Lecture XVIII. The Nature of Prayer-Venial and Mortal Sins

1 John V. 13-17.

These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God. And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask any thing according to His will, He heareth us: and if we know that He hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him. If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death.

WE are approaching the conclusion of the Epistle; the words, ‘These things have I written,’ indicate that St. John is about to give an explanation of its general purpose, if not a summary of its contents. Thus much is obvious on the first reading of them. His object was not to make proselytes of those who lay outside the Christian Church. He addressed himself to ‘those who believed on the name of the Son of God.’ They were baptized into that Name; they publicly confessed that Name; it was the Name which drew on them the charge of blasphemy from Jewish rulers and scribes; it was the Name, when associated with the person of Jesus the Crucified, which excited the contempt or hostility of the worshippers of the Greek divinities. All acts of united worship among the disciples, all their sufferings, recalled this Name.

But if they had no need to be convinced of its worth or its power, what good was an Apostolical Epistle to do them? St. John makes answer: ‘That ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.’ You will wonder at the last clause. It sounds as if he proposed to convert them to a faith which they were possessed of already. Before you determine that it is actually so empty of meaning, consider the first clause. That, at all events, is not a commonplace. ‘Ye have eternal life.’ Not ‘ye may have it; sometime hence this unspeakable blessing may be bestowed on you, or on such of you as deserve it.’ But, ‘it is yours now. The gift has been assured to you.’ I think many Christians of his day and of ours would rather be startled by the strangeness than by the simplicity of this assertion; would deem it very unlike the notions which they had associated with their traditional faith.

Yet it cannot be said that St. John is introducing a new doctrine at the close of his letter. In the first verses of it he adopted the very language which we meet with here. The Eternal Life is said to have been manifested that they might partake of it, and that so their joy might be full. There has been no inconsistency in any of the sentences which followed that early sentence. All have represented men in Jesus Christ. All have been signifying that to believe in Christ is to believe in one who has the Eternal Life of God, that Life which is intended for man who is made in the image of God, that life the loss of which is Eternal Death. The verse with which I concluded the last Lecture had the same burden: ‘He that hath the Son of God hath life. He that hath not the Son of God hath no life.’

You can understand, then, why the Apostle wrote to those who believed in the Name of the Son of God, ‘that they might believe in the Name of the Son of God.’ He does not wish to rob them of any faith they had. He does not seek to persuade them that it was good for nothing. It meant far more, not less, than they supposed. He would show them how much it meant, what rights they had which they were not claiming. And this not merely to increase their comfort, not even to enlarge the scope of their knowledge; but to save the belief they had from degenerating into the pride which is the enemy of all belief. If their faith was in a Christ in whom there was not Eternal Life for all men, who only might bestow something called Eternal Life on certain persons, hereafter; they might soon learn to compliment themselves on their superiority to the Jews and Heathens who had not this faith. They might find a certain comfort in looking forward to their exclusion from the blessings which were in reserve for the chosen flock. And yet, all the while, their notion of these blessings would become more and more vague; the Eternal Life would be a mere expression for a certain amount of conceivable or inconceivable happiness. Strange, no doubt, that we should find a compensation for the distance, indistinctness, unreality of our hopes for ourselves, in thinking that other men are cut off from them altogether! Strange;—and yet no reader of history, no reader of his own heart, will deny that our dark unregenerate nature does find a miserable consolation in this thought; or that it mixes in fearful confusion with thoughts which have their root in the regenerate will, with the zeal and affection which God Himself has inspired!

St. John permits no vagueness and no exclusiveness. He tells them of a life, an actual divine life, which has been manifested in the Son of Man to men. This is, this must be, the blessing which God desires for His creatures, which God only can bestow upon them. This must be that which they want here. The full fruition of this Life, separated from all the vanity, selfishness, death which mingles with it now, must be what the saints enter into when they cast off their mortal rags. St. John then wrote that all who believed in the Son of God then, or should believe on Him hereafter, might believe in Him in this moral, human, divine sense; not in a sense which might become immoral, inhuman, ungodly.

