# Sermons, Volume 5: A Modern Paraphrase *Sermons, Volume 5, 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'S PATIENCE THE GROUND OF OUR PATIENCE ::: {.center} Advent Sunday ::: ::: {.center} [November]{.smallcaps} 28, 1858 ::: > "*Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh*."—[James]{.smallcaps} v. 7, 8. *The passage:* Be patient, brethren, until the Lord comes. The farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth and is long patient for it, until it has received the early and the latter rain. Be patient too, and strengthen your hearts, because the Lord's coming is near. [These]{.smallcaps} words show that St. James, like the other Apostles, expected the coming of the Lord in his own day. I have often tried to show you that their expectation was not false. A greater change did come over the world than they looked for. It may not have been in every particular what they supposed, since they may have been given different degrees of light about how it would work. Their very hope shows confusions in their minds that clearer light must scatter. For it was *light* they desired, light to shine into their hearts and out upon the whole Church. But they were certain of the kind of blessing coming. It would be the same in kind as the older prophets had expected: a day of clearness and revelation, fearful to those who loved darkness and awful even to those who longed to be delivered from it. Every signal judgment on Israel had been described as such a day, and the event matched the description. It did uncover what was hidden. Fearfulness surprised the hypocrites, while trusting hearts found a refuge for the needy in distress, when the blast of the terrible ones was like a storm against a wall. They said, "This is our God, we have waited for Him; He is come, and He will save us." The Apostles expected a day that would surpass all earlier ones. It would wind up the history of the old world. It would announce that the King who entered Jerusalem meek, on a donkey, was King of the whole earth. And it would bring down the city that refused to have Him reign and cast Him out as a criminal. The New Testament writers show no timidity or hesitation here. They speak of Christ's speedy coming as confidently as of a past event. While on earth He had spoken of it with great definiteness, and He sealed His words with the declaration that heaven and earth may pass away but His words will not. His appearance in the flesh makes no sense unless it was soon to be followed by a showing of the power that was His in heaven and earth. Of course none of the Apostles knew whether he would live to see that day. The saying about St. John, "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?", might seem to suggest that he alone would. But a day that revealed Christ as Lord of both worlds, and declared that by dying, rising and ascending He had united them for ever, could not be less glorious wherever they were. On this side of death they would understand in part, and on the other far more perfectly, what the crisis meant and what victory over the enemies of God and man it signified. In this sense the Apostles could look to the day of their death as itself a day of revelation, and no men had more reason to look to it as a day of rest. But if "The time of your death draws near" had been put in place of "The coming of the Lord draws near," the Apostle's argument for patience and steadiness of heart would be worthless. A man in physical pain may possibly be helped by the thought "It will soon be over," though I think he gains little from it by itself. So much agony is packed into a moment, and pain feels so lasting, that it outruns the mere reasoning that it will pass. But a student who has laboured for years on a hard problem can get no comfort from being told that this trouble will soon end along with all others. He had looked for a joyful "Eureka!" as the reward of his search. He learns only that it was all wasted. Add the thought of a future for *him*, and you *may* fill him with fear of what is so vague and unknown. Or you *may* encourage him to think his tasks will not be interrupted, and that his calling will go on under better conditions and with more success. Mix with this future the thought of Christ's death, resurrection and ascension, and you have changed a great deal, because you have *almost* turned the day of death into a day of the Lord. But even a hope so full of immortality is unsatisfying. If we narrow our Lord's death to ourselves, we destroy its meaning for ourselves. If it does not take away the sin of the world, it does not take away ours, and if it does not reconcile men to God, it reconciles no man. This conviction grows stronger the more a man feels the links that bind him to his fellow-creatures, and sees that his union with them depends entirely on his union with Christ and on Christ's relation to the Father. He feels that redemption from selfishness is the great redemption of all. He has tasted a little of its blessedness and hopes to enter into its fulness. How can that hope be realised? How can he help losing all he has won and sinking back into the state he feels to be both natural and accursed, if in his visions of the future he sees only a comfortable escape for himself from the troubles of the present? He may stretch that escape into expectations of positive happiness, but they must melt into thin air, or harden into a sensual paradise, if he remains the centre of them. And how little such visions fit the business of life! How much of life, with its hopes and fears, concerns kinsfolk, neighbours, your country, the universe! Tell me to work patiently because soon my task will be over and I shall enter rest or enjoyment, and you imply that my work is for myself, and that if this one thread of my destiny is fully spun I shall have gained all I aimed at. That is not true in any sense unless I have lived an utterly unchristian and detestable life. It is not true even then, since I cannot by my will cut myself off from those whose life, by God's eternal law, is intertwined with mine. So it was reasonable, even inevitable, that for self-denying and loving men like St. James and his fellow-Apostles, the hope of the Lord's coming overshadowed every hope that merely pointed to the end of their own pilgrimage. And it was not reasonable for them only. They looked for this manifestation because they were men and felt as men. In every age since, the simplest and most genuine human feelings have turned the same way. Thoughts of a grave where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest have not been enough for those who were persecuted by the wicked and most weary and most needed rest. Thoughts of their own forgiveness, the deliverance of their own souls and the glorifying of their own bodies have not satisfied those who prized forgiveness most, valued the soul most highly, and saw most clearly the change of the earthly body into the heavenly. Beneath all these expectations, sustaining them, lay a strong inward conviction that there must be a Revelation of the Divine excellence and beauty in which the lowliest sufferer and saddest outcast could share. It would be for each because it was for all. It would truly fulfil all that ancient prophecies had shadowed in the hearts of those who uttered them. And it would be the real warrant for patience, because it would bring every work to its issue and every problem to its solution. Such hopes, in whatever age they have been held, have proved no more false than they did in the first. The great critical periods that good men thought were at hand did come. If those who lived through them scarcely noticed, history confesses their reality. If our vision were brighter, and we saw things less through the mists of the present, we should feel their significance more, not less. Those who foresaw them vaguely, and wrongly as to particular incidents, will have learnt on leaving the earth that they underrated their importance rather than exaggerated it. They dwelt too much on trifles concerning themselves, and too little acknowledged the Divine hand stretched out and the Divine voice speaking in them. We may be sure it is now their delight, wherever they are, to learn how that hand is stretched out to deliver men when they perceive it least, and how that voice speaks to men in the loudest clamour and the deepest silence. So they know that their hope did not make them ashamed, and will not shame anyone who holds it in the Church below. What warrants this hope and grounds this patience belongs to us as much as to any earlier generation. Advent Sunday bids us keep it in mind, and the text expresses it: "Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and the latter rain." Not long ago I considered how the image of a farmer sowing seed and waiting for harvest illustrated the kind of diligence St. Paul asked of his Corinthian disciples, and the reward they were to expect. The tiller of the ground is no speculator. He obeys natural laws, sows his seed, and leaves its ripening to no chance or skill of his own. He waits for a harvest, and it is a harvest for others as well as himself. The Apostle dwells on the fruits as the reward, not on the price they fetch at market. If St. James merely taught us this same lesson, we might be very thankful, for our attention cannot be too often fixed on such natural analogies. None do more to withdraw us from vulgar mercantile notions, or give us such a sense of a Divine and human order, and of the likeness and the difference between creatures of a Lord and children of a Father of spirits. But I think that is not all that is meant here, nor the most important part. The Spiritual Husbandman is not, first of all, man but God. The resemblance is to His dealings with us and with His universe. It applies to us because we are made in His image and have nothing good in us but the reflection of His perfect goodness. St. James would have us meditate on *His* patience: His longsuffering with individuals, families, nations and Churches, and His watchfulness until the seeds He has planted really drink in the gracious nourishment He pours on them. The language is familiar. *Longsuffering* is the word the Bible writers most often attach to God's character, and I am certain our hearts and consciences respond to their use of it. We are sure it must characterise an all-loving Being who looks out on a world like ours. We are sure the word does not deceive us, however far short it falls of what it labours to express. For we are sure it characterised Him who fully expressed the Divine substance and was the perfect image of the Father. Imagine for a moment, brethren, that we believed this. What would follow? All history would become a record of the processes of this husbandry: the means a Creator uses so that His creation may be very good, and a Father uses to bring His children into His will. Despair of our race and of ourselves would then seem the most unreasonable and wicked of things, and hope would be the sober fulfilment of a duty, a submission to irresistible evidence. Every theory that any thoughtful student has defended, about races, conquests, natural influences, religious influences, the power of law, the authority of great men, would be carefully and honestly weighed. We would not be eager to embrace one or reject another. The facts they rest on would be recognised as Divine facts, referred to one first principle, and treated as the tools and processes of the Husbandman bringing His fruit to ripeness. Whatever another class of teachers have said, learnedly or by experiment, about conscience and reflection, active and passive powers, the faculties of reasoning and induction, of affection and will, would be most interesting, provided the analysis did not destroy the life of what it examined. For we would feel that we cannot look at anything human without being led to a Divine Archetype, and that all is fragmentary and confused until seen in its relation and dependence to Him. And when we are forced, not by what we read of others but by what we feel in ourselves, to dwell on what has broken this relation and marred this dependence, when Sin stands out before each man as what has again and again turned aside the spade of the great Husbandman, who would have prepared his heart to receive seed and rain and bear fruit for harvest, let us not forget that the Word was made flesh to cast every plague, sickness and evil spirit out of our sin-stricken humanity. Let us not forget that He bore what we are tempted to call helpless and incurable, that He claimed it as His Father's possession, and that He has redeemed it by unspeakable agony and quickened it with a Divine life. I repeat, brethren: if St. James's doctrine is true, then hope, in its highest, most vigorous and most sustained form, is the godly and true state of our being, and any tempers we admit that are foreign to hope and contradict it are so far immoral and anti-Christian. But it would be the cruellest mockery to say this, and a man would prove himself unfit to preach to others, being unaware of what passes in himself, if he did not confess how much within us and around us is continually at war with this hope, threatening its existence and seeming to prove it monstrous and ridiculous. Turn anywhere in the world and you find facts that laugh at you for entertaining it, and each of them has something in our own hearts that corresponds to it and explains it. Where are the signs and pledges of Peace, Freedom and Order among the nations? How much of that Peace, Freedom and Order have we established in our own bosoms? If you see encouragement in one direction, degeneracy and darkness are growing in another, and today's clouds belie yesterday's bright promise. Is it not so in the world, and in ourselves? There is a calm, a Sabbath serenity that seems to descend and rest on you on some still evening or by a friend's sick bed. In a few hours the storms return. A slight accident, a foolish affront, the gossip of idle men, or the noise of parties has shaken to its centre the spirit you thought fixed on a rock. These are ordinary experiences. There are more fearful battles in which some are driven to despair even of life. The arguments for hope seem all answered by the very voice that first brought them. The Bible, prayers and sacraments become themselves the chief sources of despondency and terror. The words of Life remind us of voices that spoke them to us and are now mute, and of how little we profited by their speech or example. Sacraments remind us how little we have believed God's promises, how little our light has shone before men. Holy seasons, by their recurrence, seem to testify that the world has been moving and we ourselves going backward. He is only a Job's comforter who merely denounces such a state of feeling, or hopes to cure it with texts and aphorisms. Preaching patience is often the very thing that stirs up all impatience. I think it must always be so unless you believe in a Patience infinitely above ours, from which ours must be derived. When we have learned that faith, even imperfectly, we may make better use of the Scriptures, the ordinances of God and holy seasons than we commonly do. The Scriptures will no longer be a storehouse of sentences to be quoted without regard to the occasions that called them forth or the persons who spoke them, and so usually with even less fitness to the condition of those they are offered to. They will be witnesses of how the God of Patience and Hope led His servants, not over easy slopes and through sunny glades but through the valley of the shadow of death into the clearness and light of His own presence. They will show how He saw signs of life in those who counted themselves dead, or whom their discerning friends counted dead, and kindled that life until all felt it and were warmed by it, until even their failures and evil doings became lessons to distant ages. Divine Sacraments will teach us that we are only receivers of food given hour by hour from above, and partakers of a blood poured out for all as well as for us. So it will be no wonder to us that year after year we are asked to remember that Christ came in great humility, and to expect that He will come in great glory. Each year will assure us more that without His humiliation here we must be lost for ever in our pride, and for ever think falsely of God and falsely of Man. Each year will tell us more that every act of God's providence is in its measure a manifestation of His Son's glory, and a witness that He, and no other, is Prince of all the kings of the earth. Every year will tell us that unless these manifestations were to issue in a final and complete manifestation of Him as Judge of the whole earth, every hope He has cherished in us must be crushed and disappointed. Every year, showing more how God has brought His ends to pass in His own good time, and how little our restlessness has hastened the work, will bring new lessons of patience. Every year will say that death is not more certain for each of us, nor the rising of day out of night, than the unveiling of the Sun of Righteousness upon this earth of ours. ## THE SLEEP OF THE CHURCH ::: {.center} Second Sunday in Advent ::: ::: {.center} [December]{.smallcaps} 5, 1858 ::: > "*And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed*."—[Romans]{.smallcaps} xiii. 11. *The passage:* Paul says that, knowing the time, it is now high time to wake from sleep, because our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. [You]{.smallcaps} will have seen the announcement that the times for the Holy Communion in this chapel are changing. Until now it has been offered every Sunday. After Christmas Day, it will be celebrated during the regular service either on the second Sunday of each month or on the second Sunday of each Term. For most of the year I also propose to administer it at eight in the morning on the fourth Sunday of the month, and more often at that hour if those who attend the chapel wish it. I have made the change partly because attendance at the Communion was greater when it was monthly than it has been lately. I have made it partly because many have felt the regular omission of the Exhortation as a serious loss. We may well have been right, by ancient precedent and by the reason of the case, to connect our weekly worship with the Eucharist, which explains its purpose and binds its parts together. But suppose there is reason to believe, whether from local accident or from something deeper in ourselves, that repeating the service has not increased our sense of its importance. Then in trying another course we are doing what the authors of the precedent would have approved, and following the very reason that guided us before. To depart from a commandment can never be right. To give up even a good practice may often be right. The most blessed means become worthless if we forget the end for which they were given, and we honour them most when we refuse to let them block our sight of that end. I think St. Paul had a lesson on this in the Epistle read last Sunday, and I want to use it this afternoon. It belongs to the whole of Advent, and to no day more than this one, on which we pray to learn patience and comfort from the Scriptures and to hold fast the hope of everlasting life given in Jesus Christ. The sentence is hard to construct. It is not obvious whether the opening words, "And that," refer only to the remark they introduce or connect it with the passage before. Most intelligent commentators have held the second, as more like St. Paul's manner, even though it requires supplying an ellipsis and a paraphrase. He had told the Romans to owe no one anything except to love one another, because love fulfils the law. He had shown this by quoting commandments that are all fulfilled in "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Then he seems to recall how this commandment might be forgotten by the Church, though it came from Christ's own mouth, was sealed by the last Passover, and was stamped with his Cross. A torpor might creep over the Church even in its earliest days, and it might become a helpless, loveless society amid all the arguments and pledges of love. *And this too*, he exclaims, we must do: we must make this effort to love one another, not only because the law is absolute and divine, but because of times and seasons, of our own history and our place in the world's. It is not time to be asleep. The morning approaches and the dawn has already begun to show, so we must be up and alive. The Deliverer whose name we bear does not deceive. He came to bring Light, and his Light will shine more and more to the perfect day. We once believed he came to save us out of thick darkness, and now our salvation is nearer than when we believed. Many thoughts are crowded together here, and each needs the others. They cannot be separated, but we must untangle them by asking how each bears on our own life and practice. I\. The sleep the Apostle speaks of is clearly not one that Jews or heathens had fallen into, for he was not writing to them. He was writing to a society of men who confessed Jesus Christ as the Image of God and Head of men. The world's derision kept reminding that society of its profession, hostility stimulated it, and persecution knit it together. Paul had not visited it, but he knew from others' reports that it was holding its ground in the capital of the world under the eye of the Cæsars. It was accused of no looseness in doctrine and no failure in duty. How could he think such a society would fall asleep? Because he knew the temptation in himself. He had been called by Christ, had had visions and revelations, and had been in the third heaven, yet he knew he might sink into indifference and listlessness. He knew that memories of the past and tokens of God's present love would not of themselves quicken him. Persecution from outside could not do it either; apart from other powers, it might retard it. II\. The words I quoted leave no doubt about the character of this sleep. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" expresses the principle of a society's life. This love, circulating through its members, holds it together and keeps it from dissolving into separate atoms. A society sleeps a death-sleep when this love grows stagnant and ceases to be a vigorous, working power. Paul knew that no circumstances gave him this love, and that if he depended on circumstances it perished. Preaching it to others would not stir it in him; throwing his feelings outward might make them cold within. The care of all the Churches could not give it to him, since it brought him vexation and ingratitude. Neither could Sanhedrins' sentences, zealots' conspiracies, or imprisonment by Proconsuls and Emperors; their injustice naturally bred exasperation and bitterness. He could testify from experience that love to man can be killed by frost as easily as by sun, and that if it is not kindled from within, everything outside may be fatal to it. III\. How, then, does he ward off the danger from himself and wake them from their slumbers? You would call his method strange. No one knew better than he that the loss of love in a human society is the loss of everything, and that utter lovelessness is damnation. Why did he not say so? Why did he not frighten them with the pit they might sink into if this temper became fixed in them? He *did* tell them this and set the peril before them, for he spoke of *Salvation*. He reminded them that this indifference, lovelessness, contention and self-seeking was the accursed state Christ came to redeem them from. It was the hell into which he found his creatures sinking. To rescue them from it he took flesh, lived among them, died on the cross, rose again and ascended on high. He sent his Spirit to dwell in them so that they might raise other men out of this hell into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is governed by the perfectly righteous and loving Lord. They had received the first pledges of this Salvation. They had been enabled to feel and suffer for others, to desire their good, to love them as themselves. But it was only a beginning, a glimpse of Paradise and a first taste of the Tree of Life. Other thoughts in them had no fellowship with Paradise: a natural pull toward self-indulgence, a preference for self-will, a desire for self-glory. These always threatened to become supreme. If vigilance lapsed, or the converts imagined that some trick of fortune or special quality had put them beyond the world's evils, those evils would appear in the Church, and more, not less, than among those they had left. So Paul bids them think of the salvation Christ promised as something still to come. In one sense he always spoke of it as already given, a state they had entered: they were members of Christ's body, complete in him, the perfectly righteous and unselfish One, taken out of the kingdom of darkness and translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son. But if so, they must keep assuring themselves that nothing base or evil, in themselves or in the world, would be allowed to continue. They must expect every mist and cloud that hid God's face to be wholly dispersed. They must wait until the kingdom that abides because it is righteous, the kingdom of our God and his Christ, proves itself above all principalities and powers in this world or the next, and overthrows whatever opposes it. This salvation from all that clogged their progress and kept them from seeing things as they were, from lies, hatred and indifference, was contained in the promise that he in whom is light and no darkness at all would be fully manifested. Every day and hour hastened this manifestation, and so this salvation. Paul calls it *our* salvation: yours if it is mine, mine if it is yours. If we are not waiting for a common Saviour, if I look for one and you for another, what has our profession meant? Why did we receive the same baptism, and why do we bear the same cross? I need say no more to explain the text as it bore on the men of that age, because we will understand it only by reading it in reference to our own condition. "Knowing the time" must mean, for us, knowing *our* time and opportunities, where *we* stand, what temptations assail *us*, and where *we* can turn for refuge. We must weigh the difference and the likeness between our position and that of those Paul wrote to, and then we can judge how much of his language we should take to heart. 1\. First, we must strike off the persecutions Christians may have suffered, whether as Christians or as subjects of Nero's tyranny. We must strike off every other change a thousand years of Christian civilization has made in us. We must strike off whatever belonged to a Greek colony living in a Latin capital, or to a body made partly of Abraham's descendants and partly of former worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo. After these vast deductions something still remains. These Christians in Rome, creatures of the same flesh and blood as we, were baptized into the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, as we have been. They ate the bread of which Christ said "This is my body" and drank the wine of which he said "This is my blood of the new testament," as we do. It remains true for us, as for them, that "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" is the summary and essence of all the commandments. It remains true that all sacraments are Divine instruments for giving effect to this law and binding us to him who fulfilled it, so that we may dwell in him and his love in us. And it remains true for us as for them that sleep may overtake us despite every sign and badge of Christian profession, despite sincere respect and even passionate zeal for them. It comes when the new commandment has no real dominion over us, because we repeat it without keeping it. 2\. This is the next point on which I would preach to you and to myself. If we *know the time*, I think we will all feel that we need to be preached to about it, and that in one way or another God himself will be the preacher. Consider what powers are leading us to break that commandment continually rather than keep it. Among the chief is our familiarity with the words. We know them so well, and they have become so much household words, that we almost assume they have entered our life and recast us in their mould. For Christian congregations and clergymen not to think this of themselves is the hardest and most painful thing there is. Yet we must do justice to this notion, deceitful and dangerous as it is. This law *has* moulded our laws, institutions and customs marvellously, and our own perceptions more than we realise. There is a tacit confession that life would be a contradiction and a horror if it were lost, and that enacting the opposite law would be a return to anarchy and chaos. This acknowledgment in our hearts is too strong even for the practice and theories that most rebel against it. It is a witness of a Kingdom of God compassing us round and hemming us in. But oh, my brethren, does not each of us know that he sets at naught this first principle of the Kingdom of God in his daily talk and acts? What we have most to accuse ourselves of, and what in the end does most mischief, is not the vigorous, conscious act of selfishness that outrages the peace or rights of others. It is lazy, sleepy indifference to them. I think this is chiefly what St. Paul has in mind as the thing the Roman Christians needed to rouse themselves from. Everything in their circumstances seemed likely to break that slumber; the cock-crowing was constantly in their ears. The monotony of *our* social life and of *our* religious life helps us forget that any energy of thought or sympathy is required. We think love will come of itself and drop upon us. Suppose it were dropping upon us, as in one way it is. Consider how little effort we make to catch the drops, and how much we make to keep them from soaking in. What is half the conversation of society but repeating or inventing things, clever or stupid, against one another? What is the busiest and most popular part of literature but an appeal to men's contempt for each other, a machine for cultivating it? When you hear of a meeting called for the glory of God, do you not expect a great part of its business to be reviling men made in God's image? All this becomes so natural and so much a matter of course that we take no heed of it. We do not watch to counteract its influence on us, or try to stem the current or turn it another way. There is competition in everything, but competition in contempt is the most active of all. If we cannot do much, we can at least expose the absurdity of those who are trying to do anything. 3\. It is out of this sleep that the Apostle would have us awake. It is a sleep so far as any manly action for our fellows is concerned, but one in which we may dream all kinds of mischief against them and utter our dreams. The invitation would be hopeless if it came only from an Apostle. But it comes from him who sent the Apostles, the Restorer and Life-giver. If we can hear his voice in his own Feast, calling us to come and be clothed with his strength and renewed by his Spirit, we may be thankful for anything that has reminded us that the most frequent reception of it without him is worth nothing. It may be humbling to need such a lesson, but humiliations, in whatever form, are profitable; God at least means them to be. Much becomes clear when we learn that he wishes to educate and raise our *wills*, and that there is no love except what is kindled in them and kept alive there by his Holy Spirit. Then the exhortation to stir up that Spirit within us can be followed, because we are never alone in our efforts. When we think our best thoughts and form our best resolves, we are only thinking what he is working in us to think and resolving what he inspires us to resolve. Is it not also true, brethren, that this Spirit is with us to quicken and guide our social intercourse? He draws out of us the deep inward convictions and heart-utterances that really answer one another, makes our words real instead of mocking, and changes us from scoffing critics into human beings. Shall a body of men who know each other, help each other to fight, sustain each other in falls and hold out to each other the prize of a common victory not be possible once more on earth? Are we to live in an age when every mechanical means of communication between men is multiplied ten-thousandfold, only so that the inward isolation of those who meet constantly may grow far greater? Is this to be civilization's final reward, grinning masks instead of human faces and lumps of ice instead of beating hearts? May not even in this nineteenth century a communion exist worthy of the name, of men united by holy sacraments of affection because of service and devotion to Christ and to those for whom he died? To many this may seem an idle dream, and it will be nothing more while we sleep. But the voice of the Archangel and the trump of God may yet awake us, and the still small voice may yet say to us, "Now is your salvation nearer than when you believed." Sacraments exist to testify of a love that passes knowledge, gathered up once in the Cross of Calvary and to be discovered as the root of all Creation. To dwell in that love and see it as it is must be the Salvation of the Universe. While we look for it and desire it, it becomes ours. God has prepared for those who love him what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man perceived. If we believe in his love and look for its revelation, it will take possession of us and drive out our indifference, heartlessness and hatred. It will go out in acts of blessing to those near and far. So the Apostle prayed for us in this morning's Epistle: "May the God of patience and consolation grant us to be like-minded one toward another, according to Christ Jesus, that we may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!" ## THE MISERY OF LIMITING OUR HOPE IN CHRIST ::: {.center} Third Sunday in Advent ::: ::: {.center} [December]{.smallcaps} 12, 1858 ::: > "*If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable*."—1 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} xv. 19. *The passage:* If our hope in Christ reaches no further than this life, we are the most miserable of all people. [These]{.smallcaps} words have distressed many humble and devout readers. Their hope in Christ has made this life joyful to them. It has made the earth look bright and put a beauty and glory on every human face. Nature and art, the commonest things and the rarest, the past and present as much as the future, have been lit up by it. They do not owe this gladness to outward circumstances or to a cheerful temperament. Many won it through sharp bodily suffering, and not a few received it as a gift although they were naturally inclined to despondency. The word *hope* does imply looking forward. But they do not find that their expectation points chiefly to leaving the earth, and least of all do they find that the mere thought of a change of position is their blessedness. "*Lo, I am with you always*" and "*My peace I give unto you*": there, they say, is the secret. They are right to claim St. Paul in general as the highest authority for this conviction. He told these same Corinthians, "*All things are yours*, whether life, or death, or things present, or things to come; and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." He told the Philippians to rejoice, and to rejoice again. He spoke of himself as rejoicing in tribulation. As a prisoner he lifted his chained hands before Agrippa and wished that Festus, Bernice and all who heard him were such as he was, except for those bonds. Was that exception so terrible that he thought the worshippers of false gods, his own countrymen with their hateful strifes and hypocrisies, and Nero with a mother's murder on his conscience, less miserable in this life than he was? Does anyone who knows St. Paul's life and words believe this? Those very bonds, riveted more tightly than at Caesarea, became a cause of exultation to him, because through them Christ's name was made known in the palace and city of Rome. He counted as the highest privilege ever given to a mortal, not some promised future happiness, but his office as Apostle to the Gentiles, the office that made him the offscouring of all things. So that the other nations might know they were fellow-heirs and of one body with his countrymen, he cheerfully lost everything. To save those countrymen from the ruin hanging over them, he would have been willing to be accursed. Is this a man likely to say, "I am utterly miserable here, but I can endure it, for I shall be well paid hereafter"? But if that is not the meaning of the words, what is? What hidden, cabalistic sense can we find to overturn the natural one? I believe, brethren, that the simplest sense is the best. I believe we have read into the words a sense drawn from our own artificial notions, one that contradicts both the immediate context and the Apostle's general teaching. The Corinthians had heard him say, "*We are risen with Christ*." A party among them built on this, or on words like it, the conclusion that the spiritual resurrection they already possessed was all Christ had won for them. They thought they were following their teacher when they dropped the idea of a future resurrection of the body altogether. St. Paul examines this theory fully. He shows that they were turning the half-truth they had grasped against not only the other half but itself. If they were not to rise in their bodies, then Christ their Lord had not risen in His body. The very ground of the spiritual resurrection they boasted of was their union with Him; God had justified them in Him. The new doctrine disclaimed that relation. It left them poor, separated, unredeemed, unjustified creatures, or, as he put it more fully, "*yet in their sins*." I\. After pressing this argument in various lights, he says, "*If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable*." It would indeed be miserable to believe such a contradiction. Christ had broken through the barriers of death, joined the visible and invisible worlds, and scattered the darkness over the grave and the world beyond. Those who said "the resurrection concerns us only here" restored the separation. They divided present from future. After speaking of a great deliverer who had conquered death and all man's enemies, they treated Death as in effect the final ruler, and Life as shut up within threescore years and ten of conflict. No one could be so constantly tormented by the feeling of being deceived, by God Himself, with promises that had no fulfilment, as those who grafted this notion onto their Christian belief. II\. But this was not all. St. Paul had the right to tell the Corinthians that no people in any age had settled for a conclusion as miserable as the one they embraced in their pride of Christian enlightenment. They were teaching that Christ had come to confound and cancel the dim hopes of all nations. Those nations' visions of the future were often very dark, and some would gladly have given them up, since it seemed likely that outward evils, and still more the pangs of conscience, would grow worse beyond the boundary of time. But there were glimpses of hope amid the forebodings. When present misery was acute, a prophecy arose in some minds, almost to conviction, that the other side of death might offer compensation. When the injustice of human rulers was overwhelming, the heart bore witness that there must be One higher, who might hold dominion there if not here. Those who felt this unrighteousness in themselves as well as in their rulers, yet knew they did not love it and would gladly be free of it, fixed their minds on a true and lasting, though unknown, Substance with which they might have fellowship once their ties to the evidently transitory and false were dissolved. However these anticipations were expressed, clouded, sensualized, or mixed with what contradicted them, every popular belief in the world, and most attempts to escape the perplexities of popular belief, testified to their existence. They were clearly necessary not to certain places or races but to mankind. To suppose them away is to rebuild the world on a different principle from the one history shows God used. Had St. Paul not the right to say, then: "If we are not to look forward with hope into the future world, if we already possess all Christ came to give, He has taken from us something He has not taken from any others, even the most wretched of His creatures. What has never been wholly a blank to them, with some bright Elysian spots in it, has become wholly a blank to us. We are men, and so we must believe in immortality. But we are Christians, believers in a risen Lord, and so all that lies beyond the grave is to be a void we know nothing of, which we shall certainly fill, as all men have done, with pictures of our imagination, most of them very gloomy"? III\. I foresee an objection: "If you give the words this force, you must keep still more strictly to their letter. You say all men have had some hope of a future, mingled with fears. But the Apostle speaks of a hope *in Christ*. What has such a hope to do with the dreams of Greeks or Goths about an Elysium or a Walhalla? Whether they lived before our Lord's coming or after, being heathens they certainly could not hope in Him." Brethren, I do not want to evade this. I allow that if we take the Apostle's language as it stands, we must attribute the hope in Christ not only to himself and the Corinthians but to those with whom he compares them. And I think every other passage in his writings shows this was no carelessness or haste, and that he would not have explained it as a mere figure of speech. The principle underlying all his teaching, and nowhere clearer than in this epistle, is that Christ's relation to man explains all the facts of the Gospel. When He took flesh and dwelt among men, He declared Himself the King, the Son of God, the Cornerstone of Humanity of whom all nations had dreamed, whom they had conceived under different forms, and whose manifestation in His true nature all had desired. If so, I cannot imagine how Paul could describe any hope ever held by any human being except as a hope in Christ. He must have seen it, like every good gift, as coming from Christ, and, like every right wish, as tending toward Him. The phrase "hope *in* Christ" is very comprehensive and clears away many difficulties. It explains how men in different latitudes, drawn different ways by outward circumstances, could cherish the same expectation. There was one common centre from which all were diverging in search of contradictory objects, yet to which they were continually recalled. It was drawing them to itself, and each was secretly confessing it when furthest from it. The gods the Greeks or Goths worshipped, so far as they were framed from fancy or from nature, could have kindled no *hope*, only vague, inconceivable dread. Whatever hope they had came from a hidden root. It was the acknowledgment that man in his inmost being is related to the Son of God and meant to share His life and immortality. So the Apostle could truly say that if the Corinthians, professing that Jesus was the Christ, made His appearance on earth an excuse for not looking beyond the earth, and for not regarding Him as Ruler of all worlds, the same yesterday and today and for ever, they had given up some of the hope in Christ their heathen brethren possessed. IV\. There is another and, I think, ample justification of the Apostle's words. He felt the misery of the world far more deeply than anyone who did not believe the Gospel could. It must have looked immeasurably more distracted to him than to those who did not believe God had created all to be members of one body in His Son. The forms of devil-worship around him must have seemed far more hideous to him than to one who did not worship a God of perfect charity. The dark and malignant passions in human beings, matching those they imagined in the higher powers, revolted him as they could only revolt one who believed the Spirit of Christ had come to make men in His image. And these sights could never be mere sights to him. He could not look at the wickedness and misery from a distance. They were the sins and miseries of those whose nature his Lord had taken, and he shared in them, conscious of a more inward evil than he could attribute to anyone around him. There were signs that cheered him and drew out his deepest thanks that God was working amid the corruption. Otherwise, how had he come to know the Lord whom his Jewish pride had so long resisted? How had Churches arisen in cities once wholly idolatrous? But how few members those Churches had, how much of the world's evil reproduced itself in them, and how great was the fear that an even subtler evil might develop among them! If the Corinthians' theory were true, and Paul could think all Christ came to do was done when a few were awakened from their death of sensuality and unbelief to a higher life, he might well call himself the most miserable of men. For what in the sight of those few, however blessed, could console him for the myriads alive then, or who had lived before, or would live after? Feeling their misery so much more intensely than others, he would have been crushed if he had had hope in Christ in this life only, if he could have measured the future of mankind, or of the individuals of any age, by anything he saw or had yet experienced. If we count among his experiences the chief of all, Christ's love to him a sinner, that might give him hope for every one of his fellow creatures. But then that hope could not be limited, as these Corinthian heretics would limit it, to this life or world. He must suppose that love reigning everywhere. Its infinite, incomprehensible nature had been shown here, and ages upon ages must be given for its full scope upon those it created and redeemed. If it was shrivelled into a few years and confined to the benefits conferred on a few persons in a small circle, then Calvary did not show the love, wisdom and power of the eternal God as Paul had declared. Christ had not risen as first-fruits of a redeemed creation, and the Church was not the pledge and witness that all things in heaven and earth would be gathered together in its Lord. The Corinthians might be content with such a low and selfish view of Christ's glory; if St. Paul had been, he would have been of all men most miserable. V\. So those simple and true people who find their belief in Christ an infinite comfort in this life, who in pain and desertion feel they have something they would not trade for all the kingdoms of the earth, need not fancy that St. Paul sets this conviction at nought. He sympathized with it on earth and sympathizes with it now. He would not call them most miserable. He would bid them give thanks for a present King and Deliverer, who makes this earth, with all its confusions, a blessed place where they may be well content that their lot is cast, because it is full of tokens of His love and occasions for serving Him. And if a wild thought should come, as it does even to the honestest, "If an angel from Heaven told us there is no future state, ought we to give up our faith in Christ?", St. Paul would answer, "No more than you should stop taking warmth from the sun today because you have reason to think it will not rise tomorrow." But he would add, "If such an angel does come, never mind his credentials or miracles. Tell him plainly that he lies. For he contradicts the message of One greater than he, the Lord of Angels, the Son of God and Son of Man. He has made yesterdays, todays and tomorrows into one. He showed us the Eternal Life that was with the Father. He must reign till all things are put under His feet. And those who live expecting that He will are the most blessed of all." VI\. But if we have a merely selfish satisfaction with what we think we have gained by Christ's death and resurrection, if we are content that all things go on as they do now, with no higher condition for individuals or mankind, then the words apply to us in full force. We are of all men most miserable. We had better be among those who expected a Walhalla or a sensual Paradise, or among those whom earth's torments drove to think there might be a Comforter though they had never heard of one. We had better be among the wildest fanatics who have tried to set up some imagined polity on the ruins of all they see. For they have a hope. They think there is a Being somewhere who does not wish evil to go on for ever and will not allow it. The Being we worship is not such a Being, if Christ is not to make His Will triumph over all that opposes it, in earth and hell. He has not revealed His Will in His conflict with Evil and victory over it otherwise. The faith we hold, instead of overcoming the world, has been overcome by it. We say we believe in the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and we really confess the Devil to be the supreme Lord. We should often bring this thought before ourselves as we walk our streets and read of what is happening elsewhere. Are our hopes in Christ, for those we see perishing in filth, ignorance and moral debasement, hopes for this life only? Do they depend on the efficacy of our money, labours and prayers? Is it the wisdom of Rulers, the godliness of Teachers, the benevolence of Societies, the purity of Churches, that stands between them and utter ruin? Then surely we are of all men most miserable! For do we not feel daily how little separates us, respectable Christian people, from these outcasts? Do we not sometimes suspect our sins are blacker than theirs, or doubt whether, with their temptations, we should not have sunk into depths of evil they have not sounded? Do we never think that when God rises to judge the earth, the stewards of His gifts will have a heavier account than those to whom the gifts were never distributed, who fancied from our report of Him that He required much and gave little? To think of all the wickedness crowded into the most fortunate corner of the earth, of the crimes committed in God's name and for His honour, of how few great evils the Church speaks against and how many she instigates herself, and not to feel something like despair and its palsy of heart and limb, is very difficult. It would be impossible if we were not encouraged and commanded to place our hope not in what we or the Church are doing but in what Christ has done, not in what we are but in what He is. That hope must carry us beyond this life. When we speak of Death, Resurrection, Ascension, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, and the Revelation of Christ as Judge of quick and dead, we are carried into a region where our measures do not apply. "*He has overcome death; He has taken away sin; He has led captivity captive*": what words, how far beyond our grasp! Yet the Apostle uses them without hesitation, and our consciences testify that without them he would not have preached the Gospel he professed. If we think that *nothing* is given yet and we are only to look for something to come, we are most miserable, for that something to come is as shadowy as what is about us. If we think that *all* has been given and we have nothing to long for, we are most miserable, for what is good here becomes a lie if it is not the germ of what will be perfectly good. But if we accept the signs and pledges of a perfect Sacrifice made once for all, feed on it and give thanks for it, the vision of Him who died once and reigns for evermore will grow brighter and clearer. May the ministers and stewards of Christ's mysteries, while they mourn their own unfaithfulness, remember that these are His mysteries, not theirs! Then they may encourage you to hope, and may dare to hope themselves, in Christ, for this life and for that life which He will give more abundantly when He appears in His glory. ## SORROW AND JOY NECESSARY TO EACH OTHER ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday in Advent ::: ::: {.center} [December]{.smallcaps} 19, 1858 ::: > "*As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing*."