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.
- 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.
- 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.