The Law of Christ the Law of Humanity

“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”—Galatians vi. 2

The phrase, “It is a law of our nature that we should do such or such a thing,” is one which a certain class of writers are never weary of repeating. Often they mean almost nothing by it; they resort to it as a convenient method of disguising their ignorance, or of giving solemnity to an empty truism, or of persuading themselves that they have discovered a principle, when they are only generalizing from some narrow and imperfect experience. Sometimes a fact is announced which is of real worth; a tendency not merely of individuals in particular circumstances and positions, but of human beings everywhere; and yet the expression which is used to denote it is a misleading one. The fact may deserve the greatest possible attention; an acquaintance with the tendency may be a great and essential element of our self-knowledge; but it may not deserve to be called a Law; there may be some controlling or counteracting principle which claims that title by a much older creation.

Thus, for instance, a great many people seem to have convinced themselves, that when they strive one against another, which shall possess the greatest amount of money, or of the good things which money procures, they are obeying a necessary and eternal law, one which they cannot resist or transgress without ceasing to be men. You will hear it continually assumed that this strife and contention is just as much the principle which determines the movements of human society, as gravitation is the principle which determines the movements of natural bodies; that it is just as ridiculous to complain of the perpetual jostling of men against each other, with all the sorrow and misery which it causes to thousands and tens of thousands, as to be angry that water does not flow up instead of down a hill. By violent efforts, it is said, under some strange, irregular influence, the ordinary course of men’s feelings may for a time be changed even reversed. But only a fanatic would think of making these irregular influences normal; only a madman would reconstitute the universe upon a dream. In some other planet, it is added, where the inhabitants are not men, but beings of quite a different race and propensities, a better principle than this of universal rivalry may exist. But all the energy and purpose of our life would be lost if this mighty stimulus were withdrawn. If the Mammon we worship demands a costly amount of human sacrifices, there is a compensation in the benefits he bestows upon us.

Now, that the tendency which these reasoners speak of exists in the nature of every man whatsoever,—that it works most strongly in the man who has most activity, most of all the qualities which Society requires in its members,—that no circumstances which we can create or conceive of will extinguish it—I believe is undoubtedly true. And I believe a man owes much to those who keep him in mind of this fact, who say to him, “Be assured this desire of being first yourself, this inclination to trip up your neighbour, is in you now, will be in you always. Change your place, your mode of life, every influence which seems to you to have begotten or nourished it, and you will have it still. When you fancy it is dead, and are acting upon that supposition, you shall see it starting up with greater freshness than ever. Social arrangements will not put an end to it: if they aim at such a result, there is great fear that they will weaken the individual energies of those for whom they are formed, and will be, after all, what the most ingenious social arrangements were said to be by the old sage, mere spider-webs, which entangle the weaker insects, and which the stronger break through. Education will not put an end to it; so far as it awakens the faculties, and gives them greater elasticity and freedom, this disposition to outrun others, to grasp what they have, to assert mastery over them, will be also awakened.” These observations, however we may shrink from them as disagreeable, are, it seems to me, true, and therefore should not be concealed from ourselves or from others.

But to boast, when we have made them, that we have proclaimed the law by which men are bound together as members of a commonwealth, is surely of all extravagant pretensions the most monstrous. We have been fortunate enough to perceive something which hinders them from living and working together, something which induces each man to interfere with the actions and purposes of his fellow-man,—something that has been the secret of hostility in past time, and threatens to make that hostility perpetual. But who does not see that if you have lighted upon so strange and perplexing a fact in the order of the world, you are bound to show how Society has gone on in spite of it? The more vigour you attribute to this selfish rivalry—the more manifold you find its workings to be—the more you are bound to explain to yourself how it has been possible for human beings to exist together under such a condition. You must seek for some principle of cohesion which has been able to withstand this tremendous principle of repulsion; and you must confess, if you are a reasonable man, that that principle, however it may have been transgressed, however imperfectly it may have been acknowledged, is in truth the law of the Universe, the law which all human laws and schemes of government implicately confess, when they appear most to set it at naught.

