The Teacher’s Great text

For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. But if any man buildeth on the foundation gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, stubble; each man’s work shall be made manifest; for the day shall declare it, because it is revealed in fire; and the fire itself shall prove each man’s work of what sort it is.—1 Corinthians 3:11-13.

1. The vivid imagination of St. Paul puts before us here an important truth in a picturesque form. Two workmen are building side by side. One builds a palace, the other a hovel. The materials which one uses are gold and silver, for decoration; and for solidity costly stones, by which is not meant diamonds and emeralds and the like, but valuable building material, such as marbles and granites and alabaster. The other employs timber, dry reeds, straw. No doubt in Corinth, as in all ancient cities, side by side with the temples shining in marble and Corinthian brass were the huts of the poor and of slaves built of such flimsy materials as these. Suddenly there plays around both buildings a great fire, the fire of the Lord coming to Judgment. The marbles gleam the whiter, and the gold and the silver flash the more resplendently, whilst the tongues of light leap about them; but the straw hovel goes up in a flare! The one man gets wages for work that lasts, the other man gets no pay for what perishes. He is dragged through the smoke, saved by a hair’s breadth, but sees all his toil lying there in white ashes at his feet.

The building, if it be really of gold, silver, and precious stones, is not destroyed. It becomes rather, in due course, the foundation on which the new superstructure is reared. Is not that the meaning of the somewhat difficult lines in Browning’s “Aristophanes’ Apology”?—

And what’s my teaching but—accept the old,

Contest the strange! acknowledge work that’s done,

Misdoubt men who have still their work to do!

Religions, laws and customs, poetries,

Are old? So much achieved victorious truth!

Each work was product of a lifetime, wrung

From each man by an adverse world: for why?

He worked, destroying other older work

Which the world loved and so was loth to lose.

Whom the world beat in battle—dust and ash!

Who beat the world, left work in evidence,

And wears its crown till new men live new lives,

And fight new fights, and triumph in their turn.1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 200.]

2. The original application of these words is distinctly to Christian teachers. The whole section starts from a rebuke of the party spirit in the Corinthian Church which led them to swear by Paul or Peter or Apollos, and to despise all teachers but their own favourite. The Apostle reminds these jangling partisans that all teachers are but instruments in God’s hands, who is the true Worker, the true Husbandman, the true Builder. That word opens up a whole region of thought to his ardent mind. He goes on to speak of the foundation which God has laid, namely, the mission of Jesus Christ. That foundation laid once for all in actual reality, in the historical facts of our Lord’s life, death, and resurrection, had been laid in preaching by St. Paul when he founded the Corinthian Church. There cannot be two foundations. So all other teachers at Corinth have only to build on that foundation, that is, to carry on a course of Christian teaching which rests upon that fundamental truth. Let all such teachers take heed what sort of materials they build on that foundation, that is to say, what sort of teaching they offer; for there may be gold, and silver, and precious stones—solid and valuable instruction; or there may be timber, and hay, and straw—worthless and unsubstantial teaching. The materials with which the teachers build are evidently the instruction which they give, or the doctrines which they teach.

This, then, is the teacher’s Great Text. The teacher’s work is spoken of as building, with the certainty that one day the building will be tested by fire. Let us consider—

The Foundation.

The Building.

The Fire.

I

The Foundation

1. The Foundation is already laid.—“Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid.” It was laid in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was laid before St. Paul himself or any of the Apostles began to teach.

A paradox which found favour with some of the earlier moods of German Rationalism went to the effect that St. Paul and not Jesus Christ was the real founder of Christendom. How the writer of the indignant appeal to the Corinthians, “Was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul?” could ever have been seated, by the convictions of any intelligent readers of his Epistles, in his Master’s place, might well raise our wonder, if experience did not prove that of all credulity the easiest is that which is enjoined by unbelief, and of all theories, the wildest are those which are put forward in order to discredit the creed of Christendom. If the Church is built upon the labour of Apostles, as her foundation, the Apostles themselves rested on the Chief Corner-stone. And, indeed, since Schleiermacher, the paradox in question has been discredited well-nigh everywhere. It is one of that great man’s many claims to honour, that he did more than any other writer in his day and country to reassert Christ’s true historical relation to the Christian Church.

