BIBLE TALK.

Press, Volume L, Issue 8482, 13 May 1893, Page 2

BIBLE TALK.

Sermon,

SERIES No. 19. Subject—" In My Father's house are many * mansions."—John xiv. 2. Stenographic Kkpobt of Mb Wokthingyos'b Bible Talk at thjb Tbmtxk of Truth, Susdat, Ap_il 9th, 1893. The word house is defined as a dwellingplace. The house of the Father then, must be the dwelling-place of the Father. Omnipresence has a bouse; Omnipresence can only be housed in eternity, hence we say that, eternity is God's house, in which there are many mansions. God the Father, dwelling aa Omnipresence, fills all eternity, His house. Within that house there are many mansions. The home is the world of the child; no one word, perhaps, covers as much as that word home. In the home the child first opens its eyes to recognition of face and form. It is in the home where the consciousness of tbe child is first awakened to surrounding objects, it is in its home where its eye first sees face and form and object, where its ear first Sears sound. Tnere, sound becomes formulated into language; there, instinct is unfolded, and love ia bozn. The household, with its members, the homestead with it» objects of furniture, make up the world of the child; it knows nothing of the universe, nothing of the sun, moou, and star* above; it knows nothing of tbe

busy city, or of the distaut country; its radius is bounded by the home. After a while, its feet are placed upon

the path outside the door of the home, and the horizon of its consciousness is

widened by the path that leads to the xpring or the mill All at once, dawning upon its consciousness, there is a sense of an over-bending sky, tbe shining sun, the twinkling stars, and all the beyond of a wonderland that stretches out, out, out, in ever-widening circles, that seem to have no boundary. Then the child is lost in the youth, and the boundary, the mansion, that was the home-room, and the homeyard, is widened to the school playground, the atmosphere and contact of other lives and thoughts. Its eye rests upon avenues of streets in a city, perhaps, upon rows upon rows of buildings ; or in the country, upon tiers upon tiers of trees and mountains. It looks upon the paths and roads, and wonders where they lead to ; it sees the swift-borne train carried by the iron horse into the distance, lost in clouds of steam and smoke, and wonders where it goes. Its eye rests upon the stream that hurries past, »nd it wishes to know into what bosom it empties.

And finally, out of the environment of the home and the schoolhouse, out of the intimate associations of childhood, another wonderland opens its door, and it discovers the world oi thought, the world of government, the world of property, of law, of literature, of art and commerce, and in this world, in which each name that I have ottered is a mansion, into this world the

startled consciousness of the youth looks in wonderment. And swift foosteps have opened to its startled, consciousness the wider horizon of love; love, with

its stirring impulse, with its godlike trend, ■peaks to him, and the youth enters into engagements that transform it into man* hood, passing through these preparatory mansions, and in them gathering the cha racter of the manhood and the fatherhood that establishes its own home and mansion, and rears its own children. The child has read Herodotus, Plutarch, Jbsephus, and Roliin, and they have seemed to him as some distant phantasmagoria, _ moving in a world of space with which he " was unacquainted; but now he sees that he has moved from the connection of his childhood, out of the swaddling clothes of infancy, the tenderness of dimpling cheeks and tiny hands, out of the ignorance that poured its prayer into a mother's

ear, it has passed through youth into manhood. In youth it encountered its daily studies, the tasks that made up the law of its life, that put letters into words, that compelled it to add up columns of figures, that pushed it into the avenues of language, of art, and of letters, until all at once, it is carried into this manhood mansion, which carries, it across the seas and continents that it has mapped and measured, until it stands startled and alarmed, discovering that beyond this mansion there are others, there are everopening doors, there are other mansions, new furnitures, fresh guests, other com-panio-ships. Voices call it onwards, the came voices that called it from childhood's home, tbe same voice that summoned the mother, with tear-filled eyes, to give up her eon, the same voice that called it away, while the father and mother watched as it left the home to enter those other mansions, in obedience to the logic of a life that sooveb, and weaves, and thrills. Dr. Holmes said that at fifty you were on the deck of the ship in all weathers; at sixty you were in the cahiu, and others were on the deck ; at seventy you were on a raft in the ocean, with one or two companions ; and at eighty you were clinging to a spar •mid the surging tides, reaching for lifepreservers, and using ovexy force and power to keep your whitened beard above the -raves. And yet in all of these, we are but traversing mansions in the Father's house. In childhood we went out to climb the mountain or cross the river, but we took care to return to the home at night. In childhood there were a thousand questions that forced themselves into our thought: where does the sun rise from, where does it go when it sets, does the sky really touch the earth at yon horizon, whence come the stars at night, and these harrying myriads of men that we see by _ay, whence, whither, what ?

