First Sunday after Christmas

(INNOCENTS’ DAY)

“And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”—Matthew xviii. 2, 3.

I had intended to confine my discourses on the Eucharist within the four weeks of Advent. But there are some thoughts suggested by the Innocents’ Day which I should wish to connect with this subject. Nor can I regret that the Sunday after Christmas and the last of the year should be devoted to it.

If we think of this day as anything more than a commemoration of an event—and the day can be merely that—it must belong to the present and the future, not only to the past. It must tell of a certain state of mind which it would be very desirable, if it were possible, for us to keep or to recover. Innocence seems a treasure so unspeakably precious, that we must admire all to whom we can attribute it, and mourn for ourselves and for all who have lost it. This admiration and this lamentation are wont to take two forms. The child is regarded as not only the father but as the model of the man. And since Christian theology speaks of the child as born in sins, the moment after its Baptism is taken as that when it attains the summit of perfection. Then it wears the white robe, which might no doubt be kept stainless, but which is in fact soiled by all mixtures with the outward world, and by the unfolding of the feelings and passions within, which are to flower in youth and bear fruit in manhood. What can we do but lament that this innocence has departed, and try to regain what faint image of it or substitute for it we can?

At another time, or by a different class of persons, the question is viewed historically, not biographically, in reference to the race principally, to its individual members secondarily. “What a glorious time,” we exclaim, “that must have been, when the first man and the first woman were still pure! What a misery to their descendants that they lost Paradise! What multitudes have fallen in their fall! If some are reserved from the ultimate punishment of it, all have been wounded by it, even mortally.”

There are two corrections of these plausible and popular statements; one is derived from the Sacrament of Baptism, which is appealed to as justifying the exaltation of infantine innocence; the other lies in the tenor and in the express words of Scripture, respecting the life and history of mankind. Baptism was first proclaimed to a corrupt generation, polluted with all actual transgressions, a people which had rebelled against God’s Covenant. It was declared to be a Baptism of Repentance for the remission of sins. The Baptism which was to succeed this, it was prophesied, would be of a still more searching, penetrating, fiery quality. To that Baptism, Heathens as well as Jews, defiled with all imaginable crimes, were invited by Apostles and Evangelists to come. Eminent fathers and doctors of the Churches wondered how any should be allowed to receive it except those who had voluntarily turned from their iniquities. They resisted the demand of parents, though they pleaded the precedent of Circumcision, and the probable practice of Apostles, that their children should be acknowledged as heirs of the New Covenant with themselves.

The conscience, heart, reason of mankind, triumphed over their scruples. Infants had the nature which Christ took; they could not be kept from Him. To say that they were not spiritual, voluntary beings, merely because the will was as yet dormant, was to deny the plainest facts; if they were, they had a right to be claimed as such beings, not to be treated as animals. But assuredly their condition does not determine the character of the Sacrament in the opinion of any Church. Our own Catechism, written expressly for their use, takes pains to explain how they are admitted to it, notwithstanding their want of the repentance and faith which we naturally expect of the receivers. Who could imagine from such statements that Baptism put more honour upon the unconscious innocent than upon the offender who had deliberately forsaken the evil of his ways? Who could gather from the history of this ordinance that the infants whom Herod slew were to be more precious in our sight, because more precious in God’s sight, than the bravest champions of the faith, provided they had walked in lasciviousness, lusts, and revellings, like those to whom St. Peter wrote (according to the strict construction of the words he reckons himself among them), or had been persecutors and injurious like St. Paul?

