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LIBRARY
University of California.
Gli^T OF"
Mrs. SARAH P. WALSWORTH.
Received October, i8g4.
Accessions No. S!^'^lJ~(o Class No.
THE SILENCE
AND THE
VOICES OF GOD,
WITH OTHER SERMONS.
BY
FREDERIC W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.
Late Fellow of Trinity Coll^re, Cambridge ; Master of Marlborough College,
and Chaplain in Ordinary to the Qaeen.
;iriri7ERsiTT
#!?%
NEW YORK:
E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY, .
713 BROADWAY,
1875.
F'i
s"in>^L
TO
THE EEV. CANON WESTCOTT, D.D.,
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY
OP CAMBRIDGE,
I DEDICATE THESE SERMONS
WITH CORDIAL GRATITUDE
AND
WITH SINCERE ADMIRATION AND ESTEEM.
;UFI7EIlSlT7l
PREFACE.
The three first sermons, which give their title to
this little volume, were preached before the Uni-
versity of Cambridge, and are published by the
request of the Vice-Chancellor. I have added to
them a few other sermons in deference to the wishes
of those who heard them delivered, and desired to
possess them in a permanent form.
CONTENTS.
L
Silence and Voices.
Pagk.
1 Sam. iiL 10. Speak ; for ihj servant heareth 11
n.
The Voice of Conscience.
Bom. ii. 15. Their conscience also bearing witness 89
m.
The Voice of History.
Ps. xlvi. 6. The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms
are moved ; but God hath shewed His voice, and the earth
shall melt away
IV.
What Gk>D Requires.
MiCAH vi. 6-5. Wherewith shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before the high Grod ? shall I come before
Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old ? Will
(vii)
Vlll CONTENTS.
Faoe
the Lord be pleased With thousands of rams, or with ten
thousands of rivers of oil ? shall I give my firstborn for
my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my
soul ? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good ; and
what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? 93
V.
Avoidance of Temptation.
Matthew iv. 5-7. Then the devil taketh Him up into the
holy City, and setteth Him on a pinnacle of the temple,
and saith unto Him, If Thou be the Son of God, cast Thy-
self down : for it is written, He shall give His angels
charge concerning Thee : and in their hands they, shall
bear Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash Thy foot against
a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou
shalt not tempt the Lord thy God 107
VL
The Conquest over Temptation.
1 Cor. X. 13. There hath no temptation taken you but such
as is common to man : but God is faithful, who will not
suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able ; but will
with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye
may be able to bear it. 125
VH.
Wisdom and Knowledge.
Proverbs iv. 7. Wisdom is the principal thing ; therefore
get wisdom : and with all thy getting get understanding. 147
CONTENTS. IX
vm.
"Working With our Might.
Paok.
2 Chron. xxxi. 21. And in every work that lie began in the
service of the House of God, and in the Law, and in tlie
Commandments, to seek his God, he did it with all his
heart, and prospered 165
IX.
Pharisees and FnBLiOAN&
Luke xviii. 9. And he spake this parable unto certain that
trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and de-
spised others 183
•
X.
Too Late.
Luke xix. 42. If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in
this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace 1
but now they are hid from thine eyes 207
XI.
Prayer, the antidote to Sorrow.
Luke xxiL 44. And being in an agony, He prayed 225
I.
SILENCE AND VOICES.
" Muto non e, come altri credi, il cielo
Sordi siam noi, a cui 1' orecchio serra
Lo strepito insolente della terra."
Speak, for thy servant heareth. — 1 Sam. iii. 10.*
Man is a mystery to himself, and he is sur-
rounded by mysteries unnumbered. In the or-
dinary practical business of life, — in the common
task of everyday existence, — ^lie finds indeed no
difficulty ; and for millions of his race, for millions
who spend their days in servile toil, and whose
horizon is spanned by the little circle of ordinary
interests, — the * Enigmas of Life' would be a
meaningless expression. Absorbed in a sordid or a
sensual present, they have never wondered whence
they came, or whither they are going ; — they neither
question of the future, nor dream about the past.
It was the daily self-examination of one of the
most eminent of saints, Bernarde, ad quid venisti ?
" Bernard, for what purpose art thou here ? " but
* Preached before the University of Cambridge, April 27, 1873.
(11)
12 SILENCE AND VOICES.
there are whole races of mankind, to whom, shut in
by the narrowing walls of natural dulness or invol-
untary ignorance, such questions have never taken
shape. And yet these too, my brethren, are our
brothers; these too are heirs of our common im-
mortality: for these too. the great sun shines in
heaven, and the pure dew falls upon the sleeping
fields; over these, no less than over ourselves,
broods unseen, yet ever present, the atmosphere of
Eternity ; and it is as possible, we believe, for these,
as for earth's most gifted and most glorious chil-
dren, to stand redeemed before the Great White
Throne. And why ? — Because, under all diver-
sities, the essential condition of mankind is one ;
because, whatever we may fancy, God is oh TrpoauTro-
XijTZTrjg — no rcspccter of persons ; — because intelli-
gence or dulness, knowledge or ignorance, rank or
obscurity, wealth or indigence, these, and all other
evanescent or artificial distinctions between man
and man, are non-existent in the eyes of God, or
rather are only existent as conditions which in no
wise affect the innermost reality of his being ; —
which reality depends on this alone, — whether Man
is seeing the face, and holding the hand, and lis-
tening to the voice of God, or whether that face
SILENCE AND VOICES. 13
has vanished from him, that hand been withdrawn,
that voice has first sunk into silence, then faded
from memory, then been banished from belief.
My brethren, in this matter let us not be de
ceived. We of this land, of this century, of this
University are, by God's grace, heirs of the treas-
uries of the world. Nothing profound has been
ever thought, nothing enchanting ever imagined,
nothing noble ever uttered, nothing saintly or
heroic ever done, which is not or may not be ours.
For us Plato and Shakespeare thought ; for us
Dante and Milton sang ; for us Bacon and Newton
toiled ; for us Angelo and Raphael painted ; for
us Benedict and Francis lived saintly lives ; for
the heritage of our liberty have myriads of heroes
perished on the battle-field, and for the purity of
our religion hundreds of martyrs sighed away their
souls amid the flames. But let us not pride our-
selves on this our glorious inheritance, or falsely
dream that this alone will avail us anything, or
that we are favorite children in the great family of
God. Certainly since to us much has been given,
from us much shall be required ; but, nevertheless,
the poorest and most squalid savage, the most op-
pressed and ignorant slave, shares with us a blessing
14 SILENCE AND VOICES.
and a mystery incomparably more transcendent than
any of these, — as much more transcendent as the
Bun is vaster and brighter than the earth, — ^in that,
to all of -us alike God speaks ; in that for all of us
alike, Christ died. To these, no less than to us, it
is possible so to live, in obedience to the law of
God, that Life, even amid its sin and suffering, may
still echo with the distant songs of a lost Paradise ;
and so to die, that death may be none other than
the house of God, and the gate of heaven. The
earthly gifts which make man pride himself above
his fellow-man are all perishable ; it is those things
only which cannot be shaken that shall remain.
" Know" (and, when we read such utterances, and
contrast them with the moaning, groping, dis-
believing, despairing faithlessness of an increasing
mass of modern literature, we seem to be breathing
the atmosphere of another and a better world !)
" Know that all are equal before the Lord, and that
men are born for holiness as the trees of the forest
for light." Yes, holiness is the one thing need-
ful ; whether there be prophecies, they shall fail ;
whether there be tongues, they shall cease ; whether
there be knowledge, it shall vanish away ; earthly
learning, and earthly endowments are but as the
SILENCE AND VOICES. 15
grass, and as the flower : " the grass withereth, the
flower fadeth, because the Spirit of the Lord bloweth
upon it : the grass withereth, the flower fadeth,
but the Word of our God shall stand for ever." *
The Word of our God — that, and that alone;
and man, only as he listens to that Word, only as
he is in harmony with that God. The earth may
be shattered, and the heavens pass like a shrivelled
scroll ; but not the soul of man, which hath become
partaker of God's Eternity. The one thing then
of real and infinite importance to us, is, not the
fruit of our studies, not the success of our efibrts,
not the things for which men toil and weary them-
selves and sigh, not anything whereby we are dis-
tinguished from other men, but this only, which
afiects us in common with all other men, whether
our ears are quick to hear, and our hearts zealous to
obey the voice of God. To do this is safety : not
to do this is misery and failure : nay, to do this is
life, and to do it not is to make life itself an in-
itiation into death. And therefore, for these three
Sundays on which it is my high privilege to ad-
dress you, I would speak, feebly indeed and un-
worthily, but yet earnestly, on some fragment of
* Is. xl. 7, 8.
16 SILENCE AND VOICES.
this great subject — The Silence and the Voices of
God.
And surely the subject is not a needless one.
It may be a sad and startling fact, but it is a fact,
that, more and more among us, more and more
after eighteen Christian centuries, more and more,
though History has been full of lightnings and
thunderings and voices, yea, though the Word of
God has been made flesh and tabernacled among us,
there are men, men alas ! of learning and genius,
who not only refuse to listen to God's voice, but
even deny that God has ever spoken, deny even
that He is. Yes, in the dismal advance of atheism,
not content to repudiate the Lord that bought, and
the Spirit that striveth with them, men are begin-
ning openly to debate, in the blindness of their self-
sufficiency, whether there be so much as a God who
created them. And when we meet with such, what
shall we say ? My brethren, the proof of God's exist-
ence wholly transcends the region of argument, nor
is it any proposition which can be coldly reasoned
out by the finite understanding. If indeed a man of
base motives and guilty deeds, a blasphemer, a mur-
derer, an adulterer, one whose life is an organized
battle against the will and law of God, if such a man
SILENCE AND VOICES. 17
denies God, of what use is it to say to him with the
fervid Father, Et tu tamen eum nosti, dum odtisi ?*
Nay rather, must we not say to him that he is too
deeply pledged and enlisted against the truth to be
convinced of it ? that as he has chosen to live having
no hope, and without God in the world, so for him
there is no God in the world ? He hath said it in
his heart, and who, in such a matter, shall neu-
tralize the deadly bias of his will ? what more can
we say to him, and what better can we hope for
him, than that, if the weak words of man fail to
pierce the hardened intellect, God's own power may,
through strange Providences, correct and convert
His erring child and lead him by the hand into the
Temple of a pure Faith through the open portals
of a holier and nobler life ? But when a man of
whom we know no evil, when a man of whose life
Charity is sure that it is honorable and innocent,
when such a man says with Diagoras, that there
is no God, or with Protagoras that he cannot tell
whether there be or not,f then if the invisible things
* Tert. de testim. Animae, iiL
t laaoL yap ovx iKdvreg kol Xiyovatv aKOvreg . . . k&v fxr) elvat
pfjq o)C Aiaydpa^ kclv ayvoelv tl tprj^ wf lipuraydpaQ. Max. Tyr.
Dissert, xvii. ep. 5. Cic. de Nat. Deorum. I. i. Diog. Laert. ix. 51.
Arist. Niib. 830, etc
2
18 SILENCE AND VOICES.
of Him from the creation of the world be not clearly
seen, being understood by the things that are made,
even His eternal power and Godhead, — ^if God's works
be disregarded, is -it likely that Man's logic will avail ?
Can we construct a syllogism, more overpowering for.
his conviction than " the starry heavens above ? " can
we write a book of evidences more potent to his con-
science than "the moral law within?'*' A society
for the defence of Christianity may have its own work
to do, but will it persuade the unbeliever, if the
voices of the sea and the mountains fail.? A man
may stand, if he will, amid the mirth and music
of a breathing summer day, when all the air is vocal
with whispering trees, and singing birds, and the
quivering of insect wings, and assert to us, con-
temptuously, that all is silent : what can we answer
him save that it is silent to the dull deaf ear ? A
man may close his eyes if he will till they are blind,
and then, standing in the burning noonday, may
defy us to prove that there is a sun in heaven :
what need we care to say to him in answer, but that
we see its splendor, but that we feel its warmth ?
What can we say to such, but that which even a
heathen said, " God is within thee, and is thy God ;
thou carriest God about with thee and knowest
SILENCE AND VOICES. 19
Him not."* And may we not say, my brethren,
that as for ourselves we know God ; we hear His
voice ; we see His face ; His name is on our fore-
heads ? In joy He increases and purifies our joy ;
in sorrow He heals and sanctifies our sorrows ; in
sin He punishes and forgives our sins. And you,
self-honoring children of a cold and faithless gen-
eration, if such be here, you, who have invested so
much of modern thought with the clammy and
creeping mist of your uncertainties and your nega-
tions, if ye cannot yourselves believe in God, be
content at least in your own sad non-belief; and,
however much ye may be puffed up by the pride of
an imaginary emancipation, try not, in your cruel
kindness, in your condescending pity, try not to
rob us of Him. Try not to induce us to exchange for
your mean and flickering tapers our *^ offspring of
heaven first-born ; " or to enlighten our darkness by
putting out our sun. Or try your very utmost, but
it will be in vain. We too are biassed. We desire
not this strong delusion sent us that we should
believe a lie. For to lose God is not, as you say,
* 6 deoc evSov earl /cat 6 vfierepo^ 6ai/i(jv eori debx Tepi^ipeif
dhig Kai ayvoeZf. Epict. Dissert, i. 14, 16.
20 SILENCE AND VOICES.
to be robbed of some ^^ mentis gratissimus error ;*'
it is to lose our life. But we cannot lose it. Where
you argue, we feel. Where you doubt, we know,
Where you hesitate, we are certain. Where you
deny, we live. Hold yourselves, if ye will and must,
to be the sport and prey of every angry circumstance
and every pitiless law, but we will trust in the name
of the Lord our God. In the cold, in the storm, in
the darkness, prefer if ye will to wander and
stumble, without a comforter and without a friend,
but we will grope for our Father's hand. And
never have we, never hath any man groped for that
hand in vain. '^ Sanabiles fecit nationes terrae"
Man may have gone astray, but not hopelessly ; he
may have been smitten with a leprosy, but it is not
incurable. Oh, be it a little misfortune or a mighty
agony, be it a childish trouble or a boyish folly, be
it a transient disappointment or a lifelong difficulty,
be it a sudden dereliction or a besetting sin, ye who
have been sad, ye who have been weary, ye who
have been sick with discontent or self-disgust, I
challenge you to say whether you have ever sought
Him and found his promise fail ? whether you have
ever sought Him without His holding forth to you
SILENCE AND VOICES. 21
in the very bitterness of death a green leaf from that
Tree of Life that grows for the healing of the nations
in the Paradise of God ?
So then although, more and more, the icy wind
of atheism, stealing through our literature with
almost inarticulate whisper, is chilling the hearts
of many, yet to counteract it, except by noble ex-
amples, except by Christian lives, appears to be but
a futile labor. But there are myriads more, who,
though they do not doubt the existence of God, yet
deny His Providence. An image is before them,
but there is Silence. For them He is inanimate
as an idol. Clouds indeed and darkness are round
about Him, but righteousness and judgment are
not the habitation of His seat. The voices of
man, — ^voices of blasphemy, voices of anguish, voices
of adoration, — ^may break the eternal stillness, but
they reach Him not, nor careth He, nor speaketh.
How should He care .? How should He speak ?
Hath he not abdicated in favor of His own works ?
What mean ye by your God, they say to us. What
is He but the Universe ? What is He but a vast
formless Fate ? What but a dread magnificence of
Nature ? What, but a fearful Uniformity of
Laws ? What, to take the latest of these philo-
22 SILENCE AND VOICES.
sophic utterances, what but "a stream of tendency
flowing through the ages ? "
And this, my brethren, if it be not unbelief,
is just as hopeless and just as comfortless. We
cannot trust in a blind destiny. We cannot love an
awful uniformity of laws. " A stream of tendency
flowing through the ages " may be a very philosoph-
ical conception of the God adopted by the insight or
the criticism of the nineteenth century, but, unlike
"our Father which is in heaven/' it has "no ear for
prayer, no heart for sympathy, no arm to save."
This God is not our God, nor can it be our guide for
ever and ever. And what follows ? If God be not,
or be as though He were not, then man is not or is
as though he were not. For what then is man ?
What but a phantom, a vapor, a nothing, — the
shadow of a dream moving amid dreams and shadows ;
at best one dying leaf in an illimitable forest ; one un-
regarded rain drop in some immeasurable sea ? And
so, if life be but a semblance and death but an ex-
tinction, and if, amid an infinitude of Time peopled
by myriads of existences, and an infinitude of Space
teeming with innumerable worlds, man be an atom
tossed out of nothingness, and destined to become
but dust "blown about the desert or sealed within
SILENCE AND VOICES. 23
the iron hills;" — if this be so, — oh, dreary, dreary-
gospel of a darkness taking itself for exceptional
enlightenment! — if God be nothing, and Man be
nothing, what then is Virtue, and what is Truth?
Virtue forsooth — though the Prophets and the
Apostles and the Martyrs -knew it not — ^is prudence;
it is expedience ; it is utility ; it is enlightened self-
interest; it is, to use their favorite formula, the
"greatest happiness of the greatest number." And
Truth is a subjective impression ultimately resolva-
ble into particular conditions of the brain. My
brethren, who can be moved by these dim abstrac-
tions, by these coarse materialisms.? Who is the
Lord — if this be He — who is the Lord that I should
obey his voice ? All is vanity, delusion, emptiness.
All meaning is wiped out of life, as when a man
wipeth a dish, wiping and turning it upside down ;
"w^ solum certum sit nihil esse certi nee miserius
quiequam Jiomine nee superhius." * If we sin, what
does it matter to blind infinite Forces which may
crush us, but cannot love ? If we repent, what will
the iEons and the Spaces care for our repentance ?
Are we any better than what the Greek atheist said
we were, "dumb animals, driven through the mid-
* Pliny.
24 SILENCE AND VOICES.
night upon a rudderless vessel, over a stormy sea ? '^
" Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Yes,
ther. that bitter description is true, — "Seated be-
tween the tomb of his fathers whom he has dis-
owned, and the cradle of his children for whom he
feels only a bitter pity, man is no more than a mis-
erable puppet, condemned to play I know not what
lugubrious comedy before I know not what icy spec-
tators.'' ••'
And though these opinions, and such as these,
have for the young all the "fascination of corrup-
tion," — ^though they have all that destroying and
agonizing beauty which the great painter infused
into the horror of the Gorgon's countenance, on
which men must gaze though it turned them into
stone,f — yet God forbid that there should be many
of you, my younger hearers, who should have subtly
slidden into such treacherous unbeliefs. Yet they
spring alas ! from sources far beneath the soil ; and
many who have never said " There is no God," have
yet found a self-deceiving excuse for sin in " Tush,
God careth not for it. He hideth away his face, and
shall never see it." And alas ! the very best among
us all fails too often to realize, as a guiding thought
* Montalembert. f The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci.
SILENCE AND VOICES. 25
in life, that God does speak, and speaks to us, and
speaks distinct messages in voices awfully articulate ;
or, even when we believe it with all our hearts, how
little are we ready always, in the midnight as in the
noonday, to say, with bowed head and folded hands,
" Si)eak Lord, for thy servant heareth." The Jews,
in a legend that is not meaningless, tell us how, on
the Mount, the great law-giver needed no human
sustenance, because the subtle harmonies of the uni-
verse so filled his soul as to satisfy and sustain his
whole being with their heavenly diapason ; but when
he came down out of the rolling clouds, the vesture
of decay closed his ears and he heard no longer,
and hungered for earthly food. Is it not so with
us ? Times there are when we hear the voice of
God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,
yea, when we hear it all the day long ; and there are
other times when we too listen with fainting hearts
to those who tell us that we have but mistaken the
pulse of our own beings for a sound above us ; and
that the universe wherein we live has long been
smitten with the curse of silence. Oh, they do not
lack for arguments ! Around every step of our ca-
reer on earth the mystery of the Infinite rises like a
wall of adamant, and the limitation of our faculties
26 SILENCE AND VOICES.
falls like a curtain of darkness. Look, they say, at all
this pain and misery and evil ; how is it reconcilable
with the Being of a God at once omnipotent and
all-loving ? Look at the myriads of mankind who
have lived only as the beasts live, and died as the
fool dieth. Look at all the evidences of "insane
religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, de-
testable pleasure and vain hope or vile, in which the
nations of the world have lived ; so that it seems as
if the race itself were still half-serpent, not yet ex-
tricated from the clay, a lacertine brood of bitter-
ness, the track of it on the leaf a glittering slime,
and in the sand a useless furrow;"* or in lan-
guage less full of scorn, "see," they say, "how gen-
eration after generation of the young rush sanguine
into the arena, generation after generation of the
old step weary into the grave ; how the beautiful
and the noble are cut off in youth, while the stained
and mean drag their ignominy through a long career.
Look at the chastisements that do not chasten ; the
trials that do not purify ; the sorrows that do not
olevate ; the pains and privations that harden the
tender heart, but do not soften the stubborn will;
the virtues that dig their own grave ; the light that
* Buskin.
SILENCE AND VOICES. 27
leads astray." * Or need we look, they ask, beyond
our own little lives ? how often is the folly of a mo-
ment the anguish of a life ! In one instant a deed
is done, a choice is made.
And there cotneth a mist, and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again :
yet no voice from heaven speaks, no angel flashes
from the blue. And if the light does not shine, why
at least does not the thunder roll ? men do wrong and
prosper ; men do right and die in defeat and dark-
ness. On the fields which the usurer has wrung
from the orphan, the sun shines and the harvest
waves; and no midnight dreams haunt the pillow
of the seducer, as he lies down to sleep as softly as
the innocent and the just. "Blaspheme God as
you will ; deny God, if you wish to do so," says one
in a recent work of fiction; "do all the evil that you
possibly can do, and this sweet moonlight which
seems to rise out of the waves, will shine no less
sweetly for you than for me, and will conduct us
both to our quiet homes." f
My brethren, I shall not attempt to answer all
these objections from the supposed silences of God.
» Enigmas of Life, "W. R. Grey, p. 210.
t Alphonse Karr, Le Chemin le plus court, p. 70.
28- SILENCE AND VOICES.
God makes no ado: He does not defend himself:
He suffers men to blaspheme ; His enemies make a
murmuring but He refrains. And as for these,
many of them are false generalizations, many are
distorted facts, some are acknowledged mysteries,
some are wilful perversions of the truth : most of
them may be reduced to this — that God's ways are
in the sea, and His paths in the great waters, and
'His footsteps are not known. But further, much
of this, yea, and more than all this, may alas! to
those who utter it be awfully true. To men, to na-
tions, sometimes almost to a whole world, God is
silent : there is no God. Their eyes are blinded, so
that they cannot see; their ears closed that they
cannot hear. Aye, but it is a penal silence, a re-
tributive blindness. They who love the darkness,
have it. To those who will not listen, God does
not speak: Kadibg ovk kSoKifiaaav rbv Qebv Ix^iv h emyviSjaei
TrapidoKEV avrovg 6 Oebg elg a6oKifibv vovv.^ Like avCngCS.
like: there is a terrible resemblance between the
retribution and the crime: the choice that will
not discern is punished in kind, punished even here
by the mind that cannot. And then the whole uni-
verse becomes a gulf of silence, a void of blackness.
* Rom. i. 28.
SILENCE AND VOICES. 29
They suffer, and there is no God ; they sin, and there
is no Eedeemer ; they despair, and there is no Com-
forter. The Jews, who with all their deadly per-
versity yet had many a flash of moral insight, knew
this truth too well. God had spoken to them, they
said, first, face to face as to Adam in Paradise ; then
only by the Urim ; then only by dreams ; then only
by prophets ; then only by the vague uncertainties
of the daughter of a voice, which was but to the few
an intelligible utterance, to the many but an articu-
late rolling of the distant thunder-peal. And as
His voices sounded fainter and fainter, so did He
withdraw farther and farther, as the sins of men
assumed a deeper and deeper dye, until now He is
but in the seventh and inmost heaven infinitely far,
and seemed awhile to have left them to their fate.
Yes, it is even so in the individual heart of man.
God forgotten is God ignored ; God ignored is God
doubted of; God doubted of is God denied; God
denied, sooner or later is God detested.
Aye, but on the other hand, to seek God is
to find ; and to listen is to hear ; and to hear is to
know and love ; so that, to His saints, day unto
day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth
Knowledge, and "God is a declaratory God, speak-
30 silence' AND VOICES.
ing in ten thousand voices, and the whole year is one
Epiphany, one day of manifestation."
1. He speaks to us, for instance, in Nature ;
and even while I say it, I can imagine at once how
impatiently the cynic will sneer at what he will
regard as a poetic fancy which has been worn
threadbare into a deceptive platitude. It was so
in the days of the Preacher, "He hath made every-
thing beautiful in his time : also He hath set the
world in their hearts so that no man can find out
the work that God maketh." And so they cannot
even learn that one lesson which to us comes intui-
tively and at once, that Nature is but visible spirit :
that God is, and that He is a God of Love. Not
to the base, not to the sensual, not to the cold cynic,
not to the insolent scorner, but
" Every bird that sings,
And every flower that stars the elastic sod,
And every breath the radiant summer brings,
To the pure spirit is a "Word of God."
And that you may rather listen I will not state it
in my own words, but will quote here the language
of one who is dubious about many Christian truths,
and I will quote him to shew why it is that, stand-
ing with uncovered head and awful reverence in the
mighty Temple of the Universe, a believer holds
SILENCE AND VOICES. . 31
that God loves him, and wills his happiness. " The
earth," he says, "is sown with pleasures, as the
heaven is studded with stars; and when a man
has not been happy in life, we do not hesitate to
declare that he has missed one of the aims of his
existence. The path of the years is paved and
planted with enjoyments. Flowers the noblest and
the loveliest,— colors the most gorgeous and the
most delicate, — odors the sweetest and the subtlest,
— ^harmonies the most soothing and the most stir-
ring, — the sunny glories of the day, — the paje Ely-
sian graces of the moonlight, — 'silent pinnacles
of aged snow ' in one hemisphere, — the marvels of
tropical luxuriance in another, — the serenity of
sunsets, the sublimity of storms, — everything is
bestowed in boundless profusion : we can conceive
or desire nothing more exquisite or perfect than
that which is around us every hour." That then
is one revelation, but it is not all : for I add that
Nature, which is but the visible translucence of a
divine agency working upon material things, reveals
to us also that this happiness is attainable only in
the path of obedience, — that this "not-ourselves"
(if any feel happier by the use of sruch pantheistic
abstractions) is a not-ourselves which makes for
32 SILENCE AND VOICES.
righteousness. ^ Winds blow this lesson to us, and
waters roll it, and every leaf is inscribed with it, as
those on which the Sybil wrote out her prophecies
of old. "I dare to say it," writes a living author,
" that because through all my life I have desired
good, and not evil ; because I have been kind
to many, have wished to be kind to all, have wilfully
injured none, therefore the morning light is yet visi-
ble to me on yonder hills : " and, " This we may
discern assuredly ; this every true light of science,
every mercifully granted power, every wisely re-
stricted * thought, teach us more clearly day by day,
that, in the heavens above and in the earth beneath,
there is one continual and omnipotent presence of
help and peace, for all men who know that they
live, and remember that they die."
And oh, if any of you, even now, in your early
days, have lost this lofty faith, — ^if, amid the glories
of the world on which your lot is cast, you feel no
" presence which disturbs you with the sense of
elevated thoughts," or at least will not acknowledge
that that presence is the presence of our God — boast
not of this as though it were a sign of your unbi-
assed genius, or your intellectual superiority, but
rather blush for it, if it be, as it often is, the Neme-
SILENCE AND VOICES. 33
sis of a faithless disobedience, — gr, if it be not, if
it have come to you in a holy, and a humble, and
a self-denying life, at the best weep for it as the
worst curse which could have smitten your life with
an irreparable blight ; weep for it, if God give you
the grace of tears, and pray, aye, even pray to the
merciful Father in whom you have ceased to have
a living faith, that He may save you from your-
selves, and save the life which He has given you,
with all its divine possibilities, and all its heavenly
aspirations, from being dwarfed and degraded into
" a tale
" Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.^^
2. And this God who thus reveals Himself to
us in Nature, reveals Himself also in the Moral
Law. It needed no voice from the rolling darkness,
it needed no articulate thunder leaping among the
fiery hills, to persuade mankind that " God spake
these words and said." For that law was written
on their hearts, their conscience also bearing them
witness. The Jews believe that the souls of all
Jews, for generations yet unborn, were summoned
from their antenatal home to hear the Deliverance
of the Fiery Law ; and, when a Jew is charged with
3
34 SILENCE AND VOICES.
wrong by another, he says, " My soul too has been
on Sinai." But it is not the souls of Jews only,
but of all mankind who have been there. It is
there that they learnt that avroSkaiov which is un-
changeable but by the Will of God. Nay, not
there, but long before the volcanic forces upheaved
from the bases of the world those granite crags,
whenever first the dead clay began to flush and
breathe with the unconsuming fire, then and there
were learnt these eternal distinctions of right and
wrong :
oh y&p Ti vvv ye Kg-xdeg, alV ael ttote
Cv ravra, Kovdelg oldev e^ brov '(pavrj*
"In highest heaven they had their birth, neither
did the mortal race of men beget them, nor shall
oblivion ever put them to sleep ; the power of God
is mighty in them, and groweth not old."f The
great philosopher of Germany might well doubt of
all things, till he had found that their certitude
rested on the indestructible basis of duty .J If all
else were shattered under our feet, that would still
remain. False miracles themselves could not rob us
of it. As in that grand legend of the Talmud, the
tree might at the words of the doubter be trans-
* Soph. Ant. 458. f Soph. Oed. Tyr. 866. seqq. % Kant.
