# Sermons, Volume 3: A Modern Paraphrase

*Sermons, Volume 3, by Frederick Denison Maurice, restated paragraph by paragraph in modern English. This paraphrase follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. Drafted with claude-sonnet-5; reviewed by a human editor.*

## THE JUDGMENT DAY AN OBJECT OF INTENSE DESIRE

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Advent Sunday
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[November]{.smallcaps} 29, 1857
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> "*Arise, O God, and judge Thou the earth: for Thou shalt take all heathen to Thine inheritance*."—[Psalm]{.smallcaps} lxxxii. 8 (*Prayer-book Version*).

[In]{.smallcaps} the Collect for this day we give thanks that Christ has come in great humility, and we pray for grace to meet Him when He comes again in glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead. We are used to thinking of one Advent as full of blessing and the other as full of terror: we bid men hope because Christ was born and died for them, and tremble because He will come to judge all nations.

The Psalmists and Prophets did not speak this way. They earnestly desired that God would arise to judge the earth — not for their own sakes, as though they alone would be spared what others must suffer, but for the earth's sake, as its deliverance from misery and bondage. Nor did they desire it chiefly as victory for Israel, though they expected that too; they believed God would take the heathen for *His* inheritance, that this judgment would be the full establishment of *His* kingdom.

There is another difference, no less startling. We divide the Advent of Mercy from the Advent of Judgment by a vast stretch of time — a long day of grace since Christ came as Saviour, and only at its end will He come as Judge upon those who rejected Him. But the Prophets bring the two Advents together as parts of one transaction, scarcely separable. I will give two instances, both from Isaiah, the Advent Prophet, both quoted in the Gospels. The first opens Isaiah 42, quoted by St. Matthew when Jesus withdrew from the Pharisees' plotting, healed the multitudes, and charged them not to make Him known — fulfilling the words: "Behold my Servant... He shall not strive, nor cry... till He send forth judgment unto victory. And in His name shall the Gentiles trust." Here are the marks of a King coming in great humility; St. Matthew sees Christ's silencing of those He healed as fulfilling this description — yet he will not sever from it the words "He shall send forth judgment unto victory," for to do so would destroy the sense.

The other instance opens Isaiah 61, the passage our Lord read in the synagogue at Nazareth: "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me... to preach good tidings unto the meek... to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." What fuller account of a deliverer could there be? Jesus applies it to Himself: "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." But His hearers knew what followed in that very sentence — "and the day of vengeance of our God" — interposed between words of comfort on either side.

If these were isolated or doubtful texts, we might explain them away. But they are type sentences, chosen in the New Testament precisely to help us understand others like them. This joining of opposite subjects — times far apart — marks the Evangelists and Apostles as much as the older prophets. They rarely speak of Christ as having come without also bidding His followers wait and watch for His coming. The writer to the Hebrews says, "Yet a very little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not tarry" — written for the most practical purpose, to warn men clinging to old institutions that these must give way to something greater. It was no time for playing with double meanings; the Christians of Palestine faced an actual crisis, and this was the language an inspired teacher judged fittest to prepare them. How is this habit of speech to be explained? What made it natural to the Apostles? What does it clash with in our own thinking? I think a little reflection will show.

I\. The Church does not separate our Lord's Advent from His Incarnation; His coming to earth was His coming into our nature. This is what the Collect means by coming "in great humility" — He stooped into a condition not properly His own, as St. Paul says: "He being in the form of God, took upon Him the form of a servant." The Apostles joined to this another thought, without which it is incomplete: that man was made in God's image, and that He who is the perfect Image of God alone can show forth true manhood. God could not, as in Hindu fictions, become incarnate in a mere animal; for the Son to become Man was to fulfil His own purpose in creating the world. Yet this did not lessen His condescension to the conditions of fallen man, for men were also chosen by Christ to be God's children. Hebrews reconciles both: "Forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same." Flesh and blood did not belong to Him — He assumed them, to show forth in them the perfect mind of God and the perfect mind of Man, His child and servant.

What follows? This Advent was the Advent of the true King, Head, and *Judge* of men — it could be nothing else, being the Advent of the Son of God, after whose likeness men were made. Those who did not receive Him felt this to be so. They found themselves before a terrible heart-searcher, One who saw what was in them and brought it to light. He was like them, spoke with them, ate and drank with them — yet He still made them tremble, still made them feel God near. You say He was meek and gentle, that He did not break the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax. True — but is there nothing terrible in a meekness that sets my own lack of it in relief? If I do break the bruised reed, is not One who never does so an awful presence to me? Am I meant to be like Him? What does His coming in my nature mean if I am not? And if I am meant to be like Him, then His very presence judges me for failing to be.

That was the feeling of Scribes and Pharisees, and the secret of their hatred. But did He not say, "I am not come to judge the world, but to save it"? He did, and proved it true — He passed sentence on no one, Scribe, Pharisee, Publican, or Adulteress. He came to unite all to Himself, to be the Light of the World, saying to every one, "Follow me." This was the promise of salvation for every man who wished to be a man — that he could rise from a selfish life into a true human one; the promise of salvation for mankind. The Head of the race had come; its members were no longer meant to be atoms warring against each other. The Son of David was proving the sacredness of every Greek and Barbarian, freeman and bondsman. But a promise must be fulfilled. Christ's coming in humility did not complete either the Salvation or the Judgment; His Resurrection and Ascension were to carry forward what the Incarnation began. The message of full redemption and of an Advent to judgment had to rest on those.

II\. And it did. Christ, said the Apostles, died for our sins and rose for our justification. This was Peter's message to his own people: "God, having raised up His Son Jesus, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities." The gift of the Spirit witnessed that He was exalted "to be both Lord and Christ" — but that same Spirit prepared them for a great and terrible day of the Lord. Peter, apostle to the circumcised, was taught that his message could not be confined to his own people: what concerned the union of God with man was false unless it was universal. God was judging the earth and claiming the heathen for His inheritance.

Paul saw this more deeply and clearly still. He was the witness of a justification for every man, for mankind — Christ sent for the remission of sins to Gentile as well as Jew, the Gentiles fellow-heirs, members of Christ's body. And therefore Paul was the great preacher of judgment: the revelation of God's righteousness for men's justification was itself, he said, "the revelation of God's wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness." The Jewish hypocrites had not been mistaken — One without guile had come, condemning their guile, and able to raise them out of it; therefore He pronounced accursed those who clung to falsehood. This truth, imperfectly brought home to consciences by Him appearing in humility, must be brought home in full power by Him clothed in His Father's glory. He had gone up on high, the Apostles said, not to be separated from men but to claim His kingdom over them, to claim for each his true inheritance as a child of God. The Father exalted Him, and in Him the whole race He had joined Himself to. Men's desire for immortality and fellowship with God — a desire that had taken strange, even monstrous forms, that had never died out in any nation or man, strongest in the noblest nations and wisest men, yet distorted by pride, ambition, tyranny — this desire, when it seemed most exhausted, Christ had vindicated and fulfilled, not for one elect nation but for all nations, not for sages and saints but for serfs and outcasts.

And therefore the judgment of men and nations was at hand. The Son of Man who had appeared in humility would be revealed in His own glory to every people, and to each person within them; all nations gathered before Him, every eye seeing Him. Call this language figurative if you like — but if the fact of an incarnation is admitted, if it means anything definite, the language is exact: there must be exactly this trial of nations, and of every man, to see where they stand. The nation that rejected the Son of Man, that tried to hold together without Him, was rent apart with a great crash; fragments of a building two thousand years in the rising were scattered to the ends of the earth. In that crash the illuminated eye saw the sentence on the nations — God had come to judge the earth, was taking the heathen for His inheritance; an old age was passing, a new one beginning. And what concerned mankind must concern every man. He may never have heard the Apostles' announcement, but he must stand before the Son of Man; by the very law of his existence he must be brought into the Light that had always been his light, that had made him aware of his own acts and thoughts, that had shown him to himself. He may have found ways to shrink from that light, to quench it — such arts will then be impossible. He must be seen as he is, in the full brightness of noonday, not amid mists and shadows.

III\. So you see how impossible it was for this Advent to judgment not to be part of the Gospel the Apostles preached — how inconsistent that Gospel would have been without it. Was Christ truly the Being they said, and yet to remain forever hidden? Was not His revelation to man implied in His own existence and man's? Must not that revelation be infinitely desirable, if His coming in the flesh was to be desired? Must it not have seemed to the Apostles their highest duty to declare this revelation and judgment not as a distant possibility but as *the* certainty on which men might act, whatever else remained uncertain?

But now substitute for this idea of an Advent the mere notion of a birth at a certain time in Bethlehem, the birth of the Founder of our religion, from which we date our calendar as Muslims date theirs from the flight to Medina — and see how unnatural and incredible all the Apostles' conclusions become to us. We may give Christ whatever glorious titles we please, but then He is only a Man exalted above men, not the Root and Head of Humanity. There is no "great humility" in His life on earth; instead He seems to rise by degrees from the lowest ground. And though we say we believe He will come to judge us, we mean it only as we might say anyone else will judge us — not the judgment of a Person near to us, concerned with our lives at every moment, to whom our thoughts are always open, but of one standing aloof, leaving us till that day to take our own course. How can the thought of such a being suddenly appearing to decide the eternal destinies of us all be anything but a thought we shrink from — for others' sake if we think ourselves better, for our own if we honestly measure our faults? What keeps this expectation from being appalling except our feeble, vague, rare thoughts of it? No warning from divines stops us falling back on the old question, "Where is the promise of His coming," the old argument, "since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the foundation of the world." Can even Churchmen help saying in their hearts, "the Lord delayeth His coming," and so treating the household He seems to have deserted as fair game for their own tyranny?

IV\. But the question can be answered, the argument overturned — more clearly for Churchmen than for others. All things have *not* continued as they were since the fathers fell asleep. There have been changes and revolutions; the mere garments of truth have worn out, untruths laid bare, the world subjected to continual trials; only what could not be shaken has remained. Christ's ministers have claimed all His powers delegated to them, free to use for cursing as for blessing — in vain; He has kept His word, "Lo, I am with you always," appearing to avenge their presumption, to defend the helpless they oppressed, to show how little He needed them to vindicate His truth. Because He sat on the throne judging right, the Eastern Churches, withered by controversy, morally spent, blaspheming His name through their divisions, quailed before the Muslim armies possessed by a fierce conviction of one God. Because He sat on the throne judging right, the Western Churches, still grounded in His divinity and manhood, withstood that shock and grew into a united Christendom. Because He sat on the throne judging right, the might of Emperors and Popes could not withstand the words from the cell of a poor German monk. Because He has sat on the throne judging right, the dogmas of sects have proved as powerless as those of the hierarchy to hold any lasting sway over mankind — both feeble except where they testified to some part of His character or His dominion. These are assurances that the veil over the nations, hiding their true King and Deliverer, will at last be lifted, that all things will be gathered together in Christ. And though fanciful pictures of this final judgment have never restrained a crime or encouraged a virtue, the simple proclamation of it as truth has not been powerless: God has been testifying in every conscience that the hour is at hand when each must be tried, asked by the Son of Man whether he owned or despised Him in the least of his brethren.

We will not be able to thrust the thought of a Judgment Day into a corner, reducing it to a school dogma or a child's picture. It will come with the sternest reality, meeting us in the council chamber and the exchange, glaring at us through Indian mutinies and commercial panics. We will feel that One we thought far off in Heaven is concerned with our deeds and schemes on earth. Shall we not learn that it is good to be judged, and most miserable to escape judgment? That what makes things manifest is Light, that Light is armor to put on and darkness an enemy to fight? That Christ came in great humility to deliver us from our own darkness into His marvellous light? That to possess and enjoy that light fully is to rise to the immortal life He has won, which dwells perfectly in Him? Shall we not look forward, as Apostles and Saints did, to His full revelation, believing He will indeed take the nations for His inheritance and fill the earth with His glory? Shall we need confused notions of space and time to trouble our belief that when He is seen as He is, all the living and the dead, in every age, who have shared His light — whether they knew His name or never heard it, walked in His Light or their own darkness — must be brought into judgment? Shall we not rejoice in that judgment, sure it will be without error or corruption, that it will scatter all that is vile and false, being the judgment of Him who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time?

## THE GOSPEL OF HOPE

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Second Sunday in Advent
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(NOT PREACHED)
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[December]{.smallcaps} 6, 1857
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> "*That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope*."—[Romans]{.smallcaps} XV. 4.

*The passage:* Whatever was written before was written for our instruction, so that through patience and the encouragement the Scriptures give we might have hope.

[Many]{.smallcaps} people ask how we can recommend the Bible to Hindoos and Mussulmans—what authority it has that the Vedas or the Koran, said to be dictated directly to the Prophet, lack; what apologies will convince the learned; how the ignorant can be brought to feel that so strange a book deserves their attention.

Various plausible answers have been and will be given. But I think St. Paul can give us more light than any modern doctor, however familiar with our age. He was forced to face this very question, being Apostle to the Gentiles. The Scriptures he knew from childhood belonged to the Jews—a history of one separated people, whose songs and maxims asserted their own distinction, celebrated their triumphs, and seemed to doom other races to overthrow. What was he to do with these Scriptures among the very heathen whom the highest authorities believed shut out from God's favor?

This doubt was tangled further by the opinions of converts. Some Jewish converts held that Gentiles must be circumcised before the Scriptures' promises applied to them at all. Some Gentile converts, calling St. Paul their spiritual father, thought the Law flatly contradicted the Gospel, valuable only to show how far they had surpassed those still bound to it. Some Alexandrian converts dismissed the letter of the Old Scriptures as nearly worthless but treasured a hidden philosophy within it, reserved for the initiated.

Which view did St. Paul take? The Epistle appointed for this Sunday, from which my text comes, is the classic passage on the subject. He speaks directly of the Jewish Scriptures' use for Gentiles, quoting Old Testament passages that apply to them. He calls Christ a "Minister of the Circumcision to confirm the promises made to the Fathers, that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy." He takes up a phrase his Jewish opponents likely used often—a Root of Jesse who should reign over the Gentiles and in whom they should trust—and turns it to his own purpose. And he begins and ends by treating Hope, kindled through the Scriptures, as their great blessing, praying that the God of Hope fill them with joy and peace in believing, so they abound in hope through the Holy Ghost.

This differs from any of the views mentioned above. At first it seems to answer none of them directly. Strict Jews, exclusive Gentiles, and philosophical Alexandrians alike might object: hope is only one of several emotions Scripture stirs—so is fear—so how does fixing on hope explain the Scriptures' fitness for Jew or Gentile, for one age or another? The objection sounds reasonable. Let's test it.

I\. Suppose St. Paul addressing those who thought the Old Scriptures spoke only to the Jew. Their grounds were plain: the whole record concerned a covenant with one family, the fencing off of that family, its lapses through contact with surrounding nations, the punishments that followed, the blessings for faithfulness, the curse for idolatry. It was not just particular texts but the whole shape of the record that seemed to support this reading.

"Granted," says the Apostle. "I feel the force of this more than any of you. But since I've discovered these Scriptures to be books of hope, I feel the worth of that separation, that discipline, those protests against idolatry, that accumulating sentence against idolatrous practice, more than ever before. For that separation must have had a purpose beyond itself: some manifestation of God, some dominion of God over men, some final rooting out of idolatry never yet seen in the world. Nothing less can satisfy Scripture's own words, the promises holy men lived and died by, the longings that were the most real, not the most illusory, part of their lives. So the Prophets' words about the Gentiles are not stray exceptions—they reveal where their highest and soberest thoughts were tending all along, how far God's thoughts exceeded their own, and how hope itself is only possible because we are made in the image of the God of Hope."

This, I think, is also St. Paul's answer to the idea that Scripture balances hope against fear. Scripture teaches two kinds of fear. One is fear of the evil that follows distrust in God—treating Him as enemy rather than deliverer, doubting His presence or provision. Scripture holds up examples of these consequences as warnings, and in doing so gives unbounded encouragement to trust and hope in God as the one who inspires and fulfills hope. The other kind is the fear of the Lord Himself, the righteous God—a fear the worshippers of visible gods could never feel, since such gods could be mocked or scolded even by those who feared them, as old Greek comedy and modern Italian peasants' talk to their idols both show. Awe belongs only to what we know is holy and real, made by no one but our maker. The Psalmists and Prophets feared the God who delivered them from bondage, who was faithful and forgiving: "There is forgiveness with Thee, therefore shalt Thou be feared." Their countrymen who lost faith in such a God, believing instead in one unforgiving, were cowards, not fearers of God—they feared where no fear was. The godly feared God because their hope was in Him; take away that hope, and their fear would vanish too.

II\. Then there were those who boasted of the Gospel and the New Covenant of their baptism, and so spoke scornfully of the Law and Old Covenant. St. Paul could understand this too, since his own language about the Law's weakness and the Gospel's strength seemed to justify it. Could he now retract his own words, find some fine distinction that saved the old books without admitting he'd overstated Gentile privileges? He used no evasion, needed no such distinction. The one principle that Scripture was Scripture of Hope let him show the Gentiles they would lose enormously by renouncing the Jewish books, by cutting their Church off from the Church of the Fathers. Everything about the stability of their faith turned on whether they saw it as having dropped suddenly from heaven under Augustus, or as the unfolding of truth that had existed from the beginning, revealed by One whose goings forth were from everlasting. Receiving the Jewish Scriptures as testimony to God's long preparation of the world gave them a sense of the permanence of God's counsels and of God Himself. Rejecting them, dating their Church only from Christ's Advent or Pentecost, would leave them with no sense of progressive revelation, no light growing brighter toward the perfect day—only the notion that God's principles had changed, that the God of the old world had been conquered by the God of the new.

What would this do to their view of their own Gentile ancestors? Would they rise as the Jews fell? No—there would be no witness that the Light had been guiding them through their dark pilgrimage, no sign that the righteous God, though they mistook Him for idols, had been watching and preparing them for something better. Without the Jewish Scriptures testifying to a God of righteousness who cared for all nations, each nation's history would look like nothing but a chain of delusions, and every noble deed or thought of the old heathen world would be traced to some evil source.

What would rejecting the Old Scriptures do to the future? The very distinction between Law and Gospel that justified the rejection would collapse. The New Testament Church would invent its own Law and set it above, or confuse it with, the Gospel entrusted to it. Having discarded the Old Scripture's testimony against idolatry as no longer relevant, it would build a new and worse idolatry—harder to root out because dressed in the titles of the New Dispensation. The world would become not a world of hope but of dark dread, looking not to a God of Hope but to one waiting to cast his creatures into despair.

III\. St. Paul could understand just as easily those who sought a mystical meaning beneath Scripture's letter. He himself had said, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." No one had suffered more from letter-bound Rabbinical commentators, and no one knew them better. But the spirit he found beneath the letter was the spirit of the Son of Man, speaking through every word of the Book to men's hearts and consciences. He would not let phrases or maxims replace the living voice of the living Teacher, or block the connection between Him and His disciples. He never sought obscure or hidden meanings—the most human meaning, the one reaching most directly into the ordinary mind, was for him the clearest sign of divine origin. The forms of utterance varied because the hearers varied, but in every case the Divine Mind sought not to hide itself in veils but to strip away the veils that keep men from understanding. The parable was the simplest way of teaching those slow to hear; the moment their ears opened, Christ spoke plainly of the mysteries of the Kingdom and of the Father.

How different this was from those who thought common people capable only of coarse counterfeits of truth, willing even to feed them falsehoods to sharpen the contrast with the wise! The difference arose because the Apostle saw the Scriptures as written for men's learning, so that through patience and comfort they might have hope; because he saw the whole education of man by his Maker as an education of hope, every hill surmounted opening a wider view, every road leading somewhere; because he believed the knowledge of God, which is eternal life, was meant not for sages alone but for men, in His Son; because he looked forward to obstacles being removed one by one until the earth was filled with the glory of the Lord, and all flesh saw it together.

IV\. I said St. Paul can help us with pressing difficulties that modern teachers cannot. Perhaps I should say instead that he shows us what kind of help we need and where to seek it. Someone who feels keenly the gap between St. Paul's mind and ours has observed that no age has had less living hope than this one. The two facts explain each other: our difference from St. Paul is explained if the spirit of hope that filled his heart has left us. If that is true—and each of our consciences can testify how much ground there is for it—then the apostolic language has become a foreign tongue to nineteenth-century Christians. As long as that gulf remains, no learned criticism, no loud reverence for Scripture's divine authority, will bridge it. We may know more of the text, more of the customs it describes, than our fathers did; we may print fifty thousand copies for their one; we may be far more jealous of doubts about its authenticity—and yet the Book may teach us less, be less dear to us, simply because it once found in our fathers something of hope to receive it and turn its letters into life, and that hope has dried up in us, leaving the letter a mere letter, or a killing one. Wherever this is not so—wherever, on sick-beds or in lonely hovels, with few outward aids, the Book has interpreted itself and become a Word of Life—it is because the Spirit of Hope has come there and found in its words the nourishment such souls crave.

V\. Are all our advantages over our fathers—historical experience, rigorous criticism, the discoveries of travelers, philologers, and students of nature—wasted for lack of this one gift? May we not say instead that God is teaching us, at this very time, how needful and precious these gifts are, and how ready He is to give the one we think withheld? A world of old faiths and traditions, of books and peoples either governed by them or on the verge of losing them, lies open before you, placed under you. You have conquered it, and are reconquering it, chiefly not by arms but by moral energy, endurance, hope. You know that conquest is only the beginning—civilizing it must rest on quite different foundations. You want to know how to recommend your sacred books to a people with so many of their own, how to show that yours carry an authority theirs lack. I answer, in the words of the Apostle to the Gentiles: proclaim your book to be a book of Hope. Show that you believe it fills you with hope for yourselves and for mankind. Then the difference between it and other Shasters, whatever antiquity they claim, will be plain as noonday—not a dry distinction proved by minute comparison or special pleading, but something that will show itself to the conscience of men before God. They will feel it is a book of hope because it kindles hope in them, delivering them from a gloom nothing else has lifted.

I need not prove that the fullest possible knowledge of what these peoples have thought and said will be of immense value to those preaching this Gospel of Hope to circumstances utterly unlike those in which Scripture was written—nor that such knowledge serves best when used to illustrate rather than confute, to bring out the whole truth that exposes and destroys false notions, rather than merely attacking them. Nor need I show that simple men with only a little of this knowledge, but strong sympathy, the gift of recognizing a brother under any disguise, and the glow of living hope, may do great things—provided they know, as such men will, what they cannot do and must leave to others differently trained and armed.

But I must speak of something on which everything else depends: whether we can acquire the very quality we seem most to lack, though it has been remarkably awakened by suffering and necessity—shall I say despair?—in our Indian soldiers, and in civilians turned soldiers when no others were to be had.

I have partly shown how this blessing may reach us. We too may gain it through despair—by finding we have no fountain of hope in ourselves, that what we thought inexhaustible has nearly run dry. So we may learn, as our fathers never did, the force of that strange phrase—the God of Hope. Which of us would have dared use it, had St. Paul not sanctioned it? Which of us would not have found it clashing with some theory of Divine Omniscience or Omnipotence? It is indeed incompatible with all such theories and grand abstract titles by which we fence in the Divine Nature and then congratulate ourselves on the vastness of our own conceptions. But how welcome such a name sounds to the actual fighter whose theories have failed, whose abstractions have vanished at the touch of real suffering, but who needs a living God—incomprehensible, yet able to comprehend and sustain all His creatures! What joy to hear of a God who hopes with us and for us, of whom the highest thing in man is the reflection! What comfort to know a fountain of Hope in Him at which our own springs may be renewed! What meaning it gives to our saddest experiences, to learn we could not know His fullness until we had learned our own emptiness!

And—most cheering of all—these discoveries are not for ourselves alone, but to make us better teachers of the world. "How," the missionary asks, before knowing his field, "am I to convince heathen people the Bible is the Word of God?" Facing them, another question presses harder: the Word of what God? Am I to let this worshipper of Siva think the Destroyer sent this book to declare his will? Am I gathering evidence for divine origin only to have it credited to *that*? What can he do but turn from doubt to prayer: "God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose perfect Image He is, whose will He came to do—save me from blaspheming Your name, from turning the pure witness of You into a witness for Your enemy." And might not the answer come straight from Scripture's own words, unglossed: The God of Hope—it is of Him I must testify, to Him I must ascribe these Scriptures. Doing so, how the people in them breathe again! How certain I become that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God not of the dead but of the living, each handing the torch to the next, the light growing brighter until He who holds the seven stars comes forth Himself! And His coming is to beget men to a new and living hope through the resurrection, to make that hope effectual for all mankind, to promise a final Advent when the Preserver and Deliverer is declared Lord of all, to the Father's glory. Here is a continuous book because it is a book of Hope—one that can cheer those who, amid all confusion, have kept alive the dream of a God made incarnate to deliver, the dream of voluntary sacrifice, the dream of a glorious Avatar. The Book can set these dreams in order, show their substance, strip away what has corrupted them, by naming their source and their fulfillment.

One might expect readier access to Muslim minds, since they honor the same holy men, do not deny Jesus was sent by God, and are familiar with the idea of a sacred book given by God. Facts do not bear this out. Those with so many apparent points of contact with the Gospel present a harder, more impenetrable front than followers of any other faith. Nor is the opposition weakened as the old energies that once made Islam a terror to nations have weakened—the inertia of resistance is now mightier than the old vital force ever was. It should be so: the fatalist's despair should resist a message of hope even more directly than perverted hope does. And it is a solemn warning to Christendom that Scripture's names and maxims, once reduced to mere names, dead letters, or fictitious legend, do worse than fail—they darken and stifle conscience, blocking the living God's voice. The Muslim theory of their book's dictation, wherever it holds sway, makes understanding our book impossible. A book that assumes man made in God's likeness, because the Man is His perfect likeness; that affirms God's Spirit dwells with men's spirits to raise and quicken them; that treats the words of God not as purest when unconnected to human struggle and hope but as proven sacred by their power to awaken human hope and energy—such a book must baffle a people who see an unbridged chasm between God and man, and so end up worshipping the letters they suppose came from God, instead of God Himself.

But though this is not the door through which our Scriptures' hope can reach the Muslim, there must be some door. No people need hope more, none are so driven to dreams of the past—even to hopes of recovering an empire if they cannot recover a faith—to escape the burden of the present. They once hoped to make the world one great Empire of God purged of idolatry; they still look for a final Advent of judgment. Let us show we share both hopes. Let us tell them that what armed force could not accomplish—putting down everything that exalts itself against the invisible God, in heathendom or Christendom—we look to see accomplished by the proclamation that the Kingdoms of the Earth are the Kingdoms of our God and His Christ. Let us show that we leave outward crimes to outward force, but for society's true renewal we hope in Him who came in great humility to reclaim for His Father all the power the heathen gods had usurped, who made the enemies of men His own enemies, and who will come in glorious judgment to satisfy fully the hope of all who have hoped in Him, for themselves and for all mankind.

## TESTS OF THE DELIVERER

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Third Sunday in Advent
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[December]{.smallcaps} 13, 1857
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*The passage:* John, hearing in prison of the works of Christ, sent two of his disciples to ask Him, "Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?"

The Gospel for today was chosen, I have no doubt, mainly for Christ's words about John — that the ministers of the New Covenant are Prophets of the Advent of a King, Messengers to prepare His way, and that their work, however small they may seem, is greater than that of the greatest who came before the Incarnation.

But those who framed our services could not separate that teaching from what called it forth: the message John's disciples brought. That message shows John not as the preacher of repentance or the reprover of Herod, but as a man uncertain about his own mission — wondering whether he had deceived the people in telling them a greater one was coming who would baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Was John, here too, a lesson for the ministers who would follow him? Does the Collect's prayer touch this very question — "Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?"

I\. I have assumed the question expresses a real doubt in John's own mind. Many suppose he asked it only to satisfy his disciples. We would not say that if we met the story in any other book, and I see no reason to say it just because this book is the most honest one about its heroes' weaknesses. Christ's words, "Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me," were part of His answer sent to John — were they not meant specially for him, addressed by One who knew what was in every man? It would be wrong to overlook the disciples, or to forget that John himself sent them with the question. They may well have raised it first, adding another: how could the noblest witness for God be left in prison if the Deliverer were truly at hand? John may never have spoken such thoughts aloud, may even have resisted them — yet resisted, they may have stung and tormented him more than if they had been spoken, for he would know they had not come from outside him but had woken in his own heart out of a brooding, threatening sleep. This, I think, is how such a doubt is generated and ripens in us, and so we naturally attribute it to one who is expressly shown to us as having passions like our own.

II\. If this is reasonable, there is a lesson here for the New Testament minister. Is it that he should shut his ears to his disciples' anxieties and questionings, and scowl at them for feeling what causes him so much pain and self-reproach? No result could be worse than that — worse for those forced to stifle their worst perplexities or feign a satisfaction they do not feel, and worse for the teacher himself, who must either pretend to be better than he is or brood over a scepticism he lacks courage to bring into God's light. The teacher who deals this way with those who look to him is treacherous — to them, and more to his own heart. If he lets them think God is pleased by the suppression of doubts, even doubts that seem most injurious to His providence, he is turning their questioning into unbelief and training them for atheists. If he is afraid to admit he shares their difficulties, pretending to be of a higher nature than they are, he is on his way to becoming a hard, unfeeling Pharisee, secure in himself, incapable of sympathy, and treating God as an enemy. He would not be following John the Baptist, who was brave and sincere; to take this course is to be out of fellowship with everything brave and sincere that has ever lived on God's earth.

III\. There is one fear a teacher may rightly have about such questionings. When they take the form — as they so often do — of a complaint that he has been personally wronged, has received too little reward or suffered too much, they no longer speak to his sympathy or his love of truth, but to his self-conceit; they feed something in him he should wish to kill, not nourish. John's disciples might be excused for thinking his imprisonment a greater proof against the Deliverer's coming than the subjection of their nation to Rome or to its own sins — but John himself could not safely hold such a thought. If he felt himself drifting toward it — toward making his own case the test of God's faithfulness — he would have felt a kind of giddiness that only self-love can produce, confusing a man about his own place in the world and how much the world needs him. Yet how easily the best may be so confused; how necessary that the best should know they face the same danger as the worst.

IV\. Besides these personal doubts, there were others that might trouble earnest, patriotic Jews about whether Jesus could really fulfill the promises to their forefathers. What deliverance had He wrought for Israel? What signs were there that His kingdom, which He preached as John had preached, was actually being established? He called men to repent as John had, yet He mixed with sinners far more than John did, and the most religious avoided Him while He denounced them. Such facts must have troubled John's disciples, and likely added to John's own trouble. He took the one simple, manly course: he did not argue one side against the other, but sent his disciples to Jesus Himself, to ask Him to explain His claims and to see whether He was truly the one they needed.

