According to the pattern shewed to thee
Plan and pattern and purpose
Moses, when he went down from God on Sinai, knew what he was going to build, and how he was going to build it.
The thought of a thing, the conception of it, is its first and largest half. It is easier to pour in the molten iron than to make in the sand the mould into which it is to be poured. I want, first, to say something generally about plan and pattern and purpose. As I look through Scripture I discover that the men who did the best work and the most of it first wrought out in thought what they were afterwards going to work out in act and word. The Creator Himself wrought out first His creative designs. In that sense the world is as old as God. When at the end of the first week He said “All very good,” He meant that things had now become in fact what they had first and for ever been in idea. Nothing, perhaps, comes nearer God’s workmanship in this respect than art; hence our ha it of speaking of the creations of art. The modern architect, like the one on Sinai, sees the building he is going to construct before the timber has been cut or the ground broken. Gerard von Rile, six hundred years ago, saw the cathedral which has just been completed at Cologne. Slowly since the year 1200, German artisans have been copying into stone Von Rile’s thought, working from his plan, and the cathedral is perfect to-day because it was perfect then. All that God does is in prosecution of a plan, an eternal idea come to utterance. The tree ripens to the grade of a purpose that was ripe before the tree, and before the third day. It is all one whether we say that the plan is deposited in the seed, or that God builds the plant each moment against the pattern of His thought, as the mason lays bricks close to the plumb-line. It all sums up into the same result. With such examples of pattern and purpose before us, I want to go on and say that there are at least three advantages that come from having a plan in our life and work, and working and living from that plan.
1. One is, that in an open field and with a long prospect our purposes will lay themselves out in a larger and wiser proportion than when framed at close quarters and at the dictation of momentary impulse. The captain brings his ship to Liverpool in less time by having the whole course settled at the outset than by settling a little of it every day. A man’s longest purposes will be his best purposes. Immediate results are meagre results. The men who are doing most for their own day are such as are working toward an aim that is a score or a century of years away. In the days of American slavery the poor fugitive reached liberty by walking towards the stars.
2. Not only shall we think wiser and grander purposes when we mature them in advance; there is also a solidifying and invigorating power in a long purpose clearly defined. You can generally tell from a man’s gait whether he has a purpose. Plan intensities. Pursuance of a purpose makes our life solid and consecutive. Plan concentrates energies as a burning-glass does sunbeams. We cannot do to-morrow’s work to-day, but we can have to-day’s work shaped and but ressed by what we are intending to do to-morrow. In a life which has meaning in it, past and future sustain each other.
3. Then, in the next place, knowing with definiteness what we are attempting to do is a moral safeguard. Purposelessness is the fruitful toothier of crime. When men live only in conference with circumstances lying next them, they lose their bearings. A drifting boat always drifts down-stream. Young aimlessness is the seminary of old iniquity. Out of 904 convicts received at the Michigan State in the three years ending 1880. 822 (91 per cent.) were unskilled labourers--prison had never been taught how to work. Such facts challenge the attention of the Church as well as of the political economists. Character, purpose, and apprenticeship will never get far apart from each other, whether among immigrants or native population. But Moses not only approached his work with a purpose and a pattern, but brought down his pattern from on high. This teaches that there are celestial ways of doing earthly, things, and that human success consists in getting into the secrecies of God’s mind and working in the direction o! His method. Human success is a quotation from overhead. Men are enriched with presentiments of the way God would work if placed in our stead. These presentiments we call ideals. We discover, not invent, them. “In the mount” we reach after them and ascend to them. They are a continuous firmament that overarches us, but a clouded firmament that yields itself to us only in broken hints. (C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.)
Character-building according to pattern
All of us are builders--builders for time and for eternity. The building of the sacred edifice of character, which is to be a holy temple for God to dwell in; the raising of the stately structure of a lifework which shall be enduring as the years of God; the laying of secure foundations for that heavenly home in which we all hope to dwell--these are the high and heaven-appointed employments of our earthly years.
I. THE DIVINE PATTERN IS GIVEN TO US ALL. Not blindly nor ignorantly do we pursue our life vocation. Up into the mount of privilege God calls each of us, and there reveals the heavenly pattern of our life work. The yearning of all true hearts to hear the voice of God and to know His thought and will concerning us is fully met in these Divine revealings. What are these holy heights where God reveals to you the heavenly plan according to which you are to build?
1. The mount of Divine illumination, where cons, fence sits enthroned, and utters her authoritative voice as she summons you to her tribunal. That voice of warning and restraint, of persuasion and guidance, is often heard above the Babel of earthly voices that press their urgent pleas. That voice, sanctioning the right, condemning the wrong, is God’s own call to a life of fidelity to Him.
