Abraham

( Originally Published 1913 )

"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."—PHIL. ii. 5.

THE special instance of the "mind" of Christ Jesus, which the Apostle speaks of in this place, is, as you will -remember, His voluntary humiliation for our sakes, out of love for us —His Incarnation and His Passion. That was, indeed, the supreme disclosure of His "mind"; its unexampled and unapproachable manifestation. .But the "mind of Christ" is here set before Christians as the standard for their own life, and that not only in its critical and urgent trials, but in the every-day details of feeling and behaviour. The "mind of Christ Jesus" which led Him to Bethlehem and Calvary was not something related simply and separately to one particular occasion. It means all that makes Him what He is, now and for ever, in love, in goodness, in perfection—in what He wills, in what He approves—in what He does. The " mind of Christ Jesus " answers in that ineffable and transcendent personality, Divine at once and human, to what we understand in men by the word "character" The " mind of Christ Jesus," as understood by us, as something to be copied and realised by men, is the same thing as what we mean when we speak of the Christian character and temper, in all its fulness, and variety, and beauty, and strength.

The Christian character is set before us in manifold and diversified ways in the Bible. The Christian character in its completeness is the result and outgrowth of all that series of events of which the Bible is in part, but in the most important part, the record ; which begins in ages back beyond our ken, and which comes down even to the day which is passing. The Bible exhibits it in various stages, in various forms—not always perfect, yet always going on to what is higher and purer, and shows to- us at last, after the passage of so many ages and generations, so many efforts and failures and slow steps of progress, in its finished and flawless perfectness, in the Person of the Divine Son of Man. It embraces many elements, it assumes many different, some-times even contrary, appearances—different and contrary as the fruit is from the flower, and the flower from the root leaves which first shoot from the seed, and the harshness of the unripe fruit from the bloom and sweetness of the same fruit ripened. But it has a moral basis which is the same through all its forms ; it has characteristics which belong to it in all its stages ; its stages and forms are connected one with another in natural and easy gradation ; it is a substantial and definite and real thing by itself, which has affected and still affects the state and history of man, just as national character, or the philosophic habit and temper, are real and substantial and operative things. This form of human character tending from the first to the " mind of Christ," and at last culminating in it in His person, and, less completely, in His saints after the Day of Pentecost, is the character put before us in the Bible and given us to study, to learn from, and, according to our measure, to assimilate and reproduce.

It is obvious at once, as I have said, that its forms, as shown in the Bible, are very various. The life of Jesus Christ is the key of all these forms, the interpreter, the reconciler of their differences, the corrector of their imperfections ; and with that key we see the moral unity that runs through the life of faith and obedience from the beginning. But that key was not given till the fulness of time came and the slow and painful steps of necessary waiting were gone through. But in the Bible we see them made ; we follow, through out-ward and apparent changes, the inward growth of what was to issue in the Christian character. I have ventured to think that it might be interesting to try and follow this growth as set before us in the Bible. I have to supply the place during this month of one whose familiar voice every one in this place so greatly misses, and whose absence, and its temporary cause, every one so deeply regrets. I shall attempt—it can only be in the rudest outline—to follow the unfolding of what I have called the Christian character ; the true religious character ; what Scripture calls the " mind of Christ," more or less realised in men :—to point out how its various essential elements, each in its due time and occasion, made their appearance and gained consistency and health and began to discharge their functions, till all were combined in harmony, according to the pattern intended from the beginning, "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." We do not, of course, expect to find in the earlier what we find in the later forms of character. We should be surprised to find in Abraham what is natural in word and thought in Isaiah ; in Isaiah what is natural in St. Paul ; in the age of the Kings or the Captivity what belongs to the age of the Apostles. But it is no anachronism in us who believe in Christ the Everlasting Word, and in that Divine Spirit "Who spake by the prophets," to claim for the Christian character, of course in early and rudimentary, yet real, forms, all that was religious in Abraham, or Moses, or David ; for all that was good in them came from Christ their Lord ; and with all their incompleteness, here were the true beginnings of what led on to what was completed in Christ—of what, when they should be made perfect, would be developed and completed after His image in them, as in the rest of His saints. We may claim the religious discipline of patriarch, and lawgiver, and prophet, as a contribution, in its own time and stage, to the ultimate formation of the Christian character. We may claim the character thus formed in them as a necessary step and indispensable element for that more perfect whole which should be realised on earth when the fulness of time came.

The survey of this great preparation of human character for the height and perfection which Christ came to give it must necessarily be a very rapid and superficial one. But there seem to be in the Bible record of God's discipline marked and leading moments or epochs, when that discipline was exercised in a special way, with special purpose and special results. It was one thing to the Patriarchs. It was another thing in the days of the Law. It was yet another with the Psalmists and Prophets. Each time some great and essential element necessary for ever to the health, and soundness, and strength of the religious or Christian character, was developed and confirmed, and made a permanent addition to that growing body of goodness and holiness and truth, which the second Adam was at last to make perfect. Very slow was the process of growth ; interrupted and thrown back by the sins of men ; seeming at times to fail and stop. But the ground gained was never lost : the light and the knowledge and the hope once given were kept through the worst times, till the hour arrived for the Master to acknowledge and crown the work which He had so patiently watched over.

