# Sermons, Volume 4: A Modern Paraphrase *Sermons, Volume 4, 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-5-5; reviewed by a human editor.* ## GOD THE UPROOTER OF SECTS ::: {.center} For the Sunday after Ascension ::: ::: {.center} [May]{.smallcaps} 16, 1858 ::: > "*But He answered and said, Every plant, which My Heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up*."—[Matthew]{.smallcaps} xv. 13. *The passage:* Jesus answered that every plant which his heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. [Our]{.smallcaps} Lord had been stating the principle that what goes into the mouth does not defile a man, but what comes out of it does. This clearly applied very widely, and it undermined a whole scheme of religion. The Jewish teachers felt how much it involved. The disciples asked their Master whether he knew the Pharisees were offended by it. He answered that every plant his Heavenly Father had not planted would be rooted up, that they should let the Pharisees alone, that they were blind leaders of the blind, and that if the blind lead the blind both fall into the ditch. Again he stated a universal maxim, but he did not leave the disciples to work out its application. He made it plain that the sect of the Pharisees was the plant he meant, and that it was to be rooted up. The disciples must have wondered at this. They knew many Pharisees were righteous only on the surface, and they may have been with him long enough to see that keeping an outward rule is very different from doing God's will. Still, this sect was emphatically *the* religious sect. It stood as a witness against another sect, which made light of divine ordinances and would have replaced everything peculiar to their fathers' faith with a morality hardly different from the heathen schools. The earlier Pharisees were no doubt earnest men who wanted to save their countrymen from indifference, and who witnessed not just to what they believed but to what was true. There must always have been sincere, elevated devotion among them. Their teaching kept alive in the people the sense that man's existence is not bounded by what is present and visible. The disciples knew this. Must they not have asked: if a plant that has grown so long is to be rooted out, what can we expect but the disturbance of all that is most sacred in our nation and in ourselves? \(1) Such thoughts may have shaken these humble fishermen, but they were not unwholesome. Our Lord wanted them to believe that the axe was laid to the root of the tree, that a great judgment-day for their nation was approaching, and that not earth only but heaven would be shaken. All his teaching had prepared them for terrible events that would mark his coming and the end of an age. These words were one note of the trumpet announcing that day. He was saying: "It is not the Sadducees—the sect you may imagine has defied God and deserves his wrath—that will be rooted out. It is the sect that carries the names of Religion and God on its banner, that believes itself the only plank between the nation and Atheism. It must wither and die, because God is not its root and it does not draw its life from him." \(2) The disciples needed this lesson so that they would not be startled when much that looked fair and vigorous faded away. They needed it still more to understand what in the Jewish soil could not be rooted out, what would spread its fibres wider and send up higher branches where the birds of the air might nest. The Pharisee sect, our Lord says, his Father had *not* planted. Men set it up with the idea that it might further God's glory, keep his name from being forgotten, and put down his enemies. It took faith, or Religion, under its patronage and watched over the interests of the Divine Kingdom. The first father of the nation did not feel like that when he went out into Canaan not knowing where he was going. He had obeyed a call from the Voice of God, believed in a Righteous Lord who ruled him, trusted that Lord, and risen up a righteous man. He kept his flocks, lived with his wife, raised his children and fought his battles as a servant of the Unseen Protector, bearing witness to him by doing the work given him. He expected God to be with his children as he had been with him, and the seed to multiply like the stars of heaven and bless all the families of the earth. The Heavenly Father *did* plant this seed. He *did* establish a Family, bidden to trust and obey him. The Father of the Faithful began a *Family*, not a *Sect* that would proclaim itself the worshipper of Jehovah and so exalt itself rather than him. Moses was not the author of any such sect either. His heart yearned over his kinsfolk, slaves to a tyrant. Slowly and reluctantly he came to be convinced that the God of these slaves had called him to deliver them. He showed the tyrant that a God who cared for outcasts was stronger than he and his gods, and showed the slaves that the Lord, the I AM, is a Deliverer. He bound them together in that Deliverer's name as subjects of a Law no one could break without bringing punishment on himself. He taught them that the Unseen God wanted to make them a brave and understanding people, free from their own lusts and restored when they transgressed. He taught them that God himself was among them, binding them as a Nation, and that none of them should doubt his presence and help. In a word, Moses was God's instrument in planting a *Nation* of Israelites, to bear witness to him as the One Living God of the whole earth. The Laws and Ordinances he gave meant that God was King of the land, the people were his subjects, and worshipping any visible thing was revolt against him. Moses was not founding a Jewish sect to testify against heathen sects or for Jewish rites and customs. We are told likewise that God called David from keeping sheep to shepherd his people Israel. Through defeats and victories, as popular champion and as outlaw, through the strength given him to rule righteously and the punishments laid on him when he ruled unrighteously, he was taught that he was always under a higher King and lived to bear witness to him. He could do so only by judging between man and man, putting down the Nation's enemies, uniting its members, and preparing the Gentiles to feel that the same King reigned over them and would one day be revealed to them as their Light and Deliverer. David was the man after God's heart just so far as he did not set himself up as head of a self-made sect, but was the called chief of a divine Nation, destined to grow until it embraced all Mankind. \(3) Now the crisis had come, and the disciples were to understand that it had. It would decide whether this Family, of which Abraham the friend of God was the first earthly father, and this Nation that Moses led out of bondage and that under David became a Kingdom, would end in a sect or several sects, or would unfold into that *Universal Society* of which they and all the Prophets believed it was the germ. The religious party among the Jews could imagine no higher blessing than its own complete triumph over its enemies and the putting down of every notion adverse to its own. What else could be desired? Would not religion then be raised to its highest place, as the religion learnt from the Divine books? Would not everything irreligious—all heathenism, all imperfect, insincere, heretical Judaism—be banished into outer darkness? \(4) The disciples learned gradually from his lips that they were chosen to tell their countrymen that the Son of David and Son of Abraham had come to bind Publicans and Sinners, Jews, Galileans and Samaritans into one. This Son of David and Abraham was the *Son of Man*, who would finally gather all Nations into one. The Son of Man was the *Son of God*, in whose image men were created, the brightness of the Father's glory and the express image of his person. Like Moses he was a Deliverer from bondage, but because he was a Son and not a Servant he could break the bonds Moses could not, and fulfil the Righteousness of which Moses only testified. With this Gospel they were to go to Jews and Gentiles. As they carried it, they soon found that its natural and necessary enemies were the sects. Sadducees and Pharisees hated it equally, because they saw in it the destruction of the sect-principle, and they felt they could keep even a temporary ascendancy only by fighting this rival to the death. When the disciples saw how mighty the sect-principle was, how many were pledged to it, and how it tied itself to the better thoughts and faith of some, so that those people supposed everything would perish if it gave way, they must have remembered the words once spoken to them: every plant my Heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up. As they saw how wicked the Jewish sects became in the last days of the commonwealth, they grew surer that the sentence would one day be carried out, though the cry "How long, O Lord!" must often have been in their hearts and on their lips. \(5) They had deeper reasons for that cry. They saw all too clearly that other soils than Judæa's could nourish this old plant, and that its root of bitterness could be traced in every Church baptized into the all-embracing, all-uniting Name. How terrible this discovery was to St. Paul, the first Epistle to the Corinthians shows directly, and every other Epistle shows if we look into its heart. The deeper he went into the Gospel entrusted to him, the more he dwelt on the Son of God as the destroyer of all walls of partition, the Atoner of God and Man, the Head of a body fitly joined together and indwelt by a quickening, uniting Spirit, who means to gather all things in heaven and earth to himself. And so the more startling it seemed that party names and watchwords should be heard in his Society. Everything Paul said and wrote was aimed at this contradiction. When he had to speak of himself or his fellow-workers, it was as Apostles called by God and sent with a message of peace. When he spoke of the Church's members, it was to tell them they were called to be saints. This language strikes at the root of the sect-maxim just as much as his speaking of prayer to the Father of the whole family in heaven and earth, or his claiming all Church members as members of Christ and bidding them live worthily of their calling. The sect says: "*We* have bound ourselves together to promote certain great objects; *we* have adopted distinct badges of *our* faith; *we* are pledged to oppose whatever interferes with it." Christ chooses the *Church* to witness to his love for mankind. The *sect* chooses Christ because it is convinced his doctrine is better than that of other religions' founders, and then goes on to choose Cephas, Paul or Apollos for the most refined or satisfactory form of that doctrine. So the person of Christ is lost in the opinions the sects have taken up about him. \(6) What supported the Apostles as they saw this Sectarianism unfold in the Churches God had enabled them to build, and felt sure it would not cease in coming ages but spread? First, they were certain that what God had planted would not be uprooted but would bear fruit from generation to generation. Christ would remain, however men formed notions about him and split into parties over them. And they did not dare, and found it impossible, to think of human society as anything but constituted in Christ. It was men's confusion and unbelief to think they could have fellowship and existence without him, and gather simply because solitude was inconvenient. Christ's ministers were to proclaim that there could have been no families, nations, social impulses or laws, nothing to resist the selfish tendencies each of us feels in himself and complains of in his neighbours, if there were not one living centre of the whole body of Humanity, one Head of every man. So his ministers were to be assured that the Church of Christ, which stands not on men's faith but on God's Will, would go on living and bearing witness to the order he has established in his Universe and his purpose to bring all into one, whatever powers threatened to crush it from outside or undermine it from within. Second, they were to remember the words, "Every plant which my Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up." Whatever unions men form to support their theories or opinions, whatever plans they devise in their wisdom to keep the ark of God from falling—or, in their coarse jargon, "to promote the interests of religion"—carry in them the pledge and prophecy of dissolution. They may look plausible to men, and may work themselves so far into the plant our Heavenly Father *has* planted that they seem inseparable from it, but they have a different root. He can part them, though his servants cannot. He can bind the one in bundles to be burned, and gather the fruit of the other into his garner for ever. \(7) My brethren, I believe no men ever needed the lesson of this verse more than we do, and we should ask God earnestly to teach us to apply it. We are all ready enough to apply it to our opponents. Each party turns to the one it wants to overthrow and says solemnly, "*Yours* is a plant God has not planted, so it will be rooted up," and sets about the uprooting by honest means or dishonest. The Protestant tells the Romanist, "Your Popedom was not planted by our Heavenly Father; *it* will be rooted up." The Romanist tells the Protestant, "All your schools and parties were not planted by our Heavenly Father; *they* shall be rooted up." Which is right? Which uses Christ's words truly, and which abuses them? I take it that *all* use them in their true sense and *none* abuses them. Each proclaims God's judgment, which must stand though heaven and earth pass away, and each is a prophet of what will surely come to pass. Each is largely justified in what it alleges against the immorality and ungodliness the denounced system has produced and is likely to produce. But we must remember that *we* are not to look for the causes of this immorality and ungodliness in other men, but in ourselves, where we can know their malignity and be God's instruments for casting them out. There is a plant in your heart and mine that our Heavenly Father has not planted and that must be rooted out. It is that same plant of self-seeking, opinionativeness and party spirit that has shed its poison over the Church and the world. In us it springs from the same root of unbelief in One who is the Head of us all and whose Life is the common Life of all—the root out of which all sects and parties have come. It is the root of pride that has led to the amazing delusion that God has not called us to be his servants and children, but that we are taking him to be our Lord and Father. Once by his grace we are delivered from that presumption, we shall not doubt that he has taken care of his own name and kingdom on this earth, however ignorantly his creatures have set themselves to defend and exalt them. We shall not talk of a set of men who preserved his faith and Church when he had let them fall into ruin. We shall believe that his Church has stood firm in his Son. In every land he has testified to its existence by his ordinances, which no corruption of men could set aside; by the light he has kindled in the hearts of unknown myriads, which no darkness of theirs could quench; and by his witness to a Unity among men that no artificial arrangements could create and no divisions destroy. \(8) If this is so, we shall remember that when Christ spoke to his disciples of the rooting up of the Pharisee sect, he added, "Let them alone." The work will be done, but it is not yours to do. *You* cannot separate the tares from the wheat, or distinguish the *man* I love from the *Pharisee* I hate. If you tried to destroy the sect my Heavenly Father has not planted, you would destroy something of the Church he *has* planted and is watching over until it reaches the full stature of Christ. We are to listen to the denunciations parties hurl at each other and admit, trembling, that they are all too well founded. We should not eagerly join in them, for God has given us another and nobler work: showing the members of parties that when their mud houses fall, there is a house of God not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, where they may find refuge. Above all, we must never be tempted to the greatest of sins, forming a new party to displace or overcome existing ones. That temptation will come in ten thousand forms. The Evil Spirit will come as an Angel of Light and tell us we are not to build a new party—that would be very wicked—but a protest against all parties, a larger Church, a freer and more expansive Christianity. Accursed sophist! *We* construct a Church! *We* lay a broader foundation for Humanity than God has laid in his Son! *We* invent a more comprehensive Gospel than the Gospel of the Ascension, that he has gone on high, leading captivity captive and glorifying our Nature at his Father's right hand! Such an experiment would gather all the arrogance and unbelief of former sects into one grand, devilish scheme of self-exaltation, and the Society we helped form would be the Society of Antichrist. No, brethren: in the sense of competing with parties, imitating them or superseding them, we must let them wholly alone. In another sense we must never let them alone; we must keep tormenting them. The Apostles did not uproot the Pharisee sect, but they preached the corner-stone of Humanity, and against that stone the sect stumbled and fell. It could not confess a One Lord who came to bind Jew and Greek, bond and free, heaven and earth in one. It would maintain itself and its traditions against man and God, and man and God were too strong for it. So it will be with every party and system formed by human wit, however religious its purpose, that our Heavenly Father has not planted. The compromises of statesmen and churchmen will not weaken them, and indifference and infidelity will lend them a force not their own. But they will shrink and shrivel before the blast of the breath of the mouth of him who is the Son of Man and the Son of God, the Saviour and Judge of the whole earth. ## THE MEANING OF THE GIFT OF TONGUES ::: {.center} Whit-Sunday ::: ::: {.center} [May]{.smallcaps} 23, 1858 ::: > "*For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call*,"—[Acts]{.smallcaps} ii. 39. *The passage:* The promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far off, for as many as the Lord our God shall call. [These]{.smallcaps} words have perplexed Christians in almost every age since they were spoken. Was the promise fulfilled on the day of Pentecost to the Apostles also fulfilled to those who heard them and to their children, and is it being fulfilled in Britain, North America, and Australia? No one questions that in all these countries men may ask for spiritual guidance and receive it, or seek sanctification and find it. Perhaps that blessing even goes beyond the one given at Pentecost. But are the two the same? Is there any necessary connection between them? That inward privilege might have been given without the rushing mighty wind and without the Apostles speaking with tongues. Did the holy men of the Old Testament not have it already? What would "holy men" mean if they did not? Why then are we taught to treat Whitsuntide not only as the memory of a past event but as the assurance of a present power? If that power is meant for the Church now, why has it been suspended? May we look for its restoration, or is it ours even now, if only a palsy over our hearts did not stop us using it? One answer to the first of these questions has always carried weight. The Apostles were told to wait in Jerusalem for a *power* that would qualify them for a certain *work*. They needed a pure heart for that work, but they would have needed a pure heart even if they had spent their lives as fishermen on the Lake of Galilee. What made them the Missionaries of the world, it is said, was a singular gift, expressly a gift of utterance that made them intelligible to people of different races and tongues. So the question takes a new form. May this Pentecostal endowment belong specially to the Christian Missionary? Can he work effectively without it? If Christian zeal for converting the heathen had not slackened, might the promise have been fulfilled to the latest ages as much as to the earliest? I think, brethren, that we are more likely to settle this question rightly when it takes a practical shape and ties itself to a duty to be done. While we merely wish for a power to work wonders with, we are likely to mistake badly what we need. We blame God foolishly for not giving us what could not profit us, and at last we dream we have found a treasure that only puffs us up and proves worthless. But when we gird up our loins for a task we believe we are called to, and which cannot safely be left undone, the phantoms that looked fine or fearful from a distance vanish. Our needs become more real and pressing, and God's promises are seen to meet them in a way quite different from what we had guessed. We find that those promises are not limited to the occasion that first made us feel their power, but apply to every condition and emergency of human life. Let us see whether this is so here. 1\. A Missionary surveying the globe and hearing of its different dialects might at first think, "What a barrier language is! If we only had words these people could take in, what hope we would have of bringing them the message of life." But more reflection, and still more experience, would change his estimate of this obstacle and of the power that must overcome it. If all he needed were a vocabulary, or several, his zeal would soon master the difficulty. At first he might grudge the time he must be silent; gradually he would welcome that silence as a golden opportunity, itself a divine gift. For he would see that words which express only animal wants, or serve only for barter, cannot serve his ends. His great desire would become to discover what deeper thoughts lie latent in their speech, unknown to those who use it or only dimly perceived by them; to recognize its affinities with the tongues of men who are conscious of human wants; to hear the cries of a spirit, as if from a dungeon-keep, in these imperfect and barely articulate sounds; to see in what swaddling-clothes of habit and tradition that spirit is wrapped, and how the deliverer's voice might be heard through them. He would soon feel that the largest assortment of phrases would be like the staff Gehazi laid on the Shunamite's dead child, and he would have to report as Gehazi did, "It is not awake." He would learn that signs of life could come into that corpse only when, like the prophet, he put his lips to its lips and breathed his breath into it. 2\. A Missionary does need to speak to men in the dialect they were born to, but that implies far more than we usually mean by the gift of tongues. It implies a living sympathy with the people he addresses: with all that is weak and strong in them, with them as individuals and as a race. It must let him see, beneath their outward customs, the particular constitution God has given the race, and feel how its special qualities connect with the common humanity he wants it to enter. Think how hard this is when he sees at every moment, in those he wants to convert, qualities he cannot and ought not sympathize with, and must hate: cruelty, malice, falsehood. He is sometimes tempted to call people who have the features of men mere brutes, sometimes almost devils. The confessions of earnest Missionaries tell us the struggle would have been impossible if they had not been shown that their own hearts had the same tendencies to become brutes and the same capacity of becoming devils. 3\. That awful discovery may keep the teacher from refusing to see his pupils as having his own nature and needing the same grace. But it does not free him from another obstruction, which he feels more the more devoted he is. He was brought up in some town or village and belongs to a particular family. He has the habits, prejudices, and temperament of his nation, of the society that shaped his mind, and of the teachers he studied under. He has the feelings of a class, perhaps a narrow one. It would always have been dangerous and wrong to throw off the impressions and reverence of his childhood, and now, among strangers who seem to suffer from lacking his early associations, he clings to them more tenaciously than ever. Yet do they not in some sense make him stiff and unyielding, unable to be what the Apostle of the Gentiles felt a Missionary ought to be, all things to all men? How is this conquered? Surely not by a mere gift of speaking languages. And until it is conquered, he cannot hope to make idolaters actually hear the wonderful works of God in their own dialect. 4\. The Missionary also has thoughts about idolatry itself, and at first they must be overwhelming. Do these different worships and conceptions of God not make the preacher's labour endless? All are equally hostile to his message, and they make those who should hear it unintelligible to one another. They tend constantly to multiply, since every new appearance in Nature or event in men's lives may call forth a new god. They tend constantly to deteriorate, as the Evil Spirit, the Destroyer, more and more supplants the Giver of Good, the Creator and Preserver. This view of the world is appalling, but there is another. How is it that all these idolatries bear witness to some common source of good, some Deliverer or Reconciler, someone from whom life and not death must come? This fact is as indisputable as the other. Theorists may try to dismiss or explain away one of them, but the practical man must recognize both, as they press upon him separately and together. Somehow these men must be related to each other, despite their hostilities and their different worships, and that relation must rest on a common relation to the Living God. You say the divided tongues of the earth witness to the separation of human beings. Is there not a secret affinity, revealed more and more to those who study them earnestly for high ends, which witnesses as mightily to their unity? You say all the religions of the earth testify that men cannot devise a common worship or agree on any conception of the Being they worship. True; but do these religions not also declare that there *must* be a common worship, and that, because men cannot arrive at a satisfactory notion of the One they feel after, He must come forth and tell them what He is, raise them above their paltry notions, and show what each of them has been pointing to? 5\. A Missionary who through much experience and suffering has come to grasp these truths will, I think, see a way through some of these difficulties, and will find something very different in Whitsuntide from what we usually find. If he studies the Apostles' acts and thoughts in St. Luke's narrative or in their own letters, he will be startled by how little there is in favour of the opinion about the gift of tongues that has prevailed in the Church, and by how many passages directly oppose it. He would find in the record no hint that the gift to the Apostles was a stock of words they could use in teaching the nations. St. Paul seems seldom if ever to have used any medium, in speaking or writing, besides Greek, except when addressing the citizens of Jerusalem. The Fourteenth Chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians suggests that the gift, far from *necessarily* communicating understanding to others, might be intelligible only to the person who received it. On that ground St. Paul *contrasts* it with prophecy. So we are driven to accept St. Paul's own explanation, strictly to the letter. He describes the gift as a *sign*, a sign of something very important and precious, though not itself in any sense the important or precious thing. 6\. What then is the *significatum*, the truth to which this gift was the index and pledge? Look at the narrative in the Second Chapter of Acts and see whether it does not tell us. A great Feast is held in Jerusalem, as it had been for centuries. It speaks of a blessing renewed each year. It commemorates the mystery of seeds hidden in the earth and springing up in a form unlike their own, to give bread to the eater and fresh seed to the sower, and it affirms that the Author of this strange life in nature is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This same Pentecost, we are told, reminded the Israelites that they lived under the Law given on the day the Lord God descended on Sinai amid thunder and lightning and declared that He had brought them out of bondage. So Jews from every province of the Empire, whether they had emigrated there or been born there, came up to keep it. It was the pledge that they belonged to one race, that the same Creator who fed their fathers with manna fed them with daily bread, and that the same King who gave their fathers law and covenant ruled over them. Besides all other ties they had that of a common language, though each Jew ordinarily spoke the dialect of the country where he lived. Now came the events that were to turn the special feast into the universal one. On a set of poor men, trained to a manual trade, despised by their countrymen yet sharing their contempt for other nations, and noted for an uncouth dialect, there appeared cloven tongues as of fire. They had new powers of utterance. Men from the Parthian provinces as well as the Roman world heard them proclaim the wonderful works of God in the languages of the lands where they grew up. What does it mean? Is it drunken inspiration? Have the orgies of a Dionysiac feast been brought into the worship at Jerusalem? No, say the Galileans: we are the disciples and witnesses of One whom your rulers crucified and God raised from the dead. A great and terrible day of the Lord is at hand. To prepare you for it, and to show that He whom you rejected as your King is both Lord and Christ, this has been poured out which you see and hear. Repent, acknowledge your true King and Lord, be baptized in His name, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Ghost that we have received. *For the promise is unto us and to our children, and to as many as the Lord our God shall call*. Then three thousand are baptized. In the sect-ridden city of Jerusalem a Society arises, united in the name of the Son of David and the Son of God, the nucleus of a Society for all tribes and nations. 7\. I will not stop to consider how the double meaning of Pentecost was fulfilled and translated by this revelation of God as the Giver of life, not to seeds but to men, writing in their hearts the laws He gave on the Mount. I want to fix your thoughts on the sign itself. The Missionary has felt the need of words that reach not the ears but the hearts of men, and of a power to carry those words to spirits needing life, a power that can speak to the common humanity latent beneath the customs and tongues of different tribes. He has felt the need of a power that lets the teacher bear with their sins, believe that Christ is with them as well as sin, and break through the fetters of his narrow education to become all things to all men. He has learned that the relations between men must rest on a common relation to God, has been sure that only God can reveal that relation, and has half perceived that such a revelation must in the highest sense be a revelation of God Himself as the ground and object of worship. Can he not interpret these signs? Do they not interpret themselves to him? Could any others tell him the things he longed to see? Could any others tell him how *his* stammering lips may be opened and *he* may speak plainly to all men the wonderful works of God? 8\. If this is the simplest and most natural reading of the narrative, the question is settled whether the gift is for one age or for all. A particular instrument or machinery for converting the nations may be given and withdrawn. But how can a Law be established in one period and reversed in another? Can a discovery of God's own working and eternal Nature be a discovery for the first century and not for the nineteenth? If St. Paul is right, the gift of the Spirit was the revelation of what had been hidden from ages and generations: the common fellowship of Gentile and Jew in Christ, and His glorification of our nature at God's right hand. Is the Missionary to the Caffre and the Hindoo not as much bound as the Missionary to the Greeks of Corinth and Ephesus to say: "I have no power to speak a single word of life to any human creature. It is God's Spirit alone who speaks that word. No schemes, doctrines, or systems of men can unite nations. God has united them in His Son and binds them together by His Spirit. Schemes and systems only build new barriers between men, because they set up new and conflicting conceptions of God. Only the Spirit of God, teaching of the Father and the Son and leading men out of their narrow notions, can guide them into all truth"? Yes, brethren, the Missionary who seeks to do his work faithfully will be brought to this conclusion. He will confess that God's words are not deceitful but proved in the fire, not words for one age but words that will last when heaven and earth pass away. And he will reach that discovery because it is the human and the divine discovery which each of us will make for himself if we are honest in our vocations. We too must confess that our words are not our own, and that they become mischievous and accursed if we treat them as our own. We too must learn that the Spirit of God unites us to each other, and that we would be forever at war if He did not. We too must own that the Spirit is not given to any of us for his own faith or virtues. It is God's gift to Christ, the Head and Corner-Stone of a Society we enter when we abandon our separate selfish pretensions and are content to be heirs of a common blessing. 9\. So we can resolve the two difficulties I raised at the beginning. *Holy men spoke in old times as they were moved by the Holy Ghost*. They could have no other mover if they said any right word or did any right act. But *the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified*. It had not yet been declared that He is moving at the heart of humanity and that all nations share a fellowship in Him. God had been revealed in His awful *distinctness* from man, and the idolatry that moulds gods out of human conceptions had been denounced. He had not yet been fully revealed in His *union* with men. The only begotten Son, though He had always declared the Father, had not yet taken man's flesh, had not said in that flesh, "*He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father*," had not poured out His soul and body to death, risen from death, and ascended on high leading captivity captive as Priest and King of the universe. So the Holy Ghost could not yet claim men as His temples, or raise up a Church out of one nation as a witness to all. So the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the one God blessed for ever, could not yet be fully manifested as the ground of a fellowship for all tribes, peoples, and tongues. The other difficulty was this. Has the gift of tongues, and so the gift it signified, not been practically withdrawn from us, despite God's promise that all should inherit it? Yes, brethren, if Christian men love lies, or think lies may help forward their Christianity, the Spirit of Truth must seem to have left the Church. If they love parties and call them essential to Christianity, the Spirit of Unity must seem to have left it. The Spirit who spoke by the Prophets seemed utterly to have deserted the people of Jerusalem when they gave themselves to the falsehoods the Prophets lived and died testifying against. The Spirit who had kept Israelites at one seemed utterly to have forsaken the citizens of Jerusalem when they banded into parties. And it was no mistake; on the day of Pentecost the Apostles declared it awfully true that the lying, sectarian generation, having refused the One who alone could bind it together, would be left to the curse it had chosen. But by act and word they signified at the same time that the Spirit, far from having forsaken mankind, was giving such proofs of His presence as had never been known before. So we must believe it will be with those who have inherited more than Jewish privileges. In so far as we choose lies and link ourselves to parties, *we* shall be left to the spirit of lies and division. But God's oath will not fail, and the text will be established to its very letter. *To us* the Spirit speaks, though we grieve Him with our lies and hatred. He proves His presence by the misery, helplessness, and shame those lies and hatreds produce. We have sown the wind for *our children*, and we often predict that they will reap a whirlwind of superstition or infidelity. But through that whirlwind God will bring out the blessing we have refused. In the overthrow of sects and parties our children may be blessed with the revelation of one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, of whom the Spirit has testified through all ages. And those who *are afar off*, the serfs of our own soil, Jews, Turks, Hindoos, will become part of one fold under the One Shepherd whom the Father loves because He laid down His life for the sheep, that they might be endued, once and for ever, with His living Spirit. ## THE UNITING NAME ::: {.center} Trinity Sunday ::: ::: {.center} [May]{.smallcaps} 30, 1858 ::: > "*Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen*."—[Matthew]{.smallcaps} xxviii. 19, 20. *The passage:* Jesus tells his disciples to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and teaching them to observe everything he has commanded. He promises to be with them always, to the end of the world. "[Why]{.smallcaps}," it has often been asked by able, benevolent and reverent men, "did the Early Church dwell so much on mysteries concerning the Name and Nature of God? Why, above all, did it make these mysteries the bonds of communion between its members? Was it not a strange departure from the natural order of Christian education to begin with problems that only a few of the most initiated ever really master? Was it not uncharitable to make shibboleths for the Church in all nations out of expressions that hardly anyone can pronounce without some inaccuracy or stammering? Would not the Sermon on the Mount and the life of Jesus Christ have been an easier yoke for disciples young or old, and the links of a far more comprehensive fellowship?" Many take the answer almost for granted. They suppose the old Church never thought of charity or comprehension, and aimed only at making its corporation as close and exclusive as possible. Since that ought not to be our aim, and perhaps cannot be, they conclude that the ancient methods are unsuitable for us. The defenders of our creeds mostly accept these premises and dispute only the inference. The early Christians, they say, were zealous above all for Truth, and contended earnestly for the Faith once delivered to the saints. So they could tolerate none of the compromises we justify in the name of concord. Their wisdom was "first pure," and only then "peaceable." If those old men could have used a little of our charity, we need all the more their unflinching determination and logical severity to correct our tenderness and looseness. I ask both parties to consider the passage the Church appoints for its Epistle next Sunday before they conclude they have reached the bottom of this question. It would appear that the compilers of the ancient Services, from which ours derive, naturally associated with today's mystery the lessons "*God is Love, and he that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God*" and "*Whosoever saith that he loveth God and hateth his brother, is a liar*." That is so however much they forgot those lessons when they had power to enforce the doctrine of the Trinity by decrees and excommunications. Even this evidence alone I could not count slight. An act of worship expresses a man's inmost mind far more than his utterances in passion and controversy. When it belongs to a scheme of devotion, it means more. When a whole society adopts it as its united utterance, regularly and repeatedly, that society gives as distinct a pledge of its convictions as we can imagine. So this cannot be a solitary instance. Remember that the New Testament writer to whom all believers in the Trinity look as its unfolder is the writer these passages come from, and they are felt to reveal the character and purpose of his life. Neither in the early nor, I believe, in the middle ages were these two aspects of St. John's writings considered apart. Churchmen might persecute cruelly, but they never doubted that *he* was declaring the name of the God of Infinite Charity when he declared the name into which we are baptized. There is another way to examine the subject. Leaving St. John and what is called his transcendental lore, we may turn to the earlier Evangelists, from whom some modern authorities say the fourth Gospel departs so widely. We may ask what St. Matthew says of the message entrusted to the Apostles. That message is closely tied to belief in the Trinity. If it is a narrow message, the belief may fairly be charged with drawing lines that shut out different forms of thought, and with them many true and earnest spirits, from the fold of Christ. I\. St. Matthew tells us that after his resurrection Jesus stood on a mountain in Galilee and told his disciples to go, make disciples of all nations, baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and remember that he is with them always. I leave out for now the sentence that introduces this command. I only want you to remember that Galilean fishermen were told to make disciples of all nations. In some way they did make disciples among Jews, the worshippers of the I Am, the Jehovah, and among Greeks, the worshippers of human heroes and the forms of nature. I will go no further and say nothing of traditions about their journeys into more distant lands. Only consider what was needed to bring these two portions of the world into a common fellowship. Christians today sometimes undertake to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was a far more perfect and Divine Teacher than Socrates, Confucius or Zoroaster. If they succeed, they think they are making disciples of those who revere these reformers. The Galilean fishermen could not possibly have attempted this. They knew nothing of Greek, Chinese or Persian wisdom and could make no comparisons. Had they been able to, what would it have achieved? The nations believed in certain gods. They credited these with any blessings and civilization they had received, and dreaded the punishments and curses these gods could inflict. What was there in announcing a great, benevolent, supernaturally illustrious teacher to displace those convictions or abate those fears? Add what miraculous powers you please, speaking in many tongues and working marvellous cures: if these only demonstrated the greatness of a Man born and dead in Judæa, how could they supplant faith in Divine beings? How could they bring the fragments of faith into a whole? II\. The Galileans could not give "make disciples" this sense, because it was foreign to their own experience. When Jesus said to them "*Follow me*," he spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven. He taught them its mysteries and told them to proclaim to their countrymen that it was at hand. Gradually they entered into those words. They found he was revealing a strange world within themselves. He explained by the natural processes they knew best what God was doing in their hearts, and showed through ordinary human relations how they stood to him and to his Father. In every discourse, to them or to the crowd, he spoke of this Father. He said he had come so that they might see the Father's Image and know his Will, and be formed in that Image and conformed to that Will. They found he meant them to be his ministers in preaching the Father's Kingdom, in showing its nature, and in proving by healing the sick and casting out devils that it was mightier than all powers of evil and discord. Being Christ's disciples, how could they suppose they would make all nations his disciples by merely setting him forth as a greater, wiser, holier prophet than any before? How could they do anything to bind the nations into one without a Gospel concerning God? They had to declare plainly and simply Who it was that men had been dreaming of and seeking, in the hope of feeling after him and finding him. He had never been far from any of them. Through all their crude conceptions he had been making himself known in their consciences, and all their idolatries had not hidden or banished him. III\. The words he spoke on the Mount, which I passed over, "*All power is given to me in heaven and earth*," were necessary before the disciples could believe that power would descend on them to carry out such a command. Only if he had reconciled earth and heaven, conquered the visible as well as the invisible world, and gathered both up in himself, could they have the credentials or inner might that heralds to the Nations needed. "Go ye *therefore*" followed naturally from that assurance. But it was not enough. Like Moses, who saw the vision in the burning Mount, they were messengers from God to a sense-bound, earth-bound race, to say that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had seen their affliction and heard their cry and would deliver them. And they had as much need as Moses to ask: When we come and say, The God of your fathers has sent us, and they say, What is his name? what shall we say? The answer was given before the question arose: "*Go ye and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost*." IV\. The new and awful Name was proclaimed. But it was not