Etext of The Greatest Thing in the World and
Other Addresses
By Henry Drummond 

The Greatest Thing in the World By Henry
Drummond 

The Greatest Thing in the World
     The Greatest Thing in the World
     The Contrast
     The Analysis     
     The Defence 
The Programme of Christianity
     The Programme of Christianity
     The Founding of the Society
     The Programme of the Society
     The Machinery of the Society The City
Without a Church
     I Saw the City
     His Servants Shall Serve
     I Saw No Temple There The Changed Life
     The Changed Life
     The Formula of Sanctification
The Alchemy of Influence
     The First Experiment Pax Vobiscum
     Introductory
     Effects Require Causes
     What Yokes Are for
     How Fruits Grow 

The Greatest Thing in the World  and Other
Addresses By Henry Drummond (London - Hodder
& Stoughton Ltd) Undated Edition c1920,
390,000 prior copies. First Published c1880. 

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD 

THOUGH I speak with the tongues of men and of
angels, and have not love, I am become as a
sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 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 though I bestow all my goods to
feed the poor, and though I give my body to
be burned, and have not Love, it profiteth me
nothing. 

Love suffereth long, and is kind; Love
envieth not; Love vaunteth no itself is not
puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly,
Seeketh not her own, Is not easily provoked,
Thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity,
but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all
things, believeth all things, hopeth all
things, endureth all things. 

Love never faileth: but whether there be
prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be
tongues, they shall cease; whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know
in part, and we prophesy in part. But when
that which is perfect is come, then that
which is in part shall be done away. When I
was a child, I spake as a child, I understood
as a child, I thought as a child: but when I
became a man, I put away childish things. For
now we see through a glass, darkly; but then
face to face: now I know in part; but then
shall I know even as also I am known. And now
abideth faith, hope, Love, these three; but
the greatest of these is Love.--I COR xiii. 

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD 

EVERY one has asked himself the great
question of antiquity as of the modern world:
What is the summum bonum--the supreme good?
You have life before you. Once only you can
live it. What is the noblest object of
desire, the supreme gift to covet? 

We have been accustomed to be told that the
greatest thing in the religious world is
Faith. That great word has been the key-note
for centuries of the popular religion; and we
have easily learned to look upon it as the
greatest thing in the world. Well, we are
wrong. If we have been told that, we may miss
the mark. I have taken you, in the chapter
which I have just read, to Christianity at
its source; and there we have seen, "The
greatest of these is love." It is not an
oversight. Paul was speaking of faith just a
moment before. He says, "If I have all faith,
so that I can remove mountains, and have not
love, I am nothing. "So far from forgetting,
he deliberately contrasts them, "Now abideth
Faith, Hope, Love," and without a moment's
hesitation, the decision falls,"The greatest
of these is Lov." 

And it is not prejudice. A man is apt to
recommend to others his own strong point.
Love was not Paul's strong point. The
observing student can detect a beautiful
tenderness growing and ripening all through
his character as Paul gets old; but the hand
that wrote, "The greatest of these is love,"
when we meet it first, is stained with blood.
Nor is this letter to the Corinthians
peculiar in singling out love as the summum
bonum. The masterpieces of Christianity are
agreed about it. Peter says, "Above all
things have fervent love among yourselves."
Above all things. And John goes farther, "God
is love." And you remember the profound
remark which Paul makes elsewhere, "Love is
the fulfilling of the law." Did you ever
think what he meant by that? In those days
men were working their passage to Heaven by
keeping the Ten Commandments, and the hundred
and ten other commandments which they had
manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will
show you a more simple way. If you do one
thing, you will do these hundred and ten
things, without ever thinking about them. If
you love, you will unconsciously fulfil the
whole law. And you can readily see for
yourselves how that must be so. Take any of
the commandments. "Thou shalt have no other
gods before Me." If a man love God, you will
not require to tell him that. Love is the
fulfilling of that law. "Take not His name in
vain." Would he ever dream of taking His name
in vain if he loved Him? "Remember the
Sabbath day to keep it holy." Would he not be
too glad to have one day in seven to dedicate
more exclusively to the object of his
affection? Love would fulfil all these laws
regarding God. And so, if he loved Man, you
would never think of telling him to honour
his father and mother. He could not do
anything else. It would be preposterous to
tell him not to kill. You could only insult
him if you suggested that he should not steal
-.how could he steal from those he loved? It
would be superfluous to beg him not to bear
false witness against his neighbour. If he
loved hi it would be the last thing he would
do. And you would never dream of urging him
not to covet what his neighbours had. He
would rather they possessed it than himself.
In this way "Love is the fulfilling of the
law." It is the rule for fulfilling all
rules, the new commandment for keeping all
the old commandments, Christ's one secret of
the Christian lif. 

Now Paul had learned that; and in this noble
eulogy he has given us the most wonderful and
original account extant of the summum bonum.
We may divide it into three parts. In the
beginning of the short chapter, we have Love
contrasted; in the heart of it, we have Love
analysed; towards the end we have Love
defended as the supreme gift. 

THE CONTRAST 

PAUL begins by contrasting Love with other
things that men in those days thought much
of. I shall not attempt to go over those
things in detail. Their inferiority is
already obvious. 

He contrasts it with eloquence. And what a
noble gift it is, the power of playing upon
the souls and wills of men, and rousing them
to lofty purposes and holy deeds. Paul says,
"If I speak with the tongues of men and of
angels, and have not love, I am become as
sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." And we
all know why. We have all felt the brazenness
of words without emotion, the hollowness, the
unaccountable unpersuasiveness, of eloquence
behind which lies no Love. 

He contrasts it with prophecy. He contrasts
it with mysteries. He contrasts it with
faith. He contrasts it with charity. Why is
Love greater than faith? Because the end is
greater than the means. And why is it greater
than charity? Because the whole is greater
than the part. Love is greater than faith,
because the end is greater than the means.
What is the use of having faith? It is to
connect the soul with God. And what is the
object of connecting man with God? That he
may become like God. But God is Love. Hence
Faith, the means, is in order to Love, the
end. Love, therefore, obviously is greater
than faith. It is greaterthan charity, again,
because the whole is greater than a part.
Charity is only a little bit of Love, one of
the innumerable avenues of Love, and there
may even be, and there is, a great deal of
charity without Love. It is a very easy thing
to toss a copper to a beggar on the street;
it is generally an easier thing than not to
do it. Yet Love is just as often in the
withholding. We purchase relief from the
sympathetic feelings roused by the spectacle
of misery, at the copper's cost. It is too
cheap--too cheap for us, and often too dear
for the beggar. If we really loved him we
would either do more for him, or less. 

Then Paul contrasts it with sacrifice and
martyrdom. And I beg the little band of
would-be missionaries and I have the honour
to call some of you by this name for the
first time--to remember that though you give
your bodies to be burned, and have not Love,
it profits nothing--nothing! You can take
nothing greater to the heathen world than the
impress and reflection of the Love of God
upon your own character. That is the
universal language. It will take you years to
speak in Chinese, or in the dialects of
India. From the day you land, that language
of Love, understood by all, will be pouring
forth its unconcious eloquence. It is the man
who is the missionary, it is not his words.
His character is his message. In the heart of
Africa, among the great Lakes, I have come
across black men and women who remembered the
only white man they ever saw before--David
Livingstone; and as you cross his footsteps
in that dark continent, men's faces light up
as they speak of the kind Doctor who passed
there years ago. They could not understand
him; but they felt the Love that beat in his
heart. Take into your new sphere of labour,
where you also mean to lay down your life,
that simple charm, and your lifework must
succeed. You can take nothing greater, you
need take nothing less. It is-not worth while
going if you take anything less. You may take
every accomplishment; you may be braced for
every sacrifice; but if ou give your body to
be burned, and have not Love, it will profit
you and the cause of Christ nothing. 

THE ANALYSIS AFTER contrasting Love with
these things, Paul, in three verses, very
short, gives us an amazing analysis of what
this supreme thing is. I ask you to look at
it. It is a compound thing, he tells us. It
is like light. As you have seen a man of
science take a beam of light and pass it
through a crystal prism, as you have seen it
come out on the other side of the prism
broken up into its component colours--red,
and blue, and yellow, and violet, and orange,
and all the colours of the rainbow--so Paul
passes this thing, Love, through the
magnificent prism of his inspired intellect,
and it comes out on the other side broken up
into its elements. And in these few words we
have what one might call the Spectrum of
Love, the analysis of Love. Will you observe
what its elements are? Will you notice that
they have common names; that they are virtues
which we hear about every day; that they are
things which can be practised by every man in
every place in life; and how, by a multitude
of small things and ordinary virtues, the
supreme thing, the summum bonum, is made up? 

The Spectrum of Love has nine ingredients:-- 

Patience . . . . . . "Love suffereth long." 

Kindness . . . . . . "And is kind." 

Generosity . . . . "Love envieth not." 

Humility . . . . . . "Love vaunteth not
itself, is not puffed up." 

Courtesy . . . . . . "Doth not behave itself
unseemly." 

Unselfishness . . "Seeketh not her own." 

Good Temper . . "Is not easily provoked." 

Guilelessness . . "Thinketh no evil." 

Sincerity . . . . . . "Rejoiceth not in
iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth." 

Patience; kindness; generosity; humility;
courtesy; unselfishness; good temper;
guilelessness; sincerity--these make up the
supreme gift, the stature of the perfect man.
You will observe that all are in relation to
men, in relation to life, in relation to the
known to-day an the near to-morrow, and not
to the unknown eternity. We hear much of love
to God; Christ spoke much of love to man. We
make a great deal of peace with heaven;
Christ made much of peace on earth. Religon
is not a strange or added thing, but the
inspiration of the secular life, the
breathing of an eternal spirit through this
temporal world. The supreme thing, in short,
is not a thing at all, but the giving of a
further finish to the multitudinous words and
acts which make up the sum of every common
day. 

There is no time to do more than make a
passing note upon each of these ingredients.
Love is Patience. This is the normal attitude
of Love; Love passive, Love waiting to begin;
not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its work
when the summons comes, but meantime wearing
the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. Love
suffers long; beareth all things; believeth
all things; hopeth all things. For Love
understands, and therefore waits. 

Kindness. Love active. Have you ever noticed
how much of Christ's life was spent in doing
kind things--in merely doing kind things? Run
over it with that in view and you will find
that He spent a great proportion of His time
simply in making people happy, in doing good
turns to people. There is only one thing
greater than happiness in the world, and that
is holiness; and it is not in our keeping;
but what God has put in our power is the
happiness of those about us, and that is
largely to be secured by our being kind to
them. 

"The greatest thing," says some one, "a man
can do for his Heavenly Father is to be kind
to some of His other children." I wonder why
it is that we are not all kinder than we are?
How much the world needs it. How easily it is
done. How instantaneously it acts. How
infallibly it is remembered. How
superabundantly it pays itself back--for
there is no debtor in the world so
honourable, so superbly honourable, as Love.
"Love never faileth". Love is success, Love
is happiness, Love is life. "Love, I say,
"with Browning, "is energy of Life." 

 "For life,with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear, Is just our chance o' the
prize of learning love-- How love might be,
hath been indeed, and is." 

Where Love is, God is. He that dwelleth in
Love dwelleth in God. God is love. Therefore
love. Without distinction, without
calculation, without procrastination, love.
Lavish it pon the poor, where it is very
easy; especially upon the rich, who often
need it most; most of all upon our equals,
where it is very difficult, and for whom
perhaps we each do least of all. There is a
difference between trying to please and
giving pleasure Give pleasure. Lose no chance
of giving pleasure. For that is the ceaseless
and anonymous triumph of a truly loving
spirit. 

"I shall pass through this world but once.
Any good thing therefore that I can do, or
any kindness that I can show to any human
being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it
or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way
again." 

Generosity. "Love envieth not" This is Love
in competition with others. Whenever you
attempt a good work you will find other men
doing the same kind of work, and probably
doing it better. Envy them not. Envy is a
feeling of ill-will to those who are in the
same line as ourselves, a spirit of
covetousness and detraction. How little
Christian work even is a protection against
un-Christian feeling. That most despicable of
all the unworthy moods which cloud a
Christian's soul assuredly waits for us on
the threshold of every work, unless we are
fortified with this grace of magnanimity.
Only one thing truly need the Christian envy,
the large, rich, generous soul which "envieth
not." 

And then, after having learned all that, you
have to learn this further thing, Humility--
to put a seal upon your lips and forget what
you have done. After you have been kind,
after Love has stolen forth into the world
and done its beautiful work, go back into the
shade again and say nothing about it Love
hides even from itself. Love waives even
self-satisfaction. "Love vaunteth not itself,
is not pufed up." 

