Septuagesima Sunday
February 20, 1859
“And He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.” —Malachi iii. 3.
In pursuing the subject which was suggested by the Epiphany services, I passed over a topic of which this month of February specially reminds us. To it belongs the festival which used to be called Candlemas, that which is described in the Prayer-book as the festival of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, or of the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin.
I have no doubt that many said in their hearts, if not with their lips, when they noticed this service, “Here is one of the relics of a bygone time! If we ever complete the Reformation which was begun three centuries ago, this is one of the superstitions which we shall get rid of.” Let me say a few words to you on that point before I proceed to the examination of my text.
The Reformers of the sixteenth century spoke on this wise. They said—“Men have been defrauded of the Gospel. A mere law has been substituted for it. The Law shows us our evil. The Gospel shows us how God emancipates us from it. By suppressing the last, our priests have been obliged to mitigate and reduce the first. They have granted indulgences for evils which it pronounces to be accursed, because they would not testify to men that the same God who sent His Law into the world to condemn us for sin, sent His Son into the world to save us from our sins. They have prevented us from being righteous and doing righteousness, because they would not declare to us that Christ had fulfilled all Righteousness, and had invited us by faith to put on His Righteousness.”
These being the maxims or principles upon which whatever was best and truest in that Reformation rested,—the maxims and principles which have won for it the sympathy of those who have sympathized with it most,—it was the duty of the Reformers to see that sure and authentic testimonies were given to men that a Gospel had really come into the world, that Christ had really fulfilled the law. The evil which had need to be corrected was, that men were denying this practically, if not in words. They sought to win God’s forgiveness by acts and services of their own, because they did not heartily believe that one complete sacrifice had been offered and had been accepted. They invented purifications of their own, because they did not believe that one great Purifier had appeared, and had been presented to His Father in substance of our flesh.
Our Reformers, therefore, I conceive, did not dream that they were making a concession to the notions and errors which they desired to expel, when they taught men, in their ordinary united devotions, to recollect what had been accomplished for the world. They thought they were asserting their own principle in the strongest form. If they were claiming an old service for this purpose, so much the better. They were bearing a stronger witness that their truth was not a new one—not an invention of theirs—but had been implied in the earliest Christian acts of devotion. They did not suppose that it was making men superstitious, to fix, as far as they could, facts in their memories, the forgetfulness of which was the cause of their superstitions. They did not suppose that it was inflicting a burden upon men’s consciences, to teach them what the Lord of All had done to give them pure and free consciences. Every memorial feast which the Jews were directed by God to keep under the Old Dispensation, was a record of a deliverance which had been wrought out for them, of a relation between them and Him which had been established. The Bible tells us that when they became careless of their memorial feasts they ceased to believe in their Deliverer; they became the slaves of idols. It tells us that when they forgot these memorial feasts, they lost the sense of the relation between them and Him which He had revealed, and went about to create such a relation by schemes of their own. The Reformers believed the Bible. They did not think its assertions were false and unimportant, or its warnings obsolete. That method which was good to preserve the Jews in a recollection of the facts of their History, might preserve Christians from confounding the facts of the New Testament with the Legends which had been grounded upon them. The method which reminded them that the great King was in the midst of them who had brought them out of darkness into light, out of subjection to their own natures into covenant with Him, might be good to assure Christian men that the living God was in the midst of them, that He had set up His Son’s kingdom among them, that He had taken them into covenant with Him, that He had redeemed them to be His children.
