1 Peter x. 13-18.
“Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance; but as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.”
I have chosen these verses as a fitting conclusion to the subject upon which I have been speaking to you during these weeks of Epiphany. I have been trying to ascertain what that Revelation of Jesus Christ is, of which the writers in the New Testament speak so continually. Is it, as the word seems to intimate, the actual unveiling of a Person to the conscience, heart, reason of human beings? Is it, as the Church appears to say, the unveiling of the character and nature of God to a creature who is formed to know Him? Or is it the announcement of certain opinions and maxims and rules of life to a creature who is formed not to know Him, and who, because that is his condition, must receive whatever, on probable evidence, he can guess to be divine? This has been our question—nearly the most important one with which it is possible for men to occupy themselves. The metaphysical arguments by which the latter opinion has been defended, I have touched upon very slightly. They involve subtleties which the hearers of sermons cannot be expected to follow, which they are likely to judge of rather by their wishes than by their convictions. I have contented myself with suggesting the inquiry whether these arguments, if they are truly stated, do not prove the impossibility of all knowledge whatever,—of that which refers to earth as much as of what is heavenly or eternal. My business has been to show you that the Bible at all events solemnly repudiates the maxim which has been put forth in its defence; repudiates it by all the anticipations of the holy men and prophets of the Old Testament; repudiates it through every work and parable of Christ which is recorded by Evangelists, through every discourse which was delivered by Apostles.
There is, however, one justification of this doctrine which I have hinted at, but not yet fully discussed. It is said that practice, not speculation, is what God desires of men; that His Word sets before them objects of fear and objects of hope; that He tells them what kind of men He would have them be, instead of tempting them to lose themselves in endless mazes of doubt that they may ascertain what He is. To all these propositions I give a hearty assent. I wish you to see how they bear upon the controversy;—for they have, I am satisfied, a direct bearing upon it. What that is, we might have gathered from the Epistle which was read today. But as that Epistle is taken from St. John, and as those who show any special reverence for St. John are said by some to exhibit fatal symptoms of the disease which they call Mysticism, I prefer to take my text from St. Peter, whom all will admit to be the most practical, the least speculative of teachers,—who in this passage of his Epistle especially, is setting forth the hopes and fears which he would wish his disciples to keep in mind, and the maxims which were to guide them in the fight of life.
I. It will at once occur to you that the expectation which St. Peter speaks of here, is that expectation of the appearing or manifestation or unveiling of Jesus Christ which sustained the Christians of the first age, and which all the Apostles, none more than St. Paul, encouraged by their words and by their example. I have often spoken to you of the opinion which prevails so widely in our day, that this hope was disappointed,—that what they looked for as close at hand was deferred to an immense distance of time,—that there has been no fulfilment of their longings even yet. I have often declared that if that were so, their whole message to mankind, and the lives which illustrated it, would seem to me utterly perplexing and bewildering. For this hope was certainly the staff of their being; if it was false, the acts and thoughts which were inspired by it and determined by it, must also have been false. I could not hope that such statements would produce much effect upon those who believed the Apostles to have been generally under the influence of a delusion; I desired that they might be weighed by those who suppose that they were the heralds of a truth to mankind which is as needful for this age as it was for theirs.
