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Title: Discipline and Other Sermons

Author: Charles Kingsley

Release Date: December, 2004  [EBook #7042]
[This file was first posted on February 27, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, DISCIPLINE AND OTHER SERMONS ***




Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk, from the
1881 Macmillan and Co. edition.




DISCIPLINE AND OTHER SERMONS




SERMON I.--DISCIPLINE



(Preached at the Volunteer Camp, Wimbledon, July 14, 1867.)

NUMBERS xxiv. 9.

He couched, he lay down as a lion; and as a great lion.  Who dare
rouse him up?

These were the words of the Eastern sage, as he looked down from the
mountain height upon the camp of Israel, abiding among the groves of
the lowland, according to their tribes, in order, discipline, and
unity.  Before a people so organized, he saw well, none of the
nations round could stand.  Israel would burst through them, with the
strength of the wild bull crashing through the forest.  He would
couch as a lion, and as a great lion.  Who dare rouse him up?

But such a people, the wise Balaam saw, would not be mere conquerors,
like those savage hordes, or plundering armies, which have so often
swept over the earth before and since, leaving no trace behind save
blood and ashes.  Israel would be not only a conqueror, but a
colonist and a civilizer.  And as the sage looked down on that well-
ordered camp, he seems to have forgotten for a moment that every man
therein was a stern and practised warrior.  'How goodly,' he cries,
'are thy tents, oh Jacob, and thy camp, oh Israel.'  He likens them,
not to the locust swarm, the sea flood, nor the forest fire, but to
the most peaceful, and most fruitful sights in nature or in art.
They are spread forth like the water-courses, which carry verdure and
fertility as they flow.  They are planted like the hanging gardens
beside his own river Euphrates, with their aromatic shrubs and wide-
spreading cedars.  Their God-given mission may be stern, but it will
be beneficent.  They will be terrible in war; but they will be
wealthy, prosperous, civilized and civilizing, in peace.

Many of you must have seen--all may see--that noble picture of Israel
in Egypt which now hangs in the Royal Academy; in which the Hebrews,
harnessed like beasts of burden, writhing under the whips of their
taskmasters, are dragging to its place some huge Egyptian statue.

Compare the degradation portrayed in that picture with this prophecy
of Balaam's, and then consider--What, in less than two generations,
had so transformed those wretched slaves?

Compare, too, with Balaam's prophecy the hints of their moral
degradation which Scripture gives;--the helplessness, the
hopelessness, the cowardice, the sensuality, which cried, 'Let us
alone, that we may serve the Egyptians.  Because there were no graves
in Egypt, hast thou brought us forth to die in the wilderness?'
'Whose highest wish on earth was to sit by the fleshpots of Egypt,
where they did eat bread to the full.'  What had transformed that
race into a lion, whom none dare rouse up?

Plainly, those forty years of freedom.  But of freedom under a stern
military education:  of freedom chastened by discipline, and
organized by law.

I say, of freedom.  No nation of those days, we have reason to
believe, enjoyed a freedom comparable to that of the old Jews.  They
were, to use our modern phrase, the only constitutional people of the
East.  The burdensomeness of Moses' law, ere it was overlaid, in
later days, by Rabbinical scrupulosity, has been much exaggerated.
In its simpler form, in those early times, it left every man free to
do, as we are expressly told, that which was right in his own eyes,
in many most important matters.  Little seems to have been demanded
of the Jews, save those simple ten commandments, which we still hold
to be necessary for all civilized society.

And their obedience was, after all, a moral obedience; the obedience
of free hearts and wills.  The law could threaten to slay them for
wronging each other; but they themselves had to enforce the law
against themselves.  They were always physically strong enough to
defy it, if they chose.  They did not defy it, because they believed
in it, and felt that in obedience and loyalty lay the salvation of
themselves and of their race.

It was not, understand me, the mere physical training of these forty
years which had thus made them men indeed.  Whatever they may have
gained by that--the younger generation at least--of hardihood,
endurance, and self-help, was a small matter compared with the moral
training which they had gained--a small matter, compared with the
habits of obedience, self-restraint, self-sacrifice, mutual trust,
and mutual help; the inspiration of a common patriotism, of a common
national destiny.  Without that moral discipline, they would have
failed each other in need; have broken up, scattered, or perished, or
at least remained as settlers or as slaves among the Arab tribes.
With that moral discipline, they held together, and continued one
people till the last, till they couched, they lay down as a lion, and
as a great lion, and none dare rouse them up.

You who are here to-day--I speak to those in uniform--are the
representatives of more than one great body of your countrymen, who
have determined to teach themselves something of that lesson which
Israel learnt in the wilderness; not indeed by actual danger and
actual need, but by preparation for dangers and for needs, which are
only too possible as long as there is sin upon this earth.

I believe--I have already seen enough to be sure--that your labour
and that of your comrades will not be in vain; that you will be, as
you surely may be, the better men for that discipline to which you
have subjected yourselves.

You must never forget that there are two sides, a softer and a
sterner side, to the character of the good man; that he, the perfect
Christ, who is the Lion of Judah, taking vengeance, in every age, on
all who wrong their fellow men, is also the Lamb of God, who shed his
own blood for those who rebelled against him.  You must recollect
that there are virtues--graces we call them rather--which you may
learn elsewhere better than in the camp or on the drilling ground;
graces of character more devout, more pure, more tender, more humane,
yet necessary for the perfect man, which you will learn rather in
your own homes, from the innocence of your own children, from the
counsels and examples of your mothers and your wives.

But there are virtues--graces we must call them too--just as
necessary for the perfect man, which your present training ought to
foster as (for most of you) no other training can; virtues which the
old monk tried to teach by the stern education of the cloister; which
are still taught, thank God, by the stern education of our public
schools; which you and your comrades may learn by the best of all
methods, by teaching them to yourselves.

For here, and wherever military training goes on, must be kept in
check those sins of self-will, conceit, self-indulgence, which beset
all free and prosperous men.  Here must be practised virtues which
(if not the very highest) are yet virtues still, and will be such to
all eternity.

For the moral discipline which goes to make a good soldier or a
successful competitor on this ground,--the self-restraint, the
obedience, the diligence, the punctuality, the patience, the
courtesy, the forbearance, the justice, the temperance,--these
virtues, needful for those who compete in a struggle in which the
idler and the debauchee can take no share, all these go equally
toward the making of a good man.

The germs of these virtues you must bring hither with you.  And none
can give them to you save the Spirit of God, the giver of all good.
But here you may have them, I trust, quickened into more active life,
strengthened into more settled habits, to stand you in good stead in
all places, all circumstances, all callings; whether you shall go to
serve your country and your family, in trade or agriculture, at home;
or whether you shall go forth, as many of you will, as soldiers,
colonists, or merchants, to carry English speech and English
civilization to the ends of all the earth.

For then, if you learn to endure hardness--in plain English, to
exercise obedience and self-restraint--will you be (whether regulars
or civilians) alike the soldiers of Christ, able and willing to fight
in that war of which He is the Supreme Commander, and which will
endure as long as there is darkness and misery upon the earth; even
the battle of the living God against the baser instincts of our
nature, against ignorance and folly, against lawlessness and tyranny,
against brutality and sloth.  Those, the deadly enemies of the human
race, you are all bound to attack, if you be good men and true,
wheresoever you shall meet them invading the kingdom of your Saviour
and your God.  But you can only conquer them in others in proportion
as you have conquered them in yourselves.

May God give you grace to conquer them in yourselves more and more;
to profit by the discipline which you may gain by this movement; and
bequeath it, as a precious heirloom, to your children hereafter!

For so, whether at home or abroad, will you help to give your nation
that moral strength, without which physical strength is mere violent
weakness; and by the example and influence of your own discipline,
obedience, and self-restraint, help to fulfil of your own nation the
prophecy of the Seer -

'He couched, he lay down as a lion; and as a great lion.  Who dare
rouse him up?'



SERMON II.--THE TEMPLE OF WISDOM



(Preached at Wellington College, All Saints' Day, 1866.)

PROVERBS ix. 1-5.

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars:
she hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also
furnished her table.  She hath sent forth her maidens; she crieth
upon the highest places of the city, Whoso is simple, let him turn in
hither:  and to him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him,
Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled.

This allegory has been a favourite one with many deep and lofty
thinkers.  They mixed it, now and then, with Greek fancies; and
brought Phoebus, Apollo, and the Muses into the Temple of Wisdom.
But whatever they added to the allegory, they always preserved the
allegory itself.  No words, they felt, could so well express what
Wisdom was, and how it was to be obtained by man.

The stately Temple, built by mystic rules of art; the glorious Lady,
at once its Architect, its Priestess, and its Queen; the feast spread
within for all who felt in themselves divine aspirations after what
is beautiful, and good, and true; the maidens fair and pure, sent
forth throughout the city, among the millions intent only on selfish
gain or selfish pleasure, to call in all who were not content to be
only a more crafty kind of animal, that they might sit down at the
feast among the noble company of guests,--those who have inclined
their heart to wisdom, and sought for understanding as for hid
treasures:- this is a picture which sages and poets felt was true;
true for all men, and for all lands.  And it will be, perhaps, looked
on as true once more, as natural, all but literally exact, when we
who are now men are in our graves, and you who are now boys will be
grown men; in the days when the present soulless mechanical notion of
the world and of men shall have died out, and philosophers shall see
once more that Wisdom is no discovery of their own, but the
inspiration of the Almighty; and that this world is no dead and dark
machine, but alight with the Glory, and alive with the Spirit, of
God.

But what has this allegory, however true, to do with All Saints' Day?

My dear boys, on all days Wisdom calls you to her feast, by many
weighty arguments, by many loving allurements, by many awful threats.
But on this day, of all the year, she calls you by the memory of the
example of those who sit already and for ever at her feast.  By the
memory and example of the wise of every age and every land, she bids
you enter in and feast with them, on the wealth which she, and they,
her faithful servants, have prepared for you.  They have laboured;
and they call you, in their mistress's name, to enter into their
labours.  She taught them wisdom, and she calls on you to learn
wisdom of them in turn.

Remember, I say, this day, with humility and thankfulness of heart,
the wise who are gone home to their rest.

There are many kinds of noble personages amid the blessed company of
All Saints, whom I might bid you to remember this day.  Some of you
are the sons of statesmen or lawyers.  I might call on you to thank
God for your fathers, and for every man who has helped to make or
execute wise laws.  Some of you are the sons of soldiers.  I might
call on you to thank God for your fathers, and for all who have
fought for duty and for their country's right.  Some of you are the
sons of clergymen.  I might call on you to thank God for your
fathers, and for all who have preached the true God and Jesus Christ
His only-begotten Son, whether at home or abroad.  All of you have
mothers, whether on earth or in heaven; I might call on you to thank
God for them, and for every good and true woman who, since the making
of the world, has raised the coarseness and tamed the fierceness of
men into gentleness and reverence, purity, and chivalry.  I might do
this:  but to-day I will ask you to remember specially--The Wise.

For you are here as scholars; you are here to learn wisdom; you are
here in what should be, and I believe surely is, one of the fore-
courts of that mystic Temple into which Wisdom calls us all.  And
therefore it is fit that you should this day remember the wise; for
they have laboured, and you are entering into their labours.  Every
lesson which you learn in school, all knowledge which raises you
above the savage or the profligate (who is but a savage dressed in
civilized garments), has been made possible to you by the wise.
Every doctrine of theology, every maxim of morals, every rule of
grammar, every process of mathematics, every law of physical science,
every fact of history or of geography, which you are taught here, is
a voice from beyond the tomb.  Either the knowledge itself, or other
knowledge which led to it, is an heirloom to you from men whose
bodies are now mouldering in the dust, but whose spirits live for
ever before God, and whose works follow them, going on, generation
after generation, upon the path which they trod while they were upon
earth, the path of usefulness, as lights to the steps of youth and
ignorance.  They are the salt of the earth, which keeps the world of
man from decaying back into barbarism.  They are the children of
light whom God has set for lights that cannot be hid.  They are the
aristocracy of God, into which not many noble, not many rich, not
many mighty are called.  Most of them were poor; many all but unknown
in their own time; many died, and saw no fruit of their labours; some
were persecuted, some were slain, even as Christ the Lord was slain,
as heretics, innovators, and corruptors of youth.  Of some, the very
names are forgotten.  But though their names be dead, their works
live, and grow, and spread, over ever fresh generations of youth,
showing them fresh steps toward that Temple of Wisdom, which is the
knowledge of things as they are; the knowledge of those eternal laws
by which God governs the heavens and the earth, things temporal and
eternal, physical and spiritual, seen and unseen, from the rise and
fall of mighty nations, to the growth and death of the moss on yonder
moors.

They made their mistakes; they had their sins; for they were men of
like passions with ourselves.  But this they did--They cried after
Wisdom, and lifted up their voice for understanding; they sought for
her as silver, and searched for her as hid treasure:  and not in
vain.

For them, as to every earnest seeker after wisdom, that Heavenly Lady
showed herself and her exceeding beauty; and gave gifts to each
according to his earnestness, his purity and his power of sight.

To some she taught moral wisdom--righteousness, and justice, and
equity, yea, every good path.

To others she showed that political science, which--as Solomon tells
you--is but another side of her beauty, and cannot be parted, however
men may try, from moral wisdom--that Wisdom in whose right hand is
length of days, and in her left hand riches and honour; whose ways
are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.

To others again she showed that physical science which--so Solomon
tells us again--cannot be parted safely from the two others.  For by
the same wisdom, he says, which gives alike righteousness and equity,
riches and long life--by that same wisdom, and no other, did the Lord
found the heavens and establish the earth; by that same knowledge of
his are the depths broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew.

And to some she showed herself, as she did to good Boethius in his
dungeon, in the deepest vale of misery, and the hour of death; when
all seemed to have deserted them, save Wisdom, and the God from whom
she comes; and bade them be of good cheer still, and keep innocency,
and take heed to the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man
peace at the last.

And they beheld her, and loved her, and obeyed her, each according to
his powers:  and now they have their reward.

And what is their reward?

How can I tell, dear boys?  This, at least can I say, for Scripture
has said it already.  That God is merciful in this; that he rewardeth
every man according to his work.  This, at least, I can say, for God
incarnate himself has said it already--that to the good and faithful
servant he will say,--'Well done.  Thou hast been faithful over a few
things:  I will make thee ruler over many things.  Enter thou into
the joy of thy Lord.'

'The joy of thy Lord.'  Think of these words a while.  Perhaps they
may teach us something of the meaning of All Saints' Day.

For, if Jesus Christ be--as he is--the same yesterday, to-day, and
for ever, then his joy now must be the same as his joy was when he
was here on earth,--to do good, and to behold the fruit of his own
goodness; to see--as Isaiah prophesied of him--to see of the travail
of his soul, and be satisfied.

And so it may be; so it surely is--with them; if blessed spirits (as
I believe) have knowledge of what goes on on earth.  They enter into
the joy of their Lord.  Therefore they enter into the joy of doing
good.  They see of the travail of their soul, and are satisfied that
they have not lived in vain.  They see that their work is going on
still on earth; that they, being dead, yet speak, and call ever fresh
generations into the Temple of Wisdom.

My dear boys, take this one thought away with you from this chapel
to-day.  Believe that the wise and good of every age and clime are
looking down on you, to see what use you will make of the knowledge
which they have won for you.  Whether they laboured, like Kepler in
his garret, or like Galileo in his dungeon, hid in God's tabernacle
from the strife of tongues; or, like Socrates and Plato, in the whirl
and noise--far more wearying and saddening than any loneliness--of
the foolish crowd, they all have laboured for you.  Let them rejoice,
when they see you enter into their labours with heart and soul.  Let
them rejoice, when they see in each one of you one of the fairest
sights on earth, before men and before God; a docile and innocent boy
striving to become a wise and virtuous man.

And whenever you are tempted to idleness and frivolity; whenever you
are tempted to profligacy and low-mindedness; whenever you are
tempted--as you will be too often in these mean days--to join the
scorners and the fools whom Solomon denounced; tempted to sneering
unbelief in what is great and good, what is laborious and self-
sacrificing, and to the fancy that you were sent into this world
merely to get through it agreeably;--then fortify and ennoble your
hearts by Solomon's vision.  Remember who you are, and where you are-
-that you stand before the Temple of Wisdom, of the science of things
as God has made them; wherein alone is health and wealth for body and
for soul; that from within the Heavenly Lady calls to you, sending
forth her handmaidens in every art and science which has ever
ministered to the good of man; and that within there await you all
the wise and good who have ever taught on earth, that you may enter
in and partake of the feast which their mistress taught them to
prepare.  Remember, I say, who you are--even the sons of God; and
remember where you are--for ever upon sacred ground; and listen with
joy and hope to the voice of the Heavenly Wisdom, as she calls--
'Whoso is simple, let him come in hither; and him that wanteth
understanding, let him come and eat of my bread, and drink of the
wine that I have mingled.'

Listen with joy and hope:  and yet with fear and trembling, as of
Moses when he hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God.  For
the voice of Wisdom is none other than the voice of The Spirit of
God, in whom you live, and move, and have your being.



SERMON III.--PRAYER AND SCIENCE



(Preached at St. Olave's Church, Hart Street, before the Honourable
Corporation of the Trinity House, 1866.)

PSALM cvii. 23, 24, 28.

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great
waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them
out of their distresses.

These are days in which there is much dispute about religion and
science--how far they agree with each other; whether they contradict
or interfere with each other.  Especially there is dispute about
Providence.  Men say, and truly, that the more we look into the
world, the more we find everything governed by fixed and regular
laws; that man is bound to find out those laws, and save himself from
danger by science and experience.  But they go on to say,--'And
therefore there is no use in prayer.  You cannot expect God to alter
the laws of His universe because you ask Him:  the world will go on,
and ought to go on, its own way; and the man who prays against
danger, by sea or land, is asking vainly for that which will not be
granted him.'

Now I cannot see why we should not allow,--what is certainly true,--
that the world moves by fixed and regular laws:  and yet allow at the
same time,--what I believe is just as true,--that God's special
providence watches over all our actions, and that, to use our Lord's
example, not a sparrow falls to the ground without some special
reason why that particular sparrow should fall at that particular
moment and in that particular place.  I cannot see why all things
should not move in a divine and wonderful order, and yet why they
should not all work together for good to those who love God.  The
Psalmist of old finds no contradiction between the two thoughts.
Rather does the one of them seem to him to explain the other.  'All
things,' says he, 'continue this day as at the beginning.  For all
things serve Thee.'

Still it is not to be denied, that this question has been a difficult
one to men in all ages, and that it is so to many now.

But be that as it may, this I say, that, of all men, seafaring men
are the most likely to solve this great puzzle about the limits of
science and of religion, of law and of providence; for, of all
callings, theirs needs at once most science and most religion; theirs
is most subject to laws, and yet most at the mercy of Providence.
And I say that many seafaring men have solved the puzzle for
themselves in a very rational and sound way, though they may not be
able to put thoughts into words; and that they do show, by their
daily conduct, that a man may be at once thoroughly scientific and
thoroughly religious.  And I say that this Ancient and Honourable
Corporation of the Trinity House is a proof thereof unto this day; a
proof that sound science need not make us neglect sound religion, nor
sound religion make us neglect sound science.

No man ought to say that seamen have neglected science.  It is the
fashion among some to talk of sailors as superstitious.  They must
know very little about sailors, and must be very blind to broad
facts, who speak thus of them as a class.  Many sailors, doubtless,
are superstitious.  But I appeal to every master mariner here,
whether the superstitious men are generally the religious and godly
men; whether it is not generally the most reckless and profligate men
of the crew who are most afraid of sailing on a Friday, and who give
way to other silly fancies which I shall not mention in this sacred
place.  And I appeal, too, to public experience, whether many, I may
say most, of those to whom seamanship and sea-science owes most, have
not been God-fearing Christian men?

Be sure of this, that if seamen, as a class, had been superstitious,
they would never have done for science what they have done.  And what
they have done, all the world knows.  To seamen, and to men connected
with the sea, what do we not owe, in geography, hydrography,
meteorology, astronomy, natural history?  At the present moment, the
world owes them large improvements in dynamics, and in the new uses
of steam and iron.  It may be fairly said that the mariner has done
more toward the knowledge of Nature than any other personage in the
world, save the physician.

For seamen have been forced, by the nature of their calling, to be
scientific men.  From the very earliest ages in which the first canoe
put out to sea, the mariner has been educated by the most practical
of all schoolmasters, namely, danger.  He has carried his life in his
hand day and night; he has had to battle with the most formidable and
the most seemingly capricious of the brute powers of nature; with
storms, with ice, with currents, with unknown rocks and shoals, with
the vicissitudes of climate, and the terrible and seemingly
miraculous diseases which change of climate engenders.  He has had to
fight Nature; and to conquer her, if he could, by understanding her;
by observing facts, and by facing facts.  He dared not, like a
scholar in his study, indulge in theories and fancies about how
things ought to be.  He had to find out how they really were.  He
dared not say, According to my theory of the universe this current
ought to run in such a direction; he had to find out which way it did
actually run, according to God's method of the universe, lest it
should run him ashore.  Everywhere, I say, and all day long, the
seaman has to observe facts and to use facts, unless he intends to be
drowned; and therefore, so far from being a superstitious man, who
refuses to inquire into facts, but puts vain dreams in their stead,
the sailor is for the most part a very scientific-minded man:
observant, patient, accurate, truthful; conquering Nature, as the
great saying is, because he obeys her.

But if seamen have been forced to be scientific, they have been
equally forced to be religious.  They that go down to the sea in
ships see both the works of the Lord, and also His wonders in the
deep.  They see God's works, regular, orderly, the same year by year,
voyage by voyage, and tide by tide; and they learn the laws of them,
and are so far safe.  But they also see God's wonders--strange,
sudden, astonishing dangers, which have, no doubt, their laws, but
none which man has found out as yet.  Over them they cannot reason
and foretell; they can only pray and trust.  With all their
knowledge, they have still plenty of ignorance; and therefore, with
all their science, they have still room for religion.  Is there an
old man in this church who has sailed the seas for many a year, who
does not know that I speak truth?  Are there not men here who have
had things happen to them, for good and for evil, beyond all
calculation? who have had good fortune of which they could only say,
The glory be to God, for I had no share therein? or who have been
saved, as by miracle, from dangers of which they could only say, It
was of the Lord's mercies that we were not swallowed up? who must, if
they be honest men, as they are, say with the Psalmist, We cried unto
the Lord in our trouble, and he delivered us out of our distress?

And this it is that I said at first, that no men were so fit as
seamen to solve the question, where science ends and where religion
begins; because no men's calling depends so much on science and
reason, and so much, at the same time, on Providence and God's
merciful will.

Therefore, when men say, as they will,--If this world is governed by
fixed laws, and if we have no right to ask God to alter his laws for
our sakes, then what use in prayer?  I will answer,--Go to the
seaman, and ask him what he thinks.  The puzzle may seem very great
to a comfortable landsman, sitting safe in his study at home; but it
ought to be no puzzle at all to the master mariner in his cabin, with
his chart and his Bible open before him, side by side.  He ought to
know well enough where reason stops and religion begins.  He ought to
know when to work, and when to pray.  He ought to know the laws of
the sea and of the sky.  But he ought to know too how to pray,
without asking God to alter those laws, as presumptuous and
superstitious men are wont to do.

Take as an instance the commonest of all--a storm.  We know that
storms are not caused (as folk believed in old time) by evil spirits;
that they are natural phenomena, obeying certain fixed laws; that
they are necessary from time to time; that they are probably, on the
whole, useful.

And we know two ways of facing a storm, one of which you may see too
often among the boatmen of the Mediterranean--How a man shall say, I
know nothing as to how, or why, or when, a storm should come; and I
care not to know.  If one falls on me, I will cry for help to the
Panagia, or St. Nicholas, or some other saint, and perhaps they will
still the storm by miracle.  That is superstition, the child of
ignorance and fear.

And you may have seen what comes of that temper of mind.  How, when
the storm comes, instead of order, you have confusion; instead of
courage, cowardice; instead of a calm and manly faith, a miserable
crying of every man to his own saint, while the vessel is left to
herself to sink or swim.

But what is the temper of true religion, and of true science
likewise?  The seaman will say, I dare not pray that there may be no
storm.  I cannot presume to interfere with God's government.  If
there ought to be a storm, there will be one:  if not, there will be
none.  But I can forecast the signs of the weather; I can consult my
barometer; I can judge, by the new lights of science, what course the
storm will probably take; and I can do my best to avoid it.

But does that make religion needless?  Does that make prayer useless?
How so?  The seaman may say, I dare not pray that the storm may not
come.  But there is no necessity that I should be found in its path.
And I may pray, and I will pray, that God may so guide and govern my
voyage, and all its little accidents, that I may pass it by.  I know
that I can forecast the storm somewhat; and if I do not try to do
that, I am tempting God:  but I may pray, I will pray, that my
forecast may be correct.  I will pray the Spirit of God, who gives
man understanding, to give me a right judgment, a sound mind, and a
calm heart, that I may make no mistake and neglect no precaution; and
if I fail, and sink--God's will be done.  It is a good will to me and
all my crew; and into the hands of the good God who has redeemed me,
I commend my spirit, and their spirits likewise.

This much, therefore, we may say of prayer.  We may always pray to be
made better men.  We may always pray to be made wiser men.  These
prayers will always be answered; for they are prayers for the very
Spirit of God himself, from whom comes all goodness and all wisdom,
and it can never be wrong to ask to be made right.

There are surely, too, evils so terrible, that when they threaten us-
-if God being our Father means anything,--if Christ being our example
means anything--then we have a right to cry, like our Lord himself,
'Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me:' if we only
add, like our Lord, 'Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.'

And of dangers in general this we may say--that if we pray against
known dangers which we can avoid, we do nothing but tempt God:  but
that against unknown and unseen dangers we may always pray.  For
instance, if a sailor needlessly lodges over a foul, tideless
harbour, or sleeps in a tropical mangrove swamp, he has no right to
pray against cholera and fever; for he has done his best to give
himself cholera and fever, and has thereby tempted God.  But if he
goes into a new land, of whose climate, diseases, dangers, he is
utterly ignorant, then he has surely a right to pray God to deliver
him from those dangers; and if not,--if he is doomed to suffer from
them,--to pray God that he may discover and understand the new
dangers of that new land, in order to warn future travellers against
them, and so make his private suffering a benefit to mankind.

This, then, is our duty as to known dangers,--to guard ourselves
against them by science, and the reason which God has given us; and
as to unknown dangers, to pray to God to deliver us from them, if it
seem good to him:  but above all, to pray to him to deliver us from
them in the best way, the surest way, the most lasting way, the way
in which we may not only preserve ourselves, but our fellow-men and
generations yet unborn; namely, by giving us wisdom and understanding
to discover the dangers, to comprehend them, and to conquer them, by
reason and by science.

This is the spirit of sound science and of sound religion.  And it
was in this spirit, and for this very end, that this Ancient and
Honourable Corporation of the Trinity House was founded more than
three hundred years ago.  Not merely to pray to God and to the
saints, after the ancient fashion, to deliver all poor mariners from
dangers of the seas.  That was a natural prayer, and a pious one, as
far as it went:  but it did not go far enough.  For, as a fact, God
did not always answer it:  he did not always see fit to deliver those
who called upon him.  Gallant ships went down with all their crews.
It was plain that God would not always deliver poor mariners, even
though they cried to him in their distress.

Then, in the sixteenth century, when men's minds were freed from many
old superstitions, by a better understanding both of Holy Scripture
and of the laws of nature, the master mariners of England took a
wiser course.

They said, God will not always help poor mariners:  but he will
always teach them to deliver themselves.  And so they built this
House, not in the name of the Virgin Mary or any saints in heaven,
but, with a deep understanding of what was needed, in the most awful
name of God himself.  Thereby they went to the root and ground of
this matter, and of all matters.  They went to the source of all law
and order; to the source of all force and life; and to the source,
likewise, of all love and mercy; when they founded their House in the
name of the Father of Lights, in whom men live and move and have
their being; from whom comes every good and perfect gift, and without
whom not a sparrow falls to the ground; in the name of the Son, who
was born on earth a man, and tasted sorrow, and trial, and death for
every man; in the name of the Holy Ghost, who inspires man with the
spirit of wisdom and understanding, and gives him a right judgment in
all things, putting into his heart good desires, and enabling him to
bring them to good effect.  And so, believing that the ever-blessed
Trinity would teach them to help themselves and their fellow-
mariners, they set to work, like truly God-fearing men, not to hire
monks to sing and say masses for them, but to set up for themselves
lights and sea-marks, and to take order for the safe navigation of
these seas, like men who believed indeed that they were the children
of God, and that God would prosper his children in as far as they
used that reason which he himself had bestowed upon them.

It is for these men's sakes, as well as for our own, that we are met
together here this day.  We are met to commemorate the noble dead;
not in any Popish or superstitious fashion, as if they needed our
prayers, or we needed their miraculous assistance:  but in the good
old Protestant scriptural sense--to thank God for all his servants
departed this life in his faith and fear, and to pray that God may
give us grace to follow their good examples; and especially to thank
him for the founders of this ancient Trinity House, which stands here
as a token to all generations of Britons, that science and religion
are not contrary to each other, but twin sisters, meant to aid each
other and mankind in the battle with the brute forces of this
universe.

We are met together here to thank God for all gallant mariners, and
for all who have helped mariners toward safety and success; for all
who have made discoveries in hydrography or meteorology, in
navigation, or in commerce, adding to the safety of seamen, and to
the health and wealth of the human race; for all who have set noble
examples to their crews, facing danger manfully and dying at their
posts, as many a man has died, a martyr to his duty; for all who,
living active, and useful, and virtuous lives in their sea calling,
have ended as they lived, God-fearing Christian men.

To thank God for all these we are met together here; and to pray to
God likewise that he would send his Spirit into the hearts of seamen,
and of those who deal with seamen; and specially into the hearts of
the Royal the Master and the Worshipful the Elder Brethren of this
Ancient and Honourable House; that they may be true, and loyal, and
obedient to that divine name in which they are met together here this
day--the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the ever-blessed
Trinity, the giver of all good gifts, in whom we live, and move, and
have our being; always keeping God's commandments and looking for
God's guidance, and setting to those beneath them an example of sound
reason, virtue, and religion; that so there may never be wanting to
this land a race of seamen who shall trust in God to teach them all
they need to know, and to dispose of their bodies and souls as
seemeth best to his most holy will; who, fearing God, shall fear
nought else, but shall defy the dangers of the seas, and all the
brute forces of climates and of storms; who shall set in foreign
lands an example of justice and mercy, of true civilization and true
religion; and so shall still maintain the marine of Great Britain, as
it has been for now three hundred years, a safeguard and a glory to
these islands, and a blessing to the coasts of all the world.



