Bible Commentaries
2 Corinthians 1

Verses 3-4

Comfort

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction, through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.— 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.

1. Of what the heart is full the mouth will speak, and St. Paul begins this letter to the Corinthians, not, as he generally does, with compliments to the converts on their achievements and position, but with reflections on the weight of suffering that has been cast on him, what it means, and what purpose it serves. This is the theme of the whole Epistle; it is full from beginning to end of sorrow, which to the Christian turns into joy, weakness that is strength, defeat that passes into triumph. The circumstances of the Apostle when he wrote it amply explain how he was led to such thoughts. He had been looking quite recently into the face of death; in what happened to him at Ephesus he thought his end had come, and that he was to be hurried out of the world without seeing the appearance of Christ, on which he had set all his hope; and, on the other hand, the Corinthians, for whom he had done so much, from whom he hoped so much, had proved very disloyal to him. They had given ear to every kind of charge against him, had thought him weak and fickle, dishonest and designing, the preacher of an obscure and fanciful gospel, a visionary, a failure. Crushed by external calamity, disappointed, humbled, and embittered in the relations with his converts, driven to seek defences for his personal conduct and for the truth and substance of the message for which he had spent everything, he was led to think of the dark problem of suffering, and to ask why so much had been given him to bear, and what end his toil served. Of the Bible writers who have dealt with this great subject, the Apostle Paul must be reckoned not the least.

2. He begins with his usual doxology, “Blessed be God.” He will have a great deal to say in this Epistle about affliction, but he begins upon another note. He begins with the contemplation of the mercies of God, and from that standpoint he surveys the field of his own trouble.

Everything depends upon our point of view. I stood a week or two ago in a room which was furnished with wealthy pictures, and I fixed my gaze upon a Highland scene of great strength and glory. The owner of the picture found me gazing at this particular work, and he immediately said, “I am afraid you won’t get the light on the hill.” And sure enough, he was right. From my point of view I was contemplating a dark and storm-swept landscape, and I did not get the light on the hill. He moved me to another part of the room, and, standing there, I found that the scene was lit up with wonderful light from above. Yes, everything depends upon our point of view. If you are going to look upon your trouble, the primary question will be, “Where do you stand?” See where the Apostle Paul plants his feet. “Blessed be God!” That is view-point in the life of faith! Standing there we shall get the light on the hill. Paul takes his stand in the grace of God, and he gazes upon the ministry of mercies and comfort in the otherwise midnight wastes of affliction and pain. He begins, I say, in doxology. He sings a pæan of mercies and comfort, and lifts his soul in adoration to God. 1 [Note: 1 J. H. Jowett.]

I

When Comfort Comes

“Who comforteth us in all our affliction.”

1. The desire for comfort may be a very high or a very low, a noble or a most ignoble wish. It is like the love of life, the wish to keep on living, which may be full of courage and patience or may be nothing but a cowardly fear of death. We know what kind of comfort it must have been that St. Paul prayed for, and for which he was thankful when it came. We have all probably desired comfort which he would have scorned, and prayed to God in tones which he would have counted unworthy alike of God and of himself.

(1) What picture does the word “comfort” convey to your mind? Do you not almost instinctively think of it in a passive, in a somewhat selfish sense? The concrete picture of a comfortable person would have for its essentials good health, a fixed income, and for its immediate surroundings probably an arm-chair, a fire, a well-spread table, every possible sign of material friendly circumstances.

“Comfort,” says Mrs. Pearsall Smith, “is pure and simple comfort, and it is nothing else. We none of us care for pious phrases, we want realities; and the reality of being comforted and comfortable seems to me almost more delightful than any other thing in life. We all know what it is. When as little children we have cuddled up into our mother’s lap after a fall or a misfortune, and have felt her dear arms around us, and her soft kisses on our hair, we have had comfort. When, as grown up people, after a hard day’s work, we have put on our slippers and seated ourselves by the fire, in an easy-chair with a book, we have had comfort. When, after a painful illness, we have begun to recover, and have been able to stretch our limbs and open our eyes without pain, we have had comfort. When some one whom we dearly love has been ill almost unto death, and has been restored to us in health again, we have had comfort. A thousand times in our lives, probably, have we said, with a sigh of relief, as of toil over or of burdens laid down, ‘Well, this is comfortable,’ and in that word ‘comfortable’ there has been comprised more of rest, and relief, and satisfaction, and pleasure, than any other word in the English language could possibly be made to express.”

(2) But this is only a part, and the smallest part, of the comfort of the Bible. The word “comfortable” is really an active word. The derivation of the English word illustrates that perhaps better than the Greek word which it translates— fort, strong—and one very common old use of the verb “to comfort” simply meant to communicate strength. In Wycliffe’s Bible of 1382, the words of Christ which read in our Version, “The child grew and waxed strong in spirit” are given, “The child waxed and was comforted in spirit.” In Isaiah we have it, “He fastened it with nails”; in Wycliffe it is, “He comforted it with nails”; and a century and a half later, in Coverdale’s Bible, it represents “Let your hands now therefore be comforted,” instead of, as we have it, “Therefore now let your hands be strengthened.” When our fathers used this word “comfort,” they meant clearly something more than the mere entertaining of a sentiment, however kindly, or utterance of words, however sympathetic. So we must so far clear the way by getting rid of the idea that comfort is simply soothing, right and pleasant as that may be under certain conditions.

Can we not learn something from a child’s second cry? A child comes to grief in some way, suffers some blow, and the elder sister or brother manages to quiet the child by appeals to its courage and fortitude; but soon after the crying is all over the mother enters the room, and the cry breaks out afresh. It is not because the pain has come back again, it is because there is the certainty of that kind of comfort which we mean by soothing. Now, beautiful as that was, the first was just as real, perhaps more real, comfort. Comfort and fortitude have the same root in common, and he who is strengthened is most really comforted. Soothing is not denied or left out of the reckoning, but it is not the chief thing.

I was struck with the words of a psalm we were reading to-day—“Because thou, Lord, hast holpen me and comforted me.” Help comes before comfort—help to bear up in the way of duty and not to murmur. We can seek this at once, and God will help us; but comfort must follow slowly, and our heart refuses it when it offers itself at once. Do not blame yourself if you do not feel it, and be satisfied if God gives you some measure of strength. 1 [Note: Letters of John Ker, 339.]

Professor Henry Drummond in an appreciation of the life and work of Professor W. G. Elmslie, who was one of his fellow-students at New College, Edinburgh, writes, “One of the last things I read of Elmslie saying was that what people needed most was comfort. Probably he never knew how much his mission, personally, was to give it. I presume he often preached it, but I think he must always have been it. For all who knew him will testify that to be in his presence was to leave care, and live where skies were blue.” 2 [Note: Professor Elmslie, 171.]

2. Now we must feel the need of comfort before we can listen to the words of comfort. And God knows that it is infinitely better and happier for us to need His comforts and receive them than ever it could be not to need them and so be without them. The consolations of God mean the substituting of far higher and better things than the things we lose to get them. The things we lose are earthly things, those He substitutes are heavenly. And who of us but would thankfully be “allured” by our God into any earthly wilderness, if only there we might find the unspeakable joys of union with Himself? St. Paul could say he “counted all things but loss” if he might but “win Christ”; and, if we have even the faintest glimpse of what winning Christ means, we will say so too.

Everybody is signalling for comfort. There is that boy of yours; he is young, strong, daring, dashing, vivacious, vigorous. You say the boy can take care of himself, but the boy cannot. He is always signalling comfort alongside, sometimes when his parents least suspect it. Every ribbon or cup in the boy’s room which speaks of some athletic conquest is comfort to his soul. Every time his eye rests upon it, if he is a Whitefield’s boy, I fancy he says to himself, “No quest, no conquest.” Even the things which mean defeat in your boy’s athletic life are in themselves comforts to him if only he can know that he himself put out the last ounce of strength to win the anticipated and sought for victory, and that the reason why he lost it was because in the world’s arena of fair play there was a better man than himself who conquered. As he grows in years he takes comfort out of his success and out of his defeats when those defeats mean he has done his best and has been overmastered by superior technique or skill or strength.

Every mother knows how the dear little girl in the home is continually signalling for comfort and calling alongside those words of sympathy and those deeds of interest which mean everything to her in her advancing and developing life.

There, little girl, don’t cry,

They have broken your doll, I know,

And your tea-set blue and your playhouse, too,

Are things of the long ago.

Heaven holds that for which you sigh:

There, little girl, don’t cry.

There, little girl, don’t cry,

They have broken your heart, I know,

And the rainbow gleams of your faithful dreams

Are things of the long ago.

But heaven holds that for which you sigh:

There, little girl, don’t cry. 1 [Note: N. Boynton.]

