"I had found
That outward forms the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the Life within."
No analysis or recapitulation of his works can be given in these preliminary words. Perhaps his most influential book is the first, 'Christian Nurture'; while a treatise for the household, it was surcharged with theological opinions which proved to be revolutionary and epoch-making. 'The Vicarious Sacrifice' has most affected the pulpit. 'Nature and the Supernatural,' the tenth chapter of which has become a classic, has done great service in driving out the extreme dualism that invested the subject of God's relation to creation. His ablest essay is the treatise on Language; the most literary is that on 'Work and Play'; the most penetrating in its insight is 'Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination'; the most personal and characteristic is 'The Age of Homespun.' His best sermon is always the one last read; and they are perhaps his most representative work. The sermon is not usually ranked as belonging to literature, but no canon excludes those preached by this great man. They are timeless in their truth, majestic in their diction, commanding in their moral tone, penetrating in their spirituality, and pervaded by that quality without which a sermon is not one—the divine uttering itself to the human. There is no striving and crying in the streets, no heckling of saints nor dooming of sinners, no petty debates over details of conduct, no dogmatic assumption, no logical insistence, but only the gentle and mighty persuasions of truth, coming as if breathed by the very spirit of God.
Language was to him "the sanctuary of thought," and these sermons are the uttered worship in that temple where reason and devotion are one.
WORK AND PLAY
From 'Work and Play'
Let me call to my aid, then, some thoughtful spirit in my audience: not a poet, of necessity, or a man of genius, but a man of large meditation, one who is accustomed to observe, and, by virtue of the warm affinities of a living heart, to draw out the meanings that are hid so often in the humblest things. Returning into the bosom of his family in some interval of care and labor, he shall come upon the very unclassic and certainly unimposing scene,—his children and a kitten playing on the floor together; and just there, possibly, shall meet him suggestions more fresh and thoughts of higher reach concerning himself and his race, than the announcement of a new-discovered planet or the revolution of an empire would incite. He surveys with a meditative feeling this beautiful scene of muscular play,—the unconscious activity, the exuberant life, the spirit of glee,—and there rises in his heart the conception that possibly he is here to see the prophecy or symbol of another and higher kind of play, which is the noblest exercise and last end of man himself. Worn by the toils of years, perceiving with a sigh that the unconscious joy of motion here displayed is spent in himself, and that now he is effectually tamed to the doom of a working creature, he may yet discover, in the lively sympathy with play that bathes his inward feeling, that his soul is playing now,—enjoying, without the motions, all it could do in them; manifold more than it could if he were down upon the floor himself, in the unconscious activity and lively frolic of childhood. Saddened he may be to note how time and work have changed his spirit and dried away the playful springs of animal life in his being; yet he will find, or ought, a joy playing internally over the face of his working nature, which is fuller and richer as it is more tranquil; which is to the other as fulfillment to prophecy, and is in fact the prophecy of a better and far more glorious fulfillment still.
Having struck in this manner the great world-problem of work and play, his thoughts kindle under the theme, and he pursues it. The living races are seen at a glance to be offering in their history everywhere a faithful type of his own. They show him what he himself is doing and preparing—all that he finds in the manifold experience of his own higher life. They have, all, their gambols; all, their sober cares and labors. The lambs are sporting on the green knoll; the anxious dams are bleating to recall them to their side. The citizen beaver is building his house by a laborious carpentry; the squirrel is lifting his sail to the wind on the swinging top of the tree. In the music of the morning, he hears the birds playing with their voices, and when the day is up, sees them sailing round in circles on the upper air, as skaters on a lake, folding their wings, dropping and rebounding, as if to see what sport they can make of the solemn laws that hold the upper and lower worlds together. And yet these play-children of the air he sees again descending to be carriers and drudges; fluttering and screaming anxiously about their nest, and confessing by that sign that not even wings can bear them clear of the stern doom of work. Or, passing to some quiet shade, meditating still on this careworn life, playing still internally with ideal fancies and desires unrealized, there returns upon him there, in the manifold and spontaneous mimicry of nature, a living show of all that is transpiring in his own bosom; in every flower some bee humming over his laborious chemistry and loading his body with the fruits of his toil; in the slant sunbeam, populous nations of motes quivering with animated joy, and catching, as in play, at the golden particles of the light with their tiny fingers. Work and play, in short, are the universal ordinance of God for the living races; in which they symbolize the fortune and interpret the errand of man. No creature lives that must not work and may not play.