" But these things have I told you that, when the time shall come,
ye may remember that I told you of them." JOHN xvi. 4.
JESUS CHRIST is just upon the point of leaving
His disciples. He has but a few more days to
spend with them, a few more words to speak to
them. And so, as He sits gazing into their faces,
He is moved to tell them what has been the whole
method of His teaching of them. He tells them
that He has always had this hour in His sight, that
always, when He has been speaking to them, it has
been not simply the present moment of which He
has been thinking, and which He has been trying to
feed with truth; He has also had the future in His
mind. He has been storing in the granaries of their
nature provision for the wants which were to be de-
veloped in far distant days.
The disciples must have been deeply impressed
and touched by those words of their Master. They
must have felt their whole nature taken up into His
hands. Their future needs must have grown real
to their anticipation when they heard their Lord say
that He had been providing for those needs. And
the warm sense of His affection, of how entirely He
loved them, must have filled their souls with strength
and comfort. For there is no proof and sign of love
like this which, in its own extremity of suffering,
forgets itself and takes care that those whom it loves
shall not suffer because of its departure from them ;
and goes to its martyrdom making each footprint
of its agony a well out of which they may drink.
It was the token of Christ s thoughtfulness for
them that must have touched them. No benefac-
tion touches us deeply which has not the idea of
thoughtfulness pervading it. That is the reason
why we are not touched and grateful at the benefi-
cence of nature, save in a figure. The sky has not
treasured its rain because we are going to need it by
and by, nor stored its sunshine because it foresees
that the earth will lie naked and shivering when
February comes. Law cannot win our gratitude,
however it may stir our admiration and our gladness.
But God foresees our need, and stocks the world for
its supply. "Thou hast prepared a table before me,"
says David. It is the preparation more than the
table that draws His soul to God. And so, even
more than the truth He had laid up for them, the
fact that He had laid up truth for them was what
impressed the disciples with the love of Christ.
But when we look at what Christ had actually
done, we are impressed with the wisdom and the
depth of His treatment of His servants. It is in-
deed the method which all wise and loving education
naturally takes. It makes the difference between
the teaching which is hard and meagre and the other
teaching which is rich and sympathetic. A master
orders his servant to do a certain task, and he gives
him just the instruction which that task requires.
But a father educates his son, and he stores away
into that unconscious nature a hundred things which
his experience has taught him that the boy's ad-
vancing experience will by and by require. A
worthy teacher deals worthily with his scholar ; and
it is like the fitting out of a ship in some southern
harbor for the voyage which she is to make in arctic
seas. She lies there in the sunshine at the hospitable
wharf, with the warm atmosphere about her, every-
thing bright and open and summerlike; and men
are bringing on board great casks of provisions and
bales of thick warm clothing. They are making her
walls thick and her doors close, to keep out cold
which as yet she has never felt. They are strength-
ening her sides for the assaults of icy seas of which
she has not dreamed. Long months the stores of
clothing and of food will lie in the darkness of her
hold. She will sail forth, and for a time it will ap-
pear as if there were no use for such strange pro-
vision. But at last the day will come, among the
icebergs, close to the pole, when she will need them
all; and then they will come forth to bear their
blessed testimony to the wise care which filled the
ships hold with them on the June day when she
was loaded. So does the teacher tell his pupil
things of which the pupil sees not now the meaning
or the use, that, when the time of need shall come,
he may remember that his teacher told him of them.
Every now and then we hear from parents and
from teachers talk which we cannot help thinking
foolish and shortsighted. "Let us teach children,"
so it runs, "nothing which they cannot immediately
understand." If we really mean by "understand-
ing" the clear and immediate apprehension of the
truth and all that it involves, then surely such words
describe a very meagre education, and one that pro-
vides only for a very monotonous and narrow life.
The ship which men load thus must sail forever in
the zone where it was freighted. If it cross the
circle and sail into another zone, its food will spoil
and its crew will lie shivering and frozen on its decks.
