II.

THE EXPECTANCY OF FAITH.

AN ADVENT SERMON.

Be patient therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it, until it receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord is at hand. - JAMES v. 7, 8.

But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore of sound mind, and be sober unto prayer: above all things being fervent in your love among yourselves; for love covereth a multitude of sins: using hospitality one to another without murmuring: according as each hath received a gift, ministering it among yourselves, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God; if any man speaketh, speaking as it were oracles of God; if any man ministereth, ministering as of the strength which God supplieth: that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, whose is the glory and the dominion for ever and ever. Amen. - 1 PETER iv. 7-11.

THESE two pieces of writing, so similar in substance and in tone, were written by men of quite diverse temperaments and histories, concerning the event toward which the minds of all the early disciples of Jesus were firmly set. To this expectation they had come by good right as his disciples; for he had himself never wavered in his belief that he was about to stand to the world in a

relationship in which no other man had ever stood, or could ever stand after him. It is a remarkable fact that, in spite of his strong conviction on this point, he was under no illusions as to his ignorance concerning the when or the how of its coming to pass. He made no pretension in that direction. Predictions founded upon insight into his own character and his relations to God and men he could make. Predictions dependent upon foreknowledge of the accidents of history and of human caprice he was too sane to undertake. These things, he said, belonged to the Inscrutable Father. Yet while he could not foretell times or seasons, he encouraged his followers to watch for the signs of the new era, intimating that he who could observe the operations and learn the laws of life and growth might anticipate that era, as he might anticipate summer by the blossoming of the fig-tree.

It is unnecessary to say to a congregation of thoughtful people in these days, that we are to look for the secret of this expectation of Jesus and his disciples concerning his future relation to the world, in his character, and in the relation to history in which he was believed by himself and them to stand. It was too vital a belief, and held too large a place in their scheme of life, to be dependent upon any mere tradition of words of his. The cardinal faiths of the first disciples were grounded less upon what he had said than upon what they knew

him to be. His words are recorded less for their own sake than to portray his character as it appeared to those who had been acquainted with him. Sometimes but the slightest foundation appears in his recorded sayings for their teachings concerning him, and yet the portrait they have drawn shows how these doctrines must have been inferred. Frequently his own sayings concerning himself have the marks of incidental and partial self-revelations of a profounder self-knowledge. Compared with what he has turned out to be, his claims for himself have an air of modesty and reserve. When he spoke he spoke truth; but far more than that, he was the truth.

Now the expectation, both of Jesus himself and of his first disciples, that he should one day occupy to the world a distinctively new and vastly more vital relationship than anything then in sight, was an expectation based directly upon a perception by himself, and more dimly by them, of what sort of character he was, and what a pivotal position. he held in human history. He had at the beginning of his public career measured himself against the world as he found it, and he knew then that either he was a failure, and such a failure as to discredit the whole course of history, whose occurrence in the universe was a disgrace to its God, or else the world must be revolutionized through him, and must accept him as henceforth its moral and historical centre. His faith in God and in himself,

as what he knew himself to be, left him no alternative but to predict such a revolution. As to his disciples, they knew that he had come into their lives, and had turned them so completely about, had made such new men of them, that he was henceforth literally more to them than the whole world, and they were compelled, upon the basis of their personal experience with him, to assert that in so far as the world had not yet experienced a like change, it must do so. To do less than to affirm this would seem to them to be infidelity to him. No disciple of Jesus who had any realization of the change which had come to his own life, and who was in healthy touch with the every-day life of the world, could fail to expect the world to be correspondingly changed. The only way in which to cherish the sense of personal experience of newness of life through Jesus, without expecting the world also to have a similar experience, is to regard one's self as living in a hopeless and hostile environment, from which he anticipates a speedy removal. When the church gave up the hope of any early conquest of the world by Jesus, vital piety was able to maintain itself only by the cultivation of a morbid longing for the things beyond death,by other-worldliness. It was then that "being a Christian" came to mean being "prepared to die."

It is true that the faith of Christ involves a confidence in the things beyond this life, and cannot continue to exist unless it has such a message

of hope. It involves this, however, not because of the hopelessness of the conquest of this world by Jesus, but because of the assurance that this world not only belongs by right to him, but shall actually be his. The hope for the unseen cannot possibly survive without a corresponding hope for the seen. If the known world is the devil's world, there are no data for any inference that the unknown world shall prove to be God's. Men say to us with force: "What use is it for you to preach blessedness in the next world, when this one is full of selfishness and injustice? We must gain our ideas of what we cannot see from what we can see." They are in the right. If I am to acquiesce in this world's continuing to be the scene of injustice and triumphant selfishness, I must throw up my brief for the hope beyond. If I am to contend with any prospect of success for that hope, I must give myself with sincere diligence to the betterment of all human relationships, social, political, economical. People sometimes ask a minister to mind the affairs of religion, and let politics and business alone. It is just that kind of sticking to religion without reference to the establishment of right relationships between men which presently leaves one with no religion worth sticking to. True religion fulfills its mission when it creates a hope, or if need be a dread, of the permanence and culmination of present personal relationships. He, therefore, who would best serve its cause will try