Now our inquiry respecting the word Revelation is closely connected with this subject. If it denotes wherever it is used, to whatever time it is referred the removal of a veil which had hidden the eternal God from men;—if from the hour in which men were created such veils had been removing;—if the sin of man, which had seemed to cut him off from God, had been a means of discovering the nature and essential character of God, by His warfare with it and forgiveness of it;—if no one step in Jewish history, or in any history, could be regarded by holy men except as the instrument of such a discovery, as setting forth something of the divine power and righteousness;—if the one desire of those holy men was for the complete rending asunder of that which had hidden from all nations the light in which they were intended to walk, and in which alone they could see themselves or see each other;—if the Son of Man did, while he was on earth, by all His acts, discourses, parables, declare the Kingdom of God to men, did manifest to men the Father;—if, when He had overcome the sharpness of death, He opened the Kingdom, and discovered the inner mind of the Father to all who believed in Him, who received Him as the well-beloved Son;—if this unveiling of His Kingdom to men was precisely that which the Apostles were appointed to preach, and did preach; if they preached it to a world which contradicted all they said, and treated it as ridiculous;—if the spectacle which that world presented seemed to make it ridiculous to themselves, so that to keep the faith that it was not all a dream for which they were giving up the traditions of infancy, old friendships, all that belonged to life, and life itself, was often unspeakably hard, and would have been impossible if the partaking of God’s nature had not been the one only refuge from the curse and plague of their own,—what encouragement could they hold out but this: ‘There will verily be a revelation of the Son of Man and of the Son of God to the Universe; it will be, whether we look for it or not; it will be attested by that doom upon our own holy city and temple of which our Lord spoke when He was upon earth, and which He denoted as a revelation or appearing of the Son of Man; but if you look for it,—if you brace up your spirits to the expectation of it,—if you resist whatever dulls or stifles that expectation within you,—then this unveiling will indeed be to you the satisfaction of all your longings, and of all the longings of past ages. It will be this blessing to you, because it will be not for you, but for the world; because it will be as the lightning, which lighteneth from one part of heaven, and shineth even to the other.’ You will see how consistent this language was with all their other language; how little the use of it was affected by any ignorance they might have of times and seasons, or of the exact nature of the change which was to take place in the condition of the outward world. If what they expected was not a full unveiling of the Eternal Mind,—of that which is the same yesterday and today and for ever,—points of chronology would have been of the most vast importance to them; a mistake about such points would have been fatal to their hopes. If what they expected was not the full manifestation of Him of whom the things of time and sense are all testifying, but about whom no conclusion can be deduced from them,—their conception of those things would have determined the degree and character of their hopes. As it was, the invisible things were no more limited by the narrowness of their intellects than the vision of sea and sky is limited by the size of the eye which took it in. Faith, not in some notions or communications about God, but in God himself, made them inheritors of His righteousness, capable of entering into His infinite love, and of losing themselves in it.
II. And therefore the practical exhortation, “Gird up the loins of your mind, be sober,” had its proper ground in this hope; by this hope it was changed from a mere verbal exhortation into an actual stimulus and power for work. Only the spirit can entertain such a hope as this; those to whom St. Peter wrote were capable of it only so far as they were living in the spirit. They must therefore continually be ‘girding’ themselves up to the conviction that they were spirits, that Christ had claimed them as spirits, that they could by His grace have all the rights of spirits. They must assure themselves day by day that the Spirit was working with their spirits, that they might not sink, as they were always inclined to sink, under the dominion of low, vagrant, fleshly impulses. Do you think that such an expectation was likely to intoxicate these early Christians with a sense of their own consequence? St. Peter thought it was the one thing which could keep them sober,—sober in the commonest application of the word, by restraining them from indulgences that make the senses their masters; sober, as raising them above the fumes of self-conceit and vanity. For he that is always looking beyond himself and above himself, who is aspiring after the revelation of a Goodness and a Truth which are not in himself, is flying from conceit and vanity, is regarding them as his torments and curses. Himself is his prisonhouse; Christ has come to set him free from it.
Till he has escaped from its bondage altogether, and has entered into the glorious liberty of the sons of God,—the liberty from selfish objects, selfish aspirations, selfish limitations,—he cannot be satisfied. No one had had deeper experience of this truth than the Apostle. Fisherman as he was, not to think himself above his Master and Lord, not to trust his own power of going to prison and death, had been the hardest of all things for him. It was, no doubt, a battle with him still. And he looked for victory in that battle by exercising the same hope to which he encouraged all his fellow-Christians. If he had any different expectation from theirs,—any dream of some private or special reward, such as he had entertained when our Lord was upon earth,—he would soon have lost all that he had learnt from His Cross and His Resurrection.
III. This is the next point on which I would fix your attention. The Apostle is addressing a society of men. He sets the same hope before them all. There is no discrimination of characters, no attempt to ascertain which were leading sinful, which were leading exemplary lives. Why so? Because the hope was itself the great test of what they were. Because the hope itself would be the means of raising those of them who would be raised. Because the raising would consist in their casting away partial and selfish ambitions, to entertain a common ambition, ambition for an object in which all might share. Because hereby it was shown that the Church is a communion of spirits, not a communion of mere creatures of flesh and blood, and that so far as they were pursuing a spiritual object, so far were they attaining the unity of a Church. Here then we have the Apostle’s mode of educating men, by high rewards of glory, immortality, eternal life, to gird up their loins, and to be sober. Here we have his way of terrifying them with the thought of future damnation. What could be such a damnation as to lose that glory, immortality, eternal life,—as to be left without the knowledge of God?
