First Sunday of the Year
January 3, 1858
“Or despisest thou the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?”—Romans ii. 4.
The year we have passed through has been one, for Englishmen at least, of terrible excitement. The excitement has not been public only; every hearth has shared in it. Had the case been otherwise, had it been a year barren of startling incidents, there would still have been enough in the circumstances of each one of us to remind us of vicissitude, to foretell further and greater changes.
Nevertheless, it is probable that the first thought of many a man on New Year’s Day was one of complaint, that there has been so much of dreary uniformity in the past, and that there is so little hope of its being broken. “What reason have I for expecting that this twelvemonth will be at all different from that which has ended? Will there not be the same round of professional occupations? Will Society be less of a mere machine? will any variety be imparted to its workings? Will my own actions be more free, less regulated by mere accident or routine? Will my judgments be less swayed by the notions and fashions of the circle in which I move? Will not it be with my to-morrows much as it has been with my yesterdays,—resolutions formed to be broken, a chain of petty necessities always proving stronger than the energies of my will?”
The circumstances of those who raise these questions and utter these forebodings, may be very different. With some there may be a recollection of continual, monotonous pain. They may look back to long periods of suffering. They may lament that the punishment has not profited them as it might have done. They may ask, with the weariness of spirit which weariness of body so naturally produces, how they can reasonably expect that the new year will not come charged with a heavier freight of useless sorrow than its predecessor. But the monotony of pleasure, is that less oppressive? How many forms of it have been exhausted! How hard it is to invent a new enjoyment; how impossible to compel oneself to enjoy if it is invented! What need of increasing stimulants, as the power of being stimulated diminishes! How that which was intended as an escape from the severity of duty becomes the most exacting of duties! Turn which way you will, find the man whose time has passed most heavily, or who has the greatest number of appliances for making it pass lightly, and you may still hear the same dismal lamentations over the vanity and vexation of former years, the same prophecy that little but vanity and vexation can be looked for in the present.
It is sometimes fancied that these words, “Vanity and vexation,” are likewise to be the chief burden of the preacher’s song. So he appears to imitate his illustrious predecessor in the Old Testament; so he may claim the discoveries of the New respecting a future world,—respecting an eternal state—to shake the frivolity or deepen the seriousness of his hearers. If he takes this course, I question whether he will really draw his lessons either from the elder books of Scripture, or from the later. The Ecclesiastes is surely a very faithful recorder of actual experiences. He is a man walking in a labyrinth. He thinks he sees a passage out of it. He comes up to the point he had in his eye, and is baffled. He tries again, and is baffled again. He has all advantages for the search. These advantages seem to increase the hopelessness of it. The king is more lost than the common man; the wise man has his eyes opened just that he may see the stones in the path, which the fool stumbles over without being aware of them. Apparently religious considerations afford as little comfort as others. “There be just men to whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked. Again, there be wicked men to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous.” It seems to the observer, at one point of his inquiry, that it is not prudent to “be righteous overmuch, or to be wicked overmuch.” He repeats such one-sided thoughts fearlessly, like an honest man; the worth of his book, because the verity of his experience, would be sacrificed if he suppressed them. At last there comes a clear beautiful glimpse of light. There is an exit from the labyrinth for the beggar as well as the king, for the king only when he casts in his lot with the beggar. He has got little by making schemes of the universe, even if he has mixed thoughts of a Providence with his schemes. But if he will “fear God and keep His commandments”; if he will confess One who is governing him, and will submit to His government,—the earth may become brighter; the weary maze may be found not to be without a plan.
Supposing then a modern preacher took this book of the Bible for the guide of his meditations and his discourses, he must understand that he is to follow experience whithersoever it guides him; that he is not to warp its conclusions in the very least degree, whether they seem to favour a moral purpose or to interfere with it; that he is to extenuate none of the perplexities of the religious man; that he is to set down nought in malice against the worldly man; that he is to admit not only the plausibility but the worth of trials which lead to no satisfactory issue. He is not to say that other men find “vanity and vexation of spirit” in their labours, and that he is a privileged person who is free from any such misfortune. All his disappointments are to be personal, not caused by the errors of his neighbours, but by his own. And the discovery to which he is at last brought must be one which is as good for all as for himself,—the discovery that he has been seeking at a distance for a secret that was lying close to them as well as him; that the end of vanity and vexation to a man is when he abandons the effort to create worlds, in each of which he is the centre, and when he finds that there is a Centre round which his own world and all worlds are revolving.