The fifth ingredient is a somewhat strange
one to find in this summum bonum: Courtesy.
This is Love in society, Love in relation to
etiquette. "Love doth not behave itself
unseemly." Politeness has been defined as
love in trifles. Courtesy is said to be love
in little things. And the one secret of
politeness is to love. Love cannot behave
itself unseemly. You can put the most
untutored person into the highest society,
and if they have a reservoir of love in their
heart, they will not behave themselves
unseemly. They simply cannot do it. Carlyle
said of Robert Burns that there was no truer
gentleman in Europe than the ploughman-poet.
It was because he loved everything--the
mouse, and the daisy, and all the things,
great and small, that God had made. So with
this simple passport he could mingle with any
society, and enter courts and palaces from
his littl cottage on the banks of the Ayr.
You know the meaning of the word "gentleman."
It means a gentle man--a man who does things
gently, with love. And that is the whole art
and mystery of it. The gentleman cannot in
the nature of things do an ungentle, an
ungentlemanly thing. The un-gentle soul, the
inconsiderate, unsympathetic nature cannot do
anything else. "Love doth not behave itself
unseemly." 

Unselfishness. "Love seeketh not her own."
Observe: Seeketh not even that which is her
own. In Britain the Englishman is devoted,
and rightly, to his rights. But there come
times when a man may exercise even the higher
right of giving up his rights. Yet Paul does
not summon us to give up our rights. Love
strikes much deeper. It would have us not
seek them at all, ignore them, eliminate the
personal element altogether from our
calculations. It is not hard to give up our
rights. They are often external. The
difficult thing is to give up ourselves. The
more difficult thing still is not to seek
things for ourselves at all. After we have
sought them, bought them, won them, deserved
them, we have taken the cream off them for
ourselves already. Little cross the, perhaps,
to give them up. But not to seek them, to
look every man not on his own things, but on
the things of others--id opus est. "Seekest
thou great things for thyself? "said the
prophet; "seek them not." Why? Because there
is no greatness in things. Things cannot be
great. The only greatness is unselfish love.
Even self-denial in itself is nothing, is
almost a mistake. Only a great purpose or a
mightier love can justify the waste. It is
more difficult, I have said, not to seek our
own at all, than, having sought it, to give
it up. I must take that back. It is only true
of a partly selfish heart. Nothing is a
hardship to Love, and nothing is hard. I
believe that Christ's yoke is easy. Christ's
"yoke" is just His way of taking life. And I
believe it is an easier way than any other. I
believe it is a happier way than any other.
The most obvious lesson in Christ's teaching
is that there is no happiness in having and
getting anything, but only in giving. I
repeat, there is no happiness in having or in
getting, but only in giving. And half the
world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of
happiness. They think it consists in having
and getting, and in being served by others.
It consists in giving, and in serving others.
He that would be great among you, said
Christ, let him serve. He that would be
happy, let him remember that there is but one
way--it is more blessed, it is more happy, to
give than to receive. 

The next ingredient is a very remarkable one:
Good Temper. "Love is not easily provoked."
Nothing could be more striking than to find
this here. We are inclined to look upon bad
temper as a very harmless weakness. We speak
of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family
failing, a atter of temperament, not a thing
to take into very serious account in
estimating a man's character. And yet here,
right in the heart of this analysis of love,
it finds a place; and the Bible again and
again returns to condemn it as one of the
most destructive elements in human nature. 

The peculiarity of ill temper is thatit is
the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one
blot on an otherwise noble character. You
know men who are all but perfect, and women
who would be entirely perfect, but for an
easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy"
disposition. This compatibility of ill temper
with high moral character is one of the
strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The
truth is there are two great classes of
sins--sins of the Body, and sins of the
Disposition. The Prodigal Son may be taken as
a type of the first, the Elder Brother of the
second. Now society has no doubt whatever as
to which of these is the worse. Its brand
falls, without a challenge, upon the
Prodigal. But are we right? We have no
balance to weigh one another's sins, and
coarser and finer are but human words; but
faults in the higher nature may be less
venial than those in the lower, and to the
eye of Him who is Love, a sin against Love
may seem a hundred times more base. No form
of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold,
not drunkenness itself, does more to
un-Christianise society than evil temper. For
embittering life, for breaking up
communities, for destroying the most sacred
relationships, for devastating homes, for
withering up men and women, for taking the
bloom off childhood; in short, for sheer
gratuitous misery-producing power, this
influence stands alone. Look at the Elder
Brother, moral, hard-working, patient,
dutiful--let him get all credit for his
virtues--look at this man, this baby, sulking
outside his own father's door. "He was
angry," we read, "and would not go in." Look
at the effect upon the father, upon the
servants, upon the happiness of the guests.
Judge of the effect upon the Prodigal--and
how many prodigals are kept out of the
Kingdom of God by the unlovely characters of
those who profess to be inside? Analyse, as a
study in Temper, the thunder-cloud itself as
it gathers upon the Elder Brother's brow.
What is it made of? Jealousy, anger, pride,
uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness,
touchiness, doggedness, sullenness--these are
the igredients of this dark and loveless
soul. In varying proportions, also, these are
the ingredients of all ill temper. Judge if
such sins of the disposition are not worse to
live in, and for others to live with, than
sins of the body. Did Christ indeed not
answer the question Himself when He said, "I
say unto you, that the publicans and the
harlots go into the Kingdom of Heaven before
you." There is really no place in Heaven for
a disposition like this. A man with such a
mood could only make Heaven miserable for all
the people in it. Except, therefore, such a
man be born again, he cannot, he simply
cannot, enter the Kingdom of Heaven. For it
is perfectly certain-- and you will not
misunderstand me--that to enter Heaven a man
must take it with him. 

You will see then why Temperis significant.
It is not in what it is alone, but in what it
reveals. This is why I take the liberty now
of speaking of it with such unusual
plainness. It is a test for love, a symptom,
a revelation of an unloving nature at bottom.
It is the intermittent fever which bespeaks
unintermittent disease within; the occasional
bubble escaping to the surface which betrays
some rottenness underneath; a sample of the
most hidden products of the soul dropped
involuntarily when off one's guard; in a
word, the lightning form of a hundred hideous
and un-Christian sins. For a want of
patience, a want of kindness, a want of
generosity, a want of courtesy, a want of
unselfishness, are all instantaneously
symbolised in one flash of Temper. 

Hence it is not enough to deal with the
temper. We must go to the source, and change
the inmost nature, and the angry humours will
die away of themselves. Souls are made sweet
not by taking the acid fluids out, but by
putting something in--a great Love, a new
Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the
Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours,
sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only
can eradicate what is wrong, work a chemical
change, renovate and regenerate, and
rehabilitate the inner man. Will-power does
not hange men. Time does not change men.
Christ does. Therefore "Let that mind be in
you which was also in Christ Jesus." Some of
us have not much time to lose. Remember, once
more, that this is a matter of life or death.
I cannot help speaking urgently, for myself,
for yourselves. "Whoso shall offend one of
these little ones, which believe in me, it
were better for him that a millstone were
hanged about his neck, and that he were
drowned in the depth of the sea." That is to
say, it is the deliberate verdict of the Lord
Jesus that it is better not to live than not
to love. It is better not to live than not to
love. 

Guilelessness and Sincerity may be dismissed
almost with a word. Guilelessness is the
grace for suspicious people. And the
possession of it is the great secret of
personal influence. You will find, if you
think for a moment, that the people who
influence you are people who believe in you.
In an atmosphere of suspicion men shrivel up;
but in that atmosphere they expand, and find
encouragement and educative fellowship. It is
a wonderful thing that here and there in this
hard, uncharitable world there should still
be left a few rare souls who think no evil.
This is the great unworldliness. Love
"thinketh no evil," imputes no motive, sees
the bright side, puts the best construction
on every action. What a delightful state of
mind to live in! What a stimulus and
benediction even to meet with it for a day!
To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try
to influence or elevate others, we shall soon
see that success is in proportion to their
belief of our belief in them. For the respect
of another is the first restoration of the
self-respect a man has lost; our ideal of
what he is becomes to him the hope and
pattern of what he may become. 

"Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but
rejoiceth in te truth." I have called this
Sincerity from the words rendered in the
Authorised Version by "rejoiceth in the
truth." And, certainly, were this the real
translation, nothing could be more just. For
he who loves will loveTruth not less than
men. He will rejoice in the Truth--rejoice
not in what he has been taught to believe;
not in this Church's doctrine or in that; not
in this ism or in that ism; but "in the
Truth." He will accept only what is real; he
will strive to get at facts; he will search
for Truth with a humble and unbiased mind,
and cherish whatever he finds at any
sacrifice. But the more literal translation
of the Revised Version calls for just such a
sacrifice for truth's sake here. For what
Paul really meant is, as we there read,
"Rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but
rejoiceth with the truth," a quality which
probably no one English word--and certainly
not Sincerity--adequately defines. It
includes, perhaps more strictly, the
self-restraint which refuses to make capital
out of others' faults; the charity which
delights not in exposing the weakness of
others, but "covereth all things"; the
sincerity of purpose which endeavours to see
things as they are, and rejoices to find them
better than suspicion feared or calumny
denounced. 

So much for the analysis of Love. Now the
business of our lives is to have these things
fitted into our characters. That is the
supreme work to which we need to address
ourselves in this world, to learn Love. Is
life not full of opportunities for learning
Love? Every man and woman every day has a
thousand of them. The world is not a
play-ground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not
a holiday, but an education. And the one
eternal lesson for us all is how better we
can love What makes a man a good cricketer?
Practice. What makes a man a good artist, a
good sculptor, a good musician? Practice.
What makes a man a good linguist, a good
stenographer? Practice. What makes a man a
good man? Practice. Nothing else. There is
nothing capricious about religion. We do not
get the soul in different ways, under
different laws, from those in which we get
the body and the mind. If a man does not
exercise his arm he develops no biceps
muscle; and if a man does not exercise his
soul, he acquires no muscle in is soul, no
strength of character, no vigour of moral
fibre, nor beauty of spiritual growth. Love
is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is
a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of
the whole round Christian character--the
Christlike nature in its fullest development.
And the constituents of this great character
are only to be built up by ceaseless
practice. 

What was Christ doing in the carpenter's
shop? Practising. Though perfect, we read
that He learned obedience, He increased in
wisdom and in favour with God and man. Do not
quarrel therefore with your lot in life. Do
not complain of its never-ceasing cares, its
petty environment, the vexations you have to
stand, the small and sordid souls you have to
live and work with. Above all, do not resent
temptation; do not be perplexed because it
seems to thicken roundyou more and more, and
ceases neither for effort nor for agony nor
prayer. That is the practice which God
appoints you; and it is having its work in
making you patient, and humble, and generous,
and unselfish, and kind, and courteous. Do
not grudge the hand that is moulding the
still too shapeless image within you. It is
growing more beautiful though you see it not,
and every touch of temptation may add to its
perfection. Therefore keep in the midst of
life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among men,
and among things, and among troubles, and
difficulties, and obstacles. You remember
Goethe's words: Es bildet ein Talent sich in
der Stille, Doch ein Character in dem Strom
der Welt. "Talent develops itself in
solitude; character in the stream of life."
Talent develops itself in solitude--the
talent of prayer, of faith, of meditation, of
seeing the unseen; Character grows in the
stream of the world's life. That chiefly is
where men are to learn love. 

How? Now, how? To make it easier, I have
named a few of the elements of love. But
these are only elements. Love itself can
never be defined. Light is a something more
than the sum of its ingredients--a glowing,
dazzling, tremulous ether. And love i
something more than all its elements-- a
palpitating, quivering, sensitive, living
thing. By synthesis of all the colours, men
can make whiteness, they cannot make light.
By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make
virtue, they cannot make love. How then are
we to have this transcendent living whole
conveyed into our souls? We brace our wills
to secure it. We try to copy those who have
it. We lay down rules about it. We watch. We
pray. But these things alone will not bring
Love into our nature. Love is an effect. And
only as we fulfil the right condition can we
have the effect produced. Shall I tell you
what the cause is? 

If you turn to the Revised Version of the
First Epistle of John you will find these
words: "We love, because He first loved us."
"We love," not "We love Him" That is the way
the old Version has it, and it is quite
wrong. "We love--because He first loved us."
Look at that word "because." It is the cause
of which I have spoken. "Because He first
loved us," the effect follows that we love,
we love Him, we love all men. We cannot help
it. Because He loved us, we love, we love
everybody. Our heart is slowly changed.
Contemplate the love of Christ, and you will
love. Stand before that mirror, reflect
Christ's character, and you will be changed
into the same image from tenderness to
tenderness. There is no other way. You cannot
love to order. You can only look at the
lovely object, and fall in love with it, and
grow into likeness to it And so look at this
Perfect Character, this Perfect Life. Look at
the great Sacrifice as He laid down Himself,
all through life, and upon the Cross of
Calvary; and you must love Him. And loving
Him, you must become like Him. Love begets
love. It is a process of induction. Put a
piece of iron in the presence of a
magnetisedbody, and that piece of iron for a
time becomes magnetised. It is charged with
an attractive force in the mere presence of
the original force, and as long as you leave
the two side by side, they are both magnets
alike. Remain side by side withHim who loved
us, and gave Himself for us, and you too will
become a centre of power, a permanently
attractive force; and like Him you will draw
all men unto you, like Him you will be drawn
unto all men. That is the inevitable effect
of Love. Any man who fulfils that cause must
have that effect produced in him. Try to give
up the idea that religion comes to us by
chance, or by mystery, or by caprice. It
comes to us by natural law, or by
supernatural law, for all law is Divine.
Edward Irving went to see a dying boy once,
and when he entered the room he just put his
hand on the sufferer's head, and said, "My
boy, God loves you," and went away. And the
boy started from his bed, and called out to
the people in the house, "God loves me! God
loves me!" It changed that boy. The sense
that God loved him overpowered him, melted
him down, and began the creating of a new
heart in him. And that is how the love of God
melts down the unlovely heart in man, and
begets in him the new creature, who is
patient and humble and gentle and unselfish.
And there is no other way to get it. There is
no mystery about it We love others, we love
everybody, we love our enemies, because He
first loved us. 

