# Sermons, Volume 2: A Modern Paraphrase

*Sermons, Volume 2, by Frederick Denison Maurice, restated paragraph by paragraph in modern English. This paraphrase follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. Drafted with claude-sonnet-5; reviewed by a human editor.*

## First Sunday after Easter

> "*Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ*."—[Romans]{.smallcaps} v. 1.

In the Collect for today, the belief that Christ rose for our justification is made the ground for a prayer that we may put away malice and wickedness and serve God in pureness of living and truth. In my text, the same belief is said to be the ground of peace. Are we not tempted to think that the doctrine of justification by faith has actually made men careless about wickedness, and has bred wars rather than peace? These suspicions deserve serious examination. I begin with the last. I am convinced that wars, within and without, in individuals and nations, have indeed been connected with this faith. I do not see how it could have been otherwise, nor do I wish it had been otherwise; I cannot see how the peace the Apostle speaks of could have been won any other way.

Suppose a superior Being sent men this message: "I will surround you with every possible pleasure and remove every possible pain while you sojourn on earth." Would this be the message of peace man needs? No—for man has proved, by long experiment, that he can turn felicities into curses for himself, and that if left to himself he will do so. The history of the world, especially of those lands where nature has been most generous, is little else than a demonstration of this. We might imagine that where there was nothing to spur exertion, man could at least fully enjoy mere physical existence. But it is not so. A man sunk into a beast cannot even have the beast's ease, any more than its innocence. In his lowest depth some dim consciousness of something higher keeps him restless; the animals he cannot tame become his oppressors, and some of his own race, having kept their strength, enslave the rest. Deliverance from present pain, an overflow of present pleasure, was known even to the ancients to be no security of peace—not even its temporary gift.

What if the immediate gift becomes a promise instead—if deliverance from sorrow lies only in the future? No doubt teaching a man to look forward does him real good, raising him above a mere animal. So it is no wonder people have praised the benefit of expecting another life, of hoping for its blessings, of the providence a man learns when taught how to escape some distant evil. There is no exaggeration possible in such claims. But there may be fatal omissions that turn the promise into something worse than mockery. The argument for a future state, as Butler showed so well, rests on our sense that whatever is, continues, unless proved otherwise; and there is no proof that death interrupts existence. If not, belief in this life implies belief in another. But what continues? It is I—the same self that death cannot dissolve, who remains when everything about me is destroyed. What use is it to tell me of future bliss or misery, if my own heart tells me I shall be the same self, still capable of making a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell? A futurity of bliss or misery brings me no peace unless you first tell me something about myself now—unless you can show me how I may escape a perpetual war within. And that message must be a present one, not merely something to come. Providence against future evils may be desirable, but what good is it if I myself am the great evil I need delivering from? Hope may be the noblest possession—but what can I hope for, if my own being is my continual torment?

Perhaps these questions seem mere abstractions to you. I believe I am bringing them to the very point where they become practical—where they cease to be playthings for logicians and become mighty forces in the hearts of individuals and the destinies of nations. We speak of the glorious Reformation of the sixteenth century. Do we know that it began and grew into a fact of European history because a poor solitary monk was taught that he himself was the cause of all his anguish, and that no message from God or man could bring him peace unless it told him how to be delivered from the burden of himself? This monk learned in his cell that no grant of present or future felicity, no remission of penalties, could avail him anything unless he were raised to new ground—unless there were clear, authentic testimony he could not deny: "Thou art a right and true man; God accounts thee so; it is no delusion; it is certain."

Luther had done fewer of what are called evil acts than most men, yet found no comfort in that. He had tried to do more good acts than most—but were they good? Did they spring from a good root, or from a very evil one—contrivances to escape the wrath of a Being he disliked, from whom he was fleeing, whom he wished did not exist? Then the old words of his childhood—that God is the forgiver of sins, the justifier, who sent His Son to reconcile man to Himself—struck him with a revelation of the proud, dark self-will that had turned a God of Mercy into a Devil in his mind. And he found in this Epistle to the Romans that St. Paul, fifteen centuries before, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, had passed through the same struggle: that in himself dwelt no good thing; that he had cried, "Who shall deliver me from this body of death?"; that he had received Christ's resurrection as testimony that God had justified him and did not impute his trespasses to him; that this faith had made him another man, able to trust and love God instead of hating Him; that it had made him know he really was what God declared him—righteous in God's righteousness, able to rise above his own contentious, hateful self, and to claim the humble true life that is in Christ Jesus. What Paul had done, Luther could do: believe God was what He declared Himself to be, cease fighting Him, abandon the lie that enslaved him, and lay hold of the truth that set him free.

This was for himself. But then he heard of a man going about Germany selling indulgences for past, present, and future sins. It was not chiefly that the man's language was brutal and blasphemous—that was only fitting to the doctrine—nor even chiefly that he sold indulgences for money, proof though that was that he and his masters worshipped Mammon rather than God. The whole horror, to Luther, was that the man preached indulgence and not forgiveness: removal of the penalty of deeds, not deliverance from the sin at their root; ease for the sinner, not his justification, not his being made truly righteous. It was the Gospel that there is real deliverance from sin, from selfishness, from distrust and hatred of God, and a real righteousness men may put on instead of the false self-righteousness that is only another name for untruth and hatred—it was this Gospel that went through Europe, subduing multitudes of suffering hearts, shaking thrones that stood not on righteousness, and producing all the good effects of the Reformation—effects distinct from the intrigues of princes, the greed of nobles, the arrogance of doctors, and the bitterness of sects. These latter did infuse themselves into it and introduce a new kind of war, as contrary to peace with God as to peace among men, because they aimed at a false, artificial peace, substituting another doctrine for the one in my text.

That text seemed to Luther and his hearers the announcement of the one fact a human conscience most needed. "Being justified by faith we have peace with God" expressed, they said, all that sinful creatures most needed to understand. If that view was too narrow, it was still far truer than the moderate, qualified views sometimes put in its place. It is a sign of weakness, I suspect, rather than breadth, to treat with contempt even the most vehement language our forefathers used on this subject. For the principle by which a man is at peace with his Creator, and therefore with himself, is certainly declared here if anywhere. It is worth examining each word closely, to see what it must have said to others, and what it says to us.

I. The common meaning given to "justified" may not be all St. Paul intended, nor all we need see in it—but it has great worth, and no one has a right to set it aside until he has fully searched it out; nor, having searched it, will he want to go deeper until he has grasped what lies on the surface. By justified, people understand acquitted. I would not fault such an explanation as merely forensic here. Legal language is right for you to use, to a great extent; members of a profession should not rashly discard its tools, but should treat them as aids to moral and spiritual education, always finding the passage—there always is one—from professional formulas to human truth. The error of divines, I think, has been in not adhering as strictly as St. Paul does to the true idea of acquittal. St. Paul never forgets—nor, I think, did Luther, whatever terms he used—that a man is acquitted of a charge, not of a penalty. By staying true to the legal sense of the word, the Apostle stays true also to its moral sense. It is the burden of an accusing conscience, the guilt resting on the man himself, from which he craves to be justified. St. Paul says God does justify him from this—does not impute sin to him. But how can this be, given Paul's insistence, against the Jew, that all God's judgments are true, with no respect of persons, no fiction? If a man is a sinner and feels himself one, how can it be true to pronounce him not a sinner? St. Paul resolves this paradox, having first found the answer as it bore on his own being: "In me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing. I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. I feel myself a sinner, for I am utterly a sinner apart from Him in whom all righteousness dwells. God accounts me righteous, for He does not look on me apart from Him in whom He created me; He does not view me in the false way I view myself. He does not treat me as what, in my proper state united to Christ, I am not; He treats me as what, in that proper state, I am. He justifies me, and His judgment is according to truth: He holds me righteous because He has made me so." I have not departed from the ordinary force of the word—I have vindicated it. But I have also claimed for it its natural, etymological sense: the justified man is not only acquitted, not only accounted righteous, but, strictly, made or become righteous.

II. So we feel the force of the next words, "being justified by *faith*." St. Paul has spoken throughout his epistle of God as the just and righteous Justifier—this is the characteristic language of the whole letter, without which its statements become incoherent. But because God is the Justifier, who accounts and makes man righteous, a man is justified by faith. He believes God is such a Being as He has shown Himself to be, not as he had imagined—that God wills his righteousness and salvation, not, as he had thought, his destruction; that God's righteousness is his protection, not the witness against him and ground of his curse; that what God curses is not himself but his enemy, the evil nature tempting him to think it his own. He believes this witness God has given in His Son, and so has faith in what God has done and is. Only by this faith is he justified from his sins—for losing it, he can only think of himself as a separate, accursed creature, and act accordingly. Only by it is he righteous, for only by it does he claim relation to the righteous One and rise out of his own nature. Having faith in God, he becomes a true man; otherwise he has only the torments of a man joined to the instincts of an animal.

III. Being justified by faith, we have *peace*. The nature of the blessing is understood through the process that leads to it. Peace is not something a man holds as his possession. The poor Augustinian monk kept trying to catch and keep it, and the harder he tried, the further it fled—every contrivance to procure it reminded him of himself, and himself was his enemy. When he forgot his misery, it was because he forgot himself. Where could he learn to forget himself perpetually? If that were possible, there might be peace. But could he lose self-consciousness except in death—and even in death, would it not rather mean losing the things that had diverted and soothed him, like the ocean nymphs who soothed Prometheus with their forms and songs, until he was left alone with only the vulture? No, peace in death he could not dream of; what he carried within him was death, and it was death he cried to be delivered from. Peace must come by rising into life. And here it was: being justified by faith, having his trust and life in another, the war was over because its cause was removed. He no longer struggled to make himself something he could not be, no longer twined ropes of sand at a demon's bidding; he could stop thinking about himself and trust himself to God, stop plotting how to please Him, knowing self-willed effort never can please a Father, and that pleasing Him means compliance and submission—believing He is perfectly gracious, and asking Him to make us like Himself. To think this Peace is won by one momentary act of belief and thereafter guaranteed as the believer's property is to subvert the whole doctrine.

No doubt the discovery that God is not an oppressor but a justifier can burst upon a man all at once, transporting him into unimagined joy. Shame at having doubted such love may mingle with that joy, deepening rather than lessening it. This union may rightly be called Conversion, a word both Romanist and Protestant divines have taken from the Bible. No greater revolution in a man's inward life is conceivable than learning that the object of his greatest dread is his refuge and high tower. But such a Conversion means he has turned to a Friend from whom he was fleeing, has ceased boasting of any spiritual quality of his own, and has acknowledged that all human qualities are only reflections of one whose ground is in God and is perfectly shown in the Divine Mediator. If, then, under pretence of believing, he claims some possession that sets him apart from others, he denies the very meaning of faith and re-establishes the self-righteousness he claimed to abandon—and his life will testify to the delusion he practises on himself. All earnest teachers of Justification by faith have confessed that peace was theirs only when they gave up all thought of having acquired or earned anything; that they continually forgot the ground of their trust, sank back into self-will, and needed sharp reminders—sharp, yet still from a loving Parent—that they could have no other peace than what any man may have who finds God's will to be good and ceases to fight it. The peace in the text, then, as needed in actual life, is peace with God. There is no abstract peace; it must be between parties with some natural relationship. Here it means the ending of hostility between parties unnaturally opposed. Peace with God means reconciling a man either with a Being who has cast him off, or with a Being he himself has cast off. Which of these it is, the whole Epistle to the Romans is written to explain. Man supposes God has cast him off and that he must win back favor; the Bible says man has cast off God, and God seeks to bring him into union with Himself. All other differences trace to this one. The deliverance from malice and wickedness we prayed for today is not the fruit of a faith that glorifies itself and leads us to despise unbelievers—more malice and wickedness have flowed from that self-glorifying faith than from any other source; it is the leaven of hypocrisy we most need to fear. Nor does the service of God in pureness flow from such faith; it is fatal to it. Precisely because God is pure and true, we cannot serve Him while nursing that faith—it makes us shrink from His purity, and makes us treat Christ as one who hides us from His Truth rather than as the Image of that Truth who brings us into it.

IV. So we come to the last words: "Through Jesus Christ our Lord." Every man asks: How can I myself be at peace with God? Whatever is said of the world at large, he needs an answer that meets his own case, explains his own condition, and would hold even if he were alone in creation. It is a demand divines often dismiss as monstrous, throwing us back on generalities—but there is no escaping it. Each man stands out in awful distinctness and says, "I, even I, must stand before Eternity, before God; tell me how." St. Paul's answer is: God has made peace with you through Jesus Christ. In Him God has shown what He is; in Him God sees you. You may see God in Him; you may rise to be a new creature in Him. For you are not the separate atom you suppose, unrelated to any other being; you have wonderful affinities with all beings around you, and when driven by your own wretchedness to trust the One who has taken your nature upon Him, you will discover that secret as well as the secret of your own deliverance.

I have a right to say this, for we have not exhausted the Gospel of Christ merely by preaching this great doctrine of the individual conscience's justification. There is a Catholic side of the Gospel as well as a Protestant one—a side concerning Society as well as one concerning each of us. We Englishmen must recognize both. The circumstances of this age demand we face the social question as much as the personal one. But we do no justice to one truth by letting go the other, nor strengthen one by weakening the other. We need both at full strength in our daily battles with ourselves, both that we may be freed from malice and wickedness, both that we may have full peace with God and with our fellow men, through our Lord Jesus Christ.

## Second Sunday after Easter

*The passage:* "And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body."

Justification was the subject of last Sunday's Collect; Christ's Sacrifice is the subject of today's. Both connect to the Resurrection and to human life and morality. Justification concerns the peace of the individual conscience; Sacrifice concerns the peace to which we are called in one body. They must not be confused, but they cannot be separated either. The Romanist error merges Justification into Sacrifice, making what was done for the whole family a hindrance to the individual's faith. The Protestant error merges Sacrifice into Justification, making one man's private assurance the measure of what was done for all. Each has largely failed by neglecting the other: the Romanist has had to invent comforts for the individual conscience that destroy the universal character he prizes; the Protestant has had to meet the social craving with expedients that make his promise of peace to the individual hollow.

I spoke last week of how the Protestant truth of Justification by Faith arose in men raised within a society they believed Catholic and Divine. They had done and believed what their system required, yet both drove them to despair; trying to become righteous awakened in them a sense of unrighteousness. Their profession of a completed salvation only made them ask how they, personally, were saved from the ruin they found themselves in. The doctors had no answer, but the Creed did: believe in the forgiveness of sins, believe in Christ the Forgiver. They believed, and rose new men — free of the guilt that had driven them to superstition and had blocked all true thankfulness and obedience. Now they could serve God as a reconciled Father, in purity and truth.

Those were sixteenth-century experiences — are they not good for the nineteenth too? I say yes: we are the same kind of men as our fathers, sinning as they did, feeling evil as truly as they did, needing the same emancipation through faith in God the Justifier, with Christ's resurrection witnessing that Justification now as then. To despise the Reformers for what they went through is to despise St. Paul for the same experience, to despise what is deepest and truest in ourselves, and to despise what has kept Europe from utter immorality and atheism.

But I cannot deny other experiences pressing on us just as forcibly. People raised in a Protestant atmosphere, taught from childhood that faith alone saves, taught to view the church that supposedly denies this doctrine with horror — as enemy of the Bible, tyrannical, idolatrous — such people have begun to murmur, quietly at first, that this belief does not in fact give them peace of conscience; then to suspect that such peace is promised only to "one body," as my text says; then to ask, with a doubt that turns into indignation, whether we, with our divisions and uncertainties and lack of authoritative decrees, belong to that body at all; then to marvel at the grandeur of the Latin Church — its long history, strange coherence, mighty influence, grand ceremonial, roll of saints, confessional, its perpetual sacrifice offered for the world; then finally to declare that all this can only be explained by a common centre of light and wisdom at Rome, and that no blessing we have lost, individual or national, can be restored until we acknowledge that centre and make our various systems revolve around it.

You know that such feelings have been alive among us for years, in minds of every kind — imaginative and logical, skeptical and credulous alike — mixed in with traits of an age we'd think most hostile to them. What looks today like vanity or affectation may tomorrow appear alongside earnestness, humility, self-sacrifice. In any case these feelings are producing serious consequences both in those drawn to them and those repelled by them, and cannot be ignored by anyone who cares for the peace of hearts, families, English society, or Christendom.

Not ignored — but how should they be handled? By stifling them? Solemn denunciation? Ridicule? Half-concessions to placate them? Distraction with trifles? All these have been tried, and are still being tried. I believe they will fail exactly as the same methods failed in the sixteenth century against the thoughts then convulsing men's minds and threatening society. There were strong reasons then for such tactics, reasons that moved good men like Sir Thomas More as much as arrogant doctors and papal schemers. Might not old loyalties be dissolved by these doubts? Might not thousands be set adrift without chart or compass? Were not many of the objections untenable, many of the objectors frivolous? It seemed natural to conclude: persuade the persuadable to contentment, offer the half-sincere something resembling satisfaction, and crush with power those who won't be quieted and won't accept half-measures.

Weak reasoning, poor philosophy. It could not succeed, because those who tried it were fighting not men but God. He had awakened these cries for justification and peace; only He could answer them. They might disturb Church, schools, or nations, but no pope, doctor, or king could suppress them — because none of the three could survive without them. Unbelief would have extinguished the Church, earnest thought would have died in the schools, and the crudest statecraft would have quenched the nations' life, had a false peace been achievable by any of their acts.

Why should things be different now? Why might not these longings for a Universal Church — which we sometimes read as rebellion, sometimes as danger to freedom — be exactly the instrument God is using to lead us to a higher obedience and a truer liberty? Why is it less dangerous now than then to dismiss these longings as fanciful or utopian? Why might it not be our duty and our interest to understand fully what this thirst in men's hearts means, and what contentment God has provided for it, so that we do not seek to quench it at earthly springs that give only death, not life?

We often resort to certain stock arguments to cure this state of mind, which only reveal our failure to understand it and our readiness to borrow Romanism's own pious frauds against it. One such argument: in every age there have been protesters against the evils of the visible Church, and these constituted the true spiritual Church, fulfilling God's promise that it would never perish. True enough as far as it goes — such protesters believed in an invisible God and trusted His power, treating outward forms only as tokens of His presence. But you must say more: what was the nature of their protest? Did it claim they alone possessed certain spiritual privileges, or that those they addressed shared those privileges and sinned in neglecting them? If the former, it's hard to see its reasonableness or who would heed it. If the latter — like the Old and New Testament protests against corrupt kings, priests, Scribes, and Pharisees — then it presupposes a Church already existing that day, with invisible foundation and invisible treasure. What, then, have you gained by making all church history merely an echo of this fact? The inquirer still asks: what is this body, with its sacraments and spiritual powers, of which these righteous men spoke as founded by God — while others were treating it merely as an earthly machine for their own advancement?

For the same reason, pointing to the great corruptions of the medieval Church, or any Church in any age, does not touch the heart of the matter. The facts should be stated exactly as they are, neither exaggerated nor softened, just as we would state facts about ancient Rome or Greece; instances of corruption should indeed be set against overblown pictures of past innocence or heroism. But we delude ourselves if we think this array of proofs establishes some great truth or corrects some deep error. Yes, there was gross corruption in the French or Italian Church of the twelfth or fourteenth century — but St. Paul shows gross corruption, in life and doctrine, in the Corinthian and Galatian churches of the first century too. The later evil may have been worse — likely it was, though we aren't the judges — but if you grant corruption of any degree in bodies St. Paul calls elect, called, sanctified, then — unless you insist his inspired words don't mean what they seem to mean — you must admit a holy body can go on existing even while many of its members act unholily. And if you like facts, here is one: every attempt to make bodies holy by cutting off their supposedly unholy parts has failed more thoroughly the more persistently it was pursued.

If these arguments have proved ineffectual, we can trust even less the feeble attempt to satisfy men's craving for a universal, united Church by offering a more brilliant ceremonial, or an appearance of uniformity with no substance behind it.

It would be rash to dogmatize about how far spiritual worship is helped or hindered by appeals to the senses — much depends on national and personal temperament. There's room for charity in bearing with unfamiliar practices we suspect of excess or deficiency, and for self-denial in giving up what we value, or adopting what we dislike, for a brother's conscience. If we are possessed by spiritual truths, we will eventually find fitting ways to express them through outward forms. But whatever such forms are worth, they can never satisfy a spirit genuinely troubled by these doubts. Such a spirit may embrace them eagerly for a while, but will soon sicken of what will feel like dressing up a corpse; it will say we are transplanting symbols that are precious elsewhere only because of the truth embodied in them — that what is wanted is the truth itself; that what we have lost is not the forms signifying sacrifice but the sacrifice itself; that uniformity cannot be recovered until we have the unity it signifies — indeed, that having the one, we might tolerate variations in the other. These are grave claims, whose force has little to do with the rhetoric sometimes used to state them, or the bitter scorn some who make them show toward their own past, and toward friends who still hold to it. We need not fear the rhetoric; we may regret the scorn, more for those who indulge it than for its targets — but the underlying testimony, the appeal to what we truly lack, we must take seriously and learn from.

1\. We are told we want a Church of God, not of Man. Yes — that is our want, the want of Englishmen, of people everywhere. Whatever we say, we have believed in a Church resting on some human foundation, authority, or name — and it will not do. We feel it will not: there is no peace on that ground, not with each other, not in our own consciences. We must have a Church resting in the Name of God alone.

2\. Such a Church, it's said, must be one and indivisible. Certainly. If it rests on God's Name, not ours, with Christ the Son of God as its foundation and cornerstone, then it is one — eternally, absolutely, necessarily. Nothing can divide it; no power of hell can prevail against it.

3\. But, you say, such a Church actually exists — in the first ages, the Middle Ages, before and during the Reformation, and now. Quite so. No doctrine is more comforting, more delightful, and more in accord with fact and our ordinary language — the language we use when not theorizing. This Church has existed since the Gospel was first preached; the forms and creeds across Europe testify to a Church of which Latins, Greeks, bond and free were all equally members.

4\. But a Church that is one and indivisible must have an infallible guide. Certainly, no other will do. "Yes, but not an infallible book — an infallible Person." Even so. Unless Christ Himself is present with His Church, guiding it, no book or minister can help at all. If His guidance is imaginary rather than real — if it isn't guidance of Reason, Will, thought, and heart's instinct, which no one else can know or see into — then the idea of a Church is a dream. And it is equally a dream that there is any common human thought or literature at all. We have a common life and mind only because there is one Living Word who is Head and Teacher of us all; without Him the universe is an unsolvable riddle.

5\. "But a Church requires a Sacrifice — one that actually unites man to God and actually removes sin." Even so. I can conceive no other foundation for a Church. No Church can sustain fellowship among its members or produce sound Christian morals without a Divine Sacrifice at the root of all human life and the spring of all human action.

6\. "And this Sacrifice should mean a universal Communion of men of every kindred and age, of the living and the dead." Surely — the New Testament says as much: we come to an innumerable company of angels, the spirits of just men made perfect, God the Judge of all, Jesus the Mediator, the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than Abel's. Can language reach higher? Must not communion in Christ's body and blood mean this, or nothing?

7\. "But besides this, the Church must have power to absolve men's consciences." What else does the Church exist for, as far as men are concerned, but to set consciences free from their chains? What greater failure could there be than neglecting this office — what greater sin than forging chains instead of breaking them?

I have gone through the main claims commonly made about a Church, and admitted the truth of them all — not as a lazy concession. All these claims should frighten us, shame us, bring us to repentance before God. It is a fair and established charge that we have forgotten every one of these marks of a Church — lived and argued as if no such body existed, even built arguments on denying it could exist. We must confess this solemnly — indeed, every prayer should renew the confession. But what confession? Not that we are not yet members of such a Church, and might become so by some act of separation from the one established in our land — that would be an easy, self-justifying confession. It must be far more humbling: the admission that we are already actual members of just such a catholic, holy, united Society, under infallible guidance, resting on an atoning sacrifice, demanding daily self-sacrifice, implying communion with all in heaven and earth, offering emancipation to our own consciences and our brothers' — and that instead we have shut ourselves up in narrow selfishness, following our own guidance or some weak fellow-creature's, acknowledging in practice no atonement between earth and heaven, keeping fettered, guilty consciences, doing nothing to loose the yoke from our brothers' necks. What fruit should come from such confession and repentance? Should it be acknowledging the Roman Bishop as the Church's centre? No — if it is to be a Universal Church, we cannot narrow it to his measure or bind it by his Latin rules. If it needs infallible direction, we cannot submit to his fallible one. If it rests on a sacrifice made once for all, we cannot found it on his notion of an incomplete sacrifice that priests must complete. If we assert freedom of conscience, we cannot yield to one who exists to enslave it. But this will be the true fruit of confession and repentance: we may tell all men, of every nation and Church, to claim the liberty Christ has given them, the full unity they have in Him their ascended Head, the perfect communion they may share in His Sacrifice. This is our duty and our reward — to tell ourselves and all men that we are called to Peace in one body, and so may let that Peace, the Peace of Christ, rule in all our hearts.

## Third Sunday after Easter

*The passage:* "Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent."

Two Sundays ago I spoke on the strength of the Protestant principle; last Sunday, on the strength of the Catholic principle. What was the first? If we take the leader of the German Reformation as our standard—and we should, since no teacher has had so great an influence—Protestantism meant the individual conscience demanding peace and reconciliation with God, and demanding deliverance from anything, inward or outward, that interfered with that reconciliation and with a life built upon it. "God has justified me, a sinner, has made peace with me. No doctors, no ecclesiastical authority, no fears of my own heart, no memory of past evil, no sense of present evil, no conspiracy of dark powers, shall take that peace from me. I may believe in God the Justifier against all these. I must believe, or I sink into sin, death, hell." This was Luther's proclamation; this is living Protestantism. By its nature it resists dilution and clever compromise, and history proves it does: every attempt to soften it, however skilfully or charitably managed, has failed—pleasing only those who wanted an excuse for indifference, while the rest held their convictions and threw the compromises to the winds.

How was it with the other principle? We need not look abroad: here at home are cries for Catholic unity, guidance, absolution, sacrifice, sympathy with departed saints, hope for those who are not saints. Mixed with vanity and confusion as these cries are, no contempt puts them down. Mere token concessions, accepted gratefully one moment, are cast aside indignantly the next. Men sacrifice self-interest and old loyalties to get what looks like satisfaction of these cravings; some are even tempted by the half-belief that a certain Church holds what they seek to accept dogmas they hope one day not to think false. You may say the sixteenth century was an age of strong belief and exclusiveness, but here in the nineteenth, an age of trade and weak belief and desire for comprehension, you meet tendencies just as unwilling to be balanced or blended as those apparently most opposed to them.

Such a conclusion is disheartening, especially to members of the English Church, since many of our divines have held that we occupy a position which, on this showing, cannot be maintained—a view supported not only by theology and by the history of our Reformation and polity, but by that English instinct which feels there is something to be said on each side of a dispute, and that the truth lies not strictly with either but in a judgment weighing both. This temper favours compromise for a time, but being practical and impatient of anything merely on paper, it soon tires of arrangements that do not actually bring people into agreement—and then listens readily to those who explain why the Church of our fathers cannot do what it claims to do. "The Protestant," say the English sects almost in one breath, "has an intelligible position: he lets each of us judge for ourselves. The Roman Catholic has an intelligible position: he demands unlimited submission. You have none. You plead for freedom of thought against Romanists, and for the Church's right to decree belief against Protestants. The reason is plain: you will not simply call yourselves a sect with bishops ruling it, standing on our level and claiming our rights; instead, being a State-Church claiming rights above all other sects, and unwilling to admit these came by mere Acts of Parliament, you cling to notions of prescription and authority that belong properly to Rome, and that condemn your separation from her." I state briefly arguments capable of endless variation and illustrated from every country where the State does or does not recognize a Church.

These opinions find support from another quarter, little sympathetic to Nonconformist reasoning. The men of progress say: "Bare Protestantism tends to advance—it has shed Luther's fetters; the Bible is no longer its watchword, and justification by faith now means something quite different than in the sixteenth century. Bare Catholicism, meanwhile, carries thoughts of a comprehensive Humanity, sometimes even fraternizing with Democracy; but for soldiers and kings, the thought pent up in the Church would burst its creeds, just as Protestantism's old symbols are already giving way. Both these systems, then, hold hope. But your Church is simply obstructive—clinging to the old faith in the Bible's dignity and the dogma of justification, and to the notion of a Church guiding the world's thought, while daily proving its incapacity for that work."

This charge of incapacity draws the sympathy of a third group as well—people less concerned with religious or philosophical debate than with the physical and moral misery of our people. Seeing the contrast between our material wealth, and still more our talked-of spiritual powers, and the actual condition of those for whom both were given, they cry bitterly: "We would not ask whether you call yourselves Protestant or Catholic if you were doing something to remove the evils around you and renew society. Whatever body can and will do that has the true marks of a Church. But one perpetually arguing about its own right to exist and to be obeyed inspires no reverence, and hardly seems to believe in the very powers it boasts of. A real ship on real waves is a fine sight; but what is a painted ship on a painted ocean?"

Those who on these various grounds condemn our position as false, or at best precarious, are earnest and often benevolent people. What of those who defend it? Are they equally in earnest? Do they know, or care, what they are defending? Is the Church as dear to them as their party or their club? Do they look to it for help or guidance, or merely expect it to keep the public in order by some magic while letting them do as they please? Many, I am sure, could answer honestly; something deeper than our words lies in all our hearts, or these words should make us shudder. Bitter rebukes or baseless slander that show some sense of the standard clergy ought to meet, and some feeling that the Church is a common refuge, are more welcome than compliments implying that evil is part of God's order and that His Church exists chiefly to guard its own privileges. Most dangerous of all is the notion that we are safest when Protestant and Catholic elements in our body are kept feeble, merely balancing each other—when in truth we need both at their fullest strength, that we may fulfil our task, keep what we have inherited, and remain a Nation and a Church at all.

So I take this afternoon the words once addressed to the Church of Sardis, one of seven. The writer of the Apocalypse lives among them, known as the beloved disciple, the last apostle—yet he claims no authority over them. He tells them of one living centre, the High Priest of the whole family, the source of light to each part and its teacher. Christ Himself speaks to each Church: warning it of its dangers, awakening it to its own calling, telling it that in overcoming its own temptations and doing its own work it enters fellowship with the whole society, with Him its Elder Brother, with the Father of all. He assures them of His presence and power; where He sees feebleness and heartlessness, as in Sardis, He foretells the outcome and calls to repentance. If the Gospel is not an idle tale, what was true then is true now: the Son of God and Man, once dead and now alive, is the centre of all the divided portions of the Church; their unity depends on acknowledging His presence, and to each portion He speaks words of strength, warning, or comfort. Are these not the words He speaks now to the Church of England: "Remember how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent"?

I. How have we received and heard? We sense something different in our position from other Churches—sometimes boasting of it, sometimes ashamed of it, but always aware it is a fact we cannot escape, along with the responsibility it lays on us. We received the Reformation in the sixteenth century, but England passed through that crisis differently from any Continental Church, whether it stayed obedient to Rome or threw off her yoke. The same craving for justification and peace was awake, equally unquenchable by divines or politicians—yet we all recognize that English sovereigns had a direct hand in the work, giving it a more national character. The king's emancipation from the Pope was its aim and result; a Bible and Common Prayers in the nation's own tongue followed as its signs and pledges. Alongside came more doubtful signs, such as the dissolution of the monasteries, which reveals both the national preference for practical, domestic life over the "religious" life opposed to it, and the fatal belief of the upper classes that wealth needed by the nation might fairly be seized for private gain.

Let all this be remembered, for us and against us. We received the Reformation under these mixed conditions; and long before, under conditions different but not wholly so, we had received the Gospel itself and the message of a Church—from the first a Gospel to the nation through its Kings, bound up with domestic life and Anglo-Saxon respect for women; from the first a message about a divine kingdom set up in the land, not about opinions. Our people were never deep in controversy but always vigorous in action, valuing thought for its results, better able to appreciate a ruler than a dogmatist, demanding to be treated as men, not things. They revered the past but discarded its traditions, reluctantly, when these hindered present business. They showed a fierce individualism that could turn to selfishness, but also a national feeling, sometimes exclusive and contemptuous, yet bound up with courage, manliness, and godliness. From this character and these circumstances came the preservation of our social order through every danger of that time: bishops lasted alongside kings, both tied to the nation's life. The Bible was received as a national book, teaching our relation to the King of whom David and Isaiah spoke, and God's government and judgment of England. The Prayer Book too was national, though not exclusively so, drawing on Greek and Latin sources from men who never spoke our tongue; yet it bound rich and poor together in the same praises, giving all a right to call God Father in Christ and to call themselves fellow-citizens of a heavenly kingdom.

II. These things we must remember. Must we also hold them fast? I believe so strongly. If we let go of them, or hold them with trembling hands, we cannot fulfil our trust, cannot do justice to the divided parties in our land, cannot reconcile them or unite them against what is destroying us, cannot show Romanists or Protestants abroad a way of peace. Even where I say it most reluctantly, I say it: our claim to be a State Church—holding a position different from others no worse than ourselves—how often one longs to be ashamed of it and abandon it, especially when it is used for boasting or contempt! How often it seems we would strengthen our cause by stripping it of every external advantage! But if this position, whatever we owe it to, however abused, lets us say to our countrymen, "We will not call you a sect, because we do not want you to think of yourselves as one; we want you to know you are members of a Church, of Christ, children of God—and we would rather bear the seeming humiliation of resting our cause on accidents we know in our hearts we do not really rest it on, than abandon even this insignificant height at the risk of making you think we defend a mere opinion, not a great truth in which you share as much as we"—then, so long as God gives no clear sign that He removes us from it, I believe our allegiance to Christ binds us to hold it fast.

Still more confidently I would hold fast the prayers, creeds, and catechism which the men of progress tell us to sacrifice to a general Humanity. For the sake of that very Humanity—which I believe is in danger of being trampled on, or reduced to an empty name—I would keep these treasures entrusted to us. I can believe in a universal Humanity while believing in Jesus Christ our Lord, born of the Virgin Mary, who suffered, was crucified, died, was buried, descended into Hell, rose again, sits at God's right hand, and will come to judge the living and dead. I can assert that Humanity in the very words of the Creed, against those who would separate believers from the rest of mankind, exalting the sect of Christians above the race that the Church, and Christ Himself, represents. But strip me of this faith, and "Humanity" becomes either an ideal never realized, or a sentiment for a few refined people, or simply the sum of all the world's sin and suffering.

Again, holding fast our Catechism, we can say to the Protestant: "We are poor logicians; we cannot follow your fine distinctions about Faith and Justification. But we are members of Christ; we believe He died for our sins and rose for our justification. Do you want some other faith, some other justification, not in Christ? We do not intend to seek one—we mean to hold this fast, certain it is what you want as well as we." And to the Romanist: "We are children of God, adopted into this universal family in His beloved Son, baptized with His Spirit. Is that not the family you belong to, the Spirit you are baptized with? It was the family of Bernard and Francis and Bonaventura. They confessed a Pope as you do, but they believed in Christ, claimed to be members of His body and sons of His Father; and the Spirit that let them look beyond themselves, their narrow opinions, and their age, uniting them still to every country and time, was the Spirit not of the Pope but of the Father and the Son. Seeking that together, you and I will have a unity no Pope ever gave even to his greatest admirers—a unity those who put him in God's place must lose entirely."

If the most resolute Protestant and the most resolute Catholic accept this justification and this unity, they can go together—in the strength of truths learned through their different, even contradictory, discipline, and in the strength of the truth that now binds them—to those perishing of excess and luxury, and to those perishing of toil, sorrow, and neglect, calling both to rise as men, casting away whatever has robbed them of manliness and freedom or kept them from sympathy with each other. They can tell both of their birthright, making them good citizens of a soil they had regarded only as revenue or grievance, and tell them of an incorruptible inheritance reserved for them at God's right hand. And why should not the same witness, in substance, be borne to all the peoples England rules or among whom her sons have settled—the witness of a kingdom of righteousness and truth, of which all kingdoms, so far as they practice righteousness and truth, are but images, and from which all their good and strength is derived?

III. But He who told Sardis to "remember and hold fast" also said "repent." We cannot heed the first command without the second. I have had to admit that the charges brought by all our opponents are true. We have turned the unsectarian position God gave us into a plea for sectarianism. We have treated the Bible not as the guide and lamp to our path, the awakener of understanding and affection, the witness to sound, manly, national morality, but as a book of dead sentences. We have not rejoiced in our common prayers as prayers that level us all before God, that let us plead for all and claim communion even with those furthest from us in opinion, that teach us to pray for mercy on all men and carry us beyond our own notions to the final triumph of good over evil; instead we have turned them into selfish prayers, excuses for self-glory, proofs of our difference from the rest of the world. We have not been valiant for God's truth, but merely clever at turning it into a see-saw of opposing notions—so we have been exciters of strife rather than peacemakers among those unwilling to abandon a partial belief for what looks to them like no belief at all. We have not taught tradesmen and politicians that cheating and lying destroy their own souls and the nation's soul. We have not preached a gospel to the poor, but let them think Christ came to bind chains on them rather than free them. We have not made worshippers of cruel and false gods understand that we are sent, in word and deed, to testify of a God of Truth and Love.

