All Saints’ Day

“After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.”—Revelation vii. 9, 10.

The Gospel for All Saints’ Day, strictly speaking, begins with this verse. But the Church has surely shown her wisdom in not separating this vision from the one which precedes it. They stand out, indeed, in direct contrast; but the contrast illustrates the meaning of each, as well as the character and object of the book in which they are found.

I do not think it is necessary to decide whether Jerusalem had already fallen, and its temple had already been burnt, when St. John was in his exile at Patmos. Let that question be settled as it may; the all-important one which lay beneath was,—What did these events, past or to come, signify? Their signification was so awful to any one who felt that his nation had been called out from all nations to be the witness of the Living and Righteous God and of His dominion over the earth, that nothing but the words of Christ Himself could have enabled His disciples—earnest and faithful Jews as they were—to accept the most evident warnings of the Roman intention to destroy the capital and uproot the race, as manifestations of the Divine purpose. They must have expected some miraculous interference to avert, even at the last moment, the impending doom; they must have looked for some sudden resurrection of the polity with all its visible accompaniments, even after the ploughshare had gone round the holy city, and its very name had been changed. Up to the time of Hadrian at least, we know how strong the faith of the exiled people was, that God would appear in their behalf; by what desperate insurrections they defied the powers of the Empire. To an Apostle of Christ such faith was incredulity: the facts he saw were to him not the refutation of prophecies, but the confirmation of them. And yet I do not think any Jew who rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God, can have felt any measure of the awe and horror at this overthrow which it will have caused to St. John. The calling of his people was not a less sacred thing in his eyes than in the eyes of the ordinary Jew, but infinitely more sacred.

It has been the fashion of some modern critics to represent St. Paul and the writer of the Apocalypse as of opposite schools; the one resolute in his opposition to Judaism, the other fanatically attached to it. But I do not know how it was possible to use much stronger language than St. Paul uses in the 10th and 11th chapters of the Epistle to the Romans on this subject. He would be willing to be accursed from Christ if he could save his nation. To it belonged the Covenants, the Law, the Promises; of it, as concerning the flesh, Christ came. It cannot be cast away. He is certain that it is not. He himself exists to prove that it is not. A seed is to survive for future germination. He can just endure the thought of the present death of the Jewish people, when he sees what life to the Gentiles is to come out of that death. But such comfort is not enough. He has a vision, dim but dazzling, of unspeakably higher treasures which will be at its restoration.

So spoke the man whom his countrymen denounced as the deadliest apostate from the faith of his ancestors. St. John, who had not St. Paul’s calling to be a Gentile that he might gain the Gentiles, could not certainly have regarded with less amazement the desecration and desolation of the city in which he had eaten the last supper with his Master, where he had seen Him after He was risen, where the Spirit had descended on himself and his brethren. That the nation had destroyed itself, he saw of course. But could the wickedness of men set aside the purposes of God? Was it not the doctrine of Law and Gospel both, that He accomplishes His mighty scheme of Righteousness and Love, notwithstanding all the opposition which it encounters from the evil will? Was it not the special doctrine of the Gospel, that even the will itself might be at last brought into captivity? Could it be, that the coming of Christ to fulfil all things, and gather the ages into Himself, was to undo the whole economy of the universe, to prove that it had been abortive?

I. The answer to such terrible doubts was contained, as it seems to me, in that vision of the sealing of the tribes, before the winds of the heaven were let loose upon the earth, or the sea, or any tree, which is recorded in the first part of this chapter. If you ask me how a vision could ever sustain any one under the pressure of indisputable, overwhelming facts, I answer: Only just so far as the vision discovers the principle and meaning of the facts; only so far as it corrects the vague impressions which those facts make upon the senses; only so far as it leads the seer away from that which is transitory and accidental to that which is permanent. A vision, in Scripture language, is not a picture presented to the eye; it is a revelation to the heart and spirit of that which does not appear, but is. A city of walls and towers addresses itself to the senses,—a polity, the constitution of a nation, that which alone gives worth to a city, that without which its walls and towers must crumble, must be apprehended by another organ.

