January 11, 1857
“But if our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: in whom the God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, Who is the Image of God, should shine unto them.” —2 Corinthians iv. 3, 4.
I observed two or three Sundays ago, that the Second Epistle to the Corinthians set forth more completely than any other part of St. Paul’s writings his own struggles as a Minister to the Gentiles, and the lessons which they had taught him respecting the office of Ministers in all ages. I return to it now for both reasons. The Epiphany season leads us to inquire how Christ was manifested to the Gentiles; it leads us, if we have any serious thoughts of our own work, to ask how He is manifested to men by the Gospel which we preach. St. Paul’s words, in the text, contain a very direct answer to these questions.
(1) Though every tract which is thrown about in our streets tells us that Gospel means “good tidings,” I do not think it is at all unnecessary to remind you and myself of that familiar and universally acknowledged definition. In reading St. Paul we have to be continually on our guard lest we should forget it, and so attribute to him a purpose very unlike indeed that which he attributes to himself. We may suppose that he came among the Gentiles to tell them that the Divine footsteps which they thought they had traced on our earth were merely imaginary. We may think that he spoke of a darkness and horror over the past and the future, which they had known nothing of before. In either case he could not have been a messenger of good tidings. He might have boasted that he was telling the truth; but he would have been bound to say—as he was an honest man he would have said— “It is a most dismal truth.”
(2) He speaks of this Gospel or good news being “hid” from those to whom it was proclaimed. What he means we must discover partly from the former chapter, partly from the latter clause of this paragraph. He speaks in the third chapter of his own countrymen. He says that there is a veil over their hearts, which was not taken away in the reading of the Old Testament. He compares it with the veil with which Moses’ face was covered, to conceal a glory which could not be looked at. He declares that that veil has been taken away in Christ; he affirms that it shall be taken away from the heart of the Jews when that heart turns to the Lord.
The verb which we translate “hid” is, no doubt, the cognate one to the substantive which we translate “veil”: it is impossible not to suppose that the two passages are connected. But we may naturally ask how the same cause could interfere with the reception of the Gospel among Monotheists and Idolaters, among those who reverenced the Old Scriptures and those who were without them? Supposing a veil was hiding the light from both, must it not be a different veil? I think we shall find the answer to this question as we proceed.
(3) “If our Gospel be hid,” he says, “it is hid to them that are lost.” The word lost might lead us for a moment to think of future perdition. But that sense is clearly inapplicable here. St. Paul is not declaring what may be the consequences of rejecting the Gospel, but what was the cause of its rejection. He is explaining a fact that was happening continually before his eyes. His language is perfectly consistent with that which he uses habitually; as, for instance, when he speaks of men being “dead in trespasses and sins.” Nor is our version in the least obscure, if we bring very common tests to bear upon it. The translators were familiar (though not so familiar as we are) with the phrase “lost sinners,” as applicable to the condition of men whose conscience and moral instincts have been stifled by a course of evil. The phrase has become a cant one; the edge of it has been rubbed off. But it has great force. We recognize the truth of it when we are not speaking a theological dialect at all. Nearly every one talks of men “who are lost to themselves,” or “lost to all sense of right and wrong.” When St. Paul found the Gentiles given up to sensuality, he called them lost. Their minds, he said, were darkened; they were alienated from the mind of God in consequence of the ignorance that was in them, in consequence of the hardening of the heart. When St. Paul found the Jews shut up in self-righteousness and self-glorification, exulting in their law, exulting in their difference from all other men, he called them lost. There was the same blindness, the same hardness of heart, as in the other case. He knew that there was, for he had felt it; he had been lost.