Nor should I forget that Christ's warnings of sin and coming judgment were addressed first to the angels of the Church. The ministers are treated as first in fault, and so must expect to be first in punishment, first called to repent, for themselves and for all. This lesson applies to our Church and age here too. How poor and useless, then, are any words of admonition from us! How much you need to hear not what we say but what the Spirit says to the Churches! And how impossible that any good should come to you, to us, or to the land, unless He who opens and none can shut, who shuts and none can open, in whose hand are the seven stars, from whose mouth comes the two-edged sword, has Himself been raised on high to give repentance to Israel—repentance to England—and the remission of all our sins!

## Fourth Sunday after Easter

*The passage:* Moses prays that God not destroy Israel, His people and inheritance, whom He redeemed and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. He asks God to remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and not look at the people's stubbornness, wickedness, and sin — lest Egypt say that the Lord brought them out only to kill them in the wilderness, because He could not bring them into the promised land, or because He hated them. Yet, Moses says, they are still God's people and inheritance, whom He brought out by His mighty power and outstretched arm.

This prayer brings out at its sharpest a contrast running through Deuteronomy and the whole Bible: the Israelites are God's people, His inheritance, redeemed by His hand — and they are stubborn, stiff-necked, wicked. We grow so used to passages containing both descriptions that we attach little meaning to either. When we study the history with real, practical interest, the sins denounced become plain enough, since they resemble our own. But while we dwell on those sins, how can we also think of this people as righteous, holy, chosen out of all the earth? The words come to feel technical in our minds. The holiness ascribed to the nation, we suppose, cannot be the same holiness ascribed to Moses, or Elijah, or Jeremiah — the word must carry a different force in each case. We are afraid to believe that Scripture's language is as strict and honest as the language of fallible men; by tampering with it a little we hope to avoid calling evil good and good evil.

This state of mind cannot be right. A seed of insincerity lies in it, bound to bear fruit later in contradictions of belief and conduct. It cannot be cured by stifling the doubts it breeds — those doubts will work their way into the innermost corners of our minds. So long as we suspect that Righteousness and Holiness are merely conventional words in the Bible, we will not regard the Bible as a true book, however much reverence we seem to pay it. We have every interest, then, in resolving this difficulty rather than glossing over it. It touches closely on what I have lately been discussing. Last Sunday I spoke of Christ's call to a Church to remember, hold fast, and repent, and applied it to the Nation and Church of England — Christ speaking to us as to the Sardians. I said that if we heeded this we might bind different classes together, reconcile some who are most hostile and suspicious of us, appeal to Protestants and Romanists alike, and make them fellow-workers instead of foes.

I knew this language would sound unreal to some whose faith and earnestness I would most wish to share fellowship with. "What," they will say, "do you mean by *national* righteousness, *national* repentance? We know something of *individual* righteousness and repentance. There was a time when visible things attracted us without limit, when we thought the highest end of life was to gain the largest share of them or the greatest enjoyment from them. These charms were taken away, or proved hollow. Vacancy and dreariness followed; then a vision of a higher good appeared. We tried to grasp it and could not. An evil in ourselves, till then hidden, was revealed to us. We cried to be delivered from it. At last we perceived that there was a Deliverer. We prayed to be admitted into His household, if only as menials, and learned that He was far more willing to grant that than we were to ask it."

These experimental records bear the clearest stamp of truth, and are as beautiful and comforting as they are true. They explain moral facts as scientific discoveries explain physical ones — facts we all want to understand, some almost desperately. But from them, it is supposed, we can deduce the nature of righteousness and repentance itself. Taking them as the starting point, it is concluded that a righteous *society* is one containing a great number of such righteous penitents. "Strictly, it should contain nothing else," it is said, "but that is an ideal we must do without here — a rough, distant approximation must satisfy us. A nation's sword may cut off its worst members, a Church's discipline may remove more; but those in direct personal relation with God, more than merely decorous, must remain an insignificant minority. The comfort is that, though of little account in men's eyes, they alone draw the Divine favor; for their sakes the whole order of Nature and policy of Nations is allowed to exist; and in time these will pass away, leaving the chosen Saints the sole possessors of blessings the ungodly had briefly seized."

That such conclusions about God's ways sound revolting at first, and clash with what we thought Scripture taught of His character, may be no reason to reject them or the facts behind them. But it would be a serious objection if they clashed with the principles and method of the very Book they claim as their authority. A little reflection, I think, will show that this is exactly the case.

One crucial contrast appears the moment we open Scripture: it is not the record of a man seeking God, but of God seeking men. Exodus gives us clear records of Moses' life, but no one could think its purpose was to be his biography. Moses is called out by God to know His name and do His work — that is his own account of himself. This was his holiness: he was set apart by God to be His minister. The One who set him apart revealed His own character to him, showing that Righteousness, not Self-Will, governs the universe. Moses was to display this Righteousness to his countrymen and to Pharaoh — to say that God had seen their affliction and heard their cry, and to command Pharaoh to let them go. Moses the righteous man cannot be separated from Moses the deliverer of Israel. He could not have been righteous without fulfilling that task, without testifying that God, not he, was the Deliverer. The whole meaning of the story — his very saintship — disappears if we try to imagine him apart from his people. Was he not, during his forty days with the Lord, receiving a law meant for every Israelite as much as for himself, and pleading for them as though he shared every one of their privileges?

This is the very point we were seeking light on. If we see the true ground of Moses' holiness, we must admit that the nation of which he was a member was holy in exactly the same sense and for the same reason as he was — indeed, with a prior title, from which his own was derived. It was a holy nation because God had called it out, chosen it, put His name upon it. Scripture explains what it means by this. It never teaches that God created men as a set of separate individuals; it says He created everything after its kind, and made man in His image — "male and female created he them." No language could more plainly show Society as essential to the very idea of Humanity. It is not the separate man who bears God's image, but man as a kind, the individual only as a member of that kind. The first man and woman refused to own themselves as made in God's image and tried to be independent of Him, and so, necessarily, became suspicious of each other and servants of a lower creature. But God's purpose could not be defeated by their unbelief: they multiplied according to the blessing originally given, and became a society. In that society the fallen tendency showed itself; and had the Adam-nature fully worked itself out — had man seized the dreadful privilege of being left to himself — that society must have perished in endless strife and hatred. But iniquity cannot make itself a law: men cannot cut themselves off from their unseen Lord or from each other. They feel and know they cannot; the struggle to do so only contradicts their own lives. How simple and consistent, then, is the Scripture narrative, which takes God as the author and upholder of social life, and affirms that society becomes irregular and disorderly only when it loses sight of Him.

The family of Abraham was marked with God's covenant and declared holy. Was it holy only because Jacob was its head, or Joseph a member of it? Scripture guards us against any such feeble notion. It shows us that Joseph was better than his brothers precisely because he identified himself with the family while they acted as though they did not belong to it — because he believed God had chosen it, and they forgot that He had; because he believed it holy, and they did not.

Israel was told that the Invisible God was actually their King, who had brought them out of bondage, was with them in the wilderness, and would be with them in the promised land. An Israelite who believed this was strong, brave, and free, able to overcome his enemies. One who lost this faith longed again for Egypt's flesh-pots, was without heart or hope, and cried for a golden calf because the Lord seemed absent. Did strength and freedom come from believing a lie, and cowardice and idolatry from believing the truth? Yet that must be so, unless the believing Israelite had the right to call his nation holy in the full, strict sense — to say, "We are individually holy because we are members of it, and God has given each of us the same privilege He gave the whole people: to call Him our God, to know His name, to trust Him." Could the unbelief of five-sixths of the people make God's truth of no effect, or change the reality of His Word and Promise, except to prove its truth all the more by contrast with those who despised it?

See, then, how reasonable Moses' prayer was. Because he regarded the Israelites as a holy, chosen people, redeemed by God's hand, and believed this belonged to the whole covenant people at all times, he felt with intense anguish their stubbornness, wickedness, and sin. Had they not been a holy people, he could not have known what their sin consisted in. It was their forgetfulness of their holy state, their choosing another way, that he confessed with such shame — because each preferred a selfish path of his own, as though he had an interest apart from his neighbor and from the body he belonged to, that they needed his intercession and God's renewing mercy. Moses could ask for that mercy because he was certain he was asking according to God's will, asking that what resisted that will be removed. His prayer, in effect, ran: "Remember not their wickedness, stubbornness, and sin — these came from their unbelief in Thy love, from forgetting that Thou art their King and they Thy subjects. But remember Thy covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! Maintain Thy own truth against their falsehood! Prove Thou art their King! Teach them that Thou hast redeemed them, though they deny it and bow to tyrants instead of clinging to their Deliverer! Grant them the full effects of their redemption, unworthy as they are, lest the heathen doubt Thy love and power, and Thy Name be mocked through our distrust rather than hallowed through Thy grace!"

Here surely is prayer according to its true nature. Moses asks in faith, nothing doubting; he asks according to God's will, and so is sure of being heard, whatever form the answer takes. Had he instead begun by regarding the Jews merely as sinners with some possibility of becoming holy, his prayer would have been an uneasy struggle for a favor perhaps inconsistent with the very nature of the One he implored.

I said last Sunday that we in England have always given special worth to the Old Testament, accepting it as an explanation of the law under which God has placed us. The good men I referred to would not wish us to abandon this reverence; they, like me, think we are in danger of losing it and need to hold it fast against all comers. Let me beg them not to become allies of this faith's enemies — not to raise their own experiences, precious as they are, into a standard for judging God's revelations, when they might instead use those revelations to illuminate their experiences.

They accuse themselves of stubbornness, wickedness, and sin. Why? Because a voice spoke to them which they would not heed, a light shone which they closed their eyes to. Now that they have yielded to the voice and let the light in, they still feel the same evil tendencies, and feel entitled to warn others of their stubbornness, wickedness, and sin. Is the cause not the same in those they address as in themselves — are those others not also refusing a voice, shutting their eyes to a light? Is that not what we say in preaching the Gospel? Why not be consistent, and say that our stubbornness and theirs alike consist in departing from an order that belongs to us both? Why not use the very language of the Old Testament, and say that we and they are members of a righteous Nation, a holy Society, and that we have refused to own it and act as if we belonged to it?

If we believe this, what a message we have for the most different classes among us! Some live utterly reckless lives; some keep every propriety and ordinance yet feel a secret heartlessness and unbelief; some have aspired to higher thoughts than most, only to be taught by some bitter lesson that they are exposed to the same temptations as those they called carnal or worldly. These have moved in different circles, suspecting and despising one another, yet all need the same help — a common salvation or none at all. They must discover that God's covenant embraces them all, that each may say: "God has called me, therefore I am holy; my stubbornness and sin have come from not acting as what God has declared me to be. Therefore I may ask Him not to look on that sin, but to remember His covenant and set me right. In so praying, I ask Him to do His will, not mine — to free me not from the just punishment of my evil, but from the evil itself, which I know to be my real curse: from the sensual habit enslaving me, the secret pride I wrap myself in, the trust in my own heart that has made me a fool."

One who takes this ground identifies himself with all the people of his land. He has, in effect, said: "If there is no covenant broad enough for the whole nation, there is none broad enough for me." And so, I believe, he comes to a truth that helps him reconcile what he had thought was mere outward, secular life with the inward life he supposed incompatible with it. We sometimes speak as though Jewish history were unique in tracing all common affairs, all ordinary offices, all civil statutes, back to God as their ground and author. I believe we must come to see that this is the rule for all other histories as well, since we grow less and less able to explain what a nation is, or how it can exist, if we refuse to see Him as its present King and Lawgiver. Once convinced of this, every fact in a nation's history becomes sacred, every member of it a man called to a task and a stewardship, every office from highest to lowest something God Himself has appointed. Citizenship can no longer be thought a privilege belonging to men through external possessions, but must belong, as the old statesmen taught, to man as a spiritual creature. The more we broaden the limits of earthly citizenship, the more we must confess that all who hold it possess that higher glory — and so we are bound to declare on what terms they hold it, to assert their relations to God, to tell them that society is not built on mutual fear and hatred, but grounded in His Nature, who is wholly Righteous, in whom is no darkness.

Such a faith cannot be shaken by the anomalies the world shows us. We may see in them signs of a coming judgment, but not the overthrow of any principle the King of Kings has declared as the principle of His government. We must regard our nation as holy in spite of its wickedness, stubbornness, and sin. Therefore, for it as much as for ourselves — how can we separate it from ourselves? — we may still pray: "Remember not this wickedness, stubbornness, and sin. Remember Thine own covenant. Remember Thy people, whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy mighty hand and outstretched arm."

This, then, is the ground of what I mean by national repentance — not a fantastic, unreal thing. Ours and yours must be of this kind if it has any divine root, for we are to claim no righteousness of our own; we are to confess we have none and can have none, and to thank God that by raising Christ from the dead He has declared His righteousness the only righteousness for us all. We are not to seek a selfish felicity, but to lament that we have sought it, and thank God that Christ's Sacrifice has redeemed us from so miserable a pursuit. What is best for England is best for each Englishman, because what is best for England is best for every nation. If we believe our own nation has a holy calling, we shall believe every nation has one. The more we confess the stubbornness, wickedness, and sin of our own people, the more we shall long for God to remove the same from every people under heaven. While we mourn our gross idolatries, the foul orgies of our Mammon-worship, we shall trust that all idols everywhere will be utterly abolished. And so the prayer of Moses for his nation will pass into the prayer of Christ for the whole Universe; the cry of our text, "Yet they are Thy people and Thine inheritance," will help us better understand the cry of the Son: "That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us."

## Rogation Sunday

*The passage:* Who may dwell in God's tabernacle, who may rest on his holy hill? The one who lives without corruption, does what is right, and speaks truth from the heart. Who does not deceive with his tongue, does no harm to his neighbor, and does not slander him. Who does not think highly of himself but is humble, and honors those who fear the Lord. Who keeps his word to his neighbor even to his own loss. Who does not lend money at interest, nor take a bribe against the innocent. Whoever does these things will never be shaken.

The Tabernacle that traveled with Israel through the wilderness witnessed that the Lord himself dwelt among them. When it was brought to Mount Zion with shouting and trumpet, it gained no new sacredness of its own — rather it gave sacredness to the place it rested on. God was felt to be there; the city stood because he was present in it.

If David or any Psalmist dared ask "who shall dwell in Thy Tabernacle, who shall rest on Thy holy hill?" you might expect the answer to be: the priests specially consecrated, clothed in garments of glory and beauty, marked "holiness to the Lord" — these alone may approach, as Moses ascended Sinai. Such an answer would not have been vulgar superstition; it would be nothing like a heathen climbing a hill to be nearer the sun. It would simply mean that some transcendent excellence, some spiritual absorption, was required to commune with the Everlasting God.

But the actual words of the Psalm are strangely different. The qualities demanded — not of a mere visitor to the Tabernacle but of one who dwells in it, not of one who ascends the hill but rests on it — are those of an ordinary citizen, without which no one could fulfill common duties in the world. They are mostly negative: not corrupt, not lying, not taking bribes against the innocent. One condition reads as if drawn straight from Israel's civil code, local and temporary; all of them are of that same commonplace, mundane kind. None is the sort a person seeking a refined, sentimental morality would think to include.

Yet the more we read the Old Testament writers, the more we see they had an overwhelming sense of Divine Majesty, and counted nearness to it the highest privilege given to any creature. Think of Moses's communion with the Lord God of Israel, of what sustained every prophet crushed by the sins of his land and himself, of the Psalmist's habitual language in despair and in rapture. Always the same: to be without God is to be cast down, in deep waters, in mire with no footing; to see the light of his face outweighs treasures of corn and wine; in his presence is fullness of joy, and to wake in his likeness is to be satisfied. Whatever explains the seeming easiness of the Psalm's terms, it cannot be that the blessing itself was thought small, or that anything else competed with it.

The key lies in a principle running through the whole Jewish polity and history: God is always spoken of as bringing his people into fellowship with himself. "He planted them," says the Prophet, "wholly a right seed" — not meaning they were naturally right or pure, or less inclined to evil than others, or that the Covenant had changed their nature. The Prophet constantly makes them feel the opposite: they were naturally evil and as capable of indulging it, and did indulge it, as any people outside the Covenant. Exactly so far as they followed or trusted their own nature, they became the rebellious, stiff-necked people I spoke of last Sunday from Deuteronomy — because that was refusing God's government, refusing the Covenant, which means a man is good only while he renounces any goodness of his own and refers it to God. So it was no contradiction to say of Covenant people, "they are wholly a right seed: whatever wrong springs up is their own doing, from choosing their own way, from wanting independence from their true Ruler." The necessary consequence: certain evil habits and tendencies marked a refusal to remain in the state God had called them to. Such habits, being ones people naturally fall into unless they resist them, become the habits of society at large — caught by contagion, hardening quickly into the rules and maxims of the Jewish world as of any other. To resist them was to believe God's Covenant, to believe he had set his throne on his Holy Hill of Zion, that from that throne came both law and the power to enforce it, and that he would put down in his chosen nation, and in each of its members, whatever opposed his will.

To resist those habits and tendencies was to deepen this faith day by day, to test its solidity, to learn more of the Being who kindled it. To resist them was to gain a fixed dwelling in God's Tabernacle, a rest on his holy hill. Had the Psalmist spoken of heroic efforts winning entry to the Tabernacle or a seat on the hill, he would have contradicted the whole idea of heroism he and his fathers had learned. They were to seek no high place for themselves; simply to do as they were told, go where they were sent, and beat down whatever obstacle, material or spiritual, stood in their way, in God's strength. They were to assume he was with them — to fail to assume it in any case was to abandon faith. No Jew could claim God's presence because he was better or more believing than his brothers. The Lord was in the holy hill as Protector of the city, the bond of Jewish fellowship. Anyone wanting to be more than a citizen — seeking individual privilege instead of belonging to that fellowship — forfeited the Divine protection; he could not dwell in the Tabernacle or rest on Zion.

So the Jew's highest spiritual aspirations were inseparable from his most ordinary civil life. The priests, with their anointing oil and glorious garments, did not sever outward from inner existence; they witnessed to their union. They entered the Holy Place with sacrifices for the common Israelite's daily transgressions, testifying that this was where he belonged, that he had wandered from his true home through carelessness of God's Law and his neighbor's welfare, and that from that home flowed a continual power of reconciliation. The priest's office suggested the highest dedication to God, not as a strange gift for a class of votaries who cast aside common life for it, but as a gift for human beings generally, without which no one could truly live as a man — realized most by those most watchful to keep their places simply and honestly, most aware of what drew them toward artificiality and baseness. Confidence that the living God had called a man to be his servant would keep him from lying to his neighbor in word and deed; every lie would weaken that confidence. The man determined to cast off lying, usury, and bribery must be lowly in his own eyes, aware of the temptations within and around him, and must honor those who, through fear of God, could overcome these enemies and find refuge in his righteousness.

We will use this Psalm on Ascension Day, and I am glad of that choice. It bears witness to what I argued last Sunday — that the life of the Nation and of the Church, of Old and New Testament, are closely bound together, and that we in England still have much to learn at the feet of ancient Israel. Let us apply the Psalm's lessons to our own case.

I. The Lord on Zion's holy hill was an object of distinct, definite contemplation. When we speak of the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, do we mean someone less distinct, less personal? Did Jesus, saying "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father," mean our minds to drift into a haze the ancients were spared? Our reverence is not helped but destroyed by vagueness and unreality — and that vagueness breeds the darkest, most degrading superstitions. A Being of absolute righteousness, truth, and love, to whom our secret hearts are open, is an object of awe to child and sage, peasant and philosopher alike. A mere Presence or Spiritual Essence awakens no real awe in anyone — people may talk and write of it, but they do not bow before it. Yet the conscience's deep witness that there is something more, something searching and judging them, drives people to imagine what that something is. They clothe their fears in shapes as various as those fears, shapes taking their moral character from their worshippers — and out of a Pantheism boasting of universality and freedom springs the most slavish, divisive idolatry.

If we truly believe Christ, the Son of Man, has ascended bodily to him with whom he dwelt before all worlds, we believe the King of Zion's holy hill has revealed himself more distinctly and perfectly than before — that we are admitted to a far higher knowledge of him than the Jews had, that the communion the Psalmist spoke of as possible for himself is, in its highest sense, realized for us, and that God's whole dispensation has aimed at removing what stood in its way. The Jew was still haunted by a sense of distance in space. Christ's Ascension lifts that burden: he has led captivity captive, proving a power in himself to break the barrier separating earth from heaven. The freedom he claimed for the body he took implies a like freedom for the spirit that wears it — the power to break through the humiliations of sense it always felt unworthy of its birth yet could never shake off on its own.

II. The Ascension of Christ, like the Tabernacle's placing on the holy hill, claims equal privilege for us all. No Englishman may tell his brother, "the highest privileges of the New Covenant are not for you," any more than an Israelite could say so of the Covenant with Abraham. David asserts the same doctrine as Moses; Paul agrees with both. Christ has claimed for us a place in his Father's house as sons and daughters — his Father is our Father, and by that right we may ascend the holy hill. To say we ascend by virtue of our own feelings, sensations, or holiness is to set aside the Incarnation, Sacrifice, and Ascension of Christ.

These acts were not done for the wise, good, elevated few, the favorites of Heaven. They are proclaimed in streets and highways as done for the outcasts who live there, because they were done for all human beings. We must receive them as common blessings, or not at all.

III. Why then do we not receive them, freely given as they are? The fifteenth Psalm gives the reason again, and it applies to us in full strictness. This plain, homely explanation is the true one, the only true one — it is time ministers of God returned to such plain speech. We have talked as though people might be perfectly good in their dealings with neighbors and yet lack something needed to be servants of God — as if they must be something more than honest, true citizens to dwell on the holy hill. That is not what the Old Testament teaches. It says boldly: you are not honest and straightforward with your neighbors, therefore you do not believe God is honest and straightforward with you; you do not trust him, do not confess your sins, do not draw near his holy hill. Has the New Testament changed that lesson? It differs in this: it tells us more fully how to rise out of base, dishonest habits, how God has revealed his righteousness in Christ for the remission of sins. But he has revealed his righteousness — therefore no unrighteousness can have fellowship with him. He has revealed his truth — therefore no falsehood can have intercourse with him. Christ, the way and the truth and the life, ascended on high to open a way into the presence of the Eternal Living Truth, that we might share his nature.

Is that the goal we English Christians set for ourselves? If so, let us rejoice: Christ ascended that we might be delivered from our old evil life and possess righteousness in him. We may give up lying to one another, be freed from the worship of money and its power of self-multiplication — the spirit of usury that breeds immorality and dishonesty, that reduced the Jewish nation to degradation and will reduce any nation it possesses to the same. We may shake off the vanity that goes with it, become lowly in our own eyes, and honor honest, God-fearing men instead of fawning on the rich. But if this is not what we want — if we want a religion that makes us comfortable in the frauds of our trades and professions; if the shopkeeper denounces Popery loudly the better to adulterate his goods and use false weights without self-reproach; if lawyers and clergymen wear a respectable Christianity so as never to ask whether their words are honest before God or their acts fit for his scrutiny — then we must be told plainly: Sinai's thunders were no more terrible than Zion where God dwells; the New Testament tolerates such practices no more than the Old, but less; God will be as swift a witness against our crimes as against Israel's; Christ did not ascend to make fellowship with God easier for such people, but to testify that between us and a God of eternal justice and truth there can be no fellowship at all — not for want of some transcendent celestial quality, but because we possess the qualities that destroy nations.

I have now reached the point I was aiming at. When I spoke a fortnight ago of national righteousness and holiness, I expected two kinds of objection. One, from those who recognize only individual righteousness — I answered them last week. The other, from those who profess belief in a holy Catholic Church but cannot see what that has to do with a nation, treating nation and Church as barely compatible, even opposites. In the sense given to "Catholic Church" by that theory, they are indeed opposites: a nation is pledged to treat idolatry as its ruin, while a Church organized as an independent visible society with a visible head must by its nature encourage idolatry, and always has. Further, a nation is pledged to a wholesome, practical, manly morality, wholly opposed to the "touch not, taste not, handle not" morality such a Church must favor and has always favored — a morality quite compatible with gross departures from common truth and honesty. I urge those Protestant defenders of individual holiness I addressed last Sunday to consider whether their teaching hinders the great protest against idolatry inherent in a nation's very existence, substituting for it a petty protest against some act of legislation they've privately judged idolatrous — whether they are replacing the Bible's homely morality with capricious, artificial maxims — and whether they may thereby be preparing their own children for the very system they most dread.

But on the other hand, I maintain that a holy Catholic Church, in its truest and deepest sense, underlies the holy and righteous nation — that the two are not contraries but one the vestibule of the other, each supporting the other; that this Church is no imaginary or artificial society but a real one constituted in Christ our ascended Lord. So the ascension of Christ to the Father's right hand, that he might fill all things, is the meeting point of these two divine principles, these two human societies — the consummation of all the old world's hopes, and the beginning of all that is purest and holiest in the new.

## Sunday after Ascension Day

*The passage:* Paul prays that the Ephesians may know the immense greatness of God's power toward believers — the same mighty power God exercised in raising Christ from the dead and seating him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above every ruler, authority, power, and dominion, and every name that can be named, not only in this age but in the age to come. God has put all things under Christ's feet and made him head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Romans and Galatians can be called the Epistles of the Resurrection: they show that God, by raising Jesus from the dead, justified us from what the law's works could not justify us from. The Reformers turned to these letters for instruction and comfort in the sixteenth century, and found exactly the message they needed — a message to the burdened conscience, telling every sinner enslaved to sin where to find his Deliverer and true Master.

In time these references to Christ's Resurrection were heeded less. They came to be treated merely as expositions of justification by Faith — "the Resurrection was a general act; how could it justify a particular sinner?" And if it didn't, what did justify him? The answer brought back a subtler self-righteousness than the one the Reformers' preaching had freed people from: justification by works was disclaimed in words as Popish, but the Faith now demanded was itself a work — a painful one — as good a foundation for self-glorification and self-torture as the works it replaced. This real danger can only be escaped, I have tried to show you, by returning to the Apostle's exact words: the resurrection of Christ from the dead *is* God's witness of our justification. If we do not receive that witness, Faith has nothing to rest on; if we do receive it, we acknowledge God as the Justifier and give up boasting of our own acts, outward or inward.

Trusting the Bible's own wisdom this way means treating justification as much broader than Luther's modern followers would allow. But if this rescues his doctrine from its worst inversion, shows what Faith really is, and explains why Paul joins justification to his Gospel for all nations and his protest against Jewish exclusiveness, that compensates for the latitude we introduce under his authority. It also lets us see the connection between Romans and Galatians and the Epistle to the Ephesians — a letter the Reformers valued less, which some of their modern followers deny to Paul altogether because it doesn't proclaim justification in the terms they think their Lutheran apostle should use. I believe Ephesians can rightly be called the Epistle of the *Ascension*. Read this way, it confirms everything Paul drew from Christ's victory over death elsewhere, and gives full force to the hints of humanity's glorification, as well as its justification, that those other letters contain but don't develop.

I have tried to show in recent sermons that we Englishmen, faithful to our own vocation, must give even greater importance to Paul's doctrine of Justification than Protestants elsewhere do — it is the bulwark of our national existence and morality. To confess God as our Justifier is to confess he has made us a righteous people, and that our wrongdoing is a departure from that state. To stop confessing him so means our acts lose reference either to him or to our fellow-citizens; we make our own code of duty, and God becomes the ground only of certain special religious acts done to recommend ourselves to him or better our own prospects, not of our common life. But a Justification that concerns a nation cannot rest on individual faith; it must rest on acts God has done for men generally. If a sinner refuses to accept these as the warrant for his faith — if he will not humble himself before the love and forgiveness they show to him and his race — Scripture, his own conscience, and in time his own acts will testify against him. He may call himself a believer, but his belief will bear no fruit, or bad fruit, and no one will glorify the Father in heaven for seeing his works.

On Christ's resurrection by the Father's will, then, our English faith and whatever right acts flow from it must stand. But last Sunday I showed that these acts also point to an Ascension. Using the fifteenth Psalm, I argued that the highest communion with the King on Zion's holy hill, which an Israelite could know, was tied to the most ordinary civic morality — communion was impossible without that morality, and communion made the morality permanent by grounding it in God's own Nature. The Church's choice of this Psalm for Ascension Day let me apply its lessons to English Christians. I said it was not lack of some sublime devotion, but our indifference to truth and honesty in ordinary dealings, that unfits us for communion with God. We will not repent of dishonesty, or become better citizens, until we believe God exalted his Son to his right hand so that we might draw near to him, the God of Truth, and be freed from what keeps us distant from him and each other. And I said the Ascension vindicates national morality and unity because it proclaims a universal Morality and a perfect Unity — it may help us in England to be true subjects of our King and true defenders of our land, tongue, and institutions, because it reveals One clothed in our nature who is "far above all principality, and power, and might, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come," One "who is Head over all things to the Church, which is His Body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all."

I. Since I find here the realization of the widest Catholicism, the most Catholic Church men have ever dreamed of, I want you to notice the connection between these later words and verse nineteen, my text's opening words. Paul wants the Ephesian Christians to know "what is the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe." I can imagine someone accustomed to speak of believers' privileges until he thinks of them as separated by their belief from the rest of humanity, exclaiming, "That clause settles it — whatever glory follows is unfolded only to these separate persons." Very well — I am glad to think so too. So let us ask who these persons were, and what he wanted them to know of their condition. They were a very small society, alien to the Synagogue, alien to the Gentile temple, scorned by those they met in the marketplace, forced to live mostly within their own circle, with every reason to think it dangerous to wander beyond it, to think that all outside breezes should be shut out and every opening onto the world outside stopped up. It is to *these* people that Paul speaks of a fellowship with no limits. The reward of their faith was that they could not separate themselves from any creature bearing human form — to do so was *not* to believe in Christ. To believe in him was to acknowledge One who represented mankind at the Father's right hand.

II. Such a faith — carrying them above appearances, contradicting their natural understanding, overcoming their strongest temptations — could only be attributed to a Divine Operation on their spirits. That it could be awakened and kept alive in them proved the exceeding greatness of God's power. But Paul cannot measure that power by this manifestation alone, wonderful as it is; he can only explain any individual's faith by saying it follows "the mighty power" the Father "wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him on His own right hand in heavenly places." This is the measure and standard of God's working, the complete manifestation of which every other case is only a subordinate part. The power that kept the Son trusting as he passed into death, the power that raised him from the dead, is the very same power that kindles faith in any single soul, enables it to confess its relation to God and its brethren, and lifts it out of its own solitary hell. The power that raises any man into the largeness and freedom of fellowship with God and the universe is the power that exalted Christ to the right hand of the Majesty on High. This conviction explains countless passages in God's dealings, brings order to our confused thoughts, and can save us from despair when our own faith or others' seems weak. It makes us feel we are members of a body into which all life flows from the Head. And it shows how completely we invert God's method, destroying the very root of personal faith, when we put that faith before the acts of Christ that reveal God's universal will and purpose.

III. In the previous verse, Resurrection and Ascension explain the *principle* of faith; in the verses that follow, they are its *object*. The world had quailed before many powers, visible and invisible — taskmasters demanding bricks without straw, more cruel taskmasters demanding they please an invisible master who reaps where he has not sown, shapes born of their own guilty consciences, tyrants who could kill the body and do no more, subtle tempters who sought to destroy both soul and body in hell. Before these men trembled and offered accursed sacrifices, even their firstborn, even themselves. Paul declares that far above all these — imperial and priestly oppressors, cruel gods, evil spirits men had worshipped — was exalted the One who had been meek and lowly, the Good Shepherd who sought the stray sheep and gave his life for them. Everything that had trampled on man proved poorer and weaker than this Deliverer; the one who wore a crown of thorns proved to be Prince of all earth's kings, and having descended into hell, triumphed openly over hell's powers. This, Paul held, was the true Christian faith, distinguishing it from every rival faith, whether these dimly and imperfectly pointed toward such a Conqueror, or were merely the assertion of some intolerable tyranny men wearily but not hopelessly resisted. There may be honest believers who don't grasp what their confession implies — had they fully understood it, they would not have needed an apostle's teaching or his prayer that their eyes be enlightened to know the grandeur of their calling. But if such believers actually prefer a faith for themselves alone to a faith for the whole Universe, they must in turn learn to say: "We do not believe that he rose the third day, or ascended into heaven, or sits at the Father's right hand."

IV. Paul's language had been so sweeping and yet so precise that it seemed to close every avenue by which the subtle Spirit of Unbelief might enter: "He may be mightier than earth's rulers, but what of the rulers of the air? Mightier than the visible, but what of the invisible? Mightier now, but what of the age to come?" Paul knew all these objections and had answered them all. Yet he is not satisfied.

Inferiority may not mean subjection — Christ may be greater than the powers of evil, but who can say they are *put under his feet*? Paul dares to say so. Paul, who had been beaten three times, who had barely escaped the mob at Ephesus, who was now in Nero's hands at Rome — this Paul tells his disciples the powers of the world are put under Christ. Paul, who in this very Epistle says he and his brethren are still wrestling with principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high places, here declares without qualification that these too are put under Christ. And he knew what he meant: he — or whoever wrote Hebrews — explains it against the very facts that seem to contradict it, quoting the Psalm that all things are put under Man, sheep and oxen and beasts and birds, then adding: "Now we see not yet all things put under him. But we see Jesus, who for the suffering of death was made a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour." He could not have said it more plainly. As far as we are concerned it is an unfinished struggle — we are still in the midst of it, every event showing how desperate it is; our bodies show visible oppressors still sitting on thrones, our spirits bear worse scars from their blows. The animal does not yet everywhere submit to the yoke of the man; rather the man continually bears the yoke of the animal — and often a yoke worse than animal, for the malice, falsehood, and hypocrisy that possess him come from neither birds nor fish. But One who bore our nature did, we believe, establish the lordship of the human over the animal and over the devilish; and having that nature, he also proved his claim to another Nature, of which ours is the image. He is crowned with glory and honour, at God's right hand, binding us to God. His Ascension declares that all things are now put under him — the warrant of all future hope. The Apostles' confidence that the kingdoms of the world had truly become the kingdoms of God and his Christ explains their longing for Christ's final unveiling, and their zeal to keep that longing alive in their disciples. They could not set limits to the conquests of One who ascended on high to fill everything. Would any part of his creation, willing or unwilling, remain independent of him? Would not all confess him Lord, to the glory of God the Father?

V. But what witnesses to this constitution in Christ — what lives on to prophesy this ultimate victory? "He has given Him to be Head over all things to His Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all." People often say how hard it is to find a satisfactory definition of the Church. I believe it is found nowhere but here. If this account seems inadequate to you, Scripture will not help you find another.

Scripture has taught us how God chose a family to testify of himself and his relation to men, then a nation for the same purpose, and finally sent members of that family and nation to invite people of all lands into covenant and fellowship with him — because he had set forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law; had given that Son up to die the common death of all men; had raised him from the dead in his human soul and body; and had exalted him in that soul and body to his own right hand. On that warrant men were invited to be baptized. Being baptized, they were to declare themselves adopted children of God because they were members of Christ's body, and to say to all men: "This is your Head, as he is ours; you have as much right to your place in this Body as we do; if we say you are excluded from it, we cut ourselves off from it."

This was the Gospel the nations received — the explanation of all Christian brotherhood and every act that has proved that brotherhood more than a name. If this society called Christian lacked the courage to say, "We are called to be members of a body whose glorified Head is Jesus Christ, the Son of Man and Son of God; we are actually one with him where he is, and he actually dwells with us where we are," then it disowned its own history, renounced the charter its calling and privileges rested on, made itself something God had not made it, and to that extent made itself a curse to the world it was appointed to bless.

We cannot say this too strongly — it must be said more strongly than it has ever been said. All the blessings individuals have received from the Gospel, all the strength it has given the dying at sickbeds or at the stake, all the conversions from darkness to light it has caused, all the brave self-denying acts and earnest hopes it has kindled, can be traced directly to the belief our Communion Service expresses and pledges through the Sacrament: that we dwell in Christ and Christ in us, that we are members incorporate in the body of him who fills all in all. Take away that faith, and you do not take away some grand mystical notion — you take away everything that has made Christianity practical, dear to sinners and sufferers, and able to bind together men of different races, classes, countries, and ages. Without it, the Church becomes either a collection of individuals exalting themselves on their separation from the rest of mankind, proving by their jealousies, suspicions, strifes, and schisms that a bond of mere opinion is no bond at all; or it becomes a huge political system, a burden on the life of nations, families, and individuals, declaring by its acts and words that it must have some other head than Christ, that it does not regard itself as the body of him who fills all in all.

