Sermons Preached at Brighton
by Frederick William Robertson · English · Gutenberg #16645 · 551,704 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Sermons Preached at Brighton
Author: Frederick William Robertson
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Most recently updated: December 12, 2020
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SERMONS PREACHED AT BRIGHTON ***
Produced by Laura Wisewell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
SERMONS
_PREACHED AT BRIGHTON._
BY THE LATE
REV. FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON,
THE INCUMBENT OF TRINITY CHAPEL.
_THIRD SERIES._
NEW EDITION.
LONDON:
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH. & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
1884.
(_The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved_)
TO
_THE CONGREGATION_
WORSHIPPING IN
TRINITY CHAPEL, BRIGHTON,
FROM AUGUST 15, 1847, TO AUGUST 15, 1853,
THESE
RECOLLECTIONS OF SERMONS
PREACHED BY THEIR LATE PASTOR,
ARE DEDICATED
CONTENTS.
SERMON I.
Preached April 28, 1850.
THE TONGUE.
ST. JAMES iii. 5, 6.--"Even so the tongue is a little
member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a
little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of
iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the
whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set
on fire of hell." Page 1
SERMON II.
Preached May 5, 1850.
THE VICTORY OF FAITH.
1 JOHN v. 4, 5.--"For whatsoever is born of God overcometh
the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even
our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that
believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" 15
SERMON III.
Preached Whitsunday, May 19, 1850.
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
1 CORINTHIANS xii. 4.--"Now there are diversities of gifts,
but the same Spirit." 29
SERMON IV.
Preached May 26, 1850.
THE TRINITY.
1 THESS. v. 23.--"And the very God of peace sanctify you
wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be
preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." 43
SERMON V.
Preached June 2, 1850.
ABSOLUTION.
LUKE v. 21.--"And the Scribes and the Pharisees began to
reason saying, Who is this which speaketh blasphemies? Who can
forgive sins, but God alone?" 61
SERMON VI.
Preached June 9, 1850.
THE ILLUSIVENESS OF LIFE.
HEBREWS xi. 8-10.--"By faith Abraham, when he was called to
go out into a place which he should after receive for an
inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange
country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs
with him of the same promise: for he looked for a city which hath
foundations, whose builder and maker is God." 77
SERMON VII.
Preached June 23, 1850.
THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST.
2 COR. v. 14, 15.--"For the love of Christ constraineth us;
because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all
dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not
henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them,
and rose again." 90
SERMON VIII.
Preached June 30, 1850.
THE POWER OF SORROW.
2 COR. vii. 9, 10.--"Now I rejoice, not that ye were made
sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance: for ye were made sorry
after a godly manner, that ye might receive damage by us in
nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be
repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death." 104
SERMON IX.
Preached August 4, 1850.
SENSUAL AND SPIRITUAL EXCITEMENT.
EPHESIANS v. 17, 18.--"Wherefore be ye not unwise, but
understanding what the will of the Lord is. And be not drunk with
wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit." 112
SERMON X.
Preached August 11, 1850.
PURITY.
TITUS i. 15.--"Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto
them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even
their mind and conscience is defiled." 122
SERMON XI.
Preached February 9, 1851.
UNITY AND PEACE.
COL. iii. 15.--"And let the peace of God rule in your
hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye
thankful." 130
SERMON XII.
Preached January 4, 1852.
THE CHRISTIAN AIM AND MOTIVE.
MATT. v. 48.--"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father
which is in heaven is perfect." 143
SERMON XIII.
Preached January 4, 1852.
CHRISTIAN CASUISTRY.
1 COR. vii. 18-24.--"Is any man called being circumcised?
let him not become uncircumcised. Is any called in uncircumcision?
let him not be circumcised. Circumcision is nothing, and
uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of
God. Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.
Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou
mayest be made free use it rather. For he that is called in the
Lord, being a servant, is the Lord's freeman; likewise also he that
is called being free, is Christ's servant. Ye are bought with a
price; be not ye the servants of men. Brethren, let every man
wherein he is called therein abide with God." 156
SERMON XIV.
Preached January 11, 1852.
MARRIAGE AND CELIBACY.
1 COR. vii. 29-31.--"But this I say, brethren, the time is
short: it remaineth that both they that have wives be as though
they had none; and they that weep as though they wept not; and they
that rejoice as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as
though they possessed not; and they that use this world as not
abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away." 169
SERMON XV.
Preached January 11, 1852.
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH A FAMILY.
EPH. iii. 14, 15.--"Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole
family in Heaven and earth is named." 181
SERMON XVI.
Preached January 25, 1852.
THE LAW OF CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE.
1 COR. viii. 7-13.--"Howbeit there is not in every man that
knowledge: for some, with conscience of the idol, unto this hour,
eat it as a thing offered unto an idol; and their conscience being
weak is defiled. But meat commendeth us not to God: for neither if
we eat are we the better; neither if we eat not are we the worse.
But take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a
stumbling-block to them that are weak. For if any man see thee
which hast knowledge, sit at meat in the idol's temple, shall not
the conscience of him which is weak be emboldened to eat those
things which are offered to idols; and through thy knowledge shall
the weak brother perish for whom Christ died? But when ye sin so
against the brethren and wound their weak conscience ye sin against
Christ. Wherefore if meat make my brother to offend I will eat no
flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend."
196
SERMON XVII.
Preached May 16, 1852.
VICTORY OVER DEATH.
1 COR. xv. 56, 57.--"The sting of death is sin, and the
strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God which giveth us
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 212
SERMON XVIII.
Preached June 20, 1852.
MAN'S GREATNESS AND GOD'S GREATNESS.
ISAIAH lvii. 15.--"For thus saith the High and Lofty One
that inhabiteth Eternity, whose Name is Holy. I dwell in the high
and holy place--with him also that is of a contrite and humble
spirit." 230
SERMON XIX.
Preached June 27, 1852.
THE LAWFUL AND UNLAWFUL USE OF LAW. (A FRAGMENT.)
1 TIM. i. 8.--"But we know that the law is good, if a man
use it lawfully." 246
SERMON XX.
Preached February 21, 1853.
THE PRODIGAL AND HIS BROTHER.
LUKE xv. 31, 32.--"And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever
with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should
make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is
alive again; was lost, and is found." 253
SERMON XXI.
Preached May 15, 1853.
JOHN'S REBUKE OF HEROD.
LUKE iii. 19, 20.--"But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved
by him for Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, and for all the
evils which Herod had done, added yet this above all, that he shut
up John in prison." 270
SERMONS.
I.
_Preached April 28, 1850._
THE TONGUE.
"Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things.
Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue
is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our
members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the
course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell."--St. James iii.
5-6.
In the development of Christian Truth a peculiar office was assigned
to the Apostle James.
It was given to St. Paul to proclaim Christianity as the spiritual law
of liberty, and to exhibit Faith as the most active principle within
the breast of man. It was St. John's to say that the deepest quality
in the bosom of Deity is Love; and to assert that the life of God in
Man is Love. It was the office of St. James to assert the necessity of
Moral Rectitude; his very name marked him out peculiarly for this
office: he was emphatically called, "the Just:" integrity was his
peculiar characteristic. A man singularly honest, earnest, real.
Accordingly, if you read through his whole epistle, you will find it
is, from first to last, one continued vindication of the first
principles of morality against the _semblances_ of religion.
He protested against the censoriousness which was found connected with
peculiar claims of religious feelings. "If any man among you seem to
be religious and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own
heart, this man's religion is vain." He protested against that spirit
which had crept into the Christian Brotherhood, truckling to the rich,
and despising the poor. "If ye have respect of persons ye commit sin,
and are convinced of the law as transgressors." He protested against
that sentimental fatalism which induced men to throw the blame of
their own passions upon God. "Let no man say, when he is tempted, I am
tempted of God; for God cannot tempt to evil; neither tempteth He any
man." He protested against that unreal religion of excitement which
diluted the earnestness of real religion in the enjoyment of
listening. "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only; deceiving
your own souls." He protested against that trust in the correctness of
theological doctrine which neglected the cultivation of character.
"What doth it profit, if a man _say_ that he hath faith, and have not
works? Can faith save him?"
Read St. James's epistle through, this is the mind breathing through
it all:--all this _talk_ about religion, and spirituality--words,
words, words--nay, let us have _realities_.
It is well known that Luther complained of this epistle, that it did
not contain the Gospel; for men who are hampered by a system will
say--even of an inspired Apostle--that he does not teach the Gospel if
their own favourite doctrine be not the central subject of his
discourse; but St. James's reply seems spontaneously to suggest itself
to us. The Gospel! how can we speak of the Gospel, when the first
principles of _morality_ are forgotten? when Christians are excusing
themselves, and slandering one another? How can the superstructure of
Love and Faith be built, when the very foundations of human
character--Justice, Mercy, Truth--have not been laid?
1st. The license of the tongue.
2nd. The guilt of that license.
The first license given to the tongue is slander. I am not of course,
speaking now of that species of slander against which the law of libel
provides a remedy, but of that of which the Gospel alone takes
cognisance; for the worst injuries which man can do to man, are
precisely those which are too delicate for _law_ to deal with. We
consider therefore not the calumny which is reckoned such by the
moralities of an earthly court, but that which is found guilty by the
spiritualities of the courts of heaven--that is, the mind of God.
Now observe, this slander is compared in the text to poison--"the
tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison." The deadliest
poisons are those for which no test is known: there are poisons so
destructive that a single drop insinuated into the veins produces
death in three seconds, and yet no chemical science can separate that
virus from the contaminated blood, and show the metallic particles of
poison glittering palpably, and say, "Behold, it is there!"
In the drop of venom which distils from the sting of the smallest
insect, or the spikes of the nettle-leaf, there is concentrated the
quintessence of a poison so subtle that the microscope cannot
distinguish it, and yet so virulent that it can inflame the blood,
irritate the whole constitution, and convert day and night into
restless misery.
In St. James's day, as now, it would appear that there were idle men
and idle women, who went about from house to house, dropping slander
as they went, and yet you could not take up that slander and detect
the falsehood there. You could not evaporate the truth in the slow
process of the crucible, and then show the residuum of falsehood
glittering and visible. You could not fasten upon any word or
sentence, and say that it was calumny; for in order to constitute
slander it is not necessary that the word spoken should be false--half
truths are often more calumnious than whole falsehoods. It is not even
necessary that a word should be distinctly uttered; a dropped lip, an
arched eyebrow, a shrugged shoulder, a significant look, an
incredulous expression of countenance, nay, even an emphatic silence,
may do the work: and when the light and trifling thing which has done
the mischief has fluttered off, the venom is left behind, to work and
rankle, to inflame hearts, to fever human existence, and to poison
human society at the fountain springs of life. Very emphatically was
it said by one whose whole being had smarted under such affliction,
"Adder's poison is under their lips."
The second license given to the tongue is in the way of persecution:
"therewith curse we men which are made after the similitude of God."
"We!"--men who bear the name of Christ--curse our brethren! Christians
persecuted Christians. Thus even in St. James's age that spirit had
begun, the monstrous fact of Christian persecution; from that day it
has continued, through long centuries, up to the present time. The
Church of Christ assumed the office of denunciation, and except in the
first council, whose object was not to strain, but to relax the bonds
of brotherhood, not a council has met for eighteen centuries which has
not guarded each profession of belief by the too customary formula,
"If any man maintain otherwise than this, let him be accursed."
Myriad, countless curses have echoed through those long ages; the
Church has forgotten her Master's spirit and called down fire from
heaven. A fearful thought to consider this as the spectacle on which
the eye of God has rested. He looks down upon the creatures He has
made, and hears everywhere the language of religious
imprecations:--and after all, who is proved right by curses?
The Church of Rome hurls her thunders against Protestants of every
denomination: the Calvinist scarcely recognises the Arminian as a
Christian: he who considers himself as the true Anglican, excludes
from the Church of Christ all but the adherents of his own orthodoxy;
every minister and congregation has its small circle, beyond which all
are heretics: nay even among that sect which is most lax as to the
dogmatic forms of truth, we find the Unitarian of the old school
denouncing the spiritualism of the new and rising school.
This is the state of things to which we are arrived. Sisters of
Charity refuse to permit an act of charity to be done by a Samaritan;
ministers of the Gospel fling the thunderbolts of the Lord; ignorant
hearers catch and exaggerate the spirit,--boys, girls, and women
shudder as one goes by, perhaps more holy than themselves, who adores
the same God, believes in the same Redeemer, struggles in the same
life-battle, and all this because they have been taught to look upon
him as an enemy of God.
There is a class of religious persons against whom this vehemence has
been especially directed. No one who can read the signs of the times
can help perceiving that we are on the eve of great changes, perhaps a
disruption of the Church of England. Unquestionably there has been a
large secession to the Church of Rome.
Now what has been the position of those who are about to take this
step? They have been taunted with dishonest reception of the wages of
the Church; a watch has been set over them: not a word they uttered in
private, or in public, but was given to the world by some religious
busy-body; there was not a visit which they paid, not a foolish dress
which they adopted, but became the subject of bitter scrutiny and
malevolent gossip. For years the religious press has denounced them
with a vehemence as virulent, but happily more impotent than that of
the Inquisition. There has been an anguish and an inward struggle
little suspected, endured by men who felt themselves outcasts in their
own society, and naturally looked for a home elsewhere.
We congratulate ourselves that the days of persecution are gone by;
but persecution is that which affixes penalties upon _views held_,
instead of upon _life led_. Is persecution _only_ fire and sword? But
suppose a man of sensitive feeling says, The sword is less sharp to me
than the slander: fire is less intolerable than the refusal of
sympathy!
Now let us bring this home; you rejoice that the faggot and the stake
are given up;--_you_ never persecuted--you leave that to the wicked
Church of Rome. Yes, you never burned a human being alive--you never
clapped your hands as the death-shriek proclaimed that the lion's fang
had gone home into the most vital part of the victim's frame; but did
you never rob him of his friends?--gravely shake your head and
oracularly insinuate that he was leading souls to hell?--chill the
affections of his family?--take from him his good name? Did you never
with delight see his Church placarded as the Man of Sin, and hear the
platform denunciations which branded it with the spiritual
abominations of the Apocalypse? Did you never find a malicious
pleasure in repeating all the miserable gossip with which religious
slander fastened upon his daily acts, his words, and even his
uncommunicated thoughts? Did you never forget that for a man to "work
out his own salvation with fear and trembling" is a matter difficult
enough to be laid upon a human spirit, without intruding into the most
sacred department of another's life--that namely, which lies between
himself and God? Did you never say that "it was to be wished he should
go to Rome," until at last life became intolerable,--until he was
thrown more and more in upon himself; found himself, like his
Redeemer, in this world alone, but unable like his Redeemer, calmly to
repose upon the thought that his Father was with him? Then a stern
defiant spirit took possession of his soul, and there burst from his
lips, or heart, the wish for _rest_--rest at any cost,--peace
anywhere, if even it is to be found only in the bosom of the Church of
Rome!
II. The guilt of this license.
The first evil consequence is the harm that a man does himself: "so is
the tongue among the members, that it defiles the whole body." It is
not very obvious, in what way a man does himself harm by calumny. I
will take the simplest form in which this injury is done; it effects a
dissipation of spiritual energy. There are two ways in which the steam
of machinery may find an outlet for its force: it may work, and if so
it works silently; or it may escape, and that takes place loudly, in
air and noise. There are two ways in which the spiritual energy of a
man's soul may find its vent: it may express itself in action,
silently; or in words, noisily: but just so much of force as is thrown
into the one mode of expression, is taken from the other.
Few men suspect how much mere talk fritters away spiritual
energy,--that which should be spent in action, spends itself in words.
The fluent boaster is not the man who is steadiest before the enemy;
it is well said to him that his courage is better kept till it is
wanted. Loud utterance of virtuous indignation against evil from the
platform, or in the drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual
giant: so much indignation as is expressed, has found vent, is wasted,
is taken away from the work of coping with evil; the man has so much
less left. And hence he who restrains that love of talk, lays up a
fund of spiritual strength.
With large significance, St. James declares, "If any man offend not in
word, the same is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body."
He is entire, powerful, because he has not spent his strength. In
these days of loud profession, and bitter, fluent condemnation, it is
well for us to learn the divine force of silence. Remember Christ in
the Judgment Hall, the very Symbol and Incarnation of spiritual
strength; and yet when revilings were loud around Him and charges
multiplied, "He held His peace."
2. The next feature in the guilt of calumny is its uncontrollable
character: "the tongue can no man tame." You cannot arrest a
calumnious tongue, you cannot arrest the calumny itself; you may
refute a slanderer, you may trace home a slander to its source, you
may expose the author of it, you may by that exposure give a lesson so
severe as to make the repetition of the offence appear impossible; but
the fatal habit is incorrigible: to-morrow the tongue is at work
again.
Neither can you stop the consequences of a slander; you may publicly
prove its falsehood, you may sift every atom, explain and annihilate
it, and yet, years after you had thought that all had been disposed of
for ever, the mention of a name wakes up associations in the mind of
some one who heard the calumny, but never heard or never attended to
the refutation, or who has only a vague and confused recollection of
the whole, and he asks the question doubtfully, "But were there not
some suspicious circumstances connected with him?"
It is like the Greek fire used in ancient warfare, which burnt
unquenched beneath the water, or like the weeds which when you have
extirpated them in one place are sprouting forth vigorously in another
spot, at the distance of many hundred yards; or, to use the metaphor
of St. James himself, it is like the wheel which catches fire as it
goes, and burns with a fiercer conflagration as its own speed
increases; "it sets on fire the whole course of nature" (literally,
the wheel of nature). You may tame the wild beast, the conflagration
of the American forest will cease when all the timber and the dry
underwood is consumed; but you cannot arrest the progress of that
cruel word which you uttered carelessly yesterday or this
morning,--which you will utter perhaps, before you have passed from
this church one hundred yards: that will go on slaying, poisoning,
burning beyond your own control, now and for ever.
3. The third element of guilt lies in the unnaturalness of calumny.
"My brethren, these things ought not so to be;" _ought not_--that is,
they are unnatural. That this is St. James's meaning is evident from
the second illustration which follows: "Doth a fountain send forth at
the same place, sweet water and bitter?" "Can the fig tree, my
brethren, bear olive berries, or a vine, figs?"
There is apparently in these metaphors little that affords an argument
against slander; the motive which they suggest would appear to many
far-fetched and of small cogency; but to one who looks on this world
as a vast whole, and who has recognised the moral law as only a part
of the great law of the universe, harmoniously blending with the
whole, illustrations such as these are the most powerful of all
arguments. The truest definition of evil is that which represents it
as something contrary to nature: evil is evil, because it is
unnatural; a vine which should bear olive berries, an eye to which
blue seems yellow, would be diseased: an unnatural mother, an
unnatural son, an unnatural act, are the strongest terms of
condemnation. It is this view which Christianity gives of moral evil:
the teaching of Christ was the recall of man to nature, not an
infusion of something new into Humanity. Christ came to call out all
the principles and powers of human nature, to restore the natural
equilibrium of all our faculties; not to call us back to our own
individual selfish nature, but to human nature as it is in God's
ideal--the perfect type which is to be realised in us. Christianity is
the regeneration of our whole nature, not the destruction of one atom
of it.
