XI.
THE MAKING OF A PROPHET.[2]

"In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train overspreading the temple floor. Seraphs were poised above, each with six wings, with twain veiling his face, with twain veiling his feet, and with twain hovering. And those on one side sang in responsive chorus with those on the other side, saying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.' 'The fulness of the whole earth is His glory.' And the foundations of the threshold trembled at the sound of that singing, and the house was filled with incense smoke. Then cried I, 'Woe is me! for I am a dead man; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.' Then flew one of the seraphs unto me, having in his hand a burning ember, which with a tongs he had taken from off the incense altar; and he touched my mouth with it, and said, 'Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.' Thereupon I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' Then I cried, 'See me; send me.'"—Isaiah vi. 1-8 (annotated).

ISAIAH was a prophet. A prophet, we say, was a man who foretold future events. It is not an apt description. He did that, and much more besides. He interpreted past, present, and future alike in the light of eternal truth. But his supreme concern was with the present, and he cared for the past and the future only as they threw light on the problems of instant, pressing duty. The prophet was no dealer in futurities, no dreamer babbling to an age unborn. He was a potent actor in history, living and working amid the actual sins, and sorrows, and struggles of his day and generation.

Read the memoirs of Isaiah, and you will see how intense and intimate was the part he played in the life and movement of his age. One day you will find him at the Temple, scathing with scornful reprobation the hypocrisy and hollowness of the established ritual of religion. Another time he has taken his stand over against the fashionable promenade of Jerusalem, and as he watches the passing procession of pomp and opulence, built up on the misery and degradation of defenceless poverty, his heart grows hot with honest indignation, and he breaks into impassioned invective against the stream of selfish luxury, as it rolls by with a smiling face and a cruel heart. Again, he forces his way into a meeting of the Privy Council, fearlessly confronts the King and his advisers, denounces the iniquity of a faithless foreign policy and sternly demands its abandonment. In every department of national life, in every section of social and religious existence, his voice was heard and his personality felt. Yet nobody ever mistook him for a mere politician, philanthropist, or reformer. He was ever, and was ever felt to be, a prophet. For he did not speak like other men, he did not act like other men, he did not reason like other men. He spoke not for himself, but for God. He claimed for his speech, not the persuasiveness of human probability, but the imperativeness of Divine certainty. He relied solely on the coercive power of truth. He did not touch the tools of political partisanship or scheming statecraft. He cared nothing for the suggestions of expediency; he defied the most certain conclusions of earthly wisdom, and followed absolutely the bidding of an unseen guidance. He was a man taken possession of by an irresistible perception of the will of God, and an all-absorbing passion to have that will done on earth. He held in the commonwealth the place that is held by that inexorable voice which, deaf to all balancings of earthly gain or loss, unflinchingly proclaims the antithesis of right and wrong, and imperatively demands that right shall be obeyed. The prophet was the conscience of the nation. Preachers and teachers of religion, that is what England asks of us. It is a high calling.

The office of a prophet was not an easy one. The man had to hazard or sacrifice most of those things that men count dear—property, popularity, home. Every day he had to take his life in his hand, as he risked the rage of a royal tyrant, or faced the fury of insensate mobs. Still harder was it to stand alone in his faith and opinion, rejected by the multitude, by the wealth, by the wisdom of his day, mocked or pitied as a madman; hardest of all to see his efforts foiled, his country humiliated, his people depraved, to feel his heart sink within him, to struggle with dark misgivings, to doubt the reality of the Divine prompting, and despairingly to ask whether this world were indeed governed by a righteous Will, or were not rather the sport of blind caprice or the slave of iron fate! Ah! it was not easy to be a prophet. Before a man could become a prophet he needed to possess a knowledge of God of such absolute certainty as nothing could shake. Once at least in his life he must have come into actual contact with God.