2. There is also the mount of Divine revelation through the inspired word. In the pages of Bonier and Virgil, of Shakespeare and Milton, you are invited to the mount of communion with these illustrious men. Great, indeed, is that privilege. You live in their immediate presence; you breathe the atmosphere which surrounded them; you listen to their voices; you think their thoughts, and learn the priceless lessons garnered from their lives. In the Bible you are permitted to commune with the eternal God, to hear His voice as certainly as Moses heard it on the quaking mount. And here God reveals to each of us His own plan for all our earthly building and work. The plan reveal d is set before us with sufficient distinctness, completeness, and fulness of detail. It is given to us not only in doctrine and in precept, but it is clearly illustrated in the histories and biographies with which the sacred book abound, and which, as their subjects follow or disregard the Divine direction, always secure or miss life’s highest good; and thus, in a peculiar sense, they serve as “guides” or “guards” to us who are favoured with the inspired record of their successes and failures.
3. But in a preeminent sense is the pattern revealed to us on ,he mount of Divine manifestation. Moses saw only in vision the plan of the tabernacle which be was to build, but we, more privileged than was he, are permitted to behold the glorious pattern which we are to follow, clothed in concrete and tangible form, taking on our own humanity, standing before our ravished eyes incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ. Looking at this incarnation of truth, purity, duly, sacrifice, and love, we hear the heavenly voice calling to us, “See that thou make all things according to” this “pattern showed to thee” in this most sacred mount of Divine manifestation.
4. There are also given to us all seasons of special revelation, times when the height to which we are lifted is greater, and earth with its blinding atmosphere seems farther removed--its strife and clamour more faint and ineffectual--while God’s voice sounds clearer, and the heavenly vision is brighter. There are times when the soul seems more susceptible of good influences, and the powers of evil relax their grasp, and tender memories steal in upon the mind, and the thoughts of another’s love, and a lather’s prayers, and a teacher’s counsels, and a Saviour’s sympathy, and the Spirit’s gentle wooings, hold the entire being for one supreme hour under their hallowing spell. Cherish these favoured seasons. As travellers in mountainous regions, climbing to some high eminence where the glories of the entrancing view ravish the soul, carry the glorious vision with them, through all the future years of life; so take with you these clearest visions of the heavenly pattern, these best thoughts and holiest purposes and lofty ideals, down into the lowest valley of temptation and strife.
II. THE DIVINE PATTERN MUST BE FOLLOWED IN ORDER TO A TRUE AND SUCCESSFUL LIFE.
1. Let it be kept in mind that this is God’s plan for your life-work. God’s ideal life for you. Whether a life-pattern coming to us from such a source is worth our acceptance, whether it can be rejected or neglected without wreck of all worthy hopes, none but a madman can ever pause to question. Once let the thought that God’s ideal of your life has been really revealed to you actually possess the mind, with all its legitimate force, and nothing can prevent your yielding to its sway. Henceforth, your fife has a significance in it which belongs to nothing merely human; it is a Divine thing; it is God’s propose and God’s thought taking on a human form incarnated in you. You think God’s thoughts, you utter His words, you crystallize His will into actual deeds; you project into this needy and sinful world of humanity a life that is heaven planned and heaven-inspired, the copy of a Divine ideal given to you by the Almighty World-Builder.
2. All the lessons from analogy teach us the majesty of Divine law--the penalty of violating, and the profit of obeying, its behests. See everywhere in nature a perfect adjustment of part to complementary part, an adaptation of means to ends. Everything shows purpose and plan. Law reigns; order and harmony are the universal resultants. Attempt to disregard one of the laws which God has ordained, and you pay the penalty. Despise or forget the law of gravitation; step from the roof of a house or the edge of a precipice as though the air were like the solid pavement for your feet, and, quickly dashed to the ground below, your mutilated body attests the foolhardiness of your lawless act. What have you done but violated God’s order--set aside His laws? Can you, then, disregard no single part of His plan, in nature, without peril, and yet expect to set at naught His entire plan for the government of your life with immunity from evil consequences?
3. And this Divine pattern must be followed in its completeness and comprehensiveness, with all its particularity of detail. Three perils lie in ambush, even for those who, with more or less strength of purpose, regard themselves as accepting the revealed plan for their life-building. The first is the peril of accepting it in part, but not in its completeness; the second is that of accepting it theoretically, but rejecting it practically; the third is the peril of accepting it for a time, but abandoning it before the life-work is completed. (C. H. Payne, D. D.)