If you say, "My child has never yet met sorrow,
and so I will not tell him what the sources of con
solation are; he has not met temptation, and so I
cannot inspire him with the thought of the sinfulness
of sin ; he is not sensible of the attraction of study,
and I must not tell him of the duty of study ; he has
never asked for truth, and so I will teach him no
creed" do you not see how meagre all this makes
your relationship to him? Do you not see how
suspiciously it keeps you standing over him, deter-
mining that he shall have no food until the appetite
cries out for it? Do you not see how it loses for
him all that crowding and tempting forth of appetite
which comes from the sense of carrying untasted
food stored in the bosom of his life? Do you not
see how it limits your opportunity of help to him
and leaves the long future, when you may be gone
out of his sight, beyond the chance of any such
ministry as your love craves to give him?
Rather, tell your child or your scholar the very
best you know ; tell it as simply, in as true relation
to his intrinsic nature as you can ; tell him of Christ
in all the richness of His love ; so you will be feeding
him for days which shall not dawn for long years
yet. Put the whole seed of truth into him, and as
his ship sails on from zone to zone, each new zone
will call out its new growth to greet it. The deck
will be always bright with flowers, always opening
anew in each new climate out of seed which you
planted against that hour. So let your scholar or
your child sail forth out of your schoolroom or your
home, carrying in him unknown strength and char-
acter which shall unfold for the supply of emergen-
cies of which as yet he has not dreamed.
But when, in a more deliberate way, we take the
words of Jesus Christ which declare this truth, and
find in them His statement of the whole method of
His religion, it is necessary for us to join with them
some other words of His. "Lo, I am with you
always, even to the end of the world," He said.
These two utterances, together, seem to include the
whole system of the perpetuation and development
of the Christian Faith. See how they co-operate
with one another. Jesus says that He has sown in
His disciples hearts truths which the coming ex-
periences and emergencies of life are to unfold. He
says also that He Himself will be forever present to
preside over the unfolding of those truths. He
stores His Church with all that it is going to need.
Yet He does not send it forth out of His hands, to
have no more personal connection with Him, but
He goes with it to make the truth which, in the
days of each new need, it brings out of its treasuries,
fresh and vital with Himself.
Behold the completeness and proportion of that
picture ! Here is an historic faith which yet is always
full of spontaneity ! Its historic character gives it
solidity and continual identity. Its spontaneity
makes it the new faith of each succeeding age. It
is a faith which may picture itself under the meta-
phor of a rock or under the metaphor of a fountain.
Some men, in Christian history, thinking of Chris
tianity only as an historical religion, have made it
hard and stiff and formal, a thing of traditions and
of precedents, to be unearthed out of patristic books
and to be cultivated by the preservation of old cere-
monies. Other men, scarcely recognizing the his-
torical nature of Christianity at all, have made it a
thing of immediate inspiration. The present Christ
was everything, the historic Christ was almost noth-
ing. Their religion might be almost said to perish
and be born anew each instant.
It is the glory of the New Testament pictures of
these two utterances of Jesus, that they preserve
the strength and escape the weakness of each of
these two ideas by blending them with one another.
The Churchman and the Quaker meet in the full
Christian of those wide, wise pages. The thing
which the Church is to-day, it has been potentially
from the beginning, and yet it becomes this to-day
by the immediate power of a present Christ. Like
the tree which had all the luxuriance of this sweet
and gorgeous springtime in the seed which the
farmer planted who died fifty years ago, and yet
which blossomed this spring because spring had
come and this May s sun had shone; so the Church
and the Faith, historic and spontaneous at once,
have in them, as they present themselves to-day, the
power of the Christ who spoke by the side of the
sea of Tiberias words which His disciples then only
half-understood, and also the power of the Christ
who to-day feeds them with His ever-living love,
His ever-timely wisdom.
Of course all this is true not only of the historic
faith, but it is true of all life, for all life is historic.
"De nihilo nihil" there is no life upon the earth
to-day that has not come of previous life. To feel
the beating of that previous life, to recognize as
elements in what is done to-day the force of things,
known or unknown, which were done years and
years ago, that is the historic spirit. No institu-
tion of the present, however it may seem to have
sprung yesterday out of the soil, no life, however it
may seem to be free from every bondage of the past,
is capable of being understood without the activity
of that historic spirit.
