" If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is
that darkness! " MATTHEW vi. 23.
THERE are many truths and teachings in these
deep words of Jesus. I have turned to them more
than once before for the help and guidance which
they contain ; and there are no fitter words in all our
Saviour's teaching to bring us the idea which I now
wish to dwell upon. That idea is that every man has
his own point of entrance for the divine life, and
that if he does not let it in through that door,
nay, if his soul does not stand at that door waiting
to welcome it, the divine life may pass him by and
he will be responsible. He will not only be the
loser; he will be to blame for the earthliness and
darkness in which his life goes on. So vague and
loose and unreasonable are the thoughts of most
people as to the way in which men become Chris-
tians ; so often it seems to most people as if it were
all a mystery, without explanation and without law,
as to whether God would come to men with His
Spirit, and as to how He would come; that I think
it must be a great help to us if we can clearly under-
stand that there is such a principle as this : that
every man has his strong, characteristic point of
temperament, of occupation, or of circumstances,
where, if the Spirit of God ever does come to him,
it will be sure to come, and by the nature of which
the nature of the spiritual life which is possible for
him must be determined.
I may not be sure that the great royal guest who
is travelling through the land will come into my
poor house; but I know that, if he does come, he
will have to come up just that homely path and
through that humble doorway which lead to it ;
therefore I keep its passage clear and its bolts drawn
back. I do not know that the sun will shine out
from behind the cloud ; but I know that if it does,
this and this are the bright summit-points which it
must kindle into flame, and from which its glory
must be reflected to all the rest of the great build-
ing. I do not know that I can ever win the friend-
ship of such and such a man, who is far wiser and
more than I am ; but I know that my only chance
is not in trying to be something which I am not, or
in pretending to be it, but solely in being frankly
and thoroughly what I am, and in offering him that
nature for his life to play upon and for his heart to
love, if he can love it. I do not know that I can
ever understand this idea which other men seem to
make much of this philosophy which all mankind
are praising, this school of thought which evidently
has great truth in it I do not know that I can
ever make it mine ; but I do know that if I ever do
get hold of it, it must be with this particular hand
of my nature that I seize it, and so my study shall
be to keep this hand, in which my hope lies, flexible
and alert.
All these are illustrations of one truth from vari-
ous regions of life. In every region there is some
point through which the darkness of the whole re-
gion must be reached by any light. If light comes,
it must be caught there and radiated thence through-
out the whole. Upon that point, then, anxiety
fastens itself, and that point becomes critical. To
that point the warning applies : " If the light become
darkness, how great is that darkness! "
Now, I think that what a great many men need is
to realize that just that is true about religion. There
is some point in their nature, their occupation, or
their circumstances, something in them made up
from their nature, their occupation, or their cir-
cumstances, which marks how they are to be Chris
tians, and what sort of Christians they are to be.
Religion does not fall into a nature like a shower
from the clouds. It enters like a guest into the
gate. Every man may say this much of himself : I
do not know that I can ever be religious, but if I am,
I am such a man, so built by nature and so shaped
by circumstances, that it is thus and thus that my
religion must come in. And when a man has real-
ized that, then self-study must become a very seri-
ous and earnest thing, and the responsibility for the
open door of his own soul a very distinct and ever-
present consciousness. The watch over the light
that is in him, lest it should turn into darkness,
must be a continual care.
Let us follow this somewhat more into detail. I
have alluded to the nature, the occupations, and the
circumstances of men as the elements which decide
what sort of door in them shall open to religion.
And we may speak in turn of each of these.
1. And, first, about men's natures. There are
broad, deep differences of character which decide for
men the nature of their Christian life. They make
great chasms. He who is a Christian on one side
of them, is different from him who is a Christian on
the other. Lift up your eyes and look at the differ-
ence of the very essential natures of men, as they
stand together in our picturesque and various hu-
manity. One class or division of men lives in
thought. Everything is to them a problem. An-
other class lives in action. Everything is to them a
task. There are the men of solitude, who seek to
be alone as naturally as the beast flees into the
forest ; and there are the men of society who seek
to be together as naturally as the cattle collect
themselves in herds. Some men are always con-
servative ; they cannot do a rash thing. Other men
are all enterprise ; they cannot do a prudent thing.
