January 4, 1857
“This is the will of God, even your sanctification.” —1 Thess. iv. 3.
As long as we have any technical association with the principal word in this sentence, I doubt whether we shall understand what St. Paul wished the Thessalonians to understand by it. He was not writing a system of divinity, but a letter to men who were working and suffering in the world, and who wanted strength to work and suffer. When he spoke to them of sanctification, he spoke of that which concerned their every-day business; of that which every man might feel and know that he needed, because he was busy. The learned men among them, if there were any such, who tried to get a definition of the phrase from some book, would be always at fault; the simplest wayfarer, who was in the actual battle of life, and was fighting it manfully, would have some glimpse of its signification at once, and would see further into it, the harder he was pressed by his enemies. For what did such a man discover in the first century of the Christian Church? what does he discover in the nineteenth? This, I think: “It is hard to do the thing which I ought to do; hard oftentimes, when a number of different arguments present themselves to me, to know which is the thing I ought to do. I am glad to get advice from this man and that—though oftentimes the advice is very wide of the mark. It does not meet my difficulty. There is a mist over my eyes which it does not scatter, so that I may see the thing as it is; there is a lameness in my gait which it does not heal, that I may walk in the right way. Still, I can obtain a certain help from friends, when the question is about acts. I can, in simple deference to their judgment, take one course and avoid another; or I can balance between their opposing counsels, and perhaps strike out some better path for myself. But how different the case is, when that other question arises. How am I to be right! And it does arise, it does force itself upon me. I may have shuffled through the world a long time without asking myself whether my words and deeds express what is in me, or whether I merely adopted them because they were expected from me; changing them, therefore, when I go into some other society, as I change the current coin of one country for that of its neighbour, when I pass the frontier. It may be an interruption to my work to entertain this question. I may be very glad to dismiss it: but it comes back to me. I cannot pretend to be straightforward and honest if I do not face it; and yet, when I do face it, what insincerity comes to light within me! At home, in secret hours, I have to endure an inquisition. I have to be put upon a rack, which is much more searching and terrible than any I can ever be exposed to in the world. And then many words which I hear in the world—words which fell very lightly on my ear once—will seem to repeat this secret examination, and to increase the torture of it. I hear people complimenting themselves, complimenting each other, upon their sincerity. Whatever other virtues they may be wanting in, that they can claim. Happy, enviable men! What would I not give to purchase their secret! What efforts would I not make to attain the blessing which they appear to have reached so easily, and to hold so securely!”
Yes! to be or not to be, that is the question. Can we be honest, not merely in transactions with the world, but honest with ourselves? Can we not merely practise justice when there are a thousand influences of law and opinion to make injustice perilous, but hold fast justice in our heart of hearts, though all those influences should be thrown into the other scale, and to do right should be the only hazard? Is it accident, the want of opportunity, the dread of detection, which keeps us decent? Do the conventions of society make us courteous and friendly? If they were taken away, should we let loose, should we have pleasure in letting loose, our contempt and malice?
I am far from saying that it is wise or right to force this inquisition upon our fellow-men. Often, I am sure, we confuse their consciences rather than clear them by doing so. But it is forced upon ourselves in our private hours. We have to meet these demands, or confess we cannot meet them, when those who are about us suppose that all is right, and would persuade us that it is so. And then comes the most terrible of all crises in a man’s history, when a Sisyphus sentence seems to be laid upon him, when he is lifting a stone that is ever descending upon him with greater weight. He finds all outward schemes of reformation vain. He cannot engage in them; for they only helped to lay bare an internal disease, and to aggravate the suffering from it. He must eradicate that. But what is that? Is it not himself? Can he remake his own being? He finds baseness and corruption at what seems to him the very root of it. Is he to establish nobleness and purity there? Yet who else can? All Nature says, “It is not in me.” All Society says, “It is not in me.” And oh! how the effort to cure seems to augment the malignity of the complaint! How much worse he is, since he began to meditate on this evil, to pry into the depths of it! Shall the ground be covered over again as well as it may be? Shall he try to walk over it as before, forgetting what he has seen, not in a dream, but in actual revelation, below?
