# Sermons, Volume 6: A Modern Paraphrase *Sermons, Volume 6, by Frederick Denison Maurice, restated paragraph by paragraph in modern English. This paraphrase follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. Drafted with claude-sonnet-5-5; reviewed by a human editor.* ## THE RESURRECTION A POWER AS WELL AS AN EVENT ::: {.center} Easter Day ::: ::: {.center} [April]{.smallcaps} 24, 1859 ::: > "*The power of His resurrection*."—[Philippians]{.smallcaps} iii. 10. *The passage:* Paul speaks of knowing "the power of His resurrection." [I think]{.smallcaps} many of you have felt, as I often have, a kind of disappointment in today's Collect. It begins grandly, as an Easter prayer should: "Almighty God, Who through Thine only-begotten Son hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life." But what in the petition answers to this opening? Does it speak of visions of glory, or of fellowship with the spirits of just men made perfect, as we might expect if the barrier of death were really removed? Not at all. It asks only that, as God by His special grace puts good desires into our minds, so by His continual help we may bring them to good effect. Is this not a sudden and painful fall? In moments of strong feeling, when we have seen Easter as the greatest gift to the universe and the deepest comfort for private sorrow, have we not been indignant at being made to say words that seem to forget both? And when our logic is at work, are we not scandalized, since we demand logic in prayers as in everything else and see incoherence as a want of reverence to the God of order and truth, by what looks like a conclusion unrelated to its premises? The more we love the Book that has taught us the possibility, nature and awfulness of prayer, the less we shall want to stifle such questions. With a famous poem or a work of art, it shows more trust in the author to admit what we have not yet learned to admire than to affect a vague worship because we think we ought. Sir Joshua Reynolds urges this on his pupils in his Lectures, and sets the example himself: when he first saw an Italian masterwork, he honestly owned he could not see why it had its great name. He waited for light, and it came. If divines did likewise, with the same fidelity to conscience and the same trust that what is good will in the end prove itself good, there is no telling how much uneasy scepticism about Scripture, and how much suppressed discontent with the Church's ordinances and creeds, they would spare their disciples. They would often see in them what the painter saw in himself. What had seemed tame, cold and ungenial in the Bible story, or vague or too formal in the old Confession, would come out in its simplicity and power. It would be seen to have been dimmed by the artificial, showy things they had been looking at before, and it would compel the admiration they had refused to counterfeit. Where that does not happen, and the perplexity or even dislike remains about some particular point, a habit of confidence and sympathy will still be formed. We will be convinced that what calls itself the Word of God or the Church of God does not ask to be propped up by human apologies; that it trusts itself to the Living God from whom it claims to come; and that it calls on His aid to awaken the conscience and reason of men, not to lull them deeper asleep. I\. I want us to see what this apparent bathos in the Collect means, because I suspect the framers of the prayer looked at the Resurrection from a point of view less familiar to us than it should be. We dwell on the *fact* of Christ's Resurrection, on the evidences that establish it, and on the inferences from it. Paul also dwelt on the *fact*; it was the very ground of his Gospel. But he did not set out the *evidences* at length. Writing to the sceptical Greeks of Corinth, he mentions that Christ appeared to the eleven, to five hundred brethren, and to himself as one born out of due time, and says little about the credibility of the witnesses. If the Corinthians distrusted them, he took no pains to prove that they could not be deceived or could not mean to deceive. *Inferences* he did draw, in answering those who said the dead do not rise. But fact, evidences and inferences were all bound up with the idea in my text, "The Power of *His Resurrection*." A few instances from his different letters, always from significant parts of them, will show this. At the opening of Romans, declaring the message he has brought to Jews and Gentiles, he calls it the Gospel of God concerning His Son Jesus Christ, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God *with power*, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead. Read that Epistle carefully, setting this beside passages like "Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father" and "Death hath no more dominion over Him; for in that He died, He died unto sin once; in that He liveth, He liveth unto God," and you will see that the Apostle always thought of the Resurrection as a manifestation of Christ's Divine relation to the Father. It showed the Divine Life that dwelt in Him as the Son of God, and the Divine energy that sustained that life every hour, in weakness, in agony, on the cross and in the sepulchre. Turn to the Corinthian letter, to the magnificent chapter we identify with our Burial Service. There the doctrine of a divine power appears in every sentence, almost every word: a power exercised by an eternal law, first in Christ as Head of the race, then in all its members. Take away this assertion of a power, inward, mysterious, seen only in its effects, yet orderly, uniform, and impossible to suspend without overturning the whole economy of the universe. Put in its place the announcement of the Resurrection merely as a great exception to the course of nature. Then the chapter loses its sublimity, and loses everything that has cheered any mourner or helped anyone endure life and death. Here is Paul's evidence. You do not care to believe fishermen or a tentmaker? Why should you? And how could you, even if they had every outward demonstration, even if experience, tradition and mighty motives were not against them? The power is not in us but in the Resurrection itself. We believe that power is acting on the human spirit and enabling it to receive our proclamation: that Death is not part of the world's order but of its disorder, and that it has been overcome, not by a hero exalted above human suffering, but by a Son of God who entered into all of it. He speaks of this Power in Ephesians, again linking it to our Lord's resurrection. He gives thanks for them without ceasing and prays that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give them the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. He asks that the eyes of their understanding be enlightened, so that they may know the hope of His calling, the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe. That power is according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His right hand, far above every principality, power, might and dominion, and every name that is named. The energy that quickened Christ's soul and body, made it impossible for death to hold Him, delivered Him from every bondage and raised Him to God's right hand, is declared to be the very power working in us who believe. It opens the eyes of our understanding and reveals the hope of our calling. The words sound marvellous, and it is hard to connect them with the habits of thought and feeling among us, or with our religious or philosophical notions. But they stand written. Those who receive the New Testament as a divine authority cannot shrink from them or explain them away. And those who have not yet acknowledged it may seriously consider whether this message is at least in harmony with itself, and whether it would remove many discords in human life and experience if it could be accepted. II\. Those who wrote the prayers of our Liturgy certainly accepted it. They connected Easter Eve and Easter Day with Christian Baptism. They believed we are baptized into Christ's death, buried with Him in baptism, and raised to new life through faith in the working of God who raised Him. In other words, they saw the Resurrection day as the New Birth-day of the world. It declared what man is according to the true law of his being, and what each man is bound to think of himself. A man may say that he carries about with him something evil, doomed, sold to death. He has no right to say that *he* is evil, accursed, doomed to death. He is to count himself, says Paul, "dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." He is to claim the condition of a redeemed creature, reclaimed from the dominion of death and declared to be under the law, the power, of the Resurrection. If we form any lower estimate of our condition, the Apostles, by their own admission, were false witnesses of God. They testified that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up, if this is not true of those whose nature He bore. You see what must follow. Hebrews speaks of our being brought under the powers of the world to come: the influence and operation of the Kingdom of Heaven that Christ preached to the Jews, said had come near to them, and said was about to come with power among all nations. The whole history of Christendom is a confession of these powers and a continuous evidence of how real and mighty they have been. The superstitions that have defiled the Church and reproduced heathenism inside it did not spring from this confession. They sprang from minds and hearts that sensed a spiritual power, shrank from it, and so imagined it acting on them from outside, clothed in sensible shapes and idols. They sprang from the cowardice and dishonesty of priests who played with this unbelief, sanctioned it and catered to it, until they had peopled the world again with kindly and unkindly divinities. They led their followers to fancy that the Everlasting God, the Father of their spirits, is the enemy they most have to fear and guard against. The belief that He raised His Son from the dead, and in doing so raised us also, whom He created in Him to be His children, to fight His battles and do His will, has been turned into this horrible unbelief. It grows more horrible the more it takes the facts and doctrines of the Gospel into its service and makes them like itself. For would it not be better never to speak of Christ's death, resurrection and ascension, if they only make the grave look more fearful and God's presence less attractive? Should we not be silent about atonement and reconciliation, if by them we mean greater alienation from our Father in heaven and our brethren on earth? III\. But all the darkness mingled with the light, in the Church and in our hearts, has not put out the light in either. We read of the brave deeds Christian men have done in every age, the deeds that most improved the world, however the world despised them or punished their authors. Their own testimony is clear, and their errors and sins, whenever they took credit for their high impulses, confirm it. A power they could obey, but which would not obey their caprices, had been directing their counsels, kindling their energies and bringing forth their deeds. It was a power that did not appear in sudden gusts but worked evenly and tranquilly, conquering restlessness rather than causing it. It was life-giving and life-restoring. It was the same power, the Apostles teach us, that inspired the will and heart of Jesus at every moment and at last quickened the body He had given up to die. There has been a resurrection life and power in these men, in the nations they lived and died for, and in the Church into which God engrafted them. This alone has kept either from perishing, and has caused either to start again into vital energy after years, almost ages, of decay, bear fresh fruit, and pass from the dreariest winter into a joyous spring. We can explain the facts no other way. The power of His resurrection has been there. It is the very power that first moved on the face of the waters and has striven with men in all ages, reclaiming, civilizing and renewing. It is the power of the Word who was in the beginning, without whom nothing was made, whose Life was always the Light of men. But it is that power concentrated and manifested in the Word made flesh, proved stronger than death, the grave and Hell, and asserting its right over the will of man and over the creation of which man is lord. IV\. Do we not know, brethren, or should we not at least know, that this power has begotten in *us* desires that cannot be of the earth, because they raise us above it and tell us we did not spring from it? They cannot be from ourselves, because they make us feel we are not our own, and that to be shut up in self is torment. Such desires do visit us. They may be feeble, just the infant's cry that proves them alive, and then they fall silent and seem to cease. Or if they live on, their life may be so painful and sickly, in so strange an atmosphere and among such ungenial companions, that we wish we could kill them, or hope they will die without our being guilty of it. But have they not a Parent to whom they are dear, who can and will take care of them? Is there no mark on them that assures us of a high and celestial origin? Believe it: theirs is no mortal or merely angelic Sire. He who raised Jesus from the dead is awakening and sustaining in you every desire to know the truth and be true, to resist the evil that would draw you into itself, to deliver others from it, and to drive it beyond the limits of God's creation. V\. Is it then a low and grovelling prayer, unworthy of Easter and degrading to the victory won for us, to ask that He who by His special grace has put good desires into our minds will by His continual help bring them to good effect? Could you have a more wonderful or practical test of the triumph over death and the opening of the gate into life than this prayer gives you? Could any ecstatic language about departed spirits, or about the good things eye has not seen nor ear heard, let us as truly realize our communion with the one and actually share in the other? To be governed by Christ in all the movements of His being, in His purposes and their outcomes: is this not the freedom of the most glorified spirit? To be able to do what we long to do, our longings being first in accord with the divinest mind and prompted by the divinest inspiration: is this not a good beyond the grasp of eye and ear, answering the heart's desires yet surpassing them all? And this, on the strength of Christ's having overcome Death and opened the gate of Life, we are encouraged to ask. Because His risen Life is ours, we are to believe He will begin to answer at once and will answer completely hereafter. Brethren, there is no bathos in the feeling of this prayer and no want of sequence in its logic. It does imply the stooping of king to subject, of Creator to creature, that is implied in every act of Christ's life on earth: God in Christ conquering death for us, and by the same loving power conquering all that death in us which prevents us from acting out His gracious purposes. It disregards the chains by which the mere formal logician tries to keep words in the little dens where he has confined them. Death is not limited to body or to spirit; it is treated as the common enemy of both, from which the same Deliverer sets free first the nobler, then the lower. Each of us can find out for himself how much using this prayer helps us learn the mystery of death and life. During Lent, hearing of other men's calamities or entering into trials of our own, thoughts will have been put into our minds, often perplexing to us: of some good we might do, some wrong we might redress, some disease that has penetrated our society, whose seeds we can see too clearly in ourselves, and which we might help to cure. We are too used, alas, to seeing such thoughts blossom and then fall before they ripen, or be nipped by frost just as they bud. Experience has made us callous to the sight, but it is unspeakably sad. Should we not strive earnestly not to help pave Hell with these half-formed, broken resolutions? Yet if the thoughts are merely our own, that is their ultimate destiny. But if whatever in them is not fantastic or frivolous comes from the power that wrought in Christ when it raised Him from the dead, may we not, shall we not, commit them to Him in full confidence that they are His and will be brought to good effect? They will bear fruit by which men shall be blessed, which God Himself will behold with delight and rejoice to gather in. We who preach must think with sorrow and shame of the words we have spoken, felt and known to be true, living and mighty, yet left as mere words that rise up to condemn us because our deeds answer them so ill. You who have heard those words ringing in your ears, sometimes in your consciences, and felt they might be seeds of life, remember how they dropped by the wayside and were quickly carried off you knew not where. Shall we not ask, each for himself and each for the other, that from now on the power of Christ's Resurrection may be felt in our words and enter our hearts, so that men may see the good works that spring from them and glorify our Father in Heaven? ## GOD THE JUSTIFIER OF MAN ::: {.center} Second Sunday after Easter ::: ::: {.center} [May]{.smallcaps} 8, 1859 ::: > "*To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness*."—[Romans]{.smallcaps} iv. 5. *The passage:* To the person who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. [All]{.smallcaps} this week you have been praying: "Almighty Father, who hast given Thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification, grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness that we may alway serve Thee in pureness of living and truth." Anyone who speaks on my text to people who have prayed this must expect to be judged by a severe standard. You have confessed an Almighty Father as the sole Author of your righteousness. How will you tolerate me if I trace that righteousness to belief in some tenet or opinion? You have set justification against sin and tied it to Christ's resurrection. You will rightly condemn me if I turn it into a catchword, like party colours at an election. You have taken it for granted that Christ's justification and risen life have power to make you pure and true. If I say anything that weakens that sense of its power, or divorces it from your moral life, you will reject it as inconsistent with what your worship has taught you. But the prayer also protects me from the opposite danger. The truth you confessed so solemnly on your knees, which only adoration can adequately express, cannot have been too highly valued. There is no risk of exaggerating its importance. It needs no qualification, and it cannot bear to be frittered away by opposing notions. As we pray, we do not find that those who rated man's independent righteousness lowest spoke too slightingly. Nor do we find that those who exalted God's righteousness most exclusively went to a dangerous excess, or that those who looked most confidently for help from the perfectness of the one against the nothingness of the other were taking a rash risk. Where awe is greatest, courage is greatest, and he who trembles most ventures most. It is on the dry, cold level of earth that we walk as if on ice, slipping back as far as we advance, boldly announcing some sentiment and then taking care to drain it of meaning. So the preacher who follows where prayer has gone before faces a trial that is healthy for him and for his hearers. He is warned that every great truth has plausible, popular counterfeits, easily mistaken for it until they are brought into the light of God's countenance and confronted with His reality, when they grow pale and fade. He is reminded that he fosters these counterfeits whenever he enfeebles or narrows the principle they misrepresent, instead of working to show it in greater strength and largeness than ever. He is most likely, under God's teaching, to achieve the second when he follows Scripture closely and painfully. Its language is not that of school logic, fixing terms and establishing propositions. It is the language of Revelation, setting forth the Will and Mind of the Creator and His actual relations to the creature. That is the language devotion finds to be its own ground, and a fit expression for the wants and longings of every human being. Acting on this maxim, I think we shall find in the text a beautiful exposition of the principle that occupies the whole Epistle to the Romans, and that the Sundays after Easter should specially bring home to us. I\. It has often been observed that we lose clarity in reading St. Paul because our translators, perhaps of necessity, break the family of words "righteous," "righteousness," "justify," "justification." If we were reminded at every turn that these are cognate words, whose relation the Apostle never lost sight of, we should often receive a quite different impression. I fully admit the importance of this, but I doubt whether earnest readers' simplicity does not largely supply the connection philology demands. And I doubt whether the break, so far as it is real and not merely verbal, is not mainly due to the artificial methods of divines. A person who studies Romans for practical ends sees that it begins by setting forth God as the Righteous Being, revealing His righteousness. He finds in that statement an interpretation of the Old Testament, of its main purpose and all its lesser incidents. What is the whole book but the Righteous and Living Being coming out of the secret place, so that men may know Him who formed them in His likeness? The true-hearted reader accepts this interpretation when it is offered, whether or not he has put it into words himself. He would take it from the humblest teacher, because it is what he is looking for, and he will certainly not give it up when an inspired Apostle gives it, with the deepest knowledge of the inward needs it answers. God, says St. Paul, is from first to last declaring righteousness, the righteousness of His own Being, which is what He Himself is, and to which all wrong and falsehood are opposed. Whatever "justification" implies, and however it affects an individual or the human race, this must be its root, and apart from this it is unintelligible. A reader may be pained when the language loosens the chain of the Apostle's thought, and glad when a scholar repairs the links. But he will not and cannot believe that the effect of revealing God's righteousness is anything other than essentially akin to that righteousness. II\. So when he reads, "To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly," his thought fixes at once on the last words: "Him that justifieth the ungodly." He does not first speculate about "working" and "believing," confident that these will explain themselves in time. He sees that the Apostle is declaring God to be the justifier, and he is certain that nothing said about faith or works can interfere with this, but only expand it. The phrase "justifying the *ungodly*," illustrated by Abraham, is a wonderful help in finding out what divine act the name denotes. A Righteous Being makes Himself known to a man who has been ignorant of Him, but in whose mind there have been strange witnesses and prophecies of One to whom he owed allegiance, for whom something in him is searching and from whom something in him is turning away. All visible things claim him as theirs, and his inclinations assert their authority over him, yet there is a struggle and a protest. What does it mean? Then One speaks to him who makes him understand that He can command, that He has a right to command, and that He is his Friend. This must be that Righteous Person to whom all the heart's questionings were pointing, and from whom outward things and slavish tendencies were drawing him away. The voice speaks to the one thing in him that can hear it. He believes it and obeys it. The Righteous Being has raised him to a new level, taken him out of his confusion and ungodliness, justified all his anticipations, and justified him. He is no longer the servant of the things that claimed him, but of another. There is no righteousness in those things. They have a force before which he often must shrink, but it is not one to which his conscience can bow. Conscience demands another object and another ruler, and it has found that the Creator of these things is its Ruler. The order impressed on them expressed a righteousness in Him that they did not know, but that the man is made to know. III\. You see, then, that the verb "justify" is not as far from our ordinary use of it as, when we first discover its relation to "righteous" and "righteousness," we are ready to fancy. We say an anticipation is justified by the event. If that anticipation is so inward and essential to me that my very existence is bound up in it, then *I* am justified by it. He who takes hold of man's spirit and raises it to the full, distinct apprehension and possession of what it was meant to possess, but in itself lacks, justifies it. If you substitute "making righteous," you might convey an important truth, but an imperfect one, and one just as open to perversion as the word you gave up. For the man is not made righteous in himself. He is raised out of himself and lifted up to acknowledge the righteousness of Him who formed him and revealed Himself to him. That is his blessing and his elevation. His sheep and oxen are property: he surveys them and holds them against others. That is the condition of material treasures. But Righteousness he cannot appropriate in that way, cannot contemplate in himself, cannot call his and not another man's. He possesses it only when he looks up to it as above him, like the sun, yet as truly his as the sun is his while he lives in its warmth and light and does not choose the dark. Perhaps "justify" indicates the history of a man's exaltation to such a state as well as any word can. Every word must bring one side of the truth into clearness and leave the other in comparative shadow. This word shows strikingly the thought of a personal Being owning His creature, claiming him for his proper state, answering his enemies and accusers for him, and enabling him to rise above them. To complete the idea, and keep one part from setting itself against the other, we must see how carefully St. Paul connects Justification with Righteousness. He resolutely refuses to treat it as an abstraction divorced from the Righteous Being who is its Author. He also refuses to divorce it from the man, who is unrighteous so long as he is *ungodly*, yet capable of righteousness because created to know God. And he refuses to divorce it from the process by which that capacity is awakened and made effective. IV\. And so the Apostle's words, "To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness," commend themselves to heart and conscience without cavilling. If God speaks not as the things around us do, to eye and ear, but to the man himself, and if the revelation of Righteousness comes to him as a spiritual creature, how must he answer and receive it? The Apostle says that the speech is answered by the man's believing it, and the revelation of the Righteous Being is received by his trusting Him. He does not work, does not try to commend himself to this Being, and does not strain to climb up to Him. The spirit within confesses its Master. It believes that He has sought out what could not otherwise have sought Him, that it has nothing in itself and everything in Him. It consents to be raised to its true condition and becomes obedient. Any other course must be self-will, a creature choosing to be apart from its Creator, refusing to acknowledge Him as its author and end, and determined to build on another ground, which must be sand. The more hills it heaps up to scale Heaven, the more it wages a Giant's war with the Omnipotent, and the more it must expect to be confounded and crushed. V\. St. Paul's great object is to show that the case is not altered but strengthened when men are not merely ungodly, as Abraham was, but conscious of transgression and sin to a degree he could not be. It is very natural to say: "I have committed numerous actual offences, broken God's law, and known that I did it, and I feel in myself all the moral corruption that results. My position is wholly different from that of the man to whom God's righteousness was first revealed. I cannot be justified in his way, or rise up a new man by believing in Him who justifies the ungodly. I need what he did not: a series of acts by which God's punishment of my evil may be averted and the stains in my soul wiped out." Anyone who knows himself and history will admit that such reasoning is *natural*. Experience, Reason, and Scripture alike prove that it is *false*, a direct inversion of the truth. The man has brought himself into an utterly evil, corrupt state, but he is not therefore to labour to bring some worthy fruit out of that soil. The more evidence he has of what it naturally produces, the more he must despair of growing anything on it that is not vile or that he can offer to God. His sin was from the first an attempt to live without God, distrusting Him and setting up his own will. He is called to abandon that lie when he is called to believe in Him who justifies the ungodly. He is told that he may stand on his right ground, the ground God intended for him and not the one he made for himself. On that ground God Himself will work, and he will work as God's husbandman, not his own. David, fallen into adultery and murder, was obliged, St. Paul says, to act on exactly the same principle as Abraham, who was apprehending the Righteous Being for the first time. If David was to be delivered from his filthiness, he had to trust the God of Righteousness, who hated his evil and desired truth in his inward parts, just as Abraham, who only rose out of ignorance and darkness to recognise what God is and what He means men to be. David had less right than Abraham to dream that any good was in himself or could come out of himself, so he was more bound to renounce himself and seek righteousness and life in another. He was more bound to believe that God's character had not changed because he had changed, since he had more evidence that his change was a revolt from God and a contradiction of Him. And he was more bound to believe that God did not will him to stay in that contradiction, but desired to bring him out. The principle is therefore immutable, and applies to every condition of society and every individual feeling. In every case the man who tries by his own efforts, outward or inward, to justify himself and make himself righteous is guilty of disobedience and deprives himself of all power to work freely, truly, and completely. And in every case the man who believes in God as Justifier and Deliverer, and turns to Him, has righteousness reckoned or imputed to him. VI\. That phrase is most naturally interpreted by all that has gone before. To ascribe a fiction to God, to say that He holds men to be what they are not, contradicts the primary idea of justification, which is that it proceeds from a Righteous Being and has Righteousness as its end. It overthrows the foundation of all confidence in God and among men. May God in His mercy deliver us from such notions! May He forgive us for having blasphemed His Name by the faintest hint that He is not the God of Truth. May He forgive us for weakening the sense of Righteousness at the very moment we professed to set up its standard, and for sanctioning the falsehoods of ordinary life by mixing one with the most sacred principles and hopes of the Church! The need for such perilous inventions comes from our unbelief in St. Paul's plain teaching. We suppose man sees himself truly when he assumes he is without God in the world. St. Paul affirms that this is our lie. We try to ignore God's presence and deny our relation to Him, and that is the secret of all our evil. Every act becomes contradictory because this huge contradiction is at the root. God treats men as what they are, not as what they are when they yield to the spirit of lies. He affirms that they are not independent of Him and not outcasts from Him. By confessing their relation to Him and believing that He accepts them and justifies the ungodly, they come into their true, reasonable state. Their faith is not Righteousness, for faith, like sight, is nothing in itself. Our sight carries us to an object beyond ourselves, and so does faith. Its object is Righteousness, a Righteous Being. He who has called forth this faith gives it what it wants and presents Himself to it. The Apostle's language, that He reckons or imputes Righteousness to it, is skilfully devised to express how entirely it is in God, and yet how strictly and fully the man possesses it by acknowledging it in another. The forms of sense naturally express what the terms of the understanding can express only by contradiction. And the heart of the simple peasant owns the truth of this language and connects it with what he has experienced, not only with God but with his fellow-creatures. VII\. There is another part of Romans that cannot be separated from this. It concerns the national justification of the Jew. He was not treated by a fiction as a member of a righteous Nation. His circumcision declared him set apart by God, his law came from the mouth of God, and his history was the history of God's government. On the strength of one or both of these gifts he claimed a righteousness other men lacked. St. Paul examines each pretext. Was it circumcision? That was the seal of the righteousness Abram gained by trusting God while uncircumcised. Was it the law? Instead of making righteous the man to whom it spoke, it convinced him of sin. Was it the mere arbitrary favour of God to a tribe, passing from father to son by hereditary right? But the history tells of eldest sons continually set aside and younger ones being the children of the promise. Where did these arguments lead? Not to the conclusion that the Jew had less claim to be righteous than his fathers, but that he must assert his claim as they did, by believing in the righteous God. Then he would have the blessing of circumcision, would appeal from the curse of the law to the mind of the Lawgiver, would understand his divine election, and would become a blessing to all the families of the earth. For he was elected to be this: to tell all nations of the Righteous God who justified the ungodly, condemned sin and delivered from sin, and imputed His own righteousness to those who trusted in Him. VIII\. This was St. Paul's own vocation. He was to tell Jews and Gentiles that God had fulfilled the meaning of the Jewish election, of circumcision, and of the law. He had done it by sending forth His elect, in whom He delighted, endowing Him with His Spirit, giving up His body to death, raising Him from the dead, justifying Him as His Son, and justifying in Him the nature He had taken. Jews and Gentiles were alike convicted of being sinners in themselves, and alike declared righteous in Him. St. Paul could therefore bid both take up their position as redeemed, as righteous, as sons of God. He could say to all who claimed that position, "Count yourselves dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God, through Jesus Christ, whom He raised from the dead." That was our Easter Day lesson. It explains what Baptism meant to the Roman Christian of the first century, and what it means to us in this one. By it we renounce, for ourselves and our children, any standing-ground but trust in God, who has justified us by raising Christ from the dead. By it we declare that He endows us with His Righteousness. By it we declare all self-righteousness accursed and monstrous. By it we say that the Righteousness of God is bestowed on all alike in His Son, and that He is awakening all by His Spirit to put it on. IX\. I come back, then, to where I started. This justification by faith is no tenet of ours to distinguish us from other people or raise us above anyone. If it does not take from us every pretext and desire to exalt or separate ourselves from other men, we have not yet entered into its meaning. Likewise, if it does not lead us to think nobly of the race for which Christ died and rose, of which He is the Head, and which He has invested with His Righteousness, we have not yet entered into its meaning. The same is true if it does not lead us to give thanks for the faith, hope, manliness, and gentleness we find in any of His creatures, or show us that He is their final blessedness. It is no dogma of divinity, but the pilgrim's staff, the fighter's sword, and the strength of national as of individual life. If we lose it, we lose what has given England her earnest thinkers and manly doers. For England, like Judæa, is called to be a witness of God's Righteousness to the earth, and like Judæa will be lost if she glorifies herself. The strongest of her sons will perish if he begins to trust in himself, while the weakest, who trusts in the living God, may defy earth and hell to confound him. ## CHRIST MEETING WITH DOUBTERS ::: {.center} Third Sunday after Easter ::: ::: {.center} [May]{.smallcaps} 15, 1859 ::: > "*And it came to pass, as He sat at meat with them, He took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew Him; and He vanished out of their sight*."—[Luke]{.smallcaps} xxiv. 30, 31. *The passage:* As Jesus sat at table with the two disciples, He took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them. Their eyes were opened and they knew Him, and He vanished from their sight. [We]{.smallcaps} tend to suppose that people in the first century had spiritual advantages over people in the nineteenth, and that the inhabitants of Palestine had some access to the Eternal World that the inhabitants of England lack. The Apostles and Evangelists do not encourage this idea. They work to dispel it. Before His Passion, they say, Christ spoke with them about a Kingdom of God, and they had only the most confused glimpses of it. He told them they could not bear then what they would know after He had gone. They describe themselves as misunderstanding Him, as failing most when they thought themselves wisest, and as learning through terrible experience that they were no less cowardly or heartless than anyone around them. If they discovered before the Resurrection that they were like other men, we might have expected His appearances afterward to be of a very special kind, marking the superiority of that age over all later ones. But the narratives of the forty days differ markedly from those of the earlier time. Christ appeared rarely and vanished quickly. While He was present to their bodily eyes, His chief lesson seemed to be that His intercourse with them did not depend on *that* presence. He was preparing them for a time when they could not look on Him even for a moment. That was the time He wanted them to look forward to, the beginning of their true knowledge of Him and full communion with Him. And in that time the Apostles stand on the same level as we do. The story of the two disciples going to Emmaus records the most remarkable of those appearances, and none is described so minutely. It is also the one that later ages have most connected with their own experience, and the one that has done most to bridge the gap between them and those who saw and handled the Word of Life. Men have been sure it was written to tell them that this Word of Life is not far from any of them, and that it is their fault, not His, if they do not hear His voice and follow Him. Let us consider the narrative and see how this impression has been produced. I\. "*Two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, about threescore furlongs from Jerusalem, and talked together of all these things which had happened.*" Think what those events were, and what mark they have left on human society. After eighteen centuries Passion Week is still remembered in every city of Europe. So you try to imagine what those on the spot must have felt, with personal attachment and reverence deepening their amazement. Perhaps they could not speak at all; if they did, what words would come! All such expectations are disappointed. These men are like other men: perplexed and bewildered, unable to take the measure of what they have witnessed. The events must mean something, and they want to know what. There is gloom over their hearts, a misty sorrow, a sense of blank, and a craving for someone to interpret their strange doubts. We could guess this much even if we heard no more of their talk, and shortly we shall be sure of it. So we see that their thoughts were in all essentials like those of many friends walking this day to villages near London. These may not be talking of Passion Week, or even believe that what we hold to be so significant happened. But they may be asking each other gloomily whether their old hopes of something better for the world and themselves have not been scattered; whether friends they looked up to have not gone from sight or broken their promises; whether the tidings they heard in childhood of a Revelation and a Redemption have not lost their meaning, or turned into prophecies of darkness. How many live now with this weight on their hearts, and show by their speech and looks that they are sad! II\. "*While they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know Him.*" Again the Evangelist disappoints every notion we would have formed of how such an incident should be told. A man who has been laid in the grave suddenly presents himself to two men who used to see him and speak with him. Surely we expect a description of his look and manner, or at least some hint of doubt in their welcome. There is nothing of the kind. His tone is as unimpassioned as before. Jesus draws near and joins them. They do not know Him. That is the narrative. Nothing heightens the effect, and not a word makes us feel this was a new occurrence in the world's history, one that would scarcely be repeated. And why not? Because, brethren, I think it did not strike St. Luke as new or rarely to be repeated. He took the stranger's coming as a sign of what had continually happened whenever two men, near Jerusalem or anywhere else, communed and reasoned together. He took it as a sign of what would happen later in cities and villages he had never heard of, where men of the same nature would meet and engage in the same arguments. Our Lord said, "*Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.