to tell whether the State flag was that of Massachusetts or Virginia. And behind these came scant three hundred men. All the rest were sleeping between Washington and Richmond, some on almost every battle-field. The uniforms were old and faded from sun and rain. Only gun-barrel and bayonet were bright. And the men were scarred and tired and foot-sore, haggard from hard fighting and long, swift marches. For these men had been trained to be hurried back and forth behind the long line of battle, that they might be hurled into it wherever the need was greatest. I do not suppose that one of them could have delivered a fourth-of-July oration on Patriotism. They were trained not to talk, but to obey orders. But they had stood in the “bloody angle” at Spottsylvania all day and all night; and in the gray dawn of the next morning, when strength and courage are always at ebb, faint and exhausted, their last cartridge shot away, had sprung forward at the command of their colonel to make a last desperate, forlorn defence with the bayonet against the advancing enemy. Numbers do not count against men like these. What made them such invincible heroes? It was mainly the resolute will and long training to obey orders. A Christian should never forget that he is a soldier in the army of the Lord of Hosts; that enlistment is easy and quickly accomplished; but that the training is long, and that he must learn, above all, to “endure hardness.”

And so, my brothers, I beg of you to preach a heroic Christianity, for if there ever was a heroic religion it is ours. If you offer merely free transportation to a future heaven of delight on “flowery beds of ease,” you will enlist only the coward and the sluggard. But everyone who has a drop of strong old Norse blood in his veins will prefer a heathen Valhalla, though builded in hell, to such a heaven. And his Norse instincts will be nearer truth than your counterfeit of a debased Christianity. But preach the city of God’s righteousness on earth and now among men, and call on every heroic soul to take sides with God against sin within himself and the evil and misery all around him. There is an almost infinite amount of strength, endurance, and heroism in this “slow-witted but long-winded” human race waiting to leap up at the appeal to fight once more and win a victory after repeated defeats before the sun goes down. Appeal to this and point to the great “captain of our salvation made perfect through sufferings,” and every man that is of the truth will hear in your voice the call of the Master and King. You will not be disappointed, but among the publicans and fishermen of America you will find heroic souls, who will leave all to follow, as faithfully and unflinchingly as those from the shores of Galilee.

And what of faith? Faith is the personal attachment of a soul to such a leader. Fortunately the Bible contains a scientific monograph on this subject. I refer, of course, to the eleventh chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews. And the whole result is summed up in a few words of the thirteenth verse. The great heroes, like Enoch, Noah, and Abraham, “saw the promises afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”

They saw the promises afar off, dimly, on the horizon of their mental vision; as one looks into the distance and cannot tell whether what he sees be cloud or mountain. And until they could make up their minds that there was some substance in the vision, they did not embrace it. They were not credulous. Neither were they carelessly or heedlessly sure that there was and could be nothing in the vision but mist and fancy. They recognized that on their decision of the question hung the life of which they meant to make the very most. They looked again and again, and kept thinking about it. Thus they became and were “persuaded of them.” And most people stop here with a merely intellectual faith in their heads, and very little in their hearts and lives. Not so these old heroes; they were not so purely and coldly intellectual that they could not do anything. They “embraced them.” They said, that is exactly what I want and need, and I’ll have it, if it costs me my life.

Now a promise is always conditional; if you want one thing, you must give up something else. It involves a choice between alternatives; you can have either one freely, you cannot have both. It was to them as to Christ on the “exceeding high mountain,” God or the world; God with the cross, or the world with Satan thrown in. And the same alternative confronts us.

Moses could be a good Jew or a good Egyptian. Most of us, while resolved to be excellent Jews at heart, would have said nothing about it, but remained sons of Pharaoh’s daughter in order to benefit the Jews by our influence in our lofty station. We should have become miserable hybrids with all the vices and weaknesses of both races, but with none of the virtues of either. And for all that we should ever have done the Jews might have rotted in Egyptian bondage. Enlargement and deliverance would have arisen to the Jews from some other place; but we and our father’s house would have been destroyed. By faith Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the children of God, etc. And certainly he did suffer for it.

