# Sermons ::: {.center} SERMONS\ PREACHED IN LINCOLN'S INN CHAPEL ::: ::: {.center} BY\ FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE ::: ::: {.center} IN SIX VOLUMES\ VOL. V ::: ::: {.center} NEW EDITION ::: ::: {.center} London\ MACMILLAN AND CO.\ AND NEW YORK\ 1892 ::: ::: {.center} *All rights reserved* ::: ## LIST OF THE SERMONS ::: {.center} Advent Sunday.—[November]{.smallcaps} 28, 1858. ::: - [God's Patience the Ground of our Patience]{.smallcaps} · p. 1 "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 v. 7, 8. ::: {.center} Second Sunday in Advent.—[December]{.smallcaps} 5, 1858. ::: - [The Sleep of the Church]{.smallcaps} · p. 13 "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 xiii. 11. ::: {.center} Third Sunday in Advent.—[December]{.smallcaps} 12, 1858. ::: - [The Misery of limiting our Hope in Christ]{.smallcaps} · p. 26 "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable."—1 Corinthians xv. 19. ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday in Advent.—[December]{.smallcaps} 19, 1858. ::: - [Sorrow and Joy necessary to each other]{.smallcaps} · p. 40 "As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing."—2 Corinthians vi. 10. ::: {.center} St. Stephen's Day.—[December]{.smallcaps} 26, 1858. ::: - [The Witnesses for the glorified Son of Man]{.smallcaps} · p. 52 "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God."—Acts vii. 56. ::: {.center} First Sunday in the Year.—[January]{.smallcaps} 2, 1859. ::: - [The Blessing and Curse of the Law]{.smallcaps} · p. 67 "Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law."—Psalm cxix. 18. ::: {.center} First Sunday after Epiphany.—[January]{.smallcaps} 9, 1859. ::: - [Christ among the Doctors]{.smallcaps} · p. 80 "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 ii. 46, 47. ::: {.center} Second Sunday after Epiphany.—[January]{.smallcaps} 16, 1859. ::: - [St. Paul at Athens]{.smallcaps} · p. 96 "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 everywhere 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 xvii. 26-31. ::: {.center} Third Sunday after Epiphany.—[January]{.smallcaps} 23, 1859. ::: - [The Miracles of Christ generally]{.smallcaps} · p. 112 "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 x. 37, 38. ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday after Epiphany.—[January]{.smallcaps} 30, 1859. ::: - [Christ casting out the evil Spirit]{.smallcaps} · p. 126 "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 viii. 35. ::: {.center} Fifth Sunday after Epiphany.—[February]{.smallcaps} 6, 1859. ::: - [The Parables of Christ]{.smallcaps} · p. 144 "And the disciples came, and said unto Him, Why speakest Thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. 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. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and 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 they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men 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."—Matthew xiii. 10-17. ::: {.center} Sixth Sunday after Epiphany.—[February]{.smallcaps} 13, 1859. ::: - [Practice and Speculation]{.smallcaps} · p. 160 "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 i. 13-16. ::: {.center} Septuagesima Sunday.—[February]{.smallcaps} 20, 1859. ::: - [Christ the Purifier of Priests and Laymen]{.smallcaps} · p. 179 "And He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness."—Malachi iii. 3. ::: {.center} Sexagesima Sunday.—[February]{.smallcaps} 27, 1859. ::: - [The Old and New Paradise]{.smallcaps} · p. 193 "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 the water of life freely."—Revelation xxii. 17. ::: {.center} Quinquagesima Sunday.—[March]{.smallcaps} 6, 1859. ::: - [The Foundation and the Building]{.smallcaps} · p. 206 "For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ."—1 Corinthians iii. 11. ::: {.center} First Sunday in Lent.—[March]{.smallcaps} 13, 1859. ::: - [The Vine and the Branches]{.smallcaps} · p. 216 "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 xv. 4. ::: {.center} Second Sunday in Lent.—[March]{.smallcaps} 20, 1859. ::: - [The Body and the Members]{.smallcaps} · p. 229 "And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it."—1 Corinthians xii. 26. ::: {.center} Third Sunday in Lent.—[March]{.smallcaps} 27, 1859. ::: - [Theology and Morality]{.smallcaps} · p. 243 "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 vi. 8. ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday in Lent.—[April]{.smallcaps} 5, 1859. ::: - [The Sin of Man and the Justification of Man]{.smallcaps} · p. 255 "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 v. 18. ::: {.center} Fifth Sunday in Lent.—[April]{.smallcaps} 10, 1859. ::: - [Hatred necessary to Love]{.smallcaps} · p. 269 "Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against Thee?"—Psalm cxxxix. 21. ::: {.center} Sunday before Easter.—[April]{.smallcaps} 17, 1859. ::: - [The Lord of Hosts and the Lord of Peace]{.smallcaps} · p. 280 "Now the Lord of peace Himself give you peace always by all means."—2 Thessalonians iii. 16. ## 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. [These]{.smallcaps} words prove that St. James, like the other Apostles, expected the coming of the Lord in his own day. I have often endeavoured to show you that their expectation was not a false one. A greater change than they looked for took place in the condition of the world. It might not be in all its particulars that which they supposed it would be. Different degrees of illumination may have been vouchsafed them, as to the mode in which it would work. Their very hope showed that there were confusions in their minds which a clearer light must scatter. For it was *light* they desired; light which should shine into their hearts, and shine out upon the whole Church. But they were certain as to the nature of the blessing which would be vouchsafed to them. It would be a blessing, the same in kind as that which all the older prophets had expected; a day of clearness and revelation: fearful therefore to those who loved darkness; awful even to those who longed for deliverance from darkness. Every signal judgment which had come upon the nation of Israel had been described as such a day, and the event corresponded with the description. It did prove to be a discovery of that which had been hidden. When it came, fearfulness surprised the hypocrites; trusting hearts found that there was indeed a refuge for the needy in his distress, when the blast of the terrible ones was as a storm against the wall. They said, "This is our God, we have waited for Him; He is come, and He will save us." Such a day the Apostles expected, one which should transcend all former days, inasmuch as it would wind up the history of the old world; inasmuch as it would announce that the King who had entered Jerusalem, meek and sitting upon an ass, was indeed the King of the whole earth; inasmuch as it would involve the downfall of that city that would not have Him to reign over it, that had cast Him forth as a malefactor. There is no timidity or hesitation in the writers of the New Testament on this point. They speak with as much authority and confidence of Christ's coming speedily as about any past event. For while He was on earth He had discoursed on this subject with especial definiteness. And He had affixed to His language the seal of that solemn declaration, "*Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words shall not pass away*." His appearance in the flesh was unintelligible, if it were not soon to be followed by a manifestation of the power which was His in heaven and earth. Of course none of the Apostles knew whether he should stay on earth to witness that day. The sentence concerning St. John, "*If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee*?"—might seem to indicate that he alone would. But a day which would reveal Christ as Lord of both worlds—which would declare that dying, rising, ascending, He had united them for ever,—could not be less glorious, wherever they might be. On this side of death, they would know in a measure,—on that, far more perfectly, what the crisis meant,—what a victory over the enemies of God and man it betokened. In this sense, the Apostles might look forward to the day of their death as itself a day of revelation. No men had more motive for looking forward to that day as a day of repose. But if for the words, "*The coming of the Lord draweth nigh*," had been substituted, "*The time of your death draweth nigh*," the Apostle's argument for patience and stability of heart would have been worth nothing. A man may possibly encourage himself in the endurance of physical pain by the thought, "It will soon be over;" though I think, in general, he will not gain much help from that recollection taken alone;—so much agony is concentrated into a moment; there is a feeling of continuance in it which overreaches the mere intellectual conclusion that it is likely to pass away. But a student who has been labouring for years to find the solution of a difficult problem, can gather no possible comfort from hearing that in a little while that trouble would cease, along with all other trouble. He had looked forward to a joyful εὕρηκα as the reward of his search; he only learns that it has been all wasted, that he had better not have engaged in it. Add to the thought of death the thought of a future for *him*, and you *may* fill him with fears of what is so vague and unknown; you *may* encourage him to think that his tasks shall not be interrupted, that the calling to which he was devoted here shall be pursued under better conditions, with more success. Mix with this future the thought of Christ's death and resurrection and ascension, and you have wrought a change indeed, because you have *almost* changed the day of death into a day of the Lord. But there is something unsatisfactory even in a hope apparently so full of immortality as this. If we narrow our Lord's death to ourselves, we destroy its significance for ourselves; if it does not take away the sin of the world, it does not take away ours; if it does not reconcile men to God, it does not reconcile any man. This conviction waxes stronger and stronger in the mind of a man, the more conscious he becomes of the links by which he is bound to his fellow-creatures, the more he perceives how entirely his union with them depends on his union with Christ, and on the relation in which He stands to the Father. Redemption from selfishness he feels to be the great redemption of all. He has tasted a very little of its blessedness; he hopes that he shall enter into the fulness of it. How can that hope be realised? how can he help losing all he has won, and sinking back into the condition which he feels to be at once natural and accursed, if in his visions of the future he only sees a comfortable escape for himself from the tumults and calamities of his present existence? He may expand this notion of an escape into anticipations of positive felicity; but they must all gradually melt into thin air, or be condensed into the forms of a sensual paradise, if he remains the centre of them. And think how little such visions correspond to the business of life! How large a portion of that, with all the hopes and fears which belong to it, has reference to kinsfolk, neighbours, your country, the universe! Tell me that I am to work patiently, because in a little time my task will be over, and I shall enter into rest or enjoyment, and you seem evidently to imply that my work is for myself; that if this one thread of my destiny can be fully spun out, I shall have gained all I have been aiming at; which is not true in any sense, unless I have been living an utterly unchristian and detestable life; not true even then, for since I cannot by my will sever myself from those with whose life, by God's eternal law, mine is intertwined. It was reasonable then, it was inevitable, that the hope of the coming of the Lord should have overshadowed, in the minds of men full of self-denial and love like St. James and his fellow-Apostles, all hopes that merely pointed to the termination of their own pilgrimage. And it was not only reasonable for them. They looked forward to this manifestation, because they were men and felt as men. In every age since their day the most simple, genuine, human feelings have turned in the same direction. Thoughts of a grave where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, have not been enough to soothe those who have been persecuted by the wicked, who have been most weary, and had the greatest need of rest. Thoughts of their own forgiveness, the deliverance of their own souls, the glorification of their own bodies, have not contented those who have prized forgiveness most, reckoned the soul at its highest worth, have anticipated the change of the earthly body to the heavenly with the greatest clearness. Beneath all these apprehensions, sustaining them all, lay the strong inward conviction that there must be a Revelation of the Divine excellence and beauty, in which the lowliest sufferer, the saddest outcast might share; which would be for each because it would be for all; the real fulfilment of all that had been shadowed forth in ancient prophecies in the hearts of those who uttered them; the real warrant for patience, because it would bring every work to its issue, every problem to its solution. And such hopes, in whatever age conceived, have not proved more fallacious than in the first. The great critical periods which good men thought were at hand did come. If those who passed through them scarcely took note of them, history confesses their reality. If our vision were brighter, if we saw things less through the mists of the present, we should feel their significance more, not less. When those who foresaw them vaguely, imperfectly, as to special incidents erroneously, passed out of the earth, they will have learnt, no doubt, that they had underrated, not exaggerated their importance,—that they dwelt too much on trifles concerning themselves,—that they had too little owned the Divine hand which was stretched out, the Divine voice which was speaking in them. To learn how that hand is stretched out for the deliverance of men, when they perceive it least, how that voice is speaking to men amidst the loudest clamours, in the deepest silence, we may be sure is their delight now, wherever they are; therefore they know that they had a hope which did not make them ashamed, and which will not make ashamed any who cherish it in the Church below. That which is the warrant of this hope, that which is the true ground of this patience, belongs to us as much as to any former generation. Advent Sunday bids us keep it in mind, the text I have read to you 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*." I considered, not long ago, how the image of a husbandman, sowing seed and waiting for a harvest, illustrated the kind of diligence which St. Paul demanded of his Corinthian disciples, the kind of reward they were to expect from it. The tiller of the ground is not a speculator. He obeys natural laws. He casts in his seed. He leaves it to no chance or skill to ripen it. He waits a harvest. It is a harvest for others, as well as himself. The fruits are the reward the Apostle dwells on, not the price they fetch in the market. If St. James merely taught us the same lesson, we might be very thankful, for our attention cannot be too often fixed on these natural analogies; none withdraw us so much from vulgar mercantile notions, none give us such a sense of a Divine and human order; of the relation which exists, of the difference which exists, between the creatures of a Lord, and the children of a Father of spirits. But that, I think, is not all which is signified here, not the most important part of what is signified. The Spiritual Husbandman is not, first of all, man,—but God. The resemblance is to His transactions, with us and with His universe. It applies to us, because we are formed in His image, and have nothing good in us, save the reflection of His perfect goodness. It is His patience which St. James would have us meditate on; His longsuffering, with individuals, families, nations, Churches; His watchfulness, till the seeds which He has planted really drink in the gracious nourishment which He pours upon them. It is language with which we are familiar. *Longsuffering* is the epithet which the writers in the Bible most frequently associate with the character of God. And I am certain that our hearts and consciences respond to their use of it. We are sure that that must be the characteristic of an all-loving Being, Who looks out on such a world as ours. We are sure that the word does not deceive us in the least, however far short it may fall of that which it labours to utter. For we are sure that this was the characteristic of Him who did fully express the Divine substance, who was the perfect image of the Father. Now imagine for one instant, brethren, that we believed this to be true; what would follow? All history would become a record of the processes of this husbandry, of the means which a Creator uses, that His creation may be very good; which a Father uses to make his children enter into His will and fulfil it. Despair of our race and of ourselves would then seem to us of all things the most unreasonable and wicked—hope, the sober fulfilment of a duty, the submission to an irresistible evidence. Whatever theories about races, conquests, natural influences, religious influences, powers of law, authority of great men, have been defended by any thoughtful student, would be carefully and honestly considered. We should not be eager to embrace one or reject another. The facts on which they are built would be recognized as Divine facts. We should refer them all to one first principle. We should treat them as the tools and processes of the Husbandman for bringing His fruit to ripeness. Whatever another class of teachers have talked learnedly or experimentally about conscience and reflection, active or passive powers, faculties of discourse and induction, of affection and will, would be most interesting, so long as the analysis was not employed to destroy the life of that upon which it was exercised. For we should feel that we could not possibly look at anything human which does not lead us to a Divine Archetype; that all is fragmentary and confused, till it is seen in its relation to Him, in its dependency upon Him. And when we are forced, not by what we read of others, but by what we feel in ourselves, to dwell on that which has broken this relation, has marred this dependency—when Sin stands out before each man as that which has turned aside, again and again, the spade of the great Husbandman, when it would have prepared his heart to receive the seeds or the rain, and to bring forth fruits for the harvest,—oh! let us not forget that the Word was made flesh, to cast every plague, and sickness, and evil spirit out of our sin-stricken humanity! Let us not forget that what we are tempted to pronounce helpless and incurable, He bore; that He claimed it as His Father's possession; that He has redeemed it by an unspeakable agony, and quickened it with a Divine life. I repeat it, brethren, if the doctrine of St. James is a true doctrine, hope—the very highest, most vigorous, most sustained hopefulness—is the godly and true state of our being; and whatever tempers we admit that are foreign to hope and contradictory of it, are so far immoral and anti-Christian. But it would be the cruellest mockery to say this——a man would prove himself utterly unfit to preach to others, because utterly unaware of what is passing in himself,—if he did not confess at the same time how much within us and around us is continually warring with this hope, threatening its existence, seeming to prove it monstrous and ridiculous. Turn anywhere in the world, and you will find facts which laugh at you for entertaining it; and every one of those facts has that which corresponds to it and explains it in our own hearts. Where are the signs and pledges of Peace, Freedom, and Order in the nations of the earth? how much of that Peace, and Freedom, and Order do we find has established itself in our bosoms? If you see encouragements in one direction, degeneracy and darkness is increasing in another; the clouds of to-day belie the bright promise of yesterday. Is it not so in the world? is it not so in ourselves? There is a bird of calm, a Sabbath serenity, which you think has descended and rested upon you on some still evening, or by the sick bed of some friend; in a few hours the tempests have returned; a slight accident, a foolish affront, the gossip of idle men, the noise of parties, has shaken to its centre the spirit which you supposed was fixed upon its rock. These are ordinary experiences. There are more fearful battles in which some have to engage; wherein they are driven to despair even of life. The arguments for hope seem all answered by the very voice by which they were first brought. The Bible, Prayers, Sacraments, become themselves the great sources of despondency and terror. The words of Life remind us of voices that spoke them to us, which are now mute, and how little we have profited by their speech or their example! Sacraments remind us how little we have believed God's own promises, how little our light has shined before men. Holy seasons seem by their recurrence to testify that the world has been moving, and that we ourselves have been retrograding. He is but a Job's comforter who merely denounces such a state of feeling, or who hopes to cure it by texts and aphorisms. To preach of patience is often the very means of stirring up all impatience. It must be always so, I think, if you do not believe that there is a Patience infinitely above ours, a Patience from which ours must be derived. When we have learned that faith ever so imperfectly, we may make a better use of the Scriptures, of the ordinances of God, of holy seasons, than that which we commonly draw from them. The Scriptures will not be a mere repository of sentences, to be quoted without reference to the occasions which called them forth, or the persons who spoke them, and therefore generally with still less suitableness to the conditions of the persons to whom they are offered; but as witnesses 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; how He saw signs of life in those who counted themselves, or whom their discerning friends counted, dead; how He kindled that life, till all felt it and were warmed by it; till their very failures and evil doings became lessons to distant ages. Divine Sacraments will teach us that we are but receivers of a food which is given us hour by hour from above,—but partakers of a blood which has been poured out for all as well as for us. And so, it will be no wonder to us that we are asked year after year to remember that Christ has come in great humility; year after year 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; we must for ever conceive falsely of God, 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,—a witness that He, and no other, is the Prince of all the kings of all the earth. Every year will tell us, that unless these manifestations were to issue in a final and complete manifestation of Him as the Judge of the whole earth, every hope that 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 we have hastened the work by our restlessness, will contain new lessons of patience. Every year will say that death is not more certain to each of us, that the rising of day out of night is not more certain, than the unveiling of the Son 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. [You]{.smallcaps} will have seen that an alteration has been announced in the times of administering the Holy Communion in this chapel. Hitherto it has been offered to the congregation every Sunday. After Christmas Day, the celebration of it during the regular service will be either on the second Sunday of each month, or else on the second Sunday of each Term. I propose also to administer it during the greater part of the year, on the fourth Sunday of the month, at eight o'clock in the morning; oftener, at that hour, if a desire should be expressed for it by those who frequent the chapel. This change has been adopted partly because it has been ascertained that the attendance at the Communion during the year was greater when it was administered once a month than it has been of late; partly because the habitual omission of the Exhortation has been felt by many to be a serious loss. It may be true that we have been acting both according to ancient precedent, and according to the reason of the case, in connecting our worship every week with the Eucharist, which explains its object and binds together the different parts of it. But if from any cause, either local and accidental, or lying more deeply in ourselves, there is warrant for believing that our sense of the importance of the service has not been increased by the repetition of it, we are doing what the authors of the precedent would have approved,—we are yielding to the very reason which influenced us before—when we try another course. To depart from a commandment can never be right. To abandon even a good practice may often be right. For the most blessed means may become worthless if we do not recollect the end for which they have been granted; we honour them most when we resolve that they shall not intercept our sight of the end. I think St. Paul had a lesson for us upon this subject in the Epistle which was read to us last Sunday. I desire to make use of it this afternoon. It belongs to the whole period of Advent, as well as to the first Sunday of it,—to no day more properly than to this, on which we are praying that we may learn patience and comfort from the Scriptures, and may hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life which is given us in Jesus Christ our Lord. There is some difficulty in the construction of the sentence. It is not very obvious whether the opening words, "And that," refer merely to the remark which they introduce, or are meant to connect it with the passage which has preceded. A majority of intelligent commentators have judged that the last opinion is most in accordance with the manner of St. Paul, even if it assumes something more of an ellipsis, and demands something more of a paraphrase. He had been bidding the Romans "*owe no man anything, but to love one another*," because *love* was "*the fulfilling of the law*." He had illustrated that position by quoting different commandments as all fulfilled in the one, "*Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself*." Then he seems to recollect how this commandment, though issuing from the mouth of Christ Himself, though sealed by the mysteries of the last Passover, though stamped with His Cross and Passion, might nevertheless be forgotten by His Church,—that a torpor might creep over it even in its earliest days; that it might become a helpless, loveless society, amidst all the arguments and pledges of love. *And this, too*, he exclaims, we must do,—this effort to love one another we must make, not only on the general ground, not only because the law enjoining it is so absolute and divine; but from a consideration of times and seasons, of the history of our own lives, of our place in the world's history. For surely it is not time to be asleep. The morning approaches. There are already streaks of dawn. We must be up and alive. For the Deliverer whose name we bear is not a deceiver. He came to bring Light, and His Light will shine more and more unto the perfect day. We believed once that He came to save us out of a thick darkness, and "*now is our salvation nearer than when we believed*." There are many thoughts crowded together here, but each is necessary to the other. They will not bear to be separated, but we must disentangle them by considering how each of them bears on our own life and practice. I\. It is clear that the sleep or torpor which the Apostle speaks of is not one into which Jews or Heathens had fallen. He was not writing to them. He was writing to a society of men confessing the faith of Jesus Christ, declaring Him to be the Image of God and the Head of men. He was writing to a society which was reminded continually of its own profession by the derision of the world; which was stimulated by hostility, knit together by persecution. It was a society which St. Paul had not visited, but which he knew by the reports of others to be maintaining its ground in the capital of the world, under the eye of the Cæsars. It was a society which was not accused of any looseness in doctrine or failure in duty. How could the Apostle think that such a society would fall into sleep? Because he knew what the temptation to it was in himself. He knew that he, who had been called by Christ Himself, who had had visions and revelations, who had been in the third heaven, might sink into indifference and listlessness. He knew that recollections of the past, tokens of the Divine care and love in the present, would not of themselves avail to quicken him. He knew that persecutions from without could not do this work for him; apart from other powers and influences they might retard it. II\. For, secondly, the words I have quoted to you leave no doubt about the character of the sleep to which he alludes. The words of Christ, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," express the principle of a Society's life. This love, circulating through the different members of it, is that which holds it together as a society, which keeps it from dissolving into the separate atoms of which it consists. A society is sleeping a death-sleep when this love becomes stagnant, when it is not a vigorous, operative power. Now St. Paul knew that no circumstances imparted this love to him; that if he depended on circumstances it perished. He would not be stirred by it because he preached of it to others; the habit of throwing his feelings outwards might make them cold within. He could not gain it by the care of all the Churches; that brought him in contact with vexations and ingratitude. He could not obtain it through the sentences of Sanhedrins, the conspiracies of zealots, through imprisonment by Proconsuls or Emperors. Exasperation and bitterness were the natural result of their injustice. From personal experience he could testify that love to man might be as much killed by frosts as by suns; that if it is not kindled from within, everything from without may be fatal to it. III\. And how does he ward off the danger from himself? What contrivance does he use to wake them out of their slumbers? His method, you would say, is a very strange one. No one was more profoundly conscious than he was, that the loss of love in a society of human beings is the loss of everything; that a state of utter lovelessness is a state of damnation. Why, then, did he not tell them this? Why did he not frighten them with the thought of the pit of perdition into which they might sink, if this temper of mind became fixed and habitual with them? He *did* tell them this; he *did* set this peril before them: for he spoke of *Salvation*. He reminded them that this indifference, lovelessness, this contention, self-seeking, was the accursed state out of which Christ came to redeem them. It was this hell into which He found His creatures sinking. It was to rescue them from this hell that He took flesh and dwelt among them, and died on the cross, and rose again, and ascended on high. It was that they might raise other men out of this Hell and bring them into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is under the government of the perfectly righteous and loving Lord, that He sent His Spirit to dwell in them. They had received the first pledges of this Redemption, of this Salvation. They had been enabled to feel and suffer for others, to desire their good, to love them as themselves. It was but a beginning; the glimpse of a Paradise; a first taste of the Tree of Life. There were other thoughts within them which had no fellowship with Paradise, no savour of the Tree of Life. They had a natural gravitation to self-indulgence, a preference for self-will, a desire for self-glory. These tendencies were always threatening to become supreme. Let vigilance be intermitted; let the Christian converts fancy that by some trick of fortune, by some peculiarity which raised them above their fellow-men, they were out of the reach of the world's evils; and those evils would certainly be seen in the Church, more, not less, than among those whom they had left. Therefore St. Paul bids them think of the Salvation which Christ had promised as something yet to come, as a blessing yet to be attained. In one sense he always spoke of it as a blessing bestowed, as a state on which they had entered; they were members of Christ's body; they were complete in Him, the perfectly righteous, unselfish Being; they had been taken out of the kingdom of darkness, they had been translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son. But if that were so, then they must be continually assuring themselves that nothing which was base or evil in themselves, or in the world, would be suffered to continue. They must be expecting the entire dispersion of every mist and cloud which concealed the face of God from them. They must be waiting till the kingdom which is abiding because it is righteous, the kingdom of our God and His Christ, should prove itself above all principalities and powers in this world or in the world to come; should overthrow whatever was opposed to it. This salvation from all which clogged their progress and hindered them from seeing things as they were,—this salvation from lies, from hatred, from indifference—was all contained in the promise that He in whom is light and no darkness at all, should be fully manifested. Every day and hour was hastening on this manifestation, and therefore this salvation. *Our* salvation, the Apostle calls it; yours if it is mine, mine if it is yours. For if we are not waiting for a common Saviour, if I am looking for one and you for another, what has our profession meant? Why have we received the same baptism? Why do we bear the same cross? I do not know that I need say more in explanation of the words of the text, as they bear upon the condition of the men of that age; because I am satisfied that we shall only understand them as we read them in reference to our own condition. "*Knowing the time*" must mean, to us, knowing *our* time, *our* opportunities, whereabouts *we* are standing, what temptations are assailing *us*, where *we* can turn as a refuge from them. We must make an estimate of the difference and the resemblance of our position and that of those to whom the Apostle was writing; then we may judge how many or how few of his words may be taken home to our hearts. 1\. First, we must strike off all the persecutions to which Christians, either as such or as general subjects of Nero's tyranny, may have been liable. We must strike off all other changes which a thousand years of Christian civilization may have produced upon us. We must strike out all that belongs to the circumstances of a Greek colony dwelling in a Latin capital; to a body composed partly of descendants of Abraham, partly of men who had been worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo. Make these vast deductions, and then there will still remain the fact that these Christians in Rome, being creatures of the same flesh and blood as we are, were baptized into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, as we have been; ate the bread of which Christ said, "*This is my body*;" drank the wine of which He said, "*This is my blood of the new testament*," as we do. It will still remain true that the command, "*Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself*," is, for us as it was for them, the summary and essence of all the commandments. It is still true for us as for them that all sacraments are Divine instruments for giving effect to this law, for binding us to Him who fulfilled it, that we may dwell in Him, and His love may dwell in us. And it is still true for us as it was for them that sleep may overtake us, in spite of all the signs and badges of our Christian profession, in spite of a sincere respect for them, even of a passionate zeal in behalf of them, because that new commandment has no real dominion over us, because we are repeating it but not keeping it. 2\. This is the next point upon which I would preach to you and to myself. If we *know the time*, I think we shall all feel that we want to be preached to about it; that in one way or other God Himself will be the preacher. Only consider for a moment what powers and influences there are which are leading us not to keep that commandment, but to break it continually. Do not let us overlook, as among the chief of them, our familiarity with the words. We know them so well,—they have become so much household words to us,—that we almost assume they have entered into our life, that we have been recast and remoulded in conformity with them. For congregations of Christian men not to think so of themselves, for clergymen not to think so of themselves, is the hardest and most painful thing possible. And we must do justice to this notion, deceitful and dangerous as it is. This law *has* moulded our laws, institutions, customs, in a marvellous manner. It has moulded our own perceptions more than we are aware. There is a tacit confession that life would be a contradiction and a horror if it were lost; that to enact the opposite law would be simply a return to anarchy and chaos. There is this acknowledgment in our hearts, too strong even for the practice and the theories that most rebel against it. There is this 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 is setting at naught this first principle of the Kingdom of God in his daily discourse, in his daily acts? It is not the vigorous conscious act of selfishness, that which leads to some determined outrage upon the peace or rights of others; it is the lazy, sleepy indifference about them, of which we have most to accuse ourselves, and which in the end produces most mischief. It is this, I think, to which St. Paul chiefly alludes, as that out of which the Roman Christians had need to arouse themselves. Everything in their circumstances seemed likely to break that slumber; the cock-crowing was in their ears continually. The monotony of *our* social life, the monotony of *our* religious life, help to make us forget that any energy of thought or sympathy is called for. We think love will come of itself, that it will drop upon us. And supposing it were dropping upon us, as in one way it is, consider how little effort we make to detain the drops; nay, rather, how much effort we make to hinder them from penetrating into us. What is half the intercourse of society but the repeating or the inventing of things, clever or stupid, against each other? What is the busiest and most popular part of literature but an appeal to the contempt of men for each other, but a machinery for cultivating it? Do you not expect, when you hear of a meeting which is called together for the glory of God, that a great part of its business will be to revile men who are made in the image of God? And all these things become so natural to us, so much a matter of course, that we take no heed to them. We are not watching to counteract their influence upon ourselves. We are not trying to stem the current or to turn it in another direction. There is competition in everything; but competition in contempt is the most active of all. If we cannot do much, at least we can expose the absurdity of those who are trying to do anything. 3\. It is out of this sleep, a sleep as far as all manly action for our fellows is concerned, but a sleep in which we may dream all mischievous things against them and may utter our dreams,—it is out of this sleep that the Apostle would have us awake. The invitation would be hopeless if it came only from an Apostle. But it comes from Him who sent His Apostles forth. It comes from Him who is the Restorer and the Life-giver. If, brethren, we can but hear His voice speaking to us in His own Feast, calling upon us to come and be indued with His strength, to be renewed by His Spirit, we may be thankful for anything which has reminded us that the most frequent reception of it without Him is worth nothing. It may be a humiliation that we should need such a lesson; but humiliations, in whatever form they come, are profitable; at least, God means them to be profitable. Much becomes clear to us when we learn that He wishes to educate and raise our *wills*; that there is no love but what is kindled in them, but what is kept alive in them by His Holy Spirit. Then we find that the exhortation to stir up that Spirit within us is an exhortation which can be followed, because we are never alone in our efforts, because when we are thinking the best thoughts, forming our best resolves, we are only thinking what He is working in us to think, resolving what He inspires us to resolve. And is it not true also, brethren, that this Spirit is with us to quicken and guide our social intercourse, to draw forth out of us those deep inward convictions and heart-utterances which really answer to one another; to make our words real and not mocking words, to change us from scoffing critics into human beings? Shall not a body of men acquainted with each other, helping each other to fight, sustaining each other in falls, holding forth to each other the prize of a common victory, be possible once more on earth? Are we to live in an age in which every mechanical facility for communication between man and man is multiplied ten-thousandfold, only that the inward isolation, the separation of those who meet continually, may be increased in a far greater measure? Is this to be the final reward of civilization, that instead of human faces there are to be only grinning masks, lumps of ice for beating hearts? May not, even in this nineteenth century, a communion exist, which shall answer to the name, a communion of men united by holy sacraments of affection to each other, because of service and devotion to Christ and to those for whom He died? It may appear to many an idle dream; it will be nothing more while we sleep. But the voice of the Archangel, the trump of God may yet awake us out of that sleep. The still small voice may yet say to us, "Now is your salvation nearer than when you believed." Sacraments have existed to testify of a love which passeth knowledge; of a love which was gathered up once in the Cross of Calvary; of a love which shall be discovered to be the root of all Creation. To dwell in that love, to see it as it is, this must be the Salvation of the Universe. While we look for it and desire it, it becomes ours. For that which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor it hath entered into the heart of man to perceive, God hath prepared for them that love Him; and if we believe in His love, and look for the revelation of it, it will take possession of us; it will drive out of us our indifference and heartlessness and hatred; it will go forth in acts of blessing to those who are near and to those who are afar off. As the Apostle prayed for us in the Epistle of this morning, "*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. [These]{.smallcaps} words have been a cause of much distress to humble and devout readers. They have felt that their hope in Christ made this life joyful to them. It caused the earth to look bright; it threw a beauty and glory over all human faces. Nature and art, the commonest things and the rarest, the past and present as much as the future, were illuminated by it. They have not owed their serenity or their gladness to outward circumstances, or to a specially genial temperament. Many of them have won the gift through keen bodily suffering; not a few have accepted it as a gift, feeling a natural inclination to despondency. No doubt the very name *hope* implies a looking forward. But they do not find that the expectation points chiefly to departure from the earth. Least of all do they find that the mere thought of a change in their position constitutes their blessedness. "*Lo, I am with you always*;" "*My peace I give unto you*;"—there, they say, is the secret of it. Certainly they have a right to claim St. Paul in general as the witness and highest authority for their persuasion. "*All things are yours*," he said to these very Corinthians, "*whether life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours: and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's*." "*Rejoice*," he says to the Philippians, "*and again I say, rejoice*." He speaks of himself as "*rejoicing in tribulation*." When a prisoner he lifted his gyved hands to Agrippa, and wished that he and Festus and Bernice and all who heard him "*were both almost and altogether such as he was, except those bonds*." Was then that so terrible an exception, that he regarded the worshippers of false gods, and his own countrymen with their hateful strifes and hypocrisies,—Nero, with the guilt and horror of a mother's murder on his conscience,—less miserable, as far as this life went, than he was? Does any one who knows anything of St. Paul's life and words believe this? Those very bonds, when they had been more closely riveted than they were at Cæsarea, 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, not some future promised felicity, but his office as an Apostle of the Gentiles,—that office which caused him to be the offscouring of all things,—the highest privilege ever bestowed upon a mortal. That the other nations might know they were fellow-heirs and of the same body with his countrymen, he cheerfully suffered the loss of all things; to save those countrymen from the ruin which was overhanging them, he would have been willing to be accursed. Is this a man who was likely to say, "I am utterly miserable here; but I can endure my lot, for I shall be well paid hereafter"? But if that is not the meaning of the words, what is it? What hidden, cabalistical sense can we find for them to subvert the natural one? I believe, brethren, the simplest sense is the best. I believe we have put one into them, which is derived from our own artificial notions, and is as entirely at variance with the immediate context as it is with the general teaching of the Apostle. The Corinthians had heard him say, "*We are risen with Christ*." A party of them had built on these words, or on some such words, the conclusion that a spiritual resurrection, which they possessed already, was all that Christ had procured for them. They thought they were following their teacher, when they discarded the idea of a future resurrection of the body altogether. St. Paul enters into a full examination of this theory. He shows them that they were turning the half-truth which they thought they had seized, not to the destruction of the other half merely, but of itself. If they were not to rise in their bodies, Christ their Lord had not risen in His body. The very ground of the spiritual resurrection, of which they boasted, was their union with Him. God had justified them in Him. The new doctrine, in effect, disclaimed this relation between them and Him. It left them a set of poor, separated, unredeemed, unjustified creatures; or as he expressed it much more fully, "*yet in their sins*." I\. Having pressed this argument, and exhibited it in various lights, he goes on, "*If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable*." It was very miserable to believe such a contradiction as this would be. Christ had broken through the barriers of death, had brought the visible and the invisible world into one, and had scattered the darkness which covered the grave and the world beyond. Those who said, "The resurrection only concerns us here," established this separation again. They divided the present from the future. After talking of a great deliverer who had conquered death and all the great enemies of man, they treated Death as to all intents and purposes the ultimate ruler, Life as shut up within threescore years and ten of conflict. No men could be so continually tormented with a feeling of being deceived,—yes, deceived by God Himself, with promises which had no performance,—as those who grafted this notion upon their Christian belief. II\. But this was not all. St. Paul had a right to tell the Corinthians that no men in any age had acquiesced in a conclusion so miserable as that which they, in their pride of Christian enlightenment, were embracing. They were teaching that Christ had come to confound and set at nought the dim hopes of all nations. No doubt their visions of the future were often very dark. Some would have gladly parted with them altogether; it seemed so likely that their outward evils, still more that their conscience-pangs, would be aggravated when they had passed the boundary of time. But there were glimpses of hope in the midst of these forebodings. When the sense of present misery was very acute, there was a prophecy, arising in some minds almost to a conviction that the other side of death might offer a compensation. When the sense of the unrighteousness of human rulers was overwhelming, there was a witness in the heart that there must be One higher than they, and that He might have the dominion there if not here. Those who felt that this unrighteousness was not merely in those who governed, but in themselves, and yet who were certain that they did not love it and would be gladly freed from it, set their minds upon a true and permanent, though as yet unknown Substance, with which they might come into fellowship when their relations with that which had been evidently transitory and fallacious were dissolved. However these anticipations had expressed themselves, however they had been clouded, sensualized, mixed with that which was utterly at variance with them, every popular belief in the world, and most of the experiments to escape from the perplexities of popular beliefs, had testified of their existence. They had the clearest tokens of being necessary, not to certain localities or races, but to mankind. To suppose them away, is to reconstruct the world upon a different principle from that on which history shows that God has constructed it. Had not St. Paul aright to say then, "If we are not to look forward with hope into the future world, if we possess all that Christ came to give us, He has taken from us something which He has not taken from any others, even the most miserable of His creatures. That which has never been altogether a blank to them, in which there have been some bright Elysian spots, has become entirely a blank to us. We are men, and therefore we must have a belief in immortality. But we are Christians, believers in a risen Lord and Saviour, and therefore all that lies beyond the grave is to be a mere void of which we know nothing, and which assuredly we shall fill up, as all men have done heretofore, with pictures of our imagination, most of them very gloomy pictures indeed"? III\. I foresee, however, that it may be said, "If you give this force to the words, you must adhere more strictly still to the letter of them. You talk of all men having some hope of a future mingled with their fears of it. But the Apostle speaks of a hope *in Christ*. What could *such* a hope have to do with dreams of Greeks or Goths respecting an Elysium or a Walhalla? Whether they lived after the coming of our Lord, or before, makes no difference: being heathens, they certainly could not hope in Him." Brethren, I have not the least wish to evade this objection. 