We are often told that our sermons are utterly wearisome to cultivated people. We are told as often that our sermons are utterly wearisome to the poor. The charges seem as if they pointed to opposite errors, as if there must be a special remedy for each. “One class of men must be found,” it is frequently said, “who are competent to treat of all the subjects in which scholars and men of science are interested; another, who, having few acquisitions, and little to distinguish them from the mass of the people, shall understand their wants, and shall speak to them simply and broadly.”
These remarks have a very plausible sound. So far as they refer to the inefficiency of our ministrations among the cultivated and the uncultivated,—so far as they involve a call upon us to consider our ways, and to own that the cause of our failure is in ourselves and not in God,—so far as they assume that the services of all are needed for evangelizing the land, and that each has some gift which is not bestowed on another,—so far they are not only plausible, but true and profitable. They are, I am convinced, full of fallacy and full of mischief, so far as they suggest that our great want has been want of skill in adapting ourselves to the tastes and habits of particular congregations,—so far as they tempt us to cultivate certain tricks of oratory for the purpose of recommending ourselves to them. All these arts commence in vanity, end in disappointment. “I am about to address literary or scientific people. I must show that I can meet them on their own ground.” “We might have got a rather better edition of that kind of lecture at the Royal Institution. Had the preacher really not sense to guess that in our own walk we might discover he was not infallible?”—“It is a congregation of mechanics. I must stoop to their level.”—“Could not the preacher give us credit for being a little like himself?”
Yes! that is what both require,—that we should give them credit for being like ourselves, for needing what we need, for having a capacity to receive whatever is most precious to us. The common and the human, not the peculiar, is what in his heart of hearts the noble, the doctor, the peasant sighs for. That the first two must give up something which each prizes in order to attain that common blessing,—that the sacrifice is often very hard,—there can be no doubt. The wish for a surrender is often slight; the attempt to make it, clumsy and insincere; yet it is in every one; to foster it should be a chief business of every preacher. In his own self he must know what the struggle is, though he may be neither noble nor doctor; he must have experienced the bitter bondage of being shut up in particular tastes and habits, of being unable to feel himself a man. And surely he who has fought this battle is fittest also to speak to the peasant or the mechanic. For what is the hardest penalty of that toil, which, taken by itself, has so many blessings? This; that the toiler is enclosed in a circle of narrow tastes and habits; that for him to emerge out of his individual propensities, out of the customs of his class, that he may take up the freedom of a human being, appears almost impossible. How right, then, that noble, doctor, mechanic, should alike repudiate the boast of a man to be a messenger from Heaven, who only recognizes them by their heraldry, their degrees, or their crafts——whose word is not addressed to something above and beneath all these!
But how can it be avoided? “I can, no doubt,” the disheartened clergyman says, “assure all men that they are equally sinners before God. They accept the announcement all too readily. They plead it against my entreaties that they would lead a nobler and better life. I am driven out of generalities into charges of specific evils. I must, if I am honest, tell the rich man of his sins, the poor man of his. But if I do this, I must surely adapt myself to their circumstances and conditions. The common humanity you speak of is, perhaps, a very fine thing. But if it means common wickedness, that must be dissected into its elements before any one can recognize it or care about it. If it means anything but wickedness, pray explain what that is; how it is to become aught but the most shadowy, the most imaginary of all abstract names; an ideal with which the rich and lazy may amuse themselves—with which the poor, and the preacher to the poor, can have nothing to do.”
Assuredly imaginary abstractions and vague generalities should be got rid of as soon as possible; there can be no greater hindrance to all manly and effectual preaching of the gospel. They are as bad for one set of persons as another; worst of all for the minister. It is therefore a healthy and laudable desire which those manifest, who, finding that people are exceedingly patient of being talked to about sin, proceed to speak of sins, striking directly at the peculiar sins of lawyers, shopkeepers, handicraftsmen, those of the priest not being omitted, but prominently exposed. And as we know that there was a preacher in old times—proposed to us in Advent time as the specimen of preachers—who, more than any other, spoke both of sin and of sins, who called multitudes to repentance, and took careful account of Pharisees, Sadducees, publicans, and soldiers, we might do well to inquire what his method of teaching was, how he aroused the consciences which we find to be so dead.