To one who has felt thus—in any degree thus—the word Sanctification may have a very promising sound: promising because it speaks of reality; for he is well tired of everything artificial. It seems to say, “Just what you are seeking may be accomplished for you. You may be made right; not on the surface, but within. There may be a reformation; not in the acts, of which the world takes cognizance, but in you, from whom the acts proceed.” In past time he may have conceived of a Saint either as one who had reached a transcendent elevation of thought and character, or as one whose external habits separated him from other beings of his race. He may have thought the first condition enviable but unapproachable; the other disagreeable, if not morally offensive. Now his definition of the word is changed altogether. At all events the saintship or sanctification he wants is the power of stooping, not of rising. His self-conceit and consequence are his burdens. To be delivered from these is his ambition. He has been standing too much apart from his fellows; who can impart to him the difficult art of being at one with them, in entire sympathy with them? He is certain that he is not better than they are. And yet he is always wishing, struggling to pass for something better; to be gloriously inhuman. Who will enable him to be more simply human, more natural, more unassuming than men are wont to be?
He thinks this simplicity, this inward truthfulness, must be a gift; for does not discipline induce formality? He is half inclined to suppose it must be dropped into some favoured souls by some chance angel visitant. Will such an one ever come to him? Are there any waters into which he might step, after they have been troubled, and be healed of the disease which has kept him bedridden so long?
It is not of an angel St Paul speaks in the text. Writing to a set of ordinary men, lately Heathens or perhaps Pharisees, he says to them all, “This is the Will of God, even your Sanctification.” A very marvellous message when we hear it first. It seems as if anything was true rather than that. We are struggling to make ourselves right that we may obtain the favour of God; struggling to bring our minds into the state which He can look upon with some complacency, and for which He may ultimately reward us. St Paul, you see, says nothing of that kind; he regards the subject from an entirely different point of view. It is the Will of God, he says, to sanctify you. “Oh yes,” we reply, “no doubt God has given us a law;—He has told us what we are to do and not to do. That is His Will; if we can conform ourselves to it, so much the better. But the complaint we are making is, that we cannot: the adjusting our wills to that Will is the difficulty. Who can take that out of our way?”
No, this is not what the words are saying. St Paul undoubtedly believed that God had given men a law: no one believed it more. He had felt the whole force of that belief, the whole anguish of it. He had known his own inability to keep that law, his own dislike to it. And it was by this process he learnt that the Will of God was his Sanctification. Beneath the law he found there was a Divine Person, a Divine Will, which was the author of it. And that Person, that Will, was acting upon him, was working in him, to will and do of His good pleasure. This Will was not compelling him to certain acts; was not setting before him certain motives which might incline him to do those acts; it was speaking directly to his will; it was making him to be that which he was created to be, that he might do that which he was commanded to do.
You think, perhaps, that St. Paul had a beautiful soul, shaped to receive this Sanctification; one which gracefully, naturally submitted to it; upon which it fell like the dew-drops upon a flower that opens to take them in. Never, surely, was there so great a mistake. If we may trust his own statement, it was through resistance, through reluctance, through the vehemence of self-will, that he became aware of the might of that Will which was subduing him to itself. If he had not discovered that in his own person, he would never have spoken out so boldly to the Thessalonians: “This is the will of God, even your Sanctification.” “I am sure that in you there is no hard and rugged soil which there is not in me, that there is no pride choking up the avenues through which love might enter in, that did not choke up my reason and heart. All that I have learnt in myself has proved to me that this Will is not a partial one, not one that chooses some specially tender, soft nature for its operations; that it is absolutely a Will to good and to nothing else; that it is a Will which seeks to bring all wills into harmony with itself.”
St Paul had the same difficulty in believing this that you or I can have; greater difficulty, because he understood the resistance of the human will immeasurably better than we do; because he had seen it in a multitude more of terrible cases; because he had realized it more in himself. But the faith, “This is the will of God, even your Sanctification,” rose out of all these experiences, rose above them all. When his calculations failed him, he fell back upon it; when his hopes were crushed, he fell back upon it. Other things might be doubtful—this was certain. Upon this ground he stood; upon this heaven and earth stood; if heaven and earth passed away, this would not pass away.