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 to the Corinthians, but to those with whom he compares himself and them. And I think every other passage in his writings warrants us in supposing that it was no carelessness or haste which led him to adopt this form of expression, that he would not have accounted for it as a grammatical or rhetorical figure of speech. The principle, as I have often endeavoured to show you, which underlies all his teaching, and which exhibits itself nowhere more clearly than in this epistle to the Corinthians, is that the relation of Christ to man is that which explains all the facts of the Gospel; that when He took flesh and dwelt among men, He declared himself to be that King, that Son of God, that Cornerstone of Humanity, of Whom all nations had been dreaming, Whom they had been conceiving under different forms, Whose manifestation in His own true and proper nature all had been desiring. If this be so, I cannot imagine how he could describe any hope which had ever been entertained by any human being, except as a hope in Christ. Like every good gift, the Apostle must have considered it as coming from Christ; like every wish that was right and not evil, as tending towards Him. The phrase "hope *in* Christ" is very comprehensive. It clears away many difficulties. When we enter into the force of it, we understand how men in different latitudes, with all outward circumstances drawing them diverse ways, could cherish the same expectation. There was one common centre from which all were diverging in search of the most contradictory objects, yet to which they were continually recalled; which was drawing them to itself; which each was secretly confessing and bearing witness of, when furthest from it. The gods whom Greeks or Goths worshipped, so far as they were framed out of their own fancies or out of the objects of nature, could have kindled no *hopes* in them, only a vague, inconceivable dread. Whatever hope they had, came from a secret source, a hidden root. It was the acknowledgment that man himself in his inmost being is related to the Son of God, is meant to be partaker of His life, His immortality. The Apostle then might truly say, that if the Corinthians who professed to believe that Jesus was the Christ, made His appearance and His work upon earth an excuse for not looking beyond the earth,—for not regarding Him as the Ruler of all worlds, as the same yesterday and to-day and for ever,—they had parted with some of the hope in Christ which their heathen brethren possessed. IV\. But there is also another, and it seems to me a very ample justification of the Apostle's words. He had a much deeper impression of the misery of the world around him than any person who did not believe in the Gospel could have had. It must have looked to him an immeasurably more distracted place than it could have looked to those who did not believe that God had created all to be members of one body in His Son. The different forms of devil-worship which prevailed in it must have been far more hideous than they could be to one who did not worship a God of perfect charity. The exhibition of all dark and malignant passions in human creatures, answering to those which they supposed to be working in the minds of the superior powers, was revolting to him as it could only be to one who believed that the Spirit of Christ had come among men to make them after His image. And these sights could never become mere sights to him. The wickedness and the misery were not objects which he could contemplate as one who was removed from them. They were the sins and miseries of those whose nature his Lord had taken; Paul was himself a partaker of them, he was conscious of a more inward evil than he could attribute to any of those by whom he was surrounded. There were signs which cheered him, and drew forth his deepest thankfulness that God was working in the midst of this corruption. If not, how did he come to know anything of that Lord with Whom his Jewish pride had so long caused him to strive? If not, how had Churches sprung up in cities once wholly given to idolatry? But of how few members did these Churches consist! How much of the world's evil reproduced itself among them! What fear there was that even a more subtle form of evil than that might develop itself among them! If the theory of the Corinthians was true,—if the Apostle could think that all which Christ came to do was done when a few men were awakened out of their death of sensuality and unbelief, and rose to a new and higher life—he might well call himself of all men the most miserable. For what was there in the spectacle of these few men, however blessed in itself, to console him for the thought of the myriads alive in the world then, who had lived before, who should live hereafter? Feeling as he did their misery so much more intensely than others did, it would absolutely have crushed him if in this life only he had had hope in Christ, if he could have measured the future condition of mankind, or of the individuals who compose any age of human history, merely by anything that he saw or had yet experienced. Supposing indeed we reckon among his experiences that which was the chief of all, his experience of Christ's love to him a sinner, there was that which might give him hope for every one of his fellow creatures. But then that hope could not be limited, as these heretical Corinthians would limit it, by this life or this world. He must suppose that love to be reigning everywhere. Its infinite, incomprehensible nature had been manifested here. Ages upon ages must be given it for its full scope, its complete operation upon those whom it had created and redeemed. If it was shrivelled and contracted into a few years, if it was confined by the benefits which it had conferred upon a few persons within a small circle, the cross of Calvary did not really exhibit the love and wisdom and power of the eternal God as the Apostle had declared that it did; Christ had not risen as the first-fruits of God's redeemed creation; the Church was not the pledge and witness that all things in Heaven and in earth should 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, he would have been of all men most miserable. V\. Those simple and true people, then, who find their belief in Christ a cause of infinite comfort to them in this life—who, in the midst of pain and desertion, feel that they have something which they would not change for all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them,—need not fancy that St. Paul sets at nought this deep conviction of their hearts. He sympathized with it on earth, he sympathizes with it now. Instead of calling upon them to think themselves of all men most miserable, he would bid them give thanks for a present King and Deliverer, for One who makes this earth, with all its confusions, a blessed place, in which they may be well content that their lines are cast, because it is full of tokens of His love and of occasions for serving Him. And if the thought should ever come into their minds, as wild and strange thoughts will come even to the honestest and truest,—"were an angel from Heaven to tell us that there is no future state for us, ought we to give up our faith in Christ?" St. Paul would have answered, "No more than you are to cease to receive warmth from the sun to-day, because you have reason to think that it will not rise on you to-morrow." But he would have added, "If such an angel does come to you, bearing such a message, never mind what credentials he may bring, what miracles he may work. Tell him plainly that he lies. For he will contradict the message which a greater than he, the Lord of Angels, the Son of God, the Son of Man, has brought into our world. He has made yesterdays and to-days and to-morrows into one. He showed to us the Eternal Life, which was with the Father. He must reign till all things are put under His feet. And those who live in the expectation that He will, are of all men the most blessed." VI\. But if there is in our minds a mere selfish satisfaction with what we think we have gained by the death and resurrection of Christ,—if we are content that all things shall go on as they go on now, and that there should be no higher condition for individuals or for mankind,—then the words apply to us in all their force. We are of all men most miserable. We had better be amongst those who expected a Walhalla or a sensual Paradise. We had better be amongst those who were driven by the torments of earth to think there might be a Comforter, though they had never heard of one. We had better be amongst the wildest fanatics who have attempted to establish some polity which they have imagined, upon the ruins of all which they see. For they have a hope. They think that there is a Being somewhere who does not wish evil to go on for ever; who will not allow it to go on for ever. The Being whom we worship is not such a Being. Christ has not manifested His Will in His conflict with Evil, in His victory over it, if Christ is not to make that Will triumphant over all that opposes it, in earth and hell. The faith which we hold, instead of overcoming the world, has been overcome by it. We declare that we believe in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. We really confess the Devil to be the supreme Lord. This is a thought, brethren, which we should often bring before ourselves as we walk our streets, and as we read of what is doing in other parts of the world. Are our hopes in Christ, for those whom we see perishing in filth, in ignorance, in moral debasement, only hopes for this life? Do they depend upon the efficacy of our money, our labours, our prayers? Is the wisdom of Rulers, the godliness of Teachers, the benevolence of Societies, the purity of Churches, all which seems to us to intervene between them and utter, absolute ruin? Oh, then, surely we must be of all men most miserable! For do we not feel day by day how little there is to separate us who pass for respectable Christian people, from these outcasts? Do we not sometimes suspect that our sins are blacker than theirs? Do we not sometimes doubt whether, with their temptations, we should not have plunged into depths of evil which they have not sounded? Do we never think that when God arises to judge the earth, the stewards of His gifts to the world will have a heavier account to render in than those to whom the gifts have never been distributed; who fancied, from our report of Him, that He required much and bestowed little? To think of all the wickedness which is crowded into the most fortunate corner of this earth; to think, for a few instants, of all the crimes which are committed in God's name and for His honour; to think against how few great evils of the world the Church is lifting up her voice, of how many she is herself the instigatrix,—to think of this, and not to feel something very like despair and the palsy of heart and limbs which accompanies despair, is very difficult. It would be impossible, if we were not encouraged and commanded to place our hopes, not in what we are doing, not in what the Church is 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, and Ascension, of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, of the Revelation of Christ as the Judge of quick and dead, we are transported into a region to which our measures are inapplicable. "*He has overcome death; He has taken away sin; He has led captivity captive*;"—what words are these! How far beyond our grasp! And yet the Apostle uses them without hesitation. Our consciences testify that if he had not used them he would not have preached the Gospel which he professed to preach. If we think that *nothing* is given yet; that we are merely to look for something to come, we are most miserable, for the something to come is as shadowy as that which is about us. If we think that *all* has been given,—that we have nothing to long for,—we are most miserable, for that which is good here becomes a lie if it is not the germ of what is to be perfectly good. But if we accept the signs and pledges of a perfect Sacrifice made once for all,—if we feed upon that and give thanks for that,—the vision of Him who died once and reigned for evermore will become brighter and clearer. Oh that the ministers and stewards of Christ's mysteries, while they mourn over their own unfaithfulness, may yet remember that they are His mysteries, not theirs! Then they may encourage you to hope—they may dare themselves to hope 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. [I]{.smallcaps} [alluded]{.smallcaps} last Sunday to the Epistle which we have read this morning. I said that if St. Paul bade the Philippians rejoice at all times, whilst they were dwelling upon this earth, he could not mean to tell the Corinthians that they were the most miserable of all people while they dwelt upon this same earth, and that their only comfort was the hope that they should one day escape from it. But in examining what the passage which had conveyed this impression to some readers did actually mean, it became evident that St. Paul had causes enough for sorrow,—causes enough for saying that if his hopes were limited to the few years which he should spend here, he should be thoroughly wretched. He looked upon the earth as a beautiful earth, rich with tokens of God's love. He looked upon Man as a glorious being, redeemed by the Son of God, united to Him. He looked upon his own calling, as a herald of good news to men, with thankfulness and exultation. But because the earth bore such signs of a gracious Creator in all its order and comeliness, he could not be content that it should bear also such marks of the Destroyer. The Son of Man had united men to Himself, and revealed to them a Father; he could not be content that they should be living as a set of outcasts and orphans. Because his own message was one of such vast and comprehensive blessings,—blessings to unfold themselves through ages out of ages,—he would not have its purpose and fulfilment contracted to the little span of this life and of our experience. I should wish to follow this same train of thought to-day. I can easily conceive that there are many who will accept the passage which has been read to us out of the Epistle to the Philippians as suitable for Christmas-time,—as indicating a kind of festal temper which we should make an effort to cultivate, even when nature looks most wintry, whilst we think of the Nativity of Christ, and connect with that all the old memories of the season. "And yet," they will say, "the effort is an unnatural one; it cannot be sustained for long. An Apostle might contrive to banish from his mind the outward calamities, the inward perplexities, which are harassing us every instant. It is a very saintly, a very desirable frame of mind, no doubt. As such we may admire it at a distance. We may now and then strive to realize it. But the stretched bow will spring back to its ordinary state. Causes of grief are lying very close to us. We may lull it, but we cannot keep it long out of sight. We may turn to pageants to make us forget our funerals, but the hearse will always claim some of the pageantry for itself." These complaints are reasonable. And the preacher must not find fault with the capriciousness of his hearers, if they remind him of these truths when he repeats in their ears the command to rejoice; and if they tell him again that they cannot always be conversing with what is dismal, when he speaks of the shadow of death which is cast over all the works of nature and of man. No doubt such various and opposite objections indicate an inward restlessness. But it is a restlessness which we must have experienced in ourselves, the cause of which we ought well to understand. And we are not acting in the spirit of the Apostles, if we do not recognize the justice of each demand which the discontented spirit makes, if we do not confess that it has a right to sorrow as well as to joy, that it can as little dispense with one as with the other. St. Paul knew this to be the case. If he bade the Philippians rejoice, it was not that he did not understand the multiplied motives they had for sorrow, or that he wished them to be false with themselves and to smother their sorrow. He did not practise that fraud with himself. The text declares that he knew at least as much of one state of mind as the other; only that he found the secret of harmonizing them. He was sorrowing, yet alway rejoicing. I\. It is a paradox; we all feel that it is. Yet those experiences to which I have just alluded, show that we all discern a truth under the paradox; that we all want to find a way of so mingling sorrow and joy together, that neither shall contradict or even weaken the other. We want this secret. Whoever will put us in possession of it, whoever will enable us to turn it to account in the practice of life, will be the greatest of all benefactors to us. You see a number of persons hugging a sorrow, feeding upon 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 in her impulses than she was. You perceive that such indulgence is morbid and dangerous, that it leads to a neglect of action, ultimately to selfishness. But you take, in general, very feeble and unsatisfactory methods of curing what you are sure is a disease. You try, as you say, to dissipate the patient's mind, to present other objects which may cause *the* object on which it dwells to be forgotten. Often you succeed. The grief which is unnatural, merely fostered for self-indulgence or cultivated for the sake of propriety, yields to the discipline which for such a sentiment may have been suitable enough. But something is destroyed by these methods which should have been preserved,—something which was not artificial but inward, not of man's planting but of God's. The waters of Lethe are not those which purge the spirit. They take away much that is best and strongest in it; they leave weeds and mud behind. Depend upon it, sorrow, whatever outward occasions have produced it, has that in it which we need, and cannot afford to part with. The toad, ugly and venomous, carries a jewel which may be worth more to us than all the diamonds of earth. He is a thief and an enemy who would take it from us. I repeat it, brethren, this is so, whatever be the occasion or instrument of producing the sorrow; loss of property, loss of reputation, loss of a friend. Do not say to yourself, "This is a poor, mean occasion for a man to grieve about." Do not say that to your neighbour. He will grieve, you will grieve, on some plea or another, whatever you say to yourself or to him. It is better to be honest. It is a poor thing to play tricks with ourselves, and then put forth a moral to justify the tricks. The loss may be and is a calamity. The grief for it is a gift which you may turn, like all other gifts, into a curse; out of which you may extract the divinest blessing. An illustrious historian of our time said that he could discover in eminent men, of various periods, an impoverishment and decay of heart and intellect dating from a crisis of their lives, when they had wilfully thrown off some great sorrow which might have given them consistency and depth. The question is, whether we shall merely nurse sorrow as if it were our own, as if it were a warrant for disgust and misanthropy, or accept it as a message from above, an Angel of the Covenant, something which is to teach us more of our relations to other men and of our relation to God. It is in this sense, I conceive, that St. Paul was always sorrowing. There is not a trace in any of his Epistles of morbidness. He is always in action. He is thinking for others, feeling for others. He does not stop for an instant in his work to dwell upon the Christians he has persecuted, upon his share in Stephen's death. He goes right onwards. In one most important sense he "*forgets the things that are behind*." He determines that they shall not impede him; that they shall not 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 has been coloured and shaped by his own previous experiences; the whole past is stamped and burnt into his discourse, because that comes directly from his heart. He is the beaten, the flayed man, who alone, according to the poet, is really educated. What he has suffered in himself, enables him to look with straight eyes upon the sufferings of the world in which he is dwelling. With straight eyes, I say,—not with cold hard eyes; not with the eyes of a man who regards suffering as an inevitable, hopeless curse. He regards it as a sign of derangement in that which is essentially and divinely good; therefore it makes him mourn. He regards it as one of the instruments for removing that which is deranged; therefore it cannot make him despair. St. Paul learnt to sorrow for himself when he learnt to hope for himself. He knew the anguish of conscience before; he knew anger with the world before; but he did not know sorrow till he had a revelation of One who cared for him, mourned for him, died for him. There then arose upon him the vision of a Man of Sorrows; then he saw in His sorrow the full, perfect image of the Father from whom He came. And now he could desire nothing better for himself than an ever-increasing share of that sorrow. To enter into it was to enter into the mind of Jesus Christ; yea, to enter into the Nature of God Himself. And therefore all that was firmest and all that was tenderest in St. Paul came from his perpetual sorrow. His firmness; for he could not take any form of suffering as if it were something strange or unnatural. He had communed with it in its first principle; he had seen it embodied and concentrated in the Passion of Christ. He was nerved for what should be appointed for him, nerved by the very sense of his inability to bear anything except in Christ's strength. He could not grudge suffering to those whom he cared for most; it was a sign and pledge of their adoption. But again, this was the secret of his tenderness. No kind of suffering stood aloof from him. It was his own; it was his Master's. He was to bear it with Him and for the Church. It was his vocation, his privilege. He would not cheat himself of it by considering what was the occasion of the sorrow. If it was the sin of the man who had incurred it, that was a reason for more sorrow and more sympathy. He might not indeed deprive the sinner of the correction which he needed; he might not refuse to inflict the correction himself. But he could judge no man. All the seeds of sin lay in him, ready to start forth. He had known a deeper sin in himself. To feel for it and sorrow for it was to sorrow for the sin of the world, for that which Christ had come to take away. II\. Now a man who is always sorrowing in this way, *must* have been also always rejoicing. Here is the interpretation of St. Paul's great paradox. He did not put it forth to startle us; it was the most natural expression of what he felt and knew. There must be an under pressure equal to the upper pressure. Such a weight of sorrow could only have been sustained by a joy that was commensurate with it. We are always confessing this truth in one way or another. The most frivolous person says, "I have had much trial of late; I must have more than ordinary pleasure and amusement that I may endure it." We often denounce such language, or the actions that correspond to it, as heartless; but there is a meaning in it, though an inverted one. The joy which we seek for to quench sorrow, is on the whole a poor flimsy joy; not the joy which man is entitled to claim, not a joy which penetrates far below the surface. "That joy which in our embers is something that doth live," that joy which lies at the very root of our being, which is as necessary for human life as moisture is for vegetable life——that joy which the frosts of the world are seeking to kill, and which would perish utterly in every human being if Heaven did not watch over it,—that joy does not seek to escape from sorrow, but which encounters it and finds its own strength in enduring it. St. Paul perceived an infinite sorrow in the world, a sorrow originating in man, but which all nature sympathizes with and sends back in ten thousand echoes. But he perceived an infinite joy, which also is in us, not in nature, but to which, if it is in us, the trees and flowers and streams and hills will all respond. And as he found in the Son of Man the climax of all human sorrow,—as he saw in the darkness which covered the land from the sixth to the ninth hour Nature's witness that for that moment her light as well as the light of Man had been quenched,—so he owned in that same Son of Man and Son of God 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 the life had come by which all creatures were quickened and gladdened. As he recollected what the work of the Sorrower on earth had been,—how every act He had done was to take away some leprosy, or palsy, or fever, or blindness from the children of man, some death-anguish from mothers or sisters,—how every word had revealed what mysteries of the divine Kingdom lay hid in the sowing of seeds, in the work of the husbandman, in the common food, in the marriage feast,—it was not possible but that he should believe that there was another cup besides that which His Father had given Him, and which He drained to the dregs. That water of which He spake of as at Jacob's well, which should be in men a well of water springing up to everlasting life——that water of which at the Feast of Tabernacles He called all that thirsted to come and drink,—that surely was a divine Joy, such as only the Spirit of God could awaken, but which the spirit of man was created to receive and to pour forth. Every hour that Jesus was walking among men, He was giving them some foretaste of this joy, some token that He came to make them inheritors of it. But there was a special hour in which we are told He rejoiced in His own Spirit. And it was thus He expressed the cause and subject of that rejoicing. "*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 wonderful record the secret of St. Paul's continual joy in the midst of his continual sorrow. He, like his Lord, mourned over the efforts which the wise and prudent made to shut out the light of Heaven, building Babel systems of policy, of philosophy, of theology,—causing men to mistake their unjust and cruel mandates for the Divine decrees. He, like his Lord, rejoiced that the babes of the earth,—fishermen and tent-makers,—had been permitted to show forth the will of Him who governs all, to declare that He was not the tyrant which they had conceived Him, but a Father who sought to bring back His children to the Home from which they had wandered. He, too, like his Lord, could find the most perfect comfort in referring this discomfiture of the proud, this exaltation of the lowly, to that Will which is only good, and designs only good. And he, too, could perceive that that Will was the Will of a Father commanding, the Will of a Son submitting,—that in their perfect harmony consists the harmony of the universe; that to know the Son by the revelation of the Father, and the Father by the revelation of the Son, the Spirit who proceedeth from both being the witness of their eternal unity, is to discern where sorrow and joy meet again in the ocean from which they first issued. And for us, too, brethren, they are different streams, at each of which we have need to drink; by plunging in one of which we may learn how near it is to the other. Now at this coming Christmastime let none of us refuse the draughts of sorrow which the recollections of other years may bring with them. Let us not steel our hearts,—as if that were a duty to the season, a compliance with the Apostolical precept,—against the intrusion of faces and forms that the eye can gaze on no more. Oh! rather let us welcome them; let us thankfully accept their visits; let us rejoice to detain them. Do they bring with them not merely the sense of smiles that cannot lighten the circle again, but the thought of blessings abused, of hard words spoken, of acts done that can never be recalled? Oh, cherish that form of sorrow too! 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 which is the world's or the devil's gift will come the hearty, genial repentance which is God's. We shall not receive the forgetfulness which is a curse, but the forgiveness which is the divinest of blessings. It will issue from the throne of the Father of all, it will descend upon all through Him who was born of the Virgin, and who was 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 which hope fosters, out of which hope springs. They bid us mourn that we have so little believed the song of the angels, that we have done so little to give glory to God on the earth, to spread peace on earth, to establish goodwill among men. They say that even now that may become our work, and that if it is our work we shall sorrow with Christ's sorrow, and so enter into Christ's joy. For Christmas now, as of old, tells us that we are to be always rejoicing. Nothing in the past, nothing in the present, nothing in the future,—no aspects of our own life, no aspects of the world's life—are to hinder the obedience to that command. For it is obedience to a *command*; not the gratification of an instinct; not the observance of a tradition; not the assumption of a countenance which is glad to-day because it was glad of yore. Christmas Day, year after year, declares that God would reveal to the babes of the earth—to serfs and prodigals and outcasts—that which is hidden from the wise and prudent—the length and breadth of His own compassion, His nearness to the sons of men. Christmas Day declares that we are not to go into heaven or hell to seek Him; that He seeks us, that He comes and dwells among us; that He claims fellowship with our weakness, our sorrow, our death. *Even so, Father*, it says, *for so it has seemed good in Thy sight*. So hast Thou been pleased to reveal Thy Son to us in the lowliness of our flesh, 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 manifested Him to us in this wonderful birth. We could not have known Thee if He had not manifested Thee to us in His life, His death, His resurrection, His ascension; in the gift of the Comforter. But 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 is the greatest. We pray Thee, by sorrow and by joy, to soften and subdue us, till we have been changed into the likeness of that Child that was 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; Who shall make all subject to His kingdom of righteousness, and 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. [Are]{.smallcaps} we to honour those who die as defenders and champions of a false creed? The question is often asked; I think we are not always considerate enough in the answer we make to it. I\. The most common and admitted answer contains, however, a deep truth; perhaps if we search it to the bottom, we may find it quite satisfactory. "The Martyr," it is said, "is not, first of all, the man who *dies* for a cause or an opinion. He is a *Witness*. The worth of the sacrifice he makes must depend upon the worth of the witness he bears. If that is good for nothing, we have no right to say that his suffering is good for much. We may pay a certain respect to courage or constancy even in a criminal; but surely it is the greatest confusion of terms to speak of his martyrdom." Such has been the plea which Romanists have urged against the claims of those who died in the Marian persecution to be called Martyrs; the plea upon which Protestants refuse any honour to those who have suffered for Transubstantiation or the Papal Supremacy; the plea which induces English Churchmen to withhold any admiration from Puritans or Quakers, whom they deprived of the means of living, if not of life; the plea on the strength of which vehement asserters of the rights of conscience express only the smallest conceivable compassion for the Episcopalians during the Commonwealth, and offer all possible excuses for those who punished them as Malignants; the plea which satisfies all these classes that Jews, Mahometans, Heathens, or Sceptics, however many sacrifices they may have made for their convictions, should be looked upon, wholly or chiefly, as victims to a frightful delusion. I have said that the maxim which leads to these conclusions appears to me a right and a valuable one. The more we clear our minds of the notion that falsehood of any kind is worthy of sympathy or can lead to any good results,—the more we cast to the winds that sort of sentimental tolerance which is only another name for indifference to truth,—an indifference out of which no act of courage or devotion can come, and the natural fruit of which is a contempt for all such acts,—the better it will be for the sincerity of our minds. By all means, therefore, let us adhere steadfastly to the doctrine that the Martyr is a witness, and is good himself and useful to mankind only so far as he is a witness against the Spirit of Lies, for the true God. 1\. But though I can imagine no exception to this doctrine, I cannot set it up in opposition to those strong instincts which lead us to reverence every man who submits to penalties in mind, body, or estate, rather than profess anything which he does not believe,—rather than let go his hold of anything which he does believe. I think such a man is and must be a witness against falsehood and for truth, against the Devil and for God. That which he refuses to acknowledge may be a precious, a divine principle; but his acceptance of it at my bidding may be not the least precious or divine. The opinion to which he clings may be poor and worthless; but if he abandons it because force or fashion is against it, he is parting with much more than an opinion; he is giving up the veracity of his character; he is cutting himself off from fellowship with that which is high and worthy; he is disqualifying himself from attaining hereafter to a clear and full perception of facts. On this ground, were there no other, I dare not quarrel with any one who calls those who have opposed us and have suffered for their opposition, *Martyrs*. No amount of suffering, however cruelly inflicted or patiently borne, is a justification of the name; a testimony for moral honesty is a justification of it. 2\. But further, it is a witness that we need, and that we cannot dispense with. Men in the ascendant, who have got things settled their own way, very soon cease to *believe* that which they hold most strongly. They have voted certain propositions to be true or not true. The Ayes or the Noes have carried it. Henceforth the true thing comes to mean very little more than what the majority think to be the true thing. No doubt there are members of the majority who can give very plausible reasons,—perhaps very sound reasons,—in favour of the decision. Those reasons others commit to memory, and are able when their cause is attacked to produce. But the opinion about the likelihood of certain conclusions—when it is strongest and most intense—has little in common with the faith which lays hold of a fact, of a principle, as of a rock which is the only refuge from drowning. In times of ease, faith and opinion are quickly confounded; those who assail the opinions are God's blessed witnesses for the distinction between them; His instruments for bringing home the question to each one,—"Is *thine* an opinion, or a belief?" For these men will not be determined by a show of hands; they will not be bound by public opinion; they say that truth is not identical with that; is not to be measured by that. Do you differ with them so far? Do you reckon truth and general opinion to be the same? If you do,—if you have not a sense of their difference, in many cases of their radical opposition, fixed in your mind, you renounce the New Testament, you treat all that we are told of the first proclamation of the Gospel as a fable. Nothing brings the difference between Truth and our opinion about it into the full light of consciousness, like the rage which we feel that a doctrine we maintain should be assailed,—like the eagerness we feel to silence and crush the assailant. Should I have 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 which prompts my desire to stifle the contradiction? I am not sure about the issue. I may be maintaining a lie after all. And then, if it should be exposed! Verily, brethren, that is not faith. It is what the Bible would call unbelief. 3\. Again while a dominant party is thus in danger of losing faith in mere opinion, the man who suffers generally, perhaps always, finds out that there is something besides and beyond opinion. If he does not, I think he will scarcely be foolish enough to bear death, or even any great diminution of his means of earthly enjoyment. I must prefer a visible, tangible thing to a mere notion of my mind. Any one who can cast away visible and tangible things has discovered,—he has discovered because God had shown him,—that there is a substance, an invisible, intangible reality, nearer to him, dearer to him, than all which his senses report of, and that no notions of his own, or of any man's, or of all men together, may plunder him of that, or tear him from it. And therefore, as those priests and laymen, for whom the fires in Smithfield were kindled by Mary and Bonner, did not die for certain Protestant notions of theirs, but because they would not exchange faith in a living Christ for certain notions which the Romanists would have imposed on them; so I am persuaded Sir Thomas More did not lay his head on the block for a certain notion about the Papal Supremacy, but because he feared to give up his faith in another Kingdom which was higher than Henry's. And though we may be persuaded that the assertion of the royal authority was necessary, not only for the independence of the nation, but for the vindication of that higher Kingdom from a system which was disguising and distorting it, we may also admit that such a witness as this great man bore was especially demanded at that moment; and may have been indispensable to the civil as well as the ecclesiastical freedom of after-times. I would make a similar remark respecting any Romanist who suffered apparently for that other tenet of his which most scandalizes us. When that tenet comes forth clothed in anathemas, denouncing all who will not embrace it, cutting men off from Christ's Sacraments for the sake of an insolent logical conceit, all hail to the men who swear that they will die rather than accept it! But when a man, instead of forcing it upon another, says it is connected in his mind with a belief in Christ's person and sacrifice, and that therefore *he* will die rather than renounce it, such a man may deserve to be called a witness for that Person and that Sacrifice. He may not only be doing homage to them in his own heart; he may be telling us that our mere denial of his notion is worth as little as the notion itself—that if we have nothing better to live or die upon than that, it would be good to change places with him. So also in regard to the Puritans and the Quakers who bore imprisonment or banishment for the sake of their convictions. I suspect we cheat ourselves of a Divine message,—of a solemn admonition, and therefore of a great blessing,—if we pretend that they were only exalting a private judgment or opinion of theirs, and were sustained by confidence in that judgment or opinion against the tyranny which they underwent from the State or the Church. The glorification of private judgment comes afterwards,—in the day of ease or of success. The successors of these sufferers might say, "*We have a right to think as we like*;" *they* said no such thing; they did not even maintain what there is of worth in that assertion as against civil rulers. They said, "We *cannot* think as we like. We must speak the thing which is given us to speak. You are forgetting and wishing to stifle some truth which we are compelled, by a higher power than yours, to declare." They were, I conceive, doing this; they were uttering truths which we did not care for, and yet which were involved in our professions,—were necessary to our spiritual existence. They might also be denying truths which it behoved us to grasp with all our might. These could not be hurt by any opposition; *we* were doing what in us lay to hurt them, by persecuting on behalf of them. When I say *we*, I am confounding, you may complain, our age, which does not persecute, with the age of our forefathers, which did. In speaking so, I believe 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 those very testimonies which they wished to silence, have been our teachers. Yet how imperfectly have we learnt God's lesson, that if we try to promote His truth in some other way than His, He will punish the disobedience! There is an extreme case. I will not pass it over, because the moral it contains is so awful. May an utter unbeliever, by sufferings inflicted upon him for that unbelief, be a witness in the sense of which I have been speaking hitherto? I hold that he may for this reason; Christian communities have at different times so represented the character of God, that He has been confounded with the Spirit of Evil. Their vile acts have proved that to be true of them which St. Stephen charged upon the Jews, that they were not offering sacrifice to the God of our fathers, but to Remphan or Moloch. Now if this was so, surely God might draw—surely He has drawn—a confession of Himself, a renunciation of His enemy, from the lips and hearts of those who in terms were denying Him. I can comfort myself with the thought that those who would not recant their Atheism to accept our Atheism, might be making a deeper recantation than we know, or than 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 apparently accompanied with the wish for an utter anarchy, may really have meant the resolution, "I will arise and go to my *Father*." II\. I think, brethren, that we should understand this whole subject better, and should be relieved from many perplexities by which we are tormented when we first approach the consideration of it, if we would examine it by the light of that passage of Scripture which has occupied us to-day. St. Stephen we all feel to be *the* Church Martyr, *the* martyr of the New Testament. Of no other person who died for the faith have we so distinct a picture; we know exactly of what he was accused; how he defended himself; what provocation he gave to them who pronounced his sentence; what were his last words. No one compels us more to recollect the meaning of the title by which he is described; his stoning cannot for a moment be separated from his testimony. That testimony is contained in the words of my text. We may indeed say that it denotes a special privilege accorded to a saint of the Apostolic age; by treating his position as singular, we may do what in us lies to cut ourselves off from the truth which he proclaimed. But the Church forbids us to take this course. By associating St. Stephen's day with the festival of the Nativity she makes the vision of the Son of Man a common blessing. By praying in the Collect that that may be the consolation of all who suffer for the truth, she signifies that no other will avail to support any one of us in this day. And so she illustrates St. Stephen's argument from Jewish history; so she shows us why that argument, addressed to a Jewish Sanhedrim or a Jewish mob, must have ended in their stopping their ears, gnashing their teeth, taking up stones to cast at him. For why did Stephen refer to Abraham and the patriarchs, to Moses and the prophets, to Solomon and the temple? Why, but to declare that the living God had been revealing Himself to men and through men; that every event of their history, every word of their holy book, every institution of which they boasted, implied a relation between God and man, contained a promise that the relation should be fully manifested in a Son of Man? Why, but that he might bring home the truth to his hearers, that they were not believing in the God of Abraham, the God of Moses and the prophets, the God Whose glory filled the temple; that they were not believing in a living God; that they were worshipping a mere notion, or quickening that dead notion into a dark cruel hater of mankind, a favourer only of their tribes? Therefore it was inevitable that He, who came as *the* Man, who called Himself the Son of Man, who entered into the inmost fellowship and sympathy with men, should be treated by them as an enemy of their race; and that when He called Himself the Son of God, and affirmed that he who had seen Him had seen the Father, they should denounce Him as a blasphemer,—they should hand Him over to the Romans as a rebel. There was no escaping from the evidence. It went straight home 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. And therefore what they accused Stephen of prophesying would certainly be fulfilled. The customs which Moses had delivered to them, having lost their significance, being no longer tokens of a people in whom all the families of the earth were to be blessed, must be changed; the temple, being deserted by the Divine Presence, must become a mere heap of stones, not one of which would remain upon the other. Now when Stephen said, "*Behold, I see heaven opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God*," that truth which he had been proclaiming in all his discourse, which he had perceived to be the subject and the climax of all Revelation, presented itself to him just as actually as any visible thing presents itself to 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 who stood before him, a Person upon whom he might call, in whom he might trust; he was sure that it was life and substance he was in contact with, 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, One in whom God could look well pleased upon man, in whom men could look up to God and be at peace. It was a Son of Man, the fellow-worker and fellow-sufferer with every man, with the whole race; One who had broken down the distinction whilst He was upon earth between Publican and Pharisee; One who would break down the distinction, older and more sacred still, between Jew and Gentile. Was it not an opening of heaven which disclosed such a union of manhood with Godhead? Did not that opening of heaven foretell a shaking of all religions,—of all polities upon earth, which stood on some other foundation than this; which either severed man from God, or tried to fashion a God out of the notions of men? Yes! this was the witness, the distinctive Christian witness; that which it was worth while to die for, that which 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 forth on the earth to perish, if it was an opinion of his, or of any man, or of any age; to establish itself, if it was part of the constitution of things,—if it lay at the foundation of man's being,—if it was involved in the Will and Nature of God,—though the opinions of any man or any age should set it at nought. Would it, then, have surprised him to hear that this truth might have to be vindicated in after-days, as it was in his days, against consistories of religious doctors maintaining their own exclusive rights in opposition to the great human rights; substituting their dead systems for a living Creator and Father; denying that God had really made Himself known to men, or that there is really a way from man to God? Would he have wondered that even those, who had only a glimpse of one side of the truth which possessed him, might yet count that glimpse more precious than all the honours and advantages which the world could offer them; 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 who were meant to be the guardians of it? Would he not count it inevitable that any society which had learnt to regard truth as a mere dominant opinion,—to be enforced as other opinions are enforced,—would lose its connection with Him who is the Truth; would become hard-hearted and inhuman, therefore un-Christian, and would need to be reminded, even by those who do not bear the name of Christ, what He is and what He came into the world to do? Here, then, is an ample justification, both of the maxim which different religious bodies have made an excuse for denying martyrs to each other, and for the rebellion against their narrowness in our consciences. St. Stephen's witness is the witness which the Church of God is to bear upon earth. All these bodies are right in affirming that the true martyr—the martyr who deserves honour and reverence from men—bears that witness and no other. They are wrong only in pretending that they have been faithful stewards of this Divine message to men; that their divisions, hatreds, persecutions, have not marred it, broken it, inverted it; that each has not often been used by the Wisdom of God to bring forth some witness of it which the other has suppressed or mangled; that there has not been a cry rising out of the depths of the human heart,—often a cry of bitter wailing and cursing against them all—which has also, if we interpret it according to the teachings of Scripture, the same significance. But this would be a very unpractical conclusion, if it did not lead each of us to ask himself, "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, and that He has revealed God to man, and that He stands at the right-hand of God?" I think, brethren, no people can less escape from that inquiry than we, the members of the English Church. I think no persons have less right to say that their circumstances are not favourable to the full understanding of the testimony,—are not encouragements to the full proclamation of it. By every act and service, from Advent to Trinity,—by the language of our Confessions, Prayers, Thanksgivings,—by our Creeds and Sacraments—do we solemnly avouch, Sunday after Sunday, day after day, our belief that there is verily a Son of Man, one in all things with men, Who has justified and glorified our race at the right hand of God. If those Confessions and Prayers and Thanksgivings are taken from us, or materially altered, I believe it will be because this witness is offensive to the exclusiveness of this or that class or school, because they cannot endure to have a Person set continually before them instead of notions; a deliverance which is human and universal, not which we can boast of as ours. So long as Creeds were enforced by any penalties or disabilities, so long their virtue as testimonies to the true Head of man, to the real state of mankind, was necessarily hidden. They were to be received as the formulas of a certain religion, not as a Gospel to all nations and kindreds. Everything which has deprived them of their fictitious power has added to their actual power. The suffering spirit of man, that in man which cries and sighs against the intolerable burden of its own dividing conceits and fantasies, as well as against the tyranny of sects and schools and doctors, will in time learn to recognise them as no utterances of our beggarly opinions,—as no mere heirlooms of the past,—as no inventions of schoolmen, in their hour of triumph, to keep the heart and reason of men within their fences; but as voices from their brothers in other days to them, inviting them to break through all opinions and traditions and forms whatsoever, which hinder them from seeing the Son of Man as their representative and advocate at the right hand of God. And therefore I doubt not that, in our day or in other days, any who are raised up to testify on behalf of the truth which enabled St. Stephen to fall quietly asleep, with a prayer for his country and for those who were stoning him, will always find these Creeds mighty aids and comforts in their discourses to the people, as well as in their solitary hours. Still less can I doubt that the Bible, in its plain history, stripped of all refinements, will be to them, as the early part of it was to St. Stephen, the chief strengthener of their faith,—the great weapon against all artificial, notional, exclusive religion. If there were such fighters, this, I think, by degrees if not at once, they would discover to be their armoury. But where are they? Amidst 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 look for that testimony—supposing it did come forth—to be anything but a feeble or inconsistent one? Judging according to human calculation, there never was a time when such men were more demanded, or were less likely to appear. But we are not to judge according to human calculations. This is God's own cause, and He will take care of it. In places of which we know nothing, by processes of education which we cannot guess, He may have been preparing His witnesses. In the very year that is coming they may appear in our land, or in lands which we suppose, in our vanity, need reformation more. Whenever or wherever they arise, the old precedents will apply to their case. The Christian religious world will regard them as the Jewish religious world regarded Stephen. They will be denounced as wishing to overthrow institutions which will be dearer immeasurably to them than to their accusers. But they will speak with power to the hearts of men who need a Son of Man. They will be sure, even when their own vision is weakest, that the heavens will one day be opened, and that the Son of Man will be 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]{.smallcaps} Collect, Epistle, and Gospel which were read yesterday, and have been read again to-day, connect the old world with the new; the obedience of the Jew with the obedience of the Christian. The obedience of Jesus to the Law is the link between them. We are taught that we have an interest in Circumcision, because He submitted to it; we are taught that Circumcision, in its highest sense, belongs to the citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, the children of the New Dispensation. The subject in all its aspects, historical and personal, is of the deepest importance. It is not one which a preacher should pass by, under pretence that the services of the Church treat it far more satisfactorily than he can. We *may* carry away from these services a vague impression that there is some likeness and some difference between our position and that of the Jew. We *may* ascertain *what* the likeness is, and so rise to a full perception of the difference. We may content ourselves with phrases about a formal and literal obedience and a moral obedience. We may learn *why* one is better than the other; how we may exchange one for the other. I know no meditation more suitable for a new year, which should always combine memories with hopes, repentance for the past with manly and humble resolutions for the future. I have chosen a passage from the hundred and nineteenth Psalm, which expresses the feelings of a true Israelite respecting the law of his fathers—the Law under which he was born. It is one out of a great number all referring to the same topic,—all exhibiting the same character. Sometimes *the Law, the Commandments, the Statutes* of the Lord may seem as if they occupied the whole thought of the writer; but *Understanding, Knowledge, Sight*—these words recur just as often,—recur always in relation to the others. "*Give me understanding, that I may keep thy Law. Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy Law*." You perceive how little indication is here of a dry, formal, mechanical submission to a mere rule. It appears to be assumed that the law cannot be observed unless there is a faculty which enters into its meaning. It appears as if the great reward of obedience to the law were not something external or accidental, but the capacity of discovering the mind of the Lawgiver. 1\. Now whence did the Jew derive this apprehension? Was he not placed under a rigid, unbending rule, which proceeded, he was told, from a divine authority, which it was death to transgress? Could such a law as this be an exercise for the understanding? Must it not simply have awakened in him an intense terror, lest he should consciously or unconsciously break any of its precepts; lest he should incur any of the fearful penalties which it threatened? Have not we reason to know that this was actually the effect of the Law upon one who reverenced it beyond any of his countrymen,—who *as touching the righteousness of it was blameless*? Does not St. Paul tell us that it lay upon him as a heavy, intolerable curse? Did he not receive Christ expressly as the deliverer from that curse? And is it not clear that he used this language not of the ceremonial law, but of the moral? For does he not dwell especially upon the words, "*Thou shalt not covet*," as frightening him,—nay, as awakening in him the very sin which they denounced? Surely he never delighted in the law, as David says that he did; surely he never can have prayed that his eyes might be opened *to see wondrous things out of it*: for what would have been disclosed to him but the blackness of darkness and death? 