Now the nature of man is to adore God and to love what is god-like in
man. The office of the tongue is to bless. Slander is guilty because
it contradicts this; yet even in slander itself, perversion as it is,
the interest of man in man is still distinguishable. What is it but
perverted interest which makes the acts, and words, and thoughts of
his brethren, even in their evil, a matter of such strange delight?
Remember therefore, this contradicts your nature and your destiny; to
speak ill of others makes you a monster in God's world: get the habit
of slander, and then there is not a stream which bubbles fresh from
the heart of nature,--there is not a tree that silently brings forth
its genial fruit in its appointed season,--which does not rebuke and
proclaim you to be a monstrous anomaly in God's world.
4. The fourth point of guilt is the diabolical character of slander;
the tongue "is set on fire of hell." Now, this is no mere strong
expression--no mere indignant vituperation--it contains deep and
emphatic meaning.
The apostle means literally what he says, slander is diabolical. The
first illustration we give of this is contained in the very meaning of
the word devil. "Devil," in the original, means traducer or slanderer.
The first introduction of a demon spirit is found connected with a
slanderous insinuation against the Almighty, implying that His command
had been given in envy of His creature: "for God doth know that in the
day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be
as gods, knowing good and evil."
In the magnificent imagery of the book of Job, the accuser is
introduced with a demoniacal and malignant sneer, attributing the
excellence of a good man to interested motives; "Doth Job serve God
for naught?" There is another mode in which the fearful accuracy of
St. James's charge may be demonstrated. There is one state only from
which there is said to be no recovery--there is but one sin that is
called unpardonable. The Pharisees beheld the works of Jesus. They
could not deny that they were good works, they could not deny that
they were miracles of beneficence, but rather than acknowledge that
they were done by a good man through the co-operation of a Divine
spirit, they preferred to account for them by the wildest and most
incredible hypothesis; they said they were done by the power of
Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. It was upon this occasion that
our Redeemer said with solemn meaning, "For every idle word that men
shall speak, they shall give account in the day of judgment." It was
then that He said, for a word spoken against the Holy Ghost there is
no forgiveness in this world, or in the world to come.
Our own hearts respond to the truth of this--to call evil, good, and
good, evil--to see the Divinest good, and call it Satanic evil--below
this lowest deep there is _not_ a lower still. There is no cure for
mortification of the flesh--there is no remedy for ossification of the
heart. Oh! that miserable state, when to the jaundiced eye all good
transforms itself into evil, and the very instruments of health
become the poison of disease. Beware of every approach of
this!--Beware of that spirit which controversy fosters, of watching
only for the evil in the character of an antagonist!--Beware of that
habit which becomes the slanderer's life, of magnifying every speck of
evil and closing the eye to goodness!--till at last men arrive at the
state in which generous, universal love (which is heaven) becomes
impossible, and a suspicious, universal hate takes possession of the
heart, and _that_ is hell!
There is one peculiar manifestation of this spirit to which I desire
specially to direct your attention.
The politics of the community are guided by the political press. The
religious views of a vast number are formed by that portion of the
press which is called religious; it becomes, therefore, a matter of
deepest interest to inquire what is the spirit of that "religious
press." I am not asking you what are the views maintained--whether
Evangelical, Anglican, or Romish--but what is the _spirit_ of that
fountain from which the religious life of so many is nourished?
Let any man cast his eye over the pages of this portion of the
press--it matters little to which party the newspaper or the journal
may belong--he will be startled to find the characters of those whom
he has most deeply reverenced, whose hearts he knows, whose integrity
and life are above suspicion, held up to scorn and hatred: the organ
of one party is established against the organ of another, and it is
the recognised office of each to point out with microscopic care the
names of those whose views are to be shunned; and in order that these
may be the more shrunk from, the characters of those who hold such
opinions are traduced and vilified. There is no personality too
mean--there is no insinuation too audacious or too false for the
recklessness of these daring slanderers. I do not like to use the
expression, lest it should appear to be merely one of theatrical
vehemence; but I say it in all seriousness, adopting the inspired
language of the Bible, and using it advisedly and with accurate
meaning, the spirit which guides the "religious press" of this
country, which dictates those personalities, which prevents
controversialists from seeing what is good in their opponents, which
attributes low motives to account for excellent lives, and teaches
men whom to suspect, and shun, rather than point out where it is
possible to admire and love--is a spirit "set on fire of hell."
Before we conclude, let us get at the root of the matter. "Man," says
the Apostle James, "was made in the image of God:" to slander man is
to slander God: to love what is good in man is to love it in God. Love
is the only remedy for slander: no set of rules or restrictions can
stop it; we may denounce, but we shall denounce in vain. The radical
cure of it is Charity--"out of a pure heart and faith unfeigned," to
feel what is great in the human character; to recognise with delight
all high, and generous, and beautiful actions; to find a joy even in
seeing the good qualities of your bitterest opponents, and to admire
those qualities even in those with whom you have least sympathy--be it
either the Romanist or the Unitarian--this is the only spirit which
can heal the love of slander and of calumny. If we would bless God, we
must _first_ learn to bless man, who is made in the image of God.
II.
_Preached May 5, 1850._
THE VICTORY OF FAITH.
"For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is
the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he
that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the
Son of God?"--1 John v. 4-5.
There are two words in the system of Christianity which have received
a meaning so new, and so emphatic, as to be in a way peculiar to it,
and to distinguish it from all other systems of morality and religion;
these two words are--the World, and Faith. We find it written in
Scripture that to have the friendship of the world is to be the enemy
of God--- whereupon the question arises--The world?--did not God make
the world? Did He not place us in the world? Are we not to love what
God has made? And yet meeting this distinctly we have the inspired
record, "Love not the World."
The object of the Statesman is, or ought to be, to produce as much
worldly prosperity as possible--but Christianity, that is Christ,
speaks little of this world's prosperity, underrates it--nay, speaks
of it at times as infinitely dangerous.
The legislator prohibits crime--the moralist transgression--the
religionist sin. To these Christianity superadds a new enemy--the
world and the things of the world. "If any man love the world, the
love of the Father is not in him."
The other word used in a peculiar sense is Faith. It is impossible for
any one to have read his Bible ever so negligently, and not to be
aware that the word Faith, or the grace of Faith, forms a large
element in the Christian system. It is said to work miracles, remove
mountains, justify the soul, trample upon impossibilities. Every
apostle, in his way, assigns to faith a primary importance. Jude
tells us to "build up ourselves in our most holy faith." John tells us
that--"he that believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is the born of
God;" and Paul tells us that, not by merit nor by works, but by trust
or reliance only, can be formed that state of soul by which man is
reckoned just before God. In these expressions, the apostles only
develope their Master's meaning, when He uses such words as these,
"All things are possible to him that believeth:" "O thou of little
faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?"
These two words are brought into diametrical opposition in the text,
so that it branches into a two-fold line of thought
I. The Christian's enemy, the World.
II. The victory of Faith.
In endeavouring to understand first what is meant by the world, we
shall feel that the mass of evil which is comprehended under this
expression, cannot be told out in any one sermon; it is an expression
used in various ways, sometimes meaning one thing, sometimes meaning
another;-but we will endeavour to explain its general principles--and
these we will divide into three heads; first, the tyranny of the
present; secondly, the tyranny of the sensual; and lastly, the spirit
of society.
1. The tyranny of the present.
"Christ," says the Apostle Paul, "hath redeemed us from this present
evil world;" and again, "Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this,
present world."
Let a stress be laid on the word _present_. Worldliness is the
attractive power of something present, in opposition to something to
come. It is this rule and tyranny of the present that constitutes
Demas a worldly man.
In this respect, worldliness is the spirit of childhood carried on
into manhood. The child lives in the present hour--to-day to him is
everything. The holiday promised at a distant interval is no holiday
at all--it must be either now or never. Natural in the child, and
therefore pardonable, this spirit, when carried on into manhood, is
coarse--is worldliness. The most distinct illustration given us of
this, is the case of Esau. Esau came from the hunting-field worn and
hungry; the only means of procuring the tempting mess of his brother's
pottage was the sacrifice of his father's blessing, which in those
ages carried with it a substantial advantage; but that birthright
could be enjoyed only after _years_--the pottage was _present_, near,
and certain; therefore he sacrificed a future and higher blessing, for
a present and lower pleasure. For this reason Esau is the Bible type
of worldliness: he is called in Scripture a profane, that is, not a
distinctly vicious, but a secular or worldly person--an overgrown
child; impetuous, inconsistent, not without gleams of generosity and
kindliness, but ever accustomed to immediate gratification.
In this worldliness, moreover, is to be remarked the gamester's
desperate play. There is a gambling spirit in human nature. Esau
distinctly expresses this: "Behold I am at the point to die, and what
shall my birthright profit me?" He might never live to enjoy his
birthright; but the pottage was before him, present, certain, _there_.
Now, observe the utter powerlessness of mere preaching to cope with
this tyrannical power of the present. Forty thousand pulpits
throughout the land this day, will declaim against the vanity of
riches, the uncertainty of life, the sin of worldliness--against the
gambling spirit of human nature; I ask what _impression_ will be
produced by those forty thousand harangues? In every congregation it
is reducible to a certainty that, before a year has passed, some will
be numbered with the dead. Every man knows this, but he thinks the
chances are that it will not be himself; he feels it a solemn thing
for Humanity generally--but for himself there is more than a chance.
Upon this chance he plays away life.
It is so with the child: you tell him of the consequences of to-day's
idleness--but the sun is shining brightly, and he cannot sacrifice
to-day's pleasure, although he knows the disgrace it will bring
to-morrow. So it is with the intemperate man: he says--"Sufficient
unto the day is the evil, and the good thereof; let me have my portion
now." So that one great secret of the world's victory lies in the
mighty power of saying "_Now_."
2. The tyranny of the sensual.
I call it _tyranny_, because the evidences of the senses are all
powerful, in spite of the protestations of the reason. In vain you try
to persuade the child that _he_ is moving, and not the trees which
seem to flit past the carriage--in vain we remind ourselves that this
apparently solid earth on which we stand, and which seems so
immoveable, is in reality flying through the regions of space with an
inconceivable rapidity--in vain philosophers would persuade us that
the colour which the eye beholds, resides not in the object itself,
but in our own perception; we are victims of the apparent, and the
verdict of the senses is taken instead of the verdict of the reason.
Precisely so is it with the enjoyments of the world. The man who died
yesterday, and whom the world called a successful man--for what did he
live?--He lived for this world--he gained this world. Houses, lands,
name, position in society--all that earth could give of enjoyments--he
had: he was the man of whom the Redeemer said that his thoughts were
occupied in planning how to pull down his barns and build greater. We
hear men complain of the sordid love of gold, but gold is merely a
medium of exchange for other things: gold is land, titles, name,
comfort--all that the world can give. If the world be _all_, it is
_wise_ to live for gold. There may be some little difference in the
degree of degradation in different forms of worldliness; it is
possible that the ambitious man who lives for power is somewhat higher
than he who merely lives for applause, and he again may be a trifle
higher than the mere seeker after gold--but after all, looking closely
at the matter, you will find that, in respect of the objects of their
idolatry, they agree in this, that all belong to the present.
Therefore, says the Apostle, all that is in the world--"the lust of
the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, is not of the
Father, but of the world," and are only various forms of one great
tyranny. And then when such a man is at the brink of death, the words
said to the man in our Lord's parable must be said to him. "Thou fool,
the houses thou hast built, the enjoyments thou hast prepared; and all
those things which have formed thy life for years--when thy soul is
taken from them, what shall they profit thee?"
3. The spirit of society.
The _World_ has various meanings in Scripture; it does not always mean
the Visible, as opposed to the Invisible; nor the Present, as opposed
to the Future: it sometimes stands for the secular spirit of the
day--the Voice of Society.
Our Saviour says, "If ye were of the world, the world would love his
own." The apostle says, "Be not conformed to this world;" and to the
Gentiles he writes, "In time past ye walked according to the course of
this world, the spirit which now worketh in the children of
disobedience." In these verses, a tone, a temper, a spirit is spoken
of. There are two things--the Church and the World--two spirits
pervading different bodies of men, brought before us in these
verses--those called the Spirit-born, and those called the World,
which is to be overcome by the Spirit-born, as in the text,
"Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world."
Let us understand what is meant by the Church of God. When we speak of
the Church we generally mean a society to aid men in their progress
God-wards; but the Church of God is by no means co-extensive in any
age with that organized institution which we _call_ the Church;
sometimes it is nearly co-extensive--that is, nearly all on earth who
are born of God are found within its pale, nearly all who are of the
world are extraneous to it--but sometimes the born of God have been
found distinct from the Institution called the Church, opposed to
it--persecuted by it. The Institution of the Church is a blessed
ordinance of God, organized on earth for the purpose of representing
the Eternal Church and of extending its limits, but still ever
subordinate to it.
The Eternal Church is "the general assembly and church of the
first-born which are written in heaven;" the selected spirits of the
most High, who are struggling with the evil of their day; sometimes
alone, like Elijah, and like him, longing that their work was done;
sometimes conscious of their union with each other. God is for ever
raising up a succession of these--His brave, His true, His good.
Apostolical succession, as taught sometimes, means simply this--a
succession of miraculous powers flowing in a certain line. The true
apostolic succession is--not a succession in an hereditary line, or
line marked by visible signs which men can always identify, but a
succession emphatically spiritual.
The Jews looked for an hereditary succession; they thought that
because they were Abraham's seed, the spiritual succession was
preserved; the Redeemer told them that "God was able of those stones
to raise up children unto Abraham." Therefore is this ever a spiritual
succession--in the hands of God alone; and they are here called the
God-born, coming into the world variously qualified; sometimes
baptized with the spirit which makes them, like James and John, the
"Sons of Thunder," sometimes with a milder spirit, as Barnabas, which
makes them "Sons of Consolation," sometimes having their souls
indurated into an adamantine hardness, which makes them living
stones--rocks like Peter, against which the billows of this world dash
themselves in vain, and against which the gates of hell shall not
prevail. But whether as apostles, or visitors of the poor, or parents
of a family, born to do a work on earth, to speak a word, to discharge
a mission which they themselves perhaps do not know till it is
accomplished--these are the Church of God--the children of the Most
High--the noble army of the Spirit-born! Opposed to this stands the
mighty confederacy called the World. But beware of fixing on
individual men in order to stigmatize _them_ as the world. You may not
draw a line and say--"We are the sons of God, ye are of the world."
The world is not so much individual as it is a certain spirit; the
course of this world is "the spirit which now worketh in the children
of disobedience." The world and the Church are annexed as inseparably
as the elements which compose the atmosphere. Take the smallest
portion of this that you will, in a cubic inch the same proportions
are found as in a temple. In the ark there was a Ham; in the small
band of the twelve apostles there was a Judas.
The spirit of the world is for ever altering--impalpable; for ever
eluding, in fresh forms, your attempts to seize it. In the days of
Noah, the spirit of the world was _violence_. In Elijah's day it was
_idolatry_. In the day of Christ it was _power_ concentrated and
condensed in the government of Rome. In ours, perhaps, it is the _love
of money_. It enters in different proportions into different bosoms;
it is found in a different form in contiguous towns; in the
fashionable watering place, and in the commercial city: it is this
thing at Athens, and another in Corinth. This is the spirit of the
world--a thing in my heart and yours: to be struggled against, not so
much in the case of others, as in the silent battle to be done within
our own souls. Pass we on now to consider--
II. The victory of faith.
Faith is a theological expression; we are apt to forget that it has
any other than a theological import; yet it is the commonest principle
of man's daily life, called in that region prudence, enterprise, or
some such name. It is in effect the principle on which alone any human
superiority can be gained. Faith, in religion, is the same principle
as faith in worldly matters, differing only in its object: it rises
through successive stages. When, in reliance upon your promise, your
child gives up the half-hour's idleness of to-day for the holiday of
to-morrow, he lives by faith; a future supersedes the present
pleasure. When he abstains from over-indulgence of the appetite, in
reliance upon your word that the result will be pain and sickness,
sacrificing the present pleasure for fear of future punishment, he
acts on faith: I do not say that this is a high exercise of faith--it
is a very low one--but it _is_ faith.
Once more: the same motive of action may be carried on into manhood;
in our own times two religious principles have been exemplified in the
subjugation of a vice. The habit of intoxication has been broken by an
appeal to the principle of combination, and the principle of belief.
Men were taught to feel that they were not solitary stragglers against
the vice; they were enrolled in a mighty army, identified in
principles and interests. Here was the principle of the
Church--association for reciprocated strength; they were thus taught
the inevitable result of the indulgence of the vice. The missionaries
of temperance went through the country contrasting the wretchedness
and the degradation and the filth of drunkenness with the domestic
comfort, and the health, and the regular employment of those who were
masters of themselves. So far as men believed this, and gave up the
tyranny of the present for the hope of the future--so far they lived
by faith.
Brethren, I do not say that this was a high triumph for the principle
of faith; it was in fact, little more than selfishness; it was a high
future balanced against a low present; only the preference of a future
and higher physical enjoyment to a mean and lower one. Yet still to be
ruled by this influence raises a man in the scale of being: it is a
low virtue, prudence, a form of selfishness; yet prudence _is_ a
virtue. The merchant, who forecasts, saves, denies himself
systematically through years, to amass a fortune, is not a very lofty
being, yet he is higher, as a man, than he who is sunk in mere bodily
gratifications. You would not say that the intemperate man--who has
become temperate in order, merely to gain by that temperance honour
and happiness--is a great man, but you would say he was a higher and a
better man than he who is enslaved by his passions, or than the
gambler who improvidently stakes all upon a moment's throw. The
worldly mother who plans for the advancement of a family, and
sacrifices solid enjoyments for a splendid alliance, is only _worldly_
wise, yet in that manoeuvring and worldly prudence there is the
exercise of a self-control which raises her above the mere giddy
pleasure-hunter of the hour; for want of self-control is the weakness
of our nature--to restrain, to wait, to control present feeling with a
large foresight, is human strength.
Once more, instead of a faith like that of the child, which over-leaps
a few hours, or that of the worldly man, which over-passes years,
there may be a faith which transcends the whole span of life, and,
instead of looking for temporal enjoyments, looks for rewards in a
future beyond the grave, instead of a future limited to time.
This is again a step. The child has sacrificed a day; the man has
sacrificed a little more. Faith has now reached a stage which deserves
to be called religious; not that this however, is very grand; it does
but prefer a happiness hereafter to a happiness enjoyed here--an
eternal well-being instead of a temporal well-being; it is but
prudence on a grand scale--another form of selfishness--an
anticipation of infinite rewards instead of finite, and not the more
noble because of the infinitude of the gain: and yet this is what is
often taught as religion in books and sermons. We are told that sin is
wrong, because it will make us miserable hereafter. Guilt is
represented as the short-sightedness which barters for a home on
earth--a home in heaven.