SERMON IV.--GOD'S TRAINING



DEUTERONOMY viii. 2-5.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee
these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove
thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his
commandments or no.  And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to
hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did
thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live
by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of
the Lord doth man live.  Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither
did thy foot swell, these forty years.  Thou shalt also consider in
thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God
chasteneth thee.

This is the lesson of our lives.  This is training, not only for the
old Jews, but for us.  What was true of them, is more or less true of
us.  And we read these verses to teach us that God's ways with man do
not change; that his fatherly hand is over us, as well as over the
people of Israel; that we are in God's schoolhouse, as they were;
that their blessings are our blessings, their dangers are our
dangers; that, as St. Paul says, all these things are written for our
example.

'And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger.'  How true to life
that is!  How often there comes to a man, at his setting out in life,
a time which humbles him; a time of disappointment, when he finds
that he is not so clever as he thought, as able to help himself as he
thought; when his fine plans fail him; when he does not know how to
settle in life, how to marry, how to provide for a family.  Perhaps
the man actually does hunger, and go through a time of want and
struggle.  Then, it may be, he cries in his heart--How hard it is for
me!  How hard that the golden days of youth should be all dark and
clouded over!  How hard to have to suffer anxiety and weary hard
work, just when I am able to enjoy myself most!

It is hard:  but worse things than hard things may happen to a man.
Far worse is it to grow up, as some men do, in wealth, and ease, and
luxury, with all the pleasures of this life found ready to their
hands.  Some men, says the proverb, are 'born with a golden spoon in
their mouth.'  God help them if they are!  Idleness, profligacy,
luxury, self-conceit, no care for their duty, no care for God, no
feeling that they are in God's school-house--these are too often the
fruits of that breeding up.  How hardly will they learn that man doth
not live by bread alone, or by money alone, or by comfort alone, but
by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.  Truly, said
our Lord, 'how hardly shall they that have riches enter into the
kingdom of heaven.'  Not those who earn riches by manful and honest
labour; not those who come to wealth after long training to make them
fit to use wealth:  but those who have wealth; who are born amid
luxury and pomp; who have never known want, and the golden lessons
which want brings.--God help them, for they need his help even more
than the poor young man who is at his wit's end how to live.  For him
God is helping.  His very want, and struggles, and anxiety may be
God's help to him.  They help him to control himself, and do with a
little; they help him to strengthen his character, and to bring out
all the powers of mind that God has given him.  God is humbling him,
that he may know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every
word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God.  God, too, if he
trusts in God, will feed him with manna--spiritual manna, not bodily.
He fed the Jews in the wilderness with manna, to show them that his
power was indeed almighty--that if he did not see fit to help his
people in one way, he could help them just as easily in another.  And
so with every man who trusts in God.  In unforeseen ways, he is
helped.  In unforeseen ways, he prospers; his life, as he goes on,
becomes very different from what he expected, from what he would have
liked; his fine dreams fade away, as he finds the world quite another
place from what he fancied it:  but still he prospers.  If he be
earnest and honest, patient and God-fearing, he prospers; God brings
him through.  His raiment doth not wax old, neither doth his foot
swell, through all his forty years' wandering in the wilderness.  He
is not tired out, he does not break down, though he may have to work
long and hard.  As his day is, so his strength shall be.  God holds
him up, strengthens and refreshes him, and brings him through years
of labour from the thought of which he shrank when he was young.

And so the man learns that man doth not live by bread alone, but by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; that not in the
abundance of things which he possesses, not in money; not in
pleasure, not even in comforts, does the life of man consist:  but in
this--to learn his duty, and to have strength from God to do it.
Truly said the prophet--'It is good for a man to learn to bear the
yoke in his youth.'

After that sharp training a man will prosper; because he is fit to
prosper.  He has learnt the golden lesson.  He can be trusted with
comforts, wealth, honour.  Let him have them, if God so will, and use
them well.

Only, only, when a time of ease and peace comes to him in his middle
age, let him not forget the warning of the latter part of the
chapter.

For there is another danger awaiting him, as it awaited those old
Jews; the danger of prosperity in old age.  Ah my friends, that is a
sore temptation--the sorest, perhaps, which can meet a man in the
long struggle of life, the temptation which success brings.  In
middle age, when he has learnt his business, and succeeded in it;
when he has fought his battle with the world, and conquered more or
less; when he has made his way up, and seems to himself safe, and
comfortable, and thriving; when he feels that he is a shrewd,
thrifty, experienced man, who knows the world and how to prosper in
it--Then how easy it is for him to say in his heart--as Moses feared
that those old Jews would say--'My might and the power of my wit has
gotten me this wealth,' and to forget the Lord his God, who guided
him and trained him through all the struggles and storms of early
life; and so to become vainly confident, worldly and hard-hearted:
undevout and ungodly, even though he may keep himself respectable
enough, and fall into no open sin.

Therefore it is, I think, that while we see so many lives which have
been sad lives of poverty, and labour, and struggle, end peacefully
and cheerfully, in a sunshiny old age, like a still bright evening
after a day of storm and rain; so on the other hand we see lives
which have been prosperous and happy ones for many years, end sadly
in bereavement, poverty, or disappointment, as did the life of David,
the man after God's own heart.  God guided him through all the
dangers and temptations of youth, and through them all he trusted
God.  God brought him safely to success, honour, a royal crown; and
he thanked God, and acknowledged his goodness.  And yet after a while
his heart was puffed up, and he forgot God, and all he owed to God,
and became a tyrant, an adulterer, a murderer.  He repented of his
sin:  but he could not escape the punishment of it.  His children
were a curse to him; the sword never departed from his house; and his
last years were sad enough, and too sad.

Perhaps that was God's mercy to him; God's way of remembering him
again, and bringing him back to him.  Perhaps too that same is God's
way of bringing back many a man in our own days who has wandered from
him in success and prosperity.

God grant that we may never need that terrible chastisement.  God
grant that we, if success and comfort come to us, may never wander so
far from God, but that we may be brought back to him by the mere
humbling of old age itself, without needing affliction over and
above.

Yes, by old age alone.  Old age, it seems to me, is a most wholesome
and blessed medicine for the soul of man.  Good it is to find that we
can work no longer, and rejoice no more in our own strength and
cunning.  Good it is to feel our mortal bodies decay, and to learn
that we are but dust, and that when we turn again to our dust, all
our thoughts will perish.  Good it is to see the world changing round
us, going ahead of us, leaving us and our opinions behind.  Good
perhaps for us--though not for them--to see the young who are growing
up around us looking down on our old-fashioned notions.  Good for us:
because anything is good which humbles us, makes us feel our own
ignorance, weakness, nothingness, and cast ourselves utterly on that
God in whom we live, and move, and have our being; and on the mercy
of that Saviour who died for us on the Cross; and on that Spirit of
God from whose holy inspiration alone all good desires and good
actions come.

God grant that that may be our end.  That old age, when it comes, may
chasten us, humble us, soften us; and that our second childhood may
be a second childhood indeed, purged from the conceit, the scheming,
the fierceness, the covetousness which so easily beset us in our
youth and manhood; and tempered down to gentleness, patience,
humility, and faith.  God grant that instead of clinging greedily to
life, and money, and power, and fame, we may cling only to God, and
have one only wish as we draw near our end.--'From my youth up hast
thou taught me, Oh God, and hitherto I have declared thy wondrous
works.  Now also that I am old and grey-headed, Oh Lord, forsake me
not, till I have showed thy goodness to this generation, and thy
power to those who are yet to come.



SERMON V.--GOOD FRIDAY



HEBREWS ix. 13, 14.

For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer
sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh:
How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal
Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience
from dead works to serve the living God?

The three collects for Good Friday are very grand and very
remarkable.  In the first we pray:-

'Almighty God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family,
for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and
given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the
cross, who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost ever
one God, world without end.  Amen.'

In the second we pray:-

'Almighty and everlasting God, by whose Spirit the whole body of the
Church is governed and sanctified:  Receive our supplications and
prayers, which we offer before thee for all estates of men in thy
holy Church, that every member of the same, in his vocation and
ministry, may truly and godly serve thee; through our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ.  Amen.'

In the third we pray:-

'O merciful God, who hast made all men, and hatest nothing that thou
hast made, nor wouldest the death of a sinner, but rather that he
should be converted and live:  Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks,
Infidels, and Hereticks, and take from them all ignorance, hardness
of heart, and contempt of thy Word; and so fetch them home, blessed
Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the
true Israelites, and be made one fold under one shepherd, Jesus
Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy
Spirit, one God, world without end.  Amen.'

Now these collects give us the keynote of Good Friday; they tell us
what the Church wishes us to think of on Good Friday.

We are to think of Christ's death and passion.  Of that there is no
doubt.

But we need not on Good Friday, or perhaps at any other time, trouble
our minds with the unfathomable questions, How did Christ's sacrifice
take away our sins?  How does Christ's blood purge our conscience?

Mere 'theories of the Atonement,' as they are called, have very
little teaching in them, and still less comfort.  Wise and good men
have tried their minds upon them in all ages; they have done their
best to explain Christ's sacrifice, and the atonement which he worked
out on the cross on Good Friday:  but it does not seem to me that
they have succeeded.  I never read yet any explanation which I could
fully understand; which fully satisfied my conscience, or my reason
either; or which seemed to me fully to agree with and explain all the
texts of Scripture bearing on this great subject.

But is it possible to explain the matter?  Is it not too deep for
mortal man?  Is it not one of the deep things of God, and of God
alone, before which we must worship and believe?  As for explaining
or understanding it, must not that be impossible, from its very
nature?

For, consider the first root and beginning of the whole question.
Put it in the simplest shape, to which all Christians will agree.
The Father sent the Son to die for the world.  Most true:  but who
can explain those words?  We are stopped at the very first step by an
abyss.  Who can tell us what is meant by the Father sending the Son?
What is the relation, the connexion, between the Father and the Son?
If we do not know that, we can know nothing about the matter, about
the very root and ground thereof.  And we do know little or nothing.
The Bible only gives us scattered hints here and there.  It is one of
the things of which we may say, with St. Paul, that we know in part,
and see through a glass darkly.  How, then, dare we talk as if we
knew all, as if we saw clearly?  The atonement is a blessed and awful
mystery hidden in God:  ordained by and between God the Father and
God the Son.  And who can search out that?  Who hath known the mind
of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor?  Did we sit by, and
were we taken into his counsels, when he made the world?  Not we.
Neither were we when he redeemed the world.  He did it.  Let that be
enough for us.  And he did it in love.  Let that be enough for us.

God the Father so loved the world, that he sent his Son into the
world, that the world by him might be saved.  God the Son so loved
the world, that he came to do his Father's will, and put away sin by
the sacrifice of himself.  That is enough for us.  Let it be enough;
and let us take simply, honestly, literally, and humbly, like little
children, everything which the Bible says about it, without trying or
pretending to understand, but only to believe.

We can believe that Christ's blood can purge our conscience, though
we cannot explain in any words of our own how it can do so.  We can
believe that God made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, though
we not only cannot but dare not try to explain so awful a mystery.
We can believe that Christ's sacrifice on the cross was a
propitiation for sin, though neither we, nor (as I hold) any man on
earth, can tell exactly what the words sacrifice and propitiation
mean.  And so with all the texts which speak of Christ's death and
passion, and that atonement for sin which he, in his boundless mercy,
worked out this day.  Let us not torment our minds with arguments in
which there are a hundred words of man's invention to one word of
Holy Scripture, while the one word of Scripture has more in it than
the hundred words of man can explain.  But let us have faith in
Christ.  I mean, let us trust him that he has done all that can or
need be done; that whatsoever was needed to reconcile God to man, he
has done, for he is perfect God; that whatever was needed to
reconcile man to God, he has done, for he is perfect man.

Let us, instead of puzzling ourselves as to how the Lamb of God takes
away the sins of the world, believe that he knows, and that he lives,
and cry to him as to the living God,--Lamb of God, who takest away
the sins of the world, have mercy on us, and take our sins away.

And let us beseech God this day, graciously to behold his family, the
nations of Christendom, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented
to be betrayed into the hands of wicked men, and suffer death upon
the cross.  Let us ask this, even though we do not fully understand
what Christ's death on the cross did for mankind.  That was the
humble, childlike, really believing spirit of the early Christians.
God grant us the same spirit; we need it much in these very times.

For if we are of that spirit, my friends, then, instead of tormenting
our minds as to the how and why of Christ's sacrifice on the cross,
we shall turn our hearts, and not merely our minds, to the practical
question--What shall we do?  If Christ died for us, what shall we do?
What shall we ask God to help us to do?  To that the second collect
gives a clear answer at once--Serve the living God.

And how?  By dead works?  By mere outward forms and ceremonies,
church-goings, psalm-singings, sermon-hearings?  Not so.  These are
right and good; but they are dead works, which cannot take away sin,
any more than could the gifts and sacrifices, the meats and drinks of
the old Jewish law.  Those, says St. Paul, could not make him that
did the sacrifice perfect as pertaining to the conscience.  They
could not give him a clear conscience; they could not make him sure
that God had forgiven him; they could not give him spirit and comfort
to say--Now I can leave the church a forgiven man, a new man, and
begin a fresh life; and go about my daily business in joyfulness and
peace of mind, sure that God will help me, and bless me, and enable
me to serve him in my calling.

No, says St. Paul.  More than dead works are wanted to purge a man's
conscience.  Nothing will do that but the blood of Christ.  And that
will do it.  He, the spotless Lamb, has offered himself to God, as a
full and perfect and sufficient sacrifice, offering, and satisfaction
for the sins of the whole world; and therefore for thy sins, whoever
thou art, be thy sins many or few.  Believe that; for thou art a man
for whom Christ died.  Claim thy share in Christ's blood.  Believe
that he has died for thee; that he has blotted out thy sins in the
blood of his cross; that thou needest not try to blot them out by any
dead works, forms, or ceremonies whatsoever; for Christ has done and
suffered already all for thee.  Thou art forgiven.  Put away thy
sins, for God has put them away; rise, and be a new man.  Thou art
one of God's holy Church.  God has justified thee.  Let him sanctify
thee likewise.  God's spirit is with thee to guide thee, to inspire
thee, and make thee holy.  Serve thy Father and thy Master, the
Living God, sure that he is satisfied with thee for Christ's sake;
that thou art in thy right state henceforward; in thy right place in
this world; and that he blesses all thy efforts to live a right life,
and to do thy duty.

But how to serve him, and where?  By doing something strange and
fantastic?  By giving up thy business, money, time?  Going to the
ends of the earth?  Making what some will call some great sacrifice
for God?

Not so.  All that may be, and generally is, the fruit of mere self-
will and self-conceit.  God has made a sacrifice for thee.  Let that
be enough.  If he wants thee to make a sacrifice to him in return, he
will compel thee to make it, doubt it not.  But meanwhile abide in
the calling wherein thou art called.  Do the duty which lies nearest
thee.  Whether thou art squire or labourer, rich or poor; whether thy
duty is to see after thy children, or to mind thy shop, do thy duty.
For that is thy vocation and calling; that is the ministry in which
thou canst serve God, by serving thy fellow-creatures for whom Christ
died.

This day the grand prayer has gone up throughout Christ's Church--and
thou hast joined in it--for all estates of men in his holy Church;
for all estates, from kings and statesmen governing the nations, down
to labouring men tilling in the field, and poor women washing and
dressing their children at home, that each and all of them may do
their work well, whatever it is, and thereby serve the Living God.
For now their work, however humble, is God's work; Christ has bought
it and redeemed it with his blood.  When he redeemed human nature, he
redeemed all that human nature can and ought to do, save sin.  All
human duties and occupations are purified by the blood of Christ's
cross; and if we do our duty well, we do it to the Lord, and not to
man; and the Lord blesses us therein, and will help us to fulfil our
work like Christian men, by the help of his Holy Spirit.

And for those who know not Christ?  For them, too, we can pray.  For,
for them too Christ died.  They, too, belong to Christ, for he has
bought them with his most precious blood.  What will happen to them
we know not:  but this we know, that they are his sheep, lost sheep
though they may be; and that we are bound to pray, that he would
bring them home to his flock.

But how will he bring them back?  That, again, we know not.  But why
need we know?  If Christ knows how to do it, surely we need not.  Let
us trust him to do his own work in his own way.

But will he do it?  My friends, if we wish for the salvation of all
Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics, do you suppose that we are more
compassionate to them than God who made them?  Who is more likely to
pity the heathen?  We who send a few missionaries to teach them:  or
God who sent his own Son to die for them?

Oh trust God, and trust Christ; for this, as for all other things.
Believe that for the heathen, as for us, he is able to do exceedingly
and abundantly beyond all that we can ask or think; and believe too,
that if we do ask, we do not ask in vain; that this collect which has
gone up every Good Friday for centuries past, from millions of holy
hearts throughout the world, has not gone up unheard; that it will be
answered--we know not how--but answered still; and that to Jew and
Turk, Heathen and Heretic, this day will prove hereafter to have
been, what it is to us, Good Friday.



SERMON VI.--FALSE CIVILIZATION



JEREMIAH xxxv. 19.

Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Jonadab the son of
Rechab shall not want a man to stand before me for ever.

Let us think a while this morning what this text has to do with us;
and why this strange story of the Rechabites is written for our
instruction, in the pages of Holy Scripture.

Let us take the story as it stands, and search the Scriptures simply
for it.  For the Bible will surely tell its own story best, and teach
its own lesson best.

These Rechabites, who were they?  Or, indeed we may ask--Who are
they?  For they are said to exist still.

They were not Israelites, but wild Arabs, a branch of the Kenite
tribe, which claimed--at least its chiefs--to be descended from
Abraham, by his wife Keturah.  They joined the Israelites, and
wandered with them into the land of Canaan.

But they never settled down, as the Israelites did, into farmers and
townsfolk.  They never became what we call civilized:  though they
had a civilization of their own, which stood them in good stead, and
kept them--and keeps them, it would seem, to this day,--strong and
prosperous, while great cities and mighty nations have been destroyed
round about them.  They kept their old simple Arab customs, living in
their great black camels' hair tents, feeding their flocks and herds,
as they wandered from forest to forest and lawn to lawn, living on
the milk of the flock, and it would seem, on locusts and wild honey,
as did John the Baptist after them.  They had (as many Arab tribes
have still) neither corn, seed-field, nor vineyard.  Wild men they
were in their ways, yet living a simple wholesome life; till in the
days of Ahab and Jehu there arose among them a chief called Jonadab
the son of Rechab, of the house of Hammath.  Why he was called the
son of Rechab is not clearly known.  'The son of the rider,' or 'the
son of the chariot,' seems to be the most probable meaning of the
name.  So that these Rechabites, at least, had horses--as many Arab
tribes have now--and whether they rode them, or used them to draw
their goods about in carts, like many other wild tribes, they seem to
have gained from Jonadab the name of Rechabim, the sons of Rechab,
the sons of the rider, or the sons of the chariot.

Of Jonadab the son of Rechab, you heard three Sundays since, in that
noble passage of 2 Kings x. where Jehu, returning from the slaughter
of the idolatrous kings, and going to slay the priests of Baal, meets
Jonadab and asks him, Is thy heart right--that is, sound in the
worship of God, and determined to put down idolatry--as my heart is
with thy heart?  We hear of him and his tribe no more till the days
of Jeremiah, 250 years after, in the story from which my text is
taken.  What Jonadab's reasons may have been for commanding his tribe
neither to settle in towns, nor till the ground, it is not difficult
to guess.  He may have dreaded lest his people, by settling in the
towns, should learn the idolatry of the Israelites.  He may have
dreaded, likewise, lest they should give way to that same luxury and
profligacy in which the Israelites indulged--and especially lest they
should be demoralized by that drunkenness of which the prophets
speak, as one of the crying sins of that age.  He may have feared,
too, lest their settling down as landholders or townsmen would cause
them to be absorbed and lost among the nation of the Israelites, and
probably involved in their ruin.  Be that as it may, he laid his
command upon his tribe, and his command was obeyed.

Of the after-history of these simple God-fearing folk we know very
little.  But what we do know is well worth remembering.  They were,
it seems, carried away captive to Babylon with the rest of the Jews;
and with them they came back to Jerusalem.  Meanwhile, they had
intermarried with the priests of the tribe of Levi; and they assisted
at the worship and sacrifices,--'standing before the Lord' (as
Jeremiah had foretold) 'in the temple,' but living (as some say)
outside the walls in their tents.  And it is worth remembering, that
we have one psalm in the Bible, which was probably written either by
one of these Rechabites, or by Jeremiah for them to sing, and that a
psalm which you all know well, the old man's psalm, as it has well
been called--the 71st Psalm, which is read in the visitation of the
sick; which says, 'O God, thou hast taught me from my youth:  and
hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works.  Now also when I am old
and grey-headed, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy
strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to
come.'

It was, moreover, a Rechabite priest, we are told--'one of the sons
of the Rechabim spoken of by Jeremiah the prophet'--who when the Jews
were stoning St. James the Just, one of the twelve apostles, cried
out against their wickedness.

What befell the Rechabites when Jerusalem was destroyed, we know not:
but they seem to have returned to their old life, and wandered away
into the far east; for in the twelfth century, more than one thousand
years after, a Jewish traveller met with them 100,000 strong under a
Jewish prince of the house of David; still abstaining from wine and
flesh, and paying tithes to teachers who studied the law, and wept
for the fall of Jerusalem.  And even yet they are said to endure and
prosper.  For in our own time, a traveller met the Rechabites once
more in the heart of Arabia, still living in their tents, still
calling themselves the sons of Jonadab.  With one of them, Mousa
(i.e. Moses) by name, he talked, and Mousa said to him, 'Come, and I
will show you who we are;' and from an Arabic bible he read the words
of my text, and said, 'You will find us 60,000 in number still.  See,
the words of the prophet have been fulfilled--"Jonadab the son of
Rechab shall not want a man to stand before me for ever."'

What lesson shall we learn from this story--so strange, and yet so
beautiful?  What lesson need we learn, save that which the Holy
Scripture itself bids us learn?  The blessing which comes upon
reverence for our forefathers, and above all for God, our Father in
Heaven.

Reverence for our forefathers.  These are days in which we are too
apt to sneer at those who have gone before us; to look back on our
forefathers as very ignorant, prejudiced, old-fashioned people, whose
opinions have been all set aside by the progress of knowledge.

Be sure that in this temper of mind lies a sin and a snare.  If we
wish to keep up true independence and true self-respect in ourselves
and our children, we should be careful to keep up respect for our
forefathers.  A shallow, sneering generation, which laughs at those
who have gone before it, is ripe for disaster and slavery.  We are
not bound, of course--as those old Rechabites considered themselves
bound--to do in everything exactly what our forefathers did.  For we
are not under the law, but under grace; and where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is liberty--liberty to change, improve, and develop as
the world grows older, and (we may hope) wiser.  But we are bound to
do, not exactly what our forefathers did, but what we may reasonably
suppose that they would have done, had they lived now, and were they
in our places.  We are to obey them, not in the letter, but in the
spirit.

And whenever, in the prayer for the Church militant, we commemorate
the faithful dead, and thank God for all his servants departed this
life in his faith and fear, we should remember with honest pride that
we are thanking God for our own mothers and fathers, and for those
that went before them; ay, for every honest God-fearing man and
woman, high or low, who ever did their duty by God and their
neighbours, and left, when they died, a spot of this land somewhat
better than they found it.

And for God; the Father of all fathers; our Father in heaven--Oh, my
friends, God grant that it may never be said to any of us, Behold the
words of Jonadab the son of Rechab, which he commanded his children,
are performed:  but ye have not hearkened unto me.  I have sent also
unto you, saith God, not merely my servants the prophets, but my
only-begotten, Jesus Christ your Lord, saying, 'Return you now every
man from his evil way, and amend your doings, and go not after other
gods to serve them, and ye shall dwell in the land which I have given
to you and to your fathers.  But ye have not inclined your ear, nor
hearkened unto me.'

God grant that that may never be said to any of us.  And yet it is
impossible to deny--impossible to shut our eyes to the plain fact--
that Englishmen now-a-days are more and more forgetting that there
are any commandments of God whatsoever; any everlasting laws laid
down by their Heavenly Father, which, if they break, will avenge
themselves by our utter ruin.  We do not go after other gods, it is
true, in the sense of worshipping idols.  But there is another god,
which we go after more and more; and that is money; gain; our
interest (as we call it):- not knowing that the only true interest of
any man is to fear God and keep his commandments.  We hold more and
more that a man can serve God and mammon; that a man must of course
be religious, and belong to some special sect, or party, or
denomination, and stand up for that fiercely enough:  but we do not
hold that there are commandments of God which say for ever to the
sinner, 'Do this and thou shalt live;' 'Do this or thou shalt die.'

We hold that because we are not under the law, but under grace, there
is no condemnation for sin--at least for the special sort of sin
which happens to be in fashion, which is now-a-days the sin of making
money at all risks.  We hold that there is one law of morality for
the kingdom of heaven, and another for the kingdom of mammon.
Therefore we hold, more and more, that when money is in question
anything and everything is fair.  There are--we have reason to know
it just now but too well--thousands who will sell their honour, their
honesty, yea, their own souls, for a few paltry pounds, and think no
shame.  And if any one says, with Jeremiah the prophet, 'These are
poor, they know not the way of the Lord, nor the judgment of their
God.  I will get me to the great men, for they have known the way of
the Lord, and the judgment of their God:'--then will he find, as
Jeremiah did, that too many of these great and wealthy worshippers of
mammon have utterly broken the yoke, and burst the bonds, of all
moral law of right and wrong:  heaping up vast fortunes amid the ruin
of those who have trusted them, and the tears of the widow and the
orphan, by means now glossed over by fine new words, but called in
plain honest old English by a very ugly name.

How many there are in England now, my friends, who would laugh in
their hearts at those worthy Rechabites, and hold them to be
ignorant, old-fashioned, bigoted people, for keeping up their poor,
simple, temperate life, wandering to and fro with their tents and
cattle, instead of dwelling in great cities, and making money, and
becoming what is now-a-days called civilized, in luxury and
covetousness.  Surely according to the wisdom of this world, the
Rechabites were foolish enough.  But it is the wisdom of this world
itself--not simplicity and loyalty like theirs--which is foolishness
with God.

My friends, let us all take warning, each man for himself.  When a
nation corrupts itself--as we seem inclined to do now, by luxury and
covetousness, selfishness and self-will, forgetting more and more
loyalty and order, honesty and high principle--then some wholesome,
but severe judgment of God, is sure to come upon that nation:  a day
in which all faces shall gather blackness:  a day of gloominess and
thick darkness, like the morning spread upon the mountains.

For the eternal laws of God's providence are still at work, though we
choose to forget them; and the Judge who administers them is the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever, even Jesus Christ the Lord, the
everlasting Rock, on which all morality and all society is founded.
Whosoever shall fall on that Rock in repentance and humility,
confessing, bewailing, and forsaking his worldliness and sinfulness,
he shall indeed be broken:  but of him it is written, 'The sacrifices
of God are a broken spirit:  a broken and a contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise.'  And he shall find that Rock, even Christ, a
safe standing-ground amid the slippery mire of this world's
temptations, and the storms and floods of trouble which are coming--
it may be in our children's days--it may be in our own.

But he who hardens his heart:  he who says proudly, 'We are they that
ought to speak; who is Lord over us?'--he who says carelessly, 'Soul,
take thine ease; thou hast much goods laid up for many years'--he who
halts between two opinions, and believes to the last that he can
serve both God and mammon--he, especially, who fancies that
falsehood, injustice, covetousness, and neglect of his fellow-men,
can properly be his interest, or help his interest in any wise--of
all such it is written, 'On whomsoever that Rock'--even the eternal
laws of Christ the Judge--'On whomsoever that Rock shall fall, it
shall grind him to powder.'



SERMON VII.--THE NAME OF GOD



ISAIAH l. 10.

Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his
servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light?  Let him trust
in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.

To some persons it may seem strange advice to tell them, that in the
hour of darkness, doubt, and sorrow, they will find no comfort like
that of meditating on the Name of the Ever-blessed Trinity.  Yet
there is not a prophet or psalmist of the Old Testament who does not
speak of 'The Name of the Lord,' as a kind of talisman against all
the troubles which can befall the spirit of man.  And we, as
Christians, know, or ought to know, far more of God than did even
prophets or psalmists.  If they found comfort in the name of God, we
ought to find far more.

But some will say--Yes.  Let us think of God, God's mercies, God's
dealings with his people; but why think especially of the Name of the
Ever-blessed Trinity?

For this simple reason.  That it is by that Name of Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost, that God has revealed himself.  That is the name by which
he bids us think of him; and we are more or less disregarding his
commands when we think of him by any other.  That is the name which
God has given himself; and, therefore, it is morally certain that
that is God's right name; that it expresses God's very self, God's
very being, as he is.

Theology signifies, the knowledge of God as he is.  And it is dying
out among us in these days.  Much of what is called theology now is
nothing but experimental religion; which is most important and useful
when it is founded on the right knowledge of God:  but which is not
itself theology.  For theology begins with God:  but experimental
religion, right or wrong, begins with a man's own soul.  Therefore it
is that men are unaccustomed to theology.  They shrink from it as
something very abstruse, only fit for great scholars and divines, and
almost given up now-a-days even by them.  They do not know that
theology, the knowledge of God, is full of practical every-day
comfort, and guidance for their conduct and character; yea, that it
is--so says the Bible--everlasting life itself.  Therefore it is that
some shrink from thinking of the Ever-blessed Trinity, not from any
evil intent, but because they are afraid of thinking wrongly, and so
consider it more safe not to think at all.  They have been puzzled,
it may be, by arguments which they have heard, or read, or which have
risen up in their own minds, and which have made them doubt about the
Trinity:  and they say--I will not torment my soul, and perhaps
endanger my soul, by doubts.  I will take the doctrine of the Trinity
for granted, because I am bidden to do so:  but I leave what it means
to be explained by wiser men.  If I begin thinking about it I shall
only confuse myself.  So it is better for me not to think at all.