You may fancy that when I speak thus I am trying to convince you that Religion, or, as it is sometimes called still more vaguely, the Religious Principle, has been necessary for the conservation of society, and is necessary for it still. But there is much confusion and mischief, I fear, lurking in the use of such language. It may mean that Religion prevents a society from perishing, which has selfishness for its root, and which would naturally fall to pieces if it had not some supernatural power, or the dream of some supernatural power, to keep it together. Such a religion statesmen have unquestionably been desirous of, and priests have been found ready to supply them with it. But if by Religion be meant the Gospel of Christ in a living, practical sense, it declines such an honour altogether. It does not exist to keep men comfortable in their contradictions, or to avert the consequences of them. It exists as a perpetual witness against those contradictions, and a perpetual prophecy of the result which must come from them. A society which has reached the point of confessing no principle but that of rivalry, no maxim but that of “Every man for himself,” may in its dying agonies ask help of the Gospel—but assuredly too late. What can it do to save a community which has been deliberately, systematically, setting aside its first and most notorious precepts,—which has pronounced the principle, my text announces, to be no foundation of human life at all, but only an excuse for pretty sentences in commendation of charity and gentleness such as preachers deliver, and which it is respectable to listen to for a few minutes on a Sunday? No! Religion, or the Religious Principle, if it is worth anything,—if it is not another name for the worship of the God of this world, of the Evil Spirit,—cannot be the instrument of preventing or even delaying that destruction which the Righteous and True God has pronounced against all unrighteousness and untruth.

Either the Gospel declares what Society is, and what it is not; what binds men together, what separates them, or it has no significance at all. Either it shows how a uniting principle may be an effectual, living principle—how those tendencies which lead to separation may be overcome,—or it fails to do what it professes. For the Bible does not accept that position which men have courteously assigned it. It does not profess to provide rules or comforts for men as individuals, and to leave their condition as portions of a Community out of its calculations. It speaks from first to last of a Kingdom. It promulgates a social Law. It tells all men that this is the law which makes communion among men possible; that there is positively no other.

In my text St. Paul bids the Galatians fulfil the law of Christ. Does he mean the law which Christ laid down when He opened His mouth and spake, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven”? Undoubtedly he does mean that. But what did that mean? Did our Lord announce certain grave and excellent precepts, which He, being a wise and celestial teacher, had perceived by a large experience or an excellent intuition to be very desirable for human creatures? Or was He publishing a new Decalogue, to be enforced by new and more terrible sanctions? Or was it the law which His Father in heaven had formed all His human, intelligent voluntary creatures to obey, just as much as He had formed mere natural creatures to obey the law of gravitation? Was it not the law which was in the heart of the Son of God, which He actually fulfilled; which He declared to be the law of His disciples, because they were related to Him as the branches of a vine are related to the stem and root; because a living Spirit would be given them, that they might feel as He felt, be what He was? If the last be the account which our Lord Himself gives us and the Apostle gives us of this law,—if they represent it as the original primary law, of which the Ten Commandments were a formal, external expression—St. Paul may well say, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” He would have been sorry to have changed the words for “Fulfil the law of your being.” Such an expression would have been far more feeble, far less accurate, than the one he actually adopted. But it would have been nearer the truth and more consistent with his uniform language than any which should represent Christ as merely an external law-maker. He supposes Him to be the Man, the Lord of Man, Who shows what man truly is; Who is the true head of all human fellowship, the true source and spring of all human life. If Christ bore all men’s burdens,—if He glorified not Himself,—if He took upon Him the form of a servant,—if He exhibited the chief of all as the minister of all,—this, St. Paul affirms, is the law under which we are placed, the law to which we are in conformity, so far as our acts are self-consistent and harmonious; the law which we break, every time that we yield to any selfish, separating tendency, be it ever so much rooted in our nature, be it ever so universal, be it ever so closely connected with what is good and precious, and even sacred. To bear one another’s burdens, according to the Apostle, is not to act upon some sublime, heroical maxim, wholly apart from the common daily business and routine of life; it is simply to fulfil a law, simply not to break loose from the order and government under which our hearts and lives are actually constituted, simply to yield ourselves to the real Lord and Master of our spirits, Who has power to mould them according to His will, instead of choosing another service—the service of the Spirit of Division and Selfishness.

Such a view of things is undoubtedly very unlike the one which is commonly adopted by Christians in our day, even by those who most pride themselves in the name. There is indeed a general notion that benevolence is a good and desirable quality; that it is a graceful thing, and even in some cases a needful thing, to care for others as well as ourselves. But this benevolence is represented as the beautiful capital of a pillar, which rests upon the most earthly base. It is a habit which may improve and mitigate the evils of the world, but affirms them to be radical. Or else religious people say, that to bear one another’s burdens is the law of the regenerate man, but that the world generally can only follow a selfish rule. Governments must try to make that rule as efficient for keeping up good order as they can. A more hateful and accursed inference from a great truth was never suggested by the Spirit of Lies, for the purpose of undermining and making ineffectual a maxim which he dares not openly contradict. Assuredly there is this great and eternal distinction between the new and old man, the regenerate and the unregenerate. But the new man is he who consents to follow the true law of humanity which is in Christ Jesus, and so to be at one with his fellow-men; the old man is he who obeys the inclinations of his nature, and so is at war with his fellows. The law of Christ is not the law of a select few, but the law for man. It would be so, though all men disobeyed it; it continues so, though those who ought to proclaim the good news to their fellow-creatures, that Christ has taken the nature of men, and died for men, prefer to wrap themselves up in a conceit of their own privileges, and to boast that they have been put into an extra-human, or inhuman, position. Whoever comes to think habitually that there is a different law for different classes of human creatures, will infallibly obey the lower and least troublesome law in his own ordinary practice. For his distinction is grounded on this knowledge, that two principles are contending in himself, and if he once believes that the good principle is his own, for which he can, under any pretext, take credit to himself, he will fall under the dominion of the evil. He will, in all his dealings with other men, act upon the low notions which he supposes are the only notions they can understand or recognize; he will not make good his claim to be regenerate and different from these men by bearing their burdens, and so fulfilling the law of Christ, but by the most arrogant contempt and bitter judgment of them. A Christian man must believe that the law of Christ is applicable to all persons and all cases, or he will very soon apply it really and practically to no persons and in no cases. He must acknowledge it as the human law, or it certainly will not be the law of his church, or circle, or caste; he must believe that it lies at the root of all politics and of all daily business, or he will not make it the guide of his individual conduct, not even of his most sacred and solemn transactions.

