2. There must be the entire consecration of all unto Christ. The wisdom of Paul and the eloquence of Apollos may plant, but "God alone giveth the increase." If success comes, if "the rod of the priesthood bud and blossom and bear fruit," it must be "laid up in the ark of God." He will not give His glory to another. The work is Christ's. "We are ambassadors for Him." "I have chosen you and ordained you that ye should go and bring forth fruit."
3. They who would win souls must have a ripe knowledge of the sacred Scriptures. "They were written by inspiration of God. . . . that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." Our orders may be unquestioned, our doctrine perfect in every line and feature, but we shall not reach the hearts of men unless we preach Christ out of an experimental knowledge of the truths of Divine Revelation. There is but one Book which can bring light to homes of sorrow, one light to scatter clouds and darkness, one message to lead wandering folk unto God. This blessed Book will be to every soldier and lonely missionary what it was to Livingstone dying alone in Africa, or to Captain Gardiner dead on the desolate shores of Patagonia, whose finger pointed to the words, "The Blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin."
4. We must love all whom Christ loves. We may have the gift of teaching, we may understand all mysteries, we may have all knowledge, we may bestow all our goods to the poor, we may even give our bodies to be burned, but without that love which comes alone from Christ, we shall be "as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal." With St. Paul we must say, "Whereinsoever Christ is preached I do rejoice, and will rejoice."
5. Above all gifts we need the baptism of the Holy Ghost. When this consecration comes there will be no cry of an empty treasury. We shall no longer be weary with the bleating of lost sheep, to whom we have to say, I have no means and no shepherd to send you.
Christian Work—We rejoice at every sign that Christians realize that wealth is a sacred trust, for which they shall give an account. We rejoice more that they are giving that personal service which is a law of His kingdom. Men and women of culture and gentle birth are going into the abodes of sickness and sorrow to comfort stricken homes and lead sinful folk to the Saviour. Brotherhoods, Sisterhoods, and deaconesses are multiplying. Never was there greater need for their holy work. Many of our own baptized children have drifted away from all faith. To thousands God is a name, the Bible a tradition, faith an opinion, and heaven and hell fables. But that which gives us the deepest sadness and makes all Christian work more difficult is that so many of those to whom the people look for example have given up the Bible, the Lord's Day, the house of God, and Christian faith. Alas! they are telling these weary toilers whose lives are clouded by anxiety and sorrow that there is no hereafter. "They know not what they do." They are sowing to the wind and will reap the whirlwind. May God show them the danger before if is too late! The loss of faith is the loss of everything; without it morality becomes prudence or imprudence. When the tie which binds man to God is broken all other ties snap asunder. No nation has survived the loss of its religion. We are appalled at the mad cry of anarchy which tramples all which we hold dear for time and eternity under its feet. We cannot look into its face without seeing the lineaments of that man of sin who "opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God and worshipped." Antichrist is he who usurps the place of Christ. "He is antichrist who denieth the Father and the Son." Our hearts go out in pity for those whose mechanical ideas of the universe may be a revolt from a mechanical theology which has lost sight of the Fatherhood of God. We stand where two ways meet. We shall take care of the people or the people will take care of us. The people are the rulers; the power of the future is in their hands. Limit their horizon to this life, let penury, sickness, and sorrow change the man to a wolf, let him know no God and Father Who hears his cry, no Saviour to help, no brother to bind up his wounds, let there be on the one side wealth and luxury and wanton waste, and on the other side poverty, misery, and despair, and there will be, as there has been, a cry for blood. We wonder why men pass by the Church to found clubs and brotherhoods and orders. They will have them, and they ought to have them, until the Church is in its Divine love what its Founder designed it to be—the brotherhood in Christ of the children of our God and Father. What the world needs to-day is not alms, not hospitals, not homes of mercy alone. It needs the spirit and the power of the love of Christ. It needs the voice, the ear, the hand, and the heart of Christ seen in and working in His children. No powers of government, no prestige of social position, no prerogatives of Churchly authority can meet the issues of this hour; we have waited already too long. Brotherhood men will have, and it will be the brotherhood of the commune, or brotherhood in Christ as the children of our God and Father. Infidelity answers no questions, heals no wounds, fulfils no hopes. The Gospel will do, is doing, to-day what it has done through all the ages: leading men out of sin and darkness and despair to the liberty of sons of God.
