THE WORDS OP ETERNAL LIFE.1

These are the words of Peter, who was admirably adapted to be the spokesman of the Twelve. The promptness, frankness and pertinency of his replies must have been gratifying to the Master. The occasion was one on which there arose a great secession from Jesus of many who had been attracted to him by curiosity, craving for the loaves and fishes, and other low motives. A demagogue bidding for adherents, or an impostor eager to attach a crowd of followers would not have been so impolitic as to repel the throng of his partisans by distasteful doctrines and difficult requirements. This did Jesus. " Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you,"— words purposely uttered not only to test the faith of the multitude and to sift them of their chaff, but also to emphasize the necessity of so appropriating him as to make him the source of spiritual life. For our religious opinions are as much a part of our probation as our actions. Opinions are the roots of character. Perplexed with doctrinal paradoxes and apparent absurdities, vexed that they could not measure the sublime proportions of gospel truth with the foot-rule of reason, nor contain the shoreless ocean of divine knowledge in the gill cup of their finite intellect, they went away from Christ and walked no more with him forever. As he saw the crowd coldly turning their backs upon their benefactor and best friend and going their returnless way, each to follow his own illusion, each to chase his own bubble, and all to perish at last miserably in their sins, a shade of sadness darkened his countenance, and with a momentary fear lest his remaining disciples might be infected with this fatal apostasy, he turns, perhaps with tearful eyes and voice tremulous with deep emotion, saying, " Ye will not go away too, will you? " Appropriate indeed was Peter's negative response, more emphatic from its interrogatory form, " Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life."

These words, in the first place, represent the instinctive longing for immortality of all thoughtful souls. In this regard we have all had the same experience. When we have seen the grave receive the treasures of our heart, and have surveyed the horizon of the present life narrowing more and more closely about us, we have felt an irrepressible desire for a life beyond the tomb. This yearning of soul the savage evinces when he lies down in death with his pipe and tomahawk, bow and arrows by his side — the needed implements of his future pleasures and pursuits. The pagan sage gives proof of the same craving for a better life, when he carefully weaves together myths, fables and traditions, to make a raft of hope, upon which his spirit may mount and survive the coming shipwreck of death. True is it that in some this outreaching for immortal life is almost imperceptible. They have so besotted themselves that they are careless of their souls' to-morrow, provided they are well supplied with husks for to-day. But these are no exceptions. They have their lucid moments. There are rifts in the clouds of their deep spiritual darkness through which their thoughts run on to the future, and when as from a mount of vision they catch a glimpse of immortality — a view quickly eclipsed by the leaden thunder-cloud of fear. Even the forebodings of the wicked, springing up in the mysterious depths of consciousness, disclose secret intimations of a future life. Few men unaided of revelation can demonstrate their immortality by logical propositions addressed to the intellect, but all can feel the yearning after it in their own nature as the plant vegetating in darkness instinctively turns its pale, pining face toward the unseen sun in the heavens.

Secondly, Peter gives distinct expression to that distrust of our self-guidance which we all feel with respect to the attainment of eternal life. In all minds which have not been spoiled by sophistry or puffed up by false philosophy and self-conceit, there is a spontaneous shrinking back from treading alone the unexplored continent of religious truth and a crying out for a guide. "Who will show us any good?" Socrates, pronounced by the Delphic Oracle the wisest man of his generation, to whom we shall again refer in the present discussion as the best representative of the entire heathen world, on the day of his death, sitting upon his bed in his prison, when about to enter upon his argument for the immortality of the soul, exhorted his friends "to supplicate the gods for help while we take hold of one another's hands and enter this deep and rapid river." Deep and rapid indeed is the river of theological inquiry without the aid of revelation. Who feels competent, without supernatural light, to give a satisfactory answer to that solemn question which arises in every sober mind:

"Soon as from earth I go,

What will become of me? "

Can any of us lay aside our Bibles, close our eyes to the life-giving words of Jesus, and then avow our ability to answer the cry of universal humanity:

"Who can resolve the doubt

That tears my anxious breast,"

by drawing aside the veil from that " land of deepest shade," and pointing out its crystal rivers, its sunny vales, its fragrant groves, and giving to each eager soul a title deed to some choice spot for a future home? We know that a school of theological teachers has recently sprung up who magnify man's religious instincts. These teach that revelation is a superfluity; that every man has within himself all resources for the discovery of essential religious truth; that the Bible has been rendered obsolete by the progress of the race in theological science; that every soul is thrown upon its own spiritual instincts and impulses for guidance. As certain authors publish books entitled " Every Man His Own Lawyer," " Every One His Own Physician," so those professed religious teachers would have every one his own revelation, every one his own inspiration; or as others devise traps for the simple called " French Without a Master, in Six Lessons," " Latin Without a Master, in Four Lessons," so these apostles of the new dispensation of " the absolute religion " would deceive their fellow-men with the finely sounding advertisement, "Religion Without Master, in No Lessons."