Our hours of vision
I. There comes to us all TIMES OF EXCEPTIONAL INSIGHT, of moral elevation, yes, of inspiration, when in a special way our spirits are touched by the spirit of truth and goodness--times when we are, so to speak, upon the mount, and see heavenly only things clearly, and a higher pattern of life is shown to us. These hours of vision may be associated with the utmost variety of circumstances giving occasion to them. It may be simply interruption of our ordinary work. We have been going on from day to day in the regular customary routine. Each day has been so filled with its multiplicity or engagements, its interests, its distraction, its pleasures, its annoyances, as to leave little leisure and less inclination for that quiet and serious thought in which we seek to see life steadily, and see it whole. We need to stand a little back from it, as an artist has to do to judge of the effect of the picture he is painting. And sometimes God compels a man to stand aside and look upon his life and his work from a little distance. He takes him apart from the multitude that He may open his ears to voices that cannot be heard amid the bustle of the crowd. In the confinement of his chamber his spirit chafes at first as he thinks of the great tide of men with eager interests which flows every morning citywards and ebbs at evening, and of all the busy life from which he is excluded; by-and-by a change has come over his spirit--the roar of that loud stunning ride sounds faint and far off; his interest in it has become strangely weakened; other visions are opening out before his mind; he is seeing deeper than the surface stir and bustle of life, its ambitions and its rivalries, into the meaning of life itself, its possibilities and its purpose. He is learning to see things in their true proportions, and is waking up to the discovery that he has been exaggerating terribly certain aspects of them. A diviner pattern of life is being shown to him--an ideal higher in its aims, its methods, and its motives; and when he comes back to take up again among men his daily tasks, surely it is with an earnest purpose to make all things according to the nobler pattern that has been shown him. But there are experiences tending towards similar results that enter much more frequently into life than such as that. To all men, and most of all to those who have youth and hope on their side, a period of leisure and recreation and contact with nature is not more a rest than an inspiration, a time of sanguine and earnest forecasting of the future, a time of forming of plans and contemplating ideals, of storing up impulse and stimulus, of girding up the loins of the mind with strenuous self-denying purpose. There are other times-sadder times--which have worked to the same effect: hours, not of elevation, but of deep depression, when we saw things after the pattern of the heavenly. It may have been an hour of stern self-rebuke, of humiliation and shame, when conscience justly scourged and spared not, or when you felt yourself baffled and helpless in the presence of a great perplexity; or the day you came back from standing beside a new-filled grave, and realised that the world was emptier and poorer than it had been a week before. Men looking up from deep places, it is said, see stars at noon-day; and sometimes it is when it is sighing its De Profundis that the soul catches its vision of God. There are countless hours of vision which we need not stay to classify. We wake up one day to feel as if all our previous knowledge of God had been but hearsay: we feel, “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ears, but now mine eye seeth Thee.” Life seems to begin anew from times like that. We have accepted truth upon the authority of others; the time comes when we say, “We see.” The entrance of God’s Word gives light, and so certifies itself. Our own hold of truth is never satisfactory until we thus see. The man who is to influence others must first himself see heavenly things upon the mount.
II. These times of vision leave behind them RESPONSIBILITIES. “We cannot command those higher moments--at least not directly--not otherwise than by habitual obedience to the laws of Christ’s spiritual kingdom. “To him that hath shall be given.” The seeing may be special times; the acting out what we have seen belongs to our common life. That is the only possible way of keeping the vision clear--of retaining it as our lasting possession. For
“‘Tis the most difficult of tasks to keep
Heights which the soul is competent to gain.”
It is so very easy to be a seer as well as a hearer, and not a doer, to be like the man who beholdeth his natural face in a glass, to whom there comes a bright perception of truth, which reveals him to himself, with all his blots and stains and flaws, and who assents to it, and goeth his way, and forgetteth what manner of man he is. It is possible to do even worse: to use that kind of experience--even visions and revelations of the Lord--for our own self-deception. It is one of the great dangers of what may be called the religious temperament, to care a great deal more about what it can see and feel upon the mount than about faithfulness in commonplace duty on the ordinary levels of life. It is a frequent temptation after we have been touched by admiration for some aspects of duty, and mate to thrill at the thought of seeing ourselves doing it--especially if we have been led to speak warmly about it--to indulge in a soft, self-complacent, feeling, as if we had really done it or were doing it, although we may not have touched it with one of our fingers. Is not this the difference between the man of mere emotion and the man of principle--between the man of feeling and the man of faith--that the one can be thrilled with high ideals, and can proceed to work them out while the glory is upon him, and continue only so long as the excitement or emotion lasts; while the other, who has hid in his heart that which he has seen, will toil on steadily along the dull, flat levels, keeping to the path of duty when the brightness has faded from the sky? It is a great thing, an unspeakable privilege, to have seen the beauty of the Lord that our heart and conscience have said to Jesus, “My Lord and my God”; and yet it is His word, “Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord! shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven”--not be that seeth and even prophesieth in My name, but he that maketh his life according to the pattern that hath been showed to him. (A. O. Johnston, M. A.)
