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 reader of Scripture, when he meets with a story like that which we heard in the first Lesson this afternoon, often thinks thus with himself: “I may apply this narrative, or the preacher may apply it, to my own circumstances. I may feel that God is, in some sense, speaking to me as He was to the child Samuel. But I must be careful to remember that it is not in the same sense. I must beware of fanatical impressions. On the other hand, I must not get rid of the plain letter; Samuel, we are told, heard an actual voice. To doubt that he did is to doubt inspiration; to remould the whole record according to our notions.” There is evidently an honest purpose in this resolution; a wish to profit by the lessons of Scripture; a fear of dealing unfairly with them or with our own times. And yet those who adopt this course find themselves in some sad confusions.
I. It has been found impossible seriously to care for these so-called applications of Scripture. What are they? What force lies in them? They are merely so many morals appended with more or less ingenuity to the text. They are worth just as much, and just as little, as any other comments upon human conduct and exhortations to human duties. They are seemingly founded on the Bible, but really are deduced from our own observation and experience by the use of our own logical faculty. When we demand for them the reverence which is paid to Scripture, the conscience of our hearers rebels against the claim. They feel that one has only the most artificial accidental connection with the other. And we preachers feel it too. The more homage we pay in our hearts to Scripture, the more we are conscious how wholly different from it these forced deductions, moralizations, spiritualizations of ours are; we know we have no right to press them as if they had any authority; we grow languid in the utterance of them; they become at every step more dull, flat, and unprofitable.
II. There are two methods of escape from such a state of things; our age has tried, or is trying, both. One is, to surround ourselves with sensible images and impressions. “The men in the old time,” it is said, “believed that the spiritual world actually held converse with this world. Voices reached them, visions came to them, which are denied to us. They were surrounded with a religious atmosphere; the circumstances in which they dwelt kindled instead of repressing their faith. All was mystery; why should not mysterious communications be made to them from time to time?” It is insinuated, scarcely asserted, that a similar discipline would produce similar effects. Men cured of the indisposition to believe in miracles may become the subjects of miraculous agency. At all events they will be in a condition to understand those who were the subjects of it in other days, to sympathize with them, to take their reports literally. This is one process.
The other is directly the reverse of this. It affirms that the great art of the modern student is to strip off the material husk which encased the spiritual records of the old time. “A kernel,” it is said, “there is in them, which we may possess; for it belongs to one century as much as another. The facts—the wonderful facts—of Conscience,—the spiritual instincts, which exist in the infancy of the world, but become clearer and more definite as it advances, these,” it is said, “were hidden under certain forms of expression, betokening the period in which they were first observed and treasured up. We may generally remove the sensible covering without greatly damaging the substance within; what then presents itself we may gladly receive; it will be the counterpart of experiences through which we have ourselves passed.”
III. Each of these opposing methods aims at restoring our sympathy with the narratives of Scripture; each therefore assumes that the sympathy has been disturbed. Sceptical onlookers avail themselves of that confession. “You have not courage,” they say, “to declare in plain words that we have outgrown these old Hebrew traditions; yet you feel that they stand hopelessly apart from us. So you have no resource but to unlearn all that we have been acquiring in centuries of hard experience, to create a fancy world in the midst of our real world; or else to impute a high and philosophical meaning to that which was obviously gross and materialistic. Such romancing might be worth something if it were new. But it has been tried on a grand scale, by able men, and it has failed ignominiously. The Neo-Platonists of the Roman Empire strove to do with the fables of Heathenism precisely what you are striving to do with Christianity. They anticipated both your plans. They tried to create a supernatural thaumaturgic machinery around them. They deduced the sublimest philosophical maxims and principles from the old Mythology. They had the good wishes of the old Pagan devotees; once, at least, a passionate royal disciple was willing to give them the most cordial help out of the resources of his intellect and his exchequer. But the Romancers could not prevail; Reality was too strong for them.”