IV. But this glimpse into the method of his teaching does not give us an adequate conception of its practical character, or of the principle on which it rests. We must turn to the next passage: “As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to your former lusts in your ignorance; but as He which called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation.” He refers here to a former condition of mind into which there was a danger of their relapsing, if there was not that strenuous effort, that girding up of the loins of the mind, that sobriety, that hope to the end, which he had urged upon them. He describes this former state as one which was produced by their ignorance. I will not take for granted what this ignorance was. I will turn to one or two passages which may explain it. The first occurs in the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, the seventeenth and eighteenth verses: “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” There can be no doubt, I think, that when the Apostle who told the Athenians that they were living, moving, and having their being in God speaks of an alienation from the life of God, he means an unnatural separation from Him to whom they ought to have been united; that by blindness of heart he denotes the loss of a vision which they were created to enjoy. And if so, what other ignorance can he have thought of than ignorance of God? to what other cause than the absence of an actual knowledge of what He is of His nature and character—is the vanity of mind, the moral evil of the heathen traced?
Perhaps, however, a passage from the Apostle of the Gentiles may not suffice to illustrate one from the Apostle of the Circumcision. Take then the opening of St. Peter’s own second epistle: “Simon Peter, a servant and an Apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ: grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord, according as His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that hath called us to glory and virtue: whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the Divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” Twice in this short passage is the knowledge of God assumed to be the ground of all good to man. Grace and peace proceed from that knowledge. Whatever belongs to life and godliness, whatever leads to glory and virtue, comes through that knowledge. And see whether this is a mere phrase which admits of different interpretations, which may be explained to mean anything or nothing. St. Peter leaves us no excuse for thrusting in our interpretation. He gives his own: Knowledge of God is that which enables us to become “partakers of the divine Nature.” If there is not a way of ascending out of our nature into the pure and perfect Nature, he intimates that we have not received that which is necessary to life and godliness, that we have not learnt how we may escape the corruption which is in the world through lust.
I need not tell you that if I had followed up my quotation from St. Paul by an examination of the Epistle from which it is taken or any other of his Epistles, I should have found language exactly answering to this. To put on Christ, to put on the new Man, to be clothed with the righteousness of God, are not only expressions which occur continually in his writings, they are the expression of his own inmost mind, they come forth in the midst of his most earnest practical exhortations, they determine the character of his ethics. But, as I have chosen this sentence to make the purpose of my text more evident, I would leave this point to speak of the word “called,” which occurs in both the passages of St. Peter;—in our text, “As He that hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation;” and in the second Epistle, “Through the knowledge of Him that hath called us to glory and virtue.” The idea of a Calling is always present to the mind of the Apostle. How could he have entered so thoroughly as he did into the meaning of his nation’s existence if it had not been? But what hindered that belief of a calling from being the hard, exclusive belief to him which it was to his countrymen? This hindered it. He attached a much fuller and deeper meaning to God’s calling than they did. He supposed that a spiritual Being was in very deed calling out the spirits of men to behold His image, to be partakers of His Nature. It was no formal election of a set of favourites of Heaven, who were to earn rewards from which the rest of the world were excluded. It was the election of a people to know what are the rights of men, that they might be witnesses to all men of their rights. It was the election of a people to testify that God Himself is leading his creatures out of darkness to light, out of vague notions and conceptions of what is right and holy, to the knowledge, and so to the possession, of His righteousness and holiness.
V. Because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am holy. Here is the immutable morality of the Bible. It is uttered by Moses; it is repeated by St. Peter. Nothing that has happened in the interval between them has in the least affected it; everything that has happened has brought out its meaning and power more perfectly. The protecting care and faithfulness of the unseen God were unveiled to Abraham; he became the faithful man in his care of his family and his flock. A vision of God’s foresight was given to Joseph; he could teach Pharaoh to foresee. The I am, the Absolutely Righteous one, the guard of Law and Order, unveiled Himself to Moses, that name sustaining, not swallowing up, the old name of the Friend of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; so he could be the just Lawgiver, the teacher and patient guide of the people. A divine King caring for men, feeling with men, yet punishing them for their transgressions, was discovered to David; so he grew to be a king after God’s own heart. Every prophet confessed his word speaking in his heart; so he was able to speak and not be dumb. The prophets felt that God was caring for the whole nation, and suffering on account of its sins; so they were able to feel themselves parts of the nation, and to suffer for its sins. The prophets felt that God had promised to bring all nations into His family; so they could long that He should make Himself known to all nations. Just so far as they had an apprehension of God’s nature, just so far as they were partakers of that, just so far did they exhibit the gentleness, purity, truth, which the consciences of men recognize as truly human. And when the Apostles saw in Jesus of Nazareth Him of whom Moses and the Prophets did write, then they knew that this must be so, and why it must be so. They could doubt no longer that all practical goodness in men corresponds to a goodness in God and is derived from it, because they owned the Son of Man as the perfect concentration of that goodness. They were sure that He had united His divine nature to the human, that the human might share the divine. They could solemnly protest against all attempts of men to establish a righteousness of their own by obedience to the law, or by any acts, as hopeless and immoral; they could preach the Righteousness of God as manifested to all men in Christ, that all might with their spirits believe in it, know it, be conformed to it; and that those who did confess it might let their light shine forth to the world.