*" If such men are asking what bond holds them to each other, what their friendship means, how they can share each other's feeling and suffering, who gave them their sympathies, and whether these can survive separation and death, then they are asking about His name. He will show them the asking is not vain, and that His is the Name of a living Lord, not a dead one. He will prove He is in their midst not by revealing Himself to the eyes but by debating with their hearts and consciences the topics that concern them most. So the disciples' advantage, which seemed so great at first, was in St. Luke's judgment no advantage at all. They were to know Him just as all other men must know Him, and until they knew Him that way their eyes would be holden. III\. Jesus asked what they were discussing as they walked, sad. Cleopas answered, "Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who doesn't know what has happened there?" "What things?" He said. They told Him: Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, was handed over by the chief priests and rulers to be condemned to death and was crucified. "*But we trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel.*" Besides all this, it is now the third day. Some women of their company, early at the tomb, found His body gone and came back saying they had seen a vision of angels who said He was alive. Some of the others went to the tomb and found it just as the women said, "*but Him they saw not.*" They had been talking a long time about what had happened. Now, at the stranger's call, they try to put their thoughts in order, and the effort must have shown them their own disorder as never before. First came the bare facts, bewildering enough. There had been a great Teacher and Prophet, whom the people wondered at, whose deeds and words they felt came from God. Yet the priests, the men of God, said He deserved death and gave Him up to the Romans to be punished as a traitor to the Emperor. God let them have their way, and He was crucified. Then came their hopes. They were expecting a Redeemer of Israel; the priests had taught them to expect one, and said all the prophets bore witness to one. They thought this must be He, since none had so many signs of a Redeemer or broke so many chains. And this was the end! Lastly they gathered fragments of evidence, very curious, which they could neither discard nor credit. He had said something about coming back on the third day, and this was the third day. Certain women told a strange tale of an empty sepulchre and angels. Men they could trust more confirmed part of it. A most faithful summary, brethren, of half-formed beliefs, opinions, expectations and arguments, such as live in many minds today! Some want to scatter them; some tremble to touch them for fear they fall apart and leave the heart utterly empty. But the Stranger who appeared to the two friends as they walked and were sad will sift and winnow them, because He will not have His disciples content with anything less than the Truth that He said would make them free. He will sustain all their dreams of a redemption for Israel. But He knows there is another dream behind that one, which must also be realized, and realized first: the dream of a Redemption of mankind. IV\. Then He said to them, "*O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?*" Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. The words sound stern and harsh. Were these not honest, earnest men, genuine disciples and seekers after truth, however perplexed or astray? Could they be called "*fools, and slow of heart*"? Brethren, such language is not worth addressing *except* to earnest men, who are looking for truth and would die rather than fail to find it. They understand such roughness and welcome it from a Friend. Their consciences own its force, and their hearts taste the sweet kernel inside the bitter husk. "What! You have doubted whether a Redeemer of Israel could die and rise again, and whether a few fond women could be sufficient witnesses of so improbable a fact. Ask yourselves whether a Redeemer *ought* not to suffer, and be glorified through suffering. Ask what bondage you want to be redeemed from. Ask whether anyone who did not bear death with you and for you could set you above its power. Then see whether the Book you have held most sacred, yet found mostly a collection of dead letters, does not speak from first to last of God Himself as a Redeemer, working out the salvation of His creatures, meeting them in a Man. See whether the shout of a King, a Son of God, does not ring through all its records: in the thunders of Sinai, in the voice to the boy sleeping near the temple, in the prayers and thanksgivings of psalmists, in the anguish of prophets." You may wonder that a walk of threescore furlongs could hold the discourse hinted at here. Could He in that time trace God's Revelation from its mountain bed to the ocean? Brethren, have you never felt a passage of history or poetry, familiar for years, suddenly catch light and illuminate the whole region around it? Have you never studied a subject in despair, wondering what link you had missed, and then been given a clue? The paths look more manifold, even more intricate than before, but the hopelessness is gone, you see your way, and each step is a step toward discovery. Apply that to the case before us. In teaching the disciples to read His own Name beneath every Song, Prayer and Narrative, the Stranger may have given them a wholly new sense of the unity of the Scriptures. At the same time He will have given them a feeling of their variety, and of their relation to themselves, that they never had before, and proved that they deserve and would reward a lifetime of study. V\. "*They drew nigh to the village, and He made as though He would have gone further. But they constrained Him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And He went in to tarry with them.*" I am afraid you may suspect me of wanting to make a sentimental or figurative application of this passage. My anxiety is to take it literally, and so find its practical and universal meaning. I would think it a miserable perversion to call the disciples' house a metaphor for the human heart, or to suppose Jesus did not actually enter it with bodily feet. Such a frivolous method of interpretation would weaken the great doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body, an integral part of Christ's Gospel. And the inward force of the lesson perishes when we try to make it less corporeal. We cannot take the words "*Abide in Me*" as honest, substantial words about the spirit of man if we have explained away the common earthly words that correspond to them. If we hold to the manly teaching of our Child's Catechism about Sacraments, and confess that the outward sign is of highest value *because* it assures us of the reality signified, we escape that Limbo of Vanity between heaven and earth, where nothing is but all things seem, a region of notions and fantasies that insult us with a promise never fulfilled. So I regard our Lord's going with the disciples to their house as a most simple action, just as St. Luke's narrative suggests. It is no less simple if we take it as a sign of a truth in which all human beings are interested, not only these two Jews. To believe that He is with us on our walks and when we sit down to meat; that by the very constitution of our being we cannot be alone; that He is there when we perceive it least, and that all our perception of what He is, what we are, and what the world is, is awakened by Him: there is nothing strange or fantastic in this. We all profess it in words, and we should not call ourselves Christians if we did not. And oh, some day shall it not become a faith in deed, a faith that makes mysteries light, not dark, and transfigures our whole existence? VI\. "*As He sat at meat with them, He took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew Him, and He vanished out of their sight.*" The guest has become the host. He breaks the bread and distributes it, and until He takes that character they do not know Him. He has opened the Scriptures to them and made their dreary, cold hearts burn within them. That He is a Prophet they cannot doubt, for He speaks as one who knows. But that He is *the* Prophet, the King, the Christ, they have not discovered. This act reveals Him. They did not detain Him by some effort of theirs; He came intending to bless them. But the blessing does not lie in the revelation to the eye, which is granted for an instant and is over. So, brethren, I think it is in our days. At first it seems that the mighty Teacher is constrained to stay with His disciples by some hard act of faith, some vigorous religious exercise. That opinion is not a delusion. He who trained the old patriarch to wrestle trains us, the latest generation, the same way. As trust and hope are awakened in us, and as we look out of ourselves and seek confidence in the great Deliverer, we rise to a new and better life and exercise the functions of redeemed men. But we may easily persuade ourselves, and no persuasion is so akin to our evil nature or so hard to root out, that we choose Him instead of His choosing us, and that our faith alters His purpose instead of resting on it. So it may truly be said that a veil is over our eyes, and that we do not know Him until He comes before us, in the fullest sense, as the author and giver of all our life, spiritual or animal. If you ask whether His breaking of bread in that cottage was a sacramental act, I answer that I conceive no act of Christ can be anything else. Was it not a pledge of His stooping to men, His union with men, His dominion over men? But if you ask whether it was like the breaking of bread to which we are invited, who may communicate in a completed Sacrifice and draw near to God through an ascended High Priest, I answer that Christ Himself spoke of His departure to the Father as the beginning of all highest knowledge, and as opening a converse between Earth and Heaven that could never have been possible while He tarried with them. So we are guilty of strange faithlessness and ingratitude when we reckon our position worse than that of those who saw Him before the Passion or in the forty days after the Resurrection. It must be better and grander. Christ does not reveal Himself to one here and there. He is proclaimed as the Universal King and the Universal Sacrifice. As such we are permitted to receive Him, and as such to declare Him to the world. But if our consciences say, as I am sure they do, "We have not so received Him, nor declared Him so to the world," let us remember that whatever we have or have not done, He is now, as of old, revealing Himself. It was not the testimony of women or men that discovered Him to the two disciples. That testimony had not dispersed their sadness or restored their hopes. It was He Himself who drew near and reasoned with them. So it has always been, and so it is now. It may lessen some of our pride and some of our despair to be sure of this. We shall not suppose we can convert Jews, Turks, Infidels or Heretics by subtle arguments or wonderful exposures of their ignorance. But if we believe that Christ died and rose again for them and for us, and that He is truly the Lord and Teacher of man, we may believe that He knows the passage to their hearts, that He can tell what presses upon them though we cannot, that He can meet them and reveal Himself, and that it is His good pleasure that they as well as we should come to the knowledge of His truth. For what are we, that we should know it? What arts have we to keep Him among us, even if in past days He has tarried with us? Dependence on His infinite grace, on the love He has shown the world, is the only security and comfort we have. While we cherish this dependence and renounce all pretension to be better than others, He may employ us, as He did the Apostles after they had learnt the same lesson, as His Messengers to all the families of the earth. ## EXCOMMUNICATION ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday after Easter ::: ::: {.center} [May]{.smallcaps} 22, 1859 ::: > "*For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus*."—1 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} v. 3–5. *The passage:* Paul says that though he is absent in body he is present in spirit, and has already judged the man who did this deed as if he were present. When the Corinthians are gathered together, and his spirit with them in the power of the Lord Jesus, they are in the name of Jesus to hand such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. [Here]{.smallcaps} is the awful formula that was supposed to justify all the excommunications of the Middle Ages, and that makes English Churchmen sometimes complain that the power of excommunication has left them. Protestants who love the name of St. Paul, and have looked to him as a witness against the evils they complain of, do not like to think he gave any warrant for what sometimes seems the greatest of those evils. They try to explain the words away, or to limit them to the Apostle's own times. Neither expedient has worked. Our conscience rebels against trifling with any words, most of all those we profess to receive as oracles. It asks whether St. Paul was not laying the foundation of a fellowship that was to last for ever, and whether its principles can change from one generation to the next. I suspect, brethren, that what we need is a stricter, not a looser, reading of St. Paul: a firmer resolve to hold to his words and not to the comments and glosses on them. Had his meaning been honestly drawn from his actual words, the Church would have been warned against her acts of tyranny. Had she taken him as her guide, she would have done more than we can imagine for the moral culture of men, instead of promoting some of their worst immoralities. Let us ask God's help to do this. I\. You heard in the Lesson why the words were spoken. A member of the Church in Corinth had committed a crime that was odious even among heathens. It was notorious, and the Apostle had been told of it. The Corinthians must have been somewhat affected, but not as seriously as the matter deserved. Other subjects, which they had written to him about, evidently occupied them more. They were far busier deciding between the doctrines of Paul, Apollos and Cephas than clearing themselves of this scandal. St. Paul thought their concern with the one was a chief cause of their indifference to the other. Split into parties, they were naturally forgetting what their common fellowship involved. While they debated the worth of their teachers, they were coming to think their only bond was allegiance to those teachers. Full of their intellectual differences, they did not see how a moral disease beginning in one limb might infect the whole body. To teach them how to deal with this offence was to throw light on many temptations they were liable to, and on the nature and conditions of their Christian calling. II\. The case in this chapter at once suggests that the Corinthians had a strong bias to sensuality. Everything we know of their city, and St. Paul's warnings, support that. But we would be badly mistaken to think they claimed high privileges for the body and thought meanly of the soul. As Greeks, we could be sure they would lean the opposite way, and we know they did, from the notions they formed about the Resurrection. No men felt more strongly the superiority of intellect to the animal nature, of the soul to what it was to rule. This was the excuse for their partisanship. Many thought they had advanced beyond St. Paul's lessons and were ripe for the wisdom of Apollos. Some said how attractive these Jewish traditions were; others, how delightful the deliverance from them. Such feelings show an active mind. They also show a lack of any sense of a common order to which all belong, a lack of wide human sympathies, and a restlessness which, once exhausted, is likely to take refuge in fleshly indulgence as more real than mere speculation. III\. The Corinthians wanted to be spiritual men. They were proud of their so-called spiritual gifts, and rejoiced that God's Spirit had awakened in them powers of thought and utterance that they and others once lacked. St. Paul makes use of this boast. He wants them to be spiritual men, he is thankful for their powers of utterance and his own, and he is glad they come behind in no gift. But if they wish to be spiritual, he says, they cannot be factious. The Spirit in man is what unites one to another, and to be divided is to be carnal. God's Spirit is given to awaken that common spirit in men and lead it to its true object. It sets before them Christ, who gave up Himself and was crucified, as Head of the whole Society. It makes them sharers of His Mind and Character, and lets them confess His Father as their Father. Owning themselves spiritual beings united in a spiritual fellowship with Christ, they would reverence their bodies. They would no longer think lightly of them as prisonhouses of the soul or temporary tabernacles soon to be done with, but treat them as temples of the Holy Ghost, to be kept from all defilement. IV\. Regarding themselves as spiritual beings ruled by God's Spirit, they could not help seeing the evil that assailed them as spiritual. They were tempted to unrighteous acts, but first of all to being unrighteous men. The citadel was invaded: Malice, Pride, Covetousness, Hatred and Impurity were trying to master them and hold them captive. Every man was in this battle and none could evade it. Each must take a side, saying either "I submit myself to the Spirit of Good, of Truth, of Charity, and acknowledge myself His servant," or "I invite His enemy to reign over me and promise to do his bidding." People might state it differently or prefer other names, but they must somehow come to this issue: obedience of the spirit to a spirit of good or of evil. The Church had already chosen. Its very existence meant that the God of Truth and Charity is God, that He had sent His Son to claim men as His children and give them His life, and that the Devil and his works were renounced. Suppose one of its members were convicted of one of those works, and not a disputable one but one condemned by the conscience of all mankind. What was to be done? St. Paul has no doubt, and pronounces his decision clearly and awfully. How does he frame it? 1\. He explains what the Society is. "*He is gathered together with them*." "*Though absent in the body he is with them in spirit*." These are not random or merely metaphorical expressions; they fit all that goes before and follows in the Epistle. The Society is a spiritual body, and as spiritual creatures they have entered it. Time and space do not confine it. Whether in Athens, Ephesus or Rome, he is still one of them and cannot separate himself from them. This is his only security for judging rightly here. He could not trust his private judgment, which might be the victim of partial, local, temporary impressions or warped by his temperament. His confidence is that the Spirit of Truth will lift him and them above their own haste and vanity, keep them from following their own conceits, and enable them to act as members of a Society whose Head is Christ. 2\. With that confidence he decides that "*in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, when they are gathered together, and his spirit, they should deliver such an one to Satan*." I do not wish in the least to soften this expression, and for the moment I do not even quote what follows it. As it stands, it seems to me exactly what we should expect from the Apostle, and what he must have said unless he retracted his earlier teaching. By this act the man has solemnly made his choice. He has said our Master is not his, and has declared who is. To that master we must leave him. We have no right to claim from him the renunciation of a service he has devoted himself to, or a profession that is manifestly false. We owe it to ourselves not to. We are not units thrown together by chance, with no cohesion and no relations to each other. We affirm that we are a living body, every limb affected by the well or ill doing of every other. We are set in the world to witness what God would have His world be, and what it is when it has confessed its true Centre and moves in its proper orbit. 3\. He presses this reason soon after: "*Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened*." But now he gives another reason: they owe this to the offender himself. "*He was to be delivered to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord*." We say constantly, "What foolish tenderness to overlook that man's offences and let him escape the consequences! Do you not know he must be made to feel his folly and taste the wormwood before there is any hope of reform?" We all recognize the admonition as sound. It shows how cruel much of our mercy is, and what mercy may lie at the bottom of severity. It applies to our dealings with children and wrongdoers, and if we believe the Prophets, to God's dealings with men and nations. St. Paul acts on what he understands to be the divine principle. In fact he does not think the action is his own. He has no power to cut a man off from God's Church, and neither have the Corinthians. All they can do is ratify what the man has himself done, believing this to be the way to defeat his madness and finally triumph over his seducer. There is a breadth and boldness in the Apostle's speech that we cannot match. What confounds us is not the giving up "*to Satan for the destruction of the flesh*"; experience tells us only too well what that means. Not by the act of Churches or Apostles, but by their own act, we see men given up to a dark and malignant Spirit, yielding to his suggestions and becoming more and more his instruments. Not by the decrees of Apostles or Churches, but by their own decree, we see the flesh they have pampered and brutalized perishing through its own excesses. What we wonder at, what sounds too good to be true, is the hope in the other clause. That even by such tremendous processes the spirit may be brought out of bondage, that even so the man may be restored and the Tempter defeated: for all we have dreamed of the infinite storehouse of God's wisdom and loving-kindness, this might stagger our feeble faith. The words stand written. St. Paul did not think them dangerous to utter, even at such a moment, to such a Church, of such a man. I do not suppose we are pious and judicious in being more cautious than he. I suspect the more we meditated on the encouragement he holds out, the more humiliation and awe we should feel. V\. Here then is the precedent. Would it have been dangerous for Churchmen to follow? Suppose men had been taught that Christ has called them to be members of His Body; that He awakens their spirits by His Spirit to claim fellowship with Him and one another; and that so far as they yield to that Spirit, God's laws will be written in their hearts and they will be able to follow Him and resist what fights against them. Would not this have been the greatest witness for true, practical, human morality, and the greatest protest against the artificial, exclusive, sacerdotal morality Churchmen have so often cultivated? Suppose they had been taught that the Devil is in no sense their master, but that they make him so by distrusting their true, righteous, loving Master and ceasing to depend on His daily and hourly help. Suppose they had been taught that no one can know when they withdraw their allegiance from Him and give it to another, but that God knows, will enable them to know, and will bring them back. But if they openly show they have broken loose from God's law and accepted the Devil's, it may be needful to let them learn by bitter trial what they have forsaken and what they have preferred. Would not this be the best witness that a man's position in the Church is determined not by priests, bishops or popes, but by God, who places him there? Would it not be the greatest protest against the notion that ecclesiastics may rightly or safely inquire into the secret thoughts or opinions of their fellow-men, or decide anything about them except by their conduct? Suppose men were taught how careful the Apostle was not to separate himself from the general body of the Church, and that he was confident of his own judgment only because he felt himself one of them, guided by the same Spirit. Would this not greatly encourage every Christian to hope for that Spirit's help in doubt and temptation? Would it not be the greatest protest against the arrogance of doctors and priests, who have fancied they had gifts and faculties not to minister to their fellows but to be raised above them? Suppose men were taught that Excommunication is the slow, solemn, reluctant confirmation of a judgment the wrongdoer has already passed on himself. Would not this be the greatest witness that Communion is what is meant for human beings, and that the chief duty of Christ's ministers is to hold out Communion with God and with men as the privilege He has won for us? Would it not be the most effectual protest against the notion that the power of cursing is the great power of Churches, to be eagerly held and exerted by those who have it and coveted by those who have lost it? Suppose men were taught that St. Paul neither recommended nor inflicted any outward penalty on the man he wanted the Corinthian Church to cut off, that he could inflict none, and that the excluded man might, if he pleased, return to heathenism, leave all the perils of a persecuted position, and even become a persecutor himself. Would not this be the greatest witness for the entirely spiritual nature of both Communion and Excommunication, and against those who have made or would make exclusion a plea for injuries to body or estate? If men are taught that the worst fear is of becoming servants of the Spirit of Pride, Malice and Hatred, will not the Excommunicator tremble lest he be excommunicating himself in the worst sense? If they are taught that the Prodigal may at last be brought by riotous living and the swine's husks to think of his father's house, and that the very end of Excommunication is that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord, who will not see that its whole purpose is inverted when it is used to cut men off from God's forgiveness and drive them to despair? VI\. But, brethren, I have called your thoughts to this subject not chiefly to comment on the misuse of Excommunication in other days or in ours. I do not think that purpose unimportant, for our feelings about history and about Scripture are often confused because we do not see how far the recorded acts of men correspond to the commands in Scripture. But I should rejoice far more if I could impress on you and on myself the conviction that Excommunication is fearful because Communion is the real foundation of our lives, and the exercise of it is their reasonable, healthy condition. Various opinions and habits among us make this faith very hard to hold, yet we confess it to be true in many ordinary phrases. We confess that we cannot live without a daily renewal of life, and cannot separate our life from the life of our kind. Consider what that acknowledgment involves. Does it not mean that every faculty of sense, feeling and perception is awakened in us by an impulse from above, and reminds us that we must go out of ourselves if we would be truly ourselves? To be *always* going out of ourselves, *always* in fellowship with the Source of all Good and Truth, *always* passing on to those around us what we receive from it: this is the highest perfection we can dream of, the life of Christ, and the life of those spirits who have fought the fight and finished their earthly course. To receive nothing, communicate nothing, and be altogether shut up in self is the Excommunication we can hardly dream of; it must be the condition of devils. We stand between the two. At every moment something reminds us we may sink into the worst, and at every moment a voice beckons us upward to the nobler. Let each of us understand that this is the Voice of Christ, saying to him, "In thyself lie the capacities of an ever-deepening Death; I have come that thou mayest have Life, and mayest have it every day more abundantly." ## CHRIST'S DEATH AND RESURRECTION THE SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEMS OF THE UNIVERSE ::: {.center} Fifth Sunday after Easter ::: ::: {.center} [May]{.smallcaps} 29, 1859 ::: > "*But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above): or, Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead). But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved*."—[Romans]{.smallcaps} x. 6-9. *The passage:* The righteousness that comes from faith says: do not say in your heart, "Who will go up to heaven?" (to bring Christ down), or "Who will go down into the deep?" (to bring Christ back from the dead). It says instead that the word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart. This is the word of faith that we preach: if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. [St. Paul]{.smallcaps} is contrasting, as he does throughout this Epistle, the righteousness of the law, which consists in mere acts, with the righteousness of faith, which concerns a man's being and comes from trusting a righteous God. Some of his readers, Jews and Gentiles alike, would suppose he was setting aside Moses, or treating him as belonging to an earlier time and made obsolete by the Gospel. Nothing in the letter warrants that. Everywhere Paul has appealed to the Old Testament and its heroes as examples of a righteousness that was personal, not legal. If David and the Psalmists did not contradict the old Lawgiver, neither does Paul. Here he cites the Lawgiver himself. First he quotes Leviticus, which plainly describes legal righteousness: "the man which doeth these things shall live by them." Then he quotes Deuteronomy, which he says describes just as plainly the righteousness of faith. So he is not setting one period's wisdom against another's. He is asserting principles that never change and belong to the constitution of man. A law of letters, graven in stone, could never at any time be the ground of a human being's righteousness, though at all times it could be valuable in defining what must not be done. Trust in a living person could never be swallowed up in obedience to formal rules; trust must always be the root of obedience. Moses proclaimed this in his day as Paul would in his. If it is true, all the intervening history of the world should have shed light on it. And if Paul's Gospel is no delusion, it will not set aside the lessons of the old world but unfold them. I\. The words in Deuteronomy are these: "*For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it*." Paul does not quote these words exactly; he gives what he believes to be their inner sense. Moses, here as throughout the book, was setting the word proclaimed to Israel by an unseen God against the worship of visible things to which men are naturally prone. That impulse is a craving to find out what is in the heaven above or in the depth beneath. Men look up at the sun, moon, and stars, which seem to rule over us. What kind of rule is it? The sun looks down on the earth and sees what is done there. Is he a judge, taking account of those deeds? Blessings come from his light, but he also scorches and consumes. Are these signs of his good or ill will? The night too must have a sovereignty, one that seemed calmer and steadier than the day's changeable government. Fearful crimes must be laid bare to eyes that look out of those clear stars. The sage might dismiss such imaginings, but not the belief that powers in the heavens affect the earth in marvellous ways. Beneath the forms that come out by day or night he perceived a Light earlier than they. And if there is a Light, is there not also a Darkness? Have they struggled for ever? Which was first, and which will outlast the other? Who will ascend into heaven to find the answer? But again: the sun coming out like a bridegroom from his chamber, the moon walking in her brightness, speak no more to human hearts than the unfathomable deep does. Think how the first sight of the sea impresses us, and what impression it has left on the mind of the world. Before man has learned to cross it in ships, the sense of illimitable depth overpowers him even more than the sense of vastness. Is it the grave into which all things must finally descend? Has it something to do with the grave that each of us must enter? Is death the end of the universe as well as of us? Who will go down into the deep and tell us? Moses knew that this craving for tidings from above and beneath would be in all hearts, and that no disappointment would check it. God Himself had set these heavens over their heads and surrounded them with these waters, so the message they brought was His. How then could the eagerness to question the heaven above and the deep below be stayed? "Lo! the word is nigh thee, in thy heart and in thy mouth, that thou mayest do it." The Ruler you are seeking in the skies is close to you. You thought He was looking down on you out of the sun because His light was entering your heart and showing you its secrets. He commands the sun, but first He commands you. His word fixed the bounds of the deep, but first it fixed what you should be and do. He is the Creator of these things, and your Lord, your Deliverer, your Friend. Trust Him, and the heavens will look bright and clear, and the deep will not be terrible. You may walk joyfully in the light of day, because it witnesses to the One who orders your steps. You may cross the deep fearlessly, because He will be with you. This was the only way the old Lawgiver could check his people's restless search for news from the world above and the world beneath, and so check the idolatry of upper and nether gods that was the result of that restlessness in every other country. As far as they heeded his exhortation, they could walk calmly and cheerfully along life's common road. They could think about their steps and not be distracted by vague threats or promises. They could do what was given them to do, resist the temptations to distrust that beset them every moment, and rejoice in every glimpse of light while longing for more. These were the brave, true fighters we find in the Psalms, holding fast their faith, confessing their sins, uttering their complaints and hopes. These are the prophets, to whom God's word came, and who testified of it to kings, priests, prophets, and people. They told them how they were forgetting the Lord, following their own delusions, fearing where no fear was, and deceiving themselves with dreams that could have no issue. For kings, priests, prophets, and people, not believing that a word was near them, even in their hearts, and not trembling before it as God's, turned to all vain things that could not profit, to the delusions and abominations of the surrounding nations. At one time they would be taken up with gold and silver, chariots and horses, and affirm that nothing else was real. Then in hours of anguish their hearts would shake like trees in the wind. They would be afraid to ask God for signs that His promises would be fulfilled, and would consult wizards who peep and mutter. They would ask in wild dismay, "Who will go for us into the heights; who will go down for us into the deep?" The anxieties they had tried in vain to repress by a sensual life and a religion of distrust and fear would burst out in full violence, and there would be no answer. The firmament would seem to be brass, which none could break through, though all might be victims of its caprices. The ground below would utter low murmurings that none could interpret, yet it might open in a moment and swallow all the pomp and glory of the earth. II\. Fourteen hundred years had passed since Moses spoke that sentence. Paul was writing, in a character unknown to his fathers, to the people of a city on a different continent, a city that did not exist until centuries after the Lawgiver died. It seemed to have crushed all the hopes of freedom and dominion Moses had taught his countrymen to cherish, and it regarded Palestine as one of the least trophies proving it to be the predestined Queen of the Nations. Who can reckon the changes of those years, the empires that rose and fell, the dreams cherished and scattered? Yet what had *not* changed? The sun, moon, and stars still looked down on men and still suggested a fixed rule and order. The same questions about the nature of that rule had been stirring, and more actively than before. Astrologers had tried to discover it, and mythologies had been built to explain it. Philosophers had refuted those mythologies. Men had met enough disappointments to despair of any solution, and yet they could not despair. In all the weariness and unbelief of Paul's time, when so many were repeating Pilate's question "What is truth?" with more than his listlessness and scorn, the cry could be heard on every side: "Who will go for us into heaven? Who will tell us about these dynasts who exercise some strange control over our destinies?" The sea had been the scene of many a battle and had become the servant of man's wants and pleasures, but it had not lost its terrors. It still hinted at an abyss in which all things might sink and be lost, and still recalled the grave into which every ruler of the earth must pass. Only now, as Paul indicates by the changes he makes to Moses' language, it was Death himself, in his grim, naked form, that presented himself to each man, rather than general symbols of him. Who is he? Is he the great King of all kings? Why do we fight him to the last, and not quietly yield to a supremacy established by centuries of evidence? Why this clinging to life, this dream of immortality, this horror of death? Who will go down into the deep and bring us back some tidings? The countrymen of Moses were no less tormented by these questions than the heathen. They spoke learned words about a heaven above the visible heaven, about a second and third heaven, and they had much lore about the grave and a resurrection after it. But in practice they thought of God as a distant Being seated somewhere in or above the sky, just as the worshippers of Olympian Jove did. In practice their speculations about the nether world were no less confused, and in many respects darker, than those of nations that assigned it to Pluto. Why? Because they had forgotten the lesson of Moses. They knew they ought to keep the law, but did not ask how they might gain the righteous mind that would enable them to keep it. They did not believe a word was near them, speaking in their hearts, or that it came from the mouth of God. If they had, they would have asked Him to teach them about the heaven above and the deep beneath. They would have been sure He knew the secrets of both, and would not have doubted that the questions awakened in His creatures were to have a solution, more complete than they could dream of. This is the meaning of the explanations Paul inserts into the passage he borrows from Moses: "Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above): Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring Christ again from the dead)." He intimates that the craving to go up into heaven and down into the deep could not be quelled in the nations, and must go on producing fresh restlessness and superstition, unless it could be declared that One had sounded the deep, had entered death, the grave, and hell, and had ascended into heaven. He intimates that those who had learned Moses' lesson, heeding the word that spoke in their hearts and trying to obey it, would welcome the news that the problem haunting all human beings was solved for all of them. The mysteries of the nether world had been penetrated, and He who descended into the lower parts of the earth had ascended far above all heavens, that He might fill all things. Above all, he says to the Roman Christians, who had received these tidings and confessed the crucified Lord as Head of all Principalities and Powers and of every name that is named: "Let there be no fever and restlessness in you. Do not ask anyone to ascend into heaven or descend into the deep. That is to disbelieve that Christ has actually conquered death and hell, actually united our nature to God's, and actually glorified our nature at God's right hand. Your business is to trust the risen Lord with your secret hearts, to believe in His perfect righteousness, and by faith to clothe yourselves with His nature. Your business is to fight, as your forefathers fought, against the temptations to distrust, cowardice, and baseness that beset you on every side. Your business is to desire that all be known that can be known about the heaven above or the deep beneath, because nothing can be known that will not be a greater revelation of the goodness and truth of your Father in heaven, and of the glory to which He has called us by His Son. By the simplest acts of daily obedience, and by continual efforts to be true, to speak truth, and to follow truth, you are to prove that Christ's word is speaking to you and in you, and show forth His risen life. But you are to confess the Lord Jesus with your mouth as well as believe in Him with your heart. For He has not died and ascended for you only, but for mankind. He has not led your captivity captive, but the captivity of your race. He reigns not over you, nor even over your nation or your Church, but over all Powers in heaven and earth. So you are to proclaim to the inhabitants of the earth, not your religion, but Him who died and revived and went to His Father that He might draw all to Himself. You are to think that every man who, in whatever confusion, is striving to be faithful and righteous is obeying a word speaking in his heart, and because that word is God's and not man's, will be led by Him into all truth. You are not to doubt that through all cloudy and dark ways, by wars and revolutions, by judgments on kingdoms and churches, God is leading to His great victory and will accomplish it. He will throw down all our images and notions about things in the heaven above or the deep, which have hidden His righteousness from men, and will manifest Him who died and rose and ascended as the one perfect image of that righteousness to His Universe." ## HOW CHRIST'S ASCENSION BEARS UPON ORDINARY PRACTICE ::: {.center} Sunday after Ascension ::: ::: {.center} [June]{.smallcaps} 5, 1859 ::: > "*Of Whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named*." —[Ephesians]{.smallcaps} iii. 15. *The passage:* The whole family in heaven and on earth takes its name from Him. [Many]{.smallcaps} people who take comfort in Christ's death and resurrection give little thought to His Ascension. They say: "Those facts touch what we suffer and what we see our friends suffer. They answer the anguish of individual conscience; the open grave and the mourners in our streets bring them to mind; they belong to ordinary experience. The Ascension may suit dreamers and visionaries. We sometimes long for a few hours of cloister life, when our spirits might mount up like eagles toward the sun. But we live amid bustle, distraction, humbling work and daily duties, and must dwell among them. Shouldn't we accept our lot and keep our souls low, not busying ourselves with matters too high for us? Isn't that part of the humility we are told to keep, which is hard enough to keep even with all our caution?" It is indeed hard to keep humility with this caution; I