The Fruits Of The Spirit

"For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty - only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another" (Galatians 5:13).

The only bondage in God's Creation that is tolerable and desirable is the bondage of love.  No man knows true happiness till he has learned how to love - how to love, not a little, but a great deal; how to love, not occasionally, as a sweet meat at a banquet, but how so to love that he is tied up by it; he is in bondage to it, it rules him.  For the only slave on God's earth that needs no compassion and pity is the slave of love.

And yet liberty is as little understood in the general way as almost any one single name or quality.  Government, restriction are the thoughts of rulers; men are not to be trusted; men are beaten about by so many passions that if a man is to be left perfectly free, he is a dangerous animal; we must, therefore, have governments for men.  Yet in this very chapter, and further down, as we shall see by-and-by, there is a strain of music: "Against such," as he described, and as I shall, "against such there is no law." Is there a liberty, therefore, where there is no law?  Yes, and there is no liberty anywhere else.  Is it, then, the Gospel doctrine that laws and governments, officers, courts, restrictions, are all to be abolished?  Yes; but that will be in the millennium.  If there is ever a time coming when men, living in their essential manhood, in the spiritual man, and when they are inspired with the desire of being and doing that which makes them in alliance with God, so that they would rather speak the truth for their own sake than be false, that they would rather be benevolent than selfish, and had rather be humble than proud; when men, in other words, have come into spiritual things, into the same conditions as those in which they come in spiritual things, they will need no government.

When a boy first begins his arithmetic it takes a good deal of time and trouble for him to cypher, and he says: "Six and three are - eight; no, six and three are - six, seven, eight, nine - six and three are nine." An old merchant would be ashamed to go on cyphering in such a laborious way as that; and a banker or an accountant can take four columns of figures, and run them down faster than I can run down a page of writing.  Nobody has learned anything until be does it without knowing it.  When anybody begins to walk after he has been long sick, he takes care of every step; but when a man is in full health, he never stops to see whether he shall step here, there, or anywhere else. The man who is fit to take care of himself does spontaneously the thing that ought to be done.  No man has learned a language if he has to go to the dictionary and the grammar to know about it.  No man has learned music who has to sit down at the key board and spell out his notes.  No man becomes a compositor in a printing office who has to think where the letters are.  His hand thinks, and he himself is thinking of something else while he is composing his sentence out from among the type.  Knowledge that has been reduced into a man's own self, so that he knows it automatically, spontaneously, that we call knowledge.  Now our graces are largely occasional practices, and our daily life is, to a very large extent, automatic in selfishness and in animalism.  We do not have to think when we have to get angry.  The moment the offensive thing is said - flash goes the anger.  The moment a man cheats us the wrath comes up; we do not have to pump it - it takes care of itself.  And in all our lower range of life we act spontaneously.  Too often in our higher range of life we have to strive before we have the initial experiences.

Now the Apostle says: "You are free, Christ came to set you free; only abuse not your liberty as an occasion to the flesh." You are not free in material and bodily conditions.  Man is not free to fly; he has not any wings.  Man is not free to act without eating; he has got to eat. The circle of our liberty in bodily matters is a very small circle; but in that small circle men have an amazing amount of liberty.  And so the Apostle says; "Brethren, ye have been called unto liberty, but do not mistake the currency, do not take the wrong kind; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.  For all the law is fulfilled in one word, this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." There is not a man or woman in this congregation who ever fulfilled that law - not one.  "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another." Moral cannibalism is very largely practiced yet.  "This, I say then, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." Paul makes two men out of every one; or, rather, there are two men in every one; and in that he touches very close on to the modern scientific doctrine that man was born as an animal first, and that by evolution through the Divine decree and the Divine Spirit, there was super induced upon the animal man - man social, moral, intellectual, spiritual.  If you take the seventh chapter of Romans, no man can steer through that troubled passage unless he goes upon this theory, that man, according to the Apostolic idea, is a double being - the lower part is an animal, the upper part - the upper part, there is an upper part - rides him, and is not ridden by him.