I can think of no act of John's life more exemplary for later ministers than this. Disciples, or others, come to them full of doubt whether the Gospel has fulfilled its promises. If they have the courage to speak their minds — if they have not concluded that a Christian minister is exactly the person they must not speak to, who would be shocked at their honesty or too committed to his system to be roused from it — they would likely ask whether Christianity, tried for eighteen centuries, has not been found wanting; whether the state of the world, or worse, the sins and divisions of the Church in its most favored parts, is not conclusive against its truth or its power. When such doubts come from someone who would gladly believe if he could, but cannot pretend belief he does not feel, and regards falsehood as damnable, is it of any use to offer clever apologies — to show that Deism or Atheism has just as many contradictions as Christianity, or to argue, all too persuasively, that some cherished conviction must logically be given up? Does taking that course not rob our brother of the very thing he has, and put the Gospel of Christ in the lowest possible position — one of mere defense, as though we knew it could make no positive claim, and were content only to show it no worse than the systems we call godless?

If, as St. Paul taught us last Sunday, the Bible is a book of Hope, recommended to any man, Jew or heathen, only as such — then no method of pleading for it could be less apostolic, more suicidal, than this. Men want to know whether there really is a Saviour of the world who actually saves — and we answer by offering them a document to be accepted because we have clever arguments proving that rejecting it is dangerous, and that, being a revelation from God, it leaves us no darker than if no revelation had been given at all.

And is not the real reason for such arguing, if we are honest, that we do not believe God has revealed Himself or can reveal Himself to men? If we believed that the Jesus to whom John sent his disciples truly is the Christ, the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, should we not also believe He has the power and the will to make Himself known to the hearts and consciences of His creatures? On what other faith did John act? "If this man called the Carpenter's Son is indeed that King, that Word, that Son of God I have testified to, He can make it plain to my disciples and to me — He will give evidence no amount of arguing ever could." Is it not the same now? Must not the minister of Christ confess, for himself, for his disciples, for those he has tried to argue into belief — "Son of God, it is not by this means that I can bring my own heart or any man's to receive Your yoke. My logic is as powerless to bind the human will as to still the wind and the waves. We need One who can do both. Out of the confusion of my own spirit I cry to You: show us whether You are He that should come, or whether we must look for another"?

V\. Then comes the answer, from the only voice that can give it: "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them." This was the fulfillment of John's own words — "I baptize with water, He shall baptize with the Holy Ghost." Here were signs not of a Teacher but of a Ruler; acts of deliverance. The Kingdom of Heaven was not merely near — it was coming with power. People were learning in their own bodies and spirits what kind of Kingdom it was. They were not merely told how they might be made well; the wretched were made well. They were not commanded to act and live; a Gospel of life was proclaimed to them, and the One proclaiming it was Himself giving the life. John's disciples were to see, hear, and report, so that John, and each of them, could decide whether this was the Person they needed, or whether they must wait for another kind of king, ruling elsewhere, for other ends.

We are not told the result. It is quite possible these two disciples did not confess Jesus as the Christ. Seeing these acts compelled them to acknowledge His claims no more than it compelled the Pharisees, who said He cast out devils by the prince of the devils. And this is the most striking part of the evidence. The King to whom nature bowed was claiming a higher sovereignty still — lordship over the human will, which no force can subdue and which defies force even to its own destruction. This meek and gentle King does not beat down that rebel will but seeks to win it by humility, endurance, and sacrifice. Here is the strangest paradox: the Divine Will shows itself in Jesus as a will of surrender and abasement, while the creature's will aspires to set itself above the stars. Which will prevail? Which will be defeated at last?

That is exactly the problem for those who now stand where John's disciples once stood, and it is what the ministers of Christ who succeed John must declare. They are not to speak of one who sets the world right by decree and statute while leaving people inwardly unchanged — obstinate and rebellious, submitting only through force and fear. They must speak of one who could not prevail by such means, because His kingdom is within; because He baptizes with the Spirit; because His rule is not complete until His subjects are made willing. They must speak of one who is mightiest in the depth of His weakness, who in death proved love stronger than death, whose sacrifice triumphed openly over malice and selfishness. So they must meet the objection that evil still grips a world — and even a Church — that has received the Gospel, not by disputing the facts, not by claiming some place or people is exempt, not by the poor excuse that unbelievers are no better — but by appealing to the conscience of every man, whoever he is, asking whether there is not in him a battle between light and darkness, good and evil; and telling him that the Christ the Apostles proclaimed is precisely that Source of Light he fights against whenever he yields to baseness, and the source of everything manly and true within him; and asking him further whether the Jesus of the Gospels — who healed the sick and comforted the poor — is not exactly what that unseen Lord would be, must be, if He took flesh and dwelt among men. Are not these acts of fellowship with human misery the very proof of both His Manhood and His Godhead?

VI\. Arguments from Christ's miracles, treated as strange exceptions, have, I believe, little force with people today. A minister might blame the hardness of his hearers' hearts, but does he find such proofs soften his own? It is when these acts are recognized, not as proofs of a doctrine, but as signs of a living Person still healing the sick, raising the dead, preaching good news to the poor now as in the days of His flesh, that they give him patience and hope. Then he feels himself only a minister, a messenger, whose whole task is not to intercept his Master's message to men, not to spoil the good news in delivering it. Then he understands why a written record is needed to sharpen and expand what he says, and equally why a book alone will not do without a living voice to speak it — for readers so easily forget they are not merely reading letters but listening to the living Teacher. Then he can bear, as those who use it only as grounds for unbelief cannot, the heavy fact — heavier to him, in truth, a greater temptation to his own deeper unbelief — that the earth is still full of cruelty, some of it done in Christ's name. For he will remember that the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater in this than John the Baptist: he is the herald of the Advent that will complete all that Christ's first coming promised for the saving and judging of the world. He will find in every page of the history of persons and nations tokens of Christ's rule, preparations for its complete revealing. He will receive every baptism — claiming Christ's promise for infants, which He will surely keep — every communion — giving thanks for the sacrifice made for the sins of the whole world — every burial — committing a brother's body to the earth in sure hope of the resurrection — as testimonies to that unchangeable truth which his own slow mind and wavering faith are so unwilling to embrace and so ready to deny. By these means he will learn, little by little, to see the darkest clouds around us as signs of the Son of Man — hiding His light for a time, only at last to break forth and reveal Himself, and no other, to the eyes of His waiting servants.

## THE CHRISTMAS GATHERING

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Fourth Sunday in Advent
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[December]{.smallcaps} 20, 1857
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> "*Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto Him*."—2 [Thessalonians]{.smallcaps} ii. 1.

[This]{.smallcaps} verse is not a complete sentence. It gives the ground for an exhortation whose substance follows in later verses. I would rarely dislocate a passage of Scripture this way. We have no right, for the sake of a convenient phrase, to twist an Apostle's meaning. We would rebuke anyone who forced a profane author's words to mean something the author never intended; should we follow a looser rule with sacred writers?

But I do not mean to overlook the rest of St. Paul's teaching in this chapter while examining the words that introduce it. We cannot understand one without the other; once we have considered both, we will see that the opening clause recalls and points to what follows. The Thessalonians had been troubled by things St. Paul said while with them, and repeated emphatically in his first letter, about an approaching day of the Lord. Some of them had stopped working, thinking it needless or irreligious to provide for their families since Christ was at hand.

St. Paul denounces this in harsh terms — those who will not work should not eat; those who neglect their own households are worse than unbelievers. But there was more. Before the day of Christ he had announced, he believed the Churches would be sifted, and many members, perhaps many congregations, would fall away. Before Christ's revelation there would be the revelation of an Antichrist — one who was Christ's opposite in every way, yet who would draw Jews, Gentiles, and baptized Christians into his circle and receive their worship. The Thessalonians could be swept into this apostasy as easily as anyone. The very habits they were cultivating to please the true King might instead prepare them to serve his enemy. This "Man of Sin" might appear as some emperor, some Jewish sorcerer, some false apostle — but he would gather into himself all the evil scattered among heathens, Hebrews, and those sealed in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. People would worship him because they saw in him the full realization of what they themselves aspired to be. To warn them of this danger — that they could not safely anticipate the coming of One in whom all good is gathered without also expecting one in whom all evil is gathered, that evil as well as good would claim their allegiance — was the most practical lesson their spiritual father could give them. It was no excessive appeal to beg them, "by the coming of Christ and the gathering together in Him," to remember what he was telling them.

I do not, however, take these words chiefly as an appeal. The Greek preposition is more naturally rendered "for the sake of" than "by." With that rendering his meaning becomes clearer: "Let me beg you, for the sake of that appearing of Christ I have taught you to expect and desire, and for the sake of that gathering of all the limbs of the spiritual body into the one Head — do not let anything I have said about that appearing and gathering make you forget that there will be *another* appearing, one who scatters rather than gathers — and that you, children of God by baptism and sealed by the Spirit, might yet reject the Son of Man and choose the Man of Sin to reign over you instead." He is not merely appealing to the holiest of names and the highest of hopes — he is using that name and that hope as a power to keep them from apostasy, from becoming the Destroyer's men, sharing his triumph and his doom.

Some passages here we can only guess at without reaching certainty. St. Paul speaks of a hindrance delaying the full revelation of Antichrist, which he had explained to the Thessalonians in person. This hindrance still existed, he says; in time it would be removed, and then the Man of Sin would appear in full and then be defeated. It mattered greatly to the Thessalonians to know what this hindrance was, and the Apostle says they did know. To us it is a question of historical curiosity — worth investigating, perhaps, but we risk losing ourselves in it and forgetting that a Mystery of Iniquity is at work in our own day too, that it may already have some visible form, and that some outward restraint — law, or church system, or whatever it may be — may be holding it back. Insofar as that restraint is merely outward, we cannot rely on it. Once the inward evil, the poison infecting society, reaches the heart and overcomes the good resisting it there, the restraints of tradition, custom, and fear that hold back the giant of malevolence will be torn apart like tow. He must meet a mightier foe than these; those who know no other defense and depend on them will think him unstoppable.

I believe we grasp the Apostle's whole lesson to the Thessalonians most fully by dwelling on his opening words and asking how they bear on our own lives. I find in them a meaning belonging especially to Christmas Day — to this Christmas more than most — connecting the comings of Christ which, as I said three Sundays ago, we tend to separate and even set against one another; and showing the inward link between the Feast of Christ's Birth and the Feast in which we proclaim His Death until He comes.

I\. Severe Protestants in earlier times, especially Puritans in England and Scotland, spoke harshly of Christmas Day. It had a heathen origin, they said, a modern version of the old Saturnalia; it did not mark the real date of the Nativity; Popery lurked in the very name; we had abolished the Mass, yet its memory survived here; our most popular holiday tied us to the very nations whose idolatries we had renounced. Likely the answers made to these arguments reached few and convinced fewer. Yet in Protestant Germany, even in Presbyterian Scotland, even among descendants of those who called the day accursed, it has held its ground and kept its social character, as somehow bound up with its spiritual meaning. Something here is too strong for preaching, even for the swords of iconoclasts — they could suppress foreign customs and destroy mere ceremony, but they could no more end the observance of Christmas than the French Directory could replace weeks with decades. The objections have fallen flat. What if a heathen festival once testified that slaves, for one day, were treated as men — was that not a natural anticipation of a day proclaiming liberty to captives? Should not heathens have shown they expected and believed in a Deliverer? Chronological pedantry mattered as little here as under the Law: the Gospel does not fuss over small things. The birthdays of ordinary heroes are often unknown, yet people are sure they had a birth and choose some day to remember it. If the Incarnation is a fact at all, what a fact it is for mankind — and what a trifle whether the manger was in September or December! Just as little could shrieks about a Popish name disturb English Protestant conscience. The people might not know what the name meant, but it seemed to signify some bond uniting human beings of every class and belief, in every time and place. They knew they shared trade and dealings with Papists, that they shared the same flesh and blood. Their hearts told them: if we refuse fellowship with them in this name on this day, we commit the very sin we accuse them of.

These were simple, broad conclusions reached by plain people without logical argument, and firmer than any logic. Why? The text tells us. It was no false instinct but a deeply true one that linked Christ's coming with gatherings, with kinship and friendship, with warm human fellowship. God must have planted these thoughts in human hearts and kept them alive. Those who see in them only vulgar distortions of a divine mystery — rather than hailing them, even half-consciously, as recognition that our race can only be united in a Living Head — risk shrinking Christ down to their own private wants, treating Him as their servant rather than their Lord.

But the more we honor this idea of Christmas, trying to grasp it ourselves so as to keep the day as God intends, the more we must expect to find deep sorrow within its gladness.

Every Christmas gathering reminds us how families once united are now scattered across the earth, what havoc death has wrought among them, what strifes worse than death have invaded them. This week many English homes will be darkened by memory of faces once bringing gladness, now gone; many will labor to hide grief lest its shadow fall on the young. If Christmas were merely *a* festival, without knowing which one, such thoughts would overwhelm us, and the gaiety would seem hollow mockery — dressing up a death's head. But see it instead as a sign, a prophecy: think of Christ's coming in the flesh as preparation and foretaste of a glorious coming still ahead, the true gathering of children into their Father's house, the moment when "home" gains its full meaning, when Society becomes a fact and not a name. Seen this way, everything changes. The face you knew, full of warmth, becomes herald of a warmer welcome still to come; the voice richest with music and joy was sounding the first notes of a perfect harmony it will one day join. The beautiful things of this life are not, as gloomy moralists claim, mere delusive phantoms lasting an hour and leaving darkness behind — they are promises and pledges of a light and life that will outlast darkness and death. They are buds of hope, more wonderful for the cold that nips them; their fragility, and the bitterness we feel when they vanish, are themselves proof that we and they are capable of something strong and perfect. They keep alive in our hearts the sense of immortality even when it flags.

Must this not be so, if the Nativity itself warrants human sympathy and gladness? Did that birth not speak of weakness and disappointment too? Heaven promises Glory to God in the highest, yet on earth all is inglorious and low. It promises Peace, yet the Child arrives amid the sword, and innocents die for His sake. It promises Goodwill, yet factions rage everywhere, most of all in the holy city. The Birth fittingly preludes the life: thirty years of silence and obscurity, then two or three years of public ministry still marked by humiliation, with only flashes of glory; still marked by conflict, though He says "Peace I leave with you" — a peace received inwardly amid outward war; still marked by bitter factions bringing Him finally to death, with only "Father, forgive them" testifying to a goodwill higher than the will to evil. Could there be a more perfect image of what happens everywhere men dwell? Everything looks like this — glimpses of brightness in general gloom, finally extinguished in death, nothing achieved, all hopes seemingly blighted. And it *is* like this, if there is no Resurrection, no appearing in glory. But if there is, then the Apostolic vision of human life and destiny, bright and hopeful, must be the true one, and our habitual gloomy view the false one. We must not call any hope humanity has ever cherished — social improvement, spiritual renewal — abortive. All were inspired by Him, all gathered up in Him, all to be fulfilled when He is revealed as He is. That must be the revelation of the union of all things and persons as created in Him — the Manifestation of the Sons of God.

II\. If so, the thought of Christ's full coming, of our gathering together in Him, must make Christmas — the pledge and witness of that coming — a time of solemn warning as well as blessed hope. Do I mean hope for some, warning for others? No — hope for all, warning for all. If the gathering of all as one family in Christ fulfills the Mystery of Godliness, then the total separation of that family's members fulfills the Mystery of Iniquity. For everyone to acknowledge an Elder Brother and a common Father, for none to exalt himself above another or claim separate interest — that would be the perfection of human and divine society, the heavenly state. For people to feel no bond to each other, each existing purely for himself — that would destroy everything partially good we have glimpsed at our Christmas gatherings; that would be the state of Hell. Who dares claim this mystery of iniquity is not working in himself? What Christian community never shows features betraying a hellish parentage, capable of unfolding into the full likeness of the spirit they came from? It is not death that tears apart families, nations, and Churches — Christ has overcome death, and His Nativity witnesses that Life has entered a world death had severed. It is dark suspicion of others, the notion that they think ill of us, undervalue us, or plot against us; it is the secret whisper or hidden conceit of our own importance and grievances that creeps in stealthily, takes hold, and saps the bonds of blood, the warmth of friendship, the memory of the departed. The pettiness of party, class rivalry, the notion that power is good in itself apart from its purpose, the sordid morality glorified once people forget their common origin and interests — this undermines a nation and delivers it to a tyrant who embodies its evils. And similar habits of mind, turned inward and mixed with sacred traditions, adopting and degrading the holiest names, becoming in a terrible sense "spiritual wickedness in high places," have turned Churches of the living into dens of darkness rather than chambers of Light — until a Voice was heard from their midst saying, "Let us depart."

Brethren, St. Paul — Christ Himself — beseeches us "by His coming, and by our gathering together in Him," to fight these tendencies within us which, if allowed to surface, would take the form of Antichrist, showing us exactly what Christ will finally consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. We need not fear that or any incarnation of evil, provided we hold fast to the Incarnate Good. What we must dread is our own hearts — the possibility that we might love this monster, choosing him to reign over us because we have been shaping ourselves into his likeness, wishing to become what he will be. I know no way to overcome this dreadful inclination except by setting before ourselves a hope that will not disappoint — the hope Apostles cherished and urged upon their Churches: not rewards for faith and obedience, but the revelation of the Son of God, "Who shall gather together in one all things in Himself, both which are in heaven and which are on earth."

III\. To keep that hope alive, fighting the enemy always trying to rob us of it, the day of our Lord's Nativity became Christ-mas — a day commemorating the full and perfect Atonement He made for mankind by His death as well as His birth.

The word "Mass" would alarm objectors less if they knew its origin. The *Missa Catechumenorum* speaks of exclusion, not fellowship — like "the fencing" in the Scotch Kirk, it recalls those not admitted to the Lord's Table. But this original sense was soon forgotten as the name came to represent the whole worship of God, conveying that this worship is essentially a Sacrifice. As the feeling grew that Christ's Sacrifice was not complete in itself, the Mass came to be seen as completing what He had left undone. Since the idea of His Sacrifice as common to all men is inseparable from the idea of its completeness, weakening one weakened the other — so the practice of private Masses, so fiercely denounced by the Reformers, naturally followed.

Against both these abuses — against all the abuses clustered around the idea of Sacrifice in the Roman Church — we bear effective witness when we reclaim a name, not sacred in its origin, but widely felt across Europe as a symbol of unity for this week's festival. We should let those who confess the Roman Pontiff as their spiritual head understand that we too regard all worship as Sacrifice, that we cannot separate Sacrifice from Christ, that we cannot remember His birth without remembering that He gave Himself to birth and death to take away the sins of the world. We protest only against whatever narrows this communion, whatever limits the fullness of the Sacrifice — a protest we will never abandon. And we should beg them, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together in Him, to consider whether they can safely be less Catholic — whether they can call us to unite under some lesser, earthlier name than that of Him born of the Virgin, who will be revealed in His Father's glory.

But, brethren, it is not chiefly for the sake of impressing those who reject us — though we should spare no effort to show our confession implies no intended separation from anyone — that I hold to this link between the Nativity and the Sacrifice.

If God, out of tender love for mankind, sent His Son not only to take our flesh but to die on the cross, then we can face the thoughts this season stirs in so many hearts. As people eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, they remain one with those torn from them by sickness or violence; they can trust that their dearest ones are keeping a more perfect Christmas, forgetting none with whom they once kept it; they need not doubt that as Jesus died and rose, He will bring with Him those who sleep in Him. As we eat that flesh and drink that blood, we may feel Christ binding us by the greatest of Sacraments to Himself and to all whom our own evil nature and the evil spirit would tempt us to abandon — that Christ was born into a world of sin and strife so that He might give us a second birth into righteousness and peace, and that He died as sin and strife's victim so that all sin and strife might die in us.

## THE HUNGRY FILLED; THE RICH SENT AWAY EMPTY

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St. John's Day
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(SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS)
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[December]{.smallcaps} 27, 1857
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> "*And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth*." —[Matthew]{.smallcaps} viii. 11, 12.

*The passage:* Many will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the children of the kingdom will be cast into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

[This]{.smallcaps} is St. John's Day. The two Apocalypse chapters we have read commemorate it beautifully. The first shows how the Apostle wished his contemporaries to think of him — one who bore witness to the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ, their brother and companion in tribulation, and in the Kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. The second shows what that Kingdom was, in which he lived and for which he waited.

I have on other occasions spoken of this Apostle's testimony to the Word of God, and recently from a passage in the Apocalypse about the Kingdom of Heaven and its saints. My text today, from St. Matthew, is also a testimony to the Word of God and the Kingdom of Heaven. It may show how wonderfully St. John's doctrine explains the doctrine of those before him, how fitly the Apocalypse winds up the New Testament, and how its truths, by whomever delivered, expound Christmas Day and may prepare us for a New Year.

St. Matthew's words follow the story of the Roman centurion who sent Jewish elders to ask Jesus to heal his servant. I referred to him not long ago as an illustration of the deep, practical divinity a man might learn in a camp. He had soldiers under him, and was himself under authority; he ruled them and was ruled not by physical force but by *words* — he said Go, and they went; Come, and they came. The soldier considered this: must there not be some power, not physical, not visible, from which it flowed? Must not someone be speaking to his very heart, whom he was bound to obey — was not this his Lord, the source and spring of his life?

Where did these thoughts lead him? He heard of one who went about healing sicknesses, and reasoned: if this Jesus can heal, it must be because the Word of God is with him, in him — perhaps because he is this Word of God himself. There is no need that he should come into my house; I am not worthy. Let him speak, and it will be done, as my commander speaks and I obey, as I speak and my soldiers obey me.

And our Lord said: I have not found such faith in Israel. Not even the best of you, who read the Law and Prophets, have discerned their true meaning as this heathen has; not even the best of you, who worship in the Temple, have shown such freedom from idolatry as this man, raised to reverence the Jove of the Capitol. All of you still crave the touch, the sight; you must have signs and wonders before you believe; you lack this inward trust, this bowing of the spirit before an unseen King. Yet until you come to the confession this Roman soldier made, you will not learn why I have come, what good it does, and you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven I preach and am to establish. That is the Kingdom in which your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived, by faith in a King they could not see, who was with them, watched over their households and flocks, told them where to go, and made them know when they did wrong. They were learning their place in a fellowship to which you belong, catching first glimpses of a ladder set on earth and reaching to heaven, on which you may stand and climb. But I say to you, many will come from east and west and sit down with them in this Kingdom, while the children of the Kingdom will be cast out.

I\. Nothing in the first half of this announcement should have startled them. The name of Abraham should have recalled the covenant of blessing to all the families of the earth — but they had never understood what that blessing was, or that the families of the earth were to share it. What was this Kingdom of Heaven, and where? Was it at hand, the Son of David soon to enter Jerusalem as a Roman general enters his capital with spoils of east and west? Or was heaven a city in the sky, to which the pious would be carried after death for their prayers, fasts, and good deeds? Whichever notion, or whatever vaguer blend of them, was held, the same difficulty remained: how could Roman centurions, Greeks, or barbarians share in the felicity? Either they must be trampled down to grace the Conqueror's procession, or they must somehow have earned rewards scarcely any but the most devout of the Covenant could hope for. What a sentence upon those who had toiled all day for their hire, if a multitude called at the eleventh hour received the same wage!

A sentence indeed — and such a sentence Jesus came to pronounce. The gospel of his Kingdom was judgment on those who had imagined another kingdom for themselves; news of salvation to the world was condemnation to those who counted the world's salvation their own loss. We should hold this thought firmly: it shows why Christ's coming as Deliverer necessarily meant his coming as Judge, and why the Jewish expectations were inverted — the nations they thought condemned were exalted, and the nation they thought would be exalted was laid low.

We must keep strictly to our Lord's own words here, and everywhere he speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven, without importing our own fancies, if we are to grasp this great Christian paradox. The Kingdom in which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob sat, and in which many from every quarter would sit with them, could have nothing to do with either of the Jewish heavens. Judging by the centurion's story, it must be bound up with acknowledging a mysterious sovereignty over human hearts — a sovereignty in which the general, the centurion, and the common soldier alike stood within reach of its commands and its grace. If Abraham was drawn out of an idolatrous race, and preserved amid one, to witness early to this righteous rule that would one day break all unrighteous rule to pieces, then the widening of this knowledge to ever more people was already implied in choosing one man to bear practical witness of it. His own sphere was small; soon a successor would take his place, and then be forgotten too. But as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob passed out of their brief and often troubled pilgrimage, they would come to understand better the Kingdom they had confessed, see how it overshadowed the world, and watch its grace and power gradually made known to the children of men. To see fresh spirits entering this Kingdom, God's army increasing, his enemies ever freshly overthrown, to encourage the fainting, and themselves to grow in knowledge, awe, and love through every fresh service for their brethren — this was the reward God had prepared for those who loved him. Whatever rewards he had for those who sought only their own prizes and grudged others a share, such people did not aspire to.

So it was no wonder — only an infinite delight — that the divine Kingdom they themselves had grasped so faintly on earth should be made known, by one discipline or another, to Roman centurions, eastern Magians, Greek sages, sufferers at the world's ends; no wonder, but delight, that these should learn of a Father's house they might return to from the far country of their wandering, and that the Father himself was bringing them home. Every age had brought fuller apprehension of this, until the fulness of time revealed the perfect Image of the Father. That revelation opened the Kingdom of Heaven to the Gentiles; and what was a light to them was also the glory of Israel. What had been hidden for ages came to light; what prophets and kings had longed for was made known to fishermen, who were allowed to reap harvests sown by prophets and kings from fields they had ploughed. The Law went out indeed from Judah, and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem; the King of Israel claimed the homage of every land, and multitudes everywhere bowed heart and neck to his yoke.

II\. "*But the children of the Kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth*." Again, let us hold to our Lord's own words rather than substitute our own — we cannot make them clearer than he has. He speaks of darkness; St. John explains why: "This is the condemnation, that Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than Light, because their deeds were evil." The Light of the World shines on mankind; those who should welcome and spread it are instead frightened by it and flee it. Either they establish their reign of darkness, or the Light proves stronger. It does prove stronger — so they are left to the darkness they chose. It is *outer* darkness, lying outside God's kingdom, outside humanity, banished by God's order.

Such words, coming from the holiest lips, must not be handled like the phrases of ordinary rhetoric — they are to be pondered, not played with. When our Lord speaks of darkness, he means us to think of what darkness is in common experience: the inability to make out the shape of things or the faces of men, to tell the safe from the perilous. In our spiritual condition nothing can be more terrible than the corresponding state — the incapacity to know evil from good, to distinguish what should be hated utterly from what should be loved utterly. As light comes to the eye from the sun, so light comes to the spirit from the presence of the Father of Spirits; to be shut up in ourselves without him is the deepest possible ruin of a creature made in his image.

Is the phrase *gnashing of teeth* any less plain? Have you ever been in a madhouse? Compare what you saw and heard there with yesterday's Lesson: how the crowd to whom Stephen said, "Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost, as your fathers did, so do ye," gnashed on him with their teeth. Conscience within them said, He speaks truth; the Devil within them said, Kill the truth. The Devil seemed to triumph — they killed the utterer to kill the truth. But if the truth could not die, if it and its witnesses remained, must not the teeth go on gnashing? It was the gnashing over blessings very near yet unrealized, the inward conviction that they were gone.

Brethren, human conscience in every age has responded so powerfully and fearfully to these words of our Lord, finding in them so personal an application, that it has been hard to insist on their plain, direct sense — that when he spoke of Israel he meant Israel, that the children of the Kingdom who cast themselves out did so in that very generation. I believe it is both our duty and our wisdom to hold to the letter of Scripture; if we soften it merely to extract useful lessons, all its power over us vanishes. Yet I attach great weight to this response of our hearts — that these words cannot have meant more for Judæa than they mean for Christendom, that their whole blessing and terror belong to us and our children too. We shall best grasp that blessing and that terror by considering what the Advent of Christ gave the world, and what was lost to those who had been stewards of God's blessings for it. The Word made flesh opened to men a Kingdom of Righteousness, Peace, and Joy; told them they were its heirs; showed them how to enter it in spirit; promised them the Spirit that had dwelt without measure in him, so that they might enter it. The Word came to his own, and his own received him not — they would not confess him as Lord of their spirits, seeing in him only the Carpenter's Son. So the invisible world grew ever more obscure to them; they could perceive only what their senses showed them. And so those great possessions the senses cannot register — Justice, Love, Truth, the eternal treasures without which holy hearts felt they must perish — were withdrawn from the chosen people's grasp, as though they no longer existed. Shadows replaced them; the forms that had once spoken of and revealed those treasures grew monstrously large, like spectres of the night — sometimes hinting in awful voices at what they could not restore, sometimes deluding those who embraced the cloud into thinking they had found the divinity itself. Then came the uproar of parties, a Babel of noise, nothing clear but the passion and fury trying to express itself, which, words having failed, turned to other weapons.

Is the picture too familiar? Dare we not look at it because it resembles too closely what might happen, what may be happening, in our own nineteenth century? Yes — we know and feel that the signs of God's Kingdom are among us; every Christmas Day testifies that it has drawn near, that we live and move and have our being within it. It is not far off, so that we must ask who will go up to heaven or down to the deep to fetch it — it is close, at the heart of each of us. The Word of God preaches it to us there, turning every record of the past into a message for the present. Stephen looks at us as he did at the Sanhedrin, with an angel's face; he witnesses and dies for us. John is our brother and companion in tribulation and in the Kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. The Innocents mingle with the children born and dying before our eyes. All testify to an undefiled, eternal Kingdom which we may enter, whose treasures are for us all.

And around us all are powers of darkness that would persuade us there is no Kingdom of Light, and would draw us outside its bounds. They tell us the world of eye, ear, and taste is the only real world. If we believe them, the beauty of that world vanishes — what was full of life, motion, and freedom becomes dull and hopeless. We believe them, and become citizens instead of a kingdom just as spiritual as Christ's, but a kingdom of Unrighteousness, War, and Joylessness. We do not give up religion by becoming sensualists — but our religion turns into one of terror and hatred, a set of devices for escaping God, for making the Holy One cease from us.

Brethren, may Christendom, may England, never so trifle with these powers of darkness as at last to be cast into that outer darkness which fell upon the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! May we never gnash our teeth because God's Word speaks to our consciences of good things that were ours and that we refused! May the warnings and deliverances of this past year be received as God's own loving entreaties not to cast ourselves into that torment! But whether we receive them so or not, multitudes will come from east and west, north and south — even, we believe, the Jewish exiles themselves at last — and sit down in the Kingdom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As surely as day follows night, as year follows year, he who stood before John on Patmos will be revealed to every eye. As surely as any earthly friend's voice speaks warning or comfort to us, he is saying: "Behold, I come quickly, and my reward is with me, to give to every man as his work shall be."

## CHRISTMAS CHARITIES

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Sunday after Christmas
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(*Preached at Christ Church, Marylebone, for District Relief and Provident Societies*)
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> "*For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich*."—2 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} viii. 9.

*The passage:* Paul says that Christ, though rich, became poor for our sake, so that through his poverty we might become rich.