To that organ this vision of the sealing of the twelve thousand of each tribe of Israel was offered. It seemed as if the twelve tribes were hopelessly dislocated, as if the last fragment of them was about to be scattered over the face of the earth. The prophet was taught that it was not so. When Jesus chose out His twelve Apostles, He pointed to this ancient and divine institution, He asserted the permanence of it. These men, and all that portion of the house of Israel which received their words, went forth as witnesses to their dispersed countrymen throughout the world, that their election had not been in vain; that the original charter, in virtue of which they were to conquer the earth and bless all the families of it, was not abrogated,—that it was to be fulfilled to the utmost. They were to declare who God is, how He has manifested Himself. They were to declare it as of old by their organization. They were to represent the tribes in their unity as constituting a nation, in their distinctness as members of different families, each encamping by the standard of the house of his fathers.

I have had occasion to show you in former discourses that this view of the nation as an imperishable substance, when all its outward accidents were changed, is in strictest accordance with the language of the ancient Prophets. They had told how branches would be lopped from the great oak which God had planted, how all its leaves would wither, how there would be nothing left to gaze upon but a trunk stripped utterly bare; yet that what to man’s eye was dead had a life in God, which in due time all would be obliged to confess.

Such words were translated for the Apostle into reality by the experiences of his time, by the divine illumination which interpreted those experiences. The baptized men who were scattered in little bodies through the cities of Greece and Asia, were not supplanting the old commonwealth of Israel, they were the continuation and expansion of it; its tasks had devolved upon them; they had higher powers, a wider sphere, than their fathers had possessed in the times of their greatest prosperity. An earthquake was shaking, was still to shake, the Jewish world and the Heathen world. Jews might think, Heathens might think, Christians might think, not that a new world was rising out of the old, but that the life of the old had been exhausted. In truth, nothing but a carcase was given to the eagles; the body survived. No one purpose of the Almighty had been disappointed, no method had been abandoned.

I do not think, my brethren, that we need the assurance and the consolation of this vision less than St. John did. We are often inclined to adopt the notion that, at a certain period, a set of opinions and habits called Judaism disappeared, and that a set of notions and habits called Christianity took their place; and we think that by working out this notion we can satisfactorily explain the history of the Old World and of the New. Now it is unquestionably true that a miserable, jejune, inhuman, godless set of notions and habits called Judaism did exist in the country of Palestine; and that because they were miserable, jejune, inhuman, godless,—because they were a denial of all the ends for which the Jewish nation existed,—they were doomed to perdition, with the holy places which had become the shrines of them. It is also true that a set of notions and habits called Christianity appeared after the destruction of Jerusalem, that they put themselves in vehement, passionate opposition to Judaism, leading often to the persecution and massacre of Jews,—that at the same time they embodied some of the worse qualities of that which they denounced—the same inhumanity, the same ungodliness. It is needful to recollect the fate of that Judaism, because, as God’s purposes do not change, there must lie in it a fearful prophecy of the fate of that Christianity. But the name which the Jew blasphemed was not his own, but God’s; the order which the Jew abused was not his own, but God’s. He could stumble against the rock on which he and the world stood, and be broken. He could not remove that rock, or one fragment from it. The one foundation was laid; his polity rested upon it; therefore it could expand to fill the earth; neither he, nor any successor of his, nor the powers of Hell, could subvert it.

