mule, whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle," are but types of innumerable creatures, all of which are governed according to their nature. * * * * * II. Secondly, God has provided very special and very abundant instruction for us according to our own nature. "I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye." Whether it is God that says, "I will instruct thee in the way thou shalt go," or whether it is David that says it, as he said in the fifty-first Psalm, "Then will I teach transgressors thy ways," it matters little. For if it is David, he was only the minister of God. When he, inspired of the Divine Spirit, taught men the way which they should go, it was God Himself that taught them through him. So that I shall not hesitate to use the words as God's own, "I will instruct thee and teach thee." And hence my general remark-God has provided very special and very abundant instruction for us according to our nature-instruction which, having respect to the specialities of our nature, appeals to our reason, our conscience, and our sense of religion. * * * * * III. But now, in the third and last place, let me remind you of certain consequences that are sure to follow the neglect of these privileges. And now I come to the other texts which I have associated with the words of the thirty-second Psalm, "A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool's back." If a man will not be ruled and taught as a man ought to be, by means that are suited to his own high and intelligent nature, he must be ruled and taught as brutes are. "A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool's back." When other means fail, the rod is the last resort. And if the rod do not make the fool wise, it will at least punish and restrain him. Now this process you witness every day. Our police magistrates, and our higher judges, are perpetually applying the rod to the fool's back. A young nobleman, the son of a late most honoured Duke, with an annuity of £400 a year, spends £3,000 in one year's gambling and gaiety, and finds himself in the bankruptcy court, and in hourly danger of prison. What say you to such Solomon says, "A rod for that fool's back." A clerk with less than £150 a year of salary, lives at the rate of £8,000, and makes up the difference mysteriously by the persevering robbery of his employers. He will not be taught the most common-place virtue of social life, honesty, by the laws of God or the maxims of man, so that he must be taught in another way. "A rod for that fool's back." He is now a fugitive and a vagabond on the face of the earth. The rod of English justice is preparing for him; and even if he escapes it, he is now in his exile enduring the rod with which a retributive Providence visits wrong-doers. Every day's newspapers supply us with examples of this sort, and our own observation supplies us with examples. Young men will tamper with truth, with honour, and with honesty; they will waste, they will gamble, a case? they will drink, and they will indulge evil passions-they will in spite of God and man. Divine teaching, parental teaching, friendly teaching, Providential teaching is lost upon them. On they will go. go. On every side of the path they tread are the bleached bones of those who have trodden that path before them. But they are infatuated, and will not see, and will not listen, and will not pause till they are ruined. And then comes the rod, the thrice-weighted rod, for the fool's back. It is the same lesson that is suggested by the words I have just quoted from the Book of Judges. Gideon was called of God to deliver Israel from the enemies that oppressed His nation, and among these were two kings of Midian. When Gideon, with his chosen 300, were pursuing these Midianite princes, they were faint through want of food, and asked bread from the people of Succoth. The people of Succoth were bound, not merely by the ties of nationality, but by the obligations of their faith in God, to aid God's chosen servant in this conflict. But they were mean-spirited and selfish, and said in effect to Gideon, "You are not yet the conqueror, you may be the conquered; and if the Kings of Midian prevail over you, what then will become of us if we now give you bread ?” The Israelite commander soon discomfited the host of Midian and returned to Succoth. And now the men who would not be taught the duties of patriotism and of faith, by the history of their nation and by the teachings of God, must be taught some other way. The story tells us, in the language of bitter irony, that Gideon took the elders of the city, and thorns of the wilderness and briers, and with them he taught the men of Succoth! (Judges viii. 16.) This is a common process of Divine providence. It began in Paradise, and is reproduced in every generation of mankind. Adam and Eve would not be taught their duty to God by all the love and kindness God bestowed on them; and they must go forth into the wilderness to be taught by the thorns and briers of a righteous curse. Manasseh, whom we take as a type of children highly favoured but perversely set on doing evil, would not be taught by the example of his good father or by the law of God, with which he was familiar from his childhood, but did evil in the sight of the Lord, and built altars for the host of heaven, even in the courts of the house of the Lord. And so he must be taught in another way. "Wherefore the Lord brought upon him the captains of the host of Assyria, which took Manasseh among the thorns and bound him with fetters, and carried him to Babylon. And when he was in affliction, he besought the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers." Nebuchadnezzar had opportunities of Divine knowledge, which few heathen monarchs have possessed, and seemed for a time to yield himself to impressions which Divine dreams made upon him. But twelve months effaced these impressions, and he must be taught in another way. While in the act of self-worship, saying, "Is not this great Babylon that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty ?"