Septuagesima Sunday
February 20, 1859
“And He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.” —Malachi iii. 3.
The passage: The Lord will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. He will purify the sons of Levi and purge them like gold and silver, so that they may offer the Lord an offering in righteousness.
In pursuing the subject suggested by the Epiphany services, I passed over a topic that this month of February specially recalls. It is the festival once called Candlemas, which the Prayer-book describes as the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, or the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin.
I have no doubt that many, noticing this service, said in their hearts if not aloud, “Here is a relic of a bygone time! If we ever complete the Reformation begun three centuries ago, this is one of the superstitions we shall get rid of.” Before I turn to my text, let me say a few words on that point.
The Reformers of the sixteenth century said: “Men have been defrauded of the Gospel, and a mere law has been put in its place. The Law shows us our evil; the Gospel shows how God frees us from it. By suppressing the Gospel, our priests were forced to soften and reduce the Law. They granted indulgences for evils the Law pronounces accursed, because they would not tell men that the God who sent His Law to condemn us for sin also sent His Son to save us from our sins. They have kept us from being righteous and doing righteousness, because they would not declare that Christ had fulfilled all righteousness and invited us by faith to put on His.”
These were the principles on which whatever was best and truest in the Reformation rested, and which have won it the sympathy of its warmest friends. So it was the Reformers’ duty to give sure testimony that a Gospel had really come and that Christ had really fulfilled the law. The evil to be corrected was that men denied this in practice, if not in words. They tried to win God’s forgiveness by acts and services of their own, because they did not heartily believe that one complete sacrifice had been offered and accepted. They invented purifications of their own, because they did not believe that one great Purifier had appeared and been presented to His Father in the substance of our flesh.
So our Reformers, I conceive, did not think they were conceding anything to the errors they wanted to expel when they taught men, in their ordinary united devotions, to remember what had been done for the world. They thought they were asserting their own principle in its strongest form. If they claimed an old service for this purpose, so much the better, since it showed their truth was no invention of theirs but was implied in the earliest Christian devotion. They did not suppose it made men superstitious to fix in their memories the facts whose forgetfulness was the cause of their superstition, or that it burdened consciences to teach them what the Lord of All had done to make them pure and free. Every memorial feast God commanded the Jews to keep recorded a deliverance wrought for them and a relation to Him established. The Bible tells us that when they grew careless of these feasts they ceased to believe in their Deliverer and became slaves of idols; having forgotten the relation He had revealed, they tried to create one by schemes of their own. The Reformers believed the Bible, and did not think its warnings obsolete. The method that kept the Jews mindful of their history might keep Christians from confusing the facts of the New Testament with the legends built on them. The method that reminded the Jews that the great King who had brought them from darkness to light, and from subjection to their own natures into covenant with Him, was in their midst, might assure Christians that the living God is in the midst of them, that He has set up His Son’s kingdom among them, taken them into covenant, and redeemed them as His children.
So they thought. And we are told that, to show gratitude for the blessings the Reformers gave us, to secure their continuance and obtain more like them, and to prove our reverence for the Bible, our duty and wisdom is to discard the memorials of Christ’s acts and choose a way altogether different from the Bible’s. The hope is that we shall thereby stand fast in our liberty. I fear we shall instead hasten our return to every confused and slavish notion, every dark superstition that the unregenerate heart naturally breeds. Some will take such prophecies for idle tales. They have got their notion of the Reformation from clubs and platforms, and fancy they can rid themselves of Popery and every bad doctrine by shouts and curses. They do not know that Popery, Infidelity and every form of evil lie close to their own hearts, ready to spring out and take possession just when they feel most secure. They do not consider how the Evil Spirit exults in all the clamour that turns men from knowing themselves and knowing God. Nor do they consider that the very principles of the Reformation, of which they boast, may be perishing in our hearts while we direct all our zeal against those who attack them in words. The passage I have chosen, part of the Epistle for the Festival of Purification, may explain what I mean.
It is from the Prophet Malachi, and the whole passage reads: “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before Me, even the Messenger of the Covenant whom you delight in. Behold, He shall come, says the Lord of Hosts. But who can abide the day of His coming, and who can stand when He appears? He is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap. He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and shall purify the sons of Levi and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer the Lord an offering in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord, as in the days of old. And I will come near to you in judgment; I will be a swift witness against sorcerers, adulterers, false swearers, those who oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, those who turn aside the stranger from his right, and those who do not fear Me, says the Lord of Hosts.”
