November 8, 1857
“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”—Matthew v. 48.
The people who heard the Sermon on the Mount were astonished, we are told, at the doctrine; “for He taught them as One having authority, and not as the Scribes.” The words were felt to be words of a King, not of a Book. The Speaker was not spelling out the mind of God, but announcing it; He had a right to be obeyed.
Something of this impression has been transmitted to later ages. Though the words have become letters, though the letters have been stereotyped, yet men in the far West have felt as if they were standing on the brow of the old hill, and listening to Him Who opened His mouth and said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: Blessed are the meek.” Those to whom the phrases of the Bible have become hard and traditional, upon whose ears they fall as habitual sounds that carry little sense, have approached this discourse with a kind of awe. Those who have thrown off all faith in what they call the specialities of the Christian Faith, have thought they found here something common and universal, which was worthy of their honour.
One would say that these effects could not have been produced, if the discourse had not been in the highest degree simple and practical, if there were signs in it of any, even the least artifice. And yet the most popular historian of our day, or of any day—who should know what rhetoric is, if any one knows—has spoken of “those highly rhetorical passages” in this Sermon which refer to the forgiveness of injuries, and has even announced, with an almost Papal solemnity and decisiveness, that “for sixteen centuries these passages were treated by all persons as figurative”; the fancy that they have any literal force having first presented itself to George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. Such assertions, proceeding from one who represents so much of the feeling and temper of the present day, and has so large an acquaintance with the past, may well stagger us. He cannot have spoke at random. What he says must have an important meaning. And how can this meaning be reconciled with that kind of judgment respecting our Lord’s language to which I have alluded—a judgment which, in some sense or other, not sixteen but eighteen centuries appear to have confirmed?
On many accounts the subject has a close and immediate interest for us. It appeared, I think, very clearly during the last session of Parliament, that the legal and the ecclesiastical conscience in this country were at issue on a question of the deepest concern, not to lawyers and ecclesiastics, but to the domestic life of England.
There is no doubt, on either side, as to the sacredness of this domestic life. Those who proposed to constitute a new tribunal for the trial of offences connected with Marriage—those who wished to make some alterations in the rules respecting Divorce—believed that they were removing obstacles which were unfavourable to morality and family peace. Those who opposed them feared that the change might lead to a dangerous confusion respecting the holiest obligations. So far there is an agreement as to ends. But the ones believed that ordinary legislation may deal with the subject; that cases arising concerning it may be referred to an ordinary jurisdiction. The others affirm that it is absolutely subject to a divine law; that only courts specially framed to execute that law can take cognizance of it. Now the Sermon on the Mount contains some of the express statements which are said to preclude all such alterations in our system as have recently been attempted. The Sermon on the Mount certainly is that part of our Lord’s teaching to which we must turn for our estimate of the difference between the New Testament and the Old. Some writers indeed on the ecclesiastical side, of great weight for their personal character, are inclined to deprive it of this authority. They suppose that it tolerates an exception which a more strictly Christian passage in St. Luke’s Gospel has annulled. But this extreme doctrine, no less than those to which it is opposed, opens the whole inquiry, what kind of teaching it is which the Sermon on the Mount contains, what matters it deals with; to what persons it addresses itself; whether it is a code, or something else than a code; whether its statements are to be taken in their full significance, or are to be explained away as figurative and highly rhetorical.
Other more recent, more tremendous events, compel us for a different reason to enter upon the same investigation. If these passages about forgiveness to which the historian alludes are construed according to the notions of George Fox and his successors, they must prohibit that punishment of the Indian delinquents which the conscience of Englishmen seems to demand: they must prohibit all attempts to recover or retain our empire, which some of us feel that we can now less than ever dare to relinquish. But is not this mode of construing the words of Christ the only strict and literal one? If that is abandoned, must not the whole discourse lose its worth and its force, as an utterance of the Divine Mind and Will? Can we speak of it any more as containing the ethics of the Gospel? or must not these ethics be such as we can bend to our pleasure and throw away at our pleasure?