SILENCE AND VOICES. " 35
planted from its roots ; the rivulet might flow back-
ward to its source ; the walls and pillars of the con-
clave might crack ; yea, a voice from heaven itself
might preach another Law, yet nerther rushing trees,
nor backward flowing waters, nor bending roofs, nor
miracles, nor mysterious voices should prevail against
our solid and indestructible conviction, and the
Eternal Himself should approve our constancy
and exclaim from the mid glory of His Throne,
" My sons have triumphed."*
3. And, once more, God speaks to us in Scrip-
ture ; which means that He speaks to us in that
revelation of Himself which He has vouchsafed to
the lives and hearts of other men. He hath sent us
prophets, rising up early and sending. Oh, my
brethren. He who hath lost his belief, as thousands
by their own impatience and to. their own sorrow
have lost it, has been robbed of a very blessed heri-
tage. It is true that the Holy Scriptures have
been wounded in the house of their friends; it is
true that priests and theologians, in their craving
for infallible authorities, have thrown up the mere
letter of them between the intellect and God,
making them an opaque barrier between us and
* Baba Metzia, 1 59.
36 SILENCE AND VOICES.
Him of whom they were meant to be the crystal
mirror. It is true that men, who were their pro-
fessed defenders, have deprived them of their glory
and their Universality, reading them under the
vail of bigoted misconception, or through the lurid
smoke of sectarian hate, making the Gospel of Life
and Love and Liberty httle better than "the re-
membrancer of damnation, and the messenger of
Hell." And yet there, in all its human tenderness,
in all its divine wisdom, like the lamp unquenched
by the vapors of the charnel-house, for all who
will use it rightly, that Holy and Blessed Book is
laid up on the inviolable altar of truth and honesty,
the eternal protest against the very sins which are
committed in its name. Kead it not with slavish
superstition, not with a blind and literal Fetish
worship, but in loving humility, in intelligent faith ;
and you, as myriads of your fathers have done,
will find it, if not the only, yet assuredly the best,
comfort in sorrow, the best warning in danger, the
best hope in death : when all else is bitter, it still
shall be sweeter than honey and the honey-comb,
and when all else is dross, it shall be as ten times
refined gold.
4 For lastly, let us never forget that it is there
SILENCE AND VOICES. 37
chiefly — in the history that it records, in the sacra-
ments which it perpetuates, — that we hear most
clearly of all the Voice of God speaking to us by the
divine lips of the Son of Man. It was thus, my
brethren, that God revealed Himself, and if we re-
ject that revelation, can we hope for any other ? Is
not this the very lesson of the New Testament : — •
" God, who at sundry times and in divers manners
spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets,
hath, in these last days, spoken unto us by His
Son ? " And in the light of that truth, when we
look at the ever- widening skepticism of this genera-
tion, do not the words of Christ, as recorded by the
beloved Apostle, acquire a fresh and terrible sig-
nificance : — " Ye have neither heard His voice at any
time, nor seen His shape ; and ye have not His word
abiding in you : for, whom He hath sent. Him ye
believe not ? " Oh ! let us hear that voice of the Son
of God, for if we hear it not, we may hear no other ;
and they who hear it live. And, when we pour out
the impassioned prayer of Luther, " Oh, my God,
punish far rather with pestilence, with all the terri-
ble sicknesses on earth, with war, with anything
rather than that Thou be silent to us," let us re-
member that such silence is never that God doth not
38 SILENCE AND VOICES.
speak, but that we will not hear ; that whether we
hear or not, and the degree in which we hear, de-
pends upon ourselves ; that he who is of God hear-
eth the words of God, and that, if we hear them
not, it is because we are not of God. " The secret of
the Lord is with them that fear Him, and He shall
shew them His covenant;" but "the face of the
Lord is against them that do evil, to root out
the remembrance of them from the earth."
II.
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
" Se non che conseionzia m' assicura,
La buona compiignia che 1' uom francheggia
Sotto r osbergo del sentirsi pura."
Dante, Inf. xxvin. 115.
Their conscience also bearing witness. — ^RoM. ii. 15.*
I SPOKE in my last Sermon, my brethren, of the
Silence and the Voices of God; I endeavored to
shew that He does indeed speak to us, and speak to
us continually, but that we may lose all sense of His
utterance, and be wholly uninfluenced by it, as he
who lives by the roar of a cataract is often unconscious
of its sound : and then I spoke of His voice in
Nature, His voice in Scripture, His voice in the
Moral Law — above all, the voice wherewith God
speaks to us by the lips of the Son of Man. To-day
I would speak of another of His voices, of one
which illustrates most clearly the methods whereby
He deals with us, of that voice which is at once the
most personal, the most peremptory, the most pene-
trating of all, — the voice of Conscience.
♦ Preached before the University of Cambridge, May 4, 1873.
(39)
OF THSI
40 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
And here I would say on the threshold that it is
no part of my present duty to enter into the battle-
field of modern materialism. If any rejoice to fling
aside the old and inspiring conviction — that Man,
" so noble in reason, so infinite in faculty, in form
and moving so express and admirable, in action so like
an angel, in apprehension so like a god,'' originated
because God made him out of the dust of the earth
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life —
and to take in exchange for it the humiliating and
wholly undemonstrable hypothesis that he came
into being by some accident of development, I know
not how, from some film of protoplasm, I know not
where — still Man is, and the facts of his inner being
remain unchanged. Such beliefs, if they can be
called beliefs, have indeed spread with a rapidity out
of all proportion to the cogency of the arguments by
which they are supposed to have been established.
The great thinker who originated the theory, and
whose name it is impossible to mention without
admiration and respect, has distinctly declared him-
self against an atheistic materialism ; and it has
been left for his violent and reckless followers to
maintain, to the outrage of all sense and of all relig-
ion, that Man sprang from a single primordial
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 41
moneres which was self-generated and self-evolved,
and that therefore the belief in a Creator is unscien-
tific and exploded. Enough of such : but even in
England it has been thought a necessary sequel of
this belief in Evolution to argue that Man, thus
developed, proceeded to develop a moral sense out
of social instincts fortified by hereditary trans-
mission, and it is probable that very many even
of my younger hearers have read that celebrated
book on the Descent of Man, which professes — to
quote the author's own words — to "approach the
conscience exclusively from the side of natural his-
tory."
Well, if any man be content so to think, let him
so think, and be fully persuaded in his own mind.
The day has not yet arrived when it must be neces-
sary for a Christian minister to preface his simplest
teaching by a fresh proof of those grand truths which
for well-nigh two millenniums have been the common
heritage of advanced humanity. But since it is
common in these times to try and represent the
clergy as wilfully shutting their eyes to all recent
investigation, I only allude to these forms of scien-
tific assertion and negation, to shew that what
is called the silence of ignorance may sometimes be
42 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
the silence of repudiation, sometimes even the reti-
cence of scorn.
In point of fact, however, no such theories will
affect my main ohject. It is enough for me that
even the most advanced materialist admits that
whether, " approached exclusively from the side of
natural history/' or not, there is such a thing as
Conscience and that its voice is heard in the soul of
man ; and I shall appeal to-day to nothing abstruser
than these admitted facts of common experience.
Nor, again, is it my purpose to enter on any of
the subtler questions of Moral Philosophy, or to
reargue the ten-times-argued question whether or no
Morality mean anything more than a system founded
on social utility. In the Christian Church at least
of a Christian University, it may, I suppose, even in
this 19th century of illumination, have some weight
that the word "usefulness does not once occur in the
New Testament," nor was " Measure all things by a
nice calculation of advantages," the language of Sinai,
nor did our Lord and Master Jesus Christ ever place
self-interest, however enlightened, on the throne of
conscience, when He taught us the will of His Father
in Heaven. Nor will any of the ordinary defini-
tions of conscience here serve me. To call it
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 43
"reflex approbation, or disapprobation," — to de-
scribe it as "an imitation within ourselves of the
government without us," — to define it as "man,
present to himself in his ethical conduct, and the
object of his own approval or disapproval,"— may
admirably illustrate the truth that when the wisest
of the ancients defined virtue to be " a following of
Nature," they were well aware that Man is a being
of a mixt world, related to two worlds, the heav-
enly and the earthly,* and that though there be
within us higher and lower principles of action, our
nature is in reality represented by the higher and
spiritual, not by the lower or animal, so that strong
passions mean nothing more than weak reason.
But alas! how little do such considerations touch
the heart ! how fully may they be admitted by
the intellect, while they are ignored by the life !
how few of the philosophers who held them were
unaware of their practical impotence ; or, as they
themselves so sadly and so frankly confessed, were
enabled, by the intellectual strength of these con-
victions, to approach, even distantly, to the glori-
ous ideal of a holy or a noble life. No, this pale
* Anastas. Sinait. De Tiominis creatione (quoted by Harless,
Christian Mhics, p. 49).
44 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
moonliglit of an utilitarian or rational morality is
not sufficient to guide the stumbling footsteps of
man up the flinty or uphillward road : no misty
meteors of a calculating philosophy, no feeble glim-
merings of a developed instinct, no imaginary light
of a fictitious faculty, will guide him there : nothing
will save him from the precipices and pitfalls there,
but that spirit of man which is the Lamp of God
within him ; nothing less than the full sunlight of
religion, yea, the Sun of Eighteousness risen on the
dark soul with healing in His wings.
An eminent and good man who lived to do
much courageous work in the world, which to this
day is bearing good fruit on the Western Continent,
tells us a reminiscence of his childhood which will
exactly illustrate my point of view. " When I was
a little boy," he says, "in my fourth year, one fine
day in spring my father led me by the hand to a
distant part of the farm, but soon sent me home
alone. On the way I had to pass a little pond, then
spreading its waters wide ; a rhodora in full bloom,
a rare flower which grew only in that locality, at-
tracted my attention, and drew me to the spot. I
saw a little tortoise sunning himself in the shallow
water at the roots of the flaming shrub. I lifted
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 45
the stick I had in my hand, to strike the harmless
reptile.; for though I had never killed any creature,
yet I had seen other boys do so, and I felt a disposi-
tion to follow their wicked examples. But all at
once something checked my little arm, and a voice
within me said clear and loud * It is wrong ! ' I
held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emo-
tion, the consciousness of an involuntary but inward
check upon my actions, till the tortoise and the
rhodora both vanished from my sight. I hastened
home, and told the tale to my mother, and asked
what it was that told me ' it was wrong.' She
wiped a tear from her eye, and taking me in her
arms said, ' Some men call it conscience, but I pre-
fer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man.
If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer
and clearer, and always guide you right ; but if you
turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out,
little by little, and leave you in the dark and with-
out a guide. Your life depends on heeding that
little voice.' She went her way,'' he continues,
"careful and troubled about many things, and
doubtless pondered them in her motherly heart:
while I went off to wonder and think it over in my
poor childish way; but I am sure no event in my
46 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
life has made so deep and lasting an impression on
me." Wise mother ! Happy son ! It is from, such
mothers that heroes spring; it is thus that are
trained the saints of God. When the greatest of
modern philosophers * exclaims, " Duty, won-
drous power, that workest neither by insinuation,
flattery, or threat, but merely by holding up the
naked law in the soul, extortest for thyself reverence
if not always obedience, — thou before whom all
appetites are dumb however secretly they rebel,
whence is thine origin?" — to such a question the
Christian at least will answer without a moment's
hesitation, and with all his heart, " Thine origin is
God." The power of the conscience is simply para-
lyzed apart from the belief in God. If it be not, as
St. Bernard calls it the candor lucis aeternae et
speculum Dei majestatis, — if it be not man's con-
sciousness of his relation to a Higher Being, whose
Law conditions the tendencies of his will, — it is
nothing. Apart from God that moral law loses its
meaning. It may be true, that the Ten Command-
ments, written on our hearts, obeyed in our lives,
are sufficient to drive from us every assault of evil,
but then they must he commandments ; they must
* Kant
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 47
not be a nice balance of advantages, but the living
utterance of a Father and a God.
" Hear these three things," said a Jewish Kabbi,
" and thou shalt eschew transgression ; remember
what is above thee, the All-seeing Eye, and the All-
hearing Ear, and that all thy actions are written in
a book." * But, separated from the thought of
God, the conscience becomes an idle enigma. If it
do not spring from Him, if it may not appeal to
Him, if it cannot testify of Him, it has nothing to
say and nothing to command. But herein lies its
true supremacy, that it is the voice of that which
even the heathen called " the God within us." It
is in this sense that St. Paul used conscience ; it is
in this sense alone that I can understand or speak
of it.
2. We have seen then already that the first
function of the conscience is to warn. And herein
is much of its mystery, for it seems to be ourselves,
yet not ourselves ; inseparable from us, yet no part
of us; speaking to us with gentle and divine ap-
proval, or with terrible and imperious authority,
yet with no inherent power to determine our actions.
Wholly beyond our .mastery, it stands towards
* Firke Aboth, ii L
48 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
•moral evil in the same relation that pain holds
towards disease. When anything is wrong with
our bodies, when any function is disturbed, when
any mischief is latent, pain comes, whether we will
or no, to warn us beneficently of our danger. Nor
is it otherwise with the soul. All evil springs from
evil thoughts, "out of the heart proceed evil
thoughts," — evil thoughts, and then all the long
black catalogue of sins you know. And since an
evil thought is, to the soul, a disordered function,
an undeveloped disease, a latent leprosy, — when it
is lurking there, the pang of an alarmed conscience
gives us timely warning. Vain is it to plead that
this is but a thought; "Guard well," it says, "thy
thoughts : for thoughts are heard in heaven." It
was a recognized principle of Koman law that
cogitationis poenam nemo patitur ; but this is not
the principle of that sole legislation which had an
origin immediately divine. In every other code
that the world has ever seen or known, you will find
no prohibition of evil thoughts, but you will find
that prohibition, alike in the first and in the last of
those Ten Commandments which are the code of
Him, who alone searcheth and knoweth the heart
of man. Yea, in the code of heaven, a bad thought
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 49
indulged is a bad deed committed. Oh if we listen
to this warning from the first, if we thus ohstamus
prmctpiis, how strong, how noble, how impregnable
to the assaults of evil, may the soul become ! For
there are but two ways by which men grievously
fall, the one is by some sudden access of tempta-
tion, the other by the subtle corrosion of some
besetting sin. But into the latter, if we be true to
that voice within us, we cannot fall, because inno-
cence is nature's wisdom, and conscience faithfully
cherished makes it more terrible, more difficult to
yield than to resist : and if, on the other hand, evil,
unable thus to surprise us by the noiseless and sinu-
ous gliding of the serpent, bounds suddenly upon us
with a wild beast's roar and leap, even then it will
not master us, because then our habits and our
impulses, being pure and true, shield themselves
instantly under the strong breastplate of righteous-
ness, and the reiterated choice of what was good has
prepared the whole instinct of our nature, the whole
bias of our character, for resistance to the sudden
sin.
Whatever be the shape that the vile allure-
ment takes, the spirit within us thrills its glad
response to the noble utterance of the stainless
4
50 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
Hebrew boy, " How can I do this great wickedness,
and sin against God ? "
Yes, my brethren, this is the state at which we
all should aim :
" This is the happy -warrior, — this is he
Whom, every man at arms should wish to he."
For when we have attained this state, or are
attaining to • it, then we are happy. Then the
eye being single, the whole body is full of light.
We reverence ourselves ; films fall away from our
eyes; we know that righteousness tendeth to life;
we cherish in our consciences the eternal protest
against everything that can degrade and ruin us,
the eternal witness that everything sweetest and
noblest is within our reach. It is one of the
very finest and deepest sayings of the great sage
of China that " Heaven means Principle." With
him, with all good men who have ever lived,
this was the solid result and outcome of expe-
rience. Other sources of happiness are but as
transient gleams of sunlight, but this is life eternal ;
other blessings fade as the flowers fade, but
this is an everlasting foundation. How full is
all Scripture of this one lesson! With what a
glow of belief, with what a force of conviction,
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 61
do those divine utterances crowd upon us,
*' Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord:
oh well is he, and happy shall he be." " The
Lord ordereth a good man's going, and maketh
his way acceptable to himself." " Thou wilt shew
me the path of life; in Thy presence is the ful-
ness of joy ; at Thy right hand there are pleasures
for evermore." ,^
3. And why, my brethren, do we not all
live to inherit this blessedness of which we are
all the rightful heirs ? Because, alas ! we have
not all, and not always, listened to that voice
of conscience, and not to listen to it is misery;
for when it ceases to warn, it begins to accuse.
The angel who went forth so gently and tenderly
at first, to stop us on the path of ruin because
our way was perverse, assumes the drawn sword
and gleaming robe of the Avenger. And if, in
spite of this, we drive with furious passion over
the opposing power, as the wicked queen of
legend, urging her chariot over the murdered
Dody of her sire, agitated by all the furies,
drove through the city with her chariot-wheels
all dyed in blood, — then, shamed for a time, and
defeated, and defied, conscience, when it speaks
52 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
again, speaks in an altered tone; no longer in
tones of calm and love, but of sadness and re-
proach, of scorn and menace, of wrath and fear
And then begins that misery of a concordia dis-
cors, that displicentia sui,^ that jangled dissonance
in what should be the sweet music of men's
lives. " The good that I would I do not, but
,the evil that I would not that I do." We
know the story of how the great king before
whom the preacher had been contrasting the
misery of these two lives in one, exclaimed, "/
know those two men. " And indeed this loss of
all unity in our being, this miserable dishar-
mony in life, this changing of an inseparable
companion from a loving friend into a bitter
enemy, this disintegration and dissolution of an
existence dragged on in a weakness that still
yields while the moral sense would still resist,
— ^the fact that a man should know what he is,
and scorn what he is, and yet be what he is,
— the sense of an ideal missed, of an opportu-
nity wasted, of all life shrivelled into a miserable
"if" and an empty "might have been;" — this
is the very essence of human misery. It is man
* Sen. De Tranq. An. ii.
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 53
without God, and therefore man without joy, or
peace, or hope. All Scripture is full of it. The
sinner hides himself in vain amid the garden
trees, and the sounding footstep follows him,
and the awful voice asks, " Where art thou .^ "
He has murdered some mortal body, or worse
perhaps, some immortal soul, and it asks, "Where
is Abel thy brother.?" He has indulged in some
secret sneer, or unuttered blasphemy, and setting
aside his vain denials, it sternly says, " Nay, but
thou didst laugh." He has in his selfish greed
made excuses for disobeying some positive com-
mand, and it asks, " What meaneth this bleat-
ing of sheep in mine ears ? " He has stolen
what is not his own, and it convicts him with
the accusation, " Tell me now what thou hast
done." He has committed deadly and undis-
covered crimes, and it cries with uplifted voice
and threatening finger, "Thou art the man."
He has been profane and blasphemous, and while
his knees knock together, and his cheeks grow
pale, in letters of flame it writes, " Mene, Mene,
Tekel " upon his walls. Why proceed ? is not
all history, is not all experience, full of these
haunted men, men pursued by guilt unrepented
54 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
of, men for whom the whole earth is of glass;
men who thought that when the crime was over
they had done with it, but who have found
that it has not done with them; men who fan-
cied that they had but written their sins on
sand, and find them engraved on their own sad
memory as with a pen of iron on tablets of
brass, and perpetuated in the eternal records
"like a crack in the living rock" for ever? No
power, no rank can screen them. On the very
judgment-seat they are judged. Pilate may wash
his guilty hands, but what river can wash his guilty
heart ? Felix sits on his pompous tribunal, with
the scowling lictors on either side, but as Paul
reasons of temperance and judgment, Felix trembles.
Henry of Germany cowers before the aged Pontiff,
who bids him appeal to God's judgment to clear him
of his crimes. Sigismund is on his royal seat before
all the princes and prelates of his empire, but when
the humble priest whom he is about to condemn to
the stake reminds him of his broken oath, there, in
the presence of them all, he cannot repress the
deep blush which dyes his cheek with guilty crim-
son. There is no peace, saith my God, to the
wicked. How can it be peace, .
THE VOICE OP CONSCIENCE. 55
" Ncxjte dieque suum gestare in pectore testem ? ** *
How can it be peace,
" to ever bear about
A silent court of justice in himself,
Himself the judge and jury, and himself
The prisoner at the bar ever condemned, —
And that drags down his life ? " f
No ! conscience is her own avenger. " To groan
too late over a lost life," J oh what a misery is
there ! From every age, from every literature, from
every history, one might establish it. If the tes-
timony of Scripture be suspected or despised ; if
those magnificent chapters in the Wisdom of Sol-
omon be thought too akin to Scripture to be ac-
cepted, shall I summon the unsuspected, the natural
testimony of Pagan witnesses ? Shall it . be the ,
great poet-philosopher, Lucretius .? § " The scourge,
the executioner, the dungeon, the pitchy tunic, —
even though these be absent, yet the guilty mind
with anticipating terror applies the goad, and
scorches with its blows." Shall it be the great
epic poet who places the Ultrices Curae in closest
proximity to the mala mentis gaudia ? Shall it
be the youthful satirist, who asks, " Is the moan-
ing of him who is tortured in the Bull of Phalaris ;
* Juv. Sat. xiii. 198. f Tennyson, Sea Dreams.
. t Lucr. iii. 1024 § Ibid.
56 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
is the sword that glitters a-tremble over his flushed
neck from the gilded fretwork, half so terrible, as
*Imus,
Imus praecipites quam si sibi dicat, et intus
PaUeat infeUx ? ' " *
Or once more, shall it be his fellow-satirist, who
exclaims, "Why shouldst thou think that they
have escaped, whom the inward consciousness of
guilt agitates with amazement and scourges with
the soundless lash, occuUum quatiente animo
tortore flagellum ? " f
4. But bad as this is, there is something
worse than the warning, worse than the accusing,
worse than the gnawing, — it is the dead conscience.
"It is wonderful to observe," says a great bishop
of our church, "what a great inundation of
mischief will in a very short time overflow all
the banks of reason and religion. Vice first
is pleasing, then it groweth easy, then fre-
quent, then habitual, then confirmed: then the
man is impenitent, then he is obstinate; then he
resolves never to repent, and then" — I pause
at language which the 17th century was less
afraid than the 19th is to use — then comes what
comes hereafter. Yes the timid becomes first
* Pers. 8ai. iii. 39. f J^v. Sat. xiii. 195.
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 57
the wilful, then the willing sin : novepdc, aTCka
TovTo niv Kot jSoilETac.^* For what was first tampered
with, then yielded to, then persisted in, is next jus-
tified; and last, oh horrible, boasted of: aye in
whole philosophies, in whole literatures, shame-
lessly glorified. And this is the stage worse
than the gnawing, for this is the murdered con-
science. When there is any hope for a wound
it continues to give pain: but when it has mor-
tified the pain ceases. Even so ceases the throb
of a conscience which is sleeping, which is defiled,
which is dead, which, in the powerful image of
St. Paul, is "seared with a hot iron." For
either its voice grows fainter and fainter, as the
voice of temptation grows louder and louder, or
becoming hateful by its reiterated condemnations,
it so inflames the sinner's anger, that he de-
liberately silences, chokes, murders it. And then
he is let alone. His conscience will cease to
torment him. And then he may go on undis-
turbed for years and years, filling to the brim
the cup of his iniquity : for years and years he
may be dishonest, a drunkard, an adulterer, a
* Aristoph. Eq. 1281.
58 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
blasphemer : and never once hear again the voice
that he has stifled. Nay more, he may, such is
the mystery of iniquity, and because it is God's
decree that "the more we know of sin, the less
shall we feel its real nature," * he may actually
substitute for conscience another voice ; a voice
not true but lying, not faithful but traitorous ;
a voice which, answering him according to his
idols, dissimulates the taunting mockery with
which it cries, " Go up to Eamoth Gilead and
prosper;" a voice that palliates, that excuses,
that encourages, that whispers continually, " Peace,
peace," when there is no peace. And this is
the naost perilous of all. It comes to all in
proportion to their guiltiness, in proportion to
their insincerity. I have known it alas, come
even in early years. And it is wellnigh be-
yond man's cure. Woe to the traveller who
turns . his back upon the guiding star, that
* This is a profound remark of Mr. J. Martineau. This con-
iition of the soul is called cnToViduaig by Epictetus, i. e. " moral
petrifaction."
It is the aSSKtfiog vovg (Kom. i. 28), the Tzupucig r^g KapSlag, hest
described by St. Paul in Eph. iv. 17-19. See Harless, Christian
Ethics, E. Tr. p. 92.
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 59
he may plunge after the delusive meteor which
flickers hither and thither over the marsh of
death. Woe to the ship whose pilot, disregard-
ing the friendly beacon, chooses rather to steer
by the wrecker's deadly fire. And woe, woe,
double woe to that unhappy soul, which wilfully
accepts the suggestions of sin and Satan, as
though they were the pure, the unerring, the
awful voice of God ! *
5. For in this state, with a dead conscience,
the man himself may die, and perhaps often
does die, his soul as stupefied as the senses of
the traveller who lies down to sleep his last
sleep on the fields of snow. But sometimes the
task of the conscience is even yet not over, and
even the murdered starts up once more as the
terrified, the awakened conscience. Yes, some-
times for a man's punishment only, but some-
times also by Grod's infinite mercy, that a man
may be saved by that fiery agony, the dead
conscience leaps up into angry and terrible life
once more, casts off the cerements which years
* ao<l>ia kiriyeiog, ifwxtn^, iaifiovi66?jC' Jam. iii. 15. aapKLKij. 2
Cor. i. 12.
60 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
of sin have bound around it, and starts, as tlie
ghost of some murdered victim might start from
the tomb, to upbraid its murderer.* Some ter-
rific calamity, some overwhehning bereavement,
loss, failure; some arrow of God winged with
conviction ; some lightning flash, shattering to
pieces the smooth path of life, cleaving its way
irresistibly into the stony heart, hurling to the
ground with a great crash the idols within it;
worst of all, some sin becoming the natural pun-
ishment, the inalienable possession of sin, some
"tempting opportunity" meeting the "susceptible
disposition," and leading to some great crime
which, though it be but the legitimate issue of a
long train of lesser sins, yet startles a man into
a recognition of his own awful wickedness, and
filling the dark chambers of the heart with a
glare of unnatural illumination, reveals the moral
law once more in all its insupportable majesty,
— something of this kind wakens even the dead
conscience as with the trump of the Archangel
and the Yoice of God. " Perfecto demum scelere,
* " It may be obscured," says TertuUian, " because it is not
God : extiaguished it cannot be, because it is from God." {Be
Anim. xlL)
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 61
magnitudo ejus intellecta est.'' * By that great
visitation conscience is awakened. She lights the
torch of memory at that lurid glare, and waves it
round the painted imagery of the desecrated soul
She is no longer the gentle friend, the soft-voiced
monitress, the kind reprover ; but she is the ex-
ecutioner with uplifted voice and outstretched
arm ; the Erinnys with snaky tresses and shaken
torch. The man's name is no more Pashur, hut
Magor Missabib, " terror on every side." And
then the maddened soul, tormented in this flame,
rushes forth into the night; too often, alas, like
Judas into the midnight of remorse and of de-
spair, — into the cell of the madman and the
grave of the suicide ; but sometimes also, blessed
be God, into the night indeed like Peter, but it
is to meet the morning dawn.f Then though the
Angel of Innocence have long vanished, the Angel
of Repentance takes him gently by the hand.
Gently it leads the brokenhearted penitent before
the tribunal of his better self, and there his
* Tac. Ann. xiv. 10. Cf.
Quid fas
Atque nefas tandem incipiunt sentire, peractis
Criminibus. Juv. Sat. xiii 238.
f Lange, Leben Jem,.
62 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
oli sin, his old weakness, his old pride, his
old will is doomed to that death of godly sor-
row which even at the eleventh hour may issue
in a new and nohler life, and may once more
change conscience from a source of terror into a
source of perfect and inalienable peace.
