Whit-Sunday

“Wherefore He saith, When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.”—Ephesians iv. 8.

Festivals, like this of Whitsuntide, awaken a sad feeling in the hearts of many amongst us. We say, “These days meant something once; they called forth a strange, undefinable gladness. They were signs of a fellowship between men of the same neighbourhood, of the same nation,—even of different nations. They worked themselves into the very tissue of human life. They fixed epochs; they marked when solemn assemblies were to be convened, when great enterprises were to be undertaken. Lawyers and politicians could not regulate their business without reference to them. Above all, they were popular. The peasant and the mechanic, however little he might understand about their more mysterious signification, was certain that they had a signification. They spoke to him in a language clearer than the language of books is ever likely to become to him,—perhaps clearer than it is to those who read them most intelligently and laboriously.”

So many speak; so most of us, at some time or other, have thought. And then, probably, according to the mood of our minds at that time, or our education, or our opinions, we have internally added: “Well, this is over now; only the shadow of the name lasts, and that is disappearing.” Or we console ourselves with the reflection that what was linked, as we suppose, to so many superstitious thoughts of miraculous agency and priestly power should be doomed to perish. Or we dwell on the compensation for the loss which is supplied, or may sometime be supplied, by a more general book-culture. Or we congratulate ourselves that amongst us at least there remains just enough of traditional reverence for these seasons to make it possible that by due care, perhaps by some unwonted ceremonies in the observance of them, the old affection for them may be restored.

These contradictory feelings are equally characteristic of our time; not of different men, but of the same man. The zealous reverer of old ecclesiastical customs this year may denounce the utter unreality of such experiments the next; the man who counts nothing precious which does not bear the image and superscription of this age, may begin to sigh for that which is passed away; he who supposed there was something hopeful in the attachment of Englishmen to the habits and recollections of their fathers, may pronounce them to be the most wretchedly secular of all people, immersed in business, utterly careless of everything that is not material. Sometimes the result of these meditations is utter indifference and recklessness; sometimes it is a determination to uphold a stern Puritanism, because that seems most accordant with our character; sometimes it is a renunciation of all our cold, island peculiarities: “for what,” we ask, “does a Church mean, if it is to separate from us all peoples, when it should be the sign of our union with them?”

My brethren, there is still one possibility left; and it is of that I wish to speak this afternoon. May not Whitsuntide be very much more to us than it ever was to our forefathers? May it not be less of a shadow, more of a substance, to us than it was to them? May it not in its inmost signification mix with all our common transactions as it once did, as it still does in some degree, in its outward forms? May it not sustain our practical, business-like habits? May it not connect them with something more of life and joy than we usually suppose to be compatible with them? May it not preserve us from some of our dry book tendencies, by showing what there is beneath the letter of books with which our hearts may hold converse? May it not teach us to hold more firmly than ever that reverence for the invisible, for the spiritual, that dislike of the idolatrous, the merely external, which Puritanism has witnessed for? May it not give us a sense of that glory that is enshrined in all nature and art, which Puritanism has refused to recognize? May it not oblige us to prize, as we never have prized, all the gifts of which we as a nation have been made stewards, all that is peculiar and distinctive of ourselves? May it not unite us to the whole of Christendom, as we never were united in any foregone age, when we joined with them in confessing a visible father of Christendom?

That this, which is possible, will become actual, I believe, not because I have any confidence in any efforts which we can make to preserve that which we have, or to recover that which we have lost, or to acquire that which was denied to elder ages; not because I am ignorant what contempt has been deserved and earned by those of us who have devised ingenious schemes for establishing alliances with other Churches, for fencing ourselves in our isolation from all Churches, for constituting some new Church that shall supplant all which exists; but because I find in the restlessness which invents such schemes, and in their failure, proofs that God is at work amongst us, rousing us to a sense of our needs, humbling us by a discovery of our impotence, preparing us for issues which are entirely beyond our imagination, but which are shadowed forth in the previous history of the Church and the Nations, and without which the most positive statements and promises of Scripture must prove fallacious and abortive.