A great majority of the baptized body, like a great majority of the circumcised body, might fancy that it was sealed with its own seal, not God’s; that it was to be a curse to the families of the earth, not a blessing. The ministers of the Church might say that the Church had nothing to do with tribes and families; that these interfered with its sublime uniformity. But such arrogance and presumption could not in any wise frustrate the design of the Most High. Families, tribes, nations, asserted their existence, however a so-called universal Church might affect to treat them as earthly, and not divine. All the mere machinery of that Church, its schemes to make itself a name, to build for itself a tower which should be high and reach to Heaven, have been mocked and set at nought. Its efforts to create a unity, or even to maintain a unity which God had created, have been as much baffled and confounded as the unity of the Jewish tribes was by the separation under Jeroboam. Its efforts to make itself independent have been as much set at nought as the Jewish independence was set at nought by Chaldean, Persian, Roman conquests. And yet the different tribes, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, have still borne the Divine Seal upon them; and out of those tribes have still gone forth those who believed that they had this seal, and that it obliged them to bear witness of a Kingdom of which a Divine King and High-priest is the centre, of a universal family of which His Father is the Father, of a unity which the separations of time, place, death, cannot break, whereof the Holy Spirit is the Author.

II. It is at this point that the first vision of St. John passes into the second. He has been comforted under the despairing feelings which the sight of the falling commonwealth, long as he had been prepared for that sight, must have caused him. He has acquired a sense, such as he could hardly have possessed before, though he was the beloved disciple of Christ, and had grown old under His teaching and discipline, of the permanence and harmony of the Divine dispensations. And so he was ready for another and more wonderful revelation, very different indeed from that which had introduced it; mixed with no thoughts of Reuben, or Simeon, or Levi, or Joseph; but yet which, without that vision, would have been brilliant and fantastic rather than substantial. After this I looked, and lo! a multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues.

Last week I spoke of the way in which the words of our Lord, concerning the strait gate and the few who found it, were verified in the experience of his Apostles. St. John had evidence all around him of the insignificance of the bodies in Ephesus, Sardis, Smyrna, Laodicea, which confessed the faith of Christ. In comparison with the worshippers in the Synagogues or in Greek temples who denied Him. What a spectacle then was this, to burst upon him! A multitude that no man could number! Not composed, as we might have supposed, of Patriarchs, Lawgivers, Prophets, who had believed the promises, and waited for their accomplishment. They speak all languages; they belong to all races! Well might the thought rise in the mind of the Galilean fisherman—well might he assure himself that the thought was awakened by a Divine messenger—“Who are these, and whence came they?” There was a time when he would have felt much as St. Peter felt, when the sheet that was full of four-footed beasts and creeping things was let down before him. The sight of aliens from the commonwealth of Israel about the throne of God, with palms in their hands, would have tempted him to exclaim—“Not so, Lord!” Even now the sight is overpowering. He can only answer the Angel, “Sir, thou knowest.” But that answer comes from the humility and wonder of joy. The vision seems to be too good and bright for reality. And yet the truth which St. John has been learning for years himself—which he has been banished for imparting to others—is precisely the truth which this vision embodies. “I was in Patmos,” he says, “for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.” He had spoken of a Word before all worlds, Whose life was the Light of men. He had said that Jesus Christ was that Word made flesh; that He was the Prince of all the kings of the earth; that He had been dead and was alive; that He had the keys of death and of hell.

If this dangerous proclamation was not a dream, but the explanation of God’s universe, could it be strange that He should be bringing multitudes from the East and West, from the North and South, to sit down with Abraham and Isaac in His kingdom; that He should be gathering a family out of all nations? Unlike as a multitude so vast, so united, was to the little scattered flocks the Apostle had known on earth,—unlike as it might be to anything that could be seen on earth in the ages to come,—the Apostle could not doubt that in it was the consummation of all that the best men, the best societies on earth, were striving to be. Unless there were such a body as this, the hopes of all past generations had been disappointed, the promise of the day of Pentecost had been broken.

I said that we should learn much of the purpose of this whole book,—which has had so vast an influence upon the thought, the art, the language of eighteen centuries, and yet which men are often induced to put aside as a mere collection of riddles that can never be solved,—if we connect the vision on earth, the vision of the sealed tribes, with the vision in Heaven; with the vision—so the Church represents it—of All Saints. For the whole book has been an enigma, and must for ever remain an enigma to men, if the primary principle of it is forgotten or rejected, that Christ’s death and Resurrection have broken down the barrier between the seen and the unseen world; that He is the Centre of both. This belief has been too awful and too good for men to cherish; they have put it away from them; sometimes they have wished it might not be true; sometimes they have said nothing so blessed could be true.

