Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

calls it "new." "A new commandment have I given you that ye love one another, even as I have loved you." It was new, for Christ gave a new reason and ground for love. He bestowed new power through the Holy Ghost, and gave also a new example and measure of love. But nevertheless the requirement was necessarily as old as the beginning; because as long as God is God and man is man it must be right to love God with our whole heart and our neighbour as ourselves. It lies in the very fitness of things; therefore the commandment is old. The real difference between the Old and New Testaments lies in the fact, that while the Old Testament stated the law, the Gospel gave power to fulfil it.

For the command to love is powerless when it is no more than a command. No one can love merely because ordered to do so. And it is for this reason that St. Paul describes the commandment as being "holy and just and good," and at the same time weak and ineffectual. It is a right command, but being no more than a command it cannot produce love. Now what the law could not do when in the form of a bare command, is accomplished in the Gospel. Jesus Christ makes it possible for us to love God with all our hearts, and our neighbour as ourselves. For the Gospel is more than a command; it is the love of God so manifested as to awaken love in us. It is love forgiving, helping, nourishing, and enriching us-fanning the smoking flax into a flame, and strengthening the weak reed of the wavering will into fixed and joyful resolution. It is the Gospel of the Holy Ghost also, the Giver of life, and love, and conviction. Accordingly that which distinguishes Christianity from Judaism and from every other religion, is not so much any difference in the demand, as in the array of spiritual truths and influences whereby it becomes possible to meet the demand. It inspires the life of love in us, through which the law of love becomes the law of our being.

It is thus that the great commandment of love to God and man is common to both Jew and Christian, is necessarily fundamental in all religions worthy of the name, and yet assumes such a shape and is enforced by such influences in the Gospel, that while it is as old as the beginning, it becomes new in Christ Jesus.

(2.) Again, the manner in which Christ places the love of God first, and makes the love of our neighbour not secondary to, but consequent on the love of God, is exceedingly sug

gestive as to the source and character of true philanthropy. Nay, it touches on a wider question than philanthropy. It bears with direct force on one which is every day becoming of more vital interest :-Is it possible to create a true basis for human society without the recognition of the personal God? This is a matter which we can discuss at present as a theory, but which, in a few years, may prove the most terribly practical of all questions-the answer to which may be arrived at only by dire experience of what society can become when the basis of religion has been removed. With the advancing power of Democracy it will be all-important whether duty in the highest sense is to control the individuals of whom society is to be formed, or whether society is to be disintegrated by each man being a law to himself, while there is no sufficient religious authority to rule selfish passion.

The method of Christ is to bring man first to God, as the source of all righteousness, and truth, and love. When a man recognises his own relationship to God, he cannot fail to recognise his relationship to his brother man. Out of the sense of the One Father comes the sense of the common brotherhood. We then put a true value on our brother man. We see that the love which is in God for ourselves, is a love that includes every man. We can love our brother "as ourselves," for then we stand all on the same ground before God. We regard our brother no longer in the light of our own selfish wills or passions; we see him in the light of the divine purpose, and as bound up with us in a common responsibility, the object of the same love and called to be sharer of the same blessedness. When duty is planted on this firm foundation, then public order becomes secure.

This is the opposite of the materialism which, in many forms, has been advancing its claims among the learned and the unlearned, and which professes to exalt and serve humanity while God is put aside. You find it in Agnosticism, which exercises such a charm over many of the most cultured minds. You find it in Positivism, which has been accepted by others as the new religion of humanity. You find it in the coarser Atheism of certain schools of the advanced Socialists and Anarchists, as you find them by hundreds of thousands on the Continent, whose creed is the effacement of God and of all law, and who dream of a possible social system in which there shall be nothing but the Arcadian simplicities of unfettered love,

undisturbed by any ambition, or envy, or lust, or roguery.

ter of the promoters of these new theories of life, and ask, Whether it is possible to base a true philanthropy or a social order upon a materialistic creed, from which belief in a personal God has been banished? Are there the elements of success in these pro

All these systems have one common characteristic. They either ignore or deny a personal God, and therefore refuse the first and great commandment, which demands love towards God-supreme and complete-posals ? as the basis of duty. They have also this in common, that they make humanity, not God, the one object, and the love of the neighbour, and not of God, the one law of the religion of the future. Society is to be improved by every appliance which science can furnish to ameliorate man physically and mentally. Every one is to be instructed regarding the principles which affect bodily health; the mind is to be educated by the study of the wonders of the material universe; and, according to the panacea of Strauss as well as of the modern æsthetic school, man's rougher nature is to be subdued and purified by the influence of music and the fine arts.

