I.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRIAL.

    James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are of the Dispersion, greeting!  Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall into manifold temptations; knowing that the proof of your faith worketh patience, &c.     JAS. i. 1-3.

LUTHER called this piece of Scripture a 'right strawy epistle'; we shall perhaps see where the straw was before we have finished.

    Our study should begin a long way off, in the Carpenter's home at Nazareth.  We Protestants have somewhat neglected that home and its presiding spirit, but in these times we sorely need some of its lessons.  If modern mothers would sit down and carefully study this lowly Nazarene household, and get their souls steeped in the holy modesty, the meek silence, the intense spirituality, and the lofty ethical ideals of this carpenter's wife and home, they would quickly realize that there is no sphere so wide as the hearthstone, and no opportunity so rich in possibilities as the care of children.  When we look at Christ, His divinity so dazzles us that we do not see what else there is.  But Christ was a man, a real human child, and in the home at Nazareth had the same eager curiosity, the same all-pliable, highly impressionable human nature, and the same amazing retentiveness as any other child.  The Sermon on the Mount, the matchless parables, the inimitable nature-teaching of the Christ, were the rich ripe fruits of little seeds dropped into a child's mind in a peasant's cottage.  Let me give you the proof of it.  Jesus was not the only child reared in that home; there were others, both boys and girls.  One of these boys afterwards wrote a pamphlet; and that little production is so reminiscent of the Sermon on the Mount, so similar in ethical teaching and general trend, in figures taken from nature, and even in the turn of the phrases, that it becomes clear, as you compare them, that both have been quarried out of the same mine.

    Now the epistle before us is the pamphlet alluded to, and suggests how great a work one peasant woman had accomplished.  It was written by James; not the apostle James, not the one referred to in the frequent formula, 'Peter, James, and John,' but James the Lord's brother, who was not an apostle at all, not even a disciple, but who during the Saviour's life was an anxious, perplexed onlooker, sometimes coming perilously near to being an opponent.  During the Crucifixion scenes, influenced perhaps by his mother's faith and example, he seems to have thrown off all doubt, and when, after the Resurrection, Christ appeared to him alone, he became at once a whole-hearted believer in the Messiah.  There was a third brother, who eventually wrote the little document we know as the Epistle of Jude.  That little home at Nazareth, then, produced three persons who will live in history for ever: the mother who would not be satisfied with a record like that must be very hard to please.

    Now away from the blinding glory of the personality of Jesus, James was a great figure.  As a Jew among Jews, his personal character was so high that, peasant though he was, they gave him the title 'James the Just,' and, when at last he joined the disciples he rose immediately over the heads of even the apostles themselves and assumed command of the new movement.  But James had the limitations of his advantages.  A strong man, he had the rigidity of his strength; a safe man, he had the natural conservatism which accompanies steadfastness.  He had zeal enough to rejoice in the daring radicalism of Peter, and breadth and spirituality enough to sympathize with the grand universalism of St. Paul; but for himself, he was always place-bound and parochial and Christianity always remained to him an offshoot, though immeasurably the greatest offshoot, of Judaism.

    But for many years the majority of the converts were Jews, and believed still that salvation was a Jewish question.  What an immense advantage, therefore, to the early Church to have such a man as James at the head of affairs!  This is the man who wrote this epistle, and the document is of very peculiar interest to us because it was written to the earliest converts, and was probably the first bit of the New Testament ever penned, and shows us what were the truths generally taught in those introductory times between the Resurrection and what we may call the epoch of St. Paul.

    Written, perhaps, as early as fifteen years after the Crucifixion, in the days preceding the great controversies, it has only a slight tinge of distinctly Christian teaching.  The great doctrines of the faith are assumed and alluded to, but the bulk of the epistle is ethical, and deals with conduct and character rather than creed.  Let us try to realize the situation.

    Where are the Jews to-day?  Dwelling in separate quarters in nearly all the large cities of the world, living their own life and keeping themselves to themselves.  That is just what they were doing in the days of James.  With this difference: they had still a national home, which they loved intensely, and the remnants of a national life.  Some of them were emigrants, abroad for purposes of trade; some were political exiles; many had been born in the land of their captivity.  But just as a Mohammedan sacrifices everything to make his pilgrimage to Mecca, and the Chinaman slaves in British colonies to make money that he may return to his beloved native land, so these Jews, even those who had been born abroad and knew only the Jerusalem painted for them by the fond fancy of their friends, lived and worked for their one ambition—a journey to the holy city.  There were always, therefore, numerous companies of such pilgrims coming to the great feasts or returning; and the news these brought to the Ghettos in days when there were no posts, as we understand them, nor newspapers nor telegrams, was all the tidings the exiles got of their dear old city and their fellow countrymen at home.  Of late, however, all other subjects of gossip had been forgotten in the presence of the wonderful story of the crucified and risen Christ and the new religion.  Then Jewish men actually arrived in their midst preaching this new faith, and there was excitement, division, and revolution amongst them; and so in this way little Christian churches sprang up here and there in the Jewish quarters of most of the cities of the Roman Empire.

    What a personage St. James would be to people of this class who were either Christian converts or pious Jews waiting for the consolation of Israel!

    A Jew of Jews, living in their own sacred city, the human head of the new church and the highest authority as to its teaching, how eagerly this epistle would be received!  Imagine some such scene.  Here, in the insanitary purlieus of an Eastern city, are the Jewish quarters.  There, in a low dark room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, are a number of sad-looking men and women.  One guards the door against spies and mockers, and one stands with a roll in his hand reading.  They have heard lately that their wonderful new gospel has been preached to the very Gentiles, and whilst some are shocked, some are delighted, though all are a little perplexed.  And so it is with a new eagerness that they learn that their elder has received a copy of a letter to them from Jerusalem.  Here is a message coming in the very midst of their trials, and from the one man they can all implicitly trust.  Gloom, dejection, weariness vanish, and they all sit up to listen.  'James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes who are of the Dispersion—Rejoice!'  Ah! they blink their eyes in the dim light and their faces cloud over—the very first note is a false one!  Rejoice? why, that is Greek! and suits exactly the mercurial, light-headed Hellenes; but they are Jews—deep-souled, solemn, intensely religious Jews.  It is very polite and kindly, but—oh, he does not understand at all!  If they were in the dear old fatherland as he was, living in Jerusalem itself as he was, they might rejoice! he forgets where they have to live and all the agonies they are suffering.  They are persecuted, beaten from pillar to post, despised slaves and foreigners!   Shame, tears, contumely, cursing, are their daily fare; and he bids them rejoice!  We all feel like that sometimes.  It is all very well for comfortably placed ministers, arm-chair philosophers, successful authors, and able editors to talk about the blessings of poverty—let them come and try it.  It is very beautiful to write on the 'simple life' from a carpeted study and a soft easy-chair; let them come and live in 71 Brick Street, and maintain a family on a pound a week, and then see where their moralizings will be.  But St. James is proceeding: Yes, I am not trifling.  I have chosen this light-hearted Greek salutation designedly—it is the very text of my sermon.  You are in trouble; struggle, conflict, bitterness, and wrath are your daily portion; very well, my brethren, I congratulate you!  The fact is You should 'count it all joy when ye fall into manifold temptations.'  And lest there should be any mistake, further on in the chapter he descends to details, and, taking the worst conceivable case he cries, 'Let the rich man rejoice in that he is brought low.'