In a lecture, given in St. George’s, Edinburgh, Principal Rainy made this comparison between Jesus and Paul: “We can easily mark the tie between the two; we also easily feel the difference. In both, there is goodwill to men below; in both, a constant reference to One above. But in the true manhood of our Lord, we own something serener, more self-contained and sovereign. The love to His Father moves in great tides of even perpetual flow. The love to men is a pure compassion, whose perfect goodness delights in bringing its sympathy and its help to the neediest and the worst, does so with a perfect understanding and an unreserved self-communication. When He speaks, He speaks in the language of His time and land and circumstances, but He speaks like one who addresses human nature itself, finding the way to the common mind and common heart of every land and every age and every condition. When He reasons, it is not like one who is clearing his own thoughts, but like one who turns away from the perversity of the caviller, or who, for the perplexed inquirer, brings into view the elements of the spiritual world he was overlooking or forgetting. And with what resource—none the less His that He rejoiced to think of it as His Father’s—does He confront whatever comes to Him in life! As we watch Him, there grows upon us the strongest sense of a perfect inner harmony with Himself and with His Father that lives through all changes. Finally, standing in this world, He declares the order of another and a higher world. He does it as one who knew it, who speaks what He had seen.

“We turn to Paul, and we perceive him also to be great; great thoughts, great affections, great efforts, great fruits are his. But he is not great in the manner of his Master. He goes through the world full of a noble self-censure that bows him willingly to the earth, and of a passionate gratitude that cannot speak its thanks but offers up its life. Like his Master, while he reverences the order of this world and of society as God has framed it, he is at the same time full of the relations of a world unseen. To that world unseen he already belongs; it determines for him, and for all who will listen to him, the whole manner of thought and life and feeling in this world; it holds him, it inspires him. But it is in the manner of faith rather than of knowledge, of earnest rather than of possession. Especially, the influence that has mastered him and is the secret of his power and nobleness, has not brought him to the final harmony of all his powers. It has, on the contrary, committed him to an inward conflict, a fight of faith, which he will never cease to wage till the final victory crowns him. This man knows the inward weakness and the inward disgrace of Sin. He knows forgiveness and repentance, and good hope through grace. The Lord received sinners and sat and ate with them; but this man was himself a sinner who was forgiven much and loved much. That was the Saviour: this, a pattern of them that should believe on Him to life everlasting.”1 [Note: The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 426.]

2. The Foundation is Jesus Christ.—“Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” What does the Apostle mean by “Jesus Christ”? The one thing fundamental, according to the teaching of St. Paul, and according to the teaching of Jesus Himself, is faith in Jesus as the Divine Redeemer of the world. In opposition to this faith there is a Religion of the Human Christ. If we look at the points in which the Religion of a Human Christ differs from the Christian faith we shall see what the Apostle means when he says that the foundation is Jesus Christ.

Two rival views are claiming the allegiance of the present generation. The one finds the basis of Christianity in the teaching of a man, inspired as Moses was inspired and more inspired, Divine as Shakespeare was Divine and more Divine, but now dead in the sense in which Moses is dead and Shakespeare is dead. The other finds the basis of Christianity in the ever-living Person of God for men made Man. Such are the views which, in some form or other, confront each one of us, and between which, sooner or later, we must make our solemn choice.1 [Note: F. Homes Dudden.]

(1) In the first place, the religion of a Human Christ as it is represented, for example, in Renan’s Life of Jesus or in Robert Elsmere, gives us as our leader, as the centre of our faith, as the object of our reverence, a human hero.

The last movement of Ruskin’s mind had been away from evangelical faith; it had coincided with his growing admiration of the great worldly, irreligious painters; his religion had become “the religion of humanity,” though “full of sacred colour and melancholy shade”; his teaching had been in such exhortations as may be based on intellectual scepticism. But while engaged on drawing Giotto’s frescoes, “I discovered,” he says, “the fallacy under which I had been tormented for sixteen years—the fallacy that Religious artists were weaker than Irreligious. I found that all Giotto’s ‘weaknesses’ (so called) were merely absences of material science. He did not know, and could not, in his day, so much of perspective as Titian—so much of the laws of light and shade, or so much of technical composition. But I found he was in the make of him, and contents, a very much stronger and greater man than Titian; that the things I had fancied easy in his work, because they were so unpretending and simple, were nevertheless entirely inimitable; that the Religion in him, instead of weakening, had solemnized and developed every faculty of his heart and hand; and finally, that his work, in all the innocence of it, was yet a human achievement and possession, quite above everything that Titian had ever done.” This “discovery” affected, first, Ruskin’s estimate of painters; and at Florence, presently, he set himself to write of Giotto and his works in Florence, as twenty years before, with a more reserved admiration for the master, he had written of Giotto and his Works in Padua.2 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, ii. 253.]