[When]{.smallcaps} a beggar asks alms of me for Christ's sake, can I safely refuse? When wise and experienced people assure me that answering his prayer does actual harm to society, dare I give him anything? These questions trouble many of us, and not only regarding street beggars — they apply widely. Some tell us that almost every gift we make indulges a fancy and violates a law. Others say the most indiscriminate kindness is most like God's own, who gives liberally to all and sends his rain on the just and the unjust. These opposing views do not merely distract us; they often drive us to conclude that no principle at all can guide us — or, more dangerously still, that there are two principles: one for earth, proved true by experience and followed as the rule, the other for heaven, enjoined by the Bible and followed only occasionally.

Perhaps this conflict is sharpest at Christmas, a season tied to our old notions of charity. We cannot rid ourselves of the feeling that we ought to give then, if never else — not merely because it falls in winter, when work is scarce and nights are cold, nor merely because the rich feast while others starve nearby, but because we cannot bear the thought that the Son of God became a poor man among poor men while our own hearts and hands stay shut against our own flesh and blood. We half suppose that our usual maxims may be set aside in homage to the Nativity — that we may indulge liberal impulses while keeping the feast, though we must restrain them once the anniversary passes.

Such a scheme cannot be honest. What is right at Christmas must be right always. Either the Incarnation means nothing, or it governs our thoughts and deeds all our lives through. We should go to it not to find exceptions to the laws that govern men, but to learn what those laws are. It will not encourage any sentiment at odds with principle — but earnest reflection on it may bring us to a principle more comprehensive and more workable than either of those I mentioned, doing justice to both.

I\. First: if we receive the Incarnation of Christ as the revelation of God's mind and character, then any language ever used to express the fulness and universality of divine love, far from needing to be softened, must seem tame and cold. The Incarnation answers all the dark conceptions men have formed of the One in whom they live and move; the Gospel of it will beat down every devil-worship in the world — but that is only half the truth. Not only ideas of God as a cruel tyrant, but even reverent phrases that strip him of personality — "the Divinity," "Providence," "Omnipotence" — become offensive once we grasp that the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in the Son of Man. The Name of Father, which Christ proclaimed, becomes the name that interprets and includes all the others. The Divinity we reverence is the mind of a living Father. The Providence we confess is a Father's foresight, devising what is best for his children. The Omnipotence that seemed to side with evil — at the manger, when the Innocents were slain, at the Cross, when soldiers and priests mocked him — is shown by the manger and the Cross to be the very instrument the Father wields for his grace and for the world's redemption.

So far, then, the defenders of an expansive, undiscriminating charity have much to say for themselves. If we are to be followers of God as dear children, if nothing can be wrong in us that is like him, nothing right that is unlike him, then there is no danger of regarding mankind with too much affection and sympathy — only the greatest danger in stinting it. Our consciences affirm this. We may be troubled by solemn warnings against being too compassionate, and feel they strike at some real infirmity in us — but when we examine ourselves honestly, it is never the infirmity of having cared or sacrificed too much for others. No one honest with himself feels open to that charge. He may have talked too much of benevolence without having been too benevolent; he may have indulged a frothy sentimentalism, but that only shows he has been too tender of himself, not of others. The Psalmist's blessing on him who considers the poor has not become a curse, as some seem to suppose. It is inconsideration, now as ever, that is the source of every curse.

II\. Again, if we have not followed a cunningly devised fable in believing that Christ, being rich, became poor for our sakes — if this history carries any sacredness for us — then it cannot be a sound maxim that men should generally be left to the consequences of their own acts, that we should pass by one who has fallen into poverty or crime, telling ourselves it was his own fault and we need not save him from the results of his folly. No history shows more clearly than the Gospel that individuals and nations may be left to taste the fruit of their own misdoing — the Son of Man wept over a hypocritical city and yet left it to be trodden down by its enemies. But surely the chief sin of that city, of its priests and rulers, was that they were wrapped in selfish pride, that they spurned the Lazarus at their gate, that they worshipped the letter of the Law while forgetting its meaning and end. Their great complaint against Jesus was that he received sinners and ate with them. His complaint of them was that they did not look for a Shepherd who would go into the wilderness after his wandering sheep — and because they would not have such a Shepherd, they themselves, the inferior shepherds, had become mere hirelings.

We could not confess a Saviour at all if we did not believe men had fallen into an evil condition from which they needed rescue. We could not confess a Saviour like Jesus if we did not believe the worst part of that fall was voluntary — that men had themselves to blame for their greatest calamities. This principle belongs to the very idea of an Incarnation, and Christ carried it into the smallest details of his acts. Knowing all men, he could have chosen the most respectable and bestowed his blessings on them; instead he deliberately proclaimed the opposite rule — the Physician is for the sick, not the healthy. He cured a man and told him to sin no more, lest a worse thing befall him. He healed those possessed by unclean spirits. He cast seven devils out of Mary Magdalene.

Most of these acts were done for men's bodies. Our Lord drew no artificial line between cures of body and soul; he claimed to be Lord of both, and proved himself Deliverer of both. His example may fairly be pleaded by those who say we are not bound, in giving our gifts and services, to choose only the meritorious — who remind us that if we all had to prove our title to live, none of us would be left standing.

III\. But there is another aspect of the Nativity, as important as either of these, prominent in the Collect for Christmas Day: the Father gave his Son to take our nature and be born of the Virgin, that we, being regenerate and made his children by adoption and grace, might be renewed daily by his Holy Spirit. Christ did not merely stoop to our condition — he stooped to us in order to raise us. He came to claim, for those he was not ashamed to call his brethren, the dignity of Sons of God. This ultimate purpose appeared in every part of his work while he wore our mortality. He did not merely heal the sick and cast out devils; he called forth faith and trust in those he restored, and this was the very highest part of their restoration. "Thy faith has saved thee," he told the Samaritan leper who was already clean, unlike the other nine who did not return to give God glory. In other words, he called forth the true manhood in the poor, degraded creatures who came to him; he woke them to a sense of their glorious parentage; he led them to lift their eyes from the earth they had crawled on, to the living God. He found the sheep he sought and brought them home rejoicing. So he distinguished between man and man more truly than those who label one set respectable and religious, another odious and profane. He spoke to each heart by his acts more than his words. If a heart held any sense of oppression, any desire for deliverance, it answered his call and became the heart of a man. If it was shut violently against him, it suffered the worst punishment it could suffer: it remained in its old obtuseness, growing harder and more impenetrable every day.

Here, then, is a justification, drawn from the Nativity and from our Lord's example, for those who say that many of our so-called charitable deeds are not good but mischievous. We need not introduce distinctions that only perplex conscience, between acts good for Society and acts good for individuals, nor balance duties owed to one against duties owed to the other. It is plainly not good for any individual to live as a mere animal when God intended him for a man, as a slave when he ought to be free, as a liar when it is his privilege to speak truth. If our alms tempt him to remain a miserable creature, sustained by chance bounty, selling his soul for pence, we are guilty of our brother's blood; we are not leading him to feel he is a child of God, but may be keeping him from that new, high life which Christ took our flesh to win for him.

On this ground I rest the condemnation of that lazy, self-indulgent giving into which we all tend to fall, which our own consciences know has no right to the name of Charity. On this ground too we may say that many religious institutions of other days were not godly institutions, because they kept up a race of vagabonds who never learned the worth of labour, who never learned therefore to be brave and faithful, who prayed to chance rather than to their Father in heaven for their daily bread. We are not called to pronounce that such institutions were never useful, or could never be turned to good use even at their most corrupt, or that their sympathy did not sometimes compensate for the wrong their prodigality inflicted. Just as little need we decide of any particular act of almsgiving in our own day that it was wrongly directed merely because it does not conform to some rule we have set for ourselves. Rules are most fallacious things; they will be continually violated — I had almost said they ought to be, because no human being's condition is exactly like another's, and it is best that each case be tried on its own merits rather than labelled by some arbitrary classification of ours. What we need is to understand the end we should keep in view. We shall make many mistakes about the means, and learn by failure — but at least we shall know when we have succeeded and when we have failed. We shall have a standard by which to try our own acts, and to see what wrong habits of mind made them defective or harmful. We shall not be absolved from the duty of helping our fellow-men, whatever their errors or ours, their reluctance to be helped or our clumsiness in helping them. We shall know that we are only God's almoners, and that he has found more ingratitude and more misunderstanding of his purposes in us than we shall ever find in those we are quickest to complain of. And we shall be sure that the Spirit of him who gave his Son to take our nature will grant us greater wisdom in giving, more sympathy and faithfulness, the more we distrust our own discernment and cast ourselves upon his guidance.

We need not, then, treat St. John's Day as a day for forgetting his precept, that we cannot love God whom we have not seen unless we love the brother whom we have seen. We need not make Christmas any less a season for opening our hearts to the needy than we have made it hitherto. We may turn any day into a St. John's Day by taking his maxim as the rule of our lives. We may carry Christmas through every season of the year by remembering what it tells us of our divine birth and our relation to every member of Christ's family.

So that this lesson may not be dead for you, let me tell you why I think District Relief and Provident Societies like yours fulfil all the conditions of true Christmas Charity. When you relieve as private individuals, you can do a good no formal, legal distribution of alms can do, because you meet human beings face to face — but then you are felt to be the benefactor, and any gratitude fixes on you alone. When you go forth as members of a district, you have the same chance for personal kindness and vigilance, with greater assurance that those you visit truly need help — but you can also remind them, without preaching, by the very name you bear, that you and they belong to one body, that there is a Christian fellowship binding you both, that Christian prayers and sacraments join you to your neighbour and brother.

This is one great thing. I rejoice, too, that you join the words "Relief" and "Provident" together in your purpose. I do not mean they can always be joined in practice — you must relieve many who are not provident and whom you cannot make so. In doing this you bear witness to God's love for his creatures, witness that Christ, who was rich, became poor for their sakes, and that witness is not wasted even toward the highest ends. But if you can convince your poor that the only true relief is the kind that awakens them to exertion, hope, and foresight, you fulfil your duty to your fellow-men in a far more satisfying, more evangelical way.

I use this last expression deliberately, for I fear many of us suppose foresight to be a secular rather than a Christian virtue. It may become secular: men acquire large fortunes by a foresight that is merely selfish, and their own wild speculation, or a prodigal heir, commonly scatters in a short time what took long to gather. But I am convinced that if providence is ever to become a mark of the poor — who have so many motives to squander their little earnings, and to whom it is not honest to hold out the chance of winning the world's lottery — it must have a deeper root than this. They must learn that the word's two meanings are not as distant as we have made them: that we are to be provident for our children because God is provident for his; that it is man's glorious mark to look before and after, because he is made in the image of God who is, and was, and is to come. Christ took our nature and was born of the Virgin so that he might bestow divine attributes on men. He called forth foresight in them by calling forth faith in them. He taught them to trust a Father, to work cheerfully and hopefully, unanxious about tomorrow, certain they could commit themselves to him who had appointed their work and would give them strength to do it. He taught those who trusted him that they were not confined to the instant they stood on, because they shared his life and immortality.

Our poor people will not learn providence by copying the practice of the higher or moneyed classes — those classes may rather need to be reformed by them. England may become again a thrifty, provident nation, saved from sinking into a nation of gamblers, through her labourers. But if we are to gain that benefit, we must ground their providence in the Gospel that Christ, by his nativity, has claimed for them a second birth. As they receive this Gospel, they will not wait on accident like savages, or wish to live on fruits that grow of themselves; they will sow and plough in hope, waiting for the common harvest, because they refer it to the same God who will fulfil all his promises, who will show that all our kindness has its ground and completion in his love, all our knowledge in his wisdom — who will perfect every Christmas blessing when his Son appears without sin unto salvation.

## GOD'S GOVERNMENT OF US; ITS GROUND AND ITS END

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First Sunday of the Year
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[January]{.smallcaps} 3, 1858
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> "*Or despisest thou the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance*?"—[Romans]{.smallcaps} ii. 4.

*The passage:* Do you despise the riches of God's goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not realizing that God's goodness is meant to lead you to repentance?

[The]{.smallcaps} year we have passed through has been, for Englishmen at least, one of terrible excitement—not public excitement only, but shared at every hearth. Even had it been a quiet year, each of our own private circumstances would still have carried reminders of change, and warnings of more change to come.

Yet it is likely that many a man's first thought on New Year's Day was one of complaint—that the past has been full of dreary sameness, with little hope of its being broken. Will this year differ at all from the last? Will the same round of work continue, society remain the same machine, my actions be no freer, my judgments still swayed by the fashions around me? Will my tomorrows simply repeat my yesterdays—resolutions made only to be broken, petty necessities always outlasting the will?

These forebodings arise from very different circumstances. Some recall long, monotonous suffering, and, weary in spirit as in body, ask why the new year should not bring as useless a burden of sorrow as the old. But is the monotony of *pleasure* any lighter? How many forms of enjoyment are already exhausted, how hard to invent new ones, how impossible to force enjoyment even when invented; how the need for stronger stimulants grows as the capacity to be stimulated shrinks; how what was meant as escape from duty becomes the most exacting duty of all! Whichever way you turn—to the man burdened by dull time or the man rich in devices for filling it—you hear the same lament over the vanity and vexation of years past, and the same prediction for the year now beginning.

It is sometimes supposed that "vanity and vexation" ought likewise to be the preacher's chief theme—that he should imitate his great Old Testament predecessor, while borrowing the New Testament's teaching about a future and eternal state to shake or sober his hearers. If he takes this course, I doubt he is drawing rightly on either Testament. Ecclesiastes is indeed a faithful record of real experience: a man walking a labyrinth, thinking he glimpses the way out, reaching the spot, and finding himself baffled again and again. His advantages only deepen his sense of hopelessness; the king is more lost than the common man, and the wise man's opened eyes let him see the stones in the path that the fool trips over unaware. Even religious reflection brings little comfort—he notes that the just sometimes fare as the wicked do, and the wicked as the just; that it seems unwise to be "righteous overmuch" or "wicked overmuch." He sets down these one-sided observations honestly, since the book's worth lies in its truth to experience. But at last comes a clear, beautiful gleam of light: there is a way out of the labyrinth, for the beggar as for the king—but for the king only when he casts in his lot with the beggar. Scheming out the universe, even with some thought of Providence mixed in, has gained him little. But if he will "fear God and keep His commandments," acknowledging One who governs him and submitting to that government, the earth may grow brighter, and the weary maze may prove, after all, to have a plan.

Suppose, then, a modern preacher took this book as his guide. He must follow experience wherever it leads, without twisting its conclusions to fit a moral, without softening the perplexities of the religious man or blaming the worldly man out of spite; he must admit that trials which reach no satisfactory outcome are still worth something. He must not claim exemption from the vanity others feel—his own disappointments must be personal, caused by his own errors, not his neighbors'. And the discovery he is brought to must be one good for every man alike: that vanity and vexation end when a man stops trying to build worlds with himself at the center, and finds instead a Centre round which his world and all worlds revolve.

But we would be badly misled if we took this "Royal Philosopher" as typical of Old Testament preaching. To find the true public preaching of Israel we must turn to the Prophets, who begin where Solomon ends. They assume a Divine order to the world, a God who has covenanted with the Nation, calling all its members to fear and trust Him, giving them commandments, promising them a right heart to keep those commandments. The Word who speaks through their lips guides the course of empires and of individual lives alike. Past, present, and future are bound together; nothing is indifferent or barren; every human task can be made grand and fruitful—though every task may also be turned to evil, thrown into a witch's cauldron to mingle with the foul charms already brewing there. Yet even those who tend that cauldron know their hour is coming; their own withered hands must point their slaves toward crowns and sceptres that God will grant despite all their sorcery. And the true prophet, even while he must wail over his people's love of vain things, foretell the vexation awaiting those who trust in idols, and sing of the utter helplessness of the lies they cherish, must also declare that vanity and vexation come from forgetting the Lord God of their fathers—that He is unchanged from days of old, that His counsel stands and He will do all His pleasure, and that though darkness covers the earth, He will arise and shine and fill the universe with His light.

Those who today would follow this example must understand it is not their business to deepen men's sense that the years only bring fresh cause for despair, nor to give atheistic experience the authority of God's word. They must not tell young men that their youth, strength, and joyous hopes are devil's delusions, when they are God's precious gifts. They must not call any pursuit vain, since God has appointed it and we must answer to Him for the spirit in which we take it up—not tell lawyers that law is vanity, or politicians that politics is vanity, but tell them their offices are awful, even divine; that whoever handles such mighty trusts lightly, pleading some religious interest he cannot neglect for "merely secular" duties, may satisfy men who judge by appearances, but will shrink before Him who searches the heart. Lawyers and politicians need Sundays, prayers, and communion to give them strength for their tasks—not to make them indifferent to those tasks; services of that indifferent kind were exactly what the Prophets said wearied God to receive.

The Old Testament preacher was, as I tried to show you lately, in the strictest sense a preacher of Hope—hope awakened by the very sorrows and punishments that seemed to warrant absolute despair. He was this precisely because he was preparing the way for the herald of a completed Redemption, a Gospel in its fullest sense. A Gospel that began with "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" would be the greatest contradiction imaginable. It must either directly and decisively refute that conclusion drawn from mere experience, or its name is a delusion.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, professes to show both why man's life is not vanity, and how it becomes vanity. It is not vanity, because it is derived from the life of the Son of God, Lord of every man, in whom is life, and whose life is the light of men. It becomes a vain show only because a man will not confess his relation to this Fountain of Life, wants a life of his own, and seeks that life in the things he is meant to rule rather than in the Lord who rules him. From this vanity Christ redeems him. He need not be slave to the creature; he may act as child of the Creator. Doing so, he takes his place as citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven; every year gives him fresh tokens of this, shows him how fair and rich the earth is, and prepares him for the Kingdom's full manifestation and the earth's full deliverance. If he refuses, outward things become curses to him—not because they are vain, but because he has chosen to make them so.

Today's Lesson shows that St. Paul, the preacher of a Gospel to the world, spoke no smoother words than the old prophets, and was just as stern against hypocrisy and self-delusion. He addresses countrymen who judged the Heathen as outcasts from God while causing God's name to be blasphemed among them. God's judgments, he tells them, are not partial as they supposed, but according to truth: no circumstance excludes anyone from life and immortality, none secures it either. The Law was good for those who kept it, condemning those who broke it. Circumcision meant something if it signified trust in the God of the Covenant and rejection of one's own evil nature; it meant nothing if merely outward. Those who were contentious, disobeying truth and obeying unrighteousness, would meet tribulation and wrath—that narrowness, that inability to breathe, which they brought on themselves by shutting themselves up in their own privileges and refusing to let their light shine on all men.

I bring in these passages to show how little the one I have chosen—found in their midst—was picked for its gentleness. Judged even apart from context, it reads more as admonition and reproof than as comfort. I take it as such. I find in it the sharpest rebuke of the distrust and despondency with which we tend to enter a new year. It teaches that we deny the plainest facts of our lives if we conclude there is no Power near us able to make us all we wish to be, all we accuse ourselves of failing to be.

I\. The Jews supposed that Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, was urging them to despise the privileges of their birth. He turns the charge back: how dare they despise the riches God had given them? What were these riches? The Law and Covenant were pledges and witnesses of their wealth, convertible into wealth, but not the wealth itself. They spoke of a living God near to Israel, a God of goodness, forbearance, longsuffering—names given Him throughout the Scriptures and illustrated by a whole history: the nation's story is the story of a God showing kindness to an indifferent people, forbearance to a provoking one, longsuffering to an obstinate one. Other books record a *religion*—how a people introduced this rite or that ceremony, how soothsayers pointed out neglected duties, how priests demanded new propitiations. Here is nothing of the kind: the religion the people themselves introduced—hilltop worship, groves, calves, altars to Baal—is denounced, and a righteous King proves His righteousness by sweeping it all away. The subject of these records is not men's feelings toward a higher Being, or duties rendered to Him, but God's feeling toward them, His acts on their behalf. This was the nation's peculiar treasure—not a treasure given once and then withdrawn, but testimony to a Being the Same from generation to generation, one that could not be locked away in statutes, in the Book, in the forms of Tabernacle or Temple. Those forms had no worth at all unless the One they spoke of was alive, living with men, and men living by Him. To boast of Law, Covenant, and Scripture as though they were not revelations of Him was to deny and despise them. To accept them as revelations of Him, yet not believe He was good and forbearing and longsuffering, was to deny and despise both them and Him. To grant that He was good and forbearing and longsuffering at all, without believing He was so at every moment, to themselves and to all men, was to play with words—to despise their meaning, their power, their blessing.

It is the same with each of us. Our New Testament, our Baptism, our Communion testify to a God good, forbearing, and longsuffering—giving these titles an emphasis they lacked of old, and removing some obstacle that hindered the men of old from believing them fully.

*Goodness*, seen in the deeds of Him who went about doing good, loses none of its awfulness; it stands in sharper contrast to all wickedness. We know it is not abstract but reaches each individual, and yet is without limit.

Hearing of God's *Forbearance*, we ask the old, recurring question—whether He can care enough about our doings to feel anything like the "provocation" Scripture speaks of, or whether such language is merely figurative and would otherwise diminish His Holiness and Majesty. Seeking the Father through the Son clothed in our nature, we see how purity and sympathy must daily be provoked by impurity and hardness of heart; and we are sure His perfection would be lessened, not preserved, if He were incapable of pain and sorrow over evil.

The *Longsuffering* becomes intelligible in the same mirror. Without it, we might ask whether there is some boundary to it we cannot fix but must assume exists. The Cross of Calvary drives our reason from that vain, presumptuous question. It reveals a height and depth of endurance we dare not measure—for if we could, which of us would not have to say, "I have exhausted it"?

If this goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering belong to the very name and character of Him in whom we live and move and have our being, they form a wealth we may always draw upon. The more we recall and believe in them, the more truly they become our own; we may be shaped into their likeness and show them forth—this is the royal inheritance made known to us through Scripture and Sacrament. Every past year speaks, through strange events and ordinary ones, of Divine goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering shown to us, to our country, to the world. The miracle of every morning testifies to it; no child has been born, no parent has died, without traces of it. The new year will be as full of it as the old—with its own thunders to rouse us from sleep, its own quiet, hourly reminders of an unvarying, watchful loving-kindness.

II\. But here lies the great excuse for shame and gloom: we have not taken past events as bearing this meaning; the wealth has been ours, but squandered. We have despised the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering. Why should it be different now? What does a new year offer that the old lacked? Why should crossing an imaginary boundary turn death into life? Isn't the pull toward evil likely to grow stronger, not weaker? Isn't the indifference that ignores what is good and gracious sure to increase? Isn't the craving for excitement, which treats daily blessings as worthless, certain to feed on itself? These are all reasonable questions, answerable only one way. But we have left one thing out of account: we have not known that God's goodness is leading us to repentance. It is not events, sad or joyful, that lead us to it. Our own hearts, left to themselves, will not lead us to it either—and our sense of powerlessness to turn our minds may be entirely true experience. But the goodness of God present with us is not merely something to remember or profit from; it is an active, vital power, the one power able to act upon spirit, and it is acting on our spirits continually. This goodness is the very Spirit of God—being goodness, He grieves at our lack of it; being forbearance, He bears with us; being longsuffering, He will not let us destroy ourselves. He convinces us of Sin, because we have not believed in Him who is sinless and always present to deliver us from sin; of Righteousness, because He has gone to the Father as the righteous Head of our race to justify us; of Judgment, because the prince of this world stands judged, and each year brings nearer the time of his final casting out.

The Church opens the year with two festivals. One is the Feast of the Circumcision. If we grasp its meaning, we will believe that all God's discipline through past years has aimed at destroying what is selfish and carnal in us, so that the Spirit may graft and renew what is truly human, truly divine.

The other is the Epiphany. If we grasp its meaning, we will believe that Christ's glory can be shown in the greatest weakness, because it is the glory of goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering. We will ask that this glory humble us and lead us, day by day, to repentance. And we will be certain that at last there will come a full revelation of those riches which eye has not seen nor heart conceived, but which God has prepared for those who love Him.

## THE GLORY OF THE CHOSEN NATION REALIZED IN THE ILLUMINATION OF THE WORLD

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Sunday after the Epiphany
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[January]{.smallcaps} 10, 1858
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> "*A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel*." —[Luke]{.smallcaps} ii. 32.

*The passage:* Simeon, holding the infant Christ, calls him a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of God's people Israel.

[Two]{.smallcaps} apparently unconnected subjects came before us on Epiphany day. The Gospel told of the Magi led by a star to Christ's cradle; the Epistle told of St. Paul preaching to the Ephesians. What connects these — what has a star in the heavens to do with the sermons of a tent-maker?

A study of St. Paul's words suggests the answer, and it is embodied in the word *Epiphany* itself. Neither a sermon nor a star is the real subject of the Epistle or Gospel, but God's manifestation of His Son to the Gentiles. This manifestation can no more be explained by St. Paul's discourses than by the shining of an outward star. It is to the spirit within that God makes His discoveries; only with that spirit can a man grasp any truth or enter into communion with it. Newton might have seen a thousand apples fall before one led him to perceive the law of the universe: the object presented to his outward eye became the instrument by which an idea was presented to himself, a universal truth shining through one instance. His devout mind would have acknowledged that God led him to the one through the other; and if he later studied Copernicus and Kepler, he would have confessed that they too were instruments guiding him to a truth that would have been no less true for mankind even had none of them grasped it. In the same way, the leading of the star and the labours of St. Paul are equally unintelligible apart from the object common to both; connected with that object, each helps us understand the other.

I have taken the words of the old Rabbi Simeon, now sung as a Vesper Song of the Church, to illustrate this. The best commentary on them is our Epiphany Collect: "O God, Who by the leading of a star didst manifest Thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles, mercifully grant that we, which know Thee now by faith, may after this life have the fruition of Thy glorious Godhead, through Jesus Christ our Lord." A discourse can only follow lamely after the movements of a spirit in prayer, but I shall try to keep this Collect's method before me, examining its several clauses.

I\. An Eastern sage believed in a light older than the darkness, one that would at last overcome it; he connected this light with the luminous forms he saw in the evening sky, and in honestly trying to learn what they were and meant, he was in fact sending up a prayer to the Source of Light to be shown his bewildered way. Such a man is deeply interesting to contemplate — but mournful, if it was all in vain, if his longings were self-created and met no answer, if his life passed in dreams from which death was only the awakening to find they pointed to nothing. Is not the doctrine of the Epiphany more cheerful and reasonable? If we take Scripture's records, as we must if we believe them, as instances of a law, of the Divine way of working, is it not good news that God Himself was directing the thoughts of this student of the stars, and of all seekers everywhere — that their disappointments, sorrows, hasty guesses, and crude anticipations were schoolmasters by which He was bringing them to Christ, to the Light that lightens every man who comes into the world — bringing them to know that He was there Who had always been there — bringing them, through some commonly observed incident, to the deepest moral truth that concerned their own being, and by its commonness to feel it was a truth for all as well as for themselves?

If we think of the One born at Bethlehem as having never lived until conceived by the Virgin, we may lose ourselves in speculation about the miracle of that particular star. But if we hold the Catholic Faith set before us at Christmas — that the Word who was with the Father before all worlds, by whom the worlds were made, who had always been the life and light of men, was then made flesh and dwelt among us — then that star was no exception to the law all stars obey. They needed not leave their courses to become instruments of illumination to the inner spirit of man, any more than to show him his path through a wood or across the sea; in each case they obeyed their Creator, glorifying His settled order, and so ministered to the greatest as well as the humblest needs of His children. It may have been a wonder to the wise men, an overthrow of many conjectures, a tearing up of plausible schemes of the universe they had devised, when they were led to confess the glory in a Jewish child born in a Jewish stable — glory they had looked for in a Persian monarch or a sun of the upper world. But if there was this breaking-down of theories, such as every true man of science must endure and in the end give thanks for, what satisfaction was reserved for the humbled truth-seeker in the very meanness of the outward vesture — in discovering that the glory was all within, and no less a human glory for being Divine! Many lines of thought and hope, sometimes crossing, sometimes running forever parallel without meeting, found their centre in that cradle. And while they confessed how little the vision matched what, as wise men, as Magians, they should have anticipated and wished, they would be brought to see that this was what they required as men — that here was the Son of Man.

II\. There is then no violent transition from this to the general manifestation of the Only-begotten Son to the Gentiles which came through St. Paul's preaching, or that of any who followed him. He went forth as a messenger to men concerning a Son of God and Son of Man; this was his Gospel, and wherever he preached it he found other preachers had been there before him — the rains and fruitful seasons filling men's hearts with food and gladness, the sun and stars, thoughts of One of whom men were the offspring, thoughts of a Judge and Deliverer, a feeling after One in whom they lived and moved and had their being. He had no hope in his own rhetoric or power to persuade men to a new opinion; his hope lay in declaring the thing as it was — that which was from the beginning but which God was now making manifest, through the birth, death, and resurrection of His Son, to Jew and Greek, Barbarian and Scythian, bond and free. His hope lay in this: that his truth was manifesting itself in men's consciences, that he was awakening them, as he had been awakened himself, to know that the Son of God was shining into their hearts brighter than the sun — that in refusing to acknowledge the crucified Jesus as Lord they were kicking against the pricks. Wherever he went he found proof that God had other ways besides the leading of a star to manifest His Son to the Gentiles — that in every nation and language there were tokens and witnesses of Him which God Himself was drawing forth, which His minister first had to learn from the invisible Teacher in the secret ear, and then proclaim upon the housetops.

III\. And how is it now, brethren? Are things altogether changed? Do we now have, as some tell us, the Scriptures and the traditions of the Church, separately or together, as substitutes for that inner manifestation of the Son of God which Scripture and Church say came to certain wise men through a star's guiding, and to the nations through the Gospel's preaching? The Collect's prayer would make no sense with its own introduction — our desire could have no connection to the light that came to Gentiles of old, if our knowledge of God does not rest on essentially the same ground as theirs. The Magians had their traditions and paid them due reverence; they studied the stars in keeping with them. But had their traditions been a thousand times better, the traditions themselves would have said: trust God, not us; He is with you, follow His guiding. They acted on this conviction, opened their hearts to God's teaching, and He manifested His Son to them, leading them to the Child. Those to whom St. Paul preached were not merely Gentiles; a Jewish colony was mixed among them, and he spoke to both alike. He used Gentile traditions and lore; he appealed to Jewish Scriptures and to Jewish history as authoritative and true. But in both cases his object was the same: to lead them to faith in the living Son of God, who had spoken and was speaking to the Gentile conscience, and no less to the Jewish conscience — not less directly for having given the Jews a Law, raised up Patriarchs, Kings, and Prophets to rule, teach, and reprove them, and caused His oracles to be written down as testimonies of His continual presence with them. The Jew mistook the Patriarchs, the Law, the Prophets for substitutes for the voice speaking to the Gentiles; he put these, and the written oracles, and the comments and traditions of the elders, between himself and God. So while priding himself on his superiority to the Gentiles, he actually reduced himself below their level. He renounced the human privilege he could not take from them; he cut himself off, so far as he could, from the Divine light and manifestation, using his traditions and even God's own Scriptures to close the passage through which the light of Christ was entering his inner being. That is why St. Paul complains so continually that a veil is on their hearts — not lifted even in reading the Old Testament, though it testifies everywhere of Christ. Only when they turn to the Lord, seeking Him who is seeking them, will it be lifted.

