Day of Humiliation

“I will arise, and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”—Luke xv. 18.

I think you must have felt this day that our old prayers—what we call our Common Prayers—are really more special prayers, more adapted to the circumstances of this time, more expressive of what is in our hearts, than those into which the words “India” and “mutiny” have been introduced. While we were using the ones, all that we have been hearing and reading for the last two months came into our minds. The prayers of the Liturgy were for the widows and fatherless we know; for the prisoners and captives we have heard of; for those in necessities and tribulations that we can just dream of but cannot understand. On the other hand, those which forced our thoughts directly to these topics seemed to want something which could not be filled up. What was it? I think, brethren, it was this. The new prayers are addressed to an Almighty God Who is displeased with us, Who may be merciful to us. The others are addressed to an Almighty and Most Merciful Father. That gives them their common character; that also gives them their special character. We can, as members of one Family, all join in them together. But they meet all events that befall the different members of the Family in one age or another, in one part of the world or another. They belong to all times of our tribulation and to all times of our wealth.

I have not chosen my text merely because I suppose it is suitable to any humiliation day. I do indeed think there can be no humiliation and no prayer which is not grounded upon it; that our humiliation is true when it is the humiliation of children; that all prayer wants life, unction, confidence, which is not the prayer of children. But I believe also that its words contain the very consolation which those want who are enduring the anguish of retrospect, the anguish of anticipation, for those who are dearest to them; that they contain every satisfaction which those want whose minds have been staggered with doubts whether the world is not left to the mercy of the Power of Evil; that they suggest what is the sin for which we have to humble ourselves this day; that they give us a clear indication of the work we have to do, of the hope we may cherish in the time to come.

I will endeavour to draw out the lessons I have found in them on each of these points.

I. I have spoken of consolation. If they were my words and not Christ’s, how dare I even think that this gift could be hidden in them? To those who are suffering, as some in every English neighbourhood, in every English congregation, are suffering, all ordinary phrases and topics of consolation must be intolerable. But think how universal these are, think how individual they are! It is the prodigal who speaks them. None can say, “By some course of thought or action of mine I have excluded myself from the right to use them.” It is the prodigal son who speaks them. None can say, “I must make myself a son; I must establish my relationship to God before I claim the full sense and virtue of them.” And what is that full sense and virtue? Who can express it? But this must be a part of it, a very little part: I must assert that God is my Father in Jesus Christ His only begotten Son; and if mine, then the Father of every one of those who are related to me in this or in any land, who have been taken from me by the course of nature or the violence of men. I must have a right, it must be a duty, to arise and go to Him and say, “Father, these were redeemed by the precious blood of Thy dear Son. Thou hast loved them with a love that I cannot measure. All the imperfect love I ever had for them has flowed from Thine. The failures in that love which I have confessed to Thee so often, which I confess now as I never did before, were failures to be what Thou wouldst have me be, failures to be like Thyself. I know that what in me was full of flaws in Thee is without flaw. I know that the measure of it was the sacrifice of Thy Son; that there is the full, the only full revelation of it. Thanks be to Thee, Thy fatherly love to me is not determined by my sense of it, my belief of it, else what would become of me! It cannot be determined by the sense of it, by the belief of it, in any creature. It must be higher than heaven, deeper than hell,—how can I grasp it? I am content to cast myself upon it, to cast all upon it. Thy ways are unsearchable. They baffle me utterly. But Thy purposes are certain. They are revealed to us and to our children. I believe that Thy Son prayed in His agony, ‘Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from Me,’ and that it could not pass from Him; that He drank it. I believe that was the hour of the Power of Darkness, but that that was also the hour of the Power of Light; that then Good was shown to be mightier than Evil, once and for ever.”

II. It is in the act of arising and going to the Father, in the exercise of prayer, that such persons will learn secrets of which I know nothing. But there are some who will not at once be driven to this resource, who will rather be driven from it by the tidings which day after day brings to them. “What does it all mean?” will be their demand. “Can the words we have been used to hear and to utter about a good Providence have been honest words? If there is an eye of justice and mercy looking upon our doings and sufferings, why was this person, and this, and this, left to bear actually more than we can bear to speak or to think of?” This terrible inquiry will come to those who have been brought up in habits of belief as much as to the trained sceptic. I do not know that it will scare one more than the other. In the last century the Lisbon earthquake led Rousseau to write his letters on Optimism. He was nearly mad already. It would have driven him actually mad not to think that all things were somehow tending to good; that even the worst calamities befalling the innocent did not prove that opinion to be false. The philosopher of Ferney answered him in the story of Candide. The notion “everything is for the best,” applied to particulars, was exhibited as utterly ridiculous. Madame de Staël may have been right in describing this story as the grinning of an ape at the miseries of humanity. But there was much in that grinning which the understandings, even the consciences, of men felt to be true. A general maxim or theory of the universe does not meet individual cases. It breaks down the moment the particular instance occurs to which we need that it should be applied. If we did not know that this was so before, we know it now. The moralities which we have contented ourselves with, in reading of deeds of blood and horror in the pages of past history, die upon our lips,—we actually loathe them,—when any one rehearses them with solemn confidence about Delhi or Cawnpore.

