A Living Body and a Living Spirit.

A SERMON

Delivered at Longwood, on First day, the 9th of Sixth month, 1867, before the Society of Progressive Friends.

BY ROBERT COLLYER,

MINISTER OF THE CHURCH OF THE UNITY, CHICAGO, ILL.

1 CORINTHIANS, xii. 13: "For by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, bond or free.".

THE First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians is, in my opinion, one of the finest pieces of practical wisdom in the whole volume of the Apostolic correspondence, and is hardly paralleled anywhere in its way of dealing with the gravest sins into which our common name and nature can be degraded.

Corinth was in its day one of the most dissolute places in the world. The centre of a wonderful commerce, a Roman colony rooted in Greek soil, the resort of adventurers and speculators from far and wide, with no better safeguards to good morals than were presented in the rapidly rotting walls of paganism, and no better light than the shining of an old Hebrew synagogue, when Paul went there to preach the better gospel in the prime of his life.

It is clear that his fine instinct led him at once to see that he was not to ask those to care for him for whom he had come to care. They had not been used to it, would not see it, and he was far too wise to waste a chance in trying to convince them against their habit. He had friends in business there as tent makers, and he went to work at that to earn his bread; worked at it nearly two years, and on the Sabbath day went to the meeting of his own countrymen. It was to them he began first to tell what was in his heart, timidly, seemingly, for a while, then more boldly, then at last with all boldness, which brought the synagogue down on him like an avalanche. The result was the formation of the new society, to which, years after, he writes this letter. The thing had grown as to numbers, but then it had also become demoralized. It was split up into factions, each of which was as proud as Lucifer. There were men in it whose god was their belly, others so base they got drunk at the sacrament, and others led a life so evil that the heathen could not speak of their sin. Then when they came together it was Babel back again. One had a prophecy, another could say what nobody understood, one could act as a medium, another could heal, and still another could work miracles. There were sages, and cyclopedias, and apostles, and every one insisted on showing his gift in the same meeting and at the same moment, each

crying up his own gift to the exclusion of the rest, as if they had been so many quacks, and that no doubt many of them were.

And we may well suppose that there was but one way for Paul to take in dealing with such a matter. If in a regiment one goes over to the enemy, his name is blotted from the muster-roll. In commerce if a man be

comes a black sheep he has to leave the white flock. It is a part of that self-preservation we speak of as the first law of nature; the perpetual effort of the right to hold its own against the wrong, and of health to guard against disease. Paul did what few have ever done under similar circumstances; he held on to them, every one, to the worst as well as the best, the vilest as well as the purest, while there was any chance whatever of doing them any good, or a thread of hope to hold on by. And I know of nothing in letters more manly and noble than the way in which he manages this most unmanageable matter. There is nothing of the autocrat or the ecclesiastic, or of that worst of all scolds, the clerical, in the way he talks to these men and women. Nothing to be seen but the loving and large-hearted man who had come among them years ago and gone to work at tent-making for fear they should think he wanted what was not his own, but then had wrought and thought for them until they had become as dear to him as his own soul. Indeed he cannot believe that the wrong they do is so much of deliberate intention as by ignorance and incapacity. His own experience is, that when the Spirit of God fills a soul full of its power and grace, it is then as natural to be sober, temperate, chaste, true to your gift and manly in your ways, as it is to eat when you are hungry, and gather warm garments about you when you are freezing cold. He believes, too, that this power of God unto salvation, as he calls it, has already begun to touch the meanest and vilest of the men and women who stand on the outermost edge only of a true manhood or womanhood, and that those who are nearer the centre are bound to do whatever they can to aid their less fortunate fellows, because by one spirit they are all baptized into one body.

And it is this fact, that what the body is to the spirit of a man, every man in any way within the circle of their power for good is to the spirit that has made them what they are, on which he dwells in this letter with the most singular constancy. One section of the letter is devoted to the illustration of this principle-that they are altogether a body, that is to be finally pervaded, purified and made whole by the Spirit of God, through a living union with each other and with Jesus Christ, who was to them the head.

And so it is no wonder to him that in this body there should be a great diversity; that some should be all brain and others all heart; some all ears and others all eyes; some only hands, and others only feet; that there should be some very noble and some very mean members. If they are one body, it is to be expected that this will be so, of course, and it would only be unnatural if it were not so.

