Sermons for the Times

Our notions of the world—of God’s whole universe, will become full of light likewise.  Do we believe that this earth was made by Jesus Christ?—by Him who was full of grace and truth?  Do we believe our Bibles, when they tell us, that He hath given all created things a law which cannot be broken; that they continue as at the beginning, for all things serve Him?  Do we believe this?  Then we must look on this earth, yea on the whole universe of God, as, like its Master, full of grace and truth; not as old monks and hermits fancied it, a dark, deceiving, evil earth, filled with snares and temptations; a world from which a man ought to hide himself in the wilderness, and find his own safety in ignorance.  Not thus, but as the old Hebrews thought of it, as a glorious and a divine universe, in which the Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of life, creates eternal melody, bringing for ever life out of death, light out of darkness, letting his breath go forth that new generations may be made, and herein renew the face of the earth.

And experience teaches us that this has been the case; that for near one thousand eight hundred years there has been a steady progress in the mind of the Christian race, and that this progress has been in the direction of light.

Has it not been so in our notions of God?  What has the history of theology been for near one thousand eight hundred years?  Has it not been a gradual justification of God, a gradual vindication of His character from those dark and horrid notions of the Deity which were borrowed from the Pagans, and from the Jewish Rabbis? a gradual return to the perfect good news of a good God, which was preached by St. John and by St. Paul?—In one word, a gradual manifestation of God; and a gradual discovery that when God is manifested, behold, God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all?

That progress, alas! is not yet perfect.  We still see through a glass darkly, and we are still too apt to impute to God Himself the darkness of those very hearts of ours in which He is so dimly mirrored.  And there are men still, even in Protestant England, who love darkness rather than light, and teach men that God is dark, and in Him are only scattered spots of light, and those visible only to a favoured few; men who, whether from ignorance, or covetousness, or lust of power, preach such a deity as the old Pharisees worshipped, when they crucified the Lord of Glory, and offer to deliver men, forsooth, out of the hands of this dreadful phantom of their own dark imaginations.

Let them be.  Let the dead bury their dead, and let us follow Christ.  Believe indeed that He is the likeness of God’s glory, and the express image of God’s person, and you will be safe from the dark dreams with which they ensnare diseased and superstitious consciences.  Let them be.  Light is stronger than darkness; Love stronger than cruelty.  Perfect God stronger than fallen man; and the day shall come when all shall be light in the Lord; when all mankind shall know God, from the least unto the greatest, and lifting up free foreheads to Him who made them, and redeemed them by His Son, shall in spirit and in truth, worship The Father.

Does not experience again show us that in the case of our fellow-men, whatsoever is made manifest, is light?

How easy it was, a thousand years ago—a hundred years ago even, to have dark thoughts about our fellow-men, simply because we did not know them!  Easy it was, while the nations were kept apart by war, even by mere difficulty of travelling, for Christians to curse Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics, and believe that God willed their eternal perdition, even though the glorious collect for Good Friday gave their inhumanity the lie.  Easy to persecute those to whose opinions we could not, or would not, take the trouble to give a fair hearing.  Easy to condemn the negro to perpetual slavery, when we knew nothing of him but his black face; or to hang by hundreds the ragged street-boys, while we disdained to inquire into the circumstances which had degraded them; or to treat madmen as wild beasts, instead of taming them by wise and gentle sympathy.

But with a closer knowledge of our fellow-creatures has come toleration, pity, sympathy.  And as that sympathy has been freely obeyed, it has justified itself more and more.  The more we have tried to help our fellow-men, the more easy we have found it to help them.  The more we have trusted them, the more trustworthy we have found them.  The more we have treated them as human beings, the more humanity we have found in them.  And thus man, in proportion as he becomes manifest to man, is seen, in spite of all defects and sins, to be hallowed with a light from God who made him.

