First Sunday after Trinity

“Lord, I am not high-minded; I have no proud looks. I do not exercise myself in great matters, which are too high for me. But I refrain my soul, and keep it low, like as a child that is weaned from its mother; yea, my soul is even as a weaned child. O Israel, trust in the Lord, from this time forth for evermore.”—Psalm cxxxi. (Prayer-book Version).

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

Now is not that exercising ourselves in great matters? Is not this Name altogether too high for us? If we refrained our souls and kept them low, should we intrude into these mysteries? If our souls were as weaned children, would they not be content to feed on the practical portions of divinity? Should not we leave the doctrines which the Creeds teach, to those who have been gnawing the crusts and dry bones of theology till they can find nourishment in nothing else?

So many have thought; but not all. There have been those who have learnt from this Psalm what the Gloria Patri has to do with all the Psalms. While they have meditated upon it and wished to enter into it—while the words, “I am not high-minded, I have no proud looks,” have seemed to put them at an immeasurable distance from the writer, and have made them wonder where he can have discovered the secret of such submission,—while they have almost despaired of a time ever coming when they shall cease to be feverish and restless, and occupied with things too high for them,—this Name has sounded in their ears as a witness of substantial peace, of continual life, of unending hope; as an assurance that what was true in the days of the Psalmist is true now, and will be true world without end; as a uniting band between the lonely sufferer and the whole Church, militant and triumphant; as an abyss of love into which they could cast themselves and the Universe. I believe also that we may have a test of the connection between the Psalm and the ascription, which is not derived from the experience of simple worshippers, taught from their childhood to love the forms of the Church, wont to associate them with their own sorrows and hopes. I believe we may find in persons most different from each other in habits and opinions (alike chiefly in this that they all regard our creeds and worship with suspicion and alienation) proofs how in acquiring the temper of this Psalm, they learn also by degrees to know why we acknowledge the Trinity, in what power we worship the Unity.

I. I begin with those in whom this feeling of dislike to the Church and its Creeds was strongest in the last century, and is not perhaps the weakest now. I suppose a man who has devoted himself to the study of Nature; who has pursued it with a deep, fervent, passionate love; who will not be kept back from it by any warnings of moralists, that it behoves him to be thinking more of man than of the involuntary universe, or of divines, that he should be occupying himself about his own soul. He is sure that his calling is to investigate the meaning of the things which he sees; he is sure that he is following truth, and that no one has a right to tell him he shall not follow her through whatever labyrinths she may lead him. He has listened, and listened reverently, to the words of Natural Theologians who tell him that wherever he searches he will find marks of design, tokens of a living and intelligent Creator. He confesses that he does find the most wonderful adaptation of organs and functions to specific uses. But he refuses to be limited in his discoveries by these observations. It is inconsistent with his notion of science to twist facts that they may give forth a moral. And he cannot pretend that there are not times when he is utterly unable to discern that exact proportion of means to ends, which Paley and his school would have him always look for. At times he is haunted with a vision of something much grander, deeper, in the order of the universe, than any such arrangements could express. The teeming, ever-renewing life, vegetable and animal, on the earth and in the deep, the mysterious powers which are endlessly at work, the original forms which represent themselves in such wonderful variety, all baffle the inquirer who had been told that the world was formed by a perfect Mechanist, Who has suffered nothing to exist which has not some precise and definite use. Is it not better to find some general term which will represent the productive energies and processes of the world, than to assume some existence which stands wholly aloof from them? Is it not enough to speak of Nature? Has the physical student any need of God?