I said that men found continually that the further they went down into themselves, the more there was of corruption, and darkness, and evil, till at last they supposed the very root of their being was nothing else. St Paul had gone down into these depths; he had found this rottenness; in himself he says he found only that. But he discovered that there was a root below himself, a true divine root, for himself and every man. He found that each man, when he tries to contemplate himself apart from Christ, is that evil creature in which no good thing dwells. But no man, so he teaches, has a right to contemplate himself apart from Christ; God does not so contemplate him. He was formed at first in the Divine Word; in Him he lives and has his being still. To be ignorant of Him, the true root of his life, is his misery; to know Him is life and peace. He was sure that it is God’s will that men should be that which He had formed them to be; that they should find the true source and spring of their life; that they should not go on in a vain and desperate struggle, to cut themselves apart from it and to destroy themselves. But if this was so, the Will of God was their Sanctification; the Will of God was to graft them upon this living stock. Upon it they might grow, and might bring forth living fruits. He was certain that such a Will was not a lazy, inoperative will. It was not one which acted to-day, and would cease acting to-morrow. It was the Will of the Everlasting Father; it had fully uttered itself in Christ the Divine Word, when He took upon Him man’s flesh, and gave Himself up to Death, and rose again from the dead. It would go on acting itself out in all the energies of the Almighty Spirit, the Comforter Whom Christ promised His Church, to abide with it forever. Every man then in the Thessalonian Church was to receive this announcement, as made directly to him. He was not to argue about it, whether there was not some special infirmity or evil which put him beyond the scope of it, and showed that it was meant for others rather than him. If he believed that he was under a law, that there was something which it was right for him to do, something which it was right for him to be; the more infirmity, the more evil he was conscious of, the more proof had he that these words were addressed to him. But the same principle which made it a sin to deny them to himself, made it an equal sin to deny them to any one of his fellows. Whatever might be their temptations, outward or inward; however they might have yielded to one or both, there was no possible limitation of this sentence. The Will of God in its fullest sense, in its length and breadth, was their Sanctification. It was not a poor paltry benevolence, which wishes all creatures happiness, and will perhaps take pains to give them the outward animal ease and felicity which some men crave for which no man is ever content with. It is not a Will to save them from toil or suffering, or rightful punishment. It is a Will to impose and inflict these, so long as they contribute to the purification and elevation of the will, the spirit within; so long as they helped to remove clogs and impediments from that, so long as they tend to bring the man to the state in which alone he is a man, renewed in the Image of God.
In this sense, brethren, and with this faith, I would beseech you to consider the words which we have heard in the Epistle and Gospel and Collect for to-day; in this sense and with this faith I desire that we may apply them in the year upon which we are entering. It may seem a fall to pass from the Nativity of Christ to His Circumcision; from the message that a Child was born and a Son given, to the severities of the old law, the law of servants. It would be a fall indeed if the message which Christmas Day brought to us, “God has sent forth His Son, made of a woman, that ye might receive the adoption of Sons,” were in any degree invaded or weakened by the Circumcision message, if the Covenant that is done away were again forced upon us, who have received the sign of the diviner Covenant. But we keep the festival of Christ’s Circumcision on purpose that we may not suffer this moral degradation. We are always in peril of it. We are always ready to fancy that we are not redeemed, not claimed as God’s children, not grafted upon a true and holy root. We are always supposing that by some painful acts, devised by ourselves or borrowed from the practice of other days, we are to bring ourselves into a condition which we ought to attain, but which God has not bestowed upon us. St. Paul teaches us—the Church, year by year, repeats his lesson—that Christ’s Circumcision is an answer to all such reasonings, the prohibition of all such experiments. The purpose of Circumcision was accomplished when the Son of Man underwent it. His birth and death explained why it had been instituted. His birth and death destroyed its use, preserved its signification, brought forth the substance of which it was the shadow. If the Nativity says that Christ’s Sonship is the ground upon which our life and the life of humanity stands, the Circumcision says that we have no acts whatever to perform in order that we may place ourselves on this ground; that all obstacles have been removed which hinder us from asserting it as ours; that we have no right to demand anything of any human creature, before we tell him that it is his by the constitution of God’s Universe, that it is his according to the Mind and Will of God Himself.