The experience that made Isaiah a prophet took the form of a vision. It happened in a period of distressing perplexity and gloom. Wrestling passionately with the darkness, craving wistfully for light, the yearning to see God in the man's soul became so intense and sensitive that the great Heart in heaven answered the longing of the heart on earth, and aspiration leapt into realisation, and faith flashed into vision. On a throne, high and lifted up, crowning and dominating all things, fixed on immovable foundations, untouched by the changes of time, unshaken by the shocks of history, Isaiah beheld, seated in sovereign supremacy, a Form of ineffable splendour, the power and presence of the Eternal in awful actuality, beyond all doubt or question the Lord of the universe and the Arbiter of destiny. Henceforth he could never doubt the being and the might of God. That is a great experience, but it leaves the heart unsatisfied. We want to know the nature, the character of this God, who holds our fortunes in His awful hands. Is He good, and just, and gentle, or hard, and cold, and cruel? The answer came to Isaiah in the seraphs' song of adoration, with its ascription of perfect triune holiness. It told him that in God is light, and no darkness at all. Through and through, utterly and absolutely, in every chord and fibre of His being, there is no baseness, no harshness, no injustice; there is nothing but stainless purity and splendour, nothing but radiant justice, goodness, and truth. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts." Still, one wistful doubt, one anxious question, lingers in the human heart. For what were our poor world the better of this holy God if He be content to sit aloof in the light and glory of heaven, leaving the web of human story to be woven by the blundering fingers of sinning, erring men on earth? That fear, too, was laid for ever in Isaiah's soul by the comforting response of the seraphs' chorus. God does not sit apart in frigid isolation, but with His own hands He guides and controls our lost world's course. Into its strange, sad, perplexing progress He is pouring the goodness, truth, and love of His holy heart; and so when the record is finished and fulfilled, every page and syllable shall shine with that hidden holiness come to manifested light and splendour. "The fulness of the whole earth is His glory!" That sight of God—the living, holy, loving God—made Isaiah a prophet. Preachers and teachers of to-day, if we are to be prophets, we need just such a sight of God.

The vision of God made Isaiah a prophet; but the immediate effect was something very different. The first effect of contact with God was to produce in his soul an intolerable sense of sin. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." Was, then, Isaiah an exceptionally wicked man? Hardly, when God chose him as His ambassador. But if not, is, then, the proper effect on a good man of an access of nearness to God an overwhelming consciousness of personal defilement? What else should it be? Had Isaiah been a Pharisee, he would have seized the opportunity of his sudden vicinity to the Almighty to direct the Divine attention to his virtues, and excellence, and superiority over other men. Had he been one of those philosophers in whom the heart has been overlaid by the intellect, he would have calmly proceeded to make observations on the Divine for a new theory of the Absolute and Unconditioned, in sublime insensibility to the deepest problem of existence, the awful antithesis of human sin and of Divine holiness. Because Isaiah was a good man, his new proximity to God woke within him a crushing horror of defilement and undoneness. And it was so precisely because he had never been so near to God before, and had never felt himself of so much importance. Away down here, sinning among his fellow-men, the blots and blemishes of his soul seemed of little moment. But up there, in the stainless light of heaven, with God's holy eyes resting on him, every spot of sin within him grew hot and horrible, every defiling stain an insult and a suffering inflicted on the sensitive holiness of God. What he does has an effect on God; what he is, is of consequence to God. Never had Isaiah felt himself so near to God; never had he felt himself of such importance to his Maker; and therefore never had he felt his sin so black and so unpardonable. Believe me, these two things are linked together, and no man can divorce them—the dignity of humanity and the damnableness of sin. You cannot tamper with the one without touching the other. Men may, of laxity or of pitifulness, seek to extenuate the guilt of sin and its infinite possibilities of woes; but be sure of this, they will be compelled ere long to attenuate the moral grandeur of our human nature, and to surrender its majestic birthright of immortality. Two things go hand in hand through the Bible, from the first chapter to the last, and mark it out from all other books: the one is its unique and awful sense of the guiltiness of sin; the other is the quite unapproachable splendour of its conception of the dignity of man, made in the image of God, and destined for His service here, and the fellowship of His love for evermore.

The ethical process by which, in the imagery of the vision, Isaiah's sense of sinfulness came home to him, is finely natural and simple. It was at his lips that the consciousness of his impurity caught him. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips." That, judged by our formulas and standards, might seem a somewhat superficial conviction of sin. We should have expected him to speak of his unclean heart, or the total corruption of his whole nature. But conviction of sin, actual conviction of sin, is very regardless of our theories, and is as diverse in its manifestations as are the characters and records of men. Sin finds out one man in one place, and another in a quite different spot, and perhaps the experience is most real when it is least theological. Isaiah felt his defilement in his lips, for suddenly he found himself at heaven's gate, gazing on the glory of God, and listening to the seraphs' ceaseless song of adoring praise. Isaiah loved God, and instinctively he prepared to join his voice to the seraphs' chant, but ere the harmony could pass his lips he caught his breath and was dumb. A horrible sense of uncleanness had seized him. His breath was tainted by his sin. He dared not mingle his polluted praise with the worship of that pure, sinless host of heaven. Oh, the shame and agony of that disability! for it meant that he has no part or place in that fair scene. He is an alien and an intruder. Its beauty and its sweetness are not for him. He belongs to a very different scene and a very different company. He is no inhabitant of heaven, no servant of God; but a denizen of earth, and a companion of sinners. Down there, amid its squalor, and shame, and uncleanness, is his dwelling-place, remote from heaven, and holiness, and God. "Woe is me! because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." With that, the horror of his situation reached its climax. He stands there, on the threshold of heaven in full sight of God and of His holiness, dumb and praiseless, while all heaven rings and reverberates with the worship of its adoring hosts. The awful tremor of that celestial praise passed into Isaiah's frame, and it seemed like the pangs of instant dissolution. He, a creature of God's, stands there in his Maker's presence, alone mute, alone refusing to chant his Creator's glory, a blot and blank in the holy harmony of heaven, a horrible and foul blemish amid the unsullied purity of that celestial scene. It seemed to Isaiah as if all the light, and glory, and holiness of heaven were gathering itself into one fierce lightning fire of vengeance, to overwhelm and crush him out of existence. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."