In the text-book of ethics studied in one of our universities, virtue
is defined as that which is done at the command of God for the sake of
an eternal reward. So then, religion is nothing more than a
calculation of infinite and finite quantities; vice is nothing more
than a grand imprudence; and heaven is nothing more than selfishness
rewarded with eternal well-being!
Yet this you will observe, is a necessary step in the development of
faith. Faith is the conviction that God is a rewarder of them who
diligently seek Him; and there is a moment in human progress when the
anticipated rewards and punishments must be of a Mahometan
character--the happiness of the senses. It was thus that the Jews were
disciplined; out of a coarse, rude, infantine state, they were
educated by rewards and punishments to abstain from present sinful
gratification: at first, the promise of the life which now is,
afterwards the promise of that which is to come; but even then the
rewards and punishments of a future state were spoken of, by
inspiration itself, as of an arbitrary character; and some of the best
of the Israelites, in looking to the recompense of reward, seemed to
have anticipated, coarsely, recompense in exchange for duties
performed.
The last step is that which alone deserves to be called Christian
Faith--"Who is he that overcometh but he that believeth that Jesus is
the Christ?" The difference between the faith of the Christian and
that of the man of the world, or the mere ordinary religionist, is not
a difference in mental operation, but in the object of the faith--to
believe that Jesus is the Christ is the peculiarity of Christian
faith.
The anticipated heaven of the Christian differs from the anticipated
heaven of any other man, not in the distinctness with which its
imagery is perceived, but in the kind of objects which are hoped for.
The apostle has told us the character of heaven. "Eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive the things which God hath prepared for them that love
Him"--which glorious words are sometimes strangely misinterpreted, as
if the apostle merely meant rhetorically to exalt the conception of
the heavenly world, as of something beyond all power to imagine or to
paint. The apostle meant something infinitely deeper: the heaven of
God is not only that which "eye hath not seen," but that which eye can
_never_ see; its glories are not of that kind at all which can ever
stream in forms of beauty on the eye, or pour in melody upon the
enraptured ear--not such joys as genius in its most gifted hour (here
called "the heart of man") can invent or imagine: it is something
which these sensuous organs of ours never can appreciate--bliss of
another kind altogether, revealed to the spirit of man by the Spirit
of God--joys such as spirit alone can receive.
Do you ask what these are? "The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy,
peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness,
temperance." That is heaven, and therefore the Apostle tells us that
he alone who "believeth that Jesus is the Christ," and only he, feels
that. What is it to believe that Jesus is the Christ?--That He is the
Anointed One, that His life is the anointed life, the only blessed
life, the blessed life divine for thirty years?--Yes, but if so, the
blessed Life still, continued throughout all eternity: unless you
believe that, you do not believe that Jesus is the Christ.
What is the blessedness that you expect?--to have the joys of earth
with the addition of the element of eternity? Men think that heaven is
to be a compensation for earthly loss: the saints are earthly-wretched
here, the children of this world are earthly-happy; but _that_, they
think, shall be all reversed--Lazarus, beyond the grave, shall have
the purple and the fine linen, and the splendour, and the houses, and
the lands which Dives had on earth: the one had them for time, the
other shall have them for eternity. That is the heaven that men
expect--this earth sacrificed _now_, in order that it may be
re-granted for _ever_.
Nor will this expectation be reversed except by a reversal of the
nature. None can anticipate such a heaven as God has revealed, except
they that are born of the Spirit; therefore to believe that Jesus is
the Christ, a man must be born of God. You will observe that no other
victory overcomes the world: for this is what St. John means by
saying, "Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth
that Jesus is the Christ?" For then it comes to pass that a man begins
to feel, that to do wrong is hell; and that to love God, to be like
God, to have the mind of Christ, is the only heaven. Until this
victory is gained, the world retains its stronghold in the heart.
Do you think that the temperate man has overcome the world, who,
instead of the short-lived rapture of intoxication, chooses regular
employment, health, and prosperity? Is it not the world in another
form, which has his homage? Or do you suppose that the so-called
religious man is really the world's conqueror by being content to give
up seventy years of enjoyment in order to win innumerable ages of the
very same species of enjoyment? Has he not only made earth a hell, in
order that earthly things may be his heaven for ever?
Thus the victory of Faith proceeds from stage to stage: the first
victory is, when the Present is conquered by the Future; the last,
when the Visible and Sensual is despised in comparison of the
Invisible and Eternal. Then earth has lost its power for ever; for if
_all_ that it has to give be lost eternally, the gain of faith is
still infinite.
III.
_Preached Whitsunday, May 19, 1850._
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
"Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit."--1
Corinthians xii, 4.
According to a view which contains in it a profound truth, the ages of
the world are divisible into three dispensations, presided over by the
Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
In the dispensation of the Father, God was known as a Creator;
creation manifested His eternal power and Godhead, and the religion of
mankind was the religion of Nature.
In the dispensation of the Son, God manifested Himself to Humanity
through man; the Eternal Word spoke, through the inspired and gifted
of the human race, to those that were uninspired and ungifted. This
was the dispensation of the prophets--its climax was the advent of the
Redeemer; it was completed when _perfect_ Humanity manifested God to
man. The characteristic of this dispensation was, that God revealed
Himself by an authoritative Voice, speaking from without, and the
highest manifestation of God whereof man was capable, was a Divine
Humanity.
The age in which we at present live is the dispensation of the Spirit,
in which God has communicated Himself by the highest revelation, and
in the most intimate communion, of which man is capable; no longer
through Creation, no more as an authoritative Voice from without, but
as a Law within--as a Spirit mingling with a spirit. This is the
dispensation of which the prophet said of old, that the time should
come when they should no longer teach every man his brother and every
man his neighbour, saying, "Know the Lord"--that is, by a will
revealed by external authority from other human minds--"for they shall
all know him, from the least of them to the greatest." This is the
dispensation, too, of whose close the Apostle Paul speaks thus: "Then
shall the Son also be subject to Him that hath put all things under
Him, that God may be all in all."
The outward humanity is to disappear, that the inward union may be
complete. To the same effect, he speaks in another place, "Yea, though
we have known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth know we Him no
more." For this reason, the Ascension was necessary before Pentecost
could come: the Spirit was not given, we are told, because Jesus was
not yet glorified. It was necessary for the Son to disappear as an
outward authority, in order that he might re-appear as an inward
principle of life. Our salvation is no longer God manifested in a
Christ _without_ us, but as a Christ _within_ us, the hope of glory.
To-day is the selected anniversary of that memorable day when the
first proof was given to the senses, in the gift of Pentecost, that
that spiritual dispensation had begun.
There is a twofold way in which the operations of the Spirit on
mankind may be considered--His influence on the Church as a whole, and
His influence on individuals; both of these are brought together in
the text. It branches, therefore, into a twofold division.
I. Spiritual gifts conferred on individuals.
II. Spiritual union of the Church.
Let us distinguish between the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit: by
the Spirit, the apostle meant the vital principle of new life from
God, common to all believers--the animating Spirit of the Church of
God; by the gifts of the Spirit, he meant the diversities of form in
which He operates on individuals; its influence varied according to
their respective peculiarities and characteristics. In the
twenty-eighth verse of this chapter a full catalogue of gifts is
found; looking at them generally, we discover two classes into which
they may be divided--the first are natural, the second are
supernatural: the first are those capacities which are originally
found in human nature--personal endowments of mind, a character
elevated and enlarged by the gift of the Spirit; the second are those
which were created and called into existence by the sudden approach of
the same influence.
Just as if the temperature of this Northern hemisphere were raised
suddenly, and a mighty tropical river were to pour its fertilizing
inundation over the country, the result would be the impartation of a
vigorous and gigantic growth to the vegetation already in existence,
and at the same time the development of life in seeds and germs which
had long lain latent in the soil, incapable of vegetation in the
unkindly climate of their birth. Exactly in the same way, the flood of
a Divine life, poured suddenly into the souls of men, enlarged and
ennobled qualities which had been used already, and at the same time
_developed_ powers which never could have become apparent in the cold,
low temperature of natural life.
Among the natural gifts, we may instance these: teaching--healing--the
power of government. Teaching is a gift, natural or acquired. To know,
is one thing; to have the capacity of imparting knowledge, is another.
The physician's art again is no supernatural mystery; long and
careful study of physical laws capacitate him for his task. To govern,
again, is a natural faculty: it may be acquired by habit, but there
are some who never could acquire it. Some men seem born to command:
place them in what sphere you will, others acknowledge their secret
influence, and subordinate themselves to their will. The faculty of
organization, the secret of rule, need no supernatural power. They
exist among the uninspired. Now the doctrine of the apostle was, that
all these are transformed and renovated by the spirit of a new life in
such a way as to become almost new powers, or, as he calls them, gifts
of the Spirit. A remarkable illustration of this is his view of the
human body. If there be anything common to us by nature, it is the
members of our corporeal frame; yet the apostle taught that these,
guided by the Spirit as its instruments and obeying a holy will,
became transfigured; so that, in his language, the body becomes a
temple of the Holy Ghost, and the meanest faculties, the lowest
appetites, the humblest organs, are ennobled by the Spirit mind which
guides them. Thus he bids the Romans yield themselves "unto God as
those that are alive from the dead, and their members as instruments
of righteousness unto God."
The second class of gifts are supernatural: of these we find two
pre-eminent--the gift of tongues, and the gift of prophecy.
It does not appear that the gift of tongues was merely the imparted
faculty of speaking foreign languages--it could not be that the
highest gift of God to His Church merely made them rivals of the
linguist; it would rather seem that the Spirit of God, mingling with
the soul of man, supernaturally elevated its aspirations and glorified
its conceptions, so that an entranced state of ecstasy was
produced, and feelings called into energy, for the expression of which
the ordinary forms of speech were found inadequate. Even in a far
lower department, when a man becomes possessed of ideas for which his
ordinary vocabulary supplies no sufficient expression, his language
becomes broken, incoherent, struggling, and almost unnaturally
elevated; much more was it to be expected that when divine and new
feelings rushed like a flood upon the soul, the language of men would
have become strange and extraordinary; but in that supposed case, wild
as the expressions might appear to one coldly looking on and not
participating in the feelings of the speaker, they would be quite
sufficient to convey intelligible meaning to any one affected by the
same emotions.
Where perfect sympathy exists, incoherent utterance--a word--a
syllable--is quite as efficient as elaborate sentences. Now this is
precisely the account given of the phenomenon which attended the gift
of tongues. On the day of Pentecost, all who were in the same state of
spiritual emotion as those who spoke, understood the speakers; each
was as intelligible to all as if he spoke in their several tongues: to
those who were coolly and sceptically watching, the effects appeared
like those of intoxication. A similar account is given by the Apostle
Paul: the voice appeared to unsympathetic ears as that of a barbarian;
the uninitiated and unbelieving coming in, heard nothing that was
articulate to them, but only what seemed to them the ravings of
insanity.
The next was the gift of prophecy. Prophecy has several meanings in
Scripture; sometimes it means the power of predicting future events,
sometimes an entranced state accompanied with ravings, sometimes it
appears to mean only exposition; but prophecy, as the miraculous
spiritual gift granted to the early Church, seems to have been a state
of communion with the mind of God lower than that which was called the
gift of tongues, at least less ecstatic, less rapt into the world to
come, more under the guidance of the reason, more within the control
of calm consciousness--as we might say, less supernatural.
Upon these gifts we make two observations:
1. Even the highest were not accompanied with spiritual faultlessness.
Inspiration was one thing, infallibility another. The gifts of the
Spirit were, like the gifts of Nature, subordinated to the
will--capable of being used for good or evil, sometimes pure,
sometimes mixed with human infirmity. The supernaturally gifted man
was no mere machine, no automaton ruled in spite of himself by a
superior spirit. Disorder, vanity, over-weening self-estimation, might
accompany these gifts, and the prophetic utterance itself might be
degraded to a mere brawling in the Church; therefore St. Paul
established laws of control, declared the need of subjection and rule
over spiritual gifts: the spirits of the prophets were to be subject
to the prophets; if those in the ecstatic state were tempted to break
out into utterance and unable to interpret what it meant, those so
gifted were to hold their peace.
The prophet poured out the truths supernaturally imparted to his
highest spirit, in an inspired and impassioned eloquence which was
intelligible even to the unspiritual, and was one of the appointed
means of convincing the unconverted. The lesson derivable from this is
not obsolete even in the present day. There is nothing perhaps
precisely identical in our own day with those gifts of the early
Church; but genius and talent are uncommon gifts, which stand in a
somewhat analogous relation--in a closer one certainly--than more
ordinary endowments. The flights of genius, we know, appear like
maniac ravings to minds not elevated to the same spiritual level. Now
these are perfectly compatible with mis-use, abuse, and moral
disorder. The most gifted of our countrymen has left this behind him
as his epitaph, "The greatest, wisest, _meanest_ of mankind." The most
glorious gift of poetic insight--itself in a way divine--having
something akin to Deity--is too often associated with degraded life
and vicious character. Those gifts which elevate us above the rest of
our species, whereby we stand aloof and separate from the crowd,
convey no moral--nor even mental--infallibility: nay, they have in
themselves a peculiar danger, whereas that gift which is common to us
all as brethren, the animating spirit of a divine life, in whose soil
the spiritual being of all is rooted, cannot make us vain; we _cannot_
pride ourselves on _that_, for it is common to us all.
2. Again, the gifts which were higher in one sense were lower in
another; as supernatural gifts they would rank thus--the gift of
tongues before prophecy, and prophecy before teaching; but as
blessings to be desired, this order is reversed: rather than the gift
of tongues St. Paul bids the Corinthians desire that they might
prophecy. Inferior again to prophecy was the quite simple, and as we
should say, lower faculty of explaining truth. Now the principle upon
which that was tried was that of utility--not utility in the low sense
of the utilitarian, who measures the value of a thing by its
susceptibility of application to the purpose of this present life, but
a utility whose measure was love, charity. The apostle considered
_that_ gift most desirable by which men might most edify one another.
And hence that noble declaration of one of the most gifted of
mankind--"I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that I
might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown
tongue."
Our estimate is almost the reverse of this: we value a gift in
proportion to its rarity, its distinctive character, separating its
possessor from the rest of his fellow-men; whereas, in truth, those
gifts which leave us in lonely majesty apart from our species, useless
to them, benefiting ourselves alone, are not the most godlike, but the
least so; because they are dissevered from that beneficent charity
which is the very being of God. Your lofty incommunicable thoughts,
your ecstasies, and aspirations, and contemplative raptures--in virtue
of which you have estimated yourself as the porcelain of the earth, of
another nature altogether than the clay of common spirits--tried by
the test of Charity, what is there grand in these if they cannot be
applied as blessings to those that are beneath you? One of our
countrymen has achieved for himself extraordinary scientific renown;
he pierced the mysteries of nature, he analysed her processes, he gave
new elements to the world. The same man applied his rare intellect to
the construction of a simple and very common instrument--that
well-known lamp which has been the guardian of the miner's life from
the explosion of fire. His discoveries are his nobility in this world,
his trifling invention gives him rank in the world to come. By the
former he shines as one of the brightest luminaries in the firmament
of science, by the latter evincing a spirit animated and directed by
Christian love, he takes his place as one of the Church of God.
And such is ever the true order of rank which graces occupy in
reference to gifts. The most trifling act which is marked by
usefulness to others is nobler in God's sight, than the most brilliant
accomplishment of genius. To teach a few Sunday-school children, week
after week, commonplace simple truths--persevering in spite of
dullness and mean capacities--is a more glorious occupation than the
highest meditations or creations of genius which edify or instruct
only our own solitary soul.
II. The spiritual unity of the Church--"the same Spirit."
Men have formed to themselves two ideas of unity: the first is a
sameness of form--of expression; the second an identity of spirit.
Some of the best of mankind have fondly hoped to realize an unity for
the Church of Christ which should be manifested by uniform expressions
in everything: their imaginations have loved to paint, as the ideal of
a Christian Church, a state in which the same liturgy should be used
throughout the world, the same ecclesiastical government, even the
same vestments, the same canonical hours, the same form of
architecture. They could conceive nothing more entirely one than a
Church so constituted that the same prayers, in the very same
expressions, at the very same moment, should be ascending to the
Eternal Ear.
There are others who have thrown aside entirely this idea as
chimerical; who have not only ceased to hope it, but even to wish it;
who if it could be realized, would consider it a matter of regret; who
feel that the minds of men are various--their modes and habits of
thought, their original capacities and acquired associations,
infinitely diverse; and who, perceiving that the law of the universal
system is manifoldness in unity, have ceased to expect any other
oneness for the Church of Christ than that of a sameness of spirit,
showing itself through diversities of gifts. Among these last was the
Apostle Paul: his large and glorious mind rejoiced in the
contemplation of the countless manifestations of spiritual nature
beneath which he detected one and the same pervading Mind. Now let us
look at this matter somewhat more closely.
1. All real unity is manifold. Feelings in themselves identical find
countless forms of expression: for instance, sorrow is the same
feeling throughout the human race; but the Oriental prostrates himself
upon the ground, throws dust upon his head, tears his garments, is not
ashamed to break out into the most violent lamentations. In the north,
we rule our grief in public; suffer not even a quiver to be seen upon
the lip or brow, and consider calmness as the appropriate expression
of manly grief. Nay, two sisters of different temperament will show
their grief diversely; one will love to dwell upon the theme of the
qualities of the departed, the other feels it a sacred sorrow, on
which the lips are sealed for ever; yet would it not be idle to ask
which of them has the truest affection? Are they not both in their own
way true? In the same East, men take off their sandals in devotion; we
exactly reverse the procedure, and uncover the head. The Oriental
prostrates himself in the dust before his sovereign; even before his
God the Briton only kneels; yet would it not again be idle to ask
which is the essential and proper form of reverence? Is not true
reverence in all cases modified by the individualities of temperament
and education? Should we not say, in all these forms worketh one and
the same spirit of reverence?
Again in the world as God has made it, one law shows itself under
diverse, even opposite manifestations; lead sinks in water, wood
floats upon the surface. In former times men assigned these different
results to different forces, laws, and gods. A knowledge of Nature has
demonstrated that they are expressions of one and the same law; and
the great difference between the educated and the uneducated man is
this--the uneducated sees in this world nothing but an infinite
collection of unconnected facts--a broken, distorted, and fragmentary
system, which his mind can by no means reduce to order. The educated
man, in proportion to his education, sees the number of laws
diminished--beholds in the manifold appearances of Nature the
expression of a few laws, by degrees fewer, till at last it becomes
possible to his conception that they are all reducible to one, and
that that which lies beneath the innumerable phenomena of Nature is
the One Spirit--God.
2. All _living_ unity is spiritual, not formal; not sameness, but
manifoldness. You may have a unity shown in identity of form; but it
is a lifeless unity. There is a sameness on the sea-beach--that unity
which the ocean waves have produced by curling and forcibly destroying
the angularities of individual form, so that every stone presents the
same monotony of aspect, and you must fracture each again in order to
distinguish whether you hold in your hand a mass of flint or fragment
of basalt. There is no life in unity such as this.
But as soon as you arrive at a unity that is living, the form becomes
more complex, and you search in vain for uniformity. In the parts, it
must be found, if found at all, in the sameness of the pervading life.