But we should be greatly misled by the use of a title which may or may not represent the sense of the writer, if we took the Royal Philosopher as the type of Old Testament preachers. If we want to know what the Concio ad Populum as well as the Concio ad Clerum in the land of Israel was, we must turn to the Prophets. They begin where Solomon ends. They assume a Divine order of the world. They start from a God Who has made a covenant with the Nation, Who bids all the members of it fear Him and trust Him; Who gives them commandments; Who promises them a right heart, that they may keep His commandments. The course of empires, the course of individual life, is under the guidance of that Word Who is speaking by their lips. The past, the present, the future are wonderfully connected. Nothing is indifferent; nothing is sterile. Every work that man can be engaged in may be grand and productive. No doubt every work he is engaged in may tend to evil as well as to good. He may throw his acts into a witch-cauldron, where they will mix with all the elements of strife, all the foul charms, that were gathered there already. But even they who watch over this cauldron know that their hour is coming. Their own skinny hands must point their slaves to crowns and sceptres in the distance, which God will bestow in spite of all their arts. And the true prophet, though he must utter his wailing over the love of vain things which dwells in the heart of the chosen people,—though he must foretell the vexation of spirit which will come to those who trust in their idols—though he must sing to prophets, and priests, and people, of the utter helplessness of the lies in which they have delighted,—must also declare that vanity and vexation of spirit proceed from forgetfulness of the Lord God of their Fathers; that He is the same as in the days of old; that His counsel will stand, and He will do all His pleasure; that though darkness may cover the earth and gross darkness the people, He will arise to shine and fill the Universe with His light.
Those, then, who in our days would profit by this example, must feel that it is not their business to strengthen or deepen men in the notion that the years, as they succeed each other, only bring fresh excuses for despondency. They are not to indorse atheistical experience with the authority of God. They are not to tell young men that their youth and physical strength, and all the joyous expectations which should go along with youth and strength, are the devil’s delusions, when they are God’s precious and blessed gifts. They are not to say that any pursuit is or can be a vain pursuit, is or can be anything but a most serious pursuit, seeing that God has appointed it, and that to God we must account for the spirit in which we have entered upon it. They are not to tell lawyers that law is vanity; or politicians, that politics are vanity. They are to tell them that their functions are awful, even divine; they are to say that any one who deals lightly and frivolously with the mighty trusts and powers which are committed to him, under pretence that he has some religious interest, some reversion in a future state, which he must occupy himself with, and which he cannot afford to neglect for the sake of merely secular duties, may pass well with those who look on the outward appearance, but will shrink and quail before Him Who searches the heart and the reins. Sundays, prayers, communions, the lawyer and politician need, that they may have strength for their tasks; services which make them indifferent to their tasks, are not such as the Prophets urged their countrymen to engage in; they are those of which the Prophets said, that God was weary to bear them.
The Old Testament preacher was, as I strove to show you lately, in the strictest sense, a preacher of Hope,—of Hope awakened by the very sorrows and punishments which were the warrants for his solemnest denunciations; which seemed to be the warrants for the most absolute despair. But he was so, precisely because he was preparing the way for the herald of a completed Redemption, of a Gospel in its most perfect sense. A Gospel beginning with “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” would be surely the greatest contradiction which it is possible to conceive. It must either meet that natural conclusion—that inevitable result of mere experience—with some direct and decisive refutation, or the name is delusive.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ—the Gospel, as He called it, of the Kingdom of Heaven—does profess to show both why the life of man is not vanity, and how it becomes vanity. The life of man, so the Gospel declares, is not vanity, for it is derived from the life of the Son of God. He is the Lord of every man. In Him is life, and His life is the light of men. The life of a man becomes a vain show, just because he does not confess his relation to this Fountain of Life; just because he wishes to have a life of his own; just because he seeks that life where it is not to be found,—in the things which he is to rule, not in the Lord who rules him. From this vanity Christ redeems him. He is not obliged to be the slave of the creature; he may act as the child of the Creator. If he does, he takes his place as a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven; every year gives him new tokens that he is; every year tells him how fair and rich the earth is; every year prepares him for the full manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven, for the full deliverance of the earth. If not, outward things become curses to him, not because they are vain, but because he chooses to be so.