They embraced the promises with their whole hearts. They were stoned and sawn asunder rather than give them up. And what was the effect on their characters? Having counted the cost, and being perfectly willing to accept any loss or pain for the sake of these promises, and hence inspired by them, they became sublime heroes. Through faith they “subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. And others had trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: they wandered about in sheepskins and in goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented. Of whom the world was not worthy.” That is a faith worth having, and it is as sound philosophy as it is scripture.

“These all died in faith, not having received the promises.” Did they receive nothing? Moses and Elijah, Gideon and Barak gained power and heroism greater than we can conceive of. Surely that was enough. But they did not get the whole of the promise, or even the best of it. And the simple reason was that God cannot make a promise small enough to be completely fulfilled to a man in his earthly life. He gets enough to make him a king, but this does not begin to exhaust the promise. It is inexhaustible. This is the experience of anyone who will faithfully try it. And this experience is the grandest argument for immortality.

Therefore, “giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue ([Greek: arête], strength), and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance ([Greek: enkrateia], self-control), and to temperance patience ([Greek: hypomene], endurance), and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity” (love).

And what of prayer? How can it be answered in a universe of law? We certainly could have no confidence that our prayers could or would be answered if ours were not a universe of law. God’s laws are, as we have seen, his modes of working out his great plan. And the last and highest unfolding of God’s plan is the development of man. And man is to become conformed to his environment, and conformity of man’s highest powers to his environment is likeness to God.

The laws of nature, then, are in ultimate analysis and highest aim the different steps in God’s plan of man’s salvation from the disease of sin, not merely or mainly from its consequences, and his attainment of holiness. For this is the only true and sound manhood. Salvation is spiritual health, resulting also in health of body and of mind. If God’s laws are his modes of carrying out his plan for godlikeness in man, then they are so thought out as to be the means of helping me to every real good.

The Bible declares explicitly that the aim of prayer is not to inform God of our needs. For he knows them already. It is not to change God’s purpose, for he is unchangeable, and we should rejoice in this. We are to pray for our daily bread; we are to pray for the sick; and, if best for them and consistent with God’s plan, they shall recover. Elijah prayed for drought and prayed for rain, and was answered. And Abraham’s prayer would have saved Sodom, had there been ten righteous men in the city. “Men ought alway to pray and not to faint.”

“More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.”

But could not all these things be brought about without a single prayer? Not according to the plan of man’s education which God has adopted. Whether he could well have made a plan by which material blessings could have been bestowed upon men who do not ask for them, I do not know. The ravens and all animals are fed without a single prayer, for they are not fitted or intended to hold communion with God. But a prayerless race of men has never been fed long; it has soon ceased to exist. God’s plan of salvation and ordering of the universe involves prayer as a means of blessing and good things as an answer to prayer. God says, I make you a co-worker with me. I will help you in everything; but you must call on me for help, or you will forget that I am the source of your help and strength, and thus having lost your communion with me will die. “When Jeshurun waxed fat he kicked.” This is the oft-repeated story of the Old Testament and of all history. And thus, while material blessings are given in answer to prayer, these are not the chief end for which prayer is to be offered.

Prayer is a means of conformity to environment, of godlikeness. How do you become like a friend? Of course by associating and talking with him. And why does it help you to associate with a hero? Simply because you cannot be with him without being inspired with his heroism. And so while I may pray for bread and clothes and opportunities, and God will give me these or something better; I will, if wise, pray for purity, courage, moral power, heroism, and holiness. And I know that these will stream from his soul into mine like a great river. And so I may pray for bread and be denied; for hunger, with some higher good, may be far better for me than a full stomach. But if I pray for any spiritual gift, which will make me godlike, and on which as an heir of God I have a rightful claim, every law and force in God’s universe is a means to answer that prayer. And best of all, if I pray for the gift of God’s Spirit, that is the prayer which the whole world of environment has been framed to answer.