merely proclaimed. The Nations were not just to be told, "This is the Being you must now worship; to this Name the names of the Delphic Apollo and the Jove of the Capitol must bow." They were told to baptize all nations into this name. Do not speak of it as standing aloof or afar off. This mystery is about them, embracing and sustaining them. This is the Being out of whose presence they cannot go; if they ascend into Heaven he is there, and if they make their bed in Hell he is there. In all their speculations they had beheld, projected at a distance, the vision of an awful Father and a tender Brother. The sense of an Inspirer from whom all their thoughts and desires came had mingled with these visions and disturbed them. Each crossed and obscured the other, and each caught the colours of earth until it seemed only a mist drawn up from earth. Neither could subsist without the other. Neither had any worth except as it was found to be no shadow cast by the worshipper, but the substance from which all the shadows he pursues were cast. Let the Name be heard, but do not bring paltry proofs to prop up the proclamation. It will sustain itself. You can trust God to make his creatures know what he desires them to know. All they have expressed in their mythologies, all they have been unable to express, all the wonders of creation and of their own nature, will be his hornbook. Only let your light shine before those you teach. Show that you come to claim them as your Father's children, the brethren of his Son, and heirs of the One Spirit. Hold forth the simple sign he has ordained, that he owns and adopts them as sons and seals them with his Spirit. Believe, and tell them to believe, that he writes on them his own Name and the name of the City of their God, and makes them freemen of the New Jerusalem, fellow-heirs with his saints of past and future. Then see whether the idol-thrones do not fall. See whether the Nations can uphold their separate gods any longer, and whether all the pale names do not shrink before the perfect light God has kindled in the dome of this dark world, not for the wise but for the poor, the ignorant, and those who are out of the way. V\. The more we study this history, my brethren, the more convinced we shall be that preaching this Name and baptizing into it were the mighty powers that overthrew the divided, demon-worship of the old world. This was because it was felt that one inclusive Truth had been revealed to mankind. We cannot comprehend it, but it comprehends us. It is a living Truth that speaks itself out in a Person, not in a proposition. We must be received into it, and then it goes with us through life and death. It meets us at every new stage of our education and interprets itself to us by our own trials and by all the trials through which the world or any part of it must pass. Its circle takes in the sage and the little child. Here is one sign and test of its power. The Church would naturally have restricted Baptism, and we know was disposed to restrict it, to those who could understand the Gospel preached to them: who could intelligently abjure idols, repent consciously of sin, and enter into what the Catechist taught about Christ and the Father. But by a force greater than that of any doctor or all the doctors in Christendom, a force they could not account for but had to yield to, the doctrine established itself everywhere that the infant must also be signed with this Name. I think mankind never won a greater triumph over the prejudices of the appointed heralds of God's Revelation. If our confession and acceptance of that Revelation is made the first condition of entering God's Family, the very idea of a Father is lost, and the Son and the Spirit are always in danger of being regarded merely as objects of our reverence. The Name then becomes the one that distinguishes Christians, or certain Christians, from other people, instead of the Name that underlies and bears up the universe. VI\. To put the most beautiful precepts or the divinest example in place of such a Name is to deprive the precepts of their living force and their relation to humanity. It makes the example something wholly external, which we may admire but can only attempt to imitate abortively. After telling the disciples to make disciples of all Nations and baptize them into his Name, our Lord added, "Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." The highest and apparently most hopeless commands of the Sermon on the Mount become possible, and its most amazing promises come within reach of the wayfarer and the sinner, once he knows three things. The Father, whom he is to be like, has taken him into fellowship. The Son, in whom dwelt perfect obedience, has made him a partaker of his nature. The Spirit is with him to create the purity of spirit to which the Kingdom of Heaven belongs, the hunger and thirst after righteousness that will certainly be satisfied. The more we know our own selfish instincts and where they would lead us, the more desperate and often scornful we feel about maxims of morality. They are very fine, and we can talk of them and repeat them, but following them is another matter. The assurance, "You are grafted on a new stock; those selfish impulses are not the laws of your life; you are in Christ new creatures; the name of the Trinity is upon you," restores to morality its proper sense and vital energy. We feel and confess that when we are not observing all that Christ commanded, it is not because we have walked in the track we were put in, but because we have strayed from his ways like lost sheep. VII\. Yes, brethren, for Christ adds, "Lo! I am with you always, even to the end of the world." What I commanded on the Mount and when I sat with you in the ship is what I command now. I have commanded it since the world began, and will go on commanding it when your work on earth is over and I have called you home. I am with you, as much as ever the Lord and King of your spirits. I am the bond between you and God, and between you and all the men to whom you go preaching and baptizing. You go to claim their homage not for a Prophet, King or Priest who lived once, but for one who was dead and is alive and lives for evermore. You proclaim not a religion of yours or a master of yours, but the Son of Man and the Son of God. You go in the faith that he was manifested to destroy the works of the Devil: all division, strife, hatred and false worship, whatever rends the world apart and makes it unfit for the habitation of the Eternal God. You go among men who each have a Gentile name that unites him to a family on earth and recalls his forefathers. You go to give them a *Christian* name, to remind them that they are brothers of a whole family in Heaven as well as on earth. So you go to lay the foundation of a city that lies four-square, its length as large as its breadth, a city of pure gold like clear glass. VIII\. The foundation of that city has been laid, brethren. Every nation of baptized men has confessed it and brought its glory and honour into it. But the city has set itself up as a rival to the nations instead of being their teacher and making them disciples of the Son of God. It has glorified *his* name, not the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. That is why contention, narrowness and hardness of heart have come into the Church, why this Name has been evil spoken of, and why men have wished to cast it off. What is the very expression of unity, which recognises and harmonises all partial conceptions and is the spring of all free and practical life, has been slandered as a cause of separation. It has been called the contradiction of all that men thought before it was revealed to them, and the driest and most contracted of school theories. But Christ is with us always, to the end of the age. However his ministers have misunderstood his commission and turned it into a curse on those they were sent to bless, he has been present in every generation. He has turned the confusions of the world and the sins of the Church into means of manifesting the glory of the Divine Name. The Church would have kept the nations down, making its own universality an excuse for denying their distinct callings, the blessed work he has given them. He has punished it sorely for this oppression, by worse than outward calamities: by leaving it to the pride, sensuality and worldliness into which it must fall when it usurps powers that are not its own and forgets its true Lord in some visible substitute. Christ has called the nations to vindicate the moral and intellectual freedom without which they cannot worship him. The Church in those nations lost sight of the universality that belongs to it, without which it cannot be a herald to all people. He has punished it by letting sectarianism and divisions creep into every corner, so that the unity of the nations is as shaken as its own deeper and more comprehensive unity. At the same time he has awakened sighs and cries for a larger, more embracing fellowship, which men often try to satisfy by taking refuge in a closer atmosphere than the one they find hard to breathe. Only let them believe that he has not broken his promise and is with them still, and he will show them by degrees that the name put on them at the first gives them a catholicity, a freedom of the universe, that they can find in nothing else. They will find that it throws down no national altar on which we have asked strength, freedom and victory for our land, and that it hallows the family altar where we have worshipped the God of our Fathers. The name of the God of Abraham and Isaac, the name of Jehovah, is not lost in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The perfect and universal revelation explains all the gradual discoveries that led to it, and shows how each connected itself with some permanent part of human society and of man's inner being. At last it will be proved to be what an ecclesiastical system and philosophical liberalism have tried and failed to be: the assertion of a humanity in which all races equally share. The Church that is to be will not be another than the one that grew up under this commission and has stood ever since in different lands, in different degrees of strength and feebleness, sincerity and corruption. She will only have learned, through hard suffering, the foundation she forgot and the work she neglected. She will cast off whatever wood, hay or stubble, even whatever gold or precious stones, have hidden that foundation from us. She will be purged of whatever loveth and maketh a lie, so that she may understand she is the witness of Truth to all nations. In them she may consecrate temples to hallow their civil order and life, and pour her oil on king and priest. But in herself, in that universal city, the New Jerusalem, St. John writes, "I saw no temple, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof." ## THE CIRCUMCISION AND THE UNCIRCUMCISION MERGED IN CHRIST ::: {.center} First Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [June]{.smallcaps} 6, 1858 ::: > "*For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature*." —[Galatians]{.smallcaps} vi. 15. *The passage:* In Christ Jesus neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. [On]{.smallcaps} first reading, this sentence may seem awkwardly built. Why does St. Paul say "in Christ Jesus"? Why not "in the Christian religion," "in the Christian community," or "among us, the true disciples of Jesus Christ"? Would not any of these have given his sense more simply? Commentators have thought so, and have seldom hesitated to put a paraphrase of this kind in place of his words. Let us see what they gain. "In the Christian religion neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything" would mean that it made no difference to Christian doctrine or practice whether converts were circumcised or not. History does not bear this out. Christian doctrine and practice were greatly affected by earlier ideas and habits, and the influence of Jewish and of Gentile notions can be traced in all the opposing heresies of the early age, and perhaps of every age. Or "in the Christian communities they count for nothing." Could Paul tell the Galatians this at the end of a letter whose whole aim was to show that notions about circumcision and uncircumcision had torn an infant Church apart and nearly overthrown its faith? Or "among us, the Apostles, they count for nothing." But they counted for a great deal among the Apostles, and Paul himself says they were meant to, by God's own command: Peter was sent to the Circumcision, he to the Uncircumcision. They presented the Gospel of the Son of God to the differing needs and feelings of Jews and Greeks, and often followed different courses of conduct precisely because it was the same Gospel, meant for men brought up in the most various circumstances and opinions. So if we are to state the fact as broadly as Paul does, we cannot use any of these paraphrases. Nor can we prop them up by adding an *ought*, "they *ought* not to count among us," for we have found an important and far-reaching exception, and it involves a principle, perhaps the very one the Galatians were forgetting. Had they understood why Peter had one work and Paul another, they would not have thought heathens must become Jews in order to become Christians. We must go back to the old words and learn patiently what Paul means by saying that *in Christ Jesus* neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts, but a new creature, rather than thin out and exhaust his thought with our own processing. I\. Paul himself proved that in one sense circumcision counted for much. It was the sign that a nation had been set apart by God to witness to him before the world, and a sign that the fleshly nature leads men to idolatry and slavery. Paul had learned both lessons and was practising them. He went out as a witness of Abraham's God to the nations, turning them from dumb idols to serve the Living God, and affirming that in him, in his flesh, no good thing dwelt. He went as a conqueror for his land, asserting the exclusive authority of its King more than Joshua or David ever had. And he vindicated the history of his own nation by showing how it helped explain the history of all nations. Each had a calling from God, and each had in its laws and institutions a testimony for a righteous, living and true God, and against divided, evil and visible gods. In this sense both circumcision and uncircumcision had meaning and worth. It was no accident but a divine ordinance that one man was born in Athens, another in Rome, another in Jerusalem, one with memories of Marathon, another beneath the Capitol, another in sight of Mount Zion. Those who believe in one Lord over the whole earth must believe that he fixed the times and the bounds of men's habitation, and that by all his government of every other people he was fulfilling the purpose for which he separated the sons of Jacob. II\. At this time many facts might lead Gentiles to covet admission to the circumcised nation, and Jews to wish to escape it and take on Roman or Greek feelings and traditions. I leave aside the mere restlessness that makes thoughtless people long for change and imagine unknown evils lighter than their present ones. I speak of the Gentiles most earnest in thought and feeling, who had struggled hardest to grasp the truths hidden beneath their country's superstitions and to separate wheat from chaff. Consider the attraction of a zealous Pharisee's account of the simplicity of Jewish worship, of a whole nation's homage over ages to One of whom they dared form no likeness, of the forms and traditions that kept this worship from being confused with their neighbours', and of the Sacred Books handed down with such care. Think what that was to a Persian devotee of light, to a Greek whom the philosophers had taught to distrust his country's fables without giving him a substitute, to a Roman raised to feel he must have an object of adoration, whose sincerity was offended every hour by the tricks and lies of augurs and priests. Can you wonder that many were made proselytes? And yet One who knew, and could not speak falsely, said: "Woe unto you, for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of Hell than yourselves." The convert often discovered painfully that he had not gained what he expected: there was no charm in the worship, the traditions, or even the Sacred Books to keep him from evil or raise him from death to life. He might be an idolater in the temple of Jehovah, and the Being he worshipped might become a more concentrated form of evil and falsehood than those he had left. On the other side, a Jew who noticed this, or the moral degradation of his countrymen, or the self-seeking of their religious leaders, or the utter contrast between the world around him and what he read in the Holy Writings, might easily doubt whether his national restraints were curses rather than blessings. They kept him from fellowship with other men and made him uncharitable toward them, without raising him above their level. Such a man would be struck by the cultivation of the Greek cities, and by the fields of speculation Greeks had crossed if not conquered, which a Jew seemed forbidden to enter. The triumphs of the Romans, a people so much younger than his own, would dazzle him, and might seem God's own declaration that another city was to have the honours and the eternity he had attributed in childhood to the city of David. Many a Jew, probably, was led by such thoughts gradually to forget, or suddenly to throw off, the habits and faith of his home and to join the customs and idolatries of others. We can then imagine his bitterness against those he had left, his zeal for a time for what he had adopted, and yet his secret pain and alienation, his efforts to make himself easy, his discontent with a world that had looked so promising from a distance, and his growing consciousness that he could not be a heathen though he had ceased to be a Jew. What did all these experiences point to? To the same truth that the whole history of Jews and Gentiles had been pointing to, and that the decay and hopelessness of both at this crisis pointed to. They were ordained, as the history and the helplessness were ordained, to show that unless there were some spring of life near them, lost sight of or not yet discovered, all institutions, disciplines, traditions, philosophies, schemes of government, and protests against idolatry would be unable to raise men or stop them sinking lower. What Paul went about preaching was that such a spring did lie near both Jews and Gentiles, that it had been revealed, that its fountain was in God himself, that every man's heart was made to receive it and be nourished by it, and that nothing else could renew individuals or society. In Jesus Christ the Son of God, he proclaimed, there is life for Jew and Gentile. He is the ground of human fellowship and of each man's righteousness, wisdom and power. He has come to claim us as members of his body, as children of God in him, and to infuse a quickening, uniting Spirit into the lifeless carcase of Judaism and the scattered fragments of Heathenism. What you do not have in circumcision you have in him whom it was meant to teach you of; what you do not have in uncircumcision, in all your Gentile habits and traditions, you have in him to whom they too bear witness. He is the living root of humanity, the source of all its energies, apart from whom it is a name and not a reality, a fiction for a number of loose atoms. In him the different lines of human history meet, for from him they began, and in him the discipline of each man and nation finds its purpose and interpretation. In him circumcision counts for nothing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. III\. I have already indicated what I take these last words to mean, and I will not go far into the questions they raise. It has been asked whether Paul means by κτίσις a new individual creature, as our translators seem to think, or a new creation: whether he speaks of Christ's coming as affecting a given Jew or Gentile, or the whole mass of humanity, or even the whole universe of God. If the word has one of these meanings, I believe it has the other; I do not think we can separate them. He who can be and is the renewer of one man can be and is the only renewer of the race and the only regenerator of society. What Nathanael, the strict Jew, wanted as he prayed under his fig-tree was to find the Son of God and King of Israel; he was the one needed to satisfy the deepest cravings and sorrows of his heart. What Cornelius, the Roman centurion, needed as he fasted and prayed at the ninth hour was the revelation of the same Son of God and King of Men, to restore what was decayed and dead in himself and in the mighty Empire he belonged to. No forms or institutions can renew a man; he must find the ground they stand on. No forms or institutions can renew a society; it must feel its way to the living ground from which their worth and strength come. Men and societies are always sighing for something new and going hither and thither for it. They are also always crying for what is old, and will put up with abuses and corruptions to keep it. Each instinct is true. They want to be made new by digging down to the deepest and oldest root. From there comes the renovation and purification they could not find on the surface, and the everlasting stability that walls and battlements cannot give. Paul wrote to men who had confessed Christ the Son of God to be the Living Vine of which they were branches. By entering the Church and being baptized into the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, they had understood that they confessed themselves members of his body. They had proclaimed this confession true for themselves and for all men, Jews as well as Gentiles, since they invited all to make it. "Therefore," he says, "you ought to know, your profession obliges you to know, that you are a new creation in Christ Jesus, belonging to a body he has regenerated, and are yourselves regenerated. This is your glory, and you can have no other. To say that circumcision has any power, or uncircumcision any power, denies the privilege of your baptism. It is the same as saying, We do not think Christ has come to make us sons of God in him; we think this is yet to be done by some other power than his; or we think there is a better or higher state than he has raised us to, to which some outward institution or form may raise us." So you see that while Paul set at naught the pretensions of the Judaizers, who told baptized Gentiles they must be circumcised, he did not deny the Jew's privilege or advantage, or wish him to scorn the schoolmaster who had brought him to Christ, or encourage him to throw aside any part of the discipline belonging to his personal life and his nation's history. And while he set at naught the Gentile's pretension to blend the notions and habits of his earlier life with belief in the great Reconciler, the one Lord and King of Men, he did not deny that the Gentile's education had a worth of its own, that God had used it, and that his servants were to use it and recognize his hand in it. Peter had a right to go to the Circumcision and act in all respects as a rigorous Jew. Paul had a right to become as without law to the Gentile. The reason for both is that in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but a new creature. IV\. It might seem, my brethren, that since this Epistle turns on the relations between the two bodies in the infant Church, it should be interpreted solely by its circumstances. So far as I could, I have done so. I have looked at the condition of Jews and Gentiles when the letter was written, and tried to find the force of the Apostle's words from it, without wilfully straying to connect them with later times. But I could not confine them to the Apostolic age however I tried. The more I spoke of what seemed peculiar and temporary, the more I had to bring in what is universal and permanent. The head of a religion, the chief of a society, the founder of a set of institutions may be great for one generation or many and then sink into nothing, because whatever depends on human faith is exposed to that faith's accidents and fluctuations. But if Jesus Christ was the root and ground of human society in the days of Claudius and Nero, he is so now. Nothing in the circumstances of the enfeebled, exhausted, faith-deserted age to which he was first proclaimed gives it any advantage over ours. I have a right, then, to apply the Apostle's doctrine to ourselves. The difficulty is not finding cases within its range but avoiding being overwhelmed by them. I will mention one, by no means the most interesting or important, because the text itself suggests it and because it occupies Englishmen at this moment. For many years our countrymen have been considering their political relation to the countrymen of St. Paul, who without being a nation have kept through the ages the tokens of nationality, and living among other peoples are as distinct from them as when they had a city and temple of their own. We have asked whether it is our duty to exclude them from some civil privileges, at least from any share in government. Many persons, wise and excellent, say this exclusion is the very sign and badge of our Christianity, and that if it ceases we shall treat the Jews' rejection of Jesus in the first age, and their descendants' ever since, as a light error that our enlightenment can overlook. Secondly, they say that by effacing the distinction between us and the Jew, and making nothing of our New Covenant, we lose the special blessing we inherited from the Old, and lead the Jew to think our God does not care for nations and punish them as the God of his fathers did. We may keep our individual faith, they say, but England will be as atheistic as France was. Such, these critics add indignantly, is the result of statesmen's worship of expediency and Churchmen's indifference. If these were the consequences of removing Jewish disabilities, which now seems close at hand, no denunciation of the measure could be too loud and no warning too terrible. We need a much stronger feeling than we have about the sin Paul charges on the Jews of his day, the sin into which he himself had fallen. We need to appreciate more deeply its withering effects on the race, because we too are liable to it. We need a much stronger sense of our national functions and responsibilities, and of God as the Lord God of England no less than of Israel, for the tendency of our religious teaching has been to individualize all our thoughts and so put us out of sympathy with the language and principles of the Old Scriptures. But the Jew, past and present, has denied that Jesus is the Christ just because he would not allow that One had come who broke down the distinction between Circumcision and Uncircumcision and made of the twain one new Man. May we not then bear a stronger testimony against that denial, and for the truth it contradicts, by showing that we can abolish distinctions that under the old economy could not have been abolished? Is this not a lesson to the Jew about the new creation in Jesus Christ? Is it not a lesson to ourselves? And may not the impossibility of keeping up a very feeble assertion, that the right to legislate depends on a Christian's faith, be a step toward the fuller manifestation of the truth that Christ's dominion over us and all men does not rest on our opinion of it? He is King even if half a dozen members of either House of Parliament, or all the members of both, disown his authority. As to the other question, I fear that treating the exclusion of Jews as *the* distinguishing mark of our Christian nationality may have made us forget that we are called to give evidence of an entirely different kind that we are a Christian nation, in our own land and in every part of the earth we govern. The tremendous responsibility rests on us of showing that we truly confess the rule of a Righteous King and Saviour, who has taken away what separated the families of the earth and made them one in himself. By every righteous act at home or abroad we signify that we are his subjects, and by every unrighteous act we proclaim ourselves rebels. Just so far as we make the peoples of the earth, whether they bear the Christian name, cling to the old Covenant, or are idolaters, understand that there is a universal fellowship for them in Jesus Christ, we undermine their superstitions, their unbelief, their worship of divided gods, and fulfil the function of a Christian nation. If we forget that we are members of such a nation, sharing its blessings, with its sins and punishments ours, I cannot believe we shall fulfil our personal duties, worship God in our families, or reverence him in our hearts. I dread that Atheism as much as those earnest people who fear the admission of Jews to Parliament will produce it. Their prophecies make me tremble, for I feel in myself the tendencies that might help fulfil them. Those tendencies must be in our statesmen too, for they represent us, and our weaknesses and corruptions must affect their thoughts and acts. They often, I am sure, sacrifice to opinion and chance what should be laid on God's altar. But I cannot help thinking that some acts we censure as policy are really the abandonment of a long-cherished policy to irresistible indications of God's will. They work hard to preserve some maxim or law we tell them is indispensable to the Church's stability, as the shipmen of Tarshish rowed hard against wind and tide rather than cast out Jonah, when it was as necessary for his work as for their safety that he be cast out. No doubt, when *we* refuse to regard changes of opinion or action as submissions to the Divine Will expressed in events, and proclaim them mere submissions to expediency, our rulers and people are likely to feel them as such. They cannot be expected to be more devout than those whose business is to trace the Divine hand everywhere. The removal of restrictions will destroy our faith if our faith has consisted in restrictions. So it is a solemn duty to proclaim, now and always, that our national faith is positive, not negative. It may be right to prevent English constituencies from choosing Jews as representatives, or right to concede the privilege; the best men may differ on that. But woe to England if her belief in the Son of God, the Prince of all the kings of the earth, turns on the decision! Woe to each of us if we are not labouring to teach our countrymen the lesson we first learnt through our own experience! Woe to us if we are not testifying day by day that in Christ Jesus excluding unbelievers from civil privileges counts for nothing, and admitting them counts for nothing, and that we *ourselves* are to be new creatures in him, putting off the old, false, corrupt nature and putting on that which is made after God in righteousness and true holiness! If we speak truth each with his neighbour, we shall know that we are members one of another, and that he who is the Truth is our Living and Eternal Head. ## DAYLIGHT IN THE HEART THE PREPARATION FOR THE DAY OF CHRIST ::: {.center} Second Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [June]{.smallcaps} 13, 1858 ::: > "*That ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ*."—[Philippians]{.smallcaps} i. 10. *The passage:* Paul prays that the Philippians may be sincere and without offence until the day of Christ. [These]{.smallcaps} words express the deepest wishes Paul could utter before God for his converts at Philippi, and equally his deepest longings for himself. He could not separate what was good for them from what was good for him. We might think that the veteran of Christ, with so many battles behind him and so many scars, had a right to blessings the raw recruit could not ask. He did not think so. He rejoices in fellowship with them in the Gospel, in their sorrows, conflicts and supports, and he supposes no greater reward than that they and he should enter fully into it. He knows the same enemies are working to rob them of this reward and keep them apart. If they, many of whom had only just renounced their idols and been baptized, did not keep this goal in sight, they were forgetting their calling and not believing in God their Father. And if he, who had received so many revelations and endured so many sufferings, thought there was a higher end, or that he was more secure of this one, less exposed to the principalities and powers with which they and he were wrestling, he would have fallen from Christ while glorifying himself as Christ's Apostle. What was the great gift he sought for them and for himself? It was that they might know, by loving them, the things already given to them. It was that they might have judgment, the power to distinguish the true from the counterfeit, what is from what is not. He did not ask that they be lifted to some rare excellence to be admired or to congratulate themselves on, but that they be "*sincere and without offence*." These are the saintly qualities he coveted for them, and for us. Let us consider what they are. I\. The word we render "*sincere*" is expressive and beautiful. It is made from a noun meaning a ray of the sun and the verb "to judge." Joining a sensible image to a mental act, it means a clearness within all the movements of thought and judgment, like the clearness the sun gives to external things. Language of this kind never grows stale. Anyone in any age or country who notices the plain effects of light, or can see into its hidden influences, has a store of wisdom to apply to the still more wonderful processes in his own heart and in other people's. The Old Scriptures had made St. Paul familiar with these universal lessons, and he knew how our Lord had claimed them in His parables. He knew that when Christ called Himself "*the Light of the World*," He declared Himself as much in contact with human hearts and understandings as the sun is with bodily senses, and as mighty to unfold true human life as the sun is to awaken life in plants and animals. The best thing Paul could say to his disciples was this: "Believe that this Light is with you. Cultivate the habit of recognizing it. All God's discipline is to remind you of its presence." I do not want you to forget the word "*sincere*," or think the translators could have found a better. I would rather you consider whether this clearness is the fullest and most reasonable explanation of sincerity, and whether Paul shows how it is possible for you and me to be sincere. Are you surprised I say *possible*? No Saint, Martyr or Apostle would have been scandalized by the word. They were tempted every day to deal fraudulently with their fellow-men, their consciences and God. Each new event or perplexity showed them some trick the deceitful heart was playing on itself, some web the spirit of lies was weaving. The falsehoods took different shapes for each, according to his time, society, temperament, the particular good God would have him show, and the particular work God had given him. Their only safety was to be awake to the danger. They could not become sincere by talking of sincerity, or by violent efforts to become the models they described. While they lived in themselves and thought about themselves, insincerity was almost inevitable. But they looked out of themselves; they confessed the light that was near; they asked that it would shine into them; they came to it so that their deeds might be shown to be wrought in God. So they gained that clearness of spirit and guilelessness which even bad men hail when they see it, which speaks in unconscious acts and smiles through the open countenance, which must come from God and is His own image. Is it not well to remind ourselves that this sincerity is possible for us? Do we not often think it impossible? How many little, dark, shameful cheats we detect in ourselves: plotting vanity; false modesty that seeks applause by seeming to shun it; doubling to avoid frankly confessing wrong to others and ourselves; unwillingness to look at acts and states of mind as they are and call them by their right names; compromises with conscience; a readiness to bargain with God to escape punishment and gain happiness. We find this insincerity in *ourselves*, which is the true way to put it. We readily admit that the age tempts us to insincerity, and rightly. It is a time when religious profession is easy, reputable and advantageous; when feelings and exertions for every subject are labelled in books so that a man knows which to take up on every occasion; when sentences come with fearful facility; when criticism of others' thoughts and acts has become a profession, and men who circulate Bibles treat "*Judge not, that ye be not judged*" and "*Take first the beam out of thine own eye*" as obsolete commands from an authority owed no reverence; when monstrous outrages against morality, said to be done in religion's name, are met with outrages as gross; when the religious care more for the praise and blame of newspapers than for God's. Such a time is most perilous to sincerity. But it is perilous because it tempts us to forget that there is another light than any from society or ourselves, that we are meant to walk by it, and that only in it can we walk honestly. So the bane and the antidote lie, as always in God's world, close together. The evils of each past age formed the good men who lived in it: through them they learned what to flee from in themselves, and where to flee. As God showed them more of their sinfulness, He showed them more of His redemption. Our age can be such a minister of blessing to us if we use it. If, instead of denouncing the political, commercial or religious world, or succumbing to one of them, we remember that whatever bad we see in them has its counterpart in us, we shall be driven to seek help in Him who desires truth in our inward parts and will make us know wisdom secretly. II\. The next expression, "*without offence*," is scarcely less significant. The two are different, but the same idea is hidden in both. Paul desired for the Philippians a perpetual sunlight in their hearts, and at once the thought comes that in such a light they would not stumble. He knew how many causes of stumbling there were in that day. John, more than a prophet and the messenger who went before our Lord, stumbled for a while at his strange imprisonment. Could Jesus be He that should come? Must they not look for another, who would not leave his faithful servant to Herod? In his own prison hours Paul must have had thoughts that let him understand and pity the Baptist's doubts. He knew from experience how the persecutions awaiting the less instructed Philippians might shake their faith. They had Christ's words as a perpetual warning and encouragement: "*Fear not them that kill the body… but fear him*" who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell. Fear the spirit of lies and hatred, who seeks to draw you from truth, love and God and rob you of your soul's life, and who will succeed unless you trust the Father without whom "*not a sparrow falls to the ground*," who numbers the hairs of your head and will not let what is so much more precious to Him perish if you commit it to Him. These words proved charms and talismans to many a witness for God in dark, terrible hours. They said then, and have said ever since: "The physical torment that can be inflicted here, or that is threatened hereafter if you forswear the truth your conscience owns, cannot be so terrible as a lie. A lie comes straight from the devil; to yield to it is to yield to him, and to become at home in it is to fall into the second death, the true Gehenna. So hold fast to the God of Truth and Love. Anyone who would tempt you from Him is an incarnation of Satan, though he comes like an angel of light. Fear him more than all outward enemies, and cry to your Father in Heaven not to let him tempt you above what you can bear." The Christians of Paul's day had this blessed amulet from their Lord. Yet it would have been useless if their teacher on earth, and another Divine Teacher nearer to them than he, had not continually reminded them how likely they were to stumble even at slight, unexpected troubles. Paul also knew that if this class of offences were removed, others just as dangerous would remain. He was too wise to idolize adversity or teach that it is free from the sorest temptations, yet he knew better than anyone how sweet its uses are in God's hand, and how bitter its opposite, though good in itself, can prove to a man or a Church. He did not suppose that when Christ's name was no longer spoken against but exalted in high places, when the profession of the Cross was desirable and its offence ceased, there would be no more lonely captives sending the sad message, "*Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another*?" Is this world, so full of misery, pride and cruelty, what Thou hast redeemed with Thy precious blood? Is this Church, which curses, blasphemes and murders for Thy sake, what Thou hast espoused as a chaste virgin and made all glorious within? Paul may not have been enabled, as his fellow-Apostle was, to look into the future and see the toils and apparent triumphs of the Beast and the false Prophet. But he knew the past of his own chosen people too well not to expect that Christendom might need its Sennacheribs and Nebuchadnezzars, its wars, famines and pestilences, to save it from the effects of its own prosperity, and that while prosperity lasted it might hide the most profound infidelity under the fairest profession. So he did not ask outward sunshine for his converts, as if walking in it would keep them from stumbling. He asked a track of Divine light for their steps through whatever regions, gay or wintry, they must pass. The spiritual illumination he sought would show them that Jesus the Crucified is He that has come, is with us now, and is not to be replaced by another. It would show them that though all are false, He is the Truth; that if His followers plot and deceive, it is not because they believe in His Cross, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension but because they have lost faith in them, putting themselves and their fancies in place of these realities. It would show them that these truths grow fuller and brighter as the inventions fade away, and that the light in which they have believed without seeing, and tried to walk, is brightening into a perfect Day. III\. This is the third part of Paul's prayer, and it arises naturally from the others: that they may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ. I spoke to you not long ago of the duty and blessing of hoping for that day. I tried to show that we cannot be still when the earth is shaking unless we expect a full revelation of a perfect Order, a divine Kingdom. We cannot really know the Lord is God unless we believe that the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person, will be manifested and all darkness scattered by His appearing. I have pointed out the confusions that accompany this belief in some who profess it, so that you could receive it and live on it without the distraction that comes from mixing our crude fancies with what is above them. The day of Christ, as the Apostles set it forth, is not a day when a few look for their triumph and their enemies' defeat. It is the day when the Son of Man is revealed as King of the Universe and His victory for mankind is proved real, not imaginary. It does not proclaim One who has been for ages a stranger to the world He visited for a few years. It asserts that He who sacrificed Himself is, and always has been, the prince of all the kings of the earth, the source of all their power, the One who alone has kept it from destroying them and those they govern, and to whom they must give account. The day of Christ is not a new sun rising in the sky; it is the full noonday splendour of the light that has been lighting every man who comes into the world. These considerations matter especially for our text, where the thought of light runs through the whole passage. To be sincere is to be in the light; the secret of not stumbling is to walk in it. The Philippians are treated as children of the Day, to live as if it were already as revealed as it can be. They are to refer their daily acts and the thoughts that rise in their hearts to Christ, and desire that He show which have come from Him and can bear His daylight, and which belong to the night. So they would be kept from stumbling themselves and from causing others to stumble. For members of one body cannot let darkness dwell in themselves without spreading it, and cannot fall without causing falls. This is the meaning of "Woe to the world because of offences." It is another reason to separate the light in us from the darkness trying to comprehend it, and a new motive for keeping ourselves in remembrance and hope of that day which shall bring out whatever is sincerely good and destroy whatever corruption has mixed with it. Brethren, if we walk in the light of sparks we have kindled ourselves, or which the public opinion of the age has kindled, we must stumble and make others stumble; we must tolerate evils in our own hearts that we ought to hate, and be intolerant of those God cares for. It does not matter what professions we make or what reputation we earn; we shall commit acts hateful in God's sight and bring scandal on His Name. But if we look to the day of Christ, we shall be every hour more impatient of whatever in us defiles and perverts His truth, and more patient of the confusions in our fellow-men. We shall be less angry that they do not disperse at our bidding. We shall fear to increase them with our feeble instruments, instead of using that penetrating Word which is "*sharper than any two-edged sword… discerning the thoughts and intents of the heart*." We shall know that Christ must sever the tares from the wheat, and that we cannot. May God grant us all the Spirit of Truth, Love and Patience, to prepare us for that day, to make us rejoice in how righteous its judgment will be, and to make us content to leave ourselves and all men in the hands of Him who will then be manifested to quick and dead. May those who teach remember that for every idle word spoken in God's name they must give account in that day. May those who hear remember that the feeblest words which told them of His love and His desire to renew them in His image were *His* words, and will be proved true as much by their neglect as by their belief. And may we remember that the highest office of all is not to speak words, even Divine ones, in men's ears, but to present Christ's finished Sacrifice to His Father, to offer ourselves as holy and acceptable sacrifices in Him, and to ask that He who alone can see will see if there is any wicked way in us, and that He who alone can guide will guide us in the way everlasting. How can we better gather up all our petitions, for ourselves, for those dear to us, for the whole Church, than in the Apostle's prayer, "*that we may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ*"? ## THE MINISTRY OF SOVEREIGNS ::: {.center} Third Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} (THE QUEEN'S ACCESSION) ::: ::: {.center} [June]{.smallcaps} 20, 1858 ::: > "*He is the minister of God to thee for good*."