April 19, 1857
“Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”—Romans v. 1.
In the Collect for this day, the belief that Christ rose for our justification is made the ground of a prayer that we may put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, and serve God in pureness of living and truth. In the passage I have just read, the same belief is said to be the ground of peace. Are we not often tempted to think that the doctrine of justification by faith has made men less careful about putting away wickedness, less diligent and pure in the service of God? Are we not often tempted to think of it as the cause of wars rather than of peace? The reasons for both these suspicions ought to be seriously examined. I shall begin with the last. I am convinced that wars within and wars without, in individuals and in nations, have been connected with this faith. I do not see how it could have been otherwise. I dare not wish that it had been otherwise. I cannot see how the peace of which the Apostle speaks could have been won if it had been otherwise.
Supposing a superior Being sent this message to men: “I will surround you with all possible felicities during the time that you are sojourning here upon earth; I will remove from you all possible plagues and discomforts.” Would this be the message of peace which man requires? No! for he has proved by a long series of experiments that he can make plagues and curses for himself; that he can convert felicities into plagues and curses. He has proved that if left to himself he not only can do this, but will do it. The history of the world, the history of those countries especially in which nature has been most lavish of her bounties, where soil and climate have been most propitious to all animal existence, is little else than a demonstration of this fact. We might fancy that in such circumstances, though there was little to awaken exertion, little to raise man into any condition beyond one of physical enjoyment, yet that he might realize that perfectly. But it is not so. The man sunken into a beast, cannot have the ease and luxury of the beast any more than his innocence. In his lowest depth there will still be the dim consciousness of something higher, which will keep him restless. The animals whom he cannot tame or extirpate, will become his oppressors; there will be some of his own race who have still enough of strength left to make the others slaves. A deliverance from immediate pain, an overflow of immediate pleasure, is not (the ancients knew this as well as ourselves) a security that men will continue to possess peace—is not even the temporary gift of it.
How is it if the immediate gift is changed into a promise, if the deliverance from sorrow is a future and only possible one? No doubt if you can make a man look forward, you do him a wonderful good, you raise him in the scale of existence; he is not a mere grovelling animal any longer. It is not surprising therefore that people have talked so much about the advantage of expecting another state of existence, of the good which must come from hoping for its blessings; of the providence which is awakened in a man who is taught how he may escape a distant evil that is threatening him. There has been no exaggeration in statements of this kind,—there scarcely can be any. But there may be the most fatal omissions in them, omissions which make that which is told worse than a mockery. The argument for a future state, as our great Butler has so well shown, arises from the sense of continuance which there is in our minds. That which is, must be assumed to go on, unless you can bring some decisive proof that it is interrupted. There is no proof, from the reason of the thing or from the analogy of nature, that death is such an interruption. If not, the belief of a present state involves the belief of a future one. But what is to continue? What is it that is not interrupted? It is my existence. It is I whom death cannot dissolve; when it has destroyed everything that is about me, all the conditions in which I am living, it yet leaves me. What is the use of telling me about felicities hereafter or miseries hereafter, if you tell me at the same time, if my own heart and conscience tell me, that I shall be the same, with the same capacity of making a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell which I have now? It can be no message of peace to me, that there is a futurity of bliss or a futurity of misery, unless you can first reveal to me something about myself, unless you can reveal to me how I may not be the subject of a perpetual intestine war. And this must be a present message. It cannot be merely of something which is to be. Providence to avoid future evils may be a very desirable quality. But what is it, if I think that I am myself the great evil of which I need to be rid? Hope may be the most glorious of all possessions, What can I hope for, if my own being is my continual terror and torment?
Perhaps you will think that I am putting questions which never can occur to any practical mind. I believe, brethren, I am bringing these questions exactly to the point at which they are practical, the point at which they cease to be mere playthings for school logicians, the point at which they become mighty in their influence on the hearts of individuals and the destinies of nations. We talk about the glorious Reformation in the sixteenth century. Do we know what those fine words signify? Do we know that that Reformation began, and went on, and grew to be a fact for the history of Europe, because a poor solitary monk was taught that he himself was the cause of all the anguish which he was suffering, and that no message from God or man could bring him any peace which did not tell him how he might be delivered from the burden of himself? Yes, brethren, this monk learnt in his cell that no possible grant of present or future felicity could avail him anything, and that no remission of present or future penalties could avail him anything, unless he himself were raised to another ground, unless there were a testimony, a clear, authentic, satisfactory testimony which he could not gainsay: “Thou art a right and true man; God accounts thee so; thou mayest account thyself so. It is no delusion; it is certain that thou art so.”