The pattern in the mount
As the old Tabernacle, before it was built, existed in the mind of God, so all the unborn things of life, the things which are to make the future, are already living in their perfect ideas in Him, and when the future comes, its task will be to match those Divine ideas with their material realities, to translate into the visible and tangible shapes of terrestrial life the facts which already have existence in the perfect mind. Surely in the very statement of such a thought of life there is something which ennobles and dignifies our living. A child is born into the world thus morning. Its lessons are unlearned, its tasks untried, its discoveries unmade, its loves unloved, its growth entirely ungrown, as the little newborn problem lies unsolved on this the first day of its life. Is that all? Is there nowhere in the universe any picture of what that child’s life ought to be, and may he? Surely there is. If God is that child’s Father, then in the Father’s mind, in God’s mind, there must surely be a picture of what that child with his peculiar faculties and nature may become in the completeness of his life. Years hence, when that baby of today has grown to be the man of forty, the real question of his life will be, what? Not the questions which his fellow-citizens of that remote day will be asking, What reputation has he won? What money has he earned? Not even, What learning has he gained? But, How far has he been able to translate into the visible and tangible realities of a life that idea which was in God’s mind on that day in the old year when he was born? How does the tabernacle which he has built correspond with the pattern which is in the mount? All this is true not merely of a whole life as a whole, but of each single act or enterprise of life. We have not thought richly or deeply enough about any undertaking unless we have thought of it as an attempt to put into the form of action that which already has existence in the idea of God. You start upon your profession, and your professional career in its perfect conception shines already in God’s sight. You set yourself down to some hard struggle with temptation, and already in the fields of God’s knowledge you are walking as possible victor, clothed in white, and with the crown of victory upon your head. You build your house, and found your home. It is an attempt to realise the picture of purity, domestic peace, mutual inspiration and mutual comfort, which God sees already. The distinction between ideas and forms is one which all men need to know, which many men so often seem to miss. The idea takes shape in the form, the form expresses the idea. The form, without the idea behind it, is thin and hard. The form, continually conscious of its idea, becomes rich deep, and elastic. If all that I have said be true, then it would seem as if there ought to be in the world three kinds of men--the men of forms; the men of limited ideals, or of ideals which are not the highest; and the men of unlimited ideals, or the highest ideas, which, are the ideals of God. And three such kinds, f men there are, very distinct and easy of discovery. First, there are the men of forms, the men whom all their self-questionings about what they ought to do, and in all their judgments about what they have done, never get beyond the purely formal standards which proceed either from the necessity of their conditions or from the accepted precedents of other people. They never get into the regions of ideas at all. How many such men there are! To them the question of their business life never comes up so high as to mean, “What is the best and loftiest way in which it is possible for this business of mine to be done?” It never gets higher than to mean, “How can I best support myself by my business?” or else, “What are the ways and rules of business which are most accepted in the business world?” To such men the question of religion never becomes: “What are the intrinsic and eternal relations between the Father God and man the child?” but only, “By what religious observances can a man get into heaven?” or else, “What is the most current religion of my fellow-men?” It would be sad, indeed, to think that there is any man here to-day who has not at least sometimes in his life got a glimpse into a richer and fuller and more interesting sort of life than this. There is a second sort of man who does distinctly ask himself whether his deed is what it ought to be. He is not satisfied with asking whether it works its visible result or not, whether other men praise it or not. There is another question still, Does it conform to what he knew before he undertook it that it ought to be? If it does not, however it may seem successful, however men may praise it, the doer of the deed turns off from it in discontent. If it does, no matter how it seems to fail, no matter how men blame it, he thanks God for it and is glad. Here is a true idealism; here is a man with an unseen pattern and standard for his work. He lives a loftier, and likewise a more unquiet life. He goes his way with his vision before his eyes. “I know something of what this piece of work ought to have been,” he says, “therefore I cannot be satisfied with it as it is.” What is the detect of such an idealism as that? It is, that as yet the idea comes only from the man’s own self. Therefore, although it