Practice and Speculation

“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.

The passage: Peter tells his readers to prepare their minds for action, to keep sober, and to hope fully for the grace that will be brought to them when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, they must not shape themselves by the desires they followed in their ignorance. As the One who called them is holy, they must be holy in all their conduct, because it is written: “Be holy, for I am holy.”

I have chosen these verses as a fitting conclusion to the subject of these Epiphany weeks. I have been trying to find out what the Revelation of Jesus Christ is, which the New Testament writers mention so constantly. Is it, as the word suggests, the actual unveiling of a Person to the conscience, heart and reason of human beings? Is it, as the Church seems to say, the unveiling of God’s character and nature to a creature made to know Him? Or is it the announcement of certain opinions, maxims and rules of life to a creature made not to know Him, who, because of that condition, must accept whatever he can guess on probable evidence to be divine? This is nearly the most important question men can occupy themselves with. I have touched only lightly on the metaphysical arguments for the last view, since they involve subtleties hearers of sermons cannot be expected to follow, and are likely to judge by their wishes rather than their convictions. I have only suggested asking whether those arguments, if truly stated, do not prove all knowledge impossible, earthly as well as heavenly. My business has been to show that the Bible solemnly rejects the maxim put forward in its defence. The holy men and prophets of the Old Testament reject it in all their expectations, and so does every work and parable of Christ and every discourse of the Apostles.

One justification of that doctrine I have hinted at but not fully discussed. It is said that God wants practice, not speculation; that His Word sets before men objects of fear and hope and tells them what kind of men He wants them to be, rather than tempting them into endless mazes of doubt about what He is. I heartily agree with all of this, and I want you to see how it bears on the controversy, for it bears on it directly. We might have gathered how from today’s Epistle. But that Epistle is from St. John, and some say that those who revere John show fatal symptoms of the disease called Mysticism. So I take my text from St. Peter, whom everyone admits to be the most practical and least speculative of teachers. In this passage he sets out the hopes and fears he wants his disciples to keep in mind and the maxims to guide them in the fight of life.

I. You will see at once that the expectation Peter speaks of is the expectation of the appearing, manifestation or unveiling of Jesus Christ. It sustained the first Christians, and all the Apostles, none more than St. Paul, encouraged it by word and example. I have often spoken of the widely held opinion today that this hope was disappointed: that what they thought close at hand was put off to an immense distance, and that their longings have not been fulfilled even yet. I have often said that if this were so, their whole message and the lives that illustrated it would seem to me utterly bewildering. This hope was the staff of their being; if it was false, the acts and thoughts it inspired and shaped must have been false too. I could not expect such statements to move those who think the Apostles were generally deluded. I wanted them weighed by those who think the Apostles heralded a truth as needful for this age as for theirs.

Our inquiry into the word Revelation is closely connected with this. Suppose it always means, whatever time it refers to, the removal of a veil that had hidden the eternal God from men. Suppose such veils had been coming off since men were created. Suppose man’s sin, which seemed to cut him off from God, had become a means of discovering God’s nature and character through His warfare with it and forgiveness of it. Suppose holy men could regard every step in Jewish history, or any history, only as the instrument of such a discovery, a showing of something of God’s power and righteousness. Suppose their one desire was for the complete tearing away of what had hidden from all nations the light in which they were meant to walk and in which alone they could see themselves and each other. Suppose the Son of Man, while on earth, declared the Kingdom of God by all His acts, discourses and parables, and manifested the Father. Suppose that, having overcome the sharpness of death, He opened the Kingdom and disclosed the Father’s inner mind to all who received Him as the well-beloved Son. Suppose this unveiling was exactly what the Apostles were appointed to preach, and did preach, to a world that contradicted and ridiculed them. Suppose the world’s spectacle made their message seem ridiculous even to themselves, so that keeping faith that it was not a dream, while giving up the traditions of childhood, old friendships, all that belonged to life, and life itself, was often unspeakably hard, and would have been impossible unless sharing God’s nature were the only refuge from the curse and plague of their own. What encouragement could they then offer but this? “There will certainly be a revelation of the Son of Man and Son of God to the universe. It will come whether we look for it or not. It will be attested by the doom on our own holy city and temple, which our Lord spoke of and called a revelation or appearing of the Son of Man. But if you look for it, brace your spirits to expect it, and resist whatever dulls that expectation, this unveiling will satisfy all your longings and those of all past ages. It will do so because it is not for you alone but for the world; because it will be as the lightning, which lighteneth from one part of heaven, and shineth even to the other.” You can see how consistent this was with all their other language, and how little it depended on any ignorance of times and seasons or of the exact change coming in the outward world. If what they expected were not a full unveiling of the Eternal Mind, the same yesterday, today and for ever, points of chronology would have mattered enormously to them, and a mistake about them would have been fatal. If they expected something less than the full manifestation of Him whom all things of time and sense testify to but about whom no conclusion can be drawn from them, their notion of those things would have set the measure of their hope. As it was, the invisible things were no more limited by the narrowness of their intellects than the view of sea and sky is limited by the size of the eye. Faith, not in notions or communications about God but in God Himself, made them heirs of His righteousness, able to enter into His infinite love and lose themselves in it.