‘And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us: and if we know that He hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him. He has told us that we have eternal life. What then have we to ask for? Is there anything better than eternal life?’ Such a question as this would be a most reasonable one if Eternal Life were what so many of us take it to be, a state of repose after toil, a state of security not of dependence. But who that uses language faithfully associates Life with inanition, and not rather with the highest activity of all powers and energies? Or who that has learnt from bitter experience that to be independent of God is to be in death, can dream of a state which shall have any worth or any security apart from Him? No; ‘Ask and ye shall receive’ is a higher promise than ‘Ye shall receive without asking.’ And it is the climax of all St. John has been telling us about the gift of Life to say, that ‘if we ask anything according to God’s will, He heareth us.’

But some one may say, ‘We gain nothing by such asking as that. No doubt, if we pray according to God’s will, we are right. But why might not we let that Will take its course without our prayers?’ The thought is so natural that, after we have replied to it in ourselves a thousand times, we find it starting up again as strong as ever. In fact, no replies of ours to it are of much avail. God answers to it out of the whirlwind. Sufferings of body and soul drive us to pray, whether we expect much good from the effort or not. We pray, because we feel that things are not as they ought to be; we pray, because we secretly confess or faintly hope that there may be some Power in the Universe which would set them right. We have very dim and confused notions what that Power can be, or why things should have gone into disorder in spite of it, or whether it is itself the author of our misery. Nevertheless, we pray; the sense of evil goading us on. If we stop at this point of knowledge, dark superstitions, such as I spoke of in former Lectures, gather round us, and take possession of us. A number of different Minds and Wills seem to be ruling the universe and tearing it in pieces; which are in favour of us, which are adverse to us, we cannot tell; by degrees the sense of guilt within us makes us deem all as our enemies; the only question is, how we can disarm them or escape from them. Then comes the Revelation of Jesus Christ. The Son of God enters into our world. He finds, as we do, that it is full of darkness, strife, enmity. But He says,—He proves,—that this darkness, strife, enmity, are not according to the Will of His Father. Instead of succumbing to them Himself, instead of calling upon men to submit to them as decrees of an immutable destiny, He is fighting with them every hour. His death, which looks as if it were their final triumph, is the proclamation of their defeat. A WILL, then, is declared to be at the foundation of all things, at the foundation of the whole visible and invisible, material and spiritual Creation, which is a Will to Good and only to Good; which is a Will that all should be saved and should come to the knowledge of the Truth.

But this is not all. That endless question, Why did not Omnipotence prevent the existence of evil, is settled for the Conscience, the Heart, the Reason of men. Whatever restless thing in us craves for another settlement, they declare, ’No omnipotent decree can take the evil from a voluntary creature; can make him blessed. The Will of man was made in the image of God; it must be in harmony with that Will or be miserable. No power but Love can establish that harmony. The Revelation of Jesus Christ declares that Love is the power of God; that Love is at work to restore this harmony; it is all we want to be told; what remains is, to ask with boldness and confidence that all wills which are struggling with this Will may be reduced into obedience; that whatever disturbances in the natural world, the world of involuntary creatures, have been the results of our rebellion, may first be turned into instruments for quelling it, and then may be removed for ever.

