Pax vobiscum, and The greatest thing in the world
Drummond, Henry, 1851-1897
BV 4501 .D7 )&9l I I r ■ '■' A^' oox 1* ^> <• <\ ^ tVl?^ .v^ -J '. ^ ^ V -fc A s\ tf ^ ^ c o ' • « < •JO ^ "^ % ^ '* ^0' * .■■ A0' * ' V, "^. V^ PAX VOBISCUM, AND THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD. BY HENRY DRUMMOND, LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.G.S., AUTHOR OF "NATURAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD," ETC. yci 24 1893 J ' NEW YORK: ^^JZ2L-~''&f yf THE POLLARD PUBLISHING COMPANY, 13 Barclay Street. 1891. - K- Copyright, 1891, BY POLLARD PUBLISHING COMPANY. Pax Vobiscum. INTRODUCTION. Few authors have gained world-famed celebrity so quickly as did Professor Henry Drummond. From the pastorate of an obscure mission station in the island of Malta, he soared gradually in moral intellectuality until, having returned to Glasgow and won the titles of Fellow of the Eoyal Society of Engineers and Fellow of the Geographical Society, he appeared in Northfield, Massa- chusetts, in 1887, at the invitation of Mr. Moody, and shone as a beacon in religious literature. Born at Stirling— the historic Stirling of the Scottish royalty— he was educated at the Edinburgh University. Having joined the ministry, his first evangelical labors were in far-off Malta. But, soon, his great Christian soul ached for wider fields, and, returning to Scotland, he was appointed lecturer at the Free Church College in Glasgow, and took charge of a workingmen's mission in that city. Here his philosophical teachings and deep thought attracted attention ; and in a little while Henry Drummond had sprung into the first rank of moralists and social philosophers. It was at Northfield, Massachusetts, that he delivered 4 Introduction. the famous lecture, " The Greatest Thing in the World." Here, also, did he earn fame by other wonderful utter- ances. Divines from every state in the union were present; men whose eloquence had stirred communities almost to frenzy -point. But Drummond talked, not with peculiar eloquence, but with a sense of decision in religious thought which was accepted in positive awe by those who had erstwhile posed as mentors in the science of religion. His arguments were positive. His writings expose his thoughts. His work, " Natural Law in the Spiritual World," has had a sale in England and America of nearly one million copies. As an African traveller he has added a charming gem to travel-literature in " Tropical Africa." And, later, his brochure, uPax Vobiscum," sparkles with fervid religious truths and literary ex- cellence. Recently he has travelled with Professor Geike in the Rocky Mountains ; and it is more than probable that ere long the reading public will be favored with a work from his pen descriptive of that grand panorama of nature. PAX VOBISCUM. " Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." 6 PAX YOBISCUM. I heard this morning a sermon by a distinguished preacher upon u Best." It was full of beautiful thoughts; but when I came to ask myself, " How does he say I can get Rest ?" there was no answer. The sermon was sin- cerely meant to be practical, yet it contained no experi- ence that seemed to me to be tangible, nor any advice that I could grasp— any advice, that is to say, which could help me to find the thing itself as I went about the world this afternoon. Yet this omission of what is, after all, the only impor- tant problem, was not the fault of the preacher. The whole popular religion is in the twilight here. And when pressed for really working specifics for the ex- periences with which it deals, it falters, and seems to lose itself in mist. The want of connection between the great words of religion and every-day life has bewildered and discour- aged all ok us. Christianity possesses the noblest words in the language; its literature overflows with terms ex- 7 8 Pax Vobiscum. pressive of the greatest and happiest moods which can fill the soul of man. Best, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, Light— these words occur with such persistency in hymns and prayers that an observer might think they formed the staple of Christian experience. But on com- ing to close quarters with the actual life of most of us, how surely would he be disenchanted ! I do not think we ourselves are aware how much our religious life is made up of phrases; how much of what we call Chris- tian Experience is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere religious phraseology with almost nothing behind it in what we really feel and know. To some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences seem further away than when we took the first steps in the Christian life. That life has not opened out as we had hoped ; we do not regret our religion, but we are dis- appointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when wandering notes from a diviner music stray into our spirits; but these experiences come at few and fitful moments. We have no sense of possession in them. When they visit us, it