And if it has been thus, in the case of God and of humanity, has it not been equally so in the case of the physical world?  Where are now all those unnatural superstitions—the monkish contempt for marriage and social life, the ghosts and devils; the astrology, the magic, and other dreams of which I will not speak here, which made this world, in the eyes of our forefathers, a doleful and dreadful puzzle; and which made man the sport of arbitrary powers, of cruel beings, who could torment and destroy us, but over whom we could have no righteous power in return?  Where are all those dark dreams gone which maddened our forefathers into witch-hunting panics, and which on the Continent created a priestly science of witch-finding and witch-destroying, the literature whereof (and it is a large one) presents perhaps the most hideous instance known of human cruelty, cowardice, and cunning?  Where, I ask, are those dreams now?  So utterly vanished, that very few people in this church know what a great part they played in the thoughts of our forefathers; how ghosts, devils, witches, magic, and astrology, filled the minds, not only of the ignorant, but of the most learned, for centuries.

And now, behold, nature being made manifest, is light.  Science has taught men to admire where they used to dread; to rule where they used to obey; to employ for harmless uses what they were once afraid to touch; and, where they once saw only fiends, to see the orderly and beneficent laws of the all-good and almighty God.  Everywhere, as the work of nature is unfolded to our eyes, we see beauty, order, mutual use, the offspring of perfect Love as well as perfect Wisdom.  Everywhere we are finding means to employ the secret forces of nature for our own benefit, or to ward off physical evils which seemed to our forefathers as inevitable, supernatural; and even the pestilence, instead of being, as was once fancied, the capricious and miraculous infliction of some demon—the pestilence itself is found to be an orderly result of the same laws by which the sun shines and the herb grows; a product of nature; and therefore subject to man, to be prevented and extirpated by him, if he will.

Yes, my friends, let us teach these things to our children, to all children.  Let us tell them to go to the Light, and see their Heavenly Father’s works manifested, and know that they are, as He is, Light.  I say, let us teach our children freely and boldly to know these things, and grow up in the light of them.  Let us leave those to sneer at the triumphs of modern science, who trade upon the ignorance and the cowardice of mankind, and who say, ‘Provided you make a child religious, what matter if he does fancy the sun goes round the earth?  Why occupy his head, perhaps disturb his simple faith, by giving him a smattering of secular science?’

Specious enough is that argument: but shortsighted more than enough.  It is of a piece with the wisdom which shrinks from telling children that God is love, lest they should not be sufficiently afraid of Him; which forbids their young hearts to expand freely towards their fellow-creatures: which puts into their mouths the watchwords of sects and parties, and thinks to keep them purer Christians by making them Pharisees from the cradle.

My friends, we may try to train up children as Pharisees: but we shall discover, after twenty years of mistaken labour, that we have only made them Sadducees.  The path to infidelity in manhood is superstition in youth.  You may tell the child never to mind whether the sun moves round the earth or not: but the day will come when he will mind in spite of you; and if he then finds that you have deceived him, that you have even left him in wilful ignorance, all your moral influence over him is gone, and all your religious lessons probably gone also.  So true is it, that lies are by their very nature self-destructive.  For all truth is of God; and no lie is of the truth, and therefore no lie can possibly help God or God’s work in any human soul.  For as the child ceases to respect his teachers he ceases to respect what they believe.  His innate instinct of truth and honour, his innate longing to believe, to look up to some one better than himself, have been shocked and shaken once and for all; and it may require long years, and sad years, to bring him back to the faith of his childhood.  Again I say it, we must not fear to tell the children the whole truth; in these days above all others which the world has yet seen.  You cannot prevent their finding out the truth: then for our own sake, let us, their authorized teachers, be the first to tell it them.  Let them in after life connect the thought of their clergyman, their schoolmaster, their church, with their first lessons in the free and right use of their God-given faculties, with their first glimpses into the boundless mysteries of art and science.  Let them learn from us to regard all their powers as their Heavenly Father’s gift; all art, all science, all discoveries, as their Heavenly Father’s revelation to men.  Let them learn from us not to shrink from the light, not to peep at it by stealth, but to claim it as their birthright; to welcome it, to live and grow in it to the full stature of men—rational, free, Christian English men.  This, I believe, must be the method of a truly Protestant education.