 THE DEFENCE 

Now I have a closing sentence or two to add
about Paul's reason for singling out love as
the supreme possession. It is a very
remarkable reason. In a single word it is
this: it lasts. "Love," urges Paul, "never
faileth." Then he begins again one of his
marvellous lists of the great things of the
day, and exposes them one by one. He runs
over the things that men thought were going
to last, and shows that they are all
fleeting, temporary, passing away. 

"Whether there be prophecies, they shall
fail" It was the mother's ambition for her
boy in those days that he should become a
prophet. For hundreds of years God had never
spoken by means of any prophet, and at that
time the prophet was greater than the king.
Men waited wistfully for another messenger to
come, and hung upon his lips when heappeared
as upon the very voice of God. Paul says,
"Whether there be prophecies, they shall
fail" This Book is full of prophecies. One by
one they have "failed"; that is, having been
fulfilled their work is finished; they have
nothing more to do now in the world except to
feed a devout man's faith. 

Then Paul talks about tongues. That was
another thing that was greatly coveted.
"Whether there be tongues, they shall cease."
As we all know, many, many centuries have
passed since tongues have been known in this
world. They have ceased. Take it in any sense
you like. Take it, for illustration merely,
as languages in general--a sense which was
not in Paul's mind at all, and which though
it cannot give us the specific lesson will
point the general truth. Consider the words
in which these chapters were written--Greek.
It has gone. Take the Latin--the other great
tongue of those days. It ceased long ago.
Look at the Indian language. It is ceasing.
The language of Wales, of Ireland, of the
Scttish Highlands is dying before our eyes.
The most popular book in the English tongue
at the present time, except the Bible, is one
of Dickens's works, his Pickwick Papers. It
is largely written in the language of London
streetlife; and experts assure us that in
fifty years it will be unintelligible to the
average English reader. 

Then Paul goes farther, and with even greater
boldness adds, "Whether there be knowledge,
it shall vanish away." The wisdom of the
ancients, where is it? It is wholly gone. A
schoolboy to-day knows more than Sir Isaac
Newton knew. His knowledge has vanished away.
You put yesterday's newspaper in the fire.
Its knowledge has vanished away. You buy the
old editions of the great encyclopaedias for
a few pence. Their knowledge has vanished
away. Look how the coach has been superseded
by the use of steam. Look how electricity has
superseded that, and swept a hundred almost
new inventions into oblivion. One of the
greatest living authorities, Sir William
Thomson, said the other day, "The
steam-engine is pssing away." "Whether there
be knowledge, it shall vanish away." At every
workshop you will see, in the back yard, a
heap of old iron, a few wheels, a few levers,
a few cranks, broken and eaten with rust.
Twenty years ago that was the pride of the
city Men flocked in from the country to see
the great invention; now it is superseded,
its day is done. And all the boasted science
and philosophy of this day will soon be old.
But yesterday, in the University of
Edinburgh, the greatest figure in the faculty
was Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of
chloroform. The other day his successor and
nephew, Professor Simpson, was asked by the
librarian of the University to go to the
library and pick out the books on his subject
that were no longer needed. And his reply to
the librarian was this: "Take every text-book
that is more than ten years old, and put it
down in the cellar."Sir James Simpson was a
great authority only a few years ago: men
came from all parts of the earth to consult
him; and almost the whole teaching of that
time is consigned by the science of to-day to
oblivion. And in every branch of science it
is the same. "Now we know in part. We see
through a glass darkly." 

Can you tell me anything that is going to
last? Many things Paul did not condescend to
name. He did not mention money, fortune,
fame; but he picked out the great things of
his time, the things the best men thought had
something in them, and brushed them
peremptorily aside. Paul had no charge
against these things in themselves. All he
said about them was that they would not last
They were great things, but not supreme
things. There were things beyond them. What
we are stretches past what we do, beyond what
we posses. Many things that men denounce as
sins are not sins; but they are temporary.
And that is a favourite argument of the New
Testament. John says of the world, not that
it is wrong, but simply that it "passeth
away." There is a great deal in the world
that is delightful and beautiful; there is a
great deal in it that is great and engrssing;
but it will not last. All that is in the
world, the lust of the eye, the lust of the
flesh, and the pride of life, are but for a
little while. Love not the world therefore.
Nothing that it contains is worth the life
and consecration of an immortal soul. The
immortal soul must give itself to something
that is immortal. And the only immortal
things are these: "Now abideth faith, hope,
love, but the greatest of these is love." 

Some think the time may come when two of
these three things will also pass away
--faith into sight, hope into fruition. Paul
does not say so. We know but little now about
the conditions of the life that is to come.
But what is certain is that Love must last.
God, the Eternal God, is Love. Covet
therefore that everlasting gift, that one
thing which it is certain is going to stand,
that one coinage which will be current in the
Universe when all the other coinages of all
the nations of the world shall be useless and
unhonoured. You will give yourselves to many
things, give yourselves first to Love. Hold
things in their proportion. Hold things in
their proportion. Let at least the first
great object of our lives be to achieve the
character defended in these words, the
character,--and it is the character of
Christ--which is built around Love. 

I have said this thing is eternal. Did you
ever notice how continually John associates
love and faith with eternal life? I was not
told when I was a boy that "God so loved the
world that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth in Him should have
everlasting life." What I was told, I
remember, was, that God so loved the world
that, if I trusted in Him, I was to have a
thing called peace, or I was to have rest, or
I was to have joy, or I was to have safety.
But I had to find out for myself that
whosoever trusteth in Him--that is, whosoever
loveth Him, for trust is only the avenue to
Love--hath everlasting life The Gospel offers
a man life. Never offer men a thimbleful of
Gospel. Do not offer them merely joy, or
merely peace, or erely rest, or merely
safety; tell them how Christ came to give men
a more abundant life than they have, a life
abundant in love, and therefore abundant in
salvation for themselves, and large in
enterprise for the alleviation and redemption
of the world. Then only can the Gospel take
hold of the whole of a man, body, soul, and
spirit, and give to each part of his nature
its exercise and reward. Many of the current
Gospels are addressed only to a part of man's
nature. They offer peace, not life; faith,
not Love; justification, not regeneration.
And men slip back again from such religion
because it has never really held them. Their
nature was not all in it. It offered no
deeper and gladder life-current than the life
that was lived bfore. Surely it stands to
reason that only a fuller love can compete
with the love of the world. 

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and
to love for ever is to live for ever. Hence,
eternal life is inextricably bound up with
love We want to live for ever for the same
reason that we want to live tomorrow. Why do
you want to live tomorrow? It is because
there is some one who loves you, and whom you
want to see tomorrow, and be with, and love
back. There is no other reason why we should
live on than that we love and are beloved. It
is when a man has no one to love him that he
commits suicide. So long as he has friends,
those who love him and whom he loves, he will
live; because to live is to love. Be it but
the love of a dog, it will keep him in life;
but let that go and he has no contact with
life, no reason to live. The "energy of life"
has failed. Eternal life also is to know God,
and God is love. This is Christ's own
definition. Ponder it. "This is life eternal,
that they might know Thee the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." Love
must be eternal. It is what God is. On the
last analysis, then, love is life. Love never
faileth, and life never faileth, so long as
there is love. That is the philosophy of what
Paul is showing us; the reason why in the
nature f things Love should be the supreme
thing--because it is going to last; because
in the nature of things it is an Eternal
Life. That Life is a thing that we are living
now, not that we get when we die; that we
shall have a poor chance of getting when we
die unless we are living now. No worse fate
can befall a man in this world than to live
and grow old alone, unloving, and unloved. To
be lost is to live in an unregenerate
condition, loveless and unloved; and to be
saved is to love; and he that dwelleth in
love dwelleth already in God. For God is
love. 

Now I have all but finished. How many of you
will join me in reading this chapter once a
week for the next three months? A man did
that once and it changed his whole life. Will
you do it? It is for the greatest thing in
the world. You might begin by reading it
every day, especially the verses which
describe the perfect character. "Love
suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth
not; love vaunteth not itself." Get these
ingredients into your life. Then everything
that you do is eternal. It is worth doing. It
is worth giving time to. No man can become a
saint in his sleep; and to fulfil the
condition required demands a certain amount
of prayer and meditation and time, just as
improvement in any direction, bodily or
mental, requires preparation and care.
Address yourselves to that one thing; at any
cost have this transcendent character
exchanged for yours. You will find as you
look back upon your life that the moments
that stand out, the moments when you have
really lived, are the moments when you have
done things in a spirit of love. As memory
scans the past, above and beyond all the
transitory pleasures of life, there leap
forward those supreme hours when you have
been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to
those round about you, things too triling to
speak about, but which you feel have entered
into your eternal life. I have seen almost
all the beautiful things God has made; I have
enjoyed almost every pleasure that He has
planned for man; and yet as I look backI see
standing out above all the life that has gone
four or five short experiences when the love
of God reflected itself in some poor
imitation, some small act of love of mine,
and these seem to be the things which alone
of all one's life abide. Everything else in
all our lives is transitory. Every other good
is visionary. But the acts of love which no
man knows about, or can ever know about--they
never fail. 

In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgment
Day is depicted for us in the imagery of One
seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep
from the goats, the test of a man then is
not, "How have I believed?" but "How have I
loved?" The test of religion, the final test
of religion, is not religiousness, but Love.
I say the final test of religion at that
great Day is not religiousness, but Love; not
what I have done, not what I have believed,
not what I have achieved, but how I have
discharged the common charities of life. Sins
of commission in that awful indictment are
not even referred to. By what we have not
done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It
could not be otherwise. For the withholding
of love is the negation of the spirit of
Christ, the proof that we never knew Him,
that for us He lived in vain. It means that
He suggested nothing in all our thoughts,
that He inspired nothing in all our lives,
that we were not once near enough to Him to
be seized with the spell of His compassion
for the world. It means that-- 

 "I lived for myself, I thought for myself,
For myself, and none beside-- Just as if
Jesus had never lived, As if He had never
died." 

It is the Son of Man before whom the nations
of the world shall be gathered. It is in the
presence of Humanity that we shall be
charged. And the spectacle itself, the mere
sight of it, will silently judge each one.
Those will be there whom we have met and
helped: or there, the unpitied multitude whom
we neglected or despised. No other Witness
need be summoned. No other charge than
lovelessness shall be preferred. Be not
deceived. The words whic all of us shall one
Day hear, sound not of theology but of life,
not of churches and saints but of the hungry
and the poor, not of creeds and doctrines but
of shelter and clothing, not of Bibles and
prayer-books but of cups of cold water in the
name of Christ. Thank God the Christianity of
to-day is coming nearer the world's need.
Live to help that on. Thank God men know
better, by a hairsbreadth, what religion is,
what God is, who Christ is, where Christ is.
Who is Christ? He who fed the hungry, clothed
the naked, visited the sick. And where is
Christ? Where?--whoso shall receive a little
child in My name receiveth Me. And who are
Christ's? Every one that loveth is born of
God. 

 THE PROGRAMME OF CHRISTIANITY 

To Preach Good Tidings unto the Meek: 

To Bind up the Broken-hearted: 

To proclaim Liberty to the Captives and the
Opening of the Prison to hem that are Bound: 

To Proclaim the Acceptable Year of the Lord,
and the Day of Vengeance of our God: 

To Comfort all that Mourn: 

To Appoint unto them that Mourn in Zion: 

To Give unto them-- 

Beauty for Ashes, 

The Oil of Joy for Mourning, 

The Garment of Praise for the Spirit of
Heaviness. 

 THE PROGRAMME OF CHRISTIANITY 

"WHAT does God do all day?" once asked a
little boy. One could wish that more grown-up
people would ask so very real a question.
Unfortunately, most of us are not even boys
in religious intelligence, but only very
unthinking children. It no more occurs to us
that God is engaged in any particular work in
the world than it occurs to a little child
that its father does anything except be its
father. Its father may be a Cabinet Minister
absorbed in the nation's work, or an inventor
deep in schemes for the world's good; but to
this master-egoist he is father, and nothing
more. Childhood, whether in the physical or
moral world, is the great self-centred period
of life; and a personal God who satisfies
personal ends is all that for a long time
many a Christian understands. 

