Courage

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

The passage: You are not to be afraid of them, for the Lord your God is among you, a mighty and terrible God.

It 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.