# Sermons, Volume 1: A Modern Paraphrase

*Sermons, Volume 1, by Frederick Denison Maurice, restated paragraph by paragraph in modern English. This paraphrase follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. Drafted with claude-sonnet-5; reviewed by a human editor.*

## Advent Sunday

*The passage:* Be ready, because the Son of Man comes at an hour you do not expect.

I do not think I can use the Sundays in Advent better than by speaking to you of the Lord's Supper, since you are invited to keep it every week. There are strong reasons for fixing your thoughts on it now, because your thoughts are turned to it often without being fixed on it profitably. You read of debates, trials, legal judgments about it in the newspapers, mixed with all the frivolous talk of the day, until you may be tempted to think it the least serious subject the papers discuss — vague and interminable where other questions lead to results, yet stirring up all the pettiest passions and party stratagems, as if Christians had chosen this topic on purpose to show the world how little love they have for one another.

No doubt such thoughts have arisen in many hearts, and it would be sad if no others had. There must be a compensation for every evil, since all things work together for good to those who love God. When we find the question of Sacraments mixed up with the vulgarest, most mundane matters, we may learn that they are gifts to common men, not to theologians, and that their power, if real, must show itself in our daily lives. Our disgust at seeing low feelings mixed with what we call transcendent and divine may lead us to ask whether there is some peaceful refuge from this strife. The painful discovery that the same vehemence and triviality we condemn in others has its seat in ourselves may lead us to ask whether there is an escape from ourselves as well as from the world. The answer to these questions may open to us the deepest and most practical meaning of the Eucharist.

But a minister of Christ has no business assuming that these better feelings will win the contest if left alone. He must do what he can to keep them from being crushed by confusion of intellect, perplexity of conscience, or weak belief in the Power that sustains us when we are most feeble. A right use of Advent may be one of the most effective ways of counteracting the harm and drawing out the good latent in our Church's present troubles. Most people feel something of gladness in Christ's Advent when they connect it with Christmas, and something of awe when they connect it with judgment. The Church brings both together in today's services. Each mood belongs to the very nature of the Eucharist — we lose both if we lose either — and these controversies threaten both alike. If we can establish and realize their union, we will have averted a great part of the curse.

It often happens that two subjects, each of great importance and each beset with nearly equal difficulty, are set before us. After failing to clear either, we conclude that both are hopeless labyrinths not worth exploring. Then we discover a passage between them, and one becomes the clue to the other. I believe this is true of these two great subjects — not merely of theology, but of human life. There is a problem about Advent which earnest consideration of the Eucharist may help us solve.

What is the problem about Advent? You have all been perplexed by it. You hear of the Son of Man coming, and are told to be ready — language that recurs throughout the New Testament, sometimes as a thief in the night, sometimes as a bridegroom returning from the wedding, both combined in my text. What do these mean? Are they merely figures for the necessity of preparing for death — is our departure from this world what is meant by the coming of the Son of Man? If so, what has this to do with Christ's first coming, and why are the two brought together today as if closely related? But if that is not the meaning, where lies the force of the warning, and how can each of us apply it to himself? How can a coming to reign or judge the earth at some distant day be held forth as an event each man must be ready for, which may come upon him suddenly? Divines may have their technical explanations, but what is addressed to the conscience of ordinary men must commend itself to those consciences. A call to cast off the works of darkness cannot itself be a dark oracle; a message from the true God needs no tricks to explain it. If this language is not strict, what language is? Is it not meant to lay bare the falsehoods of our hearts, urging us to put on armor of light before the Judge and Searcher of hearts?

These questions cannot be parried. But neither can those raised by the Feast of the Lord's Supper — not the captious questions of sceptical minds, but those that have tormented Christendom for centuries, debated in schools and nations, watchwords of opposing Churches to this day, all turning ultimately on the presence of Christ. When we come to that Feast, is he there or absent — a real presence or an imaginary one? Do we meet him only because we believe him to be there, or is he there as the ground of our belief? If present, must he not be equally present to unbelievers as to believers? If present, may he not be worshipped there? If not present, does the Sacrament mean anything — is there any substance or person behind the sign, any bond between us and it, any bond between the visible and invisible world?

These are practical questions too, as practical as the others, and cannot be dismissed as too mysterious. They are debated in drawing-rooms and disturb the hearts of poor men and women; they cannot be too mysterious for God, whom we daily call the Author of peace and ask for knowledge of his truth, to show us our way into them — so that we may not lose the peace Christ gave, of which his hand and side were the pledge, nor the truth that alone can make us free.

We speak of the coming of *Christ* — perfectly Scriptural language. But our Lord himself speaks far more often of the coming of the *Son of Man*, as he does here, and it is worth asking whether that name sheds light on our first set of questions. What was the desire of nations? What were the tribes of the earth seeking, as we can gather from their songs, mythologies, and the complaints of philosophers and of common people alike? Surely a Son of Man — one higher than men, able to govern them, yet acquainted with men, able to feel and suffer as they did. Uniting these seemed impossible, yet each side drew people powerfully, and it was felt that some reality must correspond to this ideal. When we speak of Christ's coming in humility, entering Jerusalem on an ass amid hosannas proclaiming him heir of David's throne, we mean that he combined what seemed contradictory but what the human heart confessed to be essential in the Divine Man it awaited. He had the right to rule all human wills, and established that right by never exalting himself, by being the servant of all. His birth in the manger, his temptation, his cross, interpret the power he showed when he stilled the storm, restored the madman, raised the dead — his royalty and divinity were most fully expressed in his humiliation and sorrow. These declare the true nature of power, and the mind of him from whom all things proceed. Whoever has owned Jesus as the Son of Man has seen in him the Father of All.

This has been the faith of Christendom, giving all their worth to Advent and Christmas: that such a Son of Man has actually proved that dominion over men is his, that from him they receive the life of body and spirit, the power to see, hear, think, believe, hope, love — that apart from him they have no life at all.

So Christ's first coming, in great humility, means a continual lordship over the being and faculties of man. He did not spend thirty-three years on earth merely to display someone with whom men had had nothing to do before and would have nothing to do after. He came, the Apostles teach, because by him all things were created and consist, because he was heir of all things, upheld all things by the word of his power, and the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in him bodily. This purpose was not complete until he rose and ascended, claiming the glory he had with the Father before the world began. That vindicated his title as Lord, proved him the Christ who could baptize with the Holy Spirit, began a society that could only be universal since it stood on the name of the Son of God and Son of Man, and led captive our captivity to sense and visible things — fulfilling the promise, "The Lord God shall dwell among you, and be your Father, and you shall be his children."

This helps us understand the language about the coming, or unveiling, of the Son of Man after the Ascension — we should give the same words the same force wherever they occur. Consider how Apostles who believed in this Coming must have viewed every event in world history and in individual life. Such events must have seemed discoveries to the world of its true King, who directs the secret springs statesmen only pretend to direct, whose steady government calm times witness to, and whose righteous authority is attested by the great crises when society's frame is rent and the crimes of its evil rulers are visited with fire and blood. One such act of retribution stood before the Apostles as the coming of the Son of Man in their own day — unlike any before it, gathering up all previous history and inaugurating the new, declaring Jesus to be the Son of Man the Jewish nation existed to witness, in whose name its kings reigned and prophets spoke, whom it rejected because he came to bless all families of the earth, and who was exalted to bless them despite that rejection. This was the revelation Jesus taught his Apostles to expect, and they taught the Churches to expect and even long for, with awe, as judgment on their own land and redemption for humanity. The destruction of the Temple was the sign of the Son of Man — the sign that his body was the temple where God meets man.

The Apostles clearly meant this unveiling to be the measure for all later movements and catastrophes in the world — manifestations of the same invisible presence. And when, as in my text, the address turns to the individual conscience, telling each to be ready not knowing when the Son of Man comes, I see no reason to doubt the same events are meant, since every man's life is bound up with his nation's and his kind's. What affects a society affects each member; the difference between members lies in how earnestly each takes such warnings to himself. But this does not exclude the truth that every non-national judgment — family chastisement, sickness, the voice of parents and friends, any secret monition — is likewise a call to remember the Son of Man, a visitation from him. Our own experience tells us the force of that phrase in describing the pricks of conscience and the judgments on our thoughts and acts. What are we convicted of, but some selfish deed that showed we did not acknowledge the obligations laid on us by the law of our kind? Are not the torments of a sick bed this very witness — that a Son of Man is Lord over us, and in despising his brethren we despised him?

We may then admit that "in such an hour as you think not the Son of Man comes" gives all the warning about death that preachers have drawn from it, and more. It is no contradiction to say that though on earth we may live as if under a law of selfishness, with no ties to others, when we close our eyes on this world we pass into a region where we shall know beyond doubt that the Son of Man reigns, where it will be impossible to imagine ourselves out of his presence or to escape the divine law of love binding man to man and earth to heaven. The lie we lived by must then be exposed, our whole scheme of existence broken open, and we must confess him who gave himself for men as Lord of all.

Now to the other subject. If this is the New Testament's idea of Christ's coming, to the world or to individuals, what makes us ready for it? What saves us from the sleep our Lord warns of, or rouses us if it has overtaken us? Surely we must be reminded of his presence with us. The natural notion that the invisible is unreal, that he does not govern us because our eyes cannot see him, that he does not govern the world because the world fancies it governs itself — this must be set aside. We need constant assurance that the senses are no better judges of moral truth than of physical truth, that self, which seems the center round which everything revolves, is no more truly the center than the earth is the center of the heavens. What can give us this assurance — make the great paradox on which Christendom and all modern civilization depend, that one who died on the Cross is King of Man and in him all God's glory is revealed, a real, determining principle of our lives, or else a torment and witness against us when we act otherwise? An ordinance telling us Christ is not present, but that we may by memory recall an act he once performed, or by imagination bring his person to mind, would confuse us about his first coming as much as his second. The death it presented would be a mere event, not a power drawing all to itself, not the pledge of victory over death and hell. And the hope such a service encourages would be equally unsatisfactory — not a hope of the pierced Son of Man revealed to every eye, but only of rewards for those who believed or loved him more than others. But would a service supposing that, by miracle, he becomes present for a season though habitually absent, vindicate his incarnation and death any better? Would it not void the idea of an actual union of God with men in a Mediator, void his own words "I am with you always," void the truth of his visitations in the different circumstances of our lives?

Is there then some more comprehensive theory of the Eucharist that could supersede both of these? God forbid I should propose one, or wish you to embrace it! My aim is to show how miserably men fail when they try theories about God's relation and intercourse with his creatures — not because I think that relation less real, or that intercourse more uncertain, than relations among men. Indeed, I know no ground for human relationships except our common relation to God, and no security for lasting fellowship except what depends on nothing accidental, but on the Unchangeable God himself. This relationship is represented to us in Sacraments Christ himself ordained — outward signs of a spiritual grace given by him who cannot lie. It is not represented by theories, which are products of our intellect, have no hold on the deeper spirit, cannot take living form, and are necessarily partial, dealing with what is dead rather than what is alive. I do not set a new theory against the old ones worn out by centuries of friction yet still refusing to die; I set the Sacrament itself against all of them. It was appointed by one who knew what is in man; it has not grown old and will not, being as fresh now as when the first disciples received it with joy and singleness of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. What this Sacrament asks of us — lawyers and divines alike — is that we not imagine it needs our patronage or explanations; that we let this man and that utter his rash, imperfect dogmas without opposing equally rash ones; that we let Christ care for his own ark without supposing our clumsy hands can steady it. God's history has long ago judged such vulgar experiments. Every age tries to prove itself wiser than he is, better able to maintain his cause; he has poured contempt on such attempts even by learned and noble minds of other times, and will surely expose the puny mimicry of ours.

But he has never scorned, and never will scorn, one who seeks not to defend or theorize about this Sacrament, but simply to receive it. All are invited to that. If told that the wicked either do not partake of Christ's body at all, or partake to their own destruction, a man may well say, "Then I must not come near that table, for I am wicked — my conscience tells me so." But he may go further: "I see no way out of this wickedness unless someone has come to deliver me and my kind from it, to make us partakers of his righteousness. I hear such a one has come; my fathers believed so, and here is the Sacrament that assured them of it, that they might eat and live, cast off darkness, and put on the armor of light. It speaks to me, who feel the need perhaps more than they did, just as it spoke to them. It bids me partake of one who died that I might live forever. My spirit needs that food. Whether I have the faith required, God knows; I leave myself in his hands. I am weary of myself, and want to be delivered from the burden of self — I want the life of the Son of Man, who did not spare himself but gave himself for men. Perhaps I want more than this; if so, I believe God will give it. This much I know I want, and this I will seek."

Another may have been harassed by thoughts of death and the need to prepare for it. He has tried to fix his mind steadily on the chance that his soul may be required of him soon, and found it generally impossible — the duties of life keep intruding, and he cannot neglect them; but if he neglects them to make himself fitter for death, a bitter contradiction seizes him, for he feels he is only cultivating the selfish habit that is the very nature of sin. Then he hears of being ready for the Son of Man, of a Sacrament that shows forth his death until he comes. "To show that death to others, and share in it myself," he thinks, "must surely be better than desperate efforts to realize my own. So I enter into the common death, come into sympathy with all my fellows, and gain the mind of him who never sought to please himself, but died that we might have life."

I give these as instances of how men may grasp the inner nature of the Sacrament — most puzzling to dogmatists — through sheer necessity, through the experience of their own errors and deepest evil. Such people, finding Christ at the altar, will find him also in the study, by the fireside, in their daily work. Worshipping him there will guard them from idolizing any outward thing — bread, wine, or anything else that is sacred as God's creature and accursed when made into a god. Those who eat this heavenly food in haste, as the Lord's Passover, staff in hand and shoes on feet, know they need it to save them from forgetting an unseen Presence, from devotion to anything visible. They have no time to speculate; they want strength to live, to be ready for the Bridegroom whether he calls them to toil here or feast hereafter, wanting to share his humility, sure that this was in truth the greatest manifestation of his glory.

And if we come to the Eucharist with these desires, it may be a blessing rather than a harm that we have read of it amid reports of the crimes of states and individuals, tyrannies and slaveries abroad, frauds at home. It can bear such contact, for the Son of Man himself came into closest contact with a tyrannical, slavish, Mammon-worshipping world, in order to raise us out of it — that we might know the Spirit of Cruelty and Lies is not our king, that we have a Father in Heaven who will not let us yield to any oppressor if we yield ourselves to his Spirit. In baptism our godparents declared us children of that Father and renounced our oppressors in our name. In the Eucharist we assert our sonship, claim to share in the Son through whom God owns us as family members, and ask that nothing in heights or depths, present or future, may separate us from his love or break our allegiance. In it we declare our hope in a Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world by his own sacrifice; so we ask to be ready when the Son of Man comes to claim us as sacrifices to God, and not to be found choosing another master, shutting ourselves into a hell of selfishness and despair. In the Eucharist we give thanks for a death not for ourselves only but for the whole world; so in it we look forward to a Redemption not for ourselves only but for the world, when Christ shall appear without sin unto salvation.

## Second Sunday in Advent

*The passage:* All these things happened to the Israelites as examples, and were written down to warn us, upon whom the end of the ages has come.

The passage this text is drawn from resembles the Epistle we read this morning. In both, St. Paul claims the Jewish Scriptures for Gentile as well as Jewish use, and declares that narratives which seemed to belong only to the chosen people had a wide human application — that their force was no less for his own day than for those Moses or Joshua led, and that the passing of ages would make their warnings and consolations more intelligible and more necessary, not less. "All these things," he writes to the Corinthians, "happened unto them for ensamples: all these things were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come." This is the same moral the Church draws today in her Collect, taken from Romans xv.

There is, however, a peculiarity in this chapter that is present but not fully drawn out in the other Epistle. To help the Corinthians understand the rich Hebrew inheritance they had entered into, Paul explains the *sacramental* character of the old records. He writes that our fathers were under the cloud, passed through the sea, "were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea," ate the same spiritual meat and drank the same spiritual drink — for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, "and that Rock was Christ." Yet God was not pleased with many of them, who were overthrown in the wilderness; these things are examples warning us against lusting after evil as they did, against idolatry, against the fornication that killed twenty-three thousand in a day, against tempting Christ as they did and were destroyed by serpents, against murmuring as they did and were destroyed by the destroyer. Then come the words of our text, followed shortly after by: "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?"

I want you to notice two things here. First, Paul's argument for the unity and permanence of Scripture, and its fitness for ages that had not yet written it, rests on the fact that the events it records were Sacraments of God's presence. Second, he grounds direct moral warnings on this — against idolatry, fornication, murmuring, and the sin of tempting God, which may include all the rest. In other words, he derives the plainest, most practical use of Scripture from what many would at first call a strange and fanciful view of its character.

Our reverence for Paul as a practical Christian warrior, eager for real earnestness and wary of the Corinthians' tendency toward mere speculation, should stop us from supposing that he lapsed, even for a moment, into fancy or wit while treating so weighty and practical a subject. And yet the "typical" applications commonly made of Scripture are usually such extravagant exercises of fancy and wit, so repugnant to plain people wanting a guide for their feet and strength for their tasks, that some have wished to forget this passage of Paul's, or have listened, half-persuaded, to those who say he let the conceits of Rabbi Gamaliel's school mar the simplicity that is in Christ.

I want to speak of this on this Second Sunday in Advent, when our minds are fixed by a solemn prayer on the Scriptures written for our learning, because I believe that if the Scriptures are losing their hold on us, much of that mischief lies in our confused notions of what is called their direct and their spiritual meaning. I fully admit that honest, manly English minds protest against straining Scripture from its plain sense to fit particular experiences and circumstances; yet such strained interpretations do appeal to devout minds, as an escape from dry criticism that makes Oriental customs the chief guide to a book we are taught to regard as a lasting possession. This conflict has probably never been sharper than now. The critic entrenches himself in philological laws, insisting that Bible history, if it is history, must be tried by them. The sufferer on a sick-bed feels the words speak directly and truly to her, whatever becomes of the critic's rules. Each has special narrownesses: the student quickly sees the devotional reader's morbid self-concentration; the devotional reader senses how merely antiquarian, how little alive to human need, the student is. Neither sees his own peril or his need of the other. Each has sympathizers who make him more exclusive and prevent him from telling true from false in his own thinking, until each spends half his energy denouncing the other. Bystanders come to see the controversy as hopeless, and the indifferent and the scoffing multiply — feared by both parties, yet fed by both.

If I thought this sacramental idea of the Old Scriptures were the same as treating them merely as figures, likenesses, or types of things belonging to our own Dispensation or our spiritual life, I would have no hope of ever settling this strife. But the true understanding of Paul's words, rightly applied, would save us both from forcing analogies onto sacred history that deny it is history, and from that inhuman method which drains events of their meaning and forgets that the people in them were flesh and blood like us. Rightly grasped, his method makes the Bible divine in a sense it never can be while we treat it merely as a collection of letters dictated by God.

It is plain from this passage and what follows that Paul speaks to the Corinthians expressly as a Church bound together by Sacraments. His double purpose was to teach them to understand and not abuse their own Sacraments by studying the Jewish Scriptures as records of sacramental discipline, and then to understand those Scriptures by the light of the New Dispensation's Sacraments. As I tried last Sunday to show that our difficulties over Christ's Advent in humiliation and His advent to judgment run parallel to our difficulties over the Eucharist, each illuminating the other, so now I will try to show that our difficulties over Scripture and over the Eucharist likewise illustrate each other — that we cannot fully understand the Lord's Supper except through the Bible, nor the Bible's direction except through the Lord's Supper.

You will see that present circumstances call for at least part of this inquiry. We are told that an Act of Parliament determines that the Articles contain the whole meaning of Scripture, with no appeal from them to Scripture. But the Articles themselves assert that such an appeal does lie — this is the very feature of them we have most boasted of. Remove it, and we do not merely contradict one Article, we undo the purpose of the whole body of them, which was to protect the Church against a theory that made Scripture unintelligible until bound by ecclesiastical interpretation. The Articles assume Scripture is intelligible, more intelligible than anything human wit can invent; they denounce the private judgments of doctors and popes that fettered conscience and hindered men from seeking the common truth that alone can make them free. The Prayer-Book does this even more: it gives us fellowship with each other and with all ages in our deepest wants, and makes us discontented with mere notions, certain that only communion with a living God can satisfy us. So the Prayer-Book presumes the Sacraments as its ground, and the Articles presume Scripture as theirs. An Act of Parliament may command us to understand the Articles apart from Scripture; but if we cannot — and the Articles themselves say we cannot — we must hold to what we have subscribed. We cannot live in daily self-contradiction. If those who fled to Acts of Parliament to convict a brother of error have entangled themselves in one, that is a lesson worth taking to heart.

Notice that Paul does not say the Israelites passing through the Red Sea was a "type" of Corinthian baptism — he says our fathers "were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea." Nor does he say the manna and rock-water were "likenesses" of bread and wine — he says they "did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all drink the same spiritual drink." This difference in wording marks a difference in thought. The Red Sea crossing was a sign that the invisible God had taken Israel as His own; each Jew who accepted that sign did not merely escape Pharaoh but confessed himself under a righteous King, and became free. The manna was a sign that man does not live by bread alone but by every word from God's mouth; accepting it, a Jew entered a new dependence on God, richer than Egypt's flesh-pots, nourished by trust in an Almighty Friend. Of the rock Paul says something still more striking: it "followed" them. The struck rock itself was stationary, but the flowing water signified a Presence that was with them always, renewed at every well they drank from. The worst suffering of desert travel thus became a spiritual lesson, and relief from it, in the strictest sense, spiritual drink. Whoever acknowledged the source of that deliverance gained a new life: he tasted that the Lord was gracious, and became sure that the Ruler of Nature was not distant but must be *his* Lord, caring for him above all things, at his right hand so he should not be moved. All this Paul compresses into "that Rock was Christ" — symbolic shorthand, intelligible in context, not used carelessly. His purpose was to convince the Corinthians that they lived under the very same spiritual government as the Jewish fathers, administered by the same Being: the Christ he had preached as taking flesh, dying, rising, and ascending was the same Angel of the Covenant, the same Son of God, who had led the Hebrews by cloud and by fire.

See how much coherence this gives the Old Testament. At its outset, God made a Covenant with Abraham and his seed, and each of that seed received a sign of it. To remember the Covenant, to believe the sign was not empty but the witness of a living truth touching every moment of one's life — that was the mark of the true Israelite. To forget it, to think the sign meant nothing, to suppose oneself no longer under God's continual guidance — that was the mark of the rebellious Israelite, the root of lawlessness, and above all of the sin against the Second Commandment, the worship of visible things. The one who kept the sign and its meaning together saw every event as a sign suited to the moment, addressed to heart and conscience, meeting particular sins and needs, all pointing to one object — tokens recalling him, from among the thousand forces reducing him to a slave, back to his true allegiance and free service. The one who felt no force in the primary sign found nothing else a sign either. As the poet says of a man whose mind had been so debased that all sense of beauty was gone: "A primrose on the river's brim / A yellow primrose was to him, / And it was nothing more." That state of mind is possible for any of us, without the outward savageness of that figure. But it is a lesser fault to see nothing in primroses than to see nothing in birth, marriage, death, great crimes or noble devotion, in the rise and fall of nations — nothing but material for idle talk or idle reading. Not to see these as signs is a great brutishness, one the holy men of Israel charged upon their countrymen and sought, through prayer and thanksgiving and remembrance of God's mercies and judgments, to be delivered from. They tell us God Himself works through all these events to awaken and renew minds that could not renew themselves; that He does not forget His Covenant even when men do; that it is everlasting and must fulfill itself; that even Israel's idolatries and crimes, born of refusing to trust Him, will only manifest His truth and love to the world; that all things lead toward a fuller revelation of His relation to mankind and of His own nature — toward One in whom He can hold perfect communion with men, as a Father with His children.

Here, then, is ample justification for those who insist the Bible is a book of business and plain morality, not to be turned into riddles and allegories — and also for those who insist its history must be read as the history of a nation, not dissolved into spiritual maxims for individuals. The story of the wilderness journey, and of the whole Jewish Commonwealth, is a story of plain events — migrations, wars, victories and defeats, prosperity and adversity, the sins of men of our own flesh and blood, and the right acts of men who were true. What makes this history a Bible is that these facts are interpreted, shown to be signs. The meaning of a nation's existence, the personal ground of its law, is laid bare. Whether its laws are universal or merely local and temporary, they are shown to us as God's laws, because the whole book's premise is that He is Educator of that people and of all peoples — that every circumstance is His instrument, every event an assertion of His presence and rule, meant to display His righteousness and to shape men into His image.

But this is equally a justification for those who claim the Bible for themselves and their own time, who must find in it a message to heart and conscience even at the cost of straining its words — an excuse for their liberties with philology. If the Bible speaks of a Living God whose government is uniform beneath all changing outward forms, they are right in the essence of what they hold, and must keep hold of it against every scholar and critic. What they need is not to modify this conviction but to strengthen it — to read the Bible more exactly than before, as concerning a whole society, and so find it more precious to themselves individually than ever. Tracing it as the progressive history of God's revelation to a family, a nation, and mankind, they will find in it more support as men, and more solemn warning, as those whom God claims not as servants but as sons.

On this ground Paul tells the Corinthians that the ends of the world had come upon them. The purposes and revelations of every age had converged on one point: the Son of God had been revealed in human nature, had carried that nature through death and the grave, and exalted it to the Father's right hand; Gentiles had been told He was made of a woman and under the law so that they might receive the adoption of sons; the highest glory men could attain was now the common possession of Jew and Greek. "Wherefore let him that standeth take heed lest he fall." The old temptations to sensuality, murmuring, and idolatry were no less strong for the Corinthians than they had been for Israel. "Nevertheless there hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it." What is that way of escape, that strength to keep them mindful of God's presence and union with Him, that proof of His faithfulness? Paul takes his instance from the temptation he regarded as the root of all the rest, and the one most visible among the Corinthians: "flee from idolatry... The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread."

Here, then, was their escape, if they were wise enough to grasp the sign's meaning: the bread received at the Church's feast as communion of Christ's body, the wine as communion of His blood, would be continual witnesses that they were members of one body with each other and with Him — a continual safeguard against the tendency, which haunts all men, to worship visible things, a tendency they must fall into unless some power gives their spirits a divine object of trust and reverence.

This passage should help those who think of the Eucharist as a lofty service for advanced saints rather than a protection for weak, sinful men from the grossest vices. The Bible never draws the sharp line between sinner and saint that we sometimes draw. All are under God's care; all may receive and believe the signs of it, and cast themselves on Him to be saved from what degrades and destroys them. No greater blessing exists even for the greatest saint; if he thinks he does not need it, he sinks toward the condition of the worst sinner, having renounced his dependence, and risks a deeper fall than any mere sensualist has known. If that sensualist claims the deliverance Christ offers, seeking a righteousness not his own, he becomes a saint. The highest title to that name comes only from continual trust arising from a sense of past wrong and present weakness. The morality of the Gospel is exalted precisely because it is universal: this highest participation in Christ's life is only possible when we count ourselves members of the same body as the lowest, since His life is given through the flesh and blood He shared with the worst of us, through a death He died alongside the malefactor.

This should also help those who fear that a very lofty view of the Sacrament borders on idolatry. Paul teaches that the loftiest view of all — that it is an actual communion with the body and blood of Him who has glorified our humanity at God's right hand — is exactly what delivers from idolatry. A low view, treating it as mere ceremony, leads straight to superstition and idolatry. The view that it is the sign of Christ's eternal presence and of our claim to fellowship with Him shows this Sacrament to be the consummation of all the sacraments by which God once educated His people out of idolatry, and able to make everything in our common life a sacrament guarding us from ever putting the creature in the Creator's place.

This is part of what we gain by applying Scripture's sacramental principle to ourselves. It also helps with the question that has long perplexed us: the participation of the wicked in the Sacraments. We can see how closely falsehood borders on great truth, and how much harm comes from using our own methods rather than God's to tell them apart. Paul says all ate the same spiritual meat and drank the same spiritual drink, yet also that many did not truly receive it, because they failed to recognize the sign's meaning. He speaks of our being members of one body because we eat one bread — teaching that we cut ourselves off from the body by denying our relation to its Head, not that the relation itself is unreal. Such distinctions grow clear in the light of Scripture and the practice of life; dogmatists, by contrast, make divisions that destroy true distinctions.

There are still other difficulties about the Eucharist concerning sacrifice, which this chapter helps clarify. Some call the Eucharist a sacrifice, some a commemoration of a sacrifice; our own Service plainly favors the latter, speaking of Christ's "full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice and oblation... for the sins of the whole world." Nothing matters more than holding to this, for history shows the terrible consequences of supposing the sacrifice still needs perfecting rather than being complete and worthy only of thanks. But Paul speaks of sacrifice as implying communion, fellowship with the being to whom it is offered; he speaks of Gentile sacrifices as offered to demons, not to God, so that heathen fellowship was with these lesser, mortal beings rather than the true God and Father of Christ. This is why he tells the Corinthians not to eat things sacrificed to idols, though innocent in themselves — doing so implied sharing in the worship of those lower beings, acknowledging subjection to them when Christ had already redeemed them to His Father. Let us understand, then, what this finished sacrifice has done, and why we give thanks for it. Had it left us only with a memory of the past, it would be unlike all God's earlier sacraments, which brought Israel to recognize that the God who delivered their fathers from Egypt was with them still, in the promised land or in exile, and that they too might offer themselves as sacrifices to Him. Those sacraments told them not to rest content with present or past, since God intended fuller communion with them and meant to reveal Himself fully to the world. No lesser belief, no feebler hope, can sustain us, upon whom the ends of the world have come. The sacrifice was made once for all — but made so that we might be united to the great High Priest who has entered within the veil and continually presents His finished sacrifice before the Father, and so that we might look forward to the day that will complete all God's revelations and sacraments, when His servants shall see His face, His Name shall be on their foreheads, there shall be no night and no need of candle or sun, for the Lord God will give them light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.

## Third Sunday in Advent

*December 14, 1856*

*The passage:* Everything comes from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

Last Sunday I spoke of the Scriptures as explaining Sacraments, and of our Sacraments as throwing light back on the Scriptures' method and hope. But since my aim was to find the character and virtue of the Eucharist itself, I could not stay with general considerations. The Red Sea, the Manna, the Rock were sacraments of God, as Paul taught; the principle they showed might be universal, and every event in the history might be a sign of the same unseen Presence to the Prophets. But Scripture also tells of the special institution of Sacrifices. These had become associated with a Eucharistic service supposed to carry a sacrificial meaning, and I could not avoid asking whether it did. Treating Scripture as the continuous history of a gradual discovery of God's nature and purposes, we are driven to conclude that a time came when the sacrifices of the Law had done their work, and one complete sacrifice was offered once for all. The Eucharist, then, must be a thanksgiving for that complete sacrifice, not the completion of something left unfinished. But Paul tells us every sacrifice implies communion with the Being to whom it is offered; and if the very purpose of the Incarnation and Death was to establish complete communion between men and their Father in Heaven, then the feast celebrating the sacrifice's accomplishment asserts only the beginning of a communion — real now, but not to reach its full fruit until all evil resisting God's righteousness and love is entirely conquered.

There is another aspect of the subject I did not touch last week. The thought of sacrifice at once suggests a priest. Those who take the Eucharist as completing an unfinished sacrifice naturally take its minister as a priest offering that sacrifice. But how does this notion survive in a Church which asserts so vehemently that the sacrifice is complete? How can a prayer declaring that Christ made a "full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction... for the sins of the whole world" be read only by one we call a priest? Why do we allow no one else to consecrate the elements? It is no answer to say that "priest" is merely a contraction of "presbyter." We must explain why we reserve this office to the Presbyter, what dignity we do or do not attach to that name, and whether — and how — his office resembles the priest's under the Old Covenant.

These questions are suggested by today's Collect and Epistle, as last Sunday's subject was suggested by that day's. I hope, as before, that considering two topics together will lessen our difficulties rather than increase them. The subject of the Christian Ministry may seem more perplexing joined to the Eucharist, but the Service may in the end help us appreciate our obligations and our powers; and understanding our work may help us appreciate the worth of this Sacrament, and how it bears on the life of individuals and of society.