But as clearly as therecomes to the growing
child a knowledge of its father's part in the
world, and a sense of what real life means,
there must come to every Christian whose
growth is true some richer sense of the
meaning of Christianity and a larger view of
Christ's purpose for mankind. To miss this is
to miss the whole splendour and glory of
Christ's religion. Next to losing the sense
of a personal Christ, the worst evil that can
befall a Christian is to have no sense of
anything else. To grow up in complacent
belief that God has no business in this great
groaning world of human beings except to
attend to a few saved souls is the negation
of all religion. The first great epoch in a
Christian's life, after the awe and wonder of
its dawn, is when there breaks into his mind
some sense that Christ has a purpose for
mankind, a purpose beyond him and his needs,
beyond the churches and their creeds, beyond
Heaven and its saints--a purpose which
embraces every man and woman born, every
kindred and nation formed, which regards not
their spiritual good alone but teir welfare
in every part, their progress, their health,
their work, their wages, their happiness in
this present world. 

What, then, does Christ do all day? By what
further conception shall we augment the
selfish view of why Christ lived and died? 

I shall mislead no one, I hope, if I say
--for I wish to put the social side of
Christianity in its strongest light--that
Christ did not come into the world to give
men religion. He never mentioned the word
religion. Religion was in the world before
Christ came, and it lives to-day in a million
souls who have never heard His name. What God
does all day is not to sit waiting in
churches for people to come and worship Him.
It is true that God is in churches and in all
kinds of churches, and is found by many in
churches more immediately than anywhere else.
It is also true that while Christ did not
give men religion He gave a new direction to
the religious aspiration bursting forth then
and now and always from the whole world's
hear. But it was His purpose to enlist these
aspirations on behalf of some definite
practical good. The religious people of those
days did nothing with their religion except
attend to its observances. Even the priest,
after he had been to the temple, thought his
work was done; when he met the wounded man he
passed by on the other side. Christ reversed
all this--tried to reverse it, for He is only
now beginning to succeed. The tendency of the
religions of all time has been to care more
for religion than for humanity; Christ cared
more for humanity than for religion--rather
His care for humanity was the chief
expression of His religion. He was not
indifferent to observances, but the practices
of the people bulked in His thoughts before
the practices of the Church. It has been
pointed out as a blemish on the immortal
allegory of Bunyan that the Pilgrim never did
anything, anything but save his soul. The
remark is scarcely fair, for the allegory is
designedly the story of a soul in a single
relation; and besides, he did do a little.
But the warning may well be weighed. The
Pilgrim's one thought, his work by day, his
dream by night, was escape. He took little
part in the world through which he passed. He
was a Pilgrim travelling through it; his
business was to get through safe. Whatever
this is, i is not Christianity. Christ's
conception of Christianity was heavens
removed from that of a man setting out from
the City of Destruction to save his soul. It
was rather that of a man dwelling amidst the
Destructions of the City and planning escapes
for the souls of others--escapes not to the
other world, but to purity and peace and
righteousness in this. In reality Christ
never said "Save your soul." It is a
mistranslation which says that. What He said
was, "Save your life." And this not because
the first is nothing, but only because it is
so very great a thing that only the second
can accomplish it. But the new word
altruism--the translation of "love thy
neighbour as thyself"--is slowly finding its
way into current Christian peech. The
People's Progress, not less than the
Pilgrim's Progress, is daily becoming a
graver concern to the Church. A popular
theology with unselfishness as part at least
of its root, a theology which appeals no
longer to fear, but to the generous heart in
man, has already dawned, and more clearly
than ever men are beginning to see what
Christ really came into this world to do. 

What Christ came here for was to make a
better world. The world in which we live is
an unfinished world. It is not wise, it is
not happy, it is not pure, it is not good--it
is not even sanitary. Humanity is little more
than raw material. Almost everything has yet
to be done to it. Before the days of Geology
people thought the earth was finished. It is
by no means finished. The work of Creation is
going on. Before the spectroscope, men
thought the universe was finished. We know
now it is just beginning. And this teeming
universe of men in which we live has almost
all its finer colour and beauty yet to take.
Christ came to complete it. The fires of its
passions were not yet cool; their heat had to
be transformed into finer energies. The
ideals for its future were all to shape, the
forces to realize them were not yet born. The
poison of its sins had met no antidote, the
gloom of its doubt no light, the weight of
its sorrow no rest. These the Saviour of the
world, the Light of men, would do and be.
This, roughly, was His scheme. 

Now this was a prodigious task--to recreate
the world. How was it to be done? God's way
of making worlds is to make them make
themselves. When He made the earth He made a
rough ball of matter and supplied it with a
multitude of tools to mould it into form--the
rain-drop to carve it, the glacier to smooth
it, the river to nourish it, the flower to
adorn it. God works always with agents, and
this is our way when we want any great thing
done, and this was Christ's way when He
undertook the finishing of Humanity. He had a
vast intractable mass of matter to deal with,
and He required a multitude of tools. Chris's
tools were men. Hence His first business in
the world was to make a collection of men. In
other words He founded a Society. 

  THE FOUNDING OF THE SOCIETY 

IT is a somewhat startling thought--it will
not be misunderstood--that Christ probably
did not save many people while He was here.
Many an evangelist, in that direction, has
done much more. He never intended to finish
the world single-handed, but announced from
the first that others would not only tke
part, but do "greater things" than He. For
amazing as was the attention He was able to
give to individuals, this was not the whole
aim He had in view. His immediate work was to
enlist men in His enterprise, to rally them
into a great company or Society for the
carrying out of His plans. 

The name by which this Society was known was
The Kingdom of God. Christ did not coin this
name; it was an old expression, and good men
had always hoped and prayed that some such
Society would be born in their midst. But it
was never either defined or set agoing in
earnest until Christ made its realization the
passion of His life. 

How keenly He felt regarding His task, how
enthusiastically He set about it, every page
of His life bears witness. All reformers have
one or two great words which they use
incessantly, and by mere reiteration imbed
indelibly in the thought and history of their
time. Christ's great word was the Kingdom of
God. Of all the words of His that have come
down to us this is by far the commonest. One
hundred times it occurs in the Gospels. When
He preached He had almost always this for a
text. His sermons were explanations of the
aims of His Society, of the different things
it was like, of whom its membership
consisted, what they were to do or to be, or
not do or not be. And even when He does not
actually use the word, it is easy to see that
all He said and did had reference to this.
Philosophers talk about thinking in
categories-- the mind living, as it were, in
a particular room with its own special
furniture, pictures,and viewpoints, these
giving a consistent direction and colour to
all that is there thought or expressed. It
was in the category of the Kingdom that
Christ's thought moved. Though one time He
said He came to save the lost, or at another
time to give men life, or to do His Father's
will, these were all included among the
objects of His Society. 

No one can ever know what Christianity is
till he has grasped this leading thought in
the mind of Christ. Peter and Paul have many
wonderful and necessary things to tell us
about what Christ was and did; but we are
looking now at what Christ's own thought was.
Do not think this is a mere modern theory.
These are His own life-plans taken from His
own lips. Do not allow any isolated text,
even though it seem to sum up for you the
Christian life, to keep you from trying to
understand Christ's Programme as a whole. The
perspective of Christ's teaching is not
everything, but without it everything will be
distorted and untrue. There is much good in a
verse, but often much evil. To see some small
soul pirouetting throughout life on a single
text, and judging all the world because it
cannot find a partner, is not a Christian
sight. Chrisianity does not grudge such souls
their comfort. What it grudges is that they
make Christ's Kingdom uninhabitable to
thoughtful minds. Be sure that whenever the
religion of Christ appears small, or
forbidding, or narrow, or inhuman, you are
dealing not with the whole --which is a
matchless moral symmetry-- nor even with an
arch or column--for every detail is
perfect--but with some cold stone removed
from its place and suggesting nothing of the
glorious structure from which it came. 

Tens of thousands of persons who are familiar
with religious truths have not noticed yet
that Christ ever founded a Society at all.
The reason is partly that people have read
texts instead of reading their Bible, partly
that they have studied Theology instead of
studying Christianity, and partly because of
the noiselessness and invisibility of the
Kingdom of Gd itself. Nothing truer was ever
said of this Kingdom than that "It cometh
without observation." Its first discovery,
therefore, comes to the Christian with all
the force of a revelation. The sense of
belonging to such a Society transforms life.
It is the difference between being a solitary
knight tilting single-handed, and often
defeated, at whatever enemy one chances to
meet on one's little acre of life, and the
feel of belonging to a mighty army marching
throughout all time to a certain victory.
This note of universality given to even the
humblest work we do, this sense of
comradeship, this link with history, this
thought of a definite campaign, this promise
of success, is the possession of every
obscurest unit in the Kingdom of God. 

 THE PROGRAMME OF THE SOCIETY 

HUNDREDS of years before Christ's Society was
formed, its Programme had been issued to the
world. I cannot think of any scene in history
more dramatic than when Jesus entered the
church in Nazareth and read it to the people.
Not that when He appropriated to Himself that
venerable fragment from Isaiah He was
uttering a manifesto or announcing His formal
Programme. Christ never did things formally.
We think of the words, as He probably thought
of them, not in their old-world historical
significance, nor as a full expression of His
future aims, but as a summary of great moral
facts now and always to be realized in the
world since he appeared. 

Remember as you read the words to what grim
reality they refer. Recall what Christ's
problem really was, what His Society was
founded for. This Programme deals with a real
world. Think of it as you read--not of the
surface-world, but of the world as it is, as
it sins and weeps, and curses and suffers and
sends up its long cry to God. Limit it if you
like to the world around your door, but think
of it-- of the city and the hospital and the
dungeon and the graveyard, of the
sweating-shop and the pawn-shop and the
drink-shop; think of the cold, the cruelty,
the fever, the famine, theugliness, the
loneliness, the pain. And then try to keep
down the lump in your throat as you take up
His Programme and read-- 

TO BIND UP THE BROKEN-HEARTED: TO PROCLAIM
LIBERTY TO THE CAPTIVES: TO COMFORT ALL THAT
MOURN: TO GIVE UNTO THEM-- 

   BEAUTY FOR ASHE, THE OIL OF JOY FOR
MOURNING, THE GARMENT OF PRAISE FOR THE
SPIRIT OF HEAVINESS. 

What an exchange--Beauty for Ashes, Joy for
Mourning, Liberty for Chains! No marvel "the
eyes of all them that were in the synagogue
were fastened on Him" as He read; or that
they "wondered at the gracious words which
proceeded out of His lips." Only one man in
that congregation, only one man in the world
to-day could hear these accents with
dismay--the man, the culprit, who has said
hard words of Christ. 

We are all familiar with the protest "Of
course"--as if there were no other
alternative to a person of culture--"Of
course I am not a Christian, but I always
speak respectfully of Christianity."
Respectfully of Christianity! No remark fills
one's soul with such sadness. One can
understand a man as he reads these words
being stricken speechless; one can see the
soul within him rise to a white heat as each
fresh benediction falls upon his ear and
drive him, a half-mad enthusiast, to bear
them to the world. But in what school has he
learned of Christ who offers the Saviour of
the world his respect? 

Men repudiate Christ's religion because they
think it a small and limited thing, a scheme
with no large human interests to commend it
to this great social age. I ask you to note
that there is not one burning interest of the
human race which is not represented here.
What are the great words of Christianity
according to this Programme? Take as
specimens these: 

 LIBERTY, COMFORT, BEAUTY, JOY. 

These are among the greatest words of life.
Give them their due extension, the
significance which Christ undoubtedly saw in
them and which Christianity undoubtedly
yields, and there is almost no great want or
interest of mankind which they do not cover.
These are not only the greatest words of life
but they are the best. This Programme, to
those who have misread Christianity, is a
series of surprises. Observe the most
prominent note in it. It is gladness. Its
first word is "good-tidings," its last is
"joy." The saddest words of life are also
there--but there as the diseases which
Christianity comes to cure. No life that is
occupied with such an enterprise could be
other than radiant. The contribution of
Christianity to the joy of living, perhaps
even more to the joy of thinking, is
unspeakable. The joyful life is the life of
the larger mission, the disinterested life,
the life of the overflow from self, the "moe
abundant life" which comes from following
Christ. And the joy of thinking is the larger
thinking, the thinking of the man who holds
in his hand some Programme for Humanity. The
Christian is the only man who has any
Programme at all-- any Programme either for
the world or for himself. Goethe, Byron,
Carlyle taught Humanity much, but they had no
Programme for it. Byron's thinking was
suffering; Carlisle's despair. Christianity
alone exults. The belief in the universe as
moral, the interpretation of history as
progress, the faith in good as eternal, in
evil as self-consuming, in humanity as
evolving--these Christian ideas have
transformed the malady of thought into a
bounding hope. It was no sentiment but a
conviction matured amid calamity and
submitted to the tests of life that inspired
the great modern poet of optimism to
proclaim:-- 

 "Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world!
I think this is the authentic sign and seal
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more
glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a
rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at
sorrow." 