That practical morality,—morality, whether you regard it on the negative side or the positive, as resistance to evil, or as the being good and doing good,—is connected by the writers of the New Testament with the actual Revelation of God and the actual knowledge of God,—I have endeavoured to show. A less agreeable task remains. I must put it to your consciences and my own whether our morality has not been speculative rather than practical, whether we have not been full of vague, restless doubts as to the ends we should set before ourselves, as to our relations with other men, as to our standard of character and of duty, just because we have not believed, or have believed so weakly, that God has revealed His own holy nature to us, and that we may be partakers of it; that He has taken knowledge of us, in order that we may take knowledge of Him.
Brethren, I cannot help perceiving that the hope and expectation of any good to come is exceedingly weak among us all. There is a dread of an evil that may be threatening the world or threatening ourselves; in some minds, a dread of anarchy and infidelity; in others, a dread lest God should visit them for their own particular sins when they leave the world. But I cannot find that the first dread acts at all as a check upon infidelity. I cannot find that the second is effectual against any great temptation, far less against the daily and continual temptations to harshness, uncharitableness, injustice. Least of all does either of these dreads serve to bind us more closely together as members of a Nation or a Church. They isolate us from each other; they make us afraid lest every person we meet should be doing something to rob us of a comfort which we feel that we hold very loosely; they make us suspect that intercourse with our fellow-men on earth may lessen our chances of heaven. And so, it having become little more than a calculation of chances, men begin to reckon up what it is safe to retain, or worth while to give up, for the sake of obtaining a future good, or for the sake of evading a future misery. Which consideration, as the future misery and the future good are so indefinite, ends generally in our taking what lies before us; not expecting much enjoyment from that, but being ready to bear it, since nothing better has been provided for us.
No man is at all times in this state of mind. Properly speaking, it is not a state of mind; it is an oscillation of mind, which, while it lasts, may allow us to be credulous or sceptical, impatient of everything, or eager to place ourselves under absolute authority. And there are moments, I am certain, when other thoughts altogether different from these visit him who is most under the influence of them. There come dim recollections of our being told that we are children of God—or if we are only too familiar with the sound of these words—a suspicion that they may have a meaning; a meaning for ourselves and a meaning for the multitudes from whom we are trying to distinguish ourselves. And with those words come others stranger and more mystical, but still the words of an Apostle—“If children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” What can that mean? If it did mean that we, even we, are created to be partakers of the Righteousness, the Love, the Truth of God,—that we have not and cannot have any righteousness, love, truth of our own which can entitle us to any reward from God, but that these are His own rewards,—that these are offered us without money or price,—that these we may be claiming even here,—that these we enter upon as our full inheritance hereafter,—oh, what a difference it would make in our moral state! What a hope would be kindled in us,—a hope which cannot make ashamed,—a hope which we can boldly set before every human being! How little we should care then to convict men of their infidelity! With what shame and sorrow we should confess our own! How we should say to all:—A message has been brought us to which we have none of us given credence—or only a beggarly credence. Is it not the message which meets your questionings and longings as well as ours? Does it not present itself to you as that which in lonely sad hours you have been crying for? Oh, if it does, let us begin to hope together! You have the same right to do it as I have. There is no difference between us, except that I have offended more against God, by professing to hold that which I have not held,—by repeating words without giving them their natural force. But now let us forget the things that are behind. You do not like our pride and self-glorification. Encourage us to hate them, for they keep us from that glory and virtue which are for you, as well as us, through the knowledge of that God who has called us—who is calling us—to be like Him.
And here also would be the remedy for those uneasy thoughts about their own lot in the world to come, which haunt so many gentle and so many ungentle minds; which often lead them to neglect plain practical duties, which aggravate the very sins that give occasion to them. What would they wish to have in this world, or in any other world? Is it not Righteousness, Love, Truth? Is it not the want of these which they feel so bitterly? Yes, surely; because they are seeking them in themselves, and not in God, in whom alone they dwell. Because they are dreading Him as one who requires these things of them, instead of trusting Him as the Righteous, the True, and the Loving,—who invites them to know Him, and so to possess His own infinite treasures.