I know, my brethren, that this perplexity has led many, and does lead many, very near the gulf of atheism. And yet there is such a faithful, humble, reverent spirit in the true searcher of Nature; his very unwillingness to strain evidence or to use religious names when he has not the sense of a reality corresponding to them, is such a sign of grace, that I do not know whether the glimpse which he must sometimes take into that dreadful void, and the consciousness of its nearness to him, may not be one of God’s best gifts to him, may not be a step to the fuller and clearer revelation of Himself. How that has come, in cases not a few, I think I may venture, though not without fear and trembling, to describe. The man who knows, by inward signs and promptings, that he is meant to seek for the laws and principles which rule the kingdom of Nature, and all the secret methods of its government, cannot desert that calling; but he may find that he stands in relations to human beings even more wonderful than those in which he stands to all the things which are the subjects of his experiments. He cannot mix these relations with those; he is sure they are generically different. There comes a time when the difference presents itself to him with mighty force. It may be with a delightful force. The birth of a child may give a joy such as the discovery of a planet could not give. Or it may be a terrible force. The death of a child may darken the face of earth and sky, and make him feel for awhile as if it signified nothing to him whether they exist with laws or without them; whether the myriads of creatures which dwell in them are watched over and kept alive, or drop at once into perdition. A frightful conclusion to rest in! Is there no escape from it? Through that feeling of childhood and fatherhood, in the utter desolation which follows when the bond seems to be snapped, is there not the dawn of a new discovery; is there not the vision of a new Name? The student cannot “exercise himself in great matters”; he is overwhelmed with the questions which present themselves when he thinks of Creation. But is not a Father more than a Creator? If the world can live without the one, can he live without the other? That is the first all-embracing question. Another may lie hidden in it, some day to be brought forth, and to connect itself with his old studies, and to make them new. May not that Father be the Creator? May not the love and tenderness of a Father explain those designs, those adaptations, those varieties of form, better than the ingenuity of an architect? That, I say, is a hint for further development, when he has recovered strength; this meets him at once in his weakness and helplessness. His soul is a child weaned from its mother earth, brought to confess that it needs a Father in Heaven. Where he first heard that Name, he can scarcely tell. It sounds old, yet to him it is surely fresh and bright as a morning in early spring. Did he find it in the New Testament? It certainly is here. He hears passages in the Sermon on the Mount where it is repeated very often. Jesus Christ spoke it as it had not been spoken before. That perhaps is all, or nearly all, he has yet realized about the Gospels or Him Who is spoken of in them. Much of them he does not understand; whether he can strictly say that he accepts them as divine, he does not know. Let me go further, and make another very probable supposition. In his longing for some worship, for some way of confessing this Father, he may attach himself to those who vehemently reject our Creeds, who say that we dishonour the name of the Father, and set at nought the Unity of God by our Doxology. He thinks these teachers less exacting than others; they seem to assert what he has ascertained, and to oppose what looks to him like a contradiction of it. I do not inquire at present how long he rests in this conclusion; I only assume that he carries his scientific earnestness with him, and that if he finds he cannot hold that which he has apprehended, without yielding to convictions that are now strange to him, he will open his mind and heart to them also.

II. And now let us pass to a man who cares little for physics or physical theology; though more for them than for the authority or traditions of the Church national or the Church Catholic. He has spent his youth carelessly; has obeyed random impulses; has treated religious people contemptuously; has had occasional misgivings and compunctions, which he has stifled as quickly as he could. He is startled by some sudden calamity, or the voice of some preacher. He becomes conscious, not of faults, but of sin. He has committed it, and he is the servant of it. The yoke is heavy, and he cannot break it. He hears of a Deliverer: he is told of a Lord who came down from heaven, and died for sinners, and rose again. He is told that he may believe in that Saviour, and that so believing he will be a justified and new man. The message commends itself to his conscience. He may have heard it before,—now it has a meaning for him; it is what he is in need of. He cannot be deceived; this faith does give him the victory over the evil which has hitherto overpowered him.

This faith at first is sufficient for him. He asks for nothing more. He can live upon it and die upon it. The Bible sets forth the Saviour to him. For that he prizes it. If it speaks of anything else, that he does not understand, or in his heart care for. The Sermon on the Mount is not very much to him. No continuous Scripture record is very much to him, except perhaps the life of some man who has passed through struggles, a few of which he has himself experienced. But texts which set forth the blessings of those who believe in Jesus the Crucified he lays up in his memory and feeds on in his heart.

