Fourth Sunday in Lent
April 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 v. 18.
The passage: Just as one offence brought condemnation on all men, so one act of righteousness brought the free gift on all men, a justification that gives life.
A few years ago, political writers widely held that self-interest is the motive behind everything people do, and that government exists to make individuals’ self-interest serve the general interest. The doctrine had much to recommend it, quite apart from the able men who pressed it and applied it to problems in morals, economics, and law. Plain facts showed private interests clashing with the public good. Much had been said about virtue and patriotism, with little result. Was this not a more practical doctrine than any that credited men with better feelings? Was it not safer to assume that each will get what he can at his neighbour’s expense, and to run the social machine on that assumption?
As you know, there has lately been a strong reaction against this system. It is thought to ignore important principles in human beings, which the statesman and the ordinary man of the world ought to reckon with. It is suspected that society itself may rest on principles that cannot be explained as one person’s or class’s selfishness triumphing over the majority, or as a combined effort to defeat that selfishness and set up a wider one. Other facts have forced themselves on us besides those that won the scheme its acceptance. Politicians now seem to hesitate between the two views, unsure which is right and adopting opposite maxims in turn, perhaps to the confusion of their actual morality.
Men busy with the outward business of the world seldom trouble themselves about what goes on in the chambers of the heart, and those who live chiefly in those chambers are equally scornful of common affairs. Yet movements in the two spheres generally correspond and strongly affect each other. For all the plausible arguments of those who built political science on self-interest, I do not believe it would have taken hold of public opinion as it did if opinion had not already been turned that way by quite different influences. Nor do I believe the rebellion against it would have been so strong in politics if it had not begun elsewhere.
In the last age, clergymen and others delivered well-composed, sometimes able discourses on the beauty of virtue and the ugliness of vice. Virtue was shown to agree with man’s true nature, and vice to involve endless discord and contradiction. These discourses did not stir men’s hearts. They were heard with drowsy respect, as the sort of thing that ought to be said in pulpits, and perhaps true. Very different words were addressed by other speakers to vagabonds and criminals whom society had tried in vain to reclaim. These people were roused to feel that they had not merely done sinful acts but were sinful men. They were told they could become new men, and that God Himself would make them so. Those words carried a power the others lacked. They reached respectable people who had committed no overt act against the peace of society and believed themselves virtuous. Some of them began to suspect that what was true of the outcasts was true of them: they might have done few evil acts, but they were evil. At the root of their being was something that resisted God’s Law and was out of harmony with His Nature. They needed reformation; they must become new creatures.
Such language startled the easy and self-satisfied of that generation. It also startled some humble and sincere people, who were used to a different vocabulary, could not change it, could not think all the teaching they had heard worthless, and suspected something wrong in the new. There was excuse enough in the extravagances of some of the best of the new teaching’s hearers, and the hypocrisy of the worst, for the ridicule of the one class and the fears of the other. But an inward belief survives such trials, and soon shows how weak are the disputers and wits who oppose it, and even the good and earnest. Those who held it were testifying to what they knew, whether or not they could put it into words. They were certain they were not deceiving themselves about their main point. The world could laugh at them but could not refute them, and so, as always happens, the world struck its colours and submitted. Let us see how this submission came about and what has come of it.
I. Those who had found the secret of the evil in themselves, and found that it was common, shared by men utterly unlike them in outward circumstances, proclaimed human depravity as the starting-point of practical life and the fundamental truth from which others must be derived. This seemed a sound generalization from undoubted facts, and they were sure they had read it in the Bible. Is it not written there that God “concluded all under sin”; that the Jew who had the Law and kept its letter was no less evil than the Gentile who had only his conscience; that St. Paul, blameless in the righteousness of the Law, was yet the chief of sinners? But they found something better in the Bible than these announcements: the message of a Redemption. They read of a Saviour who had justified them by His Death and Resurrection, perfectly Righteous, in whose Righteousness they might trust and rise to newness of life. They embraced these tidings heartily. On them they felt they could stand in the hour of death and the Day of Judgment, and holding them fast they could become actually righteous, love God and their brethren, and do right and manly deeds. They were glad for others to hear them, and pressed them, in season and out of season, even on people little able to feel their force, because, as they said, souls were at stake and no one could know whom God might please to convert and save.
II. But these tidings, however widely they had to be proclaimed, concerned a small minority. These people were not to boast of their privilege, and were to ascribe it wholly to God’s undeserved grace, but they had to regard themselves as exceptions to a rule. The rule was that man is a fallen creature. He might become something else, but he was a sinner. Everything he did or thought referred to that primary postulate, and he could do nothing else until he had admitted it in its full length and breadth.