am inclined to say it is impossible. David wanted a humble and contrite heart as much as any man, yet he sought it the opposite way. "Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle? who shall rest upon Thy holy hill? He that sitteth not by himself, but is lowly in his own eyes." He does not set the two thoughts against each other. He joins them, assuming that the habit of mind that climbs the Lord's hill and the habit of thinking highly of oneself cannot live together: whoever aspires to that height must think meanly of himself. David's authority might be enough, but I suspect our own experience confirms it. Did you ever meet a man with no lofty aspirations who was lowly in his own eyes? What would make him so? He measures himself by the people around him. If any rise above him, he finds some flaw in them that restores his self-complacency. He does all he thinks he needs to do and is all he wants to be. That is not what we usually call humility. But at least we might suppose that aspiring men would despise commonplace earthly morality. I tried on a former occasion to test this from the same Psalm. What did it say? The qualities it gives the man who ascends the Lord's hill are those we ask of the ordinary English gentleman or tradesman. No deceit in his heart; he speaks the truth; he neither slanders nor injures his neighbour. The Psalm that speaks most of communion with the Lord and seeing His face dwells on such habits, and only on such. Perhaps this belongs to the Old Testament, and in the better Covenant of fuller realities we shall find a complete change: commonplace morality cast aside, and the true saintly ideal in its place. Let us turn to the Epistle my text comes from. As I have told you before, it is peculiarly the Epistle of our Lord's Ascension. The most powerful passages in our Services last Thursday were drawn from it; those about Christ leading captivity captive and receiving gifts for men are fair samples of its purpose and spirit. It opens with a marvellous thanksgiving to God for blessing us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ. It speaks of God's purpose to gather up all things, in heaven and on earth, in Christ. It joins the prayer that the Ephesians may receive the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to the power God showed in raising Christ from the dead and setting Him at His right hand, far above every principality, power, might, dominion and name, in this world and the next. You will say this is a strain of unusual elevation: the Apostle is on mountain-tops where breathing is hard, clouds at his feet, the common plain of earth far below. Then what is the new, celestial morality that is to displace everything to do with the common dwellings and affairs of men? "Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour." "Be ye angry and sin not." "Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth." "Let bitterness, and wrath, and clamour, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice." "Be not drunk with wine." "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands." "Husbands, love your wives." "Children, obey your parents in the Lord." "Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath." "Servants, obey your masters according to the flesh, not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ." "Masters, do the same thing unto them, forbearing threatening." I took these almost at random. They lie on the surface and express the spirit of the letter. The more you read, the more you feel that St. Paul never thought of the precepts for ordinary business as standing aloof from the revelations of the divine world, or as merely added to them. He supposed the Ephesians needed to know they were sitting with Christ in heavenly places precisely so that they would not lie or let filthy talk come from their mouths. He did not think it needless to tell people for whom he prayed that they might know the greatness of their calling and the unsearchable riches of Christ that they must not deceive, slander, steal or commit adultery. If the saints at Ephesus took these plain, broad exhortations as an insult, thought they had no need of them, and wanted something suited to their safe and elevated condition, they must go to some other teacher. St. Paul thought these things good and healthful for them, and from him they would get no more palatable food. So we need not debate further whether we need a convent's seclusion to enter into the mystery of the Ascension. If St. Paul's way of seeing it is the true one, and we have found no wiser, then it is in the midst of moral corruption, in a merchant city like Ephesus or London, with every temptation that besets other men, that we may expect to feel the need of this faith and, if we will, come to possess it fully. The streets and alleys of a great town with their swarming population, the crimes, neglects, pettiness and heartlessness in high places and low, and the evils from which all this comes, which lie bare in our own hearts: even these may be the schoolmasters that bring us to Christ. They bring us not only to Him who descended to be a fellow-heir of human misery and bear human sins, but to Him who ascended far above all heavens that He might fill all things. If it is asked how, I answer: because I could hardly bear the crushing load of life and death, the physical wretchedness and moral debasement of even one or two creatures singled out of that mass, even if it were not multiplied by tens of millions, and even if each evil did not spread its infection to every other. It would be nearly impossible to bear remembering that the cancer of Society lies not only where every eye sees it but where it is carefully covered and the outward appearance is most comely. It would be quite impossible to bear even a partial glimpse of what is always naked and open to the Father of Lights. We could not bear it unless we were permitted, encouraged and commanded to believe that the very nature we see and feel to be capable of such degradation has been taken, redeemed, justified and glorified by the Son of Man. In that very nature, losing none of its essential properties, lacking no spiritual, intellectual or bodily attribute, full, perfect and human, He stands at the right hand of God as our representative and High Priest. Brethren, we ask what evidence there is for this amazing assertion, which no experience vouches for and which seems to defy the senses and every argument from them. I am sure we get no answer until the facts passing before us and within us become the evidence. In themselves they are not luminous. They form a dark thunder-cloud, and its flashes blind more often than they enlighten. But you cannot and dare not believe this is all, that nothing lies behind it. And if something does, what? If there is order, beauty and harmony beneath these horrible discords, where would you look for it? In a thing or in a Person? In a light you have created, or in a light of which your brightest creations are only streaks and scattered rays? In a hero you have glorified, or in the Son of God, who was before all worlds, who humbled Himself and made Himself of no reputation, and whom His Father has glorified? A faith that boasts of resting on Christ's Death and Resurrection, taking no account of the Ascension, may do while our thoughts are taken up with our own souls and how they may be saved here and hereafter. To an awakened conscience Christ's death is an assurance of divine peace. Later, when the conflict is stilled and the mind has settled back into its ordinary state, he is given reasons why he has a right to this peace, and we try to explain how Christ's death procured it. Earlier these would not have satisfied him, since he wanted a message from God, not arguments from men. Now they content his understanding and keep alive remnants of religious feeling. To the actual mourner, the news of the Resurrection is a voice from behind the veil saying, "O Grave, where is thy victory?" When the keen grief is over and the world's business resumed, he learns how the Resurrection proves that he and his friends will someday rise. He accepts arguments that would have been worthless in his misery, says they convince him, and forgets them. But when some discipline or other brings us to feel that we are bound up with our race for good and ill, that we are not and cannot be exempt from any of its transgressions, and that we sink or swim with it, then we want something more than pardon, more than the promise of a better world if we prove worthy. We can make no special case for ourselves. No circumstances in our lives entitle us to ask exemptions or mitigations when our evil deeds are judged, still less to dream of rewards. If man is doomed, you and I are doomed; if salvation exists anywhere for man, it is for us. When we reach this border-land between absolute despair and a hope beyond all we can ask or think, Ascension-day breaks on us like the light of seven suns. He has gone up on high. He is where our eyes cannot follow, with the God who is and was and is to come, His Father and our Father. He is not separated by space from the creatures whose nature He bears, nor in any sympathy; in all things He is what He was when He bore their infirmities, was made sin for them and died their death. What makes up His perfect Humanity, His Truth, Justice, Purity and Sympathy, is our inheritance. It is the new and glorious clothing He has provided for us if we will put it on. We do put it on when we remember that it is His for us, and when we give up high conceits of ourselves, have no wish to be unlike our brethren, and are certain that all things are theirs, whether life or death, things present or things to come, because they are Christ's and Christ is God's. So we see how St. Paul drops so easily from the heaven of heavens to that vulgar morality about lying, thieving, corrupt talk, obedient children, reverent parents, and faithful masters and servants. It is very vulgar to talk against lying. Yet in all these thousands of years, what have legislators, philosophers and religious men done, by decrees, calculations and terrors of the future, to extinguish lying, or even to abate it? Have they not each in their own way endorsed different lies and systems of lies: the inward lies of self-flattery, and the deep, devilish lies that wear the form of piety, are circulated for the soul's sake, are the most complicated and spread the fastest? Deliverance from lies, in their simplest, most natural shape and in their inward essence, would surely be the great deliverance for us all. I do not think we shall obtain it, Brethren, or that Society or its members will become brave and truthful, until we take St. Paul's words in their full, broad sense: "Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour, for we are members one of another." There is the secret. We do not believe we are members one of another. We do not believe there is one living and true Head of us all, who feels for us, cares for us, knows our secrets, wishes us true in our inward parts, and is Himself the Truth. We do not believe this in our hearts, however we cant about it with our lips. So, under one pretext or another, because a man wants to deceive us and so we may deceive him, or because men must be cheated for their own good, or because faith need not be kept with heretics and enemies of God, we claim the right to hug our darling falsehoods and circulate them, and live in them, until communion with the God of Heaven, and therefore with men on earth, becomes impossible. This greatest and most radical of vices belongs to the beggar and the millionaire, to him who sells votes and him who buys them, to the Statesman and the Churchman. If faith in One who ascended on high and united us all to God and to each other can root it out, why should we doubt that this is also the most effective remedy for the crimes that tempt one class and not another, and that Society agrees to punish? There is no longer any question about this. We have condemned the thief, as we had to, whatever his motives and whatever excuses his ignorance and debasement offer, which we let him grow up in. The awe these punishments awaken is good for us all, if they are evenly administered, not excessive, not aimed at one kind of wrongdoer more than another, and not measured to suit popular opinion. It strengthens our belief in an infallible Judge and a Righteousness that must expose and expel evil. But you will not impress even that conviction on the thief, and certainly will not make him a good citizen, unless you appeal to something in him besides dread of vengeance. He will not see that he was wrong unless you show him a standard of right, tell him it is his, and tell him he can reach it. If you promise that Society will forgive and forget his offences, you deceive him, for he finds out constantly that it will not. If you assure him there is a pleasure in right acts that wrong acts lack, you may be speaking your own experience, and there are moments when it will be his. But at other moments he will feel keen delight in defying the principles his conscience recognizes, and not defying them will cost him intense effort and agony. Remembering those, he will suspect you of a pious fraud. The Spirit he has obeyed will whisper that there are charms in his service which these monitors, with their wise saws and modern instances, know nothing of. Too often he will return to the house swept and garnished, with other spirits worse than himself. But suppose you can tell him that he may recover his rights as a member of Society even if Society never recognizes them; that he may have a pure, clear conscience however much he hankers after evil; that he may resist the evil Spirit however many arguments, fresh or old, tempt him down, arguments bystanders do not feel the force of. Then you have helped make him a new creature in the sight of his fellows, in all his dealings with them and purposes toward them. You do this when you tell him that a divine righteousness dwells in Christ for him and for us, a Righteousness Christ declared to be meant for all when He ascended to the right hand of God. The same principle applies to husband and wife, father and child, master and servant. You cannot make these relations right by penalties. Penal Law takes no notice of them until they become disorganized and intolerable. How are you to keep them from sinking that far? All the health of Society depends on theirs. What diet have you to ward off sickliness in them, what medicine to cure it? When you have tried other methods, you will be driven to this. You will have to own that these relations are constituted in Christ, the Head of mankind; that He maintains their cause; that our selfishness is fighting a deadly battle against them; that they must perish utterly if selfishness is omnipotent; and that they can be quickened into new life if we believe that One has ascended on high who has led captive our captivity to selfishness and every other tyrant. When we think of the Ascension in this way, we do not for an instant lose interest in the Death and Resurrection. We recover the meaning they had when we first received them as children, or when they brought us, in our guilty manhood, news of a Father who had blotted out our sins and justified us. The speculations that have occupied us since, about how Christ's death works for our salvation and the limits beyond which His Resurrection's blessings cannot reach, become wearisome and hopeless. We leave them to leisurely people engaged in no conflict for life. We are content to receive the message of Redemption by the Cross and of Christ's victory over the grave as He and His Apostles delivered it. The Cross becomes far more than ever the sign in which alone we hope to conquer, once we acknowledge the Lamb in the midst of the Throne, the object of all love and worship to the powers in heaven as well as on earth. The Resurrection becomes far more than ever the strength of the dying man, and our strength as we commit each brother to the ground, when the voice rings through all creation, "I am He that liveth and was dead; and behold, I live for evermore, and have the keys of death and of hell." The individual sufferers in the family on earth never know what has been done for them till they count themselves part of the family in heaven. This brings me to my text. I have not spoken of it until now because I think its force is felt only after we have considered the purpose of the Epistle, whose very essence is concentrated in the prayer these words introduce. There is some doubt about the words themselves, "Of Whom the whole family in Heaven and Earth is named." On the reading we have adopted, "Jesus Christ our Lord" is the antecedent. But those words are omitted in several manuscripts that recent editors judge most trustworthy. There is some internal evidence for omitting them: the word πατριὰ, which St. Paul uses only here, is then at once connected with Πατὴρ, and the name gains a new emphasis. And since ἐξ οὗ, not ἐν ᾧ, begins the sentence, it applies more directly to the Father than to Christ. We need not struggle for the common reading because it witnesses to Christ as the Elder Brother of the Family. The whole Epistle witnesses to that, and the name of Father, your Father and my Father, implies it. But belief in a Universal Patriarchate in heaven and on earth is the very belief that vindicates all earthly relations as divine, and that destroys the notion of a Universal Patriarch on earth claiming the power of Heaven. Our ancestors testified against that notion for their own consciences and national freedom. Neither protest can be prized too dearly. But on us has fallen the duty of bearing it for a still larger interest and a wider circle. When we understand what our controversy is, all paltry special pleading, all arguments by which rival religionists establish their own wisdom and their opponents' folly, will be cast aside with contempt. Our cause is the cause of Romanists as much as of Protestants. We shall be declaring that there is a Society broad enough for every kindred and tongue, which excludes none who do not exclude themselves by denying that there is a pure, redeemed and glorious Humanity that all may put on by casting away the filthy garments of their own vanity and selfishness. In it, those who have fought the good fight and washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb, who are ever before God and go no more out of His Temple, are united with those still fighting hard here against the world, the flesh and the Devil. In it, the worst and the best, the sinner who has most ado to keep from utter shipwreck and the saint in glory, need and receive the same food: the flesh of Him who was given for the life of the world, and who is ever living for us at the right hand of His Father. ## THE HELP OF BELIEVING IN A SPIRIT WHO HAS BEEN GIVEN TO US ::: {.center} Whit- Sunday ::: ::: {.center} [June]{.smallcaps} 12, 1859 ::: > "*For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind*."—2 [Timothy]{.smallcaps} i. 7. *The passage:* God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind. [Many]{.smallcaps} readers of this passage, I doubt not, put the emphasis on the word *us*. They take St. Paul to be saying: "An ordinary man in your position would fear and tremble. You oversee a society made of contradictory elements, troubled by strange doctrines, and exposed to a commercial and corrupt city. Such a man would be assailed by cowardly thoughts of what others will say of him, crushed by responsibility, and anxious about future calamities. But it is not so with you or with me. Young as you are, God has put you beyond such temptations by a peculiar gift. You are as free from fightings and terrors as I, your spiritual father, am." Those who think the blessing of Whit-Sunday belonged only to the apostolic age will naturally take this interpretation, and they can tolerate no other. But I think it conflicts with the direct language and the whole tone of these pastoral letters, and of all St. Paul's letters to the Churches. Timothy, to judge by what is said to him, felt keenly the greatness of his task and often shrank from its weight. He was as conscious of inexperience and feebleness as any teacher or ruler in any age. No privilege saved him from fear or from the bondage fear brings. If he had been exempt, he would have been wholly unlike his teacher. Paul was so beaten down by fears within as well as fightings without that he despaired even of life. He said he had the sentence of death in him, and at times it seemed about to execute itself. What encouragement, then, could Paul give Timothy? Precisely what his own experience had driven him to. His own spirit might be palsied with fear, but a Spirit was near him and with him who was not a Spirit of fear. To that Spirit he could turn as Deliverer from fear, Restorer of energy, Quickener of hope. That Spirit had been given not to Paul but to the Family of which he was a member. If he had it in any special sense, it was only because he served that Family and needed powers not his own to make his ministry effectual. All his comfort lay in the assurance that this was God's Spirit. The Spirit is not bound by the limits or swayed by the changes of those He governs. He can at the same moment control, renew, and set free myriads of human wills, as the sun acts on myriads of living things at every stage of growth or decay. Paul believed that Pentecost spoke of a real gift, a living Person and not a floating influence. He believed it was the last, highest, most permanent of God's blessings. It was implied in the creation and constitution of Man, but could not be conferred in its fulness and universality until Christ had glorified the nature of Man at the Father's right hand. Believing this, Paul could bid Timothy remember in his darkest hours, as he did himself, that they had been baptized with the Spirit not of fear but of Power, of Love, of a Sound Mind. Assuredly, my brethren, this faith would have failed Paul, and been no refuge in his battles with principalities and powers (which he found more terrible than any battle with flesh and blood), if he had supposed that we of after-days would not have the same right to it as he. He lived to bear witness that when Christ "ascended on high, He received gifts for men, yea, even for the rebellious, that the Lord God might dwell among them." That witness was either false for his own time, or it is true for us, for our children, and for all whom the Lord our God shall call. Whitsuntide has declared to generations of every nation and tongue that the message was for them. Let us see what lessons of strength, consolation, and warning each one here may gather from words first written for Timothy. I\. I suppose we have all been tempted to say the reverse of the Apostle. We have read in the records of the past, or seen among our contemporaries, such strange panic and cowardice, with counsel and heart failing just when they were most needed, that we have exclaimed, "Surely this is Divine! Outward pressure cannot explain such a loss of nerve, for terrible circumstances often evoke the greatest courage. Natural want of courage cannot explain it either, for those same men at other crises were capable of manly effort. Their fear is supernatural. God has given them this spirit of Fear." This way of speaking is common and has strong excuse. Many awful sentences of Scripture might be alleged for it, and I think they find an echo in our own consciences. But I think our consciences will also tell us that we pervert those passages if we set them against St. Paul's doctrine here. We need not study the past or other men to learn what the spirit of fear is. Each of us knows its grip in himself. Each has trembled before the opinion of Society, or of the small part of it he deals with, or of some particular man. Each has perhaps known the cowardice that springs from self-distrust, from imagined lions in the path, from doubt which road to take, or from foretaste of coming evils. Some shrink at the thought of certain acts being exposed, and how many that "some" would include! But is there one of us who has not been conscious of tempers, habits, and states of mind that he longs to hide from the eye of the Judge to whom he is sure they are most hateful? Now every one of these fears has a real justification, not just an apparent one. The verdict we dread will very likely go against us. The sense of feebleness is no delusion. The actual sorrow often surpasses our dream of it. The bad act has been done and will someday be discovered. A man lies to himself if he says, "I have not been as unkind, base, or insincere as my heart witnesses; these things are not as much at war with a pure, loving, true God as I supposed." And yet this reasonable fear takes away my reason and makes me false and slavish. Why? Because I am not obeying the perfect reason; my will is out of harmony with the free and just will. I am afraid of things that have no right over me, but claim it once I have broken loose from my lawful allegiance. The old Scriptures may well show God giving men over to their fear, leaving them to feel what they are without Him. That is consistent with the Apostle's fuller statement that the Spirit of Fear is not God's Spirit, not the Spirit He gives. It is the Spirit we are revolting against when fear gets the mastery. Only by recollecting the continual presence of a Spirit of Power, Love, and a Sound Mind can we shake off its tyranny and recover the dignity of men. II\. The Spirit of God is said to be a Spirit of *Power*. Consider the kinds of power men bow to and covet most. None is more familiar or wonderful than the *Orator's*. It is felt in the most savage tribes and the most civilized; it is hard to say whether the North-American Indian or the Greek in the age of Pericles or Philip shows it best. It is not material force. It acts on the understandings, and still more on the wills, of men. It may be an immoral and detestable power, leading to every mischief and lying habit of mind. Yet you cannot banish it from your commonwealths, or diminish it without diminishing human sympathy and making men more inhuman. Whence does it come? How can it be directed? Consider the story we read today. Galilean fishermen, noted for an uncouth dialect, meet at a Jewish feast where men from all over the Roman and Parthian Empires are gathered. Suddenly they speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gives them utterance. They make themselves understood, and the hearers feel that through these stammering tongues One is speaking who knows what is in them and what they want. We have a stereotyped explanation: the Apostles had to know different languages to preach effectively. The Apostles themselves never speak of this necessity and seem unaware of it. What they did need was to learn that the words they used, in their own tongue or any other, were not their own. Words are an awful trust, for which they must answer to Him from whom they came. Words are the instruments of communion between men, not because men are animals but because they are spirits, and a Divine Spirit is speaking to them. Is this not the secret of the orator's power? Is there not a Spirit of Power from whom all his capacity to influence his fellows is derived? If he remembers his responsibility, confesses that Spirit as the source of his power, and never dares to trifle with truth and honesty (above all under any religious pretence), what health there will be in his speech, and what health it will impart! His words will clear the air of mists instead of raising them. And each of us, though without the orator's gifts, will feel the grandeur and fearfulness of the organ of speech committed to us all. With shame and repentance we shall confess St. James's lesson: the tongue is a little member that no *man* can tame, needing another ruler to keep it from sending out poison, and from "setting on fire the course of Nature, even as it is set on fire of hell"! That is what malicious, lying words can do, and that is their origin. Without this Spirit of Power to quell and purify them, they will laugh to scorn all the laws, conventions, charms, and restraints our wisdom can invent. There is another power, often mixed with this but different in direction and nature, which also is limited to no country, circumstance, or stage of cultivation. The *physician*, the healer, is welcomed in all lands under different titles, always because he can act on the life of men and oppose what threatens it. In some regions he is hardly distinguished from the *priest*, who also deals with life and death, a life or death that may continue when the ordinary physician's resources are exhausted. Think how these powers, combined or separate, in alliance or hostility, meet you wherever you travel! Think how they mingle with ancient traditions, philosophical theories, hints and promises of good that you fear to weaken, and with an immorality, lying, and slavery that drag nations to perdition! Think how vain the statesman's efforts are against them when they are most pernicious. In our time he generally gives up the attempt as hopeless, even as wrong, and thinks his best chance is some tolerable compromise with those who claim supernatural agencies of whatever kind. He cannot stop to ask what kind they are: whether the priests invoke a Destroyer or a Deliverer, or each by turns; whether they count Cursing or Blessing their mightiest weapon; whether they hold Truth or Falsehood the more religious. But suppose we refer every power physicians or priests exert over the bodies or spirits of men to that Spirit who dwelt in Jesus Christ. Suppose we believe He came to baptize us with that Spirit, and that God has given us that Spirit and no other. Then all love of cursing, all tampering with falsehood under any pretext, and all attempts to gain reputation or influence by practising on men's ignorance or baseness are nothing less than blasphemy against the most high God, a trafficking with the Spirit of Evil. Such sins are more terrible and penal in those appointed as witnesses of His goodness and ministers of His gifts than in anyone else. The Christian priest ought to know that he is as liable to this abuse of power as any Brahmin, and that in him it is far more criminal. It directly contradicts the doctrine of God's Spirit which he exists to proclaim, and tries to quench His light in himself and others. This reflection, if anything can, will drive him to that Spirit as his only refuge from his own presumption and wilfulness. Once more. The simplest, barest exhibition of human power is the royal Will that gains supremacy by claiming it, and compels individuals and nations, they know not how, to own that it is meant to rule them. It is as idle to deny that such a force exists as to deny the force of sea or wind. To pretend that policy or knowledge has found adequate precautions against it, or against men's yielding to it, is to deny the facts of history, as Canute's courtiers denied the facts of Nature. But somewhere there is a limit to this force, and we all feel and know it. We are certain that the most settled, organized tyranny is still a rebellion and must end as rebellions end. What is the warrant for this conviction? Whit-Sunday says it is this: the highest power, the all-ruling Will, was manifested in One who took the form of a Servant and came not to be ministered unto but to minister. He who thus descended is the same who ascended far above all Heavens, that He might fill all things. His noblest gift to men is His own Spirit of Power. To that Spirit all spirits must at last bow. Any merely arbitrary will, one that does not seek to deliver and raise those it rules, must be broken in pieces. The only effectual power will be proved at last to be the power that can give up itself. III\. If the world was to be taught that all power of speech, of imparting life and wisdom, of governing societies, is of God and His gift, no teachers could be more suitable than those Galileans. They spoke one rough dialect that their own countrymen counted ridiculous, had no art but mending nets, and had trembled before priests and rulers and even before men-servants and maid-servants. Yet I know not whether there was not something more wonderful in choosing them to show that all *Love* is of God, and that His Spirit is the author of whatever love men act out or feel. As Jews they had learnt to despise and hate all the uncircumcised. As Galileans they must often have been jealous of the more favoured part of their own race that looked down on them. They were chosen by a Teacher who bore all their narrowness and ignorance, and who trained them by careful and gracious discipline for their work. Their affection had been drawn out towards Him, and had bound them to each other, though each continually desired to be chief in His kingdom. But that affection was tried and broke down. It failed towards the Master; what strength could it have towards their fellows? If love was their own, or had its springs in them, it must have been utterly dried up. Then reflect how it burst forth and poured itself out, first on Jews who scorned them, then on Gentiles whom their religion had taught them to scorn. It had to endure not just sudden violent hostility but continuous, growing bitterness and contempt in new and unsuspected forms. All the while they were proving and confessing that they had the same inclinations to be spiteful and malicious as ever, with the added irritation of disappointed affections and hopes. So they were trained to understand that around them and with them was a Spirit of ever-living, long-suffering love, whose heights and depths they could never measure. They could only say, It is the Spirit of Him who died upon the Cross and in that death manifested the very nature of His eternal Father and His purposes to men. This Spirit has been given to us, that we may be moulded to that nature and be heralds of that purpose. While we are subject to His guidance and actuated by His energy, we can claim men of all kindreds and nations as children of the same Father and brothers of one another. We can bind them into a society of witnesses to Christ's redemption of, and dominion over, the world. Trusting our own powers and our own love, we should be the feeblest of creatures for good, and, through the greatness of the commission we had set at nought, the most potent for mischief. Brethren! this Whitsuntide lesson we must get by heart, as these Galileans did. We have talked of our love to men; some have spoken of their love to God. Both professions may be real. There may be genuine sympathy in many hearts for the miseries of fellow-creatures whom they see or only hear of, prompting active exertion as well as kind words. There may be gratitude, sometimes overpowering, to God for mercies and forgiven sins. But, oh, the infinite danger that this philanthropy becomes a hollow fashion, its phrases repeated today because we had a corresponding feeling yesterday! The well-being of hundreds of millions may become less dear to us than the triumph of a party. We may turn grand sentences about those millions into tools for our own beggarly, selfish triumphs. Not only grand philanthropy but private friendship once cordial, and love once passionate and deep, may be chilled and quite frozen by petty jealousies and suspicions. More perilous still are the warm religious emotions that seem to carry the pledge and seal of eternity. How hard to admit frankly that they are not what they were! How many arts a man will be tempted to use to persuade himself they are unchanged! He will try to keep warm by denouncing others. At last he may cast aside all faith, declaring it a delusion, and say he would save others, if he could, from the imposture to which he yielded. Where was his original mistake? What is the original falsehood of all who speak of their love to God and man? It is this: they take credit to themselves for a love that moves them to noble thoughts and good deeds but has another source than their hearts, a source divine, not earthly; universal, not partial. How may they be saved from casting off all that is true in them when they find they have been false? By frankly confessing that falsehood to the Spirit of Truth who is convincing them of it. They must own the horrible vanity and conceit of supposing that they loved men better than their Father in Heaven loved them. They must own that their love was only the result or reaction of His, and that they can be only His agents and ministers, declaring by words or deeds a little of what He is. IV\. Finally, this Spirit is said to be the Spirit of a sound mind. In the last century even wise and great divines feared to touch subjects like these. They said there was no calculating what self-willed fanaticism, extravagant heresies, and contempt of guidance and authority had followed and could follow from the notion that Christ had given His Spirit not to doctors but to human beings. They were right. It always will be impossible to calculate the vagaries of the human spirit. It is impossible to foresee the fancies and wild conceits that haunt the student in his chamber. The same is true of the union of physical emotions and nervous impressions with deep moral conviction in the devotee. It applies to the practices and doctrines suggested partly by the penitent's sin-sick conscience and partly by the confessor's over-cleverness. It applies to the effect on a people kept in ignorance of a sudden rush of light into their darkness. And it applies to the indignation that comes from the discovery, which the Scriptures give if they give nothing else, that God's highest blessings are meant for the wayfarer, mixed with the confused feeling that the wayfarer must have faculties that reach all heights and sound all depths. You cannot estimate the wildness and madness into which man may be led. Therefore *you* cannot provide the remedy or any adequate protection against it. Do you think you know of one? Perhaps you will say it lies in the Church. But Whit-Sunday says the Church stands on the gift of a divine Spirit, and that this is the very ground of its stability and universality. Perhaps you say the Scriptures will be the defence. Be it so; open them as wide as you can. Their testimony is that baptism with this Spirit is the end of all God's dispensations. Must you not then have made a prodigious mistake in trying to keep this knowledge back for fear of the excesses it will lead to? May not this be, after all, the one security against those excesses? May not the Spirit of God keep better watch over the minds He has taken into His guardianship than you can? May not the great lesson you have to teach the student, the devotee, the penitent, the confessor, the ordinary wayfarer, be this: that a Spirit of a sound mind is near them? He knows how all are tempted and what temptation is strongest for each. He is seeking to unite them in a common fellowship and guide them to the same haven. He will let none who would act rightly lack the necessary aids, and none who would seek truth be lost in falsehood. He will continually assist the desire to do right in those conscious of an inclination to wrong, and will kindle afresh the zeal for truth in those who feel themselves beginning to acquiesce in plausible lies. To tell men that such a guiding Spirit of Power, of Love, of a Sound Mind has been given them and is with them is not dangerous but safe. Believing this, they need not sink into imbecility and fear. They can cultivate every power they are conscious of, sure that God Himself is cultivating it for the good of His creatures. They can overcome the tendencies to narrowness, baseness, and selfishness that work on them every moment, knowing that the love, power, and wisdom that created earth and heaven are also at work on them. They can avoid the thousand motives to fanaticism, superstition, and exaltation of their own intellects, because the Spirit of all Wisdom has not left them to choose their own follies. Only we must continually remember that this Spirit, though given to us, can never be boasted of as ours. He is with us as light and air are with us, to raise us out of ourselves and teach us of the Father and the Son, from whom He ever proceeds. Therefore we truly keep Whit-Sunday in confessing our rebellion and vanity, in blessing the Father for the redemption of mankind by His Son, and in eating the flesh and drinking the blood of that Son who gave Himself for the life of the world. In this we begin to learn something of the unspeakable gift of which it bears witness to us and to our race. ## FAITH IN THE TRINITY NOT FAITH IN A DOGMA ::: {.center} Trinity Sunday ::: ::: {.center} [June]{.smallcaps} 19, 1859 ::: > "*One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and in you all*." —[Ephesians]{.smallcaps} iv. 5, 6. *The passage:* There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. [There]{.smallcaps} was a time when Trinity Sunday sermons were expected to be controversial. On other days the preacher might speak to the concerns all his hearers shared: their conscience of evil, their desire for good, the toils and temptations of the week. On this day he had the privilege, or the duty, of refuting objectors and establishing his conclusions. He might show strategic skill in choosing his ground. He might defend, and defy the deniers of our Creeds to prove anything against a mystery beyond all human thought. Or he might argue that a long tradition outweighs a small minority of dissenters. Or he might gather texts from various parts of the Bible and argue that together they make the doctrine more probable than the opposing texts make it improbable. Or he might rest everything on one text, claiming that if it stays in the Canon, the question is settled for all who grant Scripture divine authority. I do not think anyone who follows our Services can see Trinity Sunday as standing apart from the other Sundays or needing exceptional treatment. Since Advent we have been tracing a series of manifestations, of which this day records the latest and deepest. No one *doctrine* has been added to another. Every Collect, Epistle, and Gospel has been about a *Person*. He has taken on our weak mortal nature and shown power and glory through that weakness. He has been tempted by the Devil, has died, been buried, known the secrets of the dark world, and risen. He has ascended to His Father, and sent His Father's Spirit to dwell with men, to bind all tribes and nations into one fellowship, and to awaken and govern the powers of their spirits. This Sunday proclaims that the day has come when, as Christ promised, we may know that He is in the Father, and we in Him, and He in us, and so worship the Father and the Son in the Unity of the Spirit. From now on all our Sundays are Sundays after Trinity, in which this Name and this Worship unfold themselves in the struggles, temptations, and sufferings of our common and personal life. Services like these, which have educated the people of our land from age to age, must have been meant, in St. Paul's