    How did these Jews take this strange statement?  Probably as such things are usually taken: they are not literal truths, but preaching, rhetoric, poetry.  What is really meant was that it was no use repining and making bad worse; that the only wise course is to 'grin and bear' things, and make the best of them.  That is what we all do with the books we read and the sermons we hear; and that is why, in spite of Christ and Christianity, our troubles sour and darken our lives.  When Christ said, 'Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God,' He meant much more than we usually read into those words; He not only meant that we cannot attain to it in some future state, but that here and now, though that kingdom surrounds us, stares us in the face, and is within us, we cannot without the New Birth—which brings new faculties and new eyes—see it.  Christianity, however softly it comes into a soul, is a revolution, not poetically but really a re-creation; and what St. James was offering these poor Jews was not pious consolation, but a new philosophy—a flat, unequivocal contradiction of our working principles of life; namely that the bad of life is the higher good, the bitter the sweet, the poverty of life its riches; and that if we get the new eyes of the New Birth, and see things as they are, we shall go to life's struggles as the athlete goes to his gymnasium or the hobbyist to his hobby.  What St. James is proclaiming is grand, full-blooded Mark Tapleyism.

    This, then, is the Christian philosophy of trial, the new Christian valuation of the troubles of humanity.  As Emerson puts it: 'Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of his early instinct under the guidance of a deeper instinct.  He learns to welcome misfortune; learns that adversity is the prosperity of the great.'  A mere idea! a pretty, poetical thought that does not alter the cruel facts?  But if ideas will not help us, there is nothing under God's sun that can.  This world has been lifted to what it is by ideas.  As Emerson says again, 'They only who build on ideas build for eternity.'  As we read in that recent sensational novel, When it was Dark, 'The decisive events of the world take place in the intellect.'  The only things that count are ideas.  'As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.'  It may be objected that the idea is not new: no, but the oldest idea is new to us if we have never taken it in.  Life's problems are most of them old enough; what we want is a new point of view.  Everything depends on that.  Two men come home at the end of a day.  They have both had precisely the same amount of physical exertion; but the one is weary, cross, and stale, the other bright and good-tempered.  What is the difference?  One man's exercise has been called work, and the other golf.

    The average man gets off with as little physical exertion as he can, but there are men who go seeking it, who buy implements and join gymnasiums in order to put special strain upon their muscles, and who half starve themselves; but who, so far from complaining, go about showing their muscles, inviting people to feel their biceps, and bragging how far they have walked that day.

    On our holidays we measure the success of our days by our weariness at night, and gauge our satisfaction by the stiffness of our limbs.  Men who act thus are athletes, 'in training'; and, so far from complaining of their excessive exertions, they boast of them and 'count it all joy.'  That is St. James's thought, that is the true philosophy of trouble.  Man is greater than his circumstances.  Life, its pleasures and pains, its struggles and losses, its burdens and cares, are made for man and not man for them.  Trials are the clubs, dumb-bells, ladders, push-balls, and gymnastic paraphernalia of life's greater gymnasium—the tools, chisels, sandpaper, for the carving of the eternal marble of character.  The athlete takes joy in the things that make him athletic, and the artist in the things that make him more artistic; so if we would get hold of the true meaning and value of life the idea would revolutionize life, transform experience, and gild and glorify the sordid struggles of our daily existence with significance and splendour.  We should welcome effort, rejoice in conflict; fear and gloom would be lost in heroic lust of battle.  We should 'count it all joy,' we should 'glory in tribulation also,' 'endure hardship as good soldiers of Jesus Christ.'  Like the wounded oyster, we should mend our shell with pearl.

    This, then, is the sum of the argument.  We are not to run away from trial, but to welcome it; not to fear it, but to rejoice in it as the warrior lusts for battle and the athlete to test his powers.  Losses, crosses, sicknesses, calamities, are openings, chances, opportunities.  We are not to think of our weakness, but of our strength.  In nature, in the eternal principles of truth, in ourselves, most of all in God, we are strong!  We are divine sons:

    That which intimidates the weak arouses and inspires the strong; that which appals the coward builds up and develops the hero.  'Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.'  'Be strong, in the Lord and in the power of His might.'  Rejoice in tribulation also, for tribulation worketh patience,' &c.

 
II.

THE MYSTERY OF SORROW AND ITS SOLVENT

    If any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all liberally and upbraideth not.    JAS. i. 5.

ST. JAMES, writing to his own flesh and blood about the troubles of life, commenced, not with pious consolations or stoical maxims of resignation, but with a new idea.  Now an idea is a terrific thing, as destructive as dynamite, as constructive as a poet's imagination.  Once realize St. James's thought and it would come like a torpedo into our narrow, jerry-built, dusty-windowed concepts of life, and, blasting away our prejudices, reveal a boundless universe and a star-crowded sky—'a new heaven and a new earth.'  The thought is that God is always and everywhere working good, and that the evils of life are but intenser forms of good.  And after all St. James is only asking for the actualizing of the ideal, the ending of the long divorce between preaching and practice.  The parents of this new idea are old acquaintances, whom, however, we have never properly appreciated.  One is the scientific valuation of man, its partner is the neglected but ever youthful doctrine of immortality.  Accept the marriage of these two theories and St. James's point becomes obvious and necessary.  What is man?  A stomach on legs? an agricultural implement? a machine for the manufacture of metal disks, a million-headed huckster?  We trace his pedigree and schedule his crimes, measure his appetites and joke about his fads—Lord, what is man?  A little lower than the angels and crowned with power and glory?  Yea—

What is immortality?  It is our real life.  As Franklin puts it: 'Life is a state of embryo, a preparation for life.'  'Die—and come to life,' says Goethe.  A man is never completely born until he has died, and death, the supreme calamity, is in reality the supreme escape.

    Man being man therefore, his surroundings exist for him and not he for them.  The purposes of his life are not for the now, but for the maturity of the future.  Then if this be so, and God be God, it must be that 'all things work together for our good'; that 'Best men are moulded of their faults'; that the good are befriended by their very weaknesses and defects.  As Emerson puts it: 'Our angels go that arch-angel may come,' that 'Affliction is the good man's shining scene,' that—

    Darwin has shown us that the great law of nature is progress through struggle, and the pages of history and the stories of the great proclaim the same fact.  All the great reputations of history embody tragedies of suffering.

    The deepest in us, the richest, has come to us in our sorrows.  The gold veins in the common strata of life have been shot in by the thunderbolts of calamity.

    With this thought in us we 'count it all joy,' and 'these light afflictions' are 'not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed in us.'

    With these things about us we may indeed

    But if St. James has really a great secret, a new and revolutionary valuation of sorrow, how can we find this wonder out?  We can pray.  We can go to the very fountain-head, the very Delphic Oracle Himself: 'If any man lack wisdom'—the power to understand these dark sayings and find out this new secret of life—' let him ask of God.'