There are tremendous issues, you will see, involved in this inquiry, from whatever point we enter upon it. Nothing less, it seems to me, than the very meaning of all relative morality, and of all positive morality, is involved in it. Have we any moral foundation to stand upon that is not figurative, not rhetorical, if our Lord’s words deserve that title? That there has been a disposition through sixteen centuries, through eighteen centuries, to treat them as if they meant very little indeed, and as if that little meaning might be dispensed with in the lives of Christians, I have no doubt. That during all those same centuries there has been also a feeling that the words had the most profound, direct, awful meaning,—that human life can never be even and harmonious till it is brought into conformity with that meaning—I am also convinced. That ecclesiastics have been too strict, that Quakers have been too strict, in their interpretations of the different passages to which they have given their attention, I do not believe. I do not admit that either of them has been half strict enough, half careful enough to submit their own judgments and preconceptions to the mind of Christ, to receive Him simply as their Lawgiver and their Judge. I believe that there would not have been that conflict between the ecclesiastical and the legal conscience, either now or in the generations that are past, if ecclesiastics had been less eager to establish their theories and their jurisdiction more resolute to acknowledge the full gravity of our Lord’s teaching on the subject of Marriage and of all human relationships, more ready to connect the Sermon on the Mount, as our Lord Himself connects it, with the elder law, which He did not come to destroy, but to fulfil. I think then that it would be seen that the legislator of modern days has a function which He does not supersede, but helps him manfully to perform; and that other and higher duties devolve upon His Church in connection with human relationships than that of impeding it. Again, I think that, just so far as the Quaker has honestly sought to interpret the Sermon on the Mount rigorously, and to apply it to his own moral and spiritual life, he has been a benefactor to the world; and that he has set himself in opposition to the conscience of mankind, has given encouragement to many of the self-indulgent and cowardly feelings of mankind, just when he has shrunk from the full and clear and severe explanation of its maxims, just when he has interpreted it, according to his own notions, and not in the light which proceeds from Him Who spoke the words, and Who alone can enable us to understand them and to obey them.
I do not purpose to speak this afternoon on either of these subjects. I reserve them for next Sunday, and the following Sunday. The text I have chosen expresses the principle which I believe goes through the whole discourse, and which governs all the specific topics that are treated in it. But that text introduces us into the heart of the difficulties which are supposed to put it at a distance from the ordinary life and practice of men. If we are anywhere in the region of rhetoric, it is surely here. The command to be “perfect”—to whom can that be addressed but to some transcendent saint? The command to be perfect “as our Father in Heaven is perfect”—must not that be intended to make even the transcendent saint despair?
I. I think, my brethren, that the command to be “perfect” must cause despair to the man who has been aspiring to be a transcendent saint—who has fancied that he is not as other men are. What our Lord tells His disciples in this sermon is, that their righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. They were men of this class: they had raised themselves above the level of their fellows; from the heights which they had reached they did look down with lofty pity upon the crowd that they could just see at an immeasurable distance beneath. They were no doubt aiming at perfection; by this difference from others, they measured their approaches to it. He who began with saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for of them is the kingdom,” was laying the axe to the root of this perfection. He was not saying, “You are much farther from the top of the ladder than you have fancied.” He was not saying, “You want aids to ascend which you have not found, or which you are rejecting.” He was declaring, simply and broadly, “You are on a wrong road. You are proposing to yourselves a false end. Every step in this direction does not take you nearer perfection, but farther from it.” He tells His disciples why it must do so. The Pharisee does his works to be seen of men; yes! to be seen by those very men whom he is scorning, to be admired and worshipped by those whom it is his glory to trample upon. This is the inevitable condition of such aspirants. They live for observation. The world is to see how much they are above it. Thus the question with them is more and more, not what they shall be, but how they shall appear. With this terrible motive to become mere actors—in the strictest sense of the word, hypocrites—another conspired. God Himself was necessarily regarded as One Who demands an outside apparent service. He had given a law to His people. They were not to take His name in vain, not to kill, not to commit adultery. These were common precepts; the vulgarest men must be forced by actual penalties now, or threats of penalties hereafter, to observe them. The exalted man was to practise a different—a meritorious obedience. But though different in degree, it was to be the same in kind. He was not to eat with unwashen hands; not to eat at all at certain times; not to neglect the hours of prayer. Additional obligations were laid upon him that he might be perfect,—obligations not deduced from the law, except by accident, but appended to it,—obligations which, even if they interfered with the law according to the simple letter of it, were still to be recognized as means by which the select class might win God’s favour. Our Lord dwells on one commandment which was treated with peculiar contempt by those who were aiming at peculiar holiness. It was a sign of devoutness not to honour the father and mother, not to contribute to the support of their weakness and age, if the money which would have been given to them was dedicated to the service of the Temple. No more characteristic sign can be found of the nature of this Pharisaic religion, of the results to which it was leading. Common duties—most of all, relative duties, those which had to do with the family—were trifled with and discarded. The holiness was, altogether individual. It was to procure advantages and rewards for the individual man. And this, though in another sense it was altogether social, inasmuch as it demanded spectators, as a very great part of it would have been wasted, if there had not been bystanders to notice it and be affected by it.