2\. It might appear at first a very strange answer to these inquiries to say, David learned this secret about the Law from the Covenant of Circumcision. For St. Paul was circumcised the eighth day, and St. Paul's great fight after his conversion was with those who boasted of their circumcision. And yet I believe you will find that to be the true answer; one which, if we look fully into the meaning of it, will explain the facts which seem so puzzling and contradictory, will reconcile the experience of David with the experience of St. Paul. "God Himself—the unseen God," so spoke that rite which the children of Abraham had received from their ancestor, "has chosen you to be His people. There are tendencies in you which are earthly, sensual, idolatrous. He has not chosen *these*, He has chosen *you*, that He may separate you from these; that He may overcome them in you; that He may give you your true and proper rights as men; that He may save you from sinking into animals yourselves; that He may save you from worshipping animals, or anything—even the most vast and glorious things which you see with your eyes; that He may teach you to worship Him." 3\. Here was the foundation of the Israelite's life—a Revelation of the righteous God; a sign and pledge that the righteous God cared for his fathers and him; a sign that the great proof of His care would be the redemption of them from low, grovelling habits, from the tyranny of the senses, and from all the inclinations which bow down to the senses and serve them. Here was that Covenant of God, which so long preceded the Law that was written on tables,—a Covenant that was altogether living and personal, made by a personal guide and friend with the man himself and with his seed after him; associating itself with the life of the family, with all household sympathies; denouncing those tempers and habits which would sever brother from brother, children from their fathers. This was the Covenant which all violations of the tie of brotherhood, all rebellions of children against parents, helped to interpret; seeing that they manifestly proceeded from forgetfulness of it. Brothers thought they could keep the peace with each other, though they did not remember who had made them brothers; children thought the mere instinct of affection would keep them attached to their father, though they did not remember who had created the relationship, who had bestowed the affection. It did not prove so. The instinct of self-indulgence, or of getting good things for themselves, was too strong for their sympathies. It was shown that there could be no family union in any true sense of the word, if there were not a God to uphold it. 4\. Such were the lessons of patriarchal history, such lessons were brought home to each Jew, who was willing to receive them, by his own personal experience. Supposing he had taken them home to his heart, supposing he had become deeply convinced that the living God, just because he watched over the nation, and desired the well-being of each of its members, was making him aware of those evils which were fatal to true fellowship, fatal to his own manliness and blessedness, was promising to uphold him against these evils and overcome them; suppose the Israelite thoroughly believed that the greatest misery which could befall him was to lose hold of this gracious, loving God, and to become the servant of false gods,—what would he think of the Law? I do not know that he would be careful to distinguish one part of it from another. Such distinctions would reveal themselves to him by degrees. He would believe that all of it—what is called the local or ceremonial part, as well as the more universal and permanent—indicated the vigilance and wisdom of a Being who was devising the means, which He knew to be fittest, for preserving His people from the dangers by which they were beset, especially from their own downward propensities. He would see clearly that these propensities,—the idolatrous propensities first of all, carelessness about the name of the unseen God, the forgetfulness of His distinction of work and rest, the neglect of parents, the indifference to life, the breach of the marriage vow, violation of the neighbour's landmark, the false witness against his character, coveting his possessions,—were leading individuals and nations down to death. Therefore to be warned of these, to be told of their issues, amidst thunders and lightnings, to have the warnings laid up for all generations in fixed letters, on tables of stone, in the Tabernacle which was the witness of God's perpetual presence among them, was a new proof that no restiveness, coldness, distrust, rebellion on the part of His creatures had alienated Him from them; that His punishments, like His gifts, were all designed to break their stubbornness and to work out their reformation. And so the lesson, which is the lesson of the whole Bible,—of the Old Testament as much as the New, that Faith is the only foundation of obedience, that it is impossible truly to obey a Being whose character you do not entirely trust——to whom you attribute caprice, any inclination that is arbitrary and not righteous became rooted in their inmost convictions, gathering strength from their own evil deeds, from the evil deeds of their countrymen, from the evil deeds of the heathen, all alike being the fruits of suspicion of the Being who, in one way or another, had been revealing His goodness to them all. And what will follow from such a conviction, and from the exercise of the trust which it pronounced to be so reasonable an exercise,—to be *the* exercise which God asks of men,—but a desire to know more and more of the purpose and significance of His Law, to see more and more how truly it was the Law upon which He had constituted human society, to see more and more how it expressed His own nature? "*Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold these wondrous things out of Thy Law*." 5\. But now suppose a Jew entirely to lose sight of this great meaning of Circumcision—of this great witness which it bore against and for himself,—suppose him to look upon it merely as a sign of the Separation between him and the other people of the earth, of the hatred which God bore to them, of the partiality which He felt out of pure arbitrariness for a certain race; under what aspect would the Law come forth to him? First of all, he would glorify himself upon it as much as upon the Covenant. It was part of the national inheritance. "Poor miserable Gentiles! God has not chosen that they should know anything of it! They must perish for the want of it." "Indeed! and what then is to become of thee, child of the Covenant?—of thee, who hast this Law, who boastest of it? It says, *Thou shalt not covet*. Dost not thou covet? Dost thou covet less, for knowing that the sin is forbidden? Dost not thou covet *more*? And is the Law then not true? Does it not mean what it says? Does it denounce others, and excuse thee? Oh, think of the trumpet that sounded loud and long when it was proclaimed; of the burning mountain; of the lightning and thunder! Were they not all directed against thee? Will not they find thee out?" 6\. Such was the aspect of the Law to Saul of Tarsus, the Hebrew of the Hebrews,—the man who thought that the Covenant and the Law were devised against the Gentiles. So was it shown to him that he had that in him which every Gentile had—a nature that would not be subject to the Law of God, that hated it. But so, also,—more wonderful discovery still—it was shown him that he had that within him which delighted in the Law of God, which acknowledged that it was altogether good, which desired to obey it. The question was, Does God identify *me* with that which is evil, or with that which is good; with that which fights against Him, or with that which 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 that in me which cries out against the evil; which would pray—if it knew how to pray, to whom it should pray—for deliverance from it? 7\. "*I thank my God*," he exclaims, "*through Jesus Christ, our Lord*." Accepting Him as the revealer of God's will and purpose to men, as the manifestation of God, as the daysman between God and man, I do verily know that God does not desire to damn me for the evil to which I have yielded and am yielding, though He will damn that evil for ever and ever; that He is seeking to save me—this spirit, this inner man, which protests against it—out of its dominion. I thank God through Jesus Christ, who has perfectly fulfilled the Law, not in the spirit of a slave, but of a child; who has submitted to all its requisitions, because He knew that they were contrived for the benefit and elevation of men; who bore its punishments, that we might bear them. I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord, because He, as the Head and Redeemer of our race, claims us as sons of God, and bestows on us the Spirit of sonship, which is His own Spirit. 8\. Here then, in the first place, was the reconciliation of St. Paul with David. He had learnt, as David had learnt, that distinction between the flesh and the spirit, of which Circumcision was the sign. He had learnt to regard God's Covenant as an assurance of help to the spirit against the flesh. He had learnt, as David had learnt, that God is a Deliverer out of bondage, as the first commandment declared that He was. And so, when Saul's conscience most reproached him with sin, the Law confirmed the verdict, and he was shut up apparently in a hopeless prison. He had learnt to invoke the Lawgiver; to tell Him all that he had done and all that he was; to ask for a clean heart and a right spirit; that he might be true in his inward parts, and might know wisdom secretly. So far he was recovering his Jewish standing-ground; he was changing the lore of the rabbis for the lore of kings and prophets; he was perceiving that there were wondrous things hid in the Law, which only God could open his eyes to behold. 9\. But he could not attain this position without attaining a lower and a higher one. He could not acquire the dialect of the kings and prophets till he had confessed a Crucified Man as the King and the Prophet; till he had owned Him as the Lord of his own spirit, the Lord of his nation, the Lord over men. He must continue to regard the Law as his enemy, and the God of Abraham as His enemy;—while persecuting on behalf of Judaism, he must renounce the Jewish faith,—unless he could believe that One had come into the world who delighted to do the will of God, who had His Law within His heart, who was content to offer His soul and body that God's Law might be written also in the hearts of men, that God's will might be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Was it a great humiliation for the righteous Paul to make this confession? In making it he took up a position *higher* than that of David and the prophets. He claimed to be himself, not a servant, but a son; his power to delight in the Law came from this, that he could dare to call the Author of it his Father; that he could receive it, with all its thunders and lightnings, as the message from a Father who is determined that the enemies of His children shall be put down and exterminated. 10\. In this process of discovery, therefore, the discovery of a new covenant is involved,—a covenant with sons; but yet a covenant containing a pledge of all the same war with evil, of all the same wrath against it, of all the same separation from it, as the covenant with servants. But for whom was the Covenant designed? Who might dare to call themselves by the audacious name, Sons of God? Stripped bare of all his individual, all his national pretensions, forced to regard the Law as directed against *his* sin, the Covenant as a separation between him and his evil nature, there was nothing left for St. Paul 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 the flesh of man, having died the death of man, must be declared to be the Head of every man. It must be the right and duty of every man to confess himself a member of Christ; it must be the right and duty of every man to thank God, through Jesus Christ, for having adopted him into His family, for having promised to take him under His government and to give him the true circumcision of the spirit. There could be no limit to St. Paul's gospel, unless he denied the facts of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection. There could be no danger in asserting men to be Sons of God, unless the further message was suppressed, that He who claimed them as sons and accepted them as pure and righteous in the only-begotten Son, took them under His education and gave them His Spirit, to make them aware of their parentage and to destroy whatever in them was inconsistent with it. That is the Baptismal Covenant; so it interprets our existence to us; so it interprets the condition of mankind. 11\. This doctrine, in its length and breadth, the Church has been teaching us in the last week, and will continue to teach us during the present. The Circumcision comes between Christmas Day and the Epiphany. The ground is laid in the revelation of the Divine Word, of the only-begotten Son, in our flesh. There we have the true regenerate constitution of humanity; announced by angels, made known to shepherds in the manger of Bethlehem. Then follows the witness borne by the old dispensation, not *against* universality, but *for* distinction; the witness that man is a spiritual being; that the constitution of man is a spiritual constitution; that what is base, selfish, separating in man, will not submit to it and must perish. So we arrive—by the Jewish road, which is straighter and nearer than all bye-roads—at the full manifestation of the Redeemer and King to all the Nations; at the prayer—in which David's prayer, "*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 have no intention of entering this afternoon on the subject of the festival which suggested that prayer. The Circumcision is quite enough for one day. I hope you will have seen, that the Apostle who teaches us that we "*are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands*," was not trifling with words, or merely using a Jewish analogy, which was suitable for his time, not for ours. He was giving the very sense of the old institution, as it presented itself to the seers of his land, as it affected all their history; he was giving the result of a long, humbling, elevating experience of his own. And he was teaching us exactly what we have needed in every past year, what we shall need in this. The flesh that resists Law, human and divine, that will not be subject to it, is in all of us. You may coerce it by punishments; you may make law and government—man's or God's very terrible and very much hated. But you will not produce obedience—free and fruitful obedience—in a man, or a child, or a nation, unless you confess that there is something besides this flesh; a spirit which craves for law, craves for government, but which craves still more for a righteous Lawgiver and Governor. Do justice to yourself—do justice to every fellow-creature—by appealing to this which is the true man, the man after God's heart. Tell it of One who has claimed fellowship with it, has redeemed it, has vindicated for it the right to say, "Abba, Father." Say that the Eternal God sees it, sees all human beings, in this Redeemer, in this Son; say that He wishes to renew all in His image. Then, when we believe this, we shall not complain that law is burdensome. Divine Law we shall hail as a direct means, human as a subordinate means, for the education of the spirit—for the crushing of that which hinders its expansion and its freedom. "Circumcise our hearts and our members," we shall pray, "in such way as Thou, the All-seeing, deemest best for bringing us to the 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]{.smallcaps} manifestation to the Magians, which was brought before us in the service of Thursday, is recorded by St. Matthew. This manifestation to the doctors is only spoken of by St. Luke. We might have expected that the places of the narratives would have been reversed; that St. Matthew, who wrote for Jews, would have spoken of that which directly concerned Jews; that St. Luke, the companion of St. Paul, would have seized upon the fact which has been always spoken of as the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles. But it should be considered that he who cared especially to set forth a King of the Jews, would very appropriately notice the search of the Wise Men for such a King, and the homage which they paid Him when they had found Him. And I think there was no one fitter to speak of the way in which the Light of the World burst upon the minds of the Rabbis in the Temple, than he who had conversed with the pupil of Gamaliel, and had carefully studied the process of his illumination. What the Church seems especially to impress upon us by bringing these two facts together, and classing them under the common name of Epiphany, is that every act of our Lord, from His birth onwards, is to be looked upon as a disclosure of the glory of the onlybegotten Son of the Father—of Him from whose Grace and Truth all the grace and truth of men had proceeded. So considered, these old records which some suspect and would like to cast off, are seen to be most consistent with the tenor of the history, most helpful in delivering us from confusions respecting that history, and respecting the meaning of the word Revelation. We think it natural and reasonable that the Apostles, being endowed with certain miraculous powers, should be able to build up a Church among Jews and Gentiles. Had we the like powers, we have little doubt we might convert Hindoos and Mussulmans as well as the great body of those who are Christians only in name. The Apostles had no dream that they had any such charms for acting on the hearts and consciences of men. They said that the Gospel itself was the "*power of God unto salvation, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek*." They said that what they had to do was to preach Christ crucified, because in His weakness and humiliation were made known the power and wisdom of God. In other words, it was He who was revealing Himself, through their preaching, to that eye which was intended to receive the discovery, and was waiting for it. The story of the Star in the East leading the Wise men to the King whom they were asking the stars to tell them of, explains how He made either words or signs effectual for His own mighty purpose. And the story of His listening to the doctors in the Temple, and questioning them, shows how He compelled a set of men, who were the slaves of words, or rather of letters, who believed that all power lay in them, to confess a mightier power in Him. I\. This is the subject which I think is especially forced upon us by the Gospel to-day. There were met in the Temple a number of grave men, full of all the learning which could be got from the traditions of the past, full, as they thought, of all the learning which could be got from the words and lives of Patriarchs, Lawgivers, holy men. It was no profane wisdom that they were occupied with. Some of them might have a little measure of it. All would value it only as it illustrated the Divine wisdom which had been imparted to their land, or as a foil to set off its brightness and purity. They might not be wholly agreed about the meaning of the words on which they set such store. The Psalms were open to very different interpretations. They were not at one upon the question where and how this or that prophecy would be accomplished. They might differ even upon the relative worth of different commandments, still more when they compared those commandments, simple, broad, and general, with the accurate rules which had been transmitted to them by elders and doctors. Probably there was no doubt in the minds of the majority that the observance of the commandments was comparatively an easy and vulgar thing, that the practice of those refined rules was the sign of a more exact and scrupulous holiness, at all events a step to it. Some however there would be among them who derided such practices as idle and unnecessary. Ordinary morality, they would say, such as the Commandments prescribed, was what God demanded; the maxims of an ascetic devotion had been needlessly grafted upon these. Still, amidst all such differences, there would be a general impression that whatever there was of religion or acquaintance with the oracles of God, dwelt among them. Age, and the knowledge of what former times had bequeathed, were theirs. They were the shepherds of the people. Whether the sheep went right or wrong depended mainly on their submission to this guidance or their neglect of it. Into this grave and venerable consistory there enters a Boy just twelve years of age. No one can tell exactly how he came there. But of course it is a promising sign, a sign of early devotion, that he should like to be in the Temple. The great festival is just over. Amidst the numbers who frequented it, it is no wonder if there should be one who has been seized with awe and admiration by those beautiful buildings, or by the sense of that which they denote. This one is apparently a fugitive from his parents. He may have wandered from them by accident, or he may have a thought, if his tribe and the rules of the elders permit it, of giving himself to the service of that place. A friendly Rabbi might think it worth while to question him about his purposes, to ascertain why he was lingering in those precincts. 1\. So he stands among the Rabbis, not affrighted certainly by their dignity, with no sign of bashfulness, but also with none of forwardness. He is not eager to speak. He wishes to listen. The doctors are conversing about matters which they presume are far above the comprehension of a boy. And there is in the face of this boy nothing which tells of assumption or precocity, rather of quietness and docility. Such a one may be allowed to hear their discourse; it may impress him hereafter, if not at once, with reverence for their persons and their office. And what was that listening of his? In the highest sense, as in every lower one, the maxim holds good, "Everything is received according to the measure of the receiver." We can imagine how glibly the familiar texts would be repeated by one and another,—how often "sins" and "repentance" would be in their mouths,—how they would debate about the hope of Israel and the promise of dominion over the Gentiles,—how they would speak of all God's doings with them, if they did not actually pronounce the Name which signified His hidden essence. What awful, unutterable meanings lay beneath these sounds! And the meaning, not the sound, was that to which this Boy was listening. That of which the learned men had only the faintest consciousness, entered into His inmost being. It was in the fullest sense listening, reverent and awful listening,—the listening of a child, not the judgment of a man. It is hard for us to make that distinction; but if we believe the Incarnation, we shall try to make it. We shall believe that the Child was a child, the Boy a boy; that the Child was perfect as such, and therefore did not anticipate its aftergrowth, which would imply imperfection; that the Boy was a perfect boy, and therefore had none of that forestalling of manhood which our consciences and reason tell us is irregular and untrue. And this is not, as some would state it, merely in order that we may do justice to the Humanity of Christ. We cannot in any other way see how the Divinity manifested itself through the Humanity, how it addressed itself to all the conditions and needs of Humanity. We may make a notion to ourselves of Divinity as unlimited wisdom and power; but such notions are good for very little. What we want is to know what wisdom and power are in their fullest, highest sense, not to mould and contract them by our understandings, and then fancy we make amends for the contraction by giving them the epithet "unlimited." Do you suppose that those Rabbis, after forty, say, or fifty years, of reading and copying out the Law, of comparing and registering the different commentaries upon it, had ever felt such a presence of Divinity with them, as when they looked into the face of that listening Boy? They could copy the letters, they could overlook the commentaries. If there was something very deep and mysterious beneath them, they could reduce it into Cabbala; they could 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 to them through that, could be reduced into no Cabbala. They could never say, "*That* raises us above the rest of our countrymen." They must have felt: "That face speaks to us of our connection with Galilean peasants; it reminds us that we are of the same flesh and blood with them. While we look at it, does it not seem as if it were more glorious to be of the same flesh and blood with any one that is 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 they ever did before, that [God]{.smallcaps} was reading them. 2\. And then came the *questions. "He was sitting among them*," it is said, "*both hearing them and asking them questions*." Still all is suitable to the boy. He pronounces on nothing. He does not lay down the law upon this matter or that. The time may come when He shall go up into a mountain and open His lips, and speak as One having authority. But that time is not yet. He is not above the Scribes, but is sitting at their feet. He desires to know what *they* think about this commandment in the Law, about this sentence of David or Isaiah. At first, no doubt, the answers are all ready. They can tell that which one elder or another had written down or expressed orally to his disciples. They begin to give out the oracles, perhaps with an air of patronage or condescension, to the earnest youth. Why do the patronage and the condescension disappear? Why is the well-trained memory at fault? Why is there that look of puzzle and perplexity, almost of terror, on the countenances of those who are used to resolve all riddles, to silence all disputes? The question has gone beneath commentary and text both. The second-hand answer does not avail. What, for instance, could 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 if He were a Deliverer out of bondage. Is that indeed so? Was He only a Deliverer of our Fathers in the days of old, or is He that still, that now? The prophets always describe Him as the Living God—the God from generation to generation. What! 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, putting away their sins from them, and yet as hating all iniquity. Is that so still? Does He actually seek to make men right?" I have supposed, you see, questions which had no novelty or strangeness in them; questions which arose directly out of the language of the Holy Book. If these had been all,—if there had been none deeper than these—deeper than we can think of,—what must have been their effect? No Rabbi can have imputed captious doubt, premature disbelief to the *speaker*. May not many a one have been led to suspect *himself* of doubt and disbelief? May not many a one have thought: "It cannot be that the words are to be taken in their simple strict sense; if so, the Book is not the one I thought I knew from beginning to end?" May 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,—the place which He chose to put His name in,—I knew it not"? 3\. We are told that "*all who heard this child were astonished at His understanding and answers*." So that they must have asked Him questions as He asked them. No doubt He showed as much willingness to submit to their catechism as He had shown eagerness to receive whatever they had to impart; a child, whichever task he was engaged in,—taught by elder men, doing what they required. And the answers, we may be sure, like the questions, would not be new or rare or far-fetched. They would be startling because they presented the words of holy men in their direct, full, original force; because they did not make veils for them, but drew away the veil which had concealed them; because the words came forth in them as if the men were there in whose hearts they had been as a burning fire; because they were indeed shown to be not theirs, but His who had spoken to them, and had declared His own purpose through them. The answers, I repeat it, were not veils; they were a Revelation, or Unveiling; and that Revelation, or Unveiling, was not of a System or of a Religion, but of Him who had 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." It was therefore, as the Evangelist expresses it, the *understanding* (σύνεσις) of this child which astonished the doctors. No word can indicate more beautifully what must have been the impression upon their minds. This boy *went along with* the words which they had read and copied and committed to memory. They had never *gone along with* them. They had drawn conclusions from the words, generalized notions from them. But their hearts had never come into contact with them. They were idols to be worshipped at a distance; not worshipped till all the dangerous life had been extracted from them, till they were as powerless to act or teach or govern as the stocks and stones of the heathen, which had been denounced in them. What a wonder, to see them quick and breathing again in the answers of this Child! What a wonder, to find that He went along, not only with them, but with the very mind of Him from whom they had proceeded; that *He* spoke like one who had been brought up with Him, like a sharer of His counsels! 4\. Although, therefore, one discovers nothing in the listening or questioning or answering of this Boy which interferes with that growth in wisdom and stature of which St. Luke speaks——with that gradual unfolding of the human life which was necessary to the manifestation of the Divine life,—there is *that* foreshadowing of after-years which we generally discern in an individual man when we are acquainted with the facts of his story, and which we should confidently expect in *the* Man, the Representative of the Race. After He had entered upon His ministry, —when He was exercising the fulness of His power, when He was denouncing those Scribes and Pharisees to whom He had listened in the Temple,—He was still unveiling some of the deepest mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, by asking questions of His disciples and the multitude, that being the last, which awakened so much awe, "*What think ye of Christ? whose Son is He*?" He was still answering those who asked Him, "*what was the chief commandment*?" "*Shall we give tribute to Cæsar*?" "*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, till that adjuration of the High Priest to declare whether He was the *Son of God* brought forth that 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." In all these ways His earliest acts on earth and His latest exhibited a divine harmony. His understanding of the ways of God was more and more discovering His name to be that which the prophet had proclaimed, "*He shall be called Wonderful*, Counsellor." And the question to Mary and Joseph, when they sought Him sorrowing, "*Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business*?" was the preparation for His baptism, and for the 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 of the lessons which I think lie in it, and which we need especially at this time. 1\. And first: There is, in many divines—in many Christians who are not divines—a great fear of questions. "Certain things," they say, "have been settled long ago. To disturb the settlement, is perilous. If we are humble and modest, we shall be content without *knowledge* of divine things. Probabilities, distant approximations to knowledge, are all to which creatures such as we are can aspire." Now, brethren, as long as I believe in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, our Lord,—as long as I seek for my standard of modesty and humility in Him——so long I must protest against the kind of modesty and humility which 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 and safe tradition by that method. I find Him sanctioning that as His own sound method of detecting falsehood and laziness, and of urging men to seek Truth that they may find it. Brethren, I believe that Christ has been asking questions from that day to this; that He is asking questions of us all, divines and laymen, now; that the questions come to us in multitudes of shapes, through a multitude of lips; through children tormenting their parents and teachers about the wonderful meaning of *words* which have become to *them* mere familiar sounds, of *things* which they have gazed at till they have forgotten that there is any life or mystery in them at all;—through men who have been exercised with the puzzles of Philosophy, and want to find some ground upon which they may stand, a ground of reality, not of convention;—through the cravings of men who know nothing of Philosophy, but who have found enough in their own thoughts and in the world to amaze and confound them; through the frivolous, even, who appear to be engaged in no search at all, who only wish to throw down some system or to build up one for their own fame, but who nevertheless, because they are men, cannot be merely busy in that poor occupation, and will be sure to start some inquiry which 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; that 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; what is wood, hay, stubble of our own, and must be burnt up in those fires. 2\. I know how liable statements like these are to be misunderstood, as if one wished to discourage reverence for the past, as if one thought there were no oracles of God which were stronger and deeper than all the reasonings and speculations of men. I have endeavoured to show you to-day how fair and reasonable these charges are. Just because I would uphold reverence for the past,—just because I think our own speculations and reasoning are so much feebler than the oracles of God,—I dare not stifle one anxious question of men respecting the faith of other days, respecting those oracles of God. 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. They could not receive any communication as coming directly to the hearts of men from the Ruler of their hearts. No men needed so much to become little children, to recover the wisdom of children. That they might attain that wisdom the Child came amongst them, listened to them, asked them questions, answered their questions. I think that same Child, who has the government on His shoulders, hears us, questions us, answers us for the same end. There are those doubtless who wish to cut us off from all communion with the past, telling us that it is a chain upon our freedom. There are those who say the Bible is an obsolete book, useful in the infancy of the world, unworthy of such advanced sages as we are. You do not confute these objectors by arguing against them, by opposing the weight of opinion to them, by emulating their hard and scoffing temper. It is not that they question too much, but too little. They have never asked themselves what they want, what mankind wants. If they once fairly grappled with these questions, they would begin to reverence those who wept and bled that mankind might have what it wants; they would be filled with shame, as they contrast the tears and blood with their boasting. They would hear an old text telling them secrets of their own being, which the wisdom that mocks at texts has never penetrated. For they would perceive that they want—that mankind wants—the actual knowledge of God; that for this men have sighed and cried in every country and age of the world; that if this knowledge is not to 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 with which I began, and with which I shall end. 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 of the Father? Do they confess that *this* was His Father's business which he was about, from His cradle to His Cross? Nay, that in this He was occupied ever since the world was made; that in this He will be occupied for ever and ever? Alas! in the very highest quarters of English Rabbinism, we are taught a doctrine the very reverse of this. The only way, we are told, to confute Rationalism, to establish Christianity, is to affirm that God cannot be known; that man is prohibited by his constitution from seeking such knowledge. We are to add nothing to the Bible—except this, that our main business is to seek for a system or scheme of Religion which may produce a beneficial effect on our character; we are to take nothing from the Bible—except this, that man is created in the image of God, and that not to be acquainted with His Archetype is to be miserable. To some of us it seems that this is to add to the Bible all the inventions of men, against which it protests; to take from it whatever gives it a claim to be a Divine Revelation. This combination of the profoundest Scepticism with unlimited acquiescence is in nowise new. Half the submission to an infallible dictator, at least half the willingness of philosophers to endure the grossest superstitions, may be traced to it. The justification for it lies in the simple proposition, "We cannot conceive the inconceivable," a maxim so self-evident, that it must have swept all thoughts about an invisible world, or a divine Being, before it, if there had not been a deeply grounded conviction in human beings, 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, no knowledge of persons—fathers, brothers, friends; that all affection must perish as well (in the true sense of the word) as all understanding. That inward belief, the loss of which is the loss of every aspiration after goodness or nobleness, the destruction of any morality but that which is conventional,—that belief has given rise to the cry for some Being who is above all our thoughts and conceptions, but Who must be 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 had Himself awakened; that He did come forth in the person of His only-begotten Son, to show men what He is; that He did send His spirit into the hearts of men, that all might know Him, from the least to the greatest. The confession of this Revelation was their orthodoxy. They had no notion of a system or scheme of Religion, apart from a Manifestation of God to men. And I believe, brethren, that all schemes and systems of religion which have not this real Revelation for their basis, or which hide it from men, God will sweep away from His earth. I believe that a building which has 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 to pieces by its own weight; or if not, that the rage of disappointed human hearts will tear it down. But I believe also that the Child who stood among the Rabbis, hearing them and asking them questions——Who astonished 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,—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]{.smallcaps} picture of St. Paul at Athens, which is given us in the Acts of the Apostles, has been filled up with many lights and shades by the imagination of the reader. But these are the great outlines which cannot be effaced. He was grieved in spirit when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry; he disputed in the market-place with philosophers of different sects; the curiosity of the people to hear some new thing would not suffer him to abstain from a general statement of his object in coming to Greece, if he had desired to be silent; he did actually deliver the most elaborate of all his discourses on Mars' Hill. What that discourse would have been if he had adopted the notion respecting the right method of spreading Christianity, which is most prevalent and admired amongst us in this day, we can have no difficulty in conjecturing. He would have begun with offering proofs that all other nations had been left to follow their own courses, unguided and untended, while his had been the depositary of a divine communication. There was evidence,—he would say, not demonstrative, but sufficient to satisfy men who were alive to their own perils and their own ignorance, that the Ruler of the world had given intimations concerning His will to the children of Abraham. These intimations, so far as they concerned His nature and purposes, could not be called strictly true—for men had no faculties wherewith to receive the knowledge of an infinite Being. But they were such approximations to truth as it was desirable for men to receive. Precepts founded upon them had proved very beneficial in the practice of life. Amongst these precepts was one against the worship of graven images. No reason, of course, was given for it. How can an infinite Being be expected to give reasons for His acts? How could they be made intelligible to men if they were given? But supposing the Lawgiver possessed infinite power to enforce His decrees, was it safe to set any of them aside? Then proceeding from the people to the learned, he would show triumphantly how every speculation respecting the gods had proved abortive and ridiculous. He would prove that by the very conditions of man's being it must be so; that the dreams of men respecting a Nature so immeasurably transcending theirs, so altogether different from theirs, could have no counterpart in reality. Of course he would deal his blows with perfect impartiality. This would be aimed at the self-confidence of the Epicurean denier, that at the scepticism of the Academic, a third at the physicotheology and stern ethics of the Stoic. If there was any departure from this rule, it would be in the case of some particularly earnest inquirer. It must be a greater victory for the Gospel to expose his blunders and failures, than those of a mere sophist or professional disputer. Then, having cleared the ground of all other opinions and speculations, with what satisfaction would he commend his own religion to the acceptance of the multitude! He would represent it as milder, less national, less dogmatic, than the Jewish from which it had sprung. He would appeal to the common sense of the Athenians whether, in the utter ignorance of divine things in which they were and must be, the prudent course was not to accept a faith which promised inconceivable rewards to its champions, which denounced utter ruin against those who rejected it. I can conceive only two reasons which can be given by those who approve this kind of teaching, why it should not have been St. Paul's. One is, that he was not learned enough to know the opinions of sages, or not logical enough to produce *the* overwhelming argument against them. To such an objection I merely reply, that *I* presume St. Paul to have been sent forth with such weapons as were fitted for the work he had to do; if they think otherwise, they should say so boldly. The other is, that such language might have exposed the speaker to a storm of Greek indignation. But St. Paul, according to the opinion of him we have been wont to entertain, was a brave man, whose testimony would not have been more stern when he was in security than when he was in danger. Nor am I prepared to admit that the kind of discourse I have imagined, would have been more perilous to the Apostle, than those which had drawn down upon him the fanatical rage of Jews at Thessalonica and Berea. If his main object was to proselytize for a certain religion, I am not sure that it might not have induced more Athenians to join him than Dionysius and Damaris. For it would have appealed to passions which St. Paul in his actual speech did not invoke. Epicureans and Academics would have seen great plausibility in the denunciations of the popular worship. Each would have welcomed the sneers at the philosophical system of the others. St. Paul's own countrymen—if any were present—would have recognized in him a champion, not an enemy, of their exclusiveness. But let us consider now, not what St. 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*." This was the lesson which the Apostle had learnt by earnest meditation on the calling of his own nation, by his study of the Law and the prophets. God hath formed the nations of one blood, of one family. God hath watched over the bounds, the circumstances, the destiny, of each nation upon the face of the earth. The Jewish nation had existed to be a witness for this universal fellowship among the nations. It had existed as a witness against that which tended to divide them and set them at war. It had existed also as a witness for the special work of each one of those bodies which had its definite geographical limits, its sympathies of kindred and race. It existed to say, "The one living and true God has created you all to be one. The one living and true God has assigned you your tasks. He has never left you alone. No one fact of your history has lain beyond the circle of His providence. No one thought has been awakened in your minds without His teaching and guidance. I, the Jew, the child of Abraham, stand forth to make that claim on behalf of the God whom I worship. I stand forth solemnly to repudiate the doctrine that any nation whatever has a right to deny connection with any other. I, the Jew, the child of Abraham, stand forth to declare that you, the men of Athens, have had a divine vocation, that the God of all has appointed you to play a distinct and a very remarkable part in His great drama. I declare that you are utterly wrong when you affirm that the great deeds of your fathers are to be ascribed to them, not to Him; that your institutions, your freedom, your wisdom, are human, so as not to be also in the highest sense divine." This is a wonderful message, very unlike that one which we heard just now. But I ask you to read St. Paul's own words attentively, and see whether they express less than my paraphrase of them; whether they do not express far more. II\. But *why* has God chosen out the particular nations? *Why* has He ordered the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation? Here is St. Paul's answer: "*That they may seek the Lord, if haply they may feel after Him, and find Him*." According to this explanation of an inspired Apostle, it was God Himself who stirred up the thoughts and inquiries of men about His Being and Nature. Nay, every circumstance of their outward position was devised and ordained expressly for the purpose of giving this impulse, this direction, to their thoughts. Certainly, if we believed that, many puzzles in history—oppressive puzzles to those who read it as the history of their fellow-beings—would be solved. One sees how the soil and climate, the temperament of peculiar races, their apprehensions concerning law and government, their internal struggles, their relations with neighbours, have modified all their thoughts and feelings; but especially their apprehensions of the invisible world and of divine powers. If one might assure oneself that a soil fertile or rugged, a climate genial or cruel, the need of rule, the need of freedom, the activity which led to wars, the deeper craving for peace, all had been instruments of giving them some glimpse of a Guide and Ruler, had led them to grasp at something which is really in Him, some side of His character, some purpose of His will,—the past would become an illuminated, not an utterly dark scroll. How one apprehension should become feeble, distorted,—how others should be rejected for its sake,—how when others asserted their right and necessity, all the polytheistic confusions and contradictions should arise,—how they should become fixed in the mind by selfish fears—how they should be perpetuated by dishonest priests seeking to keep up an impression of their own power, confounding that with the unseen power,—this we can understand without much difficulty from later experience. The hard question is, What was the starting-point of those thoughts? and that other, How were they kept alive in men's minds, when so much in nature and themselves was confuting them? To these questions St. Paul gives his decided reply. This feeling after God, which has been discovered, under some condition or other, in all tribes of the earth, which has had the most marked tokens of being a human necessity, and yet which a thousand tendencies in man have threatened with death as well as with derangement,—this the Creator Himself has called forth and sustained; without His first word it could not have been, without His continual presence and inspiration it must have ceased altogether. III\. Bold as this statement is,—strange as it must sound to those who have persuaded themselves that the method of defending the principles of the Old Testament is to treat all heathen apprehensions of God as merely traditional or purely imaginative,—it is less startling than the words which follow them. We are so familiar with them,—they have so leavened the dialect of Christendom,—that we do not consider how awful they are in themselves, how much more remarkable they are for the place in which they were uttered, how they contradict some of our most approved 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*." Oh, how often has the wish presented itself to many of us that we had never heard these words in our childhood!—we think they would burst upon us with such overpowering strength if we were listening to them for the first time. It is an ungrateful and a foolish wish. We have been influenced by them all our lives through, in ways we cannot conceive, and shall not know till the day that discovers all things. We might not be more thrilled by them than any of the crowd were who stood about St. Paul in the Areopagus; they may break now through all the frost of custom; they may come on us now like guilty things surprised by a presence that we have forgotten. But is there not something in them which we shrink from because we think it may mislead us into a dangerous Pantheism? Do we not say to ourselves, "That is an especial peril of this time. The passage is no doubt true, as it occurs in the Bible. But since it is liable to be perverted, we had better dwell upon some different announcement, however suitable that may have been for other ages, which were prone to another kind of error." Now consider. If there was a city in all the world which was exposed to the assaults of Pantheism,—not in some other age, but in the very age when the Apostle visited it,—that city was assuredly Athens. Each form of idolatry, each form of speculation, was bearing towards this gulf; each, as it became weak, was sure to be absorbed in it. If St. Paul had no divine intimation of the fact, his discourses with the philosophers in the market-place must have made him aware of it. He must have seen it in the very inscription which was the text of his discourse. The dedication to the Unknown God,—whether it only indicated a desire in a time of pestilence to invoke all imaginable or possible assistance,—whether it expressed a sense of some Being who could not be represented as demons or demigods were represented,—equally declared that the mind of the nation was aiming at an all-inclusive worship, and that as one definite object after another lost its hold upon them, more and more would be drawn into a lazy acknowledgment of the vague and indefinite. With this conviction full on his mind, St. Paul uses the words, "*He is not far from every one of us; for in Him we live and move and are*." I conclude, then, that St. Paul regarded this statement as the one great protest against Pantheism, and all other evil tendencies to which the Athenian was liable; a protest against it, because it was the full and distinct assertion of the truth which was underlying Pantheism, and which Pantheism was perverting; a protest against it, because no proclamation was so certain, if it was received, to inspire men with awe of that Personal Being whom Pantheism was denying. The Apostle then is the standing witness for the maxim which is applicable to all places and all times, that you can only combat any prevalent error by seeking for the divine principle of which it is the counterfeit. Till you do that, your cleverest scoffs and reasonings will all serve to strengthen, not to abate its virulence. IV\. At last the Apostle approaches one of the teachers whom we may suppose he wishes to confute. He speaks, indeed, not of a philosopher, but of a poet; but then poets in the latter days were fond of enunciating philosophical sentiments, as in the earlier days they had done so much to build up the popular mythology. And here is a sentiment of Aratus which may be turned to either account. It may justify the old Homeric notion of men having a divine parentage; it may assert the proud notion of sages, that men by wisdom can make themselves gods; "For we also are His offspring." Surely, it might be said, the sentiment is all the more alarming because the singular number is used instead of the plural. To speak of a son of the Gods Apollo or Venus, was merely to use a phrase which most in that time would have felt to be a fable, or would have explained as a metaphor. To speak of *His* offspring was to mount into a higher region, and to assert for the poor frivolous people who cared only to tell or hear some new thing, that their origin was divine. Could you believe it?