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 doctrine of this text is very unlike one which is frequently heard in this day and from many different quarters. How often we are told, and how apt we are to think, that superstition is an excessive or exaggerated faith; that superstition diminishes with the growth of intelligence, because faith diminishes; that those who would arouse ignorant and vulgar people to faith in God, must appeal more or less directly to their superstition! This opinion presents itself in various aspects. Perhaps most of us can remember some occasions upon which we have accepted it as if it were an axiom, and have drawn practical conclusions from it. If we have been strongly alive to the mischiefs and horrors of superstition, we have been willing to risk the loss of faith that we might get rid of them; when the reaction has come, and we have felt that the world could not go on safely without faith, we have been ready to tolerate a considerable amount of superstition, lest its companion should perish with it.

The Psalmist, we see, looks at the subject from quite another point of view. He opposes “superstitious vanities” to “trust in the Lord.” One is the protest against the other; one is to be the deliverance from the other. It is not an isolated statement,—one which we can escape from by a little change in the words or the construction. It contains the very spirit of the Old Testament. Trust in God,—an invisible God,—a righteous God,—is the principle which every lawgiver, warrior, prophet, priest, is to exhibit in his actions, to enforce upon his land. So far as his trust fails, he fails to do the work he is called to do. Distrust is the sin which he charges upon his people; because they trust in this invisible, loving, righteous Being, they are not to tremble before visible things or men, they are not to fear the invisible powers of evil. Losing trust, they are told that they will infallibly bow down to objects of Nature, to idols of wood and stone; they will listen to wizards that peep and mutter; they will fear where no fear is; they will make their cruel imaginations into gods, and worship them.

The prophets of the chosen people, whose names and deeds are commemorated in Scripture, thoroughly entered into this principle. There is none to whom our thoughts are more continually directed than to Elijah. He is the witness for God in the age of the worst king; his name became typical of the witnesses for Him in after ages. What is his work? You will fancy, perhaps, that he goes to a people who are utterly indifferent to all religious acts and exercises, that he may stir up their terror of the consequences which their indifference may bring on them. No! He goes to a people busy with all religious acts and exercises; devoted to priests; continually at their hill altars; praying, crying and cutting themselves with stones, that they may gain a hearing. He goes to them, that he may turn them from these acts, for which he has no tolerance; that he may call upon them to trust in the Lord God of their nation, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; that he may restore the worship which expresses the calm trust in Him Who had made a covenant with them, Who had never ceased to watch over them and care for them, Who was even then turning their hearts back to Himself.

Look again at the kings who are commended in the same record. Hezekiah is one of the most noted of them. When Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem, his General made an oration, intended, as he boasted, quite as much for the people as for the king, exposing the absurdity of his different grounds of confidence that the city could be saved. What horses and riders had he? Was Egypt likely to aid him? And then he went on: “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 been so plausible; none will have seemed to a heathen ruler so perfectly conclusive. “What! this king dares to say that he has some claims on the powers above for his devotion! If he had set up altars in all parts of his kingdom, and invited the people to go to them, he might have some pretence to the character of a religious king. But he has done just the reverse. He has pulled down altars. He has merely cared to bring them to his capital. Will not the God Whom he professes to serve, show His sense of that crime by giving up his city to me?” And these very acts were those which proved, the Scripture says, that Hezekiah trusted in the Lord God more than all the kings that were before him.

