March 29, 1857
“Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”—Psalm cxliv. 1.
On the last Sundays I have been going over the lessons we teach our children, and have been trying to show you that they are not so unsuitable as we sometimes think to the condition of grown men. I have spoken of the adversaries whom we have to encounter if we live upon this earth, whom we can encounter if we are, as the old formulary says we are, members of Christ, children of God, inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. I have reversed the order in which the Catechism presents these enemies to us. I have taken the sinful lusts of the flesh first; the pomps and vanity of the world next; the devil and his works last. But I have adhered strictly to the ancient language, which must have been carefully considered, and cannot easily be improved. The flesh, as such, is not an enemy: if it means the body, we believe in the redemption of the flesh, in the resurrection of the flesh. But the lusts of the flesh, the desire of the flesh to be supreme—to make the man its subject,—this involves sin, or separation from God; this involves the degradation of both spirit and body. The world in itself is not our enemy: it is loved by God; it has been redeemed by Christ. The world of nature is precious in God’s sight, and should be precious in our sight. The world of human beings is more precious to Him, and should be more precious to us. But the pomps and vanity of the world, those mere outside phantoms which dazzle our eyes and hinder us from looking into the heart of nature, from knowing her substantial worth and secret loveliness; the fashions among human beings which shut them up in a little circle of time and place, and cut them off from all that is essentially human, from all that unites them to each other and to God; these are the signs of a wicked world, of a world which chooses to exclude the sun, and to dwell in its own darkness. And because these distinctions were necessary respecting the flesh and the world, because it is a dangerous and inhuman and ungodly thing to count either as evil in itself, as having anything but a derivative evil, we were obliged to speak of an evil spirit or evil will; of one who is to be treated as the Accuser, the Tempter, the Destroyer; of whose works the world and the heart of man are full, because the world is full of disease and death, and the heart of man of suspicion and insincerity; whose works are simply these: there being in him no creative energy; he having no right to claim anything or any person as his; it being our own part and duty to vindicate ourselves and all creatures from him; utterly renouncing his dominion; proclaiming that we are, one and all, the property of Him who is absolutely good and true.
If these are merely technical doctrines, parts of an anthropological or theological system, I cannot with any reason ask you, who are busy men, to care about them. If they speak of an actual fight in which you are engaged, and must be engaged every hour, you have a right to say to me, “What have you to tell us about that fight which we do not know already? Are divines better acquainted with the science or practice of this warfare than other men? Are they not commonly more ignorant of both? Are they not occupied a good part of their time with twining ropes of sand in their studies, with the preparation and delivery of harangues in pulpits, and with a certain prescribed routine of duty? Which of these pursuits is favourable to the acquisition of that knowledge of human beings which can alone qualify them to speak of the struggles and temptations of human beings?”
There may be great justice in such remarks as these; perhaps no one knows so well as the clergyman what justice there is in them; how much he has failed, and does fail continually, in appreciating the strength and nature of other men’s difficulties, because he has first failed in appreciating the strength and nature of his own. If he tries to tell his hearers how they should comport themselves in such and such circumstances, he is likely to discover, the first time that he is placed in any such circumstances, how little he recollects his rules; how little they would serve his turn, supposing he did recollect them. One main part of all the experience he has must consist, I should conceive, in such humiliations; they must be more needful for him even than those which he obtains from ascertaining that he has mistaken the maladies of his fellow-men, and that he has aggravated rather than healed them. Well for him, if by either lesson or both together he is driven to meditate upon the text I have just read to you; well for him if he is instructed that all the help he can impart to any, or can receive himself, lies in it.
I do not know what that “Book of the Wars of the Lord” was which is referred to once or twice in the Old Testament; but I apprehend the Book of Psalms was such a book to the Israelites, and that it has been such a book to Christendom. We may call it a collection of prayers, hymns, thanksgivings, what we please,—but a record of fights it assuredly is. And this sentence, which occurs in one of the latest portions of it, is a fit summary of its contents, and a kind of moral to be drawn from the whole of it: “Blessed is the Lord God of Israel, Who teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight!”
