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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sermons on National Subjects, by Charles Kingsley
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+Title: Sermons on National Subjects
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+Release Date: June, 2005  [EBook #8202]
+[This file was first posted on July 1, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, SERMONS ON NATIONAL SUBJECTS ***
+
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+Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+SERMONS ON NATIONAL SUBJECTS
+
+
+
+
+I--THE KING OF THE EARTH
+
+
+
+FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT.
+[Preached in 1849.]
+
+Behold, thy King cometh unto thee.--MATTHEW xxi. 4.
+
+This Sunday is the first of the four Sundays in Advent.  During those
+four Sundays, our forefathers have advised us to think seriously of
+the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ--not that we should neglect to
+think of it at all times.  As some of you know, I have preached to
+you about it often lately.  Perhaps before the end of Advent you will
+all of you, more or less, understand what all that I have said about
+the cholera, and public distress, and the sins of this nation, and
+the sins of the labouring people has to do with the coming of our
+Lord Jesus Christ.  But I intend, especially in my next four sermons,
+to speak my whole mind to you about this matter as far as God has
+shown it to me; taking the Collect, Epistle, and Gospels, for each
+Sunday in Advent, and explaining them.  I am sure I cannot do better;
+for the more I see of those Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, and the
+way in which they are arranged, the more I am astonished and
+delighted at the wisdom with which they are chosen, the wise order in
+which they follow each other, and fit into each other.  It is very
+fit, too, that we should think of our Lord's coming at this season of
+the year above all others; because it is the hardest season--the
+season of most want, and misery, and discontent, when wages are low,
+and work is scarce, and fuel is dear, and frosts are bitter, and
+farmers and tradesmen, and gentlemen, too, are at their wits' end to
+square their accounts, and pay their way.  Then is the time that the
+evils of society come home to us--that our sins, and our sorrows,
+which, after all, are the punishment of our sins, stare us in the
+face.  Then is the time, if ever, for men's hearts to cry out for a
+Saviour, who will deliver them out of their miseries and their sins;
+for a Heavenly King who will rule them in righteousness, and do
+justice and judgment on the earth, and see that those who are in need
+and necessity have right; for a Heavenly Counsellor who will guide
+them into all truth--who will teach them what they are, and whither
+they are going, and what the Lord requires of them.  I say the hard
+days of winter are a fit time to turn men's hearts to Christ their
+King--the fittest of all times for a clergyman to get up in his
+pulpit, as I do now, and tell his people, as I tell you, that Jesus
+Christ your King has not forgotten you--that He is coming speedily to
+judge the world, and execute justice and judgment for the meek of the
+earth.
+
+Now do not be in a hurry, and fancy from what I have just said, that
+I am one of those who think the end of the world is at hand.  It may
+be, for aught I know.  "Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, not
+even the angels of God, nor the Son, but the Father only."  If you
+wish for my own opinion, I believe that what people commonly call the
+end of the world, that is, the end of the earth and of mankind on it,
+is not at hand at all.  As far as I can judge from Scripture, and
+from the history of all nations, the earth is yet young, and mankind
+in its infancy.  Five thousand years hence, our descendants may be
+looking back on us as foolish barbarians, in comparison with what
+they know:  just as we look back upon the ignorance of people a
+thousand years ago.  And yet I believe that the end of this world, in
+the real Scripture sense of the word "world," is coming very quickly
+and very truly--The end of this system of society, of these present
+ways in religion, and money-making, and conducting ourselves in all
+the affairs of life, which we English people have got into nowadays.
+The end of it is coming.  It cannot last much longer; for it is
+destroying itself.  It will not last much longer; for Christ and not
+the devil is the King of the earth.  As St. Paul said to his people,
+so say I to you, "The night is far spent, the day is at hand."
+
+These may seem strange words, but almost every one is saying them, in
+his own way.  One large party among religious people in these days is
+complaining that Christ has left His Church, and that the cause of
+Christianity will be ruined and lost, unless some great change takes
+place.  Another large party of religious people say, that the
+prophecies are on the point of being all fulfilled that the 1260
+days, spoken of by the prophet Daniel, are just coining to an end;
+and that Christ is coming with His saints, to reign openly upon earth
+for a thousand years.  The wisest philosophers and historians of late
+years have been all foretelling a great and tremendous change in
+England, and throughout all Europe; and in the meantime,
+manufacturers and landlords, tradesmen and farmers, artisans and
+labourers, all say, that there MUST be a change and will be a change.
+I believe they are all right, every one of them.  They put it in
+their words; I think it better to put it in the Scripture words, and
+say boldly, "Jesus Christ, the King of the earth, is coming."
+
+But you will ask, "What right have you to stand up and say anything
+so surprising?"  My friends, the world is full of surprising things,
+and this age above all ages.  It was not sixty years ago, that a
+nobleman was laughed at in the House of Lords for saying that he
+believed that we should one day see ships go by steam; and now there
+are steamers on every sea and ocean in the world.  Who expected
+twenty years ago to see the whole face of England covered with these
+wonderful railroads?  Who expected on the 22nd of February last year,
+that, within a single month, half the nations of Europe, which looked
+so quiet and secure, would be shaken from top to bottom with
+revolution and bloodshed--kings and princes vanishing one after the
+other like a dream--poor men sitting for a day as rulers of kingdoms,
+and then hurled down again to make room for other rulers as
+unexpected as themselves?  Can anyone consider the last fifty years?--
+can anyone consider that one last year, 1848, and then not feel that
+we do live in a most strange and awful time? a time for which nothing
+is too surprising--a time in which we all ought to be prepared, from
+the least to the greatest, to see the greatest horrors and the
+greatest blessings come suddenly upon us, like a thief in the night?
+So much for Christ's coming being too wonderful a thing to happen
+just now.  Still you are right to ask:  "What do you mean by Christ's
+being our King? what do you mean by His coming to us?  What reason
+have you for supposing that He is coming NOW, rather than at any
+other time?  And if He be coming, what are we to do?  What is there
+we ought to repent of? what is there we ought to amend?"
+
+Well, my friends--it is just these very questions which I hope and
+trust God will help me to answer to you, in my next few sermons--I am
+perfectly convinced that we must get them answered and act upon them
+speedily.  I am perfectly convinced that if we go on as most of us
+are going in England now, the Lord of us all will come in an hour
+when we are not aware, and cut us asunder in the deepest and most
+real sense, as He came and cut asunder France, Germany, and Austria
+only last year, and appoint us our portion with the unbelievers.  And
+I believe that our punishment will be seven times as severe as that
+of either France, Germany, or Austria, because we have had seven
+times their privileges and blessings, seven times their Gospel light
+and Christian knowledge, seven times their freedom and justice in
+laws and constitution; seven times their wealth, and prosperity, and
+means of employing our population.  Much has been given to England,
+and of her much will be required.  And if you could only see the
+state of mankind over the greatest part of the globe, how infinitely
+fewer opportunities they have of knowing God's will than you have,
+you would feel that to you, poor and struggling as some of you are--
+to you much has been given, and of you much will be required.
+
+Now first, what do I mean by Christ being our king?  I daresay there
+are some among you who are inclined to think that, when we talk of
+Christ being a king, that the word king means something very
+different from its common meaning--and, God knows, that that is true
+enough.  Our blessed Lord took care to make people understand that--
+how He was not like one of the kings of the nations, how His kingdom
+was not of this world.  But yet the Bible tells us again and again
+that all good kings, all real kings, are patterns of Christ; and,
+therefore, that when we talk of Christ being a king, we mean that He
+is a king in everything that a king ought to be; that He fulfils
+perfectly all the duties of a king; that He is the pattern which all
+kings ought to copy.  Kings have been in all ages too apt to forget
+that, and, indeed, so have the people too.  We English have forgotten
+most thoroughly in these days, that Christ is our king, or even a
+king at all.  We talk of Christ being a "spiritual" king, and then we
+say that that merely means that He is king of Christians' hearts.
+And when anyone asks what that means, it comes out, that all we mean
+is, that Christ has a very great influence over the hearts of
+believing Christians--when He can obtain it; or else that it means
+that He is king of a very small number of people called the elect,
+whom He has chosen out, but that He has absolutely nothing to do with
+the whole rest of the world.  And then, when anyone stands up with
+the Bible in his hand, and says, in the plain words of Scripture:
+"Christ is not only the king of believers, He is the king of the
+whole earth; the king of the clouds and the thunder, the king of the
+land and the cattle, and the trees, and the corn, and to whomsoever
+He will He giveth them.  Christ is not only the king of believers--He
+is the king of all--the king of the wicked, of the heathen, of those
+who do not believe Him, who never heard of Him.  Christ is not only
+the king of a few individual persons, one here and one there in every
+parish, but He is the king of every nation.  He is the king of
+England, by the grace of God, just as much as Queen Victoria is, and
+ten thousand times more."  If any man talks in this way, people
+stare--think him an enthusiast--ask him what new doctrine this is,
+and call his words unscriptural, just because they come out of
+Scripture and not out of men's perversions and twistings of
+Scripture.  Nevertheless Christ is King; really and truly King of
+Kings and Lord of Lords; and He will make men know it.  What He was,
+that He is and ever will be; there is no change in Him; His kingdom
+is an everlasting kingdom, and His dominion endureth throughout all
+ages, and woe unto those, small or great, who rebel against Him!
+
+But what sort of a king is He?  He is a king of law, and order, and
+justice.  He is not selfish, fanciful, self-willed.  He said himself
+that He came not to do His own will, but His Father's.  He is a king
+of gentleness and meekness too:  but do not mistake that.  There is
+no weak indulgence in Him.  A man may be very meek, and yet stern
+enough and strong enough.  Moses was the meekest of men, we read, and
+yet He made those who rebelled against him feel that he was not to be
+trifled with.  Korah, Dathan, and Abiram found that to their cost.
+He would not even spare his own brother Aaron, his own sister Miriam,
+when they rebelled.  And he was right.  He showed his love by it;
+indulgence is not love.  It is no sign of meekness, but only of
+cowardice and carelessness, to be afraid to rebuke sin.  Moses knew
+that he was doing God's work, that he was appointed to make a great
+nation of those slavish besotted Jews, his countrymen; that he was
+sent by God with boundless blessings to them; and woe to whoever
+hindered him from that.  Because he loved the Jews, therefore he
+dared punish those who tempted them to forget the promised land of
+Canaan, or break God's covenant, in which lay all their hope.
+
+And such a one is our King, my friends; Jesus Christ the Son of God.
+Like Moses, says St. Paul, He is faithful in all His office.
+Therefore He is severe as well as gentle.  He was so when on earth.
+With the poor, the outcast, the neglected, those on whom men
+trampled, who was gentler than the Lord Jesus?  To the proud
+Pharisee, the canting Scribe, the cunning Herodian, who was sterner
+than the Lord Jesus?  Read that awful 23rd chapter of St. Matthew,
+and then see how the Saviour, the lamb dumb before His shearers, He
+of whom it was said "He shall not strive nor cry, nor shall His voice
+be heard in the streets"--how He could speak when He had occasion. .
+. . "Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"  "Ye serpents,
+ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"
+
+My friends, those were the words of our King; of Him in whom was
+neither passion nor selfishness; who loved us even to the death, and
+endured for us the scourge, the cross, the grave.  And believe me,
+such are His words now; though we do not hear Him, the heaven and the
+earth hear Him and obey Him.  His message is pardon, mercy,
+deliverance to the sorrowful, and the oppressed, and the neglected;
+and to the proud, the tyrannical, the self-righteous, the
+hypocritical, tribulation and anguish, shame and woe.
+
+Because He is the Saviour, therefore He is a consuming fire to all
+those who try to hinder Him from saving men.  Because He is the Son
+of God, He will sweep out of His Father's kingdom all who offend, and
+whosoever maketh and loveth a lie.  Because He is boundless mercy and
+love, therefore He will show no mercy to those who try to stop His
+purposes of love.  Because He is the King of men, the enemies of
+mankind are His enemies; and He will reign till He has put them all
+under His feet.
+
+
+
+II--HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+
+
+SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT.
+
+Whatsoever things were written aforetime, were written for our
+example, that we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures,
+might have hope.--ROMANS xv. 4.
+
+"Whatsoever was written aforetime."  There is no doubt, I think, that
+by these words St. Paul means the Bible; that is, the Old Testament,
+which was the only part of the Bible already written in his time.
+For it is of the Psalms which he is speaking.  He mentions a verse
+out of the 69th Psalm, "The reproaches of Him that reproached thee
+fell on me;" which, he says, applies to Christ just as much as it did
+to David, who wrote it.  Christ, he says, pleased not Himself any
+more than David, but suffered willingly and joyfully for God's sake,
+because He knew that He was doing God's work.  And we, he goes on to
+say, must do the same; do as Christ did; we must not please
+ourselves, but every one of us please our brother for his good and
+edification; that is, in order to build him up, strengthen him, make
+him wiser, better, more comfortable.  For, he says, Christ pleased
+not Himself, but like David, lived only to help others; and therefore
+this verse out of David's Psalms, "The reproaches of them that
+reproached thee fell on me," is a lesson to us; a pattern of what we
+ought to feel, and do, and suffer.  "For whatsoever was written
+aforetime," all these ancient psalms and prophets, and histories of
+men and nations who trusted in God, "were written for our example,
+that we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have
+hope."
+
+Yes, my friends, this is true; and the longer you live a life of
+faith and godliness, the longer you read and study that precious Book
+of books which God has put so freely into your hands in these days,
+the more true you will find it.  And if it was true of the Old
+Testament, written before the Lord came down and dwelt among men, how
+much more must it be true of the New Testament, which was written
+after His coming by apostles and evangelists, who had far fuller
+light and knowledge of the Lord than ever David or the old prophets,
+even in their happiest moments, had.  Ah, what a treasure you have,
+every one of you, in those Bibles of yours, which too many of you
+read so little!  From the first chapter of Genesis to the last of
+Revelations, it is all written for our example, all profitable for
+teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in
+righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly
+furnished for all good works.  Ah! friends, friends, is not this the
+reason why so many of you do not read your Bibles, that you do not
+wish to be furnished for good works?--do not wish to be men of God,
+godly and godlike men, but only to be men of the world, caring only
+for money and pleasure?--some of you, alas! not wishing to be men and
+women at all, but only a sort of brute beasts with clothes on, given
+up to filth and folly, like the animals that perish, or rather worse
+than the animals, for they could be no better if they tried, but you
+might be.  Oh! what might you not be, what are you not already, if
+you but knew it!  Members of Christ, children of God, heirs of the
+kingdom of heaven, heirs of a hope undying, pure, that will never
+fade away, having a right given you by the promise and oath of
+Almighty God himself, to hope for yourselves, for your neighbours,
+for this poor distracted world, for ever and ever; a right to believe
+that there is an everlasting day of justice, and peace, and happiness
+in store for the whole world, and that you, if you will, may have
+your share in that glorious sunrise which shall never set again.  You
+may have your share in it, each and every one of you; and if you ask
+why, go to the Scriptures, and there read the promises of God, the
+grounds of your just hope, for all heaven and earth.
+
+First, of hope for yourselves.--I say first for yourselves, not
+because a man is right in being selfish, and caring only for his own
+soul, but because a man must care for his own soul first, if he ever
+intends to care for others; a man must have hope for himself first,
+if he is to have hope for others.  He may stop there, and turn his
+religion into a selfish superstition, and spend his life in asking
+all day long, "Shall I be saved, shall I be damned?" or worse still,
+in chuckling over his own good fortune, and saying to himself, "I
+shall be saved, whoever else is damned;" but whether he ends there or
+not, he must begin there; begin by trying to get himself saved.  For
+if he does not know what is right and good for himself, how can he
+tell what is right and good for others?  If he wishes to bring his
+neighbours out of their sins, he must surely first have been brought
+out of his own sins, and so know what forgiveness and sanctification
+means.  If he wishes to make others at peace with God, he must first
+be at peace with God himself, to know what God's peace is.  If he
+wants to teach others their duty, he must first know his own duty,
+for all men's duty is one and the same.  If he wishes to have hope
+for the world, he must first have hope for himself, for he is in the
+world, a part of it, and he must learn what blessings God intends for
+him, and they will teach him what blessings God has in store for the
+earth.  Faith and hope, like charity, must begin at home.  By
+learning the corruption of our own hearts, we learn the corruption of
+human nature.  By learning what is the only medicine which can cure
+our own sick hearts, we learn what is the only medicine which can
+cure human nature.  We learn by our own experience, that God is all-
+forgiving love; that His peace shines bright upon the soul which
+casts itself utterly on Jesus Christ the Lord for pardon, strength,
+and safety; that God's Spirit is ready and able to raise us out of
+all our sin, and sottishness, and weakness, and wilfulness, and
+selfishness, and renew us into quite new men, different characters
+from what we used to be; and so, by having hope for ourselves, we
+learn step by step and year by year to have hope for our friends, for
+our neighbours, and for the whole world.
+
+For that is another great lesson which the Bible teaches us--hope for
+the world.  Men say to us, "This world has always gone on ill, and
+will always go on so.  Tyrants and knaves and hypocrites have always
+had the power in it; idlers have always had the enjoyment of it;
+while the humble, and industrious, and godly, who would not foul
+their hands with the wicked ways of the world, have been always
+laughed at, neglected, oppressed, persecuted.  The world," they say,
+"is very bad, and we cannot live in it without giving way a little to
+its badness, and going the old road."
+
+But he who, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, has hope,
+can answer "Yes--and yet no."  "Yes--we agree that the world has gone
+on badly enough:  perhaps we think the world worse than it thinks
+itself; for God's Spirit has taught us to see sin, and shame, and
+ruin, in many a thing which the world thinks right and reasonable.
+And yet," says the true Christian man, "although we think the world
+worse than anyone else thinks it, and are more unhappy than anyone
+else about all the sin, and injustice, and misery we see in it, we
+have the very strongest faith--we are perfectly certain--we are as
+sure as if we saw it coming to pass here before us, that the world
+will come right at last.  For the Bible tells us that the Son of God
+is the king of the world; that He has been the master and ruler of it
+from the beginning.  He, the Bible tells us, condescended to come
+down on earth and be born in the likeness of a poor man, and die on
+the cross for this poor world of His, that He might take away the
+sins of it."  "Behold the Lamb of God," said John the Baptist, "who
+takes away the sin of the world."  How dare we, who call ourselves
+Christians, we who have been baptized into His name, we who have
+tasted of His mercy, we who know the might of His love, the
+converting and renewing power of His Spirit--how dare we doubt but
+that He WILL take away the sins of the world?  Ay; step by step,
+nation by nation, year by year, the Lord shall conquer; love, and
+justice, and wisdom shall spread and grow; for He must reign till He
+has put all enemies under His feet.  He has promised to take away the
+sins of the world, and He is God, and cannot lie.  There is the
+Christian's hope:  let him leave infidels to say "The world always
+was bad, and it must remain so to the end;" the Christian ought to be
+able to answer, "The world was bad, and is bad; but for that very
+reason it will NOT remain so to the end:  for the Lord and king of
+the earth is boundless love, justice, goodness itself, and He will
+thoroughly purge His floor, and cast out of His kingdom all things
+that offend, and make in His good time the kingdoms of this world,
+the kingdoms of God and of His Christ."
+
+"Ah but," someone may say, "that, if it ever happens at all, will not
+happen till we are dead, and what part or lot shall WE have in it? we
+who die in the midst of all this sin, and injustice, and distress?"
+There again the Bible gives us hope:  "I believe," says the Creed,
+"in the resurrection of the flesh."  The Bible teaches us to believe,
+that we, each of us, as human beings, men and women, shall have a
+share in that glorious day; not merely as ghosts, and disembodied
+spirits--of which the Bible, thanks be to God, says little or
+nothing, but as real live human beings, with new bodies of our own,
+on a new earth, under a new heaven.  "Therefore," says David, "my
+flesh shall rest in hope;" not merely my soul, my ghost, but my
+flesh.  For the Lord, who not only died, but rose again with His
+body, shall raise our bodies, according to the mighty working by
+which He subdues all things to Himself; and then the whole manhood of
+each of us, body, soul, and spirit, shall have one perfect
+consummation and bliss, in His eternal and everlasting glory.--That
+is our hope.  If that is not a gospel, and good news from heaven to
+poor distressed creatures in hovels, and on sick beds, to people
+racked with life-long pain and disease, to people in crowded cities,
+who never from week's end to week's end look on the green fields and
+bright sky--if that is not good news, and a dayspring of boundless
+hope from on high for them, what news can be?
+
+But how are we to get this hope?  The text tells us; through comfort
+of the Scriptures; through the strengthening and comforting promises,
+and examples, and rules of God's gracious dealings which we find
+therein.  Through comfort of the Scriptures, but also through
+patience.  Ah, my friends, of that too we must think; we must, as St.
+James says, "let patience have her perfect work," or else we shall
+not be perfect ourselves.  If we are hasty, self-conceited, covetous,
+ready to help ourselves by the first means that come to hand; if we
+are full of hard judgments about our neighbours, and doubts about
+God's good purpose toward the world; in short, if we are not PATIENT,
+the Bible will teach us little or nothing.  It may make us
+superstitious, bigoted, fanatical, conceited, pharisaical, but like
+Jesus Christ the Lord it will not make us, unless we have patience.
+
+And where are we to get patience?  God knows it is hard in such a
+world as this for poor creatures to be patient always.  But faith can
+breed patience, though patience cannot breed itself;--and faith in
+whom?  Faith in our Father in heaven, even in the Almighty God
+Himself.  He calls Himself "the God of Patience and Consolation."
+Pray for His Holy Spirit, and He will make you patient; pray for His
+Holy Spirit, and He will console and comfort you.  He has promised
+That Spirit of His, The Spirit of love, trust, and patience--The
+Comforter--to as many as ask Him.  Ask Him now, this day--come to His
+holy table this day, and ask Him to make you patient; ask Him to take
+all the hastiness, and pride, and ill-temper, and self-will, and
+greediness out of you, and to change your wills into the likeness of
+His will.  Then your eyes will be opened to understand His law.  Then
+you will see in the Scriptures a sure promise of hope and glory and
+redemption for yourself and all the world.  Then you will see in the
+blessed sacrament of the Lord's body and blood, a sure sign and
+warrant, handed down from land to land, and age to age, from year to
+year, and from father to son, that these promises shall come true;
+that hope shall become fact; that not one of the Lord's words shall
+fail, or pass away, till all be fulfilled.
+
+
+
+III--THE KINGDOM OF GOD
+
+
+
+THIRD SUNDAY IN ADVENT.
+
+The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to
+preach good tidings to the meek; He has sent me to bind up the
+broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening
+of the prison to them that are bound.--ISAIAH lxi. 1.
+
+My friends, I do entreat those of you who wish to get any real good
+from this sermon, to listen to me carefully all through it.  Not that
+I have to complain of you in general for not attending to me.  I
+thank God, and thank you, that you do listen to what is said in this
+pulpit.  But there are many people who have a bad trick of minding
+the preacher carefully enough for a minute or two, and then letting
+their wits wander, and think about something else; and then if any
+word in the sermon strikes them, waking up suddenly, and thinking
+again for a little, and then letting their thoughts run wild again;
+and so on.  Whereby it happens that they only recollect a few scraps
+of the sermon, a word here, and a sentence there, and get into their
+heads all sorts of mistakes and false notions about the preacher's
+meaning.
+
+That is not right; that is not worthy of reasonable grown men:  that
+is only pardonable in little scatter-brained children.  Men and women
+should listen steadily, reverently throughout; so, and so only, will
+they be able to judge of the message which the preacher brings them.
+Listen to me, therefore, all through this sermon, and may God give
+you grace to understand it and lay it to heart, for it is the good
+news of the kingdom of God.
+
+You recollect, I hope, that I have often told you, that the Lord
+Jesus Christ's words would never pass away; that His prophecies are
+continually coming true, and being fulfilled over and over again.
+Now this text is not one of His prophecies, but it is a prophecy
+about Him; one which He fulfilled, and which He has been fulfilling
+again and again.  He is fulfilling it, as I believe, more than ever,
+now in these very days.
+
+If you will look at the 61st chapter of Isaiah, you will find this
+prophecy; and you will find, too, what will surprise you at first,
+that Isaiah was speaking of himself.  He says, "That the Spirit of
+the Lord was upon HIM"--Isaiah--"because the Lord had appointed HIM
+to preach good tidings to the meek, to bind up the broken-hearted,
+and deliverance to the captives, to preach the acceptable year of the
+Lord."  Isaiah must have spoken truly about himself.  He could not
+have meant to tell a falsehood, to say a thing was true of himself
+which was only true of Jesus, who did not come till 800 years
+afterwards.  And he did speak the truth:  you cannot read his
+prophecies without seeing that the Spirit of the Lord was indeed upon
+him; that the words which he spoke must have comforted all those who
+were sorrowing for their sins and the sins of the nation in their
+time.  We know, for a fact, that his prophecies came true; that the
+Jewish captives were delivered and brought back out of Judaea to
+Jerusalem again, and that Jerusalem was rebuilt as Isaiah prophesied,
+and the Jewish nation raised to far greater holiness, and prosperity,
+and happiness than it had ever been in before.  And yet 800 years
+afterwards the Lord took those very same words to Himself, and said,
+that HE fulfilled them.  He read them aloud once in a Jewish
+synagogue, out of the book of the prophet Isaiah; and then told the
+congregation, "This day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears."
+And again, as we read in the Gospel for this day, when John the
+Baptist sent to ask Him if He was really the Christ, He made use of
+another prophecy of Isaiah, and told John's disciples that He WAS the
+Christ, because He was fulfilling that prophecy; because He WAS
+making the deaf hear, and the blind see, and preaching the gospel to
+the poor.  Now, how is that?  Could Isaiah be right in applying those
+words to himself, and yet Christ be right in applying them to
+Himself?  Can a prophecy be fulfilled twice over?
+
+No doubt it can, my friends, and two hundred times over.  No prophecy
+of Scripture is of private interpretation, says St. Peter.  That is,
+it does not apply to any one private, particular thing that is to
+happen.  Every prophecy of Scripture goes on fulfilling itself more
+and more, as time rolls on and the world grows older.  St. Peter
+tells us the reason why.  No prophecy of Scripture is of private
+interpretation; because it does not come from the will of man, from
+any invention or discovery of poor short-sighted human beings, who
+can only judge by what they see around them in their own times:  but
+holy men of old spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.  And who
+is the Holy Spirit?  The Spirit of God; the everlasting Spirit; the
+Spirit who cannot change, for He IS God.  The Spirit who searcheth
+the deep things of God, and teaches them to men.  And what are the
+deep things of God?  They are eternal as God is.  Eternal laws;
+everlasting rules which cannot alter.  That is the meaning of it all.
+The Spirit of God is the Spirit which teaches men the laws of God;
+the unchangeable rules and ordinances by which He governs all heaven
+and earth, and men, and nations; the laws which come into force, not
+once only, but always; the laws of God which are working round us
+now, just as much as they were eighteen hundred years ago, just as
+much as they were in Isaiah's time.  Therefore it is, that I said
+that these old Jewish prophecies, which were inspired by the Holy
+Spirit, are coming true now, and will keep on coming true, time after
+time, in their proper place and order, and whensoever the times are
+fit for them, even to the end of the world.
+
+But again, we read that the Spirit of God takes of the things of
+Christ, and shows them unto us.  And what are the things of Christ?
+They must be eternal things, unchangeable things, for Christ is
+unchangeable--Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
+He is over all, God blessed for ever.  To Him all power is given in
+heaven and earth.  He reigns, and He will reign.  Do you think He is
+less a Saviour now, than He was when He spoke those things to John's
+disciples?  Do you think He is less able to hear and to help than He
+was in John's time?  Do you think He used to care about people's
+bodies then, but that He only cares about their souls now?  Do you
+think that He is less compassionate, and less merciful, as well as
+less powerful, than He was when He made the blind see, and the lame
+walk, and the deaf hear, in Judaea of old?
+
+Less powerful! less compassionate!  One would have expected that
+Christ was MORE powerful, MORE compassionate, if that were possible.
+At least one would expect that His power and compassion would show
+itself more and more, and make itself felt more and more, year by
+year, and age by age; more and more healing disease; more and more
+comforting sorrow; more and still more casting out cunning and evil
+spirits, till He had put all under His feet.  He Himself said it
+should be so.  He always spoke of His own kingdom as a thing which
+was to grow and increase by laws of its own, men knew not how, but He
+knew.  Like seed cast into the ground, His kingdom was, He said, at
+first the smallest of all seeds; but it was to grow, and take root,
+and spread into a mighty tree, He said, till the very birds in the
+air lodged in the branches of it; and David's words should be
+fulfilled, "Thou, Lord, shalt save both man and beast."  And does not
+St. Paul speak of His kingdom in the same way, as a kingdom which
+should grow? that He was to reign till He had put all enemies under
+His feet? that He would deliver at last the whole creation? the earth
+on which we stand, the dumb animals around us?  For, as St. Paul
+says, the whole creation is groaning in labour-pangs, waiting to be
+raised into a higher state.  And it shall be raised.  The whole
+creation shall be set free into the glorious liberty of the children
+of God.
+
+What does that mean?  How can I tell you?
+
+This I can tell you, that it cannot mean that Jesus Christ was
+merciful enough to heal people's bodies at first, but that He has
+given up doing it now, and will never do it again.  "Well, but," some
+would say, "what does all this come to?  You are merely telling us
+what we knew before--that if any of us are cured from disease, or
+raised up from a sick bed, it is all the Lord's doing."  If you do
+believe that, really, my friends, happy are you!  Many of you, I
+think, do believe it.  The poor are more inclined to believe it, I
+think, than the rich.  But even in the mouths of the poor one often
+hears words which make one suspect that they do NOT believe it.  I am
+very much afraid that a great many have got into the trick of saying
+that it was God's mercy that they were cured, and that it pleased the
+Lord to raise them up from a sick bed, very much as a piece of cant.
+They say the words by rote, because they have been accustomed to hear
+them said by others, without thinking of the meaning of them; just
+as, on the other hand, a great many people curse and swear without
+thinking of the awful oaths they use.  Ay, and often enough the very
+same persons will say that it was the Lord's mercy they were cured of
+their sickness; and then, if they get into a passion, pray the very
+same Lord to do that to the bodies and souls of their neighbours
+which it is a shame to speak of here.  Out of the same mouth proceed
+blessings and cursings:  showing that whether or not they are in
+earnest in cursing, they are not earnest in blessing.
+
+Again:  If people really believed that it was the Lord Jesus Christ
+who cured their sicknesses for them, they would behave, when they got
+well, more as the Lord Jesus Christ would wish them to behave.  They
+would show forth their thankfulness not only with their lips, but in
+their lives.  You who believe--you who say--that Christ has cured
+your sicknesses, show your faith by your works.  Live like those who
+are alive again from the dead; who are not your own, but bought with
+a price, and bound to work for God with your bodies and your spirits,
+which are His--then, and then only, can either God or man believe
+you.
+
+Again:  There is a third reason which makes one suspect that people
+do not mean what they say about this matter.  I think too many say,
+"It has pleased God," merely as an empty form of words, when all they
+mean is, "What must be, must, and it cannot be helped."  Else, why do
+they say, "It has pleased the Lord to send me sickness?"  What is the
+use of saying, "It has pleased the Lord to cure me," when you say in
+the same breath, "It has pleased the Lord to make me ill?"  I know
+you will say that, "Of course, whatever happens must be the Lord's
+will; if it did not please Him it would not happen."  I do not care
+for such words; I will have nothing to do with them.  I will neither
+entangle you nor myself in those endless disputings and questions
+about freewill and necessity, which never yet have come to any
+conclusion, and never will, because they are too deep for poor short-
+sighted human beings like us.  "To the law and to the testimony," say
+I.  I will hold to the words of the Bible; what it says, I will say;
+what it does not say I will not say, to please any man's system of
+doctrines.  And I say from the Bible that we have no more right to
+say, "It has pleased the Lord to make me sick," than, "It has pleased
+the Lord to make me a sinner."  Scripture everywhere speaks of
+sickness as a real evil and a curse--a breaking of the health, and
+order, and strength, and harmony of God's creation.  It speaks of
+madmen as possessed with evil spirits; did THAT please God?  The
+woman who was bowed with a spirit of infirmity, and could not lift
+herself up--did our Lord say that it had pleased God to make her a
+wretched cripple?  No; he spoke of her as this daughter of Israel,
+whom Satan had bound, and not God, this eighteen years; and that was
+His reason for healing her, even on the sabbath-day, because her
+disease was not the work of God, but of the cruel, disordering,
+destroying evil spirit which is at enmity with God.  That was why
+Christ cured her.  And THAT--for this is the point I have been coming
+to, step by step--that was the reason why, when John the Baptist sent
+to ask if Jesus was the Christ, our Lord answered:  "Go and show John
+again those things which ye do see and hear:  the blind receive their
+sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear,
+the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to
+them."
+
+Do not be in a hurry, my friends, and suppose that our Lord meant
+merely:  "Tell John what wonderful miracles I am working."  If He had
+meant that why would He have put in as the last proof that He was the
+Christ, that He was preaching the gospel to the poor?  What wonderful
+miracle was there in THAT?  No:  it was as if He had said:  "Go and
+tell John that I am the Christ, because I am the great physician, the
+healer and deliverer of body and soul:  one who will and can cure the
+loathsome diseases, the uselessness, the misery, the ignorance of the
+poorest and meanest."  He has proved Himself the Christ by showing
+not only His boundless power, but His boundless love and mercy; and
+THAT, not only to men's souls, but to their bodies also.  To prove
+Himself the Christ by wonderful and astonishing miracles was exactly
+what He would not do.  He refused, when the Scribes and Pharisees
+came and asked of Him a sign from heaven to prove that He was Christ--
+wanting Him, I suppose, to bring some apparition, or fiery comet, or
+great voice out of the sky, to astonish them with His power; He told
+them peremptorily that He would give them no such thing:  and yet He
+said that His mighty works did prove Him to be Christ; He pronounced
+woe against Chorazin and Bethsaida for not believing Him on account
+of His mighty works:  He told the Scribes and Pharisees that they
+ought to believe on Him merely for His works' sake.  And why would
+they not believe on Him?  Just because they could not see that God's
+power was shown more in healing and delivering sufferers, than in
+astonishing and destroying.  They could not see that God's perfect
+likeness shone out in Christ--that He was the express image of the
+Father, just because He went about doing good, and healing all manner
+of sicknesses and all manner of infirmities among the people.  But so
+it is, my friends!  Jesus is the Saviour, the deliverer, the great
+physician, the healer of soul and body.  Not a pang is felt or a tear
+shed on earth, but He sorrows over it.  Not a human being on earth
+dies young, but He, as I believe, sorrows over it.  What it is which
+prevents Him healing every sickness, soothing every sorrow, wiping
+away every tear NOW, we cannot tell.  But this we can tell, that it
+is His will that none should perish.  This we CAN tell; that He is
+willing as ever to heal the sick, to cleanse the leper, to cast out
+devils, to teach the ignorant, to bind up the broken-hearted.  This
+we CAN tell; that He will go on doing so more and more, year by year,
+and age by age.  This we CAN tell, from Scripture, that Christ is
+stronger than the devil.  This we can tell; that Christ, and all good
+men, the spirits of just men made perfect, the wise and the great in
+God's sight, who have left us their books, their sayings, their
+writings, as precious health-giving heirlooms--have been fighting,
+and are fighting, and will fight to the end against the devil, and
+sin, and oppression, and misery, and disease, and everything which
+spoils and darkens the face of God's good earth.  And this we CAN
+tell; that they will conquer at the last, because Christ is stronger
+than the devil; good is stronger than evil; light is stronger than
+darkness; God's Spirit, the giver of life, and health, and order, is
+stronger than all the evil customs, and ignorance, and carelessness,
+and cruelty, and superstition, which makes miserable the lives and,
+as far as we can see, destroys the souls of thousands.  Yes, I say,
+Christ's kingdom is a kingdom of health and deliverance for body and
+soul; and it will conquer, and it will spread, and it will grow, till
+the nations of the world have become the kingdoms of God and of His
+Christ.  Christ reigns, and Christ will reign till He has put all His
+enemies under His feet; and the last of His enemies which shall be
+destroyed is DEATH.  Death is His enemy.  He has conquered death by
+rising from the dead.  And the day will come when death will be no
+more--when sickness and sorrow shall be unknown, and God shall wipe
+away tears from all eyes.  I say it again--never forget it--Christ is
+King, and His kingdom is a kingdom of health, and life, and
+deliverance from all evil.  It always has been so, from the first
+time our Lord cured the leper in Galilee; it will be so to the end of
+the world.  And, therefore--to come back to the very place from which
+I started at the beginning of my sermon--therefore, whenever one of
+the days of the Lord is at hand, whenever God's kingdom makes a great
+step forward, this same prophecy in our text is fulfilled in some
+striking and wonderful way.  And I say it is fulfilled now in these
+days more than it ever has been.  Christ is healing the sick,
+cleansing the leper, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead, and
+preaching the gospel to the poor, seven times more in these days in
+which we live than He did when He walked upon earth in Judaea.
+
+Do you doubt my words?  At all events you confess that the cure of
+all diseases comes from Christ.  Then consider, I beseech you, how
+many more diseases are cured now than were formerly.  One may say
+that the knowledge of medicine is not one hundred years old.
+Nothing, my friends, makes me feel more strongly what a wonderful and
+blessed time we live in, and how Christ is showing forth mighty works
+among us, than this same sudden miraculous improvement in the art of
+healing, which has taken place within the memory of man.  Any country
+doctor now knows more, thank God, or ought to know, than the greatest
+London physicians did two generations ago.  New cures for deafness,
+blindness, lameness, every disease that flesh is heir to, are being
+discovered year by year.  Oh, my friends! you little know what Christ
+is doing among you, for your bodies as well as for your souls.  There
+is not a parish in England now in which the poorest as well as the
+richest are not cured yearly of diseases, which, if they had lived a
+hundred years ago, would have killed them without hope or help.  And
+then, when one looks at these great and blessed plans for what is
+called sanitary reform, at the sickness and the misery which has been
+done away with already by attending to them, even though they have
+only just begun to be put in practice--our hearts must be hard indeed
+if we do not feel that Christ is revealing to us the gifts of healing
+far more bountifully and mercifully than even He did to the first
+apostles.
+
+But you will say, perhaps, the dead are not raised in these days.
+Oh, my friends! which shows Christ's mercy most, to raise those who
+are already dead, or to save those alive who are about to die?  Those
+in this church who have read history know as well as I, how in our
+forefathers' time people died in England by thousands of diseases
+which are scarcely ever deadly now; ay, of diseases which have now
+actually vanished out of the land, before the new light of medicine
+and of civilisation which Christ has revealed to us in these days.
+For one child who lived and grew up in old times, two live and grow
+up now.  In London alone there are not half as many deaths in
+proportion to the number of people as there were a hundred years ago.
+And is not that a mightier work of Christ's power and love than if He
+had raised a few dead persons to life?
+
+And now for the last part of our Lord's witness about Himself.  To
+the poor the gospel is preached.  Oh! my friends, is not THAT coming
+true in our days as it never came true before?  Look back only fifty
+years, and consider the difference between the doctrines which were
+preached to the poor and the doctrines which are preached to them
+now.  Look round you and see how everywhere earnest and godly
+ministers have sprung up, of all sects and opinions, as well as of
+the Church of England, not only to preach the gospel in the pulpit,
+but to carry it to the sick bedside of the lonely cottage, to the
+prison, and to those fearful sties, worse than prisons, where in our
+great cities the heathen poor live crowded together.  Look at the
+teaching which the poor man can get now, compared to what he used to--
+the sermons, the Bibles, the tracts, the lending libraries, the
+schools--just consider the hundreds of thousands of pounds which are
+subscribed every year to educate the children of the poor, and then
+say whether Christ is not working a mighty work among us in these
+days.  I know that not half as much is done as ought to be done in
+that way; not half as much as will be done; and what is done will
+have to be done better than it has been done yet; but still, can
+anyone in this church who is fifty years old deny that there is a
+most enormous and blessed improvement which is growing and spreading
+every year?  Can anyone deny that the gospel is preached to the poor
+now in a way that it never was before within the memory of man?
+
+Now, recollect that this is an Advent sermon--a sermon which
+proclaims to you that Christ is COME; yes, He is come--come never to
+leave mankind again!  Christ reigns over the earth, and will reign
+for ever.  At certain great and important times in the world's
+history, like this present time, times which He Himself calls "days
+of the Lord," He shows forth His power, and the mightiness and mercy
+of His kingdom, more than at others.  But still He is always with us;
+we have no need to run up and down to look for Christ:  to say, Who
+shall ascend into heaven to bring Him down?  Who shall descend into
+the deep to bring Him up?  For the kingdom of God, as He told us
+Himself, is among us, and within us.  Yes, within us.  All these
+wonderful improvements and discoveries, all things beneficial to men
+which are found out year by year, though they seem to be of men's
+invention, are really of Christ's revealing, the fruits of the
+kingdom of God within us, of the Spirit of God, who is teaching men,
+though they too often will not believe it; though they disclaim God's
+Spirit and take all the glory to themselves.  Truly Christ is among
+us; and our eyes are held, and we see Him not.  That is our English
+sin--the sin of unbelief, the root of every other sin.  Christ works
+among us, and we will not own Him.  Truly, Jesus Christ may well say
+of us English at this day, There were ten cleansed, but where are the
+nine?  How few are there, who return to give glory to God!  Oh,
+consider what I say; the kingdom of God is among us now; its
+blessings are growing richer, fuller among us every day.  Beware,
+lest if we refuse to acknowledge that kingdom and Christ the King of
+it, it be taken away from us, and given to some other nation, who
+will bring forth the fruits of it, fellow-help and brotherly
+kindness, purity and sobriety, and all the fruits of the Spirit of
+God.
+
+
+
+IV--A PREPARATION FOR CHRISTMAS
+
+
+
+FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT.
+
+Rejoice in the Lord always.--PHILIPPIANS iv. 4.
+
+This is the beginning of the Epistle for to-day, the Sunday before
+Christmas.  We will try to find out why it was chosen for to-day, and
+what lesson we may learn from it.
+
+Now Christmas-time was always a time of rejoicing among many heathen
+nations, and long before the Lord Jesus Christ came.  That was
+natural and reasonable enough, if you will consider it.  For now the
+shortest day is past.  The sun is just beginning to climb higher and
+higher in the sky each day, and bring back with him longer sunshine,
+and shorter darkness, and spring flowers, and summer crops, and a
+whole new year, with new hopes, new work, new lessons, new blessings.
+The old year, with all its labours and all its pleasures, and all its
+sorrows and all its sins, is dying, all but gone.  It lies behind us,
+never to return.  The tears which we shed, we never can shed again.
+The mistakes we made, we have a chance of mending in the year to
+come.  And so the heathens felt, and rejoiced that another year was
+dying, another year going to be born.
+
+And Christmas was a time of rejoicing too, because the farming work
+was done.  The last year's crop was housed; the next year's wheat was
+sown; the cattle were safe in yard and stall; and men had time to
+rest, and draw round the fire in the long winter nights, and make
+merry over the earnings of the past year, and the hopes and plans of
+the year to come.  And so over all this northern half of the world
+Christmas was a merry time.
+
+But the poor heathens did not know the Lord.  They did not know who
+to thank for all their Christmas blessings.  And so some used to
+thank the earth for the crops, and the sun for coming back again to
+lengthen the days, as if the earth and sun moved of themselves.  And
+some used to thank false gods and ancient heroes, who, perhaps, never
+really lived at all.  And some, perhaps the greater number, thanked
+nothing and no one, but just enjoyed themselves, and took no thought,
+as too many do now at Christmas-time.  So the world went on,
+Christmas after Christmas; and the times of that ignorance, as St.
+Paul says, God winked at.  But when the fulness of time was come, He
+sent forth His Son, made of a woman, to be the judge and ruler of the
+world; and commanded all men everywhere to repent, and turn from all
+their vanities to serve the living God, who had made heaven and
+earth, and all things in them.
+
+He did not wish them to give up their Christmas mirth.  No:  all
+along He had been trying to teach them by it about His love to them.
+As St. Paul told them once, God had not left Himself without witness,
+in that He gave them rain and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts
+with joy and gladness.
+
+God did not wish them, or us, to give up Christmas mirth.  The
+apostles did not wish it.  The great men, true followers of the
+apostles, who shaped our Prayer-book for us, and sealed it with their
+life-blood, did not wish it.  They did not wish farmers, labourers,
+servants, masters, to give up one of the old Christmas customs; but
+to remember who made Christmas, and its blessings; in short, to
+rejoice in The Lord.  Our forefathers had been thanking the wrong
+persons for Christmas.  Henceforward we were to thank the right
+person, The Lord, and rejoice in Him.  Our forefathers had been
+rejoicing in the sun, and moon, and earth; in wise and valiant kings
+who had lived ages before; in their own strength, and industry, and
+cunning.  Now they were to rejoice in Him who made sun, and moon, and
+earth; in Him who sent wise and valiant kings and leaders; in Him who
+gives all strength, and industry, and cunning; by whose inspiration
+comes all knowledge of agriculture, and manufacture, and all the arts
+which raise men above the beasts that perish.  So their Christmas
+joys were to go on, year by year while the world lasted:  but they
+were to go on rightly, and not wrongly.  Men were to rejoice in The
+Lord, and then His blessing would be on them, and the thanks and
+praise which they offered Him, He would return with interest, in
+fresh blessings for the coming year.
+
+Therefore, I think, this Epistle was chosen for to-day, the Sunday
+before Christmas, to show us in whom we are to rejoice; and,
+therefore, to show us how we are to rejoice.  For we must not take
+the first verse of the Epistle and forget the rest.  That would
+neither be wise nor reverent toward St. Paul, who wrote the whole,
+and meant the whole to stand together as one discourse; or to the
+blessed and holy men who chose it for our lesson on this day.  Let us
+go on, then, with the Epistle, line by line, throughout.
+
+"Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice."  As much as
+to say, you cannot rejoice too much, you cannot overdo your
+happiness, thankfulness, merriment.  You do not know half--no, not
+the thousandth part of God's love and mercy to you, and you never
+will know.  So do not be afraid of being too happy, or think that you
+honour God by wearing a sour face, when He is heaping blessings on
+you, and calling on you to smile and sing.  But "let your moderation
+be known unto all men."  There is a right and a wrong way of being
+merry.  There is a mirth, which is no mirth; whereof it is written,
+in the midst of that laughter there is a heaviness, and the end
+thereof is death.  Drunkenness, gluttony, indecent words and jests
+and actions, these are out of place on Christmas-day, and in the
+merriment to which the pure and holy Lord Jesus calls you all.  They
+are rejoicing in the flesh and the devil, and not in the Lord at all;
+and whosoever indulges in them, and fancies them merriment, is
+keeping the devil's Christmas, and not Jesus Christ's.  So let your
+moderation be known to all men.  Be MERRY AND WISE.  The fool lets
+his mirth master him, and carry him away, till he forgets himself,
+and says and does things of which he is ashamed when he gets up next
+morning, sick and sad at heart.  The wise man remembers that, let the
+occasion be as joyful a one as it may, "the Lord is at hand."
+Christ's eye is on him, while he is eating, and drinking, and
+laughing.  He is not afraid of Christ's eye, because, though it is
+Divine it is a human, loving, smiling eye; rejoicing in the happiness
+of His poor, hard-worked brothers here below.  But he remembers that
+it is a holy eye, too; an eye which looks with sadness and horror on
+anything which is wrong; on all drunkenness, quarrelling, indecency;
+and so on in all his merriment, he is still master of himself.  He
+remembers that his soul is nobler than his body; that his will must
+be stronger than his appetite; and so he keeps himself in check; he
+keeps his tongue from evil, and his stomach from sottishness, and
+though he may be, and ought to be, the merriest of the whole party,
+yet he takes care to let his moderation, his sobriety, be known and
+plain to everyone, remembering that the Lord is at hand.
+
+And that man--I will stand surety for him--will be the one who will
+rise from his bed next morning, best able to carry out the next verse
+of the Epistle, and "be careful for nothing."
+
+Now that is no easy matter here in England; to rich and poor,
+Christmas is the time for settling accounts and paying debts.  And
+therefore in England, where living is dear, and everyone, more or
+less, struggling to pay his way, Christmas is often a very anxious,
+disturbing time of year.  Many a family, for all their economy,
+cannot clear themselves at the year's end; and though they are able
+to forget that now and then, thank God, through great part of the
+year, yet they cannot forget it at Christmas.  But, as I said, the
+man who at Christmas-time will be most able to be careful for
+nothing, will be the man whose moderation has been known to everyone;
+for he will, if he has lived the year through in the same temper in
+which he has spent Christmas, have been moderate in his expenses; he
+will have kept himself from empty show, and pretending to be richer
+than he is.  He will have kept himself from throwing away his money
+in drink, and kept his daughters from throwing away money in dress,
+which is just what too many, in their foolish, godless, indecent
+hurry to get rid of their own children off their hands do not do.
+
+And he will be the man who will be in the best humour, and have the
+clearest brain, to kneel down when he gets up to his daily work, and
+"in everything, by prayer and supplication, make his requests known
+to God."  And then, whether he can make both ends meet or not,
+whether he can begin next year free from debt or not, still "the
+peace of God will keep his heart."  He may be unable to clear
+himself, but still he will know that he has a loving and merciful
+Father in heaven, who has allowed distress and difficulty to come on
+him only as a lesson and an education.  That this distress came
+because God chose, and that when God chooses it will go away--and
+that till then--considering that the Lord God sent it--it had better
+NOT go away.  He will believe that God's gracious promises stand
+true--that the Lord will never let those who trust in Him be
+confounded and brought to shame--that He will let none of us be
+tempted beyond what we are able, but will always with the temptation
+make a way for us to escape, that we may be able to bear it.  And so
+the peace of God which passes understanding, will keep that man's
+mind.  And in whom?  "In Jesus Christ."  Now what did St. Paul mean
+by putting in the Lord Jesus Christ's name there? what is the meaning
+of "in Jesus Christ"?  This is what it means; it means what
+Christmas-day means.  A man may say, "Your sermon promises fine
+things, but I am miserable and poor; it promises a holy and noble
+rejoicing to everyone, but I am unholy and mean.  It promises peace
+from God, and I am sure I am not at peace:  I am always fretting and
+quarrelling; I quarrel with my wife, my children, and my neighbours,
+and they quarrel with me; and worst of all," says the poor man, "I
+quarrel with myself.  I am full of discontented, angry, sulky,
+anxious, unhappy thoughts; my heart is dark and sad and restless
+within me--would God I were peaceful, but I am not:  look in my face
+and see!"
+
+True, my friend, but on Christmas-day the Son of God was born into
+the world, a man like you.
+
+"Well," says the poor man, "but what has that to do with my anxiety
+and my ill-temper?"
+
+It would take the whole year through, my friend, to show you all that
+it has to do with you and your unhappiness.  All the Lessons,
+Epistles, and Gospels of the year are set out to show you what it has
+to do with you.  But in the meanwhile, before Christmas-day comes,
+consider this one thing:  Why are you anxious?  Because you do not
+know what is to happen to you?  Then Christmas-day is a witness to
+you, that whatsoever happens to you, happens to you by the will and
+rule of Jesus Christ, The perfect man; think of that.  THE PERFECT
+MAN--who understands men's hearts and wants, and all that is good for
+them, and has all the wisdom and power to give us what is good, which
+we want ourselves.  And what makes you unhappy, my friends?  Is it
+not at heart just this one thing--you are unhappy because you are not
+pleased with yourselves?  And you are not pleased with yourselves
+because you know you ought not to be pleased with yourselves; and you
+know you ought not to be pleased with yourselves, because you know,
+in the bottom of your hearts, that God is not pleased with you?  What
+cure, what comfort for such thoughts can we find?--This.
+
+The child who was born in a manger on Christmas-day, and grew up in
+poverty, and had not where to lay his head, went through all shame
+and sorrow to which man is heir.  He, Jesus, the poor child of
+Bethlehem, is Lord and King of heaven and earth.  He will feel for
+us; He will understand our temptations; He has been poor himself,
+that He might feel for the poor; He has been evil spoken of, that He
+might feel for those whose tempers are sorely tried.  He bore the
+sins and felt the miseries of the whole world, that He might feel for
+us when we are wearied with the burden of life, and confounded by the
+remembrance of our own sins.
+
+Oh, my friends, consider only Who was born into the world on
+Christmas-day; and that thought alone will be enough to fill you with
+rejoicing and hope for yourselves and all the world, and with the
+peace of God which passes understanding, the peace which the angels
+proclaimed to the shepherds on the first Christmas night--"On earth
+peace, and good will toward men"--and if God wills us good, my
+friend; what matter who wishes us evil?
+
+
+
+V--CHRISTMAS-DAY
+
+
+
+He made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a
+slave.--PHILIPPIANS ii. 7.
+
+On Christmas-day, 1851 years ago, if we had been at Rome, the great
+capital city, and mistress of the whole world, we should have seen a
+strange sight--strange, and yet pleasant.  All the courts of law were
+shut; no war was allowed to be proclaimed, and no criminals punished.
+The sorrow and the strife of that great city had stopped, in great
+part, for three days, and all people were giving themselves up to
+merriment and good cheer--making up quarrels, and giving and
+receiving presents from house to house.  And we should have seen,
+too, a pleasanter sight than that.  For those three days of
+Christmas-time were days of safety and merriment for the poor slaves--
+tens of thousands of whom--men, women, and children--the Romans had
+brought out of all the countries in the world--many of our
+forefathers and mothers among them--and kept them there in cruel
+bondage and shame, worked and fed, bought and sold, like beasts, and
+not like human beings, not able to call their lives or their bodies
+their own, forced to endure any shame or sin which their tyrants
+required of them, and liable any moment to be beaten, tortured, or
+crucified at the mercy of cruel and foul masters and mistresses.  But
+on that Christmas-day, according to an old custom, they were allowed
+for once in the whole year to play at being free, to dress in their
+masters' and mistresses' clothes, to say what they thought of them
+boldly, without fear of punishment, and to eat and drink at their
+masters' tables, while their masters and mistresses waited on them.
+It was an old custom, that, among the heathen Romans, which their
+forefathers, who were wiser and better than they, had handed down to
+them.  They had forgotten, perhaps, what it meant:  but still we may
+see what it must have meant:  That the old forefathers of the Romans
+had intended to remind their children every year by that custom, that
+their poor hard-worked slaves were, after all, men and women as much
+as their masters; that they had hearts and consciences, and sense in
+them, and a right to speak what they thought, as much as their
+masters; that they, as much as their masters, could enjoy the good
+things of God's earth, from which man's tyranny had shut them out;
+and to remind those cruel masters, by making them once every year
+wait on their own slaves at table, that they were, after all, equal
+in the sight of God, and that it was more noble for those who were
+rich, and called themselves gentlemen, to help others, than to make
+others slave for them.
+
+I do not mean, of course, that those old heathens understood all this
+clearly.  You will see, by the latter part of my sermon, why they
+could not understand it clearly.  But there must have been some sort
+of dim, confused suspicion in their minds that it was wrong and cruel
+to treat human beings like brute beasts, which made them set up that
+strange old custom of letting their slaves play at being free once
+every Christmas-tide.
+
+But if on this same day, 1851 years ago, instead of being in the
+great city of Rome, we had been in the little village of Bethlehem in
+Judaea, we might have seen a sight stranger still; a sight which we
+could not have fancied had anything to do with that merrymaking of
+the slaves at Rome, and yet which had everything to do with it.
+
+We should have seen, in a mean stable, among the oxen and the asses,
+a poor maiden, with her newborn baby laid in the manger, for want of
+any better cradle, and by her her husband, a poor carpenter, whom all
+men thought to be the father of her child. . . .  There, in the
+stable, amid the straw, through the cold winter days and nights, in
+want of many a comfort which the poorest woman, and the poorest
+woman's child would need, they stayed there, that young maiden and
+her newborn babe.  That young maiden was the Blessed Virgin Mary, and
+that poor baby was the Son of God.  The Son of God, in whose likeness
+all men were made at the beginning; the Son of God, who had been
+ruling the whole world all along; who brought the Jews out of
+slavery, a thousand years before, and destroyed their cruel tyrants
+in the Red Sea; the Son of God, who had been all along punishing
+cruel tyrants and oppressors, and helping the poor out of misery,
+whenever they called on Him.  The Light which lightens every man who
+comes into the world, was that poor babe.  It was He who gives men
+reason, and conscience, and a tender heart, and delight in what is
+good, and shame and uneasiness of mind when they do wrong.  It was He
+who had been stirring up, year by year, in those cruel Romans'
+hearts, the feeling that there was something wrong in grinding down
+their slaves, and put into their minds the notion of giving them
+their Christmas rest and freedom.  He had been keeping up that good
+old custom for a witness and a warning that all men were equal in His
+sight; that all men had a right to liberty of speech and conscience;
+a right to some fair share in the good things of the earth, which God
+had given to all men freely to enjoy.  But those old Romans would not
+take the warning.  They kept up the custom, but they shut their eyes
+to the lesson of it.  They went on conquering and oppressing all the
+nations of the earth, and making them their slaves.  And now He was
+come--He Himself, the true Lord of the earth, the true pattern of
+men.  He was come to show men to whom this world belonged:  He was
+come to show men in what true power, true nobleness consisted--not in
+making others minister to us, but in ministering to them:  He was
+come to set a pattern of what a man should be; He was the Son of Man--
+THE MAN of all men--and therefore He had come with good news to all
+poor slaves, and neglected, hard-worked creatures:  He had come to
+tell them that He cared for them; that He could and would deliver
+them; that they were God's children, and His brothers, just as much
+as their Roman masters; and that He was going to bring a terrible
+time upon the earth--"days of the Son of Man," when He would judge
+all men, and show who were true men and who were not--such a time as
+had never been before, or would be again; when that great Roman
+empire, in spite of all its armies, and its cunning, and its riches,
+plundered from every nation under heaven, would crumble away and
+perish shamefully and miserably off the face of the earth, before
+tribes of poor, untaught, savage men, the brothers and countrymen of
+those very slaves whom the Romans fancied were so much below them,
+that they had a right to treat them like the beasts which perish.
+
+That was the message which that little child lying in the manger
+there at Bethlehem, had been sent out from God to preach.  Do you not
+see now what it had to do with that strange merrymaking of the poor
+slaves in Rome, which I showed you at the beginning of my sermon?
+
+If you do not, I must remind you of the song, which, St. Luke says,
+the shepherds in Judaea heard the angels sing, on this night 1851
+years ago.  That song tells us the meaning of that babe's coming.
+That song tells us what that babe's coming had to do with the poor
+slaves of Rome, and with all poor creatures who have suffered and
+sorrowed on this earth, before or since.
+
+"Glory to God in the highest," they sang, "and on earth peace, good
+will to men."
+
+Glory to God in the highest.  That little babe, lying in the manger
+among the cattle, was showing what was the very highest glory of the
+great God who had made heaven and earth.  Not to show His power and
+His majesty, but to show His condescension and His love.  To stoop,
+to condescend, to have mercy, to forgive, that is the highest glory
+of God.  That is the noblest, the most Godlike thing for God or man.
+And God showed that when He sent down His only-begotten Son--not to
+strike the world to atoms with a touch, not to hurl sinners into
+everlasting flame, but to be born of a village maiden, to take on
+Himself all the shame and weakness and sorrow, to which man is heir,
+even to death itself; to make Himself of no reputation, and take on
+Himself the form of a slave, and forgive sinners, and heal the sick,
+and comfort the outcast and despised, that He might show what God was
+like--show forth to men, as a poor maiden's son, the brightness of
+God's glory, and the express likeness of His person.
+
+"And on earth peace" they sang.  Men had been quarrelling and
+fighting then, and men are quarrelling and fighting now.  That little
+babe in the manger was come to show them how and why they were all to
+be at peace with each other.  For what causes all the war and
+quarrelling in the world, but selfishness?  Selfishness breeds pride,
+passion, spite, revenge, covetousness, oppression.  The strong care
+for themselves, and try to help themselves at the expense of the
+weak, by force and tyranny; the weak care for themselves in their
+turn, and try to help themselves at the expense of the strong, by
+cunning and cheating.  No one will condescend, give way, sacrifice
+his own interest for his neighbour's, and hence come wars between
+nations, quarrels in families, spite and grudges between neighbours.
+But in the example of that little child of Bethlehem, Jesus Christ
+the Lord, God was saying to men, "Acquaint yourselves with Me, and be
+at peace."  God is not selfish; it is our selfishness which has made
+us unlike God.  God so loved the sinful world, that He gave His only-
+begotten Son for it.  Is that an action like ours?  The Son of God so
+obeyed His Father, and so loved this world, that He made Himself of
+no reputation, and took on Him the likeness of a slave, and became
+obedient to death, even to the most fearful and shameful of all
+deaths, the death of the cross; not for Himself, but for those who
+did not know Him, hated Him, killed Him.  In short, He sacrificed
+Himself for us.  That is God's likeness.  Self-sacrifice.  Jesus
+Christ, the babe of Bethlehem, proved Himself the Son of God, and the
+express likeness of the Father, by sacrificing Himself for us.
+Sacrifice yourselves then for each other!  Give up your own pride,
+your own selfishness, your own interest for each other, and you will
+be all at peace at once.
+
+But the angels sang, "Good will toward men."  Without that their song
+would not have been complete.  For we are all ready to say, at such
+words as I have been speaking, "Ah! pleasant enough, and pretty
+enough, if they were but possible; but they are not possible.  It is
+in the nature of man to be selfish.  Men have gone on warring,
+grudging, struggling, competing, oppressing, cheating from the
+beginning, and they will do so to the end."
+
+Yes, it is not in the NATURE of man to do otherwise.  In as far as
+man yields to his nature, and is like the selfish brute beasts, it is
+not possible for him to do anything but go on quarrelling, and
+competing, and cheating to the last.  But what man's nature cannot
+do, God's grace can.  God's good will is toward you.  He loves you,
+He wills--and if He wills, what is too hard for Him?--He wills to
+raise you out of this selfish, quarrelsome life of sin, into a
+loving, brotherly, peaceful life of righteousness.  His spirit, the
+spirit of love by which He made and guides all heaven and earth, the
+spirit of love in which He gave His only Son for you, the spirit of
+love in which His Son Jesus Christ sacrificed Himself for you, and
+took on Himself a meaner state than any of you can ever have--the
+likeness of a slave--that spirit is promised to you, and ready for
+you.  That little baby in the manger at Bethlehem--God sacrificing
+Himself for you in the spirit of love--is a sign that that spirit of
+love is the spirit of God, and therefore the only right spirit for
+you and me, who are men and women made in the image of God.  That
+babe in the manger at Bethlehem is a sign to you and me, that God
+will freely give us that spirit of love if we ask for it.  For He
+would not have set us that example, if He had not meant us to follow
+it, and He would not ask us to follow it, if He did not intend to
+give us the means of following it.  Therefore, my friends, it is
+written, Ask and ye shall receive.  If your heavenly Father spared
+not His own Son, but freely gave Him for you, will He not with Him
+likewise freely give you all things?  Oh! ask and you shall receive.