(2) In the second place, this Religion of a Human Christ blots the resurrection out of the Gospel and gives us but a cross and a tomb. Let us read Robert Elsmere’s speech to the working men of East London: “ ‘He laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock; and he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.’ The ashes of Jesus of Nazareth mingled with the earth of Palestine—

Far hence he lies

In the lone Syrian town,

And on his grave, with shining eyes,

The Syrian stars look down.

“He stopped. The melancholy cadence of the verse died away. Then a gleam broke over the pale, exhausted face—a gleam of extraordinary sweetness. ‘And in the days and weeks that followed, the devout and passionate fancy of a few mourning Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the Resurrection. How natural, and amid all its falseness how true, is that naïve and contradictory story! The rapidity with which it spread is a measure of many things. It is, above all, a measure of the greatness of Jesus, of the force with which he had drawn to himself the hearts and imaginations of men.’ ”

If It may be true, as Mr. Nettleship has said, that “A Death in the Desert goes no single step in the direction of proving Christ’s divinity as a dogma”; but the poem itself is void of all meaning, unless, in spite of its dramatic form, it can be regarded as setting forth the deepest conviction of the poet’s own soul. Hence the verdict of the man who adds the final note is this:—

If Christ, as thou affirmest, be of men

Mere man, the first and best but nothing more—

Account Him, for reward of what He was,

Now and for ever, wretchedest of all.1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 45.]

(3) Thirdly, the Religion of a Human Christ offers to us a law and an example—nothing more; the religion of Christian faith offers us a Divine power.

Mr. Gladstone has eloquently sketched in a few words the power of the Christian church: “Christianity both produced a type of character wholly new to the Roman world and it fundamentally altered the laws and institutions, the tone, temper, and tradition of that world. For example, it changed profoundly the relation of the poor to the rich, and the almost forgotten obligation of the rich to the poor. It abolished slavery, abolished human sacrifice, abolished gladiatorial shows, and a multitude of other horrors. It restored the position of woman in society. It prosecuted polygamy; and put down divorce, absolutely in the West, though not absolutely in the East. It made peace, instead of war, the normal and presumed relation between human societies. It exhibited life as a discipline, everywhere and in all its parts, and changed essentially the place and function of suffering in human experience. Accepting the ancient morality as far as it went, it not only enlarged but transfigured its teaching by the laws of humility and of forgiveness, and by a law of purity even more new and strange than these.”

(4) In the fourth place, this Religion of a Human Christ offers a temporal and local religion in place of one that is as eternal and as universal as its Divine Author. Let Robert Elsmere again explain his position: “If you wish, Catherine, I will wait—I will wait till you bid me speak; but I warn you there is something dead in me, something gone and broken. It can never live again except in forms which now it would only pain you more to think of. It is not that I think differently of this point or that point, but of life and religion altogether. I see God’s purposes in quite other proportions, as it were. Christianity seems to me something small and local. Behind it, around it, including it, I see the great drama of the world, sweeping on, led by God, from change to change, from act to act. It is not that Christianity is false, but that it is only an imperfect human reflection of a part of truth.”

It is a perfectly unique and very striking fact, that the views of Christ do not proceed from the concretely defined horizon of any age or any historical sphere, not even from His own. Mark the distinction in this respect between Christ and Socrates.1 [Note: R. Rothe, Still Hours, 213.]

3. The Foundation is the Person of Christ—Christ Himself.—This has been the teaching of the Church from the earliest day till now. In every age and in every land the Church has taught invariably that the one determining factor of the Christian religion is the Person of Jesus. That is the absolute, essential thing. The Christian religion is not a mere system of doctrine. It is not a mere ethical code. It is not merely a redemptive social force. It is above all dependence on a Person. And therein lies its peculiarity and its novelty. A Church Father of the second century, being pressed with the question, “What new thing did the Lord bring by His coming?” replied, “Know that He brought all newness in bringing us Himself.” The distinctive feature of the new religion is the Person of Jesus.