The answer is very distinct. “He preached, saying, Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” I do not want to get a definition of the Kingdom of Heaven; a definition of it would, I believe, help very little. I only would conjure all clergymen to be asking themselves continually what these words mean; to be assuring themselves that they, at all events, are not vague or abstract. It cannot, of course, mean, “Repent, for Hell is at hand.” There may be terrible warnings in John’s preaching, warnings of punishments very close at hand, punishments threatening the whole land. He may be as much an example to us in the denunciation of those punishments as he is in this, the fundamental part of his message. It may be we shall understand those denunciations much better when we have felt the force of his first words; but they cannot be confounded together. Shall we then reduce “the Kingdom of Heaven” into “the Christian dispensation”? Surely that is betaking ourselves to the abstract for the sake of explaining the concrete, to a phrase at once scholastic and indistinct, that we may not be tormented by one that is popular and living. Would it be very strange to believe that when John said, “A Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” he meant this at least, whatever more he may have meant, “The King who you believe is coming to you from Heaven is at hand; He is near; He is claiming dominion over you”? Would not that announcement, if it were true, be the ground for a call to repent and turn to Him? Would it not explain, better than most digests of divinity explain, what repentance is, and how it is possible? Would it not make the message a common message to the open wrong-doer, and the self-righteous hypocrite; only one which has encouragement for the first, if his evil has become a burden to him,—an infinite humiliation to the other, if his evil is not to become an ever-increasing and more intolerable burden? Would not the deliverer of this message be indeed exalting valleys and levelling hills? Would it not be necessary for such a one to testify that there was a Mightier than he, a King over the spirit and the will, Who comes to baptize men with His Spirit? Would not such a one be certain to say that He who sends that renovating power and life, will also send a fire to burn up what is false and evil? Would he not testify that that fire was even then kindled, and that it would not cease till it had burnt up the chaff of that most religious and most wicked nation?
I have given but two or three hints, such as the readers of this course of sermons will often have met with before, to guide the thoughts of the young clergyman who aspires to be a teacher of the poor, respecting the model which the Church sets before him. When he has considered them, I would venture to ask him, first: Whether, if he could follow this model accurately, he might not have a better chance of escaping from the unreality which he so reasonably dreads, and into which he so continually finds himself falling? Secondly: Whether he can give himself any good reason why this should not be his model; why he should deviate from it, not in accidental points, but in its main characteristic features?
The belief in a Kingdom of Heaven established over men, of a King of Heaven who is ruling in the midst of them, must be the safest ground for all appeals to the consciences of men respecting their special callings and special transgressions. “The righteous All-seer was acquainted with the cheats which thou wert practising with thy own heart in His sanctuary, with thy vanities and falsehoods whilst thou wert speaking His words and offering prayers in His name, priest of the congregation! And with thy frauds, how thou didst strive to make the worse appear the better reason, advocate in the law courts! And with thy frauds, how thou didst adulterate thy commodities, tradesman of the shop! And with all thy cheats against thy employers or benefactors or helpers or fellow-workers, poor labourer of the day! He saw these lies. And surely every lie is separating thee from Him, is uniting thee to the devil, is damnation now; even as the habit of lying, the service of lies, is the deep damnation here-after. But since the King of Heaven is at hand, since He hates this lying of thine with a perfect hatred, repent, turn round to Him, as He is bidding thee do; be delivered from it, as He can deliver thee.” If we could follow John the Baptist’s example, this might be our way of dealing with lies of act and lies of the heart. This might be our message to the seducer and the murderer, no less than to the most respectable self-deceiver. The word would go forth, witnessing to each man of One who knew him, governed him, could set him right. It would be a revelation of terror; it would be a gospel of deliverance.
But it would imply no cunning accommodation to the fancies and notions of particular classes. It would be searching to individuals, but it would be essentially human. Yes, human. For though our angry clergyman had a right to be offended with me when he suspected I was talking to him about the notion of a general Humanity, so passing off a mere school formula upon him, yet he must submit, if he reads the Gospels, to hear of a Son of Man. He must be confronted with that form of speech in every chapter, almost in every verse. He must ask God (the devil will have given him his answer already) whether it is only a form of speech,—whether it does not denote a living Person, an actual Ruler, the Head of every man? Let him grudge no toil or agony which brings him to a clear conviction on that point. Let him not think that he can preach to rich or poor till he knows. And then let him consider—for I will not tell him whether the word Humanity is still a shadow or has become substantial; whether men are merely a collection of nobles, doctors, tradesmen, mechanics, to be gathered under the one general term, knaves or liars; or whether they are not creatures bearing the image and superscription of the Son of God, and who therefore may be invited, whatever be their places or conditions on earth, to cast away lies, to believe in the Truth, and so to put on the man who is created after Christ in righteousness and true holiness.