3. The words “all comfort” admit of no limitations and no deduction; and one would suppose that, however full of discomforts the outward life of the followers of such a God might be, their inward religious life must necessarily be always and in all circumstances a comfortable life. But, as a fact, it often seems as if exactly the opposite were the case and the religious lives of large numbers of the children of God were full, not of comfort, but of the utmost discomfort. This discomfort arises from anxiety as to their relations to God, and doubts as to His love. They torment themselves with the thought that they are too good-for-nothing to be worthy of His care, and they suspect Him of being indifferent to their trials, and of forsaking them in times of need. They are anxious and troubled about everything in their religious life, about their frames and feelings, their indifference to the Bible, their want of fervency in prayer, their coldness of heart. They are tormented with unavailing regrets over their past, and with devouring anxieties for their future. They feel unworthy to enter God’s presence, and dare not believe that they belong to Him. They can be happy and comfortable with their earthly friends, but they cannot be happy or comfortable with God. And although He declares Himself to be the God of all comfort, they continually complain that they cannot find comfort anywhere; and their sorrowful looks and the doleful tones of their voice show that they are speaking the truth.

“Who comforteth us in all our affliction.” Let us note the word in which the Apostle describes the condition of the way-faring pilgrims. They are passing through “afflictions”; that is to say, they are in straits, in tight corners. Their way has become narrowed; they are hemmed in by cares or sorrows or temptations, and they are in a tight place. “He comforteth us” in such conditions.

Frederic Myers gives a touching extract from his mother’s diary, which indicates the extraordinary sympathy and comfort which he, then a child of eight, seems to have given her in her bereavement [the loss of her husband]. She said to him once that she could never be happy again, and the child replied, “You know God can do everything, and He might give us just once a vision of him as should make us happy all our lives after.” Of course, a sensitive and clever child can, and often does, in the presence of overwhelming grief, suggest words and thoughts of consolation of almost preternatural fineness and appositeness, purely by a precocity of intelligence— ex ore infantium—just as he can traffic with a coin whose battered heraldry he does not understand. But there does seem to be something more than that here—a loyal affection, a facing of great issues, a vitality of spirit, which cannot be passed over. 1 [Note: A. C. Benson, The Leaves of the Tree, 165.]

(1) He comforts us in physical weakness.—In the breakage or decay of physical power He brings out spiritual richness and strength. This was something that St. Paul knew well. Only two chapters later in this same Epistle there comes the great verse where he describes it—“Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” It is something whose experience is repeated constantly on every side of us. It is hard for us to imagine how flat and shallow human life would be if there were taken out of it this constant element, the coming up of the spiritual where the physical has failed: and so, as the result of this, the impression, made even upon men who seem to trust most in the physical, that there is a spiritual life which lies deeper, on which their profoundest reliance must and may be placed. A man who has been in the full whirl of prosperous business fails in these hard-pressed days, and then for the first time he learns the joy of conscious integrity preserved through all temptations, and of daily trust in God for daily bread. A man who never knew an ache or pain comes to a break in health, from which he can look out into nothing but years of sickness; and then the soul within him, which has been so borne along in the torrent of bodily health that it has seemed almost like a mere part and consequence of the bodily condition, separates itself, claims its independence and supremacy, and stands strong in the midst of weakness, calm in the very centre of the turmoil and panic of the aching body.

I do not know that there is anything more trying to a man of energy and activity and pride than to find himself crippled, and to see the whole world going by him. He once had the power of the senate, he once had power over the assembly, but now his voice is feeble, and his zeal is spent, and men are saying, “What a man he was,” as if he were but a mere trembling, shivering shadow now. Although sometimes the decay of mental faculties takes off the acuteness of suffering, yet there are many men who have pride that will not be alleviated, and who cannot bear to see the world going past them, and they not keeping step but standing still. Not to be able to do what they once could do—to many souls there is anguish in that; there is grace in it too, if they only know where to find it. Autumnal days are the most beautiful days of the year, and they ought to be the most beautiful days in a man’s life. In October things do not grow any more, they ripen, they fulfil the destiny of the summer, and the thought of autumn is that it is going down, going forth. When all things in nature know and feel that death is coming near, do they sheet themselves in black as pagan Christians do? Do they turn everything to hideous mourning as pagan Christians do? They cry: “Bring forth our royal garments,” and the oak puts on the habiliments of beauty, and all the herbs of the field turn to scarlet and yellow and every colour that is most precious; and the whole month of autumn goes tramping towards death, glowing and glorious. 1 [Note: H. W. Beecher.]

(2) He comforts in sorrow.—Sorrow is an indisputable fact of human experience. In many respects it is also an inexplicable fact; but there it is. We cannot account for it, but we all feel it. We may soar upon the wings of thought into the highest heaven, we may sink the plummet of inquiry into the depth, but we should not touch the bounds of this mystery. How did pain and grief ever enter into a universe ruled by a perfectly wise and loving God? Why, having entered, is it not by an act of the Omnipotent Will at once and for ever removed? How is it that its pangs are to all appearance so unevenly distributed, falling so heavily upon one, so lightly upon another; here harassing and cutting short a career of usefulness, there sparing a cumberer of the ground; here crushing the hopes of struggling virtue, and there leaving free and unrestrained the development of vice? These are questions which have agitated the minds of men ever since men began to think at all. And it might not be difficult to point out some considerations tending to lessen the perplexity, and to reconcile the mind to the existence and continuance of the physical evils referred to; it might be shown that, even so far as we can see, there is less real evil in their permission than there would be in their absolute compulsory removal. But when we come to deal with sorrow, not merely as a practical but as a personal fact, no general considerations suffice; speculation is powerless to assuage grief. We only know it is there, and either we must have it taken away or must be taught how to bear it; in other words, we feel the pain, and we long after either happiness or comfort. And of the two it is not happiness but comfort that God has appointed for us. “I pray not,” said Christ of His disciples, “that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil”; and He began His Sermon on the Mount by declaring that the poor, the suffering, the mourning—all whom we call unhappy—are blessed, “for they shall be comforted.”

The one thing in sorrow which makes it sometimes almost unbearable is its apparent aimlessness. Why am I made to suffer thus? What have I done? Hush, impatient spirit! thou art in God’s school of sorrow for a special purpose. Be careful to notice now how He comforts thee. Watch His methods. See how He wraps up the broken spirit, with touch so tender, and bandage so accurately adjusted. Remember each text which He suggests—put them down so as not to be forgotten: there will come a time in your life when you will be called on to comfort another afflicted as you are. 1 [Note: F. B. Meyer, Present Tenses, 79.]

(3) He comforts in darkness.—This does not by any means signify that God will remove all difficulties and fill every darkness with perfect light. God may do that. God does do that often for men. No one ever ought to believe that any religious difficulty he may have is hopeless and give it up in despair. He ought always to stand looking at every such difficulty, owning its darkness, but ready to see it brighten as the east brightens with the rising of the sun. Many of our religious doubts are like buildings which stand beside the road which we are travelling. When we first come in sight of them, we cannot understand them. They are all in confusion; they show no plan. We have come on them from the rear, from the wrong side. But, as we travel on, the road sweeps round them, and we come in front of them. Their design unwinds itself and we understand the beauty of wall and tower and window. So we come to many religious questions from the rear, from the wrong side. Let us keep on along the open road of righteousness. Some day we shall perhaps face them and see their orderly beauty.

Why do I not go to God with my doubts? Perhaps I can find no certainty about religious things, and I hardly dare ask for certainty. It seems like haggling and arguing with God to tell Him of my doubts. Who am I that He should care to convince me and answer my questions? This is a bad mood, but it is common enough. But I can count my enlightenment as something greater than my own release from doubt; if I can see it as part of the process by which “the light which lighteth every man” is slowly spreading through the world, then it is no longer insignificant. I dare to hope for it. I dare to pray for it. I make myself ready for it. I cast aside frivolity and despair, the two benighteners of the human soul, and when God comes and over, under, nay, through every doubt proves Himself to me, I take Him with a certainty which is as humble as it is solemn and sure. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks.]

II

Whence Comfort Comes

“The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and God of all comfort.”

1. Invariably when man confronts the problem of suffering he uses his doctrine of God to aid him in the solution. The history of human thought in all times and in all religions will, it is believed, be found to verify this statement. By a companion intuition to that which prompts man to ask why he suffers, man is prompted to feel that God is in some way related to his sufferings. This would be true in the case of an atheist, if there exists such a state of mind as pure atheism. The atheist, denying the existence of God, would thereby relate the conception of a God negatively to human suffering, saying: “There being no God, the God-idea has no bearing whatever on the sufferings of the human race.” This would be true in the case of the agnostic, who declines to commit himself to a positive statement of belief on the subject of God. He would relate God tentatively to human trouble, saying: “He may send it, or He may not; in the absence of physical demonstration it is impossible to tell.” This would be true in the case of the ethnic religions; for example, in the case of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian faith, with its dualism,—two co-eternal gods, arrayed against one another in ceaseless opposition touching man’s condition. There is Ormuzd, the god of good, sending every blessing on the race; there is Ahriman, the god of evil, showering upon humanity woe, disappointment, and every form of ill. These illustrations might be indefinitely multiplied, and in each case we would discover the tendency of the human mind to place a doctrine of God in some relation, negative, tentative, or positive, to the problem of suffering. The reason for this is plain; the sufferings of the race are so tremendous, so unceasing, and in innumerable instances so out of proportion to any recognized standard of justice—there is a feeling too deep for analysis, too axiomatic to call for demonstration—that in some way, if there is a God, humanity’s one hope of present consolation or of future relief must connect itself with Him, and be evolved through Him. Deep down below all creeds, the hope of a suffering world utters that many-sided, infinite syllable “God,” and feeling the problem of suffering to be greater than man can handle alone, confesses, sometimes scarce knowing what it means: “To whom shall we go but unto thee!”