I did not take my text from this morning's Epistle, though its opening words tempted me. If I could explain in what sense Paul bids the Corinthians count him and Apollos "ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God," I might lead you to the heart of the subject. But that explanation, I believe, comes better from Paul's second epistle to the same church, where he more fully shows his sense of the responsibilities and terrors of his office, and more fully compares the Minister of the Old Testament with the Minister of the New. In the passage I have chosen he lays down principles that apply to the whole subject — the meaning of the Eucharist as much as the meaning of the Ministry.

His first assertion, "All things are of God," belongs no more to the New Testament than the Old — it is the characteristic Hebrew maxim on which the ancient economy stood and the whole Bible is built. But it was no truism: it cuts at a whole scheme of religion familiar to Corinthians bred in heathenism, and not strange to Jews either, however their own oracles witnessed against it. How men might worship one God or many, please or propitiate them, or become gods themselves — these were the questions priests of every nation strove to answer, and philosophers too. The different methods of prayer, sacrifice, and purification that different priests invented or sanctioned, meeting different calamities, marked the character of each nation; they multiplied with new wants and new sins, provoked rival experiments and popular reactions, and drew civil rulers to use them for their own ends or to oppose them when they threatened civil society. The great proposition "all things are of God" might seem to underlie all these attempts and justify them. In the form the Jewish history gives it, it instead undermined them all: man's attempts to reach God are hopeless; God declares himself as seeking out men made in his own image, claiming them as servants, and making them aware of a relationship higher than a servant's. But this idea was, if anything, more unintelligible to the pharisaic Jew than to the heathen. Heathen gods might be capricious and full of human passion, but at least hinted at friendship and sympathy with their worshippers. All the Pharisee learned from his holy men was that the God of Abraham stood apart from such fellowship, dwelling in inaccessible darkness, issuing written decrees men were merely to obey. Since these decrees were hard to keep and terrible punishments threatened those who failed, his priests, like the heathen's, were to devise means of averting the tyrant's wrath. The Pharisee boasted that he had divine authority for these means, that God had favored his race with the knowledge of how to conciliate him — but he lied, and knew he lied. He could not destroy the meaning of Scripture at its foundation and still make it his guide; and it was not, in fact, his guide, however he worshipped its letter. As our Lord told him, he substituted the traditions of the Elders for God's commandments — traditions that taught him not how to draw near to God, but the arts of hiding from God, of silencing the Holy One of Israel so as not to be interrupted in his course of baseness and falsehood.

Paul destroys the edifice of religious notions raised by the Rabbinical schools — which he had once delighted to study — just as much as that raised over centuries in the heathen world with its incongruous additions from priests, kings, and people, when he asserts that "all things are of God" and explains this by adding, "who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ." Here God is declared the great Reconciler, entering into communion with men in the Son in whom he had originally created them, using his law, his judgments, his terrors, as instruments to bring the wills of creatures who had revolted from him back into union with his own. This purpose — removing every barrier to communion between man's spirit and the Father of spirits, every vision of wrath that might make him unwilling to draw near, every thought that some compensation or merit was needed before he returned — was accomplished, Paul declares, when God raised his Son, who had borne our death, out of the grave, and exalted him in our nature to his right hand.

On these two clauses the third depends: "he has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation." Paul could conceive of a Christian Minister only as one sent to testify that all things are of God, and that God has reconciled us to himself in Jesus Christ. It follows from the first proposition that the Minister must regard his authority as received from God. Paul spoke here as a Jew: no Jew could think he held any office — whether offering sacrifice in the Temple, making its curtains, leading and lawgiving, or serving in the humblest rank of the humblest tribe — except by God's appointment, from whom he would also receive the wisdom, courage, and strength the office required. Had the priest not been taught to see himself as chosen and clothed by God for his service at the altar, he would have been the one exception in the whole commonwealth — and a perilous one, since of all men he could do the most mischief by setting up an independent authority and losing the sense of being under government, and had the greatest temptation to confound himself with God, even to make himself a god. It was necessary that he above all be fenced round with statutes to show he was not his own master. And yet his very function made it a contradiction to think of himself as the servant of men — an opinion he was likely enough to fall into, with the result that he became their slave and their tyrant by turns, or both at once.

Did Paul, then, transfer to the new economy what he had learned in the old? That is scarcely the right way to put it. He rather learned the true position of the Old Testament Minister by feeling himself called to be a Minister of the New. Often as he had read Exodus and Leviticus, he probably never understood what was written of Aaron the Priest until he felt his own divine call to be an Apostle.

To deliver such a message, unless God himself had committed it to him, would have seemed to Paul the strangest, most monstrous assumption. For was it not a message of reconciliation from God to man — that God had actually reconciled men to himself in Christ? How could he declare that reconciliation without believing himself an ambassador from God? How could he declare that all things were of God without owning his own words as of God?

Paul's repeated assertions that he was an Apostle not of man nor by man vouch for this conviction, so far as he himself was concerned. But was this message to fall silent once he left the earth? Then it had been false in his mouth, for he had proclaimed a permanent reconciliation and taught that the Church exists to testify of it. Or was every future preacher to see a blinding light and be led sightless into a city, as Paul had, that light and blindness having told him that the One he persecuted had taken man's nature and become King over men forever? Must not all offices among men still be divine offices, as before? Did not the revelation of this King show under whom such offices were held, by whom each person was called to the one meant for him, and to whom he was responsible for the duties entrusted to him? Did it not behoove anyone doing his work faithfully to confess where his trust came from, and to seek strength from the One who laid it on him, that it not be abused? Was this obligation not heaviest on those who preached a Gospel of Reconciliation? If there is no such Gospel, then the fancy that men are called to preach it in any age is an equally gross fiction. But suppose the Gospel real, for all times — the proclamation of a Living Person in whom God is united to men and converses with them — then it would be strange if men were not called to set it forth; and the danger then lies in men supposing that their own gifts or wit make them its proclaimers, rather than that they are, as much as Paul was, ambassadors of God who must give account to him whether they have testified truly or falsely, whether they have shown by word and act that all things are of him, and that he has reconciled them to himself through Jesus Christ.

Paul never suggests that the difference between the Old and New Testament ministry is that one was appointed by God and the other not, that one would last from age to age and the other not, or that the one could call itself ministers of God while the other were merely ministers of some society that had chosen them. What he does say is that the ministers of the Old Testament were largely ministers of a letter written and graven in stone, while those of the New are ministers of the Spirit; that the one is a ministry of condemnation, the other of righteousness; that the one exhibits God's glory under a veil, the other presents it openly as revealed in Christ. These are great distinctions: they point, first, to a discipline preparatory to the full manifestation of God in the Word made flesh and dying for men; second, to a reconciliation grounded on that manifestation, and to the gift of a spirit of righteousness who makes men inwardly righteous and fits them for communion with a righteous God. They point, therefore, to truths fully embodied in the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper: the truth of a perfected atonement for the whole world; the truth that men are invited to share the holy life that dwelt fully in Christ; and the truth that their spirits are admitted, in him, to the knowledge of his Father and theirs.

I want to draw your attention to this connection between the Christian Ministry and the Christian Festival. It is expressed in the practice reserving administration of the Eucharist to the Presbyter, the Deacon's highest honor being only to assist. If this rule exalted the priest above other ministers and the congregation, if it warranted the inventions by which priests in every age have bound and enslaved sin-stricken consciences, if it confused the minister of the Old Testament with that of the New so as to reduce the latter to the former's condition — then no length of prescription, no weight of tradition, could justify a Church in keeping it, since it would clash with eternal principles which prescription must yield to. But if it testifies that the utmost a Christian minister can do is assert the reconciliation of God with men already accomplished in Christ, and on the strength of that fact beseech them to be reconciled; if it declares that no scheme priests devise for reconciling men to God can avail, and that to suggest one is sin and treason; if it shows how the New Testament priest's function is more glorious than the Old's, because he heralds what the other only showed to be necessary and promised — then I think we can understand why this old bond between the Presbyter's office and the Eucharist was not burned away in the fires of the Reformation, and why it may endure fires hotter still. Of this much I am sure: there is no more significant, and often more terrible, reminder to our consciences of the purpose of our existence, of the Gospel we are to deliver, of how paltry our words are to convey it, of the true intercourse God holds with the heart and conscience while we are at best instruments for removing — or, just as easily, for creating — obstacles to hearing his voice. To be taught that the very highest act we can perform is one in which we utter nothing of our own, in which we are merely servants, is the greatest humiliation to priestly arrogance, and the greatest lesson I can imagine about the whole of our work.

This lesson has not sufficed; we have set up our own pretensions in spite of it, even turned it into an apology for them — I do not wish to deny this. We need to consider how we fell into this error in the past, and how it may recur now, that we may not be high-minded but fearful, relying on nothing in our circumstances or in ourselves, but on God, who governs our circumstances and will govern us if we do not fight against him. I will not now speak of notions about the Ministry and Eucharist in other Churches that have hindered them from witnessing God's reconciliation — how gravely the Romish doctrine of an uncompleted sacrifice has affected the whole life of Christendom, throwing it back not only into Judaism but into Heathenism, giving rise to an ethics that destroys the distinction of right and wrong and a politics that excuses any tyranny or anarchy — I feel this strongly, but will not dwell on it. The Laudian doctrine of the Priesthood and the Eucharist, however — a native English formation, spared some of the wider scheme's consequences by English civil conditions — shows no less instructive and alarming an example of how the most blessed institutions can be robbed of their character and turned to mischief if we forget the scriptural reasons for their existence. For this school, the fact that the Eucharist cannot be administered without a Presbyter became the foundation of all its teaching: their great business was to maintain that certain blessings pass through the hands of lawful ministers in this Sacrament, of which those seeking them through other hands or other ways are deprived. Men's minds were thus fixed on an object to be attained and the means and agents through which to attain it. The old inversion was renewed: not God declaring that he had reconciled men to himself, but men, by a certain process, reconciling God to themselves. The old consequences followed too: the priest was regarded as the depository of the grace he transmitted; the ordinance was no longer a witness of direct communication between men and the living God through the ascended Mediator, but forced itself on men's notice, eclipsing the sun instead of being a transparent medium for its rays. I speak of the theory as it appeared in controversial books and in acts that startled those who never read such books. God forbid I should say that men who held this theory did not themselves often receive a true life through the Sacrament — that is exactly my point. We cannot shut out the light of God's countenance from men however we try; Sacraments are stronger than sacramental systems; suffering and sinful men turn to the one while others merely debate and declaim about the other. But this does not stop such sacramental systems from being mischievous and accursed things, even though God comes forth himself to counteract the denial of himself to which they might lead.

I believe he did come forth in the days of Charles and Laud. The strength of the protest against their system lay in the deep and true conviction of their opponents that God is living and reigning, that he has not delegated his powers to any body of ministers or shut up his grace in ceremonies. That conviction, together with the assurance that a minister's business was to proclaim good news about him to men, called forth the energy and courage that at last proved invincible. The Puritans advanced as men who could not be resisted, because they were asserting the presence of a Living Being against those setting up offices and ordinances that are dead without him, appealing to consciences that recognize his voice and no other. But it was soon proved, to the satisfaction of those who had struggled bravely and usefully against our priestcraft, that new Presbyter was only old Priest writ large — that ministers making no claim to sacramental powers might bind men's spirits as tightly and cruelly as those who thought themselves sole possessors of such powers; that men who believed their function was only to preach the word might substitute for it hard dogmas and hard practices that misrepresent God's character and make themselves objects of faith in his place. For here the old error intrudes again: all things are no longer referred to God; the Gospel is no longer a message that he has reconciled the world to himself, but a message of how certain men may, by certain acts of faith, achieve reconciliation with him; and divines must then determine the quality and degree of those acts, define the ways men may approach God, and ascertain that they are at peace with him. Whatever such ministers call themselves, once they take up this office they must cultivate all the arts of priestcraft.

Here again we see how inseparably the Eucharist is bound up with the Ministry, and how narrow or lowering notions of the one affect the other. When the Gospel ministers preach is no longer a message to mankind that God has reconciled the world to himself in Christ, but only a message of how certain men may, by certain methods, gain peace of conscience and the rewards of Heaven, then this Sacrament inevitably becomes the badge of a sect, a mark of who its true and spiritual members are — not God's seal on our union with Christ, not his invitation to hold communion with him. My text gives the one basis for a Church, a Eucharist, a Ministry. Change it for any other, and no device will keep the Church from sinking into a narrow, artificial corporation; the Eucharist, first into a mere expression of human feeling and thanksgiving, then into a means of procuring the blessings we are to be thankful for; the Minister, first into a mere representative of a society's convictions or desires, then into either an organ of its prejudices or the founder of a sect that separates from it.

In modern times, people weary of the oppressions of a body calling itself the Universal Church on one side, and of the sects tearing nations to pieces on the other, have conceived the notion that if men could shake off all associations with the priesthood as a divine institution, and simply elect officers to perform whatever devotional services satisfy their consciences or religious impulses, a Church might grow up suited to our time, or some better time to come. Those proposing such an experiment deserve respectful attention; their plans probably embody useful hints and devout suggestions, and will certainly expose evils eating into society now, sins of Churchmen and statesmen that must be repented of if society is not to perish. The more they shame us, the more grateful we should be. But if they lead us to think a Church can be reconstructed without the doctrine that all things are of God at its foundation, without regarding all offices as more — not less — divine than we have regarded them, I believe we can expect nothing from such a change but the reproduction of every old corruption, and the loss of the good that has counteracted it. We have not been wrong, my brethren, in believing we are called by God to our work, and cannot do it without that calling. We have been very wrong in not making it plain that our calling is for your sakes, that we are witnesses of his care for you. We have not been wrong in saying that when we stand at his altar and give you bread and wine we are there as his ambassadors. We have been very wrong in pretending we can be anything more, that we possess any dignity or sacredness of our own. We have not been wrong in asserting a communion between God and his children. We have been very wrong in limiting it by our own notions and fancies; in failing to believe and rejoice that God may make the truth known without our testimony; in not desiring that all should be prophets, that all should have his Spirit — as that old lawgiver did, who would not let the order of the Priesthood be changed, because that concerned not himself but the Nation and its Lord. Do not tell us we have no right to speak, in word and sign, of the complete Redemption God has wrought for men. Denounce us instead for not grasping the length and breadth of that Redemption, for so often representing God as the author of slavery rather than freedom, for so often ourselves enslaving those his Spirit seeks to free. Do not say we mock you when we speak of ourselves as priests presenting Christ's finished sacrifice for you, blessing you with the food of his body and blood. Only complain that we have not told you more of the High Priest within the veil, the Elder Brother of the whole family, in whose name we and you may draw near together to one Father. Join with us at the altar in confessing these sins, ours and yours, to him, and ask there for strength to fulfil your own ministries, to prove that God has given you work to do as well as us. Then you will find that the security against the falsehoods and oppressions of men lies in the God of truth, the God who delivers, the God who reconciles; that while we trust him, all things will minister good to us; that if we lose sight of him, the very means he devised for our blessing will become our heaviest punishment, and the pledges he has given of our unity with him and each other will become the watchwords and weapons of endless strife.

## Fourth Sunday in Advent

*The passage:* Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily entangles us, and run with patience the race set before us, looking to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

The Collects for the other Sundays in Advent seem shaped by the Epistles that follow them. This day's Collect seems to express the opposite temper from the Epistle: the Epistle speaks of "sore lets and hindrances" in running our race, while elsewhere we are told, "Rejoice evermore." How can such melancholy fit with St. Paul's command to rejoice?

I have been trying to show that the Eucharist reconciles many difficulties—why Christ's Advent in humility and His Advent in glory are joined so closely in Scripture, why Scripture has so sacramental a character throughout, why the New Testament ministry surpasses yet is not cut off from the Old. Perhaps this difficulty too, which touches our deepest experience of grief and joy mixed together, would disappear if we entered more fully into this Festival and partook of it more faithfully.

I cannot separate these two things—understanding and receiving. Intellectual difficulties interfere with a simple, honest reception of God's gift; and indifference or careless use of the gift makes our sense of its purpose dim and unsteady. This holds in every lesser case, so it must hold here. Some see more truly than they act, some act more truly than they see; but vision grows dim through insincere action, and action grows heartless when repeated without any wish to know its meaning or end. Light and warmth may differ, but we cannot safely assume one continues where the other is absent.

It is not unlikely that the words in Philippians helped shape the thought behind this Collect's prayer, for nothing more readily makes us long for God to come among us in power than discovering how little we can rejoice without the recollection of His presence and goodness. The Philippians were more prone to despondency than most of Paul's readers, and so he tells them more fully of their right to gladness. But the text from Hebrews evidently gave the Collect its form, and no other passage so fully expresses the meaning of Communion, gathering up what I have said in earlier sermons and preparing us for Christmas.

I\. Rhetoricians commonly invoke departed worthies looking down to reprove or encourage their descendants. Such language has been abused and emptied of meaning, yet it still has power—it stirs even those who doubt the speaker's sincerity. The speaker himself is often startled by the power he has raised, and credits himself with mere skill at a stale trick. He does himself an injustice: the response comes not to his paltry artifice but to the truth hidden within it. Men's consciences tell them that they habitually forget the presence of unseen witnesses, and that when this thought is roused in them, they are in a truer state of mind, not a falser one—for they feel themselves better and more serious for it, and cannot trace a moral benefit to a lie.

The writer of Hebrews has been recalling to his Hebrew readers the deeds of their ancestors, all traced to faith in an unseen Lord and the substantial hope that faith rested on. They subdued kingdoms, did righteousness, stopped lions' mouths, were made strong out of weakness, only because the unseen God was more real to them than anything visible. Now he speaks of these ancestors together, as a cloud of witnesses watching the Israelites of his own day, who run a race as hard, as hindered, as full of hope as theirs was. Each runner, however hard pressed, could be sure these witnesses' sympathy and mysterious aid were with him at every moment.

Someone trained in rhetorical habits, knowing how religious writers of every school use such devices, might take these words for one more instance. It would not change his mind to point out how practical the previous chapter is, how impatient the writer was with fine speeches, since his heroes were doers, and it was to work and trust that he was rousing the flagging Christians of Palestine. Our modern habit would explain it as calculated stimulus. But the true answer is that the whole argument of the Epistle had been building toward proving that Christ tore the veil between the departed and the living; so it is a strict, logical conclusion that this cloud of witnesses is actually present with them, not conjured up by fancy. Believing these premises, the writer had a duty to use every power he had to break the hold of sense and its child, fancy, on his readers' minds, and to make them look steadily at the facts of their position—not to work up unnatural excitement, but to clear away the delusions of indolence and despair.

The writer of Hebrews, then, is not copying the insincerity of orators who talk of saints looking down from shining seats as a trade. He is explaining why honest men, in their truest moments, facing death, have needed and confirmed the conviction that they were not alone, that the hosts on their side outnumbered those against them. It would be horrible if they acted rightly only because they believed a falsehood. It would be an infinite comfort to know they had a right to believe it then, that we have the same right always, and that the doubts resisting this belief in us are the false thing.

Yet however well we know these words, they do not by themselves give us this assurance. We can dismiss them as addressed to Hebrews of a particular age, by an inspired writer, in tones unlike anything we hear now. In hours of blessed sorrow such reasoning collapses and we feel sure what was true then is true now—but this does not last. Old doubts return; and if something of that hour's insight remains, we too easily think it was meant specially for us, as if we were the favored ones who might turn Scripture's promises to our own use—*if we can*. But everything hangs on that "if." Can we, until we are taught again that we are no better than other men, that no truth about God and man can be a private possession?

The Communion continually reaffirms these words to every age and member of the Church. It says: the pillar of cloud that followed the Hebrews converted at Pentecost, ruled by James, addressed by Paul or one with Paul's mind, follows you too. Many have been gathered into that cloud since. Every new face in it bears the same furrows as those before it; each has run the race, and by running it has learned to feel with those running now. If the doctrine of Hebrews is untrue, this Supper has no reason to exist. If it is true, one who partakes need not strain to imagine former combatants as present spectators—the Sacrament simply tells him that they are so. This may seem as strange to him as light to a child's eyes, but the light is there, and he has organs to receive it, independent of whether he can yet fully see it—as a child gazes at a lamp or the sun with ever-growing, not lessening, wonder.

II\. It is not easy to convince ourselves that we are really running a race, any more than that we have witnesses. This thought too has grown stale through repetition, yet it has gripped men everywhere and always, so it cannot be mere fancy. Those striving for worldly eminence feel it applies to them—they live to outrun others, fairly or not, for prizes worth having or worthless, and the one who sacrifices most has the best chance of winning. The Greek games and Roman arena often supplied images to St. Paul's mind. In Philippians he speaks of forgetting what is behind and reaching toward what is ahead, pressing toward the prize of God's high calling in Christ Jesus. That he was not trying to outrun others is clear from his eagerness that the Philippians run the same course, and from his testimony that his greatest reward is to share his joy with them. Yet despite this crucial difference between him and worldly competitors, he was convinced the comparison held true—that spiritual striving toward a spiritual goal is as real as any bodily effort.

So he speaks of casting aside every weight, as runners must. This refers not only to freedom from burdens at the start, but to prior training—abstaining from food and drink that would dull them. Paul may mean this almost literally: that the same causes weakening the body's activity weaken the spirit's, and the same discipline serves both. But I think he means more directly those burdens that weigh on conscience and crush hope: the incubus of the past—evil done, good left undone, thoughts wandered, base desires cherished, hours of company abused and irrecoverable; the weight of the present—petty anxieties and vanities, occupations unworthy of a spirit; the ache of responsibilities not faced, uncertainty which path to take, the fear of having lost the way or moving in circles rather than forward; the weight of the future—doubts of what is coming on ourselves and the world, whether all we believe and see may be shadow. These are heavy weights—who knows how heavy in the brother kneeling beside us at the same altar? Yet there is a weight I have sometimes felt worse than these: a leaden indifference, as if nothing—past, present, future, world, self, or God—mattered at all.

When we are told to cast off these weights, every weight, the words please us at first but distress us on reflection. Do they not mock us? Who can cast off what is part of himself? Who can undo what has been, banish what is, or turn the mist over what is coming into sunlight? How can watching eyes help us do this? If they knew the secret, did it die with them, unshared? I think, brethren, some of them did impart it before they died, and perhaps we are learning the lesson from them even now. Is this not what the Lord's Supper teaches—repeating the command, "Cast your burdens on the Lord," and showing how it can be obeyed? He to whom past, present, and future are all one, who is and was and is to come, invites you into fellowship with Him through His Son. Seeking Him, you cast away these burdens onto the burden He bore who carried the sin of the world. You can bring all that has been, all that is, all you fear will be, before Him who knows it all—come with your darkness into His light—and rise a new man in Him who died and rose for you, putting off the old self and putting on the new man created after God in Christ Jesus.

III\. So too the force of "the sin that so easily besets us"—surrounding us like a girdle—becomes clear. The image of a burden speaks to us all, but does not fully satisfy, for the sense of evil is too intimate and personal for mere oppression to describe. Is it always a weight pressing on us? Do we never embrace and cherish it? If disgust comes after, did not enjoyment come first—was the indulgence not courted, with no real wish to be free of it? These are hard questions, and often unwise ones to ask—for does debating the nature and degree of our sin not keep us in it? While we weigh how guilty we have been, does not the guilt grow? Do we not need something better than self-examination that keeps us fixed on ourselves and makes the judge complicit in the crime? Does not the Communion point another, better way—to a life-blood that cleanses from all sin, a divine dying Love more subtle than sin itself, able to enter hollows of the spirit sin cannot reach, and drive it out and take its place? Whether we understand these promises or not, is anything else sufficient to free us from that penetrating poison in our blood? If we cannot understand, will not God give understanding—is that not the very thing we ask of Him? Is there any refuge from a cold, dark, selfish nature except in the nature of a pure and loving Being in whom is no darkness at all?

The self-examination the Church asks before this bread and cup, I believe, is not an inquiry into whether we have inward qualifications to come, but whether we truly want to be rid of ourselves—whether we would welcome a Deliverer from what degrades us, a Friend in whom we might inherit the righteousness and truth we lack and can never gain except by forgetting ourselves and seeking them in Him. It is indeed profane to come to a Sacrament of fellowship with a righteous Being if we would rather be without such fellowship, of a new nature if we prefer our old, base one. So to examine whether we are in the faith—that is, whether we count Christ the Deliverer and Giver of new life, as Scripture says He is—is truly needed preparation for the Marriage Supper. If He has not taken on man's nature, if He is not the Bridegroom of Humanity, if He has not died that we might share His risen life, the Sacrament is a falsehood and we are false to come to it. Through the dullness of our spirits and love of routine, such forgetfulness steals over us continually, so we should be grateful for any warning that God is in earnest whether we are or not, and that He would rather afflict us with sickness and death than let us be cheated of the blessing through distrust and ingratitude. Such warnings, like all that happens around and within us, are goads driving us to the Father of our spirits, not reasons to turn from Him—not meant to unsettle us with anxiety, but to show us why we must cast off such anxieties, since they only hinder the race we are running.

IV\. This is the text's next theme: we throw off these weights and this besetting sin because we cannot run carrying them, or can only run impatiently and unevenly. Does "running" mean only what we call religious acts, preparing for another world? I take it to mean a man's whole business in the world—everything he wants, works for, thinks in solitude, does in society, his home life, his politics, even his humblest tasks. Whatever he does, he is running some race, aiming at something he supposes attainable someday. The text says there is one common goal for all men, which, set before them in their different callings, makes every calling human rather than selfish—the work of a creature who looks upward, not one who crawls and eats dust. All such work requires patience—to do the task well, to bear the obstacles to it, to make it serve a higher, universal end. This is why, in old times, the State treated Communion as a qualification for public office. That doctrine was abused for grasping, party ends, and we may be glad no law enforces it now; but the principle behind it still holds, whether we grasp it or not—and understanding it fully would be the secret of all moral and social reform. No office administered by or affecting men may be held as an earthly patron's gift or a prize for cunning; such offices are stewardships from God, to be held every hour under His presence and judgment, their abuse repented of, their right use sought through His grace—otherwise they are performed either in cowardly deference to others or self-willed dependence on oneself, in either case to the harm of those they are meant to serve.

V\. Some may think the closing words of the text lift it out of our common duties into a loftier sphere. The Apostle says: looking to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God's throne. Here is the full meaning of all that has gone before—correcting the worst tendencies of both religious and worldly people, vindicating our whole human life from the narrowness of each. Preachers often tell us to think of death as the goal of our life's work and to run toward it; but this writer points to a different goal: Jesus Christ, the Giver of life, is the goal of the race, and runners who fix their eyes elsewhere will miss the prize. We are often told to examine our faith, to ask whether we have a right to claim Christ as Savior; but the Epistle tells us to look past our faith to the living Person who is its only root and end—our faith rests not in itself but in Him, and if we look to it instead of Him, it dies. We are bidden to look to One who bore the cross, died as man, rose as man, ascended as man; every act by which we know Him concerns our whole race. And we are encouraged to cast off the slothful, cowardly, self-seeking nature that belongs to us as individuals, and to be clothed instead with His enduring, self-sacrificing nature, who died and lives for all. How this is done, He Himself shows us: He had a goal before Him as we have—His Father's eternal love always before Him. In darkness, agony, and desertion, He cast Himself and us upon that love. The joy set before Him was the joy of making men share in it.

And now we may begin to grasp the force of the words, "Take, eat, this is My body; drink, this is My blood." Those hindered in running their race may share in that human and divine nature that was in Him. This is the pledge that God raises up His power and comes among us in our weakness and ignorance; the pledge that we may cast every weight pressing on us, on our fellows, on the world, before His Cross; that we may lay other men's sins and our own—are they not the same evil, the same death, however different in form?—before Him who was made sin though He knew no sin. This is our ground for thanking God for all men and all things—for birth into a world of sorrow, for every sorrow found there, for all that has taught us our common blood with all humanity. This warrants us to pray for all, known and unknown, friend and enemy, and to hope for all. This assures us that Christ's coming in the flesh truly was glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, goodwill to men. This is the pledge of the pierced side and wounded hands given to us as to the Apostle; today we remember that Christ is risen indeed, our Lord and our God. This is the pledge that we belong not merely to a fighting body but to the Church of the firstborn, the assembly of just men made perfect; that our spirits may already be with Him in heaven, needing no descent of Christ into earthly elements. This is the witness that we are not dreaming, but awaiting what must come by the eternal laws of God's universe and the oath of Him who cannot lie—a coming of Christ in His Father's glory with the holy angels, a day of redemption when He claims the universe He has purchased. This is the voice reaching us out of the depths of sorrow and anguish: "Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice."

## First Sunday after Christmas

(INNOCENTS' DAY)

[December]{.smallcaps} 28, 1856

*The passage:* Jesus called a little child to Him, stood the child among the disciples, and said that unless they were converted and became like little children, they could not enter the kingdom of heaven.

I had planned to keep my sermons on the Eucharist within the four weeks of Advent. But Innocents' Day suggests some thoughts I want to connect to that subject, and I don't regret giving this Sunday after Christmas, the last of the year, to it.

If this day means more than commemorating an event, it must speak to the present and future, not only the past — it must describe a state of mind we would want to keep or recover. Innocence seems so precious a treasure that we admire anyone who has it and mourn for ourselves and others who have lost it. This admiration and lament usually take two forms. First, the child is treated as the model, not just the source, of the grown man. Since Christian theology says the child is born in sin, the moment right after Baptism is taken as its peak of perfection — it then wears the white robe, which could in principle be kept spotless but is in fact soiled by contact with the world and by the unfolding of feelings and passions that will flower in youth and bear fruit in manhood. What can we do but lament that this innocence is lost, and try to recover some faint image or substitute for it?

At other times, or by other people, the same question is viewed historically rather than personally — applied to the human race first, individuals second. "What a glorious time," we say, "when the first man and woman were still pure! What a misery for their descendants that Paradise was lost! How many have fallen through that fall! Even those spared final punishment have been wounded by it, mortally."

There are two corrections to these plausible, popular claims. One comes from the Sacrament of Baptism itself, which is appealed to as justifying the high value placed on infant innocence; the other from the plain words and whole tenor of Scripture about the history of mankind. Baptism was first proclaimed to a corrupt generation, polluted with actual sins, a people in rebellion against God's Covenant — it was a Baptism of Repentance for the remission of sins. The Baptism prophesied to follow it was to be even more searching and fiery. Apostles and Evangelists invited heathens and Jews alike, defiled with every crime, to that Baptism. Eminent fathers and doctors of the Church wondered how anyone could receive it except those who had deliberately turned from their sins; they resisted parents who asked it for their children, even though those parents cited the precedent of Circumcision and the likely practice of the Apostles in acknowledging children as heirs of the New Covenant.

The conscience, heart, and reason of mankind overruled these scruples. Infants had the nature Christ took on, and so could not be kept from Him. To say they were not spiritual, voluntary beings merely because the will was still dormant was to deny plain fact; and if they were such beings, they had a right to be claimed as such, not treated as animals. But their condition does not determine the character of the Sacrament, in any Church's teaching. Our own Catechism, written for their use, explains how they are admitted despite lacking the repentance and faith normally expected of those baptized. Nothing in this suggests that Baptism honors the unconscious infant above the sinner who has deliberately turned from evil, or that the infants Herod slew are more precious in God's sight than the bravest champions of the faith — even champions who, like those St. Peter addressed, had once lived in lust and revelling, or who, like St. Paul, had once been persecutors.

But if Baptism speaks so plainly against that view, how does Scripture speak of exalting Eden's innocence into an excuse for regret and longing? From Genesis, where Adam is banished from the garden, to the last chapter of the Apocalypse and its Water and Tree of Life, is there a single instance of such regret in the life, prayers, or laments of any holy man? Do Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, or Jeremiah ever wish that Adam had not fallen, or that the earth had never been filled with mankind? There is sorrow enough for those who broke God's Covenant and sold themselves into slavery, for those who had been planted as a right seed and corrupted themselves; there is crying enough for God to rend the heavens and come down and judge the earth. But though these warriors dare say almost anything to the God who knows their hearts — "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" "Let us speak with Thee of Thy judgment" — none of them ever maintains that it would have been better if there had been no revelation of God's righteousness overcoming sin, of God's mercy to the sinner. That blasphemy never enters their thoughts. They look forward, not back. They want more knowledge of God's Truth and Love, not the loss of what they already have. As the evil in themselves and in the world becomes more appalling to them, their vision of a good that no evil can quench grows clearer and brighter, and they wait for it. Must they not bless God that He let men eat of that tree whose fruit was death — since behind that death lay a life more divine than Adam could ever have dreamed of?