I am far from thinking that this sentence applies exclusively to what we designate spiritual conflicts. I should suppose that David, or whoever the writer of the Psalm was, gave thanks that he had been able to fight with the Philistines and Ammonites. Nay, I should think he gave thanks that he had been obliged to fight with them; that he had not been allowed to rust in the ease which he would have chosen for himself. It was in strict harmony with all the teachings he had been most familiar with, to speak thus. The Book of Judges, which he must have read continually, will have told him how the Lord God of Israel sold the people into the hands of their enemies when they followed idols and provoked Him to anger, and how then He stirred up the spirit of some champion to break the strange yoke. Was the statement puzzling and contradictory? Not to one who was himself an Israelite—who had known the habits of his people, and shared in them,—who had felt those same quickenings of heart which were recorded of Gideon and Samson. He knew that the torpor and death into which a people falls when it gives itself up to sensual worship is worse and more hopeless than the most galling outward tyranny, that such a tyranny does arouse, as nothing else does, old memories, and shame, and a cry, if it be a faint one, for deliverance,—that the man in whom this faint cry becomes a strong and earnest one, is the sign and pledge that a better day is approaching. Therefore he could not but refer the bondage, the bitter sense of it,—the wish, effort, resolution, to throw it off, all to the same source. The Lord God, the King of Israel, had appointed the punishment, had made the punishment salutary, had taught the hands of the future leader to war, and his fingers to fight, that the proud oppressors whom He had used as His scourges might be laid low as soon as their work was finished. This was the often-illustrated principle of Jewish History: of Jewish only, because it is the pattern and explanation of all history. No one who had learnt it by heart—who had become thoroughly penetrated with it—would attempt an artificial division between national wars and spiritual wars. The first supposed the last; the visible enemy was permitted to put forth his strength, that the spiritual strength which was dormant might be called forth to withstand him. So the law, exhibited in certain cases, was proved to be universal. Man is made for battle. His inclination is to take his ease: it is God who will not let him sink into the slumber which he counts so pleasant, and which is so sure to end in a freezing death. “Blessed be the Lord God, Who teacheth the hands to war, and the fingers to fight!”
I. I have spoken of this thanksgiving as one of universal application: there are some cases in which we shrink from using it, and yet in which we are taught by experience how much better we should be if we dared to use it in all its force and breadth. There are those who feel much more than others the power of that first enemy of which I have spoken. To withstand the lusts of the flesh—not to be completely overpowered by them—is with them, through constitution, or education, or indulgence, such an effort as their nearest friends may know nothing of. How natural it must be to complain that this is so! to envy those who appear removed out of this especial danger! to plead temperament or circumstances as legitimate excuses for succumbing! Excuses, no doubt, they should be to the onlooker, who has not the same burden to bear,—excuses to all who are wisely dreading lest they should also be tempted. But to the man himself, who feels and knows that to yield is to sink lower in the scale of creation, to be more of an animal, to be less of a spirit, such should be arguments of no worth. His conscience rejects them; only his lower appetites listen to them. And yet, if it is a solitary conflict, if no one but his own soul is engaged in it or aware of it, how difficult is it not to feel that, by some terrible accident of his nativity, he is doomed to serve the impulses which more fortunate men may be able to guide! Oh, what help then may be drawn from the words “Blessed be the Lord God, Who has taught my hands to war, and my fingers to fight!” There is One Who does know exactly what I am, and what I can bear. The constitution, the circumstances, are understood by Him; He has ordained them for me. And yet He is not tempting me to sink; He is tempting me to rise. He has allowed me to enter into this conflict that I may come out of it a humbler, sadder, stronger man. He does not desire me to fall in it. If I commit myself to Him, He will not suffer me to fall in it. And the falls I have had are all so many motives and goads to put that trust in Him which they show me that I cannot put in myself: and every lust of the flesh may be the instrument, in His hands, of awakening a stronger lust of the spirit to overcome it; and that temperament which I have murmured against, when I despaired of directing it by my own wisdom, if I leave it in His hands, may prove to be the fittest for the purposes to which He has destined me. It may be of a more fiery quality, because He has services for me which one that is chiller and colder would not perform; and, at all events, the battle in which He has made me understand where I am feeblest, where my easily-besetting sin is,—that must be meant for my good. Of what kind it shall be, He must be the right Judge, not I: all I have to do is to go through with it,—certain that He is on my side,—certain that I shall know more of His mercy hereafter, for having been forced to throw myself upon it here.