This example is meant for us, and is fearful enough that the Collect's truth needs continual pressing. It is God who manifested His Son to the Gentiles who alone can manifest His Son to us. No book, however divine, no Church authority or tradition, however venerable, can do it. We must know, not the book, not the tradition, but Him, by faith. We must trust Him as we trust a father — that is what the Book tells us to do, what the Church tells us to do; its authority and traditions contradict themselves and become blasphemies if they say otherwise. If we habitually believe in God as a living Person, seeking Him as refuge from our own atheism and idolatry, from our self-will, pride, spite, and malice, we shall know Him as one knows a friend — not by seeing Him with the eyes, not by reports or traditions about Him however trustworthy or reasonable, but by experiencing His help, discovering how much better He is than we are, and yet how well He understands and cares for us. To exchange this practical faith, resting on God Himself and His own manifestation in the Son, for mere belief in the holy book, is to disobey the Book's own warnings, showing we prize it as a name, not for what it teaches. To exchange it for belief in the Church — a notion that the Church will tell us the right thing and bring us to Heaven — is to show we do not know what membership in a Church means, prizing it not because it leads us to the Rock it stands on, but because we suppose it is ours and gives us privilege others lack. This is to exalt ourselves and deny God.

IV\. That is, we fail to adopt the Collect's next clause: "we which know Thee now by faith." I have anticipated these words somewhat, but they deserve separate treatment. We were willing enough to limit ourselves to objects of sight. The world offered many beautiful ones deserving admiration, but resting in them was impossible — we outgrew them. If we came to them with a heart open for joy, they fed it for a time; if we brought sorrow, they more often deepened it than lightened it. There was an inward ache, a craving of spirit for something like itself yet higher than itself, a craving for deliverance from itself, that these fair images only mocked. How good it was to escape from them to a friend, a kinsman — an object not of sight but of trust, one who could exchange thoughts and feelings with us, who actually suffered and rejoiced, who was wiser and better! But sympathy runs out, or some flaw appears in a character that seemed sound, or wisdom perishes, or jealousy severs the bond. We need more: one altogether better than ourselves, whose sympathy never fails, whose character has no flaw, who lasts forever. We need a Son of Man. What has the Gospel that there is such a Son of Man, who knows our birth, our poverty, our suffering and death, been to Europe for eighteen centuries! Into what hovels has that sound penetrated, over what cradles and coffins has it echoed! If you suppose the sun's light and heat have only been felt by those who know the right astronomy, you might as well suppose Christ's power limited to those who hold the right doctrine about His relation to the visible or invisible world. As the truest astronomy, by declaring the world's unchangeable law, shows how independent it is of our conceptions, refutes such a notion — so the truest theology spurns the other with still greater indignation. St. Paul's theology declares Christ the foundation laid for every man, not one men lay for themselves by their faith or feelings. St. John's theology declares Christ the Light that lightens every man, whether acknowledged or denied. The Church, in her Creeds, Sacraments, and prayers, proclaims the Incarnation and Manifestation of the Son of God as good news to the world. She would rather be charged with presumption and dogmatism than earn credit for modesty by teaching men that truth is created by their own opinions.

V\. But Simeon spoke not only of "a Light to lighten the Gentiles" — there was also "a glory" for the "people Israel." The Collect does not merely thank God for manifesting His Son; it asks that we, though Gentiles, may have "the fruition of His glorious Godhead." These are equivalent: we ask for the whole Church, the whole universe, what the Jew believed was reserved for his own nation.

He felt, rightly, that Abraham's children had been trained for something higher than the sight of even the most blessed Child, the most perfect Man. Their whole discipline taught them they could only be satisfied on awakening after God's likeness — that to know Him was their great reward. In converting them, we have, I think, paid too little attention to this: to the feeling, however confused, working in their minds, that there must be a revelation of divine glory encircling their nation, or else it had existed for nothing. But if we have failed to meet the secret cravings God has put in Jewish hearts, and this is why so few have cast their lot with us, we have done the same wrong to ourselves and to the other nations through the same misunderstanding. The fruition of the glorious Godhead is as needful for us as for them. Whenever we speak or think of glory, however paltry our words, however low our conceptions, this unspeakable blessedness lies behind them. Why else does the thought of glory so naturally attach itself to the thought of departure from this world? Why is there something painful in calculating the petty rewards we can give a man who has delivered his country? Why do we almost dread, however eagerly we desire his return, to hear the vulgar, formal phrases that are all we can devise to honour the toils we are most grateful for? Why is there something calming in the sadness that follows a brave man to his grave, in the very place his work was done, just when it was done? Solon thought those young men blessed above kings who yoked themselves to their priestess-mother's car, brought her to her temple, fell asleep from weariness, and — since she had prayed the Goddess to pour her best gift upon them — woke no more. Such a gift, surely, our God would bestow on those who have offered themselves as freely for our common mother. Here the hard fighter knows Him by faith, seeking the Captain of his hosts amid jungles, watching for Him by camp-fire light, whatever the nature of his warfare. It is by his own weakness he learns the everlasting Strength, by his sins the perfect Righteousness, by the feebleness of the halo about the noblest of God's servants, the substantial glory that halo reflects. After this life comes the fruition of that glory: the longing for selfish prizes ceases, the earthly weakness of wishing to exchange faith for sense is taken away, and what remains is the vision of the Light that fills earth and heaven, the revelation to the inward eye of the Godhead itself, as the spiritual body's eye grows by degrees able to take in all the beauty and harmony of God's works.

Yes — there is in us all a deep sighing for Home, a longing nothing but the beholding of God can satisfy. The more we know of the world's faiths, the more we find this, even where the desire is most perverted. Buddha taught his followers to crave annihilation; though few understand his philosophy, hundreds of millions have been shaped by his practical teaching. That dream seems monstrous to us at our best moments — yet how often it has seemed most natural, most desirable! To lose oneself, to forget, to be forgotten: who, after months of intense restlessness, has not counted this the highest blessing the soul could attain? As long as a floating image of a God of wrath lingers about us, a God whose dominion we should be glad to escape yet who would curse us with immortality, we shall turn to this as a distant but not impossible hope. Terrible as it would be to part with all the beautiful things, energies, affections, memories, and hopes we have delighted in, the conscience will count this a small sacrifice to be delivered from its own growing burden, from the presence of an irresistible enemy.

But when the conscience receives the revelation of a reconciled and reconciling God, of One who has manifested His Only-begotten Son bearing the burden we could not bear, taking away the sin of the world, bequeathing peace, giving repentance, baptizing with the Spirit — all is changed. What was sought in nothingness is found in a Father. The death of self becomes the beginning of a new life of affections, energies, memories, and hopes, which find their fruition in God and realize their glory when He is revealed. So it remains true, as of old, that the desire of nations is for a Christ, a Son of Man — but a Son of Man in whom we may see the Father. So it remains true that the star guiding wise men from the East, be they Buddhist, Brahmin, or Mahometan, will rest on the cradle of the young Child — but rest there because that Child comes to manifest the glory of God. So it remains true that preachers of the Gospel to the Gentiles must tell them that the Word who is their Light took flesh and dwelt on earth and suffered the death of the Cross, that they may be signed with the sign of His Cross — because the Wisdom and Power of God were revealed at Calvary, because there the assurance was given that sinful and dying men shall hereafter behold the face of God, and that His Name shall be on their foreheads.

## THE THIRST OF HUMAN BEINGS IN ALL AGES

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Second Sunday after the Epiphany
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[January]{.smallcaps} 17, 1858
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> "*My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of God*?"—Psalm xlii, 2 (*Prayer-book Version*).

*The passage:* The Psalmist says his soul thirsts for God, the living God, and asks when he will come to appear before God's presence.

[It]{.smallcaps} is often said that the Psalms are out of place in our common service. All are invited to that service, and many come, at least on Sundays, whose minds are not especially devout. Yet we give them language that expressed the most fervent longings of the most devout men — language that even the private suppliant often finds far above his own thoughts. How can we offer such words month after month to an ordinary congregation, as though they could speak what it was actually feeling?

Such complaints should never be lightly dismissed. They show a sense of the sacredness of words, which we should honor in others and cultivate in ourselves. Clergymen above all need reminding that they can become mechanical repeaters of sounds, so that the holiest utterances mean almost nothing to them; they need rousing, even by rough rebukes, out of a habit of mind that can pass into lethargy and death.

But even so, no one can draw a line around who ought and who ought not adopt the prayers and Psalms of holy men as their own — a fairly drawn line might very often exclude the clergyman himself. He cannot say, "Others may use these words idly, but I am in no such danger" — he knows he is in the extreme danger, and that in judging another he would be condemning himself. He may have proof that passages have quickened hearers he would have judged unfit for them, while leaving him untouched or cold.

Many will take this as proof that no caste or order can safely be trusted with custody of the Divine Oracles, or with deciding who may claim them as their own — and will say the real distinction is only sharper for the admission: not clergy versus laity, but believers versus unbelievers. To believers such a text is profoundly significant; to unbelievers it means nothing. What can they know of the thirst the Psalmist speaks of? How can they care to come into the presence of the living God, rather than wishing Him at the greatest possible distance, thirsting instead for something to make them forget Him?

There is great force in these questions. And who will feel it? Do believers not know from their own experience the estrangement from God they describe so vividly — not merely as something seen in others, but as something they are themselves liable to still? Does not the thirst for God coexist in them with the opposite feeling, so that when they speak of an inward conflict they mean these deadly enemies live close together within them, and the most they can claim is to be aware of the strife and to know where the strength lies that can make the better side win? If believers claim the name on any other ground than this, I would wholly dispute that they are in sympathy with those who trusted in God and thirsted for Him in other days; none would drink less into the spirit of David's Psalms than they.

But if that is the nature of belief, I do not see how anyone can exclude others from these prayers and hymns, or fault the Church for giving them indiscriminately to all her children. It is not merely that we cannot know whether our neighbor finds in them something we miss. It is that we have discovered why and when the Psalmist refuses to be our spokesman: so far as we are occupied with special interests, wrapped in our own feelings, disdaining fellowship with what is common to us and our kind, so far the Psalms are an unintelligible dialect to us. It is when the minister confesses his union with his congregation, and the congregation feels its relations with each other, that David's harp gives out its music for us to accompany, even in this distant age. It has been the charm of those alone in closets or on sick-beds for this reason: that they were longing there for fellowship with the Church of God, wanting an expression not of solitary but of united human thoughts. The Psalms may be Jewish to the core, like the historical and prophetical books; but if that nation was set apart to realize and exhibit the common wants and tendencies of human beings — fulfilling that function all the more because it lacked the art of the Greek or the conquest of the Roman — then the most Jewish parts of it may show us best what we are as men. They would not show us Englishmen what we are as men at all, if they gave us no type of those national feelings whose loss would be the loss of all our manhood.

I have said this might be so; we have certain proof that it is. Divines and philologers may dispute endlessly about the origin of the Psalms or any other part of the Bible, calling each other heretics and bigots as it profits them. But the book established itself as a human book before those questions were raised, and will remain one however they are settled. Let those with leisure fight them out. There are other questions human beings must fight out, getting what help they can from philologers and divines if those have help to give, and from the cries and yearnings of these old kings and warriors if such allies fail them. That help comes under strange conditions: there is no requirement that the man who receives it be comfortable or satisfied, no need to make out his claim as a believer — often unbelief seems to be his main characteristic. He need not stand on firm ground; he may be sunk in deep mire, unable to prove to the world that he has a God while others claim assurance of divine favor and ask him, Where is now thy God? To such disquieted people the old Psalmist stretches out a hand. He understands their sorrows, and the ordinary miseries too — poverty, sickness, the strength of enemies, the desertion of friends. He does not pretend these calamities are nothing, or that what hurts the body does not reach the soul. Coward that he is, he wishes for the wings of a dove to fly away and rest. He finds he has been foolish, a very beast before God, prizing outward comfort above what is substantial and abiding. He hides none of this confusion. He cares only to show there is a way out of it into clearness, for all who will trust in God.

I\. When he says "My soul is athirst," he describes no rare or peculiar feeling. The thirst of the soul is as generic as the thirst of the body: all men have it because they are men. Their cravings take innumerable directions — the thirst for pleasure, for wealth, for distinction. But we are so sure that men's desires have a common object, however distinguished or opposed they seem, that we use a vague, unsatisfactory name rather than have no way to indicate it: we say all men pursue *happiness*. We do not really know what we or they mean by it, and must resolve the generalization back into particulars to be intelligible. Still we must keep the word until we find an equivalent that fits not a few men or a class, but the whole race.

II\. The Psalmist said, "My soul is athirst for God." He knew that all the nations around him were pursuing gods — pleasure a god, wealth a god, fame a god — for living souls cannot follow abstract notions; whatever man pursues must be embodied as a reality, or there can be no ardor in seeking it. So as these gods began to fade into mere notions of the mind, as men suspected they had called the objects of their own worship into existence, the worship grew insincere and the worshipper cold and lifeless even in his ordinary work. He became the slave of his own schemes, bound to follow them though there was no affection left in his service, no hope they would bring any result. His heart testified they were finite while he was thirsting for the infinite — yet the infinite seemed a mere impersonal, dreary void, to dwell in which he must abandon all forms and feelings.

What the Jew had been taught was that the Lord his God was one Lord. He was not to pursue a god of pleasure, wealth, or fame, nor to worship any work of his own hands or conception of his own mind. He was made in the image of *the* God, who was not far from him, ordering all his ways — personal, yet infinite; an actual Ruler and Judge, yet whose majesty was not visible, who did not judge by sight or hearing; who had a Name not to be taken in vain, yet was in the likeness of nothing in heaven, earth, or the waters beneath. How often, then, did it seem as if no such Being existed! With what bitterness might worshippers of definite idols ask the Israelite, "Where is thy God?" What answer could he give — to what place could he point? If he said, "I behold Him with the mind, not the eye," how his conscience would tremble, and the mocking voice ask, "Does He really present Himself to your mind, as these outward forms do to the senses?" This Psalm tells us what he said: his tears were his food day and night while men taunted him with "Where is now thy God?"; when he thought on this he poured out his heart, remembering how he once went with the multitude to the house of God amid praise and thanksgiving. He does not pretend the taunts do not disturb him, or that his mind is clear; he recalls old times, but knows they do not restore what he has lost or assure him of a *present* God. All he can do is ask that if God is, He will reveal Himself — and this he asks courageously: "Why hast Thou forgotten me? Why go I mourning while the enemy oppresses me?" And then he could say to his troubled soul, "Put thy trust in God, for I will yet thank Him who is the help of my countenance and my God."

What a baptism of fire this was — a plunge into atheism that he might know God, a loss of all the privileges of an Israelite that he might find the ground on which Israel stood! For thus he learned that the thirst for God is the thirst of man; the thirst for happiness means this and ends in this; the thirst for all the particular finite things that try to sum themselves up as happiness has here its true center and final explanation. The holy day and solemn assembly testified of this God; and in the absence of all holy days and assemblies, He offers Himself to the solitary despairing seeker as the foundation of all human fellowship, the Being without whom all things and all thoughts must be scattered and endless. The thirst of his soul could be satisfied with nothing but Him, who both kindles and satisfies the thirst of all human souls.

III\. The Psalmist goes on, "Even for the living God" — no idle addition. The gods the Israelite was forbidden to worship were dead gods, "eyes had they, but they saw not; hands, but they handled not; feet, but they walked not"; the complaint was not that they acted as men do, but that they could not — they seemed to have organs of sense but no use of them, for worshippers had imputed to them their own gifts but could impart none in return. There is a thirst of the soul to create something in its own likeness, but the deepest thirst is to find in what likeness it is itself created, whence its living powers come, who fixed their ends and can direct them there. This is the thirst possessing the Psalmist now. He has been told of a living God — priests, lawgivers, warriors have all turned to the God of their fathers as the God of life — and it is vain to tell him of a Being who is not this, vain to point him to congregations, holy days, forms, sacrifices unless these are directed to such a Being, have Him for their author, and continually witness His presence. He has found that these too can become dead things, mere portions of a religion, an idolatry — and then they cannot quench his thirst at all. They hold out the cup of water and withdraw it; they promise a divine manifestation and tell the worshipper it is not meant for him, perhaps that it would preserve him from being consumed by it.

Here too the Psalmist is, in the strictest sense, the man. The heart and flesh of all human beings, knowingly or not, cry out for the living God, giving a thousand indications that they cannot be content with dead gods or with religious notions and forms trying to take the place of a living God. Seen this way, the phenomena of so-called sceptical ages are almost as startling evidence of the truth of the Bible as of the falsehood of some who professed to believe it. Those ages are protests against substituting death for life, solemn declarations from the deepest heart of humanity that shadows are not substances, and that unless a substance answers to the shadow, the shadow must fade away. "My soul is athirst for God, even for the living God" — this cry could be heard as a deeper undertone amid the cries for the destruction of all that bore the name of religion and God in the last century. If it had not been so — if God had not meant to answer that cry as men could not — I believe He would not have permitted those destructive processes. We may be confident He will answer it at last, if some still more sweeping ruin is ordained for our own times.

IV\. Finally the Psalmist says, "When shall I come to appear before God?" — a bold petition. Should he not rather have prayed, "Prepare me for the day when I must appear before Thee"? That is the modification we who live under the New Testament generally give to words those before the Incarnation could utter in simple fullness. Let us not suppose they had a feebler sense of the need to be prepared for meeting God than we have. What they believed was that they could not prepare themselves for what would surely come to pass, that God Himself was preparing them — by teaching them to hope for His appearing. Had they not hoped for it, they would have been startled and confounded by it; hoping for it, every step, struggle, and joy of their history was an education toward it. The Psalm we have been considering records one of the severest passages in that education. This man — perhaps through the absence of all the tokens of his country's faith, perhaps through the presence of idolatry around him, perhaps through poverty or sickness that made the world look gloomy, certainly through a terrible darkness and doubt within himself — was led to discover what he needed and could not be without, what must remain even if all things in earth and heaven were shaken and perished. He found a living God beneath all things, beneath himself. He had felt that losing Him was the fullness of misery; he was sure His presence would be the fullness of joy.

His experience, I think, was human, not solitary — he learned in himself how God was training multitudes besides himself. May we not believe that training is for our time too, that Englishmen as well as Jews are subject to it? We often hear great masses of our population called "heathenish." Vigorous efforts have lately begun, in London especially, to bring these masses to hear sermons and take part in Christian services. Our churches and chapels, it is said, have come to be regarded as belonging to the upper or middling classes, leaving the humblest class feeling excluded; and numbers have become, from this and other causes, not passively ignorant but actively infidel. Clergymen especially are urged to remove this scandal by addressing themselves directly to the poor, opening buildings, sacred or secular, for their instruction, and combating their objections to the authority of Scripture, or even to the existence of God, with whatever arguments can be found.

I have no doubt these acts of mercy will bless those who give even more than those who receive — though the blessing may come in a way we do not expect. We may find, to our shame, that "heathenish" does not belong exclusively, or even most fittingly, to those we have not had the chance to instruct. Heathenish does not mean irreligious — heathens, then and now, have made religion a principal occupation of their lives — it means idolatrous religion, the worship of visible, false, or evil gods, the direction of the soul's thirst to unworthy or unreal objects. The impulse to this heathenism lies in us all; who has not yielded to it? Who has found the habits and maxims of an artificial society — those that distinguish one class from another — any real protection against it? Who will say the Goddess of Pleasure is worshipped more in St. Giles's than in Belgravia, the God of Money more in cellars and garrets than on the Exchange, the God of Fame more among those who can only hope to die in the ranks than among the professions — legal, military, ecclesiastical? If the Jew, under the name of Jehovah, worshipped Remphan and Moloch, who can deny that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is often clothed with the attributes of these same divinities by those who kneel in churches and pray in His name? No; heathenism is not a title to stamp on one class. The more earnestly we seek to free others of it, the more we shall know our own need to ask the God of our salvation to set us free from it.

On the other hand, I think we shall find a thirst for God, even the living God, dwelling deep in the hearts of those who lack religious instruction, or who have turned from it in disgust and become nominally — in one sense really — atheists. God's education by suffering — a truth we must keep repeating to ourselves, since we keep forgetting it — is a preparation for His Gospel like no other; it sweeps away trust in the many gods comfortable men make for themselves or inherit by tradition, and testifies that the God who reveals Himself in suffering, who meets men at a Cross, is the one they need and are thirsting for. The discovery that we have not presented such a Being simply and broadly enough to the faith of poor men, and that until we do, the most elaborate machinery for awakening or keeping alive a mere "sense of religion" will utterly fail to raise them from their degradation — this, I think, will be one of our great rewards if we undertake these efforts to evangelize them with sincere and deliberate purpose.

And I am certain we cannot meet the most resolute and passionate atheism by any method more effective than this. How do such words as "resolute and passionate" come to attach themselves to something that seems so untenable and cold as the denial of God? It was so in the most earnest, enthusiastic of Roman poets: the frightful thought of gods tyrannizing over mankind, holding down all its aspirations, drove him to embrace a philosophy uncongenial to his ardent nature because it promised deliverance from their yoke — he could not bear dead gods, for his heart and flesh cried out for a living God; he could not bear cruel, false gods, for his soul thirsted for a God of Love and Truth. It is not altogether different now. The notion has spread, further and deeper than we like to admit, that the upper and middle classes uphold a system of belief that is not really their own, kept up to preserve their ascendency over their inferiors. False as the suspicion may be, you will not remove it by piling up evidences that your system rests on Divine authority — such evidences play only on the surface of the mind, while a suppressed premiss, a secret conviction, lies beneath which they never reach and which would repel them, however logical, as often as they are in fact incoherent and weak. Why not say to the cities of England, as the prophets of old said to the cities of Judah, "Behold your God"? Why not answer the charge that we worship a tyrant on heaven's throne by saying: "This Jesus, the deliverer of captives, the opener of the blind's sight, the friend of the poor, is He in whom we see the Father; for such a Being there is an infinite thirst in your souls, because we have it in our own, and we are even such as you are"?

Yes, it must come to that; and great will be the reward to the more easy and affluent members of society, if their exertions for those shut out from some advantages bring them to this conviction of a common nature and common needs. I do not say there is no message to be carried to the poor specially as poor — it comes through improving their dwellings, through every effort to make their existence less degrading, so they do not sink into a condition where the Gospel of God sounds like a contradiction and an impossibility to them. Whatever you do of this kind is as much a part of the manifestation of Christ to men as His own acts of healing were when He was on earth. But the good news concerning God Himself is for *poor* men only because they are men — it is brought to them because it has been and still is the means by which all of us assert and maintain our human dignity and rights. We forfeit that dignity, we lose those rights, whenever accidents of position or the fruits of civilization make us forget that we belong to a race God has claimed as His offspring, that we are citizens of His kingdom, and that we must have an infinite, unquenchable thirst until it is satisfied out of the fullness of a Living God.

## THE BIBLE THE BOOK OF FREEDOM, PERSONAL, NATIONAL, UNIVERSAL

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Third Sunday after the Epiphany
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[January]{.smallcaps} 24, 1858
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> "*For He brought them out of darkness, and out of the shadow of death: and brake their bonds in sunder*."—[Psalm]{.smallcaps} cvii. 14 (*Prayer-book Version*).

*The passage:* God brought his people out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke their chains apart.

[I believe]{.smallcaps} it is a common notion, backed by divines and eagerly seized by infidels, that the Bible discourages men's natural desire for Freedom as something secular and profane. Our evil nature, we're told, cries out for Liberty; Subjection and Obedience are Christianity's watchwords. There may be a regulated liberty compatible with religion, it is said — but one that religion imposes rather than one it awakens.

There is certainly a religion of which this is true — one much in vogue, one statesmen have wanted to keep the people orderly, one Churchmen have been willing to supply. But anyone reading the Old and New Testaments plainly and literally cannot say this is the religion they teach. Why else do the words "I am the Lord thy God, Which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" stand at the very threshold of the Ten Commandments, as their ground and sanction? Why is the sternest part of this record, the one that most insists on obedience, the history of a national deliverance? Why is the longing for Egypt's fleshpots, the willingness to endure slavery, precisely the sin the Divine Lawgiver denounces and all his discipline is meant to cure? Why do the Prophets warn their people of captivity and slavery as the ultimate punishments, ones they can hardly bear to contemplate? Why is praise of God always tied to some rescue out of a strange land — since the Lord's Songs, the Psalmist says, cannot be sung there? Why is "Redemption" the key-note of the New Dispensation as of the Old, the New fulfilling the Old because it completes that redemption? Are these not enough to show that the Bible does not aim to check the excesses of freedom, but to teach us its true nature, to stir up an appetite for it, to shame us out of contentment without it, and to show the conditions for gaining the fullest measure of it?

It's easy to say: yes, the Bible speaks of a freedom, but not the one men ordinarily want. There is some ground for this. The Israelites craved freedom under Pharaoh's taskmasters, yet were ready to stone Moses when he led them into the wilderness's toils and perils — they wanted they knew not what, and shrank from it once given. So it was then, so it always has been, so it will be. In this sense — but no other — the freedom the Bible speaks of is not what men mean when they ask for it. It is not true that the Bible plays a double game, appealing to a feeling only to substitute something else for it. What men cry against when most fretful and impatient, it promises to free them from; what they thirst for most urgently, it promises to supply. If men are truly in earnest — if, as a great orator put it, they will not rest while a single link of the chain that galls them still clanks at their legs — God will bring them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and break their bonds asunder. And since experience shows this earnestness is not natural to men, that fitful effort, despondency, and subservience are, Scripture teaches that God kindles by bitter suffering and by marvellous encouragements what would not otherwise be, and keeps alive what left to itself would perish.

My brethren, if we would consider these things, and believe that the words of the honestest book in the world are not cheating words, I think our lives would grow clearer and more real. We have often thought: "If only we could get into a certain posture of mind, we might sympathise with what we hear in churches — an apprehension of sin we don't have and wouldn't willingly counterfeit, a sense of rebellion against a holy Law, a desire to please and know God and be like him. Well and good for those to whom it is given, whose temperament makes religion natural. But we are cast in a different mould; must we not, for now, follow our own bent as they follow theirs, rather than force ourselves into a shape not made for us?" Such words are spoken, sometimes openly, more often secretly. Better spoken than pent up in the heart — for once the conscience sees them plainly, it has its answer ready.

What is that answer? The one already hinted at. Granted you feel none of that sense of personal evil you're told you ought to have — is there no sense of bonds you'd wish to be rid of? It hardly matters what theologians call these bonds — whether the oppressors are sensual, intellectual, or spiritual; if we are oppressed within ourselves, that is enough. I speak of what is actual, not what we read in books. Do we not hear men constantly complaining they cannot do or be what they would? They blame tyrannical laws, or governors who ignore laws, custom, social rules, old habits, present fashions, superstitions about the future. Each fixes blame on a different place, yet each feels the burden, and each has good reasons for his choice — though none does justice to his neighbour's indignation. "Misplaced," he says; "if only people knew what he knows, they'd turn their energies against the real grievance and redress it together — but he can't do it alone; he must bring the world round to his mind." Here is a confession that, whatever the evil, the mind of man is somehow the ultimate cause that it isn't removed — its home lies very near there, wherever else it may be. The Bible, I think, is not as unjust to our different views of its nature as we are to one another's; it justifies us all. Evil laws, abused law, bad customs, social rules — all are admitted as links in the chain; the promised liberty concerns them all. And yet the tacit acknowledgment — made unawares even by those whose theories most avoid it — that in the end we are slaves or free in ourselves; that no outward yoke could crush us had we not put it on; that we could cast it off if we would — this is sanctioned and repeated on every page of Scripture, indeed is the expression of its deepest principle. For when we confess, in any terms, that the will is at the root of the tyranny we groan under, we stumble on the very doctrine we found offensive: that circumstances do not forge our fetters, Sin does; circumstances only serve Sin because we ourselves serve it. We do feel this sin, even without the language others use for it. But there is no greater cruelty than to bring a man to this discovery and lead him no further — it makes him desperate, strips away his dreams of emancipation, once he thought his tyrants lay outside him, and tells him freedom is meant for him yet can never be reached. To this condition a man comes at last who has learned only the deep, precious truth that

> "It is the will\
> Alone which chains us to permitted ill,"

but has not learned that there is One seeking to set the will free — One above man, One who sympathizes with man, One working in man to will and to do of his good pleasure.

If, then, brethren, the cry for pardon has not yet risen in our hearts, it may still be working in another form — apparently, not really, another. We may cry for an *Absolver*, one to free us from the bonds of sins committed through our frailty. God's voice, be sure, is not monotonous, not confined to one measured accent shaped by human art. Some spirits respond at once to the charge of violating a righteous law, others to the sense of grieving a loving Father; but there are others, sterner and colder, who nonetheless feel a weight often too heavy to bear, and dislike giving it a religious name. Whether pride or honesty causes that reluctance, I won't disturb it — only let them be sure the choice of name doesn't hide the fact or falsify it. Whatever perplexity makes a man's actions irregular, his thoughts unquiet, his life contradictory — that is a band needing to be broken, one he will find, after endless struggle, he cannot break himself, not with all the machinery of nature and art to help his weakness. He must turn to the Lord of his will, who can meet him in a region the vulture's eye has not seen. He must say: "In this darkness and shadow of death I cannot find my way. The outer world I know something of; but here, in the depths of my own being, I am lost. Here, where I most need peace, I find the source of my disturbance; here, where I flee for freedom from the world's slavery, I find a dungeon-keep. Yet I am sure there is Light here, if I could see it — Light that might turn this prison into a kingly palace. Source of Light, enlighten me! Mighty Deliverer, absolve me!" Such voices have risen from men everywhere, in every age, and the answer has come. Their bands have been broken asunder. They have known that God's words are true, purified sevenfold; certain that Christ came to free the imprisoned spirit of man, that he is near that spirit now, to be trusted, so that day by day it may prove the truth of his words, "If the Son shall make you free, then are ye free indeed."