And yet that spirit alone can never read the entire
secret, or account for all the power of any institu-
tion or life. Everything is historic, but nothing is
entirely historical. Everything that truly lives, lives
now. There is a living power, a power of life, which
now vitalizes that which has come down of the past,
and makes it a true being of the actual present.
Here is an act which some man he may have
been a ruler playing with the fates of empires,
he may have been a farmer doing the springtime
ploughing in his field here is an act which some
man has done this week. How shall I study it?
How shall I understand it? What shall it mean to
me? Most impressive is it if I think of it historically.
I see the far-off centuries converging on this mo-
mentary action. I hear the sweep of distant forces
crowding onward through forgotten periods to in-
sure that this thing shall be done. I see men of
long-vanished times and of mysterious races plan-
ning for they know not what, but really to make
this possible. Then, coming nearer, I see the recog-
nizable play of cause and effect, effect and cause,
each cause issuing as effect, each effect turning into
cause. I hear the click and clank of the machinery
from which at last issues this event.
All that is wonderfully interesting and impressive;
and yet how I have failed to tell the story of the
action, if this is all I have to say! To leave out all
the tale of present energy and purpose ; not to ob-
serve nor to describe the stream of living power in
the statesman's or the peasant's nature which plays
on all this historical machinery and makes it live; to
let go all the personality and spontaneity of will;
that would be the grossest blunder. It would be
the blunder of a pedant, and a pedant's blunders
always are the worst blunders. To misread the
working of present, vital force is bad ; to deny pres-
ent working force is infinitely worse, for it degrades
the world to a machine.
The truth is that the vital power of present men
and present motives is what keeps the world alive
to-day. Living desires of living souls, the wishes,
the determinations of men to do and be things here
and now, these are what constitute the world s
vitality. History accounts for the forms of their
activity, but the springs of their activity are in
themselves. All history might be abolished; all
that is in man by inheritance might be eliminated
and cast out ; man might stand as fresh and new as
if he were an Adam of yesterday, with no garden,
no fall, no experience behind him; and he would
live clumsily, awkwardly, but he would live. He
would begin to make history, for history is the
utterance of life, afterwards becoming the feeder
and teacher of life; but it is never the creator of
life, and so it is always the inferior of those fresh
currents of vitality which are forever issuing new
and original from the fountain of God, and flowing
through the vital channels of men's wills.
"There is nothing new under the sun" is a true
but also shallow proverb. "Everything under the
sun is new" is vastly truer and profounder. In the
meeting of the two proverbs, in the combination of
them as the account of life, lies the meeting of the
historic and the spontaneous consciousness of man.
You remember how Tennyson nobly sings :
Love thou thy land with love far brought
From out the storied past, but used
Within the present, and transfused
Through distant times by power of thought.
There is the true spirit of history. The storied past
opens her gates and out of them comes the great
caravan bringing its precious freight of rich associa-
tions, noble deeds, and truths wrought out in the
experiences of other days. The caravan slowly
winds over the desert of the centuries until it enters
the city of our present life. Then down from the
camels backs come the rich and fragrant bales.
They are torn open by the eager hands of present
needs. Their contents are seized for present use.
Thought transforms them into shapes in which the
future is to use them. And by and by we load the
camels once again, to travel on over new deserts to
new cities of the still distant times, bearing the
treasures of history made richer by the free uses of
spontaneous life to which they have been freely put.
Such is all life an Adam ever being born, an
image ever being formed out of the dusty past, but
made a true existence in the present by the direct
inspiration of the living God.
And now, to return and consider the position of
our Christian Faith. Christianity is an historical
religion. Think what its great creed is, which we
say together Sunday after Sunday. It is a recital of
history. It is the epic of a human life. Something
which actually happened, some one who actually
lived, it is in these that we believe. True, those
historical events and that historic Person were the
utterances on the theatre of human life of everlast-
ing principles, of truths and forces which had been
real in the universe eternally. That Christ was the
Everlasting Son of the Father. His sacrifice was
the utterance of an Eternal Love. His Resurrection
was the triumph of the Essential Principle of Life.
