THE BATTLE AND BURDEN OF LIFE.*
"SERMONS are such unsatisfactory things." Yet thousands crowd still to hear Spurgeon, tens of thousands are rushing to listen to the words of Moody. There remains still an unquenched thirst in the human soul, though the cupbearer too often presents but the dregs- of a draught to the waiting multitude. It is well, then, when men like Vaughan, or Robertson, or the present Bishop of Exeter, or an able Nonconformist like the writer of the little work before us, has really something to say, and something apart too from the speech of a Maurice, an Upham, era Charming. These have done, are doing a great work, in searching again for the very roots of religious thought. But it is well also to have men who, recognising that there is a law of life other than that evolved out of a man's own uninspired inner consciousness, have applied themselves to master its conditions, and are willing to stretch out a helping hand to those who consciously but darkly are groping after such law, if haply they may find it. Mr. Baldwin Brown does not address himself to the work from its argumentative side. On the contrary, his firm stand-point is this :—" The solution of doubt is action." "How many insoluble, critical puzzles vanish in a moment before one flash of life ! " "Life is the light of humanity still." But since all life has not this vitalising, enlightening force, what is the secret of that which has ? The answer, says Mr. Brown, is to be found in the In- carnation. "Obliterate the Incarnation from history, and the pessimist philosophers are right ; life is too poor, too sad, to be the ordinance for man of a perfectly wise, good, and Almighty God." But on the other hand, he urges, "If his life be not a dream or a fic- tion, the words 'Son of God' have an everlasting meaning for us." "The life and death of the Son of Man is not the supreme sigh of life's sadness, but the spring of its hope and its higher joy." The little volume before us is addressed mainly to the young, to those just girding on life's harness, and contains a series of lectures or sermons on the "Christian Armour," written in clear, strong, Saxon English, with no artificial embellishments (if we except a few concluding paragraphs here and there, where the conventional winding-up has had a weakening effect) ; no effort at sensational effect ; at first sight very simple, though the careful reader will soon discover that if simple, they are also deep, that the most practical is not always the most easy, as the learner in many another science has found the simple in theory is often hard in. experiment ; harder still in this case, where the problem is a life, only solved by living it. With regard to the language he employs, • The Battle cued Burdes of Life. By J. Baldwin Brown, BA. London : Hodder and Stoughton. 1876. *Mr. Baldwin Brown has hit a happy medium. Too many of our modern preachers, in their eagerness for brief popularity or their revolt from the hackneyed phraseology of the pulpit, have rushed into another extreme, and speak of the gravest realities of life and death, in light colloquial phrase, better suited to the demands of modern comedy than to the elucidation of -truth. Mr. Brown has avoided all mere antiquated phrase,— too often the thin covering of a dead thought,—and in modern, but reverent words, which challenge attention to their meaning, has given much thought in small space (not a common virtue with the writers of sermons).
In the first chapter we have a brief consideration of the battle to be fought, and a glance at the earliest agency employed for carrying on the war,—"A few poor men and women charged with the vital energy which was to regenerate mankind." Not that Mr. Brown ignores the fact that all the great leaders of religious reformation in the heathen world have affirmed that it was in the name and by the strength of God they wrought upon mankind. He does not deny that God was with them, and "was the source of their strength for all the best and purest work they accomplished," but what he specially urges is that "nothing is more clearly written on the very face of the world's history than that an entirely new and higher course of human development commenced in the Apostolic age ;" that a power was then manifested which lifted civilised society bodily to It higher level, with the horizon of eternity all round,—a "vital revolution." At a moment when the old world "was simply dying of selfishness, cruelty, and lust, a power from God entered it, stirred its failing pulses, thrilled in its stiffening limbs, and raised it up in newness of life." After all, says Mr. Brown, speaking still of the warfare to be accomplished, the revolution to be effected, "The supreme act of aggression is to live. A life that is fed from the divine spring, that is kindled from the life of Christ, is the supremely victorious force against evil." And here he makes an observation which we think wise men would do well to weigh. He says that he believes Christian people make a huge mistake in estimating the aggressive force of the Gospel, and the way in which it behoves them to bring it to bear on the overthrow of the works of the Devil. "Our measure," he writes, "is mainly the visible apparatus we can set and keep in motion," but he en- deavours to show how our ponderous engines of assault have too often been pressed "by the very weight of their own mechanism" into a quite lower region of influence, and have ended in the Devil's service, and not the Lord's:— " The institutions which grow out of a deeper and purer life are blessed helps to the work of reformation ; they secure and edify what has already been gained. But the institutions which are intended to produce the work of reformation, the new arrangements of society out of which it is hoped that the regeneration will grow, are dangerous snares."