+However poor, ignorant, sinful you may be, God's promises are ready
+for you, signed and sealed by the bread and wine on that table, the
+memorial of Jesus, the babe of Bethlehem.  Ask, and you shall
+receive!  Comfort from sorrow, peaceful assurance of God's good will
+toward you, deliverance from your sins, and a share in the likeness
+of Him who on this day made Himself of no reputation, and took on Him
+the form of a slave.
+
+
+
+VI--TRUE ABSTINENCE
+
+
+
+FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT.
+
+I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection.--1 COR. ix. 27.
+
+In the Collect for this day we have just been praying to God, to give
+us grace to use such abstinence, that our flesh being subdued to our
+spirit, we may follow His godly motions.
+
+Now we ought to have meant something when we said these words.  What
+did we mean by them?  Perhaps some of us did not understand them.
+They could not be expected to mean anything by them.  But it is a sad
+thing, a very sad thing, that people will come to church Sunday after
+Sunday, and repeat by rote words which they do not understand, words
+by which they therefore mean nothing, and yet never care or try to
+understand them.
+
+What are the words there for, except to be understood?  All of you
+call people foolish, who submit to have prayers read in their
+churches in a foreign language, which none, at least of the poor, can
+understand.  But what right have you to call them foolish, if you,
+whose Prayer-books are written in English, take no trouble to find
+out the meaning of them?  Would to Heaven that you would try to find
+out the meaning of the Prayer-book!  Would to Heaven that the day
+would come, when anyone in this parish who was puzzled by any
+doctrine of religion, or by any text in the Bible, or word in the
+Prayer-book, would come confidently to me, and ask me to explain it
+to him!  God knows, I should think it an honour and a pleasure, as
+well as a duty.  I should think no time better spent than in
+answering your questions.  I do beseech you to ask me, every one of
+you, when and where you like, any questions about religion which come
+into your minds.  Why am I put in this parish, except to teach you?
+and how can I teach you better, than by answering your questions?  As
+it is, I am disheartened, and all but hopeless, at times, about the
+state of this parish, and the work I am trying to do here; because,
+though you will come and hear me, thank God, willingly enough, you do
+not seem yet to have gained confidence enough in me, or to have
+learnt to care sufficiently about the best things, to ask questions
+of me about them.  My dear friends, if you wanted to get information
+about anything you really cared for, you would ask questions enough.
+If you wanted to know some way to a place on earth you would ask it;
+why not ask your way to things better than this earth can give?  But
+whether or not you will question me I must go on preaching to you,
+though whether or not you care to listen is more, alas! than I can
+tell.
+
+But listen to me, now, I beseech you, while I try to explain to you
+the meaning of the words which you have been just using in this
+Collect.  You have asked God to give you grace to use abstinence.
+Now what is the meaning of abstinence?  Abstinence means abstaining,
+refraining, keeping back of your own will from doing something which
+you might do.  Take an example.  When a man for his health's sake, or
+his purse's sake, or any other good reason, drinks less liquor than
+he might if he chose, he abstains from liquor.  He uses abstinence
+about liquor.  There are other things in which a man may abstain.
+Indeed, he may abstain from doing anything he likes.  He may abstain
+from eating too much; from lying in bed too long; from reading too
+much; from taking too much pleasure; from making money; from spending
+money; from right things; from wrong things; from things which are
+neither right nor wrong; on all these he may use abstinence.  He may
+abstain for many reasons; for good ones, or for bad ones.  A miser
+will abstain from all sorts of comforts to hoard up money.  A
+superstitious man may abstain from comforts, because he thinks God
+grudges them to him, or because he thinks God is pleased by the
+unhappiness of His creatures, or because he has been taught, poor
+wretch, that if he makes himself uncomfortable in this life, he shall
+have more comfort, more honour, more reason for pride and self-
+glorification, in the life to come.  Or a man may abstain from one
+pleasure, just to be able to enjoy another all the more; as some
+great gamblers drink nothing but water, in order to keep their heads
+clear for cheating.  All these are poor reasons; some of them base,
+some of them wicked reasons for abstaining from anything.  Therefore,
+abstinence is not a good thing in itself; for if a thing is good in
+itself, it can never be wrong.  Love is good in itself, and,
+therefore, you cannot love anyone for a bad reason.  Justice is good
+in itself, pity is good in itself, and, therefore, you can never be
+wrong in being just or pitiful.
+
+But abstinence is not a good thing in itself.  If it were, we should
+all be bound to abstain always from everything pleasant, and make
+ourselves as miserable and uncomfortable as possible, as some
+superstitious persons used to do in old times.  Abstinence is only
+good when it is used for a good reason.  If a man abstains from
+pleasure himself, to save up for his children; if he abstains from
+over eating and over drinking, to keep his mind clear and quiet; if
+he abstains from sleep and ease, in order to have time to see his
+business properly done; if he abstains from spending money on
+himself, in order to spend it for others; if he abstains from any
+habit, however harmless or pleasant, because he finds it lead him
+towards what is wrong, and put him into temptation; then he does
+right; then he is doing God's work; then he may expect God's
+blessing; then he is trying to do what we all prayed God to help us
+to do, when we said, "Give us grace to use such abstinence;" then he
+is doing, more or less, what St. Paul says he did, "Keeping his body
+under, and bringing it into subjection."
+
+For, see, the Collect does not say, "Give us grace to use
+abstinence," as if abstinence were a good thing in itself, but "to
+use such abstinence, that"--to use a certain kind of abstinence, and
+that for a certain purpose, and that purpose a good one; such
+abstinence that our flesh may be subdued to our spirit; that our
+flesh, the animal, bodily nature which is in us, loving ease and
+pleasure, may not be our master, but our servant; so that we may not
+follow blindly our own appetites, and do just what we like, as brute
+beasts which have no understanding.  And our flesh is to be subdued
+to our spirit for a certain purpose; not because our flesh is bad,
+and our spirit good; not in order that we may puff ourselves up and
+admire ourselves, and say, as the philosophers among the heathen
+used, "What a strong-minded, sober, self-restraining man I am!  How
+fine it is to be able to look down on my neighbours, who cannot help
+being fond of enjoying themselves, and cannot help caring for this
+world's good things.  I am above all that.  I want nothing, and I
+feel nothing, and nothing can make me glad or sorry.  I am master of
+my own mind, and own no law but my own will."  The Collect gives us
+the true and only reason, for which it is right to subdue our
+appetites; which is, that we may keep our minds clear and strong
+enough to listen to the voice of God within our hearts and reasons;
+to obey the motions of God's Spirit in us; not to make our bodies our
+masters, but to live as God's servants.
+
+This is St. Paul's meaning, when he speaks of keeping under his body,
+and bringing it into subjection.  The exact word which he uses,
+however, is a much stronger one than merely "keeping under;" it means
+simply, to beat a man's face black and blue; and his reason for using
+such a strong word about the matter is, to show us that he thought no
+labour too hard, no training too sharp, which teaches us how to
+restrain ourselves, and keep our appetites and passions in manful and
+godly control.
+
+Now, a few verses before my text, St. Paul takes an example from
+foot-racers.  "These foot-racers," he says, "heathens though they
+are, and only trying to win a worthless prize, the petty honour of a
+crown of leaves, see what trouble they take; how they exercise their
+limbs; how careful and temperate they are in eating and drinking, how
+much pain and fatigue they go through to get themselves into perfect
+training for a race.  How much more trouble ought we to take to make
+ourselves fit to do God's work?  For these foot-racers do all this
+only to gain a garland which will wither in a week; but we, to gain a
+garland which will never fade away; a garland of holiness, and
+righteousness, and purity, and the likeness of Jesus Christ."
+
+The next example of abstinence which St. Paul takes, is from the
+prize-fighters, who were very numerous and very famous, in the
+country in which the Corinthians lived.  "I fight," he says, "not
+like one who beats the air;" that is, not like a man who is only
+brandishing his hands and sparring in jest, but like a man who knows
+that he has a fight to fight in hard earnest; a terrible lifelong
+fight against sin, the world, and the devil; "and, therefore," he
+says, "I do as these fighters do."  They, poor savage and brutal
+heathens as they are, go through a long and painful training.  Their
+very practice is not play; it is grim earnest.  They stand up to
+strike, and be struck, and are bruised and disfigured as a matter of
+course, in order that they may learn not to flinch from pain, or lose
+their tempers, or turn cowards, when they have to fight.  "And so do
+I," says St. Paul; "they, poor men, submit to painful and
+disagreeable things to make them brave in their paltry battles.  I
+submit to painful and disagreeable things, to make me brave in the
+great battle which I have to fight against sin, and ignorance, and
+heathendom."  "Therefore," he says, in another place, "I take
+pleasure in afflictions, in persecutions, in necessities, in
+distresses;" and that not because those things were pleasant, they
+were just as unpleasant to him as to anyone else; but because they
+taught him to bear, taught him to be brave; taught him, in short, to
+become a perfect man of God.
+
+This is St. Paul's account of his own training:  in the Epistle for
+to-day we have another account of it; a description of the life which
+he led, and which he was content to lead--"in much suffering, in
+stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labours, in watching, in
+fastings"--and an account, too, of the temper which he had learnt to
+show amid such a life of vexation, and suffering, and shame, and
+danger--"approving himself in all things the minister of God, by
+pureness, by wisdom, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the spirit of
+holiness, by love unfeigned;" "as dying, and behold we live; as
+chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as
+poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing all
+things."--In all things proving himself a true messenger from God, by
+being able to dare and to endure for God's sake, what no man ever
+would have dared and endured for his own sake.
+
+"But"--someone may say--"St. Paul was an apostle; he had a great work
+to do in the world; he had to turn the heathen to God; and it is
+likely enough that he required to train himself, and keep strict
+watch over all his habits, and ways of thinking and behaving, lest he
+should grow selfish, lazy, cowardly, covetous, fond of ease and
+amusement.  He had, of course, to lead a life of strange suffering
+and danger; and he had therefore to train himself for it.  But what
+need have we to do as St. Paul did?"
+
+Just as much need, my good friends, if you could see it.
+
+Which of us has not to lead a life of suffering?  We shall each and
+all of us, have our full share of trouble before we die, doubt it
+not.
+
+And which of us has not to lead a life of danger?  I do not mean
+bodily danger; of that, there is little enough--perhaps too little--
+in England now; but of danger to our hearts, minds, characters?  Oh,
+my friends, I pity those who do not think themselves in danger every
+day of their lives, for the less danger they see around them, the
+more danger there is.  There is not only the common danger of
+temptation, but over and above it, the worse danger of not knowing
+temptation when it comes.  Who will be most likely to walk into pits
+and mires upon the moor--the man who knows that they are there around
+him, or the man who goes on careless and light of heart, fancying
+that it is all smooth ground?  Woe to you, young people, if you fancy
+that you are to have no woe!  Danger to you, young people, if you
+fancy yourselves in no danger!
+
+"This is sad and dreary news"--some of you may say.  Ay, my friends,
+it would be sad and dreary news indeed; and this earth would be a
+very sad and dreary place; and life with all its troubles and
+temptations, would not be worth having, if it were not for the
+blessed news which the Gospel for this day brings us.  That makes up
+for all the sadness of the Epistle; that gives us hope; that tells us
+of one who has been through life, and through death too, yet without
+sin.  That tells us of one who has endured a thousand times more
+temptation than we ever shall, a thousand times more trouble than we
+ever shall, and yet has conquered it all; and that He who has thus
+been through all our temptations, borne all our weaknesses, is our
+King, our Saviour, who loves us, who teaches us, who has promised us
+His Holy Spirit, to make us like Himself, strong, brave, and patient,
+to endure all that man or devil, or our own low animal tempers and
+lusts, can do to hurt us.  The Gospel for this day tells us how He
+went and was alone in the wilderness with the wild beasts, and yet
+trusted in God, His Father and ours, to keep Him safe.  How He went
+without food forty days and nights, and yet in His extreme hunger,
+refused to do the least self-willed or selfish thing to get Himself
+food.  Is that no lesson, no message of hope for the poor man who is
+tempted by hunger to steal, or tempted by need to do a mean and
+selfish thing, to hear that the Lord Jesus Christ, who bore need and
+hunger far worse than his, understands all his temptations, and feels
+for him, and pities him, and has promised him God's Spirit to make
+him strong, as He himself was?
+
+Is it no comfort to young people who are tempted to vanity, and
+display, and self-willed conceited longings, tempted to despise the
+advice of their parents and elders, and set up for themselves, and
+choose their own way--Is it no good news, I say, for them to hear
+that their Lord and Saviour was tempted to it also, and conquered
+it?--That He will teach them to answer the temptation as He did, when
+He refused even to let angels hold Him over the temple, up between
+earth and heaven, for a sign and a wonder to all the Jews, because
+God His Father had not bidden Him to do it, and therefore He would
+not tempt the Lord His God?
+
+Is it no good news, again, to those who are tempted to do perhaps one
+little outward wrong thing, to yield on some small point to the ways
+of the world, in order to help themselves on in life, to hear that
+their Lord and Saviour conquered that temptation too?--That he
+refused all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, when
+the devil offered them, because he knew that the devil could not give
+them to Him; that all wealth, and power, and glory belonged to God,
+and was to be got only by serving Him?
+
+Oh do you all, young people especially, think of this.  As you grow
+up and go out into life, you will be tempted in a hundred different
+ways, by things which are pleasant--everyone knows that they are
+pleasant enough--but wrong.  One will be tempted to be vain of dress;
+another to be self-conceited; another to be lazy and idle; another to
+be extravagant and roving; another to be over fond of amusement;
+another to be over fond of money; another to be over fond of liquor;
+another to go wrong, as too many young men and young women do, and
+bring themselves, and those with whom they keep company, and whom
+they ought, if they really love them, to respect and honour, down
+into sin and shame.  You will all be tempted, and you will all be
+troubled; one by poverty, one by sickness, one by the burden of a
+family, one by being laughed at for trying to do right.  But
+remember, oh remember, whenever a temptation comes upon you, that the
+blessed Jesus has been through it all, and conquered all, and that
+His will is, that you shall be holy and pure like Him, and that,
+therefore, if you but ask Him, He will give you strength to keep
+pure.  When you are tempted, pray to Him:  the struggle in your own
+minds will, no doubt, be very great; it will be very hard work for
+you--sin looks so pleasant on the outside!  Poor souls, it is a sad
+struggle for you!  Many a poor young fellow, who goes wrong, deserves
+rather to be pitied than to be punished.  Well then, if no man else
+will pity him, Jesus, the Man of all men, will.  Pray to Him!  Cry
+aloud to Him!  Ask Him to make you stout-hearted, patient, really
+manful, to fight against temptation.  Ask Him to give you strength of
+mind to fight against all bad habits.  Ask Him to open your eyes to
+see when you are in danger.  Ask Him to help you to keep out of the
+way of temptation.  Ask Him, in short, to give you grace to use such
+abstinence that your flesh may be subdued to your spirit.  And then
+you will not follow, as the beasts do, just what seems pleasant to
+your flesh; no, you will be able to obey Christ's godly motions, that
+is, to do, as well as to love, the good desires which He puts into
+your hearts.  You will do not merely what is pleasant, but what is
+right; you will not be your own slaves, you will be your own masters,
+and God's loyal and obedient sons; you will not be, as too many are,
+mere animals going about in the shape of men, but truly men at heart,
+who are not afraid of pain, poverty, shame, trouble, or death itself,
+when they are in the right path, about the work to which God has
+called them.
+
+But if you ask Christ to make true men and women of you, you must
+believe that He will give you what you ask; if you ask Him to help
+you, you must believe that He will and does help you--you must
+believe that it is He Himself who has put into your hearts the very
+desire of being holy and strong at all; and therefore you must
+believe that you can help yourselves.  Help yourselves, and He will
+help you.  If you ask for His help, He will give it.  But what is the
+use of His giving it, if you do not use it?  To him who has shall be
+given, and he shall have more; but from him who has not shall be
+taken away even what he seems to have.  Therefore do not merely pray,
+but struggle and try YOURSELVES.  Train yourselves as St. Paul did;
+train yourselves to keep your temper; train yourselves to bear
+unpleasant things for the sake of your duty; train yourselves to keep
+out of temptation; train yourselves to be forgiving, gentle, thrifty,
+industrious, sober, temperate, cleanly, as modest as little children
+in your words, and thoughts, and conduct.  And God, when He sees you
+trying to be all this, will help you to be so.  It may be hard to
+educate yourselves.  Life is a hard business at best--you will find
+it a thousand times harder, though, if you are slaves to your own
+fleshly sins.  But the more you struggle against sin, the less hard
+you will find it to fight; the more you resist the devil, the more he
+will flee from you; the more you try to conquer your own bad
+passions, the more God will help you to conquer them; it may be a
+hard battle, but it is a sure one.  No fear but that everyone can, if
+he will, work out his own salvation, for it is God Himself who works
+in us to will and to do of His good pleasure.  All you have to do is
+to give yourselves up to Him, to study His laws, to labour as well as
+long to keep them, and He will enable you to keep them; He will teach
+you in a thousand unexpected ways; He will daily renew and strengthen
+your hearts by the working of His Spirit, that you may more and more
+know, and love, and do, what is right; and you will go on from
+strength to strength, to the height of perfect men, to the likeness
+of Jesus Christ the Lord, who conquered all human temptations for
+your sake, that He might be a high-priest who can be touched with the
+feeling of our infirmities, because He was tempted in all points like
+as we are, yet without sin.
+
+
+
+VII--GOOD FRIDAY
+
+
+
+In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of His
+presence saved them.  In His love and in His pity He redeemed them;
+and He bare them and carried them all the days of old.--ISAIAH lxiii.
+9.
+
+On this very day, at this very hour, 1817 years ago, hung one nailed
+to a cross; bruised and bleeding, pierced and naked, dying a felon's
+death between two thieves; in perfect misery, in utter shame, mocked
+and insulted by all the great, the rich, the learned of His nation;
+one who had grown up as a man of low birth, believed by all to be a
+carpenter's son; without scholarship, money, respectability; even
+without a home wherein to lay His head--and here was the end of His
+life!  True, He had preached noble words, He had done noble deeds:
+but what had they helped Him?  They had not made the rich, the
+learned, the respectable, the religious believe on Him; they had not
+saved Him from persecution, and insult, and death.  The only mourners
+who stood by to weep over His dying agonies were His mother, a poor
+countrywoman; a young fisherman; and one who had been a harlot and a
+sinner.  There was an end!
+
+Do you know who that Man was?  He was your King; the King of rich and
+poor; and He was your King, not in spite of His suffering all that
+shame and misery, but just because He suffered it; because He chose
+to be poor, and miserable, and despised; because He endured the
+cross, despising the shame; because He took upon Himself to fulfil
+His Father's will, all ills which flesh is heir to--therefore He is
+now your King, the Saviour of the world, the poor man's friend, the
+Lord of heaven and earth.  Is He such a King as YOU wish for?
+
+Is He the sort of King you want, my friends?  Does He fulfil your
+notions of what the poor man's friend should be?  Do you, in your
+hearts, wish He had been somewhat richer, more glorious, more
+successful in the world's eyes--a wealthy and prosperous man, like
+Solomon of old?  Are any of you ready to say, as the money-blinded
+Jews said, when they demanded their true King to be crucified, "We
+have no king but Caesar?--Provided the law-makers and the authorities
+take care of our interests, and protect our property, and do not make
+us pay too many rates and taxes, that is enough for us."  Will you
+have no king but Caesar?  Alas! those who say that, find that the law
+is but a weak deliverer, too weak to protect them from selfishness,
+and covetousness, and decent cruelty; and so Caesar and the law have
+to give place to Mammon, the god of money.  Do we not see it in these
+very days?  And Mammon is weak, too.  This world is not a shop, men
+are not merely money-makers and wages-earners.  There are more things
+in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in that sort of philosophy.
+Self-interest and covetousness cannot keep society orderly and
+peaceful, let sham philosophers say what they will.  And then comes
+tyranny, lawlessness, rich and poor staining their hands in each
+other's blood, as we saw happen in France two years ago; and so,
+after all, Mammon has to give place to Moloch, the fiend of murder
+and cruelty; and woe to rich and poor when he reigns over them!  Ay,
+woe--woe to rich and poor when they choose anyone for their king but
+their real and rightful Lord and Master, Jesus, the poor man,
+afflicted in all their afflictions, the Man of sorrows, crucified on
+this day.
+
+Is He the kind of King you like?  Make up your minds, my friends--
+make up your minds!  For whether you like Him or not, your King He
+was, your King He is, your King He will be, blessed be God, for ever.
+Blessed be God, indeed!  If He were not our King; if anyone in heaven
+or earth was Lord of us, except the Man of sorrows, the Prince of
+sufferers, what hope, what comfort would there be?  What a horrible,
+black, fathomless riddle this sad, diseased, moaning world would be!
+No king would suit us but the Prince of sufferers--Jesus, who has
+borne all this world's griefs, and carried all its sorrows--Jesus,
+who has Himself smarted under pain and hunger, oppression and insult,
+treachery and desertion, who knows them all, feels for them all, and
+will right them all, in His own good time.
+
+Believing in Jesus, we can travel on, through one wild parish after
+another, upon English soil, and see, as I have done, the labourer who
+tills the land worse housed than the horse he drives, worse clothed
+than the sheep he shears, worse nourished than the hog he feeds--and
+yet not despair:  for the Prince of sufferers is the labourer's
+Saviour; He has tasted hunger, and thirst, and weariness, poverty,
+oppression, and neglect; the very tramp who wanders houseless on the
+moorside is His brother; in his sufferings the Saviour of the world
+has shared, when the foxes had holes, and the birds of the air had
+nests, while the Son of God had not where to lay His head.  He is the
+King of the poor, firstborn among many brethren; His tenderness is
+Almighty, and for the poor He has prepared deliverance, perhaps in
+this world, surely in the world to come--boundless deliverance, out
+of the treasures of His boundless love.
+
+Believing in Jesus, we can pass by mines, and factories, and by
+dungeons darker and fouler still, in the lanes and alleys of our
+great towns and cities, where thousands and tens of thousands of
+starving men, and wan women, and children grown old before their
+youth, sit toiling and pining in Mammon's prison-house, in worse than
+Egyptian bondage, to earn such pay as just keeps the broken heart
+within the worn-out body;--ay, we can go through our great cities,
+even now, and see the women, whom God intended to be Christian wives
+and mothers, the slaves of the rich man's greed by day, the
+playthings of his lust by night--and yet not despair; for we can cry,
+No! thou proud Mammon, money-making fiend!  These are not thine, but
+Christ's; they belong to Him who died on the cross; and though thou
+heedest not their sighs, He marks them all, for He has sighed like
+them; though there be no pity in thee, there is in Him the pity of a
+man, ay, and the indignation of a God!  He treasures up their tears;
+He understands their sorrows; His judgment of their guilt is not like
+thine, thou Pharisee!  He is their Lord, who said, that to those to
+whom little was given, of them shall little be required.  Generation
+after generation, they are being made perfect by sufferings, as their
+Saviour was before them; and then, woe to thee!  For even as He led
+Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and a stretched-out arm, and
+signs and wonders, great and terrible, so shall He lead the poor out
+of their misery, and make them households like a flock of sheep; even
+as He led Israel through the wilderness, tender, forbearing, knowing
+whereof they were made, having mercy on all their brutalities, and
+idolatries, murmurings, and backslidings, afflicted in all their
+afflictions--even while He was punishing them outwardly, as He is
+punishing the poor man now--even so shall He lead this people out in
+His good time, into a good land and large, a land of wheat and wine,
+of milk and honey; a rest which He has prepared for His poor, such as
+eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart
+of man to conceive.  He can do it; for the Almighty Deliverer is His
+name.  He will do it; for His name is Love.  He knows how to do it;
+for He has borne the griefs, and carried the sorrows of the poor.
+
+Oh, sad hearts and suffering!  Anxious and weary ones!  Look to the
+cross this day!  There hung your king!  The King of sorrowing souls,
+and more, the King of sorrows.  Ay, pain and grief, tyranny and
+desertion, death and hell, He has faced them one and all, and tried
+their strength, and taught them His, and conquered them right
+royally!  And, since He hung upon that torturing cross, sorrow is
+divine, god-like, as joy itself.  All that man's fallen nature dreads
+and despises, God honoured on the cross, and took unto Himself, and
+blessed, and consecrated for ever.  And now, blessed are the poor, if
+they are poor in heart, as well as purse; for Jesus was poor, and
+theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are the hungry, if they
+hunger for righteousness as well as food; for Jesus hungered, and
+they shall be filled.  Blessed are those who mourn, if they mourn not
+only for their afflictions, but for their sins, and for the sins they
+see around them; for on this day, Jesus mourned for our sins; on this
+day He was made sin for us, who knew no sin; and they shall be
+comforted.  Blessed are those who are ashamed of themselves, and hate
+themselves, and humble themselves before God this day; for on this
+day Jesus humbled Himself for us; and they shall be exalted.  Blessed
+are the forsaken and the despised.--Did not all men forsake Jesus
+this day, in His hour of need? and why not thee, too, thou poor
+deserted one?  Shall the disciple be above his Master?  No; everyone
+that is perfect, must be like his master.  The deeper, the bitterer
+your loneliness, the more are you like Him, who cried upon the cross,
+"My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"  He knows what that
+grief, too, is like.  He feels for thee, at least.  Though all
+forsake thee, He is with thee still; and if He be with thee, what
+matter who has left thee for a while?  Ay, blessed are those that
+weep now, for they shall laugh.  It is those whom the Lord loveth
+that He chasteneth.  And because He loves the poor, He brings them
+low.  All things are blessed now, but sin; for all things, excepting
+sin, are redeemed by the life and death of the Son of God.  Blessed
+are wisdom and courage, joy, and health, and beauty, love and
+marriage, childhood and manhood, corn and wine, fruits and flowers,
+for Christ redeemed them by His life.  And blessed, too, are tears
+and shame, blessed are weakness and ugliness, blessed are agony and
+sickness, blessed the sad remembrance of our sins, and a broken
+heart, and a repentant spirit.  Blessed is death, and blessed the
+unknown realms, where souls await the resurrection day, for Christ
+redeemed them by His death.  Blessed are all things, weak, as well as
+strong.  Blessed are all days, dark, as well as bright, for all are
+His, and He is ours; and all are ours, and we are His, for ever.
+
+Therefore sigh on, ye sad ones, and rejoice in your own sadness; ache
+on, ye suffering ones, and rejoice in your own sorrows.  Rejoice that
+you are made free of the holy brotherhood of mourners, that you may
+claim your place, too, if you will, among the noble army of martyrs.
+Rejoice that you are counted worthy of a fellowship in the sufferings
+of the Son of God.  Rejoice and trust on, for after sorrow shall come
+joy.  Trust on; for in man's weakness God's strength shall be made
+perfect.  Trust on, for death is the gate of life.  Endure on to the
+end, and possess your souls in patience for a little while, and that,
+perhaps, a very little while.  Death comes swiftly; and more swiftly
+still, perhaps, the day of the Lord.  The deeper the sorrow, the
+nearer the salvation:
+
+
+The night is darkest before the dawn;
+When the pain is sorest the child is born;
+And the day of the Lord is at hand.
+
+
+Ay, if the worst should come; if neither the laws of your country nor
+the benevolence of the righteous were strong enough to defend you; if
+one charitable plan after another were to fail; if the labour-market
+were getting fuller and fuller, and poverty were spreading wider and
+wider, and crime and misery were breeding faster and still faster
+every year than education and religion; all hope for the poor seemed
+gone and lost, and they were ready to believe the men who tell them
+that the land is over-peopled--that there are too many of us, too
+many industrious hands, too many cunning brains, too many immortal
+souls, too many of God's children upon God's earth, which God the
+Father made, and God the Son redeemed, and God the Holy Spirit
+teaches:  then the Lord, the Prince of sufferers, He who knows your
+every grief, and weeps with you tear for tear, He would come out of
+His place to smite the haughty ones, and confound the cunning ones,
+and silence the loud ones, and empty the full ones; to judge with
+righteousness for the meek of the earth, to hearken to the prayer of
+the poor, whose heart he has been preparing, and to help the
+fatherless and needy to their right, that the man of the world may be
+no more exalted against them.
+
+In that day men will find out a wonder and miracle.  They will see
+many that are first last, and many that are last first.  They will
+find that there were poor who were the richest after all; the simple
+who were wisest, and gentle who were bravest, and weak who were
+strongest; that God's ways are not as men's ways, nor God's thoughts
+as men's thoughts.  Alas, who shall stand when God does this?  At
+least He who will do it is Jesus, who loved us to the death;
+boundless love and gentleness, boundless generosity and pity; who was
+tempted even as we are, who has felt our every weakness.  In that
+thought is utter comfort, that our Judge will be He who died and rose
+again, and is praying for us even now, to His Father and our Father.
+Therefore fear not, gentle souls, patient souls, pure consciences and
+tender hearts.  Fear not, you who are empty and hungry, who walk in
+darkness and see no light; for though He fulfil once more, as He has
+again and again, the awful prophecy before the text; though He tread
+down the people in His anger, and make them drunk in His fury, and
+bring their strength to the earth; though kings with their armies may
+flee, and the stars which light the earth may fall, and there be
+great tribulation, wars, and rumours of wars, and on earth distress
+of nations with perplexity--yet it is when the day of His vengeance
+is at hand, that the year of His redeemed is come.  And when they see
+all these things, let them rejoice and lift up their heads, for their
+redemption draweth nigh.
+
+Do you ask how I know this?  Do you ask for a sign, for a token that
+these my words are true?  I know that they are true.  But, as for
+tokens, I will give you but this one, the sign of that bread and that
+wine.  When the Lord shall have delivered His people out of all their
+sorrows, they shall eat of that bread and drink of that wine, one and
+all, in the kingdom of God.
+
+
+
+VIII--EASTER-DAY
+
+
+
+If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,
+where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God--COLOSSIANS iii. 1.
+
+I know no better way of preaching to you the gospel of Easter, the
+good news which this day brings to all men, year after year, than by
+trying to explain to you the Epistle appointed for this day, which we
+have just read.
+
+It begins, "If ye then be risen with Christ."  Now that does not mean
+that St. Paul had any doubt whether the Colossians, to whom he was
+speaking, were risen with Christ or not.  He does not mean, "I am not
+sure whether you are risen or not; but perhaps you are not; but if
+you are, you ought to do such and such things."  He does not mean
+that.  He was quite sure that these Colossians were risen with
+Christ.  He had no doubt of it whatsoever.  If you look at the
+chapter before, he says so.  He tells them that they were buried with
+Christ in baptism, in which also they were risen with Christ, through
+faith of the operation of God, who has raised Him from the dead.
+
+Now what reason had St. Paul to believe that these Colossians were
+risen with Jesus Christ?  Because they had given up sin and were
+leading holy lives?  That cannot be.  The Epistle for this day says
+the very opposite.  It does not say, "You are risen, because you have
+left off sinning."  It says, "You must leave off sinning, because you
+are risen."  Was it then on account of any experiences, or inward
+feeling of theirs?  Not at all.  He says that these Colossians had
+been baptized, and that they had believed in God's work of raising
+Jesus Christ from the dead, and that therefore they were risen with
+Christ.  In one word, they had believed the message of Easter-day,
+and therefore they shared in the blessings of Easter-day; as it is
+written in another place, "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the
+Lord Jesus Christ, and believe in thy heart that God has raised Him
+from the dead, thou shalt be saved."
+
+Now these seem very wide words, too wide to please most people.  But
+there are wider words still in St. Paul's epistles.  He tells us
+again and again that God's mercy is a free gift; that He has made to
+us a free present of His Son Jesus Christ.  That He has taken away
+the effect of all men's sin, and more than that, that men are God's
+children; that they have a right to believe that they are so, because
+they are so.  For, He says, the free gift of Jesus Christ is not like
+Adam's offence.  It is not less than it, narrower than it, as some
+folks say.  It is not that by Adam's sin all became sinners, and by
+Jesus Christ's salvation an elect few out of them shall be made
+righteous.  If you will think a moment, you will see that it cannot
+be so.  For Jesus Christ conquered sin and death and the devil.  But
+if, as some think, sin and death and the devil have destroyed and
+sent to hell by far the greater part of mankind, then they have
+conquered Christ, and not Christ them.  Mankind belonged to Christ at
+first.  Sin and death and the devil came in and ruined them, and then
+Christ came to redeem them; but if all that He has been able to do is
+to redeem one out of a thousand, or even nine out of ten, of them,
+then the devil has had the best of the battle.  He, and not Christ,
+is the conqueror.  If a thief steals all the sheep on your farm, and
+all that you can get back from him is a part of the whole flock,
+which has had the best of it, you or the thief?  If Christ's
+redemption is meant for only a few, or even a great many elect souls
+out of all the millions of mankind, which has had the best of it,
+Christ, the master of the sheep, or the devil, the robber and
+destroyer of them?  Be sure, my friends, Christ is stronger than
+that; His love is deeper than that; His redemption is wider than
+that.  How strong, how deep, how wide it is, we never shall know.
+St. Paul tells us that we never shall know, for it is boundless; but
+that we shall go on knowing more and more of its vastness for ever,
+finding it deeper, wider, loftier than our most glorious dreams could
+ever picture it.  But this, he says, we do know, that we have gained
+more than Adam lost.  For if by one man's offence many were made
+sinners, much more shall they who receive abundance of grace and of
+the gift of righteousness reign in life by one even Jesus Christ.
+For, he says, where sin abounded, God's grace and free gift has much
+more abounded.  Therefore, as by the offence of one, judgment came
+upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one the
+free gift came upon all men to justification of life.  Upon all men,
+you see.  There can be no doubt about it.  Upon you and me, and
+foreigners, and gipsies, and heathens, and thieves, and harlots--upon
+all mankind, let them be as bad or as good, as young or as old, as
+they may, the free gift of God has come to justification of life;
+they are justified, pardoned, and beloved in the sight of Almighty
+God; they have a right and a share to a new life; a different sort of
+life from what they are inclined to lead, and do lead, by nature--to
+a life which death cannot take away, a life which may grow, and
+strengthen, and widen, and blossom, and bear fruit for ever and ever.
+They have a share in Christ's resurrection, in the blessing of
+Easter-day.  They have a share in Christ, every one of them whether
+they claim that share or not.  How far they will be punished for not
+claiming it, is a very different matter, of which we know nothing
+whatsoever.  And how far the heathen who have never heard of Christ,
+or of their share in Him, will be punished, we know not--we are not
+meant to know.  But we know that to their own Master they stand or
+fall, and that their Master is our Master too, and that He is a just
+Master, and requires little of him to whom He gives little; a just
+and merciful Master, who loved this sinful world enough to come down
+and die for it, while mankind were all rebels and sinners, and has
+gone on taking care of it, and improving it, in spite of all its sin
+and rebellion ever since, and that is enough for us.
+
+St. Paul knew no more.  It was a mystery, he says, a wonderful and
+unfathomable matter, which had been hidden since the foundation of
+the world, of which he himself says that he saw only through a glass
+darkly; and we cannot expect to have clearer eyes than he.  But this
+he seems to have seen, that the Lord, when He rose again, bought a
+blessing even for the dumb beasts and the earth on which we live.
+For he says, the whole creation is now groaning in the pangs of
+labour, being about to bring forth something; and the whole creation
+will rise again; how, and when, and into what new state, we cannot
+tell.  But St. Paul seems to say that when the Lord shall destroy
+death, the last of his enemies, then the whole creation shall be
+renewed, and bring forth another earth, nobler and more beautiful
+than this one, free from death, and sin, and sorrow, and redeemed
+into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
+
+But this, on the other hand, St. Paul did see most clearly, and
+preached it to all to whom he spoke, that the ground and reason of
+this great and glorious mystery was the thing which happened on the
+first Easter-day, namely, the Lord Jesus rising from the dead.  About
+that, at least, there was no doubt at all in his mind.  We may see it
+by the Easter anthem, which we read this morning, taken out of the
+fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians:
+
+"Christ is risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them
+that slept.
+
+"For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of
+the dead.
+
+"For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
+
+Now he is not talking here merely of the rising again of our bodies
+at the last day.  That was in his mind only the end, and outcome, and
+fruit, and perfecting, of men's rising from the dead in this life.
+For he tells these same Corinthians, and the Colossians, and others
+to whom he wrote, that life, the eternal life which would raise their
+bodies at the last day, was even then working in them.
+
+Neither is he speaking only of a few believers.  He says that, owing
+to the Lord's rising on this day, all shall be made alive--not merely
+all Christians, but all men.  For he does not say, as in Adam all
+Christians die, but all men; and so he does not say, all Christians
+shall be made alive, but all men.  For here, as in the sixth chapter
+of Romans, he is trying to make us understand the likeness between
+Adam and Jesus Christ, whom he calls the new Adam.  The first Adam,
+he says, was only a living soul, as the savages and heathens are; but
+the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, the true pattern of men, is a
+quickening, life-giving spirit, to give eternal life to every human
+being who will accept His offer, and claim his share and right as a
+true man, after the likeness of the new Adam, Jesus Christ.
+
+We then, every one of us who is here to-day, have a right to believe
+that we have a share in Christ's eternal life:  that our original
+sin, that is, the sinfulness which we inherited from our forefathers,
+is all forgiven and forgotten, and that mankind is now redeemed, and
+belongs to the second Adam, the true and original head and pattern of
+man, Jesus Christ, in whom was no sin; and that because mankind
+belongs to him, God is well pleased with them, and reconciled to
+them, and looks on them not as a guilty, but as a pardoned and
+beloved race of beings.
+
+And we have a right to believe also, that because all power is given
+to Christ in heaven and earth, there is given to Him the power of
+making men what they ought to be--like His own blessed, and glorious,
+and perfect self.  Ask him, and you shall receive; knock at the gate
+of His treasure-house, and it shall be opened.  Seek those things
+that are above, and you shall find them.  You shall find old bad
+habits die out in you, new good habits spring up in you; old
+meannesses become weaker, new nobleness and manfulness become
+stronger; the old, selfish, covetous, savage, cunning, cowardly,
+brutal Adam dying out, the new, loving, brotherly, civilised, wise,
+brave, manful Adam growing up in you, day by day, to perfection, till
+you are changed from grace to grace, and glory to glory into the
+likeness of the Lord of men.
+
+"These are great promises," you may say, "glorious promises; but what
+proof have you that they belong to us?  They sound too good to be
+true; too great for such poor creatures as we are; give us but some
+proof that we have a right to them; give us but a pledge from Jesus
+Christ; give us but a sign, an assurance from God, and we may believe
+you then."
+
+My friends, I am certain--and the longer I live I am the more
+certain--that there is no argument, no pledge, no sign, no assurance,
+like the bread and the wine upon that table.  Assurances in our own
+hearts and souls are good, but we may be mistaken about them; for,
+after all, they are our own thoughts, notions in our own souls, these
+inward experiences and assurances; delightful and comforting as they
+are at times, yet we cannot trust them--we cannot trust our own
+hearts, they are deceitful above all things, who can know them?  Yes:
+our own hearts may tell us lies; they may make us fancy that we are
+pleasing God, when we are doing the things most hateful to Him.  They
+have made thousands fancy so already.  They may make us fancy we are
+right in God's sight, when we are utterly wrong.  They have made
+thousands fancy so already.  These hearts of ours may make us fancy
+that we have spiritual life in us; that we are in a state higher and
+nobler than the sinners round us, when all the while our spirits are
+dead within us.  They made the Pharisees of old fancy that their
+souls were alive, and pure, and religious, when they were dead and
+damned within them; and they may make us fancy so too.  No:  we
+cannot trust our hearts and inward feelings; but that bread, that
+wine, we can trust.  Our inward feelings are a sign from man; that
+bread and wine are a sign from God.  Our inward feelings may tell us
+what we feel toward God:  that bread, that wine, tell us something
+ten thousand times more important; they tell us what God feels
+towards us.  And God must love us before we can love Him; God must
+pardon us before we can have mercy on ourselves; God must come to us,
+and take hold of us, before we can cling to Him; God must change us,
+before we can become right; God must give us eternal life in our
+hearts before we can feel and enjoy that new life in us.  Then that
+bread, that wine, say that God has done all that for us already; they
+say:  "God does love you; God has pardoned you; God has come to you;
+God is ready and willing to change and convert you; God has given you
+eternal life; and this love, this mercy, this coming to find you out
+while you are wandering in sin, this change, this eternal life, are
+all in His Son Jesus Christ; and that bread, that wine, are the signs
+of it.  It is for the sake of Jesus' blood that God has pardoned you,
+and that cup is the new covenant in His blood.  Come and drink, and
+claim your pardon.  It is simply because Jesus Christ was man, and
+you, too, are men and women, wearing the flesh and blood which Christ
+wore; eating and drinking as Christ ate and drank, and not for any
+works or faith of your own, that God loves you, and has come to you,
+and called you into His family.  This is the Gospel, the good news of
+Christ's free grace, and pardon, and salvation; and that bread, that
+wine, the common food of all men, not merely of the rich, or the
+wise, or the pious, but of saints and penitents, rich and poor.
+Christians and heathens, alike--that plain, common, every-day bread
+and wine--are the signs of it.  Come and take the signs, and claim
+your share in God's love, in God's family.  And it is in Jesus
+Christ, too, that you have eternal life.  It is because you belong to
+Jesus Christ, to mankind, of which He is the head and king, that God
+will change you, strengthen your soul to rise above your sins, raise
+you up daily more and more out of spiritual death, out of
+brutishness, and selfishness, and ignorance, and malice, into an
+eternal life of wisdom, and love, and courage, and mercifulness, and
+patience, and obedience; a life which shall continue through death,
+and beyond death, and raise you up again for ever at the last day,
+because you belong to Christ's body, and have been fed with Christ's
+eternal life.  And that bread, that wine are the signs of it.  "Take,
+eat," said Jesus, "this is my body; drink, this is my blood."  Those
+are the signs that God has given you eternal life, and that this life
+is in His Son.  What better sign would you have?  There is no
+mistaking their message; they can tell you no lies.  And they can,
+and will, bring your own Gospel-blessings to your mind, as nothing
+else can.  They will make you feel, as nothing else can, that you are
+the beloved children of God, heirs of all that your King and Head has
+bought for you, when He died, and rose again upon this day.  He gave
+you the Lord's Supper for a sign.  Do you think that He did not know
+best what the best sign would be?  He said:  "Do this in remembrance
+of me."  Do you think that He did not know better than you, and me,
+and all men, that if you did do it, it would put you in remembrance
+of Him?
+
+Oh! come to His table, this day of all days in the year; and claim
+there your share in His body and His blood, to feed the everlasting
+life in you; which, though you see it not now, though you feel it not
+now, will surely, if you keep it alive in you by daily faith, and
+daily repentance, and daily prayer, and daily obedience, raise you
+up, body and soul, to reign with Him for ever at the last day.
+
+
+
+IV--THE COMFORTER
+
+
+
+FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EASTER.
+
+If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I
+depart, I will send Him unto you--JOHN xvi. 7.
+
+We are now coming near to two great days, Ascension-day and Whit-
+Sunday, which our forefathers have appointed, year by year, to put us
+continually in mind of two great works, which the Lord worked out for
+us, His most unworthy subjects, and still unworthier brothers.
+
+On Ascension-day He ascended up into Heaven, and received gifts for
+men, even for His enemies, that the Lord God might dwell among them;
+and on Whit-Sunday, He sent down those gifts.  The Spirit of God came
+down to dwell in the hearts of men, to be the right of everyone who
+asks for it, white or black, young or old, rich or poor, and never to
+leave this earth as long as there is a human being on it.  And
+because we are coming near to these two great days, the Prayer-book,
+in the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, tries to put us in mind of
+those days, and to make us ready to ask for the blessings of which
+they are the yearly signs and witnesses.  The Gospel for last Sunday
+told us how the Lord told His disciples just before His death, that
+for a little while they should not see Him; and again a little while
+and they should see Him, because he was going to the Father, and that
+they should have great sorrow, but that their sorrow should be turned
+into joy.  And the Gospel for to-day goes further still, and tells us
+why He was going away--that He might send to them the Comforter, His
+Holy Spirit, and that it was expedient--good for them, that He should
+go away; for that if He did not, the Comforter would not come to
+them.  Now, in these words, I do not doubt He was speaking of
+Ascension-day, and of Whit-Sunday; and therefore it is that these
+Gospels have been chosen to be read before Ascension-day and Whit-
+Sunday; and in proportion as we attend to these Gospels, and take in
+the meaning of them, and act accordingly, Ascension-day and Whit-
+Sunday will be a blessing and a profit to us; and in proportion as we
+neglect them, or forget them, Ascension-day and Whit-Sunday will be
+witnesses against our souls at the day of judgment, that the Lord
+Himself condescended to buy for us with His own blood, blessings
+unspeakable, and offer them freely unto us, in spite of all our sins,
+and yet we would have none of them, but preferred our own will to
+God's will, and the little which we thought we could get for
+ourselves, to the unspeakable treasures which God had promised to
+give us, and turned away from the blessings of His kingdom, to our
+own foolish pleasure and covetousness, like "the dog to his vomit,
+and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire."
+
+I said that God had promised to us an unspeakable treasure:  and so
+He has; a treasure that will make the poorest and weakest man among
+us, richer than if he had all the wealth gathered from all the
+nations of the world, which everyone is admiring now in that Great
+Exhibition in London, and stronger than if he had all the wisdom
+which produced that wealth.  Let us see now what it is that God has
+promised us--and then those to whom God has given ears to hear, and
+hearts to understand, will see that large as my words may sound, they
+are no larger than the truth.
+
+Christ said, that if He went away, He would send down the Comforter,
+the Holy Spirit of God.  The Nicene Creed says, that the Holy Spirit
+of God is the Lord and Giver of life; and so He is.  He gives life to
+the earth, to the trees, to the flowers, to the dumb animals, to the
+bodies and minds of men; all life, all growth, all health, all
+strength, all beauty, all order, all help and assistance of one thing
+by another, which you see in the world around you, comes from Him.
+He is the Lord and Giver of life; in Him, the earth, the sun and
+stars, all live and move and have their being.  He is not them, or a
+part of them, but He gives life to them.  But to men He is more than
+that--for we men ourselves are more than that, and need more.  We
+have immortal spirits in us--a reason, a conscience, and a will;
+strange rights and duties, strange hopes and fears, of which the
+beasts and the plants know nothing.  We have hearts in us which can
+love, and feel, and sorrow, and be weak, and sinful, and mistaken;
+and therefore we want a Comforter.  And the Lord and Giver of life
+has promised to be our Comforter; and the Father and the Son, from
+both of whom He proceeds, have promised to send Him to us, to
+strengthen and comfort us, and give our spirits life and health, and
+knit us together to each other, and to God, in one common bond of
+love and fellow-feeling even as He the Spirit knits together the
+Father and the Son.
+
+I said that we want a Comforter.  If we consider what that word
+Comforter means, we shall see that we do want a Comforter, and that
+the only Comforter which can satisfy us for ever and ever, must be
+He, the very Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of life.
+
+Now Comforter means one who gives comfort; so the meaning of it will
+depend upon what comfort means.  Our word comfort, comes from two old
+Latin words, which mean WITH and TO STRENGTHEN.  And, therefore, a
+Comforter means anyone who is with us to strengthen us, and do for us
+what we could not do for ourselves.  You will see that this is the
+proper meaning of the word, when you remember what bodily things we
+call comforts.  You say that a person is comfortable, or lives in
+comfort, if he has a comfortable income, a comfortable house,
+comfortable clothes, comfortable food, and so on.  Now all these
+things, his money, his house, his clothes, his food, are not himself.
+They make him stronger and more at ease.  They make his life more
+pleasant to him.  But they are not HIM; they are round him, with him,
+to strengthen him.  So with a person's mind and feelings; when a man
+is in sorrow and trouble, he cannot comfort himself.  His friends
+must come to him and comfort him; talk to him, advise him, show their
+kind feeling towards him, and in short, be with him to strengthen him
+in his afflictions.  And if we require comfort for our bodies, and
+for our minds, my friends, how much more do we for our spirits--our
+souls, as we call them!  How weak, and ignorant, and self-willed, and
+perplexed, and sinful they are--surely our souls require a comforter
+far more than our bodies or our minds do!  And to comfort our
+spirits, we require a spirit; for we cannot see our own spirits, our
+own souls, as we can our bodies.  We cannot even tell by our feelings
+what state they are in.  We may deceive ourselves, and we do deceive
+ourselves, again and again, and fancy that our souls are strong when
+they are weak--that they are simple and truthful when they are full
+of deceit and falsehood--that they are loving God when they are only
+loving themselves--that they are doing God's will when they are only
+doing their own selfish and perverse wills.  No man can take care of
+his own spirit, much less give his own spirit life; "no man can
+quicken his own soul," says David, that is, no man can give his own
+soul life.  And therefore we must have someone beyond ourselves to
+give life to our spirits.  We must have someone to teach us the
+things that we could never find out for ourselves, someone who will
+put into our hearts the good desires that could never come of
+themselves.  We must have someone who can change these wills of ours,
+and make them love what they hate by nature, and make them hate what
+they love by nature.  For by nature we are selfish.  By nature we are
+inclined to love ourselves, rather than anyone else; to take care of
+ourselves, rather than anyone else.  By nature we are inclined to
+follow our own will, rather than God's will, to do our own pleasure,
+rather than follow God's commandments, and therefore by nature our
+spirits are dead; for selfishness and self-will are SPIRITUAL DEATH.
+Spiritual life is love, pity, patience, courage, honesty, truth,
+justice, humbleness, industry, self-sacrifice, obedience to God, and
+therefore to those whom God sends to teach and guide us.  THAT is
+spiritual life.  That is the life of Jesus Christ; His character, His
+conduct, was like that--to love, to help, to pity, all around--to
+give up Himself even to death--to do His Father's will and not His
+own.  That was His life.  Because He was the Son of God He did it.
+In proportion as we live like Him, we shall he living like sons of
+God.  In proportion as we live like Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our
+spirits will be alive.  For he that hath Jesus Christ the Son of God
+in him, hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God, hath not
+life, says St. John.  But who can raise us from the death of sin and
+selfishness, to the life of righteousness and love?  Who can change
+us into the likeness of Jesus Christ?  Who can even show us what
+Jesus Christ's likeness is, and take the things of Christ and show
+them to us; so that by seeing what He was, we may see what we should
+be?  And who, if we have this life in us, will keep it alive in us,
+and be with us to strengthen us?  Who will give us strength to force
+the foul and fierce and false thoughts out of our mind, and say, "Get
+thee behind me, Satan?"  Who will give our spirits life? and who will
+strengthen that life in us?
+
+Can we do it for ourselves?  Oh! my friends, I pity the man who is so
+blind and ignorant, who knows so little of himself, upon whom the
+lessons which his own mistakes, and sins, and failings should have
+taught him, have been so wasted that he fancies that he can teach and
+guide himself without any help, and that he can raise his own soul to
+life, or keep it alive without assistance.  Can his body do without
+its comforts?  Then how can his spirit?  If he left his house, and
+threw away his clothes, and refused all help from his fellow-men, and
+went and lived in the woods like a wild beast, we should call him a
+madman, because he refused the help and comfort to his body which God
+has made necessary for him.  But just as great a madman is he who
+refuses the help and the strengthening which God has made necessary
+for his spirit--just as great a madman is he who fancies that his
+soul is any more able than his body is, to live without continual
+help.  It is just because man is nobler than the beast that he
+requires help.  The fox in the wood needs no house, no fire; he needs
+no friends; he needs no comforts, and no comforters, because he is a
+beast--because he is meant to live and die selfish and alone;
+therefore God has provided him in himself with all things necessary
+to keep the poor brute's selfish life in him for a few short years.
+But just because man is nobler than that; just because man is not
+intended to live selfish and alone; just because his body, and his
+mind, and his spirit are beautifully and delicately made, and
+intended for all sorts of wonderful purposes, therefore God has
+appointed that from the moment he is born to all eternity he cannot
+live alone; he cannot support himself; he stands in continual need of
+the assistance of all around him, for body, and soul, and spirit; he
+needs clothes, which other men must make; houses, which other man
+must build; food, which other men must produce; he has to get his
+livelihood by working for others, while others get their livelihood
+in return by working for him.  As a child he needs his parents to be
+his comforters, to take care of him in body and mind.  As he grows up
+he needs the care of others; he cannot exist a day without his
+fellow-men:  he requires school-masters to educate him; books and
+masters to teach him his trade; and when he has learnt it, and
+settled himself in life, he requires laws made by other men, perhaps
+by men who died hundreds of years before he was born, to secure to
+him his rights and property, to secure to him comforts, and to make
+him feel comfortable in his station; he needs friends and family to
+comfort him in sorrow and in joy, to do for him the thousand things
+which he cannot do for himself.  In proportion as he is alone and
+friendless he is pitiable and miserable, let him be as rich as
+Solomon himself.  From the moment, I say, he is born, he needs
+continual comforts and comforters for his body, and mind, and heart.
+And then he fancies that, though his body and his mind cannot exist
+safely, or grow up healthily, without the continual care and
+comforting of his fellow-men, that yet his soul, the part of him
+which is at once the most important and the most in danger; the part
+of him of which he knows least; the part of him which he understands
+least; the part of him of which his body and mind cannot take care,
+because it has to take care of them, can live, and grow, and prosper
+without any help whatsoever!
+
+And if we cannot strengthen our own souls no man can strengthen them
+for us.  No man can raise our bodies to life, much less can he raise
+our souls.  The physician himself cannot cure the sicknesses of our
+bodies; he can only give us fit medicines, and leave them to cure us
+by certain laws of nature, which he did not make, and which he cannot
+alter.  And though the physician can, by much learning, understand
+men's bodies somewhat, who can understand men's souls?  We cannot
+understand our own souls; we do not know what they are, how they
+live; whence they come, or whither they go.  We cannot cure them
+ourselves, much less can anyone cure them for us.  The only one who
+can cure our souls is He that made our souls; the only one who can
+give life to our souls is He who gives life to everything.  The only
+one who can cure, and strengthen, and comfort our spirits, is He who
+understands our spirits, because He himself is the Spirit of all
+spirits, the Spirit who searcheth all things, even the deep things of
+God; because He is the Spirit of God the Father, who made all heaven
+and earth, and of Jesus Christ the Son, who understands the heart of
+man, who can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, and
+hath been tempted in all things, just as we are, yet without sin.
+
+He is the Comforter which God has promised to our spirits, the only
+Comforter who can strengthen our spirits; and if we have Him with us,
+if He is strengthening us, if He is leading us, if He is abiding with
+us, if He is changing us day by day, more and more into the likeness
+of Jesus Christ, are we not, as I said at the beginning of my sermon,
+richer than if we possessed all the land of England, stronger than if
+we had all the armies of the world at our command?  For what is more
+precious than--God Himself?  What is stronger than--God Himself?  The
+poorest man in whom God's Spirit dwells is greater than the greatest
+king in whom God's Spirit does not dwell.  And so he will find in the
+day that he dies.  Then where will riches be, and power?  The rich
+man will take none of them away with him when he dieth, neither shall
+his pomp follow him.  Naked came he into this world, and naked shall
+he return out of it, to go as he came, and carry with him none of the
+comforts which he thought in this life the only ones worth having.
+But the Spirit of God remains with us for ever; that treasure a man
+shall carry out of this world with him, and keep to all eternity.
+That friend will never forsake him, for He is the Spirit of Love,
+which abideth for ever.  That Comforter will never grow weak, for He
+is Himself the very eternal Lord and Giver of Life; and the soul that
+is possessed by Him must live, must grow, must become nobler, purer,
+freer, stronger, more loving, for ever and ever, as the eternities
+roll by.  That is what He will give you, my friends; that is His
+treasure; that is the Spirit-life, the true and everlasting life,
+which flows from Him as the stream flows from the fountain-head.
+
+
+
+X--WHIT-SUNDAY
+
+
+
+The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
+gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance--against such there
+is no law.--GALATIANS v. 22, 23.
+
+In all countries, and in all ages, the world has been full of
+complaints of Law and Government.  And one hears the same complaints
+in England now.  You hear complaints that the laws favour one party
+and one rank more than another, that they are expensive, and harsh,
+and unfair, and what not?--But I think, my friends, that for us, and
+especially on this Whit-Sunday, it will be much wiser, instead of
+complaining of the laws, to complain of ourselves, for needing those
+laws.  For what is it that makes laws necessary at all, except man's
+sinfulness?  Adam required no laws in the garden of Eden.  We should
+require no laws if we were what we ought to be--what God has offered
+to make us.  We may see this by looking at the laws themselves, and
+considering the purposes for which they were made.  We shall then
+see, that, like Moses' Laws of old, the greater part of them have
+been added because of transgressions.--In plain English--to prevent
+men from doing things which they ought not to do, and which, if they
+were in a right state of mind, they would not do.  How many laws are
+passed, simply to prevent one man, or one class, from oppressing or
+ill-using some other man or class?  What a vast number of them are
+passed simply to protect property, or to protect the weak from the
+cruel, the ignorant from the cunning!  It is plain that if there was
+no cruelty, no cunning, no dishonesty, these laws, at all events,
+would not be needed.  Again, one of the great complaints against the
+laws and the government, is that they are so expensive, that rates
+and taxes are heavy burdens--and doubtless they are:  but what makes
+them necessary except men's sin?  If the poor were more justly and
+mercifully treated, and if they in their turn were more thrifty and
+provident, there would be no need of the expenses of poor rates.  If
+there was no love of war and plunder, there would be no need of the
+expense of an army.  If there was no crime, there would be no need of
+the expense of police and prisons.  The thing is so simple and self-
+evident, that it seems almost childish to mention it.  And yet, my
+friends, we forget it daily.  We complain of the laws and their
+harshness, of taxes and their expensiveness, and we forget all the
+while that it is our own selfishness and sinfulness which brings this
+expense upon us, which makes it necessary for the law to interfere
+and protect us against others, and others against us.  And while we
+are complaining of the government for not doing its work somewhat
+more cheaply, we are forgetting that if we chose, we might leave
+government very little work to do--that every man if he chose, might
+be his own law-maker and his own police--that every man if he will,
+may lead a life "against which there is no law."
+
+I say again, that it is our own fault, the fault of our sinfulness,
+that laws are necessary for us.  In proportion as we are what
+Scripture calls "natural men," that is, savage, selfish, divided from
+each other, and struggling against each other, each for his own
+interest; as long as we are not renewed and changed into new men, so
+long will laws, heavy, severe, and burdensome, be necessary for us.
+Without them we should be torments to ourselves, to our neighbours,
+to our country.  But these laws are only necessary as long as we are
+full of selfishness and ungodliness.  The moment we yield ourselves
+up to God's law, man's laws are ready enough to leave us alone.
+Take, for instance, a common example; as long as anyone is a faithful
+husband and a good father, the law does not interfere with his
+conduct towards his wife and children.  But it is when he is
+unfaithful to them, when he ill-treats them, or deserts them, that
+the law interferes with its "Thou shalt not," and compels him to
+behave, against his will, in the way in which he ought to have
+behaved of his own will.  It was free to the man to have done his
+duty by his family, without the law--the moment he neglects his duty,
+he becomes amenable to it.
+
+But the law can only force a man's actions:  it cannot change his
+heart.  In the instance which I have been just mentioning, the law
+can say to a man, "You shall not ill-treat your family; you shall not
+leave them to starve."  But the law cannot say to him "You shall love
+your family."  The law can only command from a man outward obedience;
+the obedience of the heart it cannot enforce.  The law may make a man
+do his duty, it cannot make a man LOVE his duty.  And therefore laws
+will never set the world right.  They can punish persons after the
+wrong is done, and that not certainly nor always:  but they cannot
+certainly prevent the wrongs being done.  The law can punish a man
+for stealing:  and yet, as we see daily, men steal in the face of
+punishment.  Or even if the law, by its severity, makes persons
+afraid to commit certain particular crimes, yet still as long as the
+sinful heart is left in them unchanged, the sin which is checked in
+one direction is sure to break out in another.  Sin, like every other
+disease, is sure, when it is driven onwards, to break out at a fresh
+point, or fester within some still more deadly, because more hidden
+and unsuspected, shape.  The man who dare not be an open sinner for
+fear of the law, can be a hypocrite in spite of it.  The man who dare
+not steal for fear of the law, can cheat in spite of it.  The selfish
+man will find fresh ways of being selfish, the tyrannical man of
+being tyrannical, however closely the law may watch him.  He will
+discover some means of evading it; and thus the law, after all,
+though it may keep down crime, multiplies sin; and by the law, as St.
+Paul says, is the knowledge of sin.
+
+What then will do that for this poor world which the law cannot do--
+which, as St. Paul tells us, not even the law of God given on Mount
+Sinai, holy, just, good as it was, could do, because no law can give
+life?  What will give men a new heart and a new spirit, which shall
+love its duty and do it willingly, and not by compulsion, everywhere
+and always, and not merely just as far as it commanded?  The text
+tells us that there is a Spirit, the fruit of which is love, joy,
+peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness,
+temperance; a character such as no laws can give to a man, and which
+no law dare punish in a man.  Look at this character as St. Paul sets
+it forth--and then think what need would there be of all these
+burdensome and expensive laws, if all men were but full of the fruits
+of that Spirit which St. Paul describes?
+
+I know what answer will be ready, in some of your minds at least, to
+all this.  You will be ready to reply, almost angrily, "Of course if
+everyone was perfect, we should need no laws:  but people are not
+perfect, and you cannot expect them to be."  My friends, whether or
+not WE expect baptized people, living in a Christian country, to be
+perfect, God expects them to be perfect; for He has said, by the
+mouth of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, "Be ye therefore perfect, as
+our Father which is in heaven is perfect."  And He has told us what
+being perfect is like; you may read it for yourselves in His sermon
+on the Mount; and you may see also that what He commands us to do in
+that sermon, from the beginning to the end, is the exact opposite and
+contrary of the ways and rules of this world, which, as I have shown,
+make burdensome laws necessary to prevent our devouring each other.