The illustration given by the apostle is that of the human body--a
higher unity, he says, by being composed of many members, than if
every member were but a repetition of a single type. It is conceivable
that God might have moulded such a form for human life; it is
conceivable that every cause, instead of producing in different nerves
a variety of sensations, should have affected every one in a mode
precisely similar; that instead of producing a sensation of sound--a
sensation of colour--a sensation of taste--the outward causes of
nature, be they what they may, should have given but one unvaried
feeling to every sense, and that the whole universe should have been
light or sound.
That would have been unity, if sameness be unity; but, says the
apostle, "if the whole body were seeing, where were the hearing?" That
uniformity would have been irreparable loss--the loss of every part
that was merged into the one. What is the body's unity? Is it not
this? The unity of a living consciousness which marvellously animates
every separate atom of the frame, and reduces each to the performance
of a function fitted to the welfare of the whole--its own, not
another's: so that the inner spirit can say of the remotest, and in
form most unlike, member, "That too, is myself."
3. None but a spiritual unity can preserve the rights both of the
individual and the Church. All other systems of unity, except the
apostolic, either sacrifice the Church to the individual, or the
individual to the Church.
Some have claimed the right of private judgment in such a way that
every individual opinion becomes truth, and every utterance of private
conscience right: thus the Church is sacrificed to the individual; and
the universal conscience, the common faith, becomes as nothing; the
spirits of the prophets are not subject to the prophets. Again, there
are others, who, like the Church of Rome, would surrender the
conscience of each man to the conscience of the Church, and coerce the
particulars of faith into exact coincidence with a formal creed.
Spiritual unity saves the right of both in God's system. The Church
exists for the individual, just as truly as the individual for the
Church. The Church is then most perfect when all its powers converge,
and are concentrated on the formation and protection of individual
character; and the individual is then most complete--that is, most a
Christian--when he has practically learned that his life is not his
own, but owed to others--"that no man liveth to himself, and no man
dieth to himself."
Now, spiritual unity respects the sanctity of the individual
conscience. How reverently the Apostle Paul considered its claims,
and how tenderly! When once it became a matter of conscience, this was
his principle laid down in matters of dispute: "Let every man be fully
persuaded in his own mind." The belief of the whole world cannot make
that thing true to me which to me seems false. The conscience of the
whole world cannot make a thing right to me, if I in my heart believe
it wrong. You may coerce the conscience, you may control men's belief,
and you may produce a unity by so doing; but it is the unity of
pebbles on the sea-shore--a lifeless identity of outward form with no
cohesion between the parts--a dead sea-beach on which nothing grows,
and where the very seaweed dies.
Lastly, it respected the sanctity of individual character. Out of
eight hundred millions of the human race, a few features diversify
themselves into so many forms of countenance, that scarcely two could
be mistaken for each other. There are no two leaves on the same tree
alike; nor two sides of the same leaf, unless you cut and kill it
There is a sacredness in individuality of character; each one born
into this world is a fresh new soul intended by his Maker to develope
himself in a new fresh way; we are what we are; we cannot be truly
other than ourselves. We reach perfection not by copying, much less by
aiming at originality; but by consistently and steadily working out
the life which is common to us all, according to the character which
God has given us.
And thus will the Church of God be one at last--will present an unity
like that of heaven. There is one universe in which each separate star
differs from another in glory; one Church in which a single Spirit,
the Life of God, pervades each separate soul; and just in proportion
as that Life becomes exalted does it enable every one to shine forth
in the distinctness of his own separate individuality, like the stars
of heaven.
IV.
_Preached May 26, 1850._
THE TRINITY.
"And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God
your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto
the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."--1 Thess. v. 23.
The knowledge of God is the blessedness of man. To know God, and to be
known by Him--to love God, and to be loved by Him--is the most
precious treasure which this life has to give; properly speaking the
only treasure; properly speaking the only knowledge; for all
knowledge is valuable only so far as it converges towards and ends in
the knowledge of God, and enables us to acquaint ourselves with God,
and be at peace with Him. The doctrine of the Trinity is the sum of
all that knowledge which has as yet been gained by man. I say gained
_as yet_. For we presume not to maintain that in the ages which are to
come hereafter, our knowledge shall not be superseded by a higher
knowledge; we presume not to say that in a state of existence
future--yea even here upon this earth, at that period which is
mysteriously referred to in Scripture as "the coming of the Son of
Man"--there shall not be given to the soul an intellectual conception
of the Almighty, a vision of the Eternal, in comparison with whose
brightness and clearness our present knowledge of the Trinity shall be
as rudimentary and as childlike as the knowledge of the Jew was in
comparison with the knowledge of the Christian.
Now the passage which I have undertaken to expound to-day, is one in
which the doctrine of the Trinity is brought into connection
practically with the doctrine of our Humanity. Before entering into it
brethren, let us lay down these two observations and duties for
ourselves. In the first place, let us examine the doctrine of the
Trinity ever in the spirit of charity.
A clear statement of the deepest doctrine that man can know, and the
intellectual conception of that doctrine, are by no means easy. We are
puzzled and perplexed by _words_; we fight respecting _words_.
Quarrels are nearly always verbal quarrels. Words lose their meaning
in the course of time; nay, the very words of the Athanasian creed
which we read to-day mean not in this age, the same thing which they
meant in ages past. Therefore it is possible that men, externally
Trinitarians, may differ from each other though using the same words,
as greatly as a Unitarian differs from a Trinitarian. There may be
found in the same Church and in the same congregation, men holding all
possible shades of opinion, though agreeing externally, and in words.
I speak within the limit of my own experience when I say that persons
have been known and heard to express the language of bitter
condemnation respecting Unitarianism, who when examined and calmly
required to draw out verbally the meaning of their own conceptions,
have been proved to be holding all the time--unconsciously--the very
doctrine of Sabellianism. And this doctrine is condemned by the Church
as distinctly as that of Unitarianism. Therefore let us learn from all
this a large and catholic charity. There are in almost every
congregation, themselves not knowing it, Trinitarians who are
practically Tri-theists, worshipping three Gods; and Sabellians, or
worshippers of one person under three different manifestations. To
know God so that we may be said intellectually, to appreciate Him, is
blessed: to be unable to do so is a misfortune. Be content with your
own blessedness, in comparison with others' misfortunes. Do not give
to that misfortune the additional sting of illiberal and unchristian
vituperation.
The next observation we have to lay down for ourselves is, that we
should examine this doctrine in the spirit of modesty. There are those
who are inclined to sneer at the Trinitarian; those to whom the
doctrine appears merely a contradiction--a puzzle--an entangled,
labyrinthine enigma, in which there is no meaning whatever. But let
all such remember, that though the doctrine may appear to them absurd,
because they have not the proper conception of it, some of the
profoundest thinkers, and some of the holiest spirits among mankind,
have believed in this doctrine--have clung to it as a matter of life
or death. Let them be assured of this, that whether the doctrine be
true or false, it is not necessarily a doctrine self-contradictory.
Let them be assured of this, in all modesty, that such men never could
have held it unless there was latent in the doctrine a deep
truth,--perchance the truth of God.
We pass on now to the consideration of this verse under the following
divisions. In the first place, we shall view it as a triad in discord:
"I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved
blameless;" in the second place, as a Trinity in Unity: "the God of
peace sanctify you wholly." We take then first of all for our
consideration the triad in discord: "I pray God your whole body and
soul and spirit be preserved blameless."
The apostle here divides human nature into a three-fold division; and
here we have to observe again the difficulty often experienced in
understanding words. Thus words in the Athanasian creed have become
obsolete, or lost their meaning: so that in the present day the words
"person," "substance," "procession," "generation," to an ordinary
person, mean almost nothing. So this language of the apostle, when
rendered into English, shows no difference whatever between "soul" and
"spirit." We say, for instance, that the soul of a man has departed
from him. We also say that the spirit of a man has departed from him.
There is no distinct difference between the two; but in the original
two very different kinds of thoughts--two very different modes of
conception--are represented by the two English words "soul" and
"spirit."
It is our business, therefore, in the first place, to understand what
is meant by this threefold division. When the apostle speaks of the
body, what he means is the animal life--that which we share in common
with beasts, birds, and reptiles; for our life my Christian
brethren--our sensational existence--differs but little from that of
the lower animals. There is the same external form, the same material
in the blood-vessels, in the nerves, and in the muscular system. Nay,
more than that, our appetites and instincts are alike, our lower
pleasures like their lower pleasures, our lower pain like their lower
pain, our life is supported by the same means, and our animal
functions are almost indistinguishably the same.
But, once more, the apostle speaks of what he calls the "soul." What
the apostle meant by what is translated "soul," is the immortal part
of man--the immaterial as distinguished from the material: those
powers, in fact, which man has by nature--powers natural, which are
yet to survive the grave. There is a distinction made in scripture by
our Lord between these two things. "Fear not," says He, "them who can
kill the body; but rather fear Him who can destroy both body and
soul in hell."
We have again, to observe respecting this, that what the apostle
called the "soul," is not simply distinguishable from the body, but
also from the spirit; and on that distinction I have already touched.
By the soul the apostle means our powers natural--the powers which we
have by nature. Herein is the soul distinguishable from the spirit. In
the Epistle to the Corinthians we read--"But the natural man receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto
him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things." Observe, there is a
distinction drawn between the natural man and the spiritual. What is
there translated "natural" is derived from precisely the same word as
that which is here translated "soul." So that we may read just as
correctly: "The man under the dominion of the soul receiveth not the
things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him;
neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. But
he that is spiritual judgeth all things." And again, the apostle, in
the same Epistle to the Corinthians, writes: "That is not first which
is spiritual, but that which is natural:" that is, the endowments of
the soul precede the endowments of the spirit. You have the same truth
in other places. The powers that belong to the Spirit were not the
first developed; but the powers which belong to the soul, that is the
powers of nature. Again in the same chapter, reference is made to the
natural and spiritual body. "There is a natural body and there is a
spiritual body." Literally, there is a body governed by the soul--that
is, powers natural: and there is a body governed by the Spirit--that
is, higher nature.
Let then this be borne in mind, that what the apostle calls "soul" is
the same as that which he calls, in another place, the "natural man."
These powers are divisible into two branches--the intellectual powers
and the moral sense. The intellectual powers man has by nature. Man
need not be regenerated in order to possess the power of reasoning, or
in order to invent. The intellectual powers belong to what the apostle
calls the "soul." The moral sense distinguishes between right and
wrong. The apostle tells us, in the Epistle to the Romans, that the
heathen--manifestly natural men--had the "work of the law written in
their hearts; their conscience also bearing witness."
The third division of which the apostle speaks, he calls the "spirit;"
and by the spirit he means that life in man which, in his natural
state, is in such an embryo condition, that it can scarcely be said to
exist at all--that which is called out into power and vitality by
regeneration--the perfection of the powers of human nature. And you
will observe, that it is not merely the instinctive life, nor the
intellectual life, nor the moral life, but it is principally our
nobler affections--that existence, that state of being, which we call
love. That is the department of human nature which the apostle calls
the spirit; and accordingly, when the Spirit of God was given on the
day of Pentecost, you will, remember that another power of man was
called out, differing from what he had before. That Spirit granted on
the day of Pentecost did subordinate to Himself, and was, intended to
subordinate to Himself, the will, the understanding, and the affection
of man; but you often find these spiritual powers were distinguished
from the natural powers, and existed without them.
So in the highest state of religious life, we are told, men prayed in
the spirit. Till the spirit has subordinated the understanding, the
gift of God is not complete--has not done its work. It is abundantly
evident that a new life was called out. It was not merely the
sharpening of the intellectual powers; it was calling out powers of
aspiration and love to God; those affections which have in them
something boundless, that are not limited to this earth, but seek
their completion in the mind of God Himself.
Now, what we have to say respecting this threefold state of man is, it
is a state of discord. Let us take up a very simple, popular,
every-day illustration. We hear it remarked frequently in conversation
of a man, that if only his will were commensurate with his knowledge,
he would be a great man. His knowledge is great--his powers are almost
unbounded; he has gained knowledge from nearly every department of
science; but somehow or other--you cannot tell why--there is such an
indecision, such a vacillation about the man, that he scarcely knows
what to do, and, perhaps does nothing in this world. You find it
remarked, respecting another class of men, that their will is strong,
almost unbounded in its strength--they have iron wills, yet there is
something so narrow in their conceptions, something so bounded in
their views, so much of stagnation in their thoughts, so much of
prejudice in all their opinions, that their will is prevented from
being directed to anything in a proper manner. Here is the discord in
human nature. There is a distinction between the will and the
understanding. And sometimes a feeble will goes with a strong
understanding, or a powerful will is found in connection with great
feebleness or ignorance of the understanding.
Let us however, go into this more specially. The first cause of
discord in this threefold state of man is the state in which the body
is the ruler; and this, my Christian brethren, you find most visibly
developed in the uneducated and irreligious poor. I say uneducated and
irreligious, because it is by no means education alone which can
subordinate the flesh to the higher man. The religious uneducated poor
man may be master of his lower passions; but in the uneducated and
irreligious poor man, these show themselves in full force; this
discord--this want of unity--appears, as it were, in a magnified form.
There is a strong man--health bursting, as it were, at every pore,
with an athletic body; but coarse, and rude, and intellectually
weak--almost an animal. When you are regarding the upper classes of
society, you see less distinctly the absence of the spirit, unless,
you look with a spiritual eye. The coarseness has passed away--the
rudeness is no longer seen: there is a refinement in the pleasures.
But if you take the life led by the young men of our country--strong,
athletic, healthy men--it is still the life of the flesh: the
unthinking, and the unprincipled life in which there is as yet no
higher life developed. It is a life which, in spite of its refinement,
the Bible condemns as the life of the sensualist.
We pass on now, to another state of discord--a state in which the soul
is ruined. Brethren, this is a natural result--this is what might have
been expected. The natural man gradually subordinates the flesh, the
body, to the soul. It is natural in the development of individuals, it
is natural in the development of society: in the development of
individuals, because that childlike, infantine life which exists at
first, and is almost entirely a life of appetites, gradually subsides.
Higher wants, higher desires, loftier inclinations arise; the passions
of the young man gradually subside, and by degrees the more rational
life comes: the life is changed--the pleasures of the senses are
forsaken for those of the intellect.
It appears natural, again, in the development of society. Civilization
will subordinate the flesh to the soul. In the savage state, you find
the life of the animal. Civilization is teaching a man, on the
principle of this world, to subordinate his appetites; to rule
himself; and there comes a refinement, and a gentleness, and a
polish, and an enjoyment of intellectual pleasures; so that the man is
no longer what the apostle calls a sensual man, but he becomes now
what the apostle calls a natural man. We can see this character
delineated in the Epistle to the Ephesians. "Then we were," says the
apostle, "in our Gentile state, fulfilling the desires of the flesh
and of the mind." Man naturally fulfils not merely the desires of the
flesh, but the desires of the mind. "And were," says the apostle,
"children of wrath."
One of the saddest spectacles is the decay of the natural man before
the work of the Spirit has been accomplished in him. When the savage
dies--when a mere infant dies--when an animal dies--there is nothing
that is appalling or depressing there; but when the high, the
developed intellect--when the cultivated man comes to the last hours
of life, and the memory becomes less powerful, and the judgment fails,
and all that belongs to nature and to earth visibly perishes, and the
higher life has not been yet developed, though it is destined to
survive the grave for ever--even the life of God--there is here ample
cause for grief; and it is no wonder that the man of genius merely
should shed tears at he idea of decaying life.
We pass on to consider the Trinity in unity. All this is contained in
that simple expression, "The God of peace." God is a God of unity. He
makes one where before there were two. He is the God of peace, and
therefore can make peace. Now this peace, according to the Trinitarian
doctrine, consists in a threefold unity. Brethren, as we remarked
respecting this first of all, the distinction in this Trinity is not a
physical distinction, but a metaphysical one. The illustrations which
are often given are illustrations drawn from material sources: if we
take only those, we get into contradiction: for example, when we talk
of personality, our idea is of a being bounded by space; and then to
say in this sense that three persons are one, and one is three, is
simply contradictory and absurd. Remember that the doctrine of the
Trinity is a metaphysical doctrine. It is a trinity--a division in the
mind of God. It is not three materials; it is three persons in a sense
we shall explain by and by.
In the next place I will endeavour to explain the doctrine--not to
prove it, but to show its rationality, and to explain what it is.
The first illustration we endeavour to give in this is taken from the
world of matter. We will take any material substance: we find in that
substance qualities; we will say three qualities--colour, shape, and
size. Colour is not shape, shape is not size, size is not colour. They
are three distinct essences, three distinct qualities, and yet they
all form one unity, one single conception, one idea--the idea for
example, of a tree.
Now we will ascend from that into the immaterial world; and here to be
something more distinct still. Hitherto we have had but three
qualities; we now come to the mind of man, where we find something
more than qualities. We will take three--the will, the affections, and
the thoughts of man. His will is not his affections, neither are his
affections his thoughts; and it would be imperfect and incomplete to
say that these are mere qualities in the man. They are separate
consciousnesses, living consciousnesses--as distinct, and as really
sundered as it is possible for three things to be, yet bound together
by one unity of consciousness. Now we have distincter proof than even
this that these things are three. The anatomist can tell you that the
localities of these powers are different. He can point out the seat of
the nerve of sensation; he can localize the feeling of affection; he
can point to a nerve and say, "There resides the locality of thought."
There are three distinct localities for three distinct qualities,
personalities, consciousnesses; yet all these three are one.
Once more, we will give proof even beyond all that. The act that a man
does is done by one particular part of that man. You may say it was a
work of his genius, or of his fancy; it may have been a manifestation
of his love, or an exhibition of his courage; yet that work was the
work of the whole man: his courage, his intellect, his habits of
perseverance, all helped towards the completion of that single work.
Just in this way certain special works are attributed to certain
personalities of the Deity; the work of Redemption being attributed to
one, the work of Sanctification to another. And yet just as the whole
man was engaged in doing that work, so does the whole Deity perform
that work which is attributed to one essential.
Once more, let us remember that principle which we expounded last
Sunday, that it is the law of Being that in proportion as you rise
from lower to higher life, the parts are more distinctly developed,
while yet the unity becomes more entire. You find for example, in the
lowest forms of animal life one organ performs several functions, one
organ being at the same time heart and brain and blood-vessels. But
when you come to man, you find all these various functions existing in
different organs, and every organ more distinctly developed; and yet
the unity of a man is a higher unity than that of a limpet. When you
come from the material world to the world immaterial, you find that
the more society is cultivated--the more man is cultivated--the more
marvellous is the power of developing distinct powers. In the savage
life it is almost all one feeling; but in proportion as the higher
education advances and the higher life appears, every power and
faculty developes and distinguishes itself, and becomes distinct and
separate. And yet just in proportion as in a nation every part is
distinct, the unity is greater, and just in proportion as in an
individual every power is most complete, and stands out most distinct,
just in that proportion has the man reached the entireness of his
Humanity.
