First Sunday in Lent

“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”—St. Matthew vii. 6.

Churchmen in old times and in our own have been fond of this precept. Maxims and practices have been grounded upon it. “Holy things for the holy:” therefore let the Altar be hidden from the public gaze; let there be a careful reserve in alluding to sacred mysteries.

Englishmen have, in general, little sympathy with these methods of applying the text. They denounce them with considerable vehemence. But they have their own way of applying it. They learn very early to feel that the things which are most sacred to them must be kept from the vulgar, must scarcely be spoken of among friends. The schoolboy with the strongest impulses to communicate, yet is taught by instinct or experience that there is something which he had better not throw down among his companions, lest it should be trodden underfoot. The habit of reserve grows and deepens in many. The words which denote it—the very words our Lord uses here—become familiar even to those who do not appear as if they had any very holy possession to watch over. “Dogs” and “the swinish multitude” are terms which we understand as well as most, and which affect our minds even when, for any motive, we abstain from using them. Candidates at elections, in the very depth of their servility, show that they have learnt them by heart. This is one of the precepts in the Sermon on the Mount which does not repel us by its severity, and which, in our own way, we practise before we preach.

But when we begin to think of it as a precept of our Lord, difficulties beset us. Some of them belong especially to us clergymen. The maxim about giving holy things only to the holy may have a long tradition in its favour, may be worked into ecclesiastical forms and habits. But what are we sent into the world for? Is it not to proclaim that which is holy to the unholy? Was not our Lord continually asserting that the physician is for the sick and not for the healthy? Was not His own work among publicans and sinners? Did He keep back the most divine wisdom either from them or from the dogs who compassed Him about, among the Scribes and Pharisees? How are we to fulfil His trust, to follow His example, if we only speak His message to those who we have ascertained are not dogs or swine?

And there is another question which belongs to you as well as to us. By what skill are we to ascertain who are dogs and who are swine? The words are part of a discourse. Will the previous part of it assist us? Let us read the verses which stand in immediate connection with this. “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote which is in thy brother’s eye, and considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye, and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” The text follows immediately upon this sentence. They would appear to present the most violent contrast to each other. I may not hope to rid my brother of faults, or even to discern them in him, until I rid myself of greater; and yet I am to treat certain persons as if they were dogs or swine.

But perhaps these precepts may illustrate one another more than we think. Perhaps by acting upon the first we may be taking the right way to discover the reason of the second. Supposing it were true that the moment I begin to judge my brother I am casting the holy thing to the dogs; that the moment I begin to look for motes in his eye I am casting pearls before swine? At first the notion seems monstrous, incredible. And yet, if the connection favours it, it may be worth while to consider whether nothing else—no experience of our own mind—favours it also.

Take the very instances which are before us. I detect in a man whom I meet what I may fairly call a snarling, savage, currish nature. He barks and growls at his neighbours generally, but most of all when they speak to him of anything noble, graceful, holy. It seems as if he disliked to acknowledge the fact of goodness,—as if he were trying to persuade himself that no such thing were possible. Observing this, I proceed to judge him. I describe the man by this evil nature of his. He is one of the Dog species. I do not choose to reckon him in any other. Or I see a man not with his surly, disputatious temper, but with one that is much more odious. He is gross, animal, sensual. He seems to delight in what is unclean. Seeing this, I judge him. He belongs to the Epicurean sty. I refer him to the species Swine.

Now in this act of mine, just ground as I appear to have for it, I am, in fact, giving the holy things to the dogs, and casting pearls before swine. For there is a holy thing in that creature whom, for his snapping, biting temper, I have reckoned among dogs. There is a man beneath all that which is so disagreeable, even so morally offensive; and that holy thing I have given up to its worrying tormentors. I have not only given it up in my classification, I have done my best to surrender it to them in fact. For just so far as I admit him to be only that which they are making him to be, I am doing their work. By denying that there is a better, truer being in him, I am confirming his own worst unbelief, I am strengthening all the habits to which he has yielded, I am persuading him that he can do nothing else than yield to them.

Is it different in the other case? There are pearls, precious pearls, within the heart of that wretched victim of his lusts. But I do not choose to see them. I see only the swine which are trying to trample them under their feet; and so I leave them to their mercy. I even exasperate them to fresh violence. I shall have my reward. When I see him next I shall find fewer pearls; and the swinish propensities will turn upon me, and prove how much mightier and fiercer they have become.