—2 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} vi. 10. *The passage:* "As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing" (2 Corinthians vi. 10). [Last]{.smallcaps} Sunday I spoke of this morning's Epistle. I said that if St. Paul told the Philippians to rejoice at all times while living on this earth, he cannot have meant to tell the Corinthians that they were the most miserable of people while living on the same earth, with their only comfort the hope of escaping it. Looking at what the passage that gave some readers that impression really meant, it became clear that Paul had causes enough for sorrow. If his hopes had been limited to his few years here, he would have been thoroughly wretched. He saw the earth as beautiful, rich with tokens of God's love. He saw Man as a glorious being, redeemed by the Son of God and united to Him. He looked on his own calling as a herald of good news with thankfulness and exultation. But because the earth showed such signs of a gracious Creator, he could not be content that it should also bear the marks of the Destroyer. The Son of Man had united men to Himself and revealed a Father to them, so Paul could not be content that they should live as outcasts and orphans. And because his message promised blessings that would unfold through ages upon ages, he would not shrink its purpose and fulfilment to the span of this life and our experience of it. I want to follow the same train of thought today. Many, I can easily imagine, will accept the passage from Philippians as suited to Christmas-time, a festal temper we should try to cultivate even when nature looks wintry, as we think of the Nativity and the old memories of the season. "And yet," they will say, "the effort is unnatural and cannot be kept up. An Apostle might manage to banish the outward calamities and inward perplexities that harass us every moment. It is a saintly and desirable frame of mind, which we may admire from a distance and now and then try to reach. But the stretched bow springs back. Causes of grief lie very close to us. We may lull grief, but we cannot keep it long out of sight. We may turn to pageants to forget our funerals, but the hearse will always claim some of the pageantry for itself." These complaints are reasonable. A preacher must not blame his hearers for fickleness if they remind him of these truths when he repeats the command to rejoice, or if they say they cannot always dwell on what is dismal when he speaks of the shadow of death over all the works of nature and of man. Such opposite objections do show an inward restlessness. But we must have felt that restlessness ourselves, and we ought to understand its cause. We are not acting in the spirit of the Apostles if we fail to recognize the justice of each demand the discontented spirit makes, if we do not admit that it has a right to sorrow as well as to joy and can no more do without one than the other. St. Paul knew this. When he told the Philippians to rejoice, it was not because he failed to see their many motives for sorrow, or because he wanted them to be false with themselves and smother it. He did not practise that fraud on himself. The text says he knew at least as much of one state of mind as of the other, and had found the secret of harmonizing them: sorrowing, yet always rejoicing. I\. It is a paradox, and we all feel it is. Yet the experiences I have just described show that we all sense a truth beneath it, and that we all want a way of mingling sorrow and joy so that neither contradicts or weakens the other. Whoever gives us that secret, and helps us use it in practice, will be the greatest of benefactors. You see people hugging a sorrow and feeding on it. The wild cry of Constance, "Grief fills the room up of my absent child," has been the cry of many a mother less ungovernable than she. You see that such indulgence is morbid and dangerous, leading to neglect of action and finally to selfishness. But the cures you usually try are feeble. You try to dissipate the patient's mind, offering other objects so that the one it dwells on is forgotten. Often you succeed. A grief that is unnatural, kept up for self-indulgence or for propriety's sake, yields to that discipline. But something is destroyed that should have been kept, something inward, not man's planting but God's. The waters of Lethe do not purge the spirit. They take away much of what is best and strongest in it and leave weeds and mud behind. Depend on it, sorrow, whatever outward occasion produced it, has something in it that we need and cannot afford to lose. The toad, ugly and venomous, carries a jewel worth more than all earth's diamonds, and whoever takes it from us is a thief and an enemy. I repeat, brethren, this holds whatever the occasion or instrument of the sorrow: loss of property, of reputation, of a friend. Do not say to yourself, or to your neighbour, "This is a poor, mean thing to grieve about." He will grieve, and you will grieve, on some plea or other, whatever you say. It is better to be honest. It is poor business to play tricks on ourselves and then produce a moral to justify them. The loss may well be a calamity. The grief for it is a gift, which like every gift you can turn into a curse, or draw from it the divinest blessing. An illustrious historian of our time said he could see in eminent men of various periods an impoverishment and decay of heart and intellect that dated from a crisis when they had wilfully thrown off some great sorrow which might have given them consistency and depth. The question is whether we shall nurse sorrow as our own, a warrant for disgust and misanthropy, or accept it as a message from above, an Angel of the Covenant, meant to teach us more of our relation to other men and to God. In this sense, I take it, St. Paul was always sorrowing. There is no trace of morbidness in his Epistles. He is always in action, thinking and feeling for others. He does not stop his work for an instant to dwell on the Christians he persecuted or his share in Stephen's death. In one most important sense he "forgets the things that are behind": he will not let them impede him or tempt him to think of himself when he should be thinking of Christ, the deliverer from Self. But in another sense nothing is forgotten. Every word he speaks is coloured and shaped by his past experience, which is stamped and burnt into his discourse because it comes straight from his heart. He is the beaten, flayed man who, according to the poet, alone is really educated. What he has suffered himself lets him look with straight eyes at the sufferings of the world. I say straight eyes, not cold hard ones, not the eyes of a man who sees suffering as an inevitable, hopeless curse. He sees it as a sign of derangement in what is essentially and divinely good, and so it makes him mourn. He sees it as one of the instruments for removing that derangement, and so it cannot make him despair. Paul learnt to sorrow for himself when he learnt to hope for himself. He had known the anguish of conscience and anger with the world, but he did not know sorrow until he had a revelation of One who cared for him, mourned for him, died for him. Then the vision of a Man of Sorrows rose before him, and in that sorrow he saw the full, perfect image of the Father from whom He came. Now he could desire nothing better for himself than a growing share of that sorrow, because to enter it was to enter the mind of Jesus Christ and the Nature of God Himself. So all that was firmest and all that was tenderest in Paul came from his perpetual sorrow. His firmness: he could not treat any suffering as strange or unnatural, having met it in its first principle, embodied and concentrated in Christ's Passion. He was braced for whatever was appointed him by his very sense that he could bear nothing except in Christ's strength. He could not grudge suffering to those he cared for most, since it was a sign and pledge of their adoption. And this was also the secret of his tenderness. No kind of suffering stood aloof from him. It was his own and his Master's, to be borne with Him and for the Church, his vocation and privilege. He would not cheat himself of it by asking what caused the sorrow. If it was the sin of the sufferer, that was reason for more sorrow and sympathy. He might not withhold the correction the sinner needed, or refuse to inflict it himself. But he could judge no man. All the seeds of sin lay in him, ready to start up, and he had known a deeper sin in himself. To feel and sorrow for sin was to sorrow for the sin of the world, which Christ had come to take away. II\. A man who is always sorrowing in this way *must* also have been always rejoicing. That is the interpretation of St. Paul's paradox. He did not put it forth to startle us; it was the natural expression of what he felt and knew. There must be an under-pressure equal to the upper pressure. A weight of sorrow like this could be borne only by a joy as great. We confess this in one way or another all the time. The most frivolous person says, "I have had much trouble lately; I must have more than ordinary pleasure and amusement to endure it." We often denounce such language, and the actions that go with it, as heartless, but there is a meaning in it, though an inverted one. The joy we seek in order to quench sorrow is a poor, flimsy joy, not the one man is entitled to claim, and it does not reach below the surface. The joy "which in our embers is something that doth live" lies at the very root of our being, as necessary to human life as moisture to plants. The frosts of the world seek to kill it, and it would perish in every human being if Heaven did not watch over it. That joy does not try to escape sorrow. It meets sorrow and finds its strength in enduring it. St. Paul saw an infinite sorrow in the world, which originates in man but with which all nature sympathizes and which it echoes back ten thousand times. But he also saw an infinite joy, likewise in us rather than in nature, yet one to which the trees, flowers, streams and hills will respond if it is in us. He found in the Son of Man the climax of all human sorrow. In the darkness over the land from the sixth to the ninth hour he saw Nature's witness that for that moment her light, like Man's, had been quenched. In the same Son of Man and Son of God he owned the source and climax of all human joy: the divine Word, without whom "not anything was made that was made," in whom was life, and from whom came the life by which all creatures were quickened and gladdened. He recalled the work of the Sorrower on earth: every act took some leprosy, palsy, fever or blindness from the children of men, or some death-anguish from mothers and sisters, and every word showed what mysteries of the divine Kingdom lay hidden in sowing seed, in the husbandman's work, in common food, in the marriage feast. He could not but believe that there was another cup besides the one the Father gave Him and which He drained to the dregs. The water He spoke of at Jacob's well, to be in men a well springing up to everlasting life, and the water to which He called all who thirsted at the Feast of Tabernacles, was surely a divine Joy. Only the Spirit of God could awaken it, but the spirit of man was created to receive and pour it out. Every hour Jesus walked among men He gave them some foretaste of this joy, some token that He came to make them its heirs. But there was one special hour when we are told He rejoiced in His own Spirit, and He gave its cause and subject in these words: "I thank thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight. All things are delivered to me of my Father. And no man knoweth who the Son is but the Father, and who the Father is but the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him." I think I read in this record the secret of Paul's continual joy amid his continual sorrow. Like his Lord he mourned the efforts of the wise and prudent to shut out the light of Heaven, building Babel systems of policy, philosophy and theology, and making men mistake their own unjust and cruel mandates for divine decrees. Like his Lord he rejoiced that the babes of the earth, fishermen and tent-makers, were allowed to show the will of Him who governs all, and to declare that He was no tyrant, as they had imagined, but a Father seeking to bring His children back to the Home they had wandered from. Like his Lord he found perfect comfort in tracing the discomfiture of the proud and the exaltation of the lowly to that Will which is only good and designs only good. And he saw that this Will is the Will of a Father commanding and of a Son submitting, and that in their perfect harmony lies the harmony of the universe. To know the Son through the Father's revelation, and the Father through the Son's, with the Spirit who proceeds from both as witness of their eternal unity, is to see where sorrow and joy meet again in the ocean from which they first came. For us too, brethren, they are different streams, and we need to drink at each; by plunging into one we may learn how near it is to the other. So at this coming Christmas-time let none of us refuse the draughts of sorrow that memories of other years bring. Let us not steel our hearts against faces and forms the eye can no longer see, as if that were a duty to the season or compliance with the Apostle's precept. Rather let us welcome them, accept their visits thankfully, and be glad to detain them. Do they bring not only the sense of smiles that can never again brighten the circle, but the thought of blessings abused, hard words spoken, and acts that can never be recalled? Cherish that form of sorrow too, and let it mingle with the other. The waters of Lethe will not change its nature, but the blood of Christ will. Out of the hard remorse that is the world's or the devil's gift will come the hearty, genial repentance that is God's. We shall not receive the forgetfulness that is a curse, but the forgiveness that is the divinest of blessings. It will issue from the throne of the Father of all and descend on all through Him who was born of the Virgin and made sin for us. Those we grieve for, each in the voice we knew of old, softened but not changed, will repeat the message. They beckon us to the sorrow that hope fosters and from which hope springs. They bid us mourn that we have so little believed the song of the angels and done so little to give glory to God on earth, spread peace, and establish goodwill among men. They say that even now this may become our work, and that if it does, we shall sorrow with Christ's sorrow and so enter into Christ's joy. For Christmas now, as of old, tells us we are to be always rejoicing. Nothing in the past, present or future, no aspect of our own life or the world's, is to hinder obedience to that command. It is a *command*, not the gratification of an instinct, the observance of a tradition, or the putting on of a face that is glad today because it was glad of old. Year after year, Christmas Day declares that God reveals to the babes of the earth, to serfs, prodigals and outcasts, what is hidden from the wise and prudent: the length and breadth of His compassion and His nearness to the sons of men. It declares that we are not to go into heaven or hell to seek Him; that He seeks us, comes and dwells among us, and claims fellowship with our weakness, sorrow and death. *Even so, Father*, it says, *for so it has seemed good in Thy sight.* Thou hast been pleased to reveal Thy Son to us in the lowliness of our flesh, so that Thy Son may reveal Thee to us in the glory of Thy Spirit. We could not have known the Son if Thou hadst not shown Him to us in this wonderful birth, nor Thee if He had not shown Thee to us in His life, death, resurrection and ascension, and in the gift of the Comforter. Since it has so pleased Thee, we pray Thee to give us strength to rejoice in Him when our sorrow for others and our shame for ourselves are greatest. We pray Thee, by sorrow and by joy, to soften and subdue us until we are changed into the likeness of the Child born in Bethlehem. We pray Thee to keep us in the faith that it is that Child, and no other, who shall rule the nations and make all subject to His kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy. ## THE WITNESSES FOR THE GLORIFIED SON OF MAN ::: {.center} St. Stephen's Day ::: ::: {.center} [December]{.smallcaps} 26, 1858 ::: > "*Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God*."—[Acts]{.smallcaps} vii. 56. *The passage:* Stephen says, "Look, I see heaven opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God." [Are]{.smallcaps} we to honour those who die as defenders of a false creed? The question is often asked, and I think we are not always careful enough in answering it. I\. The usual answer holds a deep truth, and if we search it to the bottom it may prove quite satisfactory. It says that the Martyr is not first of all the man who *dies* for a cause or opinion. He is a *Witness*. The worth of his sacrifice depends on the worth of his witness. If that is good for nothing, we cannot say his suffering is good for much. We may respect courage or constancy even in a criminal, but it is a gross confusion of terms to call that martyrdom. This is the plea Romanists have urged against calling those who died under Mary Martyrs. It is the plea by which Protestants refuse honour to those who suffered for Transubstantiation or the Papal Supremacy. It leads English Churchmen to withhold admiration from the Puritans and Quakers they deprived of livelihood, if not of life. It lets the vehement champions of conscience spare only the slightest pity for the Episcopalians under the Commonwealth, and make every excuse for those who punished them as Malignants. And it satisfies all these groups that Jews, Mahometans, Heathens and Sceptics, however much they sacrificed for their convictions, are to be seen wholly or chiefly as victims of a frightful delusion. I think the maxim behind these conclusions is right and valuable. The more we clear our minds of the idea that falsehood deserves sympathy or can lead to good, and the more we throw away the sentimental tolerance that is only indifference to truth, the better for our sincerity. That indifference produces no act of courage or devotion, and naturally breeds contempt for them. So let us hold firmly that the Martyr is a witness, and is good himself and useful to mankind only so far as he witnesses for the true God against the Spirit of Lies. 1\. Yet I can imagine no exception to this doctrine, and still I cannot set it against the strong instinct that makes us revere any man who accepts loss of mind, body or estate rather than profess what he does not believe or let go of what he does. Such a man is, I think, a witness against falsehood and for truth, against the Devil and for God. What he refuses to acknowledge may be a precious, divine principle, but his accepting it at my bidding might be neither precious nor divine. The opinion he clings to may be poor, but if he drops it because force or fashion is against it, he gives up more than an opinion. He gives up the veracity of his character, cuts himself off from fellowship with what is high and worthy, and disqualifies himself from ever seeing facts clearly and fully. On this ground alone I dare not quarrel with anyone who calls our opponents who suffered for their opposition *Martyrs*. No amount of suffering, however cruelly inflicted or patiently borne, justifies the name. A testimony for moral honesty does. 2\. Further, we need such a witness and cannot do without one. Men in the ascendant, with things settled their own way, soon cease to *believe* what they hold most strongly. They have voted certain propositions true or false; the Ayes or the Noes have carried it. Then the true thing comes to mean little more than what the majority thinks true. Some in the majority can give plausible, perhaps sound, reasons, and others memorise those reasons and produce them when their cause is attacked. But even the most intense opinion about the likelihood of certain conclusions has little in common with the faith that grasps a fact or principle as a rock, the only refuge from drowning. In easy times faith and opinion are quickly confused. Those who assail the opinions are God's witnesses to the difference between them, and His instruments for putting the question to each of us: "Is *thine* an opinion, or a belief?" They will not be decided by a show of hands or bound by public opinion; they say truth is not the same as that, and cannot be measured by it. Do you differ from them here? Do you reckon truth and general opinion the same? If you have no sense of how they differ, and often are radically opposed, you renounce the New Testament and treat the story of the Gospel's first proclamation as a fable. Nothing shows us the difference between Truth and our opinion about it like the rage we feel when a doctrine of ours is assailed and the eagerness to crush the assailant. Would I feel that rage if I thought, "This is not mine at all; it is an eternal truth which the eternal God will justify, against me and against the universe"? Is it not fear that makes me want to stifle the contradiction? I am not sure how it will turn out; I may be maintaining a lie after all, and it might be exposed. Brethren, that is not faith. The Bible would call it unbelief. 3\. While a dominant party is in danger of losing faith in mere opinion, the man who suffers generally, perhaps always, finds that there is something beyond opinion. If he did not, he would hardly be foolish enough to bear death, or even a great loss of earthly comfort, since I naturally prefer a visible, tangible thing to a mere notion. Anyone who can throw away visible, tangible things has discovered, because God showed him, an invisible reality nearer and dearer to him than anything his senses report, which no notions of his own or of all men together can plunder or tear away. So the priests and laymen for whom Mary and Bonner lit the fires in Smithfield did not die for Protestant notions. They died because they would not exchange faith in a living Christ for notions the Romanists would impose. In the same way I am persuaded that Sir Thomas More did not lay his head on the block for a notion about the Papal Supremacy, but because he feared to give up faith in another Kingdom higher than Henry's. We may be persuaded that asserting royal authority was necessary, both for the nation's independence and to free that higher Kingdom from a system that was disguising and distorting it. We may also admit that More's witness was especially demanded at that moment, and may have been indispensable to civil as well as ecclesiastical freedom afterwards. I would say the same of any Romanist who suffered for the other tenet that most scandalizes us. When that tenet comes clothed in anathemas, cutting men off from Christ's Sacraments for the sake of an insolent logical conceit, all hail to those who swear to die rather than accept it. But when a man, instead of forcing it on another, says it is bound up in his mind with belief in Christ's person and sacrifice, and so *he* will die rather than renounce it, he may deserve to be called a witness for that Person and Sacrifice. He may be doing homage in his own heart, and he may be telling us that our mere denial of his notion is worth as little as the notion itself, and that if we have nothing better to live or die on, we would do well to change places with him. So too with the Puritans and Quakers who bore imprisonment or banishment. I suspect we cheat ourselves of a Divine message, a solemn admonition and a great blessing, if we pretend they only exalted a private opinion and were sustained by confidence in it against State or Church. The glorification of private judgment comes later, in the day of ease or success. Their successors might say, "*We have a right to think as we like*." *They* said nothing of the kind; they did not even maintain what is worthwhile in that claim as against civil rulers. They said, "We *cannot* think as we like. We must speak what is given us to speak. You are forgetting and wishing to stifle some truth that a higher power than yours compels us to declare." I conceive they were uttering truths we did not care for, though they were involved in our professions and necessary to our spiritual life. They might also be denying truths we ought to have grasped with all our might; no opposition could hurt these, but *we* were doing what we could to hurt them by persecuting on their behalf. You may complain that by saying *we* I confuse our age, which does not persecute, with our forefathers' age, which did. In saying so I think I am more unjust to them than to ourselves. In their circumstances we should have done as they did; the futility of their experiments, and the very testimonies they tried to silence, have taught us. Yet how poorly we have learnt God's lesson, that if we try to promote His truth some way other than His, He will punish the disobedience! There is an extreme case, which I will not pass over because its moral is so awful. May an utter unbeliever, through sufferings inflicted on him for that unbelief, be a witness in the sense I have been describing? I hold that he may, for this reason. Christian communities have at times so represented God's character that He has been confused with the Spirit of Evil. Their vile acts have proved true of them what Stephen charged on the Jews: that they were offering sacrifice not to the God of our fathers but to Remphan or Moloch. If so, God might draw, and surely has drawn, a confession of Himself and a renunciation of His enemy from the lips and hearts of those who in words denied Him. I can take comfort in the thought that those who would not recant their Atheism to accept our Atheism may have been making a deeper recantation than we or they knew, to Him who reads the heart. "I will not confess that kingdom which Christ's servants hold to be His" may be turned into the cry, "*Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom*." The refusal to confess a *Tyrant*, even if joined with a wish for utter anarchy, may really have meant the resolve, "I will arise and go to my *Father*." II\. I think, brethren, we would understand this whole subject better, and be relieved of many perplexities, if we examined it by the light of the passage that has occupied us today. We all feel Stephen to be *the* Church Martyr, *the* martyr of the New Testament. Of no other who died for the faith have we so distinct a picture. We know exactly what he was accused of, how he defended himself, what provocation he gave his judges, and what his last words were. No one more forces us to remember the meaning of his title, for his stoning cannot be separated from his testimony. That testimony is in the words of my text. We might say it was a special privilege of a saint of the Apostolic age, and by treating his position as singular we might cut ourselves off from the truth he proclaimed. But the Church forbids this. By joining St. Stephen's day to the festival of the Nativity she makes the vision of the Son of Man a common blessing. By praying in the Collect that it may console all who suffer for the truth, she signifies that nothing else will support any of us in this day. And so she illustrates Stephen's argument from Jewish history, and shows why that argument, addressed to a Jewish Sanhedrim or mob, could only end in their stopping their ears, gnashing their teeth and taking up stones. Why did Stephen refer to Abraham and the patriarchs, to Moses and the prophets, to Solomon and the temple? It was to declare that the living God had been revealing Himself to men and through men. Every event of their history, every word of their holy book, every institution they boasted of implied a relation between God and man, and contained a promise that it would be fully manifested in a Son of Man. It was to bring home to his hearers that they were not believing in the God of Abraham, Moses and the prophets, the God whose glory filled the temple. They were not believing in a living God, but worshipping a mere notion, or quickening that dead notion into a dark, cruel hater of mankind who favoured only their tribes. So it was inevitable that He who came as *the* Man, who called Himself the Son of Man and entered into the inmost fellowship and sympathy with men, should be treated as an enemy of their race. When He called Himself the Son of God and said that whoever had seen Him had seen the Father, they denounced Him as a blasphemer and handed Him to the Romans as a rebel. There was no escaping the evidence; it went straight to their consciences. They had denied and killed the Just One because He was the Just One; they had hated the Son of Man because He loved men. So what they accused Stephen of prophesying would certainly be fulfilled. The customs Moses delivered, having lost their significance and no longer being tokens of a people in whom all the families of the earth were to be blessed, must change. The temple, deserted by the Divine Presence, must become a heap of stones with not one left upon another. When Stephen said, "*Behold, I see heaven opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God*," the truth he had proclaimed in all his discourse, and had seen to be the subject and climax of all Revelation, presented itself to him as actually as any visible thing meets the eye. It was not a doctrine of the Incarnation that he acknowledged in that hour; a mere doctrine would have stood him in little stead. It was a Person before him, whom he could call upon and trust, and he was sure he was in contact with life and substance, not hard forms of the understanding. It was a *Son of Man on the right hand of God*, an actual Mediator between man and God, in whom God could look well pleased on man and men could look up to God and be at peace. He was the fellow-worker and fellow-sufferer with every man and the whole race. On earth He had broken down the distinction between Publican and Pharisee, and He would break down the older and more sacred distinction between Jew and Gentile. Did not an opening of heaven that disclosed such a union of manhood with Godhead foretell a shaking of all religions and polities on earth that stood on any other foundation, whether they severed man from God or tried to fashion a God out of men's notions? Yes! This was the witness, the distinctive Christian witness: what was worth dying for, and what it was possible to die for. An immense majority might vote it ridiculous, but its truth or falsehood depended on no majority. Stephen could cast it out on the earth to perish if it was only an opinion of his, or of any man or age. If it was part of the constitution of things, lay at the foundation of man's being, and was involved in the Will and Nature of God, it would establish itself, whatever the opinions of any man or age. Would it, then, have surprised him to hear that this truth might have to be vindicated in later days, as in his, against consistories of religious doctors? They would maintain their own exclusive rights against the great human rights, put their dead systems in place of a living Creator and Father, and deny that God had really made Himself known to men or that there is a way from man to God. Would he have wondered that even those who had only a glimpse of one side of his truth might count that glimpse more precious than all the world's honours? Or that, if they did, they would become some of God's instruments to keep the whole belief in a Divine humanity from perishing in the hands of those meant to guard it? Would he not count it inevitable that any society which came to regard truth as a mere dominant opinion, enforced as other opinions are, would lose its connection with Him who is the Truth? It would become hard-hearted and inhuman, therefore un-Christian, and need to be reminded, even by those who do not bear Christ's name, what He is and what He came to do. Here, then, is ample justification both for the maxim by which religious bodies deny martyrs to each other and for the rebellion in our consciences against their narrowness. St. Stephen's witness is the witness the Church of God is to bear on earth. These bodies are right that the true martyr, who deserves honour and reverence, bears that witness and no other. They are wrong only in pretending to have been faithful stewards of this message. Their divisions, hatreds and persecutions have marred, broken and inverted it. Each has often been used by the Wisdom of God to bring out a witness of it that the other suppressed or mangled. And a cry has risen out of the depths of the human heart, often of bitter wailing and cursing against them all, which, interpreted by the teaching of Scripture, has the same significance. But this conclusion would be unpractical if it did not lead each of us to ask, "How may I, in my place and calling, bear witness of this Son of Man, if I indeed believe that there is a Son of Man, that He has revealed God to man, and that He stands at the right hand of God?" No people can less escape that question than we, members of the English Church, and none have less right to say their circumstances do not favour understanding or proclaiming the testimony. By every act and service from Advent to Trinity, by our Confessions, Prayers and Thanksgivings, by our Creeds and Sacraments, we avouch Sunday after Sunday that there is verily a Son of Man, one in all things with men, who has justified and glorified our race at God's right hand. If those Confessions and Prayers are taken from us or materially altered, I believe it will be because this witness offends the exclusiveness of some class or school, who cannot endure a Person set continually before them instead of notions, or a deliverance that is human and universal rather than something to boast of as ours. As long as Creeds were enforced by penalties or disabilities, their virtue as testimonies to the true Head of man and the real state of mankind was necessarily hidden. They were received as formulas of a certain religion, not as a Gospel to all nations and kindreds. Everything that has taken away their fictitious power has added to their actual power. The suffering spirit of man cries and sighs against the burden of its own dividing conceits and fantasies, as well as against the tyranny of sects, schools and doctors. In time it will learn to recognise the Creeds not as utterances of our beggarly opinions, mere heirlooms of the past, or inventions of schoolmen in their hour of triumph to keep men's hearts and reason within fences. It will hear them as voices from brothers in other days, inviting it to break through every opinion, tradition and form that hinders it from seeing the Son of Man as its representative and advocate at God's right hand. So I do not doubt that anyone raised up, in our day or another, to testify to the truth that let Stephen fall quietly asleep with a prayer for his country and his murderers will find these Creeds mighty aids and comforts, in public discourse and in solitude. Still less do I doubt that the Bible, in its plain history stripped of refinements, will be to them what its early part was to Stephen: the chief strengthener of faith and the great weapon against all artificial, notional, exclusive religion. If there were such fighters, they would discover, by degrees if not at once, that this is their armoury. But where are they? Amid the clatter of opinions and the confusion of schools and parties, where shall we look for those who care only to testify of a Son of Man at the right hand of God? In a time of self-indulgence, how can we expect that testimony, if it did come forth, to be anything but feeble or inconsistent? By human calculation there never was a time when such men were more needed or less likely to appear. But we are not to judge by human calculation. This is God's own cause, and He will take care of it. In places we know nothing of, by processes of education we cannot guess, He may have been preparing His witnesses. They may appear in the very year that is coming, in our land or in lands which in our vanity we suppose need reformation more. Wherever and whenever they arise, the old precedents will apply. The Christian religious world will regard them as the Jewish religious world regarded Stephen, and denounce them as wishing to overthrow institutions that are immeasurably dearer to them than to their accusers. But they will speak with power to the hearts of men who need a Son of Man. Even when their own vision is weakest, they will be sure that the heavens will one day be opened and the Son of Man revealed to the whole universe at His Father's right hand. ## THE BLESSING AND CURSE OF THE LAW ::: {.center} First Sunday in the Year ::: ::: {.center} [January]{.smallcaps} 2, 1859 ::: > "*Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law*."—[Psalm]{.smallcaps} cxix. 18. *The passage:* The psalmist prays that God would open his eyes so that he may see wondrous things in God's law. [The]{.smallcaps} Collect, Epistle, and Gospel read yesterday and again today connect the old world with the new, the Jew's obedience with the Christian's. The link is Jesus' obedience to the Law. We are taught that we have a stake in Circumcision because He submitted to it, and that in its highest sense Circumcision belongs to the citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. The subject matters deeply, both historically and personally. A preacher should not skip it on the pretext that the Church's services handle it better than he can. From those services we may carry away only a vague sense that our position is somehow like and unlike the Jew's. Or we may find out what the likeness is, and so come to see the difference fully. We may be content with phrases about formal, literal obedience and moral obedience, or we may learn why one is better than the other and how to exchange one for the other. I know no better meditation for a new year, which should join memories with hopes, and repentance for the past with manly, humble resolutions for the future. I have chosen a verse from Psalm 119, which expresses what a true Israelite felt about the law of his fathers, the Law he was born under. It is one of many verses on the same theme. Sometimes the Law, the Commandments, and the Statutes seem to fill the writer's whole mind. But Understanding, Knowledge, and Sight recur just as often, and always in connection with them: "Give me understanding, that I may keep thy Law. Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy Law." There is little sign here of dry, mechanical submission to a mere rule. The psalm assumes that the law cannot be kept without a faculty that enters into its meaning. It seems to treat the great reward of obedience as something inward, not external or accidental: the ability to discover the mind of the Lawgiver. 1\. Where did the Jew get this insight? He was under a rigid, unbending rule, which he was told came from divine authority and which it was death to break. Could such a law exercise the understanding? Must it not simply have filled him with terror of breaking it, knowingly or not, and of incurring its fearful penalties? We have reason to think this was its actual effect on the man who revered it above all his countrymen, who was "blameless" as to its righteousness. St. Paul tells us it lay on him as a heavy, intolerable curse, and that he received Christ as the deliverer from that curse. He meant the moral law, not merely the ceremonial. He dwells on the words "Thou shalt not covet," which frightened him and even awakened in him the very sin they forbade. Surely he never delighted in the law as David did, and never prayed to see wondrous things in it. What would have been shown him but the blackness of darkness and death? 2\. It may seem a strange answer to say that David learned his secret about the Law from the Covenant of Circumcision. St. Paul was circumcised on the eighth day, and his great fight after his conversion was with those who boasted of circumcision. Yet I believe this is the true answer. Understood fully, it explains the puzzling facts and reconciles David's experience with St. Paul's. The rite, which Abraham's children received from their ancestor, spoke like this: "God Himself, the unseen God, has chosen you to be His people. You have earthly, sensual, idolatrous tendencies. He has not chosen these; He has chosen you, in order to separate you from them and overcome them in you. He will give you your true rights as men and save you from sinking into animals, or from worshipping animals or anything you see, however vast and glorious. He will teach you to worship Him." 3\. Here was the foundation of the Israelite's life: a revelation of the righteous God, and a sign and pledge that He cared for his fathers and for him. The great proof of that care would be redeeming them from low, grovelling habits, from the tyranny of the senses and every inclination that bows to the senses. This Covenant long preceded the Law written on tables. It was wholly living and personal, made by a personal guide and friend with the man and his descendants. It joined itself to family life and household sympathies, and it condemned the tempers that divide brother from brother and children from fathers. Every violation of brotherhood and every child's rebellion helped interpret it, since they plainly came from forgetting it. Brothers thought they could keep the peace without remembering who made them brothers. Children thought natural affection would hold them to their father without remembering who created the relationship and gave the affection. It did not work. The instinct of self-indulgence was stronger than their sympathies. It was shown that there can be no true family union unless a God upholds it. 4\. Such were the lessons of patriarchal history, and each willing Jew learned them again from his own experience. Suppose he took them to heart. Suppose he became convinced that the living God, because He watched over the nation and wanted each member's good, was making him aware of the evils fatal to fellowship and to his own manliness and blessedness, and was promising to uphold him against them. Suppose he believed the worst misery possible was to lose hold of this loving God and serve false gods. What would he think of the Law? I do not know that he would distinguish one part from another; such distinctions come gradually. He would believe that all of it, the local or ceremonial part as well as the universal and permanent, showed the vigilance and wisdom of One devising the fittest means to protect His people, especially from their own downward tendencies. He would see that these tendencies were leading individuals and nations to death: idolatry first, then carelessness about the unseen God's name, forgetting the distinction of work and rest, neglect of parents, indifference to life, breaking the marriage vow, moving a neighbour's landmark, false witness, coveting. To be warned of these, to be told where they lead amid thunder and lightning, and to have the warnings kept for all generations in fixed letters on stone tables in the Tabernacle, was fresh proof that no stubbornness or rebellion had alienated God. His punishments, like His gifts, were meant to break their stubbornness and reform them. So the lesson of the whole Bible, Old Testament as much as New, took root: faith is the only foundation of obedience, and you cannot truly obey a Being whose character you do not entirely trust, to whom you attribute caprice or anything arbitrary and unrighteous. That conviction was strengthened by their own evil deeds, their countrymen's, and the heathen's, all of them fruits of suspicion toward the One who in various ways had been revealing His goodness to all. And what follows from such conviction, and from the trust it declared reasonable, indeed the very exercise God asks of men? A desire to know more and more of the purpose and meaning of His Law, to see how truly human society was built on it and how it expresses His own nature. "Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold these wondrous things out of Thy Law." 5\. Now suppose a Jew lost sight of this great meaning of Circumcision and the witness it bore against and for him. Suppose he saw it merely as a sign of separation from the other peoples, of God's hatred for them and His arbitrary partiality for one race. How would the Law look to him? First, he would glory in it as much as in the Covenant. It was part of the national inheritance. "Poor miserable Gentiles! God has not chosen that they should know it. They must perish for want of it." "Indeed! And what of you, child of the Covenant, who have this Law and boast of it? It says, *Thou shalt not covet.