So he goes on to tell us what he means by the flesh man, what in modern parlance we mean by the animal man, the under man; and here is the description: "For the flesh" - he gives it in the broadest terms - is it is exemplified in the largest abuse of our animal powers; for there is not one constituent element of animal life that is not, in its place and in due subordination, right, and it is only the excess and disproportion of it, and the usurpation by it of the higher functions of human existence, that makes animalism wrong.  "For the flesh" - the animal element that is in you -"lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh." Now you have got the origin of sin; you have the conflict between the developed man in Jesus Christ and the original animal man.  The two are perpetually warring against each other, the under man refusing to be bridled, guided by the inspiration of reason and moral sense and moral excellence - love, uttermost love; and, on the other hand, the higher elements in man constantly condemning the impulses that are tormenting him - gluttony, drunkenness, envyings, all forms of lust.

And here sit two courts, the infernal court below, and the supernal court above, and they are perpetually quarreling with each other's decisions. This is going on through life, and every time the under one prevails over the upper one, that is sin.  It is comprehensive enough; the particulars every man can learn by his own autobiography.  "The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other; so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." And what a piteous history is that of ninety nine men in a hundred, who, if they be conscious and faithful to their own selves, are obliged every day to say: "I knew I had an ideal, I knew what was right, I set out to do what was right, but all through the checkered day I have done the things I meant not to do, and have neglected to do the the things that I intended to do."

And this conflict, this unceasing conflict between the upper and the lower man is that that led the Apostle to say: "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" The body, the animal man, that is constantly intruding where it has no business, sullying the clear sky of love, dimming, clouding the day, and making us creep along the material ways of life when with wings we ought to soar - by love and joy, and get into the higher and unclouded realities of experience.

"But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." I am not under the law - of picking pockets, that is.  If the law were abolished tomorrow, I would not pick anybody's pocket.  I am not under the law of murder; for if there were no gallows, nor guillotine, nor officer, nor judge, nor court nor decision, nor execution, I would not murder. Why?  I have that law inside myself - humanity.  I do not want cruelty; I hate it.  I am not under the law to drunkenness.  I can go by a whole regiment of shops, and never think of turning in; I do not want it, I am above it.  I do not abstain from gambling because gambling is disreputable, nor because I fear losses.  I do not gamble, because I do not want to gamble.  I do not avoid bad company because I should lose respectability.  I do not keep bad company for the same reason that musicians do not sit down and work out discords; their ear suffers from discords, and they keep to harmony because harmony is so sweet and discord is so painful.  And so in regard to spiritual things.  We are led by the Divine Spirit into such a state of approbation and satisfaction in the higher things that we do not want the inferior, the antagonistic, the antithetic. "If ye are led of the Spirit ye are not under the law." Do you suppose that a bird, seeing a man in the muddy road toiling up the long ascent, when he can shoot through the air on even wing and go quicker and easier, would envy the man, or would stoop down to use his legs instead of  his wings?  No. A man as respects his lower nature may be said to walk; he touches the earth at every step, man in his higher nature lifts himself above the morass, above the ravine, above the mountain, and goes by the shortest course to the noblest things.  "If ye be led of the Spirit ye are under the law," that is, ye do the things by the law that is in you and by your preferences and loves and likes, which otherwise are commanded. There is not in all the statute books of the whole civilized globe one single law saying to the mother, "Thou shalt love thy babe," there is not any Church or Creed, or any form of legislature that says to the mother, "Thou shalt feed thy babe out of thine own body." But see the mother as the twilight darkens, sitting with her child as it draws sustenance from her own bosom, and singing sweet carols, and counting it the proudest of all the hours of the day.  She has the law of the mother in her, and she does the things that ought to he done, because she loves to do them - it is automatic.

"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: Adultery" - there is the quality carried to its fullest extent, despising the restraints and laws of society.  "Fornication, uncleanness" - for there is a depth beyond adultery and fornication - a salacious imagination, a fire of lust that goes on in a man's own secret chambers of the soul - "Lasciviousness" - as Galatia was a Greek colony, and as the Greeks were the most abominably corrupt in all social relations of any nation that ever lived, dissolved and rotten in their lasciviousness, you see with what specialty the Apostle specifies all the forms of that vice which has corrupted mankind and the world.  "Idolatry" - idolatry in ancient days was not condemn able on orthodox Creed principles; it was not because they made a mistake about their god; it was because idolatry made a part of their worship the indulgence of lascivious affections, and everywhere bestiality ran with idolatry.  "Witchcraft" - if there is no such thing as witchcraft, the counterfeit is amazingly like it, and we have a good deal of it yet.  "Hatred" - now you come to a very popular form, because there are multitudes of persons who think that hatred is sacred, that you are bound to hate the man who doesn't go to your Church, bound to belittle the man who is not orthodox, bound to hate the Romanist and Romanism; and if God looked out of Heaven with all the variations of impression which so called Christian men have, he would hate about four fifths, yes, nineteen twentieths of all the creatures that live on the face of the earth.  Of all Christian graces, I think the easiest and most productive is hatred.  "Variance, emulations" -That is, disagreements and strifes one against another. "Wrath, strife" -quarrelsomeness; "seditions" - breaking out in to uproar against law, order, government.  "Heresies," not doctrinal disagreements - that is not the original meaning of the word heresy: heresy had always a moral element in it, according to the original intent of the word.  "Envyings, murders, drunkenness, and such like."