is a surprise. When they leave us, it is without explanation. When we wish their re- turn, we do not know how to secure it. All which means a religion without solid base, and a poor and flickering life. It means a great bankruptcy in those experiences which give Christianity its personal solace and make it attractive to the world, and a great uncertainty as to any remedy. It is as if we knew everything about health— except the way to get it. I am quite sure that the difficulty does not lie in the fact that men are not in earnest. This is simply not the Pax Vobiscam. Q fact. All around us Christians are wearing themselves out in trying to be better. The amount of spiritual longing in the world— in the hearts of unnumbered thou- sands of men and women in whom we should never sus- pect it; among the wise and thoughtful; among the young and gay, who seldom assuage and never betray their thirst— this is one of the most wonderful and touching facts of life. It is not more heat that is needed, but more light ; not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to very real energies already there. The usual advice when one asks for counsel on these questions is, "Pray." But this advice is far from ade- quate. I shall qualify the statement presently ; but let me urge it here, with what you will perhaps call daring emphasis, that to pray for these things is not the way to get them. No one will get them without praying; but that men do not get them by praying is the simple fact. We have all prayed, and sincerely prayed, for such ex- periences as I have named ; prayed, believing that that was the way to get them. And yet have we got them ? The test is experience. I dare not limit prayer; still less the grace of God. If you have got them in this way, it is well. I am speaking to those, be they few or many, who have not got them; to ordinary men in ordinary circumstances. But if we have not got them, it by no means follows that prayer is useless. The correct con- clusion is only that it is useless, or inadequate rather, for this particular purpose. To make prayer the sole re- sort, the universal panacea for every spiritual ill, is as radical a mistake as to prescribe only one medicine for every bodily trouble. The physician who does the last 10 Pax Vobiscum is a quack; the spiritual adviser who does the first is grossly ignorant of his profession. To do nothing but pray is a wrong done to prayer itself, and can only end in disaster. It is as if one tried to live only with the lungs, as if one assimilated only air and neglected solid food. The lungs are a first essential, the air is a first essential; but the body has many members, given for different purposes, secreting different things, and each has a method of nutrition as special to itself as its own activity. While prayer, then, is the character- istic sublimity of the Christian life, it is by no means the only one. And those who make it the sole alternative, and apply it to purposes for which it was never meant, are really doing the greatest harm to prayer itself. To couple the word " inadequate " with this mighty word is not to dethrone prayer, but to exalt it. What dethrones prayer is unanswered prayer. When men pray for things which do not come that way — pray with sincere belief that prayer, unaided and alone, will compass what they ask— then, not getting what they ask, they often give up prayer. This is the natural history of much atheism, not only an atheism of atheists, but a more terrible atheism of Christians, an unconscious atheism, whose roots have struck far into many souls whose last breath would be spent in denying it. So, I repeat, it is a mistaken Christianity which allows men to cherish a blind belief in the omnipotence of prayer. Prayer, cer- tainly, when the appropriate conditions are fulfilled, is omnipotent, but not blind prayer. Blind prayer is a superstition. Prayer, in its true sense, contains the sane recognition that while man prays in faith, God acts by Pax Vobiscum. II law. What that means in the immediate connection we shall see presently. What, then, is the remedy ? It is impossible to doubt that there is a remedy, and it is equally impossible to be- lieve that it is a secret. The idea that some few men, by happy chance or happier temperament, have been given the secret— as if there were some sort of knack or trick of it — is wholly incredible and wrong. Religion must be for all ; and the way into its loftiest heights must be by a gateway through which the peoples of the world may pass. I shall have to lead up to this gateway by a very fa- miliar path. But as this path is strangely unfrequented where it passes into the religious sphere, I must ask your forbearance for dwelling for a moment upon the com- monest of commonplaces. EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. Nothing that happens in the world happens by chance. God is a God of order. Everything is arranged upon definite principles, and never at random. The world, even the religious world, is governed by law. Charac- ter is governed by law. Happiness is governed by law. The Christian experiences are governed by law. Men, forgetting this, expect Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith to drop into their souls from the air like snow or rain. But in point of fact they do not do so ; and if they did they would no less have their origin in previous activities and be controlled by natural laws. Rain and snow do drop from the air, but not without a long previous history. 