Brethren! it is because I find here the one escape from the evils by which we are surrounded,—from the lusts of an evil nature,—from the restless speculations of our intellect,—that I have contended so earnestly against those who would take this hope from us. I do not for a moment say that they intend to take it from us. I know well that what men deny with their lips, they may hold in their heart of hearts. I am quite sure that some who, whilst they speak as logicians, seem to tell us that the love of God, which was manifested at the Cross of Christ is not really the same love which is to dwell in our hearts,—that the words which describe its nature are merely accommodations to our conceptions,—I can quite believe that those who use this language, which appears to me so frightful, have a far stronger hold than I have upon that love, and are exhibiting far better fruits of it in their lives. Nor ought we to forget that Logicians, as such, are occupied with the individual soul, which, as St. Paul tells us in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, is subject to all those conditions and limitations that make the knowledge of spiritual things impossible. Schoolmen may naturally think that it is their business to investigate these conditions and limitations. And therefore we should have no cause to complain, if they did not intrude into another region,—if they did not deny the existence of that Spirit of man within us, of which the same Apostle speaks—that Spirit which acknowledges no such fetters, but claims fellowship with the Eternal, and is never satisfied till the Spirit of God has called it forth to know the truth which alone can make it free. Of such a human spirit the student in the poet’s legend who was worn out with his books of Jurisprudence, Medicine, and Theology, and was ready in his despair to take the poison-cup, became conscious, when he heard the children singing their Easter Hymn of the risen Christ. He felt it again when he went forth into the spring air among the common people and cried, ‘Here I am a man, here I dare be one.’ The legend goes on to tell that he committed that human spirit to the guidance of an evil, mocking spirit, and so fell into guilt and despair. Not for that terrible possibility which each one of us may have felt at times to be a possibility for himself, are we to suppress the lesson which the Apostle of the Gentiles and the Apostle of the Circumcision conspire to teach us. They were alive—how much alive, St. Peter’s second Epistle will tell us—to the danger of men acquiring a devilish nature; they were all the more earnest to tell them they were intended to be partakers of the divine Nature. They felt that it was impossible, since the appearance of Christ, to conceal either the glory or the peril of humanity; that if we would awaken men to the last, we must speak to them of the other. There is a middle region, through which we may pass, but in which we cannot dwell. It is a region of clouds, with none of the brightness of Heaven or the firmness of earth. In that region all is speculation; there is no practice. It may be a region of dry logical formulas, or of emotions, sensations, individual feelings. But it is one which we are called to leave by the actual sorrows and miseries that we witness,—by the sense that we are kinsmen with the lowest and worst, as well as with the noblest of our race,—by the voices of friends who, on earth, learnt that there must be an actual Kingdom of heaven, and are beckoning us to seek the home which they, we trust, have found,—by the voice of God Himself bidding us eat the flesh of His Son and drink His blood which are given for the life of the world. That life, that eternal life, is said by the Church to stand in the knowledge of God. When we partake of the sacrifice of Christ, we partake of the mind of God. To know Him is, in the words of the Apostle, to know that love which passeth knowledge. Think not that those who seek that knowledge,—who believe that the Supper of the Lord is the pledge and assurance that all men need it, that it is offered to all,—will have less of awe and trembling as they enter into the presence of God, than those who stand afar off and affirm they have no capacity for such a gift. Love is far more awful than power. The beloved Disciple who spoke most of knowing God and dwelling in God,—when the High-Priest of the Universe was actually revealed before him, fell at His feet as one dead. Those who most join in St. Paul’s prayer for other men and themselves, that they may comprehend with all Saints what is the height and length and breadth and depth of the Divine mystery, are most sure to exclaim with him, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His counsellor? Or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things; to whom be glory for ever. Amen.”
Note
The passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians which is alluded to in p. 125, is that from the ninth to the sixteenth verse of the second chapter, inclusive. I shall refer to it in my Letters, in noticing Mr. Mansell’s Lecture which gets its text (or motto) from that chapter.
The allusion in the next paragraph is to the speech of Faust when he hears the song ‘Christ ist erstanden,’ ending with the line—
Die Thräne quillt, die Erde hat mich wieder;
and to the one in the next scene ending—
Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich’s seyn.
(Goethe’s Werke, 12ter Band, 12mo. pp. 46 and 54.)