But that is not all. Man's greatest needs are
often very homely. And it is almost as much
in its fearless recognition of the
commonplace woes of life, and its deliberate
offerings to minor needs, that the claims of
Christianity to be a religion for Humanity
stand. Look, fo instance, at the closing
sentence of this Programme. Who would have
expected to find among the special objects of
Christ's solicitude the Spirit of Heaviness?
Supreme needs, many and varied, had been
already dealt with on this Programme; many
applicants had been met; the list is about to
close. Suddenly the writer remembers the
nameless malady of the poor--that mysterious
disease which the rich share but cannot
alleviate, which is too subtle for doctors,
too incurable for Parliaments, too
unpicturesque for philanthropy, too common
even for sympathy. Can Christ meet that? 

If Christianity could even deal with the
world's Depression, could cure mere dull
spirits, it would be the Physician of
Humanity. But it can. It has the secret, a
hundred secrets, for the lifting of the
world's gloom. It cannot immediately remove
the physiological causes of dulness-- though
obedience to its principles can do an
infinity to prevent them, and its
inspirations can do even more to lift the
mind above them. But where the causes are
moral or mental or social the remedy is in
every Christian's hand. Think of any one at
this moment whom the Spirit of Heaviness
haunts. You think of a certain old woman. But
you know for a fact that you can cure her.
You did so, perfectly, only a eek ago. A mere
visit, and a little present, or the visit
without any present, set her up for seven
long days, and seven long nights. The
machinery of the Kingdom is very simple and
very silent, and the most silent parts do
most, and we all believe so little in the
medicines of Christ that we do not know what
ripples of healing are set in motion when we
simply smile on one another. Christianity
wants nothing so much in the world as sunny
people, and the old are hungrier for love
than for bread, and the Oil of Joy is very
cheap, and if you can help the poor on with a
Garment of Praise, it will be better for them
than blankets. 

Or perhaps you know someone else who is
dull--not an old woman this time, but a very
rich and important man. But you also know
prfectly what makes him dull. It is either
his riches or his importance. Christianity
can cure either of these though you may not
be the person to apply the cure--at a single
hearing. Or here is a third case, one of your
own servants. It is a case of monotony.
Prescribe more variety, leisure,
recreation--anything to relieve the wearing
strain. A fourth case--your most honoured
guest: Condition--leisure, health,
accomplishments, means; Disease--Spiritual
Obesity; Treatment--talent to be put out to
usury. And so on down the whole range of
life's dejection and ennui. 

Perhaps you tell me this is not Christianity
at all; that everybody could do that. The
curious thing is that everybody does not.
Good-will to men came into the world with
Christ, and wherever that is found, in
Christian or heathen land, there Christ is,
and there His Spirit works. And if you say
that the chief end of Christianity is not the
world's happiness, I agree; it was never
meant to be; but the strange fact is that,
without making it its chief end, it wholly
and infallibly, and quite universally, leads
to it. Hence the note of Joy, though not the
highest on Christ's Programme, is a loud and
ringing note, and none who serve in His
Society can be long without its music. Time
was when a Christian used to apologize for
being happy. But the day has always been when
he ought to apologize for being miserable. 

Christianity, you will observe, really works.
And it succeeds not only because it is
divine, but because it is so very
human--because it is common-sense. Why should
the Garment of Praise destroy the Spirit of
Heaviness? Because an old woman cannot sing
and cry at the same moment. The Society of
Christ is a sane Society. Its methods are
rational. The principle in the old woman's
case is simply that one emotion destroys
another. Christianity works, as a railway man
would say, with points. It switches souls
from valley lines to mountain lines, not
stemming the currents of life but
divertingthem. In the rich man's case the
principle of cure s different, but it is
again principle, not necromancy. His spirit
of heaviness is caused, like any other
heaviness, by the earth's attraction. Take
away the earth and you take away the
attraction. But if Christianity can do
anything it can take away the earth. By the
wider extension of horizon which it gives, by
the new standard of values, by the mere
setting of life's small pomps and interests
and admirations in the light of the Eternal,
it dissipates the world with a breath. All
that tends to abolish worldliness tends to
abolish unrest, and hence, in the rush of
modern life, one far-reaching good of all
even commonplace Christian preaching, all
Christian literature, all which holds the
world doggedly to the idea of a God and a
future life, and reminds mankind of Infinity
and Eternity. 

Side by side with these influences, yet
taking the world at a wholly different angle,
works another great Christian force. How many
opponents of religion are aware that one of
the specific objects of Christ's society is
Beauty? The charge of vulgarity against
Christianity is an old one. If it means that
Christianity deals with the ruder elements in
human nature, it is true, and that is its
glory. But if it means that it has no respect
for the finer qualities, the charge is
baseless. For Christianity not only
encourages whatsoever things are lovely, but
wars against that whole theory of life which
would exclude them. It prescribes
aestheticism. It proscribes asceticism. And
for those who preach to Christians that in
these enlightened days they must raise the
masses by giving them noble sculptures and
beautiful paintings and music and public
parks, the answer is that these things are
all already being given, and given daily, and
with an increasing sense of their importance,
by the Society of Christ. Take away from the
world the beautiful things which have not
come from Christ and you will make it poorer
scarcely at all. Take away from modern cities
the paintings, the monuments, the music for
the people, the museums and the paks which
are not the gifts of Christian men and
Christian municipalities, and in ninety cases
out of a hundred you will leave them unbereft
of so much as a well-shaped lamp-post 

It is impossible to doubt that the Decorator
of the World shall not continue to serve to
His later children, and in ever finer forms,
the inspirations of beautiful things. More
fearlessly than he has ever done, the
Christian of modern life will use the noble
spiritual leverages of Art. That this world,
the people's world, is a bleak and ugly
world, we do not forget; it is ever with us.
But we esteem too little the mission of
beautiful things in haunting the mind with
higher thoughts and begetting the mood which
leads to God. Physical beauty makes moral
beauty. Loveliness does more than destroy
ugliness; it destroys matter. A mere touch of
it in a room, in a street, even on a door
knockr, is a spiritual force. Ask the
working-man's wife, and she will tell you
there is a moral effect even in a clean
table-cloth. If a barrel-organ in a slum can
but drown a curse, let no Christian silence
it. The mere light and colour of the
wall-advertisements are a gift of God to the
poor man's sombre world. 

One Christmas-time a poor drunkard told me
that he had gone out the night before to take
his usual chance of the temptations of the
street. Close to his door, at a shop window,
an angel--so he said--arrested him. It was a
large Christmas-card, a glorious white thing
with tinsel wings, and as it glittered in the
gas-light it flashed into his soul a sudden
thought of Heaven. It recalled the earlier
heaven of his infancy, and he thought of his
mother in the distant glen, and how it would
please her if she got this Christmas angel
from her prodigal. With money already pledged
to the devil he bought the angel, and with it
a new soul and future for himself. That was a
real angel. For that day as I saw its tinsel
pinions shine in his squalid room I knew what
Christ's angels were. They are all beautiful
things, which daily in common homes are
bearin up heavy souls to God. 

But do not misunderstand me. This angel was
made of pasteboard: a pasteboard angel can
never save a soul. Tinsel reflects the sun,
but warms nothing. Our Programme must go
deeper. Beauty may arrest the drunkard, but
it cannot cure him. 

It is here that Christianity asserts itself
with a supreme individuality. It is here that
it parts company with Civilization, with
Politics, with all secular schemes of Social
Reform. In its diagnosis of human nature it
finds that which most other systems ignore;
which, if they see, they cannot cure; which,
left undestroyed, makes every reform futile,
and every inspiration vain. That thing is
Sin. Christianity, of all other
philanthropies, recognizes that man's
devouring need is Liberty--liberty to stop
sinning; to leave the prison of his passions,
and shake off the fetters of his past. To
surround Captives with statues and pictures,
to offer Them-that-are-Bound a higher wage or
a cleaner street or a few more cubic feet of
air per head, is solemn trifling. It is a
cleaner soul they want; a purer air, or any
air at all, for their higher selves. 

And where the cleaner soul is to come from
apart from Christ I cannot tell. "By no
political alchemy," Herbert Spencer tells us,
"can you get golden conduct out of leaden
instincts." The power to set the heart right,
to renew the springs of action, comes from
Christ. The sense of the infinite worth of
the single soul, and the recoverableness of
man at his worst, are the gifts of Christ.
The freedom from guilt, the forgiveness of
sins, come from Christ's Cross; the hope of
immortality springs from Christ's grave. We
believe in the gospel of better laws and an
improved environment; we hold the religion of
Christ to be a social religion; we magnify
and call Christian the work of reformers,
statesmen, philanthropists, educators,
inventors, sanitary officers, and all who
directly or remotely aid, abet, or further he
higher progress of mankind; but in Him alone,
in the fulness of that word, do we see the
Savour of the world. 

There are earnest and gifted lives to-day at
work among the poor whose lips at least will
not name the name of Christ. I speak of them
with respect; their shoe-latchets many of us
are not worthy to unloose. But because the
creed of the neighbouring mission-hall is a
travesty of religion they refuse to
acknowledge the power of the living Christ to
stop man's sin, of the dying Christ to
forgive it. O, narrowness of breadth! Because
there are ignorant doctors do I yet rail at
medicine or start an hospital of my own?
Because the poor raw evangelist, or the
narrow ecclesiastic, offer their little all
to the poor, shall I repudiate all they do
not know of Christ because of the little that
they do know? Of gospels for the poor which
have not some theory, state it how you will,
of personal conversion one cannot have much
hope. Personal conversion means for life a
personal religion, a personal trust in God, a
personal debt to Christ, a personal
dedication to His cause. These, brought about
how you will, are supreme things to aim at,
supreme losses if they are missed.
Sanctification will come to masses only as it
comes to individual men; and to work with
Christ's Programme and ignore Christ is to
utilize the sun's light without its energy. 

But this is not the only point at which the
uniqueness of this Society appears. There is
yet another depth in humanity which no other
system even attempts to sound. We live in a
world not only of sin but of sorrow-- 

 "There is no flock, however watched and
tended, But one dead lamb is there; There is
no home, howe'er defended, But has one vacant
chair." 

When the flock thins, and the chair empties,
who is to be near to heal? At that moment the
gospels of the world are on trial. In the
presence of death how will they act? Act!
They are blotted out of existence.
Philosophy, Politics, Reforms, are no more.
The Picture Galleries close. The sculptures
hide. The Committees disperse. There is crape
on the door; the world withdraws. Observe, it
withdrws. It has no mission. 

So awful in its loneliness was this hour that
the Romans paid a professional class; to step
in with its mummeries and try to fill it. But
that is Christ's own hour. Next to
Righteousness the greatest word of
Christianity is Comfort. Christianity has
almost a monopoly of Comfort Renan was never
nearer the mark than when he spoke of the
Bible as "the great Book of the Consolation
of Humanity." Christ's Programme is full of
Comfort, studded with Comfort: "to bind up
the Broken-Hearted, to Comfort all that
mourn, to Give unto them that mourn in Zion."
Even the "good tidings" to the "meek" are, in
the Hebrew, a message to the "afflicted" or
"the poor." The word Gospel itself comes down
through the Greek from this very passage, so
that whateverelse Christ's Gospel means it is
first an Evangel for suffering men. 

One note in this Programme jars with all the
rest. When Christ read from Isaiah that day
He never finished the passage. A terrible
word, Vengeance, yawned like a precipice
across His path; and in the middle of a
sentence "He closed the Book, and gave it
again to the minister, and sat down". A Day
of Vengeance from our God--these were the
words before which Christ paused. When the
prophet proclaimed it some great historical
fulfilment was in his mind. Had the people to
whom Christ read been able to understand its
ethical equivalents He would probably have
read on. For, so understood, instead of
filling the mind with fear, the thought of
this dread Day inspires it with a solemn
gratitude. The work of the Avenger is a
necessity. It is part of God's philanthropy. 

For I have but touched the surface in
speaking of the sorrow of the world as if it
came from people dying. It comes from people
living. Before ever the Broken-Hearted can be
healed a hundred greater causes of suffering
than death must be destroyed. Before the
Captive can be free a vaster prison than his
own sins must be demolished. There are hells
on earth into which no breath of heaven can
ever come; these must be swpt away. There are
social soils in which only unrighteousness
can flourish; these must be broken up. 

And that is the work of the Day of Vengeance.
When is that day? It is now. Who is the
Avenger? Law. What Law? Criminal Law,
Sanitary Law, Social Law, Natural Law.
Wherever the poor are trodden upon or tread
upon one another; wherever the air is poison
and the water foul; wherever want stares, and
vice reigns, and rags rot--there the Avenger
takes his stand. Whatever makes it more
difficult for the drunkard to reform, for the
children to be pure, for the widow to earn a
wage, for any of the wheels of progress to
revolve--with these he deals. Delay him not.
He is the messenger of Christ. Despair of him
not, distrust him not. His Day dawns slowly,
but his work is sure. Though evil stalks the
world, it is on the way to execution; though
wrong reigns, it must end in self-combustion.
The very nature of things is God's Avenger;
the very story of civilization is the history
of Christ's Throne. 

