Let us “give diligence.” Uncertainty, in matters of any moment, is anguish. If we would go forward with freedom in the way of life, we must be treading on firm ground. Is not this true of the things of common life? Continual uncertainty would be a harassment which we could not bear. It is true of business. For, though in business life there are manifold contingencies which cannot be calculated, yet, if the reasonable certainty of business did not far outweigh uncertainty, its anxieties would be intolerable. It is true of the higher realm of thought. Men have to move, indeed, with cautious steps amid all the mysteries of truth; but to think at all would be to suffer with an exquisite pain, if to discern between truth and untruth were impossible. It is true of the sacred relationships of human life: uncertainty here would be worse than death. And it is no less true of the life in God that, if we would have peace, joy, strength, we must have faith—a faith which brings certitude to the soul.
1. It is of value for peace of conscience.—Toassure the conscience of pardon, to vanquish the fear of extinction in death, or the fear of awful judgment beyond, to reach the depth of man’s spirit, the seat of his misery, by an effectual assurance of reconciliation, demands the direct and healing touch of a Divine life-giving hand, the direct voice of the Almighty Consoler. This requires a distinctly revealed “Covenant,” not a guess, or a hope proceeding from man, but an “oath and a promise” of God; not a human peradventure, but a clear and distinct revelation of the redeeming love which apprehends us in Christ. It is this that the apostles say they bring us from heaven—”a good hope through grace” assured by many infallible proofs. They tell us that they bring glad tidings, definite enough to meet the necessity of every man, and make known a Saviour able to save to the uttermost all who come unto God by Him; so that God can be just, yet the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.
2. It is essential to thoroughness of character.—If we would have fulness, thoroughness, beauty of spirit and life, we must have singleness of purpose, entire trust in the Master, and consecration to His service. If we love Him with all our strength, trust Him with all our heart, there will be no uncertainty about our experience, character, or destiny.
Himself—his sensations and ideas—never fell again precisely into focus as on that day, yet he was the richer by its experience. But for once only to have come under the power of that peculiar mood, to have felt the train of reflections which belong to it really forcible and conclusive, to have been led by them to a conclusion, to have apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that it defined personal gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the shadows of the world, left this one particular hour a marked point in life never to be forgotten. It gave him a definitely ascertained measure of his moral or intellectual need, of the demand his soul must make upon the powers, whatsoever they might be, which had brought him, as he was, into the world at all. And again, would he be faithful to himself, to his own habits of mind, his leading suppositions, if he did but remain just there? Must not all that remained of life be but a search for the equivalent of that Ideal, among so-called actual things—a gathering together of every trace or token of it, which his actual experience might present? [Note: Waller Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ii. 53]
3. It is essential for the best service.—Who will burn for Christ except one who intensely believes in Him? Who will think it worth while even to attempt any distinctly Christian achievement in morals, unless on a basis of certainty that such conduct is “not in vain in the Lord”? Who can forgo retaliation, sensual indulgence, the pursuit of worldly aims or worldly praise, on the strength of a dim probability, or a vague dream of some just possible result in a dubious future? No—to practise the Christian morality in actual life we require to be filled with a certainty, and an overflowing gladness in the heart, which are capable of inciting to heroic deeds; to know that “these are the true sayings of God,” that our faith rests on the rock of ages, and that nothing in the creation is more absolutely fixed than the connexion between a life or death of martyrdom for Christ, and an eternity of glory.
To live to any purpose at all a man must have a certain amount of positive faith. The faith may be mean and squalid and base, but faith he must have if his life is to accomplish anything at all. His faith, his positives, his beliefs constitute the driving power of his life. No man can live on doubts and negations. The man who is sure of nothing will accomplish nothing, “He that doubteth is like the surge of the sea driven by the wind and tossed.” He is the sport and plaything of circumstances—life for him is bound to be without meaning, purpose, or end. It is a man’s positives that count, and if he has no positives he will count for nothing. This is true even of our secular life; it is still more true of the moral life; it is most true of all of the Christian life. If a man is to live the Christian life, there must be certain things which are not mere guesswork to him, but of which he is quite sure. [Note: J. D. Jones, The Hope of the Gospel, 168.]
4. It is necessary if our message to others is to carry weight.—If religion is to live in these days it must have a living message for these days. Such a message must be couched in language which the age can understand and must take account of its special defects and needs. If men have lost hold of religion and fail to find in it the old motives and sanctions and appeals, we may be sure that the fault is not altogether that of the men. We have to ask whether the religion itself has not changed, whether it still retains its soul, whether it stands as once it did for power and life, or has degenerated into empty forms. In other words, if men have lost the old note of certainty, why is it, and how can it be restored?