And how has this happened? Because in my eagerness to judge these poor creatures,—to fix them once for all in their proper classes,—I have never asked myself whether none of these canine and swinish characteristics may be found in me; whether I do not carry about that bestial nature which, in these different forms, has been seeking to obliterate God’s image and superscription in them. Oh! how terrible the revelation, when such a nature does make us know that it is in us,—when the judge is judged, when the measure we have meted is measured to us again! For now we begin to suspect that there is nothing in us besides this evil nature; that there is no spirit lusting against the flesh; no holy thing which has not been given to the dogs,—no pearls which the swine have not trampled upon and made utterly worthless! It is not true; may God convince us that it is not! May His Spirit, Who convinces us of Sin, convince us also of Righteousness! May He show that the dogs would not pour out such howls if there were not a holy thing which irritates them; that the swine would not rend the ground if there were not pearls that they were seeking to tread down! But the discovery that this is so, and how and why it must be so, grows more and more difficult in proportion as we have not done the justice to other men which we owe to ourselves as well as to them.

It may seem to you as if I had wholly changed and subverted the ordinary interpretation of this passage, and had carried it to an altogether different ground. I should suspect myself if I had done so; for ordinary interpretations have a great value, even when they are likely to lead us wrong. In general they are rather superficial than positively false; if you find a foundation for them, they may still be maintained, at least to a great extent, and so maintained that they shall not contradict doctrines which all confess to be true. I hope this may be the effect of what I have been saying this afternoon. I fully admit that the command not to give the holy things to dogs, and not to cast pearls before swine, has a direct reference to our mode of preaching the Gospel, and to our ordinary conversation respecting the highest truths. What reference it has we shall learn, I think, best, if we begin by getting rid of the painful doubt whether our Lord’s practice was not at variance with His Divine words.

The more earnestly we consider what is told us by the Evangelists of His discourses to the multitude, to His disciples, to His enemies, the more, I think, we shall be convinced that His practice was the sublime and perfect illustration of those words. He spake to men who might be called, if any men could be called, dogs, such as those which are described in the twenty-second Psalm,—such as those which yelled at Him as He hung upon the Cross. And He never kept back from these persons any one holy truth, any revelation of God’s character, any one announcement of God’s reconciliation. But He never gave the holy thing to dogs, because He always spoke, not to the dog in the man, but to the man in the man. He told how God was as a Shepherd, seeking that which was going astray; how He was as the Woman who had lost her money, sweeping the house diligently till she found it; how He was as a Father recovering the prodigal who was feeding upon husks. He said, “Come unto Me, ye that are weary.” He said, “Ask of Me, and I will give you living water.” These messages were not to the evil nature which carps and cavils, but to the spirit which cries for deliverance and hungers for righteousness. If the message of peace met only a warring temper, the peace, He told His Apostles, would return to them again: it had not been wasted. The Kingdom of God had come nigh to those to whom it was preached; it had borne witness of itself in their consciences; they had been treated as men, and not as dogs; the dog-nature might be enraged, but the holy thing was taken out of its teeth, not thrown to them.

So again He found men and women who had yielded to swinish lusts and appetites. To them likewise He preached a Gospel of deliverance, not a law of condemnation. From them He kept back no holy or heavenly promise. He said to the sinful woman, “Go in peace, thy sins be forgiven thee.” But He said so because His love had called forth her faith. That had saved her from herself. That had raised her out of the bestial nature. The merchant had found the goodly pearls; the swine could trample upon them no more.

But there were woes mixed with His blessings the most tremendous woes ever pronounced upon nations or upon men. These were addressed to the dark, disputatious, filthy nature in nations and in men, in Pharisees and in Publicans, in you and in me. They were announcements that the fan was in His hands, and He would purge His floor, and gather His wheat into His garner, and burn up the chaff with fire unquenchable. They were especially denunciations of that judging and condemning hateful temper which was making the Jew an enemy to God, an enemy to all mankind, an enemy to himself. The more seriously one reads them, the more heartily one believes them, the more sure one is, that they belong to all time, and not merely to that time; the more the fleshly tendencies which make us akin to the dogs and the swine, tremble and are confounded, the more the Spirit, the holy thing which they have imprisoned, the pearl which they have trampled upon, lifts itself up and gives thanks to God, because in these curses upon its tyrants it hears the voice of the Deliverer, the assurance of its redemption.

Such is the example which our Lord gives us in this matter. How may we follow in His steps? How may we commit that great error of which He here warns us? How may we escape from it? We commit it, I think, whenever we try to present the Gospel of God to the disputatious, quarrelsome dispositions in man. How prone we are to do this, most of us know; how continually we have fallen into the sin when we have charged others with it, most of us must confess with shame. We speak what we think are truths, perhaps what we know are truths. Other people reject them, or at least do not understand us. We say, “It is stubbornness of heart; it is unbelief; God has hardened them.” We are somewhat angry for their sakes, and for God’s sake; much more for the affront that has been put upon us. The dog-nature in us is roused; it encounters the dog-nature in them. The holy thing is cast to the dogs; noisy debaters fight for it;—gnaw it as if it were not the least divine, but a very coarse earthly material indeed. It signifies very little which has the victory; the thing for which they are contending has perished, or been reduced to a dry bone, in their strife about it.

