Third Sunday in Lent

“Who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father.”—Galatians i. 4.

Lent reminds us of those three enemies whom our Godfathers and Godmothers renounced for us in our Baptism. I asked St. Paul to tell us last week in what sense he spoke of the flesh as our enemy. Let us consider to-day what he means by “this present evil world.”

We have most of us some notion, more or less vague, of what he must have meant. Each notion may be worth something. We may be obliged to cast it away as insufficient, even as immoral; but it may leave us hints which we shall not have to cast away, which may be helpful for the practice of our lives.

I. First comes that opinion upon which the Church and the conscience of mankind have each fixed an anathema; and yet which is continually hovering about both; the one that is known as the Manichæan. “This visible world,” it says, “is accursed, the work of an Evil Spirit; almost given up to him. Christ came into it that He might deliver His elect out of it. While they dwell in it, they are to regard it with suspicion, with a kind of horror. Its beauty is worse than its deformity; ‘touch not, taste not, handle not’ any of its treasures. The devil told our Lord that they were his, that he gives them to those who worship him.”

I say the conscience revolts at these doctrines, and the more it is illuminated by God’s light, the more vehement, I believe, will that revolting be. Since Lent has been often made into an excuse for fostering this doctrine, a wholesome practice is adopted in some Churches of making Lent especially a time for protesting against it, by singing throughout it the Benedicite, which declares that every part of Creation praises and magnifies the good God for ever. It is not a mistake in feeling, though it may be in fact, to connect that song with the martyrs who would not bow to the image which the King of Babylon set up in the plain of Dura. Those who have purged their hearts of idolatry, who will bow to no visible thing, must have the rich reward of seeing that all visible things are good and do homage to the Eternal King. And conversely, wherever idolatry prevails, there will be Manichæism, the belief that some part of the Creation is evil, and that its author is at least partly evil. But though this is true, it is also true that Manichæism is a confused and left-handed witness against idolatry. It says to us: “These visible things are not your masters; all their beauty cannot satisfy the cravings for beauty in you; all their order cannot satisfy the craving for order in you; all the knowledge you can have of their secrets cannot satisfy the craving for knowledge in you. If you exalt them into your gods, they do become curses to you; this glorious world does become an evil world to you. For you are in it, but not of it. And you will not be truly its minister and interpreter till you understand that to be so. You will not enter into its harmonies till you have listened to a deeper harmony, and have had your spirits attuned to it.”

II. Churchmen have been very apt to fall into this interpretation of St. Paul’s words, though the Church so vehemently denounces it. There is another, which they suppose can be liable to no exception, which must be orthodox and Catholic. “Christ,” they say, “has built up a Church, has endowed it with various gifts, has pronounced it altogether good. And the world sets itself up as a rival to this divine body, is jealous of its prerogatives, wishes to enslave it or to destroy it. The outward world of trees and flowers may be good enough; the things of the world, its silver and gold, may be turned to high purposes. It is the world of men from which the Church is separated, against which it exists to protest. In baptized nations she has a right to claim these men as her own. But her power over them is disputed by kings who want them as their citizens, by parents who want them to transmit their names. With these the Church finds herself in conflict. She may enter into terms with them; may make use of their services, may consent, for her own ends, to receive their honours or their wealth; but they constitute a world-order; they belong to this earth: her polity is celestial. She must always be suspecting their maxims, always devising means for exalting her own in contrast to them.” Such are the outlines of a doctrine which has been proclaimed under various modifications through every portion of Christendom; which some, here as elsewhere, repeat with serious conviction; which many think that we ought to receive and believe thoroughly, if they cannot.

I will tell you why I think that, because I am a Churchman, I am bound not to receive and believe this statement, but to reject it and denounce it. The Church to which I belong, the Church which I read of in the Bible, is baptized into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. This name is its foundation. But if I adopted the report of the relation between the Church and the world which this theory gives, I should be obliged to suppose that the Church had nothing to do with this Name, that it existed to contradict all which that Name expresses. For it is written, that the Father loved the world, and sent His only begotten Son into it, that He might save it. It is written, that the Son came into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. It is written, that the Holy Ghost the Comforter comes to convince the world of Sin, because it believes not in Christ its Saviour; of righteousness, because he is gone to the Father; of judgment because the prince of this world is judged. The Father loves the world, the Son dies for the world, the Holy Ghost convinces the world that it has a Deliverer and a Righteous Lord, and that He has taken it out of the hands of a usurper; and the Church, which is sealed with His name, is not to love the world, not to save the world, not to convince the world, but to set itself up as a rival competitor to the world, to plot against the world, to undermine the world!

