Luke VIII. 35.
“Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.”
I have chosen a passage from St. Luke’s version of the story which we read in the Gospel of today. In doing so I am aware that I must remind you of a conspicuous variation in the Evangelists who report it. St. Matthew speaks of two men possessed with devils; St. Mark and St. Luke, only of one. The peculiarity of the incidents, and the strict agreement of the geography, leave no doubt that the miracle to which they refer is the same. Here therefore would be a legitimate subject for examination, which, if it were honestly conducted, must lead to good. The only danger in such cases is the concealment of difficulties, or the distortion of evidence for the purpose of removing them.
Another question is raised by the narrative, which may receive illustration from the physician as well as the practical divine, each helping to clear the mind and remove the prejudices of the other. Are there such cases as are described here, in modern times, or were they confined to the age of the Evangelists? Which argument can hardly fail to introduce the whole controversy respecting the existence and influence of evil spirits.
It is not because I would shun either of these lines of thought that I choose that one which the Church suggests to us by her use of the story in this season of the year. The Gospel for today is intended, no doubt, to give us another of the Epiphanies or Manifestations of Christ. I do not think we shall find such a manifestation less, whichever Evangelist we follow. One as much as another will assist us in the inquiry in which I am engaged: “What, according to the writers of the New Testament, is Revelation or Manifestation?” If we keep that problem steadily before us, I do not despair of our finding some light upon the others. At all events, we shall not be able to look upon them as mere cruxes and trivialities which may be left to critics; they will assume a human significance and grandeur.
I. Whatever differences may exist between the Evangelists, there is none as to the character of the malady which affected the one man or the two. All the symptoms of outrageous madness are described, let the cause of it be what it may. “They came out of the tombs,” says St. Matthew; “they were exceeding fierce; no man could pass by that way.” St. Mark, speaking only of a single maniac, adds some more lines to the description. “No one could bind him, no, not with chains. Because he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces; neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying and cutting himself with stones.” St. Luke says, “He wore no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs.” Surely as clear and full a picture of madness as was ever painted.
II. None of these signs are in themselves rare; we connect them with facts we have known, with sights we have seen. If there were no provision for the care of the insane, there is nothing in the conditions of modern civilization which would make it impossible or unlikely that such objects as those which presented themselves to our Lord in the country of the Gergesenes, should encounter us in England. But again, the Evangelists are agreed as to the origin of this fury. “The men,” says St. Matthew, “were possessed with devils.” “He had an unclean spirit,” say St. Mark and St. Luke. They do not however abandon the plural number. The answer, “Our name is Legion,” occurs in both. If this language is disagreeable to our ears, we cannot rid ourselves of it by comparing the documents. It stands out as strong and clear in one as the other. I need scarcely remind you that it does not belong to a single story or to ten stories. It is characteristic of the Gospels as such. It is not, as I have observed to you before, characteristic of them as well as of the Old Testament books. It distinguishes them from those books. The allusions to evil spirits are rare in the one, continual in the other.
III. In another point there is no diversity. It is that for the sake of which I am referring to the story, that which has given it a place among the Epiphany services. “What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us?” is St. Matthew’s account of the voice which met our Lord when he approached the madman. “What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not,” is St. Mark’s version. St. Luke substitutes “I beseech thee” for “I adjure thee;” otherwise he nearly repeats St. Mark. Here again the expressions are familiar to us. We meet them under varieties of form in other narrations. Evil spirits are said always to regard Jesus as their tormentor, because He is come to deliver a man from their dominion.
IV. That which distinguishes this story from others of the like kind—the entrance of the devils into the herd of swine—is also dwelt upon carefully and minutely by each of the Evangelists. However we explain it, we cannot treat it as an interpolation: and it is an evidently hopeless experiment to look for some particulars in one of the three narratives, which may induce us to hold by that as the least difficult.
V. Finally, though the passage I have taken out of St. Luke, which declares the ultimate effect of our Lord’s command, has nothing exactly corresponding to it in St. Matthew, it is evidently taken for granted in his account. The men, being delivered from the tyrants that possessed them, would of course be clothed and in their right mind. I wish to keep that result in recollection, therefore I have set it before you in express words; I might have reached it just as well by inference from the first Gospel.