In a day of division and unrest there will be many questions which perplex earnest souls. Some will dwell on the subjective side of the faith, others will think most of its manifestations in the life. These questions will affect organization for Christian work, public worship, and find expression in the ritual of the Church. There is no room for differences if Christ be first, Christ be last, and Christ in everything. The ritual of the Church must be the expression of her life. It must symbolize her faith; it must be subject to her authority. As the years go by worship will be more beautiful. The "garments of the king's daughter may be of wrought gold," and she "clothed in raiment of needlework," but "she will have a name that she liveth and is dead," unless her "fine linen is the righteousness of the saints." Lastly, to none is this council so dear as to those whose lives are spent in the darkness of heathenism, or who have gone out to new lands to lay foundations for the work of the Church of God. In loneliness, with deferred hope, neglected by brethren, your only refuge to cry as a child to God, it is a joy for you to feel the beating of a brother's heart, and hear the music of a brother's voice, and kneel with brothers at the dear old trysting-place, the table of our Lord. Let us consecrate all we have and are to Him, let us remember loved ones far away, let us gather all the work we have so long garnered in our hearts and lay it at his feet. We shall not have met in vain if out of the love learned of Him we give each to the other, and to all fellow-laborers for Him, a brother's love, a brother's sympathy, and a brother's prayers. I do not know how to clothe in words the thronging memories which cluster around us in this holy place, what searchings of heart, what cries to God, what communions with Christ, what consolations of the Holy Spirit have been witnessed in this sacred place. I cannot call over the long roll of saints, confessors, and martyrs, whose "name are written in the Lamb's Book of Life." Two names will be remembered to-day by us all. One, that gentle Archbishop Longley, who in the greatness of his love saw with a prophet's eye the Mission of the Church and planned these conferences that our hearts might beat as one in the battle of the last time. The other, the wisest of counsellors and the most loving of brethren, the great-hearted Archbishop Tait, whose dying legacy to his brethren was "love one another." They have finished their course and entered into rest. A little more work, a few more trials, and we, too, shall finish our course. We are not two companies, the militant and triumphant are one. We are the advance and rear of one host travelling to the Canaan of God's rest. God grant that we, too, may so follow Christ that we may have an abundant entrance to His eternal kingdom.
V. SERMON AT THE FOURTH ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE BROTHERHOOD OF ST. ANDREW IN CLEVELAND, OHIO, SEPT. 29, 1889.
"God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."—ST. JOHN, iii. 16.
SIN, sorrow and death have not been invented by Christian priests. They are world facts, they belong to every home, and are hid in every man's heart. There can be no design without a designer, no law without a lawgiver, no creation without a creator. So I say, with the leading scientist of England, "God is a necessity of human thought." Is this God an inexorable ruler, whose right is His infinite might? or is He an eternal Father, whose might is His infinite right? And so the question comes home to the heart: Does God care for us? The body is cared for. Every invention of man ministers to the life that is between the cradle and the grave. Man has created nothing. The lightning would run its circuit in the Garden of Eden as well as when Morse made it man's messenger. The veil has been lifted so that man can look into God's storehouse and read laws as old as creation. But the body is not the man. You ask me how do I know I have a soul? I know it as I know I have a body—by self-consciousness. There is no place in this world where men are not compelled by absolute necessity to recognize the act and the will of a soul within, which directs the act. I ask again, does God care for me? I say it reverently, brother, you cannot conceive of a God who could create a world like this, if He can feel one throb of pity for His children, unless you believe He has provided a remedy for sin, sorrow, and death. The coming of God into the family of man is an absolute necessity of the very being of God. The incarnation is the outcome of the possibility that God can love. I turn then to this record and I ask, is this Jesus the friend that the world has waited for and looked for? No one that has walked this earth could use the words which every day rested upon His lips: "I and the God you worship are one." "I am the bread that is come down from heaven, and the bread I shall give you is My flesh, and I give it for the life of the world." "I am the resurrection and the life; if any man shall believe in Me, if he were dead he shall live"—unless he were God incarnate. The miracles of Jesus were not violations of the laws of nature; they were the divine proofs