—[Romans]{.smallcaps} xiii. 4. *The passage:* The ruler is God's minister to you, for your good. [We]{.smallcaps} the clergy call ourselves Ministers. You grant us this title even when you refuse others we claim. It sounds humble, as if we gave up any right to be masters. Yet it has often produced, and still sometimes produces, the opposite effect in clergy and laity alike. Any exclusive claim, even to the meanest office, can puff up the one who makes it. Others find the claim more monstrous the greater its contrast with the thing claimed. I suppose the arrogance seems greater, not less, when we fill in the missing words and say with St. Paul, "We are ministers *of God*." Yet it is dangerous to leave open whether we mean this or something quite different. Every holder of our office must in some sense be a minister. He must serve his own tastes, notions and imaginary interests, or those of the people among whom he works. Or he must boldly say, "I am the minister of God; my commission is from Him." That risks exalting him in his own eyes, winning superstitious reverence, or exposing him to ridicule when he fails to live up to it. But even when we say it and believe it, we have gained little. The name is awful, but it is familiar. To most people it suggests a round of duties expected of a certain set of persons. A few, taught by history, may take offence. They may hint that the *Servus Servorum* set his foot on the neck of kings, and that others in the same livery set theirs on the necks of peoples. But for one with such fears there will be nine who think the phrase an innocent fiction. Hardly an hour of the day passes without tempting each of us to think so too. What escape is there from these opposite dangers, which keep succeeding each other, of ecclesiastical pretension and ecclesiastical impotence? I know only this. We should hold firmly to the name that something higher than law or custom first gave us, and which they have ratified. And we should affirm just as firmly in everyone's hearing that the name is a sign to them as well as to us. We are called Ministers of God so that they may be reminded what they are, and it is as great a sin in them as in us to take any position below this. If we do this honestly, we need not fear that we shall pass for more than we are worth on the strength of a name, or that the name will be undone by the boasting that goes with it, or that it will count as one of those safe and harmless lies the world allows itself. The word will again carry, as every word should, both healing power and a sting. I\. In the chapter my text comes from, St. Paul speaks of civil rulers as ministers of God. He does not soften his language to suit his time. He does not say emperors and kings *ought* to be ministers of God, or that it would be well if they would consent. He says plainly, "They *are* ministers of God." It is not in their pleasure *not* to be. They must be, however much they dislike the necessity or fiercely rebel against it. Nero's *will* might be devilish, but every *power* he wielded was Divine. No energy of body or mind that he abused came from an evil source, and none was his own. He had been appointed to rule the world he tormented by the One who loved that world. He was the steward of God's treasures even while he spent them making miserable the people they were meant to bless. How would such a doctrine affect the Christians of the Roman Church? Would it make them look with more slavish fear and reverence on those who wore the trappings of power? Would it make them feel less horror at those who turned power to the destruction of their fellow-men? When they remembered where power came from, and what that Power was which called heaven and earth into being and renews them every morning, they could not confuse vital power with the outward accidents of it that our vulgar nature admires and envies. They must hate every cruel and wanton use of power when they thought, "The royalty of kings and emperors is only the reflection of the royalty He showed in its fulness, who healed the sick, cast out devils, and went about doing good." No doubt regarding Nero as a minister of God made them patient under his government, so far as it touched themselves, and afraid to engage in mad schemes to overthrow it. But this faith gave strength to their cries that the earth might be delivered from all her oppressors. It assured them those cries would not be in vain. It made them welcome their own sufferings as steps toward the Redemption. Those who try the hard task of finding excuses for tyranny in Scripture sometimes ask triumphantly: if Nero's power was ordained by God according to St. Paul, what subjects can claim that the powers over them have some lower origin? I answer, "Certainly none." And subjects would be unwise to wish their case an exception to the Apostle's rule; they should insist on being brought within it. For what does it mean? That every power is a trust. That every power by its nature implies responsibility. That this responsibility is not to some imaginary judge who will not call the wrongdoer to account, but to a real Judge standing at the door, whom the greatest criminal cannot escape. Read the history of the Roman Empire in the light of St. Paul's sentence. Every sting of conscience that visited Nero the night he knew himself his mother's murderer was a message: "You are God's minister, and you have used His sword against your own flesh and blood." The assassin by whom he finally fell was saying: "You are God's minister, and so am I, guilty like you, but ordained to summon you to His Judgment-seat, to declare what you have done with the millions He committed to you." Surely, brethren, if people and rulers believed this, it would be something more than the notion that they may be brought before a bar we call "public opinion." No one can say what or where that bar is, whether its sentences are righteous, or who enforces them either way. We should feel that rulers are, in the truest sense, responsible to their subjects, because in a world governed by a righteous God everyone is responsible for his neighbour and to his neighbour. Such responsibility does not interfere with free, manly action: the courage that defies abuse for the sake of right, the will that commands, the strong hand that punishes disobedience. It does not, because there is always reference to One who knows all things and is not warped by partiality. What does interfere, as much with the government of rulers as with the freedom of subjects, with all the life of society and the manliness of individuals, is the sense of a vague, uncontrolled tyranny lodged in a man, a mob, a soldiery or a press. It follows no rule but its own caprice, claims the right to do as it likes, and declares itself the minister of nothing, though it becomes by turns the minister of everything most grovelling and base. I do not for an instant deny the reality of that mysterious Opinion before which rulers and people are said to crouch, or its awfulness. It is awful to think that you and I help create this power, and that what kind of power it is depends in some measure, none can tell how great, on each of us. It receives some of the qualities of a spirit of grace or of perdition from the words we speak and the acts we do. But let those who confess this power, undeterred by its intangible, immaterial nature, ask themselves two things. Does it take any more credulity to acknowledge a living, personal Ruler over their doings and thoughts? And if they acknowledged Him habitually, might they not help change Opinion from a misshapen idol, its eyes downward and fixed on itself, into a form expressing all holy memories and glorious aspirations? Such a change can never come from a faith that speaks of God as having a reserved, ultimate dominion, entitled to a peppercorn rent in token of it. It will come whenever we say in full force that He is our King and that we are all His ministers. II\. But St. Paul says further, "He is a minister of God to *thee*." A strange assertion! The Emperor might be a minister of God to the Roman world, however little he fulfilled his ministry. But how could he be a minister of God to some individual member of the Roman Church, who counted it the best privilege of his obscurity that the Emperor would never hear of him or inquire after him, and that he might live and die beyond the reach of his favours or his malice? In this way: the Emperor's existence testified to the poor Christian that he belonged to the great Roman world and was concerned, whether citizen or slave, in its welfare and its misery. That was a great step in his moral and spiritual education. When he was taken into the Christian Church and claimed to be a member of Christ and a child of God, he took on affinities and obligations to Jew and Greek, barbarian and Scythian, bond and free. But he could easily forget them. He might fancy, and everything encouraged the fancy, that the Church was an isolated body and that those outside it belonged to a different race. The fact of a common civil ruler, brought before him as St. Paul brought it, deepened and widened the doctrine of his baptism and cleared away the confusions mixed with it. Nor was this benefit destroyed, or scarcely weakened, by the ruler's character. If he was an oppressor, there was more need to fall back on the Source of his authority. In secret prayer to the One whose will is only for good, that His will be done on earth as in Heaven, one learns more than from all books about a government that is no less individual for being universal. It does not overlook the solitary penitent because it is occupied with the destinies of the Church in all nations, and it does not stop directing the planets because it attends to the young ravens when they cry. Is not the bitterest tyrant a minister of God to the man whom he enables to make these discoveries? I take an extreme instance because St. Paul was writing with such instances in view, and I wish to show that his language bears the test. But I am far more anxious to assert his position for those rulers who confess their calling and try to fulfil it. How cold and hard it is to speak of them as ministering only to the body politic! So far as they contribute to its health and growth, make us feel it a living whole, show us that material prosperity is not what makes or keeps a nation, and teach us that we belong to the same race as those who spoke our tongue and fought our battles in other days, so far they must be ministers of God to each of us personally. Are they not quickening our hearts and hopes, strengthening our sense of immortality, helping burn out some of our frivolity and selfishness, and enabling us to enter more truly the Kingdom of God? Since man is made in God's image, all true human rule must be like the Divine rule in this: it is most minute when it is most comprehensive, and calls for the most personal loyalty when it is most generally even and just. III\. The Apostle's last words are implied in the ones I have just touched on, yet must not be passed over: "He is a minister of God to thee for *good*." St. Paul writes this to men who might soon be lighting the city as torches to cover the guilt of the man who set it on fire. Was Nero not a minister of God for good to them, if he was the instrument of that torture? May we not say the same of every successful imitator of his, of Charles IX in France, of Philip II in the Netherlands? Were they not ministers of God for good to those whom they sent beyond the reach of their crimes, to cry beneath the altar for the day when the earth should no more conceal her blood or cover her slain? The Apostle could venture this daring sentiment. He knew that God would somehow prove it true, for that generation and all generations. And it will be known some day how many men the most hypocritical and accursed governments have served for good. They led them from trifling to earnestness, turned reckless plotters into self-denying patriots, and changed their atheism or devil-worship into a grounded faith in the God of Truth. I fear many such will rise up in judgment against those in happier circumstances, to whom the name of Freedom has become so ordinary that they jest at it as a schoolboy phrase, ask how much richer it has made them, or wish they could trade it for some of the conveniences of despotism. This nerveless, heartless, purposeless temper tends, as it grows, to the fulfilment of its own aspirations. Liberty cannot last when the desire for it has perished. Despotism is sure to come when it is beckoned for. When it does come, brethren, one sad discovery will be forced on us. We may love tyranny, but we shall never love the tyrant. Loyalty, in England at least, will not be separated from reverence for Law. Affection for the person of a Sovereign, when strongest and most cordial, is inseparably intertwined with the belief that the Sovereign has obligations and confesses them. Affection for a person is quite another thing from affection for an institution, and twenty-one years ago we were in great danger of substituting the latter for the former. It has been one of the great blessings of a female reign that the chivalry which had by then suffered greatly from political theories has to some degree revived. Our thoughts about government have become more human and less mechanical, and we regard affections and attachments not as mere ornaments on the outside of the social edifice but as necessary to its compactness and stability. But this latent chivalry, a real and blessed counteraction to the evil tendencies I spoke of, could never have come forth for any Mary Stuart, however brilliant and attractive, who thought that household laws and national laws were not made for her. The opinion that Sovereigns, male or female, have some right, divine or human, *against* the nation they represent, or apart from it, is one England has shed her best blood to extinguish, and no sophistry can revive it among us. But the direct opposite of this opinion, that the Sovereign is the minister of God to each of us for good, we should strive with all our might to realize and hold fast. If we ask how the Apostle could proclaim that principle in the heart of the Roman capital in its darkest age, I find no explanation but this. He believed Jesus Christ to be the Son of God and the King of men, so he could not help believing that all human society was organized according to the law Christ spoke, and embodied in His Incarnation and Death: "*The Chief of all is the Servant of all*." He could not doubt that the head of the Roman legions and the ruler of the provinces was therefore a minister of God, and a minister for good, since that is the one end God seeks for His creatures if Christ's revelation is true. He could not doubt that the Emperor, if he believed this, would be a blessing to the world, and that he was a curse because he thought the world was to minister to him and not he to it. He could not doubt that every Christian ought to maintain the truth Nero set at naught, and that if he did, it would prove itself in his case: Nero *would* be a minister of God for good to *him*. And if we ask how the faith has worked its way into the heart of modern Europe that there is a constitution for nations, which kings, parliaments and charters assume and ratify but did not create, the answer, I think, is the same. When the Incarnation is denied and a Mediator between God and man is utterly rejected, you must have an absolute Caliph or Sultan, or a government carried on by mere officials. You cannot have the confession of a relationship between Sovereign and subjects, or a principle of relationship, interdependence and mutual obligation running through all ranks and orders. These are involved in the faith in a Son of God and a Son of Man, and are as strong or weak as that faith. Whatever has suffocated that faith undermines constitutional liberty, whether ecclesiastical pretension, revolt against that pretension, the worship of money, or the worship of a Tyrant instead of a Father. To bring that faith out in its fulness before nations that nominally confess it is to help them break their political fetters. We cannot dig so deep for the foundations of our own free institutions without helping bring all Englishmen within their circle and blessing. We cannot dig so deep for the foundations of European liberty without seeing that the most various forms of society may express a common truth lying beneath them. If priests, instead of setting at naught the civil order of nations, will show that a universal Church, with Christ at its centre, underlies those nations, quickens them, and preserves their distinctions and their unity, the laity will readily own them as ministers of God. And if, in our Queen's reign, some cheering glimpse of the freedom with which Christ has made us free can be given to our own people, to our dependencies, and to the different tribes of the earth, how will ages to come exclaim, "Verily, she has been a minister of God to us for good"! ## WHY CHRIST COULD NOT MAKE HIS AUTHORITY KNOWN TO THE PHARISEES ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [June]{.smallcaps} 27, 1858 ::: > "*And when He was come into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came unto Him as He was teaching, and said, By what authority doest Thou these things? and who gave Thee this authority? And Jesus answered and said unto them, I also will ask you one thing, which if ye tell Me, I in like wise will tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven, or of men? And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; He will say unto us, Why did ye not then believe him? But if we shall say, Of men; we fear the people; for all hold John as a prophet. And they answered Jesus, and said, We cannot tell. And He said unto them, Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things*."—[Matthew]{.smallcaps} xxi. 23-27. *The passage:* When Jesus came into the temple and was teaching, the chief priests and elders asked Him by what authority He did these things and who gave Him that authority. He answered that He would ask them one thing, and if they told Him, He would tell them by what authority He acted: was John's baptism from heaven or from men? They reasoned among themselves. If they said "from heaven," He would ask why they had not believed John. If they said "of men," they feared the people, who all held John to be a prophet. So they answered, "We cannot tell," and He said He would not tell them by what authority He did these things. [One]{.smallcaps} could be sure that the chief priests and elders would "reason with themselves" just as the Evangelist says. The simple question, "What is the fact, or what do we believe it to be?", was not the one that would occur to them. Part of their religion was to avoid impolitic words or acts that might have mischievous consequences. They will have learnt to think straightforwardness and truthfulness not only inconvenient but, in a certain sense, wrong. Their first duty, as they saw it, was to keep up the credit of the Law and of those who interpreted and administered it. Endangering the people's faith in themselves was their highest notion of sin, for who could tell what might follow if their disciples saw them commit a false step? I know of no more fearful sign of decay in a nation's heart than this. It appears when teachers not only dare not speak the truth but make a principle of not speaking it, and have persuaded themselves that evasion is a merit and that there is a better way of serving the God of Truth than by being true. Then we may be sure that society has become radically corrupt and that some great change is at hand. I\. The Gospel's account of the priests' and scribes' motives bears the plainest mark of genuineness, and it gives us a glimpse of the secret life of that time without which the events would be unintelligible. Even so, we may believe that they were really uncertain whether John's mission was from Heaven or from men. They deceived themselves in two ways. They searched for language that would hide their thoughts, and yet often expressed very nearly what they meant. I say *very nearly*, because John's words to their own class, "O generation of vipers, who hath bidden you to flee from the wrath to come?", must sometimes have come back to them. Then a conviction they could not gainsay would follow: "He who spoke *that* had his commission from Heaven, not from men." An inward voice will have told them so, and had they heeded it they could have given our Lord a direct answer. But it was part of their disease that they did not heed it and did not think they ought to. They had rules for deciding whether a man who claimed to bring a message from God was an authorized messenger. They expected him to show signs of his mission, which they, as students of the Prophets, could recognize at once. Whatever faith they had was faith in their own power to apply these tests, and in the impossibility of the unlearned multitude applying them. They doubtless differed among themselves over whether the right signs were present in John's case, and the same man's mind may often have changed. At one moment the Rabbi would be struck by some correspondence he had not noticed. A light coming from he knew not where would seem to illuminate the page and show that the teacher with the leathern girdle might have been sent to him. Then he would be ashamed of a conclusion for which so little tangible evidence could be offered, and afraid to think that in his own day, before his own eyes, there had been a witness of the Divine presence. Such shifts of feeling might seem to justify even men of a less evasive temper in saying, "We cannot tell." They might even congratulate themselves on their diffidence. They had not merely been skilful in avoiding a possible future mischief; they had been cautious and modest in not deciding a point on which rash, foolish men were ready to pronounce at once. II\. "*The multitude counted John for a prophet*." But was the multitude not liable to be deceived, and continually the prey of impostors? We would certainly say so of every age and country, and the New Testament writers say so of that age and country in particular. They speak of Judas and Theudas as examples of a class of men who kept rising up, each claiming to be a teacher, an inspired man, a Messiah or Christ. They tempted the people into rebellion and madness, and sometimes suffered with their victims, as deceived as any of them, and sometimes deserted them. The Jewish mob regarded such men as prophets. If they were mistaken in one case, why not in another? What did they know of the marks of a holy man? What skill had they in penetrating the dark passages of the Divine mind and finding differences or correspondences? They were always at the mercy of some sudden, false, violent impression, so what did their testimony signify? And what wise man would judge a teacher's claims by counting heads and seeing whether he had a majority? It was easy to argue this way, and not easy to find the flaw in the argument. Yet every learned doctor, once he had proved his point to his own satisfaction, will have been haunted by a thought like this: "It is very strange that people from cities, from the country, from the seaside, women, publicans, soldiers, brought up in utterly different circumstances, should have been moved at once by the same impulse. It is strange that a man who held out no definite hope of freedom from the Roman yoke or from the oppression of the rich, who threatened judgment, spoke harshly, denounced sin and counselled repentance, should draw more people into the wilderness than the preachers of sedition. It is strange, above all, that we could not resist the current but were carried along, going ourselves to hear the new teacher, and some of us even submitting to that humiliating ceremony meant only for Gentile proselytes." Such reflections will have come to them again and again with a disturbing force that no rules could explain or reduce. The result was greater vagueness about what they should believe, and a deeper assurance that there was something they ought to believe. III\. What way out was there of this contradiction? What could help them tell the multitude's true instinct from its habit of being led away by lies? John had said to *them*, "Bring forth fruits meet for repentance; and think not to say unto yourselves, 'We have Abraham to our father:' for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham." Might they not have needed *these* words? Were *they* deceptive? Did the Pharisees not know, actually know, that they were not deceptive, but brought long-cherished deceptions of their own into the light? What if John were an impostor? Then the more they purged their minds of impostures, the surer they would be to detect him, and there could be no danger in that course. Someone had found them out, and they knew it. Someone acquainted with the secrets of their hearts had revealed them. They *were* saying within themselves, "We have Abraham to our father," while they had no likeness to Abraham. They were wrapping themselves in comfortable security while feeling inwardly hollow. They exulted in professing faith in an unseen God without believing in that unseen God. John said: "Repent! Turn round to Him Whom you say you believe in. Act as if you did believe in Him, as if He knew you and cared for you and wished you to be true, honest men. If you have greater knowledge than the vulgar, use it. If you have studied the Law and the Prophets more than others, remember that every sentence in them is a declaration of God to man, and a call to men not to hide their counsels deep from God. Remember that all the Law and Prophets are addressed not to Gentiles but to Jews, to men in the Covenant, speaking to them of their sins and unbelief and calling them to turn to Him from Whom they are turning away." My brethren, the Pharisees had no call whatever to settle John's claim before they received this message as meant for themselves. If these things were true, it did not matter to them whether the speaker was a liar. Nor did it matter how far the multitude's judgment of him was to be trusted. If the multitude listened because he laid bare their sins and deceptions, they could not be wrong. If they listened because he showed them the source of their sins and the way out, they were doing a safe thing, whether or not they could prove by chapter and verse that he had a right to be heard. The chapter and verse told them, so far as they entered into it, the same thing he was telling them, and his instructions, so far as they were obeyed, made chapter and verse shine as never before. What more did they want? What better evidence could they have had that the Book they were taught to revere sanctioned him? IV\. So the Pharisees and the multitude had a common starting-point. Both had this test of John's truth, and both might use it or reject it. If they rejected it, we may be sure they could not profit by any other. An angel from Heaven saying, "This is a true prophet," would have availed nothing, for the angel would have had to prove his own commission, and to their hearts rather than their eyes. If their hearts clung to the falsehood or pride that made them impervious to light, his proofs would be wasted. But suppose this first step was taken. Suppose a Pharisee honestly confessed, "I have been deceiving myself. I have substituted belief in a belief for belief in God. I have claimed to be a child of Abraham instead of claiming a child's privilege, which is to know God and trust Him." Suppose he wanted a truer, healthier state of mind and heard the call to repentance as meant for himself and not for others. He might then, I think, find that the Prophets had given him hints by which to identify the Baptist as one of themselves. If, in this new state of feeling, he turned to the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, I do not think the mere outward match of "a voice crying in the wilderness" would chiefly occupy him. It would only lead him to ask whether the cry that voice uttered was really John's. And when he read, "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low," I cannot help thinking he would recognize the very substance of the doctrine that had gone home to his heart, with the more certainty and satisfaction because its form was so different. He would say: "The stern man with the leathern girdle told us, the religious men, to do the very thing he told the publicans and harlots to do. He did not treat us as better than they; he seemed to consider us worse; he made me know I was worse. Surely this was exalting the valleys and laying the hills low. I never felt the truth or beauty of Isaiah's discourse till now. The natural image was striking and seemed a worthy preparation for some Divine appearance, yet I used to feel a kind of exaggeration in it. I did not see how the reality could match the symbol. Now I know in myself what it is to be cast down from a height where I looked on everyone beneath me as crawling ants, and to feel myself one of those ants, no better than the meanest. And I know what it is, feeling so, to discover that each of these creatures, I among them, has in it a capacity for a divine elevation and glory I never dreamed of. Surely the Prophet's comparison is not overstrained but feeble and cold! What change in nature can be an image of this change in the lord of nature, Man; of the levelling that goes on in him, and of the exaltation he feels is possible for him!" Then the other part of the passage will also have taken on new meaning: "The Glory of the Lord shall be revealed." John had spoken of One Whose fan was in His hand, Who would purge His floor, gather His wheat into His garner and burn up the chaff, and Who would baptize with the Holy Ghost and fire. This was a different idea of the glory of the Lord from any the Scribe had held before. But how it harmonized with the previous sentence, as his inward discoveries now interpreted it! It was just such a revelation he needed: of One Who could purify him and purify Society from its root, burn up the dross in him and in it, and give both a new life. One Who could do that must be the King his countrymen and he were looking for. He must be that Righteous Lord of Whose day or manifestation the Prophets were continually speaking, always connecting it with the sins and redemption of the nation and the world. V\. Here were signs of correspondence between the mind of the Prophets and the mind of John the Baptist that were worth all the signs the Pharisee had looked for so diligently. One can imagine that some of the signs he had thought decisive now looked far less so, and that he sometimes missed them altogether. He may have found less distinct chronological order in the Prophets than he had supposed, more mingling of times and seasons, and more difficulty in telling whether any of them spoke of what would happen in his own age or of events reserved for later generations. But I suspect that the awakened inquirer, instead of being discouraged, will have gained the greatest help from this. He will have found that what he needed and was to seek was an Eternal Kingdom, a Kingdom of God. Its manifestation might differ from one age to another and come more mightily into view at one time, but it *is* the same yesterday, today and for ever, and is really about all. When it shines out in its greatest brightness and fulness, it can be entered and truly seen only by those whose eyes have been purged, who have been stripped of pride and self-sufficiency and made to feel that their right and share in it is the same as that of every vagabond and outcast. Everyone is a stranger to it who will not be humbled, and no one is who will. VI\. My brethren, this is what makes the words of my text and the whole history of John the Baptist so instructive for us, for the lesson is eternally true. Our Lord did not arbitrarily refuse to tell the Pharisees His authority unless they said whether they believed in John's mission. He refused to tell them what they could not understand except on a previous condition. Were they still the proud, contemptuous, self-exalting men John had denounced? Then they could not know what Christ's authority was or enter into its meaning, however divinely accurate the definition. Had they listened to John, felt that they needed cleansing as much as any Gentile and that God must cleanse them, and received the call to repentance as the best, most comforting, most divine of messages, for them as much as for the publican? Then they were in a condition to be taught about that mysterious government over heart and will which Christ carries on, and could feel something of the freedom, universality and penetrating quality of His royal grace. Every prophet came proclaiming that valleys were to be exalted and mountains and hills made low, because every prophet witnessed to a divine, eternal, invisible kingdom that claims all as its subjects and refuses its blessings to none who do not choose to be without them. The greatest of the Prophets spoke most fully of the abasement of the proud and the exaltation of the beggar because he could speak most fully of a King Who had come into the world to be mocked, spat on and cast out as a blasphemer, and yet to baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. VII\. That last of the old race of prophets was to open a dispensation in which the least was to be greater than he. Strange that it should be so! We, the ministers of the New Covenant, cowards as we are, mostly reeds shaken by the wind or men in soft garments who like kings' houses better than the wilderness, rebuking no Herod and offending no Herodias, we are declared greater than the brave, true preacher of righteousness who prepared Christ's way. And it must be so. Those who speak of One exalted to give repentance and remission of sins must be greater than he who only preached the baptism of repentance for remission of sins. Those who can say, "The King has come, and has died and risen and ascended, and is with us always," must be greater than the man who said, "One is coming after me Who was before me." Those who can say, "He is baptizing with the Spirit," must be greater than the man who said, "He shall baptize with the Spirit." Greater, that is, in power and in weight of responsibility, however much poorer and feebler in purpose and action. Shall the time not come when God will make us understand our calling and willing to fulfil it, or else silence us and raise up faithful witnesses in our place? Is the time not at hand, or even come, when He Himself will exalt the valleys and level the mountains? Every kind of pride, lay and ecclesiastical, commercial and religious, will be trampled down, the rags that covered it torn off and its nakedness exposed. Everyone who in weakness, ignorance and blindness has turned to God and trusted in Him will have His likeness and be satisfied with it. Yes, brethren, the cry "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand" will yet be heard through the palaces and hovels of our land. And God will make the lofty as well as the lowly understand whether that voice is from Heaven or of men. It will come not with evidences drawn up to suit the taste of the world's dogmatists, but with a demonstration to the consciences of wayfarers, convincing them by crushing them. It will bid us cease from man, whose breath is in his nostrils, and expect the glory of the Lord to be revealed, which all flesh shall see however it may shrink from the sight, and in which all spirits that have waited for it shall find their own glory, life and joy. ## THE EUCHARIST CONSIDERED AS A DECLARATION OF CHRIST'S DEATH TO MANKIND ::: {.center} Fifth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [July]{.smallcaps} 4, 1858 ::: > "*For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till He come*."——1 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} xi. 26. *The passage:* Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you show the Lord's death until he comes. [I have]{.smallcaps} spoken to you often about the Eucharist, and I must speak of it again. I wish we could connect it with everything said from the pulpit on Sundays and with all our weekday acts. Then I believe the disputes about it, which each year and month renews in every corner of the Church, would distress us more than ever, yet make us despair less. We would find the root of them in ourselves. We would understand why they have been so serious and so frivolous, and why no clever men, arrangements, or decrees can settle them. We would learn how, and by Whom, they must and will be ended. I have taken these words from the chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians that is the classic one on this subject. I do not say they tell us all we want to know about the Lord's Supper. They show it in one aspect. Let us consider it carefully in that aspect, and other sides will come out as we need them. If we try to take in the whole doctrine of the Sacrament at once, or refer it to some notion in our minds, we must shrink it into a topic of controversy and lose its practical blessing. But suppose we follow the Apostle's hints one by one, compare them with our own wants and experience, and see how they interpret the wants and experience of mankind as history shows them. Then our reverence for its profound and infinite meaning will grow as we wonder more at its divine simplicity. I\. This simplicity is perhaps what we most envy in St. Paul's discourse. "As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup," he says. He says nothing about the way of receiving, the thing received, or the organ that receives. Such questions may be latent and may press on us in due time, but our teacher does not call us to them now. He says only: here is bread, the common food of men; here is wine, which speaks to all of life and exhilaration. So far we are on plain ground, and "as often" keeps us there. He is addressing a Society that meets at certain times to share that bread and cup. He assumes that the food and drink are nothing rare, and that rich and poor, all who want food and life, meet at it. The Corinthians had misunderstood this. They followed the old custom of feasts, each bringing his own contribution, and made it an occasion for bodily indulgence. St. Paul denounces them in this chapter for both perversions: their gluttony and drunkenness, and their shaming of the poor. They made it *common* in the sense of animal as opposed to spiritual. In the other sense of common, they scorned it, making it separate and exclusive. These two apparently opposite temptations are really allies, and in every century they reappear in new forms, never far apart. The Corinthians were esteeming the sign instead of the thing signified, and making the sign narrow and partial. II\. "As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do *shew*." I cannot tell why our translators preferred this verb to "proclaim" or "announce." But would we have expected either word? We are speaking of a Communion, a participation. Can an ordinance of that character be described as showing, announcing, declaring? As I said before, it is safer to let the Apostle explain himself than to insist that he follow a course we have prescribed. I believe he will tell us more about Communion and Participation than we would ever find out for ourselves, but I doubt we shall profit if we stumble at this phrase and wish to be rid of it. Do you think any ordinance of Christ can concern only the advantage or enjoyment of those who submit to it? Did He come from heaven to enjoy or to suffer, to be ministered to or to minister? If eating and drinking here means any communion or sympathy with Him, can this point be missing? Did He not come to declare a truth to men which only some would enter into? If in all our acts and services we do not make this a primary object, and put some selfish end above it, can we be like Him? Let us hold this firmly. If this feast shows nothing to the world, and we seek in it only some benefit for ourselves, it cannot be a communion in the body or mind of Jesus Christ. I am anxious to press this on you, my brethren. I believe forgetting it has been a principal cause of the confusions of both Romanists and Protestants about this Feast. The Romanist has dwelt on the Eucharist as a Mystery. A dreadful secrecy belongs to it: the priest must hide from the vulgar the solemn incantations that give it grandeur and power, and the cup must not touch lay lips. Yet he has felt that somehow it must be a message to the world, so the Host is lifted on high and becomes an object of reverence and worship to the most sensual. The Protestant rightly says that what was meant for the spirit is thus degraded into an object for the eye, and that the Second Commandment is being trifled with. As Moses declared, no people can trifle with it except at the cost of its manliness and freedom. But in his jealousy for the rights of the spirit, he denies that the Sacrament shows or declares anything to mankind. He is impatient when it is called a Mystery, yet he confines its whole force to the faithful few. So he is caught in endless controversies over whether the Sacrament actually bestows anything, or whether the receiver makes it what it is by the belief he brings. III\. But what is it that is shown? St. Paul says, *The Lord's* death. Had he not said so, many would have called the phrase hard and cold. "The Saviour," they would say, "the divine Bridegroom, the ineffable Sacrifice offered to us in this feast. How can you speak of 'the Lord' like some Old Testament writer?" I imagine this Hebrew of the Hebrews used the Hebrew phrase because he did not think it obsolete for anyone, and knew it was not obsolete for him. He wanted sympathy and fellowship, and also to be guided and governed. The Incarnation had not lessened but deepened his reverence for the unseen Guide of his heart. Believing in a brother of Man, he did not remember less, or rejoice less, that He is the Lord of men. There were times when he delighted to say *our* Lord. On other occasions *the* Lord better expressed the universality of His dominion, and this was one. He is speaking of bread and wine as testifying, not to himself or his brethren, but to all men, of One whose kingdom was in the midst of them, and who had proved Himself King and Shepherd by dying for them. IV\. For it is the Lord's *death* that we show forth whenever we eat this bread and drink this wine. Churchgoers commonly think the preacher exists to remind them of their mortality. From the scientific lecturer or the artist you hear of the wealth of life and beauty in the universe. During the week you are in the middle of civil stir and business, and everything speaks of continuous action. The Sunday schoolmaster, you suppose, is to counteract all your other teachers, and talk of the wearing out of physical powers and the transitoriness and emptiness of ordinary duties. It may be a monotonous chant, a drowsy requiem, but you look elsewhere for sounds that quicken and inspirit. At most, if we sound any such notes, they must foretell some enjoyment after death. We may sing of treasures in heaven; treasures on earth we may only proclaim as the prey of the thief and the moth. There are reasons why we cannot accept this assignment of our parts, fair as it may seem. First, we are in the midst of this world and its countless powers, physical and moral, just as you are. They act on us at every moment. If we pretend they do not, we choose the time when we speak as ambassadors of the God of Truth to utter a falsehood. And if they act on us and we know it, how can we exhort others to forget them? How can we think we serve the God who created the world by persuading anyone to shut his eyes to its sights and doings? Second, we cannot be merely preachers about the decay and extinction of life, because we cannot find in the Bible that God gave His ministers any such commission. The Old Testament seers did not complain of their countrymen's earnest interest in passing events, but of their dullness and stupidity, their failure to recognize a living God moving in the affairs of living men and a living world. Is it otherwise in the New Testament? Do we find there no interest in the actual economy of the world, social and natural, only a passionate eagerness to convince men that its operations would soon be suspended and the shadows of