Taking the story then as it stands, and not having any secret for changing it from an account of spiritual bondage and spiritual emancipation into something else, I cannot doubt that a number of persons in our day—of intelligent and devout persons—will turn from it with considerable annoyance and discontent. Any preacher who recalls his own feelings about it at some time or other of his life, will not, I should think, be inclined to judge harshly of such objectors. Least of all—unless his remembrances are of a rare and peculiar kind, or his present convictions very feeble—will he desire that their doubts should not be frankly stated, should not be fully confronted with the facts of experience as well as with the words of Scripture. For if we have any of us been led to accept this record, not coldly and reluctantly, but as one which we could not bear to part with, which has been a strength and help to us in dark hours, the process, I suppose, has been something of this kind. Beginning to contemplate the subject quietly and at a distance, with very great indisposition to compromise his reputation for sense,—asking himself what sort of maniac the man described in the Gospels might be, and what natural way of accounting for his frenzy there might be found,—the inquirer has suddenly had the thought thrust upon him, “What if thou art that man? What if the strange fact that he was a spiritual being is a fact that is common to him and to thee? What if that other strange fact, that his spirit was under the yoke of unlawful intruders, of cruel usurpers, may also explain what thou hast known in thyself, and which thou couldst very ill explain? Hast thou not been conscious of a subjection to the tyranny, not of one ruler, but of divided, contradictory rulers? Is not their name Legion? Thou hast been wont to speak of them as impulses, motives, principles: has that language made the fact clearer? They are not visible; they assail thy own very self; from them have come foul and cruel thoughts and inspirations. Is it not horrible to think they are thyself, that there is no distinction between them and thee? Is it not a lie to think so? Whether thou hast resisted them, whether thou hast obeyed, do not the very names Resistance, Obedience, imply that they are not thyself? But was there no other that thou wast resisting when thou wast obeying them? Was there no other that thou wast obeying when thou wast resisting them? What says thy conscience? Does it witness of none such? Has He never manifested Himself to thee yet? Is He not manifesting Himself to thee now? In all thy thoughts of good, in all thy struggles with evil, is He not manifesting Himself to thee? And Who else was it that manifested Himself to the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes? Was not that a crucial instance of His nature and His power? Was He not showing His purpose of claiming a spirit that had sunk into the lowest and bitterest bondage? Was not He showing that there are no usurpers over the human spirit so mighty that He cannot overcome them?”
I imagine that a person who has gone so far as this, will find in the final incident of the narrative something to cause him trembling rather than to affront his taste. He will be disposed to say, “Yes! as I see in that fierce madman a man of my flesh and blood,—such a man as I might become if a mightier than I was not upholding me,—so I cannot deny that those swine running violently down a steep place till they are choked in the sea, do set before me the liveliest image of the effect: those powers which have swayed me, which are always seeking to sway me, would produce if they were transferred to mere brute natures. They show me that we do not sink merely into a condition below humanity when evil has the mastery over us; that the depraved Will carries into its degradation a malignity which gives the animal what it has not of its own. Surely a lesson which a divine Teacher would desire to impart, by such an example as the Gospels speak of, to those whom He came to claim as spiritual beings! For,” he will go on, “when one looks at the New Testament again, with the light thrown upon it from experience, do not I perceive that this is the very character in which Christ is presented, not in one or two passages, but throughout? What does it mean, that He baptizes with the Spirit? What means the history of the Temptation? What means every discourse, miracle, parable? Are they not all testifying of One who is come to debate the possession of the man, not with flesh and blood enemies, but with principalities and powers that are assaulting, if not holding, the very citadel of his being? Why does He speak of the strong man armed, keeping the house in peace? Why does He speak of the stronger than he, who takes from him all the armour wherein he trusted, and spoils his goods?”