(1) It is Jesus Christ, and not doctrines about Jesus Christ. To say this is not to disparage the precious guidance of Scripture or Creeds or Councils. These Apostolic words, these later definitions, which furnish in our day the favourite topic for so much shallow declamation, are the voice of that Eternal Spirit by whom the whole Body is governed as well as sanctified. They guard and sustain in Christian thought the Divine Saviour’s peerless honour; they forbid, in tones of merciful severity, false and degrading beliefs about Him. Yet He, our living Lord, is the foundation; and no one can altogether rest upon the formulæ which uphold and regulate our estimate of His Glory. We prize both Scripture and the Creeds for His sake, not Him for theirs; and to rest upon them, as distinct from Him whom they keep before us, would be like building a wall upon a measuring rule, instead of upon the block of granite, of which it has given us the noble dimensions.

I do not agree with the saying imputed to some one, that God gave man religion, but the devil invented theology as a counterfeit. For theology is not the natural or proper antithesis to religion; still less its opposite or antagonist. It occupies a different sphere; and though dealing with the same subjects in great measure, yet its aim is, or should be, different; and it works by means of different faculties. Religion aims at the production of faith, hope and charity, and all the proper fruits of those graces. It would teach us to trust in God, and love Him, and to obey that second commandment, which is like unto the first both in its scope and in its importance and comprehensiveness—“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” It is that which brings the human soul consciously into relation with God, with an unseen world and a spiritual kingdom, and with a future state of retribution. Religion, therefore, is an appeal to faith and also to conscience, both of which it seeks to quicken and exercise; so that we may be godly towards God, and righteous towards our neighbour, performing all our duties from a principle of obligation and reverence to the great Father who made and loves us all, and requires us to love, pity, and help one another, because of this our common origin and family relation. Religion also requires us to be sober or temperate—regulating the appetites of our bodies and the emotions and affections of our minds, so that we be not carried away by them beside or beyond the purposes for which they were implanted, but that they may further us in attaining perfection in this world, and at last eternal felicity.

Now, though theology deals in great part with the same subjects with which religion is concerned, it differs from it in several respects. Religion deals with those subjects in a practical way, chiefly with reference to conduct or life; and it appeals to all parts of our nature, to the affections and emotions as well as to the understanding. It works through hope and fear, and seeks to influence, to restrain, to stimulate, and to regulate—in short, to make us wise, holy, good, in all manner of conversation, that we may be “perfect in all the will of God.” On the other hand, theology is wholly theoretical or speculative. Its object is to reconcile certain apparent contradictions or inconsistencies, not only between different parts, or passages, or expressions of Scripture, but between Scriptural statements or doctrines, and the phenomena of the physical and moral world. For it must deal not only with the Bible but with facts; regarding the facts of nature and providence, and of general history and experience, as being, no less than the histories, doctrines and teachings of Scripture, revelations or manifestations of the Maker and Governor of the world. These all, proceeding from the same Divine source, are and must be really consistent, however at first sight they may sometimes appear to conflict one with another. It is therefore the province of theology to point out the harmony which underlies seeming opposition and discordance in the Word or ways of God, so that we may discern a real and profound order where at first sight confusion or contradiction presents itself to our minds. Thus, in the natural world, the law of gravitation being demonstrated to be a law operating throughout the universe, it is available to explain and reconcile a multitude of facts or appearances which seemed, to minds not instructed in this law of gravitation, to be unrelated, or even opposed and contradictory, one to another.1 [Note: Robert Lee.]

(2) Still more true is it that it is Jesus Christ, and not feelings about Him. Feelings are great aids to devotion; they are often special gifts of God, the play of His Blessed Spirit upon our life of affection, raising it towards high and heavenly things. Yet what is so fugitive, so protean, so unreliable as a feeling? It comes and it is gone; it is intense, and forthwith it wanes; it promises much, and presently it yields nothing but a sense of moral languor and exhaustion that succeeds it. Feeling shouts “Hosanna” to-day, and to-morrow “Crucify”; it would pluck out its right eye for the apostle of its choice, and then suddenly he is become its enemy because he tells it the truth.