Anything that prepares the way for a better
social state is the fit work of the followers
of Christ. Those who work on the more
spiritual levels leave too much unhonoured
the slow toil of multitudes of unchurched
souls who prepare the material or moral
environments without which these higher
labours are in vain. Prevention is Christian
as well as cure; ad Christianity travels
sometimes by the most circuitous paths. It is
given to some to work for immediate results,
and from year to year they are privileged to
reckon up a balance of success. But these are
not always the greatest in the Kingdom of
God. The men who get no stimulus from any
visible reward, whose lives pass while the
objects for which they toil are still too far
away to comfort them; the men who hold aloof
from dazzling schemes and earn the
misunderstanding of the crowd because they
foresee remoter issues, who even oppose a
seeming good because a deeper evil lurks
beyond--these are the statesmen of the
Kingdom of God. 

 THE MACHINERY OFTHE SOCIETY 

SUCH in dimmest outline is the Programme of
Christ's Society. Did you know that all this
was going on in the world? Did you know that
Christianity was such a living and
purpose-like thing? Look back to the day when
that Programme was given, and you will see
that it was not merely written on paper.
Watch the drama of the moral order rise up,
scene after scene, in history. Study the
social evolution of humanity, the spread of
righteousness, the amelioration of life, the
freeing of slaves, the elevation of woman,
the purification of religion, and ask what
these can be if not the coming of the Kingdom
of God on earth. For it is precisely through
the movements of nations and the lives of men
that this Kingdom comes. Christ might have
done all this work Himself, with His own
hands. But He did not. The crowning wonder of
His scheme is that He entrusted it to men. It
is the supreme glory of humanity that the
machinery for its redemption should have been
placed within itself. I think the saddest
thing in Christ's life was that after
founding a Society with aims so glorious He
had to go away and leave it. 

But in reality He did not leave it. The old
theory that God made the world, made it as an
inventor would make a machine, and then stood
looking on to see it work, has passed away.
God is no longer a remote spectator of the
natural world, but immanent in it, pervading
matter by His present Spirit, and ordering it
by His Will. So Christ is immanent in men.
His work is to move the hearts and inspire
the lives of men, and through such hearts to
move and reach the world. Men, only men, can
carry out this work. This humanness, this
inwardness, of the Kingdom is one reason why
some scarcely see that it exists at all. We
measure great movements by the loudness of
their advertisement, or the place their
externals fill in the public eye. This
Kingdom has no externals. The usual methods
of propagating a great cause were entirely
discarded by Christ. The sword He declined;
money He had none; literature He neve used;
the Church disowned Him; the State crucified
Him. Planting His ideals in the hearts o a
few poor men, He started them out unheralded
to revolutionize the world. They did it by
making friends and by making enemies; they
went about, did good, sowed seed, died, and
lived again in the lives of those they
helped. These in turn, a fraction of them,
did the same. They met, they prayed, they
talked of Christ, they loved, they went among
other men, and by act and word passed on
their secret. The machinery of the Kingdom of
God is purely social. It acts, not by
commandment, but by contagion; not by fiat,
but by friendship. "The Kingdom of God is
like unto leaven, which a woman took and hid
in three measures of meal till the whole was
leavened." 

After all, like all great discoveries once
they are made, this seems absolutely the most
feasible method that could have been devised.
Men must live among men. Men must influence
men. Organizations, institutions, churches,
have too much rigidity for a thing that is to
flood the world. The only fluid in the world
is man. War might have won for Christ's cause
a passing victory; wealth might have
purchased a superficial triumph; political
power might have gained a temporary success.
But in these, there is no note of
universality, of solidarity, of immortality.
To live through the centuries and pervade the
uttermost ends of the earth, to stand while
kingdoms tottered and civilizations changed,
to survive fallen churches and crumbling
creeds--there was no soil for the Kingdom of
God like the hearts of common men. Some who
have written about this Kingdom have
emphasized its moral grandeur, others its
universality, others its adaptation to man's
needs. One great writer speaks of its
prodigious originality, another chiefly
notices its success. I confess what almost
strikes me most is the miracle of its
simplicity. 

Men, then, are the only means God's Spirit
has of accomplishing His purpose. What men?
You. Is it worth doing, or is it not? Is it
worth while joining Christ's ociety or is it
not? What do you do all day? What is your
personal stake in the coming of the Kingdom
of Christ on earth? You are not interested in
religion, you tell me; you do not care for
your "soul". It was not about your religion I
ventured to ask, still less about your soul.
That you have no religion, that you do not
care for your soul, does not absolve you from
caring for the world in which you live. But
you do not believe in this church, you reply,
or accept this doctrine, or that. Christ does
not, in the first instance, ask your
thoughts, but your work. No man has a right
to postpone his life for the sake of his
thoughts. Why? Because this is a real world,
not a think world. Treat it as a real world--
act. Think by all means, but think also of
what is actual, of what like the stern world
is, of low much even you, creedless and
churchless, could do to make it better. The
thing to be anxious about is not to be right
with man, but with mankind. And, so far as I
know, there is nothing so on all fours with
mankind as Christianity. 

There are versions of Christianity, it is
true, which no self-respectingmind can do
other than disown--versions so hard, so
narrow, so unreal, so super-theological, that
practical men can find in them neither outlet
for their lives nor resting-place for their
thoughts. With these we have nothing to do.
With these Christ had nothing to do-- except
to oppose them with every word and act of His
life. It too seldom occurs to those who
repudiate Christianity because of its
narrowness or its unpracticalness, its
sanctimoniousness or its dulness, that these
were the very things which Christ strove
against and unweariedly condemned. It was the
one risk of His religion being given to the
common people--an inevitable risk which He
took without reserve--that its infinite
lustre should be tarnished in the fingering
of the crowd or have its great truths
narrowed into mean and unworthy moulds as
they passed from lip to lip. But though the
crowd is the object of Christianity, it is
not its ustodian. Deal with the Founder of
this great Commonwealth Himself. Any man of
honest purpose who will take the trouble to
inquire at first hand what Christianity
really is, will find it a thing he cannot get
away from. Without either argument or
pressure, by the mere practicalness of its
aims and the pathos of its compassions, it
forces its august claim upon every serious
life. 

He who joins this Society finds himself in a
large place. The Kingdom of God is a Society
of the best men, working for the best ends,
according to the best methods. Its membership
is a multitude whom no man can number; its
methods are as various as human nature; its
field is the world. It is a Commonwealth, yet
it honours a King; it is a Social
Brotherhood, but it acknowledges the
Fatherhood of God. Though not a Philosophy
the world turns to it for light; though not
Political it is the incubator of all great
laws. It is more human than the State, for it
deals with deeper needs; more Catholic than
the Church, for it includes whom the Church
rejects. It is a Propaganda, yet it works not
by agitation but by ideals. It is a Religion,
yet it holds the worship of God to be mainly
the service of man. Though not a Scientific
Society its watchword is Evolution; though
not an Ethic it possesses the Sermon on the
Mount. This mysterious Society owns no wealth
but distributes fortunes. It has no minutes
for history keeps them; no member's roll for
no one could make it. Its entry-money is
nothing; its subscription, all you have The
Society never meets and it never adjourns.
Its law is one word-- loyalty; its Gospel one
message -- love. Verily "Whosoever will lose
his life for My sake shall find it." 

The Programme for the other life is not out
yet. For this world, for these faculties, for
his one short life, I know nothing that is
offered to man to compare with membership in
the Kingdom of God. Among the mysteries which
compass the world beyond, none is greater
than how there can be in store for man a work
more wonderful, a life more God-likethan
this. If you know anything better, live for
it; if not, in the name of God and of
Humanity, carry out Christ's plan 

   THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH 

I, John, 

Saw the Holy City, 

New Jerusalem, 

Coming down from God out of Heaven. 

 

  

  

 

And I saw no Temple therein.  

  

  

 

And His servants shall serve Him; 

And they shall see His Face; 

And His Name shall be written on their
foreheads. 

   I SAW THE CITY 

TWO very startling things arrest us in John's
vision of the future. The first is that the
likest thing to Heaven he could think of was
a City; the second, that there was no Church
in that City. 

Almost nothing more revolutionary could be
said, even to the modern world, in the name
of religion. No Church--that is the defiance
of religion; a City--that is the antipodes of
Heaven. Yet John combines these
contradictions in one daring image, and holds
up to the world the picture of a City without
a Church as his ideal of the heavenly life. 

By far the most original thing here is the
simple conception of Heaven as a City. The
idea of religion without a Church-- "I saw no
Temple therein"--is anomalous enough; but the
association of the blessed life with a
City--the one place in the world from which
Heaven seems most far away-- is something
wholly new in religious thought. No other
religion which has a Heaven ever had a Heaven
like this. The Greek, if he looked forward at
all, awaited the Elysian Fields; the Eastern
sought Nirvana. All other Heavens have been
Gardens, Dreamlands--passivities more or less
aimless. Even to the majority among ourselves
Heaven is a siesta and not a City. It
remained for John to go straight to the other
extreme and select the citadel of the world's
fever, the ganglion of its unrest, the heart
and focus of its most strenuous toil, as the
framework for his ideal of the blessed life. 

The Heaven of Christianity is different from
all other Heavens, because the religion of
Christianity is different from all other
religions Christianity is the religion of
Cities. It moves among real things. Its
sphere is the street, the market-place, the
working-life of the world. 

And what interests one for the present in
John's vision is not so much what it reveals
of a Heaven beyond, but what it suggests of
the nature of the heavenly life in this
present world. Find out wat a man's Heaven
is-- no matter whether it be a dream or a
reality, no matter whether it refer to an
actual Heaven or to a Kingdom of God to be
realized on earth--and you pass by an easy
discovery to what his religion is; And herein
lies one value at least of this allegory. It
is a touchstone for Christianity, a test for
the solidity or the insipidity of one's
religion, for the wholesomeness or the
fatuousness of one's faith, for the
usefulness or the futility of one's life. For
this vision of the City marks off in lines
which no eye can mistake the true area which
the religion of Christ is meant to inhabit,
and announces for all time the real nature of
the saintly life. 

City life is human life at its intensest, man
in his most real relations. And the nearer
one draws to reality, the nearer one draws to
the working sphere of religion. Wherever real
life is, there Christ goes. And He goes
there, not only because the great need lies
there, but because there is found, so to
speak, the raw material with which
Christianity works--the life of man. To do
something with this, to infuse something into
this, to save and inspire and sanctify this,
the actual working life of the world, is what
He came for. Without human life to act upon,
without the relations of men with one
another, of master with servant, husband with
wife, buyer with seller, creditor with
debtor, there is no such thing as
Christianity. With actual things, with
Humanity in its everyday dress, with the
traffic of the streets, with gates and
houses, with work and wages, with sin and
poverty, with these things, and all the
things and all the relations and all the
people of the City, Christianity has to do
and hasmore to do than with anything else. To
conceive of the Christian religion as itself
a thing--a something which can exist apart
from life; to think of it as something added
on to being, something kept in a separate
compartment called the soul, as an extra
accomplishment like music, or a special
talent like art, is totally to misapprehend
its nature. It is that which fills all
compartments. It is that which makes the
whole life music and every separate action a
work of art. Take away action and it is not.
Take away people, houses, streets, character,
and it ceases to be. Without these there may
be sentiment, or rapture, or adoration, or
superstition; there may even bereligion, but
there can never be the religion of the Son of
Man. 

If Heaven were a siesta, religion might be
conceived of as a reverie. If the future life
were to be mainly spent in a Temple, the
present life might be mainly spent in Church.
But if Heaven be a City, the life of those
who are going there must be a real life. The
man who would enter John's Heaven, no matter
what piety or what faith he may profess, must
be a real man. Christ's gift to men was life,
a rich and abundant life. And life is meant
for living. An abundant life does not show
itself in abundant dreaming, but in abundant
living--in abundant living among real and
tangible objects and to actual and practical
purposes. "His servants," John tells us,
"shall serve." In this vision of the City he
confronts us with a new definition of a
Christian man-- the perfect saint is the
perfect citizen. 