words, to bring them into "*the fellowship of this Mystery*." Our discourses contradict them if they present the Mystery as something common men *cannot* share, something hopelessly cut off from them. Any scholastic defence, however plausible, that leaves this impression undermines the faith we have thanked God today for the grace to confess. Will the argument from Tradition confirm it better? The best part of the Tradition tells of times when this faith belonged not to a majority but to a tiny, despised minority, and those were the times it was held most vigorously. As our Collect says, those who confessed the glory of the Eternal Trinity and worshipped the Unity learnt their lesson in adversity and had to pray to be kept through it. Are we to throw away these healthful recollections for the pleasure of telling opponents they must be wrong because East and West are against them, as they were once against Athanasius? And what comes of heaping up isolated texts? I believe this: first, a confused notion, pressed on others and reacting on ourselves, that we are fighting for an idea of ours which needs ingenuity and special pleading, not for a truth of God that can defend itself; second, that the Bible is a heap of sentences and decrees that can hardly be made to give a harmonious sense; third, that it is wise to suppress passages which, if there is a Revelation, matter as much for our well-being as those we insist on. And if we rest our reasoning on one text, God's providence may well tear that one away from us, to teach us the difference between His methods and ours, and to convince us that the Name of Him who inhabits Eternity does not depend on the reading of a manuscript. The passage I have taken from Ephesians is not one a controversialist would quote to establish the Trinity. Opponents have often seized on it, because the word "One" occurs so often and because it so clearly distinguishes the "one Lord" from the "one Father." Our method of arguing has had no unhappier result than this: we are supposed to have an interest in passing over passages that stress the Son's dependence on the Father, or the oneness of the Godhead, as if our creeds could not be falsified without that dependence and oneness, and as if Trinity Sunday were not the day we profess to worship the Unity. Precisely because St. Paul's words contain no dogmatic statement, and because Unity is their subject, they strikingly illustrate the course the Church takes in preparing us for this festival and in initiating us into its meaning. I\. The Apostle speaks first of one *Lord*. To a Jew these words would at once recall the sentence he had heard repeated since he could speak: "*The Lord thy God is One Lord*." Much of its emphasis lay in the word *Thy*. Many things surround you and crave your worship; but there is *One* near you, ruling you, caring for you, jealous of you, who claims your heart for Himself. He is the Lord. What impression did this name make on those Jews who had walked with Jesus in the streets, sat with Him in the ship on the lake, and been with Him on the Mount of Transfiguration and in Gethsemane? They called Him Lord and Master, and He said they did well, for He was that. But how could they keep this name from interfering with their homage to the One Lord whom Israel worshipped, whom no one had seen or could see? It was a deep, practical question affecting their whole lives. Was there not an infinite danger that their lives would be divided, their affections more at war than their understandings, so that they reverenced two Lords instead of One, the Visible more than the Invisible? II\. "*One Faith*." The Jew had been taught to put his whole trust in the Lord God of Israel. Trust was the principle of his being, and losing it he lost everything. Objects of sense appealed to him every moment; he could care for them or dread them, but he could not trust them. Without one faith they became his masters, nothing bound him to his fellow Israelites, and his manliness forsook him. The disciples of Jesus felt that He appealed to their trust, and to that of everyone He healed or spoke to. They felt that giving Him unlimited trust made them better men, and withholding it made them more the victims of their own senses, inclinations, and follies. But how could they give Him this entire trust and also give it to the one Lord of whom the Law and the Prophets spoke? III\. "*One Baptism*." "*I baptize you with water*," said John in the wilderness, "*One cometh after me, Who shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire*." John's Baptism had witnessed that the One God of their fathers was calling them to turn from the visible objects and secret lusts they had yielded to, that He was sending away their sins and confirming His covenant. Who was this Other, coming with mightier power to bestow a greater blessing? What was the Spirit with which He would baptize? The Apostles must often have asked themselves these questions. Our Lord Himself forced them upon them at the last Supper. He spoke, in language that sometimes seemed unintelligible and sometimes sent a flash of strange light into their souls, of a Comforter whom He would send from the Father, a Spirit of Truth, who would teach them that He was in the Father and the Father in Him. What a sense of division from their nation, and in their own hearts, they must have felt then, and what a glimpse of a Unity they had never dreamed of! IV\. "*One God and Father of all*." The Law and the Prophets had spoken of one Lord. But who had uttered this name of Father? It came forth when Jesus went up the Mount to proclaim the fulfilment, not the destruction, of what had been said of old. The essence of His discourse was gathered into that word, and it pervaded all His speech and acts afterwards. But it was spoken out in full power when He said, "*I ascend to My Father and your Father, to My God and to your God*." Then belief in "One God and Father of all" began to break through Jewish exclusiveness, and to show that this was the final result of the Jewish election. There is One God and Father of all because there is One Man who can say, "I came from the Father and am come into the world; again I leave the world and go to the Father." I have shown how each of these clauses rises above the other and helps interpret it. But I have also shown that each contains something that seems to threaten the very unity it witnesses to. Only when the "One Lord" had given the disciples, who were struggling to keep up one faith in Him, the baptism of the one Spirit, could these divided men, with opposing tastes, inclinations, and tempers, "in the power of the Divine Majesty worship the Unity." They could do so because they confessed the new Name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, with which they were to seal all the nations. V\. The last clause, "*Who is above all, and through all, and in you all*," recalls words I spoke of a few months ago, St. Paul's on Mars' Hill: "*Though He be not far from every one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being*." I said many would call those words Pantheistical if they did not have an Apostle's sanction. These words *have* been so called, though they have the sanction of the same Apostle. I would rather men uttered this thought, at least to themselves, than held it without confessing it. Then they might begin to ask what that Pantheism is which they dread, and have a right to dread; whether nothing in the heart of us all responds to it and feeds it; whether it can ever be met by mere hard, dry contradiction; and whether the mystery of the Trinity in Unity, which we consider today, is not the true faith that justifies all that is true in Pantheism and removes what is immoral and dangerous. \(a) The first words, "*Who is above all*," would suggest Greek or modern Pantheism to no one. They recall the old Hebrew song, "*O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy Name in all the earth; Thou hast set Thy glory above the Heavens*." He was far above the Sun, Moon, and Stars that the Heathen worshipped; they spoke of Him, but He could not be in them. Then comes the other part of the hymn, just as truly Hebrew, and without which the first could not be so: "*What is* Man *that Thou art mindful of Him, and the Son of Man that Thou visitest Him? Thou crownest Him with glory and honour, Thou hast set Him over the works of Thy hands*." The Lord is above Sun, Moon, and Stars because He is more related to man than to them. Man cannot see Him in them, because He visits and cares for *man*. Yet the contrast is wonderful: such glory and such insignificance! What does it mean? Who can tell? The Epistle to the Hebrews gives the New Testament interpretation of this Old Testament marvel: "*We see not yet all things put under man; but we see Jesus, Who for the suffering of death was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour*." The Son of God has stooped to the lowest condition of the creature. The Son of Man, the Head of the Race, who has "tasted death for every man," is exalted far above all things. Here the glory above the Heavens appears in inseparable, eternal union with sympathy for the beggar and the outcast. That glory is the glory of an Infinite Love, which could only be revealed in a death on the Cross. We may bow to no created thing, for He who has united us to Himself is one with that Father who is above all. \(b) Now comes the phrase in which Pantheism seems to lurk: He is "*through all*." The words are startling, I grant. Would to God they startled us more, and made us tremble habitually! We find ourselves in a strange medley of circumstances, some petty, some grand, some springing from the present hour, some stamped with the dust of ages. We try to arrange and manage them. The old legend of St. Peter is repeated in our experience: he asked leave to govern the world for a day, spent it chasing one goat over the hills, and lamented in the evening that it was too wild for him. Yet there is an order in this medley. It belongs to a Universe, not a Chaos. Where does its law come from? The old Heathen Philosopher said, "There must be a soul in them." What was that soul? If it governed the world's movements, must it not be a God? Here was Pantheism, the worship of a World-god, in direct contradiction to belief in a God *above* the world. But what was that belief when set against it? The belief in a mere Power commanding all things and sympathizing with nothing, a Power apart from all the powers in the Universe which men must nevertheless acknowledge and which act upon them every hour. Where was the refuge from this miserable alternative for them? Where is it for us? I believe, my brethren, it lies only in recognizing a Filial Word, one with that Father who is *above* all, speaking *through* all things: *in the World*, as St. John says, which "*was made by Him, though the world knew Him not*"; actually God, and yet *with* God. Thus the dream of Greek Pantheism is made real and reconciled with the sternest Hebrew faith in God as absolute and distinct from all His creatures. Thus we are saved both from the heartlessness of an all-excluding Theology and from the equal heartlessness of an all-comprehending Philosophy. But the deliverance is incomplete unless we look at Pantheism on its other side. No Heathen could be *satisfied* with a belief in a soul of the *World*. He had taken the idea from himself. *He* was conscious of something directing his body, his acts, his opinions. If the world's soul was divine, must not his be more so? Must he not be an emanation from the God; must he not be a God? This conclusion is more fearful than the other, yet harder to avoid, because even if conscience shrinks from it, there is something in us that bribes us to it, as it has bribed all men since the serpent said, "*Ye shall be as Gods*." Yet part of the serpent's promise was fulfilled: "Ye shall know *evil*." And the other part has been fulfilled too, because it was not the serpent's promise but God's: "Ye shall know *good*." St. John says: "*In Him* [the Word] *was Life, and the Life was the Light of Men. And the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not*." The good is His light shining into men's hearts; the evil is the selfish darkness that has tried to put it out. We sink into darkness, isolated from our kind, wrapped in solitude and atheism, when we try to become Gods by taking credit for the good ourselves. We rise to the highest state men can reach, that of Sons of God and not Gods, when we confess all the evil as our own, and trust in the Good that is in Christ the Word of God, revealed to us as "*the glory of the Father, full of grace and truth*." When St. Paul preached Christ to the Ephesians, he took from them no treasure they had before. If they no longer > "Had sight of Proteus coming from the sea,\ > Or heard old Triton wind his writhed horn," the voice of Him who spoke to His disciples on the Lake of Tiberias might be heard in the billows and rise out of the ocean's depths. Every familiar hill might have the awe of that Thessalian hill where the Thunderer sat, for from each might be heard the echoes of the voice that said on the mountain in Galilee, "*Blessed are the poor in spirit*," "*Blessed are the pure in heart*." The fountains kept their honour, for everyone who brought a pitcher to them had a right to the words spoken in Samaria: "*The water which I will give thee shall be in thee a well of water springing up to everlasting life*." No old hero who had done good for his city or land lost any of his glory; he gained new glory, for He who is called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, had been the author of every right deed and worthy impulse. The Greeks were right that whatever bore the true sign of humanity was divine; only the inhuman, false elements mixed with it were from beneath and doomed to destruction. So, brethren, with purged ears we should hear the Co-eternal Word speaking to us through sea, earth, and air, and receive all the harmonies of Nature as His, not hers. When those harmonies are broken by the jarring cries of our fellow-men, let us not rest until we hear through them also the voice of a Lord, who alone enables us to understand each other, and without whom no utterance would come from us, for there would be no thought in us. It is awful to think that if we take the wings of the morning, or ascend into Heaven, or dive into Hell, we cannot escape the Divine Presence. It may be more awful that we can talk with no friend or enemy without some message from God coming through them. But could we bear it to be otherwise? If the world, or men, succeeded in preventing God from speaking and manifesting Himself through them, would they not annihilate themselves, and would not Death be the universal lord? \(c) There is one clause more. According to one reading it corresponds exactly to those before: "*Above all, through all, in all*." The reading our translators adopted sacrifices the symmetry of the sentence, but the change directly suggests a meaning that is certainly latent in the other. I cannot doubt that St. Paul wanted the Ephesians to remember that God, who was above all and through all, was in *them* all, and that His presence was the only cause of *their* fellowship and unity. This was the lesson he had pressed throughout his letter. No men were more possessed by belief in spiritual agencies and communications. Their city was a favourite haunt of enchanters; the books of curious arts they burned were worth fifty thousand pieces of silver. They did not need to be told of *a* Spirit ruling and working among men. They needed to know what manner of Spirit it was. A Spirit of divination and imposture, or of truth? A Spirit of self-exaltation, or one that cultivates humbleness and the surrender of high conceits? A Spirit of division, or of love? This was the question for Ephesus in St. Paul's time. Is it not the question for the cities of England in the nineteenth century? We have not fallen on a time when spiritual influences are thought impossible or derided. The unbelief that prevailed a century ago has been vanquished. Our day has openings for as many kinds of spiritual delusion and imposture as the Roman Empire had in the first century. If a few have entered and been cherished by wise as well as foolish, there is no reason why a multitude we cannot dream of should not darken the air and defy all scientific exorcists. So it is needful above all to declare what Spirit we believe is meant to rule the wills and reasons not of a few but of all. It is needful to testify that the Spirit with which we are baptized proceeds from the Father and the Son. He strives with the pride, malice, lusts, and uncharitableness working in us for our ruin; He is working in all that they may submit to the one Lord; He will bring into harmony the scattered fragments of the one Faith throughout the world; He will baptize all at last with the fire that consumes all that is corrupt and false in His Church and Universe; He will not let our spirits rest till they have ascended through the Filial Word to the Father of all; He will make all that is above us, around us, and within us His Temple; and He will enable us to offer our souls and bodies as holy and acceptable sacrifices to Him. Brethren, these, I think, are the deep, practical lessons of Trinity Sunday. I have said that our modern society has the capacity for all the dark superstitions that invaded former ages, and that I see no escape from that danger unless we fully recognize such a Spirit as Whit-Sunday proclaims. May I not say today that Unity is, consciously or unconsciously, the end we are all striving for? Sometimes it looks hopelessly distant, sometimes very near. Must it not be hopelessly distant, its attainment impossible, if it depends on decrees, dogmas, maxims of uniformity, compromises, or eclectic schemes of creatures so ignorant, narrow, and self-exalting as we are? Must it not be very near, if it is involved in the very Nature of the Father of all, of the Son by whom we were created and redeemed, and of the Spirit who works in us to will and do of their good pleasure, if we have been adopted into God's Family and baptized with His Name, that we may show forth His Unity? ## WHY WE ARE GREATER THAN THE GREATEST OF THE PROPHETS ::: {.center} First Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [June]{.smallcaps} 26, 1859 ::: > "*Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he*."—[Matthew]{.smallcaps} xi. 11. *The passage:* Jesus says that among those born of women no one has risen who is greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. [The]{.smallcaps} Festival of John the Baptist has fallen this year in the week that began with Trinity Sunday. That is why I chose this passage, and it may help us understand it. I\. We are sometimes told that John the Baptist produced a *religious revival* in Judæa, like those we hear of in America and sometimes here. Such comparisons are useful because they remind us that men are the same in every generation: the same burdens, the same evils, the same craving for a divine message. I do not object to the assumption that such a message may be heard in one age and country as well as another. The Church's Collect, which calls John the model of later ministers, would mean nothing otherwise, and our Lord's words in the text would mean very little. The more we take John's preaching as the pattern of all common preaching, the better. That is one reason I doubt that it resembled the kind of preaching that aims to awaken a stronger sense of religion in a nation, or a more intense concern for the safety of the individual soul. Some external resemblances are worth noting. John had as little apparent claim to be heard as a preacher appearing today on an English moor. He was unknown until he spoke, and his speech carried its own credentials. It won people of every kind, broke down class distinctions, and compelled those absorbed in business or pleasure to listen. He had no miracles and no patrons. He appealed to the heart, and the heart answered. So far, a modern revivalist has no advantage over the man who drew all Jerusalem, Judæa and the country beyond Jordan. One might say John was at a disadvantage. Modern movements usually employ a good deal of machinery to help produce the effect: the scene is carefully chosen, circumstances are marshalled, and there is arrangement and co-operation. None of this was present with John. He was alone. He had not gone to the wilderness because it was more impressive than a town; he lived there, and it was his home. His dress and food may have differed from the citizens', but they were natural to him and not unfamiliar to his hearers. They would expect them of an Anchorite, and Anchorites in Palestine were common; the Essenes were almost as well known as the Sadducees. A friar's rope and bare feet might draw a moment's notice in an English village, but who would be moved by the sight in Spain or Belgium? So nothing in the mere accidents of the preacher drew the crowds, nor, so far as we can tell, did his manner or tone of voice. These probably suited his words, but then the impression depended on the quality of the words. Here is the characteristic difference between John and the vehement, successful orators in Protestant or Romanist churches with whom he is compared. John did not come into the wilderness proclaiming that people had lost interest in religion and no longer cared for it as they once had. Nothing in Jewish society, whether we learn of it from the Evangelists or from its own historian, would have warranted that complaint. Our Lord never makes it, and He did not tell His apostles to make it when He sent them into the cities and villages. His discourses and other indications suggest a religious age. If there had been indifference to the Scriptures or to worship, it had passed. The Law and the Prophets were read and studied, and countless questions arising from them were eagerly debated. Few openly denied their authority, and few thought one part worth more than another. Herodian statesmen respected their decrees. There might be ignorance and barbarism in some districts, but the people at large were not forgotten; synagogues were set up for them. It may be said that this was only general, national religion with nothing to do with the individual. The Pharisees would have found the charge especially inapplicable. Their holiness might be false or true, but it was not false for enjoining general practices rather than specific ones, for it was minutely specific. Each man might break some law and incur some divine penalty, and each had to ask for himself how to obtain probable forgiveness and escape the penalty. Only by a high individual religious practice could he hope for any blessing in the world to come. And that world was presented to the fears and hopes of Jews more constantly in this period than in any before. Religion had therefore already revived in Palestine before the Baptist. Had he said it had not, and that he came to revive it, his words would have found no answer in the conscience, and all Jerusalem and Judæa would not have gone out to his baptism. His message was especially for those most busy with religion's occupations, professions and duties. It was not for them exclusively, nor with more encouragement than for the indifferent and reckless. It was for them as sharing the same Covenant with all those they looked down on and stood apart from. They could claim only the common hope of Israelites, with no exemption from the terrors coming upon Israel. Yes, John came preaching the Baptism of Repentance for the Remission of Sins to all who needed repentance and remission. In that religious age people felt this need, and felt that no religion they possessed had met it. They did not argue themselves into believing they were sinners deserving God's wrath. They had a sense of plain, direct wrong. Parents who passed for respectable and righteous knew inwardly that they had not done for their children what they could and should have done. Children, perhaps more religious than their fathers, felt they had not honoured or obeyed them as God's law commanded. Men never suspected of false or light swearing knew they had taken God's name in vain just when they seemed to honour it most. Some knew with what frivolous talk they had demolished their neighbours' reputations; others, with what covetous, envious eyes they had feasted on their neighbours' possessions. These violations stood out in clear sunlight before the consciences of people who had committed no overt act against social peace and passed for its creditable, devout members. Was it different for those who knew they had stolen, broken the marriage vow or caused others to break it, or committed foul and secret murder? A weight sat on all of them, sometimes scarcely felt, sometimes intolerably heavy, but always crushing the spirit, making work insincere and rest impossible. What good did it do to ask, "Have others more of this pain than I, or less to expect hereafter?" There it was, and the great necessity was to be rid of it, or of what caused it. The most discriminating judge of the gravity of offences, and the most kindly flatterer of the offender, could do nothing. Only someone who could say, "You and the evil may part company; it may be removed from you as far as the east is from the west," could console him. This was the message from the Wilderness, which the Baptism in the Jordan explained and confirmed. John took no pains to prove where it came from. His only testimonies were those the hearts and consciences of men and women gave. He said, "It is God Who calls to repentance and sends sins away. This Baptism is His, not mine." They said, "It is God Who has made us know our sins, stirs us to repentance, and separates us from evil." Some saw nothing of this in the Baptism. They came because others came, because it might have some virtue, and because they were glad that irreligious people of the lower orders, who had led bad lives, should have this stimulus to be more decorous. For such people, they thought, vulgar preachers like John and outward signs like Baptism might be very useful. These were the leaders of Jewish schools and sects whom John treated so roughly. He asked them who had bidden them flee from the wrath to come. He told them plainly that a day of the Lord was at hand, in some terrible sense a day of wrath, reaching the whole land from highest to lowest. No one would fare better than another except by trusting more simply in Israel's Lord and Deliverer and rejoicing in His appearing. All John's discourse implied that this day of suffering, judgment and wrath was to be desired, since it would fulfil men's longings as well as their fears. He was preparing the way for a Lord whose shoe's latchet he was not worthy to unloose. His Baptism with water was to inaugurate a higher baptism with the Holy Ghost and with fire. II\. How could these characteristics earn John the praise, "*Among them that are born of women none is greater*"? We would have thought Elijah or Isaiah greater. He who spoke knew, and by the light of Scripture we may trace some of the principles of His judgment. If John had merely urged his countrymen to be religious, or to take care of their souls, he might have been greater than earlier prophets, but he would have been so unlike them in language and spirit that comparison would be impossible. Elijah seemed to Jezebel a denouncer of religion, endangering the people's souls, because he made them choose between Baal and the Lord God of Israel, mocked the priests, and finally slew them and overthrew their altars. Isaiah wrote in Jerusalem, where there was no Baal worship and a religious revival and reformation had taken place, yet he cries, "*Bring no more vain oblations. Incense is an abomination to Me. Your new moons and your Sabbaths My soul hateth. I am weary to bear them. Cease to do evil. Learn to do well*." Each is a stern moralist and a witness against evils destroying a nation. The question between Baal and Jehovah was between a God of Power and a God of Righteousness. The same question stood between Isaiah and those who kept the new moons and Sabbaths under Hezekiah. These religious people were not seeking a God who would deliver them from doing evil and teach them to do well. Like Ahab's courtiers, they bowed to a Being they hoped would excuse them from doing well, and allow them to do ill, if they paid Him enough court. This was John's contention with the Pharisees, Sadducees and Herodians of his day. Their religion needed to be shaken, not cultivated. It concealed their moral corruptions instead of uprooting them, sanctioned the social evils under which the nation was crumbling, and hastened the divine wrath that would lay the holy city and Temple in ruins. But it had not succeeded in banishing God from His own world. He still spoke to men in His own clear, mighty voice, however confused and false the cries they sent up to Him. He still fought sin while they persuaded Him to overlook it. He still turned men from the sin in which they were buried, to Himself, and freed the conscience from the burden He had taught it to groan under and confess. He was preparing the perfect manifestation of His own nature, which would also manifest His relation to men and His victory over evil. John's voice in the Wilderness was like that of every earlier prophet who said, "*Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God*," or "*The grass withereth, and the flower fadeth, but the Word of our God shall stand for ever*," or to the cities of Judah, "*Behold your God*!" But it was clearer and stronger than all before it. He gathered their utterances into one simple, grand utterance that could reach every corner of that land and finally of all lands, met the wants of his own time, and would meet those of every later generation. He interpreted the past by the present and showed that the future would interpret both. He made it evident that in every period a Living God, the same yesterday, today and for ever, must be the Reformer and Restorer of nations and society, and that no system, political, philosophical or religious, ever can be. Among those born of women, none ever spoke God's word more directly to men's hearts or unfolded God's purpose more completely. Who then could be greater? III\. "*Notwithstanding*," our Lord adds, "*he that is least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he*." The Baptism of Repentance wound up the old world. The Baptism of the Holy Ghost introduced the new. John's Baptism spoke of an age in which men were regarded as servants of God, but only *as born of women*. The new Baptism spoke of an age in which men are regarded as sons of God in the only-begotten Son. The first declared that the Kingdom of Heaven was near and about to declare itself; the second admitted men into it. The first was in the name of the God of Abraham, Moses and David, the Divine Root, Lawgiver and King of Israel. The second was in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, which was to unite all the families of the earth. Our Lord tells us that the least in His Kingdom, the least who is sealed with His Name, is greater than the greatest Prophet of the earlier world. If John's words were true, and he heralded a Baptism far diviner than his own, this must be so. His witness and influence depended on nothing in himself; they were strongest the weaker he was, and the more their power was felt to be God's. His disciples could not fully feel that, and his voice still sounded as if it rose from earth, not from Heaven. So he must decrease, so that One who spoke *only* God's words and manifested *only* God's life might increase and fill the whole space that John and the earlier prophets had partially and by turns occupied. But the Divine Prophet could not be felt to fill that space, to fill all things, to be the perfect Son, until John had gone away. Then the Father would reveal Him and He would reveal the Father, and the Spirit would come, in whom they are united, who reveals them to men and knits men's hearts together to receive the Revelation. Then God would indeed be all in all, and men would be the living, voluntary members and instruments of the body through which He acts and speaks. To be any member of this body, even the most insignificant, and to know oneself as such, is an honour and knowledge John could not have while on earth, and which he died to attain. This is a wonderful and awful recollection, which we need to keep and apply in many different cases. I reminded you last week that all our Sundays until Advent are Sundays after Trinity, and that each is meant to bring out some practical truth the Mystery holds for our common life. Today I want to take up one of these truths. We are to be preachers of Repentance, as John was. Like him, we are to preach a Baptism for the Remission of Sins, and a coming day of the Lord. The least of us may do all this as John could not, provided we remember what Baptism we and our hearers have received, and have some slight, growing impression of the Name into which we are baptized. That remembrance must make us feel, as John felt, that the position of men brought into covenant and communion with God is a grand one, carrying great responsibilities. Like him, we must urge men to confess, and must confess ourselves, how little we have remembered those responsibilities and how ill we have met them. In urging this confession we may know, as surely as John did, that we speak as God would have us speak, in His words and not ours. We may be sure we are speaking exactly what men need to hear, which would give them the most unutterable relief if they heard and acted on it. But we shall also know what John could know only imperfectly: that every call to Repentance is a message from a Father, coming through a Son and made effectual by a Spirit. Every promise of Remission is an assurance given to the children of a Family through an Elder Brother, who has entered into their sorrows, borne their sins, and given them a Spirit who can perfectly divide the evil in them from the good. The day of the Lord we proclaim will manifest the God whose one Name is Love, in contrast to all hateful and dividing powers, as a consuming fire that will destroy them and their works. To proclaim the Father and the Son is to lay a foundation for righteousness in fathers and reverence in children, and to proclaim the Spirit is to keep the distinctness of Relations from ever interfering with the oneness of our human Fellowship. Lastly, John forbade Jews to say, "We have Abraham to our father," because God could raise up children to Abraham out of the stones. So we must forbid ourselves and all Christians to boast of our Baptism and privileges, since God can raise up, out of the hardest and most hopeless tribes of the earth, witnesses who will worship and glorify, with loving and united hearts, the Name we have often turned into a symbol of Strife and Enmity. ## COURAGE ::: {.center} Second Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [July]{.smallcaps} 3, 1859 ::: > "*Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the Lord thy God is among you, a mighty God and terrible*." —[Deuteronomy]{.smallcaps} vii. 21. *The passage:* You are not to be afraid of them, for the Lord your God is among you, a mighty and terrible God. [It]{.smallcaps} has often been complained, and lately with much force, that the qualities Christians are urged to cultivate are not manliness and courage. Where the Christian ideal is steadily set before a nation or a man, the mind, it is said, becomes submissive rather than energetic. There is apparent evidence for this. The old Saxon strength in England decayed after a time under priestly culture. When unsparing enemies revived it, much of the old Paganism came back into the people's habits and literature. "How," it has been asked, "has that strength been kept in our sons? The upper classes are nourished on heathen books; Homer has at least as much share in their training as the Sermon on the Mount. Rough and even brutal sports were cherished among the lower people until very lately. Are we sure that if more directly Christian influences changed either of these, we should not feel it, if we were asked to resist an invader as other nations are?" I\. I cannot answer, as some might, that courage belongs to the old man, that the world will supply what we need of it, and that the Church's business is to produce tempers which contradict our nature and are commonly scorned. I cannot say this, because I do not find that courage grows of itself, like the appetite for food. I find that my natural inclinations readily cooperate with any discipline aimed at crushing it. Let anyone try to repress the energies men have admired as heroic: he will have an ally in himself and in nearly everyone he tries it on. Now and then he will meet a stout, unbending will that defies him; let him think seriously about what he does for such a will, and what comes of it. But in the great majority of cases the policy will succeed. If heathenism means courage and Christianity its absence, the conversion from one to the other would meet few of the obstacles the Apostles faced among the effeminate Greeks and Asiatics of Claudius's and Nero's day. I believe that the courage of a nation (the word means *heart*) is always liable to weaken and decay, and will wither if left alone. Some religion may hasten its death, but in doing so it proves that it is not from God and is not His instrument for reforming the world. II\. Why then has the doctrine gained currency that courage is the quality of savages? The question is fair, because every authentic record suggests that savages are *not* courageous: crowds of them quail, not before mechanical arts, but before the deliberate valour of a few civilized men. We see in them instincts of wild animals mixed with some higher instincts of men. Under our culture the former are kept down if not extinguished, and the latter hardly awakened. So they lose the force we first found terrible, and perhaps die out from want of nourishment or from diseases we bring them. Then we talk as if civilization destroyed their energy and courage. What this should teach us about courage! It belongs to the spirit; the animal has only the mere force which the spirit is meant to direct and quicken. That force is quickly beaten when alone, and perishes when it merely collides with what ought to be its master. You could sustain and complete it, if you cared to do God's work rather than your own. III\. From observing this fact without reflecting on it comes another error: we conclude that the brutal as well as the savage is allied to the courageous. This is the excuse for cruel sports, which we are told would die of themselves if they were not kept up to preserve a people's martial ardour. If that was the promoters' aim, they failed. Gladiatorial shows did nothing to stop the decay of Roman strength or the need to prop the empire with mercenaries. Spanish bull-fights have grown more popular as the nation has grown more emasculated. The appetite for such spectacles is almost a measure of the decline of valour in those who enjoy them. They feed on displays of strength so as not to feel painfully how it is perishing in them, and their glee at the sufferings of a victim who cannot hurt them shows how unready they are for a real fight with those who can. Many English amusements, in which animals were the actors and sufferers, were much the same; these *could* not prepare men to struggle or endure. It was different when men themselves fought and the spectators insisted on equality between them. But the baseness of gambling soon showed that such sights fitted men less to defend their hearths and homes than to sack and plunder cities. English troops' courage had another root and a healthier training. IV\. A return has begun to the old faith that *courage and humanity* are inseparable companions, not enemies. The misfortune is that Christianity is supposed to be a substitute for humanity rather than identical with it. This is closely tied to the opinion I mentioned, that courage is a heathen virtue, perhaps *the* heathen virtue, which we have cherished by giving our children a semi-heathen education. Let us look at this opinion in different aspects. V\. By a heathen we may mean one who is not a Jew, which is the simplest and most accurate use of the word. In that sense, my text shows that a high estimate of courage was not confined to heathens; if it is ungodly, the chosen people were as ungodly as any. The text is a specimen of its book, which is a series of lessons on how the Israelites might become a cowardly, contemptible people, and how they might become a courageous one, able to resist enemies and be honoured by neighbouring countries. Note especially that idolatry is called the great destroyer of courage, and reverence for the true God with a constant sense of His presence and protection its upholder. How is that compatible with the fact, which I fully admit, that the most illustrious heathen nations were signally brave, and that our forefathers sought to kindle English courage at their fires? It is incompatible if a heathen is *merely* an idolater. It is compatible if we trace, in the history of the great idol-worshipping nations, a continual fight with idolatry and a continual witness against it. Their belief in courage, as a quality raising them above animals, was the greatest protest of the heathen conscience against idolatry, the worship of visible things, which is tied to our animal instincts and always lowers man to the level of what he should rule. So far as a man strove to be courageous, he strove against the impulses that made him an idolater. Who gave him that desire and sustained him in the strife, we shall decide according as we believe or not that God is the Author of every good thing, and according as we refer what is right in man to himself or to his Creator. I do not suppose the bravest heathen ceased to worship by his country's rites; the contrary is notorious. He may have been more devout, but he was certainly less of an idolater. He recognized in the object of worship one to whom his spirit could look up for strength, not an image of himself or of something below himself. No one disputes that his mind was full of contradictions. The greatest was the tendency to glorify the courage in himself and think it set him above men and gods. Because that danger was constant, we have rashly concluded that the virtue heathens prized is self-glorifying. In them, as in all men, it was strongest when least conscious of its own exercise or worth. When it began to vaunt itself, it soon served tyranny, passed into mere love of dominion, and often ended in utter weakness. VI\. Courage, then, must at least be an Old Testament virtue. Before we decide that the difference between the Testaments is that what was precious under one became vile under the other, let us ask on what grounds Moses commands courage and how he says it can 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 