So says Scripture, and so says the Sacrament I have been speaking of in these sermons. The one exposes one form of this irreverent, ungrateful looking-backward; the other strikes at its very root. We cannot accept the pledge that the Son of God took the nature of men, and then trace our humanity to Adam instead of to Him. We cannot accept the pledge that the Son of God died the death of men, and then complain that Death entered the world. We cannot accept the pledge that the Lamb of God took away the sin of the world, without confessing that the victory over sin is greater than the innocence that came before it. We cannot believe He made a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world without accepting, as fully as we can, St. Paul's words: that "as the offence, so also is the free gift"; that "as by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, so by the righteousness of One, the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life"; that "as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."

But there must be a true reverence for the childhood of the individual and of mankind, or this false reverence could never have arisen. When our Lord took a child and set him among the disciples, making the child's face the answer to their question "Who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?" and telling them they could not enter that Kingdom unless converted and made like that child, He laid on us a serious obligation to ask what it was in this image that He loved, and wanted to shape us into. His words, taken plainly, dismiss the idea that we should sigh after Infancy as something left behind us — He tells grown men they may and must attain everything blessed in that state, despite all their experience of the world and of sin. But His words do justify the feeling — one that philosophers and divines fail to justify — that a childlike man is the highest, most fully developed man.

We speak of a child as unconscious, and denounce self-consciousness as almost revolting, inconsistent with its true nature. Yet if we saw no consciousness awakening in a child we would call it idiotic; if it never learned to say "this is mine" and "this I must do," we would lament that it had no energy, no sense of responsibility. This puzzle keeps thrusting itself upon us, driving continual shifts in our theories and even more in our practical upbringing of children. Should we awaken the sense of self that threatens quietness, obedience, simplicity — or stifle it and produce a good-natured slave with no purpose of its own? Anxious parents ask this again and again, and generally the answer comes before they find it: they are forced to admit they are not the creators here, that some other discipline than theirs is at work on the being entrusted to them — and they may wish they had understood sooner how immensely important that fact is. Then it may strike them — an obvious thought, yet startling to so many of us — that these facts of our human experience may have something to do with our divinity; that divinity is not wholly separate from human life, and that the passage between them may have been opened by One who knows more than we do.

We have prayed this week: "Almighty God, Who hast given Thine only begotten Son to take our nature upon Him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin, grant that we, being regenerate and made Thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by Thy Holy Spirit." Whatever is meant by becoming, or being, a little child in our text must be included in the word "Regenerate" in this Collect — a word explained by the clause before it, about the Incarnation of the Son of God. That Incarnation is the ground of the regeneration and new birth of those who call God Father. They may claim to be sons of God by adoption because the Only Begotten has made Himself their Brother. If Baptism admits people into this condition, giving them the filial name and privilege, it does so only because Christ first won that name and those privileges for all human beings by taking their flesh. Baptism can do no more and no less than its charter authorizes; it confers no separate or independent grace on anyone. It can only say: "You belong to the Head of your race, you are a member of His body; you do not merely carry the divided nature inherited from the first Adam, a nature stamped with death — you have the nature of the Divine Son, you are united to Him in whom is life, and from whom the life of you and of all creatures comes."

What follows from this? That the purity or innocence of any human creature is not, and cannot be, his own; we are only innocent so far as we claim nothing as our own, look outside ourselves, forget ourselves in another. Whether we like this language or call it mystical, we all testify to its truth. Our reverence for unconsciousness, our near-worship of childhood, is nothing but a silent homage to this doctrine. And our protest against mere unconsciousness — our desire that a child grow into a distinct living person, our conviction that "Know thyself" is a command from Heaven even when obeying it seems to bring us to the brink of hell — this too witnesses to the same doctrine. For how can there be any giving up of self if there is no self to give up? How can a man cease from his own works and strivings if nothing is working and striving within him to cease from?

It must therefore be true that we should watch, with real interest, thankfulness, and hope, the gradual sprouting of the life-buds that destroy the unconsciousness of infancy. We should welcome every strong energy, every feeling or passion that is a prophecy of manhood, even vehement self-assertion — whatever evil may be latent in it, even if it might end in savage defiance. To call any of this diabolical because it may be put to diabolical use, or to assign it to the old selfish Adam-nature because it may be debased into that nature's tool, is to deny God's purpose in Creation and Redemption. But we equally deny that purpose if we fail to see all the discipline of family and school, all the influences that soften the affections or fortify the will, the friendship that binds a society together, the law that appeals to conscience, everything that awakens the powers of mind and body and everything that restrains their excesses, as God's instruments for keeping His child from becoming his own slave instead of His free servant. We could ill spare the brief record of our Lord's own boyhood in St. Luke, which tells us that the boy has his prototype no less than the man — that as the body grows, "the inward service of the mind and soul grows wide withal," and that One was with Him who, as He grew in stature and in grace, was always about His Father's business and learning obedience in it. Those who would take these records from us would do us grave harm. But God forbid that ecclesiastical fancy should add a single word to them! It is the Manhood of Christ we chiefly need to hear of — the Manhood for which His childhood and boyhood were only a preparation, the Manhood that shows us both how we should, and how we should not, aspire to the state of the child.

These words, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" hold that secret. In everything denying Himself, exalting His Father, He was necessarily without sin — because sin consists in setting up a self, in refusing to own any end beyond self. He was undefiled, harmless, innocent, not because He was free from temptation, not because the weight of human guilt was not upon Him, but because He could carry it into His Father's presence and keep entire communion with His love under the full pressure of it.

Therefore all attempts to make ourselves innocent by shutting ourselves into a controlled environment, barring out evil; cutting ourselves off from sinners so they won't defile us; treating other men's evils as none of our concern — all this is fatal to acquiring Christ's innocence, the only innocence God recognizes. On the other hand, it contradicts Scripture, reason, and experience to say that those most stained by outward and inward defilement cannot receive the gift of innocence in its fullest measure. "Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow" was the confident assurance of a man burdened in conscience with adultery and murder — for those crimes the sword was never to leave his house, and no light penances but God's own — the loss and rebellion of his children, exile, sorrow within and without — were laid upon him. Yet he himself had a free heart and a right spirit. He had dared to seek God's righteousness and flee to Him from his own evil, and so his guilt lost its power to hold him prisoner; he was purer than he had ever been, because he trusted God more and himself less. It cannot be otherwise under a higher dispensation. St. Paul declares it is not. The history of individuals and of mankind bears witness that it is not. Whatever notions men frame about baptismal purity, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper witnesses that the sin-stricken man who has recognized that he never had, and never can have, anything righteous in himself, may become wholly childlike and spotless when he turns from himself and seeks fellowship with Him in whom is no sin.

I have dwelt on this point specially, because I think here lies the true meaning of Innocents' Day. If it stood apart from the Festival of the Nativity, as marking certain infants specially qualified by dying before they could contract actual guilt, we might imagine something peculiarly fortunate or celestial in their circumstances — as if they ranked higher in Heaven's records for having seen and known so little of earth. But the timing of the festival teaches us, as much as the event itself, that all their worth comes from their relation to the Son of Man and His taking on our flesh. And since the festival falls right after those of St. Stephen and St. John, we are reminded that the middle-aged man and the old man had just as much innocence as those who died in their cradles — were, in Christ's sense, little children, because they confessed their sins and believed God faithful and just to forgive them and cleanse them from all unrighteousness. This teaches a lesson quite opposite to what some would have us learn.

But I cannot separate this doctrine of true Christian innocence from the doctrine that Communion, by its very name, teaches us — and which the Nativity season urges on us most of all. We seek communion with the righteous Lord of man, who took man's nature. The righteousness He revealed is for each of us because it is for all; if we refuse it to anyone, we must find some ground other than God's own Word for claiming it ourselves. That is what the Church's admonition to be in charity with all men before coming to the feast means: it binds us to all men in sharing the very highest gifts God can give. If we would shut anyone out from those gifts, why are we seeking them ourselves? And if we would not shut them out from these, what gifts are there that are not included in them, or inferior to them? This is a searching test, one ministers and people alike should tremble to apply. We want discipline to exclude notorious offenders — few of them come, and we could easily exclude those who do if we had the courage. But the real discipline here is not for notorious offenders; it is for all of us, for those who pass muster best with the world and are most satisfied with themselves. Are we more content with ourselves than with that man or this one? Do we know nothing in ourselves that should exclude us, any more than we know of him? Do we come because we will not let anything keep us from seeking the God who alone understands what has kept us from Him, and who alone can remove that barrier?

Brethren, we talk much of divisions in the Church; we have our own remedies for healing wounds, our schemes of comprehension, our zeal to banish opponents whom we blame for the strife. Let those who think these methods have succeeded so far try them again. Let those who despair of them try one other experiment — an old and simple one. We have sinned in breaking the Communion of the Church. Let us confess that sin, each for himself and for the whole Church, when we meet at Communion. Others may have committed it too; acknowledging our own sins does not suppress theirs. And if we feel keenly the sins pressing nearest to us, we should also feel those we seem to have no direct part in, but to which we may have contributed a great deal.

That is one Christmas lesson connected with this Service — one we will practice better as we become more like little children, learning to confess to the Father of our spirits as children, kindly and truly dealt with, confess to their earthly fathers. There is another plain lesson tied to this season. We speak of Christmas gifts and charities, and lay alms on the Communion plate every Sunday. I don't say we should give more then; let those alms be taken as signs and pledges rather than as the whole of our giving, and let charity flow through other channels too, even the most formal and legal ones. But let the signs be true signs. Let us give always because we are in communion with God and with men; let all our charities carry something of the Nativity in them — a divine origin and a human character and purpose. You complain that charities lack this character — that they become mere displays on subscription lists, donations passed through some unknown collector or board with little real sympathy in them. But why complain, rather than try to change it? Why should not communicants feel a bond to each other? Why should not those who receive the bread and wine in every parish church or private chapel meet to consider, in the simplest and most childlike way, how to share their blessings — physical, intellectual, spiritual — with others? If we are tired of more artificial organizations, why not use this one, which has such deep roots, has stood for eighteen centuries, and can never grow old, since by its very nature it means seeking a continual renewal of life from One who has promised to give it and who does not deceive us?

I offer this as a thought for the close of the year — may it ripen and bear fruit in the year to come! And there is another thought to sustain it. Our Lord told His disciples that unless they were converted and became as little children, they could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Did He mean the very Kingdom He had already given them power to preach — the Kingdom they were to announce to all men as "at hand," calling on them to submit and become its subjects? Yes, that very Kingdom. They had the right — even Judas had the right — to say to the people of every village and street, "A Kingdom you cannot see is in the midst of you, a Kingdom of Righteousness and Peace and Joy; you are heirs of it; Christ has taken your nature so that you may enter it." These words were true, and no unbelief in speaker or hearer could make them false. But to enter this Kingdom, to breathe its atmosphere, both ministers and people alike must have the poverty of spirit and simple trust that belong to a child. And this can seem to us, as much as to you, like a sentence of permanent exclusion. Where are proud and vain men like us to find this poverty? Where are suspicious, doubting men like us to find this trust? Every time the exhortation before Communion is read, calling us to true repentance, faith, and thanksgiving, this question returns, often with growing anxiety, even terror. I know only one way to answer it — the way pointed to by the Christmas Collect I have already quoted. We are children of God; Christ, by taking our nature, has secured that title for us. It depends on no accident, rests on no condition of our feelings. And because we are children, God has sent His Spirit so that we may call Him Father and act as His children. This Spirit is the last great gift to our race — given not to its unconscious infancy but to its full, ripe manhood — so that we might know the treasures God has freely given us, the treasures of His own Nature. This is the Spirit of Trust and of Humility, the Spirit of Christ and of the Father. He is with us always, speaking and working in us always. Our conscience's reproaches for our pride and self-will are His reproaches; every movement to give up our pride and self-will is His movement. When we ask that His Spirit be renewed in us day by day, we ask to have our pride and self-will removed by One mightier than they are, mightier than we are — we ask only what He prompts us to ask. When we draw near the altar, He is there to fulfill the purposes of that Communion, to unite us to God and to our brethren, to bring us into the enjoyment of that Kingdom of Truth and Love that has no end, and to kindle in us a light that may afterward shine before men, so that seeing our good works they may glorify our Father in Heaven.

## First Sunday in the Year

*January 4, 1857*

*The passage:* This is the will of God, even your sanctification. —1 Thessalonians iv. 3.

As long as we treat the main word in this text as a technical term, I doubt we will understand what St. Paul meant by it. He was not writing a system of theology but a letter to men working and suffering in the world, who needed strength for it. When he spoke of sanctification he spoke of something bound up with their everyday business, something every busy man might feel he needed. A learned man trying to get a definition from a book would always miss it; a simple person actually fighting the battle of life would grasp something of it at once, and see further into it the harder he was pressed. For what does such a man discover, in the first century or the nineteenth? This: it is hard to do what I ought; harder still, with many arguments before me, to know what I ought to do. Advice from others helps, though often it misses my real difficulty — it does not clear the mist from my eyes or heal the lameness in my walk. Still, when the question is about acts, I can take a friend's advice, or balance opposing counsels. But how different when the question is not what to do but how to *be* right! I may go a long time without asking whether my words and deeds express what is really in me, or whether I merely adopted them as expected, changing them as I move from one society to another like currency crossing a border. I would gladly dismiss the question, but it returns. I cannot claim to be honest without facing it — and facing it, what insincerity comes to light! In secret hours I am put on a rack far more searching than any the world could apply. And words I once heard lightly now repeat this examination and sharpen the torture: people complimenting themselves and each other on their sincerity, as if that at least were secure to them. What would I not give to buy their secret, to reach so easily the blessing they seem to hold so securely!

Yes — to be or not to be, that is the question. Can we be honest not merely in our dealings with the world but with ourselves? Can we hold to justice in our heart of hearts even if every worldly inducement to injustice were removed and only the risk lay on the side of right? Is it only accident, lack of opportunity, or fear of detection that keeps us decent? Do the conventions of society make us courteous and friendly — and would we, if those conventions vanished, take pleasure in letting loose our contempt and malice?

It is not wise to force this inquisition upon others — often we confuse their consciences rather than clear them. But it is forced on ourselves in private hours, when those around us suppose all is well and try to persuade us of it. Then comes the most terrible crisis: like Sisyphus, a man lifts a stone that keeps descending on him with greater weight. Outward schemes of reform prove useless; they only expose the inner disease and increase the suffering. He must root out that disease — but what is it, except himself? Can he remake his own being? He finds baseness at what seems the very root of it. Is he to plant nobleness and purity there? Who else can? Nature says, it is not in me; Society says, it is not in me. And the very effort to cure seems to increase the disease — he is worse since he began probing its depths. Shall he cover the ground over again, and try to walk on as before, forgetting what he has seen — not in a dream, but in an actual revelation below?

To one who has felt this, the word Sanctification may sound promising, because it speaks of reality, and he is tired of everything artificial. It seems to say: what you are seeking can be done for you — you can be made right not on the surface but within, reformed not in the acts the world sees but in yourself, from whom the acts proceed. He may once have pictured a Saint as either someone of unapproachable, transcendent elevation, or someone marked off from others by external habits — repellent if not offensive. Now his idea of the word changes entirely. The sanctification he wants is the power of stooping, not of rising. His self-conceit is his burden; he wants deliverance into simple sympathy with his fellows, from whom he has stood too much apart. He is sure he is no better than they are, yet he keeps struggling to appear better, to be gloriously inhuman. Who will make him instead simply human, natural, unassuming?

He supposes this inward truthfulness must be a gift, since discipline itself seems to breed formality; he half imagines it must fall upon some favoured soul by the chance visit of an angel. Will such a visitant ever come to him? Are there waters he might step into, once troubled, and be healed of the disease that has kept him bedridden so long?

It is not an angel St Paul speaks of in the text. Writing to ordinary men, once heathens or Pharisees, he says to them all: "This is the will of God, even your sanctification." A marvellous message when first heard — it seems anything would be more likely true. We struggle to make ourselves right in order to win God's favor, to bring our minds to a state He can approve and reward. But Paul speaks from an entirely different point of view: it is God's will to sanctify you. We answer: yes, God has given us a law, told us what to do and not do — that is His will, and if we can conform to it, so much the better. But our complaint is that we cannot; adjusting our will to that will is exactly the difficulty. Who can remove that out of our way?

No — that is not what the words say. Paul certainly believed God had given men a law; no one believed it more, or had felt more fully the anguish of that belief, his own inability to keep it, his own dislike of it. It was through this that he learned the Will of God was his Sanctification. Beneath the law he found a Divine Person, a Divine Will, its author, acting upon him and working in him to will and do of His good pleasure. This Will was not compelling him to acts, nor setting motives before him to incline him toward acts; it was speaking directly to his will, making him be what he was created to be, so that he might do what he was commanded to do.

You might think Paul had a beautiful soul, naturally shaped to receive this Sanctification, submitting to it as gracefully as dew falling on an open flower. That would be a great mistake. By his own account it was through resistance, reluctance, the vehemence of his own self-will, that he became aware of the might of the Will subduing him. Had he not discovered this in himself, he would never have spoken so boldly to the Thessalonians: "This is the will of God, even your Sanctification." He could say: there is no hard, rugged soil in you that was not in me, no pride choking the avenues love might enter that did not choke my own reason and heart. All I have learned proves this Will is not partial, not choosing some specially soft nature to work on; it is a Will to good and nothing else, seeking to bring all wills into harmony with itself.

Paul had the same difficulty believing this that we have — greater difficulty, since he understood the resistance of the human will far better than we do, having seen it in more terrible cases and realized it more fully in himself. But the faith — "This is the will of God, even your Sanctification" — rose out of all these experiences, and above them. When his calculations failed, when his hopes were crushed, he fell back on it. Other things might be doubtful; this was certain. On this ground he stood; heaven and earth stood on it; if heaven and earth passed away, this would not.

I said men find, the deeper they go into themselves, more corruption and darkness, until they suppose the very root of their being is nothing else. Paul had gone into these depths and found this rottenness; in himself, he says, he found only that. But he discovered a root below himself — a true divine root, for himself and for every man. Each man, contemplating himself apart from Christ, is that evil creature in which no good thing dwells. But no man has a right to contemplate himself apart from Christ; God does not so contemplate him. He was formed at first in the Divine Word, and in Him he lives and has his being still; to be ignorant of Him is misery, to know Him is life and peace. Paul was sure it was God's will that men should be what He formed them to be, should find the true source of their life, and not struggle to cut themselves off from it and destroy themselves. If so, the Will of God was their Sanctification — a Will to graft them onto this living stock, that they might grow and bring forth living fruit. This Will was not lazy or inoperative, acting today and ceasing tomorrow; it was the Will of the Everlasting Father, fully uttered in Christ the Divine Word when He took on flesh, gave Himself up to death, and rose again — and it would go on acting through the energies of the Almighty Spirit, the Comforter promised to abide with the Church forever. Every man in the Thessalonian Church was to take this as addressed directly to himself, not to argue that some special infirmity put him outside its scope — the more evil he was conscious of, the more proof that these words were meant for him. And the same principle that made it a sin to deny them to himself made it a sin to deny them to any of his fellows, whatever their temptations, however they had yielded to them: there was no limiting this sentence. The Will of God, in its fullest sense, was their Sanctification — not a paltry benevolence wishing creatures outward ease and happiness, with which no man is ever content, not a Will to save them from toil, suffering, or rightful punishment, but a Will to impose these so long as they purify and elevate the spirit within, remove its impediments, and bring the man to the only state in which he is truly a man, renewed in the image of God.

In this sense, I ask you to consider the words we have heard in the Epistle, Gospel, and Collect today, and to apply them in the year we are entering. It may seem a fall to pass from Christ's Nativity to His Circumcision — from a Child born and a Son given, to the severities of the old law of servants. It would indeed be a fall if the Christmas message — that God sent His Son that we might receive the adoption of sons — were weakened by the Circumcision message, if the covenant now done away were forced upon us again, who have received the sign of the truer covenant. But we keep the festival of Christ's Circumcision precisely so that we do not suffer this degradation. We are always in danger of it — always ready to imagine that we are not redeemed, not claimed as God's children, not grafted onto a holy root; always supposing that by some painful acts, devised by ourselves or borrowed from other times, we must bring ourselves into a condition we ought to attain but which God has not already given us. St Paul teaches — the Church repeats his lesson year by year — that Christ's Circumcision answers all such reasoning and forbids all such experiments. The purpose of Circumcision was fulfilled when the Son of Man underwent it; His birth and death explained why it had been instituted, destroyed its use, preserved its meaning, and brought forth the substance of which it was the shadow. If the Nativity says that Christ's Sonship is the ground on which our life and humanity's life stand, the Circumcision says we have no acts to perform in order to place ourselves on that ground — that every obstacle to claiming it as ours has been removed — that we have no right to demand anything of anyone before telling him it is his, by the constitution of God's universe, by the Mind and Will of God Himself.

This privilege we are to claim for ourselves, and this gospel we are to preach to others, because only so can we come, or bring them, within the scope of this Sanctification — which, as I have said, refers to the Will of God, to His perpetual operation on spirits He has formed in His image, created in His Son, reclaimed and regenerated in that Son, that they may draw life from His life and bring forth fruits befitting such a root. This Sanctification takes effect through all the discipline God brings to bear on the hearts and spirits of men — through the signs that make them aware of their relation to Him, the inward attraction that binds them to Him, the illumination of His purposes, and the severities and hardships that remind them of their evil nature, reprove them for yielding to it, and force them to abjure it and seek His protection. Here is that Circumcision made without hands, of which the Church speaks today; by it God teaches that He watches over us no less than over His people in any older generation, dealing with us on the same principles set forth in their history — only He has brought us to a point they were always approaching but never reached, and given us light on His methods and His ultimate purpose that He did not grant to them.

We enter the New Year with the assurance that whatever befalls us must be an instrument in God's hands for this inward circumcision, for fulfilling the Will of God which is our Sanctification. I do not know what else could sustain us in looking into the dim future. Anxiety and restlessness dominate us when we speculate about what is coming, and equally when we consider what we ought to do, whether a hundred incompatible duties press upon us at once. Beneath the first lies the notion of a Fate that may crush us at any moment; beneath the second, the notion of a Taskmaster making tremendous demands, reaping where he has not sown. Despondency, irregularity, and indolence naturally follow from both. But substitute a Father for a Fate, and the Will of God which is our Sanctification for a Taskmaster, and the whole condition of the mind changes: you can wait, for you have hope; you can work, for you have an Inspirer of your work who will bring it to its right issue. He is preparing events, and preparing you to meet them, be instructed by them, make use of them. The events lie under a Will to simple and perfect good; you lie under the more immediate direction of that same Will; you can enter into its meaning and are invited to work with it. True, you are subject to an outward law, as Christ, the Everlasting Son, was subject to one. But you can obey it in the spirit of a son, as He did, and His Spirit is with you to shape your purposes and acts into His likeness. You will bear sharper crosses than you could ever contrive for yourself; Christ in His very infancy was marked to bear a cross, and took it in simple filial obedience — and the Will that laid it on Him sustained Him under it, that He might sustain all whose nature He has assumed and whose burdens He has shared.

There is another lesson in this Circumcision Festival that should stay with us through the year. We sometimes say the Jewish Covenant has nothing to do with us, no resemblance to ours, because it was a covenant with a nation. God forbid that this should set a difference between us and them — that we should think their nation was under the direct care of a Living, Righteous Lord while ours is left to foolish mortals, or that it is God's will to sanctify us as individuals but not to cut off from our nation whatever hinders it from fulfilling its tasks! Let us not destroy our patriotism — and with it our personal morality, which is inseparable from it — by such doctrine. The Father of all does not care less for particular nations because He has redeemed mankind through His Son's birth and death. We are holy as individuals only because we share in the universal holiness Christ has put upon our race. All God's Sanctification is meant to unite us more closely to our fellows; all His severe Circumcision is meant to separate us from the selfish inclinations that set us at war with them. Whatever punishments He intends for England this year are meant to destroy the weeds ruining its soil — and those weeds grow in the soil of our own hearts too, sowing seeds that stifle good there as well as in the nation at large. We know that the worship of money, the meanness of party, the hypocrisies of tongue and soul cannot reasonably be traced to some imaginary public — they are found in you and me, and in you and me they must be rooted out. This is proof that the Covenant with the nation cannot be separated from the Covenant with its members, and that Sanctification for one would be ineffectual if it did not include the other. This is why we should pray for national repentance and reformation, rather than trust to a repentance in ourselves that thinks of us apart from the sinners around us. This is why we can hope for no Sanctification at all, until we believe it is God's will to sanctify us all.

## First Sunday after Epiphany

*The passage:* If our gospel is hidden, it is hidden to those who are lost — in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, does not shine on them.

I noted a few Sundays ago that this Second Epistle to the Corinthians shows more fully than any other of St. Paul's writings his own struggles as a minister to the Gentiles, and what those struggles taught him about the ministry in every age. I return to it for both reasons. The Epiphany season asks how Christ was made known to the Gentiles; it also asks, if we take our own work seriously, how He is made known to men by the Gospel we preach. St. Paul's words in the text answer both questions directly.

(1) Every gospel tract tells us that "Gospel" means "good tidings," but it is worth reminding ourselves of that plain definition, because in reading St. Paul we easily forget it and credit him with a very different purpose. We might suppose he came to the Gentiles to tell them that the traces of God they thought they had found in the world were only imagined, or to reveal a darkness over past and future they had not known before. Either way he could not be a messenger of good news — he could only claim to be telling a dismal truth.

(2) He speaks of this good news being "hid" from those to whom it was proclaimed. We can learn what he means partly from the previous chapter, partly from the later part of this passage. In chapter three he speaks of his own countrymen: a veil lies over their hearts, unremoved in the reading of the Old Testament — like the veil on Moses' face, hiding a glory too bright to look at. That veil, he says, has been taken away in Christ, and will be taken from the Jewish heart when it turns to the Lord.

The word translated "hid" is related to the word for "veil," so the two passages must be connected. But how could the same cause block the Gospel among Monotheists and idolaters alike, among those who revered the Old Scriptures and those without them? If a veil hides the light from both, must it not be a different veil in each case? We shall find the answer as we go on.

(3) "If our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost." The word "lost" might suggest future damnation, but that is not the sense here. Paul is not describing the *consequences* of rejecting the Gospel but the *cause* of its rejection — describing something happening before his eyes, just as he elsewhere speaks of men "dead in trespasses and sins." The translation is not obscure if we test it against common speech: we still speak of men "lost to themselves," or "lost to all sense of right and wrong" — worn phrases, but forceful ones. When Paul found the Gentiles given over to sensuality, their minds darkened, alienated from God through ignorance and hardness of heart, he called them lost. When he found the Jews shut up in self-righteousness, glorying in their law and their difference from other men, he called them lost too — the same blindness, the same hardness of heart. He knew it well, for he had been lost himself.

(4) He then explains, from his own experience, what darkens the heart in both these apparently different cases: "the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not." One might expect the Apostle of the Gentiles to speak of many gods, a whole Pantheon — yet he names only one, "the god of this world." How could a single expression cover the beliefs scattered across Asia and Greece, the faith of the Latin Empire and the western tribes, and even the seed of Abraham, to whom belonged the adoption and the covenants and the promises? The answer is that he was summing up not their *beliefs* but their *unbeliefs*: the god of this world blinds those who believe *not*. In the earlier stages of idolatry, worshippers of things in heaven and earth still confessed a being connected to themselves, who sent rain and fruitful seasons, who might be looked to for protection, and who, despite caprice, was juster than those he ruled. But at each downward step, as the sins of the fathers passed to the children, this god with human sympathies degenerated into a mere god of this world — often no more personal than the air he was said to inhabit, yet taking on the worst human vices as his worshippers remade him in their own image. Such a god lay beneath every superstition, ready to emerge whenever faith in something higher was crushed by moral corruption. In Paul's day this god was continually extinguishing the truth scattered through pagan fable, effacing the traces of a divine Friend and Deliverer that had comforted the poorest sufferers, and turning all visions of a world to come — mixed as they were with Elysian fields and enduring stars — into one indistinguishable Tartarus. And this same god of this world had just as fully supplanted the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the mind of the Israelite — not through fear of nature's vengeance, since the Israelite, remembering his fathers' oracles, could not worship nature once he had lost its gracious Creator, but by becoming the Money-god, Mammon, enthroned between the Cherubim, believed to sit in the highest heaven — the god who helped him prosper in trade and might be bribed by sacrifice to let him pass unnoticed into the next world.

(5) Understanding who was blinding these minds helps us understand what Paul wanted them to believe instead — the purpose and effect of his Gospel. This is in the last clause: "lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, Who is the Image of God, should shine unto them." The good tidings concerned God — the true, living God set against the false, dead god of this world who blinded Jew and Gentile alike. But this true God could not be declared in anyone's words; He could only be shown in a Person, a living Image, seen in a man's life and death. Paul's task was to proclaim that God had shown such an Image of Himself as would confound every image men had made of Him from nature or from themselves — to say: "This is the Image of your God, the one your hearts and your fathers' hearts were seeking; He whom you dreamed of in every thought of goodness, justice, or deliverance from wrong; He whom you fled and wished dead in yourselves when clinging to wrongdoing, because you felt Him judging it; He whom you replaced with lying counterfeits when your souls grew dark and base; He who was always seeking you, through blessings and punishments, to bring you out of bondage into knowledge of His guidance."

So the Apostle would say further: "This good news is not mine to give. My rhetoric cannot make a way for it into your souls — and if it could, what good would that do? The message concerns a Person; you are called to submit to a living Ruler, to embrace a living Friend. No heap of words, however readily received, can produce this obedience or this fellowship — God does that, not we. He has created you in His Son and wants you to know who that Son is; He has formed you in His image and does not want you to mistake another image for His. His light is shining toward you, seeking entrance as light seeks the eye. Another god, the god of this world, works to intercept that light, to veil it, to disable the organ that should receive it. What I ask you to believe — I who have known both darkness and light — is that Christ's light is stronger than all darkness and can break through it."

If this is the character of the Gospel to the Gentiles, we see why the Church connects it with Epiphany. To the wise men, who questioned the stars for the King they sought, Jesus in the cradle is revealed as that King — an inward glory felt through the infant's weakness. A veil is lifted from these seekers' hearts, and they confess that even the grandest forms of the outward world can help them only by leading to a Lord who shares their own nature. A like manifestation came to every Gentile, learned or simple, who confessed the crucified Jesus as the Wisdom and Power of God: all his past studies and experiences of misery and sin, all his dreams of a good God and tendencies to worship an evil one, became evidence that the Image now shown him was the one after which he was made, and to which he must bow. Nor does the Church limit this to Gentiles any more than Paul does: all Jesus' acts among His own people between Baptism and Crucifixion — stilling the waves, healing the demon-possessed — are treated as Epiphanies, manifestations of His inward glory, a preliminary Gospel later preached more fully to the whole world after His resurrection. Of all the lessons our Services teach through their titles and structure — lessons that grow richer the more I see the confusions caused by private opinion, loose tradition, and the fashions of our age — this seems to me the most precious.

It teaches us, first, what kind of work our missionaries do in heathen lands. Before leaving home they may think their task is to awaken the natives to a sense of religion, concern for their souls, awareness of life's brevity, anticipation of judgment and eternity. But wherever England's rule or any other government extends, they will find such feelings already present, more intensely than at home. If this is all they think their calling is — if they have not learned that it is not even part of their message — they will soon wish they had stayed home, for that work is already being done, more effectively, by the Yogis and Fakirs whose influence they hope to overturn. Unless they bring a Gospel concerning God — one that can meet the anxieties about religion, soul, death, and the future which weigh on peoples still capable of noble thought and great deeds, and can turn thoughts of judgment and immortality from deadening, fear-driven sources of fraud and falsehood into moral and quickening ones — our missionaries are not doing what Paul and his contemporaries did. They are not announcing a Redemption or testifying to the glory manifested in the Person of Jesus Christ.