death would envelop all? Can you read a single parable of our Lord and think this? Is He not awakening His hearers to notice the common life of things and men, that He may lead them to a deeper life below it? Are sowers, husbandmen, shepherds, kings, fathers, and marriages indifferent to Him, or mentioned only to remind us how soon they will vanish? Are they not spoken of as signs of the Kingdom of God, which is with us now and will be fully revealed hereafter? Are not the treasures that thief and moth destroy selfish treasures, possessions we lay up for ourselves? Does our Lord not point us to the common blessings of earth and sky, open to beggar and prince, as pledges of deeper, nearer blessings hidden for all in God's eternal love? Third, we cannot always be telling men to think of their own deaths, because we are sent to witness to another death, one that does not tear men from each other but unites them, a death for all men, for the whole world. Corinth was full of activity, speculation, and corruption. Men died there as they die here. They had poets, orators, and sophists of every kind to tell them death was terrible, and they asked the questions we ask about the state it ends and the state it begins. St. Paul did not go to tell them what they knew as well as he did. He went to tell them what they wanted to know. He spoke of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. He did not say, "None of you Corinthians can expect to exceed threescore years and ten." He said, "The Son of God, Who liveth for ever and ever, has taken upon Him your flesh, and suffered your death, and has risen from death, because it was not possible that He should be holden of it." He believed God had entrusted him with this message and wanted all the Corinthians, Jews or Greeks, and all men everywhere, to hear it. So he rejoiced that it had not been entrusted only, or chiefly, to mortal lips. He gave thanks that when Christ took bread and blessed it, He was consecrating a perpetual testimony of this truth to all nations. Wherever men met to keep the feast in remembrance of Him, a voice went out that could not be limited to the two or three who knew His name and received His tokens. When anyone asked them, or their sons later, "Wherefore do ye this?", the answer would be: "Because the Son of God, Whom we confess as Head and Lord of all men, has died the death you and we die, the death that severs us from each other and seems to sever us from God. He *has* died this death. He *has* come out of it. He claimed God as His Father, and God, by raising Him again, has owned Him as His Son." Suppose the inquirer went on to object that such a service could be of no great worth, even that it was false, because sorrow, misery, disease, and death remain in spite of it. Those who eat this feast are as subject to them as anyone, and are often called to greater sufferings and more violent deaths. The answer would be something like this: "If men did not die, if all men did not, there would be no reality or meaning in Christ's death. He died because He would have no privilege apart from us whom He calls His brethren. God forbid that we should wish for one! God forbid that we should ask to be taken out of the condition of men when He refused to be! God forbid that, since He bore the worst and most shameful death of all, we should count any death a hardship rather than a gift! We are not witnesses for ourselves but for Mankind, and for Him, the Lord and Brother of men. What we fear is setting ourselves up, wishing to be separate from our fellow-creatures, which makes us separate from Him. Being shut up in himself was the guilt of the traitor when Satan, the spirit of selfishness, entered him, when he abjured his Master and made light of the pledges of His love and forgiveness. That is death indeed, that is damnation, and that is what we ask Him to deliver us from when we come to eat this common bread and drink this common cup. We are sure that He is faithful, that the witnesses of His death are true witnesses, that He has died for you and for all, and that His love is stronger to bind men and the universe together than all the powers of earth and hell are to tear them apart." It is a mighty testimony, lasting through all these generations, against those who would teach men to fear death and not to rise above the fear, trusting in its Conqueror. It is a mighty testimony against us too, when we present Christ's Death in a different form from St. Paul's. We do so when we speak of it as an arrangement to avert the consequences of man's sin, not as a deliverance out of sin; not as the act by which God reconciles the world to Himself; not as the perfectly gracious sacrifice He has made, in which He wishes us to share so that we may present our bodies to Him as willing and acceptable sacrifices. Thanks be to God, He has set up a preacher that does not twist or invert His Truth, but declares His character, His work, and His purpose to the whole creation. V\. I say this in full recollection that this feast has become a greater occasion of disagreement and hostility than any other institution, human or divine, and a greater excuse for idolatry. If it were not such a witness for unity, it would have provoked no strife. If it were not such a witness that God is a spirit, no one would have tried to make it a minister of carnality. If it did not rise so far above theories and speculations, and were not such a gospel to wayfarers and sufferers, theorists would not have spent their strength bringing it under their petty rules and definitions. All the dark elements in man's heart have worked to keep sinful men from coming as little children to eat the bread and drink the cup: whatever is most grovelling, whatever is proudest, the priest's fearful ambition, the doctor's subtlety, the devotee's sin-sick imagination. Yet by coming so, we show forth, as no words can, a Death out of which flows the freest, fullest, divinest life. But the Feast has gone on, for it has been God's and not man's. It has had a power over Christendom that we cannot measure but shall know one day. It contains a promise that may sustain us when its influence seems weakest, when the Church seems most torn by the factions against which it silently and awfully protests. It is written that as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we show the Lord's Death *till He come*. The Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of the Son of God fulfilled all that men under the Old Dispensation could long for. The manifestation of Christ in the glory of His Father and the holy Angels is the highest thing we can long for in this Dispensation. It includes every craving for righteous government and a perfect Society, for the adoption of our spirits, the perfecting of our souls' faculties, and the full redemption of our bodies. It includes the fulfilment of every relationship and loving intercourse, so imperfectly realized here but raised and sanctified by a diviner Communion. It includes the accomplishment of all earthly discipline and sorrow, and fellowship with those whose faces we miss, whose love must be far warmer than ever because it is in more immediate contact with perfect Love. It includes seeing the order and beauty of God's creatures when the veil of death over them is taken away. It includes an ever deepening sense of the meaning and force of that Death which revealed the whole mind of God and was the perfect Atonement for Man. Of this manifestation of Jesus Christ the Lord's Supper is the perpetual prophecy and assurance. It remembers the past, an act done once and never to be repeated. It witnesses to what is now, the presence of Him who said, "Lo! I am with you alway." It testifies of an eternal Kingdom, of the Father, Son, and Spirit, which is about us now and which we may enter. But it would not recall the past acts of the Son of Man for His brethren, nor make known His care for them now, if it did not also carry the promise and pledge that nothing begun shall be left incomplete, that the curse He bore shall be wholly taken away, and that Death and Hell shall be cast into the lake of fire. Let those who will idolize the elements, and identify the signs of the Sacrament with what they signify. By all their contrivances they cannot give it a glory like the one it has when we take in St. Paul's sentence in its full length and breadth: "As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till He come." ## THE EUCHARIST CONSIDERED AS A PARTICIPATION IN THE UNSELFISH LIFE OF CHRIST ::: {.center} Sixth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [July]{.smallcaps} 11, 1858 ::: > "*Then said Jesus unto His disciples, If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and then He shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in His kingdom*."—[Matthew]{.smallcaps} xvi. 24-28. *The passage:* Jesus told his disciples that anyone who wants to follow him must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow. Whoever tries to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for Jesus' sake will find it. What good is it to gain the whole world and lose one's own soul, or what could a man give in exchange for it? The Son of Man will come in his Father's glory with his angels and reward everyone according to his works. Some standing there would not die before they saw the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. [Last]{.smallcaps} Sunday I tried to show that we reach a true idea of the purpose and effects of the Lord's Supper if we begin by seeing that it shows or declares the Lord's death until he comes. I foresaw a very practical objection, one many would feel without being able to state it. "Do we not come to Christ's Table for the sake of our own souls? Does it not say, *Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you*? Does not the minister, as he gives the elements, speak to each man of *his* body and soul, and of Christ having died for *him*? Even if it is a duty to declare Christ to men, does this language not point to a different duty, to our own personal salvation? Does it not suggest that Christ's death, though in some sense for all, is in its highest and only important sense for the person who can appropriate it, who can say, 'I have signs within me which most people lack that I belong to Christ'?" There is so much in the thoughts behind these questions that I think profoundly Christian and true, and so much that I think anti-Christian and false, that I dare not try to separate them by any skill of my own. But they have been separated by the divinest skill. Our Lord has himself undertaken his proper office of dividing the wheat from the chaff in them. Some of the words I read set out as strongly as words can the preciousness of the soul and the worthlessness of the whole world beside it. Every preacher who wants to press that point turns to them. But he must not, to strengthen an argument or find a handy motto, divide sentences that Christ has joined and that illuminate each other. He must be especially wary if he is tempted to do so out of a notion that he might weaken his own exhortations by letting another part of his Master's exhortation be heard. The least suspicion of such a motive should make him tremble for his honesty and lead him to meditate on the whole discourse. None of us can boast that he will not yield to this temptation, since our translators, excellent men as they were, certainly yielded to it here. They knew that the word they rendered "life" in the 25th verse is the same word they rendered "soul" in the 26th. They were afraid to say that if a man loses his soul he shall save it, which sounded dangerous. They were afraid to weaken the tremendous question "What is a man profited if he gain the whole world?" by turning "soul" into "life." So they took a course that, considering whose words these were, must be called not cowardly compromise but desperate hardihood. They destroyed the coherence of the passage and made Him who spoke as never man spoke play with words as the juggling rhetoricians of the earth do. It is a solemn warning of a peril we all share: thinking ourselves wiser than God and better able to guard his truth than he is. I\. The first verse contains the subject of the whole passage. Peter had confessed, "*Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God*," and that confession drew a divine blessing and promise on him and on the Church. From then on Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer many things from the elders, priests and scribes, be killed, and be raised on the third day. Those who knew he was the Son of the living God were also to know by what acts he would establish his Sonship. But Peter, to whom the one truth had been revealed by the Father and not by flesh and blood, was trusting flesh and blood about the other. He rebuked Jesus: this shall not happen to you. Jesus answered, "Get thee behind me, Satan; thou art an offence to me, for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men." No soft language was possible. He who was to open the kingdom of heaven could not do so without understanding that the King must endure the sharpness of death. The second speech annulled the first, and a glorious witness became an adversary. It is a notable foreshadowing of equally sudden changes in later ages of the Church, from the same causes. Later ministers, like Peter, would be puffed up by a divine testimony to words they had spoken under divine conviction. They would trust their intellects to conclude what *must be* from what had been shown them of what *is*. So they too would rebuke Christ for his own words, and receive a withering rebuke in their consciences. But our Lord did more than announce that his own sacrifice was necessary to his character as a son. He had come to be the first-born of many brethren, adopted into his family and bearing its tokens. So he told the disciples, "*If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me*." The force of *deny himself* can be learnt only from him. In every word and act he had said, "I can do nothing of my own self. The Son doeth what he seeth the Father do. The words that I speak are not of myself." From the day of his temptation, when he refused to prove himself the Son of God by working to feed himself, to display his power, or to take possession of his kingdom, until his death, he practised this self-denial and so revealed the Father. The Cross gathered up all that earlier sacrifice. It was the complete surrender of himself to his Father's will, and it expressed the meaning of his life. Having proved this to be the true life of man, the law of human life, he called men to enter into it with him. No one could follow him on other terms, and anyone might follow and claim his place as a son of God on these terms. Self-denial is not an occasional act. It is the ground of man's existence because it is the ground of his, and the Cross is to be taken up daily, not as a meritorious service but as submission to a law that it would be monstrous to violate. II\. Taking this as the starting-point, we are ready for the next verse: "*Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it*." I admit there is a difficulty in the word ψυχή that even the most accomplished philosophers might not remove, and the study of the New Testament might not fully remove it either. Even if the translators had mastered the Greek speculations, they might still doubt whether it means the life animals share with men, or the intellectual life as opposed to the animal, or the consciousness of personal identity which, being simple and indivisible, cannot (the sages say) dissolve as composite things do. They might also recall that the word is not a favourite in the Gospels or Epistles, and that St. Paul uses the cognate adjective somewhat disparagingly, as opposed to spiritual. Had they kept consistently to "life" or to "soul," I could not fault them. But they could not read the previous verse, or the parallel in St. Luke, without seeing that whatever the technical sense of ψυχή elsewhere, our Lord uses it as equivalent to *Self*. Whatever Self includes, it denotes here. Call it Life if you like, but then it must be the entire life of the man as an individual, whatever distinguishes him from his fellows. *This* is what those who would save it will lose, and what those who are content to lose it will find. Some think the words "*for my sake*" qualify the sentence: give up your life for Christ and he will save your soul. We are sometimes told the early martyrs acted on this calculation, abandoning what would last only a few years to gain a future, permanent treasure. Some of their letters and exhortations may suggest such a thought, and they may have used language at the scaffold or stake to which we can put this interpretation. But take their acts as the commentary on their words, count their devotions as the most authoritative part of their words, and allow for the false colouring a cold spectator who has caught none of their inspiration may add. Then I think it is evident enough that they gave their bodies to be burnt or crucified because they had first given their whole selves to Christ. If they were not ready, like the Master, to pour out their souls as well as their bodies, they confessed this as a weakness and sin, a lack of full participation in his sacrifice. Until that reluctance was removed there would still be a shrinking from the Cross, and perhaps this more than anything explains the recantations and compromises of those who failed in the last hour. I am also less willing than some to think that the eagerness of men in the Middle Ages to become soldiers of the Cross came chiefly from the notion that present risk of death for Christ could avert future punishment for their crimes. I admit that motive intruded, and priests and popes turned it to shameful account, supposing sinful men capable of no other. I beg those who today would call on the same selfish instincts to rouse men to acts they deem religious to consider whether they are abetting the very immorality that, with the best evidence, they say the priestly artifices of those days promoted. But the brave and true deeds mixed with that immorality cannot have had the same origin as the evil that defiled them. They came, I think, from a sense in men's hearts that a common Saviour and Lord, to whom they might give body and soul, in whose purity they might hide their dark selves, and who had gone into death and the grave for saints and sinners, would not refuse anyone who wanted a share in his Cross and Sepulchre. Such a belief, amid whatever confusions and sensual forms, lay deep in the hearts of many whom we pity and scorn from our serene heights. Would to God it might take possession of us! Would to God we might learn, by any discipline, the right, the privilege and the necessity of losing ourselves, not a part but the whole, for Christ's sake, so that his human sympathies might drive out our self-seeking and the Divine nature of the second Adam destroy in us the sordid nature of the first! III\. Then we shall feel with quite another force the two awful questions of the next verse: "*What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? And what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?*" Few of us have, or think we have, so high an ambition as this text speaks of. We do not want the whole world, only some little portion of it. We have set our minds on a special end such as money or reputation, or a general one we call success or happiness, and we expect to find ourselves in finding it. The soul that thirsts for these things expects to take its ease and be merry when it has them. But they are hard to get, and much must be given up before the prize is won. What must be given up? Our Lord says it is the very thing we are trying to save or find: the soul. For the sake of money, reputation, success or happiness, the man must part with himself. Does he mean that the soul will be lost hereafter, perish in another world? Oh, brethren, does he not mean something more fearful still, something that makes that fear real and definite, which otherwise would be vague and easily put away? Does he not tell us the soul is lost *here*, and recall to us what we continually see? Look at the pleasure-hunter, the gold-hunter, the fame-hunter. It is all the same. The thing sought is won, or nearly won, but where is the winner? The price was paid beforehand. The debtor's own person was the security. The life that was to be enjoyed when all was acquired has gone in the acquiring. So the first question answers itself: what is the man profited if he gains the world and loses himself? Nothing depends on the quantity of good realized. No addition to the gold, pleasure or fame makes any difference. The man has devoted and sacrificed himself, so what is the world to him? Look at the jaded, hopeless faces in any authentic picture of a great day of self-seeking enjoyment, and the worn, anxious faces in any picture of those who have spent their lives in self-seeking business, and read there the true sermon on our Lord's words. I do not mean the day after the pleasure, or the failures that cast money-getters from their thrones. I mean the day itself, and the time when the world worships them. Meditate on that, and then on the words, "He that saveth his life shall lose it." But there is another question: "*What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?*" We sometimes fancy this is only a repetition of the former, and read it as "What shall a man *get* in exchange for his soul?" But our Lord does not speak unnecessary words or use words in a perverted sense. I think the question "What can I give in exchange for my soul?" is one we have all asked at times. "I do not wish to give my whole self to pleasure or money. It is my main pursuit, my chief end, but I expect to reserve something from it: some energy, conscience, affection, hope." It will not do. The divinity I have chosen will not be served on such terms. There can be no bargaining: "Thyself, thyself I must have, nothing less and nothing but that." So again, when a man perceives that there is another Being to whom he owes homage, whose nature is altogether different from what he has been worshipping in his heart, he reasons: "I must have offended him. How can I pacify him? My soul is another's, but what can I give in exchange for it? Calves of a year old? Rivers of oil? The first-born of my body?" All experiments are made and none succeed. *This* God claims thyself. Nothing else will satisfy him: "My son, give me thy heart. If not that, I care for nothing else." IV\. But what relation is there between this and the next sentence: "*For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father, with His Angels, and then shall He reward every man according to his works*"? The relation arises from that between the man spoken of in the first and the Son of Man who is the subject of the other. The self-seeker has been separating himself from his kind, his race, or has only used its members as instruments for his own ends. He has forgotten *the* Man, the Son of Man, the bond of the whole race, who gave himself a Sacrifice for all its members. The man who has given up himself has done so *for Christ's sake*, because he believes in a Son of Man, knows he is not a separate creature, and does not wish in death or life to be divided from him who died for all and lives for all. Out of these opposite states of mind the most opposite acts must come. I do not mean that either class lays down a scheme of conduct, or that one is deliberately neglectful of all duties and charities while the other observes them scrupulously. But the spirit of self-seeking, once it masters a person, moulds his thoughts and deeds, and the Spirit of the Son of Man moulds the thoughts and acts of each who submits to his government. So when it is said that the Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father and the angels and reward every man according to his works, I understand that one principle, and every act that has issued from it, will be shown to be eternally false, and the other eternally true. Christ will prove before the universe that he counts the lowest of those creatures whom the self-seekers despised or used as tools, and whom the self-deniers honoured, as his brethren, and that whatever was done to any one of them was done to him. V\. I dare not omit the last verse, though it may not seem essential to my purpose, since our Lord introduces it so solemnly: "*Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom*." I see no other meaning for it than the usual one. There were some, St. John at least, who would stay on earth till the fall of the city and temple over which Jesus had wept, and till those who rejected him were scattered through the earth. But why should these sad and portentous events be signs that the Kingdom of the Son of Man had come? I think it is because the ground on which the Jews opposed our Lord and his Apostles was precisely that he appeared not only as Heir of David but as Son of Man; people of all nations were claimed in him as children of God along with those who boasted of being children of Abraham; and his death was shown forth as a death for mankind. The fall of the exclusive nation was therefore an authentic testimony that a Kingdom was established which, however little earthly rulers might confess it or its own nominal members understand it, could have no meaner title than "*the Kingdom of the Son of Man*." VI\. To that Kingdom we belong. When we are received into it by Baptism we renounce our private, selfish life. We claim, as St. Paul says, to die and be buried with Christ. We affirm that there is no life but the life of the Son of Man, and ask for ourselves and our children to be quickened with it. That first Sacrament is framed on our Lord's universal and everlasting maxim: he that saveth his life, his own separate life, shall lose it, and he that loseth it for Christ's sake shall find it. In it we declare that there is a common death and a common life for all men, and for ourselves and our households we say we will have no other. The words "*Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you*" repeat and enforce that maxim for those engaged in the hard battle of the world. They remind us of the daily, hourly temptation to seek a life of our own, and to forget that the eternal law of God and the unchangeable conditions of our being bind us to our fellows and to their Father and ours in the Well-beloved Son. They remind us that the selfish life is no life but death, and that to choose it is to choose death. We are not bound to choose it. In doing so we renounce our true human state, try to cast off bonds that actually hold us, and resist God's Spirit. They remind us that the common life is still with us, that the Son of Man is still the same, that his flesh and blood were really given for the life of the world, and that our spirits groan for that life, to be delivered from the death into which self-pleasing and self-seeking have brought them. VII\. When a man hears the invitation to the Lord's Supper and is bidden to eat common bread and drink common wine, what should his thoughts be? Should they be: "Here is a way of saving myself, a privilege granted because I am better than others, a chance to put myself in a higher condition"? Or should they be: "I have lost myself by trying to save myself. I have asserted special privileges on the ground of special fortune or merit, and the fortune and merit have vanished, I know not where. I have tried to lift myself above other men. Oh, God, that I might at last be one of them, feel with them, suffer with them! And here is the message that I may have this great gift. Christ bids my spirit partake of the flesh and blood he shed for the world, as my body partakes of bread and wine. It is what I need. It takes away the selfish glory I coveted and clothes me with the human glory I renounced. It bids me cast off the intolerable weight of cares about my body and soul and throw myself on that sacrificing love which provides for all and each, which seeks to make me its minister to others, and which can bless me no more than by forming me after its own likeness." Yes, it is about losing ourselves that we are to think, and the finding we leave to Christ. It is necessary, indeed, to remember that what we lose we shall find, lest we fall into pantheistic dreams of all personal life and distinctness being absorbed into the great Whole or the Divine Nature. Such notions will not torment or overcome us while we believe in a Son of Man who gave his soul and body to death, but brought both out of death and ascended with both to his Father's right hand. While we celebrate the sacrifice of his death and thank him that we are made in the likeness of that death, we may look forward to being made in the likeness of his resurrection. No precious energy or affection he has bestowed can be meant to perish. Our personal being is safe when we entrust it to him. We do not enter into the fulness of his sacrifice if we are considering how to save our bodies or souls. But when we have resigned ourselves to him, his minister may say to us in his name, "*The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee* because thou art a man,—*the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee* because thou art a man, *preserve thy body and soul unto eternal life*." If there has been a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, we may trust that the Father who accepted it will draw our spirits, however sunken in evil, to his Son, and at last draw all men to him. If there has been no such sacrifice for the world, if men may speak of it as a sacrifice nominally for all and really for very few, then we have nothing to feed upon. Then no Son of Man has come or will come, and no power can raise us out of the pit of selfishness. Prayers, offerings and all the machinery of worship will only plunge us deeper into it. Then there is no Eternal Life, for that is the fruition of the Divine Love, but there is an Eternal Death, for *that* is communion with the Spirit of Selfishness and subjection to him. ## THE EUCHARIST CONSIDERED AS INTERPRETING ALL OTHER ACTS OF DEVOTION ::: {.center} Seventh Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [July]{.smallcaps} 18, 1858 ::: > "*The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all*."—2 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} xiii. 14. *The passage:* May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. [We]{.smallcaps} end our daily morning and evening prayer with these words. The compilers of our Service surely thought they expressed the deepest ground of prayer, its inmost meaning and most perfect result. I have chosen them today because I hope they resolve a difficulty about how prayer relates to the Lord's Supper, one that troubles some very earnest minds who do not concern themselves with trifles. The question is: "Can we say that the presence of our Lord promised in the Eucharist is of a different kind from the presence a faithful Christian may expect in ordinary prayer?" Some who have no wish to disparage the Sacrament answer a firm no. They fear turning it into a charm, and think they would lower its dignity by claiming too much for it. Their proposition may seem to them almost beyond dispute. But it meets a strong opposition, deserving the highest respect, which asserts a truth that cannot safely be set aside. The subject may be less embarrassing if we ask, not what the honour of the Eucharist demands, but what prayer needs in order to be Christian and effectual. I\. When I speak of Christian prayer as different from other prayer, what do I mean? Are the cries that have gone up from sorrowing creatures all over the world to count for nothing? Are we to suppose the true Lord of Sabaoth has not heard them because they were addressed in ignorance to the many gods and lords who are really His servants and creatures? St. Paul speaks of the groaning of unconscious nature as prophetic of a divine birth. Can we then suppose that God ignores even the most confused utterance of one made in His own image? If by "Christian prayer" we mean something opposed to Hindu, Muslim, or savage prayer in this sense, I must hold that we set aside the express declarations of Scripture and the very glad tidings of the New Testament. For the New Testament teaches me that I do not pray by any excellence of my own, and that I am not heard because I am better than others in belief or conduct. I pray by "*the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ*." My nature struggles hard to win blessings for itself, and does not care where they come from. It supposes they are given by some visible object or by an unseen Power that thinks and acts as I do. I measure that Power by my own intellect, judge Him by my own heart, and divide Him up according to my own notions. His mind and mine clearly clash, or things would turn out as I want. So I must move Him, by hard entreaty or by bribes He will probably approve, to take my view and overlook our disagreement. This is the prayer of the selfish nature. It is the prayer of Jew, Turk, Hindu, and Christian alike, so far as he yields to that nature. We have all yielded to it. At times it has left us torpid, taught us to see prayer as ridiculous and impossible, mocked every aspiration, and been a mere gravitation towards death. At times it has been full of restless wishes and fears. It would listen to the priest of any faith, adopt any suggestion for piercing the iron or brass of the heavens, and urge any sacrifice to escape a threatened calamity. Should not this experience of prayer as the greatest of contradictions and the greatest of necessities teach us that a power is seeking to rouse us from the sleep of Nature and deliver us from its fever? It is a gentle, penetrating power, for which the dew is the fitting Scriptural emblem. It acts on our wills, continually stirring them to claim their place among their kindred spirits, the sons of God. All men have felt it. It has come in hours of shameful degradation, when they were sinking to the state of animals, reminding them of another destiny, speaking in a language other than their enchanter's, and bidding them leave the sty where so many companions have been transformed. It has come in sorrow, consoling and bracing them to effort and hope. It has taught them to receive messages of sympathy from earth and sky that once looked on them with leaden indifference. It has given them glimpses of a world of order and peace they might live in. It has taught them to murmur "Our Father which art in Heaven" just when they felt most bound to earth and most tempted to think themselves only its children. I say all men have known these impulses, and that trusting, humble, confessing prayer, not selfish prayer to win gifts and overcome divine reluctance, has been their fruit. Who has offered such prayers we cannot know and need not ask. But we ought to know, and it is our privilege to know, where the inspiration to pray comes from. The name we bear implies that it does not fall on us casually from some distant, benevolent genius. It is the calm, regular action on our spirits of the Son of Man and Son of God, in whose likeness we were made, who took our flesh, and who has redeemed us to share His filial life and throne. Once we have learned His name and confessed His authority, we cannot confine it by rules of ours. It becomes all but impossible to think His grace absent from any age or circumstance, for those who ascribe every good thing to that grace and cannot conceive how anyone could exist a moment if left to the wayward impulses of his own nature. They are sure they are entrusted with a Gospel to all nations about this grace, and that they are to teach the nations what their instinct of prayer means by telling them what Christ has done and is doing. But then they must ask: *How* are we to teach this? *How* are we to testify to the everlasting truth of His word, "*Lo, I am with you*"? *How* are we to assure *ourselves* that it has not come to nothing, as we keep fancying it has? The answer, it seems to me, is not Prayer simply but the Holy Communion. That festival clears the mists from the nature of prayer by bearing a witness to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that prayer alone cannot bear. It gives prayer its Christian meaning by declaring that the origin of every thought that rises from us to God lies in Him who descended from God to us. It presents His divine Sacrifice as the only interpretation of our relation to God and the only ground of our devotion, and sets Him forth as the living bond between all spirits and the Father of Spirits. I greatly fear that if we measure this Sacrament by our prayers, instead of referring our prayers to it as *their* measure, we leave our evil hearts a plea for putting their own efforts in the place of Christ's grace, and we shall lose the faith of His presence in the one service as much as in the other. II\. We sometimes limit the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ to His *Forgiveness*. No wonder: our daily resistance to goodness and gentleness, our indifference to sympathy, and our refusal to follow where He leads may well make us gather all other blessings under this one. In a fuller sense He Himself teaches us to connect grace with forgiveness: "*If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses*." The words startle us. We think they make God's mercy the consequence of our good deeds, not their source. But if the grace of Christ is the continual operation of a forgiving Mind upon ours, can we not see that an unforgiving habit is precisely what opposes that operation and with which that Mind *cannot* hold intercourse? We stand aloof from the divine forgiveness, we refuse it, and prefer to stay estranged. Are we not showing greater faith in Christ's power to remove every obstacle when we ask Him to cast the unforgiving spirit out of us, than if we asked Him to bestow all possible gifts without that? Does not the apparent condition give us a brighter glimpse of the freedom and fullness of His mercy? So we can go on to the next clause, "*The Love of God*," and ask what it has to do with our prayers. The selfish nature asks for some definite thing with which it dreams it will be satisfied. He who gives His children the bread they need and not the stones they crave sends His grace to draw them into an infinite region and make them aspire after an infinite blessing. I ask where this forgiveness comes from, this human tenderness that contrasts so strangely with my coldness, this just and wise discipline that is not halted by my crying out. So far as it stirs me to pray, it stirs me to seek its origin. Prayer is the incessant demand: "Source of all life and goodness, where art Thou? It is Thyself I need, not Thy treasures. Take them away if Thou wilt not reveal Thyself while I have them, or if they hinder me from receiving that revelation." So the more the Son's grace works upon men and in them, the more it urges them to look for something beyond and deeper than itself: what is not ours, what we cannot take in, what has been and is and is to come. Yet the fullest discovery of the Love that embraces all things could never make the definite, personal grace less necessary or less dear. The Son will come out more distinctly, both as the Man of Sorrows and as the Word by whom all things were made, as we learn whose will He came to do and into whose glory He ascended. His Cross and Passion will be regarded more than ever as *the* Revelation of the Godhead, on which the human spirit must dwell if it is not to lose God, or see Him split again into idol forms distorted by its own terrors. The Universe will be welcomed as beautiful and harmonious because it reflects parts of the Image seen whole in the weakness of Gethsemane and the desertion of Calvary. And a man will turn from his own lonely experiences to those facts of history, because they declare not a partial love, to him and a few Christians, but Love itself, the very Nature of God. St. Paul was writing to a Church. He wanted Christ's grace to be with them all, the whole body and each member. But that body was a body of witnesses, each to witness in his own sphere and degree. To what? To a God who so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son for it. Unless they fulfilled this function, they could not overthrow the false gods of the heathens around them or protest effectually against Jewish incredulity and exclusiveness. The Church of Corinth was especially liable to forget it, and St. Paul had written two Epistles to say why. They gathered round special leaders, formed sects, and made Christ Himself the head of a sect. They glorified themselves on their spiritual privileges and gifts as men anointed with the Spirit. They acted carnally and sensually. They met for the common Christian Feast and turned it into a symbol of their lack of fellowship. The Apostle exposes all these symptoms of a deep-seated disease. But he does not try to cure it by telling the patient he has overrated his position. He tells the Corinthians that all things are theirs, Paul, Cephas, Apollos, life, death, because they are Christ's, and Christ is God's. Nothing is too good for them if they receive it as a universal good, not a particular or exclusive one. So, consistently, he concludes with not only "*The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ*" but "*the Love of God, be with you*." The highest inheritance of angels is for you sinful Corinthians: that Love which is above all, around all, beneath all. You may ascend into it as Christ has ascended. What argument against sectarianism and exclusiveness could strike such a blow as this magnificent invitation? But if prayer needs the Love of God as its deepest foundation and ultimate end, something is surely needed to show that it *has* this foundation and can reach this end. Prayer is apt to take its colour from the mind of the one who offers it, and to stop far short of its goal. The petitioner forgets the common blessing in the special one, the essential glory in the accidental. What will recall him to the truth? The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper carries the assurance that a Love higher than heaven and deeper than hell has worked, is working, and will not cease working to overcome the schismatic tendencies of human beings. It will not let them pursue separate objects or rest until they find the one object. On this ground too, does not the Eucharist rise above Prayer, since it speaks directly of God and what He is, and of men as all miserable alike without Him and all blessed alike in the enjoyment of Him? III\. St. Paul ends his benediction with "*the Communion of the Holy Ghost*." Whenever an Apostle spoke of *the Christ*, he took pains to show that he meant "*the Anointed of God*," "*He that anoints men with the Holy Spirit*." From the day John came preaching in the wilderness, this had been declared the sign of the expected Deliverer and King, the power with which He would work and the gift by which He would raise men to the condition of those "*born not of flesh or of blood, or of the will of man, but of God*." But was not all that could be said of this power already implied in "*the Grace of Christ*" and "*the Love of God*"? *Implied*, surely. It was implied in every announcement of the Old Dispensation, in every Psalmist's song, and in the sympathy of every Ruler and Prophet with God's purposes and with the misery of those who resisted Him. A Spirit was in the midst of the nation, speaking in its seers, showing them visions of sorrow and glory, and helping them struggle on in the darkest times, certain of an approaching light. But the Spirit had not yet been manifested, and these men were waiting for Him. Till the Desire of Nations was manifested in the flesh, *this* desire could not be fulfilled. When it was, and the day of Pentecost declared a communion for all nations because a Spirit bound all nations into the Name of the Father and the Son, those names could be uttered as never before. It was possible to speak of the Grace of One who entered into all human weakness without lessening the awe of the Godhead. The Holiest of the Holiest was opened, and a mystery of Love revealed that no loveless creature could look into. This grace and love, then, were not absorbed by the Communion of the Holy Ghost, though they involve it; through that Communion human beings can apprehend them as eternally distinct and eternally one. If that Communion were lost, grace and love would again be hidden, the message to the nations set at naught, and the world would shrivel into its old narrowness and split into its old divisions. The conditions in the Corinthian Church that I mentioned pointed to strife within the Christian community. It was the same strife that had torn nations and families apart from the beginning, but it went nearer the heart of humanity, more inward and deadly. In particular, their quarrel over the gifts of the Spirit, and how far each teacher or faction could claim them, was a gloomy prophecy, at the start of the new age, of the triumphs the Evil Spirit would win in each period of it. But was it not possible to dig a yard below his mines? Could there be no counter-prophecy of his final defeat? That deeper mine lies in the words "*Communion* of the Holy Ghost." The *gifts* of the Spirit were turned into occasions of contention and self-glorification: who could speak with most tongues, who work most wonders? Even the *graces* of the Spirit, of which humility and meekness are the most conspicuous, could be pleaded as reasons for despising others, as motives for saintly pride. St. Paul's divine words, "*They that have not the Spirit of Christ are none of His*," might in later days be turned into an argument for drawing deep lines round those who could say, "*We* have the Spirit of Him who made Himself of no reputation and was the friend of publicans and sinners; stand by, *you* have it not." But if the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Communion, and that is what distinguishes Him from the Spirit of unholiness, hatred, and lies, these subtleties of that Spirit are detected and laid bare. It is shown to what end his divine Adversary has worked from the first, how every effort to divide has brought out more fully the Spirit's fusing energy, how men have been held together in spite of themselves, how life and unity presume and demand each other, how surely a living Unity will at last supersede all dead uniformity, and how it will confound every attempt to restore vitality to the limbs by tearing the body apart. The Holy Communion testifies by its very title that Christ came for *this* end, and that for *this* end He was baptized with the Spirit. No prayers cut off from this Sacrament can represent the blessing of communion and the curse of division as it does. Carry the meaning of the Eucharist into public worship, make it the centre, and worship becomes real: it points to self-abnegation and the united service of the Eternal Father. Carry it into private worship, and that becomes an act of communion with a present Lord. But try this communion by the standard of our public or private worship, and it is in danger of sinking, as they so easily do, into mere utterance of our own wishes or mere repetition of traditional words. A common way of meeting questions like these is to say they are merely questions of words. I find that irritating and unsatisfactory. Even if the assertion were well founded, precious realities may lie under questions of words, and it is more helpful to try to bring them out than to assume they are absent. But it is not a question of words whether Christ is really present with us at all times, and whether the Lord's Supper is a true Sacrament because He appointed it to remind us of His Presence. Those who hold that conviction are bound to proclaim it, and so to vindicate every mode of intercourse with Christ: the awfulness of prayer, the daily charities of life, and the Sacrament. I think they fail to defend that noble position if they refuse to admit the principle their opponents are struggling for, that this Sacrament transcends the other modes of intercourse. Put it on the same level with them, forget that it is the specially Christian ordinance, and they *must* become weak and *may* become false. No, the strife is not verbal. The better each party understands the substance for which it contends, the more justice it will do to the substance for which the other contends. So the Unity of the Church, which we sometimes despair of, may come out of the contentions now rending it. So we may receive these words as addressed to us, the feeble fighters of these latter days, by St. Paul and the triumphant society of which he is a member: "*The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all, Amen*." ## THE EUCHARIST CONSIDERED IN ITS RELATION TO CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION ::: {.center} Eighth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} (NOT PREACHED) ::: ::: {.center} [July]{.smallcaps} 25, 1858 ::: > "*To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it*."