Some men are intrinsically self-reliant. Other men
must rest their hand upon some brother's shoulder,
and then they can do valiant work. Some men are
credulous and long to believe. Other men are
skeptical, and to doubt is to them as native as to
breathe. Everywhere are the differences of natures.
There need be no end to the enumeration.
And what do these differences mean? What shall
we say about them? What shall we think when, out
of the confusion of our own self-watched lives, there
comes gradually forth a consciousness of what we
are, of what the special nature is in us that separates
and distinguishes us from other men? Shall we
merely be fascinated and dazzled with the sparkling
variety of life in general? Shall we simply be hum-
bled or exalted with the smallness or the glory of
the separate distinctive quality which we discover in
our own selves? If there is a higher life for man to
live, if there is a sunshine which may break over all
this human landscape and transfigure it, then to any
man who knows that such a sunshine is, and who
expects its dawning, the landscape as a whole, and
every bit of it, must get its value from its actual
or possible relationship to that sunshine. Every
variety of character must be prized because it can
catch the life, the love, the authority, of God, in
some way especially its own; and every man's own
nature, as he comes to know it, must interest him
because he knows, in knowing it, how he is to know
God, whom truly to know is truly and thoroughly
to live.
Our modern novels study character with wonder-
ful acuteness. Our essayists depict the infinite va-
riety of men which exists within the evident unity
of man. Men pore over themselves, and make
themselves proud or miserable with understanding
or misunderstanding what they are. It is poor busi-
ness, unless man knows what man is for; and is
seeking to know himself only that he may open
himself more abundantly to God. Take for instance
the last of the kinds of character of which I spoke
just now: a man studies his own nature, and says
as the result, "Yes, I am skeptical. I question
everything. I cannot help it. It is innate. I did
it when I was a child. I shall do it till I die. I
shall do something like it after I am dead and am
gone to heaven. What then? Is that a sign that
there is no Christian faith for me, and an excuse
from all responsibility to seek it? Surely not.
That very skepticism must be the door by which I
must stand to keep the passage pure and clear. I
must be responsible for it. I must not merely doubt
men's affirmations; I must doubt my own doubts.
I must question the denials that men bring. I
must keep my questioning faculty pure of conceit,
and so out of this sifting of doubt on doubt, at last
the precious kernel of truth may lie there shining
and manifest, not wrapt in so many envelopes,
perhaps, as some other men wrap their belief in, and
so not looking as if it were as large as theirs, but
yet all there, and all the more clearly there, all the
more strongly held, because of the very, native
skepticalness of the soul that holds it/
This must be so. Either the questioning temper
is a disease, and not a nature, which all our experi-
ence tells us is not the truth ; or else there are some
souls built by the God that made them as if one
built a house for himself to dwell in, but built it
standing on its outside, and left no door for him-
self, its destined occupant, to get in at when it was
done. Either one or other of these things is true.
Or else a doubting temper, if it be pure and not
dimmed and blocked up with self-conceit, may be
itself a window for God to shine through, a door for
God to come through. There was a faith in Thomas
by reason of his doubt, not merely in spite of
his doubt. His doubt was the light that was in
him.
Here is a kind of self-study and self-knowledge
which is precious indeed. Here is a value for our
own peculiar nature which brings to one who has it
a quiet, grave, and lofty self-respect and joy, in being
what he is, that is as pure of self-conceit as it is filled
with solemn responsibility.
Why is it that you love the house where you have
lived from your childhood, that you honor it
and would be very sorry to live in any other? You
know it is not the best house in town ; there are
better houses by the score ; but this is yours. In it
your life has taken shape. In through its window
the sky and sun and stars have looked at you and
given you impressions of themselves. In through
its doors your friends have entered with their in-
fluences. The shapes of its rooms, the windings of
its passages, have formed the habits in which the joy
and sorrow of your life have taken coloring. And
so the value of your home is in the way in which
life has come to you through it.
Very like indeed, I think, to men's relations to
their homes is their relation to their natures. In
the qualities of their natures, as in the walls of their
houses, their selves abide, which are one with and
yet are other than the natures they abide in ; and
through them to this inner self comes God. And
the soul that has learned to love God forever honors
and loves the nature through which God came to it,
with that special manifestation of Himself which is
its life.