What they do abroad, we must do at home. Paul's message to the Jew was not essentially different from his message to the Gentile. We might expect him to preach the true God only to idolaters, and only Jesus Christ to those who already despised idols — but no: he had to declare the true God to both, and combat a false god in both. The English preacher today must learn the same. His Gospel too concerns God. He must proclaim that the God manifested in Christ Jesus is *the* God, the only God, and warn men of every class and opinion — from the fiercely religious to the dogmatically secular — that they are in danger of worshipping, indeed have worshipped, another god entirely unlike Him, and that it is essentially the same god different types of people bow to. There is truth in the saying that there are no atheists: the self-declared atheist worships the world, or something in it, or himself, submitting to a power no less terrible for being self-chosen. But in Paul's sense, every one of us risks becoming an atheist — not some milder unbelief, but the literal denial of God, disbelief in an all-righteous, all-true, all-loving Being who made us in His likeness and would have us righteous, true, and loving. To hold that belief fast through both crushing and delightful days is the hardest thing for human beings — not some other difficulty in Christianity, removable so all else comes easily, but this very belief: that God is not false, unjust, or indifferent as we are. Men endure great suffering for their souls, and accept the harshest demands on conscience and reason, who cannot accept this — or accept it only as a dead proposition, explained away at the first difficulty. We can never grasp this truth, never overcome this natural atheism, unless we take the Gospel to mean that God has manifested Himself, and is manifesting Himself, in His Son Jesus Christ; that only in that Image can we know Him or ourselves; that apart from Him we have only animal birth and death, and the deeper death of sin; that in Him we are raised, redeemed, united to God and each other; and that through Him the Spirit works in us to make His nature and will known to others.

From this follow further conclusions about the duties and failures of modern preachers. There are many complaints about the pulpit's weakness today. Those who feel they need no more sermons themselves, tired of commonplaces and doctrines they consider untenable, still want the poor — for whom the Gospel was first meant — to hear it, since the poor still need something of the kind, and may grow dangerous without it. For them, we are told, truth and falsehood scarcely matter; give them the strongest dose — sounding rhetoric, vehemence, terror of coming destruction, since nothing else will reach them. "How absurd," says the critic, himself quite unmoved, "for preachers who claim to believe such things not to preach them with all the fury such convictions demand — the only method that can move this class today! If religion is everything, why not use the most direct means to produce it, as camp-meetings do?"

To this plausible argument, the answer seems clear. If we believe what the New Testament teaches, we should look to the New Testament, not to later teachers who claim its authority, for guidance on both the substance and manner of our preaching — and we cannot appeal to a less severe judge, for Apostles and Evangelists will not excuse our coldness any more than the revivalists or the sceptics who draw such conclusions from our supposed premises. But when we look to Paul for how the work began that produced Christendom and converted the world, we find no evidence that his preaching differed from ours by appealing more to nerves than to reason, or by painting more vivid terrors of coming vengeance to force instant belief. That he stirred consciences as none had before, awakening a sense of evil never felt before, is certain — but he did this by presenting the gracious Lord of that conscience, against whom it had rebelled. The sense of wrong came when Christ's righteous Image was set before men and confessed as God's own, to which they must be conformed. If we fail to set forth such an Image, or fail to believe it truly is the Image of God's glory and the pattern of all good in men, we need look no further for our lack of influence, rich or poor, wise or foolish. We will gain no true influence over "the poor," for whom the Gospel was designed, by any trick a cultivated man would see through and mock. Such methods serve the god of this world and strengthen his empire, keeping the light of Christ's glorious Gospel from shining. Every base motive we appeal to, every dishonest argument we use, separates us further from the truth and makes it harder to commend ourselves, through manifest truth, to every conscience before God. It is a gross error, contradicted by plain fact, to think nineteenth-century enlightenment has made falsehood ineffective for those who dare use it — the enchanter's trade has never been more prosperous. But thank God, this same scepticism makes it unsafe for *us* to use such tricks as earlier, more innocent preachers once did in Christ's cause. We are driven back to the position of the early preachers of the cross: we must proclaim the Spirit of truth and love and a sound mind as the enemy of every spirit of falsehood that works through the senses and produces wild excitement and bodily contortion. We must proclaim, without hesitation, that God is light with no darkness in Him, and that those who claim fellowship with Him while walking in darkness lie and do not the truth. Our Gospel belongs to the poor only because there is a man in every beggar whom the god of this world tries to hold in death, and whom the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ addresses as His child. Finding him debased, brutalized, or false, we announce deliverance from that condition, a salvation won by Christ taking his nature and conquering his enemies. We may also speak of wrath to come — the Apostles spoke of it more to the rich than the poor, for God's wrath burns then and now against ungodliness and unrighteousness, and falls on nations and individuals when these reach their fullness. There is a still more terrible wrath, the one men nurture in their own hearts as their very nature, when they surrender to the god of this world. From both forms of coming wrath the Gospel calls men to the one true refuge: the eternal Truth and Love of God shown to all in His Son. Until we recognize our own utter want of truth and love, we may imagine some other refuge, limiting God's goodness to our own, even fancying we care more for His creatures than He does. Woe to the preacher who indulges that monstrous fancy! Happy is he if, through the most painful discoveries of the heartlessness and atheism he shares with those he preaches to, he becomes merely a witness to the glory of the Image of God. Then, feeling most strongly the blindness the god of this world seeks to work in his own mind and in his hearers', he can say with confidence: "I know the light is stronger still; I know no blindness can finally withstand it."

## Second Sunday after Epiphany

> "*For to make in Himself of twain one new man, so making peace*." —[Ephesians]{.smallcaps} ii. 15.

*The passage:* Christ made one new man out of two, Jew and Gentile, and so made peace.

Last Sunday I considered why Jews and Gentiles both rejected the Gospel, and why St. Paul traced this dislike in both to their worship of the god of this world. Today I want to examine how Jews and Gentiles were brought into one Church or body by the Gospel. I think this too belongs to Epiphany, and may help us see why the Church prays on this Second Sunday after Epiphany, and with what confidence, that God will grant us also His peace all our days.

My text touches this directly. I have taken one clause from a longer passage, but I am not perverting its intention. St. Paul does not state the problem of Jew and Gentile as we might state it. We would ask how men raised in the shadow of the Temple, who trembled at the second Commandment, who had learned before all else that the Lord their God was one, could be brought into fellowship with men who found a god in every hill and fountain, whose broad toleration welcomed new gods anywhere, but whose temples were seldom shunned by wrongdoers out of awe of some unseen Ruler. We might wonder what convictions each side had to sacrifice, what devices could stop their unyielding principles from perpetual collision.

St. Paul instead treats the Jew as an incomplete man until he found the Gentile, and the Gentile as incomplete until he found the Jew. He does not speak of adjusting opinions, of arrangements or compromises, but of each being raised to a new level, the level for which he was always intended but had never reached, where they could become one body. The Hebrew of the Hebrews, circumcised the eighth day, of Abraham's stock, a Pharisee touching the law, discovers that with all these advantages he is a maimed, dwarfed creature unless he can claim fellowship with those outside the Covenant, whom the Law has cut him off from, whom his own eyes tell him are given to idolatry. He must stand level with the Gentiles, eat with them, assert their right to every spiritual privilege — or become an unworthy descendant of those who bore witness against false gods. So that the law may not be dead to him, or worse, a hateful oppression, so that he may keep and delight in the Commandments as never before, he must become all things to all men, living as one without law.

I connect this first with St. Paul himself, since we can hardly feel its force without such a personal case. The two partial men who make the one new man cannot be reduced to mere notions; we must see, in one instance, how each felt his need of the other. The clearest test would be someone who had shut himself up most tightly in his own inherited form of life, and most despised the opposite one. But though Paul illustrates his own principle vividly, the principle is general: the Gospel declared the true humanity which had until then appeared in two seemingly irreconcilable forms. Let us ask what the Jewish mind, as such, and the Gentile mind, as such, were characterized by.

No novelties are needed to settle this. St. Paul's words — that the oracles of God were committed to the Jew, and that the Gentile was seeking God, feeling after Him if he might find Him — go to the root of the matter. The first phrase, from Romans 3, is carefully chosen. Paul does not say the Jews received a revelation while the Gentiles had none — that would contradict his teaching in the first two chapters of Romans, that God did reveal His righteousness in the Gentile conscience, and that the sin of idolaters was in not *liking* to retain God in their knowledge. He maintains equally that some Gentiles, by patient well-doing, sought glory and honor and immortality, while some Jews were contentious and disobeyed the truth. The distinction, then, was not in God's partial giving or withholding of light, nor in men's accepting or rejecting it. It was that God had spoken distinctly to the Jew, had set him apart so that speech could be understood, had made him aware through discipline of the difference between Creator and creature, and of his own tendency to confuse them. This Paul defends as his people's privilege and glory, the measure of their guilt, and the task laid on them for all lands. He acknowledges, as patriot, apostle, and man, how they failed to grasp this calling — and declares that God's purpose in choosing them was not frustrated, that he himself, once the great persecutor, proved it fulfilled: God bid him show all nations, "Behold *your* God."

Here then is one picture: a Jew starting from God, His covenant, law, and word; standing fast in the covenant, delighting inwardly in the law, feeling the word as a fire, counting it his glory to witness to God's righteousness, longing for God's reign and the fall of every rival. Here is another picture, of the same race, perhaps the same man degenerated: God shrunk to His own oracles, which speak only of favored recipients of gifts denied others; the Covenant a sentence of condemnation on the rest of the world; the Law a cause for self-exaltation by those who do not keep it; the Word no living fire but a text to argue over, an excuse for sects each claiming sole possession of its meaning and cursing every other reading. Contemplating these two images, I think we see that the true Jew must have longed for a fellowship with all God's creatures he had not yet found — his whole divine education inspired this longing — while the false Jew, never having felt it, cultivating instead all that was alien to it, was losing the very thing peculiar to him, ceasing to grasp that any oracles had been given him at all.

Now look at the Gentile's condition as the same Apostle describes it. He senses God somewhere near him. Where? He reaches this way and that. In the sky? The air? Below? Nearer still — with us in birth, in the farmer's work, the physician's, in father and mother, brother and sister, in judge and lawgiver, in the priest who offers blood as a pledge between man and man? Must not nature speak of Him, and glorious man speak of Him even more? Here is that feeling after One not far from every one of us, which Paul speaks of with such sympathy — the confession rising from countless hearts that in Him they live and move and have their being. On Mars Hill, before idol temples, to a frivolous people who had largely lost all but the outward sign, Paul, the disciple of Jewish lawgivers, did not shrink from speaking richly of the thoughts hidden beneath the wood, stone, gold, and silver he said could never be God's likeness.

Why did he speak so — he who knew better than anyone the horror of idolatry, where it led even these clever Athenians, into what moral corruption and incapacity for heavenly light? Because he, a Jew entrusted with God's oracles, had a message for the God all nations were seeking, and knew that message was meant to reach them through his own people. And why did he go beyond mythology into philosophy — quoting Aratus, calling men the offspring of the gods, using language about the Living God that verges on Pantheism? Because he recognized philosophy's great inquiries as genuine, prompted by a higher Wisdom than the philosophers themselves possessed; because he saw how barren those inquiries proved when philosophers pretended to manufacture the Being and Unity they were seeking, destroying the finer instincts that idol-worship, corrupt as it was, had not wholly crushed. Because he knew he could tell the Athenians that Aratus was right — they were the offspring of God, and knew in whom.

So we come to a word in my text I have not yet addressed: "to make in *Himself* of twain one new man." Some editors read "Him" instead; the sense is hardly weakened either way, since it is hard to find any subject but "Christ" for the whole sentence, so "in Himself" seems most reasonable. Yet Paul may have written with the Father in mind, making peace through the Son — that form of language was so habitual to him, so implied throughout, that he may not have remembered which he had used, and may have assumed it even where strict grammar did not require it. Such departures from technical rule, common to every practical writer, sometimes yield valuable theological hints; I cannot say whether this is one, and prefer the familiar reading.

Either way, both readings illustrate what I said last Sunday: the Gospel, for Paul, is not a set of propositions but the manifestation of a Person. As he told the Corinthians of the glory of God shining in the Gospel through His Image, so he tells the Ephesians that this same manifestation makes the one new man of two. If our account of Jew and Gentile drawn from Paul's other writings is right, you can see why nothing but this could explain the reconciliation of Hebrew and Greek — achieved despite fierce mutual reluctance — when the sect once called Nazarenes became the Church of Christ.

Unless the Jew could feel that God was actually speaking by him and to him, his calling was forfeited; he would not become a fuller man but simply lose all that was precious in his inheritance. Unless he felt this, he could not overcome the sectarian spirit of a degenerate age, which arose from supposing God had ceased to act and live, His words locked in a book for Pharisees and Sadducees to dispute over. Unless God now spoke more directly and personally than ever before, coming forth from behind law and prophets to reveal Himself, none of the promises that had sustained waiting Israelites could be fulfilled, and none of the narrow, selfish hopes of false Israelites could be dispelled. God speaking in a Son, revealing Himself in a Man, answers every expectation that had sustained the worshipper of Jehovah in his deepest awe — when he most felt that if the heavens could not contain God, still less could earthly temples; when he most feared to confuse God with anything seen or thought. Then the full vision that had sustained the heroes and martyrs of his land burst upon him: every thought of Creator, King, Judge culminating, without dissolving, in the confession of a Father; the idea of a Will wholly good rising in clear light behind the law that had come from thick darkness; that Will seen perfectly fulfilled in One who delighted to do it; out of the weakness of death, the full revelation of divine power and wisdom, because of divine love.

But having reached this point, must not the seeker after God — who felt God must be close at hand, present everywhere, most fully discoverable in man — have found in such a Person the only answer to his own longing, the only fulfillment of his own anticipations? The actual Friend of Man who met actual human sorrow — hunger, palsy, leprosy, blindness, madness, the grave — bearing the burden to overcome it: this was the God-man they had been feeling after, whom they had tried to picture in a thousand forms, knowing each form distorted and diminished Him. He who stilled the winds and waves, who entered the dark formless world and brought His body back from it, who ascended on high — did He not vindicate their claim to be God's offspring? Did He not justify the glory they had placed on man? And did He not equally justify the tragedian's darker insight — that man's true posture is humiliation, safe only in bowing before a Will above his own? And did the same revelation not confirm the philosopher's certainty that somewhere there must be an Ideal of truth, righteousness, and beauty which men do not invent, but which is the image of the eternal Substance, and which He enables them to grasp?

In such a Person, then, the one new man reconciling Jewish and Gentile elements could be found — and only in such a One. If there were no such Being, of whom it could be said, He is the complete manifestation of God, the living center of all human beings and thoughts, I do not see how we could explain the history of the old world or its passage into the modern. And without Him I cannot see how there is ever to be peace in this jarring world. The Angels' song proclaimed that His coming meant peace on earth and goodwill to men; He Himself proclaimed that His coming brought not peace but a sword, setting a man's foes within his own house. History has explained the paradox: because He is the Prince of Peace, all the enemies of peace within man's heart have been stirred up, finding a common cause in driving Him from His kingdom. Nor is that all: He does not come to make a solitude and call it peace, or to erase what is distinctive in nations or persons for a dead uniformity. He comes to rouse men from sleep, not to lull them. So the Jew becomes more intensely Jewish, the Gentile more intensely Gentile, before both consent to take their law from Him — and when they do, though it crushes their pride, it also fulfills the Father's purpose in their particular destiny and education. We need not be surprised, then, at greater bitterness arising from the lusts of our members since Christ's coming, nor that those best fitted to do His work and become peace's truest ministers should firmly refuse to abandon any position or conviction truly won.

These reflections may help us if we are truly seeking, in our own day, to be Peacemakers, and so called children of Him who is *the* Peacemaker. It is worth noting that however many forms of opinion and feeling surround us, they resolve at last into Paul's two great divisions. Search as we will, we find no classification so scientific and so useful as his description of Jew and Gentile as the elements of the full Christian man. Everywhere these elements try to assert themselves separately, in deadly hostility. On one side, a vehement dogmatism treating every fact and principle as settled by the oracles committed to us, and then strife among the dogmatists themselves over who holds those oracles and what they mean. On the other, a protest against authority, a restless search for what is or is not to be believed, ending in the most divergent conclusions, and for many, in utter despair of any answer. These surface signs are visible to all — the inconsistencies each temper breeds; the dogmatist's terror of doubt and inquiry, his desperate effort to suppress them, his resentment when he cannot; the skeptic's contempt for the dogmatist's certainties, alongside his own weariness and despondency even while claiming faculties to solve the riddle of the universe — which remains a riddle still. But is there nothing beneath these surface phenomena? Is there not, in the heart of the hard, self-satisfied dogmatist, an irresistible faith that Truth must be revealed by Him who is Truth, and has been and is revealed? And is there not, in the heart of the weary, contentious denier of inherited belief, an equal faith that Truth can come only from God, and is worth waiting for, even dying for, rather than receiving falsely? If we grant this much to the people around us — if we can see God's ways justified in them even at their most crooked — we begin to find, in all we read and see, evidence that men have never been able to do without these two convictions: that Truth must reveal itself, and that they must go on seeking it. There must be witnesses to each conviction, some in whom one predominates, some the other — often strangely mixed: heretical dogmatists as common as orthodox ones, Protestant as Romanist, atheist as Christian. There is a skepticism of the heart as well as of the mind: devout men often show as much impatient skepticism as the irreligious, and some turn to empty superstitions merely to escape their own doubt. It is commonly harder for people of the same type to understand each other than for opposites; there is often an unconscious pull of the skeptic toward the dogmatist, envying his confidence, and constant conflict between dogmatists themselves, and between skeptics themselves.

Where does this end? We have tried every remedy — persecution, accommodation, indifference — each attempted under the best conditions, by resolute people with every means to succeed. Still the question rises to Heaven: whence is peace to come, from the strife tearing at mankind, from the strife within our own hearts? Is there any fuller answer than the one given long ago — "He hath made of twain one new man"? There is a Center of Peace amid this endless struggle. Dogmatists miss it because they substitute their own conclusions for the manifestation of a divine Person, thinking we need something to hold rather than an Eternal God who holds us, knowledge of whom is eternal life. Skeptics miss it because they search Heaven above and the deep below for what is already close to them. But both, when weary of their own way, stripped of their different prides, may meet at last at the same Cross — finding that the manifestation of the Perfect God in the Perfect Man is the subject of all Revelation and the object of all human search; that in His Sacrifice lies the union of Godhead and Manhood, and so of those discordant elements in us, so long as we imagine God distant and forget that our seeking Him is only the consequence of His seeking us. Thus the only true peace we can desire for the world is not the repose of death but the fullness of life — His Peace, who called all things into life and by His Son overcame death. This is the Peace, His Peace and not ours, which we may ask Him who governs Heaven and earth to grant us now and always.

## Conversion of St. Paul

THIRD SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

[January]{.smallcaps} 25, 1857

*The passage:* Paul tells King Agrippa that he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but preached first to the people of Damascus and Jerusalem and all Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works fitting repentance.

Was this the only effect of the vision Paul saw on the road to Damascus? If he had simply said that afterward he began to defend the faith of Jesus Christ in Damascus, Jerusalem, Judea, and among the Gentiles, we could understand that a great change had happened in him. But was it a change that he now called his countrymen to repent? Was it a change that he thought Gentiles needed repentance even more? These questions connect with what I have been considering since Epiphany, and are raised directly by today's Festival. They concern the force of the word *Conversion*, and everything associated with it from Paul's day to ours.

Anyone who reads the Old Scriptures carefully knows that Jews could be urged to repent; the Prophets would have failed in their office if the children of the Covenant were exempt from that need. Saul, Gamaliel's pupil, could not have thought his own day needed such appeals less than earlier ones did — no Rabbinical prejudice would have led him there. Why were they slaves of Rome, if the nation were as it should be? Why were multitudes ignorant of the Law, living like heathens? Why was the sect of the Nazarenes spreading? Something was clearly wrong and needed correction. He would have dwelt on the degeneracy of Israelites who tolerated a sect that, pushed to its conclusions, might destroy the barrier separating them from the world. To call Israelites to repent of this was natural. Was it not one of the sins of the Nazarenes that they hindered publicans and sinners from repenting, by mixing with them and telling them the highest blessings were meant for them? He would have reminded such people that punishment in the world to come awaited them, and objected that these new teachers spoke of repentance while strangely announcing that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.

But before visiting Jerusalem, Saul must have talked with Greeks in Cilicia, known something of the moral degradation tied to their worship, and felt how monstrously opposed it was to all he as a son of Abraham revered. Might he not have urged those he traded and spoke with to abandon their abominations, and promised them admission to the pure worship of the Temple at Jerusalem? I do not doubt the zealous young Hebrew invited many an inhabitant of Tarsus to such a reformation, hoping that once better instructed by the Elders he could press it on greater numbers with greater force. So it seems he might have preached repentance and turning to God to exactly the people named in this passage, even while persecuting to the death those who believed in Jesus Christ.

And yet, had Paul told Agrippa something more like what we expect of his conversion — that he changed from Jew to Christian — he would have contradicted his own repeated claim that in preaching the Gospel he was fulfilling his place as a child of Abraham, not abandoning it. Had he said the light from heaven brought him to acknowledge a mission of Jesus Christ he had formerly denied, he would have had to explain that mission as I lately tried to show you: Christ as the Image of the Invisible God, sent to reveal that image to men. Perhaps that account of his teaching helps us understand this account of his conversion and its result.

I suppose Saul of Tarsus counted it lawful, even meritorious, to bid Jews or Gentiles *repent* — but "repentance" for him did not mean what it meant for the Prophets: "turning to God." How much repentance Jews owed, being within the Covenant; how much Gentiles owed, being outside it; what the signs of true repentance were in each case; which sins made repentance harder or impossible; what its effects would be once properly performed — on all these he had, no doubt, worked out careful, definite conclusions. But suppose the thought had struck him: "this phrase, *turning to God*, explains repentance — repentance does not explain it." What troubling questions that would raise! *Who* is to turn? By what power is the turning done? And — darkest of all — to *whom* is one to turn? Where is this Being, and how can Jew or Gentile meet Him? Was it not safer to bury such questions under doctrines of repentance, and never come face to face with the One whose presence made even Moses tremble?

Had Saul stayed always at Gamaliel's feet, among books and Rabbis, this careful avoidance might have lasted. But he was no mere scholar — he was a zealot, and had to act. The Law was sacred, so its enemies must be put down and the Covenant upheld. So Saul did not merely talk of repentance; he went out to enforce it by the letters of the High Priests, by sword and prison — methods that seemed far more direct than any preaching. It is in this struggle against living men that he collides with a man he had scarcely known. Returning triumphant from the synagogues, he finds someone waiting in his own chamber: himself. The commandment "Thou shalt not covet" glares at him from the very Law he has been enforcing on others. He is struck: "You covet; you are full of covetousness." Then a still more terrible thought follows: "This Law has *made* me covetous — I would not have known lust except the Law named it. Is this Law of God, then, evil? It has wrought all manner of evil in me. Without this command I would have been innocent and alive; because of it I am dead. What am I — a child of the Covenant? No — one whom God, by His own Law, is cursing and placing at a hopeless distance from Himself."

What was he to do? His schooling offered no comfort. He might quiet his restless conscience by restless action, pacifying the God at war with him through works done in His name. It was a plausible plan — and there is real satisfaction, for a man discontented with himself, in taking vengeance on others. Turning from that purpose was certainly a great conversion. So too was being brought into fellowship with the men he had hated, sharing the persecutions of those he had once honored. But beneath both these conversions lay a deeper one: he himself was converted. He turned — not from one thing to another, but from that covetous self the Law pronounced dead, to the One in whom no covetousness dwelt. His spirit claimed union with that uncovetous Being, claimed the righteousness and life of the very One he had been persecuting.

His *first* question was now answered: what in a man turns to God? He learned it is the man himself — the man losing himself by seeking himself, finding himself by renouncing himself. His *second* question was answered too: who converts the man? God Himself, seeking the creature made in His image, the wandering child. His *third* question: how can a man turn to God at all? Through a Daysman between them — One through whom God has always dealt with men, through whom men have always called on God, who came in the fullness of time to reveal God to men and make the atoning sacrifice. And the *last* question was answered in these: to whom does one turn? To the God and Father of the human spirit; the God who seeks men to bring them to Himself; the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the brightness of His glory and the exact image of His Person.

You can see, then, in what sense Paul's conversion meant conviction about the mission of Jesus Christ. He was convinced only because, as he says himself, *it pleased God to reveal His Son in him* — because he came to know that a Son of God ruled his spirit and all men, and that this Son of God must be the very Jesus he had rejected as a crucified man. You can also see why he connects this revelation with his preaching to the Gentiles. He did not know there was such a Lord of man until he knew Him as Lord of himself; then his message could have no limit. Its highest form was exactly this: he could show the people of Damascus, Jerusalem, and all Judea that they should repent, turn to God, and do works fitting repentance. This was no cruel demand, as it would have been before his conversion, when it could only have meant: "You must do this on pain of wrath and damnation, though I am sure you cannot; you must turn to a Being of whom I can show you no image, tell you nothing, except that He made a Law and will exact its penalty, and that you are utterly cut off from Him." Such a summons, under such conditions, no humane or honest man could give without self-reproach or without qualifying it into uselessness. And in fact no true call to repentance — to turning to God — went out from the Jews of Paul's day, to their countrymen or to the Gentiles. Jews were invited to become strict Jews rather than lax ones, to trade the company of publicans for that of Pharisees. Gentiles were invited to become Proselytes of the Gate, exchanging their own temples for Jerusalem's. These were changes, sometimes beneficial, sometimes — on our Lord's own authority — harmful. But none of them, by their nature, involved any turning to God, nor any bearing of the fruits of repentance: gentleness, meekness, justice, purity, manliness. Such virtues might be praised by Jews as by Gentiles, but by what power were they to be produced? How could exchanging one worship for another — when the object of worship was equally unknown in both, and the worshipper no more brought within reach of any good influence — touch a man's heart? What more is this than making him perform one set of acts instead of another, while the man himself stays unchanged? Paul, by contrast, once turned to God himself, could say with calm certainty: "I know whom I have believed. I know it is a good God who converted me from high self-regard to the knowledge that I am no better than the worst of you. What He has done for me, He will do for you. I know it is best for every man to be made right, and it is His pleasure to make you right."

You may now feel there was no mismatch between the event we commemorate today and its result — at least not the kind you might have imagined. There would be a real mismatch if the outward accidents of Paul's conversion — the mere signs of what happened within him — were mistaken for its substance. The sound, the light, the blinding, would be poor accounts of the moral change wrought in his whole being, and poorer still of the change his preaching would bring to the nations. Paul himself guards us against this vulgar error. He recounts the outward events of his conversion several times, thankful for them as signs of a deeper process — but when he explains their meaning, he says: "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me," and: "For this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show forth all longsuffering, as a pattern to those who should hereafter believe on Him to life everlasting."

In this last sentence Paul confirms that his conversion, in its law and principle, was a typical one — and that its never-to-be-repeated outward circumstances were meant to fix its universal truth more deeply in our minds. Do I mean we all need a conversion like his? I can only answer: wherever there is *aversion*, there must be *conversion*. Wherever the eye shrinks from the light, some power must turn it toward the light. If we feel no unwillingness to have our deeds exposed, that unconsciousness does not prove there is nothing to expose — rather, those most eager for truth feel most their own tendency to falsehood, and crave help against it most. What is every act of confession but an admission that we have yielded to a power drawing us from the right, and a prayer to be turned back to it? You may object that this is not parallel to Paul's case, since his conversion happened once, on the road to Damascus, and needed no repetition. I think that only half true. Better to say, in his own spirit, that on that road he learned for the first time that there was *perpetually* in him an old Adam seeking to hide from God's presence, and *perpetually* a second Adam turning to that presence as his only deliverance. At any moment he might yield to the one; at every moment he needed the other's help to raise and renew him. His conversion was the joyful discovery of an Almighty Friend he had suspected as an enemy — but it gave him no security except by stripping away all self-security, teaching him he was always dependent on that Friend. Nor did it split his life into two: it unified years that had seemed hopelessly apart, for now he knew God had been with him at Tarsus, in his studies, in his mental anguish. Periods he would once have erased forever were now overshadowed by divine love and forgiveness that made even their memory precious. He saw that all events, outward and inward, had worked together for good — that he had been marked from his mother's womb as Apostle to the nations, and no wilfulness of his could frustrate that.

This designation assumed he was not an exception, but like all those to whom he was sent — his aversion to God like theirs, the converting power of God acting on them as on him, even while, like him, they kicked against the goads and chose darkness over light. When or how the struggle would end for them, he did not know, and neither can we — God's thoughts are not our thoughts. It is enough to know who the combatants are: it is the human will that God and the devil both claim, and the will must submit to one or the other. Then there will be no restless, self-tormenting question of whether we have passed through some process others have not, or gained ground others lack. No past process proves us right if we are wrong; no absence of one shuts us out from praying "save me from my wrong; be merciful to me a sinner." No standing-ground is safe if it breeds self-trust or leads us to count others less holy than ourselves. It is the birth of a Cain that says, "I have gotten a man from the Lord." When the Deliverer is born, the cry is a child's to a father: "I am weak; undertake for me." Paul is led by the hand, a poor blind creature — but the One who leads him has said: "I will make you a light to the Gentiles; you must tell others of their weakness and My strength, because there is nothing proved true in you that I do not mean to prove true in them."

We see, then, how little suddenness or excitement has to do with the true nature of the conversion Paul records and exemplifies. There was a crisis in his life; there may be one in each of ours, attached forever to memory by some outward event — a journey, a night, a deathbed. But the crisis of a fever does not determine whether death or recovery follows. This crisis is only the moment we either yield passively to a death that has long been stealing on us, or trust the One who died that He might deliver us from it. Whoever tells us to wait for or manufacture a crisis is telling us that God wants us to stay in evil, or that deliverance comes not from the quiet, penetrating work of His Spirit but from some frantic act of our own. Both are delusions. Tell the man most bound by habit that he may defy his tyrant now and claim his freedom; tell the most helpless victim of his own impulses that he may be strengthened by God's Spirit in the inner man until every rebel within him is subdued. In every case, let Paul's conversion teach us to understand repentance only as "*turning to God*" — with no other meaning, never asking "how much of it does God demand, how much suffices to justify our faith in Him?" It must always be what God gives, or it is worth nothing — a repentance to be repented of; it must always be His highest gift, greater than any harvest. And yet we must affirm that this highest gift is never withheld — it would be treason against God to think He denies what is needed to raise His creatures from the evil He hates into the condition He made them for. Let us learn from Paul's conversion that we cannot truly believe in God's love for ourselves without confessing it also for Jews and Gentiles — for every kindred of the earth, every man in every condition. Let us learn that it is disobedience to the heavenly vision granted us, not to proclaim that love as the inheritance of all men, the mighty power able to draw all to itself. Let us learn, from his conversion and the preaching that followed it — which today's Collect will not let us separate from the event — what alone can raise the prostrate peoples of Europe and the world to their rightful freedom. The heaviest burden on them, making every other unbearable, is the notion that their God does not seek to convert them to Himself but must be converted from a desire to destroy them — that He is not a refuge from oppressors but a worse enemy to flee. Once this dark phantom they worship meets the true Image Paul held forth; once Christian preachers are converted, as he was, from worshipping a dark God to worshipping a God of pure light, and proclaim Him as still living, judging, redeeming — it will be seen why nations fail while trusting in princes and in themselves, and how God has tried and sifted them by suffering that they might learn to trust Him instead. With that trust will come strength for weakness, union for division, life for death. Master and serf will again learn, as in the Gospel's first days, that they are heirs of one salvation, brothers in one Elder Brother. Through every city of Christendom and to the ends of the earth, it will be heard and welcomed that God has not abandoned the race He purchased with His Son's blood; that His Spirit of truth and love is battling the spirits of darkness, malice, and falsehood that have torn it apart. Every ghostly superstition will hide from the brightness of His coming; every tyrant will call on the mountains to fall and hide him from the wrath of the Lamb. Men will cast away the idols they made for themselves, giving them to moles and bats. They will fear God and give Him glory, because His everlasting Gospel has gone out, and all will know that the One who has turned His people's hearts back to Him and to each other is the one God, blessed forever. [Amen]{.smallcaps}.

## Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

*The passage:* "And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

I have tried to show you on former Sundays that the Gospel St. Paul preached was an Epiphany of God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ; that this is why it provoked the opposition of the god of this world among both Jews and Gentiles, and why it brought Jews and Gentiles into one. I have spoken of a like manifestation of God's glory as the power that turned St. Paul from a hard, exclusive Judaizer into the herald of this Gospel to mankind.

