SPECULATION AND THE MASSES.
I think that the mass of the poor have more reality of thought than reasoners, and see more justly the true character of things. Their occupation with labor gives this; they toil to exist. That is now God's ordinance. What they get outside this must be real. Speculation has no place here. They may know nothing of a revelation, but if they have the thought that there is one, they want one that is a revelation from God,—something He has told them, not an improved Shakespeare. If they have Diana and Jupiter, they take Diana and Jupiter as realities. If they are under the law of Moses, they will not spiritualize everything with Philo, or his modern imitators. They will take it as Moses gave it, or not at all. If they are idolaters, they will be idolaters bond fide, not readers of Lucian. If they are skeptical,—if this pervades the population, not merely religion but the state is near its end: by that I mean society. When man speculates on the sanctions of social life,—when the divine ever-living power of faith is gone, what holds man subject to something superior to himself,—when what links man to man is gone, self is dominant, conscious that it is self. A few minds may speculate on how much may be true, and seek refined notions out of the condensed mass of materials; the mass of men will be indifferent to all. Despotism or anarchy ensues. How long did the Roman empire survive Lucian, who was but a sign of the times? or the French monarchy the Encyclopedists? On the fall of Rome, Christianity came in as a bond. Now I see not what will, save the faithfulness of God, and the Lord Himself from heaven.
REVELATION AND MAN'S MIND.—The revelation of God is, for me, the putting an immortal soul through grace in communication with the eternal fountain of blessedness, of light, of love—with God Himself. Doubtless most important revelations accompany it, necessary for the existence or full development of this. I have God manifest in the flesh. I have the blessed relationships of Father Son, and Holy Ghost, without which it is impossible for man to be thus connected with God. Besides, I have the church united to Christ; subjects into which I cannot enter now, but which, while, when revealed, they give to us conscious links of union with what is divine, and develop divine affections in the relationships they place us in, must be the subject of revelation. Man's mind cannot go beyond its own sphere. It is not God, and if it is to be really elevated, it must be elevated by something that is outside and above itself. That is, there must be a positive revelation of something not within the sphere of its own proper apprehensions. It may develop its own powers, it may create poetically what is within the sphere of those powers; but in the nature of things it cannot by itself get beyond itself. You may have Shakespeare to give all the scope of the human mind, all its workings, in a course of pictures from its highest to its lowest forms, with a graphic truth which may interest in the most absorbing way inferior minds to his—minds which cannot do this for themselves; but it is always and must be the human mind, and within the sphere of its own limits, or it would not be the human mind. The consequence is, that though it may elevate these inferior minds above their level, it contents them with man, and in result, by excluding God, degrades them from what they might be. Poetry is the effort of the human mind to create, by imagination, a sphere beyond materialism which faith gives in realities. But then it cannot rise above the level of its source, whatever displays of force there may be by its being conducted in a secret channel, and not exposed to be wasted in the open intercourse of the world. In result, it sinks down to the level towards which all human nature runs, and then settles, not to rise again. There may be a certain subjective development of mind in its use, but no more.
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Modern infidelity will allow Christianity as much as you please, provided Christ be, as another, a minister to elevate humanity as it is, comes in in his own place as one eminent instrument, and man, I, be all. I maintain the authority of God's word because it is God's, that man is lost in himself, and that God has appeared. Owned, we possess Him in blessing; rejected, we are His self-condemned enemies. I maintain redemption, which brings man out of the condition he was in, into another new and blessed one before God, according to His own righteousness and holiness. I do not want humanity educated, but God known.
LIFE AND REDEMPTION.—You must give up that which alone elevates man, his association with God, or associate him with Him according to what He is. The nature and character of God must be maintained, or it is not with Him I am associated. And I must have morally the qualities which judge of good and evil, as He does, to be really associated with Him. But I do judge the evil, and see the guilt. Now Christianity meets this, and gives me a full blessing, because it gives me life. He that hath the Son hath life. He is a life-giving Spirit.
But then, besides giving me that life, it takes away all guilt from me. I can judge evil fully in my heart and conscience, because I know I shall never be judged for it; that Christ has by Himself purged my sins, and sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.
I affirm that, without these two principles, a new life and the perfect purging of sins according to God's nature by redemption, no real moral elevation of man can take place, because he cannot be spiritually associated with God according to the perfection of God's nature. The communication of the divine nature, though absolutely necessary, does not suffice, because the communication of that nature makes one judge evil, as God does, at any rate in principle. I see the selfishness and impurity that is in man's mind—that is, now, in mine. And for that very reason I see guilt and wretchedness in myself. I have the conscience of evil or guilt (not necessarily by crimes or vices, but by comparing my whole inward life with the loveliness of the Divine nature) on my soul; conscience must be purged for God, as a consciously responsible creature before Him, that my heart may be free before Him, that His holy nature, which must repel evil, and which is the very source of my delight, may be maintained even for my soul to enjoy.
