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HOLY ORDERS, I reject the phrase, but UNDER holy orders, even the
orders of Christ Jesus, which is the law of liberty, the law whose
obedience alone can set a man free from in-burrowing slavery.
"And if any man yet say that, because of my lack of absolute
assurance, I have no right to the sacred post,--Let him, I answer,
who has been assailed by such doubts as mine, and from the citadel
of his faith sees no more one lingering shadow of a foe--let him
cast at me the first stone! Vain challenge! for such a one will
never cast a stone at man or woman. But let not him whose belief is
but the absence of doubt, who has never loved enough that which he
thinks he believes to have felt a single fear lest it should not be
true--let not that man, I say, cast at me pebble from the brook, or
cloven rock from the mount of the law, for either will fall hurtless
at my feet. Friends, I have for the last time spoken of myself in
this place. Ye have borne with me in my trials, and I thank you.
Those who have not only borne but suffered, and do now rejoice with
me, I thank tenfold. I have done--
"Save for one word to the Christians of this congregation:
"The waves of infidelity are coming in with a strong wind and a
flowing tide. Who is to blame? God it cannot be, and for
unbelievers, they are as they were. It is the Christians who are to
blame. I do not mean those who are called Christians, but those who
call and count themselves Christians. I tell you, and I speak to
each one of whom it is true, that you hold and present such a
withered, starved, miserable, death's-head idea of Christianity;
that you are yourselves such poverty-stricken believers, if
believers you are at all; that the notion you present to the world
as your ideal, is so commonplace, so false to the grand, gracious,
mighty-hearted Jesus--that YOU are the cause why the truth hangs its
head in patience, and rides not forth on the white horse, conquering
and to conquer. You dull its lustre in the eyes of men; you deform
its fair proportions; you represent not that which it is, but that
which it is not, yet call yourselves by its name; you are not the
salt of the earth, but a salt that has lost its savour, for ye seek
all things else first, and to that seeking the kingdom of God and
his righteousness shall never be added. Until you repent and believe
afresh, believe in a nobler Christ, namely the Christ revealed by
himself, and not the muffled form of something vaguely human and
certainly not all divine, which the false interpretations of men
have substituted for him, you will be, as, I repeat, you are, the
main reason why faith is so scanty in the earth, and the enemy comes
in like a flood. For the sake of the progress of the truth, and that
into nobler minds than yours, it were better you joined the ranks of
the enemy, and declared what I fear with many of you is the fact,
that you believe not at all. But whether in some sense you believe
or not, the fact remains, that, while you are not of those
Christians who obey the word of the master, DOING the things he says
to them, you are of those Christians, if you WILL be called by the
name, to whom he will say, I never knew you: go forth into the outer
darkness. Then at least will the church be rid of you, and the
honest doubter will have room to breathe the divine air of the
presence of Jesus.
"But oh what unspeakable bliss of heart and soul and mind and sense
remains for him who like St. Paul is crucified with Christ, who
lives no more from his own self, but is inspired and informed and
possessed with the same faith towards the Father in which Jesus
lived and wrought the will of the Father! If the words attributed to
Jesus are indeed the words of him whom Jesus declared himself, then
truly is the fate of mankind a glorious one,--and that, first and
last, because men have a God supremely grand, all-perfect in
God-head; for that is, and that alone can be, the absolute bliss of
the created."
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