Isaiah in the presence of God felt within him the pang of that death which must be the end of unpardoned sin in contact with the Divine holiness. He felt himself already as good as dead, yet never in all his life had he so longed to live as now, in sight of God, and heaven, and holiness. He did not ask to escape. He was too overwhelmed to pray or hope. But to God's heart that cry of despair was an infinitely persuasive prayer for mercy. Ah! Heaven needs no lengthy explanation, nor requires the recital of prescribed forms or theories. The moment a sinful soul turns loathingly from sin, and longingly to God and goodness, that instant the Heart above responds, and meets it with pity, pardon, hope. Ere the piteous echo of Isaiah's cry had died away, one of the seraphs flew with a burning ember from the incense altar, and laid it on Isaiah's mouth, and said, "Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged." The action is of course symbolic, but the thing symbolised is a great spiritual fact. In it we have mirrored the very heart of the process of redemption. The cleansing efficacy of the burning ember resided not in the ember, but in the Divine fire contained in it. In the imagery of sacrifice the fire is always conceived as God's method of accepting and taking to Himself the offering. The sacred flame that comes down from God, licks up the sacrifice, and in vapour carries it up to heaven; a sweet-smelling savour represents, therefore, the pitying holiness of God, that stoops forgivingly to sinful men, and graciously accepts and sanctifies them and their sacrifices. Contact with that has sin-cleansing power, and nothing has besides. Pagan sages and Christian saints alike unite in proclaiming the overmastering strength of sin. Mightier than nature's most potent forces, stronger than all influences of persuasion, not to be reversed or uprooted by any resources of earthly origin, is the grasp of inveterate sin within the sinner's soul. Is there, then, no possibility of recovery, no way of cleansing, no ray of hope? One there is, and one alone. If Divine Purity would but stoop in pity to the sinful one, would but enter, in claiming love, into his polluted soul, would but come into actual contact and conflict with the sin and uncleanness in a decisive struggle of triumph or defeat, then which must prove the stronger, which must conquer—human sinfulness or Divine holiness? Ay, if only God so loves our sin-stained race as that His stainless purity enters really into our humanity, and wrestles with our impurity in a contact that must be suffering to the Divine holiness, and is sin-cleansing to us, that were salvation surely, that were redemption. But is it a reality? Brethren, Jesus Christ has lived, and died, and lives again, and we know that His Holy Spirit dwells in us and in our world. That, and that alone, is salvation—not any theories, nor any rites, but God's Holy Spirit given unto us.

It was at Isaiah's lips that the sense of sin had stung him, and it was there that he received the cleansing. The seraph laid the hot ember on his lips, and it left about his mouth the fragrance of the celestial incense. He felt that he breathed the atmosphere and purity of heaven. He too might now join in heaven's praise and service; no more an alien, but a member of the celestial choir and a servant of the King. That act of Divine mercy had transformed him. He was a new creature, and instantly the change appeared. The voice of God sounds through the temple, saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And the first of all heaven's hosts to offer is Isaiah. A moment before he had shrunk back, crushed and despairing, from God's presence, feeling as if the Divine gaze were death to him. Now he springs forward, invokes God's attention on himself, and before all heaven's tried and trusty messengers proposes himself as God's ambassador. Was it presumption? was it self-assertion? I think if ever Isaiah was not thinking of himself at all, if ever he had utterly forgotten self, and pride, and all things, and was conscious only of God, and goodness, and gratitude, it was then, when his heart was running over with wonder, love, and praise for God's unspeakable mercy to him. It was not presumption; it was a true and beautiful instinct, that made him yearn with resistless longing to do something for that God who had shown such grace to him. Oh, the tender love and irrepressible devotion of a forgiven heart! Nothing can restrain it, nothing hold it back. Salvation, real salvation, springs resistlessly onward into service.