* Do you not covet? Do you covet less for knowing the sin is forbidden? Do you not covet *more*? Is the Law then not true? Does it not mean what it says? Does it denounce others and excuse you? Think of the trumpet that sounded so loud and long when it was proclaimed, the burning mountain, the lightning and thunder. Were they not all aimed at you? Will they not find you out?" 6\. Such was the Law's aspect to Saul of Tarsus, the Hebrew of the Hebrews, who thought the Covenant and Law were devised against the Gentiles. He was shown that he had in him what every Gentile had: a nature that would not submit to God's Law and hated it. But he was shown a still more wonderful thing: that he also had within him something that delighted in God's Law, acknowledged it as altogether good, and wanted to obey it. The question was whether God identifies *me* with the evil or with the good, with what fights against Him or with what cries out for Him. Or does He not recognize the difference at all? Does He only seek to damn me for the evil I do, not to save what in me cries out against it, and would pray for deliverance if it knew how to pray and to whom? 7\. "I thank my God," he exclaims, "through Jesus Christ, our Lord." Accepting Christ as the revealer of God's will and purpose, as the manifestation of God and the daysman between God and man, I know that God does not want to damn me for the evil I have yielded and am yielding to, though He will damn that evil for ever. He is seeking to save this spirit, this inner man which protests against the evil, out of its dominion. I thank God through Jesus Christ, who perfectly fulfilled the Law, not as a slave but as a child. He submitted to all its demands because He knew they were meant for men's benefit and elevation, and He bore its punishments that we might bear them. I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord because, as Head and Redeemer of our race, He claims us as sons of God and gives us the Spirit of sonship, which is His own Spirit. 8\. Here, first, was the reconciliation of St. Paul with David. Paul had learned, as David had, the distinction between flesh and spirit that Circumcision signified. He had learned to regard God's Covenant as an assurance of help to the spirit against the flesh, and to know God as a Deliverer out of bondage, as the first commandment declared. So when Saul's conscience most reproached him, the Law confirmed the verdict, and he was shut up in an apparently hopeless prison. He learned to call on the Lawgiver, to tell Him all he had done and was, to ask for a clean heart and a right spirit, to be true in his inward parts and to know wisdom secretly. So far he was recovering his Jewish standing-ground, exchanging the lore of the rabbis for that of kings and prophets, and seeing that wondrous things lay hidden in the Law which only God could open his eyes to see. 9\. But he could not reach this position without reaching a lower and a higher one. He could not speak the language of the kings and prophets until he confessed a Crucified Man as the King and Prophet, the Lord of his own spirit, his nation, and all men. Otherwise he must go on regarding the Law and the God of Abraham as his enemies. He would be persecuting on behalf of Judaism while renouncing the Jewish faith, unless he could believe that One had come who delighted to do God's will, had the Law in His heart, and was willing to offer soul and body so that the Law might be written in men's hearts and God's will be done on earth as in heaven. Was this a great humiliation for the righteous Paul? In making it he took a position *higher* than David's and the prophets'. He claimed to be a son, not a servant. His power to delight in the Law came from daring to call its Author his Father, and from receiving it, thunders and lightnings included, as the message of a Father determined that His children's enemies shall be put down and exterminated. 10\. In this process of discovery, then, a new covenant is involved, a covenant with sons, yet carrying the same pledge of war against evil, the same wrath against it, and the same separation from it as the covenant with servants. But for whom was it designed? Who might dare to call themselves by the audacious name Sons of God? Stripped of all personal and national pretensions, forced to see the Law as aimed at *his* sin and the Covenant as a separation between him and his evil nature, St. Paul had nothing left but to become an apostle of the Gentiles. He must preach the Covenant of Sonship to all without exception. The Son of God, having taken man's flesh and died man's death, must be declared the Head of every man. It must be every man's right and duty to confess himself a member of Christ, and to thank God through Jesus Christ for adopting him into His family, promising to govern him, and giving him the true circumcision of the spirit. Paul's gospel could have no limit unless he denied Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection. There is no danger in calling men Sons of God unless we suppress the further message: that He who claims them as sons and accepts them as righteous in the only-begotten Son also takes them under His education and gives them His Spirit, to make them aware of their parentage and destroy whatever in them contradicts it. That is the Baptismal Covenant; so it interprets our existence and the condition of mankind. 11\. The Church has been teaching this doctrine in its full length and breadth during the last week, and will continue to this week. The Circumcision falls between Christmas Day and the Epiphany. The ground is laid in the revelation of the Divine Word, the only-begotten Son, in our flesh. There we have the true regenerate constitution of humanity, announced by angels and made known to shepherds at the manger in Bethlehem. Then comes the witness of the old dispensation, not *against* universality but *for* distinction: that man is a spiritual being, that his constitution is spiritual, and that what in him is base, selfish, and divisive will not submit to it and must perish. So by the Jewish road, which is straighter and nearer than any byway, we arrive at the full manifestation of the Redeemer and King to all the nations. We arrive also at the prayer in which David's "Open mine eyes, that I may see wondrous things" reaches its highest point: "That we, which know Thee now by faith, may after this life have the fruition of Thy glorious Godhead." 12\. I do not intend to enter this afternoon on the festival that suggested that prayer; the Circumcision is enough for one day. I hope you see that the Apostle who says we "are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands" was not trifling with words, nor using a Jewish analogy suited only to his time. He was giving the real sense of the old institution as the seers of his land saw it and as it shaped all their history. He was giving the result of a long, humbling, elevating experience of his own. And he was teaching what we have needed in every past year and will need in this one. The flesh that resists law, human and divine, is in all of us. You may coerce it by punishments, and make law and government, man's or God's, terrible and much hated. But you will not produce free and fruitful obedience in a man, a child, or a nation unless you confess that there is something besides this flesh: a spirit that craves law and government, and craves still more a righteous Lawgiver and Governor. Do justice to yourself and to every fellow-creature by appealing to this, the true man, the man after God's heart. Tell it of One who has claimed fellowship with it, redeemed it, and won for it the right to say "Abba, Father." Say that the Eternal God sees it, and sees all human beings, in this Redeemer and Son, and wishes to renew all in His image. When we believe this, we shall not complain that law is burdensome. We shall hail Divine Law as a direct means, and human law as a subordinate means, for educating the spirit and crushing what hinders its expansion and freedom. "Circumcise our hearts and our members," we shall pray, "in whatever way Thou, the All-seeing, deemest best for bringing us to true obedience. Open Thou our eyes, that we may behold in every one of Thy laws, for men or for nature, Thy wondrous wisdom and love." ## CHRIST AMONG THE DOCTORS ::: {.center} First Sunday after Epiphany ::: ::: {.center} [January]{.smallcaps} 9, 1859 ::: > "*And it came to pass, that after three days they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers*," —[Luke]{.smallcaps} ii. 46, 47 *The passage:* After three days Joseph and Mary found Jesus in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. All who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and His answers. [The]{.smallcaps} manifestation to the Magians, which we heard in Thursday's service, is recorded by St. Matthew. The manifestation to the doctors is told only by St. Luke. We might have expected the reverse: that Matthew, writing for Jews, would tell what concerned Jews directly, and that Luke, the companion of St. Paul, would seize on the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles. But Matthew, who cared to set forth a King of the Jews, would naturally record the Wise Men's search for such a King and their homage when they found Him. And no one was fitter to tell how the Light of the World burst upon the Rabbis in the Temple than Luke, who had talked with the pupil of Gamaliel and had carefully studied how that man came to be enlightened. By bringing these two events together under the name of Epiphany, the Church seems to impress on us that every act of our Lord from His birth onward is a disclosure of the glory of the only-begotten Son of the Father, from whose Grace and Truth all human grace and truth proceeded. Seen so, these old records, which some distrust and would like to discard, fit the whole tenor of the history. They also free us from confusions about that history and about the meaning of the word Revelation. We think it natural that the Apostles, endowed with miraculous powers, could build up a Church among Jews and Gentiles. Had we such powers, we feel sure we could convert Hindoos and Mussulmans, and the many who are Christians only in name. The Apostles had no idea that they possessed any such charms for moving hearts and consciences. They said the Gospel itself was the "power of God unto salvation, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." They said their task was to preach Christ crucified, because His weakness and humiliation made known the power and wisdom of God. In other words, it was He who, through their preaching, revealed Himself to the eye meant to receive the discovery and waiting for it. The story of the Star leading the Wise Men to the King they were asking the stars about explains how He made words or signs effective for His purpose. The story of His listening to the doctors and questioning them shows how He made men who were slaves of words, or rather of letters, and who thought all power lay in them, confess a mightier power in Him. I\. This is the subject I think today's Gospel forces on us. In the Temple were gathered grave men, full of all the learning to be had from the traditions of the past, and, as they thought, from the words and lives of Patriarchs, Lawgivers, and holy men. Theirs was no profane wisdom; some might have a little of that, but all valued it only as it illustrated the Divine wisdom given to their land, or as a foil to set off its purity. They might not agree on the meaning of the words they prized. The Psalms were open to very different readings. They disagreed about where and how a given prophecy would be fulfilled. They might differ on the relative worth of the commandments, and still more when they compared those simple, broad commandments with the exact rules handed down by elders and doctors. Most probably thought that keeping the commandments was comparatively easy and vulgar, and that practising the refined rules showed a more scrupulous holiness, or at least led toward it. Some, however, would deride such practices as idle: ordinary morality, as the Commandments prescribe, was what God demanded, and ascetic maxims had been needlessly grafted on. Yet through all these differences ran a general impression that whatever there was of religion, or of acquaintance with the oracles of God, dwelt among them. Age and the inheritance of former times were theirs. They were the shepherds of the people, and whether the sheep went right or wrong depended mainly on whether they accepted or neglected this guidance. Into this grave and venerable company comes a Boy just twelve years old. No one can say exactly how He came there. But it is a promising sign, a sign of early devotion, that He likes to be in the Temple. The great festival has just ended, and among the crowds who attended it, it is no wonder if one was seized with awe at those beautiful buildings, or at what they signify. This one is apparently separated from His parents. He may have wandered off by accident, or He may be thinking, if His tribe and the rules of the elders permit, of giving Himself to the service of that place. A friendly Rabbi might think it worth asking what He intended, and why He was lingering there. 1\. So He stands among the Rabbis, not frightened by their dignity, showing no bashfulness but also no forwardness. He is not eager to speak; He wishes to listen. The doctors are talking about matters they presume are far above a boy's understanding, and His face shows no assumption or precocity, only quietness and docility. Such a boy may be allowed to hear their talk, and it may impress Him later, if not at once, with reverence for their persons and office. And what was that listening of His? In the highest sense, as in every lower one, the maxim holds: "Everything is received according to the measure of the receiver." We can imagine how glibly the familiar texts were repeated, how often "sins" and "repentance" were on their lips, how they debated the hope of Israel and the promise of dominion over the Gentiles, how they spoke of all God's dealings with them, short of pronouncing the Name that signified His hidden essence. What awful, unutterable meanings lay under these sounds! And the meaning, not the sound, was what this Boy was listening to. What the learned men had only the faintest consciousness of entered into His inmost being. It was reverent and awful listening, the listening of a child, not the judgment of a man. We find that distinction hard, but if we believe the Incarnation we shall try to make it. We shall believe that the Child was a child and the Boy a boy; that the Child was perfect as a child and so did not anticipate its later growth, which would imply imperfection; that the Boy was a perfect boy and so had none of that forestalling of manhood which our consciences and reason tell us is irregular and untrue. This is not merely to do justice to Christ's Humanity. It is the only way we can see how the Divinity manifested itself through the Humanity and addressed all the conditions and needs of Humanity. We may form a notion of Divinity as unlimited wisdom and power, but such notions are worth very little. What we want is to know what wisdom and power are in their fullest sense, not to shape and shrink them by our understandings and then fancy we have made amends by calling them "unlimited." Do you suppose those Rabbis, after forty or fifty years of reading and copying the Law and comparing and registering the commentaries, had ever felt such a presence of Divinity as when they looked into the face of that listening Boy? They could copy the letters and survey the commentaries. If something deep and mysterious lay beneath, they could reduce it to Cabbala and talk of it as *their* possession, *their* distinction from the multitude. But which of them could penetrate the awe and mystery of that countenance, clear and bright as it was? What spoke through it could not be reduced to Cabbala. They could never say, "*That* raises us above our countrymen." They must have felt: "That face speaks of our connection with Galilean peasants; it reminds us we are of the same flesh and blood. As we look at it, does it not seem more glorious to share flesh and blood with anyone called a man than to have all this learning of ours?" A strange message, a strange witness, to come to men who must uphold their reputation for sanctity and wisdom before the multitude! Yet surely a divine message. Surely those listening eyes were reading their very hearts. Surely they knew better than ever before that God was reading them. 2\. Then came the questions: "He was sitting among them, both hearing them and asking them questions." Still all is suited to a boy. He pronounces on nothing and lays down no law. The time may come when He will go up into a mountain and speak as One having authority, but not yet. He is not above the Scribes; He sits at their feet. He wants to know what *they* think about this commandment, about this sentence of David or Isaiah. At first the answers are ready: what one elder or another had written or taught his disciples. They begin to give out the oracles, perhaps with an air of patronage to the earnest youth. Why does the patronage disappear? Why does the well-trained memory fail? Why that look of puzzlement, almost terror, on faces used to resolving every riddle and silencing every dispute? The question has gone beneath commentary and text alike, and the second-hand answer does not serve. What would it profit to give the best exposition of the Commandments if the Child, with those deep, searching eyes, said: "He who spoke these commandments calls Himself The Lord *thy* God. What is this *Thy*? Is He indeed the God of each of you? He speaks as a Deliverer out of bondage. Is that so? Was He only the Deliverer of our Fathers long ago, or is He that still, now? The prophets always call Him the Living God, the God from generation to generation. Is He then actually with us as He was with them, speaking to us as He spoke to them? He is described as a Father pitying His children and putting away their sins, yet hating all iniquity. Is that so still? Does He actually seek to make men right?" I have supposed questions with no novelty in them, arising directly from the language of the Holy Book. If there had been none deeper (and there were deeper than we can imagine), what must their effect have been? No Rabbi could have charged the *speaker* with captious doubt or premature disbelief. But might not many have been led to suspect *themselves* of doubt and disbelief? Might not one have thought: "The words cannot be taken in their simple, strict sense; if so, the Book is not the one I thought I knew from beginning to end"? Might not another have said: "Yes, thanks be to God, that must be what is written. I did not perceive it, but so it is. The King of kings cannot be far from us. He must be in this place, and though it is the holy place where He put His name, I knew it not"? 3\. We are told that "all who heard this child were astonished at His understanding and answers." So they must have questioned Him as He questioned them. No doubt He submitted to their catechism as willingly as He had been eager to receive what they had to give: a child, in either task, taught by elder men and doing what they required. And His answers, like His questions, would not be new or far-fetched. They would be startling because they presented the words of holy men in their direct, full, original force. They did not make veils for those words but drew away the veil that had hidden them. The words came forth as if the men in whose hearts they had burned like fire were present, and they were shown to be not theirs but His who had spoken to those men and declared His purpose through them. The answers, I repeat, were not veils; they were a Revelation, an Unveiling. And that Unveiling was not of a System or a Religion but of Him who said, "Let not the rich man glory in his riches, nor the wise man in his wisdom, but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he *knoweth* Me, that I execute judgment and righteousness in the earth." So it was, as the Evangelist says, the *understanding* (σύνεσις) of this child that astonished the doctors. No word could better express the impression on their minds. This boy *went along with* the words they had read, copied, and memorized. They had never gone along with them. They had drawn conclusions and generalized notions from the words, but their hearts had never touched them. The words were idols worshipped at a distance, and not worshipped until all the dangerous life had been extracted from them, until they were as powerless to act, teach, or govern as the stocks and stones of the heathen which those very words denounced. What a wonder to see them living and breathing again in this Child's answers! What a wonder to find that He went along not only with the words but with the very mind of Him from whom they came, and spoke like one brought up with Him, a sharer of His counsels! 4\. Although nothing in this Boy's listening, questioning, and answering interferes with the growth in wisdom and stature St. Luke speaks of, the gradual unfolding of human life necessary to manifest the Divine life, there is a foreshadowing of later years. We generally see such a thing in an individual when we know his story, and we should confidently expect it in *the* Man, the Representative of the Race. After He entered His ministry, when He was exercising the fullness of His power and denouncing those Scribes and Pharisees He had listened to in the Temple, He was still unveiling deep mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven by asking questions of His disciples and the multitude. The last of these awakened great awe: "What think ye of Christ? whose Son is He?" He was still answering those who asked "what was the chief commandment," "Shall we give tribute to Cæsar?" and "Whose wife will the woman be hereafter, who had the seven husbands on earth?" He was again a silent hearer of the charges against Him in the Sanhedrim, until the High Priest's adjuration to say whether He was the *Son of God* drew the final answer: "Thou hast said; nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the *Son of Man* sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of Heaven." Thus His earliest acts on earth and His latest showed a divine harmony. His understanding of God's ways was more and more discovering His name to be what the prophet proclaimed: "He shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor." And His question to Mary and Joseph when they sought Him sorrowing, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?", prepared the way for His baptism and for His final prayer, "Father, glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son also may glorify Thee." II\. But the subject is for us no less than for the Rabbis. I will mention some lessons I think lie in it, which we especially need at this time. 1\. First: many divines, and many Christians who are not divines, have a great fear of questions. "Certain things," they say, "were settled long ago, and to disturb the settlement is perilous. If we are humble and modest, we shall be content without *knowledge* of divine things. Probabilities and distant approximations to knowledge are all that creatures like us can aspire to." Brethren, as long as I believe in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, and seek my standard of modesty and humility in Him, I must protest against the modesty and humility these disciples of His affect. I find Him beginning His pilgrimage on earth as a questioner. I find Him astonishing the upholders of a long, safe tradition by that method. I find Him sanctioning it as His own sound way of detecting falsehood and laziness and urging men to seek Truth so that they may find it. I believe Christ has been asking questions from that day to this, and is asking them of us all, divines and laymen, now. They come in many shapes and through many lips. They come through children who torment parents and teachers about the wonderful meaning of *words* that have become to *them* mere familiar sounds, and of *things* they have gazed at until they forget there is any life or mystery in them. They come through men exercised by the puzzles of Philosophy who want ground to stand on, a ground of reality, not of convention. They come through the cravings of men who know nothing of Philosophy but have found enough in their own thoughts and in the world to amaze and confound them. They come even through the frivolous, who seem to be engaged in no search, who only want to throw down a system or build one for their own fame, yet who, being men, cannot be merely busy at that poor work and will start some inquiry that we may pursue to its issue if they will not. I am greatly afraid that when we try to silence any of these questions we are trying to silence the voice of Christ, in others and in ourselves. We do not like Him to sift us and make us understand what in us is of Him and will bear the fires of His judgment-day, and what is our own wood, hay, and stubble, which must be burnt up in them. 2\. I know how liable such statements are to be misunderstood, as if I wished to discourage reverence for the past, or thought there were no oracles of God stronger and deeper than all human reasonings and speculations. I have tried to show you today how unfair those charges are. Just because I would uphold reverence for the past, and think our speculations far feebler than the oracles of God, I dare not stifle one anxious question men raise about the faith of other days and those oracles. The Rabbis did not reverence the past. They accepted its decrees. They had no fellowship with the life and sufferings of its men. They did not honour the oracles of God. They were buried under their own reasonings and speculations, and could not receive any word as coming directly to human hearts from the Ruler of those hearts. No men needed so much to become little children and recover the wisdom of children. That they might attain it, the Child came among them, listened to them, and asked and answered questions. I think that same Child, who has the government on His shoulders, hears us, questions us, and answers us for the same end. There are doubtless those who want to cut us off from all communion with the past, telling us it is a chain on our freedom. There are those who say the Bible is an obsolete book, useful in the world's infancy and unworthy of such advanced sages as we are. You do not refute these objectors by arguing against them, by setting the weight of opinion against them, or by matching their hard, scoffing temper. Their fault is not that they question too much but too little. They have never asked themselves what they want, or what mankind wants. If they once grappled fairly with those questions, they would begin to reverence those who wept and bled so that mankind might have what it wants, and would be filled with shame as they contrasted those tears and blood with their own boasting. They would hear an old text telling them secrets of their own being that the wisdom which mocks at texts has never penetrated. For they would see that they, and mankind, want the actual knowledge of God; that for this men have sighed and cried in every country and age; and that if this knowledge cannot be had, what is called Self-knowledge is either a miserable delusion or a curse and a horror. So you may lead even proud deniers to come as little children, not only to the Bible but to that Child whom the Bible declares to be the firstborn of Men, the perfect manifestation of God. 3\. This is the subject I began with and shall end with. Do *our* Rabbis confess Jesus Christ to be that perfect manifestation of God? Do they admit that He came into the world in very deed to show men the Father? Do they confess that *this* was His Father's business, which He was about from His cradle to His Cross; that He has been occupied in this ever since the world was made and will be for ever and ever? Alas, in the very highest quarters of English Rabbinism we are taught the reverse. The only way to confute Rationalism and establish Christianity, we are told, is to affirm that God cannot be known and that man's constitution forbids him to seek such knowledge. We are to add nothing to the Bible, except that our main business is to seek a system or scheme of Religion that may benefit our character. We are to take nothing from the Bible, except that man is made in the image of God and that to be ignorant of his Archetype is to be miserable. To some of us this seems to add to the Bible all the human inventions it protests against, and to take from it whatever gives it a claim to be a Divine Revelation. This combination of the profoundest Scepticism with unlimited acquiescence is nothing new. Half the submission to an infallible dictator, and at least half the willingness of philosophers to endure the grossest superstitions, may be traced to it. Its justification lies in the simple proposition, "We cannot conceive the inconceivable." That maxim is so self-evident that it would have swept away all thought of an invisible world or a divine Being, had there not been in human beings a deeply grounded conviction, however variously expressed or however unable to express itself, that unless we can rise above our conceptions, above ourselves, there is for us no science of things and no knowledge of persons, whether fathers, brothers, or friends; and that all affection must perish, as all understanding must, in the true sense of the word. That inward belief, whose loss is the loss of every aspiration after goodness or nobleness and the destruction of any morality but the conventional, has given rise to the cry for some Being above all our thoughts and conceptions, yet the ground and standard of them all, to tell us what He is and therefore what we are. The faith of our fathers was that God answered this cry which He Himself had awakened; that He did come forth in His only-begotten Son to show men what He is; and that He did send His Spirit into human hearts, that all might know Him, from the least to the greatest. Confessing this Revelation was their orthodoxy. They had no notion of a system or scheme of Religion apart from a Manifestation of God to men. I believe, brethren, that God will sweep from His earth all schemes and systems of religion that lack this real Revelation for their basis or hide it from men. I believe that a building with the doctrine of Bolingbroke, or the "Essay on Man," for its foundation and the teaching of Christ and His Apostles for its superstructure must fall by its own weight, or, if not, that the rage of disappointed human hearts will tear it down. But I also believe that the Child who stood among the Rabbis, hearing them and asking them questions, and astonishing them by His understanding and answers, has saved and will save the World, which by wisdom knew not God, from that miserable and fatal ignorance. He has revealed, and will reveal Himself more and more, as One who is made unto us Wisdom and Righteousness and Sanctification and Redemption. ## ST. PAUL AT ATHENS ::: {.center} Second Sunday after Epiphany ::: ::: {.center} [January]{.smallcaps} 16, 1859 ::: > "*And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also His offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: because He hath appointed a day, in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead*."—[Acts]{.smallcaps} xvii. 26-31. *The passage:* God made all nations of men from one blood to live over the whole earth. He fixed their appointed times and the boundaries of their homes, so that they might seek the Lord, feeling after him and finding him, though he is not far from any of us. In him we live, move and have our being, as some of the Athenians' own poets have said: "We are also his offspring." Being God's offspring, we should not think the Godhead is like gold, silver or stone shaped by human art. God overlooked the times of this ignorance, but now commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has appointed a day when he will judge the world in righteousness by the Man he has ordained, and he has given proof of this to all by raising him from the dead. [The]{.smallcaps} picture of St. Paul at Athens in the Acts has been filled in with light and shade by readers' imaginations, but the main outlines cannot be erased. He was grieved to see the city wholly given to idolatry. He argued in the market-place with philosophers of different sects. The Athenians' curiosity for something new would not have let him stay silent about why he had come to Greece, even if he had wished to. And he did deliver, on Mars' Hill, the most elaborate of all his discourses. We can easily guess what that discourse would have been if he had followed the method of spreading Christianity that is most admired among us today. He would have begun by offering proof that every other nation had been left to its own courses, unguided, while his own had been entrusted with a divine communication. The evidence, he would say, was not demonstrative but enough for men alive to their own dangers and ignorance: the Ruler of the world had made his will known to Abraham's children. Strictly, what was revealed about God's nature and purposes could not be called true, since men have no faculties for receiving knowledge of an infinite Being. But it was as near to truth as men could usefully get, and precepts built on it had proved beneficial in life. One of them forbade the worship of graven images. No reason was given, of course. How can an infinite Being be expected to give reasons, or how could men understand them? But since the Lawgiver has infinite power to enforce his decrees, was it safe to set any of them aside? Turning from the people to the learned, he would then show triumphantly that every speculation about the gods had come to nothing and been absurd. By the very conditions of man's being, he would argue, human dreams about a Nature so far above ours could have no counterpart in reality. He would strike impartially: at the Epicurean's self-confidence, the Academic's scepticism, the Stoic's physical theology and stern ethics. If he favoured anyone, it would be some especially earnest inquirer, since exposing his blunders would be a greater victory for the Gospel than defeating a mere sophist. Then, with the ground cleared, he would commend his own religion to the crowd, as milder, less national and less dogmatic than the Judaism it sprang from. He would ask the Athenians' common sense whether, in their hopeless ignorance of divine things, the prudent course was not to accept a faith that promised inconceivable rewards to its champions and utter ruin to those who rejected it. I can think of only two reasons why defenders of this kind of teaching might say it was not Paul's. One is that he was not learned enough to know the sages' opinions, or logical enough to produce the overwhelming argument against them. I reply only that I take Paul to have been sent with the weapons suited to his work; if they think otherwise, let them say so boldly. The other is that such language might have brought down Greek indignation on him. But we have always thought Paul a brave man whose testimony was no sterner in safety than in danger. Nor can I admit that this kind of speech would have been more dangerous than what had already roused the fanatical rage of the Jews at Thessalonica and Berea. If his main aim was to win converts to a religion, I am not sure it would not have gained him more than Dionysius and Damaris. It would have appealed to passions he did not invoke. Epicureans and Academics would have found the attacks on popular worship plausible, and each would have welcomed the sneers at the others' systems. And his own countrymen, if any were present, would have seen in him a champion, not an enemy, of their exclusiveness. But let us now consider not what Paul might have said, but what he did say to the people of this idolatrous, philosophical, news-loving city. I\. "*God hath made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell upon all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation*." Paul had learned this by meditating on the calling of his own nation and by studying the Law and the prophets. God formed the nations of one blood, one family, and has watched over the bounds, circumstances and destiny of each. The Jewish nation existed as a witness to this fellowship, and against whatever divides nations and sets them at war. It also existed as a witness to the special work of each nation, with its own geographical limits and ties of kindred and race. It was there to say: "The one living and true God made you all to be one, and gave you your tasks. He has never left you alone. No fact of your history lies beyond his providence, and no thought has risen in your minds without his teaching. I, the Jew, the child of Abraham, stand forth to claim this for the God I worship. I reject the doctrine that any nation may deny its connection with any other. I declare that you, men of Athens, have had a divine vocation, and that God has appointed you a distinct and remarkable part in his great drama. You are utterly wrong to say that your fathers' great deeds were theirs and not his, or that your institutions, freedom and wisdom are so human as not also to be, in the highest sense, divine." This is a wonderful message, very unlike the one we heard just now. But read Paul's own words attentively, and ask whether they say less than my paraphrase, or far more. II\. But *why* has God chosen the particular nations, and ordered their times and bounds? Paul answers: "*That they may seek the Lord, if haply they may feel after Him, and find Him*." On this inspired Apostle's account, God himself stirred up men's thoughts and inquiries about his Being and Nature. Every circumstance of their outward position was ordained for the very purpose of giving their thoughts this impulse and direction. If we believed that, many puzzles in history, oppressive to those who read it as the story of their fellow-beings, would be solved. We can see how soil and climate, the temperament of races, their ideas of law and government, their internal struggles and dealings with neighbours, shaped their thoughts and feelings, especially about the invisible world and divine powers. If we could be sure that fertile or rugged soil, genial or cruel climate, the need of rule and of freedom, the activity that led to war and the deeper craving for peace, had all been means of giving them some glimpse of a Guide and Ruler, and of making them grasp something really in him, some side of his character or purpose, then the past would be an illuminated scroll, not a dark one. How one apprehension grew feeble and distorted, how others were rejected for its sake, how the polytheistic confusions arose, how they were fixed in the mind by selfish fears and kept up by dishonest priests who confused their own power with the unseen power, we can understand from later experience. The hard questions are, what was the starting-point of those thoughts, and how were they kept alive when so much in nature and in men themselves refuted them? Paul gives a decided answer. This feeling after God, found in some form in every tribe on earth, marked as a human necessity, yet threatened with death and derangement by a thousand tendencies in man, the Creator himself has called forth and sustained. Without his first word it could not have been; without his continual presence it would have ceased altogether. III\. Bold as this is, and strange as it must sound to those who think the way to defend the Old Testament is to treat all heathen ideas of God as mere tradition or imagination, the words that follow are more startling. We know them so well, and they have so shaped the speech of Christendom, that we forget how awful they are, how remarkable for the place where they were spoken, and how they contradict some of our favourite religious and philosophical maxims: "*Though He is not far from every one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being*." How often we wish we had never heard them in childhood, thinking they would strike us with overpowering force if we heard them for the first time. That wish is ungrateful and foolish; they have influenced us all our lives in ways we cannot conceive. We may not be more thrilled than Paul's crowd on the Areopagus, but they may now break through the frost of custom and come on us like guilty things surprised by a forgotten presence. But is there not something in them we shrink from, fearing a dangerous Pantheism? Do we not tell ourselves that this is the special peril of our time, that the passage is true as it stands in the Bible, but that, since it can be perverted, we had better dwell on some other announcement, however suited to ages prone to a different error? Consider, then: if any city in the world was exposed to Pantheism, in the very age when the Apostle visited it, that city was Athens. Every form of idolatry and speculation was heading toward that gulf, and each, as it weakened, was bound to be absorbed in it. If Paul had no divine intimation of this, his talks with the philosophers in the market-place must have shown it to him. He must have seen it in the very inscription that was his text. The dedication to the Unknown God, whether it only expressed a wish in a time of plague to call on every possible helper, or a sense of some Being who could not be represented as demons or demigods were, equally declared that the nation's mind was aiming at an all-inclusive worship, and that as each definite object lost its hold, more and more would slide into a lazy acknowledgment of the vague and indefinite. With this full in his mind, Paul says: "*He is not far from every one of us; for in Him we live and move and are*." I conclude, then, that Paul regarded this statement as the great protest against Pantheism and the other evil tendencies of the Athenian. It was a protest because it fully and distinctly asserted the truth that lay beneath Pantheism and that Pantheism was perverting. And it was a protest because nothing was so sure, if received, to fill men with awe of that Personal Being whom Pantheism denied. So the Apostle stands as a lasting witness to a maxim for all places and times: you can combat a prevalent error only by seeking the divine principle of which it is the counterfeit. Until you do, your cleverest scoffs and arguments will only strengthen its virulence. IV\. At last the Apostle approaches one of the teachers we may suppose he wished to refute. He speaks not of a philosopher but of a poet; but later poets liked to state philosophical sentiments, as earlier ones had built up popular mythology. Here is a sentiment of Aratus that can be turned either way. It may justify the old Homeric notion that men have divine parentage, or the sages' proud notion that men can make themselves gods by wisdom: "For we also are His offspring." The sentiment might seem all the more alarming because it is in the singular rather than the plural. To speak of a son of the gods Apollo or Venus was a phrase most people of that time took as fable or metaphor. To speak of *His* offspring was to rise higher, and to assert that these poor frivolous people, who cared only to tell or hear something new, had a divine origin. Could you believe it? Paul adopts the phrase in this stronger sense. He endorses the poet's words and applies them not to his own countrymen, or some of them, but to his heathen audience. He names no exceptions, no persons who had reached higher intuitions, and uses none of the qualifications the poet himself would probably have used. He looks out on the jeering, laughing crowd and says, "We, you and I, are also His offspring: the offspring of that Unknown God who made the heavens and the earth and all things in them, whom I have been declaring to you." V\. He does not stop there. On this mighty assumption he builds an argument, *the* argument against the idolatry that had weighed so heavily on his spirit, and on it he rests the soundness of the Second Commandment: "*Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device*." Do not call this an additional motive for abandoning their fathers' tradition and their city's habit. It is the only motive. He cannot urge them to a change that convulses the whole moral being and cuts so many links of old affection, unless their poet's doctrine is true and they have a right to claim God as their Father in the strictest, fullest sense. I say it again: not in a vague, Pantheistic sense, in which he would be Father of all cattle and trees and flowers and therefore of them. The argument would then be worthless, since they could make the Godhead in the likeness of any object in nature. It was because he was the Father of their spirits, because they were spiritual beings made in his spiritual likeness to feel after him and find him, that conceiving him under their notions, or casting him in a material shape, was so degrading. The Jew's whole burning indignation against the gods of the hills and groves comes out in this assertion, yet it is full of tenderness for every heathen. Only one who believed that God had loved the whole world, and sent his Son to take on the nature of the dweller in Athens as much as of the dweller in Jerusalem, could have said it. VI\. The tenderness toward heathens, the justification of God's ways to men in all ages, and the ground for calling all of one flesh and blood, come out fully in the next passage: "*And the times of this ignorance God winked at, but now He commandeth all men everywhere to repent*." I will not debate the force of the word translated *winked at*, or whether a better expression could be found. But we can be sure this sentence does not contradict Paul's earlier claim that God had not overlooked the nations but ordered their bounds and directed their search for him. And it is utterly incompatible with the headlong, ungodly conclusions divines have often sanctioned about the heathen world and the guilt of its idol-worship. Paul certainly does not tell the Athenians what Tertullian, with his higher inspiration and later revelation, proclaimed with certainty: that their fathers were doomed to hopeless perdition. That opinion, which is said to have made an honest barbarian king refuse baptism, was not put before the Greek; a very different one was suggested. Yet the message to that generation was no less strong for involving no judgment on earlier ones: "*God commandeth you to repent*." "Since through me he tells you that your poet's words are fulfilled, and that he has sent his Son to claim you as his offspring, through me he commands you to cast aside the gods of gold and silver made by art and man's device, and to turn and own him as Father. But not only through me. The message is to your consciences, straight from him. He commands repentance, and gives it to all who will have it. If you feel separated from him who is so near, he destroys the separation. If you have felt after him and not found him, he will reveal himself. The message is to all men everywhere. The separate, material gods shall not forever tear the nations apart. All in all nations are invited to become brothers by taking their place as children of the same Father." VII\. But is the call to repentance not backed by a threat of punishment? If it were, I would produce it and dwell on it, for we cannot warn people too much of the heavy punishment they bring on themselves by serving material, sensual, unreal things instead of claiming their place as children of a gracious and righteous Father. But I cannot put into Paul's discourse a word that is not there. He speaks of *judgment*, not *punishment*: "*a day in which God will judge the world by that Man whom He hath ordained, whereof He hath given assurance in that He hath raised Him from the dead*." The two ways of speaking are as wide apart as the poles, however carelessly we confuse them. To proclaim a judgment is to proclaim an accurate discrimination of acts and characters. To proclaim God's judgment is to say that he, who knows characters and acts perfectly, will discriminate. To proclaim his judgment by the Man he has ordained is to say he will apply the measure the Son of Man applied on earth. And *he* said, "*It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for Chorazin and Bethsaida*." He preached a gospel to publicans and harlots. He said, "*Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees*." He told his disciples, "*Judge not, that ye be not judged*." With such language before him, how could Paul stand among the Athenians and say that God would cast off them or their fathers, when he had not cast them off yet? How could he help telling them that there would surely be a judging and sifting of all nations and men, since the Son of Man, the risen Head of Nations and of Men, had come to bind them all to God and to each other? How could he help saying: "He whom you have been seeking, and who has been seeking you, will be revealed in the fullness of his glory. He will know what each nation has done to fulfil the purpose for which it was called, and what each man has done to fulfil the purpose for which he was sent into the world. He will know who followed the light he gave and sought him, and who loved darkness rather than light and chose death. I, Paul, can pass no judgment on you or anyone; I do not even judge myself. But I know the judgment will accord with the truth. For he who is truth, who by dying and rising again has shown the truth to men, will be revealed in every man's conscience. Every eye shall see him." My brethren, in this sermon I have set before you two methods of presenting the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. I have not hidden, and you all know, that the first has very powerful supporters and puts itself forward as *the* logical, *the* safe, *the* orthodox method. For the other I can say only that it was the method of the Apostle whom we affirm to have been God's instrument for making his light shine through the world. By the one course we silence objectors, joining in the same *auto da fé*, as in all precedents, the representatives of the most diverse sects and schools, the devout and the scornful, the earnest and the frivolous. By the other we claim all these as witnesses for the God and Father who would lead them all to his Son. By the one we magnify the skill of the particular dialectician and reduce our common humanity to the lowest point. In the other the man who pleads is nothing, and the race is glorified by its union with a crucified and ascended Lord. To the one we owe a display of ingenious advocacy and fine metaphysical reasoning; to the other we owe the existence of a Christendom. That is the testimony of the past. How the future will speak we wait to learn. What is at stake is nothing less than this. Shall the hundred and sixty millions in India be taught that all their mythology and philosophy is folly, or that God has sent his Son to claim them as his offspring? Shall the masses of our own people who have been alienated from our Churches be told that infidelity is false and foolish because it holds out a hope that man may know something of the Infinite, or that God wants all to know him, from the least to the greatest? And shall each of us accept every dogma of the Church and Bible because that is as likely to be true as anything else, or keep praying to him who cannot be mocked that he will give us knowledge of his truth in this world and life everlasting in the world to come? ## THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST GENERALLY ::: {.center} Third Sunday after Epiphany ::: ::: {.center} [January]{.smallcaps} 23, 1859 ::: > "*If I do not the works of My Father, believe Me not. But if I do, though ye believe not Me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in Me, and I in Him*."