Do not think that in speaking of this mysterious region, where the roots of all our thoughts and acts lie, I am withdrawing you from ordinary practical life. No — it is in the common hard warfare of daily life that one learns these secrets, all the metaphysics worth knowing. In trying to do right as husbands, brothers, fathers, citizens, we find the bands that hold us; in the disappointments of meeting ordinary temptations, doing the nearest duty, being honest and truthful, still more trustful and loving. This teaches us we need an ever-present helper and deliverer, a daily absolution, a renewal of strength hour by hour — and shows what kind of absolution we need. It is the Son who makes us free, because he brings us the adoption of sons. It is the faith that in him our spirits may claim God as Father, because he has claimed us as sons and given us his Spirit to cry "Abba, Father" — this faith raises us above the flesh, meant to be our slave but claiming to be our master; above the world, meant to offer its fruits to God but demanding our worship instead; above the Spirit of Evil, who would persuade us there can be no freedom in serving a loving God, and would make us slaves of self-will and hatred. So we are driven back to our Baptism, to learn our child's Catechism afresh every day — its wonderful lessons of what God made us to be, what we make ourselves when we forget him, what his Name is and what strength and deliverance it holds for us and all our brethren; how by its power we can keep his commandments, loving him with heart, soul, and strength, loving our neighbour as ourselves; how we may pray to him together as members of one body, "Our Father"; how he answers — adopting us as children, feeding us with the flesh and blood of his Son; how, in faith of the reconciliation that flesh and blood express, we can offer ourselves as living sacrifices to God. This child-lore holds the whole secret of the deliverance we need in manhood as in infancy — may we all claim it! All we have ever dreamed of humanity's possible liberty, all that sages and saints glimpsed, sometimes far off, sometimes almost within reach, all that tempted longing hearts only to vanish like a phantom — all this is expressed in this teaching, together with the resolution of life's actual problems: escape from outer and inner woe, absolution from past guilt, present helplessness, and future terrors. Let us wait for no change of circumstance, no new experience, no fresh revelation. Our circumstances will only be a growing bondage unless we seek Divine freedom; our experience has told us enough that we cannot live without it; the revelation of God's love we already have warrants the conviction that it is near all who desire it, and that he himself is awakening that desire.

These reflections on Freedom are not unneeded now. When wild and wicked acts are done in its name, the word loses power over timid minds, tempting them to think it is not one religious men should meddle with. The obvious answer — that religion too has been used to justify plots and assassinations, so that if you cast away one on that ground you must cast away both — carries little weight with those who live only in the moment and treat history as a mere almanac of events that cannot recur. It would be an idle taunt to note that crimes now imputed to the enemies of Popes were smiled on and sanctioned by Popes themselves in other days, were it not needed as a warning: those who would make the Gospel of Christ something other than a Gospel of Freedom are making both Freedom and Religion criminal and ungodly, and so encouraging atrocities done under either name. Let this be weighed by those who, out of wantonness, love of paradox, or dislike of certain people and professions, speak lightly of a word no Englishman can despise in his heart without betraying all his country's memories and traditions — and its Faith too. For faith in a God who breaks men's bonds asunder has been our forefathers' faith, the faith to which we owe everything pure and great among us. It has given us our manliness, and equally given us noble women capable of divine strength and heroism even under the most depressing circumstances. We must remember that the Sovereigns who brought back to our soil, from lands where they had wandered, an impatience of Freedom, a taste for Absolutism, a belief that Absolutism and Religion are natural allies, brought with them also irreverence for women, heartlessness, and licentiousness. That this infection in the English Court has in our own day been thoroughly removed, and domestic purity established — this has been the great impulse to loyalty among the English people, and is the best pledge that the Queen's children, wherever they go, will show by word and life how blessed a thing it is to be born on free soil. We may confidently believe that she who is leaving us now — since simplicity is stronger than guile, old affections stronger than plausible theories — will never be tempted, by any sophistry however dressed in religious language, nor by any dread of revolution however reasonable, to think a Government earns the titles of patriarchal and divine by enslaving its subjects rather than raising them to freedom. May the happy omen of her marriage, on the day we commemorate St. Paul's conversion, forever remind her that the noblest champion for Christ bade men stand fast in the liberty with which Christ had made them free! May all that day's blessings be hers! May they be ours too, that we may be God's ministers, as St. Paul was, in bringing the nations we rule, and by degrees all nations, out of darkness and the shadow of death, and in breaking their bonds asunder.

## THE CURSE OF CONCEALMENT; THE BLESSING OF DISCOVERY

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Septuagesima Sunday
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[January]{.smallcaps} 31, 1858
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> "*But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore he saith, Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light*."—[Ephesians]{.smallcaps} V. 13, 14.

*The passage:* Everything that is exposed is made visible by light, for whatever makes things visible is itself light. That is why it is said: Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

[In]{.smallcaps} the Gospels appointed for the Sundays between Epiphany and this Septuagesima, the Church sets before us various acts by which our Lord manifested His glory to the minds of His own countrymen.

They *saw* nothing but a poor Man, outwardly unmarked. The halo painters put round His head has a true meaning — that perfect inward beauty must somehow make itself felt through every obstruction — but no one thinks it more than a symbol, made necessary by the limits of art. We may believe His face was beautiful and harmonious, undistorted by any restless appetite, and that sorrow deepened rather than impaired its trust and submission. Still, the expression of His face, like every other manifestation of His character and power, demanded a mind, not merely an eye, to recognize it. The principle is universal: every revelation of Christ, even when He stood visibly present, was addressed to something more than sight.

If so, we naturally wonder how few could have felt any real effect from the acts of grace and power they witnessed. We believe the acts were real — lepers were actually cleansed, the lame actually walked. But considered as discoveries of divine power and goodness, not merely as producing sensible effects, we are tempted to ask: to whom were the discoveries actually made? Were not ninety-nine in a hundred of those who benefited, and of the onlookers too, exactly what they would have been had nothing of the kind occurred? A light was there — but was there any illumination *in them* answering to it, proving that it was there?

St. Paul's words in the text, taken plainly, seem to affirm that there must have been. He states generally that all things, being exposed, are made manifest by light — wherever light is, it makes its power felt, discovering what was hidden. In the next clause he asserts the converse: wherever there is manifestation, wherever something hidden comes to light, light must be present. In the third clause he assumes something that might seem to conflict with this but really explains and confirms it: that a man can be asleep, even dead, while the light shines on him — though the light is in One, and comes from One, who bids him wake and rise, and can enable him to do so.

These words were addressed not to Jews who witnessed Christ's signs, but to Gentiles in a distant city, hearing the news of His resurrection preached. Yet they must be as true of the Jews of Palestine as of the Gentiles of Ephesus; we will not understand their bearing on the latter unless we understand them of the former. I venture to say, of everyone who witnessed Christ's works at Nazareth or Capernaum, who sat with Him in the boat, who met Him at the Jerusalem feasts — Scribes, Pharisees, publicans, sinners, the eleven disciples, and the one who betrayed Him — that the light did make itself manifest, not merely to their eyes but to the mind within; that it discovered and exposed what was there; that they felt and knew with certainty that a light had come into the world, and had come to them.

I\. Take these in the order named. We might suppose that whoever else felt this divine power manifesting itself, the Pharisees at least were entirely without such consciousness, their pride smothering it — that on them the signs and wonders were utterly wasted. But a closer reading of the Evangelists suggests the opposite: no one gave more unmistakable proof that every word and act had gone home to them with the force of light, uncovering secrets in them they had not known were there. Their anger and bitterness *were* that proof. There was little in His outward acts, even by their own standards, to object to; He did not openly denounce them as hypocrites until late in His ministry. It was something *in* Him, something coming through His acts that eye and ear could not account for, that tormented them to madness. He exposed them to themselves before He exposed them to anyone who had thought them models of righteousness. They felt an actual Righteousness before them, embodied in a Person, not merely higher than theirs but the very reverse of it, springing from an utterly different root. So their objections to Him rarely touched mere accidents of His position — "no prophet comes out of Galilee" — but struck at the essence of His life: "This man blasphemes." "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" "He makes himself equal with God." "He casts out devils by Beelzebub." These were not doubts about the genuineness of His powers; they were complaints against Him, revealing hatred of His character — not words against the Son of Man, as He said, but against the Holy Spirit in Him: "they have seen and hated both me and my Father." Theirs was that actual hatred of goodness as goodness which is scarcely found except in men hardened by religious profession, breaking out only when light has entered their hearts and laid bare the habitual falsehoods they had mistaken for sacred qualities — falsehoods only One who reads and rules the heart can expose. The sense of One near them who wished to set them right, whom they would not let set them right, whose voice carried an authority they could not deny yet wished to silence — this was the provocation for all their enmity and their crimes.

II\. The same truth holds, differently, for the Publicans to whom Christ preached and with whom He ate. Some may have preferred His poverty to the wealth of the Pharisees and Herod's courtiers; but many publicans were themselves rich, perhaps courtiers as well as extortioners, and such would regard the Carpenter's Son with more contempt than those born to wealth. Ordinarily they would have counted His company no honor to themselves, even a condescension on their part. Instead they felt that He was stooping to them — because kingly dignity and glory showed through His acts, because the same power that drew Levi from the tax office was working on them, because there was an awfulness in His goodness that familiarity could not diminish. Yet it seemed altogether natural that He should come among them. Through this they understood His kingly authority and grace as they never could have otherwise: that the Highest of all must, by the very law He obeys, be the servant of all; that the Most Righteous must sympathize most with the unrighteous, wanting to make them like Himself, hating evil precisely in order to free them from it. These were manifestations reaching the inmost heart and conscience — deep in some, only playing on the surface of others — but in all producing some effect: bringing out crushed desires and hopes, showing them how these had been crushed, how they had held down the truth in unrighteousness, and showing them that the light which reproved them was not dead letters and a condemning law, but a Person who could raise them from death to life.

III\. So too with the Apostles. St. John, describing the miracle at Cana, says Christ "manifested forth his glory, and his disciples believed on him" — recording an impression made on his own mind and his companions', an impression having nothing to do with the senses, since this miracle appealed to sense less than most. Likewise when Christ said, "I do always such things as please my Father," many believed on Him, though nothing in those particular words was more striking than thousands of others He spoke daily. Both instances show, more than any scholastic definition, how a sudden conviction flashed into their hearts that they stood in the presence of Creative Power. This is exactly how belief of any kind comes to us, whether the preparation is quick or slow, whether we pass from denial, indifference, or anxious hesitation: whenever faith arrives, it arrives as a manifestation we bow to, not an opinion we adopt. The Gospels show how hard the disciples found it to confess the power around and upon them, how puzzled, how burdened by old notions, how ready to explain everything by some outward or sensible cause — with great swings between doubt and conviction. But whenever conviction of their Master's divine nature truly took hold, so that one could say, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," it was plain that flesh and blood had not revealed it to him, but that the truth had been manifested to his spirit — not reached through outward authority or logical inference. The very light that had exposed the Pharisee's falsehood, that had awakened truth and hope in the sinful woman, enabled the Apostle to preach the Kingdom of God to others by showing him it was within himself.

IV\. But one Apostle who preached the Kingdom to others is called the son of perdition. Was there no such revelation in him — did the light merely play around him, never felt or acknowledged by his conscience? To think so is a shallow view of his guilt and our own danger. Throughout his history and preaching the light must have been exposing him, showing him true righteousness, showing him his own sin. At the hour he received the sop, there must have been a manifestation of divine Love to his conscience such as he had never known. But he had invited in the opposing spirit of self-seeking, malice, and treachery, and surrendered to it; and having taken the sop, he went out, and it was night in him as in the world.

V\. Given all this, we can better feel the force of St. Paul's words to those who had never known Christ in the flesh but had heard His Gospel. He could tell them boldly: there is no one walking your streets claiming to be Lord of nature and man, commanding wind and sea, whom evil spirits call the Son of God; no such person sits bodily in your harbor preaching to worshippers of your goddess. But there are thoughts within all of you — Jews, heathens, baptized alike — accusing or excusing one another. You are all reproved — not by magistrate, synagogue ruler, or church officer, who cannot know your secret acts, words, thoughts, and states of mind, and would understand them only imperfectly even if you tried to confess them. Another eye than theirs is looking into these; another light than theirs manifests them to yourselves. For whatever makes manifest is light. Whenever you are thus reproved and judged, be sure a Light is with you and near you — the very Light that stirred the Pharisee's fury, that led the Samaritan woman to say "he told me all things that ever I did," that scattered confusion and unbelief in His chosen followers, that drove Judas, when he could bear it no longer, to kill himself. It is not some other light. It is the same Light that lightens every man who comes into the world.

VI\. And so he could say with confidence: "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." Such words he addressed continually to unbelievers of the synagogue and worshippers of Diana — he could have preached no Gospel to either without telling them that the divine Light had been manifested, that the Word in whom it dwelt had been made flesh, claiming all nations as children of Light, with power to turn them from darkness and the Prince of Darkness to the God in whom is no darkness at all. But now Paul speaks to those already baptized into Christ's name, who claimed to be illuminated, children of Light, admitted into the family named in the only-begotten Son. What was true for all men in general was true in the highest sense for them; they were meant to witness to all men how true it was. Their profession declared that there is no light in any human being except what comes from Christ, the Head of Man, who has brought His Light near to every heart and conscience, to be received or shut out. If they supposed their profession excused them from coming to the Light and walking in it, if they supposed there was no darkness in them and no danger of being lost in it, the Light would soon reprove them, revealing evils they never suspected, or thought long dead, and showing how those evils infected their daily words and acts. And how good it was for them that these painful discoveries should be made! It proved they had not extinguished the light, though they had forgotten it — that Christ was indeed present and manifesting Himself, however little they heeded or wanted His presence. Their lazy trust in a mere name, in belonging to the Church, might well draw them into a sleep so deep that every spiritual faculty grew numb — a sleep akin to death, perhaps its beginning. But there was a voice the dead in their graves would hear, saying always, "Awake, arise!" The moment that voice woke even the faintest response, it would be felt to come from One to whom they could confess their dullness, their incapacity for good, their bent toward evil, and who could bring them back into fellowship with the Light they had fled.

And, brethren, if these words are not as true for the nineteenth century as the first, for Englishmen as for Ephesians, applicable without the slightest change of meaning, I do not see what a minister of Christ has to do, or how he dares speak to any congregation, rich or poor, learned or unlearned. He may say to every human being: whatever reproves you for any evil act, thought, or habit is Light. It is not the light of your fellow-creatures' opinions — that opinion itself is often what it reproves you for following. It is not the light of maxims picked up from schools or the world — it often exposes the feebleness and falsehood of such maxims. It is Light from God Himself, who knows the secrets of your spirit and can converse directly with you. It is the Light of which the sun's light is only the outward, imperfect image — the Light that dwelt in Him who is the brightness of the Father's glory and the image of His Person; the Light that shone in Christ's acts of power, shone brightest in His humiliation, weakness, and agony, came forth when the powers of Darkness seemed almighty, and proved victorious over grave and hell. It is the Light gathered up in Him who ascended to fill all things, manifesting itself ever since through men, to men, in men — without which there would be no Church, nation, family, or order among men, no evil detected or mischief redressed; which has been to the fertility of human lives and societies what visible light is to the fertility of the earth. Yes, this Light and no other causes the smart and sting of conscience, recalls old bad deeds, shows us what degrades and defiles us now. It makes each of us ashamed of the fraud, the equivocation, the acted lie we once were proud of and thought had deceived our neighbor rather than destroyed ourselves. It makes us cry out against the world's corruptions until we suspect those very corruptions are in ourselves — a suspicion that leads most of us to a shameful tolerance of what we secretly wish indulged in ourselves, but leads a few to greater indignation against wrong and greater earnestness in rooting it out, because they know what it is and where it comes from. And if this is the light within you, awake, arise! For what makes manifest is Light, and Christ will give you Light. Do not merely speak of the light in your conscience — it is there, no doubt, but believing in a conscience will not reform you or free you from your confusions. Believe instead that the light is Christ's, that it has come from Him into your heart, that He can give you power to follow it, walk in it, and love it. Believe that the light visiting you in your most secret hours is the very Light that will one day shine on the whole universe. The Christ manifested in Galilee and Jerusalem, to Pharisees, publicans, and disciples; manifested to Ephesians, Corinthians, and Romans, preached by Paul, believed in and confessed in baptism by Gauls and Britons, manifested since to every suppliant sinner, every self-righteous man, every hypocrite in every age — is the Christ who will be revealed on the day of God's final victory over all His enemies.

## THE GOADING OF AN ADVERSARY THE IMPULSE TO PRAYER

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Sexagesima Sunday
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[February]{.smallcaps} 6, 1858
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> "*And He spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint; saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man: and there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And he would not for awhile: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge His own elect, which cry day and night unto Him, though He bear long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily*."—[Luke]{.smallcaps} xviii. 1-8.

*The passage:* Jesus told a parable to teach that people ought always to pray and never lose heart. In a certain city there was a judge who feared neither God nor man. A widow there kept coming to him, saying, "Give me justice against my adversary." For a long time he refused, but at last he said to himself, "Though I fear no God and respect no man, because this widow keeps bothering me I will give her justice, or she will wear me out by her endless coming." And the Lord said: Listen to what the unjust judge says. Will not God give justice to his chosen, who cry to him day and night, even though he is slow to act? He will avenge them speedily.

"[Yes]{.smallcaps}!" people have said, or at least thought, on reading this—"If God were an unjust judge, we might need to wear him down with petitions. But since he is wholly just and merciful, what need is there for such persistence? Does he not give generously to all, sending rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike? What proof is there that his generosity depends at all on our asking? What evidence, beyond some records of fanatical experience, that prayers are actually answered in the ordinary sense of that word? And if not, what in this parable, or any other, should encourage us to pray and not faint, or suggest we would not do just as well without praying at all?"

Let us see whether the story of the widow answers this difficulty more fully than it seems to, when we treat it merely as an instance of successful pestering.

I\. Her petition was: "Avenge me of my adversary." She had an enemy—a perplexing, tormenting, powerful one—who by some means terrified or oppressed her continually. This fear was why she went to the judge. He did not want her; he had given no command that she should come; he would rather have been left in peace. But she could not help it—her misery was too galling. If there was any chance of being heard, she had to try. There was a tribunal in the city. What kind of man sat on it was not the point; its mere existence spoke of redress for wrong. It told her she was not meant to be simply the victim of power, that even a weak woman might be avenged. So she cried, for right against a tyrant, to one whose business it was to help her. As long as that sign of protection and order lasted, she could not despair. She might have much to bear, but the adversary would be put down at last.

This, then, was the secret of her importunity: the sheer necessity of getting deliverance from an actual disturber of her peace. To feel this, you must set aside every other consideration and put the case as strongly as possible: the judge is unjust, fearing neither God nor man, and gives help only to be rid of her. The parable fixes our minds on this truth: each of us also has an adversary. It is the goading of this adversary that drives us to prayer. We pray not because some ruling power says "draw near," but because of a pressure of evil around us, beneath us, upon us, which we must shake off if we can. It takes different shapes for different people, with more or less conscious force, but all feel it, and so all pray—cry to some power in earth, heaven, or hell for rescue. They cry even while half-believing that the God they beseech is an unjust judge who cares nothing for them, bears a spite for their wrongs, or even desires their destruction. Their miseries seem to confirm this: where else could such miseries come from, if not from him? Might the Judge himself be the adversary? Misery speaks this language, and the misery that is sin speaks it loudest, transferring its own darkness onto the Being worshipped—he must be dark, because we are. And yet, despite this confusion, men go on beseeching even such a mist-covered Being to avenge them of their adversary. They still feel he must be a Judge, that justice must be his function, that he cannot wish evil to triumph or wish them destroyed by it. These feelings contradict each other, and that contradiction is itself part of men's wretchedness—but it only makes the fact more striking. Even to unjust gods have men prayed under the weight of their calamities, and those calamities would be far more unbearable if they did not. If men once concluded there was absolutely no help to be hoped for, a condition entirely animal would replace one still partly human. There does come an answer to even these prayers, for there is a seat above that of the unjust judge men have made for themselves.

II\. Here comes Christ's great argument: men will cry even to an unjust judge, because they have a tormenting adversary, and not in vain. Would you pray less because it is God you pray to—a Father, who has chosen you as his children, whose will you know, who hates wrong and seeks to rescue you from it, who has invited and commanded you to flee to him? If deliverance came to the widow from a judge precisely because he was unjust, may you not expect, with far more confidence than she had, to be avenged by God, even if he bears long with you?

This is exactly the point we began from. The doubt was whether God's righteousness and mercy are reasons for prayer or against it. Now we can answer: they are reasons against it, if by prayer we mean trying to bend God's mind and will to ours. They are reasons for it, if by prayer we mean the cry, "Avenge us of our adversaries, deliver us from the powers crushing us and separating us from the Mercy and Justice and Truth that are God's very nature." This is not a formal solution but a practical one, accounting for most of our perplexities about prayer and its answers. If we suppose God commands prayer as an arbitrary exercise for future reward or to avert punishment, it is natural to ask: what good comes of it? What sign have we of the promised bliss? Why keep at something that seems more meaningless each day? Such thoughts arise in many minds, and then come clever theories explaining why prayer suited the world's childhood but not its maturity, why it fit ages when grown men were childlike, why it becomes obsolete once we put on adult dress and are no longer under priestly tutelage, why it damages our idea of God's character and of the world's unity and harmony.

Such suggestions get a hearing because they match men's experience and excuse what they had been ashamed of. There is a sense of dryness and weariness in prayer that grows on most people with age and worldly habit; they remember feeling differently as children, and compare themselves with their forefathers. It is pleasant to call this change progress, proof of having outgrown habits suited to another time. But then comes a sharp twinge of real suffering, from without or within. The man who thought prayer was for children or women, not for him, discovers that *he* has an adversary. He must cry to some power—to Fortune, to Fate—"Avenge me of this adversary." He finds it a natural, necessary, human utterance still. Suppressing it may look manly, but it cannot really be done; the groan may be hidden from others, but it must be poured out somewhere. To whom, though? Here is the difference: he has not lost the necessity of prayer—it is stronger in him than in a child—only the belief that anyone cares to hear him. He had made his peace with the world's disorder, had forgotten or ceased to believe there was any Judgment Throne in the midst of it. How strange his feelings must be, now that he wants refuge from an actual tormentor—must he not wonder whether the tormentor is the very God he would pray to? Out of the most advanced civilization and its philosophy comes the very question that haunted the savage. The man who has learned that good and evil are not real opposites but only names for sensations, that the world is a machine and he a part of it, that all notions of asking God's help are childish fantasy—this man must pass again through the oldest human experience, must shriek to some unknown power in earth or air, a Jehovah or Jove or Lord who may mean him good or ill, may be just or unjust, may want begging or despise it—yet must be invoked, because the adversary is at hand and there must be some way of escape, even into a deeper abyss than has yet been sounded. What a revelation, then, to hear the old childlike teaching again: of a Father who does not will the death of his creatures, who sent his Son to free them from their adversaries and reconcile them to himself, who sent his Spirit that they might call him "Abba, Father" and draw near to him as their everlasting Deliverer, Comforter, and Friend! What a witness that these words are meant for real human sufferers in a real world, not for people who traffic only in abstractions—or who know those abstractions to be cold and worthless! What a release, for reason as much as for the heart, from a philosophy demanding a blinder faith than any priest ever asked: that the world is in harmony, and good and evil only different notes of that harmony—when we know ourselves to be in the midst of discord, and become insensible to it only by losing all perception of what it contradicts! What comfort in being told: "You have adversaries, and you need not explain away your conscience's testimony to that; do not crush your instinct to cry out against them, but give it voice, knowing that One wages perpetual war on these adversaries, that his whole government is that war, that he wants you to join it, and that through the very experience of misery he is drawing you to himself, so that in the midst of the struggle you may find a peace that will be yours forever."

Do you want evidence, beyond superstition-laden stories, that prayers are answered? See whether every cry of "Avenge me of my adversary" does not bring its answer—a witness that there is a Judgment Throne to flee to for redress of our evils and the world's evil. See whether that answer is not worth more, more solid and certain, than the very reports whose truth you have doubted. See whether what offends your conscience in those reports is not mainly this: that they describe a partial Divinity granting special favors to favorites, departing from eternal laws for their sake. If that is what they mean, I do not blame your indignation in rejecting them—for your very rejection testifies that there must be a Being who hears all his creatures when they call, who, because he upholds eternal laws, heeds all who cry against their violation. Assert such a Being against all who would narrow him. Prove to your own hearts, in the very act of prayer, that such a One exists. But do not hastily condemn those who have perceived only the side of him turned toward themselves—do not call them false or superstitious for believing he saved them individually from some calamity. Are you not narrowing the idea of an all-seeing, all-loving Creator, if you suppose he cares for the universal and not the particular, for the race and not the individual? Is that the kind of love or wisdom you would cultivate in yourself, or admire in another—or is it not a dry, unreal, almost dishonest love, a vague and pompous wisdom? Would you attribute to God what you would count insincere and heartless in a fellow man?

No! I dare not tell any man he may not pray to the God of Life to oppose Death in whatever form it assails God's creatures. I dare not tell him he may not cry to be avenged of some sickness crippling his body or soul. I believe the sickness is sent to draw out that cry, and I believe the cry will have an answer. The illness may not lift; the sufferer may go to his grave with his pain unabated. But if that sickness has brought him into fellowship with One he did not know before—if he has found an Everlasting Friend—he has a better answer than he expected. And if he recovers, I will not tell him that was no answer; I hold it to be one. God has given him that token of his presence and care, fulfilling his promise, "O Death, I will be thy plague." Let the sufferer accept that decree from the Judgment Seat of the Universe in awe and humility, and learn what it implies. To do so, let him pray again to be delivered from the narrow, self-glorifying thought that God cares for him on the ground of his merit or out of partiality. That prayer too will be answered: he will be avenged of another, worse adversary than any sickness—what his proud heart had taken as a sign of his difference from others, he will find was a sign of his kinship with them, of the Father's common care for him and for all. He will begin to understand why Christ, in revealing the Father, did not merely preach to crowds but went about healing this palsied man, cleansing that leper, casting unclean spirits from those who dwelt among the tombs. God could not be discovered to the hearts of those who took him for an enemy unless he came to them in their particular troubles, proving that he bore each infirmity himself. This was done to bring the outcast, shut up in his lonely self, back into the fellowship of humanity—to teach him that he is one member of a body, every part suffering with every other, because the Head suffers for all. Each was taught to cry to the Just Judge, "Avenge me of this adversary," so that his voice, prepared and mellowed, its false and jarring notes cleared away, might at last join the saints beneath the altar who never tire of hoping and praying that the faithful, true Lord God will avenge the earth of its destroyers. He learns that he has had a Priest on earth, touched by the feeling of his sorrows, tempted in every way as he is—so that he may know he has a Priest within the veil, who originates all our intercessions, presents them with the incense of his own sacrifice, and sits on his priestly, filial throne until his Father has put all his enemies under his feet.

## ST. PAUL AN ENEMY NOT OF SEEMING EVIL BUT OF ACTUAL EVIL

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Quinquagesima Sunday
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[February]{.smallcaps} 14, 1858
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> "*Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. Abstain from all appearance of evil*."—1 Thessalonians v. 21, 22.

*The passage:* Test everything; hold on to what is good; keep away from every form of evil.

[This]{.smallcaps} verse's last clause is commonly taken to mean, "Abstain from everything that looks like evil, that a bystander might suspect to be evil." You will hear clergy as well as laymen alter the sentence to "Abstain from the very appearance of evil" or "even from the appearance of evil," and many readers vaguely suppose such wording exists somewhere in the Bible. I do not think our translators meant to give St. Paul's words that sense. "Every evil appearance," or "appearance of evil," may simply mean every shape or form evil takes — a fair rendering of the Greek word εἶδος, perhaps preferable to "form" or "kind," the more natural translation. But since, like "species" in the Vulgate, the word "appearance" is ambiguous, one might wish it had never been used.

A moment's thought shows St. Paul cannot have meant what we have forced on his words. Christ said, "Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment" — though that verse, using ὄψις rather than εἶδος, doesn't bear directly on how we construe our text, it does bear on whether we should judge evil by mere look. Remember the occasion: Christ had healed a sick man on the Sabbath. The act had the appearance of evil — not only to bystanders but to the religious leaders of the Jews, who at once decided he had broken the Law, and had plausible grounds for it. This is one of a series: his receiving sinners and eating with them; the acts that led to the charge "a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber"; his tolerating the sinful woman who washed his feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. The Evangelists record these things carefully — evidently believing that without them Christ would not have fully revealed his Father or been a complete pattern for his disciples, and the conscience of mankind has agreed: devout men feel that if these features were removed from the Divine Image, the whole would be changed. Do you think St. Paul believed otherwise — that he would have taught the Thessalonians these conspicuous features of Christ's character were not to be copied but treated as dangerous?

How far does Paul's own example support that suspicion? You may remind me he told the Corinthians he would eat no meat while the world stood rather than cause a brother to stumble, and warned that acting on the knowledge that all meats are equally innocent might destroy the weak brother for whom Christ died. Was this not avoiding an appearance of evil where there was no real evil? Certainly not: the highest principle of Christian morality, the law of love and fellowship, would have been violated for the sake of a mere appetite or a petty display of intellectual superiority. He set aside a rule that looked sound on the surface in order to reach a solid, real principle.

But did not Paul himself strictly follow his Master's steps, departing entirely from the maxim ascribed to him, when he appeared to Jews — converted and unconverted, even to Apostles — to be violating sacred customs and trampling on the Covenant of his fathers? What doctrine was he following when he openly ate with Gentiles in front of Peter and Barnabas, who were trying to preserve what every Jew considered a necessary mark of the difference between the Chosen People and all others? How did he avoid the mere look of evil when he left his countrymen with the impression that he was overthrowing the righteousness of the Law by preaching the righteousness of faith? His life was one long fight against appearances — continual proof that to assert any great truth, one must deliberately risk appearing evil to both bad men and good.

We need not look far for evidence — the passage itself is decisive. The three clauses, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good; abstain from all appearance of evil," are not merely strung together by accident. Anyone attentive to Paul's style will notice the antithesis marked by the Greek words κατέχετε and ἀπέχεσθε: "hold on to the good, hold off from every form of evil." And the word governing both clauses, uppermost in his mind, is δοκιμάζετε, "prove" — a word always denoting a process of testing, whether applied to things or persons, the soundness of money or fitness for citizenship. Paul had already used it in this sense earlier in the letter: "So we speak, not as pleasing men, but God that trieth the hearts." That shows that to "prove" something means to look beneath its outside appearance to its real worth and essential nature. Yet on the popular reading, the first clause would say: "Do not be content with mere semblance; look into things, find their good, hold to that" — while the second would say: "Be afraid of semblances; the moment anything looks like evil, flee it; throw away your tests, and simply hold off from what seems evil to you or to others." That is not an antithesis but a contradiction — one it is not reverent to impute to an inspired man, nor honest to impute to an honest one; in Paul's case it would make his life an even greater contradiction than his words. Let us examine the text's language to see if it offers safer, more helpful guidance.