This contradiction is broad and patent; it also goes down very deep. These words of Christ can be explained away; but I shall be judged by them, and not by the explanations men give of them, which are far more difficult to understand than they are. If you say, “But there are other words such as these in the text, which speak of the world as evil;” I admit it of course. I am seeking for the force of that language. And here is a great and terrible help in the discovery of its force. History tells me that when the Church has set itself up in this character, it has plotted, lied, murdered; that it has exhibited the worst qualities of a heathen society in greater concentration and intensity. I ask how this can be; and the answer presents itself all too readily. St. Paul speaks of the Church as a Family in heaven and earth, as united in its ascended and glorious Head. But that the Church may realise itself as the earthly antagonist of the world, it must renounce this glory, this unity. It must substantiate itself in some earthly head; it must substitute him for its Divine Head. Otherwise how can it meet and defy what it calls the world? And what then does it call the world? The nations which God has established, each under its own proper ruler, with its own distinct head; the nations which are the witnesses of an unseen and righteous Kingdom; the families which God has established, and which are the witnesses of His Fatherhood. These the Church, boasting that it is called of God, tramples under its hoofs. These it dares to defame, as if they were of the earth earthy. And all that is essentially of the earth earthy, the gold which patriots have been able to despise—which men that love the domestic hearth have cared little for—this holy body seeks for with inextinguishable hunger, and heaps up for itself against the last day.

We sometimes fancy that the Latin Church has fallen into these sins, because it aims at universality. We ought rather to say that it has fallen into them, because it has contracted the idea of a Universal Church into the idea of a Latin Church. I believe that we shall never escape the like sins—that we shall always be copying them on a small scale and have a secret desire to copy them on a large scale—till we acknowledge that the truth of a Universal Church is hidden beneath that false and apostate notion of one; and till we confess that true Universal Church to be implied in the existence of each particular and national one. The Universal Church, constituted in its Universal Head, exists to protest against a world which supposes itself to be a collection of incoherent fragments without a centre, which, where it reduces its practice to a maxim, treats every man as his own centre. The Church exists to tell the world of its true Centre, of the law of mutual sacrifice by which its parts are bound together. The Church exists to maintain the order of the nation and the order of the family, which this selfish practice and selfish maxim are continually threatening. And as the Church, following man’s guidance, and reconstituted according to man’s conception, has been enslaving, corrupting, destroying the world, and misrepresenting its Creator; so the Church, under God’s guidance, obeying the principle upon which He has formed it, has been the instrument of freeing and renovating the world. The Church, exalting itself, has raised the selfishness of the world into a law, and has stamped it with divinity. The Church, humbling itself, has borne witness to the world of One who gave up Himself that He might take away its sin.

III. The experiences to which I have alluded have made another theory plausible and popular, especially in Protestant countries, though certainly not only in them. The Church, it is said, if you regard it merely as a collection of baptized men, is not better than the outlying world, it is one of the most corrupt portions of the world. But there are, in different parts of Christendom, men with religious views, honouring and serving God. These constitute the true body of the faithful; these can meet and act together; these maintain a continual witness of God’s coming judgments against a world lying in wickedness; these assert His laws and ordinances against a world which is forgetting them.

St. Paul was certainly not ignorant of this theory. He had been brought up in a religious circle of this kind, one which undertook precisely this function which was a witness against the world precisely in this sense. After the straitest sect of his religion he was bred a Pharisee. He profited in the Jews’ religion, as he tells the Galatians in the very chapter from which my text is taken, above his equals in his own nation; he was more zealous for the traditions of his fathers. But, strange to say, this very letter is written to show why he did not maintain that position; why he utterly and for ever abandoned it; why he incurred the hatred of this select religious body by becoming a witness of God’s love and redemption to all nations; why he believed that the Galatians would abandon the faith of their baptism and would deny Christ, if they listened to the preaching of those religious and exclusive men with whom he had once been associated. It is on the very threshold of these statements and warnings that he speaks of Christ having died for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world. He can scarcely, therefore, have intended to give that force to the word which it had in his mind when he was a pupil of Gamaliel. He had seen enough of the Pharisees to know, that if covetousness in its most refined and in its most gross forms is one of the notes by which the world is to be recognised, the sect, as a sect, belonged to the innermost portion of the world. His deliverance from the maxims and habits of that sect was a part, a very principal part, of the deliverance from the world for which he gave thanks.