I think we commit the sin of casting pearls before swine, when we appeal to the motives which influence the lower nature, on behalf of those truths which are to raise men out of it. When we leaven the Word of God with carnal and idolatrous conceptions, under pretence that a carnal and idolatrous generation can only receive it in that form;—when we say that we must speak to men of sensual rewards in a sensual paradise, for what can they know of anything higher?—when we say that we must speak to them of outward, material punishments hereafter, for what can they understand of a worm in the conscience, of exile from a Father’s presence?—when we use a single phrase to the poorest, most ignorant man, which we do not in our heart believe, and which we cannot ask the Searcher of hearts to justify as His truth,—then are we casting pearls before swine; then are we cultivating, stimulating, making mighty that which God hates and curses, that from which He sent His Son to deliver us, that which shall be cast into the lake of fire. And so surely as the laws of God cannot change, so surely as Christ spoke words which will not pass away when Heaven and Earth pass away, will these swine which we have fed and fattened turn again and rend us. There is not a pious fraud which a pious man has ever invented for the prosecution of pious ends, which has not served to the purpose of impiety; which has not done something to weaken the faith of mankind; which has not been a weapon in the hands of those who oppose it. There is not an unworthy inducement which has ever been urged upon men to make them good, that has not helped to make them wicked. Woe to the world, woe to the Church, because of these offences! May God teach us that it is better for us to have a millstone about our necks, and to be drowned in the depths of the sea, than that we should be the cause of this!

Here then is an ample justification of the Churchman’s reserve, of the Englishman’s reserve. There is a danger of bringing holy things to the unholy; there is a danger of profaning that which belongs to the inmost sanctuary of the heart. But Churchmen and Englishmen are both liable to do this, in spite of their ecclesiastical theories, in spite of their constitutional haughtiness, if they do not reverence their fellow-creatures more than they are wont to do; if they do not respect themselves more than they are wont to do. Stiffness, and dignity, and airs of pretension will not prevent us from giving the holy things to dogs, and casting pearls before swine.

How may we be saved from doing it? Only if we recollect that there is not a man in the wide world who has not a holy thing in him, to which we can speak, and who has not also that dog-and-swine nature to which we may speak. Only if we keep the thought constantly before us, that the holy thing is not his own, that it is no part of his individual self; that it 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 retains the marks of a man, so long he must be related to Him who took on Him our nature, who was not ashamed to call us brethren. Only if we say each of us to himself day by day, hour by hour, “I live only because He lives; I am righteous only because He is righteous; that which divides me from Him, divides me from my kind—that is earthly, sensual, devilish. That which unites me to Him is that which He bestows upon us out of His own fulness, that we may be true men, and therefore true children of His Father.”

While we hold fast this faith, we shall be able to avoid the sin of casting the holy thing before dogs, and Christ’s pearls before swine. We shall be able to confess this Lent how often and grievously we have committed this sin; in how many ways we have lowered the Gospel to our own baseness and the baseness of those we have been addressing; and how God has punished us by lowering ourselves and by making us unable to elevate them. The evil nature in ourselves, if not in others, has again and again turned and rent us; it has gained the mastery over us, because we did not confess Him Who has gained the mastery over it. And so another confession, as deep as necessary, will go along with this. We shall own how much we have judged our neighbours; how quickly we have detected any evil propensities in them, how eager we have been to cast them out before we knew at all what answered to them in ourselves. It may not be always that we have judged open sinners, those who are manifestly yielding to their swinish inclinations. On these we may have bestowed a lofty compassion, feeling that we were at a safe distance from them. But contempt for those who are nearer to ourselves, with whom we can compare ourselves—contempt especially for them as inferior to us in gifts and insight—has not this been the easily besetting sin of each of us? We need not then reproach ourselves for having spread God’s Gospel too freely abroad; for having drawn the lines too carelessly between those whom we claim as God’s children, entitled to hear of His reconciliation, and the dogs and swine. Our fault has been of the opposite kind. We have kept back from them that which might have raised them into men, because we would not understand that to be in the purpose of God towards them. And so we have not attained the true standard of men ourselves, we have sunk to the level on which we deemed it safe to pronounce that they were standing. May God give us hearty and true repentance for this transgression of His Commandments, and may He endue us with that Holy Spirit which will overcome the flesh in ourselves, and will enable us to claim fellowship with whatever is His in our brethren!