I said Protestant—I say it again.  What is the watchword of Protestantism?  It is this.  That no lie is of the truth.  There are those who complain of us English that we attach too high a value to TRUTH.  They say that falsehood is an evil: but not so great a one as we fancy.  We accept the imputation.  We answer boldly that there can be no greater evil than falsehood, no greater blessing than truth; and that by God’s help we will teach the same to our children, and to our children’s children.  Free inquiry, religious as well as civil liberty—this is the spirit of Protestantism.  This our fathers have bequeathed to us; this we will bequeath to our children;—to know that all truth is of God, that no lie is of the truth.  Our enemies may call us heretics, unbelievers, rebellious, political squabblers.  They may say in scorn, You Protestants know not whither you are going; you have broken yourselves off from the old Catholic tree, and now, in the wild exercise of your own private judgment, you are losing all that standard of doctrine, all unity of belief.  Our answer will be—It is not so: but even if it were so—even if we did not know whither we were going—we should go forward still.  For though we know not, God knows.  We have committed ourselves to God, the living God; and He has led us; and we believe that He will lead us.  He has taught us; and we believe that He will teach us still.  He has prospered us, and we believe that He will prosper us still: and therefore we will train up our children after us to go on the path which has brought us hither, freely to use their minds, boldly to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good; manfully to go forward, following Truth whithersoever she may lead them; trusting in God, the Father of Lights, asking Him for wisdom, who giveth to all liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given them.

I have been asked to preach this day for the National Schools of this parish.  I do so willingly, because I believe that in them this course of education is pursued, that conjoined with a sound teaching in the principles of our Protestant church, and a wholesome and kindly moral training, there is free and full secular instruction as far as the ages of the children will allow.  Were it not the case, I could not plead for these schools; above all at this time, when the battle between ancient superstition and modern enlightenment in this land seems fast coming to a crisis and a death struggle.  I could not ask you to help any school on earth in which I had not fair proof that the teachers taught, on physical and human as well as on moral subjects, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them God.

SERMON XIII.  PROVIDENCE

Matthew vi. 31, 32, 33.  Be not anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or, what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed? (for after all these things do the heathen seek:) for your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.  But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.

We must first consider carefully what this text really means; what ‘taking no thought for the morrow’ really is.  Now, it cannot mean that we are to be altogether careless and imprudent; for all Scripture, and especially Solomon’s Proverbs, give us the very opposite advice, and one part of God’s Word cannot contradict the other.  The whole of Solomon’s Proverbs is made up of lessons in prudence and foresight; and surely our Lord did not come to do away with Solomon’s Proverbs, but to fulfil them.  And more, Solomon declares again and again, that prudence and foresight are the gifts of God; and God’s gifts are surely meant to be used.  Isaiah, too, tells us that the common work of the farm, tilling the ground, sowing, and reaping, were taught to men by God; and says of the ploughman, that ‘His God doth instruct him to discretion and doth teach him.’  Neither can God mean us to sit idle with folded hands waiting to be fed by miracles.  Would He have given to man reason, and skill, and the power of bettering his mortal condition by ten thousand instructions if He had not meant him to use those gifts?  We find that, at the beginning, Adam is put into the garden, not to sit idle in it, nor to feed merely on the fruits which fall from the trees, as the dumb animals do, but to dress it, and to keep it; to use his own reason to improve his own condition, and the land on which God had placed him.  Was not the very first command given to man to replenish the earth and subdue it?  And do we not find in the very end of Scripture the Apostles working with their own hands for their daily bread?

But what use of many words?  It is absurd to believe anything else; absurd to believe that man was meant to live like the butterfly, flitting without care from flower to flower, and, like the butterfly, die helpless at the first shower or the first winter’s frost.  Whatever the text means, it cannot mean that.

And it does not mean that.  I suppose, that three hundred years ago (when the Bible was translated out of the Greek tongue, in which the Apostles wrote, into English), ‘taking thought’ meant something different from what it does now: but the plain meaning of the text, if it be put into such English as we talk now, is, ‘Do not fret about the morrow.  Be not anxious about the morrow.’  There is no doubt at all, as any scholar can tell you, that that is the plain meaning of the word in our modern English, and that our Lord is not telling us to be imprudent or idle, but not to be anxious and fretful about the morrow.