There is another way in which this general application of the principle is often evaded by good men. They think that Christ is to come some day to restore the world and set all right, but that in the meantime Society is to be left to take its course, and to follow what evil maxims it chooses for itself. That Christ will one day be the acknowledged Ruler of this earth, and of all that dwell on it, no one who calls Him Lord and Master can bear to 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.” No man who feels the oppressions of the world, and tries to bear up against them, can help utterly fainting, if he does not verily believe that this earth shall not always be a den of robbers, but that its true Saviour and Helper shall Himself purge it and restore it. But the men of old were able verily to believe this truth; because they verily believed, in their own day, that the universe was not the Devil’s but God’s, and because they set themselves manfully to fight in that conviction against those who said it was the Devil’s, and tried to make it so, we must do the same. If this law of bearing one another’s burdens is not the law by which all things and all men are governed now, it never will be. Our faith in its future establishment rests wholly on our belief in its present truth. And if it is true, then must we 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, brethren. We see Society dragged along by that mighty power of competition which wise men commend, and declare to be the sovereign principle in the universe. We see some of the men who obey this impulse, exhibiting admirable zeal and energy, a zeal and energy in vanquishing circumstances which we hold to be worthy of all imitation and all cultivation. But we see that they do not after all wholly obey this impulse; that they are not merely selfish, that they are members of families, of social circles, in which, to a certain extent, yes, to a very considerable extent, they act upon the rule, “Bear ye one another’s burdens.”

And we see another sight which is more appalling. We see oftentimes their sons exhibiting very little of their strength, hardly any of their domestic feelings, yet thoroughly possessed by their doctrine. They desire to be before others, but the desire is not making them painstaking, thrifty pursuers of fortune. They covet to be rich, and they become gamblers. They will take what seems to them the shortest road to riches, heedless, of course, of all warnings, that it is a road full of pits, in which thousands are lost, while one gets his reward and finds it to be a wretched reward. You are not then really stirring up that enterprise, that hope, which you say, and say rightly, is so essential to a nation’s strength and well-being. You are producing men who are restless to-day, will be listless to-morrow; pursuers of phantoms, often ugly phantoms, for awhile; indifferent, disappointed, heartless loungers, when they have missed the prize. Must you not make an effort to recover that which competition cannot give, if you will obtain any one of its advantages? Must you not try to strengthen the bonds of sympathy which it is threatening? Must not the thought of providing for others besides ourselves, for those who shall live when we are in our graves, be in some way awakened? But that thought has its ground in the law which binds men together, not in the law which sets them one against another. That is a lower exhibition of the law which is expounded in the text, the law which was fulfilled by Jesus Christ.

I have owned, brethren, that we have no right to reproach any other men—merchants, shopkeepers, lawyers—for thinking the world’s law mightier and more generally applicable than the Divine law. We, the ministers of the Gospel, have most to answer for. We have sanctioned this unbelief. We have acted upon it. The Church ought to uphold the national life, the family of England, by its prayers, its confessions, its Sacraments. We have spoken of these prayers, confessions, Sacraments, as if they were themselves instruments and abettors of the selfish law, as if there was no force in them which could enable us to obey the other law. Oh! that this Lent we might repent altogether, you and we, of the sin of such unfaithfulness! Oh that we might, each for himself, knowing the plague of his own heart, and also with one heart and voice, own that we have not borne each other’s burdens, and so fulfilled the law of Christ! Oh that we may indeed feel that His yoke is the easy yoke, and that we have put on ourselves the heavy one! Oh that we may come to Christ’s Holy Sacrament, believing that He can feed us with the flesh and make us drink of the blood which He gave for the world, when He bore all our burdens; that He can quicken us with His Spirit, to bear each other’s burdens!