—[Revelation]{.smallcaps} ii. 17. *The passage:* To the one who overcomes, Christ says he will give some of the hidden manna to eat, and a white stone with a new name written on it, which no one knows except the one who receives it. [There]{.smallcaps} is one topic closely tied to what I have been speaking about for three Sundays that must not be passed over now. We hear much about Confession: whether a clergyman is bound to establish the formal practice, where its limits lie, and whether the laity demand it. We also hear fierce denunciations of anything resembling a Confessional, appeals to the experience of other nations against it, and a cry that the State should stop it if opinion cannot. There is plenty of frivolous talk on both sides, which must be borne as a penance. But there are also earnest thoughts and feelings on both sides. By God's grace these may be separated from the vanity around them, become clear, and work in harmony rather than opposition. I\. It helps us in England that the controversy turns mainly on one passage in the exhortation to the Communion. It says that no one should come to the Communion without full trust in God's mercy and a quiet conscience. So if anyone cannot quiet his conscience by the exhortation and wants further comfort and counsel, he is to go to the priest, or to some discreet and honest minister of God's word, and receive absolution together with ghostly counsel, so that his conscience may be quieted and his scruples removed. Those who argue that the Church of England gives little encouragement to Confession as practised abroad naturally stress that this is the only support their opponents have. If Confession were an institution affecting the whole life of society, they ask, would it be mentioned only in one service, at the close of an address that is read occasionally and may be replaced by another? They also point out that neither "confessional" nor even "confession" appears here. There is only a general direction about quieting scrupulous consciences, and the minister is spoken of more as a friendly adviser than as an authoritative director. Both points deserve attention, as any exact criticism of a disputed sentence does. But something can be said on the other side. The Communion is not merely one of our services but, as I argued last Sunday, the service that gives force and meaning to all the rest. A defender of Confession may say that to connect it with the Communion is to give it the highest honour, and to treat it as a preparation for the Communion is to treat it as the greatest necessity of a Church. He asks no more than that. And if you insist that the word "confession" is absent, he may ask how you account for the presence of a word far more offensive to anti-priestly ears, "absolution." Can that power be ascribed to an ordinary friend? Does it not belong to the priest as such? Granting all weight to these opposing reflections, I think both sides will agree on this much. The English Church, so far as we can judge from what she has said and omitted, wants us to take our idea of Confession from the nature of Communion. She must mean us to set aside every other way of judging its character, value, and place in the Christian life, however plausible. We are steadily to ask: what does the Lord's Supper signify, and how does that bear on the meaning, usefulness, and necessity of Confession? II\. We have seen that a man may approach the Lord's table for two opposite reasons. He may come because he thinks Christ's death, to which it testifies, will or may deliver his individual soul from the fate his race is doomed to. Or he may come because he wants to lose his individual soul in Christ, sharing the death Christ died for the world and the Redemption He won for the world. These two aims are independent of any theory about the elements and the effect of consecration. A Romanist, a Lutheran, or a Zwinglian may hold either, and reconcile it with his system. But I think Romanists, Lutherans, or Zwinglians who seek themselves in the Eucharist, not Christ, will not truly agree even with members of their own sect who use the same formula about transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or the memorial feast. And those who seek Christ there, not themselves, will be one at heart however different their statements. Most of us, when we first think about the Communion and the duty of receiving it, are confused between these two aims. The prominent feeling is that we have neglected our souls, or our "religious interests." But this vague feeling is mixed with the memory of particular acts, long past or recent, that we long to blot out and that have the stamp of eternity on them. The thoughts are: God knows these things were done; God knows *I* did them; He will require them of *me*; the whole universe will recognize me as their author. These thoughts create a terror that is strong at one time and weak at another, that we are strongly inclined to drown in outward sights and sounds, and that we think we ought nevertheless to cherish and deepen. If we had only those thoughts, about neglected duties, we might run to the Communion at once, taking credit for repairing a past error and beginning a career more respectable to religious men and more acceptable to our Judge. The other feelings give the service a very different character. Will it affect those past acts, or change my position toward them? I have heard of a wonderful, unutterable forgiveness, and here it seems gathered up and expressed; could I lay hold of it and make it mine? Could it tell me those acts will no longer be remembered against me? Would even that be enough unless it made *me* different? And is not this Communion awful as well as hopeful? For a mere chance of blessing, dare I risk deepening my evil and my curse? I am invited, yet driven back; bidden to come because all is ready, yet told that if I come unworthily I may increase my damnation. III\. Here is material enough to make the conscience unquiet, and the Church says such unquietness should be removed before a man comes to the Lord's Supper. She lays it on her ministers to use all their power and knowledge to remove it. Suppose a person so perplexed comes to a minister: how may he show the learning and discretion the Church ascribes to him? First, he must be clear himself about the purpose for which priests and laymen alike are bidden to eat the bread and drink the wine. Any confusion there will make his help to the conscience wholly unsatisfactory. Suppose he has not settled in his mind that when our Lord said, "He that saveth his life shall lose it; he that loseth it for My sake shall find it," He laid down a universal maxim, *the* Gospel maxim of His followers, and suppose he does not see this Sacrament as its exposition and fulfilment. How will he treat his bewildered patient? Given the plain question "What can I do to be saved?", he will stumble at St. Paul's simple answer to the jailor at Philippi. He will not boldly say: there is One in Whom you may believe and lose yourself, the same for all, the Lord and Saviour of sinners; you belong to Him, so give yourself to Him. He will think he must lay down rules about what a man must do and believe in order to be saved. So he will spoil the simplicity of the great practical testimony to the Lord's death that the Communion supplies. But the person's anxiety may not take this direct and comprehensive form, and generally we cannot expect it to. Suppose certain offences, great or small, weigh on his soul. How will such a minister deal with that? He will try to learn whether the acts belong to the venial or the deadly class of sins. He knows no list drawn up by the most refined casuists can settle this exactly. He must inquire into the state of mind that led to each wrong act and weigh the temptation. He does not hope to do more than approximate the truth, but with his books guiding a course of cross-examination he may find something to help his judgment. Where the safety of the soul is at stake, he thinks, he must search as far as he can, into the closest and darkest passages through which evil entered. What incidental harms of the method should not be risked for so great a result? It may strike him that one such harm is reviving the very thoughts and feelings that prompted the wrong, a return to the foul or revengeful imaginations in which it was born. He knows, if he knows himself at all, how endlessly we deceive ourselves when we analyze our feelings in a past event, and still more when we assign our share or another's in the guilt. But all this impurity and falsehood, he concludes, must be risked, and the sleeping embers of past evil stirred up. How can the priest honestly absolve if he has not found out, as well as he can, what is to be absolved? I want you to see how easily and naturally an English minister may slide into this course. He does not do so from a wrong intention, but from an earnest wish to follow what he takes to be his Church's precept. It comes less from a perverse theory of his own than from too faithful adherence to notions that have infected the Church generally, and that are perhaps as strong in many who denounce him as in him. If he has added to these a high notion of priestly authority, let me try to show him how little he can realize it unless he takes a quite different path. IV\. His cross-examination clearly does nothing to fulfil the wish expressed in our Exhortation. He has not quieted the conscience of the man or woman who came to him, but has greatly added to its disquiet and confusion. It may be, it must be, a relief to tell someone an act or state of mind we have kept shut up until we can no longer bear the scorching agony of concealment. But the priest, as far as he has exercised his own proper function, has contributed nothing to that relief. He has lessened it, and made the perplexity, the torture, and the inward *sin* heavier. "Yes," it will be said, "but now comes his turn to give the absolution the Church speaks of." Oh no! Not *that* absolution. Not real freedom of conscience, the loosing of a burden too heavy to bear. The priest can say words that signify absolving, but he dare not trust them to do their work. His own faith in their power is feeblest. He must help them with appeals to the senses and convey to the imagination that he is a very wonderful person. Finally he falls back on a theory that he has the right to absolve, that it *must* belong to him and *must* effect something. He does this because he secretly believes that without that assumption it effects nothing. Is this exalting priestly authority? Is it not degrading it to the lowest point and showing priestly impotence in full? Does it not make the conscience, which should own that authority's force, cry out indignantly, once it perceives it has been tampered with, "What art thou?" I would press one more point on the minister who wants to prepare penitents for the Communion. Is he *preparing* them? What are they to seek there? If he has given them any spiritual gift, it is the very gift the Eucharist itself testifies to. *His* idea of Absolution directly interferes with the meaning of the Sacrament, practically as much as theoretically. If the communicants' sins have been put away by his word, what is the grievous weight they complain of when they kneel? What need have they of the general pardon the priest announces, or of the comfortable words Christ speaks to the heavy laden? Draw what fine distinctions you please; if you are dealing with the consciences of real human beings, and not with "the Conscience" of the divinity and casuistry books, this question will force itself on you and you cannot evade it. V\. But does this question not also demand an answer from those who think the Exhortation in our Service has a quite different force from what the confessional, ancient or modern, would give it? I think they should be able to answer it. Believing the Exhortation binds me, and that I ought to have complied with it far more than I have, I would try earnestly and humbly to find the answer. First, I think we too should understand, and keep reminding ourselves, that *our* offences are deeper in nature and wider and more serious in consequence than any that those who seek relief from us can disclose. If "venial" is twisted from its derivation to mean little or insignificant, ours are not venial. If it is very hard to judge the gravity of other men's evil deeds and states of mind, we know a little, but only a little, of the length and breadth of our own. How do we know them? Not because we have worked out what they are, or worked ourselves up to a tremendous sense of their hideousness, but because God has not let us remain ignorant of them, and has not let us quench His light even when we laboured hardest to draw it into our darkness. If we have any impression of our evil at all, we have received it in that way and no other. And what have we learnt about our evils? Surely that they come from lack of communion with the true, righteous, and holy mind of Him in Whom we live and move and have our being, and from lack of communion with the human creatures among whom we live. We are constantly tempted to trace them to other causes, to think they consist in something other than the habit of self-pleasing, self-willing, self-seeking, and issue in something other than deeper alienation from God and our fellows. But we are constantly recalled to this view, first by our ministerial duties, which remind us that we are to show God's light to men and present men's sorrows and sins before God; and second by this Sacrament, our highest function to administer, which reminds us in its whole substance that God's mind is satisfied only with an entire, voluntary, filial sacrifice, and that this sacrifice is the bond of peace for all and the deliverance from the sins of the world. VI\. With this self-knowledge as his starting-point, having learnt that it becomes a contradiction and a lie unless it begins and ends in the knowledge of God, the minister may meet those who bring him their griefs with a learning and discretion not his own. The Church tells him the sin-sick man is to be quieted by being led to full confidence in God's mercy, given the absolution and godly counsel he needs, and prepared to come with a clean heart to the Communion. These are not inconsistent commands to one whose own experience has interpreted them, and who believes the highest power God can give a human being is that of leading his fellows out of the confusion and malignity of self into the clear and full revelation of Him Who is perfect Truth and Loving-kindness. To quiet the conscience by showing God's mercy is not to give a man the slightest hope of indulgence for his sin; it is to show him the way out of it, whatever it is. So no minute sifting of a past transgression is needed to know whether or on what conditions it may be forgiven. *Nothing* is forgiven to a man while he stays shut up in himself; he will have an ever-increasing consciousness of the past evil, and of its permanence as part of him. *All* is forgiven to the man who accepts deliverance from self, as from a chain he forged, and enters the fellowship with God and man that Christ has won for him. Here is the absolution one man may give another because God has given it to all. The conscience can recognize it as just what it needs, because it frees him from the very load that crushed him and from which there seemed no freedom. It does not replace the Communion but prepares for it. The Service tells him a new and living way has been consecrated for him out of his darkness into the presence of perfect Light, and in the Sacrament he is invited to throw off the weight of his evil nature and put on Him Whose cross declared Him our Wisdom, Righteousness, and Sanctification. He does carry a burden to the altar, and as a separate creature he will always bear it. What the priest told him before is that he is a member of Christ and may cast it on Him. What he is told now is that it has been borne for him and for the whole world, and that he may rise a new man, able to deny himself and serve God and his fellows in the strength of Christ's Spirit. The priest has not taken Christ's office but has led him to Christ. VII\. If this is so, we may gladly admit that the Christian Priest can do for a sinner what a merely kind friend who receives his confidence cannot do as well. By his office he testifies to the Universal Sacrifice and the Universal Fellowship. So he declares his own personal inefficiency and directs the individual to the One Centre, Deliverer, and Mediator. He warns each man that to seek his life anywhere but in the common Lord and Head of mankind is to lose it, and declares that those ready to die with Christ shall rise with Him. What motive has one privileged to give such an absolution to weigh the wrong in this act or person or that, when he knows the scales must be uneven and false? He must tell anyone who volunteers a confession: "If it comforts you to tell me, I am willing to hear. If it wronged a neighbour, I will tell you to make restitution before you come to the altar, as our Lord says you must. If it involves a quarrel with a neighbour, I will tell you to be reconciled first. But I will not, I dare not, prescribe any compensation to God or reconciliation with God. He has sent me to say that He has forgiven you for Christ's sake and made reconciliation. I can only bid you accept that, and hold out to you and to all this pledge and sign that you may cast away the sinful old man and be clothed with the true humanity of Jesus Christ, for which you were created. If you wish to revive the evil thoughts and conditions of that old man, into which you fell by forsaking your place as a member of Christ, I will give no encouragement. Such reminiscences and confessions may suit the morbid taste of the age, and you may trade in them with the caterers for the circulating library. But you shall not bring them to me or make them a preparation for Holy Communion; except for the study of religious controversies and newspapers, there is no worse preparation." However great the craving for such confessions among a portion of the laity brought up in an artificial and sickly atmosphere, as some who seem to know say it is, the priest should discourage it, not pamper it. Others may satisfy it; he has no business to, for it grows by what it feeds on, and the next generation will be feebler and more corrupt than ours. VIII\. At the same time, I do not think sensible and thoughtful men should encourage the middle classes in a blind fury against Confession and everything they denounce as Priestcraft. All classes, the aristocratic, trading, professional, and working, have sins enough to confess before God. It is better that they think about *what* they have to confess, what insincerity and hypocrisy toward God and falsehood toward their fellows, than that any one of them assume a commission to set the land's standard of faith and practice, which would certainly be a low and evil one. The middle classes, and those in the upper who abetted them, did a great and noble work in the seventeenth century in fighting the tyranny of kings and prelates. But when they won the mastery they set up a worse priestcraft than the one they overthrew. We should guard against a result much worse, because much less sincere, in our day. Establish a middle-class ascendency and a middle-class religion, and the destruction of our old ecclesiastical and civil order is the least of the evils. The *people* will be trodden down as never before, the faith of the land will be one that has no interest for them, and the Gospel will not be for them because it will not be for mankind, so they will be left to Atheism. Therefore members and ministers of the English Church should strive to understand what she does and does not mean by Confession and Absolution, not abuse her words to a false sense and not neglect to obey them in the true sense. I believe that in the false sense they will never have the slightest power over the body of our people, whatever attraction they hold for a few of its more refined members. In the true sense, I believe the body of the people will one day claim them as a message of comfort and blessing, and resolve not to be deprived of them. IX\. Still, I would have little confidence in the words of any local Church, however dear and venerable, if I did not think they echoed the Book that belongs to the whole Church and contains its principles and charter. I have reluctantly delayed so long in speaking of my text, which seems to me to express the whole doctrine of Confession in its divinest form. It is part of the address of Him Who holds the sharp two-edged sword to the Angel of the Church of Pergamos. *He* speaks, not the Beloved Disciple. He speaks to the minister not as separate from the Church but as the representative of its character, answerable for its sins. He commends the minister, and so the Church, for fidelity to His name under great temptation to forsake it. He blames the minister, and so the Church, for corruptions that had crept in and threatened its life: doctrines springing from high spiritual pretensions and leading to gross immorality. The Son of Man calls them to repent of these and of all the evils they had bred, and He fights against them with the sword from His mouth. To him who overcomes this thing that is dividing and destroying the Church, He promises, "I will give to him of the hidden manna; and I will give to him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it." No one has ever doubted that the white stone is the verdict of acquittal, the absolution of heart and conscience. What I want you to notice is: (1) this is the gift of the Son of Man; (2) it is a gift to a body; (3) it is connected with the hidden manna, the bread of life the Father gives from Heaven; (4) it is assured to each man who overcomes, by faith and confidence in the Head of the body, an infection to which all its members are liable; (5) though each may possess it, he does not hold it in his old name, for *a new Name* is written on it; (6) this forgiveness is nonetheless not something others can be told of: "no man knoweth but he who receiveth it." The more these particulars are meditated on, the more light I think they will throw on this most practical and often most embarrassing subject. So far as we believe Christ is really in the midst of us, the Source of our union and life; so far as we believe He speaks to us not as separate beings but as parts of a Divine Society, each responsible for the acts of the others and affected by their evils; so far as we own one common food for our spirits, which is the very body and blood Christ gave for the life of the world; so far as we are conscious of a power constantly striving to overcome us and that must be overcome by Christ's power; so far as we understand that all our forgiveness and better state comes in His name and not our own; so far as we own absolution as a gift to praise God for through all ages, yet a hidden gift, not palpable to the senses or to be boasted of before others, which vanishes when we try to reduce it to possession or proclaim it to the world, and which is an infinite blessing only while we refer it to the infinite God: so far as we hold these convictions, Confession will change from the hardest of duties into the most joyful of privileges, Absolution will become the setting free of the whole man from unutterable bondage, and our Eucharist will be a true Communion with Angels and Archangels around the Throne, because it is a Communion with Him Who sits on the Throne and with the Lamb, Who lives for ever and ever. ## THE EUCHARIST CONSIDERED AS CHRIST'S VOICE TO A LUKEWARM CHURCH ::: {.center} Ninth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} (NOT PREACHED) ::: ::: {.center} [August]{.smallcaps} 1, 1858 ::: > "*Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me*."—[Revelation]{.smallcaps} iii. 20. *The passage:* Christ says he stands at the door and knocks. If anyone hears his voice and opens the door, he will come in and eat with that person, and that person with him. [I took]{.smallcaps} the text of my last sermon from one of those messages to the Churches with which the Apocalypse opens. This sentence comes from another of them. Taken literally, it at once recalls the Lord's Supper, of which I have been speaking so much. Must we get rid of the letter, or explain it away, to find its spiritual meaning? Surely not, unless you are determined that the Lord's Supper shall have no spiritual meaning and be a dry form. If you think it speaks of a Presence that only a man's spirit can enter, and that is near us even when we refuse to own it, then it speaks as the text speaks, and each is the faithful interpreter of the other. I shall be reminded that the promise was made to a particular Church, one of the Apostolic age. It was, and we must not forget what that Church was like. Let me read the earlier part of the message. The Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Beginning of God's creation, writes to the angel of the Church of the Laodiceans. He knows their works: they are neither cold nor hot, and he wishes they were one or the other. Because they are lukewarm, he will spit them out of his mouth. They say they are rich, have gained goods, and need nothing, and they do not know that they are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked. He counsels them to buy from him gold refined in fire to be rich, white clothing to cover the shame of their nakedness, and eyesalve to see. He rebukes and disciplines those he loves, so they should be zealous and repent. I\. (1) Many of us would gladly accept this as a portrait of an Asiatic *city* that had taken on Greek civilization and Roman rule. How exactly, we would say, it shows the exhausted, heartless, hopeless and yet self-conceited temper of such a society, and how well it fits the age of the twelve Caesars! But if some pagan of that time or some later infidel charged the *Church* in that city, set up as a witness to what is highest and divinest, with the same qualities, we would be scandalized. We would insist that the baptized body was the great exception to the general corruption, and that the reverse of what was seen elsewhere was found there. "It may not be so now," we would say, "since the Church is mingled with the world, debased by State patronage, and free from trials. But it was so then." At the least, we would say, the *minister* of the Church must have been an example to Jews and heathens of the difference the Gospel makes. Such conclusions, reached in advance, might hold out against the evidence of fallible men, but they cannot stand against the testimony of St. John and of One higher than St. John. We are bound to believe that a Christian society, living under St. John's eye, answered to this report. I mean not an Asiatic or Romanized society, and not the society apart from its angel or minister, but the body as represented by him: "Thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold." \(2) No further words can make that description more vivid. These people have no *heat*, no fervour for any great cause or object, none of that earnestness which leads men > "To scorn delights, and live laborious days," to forget themselves and throw themselves away. But they are not *cold*. Against other men they still maintain doctrines that have stopped ruling *them* or giving them courage and devotion. They even feel a pleasant approach to warmth in proving that those who differ from them are wrong. They can almost persuade themselves that they believe, while they convict others of disbelieving. \(3) Better any state than this, says the message: better the most rash and ill-judged vehemence for a conviction, better a coldness that causes acute pain. Calm energy may follow the first excess, and the sufferers from the second may cry out for a live coal to kindle them. "I would," says the Lord of Man, "that you were cold or hot. I try the hearts and reins, and I know either state to be less deadly than this middle one. If it settles into a permanent habit, the Church must cease to be mine and be left to itself. I will spit you out of my mouth." \(4) Yet near as the dissolution of such a society is, it has no awareness of it. The Laodiceans were rich, increased in goods, and thought they needed nothing. Wherever you find the lukewarmness denounced in the previous verse, I believe you will find this contentment and self-glorification. A society that has found an exact, reasonable balance between excesses, and says, "We are not too zealous like such foolish people, nor inclined to infidelity like those unhappy ones; thank God, we have hit the mean between enthusiasm and frigidity," is wrapped in vanity and Phariseeism. Whether it fasts and tithes, or feasts and withholds tithes, it prays like the man who exalted himself in the Temple and did *not* go home justified. \(5) For such a society to see that it is poor, miserable, blind and naked must be exceedingly hard. Yet he who spoke to Laodicea declares that this knowledge is necessary to its very existence. Why? Because such a society utters a lie in every confession, and *is* a lie, the most terrible and blasphemous of lies, if its riches, light and virtues are not all in Christ, or if it has anything it can claim as its own. This was the elementary truth involved in baptism, which its members learnt when preparing for it. If it has been lost, every step must be walked again until it is recovered. If the Church of Laodicea fancied that what was acknowledged at its founding need not be acknowledged now, or if any member fancied that though he was poor and blind and naked before his conversion, he had since gained some wealth, light and covering of his own, then the sooner the delusion was torn away, even by the most terrible humiliations, the safer they would be. \(6) And there is One who declares that he has methods of discipline and correction, and is using them for this very end. He cares for those whose lukewarmness is hurrying them to ruin, who take the symptoms of disease for signs of health. Because he cares, he will not stop punishing them until he has brought them to loathe what they cherish and boast of, and made them earnest in self-renunciation and in turning to him. "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent." II\. (1) I have gone over this exhortation chiefly to show how little there was in this early community to entitle it to any rare or special blessing. Suppose the Laodicean Church was in a worse state than our own, or its faults were of a wholly different kind from ours. Neither would be a reason why we may not claim the promise our Lord makes to them. But I should be dishonest if I did not own a remarkable likeness between the condition of certain Churches today and this one. I should be dishonest if I left "certain" ambiguous, and did not say that I allude especially to the Church I know best and love best. To be neither hot nor cold, not much in earnest for any principle yet decently respectful of principles, and to congratulate ourselves on this temperance as a high virtue, fruitful in ways the torrid or frigid zones of past ages could not be: I cannot but regard these as distinctive marks of our period and country. We know it from what passes in ourselves. Each of us finds it hard to overcome this lukewarmness, or to set an object before him and pursue it as a matter of life and death. Each is tempted to think himself wiser, clearer-sighted, less liable to extremes and delusions than the men he reads of and patronizingly admires. We talk of the heroic times and wish we were in them. But honestly examined, we think those heroes were toiling amid confusion to make us what we are. Our compliments to their simple faith come with secret self-congratulation that we are far beyond the stage where such faith was possible. At least half our praise of their energy is meant to explain why we may be, must be, ought to be, listless. The *laudator temporis acti*, who praises times gone by, often shows the same disposition that appears more coarsely in the man who boasts all day of our enlightenment and progress. And how dare we distinguish between the *people* of England and the *Church* of England, and say the Laodicean vices belong to the one but not the other? No such distinction was possible in the first age, though then the Church seemed to stand in direct contrast to the world around it. The Church, considered as a collection of men with a certain name and certain opinions, *could* not show such a contrast. It necessarily embodied the tendencies of those around it. More than that, it showed the evil affecting the heathen in its root and principle. Churchmen showed it in a more complete form, with what was scattered in others concentrated in them. Let us not hide this from ourselves. By the very law of the Church's existence it must be so. The horrors of ecclesiastical history are inexplicable if we refuse to recognize the Church's relation to mankind. In the light of that relation they are more appalling but quite intelligible. I want us to bring this conviction home, and to test it less by the records of past times than by what we are doing and thinking, and still more by what we are *not* doing and *not* thinking. There is indeed in society at large a want of heat or cold. It lacks the courage to confess or to deny. It is skilled at spotting every difficulty that excuses inaction. It is unsure whether any end is worth the trouble, or whether those who venture for Truth will ever be adequately rewarded. Where does this habit of mind come from? From the half-belief of *us*, who pretend to champion belief. It comes from our nervous anxiety lest the wit of men shake doctrines we say came from God. It comes from the proof *we* give that we are calculating the advantages of obeying God, and so making his service the service of self. Here is the worldly temper, not only infecting our religion but nourished by it and growing stronger from it. The same is true of the other Laodicean symptom so closely tied to this one. Have we the right to accuse irreligious men of boasting that they are rich and increased in goods? Who boasts like us? When we speak of *our* Church, a convenient synonym for ourselves, how ready we are to say: "What a delightful medium we have found between the tinsel and worldliness of Rome and the rigidness and nakedness of Geneva. No outrageous extremes, no vehemence, all mildness, equity, propriety. We honour the wealthy, we are very good to the poor. What have we need of?" Some do not use this language. For them the established Church is a mere outward Church with certain privileges, quite distinct from the body of true believers. A very natural opinion! But does it keep them from saying that they, the believers and the true Church, are rich, increased in goods and in need of nothing? Does not this temptation lie fearfully near them as they mark the boundaries between themselves and the world? Are they not copying the world's worst traits, its pride and exclusiveness, in the very act of severing themselves from it? But perhaps we are aware of these dangers and have lived through them. "*We* are not anxious to divide ourselves from Rome; we long for fellowship with it, to repulse those vile men content with the name of Protestants." Or: "*We* are not anxious to sever ourselves from foreign Churches or the Dissenters at home; we want their aid against the wretches who would bring us into communion with Rome." Hopeful experiments both! But are those who engage in them not "rich and increased in goods," very wise, very superior to their neighbours, needing nothing but that their own schemes be realized? \(2) My brethren, I feel the danger of speaking this way of different classes of my fellow-Churchmen. In referring to them I am liable to commit the very faults I impute to them, and to think myself better than they are, possessed of riches and wisdom they lack. Why do I enter on this subject at all, except to tell you so? I want to confess how hard and perilous I feel the task of warning and exhorting to be, how often I want to shrink from it in shame, knowing that in condemning others I condemn myself. I can find no fault in them that they might not detect in an aggravated form in me, if I have not detected it in myself. I admit that this is the fearful position of those whose office calls them to reprove. Often they feel it a sin to open their lips, and often a sin to be silent. Often they suspect that it matters little to others which they do, since their words are mere sounds mingling with all the rest in the air, scarcely producing a flutter in any human spirit. But good comes out of this uncertainty and despondency. The minister who thought himself somebody finds that he is nobody, and his imaginary goods and riches disappear. He knows he is poor and blind, and he knows who has shown him so: One who can make his reproofs and chastenings felt, and who rebukes and chastens not from hatred but from love. So the minister can in some measure understand the text, and present it to his congregation as written as much for each of them as for him. \(3) "Behold, I stand at the door and knock." I know many say, "This is figurative language. We find it hard enough to acknowledge the *history* of the Bible. If we reluctantly accept that, must we also attach special meaning to its metaphors?" I know divines say, "This is spiritual language that only spiritual persons can understand. What we must set before ordinary worldly men are the plain declarations of Scripture. If they reject or half confess the literal passages, how idle to discourse to them of these mysteries!" My brethren, I never expect any man to believe the history of the Bible, except as a tradition he accepts from his fathers and fears to reject, until he listens to these words. I am satisfied that in no day would faith in the history without this have been worth anything to man or in God's sight. In *our* day, I am satisfied that no doubter will be brought, by the most pompous array of evidences, even to an intellectual acceptance of the Gospel narratives, let alone the articles of the Creed. Nor dare I grieve that God has ordered it so. For I find the secret of our lukewarmness and self-conceit in men's attempt to divide what God has joined together: the testimony of the Conscience from the facts of the History, and the voice of Christ at the door of the heart from the voice of Christ in his acts on earth or in the Book that records them. If one of these voices is treated as figurative, so will the other be. If one is supposed to be only for a select class, so will the other be. And that select class will suffer even more than those they have cut off. They will put dead phrases in place of a living Christ, and language that meant everything to their fathers will soon mean nothing to them. So I hold that we ought to declare constantly, with all our energy, that we *know* we are not using a figure of rhetoric when we repeat this text. We announce a fact that concerns every man. When we speak of the conscience in a man, we mean that which God created to hear this voice and answer it, not an abstraction that philosophers or divines may debate. If in making this proclamation we exalt valleys and level hills, so that the so-called unbelievers find Christ speaking to them and calling them to repent, and the so-called believers find the same, that is just the office John the Baptist had when he came to witness of the Christ, and it should be ours. If we seem to assume that communion between God and Man is not the rare privilege of a few but the foundation on which our race stands, so that without it there would be no thought, memory, hope, kinship, friendship or affection, we are only restating the doctrine of the Bible and confirming what all nations anticipated. We are cutting down human pride so that the Lord alone may be exalted. \(4) Because the text asserts this great and comfortable truth, does it deny that men exclude themselves, as far as they can, from this communion, and wish to be rid of it altogether? No! Otherwise what would be the force of the invitation to *open the door*? That surely implies a power in man to close his mind and stop his ears. All Scripture and experience compel us to recognize this terrible power. Only let it always be understood that it is a power to deny our proper rights and true humanity, to *make a lie*. The sensualist who blocks his heart with contemptible objects and vile imaginations, and the proud religionist, like those who persecuted St. Stephen and St. Paul, who blocks his heart with pride in his own righteousness and contempt of others, were both created and redeemed for fellowship with the Father and the Son. Christ is telling each of them so even while he rejects it. \(5) Is it not then true that this communion is in one sense the primary necessity of man, implied in all he does and costing him effort to repel, and also his final reward, the perfect good which the purest and best have seemed not to possess but to hope for? The words "I will come in to him and sup with him and he with Me" fully bear out this doctrine. They must mean the fullest intercourse a man can have with him whom all the Host of Heaven worship. So that we may feel this, the language is of the simplest, earthliest kind, such as peasants can grasp, and the awfulness is increased by the familiarity. At the close of the divine Book, as we reach the last and highest revelation, all is still common and human. Less than ever is there a separation between the little and the great, the humble and the sublime, the Cross and the Throne. The verse carries us back to the Supper where Jesus sat with his disciples, and with the one who betrayed him, the night before he suffered. It carries us forward to the time when all shall be accomplished in the Kingdom of God. The Apostles sat at that Passover as representatives of their nation, giving thanks for its deliverance. They sat there as representatives of Mankind, to whom they were to witness of the true Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. These words tell every man that only the self-seeking Judas spirit can cut him off from his great human promise. Once he gives up the dream that he is rich, increased in goods and in need of nothing, the words hold the pledge that he is the inheritor of all things. Therefore, brethren, the Lord's Supper renews this warning, promise and hope from generation to generation. It says to each one, "The Judge is at the door," and also, "If you will open