(4) Then follows an explanation, drawn from his own experience, of the darkening of the heart which he has been describing in these two apparently different cases. The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not. You would have supposed that the Apostle of the Gentiles must have come in contact with many gods; that he had to encounter a whole Pantheon. Yet he speaks here only of one. He calls that one “the god of this world.” How is this? How could he find a general expression for such a multitude of beliefs as he must have found scattered in those regions of Asia and Greece which he visited? How could he comprehend under that expression the faith of the Latin Empire, and of all the western tribes under its sway or struggling with it, which he hoped to visit? Above all, how could he reckon among these the seed of Abraham, to whom, as he says, pertained the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises? I reply, he did not sum up the beliefs of the world under this formula, but its unbeliefs. “The god of this world,” he says, “hath blinded the eyes of them that believe not.” Could he have uttered a more pregnant truth? The worshippers of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth had still, in all the earlier stages of their worship, confessed a Being who had something to do with themselves; a Being from whom came rains and fruitful seasons; to whom, amidst all his caprices, they might look for protection; who though he might sometimes dispense favours or punishments merely to please himself, yet was juster and more righteous than those whom he ruled. But at each step in the downward progress of idolatry,—as the sins of the fathers descended upon the children to the third and fourth generation—this God with human sympathies, this utterer of laws which he did not himself disobey, was changed into a mere god of this world, often not more personal than the air of which he was supposed to be the synonym, yet acquiring all attributes that belong to the most wicked and horrible personality, from the sins of his votaries who made him after their image. Such a god of this world lay beneath all the superstitions of the nations; ready to develop himself whenever the faith in some higher and better Being, which lived on amidst all confusions in their consciences, should be utterly crushed under the moral corruptions against which it protested. Such a god of this world was, in St. Paul’s day, continually putting out that truth, which in various forms and measures had been scattered through the fables of Paganism, was effacing all those footsteps of a Divine Friend and Deliverer, which had afforded some consolation to the poorest sufferers upon earth in their worst wretchedness. Such a god of this world was turning into one black undistinguishable Tartarus, all those visions of a world to come which had been mixed with pictures of Elysian plains, and of suns and stars that would not wane. And such a god of this world had just as much supplanted the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the mind of the Israelite. It was not in his case that the deification of nature had passed into a mere terror of the vengeance which natural powers would inflict upon man. He had remembered so much of the oracles of his fathers as to be incapable of reverencing nature, when he had lost the sense of its gracious Creator. The god of this world therefore became to him the mere Mammon or Money-god. That he enthroned between the Cherubim, that he believed to be seated in the Heaven of Heavens. His god was he who helped him to traffic most successfully here upon earth; and he had some dim, faint expectation that this god would listen to his prayers, and would be bribed by his sacrifices, so that when he left the world he might not see his enemy, might not wake up in confusion at his presence.
(5) If we understand who it was that was blinding the minds of those who did not believe, we shall understand better what it was that St. Paul wished them to believe—what the purpose of his Gospel was, what its effect was upon those whose blindness it overcame. This is expressed in the last clause:— “Lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, Who is the Image of God, should shine unto them.” Here was the subject of the good tidings; they were tidings concerning God. They set forth the True God, the Living God, in opposition to the false god, the dead god, the god of this world, who was blinding the minds of Jews as well as of Gentiles. But this True God, this Living God, could not be declared to one or to the other in any words of St. Paul or of any man. He could only be presented in a Person; there must be a Living Image of Him; He could only be seen in the life and death of a man. What St. Paul had to do was to proclaim that God had shown forth such an Image of Himself in the world, that it would confound all images which men had made of Him out of nature or out of themselves. What he had to say was, “This is the Image of your God; this is the God Whom your hearts are seeking after, Whom the hearts of your fathers were seeking after. This is He Whom they dreamed of whenever they thought of a good and gracious Being, whenever they thought of a just Being, whenever they thought of a Deliverer from wrong and injustice, their own or other men’s. This was He Whom they fled from and hated, and wished to put to death in them, when they had done wrong and were cleaving to their wrong, because they felt that He was reproving it and judging it. This was He Whom they were supplanting with lying counterfeits, when their souls became dark, and base, and slavish. This was He Who was always seeking after them, by blessings and by punishments, to bring them out of their baseness and slavery, and to make them aware of His guidance and government.”