This state of feeling is a happy one; he supposes it is to endure for ever, even though he takes no pains to sustain it by thought and reflection. By degrees he discovers his mistake; a number of questions present themselves to him which he had not considered. The Bible raises them; the teachers, whom he values most for their sympathy, do not permit him to forget them. What means that redemption in which he has been reposing so simply? Was it not for others as well as for him? For whom, then? What made it necessary? Great matters for a poor man to exercise himself with; often they seem too high for him. He adopts a theory that he may escape from them. A scheme of divinity, which declares why God must have inflicted endless punishments on him, unless Jesus had interposed to deliver him from His wrath, and had offered Himself as his substitute, takes the place of that faith which had raised him out of moral evil. The scheme touches at many points on his conscience; at some, upon his heart; all its arrangements are devised to satisfy the restless cravings of his understanding. He adopts it as the only security for that trust in Christ as the Saviour from sin which is becoming feeble in him; he is confident that he holds it firmly, because he defends it fiercely against all impugners.

He too has kinsmen and friends; in the first fervour of his belief he would have drawn them all in to share it with him, as no less true for them than for him; in his second stage he begins to congratulate himself on his difference from them. A time comes of weakness, bodily or mental, or both; a time when past evils start before him again; a time when he has stings of conscience for being high-minded and for having proud looks. He cannot recollect the arguments and conclusions which he thought proved him to have a stronger standing-ground than those about him. A stern Lawgiver frowns upon him from the Heaven above. He longs to be sure that the Mediator has delivered him from the demands of that Lawgiver. While he is seeking that comfort an awful thought scares him: “Do I wish to meet such a Being as this? Do I long to wake up after His likeness? Does it satisfy me that I am protected from Him? Can I bear to think that all mankind is left to His vengeance?”

Oh, brethren, there is a pit of Atheism near to this man as there was to the other! He too must look down into it! He too may be led by that fearful vision to a calmer, humbler faith than he ever had before! For what name is this which meets his eye at every turn, as he turns despairingly over the New Testament, in hopes of finding something that may soothe his anguish? Jesus calls Himself a Son. Did that never strike him before? Nor these words: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father”? Nor these: “Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of Me), that I might do Thy will, O God”? Nor these: “For I came down from Heaven not to do My own will, but the Will of Him that sent Me”? Nor these: “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them”? Yes! he has heard all these texts a thousand times. He thought that he believed them. He was always provided with an explanation of them, which enabled him to hold his system, and yet to acknowledge them as inspired. But now he is too feeble for such explanations. He wants the thing that was explained. He wants to know that God is verily and indeed not different in Will and Nature from Him who died upon the Cross. He wants to feel that he is reconciled to God, not 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, by being weaned from notions and systems, learns with heart and soul to give glory to the Son. I do not assume that he therefore accepts our creed and our worship. Perhaps he may still retain a jealousy of both. Perhaps he may think that a truth, which it has cost him such an effort to reach, cannot be one that surrounds all, even the most unconscious. Perhaps he determines to hold by the sect, whatever it may be, in which he was brought up, or that to which he was drawn, when he first perceived that the Gospel of Christ had anything to do with him. Let us leave him for the present, satisfied that he will not be suffered to rest till all which is involved in the acknowledgment of a Divine Son has become his in very deed.

III. But though both the persons I have described belong to our time, neither, I think, is so characteristic of it as the one I am to speak of next. The power of the Spirit which could set men free from the bondage of the letter and of outward rules was asserted strongly by Cromwell’s Ironsides. The proclamation took another, and, after their first excesses, a specially peaceful form in the followers of George Fox. The early Methodists affirmed that only this power could awaken inert multitudes, bound with the chain of evil habits, to a true life. The man I am imagining has considered the records of these different bodies. He admits that fanaticism, of one sort or other, might be reasonably charged upon each. But he says that those clergymen or laymen, who thought they could dispose of these teachers or of their influence by denouncing their fanaticism knew very little of human beings generally, or of themselves particularly; that they were hoodwinked by the formalities and conventions of their childhood. “Had they not wisdom to discover,” he asks, “that man is a spiritual being, affected much more powerfully by that which speaks to his spirit than by all mechanical agencies whatsoever? To be sure these Independents, Quakers, Methodists, were ignorant of that fact in the length and breadth of it. They supposed that some peculiar gift had been bestowed upon them; they thought of a Spirit coming down from heaven to inspire preachers or convert sinners. That opinion you Churchmen may confute, if you are sure that you are clear of it yourselves. But poets and artists are as much interested as the wildest sects in maintaining that men are subjects of spiritual influences, and communicate spiritual influences to each other.”

