(INNOCENTS’ DAY)
December 28, 1856
The passage: Jesus called a little child to Him, stood the child among the disciples, and said that unless they were converted and became like little children, they could not enter the kingdom of heaven.
I had planned to keep my sermons on the Eucharist within the four weeks of Advent. But Innocents’ Day suggests some thoughts I want to connect to that subject, and I don’t regret giving this Sunday after Christmas, the last of the year, to it.
If this day means more than commemorating an event, it must speak to the present and future, not only the past — it must describe a state of mind we would want to keep or recover. Innocence seems so precious a treasure that we admire anyone who has it and mourn for ourselves and others who have lost it. This admiration and lament usually take two forms. First, the child is treated as the model, not just the source, of the grown man. Since Christian theology says the child is born in sin, the moment right after Baptism is taken as its peak of perfection — it then wears the white robe, which could in principle be kept spotless but is in fact soiled by contact with the world and by the unfolding of feelings and passions that will flower in youth and bear fruit in manhood. What can we do but lament that this innocence is lost, and try to recover some faint image or substitute for it?
At other times, or by other people, the same question is viewed historically rather than personally — applied to the human race first, individuals second. “What a glorious time,” we say, “when the first man and woman were still pure! What a misery for their descendants that Paradise was lost! How many have fallen through that fall! Even those spared final punishment have been wounded by it, mortally.”
There are two corrections to these plausible, popular claims. One comes from the Sacrament of Baptism itself, which is appealed to as justifying the high value placed on infant innocence; the other from the plain words and whole tenor of Scripture about the history of mankind. Baptism was first proclaimed to a corrupt generation, polluted with actual sins, a people in rebellion against God’s Covenant — it was a Baptism of Repentance for the remission of sins. The Baptism prophesied to follow it was to be even more searching and fiery. Apostles and Evangelists invited heathens and Jews alike, defiled with every crime, to that Baptism. Eminent fathers and doctors of the Church wondered how anyone could receive it except those who had deliberately turned from their sins; they resisted parents who asked it for their children, even though those parents cited the precedent of Circumcision and the likely practice of the Apostles in acknowledging children as heirs of the New Covenant.
The conscience, heart, and reason of mankind overruled these scruples. Infants had the nature Christ took on, and so could not be kept from Him. To say they were not spiritual, voluntary beings merely because the will was still dormant was to deny plain fact; and if they were such beings, they had a right to be claimed as such, not treated as animals. But their condition does not determine the character of the Sacrament, in any Church’s teaching. Our own Catechism, written for their use, explains how they are admitted despite lacking the repentance and faith normally expected of those baptized. Nothing in this suggests that Baptism honors the unconscious infant above the sinner who has deliberately turned from evil, or that the infants Herod slew are more precious in God’s sight than the bravest champions of the faith — even champions who, like those St. Peter addressed, had once lived in lust and revelling, or who, like St. Paul, had once been persecutors.
But if Baptism speaks so plainly against that view, how does Scripture speak of exalting Eden’s innocence into an excuse for regret and longing? From Genesis, where Adam is banished from the garden, to the last chapter of the Apocalypse and its Water and Tree of Life, is there a single instance of such regret in the life, prayers, or laments of any holy man? Do Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, or Jeremiah ever wish that Adam had not fallen, or that the earth had never been filled with mankind? There is sorrow enough for those who broke God’s Covenant and sold themselves into slavery, for those who had been planted as a right seed and corrupted themselves; there is crying enough for God to rend the heavens and come down and judge the earth. But though these warriors dare say almost anything to the God who knows their hearts — “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” “Let us speak with Thee of Thy judgment” — none of them ever maintains that it would have been better if there had been no revelation of God’s righteousness overcoming sin, of God’s mercy to the sinner. That blasphemy never enters their thoughts. They look forward, not back. They want more knowledge of God’s Truth and Love, not the loss of what they already have. As the evil in themselves and in the world becomes more appalling to them, their vision of a good that no evil can quench grows clearer and brighter, and they wait for it. Must they not bless God that He let men eat of that tree whose fruit was death — since behind that death lay a life more divine than Adam could ever have dreamed of?