    It is to be feared that there is amongst us a very distinct but wide-spread decline in the habit of prayer; not public supplication so much as continuous, systematic, private prayer.  Many thoughtful, earnest Christians seem to have lost their faith in prayer.  Why?  It is because we are growing.  Our knowledge is widening us, sharpening, deepening us: the old, childlike, literal interpretation of scriptural texts about prayer cannot be made to harmonize, we think, with the character of God and the assured facts of science.  A moment's reflection suggests to us that for God to answer literally the short-sighted prayers of every man, woman, or child who may be praying to Him at any given moment would be to contradict Himself, put a sprag in the wheels of His government, and reduce the universe to chaos.  But all the time our sense of need grows by leaps and bounds.  The same process which widens our minds and sharpens our instincts quickens our sense of reverence and dependence; and so, growing knowledge on the one hand, and a growing yearning after a personal acquaintance with God on the other, mock and mutually nullify each other.

    Well, we should scarcely expect to find a solution for a particularly modern difficulty like this in a nineteen-hundred-year-old 'epistle of straw,' and yet I believe it is here.  The straw must have germinated strangely since Luther's time.  St. James, like every truly inspired man, was speaking better than he knew in this opening statement of his.  Look at the position.  We are products of the twentieth century; from the crown of our heads to the tip of our toes we are full of the spirit of the age.  We believe profoundly in the grandeur of human nature and the perfectibility of character, the very ideas underlying these verses.  When St. James asks us to welcome trial as a means of eliminating weakness and developing strength, we hear the tones of an ethical Sandow, and our whole nature responds to them.  But here comes the difficulty.  Whilst our knowledge, our reflective powers, our hunger for truth, has been growing, something else has been growing too—our sense of the profound, bewildering mystery of life.  We have some of us come to a condition in which it seems impossible to prostrate our souls before anything that contradicts our fundamental instincts; and yet we feel, or at least we say, that the ordinary Evangelical tenets in which we have been trained do so contradict.  Let us leave these tenets alone for a moment: let us take the things in which we do utterly believe and to which we think our instincts always respond.  There is no quarrel with the ethics of Christianity; as long as our teachers keep to these we are enthusiastically with them—for virtue, moral training, refinement of character, and great ideals awaken our utmost zeal.  And the other strong point in this modern tendency is admiration for Jesus Christ.  The fact is, the more we lose sympathy with the ordinary Evangelical dogmas the higher does the 'simple, sublime Nazarene' rise in our estimation.  Very well, you are brought to a standstill in your religious development by mysteries—inexplicable, self-contradictory enigmas, which stifle aspiration, benumb the higher faculties, and shut the door of prayer: why cannot you go to Christ?  Which Christ?  Your own, not ours.  It is complained that the Churches have disguised the Christ in a mystic robe of Divinity that entirely hides His beloved features.  Go to your own Christ, your 'simple, sublime Nazarene,' even as you find Him in what the critics have left of the four Gospels.  Listen to His words, brood over their meaning, catch and soak your soul in their spirit, and pray.

    Remember the old classic legend of Pygmalion and Galatea.  Pygmalion was a sculptor and a woman-hater; but in the course of his work he had to make a statue of a female.  As he worked his genius caught fire; he toiled and slaved and altered until, losing sight of everything else, he could think of his statue and that alone.  Unconsciously he fell in love with the marble figure, lost his head and his soul to it.  Oh! that she were really alive, living flesh and blood, as he had made her look!  And one day, as he worked, lost in his raptured task, the marble thing grew warm and moved and breathed, till the poor artist fell down in an ecstasy and worshipped.  Go to your Christ—your dead, historic Christ, if you will; take your perplexities and mysteries, your manly candour, your sincerity and passionate admiration of His great character, to Him and pray!  Because of, nay in spite of, your doubts —pray: drink into His spirit, get your soul saturated with His ideals, learn to see with His eyes and hear with His ears; and if you will, the confounding mystery shall melt into constellations of glory, the human vestments melt away, the fisherman's gown become 'irradiant with a light divine'; the marble figure of the historic Christ shall become a palpitating human Saviour, and you too shall cry, in the wonder of a great amazement, 'My Lord and my God.'

That is St. James's point.  Our troubles, hard enough of themselves, are made harder by their lack of meaning.  They seem so confounding, so unnecessary, that their very mystery makes them harder.  'If any man lack wisdom'—this wisdom, any wisdom—'let him ask of God.'

    Life is a mystery.  The man who finds no perplexing contradictions in his life, and has a wise saw and a pat proverb for every emergency, may be very comfortable, but he is also very stupid.  The man who sits on a safety-valve may be comfortable, but he is not exactly safe.  But the discovery of the mystery of life is often the 'Peep o' day ' of the soul, the sign of its awakening, the commencement of its growth.  The more we know the more we find there is to know.  To solve one mystery is but to burst the cloud that conceals and then reveals a hundred.  The soul most in earnest, and that goes deepest and flies highest, is the soul that sees most of the marvel; and in his highest moment of amazement he is fain to say, with Schiller's angel, 'End there is none; lo, also there is no beginning.'

    The thought that bodily pain, mental worry, spiritual struggle, are the things that build the soul is very precious; but life is such a spoil-sport, so bluntly, unpoetically real.

    One person has an unsatisfactory wife or husband, or an indolent, dishonourable partner; another has an unscrupulous competitor in trade, or is working short time; another has a sickly wife, or has missed his chance in life because his father neglected him; this man lost his wife when his family most needed her, the other has a foreman who is a brute, or has to worship in the same sanctuary with the man who sold him some rotten shares.  Many of us in these times are highly strung, and life drives savagely into the raw.  These are the hard, sordid things that make up real life; and, as though these were not enough, most of us have restless, fretful spirits perpetually crying, Why, why?  This doggèd, wearing voice is more trouble than the trouble itself.  We must go to the fountain-head, fall back on the happy old habit of prayer: 'If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not.'  But that is the very point: we spend our lives in getting rid of one trouble and then spend our time trying to explain it until another comes.  When we go to worship, our perplexities are only heightened.  There the keynote of everything is faith; the hymns, the lessons, the sermon, are exhortations to faith; and when we are trying to get hold of something to help us, the sickening thought is brought home to us that our questionings and wonderings and wantings to know are sinful, are unbelief, and signs that we are weak and sinful; and so we sit there simply upbraiding ourselves.  It pays us to worship even then.  Ministers are only amateur doctors; at best they can only render first aid.  Sometimes they handle our jangling wounds so clumsily that they hurt where they seek to help.  But we can go to Christ.  Human helpers would look very black at us if we told them all we were thinking, and maybe suspect and reproach us.  But if we go straight to the Great Physician we may shut the whole jeering, uncomprehending world out, and tumble forth every thought and fear, every doubt and misgiving, before the One who always understands and who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not.'

    Christian brotherliness is not so strong as it ought to be amongst us, and we all realize how much more we might help each other if we only understood.  The world is full of beautiful sympathy; it would be an exquisite pleasure to many of us to render help and advice to one we respected; and yet men walk in our streets every day with crushed hearts, wondering to whom they can unburden their minds.  We do not confide in each other because we are afraid, afraid of being misunderstood and despised.  Some of us have not yet outgrown the silly superstition that our sorrows are the fruits of the awful law of retribution, and we think our friends think so too.  They would not understand the peculiar circumstances of our case, and they would either despise or blame us.  We shudder to think that the man who sits in the next pew should know our trouble, and think, with a chill, of what he might say.  God knows.  'Christ is so touched with the feelings of our infirmities that He might be able to succour them that are tempted,' and He 'giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not.'