Now these are all animal; they all spring from the basilar faculties, they all come from the base of the brain; they were original; in their primitive and organic forms they simply made the material platform on which God was to build the real man; yet they are constantly tending to subtend every form of human life.  But have you ever heard an ambitious organist undertaking to show what can be done in the gymnastics of music?  He goes screwing his way up through all the chromatic scale with all sorts of thunderous conjunction of sound until he has shown that the organ is devilish, or you feel so, but at last some gale of good sense overtakes him, and he begins to modulate and gives out some sudden rare strain, such as Beethoven or Mozart hath given birth to.  So out from the cacophony of harsh and ugly affections and passions the text modulates into the very melody and music of religion.

"The fruit of the Spirit." That word "fruit" is a very great favorite in the New Testament and also in the Old Testament.  Christ made it almost fundamental.  There is the vine, and its bearing or not bearing fruit; or, as an interpreter of Divine Providence, it is pruned that it may bring forth more fruit.  The quality of fruitfulness runs through the whole New Testament, latent, or obvious and expressed.  "The fruit of the Spirit." "Oh!" says the hierarch, "the fruit of the Spirit is organized Churches, subordination to God's Ministers, clear and definite instruction in fundamental doctrines, reverence, and awe in the presence of God, obedience of common folks to uncommon folks.  That," say they, is "the fruit of the Spirit." But I do not read it here.  "The fruit of the Spirit." Why, then, this world is God's garden - God's orchard.  I should like to know the sort of things that God does like to raise in His garden; I should like to see the list of His orchard, the fruit for which God sustains the garden, the orchard, and the farm, for which His Providence controls events, for which the whole experience is blown as a sweet gale that blows away the winter and brings on the spring.  The fruit of the Spirit, over which all God's singing birds, in hymns and psalms of thanksgiving, do chant melody - the fruit of the Spirit - the end which is sought in this world among men by the Spirit, the ripeness which is the result of the fostering care of God's Spirit - what is it? Catechism?  Not a word of it.  Confession of faith?  Not a word of it. And yet these are not necessarily to be rejected, they are not to be disallowed.  "The fruit of the Spirit." What if a man, sending his children to a dancing school, should ever after insist upon it that they should reverence the fiddle and the dancing master and worship them? What are these but mere mechanical appliances by which to teach Grace and method?  And so soon as Grace and method are once organized into a person, the school at which he learned them goes behind and is forgotten.  No child will be an expert arithmetician that does not first dig in the mire of the common school; but afterwards he abandons that.  When we read we do not stop to look at the spelling, unless we run against a false one, and then instinct brings us up.  We become so habituated to it that we gather that which hovers over the letter, and is in the air, as it were, the meaning, and it is interpreted back by the heart, by the experience, by the affections.  The fruit of the Spirit is that which is under laid by culture, but culture itself is not it. The text is not the precious thing, it is the meaning in the text that is precious.  A farm must have its implements, but it is the harvest that is of value, and they are relative.  If a man can make a good crop with the poorest instruments he is better off than his neighbor who has ten times better instruments but a poorer crop.  And if a man can make out of heresies a better Christian life than another man does out of his orthodoxy, he is nearer to God than the orthodox man.  This not disowning instruments, not at all, but it is saying substantially that men are perpetually worshippers and idolaters of outside means, and quite forget that their value depends entirely on what they produce.  So we have in the world, in the religious world, a vast amount of the idea of Grace without much Grace.  And yet when men criticize these things, when faithful Pastors undertake to set forth to their congregation that while instruments or means of Grace are useful there is something higher and better, "Oh, dear! dear!" they say, holding up holy hands in horror, "where is the end going to be if you take away the foundations?" The foundations are on the top in Christian character, not on the bottom!  Then what are these fruits for which religion is established, for which Churches and all forms of moral organization exist, without which, as the Apostle declares in keenest ridicule, all religion is as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal?  The noisiest instrument in the band is the emptiest one.