I will confine myself to-day to what seems to me to have been the special lesson, the special religious acquisition of Patriarchal times ; the special contribution of that stage of God's discipline to the formation of the religious character which was to be at last " the mind of Christ."

The foundation of the religious character of the Old and New Testaments was laid in a great idea which is brought into clear and strong distinctness in the age of the Patriarchs, in God's dealings with Abraham, in what is shown to us of the discipline and guidance under which he became the " Father of the faithful," the first example,—in detail, I mean, of feeling and action,—of the religious life. And that idea is the singleness and individuality of the soul in its relation to the God Who called it into being.

The singleness, the solitariness of the human soul, compared with all other things in the world about it ; its independence, and its greatness. This is to us the most elementary of commonplaces. It has become part of the first axioms and presuppositions in our received conceptions of religion ; we cannot imagine religion without assuming it. But this great idea was not always as distinct and natural as it has come to be to us. It was once confused, imperfect, obscure. In the early days of the world it seemed much more natural to look upon men, not singly, but in great groups, or kindreds, or tribes. The individual, in his place on earth and his passage through life, was regarded as a part of a whole to which he belonged, for weal or woe, for preservation or destruction. His separate existence was of small account : the limb takes its importance from the body, the branch from the tree. " When we examine the ancient mind all the world over," writes Dr. Mozley, " one very remark-able want is apparent in it—viz., a true idea of the individuality of man ; an adequate conception of him as an independent person, a substantial being in himself, whose life and existence was his own." 1 "Society," says another writer, " in primitive times was not what it is assumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in view of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families." . . . "One peculiarity always distinguished the infancy of society. Men are regarded and treated, not as individuals, but always as members of a particular group. . . . The family relation was the narrowest and most personal relation in which a man stood ; nor, paradoxical as it may seem, was he ever regarded as himself, as a distinct individual. His individuality was swallowed up in his family." Strange as this often seems to us, it was not strange once ; nor is it so unnatural as it seems now. The first outlook on the world is not one to enforce the importance of the individual. We see in it vast masses of men, streaming, drifting, like huge clouds across the scene of time, and answering to the vast aggregates of inanimate nature—to the leaves which make up the foliage of the forest, to the blades of grass which cover the face of the pastures, to the raindrops in which the storm comes down for miles over the lands, the particles of water which fill the sea, the grains of sand which build up its shores. These great masses of human society remain, while certainly the individual, even the greatest, soon goes where he is no more seen. The poet watches with melancholy perplexity the continuity and permanence of nature. "The form remains, the function never dies," of the running water :

" Still glides the stream, and shall not cease to glide . . . While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, We men, . . . must vanish."

That is the first, and that is still one real aspect of human life. We, each of us, one by one are lost in the innumerable crowd of our fellow-men. Half our thoughts are still of man in the aggregate : the nation, the city, the public, the class, the interest. We cannot break through the natural limitations of the human imagination. In half our thoughts we ignore the man in the function—he is to us the servant, the workman, the soldier, the office-bearer : of the man, the soul, the character, his joys, his sins, his hopes, we know nothing. Of the numbers who perish in a great battle, or are swept away in daily crowds by a great epidemic, how little do we think of each separate person, his separate history, and character, and sufferings, all the long-process each has gone through since he was a little child, to the last fatal moment when he passed with so many others from life. No wonder the instinctive self-deceit still often comes into men's minds, against which the son of Sirach warns us—" Say not thou, I will hide myself from the Lord. . . . I shall not be remembered among so many people : for what is my soul among such an infinite number of creatures."