the door, that Judge is willing to claim you as his friend, and to remove whatever separates you from him, from his Father, and from the whole universe." It is the witness against all the vices that have destroyed Churches and nations and turned them from witnesses for God into his greatest enemies. It shows how those vices may be eradicated, so that we may become, socially and individually, all we are meant to be. For these reasons I hold it a better remedy for the lukewarmness and conceit of our time than all the schemes man's art can devise. We may try by sudden, desperate efforts to revive religion among us. But who are to be the revivers? Do not we, who should call others to repent, need repentance ourselves? Do not we, who would pass on our faith, need it sifted, to see how much is from above, how much from the earth, how much from the devil? We want One to rouse us out of death, in whom dwells the Spirit of calm, eternal life. He does not wait for our vehement solicitation but is ever standing at the door of our hearts, knocking. He does not raise a few above the rest but humbles all that he may exalt all. He does not terrify us into a self-seeking religion but tells us we shall have fellowship with him, and that if we overcome we shall "sit with Him on His throne, as He has overcome and has set down with His Father on His throne." ## THE BOOK OF PROVERBS ILLUSTRATED BY ST. JOHN ::: {.center} Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [October]{.smallcaps} 24, 1858 ::: > "*Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness*." —[John]{.smallcaps} viii. 12. *The passage:* Jesus spoke to them again and said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness." [We]{.smallcaps} begin this afternoon to read the Book of Proverbs. Part of it is aphorisms about the well-being of individuals and nations, which in modern terms we would call morals and politics. The ground of these lies in the earlier chapters: before we are taught how Wisdom and Folly show themselves in daily dealings, we are told what they are. Shrewd observations from a man with experience of the world and of himself are always worth studying. But if they are not collected merely to display the writer's sagacity, we may ask him to show how we can use his discoveries in our own emergencies. Solomon accepts the challenge. His claim to wisdom rests on his sympathy with his fellow-men, not on isolation from them. He is wiser than others because he enters more fully into what is human and universal. He is freer from affectation and oddity, he looks more earnestly and bravely into the heart of commonplaces, and he tells his readers what is true of themselves as much as of him. He lets his silly, headstrong son know that there is a light near him in which he may walk, and a darkness in which he may also walk. Rehoboam was no different from Solomon in this. The same law governed both, and the same unseen Wisdom revealed itself to the search and love of both. The same harlot sense tempted both away from Wisdom, to follow their own courses, choose their own delusions, and destroy themselves. Each had in him what made this tempter powerful. Each was addressed by the Divine Teacher, the true Lawgiver and King of Man, and each could heed a voice that was soft and gentle yet had a might to command that no other voice has. Wisdom, Solomon affirms, is no hard, dreary abstraction, no result of experience, no product of our understanding. It is living, actual, personal. We find it; we do not make it. If we search for it, it will disclose itself. The more we confess it, the more conscious we become of its presence, and the more our understandings do it homage rather than trust themselves, the more free, vigorous and manly they are. I\. Such is the doctrine of the Book. It asks to be tried in the greatest and pettiest details of our existence. It sets itself to judge the policy of kings, and it does not disdain the weights and measures of the shop. It needs no happy accidents of time or place to verify it, and it is as willing to be proved by the follies and sins of those who proclaim it as by their heroic deeds. With what in a work of art we would call subtle and bitter irony, the irony of fact, Scripture sets Solomon before us as the signal illustration of his own warnings. The wise king grows elated with his wisdom. He is charmed and intoxicated by the visible things that had been poured at his feet. He is overpowered by the very images he had taught others to beware of, and he becomes a fool. By his folly he establishes his principle for all who ponder the story, not in scorn or despair, but in charity and self-suspicion, trying to learn where their own safety lies. II\. We cannot separate this Book from the life of its author, and we cannot separate it from the history of the people for whom it was written. It is a great mistake to treat it as a singular document, a specimen of Jewish philosophy, and not to see its connection with the narrative of Abraham and the patriarchs, with the fixed law written in tables, and with the visions of the holy seers. The purpose of the Jewish Calling and Covenant, and of Circumcision, if we take the Bible's language plainly, was to set one race apart to the Living, True and Unseen God. It was to detach them from visible idolatries and so make them a wise and understanding people in the eyes of the sense-bound nations around them. If this was not the purpose of their family order and legal government, if God was not the author and upholder of both, if their well-being did not rest on trust in Him as a present Protector and King of their children after them, if all their institutions were not meant to redeem them from the idols they made, so that they might serve Him who made them in His image, then the story is a fiction from beginning to end. You cannot rescue it by supposing its actors honest, well-meaning, or at worst self-deceived; we would have to treat them as wilful impostors, blasphemers and liars. But if the quiet pastoral life of Genesis bears this character as legibly as the laws given in the Wilderness, if the voice that said "*Get thee out of thy father's house into a land that I will show thee*" and "*In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed*" carried this meaning, as did the I AM from the bush that burned and was not consumed, then the Psalms translate this historical language into prayer and praise, and Proverbs translates it just as accurately into moral discourse. The devotions and the maxims alike presume a perpetual conflict between Life and Death, Light and Darkness, in which every man and every nation is engaged. Both treat the fight as real, not a sham, because the Light does not come from man but to man. It comes not to his eyes but to his own self, his conscience and heart. And He from whom it comes can be trusted: He wants His creatures delivered from their enemies, and means to deliver them. This faith could be sustained in the nation's conscience, and could raise and purify the conscience of its members, because holy men kept bearing witness, through the national blessings and judgments they interpreted, that the Divine Wisdom would one day come forth. This Wisdom is the Word who was with God, "*as one brought up with Him, and whose delights were with the Sons of Men*." It would come not as a cold abstraction or the letters of a book, but living and personal, the one Solomon declared to be the source of all right thoughts and good counsel, the true King of Men, the object of all loyal homage and dutiful love. III\. In the interval between the end of independent Jewish history and the coming of our Lord, it became clear that the sense of a conflict between light and darkness had been working in all the Pagan nations. The cultivated peoples known to us then differ from others precisely in being more conscious of it. They despise the so-called barbarians, however physically strong, as lacking this perception. Yet their clearer utterances interpret the confused dreams of the barbarians and show that these too were engaged in the battle. Every tradition about a heroic man witnesses that he was great because, as the son of some god, he had decided, however imperfectly he kept to it, between the claims of sense and of an invisible guide. The later speculations of philosophers only worked out this material, asking how men could conduct themselves between two such influences, which they should obey, and where each came from. The man who truly believes in the Jewish calling and revelation, far from hiding these facts, will proclaim them loudly. They show that it was a calling for the good of man and a revelation of that Wisdom which speaks to man. They corroborate the truth Solomon illustrated in so many ways. They are testimonies from the innermost conscience and heart of humanity that a Guide was near all, one who could not be found out by searching, though He might be acknowledged in their words and acts. They are a cry from that same heart and conscience that He would declare Himself, and show what He had to do with God and Man, and so what God and Man were to each other. IV\. "*Then spake Jesus unto them again, I am the Light of the World*." He had often said this before, for every act of mercy said it to the person who received it. St. John dwells especially on His cure of *blindness*, taking it as the clearest instance of what all His miracles produced. Each sufferer felt that a power of darkness had seized him and that part of the beauty and joy of the universe was hidden from him. The appearance of a Deliverer who could free him was the appearance of a Light. He was brought out of a cave; the air that breathed on other men now breathed on him, and the common sun shone on him. So it was with the leper who had heard Christ on the Mount and dared to approach Him, though an exile from his kind: "*Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean*." That is, bring me back to human society and take away the veil between me and them. So it was with the palsied man, to whom Christ gave the more astonishing message, "*Son, thy sins be forgiven thee*." A palsy lay on his heart more hopeless than the palsy on his limbs. One saw into the depth of his heart and scattered its darkness. He became a freed, illuminated man, and could rise and walk. Christ's word was light. Entering the soul, it spread through every part of the man and brought health and vigour wherever it met sickness and decay. Whether the Evangelists tell of the words that scattered diseases or the words that taught the people, they speak the same way, because they could find no language so simple and true. He goes into the land of Zabulon and Naphthali, into Galilee of the Gentiles. It was a half-idolatrous region, and Isaiah had centuries before described it as a region of darkness and the shadow of death. Our Lord's appearance there is the appearance of a Light, not to a person here and there but to that whole outcast population. There is no real difference between these cases. The light that shines on the sorrowing or tormented man is the Universal Light, and his blessing is to be brought in some measure to share it. That Light is only doing what it is meant to do when whole multitudes feel it at once. Divines like to distinguish Christ the Teacher of the world at large from Christ the Teacher of each man's heart and conscience, an outward Christ and an inward Christ. The Evangelists indulge in no such refinements. The Christ who was born of the Virgin and suffered under Pontius Pilate reveals Himself, not to the eyes of those who see and handle Him, but to a spirit within them. He calls forth faith, the proper organ of that spirit. He speaks to the man hidden within the man. And there is *always* some answer to His voice. It may come as a stupid yawn, from one half-awakened who longs to sleep again. It may come as a growl of defiance: "What have we to do with Thee?" But either way there is a recognition of the Holy One, a sense of Light, however painful and however unwelcome to the eye. V\. So there is no need of the artificial rules and distinctions that doctors invent to their own confusion. The Light makes the distinction. It is not the distinction between Pharisee and Publican, or between religious and irreligious men. It goes deeper: between that in every man which welcomes the light and claims kinship with it, and that in every man which shuns the light and would gladly extinguish it forever. It is expressed in these words: "*He that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness*." When the Son of Man said to Matthew the Publican, sitting at the receipt of custom, "*Follow Me*," no more force was used on him than on any Scribe or Ruler who cried, "*This man blasphemeth; he casteth out devils through the Prince of the Devils*." It was wholly an inward attraction. Matthew needed a guide out of the covetousness and money-worship to which he felt his circumstances, and something stronger than circumstances, made him prone. His guide had come, had spoken, and had given the command He had the right and power to give. So Matthew became a disciple. He did not know what paths he would be led through, or what work he would do besides collecting taxes. The Master would show him in time; his business was to follow. As he followed the Light, it showed him more of the confusion he had been walking in, more of his own ignorance and folly. The path of life often seemed thornier and more tangled than before, because the thorns that had pierced him unseen were now visible, and because he had a goal in sight instead of wandering wherever chance led. Strangest of all, he found that to follow the King of Men was to follow a Sufferer, whose path was one of humiliation, contempt and death, with a Cross at the end of it. What an end! This, said our Lord, was the hour of the powers of darkness. They had apparently triumphed. The Deliverer was crushed. The Light of the World was put out. And yet it was then that Matthew found what he had to do besides collecting taxes. It was to testify: "The Light of the World is not put out. It never shone so brightly as now. That Cross is the fullest and most perfect exhibition of it, to men, to Angels, to you and to me. Now is that Being manifested in whom is Light and no darkness at all, Good with no taint of evil. Now He is seen in a dying Man. Now His reconciliation with our race is complete. Now Death and the Grave have become great testimonies for Life and Immortality. Now each man who has the sentence of Adam upon him may know he is a kinsman of the Son of God. Now he may follow Him, and when the darkness is thickest around and within him, not walk in it, but see the Light of Life." And so the doctrine of Proverbs, to which the heroes of the old world clung though it reached them through no written book, has become the message of the Gospel. The conscience of mankind has cried for the Light in various tongues, or in mere inarticulate groans, and the Light has come forth to it. The Light of the World says now to every one of us, "*Follow me, and thou shalt not walk in darkness*." Yes, brethren, to every one of us in his commonest work: at the receipt of custom, in the hall of justice, in daily dealings with each other as citizens, fathers, brothers, husbands. In whatever work a man is engaged, he is tempted into a road that looks promising and may lead, and sometimes does lead, to wealth and fame. But it is certain to end in darkness, and is dark all along. A little tampering with conscience, words spoken and things done that will not bear the light, that we cannot quite dare to look at ourselves: where do these lead? To the loss of all moral discernment, the incapacity to know right from wrong or truth from falsehood. They lead to that habit and state of falsehood which is Hell. And yet to avoid these, to keep the heart and reason open, free and pure, able to hold the truth they have and ready to receive what they lack, how hard it is! Which of us does not bitterly know how hard? And the effort would be desperate if our own understandings and consciences had to find the light they need, or had to depend on the opinion of society and the traditions of men to supply it. But it is not so. Jesus the Son of Man speaks now as ever: "*I* am the Light of the World, shining on all, not far from any. In all perplexities, bewilderments and temptations, trust in Me. I will guide you, and following Me you shall not walk in darkness." And for us too, as for our Leader, "*Via Crucis, Via Lucis*." He will use crosses on earth to purge our eyes and prepare them for the Light that will burst upon the whole world when He appears. ## MERCY AND TRUTH NOT OPPOSED IN THE NATURE OF GOD OR IN THE TRANSACTIONS OF MEN ::: {.center} Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [October]{.smallcaps} 31, 1858 ::: > "*By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the Lord men depart from evil*."—[Proverbs]{.smallcaps} xvi. 6. *The passage:* By mercy and truth wrongdoing is purged away, and by the fear of the Lord people turn from evil. [These]{.smallcaps} few words suggest many opposing theories in law, education, and theology. One doctrine we all know well today: if you want to reform criminals, use mercy, since every other method has been tried and failed. Those who think this an all-sufficient rule for convicted wrongdoers usually extend it to disciplining children, believing that severity aggravates the evil it tries to cure. The same habit of mind arrives, without any effort of logic, at a third conclusion: that God's character should be presented to men as pure, unmixed mercy. Only so, they say, can a sinner's hard heart be melted and his iniquity purged. The opposite temper is almost as common, either as a reaction against this or as the thing that provoked it. "Make criminals and children feel that there is a stern law that executes itself and does not lose its power because they choose to trifle with it. That may bring the actual offender to reason, and it is the only method likely to deter others. It teaches the young to see transgression as something that brings detection and shame. It forms strong men, not soft and puny ones, as the other system does." Those who give these qualities the highest throne on earth can see in the Majesty of Heaven only fixed, eternal Justice and Right. The sense of these, they think, purges iniquity if anything can. As we think of the first clause of the text, so we will think of the second. One class says: "The Old Dispensation taught the fear of the Lord; the principle of the New is love of Him. Men may depart from evil out of fear, but they soon return to it. Let them delight in Him who forbids evil, and they will renounce it forever." The opposite school answers: "Vain expectation, contradicted by all experience! What becomes of mere feeling, affection, gratitude, and sympathy when a strong motive meets the heart, backed by subtle arguments for the understanding? What you trusted gives way, and often joins the attacker. The hope of forgiveness you have taken such care to encourage is a standing temptation to take the risk. The tender, sensitive spirit your gentle treatment has created is the most prone to dangerous attractions. Fortify it with fear and let it tremble to do wrong, or you will not keep it from falling. Awaken its fears when it has fallen, or it will never depart from evil." These arguments are very perplexing in practice. The most practical people find, in themselves or in their experience, that neither school can be followed without reservation. But their attempts to follow both, or to find a compromise, are seldom successful. A criminal law that is partly severe and partly lenient loses both the security of rules and the grace of gentleness. The harm done by an education that is rigid today and relaxed tomorrow is proverbial. All wise people say that unvarying cruelty, or the most resolute indulgence, is less destructive of body and soul. And I dare not hide my conviction, brethren, that the theology behind these experiments, which secretly or openly justifies them, is even more terrible in principle and effect. Popular and scholastic writing often puts forward a conflict in the Divine Mind between Justice and Mercy, and a scheme by which they are reconciled. I am sure good and wise men would have found this too revolting for their consciences if they had remembered Whom they were daring to speak of. In prayer or thanksgiving they could not have borne such a conception of the Being whose name is holy and whose nature is one. But rhetoric and technical phrases can put a thick veil between the heart and its object. While we are busy with them we may have no sense of standing in a Divine presence, and may say of Him who inhabits eternity things we would resent as mean if said of a fellow-creature we cared for. By a Mercy and Truth torn apart and set against each other, iniquity is *not* purged, and the fear that such a picture of God produces will not make men depart from evil. Solomon spoke in the spirit of the Old Testament, yet his words show no sense of contradiction between these two qualities and no attempt to adjust them to each other. He assumes they work together and that neither can exist without the other. He does not say that Truth must be tempered with Mercy, or that Mercy must not go too far lest it interfere with Truth. He does not say that Mercy pleads for the guilty man Truth condemns, or that Truth demands compensation for its concessions to Mercy. He says simply, "By Mercy and Truth iniquity is purged." Both are equally enemies of iniquity, equally interested in destroying it, and equally interested in delivering the creature it torments. This was surely the only view that could satisfy a Jew who believed in the God of Abraham. He had been taught from infancy that the Lord of Heaven and Earth revealed Himself to his fathers as the God of Righteousness and Truth. They were to trust in that righteousness and truth and flee to it as a refuge in every trouble. That Truth was an unfathomable depth, but it was their only security. The temptation to honour gods less righteous and less true was strong. The surrounding heathen worshipped such gods, and all the evil tendencies in the Israelites inclined them to join in. They fell into it and found themselves degraded and enslaved. What escape had they? The Being they had forgotten was what He had always been. His Mercy and Truth were fixed like the hills, or like the firmament over their heads. When they were tired of their own inventions, and every reed they leaned on had pierced their hands, the memory of Him came back. There had been a time when the thought of One so unlike themselves was terrible, and they had fled to creatures they could judge by their own standard, images of their own good and evil. In their despondency and weakness it became their only comfort that there was One *unlike* themselves, not changeable and capricious as they were. They cried to Him, and He heard and delivered them. He was merciful and forgave their transgressions. The grace was wonderful and wholly undeserved, and until they felt that, they did not know what it meant. It opened depths in the Divine character they had known nothing of, or only by hearsay. But was the goodness strange, or more perplexing, because it came from a perfectly Righteous Being? Surely not. They felt that only a perfectly Righteous Being *could* be perfectly merciful. To be unmerciful, hard-hearted, and selfish was a chief part of their own unrighteousness and falsehood. Why, but because they had departed from that blessed Image after which they were formed, in which Mercy and Truth are necessarily and eternally united? In the Psalms we see that God's Righteousness and Truth are the refuge holy men run to from enemies within as well as without, from the sins crushing their spirits as much as from the Philistines or Ammonites threatening their bodies. They beg for Mercy, but from One they believe is willing to give it because He is Righteous. The Mercy they beg for is deliverance from unrighteousness, from lying lips and a deceitful tongue. They dare not cherish a view of Mercy that makes it indulgence of sin, or tolerance of falsehood in themselves or others. That view was often presented to them, but to yield to it is to depart from God. It is one of the diseases and enemies they want Him to deliver them from, one of the iniquities purged by His Mercy and Truth. In the same way, they knew the notion of Truth or Justice that confounds it with power or sovereignty, supposing its aim is to exact so much vengeance for so much wrong, and that it must have an equivalent for any delay in carrying out its sentences. They knew it from the religion of the heathen, and knew it because their evil hearts sympathized with it. But when they turned to their true King, the God of Truth without iniquity, they trusted Him to abolish those dark idols of their fancy and to teach them to sanctify Him in their hearts and make Him their fear and dread. Yes, their fear and dread. It is true, as has been said, that the Old Testament teaches that the fear of God is the beginning and end of wisdom, and that by it a man departs from evil. But holy men gave that name to the fear of *God*, not to that miserable substitute, the fear of punishment. It was fear of the Righteous and Merciful Lord, not of some false being, a creature of their own thoughts clothed with their own evil qualities. Such creatures they were not to fear, but to fight continually against the fear of them. The more gracious and blessed their Creator and Lord, the more they were to cultivate the fear of Him. Superstition and idolatry end in universal fear, but they begin with an effort to get rid of fear. A man does not like the feeling of an Invisible Presence near him night and day, spying out his ways and looking into his heart. He cannot bear the claim such a Being makes on his awe, and he longs to trifle. If he can have gods measurable by his conceptions and approachable by his senses, he can trifle even in worship. He knows these gods are beneath him, and he takes his revenge for the effort of honouring them by gross familiarity, sometimes by open contempt. Whatever fear he has of beings whose characters he has brought down to his own level, who are mainly his patrons and helpers, puts him under no necessity of departing from evil and has no power to withdraw him from it. I have spoken of the Old Dispensation. Is everything changed in the New, as we are sometimes told? Jesus said, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." Did anyone see in Him the warfare of Truth with Mercy that we have so rashly dreamed of in the eternal Mind? There was a warfare throughout His life on earth, with foes seen and unseen: Scribes and Pharisees, the rulers of the darkness of this world, spiritual wickedness in high places. But it was the warfare of Truth and Mercy against untruth and hardness of heart. These were united in all who set themselves against His words and acts, and the perfect harmony of their opposites was revealed in Him. He showed that Mercy and Truth are divided only by the evil that seeks to destroy both, and that iniquity is purged by their perfect union. Before that manifestation, the battle of attributes that our weakness and sin produce in us could be transferred to God. Holy men were raised by God's teaching out of that temptation, and the experience of division in themselves forced them to demand unity in Him. But when they saw in a human face the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, a glory full of Grace and Truth, the mist cleared from their eyes. Once the subject nature reflected the absolute Nature, all was calm, peace, and concentrated good. And it was seen that the Son of God became the Son of Man so that men might receive the uniting Spirit of God, so that the strife of opposing feelings and tempers might be stilled in them, and so that they might show to their fellow-men, in word and act, that Mercy and Truth which together, and not apart, purge iniquity. But are we not taught that the Sacrifice of Christ purges iniquity? Yes, brethren, but we are not taught, in the Bible at least, that it was a sacrifice to one attribute to bring it into agreement with another. We are taught that it was the sacrifice of a Son to a Father, whose Will He perfectly delighted to do. That Will, being true and merciful, was perfectly manifested in the act of self-sacrifice. It was the only act that could purge the sin of self-will, which is the sin of the world, reconcile the world to God, and bring the rebellious will back under His gracious government. The iniquity of our race and of each of its members is purged by the Mercy and Truth of the Father, seeking creatures who had become hateful and false because they had stopped trusting Him and made gods like themselves. It is purged by the Mercy and Truth of the Son, uniting Himself to those creatures in all their misery and death to raise them to share His life. And it is purged by the Mercy and Truth of the Spirit, stirring men's wills to bear the fruit of merciful and true works and so be richly rewarded with the knowledge of Him. And by the fear of this great and holy Name men depart from evil. It is rightly said that mere belief in One all-pitiful to infirmities and sins is not enough to keep men from evil or raise them out of it. It is also rightly said that dread of an unbending Lawgiver, pursuing evil with swift and inevitable punishment, is not enough either. The despair of the second conclusion has the same result as the ease of the first. Reckless, unclean living is as much an escape from the bondage of terror as it is encouraged by the expectation of endless indulgence. But the fear of One in whom all Mercy and Truth dwell, separation from whom is separation from Mercy and Truth, from whom comes restoration as well as life, and who seeks to deliver us from the misery in us that we may possess the treasures in Him — this fear, once it is in the heart and penetrates the whole man, will keep us from every evil way. We should never fancy that the revelation of God in the New Testament has made this fear obsolete or unsuitable to us. The Name uttered there is the Name of absolute, eternal Truth and Love, and so it should make us tremble more than any heard in the old time. An Israelite might break through the bounds of Sinai and mock its thunders with less danger to his moral being than a Christian runs by continually receiving the pledges of Christ's Redemption and fellowship with man while cultivating in himself every temper Christ came to redeem us from, the mind most contrary to His. Yes, brethren, this is the awfulness of our position. It is our *moral* being that is at stake. What threatens us is the second death of all trust, affection, and sincerity, or, in Solomon's words, of Mercy and Truth, in ourselves and in the world. This death, to which all other punishments are nothing, may be stealing upon us amid outward respectability, under the shadow of religious ordinances, while our profession looks fairest to ourselves and to the world. Suppose any of us discovers that it is so: that the life within has been perishing, and that we have grown less merciful and less true while using seemly phrases and punctually doing what are called religious duties. If that fearful discovery comes, let us beware how we use it. First, let us not try to persuade ourselves we must be mistaken and that our consciences have been too harsh. God is greater than our hearts and knows all things, and He is telling us these secrets. Next, let us not try by any artificial method to cultivate the fear we have lacked, or to produce an affected reverence for the outward thing or shrine when reverence for the inner Presence has gone. That will make us more false, and probably more unmerciful, since we will comfort ourselves by condemning those we suppose less devout than we are. Lastly, let us not cast off God's ordinances as if they had caused our insincerity. They have been true; we have been liars. They have been saying to us: "He who is Truth and Mercy has come near you, has pardoned you and made peace with you. He would have given you His Mercy and Truth, that you might show the image of both in your dealings with men. If in your shame and confusion you now turn to Him, owning that you have no such qualities of your own and never can have them without Him, He will show you that He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. His Mercy and Truth still have power to purge iniquity, and He can give you the Fear by which men depart from evil." ## CHRISTIAN SERVICES AND CHRISTIAN REWARDS ::: {.center} Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [November]{.smallcaps} 7, 1858 ::: > "*This I say, that he which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully*."—2 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} ix. 6. *The passage:* Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. [This]{.smallcaps} text is often cited with great triumph by those who say men can be stirred to good deeds only by the prospect of a tangible reward in a future state. "The writer," they say, "is St. Paul, whom Protestants suppose to have laid the axe to every notion of human merit. His meaning is plain. He is urging the Corinthians to collect money for their poorer brethren, and he says that if they give liberally they will receive liberally from God. Could language be more natural or reasonable? Your preachers fall into it almost inevitably. You are shocked at the idea that alms are an offering for sins. You denounce at length those who suggest that some offences may be overlooked, or that rewards in Heaven may be won by giving up part of our earthly treasure. Yet is there one of your charity sermons that does not leave hearers inferring that their condition will be better if they help the cause and worse if they are deaf to the preacher? Draw what fine distinctions you like; you suggest that opinion whenever your words are effective. And why are they so often ineffective, except that men cannot tell whether you mean what you say? Sometimes we are to take St. Paul literally and reckon the harvest by the seed sown. Sometimes you speak as if the one had nothing to do with the other. The result is what you would expect: the benevolent and religious efforts of your flocks are uncertain and desultory, begun under some sudden impulse and soon abandoned for want of motive to persevere. In ordinary affairs we act on the Apostle's maxim and expect results from our diligence. In the affairs you call most important, we seem to assume, or half assume, the opposite." These arguments point to a real inconsistency in how we speak and a real feebleness in how we act, and both should be examined and corrected. They appeal to the practical sense that Englishmen value above all refinements of divinity, and they appeal to our trade temper. It is very hard to shed in one region the habits of thought we cultivate in another. If we suppose our main business on earth is to lay out capital for a good return, then whatever we formally profess, we shall use the same measure in our expectations of the world after death. We may rail against Romanism until we are weary, but if this is Romanism, then a nation given to money-getting and gambling must be Romanist or atheistic, or both at once. I\. I want to interpret St. Paul strictly, so I ask you to notice that his comparison is not drawn from trade. He did not avoid commercial images when they came his way; the Epistle to the Ephesians is full of them. He speaks of goods left in bond by the purchaser, of the seal put on them, of the earnest-money paid, of the time when he would come to redeem them. But here the analogy comes from husbandry, not from the merchant's speculations. He speaks not of making a venture but of conforming to a law. The savage who depends on the accidents of the chase is more of a speculator, in the common sense, than the civilized man who tills and sows at the appointed season. The savage trusts partly to his skill and partly to chance. His acts are irregular, done in the uncertain hope of a reward, and when he gets it he boasts over his less fortunate rival. The farmer does best when he attends most carefully to facts he cannot control. He trusts neither skill nor chance; his acts are orderly; and he expects a result that is common, which other men share with him. His fields may be more productive than his neighbour's, but it is *the* harvest he must look to; the sun and rain will not come at irregular seasons to please him. That is St. Paul's comparison in general. Let us ask more closely what seed he required the Corinthians to sow, and what harvest he encouraged them to hope for. II\. I am not eager to explain away the context. St. Paul did wish the Corinthians to collect for the poor, so let it be fully admitted that money was the seed, or part of the seed, which they were not to scatter sparingly. He does not indulge in refinements, and we must not if we are to understand him. He wanted them to give of their substance, their gold, and other things besides if they had them. But notice how much he says about *cheerful* giving, about not giving *grudgingly* or of necessity. So something was demanded of them not only *besides* the money but *before* it, and without it the precept would not be obeyed. St. Paul was sure the seed would be sown sparingly, capriciously and unprofitably unless something directed the sower's hand. These were great demands: cheerfulness and a ready mind. How were they to be had? They do not come automatically with the possession of money; St. Paul hints that they often belong most to those who have least of it. Could calculation produce them? Suppose a man says to himself, "So much of this wealth I love must be given up, to avert a future penalty or win a future reward." Would a cheerful will and ready mind be formed in him, at once or gradually? I think he would begin by grudging, and would grudge more with every effort to diminish his hoard. Under some great pang of conscience, with death staring him in the face, he might scatter freely: "It is worth any risk now. I may not enjoy my wealth long. Why not give it to the poor or the Church as well as to my heirs?" But how sure we are that this disposition lasts only as long as the terror! I do not say it is impossible to keep up a habit of fear, a pressure never quite unfelt. But those who say that such a process will produce the state of mind the Apostle demands are no practical people; they are wild dreamers. We credit this motive with an influence it cannot have in the nature of things, because we resolutely ignore another principle in ourselves and others, wholly unlike it and absolutely opposed to it. We do not acknowledge that a power is working on us to produce a ready and loving mind, and that our true thoughts and just acts come from it. We suppose instead that the wretched calculations which disturb and destroy the sincerity of our deeds are the springs of whatever is good in them. It was not so with St. Paul. So I think this passage is entirely consistent with those which people have imagined it contradicts or qualifies. He assumes there is a Spirit of God, a Spirit of Love, stirring hearts that would of themselves be torpid into living energy, steady labour, and acts with no obvious immediate result. He bids them simply obey this Spirit. Then their acts will be simple and orderly, like the husbandman's who casts seed into the ground, loses it from sight, and trusts it to secret powers he does not direct. They will not be like the wild hunter's, who is always reckoning what he can get by his bow, who believes in no hidden, transmuting processes, who knows nothing of law or a lawgiver, and whose efforts are therefore poor, fragmentary and uncertain. "Do not sow sparingly," the Apostle seems to say. "Sow freely and ungrudgingly, for the free, ungrudging Spirit of God is working with you, to will and to do His good pleasure. You strive against Him and refuse to be the instruments of His loving purposes when you dole out with a niggardly hand what He has given you in trust for members of your own family. If you sow sparingly, you are not sowing as God sows. You are not acting as servants and children of the great Husbandman. You show that you think of Him as a taskmaster you are bargaining with, for whom you make sacrifices only because you expect to be paid." III\. These are the inferences from the sowing clause. But what does he mean by the reaping? What are the rich results that follow free sowing, and the poor ones that follow a mean, grudging use of the seed? In this passage the Apostle gives little help. He takes it for granted that the Corinthians knew what to hope for; they had heard the Gospel to little purpose if they did not. His own words elsewhere, and still more our Lord's, should remove all doubt. 1\. First, Christ clearly promises very rich blessings to come *from our fellow-creatures*: "*Give, and it shall be given you; full measure, pressed down, and running over, will men give into your bosoms*." The assurance is that those who have a free, uncalculating love in their hearts and show it in their acts will receive a larger return of the same. Those who, as He said at the same time, give "*hoping for nothing again*," who have no notion of laying out capital to advantage but give their gold, their hearts, their very selves to those around them because they sympathize with them, will find a greater sympathy than they can dream of. The Apostles must often have felt that this promise, like others from One who does not deceive, was not being fulfilled. St. Paul complained to the Corinthians that the more he loved, the less he was loved. The preachers of the Gospel seemed hated because they carried a message of peace. They sustained themselves by remembering that the servant is not above the Master, that He who showed most love found most hatred, and that He said, "They have hated both me and my Father." Through those words they learnt the truth of His others. They were sure the Divine Love had not been thrown away: if it called forth all that was most hostile to it, that was a homage to its power. In time it would also call forth, still more wonderfully, what corresponded to its own nature. Out of the hardest rock waters would gush when it was struck by the rod of the true guide and deliverer. If the Cross was the great sign of how men struggle against their dearest Friend, it would at last, He declared, *draw all to itself*. The Apostles knew what power of resistance to it lay in themselves, and they knew its mightier attraction. If in their own persons they felt the enmity it provoked, they also knew they were objects of an affection whose depth and height they could not measure. This affection might have been dangerous to them had it not been checked by many unfriendly, ungenial influences here; but they were sure it would have free scope when the vanity that perverted it into selfish gratification was burnt up, and when they understood and realized what here they believed: that they were members of one body, in which if one suffers all suffer and if one rejoices all rejoice. On the whole, then, this was a fruit they received imperfectly and might expect in fulness hereafter. But they could not produce or ripen it by making it the object of their speculations; so far as they did, they blighted it in the bud and brought barrenness and rottenness into the stock it grew from. If this is the reward we desire, the notion of earning it by merit must be diligently cast aside. 2\. But our Lord held out another prize. "*Fear not*," He said to St. Peter, astonished at the fishes that came into the net at His word, "*henceforth ye shall catch men*." Peter had in his own heart many of the thoughts fostered in the Church that calls him its head, and in Churches that disclaim him. "*We have left all, and followed thee*," he said, "*what shall we have therefore*?" He was told they should have more than they had left or knew of. But it was clear they must pass through a tremendous discipline, a fiery baptism, before they could receive the good things coming to them or even care to receive them. They had given up their father's ship and their trade to do Christ's work, and they thought that by and by they would get their wages and be allowed to rest. He never hinted at such happiness. Those who had used five talents or two well should have five or two more; they should rule over five cities or ten. The reward was fresh work, a larger sphere, a more responsible stewardship. To be distributors and doers of good was not a way of getting good for themselves; it was itself the good. If they did not enter into it, enjoy it and give thanks for it, but counted it taskwork to be endured for a time, they could not be ministers of the kingdom of Heaven or enter into the joy of their Lord. For the chief of all in that kingdom was the servant of all, and the joy of Christ was to do His Father's will and finish His work. So the great gift of His Spirit was bestowed on the Apostles not as dismissal from labour but as qualification for it. By this Spirit they were to bear witness of Christ's redemption, catch men, and gather out a Church. By it they were raised above the miserable question, "What shall we *have* then?" and felt that Selfishness is the great curse and damnation from which Christ came to free them; that Self-Sacrifice is the law of the Universe; that this part of the Universe is broken, divided and unhappy because we fight against that law and try to repeal it; and that it must be obeyed by all creatures in every region where Christ's power is fully confessed and His Father worshipped as their Father. 