Now listen to the fruits of the Spirit for which a Church is established and without the production of which it is like all empty field, for which all doctrinal schedules are ordained, without which they are but sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, for which all orders and regulations and methods are framed, and if they do not bring forth these there is no sacredness in them, and there is no irreligiousness in trampling them under foot.  It is the soul that God has filled; it is the upper man where God is the cultivator, and husbandman, and fruiterer; it is the higher man, not the under man.  And here are the harvests.  The fruit of the Spirit is - of course it is - is what?  It is the one thing that carries in its bosom everything else; it is the mother around which are gathered the group of children; "the fruit of the Spirit is Love." You would not think it, to see how Ministers act; you would not think it, to see how converted Christians act; you would not dream it by merely reading confessions of faith, which do not discard it, but which, as far as I can remember, scarcely ever mention it.  Talk about orthodoxy, sound words, wise discrimination!  The mother of all things in the soul is love.  I do not know what men do when they go into those great, dark Cathedrals, and stoop down on pretense of praying, and sit in a kind of stupid reverence, and are shocked by any wild ebullitions of life - or a congregation made happy by the luxuriant liberty of a sanctified soul.  They do not know whereunto such things will grow. "The fruit of the Spirit is Love."

And the very next thing to this word means God in us, it is "Joy." How is that for sobriety?  Stern faced, sharp, critical man, that thinks a smile is the shadow of a coming devil, how is that?  Love first, next joy.  What is joy?  It is the response of each of the higher faculties of a man's soul, when it is brought up to concert pitch.  Every one of them tends to produce pleasure, joyfulness, alertness, liberty.

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace." What is peace?  One would suppose it is going to sleep in Church.  One would suppose it to be simply the absence of pain.  Peace has a positive existence.  When the soul in every part of itself is stayed upon some good center, upon God and Christ in the love of God - when every part of the soul ceases to be hungry, when it has no clamor, no sorrow, but is restful, glad, and perfectly composed, in a sweet harmony in itself, that is peace.

"Long suffering" (I am going over this catalogue again; I have other applications of it, so I will not develop all that I think about it.) Long suffering: we admire that quality a great deal more than we practice it.  We admire long suffering in other folks.  We admire long suffering in the schoolmaster, in the regent mother, in the creditor to whom we owe a debt.  It inspires almost the dignity of perfect beauty. A man that will let you abuse him, a man that will let you cheat him even, a man that forgets today what you said or did yesterday - his long suffering, oh, how beautiful it is!  It is a patience that is not easily provoked and thinketh no evil. Yet look at that matron who through the years of early life inherited bereavements and sorrow, the thinning out of the precious flock, the dishonored name of the husband, the death, the rolling upon her of the responsibility of rearing the whole flock, the unwearied fidelity, the inexhaustible patience, furrow after furrow that experience is ploughing upon her brow; at last the children had come to ripeness, and they in their turn are lifting her out of trouble, and she sits serene at the close of life more beautiful than the going down of the sun.  Is there any object in life that a man can look upon that is more beautiful than long suffering?

"Gentleness." Now, gentleness is not a quality of not having vim. When a man is strong and energetic, and at the same time uses his strength and energy and power with sweetness, that is gentleness. See the great swarthy smith as he returns from the anvil, every muscle herculean, after the day's labor washing himself that he may come back to his own complexion.  As the little child totters out to him, see with what ineffable sweetness he gathers up the little one on his shoulder, and holds the babe in his arm, he that could swing a giant and slay him walks about the servant of the little children, so gently that they love him almost more than they love the mother's bosom.  It is the sweetness of strength in an element of love that makes gentleness, It is not an attribute of weakness; weakness is not gentle.

"Goodness." That is a very comprehensive word that everybody uses and nobody defines.  It is a sort of mixture of everything.  It is where all the qualities are brought together and shine out.  It is where all the qualities are brought together and shine out.  It is a composite Grace.

"Faith." What is that?  Believing things you do not understand? No. It is sanctified imagination; it is having the horizon above the world; it is believing that there are things that have no mortal forms; it is believing in a future, believing in a whole assembly of intelligence above your head; it is having a life hereafter, a greater life than this. Ah! The man who sits in his house all day knows exactly what he knows - that is the fireplace, that is the rug, that is the fender, that is the window, that is the door.  That is what is called a practical person, who knows what he does know.  But out of doors the whole Heaven is above his head, night and day, filled with inestimable treasures.