What is our duty, then, brethren? For the sake of the many in our own land who can find no peace in narrow societies bound by certain opinions and leaders, yet will not abandon what they learned there or exchange their leaders for ones we might prefer; for the sake of thousands groaning under our sins, who share our inward needs yet feel cut off from all fellowship, as if consigned to hopeless unbelief; for the sake of nations abroad who have struggled vainly, madly, for freedom, and feel chains on them mightier than those of unjust monarchs or evil laws; for the sake of all whom a religious system has driven into Atheism because they would not worship a tyrant-god, but who yearn to hear of a God who is a Deliverer; for the sake of all that is precious in history, worth keeping in the present, and hoped for by prophets and sages for times to come — let us assert the old faith of Ascension Day. Let us make members of sects understand we set up no opinions or leaders of ours against theirs, but wish to justify all that they and their fathers clung to in their darkest and bravest hours, all their leaders taught them when most indignant at our indifference to Christ's Gospel: that what we preach is Christ, the one Head of a body no time or space can bound, the source and object of their faith and ours, the destroyer of all sects because he unites man to God. Let us make Spaniards, Frenchmen, Italians understand we do not ask them to leave their churches for ours, or accept any English tradition not also theirs, or travel the path by which God led the Teutonic nations in the sixteenth century; nor do we urge them to throw off by sudden violence the spiritual despotism we believe hinders them from being, not Protestant, but Catholic, and preys on their moral as much as their national life. We only say: believe, as the Church in every age and country has professed, that Christ, the common Brother and Head of men, has ascended on high, and that all powers on earth and throughout creation are subject to him. Follow that faith into all its consequences, and chains no other charm could break will fall from your hearts, and you will be given power to set your countrymen free. If you seem at first a paltry, feeble band to your enemies, they will soon find invisible hosts on your side — not the relics of the saints but the saints themselves, and all who were refused that name on earth but whom God counts worthy of it, all who gave their lives for their land and for the Truth, will fight for you. He whose eyes are as a flame of fire, on whose head are many crowns, the Word of God, will go before you, and your tyrants, however mighty they seem today, you shall see no more forever.

## Whit-Sunday

*The passage:* "Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men."

Festivals like Whitsuntide stir a sad feeling in many of us. We say: these days once meant something. They stirred a strange gladness, marked fellowship among neighbors and even nations, worked into the fabric of life, fixed the times for solemn gatherings and great undertakings. Lawyers and politicians planned around them. Above all they were popular: the peasant and the mechanic, however little he grasped their deeper meaning, knew they had one. They spoke to him more plainly than books are ever likely to speak — perhaps more plainly than books speak even to their most careful readers.

So many say, and so most of us have thought at some time. Then, depending on our mood or education or opinions, we add privately that this is now over, only the shadow of the name remains and even that is fading. Or we console ourselves that what was tied to superstitious notions of miracle and priestly power deserves to perish. Or we point to the compensation offered, or someday to be offered, by wider book-learning. Or we congratulate ourselves that enough traditional reverence survives among us that, with care and perhaps some revived ceremony, the old affection might return.

These contradictory feelings mark not different men but the same man at different times. The zealous champion of old customs one year may denounce such revivals as unreal the next; the man who prizes nothing but what bears the stamp of this age may start sighing for the past; one who thought there was hope in Englishmen's attachment to their fathers' ways may pronounce them the most secular of peoples, absorbed in business, careless of anything not material. Sometimes this ends in indifference, sometimes in a stern Puritan resolve as most suited to our character, sometimes in casting off our cold island peculiarities altogether — for, we ask, what does a Church mean if it separates us from other peoples instead of uniting us with them?

There is still one possibility, and it is this I want to speak of. May not Whitsuntide mean far more to us than it ever meant to our forefathers — less a shadow, more a substance? May it not, in its inner meaning, mix with our everyday dealings as it once did outwardly, and still does in some measure? May it not sustain our practical habits, joining them to more life and joy than we usually think business can hold? May it not save us from dry bookishness by showing what lies beneath the letter, something our hearts can commune with? May it not deepen our reverence for the invisible and spiritual, our dislike of the idolatrous and merely external — the very things Puritanism has stood for? May it not give us a sense of the glory in nature and art that Puritanism has refused to see? May it not make us value, as we never have, all the gifts entrusted to us as a nation, everything distinctive of ourselves? May it not unite us to the whole of Christendom as no former age achieved, even when all confessed one visible head?

That this possibility will become real, I believe — not because I trust any effort of ours to preserve, recover, or acquire it, and not because I am blind to the contempt earned by those who have devised schemes for alliance with other Churches, or for walling ourselves off from all Churches, or for founding some new Church to replace them all — but because I find, in the very restlessness that invents such schemes and in their failure, proof that God is at work among us: rousing us to our need, humbling us by showing our helplessness, preparing us for outcomes beyond our imagining but foreshadowed in the past history of Church and nations, without which Scripture's plainest statements and promises would prove empty.

I spoke last Sunday of Ascension Day as witness to a victory actually won for the human race over every power that held it captive, and to an actual glorification of Man in him who is declared Head of every man. These are the direct assertions of this Epistle to the Ephesians; deny them, or empty them of their force and universality, and all its doctrine and exhortation become pompous nonsense. That they have been denied and emptied, I acknowledge — not by one branch of Christendom but by both, the one that boasts its Catholicism and the one that boasts its Protestantism, through the same underlying apostasy working differently in each. The Headship of Christ over the body the Apostle describes has, in the one, been effectively disbelieved: that Church reconstituted itself under another head, made him the ground of its universality, and thereby split heaven from earth, the invisible from the visible — while keeping up a show of connection, substituting symbols for reality, galvanizing a beheaded corpse into mimicking a living body. No such substitution of a stand-in for the real Christ — a mortal given absolute power to hold men captive and forbid free thought — is sanctioned among us; we bear witness against it. We like to recall, even to overstate, the historical facts showing that the Monarch of Christendom has often been worse than an ordinary monarch — baser, greedier, more eager to aggrandize his own kin than rulers who make no such claims and yet may lawfully pass honors to their heirs. We gather these facts eagerly and turn away, not quite honestly, from anything that might weaken the case. And yet the same unbelief behind that Papal outrage against the Son of Man's rights lives in our own hearts and shapes our thoughts and acts. We think of the Church as a set of religious parties, each with its opinions, bound by its own name. We talk piously of lamenting our divisions and wishing for unity, but we do not really believe all are united in one Head, that he has led captive the very sects and notions and names that divide us, that it is his purpose to gather all into one. In other words, we do not acknowledge the Ascension as St. Paul did, any more than those we denounce.

Or, if we count ourselves free of sectarian entanglements, refusing sectarianism whether outside the National Church or within it — even that phrase, National Church, becomes an excuse for forgetting the Universal Head, for the same unbelief that all powers are under his feet. A National Church ought to mean a Church that purifies and elevates a nation's mind: that gives lawmakers, administrators, and citizens a sense of the grandeur of law and its source; that tells rulers and people alike that all false ways lead to ruin, that truth alone gives stability. It should make men tremble at the voice of God in their conscience, warning them that what he says to them will be proclaimed before the universe, that every hidden deed will be brought into the light. That should be its meaning: a nation needs a Church chiefly for this, and a Church betrays its trust by aiming lower. Is that our conception of it, or yours? If the Church became what I have described, would the comfortable men of England tolerate it? Do they not tolerate the Church only because they take it to be something quite different — supposing they have hired the clergy at a price to keep the lower classes in check, and that we, your servants, keep our wages only so long as we prove we confess no higher master, so long as we treat society's passing conventions as more binding than the laws that come, not from yesterday, but from the mouth of the Eternal God? Can such a ridiculous, self-contradictory bargain hold? Must you not see that we fail the very work you say you hired us for, if we perform it on those terms? You want us to preach from the Bible — but the Bible tells us to say that Christ actually now lives as Head over all powers. Keep that back, and we deny the whole message; proclaim it, and what becomes of a bargain built on the opposite view of the universe?

I repeat these statements, and will not tire of repeating them, both because I believe this age especially needs them, and because the hopes I have expressed for what Whitsuntide can still give us are bound up with them.

The text speaks of gifts bestowed on man when Christ ascended and led captivity captive. Those gifts witnessed to a fellowship established between heaven and earth, a direct relation between human beings and their Father in heaven. If the Church on earth were divided from the Church in heaven, if it had another head than the Son of Man and Son of God, the nature of these gifts would have to change or vanish. Both possibilities have in fact become the faith, or unbelief, of parts of Christendom. The so-called Catholic portion holds that powers still descend, as of old, on the Church's rulers — powers of absolution, of discerning spirits, of healing — all belonging to a purely miraculous order, exceptions to the law of human life, establishing the dignity and dominion of certain special persons: officers with transcendent functions, saints who work miracles, to be revered by an act of faith as unlike ordinary human beings. And such gifts, on this view, are more likely to come through what is dead than through the living: relics work wonders more readily than living men who speak and breathe.

Set these notions beside the chapters on spiritual gifts in Corinthians, or this chapter in Ephesians. Notice how carefully the Apostle grounds everything not in some exceptional break in Providence, but in a universal truth for which the Church exists to witness. Notice his warning against the mere love of strangeness and novelty in these gifts, to which people raised among heathen enchantments were prone. Notice how he tests the gifts by their usefulness, and how little he values the merely startling in them, calling such things transitory, belonging to childhood. Notice how throughout he opposes the living Spirit to dumb idols, to the dead things his hearers had once treated as sacred. Notice how, in Corinthians and even more here in Ephesians, offices and orders are declared to exist for the good of the whole family — signs of the Father's care for it and of his intercourse with it through the Mediator. Notice how the Spirit to whom all these gifts are traced, ever ready to rouse those grown forgetful, is treated as the Spirit of Unity and Love, proceeding continually from him in whom he dwells fully, to strengthen every joint for the good of the whole body. Weigh this difference, and then ask whether gifts given because Christ ascended and led captivity captive can mean gifts that degrade nine-tenths of men into brutes so that a fraction may be raised into gods.

But have we escaped that danger simply by confining these gifts of the Spirit to the Church's first age, withdrawn once the mission of Jesus and his apostles was sufficiently proved? I do not see that we have escaped the danger of exalting some persons and depressing the mass — and I think we have run into other dangers just as bad. We have not escaped the arrogance of priestcraft; we have only changed its objects. Men have special talents, which by an old habit they sometimes still call gifts. They know they have them. Told not to trace them to any inspiration of God, they have no reason to see them as anything but grounds for feeling above their fellows. The weak grow merely puffed up; the strong become tyrants, in a narrower or wider circle. What good is variety of gifts if all become excuses for pretension and rivalry, rather than trusts we must answer for?

Meanwhile we have misrepresented the gifts we suppose confined to apostolic times, as much as we misuse our own. What was the special Pentecostal gift? The power to speak to men of different tribes about the wonderful works of God. Surely that was a sign that a barrier was broken down, not raised — that all human beings stand in the same relation to God, not that a few were admitted to a fellowship denied the rest; that the most sacred language is the most common one, not that a few are glorified by their unlikeness to the majority. What of the powers of healing? "In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth" — in the name of him exalted to be Head of every man — they said to the cripple at the Temple gate, "rise up and walk." This was a sign that the Lord and Giver of Life was stronger than disease and death, and could be defied in his strength. What of the powers to preach, govern, baptize, give the bread and wine of life? All pointed the same way, toward a universal human dispensation; all were, in the Apostle's words, "for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith... unto a perfect man." What can this mean but that these gifts carried the Apostles beyond themselves, making them servants of every generation, not just their own — that their glory lay in their fitness for men everywhere, for all time?

How much truer, then, has been the common faith and joy that Whitsuntide has stirred in one country and another, Roman and Protestant, than the narrow limits each side has set upon it! What deep faith has lived in men's hearts — not owed to the learning of doctors and casuists, but overriding it — that Christ, having gone up on high, has indeed received gifts for men! What we need now is for this faith to stop being blind and to justify itself, as it can when the plain facts of human life are set beside Scripture's plain words, each interpreting the other. We have among us, in varying measure, gifts of speech, of healing, of governing, distributed unevenly as St. Paul describes, some richly endowed where others are nearly bare. But speech itself — that wonder, sign of our fellowship with each other and our relation to a spiritual world, as sight and hearing and touch signify our relation to the physical world — this is shared by rich and poor, high and low alike. Our great failing is that we do not feel the weight of these gifts, what they imply, what they owe to God and man. We measure special gifts by the money they bring, or, among finer spirits, by vanity rather than gain. The common gift of speech is turned to slander and lies. Words — though their name comes from him who is the Word of God — are declared by the world's wise men, generalizing from what they see done, to be mere counters to be traded, tools for hiding thought rather than revealing it. What can break such notions and the acts that spring from them? What can make us honest and true, not in some extraordinary sense but in the plainest meaning of those words? Nothing, I think, but the enlightening of the understanding that St. Paul prayed for the Ephesians — that we might grasp the greatness of our calling, the reality of our gifts, the law governing their use, and the power present with us at every moment to guide us in using them. Has it ever struck us, in some hour of our lives: the words I learned as a child were not lies; a Spirit has been with me night and day — the Spirit of God himself — enabling me to use powers I was always tempted to waste, prompting me to turn to right and truth what I would have sold to selfishness, giving every true social impulse, reminding me of a Father's house I have strayed from, a family I belong to, a kingdom of righteousness and love I am heir to? If such a thought has ever dawned on us, even for a moment, have we not felt certain, for that moment: this must be true; though all else prove deceptive, this will stand revealed in the fires of the last day. And is it not true, then, for every moment, not just that one? Is it not the truth of our lives — the truth that makes life more than a passing shadow, that lets us face an Eternal Substance we touch at every instant?

Yes — the assurance that Pentecostal gifts are not withdrawn, that we receive them fresh every day from him who first gave them, would not by itself be joyful; it would be overwhelming. To feel such a stewardship is to recall an unfaithfulness no confession can utter and no repentance undo. But beneath this lies a deeper assurance, expressed in the Psalm St. Paul quotes: "that the Lord God might dwell among them." This is the Pentecostal revelation, which alone makes the Pentecostal gifts intelligible or blessed. The Spirit of God dwells among us, dwells in us. Rain and dew fitly picture his influences, but they cannot express that Living and Personal Presence, that abiding Friend and Comforter proceeding from Father and Son, the bond of their unbroken union, who makes men heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. That he is the gift the Son received for men upon his ascension is the truth the Holy Catholic Church exists to declare. Churches have dared to invert God's revealed order, transposing the Creed's articles, putting faith in the Church before faith in the Holy Ghost, making the Spirit depend on the body he quickens rather than the body on him. So the divine gifts have shriveled into enchantment and sleight of hand. So men have been taught to shut God out of his own universe, confining him to sudden, casual, trivial interferences, and so science has been divorced from faith and the empire of Chance set up against the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who sow this wind will reap the whirlwind. Those meant to show that God's order has triumphed over magicians and soothsayers have themselves taken up magic and soothsaying, and will meet new and stronger conjurors who will overpower them — for as it was said, "Jesus they knew, and Paul they knew, but who are these," practicing devilries in the name of Jesus and Paul instead of casting out devils?

Nor can we escape that same danger. Faith in spiritual agency is too strong in men's hearts for the most resolute materialism to defeat. Eighteenth-century wit could banish the Gospel from drawing rooms and universities, but it could not keep Cagliostro out of either. Nineteenth-century money-worship may prove a stronger enemy of the Gospel than wit ever was — but does it hinder the growth of spiritual impostures? Are they not growing under its very influence, becoming part of its own routines?

To proclaim the Spirit of Truth against these lying spirits — to declare that the Spirit truly strives with us, cultivating every faculty he has given, bringing us to repentance, shaping us into God's image, making us helpers rather than destroyers of one another — this is the Church's remaining task, the one hope for our age. And it is a hope that will not disappoint, for it joins the deepest convictions of past ages to the deepest needs of this one. Pentecost taught the Jews to rejoice at the miracle of buried seed springing up in its season by God's beautiful order, and to link this with the Law he gave to guide their steps. Whitsuntide keeps both lessons and lifts them higher: the Spirit who first brooded over darkness and made it fruitful still quickens whatever seems dead and brings the hidden to light; that same Spirit writes God's laws on men's hearts, that they may be his people and he their God. Do we not need such a quickener of our deadness, such a guide from restlessness to peace? Do we not need one to fix God's law daily in our deepest affections, to pierce our hearts and make us cry, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" — and to answer that cry as no human voice can, by working in us to will and to do what pleases God? And will not the belief that such a One has been given, and remains with us, once he has worked in us true repentance, bring us the joy and singleness of heart in our daily duties and common life that the disciples knew, when they learned to call nothing their own, but God their Father and all men their brothers?

## Trinity Sunday

*The passage:* Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God.

"You preachers tell us to give up our own wills and do the Will of God. But how are we to find out what that will is?" Many are asking this, and they get various answers. One tells him the Will of God is fully declared in Scripture, in language the most ignorant can understand. He replies that he has had the Scriptures since childhood, yet hears daily of new interpretations, held as indisputable by one school or Church and rejected as monstrous by another. Who will tell him which is right? Some are delighted at his perplexity: "Doesn't this show the need for an authority to pronounce on Scripture's meaning—that the Bible is useless without the Church?" Then comes the next question: "Where is that authority? Suppose I find it—how does it help me apply the right explanation to the tangle of my own life? How do David's experience or Paul's words to Ephesians or Corinthians tell me what to do here in London in 1857?" Others hear this difficulty with satisfaction: "It drives you to seek a guide for present emergencies, not mere generalities—an infallible voice for the whole Church, and for you a director of conscience to whom you owe simple obedience in every personal difficulty. With these, Bible and Church serve you well; without them the system stands apart from you, untouched by your individual feelings and actions."

Any of these three answers seems to the anxious inquirer far more practical than St. Paul's answer in the text. "Be not conformed to this world; be transformed, that you may prove what is God's acceptable and perfect will" strikes him as far less manageable than "Read the Bible," "Attend to the Church," "Accept a Pope," "Submit to a Spiritual Director."

But once he has tried any or all of these, he will find something still wanting—that he has not reached the root of the matter. He must begin again, or his Bible, Church, Pope, Spiritual Director will all fail to show him the Will of God or how to obey it.

Why is this so? Because the more precisely we are told what to do, and resolve to do it, the more we find that obedience belongs to something within us which says: "No book, no authority from the past, no mortal teacher, however weighty with tradition, can bring me into real, living subjection. I may try hard to surrender myself, to be a pupil, a child, a slave—but that very effort is an act of will, an assertion of choice. I was never so proud as when stooping to that government; each new step of apparent submission is a fresh assertion of self-will. I might in the end become a stone, all consciousness and affection dead in me—but until then I am still a rebel. My lips and hands may obey; I myself resist."

I. Consider St. Paul's teaching here and throughout his epistles, and ask whether it meets your case better than these Protestant and Romish prescriptions. All agree it is the Will of God you must obey—set forth in Scripture, interpreted by the Church, recognized in a Pope, submitted to in a director of conscience. But Bible and Church alike confess that this Will works directly upon you, upon the very thing within you that had to be muzzled or killed before you could even seem to obey. Do your Pope and director deny this? Do they hide that the Spirit of God is at work in you to bring you into conformity with His Will? Then they are liars, and you must tell them so—for they deny the Creed, deny that the Spirit has come to convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment, and undermine the very Church they claim to guard. But if they affirm that the Spirit has come, that you were baptized into His Name, that the Creed has not mocked you—believe them, and act on it. Say to them: "What you cannot do—for you can only speak to my outward ear and influence my outward acts, and whatever more you do, you do by God's Spirit—that the Spirit is doing: acting on me, on my will, that I may know God's perfect and acceptable will and be conformed to it."

II. We might suppose "conformed to the world" and "transformed by renewing of the mind" describe a state fit for this present life versus one fit for the next. That is a slovenly reading. The man conformed to the world is not the one who understands or admires it best, or adapts to it most skillfully. He is too enslaved to visible things to reflect on their meaning, too devoted to outward shows to perceive their hidden harmony, too confined to his own class's habits to enter into the feelings of those outside it. "Conformed" means strictly this: he takes his form from things around him, which become the mould of his mind. St. Paul will not admit this to be the form any man is made to bear—Scripture holds that man is made in God's image, that his mind's form should come from his unseen Father, not from the things subjected to him. This was true even of the heathen who bowed to idols, resisting the conscience that told him he was God's offspring, God testifying to him through the visible things of His invisible power. But we, redeemed from that worship, adopted as God's children, sealed with His Spirit to know Him—we resist that Spirit far more directly when we let the world fashion our minds, when we take its stamp. That stamp changes with each age and place, for the world's very nature is to be always shifting, with no fixed principle—which is why conformity to it is so shameful: it strips a man of all power to look before and after, makes him a creature of the moment, fluctuating, insincere, a leaf blown by every gale. How can such a man know the Will of God, which is fixed and eternal? What good is it to give him the Bible and teach him it is divine? He will believe it as readily as anything else, simply because it is the fashion of his time and place—until the fashion changes and the same instinct that made him revere it teaches him to scoff. And while he holds it sacred, he judges every word of it by the rules of the society around him, which determines how he interprets Lawgivers and Prophets, how he judges even the Judge of all the earth. Nor does adding a long series of Church decrees help, for these too are referred to that same court of appeal—the opinion of the day, or of his own faction, which fixes how he receives them, refracted through its own definitions and practices. And what is the infallible Dogmatist or Spiritual Guide but the habits and maxims of the age or party in human form—the world's own spokesman, sent to spare him the effort of thought and belief, the necessity of being a man?

III. Deliverance from this kind of conformity is the transformation named in the next clause. That transformation, far from unfitting a man for the world, alone enables him to live in it, appreciate it, and influence it. It let the prophet hear the trees and floods break into singing; it let St. Paul become all things to all men; it let St. John see the kingdom of God emerging from the kingdoms of this world. They saw all things in God's light, not the world's false light—saw the world as God made it, not as men's rebellion had remade it. Having received the true form of men, they could use the world's forms freely, adapting to Jewish, Greek, or Roman customs without ever being enslaved by any of them, their spirits never narrowed by the temporary dress they wore. In communion with the eternal, members of a spiritual and eternal fellowship, they could see history not as shifting scenes but as events moving toward a divine outcome—the fulfillment of a Will that seeks only good.

IV. St. Paul calls this process the renewing of the mind—a phrase suggesting the change when spring foliage covers winter's bare boughs. It is not exactly a recovery of what was lost; the substance is unchanged, but quickened. The change is wonderful yet entirely inward, and it is gradual, not sudden. The power once given works secretly, often amid the obstruction of harsh winds and frosts, yet that beginning already contains the sure promise of its completion. The man will be renewed in the image of his Creator and Father, because the Spirit of that Creator and Father is working in him.

V. That was last Sunday's lesson—the Pentecostal gift. Today we go a step further: we thank God for enabling us to confess the glory of the Eternal Trinity, and to worship the Unity in the power of the Divine Majesty. How were those who first prayed this enabled to confess the Eternal Trinity? Did they discover the doctrine by collating texts, or learn it from some dogmatist or director, simply accepting words with nothing answering to them in heart or reason, crushed under some infallible Juggernaut? Must we reach our confession the same way? I believe they were able to confess the glory of the Eternal Trinity because they first sought, in the simplest acts of life, not to be conformed to the world but transformed by the renewing of their minds. While conformed to the world, they sought God among the visible things around them—heaven, earth, the waters beneath—for His likeness. But a voice told their hearts: "You have a Father, the Father of your spirits. Turn from these visible things to Him. Seek Him from whom you have wandered; He is not far off—He is seeking you." The voice said: "Through Me, the Word holding converse with your hearts and consciences, you may find this Father. I am the way to Him. I took your flesh and dwelt among men, that they might know what I am and what He is—how distinct We are, and how entirely one—that they may know the Father through the Son." The voice said: "You cannot know the Father and the Son unless the Spirit of the Father and the Son works in you, transforming your will to His and bringing your reason into submission to His perfect Reason." By this they were led to confess the Eternal Trinity, and by no other process shall we be led to the same confession—not by studying or repeating words, but by entering the divine life; not by straining our own wills and reasons toward a difficult conclusion, but by seeking the simplicity of a child, or of the true scientist; not by subjecting will and reason to human authority, but by embracing the freedom God promised, do we come to share the faith once delivered to the saints. And how did they learn to worship the Unity in the power of the Divine Majesty? They felt how divided and at strife their hearts were, how inward strife produced outward strife, how impossible it was to find unity for themselves or for the world. They asked God to make them one, and found it was His will to do so; they found His Spirit had taught them the very prayer for unity they uttered; they discovered He must be the Author of all peace and unity, both in themselves and among men; they found that the Father and the Son rejoice together forever in the Unity of the Spirit. So they learned, in the power of the Divine Majesty, to worship the Unity. May we learn this secret as they did! May we hold fast the faith that Father, Son, and Spirit is the one God of Everlasting Love, blessed forever! May that Love shine forth in us, that we may glorify our Father in Heaven as He was perfectly revealed in the Only-Begotten Son, and as He reveals Himself by His Spirit in His adopted children! May we be taught to enter that Unity which fills the spirits before the throne with wonder, worship, and joy!

## First Sunday after Trinity

*The passage:* Lord, I am not proud or haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters too high for me. Instead I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like a weaned child. Israel, trust in the Lord, now and forever.

After this Psalm, as after every other, we say "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost." We praise and worship the Trinity in Unity.

Isn't that exercising ourselves in great matters? Isn't this Name too high for us? If we truly kept our souls low, would we intrude into these mysteries? If our souls were like weaned children, wouldn't they be content with the practical parts of religion, leaving the doctrines of the Creeds to those who feed on nothing else?

Many have thought so, but not all. Some have learned from this Psalm what the *Gloria Patri* has to do with it. While meditating on it, while the words "I am not high-minded" have seemed to put them at a vast distance from the Psalmist, and while they have almost despaired of ever ceasing to be restless and occupied with things too high for them — this Name has sounded to them as a witness of real peace, unending life, unending hope, a bond joining the lonely sufferer to the whole Church, an abyss of love into which they could cast themselves and the whole universe. I believe we can find a test of the connection between the Psalm and the ascription apart from the experience of simple, lifelong worshippers. We may find it in people very different from each other in habits and opinions — alike only in regarding our creeds and worship with suspicion — who, in acquiring the temper of this Psalm, learn by degrees why we acknowledge the Trinity and in what power we worship the Unity.

I. I begin with those in whom dislike of the Church and its Creeds was strongest in the last century, and is perhaps not weakest now. Picture a man devoted to studying Nature with deep, passionate love, who will not be held back by moralists telling him to think more of man than of the universe, or by divines telling him to attend to his own soul. He is sure his calling is to follow truth wherever it leads. He has listened reverently to Natural Theologians who find everywhere marks of design and a living Creator, and he does find wonderful adaptations of organs to uses. But he refuses to be limited to such findings — it would be dishonest science to twist facts to yield a moral — and he cannot pretend there aren't times when he fails to find the exact fit of means to ends that Paley's school always expects. At times he senses something grander in the order of the universe than any such neat arrangement could express. The endless, teeming, self-renewing life of the world baffles anyone told it was made by a perfect Mechanist who allows nothing without a precise use. Wouldn't it be better to use some general term for the world's productive energies than to assume some being standing apart from them? Isn't "Nature" enough? Does the physical scientist have any need of God?

I know this perplexity brings many close to atheism. Yet there is such a faithful, humble spirit in the true student of Nature — his very refusal to strain evidence or use religious words he doesn't feel to be real is itself a sign of grace — that I wonder whether his glimpses into that dreadful void may not be one of God's best gifts to him, a step toward a fuller revelation of Himself. I will venture, with some hesitation, to describe how this has happened in more than a few cases. The man called to seek the laws of Nature cannot abandon that calling, but he may discover that his relation to human beings is even more wonderful than his relation to the things he studies — generically different, and unmixable with it. This difference can strike him with great force, sometimes delightful: the birth of a child may bring a joy no discovery of a planet could give. Sometimes it strikes with terrible force: the death of a child may darken the world and make him feel it doesn't matter whether the universe runs by law or without it, whether its creatures are cared for or simply perish — a frightful place to rest. Is there no escape? Through that very feeling of fatherhood and childhood, in the desolation when the bond seems snapped, is there not the dawn of a new discovery, a new Name? The student cannot "exercise himself in great matters" — he is overwhelmed by questions about *Creation*. But is not a Father more than a Creator? If the world could live without a Creator, could *he* live without a Father? That is the first all-embracing question. Hidden within it, to be drawn out later and to renew his old studies, is another: may not that Father be the Creator? May not a Father's love explain those designs and adaptations better than an architect's ingenuity? That is a hint for later; what meets him now, in his weakness, is this: his soul is a child weaned from mother earth, brought to confess it needs a Father in Heaven. He can hardly say where he first heard that Name — it sounds old yet feels fresh to him as an early spring morning. Did he find it in the New Testament? It is certainly there — he hears it often in the Sermon on the Mount; Jesus spoke it as no one had before. That is perhaps nearly all he has yet grasped of the Gospels or of Christ; whether he strictly accepts them as divine he does not know. He may go further still: longing for some way to worship this Father, he may attach himself to those who fiercely reject our Creeds, who say our Doxology dishonors the Father and denies God's Unity. Such teachers seem to him less demanding, and to affirm what he has found while opposing what looks like its contradiction. I won't ask how long he stays in this position — only that if his scientific honesty finds he cannot hold what he has grasped without also accepting convictions now strange to him, he will open his heart to those too.

II. Now consider a man who cares little for physics or natural theology, though more for them than for the authority of the Church, national or Catholic. He has spent his youth carelessly, following impulses, scorning religious people, stifling occasional pangs of conscience. Some calamity or sermon startles him. He becomes conscious not of faults but of sin — he has committed it and is its slave. The yoke is heavy and he cannot break it. He hears of a Deliverer, a Lord who came from heaven, died for sinners, and rose again, and that believing in this Saviour makes him a justified, new man. This message reaches his conscience — he may have heard it before, but now it means something; it answers his need. He cannot be deceived: this faith actually gives him victory over the evil that had mastered him.

At first this faith is enough. He asks for nothing more; he can live and die on it. He values the Bible for showing him the Saviour; whatever else it says, he neither understands nor cares much for. The Sermon on the Mount means little to him, nor does any continuous Scripture narrative, except perhaps the story of someone who struggled as he has. But texts on the blessings of believers in the crucified Jesus he treasures and feeds on.

This state feels happy, and he supposes it will last forever, though he does nothing to sustain it by thought. Gradually he finds he was wrong; questions he hadn't considered arise, raised by the Bible itself and pressed by the teachers he trusts most. What was that redemption he rested in so simply? Was it for others too? For whom, then? What made it necessary? Great matters for a simple man, often too high for him. To escape them he adopts a theory: a scheme of divinity explaining why God must inflict endless punishment on him unless Jesus intervened as his substitute and bore God's wrath. This scheme replaces the *faith* that had first freed him from moral evil. It touches his conscience at some points, his heart at others, and is designed above all to satisfy his restless understanding. He adopts it as the only security for his weakening trust in Christ as Saviour, and defends it fiercely, taking that fierceness as proof of firm belief.

He too has family and friends. In his first fervor he wanted to share his faith with them as equally true for all; in this second stage he begins congratulating himself on being different from them. Then comes a time of weakness, bodily or mental, when old sins return and his conscience stings him for his high-mindedness and pride. He can no longer recall the arguments that once proved his ground firmer than others'. A stern Lawgiver frowns from heaven; he longs for assurance that the Mediator has delivered him from that Lawgiver's demands. But seeking that comfort, a terrifying thought seizes him: Do I actually *wish* to meet such a Being? Do I long to be made in *His* likeness? Am I satisfied merely to be protected from Him? Can I bear that all mankind is left to His vengeance?

There is a pit of Atheism near this man too, and he must look into it. It may lead him, as it led the other, to a calmer, humbler faith than before. For what name meets his eye at every turn as he searches the New Testament for comfort? Jesus calls Himself a Son. Did that never strike him before — "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father"; "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God"; "I came down from Heaven not to do My own will, but the will of Him that sent Me"; "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them"? He has heard these texts a thousand times and thought he believed them, always ready with an explanation that let him hold his system while still calling them inspired. But now he is too weak for such explanations. He wants the reality behind them. He wants to know that God is not different in will and nature from the One who died on the Cross. He wants to feel reconciled *to* God, not merely delivered *from* God. He wants to feel that the God who loves him loves the world.

Here then is one who, by becoming a child, weaned from notions and systems, learns with heart and soul to give glory to the *Son*. I don't assume he now accepts our creed and worship — he may still be wary of both, may think a truth so hard-won cannot be one meant for everyone, even the unconscious; he may stay with whatever sect raised him or first showed him the Gospel mattered to him. Let us leave him for now, confident he will not rest until all that acknowledging a Divine Son involves becomes truly his own.

III. Though both these men belong to our time, I think neither is as characteristic of it as the one I turn to next. The power of the Spirit to free men from bondage to the letter and outward rule was strongly asserted by Cromwell's Ironsides, took a quieter form among George Fox's followers, and the early Methodists said only this power could awaken multitudes bound by evil habit. My third man has studied these movements. He admits fanaticism can be charged against each, but says the clergy or laity who dismissed these teachers by calling them fanatics understood little of human beings or of themselves, blinded by the conventions of their own upbringing. "Didn't they have the wisdom to see," he asks, "that man is a spiritual being, moved far more by what speaks to his spirit than by mechanical routines? True, these Independents, Quakers, Methodists didn't grasp the full extent of that fact — they imagined some special gift, a Spirit descending from heaven to inspire preachers or convert sinners. You Churchmen may dispute that opinion, if you're sure you're free of it yourselves. But poets and artists are just as committed as the wildest sects to the idea that men are subject to spiritual influences and pass them to each other."

On this true conviction he builds his scheme of life. He tries to open his soul to all spiritual influences and to exert spiritual influence on others. Whatever is not material, not measured by money, he counts as spiritual — a classification hard to fault. But if so, all stormy passions are spiritual too: hatred is spiritual, envy is spiritual. This is no wordplay; the man feels more and more that he cannot draw the line. He is above conventions; they cannot tell him right from wrong. What can? Do such distinctions even exist? May he set them for himself? He half thinks he may. He sees no other authority, or none whose decrees could reach him. Is he not, in effect, his own lawgiver, his own God?

This is a third kind of Atheism. Who among us can say he knows nothing of it, has never been tempted into its icy depths? How is anyone delivered from it? The paths vary, but are usually harsh. This man may find he is *not* above rules and conventions after all — that they bind him faster because he imagines himself free and choosing for himself. Or he may find the appetites he, the spiritual man, meant to rule instead rule him. Or he may see that he is selling the very spiritual powers meant to lift him above gold, for gold itself. Or worst of all, he may discover that whether good and evil are real or invented, he has a growing preference for what he calls evil and a growing distaste for what he calls good.

If any of this dawns on him, he feels the powerlessness of the will he had exalted so high, a sense of degradation, a bent toward self-mockery. These feelings are unlike the Psalmist's temper, yet they may lead there. This lofty spiritualist may come to think it would be a priceless blessing to cast off his proud looks, to calm his soul, to wean it from the food that has made it bloated and sick. But how? What can bring this change? He returns to old ground and asks what those sects he used to defend against our formalism meant by a spirit *given* to them. Was it something different from the human spirit he has been asserting, which they seemed to care little for? He opens the book they claimed as their source. He finds the promise of baptism with the Holy Spirit, carefully distinguished from evil spirits it casts out. He reads in Paul of the Spirit of God bearing witness with our spirit that we are God's children, of that Spirit knowing the things of God as a man's spirit knows the things of a man. He finds every gift that distinguishes one person from another traced to this Spirit as its source — yet no narrow limits placed on its presence. "It is for you," says Peter, "and your children, and as many as the Lord shall call." He hears it called the Spirit of Truth who guides into all truth, that we are baptized into one Spirit whether Jew or Greek, bond or free, that this Spirit helps our weakness and prays in us according to God's will.

These are strange words. Not long ago he would have passed over them, or treated them as Eastern descriptions of conditions we in the West explain far better. Now they come to fill gaps in our western explanations that leave those explanations useless, even false. They make no huge demand on his faith; rather they speak to his lack of faith, strength, and will. They testify to One he senses has always been near him, awakening his faith, showing him his weakness, working in him to will and to act. This is not news of *some* spiritual influence but of the Source of all such influence — not that men are and must be subject to some influence, but how they can tell the vile from the precious, be right within rather than slaves to convention or to their own craving for independence, know God in whose image they are made and so know themselves, worship God and so not worship themselves.

So this man learns to say, "Glory to the Holy Ghost," who has rescued him from low conceits that looked high and glorious, who has undertaken to calm and govern his soul and free it from its endless choosing of new, bitterer servitudes. Still, he may keep his old hatred of forms. If the quiet spiritualism of the Quaker or the noisy spiritualism of the Revivalist seems to him too narrow, too mixed with the formality he dreads, he probably stands apart from all sects and churches, waiting for some perfectly spiritual Church to appear. If he waits with real longing, perhaps he will glimpse one as pure, large, and spiritual as his heart could desire.