And more, I think if we look carefully at these words, we shall find that they tell us the very reason why we are to work, and to look forward, and to believe that God will bless our labour.

And what is this reason?  It is this, that we have a Father in heaven; not a mere Maker, not a mere Master, but a Father.  All turns on that one Gospel of all Gospels, your Father in heaven.  For our Lord seems to me to say, ‘Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or drink, or wear.  Is not the life more than meat?  Has not your Heavenly Father given you a higher life than the mere life which must be kept up by food, which He has given to the animals?  He has made you reasonable souls; He has given to you wisdom from His own wisdom, and a share of the Light which lights every man who comes into the world, the Light of Christ His Son; He has created you in His own likeness, that like Him you may make things, be makers and inventors, each in his place and calling, each according to his talents and powers, even as your Heavenly Father, the Maker and Creator of all things.  And if He has given you all these wonderful powers of mind and soul, surely He has given you the less blessing, the mere power to earn your own food?  If He has made you so much wiser than the beasts, surely He has made you as wise as the beasts.’  ‘And is not the body more than raiment?’  Has He not given you bodies which can speak, write, build, work, plant, in a thousand cunning and wonderful ways; bodies which can do a thousand nobler things than merely keep themselves warm, as the beasts do?  Then be sure, if He has given you the greater power, He has given you the less also.  And as for fine clothes and rich ornaments, ‘Is not the body more than raiment?’  Is not your body a far more beautiful and nobler thing than all the gay clothes with which you can bedizen it?  If your bodies be fair, strong, healthy, useful, it matters little what clothes you put upon them.  Why will you not have faith in your Heavenly Father?  Why will you not have faith in the great honour which He put on you when He said at first, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let him have dominion over all things on the earth’?  Be sure, that God would not have made man, and given him all these powers, and sent him upon this earth, unless this earth had been a right good and fit place for him.  Be sure that if you obey the laws of this earth where God has put you, you will never need to be anxious or fret; but you will prosper right well, you and your children after you.  For ‘Consider the fowls of the air, they neither sow, nor reap, and gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them; and are ye not much better than they?’  Surely you are, for you can sow, and reap, and gather into barns.  And if God makes the earth work so well that it feeds the fowls who cannot help themselves, how much more will the earth feed you who can help yourselves, because God has given you understanding and prudence?  But as for anxiety, fretting, repining, complaining to God, ‘Why hast Thou made me thus?’ what use in that?  ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?’  Will all the fretting and anxiety in the world make you one foot or one inch taller than you are?  Will it make you stronger, wiser, more able to help yourself?  You are what you are: you can do what God has given you power to do.  Trust Him that He has made you strong enough and wise enough to earn your daily bread, and to prosper right well, if you will, upon this earth which He has made.  And why be anxious about clothing?  ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’  But man can toil, man can spin; your Heavenly Father has given to man the power of providing clothes for himself, and not for himself only, but for others; so that while the man who tills the soil feeds the man who spins and weaves, the man who spins and weaves shall clothe the man who tills the soil; and the town shall work for the country, while the country feeds the town; and every man, if he does but labour where God has put him, shall produce comforts for human beings whom he never saw, who live perhaps in foreign lands across the sea.  For the Heavenly Father has knit together the great family of man in one blessed bond of mutual need and mutual usefulness all over the world; so that no member of it can do without the other, and each member of it—each individual man—let him work at what thing he will, can make many times more of that thing than he needs for himself, and so help others while he earns his own living; and so wealth and comfort ought to increase year by year among the whole family of men, ay, and would increase, if it were not for sin.  Yes, my friends, if it were not for that same sin—if it were not that men do not seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, there would be no end, no bound to the wealth, the comfort, the happiness of the children of men.  Even as it is, in spite of all man’s sin, the world does prosper marvellously, miraculously; in spite of all the waste, destruction, idleness, ignorance, injustice, and folly which goes on in the world, mankind increases and replenishes the earth, and improves in comfort and in happiness; in spite of all, God is stronger than the Devil, life stronger than death, wisdom stronger than folly, order stronger than disorder, fruitfulness stronger than destruction; and they will be so, more and more, till the last great day, when Christ shall have put all enemies under His feet, and death is swallowed up in victory, and all mankind is one fold under one Shepherd, Jesus Christ, the righteous King of all.