And yet, under this Pharisaic definition of the world, and of their own separation from it, there was latent a principle into which Saul of Tarsus entered fully, when it pleased God to reveal His Son in him. To his nation he appeared a greater separatist now than ever. When he became all things to all men, that he might by any means save some, he was set in opposition to both the Jewish and Gentile worlds. Each hated him, because he was breaking down the barriers between them, because he was the witness of that Lord in Whom they were made both one. And so he testified to Jews that the votes of a Sanhedrim, the shouts of a multitude, the traditions of a series of Elders, do not constitute truth, or an opinion which can stand against the truth, when it is spoken by the feeblest voices of fishermen and tentmakers. So he testified to Romans that an empire which was identical with a world, and had legions of armed men to defend it, and the laws and prescriptions of centuries, could not withstand a message concerning a crucified Man, who had died for the monarch and the slave. So he bade all in every time go forward in the path he trod, not waiting to ascertain how many agree with them or dissent from them, but being sure that if only two or three renounce all party ties, that they may claim fellowship with the family of which Christ is the Elder Brother, He will be with them, and will enable them to tell the world of Him, and of His Father who sent Him.

IV. Once more: our text, strictly taken, suggests another sense of the word world, which has been and is very widely recognised. Αἰών, not κόσμος, is St. Paul’s expression. Why may it not be construed literally? Why may we not say that it is the evil age against which he warns us? Accordingly, people have said this in every age. Setting aside Solomon’s warning, they have inquired why the former times were better than theirs; they have convinced themselves that their lot was cast in an especially evil generation. Earnest men have said this, one after another. No arguments about improvement and progress could hinder them from saying it. Those arguments have never been used with greater eloquence and skill than in our century. On many they have a powerful effect, but not on all; not always on those whom the authors of them most care to affect,—not always on those whose thoughts are deepest and are most likely to be remembered. Many of these retain the old habit. They are quite unconvinced; or if they are convinced for a moment, they fall into their complaints again, and are never without plausible justifications of them.

For our purpose it might be sufficient to remark that the age of St. Paul was the age in which the Son of God took flesh and dwelt among men,—that Apostolic age to which we look back with such admiration and longing. If that was an evil age, which shall we select out of the course of history which was not evil?—to which should we wish to transfer ourselves? Surely, if we read the Scriptures faithfully if we believe God,—neither to that nor to any other. St. Paul’s age was the best there had ever been, for it was the latest. The ends of the periods were gathering up into it. The disciples were to reap where others had sown; their eyes were blessed, for they saw things which prophets and kings had desired to see and had not seen. The age of St. Paul was the worst that had ever been. It was the age of Judas and of Nero; it was the age upon which all the sins of former ages, and all the punishments of former ages, were to come. The new age,—the Christendom age which emerged out of that,—was, if Apostles do not deceive us, more to be desired than theirs. Every century, as it has revealed something more of God’s purposes, and has been nearer the final development and consummation of them, has been more to be desired than the one that went before it. And yet, in each century, those who have lived the best in it have been obliged to talk of the present evil age; for they were not wrestling with the evils of a foregone time, but with the evils of their own. They knew those as they could not know the others. They had a right to say, “they are worse than those of any earlier time,” because, as the light is stronger and clearer, the darkness which it exposes must be thicker and deeper.