Behind His history, as behind all history, there lay
those first and fundamental truths which must be
true before anything can happen in the world. But
none the less the manifestation of those eternal
truths and natures in Christ, and the events that
came in their developments, were epochs in the his-
tory of man, producing new results and starting new
processes. If a child s life, touching the earth like
a feather, cannot be laid upon our planet without
changing its equilibrium and making life here differ-
ent from what it had been before, surely the life of
Jesus Christ, the exhibition of God s nature in the
life of man, must have opened new sources of power,
and altered every life of man which should be lived
upon the earth forever.
This is what we mean when we say that Christian
ity is an historical religion. Do you, a total stranger
to our faith, ask what our faith is? We must first
of all draw back a curtain ; we must show you a Per-
son, walking in certain fields still extant in the
world s geography, treading on pavements which
we still may tread, toiling up mountains and over
plains where our feet still may struggle in their
weariness this Person at a certain recognizable
time, a certain date, doing certain recorded acts,
living a certain life, Him we must point out to you
and say: "He is our religion. That Christ is
Christianity."
But then, when this bewilders you, when you
seem to find it all so remote and long ago, when the
historicalness of it all seems to take it outside of all
your present needs, then is the time to tell you how
the historic Christ is a perpetual Presence among
mankind, making His own record a living Power.
The Christ of history becomes the Christ of the soul.
The story becomes quickened by the actual presence
of Him of whom the story tells. It is so wonderful !
It is as if while I read the record of what the martyrs
did, the very martyrs themselves were here looking
me in the face, firing me with their actual enthus-
iasm, each of them, as he pointed to the picture of
a deed, saying: "Yes, I did that by the power of
God ; and you can do it, too, for God is your God
as truly as He was mine." How the two elements
would work together ! How the old past would live
with the new present ! How the power of history,
and the power of an immediate inspiration, would
minister to one another !
Now, that is the feeblest picture of the way in
which, in Christianity, the historic Christ and the
ever-present Christ become one power for the salva-
tion of the soul. "I am he that liveth and was
dead, and lo ! I am alive for evermore." So Christ
described Himself to John in Patmos. The "was
dead" is history. Back comes the well-remembered
scene of Calvary and the tomb in the garden. All
the distinct facts that happened there come back,
and "Lo, I am alive for evermore," makes those
facts new, present realities to the soul which needs
the assurance of the love, and the example of the
patience, which were stored away in them centuries
ago. The Christian reads his Bible, and the Christ
beside him and the Christ within him make clear to
him the soul of the Christ who walks and works and
suffers in these blessed pages. That is the meeting
in oneness of the historic and the eternal Christ.
The Christian presses the Bible to his heart, and
deep utterances all his own, utterances of love and
help and wisdom which have been kept in that Bible
for him, unread by any other of the millions who
have pressed it to their hearts, come forth at the
summons of his Christ who lives in his soul, and
give themselves at last to him for whom they have
been waiting all these years.
To keep either one of the two aspects of our faith
alone breaks its completeness, and so makes it weak.
Some men and some ages have thought almost
solely of its historic character. They have spent
their devotion in the worship of its sacred places.
They have sent Crusades for the rescue of the Holy
Sepulchre. They have travelled in long pilgrimages,
that they might touch the ground on which the
blessed feet of Christ trod. They have made the
preservation of the forms of the earliest Church
the object of their toils and prayers. They have
clung to first statements of truth as if there were no
living Spirit of Truth among men to-day. On the
other hand, there have been ages and men to whom
the historic character of Christianity has meant very
little. To them the great Christian religion has
found its only sanction in the present needs and
instincts of the human soul. Christ has by them
been hardly thought of as an actual being who once
lived on earth. He has become a world-pervading
Spirit, a name for all the upward forces of the soul
of man, a dear conception of the present God.
We can see the danger of hardness and formalism
which must beset the first kind of men and ages.
We can see the danger of vagueness and subjectivity
which must beset the others. And we are right.
The first men and ages have become hard and formal.
