Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”—Matthew v. 38-45.

In a time like this, the subject upon which I spoke last Sunday may be considered almost obsolete, for it is two or three months since the nation at large was occupied with it. The subject which the verses I have just read to you suggest, is present to the minds of us all. There is a cry for vengeance abroad. Some say, “It is so natural, it must be indulged.” Some say, “It is so sinful, it ought to be checked.” Some say, “Strong punishment is demanded of us; we must not withhold it.” Some say, “It might be right otherwise, but Christ has forbidden it.” Which of these speaks truth? It is surely unsafe not to think of that question, since we shall act upon the answer to it, whatever it is. We may act indeed without thinking; we may merely obey an impulse of rage or an impulse of compassion. But if we do so in one case, shall we not do so in every case? If we are without a principle to guide us about India, shall we not be without one to guide us in England? Are there not hundreds of questions in our common everyday life which may be determined as this is determined? The controversy is not respecting the special method of treating certain delinquencies. On that point we may gladly seek for the judgments of men possessing special experience, and try to compare their judgments if they differ. But there seems to be equal uncertainty in the public mind about judicial punishments and military punishments; about the use which a Christian may make of the sword of the magistrate and the sword of the soldier; about the necessity of remembering, in such transactions as these, that we are Christians at all. Of that uncertainty we should try to get rid. Unless we make that effort, we may be lenient to-day, savage to-morrow; and posterity may doubt whether our leniency or our savageness was most mischievous.

When you first read our text, you may assume that our Lord intends to condemn the two sentences, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” “Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy,” absolutely, and to substitute for them some fundamentally opposite decrees of His own. On further consideration, you may be inclined to modify that opinion, and to suppose that He only pronounced these maxims unsuitable to the new time, though they may have been needful in the old. Then, again, you will doubt how maxims so broad, so definite, can ever have been true, if they have become false. If in this perplexity you glance back to other passages of the discourse—to those which I considered last Sunday and the Sunday before,—it will strike you that some of the commands which He speaks of, e.g. the commands not to kill and not to commit adultery, cannot have been less obligatory at one time than another, though to these also the same mode of speech is applied. It may strike you further, that the precepts which are set in contrast to these could not by possibility be exchanged for them. The precept, not to be angry with a brother, can never be the same kind of precept as the precept, not to commit murder. Last Sunday I tested this observation by the case of divorce. It seemed clear that our Lord’s method of treating that subject was in perfect harmony with His method of treating those that had gone before. As He did not make a new law respecting murder or adultery, so He did not make a new law respecting divorce. As He spoke to the conscience of the man in the one case, so He spoke to the conscience of the man in the other. By His mode of speaking to the conscience, by recognizing men as children of God, He might so elevate the whole condition of human society, that the outward law would be elevated too. But such an elevation, I endeavoured to show you, would have been impossible if He had merely enacted a new rule, and repealed the old. Can we apply this doctrine to the case before us? Is this part of the Sermon on the Mount consistent with the other parts, or inconsistent? That is the question which I wish to examine.

Before I address myself to it, I would make one remark, which has partly reference to a former passage. One topic, which is continually introduced into this discussion,—the lawfulness of putting any man to death, either on the field of battle or for crimes of which he has been convicted in a Court of Justice, is not touched by our text. If the words “Resist not evil” concerned judicial proceedings at all, they must do much more than forbid the axe or the rope. They must inhibit every attempt to coerce wrongdoers. If they refer to national quarrels at all, they must do much more than merely forbid the shedding of blood. They must inhibit all attempts by negotiation or arbitration to redress injuries done to the body politic, or to any of its members. Here, then, the occasion for that particular debate does not offer itself. But there was an opening for it before. If, as is alleged, the words “Thou shalt not kill,” which were in the old time thought compatible with wars against the Canaanites, with stoning for certain offences, were to have a wider range, a more stringent signification, under the new covenant, the allusion to that commandment would naturally have led to the announcement of the fresh and unsuspected force which was to be given to it. No such advantage is taken of the allusion. The law against murder is not declared to mean anything that it did not always mean. But the source of murder, anger in the heart, is brought to light; that Christ promises to extirpate.

