VII. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there

is Liberty.

BY JOHN HAMILTON THOM.*
*

GENTLEMEN, THE THEOLOGICAL STUDENTS

OF MANCHESTER NEW COLLEGE,

FTER a three days' continuous examination, closing, though far from representing, the toil of a long Session, I shall not tax your patience by a general survey, which would tell you nothing, of the Education you are undergoing-literary, historical, scientific, and philosophical,-nor yet by dwelling on the spirit and purpose in yourselves to use this seed-time of your life, which could not most fitly or profitably be appealed to at this particular moment of pause from intense application. I think I shall best supply what belongs to this time if I briefly set before you the great end you have in view, which may be pursued alike in the same spirit and to the same result, though by differences of method, in your seasons of tension, when your studies are all directed by others, and you have the inestimable privilege of coming face to face in your difficulties with great living teachers; and in your seasons of relaxation, when you naturally take to the pastures on which, with the discipline you have received, you can range for your

An Address to the Students, delivered at the Close of the Session, June 1868, by the Rev. J. H. Thom, Visitor.

selves with intellectual delight and spiritual sympathy, a familiar knowledge of which, to be gained by the thoughtful care of love, will make the richest part of your humanity.

I

You are here to acquire all that learning-I mean a mastery of its elements, and as far as may be of its instruments—an initiation into that learning, which is most needful to instruct and to equip those higher gifts of wisdom and of insight, the love guided by light, which alone can enable you to stand in the great relation of Ministers of God to your fellow-men. use the old prophetic expression, Ministers of God, as the only one that is adequate to express both the quality and the range of the office you aspire to fill, knowing at the same time that, attaching to no one profession, it is an office which in his place and measure God requires every man to fill. It can be yours pre-eminently, only in as far as by your privilege of deliverance from other cares, by your devotion to a life of thought and work freed from the biasses that necessarily beset the partial pursuits of men, to you may belong pre-eminently the divine power of spiritual mediation. As Theology is Queen of the sciences, receives her data from each, learns from all and leans to none, so the minister of religion is placed by society in an equal and independent relation to the various callings of men, that he may be able to discern the Divine operation in them all without himself being under the bent and blinds of any. This is the theory— the idea; how far it falls short of being perfected in practice I need not say. We know that nothing can save men from exposure to the temptations incident to

the functions they discharge, and that, as the ministry of religion on the moral side of it may become a trade, so on the spiritual side it may become a caste; but let us at least understand what a wretched perversion it is of the purposes of man and God when an office designed to deliver from the narrowing power of castes and special callings becomes itself the narrowest and least human, and, because of its pretensions and of the disappointments of men's expectations, the most offensive of them all.

It is altogether true that the primary, the deepest qualifications of this office are not of an intellectual nature, but in the felt nearness of God to your own hearts and conscience. But, even if any man's individual life was enough, which it is not, for the instruction and enriching of humanity, remember the vast difference there is between the possession of spiritual experience and the gift of its conveyance, that the peculiar service men will require from you, without which your office will be unfilled, your lives a weary and oppressive failure, is not that you should be vicariously religious, for all men should be religious and in equal measures; but that when by privilege of your place, of your instruction, of your secured and consecrated time, you have mused before God, in the untroubled light your knowledge gives, till the fire burns, you should be able so to speak as to kindle like fire in the seeking, desiring, hearts of earnest men, who, without your opportunities for raising the Divine spark that is in them into living flame, will yet find the best you can impart only an interpretation of themselves, and out of the treasure of their personality, the gift of the inexhaustible God to each, be able to add

to it something of their own. Spirituality is the aim of every man alike, whatever be his calling; but in addition you aim, if by the grace of God it is in you, at prophetic speech and spiritual interpretation, the power of displaying God, of bringing Him to discernment in His works and in His ways, in the order of Nature and within the life of men. No intensity of spirituality, alone and of itself, without knowledge, without culture, will confer this faculty of teaching; for if you are to reveal God to other men, you must know the steps and follow the methods of His self-revealing-how He has lived in union with our humanity, how He shows Himself, as we are able to bear it, to the unfolding spirit, from the uncorrupted child to the chastened saint the ways of His own approaches to the soul in nature and in history, in the dead mirrors of His works that will reveal the life within them only to a conscious spiritual interpreter, in the living mirrors of his children's hearts, distorted, stained, and partial--until a SON was found who could receive Him face to face, and be what he received.

There is no kind of learning, using the word in its largest sense, that is not instrumental to the perception, and, through the perception, to the communication of God. There is the symbolism of nature in its æsthetic and in its scientific aspects. No great teacher of religion can be without this sensibility--cut off from this medium of personal intercourse with the spirit that lives in Creation. Why are not we able, like our Master, the great Minister of God, to speak parables of Nature? Why does not the spiritual significance of the aspects and processes of the universe, of all common things,

come as easily to us as it did to him? Why are not we as quick to catch the Divine Word, without voice or sound, unspoken to the ear-as quick to discern the face of God, the awful beauty and love under the material vesture that to Him were garments of light? I know that these natural organs of spiritual discernment and communion, like every other, are according to the measure of the gift of God; but they are living powers in all, and all may strengthen them by converse with the exalted minds in which they have existed with something of the clearness and directness of organs of sense-with the great poets of all ages with the psalmists and the prophets and pre-eminently with Christ. In learning this language-to read, to meet the mind of God under this expression of Himself—let the natural faculty be trained and quickened only by His greatest interpreters, whose reality makes itself felt, who tell what they have seen, and speak what they do know-and as you would not be deserted by the Spirit of Truth and repel all reverential natures, catch up no borrowed and second-hand expressions through which God has not spoken to yourselves. This spiritual interpretation of nature and our daily life, which Christ possessed in unexampled measure, and used with commanding simplicity, is vital to the religious teacher because it comes through the vitality of those faculties, the apprehension and desire for living beauty, for living goodness, the thirst for living water, which are akin to the infinite, and are receptive of God.

Of all that learning, of the nature of intellectual acquirement, which can be definitely taught, and for which such ample provision is made in the two Colleges