IV. It is no great stretch to imagine these three men, so different in taste, opinion, and fate, were once friends in youth, talking freely about the questions that mattered most to them. Later, as their minds hardened, their friendship grew wary, each pinning a hard name on the others; heated argument gave way to cautious reserve and careful small talk — more fatal to friendship than open dispute. But if, after each had passed through the schooling I've described, they met again, I think none would still want to refute the others or treat them as strangers beyond communion. Their old sympathy would revive and deepen through the experience of manhood. Gradually each discovers he has learned something he cannot give up but would gladly share, and the others would gladly receive. Their roads began at different points and seemed headed to different ends, yet all sense some shaded city they are approaching together, the goal of their pilgrimage. Where does this shared pull come from? Each has spelled out one syllable of the Name in which they live and move and have their being. The one who has faintly but truly acknowledged the Father sees he cannot know the Father except in the Son. The one who has seen in the Saviour who died for him the Son who existed before all worlds sees there could be no such Son without a Father whose express image and glory's brightness He is. And the one who glorified his own spiritual nature, and found he could not truly realize it — could not truly be a man among men — unless the Holy Spirit dwelt in him and joined him to others, confesses that only a Spirit proceeding from the Holy Father and Holy Son can be the Comforter, Sanctifier, guide to all truth, bond of all love he had wearily sought and finally found.

So, because they are no longer high-minded or proud, because their souls have been calmed and kept low, because they no longer strain after matters too high for them, because they are children weaned from their conflicting beliefs and partial idolatries, they can join in saying, "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost." They are sure this is the one God, blessed forever, since He has made them of one heart and mind. What seemed a contradiction in the shifting lights of time becomes a necessity seen in the clear, steady light of Eternity. And they can go one step further. The Psalmist speaks of himself and the discipline that brought him low, but his last note is: "O Israel, trust in the Lord, from this time forth for evermore." Having learned this shared Name, they can believe they have a shared Nation, that there now exists — not merely might exist someday — a common Church for all nations, for heaven and earth. Is this not the Name our Ethelberts and Edwins were sealed with when they first turned from idols to a kingdom of Heaven set up among them? Is it not the name with which the child of the Queen and of the laborer alike is sealed at the font today? If we English trusted in this Name, would it not bind fathers' hearts to children's, giving us a charm against sects and schisms that no persecution or compromise can give — because it would satisfy what every sect longs for and remove the excuse for schism that our own pride keeps supplying? If we trusted in this Name, might we not knit the bonds of peace and love between all Christian lands, showing Roman Catholics that we stand on the ground the Creeds proclaim, and showing Protestants that we have been brought, not by human tradition but by God's own demonstration, to the very ground beneath both their feet and ours? If that is the calling of the English Church — Lord, calm our souls and keep them low, wean us from our pride, personal and national; remake us in the image of Him who alone could say, fully and perfectly, "I am not high-minded, I have no proud looks" — so that we do not hinder the work which, with us or without us, You will surely accomplish: the reconciliation of Your Church and Universe, the revelation of Yourself.

## Second Sunday after Trinity

June 21, 1857

> "Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." — Ephesians iv. 3.

*The passage:* Paul urges believers to make every effort to preserve the unity the Spirit gives, through the bond of peace.

Some recent editors, following certain early Fathers, punctuate this passage differently from our version, reading it so that "forbearing one another in love" goes with "endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit," and "in the bond of peace" is joined to "one body and one Spirit." This construction is awkward and needs strong justification. The only reason I can find is that "unity of the Spirit" and "bond of peace" are thought to repeat each other, or that it seems hard to see how the Unity of the Spirit could be *in* the bond of peace. Both objections may disappear on closer examination.

I\. If "endeavouring" carried only the force we usually give it today, it would be a poor rendering of Paul's word. Words like this quietly change meaning as a people's mind changes. "Endeavour" once meant the fullest tension, the highest energy directed at a goal. For us it has come to mean the last feeble, hopeless attempt of someone who knows he can't succeed but goes through the motions to show the failure isn't his fault. This weaker sense is especially likely to attach to the text if we feel it addressed to ourselves: "Keep unity in a divided world — impossible! Paul can't mean we actually do it, only that we try, which of course we can — we can avoid stirring up trouble, let others go their way while we go ours, so that if offense comes, the blame rests on them, not us."

We must dismiss this idea of lazy neutrality at once. Paul means an active, zealous, deliberate use of all our thought, feeling, and power toward a fixed goal — one easy to miss, but attainable, and it is our own fault and sin, as well as our own misery, if we fail to attain it. If a man does not keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, he can blame no one but himself; until he takes this home to himself, he has not understood what he is commanded to do, and will not see how to avoid breaking that command.

II\. Notice that we are told to *keep* the Unity of the Spirit — so it is something we already have and may lose, not something we might get if fortune favors us. The endeavor is to preserve what has been entrusted to us. This is not just the sense of this one passage; it agrees with the whole language of Scripture — gifts bestowed, treasures in earthen vessels, "hold fast that which is committed to thee, let no man take thy crown." Apparent exceptions resolve into this rule. There may be promises of future blessing, and it may be our duty to look for them, as a farmer looks for harvest — without which his heart and arm would grow weak. But the full corn in the ear is the same corn as the seed in the ground; once sown, watching and keeping it is the only duty left to the farmer or the earth. What comes of it depends on other influences, which neglect or misdirected effort may check or disappoint, but which offer no substitute for the seed, nor generally for the farmer's watchfulness.

III\. But "endeavouring to keep *Unity*" — who can claim this has been given us here in this world? Who can ignore the world's endless disagreements and discords? What honest man would say Christianity has ended discord rather than produced fresh, deeper, seemingly more lasting discord? It may have taught us to long for peace, but to say we have it is the very sin Isaiah charged the false prophets with.

And yet can we look at the world and fail to see a Unity existing in it? I do not mean Nature — everyone admits, in some language or other, that it is there, despite countless jars and convulsions.

I mean not that, which often makes a painful contrast to the noise men bring everywhere, but precisely human society itself, which is torn by that very noise. There is a Unity in the midst of this strife, just as there is one amid the earthquakes and volcanoes of the natural world. Families have it, nations have it — not in some imagined golden age or dreamed-of Atlantis, but take them at their worst: a family torn by every kind of contention, even by mischievous institutions like polygamy — still there is a Unity there, or you could not recognize the contention as contention. There is a Family Unity to be kept, not created — one you destroy if you try to remake it on a scheme of your own. So with every nation, however torn by old class hostilities or new revolutions: something exists there to be destroyed, and in the heart of each lies the witness of an Order and Unity that cannot be lost. Each nation seeks unity in itself, asking what it has to do with others. This Unity has been lying in some deep well, more wonderful and mysterious than we supposed; governments did not create it, fraud and force cannot preserve it — but it is to be kept. All the effort of every heart would not be wasted in keeping it, yet a single heart may keep it when the rest have let it go.

IV\. The explanation of these contradictions lies in the words "Endeavouring to keep the Unity of the Spirit." There was once a strong conscience in nations and Churches that they had a Unity to keep, and must strenuously endeavor to keep it. Strange acts came of this conscience — acts that might seem the devil's work rather than conscience at all: Albigensian massacres, Smithfield fires. They were justified by an inward assurance that nothing is more precious to a nation, the Catholic Church, or any human being than Unity, and that no cost is too great to secure it. I cannot answer the underlying premise: if such massacres and fires truly removed the causes of strife and established peace and Unity, they would be a cheap price for so vast a blessing. But thanks be to God, in a world He governs we are not driven to such terrible alternatives. We can say fearlessly: neither these measures nor any like them ever promoted Unity or removed any obstacle to it. A thoroughgoing persecution like De Montfort's or Alva's is more honest, more reasonable, and more likely to succeed than a petty, affectedly moderate persecution such as our century might attempt — but either must equally fail for this purpose. I do not say such experiments never crushed opposition or made men submit unresistingly, even contentedly, to decrees. But exactly so far as they did this, they destroyed Unity — the Unity of our text, which the Catholic Church is pledged by Creed and oath to keep. For if these Creeds mean anything, the Unity we are to keep is a Unity of the Spirit — the Unity declared at Pentecost among men of every nation and tongue. We do not believe that sign if we do not believe true Unity is unity amid diversity of custom, habit, notion, and education — not the unity attempted at Babel, one tongue under one tyrant. We do not believe in the Holy Ghost if we do not believe He is the source of Unity, bringing men to be of one mind in a house, a nation, a Church. We do not believe the Holy Ghost has been given if we do not think He is carrying on this work daily in human society and in individual hearts — if we do not see all the events of providence, all our trials and joys, even the contradictions of human judgment and the perversities of will, as either His agents or the enemies whose overthrow displays His power.

Therefore we must say — not that Innocent the Third, or any Protestant or English cleric who has imitated his vast experiments on a smaller, clumsier scale, did too much to root out heresy, but that they did too little: a more thorough, root-and-branch system was needed then, and is needed now, for this purpose. If they wished to keep the Unity of the Spirit, they should have struck more resolutely at the principles causing disunion — seeking those principles first in themselves, asking what the Spirit of Truth was testifying against in their own hearts. Had they carried their inquisition into those depths, excommunicating and delivering to slaughter whatever they found there conspiring against peace, they would have found they had not lied in proclaiming Unity most precious in God's sight, worth using His strength to protect. And with that assurance would come a sense of the baseness of the counterfeit, Babel-like Unity they had tried, in defiance of God's Spirit, to create — a sense that might have led them to real, godly repentance.

This at least should be the effect on us of what we read of them, see in our age, and feel in ourselves. We should not rail at past times but imitate their vigorous effort to keep what it is death to lose, learning wisdom from their failures where our own vigilance is needed. It is a great mistake to think Unity was necessary in the Early or Middle Ages but is not necessary now, as though we had somehow learned to do without it. We have learned no such horrible lesson, reached no such degradation. Never was the sense of the curse of division stronger, never the cry for reconciliation stronger, than now. Blundering attempts to force embraces, to smother differences; abject searches for some human guide who will make us at one despite our reasons and wills — these show how vehement the passion is, willing to risk ridicule and defeat rather than find no outlet. What we need is a deeper conviction that nothing but real Unity, Unity of the Spirit, can satisfy us. Then the New Testament's declaration, written in sunbeams across its pages, that the ascended Christ baptizes with the Holy Spirit, will come to us not as a hard dogma to accept but as news of a wellspring of life within — the answer to all our sighing, deliverance from the dry notions of intellect, from the dreary, disputatious, suspicious temper, from all in us that will not sympathize with others because it is itself cold and dead. We will find more and more that whatever is living in us flies out to meet what is living in others, that we have an interest in sustaining it even where it seems to clash with our own thinking, and that to kill a thought or hope in any man is to kill a germ of Unity which God's Spirit planted and meant to grow. Some think their calling is to find whatever is untenable in others' faith and expose or mock it. Such people have their reward; if it is a duty undertaken from conscience, not malice, perhaps some pleasure comes of it, though not a very keen one. But it is no less healthy an occupation to seek what is *tenable* — what has foundation in everyone's faith — so that ours may grow clearer and more alive through fellowship with theirs, each giving and receiving, so that neither faith rests in itself but both in the Truth which both need.

V\. And so I come to the words some have found unnecessary or awkward — "in the bond of Peace." Is this mere repetition? Is not the Unity of the Spirit the same as the bond of peace? I think not. I think there could be no Unity of the Spirit without a bond of peace, but the two are as distinct as breath from the air we breathe, or the eye from the light shining into it. By Unity of the Spirit I mean what the Spirit of God produces in us — the countless varied movements of desire, faith, and hope He awakens in different people, which He makes them feel as the struggles of a common life. By the bond of peace I mean that toward which He shows these movements tending, in which He leads them to feel they may all rest. Just as some would build the Church on the grave of all active thought and aspiration, calling that dreary solitude Christian peace, so others think a Church can be built on energy and exertion alone, needing no absolute Truth as foundation, only holy desires and good works. I cannot believe that anyone in whom such desires are stirred will remain satisfied with them alone. The yearning for Truth, for what *is*, cannot long stay separate in an earnest mind from the love of what is right. There have been instances of such division — men who would have died for goodness yet scarcely valued Truth — but they are scarcely possible now. The pursuit of natural science has had this good effect: men now demand something not hypothetical, not supplied merely by their own thoughts, as ground for those thoughts to rest on. I am sure God's Spirit presses this same demand in the spiritual world as much as the natural. They must find something common there, or our much-discussed "spiritual consciousnesses" will simply turn in on themselves and exhaust themselves searching for nothing.

Where then shall we find this bond of peace? I tried last Sunday to show, through examples, how people starting from opposite points, in different occupations, holding apparently irreconcilable opinions, might find in the Name into which we are baptized the reconciliation of their deepest convictions, and deliverance from the intellectual dogmas that had kept them apart. This evidence, from our own experience and quite apart from the traditions of our forefathers, leads us back to their conviction: that here is the living Truth underlying and sustaining both the natural and the spiritual world. If our forefathers held that the Church stands on Confession of that Name, whether spoken or written, they used dangerous language, dishonoring to Him who is and was and is to come, who Himself upholds the pillars of the earth, who alone is the rock on which any house can be built to withstand rain and wind.

A united Confession of the Name, a united Worship of Father, Son, and Spirit — of which the past holds only a dim shadow and prophecy — we have a right to expect. It may come when least expected, likely after a season of darkness, fierce contention, and utter unbelief. But the confession will be united only when we stop confusing our feeble expressions of trust, our praises and adorations, with Him to whom they rise and from whom they come — when we are brought to nothing, that He may be shown to be all in all.

Therefore, to keep the Unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, we must maintain in our own hearts, and help others feel, this great distinction. We must show that we do not want others to adopt our particular views; that we know physical force can only suppress the outward signs of disagreement — a paltry and often harmful result; and that moral force, whether argument to the understanding or appeal to the heart, is abused when used to make captives for our triumphs. All powers of reasoning and speech are gifts of God's Spirit, working to free us from narrow, partial conclusions into the full light of God's countenance. What we ask of Him is that He purge our ears to hear the countless voices speaking in His Universe, since they all proceed from the Creative Word by whom the Father made the world — but above all, that He enable us to have fellowship with the poorest child of man, who is embraced by the Father's love, bears the nature the Son took and died in, and is not unworthy that the Holy Spirit should dwell with him, comfort him, and raise him to eternal life.

Therefore no one shall persuade us, for Unity's sake, to give up this Name, explain it away, or substitute some other bond of union. For the sake of our brethren, and for the sake of those who differ from us most, we dare not do this — by doing it we would sever ourselves from both, destroying the bond of peace in which God has made us, and will prove us, eternally at one with them. We want to be more zealous for this Name than the men of old, because if we have profited from God's teaching in these later centuries, we ought to know better than they did that it is a name of inclusion, not exclusion — that there is eternal life in it because there is eternal love in it. We will not be ungrateful that it has come to us in words that peasants and children can repeat, for so we learn that it is revealed to us, not discovered by us — meant not for one age but for all ages — and that we grasp it only because it first grasps us. We will teach it to the youngest, sure that they are surrounded by this mystery as by the common air, and that their spirits are freest the more they enter into it and draw life from it. We will teach it to growing youth, not to keep him from learning all that men have thought and written who never knew it or disbelieved it, but so that he may profit from all of it without being forced to turn away in disgust at its conflicts and contradictions. We will speak of it to the grown man, busier with life's controversies than the schools', because the more he meets with strife in others and in himself, the more he needs to keep the Unity of the Spirit in his own heart, and to feel that there is a bond of peace which has never been broken and will last forever.

## Third Sunday after Trinity

> "*Likewise, ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder. Yea, all of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility: for God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble*."—1 Peter v. 5.

*The passage:* Peter tells the younger to submit to the elder, tells everyone to be subject to one another, to be clothed with humility, because God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble.

There is a common complaint today that reverence is dying out, that Isaiah's words are coming true: the young behaving proudly against the old, the base against the honourable. The feeling of respect is gone, and each person stands only on his own powers and his own rights.

I suppose we all recognize some truth in this charge against our age, and also see hopeful signs that things may not be as bad as claimed, or that some good counteracts the evil. We have perhaps asked whether the growth of personal independence is itself a good that compensates for what is lost with it.

But this comfort is checked by another thought: is personal independence really characteristic of us? Is it not fading along with the reverence it supposedly displaces? Are men not becoming lazier, casting themselves on hope of some accident or outside help rather than earning their bread by their own effort? We are told the sturdy manliness of the English peasant is disappearing just as surely as his deference to his betters.

I don't think much good comes of weighing arguments that the old days were better against arguments that we are greater and happier than our ancestors. Anyone with ordinary skill can marshal an overwhelming case either way; a practised speaker can arrange facts and authorities so that no doubt remains in the mind of anyone already inclined to agree with him.

I. But a sentence like "all of you be subject one to another," taken as a real command, is something more than speculation about the decline of reverence in an age or country. It speaks to *me*. It describes a temper that ought to govern society and would preserve it — but a temper to be cultivated first in myself, since it cannot spread through a mass except as it is formed in one heart at a time. What use is it to argue about whether signs of respect between classes are increasing or decreasing, or whether they mean anything at all? We can go straight to the thing itself: what do our outward tokens of respect answer to in us, and what do they not answer to? Is our respect merely a product of circumstance and custom, dependent on external convention, taught us by other men's rules — or does it come from a deeper source, kept alive by the Spirit of God renewing it continually?

These are the truly important questions, and everything else depends on them. A reverence grounded merely on social arrangement, on settled custom and tradition, will not survive any real shock — such things are not old or deep enough to sustain a feeling this profound; they depend on it far more than it depends on them, and speak to it only because they witness to something deeper, without which their charm vanishes. Nor can the Bible or Christianity be brought in afterward to prop up such failing customs. The Bible and Christianity keep forcing on us the truth that nothing stands without a foundation, that any social structure must be built on rock to survive storms, and that passion for external forms, however strong it looks, is not to be relied on — for yesterday's idol may not be today's, and anything that draws its substance from the worshipper's mind is subject to that mind's changes, which always claims the right to unmake what it made. This is where the Apostle brings us. He recognizes the relation of younger to elder as deep, carrying real duties and calling for subjection, and connects to it other relations equally real though less acknowledged. But he has no hope his admonitions will be more than empty maxims — approved and disobeyed — unless the principle beneath them is grasped. "All of you be subject one to another": this reverence is not ultimately grounded on differences of position or age. Unless each man feels this toward every other man — feels grandeur and awe even toward one with no outward mark of superiority, indeed with every outward mark of inferiority; feels (in Peter's own strong word) a *subjection* owed to such a man, a real deference due him — he will not sustain the other kind of respect either; it will certainly perish.

The old idea that royalty is mysterious, and loses respect once it discards mystery, rests on a real truth. It becomes a great falsehood when the mystery degenerates into a trade secret, kept up by vulgar tricks meant to preserve an impression of something sacred that those performing the tricks don't themselves believe in. St. Peter does not deny this counterfeited mystery, but points us to a deeper and more awesome one: the mystery in the being of man himself. Every person we meet is its shrine; even a beggar carries something no archangel can fully see into, something no words can describe or human standard measure. Try to see him this way — not as one with the rags that cover him, but as one of the race for which the Son of God died, bearing the nature Christ took in the virgin's womb, offered on the Cross, and now dwells in at God's right hand. Try to think of him as having a whole inner world unknown to you and to himself, more wonderful than the outward world, nearer to the source from which this visible one draws its light and heat.

Try to think so! But can the effort succeed? Can we force ourselves into so strange a feeling? Isn't sympathy with people utterly unlike ourselves a rare gift given to a few — more often women than men — and isn't it better called pity than reverence?

II. St. Peter answers these questions in the second part of the text: "Be clothed with humility." He knew, better than anyone, that neither position nor example alone can make a man humble. He was a fisherman, and proud. He walked with Christ three years, and was still proud. Low as he was, he aspired to be high — he might be scorned by Judæans as a Galilean, or by Romans as a Jew, but perhaps he would yet set his foot on both their necks and hold some great place, if not the highest, in his Master's kingdom. It seemed a lofty ambition, yet it was not lofty enough — he was meant for far more than he dreamed, a fuller apprehension of a glory already his. But to reach this he first had to know what he was in himself. His self-confidence was tested and failed: he who claimed he would go to prison and death could not even speak the truth before a servant girl. What darkness closed over him then, blotting out past and future — yet what light was breaking through that darkness, illuminating past, present, and future together! In himself he was the weakest of creatures, unable to blame any weakness or heartlessness in another that he had not found in himself. But had he no strength at all — was his boast of going to prison and death mere dream? There stood One in that house before Caiaphas, soon to face the Roman governor, then Calvary. Why had Peter once felt strength that had now deserted him? A question full of wonder, unanswered then, though Christ had just said, "I am the vine, ye are the branches; abide in me." A question the Resurrection, the words after it, and the Ascension only begin to answer — one only the promised Comforter could fully unfold. Under that teaching Peter learned that to set up himself was folly, misery, degradation; that to trust in Christ was to stand in his true place, to claim fellowship with the real source of his life and power, to share a mysterious kingdom, to hold mighty trusts, to enter the reality behind his dreams — to leave all and yet possess all. But to trust in Christ was to trust the One who said, "Come unto me, for I am meek and lowly of heart." To trust Him was to be clothed with humility. Peter had none of his own; whenever he imagined he did, he grew prouder than ever. But he learned that pride was always near, his besetting sin, and that he could only be freed from it by turning to the One who was as much friend and life-giver to the humblest lamb of the flock as to Peter himself, one of its chief shepherds.

Phrases like "Put on Christ," "Having the mind of Christ," "Be clothed with humility," often dismissed as mere figures of speech or Eastern idiom, were in fact the most exact expression the Apostle could find for his own inward experience. I believe they remain the most accurate words we can use, and the more we know ourselves, the more we will find in them the deepest reality, meeting needs nothing else can meet.

III. This leads into the third clause: "For God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble." "How can I be rid of this pride, so natural, so ingrained?" — this must have been Peter's frequent question, as it is ours. He found the answer at last, terrible and everlasting: pride was not merely breaking a rule but resisting God himself — the God who chose to dwell in man as His temple, to surround His creatures with His own power, to guide and move them by His own inspiration. Every act of pride was nothing less than fighting against God, refusing His rule; and all humility was simply yielding to that government — letting the Spirit of Christ possess the spirit He had redeemed and claimed as His own. It was a bold thing to speak of clothing oneself with Christ's righteousness, of putting on His qualities. Bold, yes — but if this is our true humanity, meant for us and no other, and everything we've substituted for it has been assumed against God's will, then He Himself will clothe us with our right mind; He is clothing us day by day. For what is all the discipline of life but this — urging us not to set ourselves above the Son of God, to be content to stoop as the Lord of heaven and earth stooped? And once a man accepts that he is not meant to be what his Master and King refused to be — that it is no condescension to stand level with those to whom the Prince of earthly kings made Himself level — then "God giveth grace." All the powers of the universe conspire with him rather than resist his wild ambition. The Creator's loving power is no longer a mere weight upon the poor atom it sustains; that atom may be sure this power and love will be with him in height and depth, life and death, quickening him with immortal energy, fitting him more and more to serve God's gracious purposes through all the ages to come.

IV. Peter could then carry his own hard-won experience over into his message to the Church, scattered then and scattered through all time: "All of you be subject one to another." So he asserted the true condition of a society while deflating the self-importance of its individual members — exalting each even as he humbled him. One dwells among you whom Principalities and Powers confess as Lord. God wills that you all should be like Him, sharing His glory — and His glory was to be the servant of all, bearing the sins of all, dying the death of all. Be sure He dwells in every one of these poor creatures of flesh and blood, who will one day be shown as His brethren. Be subject to Him in them. In every person there is something sacred, something to learn from, something to obey. Take an extreme case, since such a law admits no exceptions: even a fool or reprobate, someone it is right to restrain and punish, may speak words that strike you to the heart. The lips may be foul, but the source beneath them is divine, oracular; be wary of rejecting the message, lest you reject something that has come from the mouth of God. And reverence the shrine as well as the utterance. The man may treat himself as a beast, may be making himself one — but do not endorse his own blasphemy against himself. Reverence him, so that he may learn to reverence himself. Reverence him enough to refuse to indulge his follies or sins — deal with them severely, use whatever discipline the case demands — but remember that these are his enemies and destroyers, not himself.

V. Generally, applied to a society, this rule of mutual subjection means respecting the opinions, habits, individual peculiarities, and inherited convictions of everyone we deal with; assuming that each has something we need, and being careful not to rob him of anything God has given him. This respect does not come from caring more for him than for Truth — it is part of our homage to Truth. There is a danger of making a person less true, of estranging him from Truth, out of our eagerness to attach him to ourselves. So this same mutual subjection must also make us resolute to maintain whatever truth we have grasped, courageous in asserting it, forceful in denouncing habits of mind that we know, from our own experience, work against the love of truth.

And so this submission to man, which is really submission to God, will keep us from all servility — from the kind of deference to individual or popular judgment that is incompatible with true manliness, because it is incompatible with true reverence.

I believe, brethren, nothing is so fatal to the respect of younger for elder, or to noble and chivalrous duty and obedience, as that counterfeit homage — vulgar and contemptible rather than venerable — which so easily creeps over us, an especial disgrace of our time. The worship of men who have scraped together money by fair means or foul, and the worship of "public opinion," are possible only because reverence for man as man is so weak among us. Cultivate that reverence properly, and all due deference to age, rank, and office becomes possible and honourable. Without it, such deference becomes degrading pretense, coloured by the baseness of our ordinary habits.

How shameful, then, for churchmen to complain that they and their offices no longer receive the respect once paid them — that the rich scorn them privately and the poor openly, that religion is despised in the person of its representatives! How dare we make such complaints, or let others make them for us? This amounts to saying that the Church is not built on the very principle our Lord declared and proved it stands on — that the greatest of all is the servant of all. If that is the law of its existence, we are far more to blame for any lack of reverence around us than anyone else could be. We must have failed in that reverence, that subjection to all men, which is our calling to display. We must have failed to show the rich how petty is what sets them apart from the poor, and how glorious is what they share with them. We must have fallen into a subjection that is not human but slavish, not humble but self-seeking, not of Christ but of Antichrist. Before blaming the English people for despising us, let us make sure we have not earned their contempt through qualities offensive to true English freedom and manliness; before saying they have lost their Christianity, let us ask honestly whether we have not lost ours.

We boast that our Church rests on no merely human foundation, that we do not make the Apostle whose words we have considered today, whose festival falls tomorrow, into the Rock of our trust. That is well worth celebrating — if we truly hold instead to Him whom Peter confessed as the Son of the living God, if the precious cornerstone Peter wrote of and lived to testify to is what actually binds us together as a holy Temple. But we are not really confessing Jesus as the Son of God, nor treating Him as our cornerstone, if we fail to learn the lesson Peter has taught us today — if we seek to be called Rabbi, Rabbi, rather than showing who our Master is by being subject to one another as He was. For it was by subjection that He proved Himself on earth to be the Son who dwelt with the Father before all worlds; His subjection to the Cross was His exaltation above every name. He showed filial subjection to be essential to that perfect union of will and being which He has with the Father in the Blessed Spirit — and we are told it shall be so at the end as it was at the beginning. For it is written that when all things are put under the Son's feet, the Son Himself will be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.

## Fourth Sunday after Trinity

*The passage:* "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief."—1 Timothy i. 15.

If someone who knew the outline of St. Paul's history heard these words for the first time and was told they were his, he would likely guess wrong about when they were spoken. He would suppose such an elementary statement must belong to some early sermon to heathens who had never heard the Gospel, and the closing phrase would seem to fix it soon after Paul's own conversion — natural words for a man newly opened to grace, still remembering that he had lately been binding believers, to cry out, "Of all sinners I am chief." Would he not be startled to learn instead that this was written, with great solemnity, to a man raised from childhood on the Scriptures, trained for years under Paul himself, judged fit to govern a church needing more varied gifts than almost any other? Would the surprise not deepen on learning it was Paul the aged — scourged, imprisoned, often near death for the Gospel, carrying daily the care of all the churches — who counted his own sin greater than that of the openly disobedient and ungodly he had just named, the very people for whom he said the Law was made?

I. I want to take up this last point first, brethren. How are we to understand Paul calling himself chief of sinners? What right had he to say it? If he had that right, can anyone else claim it too? How can we use these words today without some sense of dishonesty?

Dismiss at once the thought that Paul was displaying to Timothy a kind of graceful humility. No humility is graceful unless it is grounded in truth, and this is the last quality that should ever be faked. Airs of lowliness betray a man who does not know himself and is angling for credit for being better than he is. Paul was utterly free of this. He proclaims his powers as an apostle without hesitation; he boasts, when it serves, of what God called him to do and suffer; he speaks of himself as plainly as he would of anyone else — announcing without shrinking that he had labored more abundantly than all the other apostles.

Nor should we say he called himself chief merely from a sudden vivid memory of his days as a persecutor. He certainly did remember that — the context shows the memory was present as he wrote to Timothy.

But we know from how he describes that history that he did not think himself worse than other persecutors simply for being more zealous. His zeal was a heavenly quality, not a devilish one. The same energy that drove him to seek warrants against believers in Damascus later carried him to Macedonia at the Spirit's call, made him preach in season and out, and let him resist his friends' pleas because he was ready not just to be bound but to die for Christ's name. He was not chief of sinners for having pursued a wrong conviction more forcefully than others did.

Nor do the words, taken literally, mean he was speaking mainly of the past. Saying "I am first" tells Timothy this was his present state of mind, not a charge against his old crimes. Whatever he learned the day his eyes were opened on the Damascus road had only deepened and grown within him since. What was true then he believed still truer now — his grasp of it had grown more vivid, not less.

Some have suggested the Greek word rendered "chief" does not mean quite that — that it marks Paul as an example of mercy shown to sinners rather than a comparison with others. I am willing to use "first" instead of "chief." But this change will not do all that its proposers hope. Paul still speaks as representing the whole class of sinners, not just those who have received forgiveness. Still, the change helps, because "chief" suggests he is weighing his crimes against other men's — which was not his point at all. He tells the Philippians he was, as to the righteousness of the Law, blameless. In this very letter he lists murderers of fathers and mothers and other flagrant offenders as those the Law was made for. The Law rightly punished plain, visible wrongs. Paul had enforced that Law zealously and had never once fallen under even its mildest censure.

But, as he says elsewhere, it is the Law that brings the knowledge of sin. It forbids acts, and in doing so it wakens a man to see the disposition in him to commit them — a will at war with the Lawgiver's will even while he outwardly submits. This is a wholly different discovery, one no code can touch. How can law punish an alienated heart, or reach the doer to make him a new man?

Here Paul found himself "first" — in a fearful sense, alone. He had no way to measure how far others had strayed from God's loving mind; the Law only told him, "You have done it." Gradually he saw the Law was merely echoing outwardly what a living voice said within: the Spirit of God convicting him of sin, showing him he had cut himself off from the true Lord and source of righteousness and life — speaking to him not as one of a crowd but directly, to him first. He knew other men's sins only through his own, could measure their departure from the true standard only by his; and the more he felt the pull of that divine attraction, the more he felt the strength of his own inclination to resist it, and the more he credited any rightness in himself to that influence alone. So he could say, with total sincerity, "I am first among sinners — more love has been shown to me than to anyone I know, so my resistance has been greater; if the light has overcome me, the struggle against it in me has been fiercer than I dare say it has been in others."

If this was his reason for speaking so, it is no wonder he spoke this way even more strongly in his later years than in his earlier ones. It was not that his conscience grew more scrupulous with age, attaching guilt to things once thought indifferent — quite the reverse: he grew freer every day, able to eat or abstain, live as Jew or Gentile, as his Master's cause required. Rather, the more he was possessed by the Spirit of God, the more he felt how near the Spirit of Evil lay to him; falsehood, malice, and selfishness — the essence of that Evil Spirit — seemed to him more dreadful than any of their outward forms. He felt himself in closer contact with the powers of darkness than his converts or the unconverted were, and knew that without a sustaining, ever-present grace he would fall into depths of evil none of them had ever sounded.

You might think his close, constant knowledge of the moral failures springing up in the churches he had founded would have turned his mind outward, proving that the wickedness he knew was around him, not within him. His busy labors surely spared him any morbid self-brooding, and confirmed — from his own spirit and God's — that a man should not pore over his feelings to accuse or comfort himself. But do not imagine he thought better of himself as he learned of the Corinthians' factions and immorality, or when the Galatians who once loved him turned on him for telling them the truth. I think instead that he recognized in himself the very evils that pained him in them — that he understood their heresy, carnality, and suspicion through the seeds of the same things in his own heart, and never condemned them without judging tendencies that might spring to life in him at any moment. The more fully he grasped his place as their minister and priest, the more he saw himself as first among sinners.

By this process, brethren, he was trained to a real humility, not a mock one. He sank lower in his own estimation than we ever sink in ours, because he saw more clearly the glory of his calling than we do; his knowledge of sin was more personal and more piercing because his belief in salvation from it was more exalted and complete. This is the second point I want to raise.

II. The words "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners" sound to us like a nursery commonplace — no less familiar to Timothy or to Paul. Why did they never grow stale for the aged apostle? Had he found some refined meaning in them beyond what children and simple people take from them? No — I think it was exactly their bearing on the humblest people on earth that gave them force for him. And I think it is exactly because we go hunting for refined meanings, substituting a theory or scheme of salvation for the plain belief the words express, that they have lost their force for us. A man who thought of himself first when he thought of sinners could not occupy himself with grand calculations about the amount of guilt the world had incurred, the punishment thereby deserved, or the satisfaction required to remove it. His question was too terrible for such reckonings. There was some deep hostility between his mind and the mind of his righteous Creator — could it be ended? Some bondage on his will — could it be broken? To this need comes the plain announcement: One has come from that righteous Being to make peace, to save sinners out of their sins. He might doubt long whether such good news could be true. He needed real freedom, real peace with God. Any claimed deliverer must pass the hardest test: could he do what none else had done, succeed where the Law and its sacrifices — which Paul held most sacred — had failed, and settle the very controversies they had stirred up? No archangel's authority could force him to accept the Gospel; but the plainest man could bring it to his conscience with evidence he could not deny. And once he had said "It is true," repeating that truth never grew flat or stale, for fresh rebellions kept threatening within him — sometimes the insurgents were already in arms, and he had to ask, "Am I with them?" — and the old tyrants that had bound him were not dead or even sleeping; his limbs sometimes seemed to miss their old chains.

Was that all? Was there no fuller light reaching him continually from the heaven to which the Son of God had ascended — no deeper grasp of what His coming had done than what he first received? There was. It lies in the plural word: *sinners*. His experience had been personal — he had known sin, and deliverance, in himself. But that sin was separation from his fellow men as well as from God, and that deliverance was reunion with them as well as with God. Christ had saved him, but had not come into the world only for him. Every man shared his need, and his same Helper. He could not separate himself from mankind. The saying is faithful and worthy of universal acceptance — worthy, as our Communion Service renders it, of being received by all — that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners from what kept them from being members of one human family, and to bind them into that family in Himself.

So the plain words hold the most and the most personal meaning together — we have not exhausted them; we have barely glimpsed their sense. That glimpse fades whenever we try to learn what sin is by watching and judging others, or imagine our need is escape from God's judgment rather than escape from ourselves into reconciliation with Him. But if we become children in malice and grown men in understanding — not as a show before others, but in the secrecy of a letter to a friend or of our own hearts — confessing ourselves first among sinners because we confess ourselves to have received the fullest help toward righteousness, then these glimpses will brighten more and more toward the perfect day. Then the Communion service will truly interpret the words we prepare our communicants with. Then we will be sure that He who came to save sinners sustains them by His own pure sacrifice and calls them into fellowship with His Father and theirs. Then we will not doubt that Paul's rapturous hope in today's Epistle will be fulfilled — that not only we, but the whole unwilling creation that has suffered for man's sin, will share the Deliverer's glory when He appears without sin unto salvation.

## Fifth Sunday after Trinity

*The passage:* If we judged ourselves, we would not be judged by God; but when we are judged by him, it is his discipline upon us, meant to keep us from being condemned along with the world.

It is, I fear, a common feeling among laymen and clergymen alike, that ordinary words lose their plain meaning and become mere technical terms once applied to theology. "Judge" and "judgment" have a meaning everyone recognizes in ordinary life, even if they cannot define it precisely: a judgment is an act of discrimination, an attempt to separate the right from the wrong, the tenable from the untenable. Judgment as a faculty means a power that draws lines, that distinguishes acts, thoughts, or words which would otherwise be confused. But when we speak of Divine judgments, we seem not to carry this meaning higher, but to lose it almost entirely. A "judgment," in that sense, seems to mean little more than a disaster we cannot otherwise explain, and so attribute to God. A fortune, a child, an escape from ruin, we call a mercy; a famine, a plague, an earthquake, we call a judgment. We explain the first kind of events by supposing God has gracious designs on us, and the second by supposing we have somehow offended him. In both cases we imagine some departure from his ordinary rule, some interference for us or against us, and we ask ourselves what act of ours it must be connected to.