lies farther back, than the mere form, it does not lie entirely at the back of everything. It is not final; it shares the incompleteness of the man from whom it springs. Therefore it is that something more is needed, and that only the third man’s life is wholly satisfactory. Literally and truly he believes that the life he is to live, the act he is to do, lies now, a true reality, already existent and present, in the mind of God; and his object, his privilege, is not simply to see how he can live his life in the way which will look best or produce the most brilliant visible result, not simply to see how he can best carry out his own personal idea of what is highest and best, but how he can most truly reproduce on earth that image of this special life or action which is in the perfect mind. This is the way in which he is to make all things according to the pattern which is in the mount. What quiet independence, what healthy humility, what confident hope there must be in this man who thus goes up to God to get the pattern of his living. To-morrow morning to that man there comes a great overwhelming sorrow. What shall he do, what shall he be in this new terrible life, terrible not least because of its awful newness, which has burst upon him? Where shall he find the pal tern for his new necessity? Of course he may look about and copy the forms with which the world at large greets and denotes its sorrow, the decent dreadful conventionalities of grief. That does not satisfy him. The world acknowledges that he has borne his grief most properly, but he is not satisfied. Then behind all that, he may reason it over with himself, think out what death moans, make his philosophy, decide how a man ought to behave in the terrible shipwreck of his hopes. That is a better thing by air means than the other. But this man does something more. The pattern of his new life is not in the world. It is not in himself. It is in God. To get up, then, into God, and find that image of his grieved and sorrowing life, and then come back and shape his life after it patiently and cheerfully, that is the struggle of the Christian idealist in his sorrow, of the man who tries to make all things according to the pattern which is in the mount. Can we not see what quiet independence, what healthy humility, what confident hope there must be in that man’s struggle to live out through his sorrow the new life which his sorrow has made possible? But now it is quite time for us to ask another question. Suppose that all which we have said is true; suppose that there is such a pattern of the truest life, and of each truest act of every man lying in God’s mind, how shall the man know what that pattern is? Is not Christ the mountain up into which the believer goes, and in which he finds the Divine ideal of himself? As a mountain seems to be the meeting-place of earth and heaven, the place where the bending skies meet the aspiring planet, the place where the sunshine and the cloud keep closest company with the granite and the grass: so Christ is the melting-place of divinity and humanity; He is at once the condescension of divinity and the exaltation it humanity; and man wanting to know God’s idea of man, any man wanting to know God’s idea of him, must go up into Christ, and he will find it there. All kinds of men have found their ideals in Jesus. Entering into Him, the timid soul has seen a vision of itself all clothed in bravery, and known in an instant that to be brave and not to be cowardly was its proper life. The missionary toiling in the savage island, and thinking his whole life a failure, has gone apart some night into his hut and climbed up into Christ, and seen with perfect sureness, though with most complete amazement, that God counted his life a great success, and so has gone out once more singing to his glorious work. Martyrs on the night before their agony; reformers hesitating at their tasks; scholars wondering whether the long self-denial would be worth their while; fathers and mothers, teachers and preachers whose work had grown monotonous and wearisome, all of these going to Christ have found themselves in Him, have seen the nobleness and privilege of their hard tires, and have come out from their communion with Him to live their lives as they had seen those lives in Him, glorious with the perpetual sense of the privilege of duty, and worthy of the best and most faithful work which they could give. This, then, is the great truth of Christ. The treasury of life your life and mine, the life of every man and every woman, however different they are from one another, they are all in Him. In Him there is the perfectness of every occupation: the perfect trading, the perfect housekeeping, the perfect handicraft, the perfect school teaching, they are all in Him. To go to Him and get the perfect idea of his, and of every action of life, and then to go forth, and by His strength fulfil it, that is the New Testament conception of a strong successful life. How simple and glorious it is! We are like Moses, then--only our privilege is so much more than his We are like a Moses who at any moment, whenever the building of the tabernacle flagged and hesitated, was able to turn and go up into the mountain and look once more the pattern in the face, and come down strong, ambitious for the best, and full of hope. (Bp. Phillips Brooks.)