+Now, do you think that God would have told us to be perfect, if He
+knew that it was impossible for us?  Do you think that He, the God of
+truth, would have spoken such a cruel mockery against poor sinful
+creatures like us, as to command us a duty without giving us the
+means of fulfilling it?  Do you think that He did not know ten
+thousand times better than I what I have been just telling you, that
+laws could not change men's hearts and wills; that commanding a man
+to love and like a thing will not make him love and like it; that a
+man's heart and spirit must be changed in him from within, and not
+merely laws and commandments laid on him from without?  Then why has
+He commanded us to love each other, ay, to love our enemies, to bless
+those who curse us, to pray for those who use us spitefully?  Do you
+think the Lord meant to make hypocrites of us; to tell us to go
+about, as some who call themselves religious do go about, with their
+lips full of meek, and humble, and simple, and loving words, while
+their hearts are full of pride, and spite, and cunning, and hate, and
+selfishness, which are all the more deadly for being kept in and
+plastered over by a smooth outside?  God forbid!  He tells us to love
+each other, only because He has promised us the spirit of love.  He
+tells us to be humble, because He can make us humble-hearted.  He
+tells us to be honest, because He can make us love and delight in
+honesty.  He tells us to refrain ourselves from foul thoughts as well
+as from foul actions, because He can take the foul heart out of us,
+and give us instead the spirit of purity and holiness.  He tells us
+to lead new lives after the new pattern of Himself, because He can
+give us new hearts and a new spring of life within us; in short, He
+bids us behave as sons of God should behave, because, as He said
+Himself, "If we, being evil, know how to give our children what is
+good for them, much more will our heavenly Father give His Holy
+Spirit to those who ask him."  If you would be perfect, ask your
+Father in heaven to make you perfect.  If you feel that your heart is
+wrong, ask Him to give you a new and a right heart.  If you feel
+yourselves--as you are, whether you feel it or not--too weak, too
+ignorant, too selfish, to guide yourselves, ask Him to send His
+Spirit to guide you; ask for the Spirit from which comes all love,
+all light, all wisdom, all strength of mind.  Ask for that Spirit,
+and you SHALL receive it; seek for it, and you shall find it; knock
+at the gate of your Father's treasure-house, and it shall be surely
+opened to you.
+
+But some of you, perhaps, are saying to yourselves, "How will my
+being changed and renewed by the Spirit of God, render the laws less
+burdensome, while the crime and sin around me remain unchanged?  It
+is others who want to be improved as much, and perhaps more than I
+do."  It may be so, my friends; or, again, it may not; those who
+fancy that others need God's Spirit more than they do, may be the
+very persons who need it really the most; those who say they see, may
+be only proving their blindness by so saying; those who fancy that
+their souls are rich, and are full of all knowledge, and understand
+the whole Bible, and want no further teaching, may be, as they were
+in St. John's time, just the ones who are wretched, and miserable,
+and poor, and blind, and naked in soul, and do not know it.  But at
+all events, if you think others need to be changed by God's Spirit,
+PRAY that God's Spirit may change them.  For believe me, unless you
+pray for God's Spirit for each other, ay, for the whole world, there
+is no use asking for yourselves.  This, I believe, is one of the
+reasons, perhaps the chief reason, why the fruits of God's Spirit are
+so little seen among us in these days; why our Christianity is become
+more and more dead, and hollow, and barren, while expensive and
+intricate laws and taxes are becoming more and more necessary every
+year; because our religion has become so selfish, because we have
+been praying for God's Spirit too little for each other.  Our prayers
+have become too selfish.  We have been looking for God's Spirit not
+so much as a means to enable us to do good to others, but as some
+sort of mysterious charm which was to keep us ourselves from the
+punishment of our sins in the next life, or give us a higher place in
+heaven; and, therefore, St. James's words have been fulfilled to us,
+even in our very prayers for God's Spirit, "Ye ask and have not,
+because ye ask amiss, to consume it upon your lusts"--save our
+selfish souls from the pains of hell; to give our selfish souls
+selfish pleasures and selfish glorification in the world to come:
+but not to spread God's kingdom upon earth, not to make us live on
+earth such lives as Christ lived; a life of love and self-sacrifice,
+and continual labour for the souls of others.  Therefore it is, that
+God's Spirit is not poured out upon us in these days; for God's
+Spirit is the spirit of love and brotherhood, which delivers a man
+from his selfishness; and if we do not desire to be delivered from
+our selfishness, we do not desire the Spirit of God, and the Spirit
+of God will not be bestowed upon us.  And no man desires to be
+delivered from his own selfishness, who in his very prayers, when he
+ought to be thinking least about himself alone, is thinking about
+himself most of all, and forgetting that he is the member of a
+family--that all mankind are his brethren--that he can claim nothing
+for himself to which every sinner around him has an equal right--that
+nothing is necessary for him, which is not equally necessary for
+everyone around him; that he has all the world besides himself to
+pray for, and that his prayers for himself will be heard only
+according as he prays for all the world beside.  Baptism teaches us
+this, when it tells us that our old selfish nature is to be washed
+away, and a new character, after the pattern of Christ, is to live
+and grow up in us; that from the day we are baptized, to the day of
+our death, we should live not for ourselves, but for Jesus, in whom
+was no selfishness; when it teaches us that we are not only children
+of God, but members of Christ's Family, and heirs of God's kingdom,
+and therefore bound to make common cause with all other members of
+that Family, to live and labour for the common good of all our
+fellow-citizens in that kingdom.  The Lord's prayer teaches us this,
+when He tells us to pray, not "My Father," but "Our Father;" not "my
+soul be saved," but "Thy kingdom come;" not "give ME," but "give US
+our daily bread;" not "forgive ME," but "forgive US our trespasses,"
+and that only as we forgive others; not "lead ME not," but "lead US
+not into temptation;" not "deliver ME," but "deliver US from evil."
+After THAT manner the Lord told us to pray; and, in proportion as we
+pray in that manner, asking for nothing for ourselves which we do not
+ask for everyone else in the whole world, just so far and no farther
+will God HEAR our prayers.  He who asks for God's Spirit for himself
+only, and forgets that all the world need it as much as he, is not
+asking for God's Spirit at all, and does not know even what God's
+Spirit is.  The mystery of Pentecost, too, which came to pass on this
+day 1818 years ago, teaches us the same thing also.  Those cloven
+tongues of fire, the tokens of God's Spirit, fell not upon one man,
+but upon many; not when they were apart from each other, but when
+they were together; and what were the fruits of that Spirit in the
+Apostles?  Did they remain within that upper room, each priding
+himself upon his own gifts, and trying merely to gain heaven for his
+own soul?  If they had any such fancies, as they very likely had
+before the Spirit fell upon them, they had none such afterwards.  The
+Spirit must have taken all such thoughts from them, and given them a
+new notion of what it was to be devout and holy:  for instead of
+staying in that upper room, they went forth instantly into the public
+place to preach in foreign tongues to all the people.  Instead of
+keeping themselves apart from each other in silence, and fancying, as
+some have done, and some do now, that they pleased God by being
+solitary, and melancholy, and selfish--what do we read? the fruit of
+God's Spirit was in them; that they and the three thousand souls who
+were added to them, on the first day of their preaching, "were all
+together, and had all things common, and sold their possessions, and
+goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need, and
+continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread
+from house to house, did eat their bread in gladness and singleness
+of heart, praising God and having favour with all the people."  Those
+were the fruits of God's Spirit in THEM.  Till we see more of that
+sort of life and society in England, we shall not be able to pride
+ourselves on having much of God's Spirit among us.
+
+But above all, if anything will teach us that the strength of God's
+Spirit is not a strength which we must ask for for ourselves alone;
+that the blessings of God's kingdom are blessings which we cannot
+have in order to keep them to ourselves, but can only enjoy in as far
+as we share them with those around us; if anything, I say, ought to
+teach us that lesson, it is the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.  Just
+consider a moment, my friends, what a strange thing it is, if we will
+think of it, that the Lord's Supper, the most solemn and sacred thing
+with which a man can have to do upon earth, is just a thing which he
+cannot transact for himself, or by himself.  Not alone in secret, in
+his chamber, but, whether he will or not, in the company of others,
+not merely in the company of his own private friends, but in the
+company of any or everyone, rich or poor, who chooses to kneel beside
+him; he goes with others, rich and poor alike, to the Lord's Table,
+and there the same bread, and the same wine, is shared among all by
+the same priest.  If that means anything, it means this--that rich
+and poor alike draw life for their souls from the same well, not for
+themselves only, not apart from each other, but all in common, all
+together, because they are brothers, members of one family, as the
+leaves are members of the same tree; that as the same bread and the
+same wine are needed to nourish the bodies of all, the same spirit of
+God is needed to nourish the souls of all; and that we cannot have
+this spirit, except as members of a body, any more than a man's limb
+can have life when it is cut off and parted from him.  This is the
+reason, and the only reason, why Protestant clergymen are forbidden,
+thank God! to give the Holy Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, to any
+one person singly.  If a clergyman were to administer the Lord's
+Supper, to himself in private, without any congregation to partake
+with him, it would not be the Lord's Supper, it would be nothing, and
+worse than nothing; it would be a sham and a mockery, and, I believe,
+a sin.  I do not believe that Christ would be present, that God's
+Spirit would rest on that man.  For our Lord says, that it is where
+two or three are gathered together in His name, that He is in the
+midst of them.  And it was at a supper, at a feast, where all the
+Apostles were met together, that our Lord divided the bread amongst
+them, and told them to share the cup amongst themselves, just as a
+sign that they were all members of one body--that the welfare of each
+of them was bound up in the welfare of all the rest that God's
+blessing did not rest upon each singly, but upon all together.  And
+it is just because we have forgotten this, my friends--because we
+have forgotten that we are all brothers and sisters, children of one
+family, members of one body--because in short, we have carried our
+selfishness into our very religion, and up to the altar of God, that
+we neglect the Lord's Supper as we do.  People neglect the Lord's
+Supper because they either do not know or do not like that, of which
+the Lord's Supper is the token and warrant.  It is not merely that
+they feel themselves unfit for the Lord's Supper, because they are
+not in love and charity with all men.  Oh! my dear friends, do not
+some of your hearts tell you, that the reason why you stay away from
+the Lord's Supper is because you do not WISH to be fit for the Lord's
+Supper--because you do not like to be in love and charity with all
+men--because you do not wish to be reminded that you are equals in
+God's sight, all equally sinful, all equally pardoned--and to see
+people whom you dislike or despise, kneeling by your side, and
+partaking of the same bread and wine with you, as a token that God
+sees no difference between you and them; that God looks upon you all
+as brothers, however little brotherly love or fellow-feeling there
+may be, alas! between you?  Or, again, do not some of you stay away
+from the Lord's Supper, because you see no good in going? because it
+seems to make those who go no better than they were before?  Shall I
+tell you the reason of that?  Shall I tell you why, as is too true,
+too many do come to the Lord's Supper, and so far from being the
+better for it, seem only the worse?  Because they come to it in
+selfishness.  We have fallen into the same false and unscriptural way
+of looking at the Lord's Supper, into which the Papists have.  People
+go to the Lord's Supper nowadays too much to get some private good
+for their own souls, and it would not matter to many of them, I am
+afraid, if not another person in the parish received it, provided
+they can get, as they fancy, the same blessing from it.  Thus they
+come to it in an utterly false and wrong temper of mind.  Instead of
+coming as members of Christ's body, to get from Him life and
+strength, to work, in their places, as members of that body, they
+come to get something for themselves, as if there was nobody else's
+soul in the world to be saved but their own.  Instead of coming to
+ask for the Spirit of God to deliver them from their selfishness, and
+make them care less about themselves, and more about all around them,
+they come to ask for the Spirit of God because they think it will
+make themselves higher and happier in heaven.  And of course they do
+not get what they come for, because they come for the wrong thing.
+Thus those who see them, begin to fancy that the Lord's Supper is
+not, after all, so very important for the salvation of their souls;
+and not finding in the Bible actually written these words, "Thou
+shalt perish everlastingly unless thou take the Lord's Supper," they
+end by staying away from it, and utterly neglecting it, they and
+their children after them; preferring their own selfishness, to God's
+Spirit of love, and saying, like Esau of old, "I am hungry, and I
+must live.  I must get on in this selfish world by following its
+selfish ways; what is the use of a spirit of love and brotherhood to
+me?  If I were to obey the Gospel, and sacrifice my own interest for
+those around me, I should starve; what good will my birthright do
+me?"
+
+Oh! my friends, I pray God that some of you, at least, may change
+your mind.  I pray God that some of you may see at last, that all the
+misery and the burdens of this time, spring from one root, which is
+selfishness; and that the reason why we are selfish, is because we
+have not with us the Spirit of God, which is the spirit of
+brotherhood and love.  Let us pray God now, and henceforth, to take
+that selfishness out of all our hearts.  Let us pray God now, and
+henceforth, to pour upon us, and upon all our countrymen, ay, and
+upon the whole world, the spirit of friendship and fellow-feeling,
+the spirit which when men have among them, they need no laws to keep
+them from supplanting, and oppressing, and devouring each other,
+because its fruits are love, cheerfulness, peace, long suffering,
+gentleness, goodness, honesty, meekness, temperance Then there will
+be no need, my friends, for me to call you to the Supper of the Lord.
+You will no more think of staying away from it, than the Apostles
+did, when the Spirit was poured out on them.  For what do we read
+that they did after the first Whit-Sunday?  That altogether with one
+accord, they broke bread daily; that is, partook of the Lord's Supper
+every day, from house to house.  They did not need to be told to do
+it.  They did it, as I may say, by instinct.  There was no question
+or argument about it in their minds.  They had found out that they
+were all brothers, with one common cause in joy and sorrow--that they
+were all members of one body--that the life of their souls came from
+one root and spring, from one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the
+light and the life of men, in whom they were all one, members of each
+other; and therefore, they delighted in that Lord's Supper, just
+because it brought them together; just because it was a sign and a
+token to them that they did belong to each other, that they had one
+Lord, one faith, one interest, one common cause for this life, and
+for all eternity.  And therefore the blessing of that Lord's Supper
+did come to them, and in it they did receive strength to live like
+children of God and members of Christ, and brothers to each other and
+to all mankind.  They proved by their actions what that Communion
+Feast, that Sacrament of Brotherhood, had done for them.  They proved
+it by not counting their own lives dear to them, but going forth in
+the face of poverty and persecution, and death itself, to preach to
+the whole world the good news that Christ was their King.  They
+proved it by their conduct to each other when they had all things in
+common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all,
+as every man had need.  They proved it by needing no laws to bind
+them to each other from without, because they were bound to each
+other from within, by the love which comes down from God, and is the
+very bond of peace, and of every virtue which becomes a man.
+
+
+
+XI--ASCENSION-DAY
+
+
+
+And Jesus led them out as far as to Bethany; and he lifted up his
+hands and blessed them.  And it came to pass while he blessed them,
+he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.  And they
+worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem, with great joy; and were
+continually in the temple, praising and blessing God--LUKE xxiv. 50-
+53.
+
+On this day it is fit and proper for us--if we have understood, and
+enjoyed, and profited by the wonder of the Lord's Ascension into
+Heaven--to be in the same state of mind as the Apostles were after
+His Ascension:  for what was right for them is right for us and for
+all men; the same effects which it produced on them it ought to
+produce on us.  And we may know whether we are in the state in which
+Christian men ought to be, by seeing how far we are in the same state
+of mind as the Apostles were.  Now the text tells us in what state of
+mind they were; how that, after the Lord Jesus was parted from them,
+and carried up into Heaven, they worshipped Him, and returned to
+Jerusalem, with great joy, and were continually in the temple,
+praising and blessing God.  It seems at first sight certainly very
+strange that they should go back with great joy.  They had just lost
+their Teacher, their Master--One who had been more to them than all
+friends and fathers could be; One who had taken them, poor simple
+fishermen, and changed the whole course of their lives, and taught
+them things which He had taught to no one else, and given them a
+great and awful work to do--the work of changing the ways and
+thoughts and doings of the whole world.  He had sent them out--eleven
+unlettered working men--to fight against the sin and the misery of
+the whole world.  And He had given them open warning of what they
+were to expect; that by it they should win neither credit, nor
+riches, nor ease, nor anything else that the world thinks worth
+having.  He gave them fair warning that the world would hate them,
+and try to crush them.  He told them, as the Gospel for to-day says,
+that they should be driven out of the churches; that the religious
+people, as well as the irreligious, would be against them; that the
+time would come when those who killed them would think that they did
+God service; that nothing but labour, and want, and persecution, and
+slander, and torture, and death was before them--and now He had gone
+away and left them.  He had vanished up into the empty air.  They
+were to see His face, and hear His voice no more.  They were to have
+no more of His advice, no more of His teaching, no more of His tender
+comfortings; they were to be alone in the world--eleven poor working
+men, with the whole world against them, and so great a business to do
+that they would not have time to get their bread by the labour of
+their hands.  Is it not wonderful that they did not sit down in
+despair, and say, "What will become of us?"  Is it not wonderful that
+they did not give themselves up to grief at losing the Teacher who
+was worth all the rest of the world put together?  Is it not
+wonderful that they did not go back, each one to his old trade, to
+his fishing and to his daily labour, saying, "At all events we must
+eat; at all events we must get our livelihood;" and end, as they had
+begun, in being mere labouring men, of whom the world would never
+have heard a word?  And instead of that we read that they went back
+with great joy not to their homes but to Jerusalem, the capital city
+of their country, and "were continually in the temple blessing and
+praising God."  Well, my friends, and if it is possible for one man
+to judge what another man would have done--if it is possible to guess
+what we should have done in their case--common-sense must show us
+this, that if He was merely their Teacher, they would have either
+given themselves up to despair, or gone back, some to their plough,
+some to their fishing-nets, and some, like Matthew, to their
+counting-houses, and we should never have heard a word of them.  But
+if you will look in your Bibles, you will find that they thought Him
+much more than a teacher--that they thought Him to be the Lord and
+King of the whole world; and you will find that the great joy with
+which the disciples went back, after He ascended into heaven, came
+from certain very strange words that He had been speaking to them
+just before He ascended--words about which they could have but two
+opinions:  either they must have thought that they were utter
+falsehood, and self-conceit, and blasphemy; and that Jesus, who had
+been all along speaking to them such words of wisdom and holiness as
+never man spake before, had suddenly changed His whole character at
+the last, and become such a sort of person as it is neither fit for
+me to speak of, or you to hear me speak of, in God's church, and in
+Jesus Christ's hearing, even though it be merely for the sake of
+argument; or else they must have thought THIS about His words, that
+they were the most joyful and blessed words that ever had been spoken
+on the earth; that they were the best of all news; the most complete
+of all Gospels for this poor sinful world; that what Jesus had said
+about Himself was true; and that as long as it was true, it did not
+matter in the least what became of them; it did not matter in the
+least what difficulties stood in their way, for they would be certain
+to conquer them all; it did not matter in the least how men might
+persecute and slander them, for they would be sure to get their
+reward; it did not matter in the least how miserable and sinful the
+world might be just then, for it was certain to be changed, and
+converted, and brought to God, to righteousness, to love, to freedom,
+to light, at last.
+
+If you look at the various accounts, in the four gospels, of the
+Lord's last words on earth, you will see, surely, what I mean.  Let
+us take them one by one.
+
+St. Matthew tells us that, a few days before the Lord's ascension, He
+met His disciples on a mountain in Galilee, where he had appointed
+them to await him; and there told them, that all power was given to
+Him in heaven and earth.  Was not that blessed news--was not that a
+gospel?  That all the power in heaven and earth belonged to HIM?  To
+Him, who had all His life been doing good?  To Him, in whom there had
+never been one single stain of tyranny or selfishness?  To Him, who
+had been the friend of publicans and sinners?  To Him, who had
+rebuked the very richest, and loved the very poorest?  To him, who
+had shown that He had both the power and the will to heal every kind
+of sickness and disease?  To Him, who had conquered and driven out,
+wherever He met them, all the evil spirits which enslave and torment
+poor sinful men?  To Him, who had shown by rising from the dead, that
+He was stronger than even death itself?  To Him, who had declared
+that He was the Son of God the Father, that the great God who had
+made heaven and earth, and all therein, was perfectly pleased and
+satisfied with Him, that He was come to do His Father's will, and not
+His own; that He was the ancient Lord of the earth, the I AM who was
+before Abraham?  And He was now to have all power in heaven and
+earth!  Everything which was done right in the world henceforth, was
+to be His doing.  The kingdom and rule over the whole universe, was
+to be His.  So He said; and His disciples believed Him; and if they
+believed Him, how could they but rejoice?  How could they but rejoice
+at the glorious thought that He, the son of the village maiden, the
+champion of the poor and the suffering, was to have the government of
+the world for ever?  That He, who all the while He had been on earth
+had showed that He was perfect justice, perfect love, perfect
+humanity, was to reign till He had put all His enemies under His
+feet?  How could the world but prosper under such a King as that?
+How could wickedness triumph, while He, the perfectly righteous one,
+was King?  How could misery triumph, while He, the perfectly merciful
+one, was King?  How could ignorance triumph, while He, the perfectly
+wise one, who had declared that God the Father hid nothing from Him,
+was King?  Unless the disciples had been more dull and selfish than
+the dumb beasts around them, what could they do but rejoice at that
+news?  What matter to them if Jesus were taken out of their sight, as
+long as all power was given to Him in heaven and earth?
+
+But He had told them more.  He had told them that they were not to
+keep this glorious secret to themselves.  No:  they were to go forth
+and preach the gospel of it, the good news of it, to every creature--
+to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God.  The good news that God
+was the King of men, after all; that cruel tyrants and oppressors,
+and conquerors, were not their kings; that neither the storms over
+their heads, nor the earth under their feet, nor the clouds and the
+rivers whom the heathens used to worship in the hope of persuading
+the earth and the weather to be favourable to them, and bless their
+harvests, were their kings; that idols of wood and stone, and evil
+spirits of lust, and cruelty, and covetousness, were not their kings;
+but that God was their King; that He loved them, He pitied them in
+spite of all their sins; that He had sent His only begotten Son into
+the world to teach them, to live for them--to die for them--to claim
+them for His own.  And, therefore, they were to go and baptize all
+nations, as a sign that they were to repent, and change, and put away
+all their old false and evil heathen life, and rise to a new life,
+they and their children after them, as God's children, God's family,
+brothers of the Son of God.  And they were to baptize them into a
+name; showing that they belonged to those into whose name they were
+baptized; into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy
+Spirit.  They were to be baptized into the name of the Father, as a
+sign that God was their Father, and they His children.  They were to
+be baptized into the name of the Son, as a sign that the Son, Jesus
+Christ, was their King and head; and not merely their King and head,
+but their Saviour, who had taken away the sin of the world, and
+redeemed it for God, with His own most precious blood; and not merely
+their Saviour, but their pattern; that they might know that they were
+bound to become as far as is possible for mortal man such sons of God
+as Jesus himself had been, like Him obedient, pure, forgiving,
+brotherly, caring for each other and not for themselves, doing their
+heavenly Father's will and not their own.  And they were to baptize
+all nations into the name of the Holy Spirit, for a sign that God's
+Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, would be with them, to give them
+new life, new holiness, new manfulness; to teach, and guide, and
+strengthen them for ever.  That was the gospel which they had to
+preach.  The good news that the Son of God was the King of men.  That
+was the name into which they were to baptize all nations--the name of
+children of God, members of Christ, heirs of a heavenly and spiritual
+kingdom, which should go on age after age, for ever, growing and
+spreading men knew not how, as the grains of mustard-seed, which at
+first the least of all seeds, grows up into a great tree, and the
+birds of the air come and lodge in the branches of it--to go on, I
+say, from age to age, improving, cleansing, and humanising, and
+teaching the whole world, till the kingdoms of the earth became the
+kingdoms of God and of His Christ.  That was the work which the
+Apostles had given them to do.  Do you not see, friends, that unless
+those Apostles had been the most selfish of men, unless all they
+cared for was their own gain and comfort, they must have rejoiced?
+The whole world was to be set right--what matter what happened to
+them?  And, therefore, I said at the beginning of my sermon, that a
+sure way to know whether our minds were in a right state, was to see
+whether we felt about it as the Apostles felt.  The Bible tells us to
+rejoice always, to praise and give thanks to God always.  If we
+believe what the Apostles believed, we shall be joyful; if we do not,
+we shall not be joyful.  If we believe in the words which the Lord
+spoke before He ascended on high, we shall be joyful.  If we believe
+that all power in heaven and earth is His, we shall be joyful.  If we
+believe that the son of the village maiden has ascended up on high,
+and received gifts for men, we shall be joyful.  If we believe that,
+as our baptism told us, God is our Father, the Son of God our
+Saviour, the Spirit of God ready to teach and guide us, we shall be
+joyful.  Do you answer me, "But the world goes on so ill; there is so
+much sin, and misery, and folly, and cruelty in it; how can we be
+joyful?"  I answer:  There was a hundred times as much sin, and
+misery, and folly, and cruelty, in the Apostles' time, and yet they
+were joyful, and full of gladness, blessing and praising God.  If you
+answer, "But we are so slandered, and neglected, and misunderstood,
+and hard-worked, and ill-treated; we have no time to enjoy ourselves,
+or do the things which we should like best.  How can we be joyful?" I
+answer:  So were the Apostles.  They knew that they would be a
+hundred times as much slandered, and neglected, and misunderstood, as
+you can ever be; that they would have far less time to enjoy
+themselves, far less opportunity of doing the things which they liked
+best, than you can ever have; they knew that misery, and persecution,
+and a shameful death were before them, and yet they were joyful and
+full of gladness, blessing and praising God.  And why should you not
+be?  For what was true for them is true for you.  They had no
+blessing, no hope, but what you have just as good a right to as they
+had.  They were joyful, because God was their Father, and God is your
+Father.  They were joyful because they and all men belonged to God's
+family; and you belong to it.  They were joyful, because God's Spirit
+was promised to them, to make them like God; and God's Spirit was
+promised to you.  They were joyful, because a poor man was king of
+heaven and earth; and that poor man, Jesus Christ, who was born at
+Bethlehem, is as much your King now as He was theirs then.  They were
+joyful, because the whole world was going to improve under His rule
+and government; and the whole world is improving, and will go on
+improving for ever.  They were joyful, because Jesus, whom they had
+known as a poor, despised, crucified man on earth, had ascended up to
+heaven in glory; and if you believe the same, you will be joyful too.
+In proportion as you believe the mystery of Ascension-day; if you
+believe the words which the Lord spoke before He ascended, you will
+have cheerful, joyful, hopeful thoughts about yourselves, and about
+the whole world; if you do not, you will be in continual danger of
+becoming suspicious and despairing, fancying the world still worse
+than it is, fancying that God has neglected and forgotten it,
+fancying that the devil is stronger than God, and man's sins wider
+than Christ's redemption till you will think it neither worth while
+to do right yourselves, nor to make others do right towards you.
+
+
+
+XII--THE FOUNT OF SCIENCE
+
+
+
+(A Sermon Preached at St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, May 4th,
+1851, in behalf of the Westminster Hospital.)
+
+When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and received
+gifts for men, yea, even for his enemies, that the Lord God might
+dwell among them.--PSALM lxviii. 18, and EPHESIANS iv. 8.
+
+If, a thousand years ago, a congregation in this place had been
+addressed upon the text which I have chosen, they would have had, I
+think, little difficulty in applying its meaning to themselves, and
+in mentioning at once innumerable instances of those gifts which the
+King of men had received for men, innumerable signs that the Lord God
+was really dwelling amongst them.  But amongst those signs, I think,
+they would have mentioned several which we are not now generally
+accustomed to consider in such a light.  They would have pointed not
+merely to the building of churches, the founding of schools, the
+spread of peace, the decay of slavery; but to the importation of
+foreign literature, the extension of the arts of reading, writing,
+painting, architecture, the improvement of agriculture, and the
+introduction of new and more successful methods of the cure of
+diseases.  They might have expressed themselves on these points in a
+way that we consider now puerile and superstitious.  They might have
+attributed to the efficacy of prayer, many cures which we now
+attribute--shall I say? to no cause whatsoever.  They may have quoted
+as an instance of St. Cuthbert's sanctity, rather than of his shrewd
+observations, his discovery of a spring of water in the rocky floor
+of his cell, and his success in growing barley upon the barren island
+where wheat refused to germinate; and we might have smiled at their
+superstition, and smiled, too, at their seeing any consequence of
+Christianity, any token that the kingdom of God was among them, in
+Bishop Wilfred's rescuing the Hampshire Saxons from the horrors of
+famine, by teaching them the use of fishing-nets.  But still so they
+would have spoken--men of a turn of mind no less keen, shrewd, and
+practical than we, their children; and if we had objected to their
+so-called superstition that all these improvements in the physical
+state of England were only the natural consequences of the
+introduction of Roman civilisation by French and Italian
+missionaries, they would have smiled at us in their turn, not perhaps
+without some astonishment at our stupidity, and asked:  "Do you not
+see, too, that THAT is in itself a sign of the kingdom of God--that
+these nations who have been for ages selfishly isolated from each
+other, except for purposes of conquest and desolation, should be now
+teaching each other, helping each other, interchanging more and more,
+generation by generation, their arts, their laws, their learning
+becoming fused down under the influence of a common Creed, and
+loyalty to one common King in Heaven, from their state of savage
+jealousy and warfare, into one great Christendom, and family of God?"
+And if, my friends, as I think, those forefathers of ours could rise
+from their graves this day, they would be inclined to see in our
+hospitals, in our railroads, in the achievements of our physical
+Science, confirmation of that old superstition of theirs, proofs of
+the kingdom of God, realisations of the gifts which Christ received
+for men, vaster than any of which they had ever dreamed.  They might
+be startled at God's continuing those gifts to us, who hold on many
+points a creed so different from theirs.  They might be still more
+startled to see in the Great Exhibition of all Nations, which is our
+present nine-days' wonder, that those blessings were not restricted
+by God even to nominal Christians, but that His love, His teaching,
+with regard to matters of civilisation and physical science, were
+extended, though more slowly and partially, to the Mahometan and the
+Heathen.  And it would be a wholesome lesson to them, to find that
+God's grace was wider than their narrow theories; perhaps they may
+have learnt it already in the world of spirits.  But of its BEING
+God's grace, there would be no doubt in their minds.  They would
+claim unhesitatingly, and at once, that great Exhibition established
+in a Christian country, as a point of union and brotherhood for all
+people, for a sign that God was indeed claiming all the nations of
+the world as His own--proving by the most enormous facts that He had
+sent down a Pentecost, gifts to men which would raise them not merely
+spiritually, but physically and intellectually, beyond anything which
+the world had ever seen, and had poured out a spirit among them which
+would convert them in the course of ages, gradually, but most surely
+and really, from a pandemonium of conquerors and conquered, devourers
+and devoured, into a family of fellow-helping brothers, until the
+kingdoms of the world became the kingdoms of God and of His Christ.
+
+But I think one thing, if anything, would stagger their simple old
+Saxon faith; one thing would make them fearful, as indeed it makes
+the preacher this day, that the time of real brotherhood and peace is
+still but too far off; and that the achievements of our physical
+science, the unity of this great Exhibition, noble as they are, are
+still only dim forecastings and prophecies, as it were, of a higher,
+nobler reality.  And they would say sadly to us, their children:
+"Sons, you ought to be so near to God; He seems to have given you so
+much and to have worked among you as He never worked for any nation
+under heaven.  How is it that you give the glory to yourselves, and
+not to Him?"
+
+For do we give the glory of our scientific discoveries to God, in any
+real, honest, and practical sense?  There may be some official and
+perfunctory talk of God's blessing on our endeavours; but there seems
+to be no real belief in us that God, the inspiration of God, is the
+very fount and root of the endeavours themselves; that He teaches us
+these great discoveries; that He gives us wisdom to get this wondrous
+wealth; that He works in us to will and to do of his good pleasure.
+True, we keep up something of the form and tradition of the old talk
+about such things; we join in prayer to God to bless our great
+Exhibition, but we do not believe--we do not believe, my friends--
+that it was God who taught us to conceive, build, and arrange that
+Great Exhibition; and our notion of God's blessing it, seems to be
+God's absence from it; a hope and trust that God will leave it and us
+alone, and not "visit" it or us in it, or "interfere" by any "special
+providences," by storms, or lightning, or sickness, or panic, or
+conspiracy; a sort of dim feeling that we could manage it all
+perfectly well without God, but that as He exists, and has some power
+over natural phenomena, which is not very exactly defined, we must
+notice His existence over and above our work, lest He should become
+angry and "visit" us . . . And this in spite of words which were
+spoken by one whose office it was to speak them, as the
+representative of the highest and most sacred personage in these
+realms; words which deserve to be written in letters of gold on the
+high places of this city; in which he spoke of this Exhibition as an
+"approach to a more complete fulfilment of the great and sacred
+mission which man has to perform in the world;" when he told the
+English people that "man's reason being created in the image of God,
+he has to discover the laws by which Almighty God governs His
+creations, and by making these laws the standard of his action, to
+conquer nature to his use, himself a divine instrument;" when he
+spoke of "thankfulness to Almighty God for what he has already
+GIVEN," as the first feeling which that Exhibition ought to excite in
+us; and as the second, "the deep conviction that those blessings can
+only be realised in proportion to"--not, as some would have it, the
+rivalry and selfish competition--but "in proportion to the HELP which
+we are prepared to render to each other; and, therefore, by peace,
+love, and ready assistance, not only between individuals, but between
+all nations of the earth."  We read those great words; but in the
+hearts of how few, alas! to judge from our modern creed on such
+matters, must the really important and distinctive points of them
+find an echo!  To how few does this whole Exhibition seem to have
+been anything but a matter of personal gain or curiosity, for
+national aggrandisement, insular self-glorification, and selfish--I
+had almost said, treacherous--rivalry with the very foreigners whom
+we invited as our guests?
+
+And so, too, with our cures of diseases.  We speak of God's blessing
+the means, and God's blessing the cure.  But all we really mean by
+blessing them, is permitting them.  Do not our hearts confess that
+our notion of His blessing the means, is His leaving the means to
+themselves and their own physical laws--leaving, in short, the cure
+to us and not preventing our science doing its work, and asserting
+His own existence by bringing on some unexpected crisis, or
+unfortunate relapse--if, indeed, the old theory that He does bring on
+such, be true?
+
+Our old forefathers, on the other hand, used to believe that in
+medicine, as in everything else, God taught men all that they knew.
+They believed the words of the Wise Man when he said that "the Spirit
+of God gives man understanding."  The method by which Solomon
+believed himself to have obtained all his physical science and
+knowledge of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop which
+groweth on the wall, was in their eyes the only possible method.
+They believed the words of Isaiah when he said of the tillage and the
+rotation of crops in use among the peasants of his country, that
+their God instructed them to discretion and taught them; and that
+even the various methods of threshing out the various species of
+grain came "forth from the Lord of hosts, who is excellent in
+counsel, and wonderful in working."
+
+Such a method, you say, seems to you now miraculous.  It did not seem
+to our forefathers miraculous that God should teach man; it seemed to
+them most simple, most rational, most natural, an utterly every-day
+axiom.  They thought it was because so few of the heathen were taught
+by God that they were no wiser than they were.  They thought that
+since the Son of God had come down and taken our nature upon Him, and
+ascended up on high and received gifts for men, that it was now the
+right and privilege of every human being who was willing to be taught
+of God, as the prophet foretold in those very words; and that baptism
+was the very sign and seal of that fact--a sign that for every human
+being, whatever his age, sex, rank, intellect, or race, a certain
+measure of the teaching of God and of the Spirit of God was ready,
+promised, sure as the oath of Him that made heaven and the earth, and
+all things therein.  That was Solomon's belief.  We do not find that
+it made him a fanatic and an idler, waiting with folded hands for
+inspiration to come to him he knew not how nor whence.  His belief
+that wisdom was the revelation and gift of God did not prevent him
+from seeking her as silver, and searching for her as hid treasures,
+from applying his heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning
+all things that are done under heaven; and we do not find that it
+prevented our forefathers.  Ceadmon's belief that God inspired him
+with the poetic faculty, did not make him the less laborious and
+careful versifier.  Bishop John's blessing the dumb boy's tongue in
+the name of Him whom he believed to be Word of God and the Master of
+that poor dumb boy, did not prevent his anticipating some of the
+discoveries of our modern wise men, in setting about a most practical
+and scientific cure.  Alfred's continual prayers for light and
+inspiration made him no less a laborious and thoughtful student of
+war and law, of physics, language, and geography.  These old Teutons,
+for all these superstitions of theirs, were perhaps as businesslike
+and practical in those days as we their children are in these.  But
+that did not prevent their believing that unless God showed them a
+thing, they could not see it, and thanking Him honestly enough for
+the comparative little which He did show them.  But we who enjoy the
+accumulated teaching of ages--we to whose researches He is revealing
+year by year, almost week by weeks wonders of which they never
+dreamed--we whom He has taught to make the lame to walk, the dumb to
+speak, the blind to see, to exterminate the pestilence and defy the
+thunderbolt, to multiply millionfold the fruits of learning, to
+annihilate time and space, to span the heavens, and to weigh the sun--
+what madness is this which has come upon us in these last days, to
+make us fancy that we, insects of a day, have found out these things
+for ourselves, and talk big about the progress of the species, and
+the triumphs of intellect, and the all-conquering powers of the human
+mind, and give the glory of all this inspiration and revelation, not
+to God, but to ourselves?  Let us beware, beware--lest our boundless
+pride and self-satisfaction, by some mysterious yet most certain law,
+avenge itself--lest like the Assyrian conqueror of old, while we
+stand and cry, "Is not this great Babylon which I have built?" our
+reason, like his, should reel and fall beneath the narcotic of our
+own maddening self-conceit, and while attempting to scale the heavens
+we overlook some pitfall at our feet, and fall as learned idiots,
+suicidal pedants, to be a degradation, and a hissing, and a shame.
+
+However strongly you may differ from these opinions of our own
+forefathers with regard to the ground and cause of physical science,
+and the arts of healing, I am sure that the recollection of the
+thrice holy ground upon which we stand, beneath the shadow of
+venerable piles, witnesses for the creeds, the laws, the liberties,
+which those our ancestors have handed down to us, will preserve you
+from the temptation of dismissing with hasty contempt their thoughts
+upon any subject so important; will make you inclined to listen to
+their opinion with affection, if not with reverence; and save,
+perhaps, the preacher from a sneer when he declares that the doctrine
+of those old Saxon men is, in his belief, not only the most
+Scriptural, but the most rational and scientific explanation of the
+grounds of all human knowledge.
+
+At least, I shall be able to quote in support of my own opinion a
+name from which there can be no appeal in the minds of a congregation
+of educated Englishmen--I mean Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, the
+spiritual father of the modern science, and, therefore, of the
+chemistry and the medicine of the whole civilised world.  If there is
+one thing which more than another ought to impress itself on the mind
+of a careful student of his works, it is this--that he considered
+science as the inspiration of God, and every separate act of
+induction by which man arrives at a physical law, as a revelation
+from the Maker of those laws; and that the faith which gave him
+daring to face the mystery of the universe, and proclaim to men that
+they could conquer nature by obeying her, was his deep, living,
+practical belief that there was One who had ascended up on high and
+led captive in the flesh and spirit of a man those very idols of
+sense which had been themselves leading men's minds captive,
+enslaving them to the illusions of their own senses, forcing them to
+bow down in vague awe and terror before those powers of Nature, which
+God had appointed, not to be their tyrants, but their slaves.  I will
+not special-plead particulars from his works, wherein I may consider
+that he asserts this.  I will rather say boldly that the idea runs
+through every line he ever wrote; that unless seen in the light of
+that faith, the grounds of his philosophy ought to be as inexplicable
+to us, as they would, without it, have been impossible to himself.
+As has been well said of him:  "Faith in God as the absolute ground
+of all human as well as of all natural laws; the belief that He had
+actually made Himself known to His creatures, and that it was
+possible for them to have a knowledge of Him, cleared from the
+phantasies and idols of their own imaginations and understandings;
+this was the necessary foundation of all that great man's mind and
+speculations, to whatever point they were tending, and however at
+times they might be darkened by too close a familiarity with the
+corruptions and meannesses of man, or too passionate an addiction to
+the contemplation of Nature.  Nor should it ever be forgotten that he
+owed all the clearness and distinctness of his mind to his freedom
+from that Pantheism which naturally disposes to a vague admiration
+and adoration of Nature, to the belief that it is stronger and nobler
+than ourselves; that we are servants, and puppets, and portions of
+it, and not its lords and rulers.  If Bacon had in anywise confounded
+Nature with God--if he had not entertained the strongest practical
+feeling that men were connected with God through One who had taken
+upon Him their nature, it is impossible that he could have discovered
+that method of dealing with physics which has made a physical science
+possible."
+
+No really careful student of his works, but must have perceived this,
+however glad, alas! he may have felt at times to thrust the thought
+of it from him, and try to think that Francis Bacon's Christianity
+was something over and above his philosophy--a religion which he left
+behind him at the church-door--or only sprinkled up and down his
+works so much of it as should shield him in a bigoted age from the
+suspicion of materialism.  A strange theory, and yet one which so
+determined is man to see nothing, whether it be in the Bible or in
+the Novum Organum, but what each wishes to see, has been deliberately
+put forth again and again by men who fancy, forsooth, that the
+greatest of English heroes was even such an one as themselves.  One
+does not wonder to find among the general characteristics of those
+writers who admire Bacon as a materialist, the most utter incapacity
+of philosophising on Bacon's method, the very restless conceit, the
+hasty generalisation, the hankering after cosmogonic theories, which
+Bacon anathematises in every page.  Yes, I repeat it, we owe our
+medical and sanitary science to Bacon's philosophy; and Bacon owed
+his philosophy to his Christianity.
+
+Oh! it is easy for us, amid the marvels of our great hospitals, now
+grown commonplace in our eyes from very custom, to talk of the empire
+of mind over matter; for us--who reap the harvest whereof Bacon sowed
+the seed.  But consider, how great the faith of that man must have
+been, who died in hope, not having received the promises, but seeing
+them afar off, and haunted to his dying day with glorious visions of
+a time when famine and pestilence should vanish before a scientific
+obedience--to use his own expression--to the will of God, revealed in
+natural facts.  Thus we can understand how he dared to denounce all
+that had gone before him as blind and worthless guides, and to
+proclaim himself to the world as the one restorer of true physical
+philosophy.  Thus we can understand how he, the cautious and patient
+man of the world, dared indulge in those vast dreams of the
+scientific triumphs of the future.  Thus we can understand how he
+dared hint at the expectation that men would some day even conquer
+death itself; because he believed that man had conquered death
+already, in the person of its King and Lord--in the flesh of Him who
+ascended up on high, and led captivity captive, and received gifts
+for men.  The "empire of mind over matter?"  What practical proof had
+he of it amid the miserable alternations of empiricism and magic
+which made up the pseudo-science of his time; amid the theories and
+speculations of mankind, which, as he said, were "but a sort of
+madness--useless alike for discovery or for operation."  What right
+had he, more than any other man who had gone before him, to believe
+that man could conquer and mould to his will the unseen and
+tremendous powers which work in every cloud and every flower? that he
+could dive into the secret mysteries of his own body, and renew his
+youth like the eagle's?  This ground he had for that faith--that he
+believed, as he says himself, that he must "begin from God; and that
+the pursuit of physical science clearly proceeds from Him, the Author
+of good, and Father of light."  This gave him faith to say that in
+this as in all other Divine works, the smallest beginnings lead
+assuredly to some result, and that the "remark in spiritual matters,
+that the kingdom of God cometh without observation, is also found to
+be true in every great work of Divine Providence; so that everything
+glides on quietly without confusion or noise, and the matter is
+achieved before men either think or perceive that it is commenced."
+This it was which gave him courage to believe that his own philosophy
+might be the actual fulfilment of the prophecy, that in the last days
+many should run to and fro, and knowledge should be increased--words
+which, like hundreds of others in his works, sound like the
+outpourings of an almost blasphemous self-conceit, till we recollect
+that he looked on science only as the inspiration of God, and man's
+empire over nature only as the consequence of the redemption worked
+out for him by Christ, and begin to see in them the expressions of
+the deepest and most divine humility.
+
+I doubt not that many here will be far more able than I am
+practically to apply the facts which I have been adducing to the
+cause of the hospital for which I am pleading.  But there is one
+consequence of them to which I must beg leave to draw attention more
+particularly, especially at the present era of our nation.  If, then,
+these discoveries of science be indeed revelations and inspirations
+from God, does it not follow that all classes, even the poorest and
+the most ignorant, the most brutal, have an equal right to enjoy the
+fruits of them?  Does it not follow that to give to the poor their
+share in the blessings which chemical and medical science are working
+out for us, is not a matter of charity or benevolence, but of DUTY,
+of indefeasible, peremptory, immediate duty?  For consider, my
+friends; the Son of God descends on earth, and takes on Him not only
+the form, but the very nature, affections, trials, and sorrows of a
+man.  He proclaims Himself as the person who has been all along
+ruling, guiding, teaching, improving men; the light who lighteth
+every man who cometh into the world.  He proclaims Himself by acts of
+wondrous power to be the internecine foe and conqueror of every form
+of sorrow, slavery, barbarism, weakness, sickness, death itself.  He
+proclaims Himself as One who is come to give His life for His sheep--
+One who is come to restore to men the likeness in which they were
+originally created, the likeness of their Father in Heaven, who
+accepteth the person of no man--who causeth His sun to shine on the
+evil and on the good, who sendeth His rain on the just and on the
+unjust, in whose sight the meanest publican, if his only
+consciousness be that of his own baseness and worthlessness, is more
+righteous than the most learned, respectable, and self-satisfied
+pharisee.  He proclaims Himself the setter-up of a kingdom into which
+the publican and the harlot will pass sooner than the rich, the
+mighty, and the noble; a kingdom in which all men are to be brothers,
+and their bond of union loyalty to One who spared not His own life
+for the sheep, who came not to do His own, but the will of the Father
+who had sent Him, and who showed by His toil among the poor, the
+outcast, the ignorant, and the brutal, what that same will was like.
+With His own life-blood He seals this Covenant between God and man.
+He offers up His own body as the first-fruits of this great kingdom
+of self-sacrifice.  He takes poor fishermen and mechanics, and sends
+them forth to acquaint all men with the good news that God is their
+King, and to baptize them as subjects of that kingdom, bound to rise
+in baptism to a new life, a life of love, and brotherhood, and self-
+sacrifice, like His own.  He commands them to call all nations to
+that sacred Feast wherein there is neither rich nor poor, but the
+same bread and the same wine are offered to the monarch and to the
+slave, as signs of their common humanity, their common redemption,
+their common interest--signs that they derive their life, their
+health, their reason, their every faculty of body, soul, and spirit,
+from One who walked the earth as the son of a poor carpenter, who ate
+and drank with publicans and sinners.  He sends down His Spirit on
+them with gifts of language, eloquence, wisdom, and healing, as mere
+earnests and first-fruits; so they said, of that prophecy that He
+would pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, even upon slaves and
+handmaids.  And these poor fishermen feel themselves impelled by a
+divine and irresistible impulse to go forth to the ends of the world,
+and face persecution, insult, torture, and death--not in order that
+they may make themselves lords over mankind, but that they may tell
+them that One is their Master, even Jesus Christ, both God and man--
+that HE rules the world, and will rule it, and CAN rule it, that in
+His sight there is no distinction of race, or rank, or riches,
+neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free.  And, as a
+fact, their message has prevailed and been believed; and in
+proportion as it has prevailed, not merely individual sanctity or
+piety, but liberty, law, peace, civilisation, learning, art, science,
+the gifts which he bought for men with His blood, have followed in
+its train:  while the nations who have not received that message that
+God was their King, or having received it have forgotten it, or
+perverted it into a superstition and an hypocrisy, have in exactly
+that proportion fallen back into barbarism and bloodshed, slavery and
+misery.  My friends, if this philosophy of history, this theory of
+human progress, or as I should call it, this Gospel of the Kingdom of
+God mean anything--does it not mean this? this which our forefathers
+believed, dimly and inconsistently perhaps, but still believed it,
+else we had not been here this day--that we are not our own, but the
+servants of Jesus Christ, and brothers of each other--that the very
+constitution and ground-law of this human species which has been
+redeemed by Christ, is the self-sacrifice which Christ displayed as
+the one perfection of humanity--that all rank, property, learning,
+science, are only held by their possessors in trust from that King
+who has distributed them to each according as He will, that each
+might use them for the good of all, certain--as certain as God's
+promise can make man--that if by giving up our own interest for the
+interest of others, we seek first the kingdom of God, and the
+righteousness between man and man, which we call MERCY, according to
+which it is constituted, all other things, health, wealth, peace, and
+every other blessing which humanity can desire, shall be added unto
+us over and above, as the natural and necessary fruits of a society
+founded according to the will of God, and declared in his Son Jesus
+Christ, and therefore according to those physical laws, whereof He is
+at once the Creator, the Director, and the Revealer?
+
+This was the faith of our forefathers, both laity and clergy--that
+the Lord was King, be the people never so unquiet; that men were His
+stewards and His pupils only, and not His vicars; that they were
+equal in His sight, and not the slaves and tyrants of each other; and
+that the help that was done upon earth, He did it all Himself.
+Dimly, doubtless, they saw it, and inconsistently:  but they saw it,
+and to their faith in that great truth we owe all that has made
+England really noble among the nations.  Of the fruits of that faith
+every venerable building around us should remind us.  To that faith
+in the laity, we owe the abolition of serfdom, the freedom of our
+institutions, the laws which provide equal justice between man and
+man; to that faith in the clergy, and especially in the monastic
+orders, we owe the endowment of our schools and universities, the
+improvement of agriculture, the preservation and the spread of all
+the liberal arts and sciences, as far as they were then discovered;
+so that every one of those abbeys which we now revile so ignorantly,
+became a centre of freedom, protection, healing, and civilisation, a
+refuge for the oppressed, a well-spring of mercy for the afflicted, a
+practical witness to the nation that property and science were not
+the private and absolute possession of men, but only held in trust
+from God for the benefit of the common weal:  and just in proportion
+as in the 14th and 15th centuries those institutions fell from their
+first estate, and began to fancy that their wealth and wisdom was
+their own, acquired by their own cunning, to be used for their own
+aggrandizement, they became an imposture and imbecility, an
+abomination and a ruin.  And it was this faith, too, in a still
+nobler and clearer form, which at the Reformation inspired the age
+which could produce a Ridley, a Latimer, an Elizabeth, a Shakspeare,
+a Spenser, a Raleigh, a Bacon, and a Milton; which knit together, in
+spite of religious feuds and social wrongs, the nation of England
+with a bond which all the powers of hell endeavoured in vain to
+break.  Doubtless, there too there was inconsistency enough.
+Elizabeth may have mixed up ambitious dynastic dreams with her
+intense belief that God had given her her wisdom, her learning, her
+mighty will, only to be the servant of His servants and defender of
+the faith.  Men like Drake and Raleigh, while they were believing
+that God had sent them forth to smite with the sword of the Lord the
+devourers of the earth, the destroyers of religion, freedom,
+civilisation, and national life, may have been unfaithful to what
+they believed their divine mission, and fancied that they might use
+their wisdom and valour that God gave them for their selfish ends,
+till they committed (as some say) acts of rapacity and cruelty worthy
+of the merest buccaneer.  But THAT was not what made them conquer--
+that was not what made the wealth and the might of Spain melt away
+before their little bands of heroes; but the same old faith, shining
+out in all their noblest acts and words, that "the Lord WAS King, and
+that the help that was done upon earth, He did it all Himself?"  So
+again, Bacon may have fancied, and did fancy in his old age, that he
+might use his deep knowledge of mankind for his own selfish ends--
+that he might indulge himself in building himself up a name that
+might fill all the earth, that he who had done so much for God and
+for mankind, might be allowed to do at last somewhat for himself, and
+tempted, by a paltry bribe, fall for awhile, as David did before him,
+that God, and not he, might have the glory of all his wisdom.  But
+then he was less than himself; then he had but lost sight of his
+lode-star.  Then he had forgotten, but only for awhile, that he owed
+all to the teaching of that God who had given to the young and
+obscure advocate the mission of affecting the destinies of nations
+yet unborn.
+
+And believe me, my friends, even as it has been with our forefathers,
+so it will be with us.  According to our faith will it be unto us,
+now as it was of old.  In proportion as we believe that wealth,
+science, and civilisation are the work and property of man, in just
+that proportion we shall be tempted to keep them selfishly and
+exclusively to ourselves.  The man of science will be tempted to hide
+his discoveries, though men may be perishing for lack of them, till
+he can sell them to the highest bidder; the rich man will be tempted
+to purchase them for himself, in order that he may increase his own
+comfort and luxury, and feel comparatively lazy and careless about
+their application to the welfare of the masses; he will be tempted to
+pay an exorbitant price for anything that can increase his personal
+convenience, and yet when the question is about improving the supply
+of necessaries to the poor, stand haggling about considerations of
+profitable investment, excuse himself from doing the duty which lies
+nearest to him by visions of distant profit, of which a thousand
+unexpected accidents may deprive him after all, and make his boasted
+scientific care for the wealth of the nation an excuse for leaving
+tens of thousands worse housed and worse fed than his own beasts of
+burden.  The poor man will be tempted franctically to oppose his
+selfishness and unbelief to the selfishness and unbelief of the rich,
+and clutch from him by force the comfort which really belong to
+neither of them, in order that he may pride himself in them and
+misuse them in his turn; and the clergy will be tempted, as they have
+too often been tempted already, to fancy that reason is the enemy,
+and not the twin sister of faith; to oppose revelation to science, as
+if God's two messages could contradict each other; to widen the
+Manichaean distinction between secular and spiritual matters, so
+pleasant to the natural atheism of fallen man; to fancy that they
+honour God by limiting as much as possible His teaching, His
+providence, His wisdom, His love, and His kingdom, and to pretend
+that they are defending the creeds of the Catholic Church, by denying
+to them any practical or real influence on the economic, political,
+and physical welfare of mankind.  But in proportion as we hold to the
+old faith of our forefathers concerning science and civilisation, we
+shall feel it not only a duty, but a glory and a delight, to make all
+men sharers in them; to go out into the streets and lanes of the city
+and call in the maimed, and the halt, and the blind, that they may
+sit down and take their share of the good things which God has
+provided in His kingdom for those who obey Him.  Every new discovery
+will be hailed by us as a fresh boon from God to be bestowed by the
+rain and the sunshine freely upon us all.  The sight of every
+sufferer will make us ready to suspect and to examine ourselves lest
+we should be in some indirect way the victim of some neglect or
+selfishness of our own.  Every disease will be a sign to us that in
+some respect or other, the physical or moral laws of human nature
+have been overlooked or broken.  The existence of an unhealthy
+locality, the recurrence of an epidemic, will be to us a subject of
+public shame and self-reproach.  Men of science will no longer go up
+and down entreating mankind in vain to make use of their discoveries;
+the sanitary reformer will be no longer like Wisdom crying in the
+streets and no man regarding her; and in every ill to which flesh is
+heir we shall see an enemy of our King and Lord, and an intruder into
+His Kingdom, against which we swore at our baptism to fight with an
+inspiring and delicious certainty that God will prosper the right;
+that His laws cannot change; that nature, and the disturbances and
+poisons, and brute powers thereof, were meant to be the slaves, and
+not the tyrants of a race whose head has conquered the grave itself.
+
+This is no speculative dream.  The progress of science is daily
+proving it to be an actual truth; proving to us that a large
+proportion of diseases--how large a proportion, no man yet dare say--
+are preventible by science under the direction of that common justice
+and mercy which man owes to man.  The proper cultivation of the soil,
+it is now clearly seen, will exterminate fevers and agues, and all
+the frightful consequences of malaria.  An attention to those simple
+decencies and cleanlinesses of life of which even the wild animals
+feel the necessity, will prevent the epidemics of our cities, and all
+the frightful train of secondary diseases which follow them, or
+supply their place.  The question which is generally more and more
+forcing itself on the minds of scientific men is not how many
+diseases are, but how few are not, the consequences of man's
+ignorance, barbarism, and folly.  The medical man is felt more and
+more to be as necessary in health as he is in sickness, to be the
+fellow-workman not merely of the clergyman, but of the social
+reformer, the political economist, and the statesman; and the first
+object of his science to be prevention, and not cure.  But if all
+this be true, as true it is, we ought to begin to look on hospitals
+as many medical men I doubt not do already, in a sadder though in a
+no less important light.  When we remember that the majority of cases
+which fill their wards are cases of more or less directly preventible
+diseases, the fruits of our social neglect, too often of our neglect
+of the sufferers themselves, too often also our neglect of their
+parents and forefathers; when we think how many a bitter pang is
+engendered and propagated from generation to generation in the
+noisome alleys and courts of this metropolis, by foul food, foul
+bedrooms, foul air, foul water, by intemperance, the natural and
+almost pardonable consequence of want of water, depressing and
+degrading employments, and lives spent in such an atmosphere of filth
+as our daintier nostrils could not endure a day:  then we should
+learn to look upon these hospitals not as acts of charity,
+supererogatory benevolences of ours towards those to whom we owe
+nothing, but as confessions of sin, and worthy fruits of penitence;
+as poor and late and partial compensation for misery which we might
+have prevented.  And when again, taking up scientific works, we find
+how vast a proportion of the remaining cases of disease are produced
+directly or indirectly by the unhealthiness of certain occupations,
+so certainly that the scientific man can almost prophesy the average
+shortening of life, and the peculiar form of disease, incident to any
+given form of city labour--when we find, to quote a single instance,
+that a large proportion--one half, as I am informed--of the female
+cases in certain hospitals, are those of women-servants suffering
+from diseases produced by overwork in household labour, especially by
+carrying heavy weights up the steep stairs of our London houses--when
+we consider the large proportion of accident cases which are the
+result, if not always of neglect in our social arrangements, still of
+danger incurred in labouring for us, we shall begin to feel that our
+debts towards the poorer classes, for whom this and other hospitals
+are instituted, swells and mounts up to a burden which ought to be
+and would be intolerable to us, if we had not some such means as this
+hospital affords of testifying our contrition for neglect for which
+we cannot atone, and of practically claiming in the hospital our
+brotherhood with those masses whom we pass by so carelessly in the
+workshop and the street.  What matters it that they have undertaken a
+life of labour from necessity, and with a full consciousness of the
+dangers they incur in it?  For whom have they been labouring, but for
+us?  Their handiwork renders our houses luxurious.  We wear the
+clothes they make.  We eat the food they produce.  They sit in
+darkness and the shadow of death that we may enjoy light and life and
+luxury and civilisation.  True, they are free men, in name, not free
+though from the iron necessity of crushing toil.  Shall we make their
+liberty a cloak for our licentiousness? and because they are our
+brothers and not our slaves, answer with Cain, "Am I my brother's
+keeper?"  What if we have paid them the wages which they ask?  We do
+not feed our beasts of burden only as long as they are in health, and
+when they fall sick leave them to cure themselves and starve--and
+these are not our beasts of burden; they are members of Christ,
+children of God, inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Prove it to
+them, then, for they are in bitter danger of forgetting it in these
+days.  Prove to them, by helping to cure their maladies, that they
+are members of Christ, that they do indeed belong to Him who without
+fee or payment freely cured the sick of Judaea in old time.  Prove to
+them that they are children of God by treating them as such--as
+children of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground,
+children of Him whose love is over all His works, children of Him who
+defends the widow and the fatherless, and sees that those who are in
+need or necessity have right, and who maketh inquiry for the blood of
+the innocent.  Prove to them that they are inheritors of the Kingdom
+of Heaven, by proving to them first of all that the Kingdom of Heaven
+exists, that all, rich and poor alike, are brothers, and One their
+Master, He who ascended up on high and led captivity captive, and
+received gifts for men, the gifts of healing, the gifts of science,
+the gifts of civilisation, the gifts of law, the gifts of order, the
+gifts of liberty, the gifts of the spirit of love and brotherhood, of
+fellow-feeling and self-sacrifice, of justice and humility, a spirit
+fit for a world of redeemed and pardoned men, in which mercy is but
+justice, and self-sacrifice the truest self-interest; a world, the
+King and Master of which is One who poured out his own life-blood for
+the sake of those who hated him, that men should henceforth live not
+for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again, and ascended up
+on high and received gifts for men, that the Lord God might dwell
+among them.
+
+And because all general truths can only be verified in particular
+instances, verify your general faith in that Christianity which you
+profess in this particular instance, by doing the duty which lies
+nearest to you, and GIVING, AS IT IS CALLED, to this hospital for
+which I now plead.
+
+Thanks to the spirit and the attainments of the average of English
+medical men and chaplains, to praise the management of any hospital
+which is under their care, is a needless impertinence.  Do you find
+funds, there will be no fear as to their being well employed; and no
+fear, alas! either of their services being in full demand, while the
+sanitary state of vast streets of South London, lying close to this
+hospital, are in a state in which they are, and in which private
+cupidity and neglect seem willing to compel them to remain.  It is on
+account of its contiguity to these neglected, destitute, and
+poisonous localities, that this hospital seems to me especially
+valuable.  But though situated in a part of London where its presence
+is especially needed, it has not, from various causes which have
+arisen from no fault of its own, attracted as much public notice as
+some other more magnificent foundations; while it possesses one
+feature, peculiar I believe to it, among our London hospitals, which
+seems to me to render it especially deserving of support:  I speak of
+the ward for incurable patients, in which, instead of ending their
+days in the melancholy wards of a workhouse, or amid those
+pestilential and crowded dwellings which have perhaps produced their
+maladies, and which certainly will aggravate them, they may have
+their heavy years of hopeless suffering softened by a continued
+supply of constant comforts, and constant medical solicitude, such as
+the best-conducted workhouse, or the most laborious staff of parish
+surgeons, and district visitors, ay, not even the benevolence and
+self-sacrifice of friends and relations, can possibly provide.  I
+beseech you, picture to yourselves the amount of mere physical
+comfort, not to mention the higher blessings of spiritual teaching
+and consolation, accruing to some poor tortured cripple, in the wards
+of this hospital; compare it with the very brightest lot possible for
+him in the dwellings of the lower, or even of the middle classes of
+the metropolis; then recollect that these hospital luxuries, which
+would be unattainable by him elsewhere, are but a tithe of those
+which you, in his situation, would consider absolute necessaries,
+without which a life of suffering, ay, even of health, were
+intolerable--and do unto others this day, as you would that others
+should do unto you!
+
+I might have taken some other and more popular method of drawing your
+attention to this institution.
+
+I might have tried to excite your feelings and sympathies by attempts
+at pathetic or picturesque descriptions of suffering.  But the
+minister of a just God is bound to proclaim that God demands not
+SENTIMENT, but JUSTICE.  The Bible knows nothing of the "religious
+sentiments and emotions," whereof we hear so much talk nowadays.  It
+speaks of DUTY.  "Beloved, if God so loved us, we OUGHT to love one
+another."
+
+I might also have attempted to flatter you into giving, by
+representing this as a "GOOD WORK," a work of charity and piety, well
+pleasing to God; a sort of work of Protestant supererogation, fruits
+of faith which we may show, if we like, up to a certain not very
+clearly defined point of benevolence, but the absence of which
+probably will not seriously affect our eternal salvation, still less
+our right to call ourselves orthodox, Protestants, churchmen, worthy,
+kind-hearted, respectable, blameless.  The Bible knows nothing of
+such a religion; it neither coaxes nor flatters, it COMMANDS.  It
+demands mercy, because mercy is justice; and declares with what
+measure we mete to others, it shall be surely measured to us again.