Is it nothing, then, to be told, ‘that if we ask anything according to God’s will, He heareth us; and that if He heareth us, we know that we have the petitions which we desired of Him?’ Nothing!—is it not everything? If we believed that, would not every thought of our hearts be a prayer, our work a prayer? Should not we be certain, that whatever tyranny, anarchy, falsehood, there is in the universe, or in ourselves, must be contrary to the Will of God; that when we ask for the removal of that, He heareth us; that however long the struggle may seem to us, we actually have what we desired of Him? The enemy is doomed; from the judgment-seat of Christ its death has been pronounced; only God would have us working with Him for its extinction; only He would have us understand, and act upon the understanding, that all which is against Him is against us; that all which aims to set up another Ruler instead of Him, is aiming to make us wretched slaves. Prayer, then, is not the howl of a set of Baal worshippers, crying and cutting themselves with stones, to a Power which they want to compel into consent with their own wild, selfish, cruel inclinations. It is the response of creatures—conscious of these wild, selfish, cruel inclinations, conscious of having yielded to them, conscious of having thus set themselves at war with the perfect and living Will—to the fixed resolutions of that Will, to its hatred of whatever is perverse and base, to its gracious, gentle, and therefore all-prevailing inspirations.

Many are inclined to pass over this sentence (which is the fulfilment and practical application of all we have heard from St. John concerning the Love of God and its manifestation in Jesus the Anointed Son, and the gift of His Anointing Spirit to bind His family into one) as if it signified almost nothing. They treat the next two verses differently. Upon these they dwell; upon these they found conclusions. I will dwell upon them too; they are worthy of all the thought we can give them.

‘If any man see his brother sin a sin that is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it.¹ All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death.’

These sentences have led to a distinction which has more affected the science and the practice of Christian Morals than any other that I know of. You cannot open a book of Devotion written by a Roman Catholic, or any of their numerous books on Casuistry, for the rich or the poor, without meeting with the phrases, Mortal and Venial sin, and without some announcement of what sins are mortal and what venial. I have no language to express the amount of positive transgression, of self-deception, of tyranny, which, I think, has been caused by the doctrines and decrees that have been promulgated in different ages, and are promulgated now, on this subject. My impulse might be simply to denounce them. But I have learnt from my own experience, and from the experience of far wiser men, that this is never a safe or right way of treating prevalent opinions and habits of thought, if they seem to us ever so mischievous.

In the last volume of the Sermons preached at Brighton by the late Mr. Robertson, there is one remarkable even among its noble and beautiful companions, ‘On Absolution.’ It does, I am sure, express the innermost mind and heart of the writer. Profoundly impressed, far more profoundly than those who are loudest in their declamations against Romanists, with the moral evil which has flowed from the maxims and practices respecting Confession and Absolution, that are sanctioned among them, he yet maintains that the fullest justice must be done to the principle which is at the root of these maxims and practices; otherwise there can be no deliverance from the superstitions of votaries or the assumption of priests. This remark, which comes to us from the grave, or rather, from one of that redeemed company who are witnesses and helpers of our struggles upon earth, is just as true in the case before us as in the one to which it was originally applied.

The distinction of mortal and venial sins will be, as it has been, the cause of indulgence to sin, of utter confusion as to the nature of sin and of deliverance from sin, of money value being set upon sins, if we do not show what there is in this distinction which commends itself to the conscience, which is demanded by the conscience. St. John’s words, I believe, contain what we need. If we consider them carefully, we shall see how strikingly his teaching respecting the sin unto death illustrates and vindicates that teaching respecting the answer to prayer, which has come under our notice already.

‘If we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us.’ ‘How!’ one of his readers might exclaim. ‘Did I not ask fervently, by day and by night, for the forgiveness of that friend or brother whom I saw going fearfully astray? And was it not all useless? Did he not, so far as I can judge, die in his sins? Were not some of his last acts some of his worst? Is it not, then, the Will of God to forgive sins? How can I judge of His will from the cross of Christ, if this is not His Will?’ People must have said this then; for they are saying it now. It is one of the profoundest causes of distress to earnest, true-hearted women, mothers and sisters; to them, because their affection, their compassion, yes, and their faith, is generally stronger than ours, and because it nearly always takes an individual direction. Therein lies the power and the weakness of women. Their devotion ought to be balanced,—alas! how rarely it is!—by a deeper feeling on our parts of the plagues and sins which are consuming nations, Churches, mankind; of the war which God is carrying on with these; of the sacrifices of individual life which He makes that the greater ends of His government may be accomplished. Out of these two elements together might a real Christian communion be formed, because the love of the brother would be sanctioned by a perfect trust in the Will of the Father.