—St. Paul adopts the phrase in this aggravated sense; he indorses the words of the poet; he applies them not to his own countrymen, or some portion of his own countrymen, but to his heathen audience. He does not speak of some excepted persons among them; some who had arrived by any process at higher intuitions. He resorts to none of the qualifications which the writer of the words would probably himself have adopted. He looks out upon the jeering, laughing mass about him, and says, "We—you and I—also are His offspring; the offspring of that Unknown God, that God who made the heavens and the earth, and all things therein, whom I have been declaring to you." V\. He does not stop here. He builds an argument upon this mighty assumption. It is *the* argument against that idolatry which had pressed so heavily upon his spirit. Upon it he rests the soundness and reasonableness 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 say that this was an additional motive which he urges for their abandoning the tradition of their fathers, the habit of their city. It is the only motive. He cannot recommend them to that change which involves such a convulsion in the whole moral being, which cuts asunder so many links of old affection, if the doctrine of their poet is not true, if they have not a right to claim God as related to them,—God as, in the strictest, fullest sense, their Father. I say again, in the strictest, fullest sense; not in some vague sense, which is indeed Pantheistical, a sense which represents Him as the Father of all cattle and trees and flowers, and therefore their Father. The argument would be utterly worthless and contemptible if that were his meaning. They might make the Godhead in the likeness of any object in nature; they might mould Him according to their conceptions of any of those objects, if that were all. It was because He was the Father of them, the Father of their spirits,—because they were spiritual beings created in His spiritual likeness, created to feel after Him and find Him,—it was therefore that the conceiving Him under any of these notions of theirs, the casting Him in any material shape, was so degrading and abominable. The whole burning indignation of the Jew against the gods of the hills and the groves comes forth in this assertion, which is nevertheless so full of tenderness for every heathen, and which could only have been uttered by one who believed that God had loved the whole world, and had sent His Son to take upon Him the nature of the dweller in Athens as much as of the dweller in Jerusalem. VI\. The tenderness to heathens,—the justification of God's ways to men in all ages,—the assertion of the ground upon which he had affirmed all to be of one flesh and blood,—comes out fully in the next passage of the discourse. "*And the times of this ignorance God winked at, but now He commandeth all men everywhere to repent*." I will not debate about the force of the word which we translate *winked at*, or inquire whether any better expression might have been found. No doubt it might have been an advantage to preserve the sentence in St. Paul's own form, by using a participle in the first clause. But at least we may be sure that this sentence does not contradict the Apostle's previous assertion, that God had not overlooked the different nations of the earth, so as not to order the bounds of their habitations, and to direct the search after Him; on the other hand, that it is utterly incompatible with the headlong and ungodly conclusion which divines have often sanctioned respecting the condition of the heathen world, and the amount of guilt which was involved in its idol-worship. St. Paul assuredly does not tell the Athenians what Tertullian's higher inspiration and later revelation enabled him to proclaim with absolute certainty, that their fathers were doomed to hopeless perdition. That opinion which (it is said) urged the honest barbarian monarch to refuse baptism, was not thrust before the Greek; an entirely different one was suggested to him. But the message to the men of that generation was not less strong and decisive, because it involved no judgment upon previous generations. "*God commandeth you to repent*." "Since by me He tells you that the words of your poet are fulfilled,—that He has sent His Son to claim you as His offspring—by me He commands you to cast aside the gods of gold and silver, made by art and man's device; by me He bids you to turn round to Him and own Him as your Father. But not only by me. The message is to your consciences. The message comes straight from Him to them. He commands repentance. He gives repentance to all that will have it. If you are conscious of separation from Him who is so near to you, He destroys the separation. If you have felt after Him, and not been able to find Him, He will reveal Himself to you. The message is to all men everywhere. The separate gods, the material gods, shall not for ever tear the nations asunder. All in all nations are invited to become brothers with each other, by taking up their position as children of the same Father." VII\. But is not that call to repentance fortified by a threat of punishment? If it were, I should produce it, and dwell upon it; for I do not think we can warn people too much of the heavy punishment which they bring upon themselves, by continuing servants of material, sensual, unreal things, and by not taking up their rights as children of a gracious and righteous Father. But though I might like the word if it was in St. Paul's discourse, I cannot introduce it when it is not there. St. Paul speaks of *judgment* not of *punishment*. He speaks of "*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*." I am bound to say that the two modes of speaking are wide as the poles asunder, however in our carelessness we may confound them. To proclaim a judgment, is to proclaim an accurate discrimination of acts and characters. To proclaim a judgment of God, is to proclaim that He will discriminate Who knows characters and acts perfectly. To proclaim a judgment of God by that Man whom He has ordained, is to declare that He will apply to men that kind of measure which the Son of Man applied when He was upon earth. Now *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 said to His disciples, "*Judge not, that ye be not judged*." In the face of such language, how could St. Paul dare to stand up among the Athenians, and tell them that either they or their fathers would be cast off by God, who had not cast them off yet? How could he help telling them that there would assuredly be a judging and sifting of all nations and all men, inasmuch as the Son of Man, the risen Head of Nations and of Men, had come to bind them all to God,—to bind them all to each other? How could he help saying, "He whom you have been seeking for,—He who has been seeking for you,—will be revealed in the fulness of His glory. He will know what each nation has done in fulfilment of the purpose for which it was called out. He will know what each man has done to fulfil the purpose for which he was sent into the world. He will know who have followed the light which He gave them, and sought for Him; who have loved darkness rather than light, and have chosen death. I, Paul, can pass no judgment upon you or any one. I judge not my own self. But I know that that judgment will be according to the truth. For He who is truth—He who, dying and rising again, has manifested the truth to men,—will be manifested in every man's conscience. Every eye shall see Him." My brethren, I have endeavoured in this sermon to set before you two methods of presenting the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to men. I have not concealed from you—indeed you are all aware of it—that the first has very powerful supporters, that it puts itself forth as *the* logical, *the* safe, *the* orthodox method. I have been able to say nothing on behalf of the other, except that it was the method of that Apostle, who, as we affirm, was God's instrument for causing His light to shine throughout the world. By the one course we silence objectors, joining, according to all precedents, in the same *auto da fé*, the representatives of the most diverse sects and schools, the most devout and the most scornful, the most earnest and the most frivolous. By the other, we claim all the most diverse sects and schools, the most devout and the most scornful, the most earnest and the most frivolous, as witnesses for the God and Father who would lead them all to His Son. By the one, we magnify immensely the skill of the particular dialectician who argues the case; we depress to the lowest point our common humanity. In the other, the man who pleads is nothing, but the race is glorified by its union with a crucified and ascended Lord. To the one method we are indebted for an exhibition of a vast amount of ingenious advocacy, of fine metaphysical reasoning; to the other we are indebted for the existence of a Christendom. Such is the testimony of the past. How the future will speak we wait to learn. Nothing less is involved in the question, than whether the hundred and sixty millions in India shall be taught that all their mythology and all their philosophy is folly—or that God has sent His Son to claim them for His offspring; whether the masses of our own population who have been alienated from our Churches, shall 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 seeks that all should know Him, from the least to the greatest; whether each one of us shall accept every dogma of the Church and Bible because that is quite as likely to be true as anything else,—or shall continue to pray to Him who cannot be mocked, that He will give us in this world knowledge of His truth, and in the world to come life everlasting. ## 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. [Last]{.smallcaps} Sunday I compared the method which we commonly suppose to be the most ingenious and successful for the defence of Christ's Gospel and the confutation of its opponents, with that which was adopted by St. Paul, in his speech at Athens. I showed you that there was not a difference merely between them, but a direct, formal opposition——one which could not be accounted for by any advantages which the Apostle possessed over us in the mightiness of his gifts, or that we possess over him in the fact of our being inheritors, for eighteen centuries, of the blessings which he proclaimed. If we are right, his divine Inspiration was only a means of leading him wrong; if he was right, we are showing that we have very little appreciation of the treasures which he affirmed to be ours, by the measures which we take for the purpose of securing them against invaders. The causes of this wide departure from the precedents which we profess to esteem most, is to be sought, I have maintained, in the entirely different force which he and we give to the word *Revelation* and the kindred word *Manifestation*. They are, as I have often observed to you, specially favourite words of his, —words upon which the interpretation not of single passages but of whole Epistles depends. It could not be otherwise, seeing that the revelation of Christ to him was, he declares in the Epistle to the Galatians, that which enabled him to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. The records of his own life therefore—the very meaning of that conversion which we shall be considering this week, and by a necessary consequence the meaning of the message which he delivered to the nations—are inseparably connected with his idea of Revelation. I think the more you pursue the words which express this idea through his letters, the more you will feel that he is rigidly accurate in the use of them; that the sense never changes; that Revelation is always with him the unveiling of a Person—and that Person the ground and Archetype of men, the source of all life and goodness in men—not to the eye, but to the very man himself, to the Conscience, Heart, Will, Reason, which God has created to know Him, and be like Him. Or to take his own far better and bolder language,—that which we considered last Sunday, —that of which his Epistles contain the exposition and the rationale,—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*." Now, if this idea of Revelation has been changed for another that is wholly unlike it—if by Revelation *we* understand certain communications made to us by God, and which we cannot dispense with, because the very constitution which He has given makes us incapable of knowing Him as He is, because by no possibility there can be an unveiling or discovery of His own nature, or character, or purposes to us,—the whole subject must be contemplated by us, and must be presented to others, in an aspect which it never assumes in St. Paul's writings and discourses, or in any part of the Old and New Testament. So that we are in the strange predicament of men fighting with prodigious zeal and prowess on behalf of the authority of books which, the moment we take them from their shelves and examine their contents, are found to set at nought the hypothesis upon which we have rested our apology for them. In establishing the necessity of *a* Revelation, we have done what we can to confute *the* Revelation of which these books testify. When once such a theory about the nature of Revelation as this has been fully developed (and the unfortunate rage for apologetic literature in the Christian Church has always fostered it, while the faith, the practical life, the sufferings of Christians, have been a continual protest against it)——when, I say, it has been fully developed, it will find, like jealousy, proofs strong as holy writ, proofs even drawn from holy writ, to confirm and justify it. Our Lord's miracles have been especially made to perform this office. "They are," it is said, "upon the face of them, strange, exceptional acts. What were they for? Why are they recorded? Surely to make the mission of Christ credible. Once admit them, and you cannot doubt that He spoke with an authority which never belonged to any one else. Accept this authority, and whatever you find in the book, however much it seems at variance with your heart and reason, you will be bound to receive as divine." I am not now considering the question, how far this mode of argument in our day has been successful in its intended purpose. I am not considering whether it has not kept back numbers from the faith which it recommends; I am not considering how far appeals to the intellect on the particular question of miracles are consistent with the demand for a suppression of the intellect afterwards; I merely desire to meet the question, For what purpose are these works of Christ, if not for the end these apologists have imagined? I will not answer them as they would answer me, in all cases except this, with an assumption of ignorance, "How can we penetrate the designs of an infinite Being in any of His doings?" because I think the Scriptures and the Church have given the answer, and wish us to profit by it. They declare that the miracles were for the *manifestation* of Christ's glory. That is the very expression which the beloved Disciple uses respecting the miracle at the marriage-feast; for this reason the Church has chosen that story and the story of other miracles for the Gospels on the Sundays after Epiphany. They are not, according to this teaching, arguments to convince the understanding that it ought to suspend its own proper exercises; they are unveilings or manifestations to the whole man, of the nature, character, mind, of the Son of Man; and therefore, as He shows us in the passage of which my text forms a part, of the nature, character, mind, of the Father who sent Him. I\. Our Lord says, in the words I have taken, "*If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not*." Did you think St. Paul's words at Athens very inconsistent with some of our current notions? But how much more startling are these! How continually we are told that we are evincing the greatest irreverence, that we are proving ourselves ignorant of the limitations of our own minds, and of the distance between the Divine nature and ours, if we presume to consider whether such and such acts have a divine quality in them, or one that is the reverse of divine. I trust and believe that those who speak this language are utterly inconsistent with themselves. I am satisfied—indeed, I know for certain—that they talk of many of the acts attributed to Siva and Vishnu, and to the gods of the classical mythology, as evil and hateful, and therefore as having no savour of divinity in them. Where did they learn that language? Was it not in the book which told them that God is a righteous Being, just and without iniquity? Have we not learnt it by those reasonings of God with His creatures about the madness and folly of worshipping stocks and stones, about the wickedness of pouring out drink-offerings to false and evil beings? Have we not learnt it from those chapters of Isaiah which we are reading in these Epiphany weeks, those which declare that He is setting forth His true Image, the Image of perfect gentleness and meekness, to confound all the dark images which men have made of Him? And yet, when we come back to the school in which we have received all these lessons, and are assailed by doubters of our own land with the assertion that such and such words or acts or habits of mind should not be attributed to a Divine Being instead of asking ourselves, and encouraging them to ask, whether these representations of Him are actually in the Holy Book, or whether the objector has rightly understood them, or whether they really outrage his conscience, as he fancies they do,—we stop him with a preliminary denial of his right to make the inquiry at all. From some high logical or theological tribunal, we pronounce that there is no test in man for ascertaining what is right or wrong in One who claims to be above man; that he may exercise all his faculties in ascertaining whether a certain book has probable claims to be regarded as coming from an infinite and omnipotent Being, none of them in ascertaining what manner of Being He is from whom we say it has come. Has not the disputer a right to turn upon us and say, "All that may be true enough; I daresay it is. It confirms many of my suspicions; it strengthens me in my growing atheism. But how happened it that your logic and your theology fell asleep when you were talking about Vishnu and Siva and Jupiter?" Now to all this strange and contradictory talk, I oppose not some conclusions of my own reason, but the words of Christ himself, "*If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not*." Here was a distinct appeal to something in man which *could* recognize whether the works He did were the works of His Father or not. That appeal He was making to men through His whole life upon earth; in those *good* works—so He calls them—which we have changed into mere exercises of irregular power, into violations of the order which He had himself established. Take, for example, the work at Cana, which the Church brought before us last Sunday. We are told by St. John, who must have witnessed it, that in it Christ manifested forth His glory to His disciples. Of course he means us to recollect his own words in the previous chapter, "*We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father*," which was fulness of grace and truth. A Man was sitting in the midst of them, sharing their joy, feeling with them. He manifested Himself to them as the source of that joy. A change wrought calmly, secretly, unobtrusively, unknown to those whom it would have startled most if they had known it, gave them a sense of creative power such as they had never had before. The occasion was common and earthly. The gift was the gift of an ordinary thing, though of one which symbolized life and gladness. It is in little things, in particulars, that the laws of a universe reveal themselves. The unfolding of a flower may teach us more of the birth and growth of all things than we can obtain by reflecting on the whole Cosmos. And in this one act of changing the water into wine at the marriage-feast, the sense of all good things coming down through a Brother, from a Father, may have been more profoundly awakened in the minds of those fishermen, than it had been awakened in all kings and prophets before them. From what material conceptions of Creation may it not have delivered them! How they may have risen to the perception, if not at once, yet through the discipline of after-years acting upon that one event, of a Word who giveth life! That, I think, was in the truest sense a *manifestation*. 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 on a great enchanter,—in one who could play with the powers of nature. They would not have believed in a Lord of their hearts and reins; they would not have believed in a King of nature and of man; they would not have believed in One of whose fulness all had received, and grace for grace. Take again those acts of healing which have been brought before us in the Gospel to-day. The first was wrought on behalf of a leper, who met our Lord as He came down from the Mount. The people who heard His discourse on that Mount said, "*He speaketh as one having authority, and not as the Scribes*. He speaks like a King, like one who knows the Law and the Lawgiver, not like one who has to spell the meaning of it out of books." The leper confessed the same fact. "*Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean*. Thou hast authority; I see that. Thou art the King over men, over me. And thou hast spoken of a Father who cares for His children, who cares for the unthankful and evil. That has been the burden of thy discourse. Wilt thou not then have regard even to an outcast from the society of men, to one who proclaims himself unclean? Others may cut him off, but wilt thou?" The answer, "*I will; be thou clean*," is assuredly an assertion of the authority which the leper had ascribed to Him. He assumes a kingly right over the body of this man—a right to restore its health. But so far is He from trying to separate that act of healing from the order of God's government and kingdom, that He sends the man to the priest, the ordinary and appointed judge in cases of leprosy. He is to prove, by the recognized outward sign, that the inward cure has taken effect. He is to offer the gift which the law has prescribed. He is then not a new King, now for the first time installed in that office, now for the first time exercising its noblest functions. It is the manifestation of Him whose goings-forth have been from everlasting; the revelation of Him from whom all powers and methods of healing have been derived. Most strictly then is He fulfilling His own words, "*If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not*. If my works are less regular, orderly, inward, than those of Him who governs all things, who renews the life of all things and all men day by day, *believe me not*. If my works are not works of grace and truth, works which bear witness of a Father who is full of grace and truth, of a Father who is not the destroyer but the restorer of men, who is pursuing them into all the secret places of their sorrow and misery to make them right, *believe me not*." This manifestation is the proper preparation for the next, of which I have spoken to you more than once. I will not dwell upon it in reference to the Centurion training in the Roman camp, to the lessons he had learnt there of obedience and government, and the power of words to subdue physical strength and hold multitudes in subjection. I would speak of it as the typical instance of those works of healing which demanded faith, and evoked a faith in those persons who were benefited by them. The notion we have formed of miracles and their object leads us to suppose that this faith was in a Person presented to the eye, and able to do marvels that had never been done before. Our Lord selects, as *His* instance of lively faith, a man who cared nothing for the sight or touch, who confessed an invisible might, who believed that if Christ spoke the word, his servant would be healed. May we not affirm then, without hesitation, that the highest blessing which our Lord conferred on palsied, leprous, blind, deaf, dead men, was that He awakened in them a trust which 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, precisely this, that they received a bodily cure no less perfect than he did, but that he was saved out of his selfishness and ignorance of God, because he perceived that Jesus was doing His Father's works? This, I think, has been the interpretation of earnest readers; it may almost be called the traditional interpretation of Christendom. If we would but hold it consistently,—if, in the case of this miracle or of any other, we would but accept the lessons which it has carried home to suffering and lonely people in all parts of the world,—if we would but consider those lessons worth all the apologies that ever have been written, or ever shall be written, we should be less afraid of taking the words of the Son of God as they stand,—we should not think it dangerous to apply His own test to His own works. I reserve the consideration of one of these works, that of restoring the man possessed with the devils, for next week, because it strikes directly at one of the leading and most effective reasons for inventing another test than our Lord's and for discarding that. The Church has connected with that narrative the one respecting the passage over the Lake of Galilee, when Jesus said to the storm, "Peace, be still." There is a great beauty, which all readers have felt, in the association of the tumults in nature with the tumults of the human spirit. There is more than beauty: there is the deepest practical benefit in considering wherein they are alike, wherein they differ, why the same monarch must have dominion over both. I should gladly use the Gospel of next Sunday to suggest this comparison, but as I wish to fix your minds upon the cure of the demoniac for its own sake, I will refer for one moment to the first story now, as an additional illustration of the doctrine, "*If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not*." The remark can scarcely have failed to strike any one, that our Lord's acts of power do, in a very wonderful manner, gather up the different functions which those who were seeking God, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him, had attributed to separate divinities. Little as the Jews knew of the names of Dionysus, Æsculapius, Demeter, Phœbus, they, like all other people, *felt* as if some distinct benefactor must be concerned in the gift of the wine that made glad the heart, of the common bread, of bodily health, of sickness, of the light in the eye or understanding. And so, as the disciples were to preach a Gospel to all nations, acts which testified of this union of powers were the most perfect preparation they could receive initiating them into the faiths of different races, making them in the fullest sense assertors of the unity whereof their own was the appointed witness. To realize, by one special instance, in whose hand was the trident of the seas, was surely a part of this practical discipline which they would appreciate hereafter. But they would only appreciate it hereafter, because the impression He made on them at the moment was not the impression of a wonder-worker, who was exhibiting his power in producing startling effects and a sudden excitement, but of a calm Ruler, the upholder and restorer of peace and order. It was a work which revealed Him who had fixed the bounds of earth and sea. It was a work which, beneath the Creator of the world, revealed the Father of men. II\. The first part of my text is negative—"*If this is not so, believe me not*." The second is positive; it is full of instruction, I think also of encouragement. "*But if I do, though you believe not me, believe the works*." In general, perhaps, the order was reversed. Jesus was recognized first by the Galilean fishermen as the Teacher they had craved for; to whom the prophets and John, the last of the prophets, had pointed them; then the works became fuller manifestations of His nature and His dominion. The Centurion had learnt his need of One who could command men by a word, as he commanded the soldiers that were under him; the power which sent away his servant's palsy appeared to be the proper endowment of such a Ruler. But our Lord speaks of cases in which a belief in the works may precede a belief in Him, and may lead to it. The works, He says, may lead men to *know*—actually to *know*—that the Father is in Him, and that He is in the Father. What! to know this? Is not this the deepest mystery of the Christian faith? Must it not be received as a dogma transmitted from other ages, very galling to the reason, but against which it cannot remonstrate, because it has no capacity for dealing with the Infinite? I can only repeat our Lord's words. He says that men who believe the works as works of His Father, even before they have learnt to believe Him, may come to know this truth. And suppose it were a truth—suppose this mystery did underlie the universe, as we in our creeds profess that it does,—and suppose that the Church is right in treating these works as divine manifestations, must it not be so? Could they be divine manifestations, and not manifestations of this divine relation? Could men feel them as divine, because the expression of the highest grace and truth,—feel them as human, because coming with all human grace and truth,—and not confess a Father and Son, with an inward reality and certainty such as no mere dogma or tradition ever earned for itself, ever pretends to earn for itself? And yet, brethren, we fear to let our Lord's miracles be exposed to a trial which He claimed for them, and to which such a promise as this is attached! We think it safer to stifle all examination into their moral character, lest we should put in hazard the authority of the documents which contain them! Oh, poor and heartless policy, which must produce the results of all policy that is not based on truth! No doubt, if you invite men to say whether the miracles of Christ have not in them the tokens of all grace and truth,—are not such signs of His power as a Father would give to His children,—you permit them to state their doubts, their difficulties, their suspicions. Do you not wish that they should? Do you not know that there is danger, incalculable danger, in their quelling these doubts, difficulties, suspicions,—in their not bringing them forth to the light of day? If some are merely idle doubts, doubts suggested by the spirit of scorn, are there not some which God has awakened, that He may satisfy them? Dare you crush those? Can you distinguish the tares from the wheat? Cannot you trust God to do it? Commonly—the truth must be spoken—our modern way of meeting objections nourishes and justifies all the pride and contempt which prompts the worst of them; only hinders those from coming forth which really demand a solution, which, if there is any moral standard for man, any moral sense in man, will find one. And while we consider the effect we may produce on others, let us not forget the reaction upon ourselves. History, not speculation, supplies us with an awful warning. We know, on the testimony of Evangelists and Apostles, that there were men—religious men eager to crush all doubt respecting the authority of the Scriptures; quite 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, whether they came from the Father. They did not believe they had any faculties for entering on that inquiry. And so they denied both the Father and the Son; so they came to believe that He healed the sick, stilled the winds and waves, 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. [I]{.smallcaps} [have]{.smallcaps} chosen a passage from St. Luke's version of the story which we read in the Gospel of to-day. In doing so I am aware that I must remind you of a conspicuous variation in the Evangelists who report it. St. Matthew speaks of two men possessed with devils; St. Mark and St. Luke, only of one. The peculiarity of the incidents, and the strict agreement of the geography, leave no doubt that the miracle to which they refer is the same. Here therefore would be a legitimate subject for examination, which, if it were honestly conducted, must lead to good. The only danger in such cases is the concealment of difficulties, or the distortion of evidence for the purpose of removing them. Another question is raised by the narrative, which may receive illustration from the physician as well as the practical divine, each helping to clear the mind and remove the prejudices of the other. Are there such cases as are described here, in modern times, or were they confined to the age of the Evangelists? Which argument can hardly fail to introduce the whole controversy respecting the existence and influence of evil spirits. It is not because I would shun either of these lines of thought that I choose that one which the Church suggests to us by her use of the story in this season of the year. The Gospel for to-day is intended, no doubt, to give us another of the Epiphanies or Manifestations of Christ. I do not think we shall find such a manifestation less, whichever Evangelist we follow. One as much as another will assist us in the inquiry in which I am engaged: "What, according to the writers of the New Testament, is Revelation or Manifestation?" If we keep that problem steadily before us, I do not despair of our finding some light upon the others. At all events, we shall not be able to look upon them as mere cruxes and trivialities which may be left to critics; they will assume a human significance and grandeur. I\. Whatever differences may exist between the Evangelists, there is none as to the character of the malady which affected the one man or the two. All the symptoms of outrageous madness are described, let the cause of it be what it may. "*They came out of the tombs*," says St. Matthew; "*they were exceedingly fierce; no man could pass by that way*." St. Mark, speaking only of a single maniac, adds some more lines to the description. "*No one could bind him, no, not with chains. Because he had been often bound with* *fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces; neither could any man tame him*. *And always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying and cutting himself with stones*." St. Luke says, "*He wore no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs*." Surely as clear and full a picture of madness as was ever painted. II\. None of these signs are in themselves rare; we connect them with facts we have known, with sights we have seen. If there were no provision for the care of the insane, there is nothing in the conditions of modern civilization which would make it impossible or unlikely that such objects as those which presented themselves to our Lord in the country of the Gergesenes, should encounter us in England. But again, the Evangelists are agreed as to the origin of this fury. "The men," says St. Matthew, "were possessed with devils." "He had an *unclean* spirit," say St. Mark and St. Luke. They do not however abandon the plural number. The answer, "*Our name is Legion*," occurs in both. If this language is disagreeable to our ears, we cannot rid ourselves of it by comparing the documents. It stands out as strong and clear in one as the other. I need scarcely remind you that it does not belong to a single story or to ten stories. It is characteristic of the Gospels as such. It is not, as I have observed to you before, characteristic of them *as well as* of the Old Testament books. It distinguishes them from those books. The allusions to evil spirits are rare in the one, continual in the other. III\. In another point there is no diversity. It is that for the sake of which I am referring to the story, that which has given it a place among the Epiphany services. "*What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us*?" is St. Matthew's account of the voice which met our Lord when He approached the madman. "*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*," is St. Mark's version. St. Luke substitutes "*I beseech thee*" for "*I adjure thee*;" otherwise he nearly repeats St. Mark. Here again the expressions are familiar to us. We meet them under varieties of form in other narrations. Evil spirits are said always to regard Jesus as their tormentor, because He is come to deliver a man from their dominion. IV\. That which distinguishes this story from others of the like kind—the entrance of the devils into the herd of swine—is also dwelt upon carefully and minutely by each of the Evangelists. However we explain it, we cannot treat it as an interpolation: and it is an evidently hopeless experiment to look for some particulars in one of the three narratives, which may induce us to hold by that as the least difficult. V\. Finally, though the passage I have taken out of St. Luke, which declares the ultimate effect of our Lord's command, has nothing exactly according to it in St. Matthew, it is evidently taken for granted in his account. The men, being delivered from the tyrants that possessed them, would of course be clothed and in their right mind. I wish to keep that result in recollection, therefore I have set it before you in express words; I might have reached it just as well by inference from the first Gospel. Taking the story then as it stands, and not having any secret for changing it from an account of spiritual bondage and spiritual emancipation into something else, I cannot doubt that a number of persons in our day—of intelligent and devout persons—will turn from it with considerable annoyance and discontent. Any preacher who recalls his own feelings about it at some time or other of his life, will not, I should think, be inclined to judge harshly of such objectors. Least of all—unless his remembrances are of a rare and peculiar kind, or his present convictions very feeble—will he desire that their doubts should not be frankly stated, should not be fully confronted with the facts of experience as well as with the words of Scripture. Or if we have any of us been led to accept this record, not coldly and reluctantly, but as one which we could not bear to part with, which has been a strength and help to us in dark hours, the process, I suppose, has been something of this kind. Beginning to contemplate the subject quietly and at a distance, with very great indisposition to compromise his reputation for sense, asking himself what sort of maniac the man described in the Gospels might be, and what natural way of accounting for his frenzy there might be found, the inquirer has suddenly had the thought thrust upon him, "What if *thou* art that man? What if the strange fact that he was a spiritual being is a fact that is common to him and to thee? What if that other strange fact, that his spirit was under the yoke of unlawful intruders, of cruel usurpers, may also explain what thou has known in thyself, and which thou couldst very ill explain? Hast thou not been conscious of a subjection to the tyranny, not of one ruler, but of divided, contradictory rulers? Is not their name Legion? Thou hast been wont to speak of them as impulses, motives, principles: has that language made the fact clearer? They are not visible; they assail thy own very self; from them have come foul and cruel thoughts and inspirations: is it not horrible to think they *are* thyself, that there is no distinction between them and thee? Is it not a lie to think so? Whether thou hast resisted them, whether thou hast obeyed, do not the very names Resistance, Obedience, imply that they are not thyself? But was there no other that thou wast resisting when thou wast obeying them? Was there no other that thou wast obeying when thou wast resisting them? What says thy conscience? Does it witness of none such? Has He never manifested Himself to thee yet? Is He not manifesting Himself to thee now? In all thy thoughts of good, in all thy struggles with evil, is He not manifesting Himself to thee? And Who else was it that manifested Himself to the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes? Was not that a crucial instance of His nature and His power? Was He not showing His purpose of claiming a spirit that had sunk into the lowest and bitterest bondage? Was not He showing that there are no usurpers over the human spirit so mighty that He cannot overcome them?" I imagine that a person who has gone so far as this, will find in the final incident of the narrative something to cause him trembling rather than to affront his taste. He will be disposed to say, "Yes! as I see in that fierce madman a man of my flesh and blood,—such a man as I might become if a mightier than I was not upholding me,—so I cannot deny that those swine running violently down a steep place till they are choked in the sea, do set before me the liveliest image of the effect those powers which have swayed me, which are always seeking to sway me, would produce if they were transferred to mere brute natures. They show me that we do not sink *merely* into a condition below humanity when evil has the mastery over us; that the depraved Will carries into its degradation a malignity which gives the animal what it has not of its own. Surely a lesson which a divine Teacher would desire to impart, by such examples as the Gospels speak of, to those whom He came to claim as spiritual beings! For," he will go on, "when one looks at the New Testament again, with the light thrown upon it from experience, do not I perceive that this is the very character in which Christ is presented, not in one or two passages, but throughout? What does it mean, that He baptizes with the Spirit? What means the history of the Temptation? What means every discourse, miracle, parable? Are they not all testifying of One who is come to debate the possession of the man, not with flesh and blood enemies, but with principalities and powers that are assaulting, if not holding, the very citadel of his being? Why does He speak of the strong man armed, keeping the house in peace? Why does He speak of the stronger than he, who takes from him all the armour wherein he trusted, and spoils his goods?" Now, I repeat it, a man who has learnt by this process of thought, or by any process of thought like this, to accept the narrative of the Demoniacs without change or qualification, cannot be offended with any one who hesitates about it, nay, who fights every step of his way before he will surrender his objections to it. I apprehend that his experience of such a state of mind will make him far more than tolerant of it. There are many feelings connected with it which he would not for the world eradicate, because they are some of the greatest confirmations of his own faith on this very subject. For instance, the dread of Superstition and Fanaticism. The more deep this dread is,—the more a man regards superstition and fanaticism as horrible evils into which by God's help he will not sink, and which it would be agony to suspect in the Son of Man,—the more hope, it seems to me, there is that he will take in this story in the length and breadth of it. For the direst kind of Superstition is that which connects evil with the Nature of God, and the next direst kind is that which identifies the man himself with evil. And here both are undermined from the foundation. God manifests Himself in conflict with the Evil Spirit in his essence, and in all the forms he may take. God manifests Himself in the very act of distinguishing the man from the evil which has possessed him. The direst fanaticism is that which assumes the being of any man to be the proper habitation of evil spirits. And the second most evil form is, that which supposes that certain special men have a right to claim the Spirit of God as theirs in a sense in which ordinary men may not claim it. And all the petty forms of fanaticism wherein it passes into triviality, such as abound in our day, have their root in the notion that spiritual powers and influences are light topics, for drawing-room gossip. Here at once each of these shapes of fanaticism is laid bare. The Spirit of Christ meets the Unclean Spirit in what appears his last, securest, most legitimate hold, and declares that there he has no right. The maniac is as fit to be the receptacle of His power and inspiration as the highest saint. The whole transaction is full of solemnity and awe; so that if it be true, and have come from the source of Truth, the stories with which our ears are dinned must be not ridiculous but loathsome. For all these reasons, then, a believer in the narrative will be exceedingly afraid of using even what may seem to him fair methods of argument for the sake of dispelling scepticism upon it. Something perhaps he may do by calmly stating his own conviction and how he has been led to it. But he cannot be displeased that he shall not be the means of imparting that conviction to any other mind. If it has been given him, as he thinks it has, he can trust One who knows all the passages and channels of his creatures' hearts to send it them as they want it. He knows that so far as he tries to drive it home by arts of persuasion or of ridicule or of terror, because it is his, so far he shall be marring the effect of the divine arguments which are so much subtler, and penetrate so much deeper, and carry with them such a different kind of compulsion. These conclusions are inevitable for a person who regards 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 from this has been proclaimed in our day as the only one which is consistent with Christian orthodoxy and with common sense. To represent it as the discovery of the true God in the person of His Son, to a creature capable of knowing Him, incapable of freedom and peace without the knowledge of Him, is to incur I scarcely can say what frightful charges. Mysticism is on the face of such a statement; Rationalism lies beneath it; it betrays a profound and fatal ignorance of the nature which God has given us, which can never come into near and close contact with the Eternal, which can only abstract some feeble notion of that from the things of time and sense. What then is Revelation, if not this? It contains, we are told, lessons which it is necessary for us to receive,—which God wishes us to receive—because though they are not in any strict sense manifestations of what He is, they are necessary for the regulation of our lives. Here at last is something positive. We are not merely told by what standard we *cannot* judge of that which is presented to us. We know what its office is. Be it so. Then let us consider what sort of Revelation has or has not fulfilled that office. I would still hold fast to the Scriptures in entering upon this inquiry. I would begin with this story of the Demoniac. I am not now engaged with objectors to it, but with those who say that, being a part of the Bible, it is to be received like any other part; that to raise any cavils against it, or to put any unliteral sense upon it, is perilous. Here then is a case of moral regulation. A man who was wild and furious becomes calm and orderly. He sits at the feet of Jesus clothed and in his right mind. What has wrought this mighty change? Is it the announcement to him of some law which God has laid down for his creatures? Is it the announcement of some punishment which will follow the breach of that law in some other world? Is it a series of sound ethical maxims? Is it injunctions about prayer to God or self-government? Is it anything whatever which we comprehend under the ordinary notion of moral discipline? All these regulations were desirable, assuredly, for a man in the condition of the maniac. But common sense pronounced them ridiculous. It was obvious that they could take no effect; that they must be wasted. Far more direct and simple methods were resorted to. He was chained. But that was as ineffectual a scheme of regulation as the other. The fetters were burst asunder, the chains were broken. It is just when all mere regulations, divine and human, are found absolutely vain to restrain him from being the curse and plague of his fellow-men that Christ is said to have met the man himself, to have entered into colloquy with that which could hear no laws, could be restrained by no force,—to have emancipated and reformed that. And here is the result: not a new excitement substituted for the old; not religious paroxysms taking the place of other paroxysms, but quietness and order: he is in his right mind. Here is one instance, and, as I have shown already, a type-instance, of Christ's acts towards a class of human creatures. But let us pass to a case of a decidedly opposite kind. Saul of Tarsus, instead of being a maniac, is the most correct of men, reverencing the law,—as touching all the commandments which are contained in it, blameless. He has been trained to regard the Revelation given to his fathers as a regulative one. Precisely in that character it has been set before him by the doctors at Jerusalem. The thought of its being anything but this,—of its being in any sense an unveiling of God himself,—the promise of a more perfect unveiling—may now and then have disturbed him as he pored over some passage in the Psalms or the Prophets. But he has dismissed it—angrily dismissed it. God has been pleased to give his nation a revelation. It consists mainly of a law, though it has also pleased God, in compassion to the ignorance of His creatures, to set before them also a system of worship and sacrifices which it would be very unsafe and criminal for them to neglect. He hears of a set of men who are apparently teaching another doctrine than this; who, if he has not mistaken them, proclaim that a crucified man has manifested or unveiled the Divine Being to men. All regulations, all limitations, have been burst through; these wretched fanatics are actually assuming that the Invisible has come nigh to His creatures,—that there is a way by which they may ascend to him. St. Stephen's speech perhaps first discovers to him the extent of their departure from all the maxims which he holds sacred. There every step in the Jewish History is treated as a step towards the revelation of that Just One of whom his countrymen had been the betrayers and murderers. There those countrymen are charged with having resisted the Holy Ghost, who in all ages has been striving with them. There the vision of a Son of Man at the right hand of God was openly announced in language which could be nothing less than blasphemy in the ears of one who looked on God as immeasurably distant from man. He becomes more and more furious; still it is fury against the opposers of a regulative Revelation. Then comes the crisis in his life. That regulative Revelation—the system of laws, precepts, ordinances, which God Himself has appointed for the good of his nation,—he found to be utterly ineffectual for his life. Instead of their helping him or raising him, he finds himself crushed under the weight of them. It is only when the same Lord who bade the unclean spirit depart out of the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes, claims to be the Lord and Deliverer of his spirit, that he becomes clothed and in his right mind. What kind of work he did then, what sort of revelation of God he proclaimed in the city which was most unlike Jerusalem in its speculations and its worship, I considered in a former sermon. And if we followed up the discourse there by an examination of his Epistles, we should come, I think to these two conclusions:—(1) That he is everywhere announcing an actual revelation and manifestation of God's righteousness to the spirit of man as the deliverance from a mere law—a regulative Revelation—which had never reached, which never could reach, the spirit of man. (2) That he speaks of the Spirit of God as holding converse, not with the spirit of the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes, not with the spirit of him, the Apostle of the Gentiles, but with the spirit of man, from generation to generation; that he regards the assurance that such a Spirit shall be with us, witnessing to us, sustaining us, making us partakers of the Divine Nature, as the great assurance of the Gospel, apart from which it would have no power whatever to improve the lives of men or the condition of the world. Brethren, was St. Paul right or wrong in this anticipation? Has the Gospel of Christ produced any even the slightest, amelioration in human society, except so far as it has carried this message home to the hearts of human beings? It has done singularly little in the way of outward regulation. It sent forth no decrees against gladiatorial exhibitions, against polygamy, against slavery. If it has wrought, in any period of its existence, any cure of these evils——if it has given any new face to society,—it is because a voice was saying to the unclean spirit that had possessed it, "Get thee out;" because Christ Himself was felt to be wrestling with that spirit and overcoming it. So has it been with every man. In the latest ages as in the first, there have been messages of deliverance to the outcast maniacs who could not be bound with chains, but through whomsoever they have come, through the benevolent physician or the sympathizing sister of charity, they have been recognitions of a better spirit struggling with the evil spirit; they have been tokens from Christ that He can set free the captive and put down the oppressor. Decent men have been changed in later times, as in earlier times, from self-satisfied and bitter haters into humble Christians, into zealous apostles of goodwill to men. But in every case the change has been preceded by the discovery of the inefficiency of all mere regulations, in whatever form they might come,—as laws of earth or laws of Heaven,—to make him a true man. It has taken place when the heart has owned a Son of God to whom it had been crying, "*What have I to do with thee? Art thou come to torment me*?" as a friend and deliverer. It has come when the heart has perceived that the power which it had thought most far away, in Heaven or Hell, was nigh to it. It has come when the man has confessed that the Righteous God, seeing that he had no righteousness of his own, was clothing them with the righteousness which none can comprehend, which every spiritual being is created to apprehend. I believe, brethren, it is not true of the Gospel of Christ, that if you take from it its original character,—if you strip it of those claims which Apostles and Martyrs put forth in its behalf,—it may challenge respect on a lower ground, it may claim a sort of useful and recognized position for itself 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. You will find that if we dare not proclaim Christ as the Deliverer of the spirit of man from its bondage——if we dare not say that He has come actually to reveal God's righteousness to men,—we had better cease to speak of Him at all. For it is such a one that men want; it is for such a one that in their inmost hearts, even when their language against the Son of Man is loudest, they are crying. It was so in former ages; it is so now. It was so among the most miserable and the most respectable; it is so still. If preachers of the Gospel do not answer the cry,—if they only represent it as one of the regulative processes that are at work in society,—it will be felt to be the feeblest of all these processes; the chain and the prisonhouse will be found stronger. Brethren, the lesson is written in broad and deep characters upon our annals; it is written in characters of blood. I may dare to speak to you, on this 30th of January at all events, not of other men's sins, but of our own. We are not commanded any longer to forget the beam in our eyes that we might search for the mote in our brother's eye. The Church of England has to blame herself for the event which this day commemorates, because she did not heed that groan which 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. It was supposed that they who uttered it were maniacs, and that chains might bind them. It was supposed that a regulative Revelation, if it were 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 enough for our warning! In the following century there was again the cry for a Revelation that should reach the spirits of men, that should present Christ to them as an actual Deliverer from evil spirits, claiming maniacs, robbers, outlaws, for sons of God. There was evidence——clear, undoubted evidence——that those who proclaimed Him in that character, did leave men whom they found possessed with unclean spirits, clothed, and in their right mind. There was evidence as clear and undoubted that effects the opposite of these were often the result of their preaching; that fanaticism often followed it——sometimes hypocrisy. These facts were heeded, the others not. The conclusion was drawn, that a preaching that spoke of God as actually coming near to man, of a Spirit working upon his spirit, was not favourable to morality. A regulative Revelation must be proclaimed instead of this, a revelation of things which it was fitting to believe and fitting to do, stamped with the Divine authority, but bearing no witness that man is intended with open face to behold the glory of God, and to be changed into His image. Has that attempt succeeded better than the other? Has not Methodism vanquished you, as Puritanism vanquished you before? Have not you been obliged to adopt its phrases, even some of the phrases which were most reasonably charged with leading to mischievous results, because it proved itself more strong and effectual over men's minds than any mere regulative Revelation ever was or ever can be? Brethren, must this lesson also be wasted upon us? We have not indeed the same circumstances to deal with that we had in the seventeenth century or in the eighteenth. But we have men to deal with still——men of all different classes, the criminal and the respectable, the sane and the maniac. Oh! shall we try again that old and worn-out experiment which has proved so helpless with them all? Shall we argue with men about the wickedness and folly of their unbelief? Shall we tell them how they may regulate themselves so that they may present a comely face to the world, distracted by no tumults, perplexed by no doubts? Or shall we speak to them as the Church herself speaks to them, declaring that God has verily manifested Himself, not to the eye, but to the spirit, and that His spirit is working with their spirits that they may be clean and pure within? Oh! if we could but proclaim that message to men, what would nicknames signify to us? Surely we might bear to be called Mystics or Rationalists or madmen or atheists,——all which titles have been bestowed upon far holier men, upon Apostles and Martyrs,——if we could but be Christ's instruments in casting an evil spirit out of the age; if we could but bring one man who has been possessed with a legion of them, to sit at His feet clothed and in a right mind! ## THE PARABLES OF CHRIST ::: {.center} Fifth Sunday after Epiphany ::: ::: {.center} [February]{.smallcaps} 6, 1859 ::: "*And the disciples came, and said unto Him, Why speakest Thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. 