12 Pax Vobiscum. They are the mature effects of former causes. Equally so are Eest and Peace and Joy. They, too, have each a previous history. Storms and winds and calms are not accidents, but brought about by antecedent cir- cumstances. Eest and Peace are but calms in man's in- ward nature, and arise through causes as definite and as inevitable. Eealize it thoroughly : it is a methodical not an acci- dental world. If a housewife turns out a good cake, it is the result of a sound receipt, carefully applied. She cannot mix the assigned ingredients and fire them for the appropriate time without producing the result. It is not she who has made the cake ; it is nature. She brings related things together; sets causes at work; these causes bring about the result. She is not a creator, but an in- termediary. She does not expect random causes to pro- duce specific effects— random ingredients would only produce random cakes. So it is in the making of Chris- tian experiences. Certain lines are followed; certain effects are the result. These effects cannot but be the result. But the result can never take place without the previous cause. To expect results without ante- cedents is to expect cakes without ingredients. That impossibility is precisely the almost universal expec- tation. Now what I mainly wish to do is to help you firmly to grasp this simple principle of Cause and Effect in the spiritual world. And instead of applying the principle generally to each of the Christian experiences in turn, I shall examine its application to one in some little detail. The one I shall select is Eest. And I think any one who Pax Vobiscum. 1 3 follows the application in this single instance will be able to apply it for himself to all the others. Take such a sentence as this: African explorers are subject to fevers which cause restlessness and delirium. Note the expression, " cause restlessness." Restless- ness has a cause. Clearly, then, any one who wished to get rid of restlessness would proceed at once to deal with the cause. If that were not removed, a doctor might prescribe a hundred things, and all might be taken in turn, without producing the least effect. Things are so arranged in the original planning of the world that cer- tain effects must follow certain causes, and certain causes must be abolished before certain effects can be removed. Certain parts of Africa are inseparably linked with the physical experience called fever; this fever is in turn infallibly linked with a mental experience called restlessness and delirium. To abolish the mental experi- ence the radical method would be to abolish the physical experience, and the way of abolishing the physical ex- perience would be to abolish Africa, or to cease to go there. Now this holds good for all other forms of Rest- lessness. Every other form and kind of Restlessness in the world has a definite cause, and the particular kind of Restlessness can only be removed by removing the allotted cause. All this is also true of Rest. Restlessness has a cause: must not Rest have a cause ? Necessarily. If it were a chance world we would not expect this; but, being a methodical world, it cannot be otherwise. Rest, physi- cal rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every kind of rest has a cause, as certainly as restlessness. Now causes 14 Pax Vobiscnm. are discriminating. There is one kind of cause for every particular effect, and no other; and if one particular elf act is desired, the corresponding cause must be set in motion. It is no use proposing finely devised schemes, or going through general pious exercises in the hope that somehow Eest will come. The Christian life is not casual, but causal. All nature is a standing protest against the absurdity of expecting to secure spiritual effects, or any effects, without the employment of ap- propriate causes. The Great Teacher dealt what ought to have been the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by a single question, k' Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ?" Why, then, did the Great Teacher not educate His fol- lowers fully ? Why did He not tell us, for example, how such a thing as Eest might be obtained ? The answer is, that He did. But plainly, explicitly, in so many words ? Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many words. He assigned Eest to its cause, in words with which each of us has been familiar from his earliest childhood. He begins, you remember — for you at once know the passage I refer to— almost as if Eest could be had with- out any cause: "Come unto me," He says, "and I will give you Eest." Eest, apparently, was a favor to be bestowed ; men had but to come to Him ; He would give it to every appli- cant. But the next sentence takes that all back. The qualification, indeed, is added instantaneously. For what the first sentence seemed to give was next thing to an impossibility. For how, in a literal sense, can Eest be given f One could no more give away Eest than he Pax Vobiscum. 1 5 could give away Laughter. We speak of " causing" laughter, which we can do ; but we cannot give it away. When we speak of giving pain, we know perfectly well we cannot give pain away. And when we aim at giving pleasure, all that we do is to arrange a Set of circum- stances in such a way as that these shall cause pleasure. Of course there is a sense, and a very wonderful sense, in which a Great Personality breathes upon all who come within its influence an abiding peace and trust. Men can be to other men as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land: much more Christ; much more Christ as Perfect Man ; much more still as Saviour of the world. But it is not this of which I speak. When Christ said He would give men Best, He meant simply that He would put them in the way of it. By no act of convey- ance would, or could, He make over His own Eest to them. He could give them His receipt for it. That was all. But He would not make it for them. For one thing, it was not in His plan to make it for them; for another thing, men were not so planned that it could be made for them; and for yet another thing, it was a thousand times better that they should make it for them- selves. That this is the meaning becomes obvious from the wording of the second sentence: " Learn of me and ye shall find Eest." Eest, that is to say, is not a thing that can be given, but a thing to be acquired. It comes not by an act, but by a process. It is not to be found in a happy hour, as one finds a treasure ; but slowly, as one finds knowledge. It could indeed be no more found in a moment than could knowledge. A soil has to be pre- 1 6 Pax Vobiscum. pared for it. Like a fine fruit, it will grow in one climate and not in another ; at one altitude and not at another. Like all growths it will have an orderly de- velopment and mature by slow degrees. The nature of this slow process Christ clearly defines when He says we are to achieve Eest by learning. " Learn of me,'1 He says, " and ye shall find rest to your souls." Now consider the extraordinary originality of this utterance. How novel the connection between these two words, " Learn " and "Rest " ? How few of us have ever associated them — ever thought that Rest was a thing to be learned; ever laid ourselves out for it as we would to learn a language; ever practised it as we would practise the violin ? Does it not show how en- tirely new Christ's teaching still is to the world, that so old and threadbare an aphorism should still be so little known ? The last thing most of us would have thought of would have been to associate Best with Work. What must one work at ? What is that which if duly learned will find the soul of man in Rest ? Christ answers without the least hesitation. He specifies two things— Meekness and Lowliness. "Learn of me," He says, "fori am meek and lowly in heart." Now these two things are not chosen at random. To these accom- plishments, in a special way, Rest is attached. Learn these, in short, and you have already found Rest. These as they stand are direct causes of Rest ; will produce it at once; cannot but produce it at once. And if you think for a single moment, you will see how this is necessarily so, for causes are never arbitrary, and the connection be- Pax Vobiscum. l? tween antecedent and consequent here and everywhere lies deep in the nature of things. What is the connection, then? I answer by a further question. What are the chief causes of Unrest f If you know yourself, you will answer, Pride, Selfishness, Am- bition. As you look back upon the past years of your life, is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from the succession of personal mortifications and almost trivial disappointments which the intercourse of life has brought you? Great trials come at lengthened intervals, and we rise to breast them ; but it is the petty friction of our e very-day life with one another, the jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collar se of our ambition, the crossing of our will or the taking down of our conceit, which make inward peace impossible. Wounded vanity, then, disappointed hopes, unsatisfied selfishness— these are the old, vulgar, universal sources of man's unrest. Now it is obvious why Christ pointed out as the two chief objects for attainment the exact opposites of these. To meekness and lowliness these things simply do not exist. They cure unrest by making it impossible. These remedies do not trif*e with surface symptoms; they strike at once at removing causes. The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centred