But if the words of the Psalmist express a genuine Jewish feeling, are they equally applicable to the New Dispensation? Let us consider. The Apostles certainly did not seek, like Hezekiah, to make all men worship at the altar in Jerusalem. They foretold that Jerusalem and its temple would perish; they charged their countrymen with rejecting their King; they formed churches, confessing that King as the King of Men, in all the different cities of the Roman empire. There was the greatest change and contrast in outward circumstances between them and those of whom we have been speaking. But there was no change in principle. Wherever the preachers of the Gospel went, they found men practising one superstitious vanity or another, bowing down to visible gods, trembling at the future, seeking for diviners who could penetrate its secrets. Wherever they went, they found men fearing gods, trying to conciliate their favour or avert their wrath. Wherever they went, they heard of devotees, male and female, who associated the service of the divinities with frantic utterances and wild contortions. To interfere with them was not in their power: state force, and mob opinion, were leagued in support of them. All they could do was to proclaim a Being Whom men might trust; One Who loved them; One Who had sent His Son to take their nature and die for them; One Who had made peace with them; One Who had sent His Spirit to convert the wills that refused to be at peace with Him. They did proclaim such a Being, they did incite men to trust in Him. And by so doing they struck such a blow at superstitious vanities as no iconoclast ever struck. They testified a hatred of them which they could not have testified if they had had power to lay low every heathen altar, to cast every idol into the fire. They earned the hatred of those who held to these superstitious vanities. Not a martyr fell under the axe, or was tied to the stake, or was fastened to a cross, but because he would not do sacrifice to the likeness of some emperor, or some god whom the emperor sanctioned with his divine fiat. Not one had courage to make that denial, but because he trusted in the Lord, Who had given His Son to be the perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world. The truth, then, which was proclaimed of old, remained good from generation to generation. Superstition was the enemy of trust, in the days after the Incarnation as in the days before it. Trust, because the object of it was more fully revealed, was a mightier destroyer of superstition than it had ever been.

And does not our own experience, my brethren, confirm the doctrine of Prophets and Apostles? We need not go far to look for examples of superstition, that we may understand its nature. We carry it about with us. Each one has some superstitious vanity or other to which he is prone; some dark shadow which haunts him; some visible or invisible terror, which is always ready to make a coward of him. We may try to lay them by experience, by calculations of chances, by arguments of science. All such helps are good; but there are moments when they fail altogether. Those are the moments, generally speaking, when they are wanted most; when the body is weak; when the fancy is strong; when there is no leisure for trains of reasoning. Oh! is not Trust, simple Trust, in One Who is above all and through all,—Who knows the whole Creation, Who knows us and our weaknesses;—is it not this which puts the vision to flight? Is it not this which enables us to answer the suggestion, that we are sinful, and therefore have a good right to fear; that we are sinful, and therefore 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 to do it, sin overcomes us. Have we not then a sure witness in ourselves of the fact, that Superstition and Faith are not of the same kin, but are deadly and everlasting foes?

The history of Christendom, I believe, if we look at all below the surface, leads to the same conclusion. When Protestants find fault with Romanists for attaching importance to the intercession of Saints, or to their relics, are they blaming an excess of faith? I hope not. To believe that those who have sympathized with their fellows on earth are sympathizing with them wherever they are; to think that those who prayed against the evils of the world are praying against them now;—this surely is not to be denounced as superstition. No more is it superstition to regard every token and memorial of the departed, in one period or another, with affection and reverence. To hold this faith is to hold that the visible and the invisible world have been united; that the grave has no longer a victory. But to suppose that Saints intercede with God, not according to His Will, not for the doing of His Will, but that they may induce Him to change His Will; to suppose that dead things have in them some charm and power which does not belong to the living agencies which are at work throughout God’s creation,—this is superstition: because this is loss of trust in God; this has its ground in distrust of Him. Or to take an instance from a very different class of men; from those who regarded the intercession of Saints and the efficacy of relics with horror. Why do our reason and conscience pronounce the most distinct and vehement condemnation of those murders which were enacted by the Puritans in New England, against the men and women whom they charged with the sin of witchcraft? Not because they recognized the fact of evil, not because they recognized the power of evil,—not because they believed that that power might acquire a frightful tyranny over human creatures who submitted to it. Stern facts compelled them to make these confessions; they would have lost the vigour of their characters, the might which enabled them to struggle with the untilled earth and subdue it, if they had not had these convictions. But they became cruel and savage, because they lost the faith that good was mightier than evil; that no man need be the victim and slave of the Devil, because Christ had conquered the Devil. They did not trust in the Lord, and so they yielded to superstitions—vanities we can hardly call them, they were so dark and deadly. And they left a warning to all who should come after, that they may fall into crimes as great, which shall seem to them also full of religion, if their religion ever ceases to be one of Trust, and passes into one of slavish fear.