The Lesson we have read this afternoon proves that St. Paul, who was emphatically the preacher of a Gospel to the world, did not speak smoother things than the preachers of old had spoken; that he was as stern in his denunciation of hypocrisy and self-delusion as any of them. His words are addressed to his countrymen, who were judging the Heathens as outcasts from God, and yet were causing God’s name to be blasphemed amongst the Heathen. He tells them that God’s judgments are not partial, as they supposed, but according to truth. No circumstances will exclude any from life and immortality; no circumstances will bring any to life and immortality. The Law was good for those who kept it; the Law condemned those who broke it. Circumcision was good, if it meant that they trusted Him Who gave the Covenant, and forsook their own evil nature. Circumcision was nothing, if it was only outward in the flesh. Those who were contentious and obeyed not the truth, but obeyed unrighteousness, would have tribulation and wrath; that στενοχωρία, that closeness, narrowness, incapacity of breathing, which they chose, when they shut themselves in their own privileges, and refused to let their light shine forth upon all men.
I refer to these passages, that you may see how little the one I have taken, which occurs in the midst of them, is selected for its tenderness. You might judge from its own character, even apart from its context, that it was much more a sentence of admonition and reproof than of consolation. I accept it as such. I find in it the keenest reproof of the distrust and despondency with which we are apt to enter upon a new year. I learn from it that we are denying the most evident facts of our lives, if we resolve that there is not a Power near us which can make us all that we wish to be, all that we accuse ourselves of not being.
I. The Jews thought that St. Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, was tempting them to despise the privileges of their birth and election. He retorts the charge. He asks the Jew how he could dare to despise the riches which God had bestowed upon him? What were these riches? The Law and the Covenant were the pledges and witnesses of their wealth; they could be converted into wealth; but they were not the thing itself. They spoke of a living God near to the Israelite, of a God of goodness, forbearance, longsuffering. These names were given to Him in every page of the Divine Oracles; the names were illustrated by a series of facts. The history of the Nation was the history of a God showing kindness to an indifferent race, forbearance to a provoking race, longsuffering to an obstinate race. In other books you have the records of a religion. You are told how a people introduced this worship and that ceremony, how their soothsayers told them of services that they had neglected, how their priests enforced new propitiations. Here you have nothing of the kind. All the religion which the priests or the people introduced—the worship on hills and in groves, the calves, the altars to Baal—is noticed to be denounced; a righteous King proves his righteousness by sweeping it away. The subject of these records is not certain feelings entertained by men towards a higher Being, certain duties rendered by them to Him. The subject is God’s feeling towards them, the acts which He performs on their behalf. This was the peculiar treasure of the nation. It was not a treasure given generations ago, and then withdrawn. That which was given generations ago was the testimony concerning a Being Who was the Same from generation to generation. It was not a treasure which could be shut up in statutes or decrees, in the pages of a Book, in the forms of the Tabernacle or the Temple. The statutes and decrees, the Book, the forms, ceased to have any worth if He of Whom they spake was not alive, if He were not living with men, if men were not living by Him. To boast of the Law and the Covenant and the Scriptures, as if they were not revelations of Him, was to deny and to despise them. To accept them as revelations of Him, and not to believe that He was good and longsuffering and forbearing, was to deny and despise both them and Him. To admit that He was good and forbearing and longsuffering at all, and not to believe that He was so at every moment, to themselves and to all men, was to play with words, to despise their sense, their power, their blessing.
