The passage: Christ gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father.
Lent reminds us of the three enemies our Godfathers and Godmothers renounced for us in Baptism. Last week St. Paul told us in what sense he called the flesh our enemy. Today let us consider what he means by “this present evil world.”
Most of us have some vague notion of what he meant. Each notion may be worth something. We may have to cast it away as insufficient, even immoral, but it may leave hints useful for the practice of our lives.
I. First comes the opinion on which the Church and the conscience of mankind have each fixed an anathema, and which yet keeps hovering about both — the Manichæan view. It says: this visible world is accursed, the work of an Evil Spirit, almost given up to him. Christ came to deliver His elect out of it. While His people dwell in it they should regard it with suspicion and horror; its beauty is worse than its deformity; touch not, taste not, handle not its treasures. The devil told our Lord these things were his to give to those who worship him.
The conscience revolts at this doctrine, and the more it is illuminated by God’s light, the more it will revolt. Since Lent has often been made an excuse for fostering this belief, some Churches wholesomely use Lent to protest against it, singing throughout it the Benedicite, which declares that every part of Creation praises the good God forever. It is fitting, even if not literally accurate, to connect that song with the martyrs who would not bow to the King of Babylon’s image. Those who have purged their hearts of idolatry, who will bow to no visible thing, are rewarded by seeing that all visible things are good and honor the Eternal King. Conversely, wherever idolatry prevails, Manichæism follows — the belief that some part of Creation, and its author, is evil. Yet Manichæism is a confused, left-handed witness against idolatry. It tells us: these visible things are not your masters; their beauty cannot satisfy your craving for beauty, their order your craving for order, your knowledge of their secrets your craving for knowledge. If you make them your gods, they do become curses, and this glorious world does become evil to you — for you are in it but not of it. You will not truly interpret it until you understand that, and you will not enter its harmonies until you have heard a deeper harmony and had your spirit attuned to it.
- Churchmen readily fall into this interpretation, though the Church denounces it; but they hold another, which they suppose immune to objection, wholly orthodox and Catholic. Christ, they say, has built a Church, endowed it with gifts, pronounced it good. The world sets itself up as its rival, jealous of its prerogatives, wishing to enslave or destroy it. The world of trees and flowers, of silver and gold, may be good enough or turned to good purposes; it is the world of men from which the Church is separated and against which it exists to protest. In baptized nations she claims these men as her own, but kings who want them as citizens and parents who want them as heirs dispute her claim. With these she may make terms, accept their honors or wealth for her own ends — but they belong to an earthly order, while her polity is celestial; she must always suspect their maxims and exalt her own against them. This doctrine, in various forms, has been proclaimed throughout Christendom, and many think we ought to believe it thoroughly even if they cannot themselves.
I will tell you why, as a Churchman, I am bound not to accept this but to reject and denounce it. The Church I read of in the Bible is baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — that Name is its foundation. But if I accepted this theory of the Church’s relation to the world, I would have to suppose the Church exists to contradict everything that Name expresses. For Scripture says the Father loved the world and sent His Son to save it; the Son came not to condemn the world but that it might be saved through Him; the Holy Ghost convinces the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. The Father loves the world, the Son dies for it, the Spirit convinces it that it has a Deliverer who has taken it from a usurper — and yet this theory says the Church, sealed with that Name, exists not to love or save or convince the world but to rival it, plot against it, undermine it!
This contradiction is broad and deep. Christ’s words can be explained away, but I will be judged by them, not by explanations more obscure than the words themselves. If you point to other texts calling the world evil, I admit them — I am seeking the true force of that language. And history gives a terrible clue: whenever the Church has set itself up in this rival character, it has plotted, lied, murdered, showing the worst qualities of heathen society in greater concentration. How can this be? Because for the Church to realize itself as earthly antagonist of the world, it must renounce its heavenly Head and its unity, substituting some earthly head instead — how else could it defy what it calls “the world”? And what does it then call the world? The nations God has established under their own rulers, witnesses of an unseen righteous Kingdom; the families God has established, witnesses of His Fatherhood. These the Church, boasting its divine call, tramples and defames as earthly — while the gold that patriots and lovers of home have been able to despise, this “holy” body hungers after and hoards for itself against the last day.
We sometimes think the Latin Church fell into these sins because it aimed at universality; rather it fell into them because it contracted the idea of a Universal Church into the idea of a merely Latin one. We shall never escape the same sins — copying them small, and secretly wishing to copy them large — until we acknowledge that the truth of a Universal Church lies hidden beneath that false, apostate notion, and that the true Universal Church is implied in the existence of each national and particular one. The Universal Church, constituted in its Universal Head, exists to protest against a world that imagines itself a heap of incoherent fragments without a center, where every man is his own center. The Church exists to tell the world of its true Center, of the law of mutual sacrifice binding its parts together, and to maintain the order of nation and family which selfish practice threatens. As the Church, following man’s guidance, has enslaved and corrupted the world and misrepresented its Creator, so the Church, under God’s guidance, has been the instrument of freeing and renewing it. The Church exalting itself has stamped the world’s selfishness with divinity; the Church humbling itself has witnessed to One who gave Himself to take away its sin.