Now, I repeat it, a man who has learnt by this process of thought, or by any process of thought like this, to accept the narrative of the Demoniacs without change or qualification, cannot be offended with any one who hesitates about it, nay, who fights every step of his way before he will surrender his objections to it. I apprehend that his experience of such a state of mind will make him far more than tolerant of it. There are many feelings connected with it which he would not for the world eradicate, because they are some of the greatest confirmations of his own faith on this very subject. For instance, the dread of Superstition and Fanaticism. The more deep this dread is,—the more a man regards superstition and fanaticism as horrible evils into which by God’s help he will not sink, and which it would be agony to suspect in the Son of Man,—the more hope, it seems to me, there is that he will take in this story in the length and breadth of it. For the direst kind of Superstition is that which connects evil with the Nature of God, and the next direst kind is that which identifies the man himself with evil. And here both are undermined from the foundation. God manifests Himself in conflict with the Evil Spirit in his essence, and in all the forms he may take. God manifests Himself in the very act of distinguishing the man from the evil which has possessed him. The direst fanaticism is that which assumes the being of any man to be the proper habitation of evil spirits. And the second most evil form is, that which supposes that certain special men have a right to claim the Spirit of God as theirs in a sense in which ordinary men may not claim it. And all the petty forms of fanaticism wherein it passes into triviality, such as abound in our day, have their root in the notion that spiritual powers and influences are light topics, for drawing-room gossip. Here at once each of these shapes of fanaticism is laid bare. The Spirit of Christ meets the Unclean Spirit in what appears his last, securest, most legitimate hold, and declares that there he has no right. The maniac is as fit to be the receptacle of His power and inspiration as the highest saint. The whole transaction is full of solemnity and awe; so that if it be true, and have come from the source of Truth, the stories with which our ears are dinned must be not ridiculous but loathsome.
For all these reasons, then, a believer in the narrative will be exceedingly afraid of using even what may seem to him fair methods of argument for the sake of dispelling scepticism upon it. Something perhaps he may do by calmly stating his own conviction and how he has been led to it. But he cannot be displeased if he should not be the means of imparting that conviction to any other mind. If it has been given him, as he thinks it has, he can trust One who knows all the passages and channels of His creatures’ hearts to send it them as they want it. He knows that so far as he tries to drive it home by arts of persuasion or of ridicule or of terror, because it is his, so far he shall be marring the effect of the divine arguments which are so much subtler, and penetrate so much deeper, and carry with them such a different kind of compulsion.
These conclusions are inevitable for a person who regards this story as a revelation of Christ himself, and of His dealings with the human spirit. But I have told you in former sermons that an entirely different notion of revelation from this has been proclaimed in our day as the only one which is consistent with Christian orthodoxy and with common sense. To represent it as the discovery of the true God in the person of His Son, to a creature capable of knowing Him, incapable of freedom and peace without the knowledge of Him, is to incur I scarcely can say what frightful charges. Mysticism is on the face of such a statement; Rationalism lies beneath it; it betrays a profound and fatal ignorance of the nature which God has given us, which can never come into near and close contact with the Eternal, which can only abstract some feeble notion of that from the things of time and sense. What then is Revelation, if not this? It contains, we are told, lessons which it is necessary for us to receive,—which God wishes us to receive,—because though they are not in any strict sense manifestations of what He is, they are necessary for the regulation of our lives. Here at last is something positive. We are not merely told by what standard we cannot judge of that which is presented to us. We know what its office is. Be it so. Then let us consider what sort of Revelation has or has not fulfilled that office.
I would still hold fast to the Scriptures in entering upon this inquiry. I would begin with this story of the Demoniac. I am not now engaged with objectors to it, but with those who say that, being a part of the Bible, it is to be received like any other part; that to raise any cavils against it, or to put any unliteral sense upon it, is perilous. Here then is a case of moral regulation. A man who was wild and furious becomes calm and orderly. He sits at the feet of Jesus clothed and in his right mind. What has wrought this mighty change? Is it the announcement to him of some law which God has laid down for his creatures? Is it the announcement of some punishment which will follow the breach of that law in some other world? Is it a series of sound ethical maxims? Is it injunctions about prayer to God or self-government? Is it anything whatever which we comprehend under the ordinary notion of moral discipline? All these regulations were desirable, assuredly, for a man in the condition of the maniac. But common sense pronounced them ridiculous. It was obvious that they could take no effect; that they must be wasted. Far more direct and simple methods were resorted to. He was chained. But that was as ineffectual a scheme of regulation as the other. The fetters were burst asunder, the chains were broken. It is just when all mere regulations, divine and human, are found absolutely vain to restrain him from being the curse and plague of his fellow-men that Christ is said to have met the man himself, to have entered into colloquy with that which could hear no laws, could be restrained by no force,—to have emancipated and reformed that. And here is the result: not a new excitement substituted for the old; not religious paroxysms taking the place of other paroxysms, but quietness and order: he is in his right mind.
