No. II. "Are there few that be Saved?"

"Then said one unto Him, Lord, are there few that be saved ? And He said unto him, Strive to enter in at the strait gate."—Luke xiii., 23, 24.

This passage, my brethren, give us the very essence of our Lord's teaching respecting the present and the future. Since Ho had dwelt so often on the difficulty and narrowness of the up-hillward path, and on the few who toil in it, whereas we see many rushing along the broad road that leadeth to destruction—someone, who, perhaps, had more spiritual speculative curiosity than moral earnestness, wanting to know the issues of this conflict, asked Him the plain, direct question, "Lord, are there few that be saved ?"Now, supposing that were so—supposing that, as thousands of theologians have taught for thousands of years, the vast majority are, in the next world, for over lost, would it not have been only fair to admit it ? Would not our Lord's teaching have gained terrific force from admitting it? Had the answer to the question been a plain,. Yes, only few are saved "; and had that view been as essential to morality as some assert, surely it would have been worse than dangerous—it would have been (be it said with reverence) wrong to suppress it. But what is the answer of the Divine wisdom? Is it some glaring deluge of fire and brimstone for billions of years? Is it in that style in which the coarse terrorism of the Puritan is at one with the coarse terrorism of the Inquisition? No; but it is a refusal to answer. It is a strong warning to the questioner. It is a tacit rebuke to the very question. It is the pointing to a strait gate and to a narrow way whereby alone we can enter into the kingdom of God. In this sad world it is but the few who find that way, and until they find it they cannot see the kingdom of God; but there is not one word here about an irreversible doom to material torment. If we still yearn for any nearer answer about the future, we may find it, perhaps, in the glorious words of the prophet Isaiah, "Fear not, for I am with thee. I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather j them from the west. I will say to the north, j Give up; and to the south, Keep not back. Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters j from the ends of the earth." Or, in the dazzling vision of the seer of the Apocalypse, "I beheld, and lo ! a great j multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, stood before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and alms in their hands." Or, again, we may find it in those calm words of our Lord's own promise, "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you." But the spirit of the answer of our blessed Lord on this occasion is this: "The fate of the souls whom He hath made is in the hands of Him who made them, and not in thine. Enter though in at the strait gate."

It was in that spirit, my brethren, that j strove to speak to you last Sunday, believing that much popular teaching about the awful subject of future retribution, its physical torments, its endless, and necessarily endless duration, gives us an utterly false picture of the God of love, which, though it may find warrant in texts wrongly translated or ignorantly misunderstood, finds no warrant, either in the general tone of Scripture, or in God's no less sacred teachings through our individual souls. And if some would represent such a view as dangerous, I reply that my only question is, "Is it true?"It is falsehood which is always dangerous, but truth never. It is not for us to construct, after our own fashion, the unseen world. Things are as they are. Theologians may go on spinning their systems unto the world's end; but things are as they are, and they will be as they will be; and for us to misrepresent them by the fallibility of human system, or, worse still, at the bidding of human expedients, is a blasphemy against truth and against God. What is dangerous is to drive some into indignant atheism, and ' to entangle others under frightful superstition, and to crush yet others with a horrible despair by representing to them Him whoso name is Love, as a remorseless avenger, instead of as a Father", gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, "neither keepeth He His anger forever."You think, perhaps, that men will not love God without the terrors of an endless hell. So thought not David. He said, "There is mercy with Thee; therefore shalt Thou be feared." Evil souls and foolish souls, I page 7 know, make any doctrine dangerous. St. I Peter tells us that they wrested the writings of St. Paul, as they did also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. Would you, therefore, have had the Scriptures un-Written ? Ought St. Paul never to have taken to his pen? Some of the fathers, I am afraid, held what I believe to be the truth in this matter, just as hundreds of our best clergy, I know, hold it at this day, but fear to preach it. But the greatest and best of the Fathers did j preach it, and many of the saints, at whose feet I would gladly sit, have ' preached it in this age. And if we see a truth, are we to be orthodox liars for God by suppressing it because those ' think it dangerous who believe in no more'. Potent motive for virtue and the love of God than a ghastly fear? Are we to come before the very God of truth with a lie in our right hands? Richard Baxter—a saint of God, if ever there as one—avowed his belief that even a suicide, if hurried by sudden passion to self-slaughter, may be saved. "And if,"he nobly added, ' if it should be objected that what I say should encourage suicide, I answer, I am not to tell a lie to prevent it."But, oh! My brethren, I am not afraid, and I shall never be afraid, of doing harm by asking you to think noble things of God. I not afraid to bid you plead with Him, in the spirit of righteous Abraham, with, "Be it far from Thee, O Lord. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' Or to say of Him, with holy Paul, "Shall there be injustice with God ? God forbid I" I am not afraid to plead with Him that syllogism which, as Luther said, sums up all the psalms of David—"The God of pity pities the wretched. We are wretched; therefore, not surely in this short world only, but forever, God will pity us."