life can be removed at once by learning meekness and lowliness of heart. He who learns them is forever proof against it. He lives henceforth a charmed life. Chris- tianity is a fine inoculation, a transfusion of healthy blood into an anaemic or poisoned soul. No fever can attack a perfectly sound body; no fever of unrest can disturb a soul which has breathed the air or learned the 1 8 Pax Vobiscum. ways of Christ. Men sigh for the wings of a dove that they may fly away and be at Rest. But flying away will not help us. " The Kingdom of God is within you." We aspire to the top to look for Best; it lies at the bottom. Water rests only when it gets to the lowest place. So do men. Hence be lowly. The man who has no opinion of himself at all can never be hurt if others do not acknowledge him. Hence, be meek. He who is without expectation cannot fret if nothing comes to him. It is self-evident that these things are so. The lowly man and the meek man are really above all other men, above all other things. They dominate the world because they do not care for it. The miser does not possess gold, gold possesses him. But the meek possess it. "The meek," said Christ, "inherit the earth." They do not buy it ; they do not conquer it ; but they inherit it. There are people who go about the world looking out for slights, and they are necessarily miserable, for they find them at every turn — especially the imaginary ones. One has the same pity for such men as for the very poor. They are the morally illiterate. They have had no real education, for they have never learned how to live. Few men know how to live. We grow up at random, carrying into mature life the merely animal methods and motives which we had as little children. And it does not occur to us that all this must be changed ; that much of it must be reversed; that life is the finest of the Fine Arts; that it has to be learned with lifelong patience, and that the years of our pilgrimage are all too short to master it triumphantly. Yet this is what Christianity is for-— to teach men the Pax Vobiscum. 19 Art of Life. And its whole curriculum lies in one word — " Learn of me." Unlike most education, this is almost purely personal; it is not to be had from books or lectures or creeds or doctrines. It is a study from the life. Christ never said much in mere words about the Christian graces. He lived them, He was them. Yet we do not merely copy Him. We learn His art by living with Him, like the old apprentices with their masters. Now we understand it all ? Christ's invitation to the weary and heavy-laden is a call to begin life over again upon a new principle— upon His own principle. " Watch my way of doing things," He says. " Follow me. Take life as I take it. Be meek and lowly and you will find Rest." I do not say, remember, that the Christian life to every man, or to any man, can be a bed of roses. No educational process can be this. And perhaps if some men knew how much was involved in the simple " learn " of Christ, they would not enter His school with so irresponsible a heart. For there is not only much to learn, but much to unlearn. Many men never go to this school at all till their disposition is already half ruined and character has taken on its fatal set. To learn arithmetic is difficult at fifty — much more to learn Christianity. To learn simply what it is to be meek and lowly, in the case of one who has had no lessons in that in childhood, may cost him half of what he values most on earth. Do we realize, for instance, that the way of teaching humility is generally by humiliation^ There is probably no other school for it. When a man enters 20 Pax Vobiscum. himself as a pupil in such a school it means a very great thing. There is much Rest there, but there is also much Work. I should be wrong, even though my theme is the brighter side, to ignore the cross and minimize the cost. Only it gives to the cross a more definite meaning, and a rarer value, to connect it thus directly and causally with the growth of the inner life. Our platitudes on the " benefits of affliction" are usually about as vague as our theories of Christian Experience. " Somehow," we believe affliction does us good. But it is not a question of " Somehow." The result is definite, calculable, neces- sary. It is under the strictest law of cause and effect. The first effect of losing one's fortune, for instance, is humiliation; and the effect of humiliation, as we have just seen, is to make one humble; and the effect of being humble is to produce Rest. It is a roundabout way, apparently, of producing Rest; but Nature generally works by circular processes; and it is not certain that there is any other way of becoming humble, or of find- ing Rest. If a man could make himself humble to order, it might simplify matters, but we do not find that this happens. Hence we must all go through the mill. Hence death, death to the lower self, is the nearest gate and the quickest road to life. Yet this is only half the truth. Christ's life outwardly was one of the most troubled lives that was ever lived: tempest and tumult, tumult and tempest, the waves breaking over it all the time till the worn body was laid in the grave. But the inner life was a sea of glass. The great calm was always there. At any moment jo\x Pax Vobiscum. 