And one cannot deny that they are right, as far as they go.  If they
cannot think about the Trinity without thinking wrongly, it is better
to take on trust what they are told about it.  But they lose much by
so doing.  They lose the solid and real comfort which they may get by
thinking of the Name of God.  And, I believe, they lose it
unnecessarily.  I cannot see why they must think wrongly of the
Trinity, if they think at all.  I cannot see why they need confuse
themselves.  The doctrine of the Trinity is not really an
unreasonable one.  The doubts which come into men's minds concerning
it do not seem to me sound and reasonable doubts.  For instance, some
say--How can there be three persons in one God?  It is contrary to
reason.  One cannot be many.  Three cannot be one.  That is
unreasonable.

I think, that if you will use your reason for yourselves, you will
see that it is those words which are unreasonable, and not the
doctrine of the Trinity.

First.  A thing need not be unreasonable--that is, contrary to
reason--because it is above and beyond reason--or, at least, beyond
our human reason, which at best (as St. Paul says) sees as in a glass
darkly, and only knows in part.

Consider how many things are beyond reason which are not contrary to
it.  I say that all things which God has made are so:  but, without
going so far, let us consider these simple examples.

Is it not beyond all reason that among animals, like should bring
forth like?  Why does an eagle's egg always produce an eagle, and a
dove's egg a dove, and so forth?  No man knows, no man can give any
reason whatsoever.  If a dove's egg produced an eagle, ignorant men
would cry out at the wonder, the miracle.  Wise men know that the
real wonder, the real miracle is, that a dove's egg always produces a
dove, and not any and every other bird.

Here is a common and notorious fact, entirely above our reason.
There is no cause to be given for it, save that God has ordained it
so.  But it is not contrary to our reason.  So far from it, we are
certain that a dove will produce a dove; and our reason has found out
much of the laws of kind; and found out that they are reasonable
laws, regular, and to be depended upon; so that we can, as all know,
produce and keep up new breeds whether of plants or of animals.

So that the law of kind, though it is beyond our reason, is not
contrary to our reason at all.

So much for things which have life.  Take an equally notorious
example from things which have not life.

Is it not above and beyond all our reason--that the seemingly weakest
thing in the world, the most soft and yielding, the most frail and
vanishing, should be also one of the strongest things in the world?
That is so utterly above reason, that while I say it, it seems to
some of you to be contrary to reason, to be unreasonable and
impossible.  It is so above reason, that till two hundred years ago,
no one suspected that it was true.  And yet it is strictly true.

What is more soft and yielding, more frail and vanishing, than steam?
And what is stronger than steam?  I know nothing.  Steam it is which
has lifted up the mountains from the sea into the clouds.  Steam it
is which tears to pieces the bowels of the earth with earthquakes and
volcanoes, shaking down cities, rasping the solid rocks into powder,
and scattering them far and wide in dust over the face of the land.

What gives to steam its enormous force is beyond our reason.  We do
not know.  But so far from being contrary to our reason, we have
learnt that the laws of steam are as reasonable as any other of God's
laws.  We can calculate its force, we can make it, use it, and turn
its mighty powers, by reason and science, into our most useful and
obedient slave, till it works ten thousand mills, and sends ten
thousand ships across the sea.

Above reason, I say, but not contrary to reason, is the mighty power
of steam.

And God, who made all these wonders--and millions of wonders more--
must he not be more wonderful than them all?  Must not his being and
essence be above our reason?  But need they be, therefore, contrary
to our reason?  Not so.

Nevertheless, some will say, How can one be many?  How can one be
three?  Why not?  Two are one in you, and every man.  Your body is
you, and your soul is you.  They are two.  But you know yourself that
you are one being; that the Athanasian Creed speaks, at least, reason
when it says, 'As the reasonable soul and the flesh are one man, so
God and man is one Christ.'

And three are one in every plant in the field.  Root, bark, leaves,
are three.  And yet--they are one tree; and if you take away any one
of them, the tree will die.  So it is in all nature.  But why do I
talk of a tree, or any other example?  Wherever you look you find
that one thing is many things, and many things one.  So far from that
fact being contrary to our reason, it is one which our reason (as
soon as we think deeply about this world) assures us is most common.
Of every organized body it is strictly true, that it is many things,
bound together by a certain law, which makes them one thing and no
more.  And, therefore, every organized body is a mystery, and above
reason:  but its organization is none the less true for that.

And there are philosophers who will tell you--and wisely and well--
that there must needs be some such mystery in God; that reason ought
to teach us--even if revelation had not--two things.  First, that God
must be one; and next, that God must be many--that is, more than one.

Do I mean that our own reason would have found out for itself the
mystery of the ever-blessed Trinity?  God forbid!  Nothing less.

There surely is a difference between knowing that a thing must be,
and knowing that the thing is, and what it is like; and there surely
is a difference between knowing that there is a great mystery and
wonder in God, and knowing what that mystery is.

Man might have found out that God was one, and yet more than one; but
could he have found out what is the essence and character of God?
Not his own reason, but the Spirit of God it is which tells him that:
tells him that God is Three in One--that these three are persons--
that these persons are, a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit.

This is what God has himself condescended to tell us; and therefore
this is what he specially wishes us to believe and remember when we
think of him.  This is God's name for himself--Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost.  Man may give God what name he chooses.  God's own name, which
he has given himself, is likely surely to be the most correct:  at
least, it is the one of which God means us to think; for it is the
one into which he commanded us to be baptized.  Remember that,
whenever you hear discourse concerning God; and if any man, however
learned, says that God is absolute, answer--'It may be so:  but I was
not baptized into the name of the absolute.'  If he tell you, God is
infinite, answer--'It may be so:  but I was not baptized into the
name of the infinite.'  If he tell you, God is the first cause,
answer--'That I doubt not:  but I was not baptized into the name of
the first cause.  I was baptized into the name which God has given
himself--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and I will give him no other
name, and think of him by no other name, lest I be committing an act
of irreverence toward God, by presuming to call him one thing, when
he has bid me call him another.  Absolute, infinite, first cause, and
so forth, are deep words:  but they are words of man's invention, and
words too which plain, hard-working, hard-sorrowing folks do not
understand; even if learned men do--which I doubt very much indeed:
and therefore I do not trust them, cannot find comfort for my soul in
them.  But Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are words which plain, hard-
working, hard-sorrowing men can understand, and can trust, and can
find comfort in them; for they are God's own words, and, like all
God's words, go straight home to the hearts of men--straight home to
the heart of every one who is a father or mother--to the heart of
every one who has a parent or a child--to the heart of every one who
has the Holy Spirit of God putting into his mind good desires, and
striving to make him bring them into good effect, and be, what he
knows he should be, a holy and good man.'

Answer thus, my friends.  And think thus of the mystery of the Ever-
blessed Trinity.  For this is a thoroughly reasonable plan of
thought:  and more--in thinking thus you will find comfort, guidance,
clearness of head, and clearness of conscience also.  Only remember
what you are to think of.  You are not to think merely of the mystery
of the question, and to puzzle yourselves with arguments as to how
the Three Persons are one; for that is not to think of the Ever-
blessed Trinity, but only to think about it.  Still less are you to
think of the Ever-blessed Trinity under names of philosophy which God
has not given to himself; for that is not to think of the Ever-
blessed Trinity at all.  You must think of the Ever-blessed Trinity
as he is,--of a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit; and to think of him
the more earnestly, the more you are sad at heart.  It may be that
God has sent that sadness to make you think of him.  It may be that
God has cut the very ground from under your feet that you may rest on
him, the true and only ground of all created things; as it is
written:  'Who is he among you who walketh in darkness and hath no
light?  Let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his
God.'

Some will tell you, that if you are sorrowful it is a time for self-
examination, and for thinking of your own soul.  I answer--In good
time, but not yet.  Think first of God; for how can you ever know
anything rightly about your own soul unless you first know rightly
concerning God, in whom your soul lives, and moves, and has its
being?

Others may tell you to think of God's dealings with his people.  I
answer--In good time, but not yet; think first of God.  For how can
you rightly understand God's dealings, unless you first rightly
understand who God is, and what his character is?  Right notions
concerning your own soul, right notions concerning God's dealings,
can only come from right notions concerning God himself.  He is
before all things.  Think of him before all things.  He is the first,
and he is the last.  Think of him first in this life, and so you will
think of him last, and for ever in the life to come.  Think of the
Father, that he is a Father indeed, in spirit and in truth.  Think of
the Son, that he is a Son indeed, in spirit and in truth.  Think of
the Holy Spirit, that he is a Holy Spirit indeed, in spirit and in
truth.  So you will be thinking indeed of the Ever-blessed Trinity;
and will worship God, not with your lips or your thoughts merely, but
in spirit and in truth.  Think of the Father, that he is the Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the perfect Son must be forever
perfectly like the perfect Father.  For then you will believe that
God the Father looks on you, and feels for you, exactly as does Jesus
Christ your Lord; then you will feel that he is a Father indeed; and
will enter more and more into the unspeakable comfort of that word of
all words, 'Our Father who art in heaven.'

Think of the Lord Jesus Christ as the perfect Son, who, though he is
co-equal and co-eternal with his Father, yet came not to do his own
will, but his Father's; who instead of struggling, instead of helping
himself, cried in his agony:  'Not my will, but thine be done;' and
conquered by resignation.  So you will enter into the unspeakable
comfort of conquering by resignation, as you see that your
resignation is to be like the resignation of Christ; not that of
trembling fear like a condemned criminal before a judge; not that of
sullen necessity, like a slave before his master:  but that of the
only-begotten Son of God; the resignation of a child to the will of a
father whom he can utterly trust, because that father's name is love.

Think of the Holy Spirit as a person; having a will of his own; who
breatheth whither he listeth, and cannot be confined to any feelings
or rules of yours, or of any man's; but may meet you in the
Sacraments, or out of the Sacraments, even as he will; and has
methods of comforting and educating you, of which you will never
dream; one whose will is the same as the will of the Father and of
the Son, even a good will; just as his character is the same as the
character of the Father and of the Son:  even love which works by
holiness; love which you can trust utterly, for yourself and for all
whom you love.

Think, I say, of God himself as he is; think of his name, by which he
has revealed himself, and thus you will--But who am I, to pretend to
tell you what you will learn by thinking rightly of Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost?  How can I dare to say how much you will or will not
learn?  How can I put bounds to God's teaching? to the workings of
him who has said, 'If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my
Father will love him; and we will come unto him, and make our abode
with him'?  How can I tell you in a few words of one sermon all that
that means?  How can I, or any man, know all that that means?  Who is
one man, or all men, to exhaust the riches of the glory of God, or
the blessings which may come from thinking of God's glory?  Let it be
enough for us to be sure that truly to know God is everlasting life;
and that the more we think of God by his own revealed name of Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost, the more we shall enter, now and hereafter, into
eternal life, and into the peace which comes by the true knowledge of
him in whom we live, and move, and have our being.



SERMON VIII.--THE END OF RELIGION



EPHESIANS iv. 23, 24.

Be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and put ye on the new man,
which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.

This text is exceedingly valuable to us for it tells us the end and
aim of all religion.  It tells us why we are to pray, whether at home
or in church; why we are to read our Bibles and good books; why we
are to be what is commonly called religious.

It tells us, I say, the end and aim of all religion; namely, that we
may put on 'the new man, which after God'--according to the likeness
of God--'is created in righteousness and true holiness.'  So says St.
Paul in another place:  'Be ye therefore followers'--literally,
copiers, imitators--'of God, as dear children.'

Now this is not what you will be told from too many pulpits, and in
too many books, now-a-days, is the end of religion.  You will be told
that the end of religion is to save your soul, and go to heaven.

But experience shows, my friends, in all religions and in all ages,
that those who make it their first object in life to save their
souls, are but too likely to lose them; as our Lord says, He that
saveth his soul, or life--for the words are the same in Scripture--
shall lose it.

And experience shows that in all religions, and in all ages, those
who make it their first object in life to get to heaven, are but too
likely never to get there:  because in their haste, they forget what
heaven is, and what is the only way of arriving at it.

Good works, as they call the likeness of God and the Divine life, are
in too many persons' eyes only fruits of faith, or proofs of faith,
and not the very end of faith, and of religion--ay, of their very
existence here on earth; and therefore they naturally begin to ask,--
How few good works will be enough to prove their faith?  And when a
man has once set that question before himself, he is sure to find a
comfortable answer, and to discover that very few good works indeed,-
-a very little sanctification (as it is called), a very little
righteousness, and a very little holiness,--will be enough to save
his soul, as far at least as he wishes his soul to be saved.  My
friends, all this springs from that selfish view of religion which is
gaining power among us more and more.  Christ came to deliver us from
our selfishness; from being slaves to our selfish prudence and
selfish interest.  But we make religion a question of profit and
loss, as we make everything else.  We ask--What shall I get by being
good?  What shall I get by worshipping God?  Is it not prudent, and
self-interested, and business-like to give up a little pleasure on
earth, in the hope of getting a great deal in heaven?  Is not
religion a good investment?  Is it not, considering how short and
uncertain life is, the best of all life-insurances?

My friends, we who have to earn our bread and to take honest money
for honest work, know well enough what trouble we have to keep out of
our daily life that mean, base spirit of self-interest, rather than
of duty, which never asks of anything, 'Is it right?' but only 'Will
it pay me?'--which, instead of thinking, How can I do this work as
well as possible? is perpetually thinking, How can I get most money
for the least work?  We have to fight against that spirit in worldly
matters.  For we know, that if we yield to it,--if we sacrifice our
duty to our pleasure or our gain,--it is certain to make us do
something mean, covetous, even fraudulent, in the eyes of God and
man.

But if we carry that spirit into religion, and our spiritual and
heavenly duties; if we forget that that is the spirit of the world;
if we forget that we renounced the world at our baptism, and that we
therefore promised not to shape our lives by ITS rules and maxims; if
our thought is, not of whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things
are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, of good report, whatsoever
brings us true honour and deserved praise from God and from man; if
we think only that intensely selfish and worldly thought, How much
will God take for saving my soul?--which is the secret thought (alas
that it should be so!) of too many of all denominations,--then we
shall be in a fair way of killing our souls; so that if they be
saved, they will not at all events be saved alive.  For we shall kill
in our souls just those instincts of purity, justice, generosity,
mercy, love, in one word, of unselfishness and unworldliness, which
make the very life of the soul, because they are inspired by the
Spirit of God, even the Holy Ghost.  And we shall be but too likely
not to sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus--as St. Paul tells us
we may do even in this life:  but to go to our own place--wherever
that may be--with selfish Judas, who when he found that his Saviour
was not about to restore the kingdom to Israel, and make a great
prince of him there and then, made the best investment he could,
under the danger which he saw at hand, by selling his Lord for thirty
pieces of silver:  to remain to all time a warning to those who are
religious for self-interest's sake.

What, then, is the end and aim of true Religion?  St. Paul tells us
in the text.  The end and aim, he says, of hearing Christ, the end
and aim of learning the truth as it is in Jesus, is this--that we may
be renewed in the spirit of our minds, and put on the new man, which
after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.  To put on
the new man; the new pattern of manhood, which is after the pattern
of the Son of man, Jesus Christ, and therefore after the pattern and
likeness of God.  To be followers, that is, copiers and imitators of
God, that (so says St. Paul) is the end and aim of religion.  In one
word, we are to be good; and religion, according to St. Paul, is
neither more nor less than the act of becoming good, like the good
God.

To be like God.  Can we have any higher and more noble aim than that?
And yet it is a simple aim.  There is nothing fantastic, fanatical,
inhuman about it.  It is within our reach--within the reach of every
man and woman; within the reach of the poorest, the most unlearned.
For how does St. Paul tell us that we can become like God?

'Wherefore,' he says, 'putting away lying, speak every man truth with
his neighbour:  for we are members one of another.  Be ye angry, and
sin not:  let not the sun go down upon your wrath:  neither give
place to the devil.  Let him that stole steal no more:  but rather
let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that
he may have to give to him that needeth.  Let no corrupt
communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to
the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.
And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the
day of redemption.  Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and
clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice:
and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.

Do that, he says, and you will be followers of God, as dear children;
and thus will you surely save your souls alive.  For they will be
inspired by the Spirit of God, the spirit of goodness, who is the
Lord and Giver of life; wherefore they cannot decay nor die, but must
live and grow, develop and improve perpetually, becoming better and
wiser,--and therefore more useful to their fellow-creatures, more
blessed in themselves, and more pleasing to God their Father, through
all eternity.  And thus you will surely go to heaven.  For heaven
will begin on earth, and last on after this earth, and all that binds
you to this earth, has vanished in the grave.

Heaven will begin on earth, I say.  When St. Paul told these very
Ephesians to whom my text was addressed, that God had made them sit,
even then, in heavenly places with Christ Jesus, he did not mean in
any wise--what they would have known was not true--that their bodies
had been miraculously lifted up above the earth, above the clouds, or
elsewhere:  no, for he had told them before, in the first chapter,
what he meant by heavenly places.  God their Father, he says, had
blessed them with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places, in
Christ, in that He had chosen them in Christ before the foundation of
the world--and for what end?  For the very end which I have been
preaching to you.  'That they should be holy, and without blame
before God, in Love.'  That was heaven.  If they were that,--holy,
blameless, loving, they were in heavenly places already,--in that
moral and spiritual heaven in which God abides for ever.  They were
with God, and with all who are like God, as it is written, 'He that
dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.'

My dear friends, this is the heaven for which we are all to strive--a
heaven of goodness, wherein God dwells.  And therefore an eternal and
everlasting heaven, as eternal as goodness and as eternal as God
himself; and if we are living in it, we have all we need.  But we may
begin to live in it here.  To what particular place our souls go
after death, Scripture does not tell us, and we need not know.  To
what particular place our souls and bodies go after the resurrection,
Scripture tells us not, and we need not know.  But this Scripture
tells us, and that is enough for us, that they will be in heavenly
places, in the presence of Christ and of God.  And this Scripture
tells us--and indeed our own conscience and reason tell us likewise--
that though death may alter our place, it cannot alter our character;
though it may alter the circumstances round us, it cannot alter
ourselves.  If we have been good and pure before death, we shall be
good and pure after death.  If we have been led and inspired by God's
Spirit before death, so shall we be after death.  If we have been in
heavenly places before death, thinking heavenly thoughts, feeling
heavenly feelings, and doing heavenly deeds, then we shall be in
heavenly places after death; for we shall have with us the Spirit of
God, whose presence is heaven; and as long as we are holy, good,
pure, unselfish, just, and merciful, we may be persuaded, with St.
Paul, that wheresoever we go, all will be well; for 'neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to
come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'



SERMON IX.--THE HUMANITY OF GOD



ST. LUKE xv. 7.

I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner
that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which
need no repentance.

There are three parables in this chapter:  all agree in one quality--
in their humanity.  God shows us in them that there is something in
his character which is like the best and simplest parts of our
characters.  God himself likens himself to men, that men may
understand him and love him.

Why there should be more joy over the repenting sinner than over the
just man who needs no repentance, we cannot explain in words:  but
our hearts tell us that it is true, beautiful; that it is reasonable,
though we can give no reason for it.  You know that if you had lost a
sheep; if you had lost a piece of money; if you had had a child run
away from you, it would be far more pleasant to find that thing which
you had lost, than never to have lost it at all.  You do not know
why.  God tells you that it is a part of his image and likeness in
you; that you rejoice over what you have lost and found again,
because God rejoices over what he has lost and found again.

And is not this a gospel, and good news?  Is it not good news that we
need never be afraid or ashamed to give way to our tenderness and
pity? for God does not think it beneath him to be tender and pitiful.
Is it not good news that we need never be afraid or ashamed to
forgive, to take back those who have neglected us, wronged us? for
God does not think it beneath him to do likewise.  That we need never
show hardness, pride, sternness to our children when they do wrong,
but should win them by love and tenderness, caring for them all the
more, the less they care for themselves? for God does even so to us,
who have sinned against him far more than our children ever can sin
against us.

And is it not good news, again, that God does care for sinners, and
for all kinds and sorts of sinners?  Some go wrong from mere
stupidity and ignorance, because they know no better; because they
really are not altogether accountable for their own doings.  They are
like the silly sheep, who gets out over the fence of his own fancy:
and yet no reasonable man will be angry with the poor thing.  It
knows no better.  How many a poor young thing goes wandering away,
like that silly sheep, and having once lost its way, cannot get back
again, but wanders on further and further, till it lies down all
desperate, tired out, mired in the bogs, and torn about with thorns!

Then the good shepherd does not wait for that sheep to come back.  He
goes and seeks it far and wide, up hill and down dale, till he finds
it; and having found it, he does not beat it, rate it--not even drive
it home before him.  It is tired and miserable.  If it has been
foolish, it has punished itself enough for its folly; and all he
feels for it is pity and love.  It wants rest, and he gives it rest
at his own expense.  He lays it on his shoulders, and takes it home,
calling on all heaven and earth to rejoice with him.  Ah, my friends,
if that is not the picture of a God whom you can love, of a God whom
you can trust, what God would you have?

Some, again, go wrong from ignorance and bad training, bad society,
bad education, bad example; and in other countries--though, thank
God, not in this--from bad laws and bad government.  How many
thousands and hundreds of thousands are ruined, as it seems to us,
thereby!  The child born in a London alley, reared up among London
thieves, taught to swear, lie, steal, never entering a school or
church, never hearing the name of God save in oaths--There is the
lost piece of money.  It is a valuable thing; the King's likeness is
stamped on it:  but it is useless, because it is lost, lying in the
dust and darkness, hidden in a corner, unable to help itself, and of
no use to any one.  And so there is many a person, man and woman, who
is worth something, who has God's likeness on them, who, if they were
brought home to God, might be of good use in the world; but they are
lost, from ignorance and bad training.  They lie in a corner in
darkness, not knowing their own value in God's eyes; not knowing that
they bear his image, though it be all crusted over with the dust and
dirt of barbarism and bad habits.  Then Christ will go after them,
and seek diligently till he finds them, and cleanses them, and makes
them bright, and of good use again in his Church and his kingdom.
They are worth something, and Christ will not let them be wasted; he
will send clergymen, teachers, missionaries, schools, reformatories,
penitentiaries, hospitals--ay, and other messengers of his, of whom
we never dream, for his ways are as high above our ways as the heaven
is above the earth:  with all these he sweeps his house, and his
blessing is on them all, for by them he finds the valuable coin which
was lost.

But there is a third sort of sinner, spoken of in Christ's next
parable in this chapter, from which my text is taken, of whom it is
not said that God the Father sends out to seek and to save him.  That
is the prodigal son, who left his father's house, and strayed away of
his own wantonness and free will.  Christ does not go out after him.
He has gone away of his own will; and of his own will he must come
back:  and he has to pay a heavy price for his folly--to taste
hunger, shame, misery, all but despair.  For understand--if any of
you fancy that you can sin without being punished--that the prodigal
son is punished, and most severely.  He does not get off freely, the
moment he chooses to repent, as false preachers will tell you:  even
after he does repent, and resolves to go back to his father's house,
he has a long journey home, in poverty and misery, footsore, hungry,
and all but despairing.  But when he does get home; when he shows
that he has learnt the bitter lesson; when all he dares to ask is,
'Make me as one of thy hired servants,' he is received as freely as
the rest.  And it is worth while to remark, that our Lord spends on
him tenderer words than on those who are lost by mere foolishness or
ignorance.  Of him it is not said, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found
him,'--but, Bring out the best robe, for this my son--not my sheep,
not my piece of money, but my son--was dead, and is alive again; he
was lost, and is found.

In this is a great mystery; one of which one hardly dares to talk:
but one which one must think over in one's own heart, and say, 'Oh
the depth of the riches and of the knowledge and wisdom of God!  How
wonderful 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?'  Who indeed?  God is not a tyrant, who must be appeased with
gifts; or a taskmaster, who must be satisfied with the labour of his
slaves.  He is a father who loves his children; who gives, and loveth
to give; who gives to all freely, and upbraideth not.  He truly
willeth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn
from his wickedness and live.  His will is a good will; and howsoever
much man's sin and folly may resist it, and seem for a time to mar
it, yet he is too great and good to owe any man, even the worst, the
smallest spite or grudge.  Patiently, nobly, magnanimously, God
waits; waits for the man who is a fool, to find out his own folly;
waits for the heart which has tried to find pleasure in everything
else, to find out that everything else disappoints, and to come back
to him, the fountain of all wholesome pleasure, the well-spring of
all life fit for a man to live.  When the fool finds out his folly;
when the wilful man gives up his wilfulness; when the rebel submits
himself to law; when the son comes back to his father's house--there
is no sternness, no peevishness, no up-braiding, no pride, no
revenge; but the everlasting and boundless love of God wells forth
again as rich as ever.  He has condescended to wait for his creature;
because what he wanted was not his creature's fear, but his
creature's love; not his lip-obedience, but his heart; because he
wanted him not to come back as a trembling slave to his master, but
as a son who has found out at last what a father he has left him,
when all beside has played him false.  Let him come back thus; and
then all is forgiven and forgotten; and all that will be said will
be, 'This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is
found.'



SERMON X.--GOD'S WORLD



(Preached before the Prince of Wales, at Sandringham, 1866.)

GENESIS i. 1.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

It may seem hardly worth while to preach upon this text.  Every one
thinks that he believes it.  Of course--they say--we know that God
made the world.  Teach us something we do not know, not something
which we do.  Why preach to us about a text which we fully
understand, and believe already?

Because, my friends, there are few texts in the Bible more difficult
to believe than this, the very first; few texts which we need to
repeat to ourselves again and again, in all the chances and changes
of this mortal life; lest we should forget it just as we feel we are
most sure of it.

We know that it was very difficult for people in olden times to
believe it.  Else why did all the heathens of old, and why do all
heathens now, worship idols?

We know that the old Jews, after it had been revealed to them, found
it very difficult to believe it.  Else why were they always deserting
the worship of God, and worshipping idols and devils, sun, moon, and
stars, and all the host of heaven?

We know that the early Christians, in spite of the light of the
Gospel and of God's Spirit, found it very difficult to believe it.
Doubtless they believed it a thousand times more fully than it had
ever been believed before.  They would have shrunk with horror from
saying that any one but God had made the heavens and the earth.  But
Christians clung, for many hundred years, even almost up to our own
day, to old heathen superstitions, which they would have cast away if
their faith had been full, and if they had held with their whole
hearts and souls and minds, that there was one God, of whom are all
things.  They believed that the Devil and evil spirits had power to
raise thunderstorms, and blight crops, and change that course of
nature of which the Psalmist had said, that all things served God,
and continued this day as at the beginning, for God had given them a
law which could not be broken.  They believed in magic, and
astrology, and a hundred other dreams, which all began from secret
disbelief that God made the heaven and the earth; till they fancied
that the Devil could and would teach men the secrets of nature, and
the way to be rich and great, if they would but sell their souls to
him.  They believed, in a word, the very atheistic lie which Satan
told to our blessed Lord, when he said that all the kingdoms of the
world and the glory of them were his, and to whomsoever he would he
gave them--instead of believing our Lord's answer, 'Get thee behind
me, Satan:  it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and
him only shalt thou serve.'

And therefore I tell you here--as the Church has told Christian
people in all ages--that if any of you have any fancy for such
follies, any belief in charms and magic, any belief that you can have
your fortunes told by astrologers, gipsies, or such like, you must go
back to your Bible, and learn better the first text in it.  'In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth.'  God's is the
kingdom, and the power, and the glory, of all things visible and
invisible; all the world round us, with its wonderful secrets, is
governed, from the sun over our heads, to the smallest blade of grass
beneath our feet, by God, and by God alone, and neither evil spirit
nor magician has the smallest power over one atom of it; and our
fortunes, in likewise, do not depend on the influences of stars or
planets, ghosts or spirits, or anything else:  but on ourselves, of
whom it is written, that God shall judge every man according to his
works.

Even now, in these very days, many good people are hardly able, it
seems to me, to believe with their whole hearts that God made heaven
and earth.  They half believe it:  but their faith is weak; and when
it is tried, they grow frightened, and afraid of truth.  This it is
which makes so many good people afraid of what is now called Science-
-of all new discoveries about the making of this earth, and the
powers and virtues of the things about us; afraid of wonders which
are become matters of course among us, but of which our forefathers
knew little or nothing.  They are afraid lest these things should
shake people's faith in the Bible, and in Christianity; lest men
should give up the good old faith of their forefathers, and fancy
that the world is grown too wise to believe in the old doctrines.
One cannot blame them, cannot even be surprised at them.  So many
wonderful truths (for truths they are), of which our fathers never
dreamed, are discovered every year, that none can foretell where the
movement will stop; what we shall hear next; what we shall have to
believe next.

Only, let us take refuge in the text--'In the beginning God created
the heaven and the earth.'  All that we see around us, however
wonderful; all that has been found out of late, however wonderful;
all that will be ever found out, however still more wonderful it may
be, is the work of God; of that God who revealed himself to Moses; of
that God who led the children of Israel out of their slavery in
Egypt; of that God who taught David, in all his trouble and
wanderings, to trust in him as his guide and friend; of that God who
revealed to the old Prophets the fate of nations, and the laws by
which he governs all the kingdoms and people of the earth; of that
God, above all, who so loved the world, that he gave his only
begotten Son, that the world by him might be saved.

This material world which we do see, is as much God's world as the
spiritual world we do not see.  And, therefore, the one cannot
contradict the other; and the true understanding of the one will
never hurt our true understanding of the other.

But many good people have another fear, and that, I think, a far more
serious one.  They are afraid, in consequence of all these wonderful
discoveries of science, that people will begin to trust in science,
and not in God.  And that fear is but too well founded.  It is
certain that if sinful man can find anything to trust in, instead of
God, trust therein he surely will.

The old Jews preferred to trust in idols, rather than God; the
Christians of the Middle Age, to their shame, trusted in magic and
astrology, rather than God; and after that, some 200 years ago, when
men had grown too wise to trust in such superstitions, they certainly
did not grow wise enough, most of them, to trust in the living God.
They relied, the rulers of the nations especially, in their own wit
and cunning, and tried to govern the world and keep it straight, by
falsehood and intrigue, envy and jealousy, plotting and party spirit,
and the wisdom which cometh not from above, but is earthly, sensual,
devilish,--that wisdom against which we pray, whenever we sing 'God
save the Queen,' -


'Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
   GOD save the Queen.'