To understand how entirely the perfection of which our Lord speaks was the reverse of this perfection, we must remember another quality of it, which is clearly implied in those I have spoken of already. The Pharisaical aspirant assumed evil as the ground from which he started. Evil was the condition of his race. Every step that raised him above evil, raised him above mankind. The nearer he approached to the Being he worshipped, the farther he was from those among whom that Being had placed him. Godliness and humanity were direct and deadly opposites.
Now when our Lord said to His disciples, “Be perfect,” He made it evident by all the rest of His discourse that He meant, “Be men. You cannot by any possibility be anything better than that which you are created to be. You must make yourselves worse by becoming anything else than that.” Those to whom He said the Kingdom of Heaven belonged, were those who did not lift themselves above their fellows,——the meek, the merciful. Those who should obtain consolation were precisely those who were suffering as ordinary men suffer, who were suffering with them. Those were not rewarded who had righteousness, but who were hungering and thirsting after it, and would find the attainment of it their reward. Not those whom the world looked upon, but those whom no eye but God could see, the pure in heart, were to have that which they coveted, to see Him as He saw them. Not those whom men thought well of, but those whom they thought ill of, whose names they cast out as evil, might claim fellowship with the prophets of old. All therefore in this perfection is social, not, like the Pharisaic, individual. And yet all is out of sight, not, like the Pharisaic perfection, apparent, cognizable by the eye.
Look again how this difference affects the relation of this Gospel of perfection to the Law which had been given in the old time. Evidently the difference is in kind and not in degree. It is not that a new code is appended to the old code. It is not that there is a code for a class of men which is different from the code for men generally. It is that the Gospel commandment belongs to the man himself, that the legal precept belongs to the acts of the man. It is therefore that the Gospel perfects, completes, fulfils the Law, without destroying one jot or tittle of it. Each stands out in its own distinctness. Each sustains and is necessary to the other. They do not clash, for they belong to different regions. They must be continually acting and reacting upon each other; the weakness of the one must be the weakness of the other; the strength of the one must be the strength of the other; because both equally apply to the same man, to the same human race. The Lawgiver, Who deals with acts, says, “Thou shalt not kill;” the King, Who speaks to the minds of His subjects, says, “Thou shalt not be angry with thy brother without a cause.” The Lawgiver, Who deals with acts, says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The King, Who speaks to the heart, says, “Thou shalt not look upon a woman to lust after her.” The Lawgiver says, “Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths;” so announcing that every overt act of perjury will be avenged by the all-seeing Ruler. The King over the Spirit says, “Swear not at all, for heaven is God’s throne, earth is His footstool, Jerusalem is His city, the hairs of your head cannot be white or black without Him;” so guarding the continual hourly reverence of Him in Whom we live and move and have our being, by the loss of which, through carelessness and profaneness in ordinary conversation, the solemn oath or asseveration becomes of little worth or obligation.
With what especial force this general doctrine applies to that honouring of fathers and mothers, which the Pharisees had set at naught by their traditions, I shall endeavour to show you under the next head. What I have to remark further now is, that Jesus could raise the standard of human morality, in opposition to the inhuman standard which the Pharisee set up, because He was Himself the Son of Man; because He came to declare, and in His Own person to manifest, the truth that God and man are not divided, but eternally united; because He showed and proved that man is made in the Image of God; because therefore that which is truly human must answer to that which is truly divine; because the fall of the first man must have been a fall from trust in God, and from the belief that this was the state intended for him; because the fall of each man must consist in choosing to be a separate selfish man, to stand in his Adam-nature, in renouncing that true state of union with Christ and of fellowship with each other, into which He has redeemed us and which constitutes our perfection as members of the human race.
II. But secondly, He says “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” If the first clause is not fatal to all human endeavour, if it does not prescribe an absolutely impossible enterprise,——what must we say of this addition to it? What I say is, that we have in these words, “as your Father is perfect,” that which removes any discouragement which the other, after all explanation, might have left on our minds; that we have a maxim of ethics set before us, which differs from the maxims of ordinary moral philosophers in being compassionate, practical, hopeful; that we have here the proof that our Lord’s doctrine is higher in its demands than any other, and yet that “His yoke is easy and His burthen is light.”