St. Paul's words in our text, which sum up the essence of many passages of Scripture, give us a way to test this way of speaking and thinking.

"If we would judge ourselves," he says, "we should not be judged of the Lord." We could not paraphrase "judge" in the first clause as "bring a calamity on ourselves" — so we must not do so in the second either. We are commanded to judge ourselves in the ordinary sense: to distinguish right from wrong, precious from vile, in ourselves. This, then, according to the Apostle, must be the main purpose of the judgment God exercises over us — as he affirms in the next verse. Even without that verse, this one is enough to remove many wrong impressions and to suggest many deep truths.

I. St. Paul assumes that we have a capacity to judge ourselves — that we can look over our own acts and feelings and pass sentence on them. Every man's conscience, and the common language of mankind, confirms this. We know we are abandoning a right we have no business abandoning, one we cannot safely give up, when we fail to take account of what we do to others and what passes within us. It would be no mercy but a real degradation to be excused from this task.

II. St. Paul says next that the Lord will not excuse them from this task. He takes up the office they have abandoned, appearing as Judge precisely where they will not judge. Remember to whom he was writing: the Corinthian Christians were not men of dark, reprobate character — St. Paul says they "came behind in no gift," and his letter bears this out. Yet that same letter is full of complaints and rebukes. Why? Because in their minds good and evil lay side by side, confounded rather than contrasted. Zeal mixed with party spirit; appreciation of spiritual gifts mixed with vanity over them; impatience with poor teaching alongside tolerance of real corruption; high spiritual aspiration mingled with gross sensuality — these marked them. None of this means they lacked what was best, or lacked love for it. It means that best and worst passed too easily into each other, with no landmarks between them. These were the men who did not judge themselves, and so were judged by the Lord.

III. Perhaps you will say that by "judging themselves" Paul means exercising church discipline, casting out unworthy members. No doubt the Corinthians failed at this — a man guilty of sins a heathen would be ashamed of was tolerated in their fellowship. Yet the Apostle never reproaches them for being reluctant to judge each other; instead he begs them not to be so eager at it: "Judge nothing before the time," he says, "until the Lord comes, who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the heart." Judging others was in fact their besetting sin. They were forever deciding that this man was less wise or spiritual than themselves — slandering one as a narrow follower of Cephas, another as a mystic disciple of Apollos, a third as claiming a dangerous freedom under Paul's name. And precisely because of this, they could not judge themselves; the faculty of judgment lost its edge, spent itself in unlawful, unprofitable efforts. Ever busy hunting for motes in others, they grew less and less aware of the beam in their own eye.

IV. This is exactly why their neglect of outward discipline was so shameful. They had no real sense of the sacredness of the Communion binding them together as one body, so its profanation was easily tolerated. Party symbols and party loyalties were everything; their calling as baptized men, and the common rights that came with it, were nothing. This lack of discrimination about themselves did not mean too grand a notion of their privileges as Christians, or too eager a claim upon them — it was Paul himself who urged them to believe that all things were theirs, life or death, present or future, Paul or Apollos or Cephas, because they were Christ's and Christ is God's. They are blamed not for believing this too boldly, but for the confused habit of mind that left them ignorant both of their high position and their great danger — of the light they had been brought into, and the darkness threatening to put it out.

V. All this shows that the Divine judgment Paul speaks of could not simply be one that singles out this person from that — picking out the godless man while passing over the one living consistently with his calling. The old argument against Providence, that lightning strikes the temple and its worshipper as readily as the boldest scoffer, is not refuted here; it might even find fresh support. Human judgment had not made, and could not make, that separation; it had no commission for it. It had failed instead by not discovering the thoughts and intents of the heart it was set to guard, by not keeping that heart with all diligence. The judgment now needed, because this task had been neglected, would do what had been left undone: take men aside to question them about themselves, uncover their own hidden thoughts, awaken them to consider what God had made and redeemed them to be, what they might become if they truly walked in his way, and what they would become instead if they lived only in and for themselves, as though cut off from him.

VI. Now, brethren, I think there are principles here that apply to us. I do not think it right, as I said recently, to find fault with our own age or dwell on its inferiority to ages past. But if there are qualities generally agreed to characterize us, qualities we tend to value in ourselves, it is worth asking what dangers follow from possessing them. Most agree we live in a critical rather than a creative age. Whatever else we do or do not cultivate, the critical faculty develops in us from boyhood, and we give it every scope. Criticism, in one form or another, occupies nearly everyone who writes or speaks — politicians, artists, religious men alike are critics, some censors of predecessors as well as contemporaries. I do not complain that we were born into an age with this bias; it should not be violently resisted; there must be a meaning in it worth understanding. But it cannot be denied that the same effect that followed this temper's rise in later Greece, the effect Paul found in Corinth, is just as plain among us: in judging others, we have largely lost the power of judging ourselves.

I am willing to use the Apostle's language of our own case. I grant that Englishmen of this century "come behind in no gift" — that they have as many fine, noble impulses as men of any age; that we have shaken off follies our forefathers kept; that we see sins they were blind to; that our social standard is often higher; that we acknowledge obligations unthought of a century ago; that we can condemn evils from which we ourselves are not yet free.

But this too we feel, if we are honest: we may lack no good quality, yet we are gravely short of the energy and manliness to choose good and refuse evil. We let right and wrong impulses act on us together, as if both came from the same source and either might equally be obeyed. We live in a twilight of half-realized truths and half-followed convictions, catching glimpses of a heavenly light we do not trace to its source — so that we boast of it as our own, until it is darkened by shadows cast from the very mind it should have lit.

This, brethren, is the charge no special pleading for the age can evade. It accounts for the discontent and weariness earnest men show in it, despite its undeniable excellence; it explains complaints of its practical feebleness, even when it seems to have a strength that could move mountains. If this age were as paltry and heartless as it is sometimes made out, the sight of it would be more disgusting but far less saddening. It is hard to weep over a mere voluptuary; but that strength, bravery, gentleness — beautiful, graceful gifts, an eye to see and a will to command — should waste themselves in fruitless efforts and vain imaginations, sinking at last, having achieved nothing for the world, into nothing but pain for their possessor: that is a mournful sight indeed. Who has not witnessed it, again and again? What was wanting in these spirits finely touched to the finest issues? Can we find a better answer than Paul's: they did not judge themselves. Amid the flood of impressions pouring in on them, they did not resolutely decide which to entertain and which to reject. They delighted in their own energies, sure these were not given for nothing, but were not careful to consider in what direction, to what end, and under whose guidance they should be used. They knew they held the highest aspirations, not earth-born as some told them; but how these aspirations came to be in them, and how they could exist alongside corruption and death, were questions often raised, never resolved. So when their habits carried them into free philosophical inquiry, they were quickly persuaded that religious people had degraded man, treating him as beast or devil when he has the capacity for everything godlike and true. But they did not ask boldly enough whether this misrepresentation came from a one-sided theory of the Gospel. They assumed the Gospel itself denies the glory of humanity — when in truth it proclaims that glory more loudly than any philosophy, and reconciles it with the very facts of experience that seem to deny it. They rejected the Apostle's doctrine and those facts together, and have had to verify both in their own experience: finding there is a flesh in each man as well as a spirit, and that where there is no one to humble and exalt the spirit, the flesh will make him its slave.

With others, no less brave or noble, the experience takes a different shape. They turn not to speculation but to civil life, beginning with scorn for vulgar politicians and the loftiest resolve to do nothing that degrades their fellow men, everything that raises them. But they find coarse materials to work with; those they would serve do not understand them. They grow provoked and passionate, avenge their high thoughts of humanity in bitterness toward individuals, fall into despair, and at last are content to run along in the old rut they had urged everyone to leave.

Others have been formed in a different atmosphere from either, and have looked on both with deep pity or contempt. They have dwelt in quiet cloisters, among old religious associations and memories of other days, mourning their own time as degenerate and wretched, lacking all chivalry and saintliness. Their aim has been to cultivate these virtues in themselves and to escape as far as possible from the world they were cast into. They are ready for any sacrifice, fearless in following principles to their conclusions, willing to die to restore what they find decayed and almost dead. But the habits of the age show themselves powerfully even in these denouncers of it. Severe judges of others, they too have lost the power of judging themselves. Awe of the unseen mixes with superstitious bondage to the visible; reverence for sacraments that speak of Redemption and communion with an ascended Lord becomes instead the chain God meant those very sacraments to break. They long for universal fellowship, yet shut themselves into a narrower circle, inventing new and more exclusive watchwords — until, weary of such plain inconsistency, they flee to a system that lets them accept a mortal man's decrees instead of exercising the personal judgment Paul asks of every Christian.

I have chosen my examples not from the weakest and worst of our time but from its strongest and best — those who might have been its truest champions — so that we might see our peril more clearly, and how it is bound up with that passion for criticism which, under the right conditions, God surely means us to cultivate. Now let us see what help we have toward recovering the power to judge our own acts and selves, which seems to have withered while we have been busy trying and condemning everyone but ourselves.

VII. "When we are judged we are chastened of the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world."

Much is said in pulpits about the blessed effects of God's discipline. But is it true that discipline of itself produces blessed effects? Is it your experience that mere suffering softens and subdues a person's character? Does it not often exasperate the worst in us, make us angry with God and with everyone? I am not speaking of the ill-disposed, but appealing to the best-disposed people — they would most readily say, "Suffering has brought out more evil in us than we knew was there." But such people would add: "And thank God it did! Now we know ourselves, and him, a little better. It is this revealing of what is dark in us that drives us to his light. Because we have learned we can trust ourselves so little, we have learned we may trust him altogether. In us — that is, in our flesh — dwells no good thing." So Paul's words have proved true in us: "Not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me."

What do such examples teach us? They give a striking hint of the purpose of God's judgments. They are not mere punishments, though they may be that; not merely, or immediately, ways of preparing hard ground for seed, though that may be their ultimate result. Paul's words explain their real object first of all. The voice out of the whirlwind, and the still small voice that follows it, are meant to awaken in us that slumbering faculty without which we are not truly human, because we do not truly bear God's image. He comes among us so that our criticism may serve a more practical and more glorious purpose — that the power to say to one thought, "Go," and it goes, and to another, "Come," and it comes, may not be entirely lost to us — that we may not be passive slaves of whatever influence happens to reach us, that we may not, in the words of the text, "be condemned with the world."

What does this mean — what condemnation does this judgment save us from? The world, considered apart from God, a society that frames its maxims and practice without reference to him, is condemned to a hopeless kind of darkness. Its members can see no light to guide their steps, for they acknowledge no light but what comes from themselves; they are always stumbling against each other, never doing each other justice, for the same reason. We are saved from this condemnation when God assures us he is with us, guiding us, caring for other men as much as for us, shining on them as on us — when we know he has revealed himself as reconciling men to himself in his Son, binding them together in his Sacrifice, guiding them by a Spirit who dwells in each and all. All God's chastisements are meant to show us how little we have understood our relations to each other, what harsh judges we have been of our fellows, how tolerant we have been of the selfishness that keeps us apart from them. All God's chastisements, then, are meant to purge the Church of its worldly elements — not by making it censorious and exclusive, for these are themselves worldly, but by making each man see in himself all the evil he has detected in his brother, and in his brother the image of the Lord he longs to see when night is past and day has dawned.

There are national chastisements, brethren, more terrible in the eyes of God and his saints than wars, famines, or plagues. When terrible crimes are committed in a land — even merely suspected, with evidence that makes them probable — and this awakens in those who hear or read of them no awe, only the excitement of novelty, the relief of something to break life's monotony, perhaps even a kind of admiration for evil grown to gigantic scale — then surely that land should know God's judgments are upon it. Each citizen should ask, "What is this judgment meant to do for me?" And Paul's words still answer: it is meant to make you judge yourself, so that you are not condemned to the indifference so characteristic of a God-denying world. Such possibilities of evil lie in the nature I share! Such possibilities that moral and religious influence do not prevent from ripening into real enormities! God of our fathers, reveal to us the possibilities of good that lie hidden for us all in yourself! Reveal to us the redemption from evil you have worked for us in your beloved Son! Enable us to disown the curse that lies so near each of us, that we may claim the blessing you have made the inheritance of all! Grant that your judgments here may bring us to such right judgment of ourselves and of Christ, that when he appears as Judge of the living and the dead, we may say: This is our God; we have waited for him. He has come to save us from our darkness; he has come to take away the covering cast over the nations; he has come to fill the whole earth with his light.

## Sixth Sunday after Trinity

*July 19, 1857*

*The passage:* If we have been planted together in the likeness of Christ's death, we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

In the Collects we are often taught to speak of Christ taking our nature and suffering our death. That language is copied straight from St. Paul, and filled with his spirit — no one who studies his Epistles can dispute it. But Paul also uses another kind of language, in harmony with this but not to be confused with it. He speaks not only of Christ being made like us, but of us being made in his likeness. And he does not limit this, as we might expect, to saying we may be made holy like Christ here, or glorious like Christ hereafter. He speaks of our death being cast in the mold of his Death, of Christ as the only standard by which we can measure our own: "we have been planted together in the likeness of His Death." We would badly reduce that phrase if we took it to mean only that death comes upon each of us as it came upon him — we already knew that death is a fact for every child of Adam; that needed no proof. What men needed to know was what this fact signified. It was as strange and monstrous as it was undeniable — the world's great commonplace, yet each case a new variety of it, individualizing even while universal. Generalizing from many instances only took you further from its reality; you were closer to it watching one actual deathbed than reasoning about a thousand, and yet even meeting it face to face left the experience feeling imperfect. Men have always wanted to know what Death is, as they want to know what Life is, and have felt that no definition — however fine or divine, even from God's own lips — could tell them.

I\. "We are planted together in the likeness of His Death." Does considering his Death lift the veil over our own? At first you would say no — there may be honor and glory in the record, but nothing I can connect to myself or others. Here is death with every aggravation, bodily and spiritual: without any sense of retribution deserved, involving inward agony, the sense of being forsaken by God. Can we — guilty as we are, so unlike his perfect innocence, passing so easily out of the world unlike his bodily anguish, feeling so little the want of a Father's presence unlike him who cried "Why hast thou forsaken me?" — really be planted in the likeness of this death? Surely not. It may affect us infinitely by some divine decree, but how can we think of what befalls us as anything but an awful contrast to it?

This objection has two parts: the fearfulness of our Lord's Death, and its perfect holiness and innocence.

(1) As to the first, remember we are asking after the essential nature of what the whole human race has felt to be the curse from which every other curse comes and in which every other ends — asking to see it apart from the accidents that soften it for particular sufferers, whether through ignorance, mercy, or the fact that one person's misery is not shared by another's. A plague or a routed army kills its hundreds of thousands; each dies alone, and you cannot add up the separate experiences, yet every groan speaks part of the universal woe. Is not this one Person's death a glimpse of death itself? Has not the conscience of Christendom felt that it is? You could not remove anything recorded in the Gospels or in the twenty-second Psalm without removing something that belongs to the very nature of death. The Gospels speak with intense simplicity — no wasted word, no comment, the stern facts alone. The Psalms give the inward history, so exact and human that it has spoken to thousands in every age of what they knew in themselves, all the more because they felt an infinite beyond into which they could only just glimpse. We cannot deny the truth of Paul's words because his Death was one of concentrated human and divine sorrow — without that depth, it could not be the pattern of all other sorrow.

(2) The second objection looks more decisive: one death gathers up all that is pure and holy, the other is the very mark of sin. Yet if we accept Scripture and the Church's belief, we must feel that this difference was somehow overcome — that the Perfectly Holy bore sin, and that his Death made it possible for sinners to become holy. This belief has always gone with the belief that his Death was a voluntary sacrifice: there lies its holiness and its power. Death had always been felt as a dark necessity, submission to a power neither human nor divine yet inescapable. Good men had tried, and partly managed, to feel otherwise — giving themselves to God for life or death, especially in active service, sure that he alone was Lord. But something in the character of Death itself, faced directly, seemed to force a different view: it seemed a horrible separation, an abyss where God's countenance did not reach. Our Lord's Death is the one resolution of that contradiction. Only if Death can be seen at once as the most dreadful severing — from all creatures, and inwardly from God — and also as the entire, cheerful surrender of a child to a Father, is its dark contradiction explained and its sting drawn. Once this had been shown, it could be said to every creature: "Here is the likeness of your death — you have never truly seen it before, neither its horror nor its blessedness. Look for it here from now on, not in its scattered particular cases. The Cross alone interprets it. To examine each person's own serpent-wound is as useless as trying to cure it that way; turn instead to the one Brazen Serpent, see the death of man translated into the death of the Son of God, and you know both the bite and its cure." While we are absorbed in our own experience, magnifying our torments and our sin, hoping thereby to make amends or gain deliverance, we only deepen the contradiction and the evil; each new search for a solution makes the puzzle seem more hopeless. But believe this to be the true likeness of your death, and you will find in it the power to destroy the poison of death, which is selfishness. We have been planted together in this Death — it is no longer a solitary thing, but the center drawing the whole race into unity. The simplest, most childlike penitents have proved this deep teaching of Paul true for themselves: crushed by the sense of death and its evil within them, they have turned to the death on the Cross, and out of despair come to the bold conviction that the true likeness of what had seemed all darkness could be found in this clear light. What first seemed an astonishing paradox proved at last an undoubted truth — for there is no proof like the vanishing of confused, superstitious, selfish doubt from the heart; the discovery of real union with others where division seemed rooted; the melting of pride into childlike submission; the finding of a Father in whom is no darkness, where darkness had seemed absolute. A willing surrender of self, peaceful dependence, calm hope, sympathy with every suffering creature — these further attest that those who habitually turn to Christ's Death as their own pattern do not follow a made-up fable. Every service, and the Eucharist above all, proclaims this same truth; if we deny it, the act becomes a mockery. Those who kneel at the altar are not a set of people divided by petty, competing interests, held together only by the common curse that will finally end those interests and end our connection with each other. This common Death — the Death of him who died for all — is the likeness in which we are planted; here is the bond of true human fellowship, the assurance that death cannot break the ties that hold us to each other, because the Love that formed them proved itself, in death, stronger than death.

II\. So the Eucharist joins, as Paul's words join, Death and Resurrection inseparably. We have been planted in the likeness of his Death; we shall be in the likeness of his Resurrection — one assertion grounds and guarantees the other. What is the likeness of his Resurrection? If Death is the division of man from man, of each man from himself, of the race from God, then Resurrection must be the reverse: each creature restored to unity with itself, with others, with God. If Death is a surrender to God like a child's to a Father, Resurrection means that surrender has been accepted. He who felt forsaken rose again in the Father's glory; he who prayed "let this cup pass from me" was not left in hell, nor did his flesh see corruption. He whom all his disciples deserted stood among them and said, "Peace be unto you: as my Father sent me, so send I you." He who said "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" breathed on them and said, "Receive ye the Holy Spirit." This proves that his union with the Father was not broken even as he poured out his soul in death; by that union his human soul and body were quickened, and he becomes the source of divine life to all creation. We cannot describe his Resurrection in Scripture's own words without implying it is a resurrection for us too — that we are planted together in its likeness. So the Epistle for today grounds our Baptism on the Resurrection as well as the Death of Christ, adopting us into the meaning and power of both. Christ has died: we must reckon ourselves dead to sin. Christ is risen: we must reckon ourselves alive to God. We are not establishing a claim to some privilege — he has already proved the claim. Our faith does not create the privilege; we are only called to believe what is true. We do not plant ourselves in the likeness of his Death by an act of belief — we *are* planted in it already. What is asked of us is to acknowledge that fact: not to turn Death into an endless contradiction and lie, nor to make ourselves one, by insisting we will have no center, that we will each die a separate death and live — no, that is impossible, we cannot live a separate life, since life means union, fellowship, a common head, and to deny this is suicide. If we are willing to confess our share in the groaning, the Death, the common humanity; willing to offer ourselves up for death, believing a Father and not an enemy receives that offering, presented in the name of him who offered himself once for all — then the other gift, Resurrection, is already contained in this. Our souls cannot perish if his has not; our bodies cannot perish if he has brought his own back from the grave. As he had no life apart from his Father, we have none apart from his. The renewal of life in him, at its very source, was the renewal of all creation. We may rightly say that the bleakest winter carries the pledge of spring; that we cannot look into the heart of Death without finding there the certainty of a nobler birth; that nothing in this world lies outside the reach of Christ's Cross and Passion, and therefore nothing is beyond the shadow of his Resurrection, or without the capacity for a glorious life.

## Seventh Sunday after Trinity

[July]{.smallcaps} 26, 1857

> "*For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord*."—[Romans]{.smallcaps} vi. 23.

*The passage:* Sin pays wages, and its wage is death; but what God gives is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

To sharpen the contrast, St. Paul left out the verb in each clause. You might think our translators could as well have used the future tense as the present—"the wages of sin *will be* death," "the gift of God *will be* life." I think they were right not to. That change would have destroyed the force of the words, their connection with what precedes, and their connection with our own daily experience.

I. St. Paul is not speaking of some future day when God will call us to account and inflict death as punishment. He views the matter differently. Every man has two possible masters, though he must serve one of them. Serve Sin, and you take its wages: slavery and death. Serve Righteousness, and you have all the freedom, energy, and life you are capable of. This statement cannot be identified with the other view. You cannot make the righteous God the author of death unless you also make Him the author of sin, since one is said to be the fruit of the other. He must instead be the Deliverer from death, the Giver of eternal life.

If you ask whether we must confess God's real dominion over everyone and everything, or instead suppose two rival powers with different aims, I answer: assert God's real dominion, and you will understand what the Apostle—and you yourself—mean by Sin. Sin is the denial of that dominion over things, over others, over yourself: the desire to break loose from a righteous Ruler, cherished and fed until the sense of His government is lost or inverted. Every man, deep down, tries to live independently of Him. His efforts toward that independence are acts of homage to an unrighteous power, and that power pays wages for them—death. There is no rival creator with rights over some things or persons; everything and everyone belongs to God alone. Every flower, insect, and man owes Him obedience according to its nature; whatever creature has the capacity to break that obedience, and uses it, falls under death. To say a creature "sins" is to say it has this capacity and has used it—choosing to be outside God's order rather than under His righteousness.

II. The Apostle says the wages of sin is death. Don't you say the same thing constantly? "That man is paid for his idleness—his estate wasted, his house in confusion, ending a beggar. That man is paid for his self-conceit—thinking he knew better than anyone, now the victim of every cheat. That man is paid for his gluttony—look at his premature decay, unable now to enjoy any appetite. See how the envy he tormented others with now torments himself." This is a habitual form of speech among us: men are paid in kind for what they do, think, or feel amiss. We secretly admit that this could not happen if Right did not govern the world as everywhere else—but also that Right is not the cause of the punishment; wrong is. Sin pays the wages. And notice: the effect we always dwell on is some disability—some power crippled, some spring of life dried up. St. Paul's words prove an accurate summary of all our scattered experience. Death, in one form or another—the death of some energy, ultimately of the person who held it—is the wages.

So far we can see this. Looking further ahead, the prospect grows darker. Can you say what will stop this death from progressing and worsening? Can anything in your fellow-creatures or in yourself predict that the growing evil habit will suddenly be abandoned or weaken? Who told you the man in steady decay will recover? Who assured you that death, once it seizes all that is worth anything in him, will simply stop? Neither experience nor conscience told you this. Why then do you feel that inevitable decline so outrageous, so contrary to your thoughts, affections, reason—and to something in you that you can hardly name, but might almost call faith? St. Paul answers: he is no more satisfied with this fatal, endless gravitation than you are. He boldly affirms another law exists besides it: "the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord."

III. "Another law!" someone objects. "No—the Apostle speaks of a 'gift,' conferred by God's good pleasure; introducing 'law' subverts the doctrine." True, if we substitute "wages" for "gift" we destroy St. Paul's contrast and bring life under the conditions of death. But we saw that when men earn sin's wages, they are not obeying the law they were created for but breaking it—earning slavery and death by choice. What is that law? Simple dependence on One who does not pay but gives—from whom we receive not a bargained price for work done, but the power and privilege of working; not remission of punishment for petitions offered, but the ability to pray; not praise returned for praise rendered, but the gift and energy to praise, the freedom of gratitude, even thanks for what He *is*, not only for what He does. The Apostle gathers up our own experience, then preaches a Gospel that surpasses it yet confirms and elevates it. Before, man seemed bound to a stern Necessity—he sowed the wind and must reap the whirlwind, destroying himself; nature ratifies the sentence, conscience approves it as issuing from the highest judgment throne. But the One on that throne is not satisfied merely to see His creatures suffer for lacking righteousness—He can only be content when He has made them righteous. He made man in His own image; if separation from Him is death, union with Him must be eternal life. And that union is not something strange and exceptional, with death the rule and life the exception. No: death has always been the breach of God's order, life its fulfillment. Man has never actually torn himself from God, though he has struggled desperately to do so. In countless ways he has received gifts from God alongside the wages he has earned—every sunrise, his daily food, every kind word, every friendly touch, has been a divine gift, no part of his wages. He is surrounded by gifts pressing on him continually, which ought to awaken every pulse in him to life—yet they do not, because he has the cold heart of a hireling, wanting only to establish his own claim to what is given, to shut others out. Hence the ever-growing burden of death on his spirit. Unless that burden can be removed, the cheerful world only adds to his torment; he would rather it did not smile on him, wooing a joy and sympathy he cannot return. Unless there is some gift greater than all these—the gift of life itself, not merely a call to it; a gift always renewable, as near to him as death itself, and mightier than death, delivering him from it—he must go on receiving sin's wages, though carrying the marks of a king's child, meant to be his Father's steward.

But the gift of God is eternal life *in Jesus Christ our Lord*. This is the greater gift, containing what all others lack: a well of water springing up *within* the man, not lying outside him to be visited occasionally; the gift not merely of an influence but of a Person from whom the influence flows, present perpetually rather than occasionally; One who delivers the spirit from its own burden, who bids the heavy-laden rest in Him, who does not demand joy and love but kindles and gives them. This is the eternal life St. Paul knows—not some future felicity earned by service here, which could give no rest to a man toiling and suffering now. He needed One to whom he could cast every sorrow, fear, and sin hourly, from whom he could draw strength against the constant sentence of death. If such a One was with him, He would be with him always—neither height nor depth, life nor death, present nor future would separate him from His love. This life must be eternal, not something fleeting; a gift renewed daily, not a possession claimed once for all, enjoyed only while trusted in God and lost the moment it was thought earned. It must be a gift for everyone, one he could preach to all, saying: as surely as sin dwells in you, so surely does its Enemy dwell in you; as surely as you carry death, so surely you may carry life; as surely as you can take the one as your wages, so surely you may accept the other as God's gift.

I am persuaded this is the Gospel St. Paul proclaimed everywhere—to Jews, Gentiles, Romans, Barbarians. Had it been anything less—a distant Christ, a partial deliverer, one who had not fully accomplished salvation or removed sin by His own sacrifice; a plan of salvation rather than a personal Saviour, an actual root of eternal life—he would have endured no persecution, founded no Churches, left nothing for later ages. May that same word go forth again, with the same power! May we again hear that the Kingdom of Heaven does not come with observation someday, but is already among us and in us, to be submitted to and lived in, so that it may subdue all kingdoms! May that good news reach every corner of this land, every class, with power to make them citizens and freemen and workmen of God, not Mammon's pensioners and tools! For, brethren, this should be *Gospel*—good news—preached from these pulpits, not debate and argument. You complain sometimes that here, unlike the law-courts, one person speaks freely without fear of refutation. That complaint is fair—if we are merely proving points and overthrowing opponents, our errors should be exposed and our opponents given a hearing; as ministers of truth we should want our falsehoods caught, and as ministers of mercy we should want men able to clear themselves of our charges. But we mistake our calling if we think it is to establish propositions or silence disputants. Our work is a mockery unless we are ambassadors of God, authorized to declare His will and what He has done and is doing to make that will effective for all. Do you think that if we did this honestly and boldly, we would be stifling objections by mere authority? No—we would be raising the ablest, subtlest objections in the heart of every hearer. Instead of sleepy acquiescence, the human spirit would be stirred to its depths to test whether we spoke lies or truth. However we claim authority, once such a word is spoken there must follow inward controversies no one can silence, inward convulsions only another voice than ours can calm. The matter passes out of our hands and must be settled elsewhere. What seemed mere names in a book become fearful realities, mighty powers, struggling within the man himself. He must decide: will he be Sin's hireling, taking death as his due wage, or God's freeman, receiving eternal life as the gift that belongs to him as God's child, called to inherit His own nature and glory?

## Day of Humiliation

[October]{.smallcaps} 7, 1857

*The passage:* The prodigal son resolves to get up, go back to his father, and say: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son."

I think you must have felt today that our old Common Prayers are actually more suited to this moment, more expressive of what is in our hearts, than the new ones into which the words "India" and "mutiny" were inserted. Using the old prayers, everything we have heard and read these two months still came to mind. The Liturgy prays for the widows and fatherless, for prisoners and captives, for those in necessities and tribulations we can only dimly imagine. The new prayers, which forced our thoughts directly to these topics, seemed to lack something. I think it was this: the new prayers are addressed to an Almighty God who is displeased with us and who may be merciful; the old ones are addressed to an Almighty and Most Merciful Father. That gives them their common character, letting us all join together as one Family, and also their special character: they meet every event that befalls any member of the Family, in any age or place, in times of tribulation and in times of wealth alike.

I have not chosen this text merely as suitable to a humiliation day. I believe no humiliation and no prayer is genuine unless grounded in it—that true humiliation is the humiliation of children, and that all prayer lacks life, unction, confidence unless it is a child's prayer. But I believe these words also hold the very consolation needed by those enduring the anguish of remembering and of fearing for those dearest to them; that they answer those whose minds have been staggered by doubt whether the world is left to the mercy of the Power of Evil; that they point to the sin we must confess today; and that they show clearly the work we have to do and the hope we may hold for the future.

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

I. I speak of consolation. If these were my own words rather than Christ's, I would not dare think such a gift could be hidden in them. To those suffering, as some in every English home are suffering, ordinary words of comfort are intolerable. But see how universal, and how individual, these words are. It is the *prodigal* who speaks them: none can say he has excluded himself by his own course of life from using them. It is the prodigal *son* who speaks them: none can say he must first establish his relationship to God before claiming their full virtue. That full virtue no one can express, but part of it is this: I must assert that God is my Father in Jesus Christ; and if my Father, then the Father of everyone related to me, wherever they have been taken from me by nature or by violence. I have a right, a duty, to arise and say to Him: "Father, these were redeemed by the blood of Thy Son. Thou hast loved them beyond my measure. Whatever failure there was in my love for them was failure to be like Thee; what was flawed in me is without flaw in Thee, and the measure of Thy love is the sacrifice of Thy Son—there is its one full revelation. Thy fatherly love to me is not determined by my sense or belief of it, in me or in any creature—else what would become of me! It must be higher than heaven and deeper than hell; I cannot grasp it, I am content to cast myself and all upon it. Thy ways are unsearchable, but Thy purposes are certain, revealed to us and to our children. Thy Son prayed in His agony that the cup might pass from Him, and it could not pass; He drank it. That was the hour of the Power of Darkness, but also the hour of the Power of Light, when Good was shown once and for ever mightier than Evil."

II. It is in the act of arising and going to the Father—in prayer—that such sufferers will learn secrets I know nothing of. But some will not turn to prayer; the daily tidings will instead drive them from it. "What does it all mean?" they will ask. "Were the words we have used about a good Providence honest words? If there is an eye of justice and mercy watching, why was this person, and this, and this, left to bear what we cannot bear to speak of?" This inquiry will come to the devout as much as to the trained sceptic, and will not spare one more than the other. In the last century the Lisbon earthquake drove Rousseau, already nearly mad, to write his letters on Optimism—it would have driven him wholly mad not to believe that all things tend to good, that even the worst calamities befalling the innocent did not disprove it. Voltaire answered him with Candide, showing the maxim "everything is for the best" to be ridiculous when applied to particular cases. Madame de Staël called this the grinning of an ape at human misery—she may have been right, but there was much in that grin which our understanding, even our conscience, felt to be true. A general theory of the universe does not meet an individual case; it breaks down the moment the particular instance demands it. We know this now if we did not before: the moralizing we once tolerated when reading of blood and horror in past history dies on our lips—we loathe it—when someone repeats it with solemn confidence about Delhi or Cawnpore.

No optimism can survive such times. A man asks: what have I done to deserve being spared, when those who fell were nobler and better than I? Such thoughts must and should arise. But others come with them: why am I not left to a worse fate—one of those who did the wrong? Are they not also my own flesh and blood? Do I not carry within me the same capacities for evil? Why then do I have anything besides those capacities—this horror at such evils, this consciousness of something utterly opposed to them, this sense of a righteousness, gentleness, truth I ought to match, one that would produce not mere abstinence from crime but active blessing? Where do these come from? Not from civilization—they are what constitute civilization; apart from them civilization is a fiction, or else just a name for habits that weaken manliness, courage, reverence, sincerity, justice. Must there not be a Father of Spirits from whom they issue and in whom they dwell perfectly—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 Jesus Christ, the Righteous, the Gentle, the Faithful, is truly Thy Son and Lord and Head of every man. Teach me whether I am created in Him to be holy before Thee, and redeemed to serve Thee and fight Thy battles. And since that battle goes on in the world and in me, and I cannot win it without Thee—since I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee both outwardly and within—teach me whether Thou dost quicken us with Thy Spirit of Truth and Righteousness, and whether the fires that try us most are purifying fires meant to overcome all in us and in the world that is against Thy will."

So the universal doctrine of optimism, once changed into belief in a Father who is Light and in whom is no darkness, can be reconciled with the very individual experiences that seem to contradict it. No experience is more individual than that of moral evil; and when we feel we need a God such as Jesus Christ has revealed, to deliver us from it, we know that what is blessed for the world is blessed for us too.

III. But how can such words help us understand the evils we must confess today? Consider first what good has already come from the events of these three months, what compensation there has been for the calamities we have suffered and may still suffer. Since we first held possessions in India, has there been a time we felt so closely bound to our fellow-citizens there as since this mutiny began? We speak of steam and telegraph annihilating space and time, but what have they done to unite the poorest English peasant with those fighting and dying thousands of miles away, as the Sepoys' crimes have done? Here is a good—one that may pass away unless we work to keep it, but immeasurable in itself.

There has been a mixture of feelings, but on the whole the sense of common humanity awakened at home—even where it has taken only the form of rage and horror at inhumanity—is something for which we should give hearty thanks.

By that good, judge the wrong there has been in us. With all our connection to India, all the responsibilities we have confessed in words, how little we have actually known of its people, or of the work our own countrymen do or might do there! We have clear proof that mercantile interests alone will not create the living sympathy that should exist between us and our own people who go there to govern or defend it. Commerce may strengthen human ties where they already exist, but it will not create them—it may even hinder them.

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

Before we find fault with the Company or the Government, then, let us arise and go to our Father today and say: "Father, *I* have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, in that I have been indifferent to the well-being of my fellow-countrymen and countrywomen in India, in that I have not cared for those struggling for the honour of the English name and of justice and truth there, in that I have not helped strengthen their arms or make them wiser and better where they did amiss. I confess that by these miseries and punishments Thou art calling me to repentance, 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 account to Thee."

But that empire includes Hindoos and Mussulmans as well as British subjects, the mutineers as well as the victims. We are agreed, I suppose, that for the sake of the first as much as the last we must struggle to keep it. The question is not how we came by it, nor even whether we have a commercial interest in keeping it. Other nations, whatever their own motives for wishing our power weakened, feel we would be traitors to the cause of humanity if we did not exert ourselves to see those who have outraged it righteously punished, and the land not left to their mercy. This we must do, not out of the scorn and hatred lately expressed for Asiatics, but because we regard them as made in the image of God, meant to share all the blessings that belong to Europeans. We cannot teach them His true nature without showing that He is a God who requires a reckoning for blood, who must have the land purged that has been defiled with it, who destroyed cities of old for horrid crimes and destroys them now. To turn the forgiveness of God—which we are to imitate, and only as He forgives—into tolerance of evil is to pervert its nature. Forgiveness that does not hate crime and seek its punishment is devilish forgiveness, not divine.

