Courage

“Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the Lord thy God is among you, a mighty God and terrible.” —Deuteronomy vii. 21.

The complaint has been made often, and has been made recently with much force, that the qualities which Christians are especially encouraged to cultivate, are not manliness and courage; that so far as the Christian ideal is set continually and steadfastly before the mind of a nation or of a man, that mind is likely to become submissive, not energetic. There is much apparent evidence in favour of this opinion. The old Saxon strength in our own land certainly dwindled and decayed after it had been for some time subject to a sacerdotal culture: when it was revived by the assaults of unsparing enemies, much of the ancient Paganism reappeared in the habits of the people and in their literature. “How,” it has been said, “has that Saxon strength been preserved in our sons? Those of the upper classes are nourished upon heathen books. Homer has at least as much share in their training as the Sermon on the Mount. Rough and even brutal sports were, at least till in a very late time, cherished among our lower people. Are we sure that if a change were effected under more directly Christian influences in either of these cases, we should not feel the effects, supposing resistance to an invader were demanded of us as of other nations?”

I. I cannot answer these questions, as some might, by pleading that courage belongs to the old man; that what we want of that, the world will give us; that the tempers of mind which the Church is to busy herself in producing are those which contradict our natural tendencies, and which are commonly scorned. I cannot speak so, because I do not find that courage, like the appetite for food, develops itself of course, if nothing is done to call it forth. I find, on the contrary, that my natural inclinations readily co-operate with any discipline which is directed to the purpose of crushing courage. Let any one of us aim at the repression of the energies which men have admired as heroic; he will have a seconder in himself, and in nearly every person upon whom he makes the experiment. Now and then he will find a stout unbending will which defies his efforts; what he does for such a will,—what comes of it hereafter,—let him ponder seriously; but in an immense majority of cases the policy will succeed. If heathenism means courage, if Christianity means the absence of it, the conversion from one to the other will not encounter many of those obstacles which the Apostles had to struggle with when they preached the gospel to the effeminized Greeks and Asiatics of the age of Claudius and Nero. I believe that the courage—which, as the etymology indicates, is only another way of expressing the heart—of a nation is liable to a continual weakening and decay; that left to itself it will certainly wither; that some religion may hasten its death; but that by doing so such religion will prove that it does not come from God, that it is not His religion, not His instrument for reforming and regenerating the world.

II. But why then has the doctrine gained such currency, that courage is the quality of savages? A question surely to be asked, because every authentic record which we possess of savages would appear to demonstrate that they are not courageous; that a host of them will quail, not before the mechanical arts, but before the deliberate valour of a few civilized men. But because we perceive in them many of the instincts of wild animals, mixed with some of the higher and nobler instincts of men; because under our culture the former are kept down, if not extinguished, and the latter very little awakened; and because in these circumstances they lose the force which we found terrible at first, and perhaps die out from inanition, or from the diseases which we communicate to them; we talk of civilization as if it destroyed their energy and courage. What a lesson might this very experience teach us about the nature of Courage! It belongs to the spirit; the animal has the mere force which it is meant to direct and quicken. That force you can quickly triumph over when it is alone; that force will perish, if it is merely brought into collision with what ought to be its master; that force you might sustain and complete, if you cared to do God’s work in the world rather than your own.

III. But from the mere observation of this fact without any serious reflection upon it, another error has arisen. We conclude that the brutal as well as the savage is allied to the courageous. Here is the justification for the cruel sports which we are sometimes told would cease of themselves if they were not encouraged for the sake of keeping alive the martial ardour of a people. Supposing that to be the object which the promoters of such entertainments have aimed at, they have failed signally. Gladiatorial exhibitions availed nothing to prevent the decay of native Roman strength—to avert the necessity of sustaining the empire by mercenaries. Spanish bull-fights have been more and more popular as the nation has become more emasculated. The increase of the appetite for such spectacles may almost be taken as a measure of the decrease of the valour of those who delight in them. They feed themselves with exhibitions of strength, that they may not be too painfully conscious how it is perishing within them. The glee with which they behold the sufferings of a victim which cannot injure them, shows how little they are prepared for any actual conflict with those who can. The case was not far different in many English amusements in which the inferior animals were the actors and the sufferers. These could not prepare human beings to struggle or to endure. It was different, no doubt, when men themselves were the fighters, and the spectators insisted that there should be equality between them. But the baseness of gambling soon came in to show how much less these sights were likely to fit men for withstanding an actual assault upon their hearths and homes, than for being the sackers and plunderers of cities. The courage of English troops had had another root, a more healthful training, than this.