Destiny without God is a riddle: history without God is a tragedy. But if God be to you what He was to St. Paul—“the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and God of all comfort”—does not life assume a new complexion? If you believe—not accept theoretically but believe in your heart of hearts, grasp as the fundamental fact of existence for you—if you believe in a God whom you can describe with these words of St. Paul, what can you say but, thankfully, adoringly, “Blessed be God”? What does it matter what a man believes about God? the world says. Nothing else matters. All else by comparison is a thing of indifference.

There is no real comfort in the Bible sense apart from faith. Time may mitigate or assuage or harden, the world may make us forget, life may distract, work may fill up the gap, friends may cheer and support, but only God can comfort. It is always so in the Bible. The Divine comfort is the only comfort worth speaking of. “Let thy merciful kindness be for my comfort,” prayed the Psalmist. The unfailing source of comfort in both the Old and the New Testaments is the Divine presence. “Our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father which loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and stablish them in every good work and word,” is Paul’s desire for the Thessalonians. “The God of all comfort” is His designation from whom alone can consolation come. It is only a man’s faith that can cut deep down to the roots of his life. His life follows the fortunes of his faith. Our faith settles everything, even the quality of our possible comfort. 1 [Note: Hugh Black, Christ’s Service of Love, 52.]

2. Notice the names which St. Paul gives to God.

(1) He is “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” For always to the Apostle consolation abounds “through Christ.” He is the Mediator through whom it comes. To partake in His sufferings is to be united to Him; and to be united to Him is to partake in His life. The Apostle anticipates here a thought on which he enlarges in the fourth chapter: “Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body.” In our eagerness to emphasize the nearness and the sympathy of Jesus, it is to be feared that we do less than justice to the New Testament revelation of His glory. He does not suffer now. He is enthroned on high, far above all principality and power and might and dominion. The Spirit which brings His presence to our hearts is the Spirit of the Prince of Life; its function is not to be weak with our weakness, but to help our infirmity and to strengthen us with all might in the inner man. The Christ who dwells in us through His Spirit is not the Man of Sorrows, wearing the crown of thorns, but the King of kings and Lord of lords, who makes us partakers of His triumph. There is a weak tone in much of the religious literature which deals with suffering, utterly unlike that of the New Testament. It is a degradation of Christ to our level that it teaches, instead of an exaltation of man toward Christ’s. But the last is the apostolic ideal: “More than conquerors through him that loved us.” The comfort of which St. Paul makes so much here is not necessarily deliverance from suffering for Christ’s sake, still less exemption from it; it is the strength and courage and immortal hope which rise up, even in the midst of suffering, in the heart in which the Lord of glory dwells. Through Him such comfort abounds; it wells up to match and more than match the rising tide of suffering.

We cannot read the New Testament intelligently without being impressed that a new sense of power and a new source of comfort came to men who had learned to know God through Jesus Christ. The contrast is most marked when we know the world into which the new message came, and this we can do today as never before. The epitaphs and papyri which are being discovered in such numbers in Egypt and elsewhere tell us of the customs of the common people, and show us the common point of view in the time of early Christianity before it had laid hold of the world. We see the mass of the people hungering for religion, and with nothing substantial to satisfy the hunger, and on that account open to all manner of superstition. We see them in their helplessness before the inevitable distress of death and before the great problem of life, usually either with a hopeless resignation or with a forced gaiety that is more pathetic still. One of these witnesses to a past life is suggestive as indicating the comfortless state of the world. In Yale University Library there has been deposited a Greek Papyrus of the second century, which is a letter of comfort sent over a bereavement. It reads thus: “Eirene to Taonnophris and Philon good cheer! I was as much grieved and shed as many tears over Eumoiros as I shed for Didymus, and I did everything that was fitting, and so did my whole family. But still there is nothing one can do in the face of such trouble. So I leave you to comfort yourselves. Goodbye.” It is quite evidently not meant to be heartless, but there was not anything more to be said before the final passion of life. Paul’s word is thrown into bold relief when he wrote to his converts “that ye sorrow not, even as the rest, which have no hope.” 1 [Note: Hugh Black, Comfort, 10.]

(2) God is also “the Father of mercies.” He is the Father of pity, of compassion, the Father of that gracious spirit to which we have given the name “Samaritanism.” That is the kind of mercy which streams from the hills. Mercy is the very spirit of Samaritanism. It stops by the wounded wayfarer, it dismounts without condescension, it is not moved by the imperative of duty, but constrained by the tender yearnings of humanity and love. It is not the mercy of a stern and awful judge, but the compassion of a tenderly-disposed and wistful friend. Our God is the Father of such mercies. Wherever the spirit of a true Samaritanism is to be found, our God is the Father of it. It was born of Him. It was born on the hills.

It streams from the hills,

It descends to the plain.

Wherever we discover a bit of real Samaritanism we may claim it as one of the tender offspring of the Spirit of God. With what boldness the Apostle plants his Lord’s flag on territory that has been unjustly alienated from its owner, and claims it for its rightful King! “The Father of mercies.”

(3) And he is the “God of all comfort.” What music there is about the word! It means more than tenderness: it is strength in tenderness, and it is tenderness in strength. It is not a mere palliative but a curative. It not merely soothes, but heals. Its ministry is not only consolation but restoration. “Comfort” is “mercy” at work, it is Samaritanism busy with its oil and wine. And again let us mark that whenever we find this busy goodness among the children of men, exercising itself among the broken limbs and broken hearts of the race, the Lord is the fountain of it. He is the “God of all comfort,” of every form and kind and aspect.

I have always found, in talking to my people in private, that all second-hand talk out of books about the benefits of affliction was rain against a window-pane, blinding the view but never entering. But if I can make a poor wretch believe that God is the foe of all misery and affliction, that He yearns to raise us out of it, and to show us that in His presence is the fulness of all life and joy, and nothing but our own wilfulness and imperfection keeps us in it for an instant, that the moment he will allow God to remove those sorrows, the Lord will rejoice in doing so,—it is enough. 1 [Note: Charles Kingsley.]

Let me count my treasures,

All my soul holds dear,

Given me by dark spirits

Whom I used to fear.

Through long days of anguish,

And sad nights, did Pain

Forge my shield, Endurance,

Bright and free from stain!

Doubt, in misty caverns,

’Mid dark horrors sought,

Till my peerless jewel,

Faith to me she brought.

Sorrow, that I wearied

Should remain so long,

Wreathed my starry glory,

The bright Crown of Song.

Strife, that racked my spirit

Without hope or rest,

Left the blooming flower,

Patience, on my breast.

Suffering, that I dreaded,

Ignorant of her charms,

Laid the fair child, Pity,

Smiling, in my arms.

So I count my treasures,

Stored in days long past—

And I thank the givers,

Whom I know at last! 1 [Note: Adelaide Procter, Legends and Lyrics, i. 60.]

III

Why Comfort Comes

“That we may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction.”

1. God’s dealing with a particular man is not an end in itself but is designed for a larger end for which the particular man is used. St. Paul saw this fully, and therefore his life has been the wonder of Christian history. The moral and spiritual ends involved in salvation can be secured only by the working of God’s love through loving men. St. Paul blessed God for the personal comfort he had received in his affliction, but he saw beyond that to the great wide purpose in the heart of God. He saw himself to be not an end but an instrument. He blessed God not so much for the personal comfort as because through the personal comfort he was enabled to continue the work to which he had given his life. Most of us never see much beyond ourselves. We hedge ourselves in within our own borders. We desire the sunshine for ourselves and, it may be, bless God for every ray of it. But we do not always understand the object of God’s love and comfort, that for which He gives us it. We do not always see that we are blessed in order that we may bless, comforted that we may comfort, and get that we may give.

No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him He gives him for mankind. It is the different degrees of this consciousness that make the different degrees of greatness in men. If you take your man full of acuteness, at the top of his speciality, of vast knowledge, of exhaustless skill, and ask yourselves where the mysterious lack is which keeps you from thinking that man great—why it is that, although he may be a great naturalist, or a great merchant, or a great inventor, he is not a great man—the answer will be here, that he is selfish; that what God gives him stops in himself; that he has no such essential humanity as to make his life a reservoir from which refreshment is distributed, or a point of radiation for God’s light. And then if you take another man, rude, simple, untaught, in whom it is hard to find special attainments or striking points of character, but whom you instinctively call great, and ask yourself the reason of that instinct, I think you find it in the fact that that man has this quality: that his life does take all which it receives, not for its own use but in trust; that in the highest sense it is unselfish, so that by it God reaches man, and it is His greatness that you feel in it. For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small. There is greatness in a mother’s life whose utter unselfishness fills her household with the life and love of God, transmitted through her consecration. There is greatness in a child’s life who is patient under a wrong and shows the world at some new point the dignity of self-restraint and the beauty of conquered passions. And thence we rise until we come to Christ, and find the perfection of His human greatness in His transmissiveness; in the fact that what He was as man, He was not for Himself alone but for all men, for mankind. All through the range of human life, from lowest up to highest, any religious conception of human greatness must be ultimately reducible to this: a quality in any man by which he is capable first of taking into himself, and then of distributing through himself to others, some part of the life of God. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks.]