    But there are worse kinds of cases.  There are those who have been carefully trained, have sensitive natures, and are compelled by constitution and education to be scrupulously honest with themselves.  The grosser temptations do not come in their way, but they have a profound conviction that, at any rate for them, suffering means penalty; all their great sorrows are traceable to their sins.  To such it is no use sentimentalizing about the good their sorrows may do them, for they are the direct consequences of their sins.  The sins are there—awful, irrevocable facts, from the memory of which there is no escape.  They do not confide in their pastors or friends because they value and fear to lose their respect, and the only thing left for such is to get to know themselves, avoid such mistakes in the future, and sternly eliminate their deplorable infirmities.  If it be true that good can somehow come out of evil, they prefer to struggle themselves through sorrow and pain and grief and tears, to the rest of God.  But they dare not think the very first thing that happens when they reflect is the rushing back of the past, and they are soon swallowed up of useless, bitter self-upbraidings.  They think of all they can never be, of lost chances, lost purity, lost courage, and cry in their loneliness and self-reproach, 'Oh, wretched man that I am,' &c.  Yes, no law is so inexorable as the law of the enlightened conscience, and no judge so severe as the high-minded man with himself.  The loftier the spirit the nobler the ideals, and the more maddening the processes of self-accusation.  Wrong is wrong—utterly, always wrong—and to palliate it is to blunt and mock the soul.  But God is greater than the conscience.  The light He brings to the soul makes the darkness more intense and the sin more exceeding sinful.  But God is always hope and strength and deliverance—

We know not how, but human experience demonstrates that God works good to us even out of our miserable blunders and follies.  We can never admit the horrid creed that we are to do evil that good may come, but we are not to despair; we are not to lower our ideals or take back our soul's ambitions.  We are dealing with God, and—

If, therefore, we are lost in the bogs of self-despair—pray; if we are puzzled with the intricacies and baffled by the inconsistencies of our own natures—pray.  If the mysteries of sin and suffering distract us—pray.  If there is no human heart we can speak to—pray.  If conscience and law and injured prospects upbraid us—pray.  For 'He giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not.'

 
III.

WAVERERS AND WAVERING

But let hint ask in faith, nothing wavering, &c.—JAS. i. 5-8.

A TEACHER'S best teaching is that which comes out of his own soul and has passed through the crucible of his own experience.  The man who wrote these words had been himself a waverer; we have, therefore, to examine an ex-waverer's thoughts on wavering.  St. James commenced his letter with the most prominent and interesting fact in human life—pain.  He insists that trial is indispensable to the purposes of life.  As Tennyson puts it—

    The permanent part of us, the phœnix that is to rise from the ashes of bodily destruction, is character; and trial, sorrow, disappointment, are to be welcomed and rejoiced in as the choicest means of making character.  But our temptations produce perplexities which themselves become additional and fiercer forms of trial.  Therefore we must pray (and here we may note that a very ancient tradition informs us that St. James's knees were hoofed like a camel's with the prayer he here commends).

    Then he goes on to show that if prayer is to be prayer, and succeed, it must be accompanied by faith, and our special question at this point is, What is faith?

    Now faith is the great theme of the Bible; here, there, and everywhere the maxim of Scripture is faith.  But the Bible is one of the things about which men doubt, and which suggests other doubts.  We will let the Scriptures alone.  There is an older Bible than the Bible; a book of which the Scripture is but an abstract; a book we do believe in though we do not take the trouble to read it—our own constitutions, ourselves.  Well, faith is simply full-hearted trust in the affirmations of our own natures.  Never mind theological definitions just now; let us stick to the common facts of life.  There are certain things native to us, parts of our make-up, inseparable from human nature.  A man cannot help believing, for instance, that he is something more than an animal, and that that something is the higher part of him and should govern, though it does not.  A man cannot help feeling that life does not explain itself, that it is an abortion, a solecism, a ghastly joke, unless it is the gateway to another and larger life.  Shut the door of your brain against preachers and theology and books, and sit down and listen to your own heart.  From ourselves we KNOW that there is a God, and that if He is, He must be such a One as we have heard: He must be righteous, must be love.  But we know also that there is a traitor in each of us, an obstinate, short-sighted little beast that would spoil everything for us if we allowed him.  We cannot listen to him for a moment without suffering conscious defilement and humiliation.  We know that we have each of us a nobler, manlier, more heroic self, which thrills to every lofty thought, melts before moral beauty, and never sees a noble deed or hears a fine sentiment but it immediately desires to be and do the same.  Is that so? then faith, the faith we hear so much about, but complain that we understand so little, is simply accepting and acting upon what you feel, obeying your own higher intuitions, actualizing your own theories, the turning of mere ideals and aspirations into deed and conduct and character.  Yes, faith is simply belief in ourselves—our proper selves, not the silly little creature that so often rules us, but our real, true, higher being.  Trust that, trust it enough to follow it, and act upon it, and all the rest will ensue.  Take a quotation, not from a religious book but from The Spectator:

    'No sane man is without a witness within himself of the kingdom of God.  It is to this kingdom of God within us that Christ bids us surrender our allegiance.  In this surrender lies the germ of faith, and faith thus generated is the only faith that can save a man's character.'

    To return to St. James.  The text has a sting in it, it sets our backs up, rubs us the wrong way.  It puts, in pungent form, an assumption that runs through all theology and all Scripture, and that repels and hardens us; namely, that we could believe if we would, and that unbelief is not an intellectual or constitutional difficulty but a sin.  It is assumed, not that we cannot, but that we will not believe, and thus begs the question.  'You talk of higher instincts,' says some one.  'There is one such instinct that I am perfectly sure about: I feel, I know, there is nothing that will ever be able to suppress the conviction in me that I am born to know; that inquiry, examination, reflection are not only privileges but imperative duties.  But life is mysterious, human nature is mysterious, and religion is a profound mystery.  Am I not to investigate and test?  I read, I think, I listen to sermons and lectures—is it all wrong?  Does piety consist in stopping my brain, in—

I am to believe, and believe, and believe; well, I will believe when I can understand, but I simply cannot believe what I cannot comprehend.'

    Whatever we do we must stick to that!  Ministers, books, and institutions must not move us one inch!  The desire to know is one of our most indomitable instincts.  Men hesitate often from a downright honesty of nature which resolutely faces all the facts.  Knowledge is a sobering, steadying, broadening thing; it is the tyro, the amateur, who dogmatizes; where the novice says 'Verily, verily!' the expert says, 'Perhaps.'  So in religion.  The simple and unreflective are at rest; it is the thinker, the reader, the man of resolute self-analysis, who hesitates.  And so we have a shallow, pietistic teaching which warns against worldly wisdom and hints that it is better not to know than to injure our spiritual life by knowing.  God save us from teaching like that!  The central Scripture doctrine of faith has been expounded as the substitute, the supplanter of faith.  God forbid!  The teaching that asks us to stultify one part of our natures to help another is self-condemned.  The instinct for knowledge is as much a divine instinct as any other of our nature.  Our two Bibles, the book of God in Scripture and the book of God in our own nature, must and do agree.  We are to feed our knowledge as much as we feed our faith; we are to feed our knowledge in order to feed our faith.  We are left to infer, from certain religious teaching, that our desire to know is a sign of doubt, that questions, doubts, self-investigation are so many acts of unbelief—in other words, so many sins.  Nothing of the sort!  So long as they are sincere they are noble and blessed.