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. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and 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 they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men 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*."—[Matthew]{.smallcaps} xiii. 10-17. [Many]{.smallcaps} have given their answer to the question why our Lord spoke in parables. Owing, it has been said, to the limitations of the human intellect, it is impossible for us really to know anything of divine, eternal things; they can only be presented to us through very imperfect likenesses derived from nature or the transactions of men. That is a general reason applicable to one human being as much as another. Then there is a special reason, drawn from the circumstances of our Lord's life on earth. He was instructing ignorant fishermen. Such wisdom as it was possible for men of this class to receive might, it is said, be expected to reach them best through stories and apologues. Or thirdly: Why should not the parables be veils purposely contrived to hide sacred truths from the gaze of the profane multitude? The Disciples were not less perplexed than any in later times have been on this subject. They took what appeared to them the simplest mode of freeing themselves from the perplexity. They said to our Lord, "*Why speakest thou to them in parables*?" He replied at once. The answer is contained in the passage I have read to you. Let us consider how far it accords with any of those we have invented for ourselves. I\. "*To you*," He says, "*it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven*." I need not remind you to whom He is speaking. They were those ignorant fishermen for whose sake He is supposed to have devised this kind of teaching. They are told expressly that they could dispense with it, that they are capable of a high knowledge. Yes, knowledge. He says it is given them to *know* the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. Do not let us dismiss that phrase till we have examined it. We oppose the Kingdom of Heaven to the Kingdom of Earth. We call the one eternal, the other temporal or transitory. That is ordinary language; none, whatever their theory may be, object to it. Only they say: What is eternal is mysterious, inconceivable. Our Lord admits that it is. He speaks of *mysteries*. But He speaks of knowing mysteries. He means apparently what St. Paul meant when he says, "*Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him*." But He affirms that the Disciples—taken from the commonest order of men, sharing in their ignorance—have a capacity for *knowing* these mysteries, these eternal things which cannot be conceived. Does it strike you that there is a force in the word "given," which I have neglected? Does it seem to you to take these simple men out of the common roll of men, and to signify that they had a privilege altogether special, not the least appertaining to their race? "*To you it is given; to them it is not given*." I admit all the value of the expression. It is of incalculable importance for the understanding of this passage,—and of every passage in the New Testament. But before you decide that it can bear that sense which has just been suggested, reflect on 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*." Here a Universal Law is announced as the explanation of that gift to the Disciples, and of the difference between them and others. *Whosoever* hath. *Whosoever* hath not. Is it not assumed in that universal statement—is it not affirmed—that every man whatever has received certain things which the Bestower will increase if he hold them fast; but which he may let go and be left utterly bare? And what are these things? If there is the least connection between this verse and that which precedes it,—between the difficulty and the solution,—they are *mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven*. These are the treasures—not lying far from any man—to which these fishermen had not foregone their claim, which no one can relinquish without abandoning his rights, without renouncing his manhood. III\. For thus 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, understanding, these are admitted powers of human beings. They are *gifts*, in the truest, deepest meaning of that word; they should be owned as fresh gifts every morning. They are *felt* to be gifts by those who have suffered any temporary blindness, deafness, derangement of intellect. But still they are gifts to *men*; to be without them is a fearful penalty, the exception to a rule. To have them and not to exercise them is wilfulness. Is it not intimated to us that there is something exactly corresponding to these organs of sense in the spirit of man; that an eye is *there*, which may be opened or may be closed; an ear is *there* which may be awake to take in a voice that is speaking to it, or may be stopped; a capacity for profiting by the vision, for yielding to the voice, which may be continually expanded, or may continually become more contracted? Would you say that this eye of the spirit was less truly and essentially *human* than the eye of the body? Would not you call it far *more* truly and essentially human? Would not you say that that *appertained* to the man, that this was a part of his very being? Would not you say that that might be extinguished and he still remain; nay, that the loss might bring with it, as it certainly brought to Milton, an abundant compensation; that for the other to be put out is for the man himself to perish? Supposing this were meant, you would recollect at once expressions which would illustrate it, and would appear to be of precisely the same character. Such as these:—"*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*!" The verity of this description, when we apply it to the external world, commends itself to us all. And oh! have we never thought—have we never known—that it must have the other application also, and that that application was the primary one? Have we never been brought to confess that the light of the sun cannot be *the* Light, the Light of the world, the Light of men,—that there must be an older, a more penetrating, a more universal Light than that, because there has been something in us which has quailed before it, which has wished to quench it? But if there is this correspondence between the organs of the spirit and the organs of sense,—if experience assures there is,—does not that explain to us the meaning and power of the parables? May not all sensible things, by a necessity of their nature, be testifying to us of that which is nearest to us, of that which it most concerns us to know, of the mysteries of our own life, and of God's relation to us? May it not be impossible for us to escape from these witnesses? They may become insignificant to us from our very familiarity with them; nay, we may utterly forget that there is any wonder in them. The transformation of the seed into the full corn in the ear may appear to us the dullest of all phenomena, not worthy to be noted or thought of. The difference in the returns from different soils, or from the soils under different cultivation; the difference in the quality of the produce, and the relation which it bears to the quality of the seeds, may be interesting to us from the effect such varieties have upon the market,—from the more or less money we derive from the sale;—not the least as facts in nature, facts for meditation. The relation between a landholder or farmer and those who work for him, between a steward and his employer, between a shepherd and his sheep, all in like manner may be tried by the same pecuniary standard; apart from that, they suggest nothing to us. Thus the universe becomes actually "as is a landscape to a dead man's eye;" all the business in which we are ourselves engaged, a routine which must be got through in some way or another, that we may have leisure to eat, drink, and sleep. Can any language describe this state so accurately and vividly as that of our Lord in the text? Seeing we see, and do not perceive; hearing we hear, and do not understand. But is He not declaring to His disciples why He *spoke* in parables to the Jewish people? and am not I alluding to parables which are not spoken so much as acted,—acted before us as well 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*." Were it true that these secret processes of Nature, that the transactions of human beings, had been, from the foundation of the world, the lesson-books out of which God was instructing men, and revealing Himself to them,—were it true that these lessons had been perverted and misunderstood, changed into excuses for idolatry, as if He were made after the likeness of natural things or of man's caprices—what force then would be in this application of the prophet's sentence! How truly would Christ fulfil the words by withdrawing the veil which had been covering these common facts, by showing what was behind them! How wonderfully He would be proving that He knew the mind of the Father from whom He came,—that He had indeed been as one brought up with Him! If this is not the import of the parables, does not St. Matthew's quotation sound inflated and exaggerated? How did mere apologues, intended to make truths more lively, or to recommend them to the ignorant (I say nothing of the other supposition, that they were intended to *conceal* truths), "*declare things that had been kept secret from the foundation of the world*"? But the greatest satisfaction of our doubts upon this subject is derived, I think, from a comparison of this part of my text with the passage in the fourth chapter of St. Mark's Gospel, which corresponds to it. "*Unto them that are without*,"—this is his version of our Lord's answer,—"*all things are done in parables*." To those who never dwell on that which is within upon that which concerns their own selves,—but live merely in the outward world, these things,—the things of the Kingdom of Heaven,—become only in this form of parables. I use the expression "*become*," as the most literal rendering of γίνεται, but I cannot think that our translators were wrong or unhappy in the phrase which they chose in preference to it. The divine things are not merely spoken through parables, they are *done* in parables,—the parables are about us, only, through the want of a light coming from within, we do not recognize them. IV\. But though on this ground I cannot look upon any parable as less really concerning one age than another, I do not for a moment deny that our Lord's words in the next clause 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*." Such words intimate very clearly that the incapacity for discerning anything not material or sensual, which Isaiah lamented in the Jews of his day,—which he was told would make them heedless of all his warnings and of all his consolations, till the armies of the Assyrians had laid the land waste, till there was great forsaking in the midst of it, and many cities were left without inhabitant,—was reaching its climax in the days of our Lord's Incarnation; all the Divine discipline which had been used for the correction of it, having been itself turned into a justification of it. In that day was fulfilled (or had come to its full maturity) all the coarseness, the covetousness, the pride, which had been corrupting and undermining the nation in former times, but had not then reached its vitals. For now there was no more the consciousness of wrong-doing which there had been in the days of hill-altars and of 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 who were just about to murder the Prophet of Prophets. No past lessons, therefore, were of the least avail. How did they concern men so free from all the crimes and wrong tendencies of their ancestors? They had the Holy Book in their possession; no heathen could claim it; all its sounds and letters were familiar to them; they could repeat them, argue from them, comment upon them,—only they were mere sounds, mere letters. Hearing they heard, and did not understand; seeing they saw, and did not perceive. No living voice came to them out of that which was read continually in the synagogue. No vision of a divine Presence or a divine Deliverer shone through the writings that testified of nothing else. And so idolatry—taking no shape, protested against and vehemently abhorred—crept inwards, took possession of the whole being of those who held idolaters to be accursed of God. The gold upon the altar became the measure by which they judged of the sacrifice that was offered upon it; the gold of the Temple was really for them the Presence that dwelt in it. To a race bound in these chains, our Lord spake of a Shepherd who went into the wilderness to seek after a sheep that was lost, of a Father who ran and embraced the prodigal who, while eating his swine's food, had thought of the house from which he went out. These were parables of human duty, of human affection, witnessing to hearts that were open, of some divine Shepherd who might lay down His life for the sheep, of a Father who might make a mighty sacrifice to bring back His children to Himself. These were witnesses of a care as actual and personal as that of the human shepherd, of a love as actual and personal as that of the human parent, only free from all their limitations and partialities, being about them in their daily walks, and in every book which they read. But if the shepherd was regarded merely as a servant hired to see that certain articles of merchandise were not lost to their owner,—if they, the shepherds of the people, were hirelings after the same pattern,—if the ties of father and child were changed into suspicion upon the one side, dread on the other, a calculation of worldly interests and advantages on both,—what would these Parables be to them? They would prove their truth even in these cases. It would be seen that the analogy between the human and the divine is not an imaginary or artificial one, but exists in the nature of things. For even such a shepherd, even such a father as they were, would they 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 manifest Himself by casting them forth as enemies alike of Him and of His creatures, to be a spectacle and a bye-word among the nations. V\. This terrible test of the veracity of these parables was not however to be the only one. "*Blessed*" says our Lord to the fishermen about Him, "*Blessed 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 which raised these poor men, these 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 apprehended them, whom they confessed to be the Lord and Master of the spirit within them,—who was speaking to that, illuminating that, delivering them from their own miserable conceptions, raising them above any judgments of God deduced from the objects of sense, educating them to know Him as He is? Was it not that they were under the teaching of One who repulsed no questions, listened to all doubts, bore with all confusions, showing them that it was no will of His Father that there should be veils over their hearts when they heard His words or contemplated His works? Was it not that a sense of a union between men and God was dawning upon them, through all the acts and discourses of Him who called Himself the Son of Man? Did not that name testify to them that He who was speaking to them in the ear in closets, must be indeed the King of all human hearts, and that as such they were to declare Him to all nations? Was not this Revelation of the actual glory of the Unseen God in a man, that which kings and prophets had longed to see? Was not the message that He is the Lord of Gentiles as well as Jews,—is the head of every man,—what they desired to hear? And so I think we find the explanation of a fact which has, perhaps, sometimes puzzled us. Why did not the Apostles, trained as they were in our Lord's school, when they went forth among the hardened Jews, amongst the idolatrous Gentiles——make more use of Parables? Why do we find so few in their discourses or their letters? I apprehend that when they preached of a Son of God and a Son of Man, of One in whom God was reconciled to men, in Whom God was showing forth His glory to men, they were going to the very root of this teaching; they were enabling mankind to profit by it as they had profited by it. For if once we receive that fact of God's union with our race in the Person of a Mediator as the interpretation of all other facts,—as the kernel mystery of the Universe,—we cannot suppose that we rise to conceptions of God through the things of time and sense, we cannot help supposing that through these things He is speaking to us. The Apostles who bore witness that a Spirit had been given to dwell among men, because the Son of Man was glorified at the right hand of God, and that this Spirit testifies with the spirits of men that they are Sons of God, could not suggest the thought that men must ascend to the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven by an earthly ladder. They must invite all to enter into the mysteries of that Kingdom as they had done, through a sense of deep want, through the infinite need of a Deliverer from their sensuality and their darkness. They must declare that their Deliverer, their Illuminator, was the Deliverer and Light of all, and that none need walk in darkness,—that any man might awake out of sleep, and see that Light which would one day fill the Universe. But this testimony, so far as it was received, converted all Nature, and all human acts, from dead letters into divine hieroglyphics, from instruments of idolatry into preachers concerning the Unseen and the Eternal. Such preachers they have been to the humble and meek, who have asked Christ, as the Disciples did, to tell them why He spoke by parables, and to interpret the parables which they found in every street and alley, as well as in every hill and stream. We are told, brethren, that they have been deceiving themselves. No real knowledge of the Eternal is possible; for our conceptions are bounded by the finite and the visible. My answer is:—If that is the reason, no knowledge of the seen and the temporal is possible. Slavery to our conceptions, as the teacher of experimental science has shown us, is the hindrance to any real, solid acquaintance with the mysteries of Nature. When we try to bind her with the forms of our intellect, she will give us no faithful answers; she will only return an echo to our own voices. Here is another proof of the analogy between things sensible and spiritual. The same enemy blocks the entrance into both regions. The determination to measure all things by ourselves, to bring everything under the conditions of our intellect, makes us exiles from the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Kingdom of Earth. That determination in other days was called Pride; in ours (words alter their meaning so strangely) it claims to be owned as the profoundest humility. We dare not presume to burst the shackles which God has imposed upon us; we dare not dream of ascending above the world in which He has seen good to place us; that we do not is 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; that the parables of Christ are *not* real revelations of it. For this strange method of vindicating the faith and confuting its opponents, the venerable authority of Bishop Butler is sometimes pleaded. The man to whom some of us owe the first suggestion of the thought that there is an actual analogy between the things of Earth and the things of Heaven, between what we see and what we do not see, between the temporal and Eternal,—the man who courageously adopted the words of Origen, with whose mystical tendencies his cautious intellect could have no sympathy, as the text of his book and the exposition of its design,—this man, because, through the coldness of his age, he gave a somewhat negative form to his argument, using it rather to refute opponents than to establish a principle, is now supposed to have employed his clear logical faculty chiefly for the purpose of undermining the hopes which he had himself raised, and of maintaining the melancholy proposition that the general scheme of the Universe is not on the whole much better or more intelligible than the particular scheme of Christianity, and that we should not be *more* ignorant and perplexed than we are, if we had not been obliged, under terrible penalties, to believe in the Bible. That it was the intention of this earnest and devout thinker to make good such conclusions as these, I can never convince myself; that such an intention has been imputed to him by admiring disciples, is one proof more how little in general we gain, how much we may lose, by abandoning our own positions that we may dislodge assailants from theirs. But it is a comparatively light question, whether we are doing justice or gross injustice to luminaries of our own; whether, as the orator says, we are honouring them in their noonday, or bringing forth our hymns and symbols at the moment of their eclipse. It *is* a very great and serious question indeed, whether our patronage of Christianity is subverting the revelation of Christ. It is a most serious question for ourselves, whether the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eternal realities, are indeed near to us all, and whether we may know them, or whether we may allege that they are far from us, and that by the very nature of our vision it is impossible for us even with the divinest telescopes to discern them. It is a very serious question whether we have any message or not concerning the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven, to those who are as poor as the fishermen of Galilee were; or whether we can only appeal to some vague fears which are in them, of a Kingdom of Hell,—not being allowed to tell them that the horror of the Kingdom of Hell consists in the absence of all knowledge of God's Righteousness and Truth and Love. These thoughts must press very heavily upon those who preach; I trust they press also upon some who hear. Oh, let us desire for ourselves that we may, as humble men, as little children, receive the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven; that we may not substitute an acknowledgment of the Scriptures for a study of their contents, 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, 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. [I]{.smallcaps} [have]{.smallcaps} chosen these verses as a fitting conclusion to the subject upon which I have been speaking to you during these weeks of Epiphany. I have been trying to ascertain what that Revelation of Jesus Christ is, of which the writers in the New Testament speak so continually. Is it, as the word seems to intimate, the actual unveiling of a Person to the conscience, heart, reason of human beings? Is it, as the Church appears to say, the unveiling of the character and nature of [God]{.smallcaps} to a creature who is formed to know Him? Or is it the announcement of certain opinions and maxims and rules of life to a creature who is formed *not* to know Him, and who, *because* that is his condition, must receive whatever, on probable evidence, he can guess to be divine? This has been the question—nearly the most important one with which it is possible for men to occupy themselves. The metaphysical arguments by which the latter opinion has been defended, I have touched upon very slightly. They involve subtleties which the hearers of sermons cannot be expected to follow, which they are likely to judge of rather by their wishes than by their convictions. I have contented myself with suggesting the inquiry whether these arguments, if they are truly stated, do not prove the impossibility of all knowledge whatever,—of that which refers to earth as much as of what is heavenly or eternal. My business has been to show you that the Bible at all events solemnly repudiates the maxim which has been put forth in its defence; repudiates it by all the anticipations of the holy men and prophets of the Old Testament; repudiates it through every work and parable of Christ which is recorded by Evangelists, through every discourse which was delivered by Apostles. There is, however, one justification of this doctrine which I have hinted at, but not yet fully discussed. It is said that practice, not speculation, is what God desires of men; that His Word sets before them objects of fear and objects of hope; that He tells them what kind of men He would have them be, instead of tempting them to lose themselves in endless mazes of doubt that they may ascertain what He is. To all these propositions I give a hearty assent. I wish you to see how they bear upon the controversy;—for they have, I am satisfied, a direct bearing upon it. What that is, we might have gathered from the Epistle which was read to-day. But as that Epistle is taken from St. John, and as those who show any special reverence for St. John are said by some to exhibit fatal symptoms of the disease which they call Mysticism, I prefer to take my text from St. Peter, whom all will admit to be the most practical, the least speculative of teachers,—who in this passage of his Epistle especially, is setting forth the hopes and fears which he would wish his disciples to keep in mind, and the maxims which were to guide them in the fight of life. I\. It will at once occur to you that the expectation which St. Peter speaks of here, is that expectation of the appearing or manifestation or unveiling of Jesus Christ which sustained the Christians of the first age, and which all the Apostles, none more than St. Paul, encouraged by their words and by their example. I have often spoken to you of the opinion which prevails so widely in our day, that this hope was disappointed,—that what they looked for as close at hand was deferred to an immense distance of time,—that there has been no fulfilment of their longings even yet. I have often declared that if that were so, their whole message to mankind, and the lives which illustrated it, would seem to me utterly perplexing and bewildering. For this hope was certainly the staff of their being; if it was false, the acts and thoughts which were inspired by it and determined by it, must also have been false. I could not hope that such statements would produce much effect upon those who believed the Apostles to have been generally under the influence of a delusion; I desired that they might be weighed by those who suppose that they were the heralds of a truth to mankind which is as needful for this age as it was for theirs. Now our inquiry respecting the word Revelation is closely connected with this subject. If it denotes wherever it is used, to whatever time it is referred the removal of a veil which had hidden the eternal God from men;—if from the hour in which men were created such veils had been removing;—if the sin of man, which had seemed to cut him off from God, had been a means of discovering the nature and essential character of God, by His warfare with it and forgiveness of it;—if no one step in Jewish history, or in any history, could be regarded by holy men except as the instrument of such a discovery, as the setting forth something of the divine power and righteousness;—if the one desire of those holy men was for the complete rending asunder of that which had hidden from all the nations the light in which they were intended to walk, and in which alone they could see themselves or see each other;—if the Son of Man did, while He was on earth, by all His acts, discourses, parables, declare the Kingdom of God to men, did manifest to men the Father;—if, when He had overcome the sharpness of death, He opened the Kingdom, and discovered the inner mind of the Father to all who believed in Him, who received Him as the well-beloved Son;—if this unveiling of His Kingdom to men was precisely that which the Apostles were appointed to preach, and did preach;—if they preached it to a world which contradicted all they said, and treated it as ridiculous;—if the spectacle which that world presented seemed to make it ridiculous to themselves, so that to keep the faith that it was not all a dream for which they were giving up the traditions of infancy, old friendships, all that belonged to life, and life itself, was often unspeakably hard, and would have been impossible if the partaking of God's nature had not been the one only refuge from the curse and plague of their own,—what encouragement could they hold out but this: "There will verily be a revelation of the Son of Man and of the Son of God to the Universe; it will be, whether we look for it or not; it will be attested by that doom upon our own holy city and temple of which our Lord spoke when He was upon earth, and which He denoted as a revelation or appearing of the Son of Man; but if you look for it,—if you brace up your spirits to the expectation of it,—if you resist whatever dulls or stifles that expectation within you,—then this unveiling will indeed be to you the satisfaction of all your longings, and of all the longings of past ages. It will be this blessing to you, because it will be not for you, 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 will see how consistent this language was with all their other language; how little the use of it was affected by any ignorance they might have of times and seasons, or of the exact nature of the change which was to take place in the condition of the outward world. If what they expected was not a full unveiling of the Eternal Mind,—of that which is the same yesterday and to-day and for ever,—points of chronology would have been of the most vast importance to them; a mistake about such points would have been fatal to their hopes. If what they expected was not the full manifestation of Him of whom the things of time and sense are all testifying, but about whom no conclusion can be deduced from them,—their conception of those things would have determined the degree and character of their hopes. As it was, the invisible things were no more limited by the narrowness of their intellects than the vision of sea and sky is limited by the size of the eye which took it in. Faith, not in some notions or communications about God, but in God himself, made them inheritors of His righteousness, capable of entering into His infinite love, and of losing themselves in it. II\. And therefore the practical exhortation, "*Gird up the loins of your mind, be sober*," had its proper ground in this hope; by this hope it was changed from a mere verbal exhortation into an actual stimulus and power for work. Only the spirit can entertain such a hope as this; those to whom St. Peter wrote were capable of it only so far as they were living in the spirit. They must therefore continually be "girding" themselves up to the conviction that they were spirits, that Christ had claimed them as spirits, that they could by His grace have all the rights of spirits. They must assure themselves day by day that the Spirit was working with their spirits, that they might not sink, as they were always inclined to sink, under the dominion of low, vagrant, fleshly impulses. Do you think that such an expectation was likely to intoxicate these early Christians with a sense of their own consequence? St. Peter thought it was the one thing which could keep them sober,—sober in the commonest application of the word,—by restraining them from indulgences that make the senses the masters; sober, as raising them above the fumes of self-conceit and vanity. For he that is always looking beyond himself and above himself, who is aspiring after the revelation of a Goodness and a Truth which are not in himself, is flying from conceit and vanity, is regarding them as his torments and curses. Himself is his prison-house; Christ has come to set him free from it. Till he has escaped from its bondage altogether, and has entered into the glorious liberty of the sons of God,—the liberty from selfish objects, selfish aspirations, selfish limitations,—he cannot be satisfied. No one had had deeper experience of this truth than the Apostle. Fisherman as he was, not to think himself above his Master and Lord,—not to trust his own power of going to prison and death,—had been the hardest of all things for him. It was, no doubt, a battle with him still. And he looked for victory in that battle by exercising the same hope to which he encouraged all his fellow-Christians. If he had any different expectation from theirs—any dream of some private or special reward, such as he had entertained when our Lord was upon earth,—he would soon have lost all that he had learnt from His Cross and His Resurrection. III\. This is the next point on which I would fix your attention. The Apostle is addressing a society of men. He sets the same hope before them all. There is no discrimination of characters, no attempt to ascertain which were leading sinful, which were leading exemplary lives. Why so? Because the hope was itself the great test of what they were. Because itself would be the great means of raising those of them who would be raised. Because the very raising would consist in their casting away partial and selfish ambitions, to entertain a common ambition, ambition for an object in which all might share. Because hereby it was shown that the Church is a communion of spirits, not a communion of mere creatures of flesh and blood, and that so far as they were pursuing a spiritual object, so far were they attaining the unity of a Church. Here then we have the Apostle's mode of educating men, by high rewards of glory, immortality, eternal life, to gird up their loins, and to be sober. Here we have his way of terrifying them with the thought of future damnation. What could be such a damnation as to lose that glory, immortality, eternal life—as to be left without the knowledge of God? IV\. But this glimpse into the method of his teaching does not give us an adequate conception of its practical character, of the principle on which it rests. 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 here to a former condition of mind into which there was a danger of their relapsing, if there was not that strenuous effort, that girding up of the loins of the mind, that sobriety, that hope to the end, which he had urged upon them. He describes this former state as one which was produced by their ignorance. I will not take for granted what this ignorance was. I will turn to one or two passages which may explain it. The first occurs in the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, the seventeenth and eighteenth verses: "*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]{.smallcaps} *that is in them, because of the blindness of* *their heart*." There can be no doubt, I think, that when the Apostle who told the Athenians that they were living, moving, and having their being in God, speaks of an alienation from the life of God, he means an unnatural separation from Him, to whom they ought to have been united; that by blindness of heart he denotes the loss of a vision which they were created to enjoy. And if so, what other ignorance can he have thought of than ignorance of God? to what other cause than the absence of an actual knowledge of what He is—of His nature and character—is the vanity of mind, the moral evil of the heathen traced? Perhaps, however, a passage from the Apostle of the Gentiles may not suffice to illustrate one from the Apostle of the Circumcision. Take then the opening of St. 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 is the knowledge of God assumed to be the ground of all good to man. Grace and peace proceed from that knowledge. Whatever belongs to life and godliness, whatever leads to glory and virtue, comes through that knowledge. And see whether this is a mere phrase which admits of different interpretations, which may be explained to mean anything or nothing. St. Peter leaves us no excuse for thrusting in our interpretation. He gives his own: Knowledge of God is that which enables us to become "*partakers of the divine Nature*." If there is not a way of ascending out of our nature into the pure and perfect Nature, he intimates that we have not received that which is necessary to life and godliness, that the Gospel does not tell how we may escape the corruption that is in the world through lust. I need not tell you that if I had followed up my quotation from St. Paul by an examination of the Epistle from which it is taken or any other of his Epistles, I should have found language exactly answering to this. To put on Christ, to put on the new Man, to be clothed with the righteousness of God, are not only expressions which occur continually in his writings, they are *the* expressions of his own inmost mind, they come forth in the midst of his most earnest practical exhortations, they determine the character of his ethics. But, as I have taken this sentence to make the purpose of my text more evident, I would leave this point to speak of the word "*called*," which occurs in both the passages of St. Peter;—in our text, "As He that hath *called* you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation," and in the second Epistle, "Through the knowledge of Him that hath *called* us to glory and virtue." The idea of a Calling is always present to the mind of the Apostle. How could he have entered so thoroughly as he did into the meaning of his nation's existence if it had not been? But what hindered that belief of a calling from being the hard, exclusive belief to him which it was to his countrymen? *This* hindered it. He attached a much fuller and deeper meaning to God's calling than they did. He supposed that a spiritual Being was in very deed calling out the spirits of men to behold His image, to be partakers of His Nature. It was no formal election of a set of favourites of Heaven, who were to earn rewards from which the rest of the world were excluded. It was the election of a people to know what are the rights of men, that they might be witnesses 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 to light, out of vague notions and conceptions of what is right and holy, to the knowledge, and so to the possession, of His righteousness and holiness. V\. *Because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am holy*. Here is the immutable morality of the Bible. It is uttered by Moses; it is repeated by St. Peter. Nothing that has happened in the interval between them has in the least affected it; everything that has happened has brought out its meaning and power more perfectly. The protecting care and faithfulness of the unseen God were unveiled to Abraham; he becomes the faithful man in his care of his family and his flock. A vision of God's foresight was given to Joseph; 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 he could be the just Lawgiver, the teacher and patient guide of the people. A divine King caring for men, feeling with men, yet punishing them for their transgressions, was discovered to David; so he became a king after God's own heart. Every prophet confessed his word speaking in his heart; so he was able to speak and not be dumb. All the prophets felt that God was caring for the whole nation, and suffering on account of its sins; so they were able to feel themselves parts of the nation, and to suffer for its sins. All the prophets felt that God had promised to bring all nations into His family; so they could long that He should make Himself known to all nations. Just so far as they had an apprehension of God's nature, just so far as they were partakers of that, just so far did they exhibit the gentleness, purity, truth, which the consciences of men recognize as truly human. And when the Apostles saw in Jesus of Nazareth Him of whom Moses and the Prophets did write, then they knew that this must be so, and why it must be so. They could doubt no longer that all practical goodness in men corresponds to a goodness in God and is derived from it, because they owned the Son of Man as the perfect concentration of that goodness. They were sure that He had united His divine nature to the human, that the human might share the divine. They could solemnly protest against all attempts to establish a righteousness of their own by obedience to the law, or by any other arts, as hopeless and immoral; they could preach the Righteousness of God as manifested to all men in Christ, that they might with their spirits believe in it, know it, be conformed to it; and that they might let the light which had been kindled in them shine forth to the world. That practical morality,—morality, whether you regard it on the negative side or the positive, as resistance to evil, or as the being good and doing good,—is connected by the writers of the New Testament with the actual Revelation of God and the actual knowledge of God,—I have endeavoured to show. A less agreeable task remains. I must put it to your consciences and my own whether our morality has not been speculative rather than practical, whether we have not been full of vague, restless doubts, as to the ends we should set before ourselves, as to our relations with other men, as to our standard of character and of duty, just because we have not believed, or have believed so weakly, that God has revealed His own holy nature to us, and that we may be partakers of it; that He has taken knowledge of us, in order that we may take knowledge of Him. Brethren, I cannot help perceiving that the hope and expectation of anything to come is exceedingly weak among us all. There is a dread of some evil that may be threatening the world or threatening ourselves; in some minds, a dread of anarchy and infidelity; in others, a dread lest God should visit them for their own particular sins when they leave the world. But I cannot find that the first dread acts at all as a check upon infidelity. I cannot find that the second is effectual against any great temptation, far less against the daily and continual temptations to harshness, uncharitableness, injustice. Least of all does either of these dreads serve to bind us more closely together as members of a Nation or a Church. They isolate us from each other; they make us afraid lest every person we meet should be doing something to rob us of a promise which we feel that we hold very loosely; they make us suspect that intercourse with our fellow-men on earth may lessen our chances of heaven. And so, it having become so much a calculation of chances, men begin to reckon up what it is safe to retain, or worth while to give up, for the sake of obtaining a future good, or for the sake of evading a future misery. Which consideration, as the future misery and the future good are so indefinite, ends generally in our taking what lies before us; not expecting much enjoyment from that, but being ready to bear it, since nothing better has been provided for us. No man is at all times in this state of mind. Properly speaking, it is not a *state* of mind; it is an oscillation of mind, which, while it lasts, may allow us to be credulous or sceptical, impatient of everything, or eager to place ourselves under absolute authority. And there are moments, I am certain, when other thoughts altogether different from these visit him who is most under the influence of them. There come dim recollections of our being told that we are children of God—or if we are only too familiar with the sound of these words—a suspicion that they may have a meaning;—a meaning for ourselves and a meaning for the multitudes from whom we are trying to distinguish ourselves. And with those words come others stranger and more mystical, but still the words of an Apostle "*If children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ*." What can that mean? If it did mean that we, even we, are created to be partakers of the Righteousness, the Love, the Truth of God,—that we have not and cannot have any righteousness, love, truth of our own which can entitle us to any reward from God, but that these are His own rewards,—that these are offered as without money or price,—that these we may be claiming even here,—that these we enter upon as our full inheritance hereafter,—oh, what a difference it would make in our moral state! What a hope would be kindled in us,—a hope which cannot make ashamed,—a hope which we can boldly set before every human being! How little we should care then to convict men of their infidelity! With what shame and sorrow we should confess our own! How we should say to all:—A message has been brought us to which we have none of us given credence—or only a beggarly credence. Is it not the message which meets your questionings and longings as well as ours? Does it not present itself to you as that which in lonely sad hours you have been crying for. Oh, if it does, let us begin to hope together! You have the same right to do it as I have. There is no difference between us, except that I have offended more against God, by professing to hold that which I have not held,—by repeating words without giving them their natural force. But now let us forget the things that are behind. You do not like our pride and self-glorification. Encourage us to hate them, for they keep us from that glory and virtue which are for you, as well as us, through the knowledge of that God who has called us,——who is calling us to be like Him. And here also would be the remedy for those uneasy thoughts about their own lot in the world to come, which haunt so many gentle and so many ungentle minds; which often lead them to neglect plain practical duties, which aggravate the very sins that give occasion to them. What would they wish to have in this world, or in any other world? Is it not righteousness, Love, Truth? Is it not the want of these which they feel so bitterly? Yes, surely because they are seeking them in themselves, and not in God, in whom alone they dwell. Because they are dreading 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! it is because this hope seems to me the one escape from the evils by which we are surrounded,—from the lusts of an evil nature,—from the restless speculations of our intellect,—that I have contended so earnestly against those who would take this hope from us. I do not for a moment say that this is their intention. I know well that what men deny with their lips, they may hold in their heart of hearts. I am quite sure that some who, whilst speaking as logicians, seem to tell us that the love of God, which was manifested at the Cross of Christ, is not really the same love which is to dwell in our hearts,—that the words which describe its nature are merely accommodations to our conceptions,—I can quite believe that those who use this language, which appears to us so frightful, have a far stronger hold than I have upon that love, and are exhibiting far better fruits of it in their lives. Nor ought we to forget that Logicians, as such, are occupied with the individual soul, which, as St. Paul tells us in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, is subject to all those conditions and limitations that make the knowledge of spiritual things impossible. Schoolmen may naturally think that it is their business to investigate these conditions and limitations. And therefore we should have no cause to complain if they did not intrude into another region—if they did not deny the existence of that *Spirit of man* within us, of which the same Apostle speaks—that Spirit which acknowledges no such fetters, but claims fellowship with the Eternal, and is never satisfied till the Spirit of God has called it forth to know the truth which alone can make it free. Of such a human spirit the worn-out student in the poet's legend became conscious, when leaving his books of Jurisprudence, of Medicine, of Theology, he went forth 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 tell that he committed that human spirit to the guidance of an evil, mocking spirit, and so fell into guilt and despair. Not for that terrible possibility which each one of us may have felt at times to be a possibility for himself, are we to suppress the lesson which the Apostle of the Gentiles and the Apostle of the Circumcision conspire to teach us. They were alive—how much alive, St. Peter's second Epistle will tell us—to the danger of men acquiring a devilish nature; they were all the more earnest to tell them they were intended to be partakers of the divine Nature. They felt that it was impossible, since the appearance of Christ, to conceal either the glory or the peril of humanity; that if we would awaken men to the last, we must speak to them of the other. There is a middle region, through which we may pass, but in which we cannot dwell. It is a region of clouds, with none of the brightness of Heaven or the firmness of earth. In that region all is speculation; there is no practice. It may be a region of dry logical formulas, or of emotions, sensations, individual feelings. But it is one which we are called to leave by the actual sorrows and miseries which we witness,—by the sense that we are kinsmen with the lowest and worst, as well as with the noble of our race,—by the voices of friends who, on earth, learnt that there must be an actual Kingdom of heaven, and are beckoning us to seek the home which they, we trust, have found,—by the voice of God Himself bidding us eat the flesh of His Son and drink His blood, which are given for the life of the world. That life, that eternal life, is said by the Church to stand 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 words of the Apostle, to know that love which passeth knowledge. Think not that those who seek that knowledge,—who believe that the Supper of the Lord is the pledge and assurance that all men need it,—that it is offered to all,—will have less of awe and trembling as they enter into the presence of God, 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,—when the High-Priest of the Universe was actually revealed before him, fell at His feet as one dead. Those who most join in St. Paul's prayer for other men and themselves, that they may comprehend with all Saints what is the height and length and 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. [In]{.smallcaps} pursuing the subject which was suggested by the Epiphany services, I passed over a topic of which this month of February specially reminds us. To it belongs the festival which used to be called Candlemas, that which is described in the Prayer-book as the festival of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, or of the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin. I have no doubt that many said in their hearts, if not with their lips, when they noticed this service, "Here is one of the relics of a bygone time! If we ever complete the Reformation which was begun three centuries ago, this is one of the superstitions which we shall get rid of." Let me say a few words to you on that point before I proceed to the examination of my text. The Reformers of the sixteenth century spoke on this wise. They said—"Men have been defrauded of the Gospel. A mere law has been substituted for it. The Law shows us our evil. The Gospel shows us how God emancipates us from it. By suppressing the last, our priests have been obliged to mitigate and reduce the first. They have granted indulgences for evils which it pronounces to be accursed, because they would not testify to men that the same God who sent His Law into the world to condemn us for sin, sent His Son into the world to save us from our sins. They have prevented us from being righteous and doing righteousness, because they would not declare to us that Christ had fulfilled all Righteousness, and had invited us by faith to put on His Righteousness." These being the maxims or principles upon which whatever was best and truest in that Reformation rested,—the maxims and principles which have won for it the sympathy of those who have sympathized with it most,—it was the duty of the Reformers to see that sure and authentic testimonies were given to men that a Gospel *had* really come into the world, that Christ had really fulfilled the law. The evil which had need to be corrected was, that men were denying this practically, if not in words. They sought to win God's forgiveness by acts and services of their own, because they did not heartily believe that one complete sacrifice had been offered and had been accepted. They invented purifications of their own, because they did not believe that one great Purifier had appeared, and had been presented to His Father in substance of our flesh. Our Reformers, therefore, I conceive, did not dream that they were making a concession to the notions and errors which they desired to expel, when they taught men, in their ordinary united devotions, to recollect what had been accomplished for the world. They thought they were asserting their own principle in the strongest form. If they were claiming an old service for this purpose, so much the better. They were bearing a stronger witness that their truth was not a new one—not an invention of theirs—but had been implied in the earliest Christian acts of devotion. They did not suppose that it was making men superstitious, to fix, as far as they could, facts in their memories, the forgetfulness of which was the *cause* of their superstitions. They did not suppose that it was inflicting a burden upon men's consciences, to teach them what the Lord of All had done to give them pure and free consciences. Every memorial feast which the Jews were directed by God to keep under the Old Dispensation, was a record of a deliverance which had been wrought out for them, of a relation between them and Him which had been established. The Bible tells us that when they became careless of their memorial feasts they ceased to believe in their Deliverer; they became the slaves of idols. It tells us that when they forgot these memorial feasts, they lost the sense of the relation between them and Him which He had revealed, and went about to create such a relation by schemes of their own. The Reformers believed the Bible. They did not think its assertions were false and unimportant, or its warnings obsolete. That method which was good to preserve the Jews in a recollection of the facts of their History, might preserve Christians from confounding the facts of the New Testament with the Legends which had been grounded upon them. The method which reminded them that the great King was in the midst of them who had brought them out of darkness into light, out of subjection to their own natures into covenant with Him, might be good to assure Christian men that the living God was in the midst of *them*, that He had set up His Son's kingdom among *them*, that He had taken *them* into covenant with Him, that He had redeemed *them* to be His children. So they thought. And *we* are told that in order to show our gratitude for the blessings which they were the instruments of bestowing on us,—in order to ensure the continuance of these blessings,—in order to obtain others of the like kind,—in order to prove our profound reverence for the Bible,—our duty and our wisdom is to discard the memorials of Christ's acts, to choose a way altogether different from that which the Bible suggests to us. By so doing, it is hoped, we shall be able to stand fast in the liberty wherewith we have been made free. By so doing, I fear, we shall hasten our return into every confused and slavish notion, into every dark superstition, which is naturally engendered in the evil and unregenerate heart. Of course such prophecies will seem to some mere idle tales. They have got their notion of the Reformation in clubs and on platforms. They fancy that they can rid themselves of Popery, and every bad doctrine and practice, by shouts and imprecations. They do not know that Popery, Infidelity, every form of evil, is lying close to their own hearts, is ready to spring out upon them, and to take possession of them, even at the very moment when they fancy themselves most secure from it. They do not consider how the Evil Spirit is exulting in all the noise and clamour which turn men away from the knowledge of themselves and the knowledge of God. They do not consider how the very principles which were asserted at the Reformation, those principles of which they boast themselves most, may be perishing in our hearts while we are directing all our zeal against those who impugn them in words. The passage I have chosen to-day, which is part of the passage for the Epistle on the Festival of Purification, may explain in some degree what I mean. It is taken from the Prophet Malachi; the whole of it stands thus: "*Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before Me:... even the Messenger of the Covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, He shall come, saith the Lord of Hosts. But who may abide the day of His coming? and who shall stand when He appeareth? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like fuller's soap: and He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness. Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the Lord, as in the days of old, and as in former years. And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not Me, saith the Lord of Hosts*." I have no doubt the Reformers were especially pleased that these stern sentences of the old Prophet should be read on one of the days which were set apart to the commemoration of the Virgin. For they knew how much of fantastic sentimental devotion was attached to her person,—how she was invoked as a kind of protectress from the justice and wrath of God. Therefore it was good to speak out plainly, and say, "No such protectress is there for men or women. No such protectress, thanks be to Him, has there ever been or shall there be. The Messenger of His Covenant, the real Lord of Man, comes not to hide us from His Father, but to show us what His Father is; to show us what His wrath is, what His justice is. And for that reason is He to be *delighted in*. We ought not to delight in Him if He cloaked the sin of this person or that, or offered any mitigation of the punishment of it. We may delight in Him, because He is like a refiner's fire, because He is determined to burn up dross, because He would purify us from it. And what He does perfectly, all inferior messengers, His mother and all others, must in their small measure and degree do. If they are not declarers of God's wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, if they do not proclaim *Him* as the Refiner, *Him* as the Purifier—they are not fulfilling Christ's work, they are come on another errand, they are thwarting His purposes; they must be messengers from another Father than His Father. For it was true in the days of the Prophets, before Christ came in the flesh, that this was the character and work of Him who dwelt between the Cherubim, whose Name is Holy; it continued to be true when He came; it is true now that He has ascended on high; it will be true for ever world without end. The mind of God has not been changed, it cannot be changed. It was, is, and shall be a mind of burning hostility to all kinds of injustice and oppression and wrong-doing and foulness, in all kinds of people, high and low. It was, is, and shall be a mind which acts upon all kinds of people everywhere, to purify them and to make them right. To publish and declare this character and will of God and this work of God among His creatures, by words, by acts, by sufferings, was the business of all brave and true men in the time of old. Fully to manifest this character and will of God, to execute this work of God, was the purpose and end of the Incarnation, words, acts, sufferings, of the Only-begotten Son. And since He has said, '*It is finished*,'—since He has accomplished His task of showing what God is, and since He lives on high, and has sent forth His Spirit that God's purpose of destroying evil and His purpose of purifying men from evil may not be frustrated but brought to pass,—He must assuredly put down the pretensions of all saints, living or departed, to restrain His arm, which is all one with restraining His grace, with intercepting His will of Love towards the human race. Any saint, living or departed, who asks that Christ shall not be a swift witness against the adulterers and the false swearers and those that oppress the hireling in his wages, asks for a curse on the world. Every saint, on earth or elsewhere, who prays that Christ would not sit as a refiner, to purge the evil out of the hearts of men, prays, 'Thy will be *not* done in earth as it is in heaven:' whereas it is their business, and the business of all God's ministers here upon earth, to be bearing witness of God's infinitely Loving Will, and to be desiring that that Will *may* be done in earth as it is in Heaven, that nothing may obstruct it, that everything, be it never so seemly or religious, which does obstruct it, may be swept out of the universe." The Reformers, taking Malachi's words in this sense, will have been exceedingly struck with the allusion to the Jewish priests which is contained in them. "*He shall purify the* SONS [of]{.smallcaps} [Levi]{.smallcaps};—*He shall purge* [them]{.smallcaps} *as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness*." They will have seen in these sentences, what so many other passages in the Prophets will have told them, that there was especial reason to fear that the priests, though God's own appointed servants, were *not* offering an offering in righteousness; that they were offering an offering in *unrighteousness*, and one which tended to make the people unrighteous. Whence this danger? Their own times will have told them. They will have seen priests offering sacrifices to complete the imperfect sacrifice which Christ had offered upon the Cross. They will have seen that these sacrifices had an immoral effect on the body of the people, inasmuch as they held out a hope that through the powerful intercession of certain men and certain spirits above, sins might be overlooked by God, or might become less hateful in His eyes. This, they will have perceived, was the vile, perverted notion of the character and effect of sacrifices which had debased the minds of Pagans, and infected the minds of Jews, after the outward symbols of idolatry had ceased to have an attraction for them. They will have felt, therefore,—we know how strongly they did feel,—that the corruptions of the laity might be traced in a great measure to the corruptions of the priesthood, and that a promise that these corruptions should be eradicated, that the Sacrifice should be restored in its true, righteous meaning, was a promise of health and renovation to all society. He who purified the sons of Levi in their inner lives and convictions, would be a swift witness against the adulterer, the false swearer, the oppressor of the hireling. For He would take away that which was comforting all these ill-doers in their ill doings. He would be restoring Sacrifice into the mightiest and most effectual testimony for His Loving Will, and against the self-will of men. It was the great blessing of the Reformation time that old words which had been lying dead, as if they belonged to bygone ages, and which had been reduced by the assiduous labours of generations of commentators into topics for disputation in which the people had no share, started forth full armed, as terrible as when they first proceeded from the hearts and lips of inspired men. Everything the Reformers saw around them proclaimed them to be the words of Him who liveth and reigneth, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. If we are to complete the Reformation,—if we are to preserve as much of its fruits as we still have,—the Bible must again appear to us in that form. We shall then be little disposed to patronize or argue for it. We shall not suppose it needs our good word on its behalf. It will let us know, one and all, priests and laymen, what it is, by the exposure which it makes to us of our own evils, by the promises it holds out that those evils shall not defeat God's purposes of good and blessing to our land and to mankind. The Book will not then be thought of so much as He who is speaking out of the Book, speaking to us as He spoke to Jews in the days of Malachi, as He spoke to Germans and Englishmen in the days of Luther. "I am the Lord, the righteous Lord; that is my name," will then be once more significant sounds, passing sentence upon our unrighteous and unloving deeds, not supplying us with instruments for exhibiting our own unrighteousness and unlovingness, or with cloaks for our hypocrisy. We shall not then dare to talk much of our religion. We shall feel that we are under the eye of a living Person, who is looking through our religion and seeing what it is good for, who hates robbery for burnt offering, who is no respecter of persons. Surely then these words of Malachi respecting the Purifier will tell us something that we,—as much as the Jews and the men of the Middle Ages,—are very apt to forget. The old Prophet is saying to us, "Beware, priests and laymen, lest you should fancy punishment for your sins is, or ever can be, the thing which you are most to dread yourselves, or which you are to make others dread. Beware lest you pervert the idea of intercession of men upon earth, or saints in Heaven, into an intercession that any sin should be smothered or tolerated in any man whomsoever. Beware lest you indorse all the errors of former days, by treating the Sacrifice of the Son of God, the one effectual Sacrifice, the ground of all other sacrifices, as if it were not the perfect fulfilment of the Father's Will, but in some sense a victory over that Will. Above all, beware lest you reject gracious promises which are made to you and to your own land, because you misunderstand your own deep necessities. God, the hater of evil, promises to find out your evil, and to purge you from it. "Do you think that it would be a greater thing to have your evil acts overlooked, than to be sifted and probed, that you may be set right? Have you not found that evil is your curse,—that to *be* wrong is the horrible thing, not to be detected in wrong or to endure some affliction for it? If you have, you will hail this as the most characteristic exercise of Divine power. Divine it must be. For how are all the intents and purposes of your will to be reached by one not divine? Who but the all-seeing One can say to a human being, 'I will sit and purify thee'? Who but the All-loving could care to do it? This strange penetrating power, going down into recesses below those which your consciousness has ever penetrated into, this surely carries within it a pledge that it shall be effectual,—that no hindrances from without shall prevent a new and nobler form from emerging out of the chrysalis in which it had been buried. And will not the same processes which are available for your purification be available for the purification of your nation? Does not He who sits as the refiner of one, desire also to be the refiner of the other? It was not for the sake of the sons of Levi only that He promised to be *their* purifier. It was for their sakes as representing the sanctity and unity of the land. They were to be purified that they might be fit to present the sacrifices which imported the dedication of the people to God. Is it otherwise with you? Are you not to tell your people that in every national judgment, in every individual trial, the Refiner is sitting to destroy the dross, to bring forth the pure ore?" It seems to me, my brethren, that such lessons as these, taken home to all our hearts, might help the cause of Reformation more, in the practical sense of the word, as well as in the technical and historical sense, than any alteration in the Prayer-book. I do not wish to separate the two senses. I believe, if rightly understood, they are identical; that we cannot so well promote the cause of Reformation now as by maintaining and fulfilling the work that was commenced three centuries ago. Only let us consider what that work is. That it involved a sifting of the minds and hearts of the Clergy as well as the Laity—of the Clergy more than of the Laity—I have not denied, or that a sifting more rigorous than that is to be expected and even to be desired in our day. The words we have repeated in our daily prayers will surely be subjected to the same ordeal as our other words and acts. But I cannot help thinking that *they* will pass through it, and that the levity and insincerity with which we have used them will be the chaff and dross to be consumed. These we must confess as the main causes of any new development of either Popery or Infidelity. One example of what I mean is supplied by the service which has led to these remarks. I wish to notice it before I conclude, as it may show us what is the true way of resisting any tendency to retrogression, how we may really accomplish any tasks which the Reformers left unfinished. That the Virgin was essentially and by the condition of her birth pure from all taint of human corruption is, as we all know, the latest proclamation of the authority which calls itself infallible. It is easy for Romanists to protest against such a decision as the establishment of a sect opinion into a law of the Church, as a condemnation of illustrious doctors and saints. It is easy for Protestants to condemn it on other and more general, more theological grounds. But what gives it a favour in the minds of the people? What makes it possible for a Pope in our time to do what his predecessors never ventured to do? I think it will be found that there lies beneath this exaltation of one human creature into a state different from that of all other human creatures, a witness that humanity itself has been purified and regenerated by its union with the Godhead. That truth the Reformers did not proclaim, or proclaimed very weakly. They were so occupied with the redemption of individuals from the actual evils of the Adam nature that they overlooked the Redemption which had been wrought out for the race; the glory which had been claimed for it by the resurrection and Ascension of Christ. It is not safe for us to forget what they forgot. The symbolical worship of Humanity in the person of the Virgin has increased and is increasing. The actual worship of a Goddess of Humanity is ready to unfold itself out of that, has in part unfolded itself already. No denunciation of one worship or the other, no ridicule, has availed or I believe will avail, to check its progress. The positive proclamation that Humanity has no standing-ground of its own, but that it has a standing-ground in the Son of God, that in Him it is pure and holy, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, and that His Spirit is given us that we may be purged from our inhuman selfishness and may enter upon our common inheritance, —see whether this will not undermine Mariolatry in the minds of those who do not prefer a creature to the Creator,—whether it will not show some who have fled from a cold divinity to what they suppose is a sympathizing humanity, that the Son of Man is what no abstraction ever can be, and that He is the way to the all-loving Father. Such a testimony as this lies, I believe, in this old festival of Purification. There is need that we should draw it forth and present it to spirits which are hungering and thirsting for some better food than ancient or modern superstitions can give, yet will not part with that till they have a real substitute for it. But are we fit to be distributors of this bread of life? Have we not proved already that we are unfit? We might say so, and fold our hands in despair, if it was not written, "*He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness*." ## 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. [In]{.smallcaps} the beginning of the chapter from which these words are taken we read, "*And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb*." Closely connected with this vision is one of the "*tree of life which was on either side of the river, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations*." Such passages, occurring in the last book of the Bible, could hardly fail to recall some that we were reading a week ago in the first. A Tree of Life was growing in the garden in which Adam and Eve walked; four Rivers are spoken of there, parted into four heads. The fancy of allegorists has been inexhaustible in following out these coincidences. "What Christian mysteries may not be shadowed forth by the Tree of Life! What deep lessons of wisdom may not lie hidden in the names of those early rivers to which this latest river so manifestly corresponds!" It is impossible to say that devout persons have not gained some good from these speculations. We may hope that hereafter light will be thrown upon the cabalistical lore which ingenious men have suspected in all words and numbers and signs. But at present, life appears to be too busy and serious to leave us much leisure for such inquiries. No advantage or entertainment which can come out of them is a compensation for the impression which they make on a multitude of minds that the Bible is a book of tricks, not *the* book for practice and work. It is not too much to ask of pious people that they would discard the most innocent playthings if they tempt any to regard the words of Apostles and Prophets as intended for children rather than men. I\. But the likenesses in the language of the Book of Genesis and of the Book of the Apocalypse are too remarkable not to demand an explanation. If the allegorists offered an explanation, they would claim the most respectful attention. I suspect those have helped us most to the discovery of one, who have determined most resolutely that they would not be diverted by any temptations of the individual fancy from the study of the Bible as the interpretation of the deepest human wants, as the guide in the daily perplexities of human existence. They cannot open the Book of Genesis without finding an account of the Creation of Man in the Image of God. They read on, and hear of a man made out of the dust of the ground, into whose nostrils the breath of life was breathed, who became a living Soul. They hear of this man placed in a garden, amidst trees and rivers, learning to name the things about him, exercising a dominion over them, discovering his need of fellowship, provided with a helpmeet. A picture of existence surely very pleasing, one which bears evidence of truth in its simplicity, but not one which the least satisfies the idea which is set before us in the previous chapter. If that is true, an Arcadian, Paradisiacal existence is not that which a human being is to sigh for, or can be content with. If that is true, a solitary felicity, or the felicity of one pair of creatures, could never be the end contemplated in the divine Creation. Therefore, if we are told that the beautiful infancy of the race came speedily to an end—that the Woman was tempted by an inferior creature to crave for a forbidden thing that was good for the taste, and likely to make one wise,—that the Man disobeyed the command of his unseen Lord,—one hails the commencement, a sad commencement doubtless, but the only one we can imagine, of the actual history of mankind. A history, not—if the Bible is to be taken literally and in its order—of a downward, but of an upward progress; an education of men, through work, suffering, sin, to the discovery of their real capacities, of their divine parentage; a vindication of the truth of the original record, in spite of, and by means of, the profoundest unbelief and contradiction of it by those whose destiny and glory it proclaims. If with this thought in our minds, which we gain from no mystical interpretations of Scripture, but by taking it as it stands, and throwing aside the conceits in which we have enveloped it, we compare the opening of Genesis with the last chapter of the Apocalypse, we feel indeed as if the Tree of Life and the Water of Life were useful and precious signs to connect the beginning of human discipline with the climax of it, to indicate the passage from the sensible life to the spiritual, from the solitary to the truly human. What must have been done between these two extremes? What has translated the rivers which are denoted by the presence of the bdellium and the gold and the onyx-stone, into a river that proceedeth out of the throne of God and of the Lamb? What has made a tree that grew in the midst of a garden wherein two people dwelt, into a tree the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations? What has converted a Garden into a City, a New Jerusalem, descending from Heaven as a bride adorned for her husband? Let us consider— 1\. First. He who is described in that first record as the Creator of man, must have revealed Himself as a Father; the father not of a single living soul, but of a family. The command, *increase and multiply*, has been obeyed: it has not been a curse, it has been a blessing. That which has tried to turn it into a curse has been the desire of each member of the family to be divided from the rest, to be merely a separate soul. This desire has been the virtual denial of that name of Father. But the name has been a reality; the denial has been a lie. All may hold fast by the reality and renounce the lie, and those who deny their birthright are those whom the Father seeks to bring home. 2\. Next. If that command had had time to fulfil itself, so had the threat, "*Thou shalt die*." If Adam came under the power of death on the day that he ate of the tree, every one had been born under the same death. And each one had felt that death was in some way connected with the knowledge of evil. The sting of death was sin. But had there been also no knowledge of good all that time?—no perception of a life which was struggling with the death, or rather, against which the death was struggling? Had there been no one actually bruising the serpent's head? Had not each mother, as a man was born into the world, been sure that there was? And who that was had been revealed. The seed of the woman, the object of trust, had actually come, not as the child of Eve, but as the head of the race, the Son of Man. His heel had been bruised. He had solved the mystery of death. He had changed it into a Sacrament of fellowship. He had risen out of it, declared to be the Son of God. The Word of Life is the substitute for the Tree of Life. 3\. But, thirdly, a hint is given in the first chapter in Genesis concerning a Spirit who moved on the face of the waters. In the chapter we have read this afternoon, we hear of that Spirit striving with man. One of these intimations extinguishes all hard, mechanical notions of Creation. We cannot satisfy the description of it by saying that things were called into existence; this phrase imports the communication and unfolding of vital principles. The second expression is used of a human society, proud and rebellious, hurrying to destruction. It obliges us to remember that what resists destruction in man as well as in nature, is not a force without, but an energy within; that this energy holds together the social elements which are always ready to break loose; that this energy proceeds from God. Such language needed to be unfolded. It began to be unfolded by Christ as He sat by the well of Jacob, and spoke to the Samaritan woman of a water which He would give, that should be in her a well of water springing up to everlasting life. It was unfolded still more 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 intimates in his comment on that sentence, it could not be completely unfolded till Christ was glorified. Then, when the Son of Man had been proclaimed as sitting on the right hand of God, the Spirit of God could be given to men, could come down upon different tribes and races to bind them into one, could take possession of their thoughts and their lips, could quicken their hearts with a new fire, could speak through their different dialects, could form a Church out of every kindred under Heaven, which should represent Humanity as redeemed of God, as the Bride of His Son. Such a preparation had there been for the words of my text. In those words the Spirit and the Bride are inviting men to partake of 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 understood the Church as represented by the doctors of some particular age, we might doubt greatly whether these voices could be in harmony. Often it seems as if Church*men* were bidding us seek some outward means of quenching our inward thirst. The words of our Lord respecting the well of water which is within, springing up to everlasting life, appear to frighten them; as if, though *He* spoke them, they were unreal and mystical; at least as if they must not 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 generations, in the confessions, prayers, songs, of those who bore witness that Christ verily died for man, verily exalted humanity to the right hand of God, that voice is an echo of the Spirit's voice, which says: "Come within. Turn away from shows and appearances and glittering outsides. Come to Him who is the root and ground of thy being, the spring and source of all the life that is within thee. Leave the circumference about which thou mayest wander for ever, changing thy place and finding no rest, seeking thy home in new sects or churches, ever the prey of some new or old delusion, always learning, never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth. Come to the centre from whence all the scattered lines of light which have reached these different sects and churches have radiated. Come to thy true home, thy Father's house, from which thou hast gone forth in search of one elixir after another, till all has proved vain, and thou hast found sickness instead of perpetual health, and poverty instead of gold, and the food of swine instead of the nectar thou dreamest of. Come back to this home, in which thy spirit, after all its weariness and helplessness, will still find a welcome, and the new robe, and music and dancing, and the Father's embrace." So speaks *the* Spirit, the Spirit of Holiness and Truth, to the spirit that is in you and me. And the sacraments of the Church, which are the ring and vesture of the Bride, the pledges of our filial adoption, the assurances of our being bound to an eternal Husband, the witnesses of an inward and perpetually renewing life, these speak the same language. It is still, "Come: not to the end of the earth, not to some temporary covert from the heat or the rain, but to the house not made with hands, in which all human hearts may abide together." 2\. The Apostle goes on: "And let him that heareth say, Come." The voice of the Spirit and the Bride may come to spirits that are closed against it; to those of whom Isaiah speaks, when he says, "They have made their hearts fat; and their ears are dull of hearing." He does not mean that if a human instrument conveys the message, the sounds may not reach the man for whom it is intended. He does not mean that the words may make no impression upon that man's understanding. He does not mean even that the import of them may not strike painfully upon his conscience. But he means that they are only regarded as some of the myriad voices which are ringing and buzzing in the air, not as the voice of a Deliverer and King. The invitation therefore is not obeyed; it is not felt to be an invitation. Or if it attracts, it is not recognized as having a right to command; we should like to accept it, but in fetters how can we? Still there may be an indistinct hearing, a half-conviction that the message is for us, and that God has sent it. Let him that heareth even thus say, "Come." Let him say to his own heart: "Thou art tied and bound with some heavy chains, but this is surely the angel bidding thee arise and shake them off. It is not thou who must make great efforts to stand upright and be free. The Spirit of God will give thee power, will remove the hindrances. Only be sure that it is He who is speaking, and that thou hast only to submit to His guidance, to let Him purify thee and govern thee, and thou wilt be led in the straight way, if it is a rough way, to thy proper home." All the weary metaphysics about necessity and freedom are contained in this sentence; but they are translated into life. The narrowness and hopelessness of the two party theories is avoided, the truth of each is confessed, and they sustain instead of contradicting each other. The Spirit of God comes to vindicate the freedom of man, not to crush it. When it ceases to be independent, and obeys its true ruler, its slavery ceases. 3\. Still, "he that heareth" does not express the full Gospel which the Apostle is preaching. It contains the truth, but not the whole truth. A man may say, "You demand hearing of me; and the world has so dulled my organs, has so deafened me with its bewildering cries, that I cannot hear." St. John adds, "*And let him that is athirst say, Come*." At first you might think this was a greater requirement than the other. For a man to be athirst for the Water of Life, implies a high state of feeling, a kind of craving which is to be found in very few. If the expression were, "athirst for the Water of Life," the criticism would be just. But it is simply "athirst." The man may not know at all for what. He may have tried, and be trying still, a number of ways to satisfy the dry aching he finds in him. He may be conscious merely of that. Then let any one who is conscious of that say "Come." Let him say, "I have sought the good that was to satisfy me, at a distance, and I have not found it. The faster I have pursued it, the faster it has fled from me. The Spirit and the Bride say that this could not be otherwise; for the good was close to me. I had it within me, and I did not know it. It was beneath myself, beneath all these dark and dreadful thoughts and visions respecting myself which were scaring me, and from which I am asking the world to deliver me. They say, 'Come, and look through these; for if thy own dark self which thou dreadest to meet is there, Christ, who is the deliverance from thyself, in whom thou mayest sink and drown thyself, the true Lord and Friend of Man, is also there. Come, for if there is an Evil Spirit who asserts a dominion over thee, and seeks to fill thee with his own nature, there is one who casts out the Evil Spirit; there is the Son of God, the Prince of Peace, who has come from the bosom of the Father, from the Absolute, Eternal Love, and can lead thee into it.'" 4\. There is another clause still, and at first it sounds like the one we have just considered, a discouraging one. "*Whoso will, let him take of the Water of Life freely*." "So," we exclaim, "it is come to this at last. At the threshold of the Bible we were reminded that there was this great obstacle, which existed in the very state of man, in the very gift of his Creator. In almost the last words of it the puzzle still remains unsolved. The will is still here; if that is obstinate, and it has the power of being obstinate, and for six thousand years it has proved and exerted its power, what then does all Redemption mean? What has been done to save the earth from its curse, which He who is made the ruler of it has a perpetual faculty to create and renew?" With this thought thousands who are not in earnest play as an excuse for their frivolity; it often torments for years some who are. And how can we answer it? We cannot answer it at all; but the Spirit and the Bride can. They answer it by speaking to the will—to the spirit that is in us. They make it feel that its capacity being wrong is its glory and not its curse. They awaken it to the effort and energy which belong to it, and which do not belong to any stone, or even to any tree or river or star. They make it feel that its efforts and struggles, even when they are feeble and ill-directed and working mischief, are still in themselves greater, and more dear to God, than all the unconscious movements of the Universe, though they may be calm and peaceful. They make the man understand that because they are dear to God, he does not leave them to work on turbulently to their own destruction; that the whole scheme of His providence and grace has been for the Redemption of this Will, for the bringing it out of the dominion of its oppressors, for the regeneration of it to be His servant and His child. They say to the man, "It is true that at the end of the Bible you still find, as you find at the beginning, that for a man to be blessed as a mere animal is blessed, is impossible by an Eternal Law which God will not set aside, which in Heaven and Earth and Hell He will confirm." And that is the very explanation of the history of the Bible; and that is the explanation of the history of your existence and of every man's existence. Because thou canst not be blessed as a mere animal is blessed, God would bless thee 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 by certain states of mind, or by a vigorous faith. You have found it very hard, nay, quite impossible, to bring the purchase-money. The acts you did were *not* good, they were 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, healthy faith. Receive it as God's own gift, earned by nothing in you, sought for by you because He made you conscious of evil in your deeds and thoughts, of unbelief in your inmost heart. Take of it; let it enter into you, purify you, refresh you. Take of it afresh day by day, as the ground takes in fresh moisture day by day, as you and your children and your cattle drink at the well day by day. There need be no painful thirst in you, though there will be if you refuse this Water of Life. There will be always a healthful desire for more of that which you have found necessary, which has brought enjoyment. It is the life of God you are bidden to partake of, the highest, the eternal life. 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 His blood for all. It is a life which cannot merely dwell in any one who possesses it. It must go forth, as God's life goes forth, blessing and creating. The commonest symbol is used to denote it, that our sense of its wonder may not lead us to think it less general. These symbols belong to the completion of God's work as much as to the beginning of it. The sensible thing has been all along seeking for the spiritual substance which lies beneath it. When that substance has been found, it retains 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 own transcendent greatness make any previous condition of the race insignificant. In its brightness the garden age of the world acquires a new brightness, not one that deprives any that succeed it of their brightness. The boyhood of mankind, and its mature growth, has each its own nobleness, its own temptations, its own counterfeit. The Spirit that strove with men before the Deluge, has striven with them in every period since, is striving now against the tendencies of every family, every nation, every Church to become divided, heartless, base. The first Adam was made a living soul, and would have sunk his living soul in the mere appetites of the body and the enjoyments of sense, if God had not led him by toil and suffering to seek for a higher good, to seek for a Divine helper. The second Adam was made a quickening spirit, to renovate the human spirit, soul, and body, to bring all Creation out of its bondage into the glorious liberty of the Sons of God. The dreams of a golden age, in the different nations of the earth which have not confessed a Son of Man, are beautiful, because they are witnesses that all have a sense of a better state which is meant for man, and 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; 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 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. [In]{.smallcaps} the chapter from which my text is taken, St. Paul describes himself as a Master-builder. He considers the office of a Master-builder to be the laying of foundations. The Corinthians to whom he wrote were generally of a different opinion. They thought any man could lay a foundation; the skill of the architect was shown in the building he raised upon it. A teacher who was fit for them could not be a mere teacher of elements. Those who only spoke of Jesus Christ and Him crucified might be very useful amongst Boeotians,—might do good service amongst barbarians. Men who dwelt in such a city as theirs, who had been used to hear the most various wisdom from Pagan professors, were prepared for the most advanced Christian instruction. They were not to be treated as children; they demanded the refined culture of men. This opinion probably was not confined to one of the sects into which their Church was divided; it will have exhibited itself in all under different forms. Those who called themselves after Apollos supposed that he had brought a lore with him from Alexandria which would fill up the imperfect outline that St. Paul had drawn. Those who used the name of Cephas thought that circumcision would initiate into the highest privileges those who had been made novices by the rite of Baptism. And the Pauline school will have indignantly disclaimed the notion as quite derogatory to their master's dignity, that he merely preached a simple Gospel. Had not he as much Rabbinical knowledge as Peter? Was not he better acquainted with Greek poets and philosophers than Apollos? Did he not make light of ceremonies to which they, in their infantine faith, still clung? Had he not been seeking for deep principles, while they were reverencing forms? The praise of seeking for principles, if it had been accompanied with no disparagement of his fellow-labourers, St. Paul would not have disclaimed. That was his aim; and therefore he was as much offended with the conceit of his admirers as of those who despised him. They, as well as the disciples of the other schools, were glorifying peculiarities of manner and education and spiritual insight which belonged to their different teachers; so they were missing that which was dearest to all three,—that which they most cared to make the Church aware of, at least so long as their minds were sane, and they were submitting to the Spirit of love and of truth. The common principle, the common ground, that on which they stood together, that on which all men could stand as well as they,—this was what they wished those who heard them everywhere to feel after and to find. There were different hearts and heads to which they addressed themselves. God had educated their own by different methods. It would have been an affectation, it would have been a sin, it would have been a proof that they had merely learnt their doctrines by rote from some mortal teacher, if they had thrown aside their habits of thought and modes of speech, and assumed those of the brother or father whom they loved and honoured most. But by a different mode of instruction and discipline each had been led to a Foundation lying far beneath Paul and Cephas and Apollos, to a Rock against which the gates of hell could not prevail. St. Paul therefore vindicates this to himself as the occupation of his life. He did not come to introduce among them some new order of architecture, or to devise some ornaments in those which they had already. He had a much homelier, and yet perhaps a somewhat harder and less popular task; he had to persuade these wise Corinthians that they, their own very selves, were the stones of a glorious and divine Temple; that God was hewing and shaping them into their fit places in that Temple; that there was not one of them who could say he had not a place in it, or that his neighbour had not a place in it; but that, if they would know whereabouts they stood, if they would not be always interfering with each other, if each man would not be destroying every other, and so destroying himself, they must give up disputing about the theories and opinions of this doctor or of that; they must care for something else than opinions, theories, and doctors; they must ask, "What holds *us* together? what severs *us*, one and all, from the bottomless abyss?" This being the case, it was necessary for St. Paul to define more carefully than he did, when he was merely speaking of his relation to other teachers, in what sense he called himself a Master-builder. The text limits that statement, and yet expands it. He half retracts the former expression, as if it did not fully convey his meaning. He could not lay *the* Foundation. It is laid, as our translators have it. It is lying, as St. Paul says himself; intimating that he did not put it there; that no man put it there; that the beliefs of no body of men put it there; that all which teachers can do is to say, "There it is;" that all which believers can do is to recognize it. But this apparent narrowing of his own office makes us understand, far more clearly than before, its nature and its grandeur. To argue for a set of opinions, to prove that he was right and others wrong, this was the business of the Sophist with whom Corinthians had been familiar in bygone times. The Apostle, according to St. Paul, differed from the Sophist in his primary design. He was conversant with men, not with notions; with the grounds of human life and human society, not with the vindication of certain dogmas about human life or human society. He came to declare that the foundation of the human Temple was not abstract, but living; 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, eager to assert your independence; for all whom you look upon as ignorant or as irreligious. That Christ, the Son of the Living God, of whom Cephas spoke in his great confession; that Word of God, whom Apollos and the Alexandrians declare to be the Teacher of all; that Jesus, the crucified, whom I have set forth in weakness and death; He it is on whom the social edifice rests, by whom alone it consists. Other foundation beside that can no man lay; that, God Himself has laid. If I spoke rightly some time ago of St. Paul's conversion, we cannot describe it more accurately than by saying that it consisted in his awaking from ignorance of this foundation to a full, clear apprehension of it. He had thought that there was something of his own which he could stand upon; some wisdom, or righteousness, or exclusive privilege, appertaining to him, the individual Saul of Tarsus, or to him as the Hebrew of the Hebrews. That belief made him hard, narrow, savage. He had to prove to himself as well as to others that he possessed this righteousness, this wisdom, this exclusive privilege. He had to prove it to himself in spite of evidence, very appalling evidence, presented to his inmost conscience and heart, that he was not wise, that he was not righteous, that God did not favour him. How that evidence forced itself upon him through the very words which supplied him with his only warrant for self-confidence, how he was drawn to faith in a Righteousness and Wisdom that were not his own, because his own had proved so unreal and despicable, I have often pointed out to you from his confessions. But this Righteousness and Wisdom in which he could trust so entirely, which became so truly his own when he had renounced his own, this was the foundation which he could tell the Corinthians was lying for them as much as for him, the foundation which they were denying and setting at nought by their Greek factions, as he had denied it through his Jewish pride. My brethren, in this coming season of Lent we shall hear much of repentance and conversion, and some will be asking themselves of what it is that we have generally or specially to repent? What conversion is it that we are to desire for ourselves or for our brethren? I doubt not that the Epistle which we have read to-day has suggested to one here and there an answer to the first of these questions. The Apostle tells us that we are nothing without charity. Have we that in the sense which he seems to give the word? If not, that want must be some reason for repentance. To be converted from uncharitableness must be a great conversion. But there is much to interfere with any practical result from this discovery. Charity, we see, does not mean, in his dialect, giving all our goods to feed the poor. It can hardly have meant mere tolerance for each other's opinions. The conscience of many may reproach them for a defect in that disposition; some may fear that they have it in excess. Surely repentance, if it is such a serious duty, must be directed against some very serious and radical evil. Conversion, if it has such an import as it had in the history of St. Paul, must be a change from some more fixed and definable wrong, than that of not being sufficiently tender to the acts or conclusions of our neighbours. Yes, brethren, we may be inwardly rebuked for over-severity yesterday, for over-indulgence to-day, and we may console ourselves with the thought that there is no strict rule about the degree in which we are to maintain our own positions or to concede them. But if we have been troubling ourselves about opinions our own or our neighbours—if we have been occupied with comparing theirs and ours, when we wanted an actual foundation to rest our lives upon, is not this something to be repented of? If we have been making ourselves the rule and measure of other men when we were professing that we knew of a common ground for them and us, is not this something to be repented of? For what has come of this? Onlookers say that we are always debating upon this or that dogma, and that so the practical duty, the ordinary morality, is forgotten. Have not they a warrant for that charge, so far as we are concerned? But when they go on to say that this temper of ours may be traced to our faith in Christ, and that if we cared less for that faith our works would be better, do we not know in our hearts that they are imputing to our faith what is really owing to our unbelief? We have had opinions about Him, we have made much of those opinions, we have judged other men for wanting them. But we have not been resting on that foundation which is laid for us; our judgment, our conclusion respecting the superiority of our religion to other religions has been the rock upon which we have been building what we call our Christianity. It may be our judgement about the credibility of one set of traditions, it may be our judgment about the credibility of the Bible and its superiority to the Koran, or to any idolatrous Shasters. But if there is nothing deeper than this judgment,—no one whom it owns as its support,—no one whom it owns as bearing up the pillars of the Universe,—surely we have not yet accepted the doctrine of the Apostle, we have not yet confessed Jesus Christ as the Apostle confessed Him. To be turned round, or converted, from that kind of confession of Him which is only another name for an assertion of our own wisdom and sagacity, and superiority to Jews or Turks or infidels or heretics, —to that confession of Him which is an abdication of all claims to wisdom or sagacity, a solemn assertion that we are in no wise better than Jews or Turks or infidels or heretics,—this would be a conversion such as St. Paul's was; this might enable us to become in kind such witnesses of Christ as he was. The effect must, I believe, come in all cases as it did in his, through the exposure to our own hearts of the utter fallacy and vanity of the pretences which have led us to dream that we are not as other men are, or that it is possible for us to have any foundation for life or for death which is not a foundation for every human being as well as ourselves. But these exposures will bring us, as they brought St. Paul, to the acknowledgment that it is a *moral* foundation which is laid for us all; that the Person on whom we stand, and on whom Society stands, is a *Righteous* Person, who speaks to a spirit in us, which hungers and thirsts after Righteousness; that not to think certain things, to hold certain opinions, but to be righteous as He is, that we may do righteous acts as He did them, is the demand He makes on us, the demand which He promises by His own divine Spirit to fulfil for us and in us. And so we may begin to understand how the Epistle for to-day is connected with the call to repent and be converted which is addressed to us throughout Lent. The Charity which is set forth there is the Charity of God Himself, the Charity which was in Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is the one foundation that is laid for human Society and human acts, and there can be no other; then Charity is the one foundation that is laid for human Society and human acts, and there can be no other. It is not Charity that can be limited to care for the poor; ostentatious benevolence to the poor may be a breach of its law; an apparent severity may sometimes be a fulfilment of it. But it involves a care for the poor such as Christ had; such as He was showing forth when for our sakes He became poor. It is not a Charity that can be limited to respect for other men's thoughts and opinions. What looks like such respect may mean that every one had better keep his own notion, because there is no common truth, no foundation for all. What looks like zeal against *opinions*, may be a fervent Charity to *men*. But Charity does involve the observance of Christ's command not to judge, lest we should be judged. It does involve the kind of sympathy with all men, the endurance of all men's perplexities and questionings, the sharing in their temptations, the sense of their sins, which reached their perfection in Him. It must enter into all the details of daily life, because it must penetrate the man himself who is conversant with those details. It can never be an ornamental accessory to the existence of a human being. It must be the very law under which God has placed him, obedience to which is the condition of his freedom. This, brethren, this it is which frightens us, which makes us tremble. The mere belief of a power bent upon our destruction produces certain occasional terrors, hysterical convulsions. But they do not last. The very conscience—to which those who excite such terrors have appealed—rises up and witnesses against them. But the thought of being under a law of love, of having Him as the foundation of our existence who has perfectly fulfilled this law,—here is something which may well appal us, when we think that against this law we have been continual rebels, that it is this foundation upon which we have refused to stand. Once let *that* terror take possession of a man, and the word Conversion becomes indeed a word of meaning, a word of promise and of power to him. He does not stop to ask whether a converting grace has been exerted upon him in some former day. He wants it now. The sense of resistance to perfect goodness, the certainty that that resistance must be misery, forces him to 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 a man's heart and spirit from self-willed confidence to the dependence of a child; from the desire to make all men think as he thinks, to the desire that all may stand upon the foundation that is laid for all. And because he is sure that it is laid for all and not for him alone, because the very act of turning to God has been an act of abandoning all selfish rights and privileges, he will pray also, "Oh grant that all men may come to the knowledge of Thy truth and live, for that we know to be Thy Eternal Will, manifested in Thy only Begotten Son, 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. [When]{.smallcaps} each of us asks himself in Lent, "What have I most to confess? what has been my great misdoing?" the answer does not come out very distinctly. There is a vague sense of duties omitted that might have been done; of tempers indulged that might have been repressed; of devotion to little things, of fretfulness about little things, when serious works were going on in which we ought to have taken an interest; or again, of indifference about little things, little acts of self-denial, little habits of evil, through ambition to do something fine and glorious. We may, as I said last Sunday, bring ourselves in guilty of various transgressions against the law of charity, which is set forth at the beginning of this season as the law of our lives. Still, what we probably condemn ourselves for most, is not any direct outrage upon that law, but for a kind of uselessness, lifelessness, barrenness. It seems as if we could not stir ourselves up to any course of action, scarcely to any one deliberate action; as if there were nothing for us left but to move on in an endless routine, or to float along a stream, not knowing whither it may carry us. In your services at church, in your private devotions, have you not felt oftentimes as if you were only going through prescribed rules; not acquiring strength to face the world, rather yielding to one of its fashions? There is a dull, dead pain in these feelings, which many, I doubt not, would be glad to exchange for the sharp, even the intense pain which those experience who have been awakened to the sense of some great sin. It is a kind of pain which we are ready to soothe and lull with drugs, because we are sure that we ought to be free from it, though it does not seem as if it required severe treatment. We hope it does not betoken any inward disease. We are half afraid that it may; and so we try to hide the symptoms from ourselves, and by degrees perhaps we come to think that they do not exist. This is not an honest course for us to pursue, my brethren; therefore it cannot be a wise one. Let us remember that 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, be it a sudden twinge, be it repeated day after day, is the work of God's Spirit, convincing us of sin that He may convince us of righteousness. If we really believe that all these messages are from Him, we must know that they come from a loving Friend who is grieving for us and with us; Who desires to set us right, and can make us what He would have us be. And here, in the text I have just read to you, is the lesson which that Spirit is teaching us. He is explaining to us the secret of that inability to believe, hope, love, to act freely, calmly, manfully, which