THE MONTHLY

CHRISTIAN SPECTATOR.

AUGUST, 1858.

Robertson's Sermons.

SYDNEY SMITH's recipe for a sleepless night was to take a volume of sermons and read himself into obliviousness. No doubt that the opinion of sermons implied in this sarcasm is too true, and that the majority of them are irresistibly dull and soporific. Blair's Sermons, for instance, cannot be said to be exciting even by the most lively temperament; and we suspect that it was this type of sermons that the aforesaid devout clergyman was chiefly conversant with. The great bulk of more modern sermons are insupportably heavy; so much so, that while sermons are printed by the thousand they are read only by the hundred, and then only by very simple people and elderly ladies, who study the prophecies under Dr. Cumming. But perhaps the most numerous class who read sermons are clergymen and Dissenting ministers who read to steal-and to steal in a shamefully wholesale manner. But more of this anon.

But if the charge of heaviness against the bulk of modern sermons be true, there is a charge, equally true, against some of our very modern sermons of being insupportably lively. Reader, didst thou ever see a dull fellow try to be witty? and wert thou obliged to countenance the delusion, and laugh with the rest, as if the poor dullard had really said a bright thing? We have heard Scotch professors, very safe hands at explaining the categories, and very apt at all the modes of the syllogism, perpetrating some awful things in the name of wit and poetry in the endeavour, we suppose, to make their lectures very lively and attractive to youthful minds. And they used to get well cheered for it! And so now, as preachers have been long abused for long faces, long sermons, and long sentences, many of them have determined to get rid of the reputation, and have set about the

reformation with a vengeance. The poor working classes! they have been made the victims of this experiment. Just as frogs were used for electrical experiments, so the lively school of preachers think that no great harm can be done if they try their hand first of all upon the poor man. One gentleman we remember apologizes for the buffoonery of his lectures on the Sunday afternoons by saying, that he never admits it into the regular performances in the morning or evening. But is it not a great mistake to suppose that this style of thing would be acceptable only to the working classes? If some necessary alterations were made in the style, the middle and upper classes would like lecturing too. Of course, dirt pies' would not do for them; but a melodramatic handling of the vices of the rich would be immensely popular. Did they not go to see Tom Thumb in as great crowds as the vulgar? And so set them up a preacher or lecturer, compounded in equal proportions of 'Brimstone and Treacle,' and Belgravia would rush to hear him, despite the attractions of St. Barnabas and the mysterious charms of Puseyism.

The success of such an attempt would raise the whole question as to the purpose of the pulpit and the nature of preaching. Is it to beguile an idle hour, to insinuate instruction through the medium of amusement, and by choosing such topics as may hit the fancy or taste of the hearer, to draw crowded thousands together, and regale them with poor imitations of Dickens, or some other popular novelist? Far be it from us to interdict any man from entering the pulpit and displaying the real power there is in him in his own way; if he has imagination, let him draw upon it to the utmost, so long as it serves the purpose of illustration to his argument or exposition; if he has humour, let him be unsparing of it in lashing all that is ridiculous in vice and folly; and if he has passion, let it kindle and burn in earnest love for the beautiful and holy in religion, and in indignation against the wickednesses of the world. But in the lecturing and preaching we have in our eye the real is sacrificed to the artificial, earnestness has become a canting nuisance, and real power and success are given up to the ambition of being simply popular-and scarcely anything besides.

Our earnest desire is to see the pulpit filled with men,-men of incorruptible aims, of high intelligence, and of inspired zeal; who shall rescue it from the boyish taste and shallowness with which it is threatened by some amongst us just now. As a help in this direction, we trust that the sermons of Mr. Robertson, of Brighton, which we beg to introduce to our readers, will exert a powerful influence. We know full well that they have too high a tone of religious thought and feeling ever to be extensively popular amongst the great mass of the religious world; but, nevertheless, the genius that is in them, the pure and lofty sympathies with which they abound, the high intellectual and spiritual qualities they reveal, will make them very dear to the better class of young men amongst our preachers. It would be a great blessing to every young man leaving college if he could put these three volumes

of sermons upon his shelves as soon as he had settled, and read them often and deeply in close companionship with the Bible.

We are bound to say that Mr. Robertson, in common with the Broad School to which he belonged in the Church of England, held what we believe to be defective views of the doctrine of our Lord's sacrifice. He repudiates almost violently the notion that Christ died as our substitute. That the Saviour bore the punishment due to our sin as the method by which we can obtain pardon, is a doctrine to him utterly revolting. Hear what he says: "Let no man say that God was angry with his Son. We are sometimes told of a mysterious anguish which Christ endured, the consequence of divine wrath; the sufferings of a heart laden with the conscience of the world's transgressions, which he was bearing as if they were his own sins. Do not add to the Bible what is not in the Bible. The Redeemer's conscience was not bewildered to feel that his own which was not his own. He suffered no wrath of God.' Any one who has read these volumes must feel assured that Mr. Robertson has long and anxiously studied this question of questions-this deepest, darkest question which the incarnation of Christ presents. In which way, in what sense, did Christ die for our sins? Can the innocent endure the punishment due to the guilty? Mr. Robertson answers No. Not in the popular theological meaning of those expressions. How then? This is as definite an answer as he can give us: Christ came into collision with the world's evil, and he bore the penalty of that daring. He approached the whirling wheel, and was torn in pieces. He laid his hand upon the cockatrice's den, and its fangs pierced him. the law which governs the conflict with evil. It can only be crushed by suffering from it. The Son of Man, who puts his naked foot on the serpent's head, crushes it, but the fang goes into his heel.' True, unquestionably, as far as it goes; but not an explanation found in the Bible, and encompassed with as many difficulties as the explanation he repudiates, if regarded as a complete account of the sufferings of Christ. Grant that the pure mind of Christ could not suffer the conscience of sin; and yet the Old and New Testament are so full of phrases importing that, in some sense, he bore our sins, that he suffered the just for the unjust, and so on-phrases, the depth and fulness of which do not seem to be reached and exhausted by the theory which Mr. Robertson and Mr. Maurice put forth. Does not this long-standing controversy sufficiently teach us that, after all that has been urged on both sides, there is no theory on the atonement in the word of God? But it is a great fact in God's government left unexplained, that we obtain redemption through his blood-even the forgiveness of sins.' Why not be content with preaching so great a truth just as it stands, instead of pausing and hesitating to make the announcement in all its fulness, till we can understand how it can be?