enemies this belief was to be their one strength. But to profit by it in the hour of danger, it must have been wrought into their hearts beforehand and become a 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 God of your fathers, who took you into covenant, who loved and chose you when you were the fewest of all peoples, who made you a nation, is with you. *Thy* God: not of the whole nation only, but, because of the whole nation, of every particular Israelite. Each of you, in whatever rank, however lost in the crowd, is to remember that He is thy God, the Author of thy life, the source of thy energies, the protector of thy wife and children. He is yours though no other man in the host should recall Him. He is among you, unseen as when His voice was heard at Sinai, but really here as there; not afar in some immeasurably distant world, but near the whole army and each man in it, speaking to the heart of the leader and of every follower, bidding each go forward in His name as His minister to do His will. A mighty God and a terrible: not less mighty than the night He smote Egypt's first-born, not less terrible than the day when not a beast might touch the mountain. VII\. The Hebrew's courage came from trust in this Being, who had chosen him to do His work and would accomplish it whatever powers united against it. Is that trust set at nought by the revelation in Christ? Does it tell Jew or Gentile that God is not their God? Did Immanuel, God with us, take our flesh to show that God is *not* among us? Perhaps you will say that at least He took the titles "mighty" and "terrible" from the One He called His Father and ours. I cannot find that He did. The God of Love He revealed is declared to be a consuming fire. *Because* we have not come to the mountain that could be touched, with its fire, blackness, tempest and sound of words, but to the New Jerusalem, the Church of the First-born, Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant, and the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than Abel's, *therefore* we are to serve God with more reverence and godly fear. The Gospel shows the inner mind and essential nature of Him who was partly declared, in acts and purposes, under the Law. The fuller the revelation, the deeper the ground of awe, and the stronger the reason not to be frightened by lower and meaner things, since 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 of heathenism, a *tertium quid* that excludes all that is strongest and most vital in both. It is 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 wages unceasing war against what is corrupt, debasing and disorderly in His Creation. Hebrew courage is that of a man who holds himself called by God to this war, acts as His servant, and has nothing to do but take the place in the host God has assigned and fight there. The Greek faith is that man exists to assert his supremacy over inanimate things and over all in himself that is merely animal; Greek courage is fighting on against whatever chooses to be savage and animal rather than human. The Roman, the other form of heathenism without which the Greek would have been incomplete and before which it finally fell, was faith in the power of human order to vanquish disorder; it produced a marvellous courage that upheld a marvellous discipline rather than replacing it. The Hebrew faith sank into the exclusiveness of the later Jew and lost its nature when God's choice and purpose were set against the freedom and unity of mankind instead of leading to them. Hebrew courage, divorced from that faith and allied to that exclusiveness, became a wild, incoherent resolve to keep privileges God had doomed. The Greek faith sank into mere idolatry or mere philosophy and lost all that was elevating when belief in man's power was separated from belief in its divine inspiration; Greek courage, resting only on confidence in intellectual craft, became the cunning and revenge of the slave. The Roman faith sank into mere reverence for organization and the man who could organize, when the God of Order was thought to exist only so that Rome might rule the universe; Roman courage became mechanical, resting on machinery, sure to be overpowered by the real courage of young, living tribes without any. The Gospel restored and renewed the Hebrew faith by proclaiming a God determined to set righteousness and truth in the earth, who gives up His only-begotten Son to fight hand to hand with every form of evil that torments man, and at last to set His face like a flint against death, the unseen world and every power that had disturbed the peace of the universe. The divine Man is the Servant who does the will and carries out the purposes of the everlasting God. But He is the *willing* servant because He is the Son: He enters into His Father's mind and trusts Him because He knows Him. So this Hebrew faith could not be renewed without pouring new life into the Greek faith in the dignity and glory of man, and into the Roman faith in an Order, divine and human, that must overcome all disorder. Out of this union of apparent opposites in the faith of a Father, a Son, and a Spirit proceeding from both, to make men willing and cheerful servants because they are sons of God, there must come a Courage diviner than the Hebrew, more human than the Greek, and more pledged to continual battle with disorder than the Roman. IX\. Such a Courage *must* come, and it did. But because it took the wonderful form of endurance and self-sacrifice, it has been called passive and submissive, not energetic and assertive. It was in the highest degree energetic, a vital power within overcoming natural weakness and cowardice. It was in the highest degree assertive: the most insignificant of the earth dared to say they knew what God willed and had done for men, though the powers of the world and the traditions of centuries called them liars. And remember that though the martyr's courage was in one sense purely spiritual, as all courage must be, whether at the stake or among bayonets, in another sense it witnessed to the dignity and permanence of the body. Without exaggerating the sufferings of those put to death, or supposing them greater than an ordinary sick-bed, we may confidently say that no gnostic opinion, no belief in a fantastic resurrection, made them endurable. The early Christian held fast to the faith that his Lord, the Son of God, had broken through the gates of the grave in an actual body and was in an actual body at His Father's right hand. Such a faith, though it first dwelt oftener in men of feeble, wasted frames, could afterwards quicken the Goth with his stout animal nature; it could awaken the powers of that nature rather than crush them, and support a fight in which the spirit should have the ascendant. These were the very bottles into which the new wine of the Gospel was to be poured. When Greek and Latin civilization was dying because the courage at its root was dead, the Church was to be, among these men, the source of a new and better civilization. X\. Why has the Church so failed in this task? Why has rough animal barbarism mixed confusedly with an effeminate religion, opposing it and refusing to be penetrated by it? Because Churchmen thought they glorified their faith by severing it from the course of God's government, and changed it from His faith into theirs. St. John says Christ has made us kings and priests to God and His Father. "Not kings," say the sacerdotal moralists, "only priests. We are not to rule and reign, which was a Hebrew or heathenish notion; only to offer sacrifices, since 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, and least of all His who is King and Priest for ever, who offered Himself to God to establish His kingdom and that men might dwell with Him in it. Christ's death and resurrection vindicated the royalty of our race as much as its humiliation. His sacrifice, and its acceptance, maintained the rights of both spirit and body. He has shown that only those willing to surrender themselves can maintain the dignity of their kind, and that only those can surrender themselves who resolve to give up not a jot of what belongs to their proper manhood, which Christ has redeemed and united to Himself. Brethren, I have spoken again today of one of the principles involved in the confession we made two Sundays ago. I wished you to feel how that confession united the divine teaching of the Israelite with the witness for a divine humanity so strong in the other nations. It saved the one from passing into worship of a distant, inapproachable God, and the other from becoming an exaltation and deification of the works of God's hands, and of men's. Last Sunday I tried to show how the practical morality of repentance and reformation for conscious wrongdoers is connected with the belief in Father, Son and Spirit. This afternoon I have wished you to consider how the practical morality of cultivating courage, in thought, word and act, in every man's daily business and in the defence of nations, may be strengthened by the same belief. You have thought that the lessons you learnt at school about courage were heathen, not Christian. It was your own fault if you made them so, or allow them to be so now. You were studying witnesses God raised up in heathen nations to testify to a quality that was needed then, without which nations would have perished, and is needed now, without which they must perish. We cannot dispense with these testimonies, and we contradict God's Word if we say what they told us was false. They told us it was a God who put vigour and health into any hero able to do great deeds. They were right. It is yours to know who that God is, *what* courage He would put in you, and how He would have you use it. Do not think these questions needless. All Teutonic peoples are tempted to fancy that they have courage as a natural endowment, and are insulted if told there is any cowardice in them. It is an insult we must all bear, and put on ourselves if others do not. Courage is *not* natural to us. It does not come by fortune, by being born in a certain place, or by descent from brave men. A thousand motives tempt us to cowardice in little things: we are afraid to speak the truth just as it is, to tell friends we know to be wrong that they are, and to assert what we know is right. We court public and private opinion. Self-indulgence takes away our nerve, and more than our nerve, our heart. A cold indifference creeps over us, and we ask what is worth living or dying for. These are bad symptoms in a man and terrible ones in a nation. We can part with no aid, past or present, in overcoming them. We need to admire the Homeric hero, the stern Roman patriot and the medieval knight more, not less, than we have. We need the old Hebrew seer more than ever, ringing continually in our ears: "Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the Lord thy God is among you, a mighty God and a terrible." But we shall hear and understand that voice only if we also hear and join the Apostle's prayer: "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 that is gentle because it is stern and unbending, able to endure all things because it will not tolerate evil, and essentially human because it is essentially divine. ## SAMUEL'S CALL NOT AN EXCEPTIONAL EVENT ::: {.center} Third Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [July]{.smallcaps} 10, 1859 ::: > "*It shall be, if He call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth*."—1 [Samuel]{.smallcaps} iii. 9. *The passage:* If the Lord calls you, you are to say, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." [A reader]{.smallcaps} of Scripture who meets a story like today's first Lesson often reasons this way: "I, or the preacher, may apply this to my own circumstances. I may feel that God is in some sense speaking to me as He spoke to the child Samuel. But I must remember it is not in the same sense, and I must beware of fanatical impressions. Yet I must not discard the plain letter. Samuel, we are told, heard an actual voice, and to doubt that is to doubt inspiration and remake the record to suit our notions." The purpose is honest: a wish to learn from Scripture and a fear of treating it or our own times unfairly. Yet those who take this course fall into sad confusions. I\. It has proved impossible to care seriously for these so-called applications of Scripture. What are they, and what force have they? They are morals attached to the text with more or less ingenuity, worth no more and no less than any other comment on human conduct. They look founded on the Bible but are really drawn from our own observation, experience and logic. When we demand for them the reverence due to Scripture, our hearers' consciences rebel, because the connection is artificial and accidental. We preachers feel it too. The more we honor Scripture in our hearts, the more we see how different our forced moralizings and spiritualizings are from it. We know we have no right to press them as authoritative, and they grow duller and flatter at every step. II\. There are two ways out, and our age has tried or is trying both. One is to surround ourselves with sensible images and impressions. People say that the men of old believed the spiritual world really spoke to this one. Voices and visions came to them, because their surroundings kindled faith instead of repressing it. All was mystery, so why should mysterious communications not be made to them? It is hinted, hardly asserted, that a similar discipline would have similar effects. Men cured of their unwillingness to believe in miracles might become subjects of miraculous agency. At the least they would understand the ancients, sympathize with them, and take their reports literally. The other way is the exact reverse. It says the modern student's great art is to strip off the material husk around the old spiritual records. There is a kernel, it says, that belongs to every century alike: the facts of conscience, and the spiritual instincts that exist in the world's infancy and grow clearer as it advances. These were hidden under forms of expression belonging to the period that first observed them. We can usually remove the sensible covering without damaging what is inside, and gladly receive what remains as the counterpart of our own experience. III\. Each method aims to restore our sympathy with the narratives of Scripture, and so each assumes that sympathy has been disturbed. Sceptical onlookers seize on that admission. They say: "You lack courage to say plainly that we have outgrown these Hebrew traditions, yet you feel they stand hopelessly apart from us. So you must either unlearn what centuries of hard experience have taught us and create a fancy world within the real one, or else read a lofty philosophical meaning into what was plainly gross and materialistic. Such romancing might be worth something if it were new. But able men tried it on a grand scale and failed ignominiously. The Neo-Platonists of the Roman Empire tried to do with the fables of Heathenism exactly what you are doing with Christianity. They built a supernatural, wonder-working machinery around them and drew sublime philosophical principles from the old mythology. They had the good wishes of the pagan devout, and a passionate royal disciple once offered them his intellect and his treasury. Yet the Romancers could not prevail; Reality was too strong for them." IV\. I believe, my brethren, that such criticism, however painful, may be very profitable. If we are romancing, let us thank God for any witnesses who warn us of so fatal a disease, and it does threaten us. Stern reality is unpleasant to us. We would rather see ourselves, Eternity and God in pictures, and contemplate them in a dim past or dimmer future than confess them at hand. We shrink from saying, "*This* is none other than the house of God; *this* is the gate of Heaven." Those infidels are preachers of great worth who show us that this is so. The more gratefully we listen when they expose and ridicule our inconsistency, the less likely we are to accept the alternative they offer. If we did, we would become Romancers altogether and part with reality without remorse. We would have to explain away the facts our consciences recognize as deepest, so as not to violate the nineteenth century's philosophical conventions. We would have generalizations for facts, shadows for persons, and a dream of what may be in place of belief in what is. But we know that these critics have hearts and spirits as we do, craving real food, which the mere imagination of a feast will never satisfy. The work they are permitted to do is to make men impatient of the miserable substitutes for the bread of life that we have offered. Their scorn may punish hypocritical worshippers and destroy what can be destroyed as effectively as the sword of a Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar. And like those swords it will soon grow rusty, and become the object of scorn to a newer generation of scoffers who will do the same work with the same result. V\. On some of us the best-deserved part of this ridicule has had this effect: it has made us ask whether the Scriptures, which seem so real to simple people, have been obscured by our affectations, and whether we have introduced into them the materialism we charge them with. One commonplace we must remember. We call the Hebrew narrow and exclusive. In what did his narrowness consist? Surely in this, that he differed from all other nations as a protestant against every visible, material likeness of the Unseen Being. That dull, infantine Jew of the times of Moses and Samuel must not think of the Godhead as like anything he could see, even the most glorious object in creation. This was the notorious difference between him and the cultured and the barbarous nations alike. All the minute, rigorous discipline ordained for him in these books was meant to correct a tendency to which he is said to be as prone as any man. Then consider whether the most literal reading of the story of Samuel, the one most in keeping with the rest of the record, *can* be sensual, materialistic or, which is the same thing, idolatrous. Do not lightly give up so plausible an accusation; look back at the earlier history. The national story opens with "God said to Abraham, Get thee out of thy father's house to a land that I will show thee." What did that voice do to the patriarch? From the time he heard it he ceased to be an idolater and believed in a God he could not see. Every step in his education strengthened that belief. There might be appearances to his eye and voices to his outward ear. We need not ask, and perhaps could not learn, how many communications had such accompaniments. But he knew, and the historian strives to make us know, that these were only accompaniments. The essential vision was to the inward eye and the real speech to the inward ear. That gave him strength to believe and act, and that he obeyed. His senses had their own objects, and he was constantly reminded that all of them were under the care of the Lord who cared for him. But a spirit had been awakened in him that perceived not flowers and trees but a Righteous Being, and took in not birdsong or waterfalls but His human lessons. VI\. Every later revelation must be explained by these earliest ones and will be found in strict harmony with them. Let the child Samuel confuse, as was natural, the voice that called him to be a prophet with the voice of his visible teacher, the high priest. Let it even have been an actual voice to his bodily ear. Still, it was because *he knew not the Lord* that he rested in the mere external sound. When he said, "*Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth*," another step in his education was taken. The great conviction dawned that was to be the law of his later life and the inspiration of his words and thoughts, fitting him to govern and judge as well as to exhort and foretell. It was that the Eternal Lord was near him, holding inward, secret, awful converse with him, quickening all his powers of thought, feeling and utterance, and guiding his people as well as himself. We have no material shell to break in order to make this discovery. We carry the shell about with us, and if we take it to the Bible, the Bible will break it for us. We shall find it hard, though not impossible, to preserve our sensualism near so close and penetrating a spiritual reality. We shall be forced to confuse and corrupt the one with the other if we refuse to be tried, sifted and judged by the book, or rather by that Living Word to whom the book bears witness. VII\. But is this not the story of a child? I should be treating the letter of the narrative strangely if I denied it. It professes to be about a child, and its whole style fits that profession. If there were no children in the nineteenth century as there were in the days of the Judges, or if children now differed essentially from children then, or western from eastern, that might be a reason to take no interest in the passage or merely to adapt it. But what parents want is to be reminded of the characteristics of their children that do not depend on place or times. They want to understand their children's strange questionings about an unseen world and its relation to the unrealized world around them. They need to know how their children, and they themselves, may be saved from the dominion of the senses and the fancies. The story meets these needs as no other does, if we take it as it stands, as the witness of a permanent truth. If a teacher was near Samuel, and is near every child now, speaking to it though it is slow to distinguish the voice and preparing it by degrees for its work in the world, what could be more important than to know that? What a fact for all our discipline and for all their learning! What a key to countless puzzles for which we invent clumsy and unsatisfactory solutions! What encouragement for what we may do, and what cause for repentance for what we have left undone! VIII\. And how would this belief link together the different parts of human life in natural piety! It would take away the irreverent regrets we sometimes feel and voice when the grace and, as we say, the innocence of childhood, disturbed though it is by many rebellions, gives way to the more passionate time of boyhood or girlhood. Growth watched only by human guardians, who often fear where no fear is, overlook imminent dangers, and even cause them by ill-directed vigilance, would always look like growth into evil. How dare we think it so, if we hold that He who fed the morning lamp with gladness is present in every later trial? He uses even the occasions of evil-doing outside us, even the traitors within the camp, as His ministers to call forth the faculty that tells right from wrong and the energy that rejects the wrong and chooses the right. Amid failures and falls, through the shame they bring, even through a course of reckless folly, there is an ever-present Friend, Reprover and Judge. He points out the sin behind and the peril ahead, and hedges up the path so that retreat and advance look equally hopeless, so that He may awaken the cry "Help me!" "Undertake for me!" "Thou knowest my path that I have lost it!" Brethren, what would this assurance be to us when we are utterly downcast about those we care for most, convinced that we can only hurt them and not help? And surely it is thus that the thought "The child is father of the man" ceases to be a thought of anguish and becomes one of thanksgiving. How appalling, sometimes overwhelming, is the recollection of how in early years we were storing up weakness and heartlessness for the conflicts of manhood! We did it by neglecting loving expostulations and encouragements, indulging evil imaginations and self-conceit, wasting opportunities that could never return, and refusing to let the blessed seeds take root that might have borne fruit sixty or a hundredfold. But is there nothing to mingle with this and sustain us? If the Counsellor and Inspirer of Good had ever deserted us, and given up the house to the powers of evil that would have possessed it wholly, these shameful memories would not exist, and the past would be a blank like the present. "Strong Son of God," Word of the Father, You who spoke to the child lying in Your Temple as the lamp was going out, You have been with us in all our wild plans, idle speculations and purposeless acts, from which all childish simplicity was gone and in which we had gained no manly freedom or steadfastness. You were compelling us to look our folly in the face when we would have persuaded ourselves that we were wise. You showed us our lovelessness and untruthfulness when we would gladly have consoled ourselves by denouncing our neighbours'. You have shown us that we must cast off the slough of our old nature, and that what we need is possible, since You have provided us a new and glorious nature, Your own, which we may put on by believing in You. You have told us of a Father whom we may call ours because He is Yours. You have promised us a Spirit to dwell with us, who will open to us the mysteries of His love and Yours. X\. "*Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth*," was the boy Samuel's answer to the divine Teacher who revealed Himself to him. Have five thousand years found any better formula for the child, the boy or the man? We do not need applications and adaptations of the story to modern use. The more complicated the world's experiences become, the more they throw us back on this cry, and the more we need to pour it out lest the human life within us be extinguished by the very circumstances and wants that ought to nourish it. We need still less to gather sensible images around us to make supernatural agencies less incredible. Supernatural agency is needed to withstand the pressure of the sensible images that are already too much for us. We need prayers and Sacraments as witnesses that God will not let us be victims and slaves of Nature. Faith in Him is to be our daily protection against the pursuit of rarities and novelties that dealers in miracles and enchantments try to promote in us. Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth; suffer me not to mistake for Thine the voices with which Thy love has filled the world, even the voices of Thy most consecrated servants! XI\. This last remark leads me to a peculiarity in the story of Samuel which those philosophers should not overlook who say it must be stripped of its priestly vesture and dressed afresh for our society. The voice that called the boy Samuel appointed him a witness against the formality and corruption of priests. By that voice an order of men was inaugurated whose special function this was, and I think the function has never become obsolete. We may do our utmost to restrict the name Prophet to those who bear it in the Old Testament, but the custom of every age and the conviction of mankind are too strong. Where reverence for the Bible is greatest, men will feel, as a result of that reverence, that some are called to be prophets in the strictest and widest sense. If the word means one who speaks the word of the Lord, it is identified with the preacher, and the New Testament sanctions the identification. If it means one who looks into the future, it is felt that the truest man, who most deserves the glory of a creature looking before and after, must exercise a gift of prophecy. Some men will foretell, and others will listen and believe, either because they claim special knowledge from Scripture or intuition, or because all men ought to know the signs of their times. You may deride their pretences, but you cannot silence them or stop them from making a mighty impression, often even on very acute minds. For those who accept the story we read this afternoon as it stands, a better course than ridicule is open. They will acknowledge that He who enabled Samuel to hear His voice is the same now as then. Now, as then, we speak true words only so far as we speak His words, and speak them more distinctly the more we dread the fanatical and superstitious mixtures that come from our own vanity, and the more we ask Him to separate the dross from the pure ore. To those who seek Him reverently, of whatever class or age, I believe some gift of foresight will be given. Most will be given to those who are most childlike and distrustful of themselves, who depend least on their own guesses and calculations, who most read the future in the past, who most regard all earthly acts as acts of a righteous God, and who most look for His triumph over all unrighteousness. Let us listen to such men, not trusting their sagacity and judgment, which will fail continually, but trusting Him whose wisdom and will, not their own, they wish to see established. We shall call them prophets, as men always have, not to disparage but to honor those whom God first called by that name, and made, and still makes, His interpreters to others. In these ancient seers we shall find no superstition that later science wants to be rid of. We shall find witnesses for Eternal Truth and against the counterfeits of it that science craves. We shall find no pleaders for priestly abuse or pious fraud, but a continual assurance that God Himself is present in all that befalls nations or individuals. He shows Himself as the avenger of all wrong done in His name, and as the giver of all good gifts and the author and inspirer of all the desires and hopes men can cherish and of all true petitions and sacrifices offered to Him. When the priest fancies his offering has some virtue of its own, he soon becomes profane and foul, like Eli's sons. Then God raises up a prophet to declare that the Ark of the Covenant, the offering on the Altar, the priest's title, the judge's seat and the king's throne are all His; that He puts down one and sets up another; that He means to establish Righteousness on the earth; and that His Name shall be hallowed and His Kingdom come. Blessed is the man who, when God calls him by one token or another to utter His message, confers not with flesh and blood. Blessed are those who, when God speaks through events that befall other nations or themselves, do not seek the interpretation from wizards that peep and mutter, but cry in penitence and reverence, "*Speak, Lord, Thy servants hear*." ## THE GLORY AND DELIVERANCE OF THE ANIMAL NATURE ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} ([morning]{.smallcaps}) ::: ::: {.center} [July]{.smallcaps} 17, 1859 ::: > "*Waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body*."—[Romans]{.smallcaps} viii. 23. *The passage:* We are waiting for our adoption, which is the redemption of our body. [Few]{.smallcaps} would deny that the passage chosen for today's Epistle is magnificent. Our likely complaint is that it is *too* magnificent. It lifts us out of ordinary life into an atmosphere that only a Saint or Apostle could be expected to breathe. We would prefer a divinity more level with our wants and sins. We think we need help against the petty temptations of each day, not grand anticipations of a future for mankind and the earth. Those are the first impressions St. Paul's words are likely to give. Look again, and the man who wrote them was more familiar than we are with the sufferings of common men. He had shut himself in no cloister, and he did not banish images that might disturb his temper or his devotion. He feels an incubus sitting heavily on himself and on the Universe. What he hears rising from all creation is not a hosanna of rapture but a groan for deliverance. That groan is no vague aspiration after some possible happiness. It comes from actual misery, from the separate cries of millions of beings of his own flesh and blood. Whatever else may call forth those cries, physical anguish is, in the Apostle's judgment, a main cause and justification of them. Men's bodies are subject to a torment and bondage they cannot accept. He believes they want redemption from it, and he encourages them to hope for it. May it not be a complete mistake, then, to think we need other circumstances than our own to feel the force of these sentences? May not the fullest interpretation be found in our daily walks, so that the streets of London tell us more of their sense than all the commentators' folios? I\. One word in the text, on which all the rest depend, St. Paul himself must explain before we ask what ordinary experience adds to it. He tells the Roman Church that he and they were waiting for their adoption, their full recognition as sons of God. He had said that his message to the world concerned One who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of Holiness, by the resurrection of the dead. In the rest of the letter he had shown how announcing such a Person was good news to Gentile as much as to Jew. The Gentile could not do what his conscience bade him do or be what it told him he was meant to be. The Jew's written law only showed him the same inability and made him aware of a deeper sin. God sent His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and condemned sin in the flesh, doing for men what they could never do for themselves. He justified both halves of the race alike by raising from the dead His Son, who had taken the nature of all. And He gave them His Spirit, so that they might call Him Father and live new, free lives, willing and doing what He was working in them to will and do. This is the doctrine of all his Epistles, Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians no less than Romans. It lies at the foundation of the Christian Church throughout the world. So far as there has been such a Church, there has been a proclamation that God has claimed men, whatever their race or circumstances, as His children in His only-begotten Son. There has also been an exhortation not to refuse that dignity, but to take up their position as spiritual beings, redeemed out of the service of false gods, of visible things, of their own lusts, and devoted to a service which is freedom. I think any message that is less than this, or takes another form, has been powerless to satisfy human needs and has had no lasting moral effect. If we use every argument of fear and every art of rhetoric to convince beggars or princes that they ought to care for their souls, a few may be startled out of a sleep they will fall back into. Most will feel that they are being set a task they cannot perform. They are told to think about a mysterious something in them which is itself what does the thinking, and to forget the real earth for a heaven they can only dream of. But suppose we set aside these metaphysics about the soul and return to the old, simple scriptural language of the hearth and home. Suppose we tell men of a Father who has sent the elder Brother of the household to bring them in, restore them as sons and daughters, and give them the highest rights of children. I believe we shall find that this old language is not obsolete. Many in England may despise it, as many in Italy or Asia Minor did, but it has a power that time and place have not touched. It can draw as clear a response from the peasant and mechanic of the nineteenth century as from those of the first. The strength is in the tidings, not in the person who delivers them. No gift that St. Paul or any Apostle had could have overcome the palpable evidence which, in his age, seemed to refute his doctrine of the glory Christ had given our race. If we deal as honestly as he did with that evidence, and are as resolved as he was not to hide any fact that leads men to think basely and despairingly of themselves, we shall find a witness mightier than human for our words, as he did for his. II\. Those who believed *the* Son of God to be the man of sorrows could answer without hesitation how sonship to God fits with the bitter sorrow men must endure. In the light of Christ's passion all suffering was transfigured into the mark of a son, and to be exempt from it was perilous. "If ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons" became the Christian maxim. Strange as it sounded, the conscience of mankind confirmed it. The undisciplined did not learn the secret of their parentage, while those who smarted under the scourge slowly discovered whose hand was guiding it. But St. Paul did not want them to be content with this discovery. He did not intend them to hug pain and sickness because a deep truth can be learnt from them. He admits that in themselves they are discords and anomalies in creation. He could not bear to contemplate them unless he were sure they were no part of creation's original order and so were to cease. The Son of God, revealed in weakness, pain and death, had vindicated the title of sons of God for creatures who endure weakness, pain and death. His revelation in the glory of His Father would reveal them in the glory for which they were created. III\. "I reckon," he says, "that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us." We might take him to mean that none of his own sufferings for Christ and the Gospel can compare with the rewards God will give him hereafter. But he does not say this, and in connection with the words that follow, the sense is quite different. The sufferings of the present time are not Paul's but those of the creature Man on earth, of the whole creation of which man is head. He shares in those sufferings and claims the right to. To be excluded from them would be to be cut off from human sympathy, from fellowship with the Son of Man, the great Sufferer, and from what the sufferings lead to. For they are leading, he declares, to an issue. They are travail-pangs, prophetic of a second and nobler birth. Wherever he turns, he meets the sounds and proofs of anguish. He feels it keenly himself, and far from being exempt, he knows more of it than almost anyone. His blessing, what he calls *the firstfruits of the Spirit*, is a clearer, stronger hope than others have, grounded on a Revelation of God. That hope is not for himself but for his kind. The Revelation is of God's purpose, not concerning him or the few believers gathered about him, but concerning the whole travailing world in which he lives. IV\. "For the creature," he continues, "was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him Who subjected the same." Here is the Apostle's answer to the puzzle that has tormented men ever since physical and moral evil entered a Universe made perfectly good. We have said that the punishment of the guilty is reasonable, and our consciences accept it. But part of Creation is involuntary and cannot possibly be charged with guilt, and yet it too endures misery and is subject to death. What does that mean? How can it be just? The usual way of dealing with this is to plead ignorance: men cannot judge what is righteous in God, and His justice may be quite different from ours. St. Paul does not take that way, and could not without overturning the argument of his Epistle, whose aim is to show that God has made known His Righteousness to man, that man has none of his own, and that he obtains it by trusting the righteous God. So the Apostle's method is the opposite. He feels the difficulty others feel and must find a refuge from it for himself as well as for them. He confesses that the Creation has been made subject to vanity. I take this to be a fitting phrase for the apparent frustration of the end for which it was called into being, the feebleness, failure and mortality that have plainly come upon it. He frankly admits the distinction between voluntary and involuntary creatures. He declares that the bondage the mere animal endures is not its own fault, and he does not shrink from tracing it to a Divine origin. But in doing so he affirms two mighty propositions. First, the innocent, involuntary creature is made the victim of vanity and death for the sake of the higher being whose will has gone astray and broken loose from the will it was created to serve. Second, this subjection is temporary and holds the promise of future emancipation, once the end for which it was ordained has been accomplished. "For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him Who subjected the same in hope, because (or *that*) the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." I dare not limit this language by any poor, beggarly interpretation of mine. It may mean immeasurably more than I can think. But it cannot mean less than this. All the sufferings to which the earth and its inhabitants are liable are permitted and designed for the education of those who bear the nature the Son of God bore. The redemption of the will, the restoration of God's children to their true position and inheritance, was what He sought by His death and resurrection. This is the highest and grandest of results, which no force but only the mightiest Love can achieve. No trial or suffering that contributes to it is, in the judgment of the All-good and All-wise, excessive or wasted, not even the sufferings and death of *the* innocent, *the* Holy One. When this end is attained, the Son of God will have won His final victory, and the sons of God will have triumphed through Him over the moral evil that separated them from God and degraded them into animals, though they could never reach the unconsciousness of animals. Then all forms of physical evil will be overcome too. The involuntary creation will be freed from its fetters and shame, and the whole regenerated world, in its primal order and harmony, will offer its sacrifices through its High-priest and Restorer to His Father. V\. I have said I can put no restriction on the language of an inspired Apostle. If you ask whether his teaching, taken fully and literally, involves a renewal of the whole animal creation and its redemption from vanity and death, I answer that it certainly appears to contain that assurance. To exclude it makes the passage hard to construe and, I think, impoverishes its sense. If there is to be a restitution of all things, such as God, who cannot lie, has promised by His holy Prophets since the world began, I cannot see how this element could be missing. And I am sure it would greatly console many humble and meek spirits, the sort the Kingdom of Heaven is said to consist of, if they need not suppose that the creatures that served man's needs and delights must lose for ever the perfection of their natures. Those creatures have had a certain fellowship with him and reflected some of his qualities. They have been deeply affected by his degeneracy, and they should not be shut out from the renovation of our race. Other thoughts nearly inseparable from these concern the order and beauty of the external world. The idea of a Redemption of Nature following a Redemption of Man has often dawned on the man of Science and on the Artist. The one has seen that the laws of the Universe can be fully vindicated only when the self-will that has defied them is rooted out. The other, from his deep sense of the sympathy between man and the forms he contemplates, has been certain that a purified vision awaits a revelation of loveliness beyond what the highest Prophet has only guessed. Both should rejoice that the wayfarer will share in such a manifestation with them. Once vanity and self-glorification are gone, the commonest things will seem the most wonderful, and the glory will be about all and for all. VI\. The Redemption of the body that St. Paul waited for must, I think, include the removal of whatever keeps the senses from receiving clear and satisfactory impressions of the world they are meant to converse with, and has made them feeble or rebellious servants of the spirit. But, as I have hinted, the expression has a more obvious force. The body is enslaved to disease and pain. These may be caused by a more terrible slavery of the man himself to his appetites and lusts, or traced to a multitude of circumstances beyond his control: climate, ancestors, education, poverty. However they arise, they are signs that Death has rights over the body and will assert them. St. Paul says another has an elder and stronger right over it. Christ, by going into the grave and rising out of it, has asserted and made good that right. He will fully exert it, declaring that the powers of man's body, like those of his spirit, derive from Him, and He will quicken that body by His Spirit. St. Paul felt sent to proclaim this Redemption because he was sent to proclaim men's sonship to God. He was to declare that this was no idle, nominal title but one that would be proved real at the appearing of Jesus Christ. So even when his teaching rose highest above ordinary aspirations, it remained profoundly practical. Believing fully in this redemption, men can never give in to what is called Fate or Necessity. They must never confess Death as master or give up the battle with all that leads to death. Our homage to Christ and our faith in our Divine sonship imply that we expect a victory for the wasted, enfeebled, degraded body. It was not made so fearfully and wonderfully for nothing. God will preserve all the powers He has given it, and it shall at last be made like the glorious body of Him who will subdue all things to Himself. It can safely be trusted to Him on the sick-bed, on the battle-field, at the stake. So we know that those who minister to the body, curing or warding off its diseases, are ministers of Jesus Christ and testify by deeds, not words, to the work He came to earth and ascended on high to accomplish. VII\. I end with this lesson from the Epistle because I wanted you to think more of its use in daily life than of its sublimity. Or rather, I wanted you to see that the sublimest teaching may be the most homely, and that the grandest expectations of the future may most cheer us for the toils and sufferings of the present. Our expectations of the future divide us from the present when they are selfish. We are less fit to bear common griefs or ease the griefs of others when we desire blessings our fellow-men will not share. Nothing can brace us so much for painful effort and continual patience as the hope of a revelation of the Universal Deliverer, the Emancipator of the whole Creation. ## CRY FOR GOD'S JUDGMENTS ::: {.center} Fourth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} ([afternoon]{.smallcaps}) ::: ::: {.center} [July]{.smallcaps} 17, 1859 ::: > "*Oh that Thou wouldest rend the heavens, that Thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at Thy presence, as when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make Thy name known to Thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at Thy presence*!"