But this I can never have unless I hunger for it. I can never have it to use as a means of gaining some lower good which I worship more than God. God will not and cannot lend himself to any such idolatry. I must be willing to give up anything and everything else for its attainment. Otherwise the answer to the prayer would ruin me.

I cannot grasp the higher while using both hands to grasp the lower.

Thus religion is the interpenetration and permeation of my personality by that of God. And prayer is the communion by which this permeation becomes possible. And faith is the vision of these possibilities, the being persuaded by them, and the resolute purpose to attain them. And faith in Christ is confiding communion with him and obedience to his commands that his divine life may flow over into me and dominate mine. And common-sense, and the more refined common-sense which we call science, can show me no other means to the attainment of that godlikeness which is the only true conformity to environment.

And, holding such a belief and faith, we must be hopeful. And only next in importance to faith and love stands hope. The hero must be hopeful. And when times look dark about you, and they sometimes will, you must still hope.

“O it is hard to work for God,
To rise and take his part
Upon the battle-field of earth,
And not sometimes lose heart!

“O there is less to try our faith
In our mysterious creed,
Than in the godless look of earth
In these our hours of need.

“Ill masters good; good seems to change
To ill with greatest ease;
And, worst of all, the good with good
Is at cross purposes.

“Workman of God! O lose not heart,
But learn what God is like;
And in the darkest battle-field
Thou shalt know where to strike.

“Muse on his justice, downcast soul!
Muse, and take better heart;
Back with thine angel to the field,
Good luck shall crown thy part!

“For right is right, since God is God;
And right the day must win;
To doubt would be disloyalty,
To falter would be sin.”

Hope on, be strong and of a good courage. For in the dark hours others will lean on you to catch your hope and courage. To many a poor discouraged soul you must be “a hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” Every power and force in the universe of environment makes for the ultimate triumph of truth and right. Defeat is impossible. “One man with God on his side is the majority that carries the day. ‘We are but two,’ said Abu Bakr to Mohammed as they were flying hunted from Mecca to Medina. ‘Nay;’ answered Mohammed, ‘we are three; God is with us.’”

And not only the race will triumph and regain the Paradise lost. The city of God shall surely be with men, and God will dwell with them and in them. But you and I can and shall triumph too.

We are prone to feel that the individual man is too insignificant a being to be the object of God’s care and forethought. But we should not forget that it is the individual who conforms, and that the higher and nobler race is to be attained through the elevation of individuals, one after another. God deals with races and nations as such. But his laws and promises are made almost entirely for the individuals of which these larger units are concerned.

But there is another standpoint from which we may gain a helpful view of the matter. I may be the meanest citizen of my native state, and my father may leave me heir of only a few acres of rocky land. But, if my title is good, every power in the state is pledged to put me in possession of my inheritance. They who would rob me may be strong; but the state will call out every able-bodied man, and pour out every dollar in its treasury before it will allow me to be defrauded of my legal rights. And it must do this for me, its meanest citizen, else there is no government, but anarchy, and oppression, and the rule of the strongest. And we all recognize that this is but right and necessary, and would be ashamed of our state and government were it not literally true.

If I travel in distant lands, my passport is the sign that all the power of these United States is pledged to protect me from injustice. Think of the sensitiveness of governments to any wrong done to their private citizens. England went to war with Abyssinia to protect and deliver two Englishmen. And shall God do less? Can he do less? If it is only just and right and necessary for earthly governments to thus care for their citizens, shall not the ruler and “judge of all the earth do right?”

Now you and I are commanded to be heirs of God, to attain to likeness to him. This is therefore our legal right, guaranteed by him, for every command of God is really a promise. And he will exhaust every power in the universe before he allows anything to prevent us from gaining our legal rights, provided only that we are earnest in claiming them.

But if I alienate my rights to my inheritance, the commonwealth cannot help me. If I renounce my citizenship, the government of the United States can no longer protect me. And so I can alienate my “right to the tree of life,” and to entrance into the city, and I can forfeit my heirship to all that God would give me. “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” But I can alienate and make void every promise and title, if I will or if I do not care. This is the unique glory, and awfulness of the human will. And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good. “If God is for us who is against us?” It must be so if God’s laws are his modes of aiding men to conform to environment.

