CHRISTENDOM AND HEATHENDOM.

A SERMON.

BY REV. E. E. HALE.

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?" PSA. ii. I.

THIS is the beginning of a strain of contempt and of triumph, with which King David sings of all the world but his own little Israel.

Just now crowned himself, after a fashion, crowned almost by his own hands, as King of a handful of people who are every now and then overrun by Philistines, and in the respite from the Philistines have to fight for life against the Arabs, a King who knows that Egypt on the south of him, and Assyria on the east of him, would count his kingdom as only one of the pettiest provinces in their domains,—such a King as this, knowing that his God, his Jehovah, his Lord, is worshiped only in Israel, and is scorned by Philistine, Arab, Egyptian, and Assyrian alike, if, indeed, they have ever heard of him, such a King, whose God has no temple but an old chest, which can be put on an ox-cart and trundled from hamlet to hamlet, as the enemies of the country invade it, — sings with a majestic triumph, which has long since entered into the songs and praises of the world:

"Ask of me," saith the Lord,

"And for thine inheritance

I will give thee the heathen,

And the uttermost parts of the earth

For thy possession!"

"Be wise now, therefore, O ye kings ;

Be warned in time, ye judges of the earth.

Serve the Lord with fear,

And, in your joys, rejoice with trembling."

It is worth remark, as we pass, that, in a fashion, the heathen and the uttermost parts of the earth have seen this praise fulfilled,

* Preached at the South Congregational Church, Boston, on occasion of the National Conference at Saratoga.

in a fashion, as far as that physical triumph of arms, which I suppose David had in mind: "Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron. Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."

The peoples who sing that song in their liturgies, and who worship, or pretend to worship, that God of Zion, have for centuries now been the political masters of the world. India, Africa, the Islands of the Sea, our own America, China, and, at last, Japan, have seen their war-ships and peace-ships, negotiators and soldiers, enter their ports and forts, their deserts, their market places; and have seen the symbols of the worship of this Jehovah,— nay, have heard the echoes of this very psalm, as tokens of the ideas of the governing races of this world. If that were all that David had in mind, his scornful prophecy of the weakness of heathendom and atheism, though it were throned in the pålaces of Nineveh or of Memphis, has been completely fulfilled.

But it is not of that victory of arms, or policy, or merchandise, that we have to speak here to-day. It is of the larger triumph — the triumph of Ideas of which these victories are a type, indeed; but a part only, and an inferior part. I believe it becomes us and is necessary for us to consider that victory with care, and to sort out and set in order the requisite preparation for it.

I. The atheists and heathen of to-day are not the Princes of Philistia or Edom or Assyria or Egypt; or if those princes were atheists or heathen, it would be of little consequence, in comparison, to anybody but themselves and their people. To them it is of very great consequence. But the atheists and heathen, who are of much more consequence than they, do not rule with sceptres, nor are their heads uneasy under crowns. They are atheists and heathen who live all around us,- who live in all Christian as in all unchristian lands, and hold much wider sway in the laws and government of the world than did the men who worshiped Dagon, or Baal, Ammon, as Princes of Philistia and Assyria and Egypt.

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And, on the other hand, the believers in an Unseen God, today, have a religion simpler, purer, and of which their conception is more home-like and natural than was the religion of the people of David, for whom he sang this song of triumph.

So that it is fair to say that the scale of the eternal conflict

between the heathen who rage, and God's children who adore, is a grander scale than it ever was. Far grander is it than even the fancy of David painted it; as the results involved, in a world so much larger than his world, are more noble and comprehensive.