I will tell you of a want I am beginning to experience very distinctly. I perceive more than ever the necessity of devotional reading. I mean the works of eminent holy persons, whose tone was not merely uprightness of character and highmindedness, but communion—a strong sense of personal and ever-living communion—with God besides. I recollect how far more peaceful my mind used to be when I was in the regular habit of reading daily, with scrupulous adherence to a plan, works of this description. A strong shock threw me off the habit—partly the external circumstances of my life, partly the perception of a most important fact, that devotional feelings are very distinct from uprightness and purity of life—that they are often singularly allied to the animal nature, the result of a warm temperament—guides to hell under the form of angels of light, conducting the unconscious victim of feelings that appear Divine and seraphic, into a state of heart and life at which the very world stands aghast. Cases of this kind came under my immediate cognizance, disgusted me, made me suspect feelings which I had hitherto cherished as the holiest, and produced a reaction. Nevertheless, the only true use of such a discovery is this, that our basest feelings lie very near to our highest, and that they pass into one another by insensible transitions. It is not true to take the tone so fearfully sounded in Tennyson’s “Vision of Sin,” or that of Mephistopheles when he sneeringly predicts to Faust the mode of termination for his “sublime intuition,” after the soliloquy in the forest, when Gretchen’s image has elevated his soul. The true lesson is to watch, suspect, and guard aspirations after good, not to drown them as spurious. Wordsworth says—

True dignity abides with him alone

Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,

Can still suspect, and still revere himself,

In lowliness of heart.

I feel the need of works of this kind, and I shall begin them again.1 [Note: Robertson, in Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 263.]

(3) It is Jesus Christ Himself, and not His teaching or His work apart from His Person. His work, indeed, can be appreciated only in the light of His Person; His death is at best heroic self-devotion (if it be so much as that) unless His Person is superhuman. If Jesus is only man, or if His Person is left out of view, there is no more reason for reliance on His death than on the death of Socrates. His Sacraments are only picturesque unrealities, unless He who warranted their power lives and is mighty; apart from His Person, they have no more spiritual validity than an armorial bearing or a rosette. And His teaching cannot be represented as a “foundation” of Christian life, which may be substituted for His Person, and enable us to dispense with it, for the simple reason that the persistent drift of that teaching is directly and indirectly to centre thought, love, adoration upon Himself; as though in Him, as distinct from what He said and did, mankind was to find its true and lasting strength and peace.

This is the secret of Christ’s power over men. He does not come to discuss with them some empty conundrum, some wretched enigma, that challenges only the intellect; He sets Himself down in the heart, and trains that, brings that into the liberty of His blessed captivity, and out of the heart there comes His kingdom, which can never be moved.2 [Note: J. Parker.]

4. A comprehensive idea of Jesus Christ as the foundation may be found in the very old representation of Him as Prophet, Priest, and King.

(1) Prophet.—A Prophet is not merely one who foretells future events. That is but a small and, in some respects, an inferior part of the prophet’s work. The generic idea of a prophet is one who speaks of God, who reveals the thoughts and proclaims the truth of God. And in this regard Jesus Christ is the Prophet of God, who infinitely transcends all others.

(2) Priest.—In former times the priest stood between the sinner and God, and offered sacrifice on account of his sins. The Lord Jesus, as the Son of God and the Son of Man, was fitted to be the medium to stand between our sinful souls and the righteous God; and for sacrifice, He offered Himself without spot unto God. And “If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world.”

(3) King.—Christ is also our King. As such He claims our love, our loyal obedience, our grateful homage, and our reverent worship. Instead of obeying the maxims and customs of the world, instead of following our own inclinations, and the uncertain and fitful impulses of our own hearts, let us obey Him. Let His will be supreme.

It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing to our own souls, as if we could choose for ourselves where we shall find the fulness of the Divine Presence, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found, in loving obedience.1 [Note: Dinah Morris, in Adam Bede.]

Close gently, weary eyes,

And let the closing day sing sweetly unto thee

A song of rest, that so the coming day may be

A glad surprise;

Close, weary eyes.

Rest now, oh wayward heart!

Rest in submission comes; then let the swaying trees,

Bending, obedient, at each breath of God’s light breeze

Show thee thy part;

Rest, wayward heart.

Peace, sweet peace, struggling soul!

Waves, hills and stars will say, “Seek not to walk by sight.

By faith take all thy stumbling steps, through day and night,

In God’s control.”

Peace, struggling soul.