"Meekness." That is a form of love.  If a man smite you in the face your bodily nature says: "Smite him back again." If a man betrays you in the bitterest way, nature, in the bad sense of that term, says: "Give him as good as he sent." What is meekness?  It is receiving personal injury, yet having such a predominant spirit of love in you that you wish the man that does it good.  It is not retaliation, it is being so filled with love and the nature of Jesus Christ that you give back blessing for railing and cursing, prayers for those that despitefully use you.  That is the definition.  Do you know what meekness is?  Any man that knows what perfect meekness is is at liberty to rise up without any danger of disturbing this congregation.

"Temperance" is the next; self control, self government, which in the ordinary range of life is indispensable to education, and indispensable to conduct - the power of controlling ourselves and keeping the body under.

Now, with regard to this chapter, bear in mind, if you please, that this is the inspired definition and declaration of the Christian religion as made manifest by Christ's chief servant, the Apostle Paul.  And I remark, in the first place, that there are a great many men who have religion who have no Christianity.  What is religion?  It is reverence, it is worship.  Its remote origin was fear.  It was a sense of a man's danger in the presence of the unknown Deity. It was an attempt, therefore, to palliate Him, to keep down His justice and wrath, and placate Him in some way.  The original idea of bowing down before the king and the powers that be, and bowing down before God as if He were the dreadful potentate of the universe - that was the idea of reverence, and there are multitudes of teachers who inspire the idea into the young and old that reverence is the proper manifestation of religion.  I say it is as far from it as it can possibly be.  Every child is called on to say in his earliest lispings: "Our Father." See the child that has a severe, harsh, unjust parent, how he steals in and looks to see if he is good natured or not; how he comes round the chair and never trespasses; and by-and-by he touches him.  What kind of a father is that that a child slavishly intrudes upon, not knowing whether he is going to give him a blow or a smile?  Any child that would come to me in that way is no child of mine.  "Let us come boldly," says the Apostle, "to the Throne of Grace, because God knows everything about us." Naked and open are we before Him with whom we have to do.  Fatherhood is universal invitation.  The idea of God sitting in the Heavens with a severe, stern law that He thinks more of than He does of the people under it, as the pulpit often teaches us, that God must take care of His law!  Christ says that God sends His rain on the good and the bad, and makes His sun shine on the just and the unjust, like the great heart of love brooding, not as the sun that rises and sets, but with an effulgence that has no night and no midnight. God says: "Come to Me, children; come, I am your Father"; and am I to come sneaking up unawares, to see if He is good natured or not?  I come to Him with the rush and joy of childhood, not because I think I am worthy.  A child does not think anything about whether he is worthy or unworthy; a child is sped by love and received by love.  Love, not reverence, is religion.

"Joy." We seem to suppose that joy is very proper in the shop at proper times, in the house at suitable times, but that exhibitions of joy in the Church are so irreverent that if a man smiles he does it behind his handkerchief, and those are the tricks that we try to play off with God - as if children at home with Him whom we are taught to call "Father" should play all the tricks of the slave of the Oriental despot.  God loves cheerfulness and mirthfulness, or He would not have sunk the fountains of them so deep in the best parts of the human soul.  Do you suppose that when He sees the rejoicing child coming near to Him in mirth, re-echoing the very Psalms, do you suppose that He reproves him, or that his offering is received with abatement?  Now, religion is more than believing right.  We believe right for the sake of developing religion - Christian religion.  If we believe right, and have no religion, we are like that vine which the Prophet denounced: "Wherefore, when I came, brought it forth wild grapes?" or the fig tree that had no figs. Thousands and thousands of men have substituted their Creed for their religion.  They have a petrified Creed; they do not believe that anybody one inch outside of that Creed has any considerable chance in future.  They have read in vain all the way through, with and without spectacles, that love is the fulfillment of the law, and that he who loves knows God, for God is Love, and that he who knows not love knows not God.  They have read that, and have heard it said again and again it is the end of the law for righteousness - that is, for manhood - it is the beginning, the middle, the end, the chief factor, the great producer; yet there are many men today in chairs and pulpits, up and down throughout the land, that are looking at men askance whose lives are as sweet as flowers, and whose juice is sweet as apples and peaches, and say that they will be damned, that they are forsaking the truth.