IV. A return to the old faith that courage and humanity are not enemies but inseparable companions, has certainly commenced among us. The misfortune is that Christianity is supposed to be not identical with humanity, but a substitution for it. And this opinion is closely connected with that other to which I alluded, that courage is a heathen—or perhaps the heathen virtue, and that we have cherished it by giving our children a semi-heathen education. Let us consider this opinion under different aspects.

V. By a heathen we may mean one who is not a Jew. That is the simplest, most accurate use of the name. Taking it in this sense, the text which I have read to you is decisive that a high estimate of courage was not confined to heathens; that if to form such an estimate is ungodly, the chosen people were as ungodly as any. And the text is a specimen of the book from which it is drawn. I do not know whether we could describe that book better than by saying that it is a series of lessons as to the processes by which the Israelites might become a cowardly, weak, contemptible people——as to the processes by which they might become a courageous people, able to resist their enemies, honoured by the countries round about. And what especially deserves your notice is, idolatry is said to be the great destroyer of courage; reverence for the true God, and an abiding sense of His presence and protection, the upholder of it.

How is that doctrine compatible with the fact—for I fully admit it to be the fact—that the most illustrious of the heathen nations were signally brave nations, and that our forefathers sought to kindle English courage at their fires? It is incompatible, if you regard a heathen merely as an idolater. It is perfectly compatible, if we trace through the history of the great nations which worshipped idols a continual fight with idolatry, a continual witness against it. For we shall discover their belief in courage, as a quality which raised them above the animals, to be the greatest of all the protests which the conscience of heathens was bearing against idolatry—against the worship of visible things, which is directly connected with our animal instincts, which is always lowering the human being to the level of that which he should rule. So far as any man strove to be courageous, so far he strove against those impulses which made him an idolater. Who imparted to him that high desire, who sustained him in that strife, we shall determine according as we believe or disbelieve that God is the Author and Giver of every good thing,—according as we refer what is right in man to himself or to his Creator. I do not at all suppose—the contrary fact is notorious—that the bravest heathen will have ceased to be a worshipper according to his country’s rites. He may have been a more devout worshipper; but he will unquestionably have been less of an idolater. He will have recognized in the object of his worship one to whom his spirit could look up for strength; not an image of himself, or of that which was below himself. That there will have been great contradictions in his mind no one disputes. The greatest of all will have been the tendency to glorify the strength or courage in himself; to think that it set him above men and gods. Because there was the continual peril of this self-glorification, we have rashly concluded that the virtue which Heathens accounted so precious is a self-glorifying one; whereas in them, as in all other men, it was strongest when it was least conscious of its own exercises or its own worth. If it began to vaunt itself, it soon became the abettor of tyranny, passed into the mere delight in dominion, ended often in utter weakness.

VI. Courage, then, must be at all events an Old Testament virtue. Before we decide that the difference between the Old and the New Testament is that what was deemed precious under the one became vile under the other, let us consider on what grounds Moses rests the command to be courageous, and how he tells us that it may be obeyed. “Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the Lord thy God is among you, a mighty God and a terrible.” In the presence of their enemies this belief was to be their one strength and confidence. But if they were to profit by it in the hour of peril, it must have been wrought into their hearts by various processes before; it must have become an habitual conviction. “The Lord is among you.” “He Whom all creatures in heaven and earth obey; He Who was, and is, and will be, the I Am, the Lord thy God; He Who has taken you into covenant with Him, the God of your fathers; He Who loved you and chose you when ye were the fewest of all people to be a people of inheritance to Himself; He Who has made you a nation,—He is with you. The Lord thy God,—not of the whole nation only, but because of the whole nation, therefore of every particular Israelite. Thou individually, in whatever rank thou mayest be placed, however seemingly lost in the crowd, art to remember that He is thy God,—thine, the Author of thy life, the source of thine energies, the protector of thy wife and children. Thine; though no other man in the host should recollect Him, that Lord thy God is among you; unseen as He was when His voice was heard at Sinai, but really here as there; not afar off in some immeasurably distant world; near to the united army, near to each man in it, speaking to the heart of the leader, speaking to the heart of every follower, bidding all and each one go forward in His name, as His minister, to do His will. He is among you, a mighty God and a terrible. Not less mighty than in that night when He smote the first-born of Egypt; not less terrible than on the day when not a beast might touch the mountain.”