II

The Building

1. Our attention is drawn to the materials used in the building rather than to the building itself. The materials are of two kinds—(1) “gold, silver, costly stones,” that is, those that will pass through fire unscathed; and (2) “wood, hay, stubble,”—materials which fire will consume. There is, therefore, good teaching and bad teaching. Good teaching is the showing forth of Christ Jesus in word and life.

We are, perhaps, beginning to recognize the need of special training, but hundreds of clergymen can be found who would acknowledge that they never had any kind of education in the two branches of their work—teaching and preaching. A young clergyman recently, in conversation with me, deplored this. “I did not know how to teach, and I have been obliged to try and gain some knowledge of the art by listening to the teachers in the elementary schools.” This is the example of a man wise enough to be aware of his deficiencies, and courageous enough to try and repair them. But here is a strange fact. Educated skill is demanded in some callings, and these not the most important; yet in some of the higher or more difficult callings educated skill is not demanded, and is not even deemed to be important. We do not allow our teeth to be pulled out except by a qualified practitioner, but we entrust grave moral responsibilities to untrained men. We require some evidence of practical skill from our cab-drivers, but we hand over the direction of vast national interests to men who have never learned even the rudiments of political and economic science. It is all very puzzling. It belongs to the noble faith of being able somehow to “muddle through.” The wonder is, not that things are done so well considering how much is given into untrained hands, but that things are done at all.1 [Note: W. Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of my Life, 324.]

2. What is bad teaching?

(1) A man may interpret Scripture, and yet not bring Christ out of it. He may delight himself in the study; he may be skilful in comparing Scripture with Scripture; he may perceive with a marvellous insight the doctrinal contrasts and harmonies which fill the Bible; he may be wise in combining and reconciling where careless readers see only contradiction and confusion; he may attract listeners by the clearness of his exposition and the variety of his illustration; and yet in all this there may be no savour of Christ and no unction of the Spirit. Men may come and go, depart and return, week by week, where he ministers; they may find information, find instruction, but not find edification, because they find not Christ.

(2) Again, a man may be a sincere Christian, and even in a sense preach Christ, and yet his work may be but as the wood or the stubble because in the Divine he has lost the human; because, in other words, though he knows theology, he knows not man, and, though he understands something of the glory of the Saviour, he is ignorant of the application of that Gospel to the hearts and lives of men. His doctrinal statements are correct and ample; he can discourse with feeling and beauty upon the great revelations of grace; but there is no connecting link, in his preaching, between heaven and earth, between truth and life, between the Saviour of sinners and the sinner whom He came to save. Therefore the Gospel which he enforces floats above his hearers in a region cloudy and inaccessible; they hear the sound thereof, but the voice they hear not; the revelation of Christ is become again in his hands as the letter which kills, rather than as the spirit which gives life.

(3) It may be that all the energies of a ministry have been turned upon controversy; that a congregation which came together to be fed with “the sincere milk of the word” that it “might grow thereby,” has been occupied week by week and year after year with vehement declamation or laborious argument against some form of error, supposed to be the peril of the times, upon which the preacher would concentrate all the anxieties and all the efforts of souls given him to guide and lives entrusted to him to regulate.

We naturally look to our symbolical documents—the Creeds, Catechisms, and other standards of our several Churches, for guidance as to what constitutes the main matter or substance of the Christian religion. But we find upon inspection that the subjects which those books treat of are neither those which are in themselves most necessary and important, nor those which our Lord and His Apostles chiefly insisted on; but they are for the most part the points disputed between different Churches—between Romanists and Protestants, between Calvinists and Arminians, and between Trinitarians and Unitarians. So that the books in question set forth the differences which exist among Christians, not their agreements. Now, as a general rule, their agreement is both far greater and far more momentous than their disagreement. I say the things they agree about are far more numerous, and far more essential, than the things they disagree about. These last have often swelled out into magnitude simply by reason of the quarrels respecting them, as a barren island or a sandy waste has sometimes grown into a mighty matter by reason of the struggles of great nations respecting it. In itself it is worth little or nothing; it is great only because of the contest which is carried on.1 [Note: Robert Lee.]