I spoke last Sunday of Ascension Day as a witness of a victory actually accomplished for the human race over all powers that had held it in subjection, of an actual glorification of Man in the person of Him Who is declared to be the Head of every man. Such are the direct assertions of this Epistle to the Ephesians. All its doctrine is set at naught, all its practical exhortations are turned into pompous inanities, if these assertions are denied or emptied of their force and universality. That they had been denied, that they had been emptied of their force and universality, not by one section of Christendom but by both its sections, by that which vaunts of its Catholicism, by that which vaunts of its Protestantism, I acknowledged. The cause of the apostasy in each appeared to be the same, though the method in which it has worked was different. The Headship of Christ over that society which the Apostle affirms to be His body had been, to all intents and purposes, disbelieved by those who yet talked of themselves as the Catholic Church. It had reconstituted itself in another head. It had affirmed him to be the bond and ground of its universality. It had thereby separated Heaven from earth, the invisible world from the visible. And yet it had kept up a show of their connection; had substituted symbols for the reality; had galvanized a decapitated corpse and made it mimic the acts and assume the attributes of a living body. No such substitution of a vicarious for a real Christ,—of a mortal endued with absolute power to hold men captive, to prohibit all free exercises of thought and life—for one who is passed into the Heavens that He might lead captivity captive, is sanctioned amongst us. We bear witness against it. We like to dwell upon the facts in history—even to strain them further than they will go—which prove that the Monarch of Christendom has been, and is likely to be, worse than the ordinary monarch of the nation; more base, more covetous, more eager for the worldly aggrandizement of his own kindred, than those who are but called secular, and who by strictest law may transmit their honours to their heirs. We note these facts industriously; we cull them as choice morsels out of the narrative in which they are embedded; we turn away with a not very honest dislike from any indications of an opposite kind which we suppose may weaken their effect. And yet, after all, the unbelief which is at the root of this Papal outrage upon the rights of the Son of Man is dwelling in our hearts, is affecting all our thoughts and all our acts. We suppose the Church to consist of a number of religious parties, each professing its own opinions, each bound together by a certain name of its own. We talk cantingly and insincerely of the melancholy divisions which exist amongst us, and of our great wish that all would unite. But we have no faith that all are united in one Head. We have no faith that He has led captive the captivity to these sects, notions, and names. We have no faith that it is His purpose to gather all together in one. That is to say, we do not acknowledge the fact of an Ascension as St. Paul acknowledged it, more than those whom we denounce.

Or, if we hold ourselves in a measure free from these sectarian alliances—if we refuse to be sectarian outside of the National Church or within it—that very phrase, National Church, becomes continually an excuse for the same forgetfulness of the Universal Head, for the same unbelief that all principalities and powers are put under His feet. A National Church should mean, a Church which exists to purify and elevate the mind of a nation; to give those who make and administer and obey its laws, a sense of the grandeur of law and of the source whence it proceeds; to tell the rulers of the nation, and all members of the nation, that all false ways are ruinous ways, that truth is the only stability of our time or of any time. It should exist to make men tremble at the voice of God speaking to them in their consciences, to tell them that what He is telling them will be proclaimed before the universe, that every deed which men wish to hide shall be brought forth into the clear and open day. This should be the meaning of a National Church: a nation wants a Church for these purposes mainly; a Church is abusing its trust if it aims at any other or lower purposes. Is that the conception of it amongst us or amongst you? If the Church becomes such a Church as I have described, will the easy, comfortable men of England like it? will they tolerate it? Do they not tolerate it because they take it to be something altogether different from this? Do they not suppose that they have hired the clergy, at a certain price, to keep the lower classes from breaking loose; and that we, your servants, are only entitled to our wages so long as we prove by our acts that we confess no higher masters; so long as it is evident that we regard the temporary maxims and conventions of society as paramount to the laws which are not of to-day or yesterday, but come forth from the mouth of the Eternal God? Can you or we adhere to terms so ridiculous, so self-contradictory as these? Must you not discover that we fail to do the work for which you say you have engaged us, when we execute it upon such conditions? You wish us to preach to the people out of the Bible; but the Bible bids us tell the people that Christ is the actually living Head of all principalities and powers. If we keep back that part of our message, we deny the whole of it. If we proclaim that part of it, what becomes of our bargain with you, which proceeds upon a theory of the universe that is the very opposite of this?