And so, I believe, we are come at last to the real signification of the text. The world is seen in each age. It is embodied in the various customs, habits, fashions of that age; it is a series of shifting, dissolving views. It always implies something permanent, but that permanence is not in it. And it is always trying to separate itself from that which is permanent, trying to make itself self-sufficient, trying to make us live in the transitory, the momentary. You know that this is so; you know that such a world, however hard to conceive of, is no fiction. It is about you, acting upon you, insisting that you shall believe in it and in nothing else. Yes! these are its terms. Apparently you may have a considerable choice. There is a fashionable world, a political world, an art world, a literary world, a religious world. But the first alone has an honest and intelligible title. The others become, to all intents and purposes, worlds of fashion. The literature must be a fashion, the art a fashion, the politics a fashion, the religion a fashion. Try to make any of them more than that,—try to connect them with the past,—try to discover some roots for them in the nature of man or in the Being of God,—try even to bring them into correspondence with the plainest facts, and a battle begins, a battle which you cannot escape from, which must be fought out.

What St. Paul tells us here is, that our Lord died for our sins, that He might deliver us out of this world of fashions and phantoms,—that He might bring us into fellowship with the Unchangeable and the Eternal. This was the will, he says, of God and our Father, that the children whom He had formed in His own image should not be the sport of all changes and accidents; should not be shut up in a little time-circle; should not be divided from Him Who is, and was, and is to come. Their sins had cut them off from Him. Each creature had sunk into itself, had lost communion with its Lord and Father. This was his sin; this constitutes sin. Christ gave Himself to destroy sin; to take away the separation which selfishness had produced; to make the perfect Atonement. That Atonement not only restores the union between men and God, it restores the union between men, whom time and space had put asunder. Each man may live and work joyfully in the age to which God has assigned him; need envy no other man his condition. But he is not limited or shackled by that age; he is a freeman of God’s universe. He has no cause to fret against the rules and conventions of the society around him: they are as good as those to which his fathers submitted in other times, possibly better; but if they interfere with principles and everlasting laws, he is to tear them from him as tow. The Clubs of the earth may pass bye-laws for the management of their own little affairs: the laws which govern the course of human history, like those which govern the course of Nature, were passed long ago; the Clubs must obey them, or be crushed by them.

My brethren, I should not have cared to consider such a question as this at the present moment, if I did not believe that it bore directly upon the events with which you will be occupied, and upon the conduct which is demanded of you. If I should say to you, “I am sure you are going to think far too much about politics in the next few weeks, let me beseech you to think more about religion or Christianity,” I might utter what would sound a proper and professional sentiment; but I believe it would be an ungodly, immoral sentiment, and one which could only do mischief, if it had any effect at all. I am satisfied that you are not going to think enough about politics; I wish you would think more about them; I wish we could all think about them more earnestly: I believe we should be much more religious men, much better Christians, if we did. What we have all to fight against is indifference and trifling; what we have to cultivate is, a sense of responsibility, a feeling that all which is passing about us concerns us; that we are in God’s kingdom; and that we cannot do any acts that may affect the well-being of His subjects, for which He will not call us to give an account. I am afraid some of the opinions which are current respecting the world have a very great tendency to weaken this feeling, and so to make the evil world of which St. Paul speaks, in very deed our master.

The Manichæan notion that the devil is in some sense the lord of the earth and of its outward economy, is not yet cast out of our minds. A General Election is a time which is sure to awaken it if it is sleeping in us. Here is some abuse which greatly interferes with the physical comfort, and therefore in all probability with the moral condition, of a number of persons, our fellow-citizens and countrymen. This man and that has a strong interest in supporting the abuse. If I give way on it, this and that vote may be obtained for a friend, or for my cause, or for myself. After all, what does it signify? It is a secular matter: it does not concern the conscience. Oh! dismiss that sophism at once. It is not a secular matter at all. It does concern the conscience. Speak it out. It is a bargain with the devil. It is something to be given up to him, as an acknowledgment that the things of this world, including those things,—whatever effects they may produce on the health, life, purity of men, women, and children—may be fairly surrendered to his mercy. It is an evil world indeed; you are helping to make it so and keep it so.