Therefore the Apostle was to say further, “This good news is none of mine. I have no power to make you entertain it or accept it. My rhetoric, my vehemence, cannot effect a passage for it into your souls. If it could, what would it profit you? The message is concerning a Person; you are called to submit to a Living Ruler; you are called to embrace a Living Friend. How can a whole heap of words, suppose you took them in ever so readily and liked them ever so much, work in you this obedience, bestow on you this fellowship? God is doing that, not we. He has created you in His Son; He desires that you should know who this Son is. He has formed you in His image; He desires that you should not mistake another image for His. He is manifesting His Son to you. His light is shining about you, and seeking to enter into those hearts, which must just as much take it in as the eyes the light of the sun. Another god, the god of this world, is using all arts to intercept this light, to draw a veil between you and it, to put out the organ which should transmit it to you. What I bid you believe is,—and I, Paul, speak who have known what darkness is and what light is—that Christ’s light is stronger than the darkness, and can break through it all.”
If this was the character of the Gospel to the Gentiles, we can understand why the Church has connected it with the idea of Epiphany. To the wise men, who had questioned the stars to tell them of the King they wanted, Jesus in His cradle is discovered as that King. An inward glory makes itself felt through the weakness of the infant. A veil is withdrawn from the hearts of these earnest seekers after Truth; and they confess that the most beautiful and august forms of the outward world cannot help them, except by leading them to a Lord clothed with their own nature, united to themselves. A like manifestation was made to every Gentile, sage or simple, who confessed Jesus the Crucified to be the Wisdom and Power of God. All his past studies, in whatever direction they had been pursued; all his past experiences of misery and sin, in the world and in himself; all his dreams of a Good God, all his tendencies to worship an evil god, were so many evidences that the Divine Image which was set before him was the one after which he had been created, and to which he must bow. And the Church does not limit the idea to Gentiles any more than St. Paul. All the acts of Jesus among His own countrymen after the flesh, between His Baptism and Crucifixion,—His stilling of the waves, His healing of the demoniacs,—are treated as Epiphanies, or manifestations of His inward glory, as that preliminary Gospel of His Kingdom, which was to be preached in greater fulness and to all the world when He had risen from the dead. Of all the lessons which our Services teach us by their titles and by their method,—and I find those lessons more rich and full of meaning with every experience of the confusions into which we are led by our private conceits, by ill-sifted traditions, by the opinions of our own age,—this one seems to me the most precious.
For thus we are instructed, in the first place, what kind of work it is that our Missionaries have to do when they go into Heathen lands. Perhaps before they leave their own country, they think that their business is to rouse the natives of those lands to what they would call a sense of religion, an interest about their souls, a conviction of the shortness of life, the anticipation of an approaching judgment and eternity. They can scarcely stir a step in any one of those countries which England has reduced under her sceptre, or which are the subjects of some other government, without discovering traces of a sense of religion, of an interest about the soul, of an anticipation of death, of a dread of what is to follow death, to which they were quite unused on their own soil. If they have no other vocation than this, nay, if they have not learnt that this is not even a part of the message which they are to carry with them, they may soon regret that they ever crossed the seas. They had better have stayed at home, for they will find that the task which they came to perform has been done and is doing more effectually by the Yogis and Fakirs, whose influence they wish to destroy. Unless they come with a Gospel concerning God,—unless that Gospel enables them to meet the anxieties about religion, about the soul, about death, about the future, which lie like a dead weight upon the faculties and energies of tribes which have proved themselves capable, and are still capable, of noble thoughts and great deeds,—unless they can turn the thoughts of immortality and judgment into moral and quickening thoughts, thoughts favourable to truth and honesty, from being, as they so continually are, immoral and deadening thoughts, leading to fraud and falsehood, our Missionaries are not going out upon the errand on which St. Paul and the Missionaries of his day went. They are not carrying the news of a Redemption; they are not testifying of that glory which was manifested in the Person of Jesus Christ to the world.