Let us institute some tests of the religion of nature. What headway does the human soul make in following its own light? How does it solve the religious problems which baffled the skill of all the centuries before Jesus Christ came? How is future happiness to be secured? The religionist answers, By living righteously, doing good to man and loving God. But to find his answer he has committed a stupendous plagiarism on the Bible. He has gone to it to awaken his religious instincts at this great centre of light and life, and then, like all thieves, he denies and decries the source of his plundered treasure. If the human soul has no need of going outside of itself to answer all religious questions satisfactorily, if it has no occasion for using the self-distrustful words of Peter, "To whom shall we go? " the best way of testing the question is to examine those who have never seen the inspired Word, just as we would test the brilliancy of some new lighting material by carrying the lamp out of the sunlight into the darkness. Go away with me for a moment out of the resplendence of revelation in to the darkness of heathenism, and see how wisely, how purely men live. Here is a whole nation offering worship to an ox, an onion, a lizard. Egypt was at that time the most cultivated nation on the earth. The religious instincts of another people offer human slaughter for praise, rear pyramids of skulls to secure the divine favor, toss infants to crocodiles and burn widows on huge funeral piles, and grind to powder the flesh and bones of living men beneath its bloody Juggernauts. The ancient Babylonians religiously required every virgin to surrender in Phallic worship that which is of greater value than all the gold and diamonds in South Africa; while the Thugs of India actually waylay and murder as acts of religious duty. Dimly indeed burns the flame of spiritual instinct, and widely do they wander who follow its flickering and uncertain light.

Death is a just ordeal of a religious system. How does the religion of spiritual instinct enable men to die? We are told that Theodore Parker, the great advocate of the absolute religion, as he styled it, lay down in Florence upon his dying couch in impenetrable gloom which his cold, barren and Christless theology had no power to dissipate. They who have advanced no farther than the religion of nature universally die without triumph. Said Socrates, that greatest pagan moralist, before alluded to, as the hour for drinking the hemlock approached, " The swan as it sees its end approaching, begins its most melodious song, and floating down the river charmed by its own music, meets death with dignity and composure. Man," said the dying philosopher, " should die with as much cheerfulness as the bird." " But," replied one of his disciples, uttering the feelings of the whole heathen world, " death is a terror to us. It unmans us and fills us with dreadful fears. We cannot die thus. We have no swan's song with which to float down the river of life into the boundless sea of eternity." "Go, then," said that wisest pagan, with a sagacity amounting almost to divine inspiration, " travel through all lands, spare no toil, no expense, that ye may find the song which can charm away the fear of death." But those poor pagan Greeks, amid the splendors of that era of literature and art, sought in vain for the swan's song of victory over the fear of death. But four hundred years afterward the wondering shepherds caught from the glad angels a part of that song. Behold, we bring you glad tidings of great joy: to-day is born a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. But the full song was first taught to mortals when Jesus opened his lips at Lazarus's tomb, saying, " I am the resurrection and the life," and only a few years afterward there floated from the grated window of a prison in Rome the music of this complete and triumphant swan's song: "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight. . . . Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness! " Through all the centuries of the Christian church the triumphant deaths of millions with this song upon their tongues have attested the divinity of the gospel, " O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory? Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory." At last Charles Wesley, in a moment of more than poetic inspiration, put the swan's song of the believer into a sacred lyric fit for a seraphic lyre:

" Jesus, the name that charms our fears,

That bids our sorrows cease;

'Tis music in the sinner's ears, '

Tis life, and health, and peace."

Such a test the pantheism of the Hindoo Brahmin or the American agnostic can never endure.