I. Dismissing this point for the present, I come to the words, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This sentence appears in the book of Deuteronomy. It is not inserted there as a lazy maxim. It has already been embodied in the Mosaic legislation. It is put forth as a principle of that legislation. It must have dawned upon the mind of the Leader and Prophet of the people as a principle in the government of the world, which proved that it was not under the guidance of a capricious tyrant. Every crime had really, in the Divine order, a punishment which was exactly adapted to its nature. There was a perfect compensation, however little the mortal Seer might be able to penetrate the mystery of it. He could not trace the intricacies of the Divine plan, but he could believe there was a plan. Keeping it in sight, he could, in his own imperfect way, show it forth. The likeness might be as feeble as that of the curtains of the Tabernacle to the pattern in the mount; but it was a likeness. By presenting it, he was training his people to confess an order, to submit to an order, to feel that the order was not his, but the Lord God’s.

You know how this feeling of a retributive justice in all the occurrences of human life worked in the hearts of the Greek tragedians; how it raised them above the traditions they had learnt respecting divinities who followed their own caprices; how it enabled them to see something like a drama of Providence, even though this might be often confounded with a hard dead Fate, amidst the perversities of men’s conduct and the vicissitudes of their fortunes. The faithless husband dies by the hand of the adulterous wife; he is avenged by their son; the matricide must be tormented by the Furies. Such a vision did not offer itself to the Israelite; but he lived in the faith that eye does go for eye, tooth for tooth. Samuel was announcing a law, and executing it, 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 indulging no personal vengeance against the Amalekite. But has the doctrine of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, nothing to do with the feeling of individual vengeance, with the cry for retaliation? Does not the boy or the man who insists upon giving blow for blow, proclaim it in his way, as Samuel proclaimed it in his? We feel, instantly, that there must be something in common between the maxim and the instinct. One would not be, if the other were not. It is easy to pass from this conclusion to two others, that the maxim is only generalized from the personal feeling, and that if the one is to be upheld, the other is not to be checked. But no reasoning is less legitimate than this. There is not one great duty of man, one moral principle, which has not its attendant counterfeit; there is not one great duty or moral principle which men have not tried to explain by the counterfeit; there is not one great truth or moral principle which should not be asserted loudly, for the very purpose of destroying its counterfeit. How is it in this case? The legislator who is most desirous to assert the principle of retribution, and to embody it in his practice, is hindered at every step by the lust of vengeance in the individuals of the society he is trying to set in order. Their notions of retaliation, which are measured by the sense of the wrong they have received, or think they have received,—which take no account of anything but that,—their eagerness to put these notions into act,—oppose the great obstacle to evenhanded, compensating justice. He can only advance very slowly,—watching each step carefully,—in crushing this opposition, not only because it is so formidable, not only because he has to encounter it in himself as well as in every other man, but because he may crush good along with the evil; he may stifle energies which he wants, and which he cannot create; he may even weaken that very sense of right and order to which he must appeal. Nothing is more remarkable in the legislation of Moses than the pains which are taken to vindicate all vengeance for the Law and the State, while yet there is a recognition of a claim in the private citizen to redress his own wrong. The concession to the individual is fenced round with provisions testifying that he is a servant and instrument of Law; but it is not withdrawn. The education of the people would have been greatly injured, if it had been.