Heavenly visions
As we read the story with which this passage has to deal, we feel how great are the tasks which are committed to great souls. None but a great soul could have mounded a horde of slaves into a nation, could have inspired them with national ideals, or could have kept the ideal of their future clear and bright before his own soul. Never was heavier task committed to man; and broad must have been the heart and constant the fidelity which sustained the load through the greater part of a hundred years. Great tasks like these are either easy or impossible--easy, while the deer is sustained by the inspiration which pricked and goaded his heart to perform it; impossible, when he labours in his native strength, or leans for support upon anything short of the Eternal. The Divine power which called Moses to this work, and which originated in him the genius to conceive it, m st sustain him in every turn and juncture of its execution. All great ideas like his widen and expand with the expanding visions of the growing soul. The grand outlines of such a vision, indeed, come to the soul in a flash of inspiration, but the details are filled in as the soul broods over the great revelation. Hence the world’s great teachers, its prophets and seers, have been ever given to solitude, to self-communion, and to prayer, that in silence they might hear that Voice which speaks only to the listening ear. “On a certain day,” says Plato, in one of his deepest books, “all the gods mount to the topmost heaven, and gaze upon the reams of pure truth, and all noble souls that can do so follow in their train and gaze upon the fair outlook; then they sink to earth, and all the worthiest part of their lives thenceforward is but the endeavour to reproduce what they have seen: their highest moral achievements are wrought by the power of remembered truth.” This wonderful passage is an intuition of one of the foundational truths of our highest life, and one of the greatest truths of revelation. Once or twice only does Moses gain an insight into the “life of things.” and then only when his eyes are purged of their grossness; but these rare occasions are sufficient to inspire him, and his noblest work is wrought out in obedience to his vision. As he moved about the camp, or when consulted by captains and artificers as to the manner of their labour, daily he would hear the Divine imperative admonishing him to shape it thus and thus; to remember what he had seen; to make his vision take actual shape in gold, or precious stones, or carved work. For him, too, there would be shining the “seven lamps of architecture”--the lamp of sacrifice and the lamp of truth, of power, beauty, life, and obedience, and, not the least, the lamp of memory. Great tasks, we say, are committed to great souls; but is it not true that great tasks are committed to us also, whether we be small or great? Is not the shaping of our scattered and sundered life into a habitation for God to dwell in a task as sacred and as imperative as that which was committed to Moses? And do we not see that the first thing which we need for this work is that which Moses had--a great ideal? Do we not know by experience what a difference there is between living and working with such a pattern and without one? There are no Mount Sinais now, we say, scaling which we might gain such a vision as Moses had to equip him for his work. We have no Mount Sinai, but there still stands Mount Calvary, from which a brighter glory streams and a rarer loveliness, and from which, too, a Voice still reaches us, saying: “See that thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee in the mount.” That utterly surrendered life gives us indeed the pattern which we need, the ideal to which our own life should be conformed. We know how flawless it was, and how significant; how He did those things which He had seen with His Father. This was the secret of the perfect unity of His life, of His patience, dignity, and peace. Shall we not confess, then, that we, too, have received our heavenly vision? We have, indeed, confessed it to be most beautiful and Divine, but we have allowed it to fade from our memory. Yes, and the finer our sensibility and the quicker our imagination, the greater will be the temptation to allow it to fade out into mist for all strong emotion avenges itself by exhaustion. Thus Moses, before he had well reached the camp, descending the rugged slopes of Sinai, half-blinded by the splendours he had gazed upon, dashed down in anger the tables of stone written by the finger of God. So a man may cast away in sorrowful anger the very records which he has received with fear and trembling. Sometimes in anger and sometimes in disgust, when surrounded by a herd of howling idolaters who do not enter into his thought, or through indolence, or the pressure of sordid care, a man is tempted to let his vision go, and account it but as such stuff as dreams are made of. It is a temptation especially besetting men who work in the things of the imagination and the things of the Spirit. Many men lower their ideal--as they will tell you frankly--for the sake of their wives and children. How bitter it will be hereafter if these same children grow up to be sweet, and pure, and unworldly, and despise the crooked means which have been employed for their elevation, and to be filled with sad pity for the founder of their fortune, who, like Lot, chose the well-watered country, and for the sake of it disowned every noble ambition! Thus, are we severally tempted to disobey the admonishing Voice which bids us make all things according to the pattern which has been revealed to us. But who will be left to rear God’s tabernacle if they fail who have had vision of its ideal beauty and hope of its foundation among men? It is in such an hour of temptation that we need to renew the old impressions, to revive the faded tints of the picture, and to trace the lost meaning of the vanishing lines of the pattern of heavenly things, once so clear to us. And do we ask, How can our lost impressions be renewed? Then the store before us supplies us with the suggestion. “And the Lord said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first, and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables which thou breakest.” Yes; He who first gave us the great conception of noble life can renew it when it fades away if with all our hearts we truly seek Him; it may not be with all the early glow of our first inspiration, nor with such glad announcements of its coming to our bosoms: but what we gain the second time more painfully may be cherished more religiously, watched over more prayerfully, and kept with diligence even to the end. (G. Littlemore.)
The pattern in the mount
I shall consider, in the first place, the fact that all men have ideals--have some kind of spiritual conceptions; and in the second place, I shall urge the results of consistent action upon those conceptions.