But if Baptism speaks so decisively against the attempt to make it a voucher for this opinion, how do the Scriptures speak of the attempt to exalt the garden of Eden, and turn its innocence and its charm into an excuse for regret and longing? From the beginning of Genesis, where the story of Adam’s banishment from that garden is recorded, to the latest chapter of the Apocalypse, where we read of the Water of Life and the Tree of Life, is there one instance of such regret or such longing in the life, prayers, lamentations of a single holy man? Does Abraham in his tent, or Joseph in the prison, or Moses in the wilderness and wishing to die, or David when his heart is cast down within him, or Jeremiah when his heart is broken for the daughter of his people, waste one sigh that Adam had not fallen, express one wish that the earth had not been replenished by man? There is sorrow enough for those who had broken God’s Covenant and sold themselves into slavery, for those who, being planted wholly a right seed, had corrupted themselves. There is crying enough that God would rend the heavens and come down, that He would arise and judge the earth. But though these brave sinking warriors have boldness to utter almost every complaint before the God Who knows what they mean, though they say, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” “Let us speak with Thee of Thy judgment,”—where do you find one maintaining that it would be better for him or for the world if there had been no revelation of God’s righteousness, fighting with sin and overcoming it, of God’s mercy to the sinner? Such blasphemy does not enter into their thoughts. They look onwards, not backwards. They desire more knowledge of God’s Truth and Love, not the loss of what they have. As the discovery of their own evil and of the world’s evil becomes more appalling, they have a clearer vision, which they are sure will wax brighter to the perfect day, of a good which no evil can quench. For this they wait. Must they not bless God that He suffered men to eat of that tree, of which the fruit was death? Did not life lie behind that death,—a diviner life than any which Adam could even dream of?

So says the Scripture; and so says that Sacrament of which I have been speaking in these sermons. The other may expose one form of that irreverent, ungrateful retrospection to which we are all so prone; this strikes at the principle of it. We cannot receive the pledges that the Son of God has taken the nature of men, and then deduce our humanity from Adam instead of Him. We cannot receive the pledges that the Son of God has died the death of men, and complain that Death has entered into the world. We cannot receive the pledges that the Lamb of God has taken away the sin of the world, and not confess that the victory over sin is greater than the unconsciousness which precedes it. We cannot believe that He has made a full and perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the world, and not be willing to accept St. Paul’s words, in the fullest sense we can give them, confessing our inability to enter into the length and breadth of them; that “not 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 would have been impossible. When our Lord took a child and set it in the midst of the disciples, and made its face the answer to their question, “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?” nay, even told them that they could not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven unless they were converted and became as that child, He certainly laid them and us under a very serious obligation to inquire what it is in this image which He loved, and after which He would mould us. His words indeed, taken in their most simple and obvious sense, scatter all notions that we are to sigh after the state of Infancy as one which has been left far behind us; for He tells grown men that they may and must attain all which is blessed in that state, notwithstanding their experience of the world and of sin. But they do assuredly justify the feeling of mankind, which the theories of philosophers and divines fail to justify, that a childlike man is the highest and most developed man.

You speak of a child as unconscious. You denounce what you call self-consciousness, as utterly inconsistent with its proper nature, as almost revolting. Yet, if you saw no consciousness awakening in this same child, you would be obliged to call it idiotic. If it never learnt to speak of itself in the first person,—if it never began to say with full emphasis, “This is mine,” and “This I am to do,” you would lament that it had no energy to act, no feeling of responsibility. Here is the puzzle which is continually thrusting itself in our way. It gives rise to continual changes in our speculations; to still more in our practical education. Are we to be awakening that sense of self which threatens quietness, obedience, simplicity? Are we to stifle it, and so to form a mere good-natured slave, a creature without any purpose or determination? The question is asked again and again by anxious parents. In general, before they have found the answer, it has answered itself. They are obliged to confess that they are not creators, that another discipline than theirs has been at work on the being which has been committed to them; perhaps they are obliged to wish they had been sooner aware of that fact, or at least had sooner understood the immeasurable importance of it. Then they may be struck with the reflection, obvious enough,—and yet to how many of us new and startling!—that perhaps these facts of our experience have something to do with our divinity; that that does not stand wholly apart from human life; that the passage between them may have been opened by One Who knows more than we know.