But if what is meant is that we ought to show the whole of the Divine character, not one part only—that we bear responsibility for much of their inhumanity because we have not shown them that God is a Father who has united Himself to man and redeemed mankind in His Son—this I do believe, and this I would make a great subject of today's confession. I do not think it is the clergy's business to accuse the Company or the Government of doing too little for the spread of Christianity in India. We should rather ask ourselves whether we have cultivated in our people, in our own hearts, the kind of faith in Christ that reforms men and subdues nations. On the mountain in Galilee Christ did not say, "Go and make them Galileans," or "convert them from their religion to another." He said: "All power is given Me in heaven and earth. Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and I am with you always." When we grasp the scope of that command—that the Son of Man has declared the Father to men, established a Family in which every man has a right, and given us His Spirit to free us from the narrow notions that separate us—then we may rightly find fault with Governments that hinder us from proclaiming truth that would remove their own greatest administrative difficulties: the enmity of races and classes, the insincerity and brutality that make punishment inevitable. But possessed by such a faith, we will not waste our time complaining even of governments most set against its progress. We will remember that the whole power of the Caesars proved feeble before the words of a Jewish tent-maker, and that no power can match His who rules in both worlds. But so long as we think of Christianity chiefly as a Western or English religion meant to drive out Asiatic religions, it is good for us to meet obstacles in that path—God, not man, has put them there, to teach us that such proselytizing is not what He asks, because it will not make the people entrusted to us wise and righteous. And He calls on us to say today: "Father, we have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, in that we have taken so poor a measure of the Gospel by which Thou hast built up Christendom in the West and turned our fathers from brutes into men. We have sinned in not teaching our sons, sent to trade or rule in any province of our empire, that they are servants of the Son of Man and must treat all men as His brethren and theirs. We pray that these great conflicts may bring us all to a better mind; that the sight of such inhumanity may drive us to seek the deep root of all humanity that has ever been on earth; and that the more we see men bowing to false and evil gods, the more we may shrink from any idea of Thee but that shown us in the perfect Image of Thyself set before us in Jesus Christ."

IV. I have already anticipated much of what I meant to say about our duties and hopes for the future. I keep to the exact words of my text: "I will arise and go to my Father"—dwelling on what each of us may do, rather than on the obligations, solemn as they are, that fall on our rulers. We heard last Sunday the proverb current among the Israelites in captivity: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." Ezekiel preached at length on that text, showing that the sour grapes of the fathers need not set the child's teeth on edge—that the sins of the ancestor may become the most effectual warning to the descendant. No proverb has been more often applied to our Indian dominion: there was a wrong in our original occupation, it is said, and everyone who takes part in the country's affairs is drawn into that wrong; we can only be robbers and aggressors, and if we suffer at last, the curse was inevitable. Statesmen, doctors, politicians, even divines have said this. But never has the prophet's doctrine been more fully borne out, never has the proverb been more thoroughly refuted, than by the actual history of British India. No man has gone out determined, or even merely wishing, to do right in any office there—civilian, officer, chaplain—without finding that he was not bound to do evil by his forefathers' acts, that he could confer immense benefits on his fellow subjects and on the natives, and bring home wisdom and experience that enriched us all. Many who began with nothing but personal ambition, once given great trust, remembered the traditions and teachings of their own country and became noble and beneficial rulers. Even the crimes and oppressions our own servants committed there have, through God's mercy, become our instruction, teaching us to reflect on the responsibilities of a mother country as we never had before, and giving a new character to our politics. The greatest of English statesmen may have pursued with too relentless a hostility the man he regarded as the chief delinquent, but his speeches on India mark an epoch in our history—like passing from the foulness of a London alley into the free air of a Swiss mountain, compared to the Court and Cabinet intrigues that filled the early years of George the Third's reign. And remember, much of the good done in India has been done directly against the superstitions we are supposedly pledged to respect: sacred theories about physical causes have been trampled on to teach the truths of Newton and Faraday; the pollution attached to touching a dead body has been overridden to establish schools of anatomy.

Why remind you of this? Because it shows that a clear conviction, an honest purpose, makes its way despite the sins of past generations of Englishmen and the ignorance and prejudice of their subjects. It is not a question of how much we shall give or withhold—what we truly have, we cannot help giving. If we are Atheists, we will make Hindoos and Mussulmans Atheists; the Shasters and the Koran will not stop it—they will adapt to that Atheism or give way to it. If instead we believe that God is the Father of men in Christ Jesus, who has redeemed mankind in His Son, and hold this as firmly as we hold the law of gravitation, the Shasters and the Koran will be equally unable to withstand it. But this faith will not deal with them as ruthlessly as a purely physical science does: it will recognize and claim whatever in them is healthy, moral, human, and destroy only what is unhealthy, immoral, and accursed.

You will be mere assertors of Western, Teutonic, English supremacy unless you go forth as children of God claiming children for Him, brethren for yourselves. India asks this of you, lest she lose the new culture you have given her to barbarous passions it could not overcome, and lose her older, better religious culture to the utter denial of God or the utter worship of a devil. England asks it too, for the belief we carry to the farthest boundary of her empire will be the belief that saves or ruins us at home. If we have no humanity large enough for India, we have none that will keep us from sinking into cowardice, effeminacy, and brutality in our own land. The God or the Devil we proclaim there will be the God or the Devil we offer to ourselves and our children here.

And oh, brethren, if these dire calamities should indeed establish us in this faith of a Father, making us true heralds of it, how we should cherish the memory—even without knowing their names—of those who died to win us such a blessing! England may weep for her children who are gone, but they will have fallen as those children Herod slew fell: witnesses and forerunners of a Redemption. Purged of every taint of earthly crime, their souls and bodies will have passed through much tribulation to join those crying under the altar for the earth's deliverance from its oppressors. Though offered as sacrifices to devils, the incense of their sacrifice will rise to God together with that of the great sacrifice offered for the redemption and restoration of the universe.

## Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

October 11, 1857

*The passage:* While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them what they thought of the Christ — whose son he was.

Many have thought and said that God is punishing us in India for not communicating our faith to its people. I ventured to ask on Wednesday whether he may not first be calling us to consider what the faith is that we have to communicate. What is truly alive in us will make itself felt; what we have we will somehow pass on. Perhaps our fault is not that we have failed to publish our belief, but that we have failed to believe. Perhaps the question before us is not "Why have you not taught Hindus and Muslims about Christ?" but "What think ye of Christ?"

When our Lord put this question to the Pharisees, he added, "Whose son is he?" Their answer was direct: "The son of David." The Christ must be a king — a Jewish king, not elected but descended from the royal house.

That much they had rightly learned from Scripture. We might call this answer mere narrow nationalism, but our Lord does not say so — I think he wanted them to be more national, not less. Their trouble was that they belonged to a sect and had forgotten they were Israelites; they kept company with Pharisees who despised publicans and sinners, who were as much children of Abraham as themselves. Had they truly believed in and expected a Son of David, the promised Christ would have burst upon them as he did upon old Simeon. But Moses, David, and the prophets were to them mere names in a book — how could the unrevealed descendant they spoke of be more than a shadow of a dead ancestor?

If our Lord asked us the same question, we would probably not answer "the Son of David" — we would avoid that as too coarse and earthly. But what would we put in its place?

I. One frequent answer is "the Founder of our Religion" — a phrase we would likely use with a Brahmin or a Muslim. I believe we mean something real by it, more perhaps than we say, even more than we know. Many use it out of a kind of shy honesty: they will not claim more reverence than they feel, yet they want to show that this name is bound up with what is most sacred to them from childhood. I grant this — no one who knows an Englishman's reserve should judge his inward thought by his most awkward words.

But while language may not fairly test an individual, it reveals much about the society that uses it, and we can test it by its effect on the Asiatic who hears it, simple or subtle. The simple hearer will conclude that the Founder of the white man's religion gave them not their best and strongest qualities but their weakest — perhaps even the very thing that makes them boastful, unjust, tyrannical. The subtle logician, far more common there than here, will spot the circle: "What is your religion?" "Belief in Christ." "What is Christ?" "The Founder of our religion."

What will either conclude but indifference or contempt? But we have worse reasons than they for feeling this phrase not merely weak but profane. What has "our religion" been? Can anyone name a time or place since Christ's coming and describe its religion without blushing? A learned and impartial bishop has written a history of early Christianity, and of what he calls the Latin Christianity of the Middle Ages, and the result reads like the work of a satirist, not a calm narrator. So far as Christianity is only "our religion" — man's notions about God and his own attempts to realize them — it is black and hopeless throughout. It is only because, through it all, we glimpse a Christ ruling by eternal Truth and Righteousness, not by man's conceptions, again and again humbling human pride and human failure, that the record does not drive us to atheism and despair. Neither the Teutonic, nor the Greek, nor the Latin practice of Christianity offers refuge from that despair. What we have gained — an infinite gain — is proof that substituting any religious system or church polity for Christ is rebellion against God and misery to man. But we have gained no new power to build such systems; we have largely lost the power our ancestors had to construct and work them.

Let us then stop thinking of Christ as the Founder of our Religion, lest we think of him as founding something that will perish, burned up on his day of judgment.

II. An earnest missionary would feel little temptation to such language. He would say, "I think of Christ as my Saviour, my Lord and Master; without him I cannot live or die; his service is freedom; I want all men to give up every other service." What power lies in a man of little learning who can say this because he knows it true! What hidden sympathy he stirs in hearts grown cold in habitual Christianity, or hostile to it! Such testimony, backed by self-denying lives that men could trust, accounts for most of the triumphs Protestants — perhaps the best of those Romanists — have won. Why then have these triumphs been so few? Why does the conversion of nations seem to belong to another age of the world? Is it not that the missionary does not follow his own conviction to its full conclusion? Why does some Hindu now and then sense that there must be such a Saviour, such a Master — and that this Master must be his too? Can a man who has yielded to Christ as his own Master, risking so much on the hope that others might find him too, stop short of Paul's full conviction — that Christ is Lord of every man, Saviour of the world? Of course he believes this in some sense; it is written, he could not deny it, he would grieve to deny it. But I think he must come to see that he cannot keep his own faith unless he grounds it on Paul's teaching: he must give up thinking of Christ merely as his own Deliverer and Master, or else give up thinking he has anything to say to others, unless he also holds Christ to be Lord of all men. While we practically deny him that title, the few converts we make stand on shaky ground — often puffed up with a sense of superiority that ruins their character, or tempted to presume on their new profession until they fall into sins as great as those they left. Whereas Paul's Gospel builds Christian churches and kingdoms out of men with all the same evil tendencies, the same Jewish and pagan errors he exposes in his letters — but held together by a divine Spirit, witnessing to all men of what they are meant to become.

III. Paul had been raised in the faith that named Christ Son of David, and he never renounced it. He was not converted away from it when the vision on the Damascus road revealed that the Jesus he persecuted was the Christ.

That vision, he says, revealed Christ within him — the King he had thought distant now claiming the throne of his own heart. But he did not therefore think Christ less the King of his nation. He at once set about convincing the Jews, publicly, that Jesus was their King, owed homage by them as a nation. And when he turned from them to the Gentiles, it was to proclaim the Son of David as the Son of Man, the King of the Jews as King of the whole earth. He came to understand why David, in spirit, called his promised heir "Lord" — how this Christ had truly been Lord of David and of all kings, prophets, and holy men of old, who had sung of him and named him Head of the Everlasting Age, Prince of Peace, the Man in the midst of the throne. He saw that the revelation of the last days — Christ's coming in the flesh, his death, resurrection, ascension — was the revelation of the hidden Father: that he came as Son not only of David but of God, to adopt men into God's family and anoint them with the Spirit that had anointed him. This was not a new dispensation because Christ was newly making himself known — he had existed before all worlds, delighting in the sons of men, and all had received of his fullness, grace upon grace. It was new because he had freed and adopted a race that had lived under tutelage and bondage, so that the full name of God and of God's city could now be written upon them.

If we answer the question as Paul answered it, we would say: We think of Christ as the King who led Israel through the Red Sea into the Promised Land, the true King of nations that dreamed up other kings and gods of their own making, the source of all that was righteous, true, and brave in the chosen people, and the only source of whatever was righteous, brave, and true among the heathen too. We think of him as made of David's line in the flesh, born of a woman, dying on a cross to redeem the sons of women and atone for all the world's sinners. We think of him as declared Son of God with power by his resurrection, ascending to lead captivity captive, seated at God's right hand in our nature as the representative of men. We think of him as proving his kingship by sending the Spirit of love, truth, and unity to fight the spirits of falsehood, hatred, and strife that tear men apart. We think of him as coming to judge and punish the nation that set up its own righteousness against his, that refused to own other men as brothers, that gave itself to hypocrisy, cruelty, and malice. We think of him as Judge of all nations, confessing or rejecting his name, separating in each what is good from what is evil, pledged at last to burn what is false with unquenchable fire while losing nothing of true life and worth. We think of him as the source of all manliness, freedom, and gentleness in Christendom — every unmanly, slavish, ungentle act by any Christian, whatever his rank, done against his authority, most hateful to him when done in his own name. We think of him as giver not only of rain and harvest but of moral instinct, a sense of justice and beauty, a power to act rightly and generously, to pagans and Muslims alike; every Hindu feeling about incarnation and sacrifice a groping toward him who could truly become one with men and offer himself for them; the inspirer of the Muslim's belief in one living God and hatred of idols. We think of him as withering the strength of the Hindu who turns to unclean rites and bloody sacrifice, and as upholding the Latin nations against Islam, which divides man from God, making man a slave and God a tyrant. We think of him as fighting, age after age, for the truth Romanists have witnessed to — one family under one Head, one Father, one Spirit — and against the falsehood that the family on earth is cut off from the family in heaven, ruled by an earthly lord, its spirit capable of lying rather than being the Spirit of truth. We think of him as fighting on the side of Protestants when they resist these fictions and assert the rule of the Son of Man against those who usurp his name — and against Protestants when they set their own sectarian notions against his universal and eternal kingdom. We think of him as the source of England's national strength, valor, freedom, art, science, and justice, sure to march with her armies when they fight for righteousness and humanity, and sure to call her strictly to account for every unjust or inhuman act, for worship of gold or any false and cruel god that degrades its servants into base creatures. We think of him as searcher of every heart now and judge of the living and the dead hereafter, the King who will reign until every power, willing or unwilling, is made subject to him.

IV. There is nothing new in any of this; it is all contained in the words we say every Sunday — "his Son, our Lord." None of it approaches the scope of Paul's language about Christ as Head of all Principalities and Powers, of every name named in this world or the next. And yet it will clash with the thinking of those who confine Christ to a set of notions, habits, and services they call religious — so cut off from real life by their unreality that "religious" and "unreal" become almost synonymous in their minds. I fear many who consider themselves unusually devout, who have known real seasons of fervent devotion, will feel that Christ's name loses its sacredness when brought out of their private experience into contact with the rough business of the world.

If thoughts like these tended to cut Christ off from the innermost soul, to weaken belief in him as deliverer from the burden of sin, to make him more an outward ruler and less a ruler of reason and will, I admit that would be a harm nothing could make up for. Were that their effect, they would only reinforce what is most dangerous in our current religious habits: the tendency to think of Christ as belonging to the past, found only in a book, and to miss that he was present here — in this lonely place, in this storm, when the enemy's knife was at my throat, and I did not know it. My aim is not to put the Son of Man at a distance but to show how near he is in every daily trial, great or small. My aim is not to make light of conscience's terrors or its need of deliverance, but to show that every act of self-torture, every burning of a widow, every superstition and the crimes it breeds, is itself a witness to those terrors and a cry for deliverance — so that our thought of Christ should not be bounded by the limits of Christendom. My aim is not to suggest some other name could free men from this anguish, but to insist that the Son of God has explained its secret: that man's sin is rebellion against a Father, and that Christ sacrificed himself to remove that sin and unite men with the Father. This is why I protest against any thought of Christ that would sever the bond between him and what is deepest and most human in every person born, and dying, into the world he was born and died into.

I believe, brethren, that all we say about this Indian chastisement will sound — will be — empty and meaningless unless we hold these thoughts of Christ. How can we tell people that God punishes them for not confessing Christ if in the same breath we say Christ is not Lord and Saviour of Hindus and Muslims, nor even of the whole English nation, but only of certain individuals with privileges not shared by their countrymen or by mankind? How dare we say God punishes us for withholding homage to a King who is not theirs, for failing to proclaim a Saviour who is not theirs? Or do we mean some other God — not the Father of men revealed in Jesus Christ, but a God who takes vengeance at will, who does not seek to make men holy as he is holy? They already know that God — no need to tell them of him! The danger is that our own sons may come to worship him too, bewildered as they are by vague traditions of a Saviour for mankind whom they scarcely dare call a Saviour for themselves, by unaccountable native instincts toward belief, by an awareness of right and wrong without knowing its source, by a sense of power without knowing whether it comes from mere weapons or some singular gift given to the English race, by the conviction that this power should repress crime and assert righteousness, and by the temptation to use it recklessly for private passion and revenge — until at last they bow before a Siva, dressed in some holy name learned from the West, but worshipped only as a destroyer.

Truly, Christ has been ruling over our nation and our empire, whatever we may have thought of him — or none of this would have happened to us long ago. Truly he has shown his presence in that distant land, his care for Britons, Hindus, and Muslims alike — or no Christianity of ours would have offered the least protection against what it has met there. And now he speaks — not only to our rulers, but to fathers, to schoolmasters, to all who shape the men who will carry the English name abroad.

I do not think he is telling us to devise some new scheme of education to prove ourselves wiser than our forefathers. The institutions they founded carried higher thoughts of Christ than they themselves, or we, fully grasp. They taught their children what we sometimes dismiss as "pagan lore," but they had a truer name for it — "humane lore." They believed, even without saying so, that the servants of the Son of Man should know what men everywhere and always have felt, done, and longed for; that Christ's revelation interprets the thoughts he himself had awakened in them, and that he is their fulfillment. What a discipline for citizens of an empire on which the sun never sets! All we need is to connect it to a deeper discipline learned at a mother's knee, to the struggles of individual conscience, and to expand it to meet the questions of modern history and the thought of nations modern discovery has opened to us — treating the Bible not as a book standing aloof and frowning on such inquiry, but as the key to its meaning. Then we would have armor to send our young men safely into the fiercest battles. Let us only teach them to think of Christ as the source of all that is pure and true, the enemy of all that is vile, in their own hearts and in the hearts of everyone they meet or read of; teach them that neither their thoughts nor ours measure what he is; tell them he will make them his knights, that the banner of his Cross will be over them in every land, in whatever furnace they are cast; and let us, ourselves included, look for the hour when he appears in his Father's glory, filling the whole earth.

## St. Luke's Day

*The passage:* "Luke, the beloved physician."

The Collect for today is grounded on this verse, which speaks of St. Luke as a physician of both body and soul. If this seemed a forced analogy, a play on words, it would have grated on your ears in prayer. I believe the two ideas are not joined by any trick of fancy but are actually and essentially related.

We think of St. Luke first as the companion of St. Paul, before we think of him as writer of a Gospel or of Acts. He gained his understanding of what he would write in a Gospel meant for the Gentiles by first preaching a Gospel to the Gentiles. He saw the Church grow, and helped it grow, before he described its growth. It is in this character that his profession as physician becomes important to us.

No one imagines Paul chose his companion lightly; he would have denied he could choose at all in the strict sense. He was appointed to his work, a dispensation committed to him, woe to him if he did not preach. Those joined with him must share that calling, and Paul used the spiritual discernment given him to judge whether they did. He suffered what was perhaps his greatest sorrow—separation from Barnabas—rather than be attended by one he judged unfit. John Mark, whom he rejected, must have had many merits, and was himself, like Luke if the similarity of names is not misleading, destined to be a historian of Christ's works. For one disqualification Paul would not have him; surely the man taken in his place must have had special fitness for that work.

Yet it must strike many that being a physician was a more serious objection than Mark's Jewish timidity ever was. On the common theory of spiritual gifts, it mattered greatly to Paul's success that he prove himself able to break through the laws of nature, especially in healing the sick—this, we are told, is the great difference between an Apostle and a modern missionary. Think how it would affect the impression of such acts to have constantly at his side a man known as a healer, who cured not by breaking the laws of the body but by understanding them better than others. Would you not say this is the very last person such an Apostle would keep as a companion, let alone an honoured one?

Perhaps this very consideration led the makers of legend to insist, against Paul's plain words, that Luke was a painter rather than a physician—an ingenious compromise: granting him some ordinary human art while relieving him of anything scientific. The early chapters of his Gospel give the fullest account of the Virgin Mother; why not suppose he painted her, and that this was the origin of image-worship in the Church? Those who know the fancy at work in hagiographies know it sets no limits to its guesses; each one, however false its starting point, becomes in time as fixed in popular belief as anything Luke actually wrote.

But we, who trust Scripture's words more than the best-attested traditions, must ask how Paul's simple, unstudied statement—made in the midst of greetings to friends—that Luke was a physician, fits with what we, Protestant and Romanist alike, suppose an inspired Evangelist of that age must have been. If we cannot reconcile our assumptions with this plain statement and with the whole tenor of Apostolic history, must we not abandon the assumptions? Would that be a loss to our faith, or might our faith be deepened by finding it allied with science rather than opposed to it? Would our hope for the Gospel's spread today be weakened, or might we find that some hindrances to it are of our own making, that none of God's ancient helps to His servants have been withdrawn—leading us instead to a profitable acknowledgment that it is not God who straitens us, but we who resist His purposes of love?

I\. I have noted before that the powers described in Acts as gifts of the Spirit were exercised precisely where enchanters were at work—often to confound them. This is a marked feature of both Old and New Testament narratives. Moses' rod confronts the magicians of Pharaoh; Elijah withholds rain and raises the dead in his struggle with the priests of Baal. The Roman Empire under Claudius and Nero swarmed with miracle-workers, some of them Jews like Elymas and Simon who used their knowledge of Scripture to practice fraud. At Philippi and Ephesus these magicians thrived, protected by government, patronized by the rich; and as Greek scepticism eroded the old worship, these workers kept alive the dread of unseen powers better than the regular priests could. Fear and curiosity gathered round them; materialists mocked in vain, for the sense of the invisible would not yield to ridicule, and even the scoffer secretly consulted the diviner. Why not trust these lies as readily as any of the ordinary lies of society?

Paul had no doubt these miracle-workers served a Spirit of Falsehood—the same spirit behind the lies of tradesman, politician, and state-augur—and that part of what drew people to them was nonetheless true. He did not tell Philippi and Ephesus that our world and the unseen world are sundered by an impassable veil. He announced the opposite: that the veil had been torn, that the Son of God by His death had opened a new, living way between earth and heaven. The proof of this union was that the very Spirit who broke Pharaoh's tyranny and triumphed over Baal's gods now dwelt among men, freeing them from bondage to spirits of sea, earth, or air, claiming them as children of the true God. That Spirit had dwelt in Christ as He healed bodies and souls, and what He did, He now enabled His followers to do—preaching and manifesting redemption, showing that men are not slaves to the powers the magicians served, that they have a Father and Deliverer, and that the Spirit of Power is the Spirit of Truth.

II\. I am not straining the New Testament's language here, but quoting and illustrating it plainly. Is it then inconsistent with this teaching that Luke the physician should be Paul's chosen companion? Would it undercut this testimony to be attended by a healer? Did Paul's mission require that his acts seem a defiance of divine order rather than proof of it—proof that we live under a righteous, not a capricious, Ruler, confuting those who subjected the world to chance and lying? Was not Paul's deliberate choice of Luke—a choice he took as gravely responsible, believing a hair's breadth departure from divine guidance would be sin—itself a declaration to the world: "I do not come as an enchanter, working tricks to make you marvel at me, but in the name of the God of Truth, to vindicate unchanging laws, to expose all false wit and wicked inspiration set against them, and to claim every true power of healing, every honest study, as gifts of God's Spirit meant to proclaim His kingdom"?

III\. On this day I have a right to ask that Paul's clear doctrine here be seriously pondered. Is it not true that Paul has been regarded, even by some who profess deep reverence for him, not as the enemy of magicians but as merely a superior magician working under another name? This charge fits, perhaps, the miracle-workers of the Middle Ages, or modern priests who commend the vision of the Lady of Salette—for them, saint and juggler are alike. I will not dwell on such cases except to note one thing: they are set forth as a trial of faith, and serve that purpose well. Those who do not believe a Spirit of Truth has been given to guide men's consciences and reason may in time be brought to accept such stories, along with the doctrine that faith's merit grows in exact proportion as evidence for it shrinks. Whoever truly confesses the Spirit of Truth as his abiding guide will hate these stories, and hate still more the corrosive atheism hidden in their defense.

My aim, though, is not to flatter ourselves by condemning others, but to ask whether the same mischief takes another, scarcely less harmful form among us. What does our complaint mean—that we lack the power to recommend the Gospel to unconverted nations that Paul and Luke once had? Do we not secretly think their gifts were not, as Paul said, spiritual gifts testifying to the invisible God who gave the sea its bounds and sent His Son to fulfil the law, but merely magical gifts, proved true only by their effect on the senses, marking certain men as holy enough to violate law—contrary to what Peter said, that all health and life come from that same name? If instead we held those gifts to be spiritual, not magical, what would stop us from believing that every honest, scientific cure today is likewise proof the Spirit of God is at work, guiding the physician from darkness to light, using him to witness God's healing purposes toward mankind? Is not our abandonment of this belief, we clergy, a practical denial of what the apostolic signs were meant to teach—a refusal to acknowledge Christ's kingship over the highest realm, the human spirit? But whether we persist in this or not, physicians, I trust, will see the necessity of claiming for themselves what we have refused them: for how else can they fight superstition and trickery, discard every theory—however sanctioned—that ignores the facts, resist making their own opinions or wills the final authority, and keep the highest ends before them amid constant temptation to lower ones, unless they confess that all their insight and healing power are gifts of a Spirit of Truth watching over them, making them truly His agents and witnesses?

IV\. Throughout, I have wanted to keep before you that Luke the beloved Physician was as much a missionary as Paul himself. I welcome this day's return amid our Indian troubles, because I believe it points to one of the plainest solutions to the difficulties of Christianizing that part of our Empire. You go to a land where religion fills every corner of life—can mere doctrine prevail there? A land possessed by charms and enchantments—will announcing a charm-free religion break them? A land where malignant powers are believed to afflict men's bodies—will sufferers listen merely to words, without proof that those words carry power to remove such afflictions? We maintain that when the Gospel was first preached to idol-worshippers, its preachers did reverse the enchanter's wand, healed sicknesses, and declared themselves messengers of a God of health who cared that men be freed from their plagues. We know from experience that the deepest Hindu prejudices have yielded before the proclamation of physical laws, once people saw that observing those laws actually removed disease. This interference with old superstition is one governments cannot prevent, and indeed share in—though standing alone it threatens whatever good, along with the evil, those superstitions contain.

Why should word and act not be joined? Why should the missionary not declare that the God he preaches sent His Son to redeem bodies as well as souls, taking human nature to bear its infirmities and fight its enemies? Why not say, "We come to defy the enchantment of evil men and evil spirits; we bring you health, and health is meant for you"? True, the cures would be imperfect and temporary, ending at last in death—so it was with the Apostles' cures too. But that very imperfection helped rather than marred their message: they were sent to preach not escape from death but resurrection from it; they themselves bore the dying of the Lord Jesus in their bodies, and were glad to depart. Their whole message was one of restoration and life.

I have asked why we put asunder what God joined; I might ask whether it has even been possible to separate them. Has not the missionary, preaching salvation from a New Testament full of Christ's cures, been forced to recognize the connection? Have not his converts felt it—even the surrounding Hindus and Muslims? What hinders the same cooperation today between Gospel-preacher and healer that existed in the early Church? I answer: our own faithlessness at home; our low estimate of God's goodwill toward mankind; our insistence on separating the redemption of the soul from that of the body; and above all, our refusal to connect the discovery of truth in any field with the gift of a Spirit of Truth. If we truly believed in God as the Bible teaches—unchanging in the purpose Christ revealed, concerned with the whole man, as His earthly acts prove—and studied Paul's whole history in light of what we've considered today, we could not help seeing Pentecost's promise fulfilled in every advance in the understanding of language, in the patient labor and discoveries of every scientist, and in the power to help mankind that comes with such knowledge. Without this belief we risk two errors: treating God's acts as capricious, as if He revealed Himself chiefly by overturning His own laws; or turning science into an abstract deity, a new superstition.

But when we truly and warmly accept this faith, and keep it alive by doing the works God has set before us, what a new day will dawn on our land and its farthest possessions! Its brightness may be too much even to look at from afar—perhaps we do better to hasten it than to dwell on its splendor, which God will show us or not as He sees fit. But there are signs, encouraging signs, that such a day may be coming. In every field of science and art, I trust, are men with a sense of the weight of the powers entrusted to them, and a deeper sense of the weight of truth itself. Today, an enemy of science would gain little by turning Luke from physician into painter; our artists would answer that if he was righteous and a painter, he must have been a man of science too, seeking truth in the forms of nature and in the human face, a witness for the real against the false and idolatrous—claiming his gift, as we must claim ours, from the Spirit of Truth, or else abusing it, as we must not, to mankind's harm rather than blessing. May we all—clergy, lawyers, physicians, artists—hold this conviction ever more firmly, and act on it! Even the direst sorrows, which lead the people of our land to feel that each has a gift from God, to be submitted to His guidance and used for His glory and His children's good, will prove blessings for which Englishmen may give thanks for generations to come.

## Twentieth Sunday after Trinity

> "*Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it*." —Matt. vii. 13, 14.

*The passage:* Enter by the narrow gate, for the wide gate and broad road lead to destruction, and many go that way; but the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and few find it.

Do not these words contradict the doctrine I have lately preached — that we should proclaim to Christians, Hindoos, Mussulmans, everyone alike, a Gospel that God is Father of all in Christ, head of every man, and that every gift men have is a gift and sign of the Holy Spirit's presence? Must not such a Gospel throw open the very wide gate that leads to destruction, and keep both preachers and hearers from seeking the strait gate and the narrow way to life? How can we call a blessing for all what Scripture says only a few find?

These are serious questions, and none of us can honestly say they don't concern him. I feel their force myself: they cut against habits and tastes of our age and of our own temperaments. It would suit our laziness to think that the hero's hard choice belongs to Greek courage but not to the Christian, who may trade endurance for ease; that the scientist must steer past every error on either hand to reach truth, but the seeker after God faces no such perils. Such a view would flatter our indolence — and precisely because of that, it would offend everything earnest and vigorous in us. If Christ's faith really made this claim, every sufferer and struggler would rightly say, "This is not for me." So we must search out the whole meaning of this text; to explain any part of it away is cowardly and dishonest, and if it conflicts with opinions we hold dear, those opinions must go.

How do we find that whole meaning? I know only one way. The strait gate must be the one Christ Himself passed through; the narrow way, the one He walked; the life it led to, the life He would have us seek. And by studying His gate and way we can learn what the wide gate and broad way are that so many choose, and what destruction awaits them.

I. Open any page of the Gospels — a discourse, a casual saying, the Temptation, the Transfiguration, the Passion, the Resurrection — and you find the same features. Here is One who claims to be the Son of God, and precisely because of that claim, renounces all independence and authority of His own. Being one with the Father, He can do nothing of Himself. He will not turn stones to bread, since that would deny His Sonship; He feeds the multitude because it is the Father's will; He does only what He sees the Father doing; His face shines with the Father's brightness. Alone, yet not alone, for the Father is with Him. His agony on the Cross is the sense of separation from the Father; His last word commits His spirit into the Father's hands; His message after the Resurrection is that He ascends to His Father and theirs.

The highest claim a man in the flesh could make — blasphemy to Jewish ears — became the foundation of the deepest self-abandonment ever known. Through this strait gate — absolute trust in God as Father even while events, denial, and anguish seemed to deny His Sonship, and absolute renunciation of any right to be or have anything apart from the Father — He passed. Miss either the greatness of the claim or the completeness of the renunciation, and you miss the Christ of the Gospels. Try to balance boldness against humility, and you miss Him too. Their entire, necessary union is what gives His life its calm simplicity; separate them, and you introduce artifice and confusion — something of our own sinfulness.

II. Open the Gospels again, and you find One who, without calling Himself king, proves Himself King over nature and man. The carpenter's son speaks, and is obeyed, with a power greater than storm or thunder. Yet this King distinguishes Himself from all other rulers by never exalting Himself above the lowest, never treating the worst as inferior, but feeling for them a sympathy no sinner sharing their corruption could feel. Here is a narrow path indeed: highest royalty joined to lowest service, greatest unlikeness to the race joined to closest identification with it. One step toward mere authority that lessens sympathy, or mere sympathy that lessens kingship, and the Christ is lost. Yet He does not walk a cautious middle course like some moral philosopher avoiding extremes; He moves naturally and majestically, courting misconstruction at every turn — not shrinking from being too much a King for fear of seeming Cæsar's enemy, nor from being too much the servant of all for fear of being called friend of sinners. He must be perfectly both, for to be one He must be the other.

III. Through this gate and way He moved toward the Life He had with the Father before the world was — His own proper life of trust and delight in the Father's will, of which His own will was the reflection. But He moved also toward a new life: the redeemed and reconciled life of manhood. Had God's love been content with less than this — less than giving men the full rights of sons — the Word would not have become flesh, nor would this earthly life have been lived. This, then, was the goal of His narrow way, the fruit of His baptism, without which He could not be satisfied for the travail of His soul.

IV. So the command "Enter ye in at the strait gate" is the same as "Follow me." "I who alone can open have opened this gate for you; in your nature I have claimed for you the rights of sons of God, and disclaimed for you all self-sufficiency. Do not choose another entrance than your Shepherd's, for His gate leads to life. You cannot find life refusing the Father I have shown you; you can have no life but the dependent, trusting life of a child. Assume that state, wonderful as it is — without it you cannot be humble, only proud."

For He also tells of a gate and way that lead not to life but to destruction — a wide gate, admitting all sorts of people, however different in habits or aims. If we understand His strait gate, we can read the wide one just as well — many of us know it from having passed through it. The gate of trust in God as Father is one; the gate of distrust in God as enemy is the other. So too the ways: fellowship with all as sharing one Father's love and one tendency to wander from Him is the narrow way; self-exaltation, setting ourselves apart as more favored or holy than others, is the broad one. How hard the first is to find, how easy the second, our own experience should teach us. Let me illustrate from the two classes most sharply contrasted in the Gospels — the publicans and outcasts Christ called to repentance, and the Pharisees, models of religion.

Opposite as they were, they shared one root: distrust of God. It told the extortioner and the adulterer, "You are breaking a law; the Ruler of the universe is against you," and left him in secret shame, fleeing the Judge — so he sought forgetfulness in pleasure or in restless money-getting. Many enter that wide gate with no plan at all, only care to be careless. And all who enter it walk in the broad way distrust of God produces: separation from one's fellows, each pursuing his own end, each jostling against others in the crowded road. Each man, dreading a reckoning, must make out a case for himself — proving others wrong and himself, if not perfect, at least better than this man or that.

The extremes meet here. The Pharisee's long public prayers serve the same purpose as the sensualist's eating and drinking: both try to escape the sight of a feared tyrant — one by making him forget them, the other by trying to buy him off. "I will give you offerings of time, money, and toil, if only you will let me escape you, not see your face in righteousness." The Pharisee opposes Christ in his dealings with men because he opposes Him in his belief about God: he will not believe God is a Father, that God speaks through a Man and Brother, that the Son of Man can forgive sins on earth. So while Christ stoops to the level of all and dies the common death, proving Himself the true Shepherd, the Pharisees prove themselves shepherds only by separating themselves from those they rule.

That this way led to destruction is proved by the history of the Jewish nation. The habit of suspecting God, shared by religious and irreligious alike, led to the rejection of Jesus as Christ, to superstition and cruelty that sank Jehovah's worshippers below the idolaters around them. The self-exaltation and mutual suspicion, worst among the religious but present in every class, hastened the destruction of the nation, and destroyed the individual life of every man who cherished them — what was patriotic and godly died, what was base and selfish grew supreme. Each step down the broad way he had chosen made the way narrower and darker, until it ended in utter blackness.

How could men be brought out of this broad, dark road? Our Lord told publicans and sinners of a Shepherd seeking His lost sheep, a Father letting His child wander to a far country and eat the food of swine so as to bring him home. Publicans or Pharisees who received this Gospel entered by faith and trust, walked the narrow way of self-renunciation, and found the divine and universal life. This message was given first to His disciples, to be preached as Gospel to all nations.

V. But is there not something discouraging in the saying that few find this narrow way — discouraging to those first commissioned to preach it, and more so to us now? The disciples found, when they went out, that those who rejected their report far outnumbered those who received it; among their own people and among Greeks, Romans, and barbarians, only a feeble minority confessed God as Father and themselves as one family, while a vast majority stayed in distrust and mutual estrangement, cooperating only where they had no choice.

That discovery was hard enough for men sent to preach God's kingdom to every nation — but was there not a harder one still? Did they not have to learn that they themselves, chosen heralds of this kingdom, had no power to find the narrow way while walking the broad one, nor to stay in it once brought there? Had not God led them into trust in spite of themselves? After repeated lessons, did they not keep sliding back into distrust, self-confidence, even Pharisaic pride at feeling better than others — and then, once some fall exposed the folly of that, were they not tempted to some equally Pharisaic way of appeasing God rather than simply confessing their sin to Him?

Few indeed find your narrow way, Lord — are there any? No: we do not find You, You find us. We do not bring ourselves into the hard way; You hedge our paths so we cannot walk any other. You strip us of self-trust so we are forced to trust You; You show us we are worse, not better, than others, so that we commend all men, with ourselves, to You. This is how Christ's messengers learned to speak — a lesson that made them able to endure all opposition, fit instruments for building a Christendom on God's Fatherhood revealed in His Son. They were sure it was God's will that all should be saved, because they knew it was only He who had given them the will to wish it.