At another vital point do all systems of natural religion fail utterly in affording to the guilty soul the assurance of forgiveness. Here is a practical test. Does my religion save me now from the guilt, the pollution and the dominion of sin? Go and question nature until you are gray. Her lips will ever be dumb. Though Bishop Butler may find in the constitution and course of nature some faint analogies which may confirm the doctrine of forgiveness when it has been once revealed, there is not in the whole range of nature sufficient light for the discovery and demonstration of this cardinal evangelical truth.

The analogies of suffering invariably treading upon the heels of violated natural law with no provision in nature to arrest the penal consequences, strongly incline men to believe that punishment must inevitably, without an exception, follow the transgression of moral law. Hence paganism teaches that the penalty follows the sin as surely as the cart-wheel rolls in the footsteps of the ox. Socrates was so impressed with the cardinal doctrine of natural religion, that God is just, that he doubted whether God could pardon sin. The semi-paganism of the liberalists and free-religionists teaches the absolute impossibility of the pardon of sin. In their estimation it would be plucking down the pillars of God's throne and subverting the moral order of the universe. But turn to Christianity and you rind that not only forgiveness through faith in the atoning Saviour, but also the knowledge of forgiven sin, is its grand and glorious peculiarity. From the day the apostles went forth preaching to guilty men the knowledge of the forgiveness of sins till this hour, there have not been absent from the earth witnesses to the truth of this doctrine. Millions have crossed the flood, and millions are crossing now who can say, " Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Our text demonstrates that a craving for authority in respect to religious questions is natural to the human soul and that Christianity is more than a system of abstract truth addressed to the reason,— it is a series of facts to be apprehended by faith. We hunger for certainty in matters of such vital interest and of such personal importance. The interests are of too great a magnitude to permit us to rest at ease without a clear knowledge of our relations to eternity, and without all possible safeguards about our future well-being. Uncertainty brings suspense and fear. How natural the inquiry, is there no person who knows how to answer our religious inquiries, whose word is of sufficient weight to give to our anxious souls the confidence and security of certainty? How reasonable, if such a person should appear on earth and display undoubted credentials, unrolling his commission written by the finger of God and enstamped with heaven's broad seal of miracles, that all mankind should hail him with joy, and hasten to sit at his feet, to drink in his words, and to submit to his guidance, laying their hands in his, saying, Lead thou me, O thou unerring guide, for I am blind. What a value in one word coming down out of heaven direct, distinct and authoritative on a question of immediate personal interest to us all — an interest so broad that it sweeps in the whole of the endless future of the soul.

See the perplexed Grecian moralist in his cell at Athens groping for light on the destiny of man, and finding no clear and steady blaze naming up from that heap of subtle reasonings, fables and traditions which Socrates piled up to illumine his own passage to the tomb and to cheer his lingering, weeping and inconsolable friends. How he cried out for a theios logos, a divine word, to shoot its steady radiance athwart their darkness, and to give the rest of assurance to their weary spirits. Such a divine Logos have we, who is the true light coming into the world enlightening every man. He hath brought life and immortality to light. He did not originate the doctrine, but he established it on the basis of Ms own authority. No wonder that Peter refused to abandon this light. Peter, who had left his fishing nets to go spellbound after Jesus, Peter who had beheld the miracles wrought by his word, who had listened entranced to his revelation of things unseen, and who had gazed upon the transcendent glory and majesty of his Master transfigured on the mount. This thirst for authority cannot be suppressed. It is ineradicable in the human soul. If men are deprived of the infallible word they must be provided with an infallible substitute. Hence Rome sways the rod of spiritual power over millions because she professes to speak with authority. Even sceptics themselves, who contemn the authority of Jesus as derogatory to the dignity of true manhood, distrusting the authority of reason, unconsciously lean upon one another. Voltaire, Paine, Parker and Ingersoll, each in his respective age does all the thinking, and the crowd of sceptics of feebler wing or weaker brain follow cravenly in their track. Thus our boasted freethinkers think in the chains of a fallible human authority. Said a puzzled liberalist when asked to reconcile the conflict between Jesus Christ's pretensions and his moral excellence, " I must visit Theodore and ask him how he gets along with this difficulty."

In my pastoral experience I once met an old infidel whom I invited to Christ. He attempted to sustain his irreligion by argument, but failing to do so by reason of old age and the habit which steals away the brains, he left the room in rage, but soon returned with the file of an obscure atheistic newspaper in his arms, which he handed me, saying, "There is something which will demonstrate that Christianity is false."

