Christianity.

Ir any of you should ever visit Florence, that artistic metropolis of the world, you will doubtless go to see a group of famous statues by Michael Angelo. Two of them represent Dawn and Twilight. Twilight is a man hardly past the vigour of life-his limbs left purposely unfinished by the Artist. A lethargy is stealing over his frame, a deathlike slumber is upon his eyelids. He looks as though he could yet do mighty things, if he could once rouse himself for work and effort. But no-there is some fatal charm which prevents his doing that, the day-light slowly wastes-the light in which alone man can work— and fold on fold the night is coming on. Turn now to the figure of Dawn. She is a woman of earnest and thoughtful face, in the first glory of pure and radiant womanhood. The brightness of the morning is on her limbs; her eyes, from which she is just withdrawing the veil, are turned towards the source of light. In another moment she will be alive and awake and at work, spreading a beneficent power among men.

Such, my friends, are two historical aspects of Theism. In past times there has been the Theism which has turned its back upon the Christian revelation, and slowly but surely it has always sunk back into slumber and lethargy and death. And there has been the Theism which has struggled onward into the fuller light of CHRIST, and that has been a living power among men. For my witnesses I appeal to Judaism, Arianism and Mahometanism, the only Theisms which have been tried on any large scale. Can any of these at the present day, whatever they have been in times past, be called regenerating moral powers?

To the members of the Brahmo Somaj I said last Sunday a word of genuine thanks. Will they accept from me to-day a word of loving warning?

Now all Christians, I need hardly say, are Theists. They are

believers in one GOD, and One only. The doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation guard and supplement this Unity; they do not contradict it.

Let me say a word about these two central truths of Christianitythese two doctrines which alone, when firmly held, make a Christian. I do not profess to explain them-GOD would be no God to me if I could perfectly penetrate His Nature. To do so I should have to be on a level with Him. But I will give you an illustration which may help you to see that, though these doctrines are above the grasp of human reason, they are not unreasonable. You yourselves are three persons in one: you are reason, heart, and will: you say, I think, I love, I will: and yet it is not your heart that thinks or your reason that wills. You must confess that, in some sense, you are one but you are three. Again there is another division to be made of your human nature, the division into soul-the spiritual part as a whole-and body, the material part. These are held together by one personality. And so, "As the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so GOD and man is One CHRIST." I give this, I say, but as an illustration; God's Nature is not to be measured by man's. And yet, to one who accepts the Christian doctrine that man is made in the image of God, it is more than an illustration; though it does not amount to a proof. In any case, is it a shallower or a deeper conception of GOD, to say that He is less complex, less manifold and marvellous than man?

And now let me ask you to hold these thoughts in your minds, while I resume briefly the argument of the preceding lectures. I said if you remember at the beginning, that there were three conditions indispensable to the search after truth-the honest desire of obeying it, the belief that there is a truth to discover, and the conviction that we can discover it. I laid these down as assumptions, I did not undertake to prove them: nor do I think they can be proved. But the object of the former lectures was to show that each of them respectively answers to one of the deepest and most imperious needs of the human soul-the sense of Duty, the thirst for a Religion, and the belief in GOD; needs which wherever crushed are certain to assert themselves again; needs which are felt indeed in very different measure by different souls, but to which, wherever they are most strongly felt, those three primary conditions make their stest appeal. Of these needs the most fundamental of all was

the conception of duty, orm oral obligation, and by making this enquiry into truth we hoped to establish this on a firmer footing than that vague, instinctive, unsteady longing of our human nature.

Now remember I have not spoken and I do not speak to those in whom this conception of duty has been allowed to die. But I ask you, my brothers, who have trod with me along the steps of this argument under a solemn sense of your responsibility for the truth, whether we have not found a basis on which duty can securely rest, and be deepened, strengthened, and enlarged. We have seen that if we accept the principle of Theism-"Thou shalt love the LORD thy GOD with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind "-it includes all those other principles which by themselves could only make imperfect ethical systems: the love of man; the satisfaction of the intuitive moral sense; the reaching after a righteous happiness for ourselves. "Our nature in its perfect state is intended to be the balance of many great forces acting in mutual correspondence under an overruling power, like the movements of the great deep composed of its many tides and currents under the law of gravity: and these several forces in our nature are true when they are elicited by their respective attractions, and directed to their intended ends, under the will of God."