But what help can the lawgiver obtain in this matter, when he has convinced himself by experiment of his own weakness? Shall he call in the terrors of a future state to hinder his subjects from indulging their rage against each other,—from taking the law, as we say, into their own hands? Shall he tell them, or employ priests to tell them, that if they do this for the sake of obtaining temporary satisfaction here, they will have to make satisfaction by punishments in another world? That experiment has been made. It has been made with every possible advantage. It has been made, not upon an incredulous people, but upon the most credulous; not upon those who rebel against the priestly authority, but upon those who are most subservient to it. How has it succeeded? Is Italy, is Ireland, just the country you would point to as the one in which the lust of private vengeance has been most quelled,—in which it least frequently breaks through restraint? You may say, indeed, that in certain cases the priest is not working with the law, but against it; that he is irritating the wound which he should heal. Allow for all such cases; they may be more numerous than I know; but when the legislator has been able to secure the full co-operation of these threats and warnings, when they have been used simply to forward his purpose, to restrain the outbreaks which he is unable to restrain, I believe you will find that the aid is insignificant, that it does not touch the root of the evil, that it often produces new evils for which the laws must devise new punishments.

It is not this kind of help which Christ offers us in the Sermon on the Mount. Here, as everywhere, He lays His axe to the root of the tree. Here, as everywhere, He justifies that which had been said and done in the old time; while He makes the Revelation which the old time could not make, but which fills up its deficiency, which fulfils its cravings. The elder men had perceived a principle in the outward economy of God’s Kingdom; a principle which they had tried to represent in the economy of their kingdom. Christ reveals the inner mind and purpose of His Father, the inner mind and purpose to which that outward economy is subject, which explains its workings, but which cannot be derived from it. Christ declares that the man, the child of God, may have his inner life moulded in conformity with that inner life of His Father; that so his outward plan and order may be more than ever conformed to those of the same Father. Christ ruling the winds and waves, overcoming sickness, weakness, death,—Christ, reading the hearts and bringing the dark deeds and thoughts of men to light,—makes Himself known as the King and Judge of men. He reveals the royalty and the justice of the Father, from whom His royalty and justice are derived. But Christ, yielding Himself up to die; Christ,—in that sense though in no other,—refusing to resist the evil, that He might overcome evil; Christ, when He was reviled reviling not again, when He was threatened answering not; Christ, in these acts, in these sufferings, reveals God Himself. Here we see, not the ways of the Father, but the Father Himself. The perfect obedience of the Son discovers the perfect loving Will of the Father. Infinite Forgiveness and Charity are shown to be at the root of all things; Forgiveness and Charity that are only seen, only satisfied, only made effectual by Submission and Sacrifice; Forgiveness and Charity that are not intended only to flow forth upon men, but to flow into them, to become a part of their character and being.

Now those simple, practical, unrhetorical precepts about going two miles with him who would force you to go one; giving the cloak to him who would take the coat; turning the left cheek to him who smites the right; not turning away from the borrower; not asking goods again—are all so many indications and illustrations of that Divine mind which Christ promises that His Spirit shall form in the minds of those who will submit to Him. They are precepts assuredly, but they are precepts of a Gospel: messages concerning the highest gifts which a Creator can confer on His creatures, a Father upon a child. How little we believe this Gospel, how little we claim the renovating powers of this Spirit, we must all in shame and sadness confess. But if we fairly asked ourselves, “Is this more than I should wish to be? Would less than this make me the thoroughly gracious, forgiving, self-sacrificing man who is alone the blessed man? Would less than this make society what it is struggling to be—what by its principle and constitution it should be?”—if we asked ourselves these questions, I do not know what line of our Lord’s picture we could strike out, without destroying its charm and its harmony.