That you may see better how such a doubt as that I have supposed might be met, consider how an ordinary father would answer the complaint of a daughter who had been pleading for the restoration of a reprobate brother to the house from which his offences had banished him. He would say, ‘My dear child! you are quite right to ask me to forgive this boy of mine. You know how I care for him; you know how entirely it is my wish to have him amongst us. I have forgiven him one offence after another; you felt, and I felt, that by showing him forgiveness I was taking the best course to bend him and to attach him to us. That is true up to a certain point. But there are offences about which it is not true. There are offences implying an alienation of heart from me and from you all, which the manifestation of forgiveness will not remove. I believe he has committed such offences. I believe it would not do him good, or you, his brothers and sisters—I believe it would not be right in me to send him word that he might come to us, after he has fallen into this state. We must leave him alone; we must appear to forget him; wait and see whether my treatment or yours will be the most satisfactory in the end.’ I can suppose the daughter adding, in great sadness, ‘But, father, how can I know whether his offences are of the first kind or the last?’ ‘My dear child,’ he would answer, ‘you cannot know, and I do not require you to know. Leave the judgment of that to me. Ask as you like for your brother; I shall not blame your ignorance; only if, in the greater wisdom for which I am sure you give me credit, I decide that he has done the acts to which your kind of discipline would be unsuitable, do not fancy that my mind is different from what in all other cases, in all your past experience, you have found it to be.’

I believe this human analogy is a strictly accurate one. It would not be accurate—it would not apply at all—if St. John had spoken of sins unto death, as those which make it impossible for a man to repent and turn to God, of sins not unto death as those for which a man may be forgiven. But he says nothing of the kind. He limits himself to the case of one who is asking for another; asking when that person has given no apparent signs of wishing to be a better man. What the petitioner desires is the restoration of such a one to the communion of the Christian family, to a participation in the Life of Christ. In many cases, he is told, the wish—the God-inspired wish—will have an accomplishment. The sinner will be brought into the fold. But there are cases in which the separation is more complete, when there has been an habitual resolute separation from all that is good and true; when good is abhorred, and evil becomes good. ‘I do not,’ he says, ‘speak of such cases. I do not hold out promises concerning them which may be disappointed. All unrighteousness is sin; every departure from the commandment is a separation from Christ.’ ‘He that sinneth,’ as he said before, ‘has not seen Him, neither known Him.’ But ‘there is a sin not unto death;’ one which interrupts communion, but does not destroy it. Every one’s conscience, I think, recognises this difference. Each one of us knows how little indulgences of bitterness, of insincerity, of distrust, harden into states of mind. Each one may have felt the death creeping on him, may recollect how its progress has been arrested. He cannot, therefore, wonder if he is told that the same process goes on in other men; that the all-seeing eye detects when the disease which was functional has become organic and mortal; that He acts upon that knowledge.

“You perceive not only that St. John does not say what acts are mortal, what are venial or pardonable, but that it is essential to his object that he should not say it. What he is teaching is entire dependence on the Will of God, entire confidence in that Will; a readiness, therefore, to trust Him even in cases where He seems to refuse what He has promised to grant. He is teaching also that death is the refusal of that Eternal Life which is given us in Christ. It must, therefore, go on in the soul of a man. Who can say that an external act which is no flagrant enormity, which does not look like an enormity at all, which is even admired by men, may not be hastening this death? For what can hasten it so much as hypocrisy; what sin can be so mortal as that? Yet if it were set down in a thousand books as mortal, what would the hypocrite be the better for the information; how would any one be the better able to convict him of it?