—while the word was in his mouth, there came a voice from heaven, saying, "O King Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: the kingdom is departed from thee, and they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will." Judas would not be taught by all the Divine glory he witnessed in the character of Jesus Christ, or by all the Divine words he heard from His lips; he would, notwithstanding all the love and self-sacrifice that were perpetually pouring their influences upon him, cherish in his heart that miserable covetousness, which at last sold his Lord for thirty pieces of silver. He must be taught in another way. For him there remains nothing but the wilderness, with its thorns and briers. Pilate believes in the innocence of Jesus, but has not courage to be just. His many crimes render it dangerous for him to be reported to Rome, and rather than incur this danger he gives up the Holy One and the Just to be crucified. He must be taught his duty in another way. The very thing he feared came upon him. He is reported to Rome, he is recalled, and at last, wearied with misfortune, he puts an end to his own life. The legend is that he sought to hide his sorrows on a mountain by the lake of Lucerne ; and there, after spending years in its recesses, in remorse and despair rather than penitence, plunged into a dismal lake, which occupies its summit. And, according to popular belief, a form is often seen to emerge from its gloomy waters, and go through the action of one washing his hands; and when he does so, dark clouds of mist gather round the mountain and presage a storm. Legends, such as these, historically worthless, are witnesses to the ineffaceable impression of the human soul that there is a Providence which pursues the evil doer with judgment. out And there is. Those who will not bow to the Divine law, who will not be taught by Divine truth, who will not be won by Divine love, must be dealt with in another way. "A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool's back." "He took the elders of the city, and thorns of the wilderness and briers, and with them he taught the men of Succoth." "Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched my hand and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me; for that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord: they would none of my counsel; they despised all my reproof. Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices." This, my dear friends, is the back-ground, dark and terrible, of the privileges with which you enter on life. You are personally responsible to God. This is the thought with which I began my discourse. Personally responsible. It is a thought to make one tremble. But with a life of peril before you, a life in which multitudes of souls are wrecked, your God stands by you with fatherly love and care, and says: "I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go; I will guide thee with mine eye." Know ye then your privilege. Accept the offer of Divine guidance and teaching. Place yourselves this May-day under the guardianship of God. Do it, not merely under a sense of your weakness, but of your sinfulness likewise. Do it through Him who died for sinners, and ever liveth to bring them to God and to heaven. 1869 "Just as I am--Thy love unknown, Has broken every barrier down; JOHN KENNEDY. THE RELATION OF CREEDS TO CHRISTIAN LIFE. From the Boston "Congregational Quarterly.” WE are to consider the relation which definite statements of doctrinal belief sustain toward spiritual life. 66 I. As to their origin, they grow out of the spiritual life. The creed of Christendom has been elaborated from Scripture by hearts that supremely loved the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus grew that sweetest flower of primitive theology, the Apostles' Creed. Even the sceptic asserts that Christ was deified by the " enthusiasm " of His disciples, that "the heart of Christendom gave the law to its understanding." The cavil only distorts a great fact, that Christian dogma grew up in the midst of an intense Christian life, yea, a life so immortal and self-sustaining that pagan malice with its deadliest thrusts was impotent to slay it. The doctrine of the Deity of Christ was formulated by the Council of Nicæa, A.D. 325, immediately after the close of the martyr period of the Church. This was the article of faith which the confessors of Christ in vast multitudes had witnessed with dying prayers and sealed with blood. "And of the assembly which gave it form," says Stanley,* "the older and by far the larger part. . . had lived through the last and worst of the persecutions, and they now came, like a regiment out of some frightful siege or battle, decimated and mutilated by the tortures or the hardships they had undergone. . . It was on their character as an army of confessors and martyrs, quite as much as on their character as an æcumenical council, that their authority reposed." The Creed of Nicæa, then, the most universally accepted confession of the Christian world to-day, is the work of men who had suffered for what they *"History of the Eastern Church," 186. loved, who knew for what they had suffered, and who speak what they do know from heart and life. We may say, then, that creed was a genuine outgrowth of spiritual life, digesting and interpreting the Word of God. We find substantially the same process of doctrinal development out of spiritual life repeating itself in the article of Justification through Faith. Augustine, indeed, left this in a partial confusion, from which it took a thousand years of bondage under papal legalism to work free. His controversy with Pelagius, however, concerning sin and grace, furnished from his own deep experience a large body of useful thought on this subject for his pupils among the reformers and their forerunners to work up. "In him," says Dr. Schaff, "the metaphysician and the Christian believer coalesce: he teaches nothing which he has not felt." The true biblical doctrine is enunciated, however, first in the eleventh century, in the Cur Deus Homo of Anselm, of whom Neander says: "He was the Augustine of his age. What gives him his great importance is that unity of spirit in which everything is of one piece, the harmony between life and knowledge, which in his case nothing disturbed."* Such a life it was that first gave dogmatic form to the doctrine which, after five centuries more of travail among the precursors of the Reformation, Luther again brought forth, and found a nation prepared to receive it. And of Luther, how the doctrine of justification took form out of the Scriptures amid the studies and glooms and tumults of his fervid soul, it is needless to repeat what all know. His faith, and that of his followers, has ever been the foster-child of a Christian experience. The dogma has been the interpretation of Scripture by the glowing heart," Pectus facit theologum." II. As to their influence, doctrinal beliefs nourish the spiritual life. Athanasius, "the father of theology," indeed battled for an iota at the Council of Nicæa, because, as has been truly said, a letter may be as important in theology as in algebra. Yet he had among contemporaries the reputation of a reconciler, a peacemaker, "the Samuel of the Church;" pursued with more vindictive hatred than any man of his time, yet never defending himself with the weapons of persecution or retaliation. To such a life, among the fierce passions of the excitable Orient, we point as that of the pre-eminent Christian dogmatist,— "The royal-hearted Athanase, With Paul's own mantle blest." Augustine, too, than whom a soul more tender, humble, devout, never breathed, may be cited in illustration. His portrait is the fit expression of his character; in its upturned eye of faith, and its burning heart, love's offering, presented in his right hand, while the left hand holds in pause the pen of controversy. So scrupulous was that heart, even in the minor morals, that this couplet was engraved upon the dinner-table : "To carp at absent ones who thinks it meet, "Church History," iv. 361. |