Now brethren, we apply all this to the mind of God. The Trinitarian
maintains against the Unitarian and the Sabellian, that the higher you
ascend in the scale of being, the more distinct are the
consciousnesses, and that the law of unity implies and demands a
manifold unity. The doctrine of Sabellianism, for example, is this,
that God is but one essence--but one person under different
manifestations; and that when He made the world He was called the
Father, when He redeemed the world He was called the Son, and when He
sanctified the world He was called the Holy Ghost. The Sabellian and
the Unitarian maintain that the unity of God consists simply in a
unity of person, and in opposition to this does the Trinitarian
maintain that grandness, either in man or in God, must be a unity of
manifoldness.
But we will enter into this more deeply. The first power or
consciousness in which God is made known to us is as the Father, the
Author of our being. It is written, "In Him we live, and move, and
have our being." He is the Author of all life. In this sense He is not
merely our Father as Christians, but the Father of mankind; and not
merely the Father of mankind, but the Father of creation; and in this
way the sublime language of the prophets may be taken as true
literally, "The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God
shouted for joy;" and the language of the canticle which belongs to
our morning service, "the deeps, the fountains, the wells," all unite
in one hymn of praise, one everlasting hallelujah to God the Father,
the Author of their being. In this respect, simply as the Author of
life, merely as the supreme Being, God has reference to us in relation
to the body. He is the Lord of life: in Him we live, and move, and
have our being. In this respect God to us is as law--as the collected
laws of the universe; and therefore to offend against law, and bring
down the result of transgressing law, is said in Scripture language,
because applied to a person, to be provoking the wrath of God the
Father.
In the next place, the second way through which the personality and
consciousness of God has been revealed to us is as the Son. Brethren,
we see in all those writers who have treated of the Trinity, that much
stress is laid upon this eternal generation of the Son, the
everlasting sonship. It is this which we have in the Creed--the Creed
which was read to-day--"God, of the substance of the Father, begotten
before the worlds;" and, again, in the Nicene Creed, that expression,
which is so often wrongly read, "God of God, Light of Light, very God
of very God," means absolutely nothing. There are two statements made
there. The first is this, "The Son was God:" the second is this, "The
Son was--_of_ God," showing his derivation. And in that, brethren, we
have one of the deepest and most blessed truths of revelation. The
Unitarian maintains a divine Humanity--a blessed, blessed truth. There
is a truth more blessed still--the Humanity of Deity. Before the world
was, there was that in the mind of God which we may call the Humanity
of His Divinity. It is called in Scripture the Word: the Son: the Form
of God. It is in virtue of this that we have a right to attribute to
Him our own feelings; it is in virtue of this that Scripture speaks of
His wisdom, His justice, His love. Love in God is what love is in man;
justice in God is what justice is in man; creative power in God is
what creative power is in man; indignation in God is that which
indignation is in man, barring only this, that the one is emotional,
but the other is calm, and pure, and everlastingly still. It is
through this Humanity in the mind of God, if I may dare so to speak of
Deity, that a revelation became possible to man. It was the Word that
was made flesh; it was the Word that manifested Itself to man. It is
in virtue of the connection between God and man, that God made man in
His own image; that through a long line of prophets the human truth of
God could be made known to man, till it came forth developed most
entirely and at large in the incarnation of the Redeemer. Now in this
respect, it will be observed that God stands connected with us in
relation to the soul as "the Light which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world."
Once more; there is a nearer, a closer, and a more enduring relation
in which God stands to us--that is, the relation of the Spirit. It is
to the writings of St. John that we have to turn especially, if we
desire to know the doctrines of the Spirit. You will remember the
strange way in which he speaks of God. It would almost seem as if the
external God has disappeared to him; nay, as if an external Christ
were almost forgotten, because the internal Christ has been formed. He
speaks of God as kindred with us; he speaks of Christ as Christ _in_
us; and "if we love one another," he says, "God dwelleth in us." If a
man keep the commandments, "God dwelleth in him, and he in God." So
that the spiritual manifestation of God to us is that whereby He
blends Himself with the soul of man.
These then, my Christian brethren, are the three consciousnesses by
which He becomes known to us. Three, we said, _known_ to us. We do not
dare to limit God; we do not presume to say that there are in God only
three personalities--only three consciousnesses: all that we dare
presume to say is this, that there are three in reference to us, and
only three; that a fourth there is not; that perchance, in the present
state a fourth you cannot add to these--Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.
Lastly, let us turn to the relation which the Trinity in unity bears
to the triad in discord. It is intended for the entireness of our
sanctification: "the very God of peace sanctify you wholly." Brethren,
we dwell upon that expression "_wholly_." There is this difference
between Christianity and every other system: Christianity proposes to
ennoble the whole man; every other system subordinates parts to parts.
Christianity does not despise the intellect, but it does not exalt the
intellect in a one-sided way: it only dwells with emphasis on the
third and highest part of man--his spiritual affections; and these it
maintains are the chief and real seat of everlasting life, intended to
subordinate the other to themselves.
Asceticism would crush the natural affections--destroy the appetites.
Asceticism feels that there is a conflict between the flesh and the
spirit, and it would put an end to that conflict; it would bring back
unity by the excision of all our natural appetites, and all the
desires and feelings which we have by nature. But when the apostle
Paul comes forward to proclaim the will of God, he says it is not by
the crushing of the body, but by the sanctification of the body: "I
pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless
unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."
In this my Christian brethren, there is one of the deepest of all
truths. Does a man feel himself the slave and the victim of his lower
passions? Let not that man hope to subdue them merely by struggling
against them. Let him not by fasting, by austerity, by any earthly
rule that he can conceive, expect to subdue the flesh. The more he
thinks of his vile and lower feelings, the more will they be brought
into distinctness, and therefore into power; the more hopelessly will
he become their victim. The only way in which a man can subdue the
flesh, is not by the extinction of those feelings, but by the
elevation of their character. Let there be added to that character,
sublimity of aim, purity of affection; let there be given grandeur,
spiritual nobleness; and then, just as the strengthening of the whole
constitution of the body makes any particular and local affection
disappear, so by degrees, by the raising of the character, do these
lower affections become, not extinguished or destroyed by excision,
but ennobled by a new and loftier spirit breathed through them.
This is the account given by the apostle. He speaks of the conflict
between the flesh and the spirit. And his remedy is to give vigour to
the higher, rather than to struggle with the lower. "This I say then,
Walk in the spirit, and ye _shall not_ fulfil the lust of the flesh."
Once more; the apostle differs from the world in this, that the world
would restore this unity, and sanctify man simply from the soul. It is
this which civilization pretends to effect. We hear much in these
modern days of "the progress of Humanity." We hear of man's invention,
of man's increase of knowledge; and it would seem in all this, as if
man were necessarily becoming better. Brethren, it always must be the
case in that state in which God is looked upon as the Supreme Being
merely, where the intellect of man is supposed to be the chief
thing--that which makes him most kindred to his Maker.
The doctrine of Christianity is this--that unity of all this discord
must be made. Man is to be made one with God, not by soaring
intellect, but by lowly love. It is the Spirit which guides him to all
truth; not merely by rendering more acute the reasoning powers, but by
convincing of sin, by humbling the man. It is the graces of the Spirit
which harmonize the man, and make him one; and that is the end, and
aim, and object of all the Gospel: the entireness of sanctification to
produce a perfectly developed man.
Most of us in this world are monsters, with some part of our being
bearing the development of a giant, and others showing the proportions
of a dwarf: a feeble, dwarfish will--mighty, full-blown passions; and
therefore it is that there is to be visible through the Trinity in us,
a noble manifold unity; and when the triune power of God shall so have
done its work on the entireness of our Humanity, that the body, soul,
and spirit have been sanctified, then shall there be exhibited, and
only then, a perfect affection in man to his Maker, and body, soul,
and spirit shall exhibit a Trinity in unity.
V.
_Preached June 2, 1850._
ABSOLUTION.
"And the Scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, Who is
this which speaketh blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God
alone?"--Luke v. 21.
There are questions which having been again and again settled, still
from time to time, present themselves for _re_-solution; errors which
having been refuted, and cut up by the roots, re-appear in the next
century as fresh and vigorous as ever. Like the fabled monsters of
old, from whose dissevered neck the blood sprung forth and formed
fresh heads, multiplied and indestructible; or like the weeds, which,
extirpated in one place, sprout forth vigorously in another.
In every such case it may be taken for granted that the root of the
matter has not been reached; the error has been exposed, but the truth
which lay at the bottom of the error has not been disengaged. Every
error is connected with a truth; the truth being perennial, springs up
again as often as circumstances foster it, or call for it, and the
seeds of error which lay about the roots spring up again in the form
of weeds, as before.
A popular illustration of this may be found in the belief in the
appearance of the spirits of the departed. You may examine the
evidence for every such alleged apparition; you may demonstrate the
improbability; you may reduce it to an impossibility; still the
popular feeling will remain; and there is a lurking superstition even
among the enlightened, which in the midst of professions of
incredulity, shows itself in a readiness to believe the wildest new
tale, if it possess but the semblance of an authentication. Now two
truths lie at the root of this superstition. The first is the reality
of the spirit-world, and the instinctive belief in it. The second is
the fact that there are certain states of health in which the eye
creates the objects which it perceives. The death-blow to such
superstition is only struck when we have not only proved that men have
been deceived, but shown besides how they came to be deceived; when
science has explained the optical delusion, and shown the
physiological state in which such apparitions become visible. Ridicule
will not do it. Disproof will not do it. So long as men feel that
there is a spirit-world, and so long as to some the impression is
vivid that they have seen it, you spend your rhetoric in vain. You
must show the truth that lies below the error.
The principle we gain from this is that you cannot overthrow falsehood
by negation, but by establishing the antagonistic truth. The
refutation which is to last must be positive, not negative. It is an
endless work to be uprooting weeds: plant the ground with wholesome
vegetation, and then the juices which would have otherwise fed
rankness will pour themselves into a more vigorous growth; the
dwindled weeds will be easily raked out then. It is an endless task to
be refuting error. Plant truth, and the error will pine away.
The instance to which all this is preliminary, is the pertinacious
hold which the belief in a human absolving power retains upon mankind.
There has perhaps never yet been known a religion without such a
belief. There is not a savage in the islands of the South Pacific who
does not believe that his priest can shield him from the consequences
of sin. There was not a people in antiquity who had not dispensers of
Divine favour. That same belief passed from Paganism into Romanism. It
was exposed at the period of the Reformation. A mighty reaction was
felt against it throughout Europe. Apparently the whole idea of human
priesthood was proved, once and for ever, to be baseless; human
mediation, in every possible form, was vehemently controverted; men
were referred back to God as the sole absolver.
Yet now again, three centuries after, the belief is still as strong as
ever. That which we thought dead is alive again, and not likely it
seems, to die. Recent revelations have shown that confession is daily
made in the country whose natural manners are most against it; private
absolution asked by English men and given by English priests. A fact
so significant might lead us well to pause, and ask ourselves whether
we have found the true answer to the question. The negation we have
got--the vehement denial; we are weary of its reiteration: but the
positive truth which lies at the bottom of this craving--where is
that?
Parliaments and pulpits, senators and clergymen, have vied with each
other in the vehemence with which they declare absolution
un-Christian, un-English. All that is most abominable in the
confessional has been with unsparing and irreverent indelicacy forced
before the public mind. Still, men and women, whose holiness and
purity are beyond slander's reach, come and crave assurance of
forgiveness. How shall we reply to such men? Shall we say, "Who is
this that speaketh blasphemies? who can forgive sins, but God only?"
Shall we say it is all blasphemy; an impious intrusion upon the
prerogatives of the One Absolver? Well, we may; it is _popular_ to say
we ought; but you will observe, if we speak so, we do no more than the
Pharisees in this text: we establish a negation; but a negation is
only one side of truth.
Moreover, we have been asserting that for 300 years, with small
fruits. We keep asserting, Man cannot give assurance that sin is
pardoned; in other words, man cannot absolve: but still the heart
craves human assurance of forgiveness. What truth have we got to
supply that craving? We shall therefore, rather try to fathom the
deeps of the positive truth which is the true reply to the error; we
shall try to see whether there is not a real answer to the craving
contained in the Redeemer's words, "The Son of Man hath power on earth
to forgive sins." What power is there in human forgiveness? What does
absolution mean in the lips of a son of man? These are our questions
for to-day. We shall consider two points.
I. The impotency of the negation.
II. The power of the positive truth.
The Pharisees denied the efficacy of human absolution: they said,
"None can forgive sins, but God only:" that was a negation. What did
they effect by their system of negations? They conferred no peace;
they produced no holiness. It would be a great error to suppose that
the Pharisees were hypocrites in the ordinary sense of the term--that
is, pretending to be anxious about religion when they knew that they
felt no anxiety. They _were_ anxious, in their way. They heard a
startling free announcement of forgiveness by a man. To them it
appeared license given to sin. If this new teacher, this upstart--in
their own language, "this fellow--of whom every man knew whence he
was," were to go about the length and breadth of the land, telling
sinners to be at peace; telling them to forget the past, and to work
onwards; bidding men's consciences be at rest; and commanding them not
to _fear_ the God whom they had offended, but to _trust_ in Him--what
would become of morality and religion? This presumptuous Absolver
would make men careless about both. If the indispensable safeguards of
penalty were removed, what remained to restrain men from sin?
For the Pharisees had no notion of any other goodness than that which
is restrained; they could conceive no goodness free, but only that
which is produced by rewards and punishments--law-goodness,
law-righteousness: to dread God, not to love and trust Him, was their
conception of religion. And this, indeed, is the _ordinary_ conception
of religion--the ordinary meaning implied to most minds by the word
religion. The word religion means, by derivation, restriction or
obligation--obligation to do, obligation to avoid. And this is the
negative system of the Pharisees--scrupulous avoidance of evil, rather
than positive and free pursuit of excellence. Such a system never
produced anything but barren denial. "_This_ is wrong;" "_that_ is
heresy;" "_that_ is dangerous."
There was another class of men who denied human power of absolution.
They were called Scribes or writers--pedants, men of ponderous
learning and accurate definitions; from being mere transcribers of the
law, they had risen to be its expounders. They could define the exact
number of yards that might be travelled on the Sabbath-day without
infringement of the law; they could decide, according to the most
approved theology, the respective importance of each duty; they would
tell you, authoritatively, which was the _great_ commandment of the
law. The Scribe is a man who turns religion into etiquette: his idea
of God is that of a monarch, transgression against whom is an offence
against statute law, and he the Scribe, is there to explain the
prescribed conditions upon which the offence may be expiated; he has
no idea of admission to the sovereign's presence, except by compliance
with certain formalities which the Scribe is commissioned to declare.
There are therefore Scribes in all ages--Romish Scribes, who
distinguish between venial and mortal sin, and apportion to each its
appointed penance and absolution. There are Protestant Scribes, who
have no idea of God but as an incensed judge, and prescribe certain
methods of appeasing him--a certain price--in consideration of which
He is willing to sell forgiveness; men who accurately draw the
distinction between the different kinds of faith--faith historical and
faith saving; who bewilder and confuse all natural feeling; who treat
the natural love of relations as if it were an idolatry as great as
bowing down to mammon; who make intelligible distinction between the
work that _may_ and the work that may _not_ be done on the
Sabbath-day; who send you into a perilous consideration of the
workings of your own feelings, and the examination of your spiritual
experiences, to ascertain whether you have the feelings which give you
a right to call God a Father. They hate the Romish Scribe as much as
the Jewish Scribe hated the Samaritan and called him heretic. But in
their way they are true to the spirit of the Scribe.
Now the result of this is fourfold. Among the tender-minded,
despondency; among the vainer, spiritual pride; in the case of the
slavish, superstition; with the hard-minded, infidelity. Ponder it
well, and you will find these four things rife amongst us:
Despondency, Spiritual Pride, Superstition, and Infidelity. In this
way we have been going on for many years. In the midst of all this, at
last we are informed that the confessional is at work again; whereupon
astonishment and indignation are loudly expressed. It is not to be
borne that the priests of the Church of England should confess and
absolve in private. Yet it is only what might have been expected.
With our Evangelicalism, Tractarianism, Scribeism, Pharisaism, we have
ceased to front the _living fact_--we are as zealous as Scribes and
Pharisees ever were for negatives; but in the meantime Human Nature,
oppressed and overborne, gasping for breath, demands something real
and living. It cannot live on controversies. It cannot be fed on
protests against heresy, however vehement. We are trying who can
protest loudest. Every book, every journal, rings with warnings.
"Beware!" is written upon everything. Beware of Rome; beware of
Geneva; beware of Germany; some danger on every side; Satan
everywhere--God _nowhere_; everywhere some man to be shunned or
dreaded--nowhere one to be loved freely and without suspicion. Is it
any wonder if men and women, in the midst of negations, cry, "Ye warn
me from the error, but who will guide me into truth? I want guidance.
I am sinful, full of evil! I want forgiveness! Absolve me; tell me
that I am pardoned; help me to believe it. Your quarrels do not help
me; if you cannot do _that_, it matters little what you _can_ do. You
have restricted God's love, and narrowed the path to heaven; you have
hampered religion with so many mysterious questions and quibbles that
I cannot find the way to God; you have terrified me with so many
snares and pitfalls on every side, that I dare not tread at all. Give
me peace; give me human guidance: I want a human arm to lean on."
This is a cry, I believe, becoming daily more passionate, and more
common. And no wonder that all our information, public and private, is
to the same effect--that the recent converts have found peace in Rome;
for the secret of the power of Rome is this--that she grounds her
teaching, not on variable feelings and correct opinions, but on
_facts_. God is not a highly probable God, but a _fact_. God's
forgiveness is not a feeling, but a _fact_; and a material symbolic
fact is the witness of the invisible one. Rome puts forward her
absolution--her false, priestly, magical absolution--a visible fact,
as a witness of the invisible. And her perversion prevails because
founded on a truth.
II. The power of the positive truth.
Is it any wonder, if taught on every side distrust of man, the heart
should by a violent reaction, and by an extravagant confidence in a
priest, proclaim that its normal, natural state is not distrust, but
trust?
What is forgiveness?--It is God reconciled to us. What is
absolution?--It is the authoritative declaration that God is
reconciled. Authoritative: that is a real power of conveying a sense
and feeling of forgiveness. It is the power of the Son of Man _on
earth_ to forgive sins. It is man, God's image, representing, by his
forgiveness on earth, God's forgiveness in heaven.
Now distinguish God's forgiveness of sin from an arresting of the
consequences of sin. When God forgives a sin, it does not follow that
He stops its consequences: for example, when He forgives the
intemperate man whose health is ruined, forgiveness does not restore
his health. Divine pardon does not interfere with the laws of the
universe, for it is itself one of those laws. It is a law that penalty
follows transgression. Forgiveness will not save from penalty; but it
alters the feelings with which the penalty is accepted. Pain inflicted
with a surgeon's knife for a man's good, is as keen as that which
results from the knife of the torturer; but in the one case it is
calmly borne, because remedial--in the other it exasperates, because
it is felt to be intended by malevolence. So with the difference
between suffering which comes from a sin which we hope God has
forgiven, and suffering which seems to fall hot from the hand of an
angry God. It is a fearful truth, that so far as we know at least, the
consequences of an act are connected with it indissolubly. Forgiveness
does not arrest them; but by producing softness and grateful
penitence, it transforms them into blessings. This is God's
forgiveness; and absolution is the conveyance to the conscience of the
conviction of forgiveness: to absolve is to free--to comfort by
strengthening--to afford repose from fear.