VI. This, I think, must also be the preparation of those who in our day speak of Christ to worshippers of Brahma or followers of the Prophet. So long as we ourselves are not passing through the strait gate of simple trust in God as Father — whose Son was born of woman to claim all the woman-born as God's children and seal them with His Spirit — and are not walking the narrow way of denying we have any superiority of our own, our message to other nations, however forcefully spoken, will be powerless, not a message of life. Merely announcing that the path to heaven is hard and rare is nothing new to Hindoo or Mussulman — it is already central to both creeds. Every self-torture by which devotees seek union with the Divine, every sacrifice to appease evil powers, shows how deeply this belief runs in one; and the Koran's promise of Paradise to God's warriors, which has shaped so much history, shows it in the other.

What the Hindoo needs to learn is that the Divine Nature has been revealed in a Person he can trust, that trusting Him lets him share that nature, that all evil is foreign to it, and that we may take refuge from evil in Him — that God Himself has made the sacrifice, so that men need not reconcile Him to themselves, for He has reconciled them to Himself. What the Mahometan needs to understand is that the God who demands devotion and perpetual struggle is not a tyrant but a Father, not separated from His creatures but eternally united with them, desiring not their death but their life, wanting them to fight death's powers as bearers of life.

Our conviction that we have the right to proclaim this, because it is truth, will meet fierce resistance from all that is exclusive and selfish in those we address. It would be miserable to blame that hostility on peculiarities of their race and creed if we cannot find its causes in ourselves as well. Take Caste, which we call distinctly Oriental and hopeless of reform. Is there anything in it we lack a counterpart for among Christians, among Englishmen — anything in it not put forward as characteristically Christian or English? So far as it asserts the superiority of the spiritual over the merely animal man, it holds a truth not to be crushed. So far as it asserts the superiority of one set of spiritual men over another, it is the same Pharisaism found in Judea and rampant among us now. So far as it asserts the Brahmin's inherent superiority as priest over the Sudra, it is the same self-exaltation found on every page of church history. So far as it merely boasts of one race's eminence, let him who has never boasted of unrivalled Teutonic virtues throw the first stone at the Asiatic boaster. So far as it claims hereditary superiority and privilege by birth, Englishmen are not exactly strangers to that prejudice or its effects. So the way we rightly call destruction — the loss of moral life in societies and individuals — is a broad way that any country or person may slide into. Deliverance from it must come not by preaching ourselves and our supposedly caste-free systems, but by preaching Christ, who died to make Oriental and Occidental, bond and free, one family in Him — where true distinctions of race and family will only stand out more clearly within the unity of His body, while the separations pride has invented will be abolished forever.

Or take the doctrine attributed to the more warlike faith — a sensual Paradise, so terrible to Christian ears as a reward for those who fight and die for God. I would be wary of simply denouncing this. If there is no blessing for the senses as well as the spirit, I do not know what St. Paul meant by the promised redemption of the body and of the earth, which comforted him and the persecuted churches he founded. That this truth has become gross materialism through selfishness — through believers expecting an exclusive reward, having no higher standard by which to measure the world to come than their own worldly pursuits, and imagining their own salvation only by consigning others to ruin — the history of Islam painfully proves; this is the downward road that has drained the moral energy of Muslim nations. But dare we say it is not a broad road that Christians, at the height of their profession, have also stumbled into and walked? Have we not thought of heaven's rewards as personal prizes, made more valuable by others' exclusion? Have our dreams of the world to come escaped the coloring of our waking desires here? If our business here is pursuing selfish gain, must not our expected reward there be cast in the same mold? We must leave this broad road ourselves, for it clearly leads to death. Then we can tell Mahometans of a way to life open to them as much as to us — because Christ, who is the Way and the Life, laid down His life for them as for us, and His Spirit seeks to bring us, and them, and all men, to the one living God, the universal Father.

## All Saints' Day

*(TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY)*

*November 1, 1857*

*The passage:* John sees a vision of a countless multitude, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing before God's throne and before the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palm branches, crying out, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb."

The Gospel reading for All Saints' Day proper begins with this verse. But the Church was wise not to separate this vision from the one before it. The two stand in direct contrast, and that contrast illuminates the meaning of each, as well as the purpose of the whole book.

I don't think it matters whether Jerusalem and its temple had already fallen when John was exiled on Patmos. The vital question underneath was: what did these events, whether past or still to come, mean? Their meaning was so terrible to anyone who felt his nation had been called out from all nations to witness to the living, righteous God and His rule over the earth, that only Christ's own words could have enabled His disciples—devout, faithful Jews—to accept Rome's evident intention to destroy the capital and root out the people as a fulfillment of divine purpose rather than a contradiction of it. They must have expected some miraculous rescue even at the last moment, some sudden restoration even after the city had been plowed under and its name changed. We know how strong that faith remained among the exiled people even up through Hadrian's time, and how desperately they rose up against Rome because of it. To an apostle of Christ, such faith was simply unbelief: the facts he saw confirmed prophecy rather than refuting it. And yet I don't think any Jew who rejected Jesus as the Son of God can have felt the awe and horror at this overthrow that John felt. His people's calling was no less sacred to him than to the ordinary Jew—it was infinitely more sacred.

Some modern critics like to set Paul and the writer of the Apocalypse against each other, as if one were resolutely anti-Jewish and the other fanatically pro-Jewish. But I don't know how anyone could speak more strongly than Paul does in Romans 10 and 11. He would be willing to be cut off from Christ himself if it would save his nation. To Israel belong the covenants, the law, the promises; from it, by human descent, Christ came. It cannot be cast away—he is certain of that, and he himself exists as living proof of it. A seed survives for future growth. He can just bear the thought of Israel's present death when he sees what life for the Gentiles will come from it. But that comfort isn't enough for him; he has a dim but dazzling vision of far higher blessings still to come at Israel's restoration.

So spoke the man his own countrymen denounced as the worst apostate from his ancestors' faith. John, who did not have Paul's calling to become a Gentile in order to win Gentiles, cannot have felt less amazement at the desecration of the city where he had shared the last supper with his Master, had seen Him risen, and had received the Spirit with his brethren. That the nation had destroyed itself, he plainly saw. But could human wickedness overturn God's purposes? Wasn't it the teaching of both Law and Gospel that God accomplishes His great work of righteousness and love despite every opposing evil will? Wasn't it the Gospel's particular teaching that even the will itself might finally be won over? Could Christ's coming to fulfill all things and gather the ages into Himself mean that the whole order of the universe was to be undone, proved a failure?

I\. The answer to these terrible doubts lies, I believe, in the vision of the sealing of the tribes, before the four winds were let loose on earth, sea, or tree, recorded earlier in this chapter. If you ask how a *vision* could sustain anyone against the pressure of overwhelming *facts*, I answer: only so far as the vision uncovers the principle and meaning behind the facts, corrects the vague impressions the senses receive, and leads the seer past what is passing and accidental to what is permanent. A vision in Scripture is not a picture for the eye; it is a revelation to heart and spirit of what does not appear to the senses but truly *is*. A city of walls and towers appeals to the senses; a polity—the constitution of a nation, the thing that gives the walls and towers their worth, without which they would crumble—must be grasped by another faculty.

It was to that faculty that the vision of the sealing of twelve thousand from each tribe of Israel was addressed. The twelve tribes seemed hopelessly broken apart, about to be scattered to the winds. The prophet was taught otherwise. When Jesus chose His twelve apostles, He pointed to this ancient, divine institution and affirmed its permanence. These men, and all of Israel who received their message, went out as witnesses to their scattered countrymen that their election had not been in vain, that the original charter—to conquer the earth and bless all its families—was not cancelled but was to be fulfilled to the utmost. They were to declare who God is and how He has revealed Himself, and to declare it, as of old, through their very organization: representing the tribes in their unity as one nation, and in their distinctness as separate families, each under its ancestral standard.

I've shown you before that this view of the nation as an imperishable reality, beneath all its changing outward forms, matches exactly the language of the ancient prophets. They spoke of branches lopped from the great oak God had planted, its leaves withered, nothing left but a bare stripped trunk—yet what looked dead to human eyes had a life in God that all would eventually be forced to acknowledge.

Such words became reality for the apostle through the events of his own time, understood by divine illumination. The baptized believers scattered in small groups through the cities of Greece and Asia were not replacing the old commonwealth of Israel—they were its continuation and expansion. Its tasks had passed to them, with higher powers and a wider reach than their fathers had known even at the height of their prosperity. An earthquake was shaking, and would go on shaking, both the Jewish and the pagan world. Jews, pagans, even Christians might think that a new world was simply rising on the ruins of an exhausted old one. In truth, only a carcass was thrown to the eagles; the body itself survived. Not one of the Almighty's purposes had been disappointed; no method had been abandoned.

I don't think we need this vision's assurance and comfort any less than John did. We're inclined to think that at some point a set of opinions and practices called Judaism simply vanished, replaced by a set called Christianity, and that this explains the history of the old world and the new. It is true that a miserable, narrow, inhuman, godless version of Judaism existed in Palestine, and that precisely because it denied everything the nation existed for, it was doomed to destruction along with the holy places that had become its shrines. It's also true that a thing called Christianity appeared after Jerusalem's fall, set itself violently against Judaism—leading often to the persecution and massacre of Jews—while embodying some of the same faults it denounced: the same inhumanity, the same godlessness. We need to remember Judaism's fate, because since God's purposes don't change, it stands as a fearful warning of what could befall that kind of Christianity. But the name the Jew dishonored was not his own but God's; the order he abused was not his own but God's. He could stumble against the rock on which he and the world stood, and be broken by it. He could not move that rock, not even a fragment of it. The one foundation was laid, his polity rested on it; and so it could expand to fill the earth, and neither he nor his successors nor the powers of hell could overturn it.

Most of the baptized, like most of the circumcised, might imagine they bore their own seal rather than God's, and were meant to be a curse to the nations rather than a blessing. The Church's ministers might claim the Church had nothing to do with tribes and families, that these interfered with its supposed uniformity. But such arrogance could not defeat the purpose of the Most High. Families, tribes, and nations kept asserting their existence, however much a so-called universal Church tried to treat them as merely earthly rather than divine. All that Church's machinery, its schemes to make itself a name, its tower meant to reach heaven, have been mocked and brought to nothing. Its attempts to create—or even preserve—a unity God had made have been thwarted as thoroughly as the unity of Israel's tribes was broken under Jeroboam. Its bids for independence have been set at nothing as thoroughly as Jewish independence was, by Chaldean, Persian, and Roman conquest. And yet the different tribes—Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic—have still carried the divine seal, and out of them have still come people who believed they bore that seal and were bound to testify of a kingdom centered on a divine King and High Priest, of a universal family whose Father is His Father, of a unity that time, place, and death cannot break, whose author is the Holy Spirit.

II\. It's at this point that John's first vision passes into the second. He has been comforted in his despair at seeing the commonwealth fall, even though he had long expected it. He now has a sense—one he could hardly have had before, even as Christ's beloved disciple grown old under His teaching—of the permanence and harmony of God's dealings. And so he was ready for another, still more wonderful revelation—very different from the one that prepared him for it, with no mention now of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, or Joseph, but which, without that earlier vision, would have seemed merely brilliant and fantastic rather than solid: "After this I looked, and behold, a multitude no one could count, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and languages."

Last week I spoke of how Christ's words about the narrow gate and the few who find it were confirmed in His apostles' experience. John had plenty of evidence of how small the Christian bodies in Ephesus, Sardis, Smyrna, and Laodicea were, compared to the worshippers in synagogues and pagan temples who rejected Christ. What a sight, then, to burst upon him now! A multitude no one could count—not made up, as we might expect, of patriarchs, lawgivers, and prophets who had believed the promises and waited for them, but speaking every language, belonging to every race! No wonder the thought rose in this Galilean fisherman's mind—and no wonder he was sure a divine messenger had put it there—"Who are these, and where have they come from?" There was a time when he might have reacted like Peter facing the sheet full of unclean creatures, and recoiled at the sight of Gentiles standing with palms before God's throne. Even now the sight overwhelms him; he can only answer the angel, "Sir, you know." But that answer comes from humility and wondering joy—the vision seems almost too good to be real. Yet it is exactly the truth John had spent years learning, and for proclaiming which he had been exiled: "I was in Patmos for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ." He had spoken of a Word existing before all worlds, whose life was the light of men; he had said this Word became flesh in Jesus Christ, who is ruler over all the kings of the earth, who died and is alive, who holds the keys of death and hell.

If this dangerous proclamation was no dream but the true account of God's universe, was it strange that He should be bringing multitudes from east and west, north and south, to sit down with Abraham and Isaac in His kingdom, gathering a family from every nation? However unlike this vast, united multitude was to the small, scattered flocks the apostle knew on earth, or to anything the future might show on earth, he could not doubt that it was the fulfillment of everything the best people and societies on earth had been striving toward. Without such a body as this, the hopes of past generations would have failed, and the promise of Pentecost would have been broken.

I said we would understand much more of the purpose of this whole book—which has shaped the thought, art, and language of eighteen centuries, and yet which people often dismiss as a mere collection of unsolvable riddles—if we connect the vision of the sealed tribes on earth with this vision in heaven, which the Church presents to us as the vision of All Saints. The whole book must remain forever a puzzle unless we hold to its foundational principle: that Christ's death and resurrection have broken down the wall between the seen and the unseen world, and that He is the center of both. This belief has seemed too awesome and too good for people to hold onto; they have pushed it away, sometimes wishing it weren't true, sometimes insisting nothing so blessed could be true.

They have paid for this unbelief. The conviction that there must be some communion between the living and those they've lost, between the living and past ages, was one they could not shake off. So they have been haunted by dark terrors and ghastly apparitions, and left at the mercy of every fraud. Each place and race has colored its superstitions according to its own circumstances and temperament. Civilized ages, noticing this, have concluded the superstition itself had no basis beyond those circumstances and temperaments. They thought they could discard it; it has reappeared dressed as science instead. Christendom, which by its very name and its solemn ceremonies professes faith in One who has conquered death and opened the kingdom of heaven, has nonetheless built a system of priestcraft claiming, through its prayers and curses, to manage some occasional relation between the living and the region lit by God and the Lamb, or the region of outer darkness. Yet our own consciences tell us that we cannot, by any act or thought, cut ourselves off from communion with either of those worlds—if we could, the sun and stars would mean no more to us than they do to cattle. Shall we always be at the mercy of fortune-tellers and frauds who trade on people's fears and hopes? Shall we not dare ask whether some light from above has fallen on these mysteries we keep trying to decipher by dim glimmers from below?

III\. The proof that the light in the Apocalypse comes from above lies, I think—as the proof of any scientific discovery lies—in how many confused notions it dispels, in how it confirms our strongest and most precious hopes, and in how it helps us with our highest and our most ordinary duties.

1\. Nothing distresses an earnest person more than the notion, sometimes arising in his own mind and sometimes preached as though it were settled Scripture doctrine, that here we are bound together in families and nations, but after death all such bonds cease and everything becomes solitary and individual. I have heard this stated from the pulpit as an unquestionable, self-evident truth every orthodox person must accept. I can't imagine anything more repugnant to conscience, more flatly asserting that future blessedness is not the perfection of present blessing but its total undoing. Escaping isolation, becoming capable of friendship and society—this has been God's gift to us here below. Families, nations, churches have been His work; our sins have been the violent effort to tear them apart. If the pulpit teaching is right, then God's work has failed and ours has won: society ends, and selfishness is everything.

If John's teaching is true, that other teaching is false. The countless multitude is a *society*. Their robes are white because every stain of selfishness has been washed away by the Lamb's blood. Their palms show they have conquered the very things that destroy the unity of families and nations here. There is no dull sameness, no single language—all is harmony within diversity. Here on earth, some glorify power at the cost of meekness, and some claim meekness excludes strength; there, all give glory together to the One on the throne *and* to the Lamb. Here, people sealed in God's name have thought they honored that name best by proclaiming His condemnation of their enemies. There, the one word joined to the divine name is Salvation—salvation from the curse people have made for themselves.

2\. The sight of this multitude from every nation must have taught the missionary of John's day, as it can teach the missionary of ours, a lesson that curbs both his pride and—why say "but," why not "therefore"?—his despair. He sometimes tries to comfort himself with thoughts of God's mercy toward the ignorant who never had a chance to know better. But then he sees the actual brutalization and corruption among the people he goes to, and no tolerance for their religion makes that fact less appalling. And when he considers how few can ever hear him preach, how few even understand his words, he begins to wonder if God has abandoned His own world. But it isn't so. His converts may be few, his powers of communication weak. But the One he speaks of, who sent him, has His own ways of making Himself known, of bringing people of every nation, tongue, and land, through much suffering, to know the Lord who died for them and remains with them, and to know His Father as their Father. They are not saved each by whatever sect he professes; they are saved by the one name given under heaven. But it doesn't depend on our words or wisdom how they come to know that name. If its letters reach them through us, it is another than we who reveals what they mean. He can make it known even if we stammer badly in speaking it, even if we never speak it at all.

3\. I know how easily a hostile bystander, ignorant of a missionary's real anguish and real inspiration, could twist what I've said into an excuse for indifference, since the work will be done without him. He might be tempted to laziness by that argument, or by any other—the devil has countless arguments, and I'm sure the claim that the task is hopeless is the most powerful of them. But that argument will always be defeated by anyone who counts it his highest honor to work alongside God, and who knows he could never convert a single soul without God's Spirit doing it. And if it occurs to him—rightly, so long as it isn't pushed into irreverence—that God, whose Son became man, works through human beings to reveal His name, then I return to John's vision and ask: why not through just men made perfect, as well as through just men still clothed in their imperfection? Why should the cry of "Salvation to Him on the throne and to the Lamb," rising from this multitude, not be more powerful than the cry of a weary, divided band of witnesses on earth? In hours of unspeakable sorrow, comforting voices have come to you from you know not where. In moments of temptation, teetering on the edge, some old remembered sentence has come back to you as if from sleep, some house or tree seeming to speak warning or encouragement. Why might those not be voices of people who once spoke such words aloud, now speaking to the heart instead of the ear, stirring memories they still share with you? Would it seem strange, rather than entirely natural, that a mother watches over the son she would have died to bless, even before her love had grown to its full flowering in God's love? Why might not older patriots and martyrs be echoing Christ's own words in the ears of their brothers—in lonely prisons no earthly friend can reach, at the stake with no visible smile to greet them, even while God's name is invoked to condemn them—"Be faithful unto death, and He will give you the crown of life"? And why might these same voices not go on teaching and evangelizing the very lands they wept and bled for while on earth? What could hearten a struggling soldier of the Church on earth more than knowing these unseen armies fought alongside him?

Milton's words are true:

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

The countless multitude proclaims salvation to God and the Lamb. But those too who lie on sickbeds testifying that a Father chastens them, those who die at an assassin's hand in distant lands—they also are apprentices, waiting to be initiated into these same joys and labors. They too will one day fully obey His command, hearing the voice of His word—and that command is: "Love all men for my sake."

4\. There's one more thought on this subject I dare not leave out. In much of Christendom's calendar, All Saints' Day is followed by All Souls' Day. There may be good reason why we don't observe the latter as we do the former: bound up with it is a notion that we care more for our departed brothers' souls than God does, and that through our intercession, or some saint's, His will toward them can be changed. Whatever custom feeds that irreverent, pagan-like idea must be given up, however much beauty it may seem to hold.

But we can reclaim the day, free of its dangerous associations. We can remember that the angels of God rejoice over one repentant sinner because God Himself rejoices. We can be sure that He who marks even a sparrow's fall does not lose sight of a soul He has made. So we can be sure that all saints care for all souls. Their affection and power to sympathize and bless are not limited, as ours are, by time and space. They are limited only by the love of God itself—whose height and depth and length and breadth they can no more measure than we can, but which flows forth to them, in them, and through them forever.

## Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity

*The passage:* "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

The people who heard the Sermon on the Mount were astonished, we are told, "for He taught them as One having authority, and not as the Scribes." These were felt to be the words of a King, not of a Book. The Speaker was not spelling out God's mind but announcing it; He had a right to be obeyed.

Something of this impression has carried through to later ages. Though the words have become letters, and the letters have been stereotyped, men in the far West have felt as if they stood on the brow of the old hill listening to Him. Those to whom Bible phrases have grown hard and traditional have approached this discourse with awe. Those who have thrown off faith in the specialities of Christianity have thought they found here something common and universal, worthy of their honor.

Such effects could hardly be produced if the discourse were not utterly simple and practical, free of artifice. Yet the most popular historian of our day—who ought to know rhetoric if anyone does—has called "highly rhetorical" the passages on forgiving injuries, and has declared, almost with Papal solemnity, that for sixteen centuries these passages were treated by everyone as figurative, until George Fox, founder of the Quakers, first imagined they had literal force. Such a claim, from one who represents so much of our age's temper and knowledge of the past, may well stagger us. It must mean something important. How can it be reconciled with the judgment that not sixteen but eighteen centuries seem to have confirmed—the sense that these words are momentous and literal?

This subject touches us closely. It appeared plainly in the last session of Parliament that the legal and ecclesiastical conscience of this country were at odds over a question central to England's domestic life.

Both sides agree domestic life is sacred. Those who proposed a new tribunal for marriage offences, and changes to divorce law, believed they were removing obstacles to morality and family peace. Those who opposed them feared dangerous confusion about the holiest obligations. So the ends agreed on both sides; but one side believed ordinary legislation and courts could handle the matter, the other that it is wholly subject to divine law, answerable only to specially framed courts. The Sermon on the Mount contains statements said to forbid the changes attempted. It is the very passage by which we measure the difference between the New Testament and the Old. Some ecclesiastical writers, of real weight, would strip it of this authority, supposing it tolerates an exception which a passage in Luke annuls. But this extreme view, like those it opposes, forces the whole question open: what kind of teaching is this, what does it address, to whom is it spoken, is it a code or something else, are its statements to be taken at full force or explained away as figurative and rhetorical?

Other, more recent and tremendous events press the same inquiry from a different angle. If the passages on forgiveness are read as George Fox and his followers read them, they must forbid punishing the Indian mutineers, forbid all effort to keep or recover our empire. But is that reading the only strict, literal one? If we abandon it, does the whole discourse lose its force as an utterance of the Divine Mind? Can we still call it the ethics of the Gospel, or must those ethics become something we bend and discard at will?

Tremendous issues are bound up in this inquiry from any angle we take it. Nothing less than the meaning of all morality, relative and absolute, is at stake. Is there any non-figurative moral foundation left to us, if Christ's own words are figurative? I have no doubt that through sixteen, through eighteen centuries, there has been a disposition to treat these words as meaning very little, dispensable in Christian life. I am equally convinced there has been a feeling, all along, that they carry the most profound and awful meaning, that human life cannot be whole until it conforms to it. I do not think ecclesiastics, or Quakers, have been too strict in their interpretations—rather not strict enough, not careful enough to submit their own preconceptions to the mind of Christ, receiving Him simply as Lawgiver and Judge. The conflict between legal and ecclesiastical conscience, now and in past generations, would not have arisen if ecclesiastics had been less eager to establish their own theories and jurisdictions, and more resolute in acknowledging the full gravity of our Lord's teaching on marriage and human relationships—more ready to connect the Sermon, as He connects it Himself, with the elder law He came to fulfil, not destroy. Then it would appear that the modern legislator has a function Christ's teaching does not supersede but helps him perform, and that the Church has higher duties toward human relationships than obstructing that function. Likewise, so far as the Quaker has honestly sought to interpret the Sermon rigorously and apply it to his own life, he has benefited the world; and he has worked against the conscience of mankind, encouraging its self-indulgence and cowardice, exactly where he has shrunk from the full, severe meaning of its maxims and interpreted it by his own notions rather than in the light of Him who spoke it.

I will not take up either subject this afternoon; I reserve them for the next two Sundays. My text expresses the principle running through the whole discourse and governing all its particular topics. But it already brings us to the heart of the difficulties said to remove it from ordinary life. If we are anywhere in the region of rhetoric, surely it is here. The command to be "perfect"—who but some transcendent saint could be addressed? And "perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect"—must that not drive even the transcendent saint to despair?

I. I think, brethren, that the command to be "perfect" must indeed cause despair to a man who has been aspiring to be a transcendent saint, fancying himself unlike other men. What our Lord tells His disciples is that their righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees—men who had raised themselves above their fellows and looked down on the distant crowd with lofty pity, measuring their approach to perfection by their difference from others. "Blessed are the poor in spirit" was the axe laid to the root of this kind of perfection. Christ was not saying, "You are farther from the top of the ladder than you think," or "you lack aids to ascend." He was saying: "You are on the wrong road, pursuing a false end; every step in this direction takes you farther from perfection, not nearer." And why must it? The Pharisee does his works to be seen by men—by the very men he scorns, to be admired by those he tramples on. This is the fate of such aspirants: they live for observation; the question becomes not what they are but how they appear. Alongside this motive to become actors, hypocrites in the strictest sense, ran another: God Himself was conceived as demanding an outward, apparent service. He had given common precepts—not to kill, not to commit adultery—which even the vulgar must be forced to keep by penalty. The exalted man practised a "meritorious" obedience, different in degree but the same in kind: not eating with unwashed hands, fasting at set times, keeping the hours of prayer—obligations appended to, not deduced from, the law, by which the select class might win God's favor. Our Lord dwells on one commandment treated with particular contempt by these seekers of holiness: honoring father and mother was set aside when the money that might support them was dedicated instead to the Temple. Nothing shows more clearly the nature and results of Pharisaic religion: common, relative duties—especially family duties—were discarded, while holiness became entirely individual, aimed at procuring rewards for the individual, even though it was entirely social too, since so much of it depended on having spectators to notice and be affected by it.

Another feature belongs with those already named: the Pharisaic aspirant took evil as his starting point, as the very condition of the human race; every step that raised him above evil raised him above mankind. Godliness and humanity became direct opposites.

When our Lord said "Be perfect," His whole discourse makes clear He meant, "Be men. You cannot be anything better than what you are created to be; you make yourselves worse by trying to be something else." Those to whom the Kingdom belongs are those who do not lift themselves above their fellows—the meek, the merciful. Those to be comforted are those suffering as other men suffer, with them. The reward goes not to those who possess righteousness but to those hungering and thirsting after it. Not to those the world admires, but those only God can see—the pure in heart, who shall see Him as He sees them. Not to those men speak well of, but those they revile and cast out, who thereby join fellowship with the old prophets. All this perfection is social, not individual as the Pharisee's was; yet it is hidden, not visible and admired as his was.

Notice too how this affects the relation between this Gospel of perfection and the old Law. The difference is in kind, not degree. It is not a new code appended to the old, nor a special code for a special class. The Gospel commandment belongs to the man himself; the legal precept belongs to his acts. That is why the Gospel completes and fulfils the Law without destroying a jot of it. Each stands distinct, each sustains the other; they do not clash, because they belong to different regions, yet they continually act on each other—the weakness of one is the weakness of the other, the strength of one the strength of the other, since both apply to the same human race. The Lawgiver, dealing with acts, says, "Thou shalt not kill"; the King, speaking to the mind, says, "Thou shalt not be angry with thy brother without cause." The Lawgiver says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery"; the King says, "Thou shalt not look on a woman to lust after her." The Lawgiver says, "Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but perform thine oaths to the Lord," warning that perjury will be avenged. The King over the spirit says, "Swear not at all," guarding the constant, hourly reverence for God without which even the solemn oath loses its worth through the carelessness of everyday speech.

How forcefully this applies to the honoring of parents which the Pharisees set aside by their traditions, I will show under the next head. What I note now is that Jesus could raise the standard of human morality against the inhuman Pharisaic standard because He was Himself the Son of Man—because He came to declare and to embody the truth that God and man are eternally united, not divided; that man is made in God's image, so that what is truly human answers to what is truly divine; that the fall of the first man was a fall from trust in God and from belief in the state meant for him; and that the fall of every man consists in choosing to be a separate, selfish being, standing in his Adam-nature, renouncing union with Christ and fellowship with others—the very thing that constitutes our perfection as members of the human race.

II. But secondly, He says, "Be perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." If the first clause did not already prescribe something impossible, what does this addition do? I say it removes any discouragement the rest might have left; it gives us a rule that, unlike other moral philosophies, is compassionate, practical, and hopeful—proof that Christ's demand is higher than any other, and yet that "His yoke is easy and His burden is light."

1\. A man might say: "I am convinced that social, human morality—being a good father, son, husband, citizen—is the highest morality, higher than any admired religious selfishness or its rewards. But the more I want this ordinary perfection, the farther away it seems. God may ask no more than that I do justice, love mercy, walk humbly—but how hard is doing justice! How the love of mercy vanishes when I want to avenge a personal injury! What pride enslaves me just when I think I have gained humility! The best rules cannot make me what St. Paul says I should be to my children, my servants. Even if I love those who love me and yield to natural affection, my conscience tells me I am partial, doing injury both to those I favor and those I neglect."

Such thoughts arise in someone aspiring not to fantastic excellence but simply to do his duty where he stands. He does not scorn laws; he reveres the Ten Commandments as divine, but somehow they do not reach him—he needs help they cannot give. To fulfill any relation, he must not only avoid wrong but do right, and not only do right but *be* right. How can he be right? Our Lord tells him he is actually a child of a Father in Heaven, and that earthly relationships are grounded on and shaped after that heavenly one. The Eternal Father established each family because He established one Universal Family in His Son—this is what Christ revealed. The Pharisee would not honor father or mother, reserving all honor for God, and so could not honor God either, since he did not believe in God as Father. Jesus bids us not love father or mother more than Him, because in Him alone dwells the love we can truly show them; apart from Him it becomes a mere selfish affection, dependent on accident, sure to dry up unless constantly renewed from His love. The perfection He commands, true human perfection, becomes possible when we submit to the Will governing the universe and governing us, cease resisting it, and let the Spirit proceeding continually from Father and Son remove the conceit, vanity, and restlessness that make us miserable.

2\. As this Name holds the power to make us all we could wish to be, it also holds infinite compassion and forgiveness for our failures—which we seek in vain from every teacher in the world, even the most tolerant, who bid us be content with states our own conscience refuses to accept. I have a right to be like my Father in Heaven; that is my true human condition. But I also have a right to go to Him and say, "Father, I have not cared to be like You, have not believed I could be, have not confessed myself Your child." I may lay bare all my weakness before One who knows its full extent, who understands my failures and cares for me more than I can imagine. "Be perfect by this rule"—but may I confess to a rule? Will it understand my sorrow, or make me sorry? "Be perfect by the standard of this holy man"—but does he know what I strive against, comprehend my stupidity and selfishness? Can his life become mine? "Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect"—this the man who has fallen most often, who knows best the enemy's strength and his own weakness, who is sunk in deep mire, bound in fetters he longs to escape, hears as the assurance that he may yet rise and walk, that there is a home for him and One who will bring him there. Whatever anger or hatred grips him, however circumstances seem to justify it, however far it banishes God from him—He who is all Mercy, Forgiveness, Patience is not far off; He bids me be what He is, and can make me so. Who raised in a quiet, pious home can know what it costs a man bred among curses to obey "swear not at all"? What would become of him, if he could not throw himself on the pity and strength of the very Being whose name he is tempted to profane? And doing so, how much more he may come to know of that Being than those more fortunately raised!

3\. This text cuts through the webs in which casuists entangle the conscience, ending the tricks the deceitful heart continually plays. Peter, still learning the rudiments of his faith, asks, "How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?"—an opening for a Confessor's endless refinements of degree, occasion, and circumstance, for delicate distinctions and evasions that torment the doubter's conscience while indulging his worst inclinations. Our Lord's answer contains no such subtlety: a simple parable meaning that God forgives, and if you are unlike God in this you are miserable. There is no measure or limit set. God's mind is the standard: would you have Him forgive less, or less from the heart? Then your own forgiveness may be so measured. Yet in the same parable God is shown punishing severely—so punishment is not incompatible with love and compassion, and may even be required by it. Be perfect, then, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.

I will say more on forgiveness later. I mention it now to illustrate that because Gospel morality allows no indulgences, because it sets only the highest standard, it actually lays a lighter burden than any other—it is from first to last a deliverance from burdens. We are oppressed by the sense of what we ought to be and cannot be. What do we gain by persuading our conscience that our obligations are less than we thought? Reduce them, and what remains will feel just as overwhelming; as our aims sink lower each day, the difficulty of reaching even them grows greater. Christ teaches that the burden lies not in the strictness of any law but in ourselves—that every law, human or divine, is weak through the flesh, and that so long as we are merely trying to obey a rule, even a moderate one, we will find it a burden. But when we claim our true standing as new men, created for good works, children of a Father in Heaven, we become united to the very source from which laws proceed: obedience becomes recognized as reasonable and natural to us, disobedience as the unnatural, miserable departure from a blessed order—and for such lapses there is confession, the gift of repentance, and a divine restoration that no human indulgence or tolerance can give.

Nor, since it is not casuistical, is this morality rhetorical. The rhetorician praises virtues as belonging to certain favored persons he is paid to admire, and denounces vices as though only certain people were capable of them. Our Lord speaks of the highest virtues as resemblances to the Father in Heaven, in whose image all men are made and in Christ redeemed to be renewed. He treats every vice the law condemns as one any man might fall into, lying close to every man, arising from inclinations no one is a stranger to. The rhetorician deals in grand generalities about magnanimous endurance; Christ speaks of the man struck on one cheek turning the other, the man compelled to go one mile going two—homely illustrations the rhetorician despises, and exactly what we need for the business of life.

I will not anticipate what I hope to say next Sunday about the conflict between legal and ecclesiastical morality. But I will say this: the more we clergy teach children and grown men the old Catechism's doctrine that they are "members of Christ, and children of God, and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven," the more faithfully we fulfil our task, and the more clearly we show that the nation needs help beyond what laws and penalties can give, both to preserve what is good and to reform what is evil. Above all, I trust you will come to see that in this teaching, borne out by the whole history of the Old and New Testaments, lies the protection of domestic society, of reverence for parents, of the marriage bond. What ecclesiastics have done for these things I must confess with much sorrow and shame. What the Gospel has done for them—what the Church of God, so far as it has witnessed to Christ's redemption and our adoption as His Father's children, has done for them—I can affirm with full confidence, appealing to the facts of history and the conscience of mankind. We do not owe, and shall not owe, the sacredness of our hearths and homes to legal enactments or to any court, whatever its name. We owe it to Him who said, "Be ye perfect, as my Father in Heaven is perfect," who made Himself the Bridegroom and Husband of our race; and we shall owe its continuance and its elevation to the growing belief that all things in heaven and earth rest not on the shifting sand of legal or priestly invention, but in Him who was before all worlds and will remain when everything made merely by our hands has passed away.

## Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity

[November]{.smallcaps} 15, 1857

> "*It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: but I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery*." —[Matthew]{.smallcaps} v. 31, 32.

*The passage:* The old teaching said that a man who puts away his wife should give her a certificate of divorce. But Jesus says that whoever puts away his wife, except for sexual unfaithfulness, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Last week I examined a statement, made on very high authority, that the Sermon on the Mount contains rhetorical passages not meant literally to regulate our lives. I disputed this. I argued that those supposed to err through excessive rigor in applying Christ's words had actually erred through too loose an explanation, missing hints He gave us for understanding them—and that this laxity weakened the application of His words to daily duty; they would carry far more force if not softened by their interpreters. Having discussed the words that hold the principle of the whole discourse, "Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect," I proposed to examine two special inferences drawn from Christ's teaching that have been thought impracticable: first, what ecclesiastics have inferred about divorce; second, what Quakers have inferred about forgiveness. I begin with the former.

Everyone has noticed how often the phrase "It hath been said of old time" occurs in the first part of the Sermon on the Mount, and understanding it correctly matters greatly for interpretation. In our text, and a few others, the phrase is shortened—"of old time" is dropped. This is not a major difference, but since I want to be exact with language often called loose and vague, I won't pass over it; I think the change may be significant. In Matthew 19, when the Pharisees ask whether a man may put away his wife for any cause, Jesus answers by asking whether they have not read that the Creator made them male and female, and said that for this reason a man leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and the two become one flesh—so they are no longer two but one, and what God has joined man must not separate. The Pharisees then ask why Moses commanded a bill of divorcement. In Mark 10 the exchange runs somewhat differently: Jesus asks what Moses commanded; they answer that Moses permitted a bill of divorcement; Jesus replies that Moses wrote this because of their hardness of heart, but from the beginning of creation God made them male and female. Since Christ's purpose was to show that marriage is far older than the Law, not created by it, there is good reason why the phrase "ancients" or "old time"—elsewhere applied to commandments or venerable maxims of Scripture—might be dropped here. It applied, strictly, just as much to the bill of divorcement as to the commandment against adultery. But because His special aim here was to press home that there were times older than either the permission or the commandment, the phrase may have been deliberately omitted so as not to weaken that impression.