So says Scripture, and so says the Sacrament I have been speaking of in these sermons. The one exposes one form of this irreverent, ungrateful looking-backward; the other strikes at its very root. We cannot accept the pledge that the Son of God took the nature of men, and then trace our humanity to Adam instead of to Him. We cannot accept the pledge that the Son of God died the death of men, and then complain that Death entered the world. We cannot accept the pledge that the Lamb of God took away the sin of the world, without confessing that the victory over sin is greater than the innocence that came before it. We cannot believe He made a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world without accepting, as fully as we can, St. Paul’s words: that “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 could never have arisen. When our Lord took a child and set him among the disciples, making the child’s face the answer to their question “Who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?” and telling them they could not enter that Kingdom unless converted and made like that child, He laid on us a serious obligation to ask what it was in this image that He loved, and wanted to shape us into. His words, taken plainly, dismiss the idea that we should sigh after Infancy as something left behind us — He tells grown men they may and must attain everything blessed in that state, despite all their experience of the world and of sin. But His words do justify the feeling — one that philosophers and divines fail to justify — that a childlike man is the highest, most fully developed man.
We speak of a child as unconscious, and denounce self-consciousness as almost revolting, inconsistent with its true nature. Yet if we saw no consciousness awakening in a child we would call it idiotic; if it never learned to say “this is mine” and “this I must do,” we would lament that it had no energy, no sense of responsibility. This puzzle keeps thrusting itself upon us, driving continual shifts in our theories and even more in our practical upbringing of children. Should we awaken the sense of self that threatens quietness, obedience, simplicity — or stifle it and produce a good-natured slave with no purpose of its own? Anxious parents ask this again and again, and generally the answer comes before they find it: they are forced to admit they are not the creators here, that some other discipline than theirs is at work on the being entrusted to them — and they may wish they had understood sooner how immensely important that fact is. Then it may strike them — an obvious thought, yet startling to so many of us — that these facts of our human experience may have something to do with our divinity; that divinity is not wholly separate from human life, and that the passage between them may have been opened by One who knows more than we do.
We have prayed 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.” Whatever is meant by becoming, or being, a little child in our text must be included in the word “Regenerate” in this Collect — a word explained by the clause before it, about the Incarnation of the Son of God. That Incarnation is the ground of the regeneration and new birth of those who call God Father. They may claim to be sons of God by adoption because the Only Begotten has made Himself their Brother. If Baptism admits people into this condition, giving them the filial name and privilege, it does so only because Christ first won that name and those privileges for all human beings by taking their flesh. Baptism can do no more and no less than its charter authorizes; it confers no separate or independent grace on anyone. It can only say: “You belong to the Head of your race, you are a member of His body; you do not merely carry the divided nature inherited from the first Adam, a nature stamped with death — you have the nature of the Divine Son, you are united to Him in whom is life, and from whom the life of you and of all creatures comes.”
What follows from this? That the purity or innocence of any human creature is not, and cannot be, his own; we are only innocent so far as we claim nothing as our own, look outside ourselves, forget ourselves in another. Whether we like this language or call it mystical, we all testify to its truth. Our reverence for unconsciousness, our near-worship of childhood, is nothing but a silent homage to this doctrine. And our protest against mere unconsciousness — our desire that a child grow into a distinct living person, our conviction that “Know thyself” is a command from Heaven even when obeying it seems to bring us to the brink of hell — this too witnesses to the same doctrine. For how can there be any giving up of self if there is no self to give up? How can a man cease from his own works and strivings if nothing is working and striving within him to cease from?