21 might have gone to Him and found Eest. And even when the bloodhounds were dogging Him in the streets of Jerusalem, He turned to His disciples and offered them, as a last legacy, " My peace." Nothing even for a moment broke the serenity of Christ's life on earth. Misfortune could not reach Him; He had no fortune. Food, raiment, money — fountain-heads of half the world's weariness — He simply did not care for; they played no part in His life ; He k ' took no thought " for them . It was impossible to affect Him by lowering His reputation ; He had already made Himself of no reputation. He was dumb before insult. When He was reviled, He reviled not again. In fact, there was nothing that the world could do to Him that could ruffle the surface of His spirit. Such living, as mere living, is altogether unique. It is only when we see what it was in Him that we can know what the word Eest means. It lies not in emotions, nor in the absence of emotions. It is not a hallowed feeling that comes over us in church. It is not something that the preacher has in his voice. It is not in nature, or in poetry, or in music — though in all these there is soothing. It is the mind at leisure from itself. It is the perfect poise of the soul; the absolute adjustment of the inward man to the stress of all outward things ; the prepared- ness against every emergency ; the stability of assured convictions ; the eternal calm of an invulnerable faith ; the repose of a heart set deep in God. It is the mood of the man who says, with Browning, " God's in His Heaven, all's well with the world." Two painters each painted a picture to illustrate his conception of rest. The first chose for his scene a still, 22 Pax Vobiscutn. lone lake among the far-off mountains. The second threw on his canvas a thundering waterfall, with a fragile birch- tree bending over the foam; at the fork of a branch, al- most wet with the cataract's spray, a robin sat on its nest. The first was only Stagnation; the last was Rest. For in Eest there are always two elements— tranquillity and energy ; silence and turbulence ; creation and destruc- tion ; fearlessness and fearfulness. This it was in Christ. It is quite plain from all this that whatever else He claimed to be or to do, He at least knew how to live. All this is the perfection of living, of living in the mere sense of passing through the world in the best way. Hence His anxiety to communicate His idea of life to others. He came, He said, to give men life, true life, a more abundant life than they were living; "the life," as the fine phrase in the Revised Version has it, "that is life indeed." This is what He himself possessed, and it was this which He offers to all mankind. And hence His di- rect appeal for all to come to Him who had not made much of life, who were weary and heavy-laden. These He would teach His secret. They, also, should know " the life that is life indeed." WHAT YOKES AEE FOR. There is still one doubt to clear up. After the state- ment, " Learn of Me," Christ throws in the disconcerting qualification, " Take my yoke upon you and learn of Me." Why, if all this be true, does He call it a yoke f Why, while professing to give Rest, dues He with the next breath whisper "burden"? Is the Christian life, after Pax Vobiscum. 23 all, what its enemies take it for— an additional weight to the already great woe of life, some extra punctiliousness ahout duty, some painful devotion to observances, some heavy restriction and trammelling of all that is joyous and free in the world ? Is life not hard and sorrowful enough without being fettered with yet another yoke ? It is astounding how so glaring a misunderstanding of this plain sentence should ever have passed into currency. Did you ever stop to ask what a yoke is really for? Is it to be a burden to the animal which wears it? It is just the opposite. It is to make its burden light. Attached to the oxen in any other way than by a yoke, the plough would be intolerable. Worked by means of a yoke, it is light. A yoke is not an instrument of torture; it is an instrument of mercy. It is not a malicious contrivance for making work hard ; it is a gentle device to make hard labor light. It is not meant to give pain, but to save pain. And yet men speak of the yoke of Christ as if it were a slavery, and look upon those who wear it as ob- jects of compassion. For generations we have had homi- lies on "The Yoke of Christ"— some delighting in por- traying its narrow exactions ; some seeking in these ex- actions the marks of its divinity; others apologizing for it, and toning it down; still others assuring us that, al- though it be very bad, it is not to be compared with the positive blessings of Christianity. How