THE STRONG TO BEAR WITH THE WEAK.

SUNDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 25, 1868.

Jan 21869

"WE then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves."-ROM. XV. 1.

THAT is to say, turn human conduct perfectly around, so that the bottom of the circle shall be on the top. Do exactly what men never do; and do not do as men always and everywhere do. The strong make the weak do the bearing. The command of the Apostle is, "We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves."

Paul frequently treats special cases by applying to them general principles. No mistake can be greater, therefore, than to argue that because the case is special the remedy or principle is likewise special; and that the application of it in a wider sphere is a stretching of the apostolic teaching. For he takes general principles and gives them special applications; and we have a perfect right to go back from the special to the general again.

The case in hand is an illustration. There are three stages of development, of which we can form a distinct conception, in human life and society. The first is that in which men regulate their life by rules. Actions are classified. Men do not concern themselves with the reasons of them, nor with the principles; but things are classified. Such things you may do, and such things you may not do. This is the lowest; and therefore the Ten Commandments are the literature of the lowest stage of human development. Many persons suppose that the Ten Commandments are a part of Scripture that stands far up, and that they will last forever. They will last forever, because children are being born forever, and society begins over again, as it were, at the very starting-point, and needs rules at the new beginning. The Ten Commandments are the literature for a period of rules -rules being the lowest; that is, not a period at which men are obedient and good for given reasons, and talk and act according to those

LESSON: Romans xiv. HYMNS (Plymouth Collection): Nos. 498, 494, 988.

reasons, but a period at which they blindly say, "Such things shall be done," or, "Such things shall not be done."

Next higher is a life of principle. When men, not despising actions that are customary or conventional, not despising rules, open up a consideration of the grounds and reasons of rules-of the why you shall do so, and the why you shall not do so; when, in addition to these rules, they add a power of adjusting their life by certain great principles, then they have developed a higher degree of mentality, not only, but they are living in a higher sphere.

There is one development higher than that. It is reached when to both of the foregoing-namely, rules and principles-is added intuition, the prophetic flash by which men discover right and wrong by their harmony or their discord with their own moral faculties. The great mass of the world are yet in the first stage. They are governed by rules, as far as they are governed at all; and they must continue to be governed by rules, these being adapted to their condition.

The greatest portion of civilized nations are in the second stage; that is, they are more and more governing their conduct, their disposition, and their whole life by certain great principles, which they themselves are applying from day to day.

There are but single individuals, and they only, as it were, in a few particulars, that have attained the third stage. This is, indeed, to constitute the next grand development; and the religion of the future is to be found in this direction. Men that are crying, "Lo! here, and lo! there," looking out for a religion of the future, and wanting to know whether it can not be made by a certain union of all the sects, or whether it can not be made by a certain prescriptive service, or from the scientific alembic, or whether it will come from this or that direction-these men, it seems to me, never heard the word of the Lord, saying, "The kingdom of God is within you," and that the religion of the future is to be a certain higher possibility of mental economy. And when men, by training, have received hereditary tendencies, and carried them on through generations in moral directions, so that there shall be a moral susceptibility—and carried them, too, with such power that they shall have this intuition or prophetic glance-then they will begin to discern higher elements of right and higher lines of duty, and will be sure neither to be in antagonism with men that act by principles, nor to be in antagonism with men that act by rules.

A water-fowl can walk on the land; and it is a very good way to get along, as distinguished from a stone's way of getting alongwhich is to stand still. And yet, when a duck's legs are in the water, they become the wings of the sea; and how much more graceful a

duck is in the water than on the land! The swimming is no prejudice to the walking; it is more graceful and potential than the walking. But when the hunter's cry is heard, and the bird drops the one and the other, and tries the upper ocean, and rises far above the fowler's aim and reach, and wings its way whithersoever it will, then flying is better than either swimming or walking. And yet, fly

ing is no prejudice to swimming, as swimming is no prejudice to walking.

Now, there will be a time when men will act by moral intuition; but that will not be to the prejudice of acting by principle. And acting by principle is not to the prejudice of acting by customs or rules. They all cohere, or adapt themselves severally, in their functions, to the varying wants and conditions of human life and human development. Neither will he who will some day be so sensitively organized in moral elements that he will, by its harmony or discord with his feelings, know what is right or wrong, on that account cease to use principles or rules, and to respect them, although they will act respectively in lower spheres than that of intuition.

Here I enter my protest against those who, in the name of moral intuition, follow their own erratic fancies. Not every effervescence of the brain is a moral intuition, nor every strange sensation. Some men think; and then they think," That is a novel idea ;" and they call it an angelic one. They mistakenly call those thoughts which they are not able to define or limit, intuitions; and yet is it to be rudely said that there is no such thing as intuition?