    Then if honest, intellectual doubt is not censurable, what is St. James driving at? and what does he mean by his scornful language?  How do we like the waverer?  How does the world like him?  How do the ladies like him in courtship, or the politician in politics, or the business man in business?  What sort of spectacle has he cut in history?  Are not King John, Charles I, Louis XVI, the scarecrows of history?  Were we not all feeling, some time ago, that the shilly-shally Emperor of Russia was almost the worst embarrassment of a perplexed and panic-stricken people?  Has not the waverer been the target of the satirist and the butt of the lampoonist in all the ages?  Have not unstable Reuben, double-minded Balaam, and wobbling Pilate become household proverbs among us?  The course of our studies will show that St. James was a tolerant, charitable, tender-hearted man, but he has no tenderness for the vacillator.  He had been a waverer himself, and 'Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones'—but he throws them.  The text is not pitiful, it is scornful; it is almost contemptuous.  He talks as though wobbling were a vice and not an infirmity.  Let us come back to ourselves.  How do we feel towards the man who cannot make up his mind?  Pity him?—yes, but is it ever pure pity? is there not generally something of contempt mixed with it?  In spite of our pity we have to keep a firm hand upon ourselves lest we should despise the man.  Why is this?  If it is infirmity, misfortune, idiosyncrasy, we should be sorry; and if we are quite sure, we are so.  But in most cases we are scornful, even indignant.  Why?  Because at bottom we have a feeling that the man could help it if he would.  We feel it is something unnecessary, avoidable, and therefore culpable; it is not misfortune—it is offence.

    Does that explain anything?  The complaint against the Church is that she has no sympathy with intellectual struggles and the desire to be on sure ground.  She gets impatient, and assumes that our hesitancy is blameworthy.  But we have seen that to honest doubt and the spirit of inquiry she is always sympathetic; and we have also to mark that, just as we all get impatient with the mere wobbler and suspect him of insincerity, so God and His Church insist that failure to believe is often not pitiable weakness but serious moral fault.  A grave position to take up?  It is taken reluctantly, but deliberately; some of us have had to fight our way to it through the fiercest conflicts of our intellectual life.  There is no consistency in religion, no harmony in Scripture, no logic in the Christian scheme of life, except on the assumption that all disbelief that is not intellectual, and therefore temporary, has in it the element of culpability; that unbelief is not infirmity, not misfortune, but sin.  Is it objected that this is 'much ado about nothing,' that the waverer is not a common person among us?  It would be well if it were so, but the fact is the intellectual waverer is not often purely intellectual in his doubtings.  Any honest man who will examine himself will find that his many-mindedness has a deeper origin, that in fact his mental difficulties are but the excuses to himself for symptoms far more serious.  Intellectual waverers may not be very numerous, and the same may be said of those who hesitate from constitutional infirmities.  All the same we are not discussing some curious, uncommon form of spiritual disorder which affects a small minority, but one that in one form or other is frightfully common, is in fact radical and affects us all.  The great psychological scourge of humanity is double-mindedness.  As garrulous old Montaigne says:

'We are all framed of flaps and patches, and of so shapeless and diverse a co-mixture that every piece and every moment playeth his part and there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between ourselves and others.'

    Is not the seventh chapter of Romans about the truest bit of psychology ever written?

    You have always wondered why the Bible makes so much of the theological thing we call faith.  There it is—it is the one all-lamentable lack of the race.  Faith is the keystone of the arch of destiny, and the lack of it life's supreme misfortune.  Without faith it is impossible to please God!  Aye, without faith it is impossible to please man, without faith it is impossible to please ourselves.  What, then, is faith?  It is a native instinct of the soul—the mother instinct.  To quote Dawson of Birmingham: 'Faith is a distinctive, intuitive, innate power, of which a man can never divest himself.'

    Your body has certain instincts as much higher than your physical ones as the soul is higher than the body.  Faith is as natural to the soul as breathing to the lungs and thinking to the brain.  Let lungs and brain alone and they will do their work automatically.  And so when the soul fails of its natural function of faith, it fails through interference, through hindrance.  There is no Bible like your own body, no testimony to the being, character, and government of God like that you can read in your own bosoms.  As Dr. Martineau insists: 'God is not something that was—a fact of history; not something to be found at the end of a long chain of argument: He is the LIVING GOD.'  'He is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart'—the very atmosphere thy soul breathes:

    'A man's religion,' says Carlyle, 'consists, not in the many things he is in doubt about, but in the few things he is assured of, and has no need of effort to believe.'

    Every man has eyes in his soul that can see God, ears that can hear Him.  The many-mindedness condemned by St. James is not the uncertainty induced by the insufficiency or contradictoriness of evidence, or by suspense of judgement on its way to a permanent conclusion; not indecision produced by a growing brain or a widening knowledge—these, when they are honest, never lead men far wrong.  It is the wavering that springs of a divided nature, it is self-inflicted injury done to the spiritual organ, the helplessness which throughout all nature is the penalty of neglected faculty.  In the spiritual realm God and the reign of righteousness are certainties as clear as the sun in the heavens; and before a soul can have reached the condition described in the text it must have done violence to its own nature and seriously damaged its own highest powers.  There is no condemnation in the text for the honest struggler with doubt; the man who, holding to God and right, is fighting his way through fog and mystery, is a delight and a fascination to heaven itself.  The text is simply St. James's way of showing that what we call the doctrine of the Fall is not a theory of theologians, but an awful fact stamped deep on the human constitution, blocking our upward path and frustrating all our higher ambitions.  We are to trust our own trusts, follow implicitly our own higher instincts, accept and rest on the promptings of the Spirit of God and our own souls.  That is faith, that is the cure of many-mindedness, and there is no other.

    There are some of us who live in the no-man's land of habitual wavering.  Does a waverer ever get anywhere or do anything?  The text-book we have been using mostly is our own nature.  The common excuse for spiritual indecision is that we are unsettled, that on some points we are unable to decide, and can do nothing until these are cleared up.

    And when we slip into folly and sin we excuse our blunders by the unsettled state of our beliefs.  Now that is not a matter of opinion, but of fact.  Is that so?—we are settling the order of events, that is all.  Which come first in the order of time, our doubts or our sins?  Do we sin because we are in a dubious, uncertain condition of mind, or did we begin to have doubts because we had already sinned?  Let us put it frankly to ourselves.  Our doubts are not the parents of our follies, but our sins are the parents of our doubts.  We do not sin because we are in an unsettled condition of mind, but we came into that doubting condition because of our sins; in fact—and let us carefully mark it—we find our doubts when we are searching for excuses for our sins.