No! a scheme of optimism must fail utterly at such times as these. A man asks himself, “What have I done that I should be better off than any of those who have fallen? Were not these men many of them nobler and more righteous—were not these women fairer and brighter than I can claim to be? Oh, why did the thunderbolt strike them first?” Such thoughts must arise within us, they ought to arise within us. But must not others come with them? “Why am I not left to a far worse calamity than to be the most wretched of the sufferers? Why am I not one of those who have done the wrong? Are they not also creatures of my own flesh and blood? Do not I carry within me their propensities, their capacities of evil? Why have I anything but these propensities, but these capacities? Whence comes this horror of such evils? this consciousness of something directly, absolutely opposed to them? this confession of a righteousness, a gentleness, a truth, with which I ought to be in conformity, which would work in me not the abstinence from such crimes merely, but all the acts by which mankind and the earth are blessed? Whence are these? Did civilization give them? Do not they constitute civilization? Is not civilization apart from them a name and a fiction, or else a synonym for the habits that weaken and impair manliness, courage, the reverence for women, sincerity, justice? Whence then are these? Is there not, must there not be a Father of Spirits from Whom they issue forth, in Whom they dwell perfectly, absolutely? Is there not One Who is Justice, Righteousness, Truth, Love? I will arise and go to Him, and say, ‘If Thou art, teach me of Thyself. Teach me whether it is true, as I am told in a book which my parents revered, that Jesus Christ the Righteous, the Gentle, the Faithful, is Thy Son, and that He is my Lord, the Lord and Head of every man. Teach me whether it is true that I am created in Him to be holy and unblamable before Thee in Love, and that we are redeemed by Him to be Thy servants and to fight Thy battles in the world. And if this be so—seeing that this battle is going on in the world and in me, and that without Thee I must be worsted in it,—seeing that I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee in my outward acts and in my inner life—teach me whether Thou dost indeed quicken us with Thy Spirit of Truth and Righteousness, and whether Thou hast promised that all fires which try us most here shall be purifying fires, to overcome that in us and in the universe which is contrary to Thy Will, and destructive of our peace.’”

Thus, I believe, may the universal doctrine of optimism, being changed into the belief of a Father Who is Light and in Whom is no darkness at all, be reconciled with and confirmed by all those individual experiences which seem at first to contradict it. For there is no experience so individual as that of moral evil; when we feel that we need such a God as Jesus Christ has revealed to us to be a deliverer from that, we know that what is most blessed for the world is most blessed also for us.

III. But how can such words as these help us to understand the evil acts which we are to confess this day? My brethren, if we consider first what good we have already derived from the events of the last three months, what kind of compensation there has been to us for the unspeakable calamities we have gone through, and may still go through, I think we shall find an answer to this question also. Since we have had any possessions in India, has there ever been a time in which we have felt ourselves so closely bound to our fellow-citizens there as since the commencement of this mutiny? You talk of steam and of telegraphs as helping to annihilate space and time, but what have they done towards uniting the poorest peasants in England with those now fighting and perishing in a world thousands of miles away, like the crimes of the Sepoys? Here is a good—a good which may pass away,—which will pass away, unless we make an effort to preserve it, but which is itself quite immeasurable.

There has been, no doubt, a mixture of feelings, but on the whole, the sense of a common humanity which has been awakened at home, even where it has merely taken the form of rage and horror at inhumanity, is something for which we should heartily give thanks.

And by that good, judge of the wrong that there has been in us. With all the connection which has been between us and India,—with all the responsibilities which we have in words confessed, how little have we actually known of its people and its doings! how little of the work which our own countrymen are doing or might do there! We have clear proof that no mercantile associations or interests will create the living sympathy which should exist, I do not say now, between us and the natives of any country we conquer, but between us and our own people who go forth to take any part in the government or defence of it. Commerce may be a glorious means of strengthening human ties if they exist, but commerce will not call them into existence; it may even hinder them from coming into existence.

And what does make it live and keep it alive? The acknowledgment of brotherhood must start from the acknowledgment of Fatherhood. If we believe that we have a Father Who has as much to do with one latitude as with another, Who has established a Family which He means to fill the earth, Who has made us one body in His Son,—then there is an extinction of time and space which no electricity can cause; then we may appropriate even in a wider sense than that in which he meant them, the words of the German patriot poet, and say that wherever God in heaven is praised in our tongue, there is the Englishman’s fatherland.