IV. I believe, my brethren, that such criticism as this, however painful, may be very profitable to us. If we are romancing, by all means let us thank God for any witnesses of any kind that may be raised up to warn us of so fatal a disease. And it does threaten us. Stern reality is not pleasant to us. We had rather see ourselves, Eternity, God, in pictures; rather contemplate them in a dim past, a dimmer future, than confess them to be 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 mighty worth who show us that it is so. The more gratefully we listen to them when they expose us and ridicule us for this inconsistency, the less we shall be likely to accept the alternative which they offer us. If we did, we should become Romancers altogether; we should part with reality, and should experience no remorse for deserting it. Facts which our consciences recognize as the deepest we should be obliged to explain away, that we might not violate the philosophical conventions of the nineteenth century, the fictions which they hold to be sacred. We should have generalizations for facts; shadows for persons; for a belief of that which is, a dream of that which may be. We know that they have hearts and spirits even as we have, which crave for actual food, which the bare imagination of a feast will never satisfy. The work they are permitted to do in the world is to make men impatient of the miserable substitutes for the bread of life which we have offered them. Their scorn may be as effectual as the sword of any Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar for punishing hypocritical worshippers, for destroying that which can be destroyed. And like the swords, the scorn will soon become rusty; will be itself the object of scorn to a newer generation of scoffers, destined to perform the like work with the like result.
V. Upon some of us the part of this ridicule which was best deserved has produced this effect. It has led us to ask whether the Scriptures, which seem to simple people so very real, may not have been obscured by our affectations,—whether we may not have introduced into them the materialism which we impute to them? One commonplace at least we are bound to recollect. We call the Hebrew narrow and exclusive. In what did his narrowness and exclusiveness consist? Surely he differed from all other nations in that he was a protestant against all visible, all material likenesses of the Unseen Being. He must not dare—that dull infantine Jew of the times of Moses and of Samuel—to think of the Godhead as like anything that he could see, even though it was the most glorious object in creation. Repeat this fact over and over again to yourselves. Remember that this was the characteristic, the notorious, difference between him and the most cultivated, as well as the most barbarous of other nations. Remember that all the minute, rigorous discipline ordained for the Jew and described in these books, was for the purpose of correcting a tendency, to which he is said to be just as prone as all other men. And then consider whether the most literal interpretation of the story which we have heard concerning Samuel—the one which is most in accordance with the rest of the record—can be that which is sensual, materialistic, or, which is another phrase for the same thing, idolatrous. Do not give up so promising and so plausible an accusation as this lightly. Look back to the previous history. The opening of the national story is in the words “God said to Abraham, Get thee out of thy father’s house to a land that I will show thee.” What effect had this voice on the patriarch? From the time he heard it he ceased to be an idolater. He believed in a God Whom he could not see. Every step in his education was a strengthening of this belief. There might be appearances to his eye, voices heard by his outward ear. We have no need to inquire—and we shall not perhaps get an answer if we do inquire—how many of the communications to him had or had not such accompaniments. But he knew, and the historian strives to make us know, that they were but accompaniments; the essential vision was to the inward eye; the real speech was to the inward ear; it was this which gave him strength to believe and to act; it was this which he obeyed. His senses had their own objects; he was reminded continually that all these objects were under the care of the Lord Who cared for him; but there was a spirit awakened in him, a spirit which perceived not flowers and trees, but a Righteous Being—which took in not the notes of birds or the sounds of waterfalls, but His human lessons.
VI. Every after-revelation must be explained by these, which are the earliest, and will be found in strict harmony with them. Let the child Samuel confound, as it was natural for him to confound, that voice which called him to his prophetical office with the voice of his visible teacher, the high priest of God; let that voice have been an actual one to his bodily ear if you please. Yet it was because he knew not the Lord that the mere external sound or impression was what he rested in. When he said, “Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth,” another step was taken in his education; the mighty conviction dawned before him, to be the law of his after-life,—the inspiring power of his words and thoughts—that which fitted him to govern, to judge, as well as to exhort and foretell,—that the Eternal Lord was nigh to him, was holding inward, secret, awful converse with him,—was imparting to him and quickening in him all his powers of thought, feeling, utterance,—was the guide and teacher of his people as well as of himself. We have no material shell to break in order to arrive at this discovery; we carry that shell about us; if we take it to the Bible, that will break it for us: we shall find it hard, though, alas! not impossible to preserve our sensualism in the neighbourhood of such close, penetrating, spiritual reality; we shall be forced to corrupt and confuse that with this, if we will not suffer ourselves to be tried, sifted, judged by the book, or rather by that Living Word of Whom the book is the witness.