And this privilege we are to vindicate for ourselves, and this Gospel we are to preach to others, because only by doing so can we come, or can we bring them, within the scope of that Sanctification of which the text speaks. That, I have explained already, we can only refer to the Will of God; to the perpetual operation of that Will upon spirits whom He has formed in His image, whom He has created in His Son; whom He has reclaimed and regenerated in that Son, that they may derive life and virtue from His life and virtue, and may bring forth the fruits which become such a root. This Sanctification takes effect by all the discipline which God brings to bear upon the hearts and spirits of men, by all the signs and tokens which make them aware of their relation to Him, by all the inward attraction which binds them to Him, by all illuminations respecting His purposes, by all severities and hardships which remind them of their evil nature, reprove them for having yielded to it, force them to abjure it and seek protection from it. Here is that Circumcision, made without hands, of which the Church speaks to-day; hereby God teaches us that He is not watching over us less than over His people in any older generation, that He is dealing with us upon the same principles which are set forth to us in their history; only that He has brought us to a point which was always before them, but which they never reached; only that He has given us a light respecting His methods and His ultimate object which He did not vouchsafe to them.
We enter then upon the New Year, with the assurance that whatever befalls us in the course of it, that must be an instrument in God’s hands for effecting this inward circumcision, that must be intended to fulfil the Will of God which is our Sanctification. I do not know what can sustain us in looking forward into the dim shadowy future, if this truth does not. Anxiety and restlessness get the dominion over us, when we speculate about what is likely to come upon us; they get the dominion over us often as completely when we consider what we should be doing, in which direction our work lies, whether there are not a hundred incompatible duties which we must perform in succession or at once. The notion of a Fate which may crush us at any moment lies beneath the first of these calculations. The notion of a Taskmaster who is making tremendous demands upon us, who is reaping where he has not sown, and gathering where he has not strawed, is involved in the other. Is it not natural that despondency, irregularity, indolence, should be the result of both? But if for a Fate, you substitute a Father; if for a Taskmaster, you substitute the Will of God, which is our Sanctification, surely the whole condition of your minds is changed; you can wait, for you have hope; you can work, for you have an Inspirer of your work, and One who must conduct it to its right issue. He is preparing events; He is preparing you to meet them, to be instructed by them, to make use of them. The events are under the direction of a Will which is a Will to simple and perfect good; you are under the more immediate direction of the same Will; you can enter into its meaning; you are invited to work with it. True, you are subject to an outward law; Christ, the Everlasting Son, was subject to one. But you can obey that law in the spirit of a Son, for Christ did so, and His Spirit is with you to mould your purposes and your acts to the likeness of His. You will have to undergo immeasurably sharper crosses than you can ever contrive for yourself. Christ in His very infancy was marked as One Who was to bear a cross. He took it in simple filial obedience. And the Will which laid it upon Him sustained Him under it; that He might sustain all those whose nature He has assumed, whose burdens He has shared.
There is another lesson also in this Circumcision Festival, which I hope will go with us through the year. We sometimes say that the Jewish Covenant has nothing to do with us, and has no resemblance to ours, because it was the Covenant with a nation. God forbid that that circumstance should put a difference between us and them! God forbid that we should feel that their nation was under the direct care and government of a Living and Righteous Lord, and that ours is left to the care of ignorant and foolish mortals! God forbid that we should think it is the Will of God to sanctify us as individuals, and not to cut off from our nation whatever hinders it from fulfilling the tasks which are given it to do! Let us not destroy our patriotism—yes, and our personal morality, for that is inseparable from our patriotism—by such doctrines as these. The Father of all does not regard special nations less, because by the birth and death of His Son He has redeemed mankind. We are only holy as individuals, because we have a portion in that universal holiness which Christ has put upon our race. All God’s Sanctification is to make us more united to our fellows. All His severe Circumcision is to separate us from those selfish inclinations and habits which set us at war with them. Whatever punishments He designs for England this year, are to destroy the weeds which are ruining its soil. Those weeds grow on the soil of our hearts; they are sowing seeds that stifle all better produce there, as well as in the country at large. We know it is so; we know that the worship of money, the meanness of party, the hypocrisies of the tongue, the hypocrisies of the soul, cannot be traced by any reasonable men to some imaginary public. They are to be found in you and me; in you and me they must be extirpated. This is the proof that we cannot separate the Covenant with the nation from the Covenant with its members; this is the proof that a Sanctification for one must be ineffectual, if it did not contemplate the other. This is the reason why we should ask for a national repentance and reformation, and should not trust our desires for a repentance and reformation in ourselves, while we think of ourselves apart from the sinners by whom we are surrounded. This is the reason why we can hope for no Sanctification, till we believe that it is the Will of God to sanctify us all.