I repeat these statements; with God’s help I will not be weary of repeating them, not only because I believe they are especially needed for this time, but because the hopes which I have expressed respecting the good which we are still to derive from this festival of Whitsuntide, are inseparably connected with them.

The text speaks of gifts which were bestowed on man when Christ had ascended on high and led captivity captive. Those gifts were witnesses of a fellowship established between Heaven and earth; of a direct relation between human beings and their Father in Heaven. Supposing the Church on earth to be divided from the Church in Heaven; supposing it to have another head than the Son of Man and the Son of God, the character of these gifts must be changed, or they must have ceased altogether. Each opinion has been adopted, and has become the faith or the unbelief of a portion of Christendom. The (so-called) Catholic portion of it affirms that powers descend now, as of old, upon the rulers of the Church—powers of absolution, powers of discernment of spirits, powers of healing. All these belong to a purely miraculous economy; they are exceptions from the law of human life; they establish the dignity and dominion of certain especial persons. Certain officers possess transcendent functions; certain saints can work miracles. By an effort of faith these officers are to be recognized as unlike other human beings, these saints are to be reverenced for their powers of breaking through the order of God’s world. Above all, such gifts may be expected from that which is not alive, but dead. Relics are more likely to produce wonders than actual beings who speak and breathe.

Think of these notions, and then read those chapters in the Epistle to the Corinthians which treat of spiritual gifts, or this chapter in the Epistle to the Ephesians. Observe how carefully everything in the Apostle’s discourse is grounded, not upon some great exception in the course of God’s Providence, but upon a universal truth which has been manifested for men, of which the Church is the appointed witness and proclaimer. Observe how he warns the Corinthians against the mere admiration of strangeness and novelty in these gifts, to which people educated among heathen enchantments were so liable. Observe how he points out the utility of the gifts as a special criterion of their worth. Observe how lightly he esteems the mere startling accidents of such endowments; how he speaks of these as transitory and belonging to childhood. Observe how everywhere he opposes the living Spirit to the dumb idols, the dead things to which in their time of darkness they had attached sacredness and efficiency. Observe how, in that Epistle to the Corinthians, and even more in this to the Ephesians, government, orders, offices, are all declared to be for the good of the whole family; and to be signs of the care of the Father of that family for it and for all its members, and of the intercourse which there is between Him and them, in the Mediator. Observe how the Spirit, to Whom all these gifts are referred, Who is said to be ever ready to awaken them in those who have become forgetful and torpid, is treated as the Spirit of Unity, the Spirit of Love, ever proceeding afresh from Him in Whom He dwells perfectly, to supply any joint, to make every joint minister to the well-being of the whole. Ponder this difference well, and then ask yourselves whether the gifts that were given to men because Christ has ascended on high and has led captivity captive, can mean those which degrade nine-tenths of men into brutes, that a little fraction of them may be raised into gods.

But have we not avoided that danger by speaking of these gifts of the Spirit as belonging only to the first age of the Church, and as being withdrawn so soon as the mission of Jesus and His apostles had been sufficiently proved? I do not see that we have in the least avoided this danger, of exalting certain persons and of proportionally depressing the whole kind; and I think we have incurred other dangers about as terrible. We have not escaped the conceit and insolence which accompany priestcraft; we have only altered the objects of it. Men have special talents, which they sometimes from an old superstition call gifts. They are conscious that they have. They are told not to refer them to any inspiration of God. They have no reason therefore to feel that they serve any purpose, but to exalt them above their fellows. The weaker become merely inflated; the stronger become tyrants, over a circle narrower or wider. What signifies the variety of gifts, if all are turned into an excuse for pretension and rivalry; if none are regarded as qualifications for awful ministries, as trusts for which we must give account?