The age, he writes at another moment, has yet to try Christianity. -Our costly, cumbrous, pompous, worldly apparatus is just at the opposite pole of influence to that force which once did renew the -world. That force was the introduction of a new hope. Salvation, says Mr. Brown, in the first Christian age, was not a hope of happiness or a deliverance from wrath. "It meant health, sound- ness, renewal of life in the spring." It was the hope of this which the Apostles preached, this "which lent an irresistible momen- tum to their impact on the world, a momentum which for eighteen -centuries has been the master-force in governing the movements of human society." Some of the best passages in this little volume occur in the chapter on the "Footsteps of Peace," tracing the orave for peace through its various phases as manifested in the history of humanity, the history of that peace the way to which, in the imaginations of men, has ever been through seas of blood. L'Empire c'est la pa ix is substantially the language of all the saviours of society' in all ages of the world. He points out the new element introduced into the world by Christ. "Care supremely for the _good of which there is no private possession, and you set your foot on the very neck of the demon of discord." In "The Girdle of Truth" we have a distinct acceptation of the great law of unity, and an application of it to the laws which govern religious thought. We see, Mr. Brown says, and measure but a little part of the unity, but we see unities. Our intellect is able to comprehend many diverse appearances under one law, and this discovery of unity in multiformity, of the one principle which binds together things to the eye manifold and diverse, is the keenest delight which the intellect knows. The theory of evolution he largely admits, noticing, by the way, how the whole creation is organised in an attitude of conflict, "every arrangement of particles a secret or manifest struggle for existence," but denies the action of blind 'force, believing in an eye which sees the end to which it is work- ing. He recognises the reign of absolute law, but includes within 1 it the inward law, the divine word. Subject to that law, prayer, I to the man, "who is conscious that the most solemn passages of his history are not a sacrifice, offered on the altar of folly, to his own shadow," is the most sacred and sure of all realities, the living fellowship of the human spirit with the Father,—God." There is, too, something very fine in the mode in which Mr. Baldwin- Brown treats the theories of the "sweetness and light" school, the disciples of which are instructed to follow the tendency which makes for righteousness.' Our allotted space will not allow us to do more than allude to this subject, but Mr. Brown takes these disciples at their own word, and says boldly they are right, only in a higher sense than they know of. "The man who has learnt to be righteous in St. Paul's sense has little else to learn spiritually," but "men speak of learning the lessons of righteousness as if it were quite the simplest rudiment of the spiritual schools," &c. "if you seize on this intense idea of righteousness as the secret spring of St. Paul's tremendous power, you must remember also that a long course of revelation, of unveiling of the righteous God, had raised the idea to such glorious maturity and energy in the-Jewish heart. The Jew, at any rate, of whose whole moral inheritance Paul was the heir, had not evolved righteousness out of his inner consciousness, nor distilled it as the essence of the order of the world." We have only been able, briefly and some- what disjointedly, to indicate the line of thought in these pages. But we should not complete adequately even such a notice without some reference to Mr. Baldwin Brown's true eloquence. At a moment when so much is being made of emotional power, we should scarcely be doing justice to one of the ablest of modern popular teachers, did we quite pass over his skill in making direct appeal to that side of our nature. One passage, however, must suffice :- "What is the most precious gift to man, of all the things that are around him here ? Unquestionably the power of holding living inter- course with his fellows. The blind, who are deprived of the vision of the Creation, if human lips can speak to them tenderly, bear the priva- tion with wonderful cheerfulness. The deaf, to whom the music of human speech is silent, whose living fellowship with their human brethren is crippled, bear it bitterly ; they know that the best gift of this life is lost. And the thing most precious to man, of all things which the vast universe can offer to him, is the power and the means of living fellowship with the Father of his spirit. Rob him of that, make him doubt his reality, persuade him that it is the shadow of him- self that he seems to see, and the echo of his own cry that he seems to bear, when in Christ he thinks that he sees and communes with the Father of his spirit, and you plunge him into a misery which will deepen into madness, and will spend itself in orgies of brutal cruelty and lust ; until, like the prodigal in the far wilderness, sick, starved, in an agony of inward pain and hunger, he cries, I will arise and go unto my Father: and sets his tottering steps towards the old and blessed home once more."
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