Quinquagesima Sunday, March 5, 1848.
Matthew VI. 9.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.
The prayer we considered last week could not easily be separated from the spectacle which we had just witnessed, of a fallen kingdom. Since that time we have been watching attempts to construct a new society out of the ruins of the old. If I do not mistake, many have regarded these experiments with greater impatience, with less complacency, than the events which preceded them, and made them necessary. Such words as these have risen very readily to our lips: “What a weary repetition is here of a thrice-told tale! Is it possible that phrases which have been tested and found hollow nearly sixty years ago, are still fit for use and circulation now? Can it be that we must pass through another series of the same false promises, vain hopes, bitter disappointments, the same dreams of peace realized in blood, which were appointed for the last generation?” Not to entertain thoughts of this kind is difficult—difficult even not to give them expression. Yet when they are spoken they must drive others to ask, while we harbour them, does not the question present itself to ourselves—Is then the belief a phantasy, that men are intended for a brotherhood? Must the effort to realize it terminate in ridicule or in crime? Supposing that is the fact, should we begin with accusing other men of deception? Have we not a long list of falsehoods to confess which we have been proclaiming ourselves—in pulpits especially—which have been proclaimed throughout Christendom for near 1800 years?
Such an enquiry may no doubt be evaded by the reply: “Oh! we do not take Christianity into account. That, of course, may affect anything. We complain of those who think they can work all good to their species without it.” But our conscience will not be so appeased. It will rejoin, “And if you take Christianity into account, what then? You know that it will not of course set the world right. Do you believe seriously in your heart, that it can set the world right at all, under any conditions? If not, you should not pretend to believe it. Certainly this end will not be accomplished by phrases and professions. These are not the least better when they are coined in one mint than in another. It does not help us more to talk of brotherhood on Christian principles, than of brotherhood upon any other principles. The more sacred the language, the more offensive is any trifling use of it. We must not blame our neighbours for trying to make men brothers without the Gospel, if we are not ourselves convinced that the Gospel can make them so.” There is still another resource which I know is commonly adopted by those who seek to escape from this difficulty. They say, “Christianity declares to us the exceeding sinfulness of the human heart and will. There is the root of all the confusions and miseries of the world. What mockery then to reform it by new schemes of government and society.” Christianity does, no doubt, declare to us, or rather assumes, the exceeding sinfulness of man’s heart. But it comes not proclaiming sin, but proclaiming a remedy for it. Do we believe the remedy to be effectual? If not, in what sense do we call ourselves Christians? If we do, how dare we blaspheme Christianity by calling her to prove that evil, social evil or individual, is inevitable? We cannot then avoid the enquiry, severe though it must be to most of us, What have you meant hitherto by this prayer, “Thy Will be done, as in heaven, so on earth?” What have you taken the Will of God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to be? How do you suppose it is done in heaven? What is implied in asking, that even so it may be done on earth?
I. It would be a great mistake to identify this petition with that which I spoke of a fortnight ago. The Name denotes that which a Person is in Himself, his own character. This is an object of contemplation; it is to be hallowed. A Will imports energy going forth; it points to action, to effect; it is to be done. It is very needful for the clearness of our minds, and for great practical results, to remember this distinction. But it is equally needful to remember that the Name and the Will exactly correspond to each other, that at all events in a Perfect Being there cannot be the slightest clashing or contrariety between them. Nay more; if the Name be that which has been revealed to us as the Name of God; if it express goodness, mercy, lovingkindness, we cannot think of it at all without thinking of a Will, directed towards other beings, and exercising itself upon them. To identify Will with mere Sovereignty, is to destroy the earlier petition. We cannot hallow the Name of God if we suppose power to be His most essential characteristic, or the manifestation of power to be His chief delight. This notion of Him is evidently fashioned out of our own low appetites and base fancies; it is the notion which lies at the root of the dark fables of heathenism. The whole Revelation which is delivered in the Old and New Testament is nothing else than a continuous protest against it, or rather a continuous unfolding of the truth from which it is a departure. It assaults the natural tendency of our minds which is to worship all the different shapes and appearances of power that we discern in the world around us; it leads us to feel that we need some power of an altogether higher and different kind to rule ourselves; it shews us that this power must be a Will; that it must be moral; that righteousness must be its essence, power its instrument. A God of righteousness and truth, just and without iniquity, is He whom the Bible speaks of, He who presents Himself to the conscience, heart, will, of His creatures, as the Author of all that is right and good in them and in the universe.