And what of the church? Is it anything else or other than a means of aiding man to conform to environment? If it fails of this, can it be any longer the church of God? The church is a means, not an end. And it is a means of godlikeness in man.

Some would make it a social club. The bond of union between its members is their common grade of wealth, social position, or intellectual attainments. And this idea of the church has deeper root in the minds of us all than we think. I can imagine a far better club than one formed and framed on this principle, but it is difficult for me to imagine a worse counterfeit of a church. Others make it a source of intellectual delectation, and the means of hearing one or two striking sermons each week. Such a church will conduce to the intelligence of its members, and may be rather more, though probably less, useful than the old New England Lyceum lecture system. Such a church is of about as much practical value to the world at large as some consultations of physicians are to their patients. The doctors have a most interesting discussion, but the patient dies, and the nature of the disease is discovered at the autopsy. Others still would make of the church a great railroad system, over which sleeping-cars run from the City of Destruction, with a coupon good to admit one to the Golden City at the other end. The coaches are luxurious and the road-bed smooth. The Slough of Despond has been filled, the Valley of Humiliation bridged at its narrowest point, and the Delectable Mountains tunnelled. But scoffers say that most of the passengers make full use of the unlimited stop-over privileges allowed at Vanity Fair.

The Bible would seem to give the impression that the church is the army of the Lord of Hosts, a disciplined army of hardy, heroic souls, each soldier aiding his fellow in working out the salvation which God is working in him. And it joins battle fiercely and fearlessly with every form of sin and misery, counting not the odds against it. And the Salvation Army seems to me to have conceived and realized to a great extent just what at least one corps in this grand army can and should be. And you and I can learn many a lesson from them.

The church is the body of which Christ is the head, and you and I are “members in particular.” Let us see to it that we are not the weak spot in the body, crippling and maiming the whole. The church is the city of God among men, and we are its citizens, bound by its laws, loyal servants of the Great King, sworn to obey his commands and enlarge his kingdom, and repel all the assaults of his adversaries. Thus the Bible seems to me to depict the church of God. But what if the army contains a multitude of men who will not obey orders or submit to discipline? or if the city be overwhelmed with a mass of aliens, who see in its laws and institutions mainly means of selfish individual advantage? Responsibility, not privilege, is the foundation of strong character in both men and institutions. There was a good grain of truth in the old Scotch minister’s remark, that they had had a blessed work of grace in his church; they had not taken anybody in, but a lot had gone out.

There are plenty of churches of Laodicea to-day. May you be delivered from them. But, thank God, there are also churches of Philadelphia and Smyrna. May you be pastors of one of the latter. It will not pay you a very large salary, for Demas has gone to the church of Laodicea, because the minister of the church of Smyrna was not orthodox, or not sufficiently spiritually minded meaning thereby that he rebuked the sins of actual living men in general, and of Demas in particular or preached politics, and did not mind his business. And your church may be small. For many of the congregation have gone to the church around the other corner, which is mainly a cluster of associations, having excellent names, and useful for almost every purpose except building up a manly, rugged, heroic, godlike character. The minister there, they will tell you, preaches delightful sermons. They make you “feel so good.” He annihilates pantheism, and his denunciations of materialism are eloquent in the extreme. But his incarnations of materialism are Huxley and Darwin, and to the uncharitable he seems to almost carefully avoid any language which might seem to reflect upon the dollar- and place-worship of some of the occupants of his front pews. Now, I am not here to defend Mr. Huxley or Mr. Darwin. Withstand them to the face wherever they are to be blamed. And for some utterances they are undoubtedly to be blamed, honest souls as they were. But I for one cannot help feeling that there is among the “dwellers in Jerusalem” a materialism of the heart which is indefinitely worse than any intellectual heresy. When you hit at the one heresy strike hard at the other also.