    One thing more.  Read Mr. Watkinson's Fernley Lecture on The Influence of Scepticism on Character.  It is not a pleasant book; it is brilliant, of course, but almost sickening.  We may not all be able to accept entirely its crushing evidence, but its most striking feature is its all too terrible truthfulness.  What is it supposed to show, and what is St. James driving at here?  That there is anything deadly in honest doubt?  Nothing of the sort.  At worst it is more troublesome than dangerous.  Real unbelief, the common sort St. James is assailing here, is disloyalty of the soul to itself, and disloyalty to eternal truth.  Unbelief is the removal of the mortar that holds together the fabric of the spiritual life.  Unbelief is not the silly thing silly people pretend to as a sign of intellectuality; it is a perverted will, a subtle, creeping sea that undermines character and destroys the soul.  And so the vicious circle runs on; my folly makes me a coward, my cowardice drives me to the refuge of intellectual questionings, intellectual doubts in their turn become the makers of other doubts and other sins, and help to precipitate the ultimate crisis.  We are told often that unbelief is a sin against God; so it is, but mainly because it is such a fearful crime against ourselves.  Our own and the world's feeling towards the waverer should be our serious warning.  If it will do this in the green tree, what will it do in the dry?  Indulgence in unbelief enfeebles the nature, paralyses the higher powers, and reduces to pitiful helplessness.  'Thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; thou shalt fear day and night, and thou shalt have none assurance of life.'  'But they that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall run and not grow weary, walk and not faint.'

 
IV.

THE LIFE HEROIC

    Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he hath been approved, he shall receive the crown of life.    JAS. i. 12-15.

WHATEVER place trouble occupies in the economy of life, we put it first.  Our chief excuse for the indifferences, the negligences, the pre-occupations of life which prevent us attending to the higher things, is that we are too busy, too worried, too distracted with practical difficulties.  When approached about their great souls men fling back their troubles, their losses, their debts and competitions and sicknesses and sorrows.  If, then, we can bottom this deep and terrible subject, see what it is, whence it comes, the part it plays, and the mission it performs, we shall have helped ourselves, improved our equipment, enriched our lives, and removed what we all feel is the profoundest and most ubiquitous hindrance to our peace.

    We are cursed by our misconceptions, and the most natural but mistaken of those prepossessions is that trouble is evil, that sorrow, adversity, and suffering are bad for us.  They are no more evil than doctors' medicine is evil; they are helpful, restorative, curative; they represent an ounce of bitter for a pound of sweet, temporary discomfort for perpetual health.  'No temptation for the present seemeth joyous but grievous, nevertheless afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness.'  Medicine is not the penalty of our sickness, but its remedy: so trouble, even the trouble which is the direct consequence of our sin, is not mere punishment; it is healing, medicinal, saving.  It is not mere poetry, not a figure of speech, but a scientific statement of fact that 'all things work together for good to them that love God'; that 'these light afflictions, which are but for a moment, are working out for us, more and more exceedingly, an eternal weight of glory.'

    Turn back a verse or two, and you will see that we are not merely dressing up an old idea in the flowers of rhetoric, but exploring, laying bare bed-rock principles of life.  Remember that this is a very early, perhaps the earliest, bit of the New Testament, and was written in those wonderful years immediately after Pentecost.  It reflects, therefore, the life and experience of the first Christians.  One of the strangest things, in those marvellous days, was the sudden up-flashing of the spirit of communism—the first practical demonstration of that socialistic spirit which is the very genius of Christianity.  'They were of one heart and one mind, and had all things common.'  The rich gave up their possessions for the general use, and the poor were maintained out of the forfeited abundance.  Remember that the wealthy Barnabas, amongst others, sold his possessions and laid them at the Apostles' feet; and that smaller people, such as Ananias and Sapphira, yielded to dastardly deceit.  Now, in this twentieth century, we are experiencing both the blessedness of Socialism as an ideal, and its immense difficulty as a practical system.  The difficulty of all difficulties is how to render help to a poor man without injuring him in character.  It seems clear that St. James and his fellow leaders had the same difficulty; and so, in discussing this absorbing question of our trials, he takes a problem of the hour as an illustration: two cases which were doubtless familiar both to himself and to those to whom he was writing, namely, the extremely trying form of temptation involved in sudden reverses of fortune.  The slave who suddenly became, in Christ, the equal of his master, and could not keep his head; and the man who, having sacrificed everything in the first gush of his new love, finds it hard to step down in the world gracefully.  No fiercer forms of temptation could be imagined in the Church in those early times, no fiercer even yet; but they were to rejoice in even these extreme and abnormal forms of trial, because the measure of their severity was the measure of their profitableness: the greater the trial the greater the blessing.

    Mark carefully the exact thought insisted upon.  It is a commonplace amongst us that riches take to themselves wings and fly away—that is not the point.  It is also an everyday maxim that if riches do not leave the man the man has to leave his riches—St. James is not thinking of that either.  He was a man of years and experience, and had watched carefully the effect of certain influences on human character, and had noted that, whilst a man like Barnabas, for instance, had grown a finer, loftier, richer-natured man by every sacrifice he had made, he had seen others who had stuck to their riches and grown smaller, meaner, more wretched as their possessions increased.  That is the point of this eleventh verse.  It is not the man's riches that shrivel and fade away, but his manhood.  The man himself withers, dries up, and crumbles away under the process, and his splendid soul becomes a dry stick, a pinch of worthless dust, a wisp of withered grass that a puff would sweep away.  Yes, that is the key to the position he takes up, that is the foundation on which this philosophy of trial is built.

    Man on earth is the son of God in his gymnasium, and that place of exercise has no value save what it derives from its relation to the student.  The gymnast does not spend his time in collecting and hoarding up gymnastic appliances, his success is not measured by the number of clubs, ladders, push-balls he accumulates, but by the state of his muscles and the degree to which these instruments have told upon his physical powers.  Most of us have mysterious appliances behind our bath-room doors, and Indian clubs and dumb-bells in our bedrooms; we take golf, tennis, cricket, walking exercise, bicycling, sea-side week-ends, and summer holidays, and yet we do not develop our muscles half so thoroughly as that rough lad who spends his days pulling trucks about on a pit bank.  So with life—the soul's the thing! What will benefit and develop—that is the question.  The pleasantness or unpleasantness of our experiences is not the point at all, but their efficacy, their suitability to the object desired.  The soul is a young god, a glorious, undeveloped Hercules.  You don't feed giants on gingerbread and jam trifles; you don't wheel giants about in perambulators and coddle them in cotton-wool and muslin frills!  You cannot develop the sinews of a giant by teaching him to wave a fan.  Your Hercules must have the labours of Hercules if he would finally sit amongst the gods.  These puling, self-indulgent bodies of ours have been flung over the heroic soul, as nets used to be flung over gladiators to trip them up and embarrass them, but also to develop agility and alertness and heighten the glory of hard-won victory.

Life is not a baby's plaything, it is a god's game, a Homeric battle of the deities!

We are to beware of these ease-loving bodies.  Take care that they do not play Delilah with our heroic Samson souls.  Our souls are not weakly wash-in-warm-water-and-sleep-in-blankets sort of things that need coddling and cockering and keeping in glass cases; they are lusty young giants that seek to try their powers and make them mighty.  St. Paul is the classic instance of spiritual athleticism, and, with a weakly body and many infirmities, gloried in tribulation also.  Why?  Because he was thus laying up for himself some great reward?  Yes.  Because his love to Christ was so strong that it made labour rest and pain delicious for His sake?  Yes, but for another and more practical reason.  It found exercise for the powers of his soul, training and discipline for his higher nature, development and enrichment for his immortal spirit.  He was set on being a man—a full-natured, high-toned, perfect man; therefore he cries, 'We glory in tribulation also, because tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope.'  Tribulation puts on moral muscle, breeds stamina of soul, and perfect activity and availability of every higher function.  'Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake, for when I am weak then am I strong.'  Who profits by the strength of the athlete when he has got it?  His friends, his admirers? yes; but the thing is, he enjoys and is enriched by it himself; and if you speak to him when he is engaged in his exercises, and ask him why he takes all this trouble, he points you to the grand results in his own nature.  Or, as St. Paul puts it for himself, 'I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed' in me.  Christianity, then, is the heroic life, the strenuous, godlike life; and as the athlete values his exercises according to their difficulty, so the Christian welcomes the trying, the dangerous, the impossible, because of the character they evolve and the saintly manhood they build up.