Dr. Wilson was a physician of souls, because he had, in a very high degree, what physicians call the cor medicum, and the mens medica—what one of the most famous of them explains as “that gentle womanliness of heart which the sick in depression and pain often desire, look for, and profit by.” His warm sympathy gave his voice the tone which tells at a sick-bed, and also, when fitting, that sympathetic silence which is sometimes better than speech, and which made him an attentive listener to a tale of grief that relieved the over-burdened heart. “His sympathy,” writes one, “was full of tact. He was able to touch the sore places of the heart without hurting the wound. One always felt at one’s best when with him.” To many he was an under-paraclete through whom the Paraclete fulfilled His Divine mission. For in the language of the New Testament, to console means to play the Paraclete. 1 [Note: J. Wells, Life of James Hood Wilson, 237.]

Ask God to give thee skill

In Comfort’s art,

That thou may’st consecrated be

And set apart

Unto a life of sympathy.

For heavy is the weight of ill

In every heart;

And comforters are needed much

Of Christ-like touch. 2 [Note: A. E. Hamilton.]

2. If we would be able to comfort we must ourselves be comforted. They are the expert comforters who have sought and found their comfort in the Lord. They are able to “speak a word in season to him that is weary.” They who have been comforted in doubt are the finest ministers to those who are still treading the valley of gloom. They who have been comforted in sickness know just the word which opens the pearly gates and brings to the desolate soul the hosts of the Lord. They who have been comforted in turning from sin and wickedness know just the word to speak to the shrinking prodigal when he is timidly approaching his father’s door. Let us get away to our God, let us bare our souls to Him, and let us receive His marvellous gifts of comfort and mercy. And then let us use our glorious wealth in enriching other people and by our ministry bringing them to the heights.

The most painfully tried, the most proved in suffering, the souls that are best acquainted with grief, provided their consolation has abounded through Christ, are specially called to this ministry. Their experience is their preparation for it. Nature is something, and age is something; but far more than nature and age is that discipline of God to which they have been submitted, that initiation into the sufferings of Christ which has made them acquainted with His consolations also, and has taught them to know the Father of mercies and God of all comfort. Are they not among His best gifts to the Church, those whom He has qualified to console, by consoling them in the fire?

This discipline (doubt as to his being saved) was part, I believe, of a merciful training, to teach him what he could learn effectually no otherwise. It is a discipline through which all who are to guide successfully perplexed consciences and timid Christians are made sooner or later to pass—“that they may be able to comfort them that are in any trouble with the comfort wherewith they themselves are comforted of God.” Some have it at the outset of their Christian life, and so are long before they can venture to cherish the hope of salvation; others get so quietly into joy and peace in believing, that, as Dr. Kidd said to Mr. Duncan, “they cannot understand the difficulties of others.” And some of these never do understand those difficulties. Living in sunshine themselves, they wonder that all other Christians are not as they are, and they die very much as they live—strangers to doubt and fear, but strangers also to much soul-humbling insight into the plagues of their own heart, and to that most entrancing of all Christian experiences, when, after deep, protracted, and apparently hopeless backsliding, they hear a voice saying unto them in melting accents, “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for mine anger is turned away from him,” and they are constrained in return to say with Ephraim, “What have I to do any more with idols?” Mr. Duncan’s first Christian experience was indeed very genuine—fresh and beauteous as a new-blown rose sparkling with dew-drops in the morning sun. But it was superficial. It needed deepening, solidifying, invigorating, both for his own sake and for that of others. This he got in a way which, though by no means peculiar, was in his case intensified to the utmost. Not but that there were in this second experience unsatisfactory elements, as I judge; but the real and permanent value of that experience was immense. 1 [Note: David Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 210.]

Livingstone, speaking of his friend, Dr. Philip, “Liberator of the Hottentots” [who, previous to going to South Africa, was a young Independent minister in Aberdeen], relates that Philip, when in Aberdeen, once visited an old woman in affliction. The youthful pastor began to talk very fair to her of the duty of resignation, trusting, hoping, and all the rest of it. The old woman after listening attentively looked up into his face, and said: “Puir thing, ye ken naething aboot it!”

My daughter Eppie had an album in which she wrote appropriate mottoes under the various portraits; under Dr. John Brown’s she wrote these lines from one of the elegies on Sir Philip Sidney:—

A sweet attractive kind of grace;

The full assurance given by looks;

Perpetual comfort in a face;

The lineaments of Gospel books.

What “perpetual comfort” I found in him as the years went on, bringing with them the inevitable cares and troubles, joys and sorrows, is known only to my own heart. Only one dreaded to draw too deeply on his sympathy, so real was the shadow cast on his sensitive spirit by the sorrows of others. Nor was it only his friends’ sorrows that he shared; firmly and tenderly he could face their failures, their defeats, even their sin. To be worthy of Dr. Brown’s friendship was an incentive, to more than he knew, to make the best of themselves. 1 [Note: Mrs. E. M. Sellar, Recollections and Impressions, 93.]

3. Just as with God, so also with us, comfort is not merely consolation. There are times when we come to God, as a child to its father, to be soothed and quieted, and it is His pleasure to soothe and quiet those who are in any affliction. But there are days when the most comforting thing God can do for us is to nerve us to duty. In both these ways we are to comfort each other. The recognition of the difference will have a very practical effect upon some of our dealings. We have come to believe a little too readily that the supreme way of using Christian sympathy and comfort is always in the attempt to alleviate circumstances. If we do otherwise we are supposed to be hard, inhuman, dictating to others a course which we are not prepared to follow ourselves. The only gospel to the poor and unfortunate, we are told, is the gospel of better wages, better homes, less work, more play. But there is more than that, and we simply rely on the evidence of fact when we say that in the circle of each one of us some of the noblest and strongest characters we have known have been the product of very hard and, as it seemed, cruel circumstances. Mark, the secret of it was not that there was produced in them a hard, stoical, passive endurance. That was not it at all; it was that they were strengthened to serve even under such conditions. They were taught by God that no man could sink so low that he could not contribute something to the common life. They have been helped by being taught that even they can help and comfort others.

To the Christian soul many a time a personal sorrow, or disappointment, or loss has been a turning-point of life, an occasion for deeper consecration and wider service. In Morley’s Life of Cobden there is a quotation from one of John Bright’s speeches, which explains how he was led to devote his life first of all to the anti-Corn Law agitation and so to many noble causes. “At that time I was at Leamington, and I was, on the day when Mr. Cobden called on me, in the depths of grief, I might almost say of despair; for the light and sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left on earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and of a too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. Mr. Cobden called upon me as his friend, and addressed me, as you might suppose, with words of condolence. After a time he looked up and said, ‘There are thousands of houses in England at this moment where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger. Now,’ he said, ‘when the first paroxysm of your grief is past, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest till the Corn Law is repealed.’ ” That was chastening yielding its noble fruit, sympathy born of sorrow. John Bright’s rich, useful life might have been lost to England, if he had only brooded over his grief and hardened his heart, and refused to listen to the evident call which came to him. 1 [Note: Hugh Black, Comfort, 136.]

4. We scarcely need consider how we may comfort others. If we ourselves are comforted of God, the ways in which our comfort will pass to others are endless. Our very troubles have probably more influence than we suspect on the moral condition of those about us who care for us. We may often see this in a home where there is perhaps a sick child, or a sick mother; there is a tender-heartedness, a kindness, and patience towards the weak in that family, even including the boys, which are the direct result of the presence of suffering. The meaning of that mysterious suffering may be, in part, the development in others of features of character necessary to their well-being, and of maintaining in them that softness of heart so needful to spiritual receptivity. We who are strong little know how much we are indebted for what is best in us to some we love who have gone through suffering, in part, for our sakes. But if that is true of the family, may it not be true of a much wider circle? May not the sufferings of every sufferer under heaven be an instrumentality by which God develops the moral and spiritual character of his fellows? May not our suffering be a means of grace to many whom we do not know we touch? But it is not so much the suffering, it is the comforted suffering, by which we are made ministers of consolation, even when we say not a word. It is the suffering God has helped us to bear, the suffering He has cheered us in and sanctified to us, that is the highest good, and that in the way of illustrating what God and goodness are.

A father tries to teach his little son self-restraint, but it is a long task. One day that father’s pride and indignation are touched to the quick, and the boy looks on and sees the inward conflict, and that a strong hand is laid on the rising anger, and the evil conquered. He has learnt the lesson; the father’s sanctified suffering has taught what self-restraint is, when nothing else could. A mother tries in vain to make her child know what patience is. After a time she is in trouble, in which nothing is harder than to “stand still and see the salvation of God.” But she does stand still, and in her trustful waiting she has taught what words could not. A teacher seeks in vain to make his scholars understand the worth of godliness; but in the way he endures the trials which God presently sends, he carries home the fact to their inmost heart. Sufferers little know how much they are doing for the Master and His world! For myself I have learnt many of my best lessons in sick rooms where they thanked me for going, as though they were the gainers, and not I. “Bearing about in the body”—says St. Paul—“the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body. For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.” It was a sufferer’s face, says one; men saw “as it had been the face of an angel.” 1 [Note: C. New, Sermons, 90.]