—[John]{.smallcaps} x. 37-38. *The passage:* Jesus says that if He does not do the works of His Father, people should not believe Him. But if He does them, then even those who do not believe Him should believe the works, so that they may know and believe that the Father is in Him and He in the Father. [Last]{.smallcaps} Sunday I compared the method we usually think the cleverest for defending the Gospel and refuting its opponents with the method St. Paul used in his speech at Athens. I showed that the two are not merely different but directly opposed. Neither the Apostle's greater gifts nor our eighteen centuries of inherited blessing can account for it. If we are right, his inspiration only led him wrong. If he was right, the measures we take to secure the treasures he proclaimed show how little we value them. I have argued that the cause of this departure from the precedent we profess to honour is that he and we mean quite different things by *Revelation* and *Manifestation*. These are favourite words of his, and whole Epistles, not just single passages, depend on them. That is natural, since he says in Galatians that the revelation of Christ to him is what enabled him to preach to the Gentiles. His conversion, which we consider this week, and the message he delivered to the nations are therefore bound up with his idea of Revelation. The more you follow the word through his letters, the more you will find him exact in its use. It always means the unveiling of a Person, the ground and Archetype of men and the source of all their life and goodness. The unveiling is not to the eye but to the man himself, to the Conscience, Heart, Will, and Reason God made to know Him and be like Him. In the bolder language we considered last Sunday, it is the revelation of Him "in whom we live and move and are" to creatures who are "feeling after Him, if haply they may find Him." Suppose this idea of Revelation is exchanged for its opposite. Suppose we mean by it certain communications God makes because His own constitution of us makes us incapable of knowing Him as He is, so that He cannot be unveiled to us in nature, character, or purpose. Then we must view and present the whole subject in a way that appears nowhere in St. Paul or in the Old and New Testaments. We are then like men fighting with great zeal for the authority of books whose contents, once taken off the shelf, overturn the hypothesis on which our defence rests. In proving the necessity of *a* Revelation, we have done our best to refute *the* Revelation these books bear witness to. Once this theory is fully developed, it finds, like jealousy, proofs strong as holy writ, even drawn from holy writ. The rage for apologetic literature has always fostered it, while the faith, practical life, and sufferings of Christians have protested against it. Our Lord's miracles have been made to serve it above all. They are, it is said, strange, exceptional acts, recorded to make Christ's mission credible. Admit them, and you cannot doubt that He spoke with unique authority. Accept that authority, and you must receive whatever the book says, however it clashes with your heart and reason. I am not asking now how successful this argument has been, or whether it has kept numbers from the faith it recommends. I am not asking whether appeals to the intellect about miracles fit with the later demand that the intellect be suppressed. I only ask what the works of Christ are for, if not for this. I will not answer, as these apologists answer in every other case, that we cannot penetrate the designs of an infinite Being. Scripture and the Church have given the answer. The miracles were for the *manifestation* of Christ's glory. That is John's own word for the miracle at the marriage-feast, and it is why the Church chose that story and others for the Sundays after Epiphany. On this view the miracles are not arguments telling the understanding to stand aside. They unveil to the whole man the nature, character, and mind of the Son of Man, and therefore, as the passage of my text shows, of the Father who sent Him. I\. Our Lord says, "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not." Did St. Paul's words at Athens seem inconsistent with some current notions? These are more startling. We are constantly told it is irreverent, and shows ignorance of the limits of our minds and the distance between God and us, to ask whether some act has a divine or an undivine quality. I believe those who say this contradict themselves. I know they call many acts attributed to Siva, Vishnu, and the gods of classical mythology evil and hateful, with nothing divine in them. Where did they learn that language? From the book that tells them God is righteous, just and without iniquity. They learned it from God's reasonings with His creatures about the folly of worshipping stocks and stones and pouring offerings to false and evil beings. They learned it from the chapters of Isaiah we are reading these Epiphany weeks, where God sets forth His true Image of perfect gentleness and meekness to confound the dark images men have made of Him. Yet when doubters of our own land say that some word, act, or habit of mind should not be attributed to a Divine Being, we do not ask whether the Holy Book actually represents Him so, or whether the objector has understood it, or whether it really outrages his conscience. We deny his right to inquire at all. From some lofty tribunal we pronounce that man has no test for right and wrong in One who claims to be above man. He may use all his faculties to judge whether a book probably comes from an infinite and omnipotent Being, and none to judge what manner of Being it comes from. Might not the disputer answer, "All that may be true; it strengthens my growing atheism. But why did your logic and theology fall asleep when you talked about Vishnu, Siva, and Jupiter?" To all this contradictory talk I oppose not my own reasonings but the words of Christ: "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not." This is a plain appeal to something in man that *can* recognize whether the works are the Father's. Christ made that appeal through His whole life on earth, in works He Himself called *good*, which we have turned into mere exercises of irregular power and violations of the order He Himself established. Take the work at Cana, which the Church set before us last Sunday. John, who must have witnessed it, says Christ in it manifested His glory to His disciples. He means us to remember his own earlier words, "We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father," full of grace and truth. A Man sat among them, sharing their joy, and showed Himself to them as its source. A change wrought calmly and secretly, unknown to those it would have startled most, gave them a sense of creative power such as they had never had. The occasion was common and earthly, and the gift was an ordinary thing, though one that symbolized life and gladness. But a universe reveals its laws in little things, and the unfolding of a flower may teach us more of the birth and growth of all things than reflecting on the whole Cosmos. In this one act those fishermen may have been awakened more deeply than all kings and prophets before them to the sense of good things coming down through a Brother from a Father. It may have delivered them from material conceptions of Creation. If not at once, then through the discipline of later years working on that one event, they may have risen to the perception of a Word who gives life. That, I think, was truly a *manifestation*, and we may confidently apply our Lord's test to it. If it had not come to the disciples as a work of the Father, they would not have believed on the Son of Man. They might have believed in a great enchanter who could play with the powers of nature. They would not have believed in a Lord of their hearts and reins, a King of nature and of man, One of whose fulness all received, and grace for grace. Take also the acts of healing in today's Gospel. The first was for a leper who met our Lord as He came down from the Mount. The people who heard His discourse there said, "He speaketh as one having authority, and not as the Scribes." He spoke like a King who knows the Law and the Lawgiver, not like one spelling out the meaning from books. The leper confessed the same: "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." He was saying, "Thou hast authority; thou art King over men, over me. And thou hast spoken of a Father who cares for His children, even the unthankful and evil. Wilt thou not then regard even an outcast who proclaims himself unclean? Others may cut him off, but wilt thou?" The answer, "I will; be thou clean," certainly asserts the authority the leper ascribed to Him, a kingly right over the man's body to restore its health. Yet far from separating that healing from the order of God's government, Christ sends the man to the priest, the appointed judge in cases of leprosy. He is to prove by the recognized outward sign that the inward cure has happened, and to offer the gift the law prescribes. So Christ is not a new King installed for the first time. He is the manifestation of Him whose goings-forth have been from everlasting, and from whom all powers and methods of healing derive. He is thus strictly fulfilling His words. If my works are less regular, orderly, and inward than those of Him who governs all things and renews life day by day, believe me not. If they are not works of grace and truth, bearing witness to a Father who is not the destroyer but the restorer of men, pursuing them into every secret place of sorrow to make them right, believe me not. This manifestation prepares for the next, the Centurion's, of which I have spoken more than once. I will not dwell on how his Roman training taught him obedience, government, and the power of words to hold multitudes in subjection. I speak of it as the typical case of healings that demanded faith and evoked it. Our notion of miracles leads us to suppose this faith was in a Person visible to the eye, able to do unprecedented marvels. Our Lord chooses as *His* instance of lively faith a man who cared nothing for sight or touch, who confessed an invisible might, and who believed his servant would be healed if Christ spoke the word. May we not say without hesitation that the highest blessing Christ gave to palsied, leprous, blind, deaf, and dead men was awakening in them a trust that raised them above what they saw, above themselves? Was not the difference between the nine who went their way and the one who returned to give glory to God just this? All received a bodily cure equally perfect, but he was saved out of selfishness and ignorance of God, because he saw that Jesus was doing His Father's works. I think this has been the reading of earnest readers, almost the traditional interpretation of Christendom. If we held it consistently, and counted the lessons these miracles have carried to suffering and lonely people everywhere worth all the apologies ever written, we should be less afraid to take the Son of God's words as they stand. We should not think it dangerous to apply His own test to His own works. I reserve the restoring of the man possessed with devils for next week, because it bears directly on one of the main reasons for inventing another test than our Lord's. The Church links that narrative with the crossing of the Lake of Galilee, when Jesus said to the storm, "Peace, be still." There is great beauty, as all readers feel, in joining tumults in nature with tumults of the human spirit, and deep practical benefit in considering how they are alike and different and why one monarch must rule both. I would gladly use next Sunday's Gospel for that, but since I want your minds fixed on the cure of the demoniac for its own sake, I touch the first story only briefly, as another illustration of "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not." Our Lord's acts of power gather up, wonderfully, the functions that seekers after God, feeling after Him, had assigned to separate divinities. The Jews scarcely knew the names Dionysus, Æsculapius, Demeter, Phœbus, but like all peoples they *felt* that some distinct benefactor must be behind wine that gladdens the heart, common bread, bodily health, sickness, and the light of the eye or understanding. As the disciples were to preach to all nations, acts that testified to a union of powers were the best preparation for entering the faiths of different races and asserting the unity of which their own faith was the witness. To realize by one instance in whose hand was the trident of the seas was surely part of that discipline, which they would appreciate later. They could appreciate it only later because the impression made on them at the time was not of a wonder-worker exhibiting power and causing sudden excitement. It was of a calm Ruler, the upholder and restorer of peace and order. The work revealed Him who fixed the bounds of earth and sea, and beneath the Creator of the world it revealed the Father of men. II\. The first part of my text is negative: "If I do not, believe me not." The second is positive, full of instruction and, I think, encouragement: "But if I do, though you believe not me, believe the works." Generally the order was reversed. The Galilean fishermen first recognized Jesus as the Teacher they craved, to whom the prophets and John, the last of them, had pointed. Then the works became fuller manifestations of His nature and dominion. The Centurion had learnt his need of One who could command men by a word, as he commanded his soldiers, and the power that sent away his servant's palsy seemed the fitting endowment of such a Ruler. But our Lord speaks of cases where belief in the works may come first and lead to belief in Him. The works, He says, may lead men to *know*, actually to *know*, that the Father is in Him and He in the Father. What! To know this? Is it not the deepest mystery of the Christian faith? Must it not be received as a dogma from other ages, galling to reason, which cannot object because it has no capacity for the Infinite? I can only repeat our Lord's words. He says that men who believe the works to be His Father's, even before they believe in Him, may come to know this truth. Suppose it is a truth, and this mystery does underlie the universe as our creeds profess. Suppose the Church is right to treat these works as divine manifestations. Must it not then be so? Could they be divine manifestations and not manifestations of this divine relation? Could men feel them as divine, as the expression of the highest grace and truth, and as human, coming with all human grace and truth, and not confess a Father and a Son, with an inward certainty no mere dogma or tradition ever earned or claimed to earn? And yet, brethren, we fear to let the miracles face the trial Christ claimed for them, to which such a promise is attached! We think it safer to stifle all inquiry into their moral character, lest we endanger the authority of the documents containing them! Oh, poor and heartless policy, which must have the results of all policy not based on truth! No doubt, if you invite men to say whether the miracles bear the marks of grace and truth, and are such signs as a Father would give His children, you let them state their doubts, difficulties, and suspicions. Do you not wish them to? Do you not know there is incalculable danger in their suppressing these and not bringing them into the light? Some doubts are merely idle, prompted by scorn. But are there not some God has awakened in order to satisfy them? Dare you crush those? Can you tell the tares from the wheat? Can you not trust God to do it? Commonly, the truth must be said, our modern way of meeting objections feeds and justifies the pride and contempt behind the worst of them, and only hinders from coming forth those that really demand an answer, and that will find one if there is any moral standard or moral sense in man. While we consider the effect on others, let us not forget the reaction on ourselves. History, not speculation, gives us an awful warning. We know from the Evangelists and Apostles that there were religious men, eager to crush all doubt about the authority of Scripture and ready to confess miracles that were merely miracles of power. These men refused our Lord's test. They would not ask whether His works were good or came from the Father, since they did not believe they had faculties for the inquiry. So they denied both the Father and the Son. They came to believe that He healed the sick, stilled the winds and waves, and preached glad tidings to the poor under the inspiration of Beelzebub, the Prince of the devils. ## CHRIST CASTING OUT THE EVIL SPIRIT ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday after Epiphany ::: ::: {.center} [January]{.smallcaps} 30, 1859 ::: > "*Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid*."—[Luke]{.smallcaps} viii. 35. *The passage:* The people went out to see what had happened. They came to Jesus and found the man from whom the devils had gone out sitting at Jesus' feet, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. [I have]{.smallcaps} taken my text from St. Luke's version of the story we read in today's Gospel. I must remind you that the Evangelists differ conspicuously in reporting it. St. Matthew speaks of two men possessed with devils; St. Mark and St. Luke speak of one. The peculiar incidents and the exact agreement of the geography leave no doubt that it is the same miracle. Here is a legitimate subject for examination, and an honest one must lead to good. The only danger is hiding the difficulties, or twisting the evidence to remove them. The narrative raises another question, which physician and practical divine might help each other to clear of prejudice. Are there cases like this in modern times, or were they confined to the age of the Evangelists? That question can hardly fail to bring in the whole controversy about the existence and influence of evil spirits. I do not choose my line of thought to avoid either of these questions. I choose the one the Church suggests by using the story in this season. Today's Gospel is meant to give us another Epiphany, or Manifestation, of Christ, and I think we find such a manifestation in whichever Evangelist we follow. Each helps the inquiry I am engaged in: what, according to the New Testament writers, is Revelation or Manifestation? If we keep that question steadily before us, I expect to find light on the others too. At any rate we shall not treat them as trivial puzzles to be left to critics; they will take on human significance and grandeur. I\. Whatever the differences between the Evangelists, none concerns the nature of the malady that afflicted the man or men. All the symptoms of outrageous madness are described, whatever the cause. St. Matthew says: "They came out of the tombs; they were exceedingly fierce; no man could pass by that way." St. Mark, speaking of one maniac, adds lines to the picture: no one could bind him, not even with chains; he had often been bound with fetters and chains, and had torn the chains apart and broken the fetters; no one could tame him; night and day he was in the mountains and the tombs, crying out and cutting himself with stones. St. Luke says he wore no clothes and lived not in a house but in the tombs. Surely this is as clear and full a picture of madness as was ever painted. II\. None of these signs is rare in itself; we connect them with facts we have known and sights we have seen. Without provision for the care of the insane, nothing in modern civilization would make it impossible or unlikely that we should meet in England such figures as our Lord met in the country of the Gergesenes. The Evangelists also agree about the origin of the fury. St. Matthew says the men were "possessed with devils"; St. Mark and St. Luke say the man "had an *unclean* spirit." Yet they keep the plural too: the answer "Our name is Legion" appears in both. If this language is disagreeable to us, comparing the documents will not remove it; it is as strong in one as in the other. It does not belong to one story or ten; it is characteristic of the Gospels as such. As I have said before, it is not characteristic of them *as well as* of the Old Testament books; it distinguishes them from those books, where allusions to evil spirits are rare and in the Gospels continual. III\. On another point also there is no difference, and it is the point for which I refer to this story and for which it has a place in the Epiphany services. St. Matthew gives the voice that met our Lord as he approached the madman: "What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us?" St. Mark has: "What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not." St. Luke substitutes "I beseech thee" for "I adjure thee" and otherwise nearly repeats Mark. These expressions are familiar from other narratives in various forms. Evil spirits are always said to regard Jesus as their tormentor, because He comes to deliver a man from their dominion. IV\. What distinguishes this story from others of its kind is the entrance of the devils into the herd of swine, and each Evangelist dwells on it carefully and minutely. However we explain it, we cannot treat it as an interpolation, and it is plainly hopeless to look in one of the three narratives for particulars that might make it the least difficult to hold by. V\. Finally, the passage I took from St. Luke, which states the ultimate effect of our Lord's command, has no exact counterpart in St. Matthew, but his account plainly assumes it. Men delivered from the tyrants that possessed them would naturally be clothed and in their right mind. I want that result kept in mind, so I have put it before you in express words; I could equally have reached it by inference from the first Gospel. Taking the story as it stands, with no secret method of turning it from an account of spiritual bondage and emancipation into something else, I cannot doubt that many intelligent and devout people today will turn from it with annoyance and discontent. A preacher who remembers his own feelings about it at some time will not judge such objectors harshly. Unless his memories are unusual or his present convictions very weak, he will least of all want their doubts withheld; he will want them confronted frankly with the facts of experience as well as the words of Scripture. And if some of us have come to accept this record not coldly and reluctantly but as one we could not bear to lose, a strength in dark hours, I suppose the process was something like this. The inquirer began to consider the subject quietly and from a distance, very unwilling to risk his reputation for sense, asking what sort of maniac this might have been and what natural explanation there might be for his frenzy. Then the thought was suddenly thrust upon him: "What if *thou* art that man? What if the strange fact that he was a spiritual being is common to him and to thee? What if the other strange fact, that his spirit was under the yoke of unlawful intruders and cruel usurpers, explains what thou hast known in thyself and couldst ill explain? Hast thou not been subject to the tyranny not of one ruler but of divided, contradictory rulers? Is not their name Legion? Thou hast called them impulses, motives, principles: has that language made the fact clearer? They are invisible; they assail thy very self; foul and cruel thoughts have come from them. Is it not horrible to think they *are* thyself, with no distinction between them and thee? Is it not a lie? Whether thou hast resisted or obeyed them, do not the very words Resistance and Obedience imply that they are not thyself? But was there no other whom thou wast resisting when thou wast obeying them, and obeying when thou wast resisting them? What says thy conscience? Has He never manifested Himself to thee? Is He not doing so now, in all thy thoughts of good and all thy struggles with evil? And Who else manifested Himself to the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes? Was that not a crucial instance of His nature and power, showing His purpose of claiming a spirit sunk into the lowest and bitterest bondage, and that no usurper over the human spirit is too mighty for Him to overcome?" I imagine that someone who has come this far will find in the final incident something to make him tremble rather than offend his taste. He will say: "As I see in that fierce madman a man of my own flesh and blood, such as I might become if a mightier than I did not uphold me, so I cannot deny that the swine rushing down the steep place till they are choked in the sea give the liveliest picture of what the powers that have swayed me, and always seek to sway me, would do if transferred to mere brute natures. They show me that we do not sink *merely* below humanity when evil masters us; the depraved Will carries into its degradation a malignity that gives the animal what it has not of its own. Surely a divine Teacher would want to teach this, by such examples, to those He came to claim as spiritual beings. And looking at the New Testament again in the light of experience, do I not see that this is the very character in which Christ is presented throughout? What does it mean that He baptizes with the Spirit? What does the Temptation mean, or every discourse, miracle and parable? Do they not all testify of One who comes to contest the possession of man, not with flesh-and-blood enemies, but with principalities and powers assaulting, if not holding, the very citadel of his being? Why does He speak of the strong man armed keeping his house in peace, and of the stronger who takes his armour and spoils his goods?" I repeat, a man who has come by this or a like process to accept the narrative of the Demoniacs without change or qualification cannot be offended with anyone who hesitates, or who fights every step before surrendering his objections. His own experience will make him more than tolerant. There are feelings in such a state of mind that he would not for the world remove, since they are among the greatest confirmations of his own faith on this very subject. One is the dread of Superstition and Fanaticism. The deeper that dread, and the more a man regards them as horrible evils he will by God's help not sink into, and which it would be agony to suspect in the Son of Man, the more hope there is that he will take in this story in its full length and breadth. For the direst Superstition connects evil with the Nature of God, and the next direst identifies the man himself with evil. Here both are undermined at the root. God manifests Himself in conflict with the Evil Spirit in his essence and in every form he takes. God manifests Himself in the very act of distinguishing the man from the evil that possessed him. The direst fanaticism assumes that any man's being is the proper habitation of evil spirits; the second worst supposes that certain special men may claim the Spirit of God in a sense ordinary men may not. And all the petty fanaticisms that abound in our day, which dwindle into triviality, root in the notion that spiritual powers and influences are light topics for drawing-room gossip. Here each shape of fanaticism is laid bare. The Spirit of Christ meets the Unclean Spirit in what seems his last, securest, most legitimate hold, and declares that there he has no right. The maniac is as fit a receptacle of Christ's power and inspiration as the highest saint. The whole transaction is full of solemnity and awe; so if it is true and comes from the source of Truth, the stories that dinn our ears must be not ridiculous but loathsome. For all these reasons a believer in the narrative will be very afraid of using even apparently fair arguments to dispel scepticism about it. He may calmly state his conviction and how he reached it. But he cannot mind that he will not be the means of giving that conviction to anyone else. If it has been given to him, he can trust One who knows every channel of His creatures' hearts to send it to them as they need it. He knows that insofar as he tries to drive it home by persuasion, ridicule or terror because it is his, he will mar the effect of the divine arguments, which are subtler, penetrate deeper, and carry a different kind of compulsion. These conclusions are inevitable for one who sees this story as a revelation of Christ Himself and of His dealings with the human spirit. But I have told you in former sermons that an entirely different notion of revelation has been proclaimed in our day as the only one consistent with orthodoxy and common sense. To describe it as the discovery of the true God in the person of His Son to a creature capable of knowing Him, and incapable of freedom and peace without that knowledge, is to incur I can scarcely say what frightful charges. Mysticism is on the face of such a statement; Rationalism lies beneath it; it shows a fatal ignorance of the nature God has given us, which can never come into close contact with the Eternal and can only abstract some feeble notion of it from the things of time and sense. What then is Revelation? It contains, we are told, lessons God wishes us to receive, which though not in any strict sense manifestations of what He is, are necessary for regulating our lives. Here at last is something positive: we are not merely told by what standard we *cannot* judge, but what the office of Revelation is. Be it so. Then let us consider what sort of Revelation has or has not fulfilled that office. I would still hold to the Scriptures in this inquiry, and begin with this story of the Demoniac. I am not now dealing with objectors to it, but with those who say that, being part of the Bible, it must be received like any other part, and that to cavil at it or give it any non-literal sense is perilous. Here is a case of moral regulation: a man wild and furious becomes calm and orderly, sitting at Jesus' feet clothed and in his right mind. What wrought the change? Was it the announcement of some law God has laid down for His creatures? Of some punishment in another world for breaking it? A series of sound ethical maxims? Injunctions about prayer or self-government? Anything we understand by ordinary moral discipline? All such regulations were desirable for a man in his condition, but common sense called them ridiculous; they would plainly be wasted. Far more direct methods were tried: he was chained. That was as ineffectual as the other; the fetters were burst, the chains broken. It is just when all mere regulations, divine and human, are found vain to restrain him from being the curse of his fellow-men that Christ is said to meet the man himself, to talk with that which could hear no laws and be restrained by no force, and to free and reform that. And the result is not a new excitement in place of the old, not religious paroxysms replacing other paroxysms, but quietness and order: he is in his right mind. Here is one instance, and, as I have shown, a type-instance, of Christ's acts toward a class of human creatures. Now take a decidedly opposite case. Saul of Tarsus, far from being a maniac, is the most correct of men, reverencing the law and blameless in all its commandments. He has been trained to regard the Revelation given to his fathers as a regulative one, and the doctors at Jerusalem set it before him in precisely that character. The thought that it might be anything else, in any sense an unveiling of God Himself, or the promise of a more perfect unveiling, may now and then have disturbed him over a passage in the Psalms or Prophets, but he angrily dismissed it. God gave his nation a revelation consisting mainly of a law, though in compassion for His creatures' ignorance He also gave them a system of worship and sacrifices which it would be unsafe and criminal to neglect. Then he hears of men apparently teaching another doctrine, who proclaim, if he has not mistaken them, that a crucified man has manifested or unveiled the Divine Being. All regulations and limitations are burst through; these wretched fanatics assume that the Invisible has come near His creatures and that there is a way for them to ascend to Him. St. Stephen's speech perhaps first shows him how far they depart from all his sacred maxims. There every step of Jewish history is treated as a step toward the revelation of that Just One whom his countrymen betrayed and murdered; they are charged with resisting the Holy Ghost, who has striven with them in all ages; and the vision of a Son of Man at the right hand of God is announced openly, in language that could be only blasphemy to one who thought of God as immeasurably distant from man. He grows more furious, still against opposers of a regulative Revelation. Then comes the crisis. That regulative Revelation, the system of laws, precepts and ordinances God Himself appointed for his nation's good, proved utterly ineffectual for his life. Instead of helping or raising him, it crushed him with its weight. Only when the same Lord who bade the unclean spirit depart from the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes claims to be Lord and Deliverer of his spirit does he become clothed and in his right mind. What work he did then, and what sort of revelation of God he proclaimed in the city least like Jerusalem in its speculations and worship, I considered in a former sermon. If we followed that discourse with an examination of his Epistles, we should come, I think, to two conclusions. First, that he everywhere announces an actual revelation and manifestation of God's righteousness to the spirit of man, as deliverance from a mere law, a regulative Revelation, which had never reached and never could reach the human spirit. Second, that he speaks of the Spirit of God as holding converse not only with the spirit of the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes, or with his own, but with the spirit of man from generation to generation; and that he regards the assurance that such a Spirit will be with us, witnessing to us, sustaining us, making us partakers of the Divine Nature, as the great assurance of the Gospel, without which it would have no power to improve the lives of men or the condition of the world. Brethren, was St. Paul right or wrong in this? Has the Gospel of Christ produced even the slightest improvement in human society, except by carrying this message home to human hearts? In outward regulation it has done singularly little: it sent out no decrees against gladiatorial shows, polygamy or slavery. If it has cured any of these evils in any period, or given society a new face, it is because a voice was saying to the unclean spirit that possessed it, "Get thee out," because Christ Himself was felt to be wrestling with that spirit and overcoming it. So it has been with every man. In the latest ages as in the first, messages of deliverance have come to outcast maniacs who could not be bound with chains. Through whomever they came, the benevolent physician or the sympathizing sister of charity, they were recognitions of a better spirit struggling with the evil spirit, tokens from Christ that He can free the captive and put down the oppressor. Decent men have been changed in later times as in earlier from self-satisfied, bitter haters into humble Christians and zealous apostles of goodwill. But in every case the change was preceded by the discovery that all mere regulations, whether laws of earth or of Heaven, were insufficient to make him a true man. It came when the heart owned as friend and deliverer a Son of God to whom it had been crying, "What have I to do with thee? Art thou come to torment me?" It came when the heart saw that the power it thought farthest away, in Heaven or Hell, was near. It came when the man confessed that the Righteous God, seeing he had no righteousness of his own, was clothing him with a righteousness none can comprehend and every spiritual being is created to apprehend. I do not believe that if you strip the Gospel of its original character and of the claims Apostles and Martyrs made for it, it can still command respect on a lower ground and take a useful, recognized place among the other agents of civilization. I know such an opinion prevails in many minds. They say that > \* "Reft of a crown, it still may share the feast." You will find it is not so. If we dare not proclaim Christ as the Deliverer of the human spirit from its bondage, if we dare not say He has come actually to reveal God's righteousness to men, we had better cease to speak of Him at all. For men want such a one; in their inmost hearts, even when their language against the Son of Man is loudest, they are crying for him. It was so in former ages and is so now, among the most miserable and the most respectable alike. If preachers do not answer the cry, and present the Gospel only as one of the regulative processes at work in society, it will be felt to be the feeblest of them all, and the chain and the prisonhouse will prove stronger. Brethren, this lesson is written deep on our annals, in characters of blood. On this 30th of January at least I may speak not of other men's sins but of our own; we are no longer commanded to forget the beam in our eye while we look for the mote in our brother's. The Church of England has herself to blame for the event this day commemorates, because she did not heed a groan that was deep before it became loud: "Give us a Gospel which speaks to us as spirits, for spirits we are. Do not merely deal with us as creatures of time and sense. Do not soothe us with shows or coerce us with rules and punishments. Tell us if the Eternal has come near to us. Tell us if we may know Him." The voice was not understood. Those who uttered it were taken for maniacs whom chains might bind. It was supposed that a regulative Revelation, duly proclaimed, would satisfy all reasonable wishes. The experiment was made; you know how it succeeded. Alas, the fearful lesson of this day was not warning enough. In the following century there was again a cry for a Revelation that should reach men's spirits and present Christ as an actual Deliverer from evil spirits, claiming maniacs, robbers and outlaws as sons of God. There was clear, undoubted evidence that those who proclaimed Him so left men they found possessed with unclean spirits clothed and in their right mind. There was equally clear evidence that opposite effects often followed their preaching: fanaticism often, hypocrisy sometimes. These facts were heeded, the others not. The conclusion was drawn that preaching God as actually coming near to man, and a Spirit working upon his spirit, was not favourable to morality. A regulative Revelation must be proclaimed instead: things fitting to believe and to do, stamped with divine authority, but bearing no witness that man is meant with open face to behold the glory of God and be changed into His image. Has that attempt succeeded better than the other? Has not Methodism vanquished you, as Puritanism did before? Have you not been obliged to adopt its phrases, even some most reasonably charged with leading to mischief, because it proved stronger and more effectual over men's minds than any mere regulative Revelation ever was or can be? Brethren, must this lesson also be wasted on us? The circumstances are not those of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. But we still have men to deal with, of all classes: the criminal and the respectable, the sane and the maniac. Shall we try again that old, worn-out experiment which has proved so helpless with them all? Shall we argue with men about the wickedness and folly of their unbelief, and tell them how to regulate themselves so as to present a comely face to the world, undistracted by tumults and doubts? Or shall we speak to them as the Church herself speaks, declaring that God has truly manifested Himself, not to the eye but to the spirit, and that His Spirit is working with theirs that they may be clean and pure within? If we could proclaim that message, what would nicknames matter to us? We could bear to be called Mystics or Rationalists or madmen or atheists, titles given to far holier men, Apostles and Martyrs, if we could but be Christ's instruments in casting an evil spirit out of the age, and bring one man possessed by a legion of them to sit at His feet clothed and in his right mind. ## THE PARABLES OF CHRIST ::: {.center} Fifth Sunday after Epiphany ::: ::: {.center} [February]{.smallcaps} 6, 1859 ::: *The passage:* The disciples ask Jesus why he speaks to the crowds in parables. He answers that it is given to them to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven but not to the others. Whoever has will be given more, and whoever has not will lose even what he has. So he speaks in parables because the people see without seeing and hear without understanding, and in them Isaiah's prophecy is fulfilled: their hearts have grown gross, their ears are dull, and they have shut their eyes, so that they might not see, hear, understand, be converted and be healed. But the disciples' eyes and ears are blessed, for many prophets and righteous men longed to see and hear what they see and hear, and did not. Many have answered the question why our Lord spoke in parables. One answer is that the limits of the human mind make it impossible for us to know divine and eternal things, which can reach us only through imperfect likenesses from nature or from human affairs. That reason applies to every human being alike. A second is special to Christ's circumstances: he was teaching ignorant fishermen, and men of that class would be best reached through stories. A third asks whether the parables might be veils deliberately made to hide sacred truths from the profane multitude. The Disciples were as perplexed as anyone since, and they took the simplest way out. They asked him, "Why speakest thou to them in parables?" He answered at once, in the passage I have read. Let us see how far his answer agrees with any of the answers we have invented. I\. "To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven." He is speaking to the ignorant fishermen for whose sake he is supposed to have devised this teaching. Yet he tells them they can do without it, and that they are capable of high knowledge. He says it is given them to *know*, and we should not pass over that word. We set the Kingdom of Heaven against the Kingdom of Earth, the eternal against the temporal, and no one objects to that language. But people say that what is eternal is mysterious and inconceivable. Our Lord admits it, since he speaks of *mysteries*. But he speaks of *knowing* mysteries. He seems to mean what St. Paul meant when he said that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him. Yet he affirms that the Disciples, taken from the commonest order of men and sharing their ignorance, have a capacity for knowing these mysteries, these eternal things that cannot be conceived. Perhaps you think I have neglected the force of the word "given," and that it lifts these simple men out of the common roll of mankind and marks a privilege that had nothing to do with their race. "To you it is given; to them it is not given." I admit the full value of the expression. It is of incalculable importance for understanding this passage and every passage in the New Testament. But before you decide it bears that sense, consider the next sentence. II\. "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." A universal law is announced here as the explanation of the Disciples' gift and of the difference between them and others. *Whosoever* hath; *whosoever* hath not. Is it not assumed, indeed affirmed, that every man has received certain things which the Giver will increase if he holds them fast, but which he may let go and be left utterly bare? And what are these things? If this verse has any connection with the one before it, they are the *mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven*. These are treasures not far from any man, to which the fishermen had not given up their claim. No one can give them up without abandoning his rights and renouncing his manhood. III\. He goes on: "Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand." Seeing, hearing and understanding are admitted powers of human beings. They are gifts in the truest sense, to be owned as fresh gifts every morning, and those who have suffered temporary blindness, deafness or derangement feel them to be gifts. But they are gifts *to men*; to lack them is a fearful penalty, an exception to the rule, and to have them and not use them is wilfulness. Are we not being told that something corresponds exactly to these organs in the spirit of man? An eye is *there*, which may be opened or closed. An ear is *there*, which may be awake to a voice speaking to it or stopped. There is a capacity for profiting by the vision and yielding to the voice, and it may go on widening or go on narrowing. Would you say this eye of the spirit is less truly *human* than the eye of the body? Would you not say it is far *more* so, that the bodily eye merely belongs to the man while this is part of his very being? The body's eye might be put out and the man remain, and the loss might bring abundant compensation, as it certainly did to Milton; but for the spirit's eye to be put out is for the man himself to perish. If this is what is meant, you will recall expressions of just the same kind: "The light of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light; but if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" We all accept the truth of this when applied to the outer world. But