If that feeling, of the individual being merged and swallowed up in the aggregate, is strong and even irresistible at times now, how much more so in the infancy of the world, when that discipline of man began which was to lead at last to the "mind of Christ!" And so the first work of that discipline was to enforce and impress deeply another great and paramount aspect of man and life, another great side of the truth which should balance, correct, and complete the other. It was to teach and leave firmly planted the faith that God had His eye on each separate unit in these innumerable crowds : that each separate soul in them had its direct relations to its Maker ; its course to follow for itself, its destiny to fulfil or to fail in, its special calls and gifts according to its Master's purpose to account for, its own separate hopes, its own separate responsibilities. In the history of Abraham, from his call to the last trial of his faith, we see that great and as far as we are allowed to see, at least in its greatness and depth, that new lesson. Separated from his kindred and father's house, he goes forth alone into the unknown world, with only the God of heaven and earth for his guide and friend. And so he meets God on the hill-tops of Canaan, or in the solitudes of the desert, not as the local deity, not as the God of tribe or family—that worship of "other gods " was left behind "on the other side of the flood,"—but as the Ever-lasting, and the Alone, and the Unnamed, calling into His presence the soul that He has made ; placing Himself in immediate relation with it as if it, too, was alone in existence, appointing the purpose which it was to fulfil, and the promise and blessing offered to its hope. Singly and alone God speaks to him, not to his people or his family or his father's house. Singly and alone, he is called forth from all these, " to go out not knowing whither he went:" singly and alone, he is proved and tried and owned and blessed ; singly and alone, with him, not with a tribe or a nation—this was to be, but not now—God makes the covenant which contains the hopes of the world ; singly and alone, he builds the altars where he meets with God and calls on His name. Alone, he is brought near in the awful vision, and hears the awful appeal to his faith, "Fear not, Abraham, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward ; " alone in all the world he answers it,—" he believed the Lord, and it was counted to him for righteousness ; " alone, he stands " abroad " beneath the stars, and sees in them the figure of the souls which shall be given him as his seed ; alone the "deep sleep," and " the horror of great darkness falls upon him," and he sees and hears the confirmation of the promise, as " when the sun went down, the smoking furnace and the burning lamp passed between the divided pieces" of the sacrifice.

Alone he meets the great trial of his faith—" I am the Almighty God ; walk thou before Me and be thou perfect," the words which introduced the promise of a son ; and then the words which asked the surrender of the precious gift, " Take now thy son, thine only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest," and offer him up for a burnt offering ; alone, he receives him back again, as from the dead, and with him the great concluding blessing of his life, "By Myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son ; that in blessing I will bless thee, and multi-plying I will multiply thee, as the stars of the heaven, and the sand on the sea-shore :.. . and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed."

Here at the beginning of the history of religion in the Bible, a history in which men were to be so variously dealt with, as corporate societies as well as individual persons—here, in its front and on its thresh-old, is the type and figure of the religious man. Abraham was to be the example to us all—the great instance of that faith without which there can be no communion between man and his God, the faith which realises God, and what God is. Abraham stands before us, in the Old Testament and the New, as " the friend of God." Abraham stands before us, equally in both, as the " father of us all." Of him is spoken by the mouth of Jesus Christ that mysterious grace, or that mysterious praise—" Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it, and was glad." And his history is marked as the history of a man, a soul, by itself in relation to Almighty God ; not as one of a company, a favoured brotherhood, or chosen body, but in all his doings single and alone, alone with the Alone, one with One, with his Maker, as he was born, and as he dies, alone : the individual soul, standing all by itself, in the presence of its Author and Sustainer, called by Him and answering to His call, choosing, acting, obeying, from the last depths and secrets of its being ; feeling, confessing His awful and unsearchable righteousness :—" Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right !" feeling, confessing its own nothingness before Him, and yet trusting His goodness to let it speak its prayer : "Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes. . . . Oh let not my Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once." "The Lord," it is said, "left communing with Abraham."

Thus early was laid the foundation of the religious character, the character which was to grow up into "the mind of Christ." In our mysterious being we have a double existence : we are part of a body, and God deals with men collectively as communities ; yet also we are as much single spirits as if we were alone in the world, each running separately and apart its individual course. To teach men from the first the awful, the difficult truth, that they have each of them a soul—this was the meaning of that discipline of Abraham and the Patriarchs ; and the whole history of religion has shown how necessary it was. The visible world is all about us, early and late, wrapping us round, occupying eye and thought and desire ; we seem to belong to it, and to it alone ; it seems as if we must take our chance with it. And, on the other hand, we know how easily men come to think that being one of a body —even though it were the seed of Abraham," or "the Church of Christ "-makes it less necessary to remember their personal singleness, their personal responsibility. To belong to a "good set," to a religious family, seems to give us a security for ourselves ; insensibly, perhaps, we take to ourselves credit for the goodness of our friends ; we look at ourselves as if we must be what they are. The soul has indeed to think and to work with others and for others, and for great aims and purposes, out of and beyond itself. For others, and with others, the best part of its earthly work is done. But, first, the soul has to know that " sublime" truth about itself ; that it stands before the Everlasting, by itself, and for what it is. Abraham learned it, like Moses, like Elijah, like Isaiah, like St. Paul ; in Job and the Psalter we see the early fruits of that discipline. The soul knew itself alone with God ; no words could tell the incommunicable secret of the presence of God ; and in that secret was wrapped up the seed of its conviction of its own mysterious immortality—" God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." This is the first lesson of the masters of the spiritual life. This is the first awakening to the reality of religion, when it comes upon us in our heart of hearts, in the certainties of conscience, that in spite of all that fills the eye and is not ourselves, there is ourself, and there is God; " God is God, and I am I"; and "we begin by degrees, as it has been said, to perceive that there are but two beings in the whole universe—two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings — our own soul, and the God Who made it."