VII. But is not this the story of a child? I should be treating the letter of the narrative very strangely if I said that it was not. It professes to be about a child; everything in the style and manner of it is in accordance with the profession. If there were no children in the nineteenth century as there were in the days of the Judges, or if children now were essentially different from children then, or children in the west from children in the east, that might be a reason why we should take no interest in this passage, or should merely adapt it to our circumstances. But just, it seems to me, what parents want, is to be reminded of those characteristics of their children which do not depend upon locality, or upon the changes of times and seasons. Just what they want to understand are their strange questionings respecting an unseen world and its relation to the unrealized world about them. Just what they need for their children’s sake and for their own is, that they should know how they may be saved at once from the dominion of their senses and their phantasies. These demands the story before us,—if we might take it as it stands, if we might receive it as the witness of a permanent truth,—meets as no other meets it. If there was a teacher near Samuel, if there is one near every child now, who is speaking to it, though it is slow in distinguishing the voice, who is preparing it by degrees for the work which it is to do in the world, what can be more important than for us to be aware of that fact! What a fact it must be for all our discipline, for all their profiting! What a key to innumerable puzzles, for which we invent cumbrous and unsatisfactory solutions, would this be! What an encouragement to hope in what we may do; what a cause of repentance for what we have left undone!
VIII. And how would this belief link together the different portions of human life in natural piety; taking from us all those indevout regrets which we sometimes feel and express when the grace, and, as we sometimes say, the innocence, of childhood—disturbed though it be with many rebellions—gives way to the more passionate period of boyhood or girlhood? Such growth, untended and unwatched except by the eyes of human guardians,—who fear oftentimes where no fear is, who overlook dangers that are imminent, even cause them by ill-directed vigilance,—would always appear to be a 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 step of after trial, is using the very occasions of evil-doing without, even the traitors within the camp, as His ministers to call forth the faculty which discriminates right and wrong,—the energy which rejects the wrong and chooses the right? Not to doubt that amidst failures and falls, by the shame and humiliation which they beget, even amidst a course of reckless folly, there is this everpresent Friend, Reprover, Judge, pointing out the sin behind, the peril before, hedging up the path, making retreat and advance look equally hopeless, that He may awaken the cry, “Help me!” “Undertake for me!” “Thou knowest my path that I have lost it!”—oh, brethren, what would not this assurance be to us when we are utterly downcast about those for whom we care most, convinced that we at least may hurt, rather than help them?
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. The recollection how in early years, by neglect of loving expostulations and encouragements, by indulgence of evil imaginations, by self-conceit, by opportunities wasted that could never return, by refusing to let the blessed seeds take root which might have borne fruit sixty or an hundredfold, we were preparing a store of weakness and heartlessness for the conflicts of manhood,—how appalling, sometimes how overwhelming, is this! But is there nothing to mingle with it and sustain it? If we had ever been deserted by the Counsellor and Inspirer of Good, if He had ever given up the house to the powers of evil that would have inhabited it and possessed it wholly, these shameful remembrances would not be, the past would be merely a blank as well as the present. “Strong Son of God,” Word of the Father, Thou Who didst speak to the child that lay in the couch within Thy Temple when the lamp was going out,—Thou hast been with us in all these wild plans, idle speculations, purposeless acts, from which all childish simplicity was banished, but which had acquired, in compensation, no manly freedom and steadfastness. Thou wast compelling us to look our folly in the face, when we would fain have persuaded ourselves that we were wise. Thou hast shown us our lovelessness and untruthfulness, when we would gladly have consoled ourselves by declaiming against the lovelessness and untruthfulness of our neighbours. Thou hast shown us the need of our casting off the slough of our old nature. Thou hast shown us that what we need is possible, seeing that Thou hast provided us with a new and glorious nature, even with Thine own, with which we may clothe ourselves by believing in Thee. Thou hast told us of a Father Whom we may call ours, because He is Thine. Thou hast promised us a Spirit to dwell with us, Who shall open to us the mysteries of His love and Thine.