—[Isaiah]{.smallcaps} lxiv. 1, 2. *The passage:* Isaiah cries out that God would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would melt at His presence as when fire burns and makes water boil. He asks this so that God's name would be made known to His adversaries and the nations would tremble before Him. [This]{.smallcaps} is nothing less than a prayer that God would show Himself as a Judge, and as a Destroyer. It is unlike the prayers we are naturally inclined to offer, and unlike the prayers many grave and religious counsellors would have us offer: "O God, remain far from us, hidden from us; teach us to escape Thy judgments! Let Saints, Angels, the Virgin-Mother, Thy Son, stand between us and Thy burning wrath!" These cries rise from the natural heart of man, and they seem justified by religion as well as reason. Is the preacher not sent to tell us how terrible God's wrath is, and how fearful it is to fall into the hands of the living God? Is he not sent to tell us, in the words of this same prophet, of a Man "Who shall be a hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest"? If Isaiah contradicts himself, no comment of ours can make sense of him. But perhaps the passage about the Man who shelters us from the tempest illustrates the prayer in the text rather than contradicting it, and our fancy of a contradiction shows how our Theology differs from his. Isaiah longed for a Man who would deliver people from the oppression of the world's tyrants, from the storms raised by the passions of peoples and rulers, and from the exhaustion that follows when their labours come to nothing. All this misery, he thought, springs from their pretending to be gods themselves, and from the disbelief they cherish and spread in a God altogether unlike them, whose ways and purposes are not theirs. He longed for the true Man to appear, who would fully show the ways and purposes of the true God, remove the thick veil that kept His light from His creatures, and make them know that He was present, ruling and judging them. To long for a Man who would be a covert from the storm was therefore the same thing as longing that God would rend the heavens and come down. I have said that there is a natural heart in all of us, baptized or not, Christian, Jew, Turk or Pagan, which shrinks from this prayer and would rather utter any other. I have hinted also that there is a natural religion, natural in one sense and most artificial in another, which adapts itself to these inclinations and gives them a language. It is found in every country and attaches itself to every profession; it can turn almost any litany to its use, and it commends itself equally to the highest and the lowest. Priests organize it into a system of practices, doctors into a system of notions. Under all its forms it has one common mark: its aim is to keep God at a distance from men, and its art is to turn every person who performs its offices, every prayer and dogma, into a barrier against His appearing and His vengeance. But widely spread as this religion is, and adaptable as it seems, it lacks the sign of Universality. It expresses the many *different* feelings of men in their different diseases. It does not express the one *common* feeling, the wish to be raised out of disease and made whole. It gives many shapes to the dread of God, the wish that there were no God, which dwells in every man. It has no language for the infinite craving after God that also dwells in every man, the longing to meet Him face to face and bear all His vengeance rather than be separated from Him. Many things in nature kindle that desire: sunrise and sunset, the still lake, children's faces, the music of the human voice. In all of them there is a witness to something calmer, brighter, truer than himself, which he is meant to cry after and which alone will satisfy him. There is an equally strong witness that these things do not contain the treasure. And there is a more perplexing witness that it is nearer to him than to them, yet that he, and not they, would shut it out and gladly put it out. The deep and the sky answer his question with another: "Is it not in *thee*?" When he seeks, he first exclaims, "If it is, let it depart from me, for I am a sinner;" and then, "Let it come near to me, though I am a sinner, or I shall remain one for ever." No wonder that every prayer which turns "Depart from me" into the dialect of a particular tribe is held with such tenacity, and keeps gathering new accretions from fresh experience of inward evil. Yet I say the universal prayer, the one that goes up from the whole heart of humanity and is heard through all the sounds most discordant with it, is Isaiah's: that God would make Himself known, even in melting mountains and burning fire. Where did the Prophet learn that prayer? How could he speak for Egyptians, Phœnicians and Assyrians, who despised his tribe and worship, or for Greeks, Romans and Goths, not yet known in the world? Had he not been taught to see his nation as dwelling alone, fenced off by ordinances and prohibitions from other nations' habits and prayers? Yes, and even so, he was disciplined to understand that man does not need protection against God, but needs God to protect him against himself and to raise him from the slavery he invents for himself. So he was prepared to read every event that befell Israel or her enemies as a sign that God was coming out of His place to judge both, the chosen race no less severely than those who trampled on it, by the same law of righteousness and to establish righteousness and truth on earth by purging out whatever loves and makes a lie. So he learned that the misery of the heathen was that they suspected their gods, supposed their authority merged in that of their ministers, and fancied the worshipper could flatter and pervert them with offerings. So he saw how hateful to God are even the services He has appointed, when they are not offered to Him as a righteous Being and acknowledge no purpose to make men righteous. So he knew that the melting fire is not only the minister of men's purposes, though they are meant to compel all Nature's subtlest agencies into their service, but also God's minister, executing His justice on wrong-doers and purifying the earth. So he learned to rejoice even as he trembled at convulsions in the world or in society, which bade his people cease from men whose breath is in their nostrils and hide in the clefts of the rocks from the fear of the Lord. So he understood that by such signs God was avenging the poor and helpless, shaking kings on their thrones and surprising hypocrites. So he perceived that falling into the hands of the living God is indeed fearful if we separate our cause from that of those made in His image and seek advantage for ourselves; but that the only hope for us and all human beings is that the Living God should make the nations tremble at His presence, and prove Himself, not some dead God, far less the Spirit of Pride, Oppression and Injustice, to be Lord of the nations. So, finally, Isaiah became the Evangelical prophet, the witness that unto us a Child is born and a Son is given, who can be a covert from the tempest because He is both Son of Man and Son of God, and because God appearing in Him does rend the heavens and come down. Isaiah joined to that prophecy of a Son to be born other words that often sound strange beside it: "*Every battle of the warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood. But this shall be with burning and fuel of fire*." How does this accord with our notions of Him who is called in the same passage *the Prince of Peace*, who, we affirm, was revealed in David's city, meek and sitting on an ass, with none of the warrior's trophies? Does Isaiah not link His appearing with a battle far more tremendous and destructive than ordinary battles? Did Jesus of Nazareth not fulfil the idea these words set forth? Or is He hereafter to be other than He was when the children poured out their hosannas, the daughters of Jerusalem followed Him to the Cross, and the Apostles preached Him to Jews and Greeks? Brethren, I hold that the Prophet's words were fulfilled strictly and literally when Jesus came in great humility, died, rose and ascended, and when the Apostles bade Jews, Greeks and Latins receive Him as king. I hold that they have been fulfilling themselves ever since, and are now. When Jesus came among Scribes and Pharisees, Publicans and Sinners, claimed to be the Son of Man, sympathizing with men, healing their diseases, vindicating the day of rest for them and preaching the Kingdom of God, and when He took to Himself the power of a Son of God, bidding devils depart and forgiving sins, He did not at once stir up the customary battle of the warrior with its noise and blood. Nothing seemed to threaten one. But a battle was raging in men's hearts, like a fire seizing every inflammable thing and turning it into its own nature. "Is this our King, the true King of men, or, as the Scribes and Pharisees tell us, a liar and blasphemer? Does He show us the nature of the God who made us, or, as they say, of the Devil who is destroying us?" Was a battle with that issue described by the Prophet in exaggerated phrases? Must it not be the battle of all battles, the central battle of the Universe, and the final one? Did it not grow mightier still when the word went out that Death, the Grave, Hell, all that had terrified mankind, the powers of the invisible world that held the visible in dread, had been met and conquered for men by their Champion and Lord, because He came to do His Father's Will? What a subversion of all the religious maxims that supported the world's governments! What a contradiction of the policy to which Israel and every other nation was pledged! Soon the question was debated not only in secret hearts but in the Temple, where the Jews always gathered, and in the market-place, the exercise-ground of Greek philosophy as well as Greek trade: was Cæsar, or this crucified Man of whom the tent-maker spoke, really King of kings and Lord of lords? What could come of such a debate but what did come? First the chosen people confessed they had no king but Cæsar, having given up any other dream; then they provoked Cæsar, the God-General to whom they had surrendered the faith and hopes of past ages, to show he was stronger than the wretched anarchs fighting for the holy city, and he was commissioned to destroy it. Next, when that old foe was swept away, Cæsar found a new one, not shut within walls or tied to local customs, but speaking its treason to every tribe he ruled: that One who had sacrificed Himself and lived for ever, not a commander of legions who bade men sacrifice to his image, was Ruler in the armies of Heaven and would prove mightiest on earth. Supposing such a doctrine was not mere madness, did not die of itself and was not crushed at once by imperial power, could it be anything less than the beginning of a battle with burning and fuel of fire? Was it not sure in time to cause some of those more material battles, with confused noise and garments dyed in blood? And if that battle ended, as we know it did, if a Christendom rose out of the Roman empire and the empire itself bowed to the Cross, did that cry fall silent to which we suppose Christ's appearing was the answer, the cry that the true God would "*rend the heavens, and come down, that the mountains might flow down at His presence; that as when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, He would make His name known to His adversaries, that the nations might tremble at His presence*"? It could not be silent unless the rulers of the earth, civil and ecclesiastical, confessed in word and deed the righteous, self-sacrificing King to be their King and the King of men, who came to establish His righteous, heavenly order in the world. Loud must the cry be that rises from the lonely bed of misery and the dens where prisoners lie for speaking right words and refusing to serve treacherous men. It must grow louder, swelled by the cries of all ages and echoed by new saints beneath the altar, if rulers civil and ecclesiastical think that a Cæsar, not a crucified Man, holds the real and highest royalty, and lead men to think that Christ came to enslave the world rather than redeem it, to hide us from God rather than bring us near. Hidden from Him, living in dark unbelief about His character and purposes, men are left to the mercy of those He has entrusted with powers to wield in His name, and those powers are sure to be used for the curse and not the blessing of His creatures. Brethren, we need to dwell on these thoughts far more earnestly than we have. Battles with confused noise and garments rolled in blood may end for a while. Let us not think the battle with burning and fuel of fire, the battle of principles, has ended or can end; we are more than ever in the midst of it. Let us not try to sever the principles that affect the polities of the earth from those that concern the Kingdom of Heaven, for they are inseparable. The Kingdom of Heaven is the Kingdom of Righteousness. All unrighteous government, all that sets itself against the order and freedom of man, is hostile to Christ's government and is rebellion against Him, in whatever name and by whatever instruments it is administered. Let us go back to this old and undoubted maxim, which we are strangely forgetting amid notions of religious interests and civil interests, religious duties and common duties. Remember that what the Jews took for religious interests and duties set themselves to war with Christ, blaspheme Him and crucify Him when He came in the flesh. Remember that the religious interests and duties of the Roman world sent the witnesses for Christ to the wild beasts, and that they have been the plea for every crime of the last eighteen hundred years. God has permitted us in this land to witness that civil tyranny and ecclesiastical tyranny are equally detestable to Him; that each is always strengthening and abetting the other; that both dread the appearing of Him who is the true Judge of men because He is the sufferer for them and with them. Let us never abandon that testimony, and let us ask that whatever hinders us from bearing it faithfully be taken out of our hearts. In us, as in others, there is a notion, always working, sometimes put into words and taking the shape of Christian orthodoxy, that we want a deliverer not from Atheism but from God: a Mediator to stop Him carrying out His cruel designs against us, not one to reveal His love and purge our own cruelty so that we may share it. In us there is a feeling that the Judge and the Saviour are different beings, or one being with different purposes, and not that He who hung upon the Cross will show, in the day that winds up this age as He did in the day that wound up the former, that His is the power meant to draw all things to itself, and that all power unlike His must divide and destroy. Let us think well, for we, like the other nations, may have to decide what we reverence and worship most in our hearts: the Spirit of Him who took the form of a servant and became lowest of all that He might exalt all, or the spirit that exalts itself to crush humanity. Let us solemnly resolve that nothing shall tempt us to abandon our hope for the freedom and blessedness of all nations. Let us place our hopes not in the promises of princes or the schemes of plotters, but in the oath of God that He will set Truth upon the earth. Then the cry, "*Oh that Thou wouldest rend the heavens and come down*," will be answered to us no less than to our forefathers. Now, as of old, the bitterest disappointments prepare the surest hope; when darkness is thickest the Light will come forth, to shine over all and never be put out. ## THE HONOUR AND DEGRADATION OF AN OFFICIAL ::: {.center} Fifth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [July]{.smallcaps} 24, 1859 ::: > "*For if I do this thing willingly, I have a reward: but if against my will, a dispensation of the gospel is committed unto me*."—1 [Corinthians]{.smallcaps} ix. 17. *The passage:* Paul says that if he does this work willingly he has a reward, but that if he does it against his will, a stewardship of the gospel has still been entrusted to him. "[That]{.smallcaps} man is a mere official," people say. "He does his work today as he has done it for thirty or forty years: punctual and accurate, without interest or enthusiasm, successful as a machine is, with nothing of a man's feeling or life." We have all heard such remarks, and most of us have found them just in some cases, and terrible when just. Some add that this is a peculiarly English failing. Nowhere, they say, do men so readily become officials, or does the dry sense of duty so swallow up the passion for glory, personal affection, delight in what is good for its own sake, and even the hope of any tangible reward. Pleasure in the past and hope for the future shrink into a bare admission that certain services must be performed, which the performer would gladly do in his sleep if he could. But patriotism has its revenge on those who speak so of their countrymen. We cannot separate ourselves from the people we were born among. Their tendencies are ours, and whatever tempts them tempts us. The man who has most denounced slavery to routine in his neighbour soon finds it threatening himself. His very efforts to stay free have robbed him of freedom. He refused to follow a prescribed track or be tied, like others, to set times and places. But he must follow some order, and the one he invents soon shackles him as much as the one he abandoned. He can break it with less compunction, but it binds him while it lasts. Perpetual change, the habit of breaking habits, becomes the cruellest necessity of all, and brings loss of power, weariness and poor results. Finally the proud libertine will accept any ruler, so long as he is formal and minute enough, who will spare him the dreadful privilege of deciding anything for himself. We know what usually follows from these opposite experiences and violent reactions. But what *ought* to follow? Were those wrong who thought dry, dead officiality an evil? If it is an evil, must we give in to it because it is our national or natural tendency? Is there no good at the bottom of it that we could separate from the corruption? If we kept that good, might the individual freedom Englishmen hold so tightly sustain the sense of duty that is also strong in them, instead of destroying it? Might our lives then stop being a battle of errors cancelling one another, and become a reconciliation of forces aimed at one end? I\. I have put this difficulty in its most general form because it besets us all in our different spheres of work. All are tempted to be mere officials, and all are taught that *not* being officials, choosing their own course instead of accepting one marked out for them, cutting many roads instead of walking forward on one, makes life abortive. If a clergyman said this was his special trial, which other men could not understand, and that maxims applied to him that did not apply to them, he would destroy the meaning of his name and function. He would be admitting he had no message for his fellows. But he may declare, and I think he is bound to, that what is true of them is true of him in a higher and more appalling sense. If they are in danger of becoming creatures of routine, with no lively sense of their tasks, that danger lies at least as close to him and may bring him a more hopeless moral death. If, in avoiding it, they fall into another, becoming irregular and self-willed, running like men in a dream and fighting the air, that also constantly besets him and has caused him a thousand falls. He can escape it only when he stops blaming his misdoings on his circumstances and confesses them as sins of his own. If he learns this very hard art, he may begin to confess the sins of those he pretends to teach, and so be able to help them in some of their perplexities. II\. He will do this most effectively if he studies under the greatest of Christ's preachers. In our passage St. Paul unfolds the principle we set aside both when we fall into official dryness and call it devotion to duty, and when we claim to follow the impulses of love and affection rather than of duty. He applies his words first to himself, as he always does. He never lays down a rule for others that he has not tested in his own case. So *rules* is the wrong name for the great moral maxims in his letters. They announce human and universal laws, which he was led to see through individual experience. He is always telling us *who* led him, and how little he could have learnt from trials alone without One to interpret them and give him their fruit. Where he does not say it, it is assumed in his discourse, his title and his work. His authority is not to announce dogmas *ex cathedrâ*, but to show the processes by which they became part of *his* being and may become part of *ours*. III\. The impression of the Apostle we naturally take from his writings, and which divines of nearly all schools try to fix on us, is of a man overpowered by a vehement conviction that he must proclaim at any cost of reputation or life. Nothing in our passage alters that impression, and much deepens it. But "overpowered by a conviction" can carry almost opposite meanings. We often give it a sense that is not the most natural one. We suppose a man takes up an opinion or course of action and throws his whole will into it, so that it becomes so intensely *his* that you could sooner make water run uphill than separate him from it. I will not stop to ask whether anyone has ever been identified in this way with a thought or purpose of his own. In general, the men who have moved most unflinchingly toward some purpose, good or evil, have felt that a Power, which many of them called Destiny, fixed their purposes and their outcome. Multitudes crouch before such men, none more than those who scorn their belief as superstition or hypocrisy. Paul must be reckoned among them rather than among those who talk of their own determination. In the verse before my text he says that a necessity is laid upon him, and woe is to him if he does not preach the gospel. No one could more completely renounce the idea that he chose his work or became a preacher because he liked preaching. The hardest fatalist never rejected that way of speaking more than he does. You may say he was overpowered by a conviction, and perhaps he would not repudiate the words, perhaps you mean what he means. But it is not his habitual language. He speaks of being *called*, and likes to describe himself as an apostle or messenger. He utterly disclaims being able to drop his function at pleasure, any more than he could take it up at pleasure. He is a steward of Another's treasures, commanded to distribute them, and woe is to him if he does not. IV\. St. Paul, then, is an official. He has a prescribed duty to perform, and he cannot fix what it is. It is continuous and recurring. And he is well aware he may become reluctant to do it. "If I do this thing willingly, I have a reward" assumes he might do it unwillingly, and the next clause says outright that he might. He was liable, like other men, to alternations of feeling, exhaustion, despondency and disgust, and the nature of his news did not guard him against such moods. It was good news, but most who heard it did not count it good. Those who did, constantly misunderstood and perverted it. Often its fruits looked quite unlike what was expected, to others and even to him. Then every doubt about its origin or power recoiled on himself. A chill came over the heart that should have poured it out, the message seemed to fall dead from his lips, and there was no *reward*. V\. For the reward, he affirms, was attached to his *willingness*, and he found it so, as all other men do. Work done as a task brings no joy to the doer: none now, none in looking back, none in looking forward. In some kinds of work one may hope for compensation later for the sheer amount done, whatever the spirit behind it. That hope can never be clear or lively, since sullenness and discontent are big ingredients in it and sadly disturb whatever they enter. But Paul could cherish no such hope. If he was not in sympathy with the gospel he preached, he was not in sympathy with the mind and character of God revealed in it. And the reward he held out to men was to know this mind and character thoroughly and have fellowship with God. It was a contradiction and an impossibility to connect that reward with a temper and habit alien to it. The highest blessing he could ask was that this temper and habit be entirely reversed. VI\. The question of all questions, then, was how he could obtain the willingness that was the only pledge and foretaste of any such reward. Here the Apostle parted from believers in mere Fate. They agreed so far: he held that a necessity was laid upon him, that he could not devise a scheme of life for himself, and that one had been devised for him which he was bound to pursue. "Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel." Woe, he says, if I preach anything else, or fail to preach that. But the gospel announces God's goodwill to men and the peace He has made with them. "I did not become a preacher because my will urged me to. I was the servant of *His* Will. He who loved men sent me to tell them of His love. He who had reconciled men to Himself sent me to tell them of it, that they might be reconciled to Him. I am the minister of a Will that is all good and gracious, and that can conquer rebellious wills and bring reluctant ones into consent. Do I believe this message? Then I can ask that this loving, conquering Will bear on mine and bring me into harmony with it. I can ask that I, the preacher, not be out of tune with the perfect Nature that, I declare, can and purposes to bring all natures into accord with it. I am shown again and again that, left to myself, I shall not be a willing proclaimer, but will grow cold and repeat the message because it is my business, or because it once gripped me. I know that while this is so I can have no reward now and expect none in ages to come. Yet I am equally sure that He who committed this message to me can make me willing in the day of His power, turn His poor, hard official into a living, rejoicing witness, and make that witness effective for His ends." VII\. So an infinite consolation springs from the side of the alternative that looks so disheartening: "But if against my will, a dispensation of the Gospel is committed to me." It strikes us as unspeakably mournful that a man should preach this gospel *against his will* and discharge his stewardship miserably. Yet the man whose preaching made Christ's light shine through the world faces the possibility and does not shrink from it as possible for him. Why should he? The more he feels the impotence of his own will and confesses it may be alienated from the true Will, the more he sees that Will's intention and its power to subdue all things to itself. There is honey in the carcase of the dead lion: when all strength seems gone, the real and only strength begins to show. "Nevertheless," whatever the state of my will, "a dispensation is committed to me. My calling and election stand out broad and clear, written in sunbeams, while I, the officer, am lost in shadow. The thing is true, and the decree as certain as the laws of the Medes and Persians, for my will had nothing to do with creating it and cannot revoke it. If I or an angel from heaven say God's will is not what the gospel says, that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, let me or that angel be accursed. For that Will, not mine or an angel's, shall be done on earth as it is in Heaven." VIII\. Brethren, this is the doctrine to learn at St. Paul's feet and to lay to heart in times of wealth and tribulation, self-exaltation and despondency. It is an infinite comfort that no divine word from our lips depends for its truth, or even its success, on the purity of our lips or the right will of the speaker. It is a comfort beyond all comfort to believe that *the* Will, *the* Heart, from which the good news first came, has no variableness or shadow of turning. And it is a comfort, in this sense, to feel that we are officials, open to the same just charges of coldness and deadness as all others who bear the name. But may we not ask, as the greatest sign of forgiveness in those who have heard and not been helped, and of thankfulness for any good that has borne fruit in them, that they will desire for their teachers that they may be *good* stewards of God's manifold gifts? I mean stewards who not only have a dispensation committed to them, but respond to the mind and will of Him who committed it, and whose spirits are quickened by His Spirit. Then, I think, we shall cease to be mere officials, and yet feel more than ever that nothing is more blessed and glorious than duty. For He who exacts duty is the source of all loving sympathy, and we keep His commandment when we love one another. We shall then be better able to help all classes of men in pursuing the great principle of an Englishman's life, and in avoiding the death to which that principle, cut off from its root, inevitably leads. The sense of duty draws all its strength from acknowledging a God who never acts from caprice or self-will, who governs heaven and earth by the order He has imposed, and who seeks to bring all voluntary beings to understand that order and consent to it cheerfully. Obedience and Freedom meet when we believe He asks us to yield our wills as sacrifices to His, who first made the great sacrifice for us and united us to Himself in it. Then no office is less than a calling, and in the highest and the lowest Christ's own voice says, "Follow Me." Then this nation, like the one Paul was among the latest and noblest representatives of, will become a chosen nation bound to do God's work among the nations and bear witness of Him, even unwillingly; but if willingly, oh, with what reward to each citizen and to generations unborn. ## REVIVALS ::: {.center} Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [October]{.smallcaps} 23, 1859 ::: > "*I have hated them that hold of superstitious vanities: and my trust hath been in the Lord*." —[Psalm]{.smallcaps} xxxi. 7 (*Prayer-book version*). *The passage:* "I have hated those who hold to superstitious vanities, and my trust has been in the Lord." (Psalm xxxi. 7, Prayer-book version) [The]{.smallcaps} doctrine of this text is very unlike one often heard today from many quarters. We are told, and are apt to think, that superstition is excessive faith, and that it shrinks as intelligence grows because faith shrinks. We are told that anyone who wants to rouse ignorant, common people to faith in God must appeal more or less directly to their superstition. Most of us can remember accepting this as an axiom and drawing practical conclusions from it. When we were keenly alive to the horrors of superstition, we were willing to risk losing faith in order to be rid of them. When the reaction came, and we felt the world could not go on safely without faith, we were ready to tolerate a good deal of superstition, lest faith perish along with it. The Psalmist looks at the matter from another point of view. He sets "superstitious vanities" against "trust in the Lord." One is the protest against the other, and one is to be the deliverance from the other. This is no isolated statement that a small change of wording could escape. It contains the very spirit of the Old Testament. Trust in an invisible, righteous God is the principle every lawgiver, warrior, prophet and priest is to show in his actions and enforce on his land. So far as his trust fails, he fails in his work. Distrust is the sin charged on the people. Because they trust this invisible, loving, righteous Being, they are not to tremble before visible things or men, or fear invisible powers of evil. If they lose trust, they are told, they will bow to objects of nature and idols of wood and stone, listen to wizards that peep and mutter, fear where no fear is, and turn their cruel imaginations into gods and worship them. The prophets of the chosen people entered thoroughly into this principle. Our thoughts turn most often to Elijah, the witness for God in the age of the worst king, whose name became typical of God's witnesses in later ages. What is his work? You might fancy he goes to a people utterly indifferent to religious exercises, to stir up their terror of the consequences. No! He goes to a people busy with every religious act, devoted to their priests, always at their hill altars, praying and crying and cutting themselves with stones to gain a hearing. He goes to turn them from these acts, for which he has no tolerance. He calls them to trust the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to restore the worship that expresses calm trust in the God who made a covenant with them, who never ceased to care for them, and who was even then turning their hearts back to himself. Look also at the kings commended in the same record, of whom Hezekiah is one of the best known. When Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem, his general made a speech, meant as much for the people as for the king, mocking Hezekiah's grounds of confidence. What horses and riders had he? Would Egypt help? Then: "But if ye say unto me, 'We trust in the Lord our God,' is not that He Whose altars and high places Hezekiah hath taken away, and hath said to Jerusalem and Judæa, Ye shall worship at this altar in Jerusalem?" No argument could have seemed more plausible or, to a heathen ruler, more conclusive. This king dares claim some right to the powers above for his devotion! Had he set up altars everywhere and invited the people to them, he might have some pretence to be a religious king. He has done the reverse, pulling altars down and bringing them to his capital alone. Will the God he professes to serve not show his sense of that crime by giving up the city to me? Yet these very acts, Scripture says, proved that Hezekiah trusted in the Lord more than all the kings before him. But if the Psalmist's words express a genuine Jewish feeling, do they apply equally to the New Dispensation? Let us consider. The Apostles certainly did not try, like Hezekiah, to make all men worship at the altar in Jerusalem. They foretold that Jerusalem and its temple would perish, charged their countrymen with rejecting their King, and formed churches in every city of the Roman empire confessing that King as King of Men. The outward circumstances were wholly changed, but the principle was not. Wherever the preachers went, they found men practising some superstitious vanity: bowing to visible gods, trembling at the future, seeking diviners to penetrate its secrets, fearing gods and trying to win their favour or avert their wrath, and hearing of devotees who joined the service of the divinities with frantic utterances and wild contortions. They had no power to interfere; state force and mob opinion were leagued in support of these things. All they could do was proclaim a Being whom men might trust: One who loved them, who had sent his Son to take their nature and die for them, who had made peace with them, and who had sent his Spirit to convert the wills that refused that peace. They proclaimed him and urged men to trust him. By so doing they struck such a blow at superstitious vanities as no iconoclast ever struck. They showed a hatred of them that they could not have shown had they been able to lay low every heathen altar and burn every idol. They earned the hatred of those who held to them. Not one martyr fell under the axe, or was tied to the stake or fastened to a cross, except because he would not sacrifice to the likeness of some emperor, or some god the emperor sanctioned. Not one had the courage to refuse except because he trusted the Lord, who gave his Son to be the perfect sacrifice for the world's sins. So the truth proclaimed of old held good from generation to generation. Superstition was the enemy of trust after the Incarnation as before it. Now that its object was more fully revealed, trust was a mightier destroyer of superstition than ever. Does not our own experience, my brethren, confirm the doctrine of Prophets and Apostles? We need not look far for examples of superstition, because we carry it about with us. Each of us has some superstitious vanity to which he is prone, some dark shadow that haunts him, some visible or invisible terror ready to make a coward of him. We may try to lay them by experience, by calculating chances, by the arguments of science. These helps are good, but there are moments when they fail altogether, and generally those are the moments when they are most needed: when the body is weak, the fancy strong, and there is no leisure for reasoning. Is it not simple Trust, in One who is above all and through all, who knows the whole Creation and knows us and our weaknesses, that puts the vision to flight? Is it not this that lets us answer the suggestion that we are sinful and so have good reason to fear, or are sinful and so have no right to hope? God has spoken to us sinners and bidden us confide in him. So far as we do as he commands, we overcome our sin; so far as we refuse, sin overcomes us. Have we not, then, a sure witness in ourselves that Superstition and Faith are not of one kin but deadly and everlasting foes? The history of Christendom, I believe, if we look below the surface, leads to the same conclusion. When Protestants fault Romanists for stressing the intercession of Saints or their relics, are they blaming an excess of faith? I hope not. To believe that those who sympathized with their fellows on earth sympathize with them wherever they now are, and that those who prayed against the world's evils pray against them still, is surely not superstition. Nor is it superstition to hold every memorial of the departed in affection and reverence. It is to hold that the visible and invisible worlds have been united and the grave has no victory. But to suppose that Saints intercede with God not according to his Will, nor for the doing of it, but to induce him to change it, or to suppose that dead things have a charm and power which the living agencies throughout God's creation lack, is superstition, because it is loss of trust in God and rests on distrust of him. Take an instance from men who regarded such things with horror. Why do our reason and conscience so vehemently condemn the murders the New England Puritans committed against men and women charged with witchcraft? Not because they recognized the fact of evil, or its power, or that it might gain a frightful tyranny over those who submit to it. Stern facts compelled those confessions, and without those convictions they would have lost the vigour that let them struggle with the untilled earth and subdue it. But they became cruel and savage because they lost the faith that good is mightier than evil, and that no man need be the Devil's victim and slave, since Christ has conquered the Devil. They did not trust in the Lord, and so they yielded to superstitions we can hardly call mere vanities, they were so dark and deadly. They left a warning that anyone may fall into crimes as great, which will seem to him full of religion, if his religion ceases to be one of Trust and passes into slavish fear. But is there nothing in the notion that even the worst superstitions are better than the void left in the soul when they depart? Is there nothing in the dream that they may prepare for a higher and purer faith? Even the worst superstitions