6. But how if the conscience never does awake ?
How if the sinner die rich and increased with goods,
and there be no bonds in his death, but only at the
evening-tide when there is no light, there peals
from heaven, too late, the dread and sudden voice,
" Thou fool, this night," and so his dream be
broken ? What is a dream, my brethren ? Is it
not to take the substance for the shadow, and the
shadow for the substance ? the transient for the
real, and the real for the transient ? time for eternity,
and eterjiity for time.^ Such a dream is the life
of sin. And how if it be broken — ^not by calamity,
not by repentance, not even by remorse — ^but by the
cold clear light of eternity flashed suddenly upon the
closed and dreaming eyes ; revealing all things in their
true proportions, revealing all things in their absolute
reality ; revealing all things " in the slow sure his-
tory of their ripening ; " revealing all things as they
are, not under the glamour of sensual illusion, not
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 63
under the colorings of a treaclierous philosophy, not
through the distorting mists of a self-deceiving skep-
ticism : but as they are under the pure Eternal Eyes
of the Living God ? A man has been known in his
dreams to walk in perfect safety on the edge of
a giddy precipice: but let something disturb that
unwholesome slumber, — some light unknown to -the
sunless cavern of his own dreaming phantasy, some
voice which is not a mere dull echo of the impres-
sions from within, — there is a sudden start, a wild
scream, a white robe whirling through the air, and
he is killed. The dream ends, but it ends in death :
the waking certainty begins, but it begins in the
Eternal World. Ah me, so may it be when the
chill dayspring of eternity falls first in all the clear-
ness of its agonizing reality upon the glaring night of
man's illusions ! " Like a dream when one avaketh !"
were it not better to awake to reality, to be sen-
sible of peril and folly, before the dream and the life
are o'er ?
I have been speaking, my brethren, before a
great University, and some may think that I have
spoken on too simple and plain a theme. But in
an age when so many deny that God is, and so
many more that He is the rewarder of them that
64 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
diligently seek Him, is it indeed too simple and
too plain a theme, to call attention to one of His
Voices, to appeal for its reality to the facts of man's
experience ? If, as a recent writer has truly said,
conduct he two-thirds of life, — if respecting so much
that occupies even a good man's thoughts we should
rather pray, " Oh turn away mine eyes lest they he-
hold vanity, hut quicken Thou me in Thy law," —
if the audience of a great University he, after all,
composed mainly of youthful souls engaged, as I
believe that all of you are engaged, in the hard
struggle of life, and the hard endeavor to do that
which is right in the sight of the Lord, — and if,
again, the helping of one immortal soul to gain the
victory over an evil self, and fulfil the true law of
its being, be a better and a greater thing than to
construct ten thousand ingenious Theodicaeas, or
subtle systems of moral Philosophy, — then are
these thoughts too simple ? Are they simpler than
Christ preached to the multitude on the green hill-
slopes, or John on the scorching strand ? The lan-
guage of apology sounds ill on the lips of a minister
of Christ. Better say frankly and at once that you
must look for no feats of intellect or sophism here.
The religion we preach was the religion, not of the
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 65
disdainful or the cynical, but of the poor and the
simple-hearted. It was proclaimed in the loneli-
ness of the desert and nursed in the squalor of the
catacomb : the sunrise of its first day flushed over
the manger, and the sunset of its last will fall red
upon the cross. To you therefore I speak not as wise,
or learned, or subtle, or profound, but as a human
soul to human souls, as a dying man to dying men.
The wind of heaven blows through the frail and
feeble reeds, and the voice of the preacher may to
some ear be the voice of God to-day. And if but
one here feel that on his soul is the burden of in-
iquity or the stain of guilt, if he be suffering the
conscience-stricken misery of a disintegrated and
self-despising life, then let me point him to the foot
of that cross where alone the burden can be re-
moved, and the stain be washed away. While you
are impenitent I know well that you cannot be
happy, but rather like the troubled sea that cannot
rest : but I point you thither where there is comfort
for the wretched, rest for the anxious, peace for
the troubled, purity for the defiled. You can find
it in Christ ; you can find it in the religion which
Christ came to teach ; you can find it nowhere else.
Lose your faith in this, and sin has no known sa-
66 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE.
viour, nor guilt any possible expiation. Oceans of
lustral water will not cleanse, nor the burning of
hecatombs of sacrifice atone for it, though kindled
with the blazing forests of a thousand hills. Lose
your faith in this, and then for the troubled con-
science there is no peace ; not in poppy or mandra-
gora or all the drowsy syrups in the world. Since
time was, suffering humanity has been saying to
each Prophet in turn, —
" Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart ? "
And the answer of all others must be " No ; " but
the answer of your Kedeemer is " Come unto me
and I will give you rest." This is the sum of all,
that I have striven to say to you. The voice of
your conscience is the voice of your God. Obey it,
and you will find peace and holiness : disobey it,
and you will lose the light of God's countenance,
until you repent and learn to obey once more. But
to repent heartily is to be forgiven wholly. Yes, I
preach to you once more the forgiveness of sins,
that forgiveness purchased by the precious blood of
Christ. He alone can give peace to the accusing.
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 67
to the gnawing, to the terrified ; He alone can wake
the sleeping conscience, and call it into life again
when it is dead. " Neither is there salvation in
any other: for there is none other name under
heaven given among men, whereby we must be
saved." "I have lived," said the wise and gentle
Hooker on his deathbed, " I have lived to see this
world is made up of perturbations, and have long
been preparing to leave it, and gathering comfort for
the dreadful hour of making my account with God.
And though I have, by His grace, loved Him in
my youth, and feared Him in my age, and labored
to have a conscience void of offence towards God
and towards man : yet if thou, Lord, be extreme
to mark what is done amiss, who can abide it?
And therefore, when I have failed. Lord, shew mercy
to me ; for I plead not any righteousness, but the for-
giveness of my unrighteousness, for His merits who
died to purchase pardon for penitent sinners."*
* Walton's lAfe of Hooker, ad fin.
III.
THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms are moved ; but
Grod hath shewed his voice, and the earth shall melt away. — Ps.
xlvi. 6.*
So far, my brethren, I have endeavored to en-
grave yet more deeply upon our hearts the all-per-
vading and unalterable conviction that God, our
God, our Father, our Creator, is a living God ; that
He is not far from every one of us; that His will is
the sole intelligible law of our lives ; that, if at any
time He seems to be silent, that silence is not in
Him, but in our own deafness and self-will ; that, if
our life be true life at all, in Him we live, and move,
and have our being. It is a truth of infinite impor-
tance, because with it I know of nothing so glorious,
without it of nothing so despicable and insignificant
as man. " What is man ? " asks David in the 8th
Psalm, after he had been gazing on the heavens
which broke over his head into their immeasurable
* Preached before the University of Cambridge, May 11, 1873.
(69)
^^ Off THB^'^
TTW TTTWTJCJT'P'rT
70 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
depth of stars ; — and because he feels that He who
made those heavens is his Father and his friend, he
answers in a burst of exultation, " Thou madest him
a little lower than Grod, thou crownedst him with
glory and honor : " but when, in some flushed mo-
ment of victory, David again asks in the 144th
Psalm "What is man?" then, in the midst of hu-
man malignity and human meanness, thinking only
of man witliout God, he sorrowfully answers, " Man
is like a thing of nought ; " — and immediately after-
wards, as though in a burst of incontroUable dis-
gust at the crew of liars and blasphemers by whom
he is surrounded, he cries, "Cast out Thy lightnings
and tear them ; shoot forth Thine arrows and con-
sume them : " — feeling as all the best men have ever
felt, that when God is with us we may rejoice in
" the glories of our birth and state," but that man
when he forgets, man when he loses, much more
man when he abnegates his God, is a creature so
petty, so foolish, so ephemeral, so infinitely to be
pitied, that, unless his whole race can be purified by
baptisms of fire, it were almost better that it should
cease to be.
If then we would rise to the full grandeur of
our being, if we would live worthy of our immortal-
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 71
ity, let us bend our sternest efforts, let us strain our
noblest faculties, let us absorb our entire beings in
this one aim, to see God's face, to hear His voice,
to do His will. And since we have considered how
He speaks to us in Nature, which is the translucence
of His energy ; in the Moral Law, which is the epit-
ome of His will; in Conscience, which is the voice
of His Spirit ; in Scripture, which is the revelation
of His Son; — let us try to-day to mark how He
speaks to us also in History, which is " the con-
science of the human race," and which has never
been more adequately described than as "the pro-
phetical interpreter of that most sacred epic of
which God is the poet, and Humanity the theme."
If, my brethren, man were the abject thing to
which modern materialism would degrade him, His-
tory would have no significance. It would be bujt
like a lamp hung at a ship's stern as she is driven
by chance winds over a shoreless sea, — ^warning of
no peril, lighting to no anchorage, only flinging its
ghastly lustre over a white wake of wandering foam.
But, when we believe, as we do believe, that man is
a member of Christ, a child of God, an inheritor of
the Kingdom of heaven; then indeed the history of
man becomes a noble study ; it becomes a chapter
72 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
in that book of Kevelation which enables us to rec-
ognize in the ways of God an order at once im-
mutable and divine. He who can believe that the
story of nations is but a confusion of whirling ma-
chinery which no spirit permeates or guides must
indeed despise it as an old almanac, or an agreed- on
fable ; but in this respect the ancient histories were
more religious than many of the modern, — from the
Aibg <r ereTieieTo ^ovlrj of the mighty Iliad, dowu to the
fine remark of Polybius that " History offers the
highest of education, and that it alone, without in-
jury, teaches us from every season and circumstance
to be true judges of what is best." One great histori-
an indeed of antiquity is doubtful and gloomy. ^^I
can come," he says, "to no certain conclusion as to
whether the affairs of men are guided by the im-
mutable law of destiny, or by the whirling wheel of
chance."* And yet it is evident that the whole
leaning of Tacitus was towards the nobler faith, and
if he seems to waver, it is only because he confined
his view to too limited a range. Fallen on very
evil times, encircled like our own great poet with
the barbarous dissonance of an abominable age,
gazing only on the sunset of Koman liberty as its
* Tac. Ann. vi. 22. Cf. iii. 18, H. i. 18, etc.
THE VOICE OF IIISTOllY. 73
orb sank slowly into seas of blood, he judged of
man's destiny rather as a biographer than as an
historian.
But a biographer may easily mistake the middle
for the end, and fail to see that the apparent discord
in the organ music is not, and cannot be, its close.
We read the lives of the saints of God, and we are
perplexed at first and saddened to observe how one
after another may seem to have perished broken-
hearted and despised. One may be slowly torn to
pieces like Fra Dolcino, and another may be tortured
and strangled like Savonarola, and another burnt
like Huss, and another driven to say with the un-
daunted Hildebrand, "I have loved righteousness
and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile,"
and another may faint to death in chilling anguish
like Xavier upon the lonely shore : but let us not
also fail to notice, that one and all, amid defeat and
dishonor, and desertion, they never lose the beatific
vision and the transcendant hope : one and all they
«tretch forth their hands in glorious anticipation of
the farther shore. Let us neither be deceived nor
saddened by such books as that great recent work
of fiction, which shews to us the hopeless failure of
so many human ideals, and the chilling sadness of
74 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
SO many human lives.* True, that the loftier the
ideal, the more complete may seem to be the failure ;
and the more unselfish the purpose, the more sad
the life. In seeming^ not in reality. Each high
ideal is a prophecy which, later if not sooner, brings
about its own fulfilment. No good deed dies : be it
a rejoicing river, be it but a tiny rill of human noble-
ness, yet, so it be pure and clean, never has it been
lost in the poisonous marshes or choked in the mud-
dy sands. It flows inevitably into that great river
of the water of life which is not lost, save — if that
be to be lost — in the infinite ocean of God's Eternal
Love. And it is their intuition of this truth which
makes the Idylls of our great poet truer than the
fictions of our great novelist. The blameless king
murmurs indeed, amid the broken soliloquies of his
last troubled night,
" I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I saw Him in the flowering of His fields,
But in His ways with man I found Him not : '*■
yet he never doubts of his mission, or wavers in his
purpose. The harp that has been prostituted and
jangled on earth shines still among the stars, and to
the greatly innocent, and to the sincerely penitent,
* Middlemarch.
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 75
and to the angels up in heaven, its music is still un-
disturbed.* And so, as the king dies deeply wounded
on the misty shore, yet the bark which carried him
vanishes away into the light, "and the new sun rose
bringing the new year."f Yes, this is the true and
eternal lesson. Ask all good men who have ever
died even in bitterest failure whether they would
not scorn either to fear or change, and would they
not answer with godlike unanimity, " Is not the life
more than meat, and the body than raiment?"
We sought the struggle not the victory, the service
not the reward. Though He slay us yet will we trust
in Him ; but we have no fear ; He will not slay us ;
He, the faithful God, who keepeth covenant, will
not fling us aside like broken implements, or mock
us with delusive hopes ;
" "WTioso has felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound, or doubt Him, or deny :
Tea, with one voice, oh world, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side ; for on this am L"
If then we fail at times to see this truth in the
little facts of our own lives, let us look beyond them,
and see it writ large upon the history of nations.
What would a man know of the sea by standing but
* Tristram. f Morte d! Arthur.
76 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
an hour or two beside its waters in some small bay ?
could he suppose that there was anything but idle
chance in its little eddies or sweeping currents amid
the windings of the shore, as it is fretted by chance
puffs of wind, or sways over great beds of seaweed,
or is torn by protruding rocks ? But let him study
the phenomena of the whole great deep itself, and
then he will learn with what magnificent and uner-
ring regularity the moon sways the tidal march of
those mighty waters which, as they roll onwards,
majestic and irresistible whether in ebb or flow, re-
fresh and purify the world. Nor is it otherwise
with History. A physical accident, a criminal am-
bition, a misinterpreted despatch, nay, even the
changing of a wind, the stumbling of a horse, the
depression of an omen, may seem to have influenced
the fortune of nations : but these are, in reality, but
eddies and bubbles on the surface of the advancing
or receding tide ; and, if not in our threescore years
and ten, yet in the long millenniums of history, we
see the great tidal waves of retribution overwhelm-
ing every nation which forgets the eternal distinction
of Eight and Wrong, — we hear that voice of seven
thunders which every true historian has always
heard, proclaiming aloud that " for every false word
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 77
and unrighteous deed, for insult and oppression, for
lust and vanity, the price has to be paid at last.
Truth and justice alone endure and live. Falsehood
and injustice may be long-lived, but doomsday
comes to thorn in the end."
Yes, eveiy great historian should be no dull
registrar of events, but a prophet, standing, like
him of old, amid the careless riot and luxurious
banqueting of life, and teaching men to decipher
that gleaming message of God, written, as with the
fingers of a man's hand, on the parliament of na-
tions and the palaces of kings, that what is morally
just must be politically expedient, that "what is
morally wrong cannot be politically right." And
in doing this the Hebrew prophets have been our
truest teachers, nor have any teachers ever enforced
that great lesson with such divine insight, with
such unalterable certitude, with such passionate in-
tensity as they. Around their little insignificant
strip of plain, and hill, and valley, towered the co-
lossal kingdoms of a cruel and splendid heathen-
dom ; but to their enlightened eyes these, in their
guiltiness, were but phantoms on their way to ruin,
casting a weird and sombre shadow athwart the
sunlit horizons of a certain hope. What matter
78 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
their force, their splendor, their multitude, if they
stand before the slow-moving chariot of the Eternal
God ? Is it the Kenite ? " Strong-is thy dwelling-
place, and thou puttest thy nest in a rock ; never-
theless the Kenite shall be wasted." Is it Assyria ?
" The Lord, the Lord of Hosts, shall send among
his fat ones leanness, and kindle under his glory a
burning fire." Is it Egypt ? Her wise magicians
shall be smitten with fatuity, and the papyrus of
her rivers fade. Is it golden Babylon, the city of
the oppressor ? The dead, moved at his coming,
ask her king with gibbering taunts, " Art thou also
become weak as we ? art thou become like unto us ? "
Is it purple Tyrus with her priceless merchandise ?
" Take a harp, go about the city, thou harlot, that
hast been forgotten." And so with all. " The na-
tions shall rush like the rushing of many waters,
but God shall rebuke them ; and they shall flee far
off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the moun-
tains before the wind, and like a rolling thing
before the whirlwind. And behold at evening-
tide trouble ; and before the morning he is not."
" This," exclaims the prophet in a flame of trium-
phant zeal, " this is the portion of them that spoil
us, and the lot of them that rob us."
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 79
Thus over the heads of the enemies of Israel did
her prophets roll, like a Pyriphlegethon of living
fire, the denunciation of God's wrath on sin. Never
had any nation been taught that lesson as Israel
had been taught it, from the fearful eloquence of
the maledictions upon Ebal, down to the days when
Isaiah wailed his dirge over " Ariel, the Lion of
God, the city where David dwelt." Nor had they
been taught by words alone. When Israel was yet
a child God loved him, and out of Egypt He called
His son. In the Old Testament we see that son
grow up to life. Many were the sins, the follies,
the apostasies of his youth. Can you point me to
one folly which was not visited with its natural
consequences ? to one pleasant vice which did not
become its own punishment ? to one sin which was
not lashed with its own appropriate scourge.^
Then came the ruinous and crushing humiliation of
the Babylonish Captivity. A remnant, which they
themselves compared but to the chaff of the wheat,
returned ; and of the old temptation, the tempta-
tion to a sensual idolatry, they were cured for ever.
But they were not saved from other sins. Keeping
the form of their religion they lost its spirit ; from
a living truth they suffered it to degenerate into a
80
THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
meaningless ritual, into a dead formula, into a hyp-
ocritical sham. They had for centuries been hoping,
dreaming, talking of a Messiah, and their Messiah
came ; and how did they receive Him ? they received
Him with yells of " Crucify." And there, in Scrip-
ture, at the Cross which consummated their in-
iquity, the story of their nation ends. But History,
which proves the responsibility of nations. History
adds its chapter to the Sacred book. It shews how
soon the wings of every vulture flapped heavily over
the corpse of a nation that had fallen into moral
death. Some of those who had shared in that
scene, and myriads of their children, shared also in
the long horror of that siege which, for its unutter-
able fearfulness, stands unparalleled in the story of
mankind. They had shouted, " We have no king
but Caesar," and they had no king but Csesar, and
leaving only for a time the grotesque phantom of a
local royalty, Caesar after Caesar outraged and pil-
laged them, till at last their Caesar slaked, in tlae
blood of his best defenders, the red ashes of their
desecrated Temple. They had forced the Komans
to crucify their Christ; and they were themselves
crucified in myriads by the Komans outside their
walls, till room failed for the crosses, and wood to
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 81
make them with. They had preferred a murderer
to their Messiah, and for them there was no Messiah
more, while a murderer's dagger swayed the last
counsels of their dying race. They had accepted
the guilt of blood, and the last pages of their his-
tory were glued together with that crimson stain;
and, to this day, he who will walk round about Je-
rusalem sees in its ever-extending miles of grave-
stones and ever-lengthening pavements of tombs
and sepulchres, a vivid emblem of that field which
Judas bought with the price of his iniquity, — a
potter's field to bury strangers in, an Akeldama, a
Field of blood.
2. I turn from Judaea to the short but splendid
tragedy of Athenian history ; how short, how bril-
liant, how terrible, you all know well. Yes, we owe
to Greece an infinite debt of intellectual gratitude.
The exquisite ideal of beauty of her race, the grace,
the subtlety, the activity of her intellect, the per-
fection and supremacy of her art, the power and splen-
dor of her literature, conferred upon her a wreath
of unfading admiration. had she but learned
righteousness ; had she but won the grace to obey,
as she had received the insight to read that law
written upon the fleshy tablets of her heart ! But
82 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
she cliose otherwise ; and now the world may learn
as memorable a lesson from the rapidity of her fall,
and the utterness of her extinction, as from all be-
sides ; for the ever-needed moral of that little hour
in which she played her part upon the lighted stage
is this, that intellect without holiness, beauty with-
out purity, eloquence without conscience, art with-
out religion, insight without love, are but blossoms
whose root and life are in the corruption of the
grave. All these gifts combined saved her not from
being eaten away by that fretting leprosy of her fa-
vorite sins, which degraded the Mapaduvo/idxv^ of her
youthful glory into the Graeculus esuriens of her
consuming degradation. With what fearful stern-
ness was the career of Athens cut short! It was
but ninety years after her handful of heroes had
clashed into the countless hosts of Persia and rout-
ed them, that her walls were razed among the songs
and shouts of her insulting enemies.. Some who
had seen the one might have seen the other. And
when the hour of her ruin came, when, on that
sleepless September night of terror and agony, down
the long walls from the Peiraeus to the Acropolis
rang that bitter unbroken wail which told that the
fleet of Athens had been destroyed at Aegospotami;
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 83
it is one of her own sons who tells us that it was
the shameful consciousness of her former tyrannies;
it was the avenging memory of Melos, and Torone,
and Scione, that made that bitter hour more bitter
still, by bidding her remember that even-handed
Justice was but commending to her own lips the in-
gredients of that poisoned chalice which in the plen-
itude of her pride and selfishness she had forced
the weak, and the defeated, and the unfortunate to
drink.* A great lesson doubtless, but the real
lesson of Grecian history is deeper, more universal,
more permanent than this ; and surely in days
when some men, in the worst spirit of the tainted
and godless renaissance of the fifteenth century, are
beginning shamelessly to preach a corrupt Hellen-
ism, which regards sin forsooth with aesthetic tolera-
tion, — ^in days when we have read the thoughts of
one calmly arguing an ideal so wretched and so base
as that it is best to crowd life with the greatest
number of pleasurable sensations, — in days when
hearing has been found for theories of an artistic
effeminacy, which, one hopes, would have made even
Antisthenes and Epicurus blush, — it is time, I say,
to read again that stigma of infamy which the
* Xen. Hell. iL 1, 2.
84 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
Apostle branded for ever on the unblushful forehead
of the paganism which he saw, that its sons "be-
came vain in their imaginations, and their foolish
heart was darkened ; " that it was God Himself who
gave them over to vile affections, and to a reprobate
mind, because, "knowing the judgment of God,
that they which do such things are worthy of death,
they not only did the same, but had pleasure in
them that did them."
3. Take but one more prominent example from
ancient days to shew that there is no distinction
between the sacred and the secular, and that pro-
fane history is sacred too. From the palsied hands
of Greece, Kome rudely snatched the sceptre. And
you know that so long as the character of Rome
was simple and self-respecting; so long as her
family life was pure and sweet ; so long as she was
the Rome of the Camilli, the Cincinnati, the Fabii,
the elder Scipios ; so long as her dictators came
from the honest labor of the ploughshare, and her
consuls from the hardy self-denial of the farm, so
long she prospered till none could withstand her,
and impressed the world with lessons of law and
order and discipline manlier and better, than any
which Greece had taught. But, when the dregs of
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 85
every foreign iniquity poured their noisome stream
into the Tiber ; when the old iron discipline had
yielded to an effeminate luxury and a gilded pollu-
tion ; when her youth had grown debased, and
enervated, and false ; when all regard had been
lost in her for man's honor and woman's purity ;
when her trade had become a flagrant imposture
and her religion a dishonest sham ; when, lastly, her
literature became a seething scum of cynicism and
abomination such as degrades the very conception
of humanity, — then you know how justly, in long
slow agony, the charnel-house of her dominion crum-
bled away under the assaults of all her enemies, and
" Rome, whom mightiest kingdoms curtsied to,
Like a forlorn and desperate castaway.
Did shameful execution on herself."
And why did that giant power fall into frag-
ments before the weak hands which held a despised
and hated cross? Why? because, and only be-
cause, God is King ; because in the long run there
is nothing fruitful but sacrifice ; because it is self
denial not luxury, humility not insolence, love no
violence, justice not ambition, which overthrow the
world.
4. And that Christian Church, why was it that
86 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
it too fell from that splendid eminence to which by
the immense ascendancy of justice, and the faith in
Eternal Laws, it had attained in the days of a
Hildebrand, and an Innocent ? What was it but
crime after crime that dashed the Papacy into dis-
honored ruin? The boundless ambition of Boni-
face YIII., the greedy avarice of John XXII., the
shameful violences of Urban VI., the unblushing
nepotism of Sixtus IV., the execrable crimes of
Alexander VI., the aggrandizing wars of Julius II.,
it was not till the disgusted nations had long been
alienated by such spectacles as these that a humble
monk of Erfurdt, rising in the irresistible might of
moral indignation, shattered the supremacy of the
Vatican for ever. I might go on with history j I
might ask why Spain, once the Lady of Kingdoms,
is now the most despised and impotent of European
powers ; I might ask what changed the strong and
righteous England of the Commonwealth, to the
nation which suffered a perjured trifler to sell Dun-
kirk, and live in infamy on the subsidies of France ;
I might ask how comes it that at this very day our
beloved English Church, working as she is now begin-
ning so heartily to do, amid the hatred of her oppo-
nents and the disunion of her sons, may, even yet
THE VOICE OF HISTORY.- 87
be unable to escape, by her late repentance, the
Nemesis of falling axe and kindled flame due to the
sluggish impotence and truckling worldliness of her
18th century. But though time forbids this, I
ought not to take all our instances from the past
when one flagrant illustration of this great truth
has happened in the present, and under the very
eyes of the youngest here. Is there, I ask, no plain,
no unmistakable lesson in the collapse and catas-
trophe of modern France ? Warnings enough she
had received; warnings of splendor overwhelmed
with darkness, warnings of strength smitten into
decrepitude, warnings of defeat, warnings of mas-
sacre, warnings of revolution, from the day when
her great monarch so sadly confessed to the little
child " I have loved war too much " to the day
when, in the living tomb of St. Helena, her imperial
conqueror had time to meditate on his audacious
blasphemy — "men of my stamp do not commit
crimes." But as fast as she had received such les-
sons, she had, alas ! forgotten them. Her religion
had become a godless materialism ; her practice a
calculated sensuality ; her literature a cynical jour-
nalism which sneered at every belief, and a leprous
fiction which poisoned every virtue. She trusted
88 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
in her armies, in her numbers, in her prestige, in
the elan of her soldiers, in the persiflage of her
journalists, in the vaporing patriotism of her boule-
vards, — ^in anything and everything save in God
and right. And what came of it ? Her magnifi-
cence melted away like a vision of the Apocalypae ;
her unfortunate Emperor became a despised, broken
idol; like the corpse of some exhumed king, her
strength slipped into ashes at a touch. And the
causes of this were too obvious to miss. They lay
in her puerile vanity, her administrative corruption,
her universal effeminacy ; they lay in the bourgeois
materialism which desired nothing but vulgar lux-
ury; in the absence of all dignity and seriousness
in the old, and of all discipline and subordination
in the youug.* These sorrowful accusations are
taken not from the indictment of her enemies, but
from the confession of her sons : they are from a
book of a member of her Institute. " Tainted all
of us," says another, " in the depth of our hearts,
we must disengage ourselves from our habits, from
our morals, from our facilities, from our conventions
of yesterday, to reascend to the primitive sources of
humanity and ask ourselves simply but resolutely
* Renan, La BSforme intellect, et morale, passim.
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 89
the question — Is it right, distinctly Yes or No,
that there should be a God, a morality, a society, a
family ? ought woman to be respected ? ought man
to toil ? Is truth the end ; is justice the support ;
is the good absolute ? Yes, yes, a thousand times
Yes ! And societies, governments, families, indi-
viduals, can they, if they would be noble, durable,
fruitful, do without these conditions ? No, no, a
thousand times No." * Such was the lesson of the
late prostration and calamity of France, read not by
me but by one of themselves, even a prophet of
their own ; by one who has done his best to help
the corruption he deplores, and whose very name I
can hardly mention here. And yet, so little has it
been learnt, that I read how but a few days ago
one of her most prominent statesmen asserted, amid
the applause and laughter of his audience, that God
permits the existence of so many iniquities that He
cannot be regarded as of much account in estimating
the progress of the world ! f
* Alex. Dumas, fils, Une Lettre mr lea Ghoses du Jour, p. 30.
f " These gentlemen declared that they acknowledged no con-
trolling power but God and their conscience. As for the former
of these powers, it has permitted so many iniquities to be perpe-
trated that its invocation cannot be said to have much influence
in human aifairs " (applause and laughter). From a Times re-
port of one of M. Gambetta's speeches.
90 THE VOICE OF HISTORY.
This then is the law, this the philosophy of
History. And it not only is but must be so, be-
cause the will of Grod governs the universe, and
God's will is the moral law.
And therefore all unrighteousness is sin, and all
sin is, necessarily, weakness. You will not, I am
sure, ask me what you have to do with all this ?
what the history of nations has to do with you ? It
has everything to do with every one of you. For
each biography is but a fragment of history ; each
soul but an epitome of the world. Nations are but
aggregates of such as you ; and Universities are no
small part of a nation's life ; and if this University
send forth, year by year, men who are brave, because
their consciences are clear and their hearts are
pure ; if, year by year, Cambridge add to the life of
England her stream of youthful students who are
manly, and soberminded, and fearless, and faithful,
then she will be adding no small momentum to the
forces which keep England great. But, on the
other hand,
" Vain miglitiest fleets of iron framed,
, Vain those all-conquering gtma,
Unless proud England keep untamed
The true heart of her sons."
Your lot is cast in stirring and not untroubled
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 91
times. Before you die there will hav^ been many a
vast change in the constitution of society, and many
a battle of God will have been lost or won. Oh
may you fight on God's side ! Fight against greed,
fight against falsity, fight against faithlessness, fight
against uncleanness in your own hearts, and so shall
you be ready for all God's work both now and any
time hereafter, until your Master gives you the sig-
nal that you may fall out of the ranks, or it is time
for you, not as men might say in their despair, to
give up their broken swords to Fate the Conqueror,
but to yield your pure souls to your Captain Christ.