I. Consider, for a moment, and you will see that this is the great characteristic of the man--THAT HE IS THE CONSTRUCTOR OF THINGS FASHIONED AFTER AN INWARD IDEAL OR PATTERN, and thus he transforms the outward world according to his mental and spiritual conceptions. Here, on one part, stands vast, unshaped matter--rock, wood, stream, fluent, air: on the other part is the human agent who is to work upon this world of matter. You may say that the beaver or the bee works upon matter. The one proceeds with the utmost accuracy to build its neat, and the other to construct its dam; but there is a point at which each of them stops. They do not go a jot beyond the line of instinct; they do nothing more wonderful, nothing different from what has been done for six thousand years. But see, out of this same world of matter, man makes houses, weapons, ships, printing presses, steam engines, and telegraphs. He makes implements, and produces combinations that did not exist in nature, but that stood first as shadows on the horizon of his own thought--patterns that were shown him in the mount of intellectual and spiritual elevation. But if this power which man has of working from inward conceptions is expressed in the ways in which he pours his thought into matter, it is still more apparent in the ways in which his thought, so to speak, overrides matter--as he appears not merely in inventions, but in creations. The work of art, for instance--the great work of genius--whence comes that? Something that you do not see in nature, something that can nut be interpreted as a mere combination of matter--a mere putting together of the elements of the physical world; but something that has flowed out of the ideal springs of a man’s own soul, until we have the splendours of the sunset sky woven in the fibres of the canvas, and the stones of the quarry heaved up in an architectural ant m of grandeur and aspiration. But the main conclusion to which I would lead your thought is this: than a most every man has conceptions higher and better than he realises, or than he even endeavours to make real. Before every man there hovers a high conception--or one more or less high--certainly above the level of his present conduct--of virtue, of moral action, of duty, of righteousness, of truth; and the more h-looks at that, the more vivid it becomes to him. Although he may, at the same time, not move a jot or a hair toward it, nor even endeavour, for a single instant, to come up to it, yet it stands before him, and he sees it clear and bright, kindling upon his thought, and ready to move hi heart. And you see this fact revealed m this remarkable manner by every man. If he does ever so bad an act, he tries to justify it in some way--tries to reconcile it to some ideal of virtue. So that from his own showing, his own confession, there is an ideal standard in his mind higher than that from which he has acted. What better advice, then, could be given to any man than just this? Work out your highest conceptions--the noblest standard of truth and duty that comes to you. It may not be the highest possible, nor the highest conceivable by other men, but that which seems to you the highest possible or conceivable, work up to, and live up to, and endeavour to make it the rule. And so especially it is in regard to the matter of faith about which many are much troubled and perplexed. They say they cannot believe that the Bible is divinely inspired; they are not fully convinced about the immortality of the soul, and they even sometimes incline to doubt the existence of a God. What then are you to do, my be low-men? To throw aside all faith and live outside of its circle, merely as an animal, in a coarse, material existence? No--no; some shred of faith you have. Every man has some. Some conceptions of spiritual things dawn upon every mind; live up to the faith you have. Have you a faith that it is good to do good? Live up to that. Have you a faith that charity is a blessed thing? Live up to that. Work out to the extreme limit of your conception here, and just so sure as you do it, the wider will your circle open before you.
II. In the next place, let us proceed to see WHAT WILL RESULT IF A MAN ACTUALLY ATTEMPTS THUS TO WORK UP TO HIS HIGHEST AND BEST SPIRITUAL CONCEPTIONS. In the first lace, I think he will acquire some comprehension of the worth and certainty of spiritual being, and of the reality of his own soul. Let a man think, when he endeavours to carry out the best conception of duty, how much that is all-controlling and supreme in his life, let him think that the highest claim in his life is from within; hst him think how mind will after all control and master the body. The moment you think of this power to control and master material things, you fall back upon the consciousness theft you have a soul, and that there is more evidence than you have supposed of its existence. In fact, there is more proof of a soul than of a body. When a man asks me what proof I have of a soul, I reply by asking him, What proof have you of a body? You have more logical difficulty to prove an outward world than a soul. Spiritual consciousness, mounting aspiration, ideal influences have controlled you all through life. But more than this; not only will a man, as he begins to work from his best spiritual conceptions upward, begin to comprehend the worth of spiritual things and of the soul, but he will begin to acquire right standards of action. I hardly need say that in the calculations of men, very generally they do not start from the ground of the soul. If you look at a great many of the social fallacies of our time, at a great many of the social faults and errors of men in business, in politics, and in life generally, you will find that the fallacy or error consists in the fact that they do not start from the ground of the soul as a standard, but from outward things. They estimate all outward things by their bulk or glitter. Let a man take up the subject of immortality--of