+If therefore my words shall seem to some here, to be not so much a
+humble request as a peremptory demand, I cannot help it.  I have
+pleaded the cause of this hospital on the only solid ground of which
+I am aware, for doing anything but evil to everyone around us who is
+not a private friend, or a member of one's own family.  I ask you to
+help the poor to their share in the gifts which Christ received for
+men, because they are His gifts, and neither ours nor any man's.
+Among these venerable buildings, the signs and witnesses of the
+Kingdom of God, and the blessings of that Kingdom which for a
+thousand years have been spreading and growing among us--I ask it of
+you as citizens of that Kingdom.  Prove your brotherhood to the poor
+by restoring to them a portion of that wealth which, without their
+labour, you could never have possessed.  Prove your brotherhood to
+them in a thousand ways--in every way--in this way, because at this
+moment it happens to be the nearest and the most immediate, and
+because the necessity for it is nearer, more immediate, to judge by
+the signs of the times, and most of all by their self-satisfied
+unconsciousness of danger, their loud and shallow self-glorification,
+than ever it was before.  Work while it is called to-day, lest the
+night come wherein no man can work, but only take his wages.
+
+Again I say, I may seem to some here to have pleaded the cause of
+this hospital in too harsh and peremptory a tone. . . .  And yet I
+have a ground of hope, in the English love of simple justice, in the
+noble instances of benevolence and self-sacrifice among the wealthy
+and educated, which are, thank God! increasing in number daily, as
+the need of them increases--in these, I say, I have a ground of hope
+that there are many here to-day who would sooner hear the language of
+truth than of flattery; who will be more strongly moved toward a
+righteous deed by being told that it is their duty toward God, their
+country, and their fellow-citizens, than by any sentimental baits for
+personal sympathy, or for the love of Pharisaic ostentation.
+
+
+
+XIII--FIRST SERMON ON THE CHOLERA
+
+
+
+(Sunday Morning, September 27th, 1849.)
+
+God's judgments are from above, out of the sight of the wicked.--
+PSALM X. 5.
+
+We have just been praying to God to remove from us the cholera, which
+we call a judgment of God, a chastisement; and God knows we have need
+enough to do so.  But we can hardly expect God to withdraw His
+chastisement unless we correct the sins for which He chastised us,
+and therefore unless we find out what particular sins have brought
+the evil on us.  For it is mere cant and hypocrisy, my friends, to
+tell God, in a general way, that we believe He is punishing us for
+our sins, and then to avoid carefully confessing any particular sin,
+and to get angry with anyone who tells us boldly WHICH sin God is
+punishing us for.  But so goes the world.  Everyone is ready to say,
+"Oh! yes, we are all great sinners, miserable sinners!" and then if
+you charge them with any particular sin, they bridle up and deny THAT
+sin fiercely enough, and all sins one by one, confessing themselves
+great sinners, and yet saying that they don't know what sins they
+have committed.  No man really believes himself a sinner, no man
+really confesses his sins, but the man who can honestly put his
+finger on THIS sin or THAT sin which he has committed, and is not
+afraid to confess to God, "THIS sin and THAT sin have I done--THIS
+bad habit and THAT bad habit have I cherished within me."  Therefore,
+I say, it is no use for us Englishmen to dream that we can flatter
+and persuade the great God of Heaven and earth into taking away the
+cholera from us, unless we find out and confess openly what we have
+done to bring on the cholera, and unless we repent and bring forth
+fruits worthy of repentance, by amending our habits on that point,
+and doing everything for the future which shall not bring on the
+cholera, but keep it off.
+
+Do not let us believe this time, my friends, in the pitiable,
+insincere way in which all England believed when the cholera was here
+sixteen years ago.  When they saw human beings dying by thousands,
+they all got frightened, and proclaimed a Fast and confessed their
+sins and promised repentance in a general way.  But did they repent
+of and confess those sins which had caused the cholera?  Did they
+repent of and confess the covetousness, the tyranny, the
+carelessness, which in most great towns, and in too many villages
+also, forces the poor to lodge in undrained stifling hovels, unfit
+for hogs, amid vapours and smells which send forth on every breath
+the seeds of rickets and consumption, typhus and scarlet fever, and
+worse and last of all, the cholera?  Did they repent of their sin in
+that?  Not they.  Did they repent of the carelessness and laziness
+and covetousness which sends meat and fish up to all our large towns
+in a half-putrid state; which fills every corner of London and the
+great cities with slaughter-houses, over-crowded graveyards,
+undrained sewers?  Not they.  To confess their sins in a general way
+cost them a few words; to confess and repent of the real particular
+sins in themselves, was a very different matter; to amend them would
+have touched vested interests, would have cost money, the
+Englishman's god; it would have required self-sacrifice of pocket, as
+well as of time.  It would have required manful fighting against the
+prejudices, the ignorance, the self-conceit, the laziness, the
+covetousness of the wicked world.  So they could not afford to repent
+and amend of all THAT.  And when those great and good men, the
+Sanitary Commissioners, proved to all England fifteen years ago, that
+cholera always appeared where fever had appeared, and that both fever
+and cholera always cling exclusively to those places where there was
+bad food, bad air, crowded bedrooms, bad drainage and filth--that
+such were the laws of God and Nature, and always had been; they took
+no notice of it, because it was the poor rather than the rich who
+suffered from those causes.  So the filth of our great cities was
+left to ferment in poisonous cesspools, foul ditches and marshes and
+muds, such as those now killing people by hundreds in the
+neighbourhood of Plymouth; for one house or sewer that was improved,
+a hundred more were left just as they were in the first cholera; as
+soon as the panic of superstitious fear was past, carelessness and
+indolence returned.  Men went back, the covetous man to his
+covetousness, and the idler to his idleness.  And behold! sixteen
+years are past, and the cholera is as bad as ever among us.
+
+But you will say, perhaps, it is presumptuous to say that Englishmen
+have brought the cholera on themselves, that it is God's judgment,
+and that we cannot explain His inscrutable Providence.  Ah! my
+friends, that is a poor excuse and a common one, for leaving a great
+many sins as they are!  When people do not wish to do God's will, it
+is a very pleasant thing to talk about God's will as something so
+very deep and unfathomable, that poor human beings cannot be expected
+to find it out.  It is an old excuse, and a great favourite with
+Satan, I have no doubt.  Why cannot people find out God's will?--
+Because they do not LIKE to find it out, lest it should shame them
+and condemn them, and cost them pleasure or money--because their eyes
+are blinded with covetousness and selfishness, so that they cannot
+see God's will, even when they DO look for it, and then they go and
+cant about God's judgments; while those judgments, as the text says,
+are far above out of their mammon-blinded and prejudice-blinded
+sight.  What do they mean by that word?  Come now, my friends! let us
+face the question like men.  What do you mean really when you call
+the cholera, or fever, or affliction at all, God's judgment?  Do you
+merely mean that God is punishing you, you don't know for what, and
+you can't find out for what? but that all which He expects of you is
+to bear it patiently, and then go and do afterwards just what you did
+before?  Dare anyone say that who believes that God is a God of
+justice, much less a God of love?  What would you think of a father
+who punished his children, and then left them to find out as they
+could what they were punished for?  And yet that is the way people
+talk of pestilence and of great afflictions, public and private.
+They are not ashamed to accuse God of a cruelty and an injustice
+which they would be ashamed to confess themselves!  How can men, even
+religious men often, be so blasphemous?  Mainly, I think, because
+they do not really believe in God at all, they only believe about
+Him--they believe that they ought to believe in Him.  They have no
+living personal faith in God or Christ; they do not know God; they do
+not know God's character, and what to believe of Him, and what to
+expect of Him; or what they ought to say of Him; because they do not
+know, they have not studied, they have not loved the character of
+Christ, who is the express image and likeness of God.  Therefore
+God's judgments are far away out of their sight; therefore they make
+themselves a God in their own image and after their own likeness,
+lazy, capricious, revengeful; therefore they are not afraid or
+ashamed to say that God sends pestilence into a country without
+showing that country why it is sent.  But another great reason, I
+believe, why God's judgments in this and other matters are far above
+out of our sight, is the careless, insincere way of using words which
+we English have got into, even on the most holy and awful matters.  I
+suppose there never was a nation in the world so diseased through and
+through with the spirit of cant, as we English are now:  except
+perhaps the old Jews, at the time of our Lord's coming.  You hear men
+talking as if they thought God did not understand English, because
+they cling superstitiously to the letter of the Bible in proportion
+as they lose its spirit.  You hear men taking words into their mouths
+which might make angels weep and devils tremble, with a coolness and
+oily, smooth carelessness which shows you that they do not feel the
+force of what they are saying.  You hear them using the words of
+Scripture, which are in themselves stricter and deeper than all the
+books of philosophy in the world, in such a loose unscriptural way,
+that they make them mean anything or nothing.  They use the words
+like parrots, by rote, just because their forefathers used them
+before them.  They will tell you that cholera is a judgment for our
+sins, "in a sense," but if you ask them for what sins, or in what
+sense, they fly off from that HOME question, and begin mumbling
+commonplaces about the inscrutable decrees of Providence, and so on.
+It is most sad, all this; and most fearful also.
+
+Therefore, I asked you, my friends, what is the meaning of that word
+judgment?  In common talk, people use it rightly enough, but when
+they begin to talk of God's judgments, they speak as if it merely
+meant punishments.  Now judgment and punishment are two things.  When
+a judge gives judgment, he either acquits or condemns the accused
+person; he gives the case for the plaintiff, or for the defendant:
+the punishment of the guilty person, if he be guilty, is a separate
+thing, pronounced and inflicted afterwards.  His judgment, I say, is
+his OPINION about the person's guilt, and even so God's judgments are
+the expression of His opinion about our guilt.  But there is this
+difference between man and God in this matter--a human judge gives
+his opinion in words, God gives His in events:  therefore there is no
+harm for a human judge when he has told a person why he must punish,
+to punish him in some way that has nothing to do with his crime--for
+instance, to send a man to prison because he steals, though it would
+be far better if criminals could be punished in kind, and if the man
+who stole could be forced either to make restitution, or work out the
+price of what he stole in hard labour.  For this is God's plan--God
+always pays sinners back in kind, that He may not merely punish them,
+but CORRECT them; so that by the kind of their punishment, they may
+know the kind of their sin.  God punishes us, as I have often told
+you, not by His caprice, but by His laws.  He does not BREAK HIS LAWS
+to harm us; the laws themselves harm us, when we break them and get
+in their way.  It is always so, you will find, with great national
+afflictions.  I believe, when we know more of God and His laws, we
+shall find it true even in our smallest private sorrows.  God is
+unchangeable; He does not lose His temper, as heathens and
+superstitious men fancy, to punish us.  He does not change His order
+to punish us.  WE break His order, and the order goes on in spite of
+us and crushes us:  and so we get God's judgment, God's opinion of
+our breaking His laws.  You will find it so almost always in history.
+If a nation is laid waste by war, it is generally their own fault.
+They have sinned against the law which God has appointed for nations.
+They have lost courage and prudence, and trust in God, and fellow-
+feeling and unity, and they have become cowardly and selfish and
+split up into parties, and so they are easily conquered by their own
+fault, as the Bible tells us the Jews were by the Chaldeans; and
+their ruin is God's judgment, God's opinion plainly expressed of what
+He thinks of them for having become cowardly and selfish, and
+factious and disinterested.  So it is with famine again.  Famines
+come by a nation's own fault--they are God's plainly spoken opinion
+of what HE thinks of breaking His laws of industry and thrift, by
+improvidence and bad farming.  So when a nation becomes poor and
+bankrupt, it is its own fault; that nation has broken the laws of
+political economy which God has appointed for nations, and its ruin
+is God's judgment, God's plain-spoken opinion again of the sins of
+extravagance, idleness, and reckless speculation.
+
+So with pestilence and cholera.  They come only because we break
+God's laws; as the wise poet well says:
+
+
+Voices from the depths OF NATURE borne
+Which vengeance on the guilty head proclaim.
+
+
+--"Of nature;" of the order and constitution which God has made for
+this world we live in, and which if we break them, though God in his
+mercy so orders the world that punishment comes but seldom even to
+our worst offences, yet surely do bring punishment sooner or later if
+broken, in the common course of nature.  Yes, my friends, as surely
+and naturally as drunkenness punishes itself by a shaking hand and a
+bloated body, so does filth avenge itself by pestilence.  Fever and
+cholera, as you would expect them to be, are the expression of God's
+judgment, God's opinion, God's handwriting on the wall against us for
+our sins of filth and laziness, foul air, foul food, foul drains,
+foul bedrooms.  Where they are, there is cholera.  Where they are
+not, there is none, and will be none, because they who do not break
+God's laws, God's laws will not break them.  Oh! do not think me
+harsh, my friends; God knows it is no pleasant thing to have to speak
+bitter and upbraiding words; but when one travels about this noble
+land of England, and sees what a blessed place it might be, if we
+would only do God's will, and what a miserable place it is just
+because we will not do God's will, it is enough to make one's soul
+boil over with sorrow and indignation; and then when one considers
+that other men's faults are one's own fault too, that one has been
+adding to the heap of sins by one's own laziness, cowardice,
+ignorance, it is enough to break one's heart--to make one cry with
+St. Paul, "Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the
+body of this death?"  Ay, my friends, the state of things in England
+now is enough to drive an earnest man to despair, if one did not know
+that all our distresses, and this cholera, like the rest, are indeed
+GOD'S judgments; the judgments and expressed opinions, not of a
+capricious tyrant, but of a righteous and loving Father, who chastens
+us just because He loves us, and afflicts us only to teach us His
+will, which alone is life and happiness.  Therefore we may believe
+that this very cholera is meant to be a blessing; that if we will
+take the lesson it brings, it will be a blessing to England.  God
+grant that all ranks may take the lesson--that the rich may amend
+their idleness and neglect, and the poor amend their dirt and stupid
+ignorance; then our children will have cause to thank God for the
+cholera, if it teaches us that cleanliness is indeed next to
+holiness, if it teaches us, rich and poor, to make the workman's home
+what it ought to be.  And believe me, my friends, that day will
+surely come; and these distresses, sad as they are for the time, are
+only helping to hasten it--the day when the words of the Hebrew
+prophets shall be fulfilled, where they speak of a state of comfort
+and prosperity, and civilisation, such as men had never reached in
+their time--how the wilderness shall blossom like the rose, and there
+shall be heaps of corn high on the mountain-tops, and the cities
+shall be green as grass on the earth, instead of being the smoky,
+stifling hot-beds of disease which they are now--and how from the
+city of God streams shall flow for the healing of the nations:
+strange words, those, and dim; too deep to be explained by any one
+meaning, or many meanings, such as our small minds can give them; but
+full of blessed cheering hope.  For of whatever they speak, they
+speak at least of this--of a time when all sorrow and sighing shall
+be done away, when science and civilisation shall go hand in hand
+with godliness--when God shall indeed dwell in the hearts of men, and
+His kingdom shall be fulfilled among them, when "His ways shall be
+known upon earth at last, and His saving health among all nations"--
+of a time when all shall know Him, from the least unto the greatest,
+and be indeed His children, doing no sin, because they will have
+given up themselves, their selfishness and cruelty and covetousness,
+and stupidity and laziness, to be changed and renewed into God's
+likeness.  Then all these distresses and pestilences, which, as I
+have shown you, come from breaking the will of God, will have passed
+away like ugly dreams, and all the earth shall be blessed, because
+all the earth shall at last be fulfilling the words of the Lord's
+Prayer, and God's will shall be done on earth, even as it is done in
+heaven.  Oh! my friends, have hope.  Do you think Christ would have
+bid us pray for what would never happen?  Would He have bid us all to
+pray that God's will might be done unless He had known surely that
+God's will would one day be done by men on earth below even as it is
+done in heaven?
+
+
+
+XIV--SECOND SERMON ON THE CHOLERA
+
+
+
+Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.--EXODUS xx. 5.
+
+In my sermon last Sunday I said plainly that cholera, fever, and many
+more diseases were man's own fault, and that they were God's
+judgments just because they were man's own fault, because they were
+God's plainspoken opinion of the sin of filth and of habits of living
+unfit for civilised Christian men.
+
+But there is an objection which may arise in some of your minds, and
+if it has not risen in YOUR minds, still it has in other people's
+often enough; and therefore I will state it plainly, and answer it as
+far as God shall give me wisdom.  For it is well to get to the root
+of all matters, and of this matter of Pestilence among others; for if
+we do believe this Pestilence to be God's judgment, then it is a
+spiritual matter most proper to be spoken of in a place like this
+church, where men come as spiritual beings to hear that which is
+profitable for their souls.  And it IS profitable for their souls to
+consider this matter; for it has to do, as I see more and more daily,
+with the very deepest truths of the Gospel; and accordingly as we
+believe the Gospel, and believe really that Jesus Christ is our
+Saviour and our King, the New Adam, the firstborn among many
+brethren, who has come down to proclaim to us that we are all
+brothers in Him--in proportion as we believe THAT, I say, shall we
+act upon this very matter of public cleanliness.
+
+The objection which I mean is this:  people say it is very hard and
+unfair to talk of cholera or fever being people's own fault, when you
+see persons who are not themselves dirty, and innocent little
+children, who if they are dirty are only so because they are brought
+up so, catch the infection and die of it.  You cannot say it is their
+fault.  Very true.  I did not say it was their fault.  I did not say
+that each particular person takes the infection by his own fault,
+though I do say that nine out of ten do.  And as for little children,
+of course it is not their fault.  But, my friends, it must be
+someone's fault.  No one will say that the world is so ill made that
+these horrible diseases must come in spite of all man's care.  If it
+was so, plagues, pestilences, and infectious fevers would be just as
+common now in England, and just as deadly as they were in old times;
+whereas there is not one infectious fever now in England for ten that
+there used to be five hundred years ago.  In ancient times fevers,
+agues, plague, smallpox, and other diseases, whose very names we
+cannot now understand, so completely are they passed away, swept
+England from one end to the other every few years, killing five
+people where they now kill one.  Those diseases, as I said, have many
+of them now died out entirely; and those which remain are becoming
+less and less dangerous every year.  And why?  Simply because people
+are becoming more cleanly and civilised in their habits of living;
+because they are tilling and draining the land every year more and
+more, instead of leaving it to breed disease, as all uncultivated
+land does.  It is not merely that doctors are becoming wiser:  we
+ourselves are becoming more reasonable in our way of living.  For
+instance, in large districts both of Scotland and of the English
+fens, where fever and ague filled the country and swept off hundreds
+every spring and fall thirty years ago, fever and ague are now almost
+unknown, simply because the marshes have all been drained in the
+meantime.  So you see that people can prevent these disorders, and
+therefore it must be someone's fault if they come.  Now, whose fault
+is it?  You dare not lay the blame on God.  And yet you do lay the
+fault on God if you say that it is no MAN'S fault that children die
+of fever.  But I know what the answer to that will be:  "We do not
+accuse God--it is the fault of the fall, Adam's curse which brought
+death and disease into the world."  That is a common answer, and the
+very one I want to hear.  What? is it just to say, as many do, that
+all the diseases which ever tormented poor little innocent children
+all over the world, came from Adam's sinning six thousand years ago,
+and yet that it is unfair to say that one little child's fever came
+from his parents' keeping a filthy house a month ago?  That is
+swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat--that God should be just
+in punishing all mankind for Adam's sin, and yet unjust in punishing
+one little child for its parents' sin.  If the one is just the other
+must be just too, I think.  If you believe the one, why not believe
+the other?  Why?  Because Adam's curse and "original" sin, as people
+call it, is a good and pleasant excuse for laying our sins and
+miseries at Adam's door; but the same rule is not so pleasant in the
+case of filth and fever, when it lays other people's miseries at our
+door.
+
+I believe that all the misery in the world sprung from Adam's
+disobedience and falling from God.  "By one man sin entered the
+world, and death by sin, and so death passed on all men, even on
+those who had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression."
+So says the Bible, and I believe it says so truly.  For this is the
+law of the earth, God's law which He proclaimed in the text.  He does
+visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and
+fourth generation of those who hate Him.  It is so.  You see it
+around you daily.  No one can deny it.  Just as death and misery
+entered into the world by one man, so we see death and misery
+entering into many a family.  A man or woman is a drunkard, or a
+rogue, or a swearer:  how often their children grow up like them!  We
+have all seen that, God knows, in this very parish.  How much more in
+great cities, where boys and girls by thousands--oh, shame that it
+should be so in a Christian land!--grow up thieves from the breast,
+and harlots from the cradle.  And why?  Why are there, as they say,
+and I am afraid say too truly, in London alone upwards of 10,000
+children under sixteen who live by theft and harlotry?  Because the
+parents of these children are as bad as themselves--drunkards,
+thieves, and worse--and they bring up their children to follow their
+crimes.  If that is not the fathers' sins being visited on the
+children, what is?
+
+How often, again, when we see a wild young man, we say, and justly:
+"Poor fellow! there are great excuses for him, he has been so badly
+brought up."  True, but his wildness will ruin him all the same,
+whether it be his father's fault or his own that he became wild.  If
+he drinks he will ruin his health; if he squanders his money he will
+grow poor.  God's laws cannot stop for him; he is breaking them, and
+they will avenge themselves on him.  You see the same thing
+everywhere.  A man fools away his money, and his innocent children
+suffer for it.  A man ruins his health by debauchery, or a woman hers
+by laziness or vanity or self-indulgence, and her children grow up
+weakly and inherit their parents' unhealthiness.  How often again, do
+we see passionate parents have passionate children, stupid parents
+stupid children, mean and lying parents mean and lying children;
+above all, ignorant and dirty parents have ignorant and dirty
+children.  How can they help being so?  They cannot keep themselves
+clean by instinct; they cannot learn without being taught:  and so
+they suffer for their parents' faults.  But what is all this except
+God's visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children?  Look again
+at a whole parish; how far the neglect or the wickedness of one man
+may make a whole estate miserable.  There is one parish in this very
+union, and the curse of the whole union it is, which will show us
+that fearfully enough.  See, too, how often when a good and generous
+young man comes into his estate, he finds it so crippled with debts
+and mortgages by his forefathers' extravagance, that he cannot do the
+good he would to his tenants, he cannot fulfil his duty as landlord
+where God has placed him, and so he and the whole estate must suffer
+for the follies of generations past.  If that is not God visiting the
+sins of the fathers on the children, what is it?
+
+Look again at a whole nation; the rulers of two countries quarrel, or
+pretend to quarrel, and go to war--and some here know what war is--
+just because there is some old grudge of a hundred years standing
+between two countries, or because rulers of whose names the country
+people, perhaps, never heard, have chosen to fall out, or because
+their forefathers by cowardice, or laziness, or division, or some
+other sin, have made the country too weak to defend itself; and for
+that poor people's property is destroyed, and little infants
+butchered, and innocent women suffer unspeakable shame.  If that is
+not God visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, what is it?
+
+It is very awful, but so it is.  It is the law of this earth, the law
+of human kind, that the innocent often suffer for other's faults,
+just as you see them doing in cholera, fever, ague, smallpox, and
+other diseases which man can prevent if he chooses to take the
+trouble.  There it is.  We cannot alter it.  Those who will may call
+God unjust for it.  Let them first see, whether He is not only most
+just, but most merciful in making the world so, and no other way.  I
+do not merely mean that whatever God does must be right.  That is
+true, but it is a poor way of getting over the difficulty.  God has
+taught us what is right and wrong, and He will be judged by His own
+rules.  As Abraham said to Him when Sodom was to be destroyed:  "That
+be far from Thee, to punish the righteous with the wicked.  Shall not
+the Judge of all the earth do right?"  Abraham knew what was right,
+and he expected God not to break that law of right.  And we may
+expect the same of God.  And I may be able, I hope, in my sermon next
+Sunday, to show you that in this matter God does break the law of
+right.  Nevertheless, in the meantime, this is His way of dealing
+with men.  When Sodom was destroyed He brought righteous Lot out of
+it.  But Sodom was destroyed, and in it many a little infant who had
+never known sin.  And just so when Lisbon was swallowed up by an
+earthquake, ninety years ago, the little children perished as well as
+the grown people--just as in the Irish famine fever last year, many a
+doctor and Roman Catholic priest, and Protestant clergyman, caught
+the fever and died while they were piously attending on the sick.
+They were acting like righteous men doing their duty at their posts;
+but God's laws could not turn aside for them.  Improvidence, and
+misrule, which had been working and growing for hundreds of years,
+had at last brought the famine fever, and even the righteous must
+perish by it.  They had their sins, no doubt, as we all have; but
+then they were doing God's work bravely and honestly enough, yet the
+fever could not spare them any more than it could spare the children
+of the filthy parents, though they had not kept pigsties under their
+windows, nor cesspools at their doors.  It could not spare them any
+more than it can spare the tenants of the negligent or covetous
+house-owner, because it is his fault and not theirs that his houses
+are undrained, overcrowded, destitute--as whole streets in many large
+towns are--of the commonest decencies of life.  It may be the
+landlord's fault, but the tenants suffer.  God visits the sins of the
+fathers upon the children, and landlords ought to be fathers to their
+tenants, and must become fathers to them some day, and that soon,
+unless they intend that the Lord should visit on them all their sins,
+and their forefathers' also, even unto the third and fourth
+generation.
+
+For do not fancy that because the innocent suffer with the guilty
+that therefore the guilty escape.  Seldom do they escape in this
+world, and in the world to come never.  The landlord who, as too many
+do, neglects his cottages till they become man-sties, to breed
+pauperism and disease--the parents whose carelessness and dirt poison
+their children and neighbours into typhus and cholera--their
+brother's blood will cry against them out of the ground.  It will be
+required at their hands sooner or later, by Him who beholds iniquity
+and wrong, and who will not be satisfied in the day of His vengeance
+by Cain's old answer, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
+
+We are every one of us our brother's keeper; and if we do not choose
+to confess that, God will prove it to us in a way that we cannot
+mistake.  A wise man tells a story of a poor Irish widow who came to
+Liverpool and no one would take her in or have mercy on her, till,
+from starvation and bad lodging, as the doctor said, she caught
+typhus fever, and not only died herself, but gave the infection to
+the whole street, and seventeen persons died of it.  "See," says the
+wise man, "the poor Irish widow was the Liverpool people's sister
+after all.  She was of the same flesh and blood as they.  The fever
+that killed her killed them, but they would not confess that they
+were her brothers.  They shut their doors upon her, and so there was
+no way left for her to prove her relationship, but by killing
+seventeen of them with fever."  A grim jest that, but a true one,
+like Elijah's jest to the Baal priests on Carmel.  A true one, I say,
+and one that we have all need to lay to heart.
+
+And I do earnestly trust in you that you will lay it to heart.  We
+have had our fair warning here.  We have had God's judgment about our
+cleanliness; His plain spoken opinion about the sanitary state of
+this parish.  We deserve the fever, I am afraid; not a house in which
+it has appeared but has had some glaring neglect of common
+cleanliness about it; and if we do not take the warning God will
+surely some day repeat it.  It will repeat itself by the necessary
+laws of nature; and we shall have the fever among us again, just as
+the cholera has reappeared in the very towns, and the very streets,
+where it was seventeen years ago, wherever they have not repented of
+and amended their filth and negligence.  And I say openly, that those
+who have escaped this time may not escape next.  God has made
+examples, and by no means always of the worst cottages.  God's plan
+is to take one and leave another by way of warning.  "It is expedient
+that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation
+perish not" is a great and a sound law, and we must profit by it.  So
+let not those who have escaped the fever fancy that they must needs
+be without fault.  "Think ye that those sixteen on whom the tower of
+Siloam fell and slew them, were sinners above all those that dwelt at
+Jerusalem?  I say unto you, Nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all
+likewise perish."
+
+And I say again, as I said last Sunday, that this is a spiritual
+question, a Gospel sermon; for by your conduct in this matter will
+your faith in the Gospel be proved.  If you really believe that Jesus
+Christ came down from heaven and sacrificed Himself for you, you will
+be ready to sacrifice yourselves in this matter for those for whom He
+died; to sacrifice, without stint, your thought, your time, your
+money, and your labour.  If you really believe that He is the sworn
+enemy of all misery and disease, you will show yourselves too the
+sworn enemies of everything that causes misery and disease, and work
+together like men to put all pestilential filth and damp out of this
+parish.  If you really believe that you are all brothers, equal in
+the sight of God and Christ, you will do all you can to save your
+brothers from sickness and the miseries which follow it.  If you
+really believe that your children are God's children, that at baptism
+God declares your little ones to be His, you will be ready to take
+any care or trouble, however new or strange it may seem, to keep your
+children safe from all foul smells, foul food, foul water, and foul
+air, that they may grow up healthy, hearty, and cleanly, fit to serve
+God as christened, free, and civilised Englishmen should in this
+great and awful time, the most wonderful time that the earth has ever
+seen, into which it has pleased God of His great mercy to let us all
+be born.
+
+
+
+XV--THIRD SERMON ON THE CHOLERA
+
+
+
+I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
+Fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of
+them that hate me.--EXODUS xx. 6.
+
+Many of you were perhaps surprised and puzzled by my saying in my
+last sermon that God's visiting the sins of the fathers on the
+children, and letting the innocent suffer for the guilty, was a
+blessing and not a curse--a sign of man's honour and redemption, not
+of his shame and ruin.  But the more I have thought of those words,
+the more glad I am that I spoke them boldly, the more true I find
+them to be.
+
+I say that there is in them the very deepest and surest ground for
+hope.  "Yes," some of you may say, "to be sure when we see the
+innocent suffering for the guilty, it is a plain proof that another
+world must come some day, in which all that unfairness shall be set
+right."  Well, my friends, it does prove that, but I should be very
+sorry if it did not prove a great deal more than that--this suffering
+of the innocent for the guilty.  I have no heart to talk to you about
+the next life, unless I can give you some comfort, some reason for
+trusting in God in this life.  I never saw much good come of it.  I
+never found it do my own soul any good, to be told:  "THIS life and
+THIS world in which you now live are given up irremediably to misrule
+and deceit, poverty and pestilence, death and the devil.  You cannot
+expect to set this world right--you must look to the next world.
+Everything will be set right there."  That sounds fine and resigned;
+and there seems to be a great deal of trust in God in it; but, as I
+think, there is little or none; and I say so from the fruits I see it
+bear.  If people believe that this world is the devil's world, and
+only the next world God's, they are easily tempted to say:  "Very
+well, then, we must serve the devil in this world, and God in the
+next.  We must, of course, take great care to get our souls saved
+when we die, that we may go to heaven and live for ever and ever; but
+as to this world and this life, why, we must follow the ways of the
+world.  It is not our fault that they have nothing to do with God.
+It is not our fault that society and the world are all rotten and
+accursed; we found them so when we were born, and we must make the
+best of a bad matter and sail as the world does, and be covetous and
+mean and anxious--how can we help it?--and stand on our own rights,
+and take care of number one; and even do what is not quite right now
+and then--for how can we help it?--or how else shall we get on in
+this poor lost, fallen, sinful world!"
+
+And so it comes, my friends, that you see people professing--ay, and
+believing, Gospel doctrines, and struggling and reading, and, as they
+fancy, praying, morning, noon, and night, to get their own souls
+saved--who yet, if you are to judge by their conduct, are little
+better than rogues and heathens; whose only law of life seems to be
+the fear of what people will say of them; who, like Balaam the son of
+Bosor, are trying daily to serve the devil without God finding it
+out, worshipping the evil spirit, as that evil spirit wanted our
+blessed Lord to do, because they believed his lie, which Christ
+denied--that the glory of this world belongs to the evil one; and
+then comforting themselves like Balaam their father, in the hope that
+they shall die the death of the righteous, and their last end be like
+his.
+
+Now I say my friends that this is a lie, and comes from the father of
+lies, who tempts every man, as he tempted our Lord, to believe that
+the power and glory of this world are his, that man's flesh and body,
+if not his soul, belongs to him.  I say, it is no such thing.  The
+world is God's world.  Man is God's creature, made in God's image,
+and not in that of a beast or a devil.  The kingdom, the power, and
+the glory, ARE God's now.  You say so every day in the Lord's Prayer--
+believe it.  St. James tells you not to curse men, because they are
+made in the likeness of God now--not WILL be made in God's likeness
+after they die.  Believe that; do not be afraid of it, strange as it
+may seem to understand.  It is in the Bible, and you profess to
+believe that what is in the Bible is true.  And I say that this
+suffering of the innocent for the guilty is a proof of that.  If man
+was not made so that the innocent could suffer for the guilty, he
+could not have been redeemed at all, for there would have been no use
+or meaning in Christ's dying for us, the just for the unjust.  And
+more, if the innocent could not suffer for the guilty we should be
+like the beasts that perish.
+
+Now, why?  Because just in proportion as any creature is low--I mean
+in the scale of life--just in that proportion it does without its
+fellow-creatures, it lives by itself and cares for no other of its
+kind.  A vegetable is a meaner thing than an animal, and one great
+sign of its being meaner is, that vegetables cannot do each other any
+good--cannot help each other--cannot even hurt each other, except in
+a mere mechanical way, by overgrowing each other or robbing each
+other's roots; but what would it matter to a tree if all the other
+trees in the world were to die?  So with wild animals.  What matters
+it to a bird or a beast, whether other birds and beasts are ill off
+or well off, wise or stupid?  Each one takes care of itself--each one
+shifts for itself.  But you will say "Bees help each other and depend
+upon each other for life and death."  True, and for that very reason
+we look upon bees as being more wise and more wonderful than almost
+any animals, just because they are so much like us human beings in
+depending on each other.  You will say again, that among dogs, a
+riotous hound will lead a whole pack wrong--a staunch and well-broken
+hound will keep a whole pack right; and that dogs do depend upon each
+other in very wonderful ways.  Most true, but that only proves more
+completely what I want to get at.  It is the TAME dog, which man has
+taken and broken in, and made to partake more or less of man's wisdom
+and cunning, who depends on his fellow-dogs.  The wild dogs in
+foreign countries, on the other hand, are just as selfish, living
+every one for himself, as so many foxes might be.  And you find this
+same rule holding as you rise.  The more a man is like a wild animal,
+the more of a SAVAGE he is, so much more he depends on himself, and
+not on others--in short, the less civilised he is; for civilised
+means being a citizen, and learning to live in cities, and to help
+and depend upon each other.  And our common English word "civil"
+comes from the same root.  A man is "civil" who feels that he depends
+upon his neighbours, and his neighbours on him; that they are his
+fellow-citizens, and that he owes them a duty and a friendship.  And,
+therefore, a man is truly and sincerely civil, just in proportion as
+he is civilised; in proportion as he is a good citizen, a good
+Christian--in one word, a GOOD MAN.
+
+Ay, that is what I want to come to, my friends--that word MAN, and
+what it means.  The law of man's life, the constitution and order on
+which, and on no other, God has made man, is THIS--to depend upon his
+fellow-men, to be their brothers, in flesh and in spirit; for we are
+brothers to each other.  God made of one blood all nations to dwell
+on the face of the earth.  The same food will feed us all alike.  The
+same cholera will kill us all alike.  And we can give the cholera to
+each other; we can give each other the infection, not merely by our
+touch and breath, for diseased beasts can do that, but by housing our
+families and our tenants badly, feeding them badly, draining the land
+around them badly.  This is the secret of the innocent suffering for
+the guilty, in pestilences, and famines, and disorders, which are
+handed down from father to child, that we are all of the same blood.
+This is the reason why Adam's sin infected our whole race.  Adam
+died, and through him all his children have received a certain
+property of sinfulness and of dying, just as one bee transmits to all
+his children and future generations the property of making honey, or
+a lion transmits to all its future generations the property of being
+a beast of prey.  For by sinning and cutting himself off from God
+Adam gave way to the lower part of him, his flesh, his animal nature,
+and therefore he died as other animals do.  And we his children, who
+all of us give way to our flesh, to our animal nature, every hour,
+alas! we die too.  And in proportion as we give way to our animal
+natures we are liable to die; and the less we give way to our animal
+natures, the less we are liable to die.  We have all sinned; we have
+all become fleshly animal creatures more or less; and therefore we
+must all die sooner or later.  But in proportion as we become
+Christians, in proportion as we become civilised, in short, in
+proportion as we become true men, and conquer and keep in order this
+flesh of ours, and this earth around us, by the teaching of God's
+spirit, as we were meant to do, just so far will length of life
+increase and population increase.  For while people are savages, that
+is, while they give themselves up utterly to their own fleshly lusts,
+and become mere animals like the wild Indians, they cannot increase
+in number.  They are exposed, by their own lusts and ignorance and
+laziness, to every sort of disease; they turn themselves into beasts
+of prey, and are continually fighting and destroying each other, so
+that they, seldom or never increase in numbers, and by war,
+drunkenness, smallpox, fevers, and other diseases too horrible to
+mention, the fruit of their own lusts, whole tribes of them are swept
+utterly off the face of the earth.  And why?  They are like the
+beasts, and like the beasts they perish.  Whereas, just in proportion
+as any nation lives according to the spirit and not according to the
+flesh; in proportion as it conquers its own fleshly appetites which
+tempt it to mere laziness, pleasure, and ignorance, and lives
+according to the spirit in industry, cleanliness, chaste marriage,
+and knowledge, earthly and heavenly, the length of life and the
+number of the population begin to increase at once, just as they are
+doing, thank God! in England now; because Englishmen are learning
+more and more that this earth is God's earth, and that He works it by
+righteous and infallible laws, and has put them on it to till it and
+subdue it; that civilisation and industry are the cause of Christ and
+of God; and that without them His kingdom will not come, neither will
+His will be done on earth.
+
+But now comes a very important question.  The beasts are none the
+worse for giving way to their flesh and being mere animals.  They
+increase and multiply and are happy enough; whereas men, if they give
+way to their flesh and become animals, become fewer and weaker, and
+stupider, and viler, and more miserable, generation after generation.
+Why?  Because the animals are meant to be animals, and men are not.
+Men are meant to be men, and conquer their animal nature by the
+strength which God gives to their spirits.  And as long as they do
+not do so; as long as they remain savage, sottish, ignorant, they are
+living in a lie, in a diseased wrong state, just as God did NOT mean
+them to live; and therefore they perish; therefore these fevers, and
+agues, and choleras, war, starvation, tyranny, and all the ills which
+flesh is heir to, crush them down.  Therefore they are at the mercy
+of the earth beneath their feet, and the skies above their head; at
+the mercy of rain and cold; at the mercy of each other's selfishness,
+laziness, stupidity, cruelty; in short, at the mercy of the brute
+material earth, and their own fleshly lusts and the fleshly lusts of
+others, because they love to walk after the flesh and not after the
+spirit--because they like the likeness of the old Adam who is of the
+earth earthy, better than that of the new Adam who is the Lord from
+heaven--because they like to be animals, when Christ has made them in
+his own image, and redeemed them with His own blood, and taught them
+with His own example, and made them men.  He who will be a man, let
+him believe that he is redeemed by Christ, and must be like Christ in
+everything he says and does.  If he would carry that out, if he would
+live perfectly by faith in God, if he would do God's will utterly and
+in all things he would soon find that those glorious old words still
+stood true:  "Thou shalt not be afraid of the arrow by night, nor of
+the pestilence which walketh in the noonday; a thousand shall fall at
+thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come
+nigh thee."  For such a man would know how to defend himself against
+evil; God would teach him not only to defend himself, but to defend
+those around him.  He would be like his Lord and Master, a fountain
+of wisdom and healing and safety to all his neighbours.  We might any
+one of us be that.  It is everyone's fault more or less that he is
+not.  Each of us who is educated, civilised, converted to the
+knowledge and love of God, it is his sin and shame that he is NOT
+that.  Above all, it is the clergyman's sin and shame that he is not.
+Ay, believe me, when I blame you, I blame myself ten thousand times
+more.  I believe there is many a sin and sorrow from which I might
+have saved you here, if I had dealt with you more as a man should
+deal who believes that you and I are brothers, made in the same image
+of God, redeemed by the same blood of Christ.  And I believe that I
+shall be punished for every neglect of you for which I have been ever
+guilty.  I believe it, and I thank God for it; for I do not see how a
+clergyman, or anyone else, can learn his duty, except by God's
+judging him, and punishing him, and setting his sins before his face.
+
+Yes, my friends, it is good for us to be afflicted, good for us to
+suffer anything that will teach us this great truth, that we are our
+brother's keepers; that we are all one family, and that where one of
+the members suffers, all the other members suffer with it; and that
+if one of the members has cause to rejoice, all the others will have
+cause to rejoice with it.  A blessed thing to know, is that--though
+whether we know it or not, we shall find it true.  If we give way to
+our animal nature, and try to live as the beasts do, each one caring
+for his own selfish pleasure--still we shall find out that we cannot
+do it.  We shall find out, as those Liverpool people did with the
+Irish widow, that our fellow-men ARE our brothers--that what hurts
+them will be sure in some strange indirect way to hurt us.  Our
+brothers here have had the fever, and we have escaped; but we have
+felt the fruits of it, in our purses--in fear, and anxiety, and
+distress, and trouble--we have found out that they could not have the
+fever without our suffering for it, more or less.  You see we are one
+family, we men and women; and our relationship will assert itself in
+spite of our forgetfulness and our selfishness.  How much better to
+claim our brotherhood with each other, and to act upon it--to live as
+brothers indeed.  That would be to make it a blessing, and not a
+curse; for as I said before, just because it is in our power to
+injure each other, therefore it is in our power to help each other.
+God has bound us together for good and for evil, for better for
+worse.  Oh! let it be henceforward in this parish for better, and not
+for worse.  Oh! every one of you, whether you be rich or poor, farmer
+or labourer, man or woman, do not be ashamed to own yourselves to be
+brothers and sisters, members of one family, which as it all fell
+together in the old Adam, so it has all risen together in the new
+Adam, Jesus Christ.  There is no respect of persons with God.  We are
+all equal in His sight.  He knows no difference among men, except the
+difference which God's Spirit gives, in proportion as a man listens
+to the teaching of that Spirit--rank in godliness and true manhood.
+Oh! believe that--believe that because you owe an infinite debt to
+Christ and to God--His Father and your Father--therefore you owe an
+infinite debt to your neighbours, members of Christ and children of
+God just as you are--a debt of love, help, care, which you CAN, pay,
+just because you are members of one family; for because you are
+members of one family, for that very reason every good deed you do
+for a neighbour does not stop with that neighbour, but goes on
+breeding and spreading, and growing and growing, for aught we know,
+for ever.  Just as each selfish act we do, each bitter word we speak,
+each foul example we set, may go on spreading from mouth to mouth,
+from heart to heart, from parent to child, till we may injure
+generations yet unborn; so each noble and self-sacrificing deed we
+do, each wise and loving word we speak, each example we set of
+industry and courage, of faith in God and care for men, may and will
+spread on from heart to heart, and mouth to mouth, and teach others
+to do and be the like; till people miles away, who never heard of our
+names, may have cause to bless us for ever and ever.  This is one and
+only one of the glorious fruits of our being one family.  This is one
+and only one of the reasons which make me say that it was a good
+thing mankind was so made that the innocent suffer for the guilty.
+For just as the innocent are injured by the guilty in this world,
+even so are the guilty preserved, and converted, and brought back
+again by the innocent.  Just as the sins of the fathers are visited
+on the children, so is the righteousness of the fathers a blessing to
+the children; else, says St. Paul, our children would be unclean, but
+now they are holy.  For the promises of God are not only to us, but
+to our children, even to as many as the Lord our God shall call.  And
+thus each generation, by growing in virtue and wisdom and the
+knowledge of God, will help forward all the generations which follow
+it to fuller light and peace and safety; and each parent in trying to
+live like a Christian man himself, will make it easier for his
+children to live like Christians after him.  And this rule applies
+even in the things which we are too apt to fancy unimportant--every
+house kept really clean, every family brought up in habits of
+neatness and order, every acre of foul land drained, every new
+improvement in agriculture and manufactures or medicine, is a clear
+gain to all mankind, a good example set which is sure sooner or later
+to find followers, perhaps among generations yet unborn, and in
+countries of which we never heard the name.
+
+Was I not right then in saying that this earth is not the devil's
+earth at all, but a right good earth, of God's making and ruling,
+wherein no good deed will perish fruitless, but every man's works
+will follow him--a right good earth, governed by a righteous Father,
+who, as the psalm says "is merciful," just "because He rewards every
+man according to his work."
+
+
+
+XVI--ON THE DAY OF THANKSGIVING
+
+
+
+(Nov. 15th, 1849.)
+
+God hath visited his people.--LUKE vii. 16.
+
+We are assembled this day to thank God solemnly for the passing away
+of the cholera from England; and we must surely not forget to thank
+Him at the same time for the passing away of the fever, which has
+caused so much expense, sorrow, and death among us.  Now I wish to
+say a very few words to you on this same matter, to show you not only
+how to be thankful to God, but what to be thankful for.  You may say:
+It is easy enough for us to know what to thank God for in this case.
+We come to thank Him, as we have just said in the public prayers, for
+having withdrawn this heavy visitation from us.  If so, my friends,
+what we shall thank Him for depends on what we mean by talking of a
+visitation from God.
+
+Now I do not know what people may think in this parish, but I suspect
+that very many all over England do NOT know what to thank God for
+just now; and are altogether thanking him for the wrong thing--for a
+thing which, very happily for them, He has NOT done for them, and
+which, if He had done it for them, would have been worse for them
+than all the evil which ever happened to them from their youth up
+until now.  To be plain then, many, I am afraid, are thanking God for
+having gone away and left them.  While the cholera was here, they
+said that God was visiting them; and now that the cholera is over,
+they consider that God's visit is over too, and are joyful and light
+of heart thereat.  If God's visit is over, my friends, and He is gone
+away from us; if He is not just as near us now as He was in the
+height of the cholera, the best thing we can do is to turn to Him
+with fasting, and weeping, and mourning, and roll ourselves in the
+dust, and instead of thanking our Father for going away, pray to Him,
+of his infinite mercy, to condescend to come back again and visit us,
+even though, as superstitious and ignorant men believe, God's
+visiting us were sure to bring cholera, or plague, or pestilence, or
+famine, or some other misery.  For I read, that in His presence is
+life and not death--at His right hand is fulness of joy, and not
+tribulation and mourning and woe; but if not, it were better to be
+with God in everlasting agony, than to be in everlasting happiness
+without God.
+
+Here is a strange confusion--people talking one moment like St. Paul
+himself, desiring to be with Christ and God for ever, and then in the
+same breath talking like the Gadarenes of old, when, after Christ had
+visited them, and judged their sins by driving their unlawful herd of
+swine into the sea, they answered by beseeching Him to depart out of
+their coasts.
+
+Why is this confusion?--Because people do not take the trouble to
+read their Bibles; because they bring their own loose, careless, cant
+notions with them when they open their Bibles, and settle beforehand
+what the Bible is to tell them, and then pick and twist texts till
+they make them mean just what they like and no more.  There is no
+folly, or filth, or tyranny, or blasphemy, which men have not
+defended out of the Bible by twisting it in this way.  The Bible is
+better written than that, my friends.  He that runs may read, if he
+has sense to read.  The wayfaring man, though simple, shall make no
+such mistake therein, if he has God's Spirit in him--the spirit of
+faith, which believes that the Bible is God's message to men--the
+humble spirit, which is willing to listen to that message, however
+strange or new it may seem to him--the earnest spirit, which reads
+the Bible really to know what a man shall do to be saved.  Look at
+your Bibles thus, my friends, about this matter.  Read all the texts
+which speak of God's visiting and God's visitation, and you will find
+all the confusion and strangeness vanish away.  For see!  The Bible
+talks of the Lord visiting people in His wrath--visiting them for
+their sins--visiting them with sore plagues and punishments, about
+forty times.  But the Bible speaks very nearly as often of God's
+visiting people to bring them blessings and not punishments.  The
+Bible says God visited Sarah and Hannah to give them what they most
+desired--children.  God visited the people of Israel in Egypt to
+deliver them out of slavery.  In the book of Ruth we read how the
+Lord visited His people in giving them bread.  The Psalmist, in the
+captivity at Babylon, PRAYS God to visit him with His salvation.  The
+prophet Jeremiah says that it was a sign of God's anger against the
+Jews that He had not visited them; and the prophets promised again
+and again to their countrymen, how, after their seventy years'
+captivity in Babylon, the Lord would visit them, and what for?--To
+bring them back into their own land with joy, and heap them with
+every blessing--peace and wealth, freedom and righteousness.  So it
+is in the New Testament too.  Zacharias praised God:  "Blessed be the
+Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His people;
+through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the day-spring from on
+high hath visited us."  And that was the reason why I chose Luke vii.
+16, for my text--only because it is an example of the same thing.
+The people, it says, praised God, saying:  "A great Prophet is risen
+up among us, and God hath visited His people."  And in the 14th of
+Acts we read how God visited the Gentiles, not to punish them, but to
+take out of them a people for His name, namely, Cornelius and his
+household.  And lastly, St. Peter tells Christian people to glorify
+God in the day of visitation, as I tell you now--whether His
+visitation comes in the shape of cholera, or fever, or agricultural
+distress; or whether it comes in the shape of sanitary reform, and
+plenty of work, and activity in commerce; whether it seems to you
+good or evil, glorify God for it.  Thank Him for it.  Bless Him for
+it.  Whether His visitation brings joy or sorrow, it surely brings a
+blessing with it.  Whether God visits in wrath or in love, still God
+visits.  God shows that He lives; God shows us that He has not
+forgotten us; God shows us that He is near us.  Christ shows us that
+His words are true:  "Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the
+world."
+
+That is a hard lesson to learn and practise, though not a very
+difficult one to understand.  I will try now to make you understand
+it--God alone can teach you to practise it.  I pray and hope, and I
+believe too, that He will--that these very hard times are meant to
+teach people REALLY to believe in God and Jesus Christ, and that they
+WILL teach people.  God knows we need, and thanks be to Him that He
+DOES know that we need, to be taught to believe in Him.  Nothing
+shows it to me more plainly than the way we talk about God's
+visitations, as if God was usually away from us, and came to us only
+just now and then--only on extraordinary occasions.  People have
+gross, heathen, fleshly, materialist notions of God's visitations, as
+if He was some great earthly king who now and then made a journey
+about his dominions from place to place, rewarding some and punishing
+others.  God is not in any place, my friends.  God is a Spirit.  The
+heaven and the heaven of heavens could not contain Him if He wanted a
+place to be in, as, glory be to His name, He does not.  If He is near
+us or far from us, it is not that He is near or far from our bodies,
+as the Queen might be nearer to us in London than in Scotland, which
+is most people's notion of God's nearness.  He is near, not our
+bodies, but our spirits, our souls, our hearts, our thoughts--as it
+is written, "The kingdom of God is WITHIN you."  Do not fancy that
+when the cholera was in India, God was nearer India than He was to
+England, and that as the cholera crawled nearer and nearer, God came
+nearer and nearer too; and that now the cholera is gone away
+somewhere or other, God is gone away somewhere or other too, to leave
+us to our own inventions.  God forbid a thousand times!  As St. Paul
+says:  "He is not far from any one of us."  "In Him we live and move
+and have our being," cholera or none.  Do you think Christ, the King
+of the earth, is gone away either--that while things go on rightly,
+and governments, and clergy, and people do right, Christ is there
+then, filling them all with His Spirit and guiding them all to their
+duty; but that when evil times come, and rulers are idle, and clergy
+dumb dogs, and the rich tyrannous, and the poor profligate, and men
+are crying for work and cannot get it, and every man's hand is
+against his fellow, and no one knows what to do or think; and on
+earth is distress of nations with perplexity, men's hearts failing
+them for fear, and for dread of those things which are coming on the
+earth--do you think that in such times as those, Christ is the least
+farther off from us than He was at the best of times?--The least
+farther off from us now than He was from the apostles at the first
+Whitsuntide?  God forbid!--God forbid a thousand times!  He has
+promised Himself, He that is faithful and true, He that will never
+deny Himself, though men deny Him, and say He is not here, because
+their eyes are blinded with love of the world, and covetousness and
+bigotry, and dread lest He, their Master, should come and find them
+beating the men-servants and maid-servants, and eating and drinking
+with the drunken in the high places of the earth, and saying:  "Tush!
+God hath forgotten it"--ay, though men have forgotten Him thus, and--
+worse than thus, yet He hath said it--"Lo, I am with you alway, even
+unto the end of the world."  Why, evil times are the very times of
+which Christ used to speak as the "days of the Lord," and the "days
+of the Son of man."  Times when we hear of wars and rumours of wars,
+and on earth distress of nations with perplexity--what does He tell
+men to do in them?  To go whining about, and say that Christ has left
+His Church?  No!  "Then," He says, "when all these things come to
+pass, then rejoice and lift up your heads, for your redemption
+draweth nigh."
+
+And yet the Scripture does most certainly speak of the Lord's coming
+out of His place to visit--of the Son of Man coming, and not coming
+to men--of His visiting us at one time and not at another.  How does
+that agree with what I have just said?  My dear friends, we shall see
+that it agrees perfectly with what I have said, if we will only just
+remember that we are not beasts, but men.  It may seem a strange
+thing to have to remind people of, but it is just what they are
+always forgetting.  My friends, we are not animals, we are not
+spiders to do nothing but spin, or birds only to build nests for
+ourselves, much less swine to do nothing but dig after roots and
+fruits, and get what we can out of the clods of the ground.  We are
+the children of the Most High God; we have immortal souls within us;
+nay, more, we are our souls:  our bodies are our husk--our shell--our
+clothes--our house--changing day by day, and year by year upon us,
+one day to drop off us till the Resurrection.  But WE are our SOULS,
+and when God visits, it is our souls He visits, not merely our
+bodies.  There is the whole secret.  People forget God, and therefore
+they are glad to fancy that He has forgotten them, and has nothing to
+do with this world of His which they are misusing for their own
+selfish ends; and then God in His mercy visits them.  He knocks at
+the door of their hearts, saying:  "See!  I was close to you all the
+while."  He forces them to see Him and to confess that He is there
+whether they choose or not.  God is not away from the world.  He is
+away from people's hearts, because He has given people free wills,
+and with free wills the power of keeping Him out of their hearts or
+letting Him in.  And when God visits He forces Himself on our
+attention.  He knocks at the door of our hard hearts so loudly and
+sharply that He forces all to confess that He is there--all who are
+not utterly reprobate and spiritually dead.  In blessings as well as
+in curses, God knocks at our hearts.  By sudden good fortune, as well
+as by sudden mishap; by a great deliverance from enemies, by an
+abundant harvest, as well as by famine and pestilence.  Therefore
+this cholera has been a true visitation of God.  The poor had fancied
+that they might be as dirty, the rich had fancied that they might be
+as careless, as they chose; in short, that they might break God's
+laws of cleanliness and brotherly care without His troubling Himself
+about the matter.  And lo! He has visited us; and shown us that He
+does care about the matter by taking it into His own hands with a
+vengeance.  He who cannot see God's hand in the cholera must be as
+blind--as blind as who?--as blind as he that cannot see God's hand
+when there is no cholera; as blind as he who cannot see God's hand in
+every meal he eats, and every breath he draws; for that man is stone
+blind--he can be no blinder.  The cholera came; everyone ought to see
+that it did not come by blind chance, but by the will of some wise
+and righteous Person; for in the first place God gave us fair
+warning.  The cholera came from India at a steady pace.  We knew to a
+month when it would arrive here.  And it came, too, by no blind
+necessity, as if it was forced to take people whether it liked or
+not.  Just as it was in the fever here, so it was in the cholera,
+"One shall be taken and another left."  It took one of a street and
+left another; took one person in a family and left another:  it took
+the rich man who fancied he was safe, as well as the poor man who did
+not care whether he was safe or not.  The respectable man walking
+home to his comfortable house, passed by some untrapped drain, and
+then poisonous gas struck him and he died.  The rich physician who
+had been curing others, could not save himself from the poison of the
+crowded graveyard which had been allowed to remain at the back of his
+house.  By all sorts of strange and unfathomable judgments the
+cholera showed itself to be working, not by a blind necessity, but at
+the will of a thinking Person, of a living God, whose ways are not as
+our own ways, and His paths are in the great deep.  And yet the
+cholera showed--and this is what I want to make you feel--that it was
+working at the will of the same God in whom we live and move and have
+our being, who sends the food we eat, the water in which we wash, the
+air we breathe, and who has ordained for all these things natural
+laws, according to which they work, and which He never breaks, nor
+allows us to break them.  For every case of cholera could be traced
+to some breaking of these laws--foul air--foul food--foul water, or
+careless and dirty contact with infected persons; so that by this God
+showed that He and not chance ruled the world, and that he was indeed
+the living and willing God.  He showed at the same time that He was
+the wise God of order and of law; and that gas and earth, wind and
+vapour, fulfil His word, without His having to break His laws, or
+visit us by moving, as people fancy, out of a Heaven where He was,
+down to an earth, where He was not.
+
+But, lastly, remember what I told you before, that the cholera being
+a visitation means that God, by it, has been visiting our hearts,
+knocking loudly at them that He may awaken us, and teach us a lesson.
+And be sure that in the cholera, and this our own parish fever, there
+is a lesson for each and every one of us if we will learn it.  To the
+simple poor man, first and foremost, God means by the cholera to
+teach the simple lesson of cleanliness; to the house-owner He means
+to teach that each man is his brother's keeper, and responsible for
+his property not being a nest of disease; to rulers it is intended to
+teach the lesson that God's laws cannot be put off to suit their
+laziness, cowardice, or party squabbles.  But beside that, to each
+person, be sure such a visitation as this brings some private lesson.
+Perhaps it has taught many a widow that she has a Friend stronger and
+more loving than even the husband whom she has lost by the
+pestilence--the God of the widow and the fatherless.  Perhaps it has
+taught many a strong man not to trust in his strength and his youth,
+but in the God who gave them to him.  Perhaps it has taught many a
+man, too, who has expected public authorities to do everything for
+him, "not to put his trust in princes, nor in any child of man, for
+there is no help in them," but to hear God's advice, "Help thyself
+and God will help thee."  Perhaps it has stirred up many a benevolent
+man to find out fresh means for rooting out the miseries of society.
+Perhaps it has taught many a philosopher new deep truths about the
+laws of God's world, which may enable him to enlighten and comfort
+ages yet unborn.  Perhaps it has awakened many a slumbering heart,
+and brought many a careless sinner (for the first time in his life)
+face to face with God and his own sins.  God's judgments are
+manifold; they are meant to work in different ways on different
+hearts.  But oh! believe and be sure that they are meant to work upon
+all hearts--that they are not the punishments of a capricious tyrant,
+but the rod of a loving Father, who is trying to drive us home into
+His fold, when gentle entreaties and kind deeds have failed to allure
+us home.  Oh my friends! if you wish really to thank God for having
+preserved you from these pestilences, show your thankfulness by
+learning the lesson which they bring.  God's love has spoken of each
+and every one of us in the cholera.  Be sure He has spoken so harshly
+only because a gentler tone of voice would have had no effect upon
+us.  Thank Him for His severity.  Thank Him for the cholera, the
+fever.  Thank Him for anything which will awaken us to hear the Word
+of the Lord.  But till you have learnt the lessons which these
+visitations are meant to teach you, there is no use thanking Him for
+taking them away.  And therefore I beseech you solemnly, each and
+all, before you leave this church, now to pray to God to show you
+what lesson He means to teach you by this past awful visitation, and
+also by sparing you and me who are here present, not merely from
+cholera and fever, but from a thousand mishaps and evils, which we
+have deserved, and from which only His goodness has kept us.  Oh may
+God stir up your hearts to ask advice of Him this day! and may He in
+His great mercy so teach us all His will on this day of joy, that we
+may not need to have it taught us hereafter on some day of sorrow.
+
+
+
+XVII--THE COVENANT
+
+
+
+The Lord hath chosen Jacob unto himself, and Israel for his own
+possession.  For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord is
+above all gods.  Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven
+and earth, and in the sea, and in all deep places.--PSALM cxxxv. 4,
+5, 6.
+
+Were you ever puzzled to find out why the Psalms are read every
+Sunday in Church, more read, indeed, than any other part of the
+Bible?  If any of you say, No, I shall not think you the wiser.  It
+is very easy not to be puzzled with a deep matter, if one never
+thinks about it at all.  But when a man sets his mind to work
+seriously, to try to understand what he hears and sees around him,
+then he will be puzzled, and no shame to him; for he will find things
+every day of his life which will require years of thought to
+understand, ay, things which, though we see and know that they are
+true, and can use and profit by them, we can never understand at all,
+at least in this life.
+
+But I do not think that God meant it to be so with these Psalms.  He
+meant the Bible for a poor man's book:  and therefore the men who
+wrote the Bible were almost all of them poor men, at least at one
+time or other of their life; and therefore we may expect that they
+would write as poor men would write, and such things as poor men may
+understand, if they are fairly and simply explained.  Therefore I do
+not think you need be puzzled long to find out why these Psalms are
+read every Sunday.  For the men who wrote them had God's spirit with
+them; and God's spirit is the spirit in which God made and governs
+this world, and just as God cannot change, so God's spirit cannot
+change; and therefore the rules and laws according to which the world
+runs on cannot change; and therefore these rules about God's
+government of the world, which God's spirit taught the old Hebrew
+Psalmists, are the very same rules by which He governs it now; and
+therefore all the rules in these Psalms, making allowance for the
+difference of circumstances, have just as much to do with France, and
+Germany, and England now, as they had with the Jews, and the
+Canaanites, and the Babylonians then.
+
+St. Paul tells us so.  He tells us that all that happened to the old
+Jews was written as an example to Christians, to the intent that they
+might not sin as the Jews did, and so (God's laws and ways being the
+same now as then) be punished as the Jews were.  Moreover, St. Paul
+says, that Christians now are just as much God's chosen people as the
+Jews were.  God told the Jews that they were to be a nation of kings
+and priests to Him.  And St. John opens the Revelations by saying:
+"Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood,
+and hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Father, to Him be
+glory."  St. Paul tells the Ephesians, who had not a drop of Jewish
+blood in their veins, that through Jesus Christ both Jews and
+Gentiles had "access by one Spirit unto the Father.  Now, therefore,"
+he goes on, "ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-
+citizens with the saints, and of the household of God."  In fact, he
+tells the Christians of every country to which he writes, that all
+the promises which God made to the Jews belonged to them just as
+much, that there was no more any difference between Jew and Gentile,
+that the Lord Jesus Christ was just as really among them, and with
+them, ruling and helping each people in their own country, as He was
+in Jerusalem when Isaiah saw His glory filling the Temple, and when
+Zion was called the place of His inheritance.  Indeed, the Lord Jesus
+said the same thing Himself, for He said that all power was given to
+Him in heaven and earth; that He was with His churches (that is, with
+all companies of Christian people, such as England) even to the end
+of the world; that wherever two or three were gathered together in
+His name, He would be in the midst of them; and if those blessed
+words and good news be true, we Englishmen have a right to believe
+firmly that we belong to Him just as much as the old Jews did; and
+when we read these Psalms, to take every word of their good news--and
+their warnings also--to ourselves, and to our own land of England.