There is one feature of Dr. Rainy’s character in these years of which it is more easy to speak. That is the tenderness which more and more revealed itself in his words and acts as, indeed, on his very countenance. Many persons have spoken to me of this, and declared they can never forget his sympathy in times of sorrow, nor could they even tell of its sacredness. This was no new feature of Dr. Rainy’s life; but in these later years, with a ripened Christian and human experience, and with the chastened sense that age must bring of the pathos of life, it seems more than ever to have been a deliberate part of his work to try to comfort and heal and sympathize. In these years his own family life was visited with a very sore sorrow. His third daughter, Annie, who was in many things his right hand, became ill and was sent with a friend to Algiers, where, soon after landing, she died on 9th March, 1903. She accepted with promptness and sweetness, when she realized it, the call to give up her young life, and her father in his sorrow wrote, “We have very great consolations—indeed every consolation we could have.” 2 [Note: P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 292.]

Soon after I became a minister, and while I was still a very young man, a great loss fell on a family in my congregation. The husband died a year or two after marriage. I went to see the widow. Her anguish was of that silent, self-restrained sort which it is always most terrible to witness.… Her grief was dumb. I was oppressed by it; I could say nothing. The sorrow seemed beyond the reach of comfort; and after sitting for a few minutes I rose in some agitation and went away without saying a word. After I had left the house, and when I had recovered self-possession, I felt humiliated and distressed that I had not spoken; I thought that perhaps it would have been better not to have gone at all. I do not feel so now. Sometimes the only consolation we can offer our friends is to let them know that we feel that their sorrow is too great for any consolation of ours. 3 [Note: R. W. Dale, The Laws of Christ in Common Life, 133.]

Do you long to bring relief

For the burden of a grief

Even Hope has barely stirred?

You may compass this, perchance,

By the sunbeam of a glance,

Through the music of a word.

Is the casket of a heart

Double-locked, and set apart

With its treasure all untold?

Did you only understand,

In the hollow of your hand

Lies the master-key of gold.

Do you hesitate to seek

For the souls who never speak

Of their sorrow, nor their sin?

Hasten forth to them, and wait,

Standing humbly at their gate,

Till they beckon you within. 1 [Note: M. Bartleet, in Sunday Magazine, 1905, p. 792.]

Comfort

Literature

Beecher (H. W.), Henry Ward Beecher in England, 205.

Black (H.), Christ’s Service of Love, 52.

Brent (C. H.), The Consolations of the Cross, 1.

Brooks (P.), Sermons, 1.

Denney (J.), The Second Epistle to the Corinthians (Expositor’s Bible), 10.

Hall (C. C.), The Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice, 179.

Illingworth (A. L.), The Resurrection and the Life, 105.

Jenkinson (A.), A Modern Disciple, 239.

Kitto (J. F.), in Religion in Common Life, 82.

Little (W. J. K.), Sermons in Manchester, 282.

Meyer (F. B.), Present Tenses, 74.

New (C.), Sermons Preached in Hastings, 83.

Newman (J. H.), Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 106.

Newman (J. H.), Parochial and Plain Sermons, v. 300.

Raleigh (A.), Thoughts for the Weary, 68.

Romanes (E.), Thoughts on the Collects, 30.

Smith (H. W.), The God of all Comfort, 26.

Spurgeon (C. H.), My Sermon Notes: Romans to Revelation, 233.

Stewart (A.), in The Divine Artist, 41.

Thompson (J. R.), Burden Bearing, 107.

Williams (I.), Sermons on the Epistles and Gospels, iii. 256.

Wilson (S. L.), Helpful Words for Daily Life, 363.

Christian World Pulpit, xviii. 211 (W. J. Cuthbertson); xxi. 147 (H. W. Beecher); xxx. 193 (H. W. Beecher); lii. 70 (W. H. Harwood); lvii. 214 (G. Body); lxxi. 187 (G. C. Britton); lxxviii. 113 (N. Boynton); xxiv. 392 (H. W. Beecher).

British Congregationalist, Sept. 1, 1910 (N. Boynton).

Examiner, November 2, 1905 (J. H. Jowett).

Homiletic Review, lix. 312 (A. Menzies).

National Preacher, xxi. 77 (J. P. Thompson).

Sunday Magazine, 1905, p. 792 (C. S. Horne).

Verse 20

The Yea and the Amen

For how many soever be the promises of God, in him is the yea: wherefore also through him is the Amen, unto the glory of God through us.— 2 Corinthians 1:20.

1. These words occur in a homely and curious connexion. St. Paul had not kept his appointment with the Corinthian Church, and he fears that the influence of a hostile party may cause his failure to be misunderstood. Did he use lightness? Was his pledge Yea, Yea, and Nay, Nay; Yes to-day, and No to-morrow? Now, what would seem most natural for us to say, if exposed to such a charge? Perhaps we should exclaim, “I am not such a man”; or, “They have mistaken the person they have to deal with”; or again, “I can afford to despise the insinuation.” But St. Paul did not think first about himself. He had passed out of the sphere where any subject, even the slightest, appealed first and most naturally to his personal instincts and his self-respect. When he is reproached with changing lightly the plan of a tour (which plan he had actually changed), his thoughts revert to Christ and His Gospel, which such conduct would dishonour. What notion of the Master have these people, who charge him, the herald, with such unworthy levity? There was not Yea and Nay with Paul, because in Christ was one steadfast Yea.

Now, this argument is illogical unless we supply a suppressed premiss which St. Paul did not pause to state, since he had much to say in few words. For just as God’s fidelity is no guarantee of Paul’s veracity, unless Paul was a partaker of the Divine nature, so the steadfast sincerity of Christ is no guarantee of his sincerity, unless he and Christ are one—one in being, one in thought, will, aim. But this oneness with Christ was a fundamental conception of the Christian life with St. Paul. It lay at the basis of his theology. He could neither preach a sermon nor write a letter without affirming or assuming it. So completely was he one with Christ that he affirms that he was crucified with Christ; that he died when Christ died, and rose again from the dead. All he did he did by Christ, as well as for Him. All he suffered was but a filling up of the remnant of Christ’s affliction. His motto, his characteristic word, might well be: “Henceforth I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” That being so, it was natural that he should assume this doctrine of the indwelling Christ here; and assume also that his readers would supply this premiss of his argument, which he did not think it necessary, or which it did not occur to him, to state. And, of course, the moment it was assumed, the Apostle’s argument became sound, and even irresistible. For then it ran: The Son of God, Jesus Christ, is true; Christ is in me; the spring of all virtue, as well as the hope of glory: and therefore I am, I must be, true. As He, was not Yea and Nay, my word to you is not, and cannot be, Yea and Nay.

2. Now look at the text. This is one of the many passages the force and beauty of which are, for the first time, brought within the reach of an English reader by the alterations in the Revised Version. These are dependent partly upon the reading of the Greek and partly upon the translation. As the words stand in the Authorized Version, “yea” and “amen” seem to be very nearly synonymous expressions, and to point substantially to the same thing, namely, that Jesus Christ is as it were the confirmation and seal of God’s promises. But in the Revised Version the alterations, especially in the pronouns, indicate more distinctly that the Apostle means two different things by the “yea” and the “amen.” The one is God’s voice, the other is man’s. The one has to do with the certainty of the Divine revelation, the other has to do with the certitude of our faith in the revelation. When God speaks in Christ, He confirms everything that He has said before, and when we listen to God speaking in Christ, our lips are, through Christ, opened to shout our assenting “Amen” to His great promises.

This is a truth so far-reaching that all the promises of God have the seal of their stability in Christ. As often as any pledge is realized (and that is whenever one is trusted), the conscience of the Church confesses that her enjoyment of it has been attained in Him. Through Him, therefore, she returns her glad attestation. How many soever are the promises of God, in Him is the Yea of Divine fulfilment; wherefore through Him is also the Amen of human acknowledgment and praise, “to the glory of God through us.”

3. Taken thus, the text not only gives us a new conception of the mission of Christ, it gives us also a new conception of the vocation of the Church, of our vocation as Christian men. Christ is the Yea of God: we, through the power of the indwelling Christ, are the Amen. It is His mission to translate all the thoughts of God into actual and vital forms; it is our vocation, as we study that translation, as we see those thoughts taking shape, as they become visible and recognizable to us, to add our Amen to them, i.e. to accept, welcome, and conform to them. The power to add this Amen, to consent to and obey the will of God, we derive from Christ, who lives, and dwells in us. And this power is given to us with a view “to the glory of God through us.” In fine, the vision which lies behind St. Paul’s words, and which he labours to express, seems to be nothing less than this: He conceives of the infinite God as dwelling in the inaccessible light, and thinking out the thoughts of His eternal righteousness and love; He conceives of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as translating these thoughts into creative, providential, and redeeming acts; and he conceives of the vast congregation of those who love God and believe on His Son as standing round and contemplating the Divine thoughts which take visible form at the behest of the Son, and chanting their loud Amen to all that He does, to all that He reveals of the Father’s will.