Now it was the way of the Redeemer to emancipate from sin by the
freeness of absolution. The dying thief, an hour before a blasphemer,
was unconditionally assured; the moment the sinner's feelings changed
towards God, He proclaimed that God was reconciled to him: "This day
thou shalt be with me in Paradise." And hence, speaking humanly,
hence, from this absolving tone and spirit, came His wondrous and
unparalleled power with sinful, erring hearts; hence the life and
fresh impulse which He imparted to the being and experience to those
with whom He dealt. Hence the maniac, freed from the legion, sat at
His feet, clothed, and in his right mind. Hence the outcast woman,
whom human scorn would have hardened into brazen effrontery, hearing
an unwonted voice of human sympathy, "washed His feet with her tears,
and wiped them with the hairs of her head."
And this is what we have forgotten: we have not yet learned to trust
the power of redeeming love; we do not believe in the omnipotence of
grace, and the might of an appeal to the better parts, and not the
slavish parts of human nature. Settle it in your minds, the absolving
power is the central secret of the Gospel. Salvation is unconditional;
not an offer, but _a Gift_; not clogged with conditions, but free as
the air we breathe. God welcomes back the prodigal. God loves without
money and without price. To this men reply gravely, It is dangerous to
speak thus; it is perilous to dispense with the safeguards of
restriction. Law! law! there is nothing like law--a salutary fear--for
making men holy. O blind Pharisee! had you ever known the spring, the
life which comes from feeling _free_, the gush of gratitude with which
the heart springs to duty when all chains are shattered, and it stands
fearless and free in the Light, and in the Love of God--you would
understand that a large trusting charity, which can throw itself on
the better and more generous impulses of a laden spirit, is the safest
as well as the most beautiful means of securing obedience.
So far however, there will not be much objection to the doctrine: it
will be admitted that absolution is true in the lips of Christ,
because of His Divinity. It will be said He was God, and God speaking
on earth is the same thing as God speaking in heaven. No my brethren,
it is _not_ the same thing. Christ forgiving on earth is _a new truth_
added to that of God's forgiving in heaven. It is not the same truth.
The one is forgiveness by Deity; the other is the declaration of
forgiveness by Humanity. He bade the palsied man walk, that they might
know that "the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins."
Therefore we proceed a step further. The same power He delegated to
His Church which He had exercised Himself. "Whosesoever sins ye
remit, they are remitted." Now perhaps, it will be replied to this,
that that promise belongs to the apostles; that they were
supernaturally gifted to distinguish genuine from feigned repentance;
to absolve therefore, was their natural prerogative, but that we have
no right to say it extends beyond the apostles.
We therefore, bring the question to a point by referring to an
instance in which an apostle did absolve. Let us examine whether St.
Paul confined the prerogative to himself. "To whom ye forgive
anything, I forgive also: for to whom I forgave anything for your
sakes, forgave I it in the person of Christ."
Observe now: it is quite true here that the apostle absolved a man
whose excommunication he had formerly required; but he absolved him
because the congregation absolved him; not as a plenipotentiary
supernaturally gifted to convey a mysterious benefit, but as himself
an organ and representative of the Church. The power of absolution
therefore, belonged to the Church, and to the apostle through the
Church. It was a power belonging to _all_ Christians: to the apostle,
because he was a Christian, not because he was an apostle. A priestly
power no doubt, because Christ has made all Christians kings and
priests.
Now let us turn again, with this added light, to examine the meaning
of that expression, "The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive
sins." Mark that form of words--not Christ as God, but Christ as Son
of man. It was manifestly said by Him, not solely as divine, but
rather as human, as the Son of man; that is, as Man. For we may take
it as a rule: when Christ calls himself Son of man, He is asserting
His Humanity. It was said by the High Priest of Humanity in the name
of the race. It was said on the principle that human nature is the
reflection of God's nature: that human love is the image of God's
love; and that human forgiveness is the type and assurance of divine
forgiveness.
In Christ Humanity was the perfect type of Deity, and therefore
Christ's absolution was always the exact measure and counterpart of
God's forgiveness. Herein lies the deep truth of the doctrine of His
eternal priesthood--the Eternal Son--the Humanity of the Being of
God--the ever Human mind of God. The Absolver ever lives. The Father
judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment to the Son--hath given
Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of man.
But further than this. In a subordinate, because less perfect degree,
the forgiveness of a man as man carries with it an absolving power.
Who has not felt the load taken from his mind when the hidden guilt
over which he had brooded long has been acknowledged, and met by
forgiving human sympathy, especially at a time when he expected to be
treated with coldness and reproof? Who has not felt how such a moment
was to him the dawn of a better hope, and how the merciful judgment of
some wise and good human being seemed to be the type and the assurance
of God's pardon, making it credible? Unconsciously it may be, but
still in substance really, I believe some such reasoning as _this_
goes on in the whispers of the heart--"He loves me, and has compassion
on me--will not God forgive? He, this man, made in God's image, does
not think my case hopeless. Well, then, in the larger love of God it
is not hopeless." Thus, and only thus, can we understand the
_ecclesiastical_ act. Absolution, the prerogative of our humanity, is
represented by a formal act of the Church.
Much controversy and angry bitterness has been spent on the absolution
put by the Church of England into the lips of her ministers--I cannot
think with justice--if we try to get at the root of these words of
Christ. The priest proclaims forgiveness authoritatively as the organ
of the congregation--as the voice of the Church, in the name of Man
and God. For human nature represents God. The Church represents what
human nature is and ought to be. The minister represents the Church.
He speaks therefore, in the name of our godlike, human nature. He
declares a divine fact, he does not create it. There is no magic in
his absolution: he can no more forgive whom God has not forgiven, by
the formula of absolution, or reverse the pardon of him whom God has
absolved by the formula of excommunication, than he can transfer a
demon into an angel by the formula of baptism. He declares what every
one has a right to declare, and ought to declare by his lips and by
his conduct: but being a minister, he declares it authoritatively in
the name of every Christian who by his Christianity is a priest to
God; he specializes what is universal; as in baptism, he seals the
universal Sonship on the individual by name, saying, "The Sonship with
which Christ has redeemed all men, I hereby proclaim for this child;"
so by absolution he specializes the universal fact of the love of God
to those who are listening then and there, saying, "The Love of God
the Absolver, I authoritatively proclaim to be _yours_."
In the Service for the Visitation of the Sick, the Church of England
puts into the lips of her ministers words quite unconditional: "I
absolve thee from all thy sins." You know that passage is constantly
objected to as Romish and superstitious. I would not give up that
precious passage. I love the Church of England, because she has dared
to claim her inheritance--because she has courage to assert herself as
what she ought to be--God's representative on earth. She says to her
minister, Stand there before a darkened spirit, on whom the shadows of
death have begun to fall: in human flesh and blood representing the
Invisible,--with words of human love making credible the Love Eternal.
Say boldly, I am here to declare not a perhaps, _but a fact_. I
forgive thee in the name of Humanity. And so far as Humanity
represents Deity, that forgiveness is a type of God's. She does not
put into her ministers' lips words of incantation. He cannot bless
whom God has not blessed--he cannot curse whom God has not cursed. If
the Son of absolution be there, his absolution will rest. If you have
ever tried the slow and apparently hopeless task of ministering to a
heart diseased, and binding up the wound that _will_ bleed afresh, to
which no assurances can give comfort, because they are not
authoritative, it must have crossed your mind that such a power as
that which the Church of England claims, if it were believed, is
exactly the remedy you want. You must have felt that even the formula
of the Church of Rome would be a blessed power to exercise, could it
but once be accepted as a pledge that all the past was obliterated,
and that from that moment a free untainted future lay before the
soul--you must have _felt_ that; you must have wished you had dared to
_say_ it. My whole spirit has absolved my erring brother. Is God less
merciful than I? Can I--dare I--say or think it conditionally? Dare I
say, I hope? May I not, must I not, say, _I know_ God has forgiven
you?
Every man whose heart has truly bled over another's sin, and watched
another's remorse with pangs as sharp as if the crime had been his
own, _has_ said it. Every parent has said it who ever received back a
repentant daughter, and opened out for her a new hope for life. Every
mother has said it who ever by her hope against hope for some
profligate, protested for a love deeper and wider than that of
society. Every man has said it who forgave a deep wrong. See then,
_why_ and _how_ the church absolves. She only exercises that power
which belongs to every son of man. If society were Christian--if
society, by its forgiveness and its exclusion, truly represented the
mind of God--there would be no necessity for a Church to speak; but
the absolution of society and the world does not represent by any
means God's forgiveness. Society absolves those whom God has _not_
absolved--the proud, the selfish, the strong, the seducer; society
refuses return and acceptance to the seduced, the frail, and the sad
penitent whom God has accepted; therefore it is necessary that a
selected body, through its appointed organs, should do in the name of
Man what man, as such, does not. The Church is the ideal of Humanity.
It represents what God intended man to be--what man is in God's sight
as beheld in Christ by Him; and the minister of the Church speaks as
the representative of that ideal Humanity. Church absolution is an
eternal protest, in the name of God the Absolver, against the false
judgments of society.
One thing more. Beware of making this a dead formula. If absolution be
not a living truth, it becomes a monstrous falsehood; if you take
absolution as a mystical gift conveyed to an individual man called a
priest, and mysteriously efficacious in _his_ lips, and his _alone_,
you petrify a truth into death and unreality. I have been striving to
show that absolution is not a Church figment, invented by priestcraft,
but a living, blessed, human power. It is a power delegated to you and
to me, and just so far as we exercise it lovingly and wisely, in our
lives, and with our lips, we help men away from sin: just so far as we
do not exercise it, or exercise it falsely, we drive men to Rome. For
if the heart cannot have a truth it will take a counterfeit of truth.
By every magnanimous act, by every free forgiveness with which a pure
man forgives, or pleads for mercy, or assures the penitent, he
proclaims this truth, that "the Son of man hath power on earth to
forgive sins"--he exhibits the priestly power of humanity--_he does_
absolve; let theology say what it will of absolution, he gives peace
to the conscience--he is a type and assurance of what God is--he
breaks the chains and lets the captive go free.
VI.
_Preached June 9, 1850._
THE ILLUSIVENESS OF LIFE.
"By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which
he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went
out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the
land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles
with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for
he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and
maker is God."--Hebrews xi. 8-10.
Last Sunday we touched upon a thought which deserves further
development. God promised Canaan to Abraham, and yet Abraham never
inherited Canaan: to the last he was a wanderer there; he had no
possession of his own in its territory: if he wanted even a tomb to
bury his dead, he could only obtain it by purchase. This difficulty is
expressly admitted in the text, "In the land of promise he sojourned
as in a strange country;" he dwelt there in tents--in changeful,
moveable tabernacles--not permanent habitations; he had no home
there.
It is stated in all its startling force, in terms still more explicit,
in the 7th chapter of the Acts, 5th verse, "And He gave him none
inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet He
promised that He would give it to him for a possession, and to his
seed after him, when as yet he had no child."
Now the surprising point is that Abraham, deceived, as you might
almost say, did not complain of it as a deception; he was even
grateful for the non-fulfilment of the promise: he does not seem to
have expected its fulfilment; he did not look for Canaan, but for "a
city which had foundations;" his faith appears to have consisted in
disbelieving the letter, almost as much as in believing the spirit of
the promise.
And herein lies a principle, which, rightly expounded, can help us to
interpret this life of ours. God's promises never are fulfilled in the
sense in which they seem to have been given. Life is a deception; its
anticipations, which are God's promises to the imagination, are never
realized; they who know life best, and have trusted God most to fill
it with blessings, are ever the first to say that life is a series of
disappointments. And in the spirit of this text we have to say that it
is a wise and merciful arrangement which ordains it thus.
The wise and holy do not expect to find it otherwise--would not wish
it otherwise; their wisdom consists in disbelieving its promises. To
develope this idea would be a glorious task; for to justify God's ways
to man, to expound the mysteriousness of our present being, to
interpret God,--is not this the very essence of the ministerial
office? All that I can hope however to-day, is not to exhaust the
subject, but to furnish hints for thought. Over-statements may be
made, illustrations may be inadequate, the new ground of an almost
untrodden subject may be torn up too rudely; but remember, we are here
to live and die; in a few years it will be all over; meanwhile, what
we have to do is to try to understand, and to help one another to
understand, what it all means--what this strange and contradictory
thing, which we call Life, contains within it. Do not stop to ask
therefore, whether the subject was satisfactorily worked out; let each
man be satisfied to have received a germ of thought which he may
develope better for himself.
I. The deception of life's promise.
II. The meaning of that deception.
Let it be clearly understood in the first place, the promise never was
fulfilled. I do not say the fulfilment was delayed. I say it _never_
was fulfilled. Abraham had a few feet of earth, obtained by
purchase--beyond that nothing; he died a stranger and a pilgrim in the
land. Isaac had a little. So small was Jacob's hold upon his country
that the last years of his life were spent in Egypt, and he died a
foreigner in a strange land. His descendants came into the land of
Canaan, expecting to find it a land flowing with milk and honey; they
found hard work to do--war and unrest, instead of rest and peace.
During one brief period, in the history of Israel, the promise may
seem to have been fulfilled. It was during the later years of David
and the earlier years of Solomon; but we have the warrant of Scripture
itself for affirming, that even then the promise was not fulfilled. In
the Book of Psalms, David speaks of a hope of entering into a _future_
rest. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, quoting this passage,
infers from it that God's promise had not been exhausted nor
fulfilled, by the entrance into Canaan; for he says, "If Joshua had
given them rest then would he not have spoken of another day." Again
in this very chapter, after a long list of Hebrew saints--"These _all_
died in faith, not having received the promises." To none therefore,
had the promise been fulfilled. Accordingly writers on prophecy, in
order to get over this difficulty, take for granted that there must be
a future fulfilment, because the first was inadequate.
They who believe that the Jews will be restored to their native land,
expect it on the express ground that Canaan has never been actually
and permanently theirs. A certain tract of country--300 miles in
length, by 200 in breadth--must be given, or else they think the
promise has been broken. To quote the expression of one of the most
eloquent of their writers, "If there be nothing yet future for Israel,
then the magnificence of the promise has been lost in the poverty of
its accomplishment."
I do not quote this to prove the correctness of the interpretation of
the prophecy, but as an acknowledgment which may be taken so far as a
proof, that the promise made to Abraham has never been accomplished.
And such is life's disappointment. Its promise is, you shall have a
Canaan; it turns out to be a baseless airy dream--toil and
warfare--nothing that we can call our own; not the land of rest, by
any means. But we will examine this in particulars.
1. Our senses deceive us; we begin life with delusion. Our senses
deceive us with respect to distance, shape, and colour. That which
afar off seems oval, turns out to be circular, modified by the
perspective of distance; that which appears a speck, upon nearer
approach becomes a vast body. To the earlier ages the stars presented
the delusion of small lamps hung in space. The beautiful berry proves
to be bitter and poisonous: that which apparently moves is really at
rest: that which seems to be stationary is in perpetual motion: the
earth moves: the sun is still. All experience is a correction of
life's delusions--a modification, a reversal of the judgment of the
senses: and all life is a lesson on the falsehood of appearances.
2. Our natural anticipations deceive us--I say _natural_ in
contra-distinction to extravagant expectations. Every human life is a
fresh one, bright with hopes that will never be realized. There may be
differences of character in these hopes; finer spirits may look on
life as the arena of successful deeds, the more selfish as a place of
personal enjoyment.
With man the turning point of life may be a profession--with woman,
marriage; the one gilding the future with the triumphs of intellect,
the other with the dreams of affection; but in every case, life is not
what any of them expects, but something else. It would almost seem a
satire on existence to compare the youth in the outset of his career,
flushed and sanguine, with the aspect of the same being when it is
nearly done--worn, sobered, covered with the dust of life, and
confessing that its days have been few and evil. Where is the land
flowing with milk and honey?
With our affections it is still worse, because they promise more.
Man's affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan--the tents of a
night; not permanent habitations even for this life. Where are the
charms of character, the perfection, and the purity, and the
truthfulness, which seemed so resplendent in our friend? They were
only the shape of our own conceptions--our creative shaping intellect
projected its own fantasies on him: and hence we outgrow our early
friendships; outgrow the intensity of all: we dwell in tents; we never
find a home, even in the land of promise. Life is an unenjoyable
Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it.
3. Our expectations, resting on revelation, deceive us. The world's
history has turned round two points of hope; one, the _first_--the
other, the _second_ coming of the Messiah. The magnificent imagery of
Hebrew prophecy had described the advent of the Conqueror; He came--"a
root out of a dry ground, with no form or comeliness; and when they
saw Him there was no beauty in Him that they should desire Him." The
victory, predicted in such glowing terms, turned out to be the victory
of Submission--the Law of our Humanity, which wins by gentleness and
love. The promise in the letter was unfulfilled. For ages the world's
hope has been the second advent. The early church expected it in their
own day. "We, which are alive, and remain until the coming of our
Lord."
The Saviour Himself had said, "This generation shall not pass till all
things be fulfilled." Yet the Son of Man has never come; or rather, He
has been _ever_ coming. Unnumbered times the judgment eagles have
gathered together over corruption ripe for condemnation. Times
innumerable the separation has been made between good and bad. The
promise has not been fulfilled, or it has been fulfilled, but in
either case anticipation has been foiled and disappointed.
There are two ways of considering this aspect of life. One is the way
of sentiment; the other is the way of faith. The sentimental way is
trite enough. Saint, sage, sophist, moralist, and preacher, have
repeated in every possible image, till there is nothing new to say,
that life is a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm. The other is
the way of faith: the ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist
could feel the brokenness of its promises; they confessed that they
were strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no
continuing city; but they did not mournfully moralize on this; they
said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so. They felt that all
was right; they knew that the promise itself had a deeper meaning:
they looked undauntedly for "a city which hath foundations."
II. The second inquiry, therefore, is the meaning of this
delusiveness.
1. It serves to allure us on. Suppose that a spiritual promise had
been made at first to Israel; imagine that they had been informed at
the outset that God's rest is inward; that the promised land is only
found in the Jerusalem which is above--not material, but immaterial.
That rude, gross people, yearning after the fleshpots of
Egypt--willing to go back into slavery, so as only they might have
enough to eat and drink--would they have quitted Egypt on such terms?
Would they have begun one single step of that pilgrimage, which was to
find its meaning in the discipline of ages?
We are led through life as we are allured upon a journey. Could a man
see his route before him--a flat, straight road, unbroken by bush, or
tree, or eminence, with the sun's heat burning down upon it, stretched
out in dreary monotony--he could scarcely find energy to begin his
task; but the uncertainty of what may be seen beyond the next turn
keeps expectation alive. The view that may be seen from yonder
summit--the glimpse that may be caught perhaps, as the road winds
round yonder knoll--hopes like these, not far distant, beguile the
traveller on from mile to mile, and from league to league.