I\. First, "prove" or "test" all things. This text has often been claimed as the special motto of Protestant divinity, while "Charity believeth all things" or "Blessed are they which have not seen and yet have believed" are claimed by its opponents. I know no more honourable watchword than "prove all things," rightly understood as Paul meant it. He did not mean, "Bring everything to the standard of your private judgment, and keep only what agrees with it" — no scientist who speaks of testing and experiment would accept such an interpretation. He would object that reducing everything to a rule or anticipation already in our own mind is exactly what Bacon sought to free us from; as long as we do it we never reach truth. If there is no truth absolutely true for all men, inquiry is fruitless and should be abandoned. If my own judgment is the measure of all I see, with no higher measure to enlarge it, it will grow narrower and feebler daily. But if I acknowledge a Light greater than any organ of mine can hold, yet meant for me to commune with, I will want it to enter and purify my sight and widen its power. I will want to see all things by this Light, which distinguishes the fantastic from the real, the show of things from their substance, so that I cannot mistake one for the other, whether led by my own taste or by any earthly authority. This testing of the moral and spiritual world is exercised less in schools by learned men — though they need it too — than on sick-beds, by those fighting sore temptation and seeking God's help; they gain a power to distinguish what will endure the fire from what must be burned, which those untried in the fire never gain. So the charity that believes all things is not opposed to the judgment that proves all things — they are closely akin, and neither flourishes without the other. Love, seeking God who is Perfect Love, cannot rest in counterfeits or phantoms of him. Judgment, impatient of falsehood, takes no pleasure in mere rejection; it only wants to find what it can embrace and hold. The Protestant who felt bound to prove all things claimed the Bible as his great helper, and it never failed him — until he forgot the purpose of the work, and used it merely to build up his own notions and refute adversaries, instead of asking it to help him discern right from wrong in his own heart and dealings. The Romanist, needing something given and revealed, rejoiced in his Catholic Creeds, and they did not fail him — until he ceased treating them as catholic, and built over them a vast edifice of individual notions and centuries of speculation, hiding the truth that belongs to all men, leading multitudes who dared not test them to disbelieve them and the truth together — even while making the blessing on those who believed amid that darkness a truly great blessing.

II\. Next, Paul says to prove *all things* — not merely certain doctrines submitted to us, though those are included. He assumes that everything we meet — the ordinary notions and maxims of society, the habits and traditions of whatever literary, philosophical, professional, or religious circle we move in, the words we speak, our everyday experiences — needs sifting and testing to find the good in it. He assumes there is good in it all; otherwise there would be nothing to prove. Finding that good is our task. We are not to sit in a fault-finding spirit cataloguing how our fathers or neighbours have misled us, or how much worse our profession or country is than others. Instead, where much around us is evil, we are still to pursue the good, believing it is there and that discovering it will free us and our brethren from what enslaves us. Believe the good is in all things — even things we have dismissed, been taught to hate, or learned to hate ourselves. Do not shrink from confessing that goodness and beauty lie at the bottom of them all, or they could not have continued to exist. Do not fear seeking it for fear of falling in love with the evil also present in them; you will never fully know and detest evil until you have perceived and honored what stands opposed to it. Many in our day have plunged into false systems because they and their teachers ignored this rule: hearing only denunciations of evil, they discovered there was undisclosed good, and — partly to avenge their earlier deception, partly from lost confidence in teachers who had practiced a pious fraud on them, partly from having lost all power to distinguish — they accepted the whole compound, good and evil together.

III\. Paul continues, "Hold fast the good." Having perceived and detected it anywhere, cleave to it, hold it, refuse to let it go. Be sure what you want is the substantial good, the beauty with no flaw in it. Having that, you have what God in his infinite love desires you to have, what the Son of God took your nature and died to give you, what the Spirit of God stirs all creatures to sigh and groan for. Not that it is yours in the sense that you could tell a neighbour, "It is not thine"; not yours in the sense that lets you say, "It belongs to me, I cannot lose it, I may take my ease and be merry." It is yours by faith, because it is God's, and he invites you to trust him and so inherit his own righteousness, truth, and blessedness — yours because it is not in your own keeping, because you are lifted out of yourself to enjoy it.

IV\. So we come to the word I began with: "Abstain," or keep yourselves from every form or appearance that is evil. Having seen and grasped the good, have nothing to do with whatever is not that, whatever counterfeits it. Evil will take every variety of shape and appearance, but if you have learned to look beneath, to test the heart of things, you will not be misled by that variety — you will detect the lie under each new disguise and stand aloof from it. As the truth becomes precious and familiar to you, this likeness, this double, this mockery of it will be loathed and kept at a distance. This precept never becomes obsolete; it grows more necessary each day as the final struggle between light and darkness draws nearer, for the shapes of evil grow more complicated and their mimicry of good more complete. They will deceive us if we trust to our knowledge of the past, our sagacity in detecting others' errors, or our skill in applying rules received from men. Nothing will serve us but a love of the good, a thorough distrust of ourselves, a continual sense of evil's presence, and a continual assurance that Christ is present with us too, and has overcome it.

But the danger of being conquered by evil in some of its many forms is, I think, greatly increased by the opinion that has gained strength from Paul's supposed authority. To believe we must flee whatever people think evil, whatever seems evil to us at first glance, is to become evil's prey in the worst sense. This doctrine has retarded every reformation in every age and sanctified every corruption, yet it has never restrained a single rash reformer or preserved a single truth from outrage. Conscience cannot be bound by a rule that must be broken before any brave or right act can be done; the only effect of proclaiming it is to make earnest men doubt whether Paul's authority should be heeded at all, and to rob them of the real guidance his wisdom offers. Tell a man given to foolish eccentricities that there is nothing really wrong in what he does, but that he should avoid the appearance of evil, and — since he knows that in countless cases he should not avoid it — his silly innovations become canonized in his mind as manly resistance to the world's opinion. Better to tell him that God has given him work to do, that his influence over others is a trust fitting him for it, and that his affectations, since they impair that influence, violate the trust and show a low estimate of his work — so they should be cast off not as apparent but as real evil. Tell a man clinging to a course adopted not from self-will but honest conviction, whose action grieves others, that he should avoid the appearance of evil, and you rouse his conscience — the trifle becomes serious, and he will fight and die for it. Better to bid him prove and test what he is doing, hold fast the real good in it, and discard the rest not as apparently but as really evil — a self-indulgence not offered up to Christian Unity, from which Christian Truth cannot long be separated. These examples — and your own experience will supply a hundred more — show the maxim utterly ineffectual for its own ends. Every worldly argument dressed in religious clothes and claiming an authority not its own must prove feeble and worthless; its only effect is to benumb the moral sense and degrade the hearts under its influence. People will plead it to desert a friend or refuse an unpopular cause, yet forget it the moment it crosses their own passions. Let us ask God's help to be less moved by mere appearances, whether of good or evil; let us seek the substantial and reject the semblance in all the common work of life. So we shall enter fellowship with him who is the Truth, and be delivered from the Spirit of Lies, his adversary; so, when he whose face was marred more than any man's, who appeared to men an evil-doer, who was crucified in weakness, is revealed in the glory of his Father and the holy angels, we shall not be ashamed before him at his coming.

## HOW SELF-EXAMINATION IS POSSIBLE

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First Sunday in Lent
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[February]{.smallcaps} 21, 1858
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> "*Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates*?"—2 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} xiii. 5.

*The passage:* Paul tells the Corinthians to examine themselves, to see whether they are in the faith, and to prove themselves; and asks whether they know that Jesus Christ is in them — unless they fail the test.

[We]{.smallcaps} don't usually think about where the word "reprobate" comes from. But ordinary speech keeps its true sense better than theology does. When we call a man an utter reprobate in common talk, we mean that various attempts have been made to reform him, and all have failed — he has been tried and found worthless. Some theologians give the word almost the opposite meaning: a reprobate, for them, is one God has condemned without trial at all, born into the world with a mark of condemnation already known to his Maker, gradually discovered by the man himself, and finally declared to the whole world.

Our translators kept the word's root sense here. They clearly meant "reprobate" to correspond to "prove," capturing the relation in the Greek between δοκιμάζετε and ἀδόκιμοι. We must keep that relation to keep the sense of the passage. Paul's other uses of ἀδόκιμος bear this out: in Hebrews, ground that has drunk the rain and yields only thorns is called ἀδόκιμος; Paul disciplines his body lest, having preached to others, he himself become ἀδόκιμος; in Romans, those who refuse to retain God in their knowledge are given over to an ἀδόκιμον νοῦν. In each case a trial has occurred, and the result is worthlessness — but the kind of worthlessness matches the kind of thing tested. Ground proved is simply found barren; a moral being proved worthless in this way has lost the power of moral discernment, the power to prove himself at all. This sense must not be forgotten here.

I\. We forget it if we miss Paul's first words. Substitute "examine yourselves, whether you have a *right* to be in the faith" for "examine yourselves, whether you *are* in the faith," and you alter the passage at its root. Paul is not telling the Corinthians to check whether they've passed through experiences entitling them to call themselves believers, whether they have warrant to claim their baptismal privileges. He is saying: test yourselves strictly on whether you are actually claiming these privileges, actually believing what you profess to believe. That is the natural meaning of "if you are in the faith." The Corinthians would have real cause to complain if Paul meant that perhaps, after all, they had no right to apply to themselves the promises of the Gospel he had preached to them — that God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. If he meant them to examine whether these universal-sounding words included or excluded them, he owed them some means of finding the limits — some way of knowing who was cut off from blessings he had spent his life declaring meant for every race, every intellectual and moral condition. And he would not have said "examine *yourselves*"; he would have said, "examine the terms of God's covenant for flaws, to see whether you fall under some exemption from its general amnesty, whether you are truly admitted as citizens or still held as bondmen on some pretext." And he would then have had to explain how, if the examination proved they lay outside divine mercy, they were to bring forth the fruits he demanded of them — since by his own teaching they needed faith in God, and God working in them, in order to bear fruit at all. If the trial only convinced them of their evil state, what hand could raise them out of it, if God's hand were not held out to them, if they stood in no relation to Him whatever?

All these monstrous contradictions — worse in experience and moral effect than even in logic — come not from taking Paul's words literally, but from *fearing* to, from unwillingness to obey them as they stand. If he meant simply that they ought to be in the faith, to call on God as Father and acknowledge themselves His children, he is consistent with himself. The old Prophets told Israel they were forever forgetting the Covenant, distrusting the God who called them to trust Him; and Paul told the Corinthians that all Jewish history was an example for them, upon whom the ends of the world had come. They were just as liable to forget the new and better covenant as their forefathers were to forget the old one — as likely to think themselves not God's children as those under the Law were to think themselves not His servants. The consequences would be the same in kind, worse in degree: heartlessness, idolatry, division, self-exaltation alternating with despair. It was needful for them to examine themselves for signs, inward and outward, that this indifference and forgetfulness was creeping upon them — whether the loss of brotherly feeling toward men accompanied a loss of filial feeling toward God.

Such a trial would be, strictly, a trial of themselves — not of God's words or deeds, which were assumed to bear the largest, most gracious meaning; not of other men, whose inner state they could barely know; but of their own very selves. This was all the more necessary given the nature of the New Covenant and their relation to it. It was to their own spirits that God had spoken; with their spirits He had established fellowship. He had redeemed them from the dominion of visible things precisely to set up His kingdom within them.

II\. So Paul goes on: "Or know ye not your own selves, that Christ is in you?" Many readers seem to suppose this question has no direct link to the command before it, as though "your own selves" were now a subject rather than, as before, an object. Such a separation would ruin the sense of the passage.

Paul has spoken of self-examination; now he speaks of the self-knowledge that justifies it, that makes it a reasonable, possible exercise. This deserves attention — it touches us all personally, and has caused no small perplexity.

Pick up almost any religious book — especially any written for Lent — and you find exhortations to self-examination, with rules meant to help us do it. Our consciences agree it's reasonable: we're liable to grievous moral falls if we don't watch our steps, and we fail to claim our dignity as spiritual beings if we're ignorant of our own spirit's movements. The advice comes from real experience and would help us, if only we could use it. But when we try, a terrible contradiction appears. We set out to be honest, and the attempt seems to make us dishonest. In this trial we conduct, are not plaintiff, defendant, witness, and judge all the same person? Are we really proving ourselves, really passing judgment? Are we not continually bribed to overlook what deserves condemnation, while feeling excessive remorse over trifles? Are we not losing our very sense of right and wrong — learning to magnify, to minimize, to distort — through the very process meant to secure a just view of ourselves?

And then another doubt arises. Is this self-consciousness even a good thing? Doesn't it hinder action, sap energy, breed a mawkish, indelicate urge to expose our most secret selves, even publicly? The rage for that kind of confession is less common in England now than some years back, though not extinct. But in how many other ways do men show they feel this self-consciousness as a disease that will destroy them unless cured! It drives numbers to the feet of the spiritual director. It tempts others into speculations about the "I" and the "not I," where "I" means everyone but the philosopher playing the puzzle, and "not I" means nothing at all. And multitudes who find comfort in neither expedient try instead to go numb in a whirl of business or pleasure, losing the pressure of life in a dance of death.

I cannot deny there is a Self-Consciousness — cultivated by religious as well as philosophical teachers and books — that has just this evil character and these evil results. But I believe that Self-Consciousness is the very opposite of the Self-Knowledge said to descend from Heaven, and that the Self-Knowledge Paul means here is the one real deliverance from it. The old Greek teacher thought he could free his young fellow-citizens from the philosophical tangles ensnaring their consciences and intellects only by leading them to Self-Knowledge. His path was questioning about common things and the words people used every day. But he believed he had reached his own knowledge only through an ever-present daemon — distinct from himself, a faithful monitor warning of dangers, rebuking follies, showing him how to rise above accident and circumstance and his own narrow notions to grasp what truly is and abides. That faith gave his own mind sincerity and gave him power over others; he was sure that they too, if they tried to act rightly, would find such a guide.

This faith of Socrates, true as the simplicity and manliness of his life and death suggest it was, demands an expounder. Who can tell us of this unseen guide — what he does for each of us, whether he cares only for a few favored souls or for the whole race? Paul boldly answers these demands. He speaks the *Name* of the invisible Lord and Teacher of his own spirit, and says to every man: He is the Lord and Teacher of your spirit too. He says this One has come into the world, taken human nature, died a human death, risen as Man, ascended as Man, and lives now as Man at God's right hand. He says to the Corinthians: "Know ye not your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you?"

Here is the true Self-Knowledge, the thing that makes Self-Examination real and not a fiction. Plaintiff, defendant, and judge are no longer the same. A Judge stands at the doors of our hearts, who discerns their thoughts and intents, who knows our most solitary acts and secret thoughts, who distinguishes with infallible insight the precious from the vile, the treacherous from the sincere — who wants us to distinguish them too, and is continually inspiring in us love for the one and hatred for the other. To confess Him as our Lawgiver and Judge is to confess One who cannot be misled by pretensions or won by self-flattery — yet who has no wish to condemn us, who never charges us with wrong except to show us the way out of it, never shows us fallen without helping us rise, never convinces us we are sunk in death without offering the promise of life.

So Paul uses striking language about Self-Consciousness when describing our relation to Christ: dying to ourselves, rising again as new creatures in Him. He does not present this death as some mystical process of annihilation, nor this resurrection as one soul's high effort grasping at a blessing beyond ordinary reach. He teaches that this is our proper, human state. The revelation of Christ was nothing less than the revelation of a universal Brother of men, in whom each man has his life, apart from whom each man has only death. So he tells every baptized person that, since by a single act Christ has owned them as brothers, of the race whose Head He is, they are to count themselves dead to sin but alive to God — to rise as redeemed, regenerate people, enter the hard fight of life in that strength, and in that name repulse all the enemies that have overpowered them and will daily threaten to overpower them again.

Here, then, is the real deliverance from the self-consciousness wise men denounce — and their very denunciations help cultivate it — the self-consciousness we flee from, only to have it rise up in newer, darker shapes wherever we hide. Does some preacher's accusation torment you, calling you names you think don't fit? Would the philosophical observer treat you any better — would Rochefoucauld deal more kindly with you, uncover pleasanter facts about you? Be angry at the preacher, be angry at the philosopher, if your anger speaks for your race, if you mean that humanity is libeled when it's said to be capable only of what is base. But to vindicate humanity's cause, be true to yourself. The preacher and the sharp-eyed critic torment you because your conscience half agrees with them — because it says, yes, you have felt low, grovelling pleasure even in a friend's suffering; you are inclined to sacrifice family, country, the whole universe to your own interest; you would, as Adam Smith says, care less for the ruin of an empire than a pain in your own finger. Is there something else in you besides that? Are you sure? Yes — you were told so as a child: that you were a member of Christ, that He was in you. That is still true. That is why you cannot bear to be treated as an alien and outcast, why your blood rises at being told you're capable only of foul impressions and grovelling motives, incapable of denying yourself for the highest ends. It is a lie. Hold fast that it is. But who told the lie — the preacher? Rochefoucauld? No: you told it, by acting as though you could be nothing better than they say, because you had forgotten what you are. You exchanged the heavenly self-knowledge — that Christ is Head of every man and you a member incorporate in His body — for the earthly self-knowledge that comes only from watching what men do when they act on the dream that each stands apart from his neighbor, that each can work out his own private scheme of existence, that we move amid a whirl of atoms in a chaos, not a universe.

That is the miserable faith we are all naturally prone to, which will certainly overtake and possess us if we have no higher faith to set against it. Let us then examine ourselves, whether we are in that higher faith; let us prove, day by day, our right to remain in it. This examination involves no wretched poring over our own motives. It turns us at once from the accusing spirit — which tells us we are yielding to some vile motive leading to some vile act — to seek instead the inspiration of the One in whom are the springs of all right action. It involves no neglect of plain work for the sake of morbid brooding: it is in work that we learn what we would become without a helper, and learn to trust and depend on Him. The temptations to fretfulness and cowardice, to bitter words, to feed on flattery or malice or lust, to shade the truth in small dealings, to lie for a worldly end or even a godly one, the particular temptations of each trade and calling, of home life, of national life, of church life — these are the schools where men have learned to examine themselves, learned the feebleness of mere rule, the necessity of a living, present Teacher, learned what the old nature is that must be crucified, and what the new, true man is that Christ renews in us day by day.

In that school they have learned the force of the words I began with, "except ye be reprobate" — a meaning more serious and awful, yet far more practical and far less dishonoring to God, than the sense some give it when they apply it to everyone except themselves. Let us apply it strictly to ourselves. By a habit of indifference, thoughtlessness, forgetfulness, we may become ἀδόκιμοι, utterly worthless, even after undergoing all discipline — the sign of that worthlessness being the loss of the power to discern good from evil, the inability to know that mighty truth that Christ is in us, the giver of strength, the hope of glory. To keep this from happening, let us keep assuring ourselves and each other that this is an everlasting truth, one we can act on, one that lets us face the problems of our existence and the world's without flinching, a truth that gives victory.

If others can teach us some belief that will help us live, we may consider it — but we have no time for endless, wearisome speculation on this point or that. The world moves too fast, and the energies we need for action are visibly wearing themselves out. We need One who can renew them, pour His own divine energy into them, fit us for whatever new condition His world may bring, and fit us to survive its dissolution. We need One who will not hastily cast us off as reprobate for having resisted warning after warning, mercy after mercy, but who will try every method infinite wisdom can devise to bring us under His gracious yoke, to overcome the self-will that is our ruin, to make us like Himself — preparing us for the Day when He, who has been working secretly on our hearts, will be known openly; when He, who for our sakes submitted to be tempted by the Evil Spirit, will be revealed as the Deliverer from all temptation, the Conqueror of all His enemies and ours.

## ST. PAUL'S THOUGHTS AND ACTS NOT DETERMINED BY HIS OWN LOVE BUT BY CHRIST'S

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Second Sunday in Lent
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[February]{.smallcaps} 28, 1858
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> "*For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again*."—2 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} v. 14, 15.

*The passage:* The love of Christ compels us, since we have concluded that if one died for all, then all died — and that he died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again.

[Either]{.smallcaps} there is a contradiction here, or Paul's idea of love differs from the one most common among us. "The love of Christ constrains us; because we judge" seems to mix a process of reasoning with a compulsion of feeling. If Paul had to argue himself into the conclusion that Christ died for all because all were dead, how can he also say that mere devotion to his Master drove him to act and suffer? If he were under such a passion, what need or room would there be for thinking, deliberating, concluding?

This puzzle isn't due to mistranslation. Paul actually uses a participle where we use "because": "the love of Christ constrains us—having judged" or "concluded." This change doesn't affect the real question. Paul's language assumes the love constrains those who reach this conclusion; he assumes some close connection between the conclusion and the love and its effects.

I wouldn't raise this if I weren't sure it troubles many in practice, whether or not they connect it with this text. No difficulty is more serious and tormenting, especially now, than the question of how the heart and the intellect relate — the claims of duty against the claims of affection. These questions take many complicated forms; unless we've tried to untangle the threads beforehand, they seem hopelessly knotted when we meet them in real events, yet meddling with them beforehand feels like a schoolroom exercise. I believe the Apostle's words are the best solution. Let us try to understand what they meant to him, and what they mean to us.

I'd note first that "the love of Christ" can hardly mean the love the Apostle, or any man, has for Christ. It's natural to read it that way, since love shown to us aims to produce love in us, and we easily suppose the reflection, being nearer ourselves, matters more than what it reflects. So many take "the love of Christ" or "of God" in the New Testament to mean some feeling in the creature toward the Creator. Sermons and devotional books encourage this: they grant that our love has its ground in God's nature and acts, but their real business becomes dwelling on the results in us — testing whether the feeling is present or absent, pointing to blessing if it is awakened and misery if not. Such appeals sometimes kindle what was dormant. But as often they breed hypocrisy, dishonest efforts to manufacture the required signs, sharpness in detecting our neighbors' faults, and a habit of offering our own feelings as compensation for wrongs our conscience condemns. Once we believe that all God's acts are a revelation of Himself, that knowing Him is eternal life, this method becomes impossible. Then presenting His acts and character to men must be the only right way of producing the like in them. Idolatry, unbelief, despair are what come of trying to form images of excellence for ourselves. So Scripture — the great protest against idolatry, the great warrant of faith, the cure for despair — must be understood as speaking first of the love Christ shows, not the love shown to Him.

The word "constrains" itself suggests an atmosphere surrounding and pressing on us, a power bearing down upon us — not something rising up from ourselves like incense to Heaven. Given this meaning, most of our difficulty disappears. A feeling of ours must be carefully distinguished from an exercise of judgment, even though the two are related. But a love descending upon us from a superior Being is not so confined. The sunlight of a parent's or teacher's countenance doesn't act only on a child's affections; it acts on his intellect too, giving him courage to think, power to perceive, vigor through his whole being. So the love of Christ might well constrain the judgment to a right conclusion just as it constrains the hands to right acts. If the Divine Love is at work on any creature, we'd expect it to act diffusively, leaving no faculty untouched, bringing into clearness whatever faculty is most ready for it — sometimes kindling the passive feelings, sometimes stirring the active powers, sometimes reaching the heart directly, sometimes through the winding passages of the understanding.

This, I think, is the general conclusion — but it's clearer set beside Paul's own application of it. His judgment is that if Christ died for all, all were dead. A child or pupil whose spirit has been awakened by a friend's encouragement first thinks, "What would I be without this? How cold and hard I was before!" That impression is only partly true — if that influence had been absent, another might have supplied it; when withdrawn, a further one suited to a new stage might follow. But Paul's inference is absolute and universal, not partial like this. Confessing that Christ's love is acting on his will, he concludes that apart from that love there would be no life in him at all — and what he says of himself he says of everyone. Without this primary love, no creature would have any life. He goes further, connecting this with the truth that Christ died for our sins, seeing into its hidden meaning: He died for all because all were dead — the creature had no life of its own, only what it received. He gave up His own life to the Father because this was so; He claimed nothing as His own — refusing to turn stones to bread by His own power for His own use, receiving everything from the Father, and saying at the end, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." By this perfect filial dependence He upheld the dependence, on God, of all whose nature He had taken. Their death can only be understood through His death, their life through His life.

This same love let Paul see the ultimate purpose of that death: that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again. The Death was the great witness that all men were, in themselves, dead; taken together with the Resurrection, it witnessed that God's design was to give new life to all who would receive it — not a separate, selfish life such as men make for themselves, each pursuing his own ends and rewards, impatient of others' success, jostling them aside, but the life that was first in Him who gave Himself up for all: a life proceeding from Him, continually referred back to Him, of which He is the Author and Finisher, the Spring from which all its streams descend, the Ocean in which they all meet.

In this way the different parts of this sentence unfold out of each other, and illustrate the whole doctrine and Paul's own acts. He's so learned a teacher, with so much subtlety in his Epistles, that many suppose he was elaborating a system of theology. But simple readers feel they are with a man of action, not a schoolman — one versed in men and their ways, in the perplexities of society and of individual conflict. Luther held that no one could understand Cicero's letters without thirty years as a statesman, or Paul's without forty years in Church affairs. Yet through all this doctrinal wisdom and practical experience runs a vehement, personal passion — no one could say his heart had been crushed by his understanding, or had grown cold from the world's unkindness. The teacher and ruler is at every point the man; he magnifies his office and counts himself nothing, yet Paul is as distinct a person healing the feuds at Corinth, or reminding the Galatians of the grace they had fallen from, as when insisting the magistrates of Philippi fetch him from prison, or begging Philemon to deal kindly with the slave who had become a brother. Seeking "the pulse of this machine," we look in vain to any one quality of Paul's mind — we contradict his own words if we trace his primary impulse to feeling or calculation. There was a power of love urging him on, despite all natural reluctance, to right thought and good deeds, making him, despite his natural selfishness, live as a brother and fellow-worker in Christ's Church. He yielded to that power and urged others to yield to it, since it was for them as much as for him — since he judged that Christ died for all, that all were dead without Him, that all might live through Him. This was the secret of his theology, his arguments, his passionate appeals, his struggles, his joys and sorrows, his vehemence and weakness, his self-justification and self-contempt, his rejection of the Law and his submission to it, his freedom to do all things and his labor to bring his body into subjection, his fear that he might be a castaway and his confidence that nothing could separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus his Lord.

If it is so, then what applied to Paul applies to us — as a society and as individuals, layman and priest alike. If any of us claimed, "The love of Christ constrains me," meaning that he consciously acted at every moment from love to his Master and care for His flock, how many of our deeds and words would mock that claim! How the conscience would be tormented by paltry deeds done with a scarcely-hidden purpose of self-glorification — deeds that look worse still, and do more harm, when they wear a seemingly religious face.

But where's the peril in saying: "I know that the love of Christ has constrained me to do every right act, because there is a death, a lovelessness, in myself which without such a power must have prevented them. I am surrounded by this Divine Love; it strives against my self-seeking temper, thwarts my inclination to be the isolated, self-concentrated creature I keep trying to be, stirs sympathy for my kind, and tells me I was not created to live or die for myself"? A man may confess this constraint even while most conscious of struggling against it, of trying to be independent of it, of fiercely resolving to break its bonds. Still the Love of Christ has been pressing him round, above, beneath, seeking to possess him. If he yields, he won't boast that his own choice now governs him instead of another guiding him; he will rejoice that his will has been captured by the true Will it was made to obey, and judge that such authority, enforcing such obedience, is the true source of all freedom.

He will judge that if one died for all, then all were dead. This won't be a hasty, momentary surrender to someone who showed him a peculiar mercy, but a considerate, quiet submission to One who has proved Himself the rightful governor and deliverer of him and of his whole race. He confesses that this One died not for him alone but for all — for him as one member of a body, because all its members were dead in themselves, capable of receiving quickening life from their Head. He submits to this Lord and Giver of life because experience and reason both tell him he cannot work harmoniously with his fellow-men on any other footing, and that he can work with them harmoniously only while inspired by Him "who died for all, that they who live should not live unto themselves, but unto Him."

The same judgment warrants charity toward the good deeds — and the failures — of others. What excuse have we for undervaluing anyone's kindness, or for closely questioning their motives? Such acts must proceed from the constraining love of Christ, whether the person acknowledges that love or even knows Christ's name, for they cannot proceed from mere fallen human nature — apart from Christ, that nature is dead, as Christ's death itself proclaims. They must be Christ's own acts, however marred by the flawed instrument performing them. It is blasphemy to call any instance of gentleness or charity in a human being "a splendid sin"; that is calling good evil and evil good, confounding Christ with the Spirit of Darkness.

On the other hand, this same judgment requires us to acknowledge that the darkness we feel in ourselves is at work in others too, always trying to draw the light down and extinguish it. Anyone who knows himself has no difficulty understanding all the strifes, divisions, wars, heresies, and schisms of families, nations, and churches — they are all in him, he feels them, he is tormented by them. He carries within him the witness of death, even of a second death, in which all that is better in him, all that binds him to his fellows and separates him from beasts or devils, might be utterly extinguished. But he carries too the witness of a sustaining love which could not be working on him if it were not also at work on the whole world, on every member of his race.

We do homage to Christ's love when, however cold our feelings, however barren our hearts, we still hold them as His subjects, capable of being renewed and filled with His Spirit. The understanding, honestly exercised, serves Him as well as the affections do. A man who bows out of duty, conscious he has no worthy offering of gratitude or zeal, may find his lips touched by a coal from the Altar, and that Christ does not send him away empty of gifts he sought in vain within himself. But if we believe in the constraining love of Christ, we must wish it to make every part of us a sacrifice, converting reason, will, affections, and body into instruments of His pleasure. We must wish this love not always to strive against an opposing, seemingly victorious element, but to believe it will knit men's hearts together, shape society by its own law, and not let men set up in its place a law of selfishness and hatred. In the hard faith that Christ's constraining love is the mightiest power in the universe, the source of all other powers and that to which all must be subdued, we must live, think, act, and struggle day by day.

Let us not forget that this same love, constraining all the dwellers on earth whether they confess it or not, must be acting still more wonderfully and perfectly on those who have passed out of our world into some higher work and knowledge. How sad it would be to think our relation to them depended on the strength of our affection or memory! We often feel divided from them by the willfulness and falsehood we are conscious of in ourselves. But when we remember that it is Christ's love, not ours, that binds them to us — that they now know, better and more truly than we do, that in Him they are dead and in Him alone they have life — we may be sure the tie between us is one nothing can sever. As we kneel at Christ's altar and confess a love shown at the Cross higher than Heaven and deeper than Hell, we may rejoice that in it we have communion with all the spirits before the Throne; we may ask that the sweetness and gentleness Christ enabled them to show here may appear in our own lives; and we may be sure that every hour we will know them better, the more we glorify Him.

## STILLNESS IN THE CONFIDENCE OF GOD'S TRIUMPH

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Third Sunday in Lent
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[March]{.smallcaps} 7, 1858
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> "*Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth*."—[Psalm]{.smallcaps} xlvi. 10.

[There]{.smallcaps} is a class of persons Divines and Church historians call Quietists. They have formed no community of their own, but are found in all communities, marked less by doctrine than by a certain temper. They have perhaps abounded most among two bodies utterly opposed to each other, Roman Catholics and Quakers. It is hard to say what age or circumstance has favored them most: they turn up among the Religious Orders of the fourteenth century, amid the Protestant tumults of the sixteenth, in our own Civil Wars, in the splendor and corruption of Louis XIV's Paris, in the restlessness of our own day.