Here is one instance, and, as I have shown already, a type-instance, of Christ’s acts towards a class of human creatures. But let us pass to a case of a directly opposite kind. Saul of Tarsus, instead of being a maniac, is the most correct of men, reverencing the law,—as touching all the commandments which are contained in it, blameless. He has been trained to regard the Revelation given to his fathers as a regulative one. Precisely in that character it has been set before him by the doctors at Jerusalem. The thought of its being anything but this,—of its being in any sense an unveiling of God himself,—the promise of a more perfect unveiling,—may now and then have disturbed him as he pored over some passage in the Psalms or the Prophets. But he has dismissed it—angrily dismissed it. God has been pleased to give his nation a revelation. It consists mainly of a law, though it has also pleased God, in compassion to the ignorance of His creatures, to set before also a system of worship and sacrifices which it would be very unsafe and criminal for them to neglect. He hears of a set of men who are apparently teaching another doctrine than this; who, if he has not mistaken them, proclaim that a crucified man has manifested or unveiled the Divine Being to men. All regulations, all limitations, have been burst through; these wretched fanatics are actually assuming that the Invisible has come nigh to His creatures,—that there is a way by which they may ascend to him. St. Stephen’s speech perhaps first discovers to him the extent of their departure from all the maxims which he holds sacred. There every step in the Jewish History is treated as a step towards the revelation of that Just One of whom his countrymen had been the betrayers and murderers. There those countrymen are charged with having resisted the Holy Ghost, who in all ages has been striving with them. There the vision of a Son of Man at the right-hand of God is openly announced in language which could be nothing less than blasphemy in the ears of one who looked on God as immeasurably distant from man. He becomes more and more furious; still it is fury against the opposers of a regulative Revelation. Then comes the crisis in his life. That regulative Revelation,—the system of laws, precepts, ordinances, which God Himself has appointed for the good of his nation,—prove utterly ineffectual; instead of their helping him or raising him, he finds himself crushed under the weight of them. It is only when the same Lord who bade the unclean spirit depart out of the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes, claims to be the Lord and Deliverer of his spirit, that he becomes clothed and in his right mind.
What kind of work he did then, what sort of revelation of God he proclaimed in the city which was most unlike Jerusalem in its speculations and its worship, I considered in a former sermon. And if we followed up the discourse there by an examination of his Epistles, we should come, I think to these two conclusions:—1. That he is everywhere announcing an actual revelation and manifestation of God’s righteousness to the spirit of man as the deliverance from a mere law—a regulative Revelation—which had never reached, which never could reach, the spirit of man. 2. That he speaks of the Spirit of God as holding converse, not with the spirit of the maniac in the country of the Gadarenes, not with the spirit of him, the Apostle of the Gentiles, but with the spirit of man, from generation to generation; that he regards the assurance that such a Spirit shall be with us, witnessing to us, sustaining us, making us partakers of the Divine Nature, as the great assurance of the Gospel, apart from which it would have no power whatever to improve the lives of men or the condition of the world.
Brethren, was St. Paul right or wrong in this anticipation? Has the Gospel of Christ produced any, even the slightest, amelioration in human society, except so far as it has carried this message home to the hearts of human beings? It has done singularly little in the way of outward regulation. It sent forth no decrees against gladiatorial exhibitions, against polygamy, against slavery. If it has wrought, in any period of its existence, any cure of these evils,—if it has given any new face to society,—it is because a voice was saying to the unclean spirit that had possessed it, “Get thee out;” because Christ himself was felt to be wrestling with that spirit and overcoming it. So has it been with every man. In the latest ages as in the first, there have been messages of deliverance to the outcast maniacs who could not be bound with chains; but through whomsoever they have come, through the benevolent physician or the sympathizing sister of charity, they have been recognitions of a better spirit struggling with the evil spirit; they have been tokens from Christ that He can set free the captive and put down the oppressor. Decent men have been changed in later times, as in earlier times, from self-satisfied and bitter haters into humble Christians, into zealous apostles of goodwill to men. But in every case the change has been preceded by the discovery of the inefficiency of all mere regulations, in whatever form they might come,—as laws of earth or laws of Heaven,—to make a true man. It has taken place when the heart has owned a Son of God to whom it had been crying, “What have I to do with thee? Art thou come to torment me?” as a friend and deliverer. It has come when the heart has perceived that the power which it had thought far away, in Heaven or Hell, is nigh to it. It has come when the man has confessed that the Righteous God, seeing that he had no righteousness of his own, was clothing him with the righteousness which none can comprehend, which every spiritual being is created to apprehend.