Those excellent people, who reached their sense of evil through bitter conflicts, would be surprised to see how fully this assertion has been accepted in our day. It has become an orthodox shibboleth, recognized as the fundamental dogma of the Bible even by those who study it least and care least about its contents. The confession of universal depravity, denounced as fanatical in the eighteenth century, is enforced by the public opinion of the nineteenth. Philosophers may protest on behalf of human nature, but they suppose that protest is also against Scripture. And that is not all. The triumph of these once-despised convictions has reached regions it could never have hoped to enter. The political doctrine of universal selfishness, the notion that laws and government should assume fraud, never honesty, in subjects and officers, came from a school not generally thought religious, yet it has found support and justification in these religious dogmas and the habit of mind that goes with them. Whatever you have gained or hope to gain in administrative wisdom and righteousness from cultivating universal suspicion and abandoning trust can be traced back to the popular belief, mixed with strange contradictions, yet sustained by divines even in minds where all other faith has perished, that sin is the starting-point of our moral being, from which all its conditions and principles are to be deduced.
III. Education, like politics, obeyed this influence for a time. Many can remember efforts to awaken in them a sense of sin, as the first step to knowing what is right and good and the necessary preparation for understanding the Bible. Much indoctrination of this kind once prevailed in our schools for the poor. But it is through practical education, with all its pains and sorrows, that we have been led into a new train of thought, very unlike the one I have been tracing. Teachers and mothers have discovered that they must give children credit for unselfish affections and desires, for moral instincts and purposes that cannot be brought under the law of depravity. They have been driven to ask, with doubt and anguish but not without hope, whether depravity would mean anything, or whether they could bring it home to a child, if there were not this good, which they may recognize in every appeal to the conscience. The authorities they consult may tell them that there are beautiful “columns,” remains of the old unfallen nature, standing amid its decay. But their work concerns the life of those dearest to them, and they cannot be put off with metaphors. The columns must somehow be recognized as the substantial part of the building, and whatever weakens them or has caused their decay must be treated as strange and monstrous. Every hour makes them more familiar with evil tendencies in their children, and more bound to treat those tendencies as rebellions against a state in which the children ought to be living, their own proper state. Here is the beginning of another reaction against a stereotyped opinion. It is strongest in those whose education disposes them to hold that opinion in its strongest form, who would shrink in horror from rejecting it, and who, in their sense of their own sinfulness, are most inwardly at one with their devout ancestors. But their work as teachers of the young and reformers of wrongdoers obliges them to recognize a noble feeling in both, and to make it the fulcrum of their teaching. No optimists about human nature have done equal justice to such feelings, or made such generous demands for confidence in the most degraded of their fellow-men. Where there is no mixture of mere sentimentalism, the result has justified the experiment.
IV. This contrast between our best practice and some of our professed opinions is growing very strong in the minds of those who have just reached the point of comparing them. The result will surely be a contemptuous rejection of a principle that cost the last age many bitter tears and struggles to win and hand on, unless we can reconcile it with another truth that has become indispensable to us, without which we can take no step of future progress and reform nothing that has decayed. Yet how can we hope for such a reconciliation? Partial admissions, such as that some memories or fragments of a better state may survive in our ruin, gain us nothing. Earnest men who have learnt to say with St. Paul, “In ourselves, that is, in our flesh, dwelleth no good thing,” would reject them as insincere, the feeble compromises of those who have inherited a principle, not won it. And how could such a compromise satisfy those who have found, in dealing with the most opposite classes, the inexperienced child and the hardened ruffian, that the good in both must be appealed to as lying beneath the evil, as more fundamental than it? There must be a better way to bring these two opposite experiences into harmony, or we shall deny both and suppose the clearest evidence untrustworthy. I need scarcely point out what perplexity that scepticism would bring into our actions.
V. Scripture has been appealed to as the great witness for universal depravity. It is also the favourite book and dearest treasure of those who appeal to the hearts and consciences of little children and corrupt men on behalf of truth and righteousness. No writer in Scripture is quoted more often in defence of the doctrine than St. Paul, and his whole life is the best example of the practice that seems inconsistent with it. Let us hear whether he can reconcile the two. “Therefore, as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.” St. Paul seldom mentions Adam or the effect of his act on his posterity. Look through his Epistles and you will be startled by how rare such allusions are. You may be inclined to ask, “Can this be the doctrine said to underlie the whole Gospel, which the great preacher of the Gospel throws so far into the background?” More important is to notice the cases where he does dwell on the first man’s transgression, and how he relates it to us. Here is the most conspicuous instance. Our translators have, perhaps inevitably, filled out the sentence with words of their own. St. Paul’s statement is pointed and elliptical, and he takes special pains to balance its clauses exactly. By the offence of one, or by one offence, to all men to condemnation; by the righteousness of one, or by one act of righteousness, to all men to justification.
It is obvious that whatever is affirmed of the human race in one clause is affirmed of the same race in the other. It is not said that all were condemned and some justified, but that all were condemned and all were justified. We may be surprised, but it stands written in the authoritative passage on the subject, and if we accept the Bible’s teaching, we accept this.