I

Christ’s Yea

“In him is the yea.”

There are two ways in which we may think of Christ as Yea. First He is Himself certain, and next the promises are certain in Him.

1. Christ Himself is certain.—Nothing is more noteworthy, when our attention is drawn to it, than the confidence of the assertions of Christ, so vast and far-reaching in their scope, so unqualified by any “perhaps,” by any hint of uncertainty or conjecture.

(1) This is so with regard to His own earthly life. Strange indeed is the contrast between the words of His Apostle, “I go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem, not knowing the things that shall befall me there,” and the explicit and detailed warnings given by Jesus of the manner, the circumstances, and the date of His death. “Not on the feast-day,” said the priests; but the knowledge of their Victim outran their most subtle calculations. “After two days the passover cometh, and the Son of man is delivered up to be crucified.”

(2) Again, we all feel the pressure and solemnity of the problems of human existence. Revelation is perfect as a practical guide, but a solver of theoretical problems it is not. What am I? Whither am I going? He may be a good Christian, but assuredly he is a dull thinker, who supposes that every cloud is lifted by religion from the twin problems of our origin and our destiny. Dimly these questions loom up, like gigantic mountain slopes visible through rolling vapours, before us and behind. Through changing mists we see them, half illumined in the radiance of our Christian trust, but their head and their base alike are swathed in impenetrable mystery.

In this baffled peering wonder Jesus had no share. He alone of human beings could say, without reserve, “I know whence I come, and whither I go.” And yet the mystery of His being was the most profound of all.

(3) The same tone of unwavering certitude is audible in His teaching about duty and God. Others have taught with a wonderful confidence, but it has always been avowedly a derived and imparted message. Gabriel spoke to Muhammad. The spot is shown where Gautama, after agonies of search, became Buddha, which means, “the enlightened one.” Even the prophets of the true faith were men “to whom the word of the Lord came,” a position which Christ contrasted with His own. But if men had known Him they should have known the Father. “The Father sheweth him all things that himself doeth.” “No man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.”

(4) In quite the same confident tones Jesus spoke of the life to come; “In my Father’s house are many mansions; I go to prepare a place for you”; “Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am.”

Review the whole circle of spiritual truth, and see whether there is any part of it where Jesus trod with hesitating step. Find one conjecture, one mere inference, one example of truth arrived at otherwise than as a fact within His own consciousness. He used Scripture to repel Satan, to refute gainsayers, to convince the hesitating; and, as in His last words upon the cross, to express the deepest emotions of His own heart. But His natural and characteristic method, with all teachable souls, is as He expressed it to Nicodemus: “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.”

This certainty of Christ’s is part of the completeness of His character and life. And hence it becomes part of that assurance we have when we put our trust in Him.

The character and doctrine of Jesus are the sun that holds all the minor orbs of revelation to their places, and pours a sovereign self-evidencing light into all religious knowledge. It is no ingenious fetches of argument that we want; no external testimony, gathered here and there from the records of past ages, suffices to end our doubts; but it is the new sense opened in us by Jesus Himself—a sense deeper than words and more immediate than inference—of the miraculous grandeur of His life; a glorious agreement felt between His works and His person, such that His miracles themselves are proved to us in our feeling, believed in by that inward testimony. On this inward testimony we are willing to stake everything, even the life that now is, and that which is to come. If the miracles, if revelation itself, cannot stand upon the superhuman character of Jesus, then let it fall. If that character does not contain all truth and centralize all truth in itself, then let there be no truth. 1 [Note: Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural.]

Let me forget all else that I have known—

All else that I have heard;

Let me remember Thee, and Thee alone,

O Jesus—living Word!

It is enough to know that I am Thine—

That Thou dost undertake

To hold and keep this helpless life of mine—

Accepted for Thy sake.

O, Thou alone canst hope or help afford;

There is no way beside.

I look to Thee, my glorious risen Lord,

And I am satisfied. 1 [Note: Edith H. Divall, A Believer’s Rest, 30.]

2. The promises of God are certain in Christ.—This is the special assertion of St. Paul in the text. And these promises, we may say at once, have their certainty of fulfilment in Christ because He has fulfilled the conditions on which they are suspended. “The wages of sin is death.” “Without shedding of blood is no remission.” So say the Scriptures; so says the conscience of man in a hundred lands. The promises of pardon for sin are many and rich; but they are all based on the fact that Christ voluntarily took our place under the Law and paid the penalty our disobedience incurred. Behind the promises are the cross and the real sacrifice it bore. That that sacrifice of Himself was accepted of God in our behalf is put beyond denial by His resurrection from the dead. Anyone can write a promise of pardon; many wise men have taught moral truth; and some good men have died in pity and in love for their fellow-men. There were three crosses on Calvary that day. Why do we lean with all religious hope on the central cross? Because Christ in His teaching, in His works of mercy, in giving Himself to die for us, based the acceptance by God of what He did in our behalf on His resurrection on the third day. Other men were wise; loved their fellow-men with a passion of love and died for them; but of such only Christ was raised from the dead at the time foretold. The opening of the grave and the raising of the dead is the sole prerogative of God. That resurrection is God’s endorsement and acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice as atonement for man’s sin. The promises of the needed grace for the passing day are based on the fact that after His resurrection Christ ascended into heaven and is there making continual intercession for us. These promises put us in touch with a living Saviour. The promises of future glory on which we depend are based on the fact that Christ has entered into that glory and is there now preparing a place for us, to return again to take us to Himself, that where He is we may be also. There, then, is the security behind these promises—the person and the work of Christ, His life, His death, His resurrection, and His ascension, by virtue of which the promises are Yea.

(1) The promise of the love of God is secured in Christ. All too often we forget the riches of this truth; we lose sight of the Father’s love. Perhaps in sincere anxiety not to forget that Christ is God, we think it a dim and distant truth when we hear that the Father Almighty loved, and loves, His Son and the sinner and the world. But here again the Bible tells a different story. It shows us the love of God the Father as the very source of our salvation in Christ Jesus. “This is my beloved Son; hear ye him”; “He spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”; “the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me”; “through him we have access unto the Father”; “the Father, according to his abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a lively hope.” To know the Father—through our Lord Jesus Christ, never apart from Him, but through and in Him,—is the glorious privilege of those who have life through grace. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”

The question may arise in some minds, Is there any need for proving God’s love? The question never arose except within the limits of Christianity. It is only men who have lived all their lives in an atmosphere saturated by Christian sentiment and conviction that ever come to the point of saying, “We do not want historical revelation to prove to us the fact of a loving God.” They would never have fancied that they did not need the revelation unless, unconsciously to themselves, and indirectly, all their thoughts had been coloured and illuminated by the revelation that they professed to reject. God as Love is “our dearest faith, our ghastliest doubt,” and the only way to make absolutely certain of the fact that His heart is full of mercy to us is to look upon Him as He stands revealed to us, not merely in the words of Christ—for, precious as they are, these are the smallest part of His revelation—but in the life and in the death, which open for us the heart of God. Remember what He said Himself— not “He that hath listened to me doth understand the Father,” but “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” “In him is the yea.” And the hopes and shadowy fore-revelations of the loving heart of God are confirmed by the fact of His life and death. “God establisheth (not “commendeth,” as our translation has it,) his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

At Derby Haven in the sweet Manx land

A little girl had written on the sand

This legend—“God is love.” But, when I said—

“ What means this writing?” thus she answered—

“ It’s father that’s at ‘say,’

And I come here to pray,

And … God is love.” My eyes grew dim—

Blest child! in Heaven above

Your angel sees the face of Him

Whose name is love. 1 [Note: T. E. Brown, Old John and Other Poems, 190.]

(2) The providence of God becomes a fact in Christ. We find within us an instinct which impels us to cry for some heavenly help or guidance or support in times of crisis and distress. Even the most sceptical will often give a practical denial to their doubts by the word of prayer which is wrung from their hearts under stress of some calamity, or under the shadow of an impending danger. In our heart of hearts, that is to say, we feel that God personally cares and provides for this world which He has made; deep down in our being we believe that to pray is to touch the heart of the Eternal; and in moments of anguish or of supreme joy we confide in an unseen Providence as we would in our closest friend. And then comes the cold analysis of reason, and—

Doubts will rise if God hath kept

His promises to men.

What does it all amount to? we say. Instinct?—a delusion. Providence?—a fiction of the imagination. Think of it. What do I, as an individual, count for in a world so vast, itself but a speck in an illimitable universe? How should God—if there be a God—have any personal care for me? It is the old question of the Psalmist: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the Son of man, that thou visitest him?”