And since that false wisdom has failed, and the wisdom of this world,
and the rulers of this world, came to nought in the terrible crisis
of the French Revolution, eighty years ago, men have been taking up a
new idolatry.  For as science has spread, they have been trusting in
science rather than in the living God, and giving up the old faith
that God's judgments are in all the earth, and that he rewards
righteousness and punishes iniquity; till too many seem to believe
that the world somehow made itself, and that there is no living God
ordering and guiding it; but that a man must help himself as he best
can in this world, for in God no help is to be found.

And how shall we escape that danger?

I do not think we shall escape it, if we stop short at the text.  We
must go on from the Old Testament and let the New explain it.  We
must believe what Moses tells us:  but we must ask St. John to show
us more than Moses saw.  Moses tells us that God created the heavens
and the earth; St. John goes further, and tells us what that God is
like; how he saw Christ, the Word of God, by whom all things were
made, and without whom nothing was made that is made.  And what was
he like?  He was the brightness of his Father's glory, and the
express image of his person.  And what was that like? was there any
darkness in him--meanness, grudging, cruelty, changeableness, deceit?
No.  He was full of grace and truth.  Grace and truth:  that is what
Christ is; and therefore that is what God is.

There was another aspect of him, true; and St. John saw that
likewise.  And so awful was it that he fell at the Lord's feet as he
had been dead.

But the Lord was still full of grace and truth; still, however awful
he was, he was as full as ever of love, pity, gentleness.  He was the
Lamb that was slain for the sins of the world, even though that Lamb
was in the midst of the throne from which came forth thunderings and
lightnings, and judgments against the sins of all the world.
Terrible to wrong, and to the doers of wrong:  but most loving and
merciful to all true penitents, who cast themselves and the burden of
their sins before his feet; perfect justice and perfect Love,--that
is God.  That is the maker of this world.  That is he who in the
beginning made heaven and earth.  An utterly good God.  A God whose
mercy is over all his creatures.  A God who desires the good of his
creatures; who willeth not that one little one should perish; who
will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the
truth; who wages everlasting war against sin and folly, and wrong and
misery, and all the ills to which men are heirs; who not only made
the world, but loves the world, and who proved that--what a proof!--
by not sparing his only-begotten Son, but freely giving him for us.

Therefore we can say, not merely,--I know that a God made the world,
but I know what that God is like.  I know that he is not merely a
great God, a wise God, but a good God; that goodness is his very
essence.  I know that he is gracious and merciful, long suffering,
and of great kindness.  I know that he is loving to every man, and
that his mercy is over all his works.  I know that he upholds those
who fall, and lifts up those who are down; I know that he careth for
the fatherless and widow, and executes judgment and justice for all
those who are oppressed with wrong.  I know that he will fulfil the
desire of those who call upon him; and will also hear their cry and
will help them.  I know, in short, that he is a living God, and a
loving God; a God in whom men may trust, to whom they may open their
hearts, as children to their father:  and I am sure that those who
come to him he will in no wise cast out; for he himself has said,
with human voice upon this earth of ours,--'Come unto me all ye that
labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.'

In him all can trust.  The sick man on his bed can trust in him and
say--In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth; and he is
full of grace and truth.  This sickness of mine comes by the laws of
heaven and earth; and those laws are God's laws.  Then even this
sickness may be full of grace and truth.  It comes by no blind
chance, but by the will of him who so loved me, that he stooped to
die for me on the Cross.  Christ my Lord and God has some gracious
and bountiful purpose in it, some lesson for me to learn from it.  I
will ask him to teach me that lesson; and I trust in him that he will
teach me; and that, even for this sickness and this sorrow, I shall
have cause to thank him in the world to come.  Shall I not trust him
who not only made this world, but so loved it that he stooped to die
for it upon the Cross?

The labourer and the farmer can trust in him, in the midst of short
crops and bad seasons, and say, In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth; and he is full of grace and truth.  Frost and
blight obey his commands as well as sunshine and plenty.  He knows
best what ought to be.  Shall we not trust in him, who not only made
this world, but so loved it, that he stooped to die for it upon the
Cross?

The scholar and the man of science, studying the wonders of this
earth, can trust in him, and say, In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth; and he is full of grace and truth.  Many things
puzzle me; and the more I learn the less I find I really know; but I
shall know as much as is good for me, and for mankind.  God is full
of grace, and will not grudge me knowledge; and full of truth, and
will not deceive me.  And I shall never go far wrong as long as I
believe, not only in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all
things visible and invisible, but in one Lord Jesus Christ, his only-
begotten Son, light of light, very God of very God, by whom all
things were made, who for us men and our salvation came down, and
died, and rose again; whose kingdom shall have no end; who rules over
every star and planet, every shower and sunbeam, every plant and
animal and stone, every body and every soul of man; who will teach
men, in his good time and way, all that they need know, in order to
multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it in this life, and
attain everlasting life in the world to come.  And for the rest,
puzzled though I be, shall I not trust him, who not only made this
world, but so loved it, that he stooped to die for it upon the Cross?



SERMON XI.--THE ARMOUR OF GOD



(Preached before the Prince of Wales, at Sandringham, January 20th,
1867.)

EPHESIANS vi. 11.

Put on the whole armour of God.

St. Paul again and again compares himself and the Christians to whom
he writes to soldiers, and their lives to warfare.  And it was
natural that he should do so.  Everywhere he went, in those days, he
would find Roman soldiers, ruling over men of different races from
themselves, and ruling them, on the whole, well.  Greeks, Syrians,
Jews, Egyptians,--all alike in his days obeyed the Roman soldiers,
who had conquered the then known world.

And St. Paul and his disciples wished to conquer the world likewise.
The Roman soldier had conquered it for Caesar:  St. Paul would
conquer it for Christ.  The Roman soldier had used bodily force--the
persuasion of the sword.  St. Paul would use spiritual force--the
persuasion of preaching.  The Roman soldier wrestled against flesh
and blood:  St. Paul wrestled against more subtle and dangerous
enemies--spiritual enemies, he calls them--who enslaved and destroyed
the reason, and conscience, and morals of men.

St. Paul and his disciples, I say, had set before themselves no less
a task than to conquer the world.

Therefore, he says, they must copy the Roman soldier, and put on
their armour, as he put on his.  He took Caesar's armour, and put on
Caesar's uniform.  They must take the armour of God, that they may
withstand in the evil day of danger and battle, and having done all,-
-done their duty manfully as good soldiers,--stand; keep their ranks,
and find themselves at the end of the battle not scattered and
disorganized, but in firm and compact order, like the Roman soldiers,
who, by drill and discipline, had conquered the irregular and
confused troops of all other nations.

Let me, this morning, explain St. Paul's words to you, one by one.
We shall find them full of lessons--and right wholesome lessons--for
in this parable of the armour of God St. Paul sketches what you and I
and every man should be.  He sketches the character of a good man, a
true man, a man after God's own heart.

First, the Christians are to gird their loins--to cover the lower
part of their body, which is the most defenceless.  That the Roman
soldier did with a kilt, much like that which the Highlanders wear
now.  And that garment was to be Truth.  Truthfulness, honesty, that
was to be the first defence of a Christian man, instead of being, as
too many so-called Christians make it, the very last.  Honesty,
before all other virtues, was to gird his very loins, was to protect
his very vitals.

The breastplate, which covered the upper part of the body, was to be
righteousness--which we now commonly call, justice.  To be a just
man, after being first a truthful man, was the Christian's duty.

And his helmet was to be the hope of Salvation--that is, of safety:
not merely of being saved in the next world--though of course St.
Paul includes that--but of being saved in this world; of coming safe
through the battle of life; of succeeding; of conquering the heathen
round them, and making them Christians, instead of being conquered by
them.  The hope of safety was to be his helmet, to guard his head--
the thinking part.  We all know how a blow on the head confuses and
paralyses a man, making him (as we say) lose his head.  We know too,
how, in spiritual matters, terror and despair deal a deadly blow to a
man's mind,--how if a man expects to fail, he cannot think clearly
and calmly,--how often desperation and folly go hand in hand; for, if
a man loses hope, he is but too apt to lose his reason.  The
Christian's helmet, then,--that which would save his head, and keep
his mind calm, prudent, strong, and active,--was the hope of success.

And for their feet--they must be shod with the preparation of the
Gospel of peace.

That is a grand saying, if you will remember that the key-word, which
explains it all, is Peace, and the Gospel, that is, the good news,
thereof.

The Roman soldier had his preparation, which kept him prepared and
ready to march through the world; and of that St. Paul was thinking,
and had need to think; for he had heard the sound of it in every
street, on every high road, from Jerusalem to Ephesus, ever since he
was a child--the tramp of the heavy nailed boot which the Roman
soldier always wore.  The Roman soldiers were proud of their boots,--
so proud that, in St. Paul's time, they nicknamed one of their royal
princes Caligula, because, as a boy in camp, he used to wear boots
like the common soldiers:  and he bore that name when he became
emperor, and bears it to this day.  And they had reason to be proud,
after their own notion of glory.  For that boot had carried them
through desert and through cities, over mountain ranges, through
trackless forests, from Africa even into Britain here, to be the
conquerors of the then known world; and, wherever the tramp of that
boot had been heard, it had been the sound, not of the good news of
peace, but of the evil news of war.  Isaiah of old, watching for the
deliverance of the Jews from captivity, heard in the spirit the
footsteps of the messengers coming with the news that Cyrus was about
to send the Jews home to their own land, and cried, 'How beautiful
upon the mountains are the feet of them that bring good tidings, that
publish peace!'  But the tramp of the Roman armies had as yet brought
little but bad tidings, and published destruction.  Men slain in
battle, women and children driven off captive, villages burnt, towns
sacked and ruined, till wherever their armies passed--as one of their
own writers has said--they made a desert, and then called that peace.

So had the Roman soldier marched over the world, and conquered it.
And now Christ's soldiers were beginning their march over the world,
that they might conquer it by fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy.  They
were going forth, with their feet shod with the good news of Peace;
to treat all men, not as their enemies, not as their slaves, but as
their brothers; and to bring them good news, and bid them share in
it,--the good news that God was at peace with them, and that they
might now be at peace with their own consciences, and at peace with
each other, for all were brothers in Jesus Christ their Lord.

Shod with that good news of peace, these Christians were going to
conquer the world, and to penetrate into distant lands from which the
Roman armies had been driven back in shameful defeat.  To penetrate,
too, where the Roman armies never cared to go,--among the miserable
and crowded lanes of the great cities, and conquer there what the
Roman armies could not conquer--the vice, the misery, the cruelty,
the idolatry of the heathen.

The shield, again, guarded those parts of the soldier which the
armour did not guard.  It warded off the stones, arrows, and darts--
fiery darts often, as St. Paul says, which were hurled at him from
afar.  And the Christian's shield, St. Paul says, was to be Faith,--
trust in God,--belief that he was fighting God's battle, and not his
own; belief that God was over him in the battle, and would help and
guide him, and give him strength to do his work.  To believe firmly
that he was in the right, and on God's side.  To believe that, when
he was wounded and struck down,--when men deserted him, cursed him,
tried to take his life--perhaps did take his life--with torments
unspeakable,--to have faith to say in his heart, 'I am in the right.'
When he was writhing under the truly fiery darts of
misrepresentation, slander, scorn, or under the equally fiery darts
of remorse for his own mistakes, his own weaknesses, still to say
after all, 'I am in the right.'  That shield of faith, though it
might not save him from wounds, torturing wounds, perhaps crippling
wounds, would at least save his life,--at least protect his vitals;
and, when he seemed stricken to the very earth, he could still
shelter himself under that shield of faith, and cry, 'Rejoice not
against me, O mine enemy; when I fall, I shall arise.'

And they were to take a sword.  They were to use only one weapon, as
the Roman soldier used but one.  For, though he went into battle
armed with a short heavy pike, he hurled it at once against the
enemy; then he closed in with his sword, and fought the real battle
with that alone, hand to hand, and knee to knee.  The short Roman
sword, used by brave men in close fight, had defeated all the weapons
of all the nations.  St. Paul knew that fact, as well as we; and I
cannot but suppose that he had it in his mind when he wrote these
great words, and that he meant to bid Christians, when they fought
God's battle, to fight, like the Romans, hand to hand:  not to
indulge in cowardly stratagems, intrigues, and lawyers' quibbles,
fighting like the barbarians, cowardly and afar off, hurling stones,
and shooting clouds of arrows, but to grapple with their enemies,
looking them boldly in the face, as honest men should do, trying
their strength against them fairly, and striking them to the heart.
But with what?  With that sword which, if it wound, heals likewise,--
if it kills, also makes alive; the sword which slays the sins of a
man, that he may die to sin, but rise again to righteousness; the
sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, the message of God,
the speech of God, the commandment of God.  They were to conquer the
world simply by saying, 'Thus saith the Lord.'  They were to preach
God, and God alone, revealed in his Son, Jesus Christ, a God of love,
who willed that none should perish, but that all should come to the
knowledge of the truth.

But a God of wrath likewise.  We must never forget that.  A merely
indulgent God would be an unjust God, and a cruel God likewise.  If
God be just, as he is, then he has boundless pity for those who are
weak:  but boundless wrath for the strong who misuse the weak.
Boundless pity for those who are ignorant, misled, and out of the
right way:  but boundless wrath for those who mislead them, and put
them out of the right way.  All through St. Paul's Epistles, as
through our blessed Lord's sayings and doings, you see this wholesome
mixture of severity and mercy, of Divine anger and Divine love, very
different from the sentimentalism of our own times, when men fancy
that, because they dislike the pain and trouble of punishing evil-
doers, God is even such a one as themselves, who sits still and takes
no heed of the wrong which is done on earth.

No.  The Christians were to tell men of both sides of God's
character; for both were working every day, and all day long, about
them.  They were to tell men that God had, by their mouths, revealed
from heaven his wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of
men, at the same moment that he had revealed the good news that men
might be purified by the blood of Christ, and saved from wrath
through him.  They were to tell men of a God who so loved the world
that he gave his only-begotten Son to die for it; but of a God who so
loved the world that he would not tolerate in it those sins which
cause the ruin of the world.  Tribulation and anguish upon every soul
of man that doeth evil, and glory, honour, and peace to every man
that worketh good--that was to be their message, that was to be their
weapon, wherewith they were to strike, and did strike, through the
hearts of sinners, and convert them to repentance that they might die
to sin, and live again to righteousness.

With this armour, and that one weapon, the Word of God, the
Christians conquered the souls of the men of the old world.  Often
they failed, often they were defeated, sadly and shamefully; for they
were men of like passions with ourselves.  But their defeats always
happened when they tried other armour than the armour of God, and
fancied that they could fight the world, the flesh, and the devil
with the weapons which the world, the flesh, and the devil had
forged.

Still they conquered at last--for God was with them, and the Spirit
of God; and they put on again and again the armour of God, AFTER they
had cast it off for a while to their own hurt.

And so shall we conquer in the battle of life just in proportion as
we fight our battle with the armour of God.

My friends, each and all of you surely wish to succeed in life; and
to succeed, not merely in getting money, still less merely in getting
pleasure, but with a far nobler and far more real success.  You wish,
I trust, to be worthy, virtuous, respectable, useful Christian men
and women; to be honoured while you live, and regretted when you die;
to leave this world with the feeling that your life has not been a
failure, and your years given you in vain:  but that, having done
some honest work at least in this world, you are going to a world
where all injustice shall be set right.

Then here, in St. Paul's words, are the elements of success in life.
This, and this only, is the way to true success, to put on the whole
armour of God.  Truthfulness, justice, peaceableness, faith in God's
justice and mercy, hope of success, and the sword of the Spirit, even
that word of God which, if you do not preach it to others, you can
and should preach to yourselves all day long, continually asking
yourselves, 'What would God have me to do?  What is likely to be his
will and message upon the matter which I have in hand?'--all these
qualities go to make up the character of the worthy man or woman, the
useful person, the truly able person, who does what he can do, well,
because he is what he ought to be, good; and all these qualities you
need if you will fight the battle of life like men, and conquer
instead of being conquered therein.

But some will say, and with truth, 'It is easy to tell us to be good:
we can no more change our own character than we can change our own
bodies; the question is, who will make us good?'  Who indeed, save he
who said, 'Ask and ye shall receive?'  St. Paul knew well enough that
if his armour was God's armour, God alone could forge it, and God
alone could bestow it; and therefore he ends his commands with this
last command--'Praying always, with all prayer and supplication in
the spirit, and watching thereto with all perseverance, and
supplication for all saints.'  Those who wrote the Church Catechism
knew it likewise, and have said to us from our very childhood:  'My
good child, know this:  that thou canst not do these things of
thyself, nor walk in the commandments of God and serve him without
his special grace; which thou must learn at all times to call for by
diligent prayer.'

Yes, my friends, there is but one way to obtain that armour of God,
which will bring us safe through the battle of life; and that is,
pray for it.  Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall
find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.  You who wish for true
success in life, pray.  Pray, if you never prayed before, morning and
evening, with your whole hearts, for that Spirit of God which is
truth, justice, peace, faith, and hope--and you shall not pray in
vain.



SERMON XII.--PAUL AND FELIX



ACTS xxiv. 25.

And as he reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to
come, Felix trembled, and answered, Go thy way for this time; when I
have a convenient season, I will call for thee.

This is a well-known text, on which many a sermon has been preached,
and with good reason, for it is an important text.  It tells us of a
man who, like too many men in all times, trembled when he heard the
truth about his wicked life, but did not therefore repent and mend;
and a very serious lesson we may draw from his example.

But even a more important fact about the text is, that it tells us
what were really the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion
in those early times, about twenty-five years, seemingly, after our
Lord's death; what St. Paul used to preach about; what he considered
was the first thing which he had to tell men.

Let us take this latter question first.  About what did St. Paul
reason before Felix?

About righteousness (which means justice), temperance, and judgment
to come.

I beg you to remember these words.  If you believe the Bible to be
inspired, you are bound to take its words as they stand.  And
therefore I beg you to remember that St. Paul preached not about
UNrighteousness, but righteousness; not about INtemperance, but about
temperance; not about hell, but about judgment to come; in a word,
not about wrong, but about right.  I hope that does not seem to you a
small matter.  I hope that none of you are ready to say, 'It comes to
the same thing in the end.'  It does not come to the same thing.
There is no use in telling a man what is wrong, unless you first tell
him what is right.  There is no use rebuking a man for being bad,
unless you first tell him how he may become better, and give him hope
for himself, or you will only drive him to recklessness and despair.
You must show him the right road, before you can complain of him for
going the wrong one.

But if St. Paul had reasoned with Felix about injustice,
intemperance, and hell, one could not have been surprised.  For Felix
was a thoroughly bad man, unjust and intemperate, and seemingly
fitting himself for hell.

He had begun life as a slave of the emperor in a court which was a
mere sink of profligacy and villainy.  Then he had got his freedom,
and next, the governorship of Judaea, probably by his brother
Pallas's interest, who had been a slave like him, and had made an
enormous fortune by the most detestable wickedness.

When in his governorship, Felix began to show himself as wicked as
his brother.  The violence, misrule, extortion, and cruelty which
went on in Judaea was notorious.  He caused the high-priest at
Jerusalem to be murdered out of spite.  Drusilla, his wife, he had
taken away from a Syrian king, who was her lawful husband.  Making
money seems to have been his great object; and the great Roman
historian of those times sums up his character in a few bitter words
thus:  'Felix,' he says, 'exercised the power of a king with the
heart of a slave, in all cruelty and lust.'

Such was the wicked upstart whom God, for the sins of the Jews, had
allowed to rule them in St. Paul's time; and before him St. Paul had
to plead for his life.

The first time that St. Paul came before him Felix seems to have seen
at once that Paul was innocent, and a good man; and that, perhaps,
was the reason why he sent for him again, and, strangely enough,
heard him concerning the faith in Christ.

There was some conscience left, it seems, in the wretched man.  He
was not easy, amid his ill-gotten honour, ill-gotten wealth, ill-
gotten pleasures; and perhaps, as many men are in such a case, he was
superstitious, afraid of being punished for his sins, and looking out
for false prophets, smooth preachers, new religions which would make
him comfortable in his sins, and drug his conscience by promising the
wicked man life, where God had not promised it.  So he wanted, it
seems, to know what this new faith in Christ was like; and he heard.

And what he heard we may very fairly guess, because we know from St.
Paul's writings what he was in the habit of saying.

St. Paul told him of righteousness--a word of which he was very fond.
He told Felix of a righteous and good God, who had manifested to man
his righteousness and goodness, in the righteousness and goodness of
his Son Jesus; a righteous God, who wished to make all men righteous
like himself, that they might be happy for ever.  Perhaps St. Paul
called Felix to give up all hopes of having his own righteousness--
the false righteousness of forms, and ceremonies, and superstitions--
and to ask for the righteousness of Christ, which is a clean heart
and a right spirit; and then he set before him no doubt, as was his
custom, the beauty of righteousness, the glory of it, as St. Paul
calls it; how noble, honourable, divine, godlike a thing it is to be
good.

Then St. Paul told Felix of temperance.  And what he said we may
fairly guess from his writings.  He would tell Felix that there were
two elements in every man, the flesh and the spirit, and that those
warred against each other:  the flesh trying to drag him down, that
he may become a brute in fleshly lusts and passions; the spirit
trying to raise him up, that he may become a son of God in purity and
virtue.  But if so, what need must there be of temperance!  How must
a man be bound to be temperate, to keep under his body and bring it
into subjection, bound to restrain the lower and more brutal feelings
in him, that the higher and purer feelings may grow and thrive in him
to everlasting life!  Truly the temperate man, the man who can
restrain himself, is the only strong man, the only safe man, the only
happy man, the only man worthy of the name of man at all.  This, or
something like this, St. Paul would have said to Felix.  He did not,
as far as we know, rebuke him for his sins.  He left him to rebuke
himself.  He told him what ought to be, what he ought to do, and left
the rest to his conscience.  Poor Felix, brought up a heathen slave
in that profligate court of Rome, had probably never heard of
righteousness and temperance, had never had what was good and noble
set before him.  Now St. Paul set the good before him, and showed him
a higher life than any he had ever dreamed of--higher than all his
viceregal power and pomp--and bade him see how noble and divine it
was to be good.

But it is written St. Paul reasoned with Felix about judgment to
come.

We must not too hastily suppose that this means that he told Felix
that he was in danger of hell-fire.  For that is an argument which
St. Paul never uses anywhere in his writings or speeches, as far as
we know them.  He never tries, as too many do now-a-days, to frighten
sinners into repentance, by telling them of the flames of hell; and
therefore we have no right to fancy that he did so by Felix.  He told
him of judgment to come; and we can guess from his writings what he
would have said.  That there was a living God who judged the earth
always by his Son Jesus Christ, and that he was coming then,
immediately, to punish all the horrible wickedness which was then
going on in those parts of the world which St. Paul knew.  St. Paul
always speaks of the terrible judgments of God as about to come in
his own days, we know that they did come.

We know--God forbid that a preacher should tell you one-tenth of what
he ought to know--that St. Paul's times were the most horribly wicked
that the world had ever seen; that the few heathens who had
consciences left felt that some terrible punishment must come if the
world went on as it was going.  And we know that the punishment did
come; and that for about twenty years, towards the end of which St.
Paul was beheaded, the great Roman Empire was verily a hell on earth.
If Felix lived ten years more he saw the judgment of God, and the
vengeance of God, in a way which could not be mistaken.  But did
judgment to come overtake him in his life?  We do not altogether
know; we know that he committed such atrocities, that the Roman
Emperor Nero was forced to recall him; that the chief Jews of
Caesarea sent to Rome, and there laid such accusations against him
that he was in danger of death; that his brother Pallas, who was then
in boundless power, saved him from destruction.  That shortly
afterwards Pallas himself was disgraced, stripped of his offices, and
a few years later poisoned by Nero, and it is probable enough that
when he fell Felix fell with him:  but we know nothing of it
certainly.

But at least he saw with his own eyes that there was such a thing as
judgment to come, not merely thousands of years hence at the last
day, but there and then in his own lifetime.  He saw the wrath of God
revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men.  He saw the
wicked murdering and destroying each other till the land was full of
blood.  He saw the Empress-mother Agrippina, who had been the
paramour of his brother Pallas, murdered by her own son, the Emperor
Nero; and so judgment came on her.  He saw his own brother first
ruined and then poisoned; and so judgment came on him.  He saw many a
man whom he knew well, and who had been mixed up with him and his
brother in their intrigues, put to death himself; and so judgment
came on them.

And last of all he saw (unless he had died beforehand) the fall of
the Emperor Nero himself--who very probably set fire to Rome, and
then laid the blame on the Christians,--the man of sin, of whom St.
Paul prophesied that he would be revealed--that is, unveiled, and
exposed for the monster which he was; and that the Lord would destroy
him with the brightness of his coming; the man who had dressed the
Christians in skins, and hunted them with dogs; who had covered them
with pitch, and burnt them; who had beheaded St. Paul and crucified
St. Peter; who had murdered his own wife; who had put to death every
good man whom he could seize, simply for being good; who had
committed every conceivable sin, fault, and cruelty that can disgrace
a man, while he made the people worship him as God.  He saw that
great Emperor Nero hunted down by his own people, who were weary of
his crimes; condemned to a horrible death, hiding in a filthy hole,
and at last stabbing himself in despair; and so judgment came on him
likewise; while the very heathen felt that Nero was gone to hell,
leaving his name behind him as a proverb of wickedness and cruelty
for ever.

So Felix, if he were alive, saw judgment come.  And yet more:  he
saw, if he were alive, such a time follow as the world has seldom or
never seen--civil war, bloodshed, lawlessness, plunder, and every
horror; a time in which men longed to die and could not find death,
and, instead of repenting of their evil deeds, gnawed their tongues
for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven, as St. John had
prophesied in the Revelation.

Yes, if Felix lived only ten years after he trembled at St. Paul's
words, he saw enough to show him that those words were true; that
there was a God in heaven, whose wrath was revealed against all
unrighteousness of men; who was coming out of his place to judge the
earth, and punish all the tyranny and pride and profligacy and luxury
of that Roman world.

God grant that he did remember St. Paul's words.  God grant that he
trembled once more, and to good purpose; and so repented of his sins
even at the last.  God grant that he may find mercy in that Day.  But
we can have but little hope for him; it is but too probable that he
was put to death with his brother, within five years of the time when
St. Paul warned him of judgment to come,--too probable that that was
his last chance of salvation, and that he threw it away for ever, as
too many sinners do.

What do we learn then from this sad story?  We learn one most
practical and important lesson, which we are all too apt to forget.

That the foundation of the Christian religion is not forms and
ceremonies, nor fancies and feelings, but righteousness, temperance,
and judgment to come.  Judgment, I say, to come whensoever it may
seem good to Christ, who sits for ever on his throne judging right,
and ministering true judgment among the people.  A dreadful judgment,
says the Commination Service, is always hanging over the heads of
those who do wrong, and always ready to fall on them, without waiting
for the last day, thousands of years hence.  It was by telling men
that--by telling them that Christ was righteous and pure, and desired
to make them righteous and pure like himself; and that Christ was a
living and present judge, watching all their actions, ready at any
moment to forgive their sins, and ready at any moment to punish their
sins--by that message the Apostles converted the heathen.  It was by
believing that message, and becoming righteous and good men,
temperate and pure men, and looking up in faith and hope to Christ
their ever-present Judge and Lord, that the heathen were converted,
and became saints and martyrs.  And that religion will stand, and
bring a man through the storm safe to everlasting life, while all
religions which are built on doctrines and systems, on forms and
ceremonies, on fancies and feelings, on the godless notion that
sinners are safe enough in this life, for God will not judge and
punish them till the last day, are built on a foundation of sand; and
the storm when it comes will sweep those dreams away, and leave their
possessors to shame and misery.

Therefore, my friends, let no man deceive you.  God is not mocked.
What a man soweth, that shall he reap.  The wages of sin are death,
as Felix found too well; but the fruit of righteousness is
everlasting life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Therefore follow
after innocency, and take heed to the thing which is right; for that,
and that only, shall bring a man peace at the last.



SERMON XIII.--THE GOOD SAMARITAN



LUKE x. 33, 34.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was:  and
when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound
up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast,
and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

No words, perhaps, ever spoken on earth, have had more effect than
those of this parable.  They are words of power and of spirit; living
words, which have gone forth into the hearts and lives of men, and
borne fruit in them of a hundred different kinds.  Truly their sound
is gone out into all lands, and their words to the ends of the world,
for a proof that Christ, who spake them, said truly, when he said,
'The flesh profiteth nothing; it is the spirit which maketh alive.
The words which I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.'

What was the power and the spirit of this parable?  What gave it its
strength in the hearts of men?  This--that it told them that they
were to help their fellow-men, simply because they were their fellow-
men.  Not because they were of the same race, the same religion, the
same sect or party; but simply because they were men.  In a word, it
commanded men to be humane; to exercise humanity; which signifies,
kindness to human beings, simply because they are human beings.  One
can understand our Lord preaching that:  it was part and parcel of
his doctrine.  He called himself the Son of Man.  He showed what he
meant by calling himself so, by the widest and most tender humanity.

But his was quite a new doctrine, and a new practice likewise.  The
Jews had no notion of humanity.  All but themselves were common and
unclean.  They might not even eat with a man who was a Gentile.  All
mankind, save themselves, they thought, were accursed and doomed to
hell.  They lived, as St. Paul told them, hateful to, and hated by,
all mankind.  There was no humanity in them.

The Greek, again, despised all nations but his own as barbarians.  He
would mix with them, eat with them, work for them; but he only looked
on the rest of mankind as stupid savages, out of whom he was to make
money, by the basest and meanest arts.  There was no humanity in him.

The Romans, again, were a thoroughly inhuman people.  Their calling,
they held, was to conquer all the nations of the earth, to plunder
them, to enslave them.  They were the great slaveholding, man-
stealing people.  Mercy was a virtue which they had utterly
forgotten.  Their public shows and games were mere butcheries of
blood and torture.  To see them fight to death in their theatres,
pairs after pairs, sometimes thousands in one day, was the usual and
regular amusement.  And in that great city of Rome, which held
something more than a million human beings, there was not, as far as
I am aware, one single hospital, or other charitable institution of
any kind.  There was, in a word, no humanity in them.

But the Gospel changed all that miraculously and suddenly, both in
Jew, in Greek, and in Roman.  When men became Christians at St.
Paul's preaching, all the old barriers of race were broken down
between them.  They said no more, 'I am a Roman,' 'I a Greek,' 'I a
Jew,' but 'I am a Christian man; and, because I am a Christian, Roman
and Greek and Jew are alike my brothers.'