And if again I asked myself how I suppose any approximation to this character has been produced, and in whom there are the most conspicuous, however imperfect, traces of it, I should be compelled to reply, Where men feel most the impulse to vehemence and impetuosity,—where the circumstances which surround them show them most what necessity there is for the cultivation of a gentle and forgiving temper, because any other must lead to the most frightful acts and consequences,—there, I believe, the aid of the Divine Spirit is most afforded, for the moulding of this character; there, I believe, it actually does come forth in its greatest fulness and beauty. I cannot explain in any other way what many of us have seen, what some of us may have wondered at—that the man who has been bred in camps, who has had his chief experience in them, does not seldom exhibit, along with male courage and strength, more of gentleness, sweetness, humanity,—more of the qualities of the woman and the child,—than one is wont to encounter amidst those whose occupations have been exclusively civil. It was in the Roman centurion that our Lord found such faith as He had not found in Israel. And the faith exhibited itself through the learning which he had acquired in the discipline of troops, in the government of men, respecting the mighty power of words, respecting the true secret of rule and of obedience. We sometimes explain away such facts, and preserve our self-complacency by saying, “Oh yes, no doubt, the soldier is very earnestly devoted to his profession; so far, he is an example to us.” It is not in that way that the best soldiers are examples to us. We are professional enough, and too much, all of us, clergymen, doctors, lawyers. The merely professional soldier is a pedant, just as each one of us is apt to be. But we have seen more examples in that class than in almost any other, of men shaking off their professional trammels, exhibiting hearty human sympathies, showing a reverence for whatever is high and for whatever is lowly.

There is no novelty in this opinion; this ideal of character has been one which Christendom has, in a manner, claimed for the military man, as such, though of course only a few have in any remarkable degree realized it. The quality of gentleness, in its strict sense, with all that is implied in it, was once demanded for them almost exclusively. There was a sense, however vague, in men’s minds, that those who had weapons in their hands which might tempt them to be utterly ruthless and savage, needed some special gift of courtesy and nobleness in their own hearts to make them protectors of the commonwealth, to hinder them from being its destroyers. We have made two important discoveries on this subject, which our fathers did not make. One is, that men of all professions are in possession of most dangerous and terrible weapons, which they may use with frightful recklessness and frightful mischief, and therefore that all need a humanizing discipline. We know, we positively know, that the violence of the armed men may not inflict mischief so deadly, so wide-spreading, as the madness of speculation in the merchant, the chicanery of the lawyer, the anathemas of the priest. And therefore it is necessary that soldiers, merchants, lawyers, priests, should by some means or other be made to detest the madness of speculation, chicanery, curses; should be taught to regard their respective powers with awe, as weighty trusts, and to tremble at the abuse of them. This is one truth we have learnt from experience. The other is, that gentleness cannot be assumed from the mere fact of belonging to a gens; that whoever does belong to one of high name, with noble images and bright emblazonments, should regard that as a solemn obligation, a retainer for his services to his country, a warning that inhumanity in him is a greater sin; but that neither he nor we ought to depend upon any accidents or circumstances for the production of the habits and tempers which make the good citizen and the good man; that neither he nor we must despair of seeing the noblest, even the most graceful humanity in those who are merely men without any heraldic advantages at all; that we owe more to the Sermon on the Mount than to all the books and offices of Chivalry, for the unfolding the true ideal of the knightly man—because the true ideal of the man; that the divine humanity of Christ must be the ground of gentleness in one class or another; that without His Spirit we shall all be equally at the mercy of our own vagrant passions and impulses; that with His Spirit working in us we may overcome all temptations, and may go forth boldly and manfully to execute His purposes, to vindicate His retributive law, to inflict on the wrongdoer punishments so stern, even, impartial, as shall be a lesson to all that Righteousness, and not Chance or Violence, rules in this earth of God’s. And if through any negligence in this work we leave the worshippers of evil and capricious gods to think that their theory of the universe is the true one, that the principle of justice and retribution of which the conscience testifies is not a true one,—not one which can make itself actually felt—I believe we are answerable to God for committing another injustice to our heathen subjects, over and above the wrongs we have committed already. To let the consciousness of former guilt withhold us from imparting this lesson is to increase our guilt. If any should succeed in persuading us that it would be obedience to the Sermon on the Mount—to the commands of Christ—to throw our arms away, to let the sword of justice rest in its scabbard, we shall not throw our arms away, we shall use them wickedly, cruelly, without any respect to the ends for which they have been given us; the impulse of vengeance will become our law, because we recognize no other; the sword will be as sharp as ever, but it will be the sword of injustice. A great responsibility therefore rests upon us, the ministers of the Gospel, that we should not rob men of the real weight and emphasis and authority of this discourse, by using it to denounce that which it does not denounce, in actual words or by any legitimate inference. Its full clear meaning and blessing is for the soldier, is for every man. It strikes at a multitude of feelings which are very natural to us all; it shows us how we may change them for feelings that appertain to us as children of God, as made in His image. It does not tell us that these feelings, in their very highest form, are incompatible with our using any one of the energies or instruments which God has put into our hands, as an energy and instrument for fulfilling His purposes. He is carrying on a work of justice, of retribution, of education among the sons of men. He bids us in all things be fellow-workers with Him. We may fancy we show our faith in Him by throwing away our swords and waiting for Him to protect us, just as we may fancy we show our faith in Him by letting our ploughs rust and expecting Him to send us harvests. But this is not faith—it is the opposite of faith. It is the worship of Fate. It is Mahometanism adapted to Christian notions. We are to plough in faith, we are to go to battle in faith. It is the belief in a God, a God of truth, a God Who teaches the hands to war and the fingers to fight, which nerves men for the toilsome enterprise of ridding the earth of its weeds as well as of its disturbers and oppressors.