But all this is on the supposition that we have a right to speak of the Kingdom of Heaven being at hand in the sense in which the Baptist spoke of its being at hand. Can we do this, or not? Many will say distinctly that we cannot. For have we made up our minds as to the time of Christ’s appearing? If not, how can we adopt the language of one who came to testify of His appearing? Would to God that clergymen would torment themselves with this question during this present season of Advent,—that they might have no rest from it! If it dwells on their minds with any earnestness,—if they resolve that it is the most practical of all questions demanded by the work they have to do,—I am not afraid that they should ultimately suppose the solution of it to depend upon the settlement of controversies about dates. They will leave leisurely men to occupy themselves with such investigations, and will not care the least to intrude upon them. For they will be certain that if Christ has come, if the King of the World has been revealed, He must be at hand now, precisely as John the Baptist said He was then, ruling over men, dwelling among them, acquainted with their secret acts and secret thoughts. And to tell men this, precisely in the words that John the Baptist used, must be right now if it was right then, wrong then if it is wrong now. Oh, let us learn this lesson by heart! We have been believing a cunningly devised fable all along, if this is not true, and may not be spoken out as true. The Gospel is no Gospel at all 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 know one day that it has been in the midst of us.
But can we separate this part of John the Baptist’s words from the latter part? And did not that part distinctly refer to an approaching judgment of the Jewish nation? I have hinted already that I do not think we can separate the words respecting the axe which is laid to the roots of the trees and the thorough purging of the floor, from those which concern the Kingdom of Heaven and repentance. I quite admit that those words applied to the Jewish nation, and were fulfilled to the Jewish nation. Therefore I believe they apply to us, and will be fulfilled to us. If the same King is at hand, if He is baptizing now as of old with the Spirit and with fire, it cannot be but that He will apply the same processes to those who are the appointed witnesses and stewards of His Kingdom now, which He used with those who were the appointed stewards and witnesses of it in former days. It cannot be but that now, as of old, He is able out of stones to raise up children to Abraham, and that therefore now, as of old, it is perilous to say within ourselves, “We have Abraham to our father;” to boast that we are different from others, or more loved than others, because on us has been conferred the privilege of witnessing of God’s love to all the families upon earth.
What the kind or method of our sifting may be I know not. But I do not think that there has been in any age of the Church a strong effort to evangelize the outlying portions of society, which has not been coincident with a shaking in the whole of that society, —which has not forced on the inquiry, “Have we anything to tell these people which deserves to be called good news? If we have, what is it? Do we believe it?” Again and again there has been found an orthodox no-belief prevailing in the schools, which clearly could not be delivered to the people because it consisted of mere lumps of opinion; because it practically assumed that men could know nothing of God, that they could only receive certain notions or guesses about Him, which doctors deduced from the Book that spake of His Son as the express Image of His person, as having come into the world for the express purpose of revealing His Father to men. Such in essentials was the doctrine of the Church in the thirteenth century, when the Mendicant preachers arose; in the fourteenth century, when the Wycliffites and the German Mystics appeared to restore some of that human faith which the Mendicants had once kindled, and to undo the practical unbelief which they by their scholasticism and their popular legends had been propagating; in the sixteenth century, when Luther stood up to declare that there was actually a way from man to God, and that the humblest people might walk in that way. At all these periods there was a dead weight of opinion, theological and philosophical, which was crushing down the hearts and spirits of men. The discovery that the people could hear and understand what the doctors said no human beings as such were capable of hearing and understanding, was the reformation of the Church, of philosophy, of theology.