the spirit of man enshrined in time, and working through sense, as destined to live beyond the stars, when banks and warehouses, cities and continents, shall have melted with fervent heat, and crumbled to ashes; when this world shall be dashed from its orbit as a speck of dust from a flying wheel--let him take the grand calculus of the immortality of the soul, and start with that, and then worldly good and gain will take their proper attitude, temporary expediency will sink down, and right will assert its proper place; then he will have a true standard by which to estimate all things. In the next place, if a man really endeavours to work according to his highest a-d best inward conception, he will come to perceive the need of Christ and the worth of Christianity. Working from his best and highest, he gains a better and a higher still, until at length he will come to feel that spiritual aspirations are boundless. And when, from the yearnings of his educated soul, he wants a perfect ideal, he will ask, Where is the excellence that will answer my highest ideal? where is that which will begin to fill up this boundless thirst of the soul, which has only been increased by drinking from narrow cisterns? And Jesus Christ comes out upon the horizon of history, and stands before him in the gospel, and answers that inquiry. He says virtually to man, “I am the ideal for which you aspire; in Me behold a perfect reflection of that which you now must seek; in Me behold that which continually fills up your yearning want, and makes that want the deeper, that it may fill it with more.” Here stands man on one side, with a sense of imperfection and sin, asking, What is there that will help me in, what is there that will deliver me from the power of sin? No mere man, no mere teacher, like Plato or Seneca, can do it. Man needs some spirit of Divine goodness to enter into him, to cure him of his sin and Jesus Christ embodies that Divine spirit. He comes before man to assure him of mercy, with the encouragement that the vilest sin may be cast off, and that man may throw himself upon the Divine mercy which He represents, and be lightened of his load. And here, on the other hand, are limitless wants and desires; and how does Jesus Christ gratify them? By exhibiting perfect Father; by showing an ideal to us that we never can compass, but can always aspire to. (E. H. Chapin, D. D.)
Of the right manner of doing duty
1. The same Lord who enjoins the matter, prescribes the manner.
2. As great respect is manifested to God in the manner of doing what He requires, as in matter. In this was David commended 2 Kings 3:6). This was it that Hezekiah pleaded before God 2 Kings 20:3).
3. Herein lieth a main difference between the upright and the hypocrite, instance the difference between Abel’s and Cain’s offering (Genesis 4:4-5).
4. That which is good is altered and perverted by failing in the manner. Good is thereby turned into evil, and duty into sin.
5. Failing in the manner makes God reject that which in the matter He requireth (Isaiah 1:11).
6. God detests things commanded by Himself when they are done in an ill manner (Isaiah 66:3).
7. In this case he that doth the work of the Lord is accursed Jeremiah 48:10).
1. This giveth just cause of examining ourselves even about the good things that we do. This use is the rather to be observed because every one best knoweth his own failings in the manner of what he doth (1 Corinthians 2:11).
2. Upon due examination we cannot but be deeply humbled ever for our failings in the manner of doing good things. The glory of our reading, hearing, praying, singing, partaking of the sacrament, alms-deeds, and other duties, is hereby taken away, which if profane men knew, they would insult over professors.
3. This giveth just occasion of abnegation, and of renouncing all confidence even in our best works, for we must fail therein (1 Samuel 3:2). Did justiciaries well understand this, it would make them cast down their gay peacock’s feathers. They would not be so conceited of themselves, as the proud Pharisee, but rather as the humble publican (Luke 18:11-13). There is nothing of such force to work in us This lesson of denying ourselves as a consideration of the manner of doing the good things we do. This consideration would soon put an end to all conceits of fulfilling the law, of meriting, of doing works of supererogation, and undry other proud apprehensions.
4. Upon the aforesaid ground be exhorted to learn as well as to do, what we enterprise, as what we do. God loves adverbs. We were as go d be ignorant of the duty itself as of the manner of performing it. To know what ought to be done, and not to know how it ought to be done, will be a great aggravation of sin.
6. For well-doing that which, is good observe these few rules;
(1) Exercise thyself in God’s Word, diligently read it, hear it, and meditate upon it. This is an excellent help and the best that I can prescribe. For God’s Word doth expressly and distinctly declare both what is to be done and how it is to be done (Psalms 119:105).
(2) Think on duty before hand, and endeavour to prepare thyself thereto. Sudden, rash, unprepared enterprising a sacred duty is one occasion of failing in the manner of doing it (Ecclesiastes 5:2).
(3) Consider with whom thou hast to do in all things; even with Him who is the searcher of the heart. This will make thee circumspect in every circumstance. Conceits that we have to do with man alone, make us look only to the outward duty (2 Corinthians 2:17).
(4) In penitent confessions, acknowledge thy failing in the manner of doing duty.
(5) Pray for ability even about the manner of doing duty (2 Corinthians 3:5). The work of the Spirit is herein specially manifested; we know not what we should pray for as we ought. But none can do good in a right manner except the regenerating Spirit be in him and help him.
6. For comfort in this case we must have our eye upon our Surety in whom was no failing at all (Heb 6:26). (W. Gouge.)