Now it is not for me to say that systems of Theology are to be ignored - but while we use them we are to use them as implements and instruments, not as final ends.  It is a great deal better that men should learn to read by going to school - that is, schools are conveniences that most easily teach men to read and the elements of education - but there was many a slave who lay on his belly and learned his letters by the fire or the light of the pirie torch, and when he learned his letters he could read. Imagine a man saying to him: "Have you been at school?" "No, sir!" "Then you cannot read." All creeds that tend to develop the understanding and moral sense and the higher affections are to be employed for that sake, and not for their own sake.  The fundamental doctrines, the executive doctrines are only fundamental for you and for me as private Christians. If I am to teach I must take the knowledge and experience of men in days gone by, and use those forms of doctrine which have been found under the providence of God to convict men of sin, and bring them to the Lord Jesus Christ through faith, and build them up in a holy Christian life.  There are multitudes of things that are most useful; but even if you should change your Creed today in the growing light of an advancing civilization you do not touch your religion, any more than a man who changes an old plough for a new and better one changes agriculture.  It is an instrument, and all doctrinal creeds are mere instruments; but the things that they are to produce are love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, self government.

There are, therefore, I think, a great many religious people and some Christians.  There is an impression spread abroad among the young very widely that religion is a thing to be put off as long as they can; or that religion, if it has joys, has special joys that belong to religion.  If a man wants a full out play of his own nature, he must bring his constitutional faculties up into the realm and atmosphere of the religious spirit; then there will be sources of joy.  There is a vague impression in the world that men's joy springs out of this: "I am going to be saved; when I die I am going to Heaven." Then they make up a sort of allegory or imagination as to what kind of time it will be, and it reflects itself back to them.  But the reaching of the Word of God is this - that the true development of our minds and faculties according to the Lord Jesus Christ gives them harmony and melody in themselves, and joy springs out of everything, out of sorrow itself, out of sin, as old Martin Luther, in his audacious and grand way, says: "Blessed be God for my sins," and the consciousness of their degradation; and over against it the wondrous Atoning love of Jesus Christ made him feel: "If it had not been for my sins I should never have had such a view as that"; just as a man may say: "Blessed be the storm," when he sees the rainbow spanning the Heavens.

A true life in Jesus Christ is a life of liberty, of largeness, of joyfulness and peacefulness, and if a man wants to get the most out of the life that he is living in this world it is better that he should reap the crop out of the top of his head and not out of the bottom of it.

His passions give him a certain sort of joy - lurid, but they weal out and shade down, his self contentment growing less and less as the years increase; but the joys that spring from the top of the mind, the spiritual man, are least in the beginning; increment comes day by day, and they blossom when all the world is under frost, like the asters and chrysanthemums of our garden grow full blossomed into the world. When heart and flesh fail, then in the man that is living in the true spirit of Jesus Christ, and under the enchantment of love; then, when property is lost or passes out of his hand, when no man chanting never so sweetly can fill his ear with music, when weeping friends are no longer able to help him or he to receive their consolation - then, when the Tabernacle is being taken down, joyfulness springs up, and is never so great as when a man passes from glory to glory. Another thing I wish to say is that we have got to have a new light on the subject of preaching the Gospel of Christ.  Men are ordained to preach the text, to preach the intellectual elements of the Gospel, but no man ever preaches effectually to the hearts of men any more Gospel than he has in his own heart.  Ideas are not Gospel; dispositions are Gospel; and he who brings to men thoughts of liberty in all things right and noble and good, and cheerfulness, and lovableness, and forgiveness, and patience, and long suffering, and gentleness in the warfare of this life - he that lives Christ knows Christ, and can preach Christ.  Nobody else can.  You may bring me a catalogue of fruits; all the fruits of earth do not taste good out of a catalogue.  Bring me one cluster from the orchard, that touches at once my palate and my imagination.  Gospel living is the only ordination that can make a man God's Priest and God's Minister.