We wanted a sanction for duty. We have found it: but in the quest there has dawned on us the possibility of holiness, perfection, and union with GOD.

1. Perfection! Holiness! Union with God! The very words send a wholesome and a sobering shudder through my frame, recalling me back to facts. Perfection! O world of nature, art thou not stamped from top to bottom with imperfection-ruin, waste and decay? Holiness! O world of man, art thou not scored across and across with moral evil, earthly, sensual, devilish? Union with GOD! O my soul, I look within thee, and do I not see that which GOD, "Who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity," must loathe and abhor?

It is true. The whole of this natural world, the sphere of nature, the sphere of man, the hidden recess of my own heart. is signed and sealed-surely by some enemy's hand-with the mark of corruption. (a) Look out into the world of nature. Is it not so? Could the Creator look down upon His work now, and say, Behold it is very good. Take into account that which scientific men call the waste of

Nature, her much promise and little result: which St. Paul calls the subjecting of creation to vanity,-emptiness, failure and disappointment. There are the many stunted growths and wasted seeds, the leaves which fade before the autumn, the roots which have no glad renewal in the spring. There are the ravages of storms, the untameableness of animals, the immoderate rain which floods our meadows, the drought which follows upon cloudless skies. There are those terrible famines with which you in this country are unhappily familiar. There are those fearful hurricanes which lay low whole villages, and sweep away whole populations out to sea. So much is this the case that, though there is a revelation of GOD in Nature, yet those who look upon Nature alone might well ask-nay, it is no imaginary case, they do ask-whether Nature does not conceal GOD more than she reveals Him; she testifies to a great plan, but that plan seems more than half to fail-it is everywhere broken, frustrated and checked.

"Are GOD and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to GOD,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is LORD of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.”*

(b) Human life tells the same tale. Oh, we have not to go far to look for it. Here in Calcutta draw a circle of 100 yards radius round the Church in which we are gathered. How many sorrows will you embrace, how much disease, how much physical pain, how much mental anguish? How much brutality is being committed, how

Tennyson: In Memoriam. LV.

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much selfish lust indulged, how much trampling on the rights of others, how much violent assertion of high-handed wrong? "What a thick hell of hatreds and hopes and fears." I am not speaking of Calcutta alone: it would be the same if we were in London. Human nature tells the same tale as Creation does, and that tale is, that somehow or other, "the world is out of joint."

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(c) And now let us look into our own hearts a moment. nothing there to correspond to all this? In the world we ghastly effects of sin: in ourselves we see the sin itself. proud thoughts, these covetous desires, these sensual imaginations, what are they but the root evil of all? Do not these justify, as it were, the imperfection of the outer world, for they tell us that if there were a perfect world, we should not be fit to live in it. Do they not justify our present state of banishment from the holy GOD? For they tell us that if we could come near Him, He must shrink from us in loathing, and we must tremble from His presence? Do they not justify all the evils that may happen to us-sorrow and pain, sickness, disease, and death. Death! what is death? Bodily death is but the shadow of which this gigantic central evil is the substance. Moral evil—or, as in the light of God's holiness we have learnt to call it, Sin-is death. For a right view of any religion, every thing depends upon how deep our view of this moral evil is. "A mere superficial view is followed by a religion of the merest sham, or a fairly contented worldliness: a deep and serious sense of sin by an earnest, an ennobling struggle.” Let us strengthen our own feeble sense of it by the plain words of the old prophets, who at any rate were true observers of human nature. The heart is deceitful above all things, and woefully sick."* "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds and bruises and putrifying sores." Behold, I was shapen in wickedness and in sin hath my mother conceived me."

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Let me sum up this portion of the argument in the weighty words of Dr. Newman:

"To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments,

* Jeremiah XVII. 9. 'Desperately wicked' is a mistake of translation and an exaggeration of fact.