VII. The courage of the Hebrew was derived from his trust in this Being, Who had chosen him to do His work in the world; Who would accomplish that work, let what powers would, unite to defeat it. Is that trust set at nought by the revelation in Christ? Does that proclaim to Jew or to Gentile that God is not their God? Did the Immanuel, God with us, take our flesh upon Him that He might show God not to be among us? Perhaps you will say that at least He took away those titles of the mighty and the terrible from Him Whom He called His Father and our Father. I cannot find that He did. The God of Love Whom He revealed is declared to be a consuming fire. Because we are not come to the mountain that could be touched and that burned with fire, and to blackness and tempest, and the sound of words, but to the New Jerusalem, the General Assembly and Church of the First-born, to Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant, to the blood of sprinkling which speaketh better things than the blood of Abel, therefore we are to serve God with more of reverence and godly fear. The Gospel shows us the inner mind, the essential nature of Him Who was partially declared—declared in His acts and purposes—under the Law. The fuller the revelation, the deeper is the ground of awe; the more is the Divine Majesty a reason for not being affrighted at lower and meaner things, seeing that He the mighty and terrible God is with us, and is our God.

VIII. The truth, it seems to me, is this. Christianity, as our fathers understood it, is not a denial of Judaism or a denial of Heathenism,—a tertium quid which excludes all that is strongest and most vital in both,—but the harmony and concentration of both, the discovery of Him in Whom the meaning of both is realized and raised to its highest power. The Hebrew faith is faith in a God Who is maintaining an incessant war against that which is corrupt, debasing, disorderly in His Creation. The Hebrew courage is the courage of a man who holds himself called by God to engage in this war, who is acting as His servant in it, who feels that he has nothing else to do but to take the place in the host which God has assigned him, and to fight there. The Greek faith is a faith that man exists to assert his supremacy over inanimate things, and over all in himself that is merely animal. The Greek courage consists in maintaining the battle against whatever chooses to be savage and animal rather than human. And that other form of heathenism, without which the Greek would have been utterly incomplete, and before which it at last fell—the Roman,—was a faith in the power of human order to vanquish whatever is disorderly; a faith producing a marvellous courage, not superseding but upholding a marvellous discipline. The Hebrew faith sank into the exclusiveness of the later Jew, and lost its own proper nature, when the choice and purpose of God was set up in opposition to the freedom and unity of mankind, not as leading to that freedom and unity. The Hebrew courage, divorced from that faith, allied to that exclusiveness, became a mere wild, incoherent resolution to retain privileges on which God had pronounced His doom. The Greek faith sank into the mere idolatry or the mere philosophy of the later time, and lost all that had been elevating in it, when the belief in man’s power was separated from the belief in a Divine inspiration of that power. The Greek courage, divorced from that faith, based only upon a confidence in intellectual craft and prowess, became the cunning and revenge of the slave. The Roman faith sank into a mere reverence for organization, and for the man who could organize, when the God of Order was thought to exist only that Rome might be the mistress of the Universe. The Roman courage, separated from that faith, became a mechanical courage, resting on machinery, sure to be overpowered by the real courage of tribes without any machinery, but alive and young. The Gospel restored and renovated the Hebrew faith, by proclaiming a God Who is determined to set Righteousness and Truth in the earth, a God Who gives up His only-begotten Son to fight hand to hand with all the forms of evil by which man is tormented, at last to set His face as a flint for a conflict with death and the unseen world and every power that had distracted and disturbed the peace of the Universe. The divine Man is the Servant, to do the will and execute the purposes of the everlasting God. But the Man is the willing servant because He is the Son. He enters into the mind of His Father. He trusts Him because He knows Him. And therefore this Hebrew faith could not be renovated without pouring a new life into the Greek faith in the dignity and glory of man, a new life into the Roman faith in an Order Divine and human which must overcome all disorder. And out of this union and reconciliation of apparent opposites in the faith of a Father and a Son, and of a Spirit proceeding from both, to quicken men and make them the voluntary, cheerful servants—because the sons—of God—there must come forth a Courage diviner than the Hebrew, more human than the Greek, more pledged to a continual battle with disorder than the Roman.

IX. I say, such a Courage must come, and such a Courage did come. But because it took the wonderful form of endurance and self-sacrifice, it has been said to be passive, and not energetic,—submissive, not assertive. It was in the highest degree energetic, a vital power within overcoming all natural weakness and cowardice. It was in the highest degree assertive, for the most insignificant of the earth dared to say that they knew what God willed for men and what He had done for men, though the powers of the world and the traditions of centuries told them they were liars. And let it be always remembered that though the courage of the Martyr was, in one sense, purely spiritual—as, indeed, all courage, whether it is exerted at the stake or amidst bayonets, must be—in another sense it was a witness for the dignity and the permanence of the body. Without in the least exaggerating the sufferings of those who were put to death, or supposing them to have been greater than those of an ordinary sick-bed, still we may confidently affirm that no gnostical opinion, no belief in a fantastic resurrection, made them endurable. The early Christian held fast by the faith that his Lord, the Son of God, had broken in an actual body through the gates of the grave—was in an actual body at the right hand of His Father. Such a faith, if it dwelt at first oftener in men with feeble, attenuated forms, could afterwards quicken the Goth with his stout animal nature,—could awaken, not crush the powers of that nature,—could support a fight with it which should have the ascendant. These were in fact the very bottles into which the new wine of the Gospel was to be poured; when the Greek and Latin civilization was dying because the courage that had been at the root of it was dead, among these was the Church to be the source of a new and better civilization.