The reason why persons have attempted what St. John would not attempt, what it would have been inconsistent with every one of his maxims to attempt, is this: The Church claims to have communion with the life of God. This is the meaning of its Sacraments, especially of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. If it does not signify that such a communion has been established between God and us in His Son, it signifies nothing. We do not claim too much for it, when we say that this fellowship is involved in it and expressed by it; on the contrary, by making that assertion we secure it from degenerating into a charm or ceremony; we do not allow ourselves or any to find a virtue in the mere service apart from Him of whom it testifies. But if it has this character, to cut men off from this Sacrament is as much as denying that they are partakers of the life of Christ. What an awful proclamation! Yet if no person is banished from the communion of the Church, men may be recognised as belonging to it who would be excluded from any society in the world, whom decent unbelievers would utterly refuse to mix with. It is because the sacrifice of Christ is complete, and because the communion of the Church declares it to be for all, that this disgrace should not be suffered. Men who have committed flagrant transgressions have said publicly,—‘We renounce the life of Christ; we do not choose to be His servants:’ the Church with fear and trembling must ratify their decree against themselves.

This is what St. Paul told the Corinthians they must do—what he blamed them for not having done without his authority—in the case of a man who had committed incest with his father’s wife. Such a man, he said, must be delivered to Satan. In other words, he must be told, ‘You have chosen the devil for your master: you must go and serve him, You must receive his wages; you must learn that these wages are death.’ He does not shrink from that very expression. He says he must be given up for the DESTRUCTION of the flesh. That is as much as saying, the man had committed a mortal sin. Here, then, seems to be a precedent for pronouncing what are mortal sins. A man reading this passage may ask triumphantly, How can there be any discipline in a Church such as St. Paul demands, such as the consciences of us all declare there ought to be, if we are not able to affirm, that certain transgressions are grounds for excommunication; that certain transgressions may be pardoned by the Church because they are pardoned by God?

I state the case as strongly as I can, in favour of making this arrangement of offences. And now let us see what St. Paul’s precedent, which I admit to be decisive, actually says.—1. Hear the end of the passage. The man is delivered to Satan for the destruction of this flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. The man has committed a mortal sin. By treating it with righteous severity, it may ultimately be found not mortal. God may remove it, though we cannot. 2. Hear the sequel of the story. In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians St. Paul recurs to this very case. He declares his belief that the notorious offender is penitent; he desires the Church to forgive him; he forgives him; he and they are to assure him of Christ’s forgiveness. 3. Consider what St. Paul omits to do, as well as what he does. The Church of Corinth was the one which stood most in need of directions respecting the nature of moral offences, as well as respecting the treatment of offenders. To no Church does St. Paul speak so much on these subjects; for none does he enter into so many minute questions of life and conduct. And yet nowhere, in either of his Epistles, does he make a classification of sins; not when he had this one crime of incest forced upon his notice does he put it into a catalogue, and say, You are to reckon it with this and this and this mortal crime; you can distinguish it from that and that and that venial crime.

The precedent of St. Paul, considered in all possible aspects, proves that he did not conceive he had any authority as an Apostle, as one who had had a revelation of Jesus Christ, to lay down rules and maxims about the sins which should be pardoned and should not. And he makes us feel why he would not, why he dared not, exercise such authority. He wanted the Church in every exercise of its discipline to feel that it was in the presence of the Judge of the whole earth; that it must not venture to cut off any one of His children from Him by any act or decree of its own; that it must simply inquire, feeling the awfulness of the duty, ‘Has the man sentenced himself? has he done any act which constitutes a formal renunciation of his affiance in, of his allegiance to Christ; has he refused to communicate with us and with Him?’ And even if it is determined, after solemnest deliberation, that he has done such an act, even then his exclusion is not to be regarded as cutting him off finally, but as a means of saving him finally: even then it is possible that the Church on earth ought at some time or other to readmit him among its members.