many, especially among the young, has this one mistaken phrase driven forever away from the kingdom of God ? Instead of making Christ attractive, it makes Him out a taskmas- ter, narrowing life by petty restrictions, calling for self- denial where none is necessary, making misery a virtue 24 Pax Vobiscum. under the plea that it is the yoke of Christ, and happi- ness criminal because it now and then evades it. Ac- cording to this conception, Christians are at best the vic- tims of a depressing fate; their life is a penance; and their hope for the next world purchased by a slow mar- tyrdom in this. The mistake has arisen from taking the word " yoke" here in the same sense as in the expressions " under the yoke," or " wear the yoke in his youth." But in Christ's illustration it is not thejugum of the Roman soldier, but the simple " harness" or " ox-collar" of the Eastern peas- ant. It is the literal wooden yoke which He, with His own hands in the carpenter shop, had probably often made. He knew the difference between a smooth yoke and a rough one, a bad fit and a good fit ; the difference also it made to the patient animal which had to wear it. The rough yoke galled, and the burden was heavy; the smooth yoke caused no pain, and the load was lightly drawn. The badly fitted harness was a misery; the well- fitted collar was "easy." And what was the " burden "? It was not some special burden laid upon the Christian, some unique infliction that they alone must bear. It was what all men bear. It was simply life, human life itself, the general burden of life which all must carry with them from the cradle to the grave. Christ saw that men took life painfully. To some it was a weariness, to others a failure, to many a tragedy, to all a struggle and a pain. How to carry this burden of life had been the whole world's problem. It is still the whole world's problem. And here is Christ's so- lution: " Carry it as I do. Take life as I take it. Look Pax Vobiscnm. 2$ at it from My point of view. Interpret it upon My prin- ciples. Take My yoke and learn of Me, and you will find it easy. For My yoke is easy, works easily, sits right upon the shoulders, and therefore My burden is light." There is no suggestion here that religion will absolve any man from bearing burdens. That would be to absolve him from living, since it is life itself that is the burden. What Christianity does propose is to make it tolerable. Christ's yoke is simply His secret for the alleviation of human life, His prescription for the best and happiest method of living. Men harness themselves to the work and stress of the world in clumsy and unnatural ways. The harness they put on is antiquated. A rough, ill- fitted collar at the best, they make its strain and fric- tion past enduring, by placing it where the neck is most sensitive ; and by mere continuous irritation this sensi- tiveness increases until the whole nature is quick and sore. This is the origin, among other things, of a disease called " touchiness" — a disease which, in spite of its inno- cent name, is one of the gravest sources of restlessness in the world. Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a morbid condition of the inward disposition. It is self- love inflamed to the acute point; conceit, with a hair- trigger. The cure is to shift the yoke to some other place ; to let men and things touch us through some new and perhaps as yet unused part of our nature ; to become meek and lowly in heart while the old sensitiveness is becoming numb from want of use. It is the beautiful work of Christianity everywhere to adjust the burden of life to those who bear it, and them to it. It has a per- 26 Pax Vobiscum. f ectly miraculous gift of healing. Without doing any vio- lence to human nature it sets it right with life, harmon- izing it with all surrounding things, and restoring those who are jaded with the fatigue and dust of the world to a new grace of living. In the mere matter of altering the perspective of life and changing the proportions of things, its function in lightening the care of man is alto- gether its own. The weight of a load depends upon the attraction of the earth. Suppose the attraction of the earth were removed ? A ton on some other planet, where the attraction of gravity is less, does not weigh half a ton. Now Christianity removes the attraction of the earth; and this is one way in which it diminishes man's burden. It makes them citizens of another world. What was a ton yesterday is not half a ton to-day. So without changing one's circumstances, merely by offering a wider horizon and a different standard, it alters the whole as- pect of the world. Christianity as Christ taught is the truest philosophy of life ever spoken. But let us be quite sure when we speak of Christianity that we mean Christ's Christianity. Other versions are either caricatures, or exaggerations, or misunderstandings, or shortsighted and surface readings. For the most part their attainment is hopeless and the results wretched. But I care not who the person is, or through what vale of tears he has passed, or is about to pass, there is a new life for him along this path. Pax Vobiscum. 