Dismissing then, all controversy, which I never wish to introduce into this or any pulpit, nor deigning to answer mere angry ignorance or raging prejudice, but realising, with deep responsibility, the sacredness of this place, and desiring, in deepest humility, to lead aright the thoughts of men and women with open minds and loving hearts, I will ask you to glance a little closer with me at God's ways with man—not in idle speculation, not in the interests of any dogma, but because a few years hence death stares us in the face, and because faith in the future may beneficially influence our work in the present. Let us for a moments glance at what we are, and at what we may hope in the future for others and for ourselves.

There are, in the main, three classes of men. There are the saints; there are the reprobates; there is that vast intermediate class lying between, yet shading off by infinite gradations from these two extremes. Of the saints, my brethren, I shall not speak. Their promise is sealed, their lot is sure. Beautiful, holy souls, into whom entering, in every age, the Spirit of God has made of them saints of God and prophets,! They are the joy of heaven; they are the salt of the earth. We, every one of us, are better for them, as the dull clods of the earth are better for the snowy hills whence the rivers flow, as the stagnant air o£ earth is better for the pure winds which scatter the pestilence. Uh, what would the world be, what would England be, what would this great oppressive city be without them—without the ten righteous, the thirty, the forty, the fifty righteous, for whose sake the heavens do not burst to drown, with deluging rain, the feeble vassals of lust, and auger, and wine, the little hearts that know not how to forgive? What would this city be if it were nothing more than sin? greedy coil of jarring slanders, of reckless competition, of selfish luxury, of brutal vice? Many, we know, are the sinners, and few, we know, are the saints of God, and they are mostly poor, and very often despised; and page 8 yet it is they alone who save the world from corruption by the gangrene of its own vices, and from dissolution by the centrifugal forces of its own bate. Their gentle words break upon our wrangling with the balm of love. Their calm faces look in upon our troubles with peace and hope.

"Ever their statues rise before us—
Our [unclear: loltier] brothers, but one in blood.
At bed and table they lord it o'er us.
With looks of beauty and words of good."

A millionaire—a successful man—though the world may crawl at his' feet, is but as the small dust of the balance; but, O God, give us saints! About them we have no controversy. We know that they shall be happy. We know that God will treasure them in the day when He maketh up His jewels. We know that they hath not seen, ner ear heard, nor heart conceived what God shall give to them that love Him."