II. So the practical exhortation, “Gird up the loins of your mind, be sober,” had its proper ground in this hope. By it the exhortation became an actual stimulus and power for work instead of a mere form of words. Only the spirit can hold such a hope, and Peter’s readers could hold it only so far as they lived in the spirit. So they must keep “girding” themselves to the conviction that they were spirits, that Christ had claimed them as spirits, and that by His grace they could have all a spirit’s rights. They must assure themselves daily that the Spirit worked with their spirits, so that they would not sink, as they always tended to, under low, wandering, fleshly impulses. Do you think such an expectation was likely to intoxicate them with a sense of their own importance? Peter thought it the one thing that could keep them sober. It was sober in the commonest sense, restraining them from indulgences that make the senses masters. It was sober also in lifting them above the fumes of conceit and vanity. A man who is always looking beyond and above himself, longing for the revelation of a Goodness and Truth not in himself, is fleeing conceit and vanity and treating them as torments and curses. Himself is his prison, and Christ has come to set him free. Until he has escaped it altogether and entered the glorious liberty of the sons of God, freedom from selfish objects, aspirations and limits, he cannot be satisfied. No one knew this better than the Apostle. For him, fisherman as he was, the hardest thing had been not to think himself above his Master and Lord and not to trust his own power to go to prison and death. No doubt it was still a battle, and he looked for victory by exercising the same hope he urged on his fellow-Christians. Had he held any different expectation from theirs, any dream of a private or special reward, such as he had cherished when our Lord was on earth, he would soon have lost all he had learnt from the Cross and the Resurrection.

III. This is the next point I would have you notice. The Apostle is addressing a society of men, and he sets the same hope before all of them. He makes no distinction of characters and no attempt to find out which were living sinfully and which well. Why? Because the hope was itself the great test of what they were, and itself the great means of raising those who would be raised. The raising would consist in casting away partial and selfish ambitions for a common ambition, for an object all could share. This showed that the Church is a communion of spirits, not of mere creatures of flesh and blood, and that they attained the unity of a Church just so far as they pursued a spiritual object. Here, then, is the Apostle’s way of educating men: by high rewards of glory, immortality and eternal life, to gird up their loins and be sober. Here is his way of terrifying them with future damnation. What damnation could be greater than to lose that glory, immortality and eternal life, to be left without the knowledge of God?

IV. But this glimpse of his method does not show us how practical it was, or the principle it rests on. We must turn to the next passage: “As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to your former lusts in your ignorance; but as He which called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation.” He refers to a former state of mind into which they might relapse without the strenuous effort, the girding of the mind, the sobriety and the hope to the end he had urged. He says that state came from their ignorance. I will not assume what that ignorance was; I will turn to passages that may explain it. The first is Ephesians iv. 17-18: “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” I think there can be no doubt about this. The Apostle who told the Athenians that they lived, moved and had their being in God means by “alienation from the life of God” an unnatural separation from the One they should have been united to. By “blindness of heart” he means the loss of a vision they were created to enjoy. If so, what ignorance can he have meant but ignorance of God? To what other cause than the absence of actual knowledge of what God is, His nature and character, is the vanity of mind and moral evil of the heathen traced?

Perhaps, though, a passage from the Apostle of the Gentiles may not suffice to illustrate one from the Apostle of the Circumcision. So take the opening of Peter’s own second epistle: “Simon Peter, a servant and an Apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ: grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord, according as His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that hath called us to glory and virtue: whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the Divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” Twice in this short passage the knowledge of God is assumed to be the ground of all good to man. Grace and peace come from it; whatever belongs to life and godliness, whatever leads to glory and virtue, comes through it. Nor is this a mere phrase open to any interpretation. Peter gives his own: knowledge of God is what enables us to become “partakers of the divine Nature.” If there is no way of rising out of our nature into the pure and perfect Nature, he implies we have not received what is necessary to life and godliness, and the Gospel does not tell us how to escape the corruption that is in the world through lust.