The most casual glance at the life and character of Jesus will give us the answer. He saw the providence of God in the wayside flower, in the feeding of the birds, in the fall of a sparrow; “the very hairs of your head are all numbered”; He who clothes the grass of the field will much more provide for the needs of the children of men. Because He was thus conscious of God in the things about Him, Jesus was calm and free from care in the midst of an angry and a striving world. In the march of events and the sure progress of the ages, He recognized the all-controlling will of God, and so He lived and died that the Father’s will might be accomplished. And then at the end, with a joy which all the cruelties of men could not suppress, He yielded Himself to the loving Providence which sent Him forth. “Father,” He said, “into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

“I cannot see, I cannot speak, I cannot hear, God bless you,” was Newman’s message to his old friend Mr. Gladstone in November, 1888. Newman’s delight in men, in books, and in affairs had all his life been intense, and he had a strong desire that his life might be prolonged to its utmost possible span, if it was the will of God. “For myself, now, at the end of a long life,” he wrote, “I say from a full heart that God has never failed me, has never disappointed me, has ever turned evil into good for me. When I was young I used to say (and I trust it was not presumptuous to say it) that our Lord ever answered my prayers.” 1 [Note: Alexander Whyte, Newman: An Appreciation, 61.]

(3) Pardon is made sure in Christ. Every man of deep heart-experience has felt the necessity of having a clear certainty and knowledge about forgiveness. Men do not feel it always. A man can skate over the surface of the great deeps that lie beneath the most frivolous life, and may suppose, in his superficial way of looking at things, that there is no need for any definite teaching about sin, and the mode of dealing with it. But once bring that man face to face, in a quiet hour, with the facts of his life and of a Divine law, and all that superficial ignoring of evil in Himself, and of the dread of punishment and consequences, passes away. Then the only message that answers to the needs of an awakened conscience and an alarmed heart is the old-fashioned message that Jesus Christ the Righteous has died for us sinful men. All other religions have felt after a clear doctrine of forgiveness, and all have failed to find it. Here is the Divine “Yea!” And on it alone we can suspend the whole weight of our soul’s salvation. The rope that is to haul us out of the horrible pit and the miry clay had much need to be tested before we commit ourselves to it. There are many easy-going superficial theories about forgiveness predominant in the world to-day. Except the one that says, “In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sin,” they are all like the rope let down into the dark mine to lift the captives beneath, half of the strands of which have been cut on the sharp edge above, and when the weight hangs to it, it will snap. There is nothing on which a man who has once learned the tragic meaning and awful reality and depth of the fact of transgression can suspend his forgiveness, except this, that “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.” In Him the promise is Yea.

All human religions are founded on the principle that man must do something, or feel something, or believe something, in order to make God love him and forgive him; whereas God’s religion just contains a declaration that nothing of the kind is necessary on our part in order to make God forgive us, for that He hath déjà, already, loved us and forgiven us, and given us His Son, and in Him all things. He hath declared this to the whole race without any exception, as a truth to each individual; so that the difference between the most miserable hater of God and the happiest child of God does not consist in this, that God loves the one and does not love the other; but in this, that the one knows God’s love to himself and the other does not. It is the same difference as there is between two men standing with their faces to the sun, the one with his eyes shut and the other with his eyes open. 1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 161.]

(4) The promise of holiness is ours in Christ. Here the promise, in many a varying form, is magnificently full. “These things write I unto you that ye sin not”; “Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not”; “Let not sin reign in your mortal body”; “As he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation.” How can all this possibly be? It is impossible except in Him. The secret is not it, but He. “Christ is made unto us sanctification”; “Ye are filled full in him”; “that Christ may dwell in your hearts, by faith”; that ye may “know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge.”

It is a magnificent truth that having come to Christ you are not merely near Him, but in Him; and in Him you have at once nothing short of Christ and all His treasures. But do not make a false use of the glorious fact. Remember that you may “have and not have.” You may receive a property and not enjoy it. You may inherit wealth and not use it. To grasp the great promises of what God can do for you, as well as the mighty encouragement of what He has done for you, is the way to “possess the possessions” and to realize the wealth. You have long rested, my friend in Christ, on the facts, the certainties, of His finished work. But have you made use enough of His never finished working? Our Christ is eternally fixed and unchanging, in His atoning merit. But He, the same Christ, is prepared immortally to grow in us, in His blessed indwelling by the Holy Spirit. Yes, the “exceeding precious promises” point us to Christ dwelling in the heart by faith, to Christ our very life, to Christ in whom we are already “enriched in everything.” Go on and use your riches, full of hope. For while your discouragements are all behind you, the great and precious promises are all in front. “Forget the things that are behind,” and step forth forward upon “the things that are before”; not upon your resolves, experiences, achievements, but on the Lord in His “precious promises.” Relying upon His promises you enter into the liberty that belongs to the children of God. 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, All in Christ, 40.]

A morning-glory bud, entangled fast

Amid the meshes of its winding stem,

Strove vainly with the coils about it cast,

Until the gardener came and loosened them.

A suffering human life entangled lay

Among the tightening coils of its own past;

The Gardener came, the fetters fell away,

The life unfolded to the sun at last. 2 [Note: Willis Boyd Allen.]

(5) And the promise of the future is made sure in Him. Apart from Him the future is cloud and darkness, for a verbal revelation is not enough. We have enough of arguments; what we want is facts. We have enough of man’s peradventures about a future life, enough of evidence more or less valid to show that it is “probable,” or “not inconceivable,” or “more likely than not,” and so on and so on. What we want is that somebody shall cross the gulf and come back again. And so we get in the Resurrection of Christ the one fact on which men may safely rest their convictions of immortality.

Death was above all to such as St. Paul a meeting with Jesus Christ, who was the object of his ceaseless faith, the hope of his longing heart. This man did not speculate about heaven—where it was, what it was. Nor did he imagine its glory as became a mystic like St. John. For him heaven was another name for Christ, the sum of all goodness, the revelation of all perfection. Between him and Christ there had been a long friendship, with many love-passages, which had grown more intimate every year, but had never been completed. St. Paul had heard Christ’s voice on the road to Damascus; he had seen Him in visions; for brief moments he had visited the third heavens; but face to face this great Christian may not have seen his Master as had St. Peter and St. John. For an unseen Lord he lived, laboured, suffered as none else has ever done. What wonder that St. Paul hungered and thirsted for the day when that dark servitor death would usher him into the unveiled Presence.

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,

Or decomposes but to recompose,

Becomes my universe that feels and knows. 1 [Note: J. Watson, The Potter’s Wheel, 161.]

3. All the promises of God, says the Apostle. He thinks of the sum-total of human blessedness, “all the promises of God.” Man has forfeited them; the conditions have not been kept; and yet the gift has been bestowed. Not even our unworthiness, so often proved, has frustrated the steadfast purpose of the grace of God. This also, this greatest example in the universe of an unshaken purpose, has come to us through Christ. He is, for humanity, the embodiment of the faithfulness of God. And in Him they are all certified, for He who delivered Him up, how shall He not freely give us all things? In Him is the Yea.

I remember an aged minister used to say, that the most learned and knowing Christians, when they come to die, have only the same plain promises for their support as the common and unlearned; and so I find it in my old age. It is the plain promises of the gospel that are my support; and I bless God they are plain promises, which do not require much labour and pains to understand them; for I can do nothing now but look into my Bible for some promise to support me, and live upon that. 1 [Note: J. Watts.]

As I was coming to you to-day, my path led me by a tasteful enclosure, into which I was bold enough to enter. It was a vinery, not like those of the open field, so common in Palestine, France and Germany, but a spacious and elegant conservatory. A succession of thriving stems, twisted in form, but vigorously climbing the glass wall of the structure, at once met my eye. The long arms of the plants, with their delicate tendrils, were carefully trained along the under side of the crystal roof. The branches were covered with fresh green leaves, through whose fine tissues the sunlight agreeably passed. But what delighted me most was the rare assortment of green and purple clusters that hung above me, like inverted cones or pyramids, from amid the foliage. Their luscious beauty quite arrested me. As I stood admiring, the proprietor of the conservatory, with whom I had the happiness of being a little acquainted, came in. Observing my looks he kindly asked me if I would have a cluster, and at once he proceeded to cut down a bunch for me. The grapes were very sweet. Then, noticing that I still continued my gaze, he said, “Perhaps you would wish to take a few clusters home with you?” To this I replied, that I was at the time on my way to a company of friends, whose lips were no doubt as parched as my own had been, and that I was sure there were some among them who would be as much delighted with a cluster as myself. On which he stepped aside, and, having brought out a commodious and suitable basket, he inlaid it with vine leaves. He then cut down some of the finer clusters, and, placing these carefully on the leaves, he took the basket aside, and while his back was towards me, shut down the cover, so as to secure the delicious but fragile contents from injury. Coming forward with a pleasant smile, he handed me the basket saying, “Take this; it contains a few bunches. Share them among your friends, and give a cluster to any one whom you find prepared to receive it.” And here I am, with the basket in my hand! Let me set it down and raise the cover, so neatly fastened, and, before proceeding further, hand some of the clusters to you on this thirsty afternoon. Be assured, it will afford me as much pleasure to distribute them as it will give you to receive them. Such is my parable, for parable it is—perhaps to the disappointment of some of the younger of my auditory. The beautiful clusters I have spoken of represent the Promises of God, those exceeding great and precious promises, in which the blessings of the everlasting covenant are stored up, and by which we are said to become “partakers of the divine nature.” Now let me open the basket, and take out one of its delicate specimens. Ah, here is a beauty! We must handle it softly. See how symmetrical in shape, how perfect in form, is each grape! The fruit seems as if it would melt on the lips. What are the terms of this promise? Listen!