There was seen such a sight as (so far as we know) was never seen
before on earth--the high-born white lady worshipping by the side of
her own negro slave; the proud and selfish Roman, who never had
helped a human being in his life, sending his alms to the churches of
Syria, or of some other country far away; the clever and educated
Greek learning from the Jew, whom he called a barbarian; and the Jew,
who had hated all mankind, and been hated by them in return,
preaching to all mankind the good news that they were brothers, in
the name and for the sake of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.

Instead of a kingdom of division, the Church was a kingdom of union.
Charity, and generosity, and mutual help took the place of
selfishness, and distrust, and oppression.  While men had been
heathens, their pattern had been that of the priest who saw the
wounded man lying, and looked on him and passed by.  Their pattern
now was that of the good Samaritan, who helped and saved the wounded
stranger, simply because he was a man.

In one word, the new thing which the Gospel brought into the world
was--humanity.  The thing which the Gospel keeps in the world still,
is humanity.  It brought other things, and blessed things, but this
it brought.  And why?  Because through the Church was poured on men
the spirit of God.  And what is that, save humanity?--the spirit of
the compassionate, all generous Son of Man?--the spirit of charity
and love?

What were the woes of humanity to the heathen?  If a man fell in the
race of life, so much the worse for him.  So much the better for
them, for there was one more competitor out of the way.  One of the
greatest Roman poets, indeed, talks of the pleasure which men have in
seeing others in trouble, just as, when the storm is tossing up the
sea, it is sweet to sit on the shore, and watch the ships labouring
in the waves.  Not, he says, that one takes actual pleasure in seeing
a man in trouble, but in the thought that one is not in the trouble
oneself.  A rather lame excuse, I think, for a rather inhuman
sentiment.

Yes, the heathen could feel pleasure in being safe while others were
afflicted.  And, indeed, our own fallen nature, if we give way to it,
will tempt us to the same sin.  But how did men begin to look not
only on the afflictions, but on the interest, on the feelings, on the
consciences of their neighbours, when they began to be led by the
spirit of Christ?  Let St. Paul speak for himself, not in one text
only, but in a hundred--'Though I be free from all, I have made
myself a servant to all--a Jew to the Jews, a Greek to the Greeks,
strong to the strong, weak to the weak; all things to all men, if by
any means I might save some.  Whether we be afflicted, it is for your
consolation and salvation; or whether we be comforted, it is for your
consolation and salvation.  For the love of Christ constraineth us.
For he died for all, that those who live should henceforth not live
to themselves, but to him.'

And what did he mean by living to Christ?--'Living in weariness and
painfulness, in watchings often; in hunger and thirst, in fastings
often, in cold and nakedness; beside that which cometh upon me daily,
the care of all the Church.  Who is weak, and I am not weak?  Who is
offended, and I burn not?'--Oh, who does not see in such words as
these the picture of a new ideal, a new life for man; even a life of
utter sympathy with his fellow-men, utter love and self-sacrifice--in
one word, utter humanity; as far above that old heathen poet's
selfish notion, as man is above the ape, or heaven above the earth!

This is the spirit of God, even the Holy Ghost; the spirit of Christ,
which also is the spirit of humanity; because it is the spirit of
Christ, who is both God and man, both human and divine.  This is the
spirit of love, by which God created mankind and all the worlds, that
he might have something which was not himself whereon to spend his
boundless love.  This is the spirit of love, by which he spared not
his only-begotten Son, but freely gave him for the sins of all
mankind.  This is the spirit of love, by which he is leading mankind
through strange paths, and by ways which their fathers knew not,
toward that eternal city of God which all truly human hearts are
seeking, blindly often and confusedly, and sometimes by utterly
mistaken paths:  but seeking her still, if by any means they may
enter into her, and be at peace.  This is that spirit of love, by
which, having sent forth all souls out of his everlasting bosom, he
will draw them home again in the fulness of time, as many as have
eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord, into his bosom once more, that
they may rest in peace, and God be all in all.

Take comfort from these words, my friends; for there is deep comfort
to be found in them, if you will look at them aright.  When you hear
that the spirit of God is in you, unless you are reprobates; and that
if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his--do not
be afraid, as if that spirit were something quite unlike anything
which you feel, or even think of:  as if it was something which must
show itself in strange visions or peculiar experiences, which very
few persons have, and which tempt them to set themselves apart from
their fellow-men, and thank God that they are not as other men are.
Remember that the spirit of God is the spirit of Christ, and that the
spirit of Christ is the spirit by which the good Samaritan helped the
poor wounded man, simply because he was a man.  Remember that the
spirit of God, so far from making you unlike a man, comes to make you
more perfect men; so far from parting you from your fellow-men, comes
to knit you more to your fellow-men, by making you understand them,
feel for them, make allowances for them, long to help them, however
different in habits or in opinions they may be from you; that it is,
in one word, the spirit of humanity, which comes down from heaven
into your hearts to make you humane, as it descended on Christ, that
he might be the most humane of all human beings--the very Son of Man,
who knew, understood, loved, suffered for, and redeemed all mankind,
because in him all humanity was gathered into one.

That spirit is not far from any of you.  Surely he is in all your
hearts already, if you be worthy of the name of men.  He is in you,
unless you be inhuman, and that, I trust, none of you are.  From him
come every humane thought and feeling you ever had.  All kindliness,
pity, mercy, generosity; all sense or justice and honour toward your
fellow-men; all indignation when you hear of their being wronged,
tortured, enslaved; all desire to help the fallen, to right the
oppressed;--whence do these come?  From the world?  Most surely not.
From the flesh?  St. Paul says not.  From the Devil?  No one, I
trust, will say that, save his own children, the Pharisees, if there
be any of them left, which we will hope there are not.  No! all these
come from the gracious spirit of humanity--the spirit of Christ and
of God.  Pray to him, that he may take possession of all your
thoughts, feelings, and desires, and purge you from every taint of
selfishness.  Give up your hearts to him; and grieve not, by any
selfishness, passion, or hardness of your own, his gracious
instructions:  but let him teach you, and guide you, and purge you,
and sanctify you, till you come to the stature of a perfect man, to
the fulness of the measure of Christ, who could perfectly hate the
sin, and yet perfectly love the sinner; who could see in every man,
even in his enemies and murderers, a friend and a brother.

And you who are afflicted, remember, that if the spirit of humanity
be the spirit of Christ, the spirit of Christ is also the spirit of
humanity.  What do I mean?  This:  that if that good Samaritan had
Christ's spirit, was like Christ, then Christ has the same spirit,
and is like that good Samaritan, utterly humane, for mere humanity's
sake.

Yes, thou who art weary and heavy laden--thou who fanciest, at
moments, that the Lord's arm is shortened, that it cannot save, and
art ready to cry, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?--take
comfort, and look upon Christ.  Thou wilt never be sure of the love
of God, unless thou rememberest that it is the same as the love of
Christ; and, by looking at Christ, learnest to know thy Father and
his Father, whose likeness and image he is, and see that the spirit
which proceeds alike from both of them is the spirit of humanity and
love, which cannot help going forth to seek and to save thee, simply
because thou art lost.  Look, I say, at Christ; and be sure that what
he bade the good Samaritan do to the wounded traveller, that same
will he do to thee, because he is the Son of Man, human and humane.

Art thou robbed, wounded, deserted, left to die, worsted in the
battle of life, and fallen in its rugged road, with no counsel, no
strength, no hope, no purpose left?  Then remember, that there is one
walking to and fro in this world, unseen, but ever present, whose
form is as the form of the Son of Man.

To him is given all power to execute judgment in heaven and earth,
because he is the Son of Man.  He is beholding the nations and
fashioning all their hearts.  Even as I speak now, he is pouring
contempt on princes, and making the counsels of the people of no
effect.  Even now he is frustrating the tokens of the liars, and
making diviners mad.  He is smiting asunder mighty nations, and
filling the lands with dead bodies.  Even now he is coming, as he
came of old from Bozra, treading down the people in his anger, and
making them dumb in his fury; and their blood is sprinkled on his
garments, and he hath stained all his raiment.  For the day of
vengeance is in his heart, and the year of his redeemed is come.  He
who ariseth terribly to shake the nations, has he time, has he will,
to turn aside to attend to such as thee?

He has time, and he has will.  No human being so mean, no human
sorrow too petty, but what he has the time and the will, as well as
the power, to have mercy on it, because he is the Son of Man.
Therefore he will turn aside even to thee, whoever thou art, who art
weary and heavy laden, and canst find no rest for thy soul, at the
very moment, and in the very manner, which is best for thee.  When
thou hast suffered long enough, he will stablish, strengthen, settle
thee.  He will bind up thy wounds, and pour in the oil and the wine
of his spirit--the Holy Ghost, the Comforter; and will carry thee to
his own inn, whereof it is written, He shall hide thee secretly in
his own presence from the provoking of men; he shall keep thee in his
tabernacle from the strife of tongues.  He will give his servants
charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways; and when he comes
again, he will repay them, and fetch thee away, to give thee rest in
that eternal bosom of the Father, from which thou, like all human
souls, camest forth at first, and to which thou shalt at last return,
with all human souls who have in them that spirit of humanity, which
is the spirit of God, and of Christ, and of eternal life.



SERMON XIV.--CONSIDER THE LILIES OF THE FIELD



(Preached on Easter Day, 1867.)

MATTHEW vi. 26, 28, 29.

Behold the fowls of the air:  for they sow not, neither do they reap,
nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.  Are ye
not much better than they? . . . And why take ye thought for raiment?
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not,
neither do they spin:  and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in
all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

What has this text to do with Easter-day?  Let us think a while.
Life and death; the battle between life and death; life conquered by
death; and death conquered again by life.  Those were the mysteries
over which the men of old time thought, often till their hearts were
sad.

They saw that they were alive; and they loved life, and would fain
see good days.  They saw, again, that they must die:  but would death
conquer life in them?  Would they ever live again?

They saw that other things died, or seemed to die, and yet rose and
lived again; and that gave them hope for themselves at times; but
their hopes were very dim, till Christ came, and brought life and
immortality to light.

They saw, I say, that other things died, or seemed to die, and yet
lived again.  Light rose out of darkness every morning and lived:
but darkness, as they thought, killed the light at even, till it came
to life again in the morning, and the sun rose once more.  The sun
himself--they thought of him as a glorious and life-giving being, who
every morning fought his way up the sky, scattering the dark clouds
with his golden arrows, and reigning for a-while in heaven, pouring
down heat and growth and life:  but he too must die.  The dark clouds
of evening must cover him.  The red glare upon them was his dying
blood.  The twilight, which lingered after the sun was gone, was his
bride, the dawn, come to soothe his dying hour.  True, he had come to
life again, often and often, morning after morning:  but would it be
so for ever?  Would not a night come at last, after which he would
never rise again?  Would not he be worn out at last, and slain, in
his long daily battle with the kingdom of darkness, which lay below
the world; or with the dragon who tried to devour him, when the
thunder clouds hid him from the sight, or the eclipse seemed to
swallow him up before their eyes?

So, too, they felt about the seasons of the year.  The winter came.
The sun grew low and weak.  Would he not die?  The days grew short
and dark.  Would they not cease to be, and eternal night come on the
earth?  They had heard dimly of the dark northern land, where it was
always winter, and the night was six months long.  Why should it not
be so in their own land in some evil time?  Every autumn the rains
and frost came on; the leaves fell; the flowers withered; the birds
fled southward, or died of hunger and cold; the cattle starved in the
field; the very men had much ado to live.  Why should not winter
conquer at last, and shut up the sun, the God of light and warmth and
life, for ever in the place of darkness, cold, and death?  So thought
the old Syrians of Canaan, and taught the Jewish women to weep, as
they themselves wept every autumn, over Adonai, the Lord, which was
another name for the sun, slain, as they thought, by the winter cold
and rain:  and then, when spring-time came, with its sunshine,
flowers, and birds, rejoiced that the sun had come to life again.

So thought the old Greeks, and told how Persephone, the fair maiden
who was the spring-time, was stolen away by the king of darkness who
lived beneath the earth; and how her mother earth would not be
comforted for her loss, but sent barrenness on all the world till her
daughter, the spring, was given back to her, to dwell for six months
in the upper world of light, and six months in the darkness under
ground.

So thought our old forefathers; and told how Baldur (the Baal of the
Bible), the god of light and heat, who was likewise the sun, was
slain by treachery, and imprisoned for ever below in hell, the
kingdom of darkness and of cold; and how all things on earth, even
the very trees and stones, wept for his death:  yet all their tears
could not bring back from death the god of life:  nor any of the gods
unlock the gates which held him in.

And because our forefathers were a sad and earnest folk:  because
they lived in a sad and dreary climate, where winter was far longer
and more bitter than it is, thank God, now; therefore all their
thoughts about winter and spring were sad; and they grew to despair,
at last, of life ever conquering death, or light conquering darkness.
An age would come, they said, in which snow should fall from the four
corners of the world, and the winters be three winters long; an evil
age, of murder and adultery, and hatred between brethren, when all
the ties of kin would be rent asunder, and wickedness should triumph
on the earth.

Then should come that dark time which they called the twilight of the
gods.  Then the powers of evil would be let loose; the earth would go
to ruin in darkness and in flame.  All living things would die.  The
very gods would die, fighting to the last against the powers of evil,
till the sun should sink for ever, and the world be a heap of ashes.

And then--so strangely does God's gift of hope linger in the hearts
of men--they saw, beyond all that, a dim dream of a new heaven and a
new earth in which should dwell righteousness; and of a new sun, more
beautiful than ours; of a woman called "Life," hid safe while all the
world around her was destroyed, fed on the morning dew, preserved to
be the mother of a new and happier race of men.  And so to them,
heathens as they were, God whispered that Christ should some day
bring life and immortality to light.

My friends, shall we sneer and laugh at all these dreams, as mere
follies of the heathen?  If we do so, we shall not show the spirit of
God, or the mind of Christ.  Nor shall we show our knowledge of the
Bible.  In it, the spirit of God, who inspired the Bible, does not
laugh at these dreams.  It rebukes them sternly whenever they are
immoral, and lead men to do bad and foul deeds, as Ezekiel rebuked
the Jewish women who wept for Thammuz, the dead summer.  But that was
because those Jewish women should have known better.  They should
have known--what the Old Testament tells us all through--what it was
especially meant to tell the men who lived while it was being
written, just because they had their fancies, and their fears about
summer and winter, and life and death.  And what ought they to have
known?  What does the Old Testament say?  That life will conquer
death, because God, the Lord Jehovah, even Jesus Christ, is Lord of
heaven and earth.  From the time that it was written in the Book of
Genesis, that the Lord Jehovah said in his heart, 'I will not again
curse the ground for man's sake:  neither will I again smite any more
anything living, as I have done, while the earth remaineth--seed time
and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and
night, shall not cease'--from that time the Jews were bound not to
fear the powers of nature, or the seasons, nor to fear for them; for
they were all in the government of that one good God and Lord, who
cared for men, and loved them, and dealt justly by them, and proved
his love and justice by bringing the children of Israel out of the
land of Egypt.


God treated these heathens, St. Paul says, as we ought to treat our
children.  His wrath was revealed from heaven against all ungodliness
and unrighteousness of men.  All wilful disobedience and actual sin
he punished, often with terrible severity; but not their childish
mistakes and dreams about how this world was made; just as we should
not punish the fancies of our children.  The times of that ignorance,
says St. Paul, he winked at till Christ came, and then he commanded
all men everywhere to repent, and believe in the God who gave them
rain and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and
gladness.

For he had appointed a day in which he would judge the world in
righteousness by that man whom he had ordained; of which he had given
full assurance to all men, in that he had raised him from the dead.

Some, who were spoilt by false philosophy, mocked when they heard of
the resurrection of the dead:  but there were those who had kept
something of the simple childlike faith of their forefathers, and who
were prepared for the kingdom of God; and to them St. Paul's message
came as an answer to the questions of their minds, and a satisfaction
to the longings of their hearts.

The news of Christ,--of Christ raised from the dead to be the life
and the light of the world,--stilled all their fears lest death
should conquer life, and darkness conquer light.

So it was with all the heathen.  So it was with our old forefathers,
when they heard and believed the Gospel of Christ.  They felt that
(as St. Paul said) they were translated out of the kingdom of
darkness into the kingdom of light, which was the kingdom of his dear
Son; that now the world must look hopeful, cheerful to them; now they
could live in hope of everlasting life; now they need sorrow no more
for those who slept, as if they had no hope:  for Christ had
conquered death, and the evil spirit who had the power of death.
Christ had harrowed hell, and burst the bonds of the graves.  He, as
man, and yet God, had been through the dark gate, and had returned
through it in triumph, the first-born from the dead; and his
resurrection was an everlasting sign and pledge that all who belonged
to him should rise with him, and death be swallowed up in victory.

'So it pleased the Father,' says St. Paul, 'to gather together in
Christ all things, whether in heaven or in earth.'  In him were
fulfilled, and more than fulfilled, the dim longings, the childlike
dreams of heathen poets and sages, and of our own ancestors from whom
we sprung.  He is the desire of all nations; for whom all were
longing, though they knew it not.  He is the true sun; the sun of
righteousness, who has arisen with healing on his wings, and
translated us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.
He is the true Adonai, the Lord for whose death though we may mourn
upon Good Friday, yet we rejoice this day for his resurrection.  He
is the true Baldur, the God of light and life, who, though he died by
treachery, and descended into hell, yet needed not, to deliver him,
the tears of all creation, of men or angels, or that any god should
unlock for him the gates of death; for he rose by his own eternal
spirit of light, and saith, 'I am he that was dead, and behold I am
alive for evermore.  Amen.  And I have the keys of death and hell.'

And now we may see, it seems to me, what the text has to do with
Easter-day.  To my mind our Lord is using here the same parable which
St. Paul preaches in his famous chapter which we read in the Burial
Service.  Be not anxious, says our Lord, for your life.  Is not the
life more than meat?  There is an eternal life which depends not on
earthly food, but on the will and word of God your Father; and that
life in you will conquer death.  Behold the birds of the air, which
sow not, nor reap, nor gather into barns, to provide against the
winter's need.  But do they starve and die?  Does not God guide them
far away into foreign climes, and feed them there by his providence,
and bring them back again in spring, as things alive from the dead?
And can he not feed us (if it be his will) with a bread which comes
down from heaven, and with every word which proceedeth out of the
mouth of God?

Consider, again, the lilies of the field.  We must take our Lord's
words exactly.  He is speaking of the lilies, the bulbous plants
which spring into flower in countless thousands every spring, over
the downs of Eastern lands.  All the winter they are dead, unsightly
roots, hidden in the earth.  What can come of them?  But no sooner
does the sun of spring shine on their graves, than they rise into
sudden life and beauty, as it pleases God, and every seed takes its
own peculiar body.  Sown in corruption, they are raised in
incorruption; sown in weakness, they are raised in power; sown in
dishonour, they are raised in glory; delicate, beautiful in colour,
perfuming the air with fragrance; types of immortality, fit for the
crowns of angels.  Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
For even so is the resurrection of the dead.

Yes, not without a divine providence--yea, a divine inspiration--has
this blessed Easter-tide been fixed, by the Church of all ages, at
the season when the earth shakes off her winter's sleep; when the
birds come back and the flowers begin to bloom; when every seed which
falls into the ground, and dies, and rises again with a new body, is
a witness to us of the resurrection of Christ; and a witness, too,
that we shall rise again; that in us, as in it, life shall conquer
death when every bird which comes back to sing and build among us, is
a witness to us of the resurrection of Christ, and of our
resurrection; and that in us, as in it, joy shall conquer sorrow.

The seed has passed through strange chances and dangers:  of a
thousand seeds shed in autumn, scarce one survives to grow in spring.
Be it so.  Still there is left, as Scripture says, a remnant, an
elect, to rise again and live.

The birds likewise--they have been through strange chances, dangers,
needs.  Far away south to Africa they went--the younger ones by a way
they had never travelled before.  Thousands died in their passage
south.  Thousands more died in their passage back again this spring,
by hunger and by storm.  Be it so.  Yet of them is left a seed, a
remnant, an elect, and they are saved, to build once more in their
old homes, and to rejoice in the spring, and pour out their songs to
God who made them.


Some say that the seeds grow by laws of nature; the birds come back
by instinct.  Be it so.  What Scripture says, and what we should
believe, is this:  that the seeds grow by the spirit of God, the Lord
and Giver of life; that the birds come back, and sing, and build by
the spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of life.  He works not on them,
things without reason, as he works on us reasonable souls:  but he
works on them nevertheless.  They obey his call; they do his will;
they show forth his glory; they return to life, they breed, they are
preserved, by the same spirit by which the body of Jesus rose from
the dead; and, therefore, every flower which blossoms, and every bird
which sings, at Easter-tide; everything which, like the seeds, was
dead, and is alive again, which, like the birds, was lost, and is
found, is a type and token of Christ, their Maker, who was dead and
is alive again; who was lost in hell on Easter-eve, and was found
again in heaven for evermore; and the resurrection of the earth from
her winter's sleep commemorates to us, as each blessed Easter-tide
comes round, the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, who made all
the world, and redeemed all mankind, and sanctifieth to eternal life
all the elect people of God:  a witness to us that some day life
shall conquer death, light conquer darkness, righteousness conquer
sin, joy conquer grief; when the whole creation, which groaneth and
travaileth in pain until now, shall have brought forth that of which
it travails in labour; even the new heavens and the new earth,
wherein shall be neither sighing nor sorrow, but God shall wipe away
tears from all eyes.



SERMON XV.--THE JEWISH REBELLIONS



1 PETER ii. 11.

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from
fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.

I think that you will understand the text, and indeed the whole of
St. Peter's first Epistle, better, if I explain to you somewhat the
state of the Eastern countries of the world in St. Peter's time.  The
Romans, a short time before St. Peter was born, had conquered all the
nations round them, and brought them under law and regular
government.  St. Peter now tells those to whom he wrote, that they
must obey the Roman governors and their laws, for the Lord's sake.
It was God's will and providence that the Romans should be masters of
the world at that time.  Jesus Christ the Lord, the King of kings,
had so ordained it in his inscrutable wisdom; and they must submit to
it, not for fear of the Romans, but for the Lord's sake as the
servants of God, who believed that he was governing the world by his
Son Jesus Christ, and that he knew best how to govern it.

That was a hard lesson for them to learn; for they were Jews.  This
epistle, as the words of it show plainly, was written for Jews; both
for those who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as the true King of
the Jews, and for those who ought to have believed in him, but did
not.  They were strangers and pilgrims (as St. Peter calls them), who
had no city or government of their own, but had been scattered abroad
among the Gentiles, and settled in all the great cities of the Roman
Empire, especially in the East:  in Babylon, from which St. Peter
wrote his epistle, where the Jews had a great settlement in the rich
plains of the river Euphrates; in Syria; in Asia Minor, which we now
call Turkey in Asia:  in Persia, and many other Eastern lands.  There
they lived by trade, very much as the Jews live among us now; and as
long as they obeyed the Roman law, they were allowed to keep their
own worship, and their own customs, and their law of Moses, and to
have their synagogues in which they worshipped the true God every
Sabbath-day.  But evil times were coming on these prosperous Jews.
Wicked emperors of Rome and profligate governors of provinces were
about to persecute them.  In Alexandria in Egypt, hundreds of them
had been destroyed by lingering tortures, and thousands ruined and
left homeless.  Caligula, the mad emperor, had gone further still.
Fancying himself a god, he had commanded that temples should be
raised in his honour, and his statues worshipped everywhere.  He had
even gone so far as to command that his statue should be set up in
the Temple of Jerusalem, and to do actually that which St. Paul
prophesied a few years after the man of sin would do, 'Exalt himself
over all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he would
sit in the temple of God, and show himself as God.'

Then followed a strange scene, which will help to explain much of
this Epistle of St. Peter.  The Jews of Jerusalem did not rise in
rebellion.  They did what St. Peter told the Jews of Asia Minor to
do.  They determined to suffer for well-doing,--to die as martyrs,
not as rebels.  Petronius, the Roman governor who was sent to carry
out the order, was a strange mixture of good and bad.  He was a
peculiarly profligate and luxurious man.  He wrote one of the foulest
books which ever disgraced the pen of man.  But he was kind-hearted,
humane, rational.  He had orders to set up the Emperor's statue in
the temple at Jerusalem; and no doubt he laughed inwardly at the
folly:  but he must obey orders.  Yet he hesitated, when he landed
and saw the Jews come to him in thousands, covering the country like
a cloud, young and old, rich and poor, unarmed, many clothed in
sackcloth and with ashes on their heads, and beseeching him that he
would not commit this abomination.  He rebuked them sternly.  He had
a whole army at his back, and would compel them to obey.  They
answered that they must obey God rather than man.  Petronius's heart
relented; he left his soldiers behind and went on to try the Jews at
Tiberias.  There he met a similar band.  He tried again to be stern
with them.  All other nations had worshipped the Emperor's image, why
should not they?  Would they make war against their emperor?  'We
have no thought of war,' they cried with one voice, 'but we will
submit to be massacred rather than break our law;' and at once the
whole crowd fell with their faces to the earth, and declared that
they were ready to offer their throats to the swords of the Roman
soldiers.

For forty days that scene lasted; it was the time for sowing, and the
whole land lay untilled.  Petronius could do nothing with people who
were ready to be martyrs, but not rebels; and he gave way.  He
excused himself to the mad emperor as he best could.  He promised the
Jews that he would do all he could for them, even at the risk of his
own life--and he very nearly lost his life in trying to save them.
But the thing tided over, and the poor Jews conquered, as the
Christian martyrs conquered afterwards, by resignation; by that
highest courage which shows itself not in anger but in patience, and
suffering instead of rebelling.

Well it had been for the Jews elsewhere if they had been of the same
mind.  But near Babylon, just about the time St. Peter wrote his
epistle, the Jews broke out in open rebellion.  Two Jewish orphans,
who had been bred as weavers and ran away from a cruel master,
escaped into the marshes, and there became the leaders of a great
band of robbers.  They defeated the governor of Babylon in battle;
they went to the court of the heathen king of Persia, and became
great men there.  One of them had the other poisoned, and then
committed great crimes, wasted the country of Babylon with fire and
sword, and came to a miserable end, being slaughtered in bed when in
a drunken sleep.  Then the Babylonians rose on all the Jews and
massacred them:  the survivors fled to the great city of Seleucia,
and mixed themselves up in party riots with the heathens; the
heathens turned on them and slew 50,000 of them; and so, as St. Peter
told them, judgment began at the house of God.

Whether this massacre of the Babylonian Jews happened just before or
just after St. Peter wrote his epistle from Babylon, we cannot tell.
But it is plain, I think, that either this matter or what led to it
was in his mind.  It seems most likely that it had happened a little
before, and that he wrote to the Jews in the north-east of Asia
Minor, to warn them against giving way to the same lawless passions
which had brought ruin and misery on the Jews of Babylon.

For they were in great danger of falling into the same misery and
ruin.  The Romans expected the Jews to rebel all over the world.
And, as it fell out, they did rebel, and perished in vast numbers
miserably, because they would not take St. Peter's advice; because
they would not obey every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake;
because they would not honour all men:  but looked on all men as the
enemies of God.

Good for them it would have been, had they taken St. Peter's advice,
which was the only plan, he said, to save their souls and lives in
those terrible times.  Good for them if they had believed St. Peter's
gospel, when he told them that God had chosen them to obedience, and
purification by the blood of Christ, to an inheritance undefiled and
that faded not away.

He said that, remember, to all the Jews, whether Christians or not.
St. Peter took for granted that Christ was Lord and King of all the
Jews, whether they believed it or not.  He did not say, 'If you
believe in Christ, then he is your King; if not, then he is not;'
but--Because you are Jews, you are all Christ's subjects; to him you
owe faith, loyalty, and obedience.  It was of him the old Jewish
prophets foretold, and saw that their prophecies of Christ's coming
would be fulfilled, not in their own time, but in your time--in the
time of the Jews to whom he spoke.  Therefore they were to give up
the foolish practices which had been handed down to them from their
forefathers.  Therefore they were to give up fleshly lusts, which
warred against the soul, and would only bring them to destruction;
therefore they were to be holy, even as God was holy; therefore they
were to purify their souls in sincere brotherly love; therefore they
were to keep their conduct honourable among the Gentiles, that,
though they were now spoken against as evil-doers, they might see
their good works, and glorify God in the coming day of visitation.
Therefore they were to submit to every ordinance of man for the
Lord's sake; and trust to Christ, their true King in heaven, to
deliver them from oppression, and free them from injustice, in his
own good way and time.  Free men they were in the sight of God, and
unjustly enslaved by the Romans:  but they were not to make their
being free men a cloak and excuse for malice and evil passions
against the Gentiles (as too many of the Jews were doing), but
remember that they were the servants of God; and serve him, and trust
in him to deliver them in his own way and time, by his Son Jesus
Christ.

Those Jews who believed St. Peter's gospel and good news that Christ
was their King and Saviour, kept their souls in peace.

Those Jews who did not believe St. Peter--and they, unhappily for
them, were the far greater number--broke out into mad rebellion
again, and perished in vast numbers, till they were destroyed off the
face of the earth (as St. Peter had warned them) by their own fleshly
lusts, which warred against the soul.

But what has this to do with us?

It has everything to do with us, if we believe that we are Christian
men; that Christ is our King, and the King of all the world, just as
much as he was King of the Jews; that all power is given to him in
heaven and earth, and that he is actually exercising his power, and
governing all heaven and earth.

Yes.  If we really believed in the kingdom of God and Christ; if we
really believed that the fate of nations is determined, not by kings,
not by conquerors, not by statesmen, not by parliaments, not by the
people, but by God; that we, England, the world, are going God's way,
and not our own; then we should look hopefully, peacefully,
contentedly, on the matters which are too apt now to fret us; for we
should say more often than we do, 'It is the Lord:  let him do what
seemeth to him good.'

When we see new opinions taking hold of men's minds; when we see
great changes becoming certain; then, instead of being angry and
terrified, we should say with Gamaliel the wise, 'Let them alone:  if
this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought; if it be
of God, you cannot overthrow it, lest haply you be found fighting
against God.'