I need hardly say that had I followed my quotation from St. Paul by examining that Epistle or any other of his, I would have found language exactly matching this. To put on Christ, to put on the new Man, to be clothed with the righteousness of God, are not only expressions that recur constantly in his writings. They are the expressions of his inmost mind, they come out in the midst of his most earnest practical exhortations, and they determine the character of his ethics. But I took that sentence only to make the purpose of my text clearer, so I leave this and speak of the word “called,” which occurs in both passages of Peter: in our text, “As He that hath called you is holy,” and in the second Epistle, “Him that hath called us to glory and virtue.” The idea of a Calling is always present to the Apostle’s mind; otherwise how could he have entered so thoroughly into the meaning of his nation’s existence? But what kept the belief in a calling from being the hard, exclusive belief to him that it was to his countrymen? This did. He gave God’s calling a much fuller and deeper meaning than they did. He supposed that a spiritual Being was in very deed calling the spirits of men to behold His image and share His Nature. It was no formal election of a set of heaven’s favourites to earn rewards from which the rest of the world was shut out. It was the election of a people to know what are the rights of men, so that they might witness to all men of their rights. It was the election of a people to testify that God Himself is leading His creatures out of darkness into light, out of vague notions of what is right and holy to the knowledge, and so the possession, of His righteousness and holiness.

V. Because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am holy. Here is the unchanging morality of the Bible. Moses utters it and Peter repeats it. Nothing in between has affected it in the least; everything has brought out its meaning and power more fully. The protecting care and faithfulness of the unseen God were unveiled to Abraham, and he became faithful in the care of his family and flock. Joseph was given a vision of God’s foresight, and he could teach Pharaoh to foresee. The I am, the Absolutely Righteous One, the guard of Law and Order, unveiled Himself to Moses, that name sustaining, not swallowing up, the old name of the Friend of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; so Moses could be the just Lawgiver and the patient guide of the people. A divine King who cares for men and feels with them, yet punishes their transgressions, was discovered to David, and so he became a king after God’s own heart. Every prophet confessed God’s word speaking in his heart, and so was able to speak and not be dumb. All the prophets felt that God was caring for the whole nation and suffering for its sins, so they could feel themselves parts of the nation and suffer for its sins. All felt that God had promised to bring all nations into His family, so they could long for Him to make Himself known to all. Just so far as they grasped God’s nature and shared it, they showed the gentleness, purity and truth that men’s consciences recognize as truly human. When the Apostles saw in Jesus of Nazareth the One Moses and the Prophets wrote of, they knew this must be so, and why. They could no longer doubt that all practical goodness in men corresponds to a goodness in God and comes from it, because they owned the Son of Man as the perfect concentration of that goodness. They were sure He had united His divine nature to the human so that the human might share the divine. They could protest solemnly against every attempt to build a righteousness of their own by keeping the law or by any other means, as hopeless and immoral. They could preach the Righteousness of God shown to all men in Christ, so that men might believe in it with their spirits, know it, be conformed to it, and let the light kindled in them shine out to the world.

I have tried to show that the New Testament writers connect practical morality, whether as resistance to evil or as being and doing good, with the actual Revelation and actual knowledge of God. A less agreeable task remains. I must put it to your consciences and my own whether our morality has been speculative rather than practical. Have we been full of vague, restless doubts about the ends we should set ourselves, our relations with other men, and our standard of character and duty, just because we have not believed, or believed too weakly, that God has revealed His holy nature to us and that we may share it; that He has taken knowledge of us so that we may take knowledge of Him?

Brethren, I cannot help seeing that hope and expectation of anything to come is very weak among us all. There is a dread of some evil threatening the world or ourselves. In some minds it is dread of anarchy and infidelity; in others, dread that God will visit them for their particular sins when they leave the world. But I cannot find that the first dread checks infidelity at all. Nor can I find that the second is effective against any great temptation, much less against the daily temptations to harshness, uncharitableness and injustice. Least of all does either dread bind us more closely as members of a Nation or a Church. They isolate us from each other. They make us afraid that everyone we meet may rob us of a promise we hold very loosely, and they make us suspect that dealing with our fellow-men on earth may lessen our chances of heaven. So it becomes a calculation of chances, and men reckon what it is safe to keep or worth giving up to gain a future good or avoid a future misery. As that good and misery are so indefinite, it generally ends in our taking what lies before us, not expecting much enjoyment from it but ready to bear it, since nothing better has been provided.