have we never known that it must apply the other way too, and that the other application was the primary one? Have we never had to confess that the light of the sun cannot be *the* Light, the Light of the world and of men? There must be an older, more penetrating, more universal Light, because something in us has quailed before it and wished to quench it. If there is this correspondence between the organs of the spirit and those of sense, and experience says there is, does it not explain the meaning and power of the parables? May not all sensible things, by their very nature, be testifying of what is nearest to us and most concerns us to know: the mysteries of our own life and of God's relation to us? May it not be impossible to escape these witnesses? They can become insignificant through sheer familiarity, and we may forget there is any wonder in them. The change of seed into full corn in the ear may seem the dullest of phenomena. The differences in yield between soils, or between kinds of cultivation, and the relation of the produce's quality to the seed, may interest us for their effect on the market and the money we make, and not at all as facts for meditation. The relation of landowner or farmer to workmen, of steward to employer, of shepherd to sheep, can likewise be judged by the pecuniary standard alone, and then they suggest nothing. So the universe becomes "as is a landscape to a dead man's eye," and all our business a routine to be got through so that we may have leisure to eat, drink and sleep. Can any language describe this state as exactly as our Lord does in the text? Seeing we see and do not perceive; hearing we hear and do not understand. But is he not telling his disciples why he *spoke* in parables to the Jewish people, while I am speaking of parables that are not so much spoken as acted, acted before us as before them? I will not evade the question. St. Matthew says in this chapter: "All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake He not unto them: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world." Suppose it were true that nature's hidden processes and the transactions of men had been, from the foundation of the world, the lesson-books out of which God instructed men and revealed himself. Suppose these lessons had been perverted and misunderstood and turned into excuses for idolatry, as if God were made in the likeness of natural things or of human caprice. Then what force the prophet's sentence would have! Christ would truly fulfil it by drawing back the veil that had covered these common facts and showing what was behind them, and he would show that he knew the mind of the Father from whom he came, as one brought up with him. If this is not the meaning of the parables, does St. Matthew's quotation not sound inflated? How did mere stories, meant to make truths livelier or to commend them to the ignorant (I say nothing of the other supposition, that they were meant to *conceal*), "declare things that had been kept secret from the foundation of the world"? But the best resolution of our doubts, I think, comes from comparing this part of my text with the corresponding passage in the fourth chapter of St. Mark. His version of our Lord's answer is: "Unto them that are without, all things are done in parables." To those who never dwell on what is within, on what concerns their own selves, and live only in the outward world, the things of the Kingdom of Heaven *become* only parables. "Become" is the most literal rendering of γίνεται, but I cannot think our translators wrong in the phrase they chose instead. Divine things are not merely spoken through parables; they are *done* in parables. The parables are all around us, and we fail to recognize them only because we lack a light coming from within. IV\. On this ground I cannot think any parable concerns one age less than another. But I do not deny that our Lord's next words had a special reference to the last age of the Jewish commonwealth: "And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and by seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive. For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed: lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them." These words show that the incapacity to discern anything not material or sensual was reaching its climax in the days of the Incarnation. Isaiah lamented it in the Jews of his day and was told it would make them heedless of all his warnings and consolations until the Assyrian armies laid the land waste and cities stood empty. Now all the divine discipline meant to correct it had itself been turned into a justification of it. In that day the coarseness, covetousness and pride that had been undermining the nation, without yet reaching its vitals, came to full maturity. There was no longer the consciousness of wrong-doing there had been in the days of hill-altars and temples to Baal. "Had we been in the days of our fathers, we would not have murdered the prophets" was the comfortable conviction of a people about to murder the Prophet of Prophets. Past lessons therefore did no good, for how could they concern men so free of their ancestors' crimes? They had the Holy Book, which no heathen could claim. They knew all its sounds and letters, could repeat it, argue from it and comment on it, but they were mere sounds and letters. Hearing they heard and did not understand. No living voice came to them out of what was read every day in the synagogue, and no vision of a divine Presence or Deliverer shone through writings that testified of nothing else. So idolatry, which took no outward shape and was vehemently abhorred, crept inward and possessed the whole being of men who held idolaters accursed of God. The gold on the altar became the measure by which they judged the sacrifice offered on it, and the gold of the Temple was for them the Presence that dwelt in it. To a race bound in these chains our Lord spoke of a Shepherd who went into the wilderness after a lost sheep, and of a Father who ran and embraced the prodigal who, eating swine's food, had thought of the house he left. These were parables of human duty and affection, speaking to open hearts of a divine Shepherd who might lay down his life for the sheep and a Father who might make a mighty sacrifice to bring his children home. They witnessed to a care as actual and personal as a human shepherd's and a love as actual and personal as a human parent's, only free of human limitations and partialities, and present in their daily walks and in every book they read. But suppose the shepherd was thought of merely as a hired servant seeing that certain merchandise was not lost to its owner, and they, the shepherds of the people, were hirelings of the same pattern. Suppose the tie of father and child had turned into suspicion on one side and dread on the other, with a calculation of worldly interest on both. What would these parables be to them? They would prove their truth even then, showing that the analogy between human and divine is no imaginary or artificial one but lies in the nature of things. For such shepherds and such fathers as they were, they would take God to be. They would worship a self-seeking tyrant under the name of the God of Abraham, and the true God of Abraham would show himself by casting them out as enemies of himself and his creatures, a spectacle and a byword among the nations. V\. This terrible test of the parables' truth was not to be the only one. "Blessed," says our Lord to the fishermen about him, "are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them." What was this blessedness that raised these poor, ignorant men above David and Isaiah? Was it that they saw the outward face of Jesus? So did Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. Was it not that One had laid hold of them whom they confessed as Lord and Master of the spirit within them? He was speaking to that spirit and illuminating it, freeing them from their own miserable conceptions and from judgments of God drawn from the objects of sense, and teaching them to know him as he is. He turned away no questions, listened to every doubt and bore with every confusion, showing them it was no will of his Father that veils should lie over their hearts when they heard his words or contemplated his works. A sense of union between men and God was dawning on them through all the acts and discourses of him who called himself the Son of Man. Did that name not testify that he who spoke to them in the ear in closets must be the King of all human hearts, and that as such they were to declare him to all nations? Was this revelation of the actual glory of the unseen God in a man not what kings and prophets had longed to see? Was the message that he is Lord of Gentiles as well as Jews, and head of every man, not what they desired to hear? So I think we find the explanation of a fact that has perhaps puzzled us. Why did the Apostles, trained in our Lord's school, make so little use of parables when they went out among the hardened Jews and the idolatrous Gentiles? Why are there so few in their discourses and letters? I think that when they preached a Son of God and Son of Man, in whom God was reconciled to men and showing his glory to them, they were going to the very root of this teaching and enabling mankind to profit by it as they had. For once we receive God's union with our race in the Person of a Mediator as the interpretation of all other facts, the kernel mystery of the universe, we cannot suppose we rise to conceptions of God through the things of time and sense. We can only suppose that through those things he speaks to us. The Apostles bore witness that a Spirit had been given to dwell among men because the Son of Man was glorified at God's right hand, and that this Spirit testifies with men's spirits that they are sons of God. They could not suggest that men must climb to the mysteries of the Kingdom by an earthly ladder. They had to invite everyone into the Kingdom as they themselves had come, through a deep sense of want and an infinite need of a Deliverer from their sensuality and darkness. They had to declare that their Deliverer and Illuminator was the Deliverer and Light of all, that none need walk in darkness, and that any man might wake from sleep and see the Light that will one day fill the universe. So far as this testimony was received, it turned all nature and all human acts from dead letters into divine hieroglyphics, and from instruments of idolatry into preachers of the unseen and eternal. Such preachers they have been to the humble and meek, who have asked Christ, as the Disciples did, why he spoke by parables, and have asked him to interpret the parables found in every street and alley as well as in every hill and stream. We are told, brethren, that they have deceived themselves, that no real knowledge of the Eternal is possible because our conceptions are bounded by the finite and visible. My answer is that if that is the reason, no knowledge of the seen and temporal is possible either. As the teacher of experimental science has shown us, slavery to our own conceptions is the hindrance to any real acquaintance with nature's mysteries. When we try to bind her with the forms of our intellect, she gives no faithful answers and only echoes our own voices. Here is another proof of the analogy between things sensible and spiritual: the same enemy blocks the entrance to both regions. The determination to measure everything by ourselves and bring it under the conditions of our intellect makes us exiles from the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Earth alike. In other days that determination was called Pride; in ours (words change their meaning so strangely) it claims to be owned as the profoundest humility. We dare not burst the shackles God has put on us or dream of rising above the world he has placed us in, and our not doing so is said to be the great sign that we accept Christianity with childlike submission. We prove our allegiance to the Gospel by affirming that it is *not* given us to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that Christ's parables are *not* real revelations of it. For this strange way of defending the faith and refuting its opponents, the venerable authority of Bishop Butler is sometimes pleaded. Some of us owe to him the first suggestion that there is a real analogy between the things of earth and of heaven, the seen and unseen, the temporal and eternal. He boldly took the words of Origen, whose mystical tendencies his cautious intellect could not share, as the text of his book and the exposition of its design. Because, through the coldness of his age, he gave his argument a somewhat negative form, using it to refute opponents rather than to establish a principle, he is now supposed to have used his clear logic chiefly to undermine the hopes he had himself raised. He is supposed to maintain the melancholy proposition that the general scheme of the universe is not much better or more intelligible than the particular scheme of Christianity, and that we should be no *more* ignorant and perplexed than we are if we had not been obliged, under terrible penalties, to believe in the Bible. I can never convince myself that this earnest and devout thinker meant to prove such conclusions. That admiring disciples have imputed that intention to him is one more proof how little we gain, and how much we may lose, by abandoning our own positions in order to dislodge assailants from theirs. But whether we do justice or gross injustice to luminaries of our own is a comparatively light question. As the orator says, are we honouring them in their noonday, or bringing out our hymns and symbols at the moment of their eclipse? It *is* a very great and serious question whether our patronage of Christianity is subverting the revelation of Christ. It is most serious for ourselves whether the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eternal realities, are near to us all and may be known, or whether we may allege that they are far from us and that, by the very nature of our vision, even the divinest telescopes cannot discern them. It is very serious whether we have any message about those mysteries for people as poor as the fishermen of Galilee, or whether we can only appeal to their vague fears of a Kingdom of Hell. We would then be forbidden to tell them that its horror lies in the absence of all knowledge of God's Righteousness, Truth and Love. These thoughts must press heavily on those who preach, and I trust they press also on some who hear. Oh, let us desire for ourselves that we may, as humble men and as little children, receive the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. Let us not substitute an acknowledgment of the Scriptures for a study of their contents, or contempt of doubters for faith in Christ, and so become, as the Jews of old did from the same causes, deaf to the teachings of the Spirit within and blind to the parables of the world without. ## PRACTICE AND SPECULATION ::: {.center} Sixth Sunday after Epiphany ::: ::: {.center} [February]{.smallcaps} 13, 1859 ::: > "*Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance: but as He which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy*."—1 [Peter]{.smallcaps} i. 13-16. *The passage:* Peter tells his readers to prepare their minds for action, to keep sober, and to hope fully for the grace that will be brought to them when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, they must not shape themselves by the desires they followed in their ignorance. As the One who called them is holy, they must be holy in all their conduct, because it is written: "Be holy, for I am holy." [I have]{.smallcaps} chosen these verses as a fitting conclusion to the subject of these Epiphany weeks. I have been trying to find out what the Revelation of Jesus Christ is, which the New Testament writers mention so constantly. Is it, as the word suggests, the actual unveiling of a Person to the conscience, heart and reason of human beings? Is it, as the Church seems to say, the unveiling of God's character and nature to a creature made to know Him? Or is it the announcement of certain opinions, maxims and rules of life to a creature made *not* to know Him, who, *because* of that condition, must accept whatever he can guess on probable evidence to be divine? This is nearly the most important question men can occupy themselves with. I have touched only lightly on the metaphysical arguments for the last view, since they involve subtleties hearers of sermons cannot be expected to follow, and are likely to judge by their wishes rather than their convictions. I have only suggested asking whether those arguments, if truly stated, do not prove all knowledge impossible, earthly as well as heavenly. My business has been to show that the Bible solemnly rejects the maxim put forward in its defence. The holy men and prophets of the Old Testament reject it in all their expectations, and so does every work and parable of Christ and every discourse of the Apostles. One justification of that doctrine I have hinted at but not fully discussed. It is said that God wants practice, not speculation; that His Word sets before men objects of fear and hope and tells them what kind of men He wants them to be, rather than tempting them into endless mazes of doubt about what He is. I heartily agree with all of this, and I want you to see how it bears on the controversy, for it bears on it directly. We might have gathered how from today's Epistle. But that Epistle is from St. John, and some say that those who revere John show fatal symptoms of the disease called Mysticism. So I take my text from St. Peter, whom everyone admits to be the most practical and least speculative of teachers. In this passage he sets out the hopes and fears he wants his disciples to keep in mind and the maxims to guide them in the fight of life. I\. You will see at once that the expectation Peter speaks of is the expectation of the appearing, manifestation or unveiling of Jesus Christ. It sustained the first Christians, and all the Apostles, none more than St. Paul, encouraged it by word and example. I have often spoken of the widely held opinion today that this hope was disappointed: that what they thought close at hand was put off to an immense distance, and that their longings have not been fulfilled even yet. I have often said that if this were so, their whole message and the lives that illustrated it would seem to me utterly bewildering. This hope was the staff of their being; if it was false, the acts and thoughts it inspired and shaped must have been false too. I could not expect such statements to move those who think the Apostles were generally deluded. I wanted them weighed by those who think the Apostles heralded a truth as needful for this age as for theirs. Our inquiry into the word Revelation is closely connected with this. Suppose it always means, whatever time it refers to, the removal of a veil that had hidden the eternal God from men. Suppose such veils had been coming off since men were created. Suppose man's sin, which seemed to cut him off from God, had become a means of discovering God's nature and character through His warfare with it and forgiveness of it. Suppose holy men could regard every step in Jewish history, or any history, only as the instrument of such a discovery, a showing of something of God's power and righteousness. Suppose their one desire was for the complete tearing away of what had hidden from all nations the light in which they were meant to walk and in which alone they could see themselves and each other. Suppose the Son of Man, while on earth, declared the Kingdom of God by all His acts, discourses and parables, and manifested the Father. Suppose that, having overcome the sharpness of death, He opened the Kingdom and disclosed the Father's inner mind to all who received Him as the well-beloved Son. Suppose this unveiling was exactly what the Apostles were appointed to preach, and did preach, to a world that contradicted and ridiculed them. Suppose the world's spectacle made their message seem ridiculous even to themselves, so that keeping faith that it was not a dream, while giving up the traditions of childhood, old friendships, all that belonged to life, and life itself, was often unspeakably hard, and would have been impossible unless sharing God's nature were the only refuge from the curse and plague of their own. What encouragement could they then offer but this? "There will certainly be a revelation of the Son of Man and Son of God to the universe. It will come whether we look for it or not. It will be attested by the doom on our own holy city and temple, which our Lord spoke of and called a revelation or appearing of the Son of Man. But if you look for it, brace your spirits to expect it, and resist whatever dulls that expectation, this unveiling will satisfy all your longings and those of all past ages. It will do so because it is not for you alone but for the world; because it *will be as the lightning, which lighteneth from one part of heaven, and shineth even to the other*." You can see how consistent this was with all their other language, and how little it depended on any ignorance of times and seasons or of the exact change coming in the outward world. If what they expected were not a full unveiling of the Eternal Mind, the same yesterday, today and for ever, points of chronology would have mattered enormously to them, and a mistake about them would have been fatal. If they expected something less than the full manifestation of Him whom all things of time and sense testify to but about whom no conclusion can be drawn from them, their notion of those things would have set the measure of their hope. As it was, the invisible things were no more limited by the narrowness of their intellects than the view of sea and sky is limited by the size of the eye. Faith, not in notions or communications about God but in God Himself, made them heirs of His righteousness, able to enter into His infinite love and lose themselves in it. II\. So the practical exhortation, "Gird up the loins of your mind, be sober," had its proper ground in this hope. By it the exhortation became an actual stimulus and power for work instead of a mere form of words. Only the spirit can hold such a hope, and Peter's readers could hold it only so far as they lived in the spirit. So they must keep "girding" themselves to the conviction that they were spirits, that Christ had claimed them as spirits, and that by His grace they could have all a spirit's rights. They must assure themselves daily that the Spirit worked with their spirits, so that they would not sink, as they always tended to, under low, wandering, fleshly impulses. Do you think such an expectation was likely to intoxicate them with a sense of their own importance? Peter thought it the one thing that could keep them sober. It was sober in the commonest sense, restraining them from indulgences that make the senses masters. It was sober also in lifting them above the fumes of conceit and vanity. A man who is always looking beyond and above himself, longing for the revelation of a Goodness and Truth not in himself, is fleeing conceit and vanity and treating them as torments and curses. Himself is his prison, and Christ has come to set him free. Until he has escaped it altogether and entered the glorious liberty of the sons of God, freedom from selfish objects, aspirations and limits, he cannot be satisfied. No one knew this better than the Apostle. For him, fisherman as he was, the hardest thing had been not to think himself above his Master and Lord and not to trust his own power to go to prison and death. No doubt it was still a battle, and he looked for victory by exercising the same hope he urged on his fellow-Christians. Had he held any different expectation from theirs, any dream of a private or special reward, such as he had cherished when our Lord was on earth, he would soon have lost all he had learnt from the Cross and the Resurrection. III\. This is the next point I would have you notice. The Apostle is addressing a society of men, and he sets the same hope before all of them. He makes no distinction of characters and no attempt to find out which were living sinfully and which well. Why? Because the hope was itself the great test of what they were, and itself the great means of raising those who would be raised. The raising would consist in casting away partial and selfish ambitions for a common ambition, for an object all could share. This showed that the Church is a communion of spirits, not of mere creatures of flesh and blood, and that they attained the unity of a Church just so far as they pursued a spiritual object. Here, then, is the Apostle's way of educating men: by high rewards of glory, immortality and eternal life, to gird up their loins and be sober. Here is his way of terrifying them with future damnation. What damnation could be greater than to lose that glory, immortality and eternal life, to be left without the knowledge of God? IV\. But this glimpse of his method does not show us how practical it was, or the principle it rests on. We must turn to the next passage: "As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to your former lusts in your ignorance; but as He which called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation." He refers to a former state of mind into which they might relapse without the strenuous effort, the girding of the mind, the sobriety and the hope to the end he had urged. He says that state came from their ignorance. I will not assume what that ignorance was; I will turn to passages that may explain it. The first is Ephesians iv. 17-18: "This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart." I think there can be no doubt about this. The Apostle who told the Athenians that they lived, moved and had their being in God means by "alienation from the life of God" an unnatural separation from the One they should have been united to. By "blindness of heart" he means the loss of a vision they were created to enjoy. If so, what ignorance can he have meant but ignorance of God? To what other cause than the absence of actual knowledge of what God is, His nature and character, is the vanity of mind and moral evil of the heathen traced? Perhaps, though, a passage from the Apostle of the Gentiles may not suffice to illustrate one from the Apostle of the Circumcision. So take the opening of Peter's own second epistle: "Simon Peter, a servant and an Apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ: grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord, according as His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that hath called us to glory and virtue: whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the Divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust." Twice in this short passage the knowledge of God is assumed to be the ground of all good to man. Grace and peace come from it; whatever belongs to life and godliness, whatever leads to glory and virtue, comes through it. Nor is this a mere phrase open to any interpretation. Peter gives his own: knowledge of God is what enables us to become "partakers of the divine Nature." If there is no way of rising out of our nature into the pure and perfect Nature, he implies we have not received what is necessary to life and godliness, and the Gospel does not tell us how to escape the corruption that is in the world through lust. I need hardly say that had I followed my quotation from St. Paul by examining that Epistle or any other of his, I would have found language exactly matching this. To put on Christ, to put on the new Man, to be clothed with the righteousness of God, are not only expressions that recur constantly in his writings. They are *the* expressions of his inmost mind, they come out in the midst of his most earnest practical exhortations, and they determine the character of his ethics. But I took that sentence only to make the purpose of my text clearer, so I leave this and speak of the word "*called*," which occurs in both passages of Peter: in our text, "As He that hath *called* you is holy," and in the second Epistle, "Him that hath *called* us to glory and virtue." The idea of a Calling is always present to the Apostle's mind; otherwise how could he have entered so thoroughly into the meaning of his nation's existence? But what kept the belief in a calling from being the hard, exclusive belief to him that it was to his countrymen? This did. He gave God's calling a much fuller and deeper meaning than they did. He supposed that a spiritual Being was in very deed calling the spirits of men to behold His image and share His Nature. It was no formal election of a set of heaven's favourites to earn rewards from which the rest of the world was shut out. It was the election of a people to know what are the rights of men, so that they might witness to all men of *their* rights. It was the election of a people to testify that God Himself is leading His creatures out of darkness into light, out of vague notions of what is right and holy to the knowledge, and so the possession, of His righteousness and holiness. V\. *Because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am holy.* Here is the unchanging morality of the Bible. Moses utters it and Peter repeats it. Nothing in between has affected it in the least; everything has brought out its meaning and power more fully. The protecting care and faithfulness of the unseen God were unveiled to Abraham, and he became faithful in the care of his family and flock. Joseph was given a vision of God's foresight, and he could teach Pharaoh to foresee. The *I am*, the Absolutely Righteous One, the guard of Law and Order, unveiled Himself to Moses, that name sustaining, not swallowing up, the old name of the Friend of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; so Moses could be the just Lawgiver and the patient guide of the people. A divine King who cares for men and feels with them, yet punishes their transgressions, was discovered to David, and so he became a king after God's own heart. Every prophet confessed God's word speaking in his heart, and so was able to speak and not be dumb. All the prophets felt that God was caring for the whole nation and suffering for its sins, so they could feel themselves parts of the nation and suffer for its sins. All felt that God had promised to bring all nations into His family, so they could long for Him to make Himself known to all. Just so far as they grasped God's nature and shared it, they showed the gentleness, purity and truth that men's consciences recognize as truly human. When the Apostles saw in Jesus of Nazareth the One Moses and the Prophets wrote of, they knew this must be so, and why. They could no longer doubt that all practical goodness in men corresponds to a goodness in God and comes from it, because they owned the Son of Man as the perfect concentration of that goodness. They were sure He had united His divine nature to the human so that the human might share the divine. They could protest solemnly against every attempt to build a righteousness of their own by keeping the law or by any other means, as hopeless and immoral. They could preach the Righteousness of God shown to all men in Christ, so that men might believe in it with their spirits, know it, be conformed to it, and let the light kindled in them shine out to the world. I have tried to show that the New Testament writers connect practical morality, whether as resistance to evil or as being and doing good, with the actual Revelation and actual knowledge of God. A less agreeable task remains. I must put it to your consciences and my own whether our morality has been speculative rather than practical. Have we been full of vague, restless doubts about the ends we should set ourselves, our relations with other men, and our standard of character and duty, just because we have not believed, or believed too weakly, that God has revealed His holy nature to us and that we may share it; that He has taken knowledge of us so that we may take knowledge of Him? Brethren, I cannot help seeing that hope and expectation of anything to come is very weak among us all. There is a dread of some evil threatening the world or ourselves. In some minds it is dread of anarchy and infidelity; in others, dread that God will visit them for their particular sins when they leave the world. But I cannot find that the first dread checks infidelity at all. Nor can I find that the second is effective against any great temptation, much less against the daily temptations to harshness, uncharitableness and injustice. Least of all does either dread bind us more closely as members of a Nation or a Church. They isolate us from each other. They make us afraid that everyone we meet may rob us of a promise we hold very loosely, and they make us suspect that dealing with our fellow-men on earth may lessen our chances of heaven. So it becomes a calculation of chances, and men reckon what it is safe to keep or worth giving up to gain a future good or avoid a future misery. As that good and misery are so indefinite, it generally ends in our taking what lies before us, not expecting much enjoyment from it but ready to bear it, since nothing better has been provided. No man is always in this state of mind. Properly it is not a *state* but an oscillation, which while it lasts may leave us credulous or sceptical, impatient of everything, or eager to place ourselves under absolute authority. And there are moments, I am certain, when quite different thoughts visit even the man most under its influence. There come dim recollections of being told we are children of God, or, if we are too familiar with those words, a suspicion that they may have a meaning, for ourselves and for the multitudes we are trying to distinguish ourselves from. With them come stranger, more mystical words of an Apostle: "If children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ." What can that mean? Suppose it meant that even we are created to share the Righteousness, Love and Truth of God. Suppose we have no righteousness, love or truth of our own that could entitle us to any reward, but these are His own rewards, offered without money or price, which we may claim even here and enter on as our full inheritance hereafter. What a difference it would make to our moral state! What a hope would be kindled in us, a hope that does not make ashamed, which we could boldly set before every human being! How little we should care to convict men of infidelity, and with what shame and sorrow we should confess our own! We would say to all: a message has been brought to us that none of us has believed, or has believed only in a beggarly way. Is it not the message that meets your questionings and longings as well as ours? Is it not what you have cried for in lonely, sad hours? If so, let us begin to hope together. You have the same right as I have. There is no difference between us, except that I have offended more against God by professing to hold what I have not held and repeating words without giving them their natural force. But now let us forget the things behind. You dislike our pride and self-glorification; encourage us to hate them, for they keep us from the glory and virtue that are for you as well as us, through the knowledge of the God who has called us and is calling us to be like Him. Here too would be the remedy for the uneasy thoughts about their lot in the world to come that haunt so many gentle and ungentle minds, which often lead them to neglect plain duties and aggravate the very sins that cause the thoughts. What would they wish to have, in this world or any other? Is it not righteousness, love and truth? Is it not the lack of these they feel so bitterly? Yes, surely, and they feel it because they seek these things in themselves and not in God, in whom alone they dwell. They dread Him as one who requires these things of them, instead of trusting Him as the Righteous, the True and the Loving, who invites us to know Him and to possess His own infinite treasures. Brethren, because this hope seems to me the one escape from the evils around us, from the lusts of an evil nature and the restless speculations of our intellect, I have argued so earnestly against those who would take it from us. I do not for a moment say that this is their intention. I know that what men deny with their lips they may hold in their heart of hearts. I am quite sure that some who, speaking as logicians, seem to tell us that the love of God shown at the Cross is not really the same love that is to dwell in our hearts, and that the words describing its nature are merely accommodations to our conceptions, may hold that love far more firmly than I do and show far better fruits of it in their lives. We should also remember that logicians, as such, deal with the individual soul, which, as St. Paul tells the Corinthians, is subject to conditions and limits that make knowledge of spiritual things impossible. Schoolmen may naturally think it their business to investigate those conditions. We would have no cause to complain if they did not intrude into another region by denying the *Spirit of man* within us that the same Apostle speaks of. That Spirit acknowledges no such fetters, claims fellowship with the Eternal, and is never satisfied until the Spirit of God has called it out to know the truth that alone can make it free. The worn-out student of the poet's legend became conscious of such a human spirit when he left his books of Jurisprudence, Medicine and Theology, went out into the spring air and heard the children singing their Easter song of the risen Christ. Then he could say, "Here I am a man, here I dare to be one." The legend goes on to say that he committed that human spirit to the guidance of an evil, mocking spirit and fell into guilt and despair. But we are not to suppress, because of that terrible possibility, which each of us may at times have felt as a possibility for himself, the lesson that the Apostle of the Gentiles and the Apostle of the Circumcision teach together. They were alive to the danger of men acquiring a devilish nature, as Peter's second Epistle shows, and for that very reason were more earnest to tell men they were meant to share the divine Nature. They felt that since Christ's appearing it was impossible to hide either the glory or the peril of humanity, and that to awaken men to the one we must speak of the other. There is a middle region we may pass through but cannot dwell in. It is a region of clouds, with none of the brightness of Heaven or the firmness of earth. In it all is speculation and there is no practice. It may be a region of dry logical formulas, or of emotions, sensations and individual feelings. But we are called to leave it by the actual sorrows and miseries we witness; by the sense that we are kin to the lowest and worst as well as to the noble of our race; by the voices of friends who learnt on earth that there must be an actual Kingdom of heaven and who beckon us to the home they, we trust, have found; and by the voice of God Himself bidding us eat the flesh of His Son and drink His blood, given for the life of the world. The Church says that this eternal life stands in the knowledge of God. When we partake of the sacrifice of Christ, we partake of the mind of God. To know Him is, in the Apostle's words, to know the love that passes knowledge. Do not think that those who seek that knowledge, and who believe the Lord's Supper is the pledge that all men need it and that it is offered to all, will have less awe and trembling in entering God's presence than those who stand afar off and think they have no capacity for such a gift. Love is far more awful than power. The beloved Disciple, who spoke most of knowing God and dwelling in God, fell at the feet of the High-Priest of the Universe as one dead when He was actually revealed to him. Those who most share St. Paul's prayer, for others and themselves, that they may comprehend with all Saints the height, length, breadth and depth of the Divine mystery, are most sure to exclaim with him, "*Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His councillor? Or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things; to whom be glory for ever. Amen*." ## CHRIST THE PURIFIER OF PRIESTS AND LAYMEN ::: {.center} Septuagesima Sunday ::: ::: {.center} [February]{.smallcaps} 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]{.smallcaps} iii. 3. *The passage:* The Lord will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. He will purify the sons of Levi and purge them like gold and silver, so that they may offer the Lord an offering in righteousness. [In]{.smallcaps} pursuing the subject suggested by the Epiphany services, I passed over a topic that this month of February specially recalls. It is the festival once called Candlemas, which the Prayer-book describes as the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, or the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin. I have no doubt that many, noticing this service, said in their hearts if not aloud, "Here is a relic of a bygone time! If we ever complete the Reformation begun three centuries ago, this is one of the superstitions we shall get rid of." Before I turn to my text, let me say a few words on that point. The Reformers of the sixteenth century said: "Men have been defrauded of the Gospel, and a mere law has been put in its place. The Law shows us our evil; the Gospel shows how God frees us from it. By suppressing the Gospel, our priests were forced to soften and reduce the Law. They granted indulgences for evils the Law pronounces accursed, because they would not tell men that the God who sent His Law to condemn us for sin also sent His Son to save us from our sins. They have kept us from being righteous and doing righteousness, because they would not declare that Christ had fulfilled all righteousness and invited us by faith to put on His." These were the principles on which whatever was best and truest in the Reformation rested, and which have won it the sympathy of its warmest friends. So it was the Reformers' duty to give sure testimony that a Gospel had really come and that Christ had really fulfilled the law. The evil to be corrected was that men denied this in practice, if not in words. They tried 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 accepted. They invented purifications of their own, because they did not believe that one great Purifier had appeared and been presented to His Father in the substance of our flesh. So our Reformers, I conceive, did not think they were conceding anything to the errors they wanted to expel when they taught men, in their ordinary united devotions, to remember what had been done for the world. They thought they were asserting their own principle in its strongest form. If they claimed an old service for this purpose, so much the better, since it showed their truth was no invention of theirs but was implied in the earliest Christian devotion. They did not suppose it made men superstitious to fix in their memories the facts whose forgetfulness was the *cause* of their superstition, or that it burdened consciences to teach them what the Lord of All had done to make them pure and free. Every memorial feast God commanded the Jews to keep recorded a deliverance wrought for them and a relation to Him established. The Bible tells us that when they grew careless of these feasts they ceased to believe in their Deliverer and became slaves of idols; having forgotten the relation He had revealed, they tried to create one by schemes of their own. The Reformers believed the Bible, and did not think its warnings obsolete. The method that kept the Jews mindful of their history might keep Christians from confusing the facts of the New Testament with the legends built on them. The method that reminded the Jews that the great King who had brought them from darkness to light, and from subjection to their own natures into covenant with Him, was in their midst, might assure Christians that the living God is in the midst of *them*, that He has set up His Son's kingdom among *them*, taken *them* into covenant, and redeemed *them* as His children. So they thought. And *we* are told that, to show gratitude for the blessings the Reformers gave us, to secure their continuance and obtain more like them, and to prove our reverence for the Bible, our duty and wisdom is to discard the memorials of Christ's acts and choose a way altogether different from the Bible's. The hope is that we shall thereby stand fast in our liberty. I fear we shall instead hasten our return to every confused and slavish notion, every dark superstition that the unregenerate heart naturally breeds. Some will take such prophecies for idle tales. They have got their notion of the Reformation from clubs and platforms, and fancy they can rid themselves of Popery and every bad doctrine by shouts and curses. They do not know that Popery, Infidelity and every form of evil lie close to their own hearts, ready to spring out and take possession just when they feel most secure. They do not consider how the Evil Spirit exults in all the clamour that turns men from knowing themselves and knowing God. Nor do they consider that the very principles of the Reformation, of which they boast, may be perishing in our hearts while we direct all our zeal against those who attack them in words. The passage I have chosen, part of the Epistle for the Festival of Purification, may explain what I mean. It is from the Prophet Malachi, and the whole passage reads: "Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before Me, even the Messenger of the Covenant whom you delight in. Behold, He shall come, says the Lord of Hosts. But who can abide the day of His coming, and who can stand when He appears? He is like a refiner's fire and like fuller's soap. He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and shall purify the sons of Levi and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer the Lord an offering in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord, as in the days of old. And I will come near to you in judgment; I will be a swift witness against sorcerers, adulterers, false swearers, those who oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, those who turn aside the stranger from his right, and those who do not fear Me, says the Lord of Hosts." I have no doubt the Reformers were glad that these stern sentences were read on a day set apart to commemorate the Virgin. They knew how much fantastic, sentimental devotion clung to her person, and how she was invoked as a protectress from God's justice and wrath. So it was good to say plainly: "No such protectress exists for men or women, nor ever has, thanks be to Him, nor ever shall. 