we complain of. The cause of the evil is disclosed to us, and with it 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 of it. Let us consider each in turn. I\. Our Lord says to His disciples, "*I am the Vine; ye are the Branches*." We say that this is a comparison or a parable. No doubt it is. But do we not mean when we say so, that the comparison does not express strictly the truth which it is to bring before us? Do we not mean that the truth is not what we should judge from the illustration that it was? I am sure that this thought is lurking in our minds; and I am sure it robs us of more good than we know of. We suppose a likeness is a clever artifice for telling us something about a thing or a person, not an actual presentation of that thing or that person. So we begin to think how we may translate the illustration into some abstract form of speech which shall be more exact than it is. Now I assume that our Lord knew what was in the being whose nature He had taken, as well as what was in Him from whom He came. I assume that He knew how to declare that which He was sent to declare. And therefore, when He said to His disciples at the last supper, *I am the Vine; ye are the Branches*, I suppose He intended them to look at an actual vine, and at the branches which grew upon it,—whether such a one was before their eyes as they walked to the Mount of Olives or not,—and to consider that by a law which was given at the Creation day every branch must be related to every other; every branch must be related to the root, and must receive all its life from that. I suppose He meant them also to understand that by a law not less old than that, they were as closely, as really related to each other, because they were as closely, as really related to Him. As a branch could not by its law be severed from any other without losing its life, the man could not by his law be severed from his fellow except at the same cost. And for the same reason: the loss of the relation between the branches was the loss of relation between them and their root; the loss of the relation between a man and his brother was a loss of relation between that man and Christ. This was the gathering up into one complete utterance, of all that had been scattered through our Lord's different parables and discourses. All His acts of service and grace to men, all His sympathies with them, had implied such a relation between them and Him. All stories about the Shepherd and the Sheep, the Husbandman and the Labourers, had indicated and testified of it. But there wanted something to signify that these were not arbitrary or accidental relations, that it did not depend in any sense upon the good pleasure of men whether they should exist or not. There wanted some natural emblem to say, "So it must be; you cannot by any determination or selfwill cause that it should be otherwise." The Scribes and the Pharisees had rejected Jesus as the Christ. Did that mean that they had refused to acknowledge certain evidences which showed that He was the Person whom the Prophets had spoken of? Only because these Prophets had spoken of a Root out of which all the life of the Nation, and the life of every man in it, was derived. Only so far as the Person who was said to fulfil their words gave proofs addressed to the consciences of his countrymen that he was this root. Only so far as the Scribes and Pharisees were resisting this witness in their consciences, and were trying to exist apart from the root. If that was the case, it would be proved to be the case in the way our Lord had foretold. The dissolution of the Nation which had severed itself from its root would prove that it had no life of its own. Each man, whether of that Nation or any other, who confessed Christ to be his root, would discover how he was related to his fellows, and would show by fruits that there was a true life working in him. This was the lesson that the Disciples were to learn at the Paschal Supper, after our Lord's ministry to the Jews as a Nation was over. They might easily fancy that they were gathered around a leader whom they had selected for their champion, one to whom they would continue faithful whoever else deserted Him. They were to be taught that it was not so at all. They had not chosen Jesus. They could not keep their allegiance to Him. One would betray Him; one would deny Him; all would forsake Him. But He had chosen them. He had brought them about Him, that they might know the secret of their union to Him and to each other. He was the only source, the only bond, the only upholder of their union. And though He had chosen them, it was no arbitrary choice. He was fulfilling a commandment in doing it. They were actually united to Him as much as the branch was united to the vine. True, they might do what the branches could not do. They might deliberately say, "We renounce our connection with the root. We will not abide in it." But they could not cause that He should not be their root. They would prove that He was by that very act. The withering of all life in them would supply the demonstration. This was the secret of their union to each other. Only so far as they remembered that the Chief of all had become the servant of all, that the Master had washed His disciples' feet as a proof that they belonged to Him and that He had given Himself for them, only so far would they have any care for each other as members of one family. And this was to be the subject of their Gospel to the Nations. They were to say, "We bring you news of that divine root from which all life has come, does come, will come into the Universe. We see you joined together in separate communities, worshipping this power of Nature, this and this good or evil quality. And we declare to you Him from whom all Nature derives its forms, forces, energies, the Lord of Air and Sea and Earth. And we declare to you Him from whom all the qualities and gifts and graces of all men proceed, Him in whom they are gathered up, Him from whom alone any have received them anywhere. And we call upon you to acknowledge Him, to claim your place in Him, that you may be rooted and grounded in Him, that you may grow up unto Him in all things, that you may refer all your functions, offices, abilities to Him, that you may seek all grace from Him to exercise them, that you may regard them all as channels and instruments through which His spirit is acting." This was the doctrine which they preached; this was the meaning of the ordinances by which they grafted them who received their preaching as God's word, and not man's, into the Church. Baptism expressed this. Prayer expressed this. The Communion of the Lord's Supper expressed this. All these ordinances were mere empty forms, if that was not true which Christ spoke to the Disciples on this night,—if it was not true for them, and for all to whom He should send them; if it was not true for all men everywhere. All these ordinances were living realities if this was indeed so, if Christ was the Vine, and if it was men's sin and misery to separate themselves from that Vine, because they were created to be the branches of it, and so to bring forth fruits to God. II\. So they taught, and so our fathers believed; otherwise no Church would have been set up in this land; otherwise it could have done nothing for the illumination and civilization of the surrounding world. And so, brethren, we all of us profess to believe. *Our* Creeds, our Worship, our Sacraments, as much as those of the earliest Christians, testify to it. And the secret of our Creeds and Worship and Sacraments becoming a dull routine, and the secret of our daily existence becoming a pretence, and the secret of our having that sense of inward barrenness, that incapacity to act, or to find reasons and opportunities for action, is simply this: that we do not believe these words of Christ; that they do not come to us as the revelation of a divine, living truth which cannot pass away, though the Heavens and the Earth may. We suppose that by some acts or arts of ours we are to attach ourselves to Christ, instead of simply confessing that His Father has attached us by His own purpose and love to Him, has created us and redeemed and constituted us in Him, in order that we may do the works which He desires that we should do, and which His Spirit, by all His gentlest and all His severest discipline, is working in us to do. We have not believed this message. Oh, let this be our great Lent confession, the beginning and the end of all our confessions! The Spirit convinces us of Sin, because we believe not in Him. The Spirit shows us all our failures, weaknesses, corruptions, as flowing from this source, that we have been acting as if we were not rooted in Him, as if we could persuade or train or task our selfish, corrupt Adam nature to produce something which would be good for men or well-pleasing to God. Let us resolve, once for all, that this is impossible. A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit; that is a law which has been proclaimed by Him who spoke with authority, and which can never be repealed. By no skill or discipline, by no refinements, by no religion, can you compel what is base and low and selfish to create what is manly and pure and self-sacrificing. Men have tried the experiment for six thousand years, and they have called in all politics and philosophy and religious societies to help them, and they have failed. And what then has not failed? Where has there been any success? Wherever, brethren, any body of men, or any man, has said resolutely, God has not left us to these selfish tendencies and inclinations of ours. He has grafted us into the true human and divine root. He desires us to abide in that root. He is willing to renew us day by day in Him in whom He has 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. Wherever any one has been brought to take this as the maxim and principle of his acts, and so to trust himself wholly in God's hands, that He may work in him to will and do of His good pleasure, he has been enabled to overcome the world, the flesh, and the Devil,—he has been enabled to walk according to God's will. And whenever a nation or a Church discovers that it has been going very wrong, that it has become worldly and lukewarm and uncharitable, each man seeking his own and not the things of Jesus Christ, and so that there is confusion and discontent and evil through a land on which God has poured out the tokens of His goodness, there is but one way of reformation. It is by recollecting the lore of our childhood, by returning to the old faith, the faith that we are members of Christ, and God's children, and by earnestly confessing how little we have understood that privilege or cared for it; or cared to tell all over whom we have influence, all men in the furthest ends of the earth, that it is theirs as well as ours. And these words then, brethren, these must be our watchword and charms in the time to come. "*Abide in me, and I in you*." Let us receive them not as if we read them out of a book, but as if we knew assuredly that Christ was speaking them to us no less actually than He spoke them to the eleven Disciples as He sat with them on the night of His betrayal and agony. Let us be sure that each new morning He is saying to us, "Abide in me this day, and I will abide in you." Let us be sure that He is saying them to us as we lie down at night. And then, day unto day and night unto night, by all their sad and all their joyful experiences, will repeat them and confirm them to us. The more sorely we are tempted by evil in any form, by vanity, by self-glorification, by lust, by indolence, by cowardice, the more certain shall we be that all these are messages of the Evil Spirit to draw us from our true Lord who has bound us to Himself, the more sure we shall be that greater is He that is with us than those that are against us. The more dreary and hopeless the condition of the world looks, the more we are reminded how utterly weak and unfit we are to do anything for its renovation, the more confident we shall be that the help which is done upon the earth He doeth it Himself; that He who died for Mankind must care for man more than we can; and that our highest ambition must be, in some little sphere to be His ministers, not fulfilling our ends, but His. If we care for that honour, we know, for He has told us so, that He is willing to bestow it upon us; that it is His Father's good pleasure that we should bring forth much fruit; and that He came to do His Father's pleasure, and to give us the power to do it. While you simply resolve to live as if you were His and He was in you, every lowly duty in your family circles, every effort to be useful in your neighbourhood, every body and every soul which you can comfort, will be a new bond to Christ, a new pledge and assurance of His presence. Then all things will be transformed. In the service of the Nation there will be manly purposes and clear insight, and the sacrifice of all petty ends. Power will be looked upon as a trust, to be thankfully received, and to be discharged in fear and hope, not as a prize to be coveted. The Church will never care to be anything but the witness for Him who took the nature of all that He might impart life to all who would receive it from Him. Whenever there are in us heartburnings, jealousies, suspicions, quarrels for precedence, a desire to exalt our opinions or put down our opponents, then we shall know inwardly that we are not abiding in Christ. And we shall confess that sin. And we shall ask the Father, who has grafted us into His Son, to give us repentance that we may turn to Him and cleave to Him,—to give us His Spirit, that our grudging, thankless, complaining life, may be changed into a free, manly life, which waxes stronger for all the discomforts and distresses that threaten it. Then, instead of asking what shall we get for the services we render to God, the highest blessing will seem to us the power of serving Him. For the exercise of such power will always demand more trust and dependence upon Him, and a greater knowledge of what He is. Other rewards than we, in our slothful, careless life, can dream of, are for those who have watched beside hospital pallets, and worn themselves out in encouraging, by acts more than words, the sick and dying to abide in Him who died for them. The peace which they impart returns to them again. They know that He in whom they believed is not their Lord only, but the Lord of the whole earth. They feel more of their own impotence every day to do what they wish to do, more of the evil which is fighting against them and the world, so they are obliged to think less and less of themselves, to cast all their burdens upon God, to trust Him for the accomplishment of His own blessed Will. And then, when the powers that have been spent upon their brethren become feeble in themselves,—when the eye, and the hand, and the heart fail, God will surely make all their bed in their sickness. The lesson of the whole life of toil and self-sacrifice will be gathered up in the days which call forth the endurance that is a higher and more blessed sacrifice still. The evening hour will be a Paschal supper, and He who sits at it, breaking the bread, pouring out the wine, will say, as His last, best, choicest words to His faithful disciple, "*Abide in me* and I will abide in thee; yea through long ages I will cause thee to bring forth fruit to the good of the family on earth, to the glory of the Father in Heaven." And so the thought of their deeds, which has oftener discouraged us by the contrast with our own than cheered us to follow them, will have its right effect upon us. We cannot gain strength from them, but we shall know where theirs was gained. We shall understand that it was received in weakness and perfected in weakness. When they learned to despair of themselves, and to abide in One who was the sufferer for all, the life-giver to all, then they were able to become sufferers with their fellows, to 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. But in discovering Him, we discover again our relation to all creatures. We can be continually 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. [Lent]{.smallcaps}, I have been trying for two Sundays to show you, is not a time for confessing that we have departed from some high and imaginary standard of excellence. It is a time for confessing our departure from the actual law under which we and all human beings are placed. It is a time for individual confession. Each one recollects acts which he has done, and which he can impute to no one except himself. But these are acts against the peace and order of society. They belong to the class of acts which make society untenable. We cannot impress this truth too much upon our minds. It requires continual repetition, for there are a hundred loopholes by which we escape from the acknowledgment of it. We are always persuading ourselves that the Bible has some special nomenclature about Sin and Holiness; that Sin means disobedience to some theological rule of right; that Holiness means a peculiar state of mind which a few exemplary persons may attain. We must settle it in our hearts that Sin is the being unmanly, inhuman; that Holiness is the simple, natural, orderly condition of a creature living amidst creatures like himself. When we read this 12th chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, our first thought is, What a different world is described here from that in which we dwell! Every one is supposed to be feeling his neighbour's sufferings as his own, his neighbour's joys as his own. Selfishness is not directing the movements of society, or freezing the hearts of individuals! And then we possibly fall for a few moments into a sentimental dream about the possibility of such an Elysium being created some time or other upon this earth or in some distant planet. We may even ask whether, if species are not permanent, we might not be transformed by some process into fit inhabitants for such a region. But after a little indulgence in such visions, we wisely determine that this is a waking world; that whatever may happen at some future time, we must conform to what actually exists in the present time. It cannot, we say, be meant that we should waste our energies in struggling against the conditions into which we are put, be they ever so ignominious; we must adapt ourselves to them as well as we can. That, I repeat it, must be a sound and healthy resolution: let us adhere to it. We can understand St. Paul upon no other terms. For he was not a dreamer; he lived to scatter dreams. He was essentially a practical man,—a fighter, no doubt, but a fighter against his own inclination to disobey the constitution under which he was born,—the constitution, not of some society that may be hereafter somewhere else, but of a society that was in the Greece, Italy, Palestine of his day; that is, in the France, Germany, England of our day. He would have the Corinthians struggle incessantly, would have us struggle incessantly, not to create a new order for ourselves, but that we may not in every act of our lives be contradicting that order to which we actually belong. I\. And what is that order? St. Paul takes the simplest method one can conceive for making us understand what it is. He leads us to notice obvious facts, which every one admits; and not only admits, but is compelled by the keenest experience to recognize every moment. He asks us to consider the structure of our bodies,—not any secrets about them, which anatomists and physiologists may know,—but what every mechanic must know. He says that each of our members or limbs has a power or work of its own; that no other limb can put forth the same power or do the same work. "*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*." He goes on to utter what is just as broad a commonplace, that "*though there are many members, there is but one body*." And then he appeals to every one who has ever had a sensation of pain in any part of his body, whether *if one member suffers, all the members do not suffer with it*. So far assuredly he is in the region of facts, not dreams,—of universal facts, not of partial facts,—of facts which do not concern the scholar and the saint more than the fool and the sinner; of facts which the scholar and the saint, if they would not be changed into fools and sinners of the most hopeless sort, ought to think of and to count more significant than all the novelties and rarities which we run to the ends of the earth to seek for. Here surely are laws of the Universe,—laws concerning our own selves, which no one can reverse. By no industry or discovery can you add one cubit to your stature. By no industry or discovery can you cause that one part of your body should not suffer with every other part, that the whole should not be affected by the well-being of each part. The practitioner in medicine or surgery does not aspire to alter these facts. He conforms himself to them, he regulates his treatment in accordance with them. II\. Then the Apostle goes on—to do what? To exhibit his wit by pointing out some resemblance which he has perceived between these facts, and some opinion which he wishes us to accept? No such thing. He never dreamed of comparing what cannot be compared, because they are not of the same kind. Let the dead bury their dead. Let those who spend their time in defending certain opinions find certain other opinions to weigh against them. St. Paul's work did not lie in that direction. He cared only for facts. He had found one set of facts about which he could appeal to the experience and conscience of mankind, which would bear the test and trial of all time. He goes on to speak of other facts as nearly concerning each of us individually, as nearly concerning the whole race, about which he can appeal to the same conscience and experience, which he can submit to the same test and trial. He does not ask any special field for the proof and examination of them. He asks for no choice spot which the winds of heaven do not visit too roughly. He takes the world as he finds it. A Greek city with all its corruptions, the Roman empire with its tyranny, answer his purpose better than an Atlantis. We speak of human society as a body. Men have done it in all ages. The Roman historian repeats the apologue which he found attributed by tradition to Menenius Agrippa during the secession to Mount Aventine, with the remark that it bore traces of the rudeness of the age (Livy, l. 2, c. 32). He intimates that this was a comparison which men in the simplest times instinctively adopted—instinctively recognized. They could not do otherwise. It is worked into the very tissue of human language; you can scarcely invent phrases which shall not involve it. We must introduce a revolution into the speech and thought of all nations if we would rid ourselves of it. And it does not stamp our thought or conversation less, but more, as we become civilized. The polished Roman of the days of Livy might have concealed the argument of Agrippa in seemlier phrases—have wrapped it up in some historical illustration, or flavoured it with Greek philosophy. But whenever he spoke against Anarchy—whenever he pointed out the results of it, he inevitably fell back upon the same analogy. The more distinctly he brought it home to his countrymen, the more would their consciences respond to his discourse,—the more pointedly would they feel his application of it to their time, or to the time that was coming. Well, then, St. Paul endorses this human language. He pronounces it to be sound and reasonable. He will not allow it to be figurative, in any sense of that adjective which is opposed to literal and true. It will endure, he says, the fullest unfolding. There are members or limbs of the body politic, as certainly as there are members or limbs of the body natural. Each man is such a member or limb. Each man has a function or office assigned him in the body politic, as the hand or foot has in the natural body. One man may as little do the work of another, as the hand can do the work of the foot. One man may as little say to another, I have no need of thee, as the hand may say to the foot, or the foot to the hand, I have no need of thee. And here, too, the many members can never make us forget the one body. For here, too, every part suffers with every other part; no limb can be honoured without every other sharing in the good. III\. Before I proceed further, I must again impress those two thoughts upon your mind with which I began. The first is, that this description of St. Paul does not presuppose perfection, but rather presupposes imperfection. There is an allusion to suffering in the natural body. The foot is said to feel pain, and therefore the hand to feel pain. The Prophet, no doubt, looks forward to a time when the inhabitant of God's universe shall no more say, "*I am sick*." The hearts of us all confirm the anticipation. We must believe that health is the law of the world; sickness, the anomaly. Reason says so. We must suppose the anomaly will some day be removed. Our Lord's miracles of healing bear that testimony. But St. Paul does not speak of this renovated condition. He speaks of the condition of men's bodies as he saw it, and as we see it. And so in the corresponding case. He speaks of suffering in the body politic. He takes it for granted that it is subject to confusions and derangements; that the hand and the foot were liable each to its own peculiar kind of torture. No one knew it better than he did. No one had more to endure from others and for others. He was writing to a society which was full of tumults and parties, to the Church of which the different members seemed least in harmony—least to acknowledge any relation to each other. Because he was writing to such a Church,—because he saw to what its strifes might lead,—because he saw how each school was trying to make itself or its leader the centre of the body, and to consider all other members only as they affected itself;—therefore it was that he set out more distinctly than he had ever done what the order was which God had established for them, and to which, willingly or reluctantly, they must submit. The other point on which I have insisted already, and which I would enforce, is that St. Paul was not teaching a new doctrine, but an old one, when he declared this strict analogy to exist between the physical and moral constitution of man. It was not new to his own countrymen. All their patriarchal records, which we are reading at this time in the book of Genesis, contained it and witnessed of it. The sons of Jacob, in their passionate and lawless assertion of family bonds,—as well as by the recklessness with which they broke loose from those bonds,—by their wild revenge for their sister's disgrace, by casting their brother into the pit,—showed that they were in a society which they had not created for themselves, but which God had created for them. When they emerged from a pastoral into a national state—when they felt the sternness and the certainty of law, every step in their history showed that they were members of a body; that they had the greatest inclination to deny that they were; that by the denial they brought themselves into necessary wretchedness and bondage; that He who had made them a nation was determined to keep them one,—was able to teach the most rebellious of them the blessing of His order, the curse of violating it. When the sanctions of Law had proved their inadequacy to control the wills of men, 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 manifested as mightier than all the enemies that were drawing away His subjects from their allegiance. Nor was it a new doctrine to the Greeks. All the stories of family life, in their earliest legends,—of the way in which the relations of husband to wife, of brother to brother, had been violated,—all the teaching in their dramas of the awful punishments which the Powers above had ordained for the transgression of domestic order,—all the actual experiences in their commonwealths, their struggles to make stern Law supreme over the inclinations of men, the struggles to discover some ground on which they might work together in freedom, their united achievements, their rivalries, hatred, dissolution,—all had been repeating in different ways the lesson of the one body and the many members, all had been bringing out in terrible facts that analogy which St. Paul set forth, so far as it could be set forth, in words. IV\. And 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 not been satisfactory, though they had been very clear, very decisive so far as they went. They had proved the existence of a law of fellowship between human beings. They had proved that that law was liable to constant violation. They had proved that its violation brought misery upon him who was guilty of it, as well as upon those whose claim upon him he had refused to acknowledge. They had proved that the tyrant suffered with the slave for his acts of tyranny; that the spirit of the slave was in the tyrant, and the spirit of the tyrant in the slave. They had *not* shown how that witness of Prophets respecting a divine Word and Ruler over their nation, could be actually 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 whence could come a power strong enough to make their cohesion to each other real and practical, strong enough to overcome the tendency in each member to rend itself from the rest. It is this great *Hiatus* in all the lore of past ages which St. Paul fills up when he says, "*Now are ye the body of* [Christ]{.smallcaps}, *and members in particular*." He had said before in this 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]{.smallcaps}." Language very unintelligible to many, which they would fain explain into a figure or into a mystical rapture, though all that has gone before is so very strict and practical. So probably should we all, if there were not two potent hindrances. V\. One lies in the other writings of St. Paul, and in the whole Gospel which he preached to the Nations. If this is figure and mysticism,—everything that he has taught elsewhere is figure and mysticism. It sounded so to Jews and Gentiles. He talked of one who died on a Cross at Calvary being the Head of every man. He spoke of His proving Himself to be the Head of every man by taking upon Him the form of a servant, by submitting to death, by rising from the dead, by ascending on high. He could use no other language than this to describe His identification of Himself with men—"*He was made Sin for us. He became a curse for us*." Language surely awfully profane, if it does not mean what it says. It is nothing less than trifling with the necessities and anguish of men, with the Name and promises of God. If we give it its direct and mighty meaning, the Incarnation and Sacrifice and 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 are created. If St. Paul is deceiving us in this part of his teaching, he is deceiving us also in that. What he considered the most glorious of all facts, must be given up as the wildest fictions that ever entered into the imagination of a man. VI\. This is one reason for not treating those words which crown the description of the body and the members, as if they were only flighty words, belonging to the region of fancy and not of reality. There is another, which for us must be of equal weight, which may be of some weight even to those who have not hitherto confessed St. Paul to be a veritable interpreter of human life. We cannot reduce all the past lessons of the world, the lessons derived from its tears and its joys, its conflicts and its hopes, into nothing. We cannot purge our own speech of the associations which have gathered about it. A body we must still confess, a body with many members. "Oh yes," you say, "if you will needs talk about a Universal Church, a Church of Christ,—no doubt this sort of analogy is inevitable. But we who are not theologians have no call to use that dialect. For us it has very little force." I do not ask you to use it. I would beseech you, so long as it has no force for you, to abstain from using it. But I know that if you resolutely banish that kind of discourse, yes, every kind of discourse that has a twang of theology in it, you will not the less be obliged to recognize yourselves as members of a body, to ask what is implied in that recognition, to ask how you may fulfil your own functions in the body. If you are English citizens, you must do that, though a Church be a mere phantasy. And then that other question arises, What binds me to the other members of this nation? What holds the limbs of this nation 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 upon others, or only submit to them yourselves; you will be tempted to deny your relationship to your fellow-citizens, you will be tempted to act unfaithfully by them, and therefore to lower and degrade yourselves, 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, who makes you understand and fulfil your obligations to them. If you do not think so, if it does not occur to you that you have ever yielded to the temptation of sacrificing your fellow-men to the interests of party or of self—if 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 upon you for going into the strife, which will be coming upon us soon, in the certainty that you will never deceive any class with hopes that you do not mean to realize, that you will never speak an insincere or flattering word for the sake of winning any supporter or overthrowing any opponent. But if you have not this perfect clearness about the past, or this perfect confidence in the future, then we may say to you, "You failed in your trust to the members of the body, because you were not depending upon the Head of the body, because you were not seeking grace and light from Him. And that evil you may confess. And that grace you may receive; the grace of forgiveness, the grace of purification, the grace of remembering in the time to come that no one member can suffer without all the members suffering too; that you cannot wrong one class without wronging all classes; that you cannot deceive one class without diffusing the habit of deception through all classes, without becoming the victim of that habit yourselves." VII\. Brethren, it is easy to say words such as these about men who are in different positions from ourselves, who have temptations to which we are not exposed. I know it too well. The remembrance often closes one's lips when one ought to speak, when we are failing in our duty to you by not speaking. Criticism of other men's evils, looking down upon them as from a secure height and platform of our own, is a horrible temptation and disease of our time. We are all disposed to fall into it. We preachers sometimes feel as if we had a sort of divine right to indulge ourselves in it. But we have no right,—less right than any people have. Lent tells us so, for that is a time not of criticism but of confession, of common united confession, of special individual confession. I said that 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, as members of a nation. The meaning of the other word will 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 there is no artificial, technical signification in that name. All artificial, technical significations that have been given to it, shall perish. *This* signification which connects it with the natural body, *this* signification which identifies it with that universal body politic of which Christ is the Head, because He is the Head of every man, shall remain. Of your relation to this Church you cannot rid yourselves, any more than you can change the law under which your natural bodies and the members of them exist. It is one which you must confess along with us, because you are human beings as well as we are. It is one which 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, therefore that His Son is our Lord, therefore that His Spirit of Love is working in us to bind us to all the members of the body of His Son. It must 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, notwithstanding all our efforts to tear ourselves apart and to become separate creatures,—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,—that 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. [These]{.smallcaps} words have often been quoted with respectful admiration by persons who look upon what they suppose to be the theology of the Bible with indifference or contempt. "Here," they have said, "is a genuine witness for that morality which lies hid beneath the forms and doctrines of different religions, and must at last supersede them, a morality essentially the same in all, but narrowed and localized by the notions of particular tribes, kept out of sight—often grossly contradicted—by the subtlety and self-interest of priests. The religious coverings of these great, universal, and permanent truths," it is said, "have become as much the causes of strife, division, hatred, among men, as these, if they were believed and acted upon, would be of union and fellowship." The inference is obvious. The philosopher and philanthropist is to be invited to extricate these great maxims from the overlying mass, to give them the prominence which has been given to those dogmas which are so intricate, and which lead to evil results or to none. He is not indeed to be satisfied with this vindication of what was good in the old time. It must be illustrated by all modern discoveries respecting the laws and conditions under which man and the external universe exists, by our experience of what our species has required and does require for its well-being. This wisdom will relieve the saws of antiquity of their dryness, and will connect them with our actual life and work. No doubt, brethren, those who use this language have much to say for themselves. God forbid that we should deny it! The misfortune, I believe, both for them and us, is that we have had so very much to say, when what is most desirable, according to their showing as well as ours, is that we should *do*. The Prophet says, "*Do justly*," not, Talk about Justice; "*Love mercy*," not, Understand what a very good and lovely thing Mercy is; "*Walk humbly before thy God*," not, Discourse learnedly and eloquently about Humility and about God. Let us grant at once that priests have again and again darkened counsel by words without knowledge; the Scriptures say so; Micah declares as much in this very passage; we who believe that our Lord was put to death by the priests and rulers of His nation, can have no temptation—no power—to deny that awful truth or to conceal it. Let us admit that the whole story of His life on earth tells us so, that the struggle of the Jews with Him was the struggle of men who laid down a system of belief and rules of action for themselves and their disciples, with One who believed and actually worked, and who communicated faith and the power of working to those who followed Him. But if the case is so, let us manfully ask ourselves how we are to escape their sin and their curse. Clearly we shall not escape it by changing one kind of dogmatism for another, Sadducean unreality for Pharisaic unreality, phrases about moral principles and philosophical truths for phrases about religious opinions and feelings. To be or not to be, to do or not to do, must be always the question for human beings. If we cannot find a ground for action, and a power enabling us to act, we may try one scheme after another, but all will be equally useless, frivolous, mischievous. Most cheerfully then do I take these words of the Prophet as my guide; they are worthy of all the honour which has been paid them. But they ask for no compliments. They are addressed in all earnestness to each one of us. "*What doth the Lord require of thee*?" And I own the answer sounds to me very terrible, not the least one which tempts me to return the Prophet fine words. To do justly, love mercy, walk humbly,—does God indeed require all this of me? What: this which I have been finding all my life long so unspeakably difficult? If I had been asked for ten thousand rivers of oil, they perhaps might have been rendered. But the service of a life; the resistance to tendencies which I find every moment at work in me, stronger with every new development of my own powers, stronger with every new complication of society—tendencies to be unjust, unmerciful, proud; this is indeed a demand to make on such a creature as I am. Is there no dispensation, no royal road, no possibility of commuting so much wrong-doing to which I have a disposition, for so much of the good things that have been given me? Is there no making up with long prayers for the lack of Justice, Mercy, Humility? If one speaks of them to one's fellows, will not that be something? If one denounces other men for wanting them, will not that please God? If I try to set the world right, surely He will not search out what I am? Must I my own self be all this? Is it required of me? Cruel Prophet, I will flatter thee no more. Thy words were sweet in the mouth, but when they are received within, they are as bitter as gall. Unless thou canst tell me more, thou hadst no business to tell me so much. If I may not learn how I can be just and merciful and humble, to assure me that I am bound to be so is an intolerable oppression. My brethren, men have felt this in all times, they are feeling it now. And the feeling—though it is mixed with much contradiction—is not a false one. They would have a right to complain of us, and of the Bible, if we came and delivered to them a set of precepts—the best precepts in the world—and did not tell them whence they were to derive the strength for obeying these precepts. They would have a right to say to us, You are laying heavy burdens on men's shoulders. You know nothing of yourselves if you do not know what an effort it is to lift these burdens, how often it seems an impossible effort. They would have a right to say: "You do not really mean doing justly, loving mercy, walking humbly, when you use these words; you mean something which passes for these acts in your class. You mean, not offending against certain rules and customs which you have established for your convenience. You mean by doing justly, not stealing from other men's hoards when you have plenty of your own; your mercy consists in overlooking the transgressions that do not particularly affect your comfort; your humility, in subjection to superiors whom it is not wise to affront, or in not denying opinions which you hold to be right and salutary. These virtues," so they might speak to us, "are merely decency, respectability, conventional propriety, virtues for summer weather, which in any shipwreck of society, even in any ordinary storm, are shaken to pieces, which cannot stand the shock of the most vulgar temptation, which are found too weak to resist the craving for gold even in those in whom that craving has had most abundant satisfaction." All these charges are true, and will prove true against our morality if it has not some deep underground basis to rest upon. And what is that basis? I answer, You must seek it in that very theology of the Bible which you have supposed it so great a deliverance to cast aside. There, and there only, will you find the protection against the narrow, local, artificial dogmas of priests, and the dry, hard, scarcely less artificial, often even more heartless dogmas of philosophers. There you will find the protection against the flimsy, conventional morality of classes and ages; there you will find a meaning for the words, "*Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly*," and a power to translate them from words into life. I\. The Lord requires thee to "*Do justly*." The whole question of the ground of moral obligation is raised by this sentence. It seems to tell me that some One is commanding a certain course of action which I am bound to follow because He commands it. And this course of action is described by the phrase "*doing justly*." Is justice then nothing in itself? Are actions made right because a certain Power insists that they shall be performed? The main controversy between the mere priest and the mere philosopher, so far as it bears upon human conduct, lies here. The one has always been tempted to maintain that an Omnipotent decree makes that good which would not be good without it, makes that evil which would be otherwise indifferent; the other has been always seeking to find what constitutes an action or a habit just or unjust, true or false; whether something in its own nature, or in its effect upon the individual doer, or in its influence upon society. The conscience in men cries out for a Ruler; therefore it gives heed to the priest. It exists only in the affirmation that right and wrong are eternally opposed; therefore it gives heed to the philosopher. Experience shows that the priest is very prone to raise maxims of temporary expedience to the level of eternal laws; therefore the conscience protests against him. Experience shows that the philosopher can find no standing-ground from which he can act upon individuals or society, but is obliged to beg a standing-ground from their opinion, or to erect his own above both; therefore the conscience protests against him. "*The Lord*," says Micah, "*requires thee to do justly*." Did Micah believe that the Lord was a mere Power who commanded certain things to be done, and certain things to be left undone? If he did, he set at nought the Law and History which he confessed to be divine. That Law and History declared that the I Am, the Righteous Being, had revealed Himself to the creatures whom He had formed in His image, and had said to them, "*Be ye holy, for I am holy*." The theology of the Bible starts from this ground, and declares every other to be untenable. Gods of power were worshipped by the heathens. The powers which were exercised over them in Nature were manifold; therefore the gods were manifold. Some of the influences which proceeded from those powers were beneficent, some malignant, therefore the gods were some beneficent, some malignant, or the same now beneficent and now malignant. It was unreasonable to think the same arguments could be addressed to a god of the hills and a god of the valleys,—that they would delight in the same objects; the worship must be local, the offerings local. The priest must learn, from tradition or his own guesses, which were likely to be most acceptable. Whatever they were, they must be enforced by the threat of terrible penalties which would follow if they were neglected. The conscience of the worshipper aggravates these penalties, gives them a new reality. The rivers of oil must be poured forth; the first-born of the body must be given for the sin of the soul. Then comes the message: "*He hath shewn thee, O man, what is good*." A message from whom? How has He who sends it, shown me what is good? If He has not told me what He is, the tidings are worth nothing, the good has not been shown. Then we are turned loose upon all the schemes of men to frame gods after their own conceptions, or if not gods—laws, customs, theories, as useless and as tyrannical. If you desire a Universal Morality, there must be the Revelation of a Moral Being. If you would have the command *Do justly* in place of a weight of rules and observances and ceremonies, you must have Justice set before you, not in words, formulas, decrees, but livingly, personally, historically. You must be taught what the Just Being is by seeing what He does—what He does for you. He must set before you His government over the armies of Heaven,—and, since you can only know that through what you feel, and He is ever the same,—over the children of men. And you must know how His methods may become yours. He would have you like Him. He must tell you how He makes you like Him. Any book commanding us to do justly, without imparting this knowledge, is, I must say it again, a hard-hearted book, one which enjoins the making of bricks without giving the straw; one which insists upon our being something which the writers must have known that we could not be. And it is just for not being such a book as this that we complain of the Bible; just for not being a book of mere moralities, utterly inefficient for any moral purpose. If we take away the Theology of the Bible, we reduce it into a book of this kind. For its Theology is the unveiling of the Righteous Being to the heart and conscience of the only creature that is capable of being righteous, because of the only creature that is capable of departing from Righteousness. It is an invitation, first to a man, then to a family, then to a nation, to trust in this Righteous Being who has shown that He cares for them, and will not forsake them. It is at last the manifestation to all nations of that Original Righteousness which had been the root of all Righteousness in them; the Manifestation of the Divine Righteousness in a Man, who came into the world to reconcile men to His Father, that they might receive His Spirit, and be able to be just, as He is, to do justly, as He does. II\. But the Prophet says that the Lord requires of men to "*love Mercy*." This is a higher obligation still—harder to fulfil. I may be bidden to do certain acts, and the acts will be gone through, slowly, reluctantly, against the whole bias of my nature. But they may be gone through. They will not be just or righteous acts according to the Scriptural idea of righteousness, which supposes the man to be good before he does good things. But they may be just according to some legal, philosophical, or sacerdotal rule. Can such a rule explain how I am to *love* because it is desirable that I should? Mercy is, no doubt, a beautiful quality; all religions confess it to be so; when it comes forth in life, men generally are disposed to pay it a frank, unquestioning homage. But there is a limit to this admiration. If Mercy meets an unmerciful habit of mind in us, its works will be explained away. The Pharisee will say, "*He casteth out devils through the Prince of the Devils*;" the Sadducee will say, "*He deceiveth 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*." Mercy then is not necessarily loved when it is exhibited in its fullest, most perfect form; when it shows itself in the most gracious and serviceable acts. There may be a cry for it on another ground. Men may feel that they resisted the Divine Righteousness, that they are at war with it. They may invoke Mercy to avert the punishment which they believe that Righteousness desires to inflict upon them. This notion of a war between Righteousness and Mercy, which the evil conscience so readily suggests, is often confirmed by the priest. He devises arts for enlisting the one against the other. The Philosopher protests against the separation as dangerous to morality; but he cannot extirpate the moral evil which has caused it; he even sanctions the separation; he sets Justice above Mercy, as the conscious sinner sets Mercy above Justice; he cannot teach us how we may both do justly and love Mercy. Again you must turn to the Theology of the Bible if you would remove the contradiction. For there Christ is set forth as the Image of the Father, not in one quality, but in His whole character. He is said to show forth 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 that there is in men a hopeless, invincible principle of opposition to Goodness. Regard Him as God manifest in the flesh, meeting that unkindness and hardness of heart which knew not what it did,—which hated not only the Son, but the Father,—meeting it with a divine Love which was stronger than Death and Sin and Hell,—and you feel that man indeed wants Mercy because he has sinned, but that this Mercy has in it a power of putting away sin, of covering it, extinguishing it—of transforming the creature who was the subject and slave of it, into a new creature who *can* love Mercy and do justly. Believe that the Spirit of Mercy and Forgiveness does indeed proceed from the Father and the Son, and you see how that very Forgiveness which is shown to man becomes a principle in him able to overcome his unforgiving nature, able to go out in acts of forbearance and gentleness. III\. But lastly, the Prophet says that the Lord requires man to walk "*humbly with Him*." About this virtue of Humility there is as much strife as about Justice and Mercy. The priest is inclined to extol it as the cardinal excellence, that to which all others are subordinate. But does it not seem often in his practice, as well as in his theory, to involve the destruction of moral purpose, of intellectual effort? Can it be intended that the man should think meanly of the nature and the powers which God has given him? The more nobly he judges of his Humanity, the more noble, says the philosopher, he himself will be. Men are grievously distracted between these opinions. They embrace first one, then the other. The result of each experiment is to make them suppose that the course they have not chosen must be the right one. "Oh for intellectual freedom!" cries the victim of sacerdotal rule; "Oh for an absolute, infallible guide!" cries he who has known no government but his own. Brethren, it is most true that if we try by any artificial methods to cultivate what is called the grace of Humility, it may become actually another name for meanness, for the abandonment of manliness and dignity, for a nominal self-denial which is compatible with much inward self-exaltation. And what, then, is that humility which our consciences bear witness to be true and divine,—which we demand, and not in vain, of every earnest investigator of truth, of every brave man? Micah's words contain the answer. We are humble in ourselves only when we are walking with God, when we are remembering that we are in His presence, that He is going with us where we go, and staying with us where we stay. It is this thought which lays a man in the dust, for then His eyes are upon him in whose sight the angels are not clean. It is this which raises him to a height he had never dreamt of, for the Lord God has been mindful of him, and come near to him, and fitted him for converse with Himself. Once more, then, the Theology of the Bible explains its morality, and enables us to know what we ought to be, and to be what we would wish to be. If we believe that He who was in the form of God, humbled Himself and became of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, that He might raise us to the state of sons of God, and to be the sharers of His Nature, we can understand how the poor in spirit may be heirs of the Kingdom of God; we can confess for ourselves that we have been grovellers because we have been proud, that we have undervalued the glory of our race because we have been lifted up in our own conceit, 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 in the likeness of Him who stooped to the death of the Cross, that so 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. [A]{.smallcaps} [few]{.smallcaps} years ago no doctrine was more prevalent among political writers than this, that Self-interest is the motive to all the actions and purposes of men, and that Government exists to make the