It is even so, brethren, with each one of us. Our New Testament, our Baptism, our Communion, testify of a God good and forbearing and longsuffering. They give each of those titles an emphasis which it had not of old. They remove some impediment which interfered with the belief of it in the men of the old time.
Goodness, when it is seen in the deeds of Him Who went about doing good, loses none of its awfulness; it stands out in more direct contrast to all wickedness; but we know that it is not abstract, that it is individualizing, yet that it is without limitation.
When we hear of God’s Forbearance, we ask the ancient, ever-recurring question, whether He can care enough for our doings to feel anything like that “provocation” which the Bible speaks of; whether such words must not be merely figurative, or must not detract from His Holiness and Majesty. When we seek to know the Father through the Son clothed in our nature, we see how purity and sympathy must be provoked every day by impurity and hardness of heart; we are sure that the perfection would be diminished, if it were incapable of pain and sorrow for evil.
The Longsuffering becomes intelligible like the forbearance, when we see it in this mirror. Till we so see it, we may ask ourselves whether there is not some boundary to it, which we are obliged to conceive, though we may be unable to fix it. The Cross of Calvary drives our reason from this vain and ambitious attempt. That Cross reveals a height and depth of endurance such as we dare not measure; if we could, which of us must not say, “I have exhausted it”?
Now if this goodness, forbearance, longsuffering, belong to the very name and character of Him in Whom we are living and moving and having our being, they constitute a wealth upon which we may always draw. The more we call them to mind, the more we believe in them, the more truly and actively they become ours. We may become moulded into their likeness, we may show them forth. This is that kingly inheritance which the Scriptures and the Sacraments make known to us. Every Old Year speaks of events, strange and common, which have manifested the Divine goodness, forbearance, longsuffering to us, to our country, to the world. The miracle of every morning as it rises out of night has testified to these. Not a child has been born, not a parent has died, in whom we might not have seen the traces of them. And the New Year is as certain to be full of them as the Old. It too will have its thunders to raise us out of sleep; it too will have its silent, hourly memorials of an unvarying, considerate, vigilant loving-kindness.
II. But here comes in the great excuse for shame and for gloom. We have not taken the events that have befallen us as if they bore this signification; the wealth has been ours, but it has been squandered. We have despised the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering. And why should it be otherwise in the time that is approaching? What charm is there in a New Year which the former wanted? Why should the passing of an imaginary boundary change death into life? Is not the gravitation to evil likely to be stronger, not weaker, than it has been? Is not the indifference which can take no account of that which is good and gracious certain to augment day by day? Is not the craving for violent excitement which treats all daily blessings as of no worth, sure to grow by what it feeds on? Questions too all reasonable, and to be answered only in one way. But this thought has been left out of our calculation. We have “not known that the goodness of God is leading us to repentance.” Events are not leading us to it, sad or joyful, sudden or successive. Our own hearts, left to themselves, will not lead us to it. The experience of our powerlessness to change our minds, to turn them round to the Light, may be an entirely true experience. But that goodness of God which is with us, is not merely something which we may recollect, by which we may profit. It is an active, vital power. It is the one power which can act upon spirit. It is acting continually upon our spirits. This goodness is the very Spirit of God; that Spirit Who, being goodness, grieves for our want of goodness; being the forbearance of God, bears with us; being the longsuffering of God, will not suffer us to destroy ourselves. It is He Who convinces us of Sin, because we have not believed in Him in Whom is no sin, and Who is always with us 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 is judged, and because each year is hastening on the time when he shall be finally cast out.
The Church inaugurates the year with two festivals. One is the Festival of the Circumcision.
If we enter into the meaning of it, we shall believe that all God’s discipline in past years has been intended to destroy in us what is selfish and carnal, that the Spirit may graft and renew in us what is human, what is divine.
The other is the Epiphany. If we enter into the meaning of that Festival, we shall believe that Christ’s glory may be manifested in the greatest weakness because it is the glory of goodness, of forbearance, of longsuffering. We shall ask that that glory may humble us and lead us day by day to repentance. We shall be sure that there will be at last a full revelation of those riches which eye hath not seen nor it hath entered into the heart of man to conceive, but which God hath prepared for them that love Him.