But some may ask, What does our Lord mean when He says, ‘That if we sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, all these things should be added to us?’

I cannot tell you altogether, my friends; for eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive what God has prepared for those who love Him.  But this I can tell you, that these things are taken from men, instead of being added to them, by their not seeking first God’s kingdom and His righteousness.  I can tell you, as the Prophet does, that it is the sins of man which withhold good things from him; because though, as the Prophet says in the same place, God sends the good things, and the former and latter rain in their season, and reserves to men still the appointed weeks of harvest, yet men will not fear that same Lord their God; and therefore those good things are wasted, and mankind remains too often miserable in spite of God’s goodness, and starving in the midst of God’s plenty.

If you wish to know what I mean, look but once at this present war.  I do not complain of the war.  I honour the war.  I thank God from the bottom of my heart for this great and glorious victory, and I call on you to thank Him, too, for it.  I am none of those who think war sinful.  I cannot do so, for I swore at my baptism to fight manfully under Christ’s banner against the world, the flesh, and the Devil; and if we cannot reach the Devil and his works by any other means, we must reach them as we are doing now, by sharp shot and cold steel, and we must hold it an honourable thing, and few things more honourable on earth, for a man to die fighting against evil men, and an evil world-devouring empire, like that of Babylon of old, or this of Russia now, that he may save not merely us who sit here now, but our children’s children, and generations yet unborn, from Russian tyranny, and Russian falsehood, and Russian profligacy, and Russian superstition.  I say, I do not complain of this war; but I ask you to look at the mere waste which it brings, the mere waste of God’s blessings.  Consider all the skilful men now employed in making cannon, shot, and powder to kill mortal men, who might every one of them, in time of peace, have been employed in making things which would feed, and clothe, and comfort mortal man.  Consider that very powder and shot itself, the fruit of so much labour and money, made simply to be shot away, once for all, as if a man should spend months in making some precious vessel, and then dash it to pieces the moment it was made.  Consider that Sevastopol alone; the millions of money which it must have cost—the stone, the timber, the iron, all used there—in making a mere robber’s den, which might all have been spent in giving employment and sustenance to whole provinces of poor starving Russians.  Consider those tens of thousands of men, labouring day and night for months at those deadly earthworks, whose strong arms might have been all tilling God’s earth, and growing food for the use of man.  And then see the waste, the want, the misery which that one place, Sevastopol, has caused upon God’s earth.

And consider, too, the souls of mortal men, who have been wasted there—no man knows how many, nor will know till the judgment day.  Two hundred thousand, at the least, they say, wasted about that accursed place, within the last twelve months.  Two hundred thousand cunning brains, two hundred thousand strong right hands, two hundred thousand willing hearts: what good might not each of those men have done if he had been labouring peacefully at home, in his right place in God’s family!  What might he not have invented, made, carried over land and sea?  None dead there but might have been of use in his generation; and doubtless many a one who would have done good with all his might, who would have been a blessing to those around him; and now what is left of him on earth but a few bones beneath the sod?  Wasted—utterly wasted!  Oh, consider how precious is one man; consider how much good the weakest and stupidest of us all might do, if he set himself with his whole soul to do good; consider that the weakest and stupidest of us, even if he has no care for good, cannot earn his day’s wages without doing some good to the bodies of his fellow-men; and then judge of the loss to mankind by this one single siege of one single town; and think how many stomachs must be the emptier, how many backs the barer, for this one war; and then see how man wastes God’s gifts, and wastes most of all that most precious gift of all, men, living men, with minds, and reasons, and immortal souls.