XII.
FOR AND AGAINST CHRIST.

"He that is not with Me is against Me: and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth."—Luke xi. 23.

"He that is not against us is on our part."—Mark ix. 40.

IT has never been an easy task to settle with any degree of exactitude who among men should be reckoned the Saviour's friends, and who His foes. But perhaps no time has surrounded the problem with such difficulties as those that arise from the circumstances of our own age. On every side we see truth and error intertwined in such a perplexing tangle that we scarce know on which side to rank men and parties. The Church of Christ is divided into so many divergent sections, within which good and evil are so strangely combined, that you can hardly tell if they are for Christ or against. You find men of unexceptionable profession and ample creed, but with a jarring life and scant morality. On the other hand, you see men whose creed is erroneous or imperfect, but whose life and character are instinct with the spirit of Christ. And amid such anomalies you feel it almost impossible to determine, with even an approach to certainty, whom you shall count followers, and whom foes, of the Lord Jesus Christ.

True, we are not called to sit in judgment on the inner state of heart, the hidden attitude of men's spirits, which is cognisable only by "larger, other eyes than ours;" yet we must for practical guidance form a conditional opinion regarding the position and action of our fellow-men; for so alone can we determine our treatment of them; so alone can we decide whether it is our duty to oppose or co-operate with them, to acknowledge them as brethren or deny to them the name of Christ.

Besides, for your own comfort, you must have some standard or test to determine who are Christ's and who are not, for otherwise how shall you be able to adjudicate on your own case? You are confronted, it may be, by large and influential bodies of Christians who declare you to be no member of Christ's Church at all, because you do not follow after them. You feel all the weight that attends such a verdict; you are sensible of the solemn, tragic awfulness of the question; you are humble, diffident, uncertain yourself of many things, and so, perchance, your heart knows little rest or peace. You would give much to ascertain some sure test by which you could settle, once and for ever, whether you are on Christ's side or against Him.

For our guidance in such matters we can do no better thing than to try and understand how the Saviour, when He was on earth, estimated the attitudes of men to Himself. Let us try, then, to determine the principles that guided Him.

He had come with a very definite aim in view, viz., to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth; that is to say, to secure the domination of men's hearts by God's will, so that they should always act in accordance with the Divine decrees. Or, in other words, He had come to perform this work of delivering men from sin, of making them pure, and holy, and Godlike. For this end, He sought to bring them under His immediate influence, to gather and attach them to His Person, to inspire them with faith and love for Himself. All who aided in this, all who contributed to draw men to Him, all who strove to make Christ and His word accepted and esteemed, all who were at one with Him in His aim, manifestly, were counted by Him as friends; while, on the contrary, those who exerted themselves to thwart Him, who endeavoured to alienate men from His Person and doctrine, all such were His enemies, were against Him.

"But," you may be inclined to say, "while it is true there were some men who did devote themselves to active support of Christ, and others who did commit themselves to declared hostility, was there not, between these two opposing classes, a large number who took sides neither for nor against Him, but preserved a sort of neutrality? What, then, does Christ say of these?" The two sayings of our Lord which I have taken for my text have both been applied to solve this problem. At first sight they have the appearance of clashing with one another. "He that is not with Me is against Me" seems to be a declaration that all who were not positive friends were really enemies, and thus to imply that the Master classed this whole body of neutrals as foes; and so some use it. But again, the second saying, "He that is not against us is on our part," has the appearance of asserting that all who are not declared foes are in reality the Saviour's friends, and so, according to this principle, all neutrals should be counted as allies. The appearance of discrepancy only lasts when you look at these sayings singly and apart from their occasions. They speak not of neutrals at all. Taken in conjunction, they are seen to enunciate, in fact, quite a different principle, viz., that in regard to Christ, indifferentism, neutrality, is impossible, and that every man must be either for or against the Saviour. "He that is not a friend is a foe," while "he that is not a foe is a friend;" consequently there is no such thing as a position of neither friendship nor enmity.

Let us, then, run cursorily over the incidents that gave rise to these two sayings, in order that we may see what is the essential character of the two attitudes of being for or against Christ, and so exhibit how neutrality is impossible.