It must therefore be true that we should watch, with real interest, thankfulness, and hope, the gradual sprouting of the life-buds that destroy the unconsciousness of infancy. We should welcome every strong energy, every feeling or passion that is a prophecy of manhood, even vehement self-assertion — whatever evil may be latent in it, even if it might end in savage defiance. To call any of this diabolical because it may be put to diabolical use, or to assign it to the old selfish Adam-nature because it may be debased into that nature’s tool, is to deny God’s purpose in Creation and Redemption. But we equally deny that purpose if we fail to see all the discipline of family and school, all the influences that soften the affections or fortify the will, the friendship that binds a society together, the law that appeals to conscience, everything that awakens the powers of mind and body and everything that restrains their excesses, as God’s instruments for keeping His child from becoming his own slave instead of His free servant. We could ill spare the brief record of our Lord’s own boyhood in St. Luke, which tells us that the boy has his prototype no less than the man — that as the body grows, “the inward service of the mind and soul grows wide withal,” and that One was with Him who, as He grew in stature and in grace, was always about His Father’s business and learning obedience in it. Those who would take these records from us would do us grave harm. But God forbid that ecclesiastical fancy should add a single word to them! It is the Manhood of Christ we chiefly need to hear of — the Manhood for which His childhood and boyhood were only a preparation, the Manhood that shows us both how we should, and how we should not, aspire to the state of the child.
These words, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” hold that secret. In everything denying Himself, 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, harmless, innocent, not because He was free from temptation, not because the weight of human guilt was not upon Him, but because He could carry it into His Father’s presence and keep entire communion with His love under the full pressure of it.
Therefore all attempts to make ourselves innocent by shutting ourselves into a controlled environment, barring out evil; cutting ourselves off from sinners so they won’t defile us; treating other men’s evils as none of our concern — all this is fatal to acquiring Christ’s innocence, the only innocence God recognizes. On the other hand, it contradicts Scripture, reason, and experience to say that those most stained by outward and inward defilement cannot receive the gift of innocence 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 assurance of a man burdened in conscience with adultery and murder — for those crimes the sword was never to leave his house, and no light penances but God’s own — the loss and rebellion of his children, exile, sorrow within and without — were laid upon him. Yet he himself had a free heart and a right spirit. He had dared to seek God’s righteousness and flee to Him from his own evil, and so his guilt lost its power to hold him prisoner; he was purer than he had ever been, because he trusted God more and himself less. It cannot be otherwise under a higher dispensation. St. Paul declares it is not. The history of individuals and of mankind bears witness that it is not. Whatever notions men frame about baptismal purity, the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper witnesses that the sin-stricken man who has recognized that he never had, and never can have, anything righteous in himself, may become wholly childlike and spotless when he turns from himself and seeks fellowship with Him in whom is no sin.
I have dwelt on this point specially, because I think here lies the true meaning of Innocents’ Day. If it stood apart from the Festival of the Nativity, as marking certain infants specially qualified by dying before they could contract actual guilt, we might imagine something peculiarly fortunate or celestial in their circumstances — as if they ranked higher in Heaven’s records for having seen and known so little of earth. But the timing of the festival teaches us, as much as the event itself, that all their worth comes from their relation to the Son of Man and His taking on our flesh. And since the festival falls right after those of St. Stephen and St. John, we are reminded 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, little children, because they confessed their sins and believed God faithful and just to forgive them and cleanse them from all unrighteousness. This teaches a lesson quite opposite to what some would have us learn.
But I cannot separate this doctrine of true Christian innocence from the doctrine that Communion, by its very name, teaches us — and which the Nativity season urges on us most of all. We seek communion with the righteous Lord of man, who took man’s nature. The righteousness He revealed is for each of us because it is for all; if we refuse it to anyone, we must find some ground other than God’s own Word for claiming it ourselves. That is what the Church’s admonition to be in charity with all men before coming to the feast means: it binds us to all men in sharing the very highest gifts God can give. If we would shut anyone out from those gifts, why are we seeking them ourselves? And if we would not shut them out from these, what gifts are there that are not included in them, or inferior to them? This is a searching test, one ministers and people alike should tremble to apply. We want discipline to exclude notorious offenders — few of them come, and we could easily exclude those who do if we had the courage. But the real discipline here is not for notorious offenders; it is for all of us, for those who pass muster best with the world and are most satisfied with themselves. Are we more content with ourselves than with that man or this one? Do we know nothing in ourselves that should exclude us, any more than we know of him? Do we come because we will not let anything keep us from seeking the God who alone understands what has kept us from Him, and who alone can remove that barrier?