X. “Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth,” was the answer of the boy Samuel to that divine Teacher Who revealed Himself to him. Have five thousand years discovered any better formula than that, for the child, the boy, the man? We do not want—we do not indeed—applications and adaptations of the story to modern use; the more complicated the experiences of the world are, the more they throw us back upon this cry; the more need have we to pour it forth, lest the human life within us should be absolutely extinguished by the circumstances and wants which ought to be its nourishment. Still less do we need to gather about ourselves a set of sensible images, that may make supernatural agencies less incredible to us. The supernatural agency is required 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 the victims and slaves of Nature. Faith in Him is to be the daily abiding protection against that pursuit of rarities and novelties, which dealers in miracles and enchantments seek to promote in us. Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth; oh, suffer me not to mistake the voices with which Thy love has filled the world, even the voices of Thy most consecrated servants, for Thine!
XI. This last remark leads me to notice one peculiarity in the story of Samuel, which ought not to be quite overlooked by those philosophers who say that it must be stripped of its sacerdotal vesture and dressed afresh before it can be presented in our society. The voice which called the boy Samuel designated him to be a witness against the formality and corruption of priests. By that voice an order of men was inaugurated which had this for its especial function. I conceive that that function has never become obsolete. We may do our utmost to restrict the name Prophet to him who bears it in the Old Testament; but the custom of every age and the conviction of mankind are too strong for our purpose. In countries where the reverence for the Bible is greatest—as the effect of that reverence—men will feel that some are called to be prophets, in the strictest and the most enlarged sense of that word. If it means one who speaks the word of the Lord, it becomes identified—and the New Testament sanctions the identification—with the preacher; if it means one who looks into the future, it is felt that the truest man, the one who most claims the glory of a man as a creature looking before and after, must exercise a gift of prophecy. Either on the plea that they have a special knowledge which others do not possess,—a knowledge derived from Scripture or from intuition,—or on the ground that all men ought to know the signs of the times in which they are living, a number of men will foretell, and a number of other men will listen to their foretelling, and will believe it. You may deride their pretences, but you cannot silence them, or hinder them from making a mighty impression, not only upon ignorant, but often upon very acute, minds. For those who believe the story we have read this afternoon, who accept it as it stands, a better course is open than that of ridicule. They will acknowledge that He Who of old enabled Samuel to hear His voice, is the same now as He was then; that now, as then, we speak true words only so far as we speak His words; that now, as then, we speak His words the more distinctly, the more we dread all the fanatical and superstitious mixtures with them which are the produce of our own vanity; the more we desire Him to separate the dross from the pure ore. To such as seek Him reverently, of whatever class or age they be, something, I believe, of the gift of foresight will be vouchsafed; most of it to those who are most childlike and suspicious of themselves; who depend the least upon any guesses or calculations of theirs, who most read the future in the past, who most look upon all acts that are done upon earth as the acts of a righteous God, who most anticipate His triumph over all that is unrighteous. To such let us listen, not in dependence upon their sagacity and judgment, which will fail continually, but upon Him Whose wisdom, and not their own, they wish to see established,—Whose will, and not their own, they wish to see done. Prophets we shall name them, as men have always done; not in disparagement, but in honour, of those whom God first called by that name, and made and still makes the interpreters of it to others. We shall find in these ancient seers no superstition, which later science desires to be rid of. Rather we shall find them witnesses for Eternal Truth, and against the several counterfeits of it which science craves. We shall find them no pleaders for any priestly abuse or pious fraud; rather a continual assurance that God is Himself present in all events that befall nations or individuals; is manifesting Himself as the avenger of all injustice and wrong which is perpetrated in His name; is Himself the giver of all good gifts, the author and inspirer of all the desires and hopes which men can cherish,—of all the true petitions and sacrifices that are presented to Him. When the priest fancies that his oblation has some virtue of its own, he soon becomes, like Eli’s sons, profane and foul. Then God raises up some prophet to declare that the Ark of the Covenant, the offering on the Altar, the title of the Priest, the seat of the Judge, the throne of the King, are all His; that He putteth down one and setteth up another; that He means to establish Righteousness on the earth; that His Name shall be hallowed and His Kingdom shall come. Blessed is that 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 is uttering His voice through events that befall other nations or themselves, seek not for the interpretation of it to wizards that peep and mutter, but cry in penitence and reverence, “Speak, Lord, Thy servants hear.”