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, what His wrath is, what His justice is. For that reason He is to be *delighted in*. We should not delight in Him if He cloaked anyone's sin or lightened its punishment. We may delight in Him because He is like a refiner's fire, determined to burn up dross and to purify us from it. What He does perfectly, all lesser messengers, His mother and all others, must do in their small measure. If they do not declare God's wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, and do not proclaim *Him* as Refiner and Purifier, they are not fulfilling Christ's work. They have come on another errand, they thwart His purposes, and they must be messengers from some other father than His. For this was true in the days of the Prophets of the One who dwells between the Cherubim, whose Name is Holy. It continued true when He came, it is true now that He has ascended, and it will be true for ever. God's mind has not changed and cannot change. It was, is and shall be a mind of burning hostility to all injustice, oppression, wrongdoing and foulness in all kinds of people, high and low. It was, is and shall be a mind that acts on all people everywhere to purify and set them right. To publish this character, will and work of God by words, acts and sufferings was the business of all brave and true men of old. To manifest it fully and carry it out was the purpose of the Incarnation, words, acts and sufferings of the Only-begotten Son. Since He has said, '*It is finished*,' since He has accomplished the task of showing what God is, and lives on high and has sent His Spirit so that God's purposes of destroying evil and purifying men from it may not be frustrated, He must put down the pretensions of all saints, living or departed, to restrain His arm. That is the same as restraining His grace and blocking His loving will toward the human race. Any saint who asks that Christ not be a swift witness against adulterers, false swearers and those who oppress the hireling asks a curse on the world. Every saint, on earth or elsewhere, who prays that Christ would not sit as a refiner to purge evil from men's hearts prays, 'Thy will be *not* done in earth as it is in heaven.' Their business, and that of all God's ministers on earth, is to bear witness to His infinitely loving will, to desire that it *may* be done on earth as in heaven, and that everything obstructing it, however seemly or religious, be swept out of the universe." The Reformers, taking Malachi's words in this sense, must have been struck by their allusion to the Jewish priests: "*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 would have seen, as many other passages in the Prophets told them, that there was special reason to fear that the priests, though God's own appointed servants, were *not* offering in righteousness but in *unrighteousness*, in a way that made the people unrighteous. Where did the danger come from? Their own times told them. They saw priests offering sacrifices to complete the imperfect sacrifice Christ had made on the Cross. They saw that these had an immoral effect on the people, holding out the hope that through the powerful intercession of certain men and spirits above, God might overlook sins or find them less hateful. This, they perceived, was the vile, perverted notion of sacrifice that had debased Pagans and infected Jews after idolatry's outward symbols had lost their attraction. So they felt, as we know they did strongly, that the corruptions of the laity could be traced largely to the corruptions of the priesthood. A promise that these corruptions would be eradicated and Sacrifice restored to its true, righteous meaning was therefore a promise of health 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 and the oppressor of the hireling, for He would take away what comforted them in their wrongdoing. He would make Sacrifice again the mightiest testimony for His loving will and against the self-will of men. The great blessing of the Reformation time was that old words, which had lain dead as if they belonged to bygone ages, and which generations of commentators had reduced to topics of dispute in which the people had no share, started forth full armed, as terrible as when they first came from the hearts and lips of inspired men. Everything the Reformers saw around them proclaimed these to be the words of Him who lives and reigns, the same yesterday, today and for ever. If we are to complete the Reformation, and keep what fruits of it we still have, the Bible must again appear to us in that form. We shall then be little disposed to patronize it or argue for it, or to suppose it needs our good word. It will tell us, priests and laymen alike, what it is, by exposing our own evils and by promising that those evils shall not defeat God's purposes of good for our land and for mankind. We shall think less of the Book than of Him who speaks out of it, speaking to us as He spoke to Jews in Malachi's day and to Germans and Englishmen in Luther's. "I am the Lord, the righteous Lord; that is my name" will once more be a significant sound, passing sentence on our unrighteous and unloving deeds, not supplying instruments for displaying our unrighteousness or 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 looks through our religion to see what it is good for, who hates robbery for burnt offering, and who is no respecter of persons. Surely, then, Malachi's words about the Purifier will tell us something that we, as much as the Jews and the men of the Middle Ages, are apt to forget. The old Prophet says to us: "Beware, priests and laymen, lest you fancy that punishment for your sins is, or can be, the thing you are most to dread or make others dread. Beware lest you pervert the idea of intercession, by men on earth or saints in heaven, into an intercession that any sin should be smothered or tolerated in anyone. Beware lest you endorse all the errors of former days by treating the Sacrifice of the Son of God, the one effectual Sacrifice and ground of all others, as if it were not the perfect fulfilment of the Father's will but in some sense a victory over it. Above all, beware lest you reject the gracious promises made to you and your land because you misunderstand your own deep necessities. God, the hater of evil, promises to find out your evil and purge you from it. "Do you think it would be a greater thing to have your evil acts overlooked than to be sifted and probed so that you may be set right? Have you not found that evil is your curse, that to *be* wrong is the horrible thing, not being detected or suffering some affliction for it? If you have, you will hail this as the most characteristic exercise of divine power. And divine it must be, for how can anyone not divine reach all the intents and purposes of your will? Who but the all-seeing One can say to a human being, 'I will sit and purify thee'? Who but the All-loving would care to? This strange penetrating power, going down below anything your consciousness has reached, carries a pledge that it will be effectual, and that no outside hindrance will keep a new and nobler form from emerging from the chrysalis in which it was buried. And will not the same processes that purify you be available to purify your nation? Does not He who sits as refiner of the one desire to be refiner of the other? He promised to purify the sons of Levi not for their sake only but as representing the sanctity and unity of the land. They were to be purified so as to be fit to present the sacrifices that signified the people's dedication to God. Is it otherwise with you? Are you not to tell your people that in every national judgment and every individual trial the Refiner is sitting to destroy the dross and bring out the pure ore?" It seems to me, my brethren, that such lessons taken home to all our hearts might help the cause of Reformation, in the practical sense as well as the technical and historical one, more than any alteration of the Prayer-book. I do not wish to separate the two senses; I believe that rightly understood they are identical, and that we cannot better promote Reformation now than by maintaining and fulfilling the work begun three centuries ago. Only let us consider what that work is. I have not denied that it involved a sifting of the minds and hearts of the Clergy as well as the Laity, of the Clergy more than the Laity, or that a more rigorous sifting is to be expected, even desired, in our day. The words we repeat in our daily prayers will surely be put to the same test 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 consumed. These we must confess as the main causes of any new development of Popery or Infidelity. The service that prompted these remarks gives an example, and I wish to notice it before I conclude, since it may show the true way of resisting any retrogression and of finishing what the Reformers left undone. That the Virgin was by her very birth pure from all taint of human corruption is, as we know, the latest proclamation of the authority that calls itself infallible. It is easy for Romanists to protest against turning a sect opinion into a law of the Church and condemning illustrious doctors and saints. It is easy for Protestants to condemn it on other, more general theological grounds. But what makes it favoured among the people? What makes it possible for a Pope in our time to do what his predecessors never ventured? I think it will be found that beneath this exaltation of one human creature above all others lies a witness that humanity itself has been purified and regenerated by union with the Godhead. The Reformers did not proclaim that truth, or proclaimed it very weakly. They were so occupied with the redemption of individuals from the actual evils of the Adam nature that they overlooked the redemption wrought for the race, and the glory claimed for it by Christ's resurrection and Ascension. 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 from it, and has in part done so already. No denunciation of either worship, and no ridicule, has checked its progress or, I believe, will. Instead, proclaim positively that Humanity has no standing-ground of its own but has one in the Son of God, that in Him it is pure and holy, without spot or wrinkle, and that His Spirit is given so that we may be purged of our inhuman selfishness and enter our common inheritance. See whether this will not undermine Mariolatry in minds that do not prefer a creature to the Creator. See whether it will not show those who have fled from a cold divinity to what they take for a sympathizing humanity that the Son of Man is what no abstraction can be, and that He is the way to the all-loving Father. Such a testimony lies, I believe, in this old festival of Purification. We need to draw it out and present it to spirits hungering and thirsting for better food than ancient or modern superstitions can give, yet who will not give those up until they have a real substitute. But are we fit to distribute this bread of life? Have we not already proved we are unfit? We might say so and fold our hands in despair, if it were 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*." ## THE OLD AND NEW PARADISE ::: {.center} Sexagesima Sunday ::: ::: {.center} [February]{.smallcaps} 27, 1859 ::: > "*And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely*."—[Revelation]{.smallcaps} xxii. 17. *The passage:* The Spirit and the bride say, "Come." Let everyone who hears say, "Come." Let anyone who is thirsty come, and let whoever wishes take the water of life freely. [At]{.smallcaps} the beginning of the chapter these words come from, we read of a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, flowing out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. Closely joined to this vision is the tree of life on either side of the river. It bore twelve kinds of fruit, yielded its fruit every month, and its leaves were for the healing of the nations. Such passages in the last book of the Bible can hardly fail to recall what we read a week ago in the first. There a Tree of Life grew in the garden where Adam and Eve walked, and four rivers are mentioned, parted into four heads. The fancy of allegorists has been inexhaustible in following out these likenesses: what Christian mysteries may not the Tree of Life foreshadow, and what lessons of wisdom may not lie in the names of those early rivers, to which this latest river so plainly corresponds! I cannot say that devout people have gained nothing from these speculations. We may hope that light will one day be thrown on the cabalistic lore which ingenious men suspect in all words, numbers and signs. But life is now too busy and serious for such inquiries. Whatever profit or entertainment they offer, it does not make up for the impression they leave on many minds that the Bible is a book of tricks and not *the* book for practice and work. It is not too much to ask pious people to give up even their most innocent playthings if these tempt anyone to think the words of Apostles and Prophets were meant for children rather than men. I\. Still, the likenesses between Genesis and the Apocalypse are too remarkable to go unexplained. If the allegorists offered an explanation, they would deserve respectful attention. But I suspect that those have helped most toward one who have refused to let any private fancy divert them from studying the Bible as the interpreter of our deepest wants and the guide in our daily perplexities. Such readers cannot open Genesis without finding the creation of man in the image of God. They read on and find a man made of dust, into whose nostrils the breath of life was breathed, so that he became a living soul. He is placed in a garden among trees and rivers, learns to name the things around him, exercises dominion over them, discovers his need of fellowship, and is given a helpmeet. It is a pleasing picture, and its simplicity bears the stamp of truth. But it does not at all satisfy the idea set before us in the previous chapter. If that idea is true, an Arcadian, paradisal existence is not what a human being should long for or could be content with. A solitary happiness, or the happiness of one pair of creatures, could never be the end God had in view in creating. So when we are told that this beautiful infancy of the race quickly ended, that the woman was tempted by an inferior creature to crave a forbidden thing, good for food and likely to make her wise, and that the man disobeyed the command of his unseen Lord, I welcome it as the beginning, a sad one but the only one we can imagine, of the actual history of mankind. That history is not a downward but an upward progress, if the Bible is taken literally and in its order. It is an education of men, through work, suffering and sin, into the discovery of their real capacities and their divine parentage. It vindicates the truth of the original record, in spite of, and by means of, the deepest unbelief and contradiction of it by those whose destiny and glory it proclaims. If we hold this thought, which comes from taking Scripture as it stands and discarding the conceits we have wrapped around it, and then compare the opening of Genesis with the last chapter of the Apocalypse, the Tree of Life and the Water of Life become useful and precious signs. They connect the beginning of human discipline with its climax, and mark the passage from sensible life to spiritual, from the solitary to the truly human. What must have happened between these extremes? What has turned the rivers marked by bdellium, gold and onyx into a river flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb? What has made a tree in the middle of a garden where two people lived into a tree whose leaves heal the nations? What has changed a Garden into a City, the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband? Let us consider. 1\. First, he who is described in the first record as the Creator of man must have revealed himself as a Father, and the father not of a single soul but of a family. The command to increase and multiply has been obeyed, and has been a blessing, not a curse. What has tried to turn it into a curse is each member's desire to be divided from the rest, a merely separate soul. That desire has been a virtual denial of the name of Father. But the name has been a reality and the denial a lie. All may hold to the reality and renounce the lie, and those who deny their birthright are the ones the Father seeks to bring home. 2\. Next, if that command has had time to fulfil itself, so has the threat, "Thou shalt die." If Adam came under the power of death the day he ate of the tree, everyone has been born under the same death, and each has felt that death is somehow connected with the knowledge of evil. The sting of death was sin. But in all that time was there no knowledge of good too? Was there no perception of a life struggling with the death, or rather, against which the death was struggling? Was no one actually bruising the serpent's head? Had not every mother, as a man was born into the world, been sure that there was? And who that was has been revealed. The seed of the woman, the object of trust, has actually come, not as the child of Eve but as the head of the race, the Son of Man. His heel was bruised. He solved the mystery of death and turned it into a sacrament of fellowship. He rose out of it, declared to be the Son of God. The Word of Life is the substitute for the Tree of Life. 3\. Third, the first chapter of Genesis hints at a Spirit who moved on the face of the waters, and in the chapter we read this afternoon we hear of that Spirit striving with man. The first hint rules out all hard, mechanical notions of creation. We cannot describe it by saying that things were called into existence; the phrase implies the communication and unfolding of vital principles. The second is said of a proud, rebellious human society hurrying to destruction. It makes us remember that what resists destruction, in man as in nature, is not a force from outside but an energy within, an energy that holds together social elements always ready to break loose, and that comes from God. Such language needed to be unfolded. Christ began to unfold it as he sat by Jacob's well and told the Samaritan woman of a water he would give, which would be in her a spring welling up to everlasting life. He unfolded it further when, at the Feast of Tabernacles, he invited all who were celebrating the striking of the rock in the wilderness to come to him and drink. But as St. John says in his comment on that saying, it could not be fully unfolded until Christ was glorified. Then, when the Son of Man had been proclaimed as sitting at the right hand of God, the Spirit of God could be given to men. He could come down on different tribes and races to bind them into one, take possession of their thoughts and lips, quicken their hearts with new fire, speak through their different dialects, and form a Church out of every kindred under heaven, representing humanity redeemed by God, the Bride of his Son. That was the preparation for the words of my text, in which the Spirit and the Bride invite men to take the water of life freely. Every part of their speech is addressed to one age as much as another. May it reach us! II\. 1\. If by the Bride we meant the Church as represented by the doctors of some particular age, we might well doubt whether these voices could be in harmony. Often it seems that Church*men* are bidding us seek some outward means of quenching our inward thirst. The words of our Lord about the well of water within, springing up to everlasting life, seem to frighten them, as if, though *he* spoke them, they were unreal and mystical, or at least not to be set before common people, though he addressed them to an ignorant and sinful woman. But the voice of the Church, as it sounds clear and strong through the generations in the confessions, prayers and songs of those who witnessed that Christ truly died for man and truly raised humanity to the right hand of God, echoes the voice of the Spirit. That voice says: "Come within. Turn from shows and appearances and glittering outsides. Come to him who is the root and ground of your being, the source of all the life within you. Leave the circumference, where you may wander forever, changing place and finding no rest, seeking a home in new sects or churches, always the prey of some old or new delusion, always learning and never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth. Come to the centre from which all the scattered lines of light that reached those sects and churches radiated. Come to your true home, your Father's house, which you left in search of one elixir after another, until you found sickness instead of health, poverty instead of gold, and the food of swine instead of the nectar you dreamed of. Come back to this home, where your spirit, for all its weariness and helplessness, will still find a welcome, the new robe, music and dancing, and the Father's embrace." So the Spirit of Holiness and Truth speaks to the spirit in you and me. The sacraments of the Church, which are the ring and vesture of the Bride, the pledges of our adoption as children, the assurance that we are bound to an eternal Husband, and the witnesses of an inward, ever-renewing life, speak the same language: "Come, not to the end of the earth, not to some temporary shelter from heat or rain, but to the house not made with hands, where all human hearts may live together." 2\. The Apostle goes on: "And let him that heareth say, Come." The voice of the Spirit and the Bride may reach spirits that are closed against it, those of whom Isaiah says that they have made their hearts fat and their ears dull of hearing. He does not mean that a human messenger's words may fail to reach the man they are meant for, or fail to impress his understanding, or even fail to strike painfully on his conscience. He means that they are taken as only a few of the myriad voices ringing and buzzing in the air, not as the voice of a Deliverer and King. So the invitation is not obeyed, because it is not felt to be an invitation. Or if it attracts, it is not recognized as having a right to command; we would like to accept it, but how can we, in fetters? Still there may be an indistinct hearing, a half-conviction that the message is for us and that God sent it. Let him who hears even in this way say, "Come." Let him say to his own heart: "You are tied with heavy chains, but this is surely the angel bidding you rise and shake them off. It is not you who must strain to stand upright and be free. The Spirit of God will give you power and remove the hindrances. Only be sure that it is he who speaks, and that you have only to submit to his guidance and let him purify and govern you, and you will be led by the straight way, rough though it may be, to your proper home." All the weary metaphysics about necessity and freedom are contained in this sentence, but translated into life. It avoids the narrowness and hopelessness of the two party theories, confesses the truth of each, and lets them support rather than contradict each other. The Spirit of God comes to vindicate man's freedom, not to crush it. When the will stops being independent and obeys its true ruler, its slavery ends. 3\. Still, "he that heareth" does not express the full Gospel the Apostle preaches. It holds the truth but not the whole truth. A man may say, "You demand hearing of me, but the world has so dulled my organs and deafened me with bewildering cries that I cannot hear." So St. John adds, "And let him that is athirst say, Come." At first this might seem a greater requirement, since to be athirst for the Water of Life implies a high state of feeling, a craving found in very few. If the words were "athirst for the Water of Life," that criticism would be just. But the word is simply "athirst." The man may not know for what. He may have tried, and still be trying, many ways to satisfy the dry aching in him, and be conscious of nothing but that. Let anyone conscious of that say, "Come." Let him say: "I sought the good that was to satisfy me at a distance, and did not find it. The faster I pursued it, the faster it fled. The Spirit and the Bride say this could not be otherwise, because the good was close to me. I had it within me and did not know it. It was beneath myself, beneath all the dark and dreadful thoughts and visions about myself that scared me, and from which I was asking the world to deliver me. They say, 'Come and look through these. If your own dark self, which you dread to meet, is there, so is Christ, the deliverance from yourself, in whom you may sink and drown yourself, the true Lord and Friend of Man. Come, for if an Evil Spirit claims dominion over you and seeks to fill you with his own nature, there is one who casts out the Evil Spirit: the Son of God, the Prince of Peace, who came from the bosom of the Father, from Absolute, Eternal Love, and can lead you into it.'" 4\. There is another clause, and at first it sounds as discouraging as the last. "Whoso will, let him take of the Water of Life freely." "So," we exclaim, "it comes to this at last. At the threshold of the Bible we were shown this great obstacle in the very state of man, in the very gift of his Creator, and in almost the last words of the Bible the puzzle is still unsolved. The will is still here. If it is obstinate, and it has the power to be, and for six thousand years has proved and used that power, what does Redemption mean? What has been done to save the earth from its curse, when the one made its ruler has a perpetual faculty to create and renew it?" Thousands who are not in earnest play with this thought as an excuse for frivolity, and it torments some who are earnest for years. How can we answer it? We cannot answer it at all, but the Spirit and the Bride can. They answer by speaking to the will, to the spirit in us. They make it feel that its capacity to go wrong is its glory and not its curse. They awaken it to the effort and energy that belong to it and to no stone, or even tree, river or star. They make it feel that its efforts and struggles, even when feeble, ill-directed and mischievous, are in themselves greater and dearer to God than all the unconscious movements of the Universe, however calm. They make the man understand that because these efforts are dear to God, he does not leave them to work on turbulently to their own destruction, and that the whole scheme of his providence and grace has been for the Redemption of this Will: to bring it out of the dominion of its oppressors and regenerate it to be his servant and child. They say to the man: "It is true that at the end of the Bible, as at the beginning, you find that a man cannot be blessed as a mere animal is blessed. That is an Eternal Law which God will not set aside, and which he will confirm in Heaven, Earth and Hell." That is the very explanation of the history of the Bible, and of the history of your existence and every man's. Because you cannot be blessed as a mere animal is blessed, God would bless you as a man is blessed. 5\. And here is the blessing: "Take of the Water of Life freely." You thought you were to purchase eternal life by a number of good acts, or certain states of mind, or a vigorous faith. You found it very hard, indeed impossible, to bring the purchase-money. The acts you did were *not* good but selfish; the states of mind were not real but artificial; the faith was in itself, not in God. *Take of the Water of Life freely.* Receive the eternal life which is the spring of all just works, good counsels and healthy faith. Receive it as God's own gift, earned by nothing in you, and sought by you because he made you conscious of evil in your deeds and thoughts and of unbelief in your inmost heart. Let it enter you, purify you and refresh you. Take it afresh day by day, as the ground takes in fresh moisture and as you, your children and your cattle drink at the well. There need be no painful thirst in you, though there will be if you refuse this water. There will always be a healthy desire for more of what you have found necessary and enjoyable. It is the life of God, the highest, the eternal life, that you are bidden to share. Yet it is a life we are to share with his poorest creatures, because it is the life of him who gave his flesh and blood for all. It cannot simply dwell in whoever possesses it; it must go out, as God's life goes out, blessing and creating. The commonest symbol is used for it, so that our sense of its wonder may not make us think it less general. These symbols belong to the completion of God's work as much as to its beginning. The sensible thing has all along been seeking the spiritual substance beneath it, and when that substance is found it keeps its own worth and beauty. There is a new earth as well as a new heaven. The Jerusalem that comes down from above transfigures the elements of Nature but destroys none of them. Nor does its transcendent greatness make any earlier condition of the race insignificant. In its brightness the garden age of the world gains a new brightness, which takes nothing from the brightness of any age that follows. The boyhood of mankind and its mature growth each have their own nobleness, temptations and counterfeits. The Spirit who strove with men before the Deluge has striven with them in every period since, and is striving now against the tendency of every family, nation and Church to become divided, heartless and base. The first Adam was made a living soul, and would have sunk that soul in the appetites of the body and the enjoyments of sense if God had not led him by toil and suffering to seek a higher good and a divine helper. The second Adam was made a quickening spirit, to renew the human spirit, soul and body, and to bring all Creation out of bondage into the glorious liberty of the Sons of God. The dreams of a golden age among nations that have not confessed a Son of Man are beautiful, because they witness that all have a sense of a better state meant for man, from which his sins shut him out, though they throw that state back into the past. We who know it to be an eternal state may interpret these dreams, but we may not indulge in them. How can we lament the fall of Adam, if we believe it has led to the manifestation of the glory of God and of his Kingdom over the earth and over the spirits of men? ## THE FOUNDATION AND THE BUILDING ::: {.center} Quinquagesima Sunday ::: ::: {.center} [March]{.smallcaps} 6, 1859 ::: > "*For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ*."—1 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} iii. 11. *The passage:* No one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. [In]{.smallcaps} the chapter my text comes from, St. Paul calls himself a Master-builder, and he holds that a Master-builder's office is to lay foundations. The Corinthians generally disagreed. They thought anyone could lay a foundation, and that an architect's skill showed in what he built on it. A teacher fit for them could not be a mere teacher of elements. Preaching only Jesus Christ and Him crucified might serve among Boeotians or barbarians. But men in a city like theirs, used to hearing the most varied wisdom from pagan professors, were ready for advanced Christian instruction. They were not children, and they demanded the refined culture of men. This opinion was probably not confined to one of the sects in their Church. It will have appeared in each, in a different form. The followers of Apollos supposed he had brought a lore from Alexandria to fill up the imperfect outline Paul had drawn. Those who used the name of Cephas thought circumcision would admit to the highest privileges those who were only novices by Baptism. And the Pauline school would have indignantly denied that their master merely preached a simple Gospel. Had he not as much Rabbinical knowledge as Peter, and better acquaintance with Greek poets and philosophers than Apollos? Did he not make light of the ceremonies to which they, in their infantile faith, still clung? Had he not been seeking deep principles while they reverenced forms? Paul would not have disclaimed the praise of seeking principles, if it had not come with disparagement of his fellow-labourers. That was his aim, so he was as offended by the conceit of his admirers as by those who despised him. All three parties were glorifying the peculiarities of manner, education and insight in their teachers. In doing so they missed what was dearest to all three teachers, at least while they were sane and submitting to the Spirit of love and truth. That was the common ground on which all men could stand, which they wanted every hearer to feel after and find. They addressed different hearts and heads, and God had educated their own by different methods. It would have been affectation, even sin, and a sign of learning by rote from a mortal teacher, to throw aside their own habits of thought and speech and take on those of the brother they most honoured. But each, by his own instruction and discipline, had been led to a Foundation far beneath Paul, Cephas and Apollos: a Rock against which the gates of hell could not prevail. Paul therefore claims this as the work of his life. He did not come to introduce a new order of architecture, or new ornaments for the old ones. His task was homelier, and perhaps harder and less popular. He had to persuade these wise Corinthians that they themselves were the stones of a glorious, divine Temple. God was hewing and shaping them into their places, and none could say he had no place, or that his neighbour had none. If they wanted to know where they stood, to stop interfering with each other (each destroying the rest and so himself), they must give up disputing over the theories of this doctor or that. They must care for something besides opinions, theories and doctors, and ask: "What holds *us* together? what severs *us*, one and all, from the bottomless abyss?" So Paul had to define more carefully, than when he spoke only of his relation to other teachers, in what sense he was a Master-builder. The text limits his statement and also expands it. He half retracts his earlier expression: he could not lay *the* Foundation. It is laid, as our translators have it; it is lying, as Paul says himself. That implies he did not put it there, nor did any man or body of believers. All teachers can do is say "There it is," and all believers can do is recognize it. But this narrowing of his office shows its nature and grandeur. Arguing for a set of opinions, proving himself right and others wrong, was the business of the Sophist the Corinthians had known. The Apostle differed from the Sophist in his primary design. He dealt with men, not notions, and with the grounds of human life and society, not the defence of dogmas about them. He came to declare that the foundation of the human Temple is not abstract but living. It is not an opinion or a collection of opinions but a Person, not *a* man but *the* Man. That foundation is lying for you and for all: for you, who are naturally discordant, impatient of fellowship and eager for independence, and for all whom you regard as ignorant or irreligious. Christ, the Son of the Living God, of whom Cephas made his great confession; the Word of God, whom Apollos and the Alexandrians declare the Teacher of all; Jesus the crucified, whom I set forth in weakness and death: on Him the social edifice rests, and by Him alone it holds together. No man can lay any other foundation; God has laid this one. If I spoke rightly some time ago of Paul's conversion, it consisted in waking from ignorance of this foundation to a clear apprehension of it. He had thought he had something of his own to stand on: a wisdom, righteousness or exclusive privilege belonging to Saul of Tarsus, the Hebrew of the Hebrews. That belief made him hard, narrow and savage. He had to prove to himself, as to others, that he possessed it, in spite of appalling evidence pressed on his conscience and heart that he was not wise or righteous and that God did not favour him. I have often shown from his confessions how that evidence forced itself on him through the very words that gave him his only warrant for self-confidence. His own righteousness and wisdom proved so unreal and despicable that he was drawn to faith in a Righteousness and Wisdom not his own. That Righteousness and Wisdom became truly his when he renounced his own. It was the foundation he could tell the Corinthians was lying for them as much as for him, and which they were denying through their Greek factions as he had denied it through Jewish pride. Brethren, in this coming Lent we shall hear much of repentance and conversion. Some will ask what we have to repent of, and what conversion we should desire for ourselves or our brethren. Today's Epistle may have suggested an answer to the first question to someone here. The Apostle says we are nothing without charity. Have we it in the sense he seems to give the word? If not, that is a reason for repentance, and conversion from uncharitableness would be a great conversion. But much stands in the way of any practical result. In his dialect charity does not mean giving all our goods to feed the poor. It can hardly have meant mere tolerance of each other's opinions. Some consciences may reproach them for lacking that disposition, and others may fear they have too much of it. Surely repentance, if it is so serious a duty, must be aimed at some serious and radical evil. And conversion, if it means what it meant in Paul's history, must be a change from some more fixed and definable wrong than not being tender enough toward our neighbours' acts or conclusions. Yes, we may be inwardly rebuked for over-severity yesterday and over-indulgence today, and console ourselves that there is no strict rule on how far to maintain our positions or concede them. But suppose we have been troubling ourselves about opinions, ours or our neighbours'. Suppose we have been comparing theirs with ours when we needed an actual foundation for our lives. Is that not something to repent of? And if we have made ourselves the rule and measure of other men while professing a common ground for them and us, is that not something to repent of? Look at what has come of it. Onlookers say we are always debating this or that dogma and forgetting practical duty and ordinary morality. Have they not a warrant for that charge, so far as we are concerned? But when they go on to say this temper comes from our faith in Christ, and that with less of that faith our works would be better, do we not know in our hearts that they are blaming our faith for what is really the result of our unbelief? We have held opinions about Him, made much of them, and judged others for lacking them. But we have not rested on the foundation laid for us. Our own judgment of our religion's superiority to other religions has been the rock on which we built what we call our Christianity. It may be a judgment about the credibility of one set of traditions, or about the Bible's superiority to the Koran or to any idolatrous Shasters. But if there is nothing deeper than this judgment, no one it owns as its support and as bearing up the pillars of the Universe, then surely we have not yet accepted the Apostle's doctrine or confessed Jesus Christ as he confessed Him. To be converted from that kind of confession, which is only another name for asserting our own wisdom and superiority to Jews, Turks, infidels and heretics, to a confession that gives up every claim to wisdom and solemnly asserts that we are in no way better than they: this would be a conversion like St. Paul's. It might make us witnesses of Christ as he was. I believe it must come, as it did to him, through the exposure to our own hearts of the utter fallacy and vanity of the pretences that led us to dream we are not as other men are. It must expose the dream that we could have any foundation for life or death that is not a foundation for every human being. But these exposures will bring us, as they brought Paul, to acknowledge that the foundation laid for us all is a *moral* one. The Person on whom we and Society stand is a *Righteous* Person, who speaks to a spirit in us that hungers and thirsts after Righteousness. His demand is not that we think certain things or hold certain opinions, but that we be righteous as He is, so that we may do righteous acts as He did them. By His own divine Spirit He promises to fulfil that demand for us and in us. So we may begin to see how the Epistle for today connects with the Lenten call to repent and be converted. The Charity set forth there is the Charity of God Himself, which was in Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is the one foundation for human Society and human acts, and there can be no other, then Charity is that one foundation too. It cannot be limited to care for the poor: ostentatious benevolence to the poor may break its law, and an apparent severity may sometimes fulfil it. But it does involve a care for the poor such as Christ had, shown when for our sakes He became poor. Nor can it be limited to respect for other men's opinions. What looks like such respect may mean that everyone had better keep his own notion because there is no common truth, no foundation for all. What looks like zeal against *opinions* may be fervent Charity to *men*. But Charity does involve obeying Christ's command not to judge, lest we be judged. It involves sympathy with all men: enduring their perplexities and questionings, sharing their temptations, feeling their sins, as He did perfectly. It must enter all the details of daily life, because it must penetrate the man himself who deals with those details. It can never be an ornamental accessory to a human being's existence. It must be the very law under which God has placed him, obedience to which is the condition of his freedom. This, brethren, is what frightens us and makes us tremble. Belief in a power bent on our destruction produces occasional terrors, hysterical convulsions, but they do not last. The very conscience to which those who excite such terrors appeal rises up and witnesses against them. But the thought of being under a law of love, with Him as the foundation of our existence who has perfectly fulfilled that law, may well appall us. We have been continual rebels against this law and have refused to stand on this foundation. Once *that* terror takes hold of a man, the word Conversion becomes a word of meaning, promise and power. He does not stop to ask whether converting grace was exerted on him some day in the past. He wants it now. His sense of resisting perfect goodness, and his certainty that this resistance must be misery, force from him the cry, "Turn me, O almighty Love, and I shall be turned." The answer to that prayer, which God Himself has inspired, is the conversion of his heart and spirit. It turns him from self-willed confidence to a child's dependence, and from wanting all men to think as he thinks to wanting all to stand on the foundation laid for all. He is sure it is laid for all and not for him alone, because turning to God has meant abandoning all selfish rights and privileges. So he will pray also, "Oh grant that all men may come to the knowledge of Thy truth and live." For we know that to be Thy Eternal Will, shown in Thy only Begotten Son, and to be fulfilled at last by the power of that Spirit who can subdue all things, even this rebellious, unloving heart of mine, to Himself. ## THE VINE AND THE BRANCHES ::: {.center} First Sunday in Lent ::: ::: {.center} [March]{.smallcaps} 13, 1859 ::: > "*Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in Me*."