II. But it was also said of old, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.” Where was it said? “In heathen countries,” some one will answer. Certainly it was said in heathen countries; and not in the worst of them, but the best. The sense of neighbourhood, the sympathies of race, the antipathies which answer to these sympathies, characterized the Greek city, with all its great energies, its growing civilization.

No such development of this feeling was possible in the wide Asiatic Empires. There might be despots craving for a universal dominion, with the keen eagle eye for slaughter and blood which we see in the Nineveh monuments; but there was no neighbourhood, none of that kind of love, or that kind of hatred, which was nursed by the small republic. To which does mankind owe most? which has done most to humanize the world? The evil is obvious, any one can detect it. But what was the good which lay beneath the evil? What can explain how so many of the results were good and not evil?

There was the precious sense of kinsmanship, the link between the present and the past. There was the feeling that relations among men pointed to relations of men with beings higher than themselves. There was the belief that fellowship and the power which dwells in fellowship is mightier than all physical forces. There was the awakening of the human in the members of those little communities, side by side with the animal, and the growing conviction that the younger was to rule over the elder; that which looked weak over that which looked strong. These are the germs of wonderful distinctions, of wonderful combinations. There is a mystery in these thoughts which the Divine revelation to the Jews could partly expound—which it needed a Christendom fully to unravel.

The Jew was taught to love his neighbour and hate his enemy. The thought which is expressed in this sentence, quickened his acts, quickened his devoutest and holiest songs. God had chosen him to be a witness for Himself. He was bound to all Israelites by the everlasting covenant which bound him to the unseen God. They were his neighbours, his fellow-workers, his fellow-witnesses. Their transgressions were his transgressions, their sorrows his sorrows. Nothing which touched the commonwealth could be of indifference to him. But his existence was a warfare. All around him, pressing close upon him, threatening the very vitals of his national existence, were idolatries, the worship of visible gods, of dead gods, of evil gods, the denial of the living and true God, the God of righteousness. These he is to hate with a perfect hatred. He is to count them his enemies. They take actual forms. They embody themselves in persons. Against these he must fight. It is no struggle with abstractions. Chariots of iron are pouring down against him; he must go forth to hew in pieces those who sit in them. Nor is his war only defensive. The cup of the iniquities of the Canaanites is full; they have made the earth intolerable by their crimes; he goes forth to dispossess and destroy them.