I do not believe that it will be otherwise in our day. Let those clergymen or laymen who dread such a result beware how they encourage these experiments of popular teaching! They will not, cannot, terminate in the opening of a few rooms or a few cathedrals. The shock of them will be felt in the hall of learning, in the palace of art, on every ecclesiastical throne, on those higher thrones whence journalism sends forth its mandates to the universe. Specially and immediately will it be felt by all our religious parties. If they will enter into this movement, they will be obliged to abandon a thousand conceits and traditions which they prize very dearly, which are the very badges that distinguish them from each other. These will be found to palsy all their efforts, to divide them hopelessly from the people. They may indeed 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. They will hurl them back at those who have 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 grow weary of them, or will draw inferences from them which would somewhat startle his teacher. Denunciations of Protestant Dissenters may please some well-dressed congregations; they will only suggest to the masses the natural and reasonable 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, if possible, be more helpless, more mischievous still. Those who are merely disputatious and negative will become more disputatious and negative; hearts which in their doubt and anguish are crying out for a living and gracious God, will have thoughts which He has 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 which comes out of the dogmas of our schools and out of 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.” To these petitions the agitation respecting a Gospel to the people is the pledge and foretaste of an answer. If it is an assurance that the chaff of all parties must be burnt up, it is also an assurance that what is sound in each, what each has received from on high, not contracted by its mixture with the earth, shall be quickened with a new and divine life. If the High Churchman must give up his puerile attempts to force the minds of Englishmen into the imitation of foreign practices or into the acceptance of any rule or custom which interferes with the sanctity of domestic life or with personal responsibility, he will acquire by that sacrifice tenfold power in enforcing the reverence for the past and the acknowledgment of a Kingdom which God established, and not man; that proclamation will perhaps be effectual with no class so much as with the one which has felt the inequalities of a rule deriving its authority only from convention. If the Evangelical Churchman must withdraw his denial that there is anything in man which can be appealed to against the Adam nature that is destroying him, if he must give up phrases about depravity which he has got out of books, before he can bring depraved men to hear his message or to believe that he has one, he may lose the respect and praise of newspapers, but he will have the compensation of feeling that he understands far more deeply and practically than he ever did what Luther meant; what the men of the last century, whom he admires most, meant; he will find that there are responses from spirits to his voice as there were to theirs. And neither of them will be more earnestly listened to, will meet more earnest desires and will give them a better direction, than the Millenarian—the messenger not concerning the past or the present, but the future, when he casts off his slough, leaves times and seasons to the All-wise, but testifies, with undoubting confidence on the warrant of His Revelation, that no one promise of God shall fail, that the evil Spirit is judged, that all enemies of Righteousness and Truth shall be put under Christ’s footstool.
When the Gospel comes forth in all these different aspects, each man speaking that which the Spirit has taught him, none contradicting the other, it will be as true in England as I have said it is in Hindostan, that all men, in all lay professions, who do their own work faithfully, will be preaching it. How much better, medical men have preached it to the poor at their houses and in hospitals than we have done! How far more they have witnessed of Christ the Healer of Sicknesses! How every sanitary reformer who declares that disease and death can be resisted, 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 should think that a clergyman might better devote himself to these works, or to the encouragement of saving habits among the poor, or to giving them a living interest in the politics of their country, than to the uttering of words which often pass into mere sounds, which often seem as if they were spreading death rather than life through the land? The temptation to that belief is strong in some minds; none can tell how strong. But it can be, and it must be, fought against. The messenger of God’s will to men—of God’s Redemption to men—is needed, that the work of the Physician, of the Sanitary Reformer, of the genuine Politician, may not lose all its energy and all its reward. All alike have to combat with pride, with selfishness, and with the different forms of vice and corruption of which these are the parents. 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; it cannot cease till it has purified all the forms of Society, of Nature, of man’s inventions. In daring to say we have a Gospel to the poor, we affirm that there is nothing in His creation so low but He designs to raise it, nothing so marred but that He would restore it to its perfection. A hard, notional, scholastic orthodoxy, an artificial uniformity, may shut the poor man out of that Kingdom which Christ’s death opened to him. But the living name of the Father, of the Son, of the Holy Ghost, the One God, excludes none, embraces all. While we declare that Name to men, we are justifying the highest and boldest desires of men after the knowledge of that which is; we are encouraging them to seek that knowledge in every region where men have ever longed for it. We are meeting also the necessities of the humblest wayfarer. We are telling him that there is a blessing on all his Work, that he has a Rest and a Home.