Again our text gives expression to the desire of man for a book revelation. We are told that it is derogatory to the Infinite One to shut up his truth in the form of a book; that the great God would never attempt to compress his infinitude of wisdom by inspiring a book which shall be a fixed standard of truth, to" which a word is never to be added during all the generations of men down to the last syllable of recorded time. We have heard this outcry of rationalism against what it has contemptuously styled " a book revelation," as belittling the majesty of God, tying His hands and sealing His lips. As his objection is chiefly to the form which divine truth shall take, let us listen to the voice of universal humanity. Into what form do the various false religions of the world crystallize? The form of books. What is the ultimate authority decisive of all the controversies of the polytheists? Books. Though these books are filled with fables, cunningly devised, they preach one truth, that religious instructions in the form of a book are a want of the human soul. When I see multitudes f people eating chaff and husks, the inference is legitimate that they were created with an appetite for food, and that there is somewhere in the world a supply of suitable nutriment correlated to this appetite — a supply which these wretched persons have failed to find, and hence they are appeasing their hunger with worthless substitutes. Thus when I see two hundred millions of "Hindoos reverently studying their Shaster and their Vedas, and two hundred and fifty millions of Chinese religiously treasuring up their sacred books, the words of Confucius, and one hundred and fifty millions of Mussulmans devoutly repeating the Koran, the words of Mohammed, I cannot resist the inference that mankind have an instinctive and ineradicable appetency for a book revelation of religious truth, and that the Creator of this craving has provided an appropriate supply of spiritual food. That supply is the Bible. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God. To supply the perishing millions of chaff-eaters, Jesus came down from heaven, saying, " I am the bread of life." This bread satisfies the hungry soul. The words of Jesus reported by the Evangelists feed our famishmg spiritual natures. We cannot be content with the doubtful inferences of natural religion and with the suspected traditions of paganism. We crave words, clear, distinct, authentic, the changeless symbols of immutable truth—words which we may study, and impress upon our memory, and hide in our hearts, " that we may not sin against God's law,"— words which we may hang over the tombs of our friends as a lamp of hope to dispel the gloom of death by their foretokenings of the daybreak of the resurrection,— words which we may bind as life-preservers about our souls when we wade into the swellings of Jordan and begin to lose our foothold upon these mortal shores. How empty the consolations of reason in a dying chamber! How tame the utterances of the best philosophy when chiselled upon a tombstone!

Go with me to Mt. Auburn cemetery, beneath the shadow of Harvard College, where the inspiration of the Gospels is held the same in kind as that of Homer and Shakespeare. Here sleep the elite of Boston, the centre of American free thought. This monument on the left marks the resting-place of Spurzheim, the phrenologist; here on the right is the mausoleum of Channing, the philanthropist, who could not bow the knee to Jesus Christ in supreme worship. All around us are masterpieces of monumental sculpture. Draw near and read the sentiments inscribed on these beautiful marbles. How few of the epigrammatic verses of Seneca sparkle there; how few of the " divine peradventures " of Plato; how many of the utterances of Jesus. Thus the highest culture and the freest scepticism in the shadow of death do unconscious homage to Jesus.

Go with me now through the graveyard of Salt Lake City where slumber thousands who were deluded by the American false prophet. None are the words inscribed here from the book of Mormon; abundant are the words from the Old and the New Testaments—an unconscious repudiation of the spurious scripture, and attestation to the truth of the genuine. Thus human ignorance, superstition and error, in the gloom of the charnel house, cry out after the oracles of God, a book revelation containing the words of eternal life. We might further speak of the necessity of revelation to furnish a pure object of worship and love through the contemplation and adoration of which, souls denied and deformed by sin may be transfigured into angelic purity and loveliness. We have not time further to elaborate this point.

In the course of this discussion we have found the words of Simon Peter but the echo of the voice of humanity seeking after immortal life while distrusting its own self-guidance thereto. We have seen the religion of nature tested by the pressing wants of sinful man — the forgiveness of sin, and victory over the king of terrors. We have heard through all the earth the cry for authority in religious inculcations, and the unappeasable hunger for a written standard of religious truth. In the light of this discussion we discover the chief missionary incentive.