Many will have left your little church of Smyrna. It had to be so. For the divine sifting process, which is natural selection on its highest plane, has not ceased to work. It must and shall still go on; it cannot be otherwise. Has the great principle ceased to be true in modern history that “though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved?”

But do not be discouraged. Preach Christ and a heroic Christianity. Do not be afraid to demand great things of your people. Remember that Ananias was encouraged to go to Paul because the Lord would show Paul how great things he should suffer for the name of Jesus. This is what appeals to the heroic in every man, and we do not make nearly enough use of it. And the heroic Christ and his heroic Christianity will draw every heroic soul in the community to himself. They may not be very heroic looking. You may be in some hill town in old Massachusetts “Nurse of heroes.” Pardon me, I do not intend to be invidious. Heroism is cosmopolitan. One of the pillars of your church may be the school-teacher of the little red school-house at the fork of the roads, in the yard ornamented with alders, mulleins, and sumachs. She boards around, and is clad in anything but silks and sealskins. But she trains well her band of hardy little fellows, who will later fear the multitude as little as they now mind the Berkshire winds. And from the pittance she receives for training these rebellious urchins into heroic men she is supporting an old mother somewhere, or helping a brother to an education. And your deacon will be some farmer, perhaps uncouth in appearance and rough of dress, and certainly blunt in his scanty speech. He’ll not flatter you nor your sermons; and until you’ve lived with him for years you will not know what a great heart there is in that rugged frame, and what wealth of affection in that silent hand-shake. And there is his wife. She is round and ample, and certainly does not look especially solemn or pious. She is aunt and mother to the whole community, the joy of all the children, nurse of the sick, and comfort of the dying. She is doing the work of ten at home, and of a host in the village. And your right-hand man is great Onesiphorus from the mill down in the valley, fighting an uphill battle to keep the wolf from the door, while he and his wife deny themselves everything, that their flock of children may have better training for fighting God’s battles than they ever enjoyed.

I cannot describe these men and women. If you have lived with them, you will need no description, and would resent the inadequacy of mine. If you have never had the good fortune to live with them, it is impossible to make you see them as they are. When you once have thoroughly known them, language will fail you to do them justice, and you will prefer to be silent rather than slander them by inadequate portrayal. They are at first sight not attractive-looking. If you stand outside and look at them from a distance their lives will appear to you very humdrum and prosaic. But remember that for almost thirty years our Lord lived just such a life in Nazareth, making ploughs and yokes; and then, when the younger brothers and sisters were able to care for themselves, snatched three years from supporting a peasant family in Galilee to redeem a world. And who was Peter but a rough, hardy fisherman?

Now a Paul, trained at the feet of Gamaliel, was also needed; and the twelve did not come from the lowest ranks of society. But they were honest, industrious, practical, courageous, hardy, common people. And single-handed they went out to conquer empires. And they succeeded through the power of God in them.

Who knows the possibilities of your little church in the hilltown of Smyrna? These men and women are the pickets of God’s great host. They are scattered up and down our land, fighting alone the great battle, unknown of men and sometimes thinking that they must be forgotten of God. And the picket’s lonely post is what tries a man’s courage and strength.

Take your example from Paul’s epistle. Greet Phebe, the schoolmistress, and Aquila and Priscilla on their rocky farm on the mountain-side, and greet the burden-bearing Onesiphorus. And give them God’s greeting and encouragement, for he sends it to them through you. Show them the heroism which there is in their “humdrum” lives; and cheer them in the efforts, of whose grandeur they are all unconscious. Bid them “be strong and of a very good courage.” For in the character of these people there is the granite of the eternal hills, and in their hearts should be the sunshine of God. Do not be ashamed of your congregation. Their dimes or dollars may look pitifully small and few on the collector’s plate; only God sees the real immensity of the gift in the self-denial which it has cost. Your people will take sides with the cause of right, while it is still unpopular. They have furnished the moral backbone and unswerving integrity of many of your great business houses in this city to-day. From those families will go forth the men whom the good will trust and the evil fear. The power for good proceeding from your church will be like the floods which Ezekiel saw pouring out from beneath the threshold of the Lord’s house.