3\. Though continual increase of work is one part of Christ's promise to His faithful disciples, He equally speaks of a Rest prepared for them, which they are to enter. In this world rest and work have sustained each other, and either without the other has been a curse. It must be so throughout the Universe He rules, who reveals Himself as creating all things, renewing them each day, and resting with delight in what He has made because it is very good. In no future condition under His law can there be a rest incompatible with activity, or an activity that does not imply rest and end in it. Scripture does not leave us ignorant of this rest: it speaks of it as the image of God's own rest and satisfaction. We enter it in proportion as we know Him and are satisfied with what satisfies Him. Our fevers and restlessness do not come from too much toil; they beset those most who have most idleness. They come from a dream of something we are to get for ourselves, here or elsewhere, something necessary to our happiness which the Creator does not wish us to have and which we must somehow obtain in spite of His unwillingness. This craving, whether it takes a worldly or a religious form, whether it turns openly to earth or is nominally occupied with Heaven, must destroy peace, and must be inhuman and ungodly. For the peace of God which passes understanding is not a distant thing we must go up into the sky or down into Hell to find. It is with us continually, embracing us, the source of all that is harmonious in the lives and societies of men, reflected in the order of the outward world. And because it binds us together in one, the man who wants it for himself alone refuses it, while the man who would vindicate it for all men and invite all into it discovers its nature and begins to taste its blessedness. He does not strive with God but yields to Him, believes that His Will is the loving, preserving, restoring Will, and reposes in that. I think then, my brethren, that today's text, far from encouraging the doctrine St. Paul denounces elsewhere, is one of the best warnings against it. Once learn from him what seed God would have us sow and what harvest He would have us desire, and our dreams of meritorious services that earn eternal life will seem more monstrous than ever. And the practical English sense which the dealers in these false motives try to enlist will be found utterly to reject them. Plain, material gratifications that can be seized and bring a moment's reward will not be given up for the dim possibility of some advantage in another existence. It is true that our language about rewards is fluctuating and confused; true that our benevolence is often uncertain and *dilettante*; true that the two are closely connected, perhaps as cause and effect. But it is not true that we are too opposed to the doctrine that men must be bribed to do right. We are afraid to dispense with bribes even when they plainly fail. We are afraid to tell men boldly that Selfishness is not the law of their lives, with every act of kindness and duty a graceful and meritorious departure from it. We are afraid to say that no man can live to himself or die to himself, however much he wishes it. St. Paul held that opinion, and therefore exhorted the Corinthians to collect for the poor not as some act of virtue or sanctity but as part of their regular business, to be done as they sow the ground, care for their children, or pursue their common occupations. Caring for children and performing our duties as lawyers, physicians and tradesmen imply just as much a relation to other human beings, habitual obligations to them, and daily self-sacrifice as gifts to the poor do. Family, profession and trade will be neglected, just as the poor will, by any man who resolutely acts on the principle that he is sent into the world to care for himself. Let that principle be carried into practice as consistently as it is proclaimed in theory, let men become what they are always trying to become, and the work of the world is at an end. It is not Heaven we have given up; we have renounced the blessings of earth and fallen into a condition more savage than any yet known. Do you never fear this result? Are you not sometimes terrified by the indolence, purposelessness and hopelessness you see among young men? You want to make them work for any object, however poor or mean, and you cannot make your ends low enough. You try competition for immediate rewards; that fails, or succeeds only for a moment. You try competition for distant rewards and fear of distant punishments; that is less effective still. Oh, try one method more! Do not speak to the base, covetous spirit in man, which Christ came to cast out. Speak to what He came to rescue and redeem. Hold out to that a sure and certain hope, safer than the husbandman's waiting for harvest. Speak of a Righteous Kingdom already established in the world. Say that it will assuredly be manifested whether we crave it or not. Say that in this Kingdom the great blessing is to work for a perfectly good and faithful Master, and to rest in His wisdom and truth. This is the message men want to hear. For in the idlest human being there is a crying for occupation and an impatience of the wretchedness of an idle day. There is a craving to know whether anyone will hire him, who He is, and what His vineyard is. In the most exclusive man there is a secret cry for a reward at the end of the day that is general, not special, not doled out by our narrow measure but according to the grace of Him who gives to all liberally and upbraids not. And in the most selfish man there is an inward feeling that Selfishness has been his torment, and that the Christ who breaks this yoke is the only Saviour of him and of the Universe. ## THE ETERNAL NOT OPPOSED TO THE PRESENT ::: {.center} Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [November]{.smallcaps} 14, 1858 ::: > "*While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal*."—2 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} iv. 18. *The passage:* We look not at the things that are seen but at the things that are unseen, for the things seen are temporary and the things unseen are eternal. [We]{.smallcaps} sometimes speak of Time as a river and of Eternity as the ocean it flows into. Some minds may find truth in the comparison, but it is likely to mislead. It gives us a vague impression, not exactly a thought, that we float down the stream of Time in this world and that Death first brings us into contact with Eternity. Many phrases that have passed from popular preaching into the ordinary vocabulary of theology carry this notion. St. Paul's words suggest a very different one. He says that things seen are temporal (πρόσκαιρα) and things unseen are eternal. He does not call one present and the other future, or say that here he is among passing things and hereafter will be among permanent ones. He feels himself in the midst of both, here on earth. The visible world is around him, and he has senses to take it in and a heart able to enjoy it. An invisible world is around him too. His senses do not take it in, and his heart trembles at it and sometimes would flee from it. Yet he is sure he has faculties for conversing with that world and that his heart will be content with no other. He is truly a man only so far as these faculties are awake, have their proper objects, and are occupied with what satisfies the spirit. His senses may be alive, but he is not alive unless he has something they cannot testify to. Strictly, even the senses are not alive without that. Their reports are confused and inconsistent, and they are overpowered by the world unless he is up and at work to direct and govern them. But how can he gain this power over them? Who will uphold him, and show him that other world to which he belongs and of which he thinks himself an heir, but which seems full only of vague phantoms? St. Paul teaches that this is the very purpose of God's revelations. They show men the Kingdom that eye has not seen nor ear heard, and that has not entered the human heart, so that they may make their home in it and own it as their proper dwelling-place. This is the purpose of all the divine disclosures the Bible records, and especially of the last one, when the Son of God took flesh, preached "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," and suffered death to open that Kingdom to all believers. For He opened to men the nature of God. He showed them the Image after which they were created. There had been righteous kings and subjects; He revealed the Righteousness from which theirs was derived. There had been men who taught Truth and suffered for it; He could say, "I am the Truth," and show its fulness in both teaching and suffering. There had been stout fighters and messengers of peace; He unveiled the perfect Peace that remains in the midst of tribulation. There had been joyful hearts and sorrowful ones; the Divine Joy was seen in its perfection in the Man of Sorrows. So the Kingdom of God that Christ preached, said was at hand, and manifested, is called the Kingdom of Righteousness and Peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost. These are no longer qualities in human minds, subject to the accidents of those minds. They belong to the Substance of God. I\. St. Paul's first words need no verbal proof. Every year, day, and hour of our life on earth demonstrates them. Spring and autumn both witness to them, and we hear them as much in the songs that welcome a newborn child as in the knell over the dead. But suppose the words were changed to "Things *present* are temporal." I believe conscience would then utter a deep groan and a solemn protest instead of agreeing. I can bear the changing seasons, the death of the old and the birth of the new. I can see in that change an infinite beauty it would be a calamity to lose, because I am sure the beauty is not for an hour, belongs to the permanent, and will not pass away. I can bear to see a bright flower fade, because I know its brightness and glory have not ceased and will not cease. If this is so in nature, we have still clearer assurance in our hearts that no sympathy, affection, gentleness, faith, hope, love, or devotion to truth ever seen in a human creature can perish. It may, alas, be only temporary in the man who showed it, a flash of light followed by thicker darkness. But the light has been there, and it has made known something deeper than the foundations of the earth. It came from God and belongs to God. Whatever happens to the outside of things, this unseen thing, which I have felt, experienced, and conversed with, shall not sink into the grave of nature or be counted among its trophies. Christ's resurrection affirms to all generations that it shall not. The Spirit who works to quicken, preserve, and restore is the pledge that it shall not. They echo and fulfil the oath of the Eternal Father that it shall not. So the emblems of decay and death, even decay and death to the shrines of all we hold dearest, are not intolerable. Only the things seen are temporal. When we pierce the sensible veil and ask what truly *is*, we meet what St. Paul declares: "This is not for a season; this is eternal." II\. It would be utterly oppressive to think the present belongs only to Time. I think we would be lost in hopeless perplexity if we identified Eternity with an endless past or an endless future. Is eternity behind those ages, perhaps indefinitely long, in which geologists find the earth passing through its changes before it became fit for man? I do not lament the strength of the evidence that such ages were. I thank God we may hear of them, if only because the dreariness of the thought drives us to think of what *was*: the fixed, unchangeable love that presided over these changes and was to bring forth a divine and satisfying Creation at last. After that long struggle of life with death, what repose to hear: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men!" If we need this relief from the eternity behind us, how much more the anguish of trying, with dates and myriads of numbers, to meditate on the eternity before us! The process is crushing and it is not honest, so after a while it is dropped. No one perseveres in it, however much he feels the need of bringing Eternity before him. He finds himself among hopeless contradictions. He may try to keep up the sense of endlessness by feeding his fears, but he cannot. He casts it off as a phantom of superstition, though something within him keeps witnessing that phantoms and superstitions belong to Time and Sense, and that Eternity is the great Reality that alone gives reality to what he sees. Is it not the revelation of the same Word who was before all worlds, the Son who dwelt in the Father's bosom and delighted to accomplish His purposes of creative love, that makes the thought of ages upon ages to come an ever new unfolding hope instead of a vision of despair? We can think of Him as the eternal ground of all things: they come from Him, hold together by Him, and will be gathered up in Him. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is the same when He said "Let there be light" as when He prayed in the garden "Let this cup pass from Me." He is the same when He rose and said "Peace be unto you," the same in His care of the Church and the universe in every period, and the same when He comes again in His Father's glory to judge the living and the dead. This is possible; this is an eternity we can contemplate. It includes the endurance of every person and thing the Word has created and redeemed. From it come such cheering messages as "Of that which the Father has given Me I will lose nothing," "Given a ransom for all, to be testified in due time," and "Those that sleep in Christ shall God bring with Him." Such an Eternity is not cast in the mould of time. It is not an endless series of years but a solid possession for each moment, a treasure we are to claim now so that we may hold it in whatever new circumstances life or death brings. III\. St. Paul speaks of looking at, and looking into, the things unseen and eternal. He regards this as the highest privilege and the proper occupation of a man. No one knew better that a man cannot be always busy with the future, and that if he were he would be a useless, restless, bad man. We have work to do here and now. Whoever shrinks from it, or does it half-heartedly because he dreams of good things elsewhere, sins against God. But we do not turn men from any task when we tell them they have a right to look into eternal things and that they live and move and have their being in the midst of them. Steady, habitual converse with these things makes men free and bold to act, makes their acts the result of deliberate purpose rather than sudden impulse, and takes them out of the sway of the visible and changeable so that they can rule it as an instrument of their Creator's purposes. If we tell a poor toiling brother to think of death and what comes after, we sometimes comfort him, because he links death with rest. But often we seem to mock him, for what chance has he to speculate about what will be when what is presses on him so heavily? The teacher who says to him, "There is a world of invisible treasures about you that you may enter at once, though you will not exhaust them in millions of years; what is close beside you is more precious than what is far off; what is your own is worth all the tangible things you could grasp with a hundred hands," is no mocker. He tells the poor man a secret by which a serf may become a free human being. What he says to the man ground down by manual toil and poverty is just what the man with most leisure for intellectual pursuits, and every outward enjoyment within reach, needs to hear as much. His leisure to think about everything that meets his eye and ear may be the very temptation to forget that he himself is more wonderful than they. His power to explore a vast circumference of objects may keep him from seeking a centre. His facilities for getting what he can *call* his own, and shut others out from, may leave him ignorant of what is truly his own, which makes his life a reality and not a shadow. So the busy professional man may become a slave to his work, and at last to the material advantages it brings. The man with a world of treasures at his command may become their slave and find them escaping him whenever he wants to use them. Both become feverish and restless, unable to do their common tasks heartily or to draw delight from the things they would count it a calamity to lose. This dependence on outward circumstances is what a heathen contemporary of St. Paul, who had probably never heard his name, pronounced the real servitude. He was thankful that his own birth into outward, nominal servitude had been one means of teaching him to rise out of it. IV\. So much Epictetus can tell us. We have heard such lessons since childhood, and they have become commonplaces. What more can an Apostle bring? A message that makes us *willing* to turn from the visible things that hold us captive to the invisible things that will make us free. Let us not hide the truth: we cling to the one because we are afraid of the other. There is a Conscience that makes cowards of us all. I do not like to venture into those dark chambers of my soul's imagery. "I expect to find nothing there but grisly shapes, recollections of the past and anticipations of the future, that will haunt me in all my works and pleasures. What charm have you for laying these spectres? What poppy or mandragora will dull or destroy this sense of an ever-present, eternal Self, which may make a Hell for me in the midst of Paradise? Do not draw me away from a region where I can hear some soothing melodies and see some visions of loveliness, however soon they pass, only to bring me where there is just light enough to show the shadows cast by my own body! If I am to dwell with those shadows and no others forever, let me have something else to gaze upon while I can." This, brethren, is why we cannot profit by Epictetus's noble teaching, and could not profit by St. Paul's if he had *only* told us to look at the unseen and eternal. Men tremble at eternity, whether they think of it as present or to come. They must, unless a Gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation comes out of it. It is no sham terror, bred by the arts of priests, that I feel when the thought flashes on me, "I am an eternal being. I cannot shake eternity from me. It goes with me where I go and stays with me where I stay." Death then has no look of repose. If it is a sleep, it is, as Hamlet guessed, a sleep full of frightful dreams. It stands out, not as poetical allegory but as stern fact, the twin-sister of Sin, and the two seem to be the powers and realities of the universe. I shall think so unless I hear a voice from heaven saying: "No, they are not the powers and realities of the universe. They are the contradictions of its order, the lies against its Author. And He has Himself come down into this earth and this flesh of ours to struggle with them, vanquish them, and trample on them, that you may do the same." Unless I believed that the voice bidding me turn from visible things to invisible, eternal ones was saying "Come unto me, and I will give you rest," I would not dare to invite anyone to give up even the coarsest, most sensual gratifications, however shameful I thought them or sure of where they lead. I would have nothing solid to offer in exchange. I would have to believe that when I turned to look at the eternal things near me I should find not the dark Demon of Self but Christ the deliverer from Self. I would have to believe that His death proclaimed a real conquest of Sin and Death, and His resurrection an actual new birth and new life for our race. But if I may speak of a Lamb of God who has taken away the sin of the world, and affirm that He is with us and ready to give us the eternal life that was with the Father and that He has manifested to us, then I can boldly ask you all to look at and into the things unseen and eternal. I am sure God Himself urges and helps us to claim this great privilege of our humanity. I am sure His Spirit is always with us to educate us into the inward affection, faith, and trust to which we are naturally disinclined, as we are to every manly effort, however great its later reward. I am sure that if we walk among temporal things as if the eternal treasures were around us, and as if we were resolved not to lose them, they will unveil themselves to us more and more. The Love, Goodness, and Truth at the foundation of the universe will come out to us through all the thick clouds that our selfishness and other men's have raised to hide them. We shall learn that we have the same property in them as in air and light, and that they have power to make us like their own nature and our acts conformed to them. Then with what opened eyes shall we look at the visible and temporal! What living beauty will clothe them, cast on them from that deeper, permanent world they encircle! The fixed order and orderly alternations of Nature will speak to us of an enduring Majesty and an Unchangeable Truth, which can yet show itself in infinite varieties, catch every passing light, and reflect itself in the ocean or the dewdrop. And the endless flux and reflux of life, or what is called life, in cities will drive us to seek, in our daily walks and ordinary tasks, something to rest in, a home and peace that outward tumults cannot interrupt. If we seek, we shall surely find. Every face, however furrowed with sorrow, distorted by passion, or stupefied by self-indulgence, will witness to us of Eternity. For the sorrow, passion, and self-indulgence it shows are the enemies each of us must wrestle with daily, because he is a spiritual being and a citizen of an eternal kingdom. If we think they have triumphed in this or that man, that may make us tremble for him and for ourselves. But it must not make us forget that Christ has died to redeem that man's spirit and ours and to vanquish his enemies and ours. To lose that faith is to make the visible things God has given us richly to enjoy our prison-house, and the invisible things we shrink from and yet confess our perpetual torment. To hold it fast is to wait for the full revelation of the Eternal Life that is in the Son of Man, and to look not for a new Heaven only but a new Earth, wherein dwells Righteousness. ## THE RENOVATION OF THE WILL THE GREAT SUBJECT OF PRAYER ::: {.center} Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [November]{.smallcaps} 21, 1858 ::: > "*My soul cleaveth unto the dust: quicken Thou me according to Thy word*,"—[Psalm]{.smallcaps} cxix. 25. *The passage:* My soul clings to the dust; give me life, according to your word. [We]{.smallcaps} call the Psalms the Psalms of David, not because we know how many he wrote, but because they are the cries and prayers of a king. He is learning to obey and to rule, to suffer and to subdue. He is fighting a battle, for others as well as himself, and he is certain he will be crushed unless he finds a help that is not in himself and that no mortal ally can give. The Psalms are not a collection of fine sentences or lofty aspirations. The writer does not care whether we credit him for what he says and thinks. He tells God things most likely to destroy his reputation among men. His prayers have become a heritage for generations because his conflicts were those of a human being against the enemies of human beings. We count them ours because we are sure these prayers were drawn out of a man by One who was teaching him what kingship and manhood are, and who would teach us the same. We cannot let the Psalms pass into the world of books and letters. They must stay tied to personal effort and anguish. I do not know whether David wrote the 119th Psalm or any part of it. But I find the same character in every verse. It has less connection with passing events than almost any other Psalm. It names no Ishmaelites or Moabites, and it might have been written in a lonely room or a prison. Yet it has the same personality and the same struggle, and so the same power to fit every time and place. The sentence I have chosen contains, I think, the very spirit of the Psalms and of all prayer. I\. *My soul cleaveth unto the dust.* Nothing tells us the circumstances of the man who said this, and there is no need to ask, because the words fit every circumstance and carry us beyond circumstance. He may have been wonderfully prosperous or have lost everything. Friends may have flattered his wisdom and zeal, or he may have had no friend left. He may have been in the Temple daily or surrounded by worshippers of Baal. He may have committed great sins or lived quietly and innocently. In any of these conditions a man may cry, "My soul cleaves to the dust. Whatever luck has come to me, *this* is my state. You tell me I have much to be thankful for. Perhaps so, but I find no thankfulness in me. I can repeat or invent words that express it, but they correspond to nothing within and are not mine. You tell me to hope for better days. But hope is just what I cannot manage, and with it I could do anything; where is it to come from? You tell me to shake off the sloth and despondency preying on me. I know that as well as you. But they are not raindrops on my clothes, or even the clothes; they have hold of me and seem part of my nature. So your advice is wasted. You may censure and scorn, and praise the fortunate people who have been given energy and strong purpose. Speaking of them only wakes my envy and deepens my despair. Their treasures have not been given to me." You will say I am describing a common character, but one that belongs to a serf, not a king, and so one that fits ill the man we identify with the Psalms. That is true only if the king has nothing in common with the serf, if nothing in him could sink him to the serf's level, or if he can spend all his years without finding that out. But a king after God's own heart, trained in God's school, will not be left ignorant of what he most needs to know. He will be a bad ruler, a vigorous or feeble tyrant, if he thinks he belongs to one race and most of his subjects to another. He must learn that he has a soul which, through very slight causes (a bodily sickness, something less, a trivial disappointment, or the mere satiety of success), may be brought down to the dust, cling to it, and be unable to lift itself. The degradation will be felt just in the part of him that seemed most royal. He cannot blame anything or anyone else for the baseness, cowardice and impotence he is conscious of. He must say sternly, "It is *my* soul that has sunk into this torpor and been seized by this palsy." As several Psalms tell us, trying to rally by recalling happier states of mind he once had proves useless. The question is what he can do and what he is *now*, and every memory of the past or dream of the future that dodges it is a mockery. This is a baptism of fire for a man who has had a clear sense of his own power and knows he needs it for his work. He will practise many frauds on himself, trying to convince himself he can still carry gates and tear lions like kids, and that his strength has not really left him. The commonest fraud is the use of a keen wit to detect other men's errors and falsehoods and to show how contemptible everyone around him is. "I can still do that; I still have this critical power. And if I can look down on mankind, must I not in some sense be better than they?" Poor self-deceiver! You know all the folly and feebleness of your fellow-creatures, and why they fail so badly. Then get up and act. Show them brave, heroic behaviour; shame their cowardice by showing what a conqueror of difficulties you are. What, you cannot? You cannot act? Then be honest. Suspend your lofty scorn of the crawling creatures around you, and learn to say frankly, "My soul cleaves to the dust." II\. From this confession, when it is real and rises as a sigh out of the depths, comes the prayer "*Quicken Thou me according to Thy word*." Then a man begins to believe in God, because he begins to believe he is not God himself. He may have acknowledged a Maker of the world before, and in a very complimentary fashion: "Some Intelligence called into existence this system of things, which serves my convenience and comfort. With so many adaptations to our wants, it is reasonable to suppose a good-natured contriver who would rather we were happy than miserable." But the man who surveys the universe, understands the system and talks eloquently about its adaptations: is he not, for all practical purposes, more wonderful than the Being of whom he forms this vague, distant idea and to whom he gives this occasional homage? This judgment, reason and will I feel and know as my own; I can argue myself into believing something answers to them in God. It is not until a man has a clear and painful conviction that they are *not* his own, or that if they are, they will fade and perish utterly, that he begins heartily to confess a Reason, a Will, a Judgment higher than his own and absolutely good, by which his own may be renewed. As long as he believes new circumstances will set him right, he worships those circumstances. When he despairs of all circumstances because he finds the failure is in himself, he is inclined for a time to worship nothing and own nothing but shadow and emptiness. When that becomes intolerable, and he is sinking further into the mire with no ground, he cries, *Quicken me*, scarcely knowing to whom, only convinced he must pray to some Being who can hear. Then comes such a witness that this strange faith is not an illusion, and he makes his petition definite: *Quicken Thou me*. "You of whom I heard in childhood as renewing my life every morning, who are said to give all good things, and so surely these purposes, powers and will, the most precious of all: quicken in me what must live if I am to be a man, but is clinging to the dust and seems doomed to a more terrible death than the frailest insect or flower." The Psalmist did not stop there. He says, "*according to Thy word*." "Sunk as I am, I do not count it merely possible or probable that you will help and raise me. I believe your word has gone out that you will, and that all your revelations to my race mean that you will. Your promise would come utterly to an end, and your faithfulness, the foundation of all faithfulness among men, would not be the rock it is, if I could not ask you with confidence for the strength without which I cannot be your servant or do any task you sent me here to do. You will not ask me to prove that my soul's clinging to the dust is not my own fault, or that I have not destroyed my own powers. I confess that charge. I have sinned against you, who lent me those powers in trust, and I used them as my own and for my own ends. But you are the Forgiver of sin and the Deliverer from sin. Your word declares you so. Quicken me according to that word." I said this sentence seemed to me the essence and explanation of all prayer: the necessity of it lies in a man's discovery of his weakness, and the hope of it lies in the nature of God and his relation to man. As long as the weakness can be traced to anything but the man's own will, and the bondage felt to be in something else, he may ask for rain or fruitful seasons, relief from pain, children or friends. But he will not say, *Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven*. He will not understand that this is the greatest blessing the creature can ask or the Creator give, by which the Creator becomes a Father and the creature a child. That lesson comes when he finds that every treasure he can dream of, or any demon could bestow, is worthless or harmful without a free and loving will to receive it. It comes when he sees that his will can be free and loving only when the free and loving Will that formed it has subdued it to itself. Then prayer is no longer a desperate experiment to force what is better into agreement with what is worse. It is the cry of a spirit after that Spirit who alone can unfold all its capacities, rescue it from an independence that has ended in slavery, remove the curse of perpetual barrenness, and reveal the Eternal Good it longs for and cannot rest without. III\. I have taken this short Jewish prayer as a summary of all Jewish prayers and an introduction to all Christian ones. I chose it this afternoon because I know none that better explains the Collect in which we try to put into words what we have asked since last Advent and shall need in every year to come: "*Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful people, that they, plenteously bringing forth the Fruit of good works, may of Thee be plenteously rewarded, through Jesus Christ our Lord*." This prayer assumes that we in the nineteenth century are in essentials the same as the man whose soul clung to the dust. It assumes that no outward improvement or progress of civilization has made us less likely to become inwardly torpid and incapable of earnest, manly effort. It assumes that the deepest and most rational petition is for the renovation of the Will, and also the most universal, since the well-being of families, nations, churches and the universe is as involved in it as that of individuals. It assumes that only God can stir up the weak will of a man or quicken the corrupt will of a society. It assumes that such quickening is the one security for bringing forth the fruit of good works, since a vigorous moral state is the source of all vigorous moral acts. And it assumes that every act of a right and loving will receives a plentiful reward from God: deeper acquaintance with his Will, a share in accomplishing its purposes, and at last the sight of them accomplished. These principles are implied in this prayer, as in the Psalmist's and in all prayers. The earliest prayer, as much as the latest, demands in full strength two convictions that controversies always set against each other. It calls on the absolute Divine Will, whose acknowledgment is supposed to destroy man's free agency, to give him the free agency which, left to himself, he lacks and is wretched without. And it calls on that Will in full assurance that all its workings, from Creation to this hour, were meant to break men's bonds and raise them from captivity to a throne. But the writer of the Collect can face this great paradox of humanity as the Psalmist could not, for he says, "through *Jesus Christ our Lord*." He prays through the One who has shown on earth the perfect Will of God as a Will to the Redemption and Reconciliation of the universe. In his own person Christ removed the hindrance to it, subjecting the human will to the Divine in life and death and establishing perfect harmony between them. He came to baptize with the Holy Ghost, that wills clinging to the dust might be quickened and Mankind be reconstituted in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the one God blessed for ever. Believing in that name, and that we live, move and have our being in it, we can regard prayer as the organ of man's will or spirit, no less than Logic is the organ of his intellect. We can encourage the most baffled, desperate man to cry, "My soul cleaves to the dust: quicken Thou me according to Thy word!" And one adjective in the Collect may seem to make it unfit for us: we dare not call ourselves "thy *faithful* people" when our unfaithfulness seems the very reason our wills need stirring, as if it had checked all good fruit and withheld every great reward. Let us remember that the moment we begin to ask new life of God, confident we are asking according to his Mind, we return to our true condition as faithful, trusting creatures. Let us remember also that we do not pray alone. We belong to the Church of the firstborn, made up of just men made perfect as well as saints on earth, and complete in its Head and Mediator. That Church trusts God's gracious and unchangeable Will. In the strength of the one prevailing Sacrifice, through the Eternal High-Priest who sits at the Father's right hand, it asks that all enemies be made subject to him, and that all become willing in the day of his Power. ## HOMILY I: ON NATIONAL CELEBRATIONS [This]{.smallcaps} November we begin to disuse what are called the State Services. I rejoice that the two Houses have asked the Queen to suspend the order appointing them. To explain why, I must also say why I cannot share some of the reasons given in justification of that step. I shall not raise the question of the authority behind those Services. As a clergyman, I felt no hardship in obeying an Order of the Queen in Council. If they were National Services, meant to bind the nation together by recollections of the past or thanksgivings for the present, I know of no better source for them than the Sovereign. Ecclesiastical punctilios get in the way of ecclesiastical duties, and so of ecclesiastical power; they are for idle men, not for men with work to do. Many people used the Services out of mere loyalty, though they did not like them. Still, if any consciences were troubled on this ground, it is better that they be relieved. What look like idle scruples are in a thousand cases so mixed with deep convictions that we should indulge the scruples rather than wound the convictions. Another motive for ceasing to commemorate the Gunpowder Plot, the Martyrdom of Charles, the Restoration and the Revolution has been stated very plainly in the most influential journals, and no doubt many readers accept it. "We know well enough," it is said, "that the plot was discovered through Cecil's wit; that Charles died because the army defeated the Parliament; that his son returned through General Monk's intrigues; that William succeeded because of James's confusion and weakness. Why ascribe any of this to a Divine origin? Such language does not belong to our age or honestly express our feeling. These Services have forced us to take up the tone of chronicles written in the infancy of criticism and philology, which gave every event a supernatural cause because the natural causes were unknown or wilfully ignored." Cant, language that does not match the truth of things or the real convictions of those who use it, is odious and mischievous. I do not deny that there are passages in these Services of that character. I have more than once pointed them out to the congregation at Lincoln's Inn, thinking it a duty to God and to truth. But I never admitted, and cannot admit now, that the error lay in attributing ordinary events to God or in too devout a habit of recognizing Him in our country's history. My complaint is the opposite: the Services too much reduce the tone of history to that of the newspaper. They have encouraged the very habits from which deeper awe of God, and a steadier belief that He works in the world's transactions, would deliver us. The study of the past should lift us above the passions and party-spirit of the present. Knowing that we live under the same Divine government as our forefathers should let us call them back to life and feel that their deeds, far from being merely written in books, have helped make our actual England. I utterly deny that it is sound historical criticism or profound philology to trace events that come from a long past and will bear fruit in a long future to petty accidents or some cunning man's contrivances. No historian is content with that. If he despises the mythical ages, one of his pleas is that they could not connect events or refer them to any common law. He prides himself on being a philosopher who sees the meaning of things and shows how one age grew out of another. That is a desirable faculty, unless it is spent in mere phrases, unless he summons the spirit of the age like a necromancer or puts vague generalizations in place of living men. He does this so often that many readers turn to the chronicler, who at least tried to record acts, however little he understood their causes, or to the newspaper, which gives names and gossip if it gives nothing else. May it not be that belief in One who was, and is, and is to come, an actual Lord over nations and men, would save us from the temptations we meet in each of these three sources? Might it not let us profit by all of them? The old chronicler tended to look for Divine intervention in particular cases, some breach of law, usually in favour of his own cause or against its enemies. A man who believes that the King of kings is never absent from His dominions, and never forgets those He rules, may see His presence manifested in special crises, days of the Lord. But he will not suppose that what wakes men from their lethargy is more Divine than the Will that was moving and acting while they slept. The startling event is meant to make them acknowledge Him who was in that place though they knew it not. The appearing of the righteous Judge is not meant to give one part of the nation a triumph over another or to exalt a school or faction. It is meant to make its members feel they are one body, sharing the same blessings and punishments, and to make them ashamed and afraid of their factions. In the same way, someone who really holds this faith could not see History as a dreary series of antecedents and consequents, as one class of writers makes it. Nor could he see it as a mere display of heroic men raised above their fellows, with a right to despise or trample on them, as another class does. If a Divine Will rules the whole course of the world, human wills must be the most wonderful part of the study. How they have fulfilled or refused their work, how they have understood or misunderstood it, must be the most earnest of inquiries, and no mere events can be considered apart from these. Assured that God's Will is to manifest good and put down evil, the historian will be drawn to the best men rather than the worst. Convinced that he can know the worst only through the best, he will look for the good in each man, so as to hate the evil more. He will have no preference for Titanic men, though he must do them and their powers full justice. He is certain that God designs order and government for men, and that no true man exalts himself above others. The true man seeks sympathy with them, and has power over them in proportion to it. So the historian is also kept from uttering oracles like the newspapers, or coveting their power. He cannot survey the world as they do, because he believes it is overlooked by One to whom he can safely trust it, and he only wants to understand a little of His ways in it. The present will then look as grand and awful to him as the past. The revolutions of his own day can be no more trifled with than those of earlier days; they too are God's voices, days of the Lord. If he could keep that thought constantly in mind, every fact would seem wonderful and terrible. Finding out what it is would deserve all diligence, and bending it to serve himself or his school would be a great enormity. I think our State Services sanctioned, if they did not commit, this transgression, and I am therefore thankful to be rid of them. I cannot tell whether some Members of Parliament liked one of them but were willing to give it up to be free of another. My own aversion is impartial: I object as much to the denunciation of Papists in the 5th of November Service as to that of Puritans in the other two. In each case I think historical truth was sacrificed to ferocious animosities, and putting those animosities into prayers and thanksgivings turned a sin against man into a direct sin against God. To call them confessions of sin is monstrous; they confessed other people's sins, not our own. We denounced them; we were pure. What greater perversion of the meaning of God's judgments could there be than to say the evils of the Stuarts' reigns were owing to Papists and Puritans, and that Churchmen and Royalists were not guilty of them? If these were acts of repentance, all that we call repentance in our other Services means nothing. I do not say the Services could not be read with deep repentance, but that was done by giving the words a sense they do not themselves carry, and by mourning that some of those words were ever spoken. Yet it is a serious question whether even this passionate partisanship is not better than the coldness that may replace it. Many of us have perhaps asked whether it would be safe to part with even the vulgarest Guy Fawkes procession, which kept a people mindful of their past. We need not have wasted time on such thoughts, for ceremonies do not vanish quickly. They outlive their original associations, and no one would think of suppressing them until they become positively mischievous. But some think we should invent new commemorations, to serve as lessons in history, bonds among the nation's members, and encouragements to trust in God. If they would serve any of these purposes, we cannot have too many, or establish them too quickly. How good it might be to commemorate the signing of Magna Charta, if we could set the transaction before the people and use it to explain Constitutional Government! But we must first believe in Constitutional Government, as earnestly as the good and wise man now sentenced to a French prison for it and for his love of England believes in it. We must believe in it as a gift of God and a reality, implied in the existence of parliaments and not created by them, and often disgraced by their misdoings. I hope we shall someday recover such a belief, or rather hold it with a fulness of meaning it has never had. But clearly it is not ours now. People joke that Constitutional Government has been weighed and found wanting, and think Absolutism on the whole more convenient. The Statesman may value the Constitution if he can tie it to some party cry; the Churchman finds it godly if he can tie it to some religious opinion; otherwise the first calls it obsolete and the second "merely secular." All classes are learning such lessons. The Aristocracy, who fought for the Constitution in old times, now identify it with some of its meanest accidents or worst