I have no doubt the Reformers were glad that these stern sentences were read on a day set apart to commemorate the Virgin. They knew how much fantastic, sentimental devotion clung to her person, and how she was invoked as a protectress from God’s justice and wrath. So it was good to say plainly: “No such protectress exists for men or women, nor ever has, thanks be to Him, nor ever shall. The Messenger of His Covenant, the real Lord of Man, comes not to hide us from His Father but to show us what His Father is, what His wrath is, what His justice is. For that reason He is to be delighted in. We should not delight in Him if He cloaked anyone’s sin or lightened its punishment. We may delight in Him because He is like a refiner’s fire, determined to burn up dross and to purify us from it. What He does perfectly, all lesser messengers, His mother and all others, must do in their small measure. If they do not declare God’s wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, and do not proclaim Him as Refiner and Purifier, they are not fulfilling Christ’s work. They have come on another errand, they thwart His purposes, and they must be messengers from some other father than His. For this was true in the days of the Prophets of the One who dwells between the Cherubim, whose Name is Holy. It continued true when He came, it is true now that He has ascended, and it will be true for ever. God’s mind has not changed and cannot change. It was, is and shall be a mind of burning hostility to all injustice, oppression, wrongdoing and foulness in all kinds of people, high and low. It was, is and shall be a mind that acts on all people everywhere to purify and set them right. To publish this character, will and work of God by words, acts and sufferings was the business of all brave and true men of old. To manifest it fully and carry it out was the purpose of the Incarnation, words, acts and sufferings of the Only-begotten Son. Since He has said, ‘It is finished,’ since He has accomplished the task of showing what God is, and lives on high and has sent His Spirit so that God’s purposes of destroying evil and purifying men from it may not be frustrated, He must put down the pretensions of all saints, living or departed, to restrain His arm. That is the same as restraining His grace and blocking His loving will toward the human race. Any saint who asks that Christ not be a swift witness against adulterers, false swearers and those who oppress the hireling asks a curse on the world. Every saint, on earth or elsewhere, who prays that Christ would not sit as a refiner to purge evil from men’s hearts prays, ‘Thy will be not done in earth as it is in heaven.’ Their business, and that of all God’s ministers on earth, is to bear witness to His infinitely loving will, to desire that it may be done on earth as in heaven, and that everything obstructing it, however seemly or religious, be swept out of the universe.”
The Reformers, taking Malachi’s words in this sense, must have been struck by their allusion to the Jewish priests: “He shall purify the SONS of Levi; He shall purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.” They would have seen, as many other passages in the Prophets told them, that there was special reason to fear that the priests, though God’s own appointed servants, were not offering in righteousness but in unrighteousness, in a way that made the people unrighteous. Where did the danger come from? Their own times told them. They saw priests offering sacrifices to complete the imperfect sacrifice Christ had made on the Cross. They saw that these had an immoral effect on the people, holding out the hope that through the powerful intercession of certain men and spirits above, God might overlook sins or find them less hateful. This, they perceived, was the vile, perverted notion of sacrifice that had debased Pagans and infected Jews after idolatry’s outward symbols had lost their attraction. So they felt, as we know they did strongly, that the corruptions of the laity could be traced largely to the corruptions of the priesthood. A promise that these corruptions would be eradicated and Sacrifice restored to its true, righteous meaning was therefore a promise of health to all society. He who purified the sons of Levi in their inner lives and convictions would be a swift witness against the adulterer, the false swearer and the oppressor of the hireling, for He would take away what comforted them in their wrongdoing. He would make Sacrifice again the mightiest testimony for His loving will and against the self-will of men.
The great blessing of the Reformation time was that old words, which had lain dead as if they belonged to bygone ages, and which generations of commentators had reduced to topics of dispute in which the people had no share, started forth full armed, as terrible as when they first came from the hearts and lips of inspired men. Everything the Reformers saw around them proclaimed these to be the words of Him who lives and reigns, the same yesterday, today and for ever. If we are to complete the Reformation, and keep what fruits of it we still have, the Bible must again appear to us in that form. We shall then be little disposed to patronize it or argue for it, or to suppose it needs our good word. It will tell us, priests and laymen alike, what it is, by exposing our own evils and by promising that those evils shall not defeat God’s purposes of good for our land and for mankind. We shall think less of the Book than of Him who speaks out of it, speaking to us as He spoke to Jews in Malachi’s day and to Germans and Englishmen in Luther’s. “I am the Lord, the righteous Lord; that is my name” will once more be a significant sound, passing sentence on our unrighteous and unloving deeds, not supplying instruments for displaying our unrighteousness or cloaks for our hypocrisy. We shall not then dare to talk much of our religion. We shall feel that we are under the eye of a living Person, who looks through our religion to see what it is good for, who hates robbery for burnt offering, and who is no respecter of persons.