So far as these suggestions go, there is nothing to regret but everything to be thankful for, in the emphasis which has been laid, in recent years, on the importance of using all the instruments which science and art can suggest for the improvement of man's physical and social condition. We cannot be too grateful for all the light which can be thrown on the laws of health, or enforce too strictly the much-neglected principles of sanitation. We ought also to rejoice in the aids which science and the fine arts can so well supply for the enlightenment of the intellect and the refinement of the tastes. If the Church, in the widest sense of the term, has been culpably negligent of the importance of such matters, we may be thankful to those who have roused her from her indifference and shown her fresh paths for her beneficent labours.

Nor would we deny the nobility of purpose and the refinement and beauty of personal character which have marked, and do mark, many of the apostles of the new faiths. Movements of this kind are usually inaugurated by men of a fine nature, who are fired by the fresh impulse which a new creed frequently furnishes. At the same time we may remark, without any breach of charity, that in most cases they-unconsciously, perhaps-derive their motives and their ideals from the very religion which they profess to have relinquished.

Nevertheless, however valuable the contribution may be which they bring for the elevation of society, we must look beyond the motives, and beyond the personal charac

We might assert that, judging from past history, the principle of there being no responsibility to a righteous and holy God, whose righteous and holy laws we are bound to obey, must, if adopted in modern society, produce in the long run the same fruits which similar movements have borne in former ages. Any schoolboy can point a moral from the decadence of ancient civilisations, when religious faith had become either degraded or abandoned. The merest tyro can tell whether, in more recent times, "The Age of Reason" proved a blessing or a curse.

But we can judge of what the consequences would probably be were society founded on a materialistic creed, from other considerations.

For we must have a worthy conception of what man is, if we are to love humanity, and to labour for its welfare; and we must have a sufficient motive for conduct, if we are to secure nobility of sentiment and of action in society. Duty must have a proper basis; and the only adequate basis is belief in God and immortality, because that belief alone vindicates a true estimate of humanity. Humanity can respect itself only in proportion as it takes a right and worthy view of its responsibilities and its destiny.

But if the people are taught that man has no more a future than the earth-worm or the ephemera; that all human history and existence itself are girdled by darkness and emptiness; that man is not merely linked physically or in his animal nature to the beasts around him, but that he has nothing more than they have, though he may have it in a higher and completer form; if they are taught to deny that there is in man the gift of a life that is in the image of God, and that there is a knowledge of righteousness and holiness possible for man, which the brute has not, and cannot have, let this be the creed on which the religion of humanity is to be based, and then, alas for society! Comfortable houses, healthy food, perfect drainage, lecturings on scientific discovery, and the senses soothed and saturated with music and the fine arts, will be found vain antidotes against the flood of selfish passions, or the tide of sanguinary struggles, which such culture of man as a mere animal must eventually produce. With such an animal

creed man must, in the long run, sink into mind." When we go up to God first, then sherest animalism.

"Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him."

No, the love of man to man, if it is to be more than a visionary sentiment, must be based on the love of God. Duty must have a stronger sanction than public opinion or social utility. Authority must be seated on a firmer throne than the votes of a majority. The purpose of existence must have a higher issue than to get through life pleasantly and have done with it. If there is no God and no hereafter we know too well how men will interpret present opportunities; and how weak must be the appeal to physical or social consequences which must take end, at most, in a year or two. Better far than this modern would-be representative of polished Paganism was the stern Puritan, as indifferent to art as he was ignorant of science, but who was armed with the strong sense of duty, and knew that life had a nobler purpose than material comfort, and that there was a law higher than the Social Contract.

No verily we may be certain that society, as well as the law and the prophets, hangs upon the two great commandments- and that the primary condition of all right views of man and of duty is our acceptance first and foremost of the law-"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy

are we able to sec all things in their true light. We then put the highest stamp upon man, upon the very worst, for we can regard man wherever found, not as the beast that perishes but as made by God and for God. Never was a nobler sentence penned, never one better fitted to be the charter of social liberty and order and patriotism, than the familiar statement of our old Scottish Catechism-"Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." From such a conception of life all duty, all loving service, and all courageous self-sacrifice become possible. Let this be the basis of our national life, and all is well. A Democracy charged with such a belief will be strong, loyal, orderly, brave. Such a belief, which sees man in God, and every man an object of Divine interest, has been the inspiration which made apostles and martyrs count not their own lives dear to them, and which at this very hour sends forth the countless army of Christian men and women, who, loving their neighbours as themselves, labour to teach, to alleviate the hardness of their lot, and to bless with infinite blessing their ignorant or suffering brothers and sisters.