are surely a sign and pledge that man is more than an animal: he is a spirit, connected with an invisible as well as a visible world, and you cannot chain him to Time, however many fetters of sensuality and philosophy you bring. In this sense even the worst superstitions may prepare for faith. They are inarticulate cries and groans for a Revelation of the unseen world that will scatter them, and for a Gospel of God and of the Kingdom of Heaven that will deliver us from them. But it follows that we must never acknowledge superstition as the radical thing in any human being. It is a disease cleaving to the root of his being and always threatening to kill him. We can hope for no aid from it, and our object must be to dispossess him of it by the surest and shortest way. If we take the direct method that the Psalmist's words and the Apostles' example point out, we need never fear that superstition's departure will open the way for Atheism. We should rather keep assuring ourselves that superstition is of the nature of Atheism and will at last pass into it, if God is not presented to men's faith and trust. I think these reflections are important just now, and one reason especially led me to bring them to you this afternoon. You have all heard and read of the great religious movements in parts of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the like of which may occur in England. I do not intend to comment on the conflicting opinions of clergymen and laymen about them. Anyone used to weighing evidence will throw aside many of the statistics on both sides as worthless, since it is as yet impossible to collect the facts that show whether the results on the whole are good or evil. If it should appear hereafter that the mother-vice of those impressible, excitable Celtic populations has diminished since the preachers went among them, and that many of them have learned to dread a lie and speak the truth simply and habitually, there will be great cause for thankfulness and sure proof that the God of Truth has done a mighty work. But it must be distinctly announced that such an effect never has come, and never will come, from encouraging superstitious vanities. It has come, and will come, only from awakening trust in a righteous God who seeks to make men righteous. Whatever appeals are made to the nerves and not the conscience, to what is weak and fantastic in man or woman and not to what is deep and earnest, however passionate and apparently effectual, must lead to moral mischief and not good, if the Bible's precedents are true and past experience is not fallacious. No doubt gold and clay may be mingled, as in most human compositions, and the orator may mix addresses to the nerves with addresses to the conscience, invoking now superstition and now faith. But the result will follow whichever element predominates. It is therefore most needful that they not be confounded by those who profess to be ministers of the Spirit of God, lest they make themselves ministers of the Spirit of Lies. Some parts of this subject might seem more important in a congregation of clergymen, or of people deep in the debates and factions of the religious world. But what I have said today may be as needful here as anywhere. I have noticed that cultivated men often say that "the common people require a treatment quite different from that which *they* require. It is important that they should have a religion; they are not safe neighbours or happy in themselves without it. But it must be leavened with superstition. Those who speak to them must know how to humour their superstitions, even share them. A necessary part of the machinery may be that it produces violent emotions, hysterical excitements." You must all have heard such remarks. They have an air of philosophy, and they justify what many devout people want justified, so these accept them without much examination. In the name of the Gospel, and of the poor to whom it was first preached and should be preached now, I solemnly protest against such arguments. They assume that there is nothing in every human being to which truth can address itself, and that truth must beg help of falsehood to make its way. They assume that those most prone to superstition are those in whom it ought most to be indulged. In fact these are the very people whom it is depraving, separating most from God and giving over to impulse and chance; they most need every help to be set free, and above all a Deliverer in whom to trust. If it is feared that such a message, such a God proclaimed, will not produce enough sorrow for past sin, or enough of the struggle and anguish of a spirit that feels its yoke and tries to shake it off, Scripture and experience dispel the fear. The feeling that a Father's house has been forsaken and a loving Friend's warnings continually disregarded has more power to awaken the sense of bitter wrong, and at first extreme despondency, than all theatrical tricks and all the inventions of a coarse and noisy rhetoric. No one denies that these do a work; the question is what work. Do they make the person more or less of a man, more or less a believer in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? We have assurances from the past, the present, and witnesses about the future who have not deceived us that the Gospel of a Kingdom of Righteousness, Peace and Truth will bring out all the opposing elements of Unrighteousness, Discord and Falsehood. These will wrestle in each man's heart and in the world till one is victorious and the other put down. A very frightful hell will open before each man if we preach as the Apostles preached of the mind and will of God from which it seeks to separate us. Everyone will feel how near he is to that abyss and what power he needs to keep from descending into it. But the converse is not true. Pictures of torments do not call up visions of justice and goodness, and the lurid flames of the bottomless pit give no light to trace our way up into the day. Kindling such flames, or some mechanical counterfeit of them, is the expedient that occurs to all of us when we first try to make our neighbours better. We find afterwards that the evil nature we share with them had much to do with suggesting the device, that moral and physical evil are too serious to be played with, that God teaches men what they are as no words of ours can, and that he also teaches us, and permits us, to proclaim the escape from them. These actual evils are felt by all classes, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, in different measures but essentially the same. And this actual deliverance is to be declared to all of them, with varieties of tone, diction and illustration, but essentially the same for all. If we understand the need for a great moral reformation in the whole land and in every order of men within it, we shall not speculate so cleverly about the arrangements needed to impress those least like ourselves, who are open to influences that do not reach us. We clergymen, lawyers and merchants should hear continually in our ears, "*Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand*." It should speak to us not of other men's offences but of our own. It should speak not of formal acts neglected, but of the falsehood and insincerity to which each of us has yielded in his own work and vocation, the powers we have wasted, the witness for good we might have borne, and the aid we have often given to customary and triumphant evil. If we, the priests of the people, spoke more faithfully to you all, we and you would feel that these sins press most heavily not on those at the edges of society but on those who influence its movements and hold its trusts. We should feel that everyone, down to the lowest serf of the soil, suffers for our neglects and misdoings, and might be quickened into a better life if it began first to stir in us. For this end nothing is so needful as to purge our minds of superstitious vanities, of all the dark thoughts of God that turn us from him and make Repentance impossible. What we all want, and should encourage in ourselves and each other, is trust in him as the Perfectly Good, who wills us to repent, gives us Repentance, and works in us by his Spirit that we may repent. Trust in our schemes, our wisdom or our religion will come to nothing. Those who have had most of it in any of these forms will make the most fatal wrecks and be found barest and most helpless on the day of trial. Trust in the Lord God has never failed anyone in ages past, and will last for ever, world without end. ## PRIESTS AND SAINTS ::: {.center} Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [October]{.smallcaps} 30, 1859 ::: > "*Let Thy priests be clothed with righteousness; and let Thy saints sing with joyfulness*."—[Psalm]{.smallcaps} cxxxii. 9 (*Prayer-book Version*). *The passage:* The psalmist prays that God's priests be clothed with righteousness and that His saints sing for joy. [What]{.smallcaps} did "Priests" and "Saints" mean to a Jew? Why does the Psalmist see such a close connection between the righteousness of the one and the joy of the other? Are the names obsolete? Have their meanings changed? Do those who bear them still affect one another as they did in the old times? These are the questions I propose to consider this afternoon. I\. A whole book of the Pentateuch tells us what the Jewish priest was and what he did, and all the other books throw light on his calling. The history of the people, from beginning to end, is a living commentary on their priesthood, as on all their institutions. We first meet the priest in books of Law, when Moses calls Aaron to be *his* helper, and this must not be overlooked. The priest could appoint nothing and devise nothing. He was told what to do, and from the first he was shown plainly what he must not do. Laws did not come from him, and he did not administer them. Like every other officer of the commonwealth, he was called to be a witness of the Lord God of Israel, who was revealing Himself to the nation, delivering, governing, feeding and judging it. The priest had no power to guess at God. If he invented an act of worship, or let the people invent one, he was a transgressor and a rebel. If he broke a statute on the pretence of higher insight into the Divine purposes, he was as liable to its penalty as the humblest soldier or farmer. The Jewish priest's offices were apparently no different from those of priests elsewhere. Like them, he offered sacrifices for those who felt they had offended a Divine Ruler, and for the whole nation. Like them, he took notice of bodily illnesses, especially those likely to spread. Like them, he kept alive, by his very existence as well as his acts, the belief in a communion between the invisible and the visible world. Why might he not, on the strength of this, have gained all the influence of the Brahmin? Because he could not pretend that his acts produced an effect on the mind of the Being to whom he brought the sacrifice. He had to say, or he undermined his own authority: "God Himself is the author of this sacrifice. He decreed this way of confessing your wrongdoing, not I. He has proclaimed an Atonement. Everything comes not from you, through me, to Him, but from Him, through me, to you. I am only the witness of the pardon He gives and the peace He makes. I am only the channel through which He chooses to restore your health of body or spirit." Those who believe that God really revealed His mind and will to the chosen nation must think this the higher honour. To witness an actual union of God with His creatures, and an actual putting away of their wrong, is far greater than to offer sacrifices on the chance of averting some mischief, or intercessions in a vague, dim hope of being heard. But the success of what we call *Priestcraft* depends on that uncertainty. The guilty man crouches as a slave before the one who seems to know the divine secrets, and to have guessed the price at which so much wrath can be bought off, because he dreads what the gods may plan against people they can crush in a moment. Charms and incantations are cherished where no fixed laws trace the course of a disease. So what we see as the Jewish priest's distinction above other priests was exactly what crippled him when he wanted to draw homage to himself. This was still more true of the public sacrifice, the great day of Atonement, in which all Israel, not the single worshipper, was concerned. That day proclaimed loudly that the people God had declared holy by covenant was still holy in His eyes. The sins that had divided it from Him, and were so plainly dividing its members from each other, were put away not by the people's act or the priests' but by His. This service, in harmony with all the institutions around it, showed that evil was not the nation's normal state but what made it abnormal and drew it from its proper state. It testified that God's will was reconciling and renewing, able to bring the nation back from the misery and slavery into which it had fallen through disbelieving His word. It testified too that the priest was holy, as every man in the nation was holy, because God had chosen him as His servant, and that he must consider himself holy on that ground and no other. II\. So we have reached the sense of the other word in the text. In speaking of the Jewish priests we have learned what the Jewish saints were. Were they the good and choice men of the land, standing in sharp contrast to the stiff-necked people around them? Surely they were, but only because they were Israelites, believed themselves to be Israelites, and claimed the rights of Israelites. As I have often shown you from many passages of the Bible, this was what separated them from the utterly corrupt: the most sensual of the kings, the proudest of the Pharisees. *These* stood apart from their kind. They would not rest on the common privileges of Abraham's children. They wrapped themselves in earthly or spiritual distinctions and would not see that they were only trustees of both for the whole society to which they belonged. So when they took the title of Saints for themselves, they destroyed their only claim to it, and did what they could to destroy their countrymen's claim as well. For the prophets tell Israel that God chose them as a holy nation to witness to all nations about Him, His character and His purposes. They were to let everyone know that no self-willed power ruled the universe; that its evils must not be blamed on an Evil Creator; that a right and just King upheld their kingdoms; that all the wrong and injustice of earthly kings and peoples warred against Him; and that He would prevail and reveal Himself as Judge and Monarch of the whole earth. The prophets complained that Israel did not do this work. The heathens were more faithful to gods they did not know than Israel was to the God who had chosen them as His inheritance; they were proud of their Temple and disgraced it; because of them God's name was blasphemed in every land. They were a nation of saints choosing to be a nation of sinners. III\. The prophets who bring these charges against the whole nation generally trace many of its worst corruptions to the priests. *They* represented the nation's holiness. If they began to fancy the holiness was their own, belonging to them as a caste by hereditary right, one can imagine how soon security would replace vigilance. They would look for in other men the evils taking possession of their own hearts, and gladly escape the dreary routine of meaningless duties into coarse animal indulgence. The effect of such sights in lowering the people would be gradual and certain. Even those who never saw or believed them might feel that nothing in the universe was so lifeless and monotonous as the worship of God. Some would value themselves on going through it because they found it a penance; others would seek wild delight in whatever was furthest from such a service. Then pleasures would themselves become a hard business, like religious acts. The pursuit of money, honest or base, would become the end of life. As it led to crimes, a fear of consequences would arise and be mistaken for the fear of God. A joyless, thankless spirit would spread through all hearts and show on all faces. Everywhere there would be a sense of death and a dread of it, and scarcely anywhere a glow of life. The Psalmist prayed that such a state might not overtake his land, or, if it had begun, might cease: "*Let Thy priests be clothed with righteousness*." "*Let Thy saints sing with joyfulness*." "If Thy priests regard Thee not as a hard Power they are obliged to serve but as a Righteous Being whom it is good to serve; if Right is the object they set before them and love to contemplate till it becomes the habit of their spirits; if they do not boast of it as their own but confess it as Thine, and so share in it as we share the sun and the air; then joy and liberty will spread through all Thy people. They will feel themselves truly Thy saints, a holy people, sealed, consecrated, sacrificed to Thee. They will set forth Thy Name wherever they go and in whatever work they do, and all the families of the earth will receive a blessing from them." IV\. My brethren, as I have often told you, I cannot see that the name Priest, in the sense of the Jewish Scriptures, has lost any force or worth for us. All the Jew knew of the name was good and healthy; what he lacked was the full knowledge of what the office implied and the full power to perform it. Until the complete and voluntary sacrifice of the Son of Man and Son of God had been offered, the complete atonement of Heaven and Earth made and ratified, the perfect representative of man revealed at God's right hand, and all mankind and the whole universe declared to stand in Him, the priest could bear only half his intended testimony. He could offer only a feeble sacrifice and a broken intercession for his race to the Father of all. Then he learned that there is a High Priest who always presents our nature before God and God's nature to us; that the highest sacrifice is the one God Himself made, and men's sacrifices are good by the working of His Spirit in them; that the work of the Mediator and Head of the whole family, while He wore a mortal body, was to cure sickness and conquer death. Then he would feel that every duty of the Jewish priest was his, and that if some were delegated to other ministers, those ministers, the physicians of the land, held a priestly trust and did a priestly service. And so far as he understood these high functions to be his, I conceive he would not thrust himself into offices that are not his. He would be reluctant to mix in ordinary administration, knowing it was assigned to others, and that confusing the two would weaken the dignity and sacredness of their work and his own and bring equal mischief to both. V\. In the same way, I should contend that the Apostles, being Jews, naturally took the Jewish idea of Saintship into the New Testament language, and that any other idea put in its place is feebler and narrower. They had believed themselves part of a called nation and been told it was a sin to think otherwise. Now they claimed all who were baptized in Christ's name as Saints chosen by God, and told them it was a sin to think otherwise. They had understood that their nation was chosen to witness to all nations of the Living and Righteous God, and was about to be cast out for refusing. So they held that the Church, scattered in different cities and formed of Jews and Heathens, was chosen to witness to all men that the Righteous God was their Father. He had adopted them in His Only-begotten Son, bidden them renounce their separate idolatries, and given them His Spirit that they might become One Family. Each Church in its own city or nation, they seem to have thought, would do its work in the world so far as it held this faith, and each member his own special work. How then could they change the meaning of the name Saint, or limit it to a set of especially exalted individuals, instead of letting it expand as the Gospel expanded everything else in the Old Economy? VI\. If the name keeps this old divine force, subject to this inevitable widening, then the old connection also holds between the unrighteousness of the Priests and the joylessness of the Saints or the Church. The Psalmist's prayer is still the one we most need to offer: "Let Thy Priests be clothed with righteousness, and let Thy Saints sing with joyfulness." Throughout the history of modern Europe, I think, this truth is written in sunbeams: the degeneracy of the Priesthood is the main cause of the degeneracy of the nations. Another is that the Priesthood's degeneracy always goes with unbelief in the Righteousness of God, a low estimate of what He demands of His Priests and the trusts He has given them, and an eager desire to claim powers He has not given and they cannot exercise. VII\. You will anticipate the application these circumstances suggest. All men, whatever their opinions, feel and confess that the most embarrassing complication now troubling kings, emperors and nations is what we have called the States of the Church. Whatever else is remotely involved, this is directly involved: whether priests have shown themselves even moderately good civil administrators, and whether the inhabitants of the Papal territory shall be forced to keep them in that role. On the first question, I suppose only a small minority in England would doubt. Without citing recent French writers, they would count the nearly uniform testimony of impartial travellers of every country as decisive. But in fairness we must confess that the proof is not confined to one country, age or mode of faith. With very few exceptions, wherever the experiment has been tried, whether the name Priest was accepted or carefully avoided, the results have been essentially the same. This confession must be made simply and broadly. In all countries and ages the Priests have craved to try tasks that experience declares them unfit for. Archbishop Laud called it the last and crowning effort of his work for the Church that he made Bishop Juxon Lord Treasurer. History may explain how far that and similar attempts to make the English kingdom priestly helped to secure his master's throne. What was the government of the Kirk's ministers in Scotland during the minority of James VI, and again when they proclaimed Charles Stuart King? What would the Westminster Assembly have done, had Cromwell not checked it, but the most tyrannical and abortive attempts at civil rule by ecclesiastics? These examples, which could be multiplied indefinitely, show that neither the impulse to such rule nor its consequences are confined to Romanist countries. They are at work in all of us, and it is God's great mercy if we are kept from indulging the passion and enduring the punishment. VIII\. These reflections ought to keep us from harsh and contemptuous language when we see Roman Catholic clergy and prelates clinging fiercely to what strikes us as the most worthless of shadows, the most dangerous display of the weakness of a Power they suppose has the right to govern the world. We have no right to judge them, lest we be judged. If we understand our own position, we cannot wish them to separate the idea of a Vicar of Christ over the universe from his dominion over a little local principality. It seems to be God's will that the falsity of the grand doctrine be shown through the practical comment of the anomalies and contradictions of the petty experiment. But what I have said this afternoon suggests another reason for keeping party and personal feeling out of a controversy in which the interests of one nation, indeed of all nations, are deeply involved. What Italians see around them, and what they hear from Protestant theologians and Liberal politicians, makes them regard the very name and character of a priest with hatred or scorn. This is not a natural state of mind for any people, certainly not for a Southern people. Woe to those through whom the offence has come; but it is an offence, much loss may follow, and the gain is doubtful. To extinguish reverence for what has long been reverenced must be terrible at once, and a reaction of gross superstition is sure to follow. May it not be that what the priests of that land and of all lands need is not a sense of the meanness of their office but of its grandeur and awfulness? That they have never considered how little power it takes to degrade and stupefy a people, and how much divine power it takes to raise them and make them free, just and wise? That they have been mistaken not in saying they received their functions and gifts from God Himself, but in forgetting who He is, how He has revealed Himself to man, and what purposes toward man He has declared? May there not one day be an awakening in some of these priests to the belief that they are charged with a mighty commission: to keep alive in men's minds the sense of a Perfect Reconciliation, a Finished Sacrifice and a never-ending Communion between God and His creatures? All this has been dwarfed, and its influence made ineffectual or mischievous, because they supposed *they* were to effect the reconciliation, make the sacrifice and create the communion. May there not be humble men on whose hearts this light, painful to agony at first, is just dawning, a light shining not from any Northern torches but from God's own word? Can we not be sure that, as they gaze on it, they will more and more renounce the silly ambition of grasping an authority so much poorer than what they already have? May they not readily confess that a priest who aspires to be a policeman must be a very bad policeman, because he first consented to be a bad priest? My friends, it may seem strange and ridiculous to some of you that I speak of such a conviction working in a poor friar in a lonely cell, as if it might cut a knot that monarchs and statesmen cannot untie. But is there no historical experience to support such a dream? I do not know what power or wit is at work in the councils of Europe, civil or ecclesiastical, but I do not suppose there is more than was engaged in settling the condition of Italy, the Popedom and mankind when Charles V, Francis I and Leo X were occupied with the problem. Surely the monarch of a country that had recently overrun the sacred soil, the lord of Spain, Germany and the Indies, the man who brought all the craft and learning of the Medici to sustain the Holy See and free it from the scandal of promoting ignorance, might have found, if anyone could, some adjustment of the difficulties at the start of the sixteenth century. Yet all these mighty forces were thrown into confusion, and the whole question of Italy and Europe took a new form, because a miner's son, a poor monk, cried aloud in bitterness of soul: "Lord, I am one of Thy priests, yet I am not righteous. Oh that Thou wouldst clothe me with a righteousness that is Thine, and not mine!" When he had found deliverance himself, he declared to all his fellow-sufferers that the unrighteousness of the priest crushed all hope among men and made it impossible for God's saints to sing with joyfulness. That message sounded through all lands, and that prayer went up from multitudes of hearts. The Reformation that followed was imperfect and limited, but it was one that all the contrivances of all the sovereigns in Christendom could not have wrought. There is nothing wild or irrational in supposing that like causes may produce like effects in our times. But our business is with facts, not anticipations, and first with our own land, not others. Intelligent foreigners who travel in England and mix with its most cultivated classes probably hear remarks about us not unlike what we hear from them about their priests. The English priest may not be feared in the same way; he may be seen as tamed and domesticated, his wings too clipped for dangerous flights. Still there will be complaints, painful because too just: sometimes of our impotence, sometimes of our pretentiousness; of our effort to spread a morality not based on the broad, practical distinction between right and wrong; of our appealing to the weaker elements in human nature and repudiating the strong and vital; of our ignoble contentions; of our injustice to all outside our circle, and often to those within it. When we hear such things, or learn they are said out of our hearing, I suspect we are as often tempted to side with our accusers as to defend ourselves. We admit all that is said of the necessary abuses of a priestly order, plead special exceptions in our own cases, and perhaps recriminate on other classes who, if ours is bad, cannot be shown to be better. Such excuses, however natural, are unmanly and unlawful. No one who knows himself and reviews his acts fairly can claim to be exempt from any of the evils his order has been prone to, or to have avoided them as opportunity served. No one has a right to say the fault lies with his office and not with him. Each of us ought to magnify that office, to feel the vastness of its responsibilities, the sevenfold gifts that surround it, and the mighty work it might do for our land and all lands if its stewards were found faithful. Do not, I beseech you, my lay brethren, try to strip us of that faith or weaken it; for your own sake, work hard to deepen and confirm it. If we have it rooted and grounded in us, we shall honour your callings and urge you to honour them more and count them more sacred than you have ever done, so that you may be delivered from the pettiness, trickery and vanity that go with a low estimate of their object and nature. If we ask earnestly that God's priests may be righteous, we shall extend the definition of His saints much further than we are used to. We shall tell you that you are, one and all, called and sealed to be His soldiers and servants; one and all bound to consider yourselves members of a holy Nation; one and all bound, in your different vocations, to see that this nation fulfils the work for which it is set apart. We shall tell you that you must join us in a holy war against all that degrades our English life and our English righteousness. You must show all the countries under our sway or within our influence that they have a righteous God and a loving Father over them, and so deliver them from their miseries and oppressions and make them sing with joyfulness. ## THE NEW HEAVENS AND THE NEW EARTH ::: {.center} Twentieth Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [November]{.smallcaps} 6, 1859 ::: > "*Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness*."—2 [Peter]{.smallcaps} iii. 13. *The passage:* In keeping with God's promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness lives. [The]{.smallcaps} language of the Bible, if it is the book we believe it to be, must be simple language, suited to people of every condition. But what we assume to be the simplest and most natural reading of it may not actually be so. Our reading may come from very artificial habits of ours, or we may have adopted it without looking at the context and at similar passages. When these are examined, we may find a meaning just as near to us and just as open to ordinary illustration, but far richer, fuller, and more helpful in the work of our lives. I think this has happened with the words "new" and "change" in Scripture. "New" is opposed to "old," and "change" to "continuance." A new thing *may* be one we have never seen or had anything to do with, and a change *may* be the substitution of one thing for another. We are probably inclined to think that this is the obvious force of the words. But is a man speaking some strange dialect when, coming out of his room after an illness, he says, "How new all things are to me; I feel as if I had a new life in me"? Or do we shock anyone by saying of another man, "What a happy change in him! His gloom has gone; he is what we remember him ten or twenty years ago"? The first expression plainly does not mean that the man had never breathed the air before. His feeling of newness would lose all its delight if it were not the counterpart of a feeling he had known, and much of it if the things around him were not familiar. He might adopt the poet's words, about eyes dim with childish tears and a heart idly stirred because the same sound is in his ears that he heard in those days. Surely, too, when we speak thankfully of a change in ourselves or others, we do not mean that anyone has lost his identity. All the thanksgiving would vanish, and a shivering horror take its place, if that thought could enter our minds. Which of these two meanings, both possible, is more likely St. Peter's when he speaks of a "new Heaven and a new Earth"? Before answering, it may be better to recall a few other places where this word or a related one appears. I\. I will not count the verse, "who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's," though I suspect it might throw great light on the Psalm where it stands and on the whole subject. I prefer to begin with passages that seem to require the opposite reading. The most important is St. Paul's exhortation to the Ephesians to put off the old man and put on the new. This language beyond doubt means casting away something nearer to them than their clothing, and taking up something altogether different, which would become as much one with them as the old had been. But what is cast away? "The old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts": a vile, withered thing formed by low, grovelling desires, which checked all growth, life, and breathing. The man himself may throw it off as a vile excrescence. And what is put on? "The new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness": true, essential humanity, God's original creation, now shown in Christ, which the man has a right to claim. His youth may be renewed like the eagle's. He is not to ask for something novel or rare. He wants the permanent and eternal that was always with him, and that the old man, restless after novelties and rarities, was always hiding from him. The more you meditate on this passage, the more I think you will find in it the sense I have clumsily tried to bring out. What of the other passage where the same Apostle says of himself and his fellow Christians, "Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new"? Does he mean that the objects themselves did not exist before? Or does he utter exactly the feeling of the man rising from a fever: "How new everything is! The sun and sky instead of the bed curtains, fresh breezes instead of the air of sickness, and what new clearness and proportion! We had looked at everything with jaundiced eyes, colouring it with our morbid feelings; now we see it as it really is"? If we test St. Paul's phrasing by two or three such cases, we need not doubt that we have the clue to many others. His language, however fervent and free from formality, is not loose or accidental; the more you examine it, the more consistent it proves, and apparent exceptions fall under the general law. But I will take one more example, the well-known "The trumpet shall sound, the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." A great writer of our day, who has a marvellous power of presenting his inmost experiences but perhaps lets his imagination fill the gaps in his memory, has described with fearful intensity the horror with which, as a young child, he heard these words read at the funeral of a much-loved sister nearly his own age. The thought that she was to become someone other than the creature he had known and loved overwhelmed him. And with good reason, if that had been the meaning; the words would crush every mourner. But if we look closely, their meaning is the very reverse. Paul is affirming with the utmost vehemence that the human substance, even the body, persists through all vicissitudes. "Thou fool," he says to the man who asks with what body the perfected man will come: what you sow is not quickened unless it die; you sow not the body that shall be, but bare grain; God gives it a body as it pleases Him, and to every seed its own body. How could he speak otherwise? His argument is that in the death and resurrection of our Lord we read the law for all human creatures. If we do not rise, he says boldly, Christ is not risen. It would have been anguish to him to think that the face that blinded him on the road to Damascus was not the face that was marred more than any man's in Gethsemane and on Calvary. His faith required him to acknowledge Christ's identity through all changes, from the cradle at Bethlehem until His body entered the glory He had with the Father before the worlds. How then could he doubt the identity, through birth, growth, decay, and renewal, of anyone made a living soul like the first Adam and given the quickening spirit of the second? II\. We must ask, then, whether St. Peter's language in the text is formed on the same model as St. Paul's or on the opposite principle. Are the new Heaven and new Earth like the new man, like the things that became new, like the glorious body into which the body of humiliation is to be transfigured? Or did Peter expect another Heaven and Earth, other objects substituted for those among which he had lived? I have no doubt this last is the impression the passage makes on a great many people, and at some time on all of us. There is hazard in rudely attacking an opinion under which a precious jewel may lie hidden, and which may be woven into expectations its holders can ill afford to lose. But there is hazard also in leaving our minds vague and confused, grasping at we know not what, supposing that what is given us is not what we want. From such a state of feeling, however it justifies itself by phrases of Scripture, come weariness and restlessness, and at last indifference and unbelief. \(1) St. Peter says, "We, according to His PROMISE, look for new Heavens and a new Earth." Plainly the way to learn what he meant is to ask which promises he refers to. The first and most natural is Isaiah's, which must have been in his mind: "Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. . . . and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her." Hearing "the former things shall not be remembered," you might suppose the prophet expected a heaven and earth with no connection to anything he had known or cared for. But look again at how full the words are of Jerusalem, the home of his childhood and city of his fathers, and how all his hopes turn on her deliverance and the establishment of God's kingdom in her. Observe also how he comments on his rapture later: "As the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before Me, so shall your seed and your name remain." So the coming heaven and earth are directly tied to the continuance of his people, of the seed of Israel, and, if we take the words as they stand, of their very name. Fix the time and manner of fulfilment as you will, it could not be fulfilled unless everything dearest and most sacred to him were vindicated and preserved, and the influences that threatened its life were taken away and forgotten. This was one of the books on which St. Peter had been nourished from childhood. It had grown dearer to him as he recognized the Person who is its subject, no longer in vision but clothed in a man's form and suffering as a man. Its words came back to him with full power as he looked toward a crisis that would reveal that divine and human sufferer as King of the nation that rejected Him, and of the world. Unless he dissented altogether from the old teacher of his land, or twisted its language into the opposite of its first sense, he must have given the word "new," in connection with heaven and earth, the same force St. Paul gave it when he spoke of the regenerated man and the risen body. 2\. Think, again, how inconsistent any other use of "new" would be with what Peter must always have meant by the first noun it qualifies. He had heard the Rabbis speak of different heavens, a heaven of the heavens; perhaps he took little of that lore in. But he had been in his boat on the Lake of Galilee on clear starry nights, and the words of Scripture about the firmament had come to him. The firmament had spoken to him of fixedness, permanence, and calm. Had he been like the neighbouring peoples, he would have bowed down and worshipped those symbols of what his spirit most longed for. He was forbidden to. He had been told that there was One from whom the light came, One who is and was and is to come, and that these bright forms are only the works of His hands. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who made a covenant with his fathers, had made the sun, moon, and stars shine and fixed them in their courses. From Him came the light that makes all things visible and the heat that makes them grow and bear. So the heavens he saw were witnesses to the Jew (the Psalmist said to the ends of the earth) of One he could not see but could speak with, and in whom he might find refuge from the confusions around him and in his own heart. The prophets called heaven God's throne and habitation, and called all spirits doing His commandments Heavenly Powers. Yet they also taught that He dwelt among men, filled Solomon's Temple, and met His people there. Now this language had gained a deeper and clearer sense. One who dwelt in Galilee and was called a carpenter's son had spoken of a Kingdom of Heaven, told His disciples it was near, sent them to tell their countrymen, and enabled them to show its nature by healing diseases and delivering from evil. He had removed the barriers of space and time that hid it, saying, "No man hath ascended up into Heaven, but He that came down from Heaven, even the Son of Man that is in Heaven." Was it *this* Heaven that was to pass away or be changed for another? *This* kingdom that ruled over all, whose very marks are permanence and eternity? The question answers itself. If this were the blessing the Apostle looked for, he was setting at nought all that God had taught him from infancy, through his work, the divine books, the words of Jesus, and the Spirit who was to abide with the disciples for ever and bring all things to their remembrance. You will say he meant not this Heaven but the visible heavens, which were and are only symbols of the divine presence and eternity. I believe he did look for the passing away of everything merely shadowy, everything that appears other than it is. We in this age believe that the visible firmament misleads us, and that the actual sun and stars are not what our senses report. It would be no shock but a great relief to believe that some day the senses will not deceive us as they do, that they will perform their appointed functions with a freedom and power they have never had, and no longer stand between us and the truth of things to distort it. That would be a change indeed. Think how much it involves, and, more earnestly, what must precede it. St. Peter's words can guide us here, if we first clear our minds of a notion about the *Earth* that haunts us all, which we often sanctify with religious names, and against which I believe both conscience and Scripture protest. 