A_d then, when we have passed through these mansions, we discover that there are others, that we must look at life as one enormous sublime unit, as that vast city of God which is full of the many mansions that make up the house of eternity, and we understand that mind is a mansion, that mind itself is full of mansions. We need

but to take up any of our college circulars, to read the many mansions there are in mind. If you might enter tbe study of one of those German philosophers who have lived for years in the mansions oi Sanscrit and Hebraic literature and philology, he would teli you that he had never read Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer, or any of the Knglitth classics, because be was compelled to dwell in the mansions of philology. These houses, vacated two or three thousand years ago, are moved intoby these minds, and when ere look into the vast array of mansions, each containing it* store-house of wisdom md mystery and power, as we hurry past the doors and scarce look inside, we remember how little we know, and how full sf business the great eternity is. --ink of the manmoow of invention, the dwellings of those who house themselves in the pursuit of discovery, who pursue achievement in art, in anna, in government, ia law, in chemistry, who are busy in Sology, in miner-logy, in physiology, ving gone into the mansions and closed the doors, who are housed alone with God pn the secret place, endeavouring to discover the mystery. _IFhi_k of the mansions of sorrow, oi ittanty, of hope, of love, of religion; think W these, and do not wonder that he said

_In my Father's house are many nu—udons.' _Ie who dwells in the "—"i"n>_ of beauty, goes out beneath the sky, and sees only Mbeauty in its lines; he looks into the hoeom of the flower, or against the back* jrround of rock and mountain, and in all Ihafe hia eye rests upon he sees only the breath of God's beauty, he insists upon wreathing all of life in that Greek curve which is the highest expression of beauty, ho lives in tbe harmony of life. These are bat ephemeral shift-, we move from one to the other aa we grow in apprehension and power. For a time, perhaps, it is necessary for us to live in the mansion of sorrow, to bend over the graves of our hope, to weep in the silence of the night of our disappointment, to bind up the lacerated sore that life's battle has left upon —a. These are the mansions of sorrow; within their cavernous darkness there echoes the sob and moan, we hear the cry from our souls and theirs, " H it be posaible, let this cnp pass from mc," and we * e **j* e xlaAt Gethsemane iga mansion. .-H^ l *■*"«* are tbe mansions of hope, mgn upon the mountain tops whose aumi nuta are gOdedby the first rays of the rising and kussed by the last beam of his fW"*. I**?'* »-»« re the day is longest •ad the mght v shortest is the light of the

Sermon.

i ——■——»—— ——•—-————-——-—--—————————____.. ! hope that believeth all things. These are the mansions into which such as Socrates retired in bis dying hour, in which such as Job stood when he said " I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth ;" -this is the hope that uttered itself in the word of the Christ "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto mc;" this is the hope in which Bruno stood and looked at his foes, and the stake, and the iifelicking flame, and sang his song of victory. And then there are tbe mansions of love, in which tbe flowers of human association bloom and give out their perfume, in which are gathered the childhood of humanity's development, and in which the flower of divinity gives out its perfume through humanity. / Then there are the mansions of religion, with its hope and its defeat, with its Sinai and its Mount of Beatitudes, with its Calvary and its Easter. These mansions we enter, we dwell in them, we live and learn in them, and we move on to other mansions, to more secret mysteries, on, oa, on. Then there is another mansion, that towers above them all, the mansion, oi memory, whose walls are hung with pictures of tbe eternal yesterday, in which wo live over again our childhood's hour, in which the tender mellowed face of motherhood, aud the strength of fatherhood, and the loving companionship of brothers and sisters come to us in this mansion of memory, and speak to us a language of hope, and love, and religion, and peace. And other things are there, for on those walls are deep scars driven by the ploughshare of sufferiug, there ia the story of that which made the character we now represent. In this mansion of memory there are floods and deluges, there are shocks of battle-fields, there are bivouacs beneath the stars, there are silent hours of desolation, and awful cataclysms, when man, and God, and time, and eternity seem to crush us in their grasp of vengeance and reprisal. There are such pictures in this mansion of memory.