If, again, we fancied ourselves aggrieved by any law, we should not
say, 'It is unjust, therefore I will not obey it:' for it would seem
a small matter to us whether the law was unjust to us, which only
means, in most cases, that the law is hard on us personally, and that
we do not like it; for almost every one considers things just which
make for his own interest, while whatever is against his interest is
of course unjust.  We should say, 'Let the law be hard on me, yet I
will obey it for the Lord's sake; if it can be altered by fair and
lawful means, well and good; but if not, I will take it as one more
burden which I am to bear patiently for the sake of him who lays it
on me, Christ my Lord and my King.'

The true question with us ought to be, Does the law force us to do
that which is wrong?

If so, we are bound not to obey it, as the Jews were bound not to
obey the law which commanded Caesar's image to be set up in the
Temple.  But if any man knows of a law in this land which compels him
to do a wrong thing, I know of none.  And let no man fancy that such
submission shows a slavish spirit.  Not so.  St. Peter did not wish
to encourage a slavish spirit in Jews and Christians.  He told them
that they were free:  but that they were not to use that belief as a
cloak of maliciousness--of spiteful, bitter, and turbulent conduct.
And as a fact, those who have done most for true freedom, in all
ages, have not been the violent, noisy, bitter, rebellious spirits,
who have cried, 'We are the masters, who shall rule over us?' but the
God-fearing, patient, law-abiding men, who would obey every ordinance
of man for the Lord's sake, whether it seemed to them altogether just
or not, unless they saw it was ruinous not to themselves merely, but
to their country, and to their children after them.

It is because men in their own minds do not believe that Christ is
the ruler of the world, that they lose all hope of God's delivering
them, and break out into mad rebellion.  It is because, again, men do
not believe that Christ is the ruler of the world, that, when their
rebellion has failed, they sink into slavishness and dull despair,
and bow their necks to the yoke of the first tyrant who arises; and
try to make a covenant with death and hell.  Better far for them, had
they made a covenant with Christ, who is ready to deliver men from
death and hell in this world, as well as in the world to come.

But he who believes in Christ, in the living Christ, the ordering
Christ, the governing Christ, will possess his soul in patience.  He
will not fret himself, lest he should do evil; because he can always
put his trust in the Lord, until the tyranny be overpast.  He will
not hastily rebel:  but neither will he truckle basely and cowardly
to the ways of this wicked world.  For Christ the Lord hates those
ways, and has judged them, and doomed them to destruction; and he
reigns, and will reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.



SERMON XVI.--TERROR BY NIGHT



(Preached in Lent.)

PSALM xci. 5.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.

You may see, if you will read your Bible, that the night is spoken of
in the Old Testament much as we speak of it now, as a beautiful and
holy thing.  The old Jews were not afraid of any terror by night.
They rejoiced to consider the heavens, the work of God's fingers, the
moon and the stars, which he had ordained.  They looked on night, as
we do, as a blessed time of rest and peace for men, in which the
beasts of the forest seek their meat from God, while all things are
springing and growing, man knows not how, under the sleepless eye of
a good and loving Creator.

But, on the other hand, you may remark that St. Paul, in his
Epistles, speaks of night in a very different tone.  He is always
opposing night to day, and darkness to light; as if darkness was evil
in itself, and a pattern of all evil in men's souls.  And St. Paul
knew what he was saying, and knew how to say it; for he spoke by the
Holy Spirit of God.

The reason of this difference is simple.  The old Jews spoke of God's
night, such as we country folks may see, thank God, as often as we
will.  St. Paul spoke of man's night, such as it might be seen, alas!
in the cities of the Roman empire.  All those to whom he wrote--
Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, and the rest--dwelt in great cities,
heathen and profligate; and night in them was mixed up with all that
was ugly, dangerous, and foul.  They were bad enough by day:  after
sunset, they became hells on earth.  The people, high and low, were
sunk in wickedness; the lower classes in poverty, and often despair.
The streets were utterly unlighted; and in the darkness robbery,
house-breaking, murder, were so common, that no one who had anything
to lose went through the streets without his weapon or a guard; while
inside the houses, things went on at night--works of darkness--of
which no man who knows of them dare talk.  For as St. Paul says, 'It
is a shame even to speak of those things which are done by them in
secret.'  Evil things are done by night still, in London, Paris, New
York, and many a great city; but they are pure, respectable,
comfortable, and happy, when compared with one of those old heathen
cities, which St. Paul knew but too well.

Again.  Our own forefathers were afraid of the night and its terrors,
and looked on night as on an ugly time:  but for very different
reasons from those for which St. Paul warned his disciples of night
and the works of darkness.  Though they lived in the country, they
did not rejoice in God's heaven, or in the moon and stars which he
had ordained.  They fancied that the night was the time in which all
ghastly and ugly phantoms began to move; that it was peopled with
ghosts, skeletons, demons, witches, who held revels on the hill-tops,
or stole into houses to suck the life out of sleeping men.  The cry
of the wild fowl, and the howling of the wind, were to them the yells
of evil spirits.  They dared not pass a graveyard by night for fear
of seeing things of which we will not talk.  They fancied that the
forests, the fens, the caves, were full of spiteful and ugly spirits,
who tempted men to danger and to death; and when they prayed to be
delivered from the perils and dangers of the night, they prayed not
only against those real dangers of fire, of robbers, of sudden
sickness, and so forth, against which we all must pray, but against a
thousand horrible creatures which the good God never created, but
which their own fancy had invented.

Now in the Bible, from beginning to end, you will find no teaching of
this kind.  That there are angels, and that there are also evil
spirits, the Bible says distinctly; and that they can sometimes
appear to men.  But it is most worthy of remark how little the Bible
says about them, not how much; how it keeps them, as it were, in the
background, instead of bringing them forward; while our forefathers
seem continually talking of them, continually bringing them forward--
I had almost said they thought of nothing else.  If you compare the
Holy Bible with the works which were most popular among our
forefathers, especially among the lower class, till within the last
200 years, you will see at once what I mean,--how ghosts,
apparitions, demons, witchcraft, are perpetually spoken of in them;
how seldom they are spoken of in the Bible; lest, I suppose, men
should think of them rather than of God, as our forefathers seem to
have been but too much given to do.

And so with this Psalm.  It takes for granted that men will have
terrors by night; that they will be at times afraid of what may come
to them in the darkness.  But it tells them not to be afraid, for
that as long as they say to God, 'Thou art my hope and my stronghold;
in thee will I trust,' so long they will not be afraid for any terror
by night.

It was because our forefathers did not say that, that they were
afraid, and the terror by night grew on them; till at times it made
them half mad with fear of ghosts, witches, demons, and such-like;
and with the madness of fear came the madness of cruelty; and they
committed, again and again, such atrocities as I will not speak of
here; crimes for which we must trust that God has forgiven them, for
they knew not what they did.

But, though we happily no longer believe in the terror by night which
comes from witches, demons, or ghosts, there is another kind of
terror by night in which we must believe, for it comes to us from
God, and should be listened to as the voice of God:  even that terror
about our own sinfulness, folly, weakness which comes to us in dreams
or in sleepless nights.  Some will say, 'These painful dreams, these
painful waking thoughts, are merely bodily, and can be explained by
bodily causes, known to physicians.'  Whether they can or not,
matters very little to you and me.  Things may be bodily, and yet
teach us spiritual lessons.  A book--the very Bible itself--is a
bodily thing:  bodily leaves of paper, printed with bodily ink; and
yet out of it we may learn lessons for our souls of the most awful
and eternal importance.  And so with these night fancies and night
thoughts.  We may learn from them.  We are forced often to learn from
them, whether we will or not.  They are often God's message to us,
calling us to repentance and amendment of life.  They are often God's
book of judgment, wherein our sins are written, which God is setting
before us, and showing us the things which we have done.

Who that has come to middle age does not know how dreams sometimes
remind him painfully of what he once was, of what he would be still,
without God's grace?  How in his dreams he finds himself tempted by
the old sins; giving way to the old meannesses, weaknesses, follies?
How dreams remind him, awfully enough, that though his circumstances
have changed,--his opinions, his whole manner of life, have changed--
yet he is still the same person that he was ten, twenty, thirty,
forty years ago, and will be for ever?  Nothing bears witness to the
abiding, enduring, immortal oneness of the soul like dreams when they
prove to a man, in a way which cannot be mistaken--that is, by making
him do the deed over again in fancy--that he is the same person who
told that lie, felt that hatred, many a year ago; and who would do
the same again, if God's grace left him to that weak and sinful
nature, which is his master in sleep, and runs riot in his dreams.
Whether God sends to men in these days dreams which enable them to
look forward, and to foretell things to come, I cannot say.  But this
I can say, that God sends dreams to men which enable them to look
back, and recollect things past, which they had forgotten only too
easily; and that these humbling and penitential dreams are God's
warning that (as the Article says) the infection of nature doth
remain, even in those who are regenerate; that nothing but the
continual help of God's Spirit will keep us from falling back, or
falling away.

Again:  those sad thoughts which weigh on the mind when lying awake
at night, when all things look black to a man; when he is more
ashamed of himself, more angry with himself, more ready to take the
darkest view of his own character and of his own prospects of life,
than he ever is by day,--do not these thoughts, too, come from God?
Is it not God who is holding the man's eyes waking?  Is it not God
who is making him search out his own heart, and commune with his
spirit?  I believe that so it is.  If any one says, 'It is all caused
by the darkness and silence.  You have nothing to distract your
attention as you have by day, and therefore the mind becomes
unwholesomely excited, and feeds upon itself,' I answer, then they
are good things, now and then, this darkness and this silence, if
they do prevent the mind from being distracted, as it is all day
long, by business and pleasure; if they leave a man's soul alone with
itself, to look itself in the face, and be thoroughly ashamed of what
it sees.  In the noise and glare of the day, we are all too apt to
fancy that all is right with us, and say, 'I am rich, and increased
with goods, and have need of nothing;' and the night does us a kindly
office if it helps us to find out that we knew not that we were poor,
and miserable, and blind, and naked--not only in the sight of God,
but in our own sight, when we look honestly at ourselves.

The wise man says:-


'Oh, would some power the gift but give us,
To see ourselves as others see us!'


and those painful thoughts make us do that.  For if we see some
faults in ourselves, be sure our neighbours see them likewise, and
perhaps many more beside.

But more:  these sad thoughts make us see ourselves as God sees us.
For if we see faults in ourselves, we may be sure that the pure and
holy God, in whose sight the very heavens are not clean, and who
charges his angels with folly, sees our faults with infinitely
greater clearness, and in infinitely greater number.  So let us face
those sad night thoughts, however painful, however humiliating they
may be; for by them God is calling us to repentance, and forcing us
to keep Lent in spirit and in truth, whether we keep it outwardly or
not.

'What,' some may say, 'you would have us, then, afraid of the terror
by night?'  My dear friends, that is exactly what I would not have.
I would teach you from Holy Scripture how to profit by the terror,
how to thank God for the terror, instead of being afraid of it, as
you otherwise certainly will be.  For these ugly dreams, these sad
thoughts do come, whether you choose or not.  Whether you choose or
not, you all have, or will have seasons of depression, of anxiety, of
melancholy.  Shall they teach you, or merely terrify you?  Shall they
only bring remorse, or shall they bring repentance?

Remorse.  In that is nothing but pain.  A man may see all the wrong
and folly he has done; he may fret over it, torment himself with it,
curse himself for it, and yet be the worse, and not the better, for
what he sees.  If he be a strong-minded man, he may escape from
remorse in the bustle of business or pleasure.  If he be a weak-
minded man, he may escape from it in drunkenness, as hundreds do; or
he may fall into melancholy, superstition, despair, suicide.

But if his sadness breeds, not remorse, but repentance--that is, in
one word, if instead of keeping his sins to himself, he takes his
sins to God--then all will be well.  Then he will not be afraid of
the terror, but thankful for it, when he knows that it is what St.
Paul calls, the terror of the Lord.

This is why the old Psalmists were not afraid of the terror by night;
because they knew that their anxiety had come from God, and therefore
went to God for forgiveness, for help, for comfort.  Therefore it is
that one says, 'I am weary of groaning.  Every night wash I my bed,
and water my couch with my tears,' and yet says the next moment,
'Away from me, all ye that work vanity.  The Lord hath heard the
voice of my weeping.  The Lord will receive my prayer.'

Therefore it is that another says, 'While I held my sins my bones
waxed old through my daily complaining;' and the next moment--'I said
I will confess my sins unto the Lord, and so thou forgavest the
wickedness of my sin.'

Therefore it is that again another says, 'Thou holdest mine eyes
waking.  I am so feeble that I cannot speak.  I call to remembrance
my sin, and in the night season I commune with my heart, and search
out my spirit.  Will the Lord absent himself for ever, and will he be
no more entreated?  Is his mercy clean gone for ever, and his promise
come utterly to an end for evermore?  And I said, It is mine own
infirmity; but I will remember the years of the right hand of the
most Highest.  I will remember the works of the Lord, and call to
mind the wonders of old.'

And another, 'Why art thou so heavy, O my soul, and why art thou so
disquieted within me?  O put thy trust in God, for I shall yet give
him thanks, who is the help of my countenance, and my God.'

And therefore it is, that our Lord Jesus Christ, in order that he
might taste sorrow for every man, and be made in all things like to
his brethren, endured, once and for all, in the garden of Gethsemane,
the terror which cometh by night, as none ever endured it before or
since; the agony of dread, the agony of helplessness, in which he
prayed yet more earnestly, and his sweat was as great drops of blood
falling down to the ground.  And there appeared an angel from heaven
strengthening him; because he stood not on his own strength, but cast
himself on his Father and our Father, on his God and our God.  So
says St. Paul, who tells us how our Lord, in the days of his flesh,
when he had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying
and tears, unto him that was able to save him from death, and was
heard in that he feared--though he were a son, yet learned he
obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he
became the Author of everlasting salvation unto all them that obey
him.

Oh, may we all, in the hour of shame and sadness, in the hour of
darkness and confusion, and, above all, in the hour of death and the
day of judgment, take refuge with him in whom alone is help, and
comfort, and salvation for this life and the life to come--even Jesus
Christ, who died for us on the cross.



SERMON XVII.--THE SON OF THUNDER



ST. JOHN i. 1.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.

We read this morning the first chapter of the Gospel according to St.
John.

Some of you, I am sure, must have felt, as you heard it, how grand
was the very sound of the words.  Some one once compared the sound of
St. John's Gospel to a great church bell:  simple, slow, and awful;
and awful just because it is so simple and slow.  The words are very
short,--most of them of one syllable,--so that even a child may
understand them if he will:  but every word is full of meaning.

'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God.  All things
were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was
made.  In him was life; and the life was the light of men.  And the
light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.'

Those, I hold, are perhaps the deepest words ever written by man.
Whole books have been written, and whole books more might be written
upon them, and on the words which come after them.  'That was the
true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.  He
was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew
him not.  He came unto his own, and his own received him not.  But as
many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of
God, even to them that believe on his name:  which were born, not of
blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of
God.  And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld
his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father), full of
grace and truth.'  They go down to the mystery of all mysteries,--to
the mystery of the unfathomable One God, who dwells alone in the
light which none can approach unto, self-sustained and self-sufficing
for ever.  And then they go on to the other great mystery--how that
God comes forth out of himself to give life and light to all things
which he has made; and what is the bond between the Abysmal Father in
heaven, and us his human children, and the world in which we live:-
even Jesus Christ, God of the substance of his Father, begotten
before the worlds, and man of the substance of his mother, born in
the world.

Yes.  The root and ground of all true philosophy lies in this
chapter.  Its words are so deep that the wisest man might spend his
life over them without finding out all that they mean.  And yet they
are so simple that any child can understand enough of their meaning
to know its duty, and to do it.

Remark, again, how short the sentences are.  Each is made up of a
very few words, and followed by a full stop, that our minds may come
to a full stop likewise, and think over what we have heard before St.
John goes on to tell us more.

Yes.  St. John does not hurry either himself or us.  He takes his
time; and he wishes us to take our time likewise.  His message will
keep; for it is eternal.  It is not a story of yesterday, or to-day,
or to-morrow.  It is the story of eternity,--of what is, and was, and
always will be.

Always has the Word been with God, and always will he be God.

Always has the Word been making all things, and always will he be
making.

Always has the Spirit been proceeding, and always will the Spirit be
proceeding, from the Word and from the Father of the Word, giving
their light and their life to men.

St. John's message will last for ever; and therefore he tells it
slowly and deliberately, knowing that no time can change what he has
to say; for it is the good news of the Word, Jesus Christ, who is the
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, because he is God of very God,
eternally in the bosom of the Father.

Now St. John, who writes thus simply and quietly, was no weak or soft
person.  He was one of the two whom the Lord surnamed Boanerges, the
Son of Thunder--the man of the loud and awful voice.  Painters have
liked to draw St. John as young, soft, and feminine, because he was
the Apostle of Love.  I beg you to put that sentimental notion out of
your minds, and to remember that the only hint which Holy Scripture
gives us about St. John's person is, that he was 'a Son of Thunder;'
that his very voice, when he chose, was awful; that he, and his
brother James, before they were converted, were not of a soft, but of
a terrible temper; that it was James and John, the Sons of Thunder,
who wanted to call down thunder and lightning from heaven on all the
villages who would not receive the Lord.

A Son of Thunder.  Think over that name, and think over it carefully,
remembering that it was our Lord himself who gave St. John the name;
and that it therefore has, surely, some deep meaning.

Do not fancy that it means merely a loud and noisy person.  I have
known too many, carelessly looking only at the outsides and shows of
things, and not at their inside and reality, fancy that that was what
it meant.  I have known them fancy that they themselves were sons of
thunder when they raved and shouted, and used violent language, in
preaching, or in public speaking.  And I have heard foolish people
honour such men the more, and think them the more in earnest, the
more noise they made, and say of him; 'He is a true Boanerges--a Son
of Thunder, like St. John.'

Like St. John?  The only sermon of St. John's which we have on record
is that which they say he used to preach over and over again when he
was carried as an old man into his church at Ephesus.  And that was
no more than these few words over and over again, Sunday after
Sunday, 'Little children, love one another.'

That was the way in which St. John, the Son of Thunder, spoke when
age and long obedience to the Spirit of God had taught him how to use
his strength wisely and well.

Like St. John?  Is there anywhere, in St. John's Gospel or Epistles,
one violent expression?  One sentence of great swelling words?  Are
not the words of the Son of Thunder, as I have been telling you,
peculiarly calm, slow, simple, gentle?  Can those whose mouths are
full of noisy and violent talk, be true Sons of Thunder, if St. John
was one?

No.  And if you will think for yourselves, you will see that there is
a deeper meaning in our Lord's name for St. John than merely that he
was a loud and violent man.

You hear the roar of the thunder, but you know surely that it is not
the thunder itself; that it is only its echo rolling on from cloud to
cloud and hill from hill.

But the thunder itself--if you have ever been close enough to it to
hear it--is very different from that, and far more awful.  Still and
silently it broods till its time is come.  And then there is one ear-
piercing crack, one blinding flash, and all is over.  Nothing so
swift, so instantaneous, as the thunder itself, and yet nothing so
strong.

And such are those sudden flashes of indignation against sin and
falsehood which break out for a moment in St. John's writing,
piercing, like the Word of God himself, the very joints and marrow of
the heart, and showing, in one terrible word, what is the real matter
with the bad man's soul; as the thunderbolt lights up for an instant
the whole heavens far and wide.  'If we say that we have fellowship
with God, and walk in darkness, we lie.'  In that one plain, ugly
word, he tells us the whole truth, frightful as it is, and then he
goes on calmly once more.  And again:

'He that saith, I know God, and keepeth not his commandments, is a
liar.  He that committeth sin is of the devil.  He that hateth his
brother is a murderer.  If a man say, I love God, and hateth his
brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he
hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?  He that doeth
good is of God; but he that doeth evil has not seen God.'

Such words as these, coming as they do amid the usually quiet and
gentle language of St. John--these are truly words of thunder; going
straight to their mark, tearing off the mask from hypocrisy and self-
deceiving and false religion, and speaking the truth in majesty.

And yet there is no noisiness, no wordiness, about them; nothing like
rant or violence.  Such a man is a liar, says St. John:  but he says
no more.  That is all, and that is enough.

So speaks the true Son of Thunder.  And his words, like the thunder,
echo from land to land; and we hear them now, this day, in a foreign
tongue, eighteen hundred years after they were written:  while
thousands of bigger, noisier, and frothier words and more violent
books have been lost and forgotten utterly.

And now, my friends, we may find in St. John's example a wholesome
lesson for ourselves.  We may learn from it that noisiness is not
earnestness, that violence is not strength.  Noise is a sign of want
of faith, and violence is a sign of weakness.

The man who is really in earnest, who has real faith in what he is
saying and doing, will not be noisy, and loud, and in a hurry, as it
is written, 'He that believeth will not make haste.'  He that is
really strong; he who knows that he can do his work, if he takes his
time and uses his wit, and God prospers him--he will not be violent,
but will work on in silence and peaceful industry, as it is written,
'Thy strength is to sit still.'

I know that you here do not require this warning much for yourselves.
There is, thank God, something in our quiet, industrious, country
life which breeds in men that solid, sober temper, the temper which
produces much work and little talk, which is the mark of a true
Englishman, a true gentleman, and a true Christian.

But if you go (as more and more of you will go) into the great towns,
you will hear much noisy and violent speaking from pulpits, and at
public meetings.  You will read much noisy and violent writing in
newspapers and books.

Now I say to you, distrust such talk.  It may seem to you very
earnest and passionate.  Distrust it for that very reason.  It may
seem to you very eloquent and full of fine words.  Distrust it for
that very reason.  The man who cannot tell his story without wrapping
it up in fine words, generally does not know very clearly what he is
talking about.  The man who cannot speak or write without scolding
and exaggeration, is not very likely to be able to give sound advice
to his fellow-men.

Remember that it is by violent language of this kind, in all ages,
that fanatical preachers have deceived silly men and women to their
shame and ruin; and mob-leaders have stirred up riots and horrible
confusions.  Remember this:  and distrust violent and wordy persons
wheresoever you shall meet them:  but after listening to them, if you
must, go home, and take out your Bibles, and read the Gospel of St.
John, and see how he spoke, the true Son of Thunder, whose words are
gone out into all lands, and their sound unto the end of the world,
just because they are calm and sober, plain and simple, like the
words of Jesus Christ his Lord and our Lord, who spake as never man
spake.

And for ourselves--let us remember our Lord's own warning:  'Let your
Yea be Yea, and your Nay Nay; for whatsoever is more than these
cometh of evil.'

Tell your story plainly and calmly; speak your mind if you must.  But
speak it quietly.  Do not try to make out the worst case for your
adversary; do not exaggerate; do not use strong language:  say the
truth, the whole truth; but say nothing but the truth, in patience
and in charity.  For everything beyond that comes of evil,--of some
evil or fault in us.  Either we are not quite sure that we are right;
or we have lost our temper, and then we see the whole matter awry,
through the mist of passion; or we are selfish, and looking out for
our own interest, or our own credit, instead of judging the matter
fairly.  This, or something else, is certainly wrong in us whenever
we give way to violent language.  Therefore, whenever we are tempted
to say more than is needful, let us remember St. John's words, and
ask God for his Holy Spirit, the spirit of love, which, instead of
weakening a man's words, makes them all the stronger in the cause of
truth, because they are spoken in love.



SERMON XVIII.--HUMILITY



LUKE v. 8.

Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.

Few stories in the New Testament are as well known as this.  Few go
home more deeply to the heart of man.  Most simple, most graceful is
the story, and yet it has in it depths unfathomable.

Great painters have loved to draw, great poets have loved to sing,
that scene on the lake of Gennesaret.  The clear blue water, land-
locked with mountains; the meadows on the shore, gay with their
lilies of the field, on which our Lord bade them look, and know the
bounty of their Father in heaven; the rich gardens, olive-yards, and
vineyards on the slopes; the towns and villas scattered along the
shore, all of bright white limestone, gay in the sun; the crowds of
boats, fishing continually for the fish which swarm to this day in
the lake;--everywhere beautiful country life, busy and gay, healthy
and civilized likewise--and in the midst of it, the Maker of all
heaven and earth sitting in a poor fisher's boat, and condescending
to tell them where the shoal of fish was lying.  It is a wonderful
scene.  Let us thank God that it happened once on earth.  Let us try
to see what we may learn from it in these days, in which our God and
Saviour no longer walks this earth in human form.

'Ah!' some may say, 'but for that very reason there is no lesson in
the story for us in these days.  True it is, that God does not walk
the earth now in human form.  He works no miracles, either for
fishermen, or for any other men.  We shall never see a miraculous
draught of fishes.  We shall never be convinced, as St. Peter was, by
a miracle, that Christ is close to us.  What has the story to do with
us?'

My friends, are things, after all, so different now from what they
were then?  Is our case after all so very different from St. Peter's?
God and Christ cannot change, for they are eternal--the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and if Christ was near St. Peter on
the lake of Gennesaret, he is near us now, and here; for in him we
live and move and have our being; and he is about our path, and about
our bed, and spieth out all our ways:  near us for ever, whether we
know it or not.  And human nature cannot change.  There is in us the
same heart as there was in St. Peter, for evil and for good.  When
St. Peter found suddenly that it was the Lord who was in his boat,
his first feeling was one of fear:  'Depart from me for I am a sinful
man, O Lord.'  And when we recollect at moments that God is close to
us, watching all we do, all we say, yea, all we think, are we not
afraid, for the moment at least?  Do we not feel the thought of God's
presence a burden?  Do we never long to hide from God?--to forget God
again, and cry in our hearts:  'Depart from me; for I am a sinful
man, O Lord'?

God grant to us all, that after that first feeling of dread and awe
is over, we may go on, as St. Peter went on, to the better feelings
of admiration, loyalty, worship and say at last, as St. Peter said
afterwards, when the Lord asked him if he too would leave him:
'Lord, to whom shall we go? for thou hast the words of eternal life.'

But do I blame St. Peter for saying, 'Depart from me; for I am a
sinful man, O Lord'?  God forbid!  Who am I, to blame St. Peter?
Especially when even the Lord Jesus did not blame him, but only bade
him not to be afraid.

And why did the Lord not blame him, even when he asked Him to go
away?

Because St. Peter was honest.  He said frankly and naturally what was
in his heart.  And honesty, even if it is mistaken, never offends
God, and ought never to offend men.  God requires truth in the inward
parts; and if a man speaks the truth--if he expresses his own
thoughts and feelings frankly and honestly--then, even if he is not
right, he is at least on the only road to get right, as St. Peter
was.

He spoke not from dislike of our Lord, but from modesty; from a
feeling of awe, of uneasiness, of dread, at the presence of one who
was infinitely greater, wiser, better than himself.

And that feeling of reverence and modesty, even when it takes the
shape, as it often will in young people, of shyness and fear, is a
divine and noble feeling--the beginning of all goodness.  Indeed, I
question whether there can be any real and sound goodness in any
man's heart, if he has no modesty, and no reverence.  Boldness,
forwardness, self-conceit, above all in the young--we know how ugly
they are in our eyes; and the Bible tells us again and again how ugly
they are in the sight of God.

The truly great and free and noble soul--and St. Peter's soul was
such--is that of the man who feels awe and reverence in the presence
of those who are wiser and holier than himself; who is abashed and
humbled when he compares himself with his betters, just because his
standard is so high.  Because he knows how much better he should be
than he is; because he is discontented with himself, ashamed of
himself, therefore he shrinks, at first, from the very company which,
after a while, he learns to like best, because it teaches him most.
And so it was with St. Peter's noble soul.  He felt himself, in the
presence of that pure Christ, a sinful man:- not perhaps what we
should call sinful; but sinful in comparison of Christ.  He felt his
own meanness, ignorance, selfishness, weakness.  He felt unworthy to
be in such good company.  He felt unworthy,--he, the ignorant
fisherman,--to have such a guest in his poor boat.  'Go elsewhere,
Lord,' he tried to say, 'to a place and to companions more fit for
thee.  I am ashamed to stand in thy presence.  I am dazzled by the
brightness of thy countenance, crushed down by the thought of thy
wisdom and power, uneasy lest I say or do something unfit for thee;
lest I anger thee unawares in my ignorance, clumsiness; lest I betray
to thee my own bad habits:  and those bad habits I feel in thy
presence as I never felt before.  Thou art too condescending; thou
honourest me too much; thou hast taken me for a better man than I am;
thou knowest not what a poor miserable creature I am at heart--
"Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord."'

There spoke out the truly noble soul, who was ready the next moment,
as soon as he had recovered himself, to leave all and follow Christ;
who was ready afterwards to wander, to suffer, to die upon the cross
for his Lord; and who, when he was led out to execution, asked to be
crucified (as it is said St. Peter actually did) with his head
downwards; for it was too much honour for him to die looking up to
heaven, as his Lord had died.

Do you not understand me yet?  Then think what you would have thought
of St. Peter, if, instead of saying, 'Depart from me; for I am a
sinful man, O Lord,' St. Peter had said, 'Stay with me, for I am a
holy man, O Lord.  I am just the sort of person who deserves the
honour of thy company; and my boat, poor though it is, more fit for
thee than the palace of a king.'  Would St. Peter have seemed to you
then wiser or more foolish, better or worse, than he does now, when
in his confused honest humility, he begs the Lord to go away and
leave him?  And do you not feel that a man is (as a great poet says)
'displeasing alike to God and to the enemies of God,' when he comes
boldly to the throne of grace, not to find grace and mercy, because
he feels that he needs them:  but to boast of God's grace, and make
God's mercy to him an excuse for looking down upon his fellow-
creatures; and worships, like the Pharisee, in self-conceit and
pride, thanking God that he is not as other men are?

Better far to be the publican, who stood afar off, and dare not lift
up as much as his eyes toward heaven, but cried only, 'God be
merciful to me a sinner.'  Better far to be the honest and devout
soldier, who, when Jesus offered to come to his house, answered,
'Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter under my roof.  But
speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.'

Only he must say that in honesty, in spirit, and in truth, like St.
Peter.  For a man may shrink from religion, from the thought of God,
from coming to the Holy Communion, for two most opposite reasons.

He may shrink from them because he knows he is full of sins, and
wishes to keep his sins; and knows that, if he worships God, if he
comes to the Holy Communion--indeed, if he remembers the presence of
God at all,--he pledges himself to give up his bad habits; to repent
and amend, which is just what he has no mind to do.  So he turns away
from God, because he chooses to remain bad.  May the Lord have mercy
on his soul, for he has no mercy on it himself!  He chooses evil, and
refuses good; and evil will be his ruin.