And what they do abroad we have to do at home. We have seen that St. Paul’s message to the Jew was not in its essence and principle different from his message to the Gentile. We might have thought that he would have had to preach of the True God to the idolaters, only of Jesus Christ to those who detested idols. No, it was not so: he had to declare the True God to one as much as to the other: he had to encounter a false god as much when he was speaking to the one as to the other. The English preacher in the nineteenth century must learn that the case is not otherwise with himself. His Gospel also is concerning God. He has to proclaim that the God Who was manifested in Christ Jesus is the God, the only God. He has to tell men of all classes, from the highest to the lowest, all persons of all opinions, from the most vehemently religious to the most exclusively and dogmatically secular, that they are in danger of worshipping another god wholly unlike this God; yea, that they have actually worshipped such a one. And he must, like St. Paul, testify that it is essentially the same god to which persons of these different tempers and professions are bowing down. In one sense, the common saying is a true one, that there are no atheists. The man who calls himself an atheist worships the world, or something in the world, or himself; he submits to a power which is not less terrible, less exacting, because he has chosen it or made it for himself. But in the sense in which St. Paul uses the word, every one of us is in danger of becoming an atheist. It is not some other gentler form of unbelief that we have to fight with in our hearts day by day. It is literally, emphatically, the denial of God; it is the disbelief in an All-righteous Being, an All-true Being, an All-loving Being, Who has made us in His likeness, and therefore would have us righteous, true, loving. To believe in this God, to hold fast the belief in dark days and bright days, when everything seems crushing us to death, and when everything seems full of a too delicious life, is not easy, but is most hard; let us understand it well, is the hard thing for human beings. We fancy sometimes that there is some other great crux in Christianity, which, if it could be taken away, all would come easily and naturally to us, we should have no more perplexities. It is a mistake. This is the crux, to believe in God, to believe that He is not false as we are, not unjust as we are, not indifferent to the wellbeing of men as we are. Men can bear many tortures for the sake of their souls; men can accept the most startling outrages upon their consciences and their reasons, who cannot accept this assertion, or only accept it as a dead, unmeaning proposition, which is explained away the next moment, which yields to every perplexing phenomenon in the world or in ourselves. Oh, brethren, we never can grasp this truth to our souls, we never can overcome the Atheism which so easily besets us, unless we take the Gospel to be the announcement that God has manifested Himself in His Son Jesus Christ; that God is manifesting Himself in His Son Jesus Christ; that only in that Image can we know Him or know ourselves; that, apart from Him we have an animal birth and an animal death; that apart from Him, we have that death of sin which only spirits can know; that in Him we are raised, redeemed, united to God and to each other; that through Him the Spirit comes upon us and works in us, that we may manifest His nature and will to our fellow-men.
And so we arrive at some other conclusions of no less importance, respecting the duties of modern preachers and their failures. There are many complaints about the inefficiency of pulpit ministrations in our day. Those who do not think them necessary for themselves, who think that they have learnt all which we can tell them, and who do not care (as they say) to come to church merely that they may hear endless repetitions of the same commonplaces, or proclamations of dogmas which they have convinced themselves are untenable, yet desire that the poor, for whom the Gospel was originally intended, should hear it; for they no doubt want something of the kind still, and may become dangerous if it is withheld from them. These poor people, to whom truth and falsehood cannot signify much, ought to have the dose, we are told, in its strongest form. Sounding rhetoric, vehemence, rant, are all desirable for them. They need to be aroused with terrors of a future destruction; nothing else will do for them. “How absurd it is,” exclaims the critic,—himself, of course, quite unmoved,—“for preachers who pretend that they believe such things, not to pour them forth with all the fury of manner and gesticulation which naturally accompanies such convictions, and which is the only effectual means of producing an impression upon the only class which can, in this day, receive such impressions! How reasonable,” it is said; “if these things are true, is the machinery of the Camp-meetings, and all the results that follow from the use of it! If it is everything to make men religious, why not use the most direct means of making them so?”