St. Paul does not leave us in doubt about what Condemnation and Justification mean; his Epistle is written to expound them. A man is condemned when he is treated as under a law of death, with all his appetites and inclinations towards evil. He is justified when he is declared to be under a law of life and capable of all righteousness and good. He is condemned in Adam and justified in Christ. According to St. Paul, Christ’s Resurrection vindicated the position of men as under a law of life, just as Adam’s death proved they were under a law of death. It asserted that God judges the race to be righteous as surely as the expulsion from Paradise proved that He judges them sinners. This puzzles and baffles us if we insist that Adam is the Head of our race and deny that Christ is. It equally baffles us if we suppose Christ became the Head only when His death and resurrection showed Him to be so. But if that was the manifestation of an eternal truth, showing Who holds the race together while Adam’s act showed what rends it apart, then we are wrong to speak of a universal Fall without a universal Justification. We depart from Scripture if we teach that each man enters the world with a nature ready to sink into selfishness and death, without adding that he is related to a righteous and living Lord who would raise him to righteousness and life.
VI. St. Paul had affirmed at the start of his Epistle that God’s judgments are according to truth, and that whatever fictions there are in men’s thoughts or acts, there are none in His. If He pronounces us sinners, it is because we are sinners; if He pronounces us righteous, it is because we are righteous. St. Paul declares both as facts for all men, just as we find them in our own experience. But he does not leave us in the bewilderment our experience leaves us in. He clears up the contradiction, showing how what is true of man in one aspect is false in another. He is utterly depraved in himself. Find me the man wholly shut up in himself, who never rises out of himself, and I say, “In that man is no good thing; he is buried in his lost Adam-nature, and by the conditions of the universe and the eternal law of God he is simply, nakedly evil.” Find me such a man. But those who talk with the reprobates of the earth say, “We never found him; we cannot find him. In everyone we perceive a struggle to get out of this selfish Adam-nature, a repudiation of it, an acknowledgment of some other law and standard. We speak as if a man were hidden in that nature, wallowing in that depth, and out of the depth comes an answer. We speak to him as a brother, and he admits the claim. We tell him of a Love deeper than a brother’s, and something in him says, ‘Verily there must be that.’” Is it hard to reconcile these results of actual trial with what we suppose to be the doctrines of Scripture? Very hard, if we will not let Scripture tell its whole meaning, if we read ourselves into it, bring half our own experience to it, and insist that it confirm just that half. But I am not afraid of those who are true to their convictions, however partial and narrow. If they work on from them faithfully and manfully, they will be forced to recognize facts they have so far been unable to see, and the Bible will interpret both. I am afraid of those who have no convictions at all, who profess belief in human depravity now that it is fashionable as they would have denied it half a century ago when it was not. Such men never come to any truth, though always learning. The opinions of the day pass with them for truth, and they hold to them as fast as they hold to anything. A few years hence they may be drifted off no one knows where, perhaps fighting for the opposite theory, alike in nothing except that through all these changes they will be opposing whatever confronts the corruptions and abuses of the time, and so nearly always what is for the glory of God and the well-being of Man.
VII. Brethren, the lesson I draw is this: it is far better, safer, truer language to speak of individual depravity than of universal depravity. By individual depravity I mean my own. I find it out in myself, or rather He who searches me and tries my ways finds it out in me. That sense of depravity implies recognizing a law I have violated, an order I have broken loose from, a Divine image my character has not resembled. It is the law and the order that are universal, and the character of Christ that is the true human character. It is easy to own a general depravity, and under cover of it you and I escape: we are only what we take everybody to be, what we suppose a necessity of our position compels us to be. It is hard to remember, and hard to believe, that we are members of a justified and redeemed race. It is hard to say, “When we are best we are only what the very principle of our constitution involves; we are only acting as if we were what we say in our catechism that we are.” And it is very hard to do justice to other people: hard not to suspect them of always obeying some low, mean instinct, and hard to credit them with ever obeying a high and noble inspiration. The effort to treat them fairly becomes a thousandfold greater when we think that libelling our fellows does God service and honours His truth. Let us at least cast away that delusion. Fault-finding and suspicion are not religious acts, and thinking evil is not following the doctrine of St. Paul. We shall fully recognize the doctrine of the Fall when we say, “Lord! I have sinned; by Thee I stand; Thou only canst raise me.” When we explain away the righteous deeds of others and impute bad purposes to them, we deny the doctrine of Redemption. God looks upon us in His Son, and we must look upon each other and ourselves as He does. No other way can be right. To assume selfishness as the ground of society is to say that society is impossible, and to become what we suppose Mankind is. To assume Justice and Truth as its foundation is simply to say that when Christ wrestled with the Devil, we believe the Devil was not the conqueror.