We have been praying 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.” It can scarcely be doubted, I think, that whatever is meant by becoming a little child, or being a little child, in the text or elsewhere, is included in the word Regenerate, which is used in this Collect, and that that word receives its explanation from the previous clause respecting the Incarnation of the Son of God. That is made the ground of the regeneration and new birth of the creatures who call upon God as their Father. They may claim to be sons of God by adoption, because the Only Begotten has made Himself their Brother. If Baptism admits one and another into this condition, if it gives one and another the filial name and the filial privilege, it does so because Christ had first vindicated that name and those privileges for all human beings, by taking their flesh. It cannot do less or more than the charter from which it derives its force authorizes it to do. It can confer no separate or independent grace upon any creature. It can only say: “Thou belongest to the Head of thy race; thou art a member of His body; thou dost not merely carry about with thee that divided nature which thou hast inherited from the first Adam—a nature doomed to death, with death stamped upon it—thou hast the nature of the Divine Son, thou art united to Him in Whom is life, and from Whom the life of thee and of all creatures comes.”

What follows from such a statement as this? Surely that the purity or innocence of any human creature is not and cannot be his own; that we are only innocent so far as we claim nothing of our own, so far as we look out of ourselves, so far as we forget ourselves in another. Whether we approve of this language or not, whether we call it mystical or not, we all testify to the truth of it. That reverence for unconsciousness, that almost worship of childhood, is nothing else than a silent homage to this doctrine. And the protest against mere unconsciousness, the desire we feel that a child should grow into a distinct living person, the conviction we have that the command “Know thyself” does descend from Heaven, even when obedience to it seems sometimes to bring us to the very brink of hell; this also is a witness in behalf of the same doctrine. For how can there be any giving up of self if there is not a self to give up? How can a man cease from his own works and his own strivings, if there is nothing working and striving within him which he has to cease from?

It must then be true that we are to watch, with intense interest and thankfulness and hope, the gradual outburst of all those life-buds which yet destroy the unconsciousness of infancy. We ought to welcome the appearance of every strong energy, even of every feeling and passion which is a prophecy of manhood, even of vehement self-assertion, whatever possibilities of evil may be latent in it, though it may terminate in savage independence and defiance. To regard any of these as diabolical, because they may be turned to diabolical uses; any as appertaining to the old selfish Adam nature, because they may be debased into its tools, is to deny the purpose of God in Creation and in Redemption. But we are equally denying that purpose if we do not regard all the discipline of the family and the discipline of the school, all softening influences that act upon the affections, all hardening influences that fortify the will, the friendship which binds together the members of a society, the law which appeals to the conscience of each one, everything which awakens the powers of mind or of body, everything which restrains their irregular exercises, as God’s instruments for preventing His child from becoming its own slave, instead of His free servant. We could ill spare the brief records of our Lord’s own boyhood in St. Luke, because they tell us that the boy has his prototype as well as the man, and that when the

Nature crescent does not grow alone
In thews and bulk; but as this temple waxes,
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withal,—

we may be sure that there is One with him Who, as He grew in stature and in grace, was always doing His Father’s business, and learning obedience in it. Those who would take these records from us would do us an unspeakable injury. But God forbid that ecclesiastical fancy should add one letter to them! It is the Manhood of Christ we need chiefly to hear of; that Manhood for which the childhood and boyhood were only a preparation; that Manhood which is to show us how we are not, and how we are, to aspire after the state of the child.

These words, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” contain that secret also. In all things denying Himself, in all things 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 and harmless, innocent, not because he was free from one temptation, not because the consciousness of all human guilt was not upon Him, but because He could bear it into the presence of His Father, because He could keep up entire communion with His love under the sense and pressure of it.

