LAW AND GOD.* Tar twelve short sermons which this volume
contains are amongst the best we have read for many years ;-simple, vigorous, spiritual'. They are not about divinity, but about God, and they have that unmistakable touch of life and reality in them which at once convinces us that they were not so much intellectual efforts as expressions of the author's inmost nature. The title conveys as much as it was possible to convey of the leading thought running through them. It is probable that it is since the Christian era that the greater number of the meanings which we now assign to the word 'Law' have come into existence. While the meaning of the word ' God ' has perhaps become vaguer and fainter, that of the word ' Law ' has become certainly more complex and more encroaching, and doubtless the drift of the latter word has sapped for us much of the meaning of the former. The ' law ' of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is, in its higher user, simply the commandment of a perfectly holy and wise being. There is comparatively little trace in it of the mere statutory enactment made for the security of a complex institution, like Church or State, and no trace at all of that principle of natural order which constitutes the object of modern scientific research. 'The law' which Christ came to fulfil, was the law of loyalty to God and love to man. And half the difficulty of recon- ciling Christianity with modern thought' has arisen from the tendency of 'Law' to grow into other meanings, which have seemed to encroach on the sphere of God's personal relations with man, and to substitute the comparatively impersonal attitude of mind proper to acquiescence in a 'system,' for the humble sub- mission to a Father's perfect will which was appropriate to the ante-scientific period. This Mr. Page-Roberts has evidently keenly felt, and most of his sermons contain more or less reference to the new and larger meaning of 'Law,' which partly obstructs and partly enlarges the field of man's vision of GoO. No one taught more carefully than Christ that there was a principle in the laws of growth, which it was impatience, not divine zeal, to try to supersede ; that you must wait, when the seed was sown, first, for the blade, then for the ear, then for the full corn in the
• Law awl Gad. By W. Page-Roberta, M.A., Vicar of Eye, Suffolk. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.
ear ; that the tares must be allowed to grow with the wheat till the harvest, lest in rooting-up the evil, you should root-up the good also ; that the leaven of true faith diffuses itself from heart to heart, like the leaven in a measure of meal ; that it is not divine patience, but human impatience, which refuses to study the signs of the times.' But yet undoubtedly the 'realm of Law' was not, and could not be, at the time of the publication of the Gospel, known to be anything like as large and engrossing in its extent as it is now ; and hence the difficulty of recognising the immediate personal volition of God was then less ; and on the other hand, the tendency to be patient with constitutional evil, with evil which had its origin not in the sins of the moment, but in the complicated tissue of past sins and the infirmities they had engendered, was less also. ' Law ' then seemed to reveal God more immediately, perhaps, than it does now ; more immediately, perhaps, than it really did even then. On the other hand, ' Law ' was not so full of guidance, and method, and of warning against taking the Kingdom of Heaven by violence, and how to take it by orderly means, as it now is. This is, as it seems to us, - something like the main connecting thread of thought which gives a certain unity to these simple and yet fine sermons. Throughout them there is the effort to show that Law is nothing to the soul without God within the law and beyond the law, to give to the law moral life and the elasticity of personal love ; but that, with God, Law even in its newer senses is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path,' such as it hardly was to those to whom the Gospel was first preached. The idea of Law, as subordinate to God, pervades these sermons ; and to put the same thing from a different point of view, the idea of God as above 'Law,' and containing in himself all 'Law' and what we regard as much more than Law, pervades them also.
To take example of what we mean. In a beautiful sermon on "Law and Prayer," Mr. Page-Roberta points out that .there are many things which it is foolish to pray for in one state iftur knowledge, which it might be not unwise and must be perfectly natural to pray 'for in a lower state of our knowledge,—and yet that, in, all states of knowledge, the true scope of the ' law ' of prayer is one which far trancends the scope of natural law, however wide :—
It is quite possible we may discover that the range of law extends far beyond our present conceptions. It may be that while we are pray- ing for the recovery from sickness of one who is dear to us, the doctor may clearly see the will of God, and may know that the result is as certain as in the case of death it is unalterable. Both cases are equally subject to the power of God, in both his will is declared; in the one case his will may be read by the superficial observer, and in the other by the deoper knowledge of the man of science. But until we clearly and distinctly know what God's good pleasure certainly is, it remains our soothing and hopeful privilege to tell him everything, our secret wishes and desires, the things we so much long for. He is our Father, and through Christ we know that we are his children—little children, and knowing little. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and we need not be afraid to trust our wants.to him. Even if we do make a mistake, he will give us his blessing, although he say to us 'Ye know not what yo ask ;' and when we ask him for anything, we shall do so as our Pattern did when ho, too, prayed a prayer which to human seeming could not be granted, 'Father, not my will but thine be done.' But the world of matter and of material law is not everything, nor nearly everything. There is a world of mind and soul whiclk proceeds by law, just as much as there is a world of matter which reveals law ; and as certain as the laws of motion are in the one case, is the law of prayer in the other. One of the most distinguished political thinkers of this or indeed of any other ago has written, The great malady of the soul is cold.' As the life of the earth is ultimately dependent upon the sun, so is the soul of inan dependent upon communion with God. Talk about a prayer gauge I' The surest one is the state of a man's soul. Men may rise up and lie down without prayer, and may well feel that the chills of death are upon them. They who make objections to prayer can little know its real benediction. It is not a mere piece of mental machinery for obtaining some temporal advantage for which material appliances are insufficient. In the Lord's Prayer, which may be taken as a model for all prayer, there is but one material blessing asked for; and that of the very simplest kind; not riches or power or place or plenty, but the veriest necessaries of existence= Give us this day our daily bread.' All else is for the soul. The Kingdom of Heaven Is not a. mere Union-house from which the idle and the improvident, and indeed all comers, may get a passing relief. Oh something far different is it from this. Prayer is the communion of the soul with God, its repose upon infinite love. There are men who would lose overthing they possess in tho world rather than lose the power and the strange joy of prayer. If they were to lose this, life to them would become_a barren desert. over which, tried by sand-storm and the wind of death, nnrefreshed by tree or shade or running water, they must journey on to the hopeless end. At whatever cost they must pray, for they have seen the face of God in Christ, and now they cannot live