Then, whatever happens, your life will not have
been in vain; then having heard His voice here you
shall be with Him hereafter, and you shall say, as
you stand, with bowed head indeed and awful rev-
erence, but yet a forgiven and an accepted child
before that unutterable glory, — ^you shall say, with
such joy as here the heart of man cannot conceive,
" I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear,
but now^ mine eye seeth Thee."
IV.
WHAT GOD REQUmES.
Wliere-with shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before
the high God ? shall I come before Him with burnt offerings,
with calves of a year old ? "Will the Lord be pleased with
thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil ?
shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my
body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed -thee, O man,
what is good ; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy
God?— MiCAHvi.6-8. *
Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and
bow myself before the Most High God ? It is in-
deed a momentous .question, the most momentous
that can be framed in mortal words. For as we
enter deeper into the valley of life, and its rocks
begin more and more to overshadow us, to what do
all the other questions of life reduce themselves ?
To any man who has the slightest sense of Keligion,
— to any man, who, with all his imperfections, yet
solemnly feels that if life is to be life at all, every
year must bring him nearer and nearer to the great
* A Lent Sermon, preached at the Chapel Royal, St. James's,
February 16, 1872.
(93)
94 WHAT GOD REQUIRES.
Light, — to all whom the sorrows and disappoint-
ments of life have for ever disenchanted, — no hope,
no thought, no question remains hut this, Is God's
love with me ? Am I at peace with Him ? In one
word, am I His ? Oh ! if not, how shall I, the low
liest of His creatures — how shall I approach Him ?
What else can I care for but this ? Kemove the
fear of Grod's displeasure, and I have no other fear.
Give me the joy of His countenance, and I ask no
other joy. Whatever may have been the illusions
of youth, they have vanished from the eyes of man-
hood. The winds have carried those bubbles beyond
the river, or, as we seemed to touch them, they
have burst ; but one thing have I" desired of the
Lord, that will I seek after, even to behold the fair
beauty of the Lord, and to visit His Temple.
Wherewith then shall I come before the Lord, and
bow myself before the Most High God ?
Many and various, in all ages, have been the
answers to that question, but in spirit and principle
they reduce themselves to the three, which in these
verses are tacitly rejected, that the fourth may be
established for all time. And, therefore, this is one
of those palmary passages of Holy Writ, which
should be engraved on every instructed conscience as
WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 95
indelibly as by a pen of iron upon the living rock.
It formulates the best teaching of religion ; it cor-
rects the worst errors of superstition. Every book
of Scripture, every voice of Nature, every judgment
of Conscience re-echoes and confirms it. Happy
will it be for us, if we will use it as a lamp to guide
our footsteps, a law to direct our life.
(1) The first answer is, Will Levitical sacrifices
suffice.^ "Shall I come before Him with burnt-
ofierings, with calves of a year old ? " that is, " Shall
I do some outward act, or acts, to please God.?*"
Men are ever tempted to believe in this virtue of
doing something; to ask, as they often asked our
Lord, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life .5^"
And there are times when such external systems
may, for ignorant and stiff-necked nations, be a wise
safeguard. It was so for the Israelites at the Exo-
dus, depressed and imbruted as they were by long
slavery, and saturated with heathen traditions of
cruelty and vice. The Levitical institutes, — so mul-
tiplex, so trivial, so intricate, so material, so bur-
densome, — statutes which were not good, and judg-
ments whereby they could not live, — were best suited,
intolerable as was their yoke, to a people which in
honor of their brute idol, could sit down to eat, and
96 WHAT GOD REQUIRES.
to drink, and rise up to play, while the body of heaven
in its clearness had scarcely vanished from their eyes,
and the majesty of darkness still rolled around
the burning hill. There have been attempts in all
ages to revive such ceremonials, or others like them,
because they are easier than true holiness, and tend
to pacify and appease the perverted conscience.
But God's own Word about them is plain; they
perish in the using ; they cannot sanctify to the
purifying of the flesh ; nay, in so far as they are
substituted for a heart religion, — ^in so far as they
are used to compound for the weightier matters
of the law, — in so far as they furnish an excuse
for selfishness, for censoriousness, for party spirit, —
they are eminently displeasing to God. External
observances, without inward holiness, are but the
odious whiteness of the sepulchre. "Bring no more
vain oblations, incense is an abomination unto Me,"
saith God to such; "your sabbaths and calling of
assemblies I cannot away with." Thousands, I sup-
pose, have been asking themselves this Lent, Need
we fast ? Yes, my brethren, if you think that you
ought ; and if you know and find that by doing so
you increase your religious earnestness, and strength-
en your moral life. But not if you think that fast-
WHAT GOD REQUIRE3. 97
ing is an end instead of a means ; not if it renders
you more self-satisfied ; not if it makes you less ac-
tive in works of good ; not if it renders you less len-
ient to your own failings. " Eat an ox, and be a
Christian," said the Jesuit Fathers to a penitent
who could not abstain from meat. What is the
passionate, indignant language of the Prophet Isaiah
on this subject ? ".Behold, ye fast for strife and
debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness : is
it such a fast that I have chosen.? to bow down his
head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes
under him ? wilt thou call this a fast, and an ac-
ceptable day to the Lord ? " No : fasting may be
necessary, only do not take it for religion ; — but, on
the other hand, look at home ; loose the bands of
wickedness, your own and others ; undo the heavy
burdens, your own and others ; take the beam out of
your own eyes; wash you, make you clean; put
away the evil of your doings from before Mine eyes ;
cease to do evil ; learn to do well. That is dearer
in God's eyes than perpetual sacrifice, holier and
'purer than days of unbroken fast.
(2) If then we cannot please God by merely
doing, can we by giving 1 "Will the Lord be
pleased with thousands of rams, and ten thousands
98 WHAT GOD REQUIRES.
of rivers of oil ? " Shall we like the Pagans try to
bribe God ? Shall we make His altars swim with
the blood of hecatombs, and fill his sanctuaries with
votive gold ? Or shall we, like terrified sinners in
the Middle Ages, think to buy ofi" his anger by
bequeathing our possessions to charity or to the
Church ? Ah ! my brethren, I suppose that while
not one of us is so ignorant as not to know the duty
of charity, none of us is so exquisitely foolish as to
imagine that he can by gifts win his way one step
nearer to the great White Throne. Sacrifices, to
bribe Him whose are all the beasts of the forest, and
the cattle upon a thousand hills ? Gold or gems to
Him, before whom the whole earth, were it one en-
tire and perfect chrysolite, would be but as an atom
in the sunbeam ? Ah, no !
"Vainly we offer each, ample qblation;
Vainly with gifts would His favor implore ;
Better by far is the heart's adoration,
Dearer to Grod are the prayers of the poor.**
" Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it
Thee, but Thou delightest not in burnt-ofierings.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit ; a broken
and a contrite heart, God, Thou wilt not despise."
(3) If then neither by doing, nor by giving,
WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 99
can we please God, what third experiment shall we
try ? shall it be by suffering 1 Shall I, lacerating
my heart in its tenderest affections, give my first-
born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for
the sin of my soul ? This, too, has been frequently
and fearfully attempted; frequently, and fearfully,
and more persistently than any other, because in all
ages, and in all nations, men have invested God
with the attributes of terror and of wrath. Could
we, my brethren, judge rightly of the glorious sun
in heaven, if we only saw it glaring luridly through
the' whirled sands of the desert, or dimmed and dis-
torted by the hideous ice-fogs of the North ? And
can we, my brethren, judge of God — the Sun of our
souls — when He looms dark and terrible through
the crimson mist of haunted consciences and guilty
hearts ? No ; when men have been able only to thus
regard Him, then all the day long His terrors have
they suffered with a troubled mind. He, the All-
loving, the All-merciful, has seemed to them cruel,
wrathful, irresistible, delighting in smoking victims
and streaming blood. And thus alike in sunny
Greece, and stately Kome, and apostatizing Israel,
and scorching Africa, and in the far sweet islands
of the sea, to hideous emblems of some savage Deity,
100 WHAT GOD REQUIRES.
— a Moloch, an Odin, an Atua, a Sheeva, — in the
rushing stream, or the molten furnace, or on the
blade of the consecrated sword, has the blood of man
been shed in abominable sacrifice, or his life robbed
of all health and joy in horrible self-torture. Noth-
ing seemed too sanguinary or revolting to appease
the sense of sin, or dim the glare of awakened wrath.
" Our sires knew well
The fitting course for such ; dark cells, dim lamps,
A stone floor one may writhe on like a worm,
No mossy pillow blue with violets."
They fled from the society of their fellows to
vast wildernesses, or desolate hills, or wave-washed
caverns. Knowing their sin, not knowing their
Saviour, — ^gazing in remorse and tears at the splen-
dors of Sinai, not coming in humble penitence to
the Cross of Calvary, — life became to them an in-
tolerable fear. When a man feels that the eye of
God is fixed upon him in anger, and knows not
how to escape, then no mountain seems too heavy,
no sea too deep, no solitude too undisturbed. He
says with the poet,
" Place me alone in some frail boat
Mid th' horrors of an angry sea,
Where I, while time may move, shall float
Despairing either land or day.
' WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 101
Or under earth my youth confine
To the night and silence of a cell,
Where scorpions round my limbs may twine, —
Oh Grod I so thus forgive me Hell."
But has any man ever found these sufferings
sufficient ? Has any man. ever testified that he
found forgiveness through voluntary torture ? Or is
not that true which is said of the prophets of Baal,
" They leaped upon the altar, and cried aloud, and
cut themselves after their manner. And it came to
pass that there was neither voice, nor any to answer,
nor any that regarded ? "
(4) Not then by doing, not by giving, not by
Buffering may we come before the Lord, or bow our-
selves before the most high God. Oh ! if we could
thus be at peace with Him, who would not be doing
incessantly, who would not give all that he has, who
would not cheerfully suffer, as never martyr suffered
yet ? Yet let us not imagine that if men have
acted thus in sincerity, it will all have been in vain.
No, let us take comfort, knowing that God is love.
Though not by any number of formal actions can
we enter into eternal life, yet no work done from a
right motive, however erroneous, can be the fruit of
an utterly corrupted tree. Though no self-inflicted
anguish can be acceptable to God, yet "agonies
»>^.
/^^ 01 THH ^^
fiririVBRSITT
102 WHAT GOD REQUIRES.
of pain and blood shed in rivers are better than
the soul spotted and bewildered with mortal sin."
Though no giving shall purchase interest in heaven,
yet the poorest and slightest act which has sprung
from a true charity, — the kindly word spoken in
Christ's name, the cup of cold water given for His
sake, — shall not miss its reward. You may remem-
ber how, in the old legend, St. Brendan, in his
northward voyage, saw a man sitting upon an ice-
berg, and with horror recognized him to be the
traitor Judas Iscariot ; and the traitor told him how,
at Christmas time, amid the drench of the burning
lake, an angel had touched his arm, and bidden him
for one hour to cool his agony on an iceberg in the
Arctic sea; and when he asked the cause of this
mercy, bade him recognize in him a leper to whom
in Joppa streets he had given a cloak to shelter him
from the wind, and how for that one kind deed this
respite was allotted him. Let us reject the ghastly
side of the legend, and accept its truth. Yes, char-
ity — love to God as shewn in love to man — ^is better
than all burnt-offering and sacrifice. Yet if we
condemn the errors of other ages in their mode of
approaching God, let us at the same time humbly
remember that, better had we be at ceremonials all
WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 103
day long, — better be giving in the most mercenary
spirit of self-interest, — ^better even be a Moloch wor-
shipper, drowning with drums the cries of his little
infant as he passes it through the fire, — than to be
a Christian living, as alas! so many live, without
God in the world ; living in pride, fulness of bread,
abundance of idleness ; living, while they are unjust,
unmerciful, uncharitable, unholy, in self-satisfied
Pharisaism, in gluttonous indifference, in sensual
ease.
Yet if all these be at the best but unacceptable
ways, what is the true way of pleasing God ? If not
by doing, not by giving, not by sufiering, then how ?
What is the Prophet's answer ? My brethren, by
being, " He hath shewed thee, man, what is
good ; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but
to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly
with thy God ? " Not once or twice only in Scripture
are we taught the same great lesson. "Behold,"
said Samuel to the presumptuous king, " behold, to
obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the
fat of rams." " I spake not to your fathers concern-
ing burnt-ofierings," said Jeremiah, " but this thing
commanded I them. Obey my voice." Four times
over, — thrice to the murmuring Pharisees, once to
104 WHAT GOD REQUIRES.
the inquiring Scribe who was not far from the king-
dom of heaven— did our Lord expressly sanction the
same high principle. By being then shall we please
God ; but by being what ? By being correct in the
pronunciation of half-a-dozen shibboleths ? By
being diligent in a few observances ? By fasting ?
By attending Church services ? By saying " Lord,
Lord," when, all the while, the heart is unsanctified,
the lips uncharitable, the passions unsubdued ? No,
my brethren, no a thousand times ; but by being
just, and merciful, and humble before our God. It
is the answer of all the Prophets, it is the answer of
all the Apostles, it is the answer of Christ Himself
Justice that shall hate the wicked balances, — -justice
that shall recoil from oppression and violence, — jus-
tice that shall loathe the small vices of gossip, scan-
dal, and spite : — ^mercy that shall make us careful
" Never to mix our pleasures or our pride
With, anguish of the meanest thing that feels ; "
mercy that shall cherish for every sorrow which can
be alleviated, and every pang that can be assuaged,
a divine, trembling, self-sacrificing love ; mercy
which, looking neither to be admired, nor honored,
nor loved, shall live for the good of others, not its
own ; — and lastly, a humble reverence towards God,
WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 105
which shall be the source alike of that high justice,
and that heavenly mercy, — oh this is what G.od
requires, and thus alone can we live acceptably to
Him. Yea, acceptably ; for this is to live in Christ.
In Him was justice fulfilled; in Him was mercy
consummated ; in Him was such humility of rever-
ence towards His heavenly Father that, alike on the
hills of Galilee, and in the garden of Gethsemane,
we see Him absorbed in constant prayer. Oh ! my
brethren, God needs not our services ; He needs not
our formulae ; He needs not our gifts ; least of all
does He need our anguish ; but He needs as, our
hearts, our lives, our love ; He needs it, and even
this He gives us ; shedding abroad the spirit of
adoption in our hearts. If we resist not that Spirit
we need no longer be what we are ; no longer what
we have been. All meanness and malice, all deceit-
fulness and fraud, all injustice and insolence, all
Pharisaism and uncharity, all worldliness and lust
will fall away from us, and we shall be clothed, as
with a wedding garment which Christ shall give,
with justice, and humanity, and purity, and love.
Oh ! if we would indeed know how to serve Him
aright, let us put away all idle follies and fancies of
Dur own ; and seating ourselves humbly at his feet,
106 WHAT GOD REQUIRES.
amid those poor and ignorant multitudes who sat
listening to Him among the mountain lilies, let us
learn the spirit of his own beatitudes — Blessed are
the meek for they shall inherit the earth; blessed are
the merciful for they shall obtain mercy; blessed are
they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for
they shall be filled.
V.
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
Then the devil taketh Him up into the holy City, and setteth
Him on a pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto Him, If Thou
be the Son of God, cast thyself down : for it is written, He
shall give His angels charge concerning Thee : and in their
hands they shall bear Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash
Thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him. It is written
again. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. — Matthew
iv. 5-7. *
This which is the second temptation in St.
Matthew is, as you are aware, the third in St. Luke.
It may be that the younger Evangelist, looking
upon it as a temptation subtler and more perilous
than any which could come from earthly splendor,
regarded it as the last because it was the deadliest
assault. But the fact that St. Matthew alone gives
us definite notes of sequence, — the fact that, as an
actual Apostle, he is more likely to have heard the
narrative from the lips of Christ Himself, — the fact
that the recorded words, "Get thee behind Me,
* A Lent Sermon, preached in Hereford Cathedral, March 7, 1873.
(107)
108 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
Satan/' seem to be the natural conclusion of the
entire temptation, render it all but certain that the
order of the actual temptation was that which the
first Evangelist adopts.
Nor is this all ; for there is also in this order an
inherent fitness, a divine probability. It represents,
on the part of the tempter, a Satanic subtlety- of
insight, which the acutest human intellect could
hardly have invented. For our Saviour had foiled
the first temptation by an expression of absolute
trust in God. Not even the pangs of famine in the
howling wilderness would tempt Him one step aside
from the perfect confidence that His heavenly
Father could, and, in His own time, would prepare
for Him a table in the wilderness. Adapting him-
self therefore with serpent cunning to this discov-
ered mood of the Saviour's mind, — breathing a sug-
gestion which must seem but the natural sequel of
that triumphant faith, — the tempter challenges this
perfect trust, not to gratify an immediate need, but
apparently to avert an immediate peril. There is
no stain of egotism, no impatience of sufiering, in
the present temptation. Transformed therein into
an angel of light, the tempter breathed his insidious
suggestion as a sublime victory of Messianic power,
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 109
a striking illustration of sovereign faith. Transport*
ing the Saviour to the Holy City, where
" The glorious temple reared
His pile far off, — appearing like a mount
Of alabaster, tipped with golden spires,"
the tempter set Him not on a — ^but as it should be
more accurately rendered— on the — on the topmost
pinnacle. Probably it was the summit of that Stoa
Basilik^, or Royal Porch, which towered over the
southern extremity of the magnificent mass. At
this point the walls of Jerusalem surmount a rocky
and elevated platform ; and as the porch itself was
of stupendous height, we are told by the Jewish
historian, no one could gaze down from it into the
sheer descent of the ravine below without his brain
growing giddy at the yawning depth of the abyss.
"If thou be the Son of God;" — again that
whispered doubt as though to challenge Him through
spiritual pride into an indignant exercise of His
miraculous power, — " If Thou be the Son of God,
cast Thyself down." Is not this Thy Temple, this
Thy Father's house.? Here the prophets prophe
sied about Thee ; here Anna and Simeon took Thee
in their arms ; here, while yet a boy. Thou didst
amaze by Thy wisdom the teachers of Thy people.
110 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
And here, save Thyself, or, if not save, at least
assert Thyself by the splendor of miracle, in the
majesty of faith. Give to every passer in the valley
a sign from Heaven. Flash down, like a star from
the zenith, amid the astonished populace. Art
Thou afraid ? Nay, for — (and here mark how well
the devil can quote Scripture for his purpose, and
set the fatal example so greedily followed, of isola-
ting, perverting, distorting Holy Writ) — for "He
shall give His angels charge concerning Thee : and
in their hands they shall bear Thee up, lest at any
time Thou dash Thy foot against a stone."
So deadly subtle, so speciously plausible, was
this second temptation. There was nothing vulgar
in it, nothing selfish, nothing sensuous. It seemed
all spiritual ; and oh ! to how many a Pharisee, and
Keformer, and Saint, have such and similar tempta-
tions proved a fatal snare ! But calm, spontaneous,
deep with warning, came the simple answer, " It is
written again. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy
God ! " The word in the original is yet stronger, —
it is, ovK EKTreipdaeig, thou shalt uot tempt to the full,
thou shalt not challenge to the extreme — ^the Lord
thy God ; thou shalt not wantonly experiment upon
the depth of His pity, or the infinitude of His
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. Ill
power. When thou art doing thy duty, then, trust
Him to the uttermost with a perfect confidence;
but let no seductive whisper thrust thee into sui-
cidal irreverence in thy demand for aid. Thus, to
add the words omitted by the tempter, shalt thou
be safe in all thy ways :
" Also, it is written
Tempt not the Lord thy God : He said and stood ;
But Satan — smitten by amazement — fell."
Now no one, I suppose, can ever have meditated
even superficially on the Temptation in the Wilder-
ness, without feeling its many-sided and searching
applicability; and though, at the first glance, this
second temptation may seem merely to involve a
spiritual pride, which, if not uncommon, is yet far
from universal, I think that if we look at it a little
more closely in humble simplicity, we shall, on the
contrary, find it full of warning to the youngest, no
less than to the oldest, to the worst sinner no less
than to the loftiest saint.
The key to its meaning lies surely in the answer
of our Lord. It is an allusion to the Book of Deu-
teronomy, " Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God,
as ye tempted Him at Massah.'' And how had the
children of Israel tempted God at Massah? They
112 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
were in the wilderness, and in lack of water ; but
hitherto God had guided, had fed, had loved them ;
for them He had smitten the parted sea ; for them
empearled with manna the barren waste ; for them
" By day along the astonished lands
The clouded pillar glided slow, '
By night Arabia's crimsoned sands
Returned the fiery column's glow."
And could they then, indeed, suppose that God
would desert them there to die of thirst ? What
did they need but a little calm faith, a little patient
trustfulness, a little obedient hope, and then assur-
edly for them should the wilderness have rippled
with living waves ? But what did they do ? They
broke into angry murmurs; they clamored with
self-willed indignation ; they demanded as a right
the smiting of the stony rock. This was emphatic-
ally to tempt the Lord. It was at once presump-
tion and distrust, distrust of God's ordinary Provi-
dence, presumption of His miraculous aid. It was
neither faith, nor submission, nor hope ; it was
rebellion — it was sin.
1. Are we, then, never liable to tempt the Lord
our God, as Israel tempted Him in the wilderness,
as Christ refused to tempt Him on the Temple pin-
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 113
nacle ? Yes, in many ways. Christ would not cast
Himself down, because He respected, as the laws of
His Father, the laws of nature ; and to cast Him-
self down would have been to brave and to violate
them. Now, we too, by our knowledge of those
laws, by study of them, by obedience to them, are
placed as it were upon a pinnacle of the Temple, —
on a pinnacle of that vast Cathedral of the Omnipo-
tent, whose azure dome is the vault of heaven, and
the stars its cresset lamps. Consider the supremacy
of man in nature. For us are fire and hail, snow
and vapor, wind and storm ; for us are the glorious
voices of the mountain and t*he sea ; for us the shell
upon the sand has its rosy beauty, and the moon in
heaven her silvery light. And look what man has
done ! How he has made the very elements minister
to his happiness, and decrease his toil,— how he has,
as it were, seized the very lightning by its wing of
fire, and bidden it flash his messages through the
heart of mighty mountains, and the bosom of raging
seas. But how.? By exact obedience to the laivs
of nature, never by insolent violation of them.
" The water drowns ship and sailor like a grain of
dust; but trim your bark, and the wave which
drowned it will be cloven by it, and carry it like its
8
114 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
own foam, a plume and a power." '■* But is there
no moral lesson for us here ? Aye, and a deep one :
for the Book of Nature is also the Book of God, and
the Voice of Nature the Voice of God ; and the
history of. man, and the life of man, would have
been very different, if — instead of neglecting that
Book, being deaf to that Voice, violating those
Laws, and so flinging himself down from that Tem-
ple pinnacle, whereon his feet are set — he had in all
respects and in all ages humbly and faithfully
striven to understand and to obey. Half of the
peace and prosperity of nations, half of the health
and happiness of man, half even of the serenity and
security of moral life, depend on this. For pain,
mutilation, disease, death — these are the stem,
instant, inexorable penalties affixed by nature to
every violation of every law. Drop a spark near a
magazine, and a city may be shattered ; let hot
ashes fall in a prairie, and a province may be devas-
tated. The germs of diseases the most virulent,
which spread dismay and disaster through nations
and continents, lurk in the neglected cottage, and
the stagnant pool. And, as you all know, these laws
have a direct bearing on the individual life of man.
* Emerson, The Conduct of Life.
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 115
By obedience to their beneficent indication can we
alone preserve a sound mind in a sound body. He
who would live to a green old age in purity and
honor, — he who would " account himself both a fit
person to do the noblest and most glorious deeds,
and far better worth than to deject and to defile
with such a pollution as sin is, himself so highly
ransomed and ennobled to a filial relationship with
God," — ^he who would not lay waste the inner sanc-
tities of his own immortal nature, or lie down in the
dust with his bones full of the sin of his youth, — he
must regard the laws of nature as a voice behind
him, saying, " This is the way, walk ye in it," when
he would turn aside to the right hand or to the left.
And then, indeed, he may feel that God's angels
shall guard him in all his ways. Never will he
" With unbashful forehead woo
The means of sickness and debility."
The sudden terror, the pestilence of darkness, the
arrow of noonday shall have no dread for him. Or
if he sufier, he will calmly and cheerfully accept
such suffering as a part of God's providence for his
mortal life, knowing that any suffering encountered
for the sake of duty with unflinching courage, en-
dured for the sake of duty with perfect trust, is only
116 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
less noble than martyrdom itself. It is related of one
of the bravest of our kings — a king who, in many a
hard fight, when horses were shot under him and
bullets tore his clothes, exulted with a serene and
imperturbable courage, — that he had yet a deep con-
tempt for foolhardiness and neglect. "What do
you do here ? " he once asked sternly and angrily,
of a gentleman who had come to witness a battle.
" Do you not see the danger you are in ?" " Not
in greater danger than your Majesty," was the reply.
" Yes," answered the king, " but I am here in the
path of duty, and therefore may trust my life in
God's care; but you — " . . . before the sentence
could be finished a cannon-ball laid the rash intruder
dead at the unharmed monarch's feet.
2. Again, hy our spiritual and moral privileges,
no less than by the laws of nature, we stand as it
were upon the pinnacle of the Temple. Consider
our lofty privileges. We are, every one of us, mem-
bers of Christ, children of God, inheritors of the
kingdom of heaven. In infancy the Cross was signed
upon our foreheads;, in youth we were taught at
Christ's school ; in manhood the deepest and richest
ordinances of a free and unpersecuted religion wei'e
placed wholly within our reach. How many by such
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 117
privileges as these have been tempted to their own
destruction ! " Admitted into the holier sanctuary
they have but been guilty of the deeper sacrilege ;
standing in the brighter radiance they have but
flung the deeper shadow." How many, even in the
early Church, cast themselves down at the tempter's
bidding into the gulf of Antinomianism ; how many
in all ages have imagined that they in particular
need not be guided by the strict letter of the moral
law. How is all such pride rebuked, how is the eter-
nal majesty and grandeur of the moral law asserted,
by Christ's calm answer, " Thou shalt not tempt the
Lord thy God." As long, indeed, as we stand firm
where His Providence hath set our feet we are secure.
" He shall defend thee under His wings, and thou
shalt be safe under His feathers ; His righteousness
and truth shall be thy shield and buckler." Daniel
when he prayed thrice a day looking towards Jeru-
salem was but doing what he had ever done, and
therefore for him the lions' mouths were sealed.
The three children were but resisting unsought
temptation, when they were dragged before the gold-
en image, and flung into the burning flame, and
therefore for them the Spirit of God breathed like
" a moist whistling: wind " amid the fire. But, op
118 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
ihe other hand, when the early Christians thrust
themselves presumptuously and insolently into the
peril of martyrdom, how often did "the flaniinoj
inspirations of idealist valor " sink shamefully undei
the rude shock of reality. And the fall of many of
them was more terribly shameful, when they put
themselves with reckless self-confidence in the way
of moral temptations. As long as men watch and
pray, and use the ordinary means of safety furnished
by God's grace, so long they are safe ; but when they
despise those ordinances, how utter may be their
ruin ! When Lot, in his greed for gold, was willing
to exchange his nomad tent for the foul city's wicked
streets, how in the shipwreck of all he had and all
he loved, — ^how in the earthquake-shattered city, and
the lightning-riven plain, — ^how in the putrescent
scum and glistening slime of that salt and bitter
sea, which rolled its bituminous horror where his
garden-pastures had smiled before, — ^how, I say, did
he learn that God means even the most innocent-
hearted to keep far away from sin ! When Dinah
walked forth to see the daughters of the land, and
returned to bitterness and bloodshed, with rent veil
and dishevelled hair ; — when Peter followed into the
High Priest's palace, and was startled by sneering
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 119
questions to deny with shameless curses the Lord he
loved, — how in their moral feebleness, how in their
sudden retribution, do they illustrate the great sin
and folly of rushing into danger's way ! Yes ! the
devil tempts us when he thrusts sin before us, but,
when we approach it of our own selves, it is then we
who tempt the devil; and " Lead us not into temp-
tation " is a prayer which will not be heard from the
lips of him who makes no effort to avoid it. He
who walks humbly, prayerfully, watchfully, on the
path of quiet duty, may indeed meet with danger ;
but if so, firmly holding the hand of God, — un-
shaken, unseduced, unterrified, — he shall tread upon
the lion and adder, the young lion and the dragon shall
he trample under feet. But he who dallies with
temptation, he who tampers with evil, is never safe.
People say that such and such a man had a sudden
fall ; but no fall is sudden. In every instance the
crisis of th^ moment is decided only by the tenor of
the life ; nor, since this world began, has any man
been dragged ever into the domain of evil, who had
not strayed carelessly, or gazed curiously, or lingered
guiltily, beside its verge.