They have paid the penalty of this incredulity. The conviction that there must be a communion between them and those whom they have lost, between them and the ages that are past, was one of which they could not rid themselves. Therefore they have been haunted with dark terrors and ghastly apparitions; they have been at the mercy of every impostor. Each place and race has coloured its superstitions with its own physical circumstances and temperament. Civilized ages, observing this fact, have concluded that the superstition itself had no ground but these circumstances and temperaments. They have thought they could throw it off; it has reappeared dressed in their livery, assuming the airs of science. Christendom, which by its name and by all its solemnest ceremonies testifies its faith in One Who has overcome the sharpness of death and opened the kingdom of heaven, has organized a system of priestcraft, to establish by its prayers and its curses a temporary, occasional relation between those who are walking in the light of the sun and stars, and the region which has God and the Lamb for its light, and the region of outer darkness. Our consciences all the while tell us that we cannot, in any acts we do, in any thoughts we think, put ourselves out of communion with the one or the other of these worlds; that if we did, the sun and the stars would not be more to us than they are to the cattle on which they shine, as brightly as upon human beings. Shall we be always the sport of necromancers and conjurors, of those who traffic with the fears and hopes of men? Shall we not dare to ask ourselves whether no illumination has fallen from above on those hieroglyphics, which we are trying to decipher by pale glimmerings from beneath?

III. The proof that the light in the Apocalypse is from above, lies, I think,—as the proof that establishes every scientific discovery lies—in the number of confused notions which it scatters; in the confirmation which it supplies to the anticipations and hopes that are the strongest in us, and the most precious to us; in the aid which we derive from it for our highest and our commonest duties.

1. There is nothing which is so distressing to an earnest man as the thought which sometimes rises in his own mind, which sometimes is presented to him as if it were a doctrine of Holy Writ by divines, that here we are bound together in families and nations; that after death all such relations cease; that all becomes individual and solitary. I have heard such a statement from the pulpit uttered as if it were an undoubted tenet, which every orthodox man was bound to receive, which might be assumed without even being proved. I cannot conceive any one so utterly revolting to the conscience, so distinctly affirming that future blessedness is not the perfection of the present, but the utter undoing of all which has been blessed here. To escape from solitude and individualism, to be made capable of friendship and society, this has been the gift God has conferred upon us below. Families, nations, Churches, have been His; our sins have been the dissolution of them, violent efforts to rend them asunder. Then it would seem His work has failed, ours has triumphed. Society is at an end. Selfishness is all in all.

If St. John’s teaching is true, this teaching is false. The multitude that no man can number is a Society. Their robes have become white, because every stain of selfishness has been washed from them by the blood of the Lamb. Their palms show that they have gotten the victory over those causes which have destroyed the unity of kindreds and nations here. There is no dull uniformity, no single tongue: but all is harmonious amidst diversity. Here, some have glorified Power, to the destruction of Meekness; some have pretended that Meekness is incompatible with Strength. There, all give glory to Him that sitteth on the throne, and to the Lamb. Here, men who are sealed in the Name of God have thought that they glorified that Name most by declaring His damnation of His enemies or theirs. In that company, the one word which is connected with the Divine Name is Salvation—salvation from the curse that men have made for themselves.

2. The sight of this multitude from every nation and kindred must have been a lesson to the Missionary of that day, may be a lesson to the Missionary of this, tending to abate his pride, but also—why do I say but, why not therefore?—his despair. He sometimes tries to console himself with thoughts of God’s mercy to those who are ignorant, and have had no means of knowing better. But then he sees that the heathens among whom he goes are actually brutalized and corrupted; no tolerance of their religion can make that fact less appalling to him. And then, when he thinks how few can ever hear his preaching, how few can understand the sounds he utters, he begins to doubt if God has not deserted His Own world. But it is not so. His converts may be few. He may have little power of making himself intelligible. But He of whom the Missionary speaks, He Who has sent him, has His ways of making Himself intelligible, has His ways of bringing people of every nation, and tongue, and clime, through much tribulation, to a knowledge of the Lord Who died for them and is ever with them, to a knowledge of His Father and their Father. They are not saved each by the sect he professeth. They are saved by the one Name which is given under Heaven. But it does not depend upon our lips or our wisdom, thanks be to God! how they shall become acquainted with that Name. If the letters of it do reach them through us, it is another than we who has shown them what it means. Surely He can show it them, though we stammer ever so much in the utterance of it, though we do not utter it at all.