3\. We speak scornfully of this earth, as if it were a fit place for poor, fallen, wicked creatures, while those the Spirit makes fit for the Kingdom of Heaven look down on it, regarding it at best as a place where they must live for threescore and ten years. These words often contrast sharply with the acts of those who use them; one would think they were out to prove how wretched earth's things are by preferring the meanest and most frivolous of them, above all earth's money, the love of which is the root of all evil. So it must be more and more, unless reverence for the earth is taught as an article of faith, and we are told that the Bible commands this reverence, gives the strongest and most sacred reasons for it, and warns against the sins we fall into when we esteem the earth lightly. The old Hebrews believed the earth a grand and awful place, which God created, cared for, and pronounced very good, which He watches over, and whose defilers and destroyers He punishes and will cast out. Those who say the Gospel changed this belief, and that Peter held it less strongly than Isaiah, cannot believe in their hearts that the Son of God actually walked this earth, blessed it, wept over it, and spent all His days healing the plagues and curses afflicting its inhabitants. They cannot think the Incarnation is what our creeds declare it to be. Otherwise they must suppose it was the vindication and redemption of this earth for its Creator: a sentence on those who thought it theirs to use for covetousness and ambition, and on those who declared it the Devil's and were ready to hold parts of it as his liegemen and tributaries. No! St. Peter believed the earth had been made evil by its inhabitants, just because they did not recognize its relation to and dependence on the Kingdom of Heaven, and denied that there was one Lord of both: a Lamb slain on earth and worshipped among the Hosts of Heaven. So Heaven suffered as much as earth. One became cold and dark, remote from sympathy, the seat of a tyrant's throne; the other became the prey of bad men and bad spirits who supposed God had left it at their mercy. 4\. St. Peter did not believe, as the Romans and the Jews did, that the Heavens were the seat of a tyrant's throne. He did not believe the earth was left under its curse as a home for oppressors, visible or invisible. So he looked, according to God's promise, for a new Heaven and new Earth "wherein dwelleth Righteousness." That word explains his assurance; by it his belief and hope were tested. He was sure Christ had revealed a kingdom of absolute Righteousness and shown the Ruler of heaven's armies to be the Righteous One. He could go to the Nations with that Gospel, proclaim the crucified Man as the one image of the invisible God, and declare that in Him that God is the father of all the Families of the earth. Just so far as that Gospel was received there would be a new Heaven. The old Heaven, with its powers of Nature and capricious gods, sometimes oppressors, sometimes deliverers, ruling by fear rather than justice, would pass away and not be remembered. A Righteous Being, who by all His judgments and blessings seeks to make men righteous and form them after His image, would be confessed and adored. And then there would be a new earth. Man, the minister of God's purposes, would no longer thwart them or outrage His laws or set himself up as an independent satrap making laws for himself and the universe and marring both. All God's blessed processes, often fiery ones, for purifying and renewing the earth and casting out whatever loves and makes a lie, would work freely and mightily. And it would be seen that the earth had been foully and ungratefully reviled when it was called unfit for the Saints of God, whose highest and most blessed work, if we believe the New Testament, is to help carry out God's intentions for it by bringing it within the range of Christ's Redemption and Sacrifice. 5\. In the midst of an apostate Jewish nation and a world ruled by Nero, St. Peter held fast this hope. And very soon, as we believe, he discovered that it was a hope that did not make ashamed, and that he had not followed a cunningly devised fable. An hour came (perhaps on a cross, like his Master) when the earth passed from his eyes like a scroll, the elements seemed to melt with fervent heat, and all he had seen dissolved. Then he knew that the visible framework of the heavens he had gazed on was not the Heavens indeed, and that the corruption, tyranny, and falsehood he had witnessed on earth did not constitute this earth but only vexed and disturbed it. Then the true Heaven of Righteousness, which he had seen imperfectly, as through a glass darkly, but had seen in the Only-begotten of the Father, stood out in all its fulness. Will he not then also have seen a new earth? Will not the hills, valleys, and lakes of his childhood have been clothed with a new and celestial beauty? Will he not have looked into them instead of only looking upon them? Will one line of the old picture be missing? And yet will not all have become new? He had once trodden that ground following his Master, sometimes in rash confidence, sometimes trembling and amazed. How he will now feel every spot of earth glowing with that presence! How he will know that Christ was in the midst of that earth, and of those gathered on it in His Name, and would be to the end! Such visions, or rather such fulfilments of their earthly visions, we may believe were granted to those of that company of just men made perfect whom we have remembered this week. And surely we may believe that some of them can look on and see how the events that pass us so quickly, and that we heed so little, have all been removing some hindrance to the full showing of that true Heaven and true Earth which our sins shut out from us. They may see how all of history, the brave deeds of good men and the crimes of evil men, has been helping to reveal and establish that Righteousness by which all unrighteousness shall be overcome; how every passage in national or personal life has been a divine Judgment, understood or overlooked by those who went through it; and how each judgment is a step to the final judgment that shall divide for ever between the false and the true. III\. Whatever insight may be granted to those who have left the world, there are lessons for us who are in it. The first is a negative one, about what we have *not* to expect. You cannot be ignorant that there is much excitement just now about prophecy; that events of a very appalling kind are said to be near; and that some tremble at the thought that the earth may be approaching its destruction. 1\. The study of prophecy, I think, may be most healthy, provided we remember that the true prophets of God always connected the future with the past and present. Their main object was to teach their countrymen that in God's government nothing happens by chance, and they lived to assert a Right Order that must triumph at last over all that is wrong. If we observe these laws of prophecy, we shall remember that particular times and seasons are not laws but accidents, about which we are liable to continual mistakes, and the study will strengthen our resolutions, deepen our thoughts about what is going on around us, and make our actions more serious and consistent. Above all we shall be less the slaves of the newsmonger and gossip. Every event will have solemnity as one of a long series leading to an issue, and none will be a mere subject for idle wonder. We shall feel that every moment is critical, that God's judgments are always proceeding, that the eternal always stands beside the changeable, and that our own times are the gravest of all, because all that went before has contributed to their character for good and evil. But there is a study of prophecy that is just the reverse and has the opposite effect on character. It keeps up a habit of guessing about the future. It fastens on special incidents, perhaps of little significance, because they chime with the interpreter's favourite theory. It dislocates history, subjects Scripture to the freaks of private and party interpretation, and becomes a tool for those who trade in panics. It confuses good, weak people with vague fears of some subversion of the universe which they call God's judgment but dread as if it were the work of an Evil Spirit, and it leads to neglect of homely duties and common morality. And while it does this to the well disposed, who under sound teaching might act well, it confirms the wicked in the conviction that all things continue as they were from the foundation of the world, so that they may safely go on with their cheats and lies, since there is no actual order in the world, or it cannot assert itself, or God has maxims of His own that have nothing to do with vindicating justice and rooting out injustice. I believe many of these errors would be corrected, and their evil consequences removed, if we make ourselves thoroughly sure that what we look for is not another Heaven and Earth, different in principle from the Heaven that rules us now and the Earth in which God has placed us now. 2\. But it is equally necessary that we expect a *new* Heaven and a *new* Earth wherein dwelleth Righteousness. We should remind ourselves day by day and hour by hour of the mighty change God has promised, by laying bare every deception, falsehood, and hypocrisy to which any of us yield, and bringing His Truth into full light. That is the terror we are to set before ourselves and our brethren, and that is the hope. It is a terror, because there is that in each of us which cleaves to deception, falsehood, and hypocrisy, and therefore to perdition. It is a hope, because there is that in each of us, a spirit in our race, which longs for deliverance from fraud and hypocrisy and cries out for the living God of Righteousness. The preacher's duty, and every man's, is to assure that bad nature of ours that it must be disappointed, since it is married to the evil that is under God's eternal curse, a curse to be executed to the uttermost; and to assure the better spirit within us that its highest hopes fall below what God has promised. And, my friends, will not that be indeed a new Heaven, in which we shall see only a Perfect Love that sacrificed itself for its enemies? Will not that be a new earth, in which the robber and spoiler prevail no more, and which the meek, who inherit it now, shall rule alone and for ever? ## PEACE: WHAT IT IS ::: {.center} Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity ::: ::: {.center} [November]{.smallcaps} 13, 1859 ::: > "*Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you*."—[John]{.smallcaps} xiv. 27. *The passage:* Jesus says to his disciples: "I leave peace with you; I give you my peace. I do not give it as the world gives." [These]{.smallcaps} words were spoken to the Apostles on the night of our Lord's betrayal. A few hours after receiving this gift of peace, their souls were more disturbed than ever before. They saw the One in whom they trusted to redeem Israel handed over to the heathen. Their own rulers condemned Him, no hosts of Angels came to rescue Him, and soon they themselves forsook Him and fled. That last act must have added the sharpest stings of conscience to all their other sorrows. They had lost not only Him but themselves. The Cross and the grave did not separate Him from them so much as the memory that they had been false to Him. How strangely the thought "He said, I leave you peace, I give you peace" must have mingled with these confusions! What peace had He bequeathed? Where was it? How could they claim it? Nothing seemed further from them. And there was something more fearful still: the One who gave them peace seemed to have lost it Himself. They had seen Him in the Agony of the Garden and heard His cry on the Cross. Was that not conflict and anguish? Did it not seem as if the whole world were at war with Him, and His Father had forsaken Him? Yet, brethren, these were the very hours that interpreted to the Disciples the words they had heard without understanding at the Last Supper. They must have turned back to these hours all their later lives when they considered the nature, reality and fullness of the blessing He had assured to them. I\. "*Peace* I leave with you." Peace with the people around them, with the rulers of the synagogue, with proconsuls or emperors? In this same discourse He warned them that all these would wage continual war on them. He had come into the world with a sword, and His Gospel would divide men in the same nation and the same household. He told them so that they might not be offended. It was strange that preaching mercy and goodwill should stir up rage and hatred, but He said it would, and it did. So the peace He spoke of must be something other than outward ease and quiet. "In the world ye shall have tribulation" was part of His legacy. Did it then mean peace within their own circle, though there was war in the world? For a few weeks or months after Pentecost they might have thought so. They had all things in common and ate their bread with joy and singleness of heart. But soon there arose in that infant community heartburnings and hypocrisies: widows of Greek proselytes murmuring against the Hebrews because they were neglected in the daily ministration; men and women boasting that they had laid the whole price of their possessions at the Apostles' feet when they had kept back a part. Soon there were debates about circumcision, Apostles separating because the contention between them was so sharp, and St. Paul withstanding St. Peter to the face because he was to be blamed. In giving peace, our Lord could not have meant that all would be quiet within the chosen body, any more than in the world outside. Did it mean, then, freedom from inner conflict, from fierce temptations to pride, self-glorification, lust, covetousness, open sin, unbelief, apostasy? St. Paul plainly did not take it so: "We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers, with the rulers of the darkness of this world, with spiritual wickedness in high places." Could any battle be described more terribly? It is a battle with inward spiritual enemies, and Apostles had to fight it as much as their converts. The peace Christ spoke of must be something else, or it was not really left or given, whatever the words seemed to say. II\. But what light lies in the clause "*My* peace I give unto you"! It is as if He said: "You have seen that I was not exempt from the world's contradiction; it hated Me before it hated you. Your own hearts tell you I was not exempt from the hardness and ingratitude of disciples, true and false. I endured misunderstanding, perversity, desertion and betrayal before you did. While you slept I wrestled with unseen enemies and dreadful temptations. Before you knew such warfare, I had resisted unto blood. My peace, then, is not exemption from any of these trials, and if you want one, you cannot have the other. It is that by which I was enabled to pass through them: to bear the opposition of sinners, not to be crushed by the unkindness of friends, to drink the cup to the dregs. That is *My* peace. It can live on in an element of strife, sorrow, helplessness, even hopelessness; it can sustain them and rise out of them, proving mightier. It was the peace I had in the Father, My filial union with Him and trust in Him. The darkness of all things around Me, of Nature, of human creatures, of My own senses and understanding given up to death, could not extinguish it. It survived when My Will could feel only anguish and desertion, first saying, Not Mine, but Thine, and then giving up the spirit into the Father's hands. My peace I give unto you: this filial union and trust toward Him who has revealed Himself to you in Me, and whose love for you is what I have shown in My life and death." III\. So the events after the Passover night, which seemed to refute the words spoken on it, at last made them clear. But there was another way too. The disciples' sin on that night, which banished peace from their minds more than anything they saw, told them what they needed and where to seek it. They had trusted in themselves and found themselves fools. They had thought they loved their Master, and when love should have flowed, it was dry. Then came bitter shame and separation; they were alone. But the Lord turned and looked on them. The memory of His love came upon them as never before, and the sense of having slighted it overcame the sense of having dishonoured themselves. Peter's tears took the place of Judas's remorse. Then they knew the peace had been left to them, though until then they had not found it. The love that had been with them so long had not deserted them. It had crushed them, broken their pride and called out their sorrow, so even if it was dead, it had might in death. What they loved was in the grave, but the love was among them more than before, giving them a vision of peace though all around and within them seemed at war, and a stronger hope than they could grasp when He Himself told them He would rise. This love, peace and hope could not be their own; all that was their own they had cast away. This was their preparation for the evening when He stood among them again, said "Peace be unto you," and showed them His hands and side. They were old words, perhaps His morning greeting, the one they were to bestow on every house they entered. They had sounded solemn and strange the night before the Crucifixion; their savour had been kept through the hour of travail; and now they met the disciples as they felt a new man born into the world. He vanished from their sight, but the gift did not depend on seeing Him. He had left it with them. It was a store to turn to not in sunny hours, when all was cheerful without and within, but in weariness and desolation. It was a store for their hearts to feed on, not for their eyes; they could not appropriate it, for it was His peace, not theirs. Yet as He had said, "I will be with you," they knew the Peace was with them. It might be hidden because He was hidden, but in seeking Him they sought it, and in finding Him they found it. He had not given as the world gives. The world's gifts are palpable and tangible, yet we cannot bring them near to ourselves; we may have them and still want them. The heart may be unable to enjoy them though the hand grasps them. This has always been the complaint against the world's gifts: they are good for nothing except as we make them good. "Ours is their wedding garment, ours their shroud." They delight or disgust us according to the state we are in, but cannot change that state. They need a light from within to show their colours; the colours do not bring the light, and too often find none. So men say, "These things were so different when we were young. How bright they looked once! How they have faded!" We all know it is the eye that has grown dim, and the things are as they were. Perhaps they never seemed much brighter; in youth there may have been other shadows we have forgotten. Only the heart is certain that it ought and is meant to enjoy, and so persuades itself that it once did. It has a witness in itself that there is another kind of gift, given directly to the heart and not through the eye. This gift does not require a particular state of mind to receive it but makes that state. It brings the light by which it is seen and then lights everything around. It depends on no accidents but compels them to obey it, drawing nourishment from what seems most contrary to it. This gift, which all men know they want, is what Christ gave His disciples. It was not something precious if only they had peace of mind to welcome it, but peace of mind itself. It is not a peace of mind that must be kept up by regulating its surroundings, but one that can safely face all heats and chills, and is most aware of its power when suffering most from them. It is not a peace we are to keep, but one that keeps us in the knowledge and love of God and of Jesus Christ our Lord. Here is the mystery of the gift, and the sign that He gives not as the world gives. He is Lord of man's inner being, not only of his circumstances, though He is Lord of these too and orders them all as instruments for showing Himself and for redeeming the creature made in His image. IV\. Therefore, brethren, though it was fitting to consider these words first as they applied to those who first heard them, and though the Apostles' history illustrates them as nothing else could, they must be ours or they could not have been theirs. All the gifts given them at the Passover are still ours. If He gave them the bread and said "Take, eat: this is My flesh," and poured the wine and said "This is the blood of the New Testament," He gave these treasures through them to all generations and endowed us in their names. As I have shown, the gift of peace had no special application to the Apostles merely because the giver sat visibly before them. They knew what they had been given only when He became invisible and they received it as an invisible blessing. Nor was it theirs because they were stronger or better than others; they entered into possession only when they knew they were as weak and evil as anyone. He chose them as heralds of His Grace and Peace to mankind, and if they had claimed these gifts in their own right and not as stewards, the gifts would not have been realized. To us, then, as truly as to them, and on the same conditions, He says, "Peace I leave with you: My peace I give unto you." Far off as it may seem, this peace is near to every one of us. We think we pursue it hither and thither, and it always stays ahead of us. But what we pursue is only a shadow; the substance that casts it is within. The heart cannot find it abroad. At home the treasure is laid up, though it may be in a chamber we have never visited, or have shunned because we fancy it haunted with strange spectres. Haunted it is, and the spectres will greatly scare us when we first venture in. The Disciples were startled to find such heartlessness and cowardice in themselves, though they had thought themselves ready to die for Him. Many a man has felt such anguish when the secret passages of his spirit were suddenly laid open to him. He cannot escape the discovery; it often comes on a sick-bed, when he is least able to face the terrors. But they may be faced, and there is a reward for everyone who does not flee from the truth. If he will be humbled by the sight of the dark spectres in the chambers of his soul, he will find there what is not dark and spectral. He will find the Love that the evil in him has been fighting: a perfect form of brightness and purity which the evil spirits mock, and which can bid them depart. If he will confess this Presence too, saying not only "*I have sinned*" but "*Against Thee* have I sinned, against Thee who hast cared for me, sought me, striven with me," a new light will burst upon him. In renouncing all his own pretensions to be or have anything, he gains what is truly his, an inalienable possession, a treasure in Heaven that thief cannot seize nor moth corrupt. If all our evil lies in resisting a Righteous Being who rules over us, then all good must be submission to Him. This is Peace: peace depending on One worthy of our dependence, peace in not seeking from outward things what they cannot give, nor from our own nature what is not in it. The Peace is there in our hearts, but it is there while the heart seeks its delight in another and forgets itself. When it finds its object it is at peace, and cannot be till then. Therefore Christ left this dowry to all human hearts when He revealed Himself to them as their proper and ever-present object: in them and above them, united with them yet always distinct, blending with them as the sky seems to blend with the sea at the far horizon, as the setting sun seems to share its glory between them. This peace is given to men, yet He gives it afresh each time. They have it only while content to receive it; the moment they take it as their property, it is gone. He does not give as the world gives. The world teaches us to claim each thing as our own and says nothing is ours until we can secure it against other men. We hold this peace on the opposite tenure: we have it only while we care to distribute it and want everyone to share it with us. It is theirs and ours because it is His who died for all and lives for all. And as this peace was first realized as deliverance from strife without and within, so it must be held fast in the midst of the same strife. If ease and sunshine come, it is well, but we are not to look for them. If joyful sensations are given, if our spirits have an unusual buoyancy and freedom, we should be thankful, but tomorrow all this may change. If we are provoking no hostility, let us ask how that happens, for the Author of this Peace was a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence, and was called a friend of publicans and sinners, and a blasphemer. This Peace was given the night before His crucifixion. When He rose, the pledges of it were His wounded hands and side, and they are always its pledges. In the communion of His body and blood we are to learn what it is for ourselves and for mankind. As we partake of it, we confess that it is for the most wretched sons of earth, because it is fixed and eternal in the Heavens. ## WAR: HOW TO PREPARE OURSELVES FOR IT ::: {.center} Sunday before Advent ::: ::: {.center} [November]{.smallcaps} 20, 1859 ::: > "*For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places*."—[Ephesians]{.smallcaps} vi. 12. *The passage:* We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. [Many]{.smallcaps} of you think England may not always be as safe from invasion as she has supposed. You hold that security is dangerous and that preparing for every possibility is a duty. You do not claim to be seers, and you may often change your minds about omens of calamity, since clouds that looked black yesterday may be gone today. But you say a nation should not have to speculate about contingencies. It should always be ready for the worst, so that it can pursue its ordinary work calmly. When it is most conscious of its own strength, it will be least suspicious and restless about its neighbours. These are powerful arguments, and others perhaps more powerful support them. Great side benefits, it is urged, are likely to come from uniting classes divided by social position and often by strong antipathies in one common cause. A people that depends wholly on disciplined armies will grow feeble, if it does not lose its liberties altogether. Its citizens will not feel it is their call to defend them, and its soldiers may feel it is in their power to trespass on them. When the citizen takes part in defending the soil, he becomes less shut up in his private interest. The soldier is reminded what his weapons are for, and that he must never degrade himself into a machine or a hireling. I do not say that those who object to these views have nothing to say for themselves or deserve no hearing. If the aim is to unite all hearts, the plain duty is to recognize the force of all objections. We should count everyone as wishing well to the commonwealth, however they differ about the means, and believe their warnings may hold some profitable truth even if we cannot shape our course by them. A clergyman may, from his circumstances and education, lean toward their conclusions. He must therefore guard against being persuaded himself, or persuading others, that want of nerve means love of peace, or lack of preparation means confidence in God. Since he can do so little to join in his countrymen's exertions, he must at least be anxious to do nothing to discourage them. He should rather consider whether, in his proper function, he may point out sources of strength they are forgetting, and causes of weakness that could make the best service and discipline useless. My text was in the Epistle of last Sunday. Connecting it with this subject, you may suppose I want to turn your thoughts from the battles fought on this earth by common men to some figurative conflict with unseen powers. I have no such purpose, and I believe St. Paul had none. The last thing he would have thought is that he was dealing in metaphors. He was talking of a real conflict, or his passion was wasted, and of one that common men meet in the rough work of their daily lives. When he says "We wrestle not with flesh and blood," he does not mean he had no flesh-and-blood enemies; he suffered stripes and spent much of his life in prison. Nor does he mean the Ephesians, or men in later times, would have none. Nor does he mean the fights were separate, with Jews, heathens or false brethren on one day and principalities and powers on another. Whenever he was in the one, he was in the other. When he was scourged, stoned or imprisoned, he was tempted to anger and bitterness, or to base and cowardly compliance. That was a spiritual battle against unseen foes. It seemed to him far more serious than the other, since on its outcome depended whether he would prevail or be worsted in the other. I believe it is the same with us and our nation now. We may be fighting flesh-and-blood enemies, even on our own soil. But we are also fighting unseen enemies who assault the spirits of us all. This is no Sunday talk; it is the work of the week. Each man, in whatever trade or profession, is in this strife while he does his work. How each man behaves in it decides whether he will be of service in the other battle. How a nation wrestles with the unseen evils threatening it decides whether it can repel its flesh-and-blood enemies, and whether it will have anything left that it cares to save. I\. In saying this I utter no paradox. It has been said thousands of times that the springs of a nation's inner life are what we must guard most carefully if we would guard it from outside foes. When they are allowed to become corrupt, outside violence comes naturally and cannot be warded off, because the strength to lift the weapon is gone, and so is the spirit that binds the hosts together. These are commonplaces we all know, but we need to reflect on them, apply them to ourselves, and connect them much more closely than we have done with St. Paul's burning language. Let me try to do this in two or three hints. 1\. Suppose I reminded you of the stories of electoral corruption we have read in recent months. You would admit it is a monstrous evil. You would not call it metaphorical or say it has nothing to do with men's most vulgar existence. You might observe that legislation helps little, and that the only effective remedy is an occasional exposure of a detected criminal, a thinning of the ranks of corruptors and corrupted. I will not dispute this; it may be reasonable. But whatever the remedy, the abomination remains. Suppose you read of it in another country: educated men aspiring to legislate for their land, through agents in the class below them, doing what they could to debase the minds and destroy the consciences of a class lower still. Would you not say, "There are symptoms of deep decay in that country. The more moral and religious it professes to be, the more alarming such symptoms are, because they show hypocrisy working beside these social enormities, sometimes giving them a seemly varnish, sometimes suggesting they can be offset by devotion or charity"? If you heard that a land carrying such a vice in its heart was invaded, would you not tremble for it? Would you not foretell that, without earnest effort to root out the disease, it would paralyze those who should go out to oppose the invader? And what does your doubt about an external legislative remedy mean, but this? You have come upon a plague floating all around you, spreading its infection so subtly that you do not know how to stop it or where to find it. You feel it must be approaching us all, and that any of us might be visited by it if our circumstances put us within its reach. Does this not explain the Apostle's phrase "spiritual wickedness in high places"? Can you find a better explanation? Does it not give just the sense of vagueness, and yet of a real, tremendous, penetrating curse, that your own words and confessions express? 2\. Think of another evil that forces itself on everyone who walks our streets: the moral and physical destruction of a great section of one sex to serve the appetites of the other. Is this same language not the most fitting for it? Everyone knows of it; newspapers proclaim it; benevolent persons try to rescue a few victims. You feel that legislation may abate some of its outward forms. But the principle lies altogether beyond legislation's range and belongs to another sphere. You feel that at the very root of society there is an evil that must be met and overcome. What is destroying the life of society is also destroying the life of individuals, both tempter and tempted. If it is overcome in the body politic, it must be overcome in the members of the body. What do such words mean? Are you not coming very near St. Paul's words, which you were inclined to dismiss as metaphorical? Do we not have spiritual wickedness to grapple with somewhere? Must we not look for armour against it, if the other armour is not to rust and be useless? I speak of this in connection with passing events because a country's real force against an invader must lie in the young men of its different classes. With regard to them I think we may be misled by a false and mischievous analogy. It may be said that our armies abroad have been anything but pure and self-restraining, and yet have done great deeds. The fact cannot be denied. Who does not rejoice that such deeds were possible, and that men who yielded to many temptations took part in them? That showed a noble and divine element in them which what contradicted it could not subdue, and which a great crisis, or the habit of discipline and duty, could call into triumphant vigour. One may trust that this element would be awakened in numbers by the holier task of defending their own soil and their fathers' graves. But remember that if it is crushed beforehand by reckless dissipation, and the meanness that always goes with recklessness, this motive may be far less strong than the sense of shame and dishonour worked into the nature of the professed soldier. The citizen must be braced to a work not his own by motives the trained servant of the camp can partly do without. If he has done all he could to deprive himself of that preparation, and cultivated habits that make hearth and home indifferent or even distasteful to him, it is an idle dream that the mere name of defender, which he may prize while it only involves holiday drills, will give him the courage action demands. Even if he has that courage as a gift from above, nurtured in an English school, his shame for evil deeds, his alienation from those whose counsels he despised, and his difficulty in seeing why it matters whether a country is free or enslaved may lead him, as they have led so many, to sell to the highest bidder the faculties sin could not extinguish. 3\. This is especially likely if he has yielded to another evil, more characteristic of our times than the last, and I should say more debasing and withering. Debts and gambling could turn a bold spirit like Catiline's into a conspirator against the order of his land. How many more have they turned into betrayers of their country to some foreigner whose success might free them of a burden and secure them a reward! Surely the spirit of extravagance, and the passion for getting money by any means, the most adventurous and least toilsome being the best, must do more than anything to destroy a people's patriotism. It creates mutual suspicion and makes the pursuit of a common end impossible. It therefore encourages anyone who looks greedily at our territory, or merely wishes to humble us on the one point where all, high and low, seem most sensitive. And has the money-getting, gambling habit of mind not exactly that indefinable, diffusive, penetrating character that matches the description of spiritual wickedness, wickedness the sharpest swords cannot touch nor the best-devised laws provide against? We no doubt speak of these curses very differently from St. Paul. We use abstract names; he saw them as actual powers. Our method serves tolerably in easy times. The question is whether we shall have to fall back on his if the difficult times some of us expect should come. I believe all who struggle with evil in any form find it to be a power, ready to spring on them, hold them down and take them captive. They must resort to the Apostle's language or something equivalent, for it describes the most terrible of all facts to them. How not to sink under the power, and how to be raised out of it if they sink, is the only subject worth considering. It is wholly personal, for they themselves are in the fight and must conquer or perish. Yet it is wholly a universal question. They cannot separate themselves from their kind, or find that they are less prone to wrong than others, or guess at other men's perils except from what they know of their own. They also cannot understand the fine distinctions some draw between spiritual wickedness and ordinary wickedness. To them ordinary wickedness, if that name covers all that makes men murderers, adulterers, thieves and liars, must be spiritual wickedness. The impulse to be a murderer, adulterer, thief or liar assaults the man's spirit. It addresses not his eyes, ears, taste or touch but himself. It tries to draw him away from a law he confesses binds him, and from a Father who has spoken to him and is speaking to him continually, in whispers or in thunders. So it seems no stranger to them than it did to the Hebrew prophets that this law should reveal itself to nations and individuals through threatened famine, pestilence or invasion, and that the Father should by such warnings turn His children to Himself. They welcome sanitary precautions and the rifle corps as signs that men are alive to the message and honestly trying to avert the danger. What they want beyond this is that these measures not be defeated by the selfishness that sacrifices a neighbour's health and comfort to petty personal advantage, and the well-being and freedom of the country to grovelling ambition, lust and avarice. II\. These are spiritual evils, so they must be fought with spiritual armour. In saying so we are no more using metaphors than before; the remedy is as little fantastic as the disease. Most people practically acknowledge that Right and Wrong are the great adversaries and have been since the world began, even those who argue in theory that right and wrong reduce to the expedient and inexpedient, or that one is only a modification of the other. What Scripture adds to this old and general belief is the assertion that Right is the nature of God. A living Being, the Author of the Universe and all in it, is pledged to assert and vindicate the Right. Wrong is a lie and a rebellion, and in yielding to it we yield to the Father of lies, who would not abide in the truth. From this starting point Scripture goes on to affirm that Christ, the Son of God, took on Him man's nature to wrestle with this enemy of Right and Truth and deliver man from him. Then it reaches what is characteristically the New Testament doctrine, the one St. Paul asserts here and everywhere: that the Spirit of the Father and the Son is wrestling in the great human society, in each nation and in each man, with the spirit of Wrong and Untruth. None of these principles, each unfolded out of the other, has the least element of fantasy; each is the opponent of all that is fantastical. In them, I believe, lie the strength and hope of nations and men in the day of battle. There would be something deeply discouraging in the thought of our moral weaknesses and sins. It would be more discouraging still if we began to reproach one another, saying, "They belong to that man, not to me; to that school or sect, not to mine." Such quarrelling and recrimination are the very pledges of defeat, because they hinder all united effort. And religion might deepen our fears and lessen our confidence by saying our offences provoke God's anger and He will surely punish us. But suppose the old faith is true. God is a God of Right, and not of mere Power. Right is not an abstraction but is seated on the throne of heaven. Christ has proved it mighty over wrong and sits for ever a Redeemer, Judge and King. When our spirits are most dead, there is a Spirit to quicken them, and He is not far from any of us. He bids those whose spirits are in closest bondage to cast off their chains, rise up and walk. He is not partial or limited in His work, but urges saint and sinner alike to distrust himself and trust an eternal and loving God. Then, brethren, as nothing need make us fear while we *have* moral strength and unity, so nothing in our worst condition can prevent our obtaining them. We have only to look our evils in the face, hiding none from ourselves, excusing none to each other, and confessing them all to God. We have only to understand and remember always how useless all physical means are if inner strength and heart are absent. We have only to claim our share in all our country's sins, not thrusting them on others, but owning that they belong to our evil nature and how little we have fought them. We have only to ask God to take away our self-conceit and pride, that we may be fit to stand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Then it will be seen that the evils which have clung to us and pressed so heavily are not part of our national substance, as our enemies may think and as we may sometimes be tempted to think ourselves. They are rather a poison in the blood that can be expelled, the tyranny of an evil spirit that can be cast out. Then God will clothe us in His own armour. We shall go out, in the name and power of Right, against all who would set up power against Right and so establish an Antichrist in place of the Christ. And God's Spirit will stir our wills to bring forth good works, whose plentiful fruit will redound to His glory and bring rewards to the whole land. So it will be in the daily war we wage with the powers of evil that seek to destroy the life of our country and our own. So it will be if God should send us the huge and fearful chastisement of a foreign enemy threatening our shores or even entering our borders. We may trust humbly that even such a visitation will be turned to the rooting out of our vices, the healing of our divisions, and the preparing of our hearts for the tasks God has appointed us and we have neglected. In that battle, as in the others we cannot shrink from, we may ask that the Captain of the Lord's Host Himself be our leader and champion. And if no mortal lips should speak words of encouragement and hope, that voice which is as the sound of many waters will say to each fighter, and all the good men of every age will echo it, "Be ye faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of Life."