In fact, life is an education. The object for which you educate your
son is to give him strength of purpose, self-command, discipline of
mental energies; but you do not reveal to your son this aim of his
education; you tell him of his place in his class, of the prizes at
the end of the year, of the honours to be given at college.
These are not the true incentives to knowledge, such incentives are
not the highest--they are even mean, and partially injurious; yet
these mean incentives stimulate and lead on, from day to day and from
year to year, by a process the principle of which the boy himself is
not aware of. So does God lead on, through life's unsatisfying and
false reward, ever educating: Canaan first; then the hope of a
Redeemer; then the millennial glory.
Now what is remarkable in this is, that the delusion continued to the
last; they _all_ died in faith, not having received the promises; all
were hoping up to the very last, and all died in faith--not in
realization; for thus God has constituted the human heart. It never
will be believed that this world is unreal. God has mercifully so
arranged it, that the idea of delusion is incredible. You may tell the
boy or girl as you will that life is a disappointment; yet however you
may persuade them to adopt your _tone_, and catch the language of your
sentiment, they are both looking forward to some bright distant
hope--the rapture of the next vacation, or the unknown joys of the
next season--and throwing into it an energy of expectation which only
a whole eternity is worth. You may tell the man who has received the
heart-shock which in this world, he will not recover, that life has
nothing left; yet the stubborn heart still hopes on, ever near the
prize--"wealthiest when most undone:" he has reaped the whirlwind, but
he will go on still, till life is over, sowing the wind.
Now observe the beautiful result which comes from this indestructible
power of believing in spite of failure. In the first centuries, the
early Christians believed that the millennial advent was close; they
heard the warning of the apostle, brief and sharp, "The time is
short." Now suppose that, instead of this, they had seen all the
dreary page of Church history unrolled; suppose that they had known
that after two thousand years the world would have scarcely spelled
out three letters of the meaning of Christianity, where would have
been those gigantic efforts,--that life spent as on the very brink of
eternity, which characterize the days of the early Church,--and which
was after all, only the true life of man in time? It is thus that God
has led on His world. He has conducted it as a father leads his child,
when the path homeward lies over many a dreary league. He suffers him
to beguile the thought of time, by turning aside to pluck now and then
a flower, to chase now a butterfly; the butterfly is crushed, the
flower fades, but the child is so much nearer home, invigorated and
full of health, and scarcely wearied yet.
2. This non-fulfilment of promise fulfils it in a _deeper_ way. The
account we have given already, were it to end there, would be
insufficient to excuse the failure of life's promise; by saying that
it allures us would be really to charge God with deception. Now life
is not deception, but illusion. We distinguish between illusion and
delusion. We may paint wood so as to be taken for stone, iron, or
marble; this is delusion: but you may paint a picture, in which rocks,
trees, and sky are never mistaken for what they seem, yet produce all
the emotion which real rocks, trees, and sky would produce. This is
illusion, and this is the painter's art: never for one moment to
deceive by attempted imitation, but to produce a mental state in which
the feelings are suggested which the natural objects themselves would
create. Let us take an instance drawn from life.
To a child a rainbow is a real thing--substantial and palpable; its
limb rests on the side of yonder hill; he believes that he can
appropriate it to himself; and when, instead of gems and gold hid in
its radiant bow, he finds nothing but damp mist--cold, dreary drops of
disappointment--that disappointment tells that his belief has been
delusion.
To the educated man that bow is a blessed illusion, yet it never once
deceives; he does not take it for what it is not, he does not expect
to make it his own; he feels its beauty as much as the child could
feel it, nay infinitely more--more even from the fact that he knows
that it will be transient; but besides and beyond this, to him it
presents a deeper loveliness; he knows the laws of light, and the laws
of the human soul which gave it being. He has linked it with the laws
of the universe, and with the invisible mind of God; and it brings to
him a thrill of awe, and the sense of a mysterious, nameless beauty,
of which the child did not conceive. It is illusion still; but it has
fulfilled the promise. In the realm of spirit, in the temple of the
soul, it is the same. All is illusion; "but we look for a city which
hath foundations;" and in this the promise is fulfilled.
And such was Canaan to the Israelites. To some doubtless it was
delusion. They expected to find their reward in a land of milk and
honey. They were bitterly disappointed, and expressed their
disappointment loudly enough in their murmurs against Moses, and their
rebellion against his successors. But to others, as to Abraham, Canaan
was the bright illusion which never deceived, but for ever shone
before as the type of something more real. And even taking the promise
literally, though they built in tents, and could not call a foot of
land their own, was not its beauty theirs? Were not its trellised
vines, and glorious pastures, and rich olive-fields, ministers to the
enjoyment of those who had all in God, though its milk, and oil, and
honey, could not be enjoyed with exclusiveness of appropriation? Yet
over and above and beyond this, there was a more blessed fulfilment of
the promise; there was "a city which had foundations"--built and made
by God--toward which the anticipation of this Canaan was leading them.
The Kingdom of God was forming in their souls, for ever disappointing
them by the unreal, and teaching them that what is spiritual, and
belongs to mind and character alone can be eternal.
We will illustrate this principle from the common walks of life. The
principle is, that the reward we get is not the reward for which we
worked, but a deeper one; deeper and more permanent. The merchant
labours all his life, and the hope which leads him on is perhaps
wealth: well, at sixty years of age he attains wealth; is that the
reward of sixty years of toil? Ten years of enjoyment, when the senses
can enjoy no longer--a country seat, splendid plate, a noble
establishment? Oh, no! a reward deeper than he dreamed of. Habits of
perseverance: a character trained by industry: that is his reward. He
was carried on from year to year by, if he were wise, illusion; if he
were unwise, delusion; but he reaped a more enduring substance in
himself.
Take another instance: the public man, warrior, or statesman, who has
served his country, and complains at last in bitter disappointment,
that his country has not fulfilled his expectations in rewarding
him--that is, it has not given him titles, honours, wealth. But
titles, honours, wealth--are these the rewards of well-doing? can they
reward it? would it be well-doing if they could? To _be_ such a man,
to have the power of _doing_ such deeds, what could be added to that
reward by having? This same apparent contradiction, which was found in
Judaism, subsists too in Christianity; we will state it in the words
of an apostle: "Godliness is profitable for all things; having the
promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come."
Now for the fulfilment: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ,
then are we of all men most miserable."
Godliness is profitable; but its profit it appears, consists in
finding that all is loss: yet in this way you teach your son. You will
tell him that if he will be good all men will love him. You say that
"Honesty is the best policy." yet in your heart of hearts you know
that you are leading him on by a delusion. Christ was good. Was he
loved by all? In proportion as he--your son--is like Christ, he will
be loved, not by the many, but by the few. Honesty is _not_ the best
_policy_; the commonplace honesty of the market-place may be--the
vulgar honesty which goes no further than paying debts accurately; but
that transparent Christian honesty of a life which in every act is
bearing witness to the truth, that is not the way to _get on_ in
life--the reward of such a life is the Cross. Yet you were right in
teaching your son this: you told him what was true; truer than he
could comprehend. It _is_ better to be honest and good; better than
he can know or dream: better even in this life; better by so much as
_being_ good is better than _having_ good. But, in a rude coarse way,
you must express the blessedness on a level with his capacity; you
must state the truth in a way which he will inevitably interpret
falsely. The true interpretation nothing but experience can teach.
And this is what God does. His promises are true, though illusive; far
truer than we at first take them to be. We work for a mean, low,
sensual happiness, all the while He is leading us on to a spiritual
blessedness--unfathomably deep. This is the life of faith. We live by
faith, and not by sight. We do not preach that all is
disappointment--the dreary creed of sentimentalism; but we preach that
_nothing_ here is disappointment, if rightly understood. We do not
comfort the poor man, by saying that the riches that he has not now he
will have hereafter--the difference between himself and the man of
wealth being only this, that the one has for time what the other will
have for eternity; but what we say is, that that which you have failed
in reaping here, you never will reap, if you expected the harvest of
Canaan. God has no Canaan for His own; no milk and honey for the
luxury of the senses: for the city which hath foundations is built in
the soul of man. He in whom Godlike character dwells, has all the
universe for his own--"All things," saith the apostle, "are yours;
whether life or death, or things present, or things to come; if ye be
Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the
_promise_."
VII.
_Preached June 23, 1850._
THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST.
"For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge,
that if one died for all, then were all dead; and that He died for
all that they which live should not henceforth live unto
themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again."--2
Corinthians v. 14, 15.
It may be, that in reading these verses some of us have understood
them in a sense foreign to that of the apostle. It may have seemed
that the arguments ran thus--Because Christ died upon the cross for
_all_, therefore all must have been in a state of spiritual death
before; and if they were asked what doctrines are to be elicited from
this passage they would reply, "the doctrine of universal depravity,
and the constraining power of the gratitude due to Him who died to
redeem us from it." There is, however, in the first place, this fatal
objection to such an interpretation, that the death here spoken of is
used in two diametrically opposite senses. In reference to Christ,
death literal--in reference to all, death spiritual. Now, in the
thought of St. Paul, the death of Christ was always viewed as
liberation from the power of evil: "in that he died, he died unto sin
once," and again, "he that is dead is free from sin." The literal
death then in one clause, means _freedom_ from sin; the spiritual
death of the next is _slavery_ to it. Wherein then, lies the cogency
of the apostle's reasoning? How does it follow that because Christ
died to evil, all before that must have died to God? Of course that
doctrine is true in itself, but it is _not_ the doctrine of the text.
In the next place, the ambiguity belongs only to the English word--it
is impossible to make the mistake in the original: the word which
stands for _were_, is a word which does not imply a continued state,
but must imply a single finished act. It cannot by any possibility
imply that before the death of Christ men _were_ in a state of
death--it can only mean, they became dead at the moment when Christ
died. If you read it thus, the meaning of the English will emerge--"if
one died for all, then all died;" and the apostle's argument runs
thus, that if one acts as the representative of all, then his act is
the act of all. If the ambassador of a nation makes reparation in a
nation's name, or does homage for a nation, that reparation, or that
homage, is the nation's act--if _one_ did it _for_ all, then _all_ did
it. So that instead of inferring that because Christ died for all,
therefore before that all were dead to God, his natural inference is
that therefore all are now dead to sin.
Once more, the conclusion of the apostle is exactly the reverse of
that which this interpretation attributes to him: he does not say that
Christ died in order that men might _not_ die, but exactly for this
very purpose, that they _might_ die; and this death he represents in
the next verse by an equivalent expression--the life of unselfishness:
"that they which live might henceforth live not unto themselves." The
"dead" of the first verse are "they that live" of the second.
The form of thought finds its exact parallel in Romans vi. 10, 11.
Two points claim our attention:--
I. The vicarious sacrifice of Christ.
II. The influence of that sacrifice on man.
I. The vicariousness of the sacrifice is implied in the word "for". A
vicarious act is an act done for another. When the Pope calls himself
the vicar of Christ, he implies that he acts for Christ. The vicar or
viceroy of a kingdom is one who acts for the king--a vicar's act
therefore is virtually the act of the principal whom he represents; so
that if the Papal doctrine were true, when the vicar of Christ
_pardons_, Christ has pardoned. When the viceroy of a kingdom has
published a proclamation or signed a treaty, the sovereign himself is
bound by those acts.
The truth of the expression _for all_, is contained in this fact, that
Christ is the representative of Humanity--properly speaking, the
representative of human nature. This is the truth contained in the
emphatic expression, "Son of Man." What Christ did _for_ Humanity was
done by Humanity, because in the name of Humanity. For a truly
vicarious act does not supersede the principal's duty of performance,
but rather implies and acknowledges it. Take the case from which this
very word of vicar has received its origin. In the old monastic times,
when the revenues of a cathedral or a cure fell to the lot of a
monastery, it became the duty of that monastery to perform the
religious services of the cure. But inasmuch as the monastery was a
corporate body, they appointed one of their number, whom they
denominated their vicar, to discharge those offices for them. His
service did not supersede theirs, but was a perpetual and standing
acknowledgement that they, as a whole and individually, were under the
obligation to perform it. The act of Christ is the act of
Humanity--that which all Humanity is bound to do. His righteousness
does not supersede our righteousness, nor does His sacrifice supersede
our sacrifice. It is the representation of human life and human
sacrifice--vicarious for all, yet binding upon all.
That He died for all is true--
1. Because He was the victim of the sin of all. In the peculiar
phraseology of St. Paul, he died unto sin. He was the victim of
Sin--He died by sin. It is the appalling mystery of our redemption
that the Redeemer took the attitude of subjection to evil. There was
scarcely a form of evil with which Christ did not come in contact, and
by which He did not suffer. He was the victim of false friendship and
ingratitude, the victim of bad government and injustice. He fell a
sacrifice to the vices of all classes--to the selfishness of the rich
and the fickleness of the poor:--intolerance, formalism, scepticism,
hatred of goodness, were the foes which crushed Him.
In the proper sense of the word He was a victim. He did not adroitly
wind through the dangerous forms of evil, meeting it with expedient
silence. Face to face, and front to front, He met it, rebuked it, and
defied it; and just as truly as he is a voluntary victim whose body
opposing the progress of the car of Juggernaut is crushed beneath its
monstrous wheels, was He a victim to the world's sin: because pure, He
was crushed by impurity; because just and real and true, He waked up
the rage of injustice, hypocrisy, and falsehood.
Now this sin was the sin of all. Here arises at once a difficulty: it
seems to be most unnatural to assert that in any one sense He was the
sacrifice of the sin of all. We did not betray Him--that was Judas's
act--Peter denied Him--Thomas doubted--Pilate pronounced sentence--it
must be a figment to say that these were our acts; we did not watch
Him like the Pharisees, nor circumvent Him like the Scribes and
lawyers; by what possible sophistry can we be involved in the
complicity of that guilt? The savage of New Zealand who never heard of
Him, the learned Egyptian and the voluptuous Assyrian who died before
He came; how was it the sin of all?
The reply that is often given to this query is wonderfully unreal. It
is assumed that Christ was conscious, by His Omniscience, of the sins
of all mankind; that the duplicity of the child, and the crime of the
assassin, and every unholy thought that has ever passed through a
human bosom, were present to His mind in that awful hour as if they
were His own. This is utterly unscriptural. Where is the single text
from which it can be, except by force, extracted? Besides this, it is
fanciful and sentimental; and again it is dangerous, for it represents
the whole Atonement as a fictitious and shadowy transaction. There is
a mental state in which men have felt the burthen of sins which they
did not commit. There have been cases in which men have been
mysteriously excruciated with the thought of having committed the
unpardonable sin. But to represent the mental phenomena of the
Redeemer's mind as in any way resembling this--to say that His
conscience was oppressed with the responsibility of sins which He had
not committed--is to confound a state of sanity with the delusions of
a half lucid mind, and the workings of a healthy conscience with those
of one unnatural and morbid.
There is a way however, much more appalling and much more true, in
which this may be true, without resorting to any such fanciful
hypothesis. Sin has a great power in this world: it gives laws like
those of a sovereign, which bind us all, and to which we are all
submissive. There are current maxims in church and state, in society,
in trade, in law, to which we yield obedience. For this obedience
every one is responsible; for instance in trade, and in the profession
of law, every one is the servant of practices the rectitude of which
his heart can only half approve--every one complains of them, yet all
are involved in them. Now, when such sins reach their climax, as in
the case of national bankruptcy or an unjust acquittal, there may be
some who are in a special sense, the actors in the guilt; but
evidently, for the bankruptcy, each member of the community is
responsible in that degree and so far as he himself acquiesced in the
duplicities of public dealing; every careless juror, every unrighteous
judge, every false witness, has done his part in the reduction of
society to that state in which the monster injustice has been
perpetrated. In the riot of a tumultuous assembly by night, a house
may be burnt, or a murder committed; in the eye of the law, all who
are aiding and abetting there are each in his degree responsible for
that crime; there may be difference in guilt, from the degree in which
he is guilty who with his own hand perpetrated the deed, to that of
him who merely joined the rabble from mischievous
curiosity--degrees from that of wilful murder to that of more or less
excusable homicide.
The Pharisees were declared by the Saviour to be guilty of the blood
of Zacharias, the blood of righteous Abel, and of all the saints and
prophets who fell before He came. But how were the Pharisees guilty?
They built the sepulchres of the prophets, they honoured and admired
them; but they were guilty, in that they were the children of those
that slew the prophets; children in this sense, that they inherited
their _spirit_, they opposed the good in the form in which it showed
itself in _their day_, just as their fathers opposed the form
displayed to theirs; therefore He said that they belonged to the same
confederacy of evil, and that the guilt of the blood of all who had
been slain should rest on that generation. Similarly we are guilty of
the death of Christ. If you have been a false friend, a sceptic, a
cowardly disciple, a formalist, selfish, an opposer of goodness, an
oppressor, whatever evil you have done, in that degree and so far you
participate in the evil to which the Just One fell a victim--you are
one of that mighty rabble which cry, "Crucify Him, Crucify Him!" for
your sin He died; His blood lies at your threshold.
Again, He died for all, in that His sacrifice represents the sacrifice
of all. We have heard of the doctrine of "imputed righteousness;" it
is a theological expression to which meanings foolish enough are
sometimes attributed, but it contains a very deep truth, which it
shall be our endeavour to elicit.
Christ is the realized idea of our Humanity. He is God's idea of Man
completed. There is every difference between the ideal and the
actual--between what a man aims to be and what he is; a difference
between the race as it is, and the race as it existed in God's
creative idea when he pronounced it very good.
In Christ, therefore, God beholds Humanity; in Christ He sees
perfected every one in whom Christ's spirit exists in germ. He to whom
the possible is actual, to whom what will be already _is_, sees all
things _present_, gazes on the imperfect, and sees it in its
perfection. Let me venture an illustration. He who has never seen the
vegetable world except in Arctic regions, has but a poor idea of the
majesty of vegetable life,--a microscopic red moss tinting the surface
of the snow, a few stunted pines, and here and there perhaps a
dwindled oak; but to the botanist who has seen the luxuriance of
vegetation in its tropical magnificence, all that wretched scene
presents another aspect; to him those dwarfs are the representatives
of what might be, nay, what has been in a kindlier soil and a more
genial climate; he fills up by his conception the miserable actuality
presented by these shrubs, and attributes to them--imputes, that is,
to them--the majesty of which the undeveloped germ exists already.