But over and above all these, we move out and on, for in the traverse of these many mansions in the Father's house, there is an eternal purpose, an übiquitous law, and a never failing tenderness of love that gets the best from every school in every mansion, and preserves that best.

There are other mansions. There are the mansions of vice and crime, the mansions ef hate and lust, the mansions in which the festering sore of leprous humanity houses itself. These are all in the Father's house, they all belong to the many mansions in that house. I remember once being conducted into an old palace in Venice. Inside, there was a damp and awful atmosphere that seemed to chill the very marrow in your bones, your voice gave out a dull and muddy echo; the sides of the walls had been penetrated by the insistent Eea. and great drops of slimy perspiration hung all about; there was the broken marble, and tinsel, and gilt of wealth and power, but the atmosphere was of the grave, one seemed to hear sobs and cries, and to imagine that dark deeds had been done and weak women mu.dered there, and one wished to go out. This is an illustration of some of the mansions of am, the mansions of vice and sorrow and suffering in the world to-day. Ob 2 when we meet them, when we recognise them, let us try to help those who dwell in them, let us speak the word of life and love that shall bring the resurrection to that larger understanding that frees them from the imprisonment of that lazar-house. We men and women, as we stand at this moment, are in one or other of these mansions in the Father's house. If our thought goes out with the dead vapour, the chill and slimy pestilence of hate, anger, deception and falsehood that belong to the mansion of sin, vice and crime, let us remember that we need not remain there, but that we are to go on, and that when we goon is merely a question uf consciousness with ourselves. The determining factor in our going is the realisation that there are many mansions in the Father's house, and that this mansion of darkness, of squalor, of bereavement, and want and woe in whioh we are entombed, is but speaking the message to go out from its toads and serpents, its vermin and night into other mansions that are bright, sweet and beautiful, into the mansion of hope that is ablaze with the light of God's glory, full of the bounty of God's love, waiting our entrance and assertion of our right. If we get this lesson, we look upon all of life as a combination of these mansions that make up the house of God. We then can understand that the man who is to become a pillar in that temple, to go no more out forever, must have overcome every mansion of falsehood, every influence of deception, and vice, and sin, must have climbed to the mansion at the mountain top, the mansion of faith, and hope, and love; he muse have passed all the degree mansions, and have come to the sunlight of the mansion which is one of those in the city that John saw descending out of heaven. Let us understand that in order to get the embodiment of the great thought which he launched in that statement, we do not have to pick ourselves out of our environment, and look away to some other place or time ; we do not have to associate with any class, or kueel at the feet of any teacher, nor to see through the lens of any eyes but our own ; we have to know and understand that this transcendent lesson is to teach us to recognise our place in one of those mansions, and our brother's place in h ; .s mansion, and to know ihat every mansion belongs to the great household of God. The false mansions of human beliefs that we have built upon the sands of time will be swept away in the floods of larger understanding, by and through which the larger mansions of the temple which is eterual will be seen and recognised. When we understand tliis statement as he meant it, we shall get the comfort of the preceding words, ** Let not your heart be troubled; " all confusion of mind has gone, all unrest of heart is lost, aud under the rational lens of logical thought, in the holy breath of the heart's deepest and best interpretation, we get the benediction of the Christ, our Christ, and understand that we go into this house, this homestead, we find our place at this hearthstone and become a pillar in this mighty temple to go no more out, when we apprehend our true rights, and arise to go into that temple. This apprehension cannot be gainsaid, or destroyed, or taken from us by the confusions, the sorrows, and troubles of human experience. Let us seek the mansions of hope, of love, of faith and power, and on these heavenkissing hills lift high the light that shall beckon our brethren all over the world to enter this house that is their Father's, to enjoy this home that is their Father's dwelling place, and to distribute the bounty thai is their Father* gift—[Advt.]