Born and bred as these have been, these have rounded as they have been with sights and sounds of degradation, what should we have been—what wouldst thou have been, O comfortable bigot? What wouldst thou have been, O prosperous Pharisee, if thou, in this world, heads had no more haiku than these ? Pointing to a murderer as ho went on his way to execution, "There,"said a good and holy man—"there, but for the ace of God, goes John Bradford."If, as we look into the abyss of our own hearts, we see infinite potentialities of guile and vice, so, as we look on these, we see in them, in spite of all their shame and stain, the infinite potentialities of virtue. Aid is it not almost blasphemous to suppose that Ho who Croats human beings with south rich capacities as these, should throw them from Him forever into everlasting darkness? Not moue, at any rate, shall it be to close against; them with impetuous recoil and jarring sound those gates of hell, lent they should be more justly closed upon me; but I commend them, with humblest hope, even after this life of hopelessness, to Him who did not loathe the whiteness of the leper, and who Buffered the woman who was a sinner to wash His feet with tears, I' hat without holiness none can see God; that every guilty deed of every sinner, if unrepeated of, must bring a just and aw f us retribution; that for every impure and for every cruel soul there remaineth, if it repent not, even behind the clouds of this world, the dark night—that I know; but when I remember that own these reprobates had been known to burst into tears at a mother's name; that oven these have been known at times to Hash out into high deeds of momen- page 9 try heroism,—I say that God's Spirit has nowhere taught us that He who gave cannot give back; that He who once made them innocent children cannot restore their innocence again; that lie who created them—He who wills them to be saved—cannot recreate them in His own image—cannot obliterate all their vileness in the blood of Christ and uncrate their sins. At any rate, no arrogant word, no theological dogma, up acrid prejudice of mine, shall ever utter to them the language of despair, or stand between these and God's light and His love. The Good Shepherd Homes' has told us—and must we not believe His words ?—that He will not cease to search for these, the lost sheep, until He finds them. Here, again, the Christian poet teaches us far more truly than the hard theologian—

"Still for all slips of her,
One of Eve's famlly;
Wipe those poor lips of her.
Oozing so clammily:
Cross her hands humbly,
As If praying dumbly,
Over her breast.

"Owning her weakness,
Her evil behavior,
And leaving with meekness
Her sins to her Savior."

But, my brethren, lastly, the vast, vast mass of mankind belong to the third class; they are not utter reprobates; they are not perfect saints. They may rise to the one; they may sink to the other; but for the most part they arc, like all of us, undecided. They try to face both ways. They halt between two opinions. They are neither cold nor hot. They have not clothed heart and soul with good; they have not abandoned themselves utterly to evil. They want to be pardoned, yet they want to retain the offence. They shudder to be in a state of sin, you they attain not to a state of grace. There is the tempter in them, and there is Christ. Now they sin with reckless abandonment. Now they repent in bitterest remorse. The angel has them by the hand, and the serpent by the heart. To how many of us hero will these words apply ? We break no law of man; to the eye of man it might seem that we broke no law of God; but, oh, what would be thought of us if we were all seen as we are—if our hearts were naked and open to each other as they are to God? And it is those who do try to be God's children who most realize their own exceeding sinfulness. This is way the cry of remorse and anguish which springs from the lips of a Fenelon or a Cowper is far bitterer than any confession which is ever wrung from a Richelieu or a Voltaire. Many, many of these better, and saintlier, and tendered souls have been, I believe, utterly and hopelessly made wretched, even to madness, as poor Cowper was, by that false view of God which is given by the pitiless anathemas of man. To all these comes the cry, "Comfort ye, comfort Nye, My people, south our God." Your own holier instincts tell you so. Son, or brother, or friend, or father dies; we all have lost one. It may be that they were not holy—not oven religious—perhaps not even moral men; and it may be that, after living the common life of men, they die quite suddenly, and with no space for repentance; and if a state of sin be not a state of grace, then, certainly, by all rules of man's theology, they had not repented j they were not saved. And yet, when you stood, O father, O brother, heavy-hearted by their open grave, when you drank in the sweet words of calm and hope which our Church utters over those poor remains; when you laid the white flowers on the coffin; when you heard the dull rattle of "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,"you who, if you knew their sins and their failings, knew also something of all that was good, and sweet, and amiable, and true in them, dared you—did you, even in the inmost recesses of thought, consign them, as you are honestly bound to do, as you ought to do if you held the creed which you sometimes profess to hold—dared you, and did you consign them, even in your thoughts, to the unending anguish of the popular creed you teach ? Or did your heart, your conscience, your sense of justice, your love of Christ, your faith in God, your belief in Him of whom you sing every Sunday, that "His mercy is everlasting,"rise in revolt against your nominal profession then ?