    'Make me steel—fine, watch-spring steel,' says this piece of common pig-iron.  'Lie still, be quiet; you do not know what you ask.'  'Lie still? to rust and corrode and be flung upon the scrap-heap!  I want to shine, to work, to be something.'  'But that will mean fire and hammer, and fire and hammer again.  It will mean melting your very substance and chilling and melting again.'  'Fire or no fire, chill or no chill, hammer or no hammer—make me steel! as pig I am worth little, as watch-spring steel I shall be much.'

    There is the truth.

    Listen to a modern medical man, a writer on psychology: 'There is one special set of circumstances, however, on which we must lay stress, so potent are they for good.  We allude to what we commonly call the evils of life, such as adversity, failure, loss of health or money, disappointments, opposition of all kinds. . . . It is these that call forth the nobler qualities and produce the highest results.'

    'Rightly understood,' writes a member of an American Social Brotherhood Institution, 'all experiences are good for us—the bitter ones best of all.'

    'No man,' says Jeremy Taylor, 'is more miserable than he who has no adversity.'  Every father should give his boys a copy of Professor Drummond's Baxter's Second Innings.  It is mostly about the first innings, and shows how an ignominious 'duck' led to a wonderful score—as fine a parable of life as was ever written.

    When our soldiers come home from war it is not the men in dainty uniforms and spotless accoutrements we flock out to see and cheer with shining eyes—these are mere attendants! it is raggèd, battle-scarred men, pale with loss of blood.  As Emerson exclaims: 'It was not a philosopher but a washerwoman, bless her, who cried: "The more trouble the more lion!"'

    Yes, the whole secret lies in the great undeveloped soul; there is no touching bottom when you drop your plumb-line there.  The supreme injury of life is injury to soul.  The least good to that, the minutest addition to its powers, is so valuable that nothing is worth considering that will not contribute to that end.  The end of the soul is the enlargement of itself, the reaching of higher power and richer life.  Righteousness and the struggle it involves mean the intensification and extension of life.  Sin is self-attenuation, the whittling away, the starving of the soul: the one is the evolution, the other the de-volution of the soul.  'Blessed is the man that endureth temptation, for when he is approved—passed, finished—'he shall receive a crown of life.'  Life, as we know it here, is the life of the bird in its shell, of the butterfly in its chrysalis; we are growing towards, building up, life; the true hero, the real conqueror of life, is he who has—

    And now we pass from one extreme to the other.  From the heroic aspect of life we pass to the cowardly, from the man who makes adversity his slave to him who is enslaved by it.  We have discussed the 'wobbler,' now we come to the shuffler.

    'Let no man say, when he is tempted, I am tempted of God.'  We never do! we should not think of it!  Oh no, we call it luck, fate, fortune, circumstance.  One-third of the race, a large proportion of the people called Christians, are rank fatalists.  Some of us, when temptation masters us, fall back on the oldest excuse of the race—'The woman Thou gavest me.'  Some of us, when face to face with shameful failure, put on a learned air and talk scientifically of heredity and that welcomest coward's comforter, 'environment.'  Some of us never discovered, and would by no means have been complimented, to be told that we were like our fathers, until that miserable day when we had to find excuses for some egregious folly.  No woman ever admits that her temper is her own.  It is her mother's, or her grandmother's, or at long last she 'is as she was made!'  The sudden interest which some of us discover in Darwin and Huxley and heredity is not attributable to real intellectual growth, but to the fact that from these sources we can procure palliatives to wounded consciences and easy excuses for our vices.  We are willing enough to be shown that we descend from monkeys when that theory provides plasters for wounded consciences and relief from the tortures of responsibility.  We may thank God for Darwin, for every man—philosopher, humanist, theologian, agnostic—who gives a new thought to the world; but let us not abuse such gifts by putting them to base uses and making them excuses for our sins.

    God has made us great; so great that everything else—time, nature, circumstance, the past, the present, the future, the universe of matter, the world of opportunity, the body, the brain, and all the great laws of being, are our servants, bowing to our wishes, co-operating with our efforts, contributing to our enrichment, and toiling for our ultimate victory.  And all man has to do is to be a MAN.  Nobody can stop him but himself.  He is never beaten but when he is self-beaten.  Time and eternity, God and devil, infinite blessedness or eternal misery, are all in self, as the oak is in the acorn.  To abuse our ancestors, gnash our teeth at circumstances, slander fate, and abuse the poor old devil, is cowardly.  Nobody can ever injure you but you.  If we are hindered we are self-hindered; if we are beaten we are self-beaten.  'Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lusts and enticed.'  There is no tempter, no temptation, but self.  As Emerson says: 'He who rests on what he is has a destiny above destiny, and can make mouths at fortune.  Snub him!  We may as well snub the sun.'

    Or, to quote from Omar Khayyám—

    Do not let us be cowards!  Do not let us insult God by insulting ourselves.  No temptation comes from anywhere but within.  Christ has nothing to do with our temptations save to soften and modify them.  'There hath no temptation overtaken you but such as is common to man, and God . . . will with every temptation make a way of escape.'  'All things work together for good': the good to make us better and the better to make us best.  Man's only possible fall is over himself.  The great and fruitful things of life are the painful.

 
V.

THE HEARER'S MIRROR

    But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.   JAS. i. 22-4.

IT is difficult for us Westerns to realize the peculiar conditions under which the first Christian preachers did their work.  The Oriental is a born debater.  Voluble and argumentative, he is a bad listener, and insists on his right to put his own word in.  Missionaries in China and India confess that their services are very unlike ours, and generally develop into Socratic disputations.  Any passer-by may drop in, have his little say, and pass placidly on his way again.

    It was evidently under such conditions that the ancient Hebrew prophets did their work, and there is ample proof in the New Testament that Christ and His successors suffered the same sort of inconvenience.  St. Paul, too, had to complain of it, and, as we see, St. James also found it uncomfortable and dangerous.

    It is only by bearing this peculiarity in mind that we understand some of the scenes described in the Acts of the Apostles, or the curious incidents alluded to in the Epistles.

    But preaching is a very serious business. The power by whom he is commissioned, the nature of the truths he announces, the incalculable value of the souls to whom he is sent, and the tremendous issues at stake, make the vocation of the preacher positively oppressive in its responsibility.  Most of us are agreed upon that, and are not too diffident in saying so.  It is well that it is so; it is one of the secrets of pulpit success.  But it is to be feared that we are not equally decided and unanimous upon another point.  We appreciate to the full the responsibility of the man in the pulpit, but we do not see that that involves equal responsibility upon the man in the pew.  But it does.  The one is included in the other.  Every reason that makes it dreadful to preach makes it equally serious to hear.  These are not the happiest times for the pulpit; the passion for hearing so characteristic of our fathers has cooled down seriously of late, and very flimsy excuses are sufficient to induce us to intermit the practice.  And it may be observed that, just as sick people who have most need for food have also least appetite for it, so those who manifest least anxiety to hear betray in their lives the greatest need for instruction.