It is

We have now discharged our conscience, and can proceed to speak more freely of these volumes and their excellences.

All the great religious thinkers of the world have felt deeply and

struggled to utter that awful sense of wonder and mystery with which this life fills them. The hard, unpoetical, or merely theological mind cannot appreciate this element of higher natures; to him, as to Peter Bell, a primrose is a primrose; God is a being whose existence he has proved, and whose attributes he has catalogued and described definitely. "This brave o'erhanging firmament' fills him with no thoughts too deep for tears.' Time and eternity have no perplexities for him beyond his own personal vexations. Let us give an extract from a sermon on Jacob's wrestling'-one of the finest in these volumes—to illustrate what we said at the beginning of this paragraph :

"To be blessed by God-to know him and what he is—that is the battle of Jacob's soul from sunset till the dawn of day.

'And that is our struggle the struggle. Let any true man g down into the deeps of his own being and answer us, what is the cry that comes from the most real parts of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that in his first communing with God -preservation, safety. Is it it even this to be forgiven our sins? Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and in that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about it. Or, is it this, “Hallowed be thy name?" No, my brethren. Out of our frail, and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier hours of our religion may be this,-Save my soul! but in the most unearthly moments it is this,-"Tell me thy name!" We move through a world of mystery; and the deepest question is, what is the Being that is ever near-sometimes felt-never seen. That which has haunted us from childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never yet been realized;—that which sweeps through the soul as a desolation, like the blast from the wings of the angel of death, leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness;-that which has touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain;—that which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness and conceptions of superhuman excellence. Shall we say It or He? What is it? Who is he? Those anticipations of immortality and God-what are they? Are they the mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living something beside me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing through the vast void of nothingness? or shall I call them God, Father, Spirit, Love? A living Being within me or outside me? Tell me thy name, thou awful Mystery of Loveliness. That is the struggle of all earnest life.'

We must also quote the reason the preacher gives why God does not tell Jacob his name.

'He blessed him there,' but refused to tell his name. • Wherefore dost thou ask after my name? In this, too, seems to lie a most important truth. Names have a power, a strange power, of hiding God. Speech has been sarcastically defined as the art of hiding thought. Well, that sarcastic definition has in it a truth. The

Eternal Word is the revealer of God's thoughts, and every true word of man is originally the expression of a thought; but by degrees the word hides the thought. Language is valuable for the things of this life; but for the things of the other world, it is an encumbrance almost as much as an assistance. Words often hide from us our ignorance of even earthly truth. The child asks for information, and we satiate his curiosity with words. Who does not know how we satisfy ourselves with the name of some strange bird or plant, or the name of some new law in nature? It is a mystery perplexing us before. We get the name and fancy we understand something more than we did before; but in truth we are more hopelessly ignorant: for before we felt there was a something we had not attained, and so we inquired and searched; now, we fancy we possess it, because we have got the name by which it is known: and the word covers over the abyss of our ignorance. If Jacob had got a word, that word might have satisfied him. He would have said, "Now I understand God, and know all about him."

The person of Christ is a subject difficult to speak of, except in general terms. Orthodox Christians, in the rebound from Unitarianism, have dwelt almost exclusively upon the divine part of his constitution; so that it has become difficult to realize to ourselves the thorough humanity of our Lord. There are some striking and wonderfully suggestive thoughts on this subject in several of these sermons; but we make a quotation from a remarkable discourse on 'The early Development of Jesus.'

'The child, it is written, grew. Two pregnant facts. He was a child, and a child that grew in heart, in intellect, in size, in grace, in favour with God and man. Not a man in child's years. No hotbed precocity marked the holiest of infancies. The Son of Man grew up in the quiet valley of existence-in shadow, not in sunshine-not forced. No unnatural stimulating culture. had developed the mind or feelings: no public flattery, no sunning of his infantine perfections in the glare of the world's show, had brought the temptation of the wilderness, with which his manhood grappled, too early on his soul. We know that he was childlike as other children, for in after years his brethren thought his fame strange, and his townsmen rejected him. They could not believe that one who had gone in and out, ate and drank, and worked, was he whose name is Wonderful. The proverb, true of others, was true of him: A prophet is not without honour but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. You know him in a picture at once, by the halo round his brow. There was no glory in his real life to mark him. He was in the world, and the world knew him not. Gradually and gently he woke to consciousness of life and its manifold meaning, found himself in possession of a self; by degrees opened his eyes upon this outer world and drank in its beauty. Early he felt the lily of the field discourse to him of that Invisible Loveliness, and the ravens tell of God his Father. Gradually, and not at once, he embraced the