I believe, brethren, it is not true of the Gospel of Christ, that if you take from it its original character,—if you strip it of those claims which Apostles and Martyrs put forth in its behalf,—it may challenge respect on a lower ground, it may claim a sort of useful and recognized position for itself among the other agents of civilization. I know such an opinion prevails in many minds. They say that
“Reft of a crown, it still may share the feast.”
You will find it is not so. You will find that if we dare not proclaim Christ as the Deliverer of the spirit of man from its bondage,—if we dare not say that He has come actually to reveal God’s righteousness to men,—we had better cease to speak of Him at all. For it is such a one that men want; it is for such a one that in their inmost hearts, even when their language against the Son of Man is loudest, they are crying. It was so in former ages; it is so now. It was so among the most miserable and the most respectable; it is so still. If preachers of the Gospel do not answer the cry,—if they only represent it as one of the regulative processes that are at work in society,—it will be felt to be the feeblest of all these processes; the chain and the prisonhouse will be stronger.
Brethren, the lesson is written in broad and deep characters upon our annals; it is written in characters of blood. I may dare to speak to you, on this thirtieth of January at all events, not of other men’s sins, but of our own. We are not commanded any longer to forget the beam in our eye that we may search for the mote in our brother’s eye. The Church of England has herself to blame for the event which this day commemorates, because she did not heed that groan which was deep before it became loud: “Give us a Gospel which speaks to us as spirits, for spirits we are. Do not merely deal with us as creatures of time and sense. Do not soothe us with shows, or coerce us with rules and punishments. Tell us if the Eternal has come near to us. Tell us if we may know Him.” The voice was not understood. It was supposed that they who uttered it were maniacs, and that chains might bind them. It was supposed that a regulative Revelation, if it were duly proclaimed, would satisfy all reasonable wishes. The experiment was made; you know how it succeeded.
Alas, the fearful lesson of this day was not enough for our warning! In the following century there was again the cry for a Revelation that should reach the spirits of men, that should present Christ to them as an actual Deliverer from evil spirits, claiming maniacs, robbers, outlaws, for sons of God. There was evidence—clear, undoubted evidence—that those who proclaimed Him in that character, did leave men whom they found possessed with unclean spirits, clothed, and in their right mind. There was evidence as clear and undoubted that effects the opposite of these were the result of their preaching; that fanaticism often followed it—sometimes hypocrisy. These facts were heeded, the others not. The conclusion was drawn, that a preaching which spoke of God as actually coming near to man, of a Spirit working upon his spirit, was not favourable to morality. A regulative Revelation must be proclaimed instead of this, a revelation of things which it was fitting to believe and fitting to do, stamped with the Divine authority, but bearing no witness that man is intended with open face to behold the glory of God, and to be changed into His image. Has that attempt succeeded better than the other? Has not Methodism vanquished you, as Puritanism vanquished you before? Have not you been obliged to adopt its phrases, even some of the phrases which were most reasonably charged with leading to mischievous results, because it proved itself more strong and effectual over men’s minds than any mere regulative Revelation ever was or ever can be?
Brethren, must this lesson also be wasted upon us? We have not indeed the same circumstances to deal with that we had in the seventeenth century or in the eighteenth. But we have men to deal with still,—men of all different classes, the criminal and the respectable, the sane and the maniac. Oh! shall we try again that old and worn-out experiment which has proved so helpless with them all? Shall we argue with men about the wickedness and folly of their unbelief? Shall we tell them how they may regulate themselves so that they may present a comely face to the world, distracted by no tumults, perplexed by no doubts? Or shall we speak to them as the Church speaks to them, declaring that God has verily manifested Himself, not to the eye, but to the spirit, and that His spirit is working with their spirits that they may be clean and pure within? Oh! if we could but proclaim that message to men, what would nicknames signify to us? Surely we might bear to be called Mystics or Rationalists or madmen or atheists,—all which titles have been bestowed upon Apostles and Martyrs,—if we could but be Christ’s instruments in casting an evil spirit out of the age; if we could but bring one man who has been possessed with a legion of them, to sit at His feet clothed and in a right mind!