I rest nothing on this difference by itself. If a better reading turned up using the same words as elsewhere in the discourse, I would be quite content, since the principle I think this variation suggests is fully established by the passages already quoted and by the whole tenor of Christ's discourse. We imagine He is enacting a new law to replace an old one. No—He is bringing to light something older than all penal laws and tables of law, a primary part of human nature and Divine order, something beneath all positive decrees and enactments, even beneath God's own commandments, without which they would have no meaning. What would a command against adultery be worth if marriage did not exist? How can a bond be broken that was never formed?

The whole morality of the Pharisees, as we saw last Sunday, rested on forgetting this basic principle. They treated penal laws not as preserving existing obligations but as the foundation of them, and so made the highest divine laws pointless, contradicting them in letter as well as spirit. They would not consider the reason given for the Sabbath in the Fourth Commandment—that God cared for menservants and maidservants, wanting them to rest because He rested—so the whole nature of the day was reversed: not a blessing but a curse, made against men rather than for them. On the same principle, they supposed the Fifth Commandment was the ground of honoring parents, rather than simply affirming a relation already existing in human life itself—so honor to parents could be set aside in order to honor the God who gave the commandment.

I dwelt on this last Sunday not only because it reveals the Pharisee's mind so clearly, but because it equally reveals Christ's—in what sense He spoke an old truth existing from the beginning, and revealed what had been hidden since the world's foundation. The fatherly relation existed from Eve's first-born; the brotherly relation from when the shepherd and the farmer grew up together. The earliest book of the Bible, having nothing to do with Sinai or tables of law, is chiefly about the relations within a single family—a family through which all families of the earth were to be blessed—grounded on the revelation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. With one hand, Christ struck at the Pharisees' attempt to derange their own history, putting first what God had put second, subjecting a living constitution to mere decrees. With the other, He struck at their denial of a fuller revelation of God—not as bound to men by a formal covenant, but united to them in an actual Son—which He was making known in His words and acts, and would fully reveal in His death and resurrection. By basing everything on outward law concerning only outward acts, the Pharisee destroyed the great human history of the Patriarchs, and stripped the prophetic books of their coherence, their moral and political worth, the grandeur of their poetry, their warnings and hopes—by robbing them of their central feature: that they connect human relations to the Divine, treating the nation's idolatries and unfaithfulness as adulteries against the Lord who had married it to Himself. By basing everything instead on God's own nature and eternal Sonship, Jesus restored the patriarchal record to its place in the Divine order, and proved the prophets were not idle figures and empty rhetoric but direct appeals to conscience, preparing the way for One who could speak plainly of the Father.

The Pharisees did not only misrepresent the Patriarchs and Prophets; they misrepresented the statute law they worshipped, confusing permissions with commands. Where the Legislator wisely refrained from claiming a dominion over conscience he could not exercise, they measured conscience's demands by his decrees: the rule that a man divorcing his wife must give her a writing was, to them, as binding a rule of life as the command against adultery—"both were in the book; where was the difference?" But when men argue this way, the permissive rule will be obeyed and the restraining one forgotten. Josephus's records, and the Evangelist's hints, show this was in fact the state of things in Palestine. The story in John 8—wherever it belongs—does not exaggerate that condition, even granting that the woman's accusers went out one by one, convicted of the very sin they charged her with.

Yet nothing in Christ's teaching, here or elsewhere, condemns the Mosaic regulation on divorce: "For the hardness of your heart," He says, "he suffered you to put away your wives." Here the Lord over the house justifies rather than blames His servant Moses. In granting this permission, Moses confessed the necessary limits of mere enactments. With insight that must have come from a higher wisdom—so contrary to a legislator's natural ambition—he saw what Law cannot do: that his office concerned transgression, presumed hardness of heart, and had no power to make men love their wives or honor the marriage vow. Keeping the commandment always in view, adapting his measures to the actual state of his people as signs of God's purpose, he could prevent outrages on God's ordinance and keep alive some sense of its sacredness. Overdoing might harm reverence for marriage as much as neglect; the heart may be hardened rather than softened by attempts to force and crush it. God made them male and female and said the two should be one flesh; Moses might weaken those heavenly words by earthly attempts to enforce them. In this I see Moses's fidelity to his divine office, his true inspiration, and his example of the modesty and courage fitting for legislators of every age—modesty to know how much they can do within their sphere, courage to refuse to overstep it, whatever pressures urge them to do so.

But though Christ does not blame the legislator, He speaks, as always, to the conscience and spirit of the man: "whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery; and whosoever marrieth her that is put away committeth adultery." Nothing could be plainer: "I am speaking to you, my disciples, common men—not to lawmakers or judges. I speak to you who live under Moses's Law, and could take advantage of the license it allows." Our translators are right in the first verb but unfortunate in rendering the participle differently. "Divorce," in our sense, did not describe the ordinary Jewish husband's act; he simply "put away" or "sent away" his wife, and the Law required only a document to authorize this—little more than registering what was, in effect, his own unilateral act, not a court's decision. I note this so you see how the actual circumstances of the evil Christ was rebuking fit His purpose in these words. Then comes the debated exception, which some try to remove by appeal to Luke 16:15, where it does not appear. Comparing the two passages, ours is more elaborate, part of a fuller discourse, involving a more careful contrast between old and new. Luke's words illustrate a different point—that not a jot or tittle of the Law would be abolished in the Kingdom of Heaven that many were entering. But both passages describe the man as putting away his wife; neither deals with outward law or its permissions, a subject not even hinted at here. Luke's version, even more clearly than Matthew's, refers to the existing Jewish practice and the Pharisees' notions.

The next clause shows even more clearly the personal character of this command. The man is treated as guardian of his wife's life and purity; he must not put her away, lest he cause her to commit adultery. This explains and supports the previous clause: if she has already sinned, it may be right—a stern duty, not a privilege—to treat the bond as broken, to seek separation for her sake as much as his own. Such a doctrine, as a clergyman who has written on this subject rightly observed, vindicates the sanctity of marriage far more than the opposing view does.

The final clause, "whosoever marrieth her that is put away committeth adultery," follows directly from the former. If her being put away does not, in God's sight, dissolve her first marriage—even if earthly law authorizes it—then she is not, in God's sight, married to another, even if earthly law sanctions that marriage. Again Christ speaks directly to the conscience: a lax outward rule does not excuse it, nor would a strict rule necessarily show it the limits of its responsibility. A woman divorced in our sense is declared not merely put away by her husband but no longer his wife before God. The cases are not parallel, and this text, which does not condemn the Mosaic Law, cannot tell us what a future legislator should or should not permit to men's hardness of heart. But whatever the law says, the man stands before Christ's tribunal and must ask Him to search his heart and show him what to do. To suppose Christ set aside the Mosaic code here and substituted a new one for Christendom empties His words of their life and power.

These few words have exercised immense power over mankind precisely because they do not correct outward policy but belong to the inward regeneration that the Son of Man came to bring. As long as a man is calculating what chance he has of escaping the marriage bond he has entered, he cannot regard it with real reverence; it becomes not truly a relation but merely a contract secured by penalties. Whatever more elevated idea of wedlock has existed in Christendom—in England—beyond this (and without it there would have been no Christendom, no England, only the semblance of social life) exists because Christ took marriage out of the narrow sphere of ordinary legislation, restored its ancient sanctity, and gave it a deeper sanctity still by revealing His own relation to humanity, which marriage sustains and expresses. The Gospel of marriage has done what marriage laws never have done and never can do.

So Christ has given the modern legislator help in achieving his own true ends that the ancient legislator lacked. Moses was obliged by duty and conscience not only to tolerate divorce but also polygamy; he would have overstepped his place as a servant in God's house had he tried to stop it, however great the temptation. He would have been anticipating a stage of the world's education that laws, as experience clearly shows, never accomplish—only the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the one Head of the race, accomplishes it, gradually if not at once, wherever it is preached and accepted. That is simply the fact, however we explain it. Laws and punishments have never been able to undermine what we feel to be so fatal to domestic peace and national strength; it cannot long coexist with this proclamation. Only then can the legislator move in the wake of a moral power that has gone before him, and say, "This shall not be; it violates a primary institution of society, which I will avenge"—and only then will he be heeded. The contrast is equally clear regarding divorce: the modern legislator can strip the man of any license to put away his wife at pleasure; he can guarantee her rights, watch over her, require the solemnest proof of a broken contract before divorce is granted rather than mere dismissal. So great has been this change—produced entirely by an invisible moral force—that we scarcely know how to give the old word its proper meaning any more; we unconsciously mix in ideas of formality and legality that would have been foreign to an old Jew or Roman, formalists and legalists as they both were.

The history of Christendom in every period bears this out. Intelligent, impartial Protestant historians, unwilling to credit all the power the Popes wielded in the Middle Ages merely to the superstition or wickedness of those times—believing no such power could exist in God's world without something in the conscience of mankind upholding it—have asked the records of the past what it was in this power that could raise itself above the decrees of states and the force of armies. Their answer: the so-called Fathers of the Church presented, however distorted, an image of a Fatherly government over men; they appealed to the sense of the dignity and awfulness of relationships in men's minds; they upheld these as more ancient and divine, more connected to God's dominion, than any state's statutes. So when they intervened to check the pride and license of monarchs, especially over their marriages and the dissolving of them, something in the heart of Europe defended and sustained that assumption—recognizing it as a higher tribunal correcting crimes beyond the reach of ordinary judges, a voice declaring that deeds done in darkness would be brought into the light.

Here was the power of these rulers; where was their weakness? How did they convince men that this power must be lodged elsewhere, that they could wield it only to injure the very cause that had made it tolerable and venerable? They did not assert the ancient ordinance from the beginning, stamping each marriage with the Church's sanction as witness of its sacredness before God; instead they tried to give it an artificial sanctity by their blessing, treating it as so earthly and impure in itself that holy men should not touch it even after that blessing. They pretended to make marriage a Sacrament while denying that God had already made it sacramental by His own act and institution. Marriage was made to belong to a scheme of ecclesiastical jurisprudence rather than to the Divine order—degraded from its true high honor so that it could be raised to a fictitious honor derived from human words instead. Consider whether the worst scandals of the Middle Ages—the tricks by which marriages were declared void, the deeper confusions attending clerical celibacy—did not spring from this confusion about the Church's own duties and powers. Consider whether the Church's attempt to build a rival system of jurisprudence to that of states and civil courts did not arise from a secret distrust of its own power, a secret unbelief that domestic relationships were truly holy before God, grounded in His own revelation of Himself. The very Pharisaic habit of mind Christ confronted in the Sermon on the Mount reproduced itself in His Church: nothing was venerable but edicts; the New Testament was treated as a canon law meant to govern conjugal ties the ecclesiastic himself knew nothing of and was trained to scorn.

Eventually the Teutonic mind of Europe—filled from the first with reverence for domestic life—declared this could not stand, that a lie lay beneath such contradictions. Reading the Old Testament's clear pictures of domestic and national life, people became convinced God intended both for men, and that Apostles could not have meant to set Lawgivers and Prophets at naught. It was the ecclesiastics' own fault if this popular insurrection took too much of an Old Testament direction—if, in some Reformed countries, imperfect Old Testament notions of marriage simply replaced the gross perversions of the New that had prevailed among Latin nations. We may rejoice, cautiously, if we escaped that danger, affirming marriage's fitness for all classes without admitting license of divorce. But I see no evidence we owe this blessing to our double jurisdiction of ecclesiastical law and courts. These, I think, have taught our people that marriage's sacredness is somehow fictitious, tied to technical procedure—a relic of the system that destroyed the Church's universality, humanity, and divinity by placing an earthly father between the Father in Heaven and His children, substituting symbols for actual communion. Ecclesiastical Courts give a quasi-sacredness to what should be essentially sacred, the mere appearance of indissoluble union instead of the truth in "God hath joined them together." Far from strengthening domestic or Christian life, such fictions, I believe, blind our people—even wise and holy men—to the true divinity of marriage, making them impatient with Christ's own words unless those words yield the meaning they want.

I mentioned last Sunday signs of this impatience appearing in unexpected quarters. To maintain marriage's absolute indissolubility, some have tried to explain away the exception in our text—resorting, I would say, to the strangest and most damaging experiments. The word πορνεία has been declared a technical term; passages in the Prophets calling idolatry "fornication" and "adultery" have been cited to show this religious sense fits Christ's purpose better, with heresy suggested as the New Testament equivalent of idolatry—implying, though not stated outright, that heresy might justify dissolving a marriage. This shows how far a theory at stake can drive men, and how much the ecclesiastical theory of marriage can undermine both Scripture's teaching about it and its actual stability. The Prophets' language, as I have tried to show, is not technical at all but the natural, simple, human language in which God reveals His relation to us and establishes our relationships to each other. If that is technical, everything in the Bible is technical. And once we have turned Scripture into a storehouse of fictions, what has actually been gained? Marriage is no more indissoluble than before—only now, instead of dissolution resting on moral grounds, on the destruction of the relation's essence by one party, any husband who suspects his wife of some dangerous opinion could demand a bill of divorcement. Under such a system, what domestic intercourse would remain possible, and what domestic suspicion, tyranny, and hypocrisy would not become possible?

I do not oppose such maxims by calling marriage a mere earthly institution or civil contract, but by Christ's own words, which they try to explain away, and by linking marriage to His revelation of Himself. There is an ambiguity in the phrase "civil contract" worth clearing up. Some mean by it only that marriage is fully valid before man and God even without ecclesiastical benediction—an opinion I share entirely. The legislative measure of twenty years ago authorizing English marriages before a civil officer was, I think, wise and godly. It relieved men from the terrible temptation of using holy words they neither understood nor believed, if they married at all; those who did use the words were likely to value them more, not as necessary formalities but as witnesses to the ordinance's sacredness and preparations for fulfilling their vows rightly. Greater clarity and reverence about marriage's nature seems to have resulted—because it forced us to see that marriage's worth does not derive from the authority of God's servants, civil or ecclesiastical; either may repeat, but neither can do more than repeat, His own words: "these two are one flesh; let not man put them asunder."

Our experience with that measure should make us cautious about assuming that the recent measure on divorce—which some say tends to put asunder what God has joined—will make our people regard divorce with less aversion. So long as divorce was the privilege of a class, the horror of it native to our national mind was weakened. A measure that removes this prestige, treating divorce not as a boon wealth can procure but as the solemn declaration that a crime has broken the bond; that lessens the chance of vile details being paraded in courts amid jests and in newspapers before the public; that moves judgment of these cases to tribunals deciding with simple gravity by ordinary English justice rather than the subtleties of canon law—such a measure, we may hope, serves English morality. To prevent statesmen from exercising serious judgment about what truly serves these interests, by claiming Scripture has peremptorily settled the question, is, I think, a real wrong: it makes the legislator less aware of his solemn responsibility to God, and misrepresents the character of Christ's own teaching. That teaching draws a sharp distinction between what one can do who makes rules for hardened hearts and imposes penalties on transgression, and what the Lord of the heart Himself can do when it submits to His guidance. Confusing these two provinces destroys both; demanding of outward legislation what Christ demands of the man himself makes law a presumptuous despot and the man a helpless slave. From such confusions arise all the perplexities about the alliance of Church and State that trouble us. That alliance is either a dishonest compact between two uneasy enemies, doomed like all insincerity, or a relation implied in the nature of things, in God's eternal order—one that cannot be annulled, though it can be disturbed by either party's ambition, by the belief that self-interest and mutual fear hold them together rather than a shared purpose to serve God for mankind's good. When the churchman's chief concern is watching lest the statesman rob him of privileges or powers, and the statesman tolerates the churchman only as one performing indispensable jobs, safe only if he confesses himself a hireling and acts accordingly, the country is cheated of the blessing both should offer. The churchman who thinks the statesman can take away his power forgets what that power is and who entrusted it to him; the statesman who wants the churchman to be a hireling has not understood that only a free man's services are worth anything—if the churchman's task is teaching men righteousness and honesty, he cannot be prepared for it by being required to be dishonest. Through such mean jealousies and petty struggles for precedence, what might be noble proclamations of the Church's powers, and what might be just legislation, are both debased. Good, wise teachers make us fear State encroachment more than our own pride and selfishness. Parliaments take petty revenge for clerical opposition—first forcing clergy to use services the law has made unnecessary, in cases where some feel they cannot use them without profanation and sin, then clogging the concession, once grudgingly granted, with terms bound to produce endless resentment should any clergyman forget the obligations of a Christian gentleman by intruding into a protesting brother's church. These are signs of a temper that perhaps only God's present judgments can cure. May those judgments be effectual! May we not need still more terrible calamities to teach us reverence for each other's consciences, reverence for the Lord of conscience who has given each his work and would have none scorn another's—may we be taught, by terror and by mercy alike, the sacredness of the bonds by which God has united us to each other, and of that deeper, more mysterious bond by which He has united us to Himself!

## Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity

*The passage:* You have heard it said, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" — but I tell you, do not resist evil. If someone strikes your right cheek, turn the other also. If someone sues you for your coat, give him your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go a mile, go two. Give to the one who asks, and do not turn away the borrower. You have heard it said, "love your neighbour and hate your enemy" — but I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who mistreat and persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.

The subject I spoke on last Sunday may now seem almost stale, since months have passed since the nation was preoccupied with it. But what these verses raise is present to all our minds. There is a cry for vengeance abroad. Some say it is natural and must be indulged; some say it is sinful and must be checked; some say strong punishment is demanded and must not be withheld; some say it might be right otherwise, but Christ has forbidden it. Which of these speaks truth? It is unsafe not to think about this, since we will act on whatever answer we give — even if that "answer" is simply an unexamined impulse of rage or of compassion. And if we act without principle in one case, shall we not do so in every case — in India as much as in England, in the hundred everyday questions that turn on the same point? The controversy is not over the special method of treating particular offenses; there we may gladly consult men of special experience. But there seems equal uncertainty about judicial and military punishments generally, about a Christian's use of the magistrate's sword and the soldier's, about remembering in all this that we are Christians at all. We must try to get rid of that uncertainty, or we will be lenient today and savage tomorrow, and posterity will wonder which did more harm.

When you first read our text you may assume our Lord means to condemn the two old maxims outright and set opposite decrees in their place. On reflection you may suppose instead that he only judged them unsuited to the new time, though needful in the old. Then you will wonder how maxims so broad and definite could ever have been true if they have now become false. If you glance back at the passages I considered the last two Sundays, you will notice that the commands not to kill and not to commit adultery cannot have been less binding at one time than another, though the same "ye have heard... but I say" form is used of them too. And the precepts set against them could never simply replace them: not to be angry with a brother is not the same kind of precept as not to murder. Last Sunday I tested this with the case of divorce, and found our Lord's treatment of it in harmony with the rest: he was not making a new law about murder or adultery, and he was not making a new law about divorce either — in both cases he was speaking to the conscience. By speaking to conscience, by recognizing men as children of God, he could elevate the whole condition of society, and the outward law with it — an elevation that would have been impossible had he simply enacted a new rule and repealed the old. Can we apply this to the case before us? Is this part of the Sermon on the Mount consistent with the rest, or not? That is what I want to examine.

Before that, one remark connected with an earlier passage. The lawfulness of putting a man to death, in battle or by course of justice, is not touched by our text at all. If "resist not evil" concerned judicial proceedings, it would have to forbid far more than the axe or the rope — it would inhibit any coercion of wrongdoers. If it concerned national quarrels, it would have to forbid far more than bloodshed — it would inhibit even negotiation and arbitration to redress wrongs done to the state or its members. So that debate has no foothold here. But it did have an opening earlier: if "thou shalt not kill" — compatible in the old time with wars against the Canaanites and with stoning for certain crimes — were meant to carry a wider, more stringent sense under the new covenant, this was the place to announce it. No such use is made of the allusion. The law against murder is not declared to mean anything it did not always mean. What is brought to light is its source, anger in the heart — and that Christ promises to root out.

I. Setting that aside, I come to "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." This appears in Deuteronomy, not as a careless phrase but as a principle already embodied in the Mosaic law. It must have dawned on the Leader and Prophet of the people as a principle in the government of the world, proof that it was not ruled by a capricious tyrant: every crime had, in the Divine order, a punishment exactly suited to it, a perfect compensation, however little the mortal seer could fathom the mystery of it. He could not trace the intricacies of the plan, but he could believe there was one, and in his own imperfect way could show it forth — a likeness as feeble, perhaps, as the curtains of the Tabernacle to the pattern on the mount, but a real likeness. By presenting it he was training his people to confess an order, to submit to an order, to feel that the order was the Lord God's, not his own.

You know how this feeling of a retributive justice worked in the Greek tragedians, raising them above the tales of capricious gods they had inherited, letting them glimpse something like a drama of Providence — though often confused with a hard, dead Fate — amid the perversities of men's conduct and the turns of their fortunes: the faithless husband dies by his adulterous wife's hand, is avenged by their son, the matricide is tormented by the Furies. The Israelite had no such vision, but he lived in the faith that eye does go for eye, tooth for tooth. Samuel was announcing and executing a law when he said to Agag, "As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women."

The old Judge and Prophet was not indulging personal vengeance against the Amalekite. But has the doctrine of eye for eye nothing to do with the individual feeling of vengeance, the cry for retaliation? Does not the boy or man who insists on giving blow for blow proclaim it in his own way, as Samuel proclaimed it in his? Clearly there is something in common between the maxim and the instinct — one would not exist without the other. It is easy to conclude from this that the maxim is only the personal feeling generalized, and that if one is upheld the other must not be checked. But no reasoning is less sound. Every great duty and moral principle has its counterfeit, has been explained away by that counterfeit, and needs to be asserted loudly precisely in order to destroy it. The legislator most eager to establish the principle of retribution is hindered at every step by the lust of vengeance in the individuals he governs — their notions of retaliation, measured only by the wrong they feel they have suffered, and their eagerness to act on those notions, are the great obstacle to even-handed justice. He can only advance slowly against this, watching each step, not only because the opposition is formidable and he meets it in himself as much as in others, but because in crushing it he may crush good along with evil, stifle energies he needs and cannot create, even weaken the very sense of right he must appeal to. Nothing is more remarkable in the Mosaic legislation than how carefully vengeance is claimed for the Law and the State, and yet a claim is still recognized in the private citizen to redress his own wrong — hedged about with provisions showing him to be servant and instrument of the Law, but not withdrawn. The people's education would have suffered greatly had it been withdrawn.

But once the lawgiver has proven his own weakness by experience, what help can he find? Shall he call in the terrors of a future state to keep his subjects from taking the law into their own hands — tell them, or have priests tell them, that satisfaction taken here must be paid for by punishment hereafter? That experiment has been tried, and tried under every possible advantage — not on an incredulous people but the most credulous, not on rebels against priestly authority but on those most subservient to it. How has it succeeded? Is Italy, is Ireland, the country you would point to as one where the lust of private vengeance is most restrained? Grant that the priest sometimes works against the law rather than with it, irritating the wound instead of healing it — allow for all such cases. But even where the legislator has secured the full cooperation of these threats, used purely to restrain what he cannot otherwise restrain, I believe you will find the aid insignificant: it does not touch the root of the evil, and often breeds new evils requiring new punishments of their own.

This is not the kind of help Christ offers in the Sermon on the Mount. Here, as everywhere, he lays his axe to the root of the tree; he justifies what was said and done in the old time, while making the revelation the old time could not make, but which fulfils its longing. The elder men had perceived a principle in the outward economy of God's Kingdom and tried to represent it in the economy of their own. Christ reveals the inner mind and purpose of the Father to which that outward economy is subject — which explains its workings but cannot be derived from them. Christ declares that a man, a child of God, may have his inner life shaped after that inner life of the Father, so that his outward order too may be conformed to the Father's. Christ ruling wind and wave, overcoming sickness and death, reading hearts and bringing dark deeds to light, makes himself known as King and Judge, revealing the royalty and justice of the Father from whom his own are derived. But Christ yielding himself up to die; Christ — in this sense only — refusing to resist evil that he might overcome evil; Christ reviled and not reviling again, threatened and not answering — in these acts and sufferings reveals God Himself. Here we see not the ways of the Father but the Father Himself. The Son's perfect obedience discovers the Father's perfect loving will. Infinite forgiveness and charity are shown to lie at the root of all things — forgiveness and charity seen and made effectual only through submission and sacrifice, and meant not merely to flow out upon men but to flow into them, to become part of their own character and being.

Those plain, unrhetorical precepts — going two miles instead of one, giving the cloak as well as the coat, turning the other cheek, not turning from the borrower — are all indications of that Divine mind which Christ's Spirit forms in those who submit to him. They are precepts, certainly, but precepts of a Gospel: messages about the highest gifts a Creator can give his creatures, a Father his child. How little we believe this Gospel, how little we claim the Spirit's renewing power, we must confess in shame. But if we honestly asked ourselves whether this is more than we should wish to be, whether less would make us the truly gracious, forgiving, self-sacrificing man who alone is blessed, whether less would make society what it should be — I do not think we could strike out any line of our Lord's picture without destroying its harmony.

And if I asked myself where any approximation to this character has actually appeared, I would have to answer: where men feel most the impulse to vehemence, where circumstances show most plainly the need for a gentle, forgiving temper because anything else must lead to frightful consequences — there the Divine Spirit's aid seems most given, and does in fact appear in its fullest beauty. I cannot otherwise explain what many of us have seen and wondered at: that a man bred in camps often shows, along with manly courage, more gentleness, sweetness, and humanity — more of the qualities of woman and child — than men whose occupations have been purely civil. It was in the Roman centurion that our Lord found faith he had not found in Israel, faith that came through the very discipline of commanding troops, which taught him the power of words and the true secret of rule and obedience. We sometimes explain this away by saying the soldier is simply devoted to his profession — but that is not how the best soldiers are examples to us. All of us — clergy, doctors, lawyers — are too professional; the merely professional soldier is a pedant like the rest of us. Yet we have seen more men in that class than in almost any other shake off their professional habits and show real human sympathy and reverence for both high and low.

There is nothing new in this: Christendom has, in a way, claimed this ideal of gentleness for the military man especially, though few have ever fully realized it — the vague sense that those who carry weapons tempting them to ruthlessness need some special courtesy and nobility to be protectors of the state rather than its destroyers. We have made two discoveries our fathers had not. First, that men of every profession hold dangerous weapons capable of reckless harm — the violence of soldiers may do less damage than the reckless speculation of the merchant, the chicanery of the lawyer, the anathemas of the priest — so that all professions alike need a humanizing discipline, need to regard their powers as solemn trusts and to fear their abuse. Second, that gentleness cannot simply be assumed from noble birth: a great name is an obligation, a warning that inhumanity in one who bears it is a greater sin, but neither he nor we should depend on accident of birth for the habits that make a good man, nor despair of finding the noblest humanity in those with no heraldic advantage at all. We owe more to the Sermon on the Mount than to all the codes of Chivalry for unfolding the true ideal of the knightly man — because it is the true ideal of the man as such. The divine humanity of Christ must be the ground of gentleness in every class; without his Spirit we are all equally at the mercy of our own vagrant passions; with it we may overcome temptation and go forth boldly to execute his purposes, to vindicate his retributive law, to inflict on wrongdoers punishment so stern and impartial that it teaches that Righteousness, not Chance or Violence, rules this earth. If through our negligence we let the worshippers of evil, capricious gods believe their theory of the universe is the true one — that the justice the conscience testifies to is not real, not something that actually makes itself felt — we are answerable to God for an added injustice to our heathen subjects, over and above the wrongs already done them; letting our sense of past guilt keep us from teaching this lesson only increases our guilt. If anyone persuades us that obedience to the Sermon on the Mount means throwing away our arms, letting the sword of justice rest in its scabbard, we will not in fact throw our arms away — we will use them wickedly, without regard to the end for which they were given, the impulse of vengeance becoming our only law, the sword as sharp as ever but now a sword of injustice. A great responsibility therefore rests on us, ministers of the Gospel, not to rob men of the true weight of this discourse by making it denounce what it does not denounce. Its full meaning is for the soldier as for every man: it strikes at natural feelings and shows how they may be changed into feelings proper to children of God, but it never says that the highest form of these feelings is incompatible with using any energy or instrument God has put into our hands to fulfill his purposes. He is carrying on a work of justice, retribution, and education among men, and bids us be fellow-workers with him in it. We may imagine we show faith by throwing away our swords and waiting for him to protect us, just as we might imagine we show faith by letting our ploughs rust and waiting for harvests — but this is not faith, it is its opposite: the worship of Fate, a Mahometanism dressed in Christian notions. We are to plough in faith and to go to battle in faith, believing in a God who teaches the hands to war and the fingers to fight, and who nerves men for the toilsome work of ridding the earth of its weeds as well as its oppressors.

II. But it was also said of old, "love your neighbour, and hate your enemy." Where was this said? In heathen countries — and not the worst of them, but the best. The sense of neighbourhood, the sympathies of race and the antipathies that answer to them, marked the Greek city with all its great energies and its growing civilization.

No such development was possible in the vast Asiatic empires. There might be despots craving universal dominion, with the eagle eye for slaughter we see in the Nineveh monuments, but there was no neighbourhood, none of the love or hatred nursed by the small republic. Which of the two does mankind owe more to? Which has done more to humanize the world? The evil is plain enough for anyone to see — but what good lay beneath it, that so many of its results should be good rather than evil?

There was the precious sense of kinship, the link between present and past; the feeling that human relations pointed to relations with beings higher than ourselves; the belief that the power of fellowship is mightier than any physical force; the awakening of the human alongside the animal within these small communities, and the growing conviction that the younger should rule the elder, the weak-looking over the strong. These are the seeds of remarkable distinctions and combinations — a mystery which the Divine revelation to the Jews could partly explain, but which needed the whole of Christendom to unravel.

The Jew was taught to love his neighbour and hate his enemy, and this thought quickened his acts and his holiest songs alike. God had chosen him as a witness for Himself, bound to every Israelite by the same everlasting covenant that bound him to the unseen God; they were his neighbours, his fellow-workers, his fellow-witnesses, their transgressions and sorrows his own. Nothing touching the commonwealth was indifferent to him. But his existence was a warfare: idolatries pressed close around him, threatening his people's very life — worship of visible, dead, evil gods, denial of the living and true God of righteousness — and these he was to hate with a perfect hatred, counting them enemies. They took actual form in persons; his struggle was no fight with abstractions. Chariots of iron bore down on him; he went out to hew in pieces those who rode in them. Nor was his war only defensive: when the cup of the Canaanites' iniquity was full and their crimes had made the earth intolerable, he went forth to dispossess and destroy them.

It would be absurd to suppose the hatred in most of Israel's armies was aimed only at principles and not at men, and equally absurd to suppose no man among them mixed in rage and personal indignation against those he struck down. But it may be said that so far as they acted as one host under one leader and one purpose, believing themselves servants of the Most High, the meanness and petty enmity of each man was diminished, and the inspiration of a principle overcame sordid impulse. People with work in hand do not stop to examine their own motives, but are raised, without knowing it, to a higher level; the call for united devotion and self-sacrifice holds baser thoughts in check. It is after the fighting is done, when there is power without the sense of unity and government, that pent-up ferocity displays itself. It may also be said that when the leader or king of Israel poured out prayer with a fervour he had never known before — however he might speak of his enemies — his mind was carried, in that very act of communion with God, into a purer air. A better Spirit than his own took hold of him; he went out hating what God hated, yet ready for the very work before him, his heart and conscience strengthened, not confused, by seeking the presence of Him who is merciful and gracious, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.

Our Lord opened his mouth to give the Sermon on the Mount in a time of peace, not war — Canaanite wars long over, the Jews now traders and money-makers with no sense of any commission to overthrow the idolatry of the Greek or Latin cities around them. But in that peaceful, mammon-driven time, the maxim "love thy neighbour, hate thine enemy" had taken its meanest and most spiteful form, sheltering itself under the cover of religion. The Pharisee taught his countryman to hate the heathen as God's enemy even while trafficking with him and turning him to profit; the other half of the precept, love of neighbour, he could not teach in the same way — it was not kindled by his bidding or his example. Instead there was an easy substitute: love of the traditions of his land, precisely because they separated him from mankind, could stand in for both the love of God and the love of neighbour. Our Lord was arming his disciples to go out against Greek and Roman idolatry as well as Jewish, with different weapons but the same spirit as Joshua and David before them. And so he told them: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who mistreat and persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who sends sun and rain on evil and good, just and unjust alike. His Apostles took these words literally and obeyed them in letter and spirit — and because they did, they were able to establish the Church or Kingdom of God on earth, to keep their Jewish calling as heralds of blessing to all nations, and to claim the whole earth for God and his Christ. Their Jewish narrowness disappeared as their Jewish faith grew stronger. They submitted to persecution from both circumcised and uncircumcised in order to claim, for both, their new standing in Christ Jesus. Tempted constantly to hate those who resisted and hated them, they grew, by keeping Christ's commandment, into sympathy with all men as brothers, into a sharper hatred of whatever kept men from being brothers and misrepresented the Father in Heaven, and into stronger conviction that He would use them, and all Christians in their own spheres, to put down wrong and establish righteousness and peace. They have left us their witness of the state of mind the Spirit of God would produce in each of us — but they left no protest against the deeds or principles of their forefathers. They said nothing to suggest that outward, visible evil is not to be put down by outward, visible force. They left nothing that confuses, and much that distinguishes, the two spheres of our work; nothing that would make us limit "be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect" to one sphere when it may be extended to both — being at once witnesses of his infinite charity and executors of the justice that does not conflict with charity but is needed to make it effective.

III. I have no time left to deal properly with that very respectable body of men who have chiefly upheld the doctrine I have been opposing — an allusion to whom by a popular writer first led me to preach on this Discourse. I cannot speak as scornfully of the founder of that Society as this writer does. I believe Fox was a remarkable man, raised up from the heart of the English people to witness to truths Englishmen needed to know then and always, and against errors into which clergy and soldiery, Episcopalians and Puritans alike, had fallen then and have fallen since. What is sometimes charged against him and his followers as a fanatical folly — their constant dwelling on the power and presence of the Spirit of God — I count their highest merit. I only wish we had learned more from the very forcefulness of their language on that subject, because if we are consistent with our own creeds and prayers we can and should be far more thorough witnesses to the gift and continual presence of the Holy Spirit than they are. We ought not to be satisfied with thinking of a Spirit who comes in occasional gusts; we ought to believe He has made our bodies His temples, to make us holy and blameless in love, to unite us to our ascended Lord, to overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil for us, to fit us for our common duties, to make every profession — civil, ecclesiastical, military — safe and honourable, to make even the tradesman's dealings with money, so often called the root of all evil, a blessing rather than a curse, to consecrate all study, art, and amusement to God's service rather than to self. We can hardly reach such a view of the Spirit's work if we think of Him only in his dealings with the individual soul, and not as proceeding from Father and Son to bind together and quicken a whole body. Had the idea of a Father wanting his children to be perfect as He is perfect struck the Quaker mind with the same force as the idea of spiritual influence did, I believe that idea would have proved far more solid, practical, and universal for him; his charity, admirable as it was, would have been less liable to decay into a mere sentimental tolerance of wrong, a mere dread of causing pain. He would have considered that the loving Father of all spared not even his Only Begotten Son from pain, and spares none of his adopted children pain when it is for their good; he would have trembled less to commit criminals into the hands of Him who judges righteously — a trembling that rests on an irreverent notion, one that breeds real confusion in morals, disturbing the consciences of jurymen and perhaps of Secretaries of State, that the greater a man's crimes, the more essential it is not to deny him his only chance of repentance. These and other strange affronts to reason, which cast suspicion even on God's own character, the Quaker would have escaped, I think, had he held more literally to the Sermon on the Mount's teaching about the Father in Heaven — had he believed more fully that Jesus Christ came to reveal the Father, and by his sacrifice to reconcile the Father and mankind.

That eminent historian I have referred to before, in one of his celebrated lively antitheses, mocks George Fox for reading literally the passages of the Sermon on the Mount that are obviously figurative, and figuratively the commands about the Sacraments that are obviously literal. I cannot make use of this clever sarcasm. To me Fox seems a perfectly consistent man: his error about the Sermon on the Mount was exactly the same kind as his error about the Sacraments. Had he believed that by the outward rite of Baptism God claims us all as his spiritual children, he would not have needed to explain away the commandments of the old economy in order to defend the glory of the new; he would have seen that there is an outward world as well as an inward, that God has made the outward depend on the inward but has joined the two together so that we cannot pull them apart. Had he believed that by the actual tokens of bread and wine God declares us members of one body in his Son — one body with all who came before and all who will come after, since one sacrifice has been offered for all and all may feed on it — and had he not shrunk from a Sacrament where each confesses his sin against his brother and his forgetfulness of his Father, he would have seen that forgiving, praying for enemies, blessing those who curse, bearing all injuries, can be the gift and privilege of men all the more because they are pledged, by the holiest bonds and the most solemn oaths, to go out in God's name with whatever weapons He gives them to assert his order against all that disorders his world. He would have believed that nothing — no religious sect, no commercial congress, nothing but a united Christian family speaking to the consciences and spirits of men — can hasten the day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor learn war anymore.

END OF VOL. II.