2. Think, secondly, about the occupations of our
lives, and see how they, too, get their real signifi-
cance and value as the entrance-points of God into
us, and the exhibition-points of God through us to
other men. You sit here in church, in this Sunday
promiscuousness, the representatives of very various
occupations. You did different things yesterday.
You will do different things to-morrow. One of
you sells goods, another builds houses, another
pleads causes, another counts money, another cures
sickness : what does it all mean? Is it merely a con-
venient distribution of the work that has been done
in the world, as if the master of a house said to one
servant, "You sweep the sidewalk while another
piles the wood"? Must it not be far more than
that? Remember how we spend our lives in doing
these different things. Remember that the powers
which the doing of these different things calls out in
us are widely different. And if the giving of God's
life to a man's life is always in connection with some
human activity, some action of its powers, if God
cannot give Himself to a totally passive creature,
must it not follow that according to the sort of
activity that prevails in our lives, so will be our re-
ception of God, our relation to His authority and
love and teaching, which is our religion?
Let any religious man among you suppose that
the whole occupation of his life had been different
from what it has been ; suppose that all these years
you had been tilling the ground instead of selling
goods, or building houses instead of teaching schools ;
could your religion have been just what it has been,
just what it is to-day? If so, then your religion
must have been a very limited and partial thing, a
candle burning in some shut and sacred chamber of
your life, not a true fire burning all though your
life and keeping it all ablaze. And what a terrible
waste there has been if all your professional life, all
your life in your trade or occupation, has been kept
so purely secular that it has given no character to
your religion ! It is sure to be equally true that it
has got no character from your religion either. No ;
in a true sense a man's occupation is his living. It
is the true front door to his life. By it the visitor
or the occupant of the life must come in.
What you ought to teach your boy, when he makes
the selection of his work in life, is that the deepest
and most critical value of that selection is that he is
really choosing in what way he shall ask the God to
whom his life belongs to come and take possession
of his life. And when his selection is once made,
you ought to make him know that there, in his pro-
fession, is where he is to look for God to come to
him. It is in the power to resist its special tempta-
tions that he is to learn what wonderful strength
God can give. It is in the training of the peculiar
powers of usefulness which it develops that he is to
receive God's gracious education. It is in the con-
solation of its peculiar sorrows that he is to lay hold
of God's abounding comfort ; and it is in the charac-
ter which his profession, at its best, demands, that
he is to manifest the life of God before mankind.
Such a conviction about any man's profession, fill-
ing his soul as he went into it, would have two good
results. It would at once enlarge it and sanctify it.
To the Christian merchant, the man who is so thor-
oughly a merchant that he sees clearly that if he is
to be a Christian at all, it is a merchant Christian
that he must be, to such a man his mercantile life
enlarges itself until it becomes for him the type of
all service of God, and puts him into communion
and sympathy with all God's servants everywhere;
and, at the same time, being his special form of ser-
vice, it acquires a sacredness and is done with a
scrupulousness that no merely secular occupation,
considered only as secular, could command.
It is this union of largeness and specialness that
makes the truest beauty of all human life. The
man whose sense of his own personalness is most
intense, and yet who in it reads the parable of the
greater personality of Man, and through it is kept
in truest sympathy with all his race; he always is
the richest and most interesting man. The land-
scape that fascinates you with its own clear beauty,
and at the same time suggests the beauty of all the
variously beautiful world, is always the most power-
ful to satisfy the soul. And so the task that twines
your conscientious interest into its minute details
and at the same time makes you one with all workers
in all faithful work, that is the task which most
feeds the life of him who does it. And such a char-
acter belongs not to any one occupation or class of
occupations, but to any occupation occupied re-
ligiously, to any duty done in conscious obedience
to God, and valued as the means by which He with
His help and authority and teaching may come in
and take possession of the soul.
3. I spoke of the natures of men and of their oc-
cupations as making them special points for the re-
flection of the light of God, and I spoke also of their
circumstances. If the light that is in thee be dark-
ness how great is that darkness! " says Christ, and
I think that His words may well apply to any pe-
culiar condition into which He leads one of our lives,
and by which He means to make at once a deeper
entrance into that life, and a larger illumination from
it. There is something lost when any experience
which God meant to have burn with Himself is
allowed to stand dark in irreligiousness.