+And when we read in the text, that the Lord chose Jacob unto Himself
+and Israel for His own possession, we have a right to say:  "And the
+Lord has chosen also England unto himself, and this favoured land of
+Britain for his own possession."  When we say in the Psalm:  "The
+Lord did what He pleased in heaven, and earth, and sea," to educate
+and deliver the people of the Jews, we have a right to say just as
+boldly:  "And so He has done for England, for us, and for our
+forefathers."
+
+This then is the reason, the chief reason, why these Psalms are
+appointed to be read every Sunday in church, and every morning and
+evening where there is daily service--to teach us that the Lord takes
+care not only of one man's soul here, and another woman's soul there,
+but of the whole country of England; of its wars and its peace; of
+its laws and government, its progress and its afflictions; of all, in
+short, that happens to it as a nation, as one body of men, which it
+is.  It must be so, my good friends, else we should be worse off than
+the old Jews, and not better off, as all the New Testament solemnly
+assures us a thousand times over that we are.
+
+For in the covenant which God made with the Jews, and in the strange
+events, good and bad, which He caused to happen to their nation, not
+only the great saints among them were taken care of, but all classes,
+and all characters, good and bad, even those who had not wisdom or
+spiritual life enough to seek God for themselves, still had their
+share in the good laws, in the teaching and guiding, and in the
+national blessings which He sent on the whole nation.  They had a
+chance given them of rising, and improving, and prospering, as the
+rest of their countrymen rose, and improved, and prospered.  And when
+the Lord came to visit Judaea in flesh and blood, we find that He
+went on the same method.  He did not merely go to such men as Philip
+and Nathaniel, to the holy and elect ones among the Jews, but to the
+whole people; to the LOST sheep, as well as to those who were not
+lost.  He did not part the good from the bad before he healed their
+sicknesses, and fed them with the loaves and fishes.  It was enough
+for Him that they were Jews, citizens of the Jewish nation.  God's
+promises belonged not to one Jew or another, but to the Jewish
+nation; and even the ignorant and the sinful had a share in the
+blessings of the covenant, great or small in proportion as they chose
+to live as Jews ought, or to forget and deny that they belonged to
+God's people.
+
+Now, surely the Lord cannot be less merciful now than He was then.
+He cannot care less for poor orphans, and paupers, and wild untaught
+creatures, in England now, than he cared for them in Judaea of old.
+And we see that in fact He does not.  For as the wealth of England
+improves, and the laws improve, and the knowledge of God improves,
+the condition of all sorts of poor creatures improves too, though
+they had no share in bringing about the good change.  But we are all
+members of one body, from the Queen on her throne to the tramper
+under the hedge; and as St. Paul says:  "If one member suffers, all
+the members suffer with it, and if one member rejoices, all the
+others" sooner or later "rejoice with it."  For we, too, are one of
+the Lord's nations.  He has made us one body, with one common
+language, common laws, common interest, common religion for all; and
+what He does for one of us He does for all.  He orders all that
+happens to us; whether it be war or peace, prosperity or dearth, He
+orders it all; and He orders things so that they shall work for the
+good, not merely of a few, but of as many as possible--not merely for
+His elect, but for those who know Him not.  As He has been from the
+beginning, when He heaped blessings on the stiff-necked and
+backsliding Israelites--as He was when He endured the cross for a
+world lying not in obedience, but in wickedness; so is He now; the
+perfect likeness of His father, who is no respecter of persons, but
+causes "His sun to shine alike on the evil on the good, and His rain
+to fall on the just and on the unjust."
+
+But now, there is one thing against which I have to warn you most
+solemnly, and especially in such days as these.  You may believe my
+words to your own ruin, or to your own salvation.  They are "the
+Gospel," "the good news of the Kingdom of God"--that is, the good
+news that God has condescended to become our King, to govern and
+guide us, to order all things for our good.  But as St. Paul says,
+the Gospel may be a savour of death unto death, as well as a savour
+of life unto life.  And I will tell you now; that you have only to do
+what the Jews just before the coming of our Lord did, and give way to
+the same thoughts as they, and then, like them, it were better for
+you that you had never heard of God, and been like the savages, to
+whom little or no sin is imputed, because they are all but without
+law.  How is this?
+
+As I said before--take your covenant privileges as the Pharisees took
+theirs, and they will turn you into devils while you are fancying
+yourselves God's especial favourites.  Now this was what happened to
+the Pharisees:  they could not help knowing that God had shown
+especial favour to them; and that He had taught them more about God
+than He had taught the heathen.  But instead of feeling all the more
+humble and thankful for this, and of remembering day and night that
+because much had been given to them much would be required of them,
+they thought more about the honour and glory which God had put on
+them.  They forgot what God had declared, namely, that it was not for
+their own goodness that He had taught them, for that they were in
+themselves not a whit better than the heathen around them.  They
+forgot that the reason why He taught them was, that they were to do
+His work on earth, by witnessing for His name, and telling the
+heathen that God was their Lord, as well as Lord of the Jews.  Now
+David, and the old Psalmists and Prophets, did not forget this.
+Their cry is:  "Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King."
+"Worship the Son of God, ye kings of the earth, and make your peace
+with Him lest He be angry."  "It was in vain," he told the heathen
+kings, "to try to cast away God's government from them, and break His
+bonds from off them," for "the Lord was King, let the nations be
+never so unquiet."
+
+But the Jews gradually forgot this, and their daily boast was, that
+God had nothing to do with the heathen; that He did not care for
+them, and actually hated them; that they, as it were, had the true
+God all to themselves for their own private property; and that He had
+neither love nor mercy, except for them and their proselytes, that
+is, the few heathens whom they could persuade and entice not to
+worship the true God after the customs of their own country--that
+would not have suited the Jews' bigotry and pride--but to turn Jews,
+and forget their own people among whom they were born, and ape them
+in everything.  And so, as our Lord told them, after compassing sea
+and land to make one of these proselytes, they only made him after
+all twice as much the child of hell as themselves.  For they could
+not teach the heathen anything worth knowing about God, when they had
+forgotten themselves what God was like.  They could tell them that
+there was one God, and not two--but what was the use of that?  As St.
+James says, the devils believe as much as that, and yet the knowledge
+does not make them holy, but only increases their fear and despair.
+And so with these Pharisees.  They had forgotten that God was love.
+They had forgotten that God was merciful.  They had forgotten that
+God was just.  And therefore, while they were talking of God and
+pretending to worship God, they knew nothing of God, and they did not
+do God's will, and act like God; for (as we find from the Gospels)
+they were unjust, tyrannous, proud, conceited, covetous themselves;
+and while they were looking down on the poor heathens, these very
+heathens, the Lord told them, would rise up in judgment against them:
+for they, knowing little, acted up to the light which they had,
+better than the Pharisees who knew so much.  And so it will be with
+us, my friends, if we fancy that God's great favours to us are a
+reason for our priding ourselves on them, and despising papists and
+foreigners instead of remembering that just because God has given us
+so much, He will require more of us.  It is true, we do know more of
+the Gospel than the papists, how, though they believe in Jesus
+Christ, worship the Virgin Mary and the Saints, and idols of wood and
+stone.  But if they, who know so little of God's will, yet act
+faithfully up to what they do know, will they not rise up in judgment
+against us, who know so much more, if we act worse than they?
+Instead of despising them, we had better despise ourselves.  Instead
+of fancying that God's love is not over them, and so sinning against
+God's Holy Spirit by denying and despising the fruits of God's Holy
+Spirit in them, we had much better, we Protestants, be repenting of
+our own sins.  We had better pray God to open our eyes to our own
+want of faith, and want of love, and want of honesty, and want of
+cleanly and chaste lives; lest God in His anger should let us go on
+in our evil path, till we fall into the deep darkness of mind of the
+Pharisees of old.  For then while we were boasting of England as the
+most Christian nation in the world, we might become the most
+unchristian, because the most unlike Christ; the most wanting in love
+and fellow-feeling, and self-sacrifice, and honour, and justice, and
+honesty; wanting, in short, in the fruits of the Spirit.  And without
+them there is no use crying:  "We are God's chosen people, He Has put
+His name among us, we alone hate idols, we alone have the pure word
+of God, and the pure sacraments, and the pure doctrine;" for God may
+answer us, as he answered the Jews of old:  "Think not to say within
+yourselves, We have Abraham for our father:  Verily, I say unto you,
+God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham."  . . .
+"The Kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation
+bringing forth the fruits thereof."  Oh! my friends, let us pray, one
+and all, that God will come and help us, and with great might succour
+us, "that whereas through our sins and wickedness we are sore let and
+hindered in running the race set before us, God's bountiful grace and
+mercy may speedily help and deliver us," and enable us to live
+faithfully up to the glorious privileges which He has bestowed on us,
+in calling us "members of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of
+the Kingdom of Heaven;" in giving us His Bible, in allowing us to be
+born into this favoured land of England, in preserving us to this
+day, in spite of all that we have thought, and said, and done,
+unworthy of the name of Christians and Englishmen.
+
+And then we may be certain that God will also fulfil to us the
+glorious promises which we find in another Psalm:  "If thy children
+will keep my covenant and my testimonies, which I shall learn them,
+this land shall be my rest for ever.  Here will I dwell, for I have a
+delight therein.  I will bless her victuals with increase, and
+satisfy her poor with bread.  I will deck her priests with health,
+and her holy people shall rejoice and sing."
+
+
+
+XVIII--NATIONAL REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS
+
+
+
+And that which cometh into your mind shall not be at all; that ye
+say, We will be as the heathen, as the families of the countries, to
+serve wood and stone.  As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with a
+mighty hand, and with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out,
+will I rule over you. . . .  And ye shall know that I am the Lord.--
+EZEKIEL xx. 32, 33, 38.
+
+A father has two ways of showing his love to his child--by caressing
+it and by punishing it.  His very anger may be a sign of his love,
+and ought to be.  Just because he loves his child, just because the
+thing he longs most to see is that his child should grow up good,
+therefore he must be, and ought to be, angry with it when it does
+wrong.  Therefore anger against sin is a part of God's likeness in
+us; and he who does not hate sin is not like God.  For if sin is the
+worst evil--perhaps the only real evil in the world--and the end of
+all sin is death and misery, then to indulge people in sin is to show
+them the very worst of cruelty.
+
+To sit by and see iniquity going on without trying to stop it, is
+mere laziness.  The parent, when his child does wrong, does not show
+his love to the child by indulging it, all he shows is, that he
+himself is carnal and fleshly; that he does not like to take the
+trouble of punishing it, or does not like to give himself the pain of
+punishing it; that, in short, he had sooner let his child grow up in
+bad habits, which must lead to its misery and ruin for years and
+years, if not for ever, than make himself uncomfortable by seeing it
+uncomfortable for a few minutes.  That is not love, but selfishness.
+True love is as determined to punish the sin as it is to forgive the
+sinner.  Therefore, St. Paul tells us, that we can be angry without
+sinning; that is that there is an anger which comes from hatred of
+sin and love to the sinner.  Therefore, Solomon tells us to punish
+our children when they do wrong, and not to hold our hands for their
+crying.  It is better for them that they should cry a little now,
+than have long years of shame and sorrow hereafter.  Therefore, in
+all countries which are properly governed, the law punishes in the
+name of God those who break the laws of God, and punishes them even
+with death, for certain crimes; because it is expedient that one man
+die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.
+
+And this is God's way of dealing with each and every one of us.  This
+is God's way of dealing with Christian nations, just as it was His
+way of dealing with the Jews of old.  He never allowed the Jews to
+prosper in sin.  He punished them at once, and sternly, whenever they
+rebelled against Him; not because He hated them, but because He loved
+them.  His love to them showed itself whenever they went well with
+Him, in triumphs and blessings; and when they rebelled against Him,
+and broke His laws, He showed that very same love to them in plague,
+and war, and famine, and a mighty hand, and fury poured out.  His
+love had not changed--they had changed; and now the best and only way
+of showing His love to them, was by making them feel His anger; and
+the best and only way of being merciful to them, was to show them no
+indulgence.
+
+Now the wish of the Jews all along, and especially in Ezekiel's time,
+was to be like the heathen--like the nations round them.  They said
+to themselves:  "These heathen worship idols, and yet prosper very
+well.  Their having gods of wood and stone, and their indulging their
+passions, and being profligate and filthy, covetous, unjust, and
+tyrannical, does not prevent their being just as happy as we are--ay,
+and a great deal happier.  They have no strict law of Moses, as we
+have threatening us and keeping us in awe, and making us
+uncomfortable, and telling us at every turn, 'Thou shalt not do this
+pleasant thing, and thou shalt not do that pleasant thing.'  And yet
+God does not punish them, as Moses' law says He will punish us.
+These Assyrians and Babylonians above all--they are stronger than we,
+and richer, and better clothed, and cleverer; they have horses and
+chariots, and all sorts of luxuries and comforts which we Jews cannot
+get.  Instead of being like us, in continual trouble from
+earthquakes, and drought, and famine, and war, attacked, plundered by
+all the nations round us, one after another, they go on conquering,
+and spreading, and succeeding in all they lay their hand to.  Look at
+Babylon," said these foolish Jews, perhaps, to themselves; "a few
+generations ago it was nothing of a city, and now it is the greatest,
+richest, and strongest nation in the whole world.  God has not
+punished it for worshipping gods of wood and stone, why should He
+punish us?  These Babylonians have prospered well enough with their
+gods, why should not we?  Perhaps it is these very gods of wood and
+stone who have helped them to become so great.  Why should they not
+help us?  We will worship them, then, and pray to them.  We will not
+give up worshipping our own God, of course, lest we should offend
+Him; but we will worship Him and the Babylonian idols at the same
+time; then we shall be sure to be right if we have Jehovah and the
+idols both on our side."  So said the Jews to themselves.  But what
+did Ezekiel answer them?  "Not so, my foolish countrymen," said he,
+"God will not have it so.  He has taught you that these Babylonian
+idols are nothing and cannot help you; He has taught you that He can
+and will help you, that He can and will be everything to you; He has
+taught you that He alone is God, who made heaven and earth, who
+orders all things therein, who alone gives any people power to get
+wealth; and He will not have you go back and fall from that for any
+appearances or arguments whatsoever, because it is true.  He has
+chosen you to witness to these heathen about Him, to declare His name
+to them, that they may give up their idols and serve the true God, in
+whom alone is strength.  He chose you to be these heathens' teachers,
+and He will not let you become their scholars.  He meant the heathen
+to copy you, and He will not let you copy them.  If He does, in His
+love and mercy, let these poor heathen prosper in spite of their
+idols, what is that to you?  It is still the Lord who makes them
+prosper, and not the idols, whether they know it or not.  They know
+no better, and He will not impute sin to them where He has given them
+no law.  But you do know better; by a thousand mighty signs and
+wonders and deliverances, the Lord has been teaching you ever since
+you came up through the Red Sea, that He is all-sufficient for you,
+that all power is His in heaven and earth.  He has promised to you,
+and sworn to you by Himself, that if you keep His law and walk in His
+commandments, you shall want no manner of good thing; that you shall
+have no cause to envy these heathen their riches and prosperity, for
+the Lord will bless you in house and land, by day and night, at home
+and abroad, with every blessing that a nation can desire.  Moses' law
+tells you this, God's prophets have been telling you this, God's
+wonderful dealings with you have been telling you this, that the Lord
+God is enough for you.  And if you, who are meant to be a nation of
+kings and priests to God, to teach all nations and serve solely Him,
+fancy that you will be allowed to throw away the high honour which
+God has put upon you, and lower yourselves to the follies and sins of
+these heathen round you, you are mistaken.  You were meant to be
+above such folly, you can be above it; and you shall not prosper by
+serving God and idols at once; you shall not even prosper by serving
+idols alone.  God will visit you with a mighty hand, and with fury
+poured out, and you shall know that He is the Lord."
+
+Well, my friends, and what has this to do with us?  This it has to do
+with us--that if God taught the Jews about Himself, He has taught us
+still more.  If he has shown signs and wonders of His love, and
+wrought mightily for the Jews, He has wrought far more mightily for
+us; for He spared not His own Son, but gave Him freely for us.  If He
+promised to teach the Jews, He has promised still more to teach us;
+for He has promised His Holy Spirit freely to young and old, rich and
+poor, to as many as ask Him, to guide us into all truth.  If he
+expected the Jews to set an example to all the nations around, He
+expects us to do so still more.  And if He punished the Jews, and
+drove them back again by shame, and affliction, and disappointment,
+whenever they went after other gods, and tried to be like the heathen
+around, and despised their high calling, and their high privileges,
+He will punish us, and drive us back again still more fiercely, and
+still more swiftly.  God has called us to be a nation of Christians,
+and He will not let us be a nation of heathens.  We are longing to do
+in these days very much as the Jews did of old; we are all too apt to
+say to ourselves:  "Of course we must love God, or He might be angry
+with us; and besides, how else should we get our souls saved?  But
+the old heathen nations, and a great many nations now, and a great
+many rich and comfortable people in England now, too, get on very
+well without God, by just worshipping selfishness, and money, and
+worldly cunning, and why should not we do the same?--why should we
+not worship God and Mammon at once, and serve God on Sundays, and the
+selfish ways of the world all the week?  Surely then we should be
+doubly safe; we should have God and the world on our side both at
+once."
+
+Now, my friends, God will not allow us to succeed on that plan.  We
+are members of His Church, whose head is Jesus, who gave Himself for
+sinners; whose members are all brothers of His Church, which is held
+together by self-sacrifice and fellow-help.  If we try to be like the
+heathens, and fancy that we can succeed by selfishness, and cunning,
+and covetousness, God will not let us fall from the honour which He
+has put on us, and trample our blessings under foot.  He will bring
+our plans to nought.  Whomsoever he may let prosper in sin, He will
+not let those who have heard the message prosper in it.  Whatever
+nation He may let become great by covetousness, and selfish competing
+and struggling of man against man, He will not let England grow great
+by it.  He loves her too well to let her fall so, and cast away her
+high honour of being a Christian nation.  By great and sore
+afflictions, by bringing our cleverest plans to nothing, He will
+teach us that we cannot worship God and Mammon at once; that the sure
+riches, either for a man or for a nation, are not money, but
+righteousness love, justice, wisdom; that this new idol of selfish
+competition which men worship nowadays, and fancy that it is the
+secret cause of all plenty, and cheapness, and civilisation, has no
+place in the church of Jesus Christ, who gave up His own life for
+those who hated Him, and came not to do His own will, but the will of
+His Father; not to enable men to go to heaven after a life of
+selfishness here; but by the power of His Spirit--the spirit of love
+and fellowship to sweep all selfishness off the face of God's good
+earth.  By sore trials and afflictions will God in His mercy teach
+this to England, and to every man in England who is deluded into
+fancying that he can serve God, and selfishness at once, till we
+learn once more, as our forefathers did of old, that He is the Lord.
+Because we are His children God will chasten us; because He receives
+us, He will scourge us back to Him; because He has prepared for us
+things such as eye hath not seen, He will not let us fill our bellies
+with the husks which the swine eat, and like the dumb beasts, snarl
+and struggle one against the other for a place at His table, as if it
+were not wide enough for all His creatures, and for ten times as many
+more, forgetting that He is the giver, and fancying that we are to be
+the takers, and spoiling the gift itself in our hurry to snatch it
+out of our neighbours' hands.  In one word, God will not give us
+false prosperity, as the children of the world, the flesh, and the
+devil, because he wishes to give us real prosperity as the sons of
+God, in the kingdom of his Son Jesus Christ, who died on the cross
+for us.
+
+
+
+XIX--THE DELIVERANCE OF JERUSALEM
+
+
+
+And it came to pass that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in
+the camp of the Assyrians an hundred and eighty five thousand:  and
+when they arose in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.--
+2 KINGS xix. 35.
+
+You heard read in the first lesson last Sunday afternoon, the threats
+of the king of Assyria against Jerusalem, and his defiance of the
+true Lord whose temple stood there.  In the first lesson for this
+morning's service, you heard of king Hezekiah's fear and perplexity;
+of the Lord's answer to him by Isaiah, and of the great and wonderful
+destruction of the Assyrian army, of which my text tells you.  Of
+course you have a right to ask:  "This which happened in a foreign
+country more than two thousand years ago, what has it to do with us?"
+And, of course, my preaching about it will be of no use whatsoever,
+unless I can show you what it has to do with us; what lesson we
+English here, in the year 1851, are to draw, from the help which God
+sent the Jews.
+
+But to find out that, we must hear the whole story.  Before we can
+find out why God drove the Assyrians out of Judaea, we must find out,
+it seems to me, why He sent them, or allowed them to come into
+Judaea; and to find out that, we must first see how the Jews were
+behaving in those times, and what sort of state their country was in;
+and we must find out, too, what sort of a man this great king of
+Assyria was, and what sort of thoughts were in his heart.
+
+Now, by the favour of God, we can find out this.  You will see, in
+the first thirty-seven chapters of Isaiah's prophecies, a full
+account of the ways of the Jews in that time, and the reasons why God
+allowed so fearful a danger to come upon them.  The whole first
+thirty-five chapters belong to each other, and are, so to speak, a
+spiritual history of the Jews, and the Assyrians, and all the nations
+round them, for many years.  A spiritual history--that is, not merely
+a history of what they did, but of what they were, what was in their
+inmost hearts, and thoughts, and spirits; a spiritual history--that
+is, not merely of what they thought they were doing, but of what God
+saw that they were doing--a history of God's mind about them all.
+Isaiah had God's spirit on him; and so he saw what was going on round
+him in the same light in which God saw it, and hated it, or praised
+it, only according as it was good, and according to the good Spirit
+of God, or bad, and contrary to that Spirit.  So Isaiah's history of
+his own nation, and the nations around him, was very unlike what they
+would have written for themselves; just as I am afraid he would write
+a very different history of England now, from what we should write,
+if we were set to do it.  Now what Isaiah thought of the doings of
+his countrymen, the Jews, I must tell you in another sermon, next
+Sunday.  It will be enough this morning to speak of the king of
+Assyria.
+
+These kings of Assyria thought themselves the greatest and strongest
+beings in the world; they thought that their might was right, and
+that they might conquer, and ravage, and plunder and oppress every
+country round them for thousands of miles, without being punished.
+They thought that they could overcome the true God of Judaea, as they
+had conquered the empty idols and false gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and
+Iva.  But Isaiah saw that they were wrong.  He told his countrymen:
+"These Assyrian kings are strong, but there is a stronger King than
+they, Jehovah the Lord of all the earth.  It is He who sent them to
+punish nation after nation, Sennacherib is the rod of Jehovah's
+anger; but he is a fool after all; for all his cunning, for all his
+armies, he is a fool rushing on his ruin.  He may take Tyre,
+Damascus, Babylon, Egypt itself, and cast their gods into the fire,
+for they are no gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone;
+but let him once try his strength against the real living God; let
+the axe once begin to boast itself against Him that hews therewith;
+and he will find out that there is one stronger than he, one who has
+been using him as a 'tool, and who will crush him like a moth the
+moment he rebels.  His father destroyed Samaria and her idols, but he
+shall not destroy Jerusalem.  He may ravage Ephraim, and punish the
+gluttony and drunkenness, and oppression of the great landlords of
+Bashan; he may bring misery and desolation through the length and
+breadth of the land:  there is reason, and reason but too good for
+that:  but Jerusalem, the place where God's honour dwells, the temple
+without idols, which is the sign that Jehovah is a living God,
+against it he shall not cast up a bank, or shoot an arrow into it.'
+"I know," said Isaiah, "what he is saying of himself, this proud king
+of Assyria:  but this is what God says of him, that he is only a
+puppet, a tool in the hand of God, to punish these wicked nations
+whom he is conquering one by one, and us Jews among the rest.  He,
+this proud king of Assyria, thinks that he is the chosen favourite of
+the sun, and the moon, and the stars, whom, in his folly, he worships
+as gods.  He will find out who is the real Lord of the earth; he will
+find out that this great world is ruled by that very God of Israel
+whom he despises.  He will find that there is something in this
+earth, of which he fancies himself lord and master, which is too
+strong for him, which will obey God, and not him.  God rules the
+earth, and God rules Tophet, and the great fire-kingdoms which boil
+and blaze for ever in the bowels of the earth, and burst up from time
+to time in earthquakes and burning mountains; and God has ordained
+that they shall conquer this proud king of Assyria, though we Jews
+are too weak and cowardly, and split up into parties by our
+wickedness, to make a stand against him." . . .
+
+This great eruption or breaking out of burning mountains, which would
+destroy the king of Assyria's army, was to happen, Isaiah says, close
+to Jerusalem, nay, it was to shake Jerusalem itself.  Jerusalem was
+to be brought to great misery by everlasting burnings, as well as by
+being besieged by the Assyrians; and yet the very shaking of the
+earth and eruption of fire which was nearly to destroy it, was to be
+the cause of its deliverance.  So Isaiah prophesied, and we cannot
+doubt his words came true.  For this may explain to us the way in
+which the king of Assyria's army was destroyed.  The text says, that
+when they encamped near Jerusalem the messenger of the Lord went out,
+and slew in one night one hundred and eighty thousand of them, who
+were all found dead in the morning.  How they were killed we cannot
+exactly tell, most likely by a stream of poisonous vapour, such as
+often comes forth out of the ground during earthquakes and eruptions
+of burning mountains, and kills all men and animals who breathe it.
+That this was the way that this great army was destroyed, I have
+little doubt, not only on account of what Isaiah says in his
+prophecies of God's "sending a blast" upon the king of Assyria, but
+because it was just like the old lesson which God had been teaching
+the Jews all along, that the earth and all in it was His property,
+and obeyed Him.  For what could teach them that more strongly than to
+see that the earthquakes and burning mountains, of all things on
+earth the most awful and most murderous, the very things against
+which man has no defence, obeyed God; burst forth when He chose, and
+did His work as He willed?  For man can conquer almost everything in
+the world except these burning mountains and earthquakes.  He can
+sail over the raging sea in his ships; he can till the most barren
+soils; he can provide against famine, rain, and cold, ay, against the
+thunder itself:  but the earthquakes alone are too strong for him.
+Against them no cunning or strength of man is of any use.  Without
+warning, they make the solid ground under his feet heave, and reel,
+and sink, hurling down whole towns in a moment, and burying the
+inhabitants under the ruins, as an earthquake did in Italy only a
+month ago.  Or they pour forth streams of fire, clouds of dust,
+brimstone, and poisonous vapour, destroying for miles around the
+woods and crops, farms and cities, and burying them deep in ashes, as
+they have done again and again, both in Italy and Iceland, and in
+South America, even during the last few years.  How can man stand
+against them?  What greater warning or lesson to him than they, that
+God is stronger than man; that the earth is not man's property, and
+will not obey him, but only the God who made it?  Now that was just
+what God intended to teach the Jews all along; that the earth and
+heaven belonged to Him and obeyed Him; that they were not to worship
+the sun and stars, as the Assyrians and Canaanites did, nor the earth
+and the rivers as the Egyptians did:  but to worship the God who made
+sun and stars, earth and rivers, and to put their trust in Him to
+guide all heaven and earth aright; and to make all things, sun,
+earth, and weather, ay, and the very burning mountains and
+earthquakes, work together for good for them if they loved God.
+Therefore it was that God gave His law to Moses on the burning
+mountain of Sinai, amid thunders, and lightnings, and earthquakes, to
+show them that the lightnings and the mountains obeyed Him.
+Therefore it was that the earthquake opened the ground and swallowed
+up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who rebelled against Moses.  Therefore
+it was that God once used an earthquake and eruption to preserve
+David from his enemies, as we read in the eighteenth Psalm.  And all
+through David's Psalms we find how well he had learnt this great
+lesson which God had taught him.  Again and again we find verses
+which show that he knew well enough who was the Lord of all the
+earth.
+
+In Isaiah's time, it seems, God taught the Jews once more the same
+thing.  He taught them, and the proud king of Assyria, once and for
+all, that He was indeed the Lord--Lord of all nations, and King of
+kings, and also Lord of the earth, and all that therein is.  He
+taught it to the poor oppressed Jews by that miraculous deliverance.
+He taught it to the cruel invading king by that miraculous
+destruction.  Just in the height of his glory, after he had conquered
+almost every nation in the east, and overcome the whole of Judaea,
+except that one small city of Jerusalem, Sennacherib's great army was
+swept away, he neither knew how nor why, in a single night, and
+utterly disheartened and abashed, he returned to his own land; and
+even there he found that the God of Israel had followed him--that the
+idols whom he worshipped could not save him from the wrath of that
+God to whom Assyria, just as much as Jerusalem, belonged.  For as he
+was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, his two sons smote
+him with the sword, and there was an end of all his pride and
+conquests. . . . Now Nisroch was the name of a star--the star which
+we call the planet Saturn; and the Assyrians fancied in their folly,
+that whosoever worshipped any particular star, that star would
+protect and help him. . . .  But, alas for the king of Assyria, there
+was One above who had made the stars, and from whose vengeance the
+stars could not save him; and so even while he was worshipping, and
+praying to, this favourite star of his which could not hear him, he
+fell dead, a murdered man, and found out too late how true were the
+great words of Isaiah when he prophesied against him.
+
+Yes, my friends, this is the lesson which the Jews had to learn, and
+which the king of Assyria had to learn, and which we have to learn
+also; and which God will, in His great mercy, teach us over and over
+again by bitter trials whensoever we forget it; that The Lord is
+King; that He is near us, living for ever, all-wise, all-powerful,
+all-loving; that those who really trust in Him shall never be
+confounded; that those who trust in themselves are trying their
+paltry strength against the God who made heaven and earth, and will
+surely find out their own weakness, just when they fancy themselves
+most successful.  So it was in Hezekiah's time; so it is now, hard as
+it may be to us to believe it.  The Lord Jehovah, Jesus Christ, who
+saved Jerusalem from the Assyrians, He still is King, let the earth
+be never so unquiet.  And all men, or governments, or doctrines, or
+ways of thinking and behaving, which are contrary to His will, or
+even pretend that they can do without Him, will as surely come to
+nought as that great and terrible king of Assyria.  Though man be too
+weak to put them down, Christ is not.  Though man neglect to put them
+down, Christ will not.  If man dare not fight on the Lord's side
+against sin and evil, the Lord's earth will fight for Him.  Storm and
+tempest, blight and famine, earthquakes and burning mountains, will
+do His work, if nothing else will.  As He said Himself, if man stops
+praising Him, the very stones will cry out, and own Him as their
+King.  Not that the blessed Lord is proud, or selfish, or revengeful;
+God forbid!  He is boundless pity, and love, and mercy.  But it is
+just because He is perfect love and pity that He hates sin, which
+makes all the misery upon earth.  He hates it, and he fights against
+it for ever; lovingly at first, that He may lead sinners to
+repentance; for He wills the death of none, but rather that all
+should come to repentance.  But if a man will not turn, He will whet
+his sword; and then woe to the sinner.  Let him be as great as the
+king of Assyria, he must down.  For the Lord will have none guide His
+world but Himself, because none but He will ever guide it on the
+right path.  Yes--but what a glorious thought, that He will guide it,
+and us, on that right path.  Oh blessed news for all who are in
+sorrow and perplexity!  Whatsoever it is that ails you--and who is
+there, young or old, rich or poor, who has not their secret ailments
+at heart?--whatsoever ails you, whatsoever terrifies you, whatsoever
+tempts you, trust in the same Lord who delivered Jerusalem from the
+Assyrians, and He will deliver you.  He will never suffer you to be
+tempted above that you are able, but will with the temptation also
+make a way for you to escape, that you may be able to bear it.  This
+has been His loving way from the beginning, and this will be His way
+until the day when He wipes away tears from all eyes.
+
+
+
+XX--PROFESSION AND PRACTICE
+
+
+
+Though they say, "The Lord liveth," surely they swear falsely.--
+JEREMIAH v. 2.
+
+I spoke last Sunday morning of the wonderful way in which the Lord
+delivered the Jews from the Assyrian army, and I promised to try and
+explain to you this morning, the reason why the Lord allowed the
+Assyrians to come into Judaea, and ravage the whole country except
+the one small city of Jerusalem.
+
+My text is taken from the first lesson, from the book of the prophet
+Jeremiah.  And it, I think, will explain the reason to us.
+
+For though Jeremiah lived more than a hundred years after Isaiah, yet
+he had much the same message from God to give, and much the same sins
+round him to rebuke.  For the Jews were always, as the Bible calls
+them, "a backsliding people;" and, as the years ran on, and they
+began to forget their great deliverance from the Assyrians, they slid
+back into the very same wrong state of mind in which they were in
+Isaiah's time, and for which God punished them by that terrible
+invasion.
+
+Now, what was this?
+
+One very remarkable thing strikes us at once.  That when the
+Assyrians came into Judaea, the Jews were NOT given up to worshipping
+false gods.  On the contrary, we find, both from the book of Kings
+and the book of Chronicles, that a great reform in religion had taken
+place among them a few years before.  Their king Hezekiah, in the
+very first year of his reign, removed the high places, and cut down
+the groves (which are said to have been carved idols meant to
+represent the stars of heaven), and even broke in pieces the brazen
+serpent which Moses had made, because the Jews had begun to worship
+it for an idol.  He trusted in the Lord God, and obeyed Him, more
+than any king of Judah.  He restored the worship of the true God in
+the temple, according to the law of Moses, with such pomp and glory
+as had never been seen since Solomon's time.  And not only did he
+turn to the true God, but his people also.  From the account which we
+find in Chronicles, they seemed to have joined him in the good work.
+They offered sin-offerings as a token of the wickedness of which they
+have been guilty, in leaving the true God for idols; and all other
+kinds of offerings freely and willingly.  "And Hezekiah rejoiced, and
+all the people that God had prepared the people.  Moreover, Hezekiah
+called all the men in Judaea up to Jerusalem, to keep the passover
+according to the law of Moses," which they had neglected to do for
+many years, and the people answered his call and "came, and kept the
+feast at Jerusalem seven days, with joy and great gladness, offering
+peace-offerings, and making confession to the God of their fathers.
+So there was great joy in Jerusalem; for since the time of Solomon
+there was not the like in Jerusalem.  Then the priests and the
+Levites arose, and blessed the people, and their voice was heard, and
+their prayer came up to the Lord's holy dwelling, even to heaven."
+And when it was all finished, the people went out of their own
+accord, and destroyed utterly all the idols, and high places, and
+altars throughout the land, and returned to their houses in peace.
+
+Now does not all this sound very satisfactory and excellent?  What
+better state of mind could people be in?  What a wonderful reform,
+and spread of true religion!  The only thing like it, that we know,
+is the wonderful reform and spread of religion in England in the last
+sixty years, after all the ungodliness and wickedness that went on
+from the year 1660 to the time of the French war; the building of
+churches, the founding of schools, the spread of Bibles, and tracts,
+and the wonderful increase of gospel preachers, so that every old man
+will tell you, that religion is talked about and written about now, a
+thousand times more than when he was a boy.  Indeed, unless a man
+makes a profession of some sort of religion or other, nowadays, he
+can hardly hope to rise in the world, so religious are we English
+become.
+
+Now let us hear what Isaiah thought of all that wonderful spread of
+true religion in his time; and then, perhaps, we may see what he
+would think of ours now, if he were alive.  His opinion is sure to be
+the right one.  His rules can never fail, for he was an inspired
+prophet, and saw things as they are, as God sees them; and therefore
+his rules will hold good for ever.  Let us see what they were.
+
+The first chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah is called "The
+vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and
+Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah."  Now
+this is one prophecy by itself, in the shape of a poem; for in the
+old Hebrew it is written in regular verses.  The second chapter
+begins with another heading, and is the beginning of a different
+poem; so that this first chapter is, as it were, a summing up of all
+that he is going to say afterwards; a short account of the state of
+the Jews for more than forty years.  And what is more, this first
+chapter of Isaiah must have been written in the reign of Hezekiah, in
+those very religious days of which I was just speaking; for it says
+that the country was desolate, and Jerusalem alone left.  And this
+never happened during Isaiah's lifetime, till the fourteenth year of
+Hezekiah, that is, till this great spread of the true religion had
+been going on for thirteen years.  Now what was Isaiah's vision?
+What did he, being taught by God's Spirit, SEE was God's opinion of
+these religious Jews?  Listen, my friends, and take it solemnly to
+heart!
+
+"Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law
+of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.  To what purpose is the multitude
+of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord:  I am full of the burnt
+offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts:  and I delight not in
+the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.  When ye come to
+appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my
+courts?  Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto
+me; the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot
+away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.  Your new moons
+and your appointed feasts my soul hateth:  they are a trouble unto
+me; I am weary to bear them.  And when ye spread forth your hands, I
+will hide my eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will
+not hear:  your hands are full of blood.  Wash you, make you clean;
+put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do
+evil; learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge
+the fatherless, plead for the widow. . . .  How is the faithful city
+become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in
+it; but now murderers.  Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed
+with water; thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves;
+every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards:  they judge not
+the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.
+Therefore, saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts, the mighty one of
+Israel, Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine
+enemies." . . .
+
+Again, I say, my friends, listen to it, and take it solemnly to
+heart!  That is God's opinion of religion, even the truest and
+soundest in worship and doctrine, when it is without godliness,
+without holiness; when it goes in hand with injustice, and
+covetousness, and falsehood, and cheating, and oppression, and
+neglect of the poor, and keeping company with the wicked, because it
+is profitable; in short, when it is like too much of the religion
+which we see around us in the world at this day.
+
+Yes--it was of no use holding to the letter of the law while they
+forgot its spirit.  God had commanded church-going, and woe to those,
+then or now, who neglect it.  Yet the Lord asks, "Who hath required
+this at your hands, to tread my courts?". . .  He had commanded the
+Sabbath-day to be kept holy; and woe to those, then or now, who
+neglect it.  Yet He says, "Your Sabbaths I cannot away with; it is
+iniquity, even the solemn meeting."  The Lord had appointed feasts:
+and yet He says that His soul hated them; they were a trouble to Him;
+He was weary to bear them.  The Lord had commanded prayer; and woe to
+those, then or now, in England, as in Judaea, who neglect to pray.
+And yet He says:  "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine
+eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear."  And
+why?--He himself condescends to tell them the reason, which they
+ought to have known for themselves:  "Because," He says, "your hands
+are full of blood."  This was the reason why all their religiousness,
+and orthodoxy, and church-going, and praying, was only disgusting to
+God; because there was no righteousness with it.  Their faith was
+only a dead, rotten, sham faith, for it brought forth no fruits of
+justice and love; and their religion was only hypocrisy, for it did
+not make them holy.  No doubt they thought themselves pious and
+sincere enough; no doubt they thought that they were pleasing God
+perfectly, and giving Him all that He could fairly ask of them; no
+doubt they were fiercely offended at Isaiah's message to them; no
+doubt they could not understand what he meant by calling them a
+hypocritical nation, a second Sodom and Gomorrah, while they were
+destroying idols, and keeping the law of Moses, and worshipping God
+more earnestly than He had been worshipped since Solomon's time.  But
+so it was.  That was the message of God to them; that was the vision
+of Isaiah concerning them; that there was no soundness in the whole
+of the nation, "from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head,
+nothing but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores"--that is, that
+the whole heart and conscience, and ways of thinking, were utterly
+rotten, and abominable in the sight of God, even while they were
+holding the true doctrines about them, and keeping up the pure
+worship of Him.  This, says the Lord, is not the way to please me.
+"He hath showed thee, oh 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?"  To do justly, to love mercy, and then to walk
+humbly, sure that when you seem to have done all your duty, you have
+left only too much of it undone; even as St. Paul felt when he said,
+that though he knew nothing against himself; though he could not
+recollect a single thing in which he had failed of his duty to the
+Corinthians, yet that did not justify him.  "For he that judgeth me,"
+he says, "is the Lord."  He sees deeper than I can; and He, alas! may
+take a very different view of my conduct from what I do; and this
+life of mine, which looks to me, from my ignorance, so spotless and
+perfect, may be, in His eyes, full of sins, and weakness, and
+neglects, and shameful follies.  "To walk humbly with God."  Not to
+believe that because you read the Bible, and have heard the gospel,
+and are sharp at finding out false doctrine in preachers, and belong
+to the Church of England, that therefore you know all about God, and
+can look down upon poor papists, and heathens, and say:  "This
+people, which knoweth not the law, is accursed:  but WE are
+enlightened, we understand the whole Bible, we know everything about
+God's will, and man's duty; and whosoever differs from us, or
+pretends to teach us anything new about God, must be wrong."  Not to
+do so, my friends, but to believe what St. Paul tells us solemnly,
+"That if any man think that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet
+as he ought to know"--to believe that the Great God, and the will of
+God, and the love of God, and the mystery of Redemption, and the
+treasures of wisdom which are in His Bible, are, as St. Paul told
+you, boundless, like a living well, which can never be fathomed, or
+drawn dry, but fills again with fresh water as fast as you draw from
+it.  That is walking humbly with God; and those who do not do so, but
+like the Pharisees of old, believe that they have all knowledge, and
+can understand all the mysteries of the Bible, and go through the
+world, despising and cursing all parties but their own--let them
+beware, lest the Lord be saying of them, as He said of the church of
+Sardis, of old:  "Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods,
+and have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art wretched, and
+miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked."
+
+How is this?  What is this strange thing, without which even the true
+knowledge of doctrine is of no use; which, if a man, or a nation has
+not, he is poor, and blind, and wretched, and naked in soul, in spite
+of all his religion?  Isaiah will tell us--What did he say to the
+Jews in his day?
+
+"Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from
+before my eyes.  Do justice to the fatherless, and relieve the
+widow!"  "Do that," says the Lord, "and then your repentance will be
+sincere.  Church building and church going are well--but they are not
+repentance--churches are not souls.  I ask you for your hearts, and
+you give me fine stones and fine words.  I want souls--I want YOUR
+souls--I want you to turn to me.  And what am I? saith the Lord.  I
+am justice, I am love, I am the God of the oppressed, the fatherless,
+the widow.--That is my character.  Turn to justice, turn to love,
+turn to mercy; long to be made just, and loving, and merciful; see
+that your sin has been just this, and nothing else, that you have
+been unjust, unloving, unmerciful.  Repent for your neglect and
+cruelty, and repent in dust and ashes, when you see what wretched
+hypocrites you really are.  And then, my boundless mercy and pardon
+shall be open to you.  As you wish to be to me, so will I be to you;
+if you wish to become merciful, you shall taste my mercy; if you wish
+to become loving to others, you shall find that I love you; if you
+wish to become just, you shall find that I am just, just to deal by
+you as you deal by others; faithful and just to forgive you your
+sins, and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness.  And then, all
+shall be forgiven and forgotten; "though your sins be as scarlet,
+they shall be white as snow:  though they be red like crimson, they
+shall be as wool."
+
+Surely, my friends, these things are worth taking to heart; for this
+is the sin which most destroys all men and nations--high religious
+profession with an ungodly, covetous, and selfish life.  It is the
+worst and most dangerous of all sins; for it is like a disease which
+eats out the heart and life without giving pain; so that the sick man
+never suspects that anything is the matter with him, till he finds
+himself, to his astonishment, at the point of death.  So it was with
+the Jews, three times in their history.  In the time of Isaiah, under
+King Hezekiah; in the time of Jeremiah, under King Josiah; and last
+and worst of all, in the time of Jesus Christ.  At each of these
+three times the Jews were high religious professors, and yet at each
+of these three times they were abominable before God, and on the
+brink of ruin.  In Isaiah's time their eyes seemed to have been
+opened at last to their own sins.  Their fearful danger, and
+wonderful deliverance from the Assyrians of which you heard last
+Sunday, seem to have done that for them; as God intended it should.
+During the latter part of Hezekiah's reign they seemed to have turned
+to God with their hearts, and not with their lips only; and Isaiah
+can find no words to express the delight which the blessed change
+gives him.  Nevertheless, they soon fell back again into idolatry;
+and then there was another outward lip-reformation under the good
+King Josiah; and Jeremiah had to give them exactly the same warning
+which Isaiah had given them nearly a hundred years before.  But that
+time, alas! they would not take the warning; and then all the evil
+which had been prophesied against them came on them.  From
+hypocritical profession, they fell back again into their old
+idolatry; their covetousness, selfishness, party-quarrels, and
+profligate lives made them too weak and rotten to stand against
+Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, when he attacked them; and Jerusalem
+was miserably destroyed, the temple burnt, and the Jews carried
+captives to Babylon.  There they repented in bitter sorrow and
+slavery; and God allowed them after seventy years to return to their
+own land.  Then at first they seemed to be a really converted people,
+and to be worshipping God in spirit and in truth.  They never again
+fell back into the idolatry of the heathen.  So far from it, they
+became the greatest possible haters of it; they went on keeping the
+law of God with the utmost possible strictness, even to the day when
+the Lord Jesus appeared among them.  Their religious people, the
+Scribes and Pharisees, were the most strict, moral, devout people of
+the whole world.  They worshipped the very words and letters of the
+Bible; their thoughts seemed filled with nothing but God and the
+service of God:  and yet the Lord Jesus told them that they were in a
+worse state, greater sinners in the sight of God, than they had ever
+been; that they, who hated idolatry, were filling up the measure of
+their idolatrous forefathers' iniquity; that the guilt of all the
+righteous blood shed on earth was to fall on them; that they were a
+race of serpents, a generation of vipers; and that even He did not
+see how they could escape the damnation of hell.  And they proved how
+true His words were, by crucifying the very Lord of whom their much-
+prized Scriptures bore witness, whom they pretended to worship day
+and night continually; and received the just reward of their deeds in
+forty years of sedition, bloodshed, and misery, which ended by the
+Romans coming and sweeping the nation of the Jews from off the face
+of the earth.
+
+So much for profession without practice.  So much for true doctrine
+with dishonest and unholy lives.  So much for outward respectability
+with inward sinfulness.  So much for hating idolatry, while all the
+while men's hearts are far from God!
+
+Oh! my friends, let us all search our hearts carefully in these times
+of high profession and low practice; lest we be adding our drop of
+hypocrisy to the great flood of it which now stifles this land of
+England, and so fall into the same condemnation as the Jews of old,
+in spite of far nobler examples, brighter and wider light, and more
+wonderful and bounteous blessings.
+
+
+
+XXI--THE UNFAITHFUL SERVANT
+
+
+
+But and if that servant say in his heart, My lord delayeth his
+coming; and shall begin to beat the men servants and the maid
+servants, and to eat and drink and to be drunken; the lord of that
+servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an
+hour when he is not aware, and will cut him asunder, and will appoint
+him his portion with the unbelievers.--LUKE xii. 45, 46.
+
+But why with the unbelievers?  The man had not disbelieved that he
+had any Lord at all; he had only believed that his Lord delayed his
+coming.  And why was he to be put with those who do not believe in
+him at all?  This is a very fearful question, friends, for us, when
+we think how it is the fashion among us now, to believe that our Lord
+delays His coming.--And surely most of us do believe that?  For is it
+not our notion that, when the Lord Jesus ascended up to heaven, He
+went away a great distance off, perhaps millions of miles beyond the
+stars; and that He will not come back again till the last--which, for
+aught we know, and as we rather expect, may not happen for hundreds
+or thousands of years to come?  Is not that most people's notion,
+rich as well as poor?  And if that is not believing that our Lord
+delays His coming, what is?
+
+But, you may answer, the Creed says plainly, that He ascended into
+heaven and sits at the right hand of God.  Ah! my friends, those
+great words of the Creed which you take into your lips every Sunday,
+mean the very opposite to what most people fancy.  They do not say,
+"The Lord Jesus has left this poor earth to itself and its misery:"
+but they say, "Lo, He is with you, even to the end of the world."
+True, He is ascended into heaven.  And how far off is heaven?--for so
+far off is the Lord Jesus, and no farther.  Not so far off, my
+friends, after all, if you knew where to find it.  Truly said the
+great and good poet, now gone home to his reward:
+
+
+Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
+
+
+And if we lose sight of it as we grow up to be men and women, it is
+not because heaven goes farther off, but because we grow less
+heavenly.  Even now, so close is heaven to us, that any one of us
+might enter into heaven this moment, without stirring from his seat.
+One real cry from the depths of your heart--"Father, forgive thy
+sinful child!"--one real feeling of your own worthlessness, and
+weakness, and emptiness, and of God's righteousness, and love, and
+mercy, ready for you--and you are in heaven there and then, as near
+the feet of the blessed Lord Jesus, as Mary Magdalen was, when she
+tried to clasp them in the garden.  I am serious, my friends; I am
+not given to talk fine figures of poetry; I am talking sober,
+straightforward, literal truth.  And the Lord sits at God's right
+hand too? you believe that?  Then how far off is God?--for as far off
+as God is, so far off is the Lord Jesus, and no farther.  What says
+St. Paul?  That "God is not far off from any one of us--for in Him we
+live, and move, and have our being" . . . IN Him . . . .  How far off
+is that?  And is not God everywhere, if indeed we can say that He is
+any where?  Then the Lord Jesus, who is at God's right hand, is
+everywhere also--here, now, with us this day.  One would have thought
+that there was no need to prove that by argument, considering that
+His own blessed lips told us:  "Lo, I am with you, even to the end of
+the world;" and again:  "Wheresoever two or three are gathered
+together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."  And this is
+the Lord whom people fancy is gone away far above the stars, till the
+end of time!  Oh, my friends, rather bow your heads before Him here
+this moment.  For here He is among us now, listening to every thought
+of our poor sinful hearts. . . .  He is where God is--God IN whom we
+live, and move, and have our being--and that is everywhere.  Do you
+wish Him to be any nearer, my friends?  Or do you--do you--take care
+what your hearts answer, for He is watching them--do you in the depth
+of your hearts wish that He were a little farther off?  Does the
+notion of His being here on this earth, watching and interfering (as
+we call it nowadays in our atheism) with us and everything, seem
+unpleasant and burdensome?  Is it more comfortable to you to think
+that He is away far up beyond the stars?  Do you feel the lighter and
+freer for fancying that He will not visit the earth for many a year
+to come?  In short, is it in your HEARTS that you are saying, The
+Lord delays His coming?
+
+That is a very important question.  For mind, a pious man might be,
+as many a pious man has been in these days, deceived by bad teaching
+into the notion that Jesus Christ was gone far away.  But if he were
+a truly pious man, if he truly loved the Lord, that would be a
+painful thought--as I should have fancied, an unbearable thought--to
+him, when he looked out upon this poor miserable, confused world.  He
+would be crying night and day:  "Oh, that thou wouldest rend the
+heavens and come down!"  He would be in an agony of pity for this
+poor deserted earth, and of longing for the Saviour of it to come
+back and save it.  He would never have a moment's peace of mind till
+he had either seen the Lord come back again in His glory, or till he
+had found out--what I am sure the blessed Lord would teach him as a
+reward for his love--that it was all a dream and a nightmare, and
+that the Lord of the earth was in the earth, and close to him, all
+along; only that his weak eyes were held so that he did not know the
+Lord and the Lord's works when he saw them.
+
+But that was not the temper of this servant in the Lord's parable.  I
+am afraid it is by no means the temper of many of us nowadays.  The
+servant said IN HIS HEART, that his master would be long away.  It
+was his heart put the thought into his head.  He took to the notion
+HEARTILY, as we say, because he was glad to believe it was true; glad
+to think that his master would not come to "interfere" with him; and
+that in the meantime he might be lord and master himself, and treat
+everyone in the house as if he himself was the owner of it, and
+tyrannise over his fellow-servants, and enjoy himself in luxury and
+good living.  So says David of the fool:  "The fool hath said in his
+heart, there is no God;" his heart puts that thought into his head.
+He wishes to believe that there is no God; and when there is a will
+there is a way; and he soon finds out reasons and arguments enough to
+prove what he is so very anxious to prove.
+
+Now, my friends, I am afraid that there is not so much difference as
+people fancy, between the fool who says in his heart, "There is no
+God," and the fool who says in his heart, "My master delays His
+coming."--"God has left the world to us, and we must shift for
+ourselves in it."  The man who likes to be what St. Paul calls
+"without God in the world," is he so very much wiser than the man who
+likes to have no God at all?  St. James did not think so; for what
+does he say:  "Thou believest that there is one God?  Thou doest
+well--the devils also believe and tremble."  They know as much as
+that; but it does them no good--only increases their fear.  "But wilt
+thou know, oh! vain man, that faith without works," believing without
+doing, "is dead?"  And are not too many, as I said just now, afraid
+of the thought of God; so afraid of it that they wish to allow the
+Son of God as little share as possible in the management of this
+world?  Have not too many a belief without works; a mere belief that
+there is one God and not two, which hardly, from one year's end to
+another, makes them do one single thing which they would not have
+done if they had believed that there was no God at all?  Fear of the
+law, fear of the policeman, fear of losing their work or their
+custom; fear of losing their neighbour's good word--that is what
+keeps most people from breaking loose.  There is not much of the fear
+of God in that, or the love of God either as far as I can see.  They
+go through life as if they had made a covenant with God, that He
+should have his own way in the world to come, if He would only let
+them have their way in this world.  Oh! my friends, my friends, do
+you think God is God of the next world and not of this also?  Do you
+think the kingdom, and the power, and the glory will be His a great
+many hundreds of years hence, in what you call heaven; and will not
+see what every page of Scripture tells you, what you yourself say
+every time you repeat the Lord's Prayer, that the Kingdom, and the
+Power and the Glory are His now, here in this life, and that He has
+committed all things to His Son Jesus Christ and given the power into
+His hand, that He may rule this earth in righteousness now, here, in
+this life, and conquer back for God one by one, if it be possible,
+every creature upon earth?  So says the Bible--and people profess
+nowadays to believe their Bibles.  My friends, too many, nowadays,
+while they profess very loudly to believe what the Bible says, only
+believe what their favourite teachers tell them that the Bible says.
+If they really read their Bibles for themselves, and took God at His
+word, there would be less tyrannising of one man over another, less
+grinding down of men by masters, and of men by each other--for the
+poor are often very hard on each other in England, now, my friends--
+very envious and spiteful, and slanderous about each other.  They say
+that dog won't eat dog--yet how many a poor man grudges and supplants
+his neighbour, and tries to get into his place and beat him down in
+his wages?  And there are those who call themselves learned men, who
+tell the poor that that is God's will, and the way by which God
+intends them to prosper.  If those men believed their Bibles, they
+would be repenting in sackcloth and ashes for having preached such a
+devil's sermon to God's children.  If men really read their Bibles,
+there would be less eating and drinking with the drunken; less
+idleness and luxury among the rich; less fancying that a man has a
+right to do what he likes with his own, because all men would know
+that they were only the Lord's stewards, bound to give an account to
+him of the good which they had done with what he has lent them.
+There would be fewer parents fancying that they can tyrannise over
+their children, bringing them up as heathens for the sake of the few
+pence they earn; using bad language, and doing shameful things before
+them, which they dared not do if they recollected that the Lord was
+looking on; beating and scolding them as if they were brutes or
+slaves, to save themselves the trouble of teaching them gently what
+the poor little creatures cannot know without being taught:  and most
+shameful of all, robbing the poor children of their little earnings
+to spend it themselves in drunkenness.  Ah, blessed Lord! if people
+did but know how near Thou wert to them, all that would vanish out of
+England, as the night clouds vanish away before the sun!
+
+And He is near, my friends:  He is watching; He is governing; He is
+at hand:  and in this life or in the life to come, forget Him as we
+choose, He will make us know plain enough, and without any doubt
+whatsoever, that He is the Lord.
+
+He has fulfilled this awful parable of his about the unfaithful
+servant already; many a time, against many a man, many a great king,
+and prince, and nation; and he will fulfil it against each and every
+man, from the nobleman in his castle to the labourer in his cottage,
+who says in his heart, "My Lord delays his coming," and begins to
+tyrannise over those who are weaker than himself, and to enjoy
+himself as he likes, and forget that he is not his own, but bought
+with the price of Christ's blood, and bound to work for Christ's
+kingdom and glory.
+
+So he punished the popes of Rome, three hundred years ago.  When all
+the nations in Europe were listening to them and obeying them, and
+they had put into their hands by God a greater power of doing good
+than He ever gave to any human being before or since, what did they
+do?  Instead of using their power for Christ, they used it for
+themselves.  Instead of preaching to all nations the good news that
+Christ the Son of God was their King, they said:  "I, the pope, am
+your king.  Christ is gone far away into heaven, and has committed
+all power on earth to us; we are Christ's vicars; we are in Christ's
+place; He has entrusted to our keeping all the treasures of His
+merits and His grace, and no one can get any blessing from Christ,
+unless we choose to give it him."  So they said in their hearts just
+what the foolish servant in the parable said:  and fancying that they
+were lords and masters, naturally enough went on to behave as such;
+to beat the men-servants and maid-servants, that is, to oppress and
+tyrannise over the bodies and minds and consciences of men, and women
+too, God knows; and to eat and drink with the drunken, to live in
+riot and debauchery.  But the Lord was not so far off as those
+foolish popes fancied.  And in an hour when they were not aware, He
+came and cut them asunder.  He snatched from them one-half of the
+nations of Europe, and England among the rest; He punished them by
+doubt, ignorance, confusion, and utter blindness, and appointed them
+their portion among the unbelievers in such terrible earnest, that to
+this very day, to judge by the things which they say and do, it is
+difficult to persuade ourselves that the popes really believe in any
+God at all.
+
+So He did, only three years ago, to many kings and princes on the
+Continent. {217}  They professed to be Christians; but they had
+forgotten that they were Christ's stewards, that all their power came
+from Him, and that he had given it them only to use for the good of
+their subjects.  And they too went on saying:   "The Lord delays His
+coming, we are rulers in this world, and God is ruler in the world to
+come."  So they, too, oppressed their subjects, and lived in ease on
+what they wrung out of the poor wretches below them.  But the Lord
+was nearer them, too, than they fancied; and all at once--as they
+were fancying themselves all safe and prosperous, and saying, "We are
+those who ought to speak, who is Lord over us?"--their fool's
+paradise crumbled from under their feet.  A few paltry mobs of
+foolish starving people, without weapons, without leaders, without
+good counsel to guide them, rose against them.  And what did they do?
+They might have crushed down the rebels most of them, in a week, if
+they had had courage.  And in the only country where the rebels were
+really strong, that is, in Austria, all might have been quiet again
+at once, if the king had only had the heart to do common justice, and
+keep his own solemn oaths.  But no--the terror of the Lord came upon
+them.  He most truly cut them in sunder.  They were every man of a
+different mind, and none of them in the same mind a day together;
+they became utterly conscience-stricken, terrified, perplexed, at
+their wit's end, not having courage or determination to do anything,
+or even to do nothing, and fled shamefully away one after another, to
+their everlasting disgrace.  And those of them who have got back
+their power since are showing sadly enough, by their obstinate folly
+and wickedness, that the Lord has appointed them their portion with
+the unbelievers, and left them to fill up the measure of their
+iniquity, and drink deep the cup of wrath which is in His hand, full
+and mixed for those who forget God.
+
+Oh! my friends, let us lay these things solemnly to heart.  Do not
+fancy that the Lord will punish the wicked great, and forget the
+wicked small.  In His sight there is neither great nor small; all are
+small enough for Him to crush like the moth; and all are too great to
+be overlooked, or forgotten by Him, without whom not a sparrow falls
+to the ground.  Again I say, my friends, let us lay His parable to
+heart.  Let us who have property, and station, and education, never
+forget who has given it us, and for whom we must use it.  Let us
+never forget that to whom much is given, of them will much be
+required.  Let us pray to the Lord daily to write upon our inmost
+hearts those solemn words:  "Who made thee to differ from another;
+and what hast thou which thou didst not receive?"  Let us look on our
+servants, our labourers, on every human being over whom we have any
+influence, as weaker brothers whom God has commanded us to help,
+teach, and guide in body, mind, and spirit, not that we may make them
+our slaves, but make them free, manful, self-helping, and in due time
+independent of us and of everyone except God.
+
+And you young people, who have no authority over anyone, but over
+your own bodies; to whom the Lord has given little or nothing to
+manage and take care of except your own health and strength--do not
+let the devil tempt you to believe that that health and strength is
+your own property, to do what you like with.  It belongs to the Lord
+who died for you, and He will require an account from you how you
+have used it.  Do not let the devil tempt you to believe that the
+Lord delays His coming to you--that you may do what you like now, in
+the prime of your years, and that it will be time enough to think
+about God and religion when God visits you with cares, and sickness,
+and old age.  That is the fancy of too many; but it will surely turn
+out to be a mistake.  Those who misuse their youth, and health, and
+strength, in tyrannising over those who are weaker than themselves,
+and laughing at those who are not as clever as themselves, and eating
+and drinking with the drunken--the Lord will come to them in an hour
+when they are not aware, and cut them asunder, in some way or other,
+by loss of work, or poverty, or sickness, or doubt and confusion, and
+bitter shame and perplexity of mind; till they find out, poor things,
+that they have been living like the unbelievers all their youth,
+without God in the world, while God's love and God's teaching, and
+God's happiness was ready for them; and have to go back again to
+their Father and their Lord, and cry:  "Father, we have sinned
+against heaven and before Thee, and are no more worthy to be called
+Thy children!"  Oh, you who have been fancying that the Lord was gone
+far away, and that you had a right to do what you liked with the
+powers which He has given you, go back to Him, now at once, and
+confess that you, and all belonging to you, belong to Him, and ask
+Him to teach you how to use it aright.  Ask Him to teach you how to
+please Him with it, and not yourselves only.  Ask Him to teach you
+how to do good to all around you, and not merely to do what you like.
+Ask Him to show you how to do your duty to Him, and to your
+neighbours, for whom He died on the cross, in that station of life to
+which He has called you.  Ask Him to show you how to use your
+property, your knowledge, your business, your strength, your health,
+so that you may be a blessing and a help to those whom He blesses and
+helps, and who, He wishes, should bless and help each other.  Go back
+to Him at once, my friends.  You will not have far to go, seeing that
+He is now even among us here hearing my clumsy words; and I do hope,
+and trust, and pray, bringing them home to some of your hearts with
+that spirit and power of His, which is like a two-edged sword,
+piercing to the very depths of a man's heart, and showing him how
+ugly it is--and how noble the Lord will make it, if he will but
+repent and pray to Him who never cast out any that came to Him.
+
+
+
+XXII--THE WAY TO WEALTH
+
+
+
+Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is
+near:  let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his
+thoughts and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy
+upon him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.--ISAIAH lv.
+6, 7.
+
+Some of you, surely, while the first lesson was being read this
+morning, must have felt the beauty of it; and if you were thoughtful,
+perplexed, weary, sad at heart, perhaps you felt that it was more
+than beautiful--that it was full of comfort.  And so it should be
+full of comfort to you, my friends.  God meant it to give you
+comfort.  For though it was written and spoken by a man of like
+passions with ourselves, it was just as truly written and spoken by
+God, who made heaven and earth.  It is true and everlasting, the
+message which it brings, and like all true and everlasting words, it
+is the voice of God who cannot change; who makes no difference
+between Jew and Gentile, between us in England here, and nations
+which perished hundreds of years ago.
+
+And what is its message?  What was God's word to the old Jews, among
+all their sin, and sorrow, and labour?