Before, then, we find any fault with the Company or with the Government, let us arise and go to our Father this day, and say: “Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, in that I have been indifferent to the well-being and well-doing of my fellow-countrymen and countrywomen in India; in that I have not cared for those who are struggling bravely for the honour of the English name, and of justice and truth there; in that I have not helped to strengthen their arms, or to make them wiser and better if they were doing amiss. And I confess that by these miseries and punishments Thou art calling me to repentance for this sin, reminding me that I can only be faithful to Thee in England when I remember that England has had a mighty empire committed to her, for which she must render an account to Thee.”

But that empire includes Hindoos and Mussulmans, as well as British subjects; the mutineers, as well as the victims. We are all, I suppose, agreed that for the sake of the first as much as of the last we must struggle to keep that empire. The question is not now how we came by the possession, not even whether we have a commercial interest in retaining it. Other nations, if they question our original title, if from any secondary reasons they wish our power weakened, feel that we shall be traitors to the cause of humanity if we do not exert ourselves to the utmost, that those who have outraged it may be righteously punished, that the land may not be left to their mercy. This, I say, we must do; not because we regard Asiatics with the scorn and hatred which has been sometimes expressed for them recently, but because we regard them as made in the image of God, as intended by Him to share all the blessings that belong to Europeans. We cannot teach them of His true nature if we do not show them that He is a God Who maketh inquisition for blood; Who must have the land purged which has been defiled with it; Who, of old, destroyed cities where horrid crimes had been committed, and destroys them now. To make the forgiveness of God—and we are to forgive as He forgives, and only as He forgives—into tolerance of evil, is to pervert its nature fatally. The forgiveness which does not hate crime and seek for the extinction of it, which shrinks from the punishment of the crime, is devilish forgiveness, not Divine.

But if what is meant is that we ought not only to assert one part of the Divine character, but the whole of it, in our conduct to Hindoos and Mussulmans,—if it is meant that we have to answer for much of their inhumanity because we have not made them understand that the God Whom we worship is a Father, that we believe He has united Himself to man, and has redeemed mankind in His Son,—this I indeed believe,—this I would make a great subject of our confessions to-day. I do not think it is the business of the clergy to be bringing bitter accusations against the Company or the Government because they have not done more to favour the spread of Christianity in Hindostan. I think we should rather be questioning ourselves whether we have been cultivating in our flocks, cultivating in our hearts, such a faith in Christ as will reform men and subdue the nations. When He stood on the mountains of Galilee, in the sight of the fishermen who were to be His messengers to the world, He did not say, “Go, and make them Galileans like yourselves.” He did not say, “Go, and convert them from their religions to another religion.” He said this: “All power is given Me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. And, lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world.” When we understand the length and breadth of this commandment; when we understand that the Son of Man has declared the Father to men, has established a Family in which every man has a right, has given us His own spirit, that we may be delivered from all partial and narrow notions which separate us from one another, and that we may be capable of showing forth the truth and charity of Him with Whose name we are sealed; then indeed we may find fault with Governments if they hinder us from proclaiming tidings which will be so mighty a help in removing the greatest difficulties in their own administration—the oppositions and antipathies of races and classes, the insincerity and brutality which makes intercourse impracticable and punishment inevitable. But when we are possessed and penetrated with such a faith as this, we shall not spend our time so idly as in complaining of even the Governments that are most resolute to obstruct its progress. We shall remember that the whole powers of the Cæsars were found feeble before the words of a Jewish tent-maker. We shall be sure that no power can be matched against His Who rules in both worlds. But so long as we think of Christianity chiefly as a Western or English religion, which is to drive out different Asiatic religions, so long I think it is good for us to find lions in our path of proselytism. God, and not man, has put them there. He is teaching us that such proselytism is not what He demands of us, because it is not what will make the people He has committed to us a wise and righteous people. And He calls upon us to say to Him to-day: “Father, we have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, in that we have taken so poor a measure of that Gospel by which Thou hast built up a Christendom in this Western world, and hast converted our fathers from brutes into men. We have sinned against Thee, in that we have not taught our sons, whom we have sent forth to trade or to rule in any province of our empire, that they are servants of the Son of Man, and therefore are to treat all men as His brethren and theirs. We have sinned, and we pray that these tremendous conflicts we are passing through may be effectual in bringing us all to a better mind; that the sight of acts of horrible inhumanity may drive us to seek for the deep root of all the humanity which is or ever has been in the earth; that the more we find men bowing to false and evil gods, the more we may shrink from any conception of Thee, but that which we derive from the perfect Image of Thyself which Thou hast set before us in Jesus Christ.”