So he makes this fact open out two ways. To the noble he says, You can no more find free play for your power without the mean than the noble member in the human frame can; while to the mean he says, You are as helpless alone as the meaner members of the body are without the nobler; and it is only needful that this should be understood and acted on to establish the right relation and use of the whole body to which you all belong. Are you a thinker, good at grappling with what tries the brain, but as void of emotion as a piece of Aberdeen granite? You are what you were made to be, the brain in this body. Or are you all emotion,

ready, like a full cup, to overflow at the slighest shaking, and ready when your heart is stirred for anything? You are the heart, and indispensable to the body; but you are not therefore greatest, as you are given to imagine. You depend directly on the brain you sometimes despise for any life worth living. Or, do you believe in doing things-that the kingdom of God cometh by hand labors? Or do you see it here already, in the heart of the summer flower, or the winter snow-flake; or do you hear it all in music and the melodies of nature? Then you are hand, or foot, or eye, or ear, and as that you are bound to be faithful to the purpose of your creation.

Then as there is a noblest and a meanest membership in this body, yet each is indispensable to the whole; the noble can never despise the mean in this relation, any more than it can in the human frame. If in this proper humanity the brain could ever neglect to nerve the utmost tip of the finger, or the heart to send its blood there, and not instantly find that it suffered some curtailment of its own power, there might be such neglect of the noblest toward the meanest in this larger life with a similar impunity. But let the brain neglect the finger, and that neglect reacts on the brain. Let the heart fail to send its tides to the hand or foot, and there may come a time when it will be in an agony to breaking for the one to work or the other to run, and they will care no more than if they were dead. Nay, if you cut off this vital interaction between the noblest and meanest, they are dead to the purpose and spirit for which they were all made, and there is an end to all fair hope and harmonious action. Then there is one other thing to be noticed: As there is a noblest and meanest, so there is a best and worst, a membership healthy and sound, and a membership dislocated and diseased. These men that are digging their graves with their teeth, these others that are getting drunk in the very meeting, these that are doing things the very heathen blush to mention-all this wild and disgraceful confusion, in the place set apart for the sweet sanctities of worship, is proof that in your body there are diseased members, and yet members that still belong to you. You can no more alter that than you can alter the membership of your own fearful and wonderful frame. Now as members of your body there are two ways of dealing with them. You can slive them off and have done with them, and do the best you can without them; or you can patiently, carefully and wisely do the best you can to cure them. Do just what a man will do with his hand or foot when it is diseased; hold on while there is a spark of hope, and then hope against hope, and suffer and bear, and pray and pay; and if you cannot make a perfect cure, make the best you can, though it be stiff and scarred and halt forever; for as much as you save of that member you save of yourself. Now this I conceive to be the intimate truth of God about the relation of man to man and of societies to society, to-day, just as much as it ever was. It is not to be doubted, for instance, by any well-read man that we in Europe and America have had to suffer from the ravages of the cholera because the heart and brain of the world at these centres has neglected its own extremities at the mouth of the Ganges in India; or that the neglect of the peasantry, by the nobles of Ireland and Germany, for ten centuries, found one of its results in the thick carnage that filled with dead the slums and rookeries of our great western cities last summer.

Mr. Baker, in his new book of travels, has some new things to tell us of the horrible sin of man-stealing in Africa. It is not hard as you read to see how it was first of all for an indifference in the heart and brain of

this nation to the injury done to the man away off at the outermost edge of our common humanity, that at last the angel smote with death the first-born in the homes of North America. In this world-wide sense of the truth, then, it is true that, whether we like it or no, by one spirit we are all baptized into one body, whether we be Jew or Gentile, bond or free. We cut the connection at our peril. We despise the worst as we despise a dislocated or festering finger. In the whole vast range of lite we are every one members one of another. And I doubt not that, in some deep way we cannot at all understand, the condition of every man at the torrid is interacting upon the condition of every man at the frigid "For so the whole round earth is everywhere

zones:

Bound with gold chains about the feet of God."

But it is in a closer sense than this that this fact comes home to you and me. This man Paul appears always to keep one thing before him close and clear. It is not that the noble will suffer if they neglect the base, so much as that if they will they can save them. In this Gospel of which he was an apostle this power to save men from their sin was the great central, vital thing. It was what a pure life-blood and abundant vitality is in a man. Once get it rushing and tingling through every vein and nerve of the diseased or dead member, and it will bring new life. Old things will pass away. All things will become new. These men and women, bad as they are-gluttons, drunkards, fornicators, fanatics-touched by this renovating power, brought within the circle of this mighty, merciful, healing spirit, can be saved. Let there be ever so thin a thread of this blessing of the better life flowing from the good to the bad, and there is hope. It is always the good man, the good life, and the good God on the one side, and the evil on the other. And so the charge to the pure is, Get hold, if you can, of the impure; to the strong, Grapple on to the weak, with a love that in itself is life, believing all things, bearing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things, and never failing; and then what you want to do and ought to do will be done.