Then I say more than this.  I say that the fruits of the Spirit will kill that red dragon of Infidelity dead.  Men do not believe in a Church, many of them, and men do not believe in the Bible as it lies to their understanding, and they do not believe in what they call the fantastic experiences of men who do not know themselves.  Men say: "As for that which belonged to the old Church lore, we have demonstrated that it is not true, and we have no occasion for Church and no occasion for ministry - we are Agnostics in so far as most of theology is concerned, and as to Christians, when we see some Christianity amongst men we shall be better able to judge what it is worth." Now, I say that while a man may doubt the inspiration of Scripture, and the origin of the race, and the nature of sin and of responsibility, and the tenets in regard to the Trinity, and the special philosophical theories, of which there have been eighteen or nineteen different ones, as to the Atonement of Jesus Christ - while men may say in regard to all these: "It is all foreign to me"; bring me, if you please, the man who really sees love, and who will say: "I do not believe in it." Everybody believes in it - the child, the mother, the wife, the husband, the father, the neighbor, the sweetheart - everybody believes in love.

And everybody believes in joy.  Whoever heard sweet toned bells in a chime that did not stop to listen?  Why, at Antwerp I sat for hours under the spire of that vast cathedral to hear those chimes that rang out every quarter of an hour.  It seemed as if the Heavens rained music down upon me.  Whoever saw real, simple, unalloyed, happy childhood that did not stop to look at it?  Whoever saw a school let out that did not wait to see it?  Whoever saw a bevy of sweet girls going to and fro with laughter on the street who did not wish he was all artist?  Whoever saw happiness in the family when on Thanksgiving day or Christmas day the whole circle of them entwined in each other and around each other, and merry hours went past even to the small hours of the night - whoever saw that and said!  "I am an infidel; I do not believe in joy"?  Whoever saw a great heart on whom time had spent itself, and the waves dashed against him, and the commotion of the people raged round about him, who lifted his head in calmness and patience and all peacefulness, sure of God and sure of the future - whoever saw such heroism and did not admire it?  Whoever saw long suffering anywhere and did not call it heroic?  Whoever saw a wife - of all tragedies bloodless, but the most horrible - marrying in the freshness of her early life all ideal husband, only to find out little by little that she was worshipping an idol - gambling, drunken, licentious, removed further and further from her in moral character yet she must needs cling to him, and of all lying outside of hell I know of nothing so loathsome as for one to lie side by side with a brutal beast, whose every sense gives evidence of rottenness; yet how many holy women there have been who have borne it in the morning, at noon, at night, in youth, in middle life, and further on, and when at last the wretch dies, and everybody thanks God that he is gone, there is one that sheds tears over his dishonored grave, and remembers only the things that she had thought of him - when one looks upon such heroism as that, who can say that he does not believe in long suffering?

Infidelity is external - not the Book, not the Church, not the officer, not the misinformed superstitious; but there is no infidelity in the heart when you have reproduced the fruits of the Spirit before men; and if there is ever to be a Millennial day - and I believe there will be - it will not come until the sporadic cases of Christ's likeness are swallowed up in the multitude of them.  If all those who sit here today were like the Apostles of the Pentecost; if everything that is animal and fleshly were subjected and reduced to its lowest terms; if everything that was in you was rational and inspirational; if everything in you was sweet and joyous, full of peace, goodwill, and self sacrifice for others; if all were thinking of others better than themselves - if this congregation were animated one single year with such experience as that, London would feel it like a change of climate.  Here and there we have single Christians - the head in the household - single Christians in obscurity and poverty, but we have never had communities, we have never had even whole Churches, that had this true spirit of Christ, creating an atmosphere as well as an experience.  When that day comes, oh, how fast the Gospel will gain its victories!  When that day comes, when all sects shall be, not made into one sect, not necessarily, but when they shall all be wrought this high and royal spirit of love and mutual honor and respect, then look out; the Morning Star has arisen and the Sun of Righteousness is not far.  But if we think that with all our missionaries and all our Church offerings we may cherish the spirit of the animal man, with its envyings, its jealousies, and separations, and still expect the Millennial day, we shall be expecting, as the Jews did, that when their Messiah came He would come in arms and overthrow the empire, and lift them to a physical and national triumph.  The Kingdom of God is within us, and when the Kingdom of God is displayed all men can but admire.

Dearly beloved, it is for you and for me, for each of us in his own sphere and in the calling of God, to make mention to men and give a demonstration of the reality of religion.  They do not believe it, selfish men, on your account; they do not believe it, proud men, on your account; self indulgent men, you stand in the way of Christ.  All you that are limp in your higher experiences and only strong in the lower, you stand in the way.  Prepare the way; take the stumbling block out of the way, and then, when the ransomed of the Lord shall return to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their head, you shall swell the chorus, and you shall keep step with God's Anointed One.