So they thought. And we are told that in order to show our gratitude for the blessings which they were the instruments of bestowing on us,—in order to ensure the continuance of these blessings,—in order to obtain others of the like kind,—in order to prove our profound reverence for the Bible,—our duty and our wisdom is to discard the memorials of Christ’s acts, to choose a way altogether different from that which the Bible suggests to us. By so doing, it is hoped, we shall be able to stand fast in the liberty wherewith we have been made free. By so doing, I fear, we shall hasten our return into every confused and slavish notion, into every dark superstition, which is naturally engendered in the evil and unregenerate heart. Of course such prophecies will seem to some mere idle tales. They have got their notion of the Reformation in clubs and on platforms. They fancy that they can rid themselves of Popery, and every bad doctrine and practice, by shouts and imprecations. They do not know that Popery, Infidelity, every form of evil, is lying close to their own hearts, is ready to spring out upon them, and to take possession of them, even at the very moment when they fancy themselves most secure from it. They do not consider how the Evil Spirit is exulting in all the noise and clamour which turn men away from the knowledge of themselves and the knowledge of God. They do not consider how the very principles which were asserted at the Reformation, those principles of which they boast themselves most, may be perishing in our hearts while we are directing all our zeal against those who impugn them in words. The passage I have chosen to-day, which is part of the passage for the Epistle on the Festival of Purification, may explain in some degree what I mean.
It is taken from the Prophet Malachi; the whole of it stands thus: “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before Me:… even the Messenger of the Covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, He shall come, saith the Lord of Hosts. But who may abide the day of His coming? and who shall stand when He appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap: and He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness. Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the Lord, as in the days of old, and as in former years. And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not Me, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
I have no doubt the Reformers were especially pleased that these stern sentences of the old Prophet should be read on one of the days which were set apart to the commemoration of the Virgin. For they knew how much of fantastic sentimental devotion was attached to her person,—how she was invoked as a kind of protectress from the justice and wrath of God. Therefore it was good to speak out plainly, and say, “No such protectress is there for men or women. No such protectress, thanks be to Him, has there ever been or shall there be. The Messenger of His Covenant, the real Lord of Man, comes not to hide us from His Father, but to show us what His Father is; to show us what His wrath is, what His justice is. And for that reason is He to be delighted in. We ought not to delight in Him if He cloaked the sin of this person or that, or offered any mitigation of the punishment of it. We may delight in Him, because He is like a refiner’s fire, because He is determined to burn up dross, because He would purify us from it. And what He does perfectly, all inferior messengers, His mother and all others, must in their small measure and degree do. If they are not declarers of God’s wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, if they do not proclaim Him as the Refiner, Him as the Purifier—they are not fulfilling Christ’s work, they are come on another errand, they are thwarting His purposes; they must be messengers from another Father than His Father. For it was true in the days of the Prophets, before Christ came in the flesh, that this was the character and work of Him who dwelt between the Cherubim, whose Name is Holy; it continued to be true when He came; it is true now that He has ascended on high; it will be true for ever world without end. The mind of God has not been changed, it cannot be changed. It was, is, and shall be a mind of burning hostility to all kinds of injustice and oppression and wrong-doing and foulness, in all kinds of people, high and low. It was, is, and shall be a mind which acts upon all kinds of people everywhere, to purify them and to make them right. To publish and declare this character and will of God and this work of God among His creatures, by words, by acts, by sufferings, was the business of all brave and true men in the time of old. Fully to manifest this character and will of God, to execute this work of God, was the purpose and end of the Incarnation, words, acts, sufferings, of the Only-begotten Son. And since He has said, ‘It is finished,’—since He has accomplished His task of showing what God is, and since He lives on high, and has sent forth His Spirit that God’s purpose of destroying evil and His purpose of purifying men from evil may not be frustrated but brought to pass,—He must assuredly put down the pretensions of all saints, living or departed, to restrain His arm, which is all one with restraining His grace, with intercepting His will of Love towards the human race. Any saint, living or departed, who asks that Christ shall not be a swift witness against the adulterers and the false swearers and those that oppress the hireling in his wages, asks for a curse on the world. Every saint, on earth or elsewhere, who prays that Christ would not sit as a refiner, to purge the evil out of the hearts of men, prays, ‘Thy will be not done in earth as it is in heaven:’ whereas it is their business, and the business of all God’s ministers here upon earth, to be bearing witness of God’s infinitely Loving Will, and to be desiring that that Will may be done in earth as it is in Heaven, that nothing may obstruct it, that everything, be it never so seemly or religious, which does obstruct it, may be swept out of the universe.”