What is wanting in a good deal of preaching is personal certainty and urgency. Men preach a salvation the full value of which they have not themselves experimentally realized, and yet expect that they will persuade others of its supreme importance for them. They declare what the Bible and the Church teach about the cross of Christ, but they do not bear their own testimony to what the crucified has done for them in transporting them out of the shadow of death into God’s marvellous light. [Note: A. E. Garvie, The Gospel for Today, 41.]
It is said that a certain eminent Doctor of Divinity once summed up a debate on some knotty theological problem in the following terms “Well, gentlemen, speaking for myself, I think I may venture to say that I should feel inclined to favour a tendency in a positive direction, with reservations.” It is easy to sneer at such an attitude; but in reality it is rather splendid. Here was an old man, who had spent the greater part of his life in studying the fundamental problems of metaphysics and history, and at the end of it all he had the courage to confess that he was still only at the threshold of the house of Knowledge. At least he had realized the magnitude of his subject, and if we compare him with the narrow dogmatists of other ages, we shall be forced to allow that in his exceeding humility there was some greatness, nobility of mind, and dignity. At the same time it must be confessed that such an attitude does not lend itself to expression in a terse, definite form; and that, unfortunately, is what is needed by the men who are busy doing the hard work of the world. The ordinary man wants something simple and applicable to the problems with which he has to deal. He wants a right point of view, so that he can see the hard facts which crowd his life in their proper perspective. He wants Power, that he may be able to master the circumstances which threaten to swamp him. For the nebulous views of modern theology he has little use. [Note: D. Hankey, A Student in, Arms, i. 185.]
The preachers who produce the deepest effects are those who, having fast hold of the elemental religious principles which their hearers already hold, but hold hesitatingly, or hold as in a dream, or hold without knowing what they hold, draw these out from the darkness in which they lie buried, and force them into activity, and vividly manifest the reality of their application to heart and conduct. That is what moves men so profoundly; they come to church professing a creed, they hope that they believe it; but it slumbers, inoperative and inert, without practical force, without any direct or effectual significance. The preacher reads out the secret; he takes up this assumed creed; he gives it actual meaning; he spreads it out over the surface of life; he brings it to bear on the real facts of daily conduct with incision and with fire. [Note: H. S. Holland, Personal Studies, 145.]
It was doubtless his evidently intense conviction of the absolute truth and the positive certainty of what he preached, that day after day drew crowds of the people of Boston to listen to the evangelist. We are given to understand that on the whole the intellectual atmosphere of Boston is not favourable to the growth of the full assurance of faith. Yet after all, notwithstanding Mrs. Humphry Ward’s dictum that “the force of things is against the certain people,” men do feel the magnetism of the preacher to whom the things he speaks of are obviously the supreme realities of life, which he himself unwaveringly believes and lives by, and which they also must unwaveringly believe and live by, or else incur incalculable spiritual loss. “For if the trumpet give an uncertain voice, who shall prepare himself for war?” [Note: Henry Parley’s Life-Story, 186.]
Some here present will remember that during the latter half of last century great things were expected in the interests of Christianity and the interests of religious truth from the influence of the Broad Church school of the Church of England. Today where is that school? As the battle goes on and the armies are, drawn up for conflict in that Church, one looks round for that distinguished school to exercise their influence, to make peace and to conciliate opposite views. Where are their associations? Where are their meetings? Where are their utterances? The school is non-existent for any practical purpose. It has virtually died out, and its wreck strews the shore. Is this because the Broad Churchmen were not learned? Is it because they were not pious? Is it because they were not earnest, fascinating, human, lovable? Let the names of Stanley, Maurice, and Kingsley, and, if you choose so to include him, who did not wish particularly so to be included himself, the greatest of them all, and the greatest preacher of last century, Robertson of Brighton, answer. What in younger days we expected from their influence on England, and their influence percolating through England, doubtless was correct. But they have no children today. There is no organized body today representing their opinions and contributing their share to the great theological controversy.
And why not? Because with all their excellences, and with all their sweetness, they did not sufficiently strike the note of dogmatic certainty, and did not, as the other schools have done, train up their children, their disciples after them, with crisp and clear forms of belief. Their creed was too nebulous a creed, and, however beautiful be the mist—the mist shot through by the sun, and with its glimpses, as it rolls away, of the sky—it is not by preference through the mist that one desires to climb the dangerous hills of faith. [Note: John Watson, in Christian World Pulpit, lix. 299.]