+
+Is it the message of a stern judge, saying:  "Pay me that thou owest,
+to the uttermost farthing; and if you cannot do that, fret and
+torment yourselves in shame and terror here on earth, for all your
+sins, if, possibly, you may chance to change my mind, and find
+forgiveness at the last day?"
+
+Is it the message of a proud tyrant, saying:  "If you are miserable,
+and fallen, and sinful, what is that to me?  I am perfect, blest,
+contented with myself, alone in my glory, far away beyond the sight
+of men, beyond the sun and stars--what are you worms of earth to me?"
+
+Or is it the voice of a loving Father, calling to his self-willed
+children who have gone proudly and boldly away from their Father's
+house, and thrown off their Father's government, and said in their
+conceit:  "We are men.  Do not we know good and evil?  Do we not know
+what is our interest?  Cannot we judge for ourselves, and shift for
+ourselves, and take care of ourselves?  Why are we to be barred from
+pleasant things here, and profitable things there?  We will be our
+own masters."
+
+To self-willed children who have said thus, and done thus in their
+foolish hearts, and have found all their conceit, and shrewdness,
+only lead them into sorrow, and perplexity, and distress.--Who have
+found that with all their cleverness they could not get the very good
+things for which they left their Father's house; or if they get them,
+find no enjoyment in them, but only discontent, and shame, and
+danger, and a sad self-accusing heart--spending their money for that
+which does not feed them after all, and labouring hard for things
+which do not satisfy them; always longing for something more--always
+finding the pleasure, or the profit, or the honour which a little way
+off looked so fine, looked quite ugly and worthless, when they come
+up to it and get hold of it--finding all things full of labour; the
+eye never satisfied with seeing, or the ear with hearing; the same
+thing coming over and over again.  Each young man starting with gay
+hopes, as if he were the first man that ever was born, and he was
+going to do out of hand such fine things as man never did before, and
+make his own fortune, and set the world to right at once; and then as
+he grows older, falling into the same weary ruts as his forefathers
+went dragging on it, every fresh year bringing its own labour and its
+own sorrow; and dying like them, taking nothing away with him of all
+he has earned, and crying with his last breath:  "That which is
+crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be
+numbered.  What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh
+under the sun, for all is vanity and vexation of spirit?"
+
+To self-willed children, who have tried their own way ever since they
+were born, they and their fathers before them, and found it go round
+in a ring and leave them just where they started in heart and soul,
+and, on their death-beds, in purse and power also--
+
+To such struggling, dissatisfied beings--such as nine-tenths of the
+men and women on this earth, alas! are still--comes the word of this
+loving Father:
+
+"Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters! and he that
+hath no money, come, buy and eat.  Yea, come, buy wine and milk
+without money, and without price."  Why do you fancy that money can
+give you all you want?  Why this labouring and straining after money,
+as if it was God, as if it made heaven and earth, and all therein?
+Is money a God? or money's worth? "I am God," saith the Lord, "and
+beside me there is none else.  It is I who give, and not money.  It
+is I who save men, and not money.  And I do save, and I do give
+freely to all.  Come, and try my mercy, and see if my word be not
+true."
+
+This struggling and snarling, like dogs over a bone--what profit
+comes of it? are you happier? are you wiser? are you better? are you
+more at peace with your neighbours; more at peace with your own
+hearts and consciences?  If you are, money has not made you so, nor
+plotting, and scraping, and struggling, and pushing your neighbour
+down, that you may rise a few inches on his shoulders.  No.  Hear
+what the voice of your Father says is the true way to wealth and
+comfort, after which you all struggle and labour so hard in vain.--
+"Hearken diligently unto me, and you shall eat that which is good,
+and your soul shall delight itself in fatness.  Incline your ear and
+come unto me.  Hear, and your soul shall live.  And I will make an
+everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies," or rather "the
+faithful oath which I sware unto David?"  And what is this faithful
+oath which God sware to David.--"Of the fruit of thy body, I will set
+on thy seat."  A promise of a righteous king who should arise in
+David's family.  How far David understood the full meaning of that
+glorious promise we cannot tell.  He thought most probably, at first,
+that Solomon, his son, was to be the king who would fulfil it.  But
+all through many of his psalms, there are deep and great words about
+some nobler and more perfect king than Solomon--about one who, as
+Isaiah says here, would perfectly witness to the people that God was
+their King; one who would be a perfect leader and commander of the
+people; a holy one of Israel, who would sit on God's right hand; to
+hear the good news of whom, the Jews would call nations whom they
+then did not know of, and for whose sake nations who did not know
+them would run to them.  And dimly David did see this, that God would
+raise up a true Christ, that is, one truly anointed by God, chosen
+and sent out by God, to sit on his throne, and be perfectly what
+David was only in part; a King made perfect by suffering, a King of
+poor men, a King who bore the sins and carried the iniquities of all
+His people, from the highest to the lowest.  We know who that was.
+We know clearly what David only knew dimly, what Isaiah only knew a
+little more clearly.  We know who was born of the Virgin Mary,
+crucified under Pontius Pilate, ascended into heaven, and now sits at
+the right hand of God, ever praying for us, ruling the world in
+righteousness, Jesus the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, to whom all
+power is given in heaven and earth.
+
+But Isaiah, though he knew Him only dimly, still knew Him.  He did
+not know that the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, would take on Himself
+the form of a poor man, and be called the son of the carpenter.  Such
+boundless love and condescension in the Son of God he never could
+have fancied for himself, and God had not chosen to reveal it to him;
+or to anyone else in those days.  But this he did see, that the Lord
+Jesus, He whom he calls the Holy One of Israel, was near the Jews in
+his time; that He was watching over them, mourning over their sins,
+arguing with them, and calling them to return to Him with most human
+love and tenderness, as a husband to the woman whom he loves in spite
+of her unfaithfulness to him.  As he says to his sinful and
+distressed country in the chapter before this:  "Thy Maker is thy
+husband:  the Lord of Hosts is His name, and thy Redeemer is the Holy
+One of Israel, the Lord of the whole earth shall He be called.  For
+the Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit.
+For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will
+I gather thee.  In a little anger I hid my face from thee for a
+moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee,
+saith the Lord thy Redeemer."
+
+This, then, Isaiah knew--that the heart of the Holy Lord pitied and
+yearned after those poor sinful Jews, as a husband's after a foolish
+and sinful wife.  And how much more should we believe the same, how
+much more should we believe that His heart pities and yearns for all
+foolish and sinful people here in England now!  We who know a
+thousand times more than Isaiah knew of His love, His pity, His
+condescension, which led Him to sacrifice Himself upon the cross for
+us?  Surely, surely, if Isaiah had a right to say to those Jews,
+"Seek the Lord while He may be found," I have a thousand times as
+much right to say it to you.  If Isaiah had a right to say to those
+Jews, "Let the wicked forsake his ways and the unrighteous man his
+thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy
+upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon," then I have
+a right to say it to you.
+
+Free mercy, utter pardon, pardon for all, even for the worst.  And
+what is the argument which Isaiah uses to make his countrymen repent?
+Is it "Repent, or you shall be damned:  Repent because God's wrath
+and curse is against you.  The Lord hates you and despises you, and
+you must crawl to His feet like beaten hounds, and entreat Him not to
+strike you into hell as He intends"?  Not so; it was because God
+loved the Jews, that they were to repent.  It is because God loves
+you that you must repent.  "Incline your ear," saith the Lord, "and
+come unto me, hear, and your soul shall live; and you shall eat that
+which is good, and your soul shall delight itself in fatness."  Yes,
+God is love.  God's delight and glory is to give; in spite of all our
+sins He gives and gives, sending rain and fruitful seasons to just
+and unjust, to fill their hearts with joy and gladness; and all the
+while men fancy that it is not God that gives, but they who take.
+God has not left Himself, as St. Paul says, without a witness; every
+fruitful shower and quickening gleam of sunshine cries to us--See!
+God is love:  He is the giver.  And men will not hear that voice.
+They say in their hearts, "The Lord is far away above the skies; He
+does not care for us:  we must help ourselves, each man to what he
+can get off this earth; nay, even, when we are hard put to it for a
+living, we must break God's laws to keep ourselves alive, and so
+steal from God's table the very good things which He offers us
+freely."
+
+But some will say:  "He does not give freely; we must work and
+struggle.  Why do you mock poor hard-worked creatures with such words
+as these?"
+
+Ask that question of God, my friends, and not of me.  Isaiah said
+that those who hearkened to God diligently should eat what is good.
+The Lord Jesus Christ Himself said the same--that if we seek first
+the kingdom of God and His justice, all other things should be added
+to them.  He did not mean us to be idle, God forbid! but this He
+meant, that if we, each in his business and calling, put steadily
+before ourselves what is right, what God would wish us, His subjects,
+to be in His Kingdom--if instead of making our first thought in every
+business we take in hand, "What will suit my interest best, what will
+raise most money, what will give me most pleasure?" we said to
+ourselves all day long, "What will be most right, and just, and
+merciful for us to do; what will be most pleasing to a God who is
+love and justice itself? what will do most good to my neighbour as
+well as myself?" then all things would go well with us.  Then we
+should be prosperous and joyful.  Then our plans would succeed and
+our labour bring forth real profit to us, because they would be
+according to the will of God:  we should be fellow-workers with Jesus
+Christ in the great work of doing good to this poor distracted world,
+and His help and blessing would be with us.
+
+And if you ask me, how can this come to pass, I must answer, as
+Isaiah does in this same chapter:  "The Lord's ways are not as our
+ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts, but higher than ours, as the
+heavens are above the earth."  But if we do turn to God, and repent
+each man of us of his selfishness, his unfaithfulness, his hard-
+heartedness, his covetousness, his self-will, his ungodliness--then
+God's blessing, as Isaiah says, will come down on us, and spring up
+among us, we know not how or whence, like the rain and snow, which
+comes down from heaven and waters the earth, and makes it bud and
+bring forth to give seed to the sower and bread to the eater.  So
+shall be the Lord's word, which goes out of His mouth; it will not
+return to Him void, but will accomplish what He pleases, and prosper
+in that whereto He sends it.  He will teach us and guide us in the
+right way.  He will put His word into the mouths of true teachers to
+show us our duty.  He will pour out His spirit upon us, to make us
+love our duty.  In one way and another, we know not how, we shall be
+taught what is good for England, good for each parish, good for each
+family.  And wealth, peace, and prosperity for rich and poor will be
+the fruit of obeying the word of God, and giving up our hearts to be
+led by His spirit.  As it was to be in Judaea, of old, if they
+repented, so will it be with us.  They should go forth with joy and
+do their work in peace.  The hills should break before them into
+singing, and all the trees of the field should clap their hands;
+instead of thorns should come up timber-trees:  instead of briers,
+garden-shrubs.  The whole cultivation of the country was to improve,
+and be to the Lord for a name, and a sign for ever that the true way
+to wealth and prosperity is the way of God, justice, mercy to each
+other, and obedience to the will of Him who made heaven and earth,
+trees and fruitful fields, rain and sunshine, and gives the blessings
+of them freely to His children of mankind, in proportion as they look
+up to Him as a loving Father, and return to him day by day, with
+childlike repentance, and full desire to amend their lives according
+to His holy word.
+
+
+
+XXIII--THE LOVE OF CHRIST
+
+
+
+For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that
+if one died for all, then were all dead.  And that He died for all,
+that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but
+unto Him which died for them, and rose again.--2 COR. v. 14, 15.
+
+What is the use of sermons?--what is the use of books?  Here are
+hundreds and thousands of people hearing weekly and daily what is
+right, and how many DO what is right?--much less LOVE what is right?
+What can be the reason of this, that men should know the better and
+choose the worse?  What motive can one find out?--what reason or
+argument can one put before people, to make them do their duty?  How
+can one stir them up to conquer themselves; to conquer their own love
+of pleasure, laziness, cowardice, conceit, above all their own
+selfishness, and do simply what is right, morning, noon, and night?
+That is a question worth asking and considering, for there ought to
+be some use in sermons and in books; and there ought to be some use
+in every one of us too.  Woe to the man who is of no use!  The Lord
+have mercy on his soul; for he needs it!  It is, indeed, worth his
+while to take any trouble which will teach him a motive for being
+useful; in plain words, stir him up to do his duty, to do his rights;
+for a man's rights are not, as the world thinks, what is right others
+should do to him, but what is right he should do to others.  Our duty
+is our right, the only thing which is right for us.  What motive will
+constrain us, that is, bind us, and force us to do that?
+
+Will self-interest?  Will a man do right because you tell him it is
+his interest, it will pay him to do it?  Look round you and see.--The
+drunkard knows that drinking will ruin him, and yet he gets drunk.
+The spendthrift knows that extravagance will ruin him, and yet he
+throws away his money still.  The idler knows that he is wasting his
+only chance for all eternity, and yet he puts the thought out of his
+head, and goes on idling.  The cheat knows that he is in danger of
+being almost certainly found out sooner or later; he knows too that
+he is burdening his own conscience with the curse of inward shame and
+self-contempt; and yet he goes on cheating.  The hard master knows,
+or ought to know (for there is quite enough to prove it to him) that
+it would pay him better in the long run to be more merciful, and less
+covetous; that by grinding those whom he employs down to the last
+farthing, he degrades them till they become burdens on him and curses
+to him; that what he gains by high prices, he will lose in the long
+run by bad debts; that what he saves in low wages, he will pay in
+extra poor-rates; and that even if he does make money out of the
+flesh and bones of those beneath him, that money ill gotten is sure
+to be ill spent, that there is a curse on it, that it brings a curse
+in the gnawing of a man's own conscience, and a curse too in the way
+it flows away from his family as fast as it flowed to them.  "He that
+by usury and unjust gain increases his wealth, shall gather for him
+that will pity the poor."  So said Solomon of old.  And men who
+worship Mammon find it come true daily, and see that, taking all
+things together, a man's life does not consist in the abundance of
+the things which he possesses, and that those who make such haste to
+be rich, fall, as the apostle says, "into temptation and a snare, and
+pierce themselves through with many sorrows."  Such a man sees his
+neighbours making money, and making themselves more unhappy, anxious,
+discontented by it; he sees, in short, that it is not his interest to
+do nothing but make money and save money:  and yet in spite of that,
+he thinks of nothing else.  Self-interest cannot keep him from that
+sin.  I do not believe that self-interest ever kept any man from any
+SIN, though it may keep him from many an imprudence.  Self-interest
+may make many a man respectable, but whom did it ever make good?  You
+may as well make house-walls of paper, or take a rush for a walking-
+stick, as take self-interest to keep you upright, or even prudent.
+The first shake--and the rush bends, and the paper wall breaks, and a
+man's selfish prudence is blown to the winds.  Let pleasure tempt
+him, or ambition, or the lust of making money by speculation; let him
+take a spite against anyone; let him get into a passion; let his
+pride be hurt; and he will do the maddest things, which he knows to
+be entirely contrary to his own interest, just to gratify the fancy
+of the moment.  Those who call themselves philosophers, and fancy
+that men's self-interest, if they can only feel it strong enough,
+would make all men just and merciful to each other, know as little of
+human nature as they do of God or the devil.
+
+What WILL make a man to do his duty?  Will the hope of heaven?  That
+depends very much upon what you mean by heaven.  But what people
+commonly mean by going to heaven, is--not going to hell.  They
+believe that they must go to either one place or the other.  They
+would much sooner of course stay on earth for ever, because their
+treasure is here, and their heart too.  But that cannot be, and as
+they have no wish to go to hell, they take up with heaven instead, by
+way of making the best of a bad matter.
+
+I ask you solemnly, my friends, each one of you, which would you
+sooner do--stay here on earth, or go to heaven?  You need not answer
+ME.  I am afraid many of you would not dare answer me as you really
+felt, because you would be ashamed of not liking to go to heaven.
+But answer God.  Answer yourselves in the sight of God.  When you
+keep yourselves back from doing a wrong thing, because you know it is
+wrong, is it for love of heaven, or for mere fear of being punished
+in hell?  Some of you will answer boldly at once:  "For neither one
+nor the other; when we keep from wrong, it is because we hate and
+despise what is wrong:  when we do right it is because it is right
+and we ought to do it.  We can't explain it, but there is something
+in us which tells us we ought to do right."  Very good, my friends, I
+shall have a word to say to you presently; but in the meantime there
+are some others who have been saying to themselves:  "Well, I know we
+do right because we are afraid of being punished if we do not do it,
+but what of that? at all events we get the right thing done, and
+leave the wrong thing undone, and what more do you want?  Why torment
+us with disagreeable questions as to WHY we do it?"
+
+Now, my friends, to make the matter simpler, I will take you at your
+words, for the sake of argument.  Suppose you do avoid sin from the
+fear of hell, does that make what you do RIGHT?  Does that make YOU
+right?  Does that make your heart right?  It is a great blessing to a
+man's neighbours, certainly, if he is kept from doing wrong any how--
+by the fear of hell, or fear of jail, or fear of shame, or fear of
+ghosts if you like, or any other cowardly and foolish motive--a great
+blessing to a man's neighbours:  but no blessing, that I can see, to
+the man himself.  He is just the same; his heart is not changed; his
+heart is no more right in the sight of God, or in the sight of any
+man of common sense either, than it would be if he did the wrong
+thing, which he loves and dare not do.  You feel that yourselves
+about other people.  You will say "That man has a bad heart, for all
+his respectable outside.  He would be a rogue if he dared, and
+therefore he IS a rogue."  Just so, I say, my friends, take care lest
+God should say of you, "He would be a sinner if he dared, and
+therefore he is a sinner.
+
+How can the hope of heaven, or the fear of hell, make a man do right?
+The right thing, the true thing for a man, is to be loving, and do
+loving things; and can fear of hell do that, or hope of heaven
+either?  Can a man make himself affectionate to his children because
+he fancies he shall be punished if he is not so, and rewarded if he
+is so?  Will the hope of heaven send men out to feed the hungry, to
+clothe the naked, visit the sick, preach the gospel to the poor?--The
+Papists say it will.  I say it will not.  I believe that even in
+those who do these things from hope of heaven and fear of hell, there
+is some holier, nobler, more spiritual motive, than such everlasting
+selfishness, such perfect hypocrisy, as to do loving works for
+others, for the sake of one's own self-love.
+
+What feeling then is there left which will bind a man to do good, not
+once in a way, but always and habitually? to do good, not only to
+himself, but to all around him?  I know but of one, my friends, and
+that is Love.  There are many sides to love--admiration, reverence,
+gratitude, pity, affection--they are all different shapes of that one
+great spirit of love.  Surely all of you have felt its power more or
+less; how wonderfully it can conquer a man's whole heart, change his
+whole conduct.  For love of a woman; for pity to those in distress;
+for admiration for anyone who is nobler and wiser than himself; for
+gratitude to one who has done him kindness; for loyalty to one to
+whom he feels he owes a service--a man will dare to do things, and
+suffer things, which no self-interest or fear in the world could have
+brought him to.  Do you not know it yourselves?  Is it not fondness
+for your wives and children, that will make you slave and stint
+yourselves of pleasure more than any hope of gain could ever do?  But
+there is no one human being, my friends, whom we can meet among us
+now, for whom we can feel all these different sorts of love?  Surely
+not:  and yet there must be One Person somewhere for whom God intends
+us to feel them all at once; or else He would not have given all
+these powers to us, and made them all different branches of one great
+root of love.  There must be One Person somewhere, who can call out
+the whole love in us--all our gratitude; all our pity; all our
+admiration; all our loyalty; all our brotherly affection.  AND THERE
+IS ONE, my friends.  One who has done for us more than ever husband
+or father, wife or brother, can do to call out our gratitude.  One
+who has suffered for us more than the saddest wretch upon this earth
+can suffer, to call out our pity.  One who is nobler, purer, more
+lovely in character than all others who ever trod this earth, to call
+out our admiration.  One who is wiser, mightier than all rulers and
+philosophers, to call out all our reverence.  One who is tenderer,
+more gentle, more feeling-hearted, than the kindest woman who ever
+sat by a sick bed, to call out all our love.  Of whom can I be
+speaking?  Of whom but of Jesus; He who for us stooped out of the
+heaven of heavens; for us left His eternal glory in the bosom of the
+Father; for us took upon Him the form of a servant, and was born of a
+village maiden, and was called the son of a carpenter; for us
+wandered this earth for thirty years in sorrow and shame; for us gave
+His back to the scourge, and His face to shameful spitting; for us
+hung upon the cross and died the death of the felon and the slave.
+Oh! my friends, if that story will not call out our love, what will?
+If we cannot admire Christ, whom can we admire?  If we cannot be
+grateful to Christ, to whom can we be grateful?  If we cannot pity
+Christ, whom can we pity?  If we cannot feel bound in honour to live
+for Christ, to work for Christ, to delight in talking of Christ,
+thinking of Christ, to glory in doing Christ's commandments to the
+very smallest point, to feel no sacrifice too great, no trouble too
+petty, if we can please Christ by it and help forward Christ's
+kingdom upon earth--if we cannot feel bound in honour to do that for
+Christ, what honour is there in us?  Again, I say, if we cannot love
+Christ, whom can we love?  If the remembrance of what He has worked
+for us will not stir us up to work for Him, what will stir us up?
+
+I say it again, we are bound by every tie, by every feeling that can
+bind man to man, to devote ourselves to Christ, the Man of all men.
+I say this is no dream or fancy, it is an actual fact which thousands
+and hundreds of thousands on this earth have felt.  Nothing but love
+to Christ, nothing but loving Him because He first loved us, can
+constrain and force a man as with a mighty feeling which he cannot
+resist, to labour day and night for Christ's sake, and therefore for
+the sake of God the Father of Christ.  What else do you suppose it
+was which could have stirred up the apostles--above all, that wise,
+learned, high-born, prosperous man, St. Paul, to leave house and
+home, and wander in daily danger of his life?  What does St. Paul say
+himself?  "The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge,
+and if one died for all then were all dead, and that He died for all,
+that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but
+unto Him who died for them."  And what else could have kept St. Paul
+through all that labour and sorrow of his own choosing, of which he
+speaks in the chapter before?--"We are troubled on every side, yet
+not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but
+not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing about in
+the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus
+might be made manifest in our body; for we which live are alway
+delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus
+might be made manifest in our body."
+
+We may say that St. Paul was an exceedingly benevolent man, and THAT
+made him do it; or that he had found out certain new truths and
+opinions which delighted him very much, and therefore he did it.  But
+St. Paul gives no such account of himself:  and we have no right to
+take anyone's account but his own.  He knew his own heart best.  He
+does not say that he came to preach a scheme of redemption, or
+opinions about Christ.  He says he came to preach nothing but Christ
+Himself--Christ crucified--to tell people about the Lord he loved,
+about the Lord who loved him, certain that when they had heard the
+plain story of Him, their hearts, if they were simple, and true, and
+loving, would leap up in answer to his words, and find out, as by
+instinct, what Christ had done for them, what they were to do for
+Christ.  Ay, I believe, my friends--indeed I am certain--from my own
+reading, that in every age and country, just in proportion as men
+have loved Christ personally as a man would love another man, just in
+that proportion have they loved their neighbours, worked for their
+neighbours, sacrificed their time, their pleasure, their money, to do
+good to all, for the sake of Him who commanded:  "If ye love ME, keep
+my commandments; and my commandment is this, that ye should love one
+another as I have loved you."  That is the only sure motive.  All
+other motives for doing good or being good, will fail in one case or
+another case, because they do not take possession of a man's whole
+heart, but only of some part of his heart.  Love--love to Christ, can
+alone sweep away a man's whole heart and soul with it, and renew it,
+and transfigure it, and make it strong instead of weak, pure instead
+of foul, gentle instead of fierce, brave instead of being vain and
+cowardly, and fearing what everyone will say of him.  Only love for
+Christ, who loved all men unto the death, will make us love all men
+too:  not only one here and there who may agree with us or help us;
+but those who hate us, those who misunderstand us, those who thwart
+us, ay, even those who disobey and slight not only us, but Jesus
+Christ Himself.  THAT is the hardest lesson of all to learn; but
+thousands have learnt it; everyone ought to learn it.  In proportion
+as a man loves Christ, he will learn to love those who do not love
+Christ.  For Christ loves them whether they know it or not; Christ
+died for them whether they believe it or not; and we must love them
+because our Saviour loves them.
+
+Oh! my friends, why do so few love Christ?  Why do so few live as
+those who are not their own, but bought with the price of His
+precious blood and bound to devote themselves, body and soul, to His
+cause?  Why do so many struggle against their sins, while yet they
+cannot break off those sins, but go struggling and sinning on, hating
+their sins and yet unable to break through their sins, like birds
+beating themselves to death against the wires of their cage?  Why?
+Because they do not know Christ.  And how can they know Him, unless
+they read their Bibles with simple, childlike hearts, determined to
+let the Bible tell its own story:  believing that those who walked
+with Christ on earth, must know best what He was like?  Why?  Because
+they will not ask Christ to come and show Himself to them, and make
+them see Him, and love Him, and admire Him, whether they will or not.
+Oh! remember, if Christ be the Son of God, the Lord of heaven and
+earth, we cannot go to Him, poor, weak, ignorant creatures as we are.
+We cannot ascend up into heaven to bring Christ down.  He must come
+down out of His own great love and condescension, and dwell in our
+hearts as He has promised to do, if we do but love Him.  He must come
+down and show Himself to us.  Oh! read your Bibles--read the story of
+Christ, and if that does not stir up in you some love for Him, you
+must have hearts of stone, not flesh and blood.  And then go to Him;
+pray to Him, whether you believe in Him altogether or not, upon the
+mere chance of His being able to hear you and help you.  You would
+not throw away a chance on earth; will you throw away such a chance
+in heaven as having the Son of God to help you?  Oh, cry to Him; say
+out of the depths of your heart:  "Thou most blessed and glorious
+Being who ever walked this earth, who hast gone blameless through all
+sorrow and temptation that man can feel; if Thou dost love anyone, if
+Thou canst hear anyone, hear me!  If thou canst not help me, no one
+can.  I have a hundred puzzling questions which I cannot answer for
+myself, a hundred temptations which I cannot conquer for myself, a
+hundred bad habits which I cannot shake off of myself; and they tell
+me that Thou canst teach me, Thou canst guide me, Thou canst
+strengthen me, Thou canst take out of my heart this shame and gnawing
+of an evil conscience.  If Thou be the Son of God, make me clean!  If
+it be true that Thou lovest all men, show Thy love to me!  If it be
+true that Thou canst teach all men, teach me!  If it be true that
+Thou canst help all men, help my unbelief, for if Thou dost not,
+there is no help for me in heaven or earth!"  You, who are sinful,
+distracted, puzzled, broken-hearted, cry to Christ in that way, if
+you have no better way, and see if He does not hear you.  He is not
+one to break the bruised reed, or quench the smoking flax.  He will
+hear you, for He has heard all who have ever called on Him.  Cry to
+Him from the bottom of your hearts.  Tell Him that you do NOT love
+Him, and that yet you LONG to love Him.  And see if you do not find
+it true that those who come to Christ, He will in no wise cast out.
+He may not seem to answer you the first time, or the tenth time, or
+for years; for Christ has His own deep, loving, wise ways of teaching
+each man, and for each man a different way.  But try to learn all you
+can of Him.  Try to know Him.  Pray to know, and understand Him, and
+love Him.  And sooner or later you will find His words come true, "If
+a man love me, I and my Father will come to him, and take up our
+abode with him."  And then you will feel arise in you a hungering and
+a thirsting after righteousness, a spirit of love, and a desire of
+doing good, which will carry you up and on, above all that man can
+say or do against you--above all the laziness, and wilfulness, and
+selfishness, and cowardice which dwells in the heart of everyone.
+You will be able to trample it all under foot for the sake of being
+good and doing good, in the strength of that one glorious thought,
+"Christ lived and died for me, and, so help me God, I will live and
+die for Christ."
+
+
+
+XXIV--DAVID'S VICTORY
+
+
+
+Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield:
+but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of armies, the God of
+Israel, whom thou hast defied.--1 SAMUEL xvii. 45.
+
+We have been reading to-day the story of David's victory over the
+Philistine giant, Goliath.  Now I think the whole history of David
+may teach us more about the meaning of the Old Testament, and how it
+applies to us, than the history of any other single character.  David
+was the great hero of the Jews; the greatest, in spite of great sins
+and follies, that has ever been among them; in every point the king
+after God's own heart.  Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself did not disdain
+to be called especially the Son of David.  David was the author, too,
+of those wonderful psalms which are now in the mouths and the hearts
+of Christian people all over the world; and will last, as I believe,
+till the world's end, giving out fresh depths of meaning and
+spiritual experience.
+
+But to understand David's history, we must go back a little through
+the lessons which have been read in church the last few Sundays.  We
+find in the eighth and in the twelfth chapters of this same book of
+Samuel, that the Jews asked Samuel for a king--for a king like the
+nations round them.  Samuel consulted God, and by God's command chose
+Saul to be their king; at the same time warning them that in asking
+for a king they had committed a great and fearful sin, for "the Lord
+their God was their king."  And the Lord said unto Samuel, that in
+asking for a king they had rejected God from reigning over them.  Now
+what was this sin which the Jews committed? for the mere having a
+king cannot be wrong in itself; else God would not have anointed Saul
+and David kings, and blessed David and Solomon; much less would He
+have allowed the greater number of Christian nations to remain
+governed by kings unto this day, if a king had been a wrong thing in
+itself.  I think if we look carefully at the words of the story we
+shall see what this great sin of the Jews was.  In the first place,
+they asked Samuel to give them a king--not God.  This was a sin, I
+think; but it was only the fruit of a deeper sin--a wrong way of
+looking at the whole question of kings and government.  And that
+deeper sin was this:  they were a free people, and they wanted to
+become slaves.  God had made them a free people; He had brought them
+up out of the land of Egypt, out of slavery to Pharaoh.  He had given
+them a free constitution.  He had given them laws to secure safety,
+and liberty, and equal justice to rich and poor, for themselves,
+their property, their children; to defend them from oppression, and
+over-taxation, and all the miseries of misgovernment.  And now they
+were going to trample under foot God's inestimable gift of liberty.
+They wanted a king like the nations round them, they said.  They did
+not see that it was just their glory NOT to be like the nations round
+them in that.  We who live in a free country do not see the vast and
+inestimable difference between the Jews and the other nations.  The
+Jews were then, perhaps, so far as I can make out, the only free
+people on the face of the earth.  The nations round them were like
+the nations in the East, now governed by tyrants, without law or
+parliament, at the mercy of the will, the fancy, the lust, the
+ambition, and the cruelty of their despotic kings.  In fact, they
+were as the Eastern people now are--slaves governed by tyrants.
+Samuel warned the Jews that it would be just the same with them; that
+neither their property, their families, nor their liberty would be
+safe under the despots for whom they wished.  And yet, in spite of
+that warning, they would have a king.  And why?  Because they did not
+like the trouble of being free.  They did not like the responsibility
+and the labour of taking care of themselves, and asking counsel of
+God as to how they were to govern themselves.  So they were ready to
+sell themselves to a tyrant, that he might fight for them, and judge
+for them, and take care of them, while they just ate and drank, and
+made money, and lived like slaves, careless of what happened to them
+or their country, provided they could get food, and clothes, and
+money enough.  And as long as they got that, if you will remark, they
+were utterly careless as to what sort of king they had.  They said
+not one word to Samuel about how much power their king was to have.
+They made not the slightest inquiry as to whether Saul was wise or
+foolish, good or bad.  They did not ask God's counsel, or trouble
+themselves about God; so they proved themselves unworthy of being
+free.  They turned, like a dog to his vomit, and the sow to her
+wallowing in the mire, cowardly back again into slavery; and God gave
+them what they asked for.  He gave them the sort of king they wanted;
+and bitterly they found out their mistake during several hundred
+years of continually increasing slavery and misery.
+
+There is a deep lesson for us, my friends, in all this.  And that is,
+that God's gifts are not fit for us, unless we are more or less fit
+for them.  That to him that makes use of what he has, more shall be
+given; but from him who does not, will be taken away even what he
+has.  And so even the inestimable gift of freedom is no use unless
+men have free hearts in them.  God sets a man free from his sins by
+faith in Jesus Christ; but unless that man uses His grace, unless he
+desires to be free inwardly as well as outwardly--to be free not only
+from the punishment of his sins, but from the sins themselves; unless
+he is willing to accept God's offer of freedom, and go boldly to the
+throne of grace, and there plead his cause with his heavenly Father
+face to face, without looking to any priest, or saint, or other third
+person to plead for him; if, in short, a man has not a free spirit in
+him, the grace of God will become of no effect in him, and he will
+receive the spirit of bondage (of slavery, that is), again to fear.
+Perhaps he will fall back more or less into popery and half-popish
+superstitions; perhaps, as we see daily round us, he will fall back
+again into antinomianism, into the slavery of those very sins from
+which God once delivered him.  And just the same is it with a nation.
+When God has given a nation freedom, then, unless there be a free
+heart in the people and true independence, which is dependence on God
+and not on man; unless there be a spirit of justice, mercy, truth,
+trust of God in them, their freedom will be of no effect; they will
+only fall back into slavery, to be oppressed by fresh tyrants.
+
+So it was with the great Spanish colonies in South America a few
+years ago.  God gave them freedom from the tyranny of Spain; but what
+advantage was it to them?  Because there was no righteousness in
+them; because they were a cowardly, profligate, false, and cruel
+people, therefore they only became the slaves of their own lusts;
+they turned God's great grace of freedom into licentiousness, and
+have been ever since doing nothing but cutting each other's throats;
+every man's hand against his own brother; the slaves of tyrants far
+more cruel than those from whom they had escaped.
+
+Look at the French people, too.  Three times in the last sixty years
+has God delivered them from evil rulers, and given them a chance of
+freedom; and three times have they fallen back into fresh slavery.
+And why?  Because they will not be righteous; because they will be
+proud, boastful, lustful, godless, cruel, making a lie and loving it.
+God help them!  We are not here to judge them, but to take warning
+ourselves.  Now there is no use in boasting of our English freedom,
+unless we have free and righteous hearts in us; for it is not
+constitutions, and parliaments, and charters which make a nation
+free; they are only the shell, the outside of freedom.  True freedom
+is of the heart and spirit, and comes down from above, from the
+Spirit of God; for where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty, and
+there only.  Oh, every one of you! high and low, rich and poor, pray
+and struggle to get your own hearts free; free from the sins which
+beset us Englishmen in these days; free from pride, prejudice, and
+envy; free from selfishness and covetousness; free from unchastity
+and drunkenness; free from the conceit that England is safe, while
+all the rest of the world is shaking.  Be sure that the spirit of
+freedom, like every other good and perfect gift, is from above, and
+comes down from God, the Father of lights; and that to keep that
+spirit with us, we must keep ourselves worthy of it, and not expect
+to remain free if we indulge ourselves in mean and slavish sins.
+
+So the Jews got the king they wanted--a king to look at and be proud
+of.  Saul was, we read, a head taller than all the rest of the
+people, and very handsome to look at.  And he was brave enough, too,
+in mere fighting, when he was awakened and stirred up to act now and
+then; but there was no wisdom in him; no real trust in God in him.
+He took God for an idol, like the heathens' false gods, which had to
+be pleased and kept in good humour by the smell of burnt sacrifices;
+and not for a living, righteous Person, who had to be obeyed.  We
+read of Saul's misconduct in these respects, in the thirteenth and
+fifteenth chapters of the First Book of Samuel.  That was only the
+beginning of his wickedness.  The worst points in his character, as I
+shall show in my next sermon, came out afterwards.  But still, his
+disobedience was enough to make God cast him off, and leave him to go
+his own way to ruin.
+
+But God was not going to cast off His people whom He loved.  He deals
+not with mankind after their sins, neither rewards them according to
+their iniquities; and so he chose out for them a king after His own
+heart--a true king of God's making, not a mere sham one of man's
+making.  You may think it strange why God should have given them a
+second king; why, as soon as Saul died, He did not let them return
+back to their old freedom.  But that is not God's way.  He brings
+good out of evil in His great mercy.  But it is always by strange
+winding paths.  His ways are not as our ways.  First, God gives man
+what is perfectly proper for him at that time; sets man in his right
+place; and then when man falls from that, God brings him, not back to
+the place from which he fell, but on forward into something far
+higher and better than what he fell from.  He put Adam into Paradise.
+Adam fell from it, and God made use of the fall to bring him into a
+state far better than Paradise--into the kingdom of God--into
+everlasting life--into the likeness of Christ, the new Adam, who is a
+quickening, life-giving spirit, while the old Adam was, at best, only
+a living soul.
+
+So with the church of Christian men.  After the apostles' time, and
+even during the apostles' time, as we read from the Epistle to the
+Galatians, they fell away, step by step, from the liberty of the
+gospel, till they sunk entirely into popish superstition.  And yet
+God brought good out of that evil.  He made that very popery a means
+of bringing them back at the Reformation into clearer light than any
+of the first Christians ever had had.  He is going on step by step
+still, bringing Christians into a clearer knowledge of the gospel
+than even the Reformers had.
+
+And so with the Jews.  They fell from their liberty and chose a king.
+And yet God made use of those kings of theirs, of David, of Solomon,
+of Josiah, and Hezekiah, to teach them more and more about Himself
+and His law, and to teach all nations, by their example, what a
+nation should be, and how He deals with one.
+
+But now let us see what this true king, David, was like, whom God
+chose, that He might raise, by his means, the Jews higher than they
+ever yet had been, even in their days of freedom.  Now remark, in the
+first place, that David was not the son of any very great man.  His
+father seems to have been only a yeoman.  He was not bred up in
+courts.  We find that when Samuel was sent to anoint David king, he
+was out keeping his father's sheep in the field.  And though, no
+doubt, he had shown signs of being a very remarkable youth from the
+first, yet his father thought so little of him, that he was going to
+pass him over, and caused all his seven elder sons to pass before
+Samuel for his choice first, though there seems to have been nothing
+particular in them, except that some of them were fine men and brave
+soldiers.  So David seems to have been overlooked, and thought but
+little of in his youth--and a very good thing for him.  It is a good
+thing for a young man to bear the yoke in his youth, that he may be
+kept humble and low; that he may learn to trust in God, and not in
+his own wit.  And even when Samuel anointed David, he anointed him
+privately.  His brothers did not know what a great honour was in
+store for him; for we find, in the lesson which we have just read,
+that when David came down to the camp, his elder brother spoke
+contemptuously to him, and treated him as a child.  "I know thy
+pride," he said, "and the naughtiness of thy heart.  Thou art come
+down to see the battle."  While David answers humbly enough:  "What
+have I done? is there not a cause?" feeling that there was more in
+him than his brother gave him credit for; though he dare not tell his
+brother, hardly, perhaps, dare believe himself, what great things God
+had prepared for him.  So it is yet--a prophet has no honour in his
+own country.  How many a noble-hearted man there is, who is looked
+down upon by those round him!  How many a one is despised for a
+dreamer, or for a Methodist, by shallow worldly people, who in God's
+sight is of very great price!  But God sees not as man sees.  He
+makes use of the weak people of this world to confound the strong.
+He sends about His errands not many noble, not many mighty; but the
+poor man, rich in faith, like David.  He puts down the mighty from
+their seat, and exalts the humble and meek.  He takes the beggar from
+the dunghill, that He may set him among the princes of His people.
+So He has been doing in all ages.  So He will do even now, in some
+measure, with everyone like David, let him be as low as he will in
+the opinion of this foolish world, who yet puts his trust utterly in
+God, and goes about all his work, as David did, in the name of the
+Lord of hosts.  Oh! if a poor man feels that God has given him wit
+and wisdom--feels in him the desire to rise and better himself in
+life, let him be sure that the only way to rise is David's plan--to
+keep humble and quiet till God shall lift him up, trusting in God's
+righteousness and love to raise him, and deliver him, and put him in
+that station, be it high or low, in which he will be best able to do
+God's work, or serve God's glory.
+
+And now for the chapter from which the text is taken, which relates
+to us David's first great public triumph--his victory over Goliath
+the giant.  I will not repeat it to you, because everyone here who
+has ears to hear or a heart to feel ought to have been struck with
+every word in that glorious story.  All I will try to do is, to show
+you how the working of God's Spirit comes out in David in every
+action of his on that glorious day.  We saw just now David's
+humbleness and gentleness, the fruits of God's Spirit in him, in his
+answer to his proud and harsh brother.  Look next at David's spirit
+of trust in God, which, indeed, is the key to his whole life; that is
+the reason why he was the man after God's own heart--not for any
+virtues of his own, but for his unshaken continual faith in God.
+David saw in an instant why the Israelites were so afraid of the
+giant; because they had no faith in God.  They forgot that they were
+the armies of the living God.  David did not:  "Who is this
+uncircumcised, that he shall defy the armies of the living God?"  And
+therefore, when Saul tried to dissuade him from attacking the
+Philistine, his answer is still the same--full of faith in God.  He
+knew well enough what a fearful undertaking it was to fight with this
+giant, nearly ten feet high, armed from head to foot with mail, which
+perhaps no sword or spear which he could use could pierce.  It was no
+wonder, humanly speaking, that all the Jews fled from him--that his
+being there stopped the whole battle.  In these days, fifty such men
+would make no difference in a battle; bullets and cannon-shot would
+mow down them like other men:  but in those old times, before
+firearms were invented, when all battles were hand-to-hand fights,
+and depended so much on each man's strength and courage, that one
+champion would often decide the victory for a whole army, the amount
+of courage which was required in David is past our understanding; at
+least we may say, David would not have had it but for his trust in
+God, but for his feeling that he was on God's side, and Goliath on
+the devil's side, unjustly invading his country in self-conceit, and
+cruelty, and lawlessness.  Therefore he tells Saul of his victory
+over the lion and the bear.  You see again, here, the Spirit of God
+showing in his MODESTY.  He does not boast or talk of his strength
+and courage in killing the lion and the bear; for he knew that that
+strength and courage came from God, not from himself; therefore he
+says that the Lord DELIVERED HIM from them.  He knew that he had been
+only doing his duty in facing them when they attacked his father's
+sheep, and that it was God's mercy which had protected him in doing
+his duty.  He felt now, that if no one else would face this brutal
+giant, it was HIS duty, poor, simple, weak youth as he was, and
+therefore he trusted in God to bring him safe through this danger
+also.  But look again how the Spirit of God shows in his prudence.
+He would not use Saul's armour, good as it might be, because he was
+not accustomed to it.  He would use his own experience, and fight
+with the weapons to which he had been accustomed--a sling and stone.
+You see he was none of those presumptuous and fanatical dreamers who
+tempt God by fancying that He is to go out of His way to work
+miracles for them.  He used all the proper and prudent means to kill
+the giant, and trusted to God to bless them.  If he had been
+presumptuous, he might have taken the first stone that came to hand,
+or taken only one, or taken none at all, and expected the giant to
+fall down dead by a miracle.  But no; he CHOOSES FIVE SMOOTH stones
+out of the brook.  He tried to get the best that he could, and have
+more ready if his first shot failed.  He showed no distrust of God in
+that; for he trusted in God to keep him cool, and steady, and
+courageous in the fight, and that, he knew, God alone could do.  The
+only place, perhaps, where he could strike Goliath to hurt him was on
+the face, because every other part of him was covered in metal
+armour.  And he knew that, in such danger as he was, God's Spirit
+only could keep his eye clear and his hand steady for such a
+desperate chance as hitting that one place.
+
+So he went; and as he went his courage rose higher and higher; for
+unto him that hath shall more be given; and so he began to boast too--
+but not of himself, like the giant.  He boasted of the living God,
+who was with him.  He ran boldly up to the Philistine, and at the
+first throw, struck on the forehead, and felled him dead.
+
+So it is; many a time the very blessing which we expect to get only
+with great difficulty, God gives us at our first trial, to show that
+He is the Giver, to cheer up our poor doubting hearts, and show us
+that He is able, and willing too, to give exceeding abundantly more
+than we can ask or think.
+
+So David triumphed:  and yet that triumph was only the beginning of
+his troubles.  Sad and weary years had he to struggle on before he
+gained the kingdom which God had promised him.  So it is often with
+God's elect.  He gives them blessings at first, to show them that He
+is really with them; and then He lets them be evil-entreated by
+tyrants, and suffer persecution, and wander out of the way in the
+wilderness, that they may be made perfect by suffering, and purified,
+as gold is in the refiner's fire, from all selfishness, conceit,
+ambition, cowardliness, till they learn to trust God utterly, to know
+their own weakness, and His strength, and to work only for Him,
+careless what becomes of their own poor worthless selves, provided
+they can help His kingdom to come, and get His will to be done on
+earth as it is in heaven.
+
+And now, my friends, surely there is a lesson in all this for you.
+Do you wish to rise like David?  Of course not one in ten thousand
+can rise as high, but we may all rise somewhat, if not in rank, yet
+still, what is far better, in spirit, in wisdom, in usefulness, in
+manfulness.  Do you wish to rise so? then follow David's example.  Be
+truly brave, be truly modest, and in order to be truly brave and
+truly modest, that is, be truly manly, be truly godly.  Trust in God;
+trust in God; that is the key to all greatness.  Courage, modesty,
+truth, honesty, and gentleness; all things, which are noble, lovely,
+and of good report; all things, in short, which will make you men
+after God's own heart, are all only the different fruits of that one
+blessed life-giving root--FAITH IN GOD.
+
+
+
+XXV--DAVID'S EDUCATION
+
+
+
+Made perfect through sufferings.--HEBREWS ii. 10.
+
+That is my text; and a very fit one for another sermon about David,
+the king after God's own heart.  And a very fit one too, for any
+sermon preached to people living in this world now or at any time.
+"A melancholy text," you will say.  But what if it be melancholy?
+That is not the fault of me, the preacher.  The preacher did not make
+suffering, did not make disappointment, doubt, ignorance, mistakes,
+oppression, poverty, sickness.  There they are, whether we like it or
+not.  You have only to go on to the common here, or any other common
+or town in England, to see too much of them--enough to break one's
+heart if--, but I will not hurry on too fast in what I have to say.
+What I want to make you recollect is, that misery is here round us,
+IN us.  A great deal which we bring on ourselves; and a great deal
+more misery which we do not, as far as we can see, bring on
+ourselves; but which comes, nevertheless, and lets us know plainly
+enough that it is close to us.  Every man and woman of us have their
+sorrows.  There is no use shutting our eyes just when we ourselves
+happen to feel tolerably easy, and saying, as too many do, "I don't
+see so very much sorrow; I am happy enough!"  Are you, friend, happy
+enough?  So much the worse for you, perhaps.  But at all events your
+neighbours are not happy enough; most of them are only too miserable.
+It is a sad world.  A sad world, and full of tears.  It is.  And you
+must not be angry with the preacher for reminding you of what is.
+
+True; you would have a right to quarrel with the preacher or anyone
+else who made you sorrowful with the thoughts of the sorrow round
+you, and then gave you no explanation of it--told you of no use, no
+blessing in it, no deliverance from it.  That would be enough to
+break any man's heart, if all the preacher could say was:  "This
+wretchedness, and sickness, and death, must go on as long as the
+world lasts, and yet it does no good, for God or man."  That thought
+would drive any feeling man to despair, tempt him to lie down and
+die, tempt him to fancy that God was not God at all, not the God
+whose name is Love, not the God who is our Father, but only a cruel
+taskmaster, and Lord of a miserable hell on earth, where men and
+women, and worst of all, little children, were tortured daily by tens
+of thousands without reason, or use, or hope of deliverance, except
+in a future world, where not one in ten of them will be saved and
+happy.  That is many people's notion of the world--religious people's
+even.  How they can believe, in the face of such notions, "that God
+is love;" how they can help going mad with pity, if that is all the
+hope they have for poor human beings, is more than I can tell.  Not
+that I judge them--to their own master they stand or fall:  but this
+I do say, that if the preacher has no better hope to give you about
+this poor earth, then I cannot tell what right he has to call himself
+a preacher of the gospel--that is, a preacher of good news; then I do
+not know what Jesus Christ's dying to take away the sins of the world
+means; then I do not know what the kingdom of God means; then I do
+not know why the Lord taught us to pray, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will
+be done on earth, as it is in heaven," if the only way in which that
+can be brought about is by His sending ninety-nine hundredths of
+mankind to endless torture, over and above all the lesser misery
+which they have suffered in this life.  What will be the end of the
+greater part of mankind we do not know; we were not intended to know.
+God is love, and God is justice, and His justice is utterly loving,
+as well as His love utterly just; so we may very safely leave the
+world in the hands of Him who made the world, and be sure that the
+Judge of all the earth will do right, and that what is right is
+certain never to be cruel, but rather merciful.  But to every one of
+you who are here now, a preacher has a right, ay, and a bounden duty,
+to say much more than that.  He is bound to tell you good news,
+because God has called you into His church, and sent you here this
+day, to hear good news.  He has a right to tell you, as I tell you
+now, that, strange as it may seem, whatsoever sufferings you endure
+are sent to make you perfect, even as your Father in heaven is
+perfect; even as the blessed Lord, whom may you all love, and trust,
+and worship, for ever and ever, was made perfect by sufferings, even
+though He was the sinless Son of God.  Consider that.  "It behoved
+Him," says St. Paul, "the Captain of our salvation, to be made
+perfect through sufferings."  And why?  "Because," answers St. Paul,
+"it was proper for Him to be made in all things like His brothers"--
+like us, the children of God--"that He might be a faithful and
+merciful high priest;" for, just "because He has suffered being
+tempted, He is able to succour us who are tempted."  A strange text,
+but one which, I think, this very history of David's troubles will
+help us to understand.  For it was by suffering, long and bitter,
+that God trained up David to be a true king, a king over the Jews,
+"after God's own heart."
+
+You all know, I hope, something at least of David's psalms.  Many of
+them, seven of them at least, were written during David's wanderings
+in the mountains, when Saul was persecuting him to kill him, day
+after day, month after month, as you may read in the First Book of
+Samuel, from chapters xix. to xxviii.  Bitter enough these troubles
+of David would have been to any man, but what must have made them
+especially bitter and confusing to him was, that they all arose out
+of his righteousness.  Because he had conquered the giant, Saul
+envied him--broke his promise of giving David his daughter Merab--put
+his life into extreme danger from the Philistines, before he would
+give him his second daughter Michal; the more he saw that the Lord
+was with David, and that the young man won respect and admiration by
+behaving himself wisely, the more afraid of him Saul was; again and
+again he tried to kill him; as David was sitting harmless in Saul's
+house, soothing the poor madman by the music of his harp, Saul tries
+to stab him unawares; and not content with that proceeds deliberately
+to hunt him down, from town to town, and wilderness to wilderness;
+sends soldiers after him to murder him; at last goes out after him
+himself with his guards.  Was not all this enough to try David's
+faith?  Hardly any man, I suppose, since the world was made, had
+found righteousness pay him less; no man was ever more tempted to
+turn round and do evil, since doing good only brought him deeper and
+deeper into the mire.  But no, we know that he did not lose his trust
+in God; for we have seven psalms, at least, which he wrote during
+these very wanderings of his; the fifty-second, when Doeg had
+betrayed him to Saul; the fifty-fourth, when Ziphim betrayed him; the
+fifty-sixth, when the Philistines took him in Gath; the fifty-
+seventh, "when he fled from Saul in the cave;" the fifty-ninth, "when
+they watched the house to kill him;" the sixty-third, "when he was in
+the wilderness of Judah;" the thirty-fourth, "when he was driven away
+by Abimelech;" and several more which appear to have been written
+about the same time.
+
+Now, what strikes us first, or ought to strike us, in these psalms,
+is David's utter faith in God.  I do not mean to say that David had
+not his sad days, when he gave himself up for lost, and when God
+seemed to have forsaken him, and forgotten his promise.  He was a man
+of like passions with ourselves; and therefore he was, as we should
+have been, terrified and faint-hearted at times.  But exactly what
+God was teaching and training him to be, was not to be fainthearted--
+not to be terrified.  He began in his youth by trusting God.  That
+made him the man after God's own heart, just as it was the want of
+trust in God which made Saul not the man after God's own heart, and
+lost him his kingdom.  In all those wanderings and dangers of David's
+in the wilderness, God was training, and educating, and strengthening
+David's faith according to His great law:  To whomsoever hath shall
+be given, and he shall have more abundantly; but from him that hath
+not, shall be taken away even that which he seems to have.  And the
+first great fruit of David's firm trust in God was his patience.
+
+He learned to wait God's time, and take God's way, and be sure that
+the same God who had promised that he should be king, would make him
+king when he saw fit.  He knew, as he says himself, that the Strength
+of Israel could not lie or repent.  He had sworn that He would not
+fail David.  And he learned that God had sworn by His holiness.  He
+was a holy, just, righteous God; and David and David's country now
+were safe in His hands.  It was his firm trust in God which gave him
+strength of mind to use no unfair means to right himself.  Twice
+Saul, his enemy, was in his power.  What a temptation to him to kill
+Saul, rid himself of his tormentor, and perhaps get the kingdom at
+once!  But no.  He felt:  "This Saul is a wicked, devil-tormented
+murderer, a cruel tyrant and oppressor; but the same God who chose me
+to be king next, chose him to be king now.  He is the Lord's
+anointed.  God put him where he is, and leaves him there for some
+good purpose; and when God has done with him, God will take him away,
+and free this poor oppressed people; and in the meantime, I, as a
+private man, have no right to touch him.  I must not do evil that
+good may come.  If I am to be a true king, a true man at all
+hereafter, I must keep true now; if I am to be a righteous lawgiver
+hereafter, I must respect and obey law myself now.  The Lord be judge
+between me and Saul; for He is Judge, and He will right me better
+than I can ever right myself."  And thus did trust in God bring out
+in David that true respect for law, without which a king, let him be
+as kind-hearted as he will, is but too likely to become at last a
+tyrant and an oppressor.
+
+But another thing which strikes any thinking man in David's psalms,
+is his strong feeling for the poor, and the afflicted, and the
+oppressed.  That is what makes the Psalms, above all, the poor man's
+book, the afflicted man's book.  But how did he get that fellow-
+feeling for the fallen?  By having fallen himself, and tasted
+affliction and oppression.  That was how he was educated to be a true
+king.  That was how he became a picture and pattern--a "type," as
+some call it, of Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows.  That is why so
+many of David's psalms apply so well to the Lord; why the Lord
+fulfilled those psalms when He was on earth.  David was truly a man
+of sorrows; for he had not only the burden of his own sorrows to
+bear, but that of many others.  His parents had to escape, and to be
+placed in safety at the court of a heathen prince.  His friend
+Abimelech the priest, because he gave David bread when he was
+starving, and Goliath's sword--which, after all, was David's own--was
+murdered by Saul's hired ruffians, at Saul's command, and with him
+his whole family, and all the priests of the town, with their wives
+and children, even to the baby at the breast.  And when David was in
+the mountains, everyone who was distressed, and in debt, and
+discontented, gathered themselves to him, and he became their
+captain; so that he had on him all the responsibility, care, and
+anxiety of managing all those wild, starving men, many of them,
+perhaps, reckless and wicked men, ready every day to quarrel among
+themselves, or to break out in open riot and robbery against the
+people who had oppressed them; for--(and this, too, we may see from
+David's psalms, was not the smallest part of his anxiety)--the nation
+of the Jews seems to have been in a very wretched state in David's
+time.  The poor seem in general to have lost their land, and to have
+become all but slaves to rich nobles, who were grinding them down,
+not only by luxury and covetousness, but often by open robbery and
+bloodshed.  The sight of the misrule and misery, as well as of the
+bloody and ruinous border inroads which were kept up by the
+Philistines and other neighbouring tribes, seems for years to have
+been the uppermost, as well as the deepest thought in David's mind,
+if we may judge from those psalms of his, of which this is the key-
+note; and it was not likely to make him care and feel less about all
+that misery when he remembered (as we see from his psalms he
+remembered daily) that God had set him, the wandering outlaw, no less
+a task than to mend it all; to put down all that oppression, to raise
+up that degradation, to train all that cowardice into self-respect
+and valour, to knit into one united nation, bound together by fellow-
+feeling and common faith in God, that mob of fierce, and greedy, and
+(hardest task of all, as he himself felt) utterly deceitful men.  No
+wonder that his psalms begin often enough with sadness, even though
+they may end in hope and trust.  He had a work around him and before
+him which ought to have made his heart sad, which was a great part of
+his appointed education, and helped to make him perfect by
+sufferings.
+
+And so, upon the bare hill-side, in woods and caves of the earth, in
+cold and hunger, in weariness and dread of death, did David learn to
+be the poor man's king, the poor man's poet, the singer of those
+psalms which shall endure as long as the world endures, and be the
+comfort and the utterance of all sad hearts for evermore.  Agony it
+was, deep and bitter, and for the moment more hopeless than the grave
+itself, which crushed out of the very depths of his heart that most
+awful and yet most blessed psalm, the twenty-second, which we read in
+church every Good Friday.  The "Hind of the Morning" is its title;
+some mournful air to which David sang it, giving, perhaps, the notion
+of a timorous deer roused in the morning by the hunters and the
+hounds.  We read that psalm on Good Friday, and all say that our Lord
+Jesus Christ fulfilled it.  What do we mean hereby?
+
+We mean hereby, that we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled
+all sorrows which man can taste.  He filled the cup of misery to the
+brim, and drained it to the dregs.  He was afflicted in all David's
+afflictions, in the afflictions of all mankind.  He bare all their
+sicknesses, and carried all their infirmities; and therefore we read
+this psalm upon Good Friday, upon the day in which He tasted death
+for every man, and went down into the lowest depths of terror, and
+shame, and agony, and death; and, worst of all, into the feeling that
+God had forsaken Him, that there was no help or hope for Him in
+heaven, as well as earth--no care or love in the great God, whose Son
+He was--went down, in a word, into hell; that hell whereof David and
+Heman, and Hezekiah after them, had said, "Shall the dust give thanks
+unto thee? and shall it declare thy truth?"--"Thou wilt not leave my
+soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see
+corruption."--"My life draweth nigh unto hell. . .  I am like one
+stript among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom
+thou rememberest no more; and they are cut off from thy hand. . . .
+Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? and shall the dead arise and
+praise thee?  Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy
+righteousness in the land of destruction?"--"For the grave cannot
+praise thee; death cannot celebrate thee:  they that go down to the
+pit cannot hope for thy truth."
+
+Even into that lowest darkness, where man feels, even for one moment,
+that God is nothing to him, and he is nothing to God--even into that
+Jesus condescended to go down for us.  That worst of all temptations,
+of which David only tasted a drop when he cried out, "My God, my God,
+why hast thou forsaken me?"  Jesus drained to the very dregs for us.--
+He went down into hell for us, and conquered hell and death, and the
+darkness of the unknown world, and rose again glorious from them,
+that He might teach us not to fear death and hell; that He might know
+how to comfort us in the hour of death:  and in the day of judgment,
+when on our sick bed, or in some bitter shame and trouble, the lying
+devil is telling us that we are damned and lost, and forsaken by God,
+and every sin we ever did rises up and stares us in the face.
+
+Truly He is a king!--a king for rich and poor, young and old,
+Englishmen and negro; all alike He knows them, He feels for them, He
+has tasted sorrow for them, far more than David did for those poor,
+oppressed, sinful Jews of his.  Read those Psalms of David; for they
+speak not only of David, now long since dead and gone, but of the
+blessed Jesus, who lives and reigns over us now at this very moment.
+Read them, for they are inspired; the honest words of a servant of
+God crying out to the same God, the same Saviour and Deliverer as we
+have.  And His love has not changed.  His arm is not shortened that
+He cannot save.  Your words need not change.  The words of those
+psalms in which David prayed, in them you and I may pray.  Right out
+of the depths of his poor distracted heart they came.  Let them come
+out of our hearts too.  They belong to us more than even they did to
+the Jews, for whom David wrote them--more than even they did to David
+himself; for Jesus has fulfilled them--filled them full--given them
+boundlessly more meaning than ever they had before, and given us more
+hope in using them than ever David had:  for now that love and
+righteousness of God, in which David only trusted beforehand, has
+come down and walked on this earth in the shape of a poor man, Jesus
+Christ, the Son of the maiden of Bethlehem.
+
+Oh, you who are afflicted, pray to God in those psalms; not merely in
+the words of them, but in the spirit of them.  And to do that, you
+must get from God the spirit in which David wrote them--the Spirit of
+God.  Pray for that Spirit; for the spirit of patience, which made
+David wait God's good time to right him, instead of trying, as too
+many do, to right himself by wrong means; for the spirit of love,
+which taught David to return good for evil; for the spirit of fellow-
+feeling, which taught David to care for others as well as himself;
+and in that spirit of love, do you pray for others while you are
+praying for yourself.  Pray for that Spirit which taught David to
+help and comfort those who were weaker than himself, that you in your
+time may be able and willing to comfort and help those who are weaker
+than yourselves.  And above all, pray for the Spirit of faith, which
+made David certain that oppression and wrong-doing could not stand;
+that the day must surely come when God would judge the world
+righteously, and hear the cry of the afflicted, and deliver the
+outcast and poor, that the man of the world might be no more exalted
+against them.  Pray, in short, for the Spirit of Christ; and then be
+sure He will hear your prayers, and answer them, and show Himself a
+better friend, and a truer King to you, than ever David showed
+himself to those poor Jews of old.  He will deliver you out of all
+your troubles--if not in this life, yet surely in the life to come;
+and though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet
+the peace of God shall keep your hearts and minds in Him who loved
+you, and gave Himself for you, that you might inherit all heaven and
+earth in Him.
+
+
+
+XXVI--THE VALUE OF LAW
+
+
+
+Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.  For there is no
+power but of God.  The powers that be are ordained of God.--ROMANS
+xiii. 1.
+
+What is the difference between a civilised man and a savage?  You
+will say:  A civilised man can read and write; he has books and
+education; he knows how to make numberless things which makes his
+life comfortable to him.  He can get wealth, and build great towns,
+sink mines, sail the sea in ships, spread himself over the face of
+the earth, or bring home all its treasures, while the savages remain
+poor, and naked, and miserable, and ignorant, fixed to the land in
+which they chance to have been born.
+
+True:  but we must go a little deeper still.  Why does the savage
+remain poor and wretched, while the civilised people become richer
+and more prosperous?  Why, for instance, do the poor savage gipsies
+never grow more comfortable or wiser--each generation of them
+remaining just as low as their forefathers were, or, indeed, getting
+lower and fewer? for the gipsies, like all savages, are becoming
+fewer and fewer year by year, while, on the other hand, we English
+increase in numbers, and in wealth, and knowledge; and fresh
+inventions are found out year by year, which give fresh employment
+and make life more safe and more pleasant.