[ocr errors]

This surely is the noblest creed, the true religion of humanity, the security at once of individual liberty and of national greatness:"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself."

[merged small][graphic][subsumed][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[blocks in formation]

Mission, named after Livingstone's birthplace; has a road, and proposes to have a railway of sixty miles past the Rapids, and runs again by steamer 420 miles to the head of Lake Nyassa. Thence Stevenson's Road, 260 miles long, of which a fourth is already made, connects the route with the long waterway of Tanganika. The advantages of such a route, if men are to go at all into the heart of Africa, are obvious: it saves time and avoids in great measure the fatigue and exposure which only the young and strong can stand. Things are still only in a formative condition, but it is satisfactory to think that besides the Ilala, which has been running on Lake Nyassa since October of 1875, the Company has carried the Good News (L.M.S.) in pieces to the south end of Tanganika, and that it has conveyed the pieces of the Charles Janson beyond the Rapids, so that the Uni

plying on the east coast of Nyassa.*

We may best get into it (from our fireside point of view) by way of the regions with which we have been rather longer acquainted. Burton and Speke discovered Tanganika in 1858, but did not survey it; Speke going northward alone in 1860-61 found the Victoria Nyanza and really settled the long problem of the origin of the Nile, although the fact was but slowly recognised. Baker found the Albert Nyanza a few months later. Livingstone about the same time discovered Lake Nyassa. These great lakes-seas to us islanders, for Nyassa is just the size of Scot-versities' Mission will soon have its steamer land, while Tanganika is somewhat and Victoria Nyanza is much larger-have a place in the more modern maps. You see them forming a chain of 1,500 miles or more, with comparatively short spaces of dry land interposed, from the Albert Lake at the north to Nyassa at the south, a tempting waterway for commerce. Some parts of the continent to the east of these lakes have been a little explored, one route in particular, that from Zanzibar on the Indian Ocean to Ujiji on Tanganika, being tolerably familiar to the readers of African travel as the highway not of lawful commerce but of that traffic over which Livingstone wept, not in vain, as the "running sore of the world." It was up that route, 800 miles long, toilsome and deadly, Stanley went to find Livingstone in 1871, when the weary giant, being refreshed, instead of turning homeward set his face westward for one more effort to penetrate the space which to-day is no longer blank.

We shall presently follow him to the hut from which his spirit went up in prayer, and from that point shall enter the newer world; but before leaving the east coast it is well just to take note of two other routes. The one is that used since 1875 by the African Lakes Company for purposes of legitimate trade, and by three or four missionary societies who avail themselves of the Company's willing help for the conveyance of persons, goods, and letters. This route starts from the ocean at Quilimane, passes in flat boats to the Zambezi, uses steam on that river and on the Shiré up to the Murchison Rapids, near which is the thriving Blantyre

The other Eastern route is very recent indeed, being that over which the first explorer, Mr. Joseph Thomson, passed in 1882-83. Leaving the coast at Mombasa, about five degrees south of the Equator, he made his way in a north-westerly direction to Victoria Nyanza and the headwaters of the Nile, passing through regions which are healthy, productive, and full of natural beauty. În particular, the great mountain, Kilima-njaro, only 200 miles from the coast, with a base of 60 miles, a height of 18,500 feet, and all European climates on its slopes, according to the height you ascend; another like it called Kenia, farther north; the Aberdare range; and Lake Baringo, tempt one strongly to description. But I must refer the interested reader to Mr. Thomson and Mr. H. H. Johnston, who has followed in his footprints.+

And now let us hasten to Ilala, 300 miles due west of Bandawé, on Lake Nyassa, at the point where the thirtieth meridian of longitude transects the twelfth parallel of south latitude. There is a pathos which will not soon be spent about the spot where the great missionary explorer asked his faithful followers to build him a hut in which to die, where he wrote in one of his last journals on a fragment of old newspaper, "The Gospel of Christ requires a constant propagation to at

An excellent description of this route is given by Mr.

Frederick L. M. Moir in the Scottish Geographical Magazine for
April, 1885.

"Through Masai Land," by Mr. Thomson, and Mr. H. H. Johnston's papers in the Transactions of the Royal Geographical Society for March, and of the Scottish Geographical Society for May, 1885. Their descriptions are fascinating.

« AnteriorContinuar »