When we say, Thy Will, this must be the sense in which our Lord would have us speak the words. To enter into the inmost recesses of that Will, was His only, who perfectly delighted in it. But we are sure, that were it possible for us to know as He knew, we should not discover a difference of purpose, another kind of Will than that which His acts exhibited; we should only behold that infinite abysmal love, which, through our evil and selfishness, had been hidden from us. It would be well for us, brethren, if we were more careful of insulting the Majesty of Heaven in our confessions of ignorance as well as in our boast of knowledge. We have no right to say, We are such poor creatures, we cannot tell the least what are the designs of God; we can only submit to His irresistible pleasure. It is precisely His design which He has made known to us; what His Will is to the human race and each of His members, is not one of the secrets which He withholds from us and from our children. Nor is there any real awe of Him while we choose to think our own thoughts about it instead of His, whilst we insist upon doing homage to a dreary, naked Omnipotence. For, however we may fancy that there is something at once humbling and elevating in the thought of that which may crush and may uphold us, it is not a contemplation in which we care to abide; the spirit within us soon starts up from the momentary depression it has caused, soon betakes itself to other and more natural ways of realising its own dignity. We want a mightier charm than this; we want the belief and knowledge of a Will that is always originating and effectuating good—good, and nothing else. Before such a Being, the spirit of man trembles; in His presence it feels its own nothingness; to Him it can look up, and be sure that He is raising it. Hence comes a conviction, not of weakness, but of sin; the sense, not that we have been unable to resist, but that we have actually resisted that power which is working for the deliverance and blessedness of us and of our whole race. A power we shall then joyfully confess it to be, when we know that it is not that merely or principally. We could not bear to suppose it would be the most flagrant of contradictions—that a perfectly Loving Will was ever idle, that it was not continually energizing, continually accomplishing its own deep and gracious ends. Where the limit is to their accomplishment, how is it possible that a creature Will can contend with that which has formed it; by what mysterious concurrence, which cannot be understood in either alone, obedience is produced out of rebellion here is a depth indeed, in which we may be content not to see our way; here is that secret which, except in life and practice, we never penetrate. I say, except in life and practice; for we can and do know in our own experience the fact of resistance and the law of submission. We do know that every evil act has been one against which there was a divine remonstrance within us; we do know that this act has brought disorder and contradiction after it; we do know that, not we ourselves, but He, who has curbed us and forewarned us of the evil, has wrought the repentance for it; since only when we confessed the wrong and cried to be made right were we brought into our true state. Thus much every man may know in himself; but to generalise from this experience is a more difficult process than we sometimes suspect. The logical terms in which we express our conclusions are even less adequate to describe the subtle operations of spirit than those of nature; we should not, therefore, suffer them to embarrass us either in our dealings with our individual consciences, or in our judgments respecting the purposes of God. Generalities are not accurate enough for the one; they are far too narrow for the other. A man cannot be honest in action if he applies maxims and formulas about the extent of prescience and human power to his own particular conduct; he must be profane and false if he uses them to measure the Eternal Mind. By a strange perversity those who are using their intellects to determine what must be the acts and intentions of God, resent every appeal, though grounded on express revelation, to his moral nature; as if it implied that we were circumscribing Him by our own imperfections. But this appeal is a witness against all such circumscription. We say, that we must acknowledge the absolute goodness of that Will, which was manifested in act by the onlybegotten Son, or we shall make it merely the image of our own. We must have an invariable standard to which we can refer ourselves; or we shall make ourselves, with all our variations and contradictions, the standard. We must not let logical formulas, or deductions from our own experience, and the world’s experience, or possible dangers, or the fear of losing plausible topics of declamation, come in the way of the strict simple use of this prayer, or force us to mean something less by the words, Thy Will, than a Will of efficient good to every creature; otherwise we shall either be contracting our own love within limits which God commands us to transgress, or blasphemously suppose that it is, at some point or other, greater than His. At all hazards, in despite of all reasonings and all authority, cling to the prayer. That will never do you harm, or lead you astray. The more we use it, in the faith that the Will we ask should be done is the right loving and blessed Will, the more we shall know that it is, the more we shall be sure that it must be done. We shall meet every day with a set of new impediments to that conviction; at times, it will seem the most monstrous and incredible of all convictions: then when it does, the prayer is specially needed to raise us above the plausible lies of our understandings: to place us in a point of view whence we can see the truth which surmounts them. That point of view is obtained when our state is the lowliest; we must sink not rise, if we would feel our relation to the Will which is guiding all creation; the Cross is at once the complete utterance of the prayer and the answer to it.