+
+This is the reason:  That the English have laws and obey them, and
+the gipsies have none.  This is the whole secret.  This is why
+savages remain poor and miserable, that each man does what he likes
+without law.  This is why civilised nations like England thrive and
+prosper, because they have laws and obey them, and every man does not
+do what he likes, but what the law likes.  Laws are made not for the
+good of one person here, or the other person there, but for the good
+of all; and, therefore, the very notion of a civilised country is, a
+country in which people cannot do what they like with their own, as
+the savages do.  "Not do what he likes with his own?"  Certainly not;
+no one can or does.  If you have property, you cannot spend it all as
+you like.  You have to pay a part of it to the government, that is,
+into the common stock, for the common good, in the shape of rates and
+taxes, before you can spend any of it on yourself.  If you take
+wages, you cannot spend them all upon yourself and do what you like
+with them.  If you do not support your wife and family out of them,
+the law will punish you.  You cannot do what you like with your own
+gun, for you may not shoot your neighbour's cattle or game with it.
+You cannot do what you like with your own hands, for the law forbids
+you to steal with them.  You cannot do what you like with your own
+feet, for the law will punish you for trespassing on your neighbour's
+ground without his leave.  In short, you can only do with your own
+what will not hurt your neighbour, in such matters as the law can
+take care of.  And more, in any great necessity the law may actually
+hurt you for the good of the nation at large.  The law may compel you
+to sell your land, to your own injury, if it is wanted for a
+railroad.  The law may compel you, as it did fifty years ago, to
+serve as a soldier in the militia, to your own injury, if there is a
+fear of foreign invasion; so that the law is above each and all of
+us.  Our own wills are not our masters.  No man is his own master.
+The law is the master of each and all of us, and if we will not obey
+it willingly, it can make us obey unwillingly.
+
+Can make us?  Ay, but ought it to make us?  Is it right that the law
+should over-ride our own free wills, and prevent our doing what we
+like with our own?
+
+It is right--absolutely right.  St. Paul tells us what gives law this
+authority:  "There is no power but of God.  The powers that be are
+ordained of God."  And he tells us also why this authority is given
+to the law.  "Rulers," he says, "are not a terror to good works, but
+to evil.  Wilt thou then not be afraid of those who administer the
+law?  Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise from them,
+for they are God's ministers to thee for good."
+
+For good, you see.  For the good of mankind it was, that God put into
+their hearts and reasons, that notion of making laws, and appointing
+kings and magistrates to see that those laws are obeyed.  For our
+good.  For without law no man's life, or family, or property would be
+safe.  Every man's private selfishness, and greediness, and anger,
+would struggle without check to have its way, and there would be no
+bar or curb to keep each and every man from injuring each and every
+man else; so the strong would devour the weak, and then tear each
+other in pieces afterwards.  So it is among the savages.  They have
+little or no property, for they have no laws to protect property; and
+therefore every man expects his neighbour to steal from him, and
+finds it his shortest plan to steal from his neighbour, instead of
+settling down to sow corn which he will have no chance of eating, or
+build houses which may be taken from him at night by some more strong
+and cunning savage.  There is no law among savages to protect women
+and children against the men, and therefore the women are treated
+worse than beasts, and the children murdered to save the trouble of
+rearing them.  Every man's hand is against his neighbour.  No one
+feels himself safe, and therefore no one thinks it worth while to lay
+up for the morrow.  No one expects justice and mercy to be done to
+him, and therefore no one thinks it worth while to do justice and
+mercy to others.  And thus they live in continual fear and
+quarrelling, feeding like wild animals on game or roots, often, when
+they have bad luck in their hunting, on offal which our dogs would
+refuse, and dwindle away and become fewer and wretcheder year by
+year; in this way do the savages in New South Wales live to this day,
+for want of law.
+
+It is for our good, then, that God has put into the heart of man to
+make laws, and to obey them as sacred and divine things.  For our
+good, in order to save us from sinking down into the same state of
+poverty and misery in which the savages are.  For our good, because
+we are fallen creatures, with selfish and corrupt wills, continually
+apt to break loose, and please ourselves at the expense of our
+neighbours.  For our good, because, however fallen we are, we are
+still brothers, members of God's family, bound to each other by duty
+and relationship, if not by love.
+
+Just as in a family, if parents, brothers, and sisters will not do
+their duty to each other lovingly and of their free will, the law
+interferes, and the custom of the country interferes, and the opinion
+of neighbours interferes, and says:  "You may not love your parents:
+but you have no right to leave them to starve."  "You may not love
+your brothers:  but if you try to injure and slander them, you are
+doing an unnatural and hateful thing, abhorred by God and man, and
+you must expect us to treat you accordingly, as a wild beast who does
+not feel the common laws of nature and right and wrong."  So with the
+law of the land.  The law is meant to remind us more or less that we
+are brothers, members of one body; that we owe a duty to each other;
+that we are all equal in God's sight, who is no respecter of persons,
+or of rank, or of riches, any more than the law is when it punishes
+the greatest nobleman as severely as the poorest labourer.  The law
+is meant to remind us that God is just; that when we injure each
+other, we sin against God; that God's rule and law is, that each
+transgression should receive its just reward, and that, therefore,
+because man is made in the likeness of God, man is bound, as far as
+he can, to visit every offence with due and proportionate punishment.
+And the law punishes, as St. Paul says, in God's name, and for God's
+sake.  The magistrate is a witness for God's righteous government of
+the world, the minister of God's vengeance against evil-doers, to
+remind all continually that evil-doing has no place, and cannot
+prosper, and must not be allowed, upon this God's earth whereon we
+live.
+
+But what if the laws are unfair, and punish only some sorts of evil-
+doers and not others?  What if they are like spiders' webs, which
+catch the little flies, and let the great wasps break through?  What
+if they punish poor and weak offenders, and let the rich and powerful
+sinners escape?  "Obey them still," says St. Paul.  In his time and
+country the laws were as unfair in that way as laws ever were, and
+yet he tells Christians to obey them for conscience's sake.  Thank
+God that they do punish weak offenders.  Pray God that the time may
+come when they may be strong enough to punish great offenders also.
+But, in the meantime, see that they have not to punish you.  As far
+as the laws go, they are right and good.  As far as they keep down
+any sort of wrong-doing whatsoever, they are God's ordinances, and
+you must obey them for God's sake.
+
+But what if the laws are not only unfair and partial, but also unjust
+and wrong?  Are we to obey them then?  Obey them still, says St.
+Paul.  Of course, if they command you to do a clearly wrong thing;
+if, for instance, the law commanded you to worship idols, or to
+commit adultery, there is no question then; such laws cannot be God's
+ordinance.  The laws can only be God's ordinance as far as they agree
+with what we know of God's will written in our hearts, and written in
+His holy Bible.  Then a man must resist the law to the death, if need
+be, as the old martyrs did, dying as witnesses for God's righteous
+and eternal law, against man's false and unrighteous law.  It is a
+very difficult thing, no doubt, to tell where to draw the line in
+such matters.  But we, thank God, here in England now, have no need
+to puzzle our heads with such questions.  Every man's conscience is
+free here, and he has full liberty to worship God as he thinks best,
+provided that by so doing he does not interfere with his neighbour's
+character, or property, or comfort.  There is no single law in
+England now, that I know of, which a man has any need to refuse to
+obey, let his conscience be as tender as it may.  And as for laws
+which we think hurtful to the country, or hurtful to any particular
+class in the country, our thinking them hurtful is no reason that we
+should not obey them.  As long as they are law, they are God's
+ordinance, and we have no right to break them.  They may be useful
+after all.  Or even if they are hurtful in some way, still God may be
+bringing good out of them in some other way, of which we little
+dream, as He has often done out of laws and customs which seem at
+first sight most foolish and hurtful, and yet which He endured and
+winked at, for the sake of bringing good out of evil.  At all events,
+whatsoever laws are here in England, are made by the men whom we
+English have chosen, as the men most fit and wise to make them, and
+we are bound to abide by them.  If Parliament is not wise enough to
+make perfectly good laws, that is no one's fault but our own; for if
+we were wise, we should choose wise law-makers, and we must be filled
+with the fruit of our own devices.  As long as these laws have been
+made and passed, by Commons, Lords, and Queen, according to the
+ancient forms and constitution which God has taught our forefathers
+from time to time for more than a thousand years, and which have had
+God's blessing and favour on them, and made us, from the least of all
+nations, the greatest nation on the earth; in short, as long as those
+laws are made according to law, so long we are bound to believe them
+to be God's ordinance, and obey them.  But understand; that is no
+reason why we should not try to get them improved; for when they are
+changed and done away according to the same law which made them, that
+will be a sign that they are God's ordinances no longer; that God
+thinks we have no more need for them, and does not require us to keep
+them.  But as long as any law is what St. Paul calls "the powers that
+be," obeyed it must be, not only for wrath, but for conscience's
+sake.
+
+That is a very important part of the matter.  Obey the law, St. Paul
+says, not only for wrath, that is, not only for fear of punishment,
+but for conscience's sake.  Even if you do not expect to be punished;
+even if you think no one will ever find out that you have broken the
+law, remember it is God's ordinance.  He sees you.  Do not hurt your
+own conscience, and deaden your own sense of right and wrong, by
+breaking the least or the most unjust law in the slightest point.
+
+For instance:  some people think the income-tax is very unfair; and
+therefore they think there is no harm in cheating the revenue a
+little, by making out their income less than it is.  Others, again,
+think the laws against smuggling unjust and harsh; and therefore they
+see no harm in trying to avoid paying duty on goods which they bring
+home, whenever they have an opportunity, or buying cheap goods, which
+they must know from their price are smuggled.  Others, again, think
+the game laws are unfair, and therefore see no harm in going out
+shooting on their own lands without a licence; while many see no
+harm, or say they see no harm, in poaching on other people's grounds,
+and killing game contrary to law wherever they can.  That it is wrong
+to break the law in these two first cases, you all know in your own
+hearts.  On the matter of poaching, some of you, I know, have many
+very mistaken notions.  But, my friends, I ask you only to look at
+the sin and misery which poaching causes, if you want to see that
+those who break the law do indeed break the ordinance of God, and
+that God's laws avenge themselves.  Look at the idleness, the
+untidiness, the deceit, the bad company, the drunkenness, the misery
+and sin, to man, woman, and child, which that same poaching brings
+about, and then see how one little sin brings on many great ones; how
+a man, by despising the authority of law, and fancying that he does
+no harm in disobeying the laws, from his own fancy about poaching
+being no harm, falls into temptation and a snare, and pierces himself
+through with many sorrows.  My young friends, believe my words.
+Avoid poaching, even once in a way.  The beginning of sin is like the
+letting out of water; no one can tell where it will stop.  He who
+breaks the law in little things will be tempted to go on and break it
+in greater and greater things.  He who begins by breaking man's law,
+which is the pattern of God's law, will be tempted to go on and break
+God's law also.  Is it not so?  There is no use telling me, "The game
+is no one's; there is no harm in taking it."  Light words of that
+kind will not do to answer God with.  You know there is harm in
+taking it; for you know, as well as I do, that you cannot go after
+game without neglecting your work to get it; or without going to the
+worst of public-houses, among the worst of company, to sell it.  You
+know, as well as I do, that hand in hand with poaching go lying, and
+idling, and sneaking, and fear, and boasting, and swearing, and
+drinking, and the company of bad men and bad women.  And then you say
+there is no harm in poaching.  Do you suppose that I do not know, as
+well as any one of you here, what goes to the snaring of a hare, and
+the selling of a hare, and the spending of the ill-got price of a
+hare?  My dear young men, I know that poaching, like many other sins,
+is tempting:  but God has told us to flee from temptation--to resist
+the devil, and he will flee from us.  If we are to give up ourselves
+without a struggle to every pleasant thing which tempts us, we shall
+soon be at the devil's door.  We were sent into the world to fight
+against temptation and to conquer it.  We were sent into the world to
+do what God likes, not what we like; and therefore we were sent into
+the world to obey the laws of the land wherein we live, be they
+better or worse; because if we break one law because we don't like
+it, our neighbour may break another because he don't like that, and
+so forth; till there is neither law, nor peace, nor safety, but every
+man doing what is right in his own eyes, which is sure to end by
+every man's doing what is right in the devil's eyes.  We were sent
+into the world to live as brothers, under laws which make us give up
+our own wills and selfish lusts for the common good.  And if we find
+it difficult to keep the laws, if we are tempted to break the laws,
+God has promised His Spirit to those who ask Him.  God has promised
+His Spirit to us.  If we pray for that Spirit night and morning, He
+will make it easy for us to keep the laws.  He will make us what our
+Lord was before us, humble, patient, loving, manful and strong enough
+to restrain our fancies and appetites, and to give up our wills for
+the good of our neighbours, anxious and careful to avoid all
+appearance of evil, trusting that because God is just, and God is
+King, all laws which are not wicked are His ordinance, and therefore
+being obedient to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, even as
+Jesus Christ Himself was, who, though He was Lord of all, paid taxes
+and tribute money to the Roman government, like the rest of the Jews,
+and kept the law of Moses perfectly, and was baptised with John's
+baptism, to show that in all just and reasonable things we are to
+obey the laws and customs of our forefathers, in the country to which
+it has pleased the Lord that we should belong.
+
+
+
+XXVII--THE SOURCE OF LAW
+
+
+
+Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.  For there is no
+power but of God.  The powers that be are ordained of God.--ROMANS
+xiii. 1.
+
+In this chapter, which we read for the second lesson for this
+afternoon's service, St. Paul gives good advice to the Romans, and
+equally good advice to us.
+
+Of course what he says must be equally good for us, and for all
+people, at all times, in all countries, as long as time shall last;
+because St. Paul spoke by the Spirit of God, who is God eternal, and
+therefore cannot change His mind, but lays down, by the mouth of His
+apostles and prophets, the everlasting laws of right and wrong, which
+are always equally good for all.
+
+But there is something in this lesson which makes it especially
+useful to us; because we English are in some very important matters
+very like the Romans to whom St. Paul wrote; though in others, thanks
+to Almighty God, we are still very unlike them.
+
+Now, these old Romans, as I have often told you, had risen to be the
+greatest and mightiest people in the world, and to conquer many
+foreign countries, and set up colonies of Romans in them, very much
+as the English have done in India, and North America, and Australia:
+so that the little country of Italy, with its one great city of Rome,
+was mistress of vast lands far beyond the seas, ten times as large as
+itself, just as this little England is.
+
+But it is not so much this which I have to speak to you about now, as
+how this Rome became so great; for it was at first nothing but a poor
+little country town, without money, armies, trade, or any of those
+things which shallow-minded people fancy are the great strength of a
+nation.  True, all those things are good; but they are useless and
+hurtful--and, what is more, they cannot be got--without something
+better than them; something which you cannot see nor handle;
+something spiritual, which is the life and heart of a country or
+nation, and without which it can never become great.  This the old
+Romans had; and it made them become great.  This we English have had
+for now fifteen hundred years; even when our forefathers were
+heathens, like the Romans, before we came into this good land of
+England, while we were poor and simple people, living in the barren
+moors of Germany, and the snowy mountains of Norway; even then we had
+this wonderful charm, by which nations are sure to become great and
+powerful at last; and in proportion as we have remembered and acted
+upon it, we English have thriven and spread; and whenever we have
+forgotten it and broken it, we have fallen into distress, and
+poverty, and shame, over the whole land.
+
+Now, what is this wonderful charm which made the old Romans and we
+English great, which is stronger than money, and armies, and trade,
+and all the things which we can see and handle?
+
+St. Paul tells us in the text:  "Let every soul be subject to the
+higher powers.  For there is no power but of God.  The powers that be
+are ordained of God."
+
+To respect the law; to believe that God wills men to live according
+to law; and that He will teach men right and good laws; that
+magistrates who enforce the laws are God's ministers, God's officers
+and servants; that to break the laws is to sin against God;--that is
+the charm which worked such wonders, and will work them to the end of
+time.
+
+So you see it was a very proper thing for St. Paul, when he wrote to
+these Romans after they became Christians, to speak to them as he
+does in this chapter.  They might have fancied, and many did fancy,
+that because they were Jesus Christ's servants now, they need not
+obey their heathen rulers and laws any more.  But St. Paul says:
+"No; Jesus Christ's being King of Kings, is only the strongest
+possible reason for your obeying these heathen rulers.  For if He is
+King of all the earth, He is King of Rome also, and of all her
+colonies; and therefore you may be sure that He would not leave these
+Roman rulers, and laws here if He did not think it right and fitting.
+If Jesus Christ is Lord of lords He is Lord of these Roman rulers,
+and they are His ministers and stewards; and you must obey them, and
+pay taxes to them for conscience's sake, as unto the Lord, and not
+unto man."
+
+So you see that St. Paul gave these Roman Christians no new
+commandment on these matters; nothing different from what their old
+heathen forefathers had believed.  For the law which he mentions in
+verse 9, "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal," etc., had been
+for centuries past part of the old Roman law, as well as of Moses'
+law.
+
+Those old heathen Romans believed, and rightly, that all law and
+order came from the great God of gods, whom they called in their
+tongue Jupiter, that is, the Heavenly Father.  They believed that He
+would bless those who kept the laws; who kept their oaths and
+agreements, and the laws about government, about marriage, about
+property, about inheritance; and that He would surely punish those
+who broke the laws, who defrauded their neighbours of their rights,
+who swore falsely against their neighbour, or broke their agreements,
+who were unfaithful to their wives and husbands, or in any way
+offended against justice between man and man.  And they believed too,
+and rightly, that as long as they kept the laws, and lived justly and
+orderly by them, the great Heavenly Father would protect and prosper
+their town of Rome, and make it grow great and powerful, because they
+were living as He would have men live; not doing each what was right
+in the sight of his own eyes, but conquering their own selfish wills
+and private fancies, for the sake of their neighbour's good, and the
+good of his country, that they might all help and trust each other,
+as fellow-citizens of one nation.
+
+Only St. Paul had told them:  Your forefathers were right in fancying
+that law and right came from the great God of gods:  but they knew
+hardly anything, or rather, in time they forgot almost everything,
+about that Heavenly Father.  In their ignorance they mixed up the
+belief in the one great almighty and good God, which dwells in the
+hearts of all men, with filthy fables and superstitions till they
+came to fancy that there were many gods and not one, and that these
+many gods were sinful, foul, proud, and cruel, as fallen men.  But
+you have been brought back to the knowledge of the one true, and
+righteous, and loving God, which your forefathers lost.  He has
+revealed and shown Himself, and what He is like, in His Son Jesus
+Christ.  He is love, and wisdom, and justice, and order itself; and,
+therefore, you must be sure, even more sure than your old heathen
+forefathers, that He cares for a nation being at peace and unity
+within itself, governed by wise laws, doing justice between man and
+man, and keeping order throughout all its business, that every man
+may do his work and enjoy his wages without hindrance, or confusion,
+or fear, or robbery and oppression from those who are stronger than
+he.
+
+And so St. Paul says to them:  "You must believe that power and law
+come from God, far more firmly and clearly than ever your heathen
+forefathers did."
+
+Now that St. Paul was right in this we may see from the Old
+Testament.  In the first lesson for this afternoon's service, we read
+how Jeremiah was sent with the most awful warnings to the king, and
+the queen, and the crown prince of his country.  And why?  Because
+they had broken the laws; because, in a word, they had been
+unfaithful stewards and ministers of the Lord God, who had given them
+their power and kingdom, and would demand a strict account of all
+which He had committed to their charge.  But in the same book of the
+prophet Jeremiah we read more than this; we read exactly what St.
+Paul says about the heathen Roman governors:  for the Lord God, who
+is the Lord Jesus Christ, sent Jeremiah with a message to all the
+heathen kings round about, to tell them that He was their Lord and
+Master, that He had given them their power, heathens as they were,
+because it seemed fit to Him, and that now, for their sins, He was
+going to deliver them over into the hand of another heathen, His
+servant Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon; and that whosoever would not
+serve Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord God would punish him with sword, and
+famine, and pestilence till he had consumed them.  And the first four
+chapters of the book of Daniel, noble and wonderful as they are, seem
+to me to have been put into the Bible simply to teach us this one
+thing, that heathen rulers, as well as Christians, are the Lord's
+servants, and that their power is ordained by God.  For these
+chapters are entirely made up of the history, how God, by His prophet
+Daniel, taught the heathen king Nebuchadnezzar that he was God's
+minister and steward.  And the latter part of the book of Daniel is
+the account of his teaching the same thing to another heathen, Cyrus
+the great and good king of Persia.  And here St. Paul teaches the
+Christian Romans just the same thing about their heathen governors
+and heathen laws, that they are the ministers and the ordinance of
+God.
+
+Now, our own English forefathers, as I said before, believed this
+same thing; and if I had time, I could show you, I think, plainly
+enough from God's dealings with England, how He has blest and
+prospered us whensoever we have acted up to it.  But whether we have
+believed it or not, there is enough in our English laws, and in our
+English Prayer Book too, to witness for it and remind us of it.
+
+The very title which we give the Queen, "Queen by the grace of God;"
+the solemn prayers for her when she is crowned and anointed, not in
+her own palace, or in the House of Parliament, but in the Church of
+God at Westminster; the prayers which we have just offered up for the
+Queen, for the government, and for the magistrates--these are all so
+many signs and tokens to us that they are God's stewards, called to
+do God's work, and that we must pray for God's grace to help them to
+fulfil their calling.  And are not those ten commandments which stand
+in every church, a witness of the same thing?  They are the very root
+of all law whatsoever.  And more, the solemn oath which a witness
+takes in the court of justice, what is it but a sign of the same
+thing, that our forefathers, who appointed these forms, believed that
+law and justice were holy things, and that he who goes into a court
+of law goes into the presence of God Himself, and confesses, when he
+promises to speak the truth, so help him God, that God is the
+protector and the avenger of law and justice?
+
+But some people, and especially young and light-hearted persons, are
+ready to say:  "Obey the powers that be, whosoever they may be, good
+or bad, and believe that to break their laws is to sin against God?
+We might as well be slaves at once.  A man has a right to his own
+opinion; and if he does not think a law good, how can he be bound to
+obey it?"
+
+You will often hear such words as those when you go out into the
+world, into great towns, where men meet together much.  Let me give
+you, young people, a little advice about that beforehand; for, fine
+as it sounds, it is hollow and false at root.
+
+If you wish to be really free, and to do what you like, like what is
+right; and do that, says St. Paul, and then the law will not
+interfere with you:  "For rulers are not a terror to good works, but
+to the evil.  Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power?  Do that
+which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:  for he is the
+minister of God to thee for good.  But if thou do that which is evil,
+be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain:  for he is the
+minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth
+evil."  And then he sums up what doing right is, in one short
+sentence:  "Love thy neighbour as thyself; for love is the fulfilling
+of the law."  All that the laws want to make you do, is to behave
+like men who do love their neighbours as themselves, and therefore do
+them no harm--to behave like men who are ready to give up their own
+private wills and pleasures, and even their own private property, if
+wanted, for the good of their neighbours and their country.
+Therefore the law calls on you to pay rates and taxes, which are to
+be spent for the good of the nation at large.  And if you love your
+neighbour as yourself, and have the good of everyone round you at
+heart, you will no more grudge paying rates and taxes for their
+benefit than you will grudge spending money to support and educate
+your own children.  And so you will be free, free to do what you
+like, because you like, from the fear and love of God, to do those
+right things which the law is set to make you do.
+
+But some may say:  "That is not what we mean by being free.  We mean
+having a share in choosing Members of Parliament, and so in making
+the laws and governing the country.  When people can do that the
+country is a free country."
+
+Well, my friends, and it is a strange thing, or rather not a strange
+thing, if we will but study our Bibles, that a country cannot be free
+in that way, unless the people of it do really believe that the
+powers that be are ordained of God.  Instead of that faith making the
+old Romans slavish, or careless what laws were made, or how they were
+governed, as some fancy it would make a people, they were as free a
+people, and freer almost than we English now.  They chose their own
+magistrates, and they made their own laws, and prospered by so doing.
+And why?  Because they believed that laws came from God; and,
+therefore, they not only obeyed the laws when they were made, but
+they had heart and spirit to help to make them, because they trusted
+that The Heavenly Father, who loved justice, would teach them to be
+just, and that The God who protected laws and punished law-breakers,
+would put into their minds how to make the laws well; and so they
+were not afraid to govern themselves, because they believed that God
+would enable them to govern themselves well, and therefore they were
+free.  And so far from their having a slavish spirit in them, they
+were the most bold and independent people of the whole earth.  Their
+soldiers conquered almost every nation against whom they fought,
+because they always obeyed their officers dutifully and faithfully,
+believing that it was their duty to God to obey, and to die, if need
+was, for their country.  Old history is full of tales, which will
+never be forgotten, I trust, till the world's end, of the noble deeds
+of their men, ay, and even of their women, who counted their own
+lives worthless in comparison with the good of their country, and
+died in torments rather than break the laws, or do what they knew
+would injure the people to whom they belonged.
+
+And so with us English.  For hundreds of years we have been growing
+more and more free, and more and more well-governed, simply because
+we have been acting on St. Paul's doctrine--obeying the powers that
+be, because they are ordained by God.  It is the Englishman's respect
+for law, as a sacred thing, which he dare not break, which has made
+him, sooner or later, respected and powerful wherever he goes to
+settle in foreign lands; because foreigners can trust us to be just,
+and to keep our promises, and to abide by the laws which we have laid
+down.  It is the English respect for law, as a sacred thing, which
+has made our armies among the bravest and the most successful on
+earth; because they know how to obey their officers, and are
+therefore able to fight and to endure as men should do.  And as long
+as we hold to that belief we shall prosper at home and abroad, and
+become more and more free, and more and more strong; because we shall
+be united, helping each other, trusting each other, knowing what to
+expect of each other, because we all honour and obey the same laws.
+
+And, on the other hand, have we not close to us, in France, a fearful
+sign and proof from God that without the fear of God no people can be
+free?  Three times in the last sixty years have the French risen up
+against evil rulers, and driven them out.  And have they been the
+better for it?  They are at this very moment in utter slavery to a
+ruler more lawless than ever oppressed them before.  And why?
+Because they did not believe that law came from God, and that the
+powers that be are ordained by Him.  Therefore, whenever they were
+oppressed, they did not try to right themselves by lawful ways,
+according to the old English God-fearing custom, but to break down
+the old law by riot and bloodshed, and then to set up new laws of
+their own.  But those new laws would never stand.  They made them,
+but they would not obey them when they were made, and they could not
+make others obey them; because they had no real reverence for law,
+and did not believe that law came from God, or that His Spirit would
+give them understanding to make good laws.  They talked loud about
+the power and rights of the people, and that whatever the people
+willed was right:  but they said nothing about the power and rights
+of the Lord God; they forgot that it is only what God has willed from
+everlasting that is right; and so they made laws in the strength of
+their own hearts, according to what was right in the sight of their
+own eyes, to please themselves.  How could they respect the laws,
+when the laws were only copies of their own selfish fancies?  So,
+because they made them to please themselves, they soon broke them to
+please themselves.  And so came more lawlessness and riot, and
+confusion worse confounded, till, of course, the strongest, and
+cunningest, and most shameless got the upper hand; and they were
+plunged, poor creatures! into the same pit of misery out of which
+they had been trying to deliver themselves in their own strength, for
+a sign and an example that the Lord is King, and not man at all, and
+that the fear of the Lord is the only beginning of wisdom.
+
+And very much the same sad fate had happened to the Romans a little
+before St. Paul's time.  They gave up their ancient respect for law;
+they broke the laws, and ran into all kinds of violence, and riot,
+and filthy sin; and therefore God took away their freedom from them,
+because they were not fit for it, and delivered them over into the
+hand of one cruel tyrant after another; and perhaps the cruellest of
+them all was the man who was emperor of Rome in St. Paul's time.
+Therefore it was that St. Paul says to them:  Love each other, and
+obey the laws, "knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake
+out of sleep."
+
+As much as to say:  "Your souls have fallen asleep; you have been in
+a dark night, not seeing that God would avenge you of all these sins
+of yours; that God's eye was on them:  you have fallen asleep and
+forgotten your forefathers' belief, that God loves law, and order,
+and justice, and will punish those who break through them.  But now
+the Lord Jesus, the light of the world, is come to awaken you, and to
+open your eyes to see the truth about this, and to show you that you
+are in God's kingdom, and that God commands you to repent, and to
+obey Him, and do justly and righteously.  Therefore awake out of your
+sleep; give up the works of darkness, those mean and wicked habits
+which were contrary to the good old laws of your forefathers, and
+which you were at heart ashamed of, and tried to hide even while you
+indulged in them.  Open your eyes, and see that God is near you, your
+Judge, your King, seeing through and through your souls, keen and
+sharp to discern the secret thoughts and intents of the heart, so
+that all things are naked and open in the sight of Him with whom we
+have to do."
+
+And so I may say to you, my friends, it is high time for us to awake
+out of sleep.  The people in England, religious as well as others,
+have fallen asleep of late years too much about this matter.  They
+have forgotten that God is King, that magistrates are God's
+ministers.  They talk as if laws were meant to be only the device of
+man's will, to serve men's private interests and selfishness; and
+therefore they have lost very much of their respect for law, and
+their care to make good laws for the future.  And it is high time for
+us, while all the nations of Europe are tottering and crumbling round
+us, to awake out of sleep on this matter.  We must open our eyes and
+see where we are.  For we are in God's kingdom.  God's Bible, God's
+churches, God's commandments, and all the solemn old law forms of
+England witness to us that God is King, set in the throne which
+judges right; that order and justice, fellow-feeling and public
+spirit, are His gifts, His likeness, on which He looks down with
+loving care and protection; and that if we forget that, and begin to
+fancy that law stands merely by the will of the many, or by the will
+of the stronger, or even by the will of the wiser--by any will of man
+in short; we shall end by neither being able to make just laws any
+more, nor to obey those which we have, by the blessing of God,
+already.
+
+
+
+XXVIII--THE EDUCATION OF A HEATHEN
+
+
+
+Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise, and extol, and honour the King of
+heaven, all whose works are truth, and His ways judgment; and those
+that walk in pride He is able to abase.--DANIEL iv. 37.
+
+We read for the first lesson to-day two chapters out of the book of
+Daniel.  Those who love to study their Bibles, have read often, of
+course, not only these two chapters, but the whole book.
+
+And I would advise all of you who wish to understand God's dealings
+with mankind, to study this book of Daniel, and especially at this
+present time.
+
+I do not wish you to study it merely on account of those prophecies
+in it, which many wise and good men think foretell the dates of our
+Lord's first and second comings, and of the end of the world.  I am
+not skilled, my friends, in that kind of wisdom.  I cannot tell you
+what God will do hereafter.  But I think that the book of Daniel like
+the other prophets, tells us what God is always doing on earth, and
+so gives us certain and eternal rules by which we may understand
+strange and terrible events, wars, distress of nations, the fall of
+great men, and the suffering of innocent men, when we see them
+happen, as we may see any day--perhaps very soon indeed.
+
+The great lesson, I think, that this book of Daniel teaches us is,
+that God is not the Lord of the Jews only, or of Christians only, but
+of the whole earth; that the heathens are under His moral law and
+government, as well as we; and that, as St. Peter says, God is no
+respecter of persons:  but in every nation, he that feareth God, and
+worketh righteousness, is accepted of him.  For the history of
+Nebuchadnezzar seems to me to be the history of God's educating a
+heathen and an idolater to know Him.  And we must always remember,
+that as far as we can see, it was because Nebuchadnezzar was faithful
+to the light which he had, that God gave him more.  Of course he had
+his sins; the Bible tells us what they were; just the sins which one
+would expect of a man brought up a heathen and an idolater; of one
+who was a great conqueror, and had gained many bloody battles, and
+learned to hold men's lives very cheap; of one who was an absolute
+emperor, with no law but his own will, furious at any contradiction;
+of a man of wonderful power of mind--confident in himself, his own
+power, his own cunning.  But he seems not to have been a bad man,
+considering his advantages.  The Bible never speaks harshly of him,
+though he carried away the Jews captive to Babylon.  In all that
+fearful war, Nebuchadnezzar was in the right, and the Jews in the
+wrong; so at least Jeremiah the prophet declared.  Nebuchadnezzar
+saved and respected Jeremiah; and Daniel seems to have regarded the
+great conqueror with real respect and affection.  When Daniel says to
+him, "O king, live for ever," and tells him that he is the head of
+gold, and prays that his fearful dream may come true of his enemies
+and not of him, I cannot believe that the prophet was using mere
+empty phrases of court-flattery.  He really felt, I doubt not, that
+Nebuchadnezzar was a great and good king, as kings went then, and his
+government a gain (as it easily might be) to the nations whom he had
+conquered, and that it was good that he should reign as long as
+possible.
+
+And we may well believe Daniel's interest in this great king, when we
+consider how teachable Nebuchadnezzar showed himself under God's
+education of him, so proving that there was in him the honest and
+good heart, which, when The Word is sown in it, will bring forth
+fruit, thirty-fold or a hundred-fold, according to the talents which
+God has bestowed on each man.
+
+This first lesson we read in the first chapter of Daniel.  He dreamt
+a dream.  He felt that it was a very wonderful one:  but he forgot
+what it was.  None of the magicians of Babylon could tell him.  A
+young Jew, named Daniel, told him the dream and its meaning, and
+declared at the same time that he had found it out by no wisdom of
+his own, but God had revealed it to him.  Nebuchadnezzar learned his
+lesson, and confessed Daniel's God to be a God of gods and a Lord of
+kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing that Daniel could reveal
+that secret; and forthwith, like a wise prince, advanced Daniel and
+his companions to places of the highest authority and trust.
+
+But Nebuchadnezzar required another lesson.  He had learned that the
+God of the Jews was wiser than all the planets and heavenly lords and
+gods whom the Babylonian magicians consulted; he had not learned that
+that same God of the Jews was the Creator and Lord of heaven and
+earth.  He had learned that the God of heaven favoured him, and had
+helped him toward his power and glory; but he thought that for that
+very reason the power and glory were his own--that he had a right
+over the souls and consciences of his subjects, and might make them
+worship what he liked, and how he liked.
+
+Three Jews, whom he had set over the affairs of Babylon, refused to
+worship the golden image which he had set up, and were cast into a
+fiery furnace, and forthwith miraculously delivered, and beheld by
+Nebuchadnezzar walking unhurt and loose in the midst of the furnace,
+and with them a fourth, whose form was like the form of the Son of
+God.
+
+So Nebuchadnezzar was taught that this God of the Jews was the Lord
+of men's souls and consciences; that they were to obey God rather
+than man.  So he was taught that the God of the Jews was no mere star
+or heavenly influence who could help men's fortunes, or bestow on
+them a certain fixed destiny; but a living person, the Lord and
+Master of the fire, and of all the powers of the earth, who could
+change and stop those powers at His will, to deliver those who
+trusted in Him and obeyed Him.
+
+And this lesson, too, Nebuchadnezzar learned.  He confessed his
+mistake upon the spot, just in the way in which we should have
+expected a great Eastern king to do, though not in the most
+enlightened or merciful way.  He "blessed the God of Shadrach,
+Meshach, and Abednego, who hath sent His angel, and delivered His
+servants who trusted in Him.  Therefore I make a decree, that every
+people, nation, and language, which speak anything amiss against the
+God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and
+their houses be made a dunghill:  because there is no other God that
+can deliver after this sort."
+
+But there was still one deep mistake lying in the great king's heart
+which required to be rooted out.  He had learnt that Jehovah, the God
+of the Jews, was a revealer of secrets, a master of the fire, a
+deliverer of those who trusted in Him, a living personal Lord, wise,
+just, and faithful, very different from any of his star gods or
+idols.  But he looked upon Jehovah only as the God of the Jews, as
+Daniel's God.  He had not yet learnt that God was HIS God as well as
+Daniel's; that Jehovah was very near his heart and mind, and had been
+near him all his life; that from Jehovah came all his wisdom, his
+strength of mind, his success, and all which made him differ, not
+only from his fellow-men, but from the beast; that Jehovah, in a
+word, was the light and the life of the world, who fills all things
+and by whom all things consist, deserted by whose inward light, even
+for a moment, man becomes as one of the beasts which perish.  In his
+own eyes Nebuchadnezzar was still the great self-dependent, self-
+sufficing conqueror, wiser and stronger than all the men around him.
+He thought, most probably, that on account of his wisdom, and
+courage, and royalty of soul, the God of heaven had become fond of
+him and favoured him.  In short, he was swollen with pride.
+
+God sent him again a strange dream, which made him troubled and
+afraid.  He told it to his old counsellor Daniel; and Daniel, at the
+danger of his life, interpreted it for him; and a very awful meaning
+it had.  A fearful and shameful downfall was to come upon the king;
+no less than the loss of his reason, and with it, of his throne.  But
+whether this came to pass or not, depended, like all God's
+everlasting promises and threats, on Nebuchadnezzar's own behaviour.
+If he repented, and broke off his sins by righteousness, and his
+iniquities by showing mercy to the poor, there was good reason to
+hope that so his tranquillity might be lengthened.
+
+But the lesson was too hard for the proud conqueror; he did not take
+the warning.  He could not believe that the Most High ruled in the
+kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.  He still
+fancied that he, and such as he, were the lords of the world, and
+took from others by their own power and cunning whatsoever they
+would.  He does not seem to have been angry, however, with Daniel for
+his plain speaking.  Most Eastern kings like Nebuchadnezzar would
+have put Daniel to a cruel death on the spot as the bearer of evil
+news, speaking blasphemy against the king; and no one in those times
+and countries would have considered him wicked and cruel for so
+doing; but Nebuchadnezzar seems to have learnt too much already so to
+give way to his passion.
+
+Yet, as I said before, he had not learned enough to take God's
+warning.  The lesson that he was nothing, and that God is all in all,
+was too hard for him.  And, alas! my friends, for whom of us is it
+not a hard lesson?  And yet it is the golden lesson, the first and
+the last which man has to learn on earth, ay, and through all
+eternity:  "I am nothing; God is all in all."  All in us which is
+worth calling anything; all in us which is worth having, or worth
+being; all in us which is not disobedience and shortcoming, failure
+and mistake, ignorance and madness, filthiness and fierceness, as of
+the beasts which perish; all strength in us, all understanding, all
+prudence, all right-mindedness, all purity, all justice, all love;
+all in us which is worth living for, all in us which is really alive,
+and not mere death in life, the death of sin and the darkness of the
+pit--all is from God the Father of lights, and from Jesus Christ the
+life and the light, who lighteth every man who cometh into the world,
+shining for ever in the darkness of our spirits, though that
+darkness, alas! too often cannot comprehend, and embrace, and confess
+Him who is striving to awake it from the dead and give it light.
+Hardest of all lessons!  Most blessed of all lessons!  So blessed,
+that if we will not let God teach it us in any other way, it would be
+good and advantageous to us for Him to teach it us as He taught it to
+Nebuchadnezzar--good for us to become with him for awhile like the
+beasts that perish, that we might learn with him to lift up our eyes
+to heaven, and so have our understandings return to us, and learn to
+bless the Most High, and not our own wit, and cunning, and prudence;
+and praise and honour Him that liveth for ever, instead of praising
+and honouring our own pitiful paltry selves, who are in death in the
+midst of life, who come up and are cut down like the flower, and
+never continue in one stay.
+
+"All this came upon the King Nebuchadnezzar."  It seems that after he
+or his father had destroyed the old Babylon, the downfall of which
+Isaiah had prophesied, he built a great city, after the fashion of
+Eastern conquerors, near the ruins of the old one; and "at the end of
+twelve months he walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon.  The
+king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built
+for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the
+honour of my majesty?  While the word was in the king's mouth, there
+fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it
+is spoken, The kingdom is departed from thee.  And they shall drive
+thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the
+field:  they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times
+shall pass over thee, until thou know that the Most High ruleth in
+the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.  The same
+hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar."
+
+What a lesson!  The great conqueror of all the East now a brutal
+madman, hateful and disgusting to all around him--a beast feeding
+among the beasts:  and yet a cheap price--a cheap price--to pay for
+this golden lesson.
+
+Seven times past over him in his madness.  What those seven times
+were we do not know.  They may have been actual years:  or they may
+have been, as I am inclined to think, changes in his own soul and
+state of mind.  But, at the end of the days, the truth dawned on him.
+He began to see what it all meant.  He saw what he was, and why he
+was so; and he lifted up his eyes to heaven; and from that moment his
+madness past.  He lifted up his eyes to heaven.  That is no mere
+figure of speech:  it is an actual truth.  Most madmen, if you watch
+them, have that down look, or rather that inward look, as if their
+eyes were fixed only on their own fancies.  They are thinking only of
+themselves, poor creatures--of their own selfish and private
+suspicions and wrongs--of their own selfish superstitious dreams
+about heaven or hell--of their own selfish vanity and ambition--
+sometimes of their own frantic self-conceit, or of their selfish
+lusts and desires--of themselves, in short.  They have lost the one
+Divine light of reason, and conscience, and love, which binds men to
+each other, and are parted for a while from God and from their kind--
+alone in their own darkness.  So was Nebuchadnezzar.
+
+At last he looked up, as men do when they pray; up from himself to
+One greater than himself; up from the earth to heaven; up from the
+natural things which we do see, which are temporal and born to die,
+to moral and spiritual things which we do not see, which are real and
+eternal in the heavens; up from his own lonely darkness, looking for
+the light and the guidance of God; for now he began to see that all
+the light which he had ever had, all his wisdom, and understanding,
+and strength of will, had come from God, however he might have
+misused them for his own selfish ambition; that it was because God
+had taken from him His light, who is the Word of God, that he had
+become a beast.  And then his reason returned to him, and he became
+again a man, a rational being, made, howsoever fallen and sinful, in
+the likeness of God; then he blessed and praised God.  It was not
+merely that he confessed that God was strong, and he weak; righteous,
+and he sinful; wise, and he foolish; but he blessed and praised God;
+he felt and confessed that God had done him a great benefit, and
+taught him a great lesson--that God had taught him what he was in
+himself and without God, that he might see what he was with God in
+its true light, and honour and obey Him from whom his reason and
+understanding, as well as his power and glory, came, that so it might
+be fulfilled which the prophet says:  "Let not the wise man glory in
+his wisdom, nor the mighty man in his might, nor the rich man in his
+riches:  but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he
+understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise
+loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness IN THE EARTH; for in
+these things I delight, saith the Lord."
+
+And so was Nebuchadnezzar's soul brought to utter, in his own way,
+the very same glorious song which, or something like it, is said to
+have been sung by the three men whom, years before, he had seen
+delivered from the fiery furnace, which calls on all the works of the
+Lord, angels and heaven, sun and stars, seas and winds, mountains and
+hills, fowls and cattle, priests and laymen, spirits and souls of the
+righteous, to bless the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.
+
+And so ends Nebuchadnezzar's history.  We read no more of him.  He
+had learnt the golden lesson.  May God grant that we may learn it
+also!
+
+But who tells the story of his madness?  He himself.  The whole
+account is in the man's own words.  It seems to be some public letter
+or proclamation, which he either sent round his empire, or commanded
+to be laid up among his records; having, as it seems, set Daniel to
+write it down from his mouth.  This one fact, I think, justifies me
+in all that I have said about Nebuchadnezzar's nobleness, and
+Daniel's affection for him.  He does not try to smooth things over;
+to pretend that he has not been mad; to find excuses for himself; to
+lay any blame on any human being.  He repents openly, confesses
+openly.  Shameful as it may be to him, he tells the whole story.  He
+confesses that he had fair warning, that all was his own fault.  He
+justifies God utterly.  My friends, we may read, thank God, many
+noble, and brave, and righteous speeches of kings and great men:  but
+never have I read one so noble, so brave, so righteous as this of the
+great king of Babylon.
+
+And therefore it is; because this letter of his, in the fourth
+chapter of the book of Daniel, is indeed full of the eternal Holy
+Spirit of God; therefore it is, I say, that it forms part of the
+Bible, part of holy scripture to this day,--a greater honour to
+Nebuchadnezzar than all his kingdom; for what greater honour than to
+have been inspired to write one chapter, yea, one sentence, of the
+Book of Books?
+
+My friends, every one of you here is in God's school-house, under
+God's teaching, far more than Nebuchadnezzar was.  You are baptised
+men, knowing that blessed name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which
+Nebuchadnezzar only saw dimly, and afar off.  Jesus Christ, the Word
+of God, is striving with your hearts, giving to them whatsoever light
+and life they have.  You have been taught from childhood to look up
+to Him as your King and Deliverer; to His Father as your Father, to
+His Holy Spirit as your Inspirer.  Take heed how you listen to His
+voice within your hearts.  Take heed how you learn God's lessons; for
+God is surely educating you, and teaching you far more than He taught
+the king of Babylon in old time.  As you learn or despise these
+lessons of God's, will be your happiness or your misery now and for
+ever.  Unto the king of Babylon little was given, and of him was
+little required.  To you and me much has been given; of you and me
+will much be required.
+
+
+
+XXIX--JEREMIAH'S CALLING
+
+
+
+Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a
+righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall
+execute judgment and justice in the earth.--JEREMIAH xxiii. 5.
+
+At the time when Jeremiah the prophet spoke those words to the Jews,
+nothing seemed more unlikely than that they would ever come true.
+The whole Jewish nation was falling to pieces from its own sins.
+Brutish and filthy idolatry in high and low--oppression, violence,
+and luxury among the court and the nobility--shame, and poverty, and
+ignorance among the lower classes--idleness and quackery among the
+priesthood--and as kings over all, one fool and profligate after
+another, set on the throne by a foreign conqueror, and pulled down
+again by him at his pleasure.  Ten out of the twelve tribes of Israel
+had been carried off captive, young and old, into a distant land.
+The small portion of country which still remained inhabited round
+Jerusalem, had been overrun again and again by cruel armies of
+heathens.  Without Jerusalem was waste and ruins, bloodshed and
+wretchedness; within every kind of iniquity and lies, division and
+confusion.  If ever there was a miserable and contemptible people
+upon the face of the earth, it was the Jewish nation in Jeremiah's
+time.  Jeremiah makes no secret of it.  His prophecies are full of
+it--full of lamentation and shame:  "Oh that my head were a fountain
+of tears, to weep for the sins of my people!"  He feels that God has
+sent him to rebuke those sins, to warn and prophesy to his fellow-
+countrymen the certain ruin into which they are rushing headlong; and
+he speaks God's message boldly.  From the poor idol-ridden labourer,
+offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven to coax her into sending him a
+good harvest, to the tyrant king who had built his palace of cedar
+and painted it with vermilion, he had a bitter word for every man.
+The lying priest tried to silence him; and Jeremiah answered him,
+that his wife should be a harlot in the city, and his children sold
+for slaves.  The king tried to flatter him into being quiet; and he
+told him in return, that he should be buried with the burial of an
+ass, dragged out and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.  The
+luxurious queen, who made her nest in the cedars, would be ashamed
+and confounded, he said, for her wickedness.  The crown prince was a
+despised broken idol--a vessel in which was no pleasure; he should be
+cast out, he and his children, into slavery in a land which he knew
+not.  The whole royal family, he said, would perish; none of them
+should ever again prosper or sit upon the throne of David.  This was
+his message; shame and confusion, woe and ruin, to high and low;
+every human being he passed in the street was a doomed man.  For the
+day of the Lord was at hand, and who should be able to escape it?
+
+A sad calling, truly, to have to work at; and all the more sad
+because Jeremiah had no pride, no steadfast opinion of his own
+excellence to keep him up.  He hates his calling of prophet.  At the
+very moment he is foretelling woe, he prays God that his prophecy may
+not come true; he tries every method to prevent its coming true, by
+entreating his countrymen to repent.  There runs through all his
+awful words a vein of tenderness, and pity, and love unspeakable,
+which to me is the one great mark of a true prophet; a sign that
+Jeremiah spoke by the Spirit of God; a sign that too many writers
+nowadays do not speak by the Spirit of God.  If they rebuke the rich
+and powerful, they do it generally in a very different spirit from
+Jeremiah's--in a spirit of bitterness and insolence, not very easy to
+describe, but easy enough to perceive.  They seem to rejoice in evil,
+to delight in finding fault, to be sorry, and not glad, when their
+prophecies of evil turn out false; to try to set one class against
+another, one party against another, as if we were not miserably
+enough split up already by class interests and party spirit.  They
+are glad enough to rebuke the wicked great; but not to their face,
+not to their own danger and hurt like Jeremiah.  Their plan is to
+accuse the rich to the poor, on their own platform, or in their own
+newspaper, where they are safe; and, moreover, to make a very fair
+profit thereby; to say behind the back of authorities that which they
+dare not say to their face, and which they soon give up saying when
+they have worked their own way into office; and meanwhile take mighty
+credit to themselves for seeing that there is wrong and misery in the
+world; as if the spirits in hell should fancy themselves righteous,
+because they hated the devil!  No, my friends, Jeremiah was of a very
+different spirit from that.  If he ever was tempted to it when he was
+young, and began to fancy himself a very grand person, who had a
+right to look down on his neighbours, because God had called him and
+set him apart to be a prophet from his mother's womb, and revealed to
+him the doom of nations, and the secrets of His providence--if he
+ever fancied that in his heart, God led him through such an education
+as took all the pride out of him, sternly and bitterly enough.  He
+was commissioned to go and speak terrible words, to curse kings and
+nobles in the name of the Lord:  but he was taught, too, that it was
+not a pleasant calling, or one which was likely to pay him in this
+life.  His fellow-villagers plotted against his life.  His wife
+deserted him.  The nobles threw him into a dungeon, into a well full
+of mire, whence he had to be drawn up again with ropes to save his
+life.  He was beaten, all but starved, kept for years in prison.  He
+had neither child nor friend.  He had his share of all the miseries
+of the siege of Jerusalem, and all the horrors of its storm; and when
+he was set free by Nebuchadnezzar, and clung to his ruined home, to
+see if any good could still be done to the remnant of his countrymen,
+he was violently carried off into a heathen land, and at last stoned
+to death, by those very countrymen of his whom he had been trying for
+years to save.  In everything, and by everything, he was taught that
+he was still a Jew, a brother to his sinful brothers; that their
+sorrows were his sorrows, their shame his shame, their ruin his ruin.
+In all their afflictions he was afflicted, even as his Lord was after
+him.
+
+He struggled, we find, again and again against this strange and sad
+calling of a prophet.  He cried out in bitter agony that God had
+deceived him; had induced him to become a prophet, and then repaid
+him for speaking God's message with nothing but disappointment and
+misery.  And yet he felt he must speak; God, he said, was stronger
+than he was, and forced him to it.  He said:  "I will speak no more
+words in His name; but the Word of the Lord was as fire within his
+bones, and would not let him rest;" and so, in spite of himself, he
+told the truth, and suffered for it; and hated to have to tell it,
+and pitied and loved the very country which he rebuked till he cursed
+"the day in which he saw the light, and the hour in which it was said
+to his father, there is a man-child born."  You who fancy that it is
+a fine thing, and a paying profession, to be a preacher of
+righteousness and a rebuker of sin, look at Jeremiah, and judge!  For
+as surely as you or any other man is sent by God to do Jeremiah's
+work, so surely he must expect Jeremiah's wages.
+
+Do you think, then, that Jeremiah was a man only to be pitied?
+Pitiable he was indeed, and sad.  There was One hung on a cross
+eighteen hundred years ago, more pitiable still:  and yet He is the
+Lord of heaven and earth.  Yes; Jeremiah had a sad life to live, and
+a sad task to work out; and yet, my friends, was not that a cheap
+price to pay for the honour and glory of being taught by God's
+Spirit, and of speaking God's words?  I do not mean the mere honour
+of having his fame and name spread over all Christ's kingdom; the
+honour of having his writings read and respected by the wisest and
+the holiest to the end of time; that mere earthly fame is but a
+slight matter.  I mean the real honour, the real glory, of knowing
+what was utterly right and true, and therefore of knowing Him who is
+utterly right and true; of knowing God; of knowing what God's
+character is:  that he is a living God, and not a dead one; a God who
+is near and not absent at all, loving and merciful, just and
+righteous, strong and mighty to save.  Ay, my friends, this is the
+lesson which God taught Jeremiah; to know the Lord of heaven and
+earth, and to see His hand, His rule, in all that was happening to
+his fellow-countrymen, and himself; to know that from the beginning
+the Lord, the Saviour-God, Jehovah, the messenger of the covenant, He
+who brought up the Jews out of Egypt, was the wise and just and
+loving King of the Jews, and of all the nations upon earth; and that
+some day or other He must and would conquer all the sinfulness, and
+misery, and tyranny, and idolatry in the world, and show Himself
+openly to men, and fulfil all the piteous longings after a just and
+good king which poor wretches had ever felt, and all the glorious
+promises of a just and good king which God had made to the wise men
+of old time; and, therefore, in the midst of shame and persecution,
+despair and ruin, Jeremiah could rejoice.  Jehoiakim, the wicked
+king, and all his royal house, might be driven out into slavery;
+Jerusalem might become a heap of ruins and corpses; the fair land of
+Judaea, and the village where he was bred, might become thorns, and
+thistles, and heaps of stones; the vineyard which he loved, the
+little estate at Anathoth which had belonged to him, might be trodden
+down by the stranger, and he himself die in a foreign land; around
+him might be nothing but sin and decay, before him nothing but
+despair and ruin:  yet still there was hope, joy, everlasting
+certainty for that poor, childless, captive old man; for he had found
+out that the Lord still lived, the Lord still reigned.  He could not
+lie; he could not forget his people.  Could a mother forget her
+sucking child?  No.  When the Jews turned to Him, He would still have
+mercy.  His punishment of them was a sign that he still cared for
+them.  If He had forgotten them, He would have let them go on
+triumphant in their iniquity.  No.  All these afflictions were meant
+to chasten them, teach them, bring them back to Him.  It would be
+good for them, an actual blessing to them, to be taken away into
+captivity in Babylon.  It might be hard to believe, but it must be
+true.  The Lord of Israel, the Saviour-God, who had been caring for
+them so long, rising up early and sending His prophets to them,
+pleading with them as a father with his child, He would have mercy;
+He would teach them, in sorrow and slavery, the lesson they were too
+rebellious and hard-hearted to learn in prosperity and freedom:  that
+the Lord was their righteousness, and that there was no other name
+under heaven which could save them from the plague, and from the
+famine, from the swords of the Chaldeans, or from the division, and
+oppression, and brutishness, and manifold wickedness, which was their
+ruin.  And then Jeremiah saw and felt--how we cannot tell--but there
+his words, the words of this text, stand to this day, to show that he
+did see and feel it, that some day or other, in God's good time, the
+Jews would have a true King--a very different king from Jehoiakim the
+tyrant--a son of David in a very different sense from what Jehoiakim
+was; that He would come, and must come, sooner or later, The unseen
+King, who had all along been governing Jews and heathens, and telling
+his prophets that Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, the Chaldee and the
+Persian, were his servants as well as they, and that all the nations
+of the earth could do but what he chose.  "Behold the days come,
+saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and
+a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute justice and
+judgment on the earth."
+
+This was the blessed knowledge which God gave Jeremiah in return for
+all the misery he had to endure in warning his countrymen of their
+sins.  And this same blessed knowledge, the knowledge that the earth
+is the Lord's, that to Jesus Christ is given, as He said Himself, all
+power in heaven and earth, and that He is reigning, and must reign,
+and conquer, and triumph till He has put all His enemies under His
+feet, God will surely give to everyone, high or low, who follows
+Jeremiah's example, who boldly and faithfully warns the sinner of his
+way, who rebukes the wickedness which he sees around him:  only he
+must do it in the spirit of Jeremiah.  He must not be insolent to the
+insolent, or proud to the proud.  He must not be puffed up, and fancy
+that because he sees the evil of sin, and the certain ruin which is
+the fruit of it, that he is therefore to keep apart from his fellow-
+countrymen, and despise them in Pharisaic pride.  No.  The truly
+Christian man, the man who, like Jeremiah, has the Spirit of God in
+him, will feel the most intense pity and tenderness of sinners.  He
+will not only rebuke the sins of his people, but mourn for them; he
+will be afflicted in all their affliction.  However harshly he may
+have to speak, he will never forget that they are his countrymen, his
+brothers, children of the same Father, to be judged by the same Lord.
+He will feel with shame and fear that he has in himself the root of
+the very same sins which he sees working death around him--that if
+others are covetous, he might be so too--if they be profligate, and
+deceitful, and hypocritical, without God in the world, he might be so
+too.  And he must feel not only that he might be as bad as his
+neighbours, but that he actually would be, if God withdrew His Spirit
+from him for a moment, and allowed him to forget the only faith which
+saves him from sin, loyalty to his unseen Saviour, the righteous King
+of kings.  Therefore he will not only rebuke his sinful neighbours;
+but he will tell them, as Jeremiah told his countrymen, that all
+their sin and misery proceed from this one thing, that they have
+forgotten that the Lord is their King.  He will pray daily for them,
+that the Lord their King may show Himself to their hearts and
+thoughts, and teach them all that He has done for them, and is doing
+for them; and may convert them to Himself that they may be truly His
+people, and His way may be known upon earth, His saving health among
+all nations.
+
+
+
+XXX--THE PERFECT KING
+
+
+
+Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh to thee, meek,
+and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.--MATTHEW
+xxi. 5.
+
+You all know that this Sunday is called the First Sunday in Advent.
+You all know, I hope, that Advent means coming, and that these four
+Sundays before Christmas, as I have often told you, are called Advent
+Sundays, because upon them we are called to consider the coming of
+our King and Saviour Jesus Christ.  If you will look at the Collects,
+Epistles, and Gospels for these next four Sundays, you will see at
+once that they all bear upon our Lord's coming.  The Gospels tell us
+of the prophecies about Christ which He fulfilled when He came.  The
+Epistles tell us what sort of men we ought to be, both clergy and
+people, because He has come and will come again.  The Collects pray
+that the Spirit of God would make us fit to live and die in a world
+into which Christ has come, and in which He is ruling now, and to
+which He will come again.  The text which I have taken this morning,
+you just heard in this Sunday's Gospel.  St. Matthew tells you that
+Jesus Christ fulfilled it by riding into Jerusalem in state upon an
+ass's colt; and St. Matthew surely speaks truth.  Let us consider
+what the prophecy is, and how Jesus Christ fulfilled it.  Then we
+shall see and believe from the Epistle what effect the knowledge of
+it ought to have upon our own souls, and hearts, and daily conduct.
+
+Now this prophecy, "Behold, thy king cometh unto thee," etc., you
+will find in your Bibles, in the ninth verse of the ninth chapter of
+the book of Zechariah.  But I do not think that Zechariah wrote it.
+St. Matthew does not say he wrote it; he merely calls it that which
+was spoken by the prophet, without mentioning his name.  Provided it
+is an inspired word from God, which it is, it perhaps does not matter
+to us so much who wrote it:  but I think it was written by the
+prophet Jeremiah, perhaps in the beginning of the reign of the good
+king Josiah; for the chapter in which this text is, and the two or
+three chapters which follow, are not at all like the rest of
+Zechariah's writings, but exactly like Jeremiah's.  They certainly
+seem to speak of things which did not happen in Zechariah's time, but
+in the time of Jeremiah, nearly ninety years before.  And, above all,
+St. Matthew himself seems plainly to have thought that some part, at
+least, of those chapters was Jeremiah's writing; for in the twenty-
+seventh chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, and in the ninth verse, you
+will find a prophecy about the potter's field, which St. Matthew says
+was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet.  Now, those words are not in the
+book of Jeremiah as it stands in our Bibles:  but they are in the
+book of Zechariah, in the eleventh chapter, twelfth and thirteenth
+verses, coming shortly after my text, and making a part of the same
+prophecy.  This has puzzled Christians very much, because it seemed
+as if St. Matthew has made a mistake, and miscalled Zechariah
+Jeremiah.  But I believe firmly that, as we are bound to expect, St.
+Matthew made no mistake whatsoever, and that Jeremiah did write that
+prophecy as St. Matthew said, and the two chapters before it, and
+perhaps the two after it, and that they were probably kept and
+preserved by Zechariah during the troublous times of the Babylonish
+captivity, and at last copied by Nehemiah into Zechariah's book of
+prophecy, where they stand now; and I think it is a comfort to know
+this, and to find that the evangelist St. Matthew has not made a
+mistake, but knew the Scriptures better than we do.
+
+But I think Jeremiah having written this prophecy in my text, which I
+believe he did, is also very important, because it will show us what
+the prophet meant when he spoke it, and how it was fulfilled in his
+time; and the better we understand that, the better we shall
+understand how our blessed Lord fulfilled it afterwards.
+
+Now, when Jeremiah was a young man, the Jews and their king Amon were
+in a state of most abominable wickedness.  They were worshipping
+every sort of idol and false god.  And the Bible, the book of God's
+law, was utterly unknown amongst them; so that Josiah the king, who
+succeeded Amon, had never seen or heard the book of the law of Moses,
+which makes part of our Old Testament, till he had reigned eighteen
+years, as you will find if you refer to 2 Kings xxii. 3.  But this
+Josiah was a gentle and just prince, and finding the book of the law
+of God, and seeing the abominable forgetfulness and idolatry into
+which his people had fallen, utterly breaking the covenant which God
+had made with their forefathers when he brought them up out of Egypt--
+when he found the book of the law, I say, and all that he and his
+people should have done and had not done, and the awful curses which
+God threatened in that book against those who broke His law, "he
+humbled himself before God, because his heart was tender, and turned
+to the Lord, as no king before him had ever turned," says the
+scripture, "with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all
+his might; so that there was no such king before him, or either after
+him."  The history of the great reformation which this great and good
+king worked, you may read at length in 2 Kings xxii. xxiii. and 2
+Chron. xxxiv. xxxv. which I advise you all to read.
+
+And it appears to me that this prophecy in the text first applies to
+the gentle and holy king Josiah, the first true and good king the
+Jews had had for years, and the best they were ever to have till
+Christ came Himself; and that it speaks of Josiah coming to Jerusalem
+to restore the worship of God, not with pomp and show, like the
+wicked kings both before and after him, but in meekness and
+humbleness of heart, for all the sins of his people, as the
+prophetess said of him in 2 Kings xxii. 19, "that his heart was
+tender and humble before the Lord;" neither coming with chariots and
+guards, like a king and conqueror, but riding upon an ass's colt; for
+that was, in those countries, the ancient sign of a man's being a man
+of peace, and not of war; a magistrate and lawgiver, and not a
+soldier and a conqueror.  Various places of holy scripture show us
+that this was the meaning of riding upon an ass in Judaea, just as it
+is in Eastern countries now.
+
+But some may say, How then is this a prophecy?  It merely tells us
+what good king Josiah was, and what every king ought to be.  Well, my
+friends, that is just what makes it a prophecy.  If it tells you what
+ought to be, it tells you what will be.  Yes, never forget that;
+whatever ought to be, surely will be; as surely as this is God's
+earth and Christ's kingdom, and not the devil's.