One day a man possessed of a dumb devil was brought to Jesus. By His word of power Jesus cast out the evil spirit, and immediately the man regained the power of speech. The crowd looking on were filled with wonder and admiration. They were pleased at the good deed which had been done. They partook in the dumb man's joy and gratitude, and they regarded the Saviour with increased reverence and esteem. The influence of the miracle was to attach men to Himself, and draw them towards the kingdom of God. But among the spectators there were some who had no pleasure in the act of healing at all. They were not glad to see their fellow-man in new possession of speech and soundness of mind. On the contrary, they wished it had not been done, for they grudged the credit it brought to the Saviour. His popularity was gall to them. It pained them to see men revere or trust Him. They did not wish that men should be drawn to Him. Accordingly, they attempted to turn the people's admiration into distrust by flinging out a dark suggestion that it was by the aid, not of God, but of the evil one, that the Lord had been able to work the cure. The effect designed is manifest. Such a suspicion would have the effect of turning men away from Christ, of preventing them from submitting to His guidance. Their purpose was not to draw men to Him, but rather to alienate from Him any who were attracted. Thus they were in direct antagonism to Christ's purpose and striving. They did not like Himself, nor His teaching, nor His aims, so they set themselves to oppose Him in every way. It was of such men our Lord said, "He that is not with Me is against Me; and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth."

Turning to the second story, we find that Christ's disciples had come upon a man casting out devils in the name of their Master. It is evident this man had not been much in direct communication with Christ, if at all, for apparently he was not known previously to the disciples, and their grievance is that one who did not with them follow Christ should thus employ the Master's name. It cannot but have been, therefore, that this man knew very little of Christ's Person or teaching. His knowledge of Him must have been very much more imperfect than that of the disciples, and he did not deem it his duty to become an immediate follower of the Lord. Nevertheless, he had made the discovery that Christ's name had power to cast out devils, and for this beneficent purpose he was in the habit of using it. The disciples, perhaps jealous that another, not of their number, should possess the same power, and believing that he could not be one of the Lord's privileged servants, forbade him to make any further use of the Saviour's name. On reporting this to the Master He countermanded their decision and gave His grounds for so doing. They were these: Though he did not attach himself to the personal company of Christ, though he might be very ignorant, etc. etc., nevertheless, by performing miracles of healing through Christ's name, he was bringing new honour and reverence to that name; and again, while he was thus in deed spreading Christ's fame and arousing belief in Him, he was not likely to imitate the Pharisees in slandering the Saviour—for in our Lord's words, "There is no man which shall do a miracle in My name that shall be able easily to speak evil of Me." That is to say, "By using My name to perform a miraculous cure, he puts himself out of a position to say anything that would detract from My credit." Such an one was certainly not a scatterer, but a gatherer. And "he that is thus not against us is on our part."

Reverting now to the first narrative see how the active antagonism of the Pharisees was the inevitable outcome of the fact that inwardly they were not with Him in heart and aim.

Because they did not like Him, and did not desire Him to gain influence with the people they would not unite in the general approbation of the crowd. Such conduct was marked and demanded an explanation. Apparently a good and wonderful miracle had been wrought. It will not do for them to merely refrain from approving. They must justify their reticence. Neutrality is impossible. If they will not adore they must malign. So they are forced to impugn the character of Christ's act. To justify their want of sympathy they must disavow its claim to their approbation. There is no alternative between frank acceptance of the miracle or open repudiation and disparagement of its character.

Still you must take sides for or against Christ, and you cannot be neutral. For His claims reach you not as external facts to be passively gazed at, but as imperative, active demands that lay hold of you, and insist that you shall take action upon them. You must yield or you must resist. You must comply or you must oppose. Christ lays His hand on you and if you will not obey you must shake that hand rudely off. In countless forms that strange, drawing power lays hold of you, and you must follow or reject. It may be a call to you to yield your reverence, your support, your participation to some benevolent or religious movement. If you will not, while others do accede to this claim, you must seek to justify your refusal. So you are forced into disparaging it, depreciating it, slandering it. You cannot own it to be of God and yet remain a rebel against its demands. So you must, with evil, malignant tongue, sneer at it as folly, or revile it as delusion—thus imitating the Pharisees who set down Christ's work to be the doing of the devil.

Remember, too, what a black-hearted, hateful sin that was they were guilty of. Try and picture that gentle, beneficent, holy Jesus. Realise the cruel blow such a thought was to the man just healed. Surely caution, reserve, would have made men hesitate to speak so. But they cruelly, malignantly, eagerly cry, "By Beelzebub He casteth out devils." It was in the face of such light, such considerate helpful words of Christ, that they did it. Think of the gracious words He spoke, and of the beauty of all that life, which in our days bring from the hearts of unbelievers encomiums that sound like adoration. In spite of all that, they were not made reverent, careful, slow to condemn. Nay, they were exasperated by it all.