A man goes down a street as night comes on, and
lights the long row of lamps so that by and by the
whole street is bright. But in the long row there is
one lamp which refuses to be lighted, and will not
burn, or which goes out after the man with the
torch has passed on his way. What is the conse-
quence? Will there not be all night a dark spot in
the street, where that unlighted lamp comes? Will
not each passenger stop there or stumble? Will not
the stones or pitfalls that lie just there be the most
dangerous? and will not that one unlighted spot
make the whole street unsafe, no matter how
brightly all the rest may shine? So God, I think,
goes down our life and touches every experience
with Himself, and as every experience becomes con-
scious of having come from Him and of possibly re-
vealing Him, it burns with Him. With the burning
of all those experiences with God, our whole life
becomes gradually alight.
But now, suppose that there is one experience
which, as God touches it, refuses to be lighted, or,
after He has lighted it, goes out. There is one thing
which has happened to us which we never can think
of as having come from God ; what will the conse-
quence be? Will there not always be one dark spot
just there in the long street of our life? Will not
the temptations and the doubts which arise in con-
nection with that one event be always specially
dangerous, and will not our whole life, no matter
how bright the illumination of all the rest may
be, be always unsafe because of that one unlighted
experience?
Oh, how many lives there are which have some
such unilluminated experience somewhere in them !
Something happened to you once which you never
could believe that God sent, or which you have
never been able to keep associated with Him. Your
child died, and you could not believe that He took
it. Your child recovered, and you could not believe
that He restored it. You made a fortune, and it
seemed the triumph of your own shrewdness. You
made a friend, and it seemed the triumph of your
own attractiveness. You rose up from a sick bed,
and thanked nobody but the doctors. You did a
hard duty, and congratulated yourself upon the self-
respect that had kept you from being mean or cruel.
What is the consequence? Just at that point there
is a lamp unlighted in your life. Whenever your
memory goes by that point, it stumbles ; for it walks
in darkness. Whenever you have to meet those
same emergencies again, to welcome back another
child from the grave's mouth, or to see another child
depart from you to God, or to make another friend,
or to resist a new temptation, no light comes stream-
ing out from the old experience to make the new
one plain. What is there left for us but to cry out
after Him who is the Light-giver that He will come
back, and even now touch that old dark experience
with His illumination, so that it may be a help and
not a hindrance, a light and not a darkness, in our
lives?
This is the way, then, in which circumstances or
experiences become interpreters of God, His points
of introduction to our lives. And here again there
is the same meeting of specialness with generalness
of which I spoke before. God comes into our life
through one experience, but having come through
that experience He spreads Himself then through all
the life, He occupies the entire house. There are
many histories among you, my friends, that will
bear testimony to this. God revealed Himself to
you first when He cured you of your sickness, but
the God who then came to you, you have found
since, is One who can do many another thing besides
making sick people well. Nay, so complete is the
knowledge of Himself that He gives us, when He
has once entered into us, that very often the God
who showed Himself first as the Healer of sickness
has appeared by and by again as the Sender of sick-
ness, and even as the Summoner of souls by death,
and has been recognized through all the tears of
sorrow by that first knowledge of Him which was
won in the bright atmosphere of joy.
Before I close let me say one word more. I have
dared to talk to-day as if the special care of God for
every man, and for every act and experience of every
man, were not too great a thought for man to think,
not too vast or incredible a faith for man to hold.
To some people, to many people, it does seem in-
credible. But, oh, remember that unless we believe
that, there is no real vitality in our religion. And
ought it to be incredible if we understood what
God is? The sun shines down upon a mountain side,
and every pebble catches its splendor and shines
back its answer. And if you say, "But the sun has
no feeling, no affection," then think of a great fam-
ily and, tell me, does a true father grow bewildered
among his children, and love or protect the least
less than the greatest? Only make fatherhood per-
fect and infinite, and you have God. It is only the
essential difficulty of grasping the infinite that makes
it so hard to conceive that God can care for all His
children personally, and never forget the feeblest of
them.
And yet, hard as it is, men do believe it. Christ
makes men believe it. We cannot live with Him
and not believe it; because He believes it so in-
tensely, He knows it so clearly. Let us try to live
very near to Him, and then we cannot help believ-
ing it, cannot help knowing it ; and then we cannot
walk in darkness, but shall surely have the Light of
Life.