Meantime we have been misrepresenting the gifts which we suppose were confined to the Apostolical age, as much as we have been abusing our own. What was the special Pentecostal gift? The power of speaking to men of different tribes concerning the wonderful works of God. Surely such a power was a sign that a barrier was broken down, not that a new barrier was raised; that human beings were all treated as having a relation to God as to each other, not that a few were admitted to an intercourse from which the rest were excluded; that the most divine and sacred language is the most common language, not that a few are glorified by discovering their unlikeness to the majority. What were these powers of healing? “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth,” in the name of Him Who was exalted that He might be the Head of every man, so they spoke to the cripple at the gate of the Temple, “rise up and walk.” It was a sign that the Lord and Giver of Health, the Lord and Giver of Life, was stronger than the powers of disease and death, and those might in His strength be defied. What were the powers which fitted them to preach, to govern, to baptize, to give the bread and wine of life? All were of the same character. All pointed to the coming in of a universal human dispensation; all “were for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” Can words be more expressive? What can they signify, if they do not signify that these gifts were to carry the Apostles altogether beyond themselves; were to make them servants of that generation and of all generations? What can they signify, but that the gifts of which they had the first-fruits were for all times; that their grandeur consisted in their adaptation to the circumstances of men in every region of the earth?

How much truer, then, has been the common faith, the common joy, which Whitsuntide has called forth in one country and another, Romish and Protestant, than the limitations which Romanists and Protestants have each discovered for it! What a deep faith then has been in the hearts of men, not due to the learning of doctors and casuists, but setting it at nought and rising above it; that Christ, “having gone up on high,” has indeed “received gifts for men”! What we have to desire is, that this faith should be no longer a mere blind faith, that it should be able to justify itself; as it will do, when the plain facts of human life are brought side by side with the express words of Scripture, and they are used to interpret each other. We have amongst us, in various measures, gifts of speech, gifts of healing, gifts of government. As might be expected, as ought to be the case, if there is such an order as St. Paul speaks of, they are distributed to different persons; some are almost wanting in treasures with which others are richly endowed. But speech itself, that wonderful mystery, the sign of our fellowship with each other, the sign of our relation to a spiritual world, as much as our sight and hearing and touch are the sign of our relation to an external world; this is a common inheritance; this poor and rich, high and low, share together. The great misery of us all is, that we do not appreciate the awfulness of these gifts, what is implied in the possession of them, what responsibilities to man and to God they lay us under. The worth of the special gifts is measured by the money they will bring in; more refined and less practical spirits prefer the rewards of vanity to those of pelf. The general gift is turned to the uses of slander and lying. The words which proceed from Him Whose name is the Word of God, are declared by the wise of the earth, who generalize their maxims from what they see and do, to be counters which we may traffic with as we will; instruments for concealing the thoughts which they are to embody. What can scatter such opinions and the acts which establish them and flow from them? What can make us honest and true, not in some extraordinary sense, but in the commonest sense which those epithets can bear? Nothing, I think, but that enlightening of the eyes of the understanding which St. Paul desired for the Ephesians, that we may perceive the greatness of our calling, the reality and nature of our gifts, the law under which they must be exercised, the power that is present with us at every moment, to quicken us and direct us in the use of them. Has the thought ever flashed upon us in any hour of our lives:—“The words which I learned in my nursery were not lies; there has been a Spirit with me by night and day. It is the Spirit of God Himself: He has been enabling me to use those powers which I have been continually inclined to waste. He has prompted me to turn the powers to the service of right and truth which I would have sold to selfishness and falsehood. He has given me every true social impulse. He has reminded me of a Father from whose house I have strayed, of a Family of which I am a member, of a Kingdom of righteousness and love of which I have been made an heir”? If such a thought has dawned upon us even for a moment, have we not been certain for that moment: “It must be true; if all things else should prove deceitful and unreal, that will be brought forth in full manifestation by the fires of the last day.” And is it not then true for all moments as well as that one? Is it not the truth of our lives? the truth which makes life more than a fleeting shadow; the truth which can enable us to bear up under the thought of an Eternal Substance, with which we are every moment in contact?