Luther had done fewer of what are called evil acts than most; he had in vain sought comfort from that recollection. He had tried to do more good acts than most people. Were they good acts? Did they spring from a good root? Did they not spring from a very evil one? Were they not contrivances to escape the wrath of a Being whom he disliked; one from whom he was flying, whom he would have wished not to be the lawgiver of the world, whom he would have wished not to exist? And now the old words of his childhood, that God is the forgiver of sins, that God is the justifier, that God has sent His Son to reconcile man to Himself, came upon him with the most amazing revelation of the proud, dark self-will which had been striving with a God of Mercy, and converting Him into a Devil. And he found from this Epistle to the Romans, that St. Paul, fifteen centuries before, living in an eastern atmosphere, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, had passed through the same processes of mind which he, a German priest of the order of Augustine, was passing through; that he had had to find that in himself dwelt no good thing; that he had cried, “Oh, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of death?” that he had received Christ’s resurrection as a testimony that God had justified him, and accounted him righteous, and did not impute his trespasses unto him; that that faith had made him another man, a man who could trust God and love God, instead of turning from Him and hating Him; that that faith had made him know that he was indeed what God had declared him to be—a righteous person, one who in the strength of God’s righteousness could rise above his own unrighteous, contentious, suspicious, hateful self, one who might claim that gracious, humble, true life which is in Christ Jesus. What St. Paul had done, Luther could do. He could believe that God was what He had declared Himself to be; he could cease to fight with Him; he could abandon a lie which made him a slave; he could lay hold of the truth which made him free.
This was for himself. But he heard that a man was going about Germany dispensing to men indulgences for the past, the present, and the future. It was not only or chiefly that the language of this man was brutal and blasphemous; these were becoming and suitable accidents of the doctrine he delivered. It was not even chiefly that he set these indulgences to sale; that was a decisive proof, which at a later time Luther might be able to recognize, that he and his masters were really worshipping Mammon and not God. But now the whole horror of the man’s acts and words appeared to him to centre in this, that he preached indulgence and not forgiveness; the removal of the penalty of deeds, and not the deliverance of the doer from the sin which was at the root of those deeds; the ease and comfort of the sinner, not the justification of him, and the making him really and actually righteous. And it was the Gospel that there is a deliverance of man from sin, from selfishness, from distrust and hatred of God; that there is a real righteousness for men, which they may put on instead of the false, unreal self-righteousness, which is only another name for untruth, and bitterness, and hatred;—it was this Gospel which went forth through Europe at that time, and attracted and subdued multitudes of suffering, longing hearts, and shook thrones, ecclesiastical and civil, which did not stand upon righteousness, and produced all the good and great effects which have followed from the Reformation; all the effects that did not come from the intrigues of princes, the greediness of nobles, the arrogance of doctors, the disputatiousness and bitterness of sects. These, no doubt, have infused themselves into it; these have introduced a new kind of war; these are as contrary to peace with God as to peace among men. They are so, because they have aimed at producing a false, artificial peace. They are so, because they have introduced another doctrine for that which is set forth in my text.
That text appeared to Luther, and those who listened to him, the announcement of the one fact with which the conscience of a human being had need to be acquainted. “Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God,” was a sentence which, they said, expressed all that it greatly concerned sinful creatures to understand. If that opinion was too limited and exclusive, it was far truer than any of the moderate and qualified views which are sometimes substituted for it. It is a sign, I suspect, of weakness rather than comprehensiveness, if we treat with contempt or indifference even the most vehement forms of speech in which our forefathers delivered themselves upon the subject. For the law or principle upon which a man is at peace with his Creator, and therefore with himself, is certainly declared here or nowhere. It must be worth our while to look at each of the words attentively, and to consider what it must have said to other men, and what it says to us.