This whole question of moral intuition is a question largely of the future. There are some things that we know about it; but the subject itself is yet in its obscurity. It is, however, coming to light. There is to be a time when men will overtop the prophets themselves. And it shall come to pass that the last and the least in the kingdom of the future will be greater than the greatest in the kingdom of the past.

Now, there are certain experiences which result from the gradations of education. As men are going up along the scale of education, they change gradually; and men that during all the early part of their life have been subject to rules, and governed by them, begin to substitute their own intelligence for them. A little child is told, "No, you must not go there." Perhaps it is a sweetmeat closet; perhaps it is a little museum; but whatever it is, there are certain things which the child must not do. When, however, the child comes to be fourteen or fifteen years of age, and goes away from home, and begins to be self-respecting, and to be enlightened in regard to conduct, and comes home again, we no longer say to him, "You shall not do this thing or that thing." We begin to say to him, "You

must study the peace of the family;" or, "You must see to it that you do nothing to interfere with health." Here is a principle put into his hand; and he begins to consider what will interfere with health, and what will incommode the other children, and what will promote the peace of the family. Instead of having practical rules, he begins to have principles by which to guide himself.

The processes of rising from these lower stages to higher ones are processes which have peculiar phenomena; and it is with reference. to these that the apostle wrote the chapter which I read in your hearing this morning, and the next, from which I have selected my text.

I. Those who are on the lower plane-namely, the plane where they act from rules-are strongly inclined to believe that those who go higher and act from principles are throwing off religion, and 'becoming infidels. That is, they do not any longer act according to right and wrong as they have been trained to act according to right and wrong; and therefore they are thought to be abandoning right and wrong, and are lawless and ungoverned. As they seem no longer bound by customary rules, which are the sole guide of inferiors, they seem to be without any restraint whatever. And in every age, as men have, by the process of legitimate development, become capable of acting from higher considerations, those below them have been inclined to think that they were acting from lawlessness, because they were not acting from considerations that were in force with those lower ones.

Hence, development and improvement in religious life may seem deterioration. To this day, and in high places, and among educated men, indeed-(men in one sense educated; for a man may be scholastically educated, without being educated morally and spiritually)—you shall find those who are in most serious and honest alarm because persons are breaking away from the modes of religious culture to which they have been accustomed. They suppose such persons breaking away from all religion, simply because they have come to a higher sphere of development in it.

We may imagine that a devout heathen, a conscientious idolater (there are such; there were always such) can not dissociate religion from the use of charms, from idols, from superstitious observances; and if a native near to such an one forsakes the god of his fathers, and turns to Jehovah and to Jesus, and the other does not, the convert may seem as if he was abandoning all religion. He is abandoning the only religion that this heathen man knows any thing about.

And that which takes place in heathenism takes place in Christianity. As you go up, step by step, from the religion which you have held in common with others, it seems to those who are lower down that you have gone away from religion, and not to a higher and better form of it. I can understand how an honest Romanist,

who has been accustomed to practice conscientiously each particular form of worship, binding himself by the thousand services and ceremonies that run through every day of the week, and through all the saints' days, and through all the observances of the church, which may be profitable and indispensable to him in certain stages of development I can understand how he, when one throws these things off, and neither will tell his beads, nor say his prayers, nor respect holy hours nor holy places, nor touch the holy water, nor accept the voice of the priest, but will even overslaugh the sacraments themselves-I can understand how, under such circumstances, it should seem to the one lower down as if there was an abandonment of all religion on the part of the other. And I can understand how a person may be a Protestant, and not use a single one of these ceremonies, and yet be a conscientious doubter, and honest and earnest in the development of a Christian life.

These simple instances may be carried out by you familiarly in every direction. You see how, all the time, children break away from the church of their fathers and mothers. The daughter marries; and if she marries looking up, she will follow her husband. If she marries looking down, she will not. A woman always likes to love upward. Her affection goes out. A woman is a vine. I notice that my morning-glories abandon the lower rails of the trellis, and climb to the topmost points; and if there is a peak still higher, they reach out toward it, and get hold of it. Where there is the highest support, there they are; and they twine around upon themselves and make the crown of it. And so it is with the heart that always wants the light that is higher, and still higher. And it is not strange that parents who are educated to the old worship and the old way are greatly alarmed for the child because he has gone out from their mode of religious development, and that they think he must have gone out from all religious development.

II. On the other hand, while there are dangers of this kind to those who are left behind, there are many dangers incident to a rise from a lower to a higher sphere of religion to those who go up; and it was to those especially that the apostle made the injunction which forms our text. And it is not so strange as you at first think, that improvement in religion in some respects carries with it special dangers. It certainly does. We know very well that sudden improvement and violent changes from barbarism to civilization do not prove beneficial to adults. If you take a Chinaman, twenty-five or thirty years old, away from the customs of his fatherland, and bring him into New-York, and he obtains his livelihood here, what is the result? He is brought into a higher degree of civilization; he is brought under influences that are far, far better than those of the