Yes! the assurance that the Pentecostal gifts are not withdrawn, that we are all receiving them every day fresh from Him Who first bestowed them, would not, taken by itself, be a joyful assurance; it would be an overwhelming one. The sense of such a stewardship brings with it the recollection of an unfaithfulness that no words of confession are adequate to utter, for which no acts of repentance can make amends. But there is an assurance beneath this. It was expressed in the latter clause of that verse in the Psalm from which St. Paul’s words are quoted, “That the Lord God might dwell among them.” This is the Pentecostal revelation, which alone makes the Pentecostal gifts intelligible or blessed. The Spirit of God is dwelling amongst us, is dwelling in us. The rain and the dew are apt symbols of His influences; but they do not denote that Living and Personal Presence, that abiding Friend and Comforter Who proceeds from the Father and the Son, Who is the bond of their unalterable union, Who claims men as heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. The truth that He is the gift which the Son, when He had ascended on high and led captivity captive, received for men, is the truth of which the Holy Catholic Church exists to bear witness. Churches have dared invert the order of God’s revelation, to transpose the articles of the Creed. They have placed the faith in the Church first, in the Holy Ghost second. They have made the Spirit dependent upon the body which He quickens; not the body upon the Spirit. So the divine gifts have been shrivelled into enchantment and tricks of legerdemain. So men have been taught to shut God out of His own universe, and to suppose that He was exercising no real government over their acts, confining Him to certain sudden and casual and trivial interferences with the course of Nature and with human affairs. So science has been divorced from Faith, and the empire of Chance set up to subvert the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who have sown this wind will reap the whirlwind. They who are to be witnesses that God’s divine order has triumphed over the magicians and soothsayers which had counterfeited it, have adopted the arts of the magicians and soothsayers. They will meet with a race of new adepts and conjurors, who will be too strong for them, and will leap on them and overcome them. “Jesus they knew, and Paul they knew, but who are these,” that in the name of Jesus and of Paul practise devilries instead of casting out devils?

Nor can we escape that same danger. The faith in spiritual agency is so strong in the hearts of men, that the most resolute and the most scoffing materialism cannot cope with it. The wit of the eighteenth century could banish the Gospel from the salons and the seats of learning; but it could not prevent Cagliostro from entering into either. The money-worship of the nineteenth century may prove a more effectual antagonist of the Gospel than wit ever was or can be; but will it hinder, is it hindering, the growth of spiritual impostures? Are they not growing up under its influence? Are they not beginning to form a portion of its services?

To proclaim the Spirit of Truth against these spirits of lies—to proclaim that the Spirit is verily with us and striving with us, cultivating all the faculties He has conferred, bringing us to repentance, seeking to mould us after God’s image, seeking to make us helpers and not destroyers of each other, this is the work that is left to the Church, this is the one hope for the age. And it is a good hope, a hope that will not make us ashamed. For it blends with the deepest convictions of other times; it meets the deepest necessities of this. Pentecost taught the Jews to shout at the miracle of seeds that lay deep in the earth springing up and bearing fruit in God’s appointed season, according to His beautiful order; taught them to connect this with that Law which He gave to men, the law which was to order their paths. Whitsuntide preserves both lessons and translates them into a higher. The Spirit Who first brooded over the darkness and made it pregnant, quickens from hour to hour whatever looks dead, brings what is hidden to light. That Spirit writes God’s laws in men’s hearts, that they may be His people, and He may be their God. Do we not want such a quickener of our death, such a guide out of restlessness into calmness and peace? Do we not need such a One to remind us of God’s law day by day, to fix it, to fix Him in our inmost affections? Are we not in need of One Who shall prick us in the heart and make us cry together, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Are we not in need of One Who shall answer that cry which He has raised, as no human lips can answer it; by working in us to will and do of all God’s good pleasure? Will not the belief that such a One has been given and is with us still, after it has wrought in us a godly repentance, give us that joy and singleness of heart in our common duties, in our daily feasts, which the disciples experienced when they had learned to call nothing their own, but to call God their Father, and all men their brothers?