self-interest of individuals subordinate to a general interest. Such a doctrine had much to recommend it, even if it had not been enforced by very able men, and applied to the solution of a number of problems in morals, œconomics, and jurisprudence. Notorious facts showed that partial interests do clash with the general interest. There had been much talk about virtue and patriotism, which had apparently borne little fruit. Was not this a more practical doctrine than any which gave men credit for better feelings? Was it not a safer course to assume that each would get what he could for himself at the expense of his neighbour, and to regulate the social machine upon that hypothesis? There has been, as you know, of late, a strong reaction against this system. It has been supposed to ignore some important principles in human beings, of which the statesman, as well as the ordinary man of the world, ought to take account. It has been suspected that the constitution of Society itself may involve principles which cannot be explained either into the triumph of an individual or class selfishness over the majority, or into a combined effort to defeat that selfishness and establish a more comprehensive one. Other facts have forced themselves upon us besides those which procured that scheme such acceptance. Politicians seem now to be hesitating between the two; not quite certain which is the right; alternately adopting the opposite maxims—perhaps somewhat to the confusion of their actual morality. Those who are busy with the outward business of the world generally trouble themselves little with what is passing in the chambers of men's hearts. Those who dwell chiefly in these chambers are as contemptuous about common affairs and the persons who manage them. Nevertheless the movements in the two spheres generally correspond, and they greatly affect each other. Notwithstanding the many plausible arguments of those who endeavoured to build the science of Politics upon Self-interest, I do not believe they would have taken hold as they did of public opinion, if it had not been already turned in the same direction by altogether different influences. I do not believe the rebellion against that doctrine of Self-interest would have been as strong and decided as it has been in the political region, if it had not commenced in another. In the last age, discourses, well composed and sometimes able in themselves, were delivered by clergymen and others on the beauty of Virtue and the ugliness of Vice. The one was shown to be in accordance with the true nature of man, the other to involve endless discords and contradictions. These discourses did not greatly stir the hearts of men. But they were listened to with drowsy respect; those were the words which, no doubt, ought to be spoken in pulpits; perhaps they were true. Other words very different from these were addressed by other speakers to vagabonds and criminals, whom Society had in vain sought to reclaim. They were aroused to the feeling that they had not only done sinful acts, but that they were sinful men. They were told that they might become new men; that God Himself would make them so. These words evidently carried a power with them which the others had not. They reached the ears of respectable members of society, men who had been guilty of no overt acts against its peace, who had believed themselves to be virtuous. A strong suspicion seized some of them that what was true of the outcasts was true of them. They might have done few acts of evil, but they *were* evil. At the root of their being there was that which resisted God's Law, which was out of harmony with His Nature. *They* needed reformation, *they* must become new creatures. Language of this sort startled the easy and self-satisfied of the generation to which it was addressed. It startled also some of the humble and sincere. They had been used to a different vocabulary; they could not change it; they could not think all the teaching they had heard was worthless; they suspected something wrong in the new teaching. There was excuse enough in the extravagances of some of the best of those who listened to that new teaching, in the hypocrisies of the worst, for the ridicule of one of these classes, for the fears of the other. But an inward belief can stand such trials, and will very soon show how weak the disputers and the wits are who set themselves against it,—how weak even the good and earnest. Those who had this belief were testifying what they knew, whether they were able to express their knowledge in words or not. They were certain that they were not deceiving themselves about their main proposition. The world could laugh at them, but it could not confute them. Therefore, as always happens in such cases, the world struck its colours and submitted to them. Let us see how this submission has been effected, and what has been the result of it. I\. Those who had found out the secret of the evil which was in themselves, and had found out that it was a common evil,—that other men, who were most unlike them in all outward circumstances, had the same,—proclaimed the depravity of human nature to be the starting-point in practical life, the fundamental truth from which other truths must be derived. This seemed to be a satisfactory generalization from undoubted facts; they were sure that they had read it in the Bible. Was it not written there "*that God had concluded all under sin*;" that the Jew, who had the Law, and conformed to the letter of it, was not less evil than the Gentile, who had only the light of his conscience,—that St. Paul, who concerning the righteousness of the Law was blameless, was yet the chief of sinners? They indeed found something better in the Bible than these announcements. They found the message of a Redemption. They read of a Saviour who had justified them by His Death and Resurrection, one who was perfectly Righteous, One in whose Righteousness they might trust, and so rise to newness of life. These tidings they heartily embraced. Upon them they felt they could stand in the hour of death and in the Day of Judgment. While they held them fast, they could become actually righteous men, could love God and their brethren, could do right and manly deeds. These tidings they were most glad that other men should hear; they even thrust them, in season and out of season, upon some who were little able to appreciate the force of them,—because, as they said, souls were at stake, and it was impossible to know whom it might please God to convert and save. II\. But these tidings, however widely it might be their duty to proclaim them, had reference to a small minority, who were not indeed in the least to boast of their privilege——who were to ascribe it to the pure, undeserved grace of God,—but who must look upon themselves as exceptions to a rule. The rule was expressed by the assertion that man was a fallen creature. He might *become* something else; but he *was* a sinner. Everything that he did or thought had reference to that primary postulate; he could do nothing else till he had admitted that in the length and breadth of it. It would have surprised those excellent people who had attained to their own sense of evil through the bitterest conflicts, to find how in our day this assertion of theirs has been accepted, apparently in all its fulness,—how it has now 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 which was denounced in the eighteenth century as fanatical, is enforced by the public opinion of the nineteenth. Philosophers may put in a protest for human nature, but that protest they suppose to be also one against the Scriptures. Nor, as I have intimated already, has this been all. The triumph of the convictions which were once set at nought, appears to be ever more complete; it has penetrated into regions which it could never have hoped to reach. The doctrine of universal selfishness in politics—the notion that laws and government should never assume honesty, but always fraud, in their subjects and their officers,—this scheme, though derived from a school not in general reputed religious, has found its support and justification from these religious dogmas, and from the habit of mind which corresponds to them. Whatever you have gained or hope to gain in administrative wisdom and righteousness, from the cultivation of universal suspicion, from the abandonment of trust, may be traced ultimately to the popular belief, mixed indeed with a number of strange contradictions, but still, by the help of divines, sustaining itself in minds wherein all other faith has perished, that sin is the starting-point of our moral being, from which all the conditions and principles of it are to be deduced. III\. Education, like Politics, obeyed for a time this influence. Many can recollect efforts that have been made to awaken the sense of sin in their minds, as the first step to any knowledge of what is right and good,—as the necessary preparation for understanding their Bibles. Much indoctrination of the same kind once prevailed in our schools for the poor. But it is through Education, through practical Education, with all its pains and sorrows, that we have been led into a new train of thought, very unlike indeed that of which I have been tracing the rise and progress. Teachers have discovered,—mothers have discovered,—that they must give children credit for affections and desires which are not selfish, for moral instincts and purposes which they cannot bring under the law of depravity. They have been driven to consider, with doubt and anguish, and yet not without hope, whether depravity would mean anything, whether they could bring it home to their child—if there were not this good, if they might not recognize it in every appeal to the conscience. They may be told by the authorities which they consult about this perplexity, that there are beautiful "columns," remains of the old unfallen nature, in the midst of its decay. But their work is practical, concerning the life of those dearest to them, and they cannot be put off with metaphors. These columns must somehow be recognized as the substantial part of the building; whatever weakens them or has caused their decay must be treated as strange and monstrous. Every hour brings them more acquainted with evil tendencies in their children; every hour makes it more necessary to treat those tendencies as rebellions against a state in which they ought to be living, their own proper state. Here then has been the beginning of another reaction against a stereotyped opinion. It is strongest in those whose education disposes them to receive that opinion in its strongest form; who would shrink with horror from the rejection of it; who, so far as the sense of their own sinfulness goes, are most inwardly in accordance with their devout ancestors. But the work in which they are engaged, as teachers of the young, as reformers of wrong-doers, obliges them to recognize a noble feeling in both, to make this the fulcrum of their teaching. No optimists about human nature have done equal justice to such feelings; none have made such generous demands for confidence in the most degraded of their fellow-men. And where there is no mixture of mere sentimentalism, the result has justified the experiment. IV\. A sense of this contrast between our best practice and some of our expressed opinions, is becoming very strong in the minds of those who have just arrived at the power of comparing them. The issue of the discovery will assuredly be a contemptuous rejection of a principle which it cost the last age many bitter tears and struggles to secure for us and transmit to us, if we cannot find some way of reconciling it with another truth which has become evidently indispensable to us, without which we can gain no step of future progress and accomplish no reform of that which has fallen into decay. Yet how can we hope for such a reconciliation? I have said already that we gain nothing by partial admissions, such as the possibility that some reminiscences or fragments of a better state may survive in our ruin. These admissions are such as earnest men who have learnt to say, with St. Paul, "*In ourselves, that is, in our flesh, dwelleth no good thing*," would revolt from as utterly insincere; they are the feeble compromises of those who have inherited a principle, not won it. And how could such a compromise ever satisfy any who have found, in their dealings with the most opposite classes of society,—with the inexperienced child, with the hardened ruffian,—that the good which is in both must be appealed to as if it were beneath the evil, as if it were more fundamental than that? There must be some better way than this of bringing two opposite experiences into harmony, or we shall deny both, and suppose that the clearest evidence is to be distrusted. What perplexity that scepticism must introduce into our actions I need scarcely point out to you. V\. The Scripture has been appealed to as the great witness in support of the doctrine of universal depravity; the Scripture is the favourite book, the dearest treasure, of those who are appealing to the hearts and consciences of little children and of corrupt men in favour of truth and righteousness. No writer in the Scriptures is oftener quoted in defence of the doctrine than St. Paul; the whole practice of his life is the best and highest example of the practice which seems to be inconsistent with it. Let us hear whether he can himself reconcile the one with the other. "*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*." It is not often that St. Paul alludes to Adam or to the effect of his act upon his posterity. If you look through his Epistles, you will be startled by the exceeding rarity of such allusions. You will be inclined to say, "What! can this be the doctrine which is said to underlie the whole Gospel, this which the great preacher of the Gospel throws so much into the background?" But it is more important to observe the cases in which he does dwell upon the transgression of the first man, and to see how he speaks of its relation to us. Here is the most conspicuous instance of all. Our translators have, perhaps inevitably, filled up the sentence with words of their own. St. Paul's statement is pointed and elliptical. He takes especial pains to present the clauses of the sentence in their exact balance and parallelism. 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 an obvious remark, that whatever is affirmed of the race of men in one of these clauses, is also affirmed of that same race in the other. It is not said that all were condemned and some were justified, but that all were condemned and all were justified. However much we may be surprised by the assertion, it stands written in the passage which is the authoritative one upon the subject: if we accept the teaching of the Bible, we accept this teaching. And St. Paul does not leave us in doubt about the meaning of his words, Condemnation and Justification. His Epistle is written to expound them. The man is condemned, when he is treated as being under a law of death. He is condemned, when he is treated as having all appetites and inclinations towards evil. He is justified, when he is declared to be under a law of life. He is justified, when he is declared to be capable of all righteousness and good. He is condemned in Adam; he is justified in Christ. According to St. Paul's statement, the Resurrection of Christ was no less a vindication of the position of men as being under a law of life, than the death of Adam was a proof that they were under a law of death. According to him, that resurrection just as much asserted that God judges the race to be righteous, as the expulsion of Adam from Paradise proved that He judges them to be sinners. The assertion puzzles and baffles us if we determine that Adam is the Head of our race, if we deny that Christ is the Head of it. The assertion puzzles and baffles us, if we suppose that Christ only became the Head of it when He was shown by His death and resurrection to be the Head of it. But if that was the manifestation of an eternal truth,—if that showed Who holds the race in one, while the act of Adam showed what rends it in pieces,—we must be wrong when we speak of a universal Fall without speaking also of a universal Justification. We must be departing from the lesson of Scriptures, if we teach that each man comes into the world with a nature that is 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\. Now St. Paul had been affirming at the beginning of his Epistle that the judgments of God are according to truth; that whatever fictions there may be in men's thoughts or acts, there can be none in His. If He pronounces or adjudges us sinners, it is because we are sinners; if He justifies or pronounces us righteous, it is because we are righteous. St. Paul declares both facts as facts for all men, just as we have discovered them to be in our own experience. But he does not leave us in the bewilderment in which that experience leaves us. He clears the contradiction; he shows how that which is true if we look upon Man in one aspect, is false if we look upon him in another. He is depraved, utterly depraved, in himself. Find me the man who is utterly 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; by the conditions of the universe, by the eternal law of God, he is simply, nakedly evil." Find me such a man. But those who converse with the reprobates of the earth say, "We never did find him; we cannot find him. In every one we perceive a struggle to get out of this selfish Adam-nature, a repudiation of it, an acknowledgment of some other law and standard than that which it gives. We speak as if there were a man hidden in that nature, wallowing in that depth, and out of the depth there comes an answer. We speak to him as a brother, and he admits the claim. We tell him of a Love deeper than that of a brother, and there is that in him which 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 indeed if we will not let Scripture tell us its whole meaning, if we read ourselves into it, if we bring half our own experience to it, and insist that it shall confirm just that half. But I am not afraid of those who are true to their own convictions, even if those convictions be ever so partial and narrow. If they will work on from them faithfully and manfully, they will be obliged to recognize facts which they have been hitherto unable to see, and the Bible will interpret both. I am afraid of those who have no convictions at all, who profess themselves believers in the depravity of human nature now, when that belief is in fashion, as they would have denied it half a century ago, when it was out of fashion. Such men will never come to any truth, though they be always learning. The opinions of the day pass with them for truth. They hold to these as fast as they can hold to anything. A few years hence they may be drifted away no one knows where, fighting perhaps for just the opposite theory to that which they are defending now, like in nothing but that in all these changes they will be always opposing that which encounters the corruptions and abuses of the time, and therefore nearly always that which is for the glory of God and the well-being of Man. VII\. Brethren, the lesson I would draw from what I have said 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 searcheth me and trieth my ways, finds it out in me. That sense of depravity implies the recognition of a law which I have violated, of an order from which I have broken loose, of a Divine image which my character has not resembled. It is the law and the order which are universal. It is this character of Christ which is the true human character. It is easy enough to own a general depravity; under cover of it you and I escape. We are only just what we take everybody to be, what we suppose a certain necessity of our position compels us to be. It is hard to remember, it is 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 is involved in the very principle of our constitution; we are only acting as if we were what we say in our catechism that we are." And it is hard, very hard, to do justice to other people; hard not to suspect them of always obeying some low, mean instinct; hard to give them credit for ever obeying a high and noble inspiration. The effort to treat them fairly becomes a thousandfold greater when we think it is doing God service, and recognizing His truth, to libel our fellows. Let us, at all events, cast away that delusion. Fault-finding and suspicion are not religious acts; to be thinking evil is not to be following the doctrine of St. Paul. The doctrine of the Fall will be fully recognized by us when we say, "Lord! I have sinned; by Thee I stand; Thou only canst raise me." When we seek to explain away the righteous deeds of others, when we impute to them all bad purposes, we deny the doctrine of Redemption. God looks upon us in His Son; we must look upon each other and upon 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 the foundation of it, is simply to say that when Christ wrestled with the Devil, we believe that 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]{.smallcaps} Psalmist answers his own question: "*Yea, I hate them right sore, even as though they were mine enemies*." We should most of us reply quite differently. We should 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 that this plausible, self-complacent language of ours indicates that we are in exceeding danger of wandering into that dark road, if we are not walking in it already. We think that we are far more gentle, humane, charitable, than David was. If we have courage to consider what he meant and what we mean, I fear we shall find that we are as much behind him in these specially Christian graces as in those which we may perhaps allow that he possessed, zeal and earnestness. I\. The force of the sentence evidently turns upon the word *Thee*. Who were those that hated God? Who rose up against Him? If we know what David believed of God, we shall be at no loss to understand. He did not, like the Heathen, ask the sky or the sea or the air to teach him of God. They did teach him much. They spoke to him of peace in the midst of strife; of permanence in the midst of change. They led him to think of One who might be the source of peace amidst the strifes of human beings, who remained the same amidst all changes in human thought and feeling. There must be something that abides; so said Nature to Man. "What is it?" was the question which the heart asked of itself, and trembled to hear the answer. "Is it a thing or a person, a friend to be embraced or an enemy to be fled from? Anyhow I must be closely connected with this presence. It must be very near me,—nearer to me than to all this universe. Else why is this witness in me of a right which I am to follow, of a truth which is to be in my inward parts? But if He is so near, wherefore 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 the faith of David. "He *has* declared Himself to me as my Guide and Teacher and Friend, as my Judge and King; as the Guide and Teacher and Friend, the 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; the wisdom to rule, the wisdom to obey. From Him comes the unity of my nation: it exists only as a nation in Him." This David believed. The more clear his mind became, the less it was darkened by sensuality, superstition, or self-glorification, the more freely and bravely he was acting,—the more he believed this. He knew that there was a Divine Presence with him. It was no trick, no fantasy. If he confounded that Presence with himself, if he supposed it was created by the spirit which confessed it, all did become trick and imposture within him. But when he clave to this Righteous Living Judge and Lawgiver, when he acknowledged His guidance and desired that all the movements of his life should be ruled by Him, then did he himself and his fellow-men and the world around come forth out of mist and shadow into the sunlight. Everything was seen in its true proportions. Hear how he speaks in the Psalm from which the text is taken. "*O Lord, thou hast searched me out, and known me; thou knowest my downsitting and my uprising; thou understandest my thought long before; thou art about my path and about my bed, and spyest out all my ways. For lo, there is not a word in my tongue but thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether. Thou hast fashioned me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain unto it*." Think of these words. A Being near to a creature who is formed in His image makes him aware of His presence. He was seeking after the Ruler of his spirit, if haply he might find Him, and lo! He is there close to him, looking into the depths of his being, kindling the very desires which He satisfies. What awe lies in such a discovery! "*It is too high for me; I cannot attain to it*." Yet what rest! What a sense of standing upon an eternal foundation, of being fixed upon a rock against which the waves may beat horribly, but which they will not shake. "He is not there because my teachers tell me so, because my fathers left me records of His existence. Thanks be to Him for the teachers! Thanks be to Him for the records of Himself! For they testify of that which is, of that which does not depend upon them, but upon which they depend. He is not there because I believe Him. My faith is given by Him. It is but the answer in me to the truth which calls it forth. When I lose my faith I come into waters where no ground is, or I find myself on a drifting sand. But that very experience shows me, as nothing else can, that my faith did not form the rock on which I am standing; no! nor the faiths of a thousand generations. My faith fails whenever I begin to put it in place of God. Nor is it by my acts of obedience to this Righteous Ruler of my inner self that I establish Him on His throne. My disobedience testifies of Him as my obedience does. The sense of separation from Him and all the disorders which follow from it show me that He is, and what manner of Being He is. The disbelief and disobedience of men generally, and all that flows from this disbelief and disobedience,—the cowardice, superstition, falsehood, tyranny, lust, cruelty which are setting the universe at war and making it a cage and habitation of unclean beasts,—these tell me of the goodness and truth and graciousness against which they are contending, and which shall destroy them at last." II\. And "*do not I hate those things, O Lord, which hate Thee; am not I grieved with those that rise up* *against Thee*?" You will tell me that he hated actual flesh-and-blood men, Moabites and Hagarenes, Goliaths and Sauls. Well! I do not care to dispute it. He hated whatever rose up against righteousness and truth in the earth, whatever sought to set up a lie. I cannot tell to what degree the particular man or the particular nation was the object of his aversion. To some extent I am sure it was, because I find that to some extent, probably to a much greater extent, it is so with us. But I am sure, just so far as he hated men or nations because they rose up against the God of Truth and Goodness, just so far he was hating the untruth and unrighteousness of these nations; just so far he was hating the same untruth and unrighteousness in himself. Their enemies were his enemies. He felt that there were deadly powers which were working deadly mischief in God's world. He who was about his path and his bed, and spying out his ways, 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, acts. In the inmost region of his being he had to encounter these principalities of spiritual wickedness. In those high places he had to wrestle with them; there he was trained to hate them; to hate them from a thorough knowledge of their intense essential vileness. This hatred grew just in proportion to the degree in which he believed, trusted, delighted in a Being of absolute purity and perfection. The dimmer his vision was of such a Being, the more tolerant he was of that which opposed his nation and resisted his will. The more sure he was that God is, and that He is the Lord of man, and that He seeks to establish righteousness and truth in the earth, the more vehemently and savagely he abhorred whatever he saw which 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 the chosen race; when his heart was thoroughly possessed with the Divine Spirit, "*he hated them right sore, even as though they were his enemies*." III\. And can it be then, brethren, that the blessing of our Christian profession consists in this, that we have acquired a patience of whatever hates God and rises up against Him, which David had not? Assuredly our Christian profession then does not mean the following the example of our Saviour Christ, and being like Him? It is something the most opposite of this. For do you discover 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; you hear that He ate and drank with publicans and sinners, whom the religious men of the day considered it a defilement to approach. But do you not hear of His making a scourge of small thongs and driving out of the Temple those who sold and bought 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; it expressed far more thoroughly the spirit of His life. He was engaged in a conflict to blood against evil, in a death-struggle whether it should put out the light of the world, or whether that light should prevail against it. And since He ascended on high He has been carrying on the same death-struggle in His Church and members, a struggle in which He tells us we must all engage, on one side or the other. What means then this notion which we seem to have taken up, that we are better than our forefathers because we hate less strenuously? Does it mean that there is nothing left in the world which deserves to be hated? Does it mean that Christianity or refinement, or civilization or science, or mechanical achievements, or æsthetics, or anything else we reverence, has put an end to pride and malice or cruelty? Does it mean that there are no scandals and abominations in the nation? no fierce party-spirit, no lying, in the Church? Does it mean that men are everywhere worshipping the God of Truth and Love? that they are not worshipping the Evil Spirit of Falsehood and Ill-Will? No one dreams this dream; no one doubts the existence of that which ought not to exist——of that which is contrary to the good of man and the character of God. Our kindness and gentleness have this root. We are used to these things: we suppose they cannot be helped; we think God is indifferent to them. That is to say, we have ceased to believe in a God of Truth and Love; we do not suppose that what is evil is rising up against Him. As for our hating less those who rise up against *us*, or those who dislike our notions, religious, political, or philosophical, I cannot see the evidence of it. We cannot, thanks be to God, indulge our desire for the suppression of the opinions that contradict ours as we once did. Earnest men have fought and bled that we might not have that power, any of us. We are obliged at present to limit ourselves to bitter words, dark insinuations, the destruction of each other's characters, to the undermining of moral freedom in the land. But withdraw for an instant the legal restraints upon our mutual animosities; give any one sect or party the opportunity of indulging to the full its passions against the rest; and it would be seen how much excuse we have for boasting of our charity——even of our toleration. IV\. And that bitterness on behalf of our own notions and dogmas,—that desire to crush whatever and whoever runs counter to them,—can, I believe, only be overcome by a very earnest cultivation of the other temper,—of that which we have denounced in David. Determine to hate that which rises up in you against God,—that first, that chiefly,—and you will hate, along with your indifference, cowardice, meanness, all this conceit of your own poor judgment, this dislike of opposition to it, this unwillingness to have your thoughts probed to the quick. The intense certainty that there is a God of Truth and without iniquity, and that He must mean to sweep all falsehood and all injustice from this earth, will make you desire, above all things, that He should search you and try your ways,—that He should detect whatever in you is yours and not His, and should burn that with unquenchable fire. The acknowledgment of a God who was revealed in Jesus Christ,—a God in whom is light and no darkness at all,—will compel us to desire that no traditions of the past, no conceits of our own minds, may shut Him out from us. The acknowledgment of a God who beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things,—who has been long-suffering with all His creatures and long-suffering with us,—will make us tremble to deal harshly with the struggles and doubts—how much more with the convictions—of our fellow-beings. Believing that God's Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, is the only Guide to Truth, and that He is seeking to guide us in the right way, how we must fear to check His mighty operations upon our own spirit or upon the spirit of any with whom we are in contact! How we must desire that we may be His instruments, not His foes, and therefore that we may partake of His own grace and gentleness! And so with this hatred, deeply and inwardly cherished, will come the true, and not the imaginary charity,—the genuine, not the bastard toleration. To detect the right meaning, the sound faith, the divine inspiration which is latent under confused, rough angry words, directed against ourselves,—even against principles which are dearer to us than ourselves,—will be a duty which we learn at the Cross,—a faculty which only Christ can impart to us. We shall exercise it just because we believe Truth to be all-important, falsehood accursed; just because we love the one and hate the other. We shall remember that God honoured Job,—who complained bitterly and spoke words like the east wind, and was determined that he would know the meaning of the Divine judgments,—more than the three friends who pretended to justify Him, and in fact only showed their want of sympathy with His purposes of mercy and goodness. Whatever is contrary to that mercy and goodness, which are parts of His being, we shall desire to hate more and more,—therefore to bear more and more with all that merely crosses our tastes and inclinations and judgments. Brethren, these are lessons which I think are not quite out of place at the beginning of a general election. In spite of the mingling and confusion of parties amongst us, and the uncertainty about leaders—perhaps about principles—I suspect we shall find excuses enough for denouncing one another, if not for hating one another. To interpose general maxims about goodwill and forbearance at such times is mere idleness; every one accepts them, no one gives heed to them. I would press another exhortation upon you; I would beseech you to give full scope to your hatred. I am sure you will need it. For you will be tempted to do things that are hateful in the sight of God, and that you should do your utmost to make hateful in the sight of men. Those frauds which candidates use to disguise their meaning, to pass themselves off as intending that which they do not intend,—to obtain suffrages from two opposite quarters,—do they not deserve to be hated with a perfect hatred? Is not every slander against any opponent, every encouragement which you give to tongues and pens less scrupulous than your own, part of a hateful system? Is not the trafficking with party-symbols and ambiguous phrases, which may import everything or nothing, hateful? Is not the trafficking with sacred names for low purposes more profane and hateful still? Is not everything which tends to bewilder the consciences, to degrade the moral nature of those whose support you seek, to be hated as an insult to the God of Truth, to the God who seeks truth in His creatures? Do not all these deceitful words and acts go to make up a frightful sum of falsehood, to destroy the land which we pretend that we wish to save? Must not they bring God's curse upon us? Oh! for a more burning rage in us all against that which makes our professions ridiculous, 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, because we have so many hidden falsehoods of our own, let us rejoice while we tremble that God has promised to search us and try us, and see what wicked way there is in us, and 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. [There]{.smallcaps} is another reading of this passage, which modern editors have preferred, and I think with good reason; for τρόπῳ they substitute τόπῳ,—"in every place" for "by all means." The expression in our version may, no doubt, have a good and important sense; but it sounds like a tame addition to the words which have preceded. The other suggests a new thought, which enlarges and completes the prayer. "May the Lord of Peace give you peace at all times and in all places." The Apostle is not satisfied with desiring that it might not be less one year than another; he desires that it might be the same whether his disciples were in Thessalonica, or in Athens, or in Rome, surrounded by friends or enemies, in a city or a desert, in a church or in a prison. Such a petition must needs have a deep and solid ground to rest upon. *The Lord of Peace*, he says, *give you peace*. This he assumes as the very name of [God]{.smallcaps}. A God of War they had all heard of. He was said to have watched over the infancy of the greatest city in the world, to have been the father of its first king. Whithersoever the Roman Eagle had been borne, there were the tokens of his presence. The name Thessalonica testified that he had been on that soil. Nor did the Scriptures, to which the Apostles appealed as witnesses of the true God, reject this title. They too spoke of a Lord of Hosts. They bade every band of Jews remember that He was in the midst of it, to give it strength against enemies ten times as numerous or mighty as itself. Did St. Paul come to insult that old faith of Greeks and Romans? Did he mean to recant that faith in which he had been nourished, and which was embodied in the books that he accounted most sacred? I believe, if he had taken the first course, he would have robbed the Heathen of a treasure, instead of bringing them a treasure; that if he had taken the other, he would have torn out of his own mind the very roots upon which his faith in the Son of God grew. The Greeks had felt that they must ascribe every act of animal, much more of human, courage, every great achievement, every triumph of order and discipline over inorganic force, to some mysterious divine power; their consciences and reason told them so. The faith was flickering; since they had lost their freedom it had almost died out. St. Paul's business was not to extinguish the sparks, but to rekindle them. He believed that this mysterious divine power was a righteous Being, just, and without iniquity, who was warring for the extirpation of evil out of His Universe; who, for that end, made plagues, pestilences, earthquakes His instruments; these, and men also, whom He had formed in His image, whom He had appointed to carry on His government and to execute His chastisements; who were not to shrink from that office, but to believe that He had called them to it; who were to give Him thanks if they fulfilled it rightly. This is the doctrine which is written in sunbeams upon the records of the Old Testament; a doctrine which St. Paul at all events did not suppose to be obsolete. He had opportunities enough for saying so if he did. It was his especial vocation to teach the Gentiles. He would not let the law, ceremonial or moral, stand in the way of the Gospel which he preached. He foresaw clearly that all which was exclusive in the Jewish polity would soon come to nought. Yet he never said, "Our fathers were mistaken when they went out to battle in the name of the Lord; *we* shall be mistaken if we imitate them." He never spoke these words, or any words at all like them, or any from which such an inference could, by any ordinary or legitimate process of reasoning, be deduced. But he did speak *these* words: "*The Lord of Peace*." He knew that the Heathens had never been satisfied with the idea of a God of War, however much it might have possessed them. They felt that the olive was a sacred emblem as well as the laurel. There must be some One from whom it came,—of whom it testified. The quiet homestead, the growth of trees and flowers, the power and art of tillage, must have an origin, as well as the skill and feats of armies. Surely tempests did not witness of unseen power more than a still lake or an evening of clear starlight. All sweet notes and their intricate combinations told of some secret source of harmony. The heart which responded to these sights and sounds demanded a Lord of Peace nigh, and not afar off. Was He a different Being from the other? It was the misery of Polytheism to believe that He must be different. How could such opposite effects proceed from the same Cause? How could both be accounted for, if there were not a number of powers contending among themselves, exciting contentions in Nature and in men? There seemed but one refuge from such a belief,—the philosophical dogma that the Gods could not be affected by human feelings, joys, or sorrows; that theirs must be a nature far removed from the concerns of the world and its sympathies; one of entire quietness, inactivity, self-concentration. The philosopher would have added "*Peace*," but his conscience rebelled against the use of that word. He might not see what Peace meant; but he knew that in its highest form it did and must mean something altogether different from stupid Repose, from indolent Selfishness. It was the blessed privilege of the Jew to be taught in direct words, and by the whole course of his history, that the Lord his God was one Lord, that the God of armies was the same as 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, and plenteous in mercy; *therefore* would He not clear the guilty; *therefore* was all evil, everything unmerciful and oppressive, hateful in His eyes; therefore was He pledged to destroy it. There was no actual or implicit contradiction in His Nature. The aspect of His countenance towards all that degrades the earth which He has made, and defaces His Image in His creature, is one token of that inner mind which would unfold itself more and more perfectly to those who sought for Him, who cried out day by day for wisdom as for hid treasure. The more the holy man meditated upon the fearful judgments which were visiting people who had transgressed the law and broken the Everlasting Covenant, the more did the righteousness and beauty of that Law, the perfect grace of that Covenant, shine forth before his eyes, the more would he put his trust in the Lord, the more certain was he that the Lord of Peace would one day manifest His whole Being, His innermost Nature, to mankind. The vision was yet for an appointed time; it rose gradually upon the eyes of the chosen seed, still more gradually upon the nations of the earth. But it came out fully at length. The Angels' song, "*Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill among men*," was heard by the shepherds as the message of a Prince of Peace. He went forth preaching peace to publicans and sinners. He said, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you," to His own disciples. He gave them the bread and the wine at the Paschal Supper, the witnesses of peace to them and the universe. He met them after the Resurrection with the words, "Peace be with you," and showed them His hand and His side. He sent His Spirit of Peace among them, to bind nations and languages together in one bond of peace. And that bond was the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the perfect Unity, the complete Revelation of the Lord of Peace, the fulfilment of that idea of God which prophets and lawgivers had been unfolding, the reconciliation of all those different, separate names by which heathens had striven to explain the divine operations in Nature, the perplexing testimonies of their own hearts. It is in this name that St. Paul is wont to bless the Churches to which he writes; this is the Lord of Peace to whom he prays that He will Himself give to the Thessalonians peace always and in every place. I\. The words are very emphatic. May He *Himself* give you peace. As if he had said, "I know and am persuaded that no one else can give it you; not I, not all the preachers and doctors in the Universe. Properly speaking, you do not even receive it at second-hand through us. He gives you the thing itself; we present you with the seals and sacraments of it. He opens a direct communication with your hearts; he conveys into them that which we only stand offering to them from without. May He," says the Apostle, "Himself give it you! Be not content to take it from any other. Do not expect it from any other. When you seek it, be sure that He is present to bestow it; so will it become yours." II\. "And be sure also that He *gives* it. You do not purchase it by prayers or faith or good deeds. Your prayers, if they are true prayers, are acts of submission and surrender to Him. The heart is frozen up in self-reliance, self-exaltation. You pray that it may be thawed, that the pores through which His grace would enter you may not be unnaturally stopped. You bring nothing in your prayer except the confession of unworthiness and helplessness." St. Paul's divine teaching anticipated that 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 doctrine is applicable, in a higher and stricter sense, to the relations of man with his Creator. He can but draw nigh to Him or dwell apart from Him: the consequences follow inevitably. God works in him: or he remains 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 a state of perpetual war. III\. *This peace* the Apostle desires for the Thessalonians. Not some image or shadow of peace, but peace itself, in its full meaning. Not a peace which depends upon pacts and bargains among men, but which belongs to the very nature and character and being of God. Not a peace which is produced by the stifling and suppression of activities and energies, but the peace in which all activities and energies are perfected and harmonized. Not a peace which comes from the toleration of what is base or false, but which demands its destruction. Not a peace which begins from without, but a peace which is first wrought in the inner man, and thence comes forth to subdue the world. Not a peace which a man gets for himself by standing aloof from the sorrows and confusions of the world into which he is born, of the men whose nature he shares, choosing a calm retreat and quiet scenery and a regulated atmosphere; but a peace which has never thriven except in those who have suffered with their suffering kind, who have been ready to give up selfish enjoyments, sensual or spiritual, for their sakes, who have abjured all devices to escape from ordained toils and temptations; the peace which was His who bore the sorrows and infirmities and sins of man, who gave up Himself that He might become actually one with them, who thus won for them a participation in the Divine Nature, an inheritance in that peace of God which passeth understanding. IV\. St. Paul could then say boldly, "The Lord give you peace *at all times*." He was living in a time of exceeding restlessness. All about him were wars and rumours of wars. The Jewish commonwealth was breaking to pieces, from the hatreds of its sects, from its mad desire to measure its strength with its Roman masters. St. Paul was the object of the fiercest spite of those fighting sects. They did not abhor each other so much as they abhorred him. And he knew that the end was coming,—that God Himself had pronounced the doom of the city of David; that if he did not witness the fall of that nation, to save which he was willing to be accursed, it would be only because some violent death would take him sooner than it out of the world. In this time, which affected all his disciples as well as himself, which had caused great sufferings to the Thessalonian Church, both from present Jewish persecutions, and from the dim feverish apprehension of some day of the Lord which was near at hand; in this time, he could ask the Lord of Peace to give himself and them peace. He could ask it confidently, nothing doubting that the petition would be heard and answered, nay, that the very tumults in the world and in themselves were intended to awaken it and to accomplish it. He knew that easy and comfortable circumstances do not impart the peace which men want. He knew that the most disastrous may drive them to that centre where it dwells, and where they may possess it. V\. He prayed also, if the reading I have spoken of is the true one, that they might have peace *in every place*. He had some experience of different places, of Greek cities and Jewish, if he had not yet seen Rome, as he purposed to do; and all his experience hitherto had been of strifes, tumults, persecutions. He had come to Thessalonica because he had been thrown into prison at Philippi. He escaped from Thessalonica to Beraea, thence to Athens. In Corinth the continued Jewish opposition was trifling compared with the struggle in his own spirit, which made him despair even of life. At Ephesus he was destined to fight with men who assailed him as the beasts assailed those who were 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 imprisonments awaited him in the capital of the world. And yet he could say, The Lord of Peace give you peace in all places. In the prison he had found it; in that infinite tumult and despair of his own spirit he had found it. When there was nothing to rest upon in what he saw around him,—in what he felt within him,—when he was more battled by his own thoughts and the contradictions in them than by those of Jews or heathen or false brethren,—though he was no Stoic as to these, but felt them in every nerve,—he had learnt that the Lord of Peace was there, sitting above the water-floods, as a King, a Friend, a Father for ever. And this, he was certain, was not because he was an Apostle——because he had had divine revelations,—because he had singular gifts. It was because he was a man, sharing the temptations of men, experiencing in himself the redemption which had been wrought out for men. It was because he was sent to men everywhere with glad tidings of peace. VI\. Brethren, do we not need to hear at this time, in this place, the same message? We shall soon be giving thanks for victories won over men who two years ago were accounted our friends and defenders. We are asking one another, Can anything hinder the nations of our own Continent from drawing their swords against each other? We have enough to remind us that Peace is not a thing to be reckoned upon; that there are powers at work within and without, to take it from us. Our own minds, it may be, are not all of them very peaceful. Passion-week and Easter-week will be a time of contention between parties at home, if not between armies abroad. Does it appear to you strange that this should be so? Do you think that this week should be what in one country it is called, "the still week;" that the Death of our Lord at least should be remembered in silence and calm? God has not ordained this outward quietness, and we cannot create it. Perhaps we should understand the meaning of these days less, if we could make the circumstances in which they occur more apparently suitable. The Passion does not mean rest, but suffering and agony. Through those the Head of the body passed. Will the members of it revere Him more if nothing in their own condition testifies to the need of effort and endurance? The Resurrection means not sleep, but the awaking out of sleep, the return to all the energies of life. Shall we believe in it more if we covet that kind of rest of which the grave is the emblem? VII\. But is not the week that witnesses of the Sacrifice of the Victim one that brings peace, if it finds little? Is not the week that commemorates the completion of the sacrifice one that carries 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, one in whom Peace dwells always, under all conditions, amidst all turmoils. Here, in the agony of the Garden, on the Cross of Calvary, behold Him! See there the Peace which lasts on, not only when it is threatened without, but when it seems to have perished within; when the soul *is troubled even to death*, when it cries out, *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 that He may sustain all creation, glorifying the Son that He may glorify the Father. You want to know whence Peace may come forth to men in all conditions, amidst all turmoils. Again behold the Agony and the Cross. Thence it issues, to meet all that is striving against it in the world and in you. Thence it issues, as the power of Sacrifice, which is stronger than the power of Self; as the power of Love, which is stronger than the power of Hatred; as the power of Life, which is stronger than the power of Death. Thence it comes, as the Peace which can subdue all things to itself, can reconcile all things in itself. The Lord of Peace then *Himself* give you this peace. He has given it you whenever you have won it. We did not recover it in India because we were the best of all people, for we had sins enough to answer for there,—hard and unjust acts by governors and individual men, the very reasons why we lost it. But God gave it us—gave it all the more perfectly, because He did not let it drop upon us like the manna out of heaven, but gave stoutness of heart and wisdom and endurance to our soldiers and citizens, that they might seek for it and obtain it. He Himself will give it, not diplomatists or monarchs, if it should be preserved on the Continent——His Wisdom using or else counteracting theirs. He will give it, even though the wars and fightings in men's hearts should make it needful that the nations should receive it through blood; that swords should punish those who have removed their neighbours' landmarks, and trampled on Freedom and Right. He Himself, and not any intrigues or compromises of statesmen or of schools, will give us Peace in our own land, the reconciliation of that which is good in those who can acknowledge no good but their own, the destruction of that which is contentious and selfish in them all. He alone, and not our opinions, or judgment, or 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 for this Peace,—that which He promises, that which He 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, that we have forfeited it most utterly; because it descends upon us from Him who gave His Son for us, not to reward our love to Him, but that His Love might bring back ours. Let us desire it in all times of our tribulation and of our wealth; when our self-accusations are loudest, and our self-security most dangerous. Let us desire it in every place, that in every place we may be peace-makers, and so may be called the children of Him who is the Great Peacemaker. ::: {.center} END OF VOL. V :::