You can bear to think of them as you can bear to think of yourselves, suffering, as they never did on earth, the aching glow of God's revealing light, the willing agony of God's remedial lire. We should all desire—we should even pray for that—the natural consequence of our own alienation, meant not to torment us but to profit. An arbitrary infliction of burning torment, an endless agony, a material hell of worm and flame—a doom to everlasting sin, and all this with no prospect of amendment, with no hope of relief—the soul's transgressions of a few brief hours of struggling, tempted life, followed by billions of millenniums in scorching fire, and all this meant not to correct, but to harden—not to amend, but to torture and to degrade. Did you believe in that for any one whom you have ever loved ? Again X say, God forbid ! Again, t say, I fling from me with abhorrence such a creed as that. Let every Pharisee gnash his teeth if he will; let every dogmatist anathematise; but that I cannot and do not believe. Scripture will not let me; my conscience, my reason, my faith in Christ, the voice of the Spirit within my soul, will not let me. God will not let mo. What I do believe is this : That for every willful sin which we commit, unless it be repented of, we shall hereafter, as we do now, feel the heavy and the merciful wrath of God until He have purged page 10 the vile dross from us and made us as the fine gold for Himself. One has said—and it seems to me, and the highest authorities, too, have declared—that we, in this Church of England, may have and cherish this hope, that they who have had no chance here shall have one there; that they who have had a poor chance here shall have a better there; and they who have had a good chance here and lost it will get a new and severer chance; and even while they feel the inevitable results of their sin and folly, will feel also the hands that reach through darkness molding man. What, shall nature fill the hollows of her coarse, rough flints with purple amethysts!—shall she, out of the grimy coal, over which the shivering beggar crouches to warm his limbs, form the glittering diamond which trembles on the forehead of a queen !—shall man take the cast-off rubble and slag of the furnace, and educe from it his most lustrous and glowing dyes ! and shall God—the God of nature, not be able to make anything of His ruined souls ? And what! shall we be able to pity and to love, as we can, thank God, pity and love those who have wronged us; shall we be willing to pardon our prodigals and to call them home; and shall God not be willing, or, if willing, who shall dare to say that He is not able, even beyond the grave ? Shall mortal man be more just thank God ? Shall man be more just than his Maker ? We made them not—these sinners. They are not the people of our pasture, or the sheen of our hand; and yet, if we can feel for them a sincere and yearning love, and a trembling pity, and if that love and pity spring from all that is holiest and most Christ-like in our souls, and if it would be wholly impossible for even us guilty creatures to be so remorseless as to condemn our very deadliest enemies to an eternal vengeance, are we to believe this of God; to believe that He who planteth mercy in us cannot be merciful; to believe that He will, in those words of a theologian which I quoted last Sunday, hold us up with one hand, and torment us with the other, though He knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are but dust ? Or, shall we not rather believe, as the wise woman of Tekoah said to David three thousand years ago, we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground; and God does not take away life, but devises devices that the wanderer may not for ever be expelled from Him ?"

Yes, where sin aboundeth grace shall much more abound. If God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Him, Ho sheweth mercy, not only unto thousands, as our version has it, but unto the thousandth and thousandth generation of them that love Him and keep His commandments; and so always in God's promises, though not in man's systems, in God's revelation, though not in man's belief, there is a vast overbalance of mercy above wrath, and therefore, my brethren, let us not fear. Have faith in God. Think noble things of God. Be sure that trust in the righteous God means the triumph of good over evil. Be sure that the Cross of Christ, and Christ's plenteous redemption, and Christ's infinite atonement, must, in some way, though we know not how, mean—or, at any rate, we may suppose it to mean—that the evil of this world shall be transformed into its good, and that earth's sinners—far off it may be—shall be transformed, far-off, yet at last, into God's saints.

"I say to thee, Do thou repent
To the first man thou Mayes; meet
In lane, highway, or open street,
That we, and he, and all men, move
Under the canopy of love.
As tread as the blue sky above.
And ere thou leave him, say yet this,
This one word more. They only miss
The winning of that final bliss
Who will not count it true that love,
Blessing, not cursing, reign above.
And that in it we 1 ve and move.
And one thing further make him know,
That to believe these things are so.
This firm faith never to forego,
Despite of all it seems—that strife
And curses are with blessings rife—
That this Is blessing; this is life."