—[John]{.smallcaps} xv. 4. *The passage:* Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it stays in the vine, neither can you unless you stay in me. [When]{.smallcaps} each of us asks in Lent, "What have I most to confess? What has been my great misdoing?", no distinct answer comes. There is a vague sense of duties left undone and tempers indulged. There is a sense of devotion and fretfulness over little things while serious work went on that we should have cared about, or else of indifference to little acts of self-denial and little habits of evil, out of ambition to do something fine. As I said last Sunday, we may find ourselves guilty of various offences against the law of charity, which this season sets out as the law of our lives. But what we probably condemn ourselves for most is not any direct outrage against that law. It is a kind of uselessness, lifelessness, barrenness. We cannot stir ourselves to any course of action, scarcely to one deliberate act. We seem left with an endless routine, or with floating along a stream without knowing where it leads. In church and in private prayer, have you not often felt that you were only going through prescribed rules, not gaining strength to face the world but yielding to one of its fashions? There is a dull, dead pain in these feelings, and many would gladly exchange it for the sharp pain of those awakened to some great sin. We try to lull it with drugs, since we are sure we ought to be free of it, though it does not seem to need severe treatment. We hope it does not mean inward disease, and half fear it does. So we hide the symptoms from ourselves, and in time may think they do not exist. This is not an honest course, brethren, and so it cannot be a wise one. There is comfort as well as terror in St. John's words: "If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things." Every reproof of conscience, whether a sudden twinge or a pain repeated day after day, is the work of God's Spirit, convincing us of sin so that He may convince us of righteousness. If we believe these messages are from Him, we must know they come from a loving Friend who grieves for us and with us, who wants to set us right and can make us what He would have us be. Here, in my text, is the lesson that Spirit is teaching. He explains the secret of our inability to believe, hope, love, and act freely, calmly and manfully. He discloses both the cause and the remedy. "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me": there is the source of the malady. "Abide in me, and I in you": there is the cure. Let us consider each in turn. I\. Our Lord says to His disciples, "I am the Vine; ye are the Branches." We call this a comparison or a parable, and so it is. But do we not mean by this that it does not strictly express the truth, that the truth differs from what the illustration suggests? I am sure this thought lurks in our minds and robs us of more good than we know. We suppose a likeness is a clever device for telling us something about a thing or person, not an actual presentation of it. So we set about translating the illustration into some more exact abstract speech. But I assume that our Lord knew what was in the being whose nature He had taken, and in Him from whom He came, and knew how to declare what He was sent to declare. So when He said at the last supper, "I am the Vine; ye are the Branches," I suppose He meant them to look at an actual vine and its branches, whether or not one was before their eyes on the walk to the Mount of Olives. By a law given at creation, every branch is related to every other and to the root, and receives all its life from the root. I suppose He also meant them to understand that by a law as old as that, they were as really related to each other, because they were as really related to Him. A branch cannot be severed from the others without losing its life, and neither can a man be severed from his fellow, except at the same cost. The reason is the same: losing the relation between the branches is losing the relation to the root, and losing the relation between a man and his brother is losing the relation between that man and Christ. This gathered into one utterance all that had been scattered through our Lord's parables and discourses. His acts of service and grace, and all His sympathies with men, had implied such a relation. So had the stories of the Shepherd and the Sheep, and of the Husbandman and the Labourers. But something was needed to show that these relations were not arbitrary or accidental, and did not depend on men's good pleasure. There needed to be a natural emblem saying, "So it must be; no determination or self-will can make it otherwise." The Scribes and Pharisees had rejected Jesus as the Christ. Did that mean only that they refused certain evidences that He was the Person the Prophets spoke of? It was more, because the Prophets had spoken of a Root from which the whole life of the Nation, and of every man in it, was derived. The Person said to fulfil their words gave proofs, addressed to the consciences of His countrymen, that He was this root. The Scribes and Pharisees were resisting that witness in their consciences and trying to exist apart from the root. If so, it would be proved as our Lord had foretold: the dissolution of the Nation that had severed itself from its root would show it had no life of its own. And each man, of that Nation or any other, who confessed Christ as his root would discover how he was related to his fellows, and would show by his fruits that a true life was working in him. This was the lesson the Disciples were to learn at the Paschal Supper, after His ministry to the Jews as a Nation was over. They might easily fancy they were gathered round a leader of their own choosing, to whom they would stay faithful whoever else deserted Him. They were to learn it was not so. They had not chosen Jesus, and they could not keep their allegiance to Him. One would betray Him, one would deny Him, and all would forsake Him. But He had chosen them, and brought them about Him so that they might know the secret of their union with Him and with each other. He was the only source, bond and upholder of that union. His choice was not arbitrary either; in making it He was fulfilling a commandment. They were as truly united to Him as the branch to the vine. They could do what branches cannot do: deliberately say, "We renounce our connection with the root; we will not abide in it." But they could not make Him not their root, and by that very act they would prove He was, since the withering of all life in them would be the demonstration. This was also the secret of their union with each other. They would care for each other as members of one family only so far as they remembered that the Chief of all had become the servant of all, and that the Master had washed His disciples' feet to show they belonged to Him and that He had given Himself for them. And this was to be the subject of their Gospel to the Nations. They were to say: "We bring you news of the divine root from which all life has come, does come, and will come into the Universe. We see you joined in separate communities, each worshipping this power of Nature or that good or evil quality. We declare to you Him from whom all Nature derives its forms and forces, the Lord of Air and Sea and Earth. We declare to you Him from whom all the gifts and graces of all men proceed, in whom they are gathered up, and from whom alone anyone has received them. We call you to acknowledge Him and claim your place in Him: to be rooted and grounded in Him, to grow up into Him in all things, to refer all your abilities to Him and seek from Him the grace to use them, and to regard them as channels through which His Spirit acts." This was their doctrine. It was the meaning of the ordinances by which they grafted into the Church those who received their preaching as God's word and not man's. Baptism, prayer and the Communion of the Lord's Supper all expressed it. All these ordinances would be empty forms if what Christ said that night were not true: true for them, for all to whom He would send them, and for all men everywhere. They were living realities if Christ really was the Vine, and if it is men's sin and misery to separate themselves from that Vine, since they were created to be its branches and so to bear fruit to God. II\. So they taught, and so our fathers believed. Otherwise no Church would have been set up in this land or done anything to enlighten and civilize the world around. And we all profess to believe it too; our Creeds, Worship and Sacraments testify to it as much as the earliest Christians' did. The secret of their becoming dull routine, of our daily existence becoming a pretence, and of our inward barrenness and incapacity to act or find reasons for action, is simply this: we do not believe these words of Christ. They do not come to us as the revelation of a living truth that cannot pass away though heaven and earth may. We suppose we must attach ourselves to Christ by some acts or arts of our own. We do not simply confess that His Father has attached us to Him by His own purpose and love, created, redeemed and constituted us in Him, so that we may do the works He wants done, which His Spirit is working in us to do by all His gentlest and severest discipline. Let this be our great Lent confession, the beginning and end of all our confessions. The Spirit convinces us of sin because we believe not in Him. He shows our failures, weaknesses and corruptions as flowing from this source: we have acted as if we were not rooted in Him, as if we could persuade, train or task our selfish, corrupt Adam nature into producing something good for men or pleasing to God. Let us resolve, once for all, that this is impossible. A corrupt tree cannot bear good fruit; this is a law proclaimed by Him who spoke with authority, and it can never be repealed. No skill, discipline, refinement or religion can compel what is base and selfish to create what is manly, pure and self-sacrificing. Men have tried it for six thousand years, calling in politics, philosophy and religious societies, and have failed. Where, then, has there been success? Wherever a body of men, or one man, has said resolutely: God has not left us to our selfish tendencies; He has grafted us into the true human and divine root; He wants us to abide in it and is willing to renew us day by day in Him in whom He regenerated us. He has said, "Abide in me, and I in you," and in His commandment is life; He does not break His promises as we break ours. Whoever has taken this as the principle of his acts, and trusted himself wholly to God's working in him, has been enabled to overcome the world, the flesh and the Devil and walk according to God's will. And when a nation or a Church finds it has gone far wrong, become worldly, lukewarm and uncharitable, each seeking his own and not the things of Jesus Christ, so that confusion, discontent and evil spread through a land on which God has poured out His goodness, there is one way of reformation. It is to recall the lore of our childhood and return to the old faith that we are members of Christ and God's children. It is to confess how little we have understood or cared for that privilege, or cared to tell everyone we influence, in the furthest ends of the earth, that it is theirs as well as ours. These words, brethren, must be our watchword and charm in the time to come: "Abide in me, and I in you." Let us receive them not as read out of a book, but as truly spoken to us by Christ as He spoke them to the eleven on the night of His betrayal and agony. Let us be sure that each morning He says, "Abide in me this day, and I will abide in you," and says it again as we lie down at night. Then day after day and night after night, by all their sad and joyful experiences, will repeat and confirm it. The more sorely we are tempted by vanity, self-glorification, lust, indolence or cowardice, the more certain we shall be that these are messages of the Evil Spirit to draw us from the Lord who has bound us to Himself, and that greater is He that is with us than they that are against us. The more dreary the world looks, and the more we feel our weakness to renew it, the more confident we shall be that He does the help that is done upon the earth, that He who died for Mankind cares for man more than we can, and that our highest ambition must be to be His ministers in some little sphere, fulfilling His ends and not ours. If we care for that honour, He has told us He is willing to give it: it is His Father's pleasure that we bear much fruit, and He came to do that pleasure and to give us power to do it. While you simply resolve to live as if you were His and He in you, every lowly duty in your family, every effort to be useful in your neighbourhood, every body and soul you comfort will be a new bond to Christ and a new pledge of His presence. Then all things will be transformed. In the service of the Nation there will be manly purposes, clear insight and the sacrifice of petty ends. Power will be seen as a trust, received thankfully and discharged in fear and hope, not as a prize to covet. The Church will care to be nothing but the witness for Him who took the nature of all so as to give life to all who would receive it from Him. Whenever we feel heartburnings, jealousies, suspicions, quarrels for precedence, a desire to exalt our opinions or put down our opponents, we shall know inwardly that we are not abiding in Christ. We shall confess that sin, and ask the Father who grafted us into His Son to give us repentance so that we turn and cleave to Him. We shall ask for His Spirit, that our grudging, thankless, complaining life may change into a free, manly life that grows stronger for the discomforts that threaten it. Then, instead of asking what we shall get for serving God, the highest blessing will seem to be the power to serve Him, because exercising it always demands more trust in Him and more knowledge of what He is. Rewards beyond what we in our slothful life can dream of are for those who have watched beside hospital beds and worn themselves out encouraging the sick and dying, by deeds more than words, to abide in Him who died for them. The peace they give returns to them. They know that He in whom they believed is not their Lord only but the Lord of the whole earth. They feel more each day their own impotence and the evil fighting against them and the world, so they must think less of themselves and cast every burden on God, trusting Him to accomplish His own will. Then, when the powers spent on their brethren grow feeble, when eye, hand and heart fail, God will surely make all their bed in their sickness. The lesson of a whole life of toil and self-sacrifice will be gathered up in the days that call forth endurance, a higher and more blessed sacrifice still. The evening hour will be a Paschal supper, and He who sits at it, breaking the bread and pouring the wine, will say to His faithful disciple, as His last and best words: "Abide in me and I will abide in thee; yea, through long ages I will cause thee to bear fruit for the good of the family on earth and the glory of the Father in Heaven." So the thought of such people's deeds, which has more often discouraged us by contrast with our own than cheered us to follow, will have its right effect. We cannot gain strength from them, but we shall know where theirs was gained: it was received in weakness and perfected in weakness. When they learned to despair of themselves and to abide in One who suffered for all and gives life to all, they became able to suffer with their fellows and bring them life. If the disciples cannot cast the dumb and deaf spirit out of us, the Master can. If we cannot renew our youth at the spring, we can at the fountain. The sense of weakness and sin drives us from all intermediate creatures to the Mediator between the God of Love and us who have wandered from that Love. In discovering Him, we discover again our relation to all creatures. We can go on receiving blessings from them and imparting blessings to them, because He has said, "Abide in me and I will abide in you." ## THE BODY AND THE MEMBERS ::: {.center} Second Sunday in Lent ::: ::: {.center} [March]{.smallcaps} 20, 1859 ::: > "*And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it*."—1 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} xii. 26. *The passage:* If one member of the body suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honoured, all the members rejoice with it. [Lent]{.smallcaps}, I have been trying for two Sundays to show you, is not a time for confessing that we have fallen short of some high, imaginary standard of excellence. It is a time for confessing that we have departed from the actual law under which we and all human beings are placed. It is a time for individual confession. Each of us remembers acts that he can charge to no one but himself. But these are acts against the peace and order of society, the kind of acts that make society untenable. We cannot press this truth on our minds too much. It needs constant repetition, because we have a hundred loopholes for escaping it. We keep persuading ourselves that the Bible has a special vocabulary about Sin and Holiness. Sin, we think, means disobeying some theological rule, and Holiness a peculiar state of mind that a few exemplary people may reach. We must settle it in our hearts that Sin is being unmanly and inhuman, and that Holiness is the simple, natural, orderly condition of a creature living among creatures like himself. When we read this twelfth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, our first thought is how different the world it describes is from ours. Everyone there feels his neighbour's sufferings and joys as his own; selfishness neither directs society nor freezes hearts. We may then slip for a moment into a sentimental dream that such an Elysium might some day be created on this earth or on some distant planet. We may even ask whether, if species are not permanent, we might be transformed into fit inhabitants of such a place. But after a little of this we sensibly decide that this is a waking world, and that whatever may happen in time to come, we must conform to what actually exists now. We say it cannot be meant that we should waste our energies fighting the conditions we are put in, however ignominious; we must adapt to them as well as we can. That, I repeat, is a sound and healthy resolution, and we should keep to it. We can understand St. Paul on no other terms, for he was no dreamer; he lived to scatter dreams. He was a practical man and a fighter, but a fighter against his own inclination to disobey the constitution he was born under. That constitution belonged not to some society that may exist hereafter somewhere else, but to the society of the Greece, Italy and Palestine of his day, which is the France, Germany and England of ours. He would have the Corinthians, and us, struggle ceaselessly, not to create a new order, but not to contradict in every act of our lives the order to which we actually belong. I\. And what is that order? St. Paul takes the simplest method imaginable to make us understand it. He points us to obvious facts that everyone admits, and that the keenest experience forces us to recognize every moment. He asks us to consider the structure of our bodies, not the secrets known to anatomists and physiologists, but what every mechanic knows. Each limb has a power or work of its own, which no other limb can exercise. "*The foot cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee; neither the hand to the foot, I have no need of thee*." And, as broad a commonplace, "*though there are many members, there is but one body*." Then he appeals to anyone who has ever felt pain in any part of his body: *if one member suffers, do not all the members suffer with it*? So far he is certainly dealing with facts, not dreams: universal facts, which concern the scholar and the saint no more than the fool and the sinner. The scholar and the saint, if they are not to turn into fools and sinners of the most hopeless kind, ought to count these facts more significant than all the novelties we run to the ends of the earth to find. These are laws of the Universe, laws about our own selves, which no one can reverse. No industry or discovery can add a cubit to your stature, or make one part of your body not suffer with every other part, or make the whole not be affected by the well-being of each part. The doctor or surgeon does not aspire to alter these facts. He conforms to them and regulates his treatment by them. II\. Then what does the Apostle do? Show his wit by pointing out some resemblance between these facts and an opinion he wants us to accept? Nothing of the kind. He never dreamed of comparing things that cannot be compared because they are not of the same kind. Let the dead bury their dead; let those who spend their time defending opinions set other opinions against them. St. Paul's work lay elsewhere. He cared only for facts. He had found one set of facts to which he could appeal to the experience and conscience of mankind, and which would bear the test of all time. He goes on to speak of other facts, which concern each of us and the whole race as nearly, and to which he can appeal to the same conscience and experience and submit to the same test. He asks for no special field in which to prove them, no sheltered spot the winds of heaven do not visit too roughly. He takes the world as he finds it. A Greek city with all its corruptions, or the Roman empire with its tyranny, serves his purpose better than an Atlantis. We speak of human society as a body, and men have done so in every age. The Roman historian repeats the apologue that tradition attributed to Menenius Agrippa during the secession to Mount Aventine, remarking that it bore traces of the rudeness of the age (Livy, l. 2, c. 32). He suggests that men in the simplest times adopted this comparison instinctively; they could not do otherwise. It is worked into the very tissue of human language, and you can scarcely invent phrases that avoid it. We would have to revolutionize the speech and thought of all nations to be rid of it. And civilization does not weaken its hold on our thought and talk but strengthens it. The polished Roman of Livy's day might have dressed Agrippa's argument in more seemly phrases, wrapped it in historical illustration, or flavoured it with Greek philosophy. But whenever he spoke against Anarchy and pointed out its results, he fell back on the same analogy. The more plainly he brought it home to his countrymen, the more their consciences would respond, and the more pointedly they would feel it applied to their own time or the time coming. Well, then, St. Paul endorses this human language. He pronounces it sound and reasonable. He will not allow it to be figurative in any sense opposed to literal and true. It will bear, he says, the fullest unfolding. There are members of the body politic as certainly as there are members of the natural body, and each man is one. Each has a function assigned him in the body politic, as the hand or foot has in the natural body. One man can no more do another's work than the hand can do the foot's. One man can no more say to another, I have no need of thee, than the hand can say it to the foot. Here too the many members never let us forget the one body: every part suffers with every other, and no limb is honoured without every other sharing in the good. III\. Before going further, I must again press on you the two thoughts I began with. The first is that St. Paul's description does not presuppose perfection but imperfection. He alludes to suffering in the natural body: the foot feels pain, and therefore the hand feels pain. The Prophet looks forward, no doubt, to a time when no inhabitant of God's universe shall say, "*I am sick*," and our hearts confirm the hope. We must believe that health is the law of the world and sickness the anomaly. Reason says so, and we must suppose the anomaly will one day be removed; our Lord's miracles of healing bear witness to it. But St. Paul does not speak of this renewed condition. He speaks of men's bodies as he saw them and as we see them. So too in the corresponding case: he speaks of suffering in the body politic. He takes for granted that it is subject to confusions and derangements, and that hand and foot are each liable to their own peculiar torture. No one knew this better than he, who had more to endure from others and for others than anyone. He was writing to a society full of tumults and parties, a Church whose members seemed least in harmony and least willing to acknowledge any relation to each other. He saw where its strifes might lead, and how each school was trying to make itself or its leader the centre of the body and to regard all other members only as they affected itself. Therefore he set out more plainly than ever before the order God had established for them, and to which, willingly or not, they must submit. The other point I have already insisted on is that St. Paul was teaching an old doctrine, not a new one, when he declared this strict analogy between the physical and moral constitution of man. It was not new to his own countrymen. All their patriarchal records, which we are reading now in Genesis, contain it and witness to it. The sons of Jacob showed that they lived in a society they had not made for themselves but God had made for them. They showed it by their passionate and lawless assertion of family bonds and by the recklessness with which they broke loose from them: their wild revenge for their sister's disgrace, their casting their brother into the pit. When they passed from a pastoral to a national state and felt the sternness and certainty of law, every step of their history showed that they were members of a body. It showed their strong inclination to deny it, and that by denying it they brought themselves into wretchedness and bondage. It showed that He who had made them a nation was determined to keep them one, and able to teach the most rebellious the blessing of His order and the curse of violating it. When the sanctions of Law proved unable to control men's wills, each prophet spoke of a divine Ruler of those wills, an Almighty Word who governed the spirits of Angels and Men, and who would one day be shown mightier than all the enemies drawing His subjects from their allegiance. Nor was it a new doctrine to the Greeks. Their earliest legends of family life, telling how the relations of husband and wife, brother and brother, were violated, taught the same. So did their dramas, with their awful punishments ordained by the Powers above for transgressing domestic order. So did their actual experience in their commonwealths: the struggles to make stern Law supreme over men's inclinations, to find ground on which they could work together in freedom, and their united achievements, rivalries, hatred and dissolution. All of it repeated in different ways the lesson of the one body and the many members, and brought out in terrible facts the analogy St. Paul set forth, as far as words can, in language. IV\. What then did St. Paul add to these Jewish and Greek discoveries? What light could he throw on them? How could he harmonize them? They had been clear and decisive as far as they went, but they had not been satisfactory. They had proved that a law of fellowship exists between human beings, that it is constantly violated, and that its violation brings misery on the offender as well as on those whose claim he refused. They had proved that the tyrant suffers with the slave for his tyranny, that the slave's spirit is in the tyrant and the tyrant's in the slave. They had *not* shown how the Prophets' witness to a divine Word and Ruler over their nation could be fulfilled for the blessing of all nations. They had *not* shown who was the Centre and Head of that body with its many members. They had *not* shown where a power could come from strong enough to make the members really and practically cohere, and to overcome the tendency in each to tear itself from the rest. This great *Hiatus* in all the lore of past ages St. Paul fills when he says, "*Now are ye the body of* Christ, *and members in particular*." He had said earlier in the chapter, "*As the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that body, being many, are one body, so also is* Christ." Many find this language unintelligible and would like to explain it away as a figure or a mystical rapture, though everything before it is so strict and practical. So probably should we all, if there were not two powerful hindrances. V\. One lies in St. Paul's other writings and in the whole Gospel he preached to the Nations. If this is figure and mysticism, then everything else he taught is too, and so it sounded to Jews and Gentiles. He said that one who died on a Cross at Calvary is the Head of every man. He said He proved Himself the Head of every man by taking the form of a servant, submitting to death, rising from the dead, and ascending on high. He could use no other language to describe His identification of Himself with men: "*He was made Sin for us. He became a curse for us*." This is awfully profane language if it does not mean what it says; it trifles with men's necessities and anguish, and with the Name and promises of God. If we give it its direct and mighty meaning, the Incarnation, Sacrifice, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, wonderful as they are, become necessary parts of a divine Manifestation. To lose them is to lose the knowledge of what we are, and of what He is in whose image we were created. If St. Paul deceives us here, he deceives us there too, and what he held the most glorious of all facts must be given up as the wildest fiction that ever entered a man's imagination. VI\. That is one reason for not treating the words that crown the description of the body and the members as flighty words of fancy rather than reality. There is another, equally weighty for us, and perhaps of some weight even for those who have not yet accepted St. Paul as a true interpreter of human life. We cannot reduce to nothing all the past lessons of the world, drawn from its tears and joys, conflicts and hopes. We cannot purge our speech of the associations that have gathered round it. A body, with many members, we must still confess. "Oh yes," you say, "if you will talk about a Universal Church, a Church of Christ, this analogy is inevitable. But we who are not theologians have no call to use that dialect, and for us it has little force." I do not ask you to use it; so long as it has no force for you, I beg you to refrain. But I know that if you banish that kind of discourse, and every kind with a twang of theology in it, you will still have to recognize yourselves as members of a body, to ask what that recognition implies, and to ask how to fulfil your own functions in it. As English citizens you must do that, though a Church were a mere phantasy. And then another question arises: What binds me to the other members of this nation? What holds its limbs together? Brethren, that *What* must pass into a *Who*, or you will be dishonest citizens. Whether you are hands or feet in the body politic, whether you make laws or administer them, whether you bring them to bear on others or only submit to them yourselves, you will be tempted to deny your relationship to your fellow-citizens and to act unfaithfully by them, and so to lower and degrade yourselves. You will, unless you feel that it is not an abstraction but a Person who unites you to them, who admonishes you of your transgressions against them, and who makes you understand and fulfil your obligations to them. Perhaps it has never occurred to you that you have yielded to the temptation of sacrificing your fellow-men to party or self, and each of you can say, "I am clean from that sin." Then I congratulate you. I suppose you have nothing to confess this Lent. All has been clean with you hitherto, and we may depend on you, in the strife that will soon come upon us, never to deceive any class with hopes you do not mean to realize, and never to speak an insincere or flattering word to win a supporter or overthrow an opponent. But if you have not this perfect clearness about the past or this perfect confidence about the future, then we may say to you: "You failed in your trust to the members of the body because you were not depending on the Head of the body and seeking grace and light from Him. That evil you may confess, and that grace you may receive: the grace of forgiveness, of purification, and of remembering in time to come that no one member can suffer without all suffering too. You cannot wrong one class without wronging all, and you cannot deceive one class without spreading the habit of deception through all classes and becoming its victim yourselves." VII\. Brethren, it is easy to say such words about men in different positions from ours, with temptations we are not exposed to. I know it too well. The remembrance often closes one's lips when one ought to speak, and we fail in our duty to you by not speaking. Criticizing other men's evils from a secure height of our own is a horrible temptation and disease of our time, and we are all disposed to it. We preachers sometimes feel we have a divine right to indulge in it, but we have less right than anyone. Lent tells us so, for it is a time not of criticism but of confession, common and united, and special and individual. I said I did not ask you to think first of all about a Church; I was content that you should strive to realize your position as members of a family and of a nation. The meaning of the other word would come to you then, in due time and with its proper force. I do ask you to think of yourselves as members of a Church now, because I can dare to tell you that the name has no artificial, technical meaning. All the artificial, technical meanings given to it shall perish. *This* meaning shall remain, which connects it with the natural body and identifies it with that universal body politic of which Christ is the Head because He is the Head of every man. You can no more rid yourselves of your relation to this Church than you can change the law under which your natural bodies and their members exist. You must confess it along with us, because you are human beings as we are. It must be the ground of a confession, for you and for us, to the Father of our spirits: that we have forgotten we are His children, and therefore that His Son is our Lord, and therefore that His Spirit of Love is working in us to bind us to all the members of His Son's body. It must also be the ground of a prayer, for you and us, to the Father of all, through the Son in whom we are one with Him and with our brethren, despite all our efforts to tear ourselves apart and become separate creatures. We pray that He will renew the whole body with His quickening Spirit, so that every member may submit to the law and give thanks for it, which declares that if one suffers all must suffer, and if one is honoured all must rejoice with it. ## THEOLOGY AND MORALITY ::: {.center} Third Sunday in Lent ::: ::: {.center} [March]{.smallcaps} 27, 1859 ::: > "*He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God*?"—[Micah]{.smallcaps} vi. 8. *The passage:* God has shown you, O man, what is good. What does the Lord ask of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? [These]{.smallcaps} words are often quoted with respectful admiration by people who regard what they take to be the Bible's theology with indifference or contempt. "Here," they say, "is a true witness to the morality that lies hidden beneath the forms and doctrines of the different religions, and that must in the end replace them. It is essentially the same in all of them, but particular tribes have narrowed and localized it, and the cunning and self-interest of priests have kept it out of sight and often flatly contradicted it. The religious coverings of these universal and permanent truths have become as much a cause of strife, division and hatred as the truths themselves, if believed and acted on, would be a cause of union." The inference is plain. The philosopher and philanthropist should be invited to pull these maxims out from under the overlying mass and give them the prominence now given to dogmas that are intricate and lead to evil or to nothing. Nor should he stop at vindicating what was good in the old time. He should illustrate it from modern discoveries about the laws under which man and the universe exist, and from our experience of what our species needs for its well-being. This wisdom will take the dryness from the old sayings and connect them with our actual life and work. Those who speak this way have much to say for themselves, brethren, and God forbid that we should deny it. Our misfortune, and theirs, is that we have had so much to *say*, when by their account as well as ours what we most need is to *do*. The Prophet says "Do justly," not "Talk about justice"; "Love mercy," not "Understand what a lovely thing mercy is"; "Walk humbly with your God," not "Discourse learnedly about humility and about God." Let us grant that priests have again and again darkened counsel with words without knowledge. Scripture says so, and Micah says so in this very passage. We who believe our Lord was put to death by the priests and rulers of His nation can neither deny nor conceal that truth. The whole story of His life says it: the Jews' struggle against Him was the struggle of men who had laid down a system of belief and rules of action for themselves and their disciples against One who believed and actually worked, and who gave faith and the power to work to His followers. But if so, let us ask ourselves honestly how we are to escape their sin and their curse. We shall not do it by swapping one dogmatism for another, Sadducean unreality for Pharisaic unreality, phrases about moral principles and philosophical truths for phrases about religious opinions and feelings. For human beings the question is always to be or not to be, to do or not to do. If we can find no ground for action and no power to act, every scheme we try will be equally useless, frivolous and mischievous. So I gladly take the Prophet's words as my guide; they deserve all the honour they have received. But they ask for no compliments. They are addressed in earnest to each of us: "What does the Lord require of *thee*?" And I own the answer sounds terrible to me, and tempts me to hand the Prophet back his fine words. Does God really require all this of me, to act justly, love mercy, walk humbly? This thing I have found unspeakably hard all my life? If I had been asked for ten thousand rivers of oil, perhaps that could have been supplied. But the service of a whole life is another matter. I would have to resist tendencies to be unjust, unmerciful and proud that I find at work in me every moment, stronger with each new development of my powers and each new complication of society. That is a heavy demand to make of a creature like me. Is there no dispensation, no royal road, no way of trading some of the good things I have been given for some of the wrong I am inclined to do? Can long prayers not make up for lack of justice, mercy and humility? Will it not count for something to speak of them to others, or to denounce others for lacking them? If I try to set the world right, surely He will not search out what I am? Must I myself be all this? Cruel Prophet, I will flatter you no more. Your words were sweet in the mouth, but received within they are bitter as gall. Unless you can tell me more, you had no business telling me so much. If I cannot learn *how* I can be just, merciful and humble, to be assured that I am bound to be so is an intolerable oppression. Men have felt this in all times, brethren, and are feeling it now. Mixed with contradiction as it is, the feeling is not false. They would have a right to complain of us and of the Bible if we handed them a set of precepts, the best in the world, and did not tell them where to find the strength to obey. They could say, "You are laying heavy burdens on men's shoulders. You know nothing of yourselves if you do not know how hard it is to lift them, and how often it seems impossible." They could say, "By doing justly, loving mercy and walking humbly you do not really mean those things. You mean what passes for them in your class: not breaking the rules and customs you have set up for your convenience. Your justice is not stealing from other men's hoards when you have plenty of your own. Your mercy is overlooking offences that do not disturb your comfort. Your humility is submitting to superiors it would be unwise to offend, or not denying opinions you hold to be right and wholesome. These virtues are mere decency, respectability and conventional propriety, virtues for summer weather. In any shipwreck of society, or even an ordinary storm, they are shaken to pieces. They cannot stand the shock of the most vulgar temptation, and they fail to resist the craving for gold even in those who have had most of it." All these charges are true, and will prove true of our morality unless it has a deep underground basis. What is that basis? I answer that you must look for it in the very theology of the Bible which you thought it such a deliverance to cast aside. There and only there is protection against the narrow, local, artificial dogmas of priests, and against the dry, hard, scarcely less artificial and often more heartless dogmas of philosophers. There is protection against the flimsy, conventional morality of classes and ages. And there you will find a meaning for "Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly," and a power to turn those words into life. I\. The Lord requires you to "do justly." This sentence raises the whole question of the ground of moral obligation. It seems to tell me that Someone commands a course of action which I must follow because He commands it, and the course is called "doing justly." Is justice then nothing in itself? Are actions made right only because a certain Power insists on them? So far as it touches human conduct, the main controversy between the mere priest and the mere philosopher lies here. The priest has always been tempted to say that an Omnipotent decree makes good what would not be good without it, and makes evil what would otherwise be indifferent. The philosopher has always been trying to find what makes an action or habit just or unjust, true or false: its own nature, its effect on the doer, or its influence on society. Conscience cries out for a Ruler, so it listens to the priest. It exists only in affirming that right and wrong are eternally opposed, so it listens to the philosopher. Experience shows the priest prone to raise maxims of temporary expediency to eternal laws, so conscience protests against him. Experience shows the philosopher has no standing-ground from which to act on individuals or society, and must either borrow one from their opinion or build his own above both, so conscience protests against him too. "The Lord," says Micah, "requires thee to do justly." Did Micah think the Lord was a mere Power commanding certain things done and certain things left undone? If he did, he set at nothing the Law and History he confessed to be divine. They declared that the I Am, the Righteous Being, had revealed Himself to creatures made in His image and said to them, "Be ye holy, for I am holy." The Bible's theology starts from this ground and declares every other untenable. The heathen worshipped gods of power. The powers that acted on them in Nature were many, so the gods were many. Some influences were beneficent and some malignant, so some gods were beneficent, some malignant, or the same god now one and now the other. It was unreasonable to think the same arguments could move a god of the hills and a god of the valleys, or that they would delight in the same things, so worship and offerings were local. The priest had to learn from tradition or guesswork which offerings were likely to be acceptable, and enforce them with threats of terrible penalties. The worshipper's conscience aggravated those penalties and gave them new reality. The rivers of oil had to be poured out, and the first-born given for the sin of the soul. Then comes the message: "He has shown thee, O man, what is good." From whom? How has the sender shown me what is good? If He has not told me what He is, the tidings are worth nothing and the good has not been shown. We are then turned loose among all the schemes of men to frame gods after their own conceptions, or, if not gods, laws, customs and theories as useless and tyrannical. If you want a Universal Morality, there must be the Revelation of a Moral Being. If you want the command "Do justly" in place of a weight of rules, observances and ceremonies, Justice must be set before you not in words, formulas and decrees but livingly, personally, historically. You must learn what the Just Being is by seeing what He does, and what He does for you. He must set before you His government over the armies of Heaven and, since you can know that only through what you feel and He is always the same, over the children of men. And you must know how His methods may become yours. He wants you to be like Him, so He must tell you how He makes you so. Any book that commands us to do justly without imparting this knowledge is, I say again, a hard-hearted book, one that demands bricks without straw, and insists that we be what its writers must have known we could not be. We complain of the Bible precisely for not being such a book, for not being a book of mere moralities, which would be utterly useless for any moral purpose. Take away its theology and that is what it becomes. For its theology is the unveiling of the Righteous Being to the heart and conscience of the only creature capable of being righteous, because the only creature capable of departing from righteousness. It is an invitation, first to a man, then to a family, then to a nation, to trust this Righteous Being who has shown He cares for them and will not forsake them. At last it is the manifestation to all nations of the Original Righteousness that was the root of all righteousness in them: the Divine Righteousness shown in a Man who came into the world to reconcile men to His Father, so that they might receive His Spirit and be able to be just as He is, and to do justly as He does. II\. But the Prophet says the Lord requires men to "love mercy." This is a higher obligation still, and harder. I may be told to do certain acts, and I may go through them slowly and reluctantly against the whole bias of my nature. They will not be just acts by the Scriptural idea of righteousness, which supposes the man to be good before he does good things, but they may be just by some legal, philosophical or priestly rule. Can any such rule explain how I am to *love* because it is desirable that I should? Mercy is certainly beautiful; all religions say so, and when it comes out in life men are generally ready to pay it frank, unquestioning homage. But the admiration has a limit. If Mercy meets an unmerciful habit of mind in us, its works will be explained away. The Pharisee will say, "He casts out devils through the Prince of the Devils"; the Sadducee will say, "He deceives the people." The people themselves may come to prefer an insurgent leader, a brigand, to the One who has shown them the most royal mercy: "Not this Man, but Barabbas. Let Him be crucified." So Mercy is not necessarily loved when shown in its fullest and most perfect form, in the most gracious and serviceable acts. Men may cry out for it on another ground. They may feel that they have resisted the Divine Righteousness and are at war with it, and may invoke Mercy to avert the punishment they believe Righteousness wants to inflict. The evil conscience readily suggests this notion of a war between Righteousness and Mercy, and the priest often confirms it, devising arts for enlisting the one against the other. The philosopher protests that the separation endangers morality, but he cannot root out the moral evil that caused it. He even sanctions it: he sets Justice above Mercy, as the conscious sinner sets Mercy above Justice. He cannot teach us how to do justly and love mercy both. Again you must turn to the theology of the Bible to remove the contradiction. There Christ is set forth as the Image of the Father, not in one quality but in His whole character, and is said to show the Righteousness of God in the forgiveness of sins. Regard Him only as a wonderfully gracious and merciful man, and you can only feel that the evil in man triumphed over the good. Those who nailed Him to the tree will have proved a hopeless, invincible principle of opposition to goodness in men. Regard Him as God manifest in the flesh, meeting with a divine Love stronger than Death, Sin and Hell that unkindness and hardness of heart which knew not what it did and hated not only the Son but the Father, and you feel that man indeed needs Mercy because he has sinned. But you feel too that this Mercy has the power to put away sin, cover it and extinguish it, and to transform the creature who was sin's subject and slave into a new creature who *can* love mercy and do justly. Believe that the Spirit of Mercy and Forgiveness does proceed from the Father and the Son, and you see how the very Forgiveness shown to man becomes a principle in him, able to overcome his unforgiving nature and go out in acts of forbearance and gentleness. III\. Lastly, the Prophet says the Lord requires man to walk "humbly with Him." About humility there is as much strife as about justice and mercy. The priest tends to extol it as the cardinal excellence to which all others are subordinate. But in his practice, as in his theory, does it not often seem to destroy moral purpose and intellectual effort? Can it be intended that a man should think meanly of the nature and powers God gave him? The more nobly he judges his humanity, says the philosopher, the more noble he himself will be. Men are grievously torn between these opinions. They embrace first one, then the other, and each experiment makes them suppose the course they have not chosen must be the right one. "Oh for intellectual freedom!" cries the victim of priestly rule. "Oh for an absolute, infallible guide!" cries the man who has known no government but his own. It is quite true, brethren, that if we try to cultivate by artificial methods what is called the grace of humility, it may become another name for meanness, for abandoning manliness and dignity, a nominal self-denial compatible with much inward self-exaltation. What, then, is the humility that our consciences witness to be true and divine, and that we rightly demand of every earnest searcher after truth and every brave man? Micah's words contain the answer. We are humble only when we walk with God, remembering that we are in His presence, that He goes with us where we go and stays with us where we stay. This thought lays a man in the dust, for then he is under the eyes of the One in whose sight the angels are not clean. It also raises him to a height he never dreamt of, for the Lord God has been mindful of him, come near to him, and fitted him for converse with Himself. Once more, then, the theology of the Bible explains its morality and lets us know what we ought to be, and be what we would wish to be. If we believe that He who was in the form of God humbled Himself, made Himself of no reputation, and took the form of a servant, in order to raise us to be sons of God and sharers of His Nature, then we can understand how the poor in spirit may be heirs of the Kingdom of God. We can confess that we have been grovellers because we have been proud, that we have undervalued the glory of our race because we were lifted up in our own conceit, and that we have despised our brethren because we have not aspired to intercourse with Him who despises nothing and cares for all. We may ask to be made like Him who stooped to the death of the Cross, so that we may have the likeness of the Eternal God of Justice and Mercy, who dwelt in Him bodily. ## THE SIN OF MAN AND THE JUSTIFICATION OF MAN ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday in Lent ::: ::: {.center} [April]{.smallcaps} 5, 1859 ::: > "*Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life*."