We are not here to-day to plead for Christian missions in the interest of civilization. We do not adduce the motives of philanthropy to man as a being of the present world merely. Christianity is the grand civilizer; Christianity is the best benefactor of man, viewed as a mere inhabitant of this world, teaching the highest political wisdom to nations, and inciting to advancement in all the humane arts. But these considerations do not afford to the Christian world the chief motive to missionary effort and sacrifice. That motive is found in the fact that without a knowledge of Jesus the millions of the pagan world must sit in darkness, groaning under distressing superstitions, degraded by the vices inculcated by their religion, with no rainbow of hope arching his future. Although he may be saved by the historical Christ, even when he knows him not, if he has the spirit of faith and the purpose of righteousness, it must be confessed that there is very little in his education and environment to awaken that spirit and purpose.

Bad as is the pagan's creed, his character is generally much worse. The little light which pierces his darkness affords only a feeble motive to righteousness, yet enough to be the ground of his responsibility in the day of judgment. " So they are without excuse." Therefore " the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness." Yet, thought Paul, these may be saved, and the divine instrument of their salvation is committed to my hands—Christ's gospel. Hence I am a debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians; both to the wise and to the unwise — terms comprehending a large parish, the whole pagan world.

This feeling of debt to all the Gentile nations was the spur which urged the apostle to press onward, that he might preach the gospel in the regions beyond. Paul was too honorable to take the benefit of the bankrupt act in view of the vast multitude of his creditors, as I fear many of our modern church members are inclined to do, appalled by the countless throng who cry to them for the bread of life, and tempted through covetousness to withhold their tithes from the missionary treasury.

We are debtors to every pagan on the earth. Our ascended Saviour wills that the uttermost parts of the earth shall inherit the riches of his salvation, and he has made us, Christians of the nineteenth century, us, members of the numerous, rich and influential Methodist Episcopal Church, the executors of that will. Shall we as individuals, shall we as a missionary church prove defaulting trustees, by refusing to communicate to all the heirs their share of the inheritance?

" Shall we, whose souls are lighted

With wisdom from on high,

Shall we to men benighted

The lamp of life deny? "

Over the great subject of the evangelization of the heathen world the majority of the members of the church seems to be in a profound sleep. Here and there is one wakeful soul in the closet wrestling with God in prayer, and consecrating silver and gold to this great cause. Here and there one hears the cries of the pagan world, and says, u Here am I; send me. But the membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church have not shown yet that loyalty to Christ's kingdom which they evinced to the national government in its hour of peril, when, in the language of President Lincoln, " She sent more soldiers to the field and more nurses to the hospitals than any other church." We have during the past year failed to induce our membership to contribute the average of two cents weekly to missions at home and abroad, for less than this was requisite to raise the million and a half of dollars called for by the Missionary Board. When this duty of evangelization takes strong hold of the conscience of the church, we shall hear our membership asking, not how little can I give and keep up appearances, but how much can I give, and how little will suffice for my own subsistence? Then every Christian mother will consecrate at least one of her children to the work of Christian missions—for even then the world would not be oversupplied with teachers and preachers. Then, like the Moravians, we shall have more converts in mission fields than we have church members at home; then thousands of our mammon-cursed churches, which imagine that they cannot adequately support their preacher, will support a missionary in India as well as their own pastor. We are not chimerical, but simply prophetic. May many of us live to see the fulfilment. To hasten the coming of that day we must put on the spirit of the primitive Christianity. We must vividly realize and believe in our inmost souls that the sinner unsaved through Jesus' blood, whether in New York or New Zealand, is on his way to hell fire. We must divest ourselves of the notion that the pagan is as well off while bowing to his vile and cruel gods as those who live in the resplendence of the New Testament. This notion cuts the sinews of effort, hushes the voice of prayer, dries up the streams of Christian beneficence, and sends a death-chill to the very heart of the church. It is because this baneful idea is leaking into the church from the subtle infidelity which pervades our literature that our thoughts have taken a controversial aspect somewhat unusual in a missionary address. If there be a quenchless missionary fire in the pulpit, there will be ceaseless streams from the pews to the missionary treasury. Brethren, the only fuel with which that fire can be kept burning is a hearty faith in the word of God; especially in the truth that Jesus alone has the words of eternal life. For there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. A belief of this will send us into our closets with Carey, to weep over the map of the world, will set the ministry on fire with resistless eloquence, and will arouse the church to the grandeur of her calling in this day of great events.

1) "Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life."— John vi. 68.