The others have become vague and subjective. But
the true faith has the defects and vices of neither,
because it has the truth and excellence of both. It
is sharp, clear, definite, objective; and yet is free
and fresh and spiritual and different and new for
every soul. Its Christ is there in Palestine, and yet
here in the soul. He is all the more there because
He is here, and all the more here because He is
there. The inner pilgrimages, the visits of the
weakened will for the recovery from its weakness to
the holy places in the soul where Christ abides, are
all the more vivid and real because of that voice
which cries down out of history from the last day,
that great day of the Feast, when a visible Saviour
stood in the old Hebrew Temple and cried, "If any
man thirst, let him come unto me and drink." And
those venerable spots in Palestine are and have ever
been the inspiration of mankind, because each new
soul, as it became conscious of itself, found their
spiritual geography repeated in itself, and all that
once took place there taking place again and forever
upon its little stage.
This is the complete Christianity. Let us beware
lest in our lives it lose either of its two parts, and
become incomplete. Let the voice, which summons
us to be Christians, call us with both of these inspir-
ing tones. Come to Christ ! " let it say ; and let the
Christ to whom it summons us be both the Christ of
history and the Christ forever manifest and power-
ful in thef ml o souan. Come to Him who lived in
the blessed story of the Gospels. Come, and as
truly as if you were Peter or John, make yourself
His disciple and follower. Come to His manger-
cradle, and adore the mystery of God made man.
Come walk with Him and hear His teaching. Come
to His Cross, and feel the rich power of the perfect
Sacrifice. Do this really and definitely, so that
when men ask you, when you ask yourself, "Who
is your Master? " your glowing face shall turn, your
eager finger shall point there, to the Man of the
days in Palestine, to the summit of history where
stand the shining feet of the Incarnate God.
And yet, let the cry, "Come to Christ," keeping
this meaning, be to you also the summons to a
present Righteousness and Love, to an immediate
Divinity here at your side, here in your heart,
whom you may hear speak words of loving wisdom
which were never spoken to any ear before ; let it
be your Christ, who is the utterance of God s Love
calling you and of your possibility of holiness. Let
it be your Christ, to whom you come in answer to
an invitation, in the claiming of a privilege, that is
all your own.
Let us come back for a moment to where we
began. Jesus Christ is taking leave of His disciples,
and He says: "I have told you the truth. All the
truth which you and they who come after you are
to need forever, I have given you." And the dis-
ciples sit silent and awed, as men who hold mys-
terious, unopened treasures in their hands. And
then Christ goes on: "Not yet do you know, not
yet can you know, all the rich meaning of what I
have given you ; but when the time shall come, then
I will be with you, and we together will open these
closed words of mine, and then all that is in them
shall be yours. *
Can we conceive a nobler, a more inspiring or
gracious programme for human history than that?
As the years have gone by, as again and again "the
time has come," and the Christian world, the Chris
tian Church, has "remembered that its Master told
it of these things," and has seen the covering drawn
back and the deeper meaning of some word of His
made plain, and has known that it was by His pre-
sent spirit that His historic word was being illu-
minated, has not His promise been fulfilled?
What "times shall come" in the future, who shall
dare to say? We only know that the full time, the
whole time, has not come yet. What light shall
stream out of God s word, richening and deepening
all the light that it has shown before ; what the old
ever-new story of the Gospels may have to say to
the new needs of the men and the society and the
nations which are yet to be, no man can presume to
say. The new-old Christ in the old-new world !
can we not hear Him saying, as He repeats His
precious truths: "These things have I told you,
that ye may remember that I told you of them."
This makes the unity of the succeeding genera-
tions. To each of them the ever-present Christ
opens something more of that treasury of truth and
life which was enfolded in His historic Incarnation.
They are one with each other the fathers, the
medievalists, the reformers in their common loy-
alty to the Incarnate Lord and Master; while each
lives his own life in that degree of the truth of the
Lord and Master which has been made known to
him.
And as between the ages, so between contempo-
rary men. To each different soul among us different
"time" has come, and with each "time" its own
enlightenment. And yet all the enlightenments are
broken lights of the "Light which lighteth every
man." Shall we not all be one in Him, however
each "cannot but speak those things which he hath
heard and seen "?
There is no other name under heaven given
among men, whereby we can be saved, but the
name of Jesus Christ. And yet each man is saved
by Christ with his own appropriate salvation. Let
us give ourselves to the eternal Christ, and then wait
working, and work waiting, till, little by little, but
ever more and more, He shall show us of His truth
and lead us at last into whatever chamber of His
righteousness He has made ready for our eternal
home.