—[Romans]{.smallcaps} v. 18. *The passage:* Just as one offence brought condemnation on all men, so one act of righteousness brought the free gift on all men, a justification that gives life. [A few]{.smallcaps} years ago, political writers widely held that self-interest is the motive behind everything people do, and that government exists to make individuals' self-interest serve the general interest. The doctrine had much to recommend it, quite apart from the able men who pressed it and applied it to problems in morals, economics, and law. Plain facts showed private interests clashing with the public good. Much had been said about virtue and patriotism, with little result. Was this not a more practical doctrine than any that credited men with better feelings? Was it not safer to assume that each will get what he can at his neighbour's expense, and to run the social machine on that assumption? As you know, there has lately been a strong reaction against this system. It is thought to ignore important principles in human beings, which the statesman and the ordinary man of the world ought to reckon with. It is suspected that society itself may rest on principles that cannot be explained as one person's or class's selfishness triumphing over the majority, or as a combined effort to defeat that selfishness and set up a wider one. Other facts have forced themselves on us besides those that won the scheme its acceptance. Politicians now seem to hesitate between the two views, unsure which is right and adopting opposite maxims in turn, perhaps to the confusion of their actual morality. Men busy with the outward business of the world seldom trouble themselves about what goes on in the chambers of the heart, and those who live chiefly in those chambers are equally scornful of common affairs. Yet movements in the two spheres generally correspond and strongly affect each other. For all the plausible arguments of those who built political science on self-interest, I do not believe it would have taken hold of public opinion as it did if opinion had not already been turned that way by quite different influences. Nor do I believe the rebellion against it would have been so strong in politics if it had not begun elsewhere. In the last age, clergymen and others delivered well-composed, sometimes able discourses on the beauty of virtue and the ugliness of vice. Virtue was shown to agree with man's true nature, and vice to involve endless discord and contradiction. These discourses did not stir men's hearts. They were heard with drowsy respect, as the sort of thing that ought to be said in pulpits, and perhaps true. Very different words were addressed by other speakers to vagabonds and criminals whom society had tried in vain to reclaim. These people were roused to feel that they had not merely done sinful acts but were sinful men. They were told they could become new men, and that God Himself would make them so. Those words carried a power the others lacked. They reached respectable people who had committed no overt act against the peace of society and believed themselves virtuous. Some of them began to suspect that what was true of the outcasts was true of them: they might have done few evil acts, but they *were* evil. At the root of their being was something that resisted God's Law and was out of harmony with His Nature. *They* needed reformation; *they* must become new creatures. Such language startled the easy and self-satisfied of that generation. It also startled some humble and sincere people, who were used to a different vocabulary, could not change it, could not think all the teaching they had heard worthless, and suspected something wrong in the new. There was excuse enough in the extravagances of some of the best of the new teaching's hearers, and the hypocrisy of the worst, for the ridicule of the one class and the fears of the other. But an inward belief survives such trials, and soon shows how weak are the disputers and wits who oppose it, and even the good and earnest. Those who held it were testifying to what they knew, whether or not they could put it into words. They were certain they were not deceiving themselves about their main point. The world could laugh at them but could not refute them, and so, as always happens, the world struck its colours and submitted. Let us see how this submission came about and what has come of it. I\. Those who had found the secret of the evil in themselves, and found that it was common, shared by men utterly unlike them in outward circumstances, proclaimed human depravity as the starting-point of practical life and the fundamental truth from which others must be derived. This seemed a sound generalization from undoubted facts, and they were sure they had read it in the Bible. Is it not written there that God "concluded all under sin"; that the Jew who had the Law and kept its letter was no less evil than the Gentile who had only his conscience; that St. Paul, blameless in the righteousness of the Law, was yet the chief of sinners? But they found something better in the Bible than these announcements: the message of a Redemption. They read of a Saviour who had justified them by His Death and Resurrection, perfectly Righteous, in whose Righteousness they might trust and rise to newness of life. They embraced these tidings heartily. On them they felt they could stand in the hour of death and the Day of Judgment, and holding them fast they could become actually righteous, love God and their brethren, and do right and manly deeds. They were glad for others to hear them, and pressed them, in season and out of season, even on people little able to feel their force, because, as they said, souls were at stake and no one could know whom God might please to convert and save. II\. But these tidings, however widely they had to be proclaimed, concerned a small minority. These people were not to boast of their privilege, and were to ascribe it wholly to God's undeserved grace, but they had to regard themselves as exceptions to a rule. The rule was that man is a fallen creature. He might *become* something else, but he *was* a sinner. Everything he did or thought referred to that primary postulate, and he could do nothing else until he had admitted it in its full length and breadth. Those excellent people, who reached their sense of evil through bitter conflicts, would be surprised to see how fully this assertion has been accepted in our day. It has become an orthodox shibboleth, recognized as the fundamental dogma of the Bible even by those who study it least and care least about its contents. The confession of universal depravity, denounced as fanatical in the eighteenth century, is enforced by the public opinion of the nineteenth. Philosophers may protest on behalf of human nature, but they suppose that protest is also against Scripture. And that is not all. The triumph of these once-despised convictions has reached regions it could never have hoped to enter. The political doctrine of universal selfishness, the notion that laws and government should assume fraud, never honesty, in subjects and officers, came from a school not generally thought religious, yet it has found support and justification in these religious dogmas and the habit of mind that goes with them. Whatever you have gained or hope to gain in administrative wisdom and righteousness from cultivating universal suspicion and abandoning trust can be traced back to the popular belief, mixed with strange contradictions, yet sustained by divines even in minds where all other faith has perished, that sin is the starting-point of our moral being, from which all its conditions and principles are to be deduced. III\. Education, like politics, obeyed this influence for a time. Many can remember efforts to awaken in them a sense of sin, as the first step to knowing what is right and good and the necessary preparation for understanding the Bible. Much indoctrination of this kind once prevailed in our schools for the poor. But it is through practical education, with all its pains and sorrows, that we have been led into a new train of thought, very unlike the one I have been tracing. Teachers and mothers have discovered that they must give children credit for unselfish affections and desires, for moral instincts and purposes that cannot be brought under the law of depravity. They have been driven to ask, with doubt and anguish but not without hope, whether depravity would mean anything, or whether they could bring it home to a child, if there were not this good, which they may recognize in every appeal to the conscience. The authorities they consult may tell them that there are beautiful "columns," remains of the old unfallen nature, standing amid its decay. But their work concerns the life of those dearest to them, and they cannot be put off with metaphors. The columns must somehow be recognized as the substantial part of the building, and whatever weakens them or has caused their decay must be treated as strange and monstrous. Every hour makes them more familiar with evil tendencies in their children, and more bound to treat those tendencies as rebellions against a state in which the children ought to be living, their own proper state. Here is the beginning of another reaction against a stereotyped opinion. It is strongest in those whose education disposes them to hold that opinion in its strongest form, who would shrink in horror from rejecting it, and who, in their sense of their own sinfulness, are most inwardly at one with their devout ancestors. But their work as teachers of the young and reformers of wrongdoers obliges them to recognize a noble feeling in both, and to make it the fulcrum of their teaching. No optimists about human nature have done equal justice to such feelings, or made such generous demands for confidence in the most degraded of their fellow-men. Where there is no mixture of mere sentimentalism, the result has justified the experiment. IV\. This contrast between our best practice and some of our professed opinions is growing very strong in the minds of those who have just reached the point of comparing them. The result will surely be a contemptuous rejection of a principle that cost the last age many bitter tears and struggles to win and hand on, unless we can reconcile it with another truth that has become indispensable to us, without which we can take no step of future progress and reform nothing that has decayed. Yet how can we hope for such a reconciliation? Partial admissions, such as that some memories or fragments of a better state may survive in our ruin, gain us nothing. Earnest men who have learnt to say with St. Paul, "In ourselves, that is, in our flesh, dwelleth no good thing," would reject them as insincere, the feeble compromises of those who have inherited a principle, not won it. And how could such a compromise satisfy those who have found, in dealing with the most opposite classes, the inexperienced child and the hardened ruffian, that the good in both must be appealed to as lying beneath the evil, as more fundamental than it? There must be a better way to bring these two opposite experiences into harmony, or we shall deny both and suppose the clearest evidence untrustworthy. I need scarcely point out what perplexity that scepticism would bring into our actions. V\. Scripture has been appealed to as the great witness for universal depravity. It is also the favourite book and dearest treasure of those who appeal to the hearts and consciences of little children and corrupt men on behalf of truth and righteousness. No writer in Scripture is quoted more often in defence of the doctrine than St. Paul, and his whole life is the best example of the practice that seems inconsistent with it. Let us hear whether he can reconcile the two. "Therefore, as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life." St. Paul seldom mentions Adam or the effect of his act on his posterity. Look through his Epistles and you will be startled by how rare such allusions are. You may be inclined to ask, "Can this be the doctrine said to underlie the whole Gospel, which the great preacher of the Gospel throws so far into the background?" More important is to notice the cases where he does dwell on the first man's transgression, and how he relates it to us. Here is the most conspicuous instance. Our translators have, perhaps inevitably, filled out the sentence with words of their own. St. Paul's statement is pointed and elliptical, and he takes special pains to balance its clauses exactly. By the offence of one, or by one offence, to all men to condemnation; by the righteousness of one, or by one act of righteousness, to all men to justification. It is obvious that whatever is affirmed of the human race in one clause is affirmed of the same race in the other. It is not said that all were condemned and some justified, but that all were condemned and all were justified. We may be surprised, but it stands written in the authoritative passage on the subject, and if we accept the Bible's teaching, we accept this. St. Paul does not leave us in doubt about what Condemnation and Justification mean; his Epistle is written to expound them. A man is condemned when he is treated as under a law of death, with all his appetites and inclinations towards evil. He is justified when he is declared to be under a law of life and capable of all righteousness and good. He is condemned in Adam and justified in Christ. According to St. Paul, Christ's Resurrection vindicated the position of men as under a law of life, just as Adam's death proved they were under a law of death. It asserted that God judges the race to be righteous as surely as the expulsion from Paradise proved that He judges them sinners. This puzzles and baffles us if we insist that Adam is the Head of our race and deny that Christ is. It equally baffles us if we suppose Christ became the Head only when His death and resurrection showed Him to be so. But if that was the manifestation of an eternal truth, showing Who holds the race together while Adam's act showed what rends it apart, then we are wrong to speak of a universal Fall without a universal Justification. We depart from Scripture if we teach that each man enters the world with a nature ready to sink into selfishness and death, without adding that he is related to a righteous and living Lord who would raise him to righteousness and life. VI\. St. Paul had affirmed at the start of his Epistle that God's judgments are according to truth, and that whatever fictions there are in men's thoughts or acts, there are none in His. If He pronounces us sinners, it is because we are sinners; if He pronounces us righteous, it is because we are righteous. St. Paul declares both as facts for all men, just as we find them in our own experience. But he does not leave us in the bewilderment our experience leaves us in. He clears up the contradiction, showing how what is true of man in one aspect is false in another. He is utterly depraved in himself. Find me the man wholly shut up in himself, who never rises out of himself, and I say, "In that man is no good thing; he is buried in his lost Adam-nature, and by the conditions of the universe and the eternal law of God he is simply, nakedly evil." Find me such a man. But those who talk with the reprobates of the earth say, "We never found him; we cannot find him. In everyone we perceive a struggle to get out of this selfish Adam-nature, a repudiation of it, an acknowledgment of some other law and standard. We speak as if a man were hidden in that nature, wallowing in that depth, and out of the depth comes an answer. We speak to him as a brother, and he admits the claim. We tell him of a Love deeper than a brother's, and something in him says, 'Verily there must be that.'" Is it hard to reconcile these results of actual trial with what we suppose to be the doctrines of Scripture? Very hard, if we will not let Scripture tell its whole meaning, if we read ourselves into it, bring half our own experience to it, and insist that it confirm just that half. But I am not afraid of those who are true to their convictions, however partial and narrow. If they work on from them faithfully and manfully, they will be forced to recognize facts they have so far been unable to see, and the Bible will interpret both. I am afraid of those who have no convictions at all, who profess belief in human depravity now that it is fashionable as they would have denied it half a century ago when it was not. Such men never come to any truth, though always learning. The opinions of the day pass with them for truth, and they hold to them as fast as they hold to anything. A few years hence they may be drifted off no one knows where, perhaps fighting for the opposite theory, alike in nothing except that through all these changes they will be opposing whatever confronts the corruptions and abuses of the time, and so nearly always what is for the glory of God and the well-being of Man. VII\. Brethren, the lesson I draw is this: it is far better, safer, truer language to speak of individual depravity than of universal depravity. By individual depravity I mean my own. I find it out in myself, or rather He who searches me and tries my ways finds it out in me. That sense of depravity implies recognizing a law I have violated, an order I have broken loose from, a Divine image my character has not resembled. It is the law and the order that are universal, and the character of Christ that is the true human character. It is easy to own a general depravity, and under cover of it you and I escape: we are only what we take everybody to be, what we suppose a necessity of our position compels us to be. It is hard to remember, and hard to believe, that we are members of a justified and redeemed race. It is hard to say, "When we are best we are only what the very principle of our constitution involves; we are only acting as if we were what we say in our catechism that we are." And it is very hard to do justice to other people: hard not to suspect them of always obeying some low, mean instinct, and hard to credit them with ever obeying a high and noble inspiration. The effort to treat them fairly becomes a thousandfold greater when we think that libelling our fellows does God service and honours His truth. Let us at least cast away that delusion. Fault-finding and suspicion are not religious acts, and thinking evil is not following the doctrine of St. Paul. We shall fully recognize the doctrine of the Fall when we say, "Lord! I have sinned; by Thee I stand; Thou only canst raise me." When we explain away the righteous deeds of others and impute bad purposes to them, we deny the doctrine of Redemption. God looks upon us in His Son, and we must look upon each other and ourselves as He does. No other way can be right. To assume selfishness as the ground of society is to say that society is impossible, and to become what we suppose Mankind is. To assume Justice and Truth as its foundation is simply to say that when Christ wrestled with the Devil, we believe the Devil was not the conqueror. ## HATRED NECESSARY TO LOVE ::: {.center} Fifth Sunday in Lent ::: ::: {.center} [April]{.smallcaps} 10, 1859 ::: > "*Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against Thee*?"—[Psalm]{.smallcaps} cxxxix. 21. *The passage:* The Psalmist asks God whether he does not hate those who hate God, and whether he is not grieved by those who rise up against God. [The]{.smallcaps} Psalmist answers his own question: "*Yea, I hate them right sore, even as though they were mine enemies*." Most of us would answer very differently. We would say, "Hate them? We hate nothing. We try to obey Christ's command, *Love thy neighbour as thyself*." "*There is a way which seemeth right to a man, but the end of it is the way of death*." I believe our plausible, self-satisfied language shows that we are in great danger of wandering onto that dark road, if we are not already on it. We think ourselves far more gentle, humane and charitable than David was. If we have the courage to consider what he meant and what we mean, I fear we shall find that we are as far behind him in these Christian graces as we are in the zeal and earnestness we may perhaps allow him. I\. The force of the sentence turns on the word *Thee*. Who were those that hated God and rose up against Him? To know, we must know what David believed about God. He did not, like the heathen, simply ask the sky, the sea or the air to teach him of God, though they did teach him much. They spoke of peace in the midst of strife and permanence in the midst of change. They led him to think of One who might be the source of peace amid human strife, and who stays the same amid all changes in human thought and feeling. Something must abide, Nature told Man. The heart asked what it was, and trembled to hear the answer. "Is it a thing or a person, a friend to embrace or an enemy to flee? Either way I must be closely connected with it, nearer to me than to the whole universe. Otherwise why is there in me this witness of a right I am to follow, of a truth that is to be in my inward parts? But if He is so near, why is He hidden? If I cannot find Him out, is it impossible that He should make Himself known?" "He *has* made Himself known": this was David's faith. "He has declared Himself to me as my Guide, Teacher, Friend, Judge and King, and as the Guide, Teacher, Friend, Judge and King of my nation. *He teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight*. He is the source of my strength, my freedom, my hope. In Him are the springs of my life. From Him comes the discernment of justice and equity, and the wisdom to rule and to obey. From Him comes the unity of my nation, which exists as a nation only in Him." David believed this, and he believed it more the clearer his mind became, the less it was darkened by sensuality, superstition or self-glorification, and the more freely and bravely he acted. He knew a Divine Presence was with him, and it was no trick or fantasy. If he confounded that Presence with himself, supposing it was created by the spirit that confessed it, everything within him became trick and imposture. But when he clung to this Righteous Living Judge and Lawgiver, and wanted all his life ruled by Him, then he himself, his fellow-men and the world around him came out of mist and shadow into sunlight. Everything was seen in its true proportions. Hear him in the Psalm of our text. The Lord has searched him out and known him; knows his sitting down and rising up; understands his thought long before; is about his path and his bed and spies out all his ways; knows every word on his tongue; has fashioned him behind and before and laid a hand upon him. Such knowledge is too wonderful and high for him to attain. Think of these words. A Being near to a creature made in His image makes that creature aware of His presence. David was seeking the Ruler of his spirit, if haply he might find Him, and lo, He was close by, looking into the depths of his being and kindling the very desires He satisfies. What awe in such a discovery! Yet what rest, what a sense of standing on an eternal foundation, a rock against which the waves may beat horribly but cannot shake. "He is not there because my teachers tell me so, or because my fathers left records of Him. Thanks be to Him for teachers and records! They testify of what is, which does not depend on them, but on which they depend. Nor is He there because I believe in Him. My faith is given by Him; it is only the answer in me to the truth that calls it forth. When I lose my faith I come into waters with no ground, or find myself on drifting sand. But that very experience shows me that my faith did not form the rock I stand on, nor did the faiths of a thousand generations. My faith fails whenever I begin to put it in place of God. Nor do I establish this Righteous Ruler of my inner self on His throne by my obedience. My disobedience testifies of Him as much as my obedience does. The sense of separation from Him, and all the disorders that follow from it, show me that He is, and what kind of Being He is. So do the disbelief and disobedience of men generally, and all that flows from them: the cowardice, superstition, falsehood, tyranny, lust and cruelty that set the universe at war and turn it into a cage of unclean beasts. They tell me of the goodness, truth and graciousness they are fighting against, which shall destroy them at last." II\. "*Do not I hate those things, O Lord, which hate Thee; am I not grieved with those that rise up against Thee?*" You will say he hated actual flesh-and-blood men: Moabites, Hagarenes, Goliaths, Sauls. I do not care to dispute it. He hated whatever rose up against righteousness and truth on earth and sought to set up a lie. I cannot tell how far the particular man or nation was the object of his aversion. To some extent I am sure it was, because I find it so, probably to a much greater extent, in ourselves. But I am sure that just so far as he hated men or nations for rising up against the God of Truth and Goodness, he was hating their untruth and unrighteousness, and hating the same untruth and unrighteousness in himself. Their enemies were his enemies. He felt that deadly powers were doing deadly mischief in God's world. He who was about his path and his bed showed him what they were. He felt them plaguing his own heart, tormenting him every moment, withdrawing him from trust and obedience, dragging him into a whirlpool of contradictory thoughts, words and acts. In the inmost region of his being he had to meet these principalities of spiritual wickedness and wrestle with them in the high places. There he was trained to hate them, from a thorough knowledge of their intense essential vileness. This hatred grew in proportion to his belief in, trust in, and delight in a Being of absolute purity and perfection. The dimmer his vision of such a Being, the more tolerant he was of whatever opposed his nation and resisted his will. The surer he was that God is, that He is the Lord of man, and that He seeks to establish righteousness and truth on earth, the more fiercely he abhorred whatever denied God and aimed at keeping the earth an abode of deceit and wrong. When he forgot God's name and disbelieved in His mercy, he could be meek and gentle with the butchers of the world and of the chosen race. When his heart was thoroughly possessed by the Divine Spirit, "*he hated them right sore, even as though they were his enemies*." III\. Can it be, brethren, that the blessing of our Christian profession is that we have acquired a patience toward whatever hates God and rises up against Him, which David lacked? Then our profession surely does not mean following the example of Christ and being like Him; it means something quite opposite. Do you find in Him any sign of *this* patience, *this* tolerance? You are told that when He was reviled, "*He reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not*." You hear that He bore the contradiction of sinners against Himself, and ate and drank with publicans and sinners whom the religious men of the day thought it defilement to approach. But do you not also hear of His making a scourge of small thongs and driving out of the Temple those who bought and sold there? Do you not find Him denouncing the Scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites and whited sepulchres? "*Do not I hate them that hate Thee, O Father; am I not grieved with them that rise up against Thee?*" was the language of the Master far more fully than of the servant, and expressed far more thoroughly the spirit of His life. He was engaged in a conflict to the death against evil, over whether it should put out the light of the world or that light should prevail against it. Since He ascended on high He has carried on the same struggle in His Church and its members, a struggle in which He tells us we must all take part, on one side or the other. What, then, means this notion we seem to have taken up, that we are better than our forefathers because we hate less strenuously? Does it mean there is nothing left in the world that deserves to be hated? Does it mean that Christianity, refinement, civilization, science, mechanical achievement, æsthetics, or anything else we reverence, has put an end to pride, malice and cruelty? That there are no scandals and abominations in the nation, no fierce party-spirit or lying in the Church? That men everywhere worship the God of Truth and Love and not the Evil Spirit of Falsehood and Ill-Will? No one dreams this; no one doubts that there exists what ought not to exist, what is contrary to the good of man and the character of God. Our kindness and gentleness have a different root. We are used to these things; we suppose they cannot be helped; we think God is indifferent to them. That is, we have ceased to believe in a God of Truth and Love, and do not suppose that what is evil rises up against Him. As for our hating less those who rise up against *us*, or who dislike our religious, political or philosophical notions, I cannot see the evidence of it. Thanks be to God, we can no longer indulge our desire to suppress opposing opinions as we once did. Earnest men have fought and bled so that none of us should have that power. For the present we limit ourselves to bitter words, dark insinuations, the destruction of one another's characters, and the undermining of moral freedom in the land. But withdraw the legal restraints on our mutual animosities for an instant, give any one sect or party the chance to indulge its passions fully against the rest, and it would be seen how much excuse we have for boasting of our charity, or even our toleration. IV\. That bitterness on behalf of our own notions and dogmas, that desire to crush whatever and whoever runs counter to them, can, I believe, be overcome only by earnestly cultivating the temper we have denounced in David. Determine to hate what rises up in you against God, that first and chiefly, and along with your indifference, cowardice and meanness you will hate your conceit of your own poor judgment, your dislike of opposition to it, and your unwillingness to have your thoughts probed to the quick. An intense certainty that there is a God of Truth without iniquity, who must mean to sweep all falsehood and injustice from the earth, will make you desire above all things that He search you and try your ways, detect whatever in you is yours and not His, and burn it with unquenchable fire. Acknowledging a God revealed in Jesus Christ, in whom is light and no darkness at all, will compel us to want no traditions of the past and no conceits of our own minds to shut Him out. Acknowledging a God who beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, and has been long-suffering with all His creatures and with us, will make us tremble to deal harshly with the struggles and doubts of our fellow-beings, and still more with their convictions. If God's Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, is the only Guide to Truth, and is seeking to guide us right, how we must fear to check His mighty work in our own spirit or in anyone we meet! How we must desire to be His instruments and not His foes, and so to share His own grace and gentleness! So with this hatred deeply and inwardly cherished will come true charity, not imaginary, and genuine toleration, not the bastard kind. To detect the right meaning, sound faith and divine inspiration hidden under confused, rough, angry words aimed at ourselves, even at principles dearer to us than ourselves, is a duty we learn at the Cross and a faculty only Christ can give. We shall exercise it just because we believe Truth all-important and falsehood accursed, loving the one and hating the other. We shall remember that God honoured Job, who complained bitterly, spoke words like the east wind, and was determined to know the meaning of the Divine judgments, more than the three friends who pretended to justify Him and only showed their lack of sympathy with His purposes of mercy and goodness. We shall want to hate more and more whatever is contrary to that mercy and goodness, which are parts of His being, and so to bear more and more with whatever merely crosses our tastes, inclinations and judgments. Brethren, I think these lessons are not out of place at the beginning of a general election. Parties are mingled and confused, and leaders, perhaps principles, are uncertain, but I suspect we shall find excuses enough for denouncing one another, if not for hating one another. General maxims about goodwill and forbearance are idle at such times; everyone accepts them and no one heeds them. I would press another exhortation: give full scope to your hatred. You will need it, for you will be tempted to do things hateful in God's sight, which you should do your utmost to make hateful in men's sight. The frauds candidates use to disguise their meaning, to pass for intending what they do not intend, to win votes from two opposite quarters: do they not deserve to be hated with a perfect hatred? Is not every slander against an opponent, and every encouragement to tongues and pens less scrupulous than your own, part of a hateful system? Is not trafficking with party symbols and ambiguous phrases that may mean everything or nothing hateful, and trafficking with sacred names for low purposes more profane and hateful still? Should not everything that bewilders the consciences, or degrades the moral nature, of those whose support you seek be hated as an insult to the God who seeks truth in His creatures? Do not all these deceitful words and acts add up to a frightful sum of falsehood, destroying the land we pretend to save, and must they not bring God's curse upon us? Oh, for a more burning rage in us all against whatever makes our professions ridiculous, and our acts and words destructive of sincerity in ourselves and in all whom they influence! And since we are so unfit to search each other, having so many hidden falsehoods of our own, let us rejoice, while we tremble, that God has promised to search us and try us, to see what wicked way there is in us, and to lead us in His true and everlasting way. ## THE LORD OF HOSTS AND THE LORD OF PEACE ::: {.center} Sunday before Easter ::: ::: {.center} [April]{.smallcaps} 17, 1859 ::: > "*Now the Lord of peace Himself give you peace always by all means*."—2 [Thessalonians]{.smallcaps} iii. 16. *The passage:* May the Lord of peace himself give you peace always, by all means. [There]{.smallcaps} is another reading of this passage, which modern editors have preferred, and I think rightly. For *by all means* they read *in every place*. Our version's wording may carry a good sense, but it sounds like a tame addition to what came before. The other reading adds a new thought and completes the prayer: may the Lord of Peace give you peace at all times and in all places. The Apostle is not content to wish that the peace be no less one year than another. He wants it to be the same whether his disciples are in Thessalonica, Athens or Rome, among friends or enemies, in a city or a desert, in a church or a prison. Such a petition needs a deep and solid ground, and Paul assumes it as the very name of God: *the Lord of Peace*. His readers had all heard of a God of War. He was said to have watched over the infancy of the greatest city in the world and to have fathered its first king. Wherever the Roman Eagle had been carried, there were signs of him, and the name Thessalonica witnessed that he had been on that soil. Nor did the Scriptures Paul appealed to reject this title. They too spoke of a Lord of Hosts, and told every band of Jews that he was in its midst to strengthen it against enemies ten times as numerous. Did Paul come to insult the old faith of Greeks and Romans? Did he mean to recant the faith in which he was raised, embodied in the books he held most sacred? If he had done the first, I believe he would have robbed the heathen of a treasure instead of bringing them one. If he had done the second, he would have torn out the roots on which his faith in the Son of God grew. The Greeks had felt, by conscience and reason, that every act of courage, every great achievement, every triumph of order over brute force must be ascribed to some mysterious divine power. That faith was flickering, and since they lost their freedom it had almost died out. Paul's business was to rekindle the sparks, not extinguish them. He believed this divine power was a righteous Being, just and without iniquity, who was warring to root evil out of his universe. For that end he made plagues, pestilences and earthquakes his instruments, and also men, formed in his image and appointed to carry on his government and execute his chastisements. They were not to shrink from that office but to believe he had called them to it, and to give him thanks if they fulfilled it rightly. This doctrine is written in sunbeams across the Old Testament, and Paul at least did not think it obsolete. He had every chance to say so. His special vocation was to teach the Gentiles. He would not let the law, ceremonial or moral, stand in the way of the Gospel. He saw clearly that everything exclusive in the Jewish polity would soon come to nothing. Yet he never said, "Our fathers were mistaken when they went out to battle in the name of the Lord, and we shall be mistaken if we imitate them." He never said anything like it, or anything from which such an inference could legitimately be drawn. But he did say *these* words: "*The Lord of Peace*." He knew the heathen had never been satisfied with a God of War, however much the idea possessed them. They felt the olive was as sacred an emblem as the laurel, and that someone must be the source of which it testified. The quiet homestead, the growth of trees and flowers, the art of tillage must have an origin, as much as the feats of armies. Tempests surely did not witness to unseen power more than a still lake or a clear starlit evening. All sweet notes and their combinations told of a secret source of harmony. The heart that answered these sights and sounds demanded a Lord of Peace near, not far off. Was he a different Being from the God of War? The misery of polytheism was to believe he must be. How could such opposite effects come from one Cause? How could both be explained unless a number of powers were contending, stirring up contention in nature and in men? The only refuge from that belief was the philosophers' dogma that the gods are untouched by human joys and sorrows, living in entire quietness, inactivity and self-concentration. The philosopher would have added "*Peace*," but his conscience rebelled against using the word so. He might not see what Peace meant, but he knew that in its highest form it meant something altogether different from stupid repose and indolent selfishness. The Jew had the blessed privilege of being taught, in direct words and by the whole course of his history, that the Lord his God was one Lord, and that the God of armies was the Lord of Peace. The acts of his power were the manifestations of his righteous will. He was the Lord God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, and *therefore* he would not clear the guilty, *therefore* everything unmerciful and oppressive was hateful in his eyes, *therefore* he was pledged to destroy it. There was no contradiction in his nature. His stern face toward all that degrades the earth he made and defaces his image in his creature is one token of an inner mind that would unfold itself ever more perfectly to those who sought him and cried for wisdom as for hidden treasure. The more the holy man meditated on the fearful judgments falling on people who had broken the Everlasting Covenant, the more the righteousness of the Law and the perfect grace of the Covenant shone out to him. The more he trusted the Lord, the more certain he was that the Lord of Peace would one day show his whole being to mankind. The vision was for an appointed time and rose gradually, first on the chosen seed and still more slowly on the nations. But it came fully at last. The shepherds heard the Angels' song, "*Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill among men*," as the message of a Prince of Peace. He went preaching peace to publicans and sinners. He told his disciples, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you." At the Paschal Supper he gave them bread and wine as witnesses of peace to them and to the universe. After the Resurrection he met them with "Peace be with you" and showed them his hand and his side. He sent his Spirit of Peace to bind nations and languages in one bond. That bond was the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the perfect Unity and complete Revelation of the Lord of Peace. It fulfilled the idea of God that prophets and lawgivers had been unfolding, and reconciled the separate names by which the heathen had tried to explain the divine workings in nature and the perplexing witness of their own hearts. It is in this name that Paul blesses the Churches he writes to. This is the Lord of Peace whom he asks to give the Thessalonians peace always and in every place. I\. The words are very emphatic: may he *Himself* give you peace. It is as if Paul said, "I am persuaded that no one else can give it, not I nor all the preachers and doctors in the universe. Strictly, you do not even receive it second-hand through us. He gives you the thing itself, and we present the seals and sacraments of it. He opens a direct communication with your hearts and conveys into them what we can only offer from outside. Do not be content to take it from anyone else, or expect it from anyone else. When you seek it, be sure he is present to give it, and so it will become yours." II\. "And be sure also that he *gives* it. You do not purchase it by prayers or faith or good deeds. True prayers are acts of submission and surrender. The heart is frozen in self-reliance and self-exaltation. You pray that it may be thawed, so that the pores through which his grace would enter are not unnaturally stopped. You bring nothing to your prayer but the confession of unworthiness and helplessness." Paul's divine teaching anticipated the humbling maxim of physical science: "Man can only bring natural bodies together or separate them; all else is transacted by Nature in secret." He taught that this holds in a higher and stricter sense of man's relation to his Creator. Man can only draw near to God or dwell apart from him, and the consequences follow inevitably. Either God works in him, or he stays wrapped in himself. He receives the gift of a higher life, or he sinks into death. In other words, God gives him peace, or he continues in perpetual war. III\. *This peace* the Apostle desires for the Thessalonians: not an image or shadow of peace but peace itself in its full meaning. It is not a peace resting on pacts and bargains among men, but one belonging to the very nature and being of God. It does not come from stifling activities and energies, but is the peace in which they are perfected and harmonized. It does not come from tolerating what is base or false, but demands its destruction. It does not begin from outside, but is first wrought in the inner man and then goes out to subdue the world. And it is not the peace a man gets for himself by standing aloof from the sorrows and confusions of the world and of the men whose nature he shares, choosing a calm retreat, quiet scenery and a regulated atmosphere. It is a peace that has thrived only in those who have suffered with their suffering kind, given up selfish enjoyments, sensual or spiritual, for their sake, and abjured every device to escape ordained toils and temptations. It was the peace of him who bore man's sorrows, infirmities and sins, who gave himself up to become one with them, and so won for them a share in the Divine Nature and an inheritance in the peace of God which passes understanding. IV\. So Paul could boldly say, "The Lord give you peace *at all times*." He lived in an exceedingly restless time. All around him were wars and rumours of wars. The Jewish commonwealth was breaking up through the hatreds of its sects and its mad desire to test its strength against its Roman masters. Those fighting sects directed their fiercest spite at Paul; they did not hate each other as much as they hated him. He knew the end was coming, that God himself had pronounced doom on the city of David. If he did not see the fall of the nation he was willing to be accursed to save, it would only be because a violent death took him from the world first. This time of trouble touched his disciples as well. It had brought great suffering on the Thessalonian Church, from present Jewish persecution and from a dim, feverish dread of a day of the Lord close at hand. In such a time he could ask the Lord of Peace to give peace to himself and to them. He could ask confidently, not doubting the petition would be answered, and even sure that the tumults in the world and in themselves were meant to awaken and accomplish it. He knew that easy and comfortable circumstances do not give men the peace they need, and that the most disastrous may drive them to the centre where it dwells and where they may possess it. V\. He prayed also, if the reading I mentioned is the true one, that they might have peace *in every place*. He knew different places, Greek cities and Jewish, though he had not yet seen Rome as he intended, and all his experience so far was of strife, tumult and persecution. He came to Thessalonica because he had been imprisoned at Philippi, escaped to Beraea, and then went to Athens. At Corinth the continued Jewish opposition was trifling beside the struggle in his own spirit, which made him despair even of life. At Ephesus he was to fight with men who assailed him as beasts assail those exposed in the Amphitheatre. At Jerusalem voices cried, "*Away with such a fellow from the earth! it is not fit that he should live*." Bonds and imprisonment awaited him in the capital of the world. Yet he could say, the Lord of Peace give you peace in all places. He had found it in prison, and in the tumult and despair of his own spirit. When nothing around or within him gave him anything to rest on, when he was more battered by his own thoughts and their contradictions than by Jews, heathen or false brethren, he had learnt that the Lord of Peace was there. This was so even though he was no Stoic about these things but felt them in every nerve. The Lord sat above the water-floods as King, Friend and Father for ever. And Paul was certain this was not because he was an Apostle, or had divine revelations, or singular gifts. It was because he was a man, sharing men's temptations and experiencing in himself the redemption wrought for men. It was because he was sent to men everywhere with glad tidings of peace. VI\. Brethren, do we not need to hear the same message now, in this place? We shall soon be giving thanks for victories over men who two years ago were counted our friends and defenders. We ask one another whether anything can keep the nations of our own Continent from drawing swords on each other. We have enough to remind us that peace is not to be reckoned on, and that powers within and without are at work to take it from us. Our own minds, perhaps, are not very peaceful. Passion-week and Easter-week will be a time of contention between parties at home, if not between armies abroad. Does that seem strange to you? Do you think this week should be what in one country it is called, "the still week," so that our Lord's Death at least is remembered in silence and calm? God has not ordained this outward quietness, and we cannot create it. Perhaps we would understand these days less if we could make their circumstances look more suitable. The Passion means not rest but suffering and agony, through which the Head of the body passed. Will its members revere him more if nothing in their own condition testifies to the need of effort and endurance? The Resurrection means not sleep but awaking out of sleep and return to all the energies of life. Shall we believe in it more if we covet the kind of rest of which the grave is the emblem? VII\. But does not the week that witnesses the Sacrifice of the Victim bring peace, if it finds little? Does not the week that commemorates the sacrifice's completion carry peace even into the midst of war? Yes, this and nothing less is what these days signify. "*The Lord of Peace Himself give you peace always in all places*." You want a Lord of Peace in whom Peace dwells always, under all conditions, amid all turmoils. Behold him in the agony of the Garden and on the Cross of Calvary. There is the Peace that lasts, not only when it is threatened from without, but when it seems to have perished within, when the soul *is troubled even to death* and cries, *Why hast Thou forsaken me?* It is there because trust is there, because the sufferer can say, *Thou continuest the same, O Thou worship of Israel; Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit*. There is the Peace of God resting on the Man, sustaining him so that he may sustain all creation, and glorifying the Son so that he may glorify the Father. You want to know where Peace may come from to men in all conditions and turmoils. Behold again the Agony and the Cross. From there it goes out to meet everything in the world and in you that strives against it. It goes out as the power of Sacrifice, stronger than the power of Self, as the power of Love, stronger than Hatred, and as the power of Life, stronger than Death. It comes as the Peace that can subdue all things to itself and reconcile all things in itself. The Lord of Peace then *Himself* give you this peace. He has given it whenever you have won it. We did not recover it in India because we were the best of peoples; we had sins enough to answer for there, in hard and unjust acts by governors and individuals, the very reasons we lost it. But God gave it to us, and gave it all the more perfectly because he did not let it drop like manna from heaven. He gave our soldiers and citizens stoutness of heart, wisdom and endurance, that they might seek and obtain it. He himself will give it, not diplomatists or monarchs, if it is to be preserved on the Continent, his Wisdom using or else counteracting theirs. He will give it even if the wars and fightings in men's hearts make it needful that the nations receive it through blood, that swords punish those who have removed their neighbours' landmarks and trampled on Freedom and Right. He himself, and not the intrigues or compromises of statesmen or of schools, will give us Peace in our own land. That will be the reconciling of what is good in those who can acknowledge no good but their own, and the destruction of what is contentious and selfish in them all. He alone, and not our opinions, judgment, virtues or faith, will give us Peace in a nearer region still: Peace with him, Peace with our brethren, Peace with our own hearts. Therefore let us crave this Peace, which he promises and has assured us in the blood of his Eternal Son, always and in all places. Let us desire it when we know we have deserved it least and forfeited it most utterly, because it comes down to us from him who gave his Son for us, not to reward our love but that his Love might bring ours back. Let us desire it in all times of tribulation and of wealth, when our self-accusations are loudest and our self-security most dangerous. Let us desire it in every place, so that in every place we may be peace-makers and be called the children of the Great Peacemaker.