3. I am aware how easily a captious bystander, knowing nothing of the real anguish of a missionary, or of his real inspiration, may turn what I have said into an argument why he may be indifferent to the work, seeing it will be performed without him. He may be tempted to indolence by that or any argument; the devil has a multitude of arguments, of which, I am sure, that of the hopelessness of the enterprise is the mightiest. I am sure the other will always be baffled by any one who counts it his highest honour to be a fellow-worker with God, who is certain that he could not convince a single soul unless God’s Spirit convinced it. And if the thought should occur to him, in which, provided it is not pushed to impiety, there is truth and wisdom, that God, whose Son became man, works by men for the revelation of His own name, then I turn again to this vision of St. John, and say, Yes, by men, and why not by just men made perfect, as well as by just men in the weeds of their imperfection? Why is not this cry in which they join, of “Salvation to Him that sitteth on the throne, and to the Lamb,” to be a more effective cry than that which ascends from a poor jaded, divided, body of witnesses upon earth? In hours of unutterable sorrow, voices of consolation have come to you, you knew not from whence. In times of temptation, when your souls were balancing on the edge of a precipice, some old sentence has been brought back to you from the field of sleep, some house, or tree has served to pour forth strange warnings or encouragements. Why may not those whispers have been borne from those who spoke them of old to the ear, not as now to the heart? Why may not they be kindling the memories which they still share with you? Would it strike you as strange, not as most natural, that a mother should be watching over the boy, whom, when her affections were only in their first bud, before they had come to their flower in the full warmth and light of God’s love, she would have died to bless? Why may not elder patriots and martyrs be echoing Christ’s own words in the ears of their brothers, in lonely dungeons which no friend in the flesh can approach, at the stake when no visible smile may greet them, when God’s name is used to condemn them,—“Be faithful unto death, He will give you the crown of life.” And why may not these same be the teachers and Evangelists of the lands for which they wept and bled below? Would anything cheer the fainting warrior of the Church on earth more than to feel that these unseen hosts were fighting with him?

Yes, the grand words of the blind poet are true:—

“His state is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed.
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

A multitude that no man can number are proclaiming salvation to God and the Lamb. They also who lie on sick-beds, bearing witness that it is a Father who chastens them—they who die by the hands of assassins in distant lands—they also are novices, hereafter to be initiated in these toils, in these blessings. They also will at last fully do His commandment, hearkening to the voice of His words. And that commandment is, “Love all men for my sake.”

4. And there is one thought more in connection with this subject which I dare not suppress. In the calendar of a great part of Christendom All Saints’ Day is followed by All Souls’ Day. There is good reason, perhaps, why the latter should not be remembered by us as the former is. There is closely connected with the observation of it a certain notion that we care more for the souls of our brethren who are departed than God does, that by some intercession of ours, or by the intercession of some of His Saints, His Will towards them may be changed. Whatever custom fosters this indevout and heathenish imagination must be abandoned, even if there is worth and beauty in it.

But we may recover the day and redeem it from all its dangerous associations. We may remember that the Angels of God rejoice over one sinner that repents, because God rejoices. We may be sure that He, without whom a sparrow does not fall to the ground, does not lose sight of a soul which He has made. We may be sure therefore that all Saints care for all Souls. Their affections, their powers of sympathy and blessing, are not limited as ours are by circumstances of time and space. They are limited only by that Love of God, the height and depth and length and breadth of which they are as incapable of measuring as we are, but which flows forth to them, and in them, and through them everlastingly.