1 A. Chandler, Faith and Experience, 102.
JEREMIAH vi. 16 21
the Father we are coming to know Him more and more intimately and fully. We cannot stand in the old paths in that sense.
T[ There is no saint in the Congregational denomination held — and deservedly held — in higher honour than Richard Baxter, who suffered imprisonment for his loyalty to the truth. Yet no man was more fiercely assailed by the rigid doctrinaires of his day as being a heretic. And his biographer, in defending him, uses this quaint illustration. " The discussion of truth and the agitation of doctrines have always resulted in good to the Church and to the world. Even the waters of Bethesda in the very house of mercy itself needed to be agitated and disturbed to renew their healing power. It is, therefore, unseemly in theologians that, when some Doctor Angclicus descends among them and agitates the settled waters of their dull and stagnant orthodoxy, then always a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, and withered, creep from the five points of their five porches to brandish their crutches against the intruder, or to mutter their anathemas against the innovation, instead of welcoming the benignant visitor, sharing in the healthiness of the agitation, and becoming healed of whatsoever disease they had." You see, then, that if you are brave enough to trouble the settled waters of the theological Bethesda, you must expect to be threatened with the crutches of the very men you are anxious to heal. But you will remember that, long centuries ago, the Apostle Paul had to defend himself to the governor of the Jews because, as he said, " After the way that they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers." And you will remember that, when the Catholic Church excommunicated Wycliffe, he was bold enough to say that, when they had first made Christ a heretic, it was a little matter to call His followers by the same name. Yes, there are men who would make a heretic of Christ. Some of the saintliest heroes who ever lived have been driven out of the Churches because, " after the Way that men called heresy, so worshipped they the God of their fathers." It may be the highest honour to be called a heretic, if it comes from your loyalty to the living Christ and your impatience of phrases and forms that have concealed His reality, instead of expressing His relation to God and man.1
2. What, then, is the old way? It is simply the way of Tightness. It is the good way because it is the way of goodness ; it is the way of the keeping of the commandments of God. What Jeremiah meant was this: if the children of Israel were to be
1 C. Silvester Horn*.
22 THE OLD PATHS
redeemed they must go back to the old paths of righteousness. They would never be saved by mere forms of ritual. They must go back to the old paths of right doing. " Do justly," says the prophet Micah, " do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God." And Jeremiah comes to the people in their distress, in their moral and spiritual degradation, and he says to them : " There is just one hope for you, you must begin to do right, you must abandon all your unfaithful ways, you must go back to the old paths God has laid down from all eternity for man's life — the paths of justice and truth."
T[ Even an old house has a haunting grace enough, as a place where men have been born and died, have loved and enjoyed and suffered ; but a road like this, ceaselessly trodden by the feet of pilgrims, all of them with some pathetic urgency of desire in their hearts, some hope unfulfilled, some shadow of sickness or sin to banish, some sorrow making havoc of home, is touched by that infinite pathos that binds all human hearts together in the face of the mystery of life. What passionate meetings with despair, what eager upliftings of desirous hearts, must have thrilled the minds of the feeble and travel-worn companies that made their slow journeys along the grassy road ! And one is glad to think, too, that there must doubtless have been many that returned gladder than they came, with the burden shifted a little, the shadow lessened, or at least with new strength to carry the familiar load. For of this we may be sure, that, however harshly we may despise what we call superstition, or however firmly we may wave away what we hold to have been all a beautiful mistake, there is some fruitful power that dwells and lingers in places upon which the hearts of men have so concentrated their swift and poignant emotions — for all, at least, to whom the soul is more than the body, and whose thoughts are not bounded and confined by the mere material shapes among which, in the days of our earthly limitations, we move uneasily to and fro.1
3. This is the very truth which Christ always uttered. When the scribe came to Him demanding "What must I do to have eternal life ? " He answered at once, " Keep the commandments." And the Apostles after Him used the same language. " Circum- cision is nothing," said St. Paul, " and un circumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God." Nothing can take the place of that. And if the gospel was new, it was new only in this that it made possible the keeping of the commandments of