II. Violent desires or passions remind us of their presence. The fashion of the world is hemming us in and holding us down, without our knowing it. A web composed of invisible threads is enclosing us. It is not by some distinct influence that we are pressed, but by an atmosphere full of influences of the most mixed quality, hard to separate from each other. How natural it is to yield to these influences! how very mischievous the effort to resist them often appears,—yes, and is! For how many a man becomes impatient of the habits of that particular society in which he is born; fancies that the habits of some other must be better in themselves or be better for him; flings himself eagerly into it, and finds that the chain which bound him before is more closely about him now. If it galls him, that is something to be thankful for. Too often it does not gall him; he hugs it: all moral energy perishes within him. How often again do we see men protesting against their local customs or the customs of their time, merely because all restraints are irksome to them, because they are determined to do only what pleases themselves. They struggle for independence and not for freedom, and the result is a more cruel service to a worse master. How often again do we see a man setting at naught the maxims of the people around him, only that he may publish a new code of his own; that he may erect himself into the tyrant who enforces it; that he may become the lord of a narrow little world, which has all the follies of the great one, and a pride of superiority which is worse than any follies!
Yet there are signs in these irregular movements and abortive experiments, that men cannot be at ease in a world of shows and outsides,—that they belong to another order, and must discover it if they perish in the search. “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, Who stirs the hands to war and the fingers to fight,” for this divine order which He has established, and not man! Blessed be that Lord God for not allowing His creature, His child, to lie buried under the weight of opinions, maxims, traditions, which is crushing him! for giving him visions of a city which has foundations, of which He is the builder and maker! for giving him the assurance that he may and that he must beat down all obstacles that hinder him from possessing its glorious privileges! Blessed be the God of Israel for this! since surely it must be He, and no other, Who shows us that we do not want to be loose from government, but to be under a stricter and a more righteous government than that of accident and convention and the floating opinion of an age; that we do not want to be more but less under the yoke of our own fancies and conceits; that self-will and vanity have been the great destroyers of all freedom and manliness in us and in our race; that these have built up that false world which has become our prison-house. Blessed be the Lord God for this! since to such awakenings of the conscience in men we owe all great and earnest reformations, all victories over desperate abuses which private interests established and sustained. Not the restless, disorderly men who would have their own way, and who fretted against all the ordinances of man and of God, which told them they could not and should not have it; not to these were those hard-won triumphs owing; but to those in whom the desire of order had grown to be a passion,—to whom disorder, if it had the prescription of centuries and the sanction of all existing authorities and opinions on its side, was intolerable,—who went off in the name of the Lord of Hosts against it. Probably they had no fiercer antagonists than those who said they were not of the world, but of the Church. But they knew that that profession was false. They knew that all who worship Customs and Traditions instead of God must be of the world; and that the Church against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail, exists to withdraw men from the one worship and to fix them in the other. Blessed be the Lord God, Who has not left it to preachers or doctors of the law, or reformers, to fix that conviction in the hearts of His servants; Who writes His law Himself in their hearts, and then gives them hands to war and fingers to fight for it.
III. Least of all is there any natural energy in us to contend against that enemy, who is described in Scripture as going about seeking whom he may devour. There is, as I urged last Sunday, a natural, and therefore a very general impression of his existence; there is a sense in all men that in some form or other he is not far from them. But the impulse among rude people is to conciliate the adversary who, as their consciences tell them, has had and still has such dominion over them. He is a god, whom it is worth while to persuade with litanies and sacrifices that he will spare his victims. By degrees, if there is no counteracting force, he is certain to become the god: he will demand all services for himself. Among the civilized it is otherwise. They are inclined to regard the devil as a fiction of the nursery; it is the shadow of a name which cannot be banished from conversation, nor quite from the thoughts, but it means nothing. Yet something steals over these refined people which they know not exactly how to describe. Apathy, loss of power, despondency,—these are some of the names which they invent for it. The symptoms are carefully ticketed and noted by physicians of the body and of the soul; the patient merely suffers from them, without being able to give any clear report of them. They spread over a period. We talk of it as one in which there is less of gigantic crime and less of heroism than belonged to other times. And then our confidence in this characteristic of an advanced age is shaken. Very dark and hideous crimes indeed come forth into light. We discover that the poisoner and the assassin have not less to do with us than with other generations. Only there is less of excitement and of passion in the acts; they are done more deliberately, with accurate calculation and foresight about the means which are most likely to attain the end, and to involve the least risk of detection. Vengeance is much less the motive to them than the thirst for gold; that is to say, if we use the old nomenclature, our temptations are less of the flesh and more of the spirit. It is the energy of the spirit which is undermined. It is some terrible infusion of inward wickedness, not some great outward force or attraction, which leads to the deeds that darken our history. Is it not true then that the time which boasts to have outlived the evil spirit is the one which is most directly exposed to his assaults? May it not be that our progress, which is not to be denied, and for which we are to feel all gratitude, has brought us into a closer conflict with the spiritual wickedness in high places than our forefathers were ever engaged in?