(4) There is a fourth case in which a fatal deadness has fallen upon a ministry in the very attempt to communicate to it a vigorous life. The preacher gives himself to the one aim of making his sermons lively. He counts nothing below the level of pulpit gravity; nothing too secular or too mundane to be made the starting-point of Sunday exhortation. He speaks of giving “a healthy tone to common life,” and this, not by raising earth to heaven, but by bringing down the heavenly to the level of the earthly. He forgets that the Christian politician and the Christian student and the Christian man of business do not come together in the Lord’s house to hear their own subjects discussed by one far less fitted to do so than themselves, but rather to be reminded of a subject higher and nobler than their own, a subject in which they may rest altogether from week-day toils and cares, and realize a loftier aim and a deeper unity in things unseen, things heavenly, things Divine.

It is no part of my business to condemn this, that, and the other kind of teaching, but I will tell you what is evidently wood and hay and stubble. Misplaced learning; misplaced speculation; misplaced eloquence; sham philosophy; preaching one’s self; talking about temporary, trivial things; dealing with the externals of Christianity, its ceremonial and its ritual; dealing with the morals of Christianity apart from that one motive of love to a dying Saviour which makes morality a reality in human life. All that kind of Christian teaching, remote from daily life and from men’s deepest needs, however it may be admired, and thought to be “eloquent,” “original,” and “on a level with the growing culture of the age,” and so on, is flimsy stuff to build upon the foundation of a crucified Saviour. There is no solidity in such work. It will not stand the stress of a gale of wind while it is being built, or keep out the weather for those who house in it; and it will blaze at last like a thatched roof when “that day” puts a match to it.2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

III

The Fire

1. The flame plays round both the buildings. What fire is it? The text answers the question for us—“the day shall declare it.” The Apostle does not think that he needs to say what day. His readers know well enough what day he means. To him and to them there is one day so conspicuous and so often in their thoughts, that there is no need to name it more particularly. The day is the day when Christ shall come. And the fire is but the symbol that always attends the Divine appearance in the Old and in the New Testament.

Many of us who live in London have at some time watched that awful but fascinating sight, the progress of a great fire; we have marked how the devouring element masters first one and then another department of the building which is its victim; but especially we have noted what it consumes and what it is forced to spare, the resistless force with which it sweeps through and shrivels up all slighter materials, and pauses only before the solid barriers of stone or iron, thus trying, before our eyes, the builder’s work of what sort it is.1 [Note: H. P. Liddon.]

I felt begin

The Judgment-Day: to retrocede

Was too late now. “In very deed,”

(I uttered to myself) “that Day!”

The intuition burned away

All darkness from my spirit too:

There stood I, found and fixed, I knew,

Choosing the world. The choice was made;

And naked and disguiseless stayed,

And unevadable, the fact.2 [Note: Browning, Easter-Day.]

2. But He who at the end will judge us once for all, is now and always judging us; and His perpetual presence as the Judge who is constantly probing and sifting us is revealed by events and circumstances which have on our souls the effect of fire—they burn up what is frivolous and worthless, and they leave what is solid unscathed. There are many events and situations which act upon us as fire; it will be enough to consider one or two of them.

(1) There is the searching, testing power of a responsible and new position, of a situation forcing its occupant to make a critical choice, or to withstand a strong pressure. Such a new position discovers and burns up all that is weak in a man’s faith or character. In quiet times there is nothing to extort the discovery; but when a great effort of action or of resistance becomes necessary, it is soon seen what will and what will not stand the test. All that looks like a hold on solid principle, and is in reality only fancy, or sentiment, or speculation, is then seen to be unserviceable; and if a man’s religious mind is composed mainly of such material, a catastrophe is inevitable.

Take the Pope in Browning’s The Ring and the Book. The aged man, on the verge of the grave, has the responsibility laid upon him of deciding the fate of Count Guido. He holds the balance between life and death.

In God’s name! Once more on this earth of God’s,

While twilight lasts and time wherein to work,

I take His staff with my uncertain hand,

And stay my six and fourscore years, my due

Labour and sorrow, on His judgment-seat,

And forthwith think, speak, act, in place of Him—

The Pope for Christ. Once more appeal is made

From man’s assize to mine: I sit and see

Another poor weak trembling human wretch

Pushed by his fellows, who pretend the right,

Up to the gulf which, where I gaze, begins

From this world to the next—gives way and way,

Just on the edge over the awful dark:

With nothing to arrest him but my feet.

And I am bound, the solitary judge,

To weigh the worth, decide upon the plea,

And either hold a hand out, or withdraw

A foot and let the wretch drift to the fall.