IV. I have already anticipated much that I meant to have said about our duties and our hopes in time to come. And here again I would remember the exact words of my text: “I will arise and go to my Father;” I would dwell upon what each may do, rather than upon the obligations—solemn as they are—that devolve upon our rulers. We heard a proverb last Sunday which was current in the minds of the Israelites during the Captivity: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The prophet Ezekiel delivered an elaborate discourse on that text. He showed that the sour grapes of the fathers need not set any child’s teeth on edge; that the sins of the ancestor might be most blessed and effectual warnings to the descendant. I suppose no proverb has been oftener applied in one form or another to our Indian dominion than this. “There was a wrong,” it has been said, “in our original occupation of the country. Each person taking a part in the affairs of the country has been obliged to enter into the wrong. We can only be robbers and aggressors: if we suffer at last, the entail of curses has been inevitable.” So statesmen, doctors, politicians, even, I fear, divines, have spoken. But never has the prophet’s doctrine been more fully borne out; never has the proverb been more signally refuted than by this very history of British India. No single man has gone forth with a determination, even with a desire, to do right and be right in any one office to which he has been appointed in that land, as civilian, military officer, chaplain, without finding that he was not committed to do evil by the acts of his forefathers; that he could confer unspeakable benefits on his fellow subjects and on natives; that he could bring home a wisdom and experience to enrich us. Many even who have started with no distinct purpose but that of advancing their fortunes, when great trusts have been committed to them, have recollected the traditions and laws of their country, the teachings of their fathers and mothers, and have been converted into noble and beneficial rulers. Nay, the crimes and oppressions which our servants have done in that land have been turned through God’s infinite mercy to our instruction, and have led us to reflect on the responsibilities of a mother country as we never reflected on them before; they have given a new character to our politics. The greatest of English statesmen may have pursued with too relentless an hostility one whom he regarded as the chief of delinquents; but what an epoch in our history is marked by his speeches on India! We pass to them from the records of Court and Cabinet intrigues, in which the early years of George III.’s reign were so abundant. It is like being transported at once from the noisomeness of a London alley to the free air of a Swiss mountain. And, remember, much of the good that has been done to India has been done in the very teeth of the superstitions which, it is said, we are under pledges to reverence. There are sacred theories about the causes of all physical phenomena: you trample upon those theories to teach the doctrines of Newton or Faraday. It is pollution and curse to touch a dead body: you have established schools of anatomy.

Why do I remind you of these things? Because they bear witness that wherever there is a clear conviction—wherever there is an honest purpose,—that conviction, that purpose makes its way, in spite of the sins of past generations of Englishmen, in spite of the ignorance and prejudices of their subjects. It is not a question how much we shall give, how much we shall withhold. What we really have we must give, it is not a matter of choice; that we cannot withhold. If we are Atheists, we shall make Hindoos and Mussulmans Atheists. The Shasters and the Koran will not hinder the work: they will adapt themselves to the Atheism or will succumb to it. If we believe that God is the Father of men in Christ Jesus, that He has redeemed mankind in His Son,—if we hold this faith as firmly as we hold the law of gravitation,—the Shasters and the Koran will be as little able to withstand it. But this faith will not deal as ruthlessly with them as the physical faith does. Whatever is healthy, moral, human in them, it will recognize, it will claim; only what is unhealthy, immoral, accursed, it will destroy.

You must be merely assertors of a Western, Teutonic, English supremacy, unless you go forth as children of God to claim children for Him, brethren for yourselves. India asks you to do that, lest she should lose all the new culture you have given her, in the barbarous passions which it has not been able to overcome; lest she should lose all her old better religious culture, in the utter denial of God or the utter worship of a devil. England asks you to do that, for the belief which we carry forth to the remotest boundary of her empire will be the belief that will save or ruin us at home. If we have not a humanity that is large enough for India, we have none that will keep us from sinking into cowardice, effeminacy, brutality in our own land. The God or the Devil we proclaim there will be the God or the Devil to whom we offer ourselves or our children here.

And oh! brethren, if these dire calamities should indeed be the means of establishing us in this faith of a Father, of making us true heralds of it, how should we cherish the memory, even if we know not the names, of those who have died to obtain us such a blessing! England may weep over her children because they are not, but they will have fallen as those children fell whom Herod slew, the witnesses and harbingers of a Redemption. Purged from all taint of earthly crime and pollution, their souls and their bodies will have been brought through much tribulation to join those who are crying under the altar for the deliverance of the earth from its oppressors. Though they were offered as sacrifices to devils, the incense of their sacrifice will ascend to God with that of the great sacrifice which was offered for the redemption and restoration of the universe.