The Witnesses for the Glorified Son of Man

“Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.”—Acts vii. 56.

Are 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.