It is unfair to judge these Quietists from their opponents' account, or even from their own, without knowing the whole context of their lives — their education, and whatever led them to overvalue one kind of character and undervalue another. But so far as they show dislike of energetic qualities, of conflict, of mixing in the business and perplexities of their fellow men, their spirit seems alien to that of the holy men the Bible shows us. Those men live in an element of perpetual contention, and confess that this is what they are meant for. Enemies surround them; they can neither stand still nor flee; they must keep advancing, winning ground, or else be led captive in a triumph. A Quietist who imagines every day should be a Sabbath must find the Psalms a most uncongenial book. He cannot see how a warrior like David could be a man after God's own heart, or could have given the Church its thoughts, prayers, and music for all time.

And yet there surely is a Sabbatical character in these Psalms, a quiet of their own that all have felt — the very charm weary, storm-tossed pilgrims have found in them. To meditate on the Law day and night, to commune with one's own heart upon the bed, to wait patiently for the Lord, to rest in Him — this is the continual effort of the very man who is engaged with hosts of visible and invisible foes. He learns the delight of rest through ceaseless labor, and how vain and hopeless labor is when it is not grounded in rest. Only one who feels he has a home can venture abroad bravely into the world's bustle; only one who knows the secret of stillness can toil like a man.

Here, then, is the true quietism of the Psalms: quietism in the midst of action, understood only by one who hears the call to act and obeys it. The ground of this quiet is in the verse I have read: "Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth."

The 46th Psalm opens, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." It must have been written in such a time — no Psalm bears clearer traces of struggle and suffering. Many refer it to Hezekiah's day, seeing in "there is a river whose streams make glad the city of our God" an allusion to Sennacherib's stopping of the watercourses when he besieged Jerusalem, and finding in it a likeness to Isaiah's language, so that some have guessed Isaiah wrote it. Certainly the whole tone fits such a season. Its recurring burden, "The Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge," recalls that passage in Isaiah — belonging, however, to the time of Ahaz — where those confederated against Jerusalem are told they will be broken in pieces, for God is with us.

That idea of Emmanuel, God with us, which comes out so strongly there, is truly felt to be the pervading idea of Isaiah's prophecy, giving it all its sublimity. It is also the pervading idea of this Psalm: "The Lord of Hosts is with us." He is not a heathen god descending to help in an emergency — He is with us, not visible, but really present, the strength and refuge of our hearts. "Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea."

And therefore "Be still." The thought of possible help arriving from some propitious Divinity when other aid fails may lift the spirit and keep it from utter collapse, but it cannot bring stillness — it can only produce a flutter of expectation, a feverish anxiety, until the hoped-for vision appears. Only the belief in a Presence near us, with us, can inspire lasting awe, keep us steady while all things rock around us, and take away both the eagerness to move and the cowardice that paralyzes movement.

"Be still and *know*." You cannot know this truth unless you are still. Keep the waters of your spirit forever stirred, and you will see nothing in them but the reflection of your own troubled self. To know is not to gather scattered fragments of information or ingenious speculations; it is to find a center to which we can refer ourselves and everything else, to feel the ground we stand on, what we did not create, what is and must abide. Such knowledge comes only in stillness — but it also, in turn, produces stillness. Without it, or without seeking it, we must be restless; so far as it is given us, it brings tranquility.

For "Be still and know that *I am God*." Notice how often Scripture shifts between speaking of God and letting God speak. We would lose much if it did not: this change of form expresses more than a more "natural" mode of speech could. It teaches us that it is God who reveals Himself to us. He says, "I am God" — not a notion of our minds, not something we make Him by how we think of Him, but a living Person, saying to us what He said to Moses at the bush, "I am"; teaching us that we could not exist if He did not, that all our thoughts and apprehensions were given by Him and are meant to lead us to Him. Not a mere Being, not a mere Ruler, but the perfectly Good Being, the perfectly Righteous Ruler — "the Lord, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin" — the God from whom every dream and image of goodness we find in ourselves, in others, or try to embody in our own works, has come; who alone can show us what perfect goodness is, and open our eyes to the image after which we are formed, to see whose it is, and that from its fullness all creatures receive grace for grace.

The Jew was taught, by a wonderful discipline, to turn from every likeness of things in heaven or earth, from the works of his own hands, from whatever he was most prone to worship, to this Living God who had chosen him and his fathers to know His Name and confess Him Lord. They were trained in a school of suffering to feel the emptiness of all visible creature-worship, and to feel that if they were to be preserved in trouble, delivered from the curse of their own follies, made a wise and righteous people, they must return to the unseen King and Deliverer, seek Him in stillness, and confess Him Lord even of the spirits that had revolted from Him and, in seeking independence, become slaves to all that was earthly.

But the lesson would be incomplete without what follows: "I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth." They were not withdrawn from visible things in order to despise them, nor separated from the surrounding nations in order to count their thoughts and acts and lives as worthless. The Lord they worshipped, whom in stillness they knew, who was their refuge in trouble and to whom they returned after forgetting His covenant, was the Ruler of all nations, who had made the earth and its treasures for His own service. To despise the heathen, or to despise the earth, was to despise Him; the Jew existed to assert the sacredness of both by claiming both as His dominion. Even as comfort in disaster, belief in God's presence and goodness would have been unsatisfying without the further belief in His power — the assurance that it would one day be manifest over the whole universe and crush all that opposed it. For the heathen powers threatened them, insisting that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was no different from the gods of Hamath and Arphad, of Hena and Ivah, and that His rule might be swept away as theirs had been. The dynasts of the earth, the powers of nature, measured their strength against Him. They must have triumphed as tyrants forever, had there not been a sure witness and prophecy that the God of Righteousness and Truth would establish His Kingdom over them all, a Kingdom without end.

Those Israelites who had learned these lessons, who had truly sought in stillness to know God, were prepared to receive the Only Begotten Son as the Express Image of His Person. But it was hard to see how One who came in such humility, however that humility showed forth the Father's righteousness and grace, could ever be exalted over the heathen and the earth. It took the death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord to reconcile that conviction which gave the heart its rest with the hope that gave it its expectation. It took the descent of the Holy Spirit to let men feel at once that the Lord of Hosts was with them — that knowing Him was peace and rest and eternal life — and yet go forth as conquerors of the heathen and the earth. Their need of a refuge from surrounding trouble drove them to seek God in His secret dwelling; the love for their fellow men that grew from communion with Him drove them to carry His name into all lands, claiming all peoples as His servants and children. They found the Church had no ground to stand on except "I am God," and so its true home was the unseen world — yet it could not claim that home unless it also said that every corner of earth, every creature on it, all that was done in it, had been redeemed for God and was subject to His rule. If the Church ever forgot it belonged to the invisible world, it would lose its influence on the visible world; if it ever forgot to exalt its Master over the nations and the earth, it would also lose its own fellowship in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Brethren, it is worth asking whether both these dangers assail us now, from the same cause. "Be still and know that I am God" sounds strange to most of us. How can we be still while all things are unsettled and in motion — while everyone hastes to be rich and to outstrip his neighbor, while the political world is full of slumbering fires, while the religious world is full of controversy and hatred? The answer must be: because of all this upheaval, this is exactly the time to obey the command, Be still. For if we do not, we shall never know that the Lord is God; we shall not really believe, whatever we pretend, that He abides and is with us though the earth be removed and the mountains carried into the sea. And without that belief, what other belief is worth anything to us?

There is, however, another question: why do we have all this tumult and confusion to complain of — this hasting to be rich, this eagerness to trip up our neighbors, these convulsions in governments, these deeper rendings in spiritual bodies? Why is it so hard to be still, so hard to rest in the faith that the Lord is God? Surely because we have not believed His other words, "I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth." We sometimes think we ought to make great efforts to Christianize the nations, to put down the false worships defiling the earth. But we cannot agree what efforts to make — whether to offer rewards for conversion, to penalize other faiths, merely to keep arguing as we have done with so little effect, or to trust the gradual spread of knowledge and civilization, which so far seem to have worked no moral change and leave the masses undisturbed in their superstitions.

My brethren, if we have no faith that God designs to exalt Himself among the heathen and in the earth, if we do not believe He is working to bring men from darkness to light, from communion with evil to communion with His truth, then it seems to me we must despair of one of these methods as much as the other. For us to expect that our clever arguments or our machinery, religious or political, will shake the belief of ages, for us worms to imagine we can exalt Him whom we proclaim Lord of Heaven and Earth — what vanity and madness! What restlessness in the struggle, what despair in the outcome! But if we truly believe that every glimpse of knowledge of the Living God is His own gift, that we are not bowing to stocks and stones because He has redeemed the world and sent His Spirit to guide us from falsehood to truth, if we remember that those who preached His Gospel to the heathen — and to us — lived, fought, and died believing they were His servants doing His will, then this faith will remove some of our disturbing questions and let us look more steadily at those that remain. Penalties and persecutions may indeed be effective means of enforcing a religion we wish to root out: if we want to convert men to worship a Destroyer, in his name let us destroy. Bribes are excellent means of tempting men to certain kinds of service: if we confess Mammon to be the God of the English, in his name let us scatter promises, gifts, and offices among Hindus and Muslims. We shall not be disappointed — with such inducements they will press in crowds to that altar.

Or if we aspire instead to exalt a God who is merely the negation of the gods the heathen now serve, wishing to strip them of all trust and hope, let us spend our time arguing over their follies and scoffing at what they revere. We shall have our reward for that too — experience assures us of it. We shall turn idolaters into atheists.

But if we do believe the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to be the Lord, if we worship Him as revealed at the Cross, then proclaiming that God is still, now as of old, the instrument for putting down the false, establishing the true, scattering the darkness, and gathering in the scattered light. The preacher who secretly regards the devil as truly Lord of the Universe can only fight feebly and hopelessly; but let him be assured he goes in the name of the real Lord, to beat down a usurper whose head is already bruised, and he will strike deadly blows. He will tell the heathen how God is speaking to them, acting on them, turning them to Himself. In calmness and stillness he will perceive how everything around him that seems most to contradict God is actually bearing witness to Him. All God's works, all men's works, all science, ignorance, sorrow, sin, and death will supply arguments no human wit could devise. He will hear every hill and grove and idol temple echoing the words, "Know that I am God. I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth."

And if you say, "This is for the preacher — but can the statesman, the soldier, the trader, do anything?" Yes, indeed. Let each say in his own heart: "I, for myself, do not worship the Destroyer, the Money-God, the negation of all other gods. I worship Him whom Jesus revealed. In my quiet thoughts and my open acts I will do Him homage. I will show, in my earthly dealings as much as in my words about unseen things, that I renounce every lord but Him. I will bear witness to Him as the Friend and Deliverer of all men, by justice in asserting right and punishing wrong — whether toward Christians or despisers of Christianity — by sympathy with human beings, by zeal to free them from whatever fetters keep them from being righteous, brave, noble, and free as God would have them be. And because I find myself tempted to speak and act lies, apt to become at heart like these poor idolaters, I will ask that God whom I serve to exalt Himself in my heart and reign over me; I will ask Him, by the Spirit of Truth and Freedom and Unity He has promised, to overcome the spirits of Falsehood, Slavery, and Division that have led these idolaters captive, and may lead us captive too." Let the statesmen, soldiers, and servants of the Queen of England, in lands where the heathen dwell, take up this language and form this resolve. The Gospel asks nothing more of them than that. God asks nothing more than that. He will exalt Himself in the earth. We have only to ask that He not let us strive to exalt ourselves, or any vile thing, into His holy place.

## THE LAW OF CHRIST THE LAW OF HUMANITY

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Fourth Sunday in Lent
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[March]{.smallcaps} 14, 1858
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> "*Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ*."—[Galatians]{.smallcaps} vi. 2

[Certain]{.smallcaps} writers never tire of saying "it is a law of our nature" to do this or that. Often they mean almost nothing by it — the phrase disguises ignorance, or dresses up an empty truism, or lets them mistake a narrow generalization for a discovered principle. Sometimes, though, a real fact is being pointed to — a genuine tendency of human beings everywhere — yet the word "Law" is still the wrong word for it. The fact may deserve close attention and be essential to our self-knowledge, without being a Law; some older, controlling principle may hold that title instead.

Many people have convinced themselves that the scramble to possess more money, or the goods money buys, than one's neighbor is a necessary, eternal law — as fixed as gravitation, and just as absurd to resent as to be angry that water runs downhill. They grant that under some strange influence men's ordinary feelings can for a time be reversed, but say only a fanatic would try to make such reversal normal. Perhaps on some other planet, inhabited by a different kind of being, a better principle than universal rivalry might hold — but here, they say, all the energy of life would collapse without this stimulus. If Mammon demands human sacrifices, his benefits compensate for them.

That this tendency exists in every man, that it is strongest in the most active and socially capable men, that no circumstance can extinguish it — this I believe is true. We owe something to those who remind us of it, who tell us: this desire to be first, to trip up your neighbor, is in you now and will remain, however you change your place or your habits; when you think it dead you will find it starting up fresh. Social arrangements will not end it — if they try, they will only weaken individual energy, becoming, as an old sage said of clever social schemes, spider-webs that catch the weak while the strong break through. Education will not end it either — the more it frees and sharpens the faculties, the more it awakens this same drive to outrun and master others. Disagreeable as these observations are, I think them true, and not to be hidden from ourselves or others.

But to boast, having made them, that we have thereby proclaimed the *law* binding men together as a commonwealth is a monstrous claim. We have only noticed something that *hinders* men from living and working together — a secret of hostility, threatening to become permanent. But if you have found so strange a fact in the world's order, you are bound to explain how society has managed to go on despite it. The more power and range you grant this selfish rivalry, the more you must explain how human beings have managed to exist together under it at all. You must look for some principle of cohesion strong enough to withstand this principle of repulsion — and if you are reasonable, you must admit that this cohesive principle, however violated or poorly acknowledged, is the true law of the universe, the law every human law and government tacitly confesses even while seeming to defy it.

You may think I am arguing that "Religion," or vaguely "the Religious Principle," has been and still is necessary to hold society together. But there is confusion in that language. It may mean that Religion keeps from collapsing a society rooted in selfishness, propping it up with some supernatural power, or the dream of one — a religion statesmen have wanted and priests have supplied. But if by Religion we mean the Gospel of Christ in a living, practical sense, it refuses that office. It does not exist to make men comfortable in their contradictions or shield them from the consequences; it exists to witness against those contradictions and to prophesy the outcome they must produce. A society that has come to confess no principle but rivalry, no maxim but "every man for himself," may in its death-agony call on the Gospel — too late. What can save a community that has systematically set aside the Gospel's first precepts, treating my text's principle as no foundation for life at all but merely fodder for pretty Sunday sermons about charity? No: Religion, unless it is only another name for worshipping the god of this world, cannot delay the destruction the righteous and true God has pronounced on all unrighteousness.

Either the Gospel declares what Society is and is not — what binds men, what separates them — or it has no meaning at all. Either it shows how a uniting principle can be a living, effectual one, overcoming the tendencies to separation, or it fails at what it professes. The Bible does not accept the modest role men politely assign it, offering rules and comforts to individuals while ignoring their condition as members of a Community. It speaks throughout of a Kingdom. It proclaims a social Law. It tells all men this is the law that makes communion among men possible at all, and that there is no other.

St. Paul bids the Galatians fulfil the law of Christ. Does he mean the law Christ spoke — "Blessed are the poor in spirit"? Certainly. But what did that mean? Was our Lord announcing excellent precepts he, as a wise teacher, had perceived to be desirable? Was he issuing a new Decalogue backed by fiercer penalties? Or was it the law his Father had formed all rational, voluntary creatures to obey, as surely as he formed natural things to obey gravitation — the law in the heart of the Son of God, which he actually fulfilled, and declared to be his disciples' law because they are related to him as branches to the vine, given his Spirit so as to feel what he felt and be what he was? If this last is the true account — if the Ten Commandments were only the formal, external expression of this deeper, original law — then Paul is right to say "bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ," rather than the weaker phrase "fulfil the law of your being," though that too would be closer to the truth than treating Christ merely as an external lawgiver. Paul supposes Christ to be the Man, the Lord of Man, showing what man truly is, the true head of all human fellowship, the source of all human life. If Christ bore all men's burdens, did not seek his own glory, took the form of a servant, made the chief the minister of all — then this, Paul says, is the law under which we stand, the law we conform to whenever our acts are consistent, and break whenever we yield to any selfish, separating impulse, however deeply rooted in our nature, however universal, however bound up with things good, precious, even sacred. To bear one another's burdens is not to obey some heroic maxim removed from daily business; it is simply to fulfil a law, to stay within the order our hearts are actually made for, to yield to the true Lord of our spirits rather than serve the Spirit of Division and Selfishness.

This view is quite unlike what most Christians commonly hold, even those proudest of the name. There is a general notion that benevolence is a graceful, sometimes necessary, quality — but it is treated as an ornamental capital resting on an earthly base, a habit that mitigates the world's evils without denying they are radical. Or religious people say that bearing one another's burdens is the law of the regenerate man, while the world at large can only follow a selfish rule, which governments must merely make as orderly as possible. No more hateful inference from a great truth was ever suggested by the Spirit of Lies, undermining a maxim he dares not openly deny. There is indeed an eternal distinction between the new man and the old: but the new man is one who follows the true law of humanity in Christ Jesus and so is at one with his fellows; the old man follows his own inclinations and is at war with them. The law of Christ is not a law for a select few, but for man — true even if all men disobeyed it, true even when those meant to proclaim it prefer to wrap themselves in a sense of privilege and boast of standing outside common humanity. Whoever believes there is one law for one class and another for another will infallibly obey, in his own practice, the lower and easier law. For his very distinction rests on believing two principles contend within him, and once he assumes the good one is simply his own possession, he falls under the dominion of the evil one — dealing with others by the low notions he assumes are all they can understand, proving himself "regenerate" not by bearing their burdens but by contempt and harsh judgment of them. A Christian must believe the law of Christ applies to all persons and all cases, or he will soon apply it to none; must acknowledge it as the human law, or it will not even be the law of his own church or circle; must believe it underlies all politics and all business, or it will not even guide his private, most solemn conduct.

Good men evade this general application another way — supposing Christ will someday come to set the world right, but that meanwhile Society may follow whatever evil maxims it likes. That Christ will one day be acknowledged Ruler of earth, no one who calls him Lord can doubt. "I should utterly have fainted," says the Psalmist, "if I had not verily believed to see the goodness of God in the land of the living" — and no one bearing the world's oppressions can help fainting unless he truly believes this earth will be purged and restored by its true Saviour. But the men of old believed this future truth because they believed, in their own day, that the universe belonged to God and not the Devil, and fought accordingly against those who claimed and worked to make it otherwise; we must do the same. If the law of bearing one another's burdens does not govern all things and all men now, it never will. Our faith in its future rests entirely on our belief in its present truth — and if it is true, we must desire him who has fulfilled it in his own life to fulfil it in all the members of his body.

This, then, is our position. We see Society driven by that mighty competitive power which wise men praise as sovereign in the universe. Some who obey it show admirable zeal and energy in conquering circumstances, worthy of imitation. Yet they do not wholly obey this selfish impulse — they belong to families and social circles where, to a considerable extent, they already act on the rule "bear ye one another's burdens."

We see something more appalling: their sons often show little of that strength or those domestic feelings, yet are thoroughly possessed by the doctrine itself. Wanting to get ahead does not make them thrifty, painstaking pursuers of fortune — it makes them gamblers, taking the shortest road to riches, heedless of the pits along it where thousands are lost for the one who wins his wretched reward. Competition is not really producing the enterprise and hope you rightly call essential to a nation's strength; it is producing men restless today, listless tomorrow — chasers of ugly phantoms for a while, then indifferent, disappointed, heartless when the prize is missed. Must you not then try to recover what competition cannot give, to strengthen the bonds of sympathy it threatens, to awaken thought for others and for those who will live after us? That thought is grounded in the law that binds men together, not the law that sets them against each other — a lower expression of the very law expounded in the text, the law Jesus Christ fulfilled.

I have granted that we have no right to reproach merchants, shopkeepers, or lawyers for thinking the world's law mightier and more applicable than the divine law. We, the ministers of the Gospel, have most to answer for. We have sanctioned this unbelief and acted on it. The Church should uphold the nation's life, the family of England, through its prayers, confessions, Sacraments — yet we have spoken of these as though they served the selfish law, as if they held no power to enable obedience to the other. Let us this Lent repent wholly of that unfaithfulness — each knowing the plague of his own heart, and together confessing that we have not borne one another's burdens and so fulfilled the law of Christ. Let us feel that his yoke is the easy one, and that we have chosen the heavy one instead. Let us come to Christ's Holy Sacrament believing he can feed us with the flesh and blood he gave for the world when he bore all our burdens, and quicken us by his Spirit to bear each other's.

## CHRIST'S BAPTISM OF FIRE

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Fifth Sunday in Lent
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[March]{.smallcaps} 21, 1858
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> "*Whose fan is in His hand, and He will throughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the garner; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire*."—[Matthew]{.smallcaps} iii. 12.

*The passage:* John says of Christ, "His fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."

[When]{.smallcaps} we compare John the Baptist with the Lord whose way he prepared, we commonly stress the severity of the one and the graciousness of the other — the servant standing apart from the world, the Master entering freely into it; John a righteous Reprover condemning sin, Jesus a merciful Saviour bringing forgiveness.

Whatever truth is in this, it seems to clash with the words I have just read. There John speaks expressly of Christ, and does not say, "My words are terrible, His will be all gentleness." He says: "I baptize with water; He will baptize with fire. I preach repentance; He will thoroughly purge His floor and burn up the chaff." The contrast runs the opposite way from how we usually put it. The forerunner is sent to save men from ruin; He of whom John speaks comes with power to destroy.

I think we need to examine this carefully. Perhaps we have never seriously asked what men need from a King and Deliverer, and how the Christ we confess has met that need.

The parts of John's discourse hang together. He denounces the Scribes and Pharisees as men of surface faith who trusted in having Abraham for their father; he tells them the axe is laid to the root of the tree; he says the Teacher whose shoes he is unworthy to unloose will baptize with a Spirit that reaches the depths of human hearts. His own work, he is convinced, is to tear off veils, show men themselves as they are, often reverse their relations to each other, level the hills and exalt the valleys. But he cannot do this radically. He can only awaken the self-righteous man to wonder whether he is righteous at all — whether he is not furthest from righteousness. Another must drive that conviction home, must look into the man's very self and make him feel detected. John was sent to stir the conscience to a sense of wrong; making men right belonged to other hands. What he declares is that the Discoverer of wrong, the Restorer of right, is at hand and about to appear. If there were no such one — no guide of men's thoughts, no inspirer of good, no condemner of evil — he had nothing to hope, nothing to bid his country hope. If there were no such one, there was no Christ, and all the Prophets had said was delusion.

If a king were coming such as the Pharisees hoped for — one who would give their sect the upper hand — the Desire of Nations would prove only another of the tyrants the world groaned under. But if He was not this, He must be the very reverse: one who comes sifting, overturning, burning. No symbol could fit Him better than the fan and the thoroughly purged floor.

The Jew, familiar with such emblems from the Prophets, would understand the House of Israel as, in some sense, this threshing-floor — and any Scribe would be ready to translate it for him, turning simple, living language into abstract and difficult language, as dictionaries do. The threshing-floor was a living image; even the dullest peasant, by watching its operations, could grasp something of the meaning, or at least know there was a meaning to be grasped — where the Scribe's book-phrase would stifle his mind as it had stifled the Scribe's own. But in what sense did the floor mean the House of Israel? The man who had heard John's call to repentance was coming to know: not a mere crowd within geographical bounds, but a message to *him*. The Kingdom of Heaven was near *him*; *he* was to turn to God; *he* was to look for One whose axe was at the root of the tree and whose fan was in His hand. His own heart was part of that threshing-floor, the part most needing his attention just then. And concerning himself with it did not separate him from his people or lessen his sense of belonging to a family — quite the opposite: as the hidden springs of his life opened, as he saw the evil he'd noticed in others was in himself too, as he grasped that the Lord who cared for Abraham's children was not indifferent to him, he felt something of what it meant to belong to a nation God had called to know His name. To have Him so near might be terrible — Moses had said so — yet blessing and terror must be strangely joined. Could a man truly be a man without this? Had he ever known anything of his own mysterious existence until this glimpse of One overlooking him, calling him to account, meeting and judging him?

The Israelite took the true benefit of his covenant only in grasping this. As long as he looked for outward glory or outward deliverance he was, like the surrounding nations, an idolater of the hardest kind. Only when he acknowledged an invisible Sower and Husbandman cultivating his whole inner being, working in him to bring forth fruit worthy of the divine seed; only when he believed this Husbandman was acting on the whole House of Israel as on himself, that it might witness God's Wisdom, Righteousness, and Mercy to mankind; only when he looked for a fuller revelation of these than had yet been granted, and desired that revelation to separate the true from the false, the wheat from the chaff, in himself and all his brethren — only then did he truly enter into his people's history or claim the treasure their fathers had received.

First, then, John's disciples were to learn that their hearts were under another's tillage than their own. The seeds sown in them were not self-sown; they could not give them life, nor even by their own skill keep the birds from carrying them off or weeds from choking them. They were subordinate husbandmen; the harvest depended on submitting to the chief Husbandman, not thwarting His plans. And as with the field, so with the floor where the harvest was carried: they could not winnow it themselves, could not separate corn from chaff. If no one more skilful than they existed to do this, their labor was wasted — the corn would feed no one and seed nothing.

Next, they were to be sure this discipline, being divine, would be thorough — "thoroughly purge His floor" — not insincere or indulgent like our own pretended self-examinations, or like well-meaning friends who mix in fresh chaff of their own and leave us in greater doubt what is wheat and what is chaff.

Thirdly, those who heard and understood John received two lessons, seemingly inconsistent. They were sure the One conducting this sifting over them and the whole nation was the Lord of the spirits of all flesh, who had revealed Himself to their fathers through the Prophets. Yet they were told of a man standing among them who claimed the floor as His own, and would prove it by purging it. John himself often found the two hard to reconcile — but they were reconciled in the experience of those who repented at his preaching. They could find no dominion over their hearts real or satisfying unless it was *divine* — exercised by One who knows past, present, and future; and none real or satisfying unless it was also essentially *human* — involving the sympathy and participation of one who shares their sorrows and temptations. As the thought of a righteous God they had sinned against replaced the thought of a mere angry Power, they longed more and more to see Him as He is — and grew certain this was only possible in the life of a Man.

But again: a man merely displaying a model of excellence would have answered nothing to their need of One who could sway, quicken, and renew the very motions of the spirit. A baptism with the Spirit — power dwelling in them to overcome what was corrupt, partial, solitary in them, to make them possessors of Truth and not merely its subjects, fellow-workers with God and with men — this was the promise all John's words pointed toward, the baptism his own prepared for. If no one existed who could give this baptism, his had been in vain.

Yet this baptism was no mere gracious gift; it was bound up with a judgment awaiting each man and the whole land. Would not John's converts often wish to escape it? Not in their truest moments, when they were really turning from evil to good. They would always long that the fires not utterly destroy their nation, and hope it would come through them; they would pray to pass safely through the fire themselves. But they could not pray that the fire be less than real and mighty, or quenched by pity for its victims — and least of all that they be spared what their fellow-countrymen bore, standing untouched while the land suffered. The dread of being a stupid, careless spectator of their nation's calamity would have seemed to them the worst possibility of all — the surest sign of a divine curse, proof they had received none of the blessings the great Deliverer came to give.

I have been careful to take these words literally. If John had said, "Christ will accomplish a great work of salvation now; thousands of years hence He will come again to gather the wheat and burn the chaff," I would follow that reading. But he gives us no excuse for such a paraphrase. He describes this as the immediate, great work of the Divine Word who came after him and existed before him. When John later sent disciples to ask whether Jesus was He that should come, he must have meant them to apply this test: is He doing what I said He would do — gathering wheat, burning chaff? And whatever John or his disciples made of the answer, I believe it accepted and rested on that very test: "The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the poor have the gospel preached to them." By all these acts the Son of Man fulfilled that character. He gathered wheat: what the world thought worthless He sifted, separating it from the accidents that made it look contemptible, claiming it as treasure — the most beggarly human body recognized as bearing the stamp of His creative wisdom and love. What had brought it to decay and death was an intruding element with nothing to do with its true substance; that He redeemed, and the intruder fled at His word. The gospel He preached to poor men's hearts — by lips and by each act of individual grace — did the same work: it claimed every human heart, however wretched, as God's own, a subject of His care; it invited every heart to trust Him and submit to His discipline; and it made every heart conscious of the vanity, self-sufficiency, and slavery that hindered such trust and chafed under such discipline. The more His voice was heard and felt, the more He separated wheat from chaff, teaching that their union was temporary and unnatural, one doomed to destruction, the other gathered into His barn.

The same holds in His discourses with the Apostles. Their minds, we're told, were full of poor, vulgar notions; the Scriptures bewildered them, Christ's own words often bewildered them; their hearts were hard and slow, signs left little impression, today's events erased yesterday's lesson. Only afterward could they see what process they had been undergoing — how wonderfully He was winnowing chaff from wheat. Yet they show us how little mere words, even His, could accomplish this alone. They had to pass through the fires of desertion, of felt insincerity, cowardice, self-contempt; they had to see their Lord taken from them and all their hopes dashed, before they could become heralds of a risen Lord and a divine hope. And when they were called and empowered for that work, the baptism of fire their Master had also undergone came along with the baptism of His Spirit: these messengers of peace were charged, truly, with turning the world upside down, and became the offscouring of all things, a spectacle to angels and men.

So too we understand the other side of Christ's teaching, often thought of a different spirit — His denunciations of the Scribes and Pharisees, His asking them how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Their pride, self-righteousness, exclusiveness; their belief that they were the wheat and the people mere chaff for the wind to scatter; their false picture of God as hard-hearted and self-seeking like themselves; their determination to feed their countrymen only husks of outward religion, and their consequent growing inability to feed on anything else themselves; the utter confusion of good and evil in supposing gracious acts could spring from an evil spirit — these were the heaviest calamities that could befall them. Persisting in this state, they must be shut out from God's presence, shut up in their own selfishness. These burning words express the indignation that perfect love must feel, and always feel, toward what is contrary to love. They show us something of the unquenchable fire in which all that is base, inhuman, and false must be consumed — and that if it could be quenched, God's love itself would be quenched. They show, too, how dangerous and sinful it is to turn these words about fire into arguments against trusting that love to the utmost, against believing it surrounds us and all creation. This wall of fire is around us — let us acknowledge who built it, and desire that it do its work, for us and for the whole Universe.

