Revivals

“I have hated them that hold of superstitious vanities: and my trust hath been in the Lord.” —Psalm 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 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.