To all which exceedingly plausible language, which all of you must have heard or read, this seems to me a satisfactory reply. If we do believe these things which are written in the New Testament, we cannot be very inconsistent if we should refer to the New Testament as our teacher about the subject of our preaching, and the manner of it. We cannot be wrong if we take that as our judge, rather than the opinions and examples of later teachers, who have professed as we do to mould themselves upon its maxims. Certainly we are not bringing our cause before a less severe tribunal than the one from which we appeal. Certainly Apostles and Evangelists will not wink at our misdoings, or condemn our coldness less than either the religious men who have faith in conversions which are effected by violent excitements, or than the sceptical and worldly men, who maintain that, given our foolish premises, these are the legitimate conclusions from them. But if we turn to St. Paul, that we may learn from him what the commencement of that work was, which was to issue in the formation of a Christendom and the conversion of a world, he gives us what may be a very satisfactory explanation of the difference between his preaching and ours, but one which certainly does not make it consist in this, that he addressed himself more to the nerves of men and women than we do, or that he set before them more vivid and terrible pictures of the vengeance which awaited them after death, unless they could force themselves into an instantaneous belief of the message which was brought to them. That he did rouse the consciences of men as they had never been roused before, that he did awaken them to a sense of evil in themselves which they had never known before, this is certain. But the process of appealing to the conscience was the setting before them the gracious Lord of that conscience, against Whom it had been rebelling. That feeling of wrong came, when the perfectly righteous Image of Jesus Christ was presented to men, when they confessed it as God’s Image, to which he would have them conformed. If we fail to do this, if we fail to set forth such an Image before men, or do not believe that it is indeed the Image of the glory of God, and the pattern of all that can be good and blessed in men, there is no need to go further for the interpretation of our want of influence upon rich or poor, upon wise men or fools. But let all of us understand it well; we shall not get an influence over those to whom it is rightly said that the Gospel was first preached, and for whom it was designed, by practising a single art upon them which a man of cultivation would see through and would laugh at. By such courses we shall serve the god of this world; we shall strengthen his empire over men; we shall do what in us lies that the light of the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ, Who is the Image of God, may not shine unto them. Every base motive to which we address ourselves, every dishonest argument which we make use of, puts us so much further out of communion with Him Who is the truth; makes it so much the more impossible for us, by the manifestation of the truth, to commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. It is a gross error, confuted by the most notorious facts, that the civilization or enlightenment of the nineteenth century has made falsehoods, spiritual or secular, ineffectual for the use of those who dare resort to them. The trade of the enchanter is not spoiled; it was never more promising or prosperous. But, thanks be to God, that enlightenment or civilization or scepticism does make it unsafe for us to meddle with these accursed tricks, to use them as men of old used them, with comparative innocence, in the cause of Christ. We are driven back into the position which was occupied by the early preachers of the cross. We must proclaim the Spirit of God, the Spirit of truth and love and of a sound mind, as the antagonist and subverter of all those spirits of falsehood which play upon the senses, which are the sources of wild inspirations and contortions of the animal frame. We are bound, unless we would desert our function or abuse it to vile ends, with no hesitating or timid speech to proclaim that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all, and that they who say that they have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, lie and do not the truth. Our Gospel is to the poor, only because there is a man in every beggar, whom the god of this world is trying to hold down in death, whom the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is speaking to as His child. If we find him in a state of moral debasement, lost in brutality or falsehood, we announce to him a deliverance from that damnation; we preach of a Salvation which Christ has won for him by taking his nature and vanquishing his enemies. We may speak to him also of a wrath to come; the Apostles spoke of it to rich and poor also—to the rich more than to the poor. For God’s wrath was hot then, and is not less hot now, against all ungodliness and unrighteousness. When these have reached their fulness, when they make the earth an utterly hateful and intolerable habitation, that Divine wrath comes down, now as of old, upon nations and upon individuals. And there is a wrath more terrible than this, the wrath which men cherish in their own hearts, which becomes their very nature and the principle of their existence, when they give themselves up to the dominion of the god of this world. From the wrath to come, in both senses, the Gospel bids men flee to the one true sanctuary, the eternal Truth and love of God, as it is manifested to all men in His Son. Till we discover our own utter want of truth and love, we may fancy there is some other refuge than this. We may limit God’s goodness to the dimensions of ours; we may even persuade ourselves that we care more for His creatures than He does. Alas for the preacher of the Gospel who cherishes that monstrous imagination! Happy is it for him, if by any the most terrible discoveries of the heartlessness and atheism which he shares with those to whom he is sent, he is brought to become only a witness for the glory of Him Who is the Image of God! Then, when he feels most strongly the blindness which the god of this world is seeking to produce in his own mind, and the minds of all who listen to him, he will be able confidently to say, “I know that the light is mightier still; I know that no blindness will at last be able to withstand it.”