- These experiences have made another theory plausible and popular, especially in Protestant lands though not only there. The Church, merely as a body of baptized men, is said to be no better than the world — indeed one of its most corrupt portions. But there are, scattered through Christendom, religious men who truly serve God; these form the true body of the faithful, who can act together as a continual witness against a world lying in wickedness, asserting God’s laws against a world forgetting them.
St. Paul knew this theory well — he had been raised in just such a religious circle, bred a Pharisee of the strictest sect, more zealous for the traditions of his fathers than his peers, as he tells the Galatians in this very chapter. Yet this letter exists to explain why he abandoned that position utterly, incurring the hatred of that exclusive body by becoming a witness of God’s love to all nations, and why he warned the Galatians that they would deny Christ if they listened to such preachers again. It is on the threshold of these very warnings that he speaks of Christ dying for our sins to deliver us from this present evil world. So he could hardly have meant by “world” what it meant to him as Gamaliel’s pupil. He had seen the Pharisees closely enough to know that if covetousness, refined or gross, marks the world, then that sect belonged to the world’s innermost core. His deliverance from their maxims and habits was a chief part of his deliverance from the world.
And yet within that Pharisaic idea of separation lay hidden a true principle, which Saul of Tarsus fully entered when God revealed His Son in him. To his nation he now seemed a greater separatist than ever. Becoming all things to all men that he might save some, he stood opposed to both Jewish and Gentile worlds alike, each hating him for breaking down the barrier between them, for witnessing to the Lord in whom they were made one. So he testified to Jews that a Sanhedrim’s votes or a crowd’s shouts or generations of tradition do not make truth, when truth is spoken even by fishermen and tentmakers. So he testified to Romans that an empire identified with the world, defended by legions and centuries of law, could not withstand the message of a crucified Man who died for monarch and slave alike. So he taught all who would follow him not to wait and count how many agree, but to trust that if only two or three renounce party ties to claim fellowship with Christ’s family, He will be with them to tell the world of Him and His Father.
- Our text, strictly read, suggests yet another sense of “world.” St. Paul’s word is age (αἰών), not order (κόσμος) — why not take it literally, as the evil age he warns against? People in every age have said this, questioning why former times were better, convinced their own generation was especially wicked. Earnest men repeat it generation after generation; no argument about progress has stopped them, though such arguments have never been urged with more skill than in our century. They persuade many, but not all, and not always the deepest thinkers. Many remain unconvinced, or if briefly persuaded, fall back into the old complaint, always finding some plausible excuse for it.
It should be enough to note that St. Paul’s age was the age in which the Son of God took flesh and dwelt among us — the Apostolic age we look back on with longing. If that was evil, what age shall we choose instead? None, if we believe God. St. Paul’s age was the best there had been, for it was the latest, gathering up the ends of former ages; the disciples saw what prophets and kings had desired to see and had not seen. It was also the worst there had been — the age of Judas and Nero, upon which all former sins and punishments converged. The Christian age that followed was, if the Apostles do not deceive us, more to be desired than theirs; every century since, revealing more of God’s purposes and drawing nearer their consummation, has been more desirable than the one before. Yet in every century, the best men in it have called their own age “evil,” because they wrestled with its evils, not with those of a vanished time — the darkness they saw was thicker only because the light exposing it was clearer.
So we come to the real meaning of the text. The world appears in each age, embodied in its shifting customs, habits, fashions — a series of dissolving views. It always implies something permanent, but that permanence is not in it; it constantly tries to separate itself from the permanent, to make itself self-sufficient, to make us live only in the transitory and momentary. This world is real, acting on you, demanding that you believe in it and nothing else. There seems to be a wide choice — a fashionable world, a political world, an art world, a literary world, a religious world — but only the first has an honest title; the rest become, in effect, worlds of fashion too, their literature, art, politics, religion all reduced to fashion. Try to make any of them more than that, to root them in the past, in human nature, or in God’s Being, or even to test them against plain facts, and a battle begins that cannot be avoided.
St. Paul tells us that our Lord died for our sins to deliver us from this world of fashions and phantoms, to bring us into fellowship with the Unchangeable and Eternal. This, he says, was the will of God our Father: that His children, made in His image, should not be the sport of every change and accident, shut up in a little circle of time, cut off from Him who is and was and is to come. Their sins had cut them off from Him — each creature sinking into itself, losing communion with its Lord. This is sin. Christ gave Himself to destroy sin, to remove the separation selfishness had caused, to make the perfect Atonement — restoring not only union with God but union among men whom time and space had sundered. Each man may live joyfully in the age God assigns him, envying no other man’s condition; but he is not shackled by it — he is a freeman of God’s universe. He need not resent the customs of his own society, no worse and perhaps better than those of former times; but where they conflict with everlasting principles, he must tear them away like tow. The clubs of earth may pass bye-laws for their own affairs, but the laws governing human history, like those governing nature, were passed long ago — the clubs must obey them or be crushed.