On this true observation—this undoubted conviction—he builds his scheme of life. He tries to open his soul to all spiritual influences; he tries to exert spiritual influences over his fellows. Whatever is not material, whatever cannot be measured by a money standard, he accounts spiritual. It would be difficult to convict him of error in that classification. But if it is so, all stormy passions are spiritual. Hatred is spiritual. Envy is spiritual. It is no play upon words; no mere theory. The man feels more and more the impossibility of making any distinction. He is above conventions and formalities; they are not to determine for him what is right or what is wrong. What is to determine? Do the distinctions exist? May he establish them for himself? He half thinks that he may. He does not see what other authority there can be, or, if there is, how its decrees can reach him. Is he not virtually his own lawgiver, his own God?

This is a third kind of Atheism. Which of us dares say that he knows nothing of it? that it has never tempted him into its icy caverns? And how may any one be delivered from it? The processes may be various; generally they will be severe. This man may find that he is not superior to rules and conventions; that he is as much their victim as any of his neighbours; that they bind him all the faster because he fancies he is at liberty and is choosing for himself; or he may find that the appetites which he, the spiritual man, was to rule, do in fact rule him. Or he may perceive that he is actually selling those spiritual powers, which were to raise him above the pursuit of gold, for so much gold. Or the most terrible revelation of all may be made to him, that whether the distinction between good and evil is real or fantastic, there is in him a growing preference for that which he has been used to call evil, a growing dislike for that which he has been used to call good.

If his eyes are opened to any of these painful facts, there comes with it a sense of the impotency of that spirit, that will, which has been lifting itself so high; a consciousness of degradation, a disposition to self-mockery. These tempers are very unlike that which our Psalmist speaks of; yet they may be the road to it. The lofty spiritualist may begin to think that it would be a blessing beyond all price if he could cast away his proud looks; if he could refrain his soul and keep it low; if he could wean it from food which has made it so bloated and so sickly. But how may this be? What can work this transformation? He travels the old ground again; he asks what those sects which he used to defend against us and our formalism meant by a spirit that was given to them? Was it after all something different from that spirit in man which he has been asserting, and for which they seemed to have little regard? He opens the book from which they professed to derive their teaching. He finds the promise of a baptism with the Holy Spirit. He finds this Spirit carefully contrasted with evil and unclean spirits, which are said by His power to be cast out. He reads in St. Paul of this Spirit of God bearing witness with our spirit that we are sons of God. He reads in the same St. Paul of this Spirit of God knowing the things of God, as the spirit of man knows the things of a man. He discovers that all gifts by which one man is distinguished from another are referred to this Spirit as their source. But he discovers no narrow limitations assigned to the presence of the Spirit. “It is for you,” says St. Peter, “and for your children, and for as many as the Lord your God shall call.” He hears this Spirit called the Spirit of Truth, who will guide him into all Truth. He hears it said that we are baptized into one Spirit, whether we be Jews or Greeks, bond or free. He hears of this Spirit helping our infirmities, and praying in us according to the will of God.

Here are strange words. A little while ago they would have been passed over heedlessly, or treated as Oriental descriptions of certain conditions of humanity, which we in the West have investigated much more thoroughly, and can explain much more accurately. Now they come to him as filling up blanks in these western explanations, which render them practically useless, and even false. They do not make a huge demand upon his faith. They speak to his want of faith, his want of strength, his want of will. They bear witness of One Who he is sure has always been near him, awakening him to faith, making him conscious of his weakness, working in him to will and to do. It is not news of a spiritual influence, but of the Source of spiritual influences; not the announcement that men are and must be the subjects of some influence, but how they may discriminate between the vile and precious; how they may be right within, not the slaves to conventions or to their own lust of independence; how they may know God, in whose image they are formed, and so know themselves; how they may worship God, and so not worship themselves.