To suppose that the hatred of enemies in the majority of the hosts of Israel was directed against principles and not men, would be absurd; to suppose that in any man of these hosts there was no mingling of rage and indignation against those whom he was striking down, may be equally absurd. But this may be said, that just so far as they were a host, acting under a common leader, with a common purpose, believing themselves to be the servants of the Most High God, just so far was the meanness, covetousness, petty enmity of each man diminished, just so far did the inspiration of a principle overcome the sordid impulses which set men one against the other. People with a work in hand do not stop, happily for them, to analyze their feelings and motives, but they are raised without knowing it to a higher level. While there is a call for united energy, devotion, self-sacrifice, vulgarer thoughts are held in check. It is after the fight is done that the dangerous hour comes. It is when there is power without the sense of unity and government, that all the pent-up ferocity and wickedness of men displays itself. This may be said; and it surely may be said also, that when the leader or king of the Israelitish host poured out his prayers with a fervency and force he had never known in the same degree till then—however he might express himself about his enemies, whatever visible persons might seem to him to be his enemies,—his mind was carried in the very act of communion with God into another region, into a purer atmosphere. A better Spirit than his own took possession of him. He went forth hating what God hated, yet not the less prepared to do just the work which was before him; his heart and conscience nerved, not distracted or made doubtful, by having sought the presence of Him Who is merciful and gracious, and forgiveth iniquity and transgression and sin.

It was in a time of peace, not of war—of peace at least so far as Israelites are concerned—that our Lord opened His lips to deliver the Sermon on the Mount. Canaanitish wars had been over for centuries. The Jews were traders, money-getters, with no sense of any commission to overthrow the idolatry of the Greek or Latin cities into which they might go. But in that peaceful mammonish time, the maxim “Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy” had taken its meanest, most spiteful, most cruel form, had sheltered itself most under the sanctions of religion. The Pharisee taught his countryman that he was to hate the heathen as an enemy of God, even when he was trafficking with him and turning him to account. The other half of the precept he could not inculcate in the same manner. The love of the neighbour did not come at the Pharisee’s bidding, was not kindled into much warmth by his example. But there was a plausible easy substitute for it. He might love the traditions of his land just because they separated him from mankind. The love for these might represent and comprehend the love of God and of the neighbour both. Our Lord was arming His disciples to go forth against Greek and Roman as well as Jewish idolatry, to go forth with other arms, but not in another spirit, than that in which Joshua and David had gone forth. And therefore He said to them, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven: for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth His rain on the just and on the unjust.” His Apostles took these words literally. They obeyed these words both in the letter and in the spirit. Because they did so, they were able to establish the Church or Kingdom of God upon earth, they could maintain their Jewish privilege of being heralds of blessings to all the families upon earth, they could claim the whole earth as belonging to God and to His Christ. Their Jewish narrowness disappeared as their Jewish faith became stronger. They could submit to all persecutions, from the circumcision or the uncircumcision, that they might assert for both the position of new creatures in Christ Jesus. Tempted every hour to hate the men who resisted them and hated them, they grew every hour, as they kept Christ’s commandment, into a sympathy with all men as their neighbours, as their brethren,—into an intenser hatred of that which kept them from being brethren, which was misrepresenting the Father in Heaven, to a stronger conviction that He would use them in their spheres, and all other Christians in theirs, to put down wrong, and to establish the dominion of righteousness and peace. They have bequeathed to us their witness of that state of mind which the Spirit of God would produce in every one of us. But they have bequeathed to us no protest against the deeds or principles of their forefathers. They have said nothing which can lead us to think that, while there is outward palpable evil in the world, that is not to be put down by outward palpable swords. They have left no sentence which leads us to confound, multitudes which lead us to distinguish, the two spheres of our work. They have left no precepts which would lead us to suppose that we ought to limit their Master’s precept, “Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” to one of these spheres when we may extend it to both,—when we may at once be witnesses of His infinite charity, and executors of the justice which does not interfere with this charity, but is needful to make it effectual.