But you may say, "They were zealous, mistaken men, wrongly trained; they thought Christ a heretic; they were the victims of an erroneous creed. So many had deceived them, so many false Christs had appeared! Besides, did not Moses say that they were not to believe a miracle simply, but to judge it by the teaching of the worker?" It is true, there were many such. But you do not find them among the number who ascribed Christ's works of healing to the devil. There were, indeed, honest but timid souls who were staggered by the pretensions and claims of Christ, but how did they act? Remember how one such came to Christ and went away with mingled feelings of attraction and perplexity; but when the body of Christ lay lone and forsaken Nicodemus came and did honour to the sacred dead. But these men were not such as he; their error was not of the intellect, but of the heart. They did not yield to the beauty of Christ's character, life, and teaching. They were not one with Him in His longing to establish God's kingdom on the earth. There was an inner antagonism of spirit, of nature. They were proud, haughty, self-righteous, and they were hypocrites, evildoers, cruel. They hated Christ because His pure life shamed and pained them, and they dreaded the loss of their own prestige and power. The secret and the essence and seat of their antagonism was not intellectual error, but deep, dark, moral perversion and evil of heart and conscience. Thus, because they were not with Christ, even in so far as to have sympathy with the undeniable good in Him, therefore they were in act and word against Him.

Finally, from the second narrative see what it is to be with Christ and how those who inwardly are not against are by His own verdict on His side. And, first of all, note the error into which the disciples fell. Very like the conduct of the Pharisees is theirs. They find a man doing good in Christ's name. He is not all he should be, not one of them, and not a constant pupil of Christ's. But instead of seeking to draw him to more perfect light, they intolerantly forbid him to do the good he was doing. So mistaken an action must have come from a wrongness of heart. They, too, fell before that evil, monopolising tendency that grudges to another God's gifts which we possess. It was a cruel thing to the man, a harmful thing, and might have turned him from Christ. Let us take the lesson to ourselves. Let us beware of refusing to allow good in those who differ from us; let us beware of rashly judging those who are not just the same as we. Harm—grave harm—is often done by treating imperfect, immature followers of our Master as if they had neither part nor lot with Him. But mark how this man was with Christ; only, remember, he is not an example of what we should be, rather he is a specimen of one just over the borderland: but over. It was not intellectual orthodoxy; not a perfect knowledge of God's mysteries that he possessed. He was very ignorant about God, about Christ. He did but know a little of the power of Christ and His majestic character and stupendous work. Yet so far as his knowledge went of Christ he had received it gladly. He rejoiced in the power of the Saviour's name to cast out devils, to cure the troubled ones. He did the good he knew. He acted up to his light. In his measure he gave glory and reverence and obedience to the Saviour. He was working for good and mercy and truth and God in the world. Thus he was not against Christ in these his aims, and so was for the Lord. It is only of those who are not against Christ in this sense that He says they are on His side.

Friends, there is warning and comfort in that. Warning there is, for, mark, that vain dream is dispelled which would read Christ's words as meaning that if only you do not oppose Him actively you are to be counted on His side. No! if that is your position, you are not for Him; you must be against Him: for passivity, neutrality is impossible.

Comfort there is, on the other hand, to you who feel yourselves very feeble, very imperfect; to you who find it hard to understand; to you who fear you are mistaken about many things. Ah! men may condemn you; the disciples may dissuade you from taking His name and counting yourself His, but do not fear. If you do, as far as you see how, strive to do the good He has taught you; if you do, it may be afar off, follow in His footsteps; if you have learned to find in Him in any degree a power that helps you to cast out the evil spirits in your soul and in the hearts of men: be sure that though you may not follow with other disciples, though you may be very deficient, very immature, a very unworthy servant—be sure that, nevertheless, you are not against, but for Him, and that in the end of the days He will not forbid you to claim His name, but will acknowledge you for His own.

XIII.
THE PROPHECY OF NATURE.

"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet."—Psalm viii. 3-6.

"But now we see not yet all things put under Him."—Heb. ii. 8.

THE Eighth Psalm is a very striking one. It lifts the mind of the reader to a lofty height where he seems to have soared above sin and sorrow. It exults in man's greatness and Nature's grandeur. It is not Hebrew and theocratic, but human and universal. What it says is said of man as man; of man as he ought to be, was meant to be, may be. The subject is Humanity.

The New Testament writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes what is said in this psalm to be true of Christ, and he thinks that he has a right to find in the words a prophecy of Christ's coming. If you read the psalm without thinking of what is said in the Epistle you would not immediately apply it to Christ. How, then, is there a real connection between this old Hebrew utterance and the coming of our Lord?