    But there are many of us still who do hear, much and often.  We are in our places with commendable punctuality every Sabbath day; we listen to the preacher with courteous attention, and even sometimes endure him to the point of heroism.  We have a quick and keen appreciation of every morsel he gives us, and are amongst his most inspiring listeners.  And we remember what we hear; the points of the discourse stick in our minds like arrows in a target; some of us can carry away considerable portions of them, and even reproduce them with highly original embellishments afterwards.  We remember the sermon most of the day, and there have been known phenomenal instances in which fragments of the Sunday sermon have been producible as late as Monday morning.

    All the same, we have not outgrown the evils complained of by St. James.  We remember a preacher's mannerisms, his oddities, his witticisms, or his pointed home-thrusts—at other people.  Five minutes added to the length of a sermon will redeem it from oblivion, and we remember—never to give that prophet another chance.  We note the literary finish of a sermon, or its lack of it, the sparks of epigram, the telling illustrations, and listen with sheer delight to the thrilling peroration.  And thus the preacher's reputation is built up, the congregation gets its decent Sunday entertainment, and everything is satisfactory!

    Is it?  Is the preacher of the gospel a sort of verbal conjurer, juggling with a text of Scripture?  Should congregations come together to be respectably entertained?  The true preacher is the herald of the Lord of Hosts.  By the authority of his commission and the character of his message he has a right to say, 'I have a message from God unto thee.'  The preacher's message is not an illustration of the art of rhetoric, it is a royal proclamation, an exposition of the mind of God.  Men are not called together to have their emotions stirred, their fancy tickled, and their literary knowledge extended, but to hear eternal truth.  But if this awful business of preaching and hearing is to be judged by its apparent effect on most of those who hear, it is still too sadly true: 'Eyes have they, but they see not; ears have they, but they hear not.'  They draw water from the wells of salvation, but they draw it in sieves; they go and gather gold and precious stones, but they put them into bags with holes.  They see themselves time by time in the gospel mirror on the Sunday, but they go away and 'forget what manner of persons they are.'

    Now we all detest deception—and we all practise it.  The deadliest form of deceit is self-deception—it is also the commonest.  The man who is scrupulously honest to everybody else is a rogue and a trickster to himself.  Take this business of preaching and hearing, for instance.  We hear the proclamation of the truth, and we heartily assent to it; we generously admire the honesty and ability of the man who delivers it, but there we stop.  But the only object of preaching is that it may influence practice, the only purpose of hearing is that we may do; and if we do not do, it were almost better not to have heard.

    Take a few sample cases.  A man goes to God's house on the Sabbath, and finds that the preacher is 'getting at him.'  He holds up what St. James calls the gospel mirror until the hearer can see every line of his soul's features, every flaw, every blot.  It probes him to the quick, and he winces under it.  His 'amiable weakness' becomes a deadly sin, and he despises himself and quails in the sight of God and his conscience.  Then the preacher touches his besetting sin, shows how it came and what it may grow to.  Then the way to get rid of it, all is explained, and the hearer resolves that he will.  Does he?  In the days of the week following he frequents the infected and forbidden neighbourhood, eats again of the fatal fruit, drinks once more of the stolen waters.  The preacher made him see himself on the Sunday, but in the days of the week he has 'forgotten what manner of person he is.'

    A man hears a sermon on the privileges and distinctions of the Christian, and the lofty, undying joys of religion.  Then he is told what these high honours involve—the upright dealing, the clean thinking, the charitable speaking, and he sees it all.  He sees how paltry and mean were his tricks in trade and his ambiguities in conversation, and resolves, God helping him, henceforth to 'keep himself unspotted from the world.'  But ere the week is out he is driving his cheese-paring bargain again, issuing his questionable advertisement again, doing his own work, or no work at all, in his employer's time again.  He had seen in the gospel mirror on the Sabbath what a glorious thing it was to be a Christian, but in the days of the week he had 'forgotten what manner of person he was.'

    A third man hears a tender discourse about charity, loving-kindness, and mutual forgiveness.  He is reminded how weak he is himself, how often he needs the pardon of both God and his fellow man, and how inconsistent it is to be hard and censorious; but in the days of the week he is judging unjustly, speaking unkindly, raking up old grievances, whispering old slanders, and carelessly misrepresenting his fellows again.  Gazing into the Glass of Truth, he had seen how beautiful a thing Christian brotherhood was, and that every man was his brother and benefactor; but he goes away and 'forgets what manner of person he is.'

    Now a bad memory is a very inconvenient thing.  The reputation for having one may be useful sometimes, but the thing itself is a serious disability.  A man known to have a treacherous memory is excused for forgetting trifles, but if the matter be serious the plea of forgetfulness is an aggravation of the offence.  A man borrows money on a faithful promise to pay on a certain date—and fails.  Do we accept the plea of forgetfulness in such a case?  We feel that the excuse is worse than the offence.  It was a thing no man ought to forget, and the man who does is not fit to have anybody's money.  A man who protested that he was dying, but declared that he had forgotten there were such persons as doctors, would simply not be believed, and the same might be said of a farmer who declared that he had forgotten to put seed into his field.  So, when a man with an immortal soul within him, a record of sin against him, and a dread Judgement before him, hears and hears eternal truth but does not heed it, it is a sign of something amiss; it is a symptom of serious disorder; there is something wrong with the acoustic properties of that man's soul.  He has got deafness of the heart, like old Falstaff.  'It is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking,' that he is troubled with.

    What is the cause of this strange moral deafness? why do we hear and not hear?  It is simply that we are not sufficiently interested: our minds are so preoccupied with machines and stock and ledgers and wages and dividends that there is not room in them for God.  We close our places of business, but even then our bodies are in one place and our minds in another.  There are so many noisy, trumpery things in men's hearts that they have no ears for the still small voice of the Eternal Spirit.

    'Take heed how ye hear!'  Mere hearing with the outward ear will only increase our condemnation.  Looking into a mirror will not make a plain face handsome or a dirty one clean, but if we go into God's presence unwashed and disfigured with sin the fact that we have had the mirror and looked into it will immensely increase our condemnation.

    Sermons!  How many sermons we hear, and how ridiculously small is the result!  Some have heard discourses on patience all their lives, and are not even so patient as they were.  Men hear sermons on charity, and it is the last thing they cultivate; the Parable of the Rich Fool, the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the Cruel Debtor times without count, and are worldly and covetous yet.  They have heard about the Ten Virgins until the topic is stale, but they are negligent and procrastinating yet.

    Ah, preaching is weary work.  'We have piped unto you and you have not danced, mourned unto you and you have not wept.'  'Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?'

    We are not to judge this business of preaching by the preacher, nor even by his message.  Some of the things you hear from the pulpit are better forgotten—but you know what these are.  We should measure this business by Him from whom all preachers receive their mandate: by the justest, most serious estimate we can reach of the value of our own souls; by the awful sublimity of the topics discussed, and by the dread issues at stake.  We are souls—great, free, immortal souls.  We are here for a short but infinitely precious time to prepare ourselves for the eternal life awaiting us.  'Take heed how ye hear!'

    'For whoso heareth these sayings of Mine and doeth them not, shall be likened to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house; and it fell and great was the fall of it.'