The heathen, of whom you and I see most, the men and women who do not worship our Father in Heaven, are those prosperous and well-satisfied heathen who worship themselves, or the works of their own hands; or, in cases especially exalté or transcendental, they worship an ideal of something they are going to have, as the office to which they mean to be elected, or the palace they mean to build, or the fortune they mean to create in the future. I know such men, who pay respect and reverence even to their own books, nay, even to their own articles in the newspapers. You know such men, who, in the same way, set up a certain office which they mean to be chosen to, and worship the idea of that, bend to the attainment of it the whole of life, its aspiration, and its energy. I could name a man, again, who, in his determination to accumulate wealth, denied himself a home, or what you and I would call a home, would not marry, would not build a house, would hardly wear decent clothes, or eat a decent meal. The particular men whom I have in mind, who set up such little fetiches for worship, have nothing left to give to the homage of God, or the love of him. I sometimes think that such men are the worse off for the existence of churches, of a clergy, and of other institutions of religion; for I observe that such men say and generally believe that we who do pray to God, and try to persuade other people to honor him, are simply a set of selfish impostors. They measure us by themselves, and so they come to believe that we are seeking our purposes as they seek theirs, and that the whole fabric of Religion and its institutions is got up by priests for their own behoof. You will find that very definitely stated in Volney's Ruins, and all that class of books, and I could take you to half a dozen public meetings in Boston, I think, where the same thing will be said to-day. But, generally speaking, this class of the heathen do not trouble themselves about meetings or statements. They carry their gods round in their pockets. Their worship is solitary worship, and

they have no wish to extend it farther. This class of the heathen is not to be spoken of as small, or powerless. If anybody could make them act together, they would be very powerful; for there are a great many of them. But, then, no one of them will act with anybody else if he can help it. They are living every man for himself, and by that law the strength of union and harmony becomes impossible.

So far as such people have any faith, it may be said to be faith in themselves. "My right arm is my God," as Turnus said, when he refused to offer any other prayer.

II. I have classed them as heathen, because they have some object of worship; but there exist, also, all around us, those who are without God in the world, because they are logically dissatisfied. They cannot demonstrate God, and they are really affected by the atheistical argument which would demonstrate him out of his universe.

I know that theologians are apt to say that there never was an atheist; sentimental theologians say it a good deal. And I know what they mean, and what they mean is true. They mean that there never was a man of any sort of sense who did not see order in the world. Every man must see that it moves by law of some sort, or system of some sort; that it is possible always to reduce forces to one force, or laws to simpler law. In that sense everybody believes in a unity in nature, and in that sense everybody believes in a God. But for all that, I do not see the good sense of saying there are no atheists in the world. When David Hume went from England to Paris, he was very well received as an English free-thinker by the free-thinkers there. Baron D'Holbach asked him to dinner, and he met, as the story says, sixteen of the more celebrated of the Cyclopædists. Hume called himself a deist, a believer in God, who did not believe that Jesus Christ had any mission from God. Hume, in the decorous way of the English free-thinkers of his time, said to Baron D'Holbach, as the conversation turned on philosophy, that he supposed there was never an atheist in the world. "Pardon me," said the polite Frenchman, "but here are sixteen at the table with you." That seems to me to have been the frank answer. And I think it is a great pity if the men of faith in our time, the men

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who stand on "hard pan," or on the Eternal Rock, should deceive themselves, by any sentimental use of language, into thinking that everybody else stands where they stand. I suppose the truth to be that a large number of thinking men are willing to say that they have no belief in a God who has such consciousness of their existence, such love or hate, such justice or mercy, or who has such care of his children as men have assigned to God. Theology has been so badly taught, and religion has been so badly preached, that there is a very large number of such men. They are without God in the world, not because they want to be, but because they are wholly dissatisfied with the arguments they have heard in the matter, and they do not suppose that there are any better. And, which is much more important, they have not tried that vital experiment themselves from which real knowledge in this matter comes. They have not sought for him, and therefore they have not found him. That is, "Ye have not sought for me with all your hearts."

These are those heathen who rage, and those people who imagine vain things against God and against his anointed, with whom we have most to do. And what seems to me most extraordinary in the religious aspects of our time, is that so large a proportion of the men of faith, and especially of those consecrated and ordained to the extension of faith, seem to be ignorant of the existence of such people. To speak in round numbers, I suppose that half the men in America have not any working faith in God. I mean that they go and come without any reference that they could themselves trace to his present will. By far the larger part of these are those people who have determined to live by and for themselves. The smaller part, and much the more interesting part, are those who for whatever cause - have thought God out of their minds and hearts, have by intellectual process dismissed him from their lives. For instance, what seems to me extraordinary is, that when I read the religious newspapers I find so little thought given to these two classes of men. I have an opportunity, if I choose, to read a hundred such newspapers every week. I find them all, without an exception, engaged in the arrangements of their own organizations, and, in less degree, in attacks upon other organizations. But with regard to the great mass of irreligious poverty, of con