The Reformers, taking Malachi’s words in this sense, will have been exceedingly struck with the allusion to the Jewish priests which is contained in them. “He shall purify the SONS of Levi;—He shall purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.” They will have seen in these sentences, what so many other passages in the Prophets will have told them, that there was especial reason to fear that the priests, though God’s own appointed servants, were not offering an offering in righteousness; that they were offering an offering in unrighteousness, and one which tended to make the people unrighteous. Whence this danger? Their own times will have told them. They will have seen priests offering sacrifices to complete the imperfect sacrifice which Christ had offered upon the Cross. They will have seen that these sacrifices had an immoral effect on the body of the people, inasmuch as they held out a hope that through the powerful intercession of certain men and certain spirits above, sins might be overlooked by God, or might become less hateful in His eyes. This, they will have perceived, was the vile, perverted notion of the character and effect of sacrifices which had debased the minds of Pagans, and infected the minds of Jews, after the outward symbols of idolatry had ceased to have an attraction for them. They will have felt, therefore,—we know how strongly they did feel,—that the corruptions of the laity might be traced in a great measure to the corruptions of the priesthood, and that a promise that these corruptions should be eradicated, that the Sacrifice should be restored in its true, righteous meaning, was a promise of health and renovation to all society. He who purified the sons of Levi in their inner lives and convictions, would be a swift witness against the adulterer, the false swearer, the oppressor of the hireling. For He would take away that which was comforting all these ill-doers in their ill doings. He would be restoring Sacrifice into the mightiest and most effectual testimony for His Loving Will, and against the self-will of men.
It was the great blessing of the Reformation time that old words which had been lying dead, as if they belonged to bygone ages, and which had been reduced by the assiduous labours of generations of commentators into topics for disputation in which the people had no share, started forth full armed, as terrible as when they first proceeded from the hearts and lips of inspired men. Everything the Reformers saw around them proclaimed them to be the words of Him who liveth and reigneth, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. If we are to complete the Reformation,—if we are to preserve as much of its fruits as we still have,—the Bible must again appear to us in that form. We shall then be little disposed to patronize or argue for it. We shall not suppose it needs our good word on its behalf. It will let us know, one and all, priests and laymen, what it is, by the exposure which it makes to us of our own evils, by the promises it holds out that those evils shall not defeat God’s purposes of good and blessing to our land and to mankind. The Book will not then be thought of so much as He who is speaking out of the Book, speaking to us as He spoke to Jews in the days of Malachi, as He spoke to Germans and Englishmen in the days of Luther. “I am the Lord, the righteous Lord; that is my name,” will then be once more significant sounds, passing sentence upon our unrighteous and unloving deeds, not supplying us with instruments for exhibiting our own unrighteousness and unlovingness, or with cloaks for our hypocrisy. We shall not then dare to talk much of our religion. We shall feel that we are under the eye of a living Person, who is looking through our religion and seeing what it is good for, who hates robbery for burnt offering, who is no respecter of persons.
Surely then these words of Malachi respecting the Purifier will tell us something that we,—as much as the Jews and the men of the Middle Ages,—are very apt to forget. The old Prophet is saying to us, “Beware, priests and laymen, lest you should fancy punishment for your sins is, or ever can be, the thing which you are most to dread yourselves, or which you are to make others dread. Beware lest you pervert the idea of intercession of men upon earth, or saints in Heaven, into an intercession that any sin should be smothered or tolerated in any man whomsoever. Beware lest you indorse all the errors of former days, by treating the Sacrifice of the Son of God, the one effectual Sacrifice, the ground of all other sacrifices, as if it were not the perfect fulfilment of the Father’s Will, but in some sense a victory over that Will. Above all, beware lest you reject gracious promises which are made to you and to your own land, because you misunderstand your own deep necessities. God, the hater of evil, promises to find out your evil, and to purge you from it.