But is there nothing, then, in the notion that even the worst superstitions are better than the utter void which is left in the soul when they have departed? Is there nothing in the dream, that they may be the preparation for a higher and purer faith? Even the worst superstitions are, assuredly, a sign and pledge that man is more than an animal,—that he is a spirit; that he is connected with a visible as well as an invisible world; that you cannot chain him to Time, if you bring all the fetters of sensuality and of philosophy to help you. Even the worst superstitions may, in this sense, be the preparation for faith; they are inarticulate cries and groans for a Revelation of the unseen world which shall scatter them; for a Gospel of God and of a Kingdom of Heaven which shall be a deliverance from them. But then it follows from this, that we are never to acknowledge the superstition as the radical thing in any human creature; we are to consider it a disease which cleaves to the root of his being, and which is always threatening to kill him. We can hope for no aid from it: our object must be, in the surest and shortest way we can find, to dispossess him of it. And if we take the shortest, the direct method, that which the words of the Psalmist and the example of the Apostles point out to us, we never need fear that the departure of Superstition will prepare the way for the entrance of Atheism. We should rather assure ourselves continually that superstition is of the nature of Atheism, and will at last pass into it, if God is not presented to the faith and trust of men.

I think these reflections are important to us just at this time for several reasons. One especially has induced me to bring them before you this afternoon. You have all been hearing and reading of great religious movements, which have taken place in some parts of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and the like of which may occur in England. It is not my purpose to comment on the conflicting opinions of clergymen or laymen respecting these phenomena. Many of the statistics on both sides will, I should conceive, be thrown aside as worthless by persons at all used to the examination of evidence; so impossible must it be as yet to collect or arrange the facts which show whether the results, on the whole, have been good or evil. If it should hereafter appear that the mother-vice of those impressible, excitable Celtic populations has been diminished since the preachers went among them,—if any number of them shall learn to dread a lie, and to speak the truth simply and habitually how much cause will there be for thankfulness, what sure proof will there be that the God of Truth has been accomplishing a mighty work among them! But it must be distinctly understood and announced that such an effect never has proceeded, never will proceed, from the encouragement of superstitious vanities of one kind or another; that it has proceeded, and will proceed, only from the awakening of trust in a righteous God, Who seeks to make men righteous. Whatever appeals are made to the nerves, and not to the conscience, to that which is weak and fantastic in man or woman, and not to that which is deep and earnest,—let these appeals be as passionate as they may be, let them be apparently ever so effectual, must, if the precedents and statements in the Bible are true, and if all past experience is not fallacious, lead to moral mischief and not good. No doubt the gold and the clay may be mingled, as they are in most human compositions. The orator may mix addresses to the nerves with addresses to the conscience, may sometimes invoke and evoke superstition, sometimes faith. But just according to the predominance of either element will be the result; and therefore it is most needful that they should not be confounded by those who profess themselves ministers of the Spirit of God, lest haply they should make themselves ministers of the Spirit of Lies.