This man then learns to say, “Glory to the Holy Ghost,” Who has rescued me from low conceits, that looked high and glorious, Who has undertaken to refrain and govern my soul, and to make it free, which left to itself is always choosing some new and bitterer kind of servitude.” Still, it may be, he holds fast by his old hatred of forms. If he is not satisfied with the quiet spiritualism of the Quaker, or the noisy spiritualism of the Revivalist; if they seem to him narrow, and mixed with the formality he dreads, he probably stands aloof from all sects and Churches, waiting for some perfectly spiritual Church to develop itself. Let him only wait with a real longing, perhaps he will have a vision of one as pure, as large, as spiritual, as his heart or reason can desire.

IV. Once more. It is surely no great stretch of fancy to suppose that these three persons, with their different tastes, opinions, and destinies, were friends in youth; that they had conversed freely in their early years on all the questions which interested them most; that afterwards, when their minds were formed and hardened, their intercourse became suspicious; each fastening some hard name upon the other; vehement arguments to shake each other’s conclusions being succeeded by that cautious reserve, that elaborate selection of indifferent topics, which is more fatal to friendship even than the roughness and weariness of disputation. Now if, after each had gone through the schooling I have imagined for him, they met once more, I cannot help thinking that the desire of confuting, and the disposition to regard each other as aliens with whom communion was impossible, would be equally far from all three. The old sympathy, I apprehend, would revive, and would be deepened, not weakened, by the experiences of manhood. Gradually they discover that each has learnt something which he cannot part with, but which he would gladly impart, and the others would gladly share. They have not travelled the same road; their roads started apparently from a different point, they have been tending apparently to a different goal. And yet—they have a sense that there is some shady city of palm-trees, which they are all approaching, and which is to be the bourne and the reward of their pilgrimage. Whence comes this sense? What is their common attraction? Each has spelled out one syllable of that Name in which they are living and moving and having their being. And he that has faintly but truly acknowledged the Father, perceives that he cannot know the Father but in the Son. And he that has seen in the Saviour who died for him the Son that was before all worlds, perceives that there could have been no such Son, if there were not a Father of whose Person He is the express image, of whose glory He is the brightness. And he who has been glorifying his own spiritual nature, and has become aware of the impossibility of realizing it,—of being truly a man among men,—unless the Holy Spirit dwells with him and unites him to his kind, confesses that only a Spirit who proceeds from the Holy Father and the Holy Son, can be the Comforter, Sanctifier, the guide to all truth, the bond of all love, whom he has wearily sought for and at last found.

And so, because they are not high-minded and have no longer proud looks, because their souls have been refrained and kept low, because they no longer exercise themselves in great matters which are too high for them, because they are as children weaned from their contradictory 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 that this is the One God blessed for ever, since He has made them to be of one heart and one mind. What was a contradiction when contemplated in the shifting lights of time, becomes a necessity when they see God and see themselves in the clear steadfast light of Eternity. And now they can take one step further. The Psalmist has been talking of himself and of the discipline which brought him low. But the last note of his song is, “O Israel, trust in the Lord, from this time forth for evermore!” Now that they have learnt this common Name, they can believe that they have a common Nation, that there is now (not that there may be hereafter) a common Church for all nations; yes, for heaven and earth! Is not this the Name with which our Ethelberts and Edwins were sealed when first they turned from idols and owned that a kingdom of Heaven was set up amongst them? Is it not the name with which the child of the Queen and of the mechanic is sealed at the font in our day? If we Englishmen trusted in this Name, would it not bind the hearts of the fathers to the children? should we not have a charm against sects and schisms which no persecutions, no compromises can give us, because we should satisfy the yearning of all sects, and take away the pretext for schism which our proud looks are continually ministering? If we trusted in this Name might we not

“Knit the bonds of peace and love
Between all Christian lands,”

showing Romanists that we rest on the ground which the Creeds proclaim, showing Protestants that we have been brought to feel that ground which is at their feet and ours, not by the traditions of men, but by the demonstrations of God? If that is the calling of the English Church, O Lord! refrain our souls and keep them low, and wean us from our individual and national pride; make us anew in the image of Him Who could alone say, fully and perfectly, “I am not high-minded, I have no proud looks,” that we may not hinder the work which with us or without us Thou wilt certainly accomplish—the reconciliation of Thy Church and Universe, the revelation of Thyself!