Sunday before Advent
November 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 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 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.”