No man is always in this state of mind. Properly it is not a state but an oscillation, which while it lasts may leave us credulous or sceptical, impatient of everything, or eager to place ourselves under absolute authority. And there are moments, I am certain, when quite different thoughts visit even the man most under its influence. There come dim recollections of being told we are children of God, or, if we are too familiar with those words, a suspicion that they may have a meaning, for ourselves and for the multitudes we are trying to distinguish ourselves from. With them come stranger, more mystical words of an Apostle: “If children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” What can that mean? Suppose it meant that even we are created to share the Righteousness, Love and Truth of God. Suppose we have no righteousness, love or truth of our own that could entitle us to any reward, but these are His own rewards, offered without money or price, which we may claim even here and enter on as our full inheritance hereafter. What a difference it would make to our moral state! What a hope would be kindled in us, a hope that does not make ashamed, which we could boldly set before every human being! How little we should care to convict men of infidelity, and with what shame and sorrow we should confess our own! We would say to all: a message has been brought to us that none of us has believed, or has believed only in a beggarly way. Is it not the message that meets your questionings and longings as well as ours? Is it not what you have cried for in lonely, sad hours? If so, let us begin to hope together. You have the same right as I have. There is no difference between us, except that I have offended more against God by professing to hold what I have not held and repeating words without giving them their natural force. But now let us forget the things behind. You dislike our pride and self-glorification; encourage us to hate them, for they keep us from the glory and virtue that are for you as well as us, through the knowledge of the God who has called us and is calling us to be like Him.

Here too would be the remedy for the uneasy thoughts about their lot in the world to come that haunt so many gentle and ungentle minds, which often lead them to neglect plain duties and aggravate the very sins that cause the thoughts. What would they wish to have, in this world or any other? Is it not righteousness, love and truth? Is it not the lack of these they feel so bitterly? Yes, surely, and they feel it because they seek these things in themselves and not in God, in whom alone they dwell. They dread Him as one who requires these things of them, instead of trusting Him as the Righteous, the True and the Loving, who invites us to know Him and to possess His own infinite treasures.

Brethren, because this hope seems to me the one escape from the evils around us, from the lusts of an evil nature and the restless speculations of our intellect, I have argued so earnestly against those who would take it from us. I do not for a moment say that this is their intention. I know that what men deny with their lips they may hold in their heart of hearts. I am quite sure that some who, speaking as logicians, seem to tell us that the love of God shown at the Cross is not really the same love that is to dwell in our hearts, and that the words describing its nature are merely accommodations to our conceptions, may hold that love far more firmly than I do and show far better fruits of it in their lives. We should also remember that logicians, as such, deal with the individual soul, which, as St. Paul tells the Corinthians, is subject to conditions and limits that make knowledge of spiritual things impossible. Schoolmen may naturally think it their business to investigate those conditions. We would have no cause to complain if they did not intrude into another region by denying the Spirit of man within us that the same Apostle speaks of. That Spirit acknowledges no such fetters, claims fellowship with the Eternal, and is never satisfied until the Spirit of God has called it out to know the truth that alone can make it free. The worn-out student of the poet’s legend became conscious of such a human spirit when he left his books of Jurisprudence, Medicine and Theology, went out into the spring air and heard the children singing their Easter song of the risen Christ. Then he could say, “Here I am a man, here I dare to be one.” The legend goes on to say that he committed that human spirit to the guidance of an evil, mocking spirit and fell into guilt and despair. But we are not to suppress, because of that terrible possibility, which each of us may at times have felt as a possibility for himself, the lesson that the Apostle of the Gentiles and the Apostle of the Circumcision teach together. They were alive to the danger of men acquiring a devilish nature, as Peter’s second Epistle shows, and for that very reason were more earnest to tell men they were meant to share the divine Nature. They felt that since Christ’s appearing it was impossible to hide either the glory or the peril of humanity, and that to awaken men to the one we must speak of the other. There is a middle region we may pass through but cannot dwell in. It is a region of clouds, with none of the brightness of Heaven or the firmness of earth. In it all is speculation and there is no practice. It may be a region of dry logical formulas, or of emotions, sensations and individual feelings. But we are called to leave it by the actual sorrows and miseries we witness; by the sense that we are kin to the lowest and worst as well as to the noble of our race; by the voices of friends who learnt on earth that there must be an actual Kingdom of heaven and who beckon us to the home they, we trust, have found; and by the voice of God Himself bidding us eat the flesh of His Son and drink His blood, given for the life of the world. The Church says that this eternal life stands in the knowledge of God. When we partake of the sacrifice of Christ, we partake of the mind of God. To know Him is, in the Apostle’s words, to know the love that passes knowledge. Do not think that those who seek that knowledge, and who believe the Lord’s Supper is the pledge that all men need it and that it is offered to all, will have less awe and trembling in entering God’s presence than those who stand afar off and think they have no capacity for such a gift. Love is far more awful than power. The beloved Disciple, who spoke most of knowing God and dwelling in God, fell at the feet of the High-Priest of the Universe as one dead when He was actually revealed to him. Those who most share St. Paul’s prayer, for others and themselves, that they may comprehend with all Saints the height, length, breadth and depth of the Divine mystery, are most sure to exclaim with him, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His councillor? Or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things; to whom be glory for ever. Amen.”