III. I have left myself no time to notice that very respectable body of men who have been the principal supporters of the doctrine I have combated in this sermon, and an allusion to whom, by a popular writer, induced me first to preach on our Lord’s Discourse. I cannot speak so scornfully of the founder of that Society as this writer does. I believe Fox to have been a most remarkable man, raised from the heart of the English people, to bear witness of many truths which it concerned Englishmen at that time and in all times to be acquainted with; to bear witness against many errors into which the clergy as well as the soldiery, into which Episcopalians as well as Puritans, had fallen then, and into which they have fallen since. That which is sometimes imputed to this teacher and to his followers as a fanatical folly—that they dwelt so much upon the power and the presence of the Spirit of God—I esteem as their highest merit. I only wish that we had profited more by the vehemency of their language upon that subject; because I believe, if we are consistent with our creeds and prayers, we can be, we shall be, much more thorough witnesses for the gift and continual abiding of that Holy Spirit than they are. We ought not to be content with thinking of a Spirit Who comes in momentary gusts. We ought to believe that He has taken possession of our bodies as His temples, to make us holy and without blame before God in love; to unite us to Christ, our ascended Lord; to overcome for us the world, the flesh, and the devil; to fit us for all common duties and occupations; to make professions—civil, ecclesiastical, military—safe and honourable; to make the occupation of the tradesman also—his dealings with money, the love of which is said to be the root of all evil—beneficial and not accursed; to consecrate all studies, arts, even amusements, to the service of God and not of self. Such an estimate of the power and work of the Holy Spirit we can scarcely form if we meditate exclusively on His dealings with the individual soul, if we do not regard Him as proceeding from the Father and the Son, to bind together and quicken a whole body. Had the idea of a Father Who would have His children be perfect as He is perfect, presented itself to the mind of the Quaker with the same power with which the idea of a spiritual influence has presented itself, I cannot but think that that last idea would have been far more substantial, practical, universal for him; that his charity, which has been worthy of all admiration, would have been less liable to degenerate into a sentimental tolerance of wrong, a mere dread of inflicting pain; that he would have considered how the loving Father of All spared not pain to His Only Begotten Son, spares not pain to any of His adopted children, when it is for their profit; that he would less have trembled to commit criminals to Him Who judgeth righteously, through a notion which is most irreverent, which leads to the greatest perplexities in morality, which has disturbed the consciences of jurymen, sometimes perhaps the consciences of Secretaries of State, that the greater a man’s enormities have been, the more necessary it is not to deprive him of his only chance of repentance. These and other strange outrages upon the sense and reason of mankind, involving also suspicions of the character of God, the Quaker would have escaped, I think, if he had more literally adhered to the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount respecting the Father in Heaven; if he had believed more thoroughly that Jesus Christ came to manifest the Father, and, by His sacrifice, to make the Father and mankind at one.

That eminent historian to whom I have alluded before, in one of the lively antitheses for which he is so celebrated, holds up George Fox to great ridicule for his literal construction of the passages in the Sermon on the Mount, which are so obviously figurative; for his figurative interpretation of our Lord’s commands respecting the Sacraments; which are so obviously literal. I cannot avail myself of this clever sarcasm. To me it seems that Fox was a perfectly consistent man; that his error respecting the Sermon on the Mount was exactly of the same kind with his error respecting the Sacraments. Had he believed that by the simple outward rite of Baptism, God has claimed us all for His spiritual children, he would not, I think, have needed to explain away the commandments of the old economy, that he might vindicate 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 dependent upon the inward; but that He has joined them together, and that we cannot put them asunder. Had he believed that by the actual tokens of bread and wine, God declares to us that we are members of one body in His Son, one body with all that have gone before and with all that shall come after, because one sacrifice has been offered for all, on which all may feed; had he not shrunk from a Sacrament at which each may confess his sin against his brother on earth, his forgetfulness of his Father in Heaven, he would have seen that to forgive, to pray for enemies, to bless them that curse, to bear all injuries, may be the gift and privilege of men all the more because they believe that they are pledged by the holiest bonds, the most awful oaths, to go forth in God’s Name, with whatever weapons He puts into their hands, to assert His order against all that is working disorder in His world. They would have believed that no religious sect, no commercial congress, nothing but a united Christian family speaking to the consciences and spirits of men, can hasten the time when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor be obliged to learn war any more.