Now then this is the thing that comes home to us as the conclusion of the whole matter. We can consider, if we will, our relation to the whole world, or to our own land, or country, or neighborhood, or our relation to all as men and women. The same thing must always meet us at every turn; that if we are reformers and so of course reformed, there is a power in us that can flow out to those at the extremities of our influence, and save them-if not altogether, then as much as they can be saved. Deformed members,like enough, and scarred, ready to break out again, to give trouble and care and pain to us. We can hold on to them in the best way possible to us all," and faintly trust the larger hope." To know that what we are doing is not done merely for that wretched drag of a body, but for a soul that in some dim, blind way is trying to attach itself to something stronger, some thread perhaps of loving-kindness and tender mercy, and climb up by it as well as it can out of the pit. Would you know what is my faith about the brother, or friend, man or woman, you tried to save, but who went down out of your grasp every time, until at last they sank out of sight, and left you with nothing but a bitter sense of failure, and a feeling that after all the poor lost thing must carry wherever it goes some spark of gratitude for what you tried to do? I will tell you. I believe that if they are not out of the pit already, when you enter the world to come, instead of your sitting down to sing because you are saved while they

are lost, there will come a voice out of the mystery bidding you go down into hell to seek that one soul. And somehow the feeling that it is just what you want to do, as a part of your heavenly felicity, will come warm and full to your heart; and as you go, the way will open before you, and the horrors of the dark world will stand back. And then, away in there you will find those you are seeking, waiting and watching for your coming, never able to shake off the hope that some day you would come; waiting and watching with sad, patient, hungry eyes for deliverance. And your arms and heart will be very strong, so that the gates of hell shall not prevail against you. Indeed, friends, there are some that I only fairly begin to hope for when they die. Born in the thick of the sins that easily beset them, with a nature that needs the most constant care of the good and pure, bitten every day they live with the virus of the most baleful vices, it is only when the Eternal Mercy has caught them out of the world in which all the chances were against them that the first fair hope begins to dawn for a better life.

Still it is notable again that while Paul has some consciousness of this, and a sense that there may be those in that depraved society in Corinth it is useless in this life trying to save, he lets no such sense for a moment chill his effort. Now is the day of salvation. This whole conviction centred on two things: first, while there is life there is hope; and second, hope is likely to come to its fair fruition through the best endeavor of the whole body-head, heart, hands, eyes, ears-every power still good is to be turned to the salvation of whatever beside in the body is smitten with this leprosy of sin. No amputation, no sliving away, while any life in the member holds out a hope, and no holding back of any power by which such hope can be realized.

Now, I am sure you have not mistaken me so far as to believe that the final application of my words to saints and sinners alike is only to be found within the circle of this meeting. In a deeper sense than we can realize, as a few immaculate men and women who come here to say, "God, we thank thee that we are not as others," I affirm that there are members of this Longwood meeting in all the bride wells and prisons in Eastern Pennsylvania, and in the lowest slums of Philadelphia; men and women doing things the heathen would blush to name.

Your Society is spread out far and wide by the natural and noble breadth you have given it; but by the breadth the Spirit of God has given it, it spreads out wider still. For it includes all the men, women, and children in this land who can be made better by the power and life that centres in this place, and can be saved in any way or ever so little by its agency. And sure I am that, once fairly believing this, you will not be content only to meet here once a year, or once a week, and be a finger pointing out a safe and good landing to those that are sinking down the third time into the deep waters; a tongue talking about the bad and good, and bearing good "testimonies," but no whole earnest body, plunging in at any risk to save those that are lost. At any risk, I say, friends, because I would rather see a man smitten with the leprosy himself in trying to save others, and die of it, if that be possible, than to see him a saint of as pure a saintliness as John through secluding himself from every sight and sound that might speck the spotlessness of his robe, and letting the fiend have his fling. And it only needs that there be in this body of yours, first, what this man wanted to see in Corinth, a real union of every power for good against every power for evil, to make you all you can be; that you shall not rely in the least on the Lord in what you