1. A man may say, “I am quite convinced that the social, human morality is the highest morality, that this is what God seeks of us. I feel that to be a good father, a good son, a good husband, a good citizen, in the full sense of that word, may be, must be, to lead a more perfect life than to be practising the most admired religious selfishness, than to be seeking after the highest selfish rewards which religious teachers have ever spoken of. But the more I wish for this perfection, commonplace as it is said to be, the more distant it appears to be from me. God may require nothing more of me than to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before Him; but oh, how hard is doing justice! how the love of mercy vanishes when I have some personal injury to avenge! what pride springs up in me and enslaves me, when I fancy most that I have acquired humility! The best laws, the most admirable rules of conduct, cannot make me what St. Paul says I should be, to my children, to my servants. Suppose I love those who love me; suppose I yield to impulses of affection; does not my conscience tell me that I am partial, and therefore am doing injury to those whom I fondle, as well as to those whom I treat with coldness and indifference?”
Such thoughts arise in one who is aspiring after no fantastic excellence, who is simply caring to do his duty in that state in which he finds himself. He certainly does not scorn laws, not the most vulgar earthly laws. The Ten Commandments he reverences as divine, but somehow they do not reach him; he wants help which they do not give. To act out any one relation, he must not only avoid transgression, but do right; he must not only do right, but be right. How can he be right? Our Lord tells him that he is actually, really a child, not only of an earthly parent, but of a Father in Heaven. These relationships on earth are grounded on that celestial relationship; they exist because it exists; they are formed in its likeness. The Eternal Father has constituted each family, because He has established one Universal Family in His Son. This is the state which Christ has revealed to us. The Pharisee would not honour father and mother, that he might reserve all his honour for God; therefore he could not honour God, because he did not believe in God as a Father. Jesus Christ bids us not love father or mother more than Him, because in Him dwells the only love which we can show to father and mother; because it becomes a mere selfish affection, dependent on accident or circumstance, sure to dry up, if it is not derived from His love, not constantly renewed by it. Thus then the perfection which He enjoins, the true human perfection, is possible when we submit to the Will which is governing the universe and governing in us; when we cease to kick against the pricks; when we will permit the Spirit which is proceeding at every moment from the Father and the Son to take from us the conceit, vanity, restlessness which are making us miserable.
2. But as there lies in this Name the power which may make us all that we can want to be, so there is in it also the infinite compassion and forgiveness for our failures, which we ask and ask in vain from all the doctors in the world, even those who seem most tolerant, even those who bid us content ourselves with acts and states of mind with which our consciences refuse to be content. I have a right to be like our Father in Heaven. Likeness to Him is my proper human condition. But I have also a right to go to Him and say, “Father, I have not cared to be like Thee, I have not believed that I could be like Thee, I have not confessed myself to be Thy child.” I have a right to lay bare all my weakness before Him, to speak to Him as One Who knows how great it is, as One Who understands all my defections from His ways, and cares for me more than I possibly can. “Be perfect according to this rule or that.”——“Yes, but may I confess to the rule? Will it understand me when I say I am sorry? Will it make me sorry?”——“Be perfect according to the standard of this holy man or that.”——“Yes, but does he know what I am striving after?—Do his thoughts comprehend me? all my stupidity, all my selfishness? Can his life become mine?”—“Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” The wrestler who has had most falls, who has had most experience of the strength of the enemy, of his own feebleness; the man who is in deep mire where no ground is; he who is in fetters from which he only wishes to be free,—hears this message and finds in it the assurance that he may yet rise up and walk; that there is a home for him, that there is One Who will bring him to it. What anger, rage, inclination to hate, there is in him! How circumstances seem to conspire with it! What strong pleas seem to justify it! How it is banishing God from him! what a distance it is creating between Him and His child! But He in Whom is all Mercy, Forgiveness of enemies, Patience, is not afar off. He bids me be what He is! He can convert me to be what He is! Who that has had a quiet, even pious education, can tell what infinite efforts it may be costing some poor or rich man, bred among people whose language was half made up of curses, to obey the precept “Swear not at all”? What would become of him if he might not throw himself on the pity and strength of the very Being Whose name he is tempted continually to trifle with? When he does, how much more he may know of that Being than men do whose lot has been more fortunate!