Ay, and while thus I dally, dare perchance

Put fancies for a comfort ’twixt this calm

And yonder passion that I have to bear,—

As if reprieve were possible for both

Prisoner and Pope—how easy were reprieve!

He weighs all the evidence, the reasons which might be urged in the name of mercy for flinching from the solemn decision.

Quis pro Domino?

“Who is upon the Lord’s side?” asked the Count.

I, who write—

And he signs the death-warrant.

For I may die this very night

And how should I dare die, this man let live?

(2) Sometimes men surprise us, when placed in a difficult position, by the sudden exhibition of qualities for which no one before had given them credit; the apparently thoughtless show foresight, and the timid courage, and the selfish disinterestedness; and the irresolute perseverance, of which there had been no evidence whatever. The quiet school-boy in an Italian village, whom his playmates name the “dumb ox,” becomes, almost in spite of himself, the first of the scholars, one of the few greatest thinkers in the world. The officer who has been distinguished for nothing but a punctual regard to duty is suddenly placed in a position to show that he has almost the genius and courage sufficient to roll back the course of history, and to save a falling empire from ruin. The youth whose life has been passed amidst scenes of frivolity, or perhaps of licentiousness, hears one day an appeal to his conscience, his sense of duty, his sense of failure, and wakes from a dream of sensual lethargy to show the world that he has in him the making of a man, aye, the making of a saint.

The sense of power which comes from self-development can only be fruitful for good if it be directed by the profound sense of responsibility, which the perpetual consciousness of life as lived in God’s sight alone can give.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, i. 185.]

(3) But the Greeks had a stern proverb to the effect that a position of leadership shows what a man is. The real drift of the saying was that in practice it too often shows what he is not. It implies that too generally the discovery would be unfavourable; that the test of high office would, in a majority of cases, bring to light something weak or rotten in the character, which in private life might have escaped detection. History is strewn with illustrations of this truth; the virtuous though weak Emperor, who was floated to power on the surf of a revolution, is by no means the only man of whom it might be written that all men would have judged him capable of ruling others, had he only never been a ruler. How often does manhood open with so much that seems promising—intelligence, courage, attention to duty, good feeling, unselfishness, all that looks like high principle—and then a man is put into a position of authority. It is the fire which tests the work he has done in his character. Suddenly he betrays some one defect which ruins everything. It may be vanity; it may be envy; it may be untruthfulness; it may be some lower passion which emerges suddenly, and as if unbidden, from the depths of the soul, and gains over him a fatal mastery. All his good is turned to ill, all is distorted, discoloured; he might have died as a young man, amid general lamentations that so promising a life had been cut short. He does die, as did Nero or Henry VIII., amidst the loudly expressed or muttered thanksgiving of his generation that he has left the world. The fact was, that the position in which he found himself exposed him to a pressure which his character could not bear.

After the Council the King [George iv.] called me and talked to me about racehorses, which he cares more about than the welfare of Ireland or the peace of Europe.1 [Note: The Greville Memoirs, i. 144.]

You remember how the old Tay bridge, before that fatal winter night, was believed to be equal to its purpose; no one of us who had travelled by it high in the air, over what was practically an arm of the sea, thought that it could but do its work for many long years to come, in all winds and weathers. It needed, no doubt, a mighty impact, a terrific rush of wind from a particular quarter, to show that the genius and audacity of man had presumed too largely on the forbearance of the elements; but—the moment came. We, many of us, remember something of the sense of horror which that tragic catastrophe left on the, public mind—the gradual disappearance of the last train, as it moved along its wonted way into the darkness, the suddenly observed dislocation and flickering of the distant lights, the faint sound as of a crash, rising for a moment above the din of the storm, and then the utter darkness, as all—train and bridge together sank into the gulf of waters beneath, and one moment of supreme agony was followed by the silence of death.2 [Note: H. P. Liddon, 59.]

Not alone in pain and gloom

Does the abhorred tempter come;

Not in light alone and pleasure

Proffers he the poisoned measure.

When the soul doth rise

Nearest to its native skies,

There the exalted spirit finds,

Borne upon the heavenly winds,

Satan, in an angel’s guise,

With voice divine and innocent eyes.1 [Note: Richard Watson Gilder.]

The Teacher’s Great Text

Literature

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