One subject remains before we leave this part of our year. Does this revelation of God's glory concern only past and present, or does it touch the future too? We believe Jesus Christ was the Image of God the prophets longed to see, and that in the fulness of time that longing was fulfilled — He took flesh and showed the fulness of glory earlier ages had glimpsed only in fragments. Is that enough for us? Are we content that the world, Christian or not, should go on as it is? If not, what do we want — something other than the manifestation of Christ, some new revelation? Is Jesus the One who is to come, or do we look for another?

We must face this question, brethren. There is, we must admit, a disposition among religious people to look for something besides the manifestation of Christ. They think He came in the flesh and died so that they might escape Hell and gain Heaven — but ask them what Hell and Heaven are, and their answers grow vague. Hell is some infinite evil Christ delivered them from; Heaven some infinite good He has won for them — but the evil seems to be certain punishments God has appointed for wrongdoing, the good certain rewards promised to goodness. Christ, on this view, is a means to an end, not the end itself; seeing Him is not itself what they want, losing Him not itself what they dread.

Again, no few people today say the Gospel has failed of its purpose. They point to facts: has it set the world right, ended misery, ended wrong, brought the reign of peace? Eighteen weary centuries, they say, have fulfilled none of its early promises. The Deliverer cannot yet have been born into the world. Perhaps some King or Hero is still to come; perhaps some great social change or enlightenment of minds will do what our fathers thought He would do.

I think this last opinion, which so dismays religious people, will not be — should not be — rejected until they have cleared their minds of the first. If those who call themselves Christians are not above all desiring the unveiling of Christ, how can they blame others for setting their hopes elsewhere? Is it certain that some of these others may not, under another name, be seeking more earnestly for Him whom prophets and kings desired to see than we are? That they may not be haunted by the very vision of the Son of Man and Son of God we might proclaim to them, if we understood our own faith? That we ourselves have not been refusing to enter the kingdom of Heaven, and hindering those who are entering?

Reading the Old Testament, you find a striking uniformity beneath its variety. The misery of the Jewish people, in different ages, comes from the most different instruments, but the cause is always the same. Pharaoh makes them build bricks without straw; Jabin torments them with six hundred iron chariots; Sennacherib threatens Jerusalem; Nebuchadnezzar burns the Temple and carries the people captive. But whatever the tyrant, tyranny is the cause of their groaning — they cry out because of oppression, or, when their hearts are too benumbed to cry, holy men cry for them. And since the disease is always the same, so is the remedy: a Deliverer from Egyptian, Canaanite, Assyrian, Babylonian bondage is their one infinite necessity. Men appear as deliverers, but always in the name of the Lord: "He has sent us; we have no power or will of our own to save you; He has the power and will; He is the enemy of tyrants; He is the Deliverer." Moses tells the crushed slaves of Goshen this, sends plagues in God's name, lifts the rod so the waters drown the pursuer. But at Sinai Moses speaks no more; out of the thunder and darkness the voice itself says, "I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt... Thou shalt have none other Gods but Me."

As Gideon ponders these words by his sheepfold, as Samson hears them from Manoah's lips, as Samuel is taught them in the night visions when the Temple lamp has gone out, each feels the same inspiration: the Lord his God is a Deliverer, and each rises to break the chain binding his people. The King, praying alone before battle, casts himself on God as his Saviour and his people's, and in that strength goes forth to victory. The Prophet seldom has that consolation — his battles are fought in his own secret chamber, with himself, with slanderous friends, with a mocking people who take his stern plain reproofs for parables. But he sees more clearly than lawgivers or kings what they struggle against: why idolatry has been the nation's sin and curse; why gods who are not deliverers but tyrants — gods imaged in kings who build tombs with slave labor, or kings with their six hundred iron chariots — have become objects of worship and fear to Abraham's children as to the surrounding nations. This is the cause of their deep moral degradation, the reason they cannot rise out of servitude, the reason they practice petty tyrannies of their own even while trampled by tyrants.

At first such a view seems impenetrably dark. History shows an ever-increasing tendency to this idolatry; it fulfils the second Commandment, the sins of the fathers visited on the children to the third and fourth generation. There are moments of faith, sudden bursts of thanksgiving, then distrust and quick decline. The Israelites sing that the Lord has triumphed gloriously, the horse and rider thrown into the sea — and soon forget His works, sinking into stupid indifference, so that the host of heaven or an Egyptian calf becomes more real to them than the God of the cloudy pillar. They can only think of God as one from whom to hide. How can this end? Without faith none can please Him, and without faith there is no energy or life in man — yet to depend on faith was to depend on the most changeable of things, a morning cloud that appears and vanishes.

These experiences were the school of the Prophets. Through this despair of faith they learned what faith was; through the prevalence of idolatry in the world and in their own hearts, they were driven to rely on God's might and to expect the revelation of His glory. Reading Isaiah's fortieth chapter and those that follow, you can see he had passed through this baptism, and how it had made him invulnerable. He finds comfort for his people rising out of the depths of their sorrow — not from any change in circumstance (he had seen promising changes come to nothing), but from certainty that God would declare Himself, in that same character declared of old in the Commandments — as Deliverer — confounding every counterfeit god that mimicked His power to work not freedom but oppression, robbery, murder instead of life. The more his experience showed him human weakness, even in chosen men and the chosen nation, the fuller and clearer this vision grew. God cannot be disappointed; His purposes cannot fail. His purpose is to reveal Himself, and He will. That revelation is the blessing and deliverance man wants; all else is ineffectual apart from it, and all else is included within it.

This is why Isaiah is rightly called "the Evangelical Prophet." He saw, more clearly than anyone, that only one who perfectly revealed God as Deliverer could be the Person Israel and all nations desired — the desire He Himself was teaching them to feel. He saw in every event of his own day a partial Epiphany, a manifestation of God the Righteous Judge and Deliverer, not confined to Jews but carrying its message, like the sun, to the ends of the earth. Yet the more he recognized these partial revelations, the more he craved one that should be perfect, for *all flesh* in the fullest sense. Living in the heart of Judaism, perhaps seven hundred, at the least five hundred, years before Christ appeared, he was certain it must come — to expect less would have been treason against God. The mouth of the Lord had spoken this as surely as He had spoken the commands against adultery, murder, false witness; one might as soon be abrogated as this promise. The old heaven and earth might pass away, but nothing could prevent the glory of the Lord from being revealed, and all flesh from seeing it together.

The Apostles joyfully claimed the words of this and all the prophets as pointing to Him who took the form of a servant and died for men — affirming that God's Righteousness, Wisdom, and Power were manifest in His weakness and death, that in Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, that all flesh were to share the blessings of His Incarnation and Death, baptizing men of all nations and preaching His Kingdom to all. Yet none of them taught their disciples to be content with what they had heard, seen, felt, or believed — nor even to rest satisfied with their own most solid convictions, their strongest trust in Christ as Lord and Saviour and Friend. They said, "We are saved by hope." They urged the Churches to hope continually for what they did not see, pointing them always to the future revelation of Christ and of the Son of God in Him as the one goal of expectation. Every eye should see Him, they said, even those who pierced Him.

Such language is as definite as possible in pointing to one Person, who had revealed Himself in the simplest acts of human love. Yet it is boundless language, considering either the creatures addressed or the Being spoken of. Those creatures suffered every form of sorrow, material and spiritual; Jesus on earth had met some specimen of each with sympathy and healing power. So long as any of these evils remained unredressed — so long as creation groaned, so long as wills remained bound by inward evil — they could not but hope for a deliverance yet to come, however much the pledge of it had already been given. And that hope ranged wider even than the evils that provoked it could justify, when it turned to the infinite Goodness and Love discovered in the Son, losing itself in raptures like: "Oh the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!... of Him and to Him and through Him are all things" — or in prayers like: "that ye may comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height, and know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God."

If such teaching were truly received, this must follow: whatever calamities befell the world would only stimulate and encourage this hope. There would be no shame in it, since it was hope for the world, not only for oneself. There would be no uncertainty in it, since it rested not on their faith or virtue but on the Eternal Word of God — the mouth of the Lord had spoken it. There would be no danger of forgetting the abyss of darkness while dwelling on visions of light, for the more they hoped for God's glory, the more they would feel the horror of being left without it, sinking back into their own wretched selves. Nor would they lose their motive for earthly action while expecting a glory to be revealed most fully after death — because that glory is the glory of God the Deliverer of earth and man, and they could only know it by entering His service, doing His work, becoming deliverers themselves.

So, brethren, we may take these lessons for our own profit. Let us not doubt that, however we classify men's oppressions — individual or social, political or intellectual, animal or spiritual — God Himself has awakened the cry for freedom, and that this cry, rightly understood, is a cry that God will appear as Deliverer, that His glory may be revealed. Let us therefore meet all these cries eagerly, however discordant, however full of absurdity or contradiction, however they wear the form of denial — with true Christian sympathy, showing rather by acts than words, rather by confessing our fellowship in the same needs than by boasting our own wisdom, that we believe we can give God's answer to them. We shall not give that answer if we in any way narrow Scripture's statements or explain away its grand full words. If all flesh together is to see the glory of God, let us be sure that all flesh will see it, and that it is good that all flesh should see it. We may not be able to foresee the effect of such a burst of light on this man or that — it may dazzle and blind, or fill the whole body with light — but light is to be desired and darkness hated, and so we should encourage all men to hope for this revelation. We should turn men's wretchedness into an argument for hope, and their sinfulness too — for no man ever rose out of sin, or ever will, until he begins to hope.

It is an old commonplace of divinity, which we are strangely forgetting, that despair alone is utter ruin — for despair imprisons a man in his evil nature and fastens the Evil Spirit's chain on him, while all hope points upward to God and answers His Spirit with ours. So I say again: we ought to stir up hope in every human being — hope for present help from God against the sin that besets him, hope that he may say to the mountain in his way "Remove, and be cast into the sea," hope for the future that the glory of the Deliverer shall be fully revealed and that he, included in the "all flesh" of the Prophet's words, bearing the nature for which Christ died, shall see it and rejoice in it. If this seems strange and incredible to him, let us send him to the Cross of Christ and tell him that is the Being, and no other, we look for; that the glory to be revealed is the glory that shone in His agony and death; that this has power to take the poison and curse out of our nature and remake us in His likeness. Let us do this for others and for ourselves, and then see whether they wish for some other lord than this crucified man — a triumphant hero and destroyer rather than this fellow-sufferer — one who would glorify them, rather than one whose glory shall be so revealed that all flesh may see it together.

This test will prove decisive at last, deciding who are and who are not content to be Christ's sheep and follow where He leads. Used wisely, it may turn some who have spent their days chasing a phantom toward a real object very near them. But when we fail with any man, let us not blame him, and least of all blame God — let us instead turn the test upon ourselves, asking whether this is the Christ we hope for, whether it is the glory of that Cross we wish revealed, whether we truly want all flesh to see it and be blessed by it as well as ourselves. If we do, we will receive with ever more joy and thankfulness the words "The mouth of the Lord has spoken it." This promise of a final Epiphany rests not on lawgivers' decrees, holy men's expectations, or seers' confidence, but on Him who said, "Let there be light, and there was light." It was first uttered when He made man in His own image. All history's thousand voices have echoed and ratified it; the very sins of men that strive to defeat it bear witness for it; the Redeemer, by His Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, has made it firmer than the everlasting hills; the Holy Spirit writes it on men's hearts, confirming it through every trial that tears those hearts asunder. Its fulfilment seems as unlikely as the sun rising out of dark, cold night, or spring's teeming life following winter's death — yet it is more sure than the return of day or the order of the heavens, for those belong to things temporary and symbolic, while this has its fixed, permanent reality in the New Heaven and New Earth where righteousness dwells.

## Septuagesima Sunday

> "*For many are called, but few are chosen*."—[Matthew]{.smallcaps} xxii. 14.

*The passage:* Many are called, but few are chosen.

These words have troubled many minds. Some ask: "By what tests can we tell the few chosen from the many called? How can we build a Church made up of the first class rather than the second?" Others ask: "How can I know whether I belong to the called or the chosen?" If either doubt needs settling, our Lord must have given us the means to settle it — for St. Matthew shows Him using these words twice, each time attached to a Parable meant to explain them.

The first Parable is the one you heard this morning. The Master of a Vineyard hires men at the third hour, the sixth, the ninth, the eleventh. At day's end all receive the same wage. The first complain, thinking themselves owed more. The owner answers one complainer, "Did I not agree with thee for a penny? May not I do what I will with my own? Is thine eye evil because mine is good? I will give unto this last, even as unto thee." The teaching here seems to level rather than to establish distinctions — all are treated alike. Yet the words follow: "For many are called, but few are chosen."

In the Parable of the King's marriage feast for his Son, distinctions are likewise broken down: servants are sent to the highways and hedges to compel the poor, the halt, the lame, the blind to come in. But then comes an act of discrimination — a man without a wedding-garment is found speechless when asked how he got in, and is bound and cast out. It is natural to explain this offense and punishment by the same saying: many are called, but few chosen. The obvious meaning, we are told, is that the outward call goes to everyone without limit, but only a few are actually meant by God to receive the blessing — only a chosen circle is sealed for eternal life.

This reading has real plausibility, and once a person embraces it he will not easily let it go — nor should he be pressed to, for it holds too much precious truth to be cast off merely because of difficulties. A man should be sure he has drawn all the good out of a notion before discarding it as a husk; sudden reversals of opinion have done, and are doing, melancholy damage, and should make us careful about undermining another's conviction. But it is not too much to ask, of anyone who reveres our Lord's words, that He did not contradict Himself or use so solemn a sentence lightly — that both Parables be seriously weighed together before we settle on the sense common to them. And that weighing must suggest one rather startling thought.

The men in the Vineyard parable who were, it seems, only called and not chosen, are exactly those who thought themselves owed a privilege others lacked. They could not accept an equal gift; they needed something exclusively their own, something others had no right to. Their reasoning would have run: "Those hired at the eleventh hour were no doubt *called* — they could not have taken up a spade otherwise. But *we*, summoned early, are surely the favorites, the ones He has specially chosen. This will be plain when the accounts are settled." That was their calculation — and our Lord calls it presumptuous and false. It was proved false when all were paid alike, and their pain at that discovery proved the very judgment they had passed on others true of themselves: they were called merely, not chosen.

No one can say this comment strains the first Parable; it is its plain natural sense, one that would occur to anyone not told to adopt another. It holds whether we say the early laborers are the Jews and the late ones the Gentiles, or take it as different stages of an individual life. However applied, our Lord's own use of the Parable stands as the right use — and it should make us pause, even tremble, before concluding that He taught exclusiveness in one saying which He used elsewhere expressly to teach the sin of exclusiveness.

I. The same point appears just as clearly in the Parable of the King's marriage feast. The guests do not invite themselves, just as the laborers do not hire themselves. This is the principle running through all our Lord's teaching: the Kingdom of Heaven is entered by a divine, mysterious power, not by anything men would do left to themselves. This runs through all Scripture. A calling of God lay at the foundation of Jewish life: the nation's first father was a called man, the whole nation a called nation. Our Lord, in showing how the Covenant would widen to all peoples, never abandons this idea or its language — King, Husbandman, Sower remain the source of blessing to subjects, laborers, land. The notion that good comes to man by his own effort, his own bid to build a world or climb to heaven, is as foreign to the New Dispensation as to the Old.

II. But if so, how could the general call have come from messengers, while the limiting of that call came from the King himself? Then either the messengers exceeded their commission, or He led them to think His will more gracious than it really was. The Parable refutes both. The King bids guests to His Son's marriage; they refuse, going off to farm and merchandise. He then commands His messengers to go everywhere, urging and compelling outcasts to come. Nothing suggests the messengers' intentions were more generous than their King's — that He held some secret reserve against those they were pressing so urgently to enter His blessing.

III. Would not the meaning then be this: here are blessings meant for man as man, not for one person here and another there — blessings that cannot be seized or bought but only received as gifts, blessings without which man cannot fulfill his being, and so blessings addressed to heart and will. If the heart and will do not consent, do not join with the Giver's own mind, the gift is wasted; the one thing that could taste the feast rejects it. Why? Because it is too common — because these guests want something exclusively their own: a farm they inherited and can hold against the world, merchandise won by their own luck. A gift that all may share equally, held on no different terms than what they've already claimed for themselves, is worth nothing to them. By this they show themselves called — called to the highest honor God gives, called by His own loving voice — but not chosen, because nothing in them answers that voice; their minds are estranged from His.

This is the lesson I think this Parable teaches at once, if we give the King's Marriage for His Son the meaning Apostles, saints, and martyrs gave it. To them the union of the Son of God with our nature was the greatest of all blessings, by which every other blessing was understood. Every dream of every people and age — of freedom from evil, of union among men, of full possession of God — pointed toward this Marriage and could be fulfilled only in it.

This Marriage meant God's purpose to reconcile man to Himself; it meant that men could approach Him as justified and redeemed children; it meant the gift of a Spirit to bring them near. Such a gift to the whole race must be the substance of the Gospel. The invitation had to go out to the highways, because the most ordinary, even the vilest of humankind, were being made partakers of this unspeakable privilege. And so the man without the wedding-garment must be the one who stayed shut up in his own self-sufficiency, detected by the Giver's all-seeing eye as having no grasp of the feast's universal nature, no feeling for the Divine Love that had stooped to join itself to earthly life, no wish to give up his miserable pride to be filled with that same love.

IV. This reading brings the two Parables into full agreement. The laborers who had agreed for a penny a day — who worked from the start in the spirit of hirelings — are utterly discontented with their wage, having supposed they'd get something for themselves. The true reward is to be freed from the love of getting, to become like the Master whose eye is good and not evil, who wants all to share His own blessedness. All are called to this inheritance; only those who have the Master's Spirit actually inherit it, for having that spirit is itself the chief part of the inheritance. To have it is to choose what God chooses — which, in the deepest sense, is to be chosen.

V. I hope this may help solve the two puzzles I mentioned, if indeed they are puzzles and not mere doubts we raise without wanting an answer. As to the first — how to form or select a Church consisting only of the chosen, not merely the called — history and these Parables give the same answer, and a satisfying one: if the words "called" and "chosen" mean anything, God must call, God must choose; we cannot. The Husbandman sends whom He will into the vineyard; the King calls whom He will to the feast; the Husbandman alone judges whose eye was evil; the King alone comes in to see who lacks the garment. If we imagine we can perform any of these functions ourselves, we must learn it from someone other than our Lord, who reserves such judgment to His Father, saying, "Judge not, that ye be not judged" — and who tells us through history that wherever men have tried to build a Church of their own testing, made up only of the chosen, it has ended in members resenting others receiving the same wages, and in denying that the King has truly made this Marriage for His Son with the whole human race.

VI. But to the second question — how we may know whether we ourselves are called or chosen — the answer differs, for here no vigilance is excessive if rightly used. The better we know ourselves, the more we shall see our own tendency to the sin of those who murmured against their master: to think our work harder than others', to imagine we deserve pay others can't have. We shall see how little we have truly entered into the celestial Marriage we are invited to celebrate, how often low thoughts of our own happiness crowd out real thanksgiving and block true participation in Christ's finished Sacrifice. But we did not discover these things ourselves — the Husbandman who called us gave us the very awareness of our hardness and ingratitude; the King who comes to the feast shows us we lack the proper garment. We must not shrink from such exposures of our own evil. They may show that we have acted merely as the called, not craving the higher gift of being united in spirit with our Lord, of sharing His righteous and gracious mind. We should bear His reproofs, for "As many as I love I rebuke and chasten"; we may be sure He excludes from His chosen no one whom He Himself has called, or withholds grace from none He calls. The fault lies in us — in the pride that resists His counsel, in our reluctance to open to His knock. So the called may become the chosen: even the humblest daily task may be taken as the Husbandman's summons to labor in His vineyard, to serve Him in His own free Spirit, and to enter into His own Joy.

The King's call to His Son's marriage feast may be welcomed as a pledge that He will clothe us in the Marriage-Garment — that He has indeed chosen us as true members of that body which is the blessed company of all faithful people.

## Sexagesima Sunday

[February]{.smallcaps} 15, 1857

> "*A sower went out to sow his seed*."—[Luke]{.smallcaps} viii. 5.

*The passage:* A sower went out to sow his seed.

[Preachers]{.smallcaps} sometimes think this parable applies especially, almost exclusively, to their own work. They sort their hearers into classes matching the soils Christ describes—wayside hearers, stony ones, thorn-choked ones. *They* sow the seed; the joy of fruit and the disappointment of waste are *theirs*.

I think this way of speaking hides real dangers. No distinctions are more precious or exact than these, given in this parable of parables, by which we are meant to understand all parables. Christ himself says they apply to hearers—but they must be handled carefully. If the mysteries of the Kingdom could be reduced to technical phrases, the living processes of nature would never have been called in to illustrate them; those processes are living and must be studied where they live. Still more, we must apply them not to our neighbors but to ourselves. A preacher becomes a grievous hypocrite if he tries to identify these characters by watching others rather than himself. "Cast first the beam out of thine own eye" must stay before him in all its terror. No one is exempt.

But thinking of the matter this way risks a still greater mistake—imagining that *we* are the sowers. Motives beyond vanity or clerical pretension may tempt us, secretly if not openly, toward this reading: it would let us dodge some puzzles theologians would rather avoid, if only we could think ourselves in some sense the persons Christ describes. But another parable, essentially the same as this one, tells us plainly: "He that soweth the seed is the Son of Man." Whatever the consequences, we must start there; no other reading makes intelligible Christ's own interpretation to his disciples, or any lesson he draws from it. No one who merely stands outside a man speaking words into his ear—well or poorly put, refined or crude—can sow the seed the parable compares to words. Only the One who made the ear to receive sound and the heart to receive words can do this work. Whatever becomes of the seed—carried off, falling on stone, choked by weeds, or bearing a hundredfold in good ground—the same holds: we cannot swap in another sower to suit our theories. The Son of Man, Lord of man's heart and will, source of all man's powers, must be the one who gives whatever might bear fruit, even where it perishes.

Consider what this means for how far and how deep the seed is scattered. A minister in a London parish may complain that three-fourths of his flock die without ever hearing his voice or knowing why he is set among them. Does he suppose they die without hearing the Voice of the Son of Man? Did they die without ever being poor or sick, without human ties, without inward struggle, without a desire formed and left unmet? Wherever these things were present, the Son of Man was present. Wherever any human sympathy fought against its counterfeit—mere animal appetite—wherever selfishness did not reign wholly unopposed (and who reigns in unopposed?), the Son of Man was there. You speak, not without truth, of certain places as hells on earth. I say: go down into them, and he is there. None of them lacks some remnant of the human face divine, however brutalized. And where that sign is, the Sign of the Son of Man is—truer, though more terrible, than the sign the Pharisees demanded from the heavens.

And wherever the Son of Man is, he is sowing his seed. The thought, however faint, in any fallen creature that there must be a way out of the pit to firmer ground, to some region of twilight if not day—this is seed of his planting, and could have dropped from no other hand. It may be snatched away at once, as he warns; it may sicken even in seeming sunshine; it may be choked after gaining some strength. But its source is certain. The man's wretched circumstances did not put it there. His mocking, seducing comrades—who feel the same dim hope themselves—did not put it there. His own selfish nature did not put it there. It came from the Son of Man. Whether on the surface or buried deep, it would not be there at all had he not gone out to sow, as he has done since the world began.

But if the seed is the Word of God, how can this be? Do these wretched people know anything of Scripture? Are many of them not even acquainted with its plainest facts? And might not some who do know those facts only use them to sharpen their curses? All this may be true—yet if the Scriptures are true, there is no speech or language where the Voice of the Word of God is not heard. The earth and its pillars would collapse without him upholding them. Conscience could not accuse or excuse if he were not awakening and informing it. So the seed planted in men's hearts must be the Word of God—it could have no living power if it were anything else. If there is good in it, it comes from him who alone is good; if it is to bear good fruit, the Creator himself must go out with it.

I know how hard this belief is to hold—even with Christ's own assertion behind it, even though the whole parable collapses into contradiction unless the seed on the wayside is the same seed as on the good ground. The mind still asks: how can this be, if God is all-powerful? And those most insistent that we suppress every other doubt in favor of Scripture's plain statements are often the ones most eager to nurse this particular doubt, and draw long chains of inference from it. I do not deny the difficulty; for some it may be painful. I do not see how it could be otherwise for anyone who has not settled that the Righteousness of God revealed in Christ must be held fast, however little we can explain the apparent limits on his Power. This Righteousness has been declared to us and our children as an eternal inheritance; to lose it is to lose everything. Power, I believe, serves Righteousness, not the reverse: he who *is* Love is *clothed* with Power, and that clothing can be laid aside, as when Christ took the form of a servant and submitted to death—but the Righteous, Gracious Will can never be laid aside; indeed it showed itself most fully in weakness. If we do not believe this, what is the Parable of the Sower, or any of Christ's works, or Christ himself, to us? If we do believe it, why deny ourselves a lesson perfectly consistent with it, out of a jealousy for God's Power greater than his own Son's? I do not doubt Power will vindicate itself in time, and that the only Power that ever moved a heart—Love's power—will prove mightier than we have imagined. But meanwhile let each of us say, in shame: "I know it is God's Word, not man's, that has met the rock and thorns in me. I know it is his gracious Will, declared in that Word, that my will has fought against. I have tried to persuade my conscience otherwise, and it will not swallow the excuse. It repeats God's own words plainly: 'I have called and ye refused; ye have set at nought my counsel, ye would have none of my reproof.'"

Decent and disreputable, wise and foolish, preacher and hearer alike need to make this same confession; each carries the witness of its truth within himself. Let each look back over recent years—even the years he would call his best—and ask: "Did no words come close to me, from loving lips, from open graves, from sorrows that might have crushed a prouder spirit? And did no idle vanity, no craving for approval, no bitter resentment scatter those words to the wind? The Son of Man was sowing his Master's seed in me, and the Devil carried it off. God was in that place, and I did not know it, and would have put something else there instead." Has it not been so? Does not the Spirit who brings all things to remembrance confirm it?

Or take the next part of the parable: have we not known a heart that seems anything but hard and stony—quick to feel, easily moved by others' sorrows, ready to admire goodness and back every good plan—and yet *is* hard and stony, because these impressions never penetrate, never survive conflict, never displace the underlying love of ease? We have known such a heart—where? In some neighbor, some supposed model of a common modern type? Or have we found it at home, in ourselves? Has nothing shown us that we are likely to be, and often have been, our own such models—that the spirit of the age is our spirit? We must not shrink from that discovery, painful as it is. It is the Word of God revealing it, seeking through all our discipline to destroy that shallowness, that incapacity for depth and earnest purpose, which we could never cure ourselves.

Again—have we imagined that thorns and weeds choke the heart only of the idle rich man, or the merchant worn down by restless money-getting, or the poor man anxious about tomorrow's bread? Is anyone without such cares? Is there a priest or layman among us who has not let them grow, planted and tended them himself? It is folly to deny it, madness to hide from ourselves that the fires of discipline around us and within us were meant to burn up these very thorns, so the Word of God might have room to grow.

But that good ground Christ speaks of—do we know anything of that in ourselves? Must we turn to the lives of the Saints to learn what it means and whence its fruitfulness comes? We may go there; they will teach us of their own stubborn, powerless wills, and the hard lessons that taught them all things are of God, that they could do good only because he worked in them to will and to do. But do we not have nearer, readier lessons? Are not the experiences already named just such lessons? Have we not resisted a Will we were made to obey? Were not the desires and hopes the Evil Spirit plundered from us God's own inspirations? Was not that crust of vanity raised against a power that inwardly despised it? Were not those restless, frivolous cares a strange growth on soil meant, and known to be capable, of bearing something better? Is not the good ground simply the heart and will of every man, once he learns he is a man—not a beast, who could trust to instinct, not a god, who could follow his own will—but a man related to God, his servant and child, created in Christ Jesus and replanted in that divine root to bear fruit that remains?

Yes, brethren, it is our task to tell everyone this is their condition. We do not summon people to church so that the Son of Man's discipline and the Word's work may begin in them there—they come to learn they cannot escape him, that he is with them lying down and rising up, watching all their ways. They come to be told what that flame is that keeps breaking out in them, what those smoldering ashes are that they fear will reignite. We must tell them: it is the Word of God kindling that fire, burning up what is false and evil, and it will not stop scorching them until they yield to it and desire it to finish its work. We preach this to you, and to ourselves, knowing God preaches it to us all—not from the pulpit, but out of the whirlwind. A sermon is a poor, godless substitute for the lessons of life; it can be a godly interpreter of them, clearing away the confusion of not knowing whether the Lord of the universe works with us or against us, whether every effort of ours must overcome some reluctance in him to bless us, or whether he is working continually to overcome our reluctance to be blessed, and to keep us from ruining ourselves. So far as a sermon does this, its preacher is, in a very subordinate sense, a sower of the divine seed—not to the exclusion of others with different offices, and least of all in competition with the one Lord of the field who alone can make it bear. His task is only to declare that this Lord is unchanged from age to age—the same in Will as when he died for man, the same in Power as when he rose—and that there can be no barrenness in his universe once we stop measuring our will and power against his.

The Parable of the Sower, then, is better suited to testing each hearer's own heart than to sorting hearers into classes. Yet it was spoken, like Christ's other parables, to a multitude. The desire to sway crowds can be carried too far and brings real temptations. But there is also great justification for it. We might speak, as of reeds moved by one wind, or complain, as Paul does to the Corinthians, that crowds favor those who enslave and strike them. But such charges need weighing before they're made. There is something awesome and elevating in the effect produced on a whole body of people by words addressed to them, however roughly, as spiritual beings. Hearing such words, they recognize themselves as bound together, sharing the same interests, addressed by the same God. May not the Son of Man, whatever the message and however mortal the lips delivering it, be present sowing his seed in the hearts of such a crowd? It matters that people are wakened to think someone cares for them and wishes them good; they think more truly of their Father in Heaven once they suppose he is not indifferent to them—even if they think he only means to punish their sins. And no crude, material threats of punishment are as terrible as the actual separation from goodness and truth that conscience testifies to, once awakened to it, perhaps for the first time. The grounds for fear are not exaggerated, though they may be misreported. What is needed is not to speak slightingly of such influences, wherever they come from, nor to explain them away, nor to boast that our own preaching is wiser because it falls more lifelessly on the ear—but to bear true witness to God ourselves, and so counter false witness of him. It is tempting, all too easy, to darken God's character a little, thinking it will deepen men's dread of sin; to lower, just slightly, the Apostles' language that it is his wish all men should believe and know the truth. Is it safe to use such large words to congregations so indifferent, so besotted as ours often are? I answer those who trust their Bibles: "It stands written—dare you change it?" I answer those who believe in Christ: "You call him the Image of God. Do you think he is? Dare you make God other than that Image shows?" I answer those who appeal to experience: "Does distrust of God's willingness to perfect you increase your power to become what you ought? Does doubting he will break the chain of evil habit from your neck make you less tolerant of that chain?" I answer those who cite the Church's call to confession as the way to peace with God: "I rejoice she does. We ought to confess that we were made to bear good fruit and have not; that divine seed need not have been snatched from us, yet has been; that we need not have grown cold, yet have; that we need not have been choked by care and pleasure, yet have been. The Church bids us confess to God because he is good and wills our goodness; because he has redeemed us in Christ; because he has given and renews his Spirit in us. If he were not our good Father, we would lose nothing by separation from him; if he had not redeemed us, claiming redemption would be no duty; if no Spirit urged us to obey, disobedience would be no fault. Believing in one God, Father, Son, and Spirit—perfect Righteousness and Love—we can confess together, and he grants us absolution together."

And lastly, to those who say it is impossible to address the multitude without darkening God's character to them: Jesus Christ spoke to the multitude and said, "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect," and the multitude said, "He speaks as one having authority, not as the Scribes." He spoke his parables to a multitude with blinded eyes and hardened hearts, and those parables reveal a Kingdom of Righteousness, Peace, and Joy he declared near to publicans and sinners. They reveal the Will of the Shepherd who seeks the lost sheep in the wilderness, of the Father who so loved the world he gave his Son. These parables declare that God sows the good seed in his field; that the enemy, not God, sows the tares; and that in the end the tares will be burned, while what God has planted will bear fruit—fruit he will gather, and in which he will delight forever.