I. The common meaning which is put upon the word justified, may not be all that St. Paul intended by it, not all that we need to see in it. But it must have a great worth. No one has a right to put it aside till he has fully searched it out. No one, I think, will put it aside who has searched it out; he will not hope to see any deeper until he has realized that which appears on the surface of the phrase. By justified, all people understand acquitted. It is not in this place certainly that I would complain of such an explanation as forensic. Your language ought to be, and must be to a certain extent, to a very great extent, forensic. The members of a profession should never rashly discard the tools and instruments which belong to it; they should regard them as helps in their moral and spiritual education; they should not be content till they find the passage—there always is a passage—from professional habits and formulas to those which are human. In this instance the error of divines has arisen, I think, from their not adhering as strictly as St. Paul has adhered to that which you would at once recognize as the true idea of acquittal. St. Paul never forgets—I think Luther never forgot, whatever terms he may have used to convey the impression—that a man is acquitted of a charge or imputation, not of a penalty. By being true to the legal sense of the word, the Apostle is true also to the moral sense of it. The burden of an accusing conscience, the guilt which rests on the man himself, is that from which he craves to be justified. St. Paul affirms that God does justify him from this. He does not impute sin to him. But how could this be? He had been affirming before, with the greatest vehemence, against the Jew, that all God’s judgments are according to truth, that there can be no respect of persons, no fictitious way of looking at acts or men with Him. If a man is a sinner, and feels himself to be a sinner, how can it be a true thing to pronounce him not a sinner—to account him righteous? St. Paul clears up the amazing paradox, having first had to find the solution of it as it bore on his own being. “In me,” he says, “that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing. I live, yet not I; but Christ liveth in me. I feel myself a sinner, for I am utterly and absolutely a sinner, apart from Him in Whom all righteousness dwells. God accounts me righteous, for He does not look upon me apart from Him in whom He created me; He does not look upon me in the false way in which I have looked at myself. He justifies me; He does not account me that which in my proper legitimate state, as united to Christ, I am not; He treats me as that which, in this my proper and reasonable state, I am. God justifies me, and His judgment of me is according to truth. He holds me to be righteous because He has made me so.” I have not departed, you see, in the least from the force which people ordinarily give to the words: I have vindicated their use of it. But, in doing so, I have claimed for the word its natural etymological sense. The justified man is not only one that is acquitted, not only one who is set down as righteous, but one who, in the strictest sense, has become, or has been made, righteous.
II. And thus we are able to feel the force of the next words, “Being justified by faith.” St. Paul has been speaking throughout his epistle of God as a just and righteous Being, of God as the Justifier. He recurs to this language again and again. It is the characteristic language of his epistle. Any other makes the statements of it incoherent and contradictory. But because God is the justifier, He who accounts man righteous and makes him righteous, a man is justified or made righteous by faith. He believes that God is such a Being as He has manifested Himself to be; not such a one as he had imagined Him to be. He believes God to will his righteousness and salvation; not, as he thought He had willed, his destruction. He believes God’s righteousness to be his only protection, refuge, security; not, as he had felt it to be, the witness against him, the ground and ratification of the curse upon him. He believes that that which God curses is not himself, but his enemy, the evil nature which he is carrying about with him, the evil spirit which is tempting him to think that he belongs to that nature. He believes this witness which God has given of Himself in His Son, and therefore he has faith in God, faith in what He has done, faith in what He is. He is justified from his sins only by this faith; for when he loses it, he can only think of himself as a separate, accursed creature, he can only act as if that were his condition. He is righteous only by this faith; for only by it does he claim any relation to Him who is righteous, only by it can he ascend out of his own nature. Having faith in God, he becomes a true man; otherwise, he possesses only the torments of a man with the instincts and pleasures of an animal.
III. Being justified by faith, we have peace. The nature of the blessing is understood by the process which leads to it. Peace is not something which a man holds, and can say, It belongs to me. The poor Augustinian monk was always fancying he should be able to catch it and appropriate it: the more he tried to do so, the further it fled from him. He found all his contrivances for procuring it increased the war within him; they always reminded him of himself, and himself was his enemy. If he forgot his misery for a moment, it was when he forgot himself. Where could he learn the secret of forgetting himself perpetually? If that were possible, there might be peace. But could he lose self-consciousness except in death? Alas! could he lose it in death? Would not death be rather the loss of those things which kept him diverted; which soothed him, as the ocean nymphs soothed Prometheus on his rock with their beautiful forms, and sweet melodies, and gentle sympathy? Would not the time come when he should be left by himself, with only the vulture to feed upon him? Yes, Peace in Death he could not dream of. What he carried about him was Death; what he cried to be delivered from was Death. Peace must come by rising into life. And here it was, Being justified by faith; having his trust, his hope, his life in another; the war was over; the cause of it was removed. He was no more struggling to make himself something which he could not be; he was no more twining ropes of sand at the bidding of a demon; he could give up thinking about himself, trusting himself to God; he could give up planning and plotting how he might please God; knowing that self-willed rebellious efforts can never please Him; that the only way of pleasing a Father is by compliance and submission, by believing that He is perfectly gracious to us, and asking Him to make us like Himself. To suppose that this Peace is something won by a certain momentary act of belief, and thenceforth guaranteed to the believer as his treasure and property, is to subvert this whole doctrine.