But there are other questions of a different kind from this; questions that are, according to the approved classification, not secular, but belonging to the Church or to religion. I do not want to speak of them by their names, or to express any opinion about them. Respecting every one of them probably there may be honest opinions on each side. But is there not oftentimes a very zealous determination on each side that there shall not be an honest opinion upon one or the other? Are not candidates urged and coerced into promising that they will do what they think it is not right to do? and is it not true that there are those who will submit to the coercion, and become legislators with a consciousness that they are degraded as men? Surely every churchman, every religious man who is a party to this kind of influence ought to know that for a temporary end, for the promotion of what he calls an ecclesiastical or religious object, he has been committing a sin against Almighty God. He has been working, so far as in him lies, that his country may be governed by unprincipled men, by men who speak with their mouths what they do not intend with their hearts. He has brought a curse upon the land; and surely it will not avail him much that he has done what is well pleasing in the sight of a religious coterie, if it is abomination in the sight of his Maker and his Judge. I say this to all persons whomsoever, who take up the strange and monstrous heresy that the cause of the Church can be separated from the cause of Righteousness and Truth, and that therefore whatever interferes with Righteousness and Truth need not injure the cause of the Church. I say it especially for those who are as eager as I think we ought all to be for Protestantism. Beyond all question, every one who resorts to any baseness, any violence, any misrepresentation which he would condemn as Jesuitical in an opponent, for the sake of advancing what he thinks the interests of Protestantism, is the best friend and ally of its adversaries; is doing their work with a success which they could never hope for from any efforts of their own; is helping to diffuse and to establish this tenet, that evil means are lawful for a good end, and that faith is not to be kept with heretics; is guilty of undermining the faith by secret arts, of which he wishes the world to consider him the champion.

These are remarks which, however obvious and old, need to be repeated on every such occasion as this. If they fall dead upon the ears of most, one here and there may lay them to heart; and I would, brethren, protest solemnly in the name of honesty and of England against the folly and crime of which we are continually guilty towards our younger men, when we send them tied and bound to Parliament, with promises concerning certain measures, the nature and bearing of which they can have but very imperfectly studied; so committing them hereafter to the necessity of changes which shake the morality of their country and their own, or else to a mad persistency in the course they have once fixed for themselves, which is more dangerous and even less conscientious. Does not this cruel bandaging of limbs, which should be free if they are to be of any use, proceed from our confusion between measures, which must vary with time and circumstances, which may be right one year and wrong the next, and principles, which are not of to-day or yesterday, but are fixed as the throne of God? Do we not make unjust exactions respecting the one, because we have a most inadequate belief in the reality and sacredness of the others?

It is this unbelief which is the characteristic of that evil world whereof St. Paul speaks; that world which as much undermines the life of the household and the life of the Nation, as the life of the universal Church; that world to which we should assure every man, however much he may have caught its colour and its habits, that he does not of right belong. There is worldliness enough in all of us; but I am certain there is not a man who is simply a worldly man, who has not that in him which rises against the confession that he is, and claims to be something higher and better. Just as I said last Sunday, that in every man there is a spirit that lusteth against the flesh, so I say to-day, that every society has in it an element of the Church as well as of the world, that every member of every society may believe, and is bound to believe, that the Church-element is stronger than the world-element, because God is sustaining it, God is fighting for it.

If we cherish that conviction, the greatest danger of our age may be overcome—that listlessness I mean, that despair of truth and good, that readiness to let the current carry us whither it pleases, because there is no striving against it, which we see in others, which we feel in ourselves. With this, in God’s strength, let us strive mightily. Do not let us complain that the age is weaker or worse than others, because men are no longer satisfied with their opinions, because they cannot find any opinions upon which they may cast anchor. Thanks be to God if they are making that discovery! For as long as there is any resting upon opinions, so long will the Apostle’s words, “Other foundation can no man lay than is laid” (or, is lying), “which is Jesus Christ,” be but dead letters to us. We shall think that it is our notions about Christ, not He Himself, who is upholding the pillars of Heaven and earth. We shall believe in our belief about the Trinity, not in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Thanks be to God, I say again, for making our age better in this respect than any age that has gone before, as St. Paul’s was better than any which went before it; because the real ground of all Divinity and all Humanity is nearer to its complete manifestation; because we shall be less able than ever to hide it from men by any of our conceits. But this, this is the reason why our age may be worse than any which has gone before it, as St. Paul’s was worse than any which went before it; because we are all so ready to take its maxims as our guides, rather than to suspect and challenge them as our foes; because we have not exchanged our trust in opinions for a trust in God, Who has promised that He will guide us into all truth; because we have retained a certain lazy acknowledgment that Christ gave Himself for us, without understanding that He gave Himself to deliver us from this present age of passing fashions and opinions, to give us a portion in that age which is everlasting and unchangeable because it rests on the unchangeable Will of our God and Father.