II. For it is the Cross which tells us how this Will is done in Heaven. We should be giving an intelligible sense to this clause, if we took heaven in its simplest, most outward, sense, as synonymous with what we call the heavenly bodies, and if we supposed the prayer to be that, as all these silently and calmly obey the law which was given them on the fourth day, so the voluntary creatures of God, who have set His Will at nought, might be brought into a submission as complete, into an order as unbroken and harmonious. There would be a deep significance in such a petition, though we should need great caution to prevent it from turning into the most unchristian and dreadful of all desires—the desire to be free from responsibility, to lose our wills, to become mere natural creatures. And I do not think any one who has prayed the Lord’s Prayer ever rested in this interpretation, even if it might be cherished for a moment. The general feeling of Christian people has been that this Will is done in heaven, not by blind agents, but by intelligent, spiritual, creatures; by wills which might have fallen, but which stood in holy, cheerful obedience. Of such beings Scripture speaks often; their existence it assumes throughout; only it does not indulge us with any such account of their condition and circumstances as would lead us away from that one great truth of their history, in which all others are included: ‘They do His commandments, hearkening to the voice of His words.’ We have, in the Bible, no description of celestial hierarchies, such as the schoolmen of the middle ages were wont to draw out: above all, no allusions to the angelic nature, in terms so common in more modern writers, which would lead us to suppose that it was essentially different from our own. The more carefully you consider the passages in Scripture concerning angels, the more you will be struck with the use of a language which seems almost to confound them with men. And why, but because Scripture never for an instant contemplates the derangement of man’s state, which is the consequence of his disobedience, as determining what that state is. It looks upon the unfallen creature, or the creature renewed after the fall, as the proper representative of humanity—not upon one who is dead in trespasses and sins; it never treats an anomaly as a law. ‘Their angels,’ says our Lord, ‘do always behold the face of my Father in heaven; for the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.’ The true form of human existence and society has not perished because certain fragments have been severed from it; the flock was not destroyed because a set of sheep had wandered from it: only He, in whom the whole harmony stood perfect, came to re-unite the fragments; the Shepherd came into the wilderness to carry home rejoicing the lost one. It is the effect of our sin to make us look upon ourselves as the centres of the universe; and then to look upon the perverse and miserable accidents of our condition as determining what we ourselves are: so all the manifestations of God are treated as if they were merely appropriate to those accidents, till we learn at last to look upon sin, not as that which takes us out of the harmony God has established, but as that which has been able to subvert the harmony; to frustrate the Divine will. To feel sin, as we are intended to feel it, seems almost impossible while we adopt this scheme; still more, to feel the might and mystery of redemption. But if we contemplate the Son of Man as the Lord of the unfallen as well as of the fallen creation, if we believe that He perfectly fulfilled that Will under all the conditions of temptation and misery upon earth, which He had fulfilled before the worlds were, our minds become quieter and more hopeful. Let Science discover to us as many myriads of worlds as it may; let each of these myriads of worlds be peopled with myriads of creatures; we know, if they are involuntary, they are subject to the same Will which rules every animal and vegetable on this planet: if they are voluntary, their state must be one of cheerful dependence upon that Will, or else of rebellion against it. There must be an order for them, and it must be a blessed order. Space and time can make no difference in that which concerns the Eternal government; in the principles of obedience, disobedience, redemption. And however darkly we may see into these things, we are sure of this prayer ‘as in Heaven;’ we are sure that we are not presuming when we believe it and offer it up. As we do so, the fetters of time and space become more and more loosened through His might who willingly took them upon Himself, and then ascended up on high, leading captivity captive, that he might fill all things. It becomes no hard effort to suppose the existence of multitudes of blessed creatures, formed and kept in the image of Him who said, ‘Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight;’ or to believe that mysteries of love have been revealed to them, through our fall and redemption, which they desire more deeply to look into; or to feel that they must rejoice over one sinner who repenteth.