“Fear thou not; for I am with thee:

Be not dismayed; for I am thy God:

I will strengthen thee;

Yea, I will help thee;

Yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.” 1 [Note: A. N. Somerville, Precious Seed, 233.]

(1) No doubt, when the Apostle, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, spoke of the promises of God, the first thought that would arise in his mind would be the promises to the people of Israel: the promises of dominion and supremacy; the brilliant pictures of the Prophets; the glories foreshadowed in the lives of David and Solomon; the majesty and excellence implied in the very fact that they were the people of God’s choice. And if this thought passed, as of course it must have passed, beyond the limits of Israel after the flesh, still the promises would be the same, only in a spiritual form: the glory of the new Israel, the new Jerusalem, the new Law, the new Covenant; promises made under a figure but holding good in their essence even when the figure exists no longer.

(2) Such, perhaps, would hardly be the first thought suggested to one of us by the promises of God; and, indeed, would not be the last or the crowning thought in the mind of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Far deeper and older than these are the promises which God has written with His own finger, not on tables of stone, but on the fleshy tables of the heart of man. These promises, the earliest of all God’s revelations, made to mankind before even the oldest book in the Bible was written; these promises which the loving heart finds repeated in every page of the Bible; these promises which the Bible often reveals to us in so strange a way, making us quite unable to tell whether the word within or the word without, whether the yearnings of conscience or the oracles of the Scripture, first pronounced them in our spiritual ears; these are above all the promises which Christ came to ratify and fulfil. Deep down in the heart of man there speaks a voice which calls us to God, and promises to take us to Him. And in former days, no doubt, when it spoke to those who had no revelation to interpret or confirm its sayings, what it said must have been often strange, inarticulate, even unintelligible. In dumb instincts rather than in plain commands, in voiceless longings, in yearnings for something unearthly, in strange doubts and questions did it often speak to men who had no other teaching. And even now, to those who have the Bible in their hands, but are still unawakened, or only half awakened, the voices that call from the deep abysses of the soul are faint and strange, and hard to understand, and often seem hopelessly impossible to obey. The Bible is, as it were, the grammar and the dictionary of this spiritual language, and teaches us to interpret its accents into duties and prayers and hopes and battle and assurance of victory. But even when we have the Bible, how much study we need before we can fathom the depths of spiritual meaning contained in the everlasting promises which God’s finger has written on the soul of man. Men still unawakened, or only half awakened, could not, even with the Bible in their hands, always translate the language of the spirit that speaks within them. But even the awakened, in our human sense of the word awakened, what can they do but see in a glass darkly the dim reflection of the truth of God? Yet what they see is the never-dying truth, and that truth received its final seal in the life of Christ.

This, Edwin Markham, the spiritually-minded, has put for us in his rhapsody on “The Desire of All Nations,” where he sees that in Christ is the one positive figure that fulfils the highest prophecies and sublimest promises that were cherished in the hearts of the world’s great nations from the most ancient days; for in Him God had answered Yea to all the desires of the people of the whole world.

And when He comes into the world gone wrong,

He will rebuild her beauty with a song.

To every heart He will its own dream be:

One moon has many phantoms in the sea.

Out of the North the horns will cry to men:

“ Balder the Beautiful has come again!”

The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:

“ Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!”

The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:

“ Osiris comes; O tribes of Time rejoice!”

And social architects who build the State,

Serving the dream at citadel and gate,

Will hail Him coming through the labour hum.

And glad quick cries will go from man to man:

Lo, He has come, our Christ the Artisan—

The King who loved the lilies, He has come!

Lord, the Apostle dissuadeth the Hebrews from covetousness, with this argument, because God said, I will not leave thee nor forsake thee. Yet I find not that God ever gave this promise to all the Jews, but he spake it only to Joshua when first made commander against the Canaanites; which, without violence to the analogy of faith, the Apostle applied to all good men in general. Is it so that we are heirs apparent to all promises made to thy servants in Scripture? Are the charters of grace granted to them good to me? Then will I say with Jacob, I have enough. But because I cannot entitle myself to thy promises to them, except I imitate their piety to thee; grant I may take as much care in following the one, as comfort in the other. 1 [Note: Thomas Fuller, Good Thoughts in Bad Times.]

II

Our Amen

“Through him is the Amen.”

Therefore, through Him is the great Amen of the Universal Church, attesting and acclaiming His fidelity by psalms and anthems, by every act of living faith, by the labours of time, by the triumphs of countless death-beds, where death has been without a sting, and by the songs of those within the veil.

1. Now there should be some kind of correspondence between the firmness with which we grasp, the tenacity with which we hold, the assurance with which we believe, these great truths, and the rocklike firmness and immovableness of the evidence upon which they rest. It is a poor compliment to God to come to His most veracious affirmations, sealed with the broad seal of His Son’s life and death, and to answer with a hesitating “Amen,” that falters and almost sticks in our throat. Build rock upon rock. Be certain of the certain things. Grasp with a firm hand the firm stay. Immovably cling to the immovable foundation; and though you be but like the limpet on the rock hold fast by the Rock, as the limpet does; for it is an insult to the certainty of the revelation, where there is hesitation in the believer.

The sensitive paper, which records the hours of sunshine in a day, has great gaps upon its line of light answering to the times when clouds have obscured the sun; and the communication of blessings from God is intermittent, if there be intermittency of faith. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren, The Wearied Christ.]

In happy ease I cried: “O sweetest Dusk

That ever pressed a kiss on weary eyes!

Bless now mine ears with murmur of thy name

And noble origin.” Then answered he:

“ My father’s name was Night; from the embrace

Of Life and Death he sprang, and wed with Rest;

I am their offspring Promise, and whene’er

I meet with Faith, then is Fulfilment born.” 2 [Note: A. Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 12.]

2. Our Amen is through Him. He is the Door. The truths which He confirms are so inextricably intertwined with Himself that we cannot get them and put away Him. Christ’s relation to Christ’s gospel is not the relation of other teachers to their words. We may accept the words of a Plato, whatever we think of the Plato who spoke the words. But we cannot separate Christ and His teaching in that fashion, and we must have Him if you are to get it. So faith in Him, the intellectual acceptance of Him, as the authoritative and infallible Revealer, the bowing down of heart and will to Him as our Commander and our Lord, the absolute trust in Him as the foundation of all our hope and the source of all our blessedness—that is the way to certitude. And there is no other road that we can take.

Not long ago, in Further India, an aged Christian convert, a man of eighty years, a surviving disciple of Adoniram Judson, was found dying, by a missionary visitor. His once strong mind was shaken by age and weakness; his thoughts failed and wandered; but when they were pointed to Christ, they settled and were clear again. When asked about his own faith in his Redeemer, his answer was strong in its simplicity: “ I have hold of Him with both my hands.” 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All, 106.]

3. If we thus keep near Him our faith will bring us the present experience and fulfilment of the promises, and we shall be sure of them, because we have them already. And whilst men are asking, “Do we know anything about God? Is there a God at all? Is there such a thing as forgiveness? Can anybody find anywhere absolute rules for his life? Is there anything beyond the grave but mist and darkness?” we can say, “One thing I know, Jesus Christ is my Saviour, and in Him I know God, and pardon and duty and sanctifying and safety and immortality; and whatever is dark, this, at least, is sun-clear. Get high enough up and you will be above the fog; and while the men down in it are squabbling as to whether there is anything outside the mist, you, from your sunny station, will see the far-off coasts, and haply catch some whiff of perfume from their shore, and see some glinting of a glory upon the shining turrets of “the city that hath foundations.”

Bunyan’s stepping-stones are Scripture promises. There are other stepping-stones. Tennyson speaks of making “stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things,” and many a man, learning self-respect through failure, has blessed God for these. Again, there are yet other stepping-stones. There is a certain valley in the North where a rude path, hardly distinguishable at the best of times, leads through dangerous moss-hags, right across the centre of a morass. In rainy weather the track would be wholly obliterated but for the little foot-prints of a band of children who go to school that way. Many a traveller has found his path safely through the Slough of Despond by following in the children’s footsteps. But after all there are no such stepping-stones as God’s promises. A white boulder is a poor enough object until you see it shining in a morass; then it means life and safety. So the promises of God, that have often seemed but wayside facts of no particular interest, shine suddenly with the very light of salvation when we see them in the Slough of Despond. 2 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, i. 21.]

The Yea and the Amen

Literature

Chadwick (G. A.), Pilate’s Gift, 84.

Cox (S.), Expositions, iii. 97.

Mackenzie (R.), The Loom of Providence, 227.

Maclaren (A.), The Unchanging Christ, 82.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: 1 and 2 Corinthians, 268.

Moule (H. C. G.), Christ is All, 97.

Somerville (A. N.), Precious Seed, 233.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xlvi. (1900), No. 2657.

Stewart (J.), Outlines of Discourses, 317.

Temple (F.), Rugby Sermons, i. 235.

Christian World Pulpit, lxxviii. 236 (L. Richard).

Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd. Ser., i. 283 (G. A. Chadwick).

Clerical Library: Outlines of Sermons for Special Occasions, 218 (J. Culross).

Treasury (New York), xx. 655 (O. Huckel).

Twentieth Century Pastor, xxx. (1912), 132 (F. B. Meyer).