without it. ineir *praygr: he mistaken ones, but the spirit which inspires them tills of him who listens to the crying of his children. Underlying the passing wants are the deeper needs of a soul which has found out how insufficient are the best things of earth, and how full of disappointment that which we have most desired. Yes, in a now joy as well as in a blinding reverse, in the wean ra nd netts of too often repeated pleasures, in the gnawing dissatisfaction of I conscious failure and on tho high places of success, to poor bumble 1 people as well as to the solitary great ones of earth, there conies the I need of prayer and the crying for God. 0 God, thou art my (led; early will I seek thee. My soul thirsteth for thee. My flesh also longeth after thee in a barren and dry land where no water is.'" That comparison of the Kingdom of God, as it is viewed by many, to the Casual Ward of a spiritual Union, where the idle and im- provident may obtain a passing relief by prayer, is a fine as well as true one ; and the simile reminds us of a passage in another sermon, where Mr. Page-Roberts contrasts the value to the poor and aged of the promises of Christwith the utmost promises of this world to them,—namely, that if they have been well-conducted and struggled hard against the degradation of poverty and temptation, they may "have a very good chance of out-door relief" in their solitary and helpless old age. Throughout this little book runs the belief that the value of 'Law' to us is lost, if we do not keep the flrffiest hold of him whb is above Law, and that this is not more difficult, perhaps even easier, to those whose brightest earthly prospect is contained in the sarcasm we have just quoted, than it is even to the rich and prosperous. Take, for instance, this fine passage on the highest kind of prayer, the kind which really does ascend beyond the conception of Law to the spirit which is its source :— "There are still Christian people to whom God is scarcely ever the object of pure, selfless worship. They are too terrified to do anything but cower before the watching eyes and retributive justice of the Ompi- potent. They can weep, and cry, and pour forth ceaseless litanies; but as for being still, and dwelling upon God until earthly pales and sorrows and sins fall off from the entranced mind, 'and all is tranquil as a dreamless sleep,' they know not what it means. And yet this is. the highest form of religious service; seen with such lofty pathos in the worship of our Lord and Master ; presented to us as the absorbing occupation of heaven where prayer is needless and faith is lost in sight; to be struggled and strained after and hoped for in this mortal life, with its sordid cares and earthly anxieties, as the passing brightness which redeems the present, and the occasional entrancement the recol- lection of which refines the life of common duties, and the hope of which gives strength to bear manfully onward through the gloom and disappointment and irritation and dull routine employment which must engage so large a portion of our time."
There is a fine sermon, too, on "how to Make a New Heart," in which Mr. Page-Roberta presses home the subordination of spiritual law to God, with a simplicity and vigour which must have been intelligible to the poorest man in his church, as well as impressive to the most cultivated. We can only find space for a short passage from it, the shortness of which, and its inadequacy to give any proper conception of the vigour of the whole, we regret the less, that it may send many to the volume of which we have been speaking :— " What, then, do people generally answer when they are asked by some ono, how am Ito get a better heart? The answer usually given is—it must come from God. This is perfectly true; but it does not help a man much. All good comes from God. This is an axiom in religion, a foundation-truth upon which all else is built. But the ques- tion is, how does it come from God, in what way does it come from God ? If a man with a new allotment were to ask me how he was to grow a crop upon it, it would not help him very much if I, being ignorant of the methods of farming, were to say that the crop comes from the Almighty, and that he 'crowns tho year with his goodness.' It is quite true that God gives the harvest, but he gives it in a particular way ; Ho gives it in accordance with his own plans, or as we pty, according to the laws of nature ; and the laws of nature arc simply the way in which it has pleased the Almighty to act. If a poor man, whose educa- tion had been much neglected, who had been sent to pick stones and to scare birds ' when he was quite young, and had had very little learn- ing, were to ask me how he might become a scholar, it would not help him very much if I were to say that learning comes from God, and that 'out of his mouth cometh knowledge and instruction.' This is quite true; but yet there are laws for the mind as well as for the body,— that is, God has his plan of acting in mental things as well as in physi- cal, and results arc to be obtained by acting in accordance with his plan. And so when a man asks me how he is to got a new heart ? and I reply, it comes from God, this is quite true ; but there is a law of the soul, as well as a law of the mind and a law of the body, and this law we call the plan of salvation, and we must find out what God's plan is if we are to obtain his gift."
It has always seemed to us a very difficult thing for a modern preacher to address at one and the same time an audience per- meated with intellectual conceptions of Christianity and of the modern perplexities about it, and one which knows no more of these subjects than the early Christians, and which probably attaches much less vivid meaning than the early Christians did to the spiritual ideas which underlay the writings of the Old and New Testaments. Mr. Page-Roberts, however, seems to us to have in great part sur- mounted the difficulty. Certainly there is not one of these short ser- mons which would not have penetrated beneath the surface of the 'ordinary educated indifference to the voice of the pulpit ; and we believe there is hardly one to the greater part of which the poorest might not have listened with intelligent eagerness, as to a real invitation given in the name of him wh9m the "common people heard gladly,"
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