To make Cities--that is what we are here for.
To make good Cities--that is for the present
hour the main work of Christianity. For the
City is strategic. It makes the towns: the
towns make the villages; the villages make
the country. He who makes the City makes the
world. After all, though men make Cities, it
is Cities which make men. Whether our
national life is great or mean, whether our
social virtues are mature or stunted, whether
our sons are moral or vicious, whether
religion is posible or impossible, depends
upon the City. When Christianity shall take
upon itself in full responsibility the burden
and care of Cities the Kingdom of God will
openly come on earth. What Christianity waits
for also, as its final apologetic and
justification to the world, is the founding
of a City which shall be in visible reality a
City of God. People do not dispute that
religion is in the Church. What is now wanted
is to let them see it in the City. One
Christian City, one City in any part of the
earth, whose citizens from the greatest to
the humblest lived in the spirit of Christ,
where religion had overflowed the Churches
and passed into the streets, inundating every
house and workshop, and permeating the whole
social and commercial life--one such
Christian City would seal the redemption of
the world. 

Some such City, surely, was what John saw in
his dream. Whatever reference we may find
there to a world to come, is it not equally
lawful to seek the scene upon this present
world? John saw his City descending out of
Heaven. It was, moreover, no strange
apparition, but a City which he knew. It was
Jerusalem, a new Jerusalem. The significance
of that name has been altered for most of us
by religious poetry; we spell it with a
capital and speak of the New Jerusalem as a
synonym for Heaven. Yet why not take it
simply as it stands, as a new Jerusalem? Try
to restore the natural force of the
expression--suppose John to have lived to-day
and to have said London? "I saw a new
London?" Jerusalem was John's London. All the
grave and sad suggestion that the word London
brings up to-day to the modern reformer, the
word Jerusalem recalled to him. What in his
deepest hours he loned and prayed for was a
new Jerusalem, a reformed Jerusalem. And just
as it is given to the man in modern England
who is a prophet, to the man who believes in
God and in the moral order of the world, to
discern a new London shaping itself through
all the sin and chaos of the City, so was it
given to John to see a new Jerusalem rise
from the runs of the old. 

We have no concern--it were contrary to
critical method--to press the allegory in
detail. What we take from it, looked at in
this light, is the broad conception of a
transformed City, the great Christian thought
that the very Cities where we live, with all
their suffering and sin, shall one day, by
the gradual action of the forces of
Christianity, be turned into Heavens on
earth. This is a spectacle which profoundly
concerns the world. To the reformer, the
philanthropist, the economist, the
politician, this Vision of the City is the
great classic of social literature. What John
saw, we may fairly take it, was the future of
all Cities. It was the dawn of a new social
order, a regenerate humanity, a purified
society, an actual transformation of the
Cities of the world into Cities of God. 

This City, then, which John saw is none other
than your City, the place where you live--as
it might be, and as you are to help to make
it. It is London, Berlin, New York, Paris,
Melbourne, Calcutta--these as they might be,
and in some infinitesimal degree as they have
already begun to be. In each of these, and in
every City throughout the world to-day, there
is a City descending out of Heaven from God.
Each one of us is daily building up this City
or helping to keep it back. Its walls rise
slowly, but, as we believe in God, the
building can never cease. For the might of
those who build, be they few or many, is so
surely greater than the might of those who
retard, that no day's sun sets over any City
in the land that does not see some stone of
the invisible City laid. To believe this is
faith. To live for this is Christianity. 

The project is delirious? Yes--to atheism. To
John it was the most obvious thing in the
world. Nay, knowing all he knew, its
realization was inevitable. We forget, when
the thing strikes us as strange, that John
knew Christ. Christ was the Light of the
World--the Light of the World. This is all
that he meant by his Vision, that Christ is
the Light of the World. This Light, John sw,
would fall everywhere--especially upon
Cities. It was irresistible and
inextinguishable. No darkness could stand
before it. One by one the Cities of the world
would give up their night. Room by room,
house by house, street by street, they would
be changed. Whatsoever worketh abomination or
maketh a lie would disappear. Sin, pain,
sorrow, would silently pass away. One day the
walls of the City would be jasper; the very
streets would be paved with gold. Then the
kings of the earth would bring their glory
and honour into it. In the midst of the
streets there should be a tree of Life. And
its leaves would go forth for the healing of
the nations. 

Survey the Cities of the world today, survey
your own City--town, village, home --and
prophesy. God's kingdomis surely to come in
this world. God's will is surely to be done
on earth as it is done in Heaven. Is not this
one practicable way of realizing it? When a
prophet speaks of something that is to be,
that coming event is usually brought about by
no unrelated cause or sudden shock, but in
the ordered course of the world's drama. With
Christianity as the supreme actor in the
world's drama, the future of its Cities is
even now quite clear. Project the lines of
Christian and social progress to their still
far off goal, and see even now that Heaven
must come to earth. 

   HIS SERVANTS SHALL SERVE 

IF any one wishes to know what he can do to
help on the work of God in the world let him
make a City, or a street, or a house of a
City. Men complain of the indefiniteness of
religion. There are thousands ready in their
humble measure to offer some personal service
for the good of men, but they do not know
where to begin. Let me tell you where to
begin--where Christ told His disciples to
begin, at the nearest City. I promise you
that before one week's work is over you will
never again be haunted by the problem of the
indefiniteness of Christianity. You will see
so much to do, so many actual things to be
set right, so many merely material conditins
to alter, so much striving with employers of
labour, and City councils, and trade
agitators, and Boards, and Vestries, and
Committees; so much pure unrelieved
uninspiring hard work, that you will begin to
wonder whether in all this naked realism you
are on holy ground at all. Do not be afraid
of missing Heaven in seeking a better earth.
The distinction between secular and sacred is
a confusion and not a contrast; and it is
only because the secular is so intensely
sacred that so many eyes are blind before it.
The really secular thing in life is the
spirit which despises under that name what is
but part of the everywhere present work and
will of God. Be sure that, down to the last
and pettiest detail, all that concerns a
better world is the direct concern of Christ. 

I make this, then, in all seriousness as a
definite practical proposal. You wish, you
say, to be a religious man. Well, be one.
There is your City; begin. But what are you
to believe? Believe in your City. What else?
In Jesus Christ. What about Him? That He
wants to make your City better; that that is
what He would be doing if He lived there.
What else? Believe in yourself--that you,
even you, can do some of the work which He
would like done, and that unless you do it,
it will remain undone. How are you to begin?
As Christ did. First He looked at the City;
then He wept over it; then He died for it. 

Where are you to begin? Begin where you are.
Make that one corner, room, house,office as
like Heaven as you can. Begin? Begin with the
paper on the walls, make that beautiful; with
the air, keep it fresh; with the very drains,
make them sweet; with the furniture, see that
it be honest. Abolish whatsoever worketh
abomination--in food, in drink, in luxury, in
books, in art; whatsoever maketh a lie--in
conversation, in social intercourse, in
correspondence, in domestic life. This done,
you have arranged for a Heaven, but you have
not got it. Heaven lies within, in kindness,
in humbleness, in unselfishness, in faith, in
love, in service. To get thee in, get Christ
in. Teach all in the house about Christ--what
He did, and what He said, and how He lived,
and how He died, and how He dwells in them,
and how He makes all one. Teach it not as a
doctrine, but as a discovery, as your own
discovery. Live your own discovery. 

Then pass out into the City. Do all to it
that you have done at home. Beautify it,
ventilate it, drain it. Let nothing enter it
that can defile the streets, the stage, the
newspaper offices, the booksellers' counters;
nothing that maketh a lie in its warehouses,
its manufactures, its shops, its art
galleries, its advertisements. Educate it,
amuse it, church it. Christianize capital;
dignify labour. Join Councils and Committees.
Provide for the poor, the sick, and the
widow. So will you serve the City. 

If you ask me which of all these things is
the most important, I reply that among them
there is only one thing of superlative
importance and that is yourself. By far the
greatest thing a man can do for his City is
to be a good man. Simply to live there as a
good man, as a Christian man of action and
practical citizen, is the first and highest
contribution any one can make to its
salvation. Let a City be a Sodom or a
Gomorrah, and if there be but ten righteous
men in it, it will be saved. 

It is here that the older, the more
individual, conception of Christianity, did
such mighty work for the world--it produced
good men. It is goodness that tells, goodness
first and goodness last. Good men even with
small views are immeasurably more important
to the world than small men with great views.
But given good men, such men as were produced
even by the self-centred theology of an older
generation, and add that wider outlook and
social ideal which are coming to be the
characteristics of the religion of this age,
and Christianity has an equipment for the
reconstruction of the world, before which
nothing can stand. Such good men will not
merely content themselves with being good
men. They will be forces--according to their
measure, public forces They will take the
city in hand, some a house, some a street,
and some the whole. Of set purpose they will
serve. Not ostentatiously, but silently, in
ways varied as human nature, and many as
life's opportunities, they will minister to
its good. 

To help the people, also, to be good people
good fathers, and mothers, and sons, and
citizens--is worth all lse rolled into one.
Arrange the government of the City as you
may, perfect all its philanthropic machinery,
make righteous its relations great and small,
equip it with galleries and parks, and
libraries and music, and carry out the whole
programme of social reform, and the one thing
needful is still without the gates. The
gospel of material blessedness is part of a
gospel--a great and Christian part-- but when
held up as the whole gospel for the people it
is as hollow as the void of life whose
circumference even it fails to touch. 

There are countries in the world--new
countries--where the people, rising to the
rights of government, have already secured
almost all that reformers cry for. The lot of
the working man there is all but perfect. His
wages are high, his leisure great, his home
worthy. Yet in tens of thousands of cases the
secret of life is unknown. It is idle to talk
of Christ as a social reformer if by that is
meant that His first concern was to improve
the organization of society, or provide the
world with better laws. These were among His
objects, but His first was to provide the
world with better men. The one need of every
cause and every community still is for better
men. If every workshop held a Workman like
Him who worked in the carpenter's shop at
Nazareth, the labour problem and all other
workman's problems would soon be solved. If
every street had a home or two like Mary's
home in Bethany, the domestic life of the
city would be transformed in three
generations. 

External reforms-- education, civilization,
public schemes, and public charities--have
each their part to play. Any experiment that
can benefit by one hairbreadth an single
human life is a thousand times worth trying.
There is no effort in any single one of these
directions but must, as Christianity
advances, be pressed by Christian men to ever
further and fuller issues. But those whose
hands have tried the ways, and the slow work
of leavening men one by one with the spirit
of Jesus Christ. 

The thought that the future, that any day,
may see some new and mighty enterprise of
redemption, some new departure in religion,
which shall change everything with a breath
and make all that is crooked straight, is not
at all likely to be realized. There is
nothing wrong with the lines on which
redemption runs at present except the want of
faith to believe in them, and the want of men
to use them. The Kingdom of God is like
leaven, and the leaven is with us now. The
quantity at work in the world may increase
but that is all. For nothing can ever be
higher than the Spirit of Christ or more
potent as a regenerating power on the lives
of men. 

Do not charge me with throwing away my brief
because I return to this old, old plea for
the individual soul. I do not forget that my
plea is for the City. But I plead for good
men, because good men are good leaven. If
their goodness stop short of that, if the
leave does not mix with that which is
unleavened, if it does not do the work of
leaven--that is, to raise something-- it is
not the leaven of Christ. The question or
good men to ask themselves is: Is my goodness
helping others? Is it a private luxury, or is
it telling upon the City? Is it bringing any
single human soul nearer happiness or
righteousness? 

If you ask what particular scheme you shall
take up, I cannot answer. Christianity has no
set schemes. It makes no choice between
conflicting philanthropies, decides nothing
between competing churches, favours no
particular public policy, organizes no one
line of private charity. It is not essential
even for all of us to take any public or
formal line. Christianity is not all carried
on by Committees, and the Kingdom of God has
othe ways of coming than through municipal
reforms. Most of the stones for the building
of the City of God, and all the best of them,
are made by mothers. But whether or no you
shall work through public channels, or only
serve Christ along the quieter paths of home,
no man can determine but yourself. 

There is an almost awful freedom about
Christ's religion. "I do not call you
servants." He said, "for the servant knoweth
not what his lord doeth. I have called you
friends." As Christ's friends, His followers
are supposed to know what He wants done, and
for the same reason they will try to do
it--this is the whole working basis of
Christianity. Surely next to its love for the
chief of sinners the most touching thing
about the religion of Christ is its amazing
trust in the least of saints. Here is the
mightiest enterprise ever launched upon this
earth, mightier even than its creation, for
it is its re-creation, and the carrying of it
out is left, so to speak, to haphazard--to
individual loyalty, to free enthusiasms, to
uncoerced activities, to an uncompelled
response to the pressures of God's Spirit.
Christ sets His followers no tasks. He
appoints no hours. He allots no sphere. He
Himself simply went about and did good. He
did not stop life to do some special thing
which should be called religious. His life
was His religion. Each day as it came brought
round in the ordinary course its natural
ministry. Each village along the highway had
someone waiting to be helped. His pulpit was
the hillside, His congregation a woman at a
well. The poor, wherever He met them, were
His clients; the sick, as often as He found
them, His opportunity. His work was
everywhere; His workshop was the world. One's
associations of Christ are all of the
wayside. We never think of Him in connection
with a Church We cannot picture Him in the
garb of a priest or belonging to any of the
classes who specialize religion. His service
was of a universal human order. He was the
Son of Man, the Citizen. 