THE WORD OF GOD.—No one ever produced anything like it. You have only to read Apocryphal books. There is effort in them; there is none in Scripture. Not once do you find an epithet attached to Jesus, (this were a human feeling, perhaps a right one,) but what He is to tell its own tale of what He is. What human writer in recording His history would have kept uniformly to this Yet how it becomes a divine person! Every epithet would lower. They may be put as the expression of my sentiment, but not as the cause of them. And how it has forced man to deal with it. Infidels or not, they must deal with it where it is. It is God telling us in grace, but telling us of Himself, telling of heavenly things, and for man. What can num do? It concerns him. He may be angry with the grace, angry to be forced to say he does not like what is heavenly, he may exalt heathenism which has been tired of itself; but there it is; and he has to say to it. Blessed they who have tasted that God is in it, speaks in it, and that have found Him to be holy, as He must be, but love in revealing Himself to them, and in bringing them by redemption and Divine righteousness to Himself to enjoy Him forever.
MIRACLE.—I believe that in a certain sense the physical world is subject to man, and, if God allow him, I know no limit to his employing the powers of nature. Miracle is divine power over nature, the will of God in exercise not ordinarily but extraordinarily, whoever may be the person who brings that will into play. The powers used are, to my mind, immaterial; they may be natural or supernatural; but when natural powers are in exercise according to the prescribed course of things, there is no miracle. The power exercised may be as great, or greater, but it is the ordinary course of nature. But when not in that course, even though it be the same power, but by an extraordinary occasional action of the Divine will any event is produced, this is a miracle.
COSMOGONY.—Ones we have seen the laborious efforts at cosmogony which occupied the heathen world, and that not one ever arrived at the simple fact of a creation, the force of Heb. 11:33Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. (Hebrews 11:3) becomes obvious. One sentence of revelation from God settled what all the profound elaborations of man never could arrive at; and, what is not very much to the honor of man's intellect, once the fact is stated, there is the consciousness that it could not be otherwise. Yet, instead of the best and most probable account (as the skeptic calls it) that could be given, it is in absolute opposition to the uniform and universal view of the matter in every known record.
DO YOU LOVE THE TRUTH?—When infidels speak of a love of truth, they never go beyond Pilate's question, what is truth? It is never a holding fast truth they have got, but a casting doubt on what others believe, and professing to search for it always to be ready to receive it because they have never got it.
The word of God gives you many certain truths, and it makes you doubt of nothing. It has no need, for it possesses the truth, and gives what is positive. This is an immense difference. It stamps both morally.
We are in serious, most serious times, and there must be reality. Only the Lord keeps us from pretended love of the truth, which destroys the truth we love; which has nothing to keep, and hence has nothing to lose, and can be always seeking. When conventional systems are crumbling around, and evil raises up its head, may men be seen who can walk peacefully, because they possess what can never crumble till God makes all things new according to the truth He has revealed.
The question for a soul now in Christ, that blessed person who reveals the Father; the truth of a living acting Spirit, the Comforter, given; and the revealed written word of God, the only source and standard of truth, and that which we are called to confess is the truth, known by the Spirit from that word, known in the heart with God, and while acknowledging we may be mistaken in a hundred points, knowing that we have the truth for which martyrs have died, and that we had rather give up our lives than lose or deny it. The Lord Jesus is at the right hand of God the Father. He may suffer us to be tried, but He is above all and will prevail. He watches over us always as the good shepherd, and will in the Father's own time come and receive us to Himself, that where He is we may be also.
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Christ has been manifested to put away sin out of God's sight, out of man's heart, and out of the world. The great work which does it is accomplished, the results not all accomplished in power.
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He who does not see the principle and nature and guilt of sin, as it stands in man's self-will, has not the estimate which the knowledge of a holy nature in reconciliation to God gives.
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It is a deadly principle, making men's present habit of thinking the measure of the fitness of God's word; and thus gradually leading to the belief that it was the product of the age and country it was written in.
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The cross made an impassable gulf between the Old and the New Testament; yet the New confirmed and adopted the Old; and the Old predicted and prepared the way for the New which yet set it aside. This remarkable phenomenon stands alone. No two systems on earth stand in the same relation as these do to one another.
THE LAWFUL USE OF LAW.—The true secret of putting us under the law is, that, having nothing of the discipline of the primitive church, they are obliged to modify the gospel, and make the law a schoolmaster after Christ to keep men in order. Then all naturally fall under it. Because man has the keeping of it, it flatters man; if he has a tender conscience, it tortures him, as we often see; if not, he thinks of himself, takes for granted some failure is to be there, judges it perhaps pretty easily, will really sorrow if the new nature be there; but in any case he can think of himself, and this the heart likes. A man likes thinking badly of himself, and saying so, better than not thinking of self at all, and simply displaying Christ's precious life by thinking on Him only. We have to judge ourselves; but our right state is thinking of the Lord alone.
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True simplicity is forgetfulness of self; and there is only one way to arrive at it (for it is as all spiritual life, a matter of overcoming), and that is by being much with God, and God known in grace, because then self (the opposite of simplicity) dies down.