Now the difference between those trees seen in themselves, and seen in
the conception of their nature's perfectness which has been previously
realized, is the difference between man seen in himself and seen in
Christ. We are feeble, dwarfish, stunted specimens of Humanity. Our
best resolves are but withered branches, our holiest deeds unripe and
blighted fruit; but to the Infinite Eye, who sees in the perfect One
the type and assurance of that which shall be, this dwindled Humanity
of ours is divine and glorious. Such are we in the sight of God the
Father as is the very Son of God Himself. This is what theologians, at
least the wisest of them, meant by "imputed righteousness." I do not
mean that all who have written or spoken on the subject had this
conception of it, but I believe they who thought truly meant this;
they did not suppose that in imputing righteousness there was a kind
of figment, a self-deception in the mind of God; they did not mean
that by an act of will He chose to consider that every act which
Christ did was done by us; that He imputed or reckoned to us the
baptism in Jordan and the victory in the wilderness, and the agony in
the garden, or that He believed, or acted as if He believed, that when
Christ died, each one of us died: but He saw Humanity submitted to the
law of self-sacrifice; in the light of that idea He beholds us as
perfect, and is satisfied. In this sense the apostle speaks of those
that are imperfect, yet "by one offering He hath perfected for ever
them that are sanctified." It is true again, that He died for us, in
that we present His sacrifice as ours. The value of the death of
Christ consisted in the surrender of self-will. In the fortieth Psalm,
the value of every other kind of sacrifice being first denied, the
words follow, "then said I, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God." The
profound idea contained, therefore, in the death of Christ is the duty
of self-surrender.
But in _us_ that surrender scarcely deserves the name; even to use the
word self-sacrifice covers us with a kind of shame. Then it is that
there is an almost boundless joy in acquiescing in the life and death
of Christ, recognizing it as ours, and representing it to ourselves
and God as what we aim at. If we cannot understand how in this sense
it can be a sacrifice for us, we may partly realize it by remembering
the joy of feeling how art and nature realize for us what we cannot
realize for ourselves. It is recorded of one of the world's gifted
painters that he stood before the master-piece of the great genius of
his age--one which he could never hope to equal, nor even rival--and
yet the infinite superiority, so far from crushing him, only elevated
his feeling, for he saw realized those conceptions which had floated
before him, dim and unsubstantial; in every line and touch he felt a
spirit immeasurably superior yet kindred, and he is reported to have
exclaimed, with dignified humility, "And I too am a painter!"
We must all have felt, when certain effects in nature, combinations of
form and colour, have been presented to us, our own idea speaking in
intelligible and yet celestial language; when for instance, the long
bars of purple, "edged with intolerable radiance," seemed to float in
a sea of pale pure green, when the whole sky seemed to reel with
thunder, when the night wind moaned. It is wonderful how the most
commonplace men and women, beings who, as you would have thought, had
no conception that rose beyond a commercial speculation, or a
fashionable entertainment, are elevated by such scenes; how the
slumbering grandeur of their nature wakes and acknowledges kindred
with the sky and storm. "I cannot speak," they would say, "the
feelings which are in me; I have had emotions, aspirations, thoughts;
I cannot put them into words. Look there! listen now to the storm!
That is what I meant, only I never could say it out till now." Thus do
art and nature speak for us, and thus do we adopt them as our own.
This is the way in which His righteousness becomes righteousness for
us. This is the way in which the heart presents to God the sacrifice
of Christ; gazing on that perfect Life we, as it were, say, "There,
that is my religion--that is my righteousness--what I want to be,
which I am not--that is my offering, my life as I would wish to give
it, freely and not checked, entire and perfect." So the old prophets,
their hearts big with unutterable thoughts, searched "what or what
manner of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify,
when it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ, and of the
glory which should follow;" and so with us, until it passes into
prayer: "My Saviour, fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my
clumsy hand has drawn of a divine life, with the fullness of Thy
perfect picture. I feel the beauty which I cannot realize:--robe me in
Thine unutterable purity:--
"Rock of ages cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee."
II. The influence of that Sacrifice on man is the introduction of the
principle of self-sacrifice into his nature,--"then were all dead."
Observe again, not He died that we might not die, but that in His
death we might be dead, and that in His sacrifice we might become each
a sacrifice to God. Moreover, this death is identical with life. They
who in the first sentence, are called dead, are in the second
denominated "they who live." So in another place, "I am crucified with
Christ, nevertheless I live;" death, therefore--that is the sacrifice
of self--is equivalent to life. Now, this rests upon a profound truth.
The death of Christ was a representation of the life of God. To me
this is the profoundest of all truths, that the whole of the life of
God is the sacrifice of self. God is Love; love is sacrifice--to give
rather than to receive--the blessedness of self-giving. If the life of
God were not such it would be a falsehood, to say that God is Love;
for even in our human nature, that which seeks to enjoy all instead of
giving all, is known by a very different name from that of love. All
the life of God is a flow of this divine self-giving charity. Creation
itself is sacrifice--the self-impartation of the divine Being.
Redemption too, is sacrifice, else it could not be love; for which
reason we will not surrender one iota of the truth that the death of
Christ was the sacrifice of God--the manifestation once in time of
that which is the eternal law of His life.
If man therefore, is to rise into the life of God, he must be absorbed
into the spirit of that sacrifice--he must die with Christ if he would
enter into his proper life. For sin is the withdrawing into self and
egotism, out of the vivifying life of God, which alone is our true
life. The moment the man sins he dies. Know we not how awfully true
that sentence is, "Sin revived, and I died?" The vivid life of sin is
the death of the man. Have we never felt that our true existence has
absolutely in that moment disappeared, and that _we_ are not?
I say therefore, that real human life is a perpetual completion and
repetition of the sacrifice of Christ--"all are dead;" the explanation
of which follows, "to live not to themselves, but to Him who died for
them and rose again." This is the truth which lies at the bottom of
the Romish doctrine of the mass. Rome asserts that in the mass a true
and proper sacrifice is offered up for the sins of all--that the
offering of Christ is for ever repeated. To this Protestantism has
objected vehemently, that there is but one offering once offered--an
objection in itself entirely true; yet the Romish doctrine contains a
truth which it is of importance to disengage from the gross and
material form with which it has been overlaid. Let us hear St. Paul,
"I fill up that which is behindhand of the sufferings of Christ, in my
flesh, for His body's sake, which is the Church." Was there then,
something behindhand of Christ's sufferings remaining uncompleted, of
which the sufferings of Paul could be in any sense the complement? He
says there was. Could the sufferings of Paul for the Church in any
form of correct expression be said to eke out the sufferings that were
complete? In one sense it is true to say that there is one offering
once offered _for_ all. But it is equally true to say that that one
offering is valueless, except so far as it is completed and repeated
in the life and self-offering _of_ all. This is the Christian's
sacrifice. Not mechanically completed in the miserable materialism of
the mass, but spiritually in the life of all in whom the Crucified
lives. The sacrifice of Christ is done over again in every life which
is lived, not to self but, to God.
Let one concluding observation be made--self-denial, self-sacrifice,
self-surrender! Hard doctrines, and impossible! Whereupon, in silent
hours, we sceptically ask, Is this possible? is it natural? Let
preacher and moralist say what they will, I am not here to sacrifice
myself for others. God sent me here for happiness, not misery. Now
introduce one sentence of this text of which we have as yet said
nothing, and the dark doctrine becomes illuminated--"the _love_ of
Christ constraineth us." Self-denial, for the sake of self-denial,
does no good; self-sacrifice for its own sake is no religious act at
all. If you give up a meal for the sake of showing power over self, or
for the sake of self-discipline, it is the most miserable of all
delusions. You are not more religious in doing this than before. This
is mere self-culture, and self-culture being occupied for ever about
self, leaves you only in that circle of self from which religion is to
free you; but to give up a meal that one you love may have it, is
properly a religious act--no hard and dismal duty, because made easy
by affection. To bear pain for the sake of bearing it has in it no
moral quality at all, but to bear it rather than surrender truth, or
in order to save another, is positive enjoyment as well as ennobling
to the soul. Did you ever receive even a blow meant for another in
order to shield that other? Do you not know that there was actual
pleasure in the keen pain far beyond the most rapturous thrill of
nerve which could be gained from pleasure in the midst of
painlessness? Is not the mystic yearning of love expressed in words
most purely thus, Let me suffer for him?
This element of love is that which makes this doctrine an intelligible
and blessed truth. So sacrifice alone, bare and unrelieved, is
ghastly, unnatural, and dead; but self-sacrifice, illuminated by love,
is warmth and life; it is the death of Christ, the life of God, the
blessedness, and only proper life of man.
VIII.
_Preached June 30, 1850._
THE POWER OF SORROW.
"Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed
to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that
ye might receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh
repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of
the world worketh death."--2 Corinthians vii. 9, 10.
That which is chiefly insisted on in this verse, is the distinction
between sorrow and repentance. To grieve over sin is one thing, to
repent of it is another.
The apostle rejoiced, not that the Corinthians sorrowed, but that they
sorrowed unto repentance. Sorrow has two results; it may end in
spiritual life, or in spiritual death; and in themselves, one of these
is as natural as the other. Sorrow may produce two kinds of
reformation--a transient, or a permanent one--an alteration in habits,
which originating in emotion, will last so long as that emotion
continues, and then after a few fruitless efforts, be given up,--a
repentance which will be repented of; or again, a permanent change,
which will be reversed by no after thought--a repentance not to be
repented of. Sorrow is in itself, therefore, a thing neither good nor
bad: its value depends on the spirit of the person on whom it falls.
Fire will inflame straw, soften iron, or harden clay; its effects are
determined by the object with which it comes in contact. Warmth
developes the energies of life, or helps the progress of decay. It is
a great power in the hot-house, a great power also in the coffin; it
expands the leaf, matures the fruit, adds precocious vigour to
vegetable life: and warmth too developes, with tenfold rapidity, the
weltering process of dissolution. So too with sorrow. There are
spirits in which it developes the seminal principle of life; there are
others in which it prematurely hastens the consummation of irreparable
decay. Our subject therefore is the twofold power of sorrow.
I. The fatal power of the sorrow of the world.
II. The life-giving power of the sorrow that is after God.
The simplest way in which the sorrow of the world works death, is seen
in the effect of mere regret for worldly loss. There are certain
advantages with which we come into the world. Youth, health, friends,
and sometimes property. So long as these are continued we are happy;
and because happy, fancy ourselves very grateful to God. We bask in
the sunshine of His gifts, and this pleasant sensation of sunning
ourselves in life we call religion; that state in which we all are
before sorrow comes, to test the temper of the metal of which our
souls are made, when the spirits are unbroken and the heart buoyant,
when a fresh morning is to a young heart what it is to the skylark.
The exuberant burst of joy seems a spontaneous hymn to the Father of
all blessing, like the matin carol of the bird; but this is not
religion: it is the instinctive utterance of happy feeling, having as
little of moral character in it, in the happy human being, as in the
happy bird.
Nay more--the religion which is only sunned into being by happiness,
is a suspicious thing: having been warmed by joy, it will become cold
when joy is over; and then when these blessings are removed, we count
ourselves hardly treated, as if we had been defrauded of a right;
rebellious hard feelings come; then it is you see people become
bitter, spiteful, discontented. At every step in the solemn path of
life, something must be mourned which will come back no more; the
temper that was so smooth becomes rugged and uneven; the benevolence
that expanded upon all, narrows into an ever dwindling selfishness--we
are alone; and then that death-like loneliness deepens as life goes
on. The course of man is downwards, and he moves with slow and ever
more solitary steps, down to the dark silence--the silence of the
grave. This is the death of heart; the sorrow of the world has worked
death.
Again there is a sorrow of the world, when sin is grieved for in a
worldly spirit. There are two views of sin: in one it is looked upon
as wrong--in the other, as producing loss--loss for example, of
character. In such cases, if character could be preserved before the
world, grief would not come; but the paroxysms of misery fall upon our
proud spirit when our guilt is made public. The most distinct instance
we have of this is in the life of Saul. In the midst of his apparent
grief, the thing still uppermost was that he had forfeited his kingly
character: almost the only longing was, that Samuel should honour him
before his people. And hence it comes to pass, that often remorse and
anguish only begin with exposure. Suicide takes place, not when the
act of wrong is done, but when the guilt is known, and hence too, many
a one becomes hardened who would otherwise have remained tolerably
happy; in consequence of which we blame the exposure, not the guilt;
we say if it had hushed up, all would have been well; that the servant
who robbed his master was ruined by taking away his character; and
that if the sin had been passed over, repentance might have taken
place, and he might have remained a respectable member of society. Do
not think so. It is quite true that remorse was produced by exposure,
and that the remorse was fatal; the sorrow which worked death arose
from that exposure, and so far exposure may be called the cause: had
it never taken place, respectability, and comparative peace, might
have continued; but outward respectability is not change of heart.
It is well known that the corpse has been preserved for centuries in
the iceberg, or in antiseptic peat; and that when atmospheric air was
introduced to the exposed surface it crumbled into dust. Exposure
worked dissolution, but it only manifested the death which was already
there; so with sorrow, it is not the living heart which drops to
pieces, or crumbles into dust, when it is revealed. Exposure did not
work death in the Corinthian sinner, but life.
There is another form of grief for sin, which the apostle would not
have rejoiced to see; it is when the hot tears come from pride. No two
tones of feeling, apparently similar, are more unlike than that in
which Saul exclaimed, "I have played the fool exceedingly," and that
in which the Publican cried out, "God be merciful to me a sinner."
The charge of folly brought against oneself only proves that we feel
bitterly for having lost our own self-respect. It is a humiliation to
have forfeited the idea which a man had formed of his own
character--to find that the very excellence on which he prided
himself, is the one in which he has failed. If there were a virtue for
which Saul was conspicuous, it was generosity; yet it was exactly in
this point of generosity in which he discovered himself to have
failed, when he was overtaken on the mountain, and his life spared by
the very man whom he was hunting to the death, with feelings of the
meanest jealousy. Yet there was no real repentance there; there was
none of that in which a man is sick of state and pomp. Saul could
still rejoice in regal splendour, go about complaining of himself to
the Ziphites, as if he was the most ill-treated and friendless of
mankind; he was still jealous of his reputation, and anxious to be
well thought of. Quite different is the tone in which the Publican,
who felt himself a sinner, asked for mercy. He heard the contumelious
expression of the Pharisee, "this Publican." With no resentment, he
meekly bore it as a matter naturally to be taken for granted--"he did
not so much as lift up his eyes to heaven;" he was as a worm which
turns in agony, but not revenge, upon the foot which treads it into
the dust.
Now this sorrow of Saul's too, works death: no merit can restore
self-respect; when once a man has found himself out, he cannot be
deceived again. The heart is as a stone: a speck of canker corrodes
and spreads within. What on this earth remains, but endless sorrow,
for him who has ceased to respect himself, and has no God to turn to?
II. The divine power of sorrow.
1. It works repentance. By repentance is meant, in Scripture, change
of life, alteration of habits, renewal of heart. This is the aim and
meaning of all sorrow. The consequences of sin are meant to wean from
sin. The penalty annexed to it is in the first instance, corrective,
not penal. Fire burns the child, to teach it one of the truths of this
universe--the property of fire to burn. The first time it cuts its
hand with a sharp knife, it has gained a lesson which it never will
forget. Now, in the case of pain, this experience is seldom, if ever,
in vain. There is little chance of a child forgetting that fire will
burn, and that sharp steel will cut; but the moral lessons contained
in the penalties annexed to wrong-doing are just as truly intended,
though they are by no means so unerring in enforcing their
application. The fever in the veins and the headache which succeed
intoxication, are meant to warn against excess. On the first occasion
they are simply corrective; in every succeeding one they assume more
and more a penal character in proportion as the conscience carries
with them the sense of ill desert.
Sorrow then, has done its work when it deters from evil; in other
words when it works repentance. In the sorrow of the world, the
obliquity of the heart towards evil is not cured; it seems as if
nothing cured it: heartache and trials come in vain; the history of
life at last is what it was at first. The man is found erring where he
erred before. The same course, begun with the certainty of the same
desperate end which has taken place so often before.
They have reaped the whirlwind, but they will again sow the wind.
Hence I believe, that life-giving sorrow is less remorse for that
which is irreparable, than anxiety to save that which remains. The
sorrow that ends in death hangs in funeral weeds over the sepulchres
of the past. Yet the present does not become more wise. Not one
resolution is made more firm, nor one habit more holy. Grief is all.
Whereas sorrow avails _only_ when the past is converted into
experience, and from failure lessons are learned which never are to be
forgotten.
2. Permanence of alteration; for after all, a steady reformation is a
more decisive test of the value of mourning than depth of grief.
The susceptibility of emotion varies with individuals. Some men feel
intensely, others suffer less keenly; but this is constitutional,
belonging to nervous temperament, rather than to moral character.
_This_ is the characteristic of the divine sorrow, that it is a
repentance "not repented of;" no transient, short-lived resolutions,
but sustained resolve.
And the beautiful law is, that in proportion as the, repentance
increases the grief diminishes. "I rejoice," says Paul, that "I made
you sorry, though it were but for a time." Grief for a time,
repentance for ever. And few things more signally prove the wisdom of
this apostle than his way of dealing with this grief of the
Corinthian. He tried no artificial means of intensifying it--did not
urge the duty of dwelling upon it, magnifying it, nor even of gauging
and examining it. So soon as grief had done its work, the apostle was
anxious to dry useless tears--he even feared lest haply such an one
should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. "A true penitent," says
Mr. Newman, "never forgives himself." O false estimate of the gospel
of Christ, and of the heart of man! A proud remorse does not forgive
itself the forfeiture of its own dignity; but it is the very beauty of
the penitence which is according to God, that at last the sinner,
realizing God's forgiveness, does learn to forgive himself. For what
other purpose did St. Paul command the Church of Corinth to give
ecclesiastical absolution, but in order to afford a symbol and
assurance of the Divine pardon, in which the guilty man's grief should
not be overwhelming, but that he should become reconciled to himself?
What is meant by the Publican's going _down to his house_ justified,
but that he felt at peace with himself and God?
3. It is sorrow with God--here called godly sorrow; in the margin
sorrowing according to God.
God sees sin not in its consequences but in itself: a thing infinitely
evil, even if the consequences were happiness to the guilty instead of
misery. So sorrow according to God, is to see sin as God sees it. The
grief of Peter was as bitter as that of Judas. He went out and wept
bitterly; how bitterly none can tell but they who have learned to look
on sin as God does. But in Peter's grief there was an element of hope;
and that sprung precisely from this--that he saw God in it all.
Despair of self did not lead to despair of God.
This is the great, peculiar feature of this sorrow: God is there,
accordingly self is less prominent. It is not a microscopic
self-examination, nor a mourning in which self is ever uppermost: _my_
character gone; the greatness of _my_ sin; the forfeiture of _my_
salvation. The thought of God absorbs all that. I believe the feeling
of true penitence would express itself in such words as these:--There
_is_ a righteousness, though I have not attained it. There is a
purity, and a love, and a beauty, though my life exhibits little of
it. In that I can rejoice. Of that I can feel the surpassing
loveliness. My doings? They are worthless, I cannot endure to think of
them. I am not thinking of them. I have something else to think of.
There, there; in that Life I see it. And so the Christian--gazing not
on what he is, but on what he desires to be--dares in penitence to
say, That righteousness is mine: dares, even when the recollection of
his sin is most vivid and most poignant, to say with Peter, thinking
less of himself than of God, and sorrowing as it were with God--"Lord,
Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee."
IX.
_Preached August 4, 1850._
SENSUAL AND SPIRITUAL EXCITEMENT.
"Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of
the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be
filled with the Spirit."--Ephesians v. 17, 18.
There is evidently a connection between the different branches of this
sentence--for ideas cannot be proper
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