This, remember, was the highest life ever
lved, this informal citizen-life. So simple a
thing it was, so natural, so human that those
who saw it first did not know it was
religion, and Christ did not pass among them
as a very religious man. Nay, it is certain,
and it is an infinitely significant thought,
that the religious people of His time not
only refused to accept this type of religion
as any kind of religion at all, but
repudiated and denounced Him as its bitter
enemy. 

Inability to discern what true religion is,
is not confined to the Pharisees. Multitudes
still who profess to belong to the religion
of Christ, scarcely know it when they see it.
The truth is, men will hold to almost
anything in the name of Christianity, believe
anything, do anything--except its common and
obvious tasks. Great is the mystery of what
has passed in this world for religion. 

I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE "I SAW no Church
there," said John. Nor is there any note of
surprise as he marks the omission of what one
half of Christendom would have considered the
first essential. For beside the type of
religion he had learned from Christ, the
Church type --the merely Church type--is an
elaborate evasion. What have the pomp and
circumstance, the fashion and the form, the
vestures and the postures, to do with Jesus
of Nazareth? At a stage in personal
development. and for a certain type of mind,
such things may have a place. But when
mistaken for Christianity, no matter how they
aid it, or in what measure they conserve it,
they defraud the souls of men, and rob
humanity of its dues. It is because to large
masses of people Christianity has become
synonymous with a Temple service that other
large masses of people decline to touch it.
It is a mistake to suppose that the working
classes of this country are opposed to
Christianity. No man can ever be opposed to
Christianity who knows what it really is. The
working men would still follow Christ if He
came among them. As a matter of fact they do
follow anyone, preacher or layman, in pulpit
or on platform, wh is the least like Him. But
what they cannot follow, and must evermore
live outside of, is a worship which ends with
the worshipper, a religion expressed only in
ceremony, and a faith unrelated to life. 

Perhaps the most dismal fact of history is
the failure of the great organized bodies of
ecclesiasticism to understand the simple
genius of Christ's religion. Whatever the
best in the Churches of all time may have
thought of the life and religion of Christ,
taken as a whole they have succeeded in
leaving upon the mind of a large portion of
the world an impression of Christianity which
is the direct opposite of the reality. Down
to the present hour almost whole nations in
Europe live, worship, and die under the
belief that Christ is an ecclesiastical
Christ, religion the sum of all the Churches'
observances, and faith an adhesion to the
Churches' creeds. I do not apportion blame;I
simply record the fact. Everything that the
spiritual and temporal authority of man could
do has been done-- done in ignorance of the
true nature of Christianity--to dislodge the
religion of Christ from its natural home in
the heart of Humanity. In many lands the
Churches have literally stolen Christ from
the people; they have made the Son of Man the
Priest of an Order; they have taken
Christianity from the City and imprisoned it
behind altar rails; they have withdrawn it
from the national life and doled it out to
the few who pay to keep the unconscious
deception up. 

Do not do the Church, the true Church at
least, the injustice to think that she does
not know all this. Nowhere, not even in the
fiercest secular press, is there more
exposure of this danger, more indignation at
its continuance, than in many of the Churches
of to-day. The protest against the confusion
of Christianity with the Church is the most
threadbare of pulpit themes. Before the
University of Oxford, from the pulpit of St.
Mary's, these words were lately spoken: "If
it is strange that the Church of the darker
ages should have needed so bitter a lesson
(the actal demolition of their churches), is
it not ten times stranger still that the
Church of the days of greater enlightenment
should be found again making the chief part
of its business the organizing of the modes
of worship; that the largest efforts which
are owned as the efforts of the Church are
made for the establishment and maintenance of
worship; that our chief controversies relate
to the teaching and the ministry of a system
designed primarily, if not exclusively, for
worship; that even the fancies and the
refinements of such a system divide us; that
the breach between things secular and things
religious grows wider instead of their being
made to blend into one; and that the vast and
fruitful spaces of the actual life of mankind
lie still so largely without the gates? The
old Jerusalem was all temple. The mediaeval
Church was all temple. But the ideal of the
new Jerusalem was--no temple, but a
God-inhabited society. Are we not reversing
this ideal in an age when the church still
means in so many mouths the clergy, instead
of meaning the Christian society, and when
nine men are striving to get men to go to
church for one who is striving to make men
realize that they themselves are the Church?" 

Yet even with words so strong as these
echoing daily from Protestant pulpits the
superstition reigns in all but unbroken
power. And everywhere still men are found
confounding the spectacular services of a
Church, the vicarious religion of a priest,
and the traditional belief in a creed, with
the living religion of the Son of Man. 

"I saw no Temple there"--the future City will
be a City without a Church. Ponder that fact,
realize the temporariness of the Church,
then--go and build one. Do not imagine,
because all this has been said, that I mean
to depreciate the Church. On the contrary, if
it were mine to build a City, a City where
all life should be religious, and all men
destined to become embers of the Body of
Christ, the first stone I should lay there
would be the foundation-stone of a Church
Why? Because, aong other reasons, the product
which the Church on the whole best helps to
develop, and in the largest quantity, is that
which is most needed by the City. 

For the present, and for a long time to come,
the manufactory of good men, the nursery of
the forces which are to redeem the City, will
in the main be found to be some more or less
formal, more or less imperfect, Christian
Church. Here and there an unchurched soul may
stir the multitudes to lofty deeds; isolated
men; strong enough to preserve their souls
apart from the Church, but shortsighted
enough perhaps to fail to see that others
cannot, may set high examples and stimulate
to national reforms. But for the rank and
file of us, made of such stuff as we are made
of, the steady pressures of fixed
institutions, the regular diets of a common
worship, and the education of public
Christian teaching are too obvious safeguards
of spiritual culture to be set aside. Even
Renan declares his conviction that "Beyond
the family and outside the State, man has
need of the Church . . . Civil society,
whether it calls itself a commune, a canton,
or a province, a state, or fatherland, has
many duties towards the improvement of the
individual; but what it does is necessarily
limited. The family ought to do much more,
but often it is insufficient; sometimes it is
wanting altogether. The association created
in the name of moral principle can alone give
to every man coming into this world a bond
which unites him with the past, duties as to
the future, examples to follow, a heritage to
receive and to transmit, and a tradition of
devotion to continue." Apart altogether from
the quality of its contribution to society,
in the mere quantity of the work it turns out
it stands alone. Even for social purposes the
Church is by far the greatest Employment
Bureau in the world. And the man who, seeing
where it falls short, withholds on that
account his witness to its usefulness, is a
traitor to history and to fact. 

"The Church," as the preacher whom I have
already quoted, most trul adds, "is a society
which tends to embrace the whole life of
mankind, to bind all their relations together
by a Divine sanction. As such, it blends
naturally with the institutions of common
life--those institutions which, because they
are natural and necessary, are therefore
Divine. What it aims at is not the
recognition by the nation of a worshipping
body, governed by the ministers of public
worship, which calls itself the Church, but
that the nation and all classes in it should
act upon Christian principle, that laws
should be made in Christ's spirit of justice,
that the relations of the powers of the state
should be maintained on a basis of Christian
equity, that all public acts should be done
in Christ's spirit, and with mutual
forbearance, that the spirit of Christian
charity should be spread through all rank and
orders of the people. The Church will
maintain public worship as one of the
greatest supports of a Christian public life;
but it will always remember that the true
service is a life of devotion to God and man
far more than the common utterance of
prayer." I have said that were it mine to
build a City, the first stone I should lay
there would be the foundation-stone of a
Church. But if it were mine to preach the
first sermon in that Church, I should choose
as the text, "I saw no Church therein." I
should tell the people that the great use of
the Church is to help men to do without it As
the old ecclesiastical term has it, Church
services are "diets" of worship. They are
meals. All who are hungry will take them,
and, if they are wise, regularly. But no
workman is paid for his meals. He is paid for
the work he does in the strength of them. No
Christian is paid for going to Church. He
goes there for a meal, for strength from God
and from his fellow-worshippers to do the
work of life --which is the work of Christ.
The Church is a Divine institution because it
is so very human an institution. As a channel
of nourishment, as a stimulus to holy deeds,
as a link with all holy lives, let all men
use it, an to the utmost of their
opportunity. But by all that they know of
Christ or care for man, let them beware of
mistaking its services for Christianity. What
Church services really express is the want of
Christianity. And when that which is perfect
in Christianity is come, all this, as the
mere passing stay and scaffolding of
struggling souls, must vanish away. 

If the masses who never go to Church only
knew that the Churches were the mute
expression of a Christian's wants and not the
self-advertisement of his sanctity, they
would have more respectful words for
Churches. But they have never learned this.
And the result in their case of confounding
religion with the Church is even more serious
than in the case of the professing Christian.
When they break with the Church it means to
them a break with all religion. As things are
it could scarce be otherwise. With the Church
in ceaseless evidence before their eyes as
the acknowledged custodian of Christianity;
with actual stone and lime in every street
representing the place where religion dwells;
with a professional class moving out and in
among them, holding in their hands the souls
of men, and almost the keys of Heaven--how is
it possible that those who turn their backs
on all this should not feel outcast from the
Church's God? It is not possible. Without a
murmur, yet with results to themselves most
disastrous and pathetic, multitudes accept
this false dividing-line and number
themselves as excommunicate from all good.
The masses will never return to the Church
till its true relation to the City is more
defined. And they can never have that most
real life of theirs made religious so long as
they rule themselves out of court on the
ground that they have broken with
ecclesiastical forms. The life of the masses
is the most real of all lives. It is full of
religious possibilities. Every movement of it
and every moment of it might become of
supreme religious value, might hold a
continuous spiritual discipline, might
perpetate, and that in most natural ways, a
moralinfluence which should pervade all
Cities and all States. But they must first be
taught what Christianity really is, and learn
to distinguish between religion and the
Church. After that, if they be taught their
lesson well, they will return to honour both. 

Our fathers made much of "meetness" for
Heaven. By prayer and fasting, by
self-examination and meditation they sought
to fit themselves "for the inheritance of the
saints in light." Important beyond measure in
their fitting place are these exercises of
the soul. But whether alone they fit men for
the inheritance of the saints depends on what
a saint is. If a saint is a devotee and not a
citizen, if Heaven is a cathedral and not a
City, then these things do fit for Heaven.
But if life means action, and Heaven service;
if spiritual graces are acquired for use and
not for ornament, then devotional forms have
a deeper function. The Puritan preachers were
wont to tell their people to "practise
dying." Yes; but what is dying? It is going
to a City. And what is required of those who
would go to a City? The practice of
Citizenship--the due employment of the
unselfish talents, the development of public
spirit, the payment of the full tax to the
great brotherhood, the subordination of
personal aims to the common good. And where
are these to be learned? Here; in Cities
here. There is no other way to learn them.
There is no Heaven to those who have not
learned them. 

No Church however holy, no priest however
earnest, no book however sacred, can transfer
to any human character the capacities of
Citizenship--those capacities which in the
very nature of things are necessities to
those who would live in the kingdom of God.
The only preparation which multitudes seem to
make for Heaven is for its Judgment Bar. What
will they do in its streets? What have they
learned of Citizenship? What have they
practised of love? How like are they to its
Lord? To "practise dying" is to practise
living. Earth is the rehearsal for Heaven.
The eternal beyond is the eternal here. The
stret-life, the home-life, the business-life,
the City-life in all the varied range of its
activity, are an apprenticeship for the City
of God. There is no other apprenticeship for
it. To know how to serve Christ in these is
to "practise dying." 

To move among the people on the common
street; to meet them in the market-place on
equal terms; to live among them not as saint
or monk, but as brother-man with brother-man;
to serve God not with form or ritual, but in
the free impulse of a soul; to bear the
burdens of society and relieve its needs; to
carry on the multitudinous activities of the
City--social, commercial, political,
philanthropic--in Christ's spirit and for His
ends: this is the religion of the Son of Man,
and the only meetness for Heaven which has
much reality in it. 

No; the Church with all its splendid
equipment, the cloister with all its holy
opportunity, are not the final instruments
for fitting men for Heaven. The City, in many
of its functions, is a greater Church than
the Church.It is amid the whirr of its
machinery and in the discipline of its life
that the souls of men are really made. How
great its opportunity is we are few of us
aware. It is such slow work getting better,
the daily round is so very common, our ideas
of a heavenly life are so unreal and mystical
that even when the highest Heaven lies all
around us, when we might touch it, and dwell
in it every day we live, we almost fail to
see that it is there. The Heaven of our
childhood, the spectacular Heaven, the Heaven
which is a place, so dominates thought even
in our maturer years, that we are slow to
learn the fuller truth that Heaven is a
state. But John, who is responsible before
all other teachers for the dramatic view of
Heaven, has not failed in this very allegory
to proclaim the further lesson. Having
brought all his scenery upon the stage and
pictured a material Heaven of almost
unimaginable splendour, the seer turns aside
before he closes for a revelation of a
profounder kind. Within the Heavenly City he