Third Sunday after Trinity
July 10, 1859
“It shall be, if He call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.”—1 Samuel iii. 9.
The passage: If the Lord calls you, you are to say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
A reader 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.”