But, again, a man may shrink from God, from church, from the Holy
Communion, because he feels himself bad, and longs to be good;
because he feels himself full of evil habits, and hates them, and
sees how ugly they are, and is afraid to appear in the presence of
God foul with sin.

Let him be of good cheer.  He is not going wrong wilfully.  But he is
making a mistake.  Let him make it no more.  He feels himself
unworthy.  Let him come all the more, that he may be made worthy.
Let him come, because he is worthy.  For--strange it may seem, but
true it is--that a man is the more worthy to draw near to God the
more he feels himself to be utterly unworthy thereof.

He who partakes worthily of the Holy Communion is he who says with
his whole heart, 'We are not worthy so much as to gather up the
crumbs under thy table.'  He with whom Christ will take up his abode
is he who says, 'Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter
under my roof.'

For humility is the beginning of all goodness, and the end of all
wisdom.

He who says that he sees is blind.  He who knows his own blindness
sees.  He who says he has no sin in him is the sinner.  He who
confesses his sins is the righteous man; for God is faithful and just
to forgive him, as he did St. Peter, and to cleanse him from all
unrighteousness.



SERMON XIX.--A WHITSUN SERMON



PSALM civ. 24, 27-30.

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them
all:  the earth is full of thy riches. . . .  These wait all upon
thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season.  That thou
givest them they gather:  thou openest thine hand, they are filled
with good.  Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled:  thou takest
away their breath, they die, and return to their dust.  Thou sendest
forth thy Spirit, they are created:  and thou renewest the face of
the earth.

You may not understand why I read this morning, instead of the Te
Deum, the 'Song of the three Children,' which calls on all powers and
creatures in the world to bless and praise God.  You may not
understand also, at first, why this grand 104th Psalm was chosen as
one of the special Psalms for Whitsuntide,--what it has to do with
the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the Spirit of God.  Let me try to
explain it to you, and may God grant that you may find something
worth remembering among my clumsy words.

You were told this morning that there were two ways of learning
concerning God and the Spirit of God,--that one was by the hearing of
the ear, and the Holy Bible; the other by the seeing of the eye--by
nature and the world around us.  It is of the latter I speak this
afternoon,--of what you can learn concerning God by seeing, if only
you have eyes, and the same Spirit of God to open those eyes, as the
Psalmist had.

The man who wrote this Psalm looked round him on the wondrous world
in which we dwell, and all he saw in it spoke to him of God; of one
God, boundless in wisdom and in power, in love and care; and of one
Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of Life.

He saw all this, and so glorious did it seem to him, as he looked on
the fair world round him, that he could not contain himself.  Not
only was his reason satisfied, but his heart was touched.  It was so
glorious that he could not speak of it coldly, calmly; and he burst
out into singing a song of praise--'O Lord our God, thou art become
exceeding glorious; thou art clothed with majesty and honour.'  For
he saw everywhere order; all things working together for good.  He
saw everywhere order and rule; and something within him told him,
there must be a Lawgiver, an Orderer, a Ruler and he must be One.

Again, the Psalmist saw everywhere a purpose; things evidently
created to be of use to each other.  And the Spirit of God told him
there must be One who purposed all this; who meant to do it, and who
had done it; who thought it out and planned it by wisdom and
understanding.

Then the Psalmist saw how everything, from the highest to the lowest,
was of use.  The fir trees were a dwelling for the stork; and the
very stony rocks, where nothing else can live, were a refuge for the
wild goats; everywhere he saw use and bounty--food, shelter, life,
happiness, given to man and beast, and not earned by them; then he
said--'There must be a bountiful Lord, a Giver, generous and loving,
from whom the very lions seek their meat, when they roar after their
prey; on whom all the creeping things innumerable wait in the great
sea, that he may give them meat in due season.'

But, moreover, he saw everywhere beauty; shapes, and colours, and
sounds, which were beautiful in his eyes, and gave him pleasure deep
and strange, he knew not why:  and the Spirit of God within him told
him--'These fair things please thee.  Do they not please Him who made
them?  He that formed the ear, shall he not hear the song of birds?
He that made the eye, shall he not see the colours of the flowers?
He who made thee to rejoice in the beauty of the earth, shall not he
rejoice in his own works?'  And God seemed to him, in his mind's eye,
to delight in his own works, as a painter delights in the picture
which he has drawn, as a gardener delights in the flowers which he
has planted; as a cunning workman delights in the curious machine
which he has invented; as a king delights in the fair parks and
gardens and stately palaces which he has laid out, and builded, and
adorned, for his own pleasure, as well as for the good of his
subjects.

And then, beneath all, and beyond all, there came to him another
question--What is life?

The painter paints his picture, but it has no life.  The workman
makes his machine, but, though it moves and works, it has no life.
The gardener,--his flowers have life, but he has not given it to
them; he can only sow the seemingly dead seeds.  Who is He that
giveth those seeds a body as it pleases him, and to every seed its
own body, its own growth of leaf, form, and colour?  God alone.  And
what is that life which he does give?  Who can tell that?  What is
life?  What is it which changes the seed into a flower, the egg into
a bird?  It is not the seed itself; the egg itself.  What power or
will have they, over themselves?  It is not in the seed, or in the
egg, as all now know from experience.  You may look for it with all
the microscopes in the world, but you will not find it.  There is
nothing to be found by the eyes of mortal man which can account for
the growth and life of any created thing.

And what is death?  What does the live thing lose, when it loses
life?  This moment the bird was alive; a tiny pellet of shot has gone
through its brain, and now its life is lost:  but what is lost?  It
is just the same size, shape, colour; it weighs exactly the same as
it did when alive.  What is the thing not to be seen, touched,
weighed, described, or understood, which it has lost, which we call
life?

And to that deep question the Psalmist had an answer whispered to
him,--a hint only, as it were, in a parable.  Life is the breath of
God.  It is the Spirit of God, who is the Lord and Giver of life.
God breathes into things the breath of life.  When he takes away that
breath they die, and are turned again to their dust.  When he lets
his breath go forth again, they are made, and he renews the face of
the earth.

That is enough for thee, O man, to know.  What life is thou canst not
know.  Thou canst only speak of it in a figure--as the breath, the
Spirit of God.  That Spirit of God is not the universe itself.  But
he is working in all things, giving them form and life, dividing to
each severally as he will; all their shape, their beauty, their
powers, their instincts, their thoughts; all in them save brute
matter and dead dust:  from him they come, and to him they return
again.  All order, all law, all force, all usefulness, come from him.
He is the Lord and Giver of life, in whom all things live, and move,
and have their being.

Therefore, my friends, let us at all times, in all places, and
especially at this Whitsuntide, remember that all we see, or can see,
except sin, is the work of the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God.  Let us
look on the world around us, as what it is, as what the old Psalmist
saw it to be,--a sacred place, full of God's presence, shaped,
quickened, and guided by the Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of
life.

My dear friends, God grant that you may all learn to look upon this
world as the Psalmist looked on it.  God grant that you may all learn
to see, each in your own way, what a great and pious poet of our
fathers' time put into words far wiser and grander than any which I
can invent for you, when he said how, looking on the earth, the sea,
the sky, he felt -


'A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.  Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world;
Of eye and ear, both what they half create
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.' {243}


'Of all my moral being.'

Yes; of our moral being, our characters, our souls.  By looking upon
this beautiful and wonderful world around us with reverence, and
earnestness, and love, as what it is,--the work of God's Spirit,--we
shall become not merely the more learned, or the more happy, we shall
become actually better men.  The beauties in the earth and sky; the
flowers with their fair hues and fragrant scents; the song of birds;
the green shaughs and woodlands; the moors purple with heath, and
golden with furze; the shapes of clouds, from the delicate mist upon
the lawn to the thunder pillar towering up in awful might; the
sunrise and sunset, painted by God afresh each morn and even; the
blue sky, which is the image of God the heavenly Father, boundless,
clear, and calm, looking down on all below with the same smile of
love, sending his rain alike on the evil and on the good, and causing
his sun to shine alike on the just and on the unjust:- he who watches
all these things, day by day, will find his heart grow quiet, sober,
meek, contented.  His eyes will be turned away from beholding vanity.
His soul will be kept from vexation of spirit.  In God's tabernacle,
which is the universe of all the worlds, he will be kept from the
strife of tongues.  As he watches the work of God's Spirit, the
beauty of God's Spirit, the wisdom of God's Spirit, the fruitfulness
of God's Spirit, which shines forth in every wayside flower, and
every gnat which dances in the sun, he will rejoice in God's work,
even as God himself rejoices.  He will learn to value things at their
true price, and see things of their real size.  Ambition, fame,
money, will seem small things to him as he considers the lilies of
the field, how the heavenly Father clothes them, and the birds of the
air, how the heavenly Father feeds them; and he will say with the
wise man -


'All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.'


Dust, indeed, and not worthy the attention of the wise man, who
considers how the very heaven and earth shall perish, and yet God
endure; how--'They all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a
vesture shall God change them, and they shall be changed:  but God is
the same, and his years shall not fail.'

And as that man grows more quiet, he will grow more loving likewise;
more merciful to the very dumb animals.  He will be ashamed even to
disturb a bird upon its nest, when he remembers the builder and maker
of that nest is not the bird alone, but God.  He will believe the
words of the wise man -


'He prayeth well who loveth well
   Both man, and bird, and beast.
He prayeth best who loveth best
   All things, both great and small;
For the great God who loveth us,
   He made and loveth all.'


More quiet, more loving will that man grow; and more pious likewise.
For there ought to come to that man a sense of God's presence, of
God's nearness, which will fill him with a wholesome fear of God.  As
he sees with the inward eyes of his reason God's Spirit at work for
ever on every seed, on every insect, ay, on every nerve and muscle of
his own body, he will heartily say with the Psalmist--'I will give
thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.  Thine
eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in thy book were
all my members written, which day by day were fashioned, when as yet
there was none of them.  Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit, or
whither shall I flee from thy presence?  If I climb up to heaven,
thou art there; if I go down to hell, thou art there also; if I take
the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand hold me
still.  If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then
shall my night be turned into day.'

Yes, God he will see is everywhere, over all, and through all, and in
all; and from God there is no escape.  The only hope, the only
wisdom, is to open his heart to God as a child to its father, and cry
with the Psalmist--'Try me, O God, and search the ground of my heart;
prove me, and examine my thoughts.  Look well if there be any way of
wickedness in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.'

My dear friends, take these thoughts home with you:  and may God give
you grace to ponder over them, and so make your Whitsun holiday more
quiet, more pure, more full of lessons learnt from God's great green
book which lies outside for every man to read.  Of such as you said
the wise heathen long ago--'Too happy are they who till the land, if
they but knew the blessings which they have.'

And it is a blessing, a privilege, and therefore a responsibility
laid on you by your Father and your Saviour, to have such a fair,
peaceful, country scene around you, as you will behold when you leave
this church,--a scene where everything is to the wise man, where
everything should be to you, a witness of God's Spirit; a witness of
God's power, God's wisdom, God's care, God's love.  Go, and may God
turn away your hearts from all that is mean and selfish, all that is
coarse and low, and lift them up unto himself, as you look upon the
fields, and woods, and sky, till you, too, say with the Psalmist--'O
Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all:
the earth is full of thy riches.  I will praise my God while I have
my being; my joy shall be in the Lord.'



SERMON XX.--SELF-HELP



ST. JOHN xvi. 7.

It is expedient for you that I go away:  for if I go not away, the
Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him
unto you.

This is a deep and strange saying.  How can it be expedient, useful,
or profitable, for any human being that Christ should go away from
them?  To be in Christ's presence; to see his face; to hear his
voice;--would not this be the most expedient and profitable, yea, the
most blessed and blissful of things which could befall us?  Is it not
that which saints hope to attain for ever in heaven--the beatific
vision of Christ?

My dear friends, one thing is certain, that Christ loves us far
better than we can love ourselves, and knows how to show that love.
He would have stayed with the apostles, instead of ascending into
heaven, if it had been expedient for them.  Yea, if it had been
expedient for him to have stayed on earth among mankind unto this
very day, he would have stayed.

Because it was not expedient, not good for the apostles, not good for
mankind, that he should stay among them, therefore he ascended into
heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God, all authority and
power being given to him in heaven and in earth.

And he gives us a reason for so doing--only a hint; but still a hint,
by which we may see to-day it was expedient for us that he should go
away.

Unless he went away, the Comforter would not come.  Now the true and
exact meaning of the Comforter is the Strengthener, the Encourager--
one who gives a man strength of mind, and courage of spirit, to do
his work.  Without that Comforter, the apostles would be weak and
spiritless.  Without being encouraged and inspirited by him, they
would never get through the work which they had to do, of preaching
the Gospel to the whole world.

We may surely see, if we think, some of the cause of this.  The
apostles, till our Lord's ascension, had been following him about
like scholars following a master--almost like children holding by
their father's hand.  They had had no will of their own; no opinion
of their own; they had never had to judge for themselves, or act for
themselves; and, when they had tried to do so, they had always been
in the wrong, and Christ had rebuked them.  They had been like
scholars, I say, with a teacher, or children with a parent.  Yea
rather, when one remembers who they were, poor fishermen, and who he
was--God made man--they had been (I speak with all reverence) as dogs
at their master's side--faithful and intelligent truly; but with no
will of their own, looking for ever up to his hand and his eye, to
see what he would have them do.  But that could not last.  It ought
not to last.  God does not wish us to be always as animals, not even
always as children; he wishes us to become men; perfect men, who have
their senses exercised by experience to discern good and evil.

And so it was to be with the apostles.  They had to learn, as we all
have to learn, self-help, self-government, self-determination.  They
were to think for themselves, and act for themselves; and yet not by
themselves.  For he would put into them a spirit, even his Spirit;
and so, when they were thinking for themselves, they would be
thinking as he would have them think; when they were acting for
themselves, they would be acting as he would have them act.  They
would live; but not their own life, for Christ would live in them.
They would speak:  but not their own words; the Spirit of their
Father would speak in them; that so they might come in the unity of
the faith, and the knowledge of the Son of God, to be perfect men, to
the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

My dear friends, this may seem deep and a mystery:  but so are all
things in this wondrous life of ours.  And surely we see a pattern of
all this in our own lives.  Each child is educated--or ought to be--
as Christ educated his apostles.

Have we not had, some of us, in early life some parent, friend,
teacher, spiritual pastor, or master, to whom we looked up with
unbounded respect?  His word to us was law.  His counsel was as the
oracles of God.  We did not dream of thinking for ourselves, acting
for ourselves, while we had him to tell us how to think, how to act;
and we were happy in our devotion.  We felt what a blessed thing, not
merely protecting and guiding, but elevating and ennobling, was
reverence and obedience to one wiser and better than ourselves.  But
that did not last.  It could not last.  Our teacher was taken from
us; perhaps by mere change of place, and the chances of this mortal
life; perhaps by death, which sunders all fair bonds upon this side
the grave.  Perhaps, most painful of all, we began to differ from our
teacher; to find that, though we respected and loved him still,
though we felt a deep debt of thanks to him for what he had taught
us, we could not quite agree in all; we had begun to think for
ourselves, and we found that we must think for ourselves; and the new
responsibility was very heavy.  We felt like young birds thrust out
of the nest to shift for themselves in the wide world.

But, after a while, we found that we could think, could act for
ourselves, as we never expected to do.  We found that we were no more
children; that we were improving in manly virtues by having to bear
our own burdens; and to acquire,


'The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.'


And we found, too, that though our old teachers were parted from us,
yet they were with us still; that (to compare small things with
great, and Christ's servants with their Lord) a spirit came to us
from them, and brought all things to our remembrance, whatsoever they
had said to us; that we remembered their words more vividly, we
understood their meaning more fully and deeply, now that they were
parted, than we did when they were with us.  We loved them as well,
ay, better, than of old, for we saw more clearly what a debt we owed
to them; and so it was, after all, expedient for us that they should
have gone away.  That parting with them, which seemed so dangerous to
us, as well as painful, really comforted us--strengthened and
encouraged us to become stronger and braver souls, full of self-help,
self-government, self-determination.

And so we shall find it, I believe, in our religion.

We may say with a sigh, 'Ah, that I could see my Lord and Saviour.  I
should be safe then.  I dare not sin then.'

It may be so.  I am the last to deny that our Lord Jesus Christ has
(as he certainly could, if he chose) shown himself bodily to certain
of his saints (as he showed himself to St. Paul and to St. Stephen)
in order to strengthen their faith in some great trial.  But if it
had been good for us in general to see the Lord in this life, doubt
not that we should have seen him.  And because we do not see him, be
sure that it is not good.

We may say, again, 'Ah that the Lord Jesus had but remained on earth,
what just laws, what peace and prosperity would the world have
enjoyed!  Wars would have ceased long ago; oppression and injustice
would be unknown.'

It may be so.  And yet again it may not.  Perhaps our Lord's staying
on earth would have had some quite different effect, of which we
cannot even dream; and done, not good, but harm.  Let us have faith
in him.  Let us believe in his perfect wisdom, and in his perfect
love.  Let us believe that he is educating us, as he educated the
apostles, by going away.  That he is by his absence helping men to
help themselves, teaching men to teach themselves, guiding and
governing men to guide and govern themselves by that law of liberty
which is the law of his Spirit; to love the right, and to do the
right, not from fear of punishment, but of their own heart and will.

For remember, he has not left us comfortless.  He has not merely
given us commands; he has given us the power of understanding,
valuing, obeying these commands.  For his Spirit is with us; the
Spirit of Whitsuntide; the Comforter, the Encourager, the
Strengthener, by whom we may both perceive and know what we ought to
do, and also have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same.

Come to yonder holy table this day, and there claim your share in
Christ, who is absent from you in the body, but ever present in the
spirit.  Come to that table, that you may live by Christ's life, and
learn to love what he commandeth, and desire what he doth promise,
that so your hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to
be found; namely, in the gracious motions and heavenly inspirations
of the Holy Ghost the Comforter, who proceedeth from the Father and
the Son.



SERMON XXI.--ENDURANCE



I PETER ii. 19.

This is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief,
suffering wrongfully.

This is a great epistle, this epistle for the day, and full of deep
lessons.  Let us try to learn some of them.

'What glory is it,' St. Peter says, 'if, when ye be beaten for your
faults, ye take it patiently?'  What credit is it to a man, if,
having broken the law, he submits to be punished?  The man who will
not do that, the man who resists punishment, is not a civilized man,
but a savage and a mere animal.  If he will not live under
discipline, if he expects to break the law with impunity, he makes
himself an outlaw; he puts himself by his rebellion outside the law,
and becomes unfit for society, a public enemy of his fellow-men.  The
first lesson which men have to learn, which even the heathen have
learnt, as soon as they have risen above mere savages, is the
sacredness of law--the necessity of punishment for those who break
the law.

The Jews had this feeling of the sacredness of law.  Moses' divine
law had taught it them.  The Romans, heathen though they were, had
the same feeling--that law was sacred; that men must obey law.  And
the good thing which they did for the world (though they did it at
the expense of bloodshed and cruelty without end) was the bringing
all the lawless nations and wild tribes about them under strict law,
and drilling them into order and obedience.  That it was, which gave
the Roman power strength and success for many centuries.

But above the kingdom of law, which says to a man merely, 'Thou shalt
not do wrong:  and if thou dost, thou shalt be punished,' there is
another kingdom, far deeper, wider, nobler; even the kingdom of
grace, which says to a man, not merely, 'Do not do wrong,' but 'Do
right;' and not only 'Do right for fear of being punished,' but 'Do
right because it is right; do right because thou hast grace in thy
heart; even the grace of God, and the Spirit of God, which makes thee
love what is right, and see how right it is, and how beautiful; so
that thou must follow after the right, not from fear of punishment,
but in spite of fear of punishment; follow after the right, not when
it is safe only, but when it is dangerous; not when it is honourable
only in the eyes of men, but when it is despised.  If thou hast God's
grace in thy heart; if thou lovest what is right with the true love,
which is the Spirit of God, then thou wilt never stop to ask, "Will
it pay me to do right?"  Thou wilt feel that the right thou must do,
whether it pays thee or not; still loving the right, and cleaving
steadfastly to the right, through disappointment, poverty, shame,
trouble, death itself, if need be:  if only thou canst keep a
conscience void of offence toward God and man.'

'But shall I have no reward?' asks a man, 'for doing right?  Am I to
give up a hundred pleasant things for conscience' sake, and get
nothing in return?'  Yes:  there is a reward for righteousness, even
in this life.  God repays those who make sacrifices for conscience'
sake, I verily believe, in most cases, a hundred fold in this life.
In this life it stands true, that he who loses his life shall save
it; that he who goes through the world with a single eye to duty,
without selfishness, without vanity, without ambition, careless
whether he be laughed at, careless whether he be ill-used, provided
only his conscience acquits him, and God's approving smile is on him-
-in this life it stands true that that man is the happiest man after
all; that that man is the most prosperous man after all; that, like
Christ, when he was doing his Father's work, he has meat to eat and
strengthen him in his life's journey, which the world knows not of.
But if not; if it seem good to God to let him taste the bitters, and
not the sweets, of doing right, in this life; if it seem good to God
that he should suffer--as many a man and woman too has suffered for
doing right--nothing but contempt, neglect, prison, and death; is he
worse off than Jesus Christ, his Lord, was before him?  Shall the
disciple be above his master?  What if he have to drink of the cup of
sorrow of which Christ drank, and be baptized with the baptism of
martyrdom with which Christ was baptized?  Where is he, but where the
Son of God has been already?  What is he doing, but treading in the
steps of Christ crucified; that he may share in the blessing and
glory and honour without end which God the Father heaped upon Christ
his Son, because he was perfect in duty, perfect in love of right,
perfect in resignation, perfect in submission under injustice,
perfect in forgiveness of his murderers, perfect in faith in the
justice and mercy of God:  who did no sin--that is, never injured his
own cause by anger or revenge; and had no guile in his mouth--that
is, never prevaricated, lied, concealed his opinions, for fear of the
consequences, however terrible; but before the chief priests and
Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession, though he knew that it
would bring on him a dreadful death; who, when he was reviled,
reviled not again, but committed himself to him who judgeth
righteously--the meekest of all beings, and in that very meekness the
strongest of all beings; the most utterly resigned, and by that very
resignation the most heroic--the being who seemed, on the cross of
Calvary, most utterly conquered by injustice and violence:  but who,
by that very cross, conquered the whole world.

This is a great mystery, and hard to learn.  Flesh and blood, our
animal nature, will never compass it all; for it belongs, not to the
flesh, but to the spirit.  But our spirits, our immortal souls, may
learn the lesson at last, if we feed them continually with the
thought of Christ; if we meditate upon whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good
report.  Then we may learn, at last, after many failures, and many
sorrows of heart, that the spirit is stronger than the flesh; that
meekness is stronger than wrath, silence stronger than shouting,
peace stronger than war, forgiveness stronger than vengeance, just as
Christ hanging on his cross was stronger--exercising a more vast and
miraculous effect on the hearts of men--than if he had called whole
armies of angels to destroy his enemies, like one of the old kings
and conquerors of the earth, whose works have perished with
themselves.

Yes, gradually we must learn that our strength is to sit still; that
to do well and suffer for it, instead of returning evil for evil, and
railing for railing, is to show forth the spirit of Christ, and to
enter into the joy of our Lord.

The statesman debating in Parliament; the conqueror changing the fate
of nations on bloody battle-fields; these all do their work; and are
needful, doubtless, in a sinful, piecemeal world like this.  But
there are those of whom the noisy world never hears, who have chosen
the better part which shall not be taken from them; who enter into a
higher glory than that of statesmen, or conquerors, or the successful
and famous of the earth.  Many a man--clergyman or layman--struggling
in poverty and obscurity, with daily toil of body and mind, to make
his fellow-creatures better and happier; many a poor woman, bearing
children in pain and sorrow, and bringing them up with pain and
sorrow, but in industry, too, and piety; or submitting without
complaint to a brutal husband; or sacrificing all her own hopes in
life to feed and educate her brothers and sisters; or enduring for
years the peevishness and troublesomeness of some relation;--all
these (and the world which God sees is full of such, though the world
which man sees takes no note of them)--gentle souls, humble souls,
uncomplaining souls, suffering souls, pious souls--these are God's
elect; these are Christ's sheep; these are the salt of the earth,
who, by doing each their little duty as unto God, not unto men, keep
society from decaying more than do all the constitutions and acts of
parliament which statesmen ever invented.  These are they--though
they little dream of any such honour--who copy the likeness of the
old martyrs, who did well and suffered for it; and the likeness of
Christ, of whom it was said, 'He shall not strive nor cry, neither
shall his voice be heard in the streets.'

For what was it in the old martyrs which made men look up to them, as
persons infinitely better than themselves, with quite unmeasurable
admiration; so that they worshipped them after their deaths, as if
they had been gods rather than men?

It was this.  The world in old times had been admiring successful
people, just as it does at this day.  Was a man powerful, rich?  Had
he slaves by the hundred?  Was his table loaded with the richest
meats and wines?  Could he indulge every pleasure and fancy of his
own?  Could he heap his friends with benefits?  Could he ruin or
destroy any one who thwarted him?  In one word, was he a mighty and
successful tyrant?  Then that was the man to honour and worship; that
was the sort of man to become, if anyone had the chance, by fair
means or foul.  Just as the world worships now the successful man;
and--if you will but make a million of money--will flatter you and
court you, and never ask either how you made your money, or how you
spend your money; or whether you are a good man or a bad one:  for
money in man's eyes, as charity in God's eyes, covereth a multitude
of sins; and as long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak
well of thee.

But there arose, in that wicked old world in which St. Paul lived, an
entirely new sort of people--people who did not wish to be
successful; did not wish to be rich; did not wish to be powerful; did
not wish for pleasures and luxuries which this world could give:  who
only wished to be good; to do right, and to teach others to do right.
Christians, they were called; after Christ their Lord and God.  Weak
old men, poor women, slaves, even children, were among them.  Not
many mighty, not many rich, not many noble, were called.  They were
mostly weak and oppressed people, who had been taught by suffering
and sorrow.

One would have thought that the world would have despised these
Christians, and let them go their own way in peace.  But it was not
so.  The mighty of this world, and those who lived by pandering to
their vices, so far from despising the Christians, saw at once how
important they were.  They saw that, if people went about the world
determined to speak nothing but what they believed to be true, and to
do nothing but what was right, then the wicked world would be indeed
turned upside down, and, as they complained against St. Paul more
than once, the hope of their gains would be gone.  Therefore they
conceived the most bitter hatred against these Christians, and rose
against them, for the same simple reason that Cain rose up against
Abel and slew him, because his works were wicked, and his brother's
righteous.  They argued with them; they threatened them; they tried
to terrify them:  but they found to their astonishment that the
Christians would not change their minds for any terror.  Then their
hatred became rage and fury.  They could not understand how such poor
ignorant contemptible people as the Christians seemed to be, dared to
have an opinion of their own, and to stand to it; how they dared to
think themselves right, and all the world wrong; and in their fury
they inflicted on them tortures to read of which should make the
blood run cold.  And their rage and fury increased to madness, when
they found that these Christians, instead of complaining, instead of
rebelling, instead of trying to avenge themselves, submitted to all
their sufferings, not only patiently and uncomplaining, but joyfully,
and as an honour and a glory.  Some, no doubt, they conquered by
torture, agony, and terror; and so made them deny Christ, and return
to the wickedness of the heathen.  But those renegades were always
miserable.  Their own consciences condemned them.  They felt they had
sold their own souls for a lie; and many of them, in their agony of
mind, repented again, like St. Peter after he had denied his Lord
through fear, proclaimed themselves Christians after all, went
through all their tortures a second time, and died triumphant over
death and hell.

But there were those--to be counted by hundreds, if not thousands--
who dared all, and endured all; and won (as it was rightly called)
the crown of martyrdom.  Feeble old men, weak women, poor slaves,
even little children, sealed their testimony with their blood, and
conquered, not by fighting, but by suffering.

They conquered.  They conquered for themselves in the next world; for
they went to heaven and bliss, and their light affliction, which was
but for a moment, worked out for them an exceeding and eternal weight
of glory.

They conquered in this world also.  For the very world which had
scourged them, racked them, crucified them, burned them alive, when
they were dead turned round and worshipped them as heroes, almost as
divine beings.  And they were divine; for they had in them the Divine
Spirit, the Spirit of God and of Christ.  Therefore the foolish world
was awed, conscience-stricken, pricked to the heart, when it looked
on those whom it had pierced, as it had pierced Christ the Lord, and
cried, as the centurion cried on Calvary, 'Surely these were the sons
and daughters of God.  Surely there was some thing more divine, more
noble, more beautiful in these poor creatures dying in torture, than
in all the tyrants and conquerors and rich men of the earth.  This is
the true greatness, this is the true heroism--to do well and suffer
for it patiently.'

And thenceforth men began to get, slowly but surely, a quite new idea
of true greatness; they learnt to see that not revenge, but
forgiveness; not violence, but resignation; not success, but
holiness, are the perfection of humanity.  They began to have a
reverence for those who were weak in body, and simple in heart,--a
reverence for women, for children, for slaves, for all whom the world
despises, such as the old Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, had never had.
They began to see that God could make strong the weak things of this
world, and glorify himself in the courage and honesty of the poorest
and the meanest.  They began to see that in Christ Jesus was neither
male nor female, Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free,
but that all were one in Christ Jesus, all alike capable of receiving
the Spirit of God, all alike children of the one Father, who was
above all, and in all, and with them all.

And so the endurance and the sufferings of the early martyrs was the
triumph of good over evil; the triumph of honesty and truth; of
purity and virtue; of gentleness and patience; of faith in a just and
loving God:  because it was the triumph of the Spirit of Christ, by
which he died, and rose again, and conquered shame and pain, and
death and hell.



SERMON XXII.--TOLERATION



(Preached at Christ Church, Marylebone, 1867, for the Bishop of
London's Fund.)

MATTHEW xiii. 24-30.

The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in
his field:  but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among
the wheat, and went his way.  But when the blade was sprung up, and
brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.  So the servants
of the household came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good
seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?  He said unto
them, An enemy hath done this.  The servants said unto him, Wilt thou
then that we go and gather them up?  But he said, Nay; lest while ye
gather up the tares, ye toot up also the wheat with them.  Let both
grow together until the harvest and in the time of harvest:  I will
say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them
in bundles to burn them:  but gather the wheat into my barn.

