October 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.”
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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.