3. Once more and lastly, and this is a point
which nearly affects us all, independently of all
120 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
spiritual privileges, independently of God's inesti-
mable love in the redemption of the world by our
Lord Jesus Christ, we are set as it were upon a
pinnacle of the Temple, by the mere grandeur and
loftiness of our being, by the freedom of our wills,
by the immortality of our souls, by the glory and
honor, a little lover than the angels, wherewith
God has crowned our race. And how often, alas 1
and how fearfully, do men fling themselves down
from this glory and grandeur, into the abyss I
" Ah deeper dole I
That so august a spirit, shrined so fair,
Should, from the starry session of his peers,
Decline to quench so bright a brilliance
In Hell's sick spume ; — ah me the deeper dole ! "
For, indeed, by every sin, — above all by every wil-
ful, by every deliberate, by every habitual sin, — we
do fling ourselves from our high station down into
shame and degradation, into guilt and fear, into
fiery retribution and, it may be, final loss. And
yet, how many talk in these days as though to sin
were no great harm ; as though the sins of youth,
for instance, were all venial, and it were rather a
better thing than otherwise for a young man to
sow, as they call it, his wild oats ! But yet, though
man deceive himself and be deceived — though the
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 121
tables of the Moral Law, even ere they were pro-
mulgated, were shattered to pieces on the mountain
granite — the Moral Law remains in its eternal maj-
esty, and in the heart and conscience of every living
man, louder than amid the thunder-echoing crags
of Sinai, " God spake these words and said" So
that every violation of God's law is to fling our-
selves down from the Temple pinnacle into the foul
and dark ravine ; — ^it is to see whether man's inso-
lent rebellion shall not triumph over God's immuta-
ble designs.
And to what do men trust, to what alas ! do
we trust when we act thus ? Is it not to the lying
whisper that God will give His angels charge over
us, and that, whatever we do, we shall still be saved ?
But oh, we cannot learn too early that stern lesson
of St. Augustine's that though God hath indeed
promised forgiveness to those who repent, He hath not
promised repentance to those who sin. We cannot
convince ourselves too absolutely, that, if we sin,
God will work no miracle for our deliverance. Peo-
ple talk of time producing a change in them ; but
time is no agent, and can lend no aid. And thus,
more men destroy themselves by hope than by de-
spair ; by the hope that is — the vague, vain, idle
122 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
hope, — that they will some day be saved, than by
the despairing conviction that they never can be
saved. It has been often said that " hell is paved
with good intentions ; " it would be far more true
to say that hell is paved with idle hopes. Century
after century has the tempter been whispering to
myriads and myriads of human souls, " Cast thyself
boldly down. Yea, hath God said ? — ^Fear not !
Thou shalt not surely die. Thou shalt enjoy the
sweetness Oi the sin, and shalt escape — for God is
merciful — the bitterness of the punishment." And
yes, my brethren, God is merciful; but shall we
make His mercy an excuse for our own wickedness,
or pervert His love into an engine for our own de-
struction.? Did our first parents, did any of all
their millions of descendants in all ages, ever find
that whisper true ? In the lost Paradise, in the
crushing shame, in the horror at God's presence,
in the waving barrier of fire about the Tree of Life,
in the son who was murdered, in the son who was a
murderer, in the ruin, and angi^ish, and degradation
that burst in like a flood upon their race, — did they
find that God thinks nothing of His word, and does
not mean what He has said.? And if indeed He
ioes not, what mean in history the battles and the
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 123
massacres, and in nature the earthquake and the
pestilence, and in daily experience the cell of the
lunatic and the grave of the suicide ? Do these
look like " a reckless infinitude of mercy, and bound-
less obliteration of the work of sin ? " Might we
not, it has been said, seeing a river, hope that it is
not a river, and so walk into it and be drowned, as
seeing, in all Scripture, and in all nature, judgment
and not mercy written down as the penalty of im-
penitent transgression, " hope that it is mercy and
not judgment, and so rush against the bosses of the
Eternal buckler as the wild horse rushes into the
battle?"
Thus then, my brethren, if Satan tempt us to
cast ourselves down from that high pinnacle, where-
on we are now standing, — ^whether it be by neglect-
ing the law of Nature, or by presuming on the law
of Grace, or by defying the law of Retribution, —
we shall, if we yield to that temptation, be yielding
to our own destruction. But to each of such temp-
tations we have the true answer, " Thou shalt not
tempt the Lord thy God." Trust Him, but tempt
Him not. Trust Him, for thou art His child ; and
if thou wilt love and fear Him, the very hairs of thy
head are all numbered. In the accidents of life, in
124 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION.
its dangers, in its difficulties, in its moral crises, yea,
in the very valley of the shadow of death, trust
Him ; but in obedience, not in rebellion ; in faith,
not in audacity ; in humble patience, not in insolent
self-will. So, but so only, shall He give His angels
charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall
bear thee up lest at any time thou dash thy foot
against a stone.
VI.
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to
man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted
above that ye are able ; but will with the temptation also
make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. — 1 CoB.
X. 13 *
You have just heard these words, my brethren,
in the second lesson of this evening's service. They
form the climax of a long and memorable digression
of which the leading thought is distrust of self, trust
in God, — distrust of self as a cause of watchfulness,
trust in God as a ground of hope. Like most of St.
Paul's words, real and burning words as they always
are, they acquire a yet intenser significance from the
sequence of thought with which they are connected.
He has been speaking of his position as an Apostle,
and claiming his right to be supported by his evan-
gelizing work. But he reminds his Corinthian
converts that he had deliberately waived that right.
* Preached as a Farewell Sermon in the Chapel of Harrow
School on the evening of Jan. 29, 1871.
(125)
126 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
He had followed that rarer and nobler course which
is so hard to learn, and which he urges so often on
all Christians, of calmly and habitually being content
if need be, with less than is our due. And therefore,
instead of accepting the maintenance to which he
was so clearly entitled from the hands of his con-
verts, he had labored with his own hands to meet
the modest wants of a disciplined and simple life.
Yet he did not boast of this great self-denial ; he
had not done it for glory, or for gratitude, but for
God. What he had done he could not help doing.
The sacred hunger for souls had absorbed his ener-
gies ; the burning impulse of love had swayed his
soul; his labor had been its own reward, because
it had been done for the Gospel's sake, that he and
they might alike be partakers of its benefits.
And there for a moment he pauses. The thought
arrests his attention. You may have sometimes
watched a great tide advancing irresistibly towards
the destined shore, yet broken and rippled over
every wave of its sunlit fretwork, and liable at
any momeilt to mighty refluences as it foams and
swells about opposing sandbank or rocky cape.
Such, as the elder of you will recognize, is the style
of St. Paul. The word " Gospel,"— the thought of
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 127
sharing with them its awful privileges, — arrests him ;
he is suddenly startled at the grandeur of his own mis-
sion, and stops to warn them that even he, their
teacher, — even he called to be an Apostle, — even he
with all his perils and labors and sacrifices, needed,
no less than they did, unsparing, constant, anxious
self-discipline, lest he should become a castaway.
He reminds them that the mortification, the conflict,
the self-mastery which were necessary for him who
would wear heaven's wreath of amaranth,* were far
more intense and continuous than the severe train-
ing which the young athletes of their city must
undergo before they could win those coveted and
fading garlands of Isthmian pine. He reminds them
too of the awful lesson involved in the history of
their fathers. They, by glorious privilege, had been
guided by the fiery pillar, had been baptized in the
parted sea, had quenched their thirst from the
cloven rock, — yet all had been in vain. In spite of
all, their hearts had lusted after evil things. Some
had committed fornication and fallen in one day
three and twenty thousand ; some had tempted
Christ and been destroyed of serpents ; some had
murmured and been destroyed of the destroyer. Oh
• 1 Cor. ix. 25. 1 Peter v. 4. tov afiapdvTcvov rrj^ i^^fJ-Q ori^avov.
<
128 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
let them beware, for all this dark and splendid his-
tory was written for their example. It was no dim
revelation of God's will, no uncertain utterance of
His voice. And its lesson was "Let him that
thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall." But
then, at once, after those stern and solemn messages,
4
the heart of the great apostle breaks with tears.
fle yearns to comfort his children. " Why should
they — why need they fall ? " The thought flashes
across his mind too rapidly for utterance, and leav-
ing it unexpressed, he continues, " There hath no
temptation taken you but such as is common to
man ; but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to
be tempted above that ye are able ; but will with
the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye
may be able to bear it."
At those blessed words, my brethren, we too will
pause. They are words of mercy, of strength, of con-
fidence, of comfort. Yery gladly for a few moments
would I dwell on them as my last words amongst
you. Very earnestly would I pray to Almighty
God, that, as a savor of life unto life, their meaning
may linger in our souls ; and that thereby we may
be helped forward by God's grace on the path of a
Christian life, feeling more peace amidst its troubles.
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 129
more courage under its difficulties, more hope amid
its failures, more joy as the quiet scene of its many-
blessings gleams forth under the sunlight of God's
approving smile.
1. Mark first, my brethren, that St. Paul as-
sumes the certainty of our encountering temptation.
No life, not even the life of our Lord and Master,
was ever yet without it. That journey of the Israel-
ites in the desert to which St. Paul alludes, fur-
nishes a close emblem of our own. Before each one
of us — a pillar of a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by
night, — glides visibly the protecting providence of
God. Wonderful deliverances are vouchsafed to us.
Enemies pursue us, and we must fly from them.
Enemies confront us, and we must fight with them.
Vividly and distinctly, loudly and intelligibly, — as
among the burning summits and thunder-beaten
crags of Sinai, — blaze for us the revealing splen-
dors, reverberate for us the majestic utterances of
the moral law. Simple and sweet as virgin honey,
— if we will only live thereon, — ^lies round us the
angels' food ; clear and crystalline, — if we will but
drink thereof, — murmurs and shines about us the
river of God's love. Yet, alas ! we fall as Israel fell.
Idolaters like them, we inflame ourselves with idols.
9
130 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATIOIT.
Sensualists like them, we sigh for the fleshpots of
Egypt among the manna-dews of heaven. Thank-
less as they, we have heen discontented an(^ rebel-
lious in the midst of mercies. The language is
allegorical, the fact is bitterly real. All of us have
been tempted ; many of us have fallen ; some have
been overthrown in the wilderness.
And these temptations — these impulses from
without, these tendencies from within, to love our
bodies more than our souls, our pleasures more than
our duties, ourselves more than our God, — ^begin,
alas, almost with our earliest years. The very
youngest boy who hears me, knows what it is to be
tempted to do wrong, — tempted to neglect known
duties, to utter wicked language, — tempted to be
idle, or self-indulgent, or unholy, or unkind. Ah
my brethren, let us not conceal it, — let us frankly
acknowledge the plain fact, — ^an English Public
School, — nay, any school, public or private, is, and
must be a scene of temptation. That temptation
may vary in extent, in intensity, in deadliness ; at
one time, in one house, under one set of circum-
stances it may be fearfully virulent ; — under happier
influences it may be comparatively faint ; — but it
will be always there. It must needs be that offences
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 131
come. To one who feels the sacredness of life, to
one who cares for the souls of others, to one who
can thrill with an emotion of assent to that crush-
ing indignation which "flung the desecrator of
youthful innocence with a millstone round his neck
into the sea," the advent of a new boy to a Public
School must always cause anxiety ; he must be care-
fully shielded, gently watched over, wisely, and, if
need be, even solemnly forewarned. And even then,
though many a prayer be poured forth for him at
the throne of grace, though hands firm and tender
be outstretched to upbear his stumbling feet, nay,
even though, in the silent watches of the night,
hours of sleepless thought may have been given to
his welfare, as they have been given by many here
for many here, — ^he may cause bitter disappoint-
ment, he may go terribly astray. My brethren, it
is not my purpose to awaken the memories of the
past ; yet, as I look back over a space of more than
fifteen years, it is sadly,-* solemnly true, that I have
known some with whom God was not well pleased,
some who, listening to the subtle whispers of temp-
tation, forsook the guide of their youth to perish in
the wilderness. I mean not, God forbid! those
over whose young graves the grass is green ; those
132 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
whom in the midst of us the voice of God has call-
ed, the finger of death has touched. I knew indeed
each and all of those whose names, from these mute
tablets, make to you their touching and eloquent
appeal ; I knew many others, whose names are unre-
corded here, but whom, — some by the sharp stroke of
accident, some down the lingering declivities of dis-
ease — God, perhaps only because they were so fit to
die, called away to their long home, nearer to their
heavenly Father, nearer to their brother Christ.
On their vacant places we could always gaze with-
out a tear; but from time to time there have been
other vacant places among you, not due to death ;
the vacant places of those who once were innocent,
who once were simple-minded, who once were up-
right, but from whom, partly for their own good,
partly for yours, it was best that you should sepa-
rate. And others there have been who have not left
us in sorrow ; but yet, if you could call them here,
— if they could show you how their feet have been
lacerated by the thorns which their own careless
hands sowed broadcast on their youthful path, — if
they could reveal to you what it is to bleed inwardly
and well nigh unto death with self-inflicted wounds,
— if, saved so as by fire, they could make you feel
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 133
beforehand that (it may be in years long after) a
man must possess and inherit the sins, aye and even
the mere follies of his youth, — then with what em-
phasis of warningy then with what solemnity of
dready would you hear St. Paul's admonition to dis-
trust of self, — ^would you learn that your life here is
to all but the careful and the prayerful a time of
danger, — that it is a wilderness of temptation in
which many fall.
2. Yes, so much I was forced to say; but I
add eagerly and joyfully that you need not fall, —
not one of you need fall, — every one of you may be-
come pure, and sweet, and noble ; every one of you
may die a holy man. My subject is not warning,
but comfort ; and St. Paul's comfort to those whom
he loved was this, " There hath no temptation taken
you but such as is common to man." Perhaps you
will say that this is no comfort.
" That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter ; rather more ;
Too common, — never evening wore
To morning, but some heart did break."
When a ship is going down in the angry sea, is it
any comfort to the drowning struggling mariner to
think that all his comrades also, — all whom he has
134 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
honored, all whom he has loved, — are buffeting
hopelessly with those overwhelming waves? No,
my brethren, the consolations of Scripture are not
like this ; but how if we could tell him that .though
some will perish, all might escape ? How if we
pointed him to the life-buoy floating near him on
the billows, — to the life-boat straining towards him
through the storm ? How if, without concealing
his peril, yet cheering, aiding, inspiriting the bold
Courage, we cried, and pointed toward the land ;
This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon ?
Aye this is St. Paul's comfort — not that our
temptations are common to man, but they are hu-
man;'--' that there is nothing strange, abnormal, in-
superable about them ; that they are well within the
scope of our power to struggle with. If you would
kindle a soldier into daring would you point out to
him his spiritless, defeated comrades, — the victorious
insulting foe.^ Would some French general — a
Chanzy or a Bourbaki, — cheer on the despairing
armies of France in the hour of battle by telling
vthem of the retreat from Moscow or the rout at
* Greek avdptjiripog A. V. marg. "Moderate."
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 135
Waterloo ? Would he not rather fire their memo-
ries with the heroisms of Valmy and of Marengo,
with the glories of Jena and of Austerlitz ? Would
he not tell them how, exhausted by drought and
weariness, their glorious fathers had shattered the
magnificent chivalry of the Mamelukes at the Pyra-
mids, and how, ragged and shoeless, yet irresistible,
they had swept through the storm of fire to hurl the
German artillery from the Bridge of Lodi ? Even
so, in a world of sin and sorrow, in a moral world
which has its own disgraces and defeats, St. Paul
would point us not to those sad pale multitudes of
wasted and ruined lives, — not to the retributive dis-
eases of desecrated bodies, or the gnawing Nemesis
of guilty souls, — not to the chain of the felon, or the
cell of the lunatic, or the grave of the suicide, — ah
no ! these with an infinite pity, these with a faith
that transcends and tramples on the petty Phari-
saisms of dogma, these, sorrowing but not scorning,
compassionating but not condemning, we leave with
infinite tenderness in the tender hands of God, —
but no ! he points us, and we point you now, to the
glorious company of the high and noble, of the
pure and holy ; to. the white-robed, palm-bearing
procession of happy human souls; to those who
136 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
have fought and conquered, to those who have
wrestled and overcome !
3. But these perhaps you will say to me are
the strong great souls, the ScaBvolas of Christian
daring, the Manlii of Christian faith. Temptations
insignificant to them might well be insuperable to
us. Nay, my brethren, God is faithful, and will
not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are
able. In an age of cold faith and dead enthusiasm
no splendid heroisms, no agonizing martyrdoms are
required of you. Ye have not yet resisted unto
blood, striving against sin. Not yet, like the boy
Origen, have you seen a father torn from you by
violence ; or like the girl Blandina, been called upon
to face the cruel gaze of the bloody amphitheatre.
He who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, tem-
pers also the temptation to the weak soul. He
knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are
but dust. Oh in that hero-multitude who follow
the Lamb whithersoever he goeth, think not that
there are only the dauntless and the powerful, the
great in heart and the strong in faith : no, there are
many of the weak and the timid, many of the
obscure and the ignorant, many of the shrinking
and the suffering there. We saw not, till they
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 137
were unfolded for the flight of death, their angel
wings. Yes ! Jacob, once a mean trickster, and
Aaron, once a weak apostate, is there ; and Rahab
the harlot, and David the adulterer; and Mary
the weeping Magdalene, and Matthew the con-
verted publican, and Dysmas the repentant thief;
many as frail, many as fallen, many as sinful as
the weakest and the worst of you; but there are
no stains on their white robes now ; there is no
weakness or meanness in their regenerated spirits
now, and the solemn agony has faded from their
brows. You think that you could never have been a
martyr, yet women more timid, and children more
delicate, have won and worn that crown ; nearer to
the flame they were nearer to Christ, and as the balmy
winds of Paradise beat upon their foreheads while
the fii'e roared about their feet, so believe me will it
be with you. I have known martyrs • here — ^boys
ungifted and unattractive, boys neglected and de-
spised, — yet so firm in their innocence, so steadfast
in their faith, that no evil thing had power to hurt
them. Every day their struggle was easier; every
day their path more happy. Weak, unloved, and
singlehanded, they overcame the world. And why ?
Oh, if any passing interest attaches to the accident
138 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
of these last words, would that I could leave you
this thought as an indelible impression ; — Why ?
because God is faithful. To us in our blindness,
ignorance, waywardness, He does not always seem
so. To the strong man when he sits, despairing and
stricken, amid the ruins of his life, — to the father
whose erring son causes him agony and shame, — to
the mother who kneels broken-hearted beside the
cradle where her pretty little one lies dead, — to these
the sun shines not, and the stars give no light, —
the heavens above their heads are iron, and the
earth beneath their feet is brass. Yet, oh how gen-
tly He heals even for these the wounds which His
own loving hand has made ; how do the clouds break
over them and the pale silver gleam of resignation
brighten into the burning ray of faith and love.
Why art thou so cast down, oh my soul, and why
art thou so disquieted within me ? Trust thou in
God. Is there one of you, is there one in this
chapel whom he has not richly blessed ? I am sure
that there is not one of you. For our path in
life, my brethren, is like that of the traveller who
lands at the famous port of the Holy Land. He
rides at first under the shade of palms, under
the golden orange-groves, beside the crowded
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 139
fountains, with almonds and pomegranateif break-
ing around him into blossom : soon he leaves be-
hind him these lovely groves ; he enters on the
bare and open plain ; the sun burns over him, the
dust-clouds whirl around him ; but even there the
path is broidered by the quiet wayside flowers, and
when at last the bleak bare hills succeed, his
heart bounds within him, for he knows that
he shall catch his first glimpse of the Holy City, as
he stands weary on their brow. Oh how often, my
brethren, must the Christian, in this the Holy
Land of his short pilgrimage on earth, from the
golden morning to the blaze of noon, from the burn-
ing noon to the beautiful twilight, again and again
recall that tender verse of the Prophet, " I know
the thoughts that I think towards you," saith the
Lord, " thoughts of peace and not of evil"
4. Yes, Grod is faithful ; and most of all, be-
cause He will lay no heavier burden on any one of
us than we can carry well. Whether in the way of
trial, or in the way of temptation, remember, my
brethren, in the words of the poet,
" 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalos,
Another thing to fall.**
We shall all be tempted, but the effects of the
fuKIVBRSITT,
140 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
temptation depend upon ourselves. Fling into the
same flame a lump of clay and a piece of gold, —
the clay will be hardened, the gold will melt;
the heart of Pharaoh hardened into perfidious in-
solence, the soul of David melted into pathetic
song. Bear temptation faithfully, and it will leave
you not only unscathed, but nobler. With each
temptation God will also provide not — as the En-
glish version has it — a way, but the wa,j of es-
cape ; * the one separate escape for each separate
temptation. Because God loves us, because Christ
died, because having risen again He shed forth
the Spirit in our hearts, therefore under the fiercest
assaults of Satan the soul may be always safe.
It may be like a beleaguered city, the powers of
evil may marshal all their devilish enginery, and
make the air hiss with their fiery darts, but every
sortie of the besieged shall be inevitably success-
ful; never shall there be capitulation; and by
true resistance the assaults of the tempter shall
at last be driven back in irretrievable, disgraceful
rout.
It would take me too long, my brethren, were I
to dwell on the way of escape from each temptation.
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 141
But without dwelling on them, I would gladly men-
tion — and merely mention — ^fbur, with the power
and efficacy of which I have been often struck.
i. The first is watchfulness over the thoughts. As
is the fountain, so will be the stream. Quench the
spark, and you are safe from the conflagration.
Crush the serpent's Qg^, and you need not dread
the cockatrice. Conquer evil thoughts, and you
will have little danger of evil words and evil ways.
The victory over every temptation is easiest, is
safest, is most blessed there, ii. The second way
is avoidance of danger. The best courage, believe
me, is sometimes shown by flight. Consider which
is your weakest point, who are your most dangerous
companions, which is your guiltiest hour. Avoid
those companions, defend that weak point, put the
strongest guard upon those hours, iii. Then, third-
ly, overcome evil with good. Kill wicked passion
by religious passion. Expel evil affections by no-
ble yearnings. Banish mean cravings by holy en-
thusiasms. " Give me a great thought" said the
German poet, " that I may live on it." Read great
books ; enrich your minds with noble sentiments ;
above all, read your Bibles ; fill your whole souls
with the thought of Christ ; make of him not only
142 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
a Kedeemer, but a brother, — not only a Saviour,
but a friend, iv. And fourthly, I will mention
prayer. That, my brethren, is the truest amulet
against the siren songs, the holiest enchantment
against each Circaean spell. Suffer me to quote the
words of that great poet, whom I have wished
many of you to love :
" Amongst the rest a small unsightly root,
But of divine eflfect, he culled me out ;
* * * * ♦
He called it Hoemony, and gave it me :
And bade me keep it as of sov'ran use
'Grainst all enchantments, mildew, blast, or damp.
Or ghastly furies' apparition."
I have said nothing, my brethren, of happy Sabbath
days; nothing of the strength that comes from
mutual communion; nothing of these delightful
services ; nothing of kindly admonitions ; nothing
of confirmation ; nothing of the memories of bap-
tism; nothing of that divine viaticum on life's
journey, the Supper of the Lord. My brethren, I
cannot say all I would, or a tithe of all. Would to
God that this little might be enough; enough to
convince you that because God is faithful you never
need do wrong ; enough to point to the drawn
sword in the path of wilful sinners ; enough to show
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 143
to those who are struggling timidly that around
them are angel champions, and over them are in-
vincible shields. To those who are new boys among
you, I would say. Resist the devil, and he will flee
from you. Ohsta principiis — avoid the beginnings
of evil — this is the way of escape for you. And
you who have learnt here some lessons of sin and
sorrow, believe me that no less to you ako lies open
the way of escape. Oh rouse yourselves, and play
the men. Indolence and selfishness would terrify
you by the sight of lions in the path, but press
onward and you will find them chained. God does
not mean you to perish. Your Lord came to seek
the sinful ; He died to save the lost. Make but
one effort, and yours too shall be the blessed-
ness of Him " whose iniquity is forgiven, whose sin
is covered."
My subject is ended. I thank God from my
heart that it has been a subject^ of comfort, of en-
couragement, of hope. And here I would gladly
close, but the last word must be spoken however
painful. After more than fifteen years among you,
it would not be natural, you would not wish me, to
make no allusion to a parting which to me at least
144 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION.
is very full of pain. Yet what shall I say .? To
those Colleagues who for so many years have treated
me with such generous sympathy and indulgent
kindness, I would offer from a full heart my sincere
and earnest and grateful thanks. To all those —
not a few of your number — whom at one period or
other it has been my high privilege to teach, I
would say, if God has ever enabled me to speak to
you any true and righteous words, continue thou in
the things that thou hast learned. To those who
have been placed towards me in the yet nearer
and dearer connection of Friends and Pupils, I
would say, Think kindly of me still, and for my
sake think and speak kindly of the new home to
which God's providence is calling me. And on ail
the Masters and Scholars and Benefactors of this
great and famous school I would invoke God's
richest and choicest blessings. You are entering
on a year of intense interest. I pray to God that
the tercentenary of Harrow may be right royally
prospered ; and when its celebrations are over, when
its benefits are achieved, may it witness the yet
deeper blessing of ever holier traditions ; may it
hand on from year to year the ever-brightening
torch of knowledge and of truth. But one word
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 145
more. When the last echo of my voice shall have
died away, we shall all kneel upon our knees to
utter in silence one last petition ere the Sabbath
services are over and we leave the House of God.
Oh suffer me to beg of you, as my last request, that
each one of you. Masters and Boys and Friends,
would, as you kneel before our common Father,
utter one brief prayer for God's blessing upon him
whose place here will know him no more. It will
cheer me more than I can tell you in the midst of
new and difficult reponsibilities, to think that, as
I was leaving my Harrow home, the hearts of all in
this School Chapel which we love so well, were for
one moment united as the heart of one, in the sweet
and peaceful petition " For my brethren and com-
panions' sake I will wish thee prosperity ; yea, be-
cause of th« house of the Lord our God I will seek
to do thee good."
T <Je^ Oeip x^P^C T^ StSSvTi
^filv rb viKoa 6ia rov Kvpiov ^av
^Iriaov Xpiarov.
10
VII.
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.
Wisdom is the principal thing : therefore get wisdom : and with
all thy getting get understanding.— Provekbs iv. 7.*
Bead in the light which falls upon it from the
teaching of Christ and His Apostles, there is, per-
haps, no Book of holy Scripture which illustrates more
clearly than the Book of Proverbs the objects and
th« privileges, the duties and the dangers, of this
seat of learning. Into the wonderful structure of
that book, into the TroltmolKiUc (Axpia of its noble teach-
ing, it is not my purpose to enter ; but there are
two features of it which will immediately -strike the
most careless reader; one is the allusive contrast
which runs through its earlier chapters, the other is
the constant connection of Wisdom with Knowl-
edge. Two voices are heard in it, — the voice of
Prudence and the voice of Folly ; the voice of "Virtue
and the voice of Pleasure ; the pleading of the vir-
* Preached in the chapel of King's College, London, at the
Annual Commemoration, July 16, 1871.
(147)
148 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.
gin Innocence and the pleading of the harlot Sense ;
the enticements of a Passion earthly, sensual, devil-
ish, and the lofty invitations of a Wisdom which is
pure, peaceable, gentle, full of mercy and good
fruits.
Subtle, and sweet, and perilous, and evanescent,
— ^powerful only to the soul that forgets its God, —
heard only in the twilight, in the evening, in the
black dark night, an unhallowed song is suffered to
break in upon those solemn utterances; a song,
drowned almost from the very beginning by the
groans of the deluded and the stern epitaph pro-
nounced over the living dead : and ever, overmas-
tering that strain, shaming it into terrified silence,
chilling it into penitent despair — is heard that other
Voice, pure as the voices of the Seraphim, offering
peace and pleasantness in life, and hope and safety
beyond the grave, — an ornament of grace for the
living, a crown of everlasting remembrance and
unfading glory for the dead.
And while the praises of this heavenly Wisdom are
painted in such fair colors, — while its worth is set
far above rubies and crystal, the gold of Ophir, and
the topaz of Ethiopia, — it is, both in the Book
of Proverbs and in other parts of Scripture, united
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 149
constantly with Knowledge. "In the night that
God did appear unto Solomon, He said unto him,
Ask what I shall give thee. And Solomon said unto
God, Give me now wisdom and knowledge. And
God said unto Solomon, Wisdom and knowledge is
granted unto thee." They are not mere synonyms.