It is a fact that the patriarchs expected the coming of some great and wonderful blessing in the future, and it is a fact that in the coming of Christ a gift came to men in the lines of anticipated blessing; but far greater than they ever dreamed of.

Reflecting on those predictions and anticipations of future blessing, might there not be in the very structure of the world, of the material universe itself, in the course of events as they have fallen out in history, something to lead men to expect the advent of their Christ? God makes His plans looking, as a wise man looks, to the end. We should expect, then, in all the foundation-laying, that that was provided for and expected which should be the crown of all.

Is there not in creation an aspect of things which makes men think that there is something great and grand in store for their race? The writer of this psalm conceived his poem as he stood in the open fields and looked up into the solemn sky, and watched the unhasting and untiring motion of the shining stars—worlds upon worlds burning and throbbing in the abyss of space. Away from the hum and tumult of men, no one can look at those hosts of silent stars without a subdued and awed sense of the mystery of being, of the infinite possibilities that the universe discloses. The star-studded heaven at night makes a man irresistibly think of God. It makes a man think, too, of himself. The silence, the shining, the mystery and the solemnity of the starry heavens make a man's beating, living life, as it were, become heard. A man is intensely conscious of himself. That is exactly what passed through the heart of this writer. It was not he who chose to have these thoughts, no more than it is our wish to have these thoughts. God was playing upon the strings of this man's heart—more directly, more rigorously in him, but just as He plays upon the strings of your own when you have had great solemn thoughts of God on a dark night, beneath the burning stars. The man's thoughts went up, and then they went down into himself, when he looked up into heaven, when he saw the moon and the stars, when he realised all their wondrous being, the regularity, the order, the vastness, the distance; then he thought of God, and God became great and grand and majestic, and then he burst out, "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth!" That is what he said. Then he looked into himself, his own conscious life, met its failure, and his first thought was of his own terrible pettiness. In the face of these countless worlds revolving in the far heaven, "what is man?" And then there came another thought to him: "And yet how great is man!" That mighty moon, millions of times vaster than man, does not know its own shining, its lustre, its own motions, its majesty. It is blind, and deaf, and dumb, and insensate, and man sees it and wonders at it, measures and weighs it, and understands its nature; and so man in all his meanness, in all his smallness, in all his weakness, in all the fragility of his life, is greater far than sun and moon and stars, and all revolving worlds. How little is man—and yet how great, O God! Here down below on earth man watches the stars, and up in heaven God watches them too. Man thinks, God thinks; man creates, God creates; man loves, God loves; so little, so great, and yet so like; Father and child, the One so grand, the other so insignificant.

Then he turned to the earth on which he stood, and with a grandeur of soul he recognised man's position on earth sharing the likeness of God, gifted with God's power of thought and of plan, of will and of love; man stands lord of all lower things that have been made, king and ruler with power to control, with mastery to move them, he is lord and master over all their ways, uncontrolled by aught, undismayed by aught, king, god of earth: "Thou hast made him ruler over all the works of Thy hands."

Is it not a grand poem, that? If I could read to you the best poems written in other lands by men of other days, by men of other faiths, if I could compare the thoughts of this psalm with other thoughts of God's plan and of man's position, you would understand what I mean when I say the psalm is grand, the psalm is a revelation of man and of God.

If I had the capacity or the time to try and show you how these thoughts about God and about Nature and about man, give man all the dignity, all the elevation of character, all the powers and abilities to shape and fashion the world he is in, one could not but wonder at the grandeur of that psalm. The faith about God, and the faith about man's destiny written down in that psalm—that faith is the Magna Charta of humanity that has emancipated men from the slavery to sun, moon and stars, and all the powers of Nature.

The psalm is a true conception of man's relation—upwards to God, and downwards to Nature. It has been perfectly described by a German commentator as a poetical echo of creation! A psalm, a poem, such as this flings a spell about you. You forget actualities. It is so good, it seems so true, it is so human, it is so living, you yield your soul to it, you are filled with its glow and joyfulness, you are warmed with its strength and triumph. You hail it;—and then you begin to think, you look round, and what do you see? Mankind lord over lower things, yourself lord over your own body, master of your appetites? Your neighbours kings? The best of men enslaved! Bound down by the greed of gain! So that the nobler powers of mind and body, and soul, are degraded and cramped in them—men and women slaves of superstition, slaves of prodigies and foolish fancies wrought into their very nature.