III. And therefore the prayer may well go on, ‘Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.’ Holding fast the testimony of Christ respecting His Father’s Will; believing that it is continually at work to execute its purposes; believing that there are multitudes of wills in whom it does work effectually, triumphantly, who obey it and are free; believing, lastly, that He who guides them, and to whom they do homage, has taken account of this earth for the purpose of restoring those who dwell upon it to submission, liberty, unity, we can ask without fear, that all which resists this Will in one place or another, may be brought to acquiesce in it, and to become its cheerful servant and child. If place makes no difference in the view which we take of those who confess this Will, and yield themselves to it, place can make no difference in its power of reaching and subduing those who have been refractory. There is nothing, surely, in this fair earth to make it an unfit dwelling for all that is pure and gracious. It is the revolted will which interposes the one barrier to all communications from above, to union and fellowship below. The selfish, self-seeking, spirit, says ‘Thy Will be not done;’ love shall not have dominion here: supposing that demon cast out, supposing the spirit of man brought to desire that it should serve in heaven, instead of reigning in hell; and the earth, the battlefield between them, which Christ won when he gave up Himself, becomes not potentially but actually God’s; by its own acknowledgment, as well as by His victory. And we know, assuredly, that spirits which have yielded themselves to the tyranny of the evil power are, day by day, set free from its yoke; that God, by the mighty instruments which He has wrested out of the hands of His enemies, by individual sorrows, by national calamities, does lead men to feel that it is better to live in their Father’s house, than to feed upon husks, or to starve. If we do not think so, why do we use this prayer? what sense is there in it? what hope can we have from it? If we confess so much, how can we ever make it a charge against any people, that they hope for a brotherhood upon earth? To tell them, if that is the case, that they are not resting their expectations on a safe ground; that there is no brotherhood, unless we begin with confessing a Father; that we must attain it by giving up ourselves to do His Will; that if we set up our own, we are enthroning the very principle which has made all unity impossible: this is right, this is benevolent. But we have scarcely a right to dispossess a man of a pleasant dream unless we can give him a reality in place for it; for every hope points upwards: if it does not find an object, it is in search of one; you cannot crush it without robbing your fellow-creature of a witness for God, and an instrument of purification. I do not mean that falsehood can ever do good to a human soul, or be anything except a curse to it; but I mean that hope is a deliverance out of the falsehoods of sense, and that there is a truth always corresponding to it, which is missed, not because the hope is too strong, but because inconsistent elements are mingled with it, which weaken and debase it. Therefore let us labour diligently to clear ourselves of all such mixtures. One I referred to before, and will speak of now. We say that Christianity can bring about a true fraternity among men. But this is an elliptical mode of speech, and may be a misleading one. Christianity, as a mere system of doctrines or practices, will never make men brothers. By Christianity we must understand the reconciliation of mankind to God in Christ; we must understand the power and privilege of saying, ‘Our Father—Thy Will be done in earth as it is in heaven.’ No notion, or set of notions, will bind us together; He binds us who has given His Son for us all, that we might not live for ever in separation from Him and from each other. There is another error which is, perhaps, in practice, even more fatal. We are apt to say, ‘These large schemes of the universe, which we hear so much of, are vain; what good can come of them? let us try to do our duty each in his own sphere. An excellent resolution: but, too often, adopted merely in spite, and therefore leading to no result. We exalt the little for the sake of disparaging the large; presently we grow weary of not doing more; we fly back to great schemes which we have pronounced abortive: because we find them so we do nothing. This prayer meets us at each point; it will not allow us to escape by one pretext or the other. It does not treat the projects of men for universal societies, unbounded pantisocracies, as too large. It overreaches them all with these words, ’As in Heaven.’ It opens to us the vision of a society, in which angels and archangels, and the spirits of the just made perfect, are citizens, and in which we too have an inheritance. It does not look upon any homely individual task of self-sacrifice as insignificant: ‘So upon earth’ meets every such case, and reminds us that the lowliest tasks beseem the disciples of Him who ‘took upon Him the form of a servant, and was found in fashion as a man.’ ‘Thy Will be done’ reconciles the high and the mean; the Will of Him who created the heavens, and stretched them out; the Will of Him who was born in the manger; the Will of that Spirit of Holiness in whom they are eternally one.