3. This text, therefore, cuts through a number of webs in which casuists have entangled the human conscience. It does so by putting an end to those tricks of the deceitful heart into which we are all falling continually. “How oft,” asks the Galilean, for he was just learning the first rudiments of his faith, under the Divine Teacher,—“How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?” What an opening for the refinements of a Confessor or Spiritual Director! How accurately the degrees, qualities, occasions, times, objects, places of forgiveness, might be set down! What delicate distinctions, what hairbreadth evasions of difficulties! What torments to the memory and heart of the doubter, what practical indulgences to his worst inclinations! In our Lord’s answer not a single subtlety. He replies by a simple parable which brings out the very meaning of our text. God forgives, thou art unlike God, therefore thou art miserable if thou dost not forgive. There is no measure or limit in the command. God’s mind is the standard. Try your mind by that. Do you wish God to be less forgiving than He is? Would you contract His forgiveness? Would you make it not a forgiveness from the heart? Then yours may be so. But in this very parable God is represented as punishing, as punishing severely. Punishment in Him is not then incompatible with the most fervent love and compassion—may be demanded by love and compassion. So be it with you. Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.
On this instance of forgiveness I shall have more to say hereafter. I refer to it now as one of the most complete illustrations of the truth, that, just because there are no indulgences in the Gospel morality, just because it proposes to man only the highest standard, it lays less burden on him than any other; it is from first to last a deliverance from burdens. We are oppressed with the consciousness of something which we ought to be, of something which we cannot be. What do you gain by persuading your conscience that it has deceived you as to the extent of your obligations? Diminish them, and what remains will be just as overwhelming. Each day, as your aims become lower, your difficulty in pursuing these aims will be greater. Christ teaches us that the burden is not in the strictness of the law, but in ourselves; that a law—every law, human or divine—must be weak through the flesh; that so long as we are merely trying to obey a rule we shall find that rule a burden—be it the most moderate ever invented—that when we claim our rights as new men, as created in Him to good works, as children of a Father in Heaven, we become united with Him from Whom laws proceed: obedience to them is recognized as reasonable, as part of our constitution; disobedience is felt to be the unnatural, miserable state; all disobedient acts to be departures from a blessed order. But for such acts, for such relapses into an unhealthy evil state, there is confession; there is the gift of repentance; there is that Divine restoration which no indulgence or toleration such as men dream of can give.
And if this morality of Christ is not casuistical morality, still less is it rhetorical morality. The rhetorician exalts virtues, as if they were characteristic of certain favoured persons whom it is his calling to praise; denounces vices, as if none could have fallen into them but those whom it is his calling to vituperate. Our Lord speaks of the highest virtues which any man has ever practised as being resemblances to the Father in Heaven, Who has made all men in His image; Who has redeemed all in Christ that they may be renewed in His image. Our Lord treats all vices which the law condemns, as vices into which it is possible for any man to fall, as lying close to every man, as being the consequences of inclinations to which no man is a stranger. The rhetorician deals in high-sounding generalities about magnanimous endurance of wrong and suffering. Christ speaks of the man who is smitten on one cheek, turning the other; of the man who is bidden to go one mile, going twain. Homely, human illustrations, surely; precisely those which the rhetorician scorns; precisely those which we need for the business of life.
I will not anticipate what I shall have to say, if God permit, next Sunday, respecting the conflict between legal and ecclesiastical morality. But this I will say, that the more we clergymen teach children and teach grown men the doctrine of our old Catechism, that they are “members of Christ, and children of God, and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven,” the more I believe we shall be fulfilling our tasks; the more we shall prove to you that the country needs some help besides that which laws and penalties can give, for the preservation of anything that is good among us, for the reformation of anything that is evil. Above all, I trust that you will come to perceive that in this teaching, illustrated by the whole history of the Old and New Testament, lies the protection of all domestic society, of the reverence for fathers, of the marriage bond. What ecclesiastics have done for these, I shall have to confess with much sorrow and shame. What the Gospel has done for them, what the Church of God—so far as it has been the witness of Christ’s redemption and of our adoption to be children of His Father—has done for them, I can assert with freedom and confidence, because I can appeal to the facts of history and the conscience of mankind in support of what I say. The sacredness of our hearths and homes we do not owe, we shall not owe, to legal enactments, to courts of justice, whatever names they may bear. We have owed them to Him Who has said, “Be ye perfect, as my Father in Heaven is perfect,” to Him Who has made Himself the Bridegroom and Husband of our race. We shall owe the continuance and elevation of them to the growing belief that all things in heaven and earth stand not upon some shifting sand of legal or of priestly inventions, but in Him Who was before all worlds, and Who will abide when all that has been merely the work of our hands shall be dissolved.