that that God whose hand is behind every law of nature had come into the world to help those who needed help. When He multiplied bread in His hands, He did of His own will that which God does when He multiplies the wheat in the harvest. When He created the wine of Cana, He did that of His own will which He does when He distills the dewdrop in the clusters of the vine. But that which unseals my heart, is the divine compassion, is the tender pity, is the love that never turns from the weary. If man had invented this Gospel, the story of Mary Magdalene would never have been in the record. It is not in the wrecks strewn along the path of life that men would find those they would lift to the bosom of God. It is the Divine eye that pities, it is the Divine hand that is reached out to save. I follow Him to the cross, I follow Him to the grave, where we are going, where our loved ones are sleeping. The third day He came back from the darkness; He showed men, by the marks of the nails in His hands and by the print of the spear in His side, that He was the very Jesus they parted with at the foot of the cross; and He ascended to heaven to be the friend of any aching heart that needs a friend at the right hand of God. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not a philosophy, it is not a dogma; it is the story of a Person, a real hand to grasp, a real Saviour to love, a real God to save. Marvelous as is this story that never can grow old and will be the burden of the songs of the redeemed, more wonderful is the Christ of history. Men ask for proof. You do not ask for proof of a sun when the world is bending low with golden harvests The other day there was a gathering of great men, scholars, philosophers. It so happened that one man who had lost his faith, congratulated his fellows that superstition was dying out, that the day was at hand when Christianity would be an effete thing of the past. James Russell Lowell rose, the blood rushing to his cheeks, and quietly said: "Show me twelve miles square in the world in which I live where childhood is cared for, where womanhood is reverenced, where old age is protected, where life and property are absolutely safe, where it is possible for a decent man to live decently—where the Gospel of Jesus Christ has not gone before and made that life possible; and then I will listen to your revilings of my Master." Can I go nearer your heart? There is a wide difference between men, but there is one side of human nature that is the same; it is that we call the heart—that which loves, that which fears, that which suffers, that which is the same in the poorest laborer that ever handled the spade as in the greatest scholar that ever graced a university. If we can get the rubbish from the heart, the good news of God sounds the same to all.
When Sir Walter Scott was dying, in suffering and agony he turned to Lockhart and said, "Read to me; I am in such agony." He said, "What book, Sir Walter?" "What book? There is but one book for a dying man; it is the story of the One that passed this way before me, of Jesus the Saviour." I stood the other day by the death-bed of one who, when I first met him was a savage warrior. He looked up in my face and said, "The Great Spirit has called me. I am going on the last journey. I am not afraid, for Jesus is going with me and I shan't be lonesome on the road." Brothers, it is to tell this story that you have banded yourselves together in the service of Him who redeemed you with His precious blood. Your motto must be the words of that sainted apostle whose honored name you bear: "We have found Christ." For it is only when we have reached out our hand to grasp the hand of Jesus, that, because we cannot help it, we reach out the other hand to help some one else. We cannot from the heart say, "Our Father," and not remember wandering brothers whom we may lead to the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. The story is not for wage-workers alone, not for the poor in the attic and the cellar alone; it is for the man who lives in the marble house, it is for the trafficker in the market, it is for every one away from home and heaven and God. We must find the way to speak as one tempted man has the right to speak to a brother that is battling with temptation. It is not done by assailing sinners as you would besiege a city. We have tried hard words and the have answered us with a curse. It does no good to tell the poor wretch in the ditch, "It is your fault." We have led men to Mount Sinai, and their hearts would break if we led them to Mount Calvary. It is this that makes the life of an earnest minister of Christ the happiest life that God ever gave to man. I am not here to-day to tell you what to do, but to tell you your Master's secret, "If you give Him the will, He will find for you the way." Although you might be the veriest stammerer, if Christ speaks out in all your life, you will be the best talker in the world. We must believe in our work; we cannot make others believe until we first believe ourselves. Our feet must be upon the rock; there is no question of success or failure there. It may be Athanasius against the world, but the Athanasius and the faith of Christ will conquer.