## Quinquagesima Sunday

*The passage:* "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." (1 Corinthians 13:13)

This sentence does more than say Charity is superior to Faith and Hope. It contains an important verb, "abideth," which our translators rightly render so, in keeping with the context. St. Paul had been speaking of great gifts which, being signs of an imperfect state, would cease in a perfect one: Prophecies, Tongues, Gnosis. Even Gnosis he does not equate with Knowledge in its full sense, since his hope is to know even as he is known. It is the childish habit of seeing things only on one side, sometimes inverted, that is to disappear, along with the prophecies and divided tongues that belong to partial, infantine perception. But is there nothing precious to us now that will be precious to us always? Yes: Faith, Hope, Charity are not to disappear. These abide.

No attentive reader can miss this meaning in St. Paul's words. Yet if we see it, we must give up notions that have become theological commonplaces among us. We are told it is the consequence of our exile from Heaven that we walk by Faith, not by sight, and that a time will come when Faith is lost in sight. So too with Hope: we are told it is to be drowned in fruition once we reach our inheritance. I do not deny there may be a truth hidden in this language, worth searching out. But we cannot arrive at that truth by flatly contradicting an Apostle, who is here magnifying Charity above Faith and Hope while saying, in plain words, that all three continue when partial things have vanished.

I. I will not give you my definition of Faith; no definition ought to satisfy you. I say this boldly because when the writer of Hebrews gives what schoolmen call a definition — so unlike theirs that they must immediately redefine it to make it intelligible — he at once translates it into life, going through the history of his people to show Faith in its actual exercises. From these deeds we learn how Faith is "the substance of things hoped for" and "the evidence of things not seen." Consider any one of these deeds and you feel the force of the word *Substance*. This belief made Jewish fathers, lawgivers, prophets substantial men; it stood under them, bearing witness to a ground beneath itself. The recurring phrase "They put their trust in the Lord" explains how they became substantial. The earth they saw was fair and good; they had no complaint against its trees, flowers, fountains, sky, sun. But they could not find their own foundation in these, though they tried, by making them gods — and everything became capricious and uncertain. The things themselves were firm, but they who worshipped them had no firmness, being tossed by every change. Such things might be feared, even loved in some sense, but not trusted. Were they then driven back on their own thoughts and speculations, finding no rest in visible things? That was looser sand still, sometimes quicksand — "they sank in deep mire, where no ground was." They could not trust themselves any more than the winds or waves. So "they cried unto the Lord" — out of the idols of sense, out of the mire within themselves — and He heard them, made them feel He was there, made them feel they might trust Him. They trusted, and were not confounded.

Thus Faith was the substance of their daily life, their strength in daily battles. But it was also, says the Epistle, "the substance of things hoped for": what they did not yet possess, it made theirs. The unborn child, the promised seed as many as the stars, became integral to their existence no less than the flocks they watched by day. The Promiser was the same as the Giver; if they trusted Him for today, they might trust Him for tomorrow. The sense of truth and the sense of perseverance grew together in their minds, for the Lord could not lie — what He was now, He would always be.

The second clause of the definition follows naturally from the first: Faith is "the evidence of things not seen." Truth, Righteousness, Mercy are not objects for the eye. The Jew was taught that a God of Truth, Righteousness, Mercy actually lived, was his Lord, and might be trusted. This trust, or Faith, conversed with invisible things which *were*, which it did not create any more than the eye creates what it sees. In both cases there is a revelation: the outward world reveals itself to the eye, God reveals Himself to Faith. Where the eye is blind, there is no revelation to it though the universe is revealing itself; where Faith is absent, there is no revelation of God though God is ever revealing Himself. Faith is the evidence in one case, as Sight is in the other.

When people speak of Faith being changed into Sight, what do they mean? Are Truth, Righteousness, Mercy to be translated into objects of sense — is God to become an object of sense? Have we fought against idolatry all our earthly lives, as the great sin that degrades God to the level of earth, only to become idolaters the moment our eyes close on this world — is that the heavenly reward? Or is Faith, as trust, to cease — is the glorified saint no longer to depend on God for all he has and is, given some higher security than unceasing trust?

Stated plainly, every devout man turns from these propositions with horror. Yet by not facing them squarely, by letting them hide under seemly phrases, great harm creeps into our souls. We fancy that eternal things will somehow come within range of our senses, becoming like the things of time; and we half suppose that, as reward for having trusted God's promises here, a day will come when we possess something assured to us as lands or goods are — held not of God but as our own. These are fearful habits of mind to cherish, the more so because so congenial to our indolence and selfishness. Let us cast them off. Remember that when the Son of Man presented Himself in a body that could be seen and touched to those He called His brethren, it was to their Faith He appealed, their Faith His words and healings sought to call forth. When it did not answer, He said, "You know me not, though you see me; you do not come to me, though you follow me." It was to Faith alone He revealed Himself, even when the senses seemed most capable of reporting on Him. And it must always be so: Faith must pierce through the robes of His visible Majesty as it once pierced through the robes of His humiliation. We must know Him in His own pure essential Nature, or there can be no delight in His presence. If adoration is not paid to the Lamb that was slain, it is not the adoration of the saints about the throne. And is not this the very difference between those whose garments are made white in the blood of the Lamb and those still stained with earthly foulness — that the one trusts absolutely, while the other's trust is mixed with doubt? Some say they have assurance of attaining heaven's bliss, and that without such assurance none can live a true human life. I would rather seek the honest sense possibly wrapped in such words than the hideous use made of them. If Assurance means Faith or Trust in a God who has reconciled the world to Himself and said to us in Christ, "I will be to you a Father; you shall be to Me sons and daughters," then the more we hold to that Faith and fight all that assaults it, the clearer, healthier, manlier our minds will be. We shall do the works God has given us because we are sure they are His, not ours. Since the bliss of Heaven, I believe, must consist in entire freedom from the unbelief and suspicion that hinder sound action, comfortable intercourse, and inward peace here, such Faith, the more vigorously exercised, must be the right entrance to that bliss. But doubt, unbelief, even temporary despair would be a better exchange than an assurance grounded in some private privilege that the Incarnation and Death of Christ have not made the common inheritance of all, or than supposing that inheritance could be anything but a full discovery of Him whom our want of Faith and our wish for private felicity have kept us from seeing.

Let us believe, then, with St. Paul, that Faith must abide always with us if we are to be blessed creatures. No distinction belonging to God's divine order can be abolished. Faith and Sight may both be perfected; invisible things may become more real and certain than things of sense — we may be sure they are the substances, apart from which sensible things would be mere shadows. Hereafter this world, full of unfathomed secrets, may disclose them to the purified searcher; every sense may put forth its fullest energy; the glorified body may be fit to understand the glorified earth. Faith and sight may become the divinest allies instead of the murderous antagonists they so often are now. But neither will usurp the other's place; there will be no confusion of their functions. Such confusion belongs to our twilight; it will be scattered in God's perfect Day.

II. It has not been possible to speak of Faith without touching Hope, since Faith is "the substance of things hoped for." I have lately connected Hope with the glory Isaiah says is to be revealed, which all flesh shall see together. What are these "things hoped for"? Are they the same as the Prophet's glory? If so, consider how far fruition of such a Hope could extinguish it. Is not the Hope of God's glory the hope of something infinite, always unfolding further to one in communion with it, and so always kindling fresh hope? Suppose a man reached a final pillar on his voyage of discovery and was told, "Now you know all; there is no further depth or height" — would not the hope he had nourished be frustrated rather than fulfilled? Would he not become a dwarfed, stunted creature, thrown back into the self-sufficiency God had delivered him from? The Hope that does not disappoint, that purifies, cannot be of this kind. It has Faith for its substance because it has God for its substance and its end. It comes from Him and can only be satisfied in Him.

Not that, being the ground and final satisfaction of Hope, He disdains lesser objects — all things shine in His light, glow with His life. But for that very reason even the pettiest creature must lie beyond the full comprehension of saints and angels; they must give up any ambition to fully grasp it, remaining ever filled with hope of apprehending a little more of the divine secret set before them for endless inquiry and wonder. It is the babyhood of existence that dreams of grasping water in the hollow of the hand or finding the end of the rainbow. In our manhood, seeing things as they are, we shall cry out — not in terror or shame, but in awe and thanksgiving and hope — "How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!"

III. So we arrive naturally at the Apostle's conclusion: "The greatest of these is Charity." Had he said, as some do, "The only one that abides is Charity," he would have taught, in effect, the Pantheistic doctrine that the creature is to sink and be lost in God. His actual reason for exalting Charity above Faith and Hope is that Faith and Hope point to His Being and Nature, while Charity constitutes it. That must be greatest without which the other two could not exist, without which they would have no object. A being who is not altogether Charity does not ask for trust — he bids his creatures distrust him, tremble, shrink from him. Such a being does not invite hope — he bids creatures despair, since he might at any moment loose the power to destroy them. Such a being is no fit object for Faith, which would always be seeking some other rest, forever flickering and uncertain. Nor is he fit object for Hope, which would always be looking to escape his cold atmosphere for some warmer region. Therefore, if Faith abides and Hope abides, Charity must abide. Because Charity is the fixed, eternal Substance, Faith and Hope have substance; because it cannot fail, they do not fail.

Perhaps this seems a perverse use of the word St. Paul has been discussing throughout the chapter — surely, you will say, it must mean the same in the last verse as in the first. But in the first verse he says, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal" — plainly speaking of human Charity. How can it be converted here into divine Charity?

This is an important question. What we want to know is how we can have that Charity without which we are tinkling cymbals — how St. Paul himself came to possess it. He speaks elsewhere of being saved by Faith and saved by Hope, speaking from his own experience: he knew he was lost in his own selfishness until he began to believe and hope in God. But Faith and Hope in what God? In a God of absolute Love, the God who revealed Himself on the road to Damascus, whom Paul then sought to serve by preaching Christ, His perfect Image. Only then did he, who had much knowledge and a Faith — of a gloomy kind — able to remove mountains, begin to have Love working in his heart. Faith and Hope, these saving powers, brought him into fellowship with something greater than themselves; he found them the conductors of its power, the unseen wires by which the life in the Father passed into those formed to be one body in the Son. God brings men into that body not that they may speak with tongues, remove mountains, or give their bodies to be burned — though He may call some to do any of these — but that, being baptized into one body, having one Faith, one Lord, they may receive the one Spirit, the Spirit of Love, and be stirred to do the works Love would have them do.

This is our teaching for the Sunday before Lent. What then should be the subject of our confession during Lent? We shall all own that the Love which bears all things, hopes all things, never seeks its own, has been weak in us — if it has had any hold on us at all. But what good is there in owning this? We cannot make ourselves love God by thinking how heavily He will punish us if we do not; we cannot make ourselves loving to our brother by calculating future gain from cultivating such affections. Our ordinary religious motives fail this test, proving as unpractical as they are coarse and grovelling. But if Faith and Hope stand to Love as I have described — substantial and good for us because Love is the Eternal Substance of God — then we may look on ourselves more humbly, less despondingly. We may give up the proud, idle dream of working ourselves into Love by artifice or calculation. We may discover that without Faith or Trust in God's Love, it is impossible, by the laws of the universe, by the relation of creature to Creator, for there to be any Love in us at all. We shall discover too that this Faith must itself be God's gift, that it could not exist in us unless His Love awakened it — and that thought, instead of creating uncertainty, becomes the beginning of confidence. If God desires Faith in us, He must plant it in us; by every act of His discipline He is planting it, bidding us trust Him — that voice never clearer than when it reminds us of our failures, neglects, heartlessness, selfishness. Every conviction of our want of Charity is a call to turn to His infinite Charity. The more hollow we are, the more we need what alone can fill the hollow; the more cause we see for despair in ourselves, the more we are driven to hope in the living God. So our confessions become sincere, our repentance one not to be repented of. We do not blame God for leaving us bare of what we need to please Him or live; we blame ourselves for not understanding His invitation to unbounded trust, His promise that what most threatens to destroy Hope will be made to keep it alive. We blame ourselves that when His Spirit of Love has been working to enter us, we have let another spirit, of self-seeking, possess and rule us instead. Such confessions do not lose themselves in vagueness: it is the round of daily life — omitted acts that might have helped our fellow-men, careless thoughts and habits that hinder us from helping them, reckless words and deeds that lower their moral life and ours — that God brings to mind, and through these we learn the mysteries of our nature and of His. Through these we are driven to feel the separation between us and His Charity, led to understand that the Atonement must be His work, not ours, led to feel that He can only be satisfied with us because He sees us in that Son who perfectly reflects His Charity, who believed and hoped in it through His humiliation and so endured the burden of our sins and death, who believes and hopes in it now and so presents the sacrifice of all His redeemed with the incense of His own perfect sacrifice to the Father. Through the sins that torment our daily life we learn the cause of all sin, in others as in ourselves: that it springs from suspicion of God and spreads in suspicion of one another; that the Spirit of God makes us aware of it because He is fighting it in each of us; and that if we yield to Him, He will drive out these great enemies and endue us with those three choicest blessings, Faith, Hope, and Charity, which are to abide with us and make us one with God and with our brethren for ever.

## First Sunday in Lent

[March]{.smallcaps} 1, 1857

(MORNING)

*The passage:* Our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power by which he is able to subdue all things to himself.

St. Paul had just spoken of church members whose god was their belly, who minded earthly things. It's a plausible view that here he meant to contrast his own mind, and that of those who imitated him as he imitated Christ, with theirs. Our translators probably thought so too, or they would hardly have rendered *politeuma* as "conversation" — a word that in the seventeenth century covered one's whole course and habit of life, not just speech. But it could never carry what a word built from City and Citizen naturally carries: a condition and privilege belonging to certain people whether they used it or forgot it.

That natural sense, I think, is what Paul intends. He isn't contrasting his own heavenly temper with their earthly one. He blames them for that temper precisely because he and they alike had a divine *politeuma* — a status claimed for them, rightfully theirs, implied in their very actions, with which such a temper was utterly at odds. The contrast isn't between them and him; it's between them and themselves. Nor is it between them and their professions, as if they boasted a high citizenship while being mere aliens. Their fault was too low an estimate of their status and rights, not too high a claim to it. They would rise above their grovelling ways — and above the conceit that went with them — if they understood what they actually were: what honors and estates were legally theirs, waiting to be claimed, and under what title they were held.

Still, the words "in the Heavens" plainly contrast with "earthly things" in the sentence before. Did the translators then make another, worse mistake — should they have used a future tense instead of a present? Should Paul be made to say "our citizenship *will be*," not "*is*," in the Heavens? Any reasonable reader will see they were right as it stands; the change would have destroyed the passage's meaning and moral force. The earthly-minded could rightly answer, "We're on earth; we need actual goods, not possibilities. Keep your shadows if you like — give us something substantial, even short-lived." And Paul's own language and deepest convictions would have left him no answer to that. All his exhortations pushed men from the fantastic toward the real. His whole life was spent presenting a present Saviour, able to free them from present bondage and sustain them under immediate death. Even the plainly future part of this passage — the coming manifestation of the Saviour, the complete redemption from bondage — would be just as emptied of meaning if his readers thought they did not yet have, but would only later have, a citizenship in the Heavens.

But how can such a thought ever become practical for us? Consider how it became one for Paul himself. He was a Roman citizen, valued the privilege, and it served him well more than once. Asking himself why it had been so prized by old Roman families, how provincials came to share it, how it came to be bound up with world dominion — what answer could he find? Was it won by men like those he saw in Nero's palace, given over to animal pleasure, careless of past or future, minding only earthly things? Did Rome grow great under their care? Or was its power due to the opposite sort — men who scorned such indulgences, held fast the reverence for ancestors that these had lost, believed in some unseen protector of their land rather than a visible idol or a tyrant's terrifying phantom? Were not the true citizens who built Rome different from the false ones now hastening its ruin, in this: that they minded earthly things less, and had some dream, however confused, of a citizenship in the Heavens?

But Paul was also an Israelite, a child of Abraham, and here the same facts appeared in far greater clarity. He saw everywhere — in every scattered city, in Jerusalem itself — men proud of their origin, clinging to their fathers' traditions, yet in the fullest sense minding earthly things: money-getters by profession and heart, reading their sacred records through the lens of Mammon rather than Jehovah. Were these like the men those records spoke of? Very like those the prophets denounced for forgetting the Everlasting Covenant, for setting their hearts on gain, for drawing down God's wrath and hastening the city's destruction. And therefore the exact reverse of those heroes who had done great things on earth by mastering it. Those men did not mind earthly things; they believed themselves citizens of a city with foundations, whose builder was God, and lived and died in that faith. They held their heavenly citizenship while still on earth, and could hope, once their eyes closed, to understand still more of what it meant, and how many others shared the inheritance.

This was Paul's schooling in what citizenship means — his preparation to believe there existed a city where Jew and Roman, Greek and Barbarian had equal standing, a city that must be in the Heavens, and whose gates, for that very reason, were never shut to any inhabitant of earth who chose to enter. In other words, he found there is a human society, for men as men, founded on the spirit, not the body — men become members of it because they have spirits, and are made free of it because the Father of Spirits has declared, in His Son Jesus Christ, that He is their Father, and they are brethren. So he mourned that men with such an origin and inheritance should think of themselves merely as sons of earth, living as though their fellowship depended on earthly accidents rather than on their relation to the unseen world. So far as they did this, their intercourse would be capricious and shallow — never deep enough to overcome the pull toward grovelling, separate, animal indulgence, never rising above pleasant words, acts, and the flattery of vanity. But so far as anyone traced their attraction to each other to a higher, diviner source — believing the bonds of friendship no more accidental or self-willed than the bonds of natural kinship, and referring both to God's eternal love and to our relation to Him — their associations would be genuine and lasting, surviving circumstance, surviving even death.

To say, brethren, "our *conversation* is in the Heavens" would be bold for most of us; conscience would sting us with memories — solitary hours wasted on miserable self-regarding speculation when we might have conversed with higher things; social hours spoiled by carelessness when we might have learned wisdom or gentleness from lips now silent and eyes now closed; hours when our lips drew near to God while our hearts held no converse with Him. But to say "our *citizenship* is in the Heavens" needs no such faltering. That confession belongs to Lent: it declares God true and us liars, affirming that He has not made our lives insincere, or our friendships poor and short-lived — that all the fragility and transience is our own doing, our failure to recognize the stamp of His eternity on us and on our attachments. We sever by sin and unbelief the links He has fastened; our noise disturbs the quiet deep of memory His Spirit broods over. But His order stands firm however little we abide in it. Human affinities, like natural ones, are all constituted and maintained by Him. The unity of one man's own frame is less mysterious than the unity between members of the body politic — the latter indestructible, whatever happens to the former, because our polity is in the Heavens. We are made one in Christ.

Therefore the dream each man dreams — that he is the center of the world, that everything can be referred back to himself — is monstrous and ridiculous. Therefore no friendship between men can have its origin in mere choice. Therefore anyone who will own his friendships as derived from Christ, and fulfilled in Him, may have them restored — the youth of old loves renewed, years of famine spent under selfishness' canker-worm followed by years of plenty from the inexhaustible treasury of God's love, sought from Him, not from earth or self.

Given this meaning, Paul's words concern us as much as the Philippians — by their very nature they cannot be local or temporary, and it is for our humbling, not our pride, to accept them fully. What meaning this gives to the Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ! It says: because you are hard-worked, warring citizens of earth, beset by infirmity, temptation, and death, *therefore* you may claim your citizenship in the Heavens — for the One ascended into Heaven had an actual body, offered it on the Cross, raised it, carried it to God's right hand. In Him you are united to your fighting brethren on earth, to past generations, to everyone who has passed from your circle into God's nearer presence. In Him you may confess your cold, hard, selfish acts, your forgotten holy influences and resolutions and aims — and the confession brings forgiveness, freedom, new life. It is God's will that we cast off the burden of past neglect and sin, self-reproach and shame, unrequited love and unfulfilled duty; that we believe constantly that He regards us not as poor separate creatures but as one body in Christ, justified, offered as a pure sacrifice; that we go forth to every task assured the whole family of God works with us and cheers us, and that the veil dividing us from them will one day be withdrawn. For if our citizenship *is* in Heaven, if denying that truth has made our lives here bewildered and inconsistent, if this slavery to earthly things has left us unable even to understand earthly things or fulfill rightly the duties they impose — then we may surely expect a day when laws are vindicated and anomalies swept away, when we see ourselves and all God's creatures as He sees them, not through the mists of this lower world.

So the latter part of Paul's words is a sure warrant of Hope for what shall be, as the former was a warrant of Faith for what now is. "From whence we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ." If we stood in no relation to this Lord — if He were not Head of a body of which we are members, if He had not come to save that body from division and make it one in Himself, if He had not ascended to raise it above its visible bondage into the eternal life of the Father — I do not know what this expectation could mean to any of us. To expect merely that a man born at some point in a Judean village should reappear at some uncertain future time would be poor comfort to those groaning under misery and sin, and feeble terror to those causing it. It does not matter what wonders we credit His first coming with, or what power we assign His second, so long as we regard those wonders as peculiar to a bygone age — they only stand in cold contrast to our present experience, and a future power we feel no effect of now is too vague, too easily imagined as indulgent or escapable, to overcome a real temptation or rouse flagging spirits to a hard duty. But to believe that He who showed on earth His dominion over Nature and over human wills — a dominion always His, exercised even now over us and over every corner of God's Kingdom — will vindicate that dominion against all that defies it or sets up hostile tyranny; to believe that He who claimed us as members of one Family in heaven and earth, Himself its Head, will not let us go on treating earth as cut off from Heaven, or the death He made a living way to God as a barrier between us and those about His throne; to believe that this body He has given each of us will not always hinder our spirits but become their helpful servant, will not always separate us from one another but bear clear witness to the necessity and permanence of that fellowship — this agrees with reason, though hard to grasp by sense, and proves itself true the more we hold to it, by its power over our lives and by the victory it gives us over the earthly things that would have us worship them.

It was natural for Paul, having rebuked the earthly-minded by telling them of their heavenly polity and pointing them to their ascended, invisible King, to declare his sure conviction that He would change the body of our humiliation to be like His body of glory, by the power that subdues all things to Himself. Natural, because without this his earlier words would be incredible — if this were false, the rest could not be true. If men are not spiritual beings possessing bodies, but merely bodies into which some spark or soul has intruded, then there can be no polity in Heaven; the notion is a fond dream, an outrage on fact. But if they are spiritual beings, their bodies must suffer wrong, degradation, and death, incapable of free exercise until the Spirit fully asserts its true state and is united to its rightful Lord. All through life we are slowly learning, amid perplexity and relapse, what our spirits truly are, who their Lord is, what their redemption means. Many instruments serve this schooling — Nature some, sorrow more, weakness, temptation, the sense of sin, and the need for deliverance still more. By what little we know of others' education we may judge God's method with us, and be sure He is working the same in them. But bodily suffering forms so large and regular a part of this discipline, so steady a means of teaching the spirit to feel its wings and long for freedom, that we know the body's redemption must belong to a later stage. Its pains are themselves continual prophecies of that redemption — the loss of strength and beauty, their unwonted endurance, even the look that remains on a corpse. Surely all these prophecies shall be fulfilled! Surely no energy exists without its perfect development and purpose fulfilled; surely no loveliness of infancy or manhood of which Death can say, "I have crushed it." For He shall make it like His glorious body — this is Paul's declaration, the pledge of Christ's Sacrament. As we eat His flesh and drink His blood, let us say boldly: we will believe this for others and for ourselves, not for our own comfort, but for His glory who gave His soul to death and brought His body through death, that death might have no dominion over us, that we might rise above it and above earthly things, inheritors of His divine and eternal life. And there is another blessing in this: the meaning of the great Hymn we sang today shall be fulfilled. Winds and waves, lightnings, storms, and green things even now praise the Lord; a few of us are privileged to hear His voice in Nature's harmonies. How much more, when the souls of the Righteous are purified in the blood of the Lamb and their bodies redeemed from corruption, will they lead the songs of the heavens, and teach all things to bless and magnify the Lord for ever!

## First Sunday in Lent

*The passage:* Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them and turn and tear you.

Churchmen in old times and our own have liked this text. From it come maxims and practices: "holy things for the holy" — hide the Altar from public view, keep a careful reserve about sacred mysteries.

Englishmen generally have little sympathy with these applications and denounce them. But they have their own version. They learn early that their most sacred things must be kept from the vulgar, scarcely mentioned even among friends. The schoolboy, however eager to share, senses he had better not throw down certain things among his companions lest they be trampled. This reserve deepens with age. The very words of this text — "dogs," "the swinish multitude" — are familiar to us and affect us even when we don't use them; election candidates, in their depths of servility, show they know these terms by heart. This is one precept of the Sermon on the Mount that doesn't repel us by its severity — we practise it, in our own way, before we preach it.

But treated as a precept of our Lord, it raises difficulties, especially for us clergy. The maxim about giving holy things only to the holy has tradition behind it, is built into church forms. But what were we sent into the world for, if not to proclaim what is holy to the unholy? Did not our Lord say the physician is for the sick, not the healthy? Was not His work among publicans and sinners? Did He withhold His divine wisdom from them, or from the dogs who surrounded Him among the Scribes and Pharisees? How can we follow His example if we only speak His message to those we've first certified are not dogs or swine?

And there's another question, for you as much as for us: by what skill do we tell who are dogs and who are swine? Let's read what comes just before this text: "Judge not, that ye be not judged... why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother's eye, and considerest not the beam in thine own?... first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother's eye." Our text follows immediately. The two seem to clash violently: I may not judge my brother's faults until I've dealt with my own greater ones — yet I'm to treat certain people as dogs and swine.

But perhaps these precepts illuminate each other more than we think. Perhaps obeying the first is the way to discover the reason for the second. Suppose it were true that the moment I judge my brother, I am casting the holy thing to the dogs; that the moment I look for the mote in his eye, I am casting pearls before swine. At first this seems monstrous. But if the context favors it, it's worth asking whether our own experience favors it too.

Take the very instances before us. I meet a man with a snarling, savage, currish nature — he barks and growls at everyone, especially when they mention anything noble or holy, as if he can't bear to acknowledge goodness exists. Seeing this, I judge him: he is of the Dog species, nothing else. Or I see a man who is gross, sensual, delighting in uncleanness. I judge him too: he belongs to the Epicurean sty, the species Swine.

Now in this very act — however justified it seems — I am giving the holy thing to the dogs and casting pearls before swine. For there IS a holy thing in that snapping, biting man, a man beneath all that is disagreeable and offensive; and I have handed that holy thing over to its tormentors — not only in my classification, but in fact. By denying there is a better, truer being in him, I confirm his own worst unbelief, strengthen the habits he's yielded to, and persuade him he can do nothing else.

Is it different with the other man? There are precious pearls in the heart of that victim of his lusts. But I refuse to see them; I see only the swine trampling them, and I leave him to their mercy — even provoke them to fresh violence. I'll have my reward: next time I see him, fewer pearls, and the swinish propensities turned on me, fiercer than before.

How has this happened? Because in my eagerness to judge these people, to fix them once and for all in their classes, I never asked whether these same canine and swinish traits might be found in me — whether I too carry the bestial nature that, in different forms, seeks to blot out God's image in them. How terrible when that nature reveals itself in us too — when the judge is judged, the measure we used is measured back to us! Then we begin to suspect there is nothing in us but this evil nature, no spirit fighting against the flesh, no holy thing that hasn't been thrown to the dogs, no pearls the swine haven't trampled to nothing! It is not true — may God convince us it is not! May His Spirit, who convicts us of sin, convict us also of righteousness! May He show that the dogs would not howl so if there were no holy thing irritating them, that the swine would not tear the ground if there were no pearls they sought to trample! But discovering this grows harder the less justice we've done to others — justice we owe them as much as ourselves.

It may seem I have overturned the ordinary reading of this passage. I'd suspect myself if I had, for ordinary interpretations have great value even when they mislead — they're usually shallow rather than false, and can be maintained on a sound footing without contradicting confessed truths. I hope that's the effect of what I've said. I fully grant that the command not to give holy things to dogs nor cast pearls before swine bears directly on how we preach the Gospel and speak of the highest truths in ordinary conversation. What that bearing is, we'll learn best by first getting rid of the painful doubt whether our Lord's practice contradicted His own words.

The more closely we examine His discourses to the multitude, His disciples, His enemies, the more convinced we'll be that His practice perfectly illustrated these words. He spoke to men who might, if any could, be called dogs — those described in the twenty-second Psalm, those who yelled at Him on the Cross. Yet He never withheld from them any holy truth, any revelation of God's character, any announcement of reconciliation. But He never gave the holy thing to dogs, because He spoke not to the dog in the man but to the man in the man. He told how God was like a Shepherd seeking the lost, like a Woman sweeping her house for lost money, like a Father recovering the prodigal eating husks. He said, "Come unto Me, ye that are weary." He said, "Ask of Me, and I will give you living water." These messages went not to the carping, cavilling nature but to the spirit crying for deliverance and hungering for righteousness. If the message of peace met only a warring temper, He told His Apostles the peace would return to them — not wasted. The Kingdom of God had come near to those who heard it, had witnessed in their consciences; they were treated as men, not dogs; the dog-nature might rage, but the holy thing was taken from its teeth, not thrown to it.

So too He found men and women who had yielded to swinish lusts. To them also He preached deliverance, not condemnation. He withheld no holy promise from them. He said to the sinful woman, "Go in peace, thy sins be forgiven thee" — because His love had called forth her faith, which saved her from herself, raised her from the bestial nature. The merchant had found the goodly pearls; the swine could trample them no more.

But woes were mixed with His blessings — the most tremendous woes ever pronounced on nations or men. These were addressed to the dark, disputatious, filthy nature in nations and men, in Pharisees and Publicans, in you and me — announcements that the fan was in His hand to purge His floor, gather the wheat, burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. They especially denounced the judging, condemning temper that made the Jew an enemy of God, of mankind, of himself. The more seriously and heartily we believe these words belong to all time, the more the fleshly tendencies akin to dogs and swine tremble and are confounded, and the more the imprisoned Spirit, the trampled pearl, lifts itself and gives thanks to God — hearing in these curses on its tyrants the voice of the Deliverer, the assurance of its redemption.

Such is our Lord's example. How do we follow it? How do we commit the error He warns against, and how escape it? We commit it whenever we try to present the Gospel of God TO the disputatious, quarrelsome dispositions in man. Most of us know how prone we are to this, and must confess with shame how often we've fallen into the very sin we charged on others. We speak what we think — or know — are truths. Others reject them or don't understand. We say: it is stubbornness, unbelief, God has hardened them. We are somewhat angry for their sakes and God's sake, but much more for the affront to us. The dog-nature in us meets the dog-nature in them. The holy thing is cast to the dogs; noisy debaters fight over it, gnawing it as if it were coarse earthly stuff, not divine at all. It matters little who wins — the thing they fought over has perished, or been reduced to a dry bone, in the strife.

I think we commit the sin of casting pearls before swine when we appeal to the lower nature's motives on behalf of truths meant to raise men out of it. When we leaven God's Word with carnal, idolatrous conceptions, on the pretense that a carnal generation can only receive it so — when we say we must speak of sensual rewards in a sensual paradise, since what higher thing could they understand? — when we say we must speak of outward material punishments hereafter, since what could they know of a worm in the conscience, of exile from a Father's presence? — when we use to the poorest, most ignorant man a single phrase we do not ourselves believe, that we could not ask God to justify as His truth — then we are casting pearls before swine, cultivating and making mighty what God hates and curses, what He sent His Son to deliver us from, what shall be cast into the lake of fire. And as surely as God's laws cannot change, as surely as Christ's words will not pass away when Heaven and Earth pass away, these swine we have fed and fattened will turn and rend us. There is not a pious fraud ever invented for pious ends that has not served impiety, weakened mankind's faith, become a weapon for its opponents. There is not an unworthy inducement ever urged to make men good that has not helped make them wicked. Woe to the world, woe to the Church, for these offences! May God teach us it were better to have a millstone about our necks and be drowned in the sea than to cause this!

Here, then, is ample justification for the Churchman's reserve, the Englishman's reserve. There is danger in bringing holy things to the unholy, danger of profaning what belongs to the heart's inmost sanctuary. But Churchmen and Englishmen alike are liable to do this, whatever their ecclesiastical theories or constitutional haughtiness, if they do not reverence their fellow-creatures more than they are wont, and respect themselves more than they are wont. Stiffness, dignity, and pretension will not keep us from giving holy things to dogs and casting pearls before swine.