Therefore, brethren, all attempts to make ourselves innocent by putting ourselves into a regulated atmosphere, and trying to bar out the intrusion of evil; all attempts to cut ourselves off from sinners, lest they should defile us; all treatment of other men’s evils as if they were not our own, must be fatal to the acquisition of Christ’s innocence, the only innocence which God knows anything of. On the other hand, it is contradicting Scripture, and reason, and experience, to say that those who have been most stained with outward and inward defilements may not receive the gift of innocency 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 and well-grounded assurance of a man upon whose conscience lay the burden of adultery and murder. For those crimes the sword was never to depart from his house. No petty penances, such as confessors lay upon kings, but such as God lays upon them and their subjects equally, the loss and rebellion of children, exile, sorrow without and within, were appointed for him. But he himself had a free heart and a right spirit. He had dared to seek God’s righteousness, to fly to Him from his own evil, and therefore it had not power to hold him a prisoner. Guilt fell off from him. He was purer than ever he had been, because he trusted in God more than he had ever done, and in himself less. It cannot be otherwise in a higher and diviner dispensation. St. Paul declares that it is not. The history of individuals and of mankind witnesses that it is not. And let men frame what notions they will about baptismal purity, the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper witnesses that the sin-stricken man who has discerned that he never had, and never can have, anything righteous in himself, may become altogether childlike and spotless when he turns from himself, and seeks for fellowship with Him in Whom is no sin.

I have dwelt specially upon this point, because I think we have here the true sense and meaning of the Innocents’ Day. If it had stood apart from the Festival of the Nativity, as the special qualification of certain infants who died before they had contracted any actual guilt, we might fancy there was something in their circumstances peculiarly fortunate or celestial,—something which raised them higher than others in the records of Heaven, because they saw and knew so little of earth. But when we are taught by the time which is chosen for celebrating them, as much as by the event itself which we celebrate, that all their worth is derived from their relation to the Son of Man, and to His adoption of our flesh; when we are reminded by the recurrence of their festival after those of St. Stephen and St. John, 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 of the word little children, because they confessed their sins and believed that God was faithful and just to forgive them their sins and to cleanse them from all unrighteousness,—we are certainly taught a lesson of the most opposite kind to that which some would enforce upon us.

But I cannot separate this doctrine respecting true Christian innocence from that other which Communion by its very name inculcates upon us, and which is never more urged upon us than by the season of the Nativity. We seek communion with the Righteous Lord of man, with Him Who took upon Him the nature of man. The righteousness which He revealed is a righteousness for each, because it is a righteousness for all. If we refuse it to any one, we must explain on some other grounds than God gives us in His Word why we have any right to it. That is what is indicated to us by the admonition of the Church, that we must be in charity with all men when we come to that feast. It is to bind us to all men in the participation of the very highest gifts which God Himself can confer. If we would shut out any from those gifts, what do we mean by seeking them? If we would not shut them out from these gifts, what are the gifts which are not included in them, which are not inferior to them? The text is a most searching one. Ministers and people may well shrink and tremble at the application of it. You want discipline to keep out notorious offenders. Few of them come; if we have courage, we may easily exclude those who do. But here is a discipline not for the notorious offenders, but for all of us; for those who pass muster best with the world; for those who are most satisfied with themselves. Are we more content with ourselves than with that man and that? Do we know nothing in ourselves which should exclude us, more than anything that we know of him? Do we come because we will not let anything exclude us from seeking the God Who alone understands what has kept us from Him, Who can take that barrier away?

Brethren, we talk much of divisions in the Church; we have many nostrums of our own for healing wounds; many schemes of comprehension; much zeal to banish opponents of ours, who, we affirm, are the causes of strife. Let as many as think these methods have been successful hitherto, try them again. Let those who despair of such, make one other experiment. It is an old and simple one. We have sinned in breaking the Communion of the Church. Let us confess that sin, each for himself and the whole Church, when we meet at the Communion. Others may have committed it. We are not suppressing their sins when we are acknowledging our own. If we feel those that are pressing upon us most nearly, we shall feel also those with which we seem to have no immediate concern, but to which we may have contributed very largely.