I would not raise such a question now if I did not believe it bore directly on the events occupying you and the conduct demanded of you. To tell you, “You think too much of politics, think more of religion,” would sound proper but would be an ungodly, mischievous sentiment. I believe you do not think enough about politics — I wish you thought more, and were more religious for it. What we must fight is indifference and trifling; what we must cultivate is a sense that all that passes about us concerns us, that we are in God’s kingdom, and that we will answer for every act affecting His subjects’ welfare. Some current opinions about “the world” tend to weaken this feeling, making the evil world St. Paul speaks of truly our master.
The Manichæan notion that the devil is lord of the earth’s outward economy is not yet cast out of our minds. A General Election is sure to awaken it if it sleeps in us. Some abuse harms the comfort, and so probably the moral condition, of our fellow-citizens; someone has a strong interest in supporting it; if I give way, votes may be gained for a friend, a cause, myself. “It’s only a secular matter,” we say, “it doesn’t touch the conscience.” Dismiss that sophism at once — it does touch the conscience. Speak plainly: it is a bargain with the devil, an acknowledgment that such things — whatever harm they do to health, life, purity — may be surrendered to his mercy. It is indeed an evil world, and you help make and keep it so.
Other questions are classed not as secular but as belonging to Church or religion. I won’t name them or give my opinion on them. Honest opinion is possible on each side of every one — yet is there not often a zealous determination on each side that there shall not be an honest opinion allowed on the other? Are not candidates coerced into promising to do what they believe wrong, and do not some submit, becoming legislators who know themselves degraded? Every churchman party to such coercion, for some ecclesiastical end, has sinned against God — working to see his country governed by unprincipled men who say with their mouths what they do not mean, bringing a curse on the land; it will not help him that he pleased a religious coterie if it is abomination to his Maker. I say this to all who hold the monstrous heresy that the Church’s cause can be separated from the cause of Righteousness and Truth, so that whatever harms Truth need not harm the Church — especially to zealous Protestants. Whoever resorts to baseness, violence, or misrepresentation he would call Jesuitical in an opponent, for the sake of “Protestant interests,” is the best ally of its enemies, doing their work more successfully than they could themselves, spreading the doctrine that evil means serve good ends and that faith need not be kept with heretics — undermining, by secret arts, the very faith he claims to champion.
These remarks, however old and obvious, need repeating on such occasions. If they fall dead on most ears, one or two may take them to heart. I protest, in the name of honesty and of England, against our habitual folly and crime toward younger men, sending them to Parliament bound by promises about measures they have barely studied — committing them either to conscience-shaking reversals or to a stubborn, less honest persistence in a fixed course. Does not this cruel binding of limbs that should be free arise from confusing measures — which vary with time and may be right one year, wrong the next — with principles, which are fixed as God’s throne? Do we not make unjust demands about the one because we scarcely believe in the reality and sacredness of the other?
This unbelief is the mark of the evil world St. Paul speaks of — a world undermining household, nation, and Church alike, to which we should assure every man, however much its color has rubbed off on him, he does not rightly belong. There is worldliness enough in all of us, but no man is merely worldly without something in him rising against that verdict, claiming to be higher and better. As I said last Sunday that every man has a spirit lusting against the flesh, so today every society has an element of the Church as well as of the world, and every member may and must believe the Church-element stronger, because God sustains and fights for it.
If we hold that conviction, we may overcome the great danger of our age — that listlessness, that despair of truth and good, that readiness to drift with the current because resistance seems useless, which we see in others and feel in ourselves. Let us strive mightily against it in God’s strength. Let us not complain that our age is weaker or worse than others because men are no longer satisfied with their opinions, finding nothing to anchor to. Thank God if they are making that discovery! For as long as men rest on opinions, the words “Other foundation can no man lay than is laid, which is Jesus Christ” remain dead letters to us — we will think our notions about Christ, not He Himself, uphold heaven and earth; we will believe in our belief about the Trinity, not in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Thank God our age is better than any before it in this respect, as St. Paul’s was better than any before it, because the true ground of all Divinity and Humanity draws nearer full manifestation, harder than ever to hide behind our conceits. But this is also why our age may be worse than any before it, as St. Paul’s was worse: because we so readily take its maxims as guides rather than suspecting them as foes; because we have not exchanged trust in opinions for trust in God, who promises to guide us into all truth; because we retain a lazy acknowledgment that Christ gave Himself for us, without grasping that He gave Himself to deliver us from this present age of passing fashions and opinions, into that age which is everlasting and unchangeable because it rests on the unchangeable will of our God and Father.