27 HOW FRUITS GROW. Were Rest my subject, there are other things I should wish to say about it, and other kinds of Rest of which I should like to speak. But that is not my subject. My theme is that the Christian experiences are not the work of magic, but come under the law of Cause and Effect. And I have chosen Rest only as a single illustration of the working of that principle. If there were time I might next run overall the Christian experiences in turn, and show how the same wide law applies to each. But I think it may serve the better purpose if I leave this further exercise to yourselves. I know no Bible study that you will find more full of fruit, or which will take you nearer to the ways of God, or make the Christian life itself more solid or more sure. I shall add only a single other illustration of what I mean, before I close. Where does Joy come from ? I knew a Sunday scholar whose conception of Joy was that it was a thing made in lumps and kept somewhere in Heaven, and that when people prayed for it, pieces were somehow let down and fitted into their souls. I am not sure that views as gross and material are not often held by people who ought to be wiser. In reality, Joy is as much a matter of Cause and Effect as pain. No one can get Joy by merely asking for it. It is one of the ripest fruits of the Christian life, and, like all fruits, must be grown. There is a very clever trick in India called the mango-trick. A seed is put in 28 Pax Vobisaim. the ground and covered up, and after diverse incantations a full-blown mango-bush appears within five minutes. I never met any one who knew how the thing was done, but I never met any one who believed it to be anything else than a con juring-trick. The world is pretty unani- mous now in its belief in the orderliness of Nature. Men may not know how fruits grow, but they do know that they cannot grow in an hour. Some lives have not even a stalk on which fruits could hang, even if they did grow in an hour. Some have never planted one sound seed of Joy in all their lives ; and others who may have planted a germ or two have lived so little in sunshine that they never could come to maturity. Whence, then, is Joy ? Christ put His teaching upon this subject into one of the most exquisite of His para- bles. I should in any instance have appealed to His teaching here, as in the case of Rest, for I do not wish you to think I am speaking words of my own. But it so happens that He has dealt with it in words of unusual fulness. I need not recall the whole illustration. It is the para- ble of the Vine. Did you ever think why Christ spoke that parable ? He did not merely throw it into space as a fine illustration of general truths. It was not simply a statement of the mystical union, and the doctrine of an indwelling Christ. It was that; but it was more. After He had said it, He did what was not an unusual thing when He wras teaching His greatest lessons. He turned to the disciples and said He would tell them why He had spoken it. It was to tell them how to get Joy. " These things have I spoken unto you," He said, " that Pax Vobisciun. 29 My Joy might remain in you and that your Joy might be full." It was a purposed and deliberate communica- tion of His secret of Happiness. Go back over these verses, then, and you will find the Causes of this Effect, the spring, and the only spring, out of which true Happiness comes. I am not going to ana- lyze them in detail. T ask you to enter into the words for yourselves. Remember, in the first place, that the Vine was the Eastern symbol of Joy. It was its fruit that made glad the heart of man. Yet, however inno- cent that gladness — for the expressed juice of the grape was the common drink at every peasant's board— the gladness was only a gross and passing thing. This was not true happiness, and the vine of the Palestine vine- yards was not the true vine. Christ was "the true Vine." Here, then, is the ultimate source of Joy. Through whatever media it reaches us, all true Joy and Gladness find their source in Christ. By this, of course, is not meant that the actual Joy experienced is trans- ferred from Christ's nature, or is something passed on from Him to us. What is passed on is His method of getting it. There is, indeed, a sense in which we can share another's joy or another's sorrow. But that is another matter. Christ is the source of Joy to men in the sense in which He is the source of Rest. His people share His life, and therefore share its consequences, and one of these is Joy. His method of living is one that in the nature of things produces Joy. When He spoke of His Joy remaining with us He meant in part that the causes which produced it should continue to act. His followers, that is to say, by repeating His life would ex- 30 Pax Vobiscttm. perience its accompaniments. His Joy, His kind of Joy, would remain with them. 