Surely, then, Malachi’s words about the Purifier will tell us something that we, as much as the Jews and the men of the Middle Ages, are apt to forget. The old Prophet says to us: “Beware, priests and laymen, lest you fancy that punishment for your sins is, or can be, the thing you are most to dread or make others dread. Beware lest you pervert the idea of intercession, by men on earth or saints in heaven, into an intercession that any sin should be smothered or tolerated in anyone. Beware lest you endorse all the errors of former days by treating the Sacrifice of the Son of God, the one effectual Sacrifice and ground of all others, as if it were not the perfect fulfilment of the Father’s will but in some sense a victory over it. Above all, beware lest you reject the gracious promises made to you and your land because you misunderstand your own deep necessities. God, the hater of evil, promises to find out your evil and purge you from it.
“Do you think it would be a greater thing to have your evil acts overlooked than to be sifted and probed so that you may be set right? Have you not found that evil is your curse, that to be wrong is the horrible thing, not being detected or suffering some affliction for it? If you have, you will hail this as the most characteristic exercise of divine power. And divine it must be, for how can anyone not divine reach all the intents and purposes of your will? Who but the all-seeing One can say to a human being, ‘I will sit and purify thee’? Who but the All-loving would care to? This strange penetrating power, going down below anything your consciousness has reached, carries a pledge that it will be effectual, and that no outside hindrance will keep a new and nobler form from emerging from the chrysalis in which it was buried. And will not the same processes that purify you be available to purify your nation? Does not He who sits as refiner of the one desire to be refiner of the other? He promised to purify the sons of Levi not for their sake only but as representing the sanctity and unity of the land. They were to be purified so as to be fit to present the sacrifices that signified the people’s dedication to God. Is it otherwise with you? Are you not to tell your people that in every national judgment and every individual trial the Refiner is sitting to destroy the dross and bring out the pure ore?”
It seems to me, my brethren, that such lessons taken home to all our hearts might help the cause of Reformation, in the practical sense as well as the technical and historical one, more than any alteration of the Prayer-book. I do not wish to separate the two senses; I believe that rightly understood they are identical, and that we cannot better promote Reformation now than by maintaining and fulfilling the work begun three centuries ago. Only let us consider what that work is. I have not denied that it involved a sifting of the minds and hearts of the Clergy as well as the Laity, of the Clergy more than the Laity, or that a more rigorous sifting is to be expected, even desired, in our day. The words we repeat in our daily prayers will surely be put to the same test as our other words and acts. But I cannot help thinking that they will pass through it, and that the levity and insincerity with which we have used them will be the chaff and dross consumed. These we must confess as the main causes of any new development of Popery or Infidelity. The service that prompted these remarks gives an example, and I wish to notice it before I conclude, since it may show the true way of resisting any retrogression and of finishing what the Reformers left undone.
That the Virgin was by her very birth pure from all taint of human corruption is, as we know, the latest proclamation of the authority that calls itself infallible. It is easy for Romanists to protest against turning a sect opinion into a law of the Church and condemning illustrious doctors and saints. It is easy for Protestants to condemn it on other, more general theological grounds. But what makes it favoured among the people? What makes it possible for a Pope in our time to do what his predecessors never ventured? I think it will be found that beneath this exaltation of one human creature above all others lies a witness that humanity itself has been purified and regenerated by union with the Godhead. The Reformers did not proclaim that truth, or proclaimed it very weakly. They were so occupied with the redemption of individuals from the actual evils of the Adam nature that they overlooked the redemption wrought for the race, and the glory claimed for it by Christ’s resurrection and Ascension. It is not safe for us to forget what they forgot. The symbolical worship of Humanity in the person of the Virgin has increased and is increasing; the actual worship of a Goddess of Humanity is ready to unfold from it, and has in part done so already. No denunciation of either worship, and no ridicule, has checked its progress or, I believe, will. Instead, proclaim positively that Humanity has no standing-ground of its own but has one in the Son of God, that in Him it is pure and holy, without spot or wrinkle, and that His Spirit is given so that we may be purged of our inhuman selfishness and enter our common inheritance. See whether this will not undermine Mariolatry in minds that do not prefer a creature to the Creator. See whether it will not show those who have fled from a cold divinity to what they take for a sympathizing humanity that the Son of Man is what no abstraction can be, and that He is the way to the all-loving Father.
Such a testimony lies, I believe, in this old festival of Purification. We need to draw it out and present it to spirits hungering and thirsting for better food than ancient or modern superstitions can give, yet who will not give those up until they have a real substitute. But are we fit to distribute this bread of life? Have we not already proved we are unfit? We might say so and fold our hands in despair, if it were not written, “He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.”