For these common people, whom “God must have loved because he made so many of them,” are the true heirs to the future. And wealth and culture, art and learning, are to burn like torches to light their march. Finally, my young brothers, do not be bitterly disappointed if you are not “popular preachers.” Do not let too many people go to sleep under your preaching, even if one young man did go to sleep under one of Paul’s sermons. But if now and then someone is angry at what you have said, do not worry too much over it. Preach the truth in love. If Elijah and John the Baptist, and Peter and Paul, were to preach to-day I doubt greatly whether they would be popular preachers. I cannot find that they ever were so. They would probably be peripatetic candidates, until someone supported them as independent evangelists. After their death we would rear them great monuments, and then devote ourselves to railing at Timothy because he was not more like what we imagine Paul was.

Even Socrates found that he must bid farewell to what men count honors, if he would follow after truth. You may have the same experience. You will have to champion many an unpopular cause, and your people will not like it. They will say you lack tact. Now Paul was a man of infinite tact. Witness his sermon on Mars’ Hill. But if his letters to the church in Corinth were addressed to most modern churches, they would soon set out in search of a pastor of greater adaptability.

If you play the man, and fight the good fight of faith, I do not see how you can always avoid hitting somebody on the other side. And he will pull you down if he can; and will probably succeed in sometimes making your life very uncomfortable. Remember the teaching of scripture and science, that the upward path was never intended to be easy. The scriptural passages to this effect you can find all through the gospels and epistles, and I need not quote them to you. I will, however, tell you honestly that many are of the opinion that these passages are now obsolete, being applicable only to the first centuries, or to especially critical times in the history of the church. I cannot share that view, but, lest I seem too old-fashioned, will merely quote the ringing words of our own Dr. Hitchcock, that “no man ever enters heaven save on his shield.” And allow me to quote in the same connection the testimony of that prince of scientists, Professor Huxley, in his lecture on “Evolution and Ethics:”

“If we may permit ourselves a larger hope of abatement of the essential evil of the world than was possible to those who, in the infancy of exact knowledge, faced the problem of existence more than a score of centuries ago, I deem it an essential condition of the realization of that hope that we should cast aside the notion that the escape from pain and sorrow is the proper object of life.

“We have long since emerged from the heroic childhood of our race, when good and evil could be met with the same ‘frolic welcome;’ the attempts to escape from evil, whether Indian or Greek, have ended in flight from the battle-field; it remains to us to throw aside the youthful over-confidence and the no less youthful discouragement of nonage. We are grown men, and must play the man

“... ’strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,’

“cherishing the good that falls in our way and bearing the evil in and around us, with stout heart set on diminishing it. So far we all may strive in one faith toward one hope:

“’It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.

“... but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note may yet be done.’”

We must be strong and of a very good courage. While the avoidance of pain and discomfort, or even happiness, cannot be the proper end of life, it is not a world of misery or an essentially and hopelessly evil world. There is plenty of misery in the world, and we cannot deny it. Neither can we deny that God has put us in the world to relieve misery, and that until we have made every effort and strained every nerve as we have never yet done, we, and not God, are largely responsible for it. But behind misery stand selfishness and sin as its cause. And here we must not parley but fight. And the hosts of evil are organized and mighty. “The sons of this world are for their own generation wiser than the sons of light.” And we shall never overcome them by adopting their means. But we can and shall surely overcome. For he that is with us is more than they that be with them. “The skirmishes are frequently disastrous to us, but the great battles all go one way.” And we long for the glory of “him that overcometh.” But the victor’s song can come only after the battle, and be sung only by those who have overcome. And we would not have it otherwise if we could. The closing words of Dr. Hitchcock’s last sermon are the following:

“It is one of the revelations of scripture that we are to judge the angels, sitting above them on the shining heights. It may well be so. Those angels are the imperial guard, doing easy duty at home. We are the tenth legion, marching in from the swamps and forests of the far-off frontier, scarred and battered, but victorious over death and sin.”