Our progress!—cause for thankfulness, if this is the result of it! Yes; blessed be the Lord God of Israel, Who teacheth our hands to war, and our fingers to fight. Blessed is He for bringing us into immediate encounter with His own immediate enemies, that so we may know more than others did of His own immediate presence! It is a terrible thing indeed to have the spirits of indolence and indifference and vanity all about us, and to think that they are mere names and abstractions. But it is a glorious thing to be roused up to the apprehension of them as real enemies, from whom none but a real Friend, an actual Captain of the Lord’s host, can deliver us! It is frightful to be reading of crimes in a newspaper, and only to feel a lazy self-conceited surprise that people of our nature should commit them, a secret triumph that we are not like these people. But it is blessed to know that we are like the very worst of them; that the evil which is assaulting them may any day assault us; because so we are certain that there is no good, no victory over sin and death which we can lay hold of for ourselves, that is not equally for them. Oh, brethren! may this be our progress! may we long for this, and for no other! Not a lazy drifting into a prosperity which shall demand no effort, which shall go on while we are inert and helpless; but a quick perception of the evils which are encompassing us and our land, that we may brace our hearts to struggle with them and to overcome them. Not a fond dream that all things are somehow to become what they ought to be; but an inward conviction that God means them to be what they ought to be, and that He calls upon us to be His fellow-workers, in getting rid of that which makes them what they ought not to be. This is the progress which we want; if we have it not, we must have continual retrogression. If our young men become listless and heartless, and merely critical, deeming that manly energy was for other days, not ours,—beyond all question such a death must come over us as no lucky accidents, no series of lucky accidents, can arrest; nay, one which they must accelerate.
But we are not sentenced to this death. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness,” was the riddle which the Israelite warrior propounded to the children of the Philistines. It is still the great riddle which is set before us in our pilgrimage through the earth, and which we also may use to perplex our enemies. They thus may be our ministers, to stir us to life and hope. I know and feel inwardly what this torpor of the soul is which assails our time. I can well understand the cry for the stouter conflicts of another time. But is not the wrestling with that torpor work enough for us? Can we desire a more terrible death-grip than that which it demands of us? Yes, all the seven devils are in that. We cannot cast them out. But may they not have been suffered to torment and vex us and get possession of us that we may learn Who can cast them out? Is not this torpor the most decisive of all witnesses to us that we are utterly weak? Is it not then the revelation to us of a God of Strength? If a host of visible angels descended with drawn swords to such a battle as this, what would they avail us? But if the seven Spirits that are about the throne of God come to the help of our spirits against the seven devils; if the Spirit of power and love and a sound mind enters into conflict with the spirit of indifference and coldness and restlessness, is that nothing? Is it not the very thing that we need? So then the riddle is solved. The carcase of the Lion, of the foe which seemed most ready to devour, supplies us with nourishment to sustain us in each future assault. The deadliest foes turn at last to be our teachers respecting the eternal life of which we may be partakers. In the struggle with principalities of which in childhood we knew nothing, we learn to say “Our Father,” with the same faith and heart with which we said it when we first repeated it. And since want of earnestness, coldness, indifference, are the foes which threaten our nation and all nations with perdition, every victory over them in our own chambers, in the commonest circumstances of our own lives, is a victory for England and for mankind. Nor is the solution of the other part of the enigma less clear and satisfactory. There is a sweetness as well as a strength for him who gives up ease, who seeks for hands to war and fingers to fight with the enemies of earth and of God. The worth of the Sabbath is understood by the toil of the week. It is in war with the world the flesh, and the devil, that we may hope to learn what is that Peace of God which passeth all understanding.