No doubt the discovery that “God is not an oppressor, not one who seeks to condemn us, but to justify us,” may burst all at once upon a man’s mind, and may transport him into a joy passing anything he ever dreamed of. The shame and humiliation for having doubted the love of such a Being, and for having been estranged from Him, may mingle with this joy, deepening and softening, not diminishing it. The union of the two may be rightly and happily denoted by that word Conversion, which both Romanist and Protestant divines have adopted from the Bible. A more complete revolution in the purpose and tenour of a man’s inward existence cannot be conceived than that which takes place when he has been taught that the object of his greatest dread is the refuge and high tower to which he may always fly for protection. But such a Conversion implies that the man has turned round to a Friend from whom he was turning away; that he has ceased to boast of any spiritual quality of his own; that he has acknowledged all human qualities to be only reflections of some one which has its ground in God, and is exhibited perfectly in the Divine Mediator. If, therefore, under pretence of being a believer, he claims to have a certain quality or possession which distinguishes him from other people, he is denying the only meaning of belief and faith; he is re-establishing that self-righteousness which he professes to have abandoned, and his external life as much as his internal will continually testify to the delusion which he is practising upon himself. All earnest teachers and preachers of Justification by faith, all men who have shown that these words expressed to them a reality, have confessed that peace, instead of being a gift which they had acquired in virtue of their conversion, their belief, or anything else, was theirs only when they abjured all thought of acquisition or distinction. They have confessed that they were continually forgetting the ground of their trust and confidence, continually sinking back into selfishness and self-will, and that they had need continually to be reminded by sharp warnings, which did not the less bear the stamp of the loving Parent who sent them because they were sharp, that they could have no other peace, save that which every man in the world may have who discovers God’s will to be good, and therefore ceases to strive with it. The peace therefore in the text, as the peace which is needed and craved for in actual life, is peace with God. There cannot be an abstract peace. It must be between some parties who have some natural affinity and relationship. Here, in this earth, it generally refers to the ceasing of hostility between some parties who have been unnaturally opposed. Peace with God must signify the reconciliation of a man with a Being who has cast off him, or with a Being whom he has cast off. Which of the two it implies, the Bible and all this Epistle to the Romans is written to explain. A man supposes that God has cast off him, and that, in some way or other, he must seek to win back His favour. The Bible says that man has cast off God, and that God is seeking to bring him into union with Himself. All other differences lie in this one. The deliverance from the leaven of malice and wickedness for which we have prayed to-day is not the fruit of that faith which glorifies itself, which induces us to treat other men as unbelievers. More malice and wickedness have flowed and are flowing from that self-glorifying faith than from any other source whatever. It is the leaven of hypocrisy, of which we have most need to beware. The service of God in pureness of living and truth does not flow from that self-glorifying faith. It is fatal to the service of God. Just because He is pure and is true, we cannot serve Him while we are nursing that faith. It makes us shrink from His purity; it makes us look upon Christ as one who is to hide us from His Truth, instead of being the Image of His Truth, who brings us into it.
IV. And so we are brought to the last words of the text, “Through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The great question which every man asks is, How can I myself be at peace with God? He feels that whatever is told him about the world at large, he must have this answered in some way which shall meet his own individual case; which shall explain what he actually knows of his own condition; which should be applicable to him if he were left alone in creation. It is a strange demand; a demand which divines often set at naught, as if it were a monstrous one. They would throw us back upon generalities. But there is no shrinking from it. Each man does stand out in awful distinctness; he says, “I, even I, must stand face to face with Eternity, with God; tell me how I can do it.” The answer St. Paul makes is, “God has made peace with thee, through Jesus Christ. In Him He has manifested to thee what He is; in Him He sees thee. Thou mayest see God in him; thou mayest rise thyself to be a new creature in Him. For thou art not what thou supposest thyself to be, a separate atom in the universe; a creature who has no relation to any other. Thou hast wonderful affinities with all these beings about thee; and when thou art driven by thy wretchedness and despair of thyself to trust in Him who has taken thy nature upon Him, thou wilt find out that secret as well as the secret of thy own emancipation.”
I have a right to say so, for we have not exhausted the Gospel of Christ when we have preached this great and comfortable doctrine of the justification of the individual conscience. There is a Catholic side of the Gospel as well as a Protestant; a side that has reference to Society as well as one that concerns each of us. We Englishmen are bound to recognise both. The circumstances of this age demand that we should encounter the social question at least as much as the personal one. But we shall not do justice to the one truth if we let go the other. We shall not make that stronger by weakening this. We want each in its fullest strength, in our daily battles with ourselves. We want both, that we may be freed from the leaven of malice and wickedness. We want both, that we may have full peace with God and with our fellowmen, through our Lord Jesus Christ.