“Do you think that it would be a greater thing to have your evil acts overlooked, than to be sifted and probed, that you may be set right? Have you not found that evil is your curse,—that to be wrong is the horrible thing, not to be detected in wrong or to endure some affliction for it? If you have, you will hail this as the most characteristic exercise of Divine power. Divine it must be. For how are all the intents and purposes of your will to be reached by one not divine? Who but the all-seeing One can say to a human being, ‘I will sit and purify thee’? Who but the All-loving could care to do it? This strange penetrating power, going down into recesses below those which your consciousness has ever penetrated into, this surely carries within it a pledge that it shall be effectual,—that no hindrances from without shall prevent a new and nobler form from emerging out of the chrysalis in which it had been buried. And will not the same processes which are available for your purification be available for the purification of your nation? Does not He who sits as the refiner of one, desire also to be the refiner of the other? It was not for the sake of the sons of Levi only that He promised to be their purifier. It was for their sakes as representing the sanctity and unity of the land. They were to be purified that they might be fit to present the sacrifices which imported the dedication of the people to God. Is it otherwise with you? Are you not to tell your people that in every national judgment, in every individual trial, the Refiner is sitting to destroy the dross, to bring forth the pure ore?”
It seems to me, my brethren, that such lessons as these, taken home to all our hearts, might help the cause of Reformation more, in the practical sense of the word, as well as in the technical and historical sense, than any alteration in the Prayer-book. I do not wish to separate the two senses. I believe, if rightly understood, they are identical; that we cannot so well promote the cause of Reformation now as by maintaining and fulfilling the work that was commenced three centuries ago. Only let us consider what that work is. That it involved a sifting of the minds and hearts of the Clergy as well as the Laity—of the Clergy more than of the Laity—I have not denied, or that a sifting more rigorous than that is to be expected and even to be desired in our day. The words we have repeated in our daily prayers will surely be subjected to the same ordeal as our other words and acts. But I cannot help thinking that they will pass through it, and that the levity and insincerity with which we have used them will be the chaff and dross to be consumed. These we must confess as the main causes of any new development of either Popery or Infidelity. One example of what I mean is supplied by the service which has led to these remarks. I wish to notice it before I conclude, as it may show us what is the true way of resisting any tendency to retrogression, how we may really accomplish any tasks which the Reformers left unfinished.
That the Virgin was essentially and by the condition of her birth pure from all taint of human corruption is, as we all know, the latest proclamation of the authority which calls itself infallible. It is easy for Romanists to protest against such a decision as the establishment of a sect opinion into a law of the Church, as a condemnation of illustrious doctors and saints. It is easy for Protestants to condemn it on other and more general, more theological grounds. But what gives it a favour in the minds of the people? What makes it possible for a Pope in our time to do what his predecessors never ventured to do? I think it will be found that there lies beneath this exaltation of one human creature into a state different from that of all other human creatures, a witness that humanity itself has been purified and regenerated by its union with the Godhead. That truth the Reformers did not proclaim, or proclaimed very weakly. They were so occupied with the redemption of individuals from the actual evils of the Adam nature that they overlooked the Redemption which had been wrought out for the race; the glory which had been claimed for it by the resurrection and Ascension of Christ. It is not safe for us to forget what they forgot. The symbolical worship of Humanity in the person of the Virgin has increased and is increasing. The actual worship of a Goddess of Humanity is ready to unfold itself out of that, has in part unfolded itself already. No denunciation of one worship or the other, no ridicule, has availed or I believe will avail, to check its progress. The positive proclamation that Humanity has no standing-ground of its own, but that it has a standing-ground in the Son of God, that in Him it is pure and holy, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, and that His Spirit is given us that we may be purged from our inhuman selfishness and may enter upon our common inheritance, —see whether this will not undermine Mariolatry in the minds of those who do not prefer a creature to the Creator,—whether it will not show some who have fled from a cold divinity to what they suppose is a sympathizing humanity, that the Son of Man is what no abstraction ever can be, and that He is the way to the all-loving Father.
Such a testimony as this lies, I believe, in this old festival of Purification. There is need that we should draw it forth and present it to spirits which are hungering and thirsting for some better food than ancient or modern superstitions can give, yet will not part with that till they have a real substitute for it. But are we fit to be distributors of this bread of life? Have we not proved already that we are unfit? We might say so, and fold our hands in despair, if it was not written, “He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.”