How may we be saved from doing it? Only by remembering that there is no man alive without a holy thing in him to which we CAN speak, and without that dog-and-swine nature to which we MAY speak. Only by holding constantly before us that the holy thing is not his own possession, no part of his private self, but is his because he is Christ's, and Christ is God's; because Christ is the head of every man; because so long as he keeps the marks of a man he is related to the One who took our nature and was not ashamed to call us brethren. Only by saying to ourselves, hour by hour: "I live only because He lives; I am righteous only because He is righteous; whatever divides me from Him divides me from my kind — that is earthly, sensual, devilish. Whatever unites me to Him is what He gives us from His own fullness, that we may be true men and so true children of His Father."

Holding this faith, we shall avoid casting the holy thing before dogs and Christ's pearls before swine. We shall be able to confess this Lent how often we have committed this sin — lowering the Gospel to our own baseness and that of those we addressed — and how God has punished us by lowering ourselves and disabling us from raising them. The evil nature in ourselves, if not in others, has again turned and rent us, mastering us because we did not confess Him who has mastered it. Alongside this, another confession, equally necessary: how much we have judged our neighbours, how quickly we detected evil propensities in them, how eager to cast them out before knowing what answered to them in ourselves. It may not always be open sinners we've judged — those manifestly yielding to swinish inclinations we may have regarded with lofty compassion, feeling safely distant. But contempt for those nearer ourselves, whom we can compare ourselves to — especially contempt for them as inferior to us in gifts and insight — has this not been each of our easily besetting sin? We need not reproach ourselves for spreading God's Gospel too freely, for drawing the lines too carelessly between those we claim as God's children entitled to His reconciliation, and the dogs and swine. Our fault has run the other way: we have withheld from them what might have raised them into men, refusing to see that as God's purpose toward them. And so we have not attained the true standard of manhood ourselves; we have sunk to the level we deemed safe to assign to them. May God give us true repentance for this transgression, and endue us with the Holy Spirit that will overcome the flesh in ourselves, and enable us to claim fellowship with whatever is His in our brethren!

## Second Sunday in Lent

> "*I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh, for the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would*."—[Galatians]{.smallcaps} v. 16, 17.

*The passage:* Walk in the Spirit, Paul says, and you will not carry out what the flesh craves; for the flesh desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, so that you cannot do the things you want to do.

When I spoke last week on "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs," my aim was not merely to correct dangerous inferences drawn from it, or to reconcile it with "Judge not." I wanted still more to fix in your minds that there is in each of us a holy thing and a bestial nature, and that we are most likely to hand the holy thing over to the bestial nature—in ourselves and in our brother—precisely when we see only the worse in him and refuse to credit him with the better. Those lessons are a fitting introduction to the passage I have just read, which I know of nothing more instructive, or more suited to this season.

Few would defend our translators' rendering of the last clause of verse 17. The Greek has simply the subjunctive of ποιεῖν after ἵνα, so the natural rendering is "the things that ye will, those ye do not," rather than "ye cannot do the things that ye would." I mention this because I mean to reverse Paul's order and begin from the end. There he states the paradox of our lives; in the middle clause he explains it; in the opening sentence he tells us how we may act freely and rightly in spite of it.

I. If we keep our translators' wording, Paul would be announcing a paradox—and a hopeless one: that by some fixed necessity our acts and our wills must always be at odds, every purpose defeated in the attempt to carry it out. That would be a strange gospel. I believe his object is the opposite: to show there is *no* such necessity, that the anomaly can be removed—but first we must state it and bring it home to our consciences. We form grand conceptions, conceptions that seem right, that we could not narrow without giving up some principle we believe meant for us. But when these are to become acts, they turn out addled; the results bear little or no resemblance to the conception. How has this happened, exposing us to others' ridicule and to a bitterer self-contempt? We say, "We will lower our sights, we are earthy, we will stop aspiring to the stars." But how far down must we go? No resolution is so modest that the act will match it. We may abandon all lofty dreams and settle for what the most worldly man wants—but the same puzzle meets us there too. Selling ourselves to Mammon does not save us from unfulfilled schemes; in his kingdom, just as before, we plot much and realize little, rarely doing what we intended. It would seem the only escape is to give up willing altogether—if we could stop having purposes and hopes, we would at least be spared the pain of seeing them fail.

These remarks apply to more than good purposes. It is not only those who will noble and brave things who must mourn how little comes of their efforts. The man plotting a crime is just as often thwarted, by some outward obstacle or by something in himself he cannot explain—still he does not do what he intended. Others, even if he does not, can see he has been defeated. The king resolves to keep his slaves, yet ends up begging them to leave in haste. The prophet is hired to curse, and wants to curse, but the words that come out are blessing instead.

II. That is the fact—what is the explanation? It cannot be satisfactory if it explains only why our good intentions are weak and not why our bad ones are weak too. Paul addresses both. "The flesh," he says, "lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh." Two powers struggle within us; whichever wins at a given moment, the battle continues, and the weaker one still finds many ways to disturb and supplant the stronger.

Such a conflict has often been described—by mythologies giving it living form, by philosophies trying to analyze it, even to extinguish one side or broker peace. Many have called it a struggle between Reason and Appetite, where "Reason" often means little more than prudence or self-control. This does not match Paul's account. He speaks of a Spirit and a Flesh, each with strong appetites, each restless until fed, each ready to sacrifice the other to satisfy itself. His Spirit is no cool calculator or overseer; it is fervent, aspiring, and just as far from self-contentment as its rival.

As a glutton's flesh will endure torment rather than lose its luxuries, and a miser's flesh will starve rather than lose his gold, so the spirit will lose itself in its hunger and thirst for righteousness. The difference between them lies in the nature of what they crave, not in how moderately they pursue it.

That a man caught between such powers should be inconsistent, that what he resolves should bear little resemblance to what he does, is hardly surprising. Suppose he lets his animal inclinations rule him habitually, feeding and stimulating them—still, at certain moments, lusts of the spirit will rise: a wish to be like some friend, to be the man his mother prayed he'd be, to be as faithful as his own dog or horse. These cross and counteract the fleshly lusts, producing faint dreams of some better state, some other home; and quite apart from any punishment that indulgence brings, these yearnings break in on the coarsest existence and make it uneasy, sharpening pain with memory of the past. Or take a man whose pleasures are mostly intellectual, proud of his superiority to mere sensual men, confident he knows just how far to indulge his appetites. A time comes when his intellectual resources feel cold and abstract; he wants something actual, and begins seeking visible, palpable pleasures. Soon he thinks the intellectual things were only means to these; the lusts of the flesh become supreme; he does not do what he once willed, nor what he wills now, since he cannot heartily enjoy what he long ago recognized as base. Or take one who has more deliberately mastered his bodily inclinations because they interfere with his wish to rule others—he will not be pulled down or made soft by any craving of his own. How long before he discovers that ruling men requires sympathizing with them; before that sympathy, denied to the many, fixes on one or two, perhaps the least worthy; before it becomes subjection, and the tyrant turns into the slave of others and of his own desires?

Once more: a man is roused to think of his soul as something wholly different from his intellect, something to be saved or lost forever. He no longer cares for ruling others; fleshly enjoyments seem insignificant. At first he dwells much on the struggle between the evil nature holding him down and the cry within him for deliverance. But gradually he settles into the condition of "a religious man." He thinks the spirit's lusts are satisfied, or he keeps them on a meager diet. Then the fleshly lusts, which had been overcome only by the stronger activity of their opposites, reassert themselves—and they are not content with mere imagination. They grow by what they feed on, until they occupy the man almost wholly, with only stray moments left for anything else.

I want you to see, from these examples, that Paul's account of this struggle is not about a few special cases—it explains what is happening in all men, however different their circumstances, however unconscious they may be of any struggle, however hard they may have worked to avoid one. As long as you live among human beings on this earth, you encounter a flesh and a spirit lusting against each other, neither willing to leave the other in peace. The more each of us admits this is our condition, adapts to it, and abandons the hope of escaping the strife by some arrangement or other, the more manly and true our life becomes, and the more intelligible those otherwise bewildering events of life appear. For then the question arises: "Where do these lusts of the spirit come from? Who awakens them in me? The fleshly lusts I can trace easily enough to a natural origin—I have no right to be surprised at them in anyone. But these others—who brought them into a region where they seem strangers, sometimes tolerated exiles, sometimes troublesome intruders to be expelled, sometimes lords come to claim the ground and dispossess the old inhabitants? Lusts of the spirit, who sent you? What account can you give of yourselves?" At least this: that without them nothing that makes the world fit for human habitation would exist. No love of country, no care of children, no reverence for parents, no trust between man and man, no tenderness between man and woman. Without them the flesh would still lust, but would have only wild fruits to feed on—no beasts hunted, no fish netted, no sheep tended, no seed sown in ploughed ground. These strangers taught us every art, taught us to dream that not everything is left to chance. It seems they have more to do with our true selves, our proper manhood, than the lusts that feel so natural to us—as if we would never know what we ourselves are until we entertained them and learned something of their origin.

It is just this light that Paul, the Jew of Tarsus, claimed he could bring to the Gentiles of Asia and Europe. He said he knew where these lusts of the spirit came from: from the Spirit of God, awakened in each human being by Him, who watched to give them strength and victory over their enemies. He said the Eternal Son of God had also become the Son of Man, taken on man's nature, wrestled with man's enemies, claimed publicans and sinners as His Father's children, and given them power to live as His children—as spiritual beings whom the flesh and its lusts could not separate from Him and drag back into bondage.

III. So we come to Paul's opening words, taken last: "Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh." This is not the miserable "cannot" spoken of before; it sounds like good news, full of hope. But we must look carefully, lest it deceive us as so many such words have. The man anxious about his soul's salvation who adopts a religious course might, as we saw, surrender himself more shamefully than others to fleshly lust, precisely because he supposed it already subdued and had no idea how near it still was. How does Paul's teaching differ from a doctrine that daily proves so ineffectual in practice?

It differs in this: he never lets anyone suppose he is safer than his neighbor from the assaults of the flesh. The lusts may change shape through life—youth's lusts burnt out in age, the poor man's replaced by others in the rich, the rich man's never awakened in the poor for want of means. New circumstances redirect the lusts but do not change their essential nature. Childhood's besetting sins often reappear before the grown man, startling him with his own likeness to his younger self; others arise from opportunities and knowledge unavailable earlier, yet bear a clear family resemblance, coming from the same source. Experience may be gained, wisdom learned from books and from other men's failures and successes—valuable if it makes us more watchful against our fleshly lusts, but dangerous if it lulls us into thinking they are no longer there and need no watching. Least of all does "religious wisdom" offer any security, since if it is worth anything it will keep reminding us of the dangers, not remove them.

Here is one difference between Paul and those who use his language while missing his meaning. Another is that he believes there is a spirit in every man to whom he can speak, and whom he can call to rise and walk, however palsied and bedridden. His explanation is universal, and so is his message. "The flesh lusteth against the spirit" interprets a puzzle common to everyone; "Walk in the Spirit" can be said to anyone. There is no respect of persons in his Gospel, because there is none with God.

And here is the greatest difference of all. For Paul, it is not that men have souls which they must somehow save. It is that God created them to be spirits, and all His dealings with the race and with each person aim at accomplishing this, and at overthrowing the lusts within and the temptations without that conspire against it. When Paul says "Walk in the Spirit," he means: "Be the men God would have you be. Be what God by His Spirit is continually working in you to become. Do not resist that mighty Will acting on your wills every hour; do not fight it, weakening your own will even in its most resolute moments, making it incapable of consistent action even when most impatient of hindrance. Remember always that these lusts of the spirit, which you have often tried to stifle as strange yearnings after the impossible, are gifts from the Father of your spirit, reminders of your glorious origin and high destiny, pledges that He wants you to inherit the real treasures of His Truth and Goodness."

And then, he says, "you shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh." Be as intellectual, determined, or religious as you like—if that intellect, determination, or religion is something that is *yours*, that sets you above your neighbors, you *will* fulfil the lusts of the flesh; they will overpower you, and if you cast out one evil, seven worse will replace it. But to walk in the spirit is to be dependent, self-distrustful, seeking help and satisfaction in One who has everything you need. A spirit must be rising above itself; it turns devilish when it sinks into itself. That is why the spirit is rightly described as desiring, as lusting, and why communion with a higher Spirit is the only way to satisfy it. Through such communion it wins a victory over the lower lusts. God brings them to order and submission when we put ourselves in His hands, asking Him—who knows what we need—to give us that, and—who knows what is bad for us—to keep us from it.

Such a walk in the spirit must be silent, deep, unseen by others. Yet all of God's open and public ordinances give it strength, and show it is not a solitary walk merely because it is invisible. Nothing could be a more dangerous error than to think otherwise—and God has done much, mercifully, to guard us from it. It is the slave of his own impulses, the victim of fleshly lust, who is necessarily alone, working for himself, using others as tools rather than treating them as fellows. The spirit, in its deepest exercises, is building fellowship with countless unseen and unborn others, entering their temptations, bearing their burdens—always breaking through the shell that separates each creature from the rest, seeking what is social and responsive. So those ordinances which give each of us the strongest sense of our own personal relation to God are exactly those that most declare His equal relation to all. "Child, I baptize thee *with* this name, in the Universal Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." "Take and eat this bread, for Christ died for thee"—the formula of our shared participation in a death meant for the whole world.

And so, when I call this lesson about the flesh and the spirit especially a Lenten lesson, I mean that the forty days of Lent explain the other three hundred and sixty-five, because I know you will spend this Lent, like every other, not in closets or hermitages but amid the noise of the world, in business and party conflict. There you will be taught—will certainly be taught—that Paul was not describing a dream when he spoke of flesh warring against spirit. That half of the lesson you will learn by heart, if you have not already; every day among your fellow-men, of whatever class or trade, will show you how much in them is fleshly, ignoble, selfish, and how easily made more so by your own arts and appeals. But will you not also believe the other half—that in every poor voter at an English election there dwells a spirit for which the Son of God gave His life, that it might not be sold for corruption and falsehood, that it might be capable of true desires, made like His Father and not the father of lies? Will you not believe that any candidate who degrades that spirit—making it more insincere through canting phrases, or stirring fleshly lusts to smother the higher ones—must reap a just penalty in the loss of whatever was sincere in himself, besides all the harm he stores up for his country through the habits he cultivates in rulers and ruled alike? Is it wrong for me to say this if these are not my own particular temptations, when there are others just as great to which I may yield? Then warn me of mine as plainly; tell me how they have injured you, lowered your standard, furnished excuses for your own failures. Let us not think it merciful to withhold solemn warning against wrongdoing merely because we must not judge the wrongdoer. Let us believe the more our consciences are searched, the better for us—just as the All-Merciful deals with us, as the Judge of all the earth prepares us so that we need not be ashamed to stand before Him. He shows us how strong the lusts of the flesh are in us so that we may ask Him to keep alive, and fulfill, the higher lusts. He gives us repentance for having lived as mere higher animals, born to eat and drink and die, so that we may walk in the spirit and claim, for ourselves and for all, that higher life which is ours—if only, grown to manhood, we remember what we were told as children: that we are members of Christ and heirs of the kingdom of Heaven.

## Third Sunday in Lent

*The passage:* Christ gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father.

Lent reminds us of the three enemies our Godfathers and Godmothers renounced for us in Baptism. Last week St. Paul told us in what sense he called the *flesh* our enemy. Today let us consider what he means by "this present *evil* world."

Most of us have some vague notion of what he meant. Each notion may be worth something. We may have to cast it away as insufficient, even immoral, but it may leave hints useful for the practice of our lives.

I. First comes the opinion on which the Church and the conscience of mankind have each fixed an anathema, and which yet keeps hovering about both — the Manichæan view. It says: this visible world is accursed, the work of an Evil Spirit, almost given up to him. Christ came to deliver His elect out of it. While His people dwell in it they should regard it with suspicion and horror; its beauty is worse than its deformity; touch not, taste not, handle not its treasures. The devil told our Lord these things were his to give to those who worship him.

The conscience revolts at this doctrine, and the more it is illuminated by God's light, the more it will revolt. Since Lent has often been made an excuse for fostering this belief, some Churches wholesomely use Lent to protest against it, singing throughout it the *Benedicite*, which declares that every part of Creation praises the good God forever. It is fitting, even if not literally accurate, to connect that song with the martyrs who would not bow to the King of Babylon's image. Those who have purged their hearts of idolatry, who will bow to no visible thing, are rewarded by seeing that all visible things are good and honor the Eternal King. Conversely, wherever idolatry prevails, Manichæism follows — the belief that some part of Creation, and its author, is evil. Yet Manichæism is a confused, left-handed witness against idolatry. It tells us: these visible things are not your masters; their beauty cannot satisfy your craving for beauty, their order your craving for order, your knowledge of their secrets your craving for knowledge. If you make them your gods, they do become curses, and this glorious world does become evil to you — for you are in it but not of it. You will not truly interpret it until you understand that, and you will not enter its harmonies until you have heard a deeper harmony and had your spirit attuned to it.

II. Churchmen readily fall into this interpretation, though the Church denounces it; but they hold another, which they suppose immune to objection, wholly orthodox and Catholic. Christ, they say, has built a Church, endowed it with gifts, pronounced it good. The world sets itself up as its rival, jealous of its prerogatives, wishing to enslave or destroy it. The world of trees and flowers, of silver and gold, may be good enough or turned to good purposes; it is the world of *men* from which the Church is separated and against which it exists to protest. In baptized nations she claims these men as her own, but kings who want them as citizens and parents who want them as heirs dispute her claim. With these she may make terms, accept their honors or wealth for her own ends — but they belong to an earthly order, while her polity is celestial; she must always suspect their maxims and exalt her own against them. This doctrine, in various forms, has been proclaimed throughout Christendom, and many think we ought to believe it thoroughly even if they cannot themselves.

I will tell you why, as a Churchman, I am bound not to accept this but to reject and denounce it. The Church I read of in the Bible is baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — that Name is its foundation. But if I accepted this theory of the Church's relation to the world, I would have to suppose the Church exists to contradict everything that Name expresses. For Scripture says the Father loved the world and sent His Son to save it; the Son came not to condemn the world but that it might be saved through Him; the Holy Ghost convinces the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. The Father loves the world, the Son dies for it, the Spirit convinces it that it has a Deliverer who has taken it from a usurper — and yet this theory says the Church, sealed with that Name, exists not to love or save or convince the world but to rival it, plot against it, undermine it!

This contradiction is broad and deep. Christ's words can be explained away, but I will be judged by them, not by explanations more obscure than the words themselves. If you point to other texts calling the world evil, I admit them — I am seeking the true force of that language. And history gives a terrible clue: whenever the Church has set itself up in this rival character, it has plotted, lied, murdered, showing the worst qualities of heathen society in greater concentration. How can this be? Because for the Church to realize itself as earthly antagonist of the world, it must renounce its heavenly Head and its unity, substituting some earthly head instead — how else could it defy what it calls "the world"? And what does it then call the world? The nations God has established under their own rulers, witnesses of an unseen righteous Kingdom; the families God has established, witnesses of His Fatherhood. These the Church, boasting its divine call, tramples and defames as earthly — while the gold that patriots and lovers of home have been able to despise, this "holy" body hungers after and hoards for itself against the last day.

We sometimes think the Latin Church fell into these sins because it aimed at universality; rather it fell into them because it contracted the idea of a Universal Church into the idea of a merely Latin one. We shall never escape the same sins — copying them small, and secretly wishing to copy them large — until we acknowledge that the truth of a Universal Church lies hidden beneath that false, apostate notion, and that the true Universal Church is implied in the existence of each national and particular one. The Universal Church, constituted in its Universal Head, exists to protest against a world that imagines itself a heap of incoherent fragments without a center, where every man is his own center. The Church exists to tell the world of its true Center, of the law of mutual sacrifice binding its parts together, and to maintain the order of nation and family which selfish practice threatens. As the Church, following man's guidance, has enslaved and corrupted the world and misrepresented its Creator, so the Church, under God's guidance, has been the instrument of freeing and renewing it. The Church exalting itself has stamped the world's selfishness with divinity; the Church humbling itself has witnessed to One who gave Himself to take away its sin.

III. These experiences have made another theory plausible and popular, especially in Protestant lands though not only there. The Church, merely as a body of baptized men, is said to be no better than the world — indeed one of its most corrupt portions. But there are, scattered through Christendom, religious men who truly serve God; these form the true body of the faithful, who can act together as a continual witness against a world lying in wickedness, asserting God's laws against a world forgetting them.

St. Paul knew this theory well — he had been raised in just such a religious circle, bred a Pharisee of the strictest sect, more zealous for the traditions of his fathers than his peers, as he tells the Galatians in this very chapter. Yet this letter exists to explain why he abandoned that position utterly, incurring the hatred of that exclusive body by becoming a witness of God's love to all nations, and why he warned the Galatians that they would deny Christ if they listened to such preachers again. It is on the threshold of these very warnings that he speaks of Christ dying for our sins to deliver us from this present evil world. So he could hardly have meant by "world" what it meant to him as Gamaliel's pupil. He had seen the Pharisees closely enough to know that if covetousness, refined or gross, marks the world, then that sect belonged to the world's innermost core. His deliverance from their maxims and habits was a chief part of his deliverance from the world.

And yet within that Pharisaic idea of separation lay hidden a true principle, which Saul of Tarsus fully entered when God revealed His Son in him. To his nation he now seemed a greater separatist than ever. Becoming all things to all men that he might save some, he stood opposed to both Jewish and Gentile worlds alike, each hating him for breaking down the barrier between them, for witnessing to the Lord in whom they were made one. So he testified to Jews that a Sanhedrim's votes or a crowd's shouts or generations of tradition do not make truth, when truth is spoken even by fishermen and tentmakers. So he testified to Romans that an empire identified with the world, defended by legions and centuries of law, could not withstand the message of a crucified Man who died for monarch and slave alike. So he taught all who would follow him not to wait and count how many agree, but to trust that if only two or three renounce party ties to claim fellowship with Christ's family, He will be with them to tell the world of Him and His Father.

IV. Our text, strictly read, suggests yet another sense of "world." St. Paul's word is *age* (αἰών), not *order* (κόσμος) — why not take it literally, as the evil *age* he warns against? People in every age have said this, questioning why former times were better, convinced their own generation was especially wicked. Earnest men repeat it generation after generation; no argument about progress has stopped them, though such arguments have never been urged with more skill than in our century. They persuade many, but not all, and not always the deepest thinkers. Many remain unconvinced, or if briefly persuaded, fall back into the old complaint, always finding some plausible excuse for it.

It should be enough to note that St. Paul's age was the age in which the Son of God took flesh and dwelt among us — the Apostolic age we look back on with longing. If that was evil, what age shall we choose instead? None, if we believe God. St. Paul's age was the *best* there had been, for it was the latest, gathering up the ends of former ages; the disciples saw what prophets and kings had desired to see and had not seen. It was also the *worst* there had been — the age of Judas and Nero, upon which all former sins and punishments converged. The Christian age that followed was, if the Apostles do not deceive us, more to be desired than theirs; every century since, revealing more of God's purposes and drawing nearer their consummation, has been more desirable than the one before. Yet in every century, the best men in it have called their own age "evil," because they wrestled with its evils, not with those of a vanished time — the darkness they saw was thicker only because the light exposing it was clearer.

So we come to the real meaning of the text. The world appears in each age, embodied in its shifting customs, habits, fashions — a series of dissolving views. It always implies something permanent, but that permanence is not in it; it constantly tries to separate itself from the permanent, to make itself self-sufficient, to make us live only in the transitory and momentary. This world is real, acting on you, demanding that you believe in it and nothing else. There seems to be a wide choice — a fashionable world, a political world, an art world, a literary world, a religious world — but only the first has an honest title; the rest become, in effect, worlds of fashion too, their literature, art, politics, religion all reduced to fashion. Try to make any of them more than that, to root them in the past, in human nature, or in God's Being, or even to test them against plain facts, and a battle begins that cannot be avoided.

St. Paul tells us that our Lord died for our sins to deliver us from this world of fashions and phantoms, to bring us into fellowship with the Unchangeable and Eternal. This, he says, was the will of God our Father: that His children, made in His image, should not be the sport of every change and accident, shut up in a little circle of time, cut off from Him who is and was and is to come. Their sins had cut them off from Him — each creature sinking into itself, losing communion with its Lord. This is sin. Christ gave Himself to destroy sin, to remove the separation selfishness had caused, to make the perfect Atonement — restoring not only union with God but union among men whom time and space had sundered. Each man may live joyfully in the age God assigns him, envying no other man's condition; but he is not shackled by it — he is a freeman of God's universe. He need not resent the customs of his own society, no worse and perhaps better than those of former times; but where they conflict with everlasting principles, he must tear them away like tow. The clubs of earth may pass bye-laws for their own affairs, but the laws governing human history, like those governing nature, were passed long ago — the clubs must obey them or be crushed.

I would not raise such a question now if I did not believe it bore directly on the events occupying you and the conduct demanded of you. To tell you, "You think too much of politics, think more of religion," would sound proper but would be an ungodly, mischievous sentiment. I believe you do not think enough about politics — I wish you thought more, and were more religious for it. What we must fight is indifference and trifling; what we must cultivate is a sense that all that passes about us concerns us, that we are in God's kingdom, and that we will answer for every act affecting His subjects' welfare. Some current opinions about "the world" tend to weaken this feeling, making the evil world St. Paul speaks of truly our master.

The Manichæan notion that the devil is lord of the earth's outward economy is not yet cast out of our minds. A General Election is sure to awaken it if it sleeps in us. Some abuse harms the comfort, and so probably the moral condition, of our fellow-citizens; someone has a strong interest in supporting it; if I give way, votes may be gained for a friend, a cause, myself. "It's only a secular matter," we say, "it doesn't touch the conscience." Dismiss that sophism at once — it does touch the conscience. Speak plainly: it is a bargain with the devil, an acknowledgment that such things — whatever harm they do to health, life, purity — may be surrendered to his mercy. It is indeed an evil world, and you help make and keep it so.

Other questions are classed not as secular but as belonging to Church or religion. I won't name them or give my opinion on them. Honest opinion is possible on each side of every one — yet is there not often a zealous determination on each side that there shall *not* be an honest opinion allowed on the other? Are not candidates coerced into promising to do what they believe wrong, and do not some submit, becoming legislators who know themselves degraded? Every churchman party to such coercion, for some ecclesiastical end, has sinned against God — working to see his country governed by unprincipled men who say with their mouths what they do not mean, bringing a curse on the land; it will not help him that he pleased a religious coterie if it is abomination to his Maker. I say this to all who hold the monstrous heresy that the Church's cause can be separated from the cause of Righteousness and Truth, so that whatever harms Truth need not harm the Church — especially to zealous Protestants. Whoever resorts to baseness, violence, or misrepresentation he would call Jesuitical in an opponent, for the sake of "Protestant interests," is the best ally of its enemies, doing their work more successfully than they could themselves, spreading the doctrine that evil means serve good ends and that faith need not be kept with heretics — undermining, by secret arts, the very faith he claims to champion.

These remarks, however old and obvious, need repeating on such occasions. If they fall dead on most ears, one or two may take them to heart. I protest, in the name of honesty and of England, against our habitual folly and crime toward younger men, sending them to Parliament bound by promises about measures they have barely studied — committing them either to conscience-shaking reversals or to a stubborn, less honest persistence in a fixed course. Does not this cruel binding of limbs that should be free arise from confusing measures — which vary with time and may be right one year, wrong the next — with principles, which are fixed as God's throne? Do we not make unjust demands about the one because we scarcely believe in the reality and sacredness of the other?

This unbelief is the mark of the evil world St. Paul speaks of — a world undermining household, nation, and Church alike, to which we should assure every man, however much its color has rubbed off on him, he does not rightly belong. There is worldliness enough in all of us, but no man is merely worldly without something in him rising against that verdict, claiming to be higher and better. As I said last Sunday that every man has a spirit lusting against the flesh, so today every society has an element of the Church as well as of the world, and every member may and must believe the Church-element stronger, because God sustains and fights for it.

If we hold that conviction, we may overcome the great danger of our age — that listlessness, that despair of truth and good, that readiness to drift with the current because resistance seems useless, which we see in others and feel in ourselves. Let us strive mightily against it in God's strength. Let us not complain that our age is weaker or worse than others because men are no longer satisfied with their opinions, finding nothing to anchor to. Thank God if they are making that discovery! For as long as men rest on opinions, the words "Other foundation can no man lay than is laid, which is Jesus Christ" remain dead letters to us — we will think our notions about Christ, not He Himself, uphold heaven and earth; we will believe in our belief about the Trinity, not in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Thank God our age is better than any before it in this respect, as St. Paul's was better than any before it, because the true ground of all Divinity and Humanity draws nearer full manifestation, harder than ever to hide behind our conceits. But this is also why our age may be worse than any before it, as St. Paul's was worse: because we so readily take its maxims as guides rather than suspecting them as foes; because we have not exchanged trust in opinions for trust in God, who promises to guide us into all truth; because we retain a lazy acknowledgment that Christ gave Himself for us, without grasping that He gave Himself to deliver us from this present age of passing fashions and opinions, into that age which is everlasting and unchangeable because it rests on the unchangeable will of our God and Father.

## Fourth Sunday in Lent

[March]{.smallcaps} 22, 1857

*The passage:* Be sober and alert, because your adversary the devil prowls like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, knowing that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same sufferings.

I have heard preachers say it is hard to convince men of a devil's existence — that people scarcely know if they believe it themselves. I think this is wrong. People already believe in a devil, whatever else they lack faith in. I wish I were as sure that we always believed in God.

The name of the devil is never long absent from human speech, used in jest even by those who don't mean it seriously — itself a sign that the idea has long held minds before reaching lips so easily. Other signs: everyone complains of some burden he wants off him. One finds it outside himself — if only he had better people to work with. Another feels it wholly within, an enemy in his own heart, a solitary struggle no one else shares. Opposite as these are, both agree that something acts on them like an outward invader or tyrant would. Christians and atheists may agree that Scripture's language on this is unsuited to our times, yet both fall into that very language unawares when describing what they suffer. Missionaries and travellers find that in barbarous countries the difficulty is never to convince men of this doctrine, but of any other.

This may relieve us of a painful suspicion. Scholars often say confidently that our Lord only conformed to Jewish tradition when he spoke of evil spirits causing men's plagues. Given how much of his acts and words express this, no one who believes he is the Truth can accept that claim as usually put. But we may grant this much: none of his words aimed to prove evil spirits exist — he found that already acknowledged. Sickness, pain, and death were what demonstrated their presence to men's hearts; conscience of wrongdoing mixed with suffering to give them a dread dominion. Belief in one single Evil Spirit was less distinct and popular — a natural generalization to the cold thinker, a dark vision to the actual fighter, lying in the background while he had strength to work and pray, but able to overwhelm him in hours of weakness.

The same is true of his acts. He who met sickness, madness, and death was not displaying the power of evil spirits but their weakness — the Evangelists say he was "casting them out," honest language, disagreeable to refined men but fitting for the Son of Man who broke down the barriers separating us as one kind. Suffering isolates: my sickness, however like yours, feels wholly my own; even epidemics, which testify to our common nature, feel as individual as any other. Only if One appeared who sympathized with all suffering as his own, yet treated it as an alien intruder in the body and soul it possessed, could this isolation be overcome. Such a Deliverer could not set aside the old doctrine that evil had marred a creation that was perfectly good, and that this evil was voluntary, not natural; he had to endorse it and give it a definiteness it lacked before — turning an anticipation of human reason into a reality that could for the first time be faced.

Still more certain: if a Son of God could not contradict the heart's witness that Evil, however many its shapes, exists essentially in some Will — to be called the Accuser, the Tempter, the Adversary — then the revelation of a Father was the revelation of a Will opposed to this. Good and evil are so mixed in our world that it's natural to suppose them mixed by an eternal law; but once we confess a Being of perfect goodness, that thought becomes blasphemous. There remains the refuge of an abstract, impersonal Goodness, not a Power drawing creatures to itself. When the true vision dawns, we may suspect for a while that each of us is the source of the evil threatening him — and it is well to rest there long enough to realize that it is our self-will resisting God's loving Will. But we cannot shut ourselves up in contemplating our own sin without sinking into despair and deeper sin; since the sin of others, the sin of the world, is the very sin crushing me, the thought of a Self-Will acting on us all grows with the conviction that the preaching, life, and death of Christ gives us. Remove that conviction — say we are fatherless, with no Elder Brother — and the feeling of a common foe becomes utterly vague. Compare the Old and New Testaments and you will find this: the New Testament's language about the Devil cannot be resolved into a vague inheritance from the Old which a higher wisdom simply failed to shed. It is so much broader, more distinct, more personal that if such qualities mark superstition, the Jew and his law are nearly acquitted of a superstition the Gospels must be credited with establishing, almost introducing.