That is one Christmas lesson connected with this Service; the lesson which we shall practise better when we become more of little children, and have learnt to confess to the Father of our spirits, as they, when they are kindly and truly dealt with, confess to their fathers after the flesh. There is another lesson, also a very plain one, which has to do with this season. We speak of Christmas gifts and Christmas charities, and we lay every Sunday some alms upon the Communion plate. I do not say that it would be better if we gave more then. Let those alms be taken as signs and pledges, rather than as specific acts. Let charity find its way through other channels; even, if you will, through the most formal and legal. But let the signs be true signs. Let us give always because we are in communion with God and in communion with men. Let all charities have a savour of the Nativity in them; let them have a divine origin, and a human character and purpose. You complain, perhaps, that charities have not this character and purpose; you talk of the display of subscription lists, of the little sympathy which accompanies donations that pass through some unknown collector or board. But why complain? Why should we not try to make it otherwise? Why should not communicants feel that they have 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 what they may do in the best, simplest, most childlike way, for making others sharers in their blessings, physical, intellectual, spiritual? If we are tired of more artificial organisations, why not use this, which has so deep a groundwork, which has stood for eighteen centuries, which need never grow old, because it implies by its very nature that we seek a continual renewal of life from One Who has promised to bestow it, and Who does not deceive us?

I would suggest this to you as a thought for the conclusion of the year. May it ripen and expand and bear some fruits in the one which is coming! And there is another, which may sustain it and make it effectual. Our Lord told His disciples that unless they were converted and became as little children, they could not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Did He mean that Kingdom of Heaven which He had already given them power to preach of to others; that Kingdom of which they were to say to all men, “It is at hand, it is about you; submit to it; become the subjects of it”? Yes! that very Kingdom! They had a right to say—Judas had a right to say—to the inhabitants of every village and street, “A Kingdom which you cannot see is in the midst of you. It is a Kingdom of Righteousness and Peace and Joy. You are heirs of it. Christ has taken your nature that you may enter into it.” The words were true; no unbelief in those who heard them or in those who spoke them could make them untrue. But if they would enter into this Kingdom of Righteousness and Peace and Joy which is brought near us—if they would breathe this atmosphere which is surrounding those who speak and those who hear—ministers and people must alike have that poverty of spirit, that simple trust, which belong to the child. And this appears to us often—to us quite as often as to you—as if it were a sentence of perpetual exclusion. Where are proud and vain men, such as we are, to find this poverty? where are suspicious and doubting men, such as we are, to obtain this trust? Each time the exhortation before the Communion is read—each time that we are called to true repentance and faith and thanksgiving, the question may come back to us; yes, and with increased anxiety, even terror. I know but one way of treating it; the Collect to which I have referred already—our Christmas Collect—points out the way. We are children of God; Christ, by taking our nature, has assured that title to us. It depends on no accidents; it rests not upon any condition of our feelings. And because we are children, God has sent forth His Spirit that we may call Him Father, and that we may do the acts of children. The Spirit is the last great gift to our race; the gift to it, not in its unconscious infancy, but in its full ripe manhood. That Spirit was given that we might know the treasures which God has freely given us,—the treasures of His own Nature. That Spirit is the Spirit of Trust and of Humility. That Spirit is the Spirit of Christ and of the Father. He is with us always, speaking to us always, working in us always. The reproaches of our conscience for our pride and self-will are His reproaches. All movements to give up our pride and self-will are His movements. When we ask that His Spirit may be renewed in us day by day, we ask to have our pride and self-will taken away by One Who is mightier than they are, mightier than we are. We ask what He prompts us to ask. When we draw nigh to the altar, He is with us, to fulfil the purposes of that Communion, to unite us to God, to unite us to our brethren. He is there that we may enter into the enjoyment of that Kingdom of Truth and Love which shall have no end. He is there to kindle that light in us which may afterwards shine before men, that seeing our good works they may glorify our Father in Heaven.