The thoughtful man who wishes well to the Gospel of Christ will
hardly hear this parable without a feeling of humiliation.  None of
our Lord's parables are more clear and simple in their meaning; none
have a more direct and practical command appended to them; none have
been less regarded during the last fifteen hundred years.
Toleration, solemnly enjoined, has been the exception.  Persecution,
solemnly forbidden, has been the rule.  Men, as usual, have fancied
themselves wiser than God; for they have believed themselves wise
enough to do what he had told them that they were not wise enough to
do, and so have tried to root the tares from among the wheat.  Men
have, as usual, lacked faith in Christ; they did not believe that he
was actually governing the earth which belonged to him; that he was
actually cultivating his field, the world:  they therefore believed
themselves bound to do for him what he neglected, or at least did not
see fit, to do for himself; and they tried to root up the tares from
among the wheat.  They have tried to repress free thought, and to
silence novel opinions, forgetful that Christ must have been right
after all, and that in silencing opinions which startled them, they
might be quenching the Spirit, and despising prophecies.  But they
found it more difficult to quench the Spirit than they fancied, when
they began the policy of repression.  They have found that the Spirit
blew where it listed, and they heard the sound of it, but knew not
whence it came, or whither it went; that the utterances which
startled them, the tones of feeling and thought which terrified them,
reappeared, though crushed in one place, suddenly in another; that
the whole atmosphere was charged with them, as with electricity; and
that it was impossible to say where the unseen force might not
concentrate itself at any moment, and flash out in a lightning
stroke.  Then their fear has turned to a rage.  They have thought no
more of putting down opinions:  but of putting down men.  They have
found it more difficult than they fancied to separate the man from
his opinions; to hate the sin and love the sinner:  and so they have
begun to persecute; and, finding brute force, or at least the
chichane of law, far more easy than either convincing their opponents
or allowing themselves to be convinced by them, they have fined,
imprisoned, tortured, burnt, exterminated; and, like the Roman
conquerors of old, 'made a desert, and called that peace.'

And all the while the words stood written in the Scriptures which
they professed to believe:  'Nay:  lest while ye root up the tares,
ye root up the wheat also.'

They had been told, if ever men were told, that the work was beyond
their powers of discernment:  that, whatever the tares were, or
however they came into God's field the world, they were either too
like the wheat, or too intimately entangled with them, for any mortal
man to part them.  God would part them in his own good time.  If they
trusted God, they would let them be; certain that he hated what was
false, what was hurtful, infinitely more than they; certain that he
would some day cast out of his kingdom all things which offend, and
all that work injustice, and whatsoever loveth and maketh a lie; and
that, therefore, if he suffered such things to abide awhile, it was
for them to submit, and to believe that God loved the world better
than they, and knew better how to govern it.  But if, on the
contrary, they did not believe God, then they would set to work, in
their disobedient self-conceit, to do that which he had forbidden
them; and the certain result would be that, with the tares, they
would root up the wheat likewise.

Note here two things.  First, it is not said that there were no tares
among the wheat; nor that the servants would fail in rooting some of
them up.  They would succeed probably in doing some good:  but they
would succeed certainly in doing more harm.  In their short-sighted,
blind, erring, hasty zeal, they would destroy the good with the evil.
Their knowledge of this complex and miraculous universe was too
shallow, their canons of criticism were too narrow, to decide on what
ought, or ought not, to grow in the field of him whose ways and
thoughts were as much higher than theirs as the heaven is higher than
the earth.

Note also, that the Lord does not blame them for their purpose.  He
merely points out to them its danger; and forbids it because it is
dangerous; for their wish to root out the tares was not 'natural.'
We shall libel it by calling it that.  It was distinctly spiritual,
the first impulse of spiritual men, who love right, and hate wrong,
and desire to cultivate the one, and exterminate the other.  To root
out the tares; to put down bad men and wrong thoughts by force, is
one of the earliest religious instincts.  It is the child's instinct-
-pardonable though mistaken.  The natural man--whether the heathen
savage at one end of the scale, or the epicurean man of the world at
the other--has no such instinct.  He will feel no anger against
falsehood, because he has no love for truth; he will be liberal
enough, tolerant enough, of all which does not touch his own self-
interest; but that once threatened, he too may join the ranks of the
bigots, and persecute, not like them, in the name of God and truth,
but in those of society and order; and so the chief priests and
Pontius Pilate may make common cause.  And yet the chief priests,
with their sense of duty, of truth, and of right, however blundering,
concealed, perverted, may be a whole moral heaven higher than Pilate
with no sense of aught beyond present expediency.  But nevertheless
what have been the consequences to both?  That the chief priests have
failed as utterly as the Pilates.  As God forewarned them, they have
rooted up the wheat with the tares; they have made the blood of
martyrs the seed of the Church; and more, they have made martyrs of
those who never deserved to be martyrs, by wholesale and
indiscriminate condemnation.  They have forgotten that the wheat and
the tares grow together, not merely in separate men, but in each
man's own heart and thoughts; that light and darkness, wisdom and
folly, duty and ambition, self-sacrifice and self-conceit, are
fighting in every soul of man in whom there is even the germ of
spiritual life.  Therefore they have made men offenders for a word.
They have despised noble aspirations, ignored deep and sound
insights, because they came in questionable shapes, mingled with
errors or eccentricities.  They have cried in their haste, 'Here are
tares, and tares alone.'

Again and again have religious men done this, for many a hundred
years; and again and again the Nemesis has fallen on them.  A
generation or two has passed, and the world has revolted from their
unjust judgments.  It has perceived, among the evil, good which it
had overlooked in an indignant haste and passionateness, learnt from
those who should have taught it wisdom, patience, and charity.  It
has made heroes of those who had been branded as heretics; and has
cried, 'There was wheat, and wheat alone;' and so religious men have
hindered the very cause for which they fancied that they were
fighting; and have gained nothing by disobeying God's command, save
to weaken their own moral influence, to increase the divisions of the
Church, and to put a fresh stumbling-block in the path of the
ignorant and the young.

And what have been the consequences to Christ's Church?  Have not her
enemies--and her friends too--for centuries past, cried in vain:-


'For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight,
His can't he wrong, whose life is in the right.'


Of Christian morals her enemies have not complained:  but that these
morals have been postponed, neglected, forgotten, in the disputes
over abstruse doctrines, over ceremonies, and over no-ceremonies;
that men who were all fully agreed in their definition of goodness,
and what a good man should be and do, have denounced each other
concerning matters which had no influence whatsoever to practical
morality, till the ungodly cried, 'See how these Christians hate one
another!  See how they waste their time in disputing concerning the
accidents of the bread of life, forgetful that thousands were
perishing round them for want of any bread of life at all!'

My friends, these things are true; and have been true for centuries.
Let us not try to forget them by denouncing them as the utterances of
the malevolent and the unbelieving.  Let us rather imitate the wise
man who said, that he was always grateful to his critics, for,
however unjust their attacks, they were certain to attack, and
therefore to show him, his weakest points.  And here is our weakest
point; namely, in our unhappy divisions--which are the fruits of
self-will and self-conceit, and of the vain attempt to do that which
God incarnate has told us we cannot do--to part the wheat from the
tares.

We cannot part them.  Man could never do it, even in the simpler
Middle Age.  Far less can he do it now in an age full of such
strange, such complex influences; at once so progressive and
conservative; an age in which the same man is often craving after
some new prospect of the future, and craving at the same moment after
the seemingly obsolete past; longing for fresh truth, and yet
dreading to lose the old; with hope struggling against fear, courage
against modesty, scorn of imbecility against reverence for authority
in the same man's heart, while the mystery of the new world around
him strives with the mystery of the old world which lies behind him;
while the belief that man is the same being now as he was five
thousand years ago strives with the plain fact that he is assuming
round us utterly novel habits, opinions, politics; while the belief
that Christ is the same now as he was in Judaea of old--yea, the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever--strives with the plain fact that his
field, the world, is in a state in which it never has been since the
making of the world; while it is often most difficult, though (as I
believe) certainly possible, to see those divine laws at work with
which God governed the nations in old time.  May God forgive us all,
both laity and clergy, every cruel word, every uncharitable thought,
every hasty judgment.  Have we not need, in such a time as this, of
that divine humility which is the elder sister of divine charity?
Have we not need of some of that God-inspired modesty of St. Paul's:
'I think as a child, I speak as a child.  I see through a glass
darkly'?  Have we not need to listen to his warning:  'he that
regardeth the day, to the Lord he regardeth it; and he that regardeth
it not, to the Lord he regardeth it not.  Who art thou that judgest
another?  To his own master he standeth or falleth.  Yea, and he
shall stand; for God is able to make him stand'?  Have we not need to
hear our Lord's solemn rebuke, when St. John boasted how he saw one
casting out devils in Christ's name, and he forbade him, because he
followed not them--'Forbid him not'?  Have we not need to believe St.
James, when he tells us that every good gift and every perfect gift
cometh from above, from the Father of lights, and not (as we have too
often fancied) sometimes from below, from darkness and the pit?  Have
we not need to keep in mind the canon of the wise Gamaliel?--'If this
counsel or this work be of man, it will come to nought:  but if it be
of God, we cannot overthrow it, lest haply we too be found fighting
even against God.'  Have we not need to keep in mind that 'every
spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of
God;' and 'no man saith that Jesus is the Christ, save by the Spirit
of God;' lest haply we, too, be found more fastidious than Almighty
God himself?  Have we not need to beware lest we, like the Scribes
and Pharisees, should be found keeping the key of knowledge, and yet
not entering in ourselves, and hindering those who would enter in?
Have we not need to beware lest, while we are settling which is the
right gate to the kingdom of heaven, the publicans and harlots should
press into it before us; and lest, while we are boasting that we are
the children of Abraham, God should, without our help, raise up
children to Abraham of those stones outside; those hard hearts, dull
brains, natures ground down by the drudgery of daily life till they
are as the pavement of the streets; those so-called 'heathen masses'
of whom we are bid to think this day.

If there be any truth, any reason, in what I have said--or rather in
what Christ and his apostles have said--let us lay it to heart upon
this day, on which the clergy of this great metropolis have found a
common cause for which to plead, whatever may be their minor
differences of opinion.  Let us wish success to every argument by
which this great cause may be enforced, to every scheme of good which
may be built up by its funds.  Let us remember that, however much the
sermons preached this day differ in details, they will all agree,
thank God, in the root and ground of their pleading--duty to Christ,
and to those for whom Christ died.  Let us remember that, to whatever
outwardly different purposes the money collected may be applied, it
will after all be applied to one purpose--to Christian civilization,
Christian teaching, Christian discipline; and that any Christianity,
any Christian civilization, any Christian discipline, is infinitely
better than none; that, though all man's systems and methods must be
imperfect, faulty, yet they are infinitely better than anarchy and
heathendom, just as the wheat, however much mixed with weeds, is
infinitely better than the weeds alone.  But above all, let us wish
well to all schemes of education, of whatever kind, certain that any
education is better than none.  And, therefore, let me entreat you to
subscribe bountifully to that scheme for which I specially plead this
day.

Let me remind you, very solemnly, that the present dearth of
education in these realms is owing mainly to our unhappy religious
dissensions; that it is the disputes, not of unbelievers, but of
Christians, which have made it impossible for our government to
fulfil one of the first rights, one of the first duties, of any
government in a civilized country; namely, to command, and to compel,
every child in the realm to receive a proper education.  Strange and
sad that so it should be:  yet so it is.  We have been letting, we
are letting still, year by year, thousands sink and drown in the
slough of heathendom and brutality, while we are debating learnedly
whether a raft, or a boat, or a rope, or a life-buoy, is the
legitimate instrument for saving them; and future historians will
record with sorrow and wonder a fact which will be patent to them,
though the dust of controversy hides it from our eyes--even the fact
that the hinderers of education in these realms were to be found, not
among the so-called sceptics, not among the so-called infidels; but
among those who believed that God came down from heaven, and became
man, and died on the cross, for every savage child in London streets.
Compulsory government education is, by our own choice and
determination, impossible.  The more solemn is the duty laid on us,
on laity and clergy alike, to supply that want by voluntary
education.  The clergy will do their duty, each in his own way.  Let
the laity do theirs likewise, in fear and trembling, as men who have
voluntarily and deliberately undertaken to educate the lower classes;
and who must do it, or bear the shame for ever.  For in the last day,
when we shall all appear before Him whose ways are not as our ways,
or his thoughts as our thoughts--in that day, the question will not
be, whether the compulsory system, or the denominational system, or
any other system, satisfied best our sectarian ways and our narrow
thoughts:  but whether they satisfied the ways of that Father in
heaven who willeth not that one little child should perish.



SERMON XXIII.--THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST



LUKE xix. 41.

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it.

Let us think awhile what was meant by our Lord's weeping over
Jerusalem.  We ought to learn thereby somewhat more of our Lord's
character, and of our Lord's government.

Why did he weep over that city whose people would, in a few days,
mock him, scourge him, crucify him, and so fill up the measure of
their own iniquity?  Had Jesus been like too many, who since his time
have fancied themselves saints and prophets, would he not have rather
cursed the city than wept over it with tenderness, regret, sorrow,
most human and most divine, for that horrible destruction which
before forty years were past would sweep it off the face of the
earth, and leave not one stone of those glorious buildings on
another?

The only answer is--that, in spite of all its sins, he loved
Jerusalem.  For more than a thousand years, he had put his name
there.  It was to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world,
the city set on a hill, which could not be hid.  From Jerusalem was
to go forth to all nations the knowledge of the one true God, as a
light to lighten the Gentiles, as well as a glory to his people
Israel.

This was our Lord's purpose; this had been his purpose for one
thousand years and more:  and behold, man's sin and folly had
frustrated for a time the gracious will of God.  That glorious city,
with its temple, its worship, its religion, true as far as it went,
and, in spite of all the traditions with which the Scribes and
Pharisees had overlaid it, infinitely better than the creed or
religion of any other people in the old world--all this, instead of
being a blessing to the world, had become a curse.  The Jews, who had
the key of the knowledge of God, neither entered in themselves, nor
let the Gentiles enter in.  They who were to have taught all the
world were hating and cursing all the world, and being hated and
cursed by them in return.  Jerusalem, the Holy City set on a hill,
instead of being a light to the world, was become a nuisance to the
world.  Jerusalem was the salt of the world, meant to help it all
from decay; but the salt had lost its savour, and in another
generation it would be cast out and trodden under foot, and become a
byword among the Gentiles.

Our Lord, The Lord, the hereditary King of the Jews according to the
flesh, as well as the God of the Jews according to the Spirit,
foresaw the destruction of the work of his own hands, of the spot on
earth which was most precious to him.  The ruin would be awful, the
suffering horrible.  The daughters of Jerusalem were to weep, not for
him, but for themselves.  Blessed would be the barren, and those that
never nursed a child.  They would call on the mountains to cover
them, and on the hills to hide them, and call in vain.  Such
tribulation would fall on them as never had been since the making of
the world.  Mothers would eat their own children for famine.  Three
thousand crosses would stand at one time in the valley below with a
living man writhing on each.  Eleven hundred thousand souls would
perish, or be sold as slaves.  It must be.  The eternal laws of
retribution, according to which God governs the world, must have
their way now.  It was too late.  It must happen now.  But it need
not have happened:  and at that thought our Lord's infinite heart
burst forth in human tenderness, human pity, human love, as he looked
on that magnificent city, those gorgeous temples, castles, palaces,
that mighty multitude which dreamt so little of the awful doom which
they were bringing on themselves.

And now, where is he that wept over Jerusalem?  Has he left this
world to itself?  Does he care no longer for the rise and fall of
nations, the struggles and hopes, the successes and the failures of
mankind?

Not so, my friends.  He has ascended up on high, and sat down at the
right hand of God:  but he has done so, that he might fill all
things.  To him all power is given in heaven and earth.  He reigneth
over the nations.  He sitteth on that throne whereof the eternal
Father hath said to him, 'Sit thou on my right hand until I make thy
foes thy footstool;' and again, 'Desire of me, and I shall give thee
the heathen for thine inheritance, and the utmost ends of the earth
for thy possession.'  He is set upon his throne (as St. John saw him
in his Revelation) judging right, and ministering true judgment unto
the people.  The nations may furiously rage together, and the people
may imagine a vain thing.  The kings of the earth may stand up, and
the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his
anointed, saying, 'Let us break their bonds'--that is their laws,--
'asunder, and cast away their cords'--that is, their Gospel--'from
us.'  They may say, 'Tush, God doth not see, neither doth God regard
it.  We are they that ought to speak.  Who is Lord over us?'
Nevertheless Christ is King of kings, and Lord of lords; he reigns,
and will reign.  And kings must be wise, and the judges of the earth
must be learned; they must serve the Lord in fear, and rejoice before
him with reverence.  They must worship the Son, lest he be angry, and
so they perish from the right way.  All the nations of the world,
with their kings and their people, their war, their trade, their
politics, and their arts and sciences, are in his hands as clay in
the hands of the potter, fulfilling his will and not their own, going
his way and not their own.  It is he who speaks concerning a nation
or a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it.  And
it is he again who speaks concerning a nation or kingdom, to build
and to plant it.  For the Lord is king, be the world never so much
moved.  He sitteth between the cherubim, though the earth be never so
unquiet.

But while we recollect this--which in these days almost all forget--
that Christ the Lord is the ruler, and he alone; we must recollect
likewise that he is not only a divine, but a human ruler.  We must
recollect--oh, blessed thought!--that there is a Man in the midst of
the throne of heaven; that Christ has taken for ever the manhood into
God; and that all judgment is committed to him because he is the Son
of man, who can feel for men, and with men.

Yes, Christ's humanity is no less now than when he wept over
Jerusalem; and therefore we may believe, we must believe, that while
Jesus is very God of very God, yet his sacred heart is touched with a
divine compassion for the follies of men, a divine regret for their
failures, a divine pity for the ruin which they bring so often on
themselves.  We must believe that even when he destroys, he does so
with regret; that when he cuts down the tree which cumbers the
ground, he grieves over it; as he grieved over his chosen vine, the
nation of the Jews.

It is a comfort to remember this as we watch the world change, and
the fashions of it vanish away.  Great kingdoms, venerable
institutions, gallant parties, which have done good work in their
time upon God's earth, grow old, wear out, lose their first love of
what was just and true; and know not the things which belong to their
peace, but grow, as the Jews grew in their latter years, more and
more fanatical, quarrelsome, peevish, uncharitable; trying to make up
by violence for the loss of strength and sincerity:  till they come
to an end, and die, often by unjust and unfair means, and by men
worse than they.  Shall we not believe that Christ has pity on them;
that he who wept over Jerusalem going to destruction by its own
blindness, sorrows over the sins and follies which bring shame on
countries once prosperous, authorities once venerable, causes once
noble?

They, too, were thoughts of Christ.  Whatsoever good was in them, he
inspired; whatsoever strength was in them, he gave; whatsoever truth
was in them, he taught; whatsoever good work they did, he did through
them.  Perhaps he looks on them, not with wrath and indignation, but
with pity and sorrow, when he sees man's weakness, folly, and sin,
bringing to naught his gracious purposes, and falling short of his
glorious will.

It is a comfort, I say, to believe this, in these times of change.
Places, manners, opinions, institutions, change around us more and
more; and we are often sad, when we see good old fashions, in which
we were brought up, which we have loved, revered, looked on as sacred
things, dying out fast, and new fashions taking their places, which
we cannot love because we do not trust them, or even understand.  The
old ways were good enough for us:  why should they not be good enough
for our children after us?  Therefore, we are sad at times, and the
young and the ambitious are apt to sneer at us, because we delight in
what is old rather than what is new.

Let us remember, then, that whatsoever changes, still there is one
who cannot change, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for
ever.  Surely he can feel for us, when he sees us regret old fashions
and old times; surely he does not look on our sadness as foolish,
weak, or sinful.  It is pardonable, for it is human; and he has
condescended to feel it himself, when he wept over Jerusalem.

Only, he bids us not despair; not doubt his wisdom, his love, the
justice and beneficence of his rule.  He ordereth all things in
heaven and earth; and, therefore, all things must, at last, go well.


'The old order changes, giving place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.'


We must believe that, and trust in Christ.  We must trust in him,
that he will not cut down any tree in his garden until it actually
cumbers the ground, altogether unfruitful, and taking up room which
might be better used.  We must trust him, that he will cast nothing
out of his kingdom till it actually offends, makes men stumble and
fall to their destruction.  We must trust him, that he will do away
with nothing that is old, without putting something better in its
place.  Thus we shall keep up our hearts, though things do change
round us, sometimes mournfully enough.  For Christ destroyed
Jerusalem.  But, again, its destruction was, as St. Paul said, life
to all nations.  He destroyed Moses' law.  But he, by so doing, put
in its place his own Gospel.  He scattered abroad the nations of the
Jews, but he thereby called into his Church all nations of the earth.
He destroyed, with a fearful destruction, the Holy City and temple,
over which he wept.  But he did so in order that the Holy City, the
New Jerusalem, even his Church, should come down from heaven; needing
no temple, for he himself is the temple thereof; that the nations of
those which were saved should walk in the light of it; and that the
river of the water of life should flow from the throne of God; and
that the leaves of the trees which grew thereby should be for the
healing of the nations.  In that magnificent imagery, St. John shows
us how the most terrible destruction which the Lord ever brought upon
a holy place and holy institutions was really a blessing to all the
world.  Let us believe that it has been so often since; that it will
be so often again.  Let us look forward to the future with hope and
faith, even while we look back on the past with love and regret.  Let
us leave unmanly and unchristian fears to those who fancy that Christ
has deserted his kingdom, and has left them to govern it in his
stead; and who naturally break out into peevishness and terrified
lamentations, when they discover that the world will not go their
way, or any man's way, because it is going the way of God, whose ways
are not as man's ways nor his thoughts as man's thoughts.  Let us
have faith in God and in Christ, amid all the chances and changes of
this mortal life; and believe that he is leading the world and
mankind to


   'One far-off divine event
Toward which the whole creation moves;'


and possess our souls in patience, and in faith, and in hope for
ourselves and for our children after; while we say, with the Psalmist
of old:  'Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundations of
the earth, and the heavens are the work of thy hands.  They shall
perish, but thou shalt endure.  They all shall wax old as doth a
garment; and as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be
cleansed.  But thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.  The
children of thy servants shall continue; and their seed shall stand
fast in thy sight.'  Amen.



SERMON XXIV.--THE LIKENESS OF GOD



EPHESIANS iv. 23, 24.

And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and that ye put on the new
man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.

Be renewed, says St. Paul, in the spirit of your mind--in the tone,
character, and habit of your mind.  And put on the new man, the new
pattern of man, who was created after God, in righteousness and true
holiness.

Pay attention, I beg you, to every word here.  To understand them
clearly is most important to you.  According as you take them rightly
or wrongly, will your religion be healthy or unhealthy, and your
notion of what God requires of you true or false.  The new man, the
new pattern of man, says St. Paul, is created after God.  That, is
after the pattern of God, in the image of God, in the likeness of
God.  You will surely see that that is his meaning.  We speak of
making a thing after another thing; meaning, make it exactly like
another thing.  So, by making a man after God, St. Paul means making
a man like God.

Now what is this man?  None, be sure, save Christ himself, the co-
equal and co-eternal Son of God.  Of him alone can it be said,
utterly, that he is after God--the brightness of God's glory, and the
express image of his person.  But still, he is a man, and meant as a
pattern to men; the new Adam; the new pattern, type, and ideal for
all mankind.  Him, says St. Paul,--that is, his likeness,--we are to
put on, that as he was after the likeness of God, so may we be
likewise.

But now, in what does this same likeness consist?

St. Paul tells us distinctly, lest we should mistake a matter of such
boundless importance as the question of all questions--What is the
life of God, the Divine and Godlike life?

It is created, founded, says he, in righteousness and true holiness.
That is the character, that is the form of it.  Whatever we do not
know, whatever we cannot know, concerning God, and his Divine life,
we know that it consists of righteousness and true holiness.

And what is righteousness?  Justice.  You must understand--as any
good scholar or divine would assure you--that St. Paul is not
speaking here of the imputed righteousness of Christ.  He is speaking
of righteousness in the simple Old Testament meaning of the word, of
justice, whereof our Lord has said, 'Do unto others as ye would they
should do unto you;' justice, which, as wise men of old have said,
consists in this,--to harm no man, and to give each man his own.
That is true righteousness and justice, and that is the Godlike life.

'And true holiness.'  That is, truthful holiness, honest holiness.
This is St. Paul's meaning.  As any good scholar or divine would tell
you, St. Paul's exact words are 'the holiness of truth.'  He does not
mean true holiness as opposed to a false holiness, a legal holiness,
a holiness of empty forms and ceremonies, or a holiness of ascetism
and celibacy; but as opposed to a holiness which does not speak the
truth, to that sly, untruthful, prevaricating holiness which was only
too common in St. Paul's time, and has been but too common since.  Be
honest, says St. Paul; for this too is part of the Godlike life, and
the new man is created after God, in justice and honesty.

And that this is what St. Paul actually means is clear from what
immediately follows:  'Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man
truth with his neighbour:  for we are members one of another.'

What does the 'wherefore' mean, if not that, because the life of God
is a life of justice and honesty, therefore you must not lie;
therefore you must not hear spite and malice; therefore you must not
steal, but rather work; therefore you must avoid all foul talk which
may injure your neighbour; but rather teach, refine, educate him?

It would seem at first sight that this would have been a gospel, and
good news to men.  But, alas! it has not been such.  In all ages, in
all religions, men have turned away from this simple righteousness of
God, which is created in justice and truth, and have sought some
righteousness of their own, founded upon anything and everything save
common morality and honesty.  Alas for the spiritual pride of man!
He is not content to be simply just and true! for any one and every
one, he thinks, can be that.  He must needs be something, which other
people cannot be.  He must needs be able to thank God that he is not
as other men are, and say, 'This people, this wicked world, who
knoweth not our law, is accursed.'

If God had bid men do some great thing to save their souls, would
they not have done it?  How much more when he says simply to them, as
to Naaman, 'Wash, and be clean.'  'Wash you,' says the Lord by the
prophet Isaiah, 'make you clean.  Put away the evil of your doings
from before my eyes.  Cease to do evil.  Learn to do well, seek
justice, relieve the oppressed,' and then, 'though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be white as snow.'  But no:  any one can do that;
and therefore it is beneath the spiritual pride of man.  In our own
days, there are too many who do not hesitate to look down on plain
justice, and plain honesty, as natural virtues, which (so they say)
men can have without the grace of God, and make a distinction between
these natural virtues and the effects of God's Spirit; which is not
only not to be found in Scripture, but is contradicted by Scripture
from beginning to end.

Now there can be no doubt that such notions concerning religion do
harm; that they demoralise thousands,--that is, make them less moral
and good men.  For there are thousands, especially in England, who
are persons of good common-sense, uprightness, and truthfulness:  but
they have not lively fancies, or quick feelings.  They have no
inclination for a life of exclusive devoutness; and if they had, they
have no time for it.  They must do their business in the world where
God has put them.  And when they are told that God requires of them
certain frames and feelings, and that the Godlike life consists in
them, then they are disheartened, and say, 'There is no use, then, in
my trying to be religious, or moral either.  If plain honesty,
justice, sobriety, usefulness in my place will not please God, I
cannot please him at all.  Why then should I try, if my way of trying
is of no use?  Why should I try to be honest, sober, and useful, if
that is not true religion?--if what God wants of me is not virtue,
but a certain high-flown religiousness which I cannot feel or even
understand?'--and so they grow weary in well-doing, and careless
about the plain duties of morality.  They become careless, likewise,
about the plain duties of religion; and so they are demoralised,
because they are told that justice and the holiness of truth are not
the Godlike and eternal life; because they are told that religion has
little or nothing to do with their daily life and business, nothing
to do with those just and truthful instincts of their hearts, which
they feel to be the most sacred things about them; which are their
best, if not their only guide in life.  But more:  they fall into the
mistake that they can have a righteousness of their own; and into
that Pelagianism, as it is called, which is growing more and more the
creed of modern men of the world.

Too many religious people, on the other hand, are demoralised by the
very same notion.

They too are taught that justice and truth are mere 'morality,' as it
is called, and not the grace of God; that they are not the foundation
of the Divine life, that they are not the essence of true religion.
Therefore they become more and more careless about mere morality,--so
careless of justice, so careless of truth, as to bring often fearful
scandals on religion.

Meanwhile men in general, especially Englishmen, have a very sound
instinct on this whole matter.  They have a sound instinct that if
God be good, then goodness is the only true mark of godliness; and
that goodness consists first and foremost in plain justice and plain
honesty; and they ask, not what a man's religious profession is, not
what his religious observances are:  but--'What is the man himself?
Is he a just, upright, and fair-dealing man?  Is he true?  Can we
depend on his word?'  If not, his religion counts for nothing with
them:  as it ought to count.

Now I hold that St. Paul in this text declares that the plain English
folk who talk thus, and who are too often called mere worldlings, and
men of the world, are right; that justice and honesty are the Divine
life itself, and the very likeness of Christ and of God.

Justice and truth all men can have, and therefore all men are
required to have.  About devotional feelings, about religious
observances, however excellent and blessed, we may deceive ourselves;
for we may put them in the place of sanctification, of righteousness
and true holiness.  About justice and honesty we cannot deceive
ourselves; for they are sanctification itself, righteousness itself,
true holiness itself, the very likeness of God, and the very grace of
God.

But if so, they come from God; they are God's gift, and not any
natural product of our own hearts:  and for that very reason we can
and must keep them alive in us by prayer.  As long as we think that
the sentiment of justice and truth is our own, so long shall we be in
danger of forgetting it, paltering with it, playing false to it in
temptation, and by some injustice or meanness grieving (as St. Paul
warns us) the Holy Spirit of God, who has inspired us with that
priceless treasure.

But if we believe that from God, the fount of justice, comes all our
justice; that from God, the fount of truth, comes all our
truthfulness, then we shall cry earnestly to him, day by day, as we
go about this world's work, to be kept from all injustice, and from
all falsehood.  We shall entreat him to cleanse us from our secret
faults, and to give us truth in the inward parts; to pour into our
hearts that love to our neighbour which is justice itself, for it
worketh no ill to its neighbour, and so fulfils the law.  We shall
dread all meanness and cruelty, as sins against the very Spirit of
God; and our most earnest and solemn endeavour in life will be, to
keep innocence, and take heed to the thing that is right; for that
will bring us peace at the last.



Footnotes:

{243}  Wordsworth's 'Ode on Tintern Abbey.'




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