I've spoken of Christ's earthly life. When the Apostles preached his resurrection, they too had no need to persuade men that evil powers existed — that was assumed; Jew and Gentile agreed on this, though their theories differed, because the facts of the world and of their own experience bore essentially the same witness to their consciences.

The only important question was: can there be a deliverer from these evil powers? The Apostles proclaimed that there was — that the Son of God was Author and Upholder of the true order of the world, come to fight its disorders; that he had overcome diseases here on earth, overcome Death by death, and was every hour overcoming some principality and power claiming men as captives. This was their Gospel, and having it, they spoke necessarily of these principalities and powers; they did not begin by telling people their dread of such adversaries was mere fancy. Did this increase the existing dread of haunted places, the disposition to conjure up visible shapes of evil? I believe that if any language could teach men to dread not outward dark places but the dark places within themselves — that nothing material is accursed, since evil is spiritual and voluntary — it was this language. Imagine the Ephesians, who had seen Paul endangered by Demetrius the shrine-maker, by conspiracies of his own countrymen, who knew he had been stoned at Iconium, nearly killed by a mob at Jerusalem, imprisoned at Rome — imagine them reading his words, "We wrestle not against flesh and blood." He, of all men, to say that! Yet he said it in sober earnest. These flesh-and-blood men were not his enemies, whether as flesh and blood or as men with spiritual capacities — both were signs of their kinship with the Son of Man. It was the spiritual wickedness enslaving their spirits, receiving their unlawful homage, that cried in them, "What have we to do with you, preacher of a Son of God? He will make our victims restless under our yoke; his voice must be stifled or ours will be." These principalities and powers were all that Paul actually feared; everything else was to be loved and reverenced. The earth was redeemed — no part of creation was not God's; man was redeemed, Christ the Head of every man; the whole realm of nature and humanity conquered for the righteous King. But was not Paul tempted, exactly as Demetrius was, to doubt this redemption, to believe himself sold to evil as his necessary lot? Did that temptation mean nothing? To say so is to say that the crimes destroying men's souls and bodies mean nothing. Or were his temptations mere echoes of his own bad thoughts or others' suggestions? That answer satisfies no resolute thinker or doer. Paul spent his life fighting these enemies; if the fight was not real, his life was not real. Those who never fought might call the battle what they liked; to him it was one with principalities and powers, and no other name would have been less false, only feebler.

Temptations as diverse and contradictory as those Paul faced himself, and saw besetting the churches he founded, had to be named this way; to reject the language would misrepresent the most perplexing and serious passages of human experience. Why does no day's temptation take exactly yesterday's form? Why may today's temptation be the very opposite evil from yesterday's? Why can no one measure a word's effect on another by its effect on himself — an argument that falls dead on one fills another with endless doubts, one man is driven to crimes by motives his neighbor barely feels? Is it not right, then, to speak of principalities and powers? Such language may seem unnecessary to those who formalize life; to those in its agony, it is indispensable.

But the Apostles, like their Master, used the singular as well as the plural — forced to speak of an Adversary, a Tempter, because they brought a message of one absolutely good God, manifest in one Image, baptizing men into one Spirit, to races who had split the Divine Being into a thousand portions and confounded good and evil. The moment this complete unity was proclaimed — Father with Son in one Spirit — and men baptized into this loving, all-embracing Name, they had to be told: there is an adversary of this Name, self-seeking and self-worshipping, trying to draw you out of communion with it and with each other. Be sober, for he seeks to make you drunk with pleasure and self-conceit, so you forget your Father's house. Be vigilant, for he seeks to stupefy you into sleep. The language describing him had to be simple, even coarse — no vague generalizations that might make the danger seem unreal. Men who knew the distant howl of wild beasts, the hunger it signaled, who had heard the creature start from a thicket when the watch-fires burned low and the caravan slept, were told that this adversary too gives a low warning note before he springs — that his claws do not play with the victim but tear him, for his purpose is not to hurt but to devour.

Peter felt such a vivid picture was necessary so his next words would not be empty: "Whom resist steadfast in the faith." Once you believe you have an adversary — that the conflict is no sham — you can repulse him. You are not winning a position but defending one you already hold; you belong to God, and can tell the adversary you owe him nothing, that you scorn his promises and threats, and will not trade your Father's Kingdom of Heaven for his Kingdom of Hell. But this command would be useless without what follows: "knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world." Christians were prone to think themselves under different laws than others, exempt from the passions and the Evil Spirit's influence that governed other men — a plausible and perilous delusion. The Apostle's duty was to shatter it, by his own hard-won experience and by the falls of others before and around him: the privilege of brotherhood in Christ exempted no one from the very assault that threatened those without it. Precisely the same motives to evil surrounded Heathen and Pharisee alike, no weaker for either. The brotherhood's first advantage was simply to know their enemy's nature and their own weakness. Those who didn't believe Christ had taken their nature and been tempted as they were met evil only in its complicated outward forms; the Christian met it at its root. The world thought it could vanquish evils by clever tricks or beat evil with evil's own weapons. The member of Christ's brotherhood had to grasp the paradox: his only safety lay in hoping for no safety of his own — his hope lay in his despair, since being unable to save himself, he was forced to stand still and see the salvation of God. And he had this further advantage: as one of a Brotherhood, he felt his enemy was the enemy of his brethren and of the world he wished to claim as family, so that fighting for himself was fighting for all men. The flesh might contradict his spirit, the world draw him into its vortex — but seeing the devil as the source of both flesh's and world's malignity, he could not be a champion for himself without being a champion for all men, however they hated or tried to seduce him.

What I said at the start, I repeat: no one need be told to believe in a devil, for he does so whether he admits it or not. But everyone should be told to believe in God, to trust him as a living, personal Deliverer and Helper — then he will know what enemy he needs deliverance from. Everyone should be told he has a Father in Heaven whose name he is to hallow; then he will discover there is a father of all the evil he has ever thought, the father of all that is dark, superstitious, and foul in the universe, whose name he must hate in order to love God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself.

I said physical evils as well as moral are traced in the Gospel to this source. I know how greatly good people dread this language today. They appeal to the Visitation of the Sick service, which says Almighty God is the God of life and death and all pertaining to them — youth, strength, health, age, weakness, sickness — and ask whether, believing this, we can say sickness has any origin in an evil spirit. I steadfastly believe this assertion of the service — and believe the Evangelists held it more steadfastly than I do, and that the writers of the service learned it from them. The life and death of Christ are the ground of this confidence. Yet the Evangelists and Apostles, with full confidence in that life and death, still spoke of the devil holding a palsied woman bound eighteen years, spoke of Christ delivering men from plagues and evil spirits. I hold these consistent: Almighty God has turned physical disease into an instrument for curing moral disease, and those afflicted should use it so, trusting they are in a merciful Father's hands; those free from it should honour the sick as suffering for our good. Yet we must still say plainly that health as such is divine and according to God's order, and disease as such is of the devil and contrary to that order. Far from being superstitious, this is the great remedy against the truly mischievous superstition that regards plagues with a tenderness suggesting we should not fight them with all the resources of science and art — a superstition that lets the causes of disease multiply, as if God did not count them his foes and enable us, if we truly trusted his wisdom and power, to put them down.

But I care much more that we not shrink, from shame of an old and vulgar opinion, from acknowledging an adversary of Righteousness and Unity plotting against us all. Unless we watch against him, I fear we will not see God as wholly good — we will unawares invest him with dark qualities, and fail to feel him a Person we may trust and a refuge we may resort to. I fear our service of him will be mixed with petty scruples, because we do not see the great alternative: worshipping him, or worshipping in our hearts his direct opposite. I fear we will look on Sloth, Cowardice, and Insincerity not as hideous things to cry out for deliverance from, but as conditions we may safely tolerate. I fear we will accuse each other of faction, delighting to fix the charge on opponents, never suspecting the same fiend fills us all with the same low, venomous tempers, to our country's cost. I fear our young men will say they see no real distinction left between political or religious schools, though each retains its spite against the other, and conclude the safest course is contempt for all alike; that they can no more choose between men than between principles, and that each must do what is right in his own eyes. But surely another lesson is to be drawn: party distinctions are disappearing so that the eternal distinction between Right and Wrong, Light and Darkness, God and the Devil, may be fully seen. We have been doing what was right in our own eyes, choosing leaders by taste and fancy; we can do so no longer. We must now choose between higher chiefs — commit ourselves to the Spirit of Self-Will, to be drawn into whatever pits of darkness he pleases, or to the Spirit that dwelt in the Son of God, to become his faithful servants. This is not a question about this occupation or that: in politics, trade, or worship, we must yield to the Spirit of Truth or the Spirit of Lies. The Kingdom of Hell is not far off; it is about us, and each of us at each moment may be doing its ruler's work and earning his wages. The Kingdom of Heaven is not far off either; it is about us. Let us repent and turn to its King, who says to us, when all other guides fail, "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; I will guide you by my counsel here, and receive you to my glory hereafter."

## Fifth Sunday in Lent

> "*Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.*"—[Psalm]{.smallcaps} cxliv. 1.

*The passage:* Blessed be the Lord my strength, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.

On the last Sundays I have gone over the lessons we teach children, trying to show they suit grown men too. I spoke of the adversaries we face if we live on this earth, and can face if we are, as the old formulary says, members of Christ, children of God, heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven. I reversed the Catechism's order: the lusts of the flesh first, the pomps and vanity of the world next, the devil last—but kept its careful ancient language. The flesh itself is not an enemy; we believe in the resurrection of the flesh. But the lusts of the flesh, its wish to be supreme, involve sin, the degradation of both body and spirit. The world itself is not our enemy; it is loved and redeemed by God—nature precious, humanity more precious still. But the pomps and vanity of the world—the outward show that dazzles us and hides nature's real worth, the fashions that trap people in narrow circles and cut them off from what unites them to each other and to God—these mark a *wicked* world, one that shuts out the sun and chooses its own darkness. Because neither flesh nor world is evil in itself, only derivatively so, we had to speak of an evil spirit or will—the Accuser, Tempter, Destroyer, whose works fill the world's disease and death and the heart's suspicion and insincerity; who has no creative power, no rightful claim on anyone; whom it is our part to renounce utterly, proclaiming ourselves the property of Him who is wholly good and true.

If these are merely technical doctrines, parts of a theological system, I have no right to ask busy men to care about them. But if they describe an actual fight you are engaged in every hour, you may fairly ask: what do you have to tell us that we don't know already? Are divines better acquainted with this warfare, in science or practice, than other men—are they not commonly more ignorant of both, occupied with study-room abstractions, pulpit harangues, and routine duties? Which of these fits them to know the real struggles of real men?

There may be much justice in that; no one knows it better than the clergyman himself—how he fails to appreciate others' difficulties because he first fails to appreciate his own. If he tells his hearers how to behave in given circumstances, he is likely to find, once placed in those circumstances himself, how little he remembers his own rules, and how little they would help even if he did. Much of whatever experience he gains must come from just such humiliations—needed even more than the discovery that he has mistaken, and worsened, other men's troubles. Well for him if either lesson drives him to meditate on this text; well for him if he learns that all the help he can give or receive lies in it.

I do not know what the "Book of the Wars of the Lord," mentioned once or twice in the Old Testament, was; but I suppose the Book of Psalms was such a book to Israel, and has been to Christendom. Call it prayers, hymns, thanksgivings—it is certainly a record of fights. And this verse, from one of its latest parts, sums up its contents and draws its moral: "Blessed is the Lord God of Israel, who teaches my hands to war, and my fingers to fight."

I do not think this applies only to what we call spiritual conflicts. David, or whoever wrote it, likely thanked God for being able to fight Philistines and Ammonites—indeed thanked God he was *obliged* to fight them, not left to the ease he would have chosen. This matched all he had learned: Judges told him how the Lord sold Israel into enemies' hands when they followed idols, then raised up a champion to break the yoke. Was this puzzling? Not to an Israelite who knew his people's ways and had felt the same stirrings recorded of Gideon and Samson. He knew that the torpor of a people sunk in sensual worship is worse than any outward tyranny—that tyranny stirs old memories and shame, a cry, however faint, for deliverance—and that the man in whom this cry grows strong is the sign of a better day coming. So he traced the bondage, the bitterness of it, and the resolve to throw it off, all to the same source: the Lord had appointed the punishment, made it useful, taught the future leader's hands to war, so the oppressors used as His scourges would fall once their work was done. This was the pattern of Jewish history because it is the pattern of all history. No one who had learned it by heart would try to separate national wars from spiritual wars artificially: the one implied the other—the visible enemy was allowed strength so that dormant spiritual strength might rise to meet him. Man is made for battle; his own inclination is toward ease, and it is God who will not let him sink into the sleep that seems so pleasant and ends in death. "Blessed be the Lord God who teaches the hands to war, and the fingers to fight!"

I. I have called this thanksgiving universal, yet there are cases we shrink from applying it to, though we would be better for daring. Some feel the power of that first enemy far more than others—by constitution, upbringing, or indulgence, resisting the lusts of the flesh costs them an effort their nearest friends know nothing of. How natural to complain of this, to envy those who seem spared it, to plead temperament as an excuse for giving way! To onlookers these may be legitimate excuses for caution; but to the man himself, who knows that yielding means sinking toward the animal and away from the spirit, such excuses are worthless—conscience rejects them, only the lower appetites accept them. Yet if the conflict is solitary, known to no soul but his own, how hard not to feel doomed by some accident of birth to serve impulses that luckier men can govern! What help then in "Blessed be the Lord God who has taught my hands to war"! There is One who knows exactly what I am and can bear; He ordained my constitution and circumstances, yet is not tempting me to fall but to rise—letting me enter this conflict to emerge humbler, sadder, stronger, not willing my fall, and if I trust Him, not permitting it. My past falls become reasons to trust Him rather than myself; every fleshly lust may become, in His hands, the means of rousing a stronger spiritual desire to conquer it; the temperament I have resented, left in His hands, may prove exactly fitted to His purposes for me—perhaps fierier, because He has work for me a colder nature could not do. At any rate, the battle that shows me my weakest point, my besetting sin, must be meant for my good. What kind it should be is His judgment, not mine; my part is only to go through it, certain He is on my side, certain I will know more of His mercy hereafter for having been forced to rely on it here.

II. Violent desires announce themselves. But the fashion of the world hems us in and holds us down without our knowing it—an invisible web, not one distinct pressure but a mixed atmosphere hard to untangle. How natural to yield to it, and how mischievous—yes, and harmful—resisting it often seems and is! Many grow impatient with the society they were born into, imagine another's habits must be better, throw themselves into it, and find the old chain now closer around them. If it galls them, that is something to be thankful for; too often it does not, and all moral energy dies. How often, too, we see men reject local customs merely because restraint irks them, wanting only their own way—struggling for independence, not freedom, and ending in a crueler bondage to a worse master. And how often a man sets aside the maxims around him only to publish a new code of his own, making himself tyrant over it, lord of a narrow little world with all the follies of the great one, and a worse pride of superiority besides!

Yet these erratic movements and failed experiments show that men cannot rest easy in a world of shows and surfaces—that they belong to another order and must find it, even at the cost of ruin. Blessed be the Lord God who stirs hands to war for this divine order which He, not man, has established! Blessed for not letting His child lie crushed beneath the weight of opinions and traditions, for giving him visions of a city with foundations, whose builder He is, and the assurance that he must beat down whatever bars him from its glories! The other side of the riddle is answered too: we do not want to be free of government, but under a stricter, more righteous government than accident and convention and floating opinion give us; we want less, not more, subjection to our own fancies; self-will and vanity have destroyed freedom and manliness in us, building the false world that imprisons us. Blessed be God for this—since to such awakenings of conscience we owe every great reformation, every victory over abuses that private interests upheld. Not the restless men who wanted their own way and chafed at every ordinance won those hard triumphs, but those to whom order had become a passion, to whom disorder—however sanctioned by centuries and authority—was intolerable, who fought it in the name of the Lord of Hosts. Their fiercest opponents were probably those who called themselves not of the world but of the Church—but they knew that claim was false: whoever worships Custom and Tradition instead of God is of the world, and the Church exists to draw men from that worship to the true one. Blessed be the Lord who does not leave that conviction to preachers or reformers to plant, but writes His law Himself in men's hearts, and then gives them hands to war and fingers to fight for it.

III. Least of all is there natural strength in us against that enemy who goes about seeking whom he may devour. As I said last Sunday, there is a natural, widespread sense of his existence, a feeling that he is not far off. Among rude peoples the impulse is to conciliate this adversary who has ruled over them, to treat him as a god worth appeasing with rites and sacrifices—and left unchecked, he becomes *the* god, demanding all worship. Among civilized people it is different: they treat the devil as a nursery fiction, a name lingering in speech but meaning nothing. Yet something steals over these refined people they cannot quite name—apathy, loss of power, despondency are labels invented for it. Physicians of body and soul catalogue the symptoms carefully; the patient only suffers, unable to explain them. Such symptoms spread over whole periods; we call ours one with less gigantic crime and heroism than others had. Then our confidence in that flatters us is shaken—dark crimes do surface, the poisoner and the assassin are as much with us as with any generation, only their acts are calmer, more calculated, more concerned with safety than passion. Greed for gold, not vengeance, is the motive—meaning, in old terms, that our temptations are less of the flesh and more of the spirit. It is the spirit's energy that is undermined; some inward wickedness, not outward force, produces the deeds that darken our history. Is it not true, then, that the age which boasts of having outgrown the evil spirit is most directly exposed to his assaults? May our progress—real, and to be thankful for—have brought us into closer conflict with spiritual wickedness in high places than our forefathers ever knew?

Our progress!—cause for thanks, if this is its result! Yes, blessed be the Lord God who teaches our hands to war, for bringing us into direct encounter with His own enemies, that we may know His presence more directly than others did! It is terrible to have the spirits of indolence, indifference, and vanity about us and think them mere abstractions—but glorious to know them as real enemies from whom only a real Friend, an actual Captain of the Lord's host, can deliver us. It is frightful to read of crimes in a newspaper with only a lazy, self-satisfied surprise that our own kind could commit them, a secret triumph that we are not like them—but blessed to know we *are* like the worst of them, that the evil assaulting them may assault us any day, so that no victory over sin and death we can lay hold of is not equally theirs. May this be our progress, and no other! Not a lazy drift into a prosperity demanding no effort while we lie inert, but a quick perception of the evils around us, bracing our hearts to overcome them. Not a fond dream that things will somehow become what they should be, but the inward conviction that God means them to be so and calls us His fellow-workers in removing what makes them otherwise. This is the progress we need; without it, only continual retrogression. If our young men grow listless, heartless, merely critical, thinking manly energy belonged to other days, not ours, a death must come over us that no lucky accidents can arrest—only hasten.

But we are not sentenced to this death. "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness"—the riddle the Israelite warrior set before the Philistines. It is still the great riddle set before us on our pilgrimage, and we too may use it to perplex our enemies, turning them into our ministers, stirring us to life and hope. I know this torpor of soul that assails our time; I understand the cry for the sterner conflicts of another age. But is not wrestling with that torpor work enough for us? Could we wish a more terrible death-grip than it demands? Yes—all seven devils are in it. We cannot cast them out ourselves. But may they not have been permitted to torment and possess us so that we learn who can cast them out? Is not this torpor the clearest proof of our utter weakness, and so the revelation of a God of strength? If a host of visible angels with drawn swords came to such a battle, what would they do for us? But if the seven Spirits before God's throne come to help our spirits against the seven devils—if the Spirit of power, love, and a sound mind fights the spirit of indifference, coldness, and restlessness—is that nothing? Is it not exactly what we need? So the riddle is solved: the carcase of the Lion, the very foe that seemed ready to devour, supplies nourishment for each future assault. Our deadliest foes become our teachers about the eternal life we may share. In struggling with powers unknown to us in childhood, we learn to say "Our Father" with the same faith as when we first said it. And since lack of earnestness, coldness, indifference, threaten our nation and all nations with ruin, every victory over them in our own private lives is a victory for England and for mankind. The other half of the riddle is equally clear: there is sweetness as well as strength for one who gives up ease and seeks hands to war against the enemies of earth and God. The worth of the Sabbath is known through the toil of the week. It is in war with the world, the flesh, and the devil that we may hope to learn the Peace of God that passes all understanding.

## Sunday before Easter

> "*Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind*."—1 Peter iv. 1.

*The passage:* Because Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves with that same mind.

I believe many religious people approach this coming week with pain and dread. Not awe—they complain of having almost none of that. Their pain comes from memories of past years when they tried to grasp the greatness of Christ's sufferings and be moved by them, and failed, leaving their hearts drier than before. Their dread is the expectation that this week will bring the same failure. They call it a still, holy week—words suggesting rest—but they expect struggle and disappointment instead, and if honest, would admit they'd rather forget it altogether. But old associations, the Church's language, and their own consciences won't let them; the week comes freighted with more than they feel able to carry.

Someone may think it unsafe to voice such doubts—won't unbelievers seize on the admission that holy seasons bring turbulence rather than peace, that the most sacred exercises are the least strengthening? It matters little what inferences others draw. It is always safe to be honest, and unsafe to tolerate contradictions in ourselves or others. Anyone who has lived through this contradiction knows it: just when we meet the most solemn realities, our minds feel most artificial. We strain to think and feel what we do not actually think or feel, using methods urged on us or invented by ourselves, half-persuading ourselves we've succeeded, half-priding ourselves on the effort. Then comes reaction: conscience says this is wrong, and inclination agrees; the heart springs free from its own self-imposed strain and looks back ashamed at ever submitting to it. The facts of the week grow as dim as the distorted lens through which they were viewed, and the excited devotee turns scorner. This story repeats every year, filling Church history and our own circles. Where is the real danger—in facing this honestly, or in hiding it? In asking whether it springs from a false notion the Bible and the Church actually warn against, from which their counsel might have saved us—or in letting the harm spread and destroy more souls? We should not approach so vital a matter without deep self-questioning, distrust of our own wisdom, and every available help used with the highest wisdom. But a preacher who trusts himself is a fool, and one who avoids the deepest wounds should give up preaching altogether.

You must have noticed that nothing in our Lenten services—Scripture or the meditations of holy men drawn from it—has aimed at lifting our minds to some high pitch. Quite the opposite: they have been proofs and confessions of feebleness and inability. We've been told to subdue flesh to spirit because flesh tends to exalt itself and smother the spirit's promptings. We've heard of temptations to body and soul so that we might confess we have no strength to resist them. The last three Sundays' Collects are pitched in exactly this key: leading us from struggle and self-exaltation into dependence. The Epistles and Gospels chosen for them carry this same inner meaning—the creature's incapacity to do or be anything except a dependent on a higher will, a receiver of a higher life. The lessons have told of the chosen family's redemption, first from idols, then from bondage in Goshen: Scripture always sets emancipation before us, freedom as its great promise—but the process frees the slave of a tyrant only by binding him more completely to the Master he was made to obey. The yoke broken is self-will's.

How well this matches the whole discipline of this season! That discipline is defined exactly by its aim. There's no precision in its outward measures, and church attempts at precision produce only more excess and looseness. But the principle never varies: subjection, not exaltation—condemning feats of self-mortification and rivalry in abstinence just as much as indulgence of appetite, since both spring from the same root and lead to the same end. Fullness of meat is denounced by sages and saints alike because it breeds pride and self-indulgence. But those like John the Faster of Constantinople, who traded food for worldly ambition and spiritual self-glorification, gave their evil natures not a Lent but a Carnival.

Today's Collect is the climax of our Lenten teaching. It seems to explain the purpose behind all this urging toward humiliation—but its language may deepen our perplexity. It speaks of following the example of Christ's great humility. That, we say, is exactly what we've tried and utterly failed to do; we can manage almost anything else. Simple humility is hard enough—harder than mercy or justice. To ask that we be humble as Christ was humble seems to mock both God and ourselves. I would think so, and would think St. Peter guilty of the same mockery in urging us to arm ourselves with Christ's mind and follow his steps of suffering—except for the opening words of the Collect, from which its whole meaning flows, words that carry the very spirit of St. Peter and all the Apostles. They add no new burden to Passion Week; they show us how to be freed from the diseased temper that turns it into one, how to enter the deliverance it promises.

I. The words are these: "Almighty and everlasting God, Who of Thy tender love hast sent Thy Son."

We are not told here to labor at grasping how great our sins are, how justly we've earned God's wrath, and then to climb from that to the thought of Christ's sufferings as matched to the size of our guilt. I don't mean this adaptation is denied or hidden—but the method here is the opposite. The Church starts from the highest ground rather than working up to it from the lowest. She does not require us to measure this divine love first, so that gratitude may follow as a result—that she trusts will come later, more truly. Her first task is to assert God's love absolutely, apart from consequences or our response to it. This method plainly comes from Scripture—the whole New Testament, Peter's Epistle as much as Paul's. If it appears most fully in John's writings, that's because they gather up the meaning of all earlier Scripture, the full and final revelation toward which everything else led. "God so loved the world," "God is love"—these are not devotional raptures but the scientific foundation of Catholic and Evangelical theology. If we refuse this foundation and substitute our own maxims and method, we destroy Christian theology and Christian morality together.

II. I have not yet dwelt on the word *mankind*, so prominent in the Collect, though it matters greatly here. All agree that love, if real, must find an object. The impatient, sin-sick soul asks first, "Am I that object?" The spiritual director makes it his chief task to answer this, testing his disciple to discover or realize his interest in that love. The Church shares this urgency to bring love to bear on the individual heart, but knows she has a prior duty—to witness for God—without which the lesser duty cannot be done. So she suspends the personal question and begins with the broader proclamation: God's truth and love reach to mankind as a whole. Such general language may sound unsatisfying at first to the sinner absorbed in his own case; he may prefer a physician who addresses only his symptoms. Yet I think a promise of deeper, more radical healing lies in these wider words than in the narrower ones. He will sense they bring him closer to the Bible itself—for while Scripture often seems to speak directly to his own case, it also unsettles him with so much that seems vague and general. He wishes he could strip the Old Testament of its Jewish history and the New of its concern with Churches. He cannot quite see how the greatest proclamation of all could be, "Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill to men."

III. But those words should carry their full force once he grasps the next clause: "Who of Thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent Thy Son to take our nature upon Him, and to suffer death upon the cross."

Those who begin from reflection on their own sins calculate first the punishment deserved, then the compensation needed to remove it, then who could offer it—arriving by hard reasoning at the conclusion that only a divine person, united to human nature, could satisfy justice's demands.

Compare these cold, dry mental processes—which need forced efforts of feeling and imagination to connect them to the events of Passion Week—with the language of the Collect instead. God, who is Love, who has tender love for mankind, is said for that very reason to have sent His Son. There is One who expresses and manifests this love—One who is with God and is God—manifesting it by taking human flesh and dying on the cross. Christmas and Passion Week are not separate mysteries: both flow from the Father's eternal, absolute love, and both show the Son's submission to that love, his willing conformity to it. He wrings no reluctant consent from an unwilling Judge to pardon rebels; he brings down into human nature the very love that created man and from which man's self-will had separated him. This love becomes human through acts of simple obedience. The Son yields himself to it, refusing every temptation to act independently—refusing to prove his sonship by turning stones to bread, or leaping from the temple, or seizing the kingdoms of the world. He rests on the word spoken at his baptism, acting as one baptized with the Spirit, doing and suffering what is appointed. By that same Eternal Spirit he heals the sick and casts out devils, and offers himself to God.

See, then, how this line of thought—which the Church draws from Scripture, which gives the Gospels their coherence, which the Apostles trace in every discourse and letter—speaks directly to conscience, heart, and reason. Does it not answer, "Yes, this is love—if real, if it truly reaches me and doesn't stay forever distant, it must declare itself exactly this way. Only so can I know it, feel it, be brought to obey it"? When Incarnation and Passion are presented like this, can we call them merely fine ideas, man's dream of his own nature's capacity for infinite self-sacrifice? Doesn't everything honest in us protest, "No, I demand realities, not fiction—an actual personal love reaching me from above, not my own idea projected into some superhuman shape. My heart and reason ask this and will accept nothing less. And that capacity for self-sacrifice you speak of in human nature—its reality depends entirely on whether there is a Being to whom the self can be given, who himself shows the example and principle of sacrifice, in whose image I am made. If not, there is no such capacity in me; it may be a fine idea, but it will never appear in the practice of life—only the fearful hypocrisy of self-will counterfeiting self-surrender."

This notion that the divine is merely the human glorified rather than its true ground—that a man becomes a god by imagining himself one—this philosophical revival of the world's oldest corruption and superstition, man's first disobedience, is at once the natural reaction against a theology obsessed only with human depravity, and the natural result of a theology that begins from man rather than from God. I have used the first part of the prayer to protest the method common to both errors. I believe the second part—the prayer itself—delivers us from the self-exaltation and restlessness that both produce. Grant that we may both "follow the example of His patience, and also be made partakers of His resurrection." Following the example of Christ's humility seemed at first an outrageous ambition. Does following the example of his passion—imitating his sacrifice—seem even more outrageous? It would be, if the Passion were not simply the human will surrendering to the Absolute Will, the Son refusing to be anything except in union with his Father. It would be profane, if the power of this sacrifice—the power of the law of God it reveals—were not exactly this: that it can end our unnatural striving against the Will we were made to obey, subdue us, and free us from the Self that has tormented us all our lives. "In that He died, He died unto sin once." This complete surrender of self was the extinction of the barrier between man and God. He would be nothing in himself, that God might be all in all. So we follow the example of his patience when we stop seeking anything in or from ourselves, resisting every urge to glorify self instead of God, to climb to God by our own ladder. To follow his patience is to accept, however God chooses to send it, deliverance from self-will and self-seeking; to share his resurrection is to enter the true life he has in God—trusting him, and finding in him what we sought in vain within ourselves.

If this is true, Passion Week need not be weary struggle, darkness, and confusion. We may take it as God's message about his purpose and his way of bringing our wills into harmony with it—a pledge for every kind of mind. Some are given a strong power of imaginative realization. Let them hold this as a trust, remembering that their vivid conceptions are worthless in themselves, valuable only as they draw the mind closer to the truths themselves, and that without great humility such conceptions may obscure those truths for others and for themselves. Others feel they have no such faculty at all—no scenes, no pictures form in their minds; sacred places stir no reverence, memorable seasons recall nothing vividly. Let such people turn their weakness into pure faith, holding most firmly the truths imagination can least picture. Let them say, "Passion Week reminds me these things are real quite apart from my thoughts about them. I thank God they are. I thank God that in tender love he sent his Son to die on the cross. This is real. I leave my power of realizing it to him." Others of quick, tender feeling are deeply moved by human sorrow, even unseen, and weep to think of the King of men dying for men. This too is a gift, to be received with thanks—only let them guard against turning sympathy into mere luxury, forgetting it must bear fruit in life. Still others cannot be roused even by their own sharpest sorrows to seriousness or tenderness, much less to feel Christ's sorrow. Let them confess this hardness, thank God for showing it to them, and submit to its bitter humiliation—and then Christ's deeper sorrow and humility will work in them the repentance that needs no repenting of, godly sorrow without effort or pretense. Let them leave this sensibility in God's hands, to give as much or as little as he sees fit, asking only that they may bear steady witness to his love because they have none of their own, and whatever comes forth in them must be entirely his.

So all may learn the force of Peter's words. We need Christ's mind as armor for real battles. Passion Week, which shows us how that mind appeared in his sufferings, is meant to clothe us in that armor. It is no time for indulging feeling, but for mourning the lack of it—a time to gain strength for action and endurance. This great weight of self—selfish thoughts, selfish plans, fears and hopes for self—crushes us all, individuals, nations, Churches alike. Passion Week tells us it may be thrown off. Christ bore it for us and for the world; at his cross we may lay it down. God will enable us to do so—for if he gave his Son for us all, will he not also freely give us all things with him?