I have spoken of John's words as fulfilled at once when Christ came in the flesh. I believe they have gone on fulfilling themselves in every age since His ascension. Men who discovered their own deep need have asked earnestly for One who would forgive their sins, but just as earnestly, without separating the two requests, for One who would destroy their sins — who would set an everlasting barrier between the enemy within them and the part of them that clung to a Friend and sought fellowship and likeness with Him. They felt that no message lacking this separation was truly gospel, and no one desiring or working it in them was other than the Christ. They grew sure that clinging to any destructive habit, or to anything that set them against other men, meant resisting a mighty power seeking to break their chains and make them one. They learned to welcome sufferings once they saw this was their purpose — good fires, signs that they were baptized with the Spirit, and that He would not leave them until He had made them what they were created to be. The course of history and the trials of nations read the same way. As long as a people retains strength, vitality, faith, there is wheat Christ will gather into His barn — and so that nation will be subjected to repeated fires, that its chaff of untruth, baseness, and heartlessness may be burned away. It might even be said that a nation is always in such fires, for the time of prosperity searches us as much as the time of tribulation, and is harder still for telling wheat from chaff — all the more reason to remember there is a Lord doing this, and doing it thoroughly.

That the chaff in God's Universal Church, and in every part of it, may be thoroughly burnt up, we ask each time we say the Litany or the Lord's Prayer. If we begin to think our own Church has no chaff needing to be burned, we sink to the condition of the Scribes and Pharisees, and prove ourselves near a consuming fire. It is a strange doctrine, spread by some Christians and some unbelievers alike, that we should dread having our opinions challenged or our wrongdoing exposed — "Take care," the warning runs, "yours is a tottering house; let one brick fall and the whole may collapse." If our house is indeed tottering, built on sand, Christ's words oblige us to believe it must and ought to fall — no scheme of ours can save it, He will frustrate them all. But if our house stands on Him, on the rock, then though we cannot ourselves discover what wood, hay, or stubble we have built into it, He will discover it, and will burn it away. So we must tell such friends they have it backward: they urge on us, *because* we are Christians, a course that would only be sensible and wise if we were *not* Christians. If there were no Christ, it would be wisdom to cling to all today's notions and superstitions, since giving them up would only bring worse ones tomorrow. But because we believe in Christ, who came into the world with a fan in His hand and has used it ever since to purge His floor, we are certain He will let no falsehood dwell beside His eternal Truth. He will go on winnowing and threshing until every grain of wheat — every good thought, desire, and hope in any heart — is gathered into His garner, known to have come from seed He planted; and until all the chaff mixed with it, whether religious notions, philosophical conceits, or ordinary selfishness and fleshly lust, is separated from it and cast into the unquenchable fire.

## THE GREAT SACRIFICE AND THE FEAST OF DELIVERANCE

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Sunday before Easter
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[March]{.smallcaps} 28, 1858
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> "*For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth*."—I [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} v. 7, 8.

*The passage:* Christ our passover is sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

[This]{.smallcaps} is one of the texts for Easter Day, and may seem an odd choice to open Passion Week with. But Passion Week is the preparation for Easter. To say these words rightly on Resurrection Day we must have pondered them during the week that tells of His Agony and Cross. The plainer we take the words the better; the wonder in them lies not in our interpreting, nor even in the words themselves, but in the fact and the Person they speak of.

1\. It is the Person to whom St. Paul, first and always, points his disciples' minds. He does not say that Christ's death corresponds to the sacrifice of the lamb, or that one is the type of the other. He says plainly, "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us." That difference may look small, but I believe there is a whole Heaven's distance between the two ways of speaking. There is endless room for ingenuity in finding resemblances between the Old Testament and the New, but great danger that such ingenuity may dissolve the reality of both. The plain, practical history of the old Fathers may turn into a mere picture or shadow of what we think matters for ourselves; we may stop believing the Israelites actually left Egypt, actually killed a lamb, actually ate unleavened bread because they were driven out in haste with no time to prepare food. This homely narrative offends our refined taste, which craves something we call "spiritual" but which is really unsubstantial. And by a just retribution, the deeper truth we destroyed the earlier truth to reach becomes equally vague. The plain histories of the Passion we read this week cannot simply stand as they are either; they too get "spiritualized" into mist — into mere feelings, often morbid ones, of our own minds. Or, avoiding that fanciful path, we take the opposite, harder one that is just as unsatisfying: we turn the history into a set of dogmas, considering not what our Lord did or said but the effects of His doing and saying according to some scheme of divinity. We contemplate not Him, but a theory about Him.

But it is Him the Apostle wants us to contemplate. His Gospel to the Romans concerned Jesus Christ, made of David's seed according to the flesh, declared Son of God by the resurrection — a Gospel about a Person, not about notions. Christ, he tells the same church, is the end of the Law for righteousness to believers: they gain that righteousness not by achievement but by trusting a Person in whom it livingly dwells. To the Corinthians he preaches Jesus Christ crucified, not some fine system distinguishing him from Cephas or Apollos; Christ, not any teacher or doctrine, is their foundation. To the Galatians, Christ was revealed in him so he might preach Him — not a new or higher religion, but who it was that had revealed Himself as Lord of his spirit and theirs. To the Ephesians he blesses the Father who has blessed us in Christ, chosen in Him before the world's foundation to be holy and blameless in love — a Person, not a notion, is the ground of this eternal order and the bond between Jews and Gentiles, made real only when Christ appeared in the flesh. The mind he prays may be in the Philippians is the mind that actually dwelt in Jesus, who humbled Himself and took a servant's form — not some ideal or imagined excellence never embodied. In Christ, he tells the Colossians, dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily; in Him they are complete; in Him they were circumcised without hands, buried with Him in baptism and raised with Him through faith in God's power. The relation was as real as any earthly relationship they could claim; baptism's simple sign showed how living and eternal it was. His preaching turned the Thessalonians from idols to the living and true God, and to waiting for His Son from heaven, who delivers from the coming wrath — they received news of a living Being, their Father, who saved them, and waited for a Person to be revealed; nothing else could have comforted their sorrows or satisfied their hearts' deepest need.

I give these examples to show that St. Paul is not departing from his usual manner but exactly following it when he says "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us," rather than something like "the antitype of the Paschal Lamb has appeared," or "what the Jewish dispensation dimly foretold is now perfectly fulfilled in the Christian scheme." The name Christ, the Anointed One, replaces in Paul's letters all such vague, cumbersome language.

2\. And yet he says everything that a multitude of words could say, for he adds, Christ "our *Passover*." In that single word he gathers all the meanings of that Festival — the whole course of divine history from Abraham's call to the Voice that said, "This is He in whom I am well pleased." The Passover expressed the deliverance and consecration of Israel's firstborn, the distinction between Israelites and Egyptians, the destruction of oppressors and redemption of slaves, the leaving of Egypt's comforts for the wilderness and the hope of the Promised Land, humiliation and sorrow, thankfulness and victory, life under a divine government rather than a visible tyrant. Looking at the later history, its loss coincided with every relapse into idolatry and the slavery that followed; its restoration, with every reformation, the destruction of idol-shrines, and the memory of God's everlasting Covenant with the land. All these aspects gathered around the Lamb: its blood sprinkled on the doorposts when the Destroying Angel passed by symbolized the whole deliverance; eating the lamb was the Feast's central act, reminding them they were both distinct families and one nation, drawing people to Jerusalem from wherever they were scattered.

3\. "Christ *our* Passover," says Paul — ours who are Abraham's seed by flesh, and ours who are grafted into that same stock. He fulfills all the Passover ever meant, but for the whole human family, not one portion of it. He was firstborn among many brethren, consecrated to God as representative of the whole race. He showed the true distinction between the flesh in each man, doomed to death, and the spirit, redeemed and united to God with new life. He claimed for man, in His own Person, deliverance from the oppressor and subjection to the unseen, gracious Ruler. He showed that man's fleshly inclinations are the prison he must leave, and that the way to liberty runs through darkness and death's shadow. He showed Himself the uniting bond of all creatures, the source of their life, apart from whom they are divided and dead. In all these ways He was their Passover. But every other aspect of His character was gathered up and concentrated in His character as Sacrifice. The act of giving Himself up revealed what He was: the great witness of His sonship to God and delight in the Father's will, and equally the witness of His full identification with His human brethren, His refusal to be separate from them in their worst condition, His refusal to have any life He would not share with them. Above all it witnessed that everything He had was His Father's, that He did only what He saw the Father do, that His love merely reflected the Father's love, and that the Father Himself was the source even of that highest sacrifice which alone could satisfy Him and through which alone all other sacrifices could be accepted.

4\. Christ our Passover, therefore, he says, *is* sacrificed for us. The complete offering has been made — the ground of all other sacrifices, presented and accepted. Nothing more remains to be done. The atonement of God and man, earth and heaven, is accomplished. God has claimed man as servant and child; man, in Christ, has recognized God as ruler and father. The sin of the world — self-will, distrust, disobedience — has been taken away; the Lamb of God bore it to the Cross and put it to death there. Nothing now separates children from their Father, since He is the perfect mediator between them, through whom they see the Father and the Father sees them, through whom they receive the Spirit to guide their work, bind them as a family on earth to the larger family beyond, and enable them to offer sacrifices holy and acceptable to God — their reasonable service.

5\. St. Paul therefore boldly says, "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for *us*." No one supposes he meant only the Apostles, the Corinthians, or the men of his own age. He did mean them particularly and definitely — if his hearers lost the sense of their own share in a general notion of benefit to the world, his whole purpose in writing would fail. Yet equally, they would have had no grasp of the benefit conferred on them if they had not stood on their common human title — confessing that Christ's incarnation was His taking man's nature, His death a death for man. Had they in any way narrowed these redeeming acts, they would have lost the very ground on which to say, "He has been sacrificed for us."

6\. "*Therefore let us keep the Feast*," Paul continues. Notice the order — perhaps not what you'd expect, since we usually call the Passover itself the Feast, and Paul does not contradict that usage. But he wants them to remember the feast marked a deliverance already accomplished — the Destroying Angel passed, the tyrant overthrown — while still witnessing to a present Deliverer and King reigning over each new generation, and to the fact that losing faith in Him brings bondage again. If the Jews imagined, as many probably did at the time of the Incarnation, that eating the Passover was itself meritorious apart from the deliverance it commemorated — a mere ordinance carrying its own rewards — then its true grandeur, its witness to God's living acts and relation to His people, disappeared; it became mere submission to a rule rather than fulfillment of a Covenant. If instead, like the Sadducees, they judged the outward service morally worthless, a formality to be dropped, they reached the same result by the opposite road — putting God at a distance, denying any living communication from Him, making morality a matter of precept-keeping or self-achieved qualities that might earn God's favor or make a man into a god.

Paul, distinguishing the Christian Feast from the Christian Sacrifice while binding them closely together, meets both dangers. Our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the Feast: do not forget the sacrifice was offered once for all, or the feast means nothing — it would not truly be a Eucharist, for we would have nothing to give thanks for, unless we are fully redeemed creatures, claimed and adopted by God, reconciled to Him and each other. But equally, if we forget that He lives as continual Priest presenting His sacrifice before the Father — if we think one act of faith in His Redemption excuses us from continually devoting ourselves to Him, or that such devotion can be some solitary act performed our own way rather than received as God's gift to which we merely submit — we mistake our position as creatures and forfeit the blessings meant for us.

And surely he meant us, no less than the men of his own age, to feel ourselves heirs of these blessings. He did not think of God's relation to man as belonging to one time or place only; he did not think Christ could be their Passover without being ours, or that the feast — eaten in full assurance that Redemption was finished and its liberty already possessed — could mean less for us, passing through the world's wilderness eighteen centuries later.

If Christ has really died — if Passion Week tells no cunningly devised fable — we have the right to keep this great feast of His Sacrifice as a Eucharist: the fixed, eternal pledge of our redemption from the deepest curse and our admission to the highest blessedness. That curse is separation from God and our brethren, selfishness and solitude; that blessedness is fellowship with God and our brethren, the power to cast off whatever holds us at a distance from either, to rise above self-will and self-glorification, to become witnesses and channels of God's free love to our race. Of such redemption, the highest gift any archangel could receive, this Feast is our assurance. Eating it, we do no meritorious act but renounce all claim to merit, submitting simply to receive God's grace. We come confessing our pride in claiming merit for ourselves and all the selfishness and godlessness that flows from it. We eat not because we are better than those who won't, but because we dare not claim any better standing than the lowest of them, since none of us live except by the common grace in Christ's death and life.

Passion Week is the most solemn protest against the natural notion that sacrifice means bringing something to God, rather than giving up everything to Him as the source of all right thought and act. It is a protest against our habit of distinguishing ourselves from others. He who hung on the Cross identified Himself with the soldier who pierced His side and the priests who mocked Him; He carried their sins and bore their burdens. And we imagine we can come to the Cross claiming to be holier than others, or that our sect is the way to God!

7\. This is the unceasing force of the last words: "Let us keep the Feast, *not with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth*." The Passover commemorated a deliverance already accomplished for a whole people, lasting generation after generation; eating the Lamb marked the fullness of that Redemption. Did eating unleavened bread signify something more the man must do to complete God's work? Surely not — it signified that he was to *abstain* from mixing anything of his own into God's ordinance, simply receiving and giving thanks. Paul teaches us, Passion Week teaches us, this terrible lesson: God's Sacraments do not depend on the clearness of our thoughts about them or our correct judgments of their nature — they rise above all our thinking. They express His will; they speak of a sacrifice offered once for all, a complete atonement between heaven and earth. Yet we bring to these Sacraments the foul leaven of our own scheming and calculation — debating who may come, arguing over the quality of what is freely given, bringing the week's quarrels, meanness, and pride to God's altar not to confess and kill them there but as preparation for receiving the pledge of universal love. This is the leaven of malice and wickedness, which makes the Sacraments useless for renewing the Church, and even turns them into weapons for its bitterest divisions and hatreds.

This malice and wickedness God desires to purge from His Church and from His children's hearts. Here lies our hope. The Sacrifice of Christ is God's, not ours; the Sacrament testifying to it is God's, not ours. Christ's Sacrifice is mightier than the world's sin; the Sacrament will prove mightier than the malice and wickedness among the Church's members. We may come to the Feast confessing the malice and wickedness in us — God will not send us away empty. He who in tender love gave up His Son for us all will surely also freely give us, with Him, the purity and love we do not have and never will have in ourselves.

## CHRIST THE LORD OF LIFE AND THE CONQUEROR OF DEATH FOR ALL TIMES

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First Sunday after Easter
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[April]{.smallcaps} 11, 1858
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> "*Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ*,"—1 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} xv. 57.

[St. Paul]{.smallcaps} speaks in this chapter as if Christ's resurrection were *the* victory over the grave. Was it then impossible for men before Christ to look beyond the grave? Were the hopes of immortality cherished by sages of the old world false hopes? Christian apologists have often said that for men generally the hope did not exist at all; that the Jew was kept from it by divine purpose; that the few Gentiles who held it appealed to evidence they must have felt themselves, and we know, to be unsatisfactory. Nothing, they urge, but the reappearance of one who had lain in the tomb could assure human beings that death was not final.

I suspect that special pleaders for the Gospel generally do it more harm than its opponents do. They are tempted to suppress, warp, even invent facts, and this injures a true cause and offends a true God. To gain a plausible defence of a principle, we distort the principle itself. This is a case in point: we have dwarfed the New Testament doctrine of the resurrection through our eagerness to disparage what those before Christ expected. We will understand far better that victory over the grave is God's gift in Christ, not an inherent right of our nature, if we do justice to those earlier expectations.

The Apostles certainly speak of the resurrection as unprecedented, but say its importance lay in this: it declared Jesus to be the Son of God with power. It was retrospective and prospective at once. It revealed the Head of the human race, and the race's relation, in that Head, to the Father of All. What was shown true when He who bore our nature and died as we die rose because death could not hold Him, had been true always. Believers in Christ could not doubt that man learns his condition from Christ, and only from Christ. As Paul puts it in two converse propositions: if we do not rise, Christ is not risen; if Christ is risen, then as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. The evidence for the Resurrection lay in the whole history and experience of men up to that hour. Fishermen and tent-makers could not establish it themselves. If there was such a Person, such a Head, such a Son of God as this event denoted, God would show it; if not, there was no Gospel.

To think we honour the Resurrection by dishonouring the immortality-hopes men in earlier ages drew from various sources is monstrous. Suppose they were only the guesses of a few earnest, thoughtful men—are guesses discredited, rather than confirmed, by a later discovery agreeing with them? Does any scientist scoff at Galileo or Copernicus because Newton proved what they had guessed? If every argument in Plato's *Phædo* can be answered, if a clever advocate can find holes in each one, is it not the more interesting question why those arguments seemed so weighty to as acute a reasoner as his critics? Why did the fact of Memory seem to him a sign that he belonged not only to the present but to past and future? Why did the alternation of light and darkness suggest that death might be entrance upon another stage of life? You can show the evidence proved too little or too much—any logician of his day could have done as much. But I must still ask: how did such thoughts arise in this man's mind at all? Are they not in yours too, despite your seeing their weakness? May they not point toward some real demonstration, even if this is not one? And ought not anyone who believes such a demonstration has since been made, to welcome every earlier effort toward it with gladness?

But the assumption I began with will not hold. Those who argued for immortality were not opposing the belief of the rest of the world; they were defending a belief expressed in every mythology and legend against the unbelief which the falsehoods of those mythologies, together with natural appearances and very strong motives of the heart, were producing all around them and within themselves. The death of every flower, beast, and man was a plain argument to the senses that no imagination should have been able to resist. But other arguments worked just as strongly against the struggle to believe. Sickness and pain did not merely bring death home to each person as under a common law; they took away the very will to resist it, becoming perpetual reasons to yield. Stronger reasons still: was anything gained by not yielding? Was it not worse to think there was no boundary at threescore years and ten? Might the gulf beyond not be more horrible and trackless than any wilderness traversed here? Would it not be an infinite relief simply to leap into the life to come, rather than face the likely prospect that whatever was worst here would only be deepened there?

So there were every kind of excuse and motive for accepting the grave as conqueror rather than dreaming of conquering it. But consider what such surrender involved. If a man truly gave up the fight with death, admitting its absolute dominion, could he merely leap ahead to the next life? Would he not have to abandon all effort to preserve this one too? Would not the sense of a sword forever hanging over him make every effort of the physician against disease seem futile, every struggle against the elements mere useless strife with an eventual tyrant, every thought of children and provision for them absurd? I use language of "giving up," though the person I describe is incapable of calculation at all—that incapacity is itself part of his calamity, his barbarism. He cannot look before and after; he cannot exercise the attributes of a man. Why not? Because he yields to nature's appearances, having no belief that life is stronger than death, no belief in any law beyond nature's own. If no race, perhaps no single man, has ever quite sunk to this level, though many have come close, it is because some faith in victory over the grave has always persisted in every man and every people.

I have called this a faith. Do I mean a faith in the immortality of the soul, in our abstract sense? No—it never appeared in that notional shape to any ancient or modern people, pagan, Jew, Muslim, or Christian. Men believed their life was sustained by some living Power, mightier than themselves, from whom it originally came and who added whatever made it bearable. The strength of their resolve not to be crushed by death, in whatever form, matched the strength of their belief that such a Power was on their side. With this help it was worth ploughing the ground, resisting the elements and turning them to service, working for generations unborn, living as members of families and cities, even giving up life for family or city. This defied nature's apparent edicts—but the man was confident he could rise above them, was meant to rise above them, was not truly a man if he did not. He could not explain how; he could only say: "There is a Being, or beings, urging me not to be a slave, bidding me fight everything that would enslave me. I obey this higher power, claim it as my ally, when I refuse to accept death as master, when I act on the principle that I am born to live."

But then came a terrible doubt: Can I count on this alliance? Is this higher power really friendly? Might it be jealous or suspicious of me, using me while grudging my successes? Does it have real complaints against me—have I misused its gifts, withheld its homage? Might it be in league with the tyrant death, even identical with him? When I enter the unseen world, might every struggle and victory only deepen my doom?

Every man, according to his measure, faced such questions—the hero who secretly wished to be a god, and the ordinary man who wondered whether seeking a physician's help was itself defiance of God, since the disease too seemed divine. Great and small alike felt an evil in themselves that deserved and would someday meet punishment, and both felt the same alternation of fear and hope that the Highest might prove either avenger or deliverer. And ultimately that doubt merged into another: was he the author of the evil men did, or its enemy?

Priests in different nations sustained belief in deliverers and punishers, keeping alive the sense of communion between the visible and invisible worlds, and of wrongs the invisible world would avenge. As they systematized these ideas, adapting them to different peoples' hopes and terrors, and as they began sinking their own divinity while believing divine wrath and deliverance lay in their own hands, worship of the evil and destructive became the dominant worship, and worship of the good and helpful the exception. So immortality grew to be a terrible, hateful thought men could not shake off. One school of philosophers tried to relieve them by appealing to nature's evidence that the grave conquers finally—this worked well enough for those whose consciences were not tormented by guilt. Their harder task was persuading men to make the most of life because it ends so soon—but "making the most of life" on this reasoning could not mean what it meant to those who saw life as continual resistance to death; it could not mean sacrificing present pleasure for family, friends, or country. It had to collapse into "let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." So philosophers who rejected this answer, yet were sure the priests and mythologists hadn't solved the riddle either, sought another. They asked whether the constitution of the world and of man showed that man was more than animal, and that what in him rose above the animal was not doomed to the animal's death. The thinking, believing, hoping part of him, they held, belonged to life. So they claimed not a natural immortality but one earned by rising above nature. They tried to preserve their countrymen's faith in a living Being, source of life, apart from the unbelief that made Him an author of death. They could not stop there: feeling the Author of Life must be author of all good in it, they upheld—even vehemently—the doctrine that He must punish wrong, but insisted this punishment must be good as He is good, not vengeance but the triumph of eternal right over wrong.

There was manifest weakness in these thoughts. Something in man was not animal, and would survive—and that something could be nothing but himself. But was all he shared with the animals to perish? Was this wonderfully made body to be discarded before it had hardly used its powers? So it seemed. Only the soul survives, they said—but whose soul? The wise man's, who rose above ordinary defeat? That too seemed so, yet could not be so if the evidence came from a fair reading of what distinguishes man as man. And again: the evil man would meet punishment, the good, reward—but was there to be some fine arithmetic weighing good deeds against evil to settle it? The philosopher would recoil from such a theory, which resembled the vulgar priestly haggling he wished to escape, and which contradicted his idea of a morality of principles, not acts, judged by an absolute Right. Yet how avoid the contradiction? Could there be a judgment of ordinary human beings by inward principle rather than outward act?

Still I ask: where did such thoughts come from, however flawed? Why did Greek legend breathe of immortality? Why did sages who felt its contradictions and burdens still hold the same expectation? I find the answer in the Old Testament. There the invisible God who made man in His image is Teacher of a race depicted as dull, animal, idolatrous. Despite every tendency to worship dead things and be nature's slave, the Jew is made conscious of a calling to know the living God and serve Him. Trusting that God, the lowly creature becomes capable of family and civic life, can keep laws, conquer giants, look to a distant future, anticipate blessing to all nations through his descendants. But Scripture shows the other side too: the Jew follows his own nature, wants to be like the peoples around him, confuses God with what he sees, imagines God shares his own dark, cruel tendencies. His priests encourage these delusions, hating any witness that God is righteous and a deliverer. Then Prophets are sent to show him he has sunk back into a crawling insect, that losing faith in the God of Heaven means losing his place on earth, that he cannot be a faithful brother, husband, father, judge, or soldier, and has inevitably sold himself to oppressors. The Prophets show that every punishment is a call to repentance, a divine voice bidding the nation and each man in it abandon the lying gods that debase their worshippers and return to the true God, the Deliverer.

If I believe these records, I believe men would certainly sink under death's dominion, confessing it omnipotent, unless God taught them the opposite—that life is stronger than death, and that they act, think, and speak because it is so. I believe God alone has given this discovery, in whatever degree received, to every nation and every human heart. I believe all the confusions mingled with and contradicting it have come, as Scripture affirms and history shows, from men's unbelief in this continual divine teaching—from their choosing to worship the creature instead of the Creator, dead things instead of Him who lives forever, an Enemy of man instead of a Deliverer. This is the sin of Jew and Gentile, the sin of the world, the sin that brought death into it; it is against this sin and death that the God of Life and Righteousness has always fought, seeking always to redeem our race. Our Lord's earthly life, as the simple Gospels present it, is therefore the wonderful climax of this education. Throughout it is a history of battle with death's power over body and spirit, and of victory won not in His own name but His Father's. With calm majesty He simply bids sickness and disease—death's early forms—depart, freeing men from death itself as an intruder into the divine order. Then just as calmly He accepts death Himself, claiming no exemption on the ground of holiness or sonship, leaving that to His Father. He is one with us; death shall have all it can have, its utmost power proved on Him. He claims no immortality apart from God, no trust in Nature, only trust in His Father—and the Father honours that trust, raising Him from the dead not because He had severed Himself from men but because He had made Himself one with them. His goodness in the Father's eyes lies not in standing apart from sinners but in bearing their sins. He rises not as a bodiless spirit but with the very body laid in the tomb. God has given the Man an entire victory over death and him that had death's power.

So Paul's words in the text explain themselves to the Jews and Greeks of Corinth. He knows why death stung both, why the grave claimed victory over both. A voice in each conscience said, "You have sinned"; the Law, denouncing righteous judgment on transgression, confirmed it. Death might bring the sinner face to face with the Judge from whom that sentence came—dreadful, if meeting the Righteous Judge is terrible. Paul declares that the Righteous Judge has met His creature and made peace, showing that separation from Him is misery and union with Him blessedness. God Himself, coming to us in His dying Son, has taken away death's sting for all; God Himself, raising His Son, has given all a victory over the grave. The Jew had been taught that God's will must be done and man must yield to it; the Greek, that man has a will which must shake off every fetter. Christ dying to do His Father's will, and rising because that will was accomplished in man's emancipation, let a Hebrew of the Hebrews say to the people of the isthmus—where earthly lords sought by valour to make themselves gods—"Thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory!" From Him comes the triumph of the very life they thought He was crushing—not a momentary triumph, but an everlasting one. What seemed a hopeless barrier to the hero has proved weak before the crucified Man.

Though these words illuminate the darkest passages of history, reaching into the caverns where lonely thinkers of the old world toiled and suffered, it is not chiefly for the past that I use them today. They were written for the consolation of those looking upon their forefathers' tombs and unfinished, seemingly failed struggles—but even more for the times to come; they belong to us, and we must ponder each one.

I\. It is *God* who gives us the victory. We are as prone as Jews or Greeks were to imagine Him not the God of Life but of Death, fighting against us rather than with us, bent on our destruction. The history of Christendom shows that every dark pagan conception of God can clothe itself in New Testament forms, justify itself by tradition, even quote Scripture as the devil did at the Temptation. Our own consciences tell us why: we are as prone to sensuality and idolatry as our forefathers who worshipped stocks and stones, though in different forms, and as prone to malice and hatred. When we become earthly and sensual we think of God as earthly and sensual; when malicious, as malicious—and then we must appease Him as evil spirits are appeased, persuading Him not to vent His spite on us. As of old, there will be religious teachers who foster these diseases of the natural heart, treating the jaundiced likeness of God as the true one, blocking the way to Him. Since such corruption leads straight to baseness, cowardice, and death for nations and men, the old Gospel must be sounded: God gives us the victory. God is seen in Christ, and only in Him. God is now what He was when He raised His Son. You may arise and go to Him as your father—that is the only repentance for any sinner, the only way to cast off old habits and become a new and right man.

II\. Next, the victory is a *gift*. Not only the final victory over the grave—though we forget that too, imagining we shall win immortal happiness by our own exertions or faith, by struggle against God's will rather than trust and submission to it. We will fall into this error unless we see every preparatory victory of life over death, too, as God's gift: each morning we wake, each power we exert over matter, each bodily energy, each return of health, each hard discovery, each power of will over fleshly inclination, each act of just government, each influence toward making others wiser or freer—of all this we must say, "God gives it," accepting it as the fruit of His will and the pledge of final victory. Believe it, young man rejoicing in the fullness of life; believe it, weary pilgrim under increasing pain: God is testifying in each case that life in you is stronger than death and shall overcome it. So give your life to Him to use as He knows best—your vigour, to turn against the enemies of your country and of men; your feebleness, that His fatherly love and the obedience wrought in Christ through suffering may shine in you. His methods of showing the power of His Son's Resurrection vary greatly, but if you trust Him and do not faint, the end is the same: all shall share alike in the victory.

III\. And it is God who gives *us* the victory—not some rare people born with special aptitude for good, exempt from evil inclinations, but us, who have fallen into countless errors, who know evils we dare not confess to a neighbour, who are tempted continually to let the current carry us to shipwreck. We find it impossible to save ourselves; circumstances, example, the pressure of the age, ingrained habit forbid our rising. But the Creator of heaven and earth commands us to rise. The forces against us may be overwhelming; He is on our side.

IV\. Still it is a *victory*. Immortality is not natural, if "natural" means what would befall us regardless of our being voluntary spiritual beings; it belongs to us only as such beings. Surrender that condition and we surrender our immortality, taking our place among mortal things. But we cannot surrender it—we know we cannot, even when trying hardest, even in deepest degradation. So let us never stop connecting Resurrection with faith, hope, and therefore conflict. We must judge our resurrection by His if we connect the two at all. He set His face like flint; His garments were like one who treads the winepress. It was agony, though the agony of submission; His sweat was like great drops of blood, though the outcome was "Father, not my will, but Thine be done." Therefore God gave Him the victory—the perfect victory of spirit, soul, and body.

V\. This warning against besetting sloth, and this encouragement that God's Spirit is always striving to shake it off, comes from the text's closing words, "through Jesus Christ our Lord." We need these words also to remove the conceit that the battle, though each of us must fight and win it, is fought for some separate, selfish prize. Christ, Head of our race, has entered the holiest place, having obtained eternal Redemption for us. That holiest place is His Father's presence; that Redemption is from bondage to our own selfish nature and to the spirit of selfishness that made fellowship with God and with our brethren impossible. If we think we can enter God's presence by some work or faith of our own, we do not enter through Jesus Christ our Lord; if we think we have some redemption or victory over the grave that does not belong to our whole race, we do not receive it through Him. He is the Redeemer of Mankind, who won the Victory by stooping to the level of all; it is another redemption, another victory than His, that we seek if we try to separate ourselves from anyone.

VI\. This text, then, is nothing but the Easter Eucharist put into words. "Thanks be to God," says the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, "who giveth us the Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." Last Sunday you came to celebrate an accomplished victory—to give thanks that God had raised His Son, and so our race, from death to life. You came to say that you, being part of this race, need that life day by day, having a daily conflict with death's powers. You came to say you could receive that life only from God, sought through the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. You came to confess that only as members of His Body, only by the power of His Holy Spirit, do you hope for victory over even your feeblest enemies—believing that as members of His body, by His Spirit's power, the last enemy, and all enemies, will be put under His feet, and therefore under yours.