X. Why has the Church failed so much in accomplishing this task? Why has rough, animal barbarism mixed strangely and confusedly with an effeminate religion, opposing it, refusing to penetrate it? Because Churchmen have thought they were glorifying their faith, by severing it from the course of God’s government; because they have changed it from His faith into theirs. St. John says that Christ has made kings and priests to God and His Father. “Not kings,” say the sacerdotal moralists, “only priests. We are not to rule and reign,—that was a Hebrew or heathenish notion,—only to offer sacrifices, for that Christ did.” What comes of this denial? We become neither kings nor priests. A certain set of men offer sacrifices for us, and rule for us. We do not understand the office of either, because we do not understand our own; least of all do we understand His office Who is King and Priest for ever,—Who offered Himself to God that He might establish His kingdom, and that men might dwell with Him in that kingdom. The royalty of our race has been as much vindicated by Christ’s death and resurrection as its humiliation. The rights of the spirit and of the body have been both maintained by His sacrifice, and by the acceptance of it. He has shown that those only can maintain the dignity of their kind who are willing to surrender themselves; that only those can surrender themselves, who are resolved not to surrender a jot of that which belongs to their proper manhood,—to that which Christ has redeemed and united to Himself.

Brethren, I have been speaking to you again to-day of one of the principles which are involved in the confession we made two Sundays ago. I wished you then to feel how that confession united the divine teaching of the Israelite with the witness for a divine humanity which was so strong in the minds of the other nations; how it saved the one from passing into the worship of a distant, inapproachable God,—the other, from being an exaltation and deification of the works of God’s hands, yes, and of men’s hands. How that practical morality which refers to the repentance and reformation of conscious wrong-doers, is connected with the belief in a Father and Son and Spirit, I tried to show you last Sunday. How that practical morality which refers to the cultivation of courage in thought, word, and act, in the business of every man’s daily life,—in the defence of nations,—may be strengthened by this same belief, I have wished you to consider this afternoon. You have thought that the lessons you learnt at school respecting the virtue of courage, were heathen, not Christian lessons. Brethren, it was your own fault if you made them so, or if you allow them to be so now. You were studying witnesses which God raised up in heathen nations to testify of a quality which was wanted then,—without which the nations would have perished then; which is wanted now,—without which the nations must perish now. We need these testimonies, we cannot dispense with them; we shall contradict God’s Word if we say that what they have told us on this subject was false. They told us that it was a God Who put vigour and health into any hero who was able to do great deeds. They were right,—they must have been right. It is yours to know Who that God is; what courage He would put in you; how He would have you use it. Do not think that these questions are needless for any of us. There is a temptation in all Teutonic people to fancy they have courage as a natural endowment; they are insulted if they are told that there is any cowardice in them. It is an insult which we must all bear—which we must put upon ourselves if others do not put it upon us. Courage is not natural to us; it does not come through fortune, or the accident of being born in a certain locality, or because we have the blessing of being descended from brave men. A thousand motives tempt us to cowardice in little things; we are afraid to speak the truth just as it is; we are afraid to tell our friends when we know that they are wrong; we are afraid to assert what we know to be right. We court public opinion, private opinion. Self-indulgence takes away our nerve; and, what is more than our nerve, our heart. A cold indifference creeps over us; we ask what there is which is worth while to live or to die for. These are bad symptoms in a man,—terrible symptoms in a nation. We can part with no aid, past or present, in the effort to overcome them. We want to admire more, not less, than we have done, the Homeric hero, the stern Roman patriot, the knight of the Middle Ages. We require more than ever the help of the old Hebrew seer. We want him to ring in our ears continually, “Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the Lord thy God is among you, a mighty God and a terrible.” But we shall only hear and understand that voice if we hear also the prayer of the Apostle, and join in it: “For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that He will grant you to be strengthened by might with His Spirit in the inner man.” That Spirit is the true source of the courage which is gentle, because it is stern and unbending; able to endure all things, because it is intolerant of evil; essentially human, because it is essentially divine.