Knowledge may come when wisdom lingers ; and, on
the other haftd, wisdom may exist in rich and divine
ahundance where knowledge is scanty and superfi-
cial. And it is clear that, in Scripture, wisdom is
the loftier and the more sacred of the two. Take
knowledge to mean the sum total of every magnifi-
cent endowment and every extensive acquisition;
— ^let it involve not only erudition, but insight';
not only information, but intellect ; not only the-
oretical acquaintance, but practical ability ; make
it include, if you will, the power to think as Plato
thought, and to write as Shakespeare wrote; be-
stow it on one single mind with such brightness
as never yet illuminated the world, and reward it
with a splendor of reputation such as no man
ever yet enjoyed, — ^yet even then knowledge falls
far, far below wisdom, — ^below wisdom merged in
obscurity ; below wisdom accompanied by igno-
rance ; below wisdom burdened with every earthly
150 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.
calamity, and insulted by every human scorn. Does
not all history justify herein the estimate of Scrip-
ture ? Have we not read of men whose heads
towered high above their contemporaries, who by
eloquence, or song, or intellect, have elevated and
charmed mankind, and yet of whom the humblest
child, the most ignorant pauper in the kingdom
of heaven, is greater than these ? Any age will
furnish us with examples. Seneca uttered words
of lofty morality and almost Apostolic force, yet
his inconsistent sycophancy and grasping avarice
awoke the scorn of even a dissolute and greedy age.
Ab6lard was endowed with an intellect keener than
is granted in a century to any of our race ; yet so
flagrant was his folly, so fatal his vanity, so gross
his crime, that the miserablest could afford to look
on him with pity, and almost the meanest with con-
tempt. Bacon has won for his glorious intellect the
reverence and admiration of every succeeding age,
yet there is, alas ! many an ignoble passage of his
life which can only claim to be forgotten by the
generous, and forgiven by the just. Has not God
over and over again scattered penal blindness over
vaunted acquisitions, and smiting a godless in-
tellect with a moral imbecility, has He not frus-
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 151
trated the tokens of the liars, and made diviners
mad ? But why need we dwell on the fact that in-
tellectual eminence is no preservative against moral
infatuation, when God has written the same truth
so large over the history of nations ? Have we not
known mighty peoples who, professing themselves
to be wise, became fools ; who, because when they
knew God they glorified him not as God, became
vain in their imagination, and their foolish heart was
darkened ? Did the lustre of her genius, did the
liberality of her institutions, did the glorious roll of
her eloquence, did the lyric sweetness of her song,
save Greece from the infamy of her obliteration, when
she perished under the eating cancer of her favorite
sins ? Did the iron sceptre or the invincible sword,
did the dignity of her government or the strength
of her determination, deliver Rome from the long
agony of her vile corruption and pitiable decay ?
The fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, for all
their reviving knowledge and glittering refinement,
were they not full of wickedness, covetousness,
maliciousness ; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit,
malignity? Did not the one honor Aretino as a
])oct, and Poggio as a wit ; and the other accept
Chesterfield as a moralist, and elevate Voltaire into
152 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.
a sage ? Yes, — ^and it is a lesson of which this cen-
tury too has need, — ^knowledge without wisdom is,
as even a corrupt and worldly poet has expressed it,
" Dim as the borrowed beams of moon or stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers ;
And as their twinkling tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends the hemisphere,
So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight,
So dies and so dissolves in supernatural light."
Wisdom then is the principal thing, therefore get
wisdom. But what is wisdom 7 The world gives
the name to many higher and lower manifesta-
tions of intellectual foresight and practical sense,
but Scripture sees in it nothing save one single
law of life. In that most magnificent outburst
of life. In that most magnificent outburst of
Semitic poetry, tne 28th chapter of the book of
Job, — after pointing out that there is such a thing
as a high and noble natural knowledge, that there
is a vein for the silver, and ore of gold, and a place
of sapphires, and reservoirs of subterranean fire, —
the Patriarch asks, " But where shall wisdom be
found, and where is the place of understanding .? " —
and after showing with marvellous power that it is
beyond man's unaided search, — that the Depths and
the Sea say " It is not in me," and Destruction and
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 153
Death have but heard the fame thereof with their
ears, — then he adds, as with one great thunder-
crash of concluding music, " God understandeth the
way thereof, and He knoweth the place thereof
And unto man He said, Behold, the fear of
the Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil
is understanding." And again, " The fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And again, he
who, in the book of Ecclesiastes, rises step by step
out of the dreary cynicism of the sated worldling
into the calm confidence of a godly hope, states as
the conclusion no less than as the commencement
of the whole matter, " Fear God and keep His com-
mandments, for this is the whole duty of man : "
and in the Epistle of St. James, after the question,
" Who is a wise man, and endued with knowledge
among you ? " the answer is, not he who under-
standeth all mysteries, not he who can speak with
the tongue of men or of angels, but " Let him show
out of a good conversation his works with meekness
of wisdom."
But, if this be so, perhaps some one may say,
Is any knowledge worth the attainment, save the one
knowledge which is wisdom ? If knowledge be full
of difficulties, — ^if, without charity, it puffeth up, —
154 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.
if he who increaseth it increaseth sorrow, why then
do we labor for it with such sore travail? We
toil and toil, and perhaps in a moment we fall ill,
and in one day the flames of a fever calcine for ever
the tablets of the earthly memory, or in one moment
death comes upon us, and under its cold ^^hicjacet"
buries all that we have won. Or death comes to
another who has not labored, and, as that impene-
trable curtain is drawn aside, there is revealed to
him as by a single lightning-flash, secrets deeper
ten thousand-fold than those which we have wearied
ourselves in the very fire to win. Why strive then
after that which death may in a moment obliterate,
or disease destroy ? Were it not better done as
others use — ^not indeed to waste life* in indolent
frivolity or shameful sloth, but to give it all to
prayer and penitence, to religious musings or char-
itable works ? " Oh happy school of Christ," wrote
Peter of the Cells to a young disciple who had com-
plained of the weary seductions and splendid vices
of the mediaBval Paris, — " Oh happy school of
Christ, where He teaches our heart with the word
of power ; where the book is not purchased nor the
master paid. There, life availeth more than learn-
ing, and simplicity than science. There, none are
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 155
refuted, save those who are for ever rejected, and one
word of final judgment, 'lie' or 'Venite,' decides all
questions and all cavils for ever." It was a natural
exclamation, but the answer to it is, that to the
true Christian every school will be a school of
Christ. On the ample leaf of knowledge, whether
it be rich with the secrets of nature or with the
spoils of time, he will read no name save the name
of God. The great stone pages of the world will
have it carved upon them legibly, as on the granite
tables of Sinai, and stars will sing of it in their
courses, and winds blow and waters roll. Each
Science, each History, each Literature, will be to
him but a fresh volume of divine revelation. We
were not meant to leave those volumes clasped, or
to suffer the book of life to drop out of our idle
hands unread. Kather would we exclaim to each
young student, as did the wise and holy St. Ed-
mund of Canterbury, "Work as though you would
live for ever ; live as though you would die to day."
To seek for knowledge where it is possible is the
ilear duty of man ; to win it is the gift of God.
Knowledge apart from wisdom is like a vestibule
dissevered from its temple ; but it may on the other
hand be the worthy vestibule of that sacred shrine.
156 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.
^^ Felix ille" says St. Augustine, ^^qui hcec omnia
nesciat, te autem sciat ; " aye, but happier he in
whom knowledge is but a spark kindled from the
fountain of all heat, a sunbeam whereby he may
climb to the Father of Lights. If in any soul there
be, by the grace of God, health and happiness, truth
and justice, purity and peace, then for that soul
undoubtedly will industry be a fresh virtue, and
knowledge an added grace. Knowledge is a vain
thing only when it is sought out of unworthy mo-
tives and applied to selfish ends ; but it becomes
noble and glorious when it is desired solely for
man's benefit, and consecrated wholly to God's
praise. " There are some," writes St. Bernard,
"who desire to know with the sole purpose that
they may know, and it is base curiosity ; and some
who desire to know that they may be known, and
it is base ambition ; and some who desire to know
that they may sell their knowledge for wealth and
honor, and it is base avarice: but there are some
also who desire to know, that they may be edified,
and it is prudence ; and some who desire to know
that they may edify others, and it is charity."
" My child," said St. Columban to Luanus, when he
saw how ardently he devoted himself to learning,
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 157
" thou hast asked a perilous gift of God. Many out
of undue love of knowledge have made shipwreck of
their souls." " My father," replied the boy with
deep humility, "if I learn to know Grod, I shall
never offend Him, for they only offend Him who
know Him not." " Go my son," replied the Abbot,
charmed with his reply ; "remain firm in that faith,
and the true science shall conduct thee on the road
to heaven."
And therefore we earnestly ask your support to-
day, a support, which as you may know, is urgently
required, for this seat of sound learning as well as
of religious education, — for a place where the youth
of England may be trained, as have been the noblest
of their fathers before them, to be not only " profit-
able members of the Church and Commonwealth,"
but also to be " hereafter partakers of the immortal
glories of the Kesurrection." It was, as you are
aware, the avowed design of King's College that its
alumni should be taught holily as well as wisely,
and should be definitely brought up not only as
scholars but as Christians. Well we know how
heavy are the assaults which in these days the relig-
ion of Christ must undergo; and amid those as-
saults we need all the knowledge that we can. If,
158 ' WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.
as men say, that religion is doomed to perish, we
smile indeed in the certainty of faith, knowing that
Christ has built His Church upon a rock, and that
never shall the gates of Hell prevail against it; but
we are ready to exclaim with the ancient hero when
his battle-brunt was checked in the darkness,
•ev de <j>det Kai dXeaaovl Our enemies charge us with
timidity and obscurantism; let us in answer, as
children of the light, advance fearlessly into the
battle. As far as the farthest have pressed into
science, we would press; as high as the highest
have soared into speculation, we would soar ; as deep
as the deepest have dug in search for truth, we too
would dig. We are false descendants of the Crusa-
ders if we yield to cowardice ; false heirs of the
Martyrs if we shrink from pain ; false children and
false successors of the Fathers and the Schoolmen
and the Keformers if we scowl on intellect or sneer
at knowledge ; false to every tradition of our faith
and of our history, of our vocation and of our name,
if, being partakers of the divine nature, and having
escaped the corruption that is in the world through
lust, we do not "give all diligence to add to our
faith Virtue, and to our virtue Knowledge."
And it seems to me, my brethren, that in every
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 159
word which I have spoken, I have been but feebly
endeavoring to interpret and illustrate the reasons
for which this college exists, namely, so far as may
be, to make knowledge the handmaid of Religion,
and each step in its acquisition a step also in holi-
ness of living and certitude of faith. And therefore,
in one of its departments, where its students learn
to apply for the service of man the Laws of Nature,
it would impress upon them that those majestic
agencies, which it is given to man only to control
and modify but not to change, are no mere blind
passionless elemental Forces, but the creation and
expression of a loving and a living Will. — And in
another of its great departments, devoted to the
Arts of Healing, it would teach them not only to
deal tenderly with this "harp of a thousand strings,"
because of its delicate and beautiful organization,
but, far rather, to regard each sufferer who may rely
upon their skill as one for whom Christ died, and
each human body as a temple — ay, even in its worst
ruins, still as a temple of the living God. Who
shall overrate the value of such teachings ? There
have been those
" Who, in the dark dissolving human heart
And hallowed secrets of this microcosm,
160 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.
Dabbling, with shameless jest, a shameful hand
Encamalized their spirits;"
There have been those who have marred a scientific
eminence by a godless materialism ; there have been
those who have desecrated a noble study by a brutal
irreverence: — ^but here the young student may be
taught to hallow the healing art by making it yet
more and more of a resemblance to the life of Him
who went about doing good, and healing those who
were sick of divers diseases ; and here he may learn,
an' if he will, to make his high profession a blessing
alike to the souls and to the bodies of those with
whom he deals, — a profession eminently pure and
tender and unselfish — pre-eminently Christian, and
therefore in exact proportion as it is so, pre-emi-
nently great. — How invaluable again may be a teach-
ing avowedly religious in supplementing the deficien-
cies, in counteracting the dangers, of a training in
Ancient Literature! how may it show that the
saints, and the great men, and the civilization of
Christianity, transcend the loftiest achievements of
heathendom ; that the truest progress of humanity
has been its progress under the banner of the Cross,
and that with all the natural virtues and splendid
heroisms of those memorable days, they yet cannot
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 161
sway the soul with one thousandth part of that
thrilling and tender power which lies in that invita-
tion, so sweet and so divine, " Come unto me, all ye
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest!"
Once more and lastly, there is one department
of this College which is devoted to the direct and
immediate study of sacred things. If it be the ob-
ject of every literary training which is truly Chris-
tian to "baptize as it were the logic and literature of
Greece and Rome," and to read many books that
we and all others may the better read the one, it is
also deeply desirable, and desirable more than ever
in an age of difficulty and doubt, that the studies of
those who are to be its ministers should be immedi-
ately devoted to the doctrines, the history, and the
evidences of our faith. He who has been called the
last of the Romans,* saw, in his famous vision, a
woman full of years but of unexhausted strength,
and brilliant countenance, and glowing eyes, on the
lower skirt of whose garments of exquisite work-
manship was inwoven the letter $, and on the upper
the letter e, with letters which seemed to rise be-
tween them like the steps of a ladder. But those
* Boethius, De ConsoUUione ; ad init.
11
162 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.
garments were aged and neglected, and a part of
them seemed to have been torn away as if by vio-
lence. To mend those rent robes, to restore them
from neglect, to re-supply the torn fragments, to
brighten the dimmed letters which are woven upon
them, to make clear once more the connection be-
tween Philosophy and Theology, to show that The-
ology may be indeed the '^scientia scientiarum" if
it be animated by enthusiasm and inspired by truth,
— this is the task of those who labor in the Depart-
ment of Theology. And surely all these tasks are
worthy of your hearty sympathy and worthy of
your generous aid ! Should it blunt that sympathy
or diminish that aid to be informed that this In-
stitution, so lofty in its purposes, is expressly devot-
ed to the support and service of the English
Church ? If it be Patriotism to aid our country,
is it mere Sectarianism to support our Church ? If
it was held glorious in a Spartan of old to love the
civil institutions of Sparta, is it a mere narrowness
in us to love the ecclesiastical polity of England 7
The poet says " dear city of Cecrops ; " shall we
not say " dear city of God ? " It is probable that
days of struggle and anxiety are before us. And
what in those days shall support the Church of
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 163
England ? Not her pride of station — that may be
humiliated; not her connection with the State —
that may be abruptly severed ; not her magnificent
endowments — they may be rudely torn away ; but
this — if men shall be able to say of her, as the Spirit
said unto the Angel of the Church in Thyatira, " I
know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith,
and thy patience, and thy works ; and the last to be
more than the first." One of those works, and one
for which she hath mighty witnesses, has surely been
the high work of a Christian education. Oh, here-
in may her last works be ever more than her first I
And though, in these days of struggling selfishness,
the virtue of Public Spirit seems in most men to
be well-nigh dead, may God kindle the desire, as
He has granted the ability, among some of those
who hear me, to help — to help cheerfully and to
help munificently — in this great work to-day.
TQ eEi2 AOSA.
YIII.
WORKma WITH OUR MIGHT.
And in every work that lie began in the service of the House of
God, and in the Law, and in the Commandments, to seek his
God, he did it with all his heart, and prospered. — 2 Chron.
xxxi. 21 *
Work, Energy, Success — those are the prom-
inent conceptions brought before us by this text,
and those are the main topics of the plain and
familiar thoughts I must address to you this morn-
ing. The duty of work, the necessity of energy,
the certainty of success, — such are the impressions
which, imperfect as must be our consideration of
this subject, I would yet desire, by God's grace,
to leave upon your minds. You are gathered at
an English public school, that you may prepare for
the work of your lives, and begin it here. Now,
the work of a good man in the world is mainly
threefold : — Work in the ordinary business of life ;
work for the good of others ; work to make his own
* Preached in the Chapel of Clifton College at the Annual
Commemoration, June 11, 1872.
(165)
166 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT.
soul worthy of its eternal inheritance ; and in each
of these three tasks — which are - in reality blended
into one — toil and energy are the appointed condi-
tions ; with them, by God's blessing, success is the
certain reward.
And here, on the threshold, I hope that not one
of you — not even the youngest boy here — is in any
way repelled or disheartened by the thought that
work — aye, and hard work — ^is, in some form or
other, the law of life. There is, believe me, noth-
ing whatever stern, or repellant, or wearisome in
the thought. On the contrary, if God said "In
the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread," He said
it in mercy to a race fallen from innocence. If He
cursed the ground, He cursed it for man's sake.
Even the Heathen poet could say
Pater ipse colendi
Hand facilem. esse viam yoluit.
Yes, work is the best birthright which man still re-
tains. It is the strongest of moral tonics, the most
vigorous of mental medicines. All nature shows us
something analogous to this. The standing pool
stagnates into pestilence ; the running stream is
pure. The very earth we tread on, the very air we
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 167
breathe, would be unwholesome but for the agita-
ting forces of wind and sea. In balmy and ener-
vating regions, where the summer of the broad
belt of the world furnishes man in prodigal luxuri-
ance with the means of life, he sinks into a des-
picable and nerveless lassitude; but he is at his
noblest and his best in those regions where he has
to wrestle with the great forces of nature for his
daily bread. I trust that every one of you, I
trust that every rightly trained and manly English
boy of this generation, feels a right scorn for a
slothful, which is always a miserable life. I trust
that not one is so ignorant as to fancy that a life
of toil is also necessarily a life without enjoyment.
Your school-life here gives you many a golden op-
portunity of innocent happiness ; many a spring and
summer day in which the world is " wrapped round
with sweet air and bathed in sunshine," and " it
is a luxury to breathe the breath of life." God as
little grudges you these as he grudges to the weary
traveller his draught of the desert spring ; and he
who will work but faithfully will assuredly receive
of God many a free and happy day spent under the
blue sky, in which he may, as it were, draw large
draughts of sunshine into his bosom, and rise for
168 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT.
happy hours with thoughts fragrant as roses, and
pure as the dew upon their leaves. The man or
boy who has first thoroughly done his duty, — not
with eye-service, as a man-pleaser, but with single-
ness of heart serving God — ^may afterwards enjoy to
the very utmost his innocent delight ; —
The hour so spent shall live
Not tmapplauded in the book of Heaven.
/ Yes, my brethren, only put duty always before
'pleasure. Never invert tliis order ; never let pleas-
ure interfere with the times of duty ; never let
pleasure usurp the place of duty ; never let pleasure
infringe on the domain of duty. To do this is to
imitate those ancient Egyptians who worshipped a
fly and offered an ox in sacrifice to it. And when
the higher purposes of life are thus subordinated
to the lower, it is but fit and natural that the
higher should wither away. When the trees of the
forest deliberately chose the worthless and trailing
bramble for their king, it was but a just nemesis
that fire should break forth from the bramble, and
devour the cedars of Lebanon. But if you take
work — not amusement, not indolence, not folly — as
the holy and noble law of life, it shall save you
from a thousand petty annoyances, a thousand
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 169
precocious egotisms, a thousand sickly day-dreams
and morbid discontents. I hope that all of you
will admire the spirit of that eloquent and noble
knight who rode into the streets of Orleans with
these words enwoven in gold upon the purple
housings of his saddle, Qui non lahorat, neque man-
ducahit, " If any will not work, neither shall he
eat." I hope that all of you will feel the grandeur
of that last word, spoken at York, after a life of
splendid energy, by the dying Emperor Septimiu»
Severus to his sons — Laboremus, "Let us toil/'
Oh, let each one of you learn now, learn indelibly,
learn even in your boyhood, that " to pass out of
the world in the world's debt, to consume much and
produce nothing, to sit down at the feast of life and
to go away without paying the reckoning," to have
struck no blow for Grod, to have done no service to
the cause of righteousness, is discreditable indeed
even to a man ordinarily high-minded, but is to a
Christian guilty and shameful ; nay, is to a true
Christian even impossible. The only motto for him
is, " Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with
thy might." The only true description of his life
is, " Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serv-
ing the Lord."
170 WORKING WITH. OUR MIGHT.
1. Now, let US take this text first, and test it
by your most ordinary life — your work here. You
know that your main external work here is to profit
by the studies of the place : to train yourselves by
patience, attention, thought, knowledge, for any
position to which in future life God may call you.
Well, I am not in the least afraid to say that in
this, as in all else, not only is work a duty, and
energy a necessity, but also that, with these, success
is a certainty. Of work being a duty I will say no
more, because, short as is the history of your school,
it proves how well you have learnt that noble lesson.
I know that idleness is not a besetting temptation
of this school, and that manly diligence is common
among you, and, therefore, as a school you have bril-
liantly succeeded. And yet, perhaps, there may be
some boys among you who think, with a sense of dis-
couragement, that they, individually, have failed.
Now, remember that by success in the highest sense,
we do not mean gaining brilliant honors, or reach-
ing distinguished attainments. They can be but
for the few. But God is " no respecter of persons ;"
He loves all of us. His children, and wills that in
the best sense we should all succeed ; nor are the
petty differences between intellect and intellect any-
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 171
thing at all to His infinitude. He who has but re-
ceived the two, aye, or even the one talent, may do
as good service to God, may Ke infinitely dearer and
nobler in His sight than he who has received the
ten, and may hear, no less surely than* the other,
that high sentence of glorious approval, " Servant
of God, well done ! " And when a boy who has, or
thinks he has, always done his duty, — who has, or
thinks he has been always diligent, — does not get
on, lingers at the bottom of his form, wins no prize,
makes no appreciable progress, gets superannuated,
and so on, — where does the failure lie ? If not in
a want of diligence, then mainly, I think, in a
want of energy. To get on in this sense, a boy —
and especially a boy not naturally gifted — ^needs
energy ; he needs resolve ; he needs purpose ; he
needs heart ; he needs hope ; he needs enthusiasm ;
he needs courage ; he needs undaunted perseverance ;
he needs the power to say, — aye, and to mean it —
I will. In the regions of that which is at all pos-
sible there are hardly any known limits to that
which the human will can do. If a boy succeeds
in nothing, is poor in work and poor in games, lets
slip all his opportunities one after another, — de-
pend upon it this is because his resolutions have
172 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT.
been feeble, and his purposes flaccid, and his habits
listless, and his will infirm ; because, in a word,
there has been no iron in him, but only wood and
straw. Let him pray and labor, let him believe
and hope and then he cannot fail. The great con-
temporary statesman gave the secret of Sir Walter
Kaleigh's marvellous achievements, when he said,
"I know that he can toil terribly." — That is one
side of the matter : humble and faithful dependence
on the help of God is another ; and, therefore,
when St. Bonaventura, the Seraphic doctor, was
asked the secret of his amazing knowledge, he
pointed in silence to the crucifix, which was the
only object that adorned his cell. Or a et labor a,
said grand old Martin Luther. " Prayer and pains-
taking," said Elliot, the lion-hearted missionary,
" will accomplish everything ; " nor, if he have
really made trial of this, will I ever believe that
any boy, in this or in any school, has cause to say
that he has failed.
So nigli is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to Man,
When Duty whispers, low, " TTwu muBt^
The youth replies " / can.^'*
2. But, secondly, while you work, you must
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 173
remember that you are not, or ought not, to be
working for yourselves, or your own selfish interests
alone, but also, and mainly, for the good of others.
If all the law be summed up in those two command-
ments, " Thou shalt love the Lord God with all thy
tieart," and " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy-
self," then, assuredly, that work for others should
Degin here and now. We are not alone in this
world. In communities like these it is emphatically
true that no man liveth, no man dieth to himself.
The lowest, dullest, youngest boy here, does, and
must, and cannot help, in some way, and to some
degree, influencing others. Not more surely does
every word you speak make a tremulous ripple on
the surrounding air, than it makes a ripple in the
hearts of those around : but with this difference,
that, whereas the pulse of articulated air seems
soon to die away, on the other hand —
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And live for ever and for ever.
How vast is the power of a good boy for good, how
rapid is the influence of a bad boy for evil, is a daily
and deepening as well as a very solemn experience.
Often in a school, or in a house, have I seen a good
boy make virtue fearless and confident, and vice
174 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT.
timid and ashamed. Often have I known boys by
whose mere presence, by whose countenance, as was
said of the Koman Cato, the good were inspired and
the wicked checked. Often, too, have I noticed the
reverse. Just as you may have seen a river bright
and " pure as the tears of morning," and pellucid
to its very depths, until it reaches some one spot,
and there, receiving some dark admixture, its waters
are stained, and the herbage withers on its banks,
and, as wave after wave catches the local taint, the
whole flowing river is thenceforth polluted and per-
turbed, and any beauty it has left is but the irides-
cent film over the corruption underneath, — even so
it often is in the house or school. And yet in this
case also — in the endeavor to raise the tone of
those around you, in the aim to make your school,
your house, your form, your dormitory, your chosen
friends better than you found them, — I say again
that as work is a duty, and energy -a necessity, so
success is a certainty. Let me show you that it is
so, not by an argument, but by an instance — one
instance where history might furnish hundreds — of
whole communities, even in their worst condition,
cleansed and ennobled by one man's influence for
good. At a time when society was corrupt and
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 175
hollow to its heart's core, there was one — his name
was Armand de Kance — ^who lived in that glittering
world with immense applause. Kich, noble, eloquent,
handsome, he drank the cup of pleasure to the
dregs, and by God's grace, while yet young, found
it unutterably bitter. For a time he fell into de-
spair ; everything seemed to fall to dust in his hand,
to slip into ashes at his touch. But he was not one
who, as it were, longed only to purchase a cheap for-
giveness, and then still to clutch at every not abso-
lutely forbidden comfort. No; having sinned and
suffered, and been forgiven, he felt that henceforth
his life was consecrated, not to easy pietisms, but
to heroic endeavors. He shook off everything —
wealth, love, home, fame — and retired to a monas-
tery deep among the gloomy mountain-woods,
where, as you approach, you pass by three pillars
of iron, and on the first of these is engraved the
word Charity y and on the second Brotherly Union,
and on the third Silence. To this monastery he
retired, and found it in a condition truly frightful.
The few monks left in it were corrupt, degraded,
and ignorant to the last degree. Among these he
went alone, but with the avowed hope, the avowed
purpose, of reforming them ; — unarmed, save by the
176 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT.
force of God, and that strong-sided champion, Con-
science. Many attempts were made to waylay and
mm'der him ; one monk tried to shoot him in open
day. But De Ranee never flinched. He worked
with his might, and, God helping him, he prosper-
ed. His most violent persecutors became his most
steadfast friends. The monk who shot at him be-
came a most humble and holy penitent. And thus,
in the irresistible might of a firm purpose and a
holy courkge, did one man triumph over his own en-
emies and the enemies of God. He came to a den
of robbers and left it a house of prayer. You are
not in a corrupt and dangerous place like that, but
in a Christian and an English school, where thou-
sands of good influences are at work around you ;
and yet, is there nothing that you can do ? Are
there no evils to check ? No sins to conquer ?
No characters to be amended ? No wrong-doings
to be repressed.? — Oh, assuredly, there is not one
of you who might not make those about him better ;
not one of you who will not succeed in doing so
if only he will faithfully try; not one who, in trying,
would not win God's richest blessing on his own
heart and his own life.
3. But how, my brethren, is this work possible,
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 177
how is any other work worth doing, until the initial
work, the work of self-conquest, the work of setting
our own hearts right with God has been performed ?
He who would help others to be better, must first be
good himself; he who would point others to the
path which leads to their Saviour's feet, must first
nave found it for himself. But how find it ? Can
it come to him in a dream ? Can he stumble on it
by an accident ? Can he yawn it into being by a
wish ? Or, does it not lie rather through a strait
gate ? and must not he struggle and agonize who
would pass there- through .? (l think that we are
all liable to the danger of viewing with a fatal and
paralyzing indifierence our relation to God's majestic
law. For though it is not difficult for any one to
walk in God's ways, who, from childhood upwards,
has lived in the light of his earliest prayers, — with
how few, alas, is this the case ! How few of us are
unwounded.? How many of us must sadly say
." The crown is fallen from our heads, for we have
sinned ? " Innocence of heart, my brethren, blame-
lessness of life, a conscience void of offence towards
God and towards man, — these are easier not to lose
than when once lost to recover ; and it is a fatal
thing, a fatally perilous arrogance and disbelid^to be
^^^^
U!ri7ERSIT7)
178 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT.
living in sin yet not in sorrow ; in rebellion against
God's law, yet without either penitence or fear. In
this respect, therefore, pre-eminently,; work is a
duty ; the work of conscious, steady, self-improve-
nent : the will, nay, the resolve ; nay, the solemn
vow ; nay, the inflexible absorbing purpose, that
each year shall see us better, holier, wiser than
the last. And this work, too, must be with our
might ; it must be in penitence, and watchfulness,
and self-denial. But then it must and will succeed ;
aye, succeed with that highest of all successes, —
that success which includes and exceeds all others,
and beside which all others shrink into insigni-
ficance, — the prosperity of a heart at peace with
God. Other prosperity may or may not follow : it
generally does, but it is no great matter whether it
does or not, and when it does not, that loss is more
than compensated by a peace of mind which does not
even desire it. No true work since the world began
was ever wasted ; no true life since the world began
has ever failed. Oh, understand, my brethren,
those two perverted words, failure and success, and
measure them by the eternal not by the earthly
standard. What the world has regarded as the
bitterest failure has often been in the sight of
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 179
Heaven the most magnificent <Buccess. When the
cap, painted with devils, was placed on the brows of
John Huss, and he sank dying amid the embers of
the flame, — was that a failure ? When St. Francis
Xavier died cold and lonely on the bleak and desolate
shore of a heathen land, — was that a failure ?