Some parts of this subject I might deem more important in another congregation than this, a congregation of clergymen, or of persons mixing greatly in the debates and factions of the religious world. But what I have said to-day, I believe may be as needful here as anywhere. For I have observed that cultivated men often speak on this fashion. They 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 if they have it, it must be leavened,” these observers say, “with superstition. Those who speak to them must be men who know how to humour their superstitions, nay, who participate in them. A necessary incident of the machinery which is brought to bear upon them may be, that it should produce violent emotions, hysterical excitements.” You must all have heard remarks of this kind; they have a certain air of philosophy, which commends them to some: they justify that which many devout people wish to be justified; these accept them therefore without much examination. In the name of the Gospel, and of the poor, to whom the Gospel was preached at first and should be preached now, I solemnly protest against such arguments. They proceed on the assumption that there is not that in every human being to which truth can address itself; that it must beg help of falsehood in order to make its way. They assume that those who are most prone to superstition are those in whom it ought to be most indulged: whereas they are the very persons whose character it is depraving, whom it is most separating from God, and giving over to the government of impulse and of chance; who most demand all aids and helps that they may be set free from it; who require above all a Deliverer in Whom they may trust. If it is feared that there will not be enough of sorrow for past sin, of the struggles and anguish of a spirit feeling its yoke and trying to shake it off, when such a message is delivered, when such a God is proclaimed, Scripture and experience unite to dispel that apprehension. The feeling that a Father’s house has been forsaken, that the monitions of a loving Friend have been continually disregarded, has more power to awaken the sense of bitter wrong, at first of extreme despondency, than all theatrical tricks, than all the inventions of a coarse and noisy rhetoric. No one denies that these will do a work; the question is, what work? One which will make the subject of it more, or less of a man? more, or less of a believer in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? That the Gospel of a Kingdom of Heaven, a Kingdom of Righteousness, Peace, Truth, will bring out all the opposing elements of Unrighteousness, Discord, Falsehood,—that these will wrestle together in each man’s heart and in the world,—till the one be victorious and the other put down, we have also assurances from the past and the present, and from witnesses concerning the future who have not deceived us. A very frightful hell will be opened before each man, if we preach, as the Apostles preached, of the mind and will of God from which it seeks to separate us. Every one will feel how near he has been and is to that abyss, what power he needs to save him from descending into it. But the converse assertion is not true. Pictures of torments do not call up visions of justice and goodness. The lurid flames of the bottomless pit give no light by which we may trace our way upwards into the regions of day. To kindle such flames, or at least to produce some mechanical counterfeit of them, is the expedient which occurs to us all, when we first try to make our neighbours better. We find afterwards that the evil nature, which we share with these neighbours, had much to do with the suggestion of the device; that moral evil, and physical evil too, are things too serious to be played with; that God teaches men what these are, as no words of ours can; that He also teaches and permits us to proclaim what is the escape from them.

And these actual evils are felt by all classes, rich and poor, learned and unlearned—in different measures—but they are essentially the same for all. And this actual deliverance is to be declared to rich and poor, learned and unlearned, with varieties of tone, of diction, of illustration, no doubt; but it is essentially the same for all.

If we understand the need there is for a great moral reformation in the whole land, and in every order of men within it, we shall not be speculating so cleverly about the particular arrangements which are needful, to make an impression upon those who are the least like ourselves, who are susceptible of influences which do not reach us. We, Clergymen, Lawyers, Merchants, should hear the words, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” continually ringing in our ears, speaking to us not of some other men’s offences but of our own, not of some formal acts which we have neglected, but of the falsehood and insincerity to which we have yielded, each in his own work and vocation, of the powers which we have wasted, of the witness which we might have borne for good, of 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 should feel, and you would feel, that these sins press most heavily, not upon those who lie on the outskirts of society, but upon those who are influencing its different movements, who are charged with its different trusts. We should feel that every one, down to the lowest serf of the soil, was suffering for our neglects and misdoings, and might be quickened into a better life if it first began to stir in us.

And for this end nothing is so needful as that we should purge our minds of superstitious vanities; of all those dark thoughts of God which turn us away from Him, and so make Repentance impossible. Trust in Him as the Perfectly Good, Who wills us to repent, Who gives us Repentance, Who works in us by His Spirit that we may repent,—this is what we all want; to this we should be encouraging ourselves and each other. Trust in our schemes, in our wisdom, in our religion, will come to nought. Those who have had most of it in any of these forms will make the most fatal wrecks, will be found most bare and helpless in the trial day. Trust in the Lord God has never failed any one in the age past, and will last for ever, world without end.