Brethren, we talk much of divisions in the Church; we have our own remedies for healing wounds, our schemes of comprehension, our zeal to banish opponents whom we blame for the strife. Let those who think these methods have succeeded so far try them again. Let those who despair of them try one other experiment — an old and simple one. We have sinned in breaking the Communion of the Church. Let us confess that sin, each for himself and for the whole Church, when we meet at Communion. Others may have committed it too; acknowledging our own sins does not suppress theirs. And if we feel keenly the sins pressing nearest to us, we should also feel those we seem to have no direct part in, but to which we may have contributed a great deal.
That is one Christmas lesson connected with this Service — one we will practice better as we become more like little children, learning to confess to the Father of our spirits as children, kindly and truly dealt with, confess to their earthly fathers. There is another plain lesson tied to this season. We speak of Christmas gifts and charities, and lay alms on the Communion plate every Sunday. I don’t say we should give more then; let those alms be taken as signs and pledges rather than as the whole of our giving, and let charity flow through other channels too, even the most formal and legal ones. But let the signs be true signs. Let us give always because we are in communion with God and with men; let all our charities carry something of the Nativity in them — a divine origin and a human character and purpose. You complain that charities lack this character — that they become mere displays on subscription lists, donations passed through some unknown collector or board with little real sympathy in them. But why complain, rather than try to change it? Why should not communicants feel 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, in the simplest and most childlike way, how to share their blessings — physical, intellectual, spiritual — with others? If we are tired of more artificial organizations, why not use this one, which has such deep roots, has stood for eighteen centuries, and can never grow old, since by its very nature it means seeking a continual renewal of life from One who has promised to give it and who does not deceive us?
I offer this as a thought for the close of the year — may it ripen and bear fruit in the year to come! And there is another thought to sustain it. Our Lord told His disciples that unless they were converted and became as little children, they could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Did He mean the very Kingdom He had already given them power to preach — the Kingdom they were to announce to all men as “at hand,” calling on them to submit and become its subjects? Yes, that very Kingdom. They had the right — even Judas had the right — to say to the people of every village and street, “A Kingdom you cannot see is in the midst of you, a Kingdom of Righteousness and Peace and Joy; you are heirs of it; Christ has taken your nature so that you may enter it.” These words were true, and no unbelief in speaker or hearer could make them false. But to enter this Kingdom, to breathe its atmosphere, both ministers and people alike must have the poverty of spirit and simple trust that belong to a child. And this can seem to us, as much as to you, like a sentence of permanent exclusion. Where are proud and vain men like us to find this poverty? Where are suspicious, doubting men like us to find this trust? Every time the exhortation before Communion is read, calling us to true repentance, faith, and thanksgiving, this question returns, often with growing anxiety, even terror. I know only one way to answer it — the way pointed to by the Christmas Collect I have already quoted. We are children of God; Christ, by taking our nature, has secured that title for us. It depends on no accident, rests on no condition of our feelings. And because we are children, God has sent His Spirit so that we may call Him Father and act as His children. This Spirit is the last great gift to our race — given not to its unconscious infancy but to its full, ripe manhood — so that we might know the treasures God has freely given us, the treasures of His own Nature. This is the Spirit of Trust and of Humility, the Spirit of Christ and of the Father. He is with us always, speaking and working in us always. Our conscience’s reproaches for our pride and self-will are His reproaches; every movement to give up our pride and self-will is His movement. When we ask that His Spirit be renewed in us day by day, we ask to have our pride and self-will removed by One mightier than they are, mightier than we are — we ask only what He prompts us to ask. When we draw near the altar, He is there to fulfill the purposes of that Communion, to unite us to God and to our brethren, to bring us into the enjoyment of that Kingdom of Truth and Love that has no end, and to kindle in us a light that may afterward shine before men, so that seeing our good works they may glorify our Father in Heaven.