When the frail worn body of the Apostle of the
Gentiles was dragged by a hook from the arena,
and the white sand scattered over the crimson life-
blood of the victim whom the dense amphitheatre
despised as some obscure and nameless Jew, — was
that a failure ? And when, after thirty obscure,
toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village
carpenter. One came forth to be pre-eminently the
Man of Sorrows, to wander from city to city in
homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon
the shameful cross, — was that a failure.^ Nay,
my brethren, it was the life, it was the death, of
Him who lived that we might follow in his steps —
it was the life, it was the death, of 'the Son of
God.
Oh, may you learn this lesson here and now, in
this Christian chapel, the Holy of Holies of a Chris-
tian school, which, like every Christian school, is and
must be a Temple of the living God ! You may
180 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT.
learn here many and valuable lessons ; but the day-
may come when all others shall be as dust, and the
lessons learnt in this chapel be as pearls and gold.
" Believe me," said an eminent man, speaking to a
school like this, "believe one who tells you, from
his own recollection, that if there be any time or
place in which he may seem to have met the angels
of God on his pilgrimage through life, it was in
the midst of a congregation and in the walls of a
chapel such as this. Years have rolled away, yet
that chapel, with its joyful and mournful recollec-
tion, still remains a distinct and blessed spot in the
memory of the past. The words which were there
heard return again and again with the freshness and
vividness of yesterday, to cheer and enliven, to con-
sole and solemnize, the labor and the leisure, the
joys and the sorrows, not of one only who listened to
them, but of many far and near, who will remember
those hours and that scene as long as life and mem-
ory last. What has once been may, in its measure,
be yet again."* May God grant it, and so may this
School, which He has already so richly blessed, train
up many and many a youthful son who shall be a
* " Tliis is God's Host ! " — A Sermon preached in Marlborough
C5ollege Chapel, by the Very Kev. the Dean of "Westminster.
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 181
profitable member of the Church and Common-
wealth; and not this only, but — which shall be a
yet more blessed and enduring crown, — many and
many who, working with their might, shall, whethei
they prosper on earth or not, be partakers hereaftei
of the immortal glory of the Resurrection.
IX.
PHABISEES AND PUBLICANS.
And he spake this parable unto certain that trusted in themselves
that they were righteous, and despised others. — Luke xvii. 9.*
The parable which our Lord spoke on this occa-
sion told how two men went up to the Temple to
pray, a Pharisee and a Publican, and while the one
made his prayer a self-complacent catalogue of his
own virtues, the other would not so much as lift
up his eyes to heaven, but smote upon his breast,
saying, God be merciful to me a sinner; and this
man went down to his house justified rather than
the other. You will see therefore at once that the
lesson thus addressed to the proud and the self-
righteous is a pointed rebuke to self-righteousness
and pride ; and that, strange and terrible as such a
lesson might appear, those who despised others were
taught that their own position must be more dan-
gerous, more alien, less pleasing to God, than that
* Preached in Westminster Abbey (Special Eyening Service,
May 10, 1868).
(183)
184 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
of those whom they despised. We always find this
fearless directness, this immediate pertinence, in the
teaching of our Lord. Straight and swift as the ar-
row to the mark, his words struck full into the hearts
and consciences of His hearers, and if they wounded,
it was not the rankling wound of an enemy, but the
faithful and blessed wound of a friend who stood at
hand to heal. Were there hypocrites among his hear-
ers ? He tore the mask from their faces, and held up
their true semblance to themselves and to the world.
Were there penitents ? He flung the white robe
of his mercy over their offences, and told them how
they might be justified and cleansed. Were there
the indifferent and the insolent ? the thunders
whose echo rolled upon the desert winds, were less
terrible than the awful warnings of His voice. They
who would rightly deliver Christ's message, must
herein study His example ; they must address them-
selves to the spiritual needs of their hearers ; and
if into the souls of the humble and the sorrowful
their words should descend as the dew of God upon
the tender grass, on the other hand to the hardened,
and the scornful, and the dead in heart, that word
must be a sword to pierce, a fire to calcine into dust,
a hammer to dash in pieces the flinty heart. Woe
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 185
to the Church which answers her worshippers accord-
ing to their idols ; which sinks her voice into the
dull conventional murmurs of " peace, peace, when
there is no peace ; " which reflects too faithfully the
easy and polished optimism of the world to utter
aloud in all their dread significance the plain stern
messages of God. If we would learn what and how
to speak, we must go back to read, with no filmed
vision, with no biassed perception, with no glozing
heart, the clear, unmistakable words of Christ; —
remembering only that He spake out of His divine
and spotless innocence, and we speak but as sinful
among the sinful, as weak and dying among weak
and dying men.
There were, as you know, two classes to which
our Lord's teachings were constantly addressed ;
on the one hand to Scribes and Pharisees, on the
other hand to Publicans and sinners. Now mark
what a rift of difference separated these two classes.
The Pharisees were the well-to-do, the instructed,
the religious classes, they were called Rabbi ; they
were honored in the synagogues; their profession
of sanctity was open and ostentatious ; it was worn
like the phylactery upon their foreheads, and like
the riband of legal blue which they made so broad
186 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
upon the fringes of their robes. On the other hand
the Publicans and sinners were the dregs of man-
kind, — the offscouring and outcasts of the people,
the fallen, the friendless, the dangerous, and the de-
spised. Their very livelihood was guilt, their name
was infamy. A Pharisee regarded their mere pres-
ence as contamination, and would have shaken his
robe had it but touched them in his walk. Yet
how does our Lord deal with these two classes. J*
For the latter we find no single word of bitter irony
or crushing denunciation; awakement to the sense
of guilt and the need of repentance was easier for
them in whom self-deceit was impossible, nor did
they need warning who were so burdened already
with the world's agony and shame. But Christ
alone spake to them of hope, and therefore His
teaching dawned upon them like the dayspring
upon the darkness. They came to him as aWakened
penitents, and He treated them as the lost sheep
whom He came to save, the bruised reed which He
would not break, the smoking flax He would not
quench; and washed, and cleansed, and justified,
they repaid with passionate devotion the pity which
had touched their neglected and trembling souls.
But for the others, for them whose dead hearts mis-
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 187
took their own hypocrisy for holiness, and their own
ignorance for wisdom, — against them only that
divine and loving voice seems to ring with scorn
and indignation, and the lips that breathed the
Beatitudes to the poor crowds who sat listening
among the mountain-lilies, run over with scathing,
withering, almost pitiless rebuke at their smooth
hypocrisy, their ceremonial pedantry, their censori-
ous orthodoxy, their intolerable pride. For them
the crystal river of his tenderness becomes a stormy
torrent of living fire. To the Publicans and harlots
He gently said with that tone which broke into
sobs over lost Jerusalem, "Come unto me, all ye
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest;" but to the Scribes and Pharisees He
cried in tones of doom and wrathfulness, " Ye fools
and blind ; blind guides, blind Pharisees ; ye ser-
pents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape
the damnation of hell ? "
Burning words, my brethren, and such as may
well astonish us ; men who have borrowed their
morality from Christianity, and used that very
morality to criticise its divine source, have ventured
to condemn them. That men have so ventured
to condemn, — that even to us, who believe in the
188 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
Lord Jesus Christ, they come with a shock of sur-
prise as though at first sight they were inconsistent
with loving and sacred tenderness — ^is a proof that
they need our most serious attention : it is a proof
surely that they belong to some aspect of his charac-
ter which hitherto we have not rightly understood.
And such is pre-eminently the case. Christian art,
Christian eloquence, Christian song have long made
us familiar with Christ's meekness and lowliness of
heart ; they have portrayed him most often as the
Man of Sorrows ; they have lost themselves in the
infinitude of his suffering and his love. But it is
ever our danger to realize but half the truth ; and
there is one side of our Lord's character which, be-
cause it has not sufficiently been dwelt upon, has
scarcely exercised its due influence upon our minds.
It is his just indignation. The ideal of the Chris-
tian life, — ^not the true ideal, but the common one,
— ^has been too tame, too timid, too effeminate ;
strange as it may seem, it has wanted not only
that brightness and joyance, that high victorious
faith, that royalty of happiness, which of due right
belong to it, but it has been lacking also in that
fire and force, that iron in the blood, that dauntless
courage, that glorious battle-brunt in the heart of
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 180
man, which are yet necessary to soldiers of the
Cross. Yes, amid the perplexed hypocrisies of
civilization, amid the hollow insincerities which
permeate our very forms of speech, — it seems as
though we never dared that intensity of purpose,
that burning moral indignation, that splendid pas-
sion of scorn and hatred against all that is corrupt
and base, which lends to the words of Psalmist and
Prophet their eternal significance. The old mighty,
unswerving, heart of Christendom seems dead. We
dare not face our thoughts ; we dare not act up to
our convictions ; we are full of conventional phrases,
and polite reticence, and soft compromise, under
which is smothered that fire which of old burnt in
men's hearts till at the last they spake with their
tongue. There is indeed a wrath, as you read in
Scripture, an ignoble wrath, which worketh not the
righteousness of God ; but there is also a wrath of
righteous indignation, which is not permissible
only, but also pre-eminently noble. Such was the
wrath which nerved the strong right arm of Phine-
has, when he stayed the shameful apostacy of Israel
with one thrust of his avenging spear ; such was
the wrath wherewith Elijah bearded and smote at
their own altar the priests of Baalim, — such the
190 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
wrath which flames in every unenervated heart
under intense love of right and intense hate of
wrong. We see it in the great forerunner, when
he braved in their tyranny the bloodstained tyrant
and the adulterous queen ; we see it in our blessed
Lord when he overthrew the tables of the money-
changers and drove them from the Temple with his
knotted scourge ; we see it in him whose whole
nature seems to have caught the lightnings which
flashed in his face as he journeyed to Damascus ; —
we see it in those great martyrs who with " the
unresistible might of weakness shook the world : " —
we see it in Origen, and Athanasius, and Augustine,
and Bernard, and Luther, and Knox, and Milton,
and Whitfield, and Wilberforce. .There was no
half-heart^dness of judgment, no timidity of com-
promise, in the thoughts and words of men like
these. They spoke as their Master spoke, and if
ever a worldly age is to be startled from its torpor,
it must be by voices like to theirs. Such men may
be stigmatized, as hot and rude, and violent, but
oh ! better is the clearing hurricane than the brood-
ing pestilence ; better their sacred fury than the
sleepy selfishness of a smooth prosperity : better, as
has been truly and boldly said, better are agonies
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 191
of pain and blood shed in rivers than souls spotted
and bewildered with mortal sin.
But, if from Christ's example we must learn the
duty of fervency, and the necessity for righteous in-
dignation, I know nothing which it more solemnly
imports us to realize than the conditions which J^in-
dled that lofty passion. Is there anything in us, or
in our circumstances, like that which moved the
wrath of the Lamb, and made the messages of de-
nunciation iall with such fearful emphasis from the
lips of perfect love ? Were the steps of our Master
in this city now, are there any like those Publicans
whom He so deeply pitied, — any like those Pharisees
against whom he uttered so terrible an anger, though
He well knew that He was thus awakening the re-
sentment which would nail Him at last to the bitter
cross ?
Ah, my brethren, the first at any rate of these,
classes is never far to seek. . Will you find them in
this fair Cathedral .? No ! they are not here. In
God's sight indeed, — to those eyes infinitely brighter
than the sun, which pierce into the naked human
heart, — there may have " been some whose prayers
this evening haVe been but "a noise of men and
women between dead walls," and there may be some
192 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
criminal among those here present, whose crime
were it known would even make him amenable to
the broken laws of man. But if there be any such,
— and we know that ere now such have knelt in the
anctuary among God's Saints, — yet it is not of
such criminals that congregations are composed.
Happy might it be for us if we could gather more
of them into our Churches ; — ^happy if we could
make them feel that they, even they, in their sinful-
ness and shame, belong indeed to the Church's fold;
— ^happy if we could seek them as the shepherd
seeks his lost and wandering sheep ; — happy if we
could teach them to believe that the joy of the
Church on earth over one sinner that repenteth, is
the same in kind as that which causes a fresh strain
of exultation to ring from the harps of heaven.
So far as we can do this, are we doing the work that
Christ loves best. For His soul yearned towards
them, — ^nor was there any lesson that He better
loved to teach than the lesson that they too might
still repent and return and be received with love in
the home from which they had wandered ; — that in
spite of all their errors and all their crimes they
were still dear to that heavenly Father who is full
of tenderness to all His children, — who maketh His
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 193
sun to shine upon the evil and on the good, and His
rain to fall on the just and on the unjust.
But if the criminal classes — the Publican and
the sinner — exist no less in modern England than in
ancient Palestine, and if we, here assembled, assur-
edly do not belong to the number of open, flagrant,
and defiant sinners, is there on the other hand no
resemblance in us, inwardly no less than outwardly,
to those well-to-do, respectable, religious classes,
who stood so fair in the world's eye, but whom He
who was the Truth, and who came to reveal God
to man, compared to whited sepulchres full of dead
men's bones, — to graves which appear not, so that
they who walk over them are not aware of them ?
Are there among us no full-fed Sadducees, who be-
lieve neither in ^ngel nor spirit ; — no temporizing
Herodians anxiotie only for quiet and success ; — no
orthodox Scribes fiercely eager about the letter of
the law, profoundly ignorant of its spirit ; — none
like those worldly Priests and violent Pharisees,
who, in the desperate blindness of the human heart,
persuaded themselves doubtless that they were the
friends of God, while they were arraying every en-
gine of popular ignorance, and established power,
against His image in His Son ? The form indeed is
13
194 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
changed, but must we not ask ourselves with deep
humility whether the spirit may not still remain ?
We too are not extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or
even as these publicans : yet can it be that some of
us also may be the children of wrath, even as others,
— can it be that of us also there are some whose
dull and selfish lives are so displeasing to God, that
they shall stand hereafter in the full front of His
displeasure, and hear from a Father most loving,
from a Judge most merciful, that chilling, crushing,
heart-appalling sentence, " I never knew you ; de-
part from me, ye workers of iniquity."
I for one, my brethren, cannot approach this
question with the easy confidence of our smooth
popular theology; I cannot profess to approach it
without deep and anxious misgiving; I cannot
clearly see in what respect we are exempt from dan-
ger lest our religion should not exceed the religion
of the Scribes and Pharisees. Certainly when we
look round us on the world of ordinary respectability
it looks fair enough. Yet it takes no very keen ob-
servation^ to note many and unlovely stains on the
white surface of our conventionality. Strip the iri-
descence from the surface of the standing pool, and
the stagnant waters putrefy below. Under that
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 195
glittering film of surface-respectability lie evils
which, as has been well said, "vex less, but mortify
more, which suck the blood though they do not
shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not tor*
ture it." That the age in which we live is full of
restlessness and discontent, — that it is an age but
half sincere in its beliefs, — that it is sinking more
and more deeply into luxury and self-indulgence, —
that it is agitated with an emulous and feverish de-
sire for wealth, — that it is afflicted with a deep un-
christian sadness and anxiety, — we learn not so
much from our preachers as from our daily moral-
ists. It is an age not of great crime, but of little
meannesses ; there are few murders, but plenty of
malice ; little blasphemy, but universal cynicism ;
rare epen thefts, but widespread secret dishonesty.
And the worst sign is that the Church has well-nigh
ceased to be fruitful of pre-eminent saintliness ; few
lights shine out distinctly from the general darkness.
Good and evil seem to be at truce, " lying together
flat upon the world's surface. Our very conception
of goodness seems to be dwarfed and impoverished ;
and so little do we attain the high and heroic ideal
of the Gospel, that men have begun to argue openly
that it is an ideal which is in these days obsolett and
/
196 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
impossible. Little, alas ! do we act up to our liigh
profession, and we know to our deep shame that the
world has some ground for its bitter taunt, that
often men who call themselves children of the king-
dom are as ready to take offence, and as prompt to
repeat calumny, and as hard to drive a bargain, and
as eager for gain, and as anxious for power, and as
bitter and as contemptuous to those who differ from
them in matters of opinion, as though they wero
not professed disciples of Him who was a village
carpenter, — of Him who prayed for His murderers,
—of Him who shrank not from the white leper's
loathly touch, and felt no horror when the tears of
the forgiven harlot flowed fast on His unsandalled
feet.
But since it is fatally easy to see the faults of
others, let us look rather at our own hearts. And,
though most of us may be wholly free from open
and notorious sins, our conception of our high call-
ing in Christ Jesus must be mean indeed, if that
suffice. So were the Pharisees who crucified their
Lord. Fear, happy circumstances, the absence of
temptation, — nay, even prudential calculation, — may
save a man from sinning thus ; and yet the
publicans and harlots may go into the kingdom of
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 197
God before him. Our lives may be correct before
men ; but God seeth the heart ; and our hearts, are
they right with God .? Is the glory of the Spirit
indeed bright within those spiritual temples, or is
there many an unhallowed idol in their inmost
chambers ? The real danger and ruin of guilt rests
not so much in the poison which it infuses into so-
ciety, not so much in its deadly and fatal conse-
quences to the well-being of nations, not so much
in any outward circumstances of punishment and
retribution, as in that alienation of the soul from
God, that gradual, slow-creeping mysteiy of spiritual
death of which men are often themselves unconscious,
until God suffers them, — as he suffered David, — to
fall into some great sin, which lights up the theatre
of the soul with a glare of unnatural illumination,
and reveals to them the true horror of themselves.
Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts; — evil
thoughts, and then, as though thereby the flood-
gates of iniquity were opened, — murders, adulteries,
and all the black and terrible sins whose catalogue
you know. When the Scribes and Pharisees
dragged into Christ's sacred presence a sinful and
fallen woman, and He said, " Let him that is without
sin among you cast the first stone at her," — ^is there
198 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
not a solemn warning to us in the fact that those
words pierced the thick self-deception of dead con-
sciences, and one by one, — without even His eye
upon them to make the blush burn upon the guilty
cheek, — one by one, self-convicted, self-condemned,
—one by one, white-robed priest, and scrupulous
Pharisee, and self-complacent scribe, — one by one,
boy, and maiden, and old man, beginning from the
eldest unto the last, — abased by the sudden recogni-
tion of their own inward guilt, they rose and stole
from the Temple precincts, and left none there save
the Kedeemer and the redeemed ? Oh ! would it
not be so with us if Christ were here ? and He is
here ; and though now we see Him not, one day we
shall stand before his Holy eye ; and the moral sen-
sibility must be very dead in that man, who, in the
, filthy rags of his own righteousness, could meet that
• gaze before which the very heavens are not clean.
Oh, let us not deceive ourselves : this contented ac-
quiescence in ignoble efforts, this lukewarm subser-
vience to a low and unworthy standard, is the pecu-
liar disease of this century, and the peculiar danger
of a soft, luxurious, unvexed .career. Alas ! the
primrose path may lead only to the edge of the pre-
cipice ; and even if our lives be externally free from
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 199
every grave offence against the law of God, can we
afford to obliterate wholly from our memories those
two parables of Christ about the two men, — wealthy,
successful, respected, free from crime, — yet for one
of whom there was only that thundercrash of judg-
ment, " Thou fool, this night," and the silence which
followed it ; — and for the other only that lurid pic-
ture — ^aye, it may well appal us, yet Christ drew it
— that lurid picture of one carried from purple, and
fine linen, and sumptuous feast, to the burning
thirst and the tormenting flame ?
And when I think of these things, my brethren,
I feel, as I said before, a deep misgiving, — a mis-
giving which I cannot gloss over or disguise, — lest
some of us be guiltier even than the openly guilty,
and lest with more than the blessings of Chorazin
and Bethsaida we suffer more than the condemna-
tion of Sidon and of Tyre. Without life in the
spirit, — without the fire of God's love burning bright
on the altar of the regenerated heart, — how can we
enter into the kingdom of God ? And the dull
comforts of the world, — the blind, groping, illiberal
absorption in some mechanical routine, — the earth-
liness of a life toiling for riches, clogged with cares,
surfeited with indulgence, — these are the things
200 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
which, if we he not very humhle and very careful,
more than all others quench the spiritual perception,
and, in the scornful concentration of the Psalmist's
language, make the heart grow/a^ as brawn. It is
not a Christian minister, it is a secular historian
who says that of all unsuccessful men, in every
shape, "whether divine or human, there is none
equal to Bunyan's Facing-both-ways, — the fellow
with one eye on heaven and one on earth, — who sin-
cerely preaches one thing and sincerely does another,
and from the intensity of his unreality is unable
even to see or feel the contradiction. He is sub-
stantially trying to cheat both God and the devil,
and is in reality only cheating himself and his
neighbor. This of all characters upon the earth
appears to me to be the one of which there is ' no
hope at all, — a, character becoming in these days
alarmingly abundant." Do we not find a significant
commentary on these words in the blank surprise
of John the Baptist, when Scribes and Pharisees
came to his ministry — " generation of vipers, who
hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come ? "
The robber and the Publican, the ignorant peasant
and the brutal soldier — it is natural that these
should come : but what has the wild rude prophet
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 201
of the desert and his doctrine of repentance to do
with you, and your dead sanctities, and your des-
picable orthodoxies, and your " Stand aside, for I
am holier than thou ? " Aye, it might well seem
impossible that anything should arouse respectable
men whose consciences have fallen into a death-like
slumber, as they slave at their farm and their mer-
chandise, and think that they have successfully
solved the problem of serving alike their Mammon
and their God. There are some men whose sins are
open, going before to judgment, marshalling them
with pointed finger and tumultuous condemnation,
haling them with open violence and public shame
before the bar : but, when our sins are only following
after us unseen, with stealthy footsteps and invisible
array, when the long accumulations of malice and
meanness, and avarice, and impurity — when the
false and settled habits of a worldly and selfish re-
ligionism gather in our rear in ever-increasing
multitudes, ready to crowd upon the stricken mem-
ory when death lets in upon the self-deceiving soul
the chill light of eternity, — then our condition,
though less molested and less notorious, may be
more full of peril. Oh, better by far that God
should break us with His indignation, and vex us
202 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
with all His storms, — ^better that He should make us
suffer in every fibre of our being the ignoble mar-
tyrdom of sin, — ^better that His lightnings should
shatter the lowest bases of our earth-born happi-
ness, and let the nether fires glare in our very faces,
than that He should thus suffer our souls, under
this terrible danger of His wrath, to slumber on,
in this trance of despairing insensibility, in this un-
consciousness of commencing death.
For, believing that God's wrath against sin is
established in inexorable laws, — ^believing that He
has revealed that wrath as plainly as if He had en-
graved it upon the sun, or written it in stars upon
the midnight sky, — then casting my thoughts be-
yond death, and fixing them seriously there, my
heart shivers like a leaf in some cold wind ; and an
earnest, hearty, entire repentance, a searching, honest,
unshrinking self-examination, appear to be the
very work of life. Oh, we have all need of that
prayer of the Breton mariner, " Save us, God,
thine ocean is so large, and our little boats so small.'*
Smoothly indeed now, — ^like some frail vessel, with
white sail and streaming pennon, we may be gliding
over the calm and sunlit waves, yet without God's
love we may find at last that this dead sea of life
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 203
was but a sea of glass mingled with fire, — a sea in
which no haven opens, nor any light-house shines,
— a sea whose depths are unfathomable and whose
rolling waters have no shore. Ah, if our ship foun-
der in that sea, it will be too late to know things
in their true light, too late to be alarmed. Like
those of whom our Saviour so sadly spoke, — and oh !
my brethren, consider for ourselves if the picture be
not as terrible as it is true, — we too may pass away
from our weeping families, from our mourning
friends ; we may leave the white marble to record
our blameless lives ; we may have got the money
or the success for the sake of which we forgot God,
and, passing into His presence, we may expect to be
received at His marriage-feast. And coming then
before His great white Throne with the familiar
words "Lord, Lord" upon our lips, we shall plead
our diligence and our usefulness, our amiable char-
acters, our decent professions, our moral lives, but,
even while our tongues falter with fear and misgiv-
ing, the numberless phantoms of forgotten but re-
corded and unrepented sins, from childhood to
youth, from youth to manhood, from manhood to
old age, shall be thronging like thick clouds between
us and our Judge ; — ^and, like the tolling of some
204 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS.
bell of death, shall fall, stroke after stroke, upon our
ears the judgments of Scripture, " Ye cannot serve
God and Mammon ; " "Ye did it not unto these little
ones ;" "He that offendeth in one point is guilty of
all ; " " He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool ; "
— and then, at last, in a voice which mingles . the
awfulness of death, judgment, and eternity, " Cast
out the unprofitable servant."
Oh, to no one of us may this ever be ! I have not
spoken, God forbid ! to make those hearts sad which
God has not made sad, but I have spoken these
words of warning, my brethren, because in this life
we have all need of frequent warning — ^because I
have supposed them to be needed by others, know-
ing them to be needed by myself And let us re-
member that the lessons of God's wrath against sin
are in reality the lessons of His love for a sinful
race. God shews His love by destroying that in us
which would keep us from Him. He would save
us, even by fire, from that spiritual death which,
unawikened, ends in eternal death. And he will
save us if we seek Him. While life lasts there is
possible for every one of us an eternal and glorious
hope. The purple thunderclouds which gather
around a sinful path, may dim, indeed, but they
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 205
cannot wholly obliterate the rainbow which spans
their gloom. I look on this great congregation, and
I say, in God's name, that there is not one immor-
tal being among you all for whose soul the great
Father who made it does not yearn ; not one whom
He does not long to reckon in the days that He
maketh up His jewels; not one, however soiled
with sinful stains, for whom Christ did not die.
And therefore the grace of God still calleth you to
repentance. If we perish, we perish wilfully ; but
no living soul, not one of all those millions of human
beings who are now breathing on the surface of the
globe, need be cut off from the mercy and peace of
God. Oh, let us then beware of hard, dead, pre-
sumptuous, worldly hearts — the insidious leaven of
the Pharisees and of Herod. Let us, with God's
help, work out our own salvation with fear and
trembling ; and that we may soon attain to that
perfect love which casteth out fear, and is a nobler
and better thing, let us all breathe this very night,
not with the lips only, but in the deep sincerity of
penitent and trembling hearts, that heaven-blessed
prayer of the broken and contrite publican,
** God be merciful to me a sinner.**
X.
TOO LATE.
If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things
which belong unto thy peace ! but now they are hid from thine
eyes. — Luke xix. 42.
On Friday eveniDg, a week before the Cruci-
fixion, our Lord arrived at Bethany, the sweet and
quiet home of Martha and Mary and Lazarus whom
He loved. On the evening of the next day, — the
Jewish Sabbath, — the little family made in His
honor that memorable feast, in which the love of
Mary, glowing into sudden rapture, led her to break
the vase of alabaster, and anele with precious
spikenard her Saviour's feet. The presence of the
risen Lazarus added to the scene a touch of awe.
Many Jews from Jerusalem, who had strolled to the
little village when the setting sun removed the Sab-
bath restriction of distance, mingled among the
guests ; and as they returned to the city, through
the tents and booths of the thronging pilgrims, they
* Preached at Hereford Cathedral on Palm Sunday, 1871.
(207)
208 TOO LATE.
were able to answer the eagerly-debated question,
whether Jesus, — in spite of the violence with which
He had been treated in His last visit to Jerusalem, —
would still venture to be present at the Paschal feast.
Yes ! the great Prophet would indeed be there !
The rumor spread more and more widely as the
morning dawned; and it was apparently towards
the busy noon, that, accompanied by a vast throng
of Galilean pilgrims, our Lord started on foot from
the friendly home under the palms of Bethany.
The main road from the village to Jerusalem wound
round the southern shoulder of the Mount of Olives,
and when it brought Him near the fig-gardens of
Bethphage, Jesus dispatched two of His disciples,
to fetch for His use an ass's colt, which had never
before been ridden. St. Mark, reflecting the vivid
memories of St. Peter, tells us how they found it tied
up to a door in the street ; and when the owners
willingly resigned it, the disciples, thrilling with in-
tense excitement, — ^for surely now, at last, the great
Messianic kingdom of their hopes was to be revealed
— ^flung their garments over it to do regal honor to
their Lord. Then they lifted Him upon it, and the
'triumphal procession started on its way. They had
advanced but a short distance when there cani(%
TOO LATE. 209
round the shoulder of the hill, another festal throng
which had streamed forth to meet Him from Jeru-
salem, waving in the sunny air the green branches
which they had torn from the neighboring palms.
All were full of awful expectation. The tale of
the recent raising of Lazarus was on every lip. At
last, swept away by uncontrollable emotion, the
disciples began to raise those passionate cries of
" Hosanna to the Son of David," which formed part
of the great Hallel of their festal services. A scene
of intense enthusiasm ensued. Breaking into in-
voluntary acclamations, the whole multitude, — as
they pealed forth the burden of the strain, — ^began
to fling off their talliths, and spread them on the
dusty road to tapestry His path ; while others kept
plucking, from the roadside trees, the boughs of
fig and olive to strew them on His way. And so,
with ringing Hosannas and waving palms — one
multitude preceding, another following, the disciples
grouped around — the Saviour approached the Holy
City. It was no seditious movement of politic<al in-
dignation ; — it was no insulting vanity of self-as-
serting pre-eminence. It was but the triumph of
the poor : it was but the lowly pomp of one who
rode to die. The haughty Gentiles ridiculed the
14
210 TOO LATE.
very record of it ; and yet, besides the tragic gran-
deur of its real majesty, what king's or consuFs
triumph has had one tithe of such power to move
the heart ?