outgrowths, and think that when they defend these they defend it, and that when they must abandon them it must go. The Middle Classes, who owe everything to the constitutional principle, cannot see that it adds materially to the country's trade, so why preserve it? The Working Classes have not yet found how deep an interest they have in it, and have an excuse for thinking the phantom presented to them under that name an enemy, not a friend. What chance, then, of a hearty popular or religious celebration of any event connected with its manifestation or growth? A plausible suggestion has been made. This very month is the tercentenary of Queen Elizabeth's accession. Might not that event unite everyone's sympathies? Is it not one for which we should thank Almighty God? I think it ought to unite English sympathies, since it began the most English reign in our annals. I think we cannot praise God too much for it, since it marked an outburst of enterprise, thought and song in our country that we can refer only to His teaching and government. The Queen herself, moreover, was so evidently the human centre of the nation, the awakener of its energies and chivalry, the very pulse of the machine, that one cannot be wrong in connecting the blessings of her time with her. So far it would seem that not only the third century of her accession but every year might be remembered, perhaps with an annual celebration. But I am convinced that this event too could not be commemorated nationally. It would be an excuse for factious statements, and so for the perversion of history and the dishonour of God. Queen Elizabeth would be celebrated as *par excellence* the Protestant Sovereign, and we mislead our people if we give her that name. They associate Protestantism with dislike of splendid ceremonial in worship; she had a partiality for such ceremonial. They think, perhaps naturally and truly, that it is opposed above all to clerical celibacy; by credible accounts she favoured that celibacy. They think perhaps it means special severity to Romanists. She no doubt put to death Jesuits who conspired against her, without scruple, but she was nowise inclined to tolerate the Puritans, the most vehement opposers of Romanism. Her foreign policy may be regarded as peculiarly anti-papal, and I have no doubt it was so in effect. But before we can prove she meant it so, we must explain why relations with France were not more affected by the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, why she endured one of the most wicked of the French princes as a suitor, and why William of Orange complained so much of the lack of help from England. I do not dwell on these acts or omissions as greatly detracting from her character or usefulness. I think she did more for England, and more in the best sense for Protestantism, than if she had thrown herself more vehemently into the cause. She was more completely a National Sovereign, upholding the Nation as such against Papal or Spanish Catholicism, than she would have been had she cared more about the mere points in dispute between the parties. She looked up to God directly as the source of her power, and the Bible witnessed to her of the only foundation on which she or the country could stand. The more these facts are brought out, the better we shall understand her and the blessings she conferred on us. But a national celebration would not bring them out. It would become an occasion for special pleading on behalf of Protestantism merely as a set of opinions, and of Protestants as a sect. The next age would be the same. For the good of the land and the discovery of important truths, it was essential then that the parties she had held in union should stand face to face. The relations of parliaments to kings had to be thoroughly settled, and the Stuart dogma, which nearly confounded the earthly king with the King of kings, had to be exploded. The idea of a Kingdom of God had to be proclaimed, however great a failure the attempt to realize it might be. That age would become unintelligible through the vague general phrases that suit parties well but utterly confound us, as generalizations in physics do, when we try humbly and devoutly to investigate the order of God's Universe and the course of His Providence. Still more would this treatment of Elizabeth's reign hinder us from seeing the obligations on those who belong to Queen Victoria's reign, and from treating the records of her times faithfully. For hers, I trust, will be as national a reign as that of the Virgin Queen. But "Virgin" names a relation, besides that of sovereign, which Elizabeth did not enter and which our Queen has entered, to our deepest concern. So I think the Family and the Nation together must lead us on, as mere nationality could not lead Elizabeth's age, to the discovery of a higher Catholicism. It is not incompatible with them, as the Papal Catholicism she resisted must be. It sustains them against the spirit of Class and Sect, against Mammon-worship and individual selfishness, which are their common foes. The most anarchical movements of our time point the way to such a Catholicism. Without it the claims of the great working body in our country cannot be satisfied, and the noble, the professional man and the trader cannot take their places as its allies and leaders. Without it the idea of a general fellowship among nations will sink into a mere customs union, and even that low form will not be realized. When this true Catholicism in Christ has been attained, each nation may begin again to celebrate the great men who helped establish it and the great crises of its history, and such a celebration will indeed be a *Gloria Deo in excelsis*. Till then it is better that each of us, in his own sphere, work to hasten its approach, especially by cultivating the honest and devout study of history. ## HOMILY II: ON THEOLOGY AND GOVERNMENT IN INDIA [The]{.smallcaps} clergy of London have been asked to join in a protest against a proposition lately issued by the new India Board. Its President has declared that the spheres of theological opinion and of government are entirely distinct. The protesters see in this maxim the start of a policy that would tie the Queen, now the direct ruler of India, to the religious neutrality that guided the Company's acts while it held power. They think England would be forfeiting her national position and her duty to the religion she professes. They therefore wish to state solemnly to the Sovereign why her position and her oaths commit her to a different course. The importance of these propositions is hard to exaggerate, even setting aside the millions in Hindostan who may be affected by their truth or falsehood. So we should not hurry to agree with either of the opposing statements; we should ask carefully what each means. I do not think a statesman as accomplished and well read in history as Lord Stanley can mean that the two spheres are separate in the sense that governors have found it easy to keep them from getting confused. He knows that even those most anxious to keep them apart have found in practice that they interfere. The Romans were very tolerant. Even if some of them, out of habitual tyranny, would have meddled with a new faith as with a new game, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius would surely have been inclined to leave theological opinions alone. They could not. They concluded that the Christian Church and the Empire were rival kingdoms, and that one must destroy the other or make it a servant. That was an experiment on a large scale. I pass over the new Western Empire, where the two were naturally confounded, Charlemagne's *Capitularies* mixing them as much as his wars. I pass over the Middle Ages, when Christians kept them as little distinct as Muslims did. But the Reformation asserted the distinct, individual Conscience, and monarchs apparently had nothing to do with it. Yet every German prince was affected by it, the policy of Charles V. was changed by it, and France was torn apart by it. The English monarch became first Defender of the Faith, then the great champion of the National King's rights against the Universal Bishop. For two centuries the wars of the League, the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil Wars proved that the two spheres, by some strange fatality, will not separate. Did not the eighteenth century, which put questions about the balance of power in place of questions about Romanism and Protestantism, settle the division for ever? Was that not its philosophy's great triumph? If so, the philosophy defeated itself, for the child destroyed the parent. It produced the French Revolution, and that Revolution, by overthrowing Catholicism and Christianity under the Convention and Directory and by trying to restore them under Napoleon, declared from first to last that the two spheres have learnt no more about separating in this century than in the second, ninth, sixteenth or seventeenth. But if the experiment has been impossible in Europe, may it not be possible in the East? Yet the East is where theological opinion, opinion about divine things, has most mixed itself with all human affairs and most affected the acts of government. Every relation of life, all intercourse, the administration of justice, clothing, food and cleanliness are directly influenced by the natives' "theological opinion". Suppose the rulers had shed all theological opinions, formally and practically. They would still bring traditions, habits, indifference and scorn, which would collide in a thousand ways with what they find. A Government that wants to hold its position, and even to protect its Hindoo and Mussulman subjects, would be forced to interfere. Lord Stanley knows these facts better than any of us and cannot mean to ignore them. Nor can he expect a *sic volo, sic jubeo* from a Board not six months old to produce a division of provinces that so many earlier statesmen could not achieve. But he is evidently convinced that government ought not to be impeded by theological opinion, and that theological opinion ought not to be made less sound or sincere by government's interference. I do not think the protesters differ from him here. They would say that native theological opinion often clogs the wheels of government because it is mixed with so much falsehood, as it did in the Middle Ages. They would also admit that governments have done immense harm to faith, more by some efforts to advance it than by any to retard it. What Lord Stanley seems to imagine is that, these things admitted, Englishmen can work together, more effectively than any nation has, to prevent the evils experience warns of. Here again I cannot believe he is really at issue with those who dread a neutral policy and want the nation to do what it can to deliver India from an immoral worship. Perhaps the protesters will seize on the words *immoral worship* and say: "You want to preach an ethical religion to replace that of Hindoos and Mussulmans; we want Christianity, definite Christianity." I presume that is their aim: a message to all the races under our rule as definite as St. Paul's at Corinth and Ephesus, in fact the very same. I will go further. That message was universal, it came from a member of no dominant race, and in delivering it St. Paul had to meet the exclusive national prejudices of his own people. Still, I do not forget that we are a nation and must send out this message in the form in which we hold it. So I take it for granted that, being a Protestant nation, we must evangelize India according to Protestant maxims, in a Protestant way. Let us see what follows from these premises. There is a Society for the *Propagation of the Faith*. Many Protestant countrymen of ours, I suspect, think it would be doing a great and good work if only it propagated *our* faith instead of the Romish one. They rightly admire the pains taken to train men for the service, the colleges for the missionaries' languages, and the devotion and courage of many who have gone out from them. "If only such zeal and gifts were spent on spreading a Scriptural Christianity! If only our Government would favour our Church's efforts as some Continental Governments favoured or favour the propagators of Romanism!" I cannot join in these longings. The idea of propagating a *Faith* is false at its root, and if we import it we import the Romish system with it, for it is part of that system. When we try to throw a faith outward as a formal thing that can be conveyed and delivered to others, we must mean a congeries of notions and opinions we have inherited or adopted: tenets concerning God. The Romanist admits this at once. The Church holds certain doctrines that men must believe on pain of damnation, and bringing men inside the circle that holds them is the first duty. Priests chiefly fulfil it; kings aid it with money, patronage and, if needed, arms. I am confident that Francis Xavier and many great Romish missionaries became conscious of another object, which was unconsciously present to them from the start. To an earnest, self-denying man the name Christian, even the name Jesuit, suggested not a set of opinions but a living Person whom they could proclaim everywhere as Saviour and King. Still, the Propagandist maxim must be as I describe; a Romanist would struggle to frame another that defines clearly and adequately why he goes among savages or civilized men, heathens or heretics. We ought to have no such difficulty. There is a word that told the Apostles plainly what they were sent to do: they were to preach a *Gospel*. That means not the tenets of certain doctors or of a certain Church about God, but His own message about Himself. The Reformers clung to this word for their work at home. When our ancestors woke to our responsibilities toward our colonists, they adopted it for missionary work abroad. In King William's days they founded a Society not for the propagation of the *Faith* but for the Propagation of the *Gospel*. I am not asking now how far that Society's acts have lived up to its pretensions. All will admit it is less magnificent in plans and machinery than its counterpart in Italy. I would say that even in its feeblest time it showed the blessing of a rightly chosen title, and that even in its best it had not quite cleared itself of the false associations of the title it rejected. Its admirers may boast that it has stressed especially our duty to the children of our own soil; its enemies may say it has cared too little for the outlying world. But the enemies, even more than the admirers, would prize the word Gospel above every other and admit that it has a peculiarly Protestant sound. That is the point I am pressing. I want Churchmen and Statesmen to consider earnestly what we mean when we say we have a Gospel, good news, to declare to all nations. For Churchmen the doctrine is at least familiar, part of their earliest belief and education. People may ask them, with wonder or perhaps contempt: "You know these things you are going to proclaim? You are sure of them? You can announce them as true?" Churchmen have always answered, in act if not in word: "Yes, we speak of what we have known and testify of what we have seen. We have had, and often still have, racking doubts whether anything is, whether all things only seem, whether we are mere shadows of a dream. What saves us from that horrible confusion, in which all action and thought are impossible, is the belief that God is. We are in an order, not a chaos, because there is an absolute, living, righteous Being from whom law and order proceed. We see every mythology as a search after that Being, a series of experiments to feel and find Him. We believe that He is, that all men in their inmost heart need Him, and that they must make lies about Him if He does not reveal Himself. So we think He has answered the cries He taught His creatures to pour out, and has revealed Himself in His Son. Our fathers reached that conviction by hard fighting. They were inclined to believe in dark, bloody, hateful gods, and the inclination kept returning. It mingled with their faith in a righteous God who had shown Himself in His only-begotten Son, reconciled them to Himself, claimed them as children, and given them His Spirit to be like Him. But that faith, held amid all inconsistencies, kept them from sinking into the cruelty, superstition and foulness natural to them, and led them to struggle after manhood and bravery. We have as hard a work to keep belief in this Name as they had to receive it. If we take it as an heirloom, we take it surrounded by opinions and habits at variance with it. We have had to grasp it for ourselves, as protection against superstition, grovelling thoughts of God, hateful feelings about men, unbelief in the glory of our race, and a readiness to become cowards and slaves, by all of which we are constantly beset. And because we believe God is the God of Hindostan as well as England; because Hindoos and Mussulmans have thought about Him and felt after Him in their different ways, and their whole history and life have been moulded by their speculations; because it is God's will to reveal Himself to them; and because we see no hope of their deliverance from moral, intellectual and physical degradation except by this knowledge, therefore we will preach this Gospel to them, as Christ's messengers did of old. Call it a theological opinion who will; the other name is shorter and simpler and expresses our object far better." So Churchmen have been wont to speak; so, I trust, many still do. "Yes," it will be said, "that high discourse may do among *us*, but Statesmen cannot follow it. We must talk to them of advancing our English religion. They may not agree, but they will understand our purpose." What a silly, ignoble policy, which has degraded Churchmen and made them unintelligible as well as insolent to those they hope to influence! I say Statesmen *can* understand talk of a Gospel for our subjects in India, and *cannot* understand talk of spreading a particular religion there. They themselves have a calling to preach a Gospel and know it; they have no calling to advance a religion and feel they have none. They preach a Gospel whenever they see justice administered in a Law Court, impose and collect taxes honestly and fairly, or labour through military and civil servants to establish order and put down anarchy. All these acts witness to Righteousness and Truth. They are part of Christ's witness: when He declared God's Kingdom in words, He also healed the sick and cast out devils. Any healing of men's bodies or outward condition, any deliverance from the devils that torment and possess them, testifies against the false and unrighteous powers they worship and for the true and righteous Power we profess to worship. This is the common national duty to which the remonstrants think we are appointed, and this is the distinction of spheres Lord Stanley desires. The Priest cannot deliver one part of the Gospel message and the civil Ruler another. Each, delivering his own, fulfils his portion of the Nation's vocation, and each doing his own duty helps the other's. How does the case stand, then, about the natives' "theological opinions"? While the notion of propagating a *faith* displaces the older Apostolic, Protestant and English doctrine of propagating a Gospel, it is hard to explain; such complications and contradictions are inevitable under that theory. It is natural that a Christian Priest, thinking he must set his faith against a rival one, should be glad of the magistrate's help in crushing what his words cannot. It is natural that the Magistrate, caring for a whole land, should resist that cry, even winking at practices he sees as unsocial and criminal because they belong to the popular religion. But this inverts the proper relation. Naturally the Magistrate is the stern Iconoclast, while the Priest, seeing signs of good and dawnings of truth under a people's superstitions, is too inclined to be gentle. When both feel they have different sides of the same message, and neither thinks his business is to suspect and supplant the other, that will again be the rule. The Magistrate will put down widow-burning or any other enormity, not as a compliment to Christianity, but because it disturbs social order. The Priest will remember that St. Paul laid the axe to the root of slavery not by denouncing it as an institution but by telling Philemon to receive Onesimus as a brother, and he will follow that precedent with Hindoos and Mussulmans. He will sometimes show the Governor how a venerable Eastern institution may be rescued from its corruptions and restored to the meaning hidden under it. He will be sure that a Magistrate bent on his land's moral improvement will be destructive enough of the evil rites and habits that hinder it; to quicken and renovate is the Priest's function. So Teacher and Ruler will be fellow-workers and, to some degree, checks on each other, but in a sense opposite to the usual one. I think Buchanan and the eminent men who established an Episcopate in India, and those who extended it since, served this end. It was not chiefly, as is sometimes said, because they set the Anglican Church in its full proportions before the natives, but far more because they presented the Gospel as that of a Fatherly Kingdom over all nations, rather than the announcement of an English religious system. If our Bishops strive to be Fathers, to the English of every creed and to the Natives, they will be what mere Governors cannot be and should not attempt to be. We know in Europe what mockery and tyranny lie under the affectation of a Fatherly Monarchy; the King who loves his subjects best knows he is the just head of a Nation, not the gracious parent of a Family. But awkward attempts to unite the offices prove the need of both. Nowhere, I believe, more than in India can they co-operate for the blessing and education of the land. The word Education raises a long question I shall not enter. But I believe the hint in this paper might make that controversy less embarrassing. The Missionary School that teaches the Bible presents the native child with a Being altogether unlike those its fathers worshipped. The Government School teaching European Science equally outrages the doctrine of the Shasters. Both bring a light from which darkness must recoil. Both should do their utmost to wound no feeling of reverence in the child for its fathers, only to make it glad to have found what they were groping for. If the Government aims at this for the sake of peace and order, the Missionary must desire it equally, lest he kindle self-conceit when sent to cultivate humbleness of mind. The task of both is difficult and will not be easier if they thwart each other. If they are willing to do God's work each in his own place, He will make the whole nation an Evangelist. ## HOMILY III: ON PREACHING TO THE POOR [We]{.smallcaps} are often told that our sermons are wearisome to cultivated people, and just as often that they are wearisome to the poor. The two charges seem to point to opposite errors, each needing its own remedy. "One class of men must be found," it is said, "who can treat all the subjects that interest scholars and men of science. Another class, with few acquisitions and little to distinguish them from the mass of the people, must understand the people's wants and speak to them simply and broadly." These remarks sound very plausible. They are true and profitable so far as they point to our failure among both the cultivated and the uncultivated. They are also true so far as they call us to examine our ways and admit that the cause lies in ourselves and not in God, and so far as they assume that everyone's service is needed to evangelize the land, each having a gift another lacks. But I am convinced they are full of fallacy and mischief when they suggest that our great want has been skill in adapting ourselves to the tastes and habits of particular congregations. They are equally mischievous when they tempt us to cultivate tricks of oratory to win favour. Such arts begin in vanity and end in disappointment. The preacher says, "I am addressing literary or scientific people; I must show I can meet them on their own ground." They answer, "We might have had a better edition of that lecture at the Royal Institution. Had the preacher no sense to guess that in our own field we might find he was not infallible?" Or he says, "This is a congregation of mechanics; I must stoop to their level." They answer, "Could he not give us credit for being a little like himself?" Yes, that is what both classes require: that we *give them credit for being like ourselves*, for needing what we need and being able to receive whatever is most precious to us. What the noble, the doctor and the peasant long for in their heart of hearts is the common and the human, not the peculiar. The first two must give up something each prizes in order to reach that common blessing, and the sacrifice is often very hard. The wish to make it is often slight, and the attempt clumsy and insincere. Yet the wish is in everyone, and fostering it should be a chief business of every preacher. Though he be neither noble nor doctor, he must know in himself what the struggle is. He must have felt the bitter bondage of being shut up in particular tastes and habits, unable to feel himself a man. And surely the man who has fought that battle is fittest to speak to the peasant or the mechanic. For the hardest penalty of toil, whatever blessings it brings, is that the toiler is enclosed in a circle of narrow tastes and class customs, and escaping into the freedom of a human being seems almost impossible. Noble, doctor and mechanic are right, then, to reject the boast of a messenger from Heaven who recognizes them only by their heraldry, degrees or crafts, and whose word is not addressed to something above and beneath all these. But how can this be avoided? The disheartened clergyman says: "I can tell all men they are equally sinners before God. They accept that all too readily and plead it against my entreaties to live a better life. I am driven out of generalities into charges of specific evils. If I am honest I must tell the rich man his sins and the poor man his, and then surely I must adapt myself to their circumstances. The common humanity you speak of may be a fine thing. But if it means common wickedness, that must be dissected into its elements before anyone will recognize it or care. If it means anything other than wickedness, explain what, and how it can be anything but the most shadowy of abstract names, an ideal for the rich and idle to amuse themselves with, and which the poor and their preacher can have nothing to do with." Imaginary abstractions and vague generalities certainly should be got rid of as soon as possible. There is no greater hindrance to manly and effective preaching of the gospel; they are bad for every hearer and worst for the minister. So it is a healthy desire in those who find that people patiently endure talk about *sin* and therefore speak of *sins*. They strike directly at the particular sins of lawyers, shopkeepers and craftsmen, and they expose the priest's sins most prominently of all. There was a preacher in old times, set before us in Advent as the specimen of preachers, who spoke more than any other both of sin and of sins. He called multitudes to repentance and took careful account of Pharisees, Sadducees, publicans and soldiers. We might do well to ask what his method was, and how he aroused the consciences we find so dead. The answer is very distinct: "*He preached, saying, Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand*." I do not want a definition of the Kingdom of Heaven, which I think would help very little. I would only urge all clergymen to keep asking themselves what these words mean, and to be sure that *they*, at least, are not vague or abstract. They cannot mean "Repent, for Hell is at hand." John's preaching may contain terrible warnings of punishments close at hand and threatening the whole land. He may be as much an example in denouncing them as in this fundamental part of his message. We may understand those denunciations better once we have felt the force of his first words, but the two cannot be confused. Shall we reduce "the Kingdom of Heaven" to "the Christian dispensation"? That is to explain the concrete by the abstract, using a scholastic and indistinct phrase so as not to be troubled by a popular and living one. Would it be strange to believe John meant at least this: "The King you believe is coming to you from Heaven is at hand; He is near; He is claiming dominion over you"? If that were true, would it not ground a call to repent and turn to Him? Would it not explain what repentance is, and how it is possible, better than most digests of divinity? It would be a common message to the open wrong-doer and the self-righteous hypocrite. It would encourage the first if his evil has become a burden to him, and it would be an infinite humiliation to the other, unless his evil is to grow into an ever heavier burden. Would not the man who delivered it be exalting valleys and levelling hills? He would have to testify that there is One mightier than he, a King over spirit and will, who comes to baptize men with His Spirit. He would be certain to say that the One who sends that renewing life will also send a fire to burn up what is false and evil. He would testify that the fire was already kindled and would not cease until it had burnt up the chaff of that most religious and most wicked nation. I have given only two or three hints, such as readers of this course of sermons have often met before, to guide the young clergyman who aspires to teach the poor, about the model the Church sets before him. When he has considered them, I would ask him two things. First, if he could follow this model accurately, might he not have a better chance of escaping the unreality he so reasonably dreads and keeps falling into? Second, can he give himself any good reason why this should *not* be his model, and why he should depart from it, not in accidents but in its main features? Belief in a Kingdom of Heaven established over men, and in a King of Heaven ruling in the midst of them, must be the safest ground for appealing to consciences about their special callings and transgressions. We might say: "The righteous All-seer knew the cheats you practised on your own heart in His sanctuary, priest of the congregation. He knew your vanities and falsehoods while you spoke His words and prayed in His name. He knew your frauds, advocate, as you made the worse appear the better reason. He knew how you adulterated your goods, tradesman. He knew your cheats against employers, benefactors and fellow-workers, poor labourer. He saw these lies. Every lie separates you from Him and unites you to the devil; it is damnation now, as the habit of lying and the service of lies is deep damnation hereafter. But since the King of Heaven is at hand and hates this lying with a perfect hatred, repent. Turn round to Him as He bids you, and be delivered from it as He can deliver you." If we followed John the Baptist, this might be our way of dealing with lies of act and lies of the heart. It might be our message to the seducer and the murderer, no less than to the most respectable self-deceiver. The word would go out to each man, witnessing of One who knew him, governed him and could set him right. It would be a revelation of terror and a gospel of deliverance. But it would involve no cunning accommodation to the fancies of particular classes. It would search individuals, yet it would be essentially human. Yes, human. Our angry clergyman had a right to be offended if he suspected me of passing off a mere school formula about a general Humanity. But if he reads the Gospels he must hear of a *Son of Man*. He will meet that phrase in every chapter, almost every verse. He must ask God (the devil will already have given his own answer) whether it is *only* a form of speech, or whether it denotes a living Person, an actual Ruler, the Head of every man. Let him grudge no toil or agony that brings him to a clear conviction on that point, and let him not think he can preach to rich or poor until he knows. Then let him consider, for I will not tell him, whether the word Humanity is still a shadow or has become substantial. Are men merely a collection of nobles, doctors, tradesmen and mechanics, to be gathered under the general term knaves or liars? Or are they creatures bearing the image and superscription of the Son of God, who may therefore be invited, in whatever place or condition on earth, to cast away lies, believe the Truth, and put on the man created after Christ in righteousness and true holiness? But all this supposes that we have a right to say the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand in the sense the Baptist meant. Many will say plainly that we cannot. Have we made up our minds about the time of Christ's appearing? If not, how can we use the language of one who came to testify of His appearing? I would to God that clergymen would torment themselves with this question this Advent and find no rest from it. If it dwells on their minds with any earnestness, and they resolve that it is the most practical question their work raises, I am not afraid that they will suppose the answer depends on settling controversies about dates. They will leave such investigations to leisurely men without the least wish to intrude on them. For they will be certain that if Christ has come and the King of the World has been revealed, He must be at hand now exactly as John said He was then. He rules over men, dwells among them and knows their secret acts and thoughts. To tell men this in John's own words must be right now if it was right then, and wrong then if it is wrong now. Let us learn this lesson by heart. If it is not true, and may not be spoken out as true, we have been believing a cunningly devised fable all along. The Gospel is no Gospel if it is not a Gospel of the Kingdom of God, if it does not say that this Kingdom is in the midst of us and that we shall one day know it has been. But can we separate this part of John's words from the latter part, which clearly referred to an approaching judgment on the Jewish nation? I have already hinted that I do not think we can separate the words about the axe laid to the roots of the trees and the thorough purging of the floor from those about the Kingdom of Heaven and repentance. I admit that those words applied to the Jewish nation and were fulfilled in it. Therefore I believe they apply to us and will be fulfilled in us. If the same King is at hand, baptizing now as of old with the Spirit and with fire, He will apply the same processes to the present witnesses and stewards of His Kingdom that He applied to those of former days. Now as of old He is able to raise up children to Abraham out of stones. So now, as then, it is perilous to say within ourselves, "We have Abraham to our father." It is perilous to boast that we are different from others, or more loved, because we have the privilege of witnessing to God's love for all the families of the earth. What the method of our sifting may be I do not know. But I do not think that in any age of the Church a strong effort to evangelize the outlying parts of society has occurred without a shaking of the whole of society. It has forced the inquiry: "Have we anything to tell these people that deserves to be called good news? If we have, what is it? Do we believe it?" Again and again an orthodox no-belief has prevailed in the schools which clearly could not be delivered to the people. It consisted of mere lumps of opinion and practically assumed that men can know nothing of God, only receive notions or guesses about Him. The doctors deduced these from the Book that speaks of His Son as the express Image of His person, come into the world precisely to reveal His Father to men. Such, in essentials, was the doctrine of the Church in the thirteenth century when the Mendicant preachers arose. It was the same in the fourteenth, when the Wycliffites and German Mystics appeared to restore some of the human faith the Mendicants had once kindled. They also came to undo the practical unbelief the Mendicants had spread by their scholasticism and popular legends. It was the same in the sixteenth, when Luther declared that there was actually a way from man to God and that the humblest might walk in it. At all these periods a dead weight of theological and philosophical opinion was crushing men's hearts and spirits. The discovery that the people could hear and understand what the doctors said no human beings as such could hear and understand was the reformation of the Church, of philosophy and of theology. I do not believe it will be otherwise in our day. Let those clergymen or laymen who dread such a result beware of encouraging these experiments in popular teaching. They will not end in the opening of a few rooms or cathedrals. The shock will be felt in the hall of learning, the palace of art, on every ecclesiastical throne, and on those higher thrones from which journalism sends its mandates to the universe. It will be felt specially and immediately by all our religious parties. If they enter this movement they will have to abandon a thousand cherished conceits and traditions, the very badges that distinguish them from one another. These cripple their efforts and divide them hopelessly from the people. They may be listened to for an hour while they expose each other's weaknesses and absurdities. But men who want bread will not long be content with stones, and will hurl them back at those who gathered them for their neighbours. Denunciations of Romanism may delight the comfortable shopkeeper, who would rather hear about the Scarlet Lady than about the bag of deceitful weights and the scant measure which is abominable. The working man will soon tire of them, or will draw inferences that would startle his teacher. Denunciations of Protestant Dissenters may please some well-dressed congregations. To the masses they will only suggest the natural reflection that Churchmen have as much of the spirit of dissent, if that is the spirit of contradiction and denial, as their opponents. Denunciations of Infidels and Atheists will be, if possible, still more helpless and mischievous. The merely disputatious and negative will become more so. Hearts crying out in doubt and anguish for a living and gracious God will have the thoughts He awakened stifled by a dead argument or an ungracious sneer, or will be thrust into despair. But there are Churchmen who pray secretly in their chambers and in the house of God: "From the hardness and coldness of our Orthodoxy and of our liberal Philosophy; from the frivolity, meanness and helplessness of our religious parties; from all the infidelity that comes out of the dogmas of our schools and the vanity of our popular discourses; by the mystery of Thy holy Incarnation; by Thy holy Nativity and Circumcision; by Thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation; by Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy Cross and Passion; by Thy precious Death and Burial; by Thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension, and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord deliver us." The agitation about a Gospel to the people is the pledge and foretaste of an answer to these petitions. It assures us that the chaff of all parties must be burnt up. It equally assures us that what is sound in each, what each received from on high and not by mixture with the earth, shall be quickened with new and divine life. The High Churchman must give up his puerile attempts to force Englishmen's minds into foreign practices, or into any rule or custom that interferes with the sanctity of domestic life or with personal responsibility. By that sacrifice he will gain tenfold power to enforce reverence for the past and the acknowledgment of a Kingdom which God established and not man. That proclamation will perhaps be effective with no class so much as the one that has felt the inequalities of a rule whose authority is only convention. The Evangelical Churchman must withdraw his denial that anything in man can be appealed to against the Adam nature that is destroying him. He must give up phrases about depravity taken from books before depraved men will hear his message or believe he has one. He may lose the respect and praise of newspapers, but he will feel that he understands far more deeply and practically than before what Luther meant, and what the men of the last century whom he most admires meant. He will find that spirits respond to his voice as they did to theirs. And neither will be listened to more earnestly, or meet more earnest desires and give them a better direction, than the Millenarian. He is the messenger concerning not the past or the present but the future. Once he casts off his slough and leaves times and seasons to the All-wise, he testifies with undoubting confidence, on the warrant of Revelation, that no promise of God shall fail, that the evil Spirit is judged, and that all enemies of Righteousness and Truth shall be put under Christ's footstool. When the Gospel comes forth in all these aspects, each man speaking what the Spirit has taught him and none contradicting another, it will be as true in England as I have said it is in Hindostan: all men in all lay professions who do their own work faithfully will be preaching it. Medical men have preached it to the poor in their houses and in hospitals far better than we have, and have witnessed far more of Christ the Healer of Sicknesses. Every sanitary reformer who declares that disease and death can and ought to be resisted in every alley and cabin shames us by his faith in the Conqueror of Death. Is it wonderful that many think a clergyman might better devote himself to such works, to encouraging saving habits among the poor, or to giving them a living interest in their country's politics, than to uttering words that often become mere sounds and seem to spread death rather than life? None can tell how strong that temptation is in some minds. But it can and must be fought. The messenger of God's will and of God's Redemption is needed so that the work of the Physician, the Sanitary Reformer and the genuine Politician may not lose all its energy and reward. All alike must combat pride, selfishness and the forms of vice and corruption they breed. A Baptism of the Spirit and of fire is needed as much for the physical as for the moral regeneration of the earth and of man. It must begin in the highest region of the Will, and it cannot cease until it has purified all the forms of Society, of Nature and of man's inventions. In daring to say we have a Gospel to the poor, we affirm that nothing in His creation is so low that He does not design to raise it, and nothing so marred that He would not restore it to perfection. A hard, notional, scholastic orthodoxy, or an artificial uniformity, may shut the poor man out of the Kingdom Christ's death opened to him. But the living name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the One God, excludes none and embraces all. While we declare that Name to men, we justify their highest and boldest desires after the knowledge of that which is, and encourage them to seek it in every region where men have ever longed for it. We also meet the necessities of the humblest wayfarer, telling him that there is a blessing on all his Work, and that he has a Rest and a Home. ## NOTE ON THE SECOND HOMILY Much evidence for the doctrine of this Homily is, I think, pouring in from different quarters. Intelligent officials complain against the practice of giving Government aid to the secular teaching in Missionary Schools. Should the Missionary want such aid? Does it not cramp his efforts by forcing on him a division he should not make, one he could only be tempted to make by imagining he has a thing called a Faith or Religion to teach, and other things that have nothing to do with it? Colonel Edwardes has also given important help to our conclusions. He goes beyond all my conceptions of how layman and clergyman should stand to each other: he would confiscate the property of the Hindoo Temples and the Mosques. Even from a soldier, this is startling. In his well-known work he boasted that in his province, which presumably no news of the Clive or Hastings policy had ever reached, an Englishman was thought incapable of an untruth. Can we keep that enviable, glorious, though somewhat perilous reputation if the acts he recommends are carried out? But *we* have another reason to protest. We know the Gospel grew mightily in Ephesus under an Apostle whom an impartial witness declared no plunderer of temples and no blasphemer of the Ephesian Goddess. Endued, as we believe, with powers from above, he used them to heal the sick and to show that the God he spoke of gives all good things. We also know that three centuries later in Alexandria a Bishop quite unlike Saul of Tarsus, aided and encouraged by the Imperial Government, led a mob to destroy the Temple of Serapis. We know what came of that effort to assert the true faith: it never became so false, so mixed with heathen abominations, as after it had so recklessly disposed of the outward symbols of heathen worship. We know Alexandria was destined in God's counsels to be trodden underfoot by the Moslem, who was a better witness against idolatry than the Christian. We clergymen believe, as we must, that the success of the one experiment and the failure of the other follow necessarily from obedience and disobedience to the commands and example of our Lord Jesus Christ. In His name we must therefore adjure the Government not to imitate the Emperor of Constantinople, lest it be said that, while bearing the name of the Crucified, they have in practice been converted to the maxims of Juggernaut or of Mahomet.