"We see not yet all things put under him." If exultation was the mood made by the picture of the psalm, depression is the mood made by the picture of mankind; and are we to end with that? No. The writer to the Hebrews has given us the key by which we can unlock the secret, and have confidence in the triumph of man's better nature, and hope for a better future.

Let us look a little deeper into things, let us do men justice. Has man ever acquiesced in his sinful, sorrowful slavery? Never. It is always under protest that he regards it. It is always with a sense of fallen greatness. It is always with discontent. It is always with an unconquerable conviction that man was made for something better. Proof, do you want? Why is it when you read a story of heroic generosity, like that of the captain who gave away his own life for that of a wretched boy the other day, that you feel life to be worth living? What is the meaning of that sense of grandeur, of greatness, of triumph, that comes over you? How is it? What is it? When you see a brave deed of self-denial; at another time, when we hear of a cruel, mean deed done—how do we feel towards each? Are we all bad? If that were our natural lot we should acquiesce in the evil deed, we should have no shock, no surprise; instead of that there is a sense of surprise, and revolt. There is an error somewhere—a disaster, a calamity. It is a sin—sin—a thing that robs us of our heavenly nature. Do we recognise it as a part of human nature? No. Sin is unnatural, sin is horrible. That is the meaning of the death scene in Macbeth. A knock at the door reveals to the murderer the distance his crime has set between him and the simple ordinary life of man. Sin is something unnatural, it is a calamity, an intrusion, it ought not to be there. Fellowship with God! Impossible to us! Why? Because we were never meant to have it? No. If there be a God at all, if He made this world, if He made men to think, and feel and understand, then God meant the world to be like a written book that should speak of Him. Why does not all Nature so speak to man? Because we have sinned, because we have lost the lineage, because we are not like Christ, the sinless Son: to Him the lilies had the touch of God on them, the birds in every song proclaimed His praise.

So, then, while we see that all things are not put under man, we see plainly that God meant it otherwise, and that God made man to be lord of creation. What God does not wish is hardly likely to stand. If man has missed being what he was meant for, there is good possibility that he may regain it. If God be love, there is certainty. I enter a master-painter's studio, and I see upon his easel a spoiled picture. I can see the majesty of the design, the beauty of the ideal, but from some defect in the pigment or flaw in the canvas, it has gone wrong; it is blurred and dim and spoiled. But not so to himself; that man will not allow the disaster to prevent him creating in visible form the vision of beauty that once charmed his heart. The man would not be a man of will and determination if he allowed the disaster to hinder him in his purpose. God is unchangeable. God is God.

Man is not what God made him for; man is not what God made him to be; and God is God. His purpose may lapse for a little, His designs may be delayed on the way, but if the beginning points to the grand end, that end will be reached. God meant it. God means it. God shall do it.

We stand farther on along the track of God's providential dealings with men. We see more than the writer to the Hebrews saw. He, too, remembered that psalm when he described man as he ought to be. Why did he still let it live and exist as a thing that is true? He could wait. What was he waiting for? And what were the singers thinking of as they chanted that psalm? They thought of a good time coming, they thought not the less of the disaster, they thought of God redeeming men, of God causing a Man to be born who should be a Deliverer, they thought of Him reaching out hands of help to all who came to Him, and the writer to the Hebrews writes truly when he says that that is prophesied of Christ. It is a prediction of His coming. God cannot be foiled. Man is not yet what God created him to be, the crown of all the earth-creation, but in the divine heart and mind there has been that vision—man wanting but little of exaltation to be next to God—man the lord of all—and the writer to the Hebrews was able to say, "God has achieved it; in Christ, crowned King and Lord of all creation, the psalm is fulfilled."

What depth of meaning and of wonder, of future joy and triumph, there is in that feeling he has of Christ as the Flower and Fruit of God's design in all creation! What depth of meaning there may be I do not dare to fathom, of good to all mankind; but this I will think,—that in the end of time when all things have been summed up and restored in Jesus Christ, when God shall have gathered together in one the broken threads, when the whole creation that with man groaneth until now, shall be delivered from its bondage—God will be seen not to have failed. What future revelation of grandeur, and of Divine goodness, and of redemption beyond our utmost thoughts, there may be, I do not think we were meant to know. I do not think we should dare to dogmatise; but we were meant to have our eyes drawn away to that glorious, radiant, splendrous future, and we are bidden there to see all God's loving pity and wise provision for us. Ah! God is working; He is creating, loving; He is providing, planning; He is redeeming creation, gathering together into one grand whole a restored humanity and a ransomed creation; and all mysteriously and strangely wrought into a great unity with Christ, and through Christ, with God.