At the time, however, even the disciples did not
understand it, nor did they recall till afterwards the
prophecy of Zechariah about "the king meek and
bringing salvation, lowly and riding upon an ass."
They expected something Avholly different from
what occurred ; they still hankered for some material
victory. Would He not, even now, restore the
kingdom to Israel.? Had not the demons dis-
cerned Him, and fled His gaze ? Had not heaven
recognized Him, and lit her stars ? Had not earth
known Him, and hushed her winds ? Had not the
rough sea heard Him, and stilled his waves ? Why
should not the humble Prophet of the poor now
burst forth as the irresistible avenger of the mighty ?
Why should He not, even now, change the ass's colt
for the chariots of God which are twenty thousand,
and, amid the rushing of congregated wings, drive
down in thunder upon insulting Koman and apos-
tate priest ? Had not the supreme moment come ?
did not the hand point to the hour on the dial-plate
of heaven ?
TOO LATE. 211
Yes ! the moment had come : yes ! the hand
pointed to the horn', — but not as they hoped. — The
road from Bethany slopes up the Mount of Olives,
through green fields and shady trees, till, as it sud-
denly sweeps round towards the north, Jerusalem,
which has hitherto been hidden, bursts full upon
the view. Many a traveller has reined his horse at
that memorable spot with feelings too deep for
speech. But the Jerusalem of that day, — as Jesus
saw it under the burning flood of vernal sunshine,
wrapped in its imperial mantle of proud towers, —
the Jerusalem whose massive ramparts and lordly
palaces made it a wonder of the world, — was a
spectacle incomparably more magnificent than the
decayed and crumbling city of to-day. And as
there, — through the transparent atmosphere, — tow-
ering above the deep umbrageous valleys which sur-
rounded it, — the city reared into the morning sun-
light its multitudinous splendors of marble pinnacle
and golden roofs, — was there no pride, no gladness,
in the heart of its true King ? Far otherwise ! An
indescribable sorrow seized Him. He paused. The
procession halted. All the tumult of acclaim was
hushed. The glad cries sank into silence. And, as
Jesus gazed, a rush of divine sorrow and compassion
luFIVBRSlfyl
212 TOO LATE.
welled up from His inmost heart. He had dropped
silent tears at the grave of Lazarus ; here, over fallen
Jerusalem, He wept aloud. Five days afterwards,
all the shame of His mockery, all the anguish of His
torture, were unable to extort from Him one single
sob, or to wet his eyelids with one trickling tear ;
but now an infinitude of yearning pity and trem-
bling love overmastered His whole spirit, and He
not only wept, but burst into a passion of lamen-
tation in which the choked voice seemed to struggle
for utterance. — Strange Messianic triumph ! Mourn-
ful inteiTuption of those exultant Hosannas ! As
He gazed on David's Sion, — as He stood before the
Jerusalem of the prophets and the kings, — the King,
the Deliverer, the son of David, wept !
And why ? — At His feet the olives were flinging
their broad shadows over green Gethsemane, the
scene of His coming agony, — but it was not that.
Opposite Him, on the rocky plateau beyond the
Kidron, Calvary was waiting for His cross of torture,
— but it was not that. Nay, but it was something
which no eye saw but His. For He was gazing,
with the eagle glance of prophecy, on a scene far
different from that which met his actual gaze.
What He saw was, not a fair and holy city, sitting.
TOO LATE. 213
like a lady of kingdoms, upon her virgin heights, —
but a city cowering, abject, degraded, desolate. To
Him the faithful city has become a harlot. Her
gold has become dross ; her wine mixed with water;
and now her hour had come. In the Jerusalem that
was — the glittering Jerusalem of the days of Herod
and Tiberius — He saw, down the dim vista of fifty
years, the Jerusalem that was to be, — the desecrated
Jerusalem of the days of Titus. He saw those
lordly towers shattered, — those umbrageous trees
hewn down, — that golden sanctuary polluted, —
Judaea Capta a desolate woman, weeping under her
palm-tree amid her tangled hair. In the flush of
the existing prosperity He foresaw the horrors of
the coming retribution. The eye of His troubled
imagination beheld the 600,000 corpses carried out
of those city-gates ; — the wretched fugitives cruci-
fied by myriads around those walls ; — the priests,
swollen with hunger, leaping madly into the de-
vouring flames, until those flames had done their
purging, scathing, avenging work, and what had
been Jerusalem, the holy, the noble, was but a
heap of ghastly ruins where the smouldering em-
bers were half-slaked in the rivers of a guilty na-
tion's blood.
214 TOO LATE.
And as He saw it, — as this vision of the future
rushed red upon His gaze, — as He recalled the
promise of peace which the very name of the city-
breathed, and knew that she would see peace again
no more, — this Saviour whom they rejected, whom
they hated, whom they crucified, cried aloud in a
broken voice, and with eyes that streamed with
tears, " If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in
this thy day, the things that belong unto thy
peace," — " If thou hadst known," — and indeed those
words seemed to summon up yet another picture, —
not of Jerusalem as she was, — not of J,erusalem as
she Wds to he, — ^but of Jerusalem as she might have
been, — yes ! of a Jerusalem little less glorious than
her of the prophet's vision, descending out of
heaven with her walls of jasper and gates of pearl, —
of that Jerusalem about whom so many glowing
hearts have sung, —
Oh. happy harbor of the saints,
Oh sweet and pleasant soil,
In thee no sorrows may be seen,
No pain, no grief, no toil.
Thy houses are of ivory,
Thy windows crystal clear,
Thy tiles they are of beaten gold,
O would that I were there !
TOO LATE. 215
Right through the streets, with silver sound,
The flood of life doth flow,
Upon whose banks, on either hand,
The trees of life do grow.
Alas! it was all a glorious "if" — a heartrending
" might have been." It was as when a traveller
stands on some great misty mountain-top, — longing
to gaze on the magnificent expanse of city, and
plain, and river, and the rippling sea, — and for one
moment, through one great rent of the enshrouding
mist, he looks on a fairy vision, bathed in sunlight
and overarched with iris, — ^but, almost before he has
seen it, the rent in the mist is closed once more, and
ragged and grey the clouds roll up, and he is alone,
and miserable, and chill, and disenchanted. Even
so was it with that momentary glimpse of the possi-
ble Jerusalem; it was, alas ! but a vanishing "might
have been/' and
Of all sad words of tongue and pen
The saddest are those " It might have been.**
It might have been — ^but it was not : it never would
be now ; and love, after doing all in vain, could only
weep. " If thou hadst known — even thou — at least
in this thy day — the things that belong unto thy
peace;"— if — and there sorrow suppressed the
216 TOO LATE.
apodosis ; and when the sob, which broke His voice,
was over, He could only add " but now they are hid
from thine eyes."
And herein, my brethren, lies the meaning of
this scene for us; this is the lesson on which I
would desire to fix our hearts this evening. May I
not hope, that, even now, in part at least, your
hearts and consciences have been interpreting it into
words ? It is an awful, but it is also, for that very
reason, a blessed lesson : and oh may Grod give me
wisdom to speak, and give you hearts to realize,
alike its awful and its blessed side !
1. The awful side is this. There, before the
Saviour's gaze of tears, lay a city, splendid appar-
ently and in peace, and destined to enjoy another
half century of existence. And the day was a com-
mon day ; the hour a common hour : no thunder
was throbbing in the blue unclouded sky ; no deep
voices of departing deities were rolling through the
golden doors : and yet, — soundless to mortal ears in
the unrippled air of Eternity, — the knell of her des-
tiny had begun to toll : and, in the voiceless dialect
of heaven, the fiat of her doom had been pro-
nounced ; and in that realm which knoweth and
needeth not any light save the light of God, the sun
TOO LATE. 217
of her moral existence had gone down while it yet
was day. — Were her means of grace over ? No, not
yet. Was her Temple closed ? No, not yet. Were
her services impossible ? No, not yet. The white-
robed Levites still thronged her courts ; the singers
still made the heavens ring with their passionate
litanies and silver Psalms ; the High Priest yet
sprinkled, year by year, the gold of the holiest altar
with the blood of unavailing sacrifice. No change
was visible in her to mortal eyes. And yet, for her,
from this moment even until the end, the accepted
time was over, the appointed crisis past, — the day
of salvation had set into irrevocable night. It was
with her as with the barren fig-tree, on which, next
day, the Lord pronounced His doom. The leaf of
her national life was still glossy-green ; the sun still
shone on her; the rain fell; the dew stole down;
but the fruit would grow on her no more, and there-
fore the fire was kindled for the burning, the axe
uplifted, which would crash on the encumbering
trunk. She was not spared for her beauty ; she was
not forgiven for her fame. And if it were so with
the favored city, may it not be so with thee, and
thee, and me ? What shall the reed of the desert
do, if even the cedar be shattered at a blow ? — Yes :
218 TOO LATE.
the lesson of the tears of Jesus over Jerusalem, as
she gleamed before Him in the vernal sunshine, a
gem upon her crown of hills, is this : and oh may
we all have grace to learn it now — ^learn it even in
this solemn week : that, as for her, so for us, there
may be a too-late ; the door may be shut without a
sound ; the doom sealed without a sigh ; life may
be over before death comes. It is not — (oh mark
this !) — ^it is not that Grod loses His mercy, but that
we lose our capacity for accepting it : it is not that
God hath turned away from us, but that we have
utterly paralyzed our own power of turning back to
Him. And then the voice sighs forth with unutter-
able sadness, "Ephraim is turned unto idols, let
him alone." Let him alone, preacher, for he
hates the words of truth ! let him alone, Word of
God, for he hath set his face as a flint against thee ;
let him alone, Conscience, for he is bent on mur-
dering thee ; his sins have become not wilful only
but willing; he has chosen them, — let him have?
them. He has loved death more than life, and lies
rather than righteousness, and vice more than
virtue, and the world more than heaven, and the
lusts of the flesh rather than the law of God. And
the Spirit of God hath striven with him, and striven
TOO LATE. 219
in vain : all, all hath been in vain : let him alone :
let him eat of the fruit of his own works, and be
filled with his own devices.
fearful voice of most just judgment I and yet
observe further, as a still more solemn source of
warning, that, at the very instant when this dread
fiat is sounding forth, we may be all unconscious of
it. Jerusalem knew not — she was wholly unaware —
that this was the last day of her visitation. She
had quenched the light of life, — ^but dreamed not of
the hastening midnight : she had silenced the voice
of warning, and suspected not that the hush which
followed was but the hush before the hurricane, —
the silence before the trumpet's sound. Sick — she
knew it not : dying — she knew it not. " Ephraim
hath gray hairs upon him, and he knoweth it not."
It is, alas ! ever thus. This is the very method of
God's dealings with us, — not by stupendous mira-
cles but by quiet warnings ; not by shocks of catas-
trophe, but by processes of law. The Holy Light is
but a beam shining quietly in the darkness, easily
strangled in the wilful midnight : the pleading voice
is but a low whisper amid the silence, easily drowned
in the tempest of the passions. And so, though the
day of grace has its fixed limits, and these may bo
220 TOO LATE.
often narrower than the day of life, we neither know
what those limits are, nor when they are transcend-
ed. And if ours be a guilty ignorance, a penal blind-
ness, we cannot know. So that then the presump-
tuous sinner may be in this awful condition : — A
temptation may come to him, — perhaps a temptation
to some besetting sin to which he has often and often
yielded, and stifling the last faint whisper of con-
science he may sin once more ; and after that con-
science speaks no more ; and for the sake of that
one last miserable sin, he has lost his soul. Or per-
haps it is one last call to repentance ; and because
he has rejected it so often, he carelessly and wilfully
once more rejects it ; and after that, the call comes
again no more for ever, and the things that belong
unto his peace are hid for ever from his eyes. Life
continues, but it is really death ; and on the dead
soul in the living body the gates of the eternal
tomb have closed.
2. Can there be a blessed side to truths so true,
and yet so full of solemnity and judgment as these ?
Yes, if we will it, a most blessed side. Seeing that
there is good in the world, and there is evil in the
world, and that the evil is ruin, and misery, and
death, and that the good is blessing, and hope, and
TOO LATE. 221
peace, — and that we can, if we will, choose the evil
and reject the good and so destroy ourselves for time
and for eternity, — what can God in his mercy do
more merciful than to make evil terrible to us, if so
be we may be averted from it ? And the more
terrible evil becomes to our inmost nature, — the
more, out of very hatred and horror, we turn away
from it as from our utmost bane, the happier are we.
And therefore everything is blessed which is meant
to make us tremble at sin,, every doctrine, however
awful, is blessed if it helps to startle us from that
fatal drunkenness, to wean us from that fatal fascina-
tion. The object of all terror is persuasion : of all
warning prevention : of all danger repentance. The
object of all that I have said is this, " Judge there-
fore yourselves, brethren, that ye be not judged of
the Lord." All our lives are in some sense a " might
have been ; " the very best of us must feel, I suppose,
in sad and thoughtful moments, that he might have
been transcendantly nobler, and greater, and loftier
than he is : but, while life lasts, every " might have
been " should lead, not to vain regrets, but to manly
resolutions ; it should be but the dark background
to a "may be" and a "will be" yet. "Arise then,
and flee to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope."
222 TOO LATE.
Every one of us may be saved : every one of us
may be forgiven ; every one of us may be sanc-
tified: every one of us may break even the iron
fetters of besetting sins ; every one of us may be
brought to love so well everything that is good,
and true, and pure, that we shall loathe, even in
thought, the thing that is evil. As we love our
souls let us strive after this end with every energy
of our lives. If we are striving, — not loving our
sins, but hating them, — not yielding to them, but,
heart and soul, fighting against them, then Grod is
with us and we are safe : but if, on the other hand,
we have for months and years been growing colder,
deader, more indifferent to God and Chri-st, — if we
can listen now unmoved to what would once have
impressed and affected us, — if we can dally now
with temptations which we should once have shun-
ned, — ^if we can now commit sins from which we
would once have shrunk, — ^by these marks we may
be sure that our day of grace has been declining, —
that the shadows of its evening are lengthening out,
— and that, if no change occur, then, " ere the sun
of our natural existence has gone down, the sun of
our spiritual day may have set, never to rise again."
Oh, my brethren, who knows whether these very
TOO LATE. 223
days of Passion Week may not be for us the day of
our visitation ? Let us all pray that they do not
pass in vain ? Now the door of repentance stands
open, and Heaven's light streams through it ; — ^now
in all love and gentleness the voice of our Saviour
calls : — now the Holy Spirit of God still strives with
us in our wanderings, still pleads for us in our fail-
ures ; — ^now, but who shall say how long ? not for
ever: not, it may be, even all our lives : not even it
may be, for many days. Oh, to-day if ye will hear
his voice, harden not your hearts.
XI.
PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW.
And being in an agony, He prayed. — Luke xxii. 44.*
When the last supper was over, and the last
hymn had been sung, our Lord and His Apostles —
with the one traitor fatally absent from their
number — ^went out of the city gate, and down the
steep valley of the Kidron to the green slope of
Olivet beyond it. Solemn and sad was that last
walk together; and a weight of mysterious awe
sank like lead upon the hearts of those few poor
Galileans as in almost unbroken silence, — through
the deep hush of the Oriental night, — ^through the
dark shadows of the ancient olive-trees, — ^through the
broken gleams of the Paschal moonlight, — they fol-
lowed Him, their Lord and Master, who, with bowed
head and sorrowing heart, walked before them to
His willing doom.
* Preached before Her Majesty the Queen, in the private
Chapel, "Windsor ; and, subsequently, at Marlborough College.
15 (225)
226 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW.
That night they did not return as usual to
Bethany, but stopped at the little familiar garden
of Gethsemane, or " the oilpress." Jesus knew that
the hour of His uttermost humiliation was near, —
that from this moment till the utterance of that
great cry which broke His heart, nothing remained
for Him on earth, save all that the human frame can
tolerate of torturing pain, and all that the human
soul can bear of poignant anguish ; — till in that tor-
ment of body and desolation of soul, even the high
and radiant serenity of His divine spirit should suf-
fer a short but terrible eclipse. One thing alone
remained before that short hour began ; a short space
was left Him, and in that space He had to brace His
body, to nerve his soul, to calm His spirit by prayer
and solitude, until all that is evil in the power of
evil should wreak its worst upon His innocent and
holy head. And He had to face that hour, — to win
that victory — as all the darkest hours must be faced,
as all the hardest victories must be won — alone. It
was not that He was above the need of sympathy, —
no noble soul is ; — and perhaps the noblest need it
most. Though His friends did but sleep, while the
traitor toiled, yet it helped Him in His hour of
darkness to feel at least that they were near, and
PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 227
that those were nearest who loved Him most.
" Stay here/' He said to the little group, " while I
go yonder and pray." Leaving them to sleep, each
wrapped in his outer garment on the grass. He took
Peter and James and John, the chosen of the cho-
sen, and went about a stone's throw off. But soon
even iheir presence was more than He could endure.
A grief beyond utterance, a struggle beyond endur-
ance, a horror of great darkness, overmastered Him,
as with the sinking swoon of an anticipated death.
He must be yet more alone, and alone with God.
Keluctantly He tore Himself away from th^ir sus-
taining tenderness, and amid the dark-brown trunks
of those gnarled trees withdrew from the moonlight
into the deeper shade, where solitude might be for
Him the audience-chamber of His Heavenly Father.
And there, till slumber overpowered them. His
three beloved Apostles were conscious how dreadful
was the paroxysm through which He passed. They
saw Him sometimes with head bowed upon His
knees, sometimes lying on his face in prostrate suf-
fering upon the ground. And though amazement
and sore distress fell on them, — though the whole
place seemed to be haunted by Presences of good
and evil struggling in mighty but silent contest for
228 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW.
the eternal victory, — yet, before thej sank under the
oppression of troubled slumber, they knew that they
had been the dim witnesses of an unutterable
agony, in which the drops of anguish which dropped
from His brow in that deathful struggle looked to
them like gouts of blood, and yet the burden of
those broken murmurs in which He pleaded with
His Heavenly Father had been ever this, "If it be
possible, — yet not what I will, but what Thou
wilt."
What is the meaning, my brethren, of this scene
for us ? What was the cause of this midnight hour ?
Do you think that it was the fear of death, and that
that was sufficient to shake to its utmost centre the
pure and innocent soul of the Son of Man ? Could
not even a child see how inconsistent such a fear
would be with all that followed ; — with that heroic
fortitude which fifteen consecutive hours of sleepless
agony could not disturb; — ^with that majestic
silence which overawed even the hard Roman into
respect and fear; — with that sovereign ascendency
of soul which flung open the gate of Paradise to
the repentant malefactor, and breathed its compas-
sionate forgiveness on the apostate priest ? Could He
have been afraid of death, in whose name, and in
PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 229
whose strength, and for whose sake alone, trembling
old men, and feeble maidens, and timid boys have
faced it in its worst form without a shudder or a
sigh ? My brethren, the dread of the mere act of
dying is a cowardice so abject that the meanest pas-
sions of the mind can master it, and many a coarse
criminal has advanced to meet his end with unflinch-
ing confidence and steady step. And Jesus knew,
if any have ever known, that it is as natural to die
as to be bom ; — that it is the great birthright of all
who love God ; — that it is God who giveth His be-
loved sleep. The sting of death — ^and its only sting
— ^is sin ; the victory of the grave — and its only vic-
tory — is corruption. And Jesus knew no sin, saw
no corruption. No, that which stained His fore-
head with crimson drops was something far deadlier
than death. Though sinless He was suffering for
sin. The burden and the mystery of man's strange
and revolting wickedness lay heavy on His soul;
and with holy lips He was draining the bitter cup
into which sin had infused its deadliest poison.*
* Is. liii. 4-6; Rom. iv. 25; 1 Cor. xv. 3. "Non mortem
homiit simpliciter, quatenus transitus est e mundo... ; peccata
vero nostra, quorum onus illi erat impositum, sua ingenti molo
eum premebant." Calvin ad Matt. xxvi. 37.
230 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW.
Could perfect innocence endure without a shudder
all that is detestable in human ingratitude and hu-
man rage? should there be no recoil of horror in
the bosom of perfect love to see His own, — for whom
He came, — absorbed in one insane repulsion against
infinite purity and tenderness and peace ? It was a
willing agony, but it was agony ; it was endured for
our sakes ; the Son of God suffered that He might
through suffering become perfect in infinite sympa-
thy as a Saviour strong to save.
And on all the full mysterious meaning of that
agony and bloody sweat it would be impossible now
to dwell, but may we not for a short time dwell with
profit — may not every one whose heart — ^being free
from the fever of passion, and anfretted by the pet-
tiness of pride — is calm and meek and reverent
enough to listen to the messages of God, even be
they spoken by the feeblest of human lips, — may
we not all, I say, learn something from this frag-
ment of that thrilling story, that — "being in an
agony. He prayed." One or two lessons however
slight— if any have ears to hear — ^let me draw from
this.
For oh how much it may mean for us ; not it
may be to you as yet in the spring of life, though
PKAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 231
even you have had solemn warnings how death may
stand unseen and silent even at the right hand of
youth. But however bright the brightest of your
lives may hitherto have been, — and may God your
Heavenly Father make your boyhood very bright
for all of you, that the memories of an innocent
and happy dawn may refresh you in life's burning
noonday and life's grey decline ! yet for every one of
you, I suppose, sooner or later the Gethsemane of
life must come. It may be the Gethsemane of
struggle, and poverty and care; — it may be the
Gethsemane of long and weary sickness ; — ^it may be
the Gethsemane of farewells that wring the heart
by the deathbeds of those we love ; — it may be the
Gethsemane of remorse, and of well-nigh despair,
for sins that we will not — but which we say we can-
not overcome. Well, my brethren, in that Gethse-
mane — aye, even in that Gethsemane of sin — no an-
gel merely, — ^but Christ Himself who bore the bur-
den of our sins, — ^will, if, we seek Him, come to com-
fort us. He will, if being in agony, we pray. He
can be touched. He is touched, with the feeling of
our infirmities. He too has trodden the winepress
of agony alone ; He too has lain face downwards in
the night upon the ground ; and the comfort which
232 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW.
then came to Him He has bequeathed to us — even
the comfort, the help, the peace, the recovery, the
light, the hope, the faith, the sustaining arm, the
healing anodyne of prayer. It is indeed a natural
comfort — and one to which the Christian at least
flies instinctively. When the waterfloods drown us,
— when all God's waves and storms seem to be beat-
ing over our souls, — when " Calamity
Comes like a deluge, and o'erfloods our orimes
Till sin is hidden in sorro-w — " \
oh then, if we have not wholly quenched all spiritual
life within us, what can we do but fling ourselves at
the foot of those great altar stairs that slope through
darkness up to God ? Yes, being in an agony, we
pray ; and the talisman against every agony is there.
And herein lies the great mercy and love of God,
that we may go to Him in our agony even if we have
never gone before. Oh, if prayer were possible only
for the always good and always true, possible only
for those who have never forsaken or forgotten God,
— if it were not possible for sinners and penitents
and those who have gone astray, — then of how in-
finitely less significance would it be for sinful and
fallen man ! But our God is a God of Love, a God
233
of mercy. He is very good to us. The soul may
come bitter and disappointed, with nothing left to
offer him but the dregs of a misspent life ; — the
soul may come, like that sad Prodigal, weary and
broken, and shivering, and in rags; but if it only
come — the merciful door is open still and while yet
we are a great way off our Father will meet, and
forgive, and comfort us. And then what a change
is there in our lives ! They are weak no longer ;
they are discontented no longer ; they are the slaves
of sin no longer. You have seen the heavens grey
with dull and leaden-colored clouds, you have seen the
earth chilly and comfortless under its drifts of im-
melting snow : but let the sun shine, and then how
rapidly does the sky resume its radiant blue, and
the fields laugh with green grass and vernal flower I
So will it be with even a withered and a wasted life
when we return to God and suffer Him to send His
bright beams of light upon our heart. I do not
mean that the pain or misery under which we are
suffering will necessarily be removed, — even for
Christ it was not so; but peace will come and
strength will come and resignation will come and
hope will come, — and we shall feel able to bear any-
thing which God shall send, and though He slay us
234 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW.
we still shall seek Him, and even if the blackest
cloud of anguish seem to shroud His face from us,
even on that cloud shall the rainbow shine.
Yet do not think, my brethren, that, because
God never rejects the prayer of sinner or sufferer,
that therefore we may go on sinning, trusting to re-
pent when we suffer. That would be a shameful abuse
of God's mercy and tenderness ; it would be a frame
of mind which would need this solemn warning, that
agony by no means always leads to prayer ; that it
may come when prayer is possible no longer to the
long hardened and long prayerless soul. I know no
hope so senseless^ so utterly frustrated by all experi-
ence, as the hope of what is called a deathbed re-
pentance. Those who are familiar with many death-
beds will tell you why. But prayer, my brethren,
— God's blessed permission to us, to see Him and
to know Him, and to trust in Him — that is granted
us not for the hours of death or agony alone, but for
all life, almost from the very cradle quite to the
very grave. And it is a gift no less priceless for
its alleviation of sorrow than for its intensification of
all innocent joy. For him who would live a true
life it is as necessary in prosperity as in adversity,
— in peace as in trouble — ^in youth as in old age.
PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 235
Here too Christ is our example. He lived, as we may
live, in the light of His Father's face. It was not
only as the Man of Sorrows, it was not only in the
moonlit garden of His agony, or on the darkening
hills of His incessant toil, that prayer had refreshed
His soul ; but often and often, every day during
those long unknown years in the little Galilean
village, — daily and from childhood upwards in sweet
hours of peace, kneeling amid the mountain lilies or
on the cottage floor. Those prayers are to the soul
what the dew of God is to the flowers of the field ;
the burning wind of the day may pass over them, and
the stems droop and the colors fade, but when the
dew steals down at evening, they will revive. Why
should not that gracious dew fall even now and
always for all of us upon the fields of life ? A life
which has been from the first a life of prayer, — a
life which has thus fi-om its earliest days looked up
consciously to its Father and its God, — ^will always
be a happy life. Time may fleet, and youth may
fade, — as fleet and fade they will ; and there may be
storm as well as sunshine in the earthly career ; yet
it will inevitably be a happy career, and with a hap-
piness that cannot die. Yes. this is the lesson
which I would that we all might learn from the
236 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW.
thought of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane ; —
the lesson that Prayer may recall the sunshine even
to the dark and the frozen heart ; but that there is
no long winter, there is no unbroken night, to that
soul on which the Sun of Kighteousness has risen
with healing in His wings.
And that, my brethren, because . true prayer is
always heard. We read in the glorious old G-reek
poet of prayers which, before they reached the por-
tals of heaven, were scattered by the winds; and
indeed there are some prayers so deeply opposed to
the wiU of God, so utterly alien to the true interests
of men, that nothing could happen better for us
than that God should refuse, nothing more terrible
than that He should grant them in anger. So that
if we pray for any earthly blessing we must pray for
it solely " if it be God's will," " if it be for our highest
good ; " but, for all the best things we may pray
without misgiving, without reservation, certain that
if we ask God will grant them. Nay even in asking
for them we may know that we have them, — for
what we desire we ask, and what we ask we aim at,
and what we aim at we shall attain. No man
ever yet asked to be, as the days pass by, more and
more noble, and sweet, and pure, and heavenly-
PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 237
minded, — no man ever yet prayed that the evil
spirits of hatred, and pride, and passion, and world-
liness, might be cast out of his soul, — without his
petition being granted and granted to the letter.
And with all other gifts God then gives us His own
self besides, — He makes us know Him, and love
Him, and live in Him. " Thou hast written well of
me," said the Vision to the great teacher of Aquin-
um, " what reward dost thou desire ? '* — " Non aliam,
nisi te Domine " — " no other than Thyself Lord,''
was the meek and rapt reply. And when all our
restless, fretful, discontented longings are reduced
to this alone, the desire to see God's face ; — when
we have none in Heaven but Him, and none upon
earth whom we desire in comparison of Him ; —
then we are indeed happy beyond the reach of any
evil thing, for then we have but one absorbing wish,
and that wish cannot be refused. Least of all can
it be refused when it has pleased God to afflict us.
" Ye now have sorrow," said Christ, " but I will see
you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your
joy no man taketh from you." Yes, when God's
children pass under the shadow of the Cross of
Calvary, they know that through that shadow lies
their passage to the Great White Throne. For
238 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW.
them Gethsemane is as Paradise. Grod fills it with
sacred presences ; its solemn silence is broken by
the music of tender promises ; its awful darkness
softened and brightened by the sunlight of heavenly
faces, and the music of angel wings.
74^ O? THB
THE END.
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