So then St. John’s caution in defining is not greater than is St. Paul’s in practice. The one says—‘This is a sin unto death, I am not speaking of that when I ’tell you that your prayers for your brother will be answered’—and then is silent. The other coming into direct contact with one of these deadly cases, being obliged to legislate about it, not avoiding in the least degree that responsibility, not allowing the Corinthians to escape from their share of the responsibility; yet imposes upon himself and them the obligation of committing everything to God, of not anticipating His judgment. And here then, in the principle and in the conduct of both these Apostles, exhibited in such different circumstances, I find our protection from the definitions and divisions of Church doctors. St. Paul and St. John show us why those who have claimed a wisdom higher than theirs, have also claimed a wisdom different from God’s, and therefore most destructive to His creatures.

If those who have affirmed certain sins to be mortal, and certain sins to be venial, had adhered to their own statements, their doctrine might have been a presumptuous or a cruel one; but it would have been far less injurious to morality than it has been. In effect, mortal sins have been declared to be as much within the scope of the Church’s forgiveness as venial. Out of its infinite treasure-house of pardons there may come relief for every conceivable, almost for every inconceivable, transgression. And then the question has been, On what terms will the Church bestow these infinite pardons? Shall they be dealt out freely, or shall there be certain acts done to procure them? If certain acts, of what kind shall they be? ‘Certainly,’ the Church has said, ‘The man must give proofs of his wish to be pardoned.’ The proofs may be submitting to severe penances; they may be deeds of charity to the poor; they may be presents to the Church itself. Consider what comes of this! Penances which might be good to make a soft flexible temper capable of endurance; deeds of charity which might be good as witnesses of a common brotherhood; gifts to the Church which might mean a devotion to the general weal or a confession of God’s care for all; become vile selfish contrivances for averting a threatened sentence, for purchasing a possible good. Deeds, which should flow out of God’s love, are means for buying off His wrath. And as good loses its nature and principle, so does evil. Evil becomes not a detestable, accursed state, the state of separation from God the perfect Good, but something which brings a punishment that may be severe, that may be everlasting, that may be avoided by certain compensations. Conceive the inward perplexity, the trickery, the moneyworship, which such notions must introduce into the hearts of a people, of the rich and of the poor. Conceive the still worse effect which they must have on the minds of the priests, who have power to play fast and loose with mortal and venial sins, with terrors and with pardons, with dispensations and excommunications!

About all these things we in Protestant countries hear warnings enough, warnings often so fierce and ill-timed that we cease to believe there is any ground or necessity for them. Would to God there were not! But the facts are clear and patent; it is a childish affectation of liberality to deny them. It is, indeed, a solemn duty to acknowledge that beneath them there lies, in every Roman Catholic country, a better faith, a deeper Gospel, which they have overlaid and half smothered, but which they have not destroyed. It is a duty to see that we assert that better faith, that deeper Gospel, for them and ourselves. It may be hidden from us as well as from them; the same tempers of mind, differently exhibited, may undermine it for both. If we do not adopt St. John’s interpretation of the faith of Christ the Son of God; if we do not think that God has manifested the true eternal life in Him, has given it to mankind in Him;—we may be confusing eternal death, the separation from the divine Life of which His sacrifice and death have made us heirs, with certain outward punishments to be inflicted here or hereafter; we may begin to ask whether we cannot make compensation by outward acts or inward, by some great deeds or by professions of faith, for our sins, and so escape their punishment. And so our English morality may become as insincere, treacherous, venal, as any Papal morality ever was. On the other hand, if we declare that the sacrifice of Christ was made for the whole world, that the eternal righteous love and truth of God are revealed in Christ to every sinful man; that he may cast off his death, his unrighteousness, hatred, untruth, and enter into possession of them; we shall be bearing a testimony which the same creeds and sacraments bear to Romanists and to Englishmen, a testimony to which there will be a response in the most conscience and heart of the Catholic as well as of the Protestant.