+
+Now, it does not matter in the least whether the prophet, when he
+spoke these words, knew that they would apply to the Lord Jesus
+Christ.  We have no need whatsoever to suppose that he did:  for
+scripture gives us no hint or warrant that he did; and if we have any
+real or honest reverence for scripture, we shall be careful to let it
+tell its own story, and believe that it contains all things necessary
+for salvation, without our patching our own notions into it over and
+above.  Wise men are generally agreed that those old prophets did
+not, for the most part, comprehend the full meaning of their own
+words.  Not that they were mere puppets and mouthpieces, speaking
+what to them was nonsense--God forbid!--But that just because they
+did thoroughly understand what was going on round them, and see
+things as God saw them, just because they had God's Eternal Spirit
+with them, therefore they spoke great and eternal words, which will
+be true for ever, and will go on for ever fulfilling themselves for
+more and more.  For in proportion as any man's words are true, and
+wide, and deep, they are truer, and wider, and deeper than that man
+thinks, and will apply to a thousand matters of which he never
+dreamt.  And so in all true and righteous speech, as in the speeches
+of the prophets of old, the glory is not man's who speaks them, but
+God's who reveals them, and who fulfils them again and again.
+
+It is true, then, that this text describes what every king should be--
+gentle and humble, a merciful and righteous lawgiver, not a self-
+willed and capricious tyrant.  But Josiah could not fulfil that.  He
+was a good king:  but he could not be a perfect one; for he was but a
+poor, sinful, weak, and inconsistent man, as we are.  But those words
+being inspired by the Holy Spirit, must be fulfilled.  There ought to
+be a perfect king, perfectly gentle and humble, having a perfect
+salvation, a perfect lawgiver; and therefore there must be such a
+king; and therefore St. Matthew tells us there came at last a perfect
+king--one who fulfilled perfectly the prophet's words--one who was
+not made king of Jerusalem, but was her King from the beginning; for
+that is the full meaning of "Thy King cometh to thee."  To Jerusalem
+He came, riding on the ass's colt, like the peaceful and fatherly
+judges of old time, for a sign to the poor souls round Him, who had
+no lawgivers but the proud and fierce Scribes and Pharisees, no king
+but the cruel and godless Caesar, and his oppressive and extortionate
+officers and troops.  Meek and lowly He came; and for once the people
+saw that He was the true Son of David--a man and king, like him,
+after God's own heart.  For once they felt that He had come in the
+name of the Lord the old Deliverer who brought them out of the land
+of Egypt, and made them into a nation, and loved and pitied them
+still, in spite of all their sins, and remembered His covenant, which
+they had forgotten.  And before that humble man, the Son of the
+village maiden, they cried:  "Hosanna to the Son of David.  Blessed
+is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.  Hosanna in the Highest."
+
+And do you think He came, the true and perfect King, only to go away
+again and leave this world as it was before, without a law, a ruler,
+a heavenly kingdom?  God forbid!  Jesus is the same yesterday, to-
+day, and for ever.  What He was then, when He rode in triumph into
+Jerusalem, that is He now to us this day--a king, meek and lowly, and
+having salvation; the head and founder of a kingdom which can never
+be moved, a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is
+God.  To that kingdom this land of England now belongs.  Into it we,
+as Englishmen, have been christened.  And the unchristened, though
+they know not of it, belong to it as well.  What God's will, what
+Christ's mercies may be to them, we know not.  That He has mercy for
+them, if their ignorance is not their own fault, we doubt not;
+perhaps, even if their ignorance be their own fault, we need not
+doubt that He has mercy for them, considering the mercy which He has
+shown to us, who deserved no more than they.  But His will to us we
+do know; and His will is this--our holiness.  For He came not only to
+assert His own power, to redeem his own world, but to set His people,
+the children of men, an example, that they should follow in His
+steps.  Herein, too, He is the perfect king.  He leads His subjects,
+He sets a perfect example to His subjects, and more, He inspires them
+with the power of following that example, as, if you will think, a
+perfect ruler ought to be able to do.  Josiah set the Jews an
+example, but he could not make them follow it.  They turned to God at
+the bidding of their good king, with their lips, in their outward
+conduct; but their hearts were still far from Him.  Jeremiah
+complains bitterly of this in the beginning of his prophecies.  He
+complains that Josiah's reformation was after all empty, hollow,
+hypocritical, a change on the surface only, while the wicked root was
+left.  They had healed, he said, the hurt of the daughter of his
+people slightly, crying, "Peace, peace, when there was no peace."
+But Jesus, the perfect King, is King of men's spirits as well as of
+their bodies.  He can turn the heart, He can renew the soul.  None so
+ignorant, none so sinful, none so crushed down with evil habits, but
+the Lord will and can forgive him, raise him up, enlighten him,
+strengthen him, if he will but claim his share in his King's mercy,
+his citizenship in the heavenly kingdom, and so put himself in tune
+again with himself, and with heaven, and earth, and all therein.
+
+Keeping in mind these things, that Jesus, because He is our perfect
+King, is both the example and the inspirer of our souls and
+characters, we may look without fear at the epistle for the day,
+where it calls on us to be very different persons from what we are,
+and declares to us our duty as subjects of Him who is meek and lowly,
+just and having salvation.  It is no superstitious, slavish message,
+saying:  "You have lost Christ's mercy and Christ's kingdom; you must
+buy it back again by sacrifices, and tears, and hard penances, or
+great alms-deeds and works of mercy."  No.  It simply says:  "You
+belong to Christ already, give up your hearts to Him and follow His
+example.  If He is perfect, His is the example to follow; if he is
+perfect, His commandments must be perfect, fit for all places, all
+times, all employments; if He is the King of heaven and earth, His
+commandments must be in tune with heaven and earth, with the laws of
+nature, the true laws of society and trade, with the constitution,
+and business, and duty, and happiness of all mankind, and for ever
+obey Him."
+
+Owe no man anything save love, for He owed no man anything.  He gave
+up all, even His own rights, for a time, for His subjects.  Will you
+pretend to follow Him while you hold back from your brothers and
+fellow-servants their just due?  One debt you must always owe; one
+debt will grow the more you pay it, and become more delightful to
+owe, the greater and heavier you feel it to be, and that is love;
+love to all around you, for all around you are your brothers and
+sisters; all around you are the beloved subjects of your King and
+Saviour.  Love them as you love yourself, and then you cannot harm
+them, you cannot tyrannise over them, you cannot wish to rise by
+scrambling up on their shoulders, taking the bread out of their
+mouths, making your profit out of their weakness and their need.
+This, St. Paul says, was the duty of men in his time, because the
+night of heathendom was far spent, the day of Christianity and the
+Church was at hand.  Much more is it our duty now--our duty, who have
+been born in the full sunshine of Christianity, christened into His
+church as children, we and our fathers before us, for generations, of
+the kingdom of God.  Ay, my friends, these words, that kingdom, that
+King, witness this day against this land of England.  Not merely
+against popery, the mote which we are trying to take out of the
+foreigner's eye, but against Mammon, the beam which we are
+overlooking in our own.  Owe no man anything save love.  "Thou shalt
+love thy neighbour as thyself."  That is the law of your King, who
+loved not Himself or His own profit, His own glory, but gave Himself
+even to death for those who had forgotten Him and rebelled against
+Him.  That law witnesses against selfishness and idleness in rich and
+poor.  It witnesses against the employer who grinds down his workmen;
+who, as the world tells him he has a right to do, takes advantage of
+their numbers, their ignorance, their low and reckless habits, to
+rise upon their fall, and grow rich out of their poverty.  It
+witnesses against the tradesman who tries to draw away his
+neighbour's custom.  It witnesses against the working man who spends
+in the alehouse the wages which might support and raise his children,
+and then falls back recklessly and dishonestly on the parish rates
+and the alms of the charitable.  Against them all this law witnesses.
+These things are unfit for the kingdom of Christ, contrary to the
+laws and constitution thereof, hateful to the King thereof; and if a
+nation will not amend these abominations, the King will arise out of
+His place, and with sore judgments and terrible He will visit His
+land and purify His temple, saying:  "My Father's house should be a
+house of prayer, and ye have made it a den of thieves."  Ay, woe to
+any soul, or to any nation, which, instead of putting on the Lord
+Jesus Christ, copying His example, obeying His laws, and living
+worthy of His kingdom, not only in the church, but in the market, the
+shop, the senate, or the palace, give themselves up to covetousness,
+which is idolatry; and care only to make provision for the flesh, to
+fulfil the lusts thereof.  Woe to them; for, let them be what they
+will, their King cannot change.  He is still meek and lowly; He is
+still just and having salvation; and He will purge out of His kingdom
+all that is not like Himself, the unchaste and the idle, the unjust
+and the unmerciful, and the covetous man, who is an idolater, says
+the scripture, though he may call himself seven times a Protestant,
+and rail at the Pope in public meetings, while he justifies
+greediness and tyranny by glib words about the necessities of
+business and the laws of trade, and by philosophy falsely so called,
+which cometh not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish.  Such
+a man loves and makes a lie, and the Lord of truth will surely send
+him to his own place.
+
+
+
+XXXI--GOD'S WARNINGS
+
+
+
+It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I
+purpose to do unto them; that they may return every man from his evil
+way; that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin.--JEREMIAH
+xxxvi. 3.
+
+The first lesson for this evening's service tells us of the
+wickedness of Jehoiakim, king of Judah.  How, when Jeremiah's
+prophecies against the sins of Jehoiakim and his people were read
+before him, he cut the roll with a penknife, and threw it into the
+fire.  Now, we must not look on this story as one which, because it
+happened among the Jews many hundred years ago, has nothing to do
+with us; for, as I continually remind you, the history of the Jews,
+and the whole Old Testament, is the history of God's dealings with
+man--the account of God's plan of governing this world.  Now, God
+cannot change; but is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and
+therefore His plan of government cannot change:  but if men do as
+those did of whom we read in the Old Testament, God will surely deal
+with them as He dealt with the men of the Old Testament.  This St.
+Paul tells us most plainly in the tenth chapter of 1 Corinthians,
+where he says that the whole history of the Jews was written for our
+example--that is for the example of those Christian Corinthians, who
+were not Jews at all, but Gentiles as we are; and therefore for our
+example also.
+
+He tells them, that it was Christ Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, who
+fed and guided the old Jews in the wilderness, and that the Lord will
+deal with us exactly as He dealt with the old Jews.
+
+Therefore it is a great and fearful mistake, to suppose that because
+the Jews were a peculiar people and God's chosen nation, that
+therefore the Lord's way of governing them is in any wise different
+from His way of governing us English at this very day; for that fancy
+is contrary to the express words of Holy Scripture, in a hundred
+different places; it is contrary to the whole spirit of our Prayer
+Book, which is written all through on the belief that the Lord deals
+with us just as He did with the Jewish nation, and which will not
+even make sense if it be understood in any other way; and besides, it
+is most dangerous to the souls and consciences of men.  It is most
+dangerous for us to fancy that God can change; for if God can change,
+right and wrong can change; for right is the will of God, and wrong
+is what is against His will; and if we once let into our hearts the
+notion that God can change His laws of right, our consciences will
+become daily dimmer and more confused about right and wrong, till we
+fall, as too many do, under the prophet's curse, "Woe to them who
+call good evil, and evil good; who put sweet for bitter, and bitter
+for sweet," and fancy, like Ezekiel's Jews, that God's ways are
+unequal; that is, unlike each other, changeable, arbitrary, and
+capricious, doing one thing at one time, and another at another.  No.
+It is sinful man who is changeable; it is sinful man who is
+arbitrary.  But The Lord is not a man, that He should lie or repent;
+for He is the only-begotten Son, and therefore the express likeness,
+of The Everlasting Father, in whom is no variableness, nor shadow of
+turning.
+
+But some may say, Is not that a gloomy and terrible notion of God,
+that He cannot change His purpose?  Is not that as much as to say
+that there is a dark necessity hanging over each of us; that a man
+must just be what God chooses, and do just what He has ordained to
+do, and go to everlasting happiness or misery exactly as God has
+foreordained from all eternity, so that there is no use trying to do
+right, or not to do wrong?  If I am to be saved, say such people, I
+shall be saved whether I try or not; and if I am to be damned, I
+shall be damned whether I try or not.  I am in God's hands like clay
+in the hands of the potter; and what I am like is therefore God's
+business, and not mine.
+
+No, my friends, the very texts in the Bible which tell us that God
+cannot change or repent, tell us what it is that He cannot change in--
+in showing loving-kindness and tender mercy, long-suffering, and
+repenting of the evil.  Whatsoever else He cannot repent of, He
+cannot repent of repenting of the evil.
+
+It is true, we are in His hand as clay in the hand of the potter.
+But it is a sad misreading of scripture to make that mean that we are
+to sit with our hands folded, careless about our own way and conduct;
+still less that we are to give ourselves up to despair, because we
+have sinned against God; for what is the very verse which follows
+after that?  Listen.  "O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as
+this potter? saith the Lord.  Behold, as the clay is in the hand of
+the potter, so are ye in my hand, O house of Israel.  At what instant
+I shall speak concerning a kingdom, to pull down and destroy it; if
+that nation against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I
+will repent of the evil which I thought to do to them.  And at what
+instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom,
+to build and to plant it; if it do evil in my sight, that it obey not
+my voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said I would
+benefit them."
+
+So that the lesson which we are to draw from the parable of the
+potter's clay is just the exact opposite which some men draw.  Not
+that God's decrees are absolute:  but that they are conditional, and
+depend on our good or evil conduct.  Not that His election or His
+reprobation are unalterable, but that they alter "at that instant" at
+which man alters.  Not that His grace and will are irresistible, as
+the foolish man against whom St. Paul argues fancies:  but that we
+can resist God's will, and that our destruction comes only by
+resisting His will; in short, that God's will is no brute material
+necessity and fate, but the will of a living, loving Father.
+
+And the very same lesson is taught us in Ezek. xviii., of which I
+spoke just now; for if we read that chapter we shall find that the
+Jews had a false notion of God that He had changed His character, and
+had become in their time unmerciful and unjust.  They fancied that
+God was, if I may so speak, obstinate--that if His anger had once
+arisen, there was no turning it away, but that He would go on without
+pity, punishing the innocent children for their father's sin; and
+therefore they fancied God's ways were unfair, self-willed, and
+arbitrary, without any care of what sort of person He afflicted;
+punishing the righteous as well as the wicked, after He had promised
+in His law to reward the righteous and punish the wicked.  They
+fancied that His way of governing the world had changed, and that He
+did not in their days make a difference between the bad and the good.
+Therefore Ezekiel says to them:  "When the righteous man turneth away
+from his righteousness, he shall die."  "When the wicked man turneth
+away from his wickedness, he shall live."  "Have I any pleasure at
+all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God, and not that he
+should return from his ways, and live?"
+
+This, then, is the good news, that God is love; love when He
+punishes, and love when He forgives; very pitiful, and full of long-
+suffering and tender mercy and repenting Him, never of the good, but
+only of the evil which He threatens.
+
+Both Jeremiah, therefore, and Ezekiel, give us the same lesson.  God
+does not change, and therefore He never changes His mercy and His
+justice:  for He is merciful because He is just.  If we confess our
+sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.  That is His
+everlasting law, and has been from the beginning:  Punishment, sure
+and certain, for those who do not repent; and free forgiveness, sure
+and certain also, for those who do repent.
+
+So He spoke to Jeremiah in the time of Jehoiakim:  "It may be that
+the house of Judah will hear all the evil that I purpose to do to
+them; that I may forgive them their iniquity and their sin."  The
+Lord, you see, wishes to forgive--longs to forgive.  His heart yearns
+over sinful men as a father's over his rebellious child.  But if they
+will still rebel, if they will still turn their wicked wills away
+from Him, He must punish.  Why we know not; but He knows.  Punish He
+must, unless we repent--unless we turn our wills toward His will.
+And woe to the stiff-necked and stout-hearted man who, like the
+wicked king Jehoiakim, sets his face like a flint against God's
+warnings.  How many, how many behave for years, Sunday after Sunday,
+just as king Jehoiakim did!  When he heard that God had threatened
+him with ruin for his sins, he heard also that God offered him free
+pardon if he would repent.  Jeremiah gave him free choice to be saved
+or to be ruined; but his heart and will were hardened.  Hearing that
+he was wrong only made him angry.  His pride and self-will were hurt
+by being told that he must change and alter his ways.  He had chosen
+his way, and he would keep to it; and he cared nothing for God's
+offers of forgiveness, because he could not be forgiven unless he did
+what he was too proud to do, confess himself to be in the wrong, and
+openly alter his conduct.  And how many, as I first said, are like
+him!  They come to church; they hear God's warnings and threats
+against their evil ways; they hear God's offers of free pardon and
+forgiveness; but being told that they are in the wrong makes them too
+angry to care for God's offers of pardon.  Pride stops their cars.
+They have chosen their own way, and they will keep it.  They would
+not object to be forgiven, if they might be forgiven without
+repenting.  But they do not like to confess themselves in the wrong.
+They do not like to face their foolish companions' remarks and sneers
+about their changed ways.  They do not like even good people to say
+of them:  "You see now that you were in the wrong after all; for you
+have altered your mind and your doings yourself, as we told you you
+would have to do."  No; anything sooner than confess themselves in
+the wrong; and so they turn their backs on God's mercy, for the sake
+of their own carnal pride and self-will.
+
+But, of course, they want an excuse for doing that; and when a man
+wants an excuse, the devil will soon fit him with a good one.  Then,
+perhaps, the foolish sinner behaves as Jehoiakim did.  He tries to
+forget God's message in the man who brings it.  He grows angry with
+the preacher, or goes out and laughs at the preacher when service is
+over, as if it was the preacher's fault that God had declared what he
+has; as if it was the preacher's doing that God has revealed His
+anger against all sin and unrighteousness.  So he acts like
+Jehoiakim, who tried to take Jeremiah the prophet and punish HIM, for
+what not he but the Lord God had declared.  Nay, they will often
+peevishly hate the very sight of a good book, because it reminds them
+of the sins of which they do not choose to be reminded, just as the
+young king Jehoiakim was childish enough to vent his spite on
+Jeremiah's book of prophecies, by cutting the roll on which it was
+written with a penknife, and throwing it into the fire.  So do
+sinners who are angry with the preacher who warns them, or hate the
+sight of good books.  But let such foolish and wilful sinners, such
+full-grown children--for, after all, they are no better--hear the
+word of the Lord which came to Jehoiakim:  "As it is written, he that
+despiseth Me shall be despised, saith the Lord."  And let them not
+fancy that their shutting their ears will shut the preacher's mouth,
+still less shut up God's everlasting laws of punishment for sin.  No.
+God's word stands true, and it will happen to them as it did to
+Jehoiakim.  His burning Jeremiah's book did not rid him of the book,
+or save him from the woe and ruin which was prophesied in it; for we
+have Jeremiah's book here in our Bibles to this day, as a sign and a
+warning of what happens to men, be they young or old, be they kings
+or labouring men, who fight against God.  Jeremiah's words were not
+lost after all; they were all re-written, and there were added to
+them also many more like words; for Jehoiakim, by refusing the Lord's
+offer of pardon, had added to his sins, and therefore the Lord added
+to his punishment.
+
+Perhaps, again, the devil finds the wilful sinner another excuse, and
+the man says to himself, as the Jews did in Ezekiel's time:  "The
+fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on
+edge.  It is not my own fault that I am living a bad life, but other
+people's.  My parents ought to have brought me up better.  I have had
+no chance.  My companions taught me too much harm.  I have too much
+trouble to get my living; or, I was born with a bad temper; or, I
+can't help running after pleasure.  Why did God make me the sort of
+man I am, and put me where I am?  God is hard upon me; He is unfair
+to me.  His ways are unequal; He expects as much of me as He does of
+people who have more opportunities.  He threatens to punish me for
+other people's sins."
+
+And then comes another and a darker temptation over the man, and the
+devil whispers to him such thoughts as these:  "God does not care for
+me; God hates me.  Luck, and everything else is against me.  There
+seems to be some curse upon me.  Why should I change?  Let God change
+first to me, and then I will change toward Him.  But God will not
+change; He is determined to have no mercy on me.  I can see that; for
+everything goes wrong with me.  Then what use in my repenting?  I
+will just go my own way, and what must be must.  There is no
+resisting God's will.  If I am to be saved, I shall be; if I am to be
+damned, I shall be.  I will put all melancholy thoughts out of my
+head, and go and enjoy myself and forget all.  At all events, it
+won't last long:  'Let me eat and drink, for to-morrow I die.'"
+
+Oh, my dear friends, have not some of you sometimes had such
+thoughts?  Then hear the word of the Lord to you:  "When--whensoever--
+whensoever the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness which he
+hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall
+save his soul alive."  "Have I any pleasure in the death of him that
+dieth? saith the Lord, and not rather that he should be converted,
+and live?"  True, most true, that the Lord is unchangeable:  but it
+is in love and mercy.  True, that God's will and law cannot alter:
+but what is God's will and law?  The soul that sinneth, it shall die?
+Yes.  But also, the soul that turneth away from its sin, it shall
+live.  Never believe the devil when he tells you that God hates you.
+Never believe him when he tells you that God has been too hard on
+you, and put you into such temptation, or ignorance, or poverty, or
+anything else, that you cannot mend.  No.  That font there will give
+the devil the lie.  That font says:  "Be you poor, tempted, ignorant,
+stupid, be you what you will, you are God's child--your Father's love
+is over you, His mercy is ready for you."  You feel too weak to
+change; ask God's Spirit, and He will give you a strength of mind you
+never felt before.  You feel too proud to change; ask God's Spirit,
+and He will humble your proud heart, and soften your hard heart; and
+you will find to your surprise, that when your pride is gone, when
+you are utterly ashamed of yourself, and see your sins in their true
+blackness, and feel not worthy to look up to God, that then, instead
+of pride, will come a nobler, holier, manlier feeling--self-respect,
+and a clear conscience, and the thought that, weak and sinful as you
+are, you are in the right way; that God, and the angels of God, are
+smiling on you; that you are in tune again with all heaven and earth,
+because you are what God wills you to be--not His proud, peevish,
+self-willed child, fancying yourself strong enough to go alone, when
+in reality you are the slave of your own passions and appetites, and
+the plaything of the devil:  but His loving, loyal son, strong in the
+strength which God gives you, and able to do what you will, because
+what you will God wills also.
+
+
+
+XXXII--PHARAOH'S HEART
+
+
+
+And the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and he did not let the people
+go.--Exodus ix. 17.
+
+What lesson, now, can we draw from this story?  One, at least, and a
+very important one.  What effect did all these signs and wonders of
+God's sending, have upon Pharaoh and his servants?  Did they make
+them better men or worse men?  We read that they made them worse men;
+that they helped to harden their hearts.  We read that the Lord
+hardened Pharaoh's heart, so that he would not let the children of
+Israel go.  Now, how did the Lord do that?  He did not wish and mean
+to make Pharaoh more hard-hearted, more wicked.  That is impossible.
+God, who is all goodness and love, never can wish to make any human
+being one atom worse than he is.  He who so loved the world that He
+came down on earth to die for sinners, and take away the sins of the
+world, would never make any human being a greater sinner than he was
+before.  That is impossible, and horrible to think of.  Therefore,
+when we read that the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, we must be
+certain that that was Pharaoh's own fault; and so, we read, it was
+Pharaoh's own fault.  The Lord did not bring all these plagues on
+Egypt without giving Pharaoh fair warning.  Before each plague, He
+sent Moses to tell Pharaoh that the plague was coming.  The Lord told
+Pharaoh that He was his Master, and the Master and Lord of the whole
+earth; that the children of Israel belonged to Him, and the Egyptians
+too; that the river, light and darkness, the weather, the crops, and
+the insects, and the locusts belonged to Him; that all diseases which
+afflict man and beast were in His power.  And the Lord proved that
+His words were true, in a way Pharaoh could not mistake, by changing
+the river into blood, and sending darkness, and hailstones, and
+plagues of lice and flies, and at last by killing the firstborn of
+all the Egyptians.  The Lord gave Pharaoh every chance; He
+condescended to argue with him as one man would with another, and
+proved His word to be true, and proved that He had a right to command
+Pharaoh.  And therefore, I say, if Pharaoh's heart was hardened, it
+was his own fault, for the Lord was plainly trying to soften it, and
+to bring him to reason.  And the Bible says distinctly that it was
+Pharaoh's own fault.  For it says that Pharaoh hardened his own
+heart, he and his servants, and therefore they would not let the
+children of Israel go.  Now how could Pharaoh harden his own heart,
+and yet the Lord harden it at the same time?
+
+Just in the same way, my friends, as too many of us are apt to make
+the Lord harden our hearts by hardening them ourselves, and to make,
+as Pharaoh did, the very things which the Lord sends to soften us,
+the causes of our becoming more stubborn; the very things which the
+Lord sends to bring us to reason, the means of our becoming more mad
+and foolish.  Believe me, my friends, this is no old story with which
+we have nothing to do.  What happened to Pharaoh's heart may happen
+to yours, or mine, or any man's.  Alas! alas! it does happen to many
+a man's and woman's heart every day--and may the Lord have mercy on
+them before it be too late,--and yet how can the Lord have mercy on
+those who will not let Him have mercy on them?
+
+What do I mean?  This is what I mean, my friends; Oh, listen to it,
+and take it solemnly to heart, you who are living still in sin; take
+it to heart, lest you, like Pharaoh, die in your sins, and your
+latter end will be worse than your beginning.
+
+Suppose a man to be going on in some sinful habit; cheating his
+neighbours, grinding his labourers, or getting tipsy, or living with
+a woman without being married to her.  He comes to church, and there
+he hears the word of the Lord, by the Bible, or in sermons, telling
+him that God commands him to give up his sin, that God will certainly
+punish him if he does not repent and amend.  God sends that message
+to him in love and mercy, to soften his heart by the terrors of the
+law, and turn him from his sin.  But what does the man feel?  He
+feels angry and provoked; angry with the preacher; ay, angry with the
+Bible itself, with God's words.  For he hates to hear the words which
+tell him of his sin; he wishes they were not in the Bible; he longs
+to stop the preacher's mouth; and, as he cannot do that, he dislikes
+going to church.  He says:  "I cannot, and what is more, I will not,
+give up my sinful ways, and therefore I shall not go to church to be
+told of them."  So he stops away from church, and goes on in his
+sins.  So that man's heart is hardened, just as Pharaoh's was.  Yet
+the Lord has come and spoken to that sinful man in loving warnings:
+though all the effect it has had is that the Lord's message has made
+him worse than he was before, more stubborn, more godless, more
+unwilling to hear what is good.  But men may fall into a still worse
+state of mind.  They may determine to set the Lord at naught; to hear
+Him speaking to their conscience, and know that He is right and they
+wrong, and yet quietly put the good thoughts and feelings out of
+their way, and go in the course which they know to be the worst.  How
+many a man in business or the world says to himself, ay, and in his
+better moments will say to his friend:  "Ah, yes, if one could but be
+what one would wish to be. . . .  What one's mother used to say one
+might be. . . .  But for such a world as this, the gospel ideal is
+somewhat too fine and unpractical.  One has one's business to carry
+on, or one's family to provide for, or one's party in politics to
+serve; one must obey the laws of trade, the usages of society, the
+interests of one's class;" and so forth.  And so an excuse is found
+for every sin, by those who know in their hearts that they are
+sinning; for every sin; and among others, too often, for that sin of
+Pharaoh's, of "NOT LETTING THE PEOPLE GO."
+
+And how many, my friends, when they come to church, harden their
+hearts in the same quiet, almost good-humoured way, not caring enough
+for God's message to be even angry with it, and take the preacher's
+warnings as they would a shower of rain, as something unpleasant
+which cannot be helped; and which, therefore, they must sit out
+patiently, and think about it as little as possible?  And when the
+sermon is over, they take their hats and go out into the churchyard,
+and begin talking about something else as quickly as possible, to
+drive the unpleasant thoughts, if there are a few left, out of their
+heads.  And thus they let the Lord's message to them harden their
+hearts.  For it does harden them, my friends, if it be taken in this
+temper.  Every time anyone sits through the service or the sermon in
+this stupid and careless mood, he dulls and deadens his soul, till at
+last he is able coolly to sit through the most awful warnings of
+God's judgment, the most tender entreaties of God's love, as if he
+were a brute animal without understanding.  Ay, he is able to make
+the responses to the commandments, and join in the psalms, and so
+with his own mouth, before the whole congregation, confess that God's
+curse is on his doings, with no more sense or care of what the words
+mean, and of what a sentence he is pronouncing against himself, than
+if he were a parrot taught to speak by rote words which he does not
+understand.  And so that man, by hardening his own heart, makes the
+Lord harden it for him.
+
+But there is a third way, and a worse way still, in which people's
+hearts are hardened by the Lord's speaking to them.  A man is warned
+of his sins by the preacher; and he says to himself:  "If the
+minister thinks that he is going to frighten me away from church, he
+is very much mistaken.  He may go his way, and I shall go mine.  Let
+him preach at me as much as he will; I shall go to church all the
+more for that, to show him that I am not afraid."  And so the Lord's
+warnings harden his heart, and provoke him to set his face like a
+flint, and become all the more proud and stubborn.
+
+Now, young people, I speak openly to you as man to man.  Will you
+tell me that this was not the very way in which some of you took my
+sermon last Sunday afternoon, in which I warned you of the misery
+which your sinful lives would bring upon you?  Was there not more
+than one of you, who, as soon as he got outside the church, began
+laughing and swaggering, and said to the lad next him:  "Well, he
+gave it us well in his sermon this afternoon, did he not?  But I
+don't care; do you?"
+
+To which the other foolish fellow answered:  "Not I.  It is his
+business to talk like that; he is paid for it, and I suppose he likes
+it.  So if he does what he likes, we shall do what we like.  Come
+along."  And at that all the other foolish fellows round burst out
+laughing, as if the poor lad had said a very clever thing; and they
+all went off together, having their hearts hardened by the Lord's
+warning to them, as Pharaoh's was.
+
+And they showed, I am afraid, that very evening that their hearts
+were hardened.  For out of a sort of spite and stubbornness they took
+a delight in doing what was wrong, just because they had been told
+that it was wrong, and because they were determined to show that they
+would not be frightened or turned from what they chose.
+
+And all the while they knew that it was wrong, did those poor foolish
+lads.  If you had asked one of them openly, "Do you not know that God
+has forbidden you to do this?" they would have either been forced to
+say, "Yes," or else they would have tried to laugh the matter off, or
+perhaps held their tongues and looked silly, or perhaps again
+answered insolently; showing by each and all of these ways of taking
+it, that the Lord's message had come home to their consciences, and
+convinced them of their sin, though they were determined not to own
+it or obey it.  And the way they would have put the matter by and
+excused themselves to themselves would have been just the way in
+which Pharaoh did it.  They would have tried to forget that the Lord
+had warned them, and tried to make out to themselves that it was all
+the preacher's doing, and to make it a personal quarrel between him
+and them.  Just so Pharaoh did when he hardened his heart.  He made
+the Lord's message a ground for hating and threatening Moses and
+Aaron, as if it was any fault of theirs.  He knew in his heart that
+the Lord had sent them; but he tried to forget that, and drove them
+out from his presence, and told them that if they dared to appear
+before him again they should surely die.  And just so, my friends,
+people will be angry with the preacher for telling them unpleasant
+truths, as if it was any more pleasure to him to speak than for them
+to hear.  Oh, why will you forget that the words which I speak from
+this pulpit are not my words, but God's?  It is not I who warn you of
+what you are bringing on yourselves by your sins, it is God Himself.
+There it is written in His Bible--judge for yourselves.  Read your
+Bibles for yourselves, and you will see that I am not speaking my own
+thoughts and words.  And as for being angry with me for telling you
+truth, read the ordination service which is read whenever a clergyman
+is ordained, and judge for yourselves.  What is a clergyman sent into
+the world for at all, but to say to you what I am saying now?  What
+should I be but a hypocrite and a traitor to the blessed Lord who
+died for me, and saved me from my sins, and ordained me to preach to
+sinners, that they too may be saved from their sins,--what should I
+be but a traitor to Him, if I did not say to you, whenever I see you
+going wrong:
+
+"O come, let us worship, and fall down and kneel before the Lord our
+Maker.
+
+"For He is the Lord our God; and we are the people of His pasture,
+and the sheep of His hand.
+
+"To-day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts,
+
+"Lest He sware in His wrath that you shall not enter into His rest!"
+
+And now, my friends, I will tell you what will happen to you.  You
+see that I know something, without having been told of what has been
+going on in your hearts.  I beseech you, believe me when I tell you
+what will go on in them.  God will chastise you for your sins.  He
+will; just because He loves you, and does not hate you; just because
+you are His children, and not dumb animals born to perish.  Troubles
+will come upon you as you grow older.  Of what sort they will be I
+cannot tell; but that they will come, I can tell full well.  And when
+the Lord sends trouble to you, shall it harden your hearts or soften
+them?  It depends on you, altogether on you, whether the Lord hardens
+your hearts by sending those sorrows, or whether He softens and turns
+them and brings them back to the only right place for them--home to
+Him.  But your trouble may only harden your heart all the more.  The
+sorrows and sore judgments which the Lord sent Pharaoh only hardened
+his heart.  It all depends upon the way in which you take these
+troubles, my friends.  And that not so much when they come as after
+they come.  Almost all, let their hearts be right with God or not,
+seem to take sorrow as they ought, while the sorrow is on them.
+Pharaoh did so too.  He said to Moses and Aaron:  "I have sinned this
+time.  The Lord is righteous, and I and my people are wicked.
+Entreat the Lord that there be no more mighty thunderings and hail;
+and I will let you go."  What could be more right or better spoken?
+Was not Pharaoh in a proper state of mind then?  Was not his heart
+humbled, and his will resigned to God?  Moses thought not.  For while
+he promised Pharaoh to pray that the storm might pass over, yet he
+warned him:  "But as for thee and thy servants, I know that ye will
+not yet fear the Lord your God."  And so it happened; for, "when
+Pharaoh saw that the rain, and hail, and thunder had ceased, he
+sinned yet more, and hardened his heart, he and his servants.
+Neither would he let the children of Israel go." . . .  And so, alas!
+it happens to many a man and woman nowadays.  They find themselves on
+a sick-bed.  They are in fear of death, in fear of poverty, in fear
+of shame and punishment for their misdeeds.  And then they say:  "It
+is God's judgment.  I have been very wicked.  I know God is punishing
+me.  Oh, if God will but raise me up off this sick-bed; if He will
+but help me out of this trouble, I will give up all my wicked ways.
+I will repent and amend."  So said Pharaoh; and yet, as soon as he
+was safe out of his distress, he hardened his heart.  And so does
+many a man and woman, who, when they get safe through their troubles,
+never give up one of their sins, any more than Pharaoh did.  They
+really believe that God has punished them.  They really intend to
+amend, while they are in the trouble:  but as soon as they are out of
+it, they try to persuade themselves that it was not God who sent the
+sorrow, that it came "by accident," or that "people must have trouble
+in this life," or that "if they had taken better care, they might
+have prevented it."--All of them excuses to themselves for forgetting
+God in the matter, and, therefore, for forgetting what they promised
+to God in trouble; and so, after all, they go on just as they went on
+before.  And yet not as they went on before.  For every such sin
+hardens their hearts; every such sin makes them less able to see
+God's hand in what happens to them; every such sin makes them more
+bold and confident in disobeying God, and saying to themselves:
+"After all, why should I be so frightened when I am in trouble, and
+make such promises to amend my life?  For the trouble goes away,
+whether I mend my life or not; and nothing happens to me; God does
+not punish me for not keeping my promises to Him.  I may as well go
+on in my own way, for I seem not the worse off in body or in purse
+for so doing."  Thus do people harden their hearts after each
+trouble, as Pharaoh did; so that you will see people, by one
+affliction after another, one loss after another, all their lives
+through, warned by God that sin will not prosper them; and confessing
+that their sins have brought God's punishment on them:  and yet going
+on steadily in the very sins which have brought on their troubles,
+and gaining besides, as time runs on, a heart more and more hardened.
+And why?
+
+Because they, like Pharaoh, love to have their own way.  They will
+not submit to God, and do what He bids them, and believe that what He
+bids them must be right--good for them, and for all around them.
+
+They promised to mend.  But they promised as Pharaoh did.  "If God
+will take away this trouble, then I will mend"--meaning, though they
+do not dare to say it:  "And if God will not take away this trouble,
+of course He cannot expect me to mend."  In plain English--If God
+will not act toward them as they like, then they will not act toward
+Him as He likes.  My friends, God does not need us to bargain with
+Him.  We must obey Him whether we like it or not; whether it seems to
+pay us or not; whether He takes our trouble off us or not; we must
+obey, for He is the Lord; and if we will not obey, He will prove His
+power on us, as He did on Pharaoh, by showing plainly what is the end
+of those who resist His will.
+
+What, then, are we to do when our sins bring us, as they certainly
+will some day bring us, into trouble?
+
+What we ought to have done at first, my friends.  What we ought to
+have done in the wild days of youth, and so have saved ourselves many
+a dark day, many a sleepless night, many a bitter shame and
+heartache.  To open our eyes, and see that the only thing for men and
+women, whom God has made, is to obey the God who has made them.  He
+is the Lord.  He has made us.  He will have us do one thing.  How can
+we hope to prosper by doing anything else?  It is ill fighting
+against God.  Which is the stronger, my friends, you or God?  Make up
+your minds on that.  It surely will not take you long.
+
+But someone may say:  "I do wish and long to obey God; but I am so
+weak, and my sins have so entangled me with bad company, or debts,
+or--, or--."  We all know, alas! into what a net everyone who gives
+way to sin gets his feet:  "And therefore I cannot obey God.  I long
+to do so.  I feel, I know, when I look back, that all my sin, and
+shame, and unhappiness, come from being proud and self-willed, and
+determined to have my own way, and do what I choose.  But I cannot
+mend."  Do not despair, poor soul!  I had a thousand times sooner
+hear you say you cannot mend, than that you can.  For those who say
+they can mend, are apt to say:  "I can mend; and therefore I shall
+mend when I choose, and no sooner."  But those who really feel they
+cannot mend--those who are really weary and worn out with the burden
+of their sins--those who are really tired out with their own
+wilfulness, and feel ready to lie down and die, like a spent horse,
+and say:  "God, take me away, no matter to what place; I am not fit
+to live here on earth, a shame and a torment to myself day and
+night"--those who are in that state of mind, are very near--very near
+finding out glorious news.
+
+Those who cannot mend themselves and know it, God will mend.  God
+will mend your lives for you.  He knows as well as you what you have
+to struggle against; ay, a thousand times better.  He knows--what
+does He not know?  Pray to Him, and try what He does not know.  Cry
+to Him to rid you of your bad companions; He will find a way of doing
+it.  Cry to Him to bring you out of the temptations you feel too
+strong for you; He will find a way for doing it.  Cry to Him to teach
+you what you ought to do, and He will send someone, and that the
+right person, doubt it not, to teach you in His own good time.  Above
+all, cry and pray to Him to conquer the pride, and self-conceit, and
+wilfulness in your heart; to take the hard proud heart of stone out
+of you, and give you instead a heart of flesh, loving, and tender,
+and kindly to every human creature; and He will do it.  Cry to Him to
+make your will like His own will, that you may love what He loves,
+and hate what He hates, and do what He wishes you to do.  And then
+you will surely find my words come true:  "Those who long to mend,
+and yet know that they cannot mend themselves, let them but pray, and
+God will mend them."
+
+
+
+XXXIII--THE RED SEA TRIUMPH
+
+
+
+Preached Easter-day Morning, 1852.
+
+This is a night to be much observed unto the Lord, for bringing the
+children of Israel out of the land of Egypt.--EXODUS xii. 42.
+
+You all, my friends, know what is the meaning of Easter-day--that it
+is the Day on which The Lord rose again from the dead.  You must have
+seen that most of the special services for this day, the Collect,
+Epistle, and Gospel, and the second lessons, both morning and
+evening, reminded you of Christ's rising again; and so did the proper
+Psalms for this day, though it may seem at first sight more difficult
+to see what they have to do with the Lord's rising again.
+
+Now the first lessons, both for the morning and evening services,
+were also meant to remind us of the very same thing, though it may
+seem even more difficult still, at first sight, to understand how
+they do so.
+
+Let us see what these two first lessons are about.  The morning one
+was from the twelfth chapter of Exodus, and told us what the Passover
+was, and what it meant.  The first lesson for this afternoon was the
+fourteenth chapter of Exodus.  Surely you must remember it.  Surely
+the most careless of you must have listened to that glorious story,
+how the Jews went through the Red Sea as if it had been dry land,
+while Pharaoh and the Egyptian army, trying to follow them, were
+overwhelmed in the water.  Surely you cannot have heard how the poor
+Jews looked back from the farther shore, and hardly believed their
+own eyes for joy and wonder, when they saw their proud masters swept
+away for ever, and themselves safe and free out of the hateful land
+where they had been slaves for hundreds of years.  You cannot surely,
+my friends, have heard that glorious story, and forgotten it again
+already.  I hope not; for God knows, that tale of the Jews coming
+safe through the Red Sea has a deep and blessed meaning enough for
+you, if you could but see it.
+
+But some of you may be saying to yourselves:  "No doubt it is a very
+noble story; and a man cannot help rejoicing at the poor Jews'
+escape, and at the downfall of those cruel Egyptians.  It is a
+pleasant thought, no doubt, that if it were but for that once, God
+interfered to help poor suffering creatures, and rid them of their
+tyrants.  But what has that to do with Easter Day and Christ's rising
+again?"
+
+I will try to show you, my friends.  The Jews' Passover is the same
+as our Easter-day, as you know already.  But they are not merely
+alike in being kept on the same day.  They are alike because they are
+both of them remembrances and tokens of the Lord Jesus Christ's
+delivering men out of misery and slavery.  For never forget--though,
+indeed, in these strange times, I ought rather to say, I beseech you
+to read your Bibles and see--that it was Jesus Christ Himself who
+brought the Jews out of Egypt.  St. Paul tells us so positively,
+again and again.  In 1 Cor. x. 4 he tells us that it was Christ who
+followed them through the wilderness.  In verse 9 of the same
+chapter, he says that it was Christ Himself whom they tempted in the
+wilderness.  He was the Angel of the Covenant who went with them.  He
+was the God of Israel whom the elders of the Jews saw, a few weeks
+afterwards, on Mount Sinai, and under His feet a pavement like a
+sapphire stone.  True, the Lord did not take flesh upon Him till
+nearly two thousand years after.  But from the very beginning of all
+things, while He was in the bosom of the Father, He was the King of
+men.  Man was made in His image, and therefore in the image of the
+Father, whose perfect likeness He is--"the brightness of His glory,
+and the express image of His person."  It was He who took care of
+men, guided and taught them, and delivered them out of misery, from
+the very beginning of the world.  St. Paul says the same thing, in
+many different ways, all through the epistle to the Hebrews.  He
+says, for instance, that Moses, when he fled from Pharaoh's court in
+Egypt, esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than the
+treasures of Egypt; for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible.
+The Lord said the same thing of Himself.  He said openly that He was
+the person who is called, all through the Old Testament, "The Lord."
+He asked the Pharisees:  "What think ye of Christ? whose son is He?
+They say unto Him, David's son.  Christ answered, How then does David
+in spirit call him Lord, saying, the Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou
+on my right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool?"  So did Christ
+declare, that He Himself, who was standing there before them, was the
+Lord of David, who had died hundreds of years before.  He told them
+again that their father Abraham rejoiced to see His day, and saw it
+and was glad; and when they answered, in anger and astonishment,
+"Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?"
+Jesus said, "Verily I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am."  I am.
+The Jews had no doubt whom He meant; and we ought to have none
+either.  For that was the very name by which God had told Moses to
+call Him, when he was sent to the Jews:  "Thou shalt say unto them, I
+AM hath sent me to you."  The Jews, I say, had no doubt who Jesus
+said that He was; that He meant them to understand, once and for all,
+that He whom they called the carpenter's son of Nazareth, was the
+Lord God who brought their forefathers up out of the land of Egypt,
+on the night of the first Passover.  So they, to show how reverent
+and orthodox they were, and how they honoured the name of God, took
+up stones to stone Him--as many a man, who fancies himself orthodox
+and reverent, would now, if he dared, stone the preachers who declare
+that the Lord Jesus Christ is not changed since then; that He is as
+able and as willing as ever to deliver the poor from those who grind
+them down, and that He will deliver them, whenever they cry to Him,
+with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm, and that Easter-day is as
+much a sign of that to us as the Passover was for the Jews of old.
+
+But, my friends, if Christ the Lord showed His love and power in
+behalf of poor oppressed wretches on that first Passover, surely He
+showed it a thousand times more on that first Easter-day.  His great
+love helped the Jews out of slavery; and that same great love of His
+at this Easter-tide, moved Him to die and rise again for the sins of
+the whole world.  In that first Passover He delivered only one
+people.  On the first Easter He delivered all mankind.  The Jews were
+under cruel tyrants in the land of Egypt.  So were all mankind over
+the world, when Jesus came.  The Jews in Egypt were slaves to worse
+things than the whip of their task-masters; they had slaves' hearts,
+as well as slaves' bodies.  They were kept down not only by the
+Egyptians, but by their own ignorance, and idolatry, and selfish
+division, and foul sins.  They were spiritually dead--without a
+noble, pure, manful feeling left in them.  Their history makes no
+secret of that.  The Bible seems to take every care to let us see
+into what a miserable and brutal state they had fallen.  Christ sent
+Moses to raise them out of that death; to take them through the Red
+Sea, as a sign that all that was washed away, to be forgiven of God
+and forgotten by them, and that from the moment they landed, a free
+people, on the farther shore, they were to consider all their old
+life past and a new one begun.  So they were baptized unto Moses in
+the cloud and in the sea, as St. Paul says.  And now all was to be
+new.  They had been fancying that they belonged to the Egyptians.
+Now they had found out, and had it proved to them by signs and
+wonders which they could not mistake, that they belonged to the Lord.
+They had been brutal sinners.  The Lord began to teach them that they
+were to rise above their own appetites and passions.  They had been
+worshipping only what they could see and handle.  The Lord began to
+teach them to worship Him--a person whom they could not see, though
+He was always near them, and watching over them.  They had been
+living without independence, fellow-feeling, the sense of duty, or
+love of order.  The Lord began to teach them to care for each other,
+to help each other, to know that they had a duty to perform towards
+each other, for which they were accountable to Him.  They had owned
+no master except the Egyptians, whom they feared and obeyed
+unwillingly.  The Lord began to teach them to obey Him loyally, from
+trust, and gratitude, and love.  They had been willing to remain
+sinners, and brutes, and slaves, provided they could get enough to
+eat and drink.  The Lord began to teach them that His favour, His
+protection, were better than the flesh-pots of Egypt, and that He was
+able to feed them where it seemed impossible to men; to teach them
+that "man does not live by bread alone--cheap or dear, my friends--
+not by bread alone, but by EVERY word that proceeds out of the mouth
+of God, does man live."  That was the meaning of their being baptized
+in the cloud and in the sea.  That was the meaning, and only a very
+small part of the meaning, of their Passover.  Would you not think,
+my friends, that I had been speaking rather of our own Baptism, and
+of our own Supper of the Lord, to which you have been all called to-
+day, and that I had been telling you the meaning of them?
+
+For when Jesus, the Lord, and King, and Head of mankind, died and
+rose again, He took away the sin of the world.  He was the true
+Passover, the Lamb without spot, slain, as the scripture tells us,
+for the sins of the whole world.  In the Jews' Passover, when the
+angel saw the lamb's blood on the door of the house, he passed by,
+and spared everyone in it.  So now.  The blood of Jesus, the Lamb of
+God, is upon us; and for His sake, God is faithful and just to
+forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
+
+But the Lord rose again this day.  And when He, the Lord, the King,
+and Head of all men, rose, all men rose in Him.  "As in Adam all
+die," says St. Paul, "even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
+
+Baptism is a sign of that to us, as the going through the Red Sea,
+and being baptized to Moses in it, was to the Jews.  The passing of
+the Red Sea said to the Jews:  "You have passed now out of your old
+miserable state of slavery into freedom.  The sins which you
+committed there are blotted out.  You are taken into covenant with
+God.  You are now God's people, and nothing can lose you this love
+and care, except your own sins, your own unfaithfulness to Him, your
+own wilful falling back into the slavish and brutal state from which
+He has delivered you."
+
+And just so, baptism says to us:  "Your sins are forgiven you.  You
+are taken into covenant with God.  You are God's people, God's
+family.  You must forget and cast away the old Adam, the old slavish
+and savage pattern of man, which your Lord died to abolish, the guilt
+of which He bore for you on His cross; and you must rise to the new
+Adam, the new pattern of man, which is created after God in
+righteousness and true holiness, which the Lord showed forth in His
+life, and death, and rising again.  For now God looks on you not as a
+guilty and condemned race of beings, but as a redeemed race, His
+children, for the sake of Jesus Christ the Lamb of God, who takes
+away the sins of the world.  You have a right to believe that, as
+human beings, you are dead with Christ to the old Adam, the old
+sinful, brutal pattern of man.  Baptism is the sign of it to you.
+Every child, let it or its parents be who they may, is freely
+baptized as a sign that all that old pattern of man is washed away,
+that they can and must have nothing to do with it hence-forward, that
+it is dead and buried, and they must flee from it and forget it, as
+they would a corpse.
+
+And the Lord's Supper also is a sign to us that, as human beings, we
+are risen with Christ, to a new life.  A new life is our birthright.
+We have a right to live a new life.  We have a duty to live a new
+life.  We have a power, if we will, to live a new life; such a life
+as we never could live if we were left to ourselves; a noble, just,
+godly, manful, Christlike, Godlike life, bred and nourished in us by
+the Spirit of Christ.  That is our right; for we belong to Him who
+lived that life Himself, and bought us our share in it with His own
+death and resurrection.  That is our duty; for if we share the Lord's
+blessings, it can only be in order that we may become like the Lord.
+Do you fancy that He died to leave us all no better than we are?  His
+death would have had very little effect if that was all.  No, says
+St. Paul; if you have a share in Christ, prove that you believe in
+your own share by becoming like Christ.  You belong to His kingdom,
+and you must live as His subjects.  He has bought for you a new and
+eternal life, and you must use that life.  "If ye then be risen with
+Christ, seek those things that are above."  . . .  And what are they?
+Love, peace, gentleness, mercy, pity, truth, faithfulness, justice,
+patience, courage, order, industry, duty, obedience. . . .  All, in
+short, which is like Jesus Christ.  For these are heavenly things.
+These are above, where Christ sits at God's right hand.  These are
+the likeness of God.  That is God's character.  Let it be your
+character likewise.
+
+But again; if it is our right and our duty to be like that, it is
+also in our power.  God would not have commanded us to be, what He
+had not given us the power to be.  He would not have told us to seek
+those things which are above, if He had not intended us to find them.
+Wherefore it is written:  "Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye
+shall find; for if ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts to
+your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give His Holy
+Spirit to those who ask him?"
+
+This is the meaning of that text; namely, that God will give us the
+power of living this new and risen life, which we are bound to live.
+This is one of the gifts for men, which the scripture tells us that
+Christ received when He rose from the dead, and ascended up on high.
+This is one of the powers of which He spoke, when after His
+resurrection He said, "That all power was given to Him in heaven and
+earth."  The Lord's Supper is at once a sign of who will give us that
+gift, and a sign that He will indeed give it us.  The Lord's Supper
+is the pledge and token to us that we all have a share in the
+likeness of Christ, the true pattern of man; and that if we come and
+claim our share, He will surely bestow it on us.  He will renew, and
+change, and purify our hearts and characters in us, day by day, into
+the likeness of Himself.  He who is the eternal life of men will
+nourish us, body, soul, and spirit, with that everlasting life of
+His, even as our bodies are nourished by that bread and wine.  And if
+you ask me how?  When you can tell me why a wheat grain cannot
+produce an oak, or an acorn a wheat plant; when you can tell me why
+our bodies are, each of them, the very same bodies which they were
+ten years ago, though every atom of flesh, and blood, and bone in
+them has been changed; when, in short, you, or any other living man,
+can tell me the meaning of those three words, body, life, and growth,
+then it will be time to ask that question.  In the meantime let us
+believe that He who does such wonders in the life and growth of every
+blade of grass, can and will do far greater wonders for the life and
+growth of us, immortal beings, made in His own likeness, redeemed by
+His blood, and so believe, and thank, and obey, and wait till another
+and a nobler life to understand.  And if we never understand at all--
+what matter, provided the thing be true?
+
+
+XXXIV--CHRISTMAS-DAY
+
+
+
+For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the
+government shall be on His shoulder:  and His name shall be called
+Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Father of an Everlasting
+age, The Prince of Peace.  Of the increase of His government and
+peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his
+kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with
+justice henceforth even forever.--ISAIAH ix. 6, 7.
+
+In the time when the prophet Isaiah wrote this prophecy, everything
+round him was exactly opposite to his words.  The king of Judaea, the
+prophet's country, was not reigning in righteousness.  He was an
+unrighteous and wicked governor.  The princes and great men were not
+ruling in judgment.  They were unjust and covetous; they took bribes,
+and sold justice for money.  They were oppressors, grinding down the
+poor, and defrauding those below them.  So that the weak, and poor,
+and needy had no one to right them, no one to take their part.  There
+was no man to feel for them, and defend them, and be a hiding-place
+and a covert for them from their cruel tyrants; no man to comfort and
+refresh them as rivers of water refresh a dry place, or the shadow of
+a great rock comforts the sunburnt traveller in the weary deserts.
+
+Neither were these very poor oppressed people of the Jews in a right
+state of mind.  They were ignorant and stupid, given to worship false
+gods.  They had eyes, and yet could not use them to see that, as the
+psalm told us this morning, the heavens declared the glory of God,
+and the firmament showed His handiwork.  They were worshipping the
+sun, and moon, and stars, in stead of the Lord God who made them.
+They were brutish too, and would not listen to teaching.  They had
+ears, and yet would not hearken with them to God's prophets.  They
+were rash, too, living from hand to mouth, discontented, and violent,
+as ignorant poor people will be in evil times.  And they were
+stammerers--not with their tongue, but with their minds and thoughts.
+They were miserable; but they could not tell why.  They were full of
+discontent and longings; but they could not put them into words.
+They did not know how to pray, how to open their hearts to God or to
+man.  They knew of no one who could understand them and their
+sorrows; they could not understand them themselves, much less put
+them into words.  They were altogether confused and stupefied; just
+in the same state, in a word, as the poor negro slaves in America,
+and the heathens ay, and the Christians too, are in, in all the
+countries of the world which do not know the good news of Christmas-
+day or have forgotten it and disobeyed it.
+
+But Isaiah had God's Spirit with him; the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of
+holiness, righteousness, justice.  And that Holy Spirit convinced him
+of sin, and of righteousness and of judgment, as He convinces every
+man who gives himself up humbly to God's teaching.
+
+First, the Spirit convinced Isaiah of sin.  He made him feel that the
+state of his country was wrong.  And He made him feel why it was
+wrong; namely, because the men in it were wrong; because they were
+thinking wrong notions, feeling wrong feelings, doing wrong things;
+and that wrong was sin; and that sin was falling short of being what
+a man was made, and what every man ought to be, namely, the likeness
+and glory of God; and that so his countrymen the Jews, one and all,
+had sinned and come short of the glory of God.
+
+Next, He convinced Isaiah of righteousness.  He made Isaiah feel and
+be sure that God was righteous; that God was no unjust Lord, like the
+wicked king of the Jews; that such evil doings as are going on were
+hateful to Him; that all that covetousness, oppression, taking of
+bribes, drunkenness, deceit, ignorance, stupid rashness and folly, of
+which the land was full, were hateful to God.  He must hate them, for
+He was a righteous and a good God.  They ought not to be there.  For
+man, every man from the king on his throne to the poor labourer in
+the field, was meant to be righteous and good as God is.  "But how
+will it be altered?" thought Isaiah to himself.  "What hope for this
+poor miserable sinful world?  People are meant to be righteous and
+good:  but who will make them so?  The king and his princes are meant
+to be righteous and good, but who will set them a pattern?  When will
+there be a really good king, who will be an example to all in
+authority; who will teach men to do right, and compel and force them
+not to do wrong?"
+
+And then the Holy Spirit of God answered that anxious question of
+Isaiah's, and convinced him of judgment.
+
+Yes, he felt sure; he did not know why he felt so sure:  but he did
+feel sure; God's Spirit in his heart made him feel sure, that in some
+way or other, some day or other, the Lord God would come to judgment,
+to judge the wicked princes and rulers of this world, and cast them
+out.  It must be so.  God was a righteous God.  He would not endure
+these unrighteous doings for ever.  He was not careless about this
+poor sinful world, and about all the sinful down-trodden ignorant
+men, and women, and children in it.  He would take the matter into
+His own hands.  He would show that He was Lord and Master.  If kings
+would not reign in righteousness, He would come and reign in
+righteousness Himself.  He would appoint princes under Him, who would
+rule in judgment.  And He would show men what true righteousness was;
+what the pattern of a true ruler was; namely, to be able to feel for
+the poor, and the afflicted, and the needy, to understand the wants,
+and sorrows, and doubts, and fears of the lowest and the meanest; in
+short, to be a man, a true, perfect man, with a man's heart, a man's
+pity, a man's fellow-feeling in Him.  Yes.  The Lord God would show
+Himself.  He would set His righteous King to govern.  And yet Isaiah
+did not know how, but he saw plainly that it must be so, that same
+righteous King, who was to set the world right, would be a MAN.  It
+would be a man who was to be a hiding-place from the storm and a
+covert from the tempest.  A man who would understand man, and teach
+men their duty.
+
+Then the eyes of the blind would see, and the ears of those who heard
+should hearken; for they would hear a loving human voice, the voice
+of One who knew what was in man, who could tell them just what they
+wanted to know, and put His teaching into the shape in which it would
+sink most easily and deeply into their hearts.  And then the hearts
+of the rash would understand knowledge; and the tongue of the
+stammerers would speak plainly.  There will be no more confused cries
+from poor ignorant brutish oppressed people, like the cries of dumb
+beasts in pain; for He who was coming would give them words to utter
+their sorrows in.  He would teach them how to speak to man and God.
+He would teach them how to pray, and when they prayed to say, "Our
+Father which art in heaven."
+
+Then the vile person would be no more called bountiful, or the churl
+called liberal:  flattery and cringing to the evil great would be at
+an end.  The people would have sense to see the truth about right and
+wrong, and courage to speak it.  Men would then be held for what they
+really were, and honoured and despised according to their true
+merits.  Yes, said Isaiah, we shall be delivered from our wicked king
+and princes, from the heathen Assyrian armies, who fancy that they
+are going to sweep us out of our own land with fire and sword; from
+our own sins, and ignorance, and infidelity, and rashness.  We shall
+be delivered from them all, for The righteous King is coming.  Nay,
+He is here already, if we could but see.  His goings-forth have been
+from everlasting.  He is ruling us now--this wondrous Child, this Son
+of God.  Unto us a Child is born already, unto us a Son is given
+already.  But one day or other He will be revealed, and made
+manifest, and shown to men as a man; and then all the people shall
+know who He is; and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
+the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
+
+Ah, my friends, Isaiah saw all this but dimly and afar off.  He saw
+as through a glass darkly.  He perhaps thought at times--indeed we
+can have little doubt that he thought--that the good young Prince
+Hezekiah, "The might of God," as his name means, who was growing up
+in his day to be a deliverer and a righteous king over the Jews, was
+to set the world right.  No doubt he had Hezekiah in his mind when he
+said that a Child was born to the Jews, and a Son given to them; just
+as, of course, he meant his own son, who was born to him by the
+virgin prophetess, when he called his name Emmanuel, that is to say,
+God with us.  But he felt that there was more in both things than
+that.  He felt that his young wife's conceiving and bearing a son,
+was a sign to him that some day or other a more blessed virgin would
+conceive and bear a mightier Son.  And so he felt that whether or not
+Hezekiah delivered the Jews from their sin, and misery, and
+ignorance, God Himself would deliver them.  He knew, by the Spirit of
+God, that his prophecy would come true, and remain true for ever.
+And so he died in faith, not having received the promises, God having
+prepared some better King for us, and having fulfilled the words of
+His prophet in a way of which, as far as we can see, he never
+dreamed.
+
+Yes.  Hezekiah failed to save the nation of the Jews.  Instead of
+being the "father of an everlasting age," and having "no end of his
+family on the throne of David," his great-grandchildren and the whole
+nation of the Jews were swept away into captivity by the Babylonians,
+and no man of his house, as Jeremiah prophesied, has ever since
+prospered or sat on the throne of David.  But still Isaiah's prophecy
+was true.  True for us who are assembled here this day.
+
+For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; even the Babe of
+Bethlehem, Jesus Christ the Lord.  The government shall indeed be
+upon His shoulder; for it has been there always.  For the Father has
+committed all things to the Son, that he may be King of kings and
+Lord of lords for ever.  His name is indeed Wonderful; for what more
+wondrous thing was ever seen in heaven or in earth, than that great
+love with which He loved us?  He is not merely called "The might of
+God," as Hezekiah was,--for a sign and a prophecy; for He is the
+mighty God Himself.  He is indeed the Counsellor; for He is the light
+who lighteth every man who comes into the world.  He is "the Father
+of an everlasting age."  There were hopes that Hezekiah would be so;
+that he would raise the nation of the Jews again to a reform from
+which it would never fall away:  but these hopes were disappointed;
+and the only one who fulfilled the prophecy is He who has founded His
+Church for ever on the rock of everlasting ages, and the gates of
+hell shall not prevail against it.  Hezekiah was to be the prince of
+peace for a few short years only.  But the Child who is born to us,
+the Son who is given to us, is He who gave eternal peace to all who
+will accept it; peace which this world can neither give nor take
+away; and who will make that peace grow and spread over the whole
+earth, till men shall beat their swords into plough-shares, and their
+spears into pruning-hooks, and the nations shall not learn war any
+more.  Of the increase of His government and of His peace there shall
+be no end, till the earth be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as
+the waters cover the sea, and the spirit of God be poured out on all
+flesh, to teach kings to reign in righteousness, after the pattern of
+the King of kings, the Babe of Bethlehem; to make the rich and
+powerful do justice, to teach the ignorant, to give the rich wisdom,
+to free the oppressed, to comfort the afflicted, to proclaim to all
+mankind the good news of Christmas Day, the good news that there was
+a man born into the world on this day who will be a hiding-place from
+the storm, a covert from the tempest, like rivers of water in a dry
+place, like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land; even the man
+Christ Jesus, who is able and willing to save to the uttermost those
+who come to God through Him, seeing that he has been tempted in all
+things like as we are, yet without sin.
+
+Yes, my friends, on that holy table stands the everlasting sign that
+Isaiah's prophecy has been fulfilled to the uttermost.  That bread
+and that wine declare to us, that to us a Child is born, to us a Son
+is given.  They declare to us, in a word, that on this blessed day
+God was made man, and dwelt among men, and we beheld His glory, the
+glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
+
+Oh, come to that table this day, and there claim your share in the
+most precious body and blood of the Divine Child of Bethlehem.  Come
+and ask Him to pour out on you His Spirit, the Spirit which He poured
+on Hezekiah of old, "that he might fulfil his own name and live in
+the might of God."  So will you live in the might of God.  So you
+will be able to govern yourselves, and your own appetites, in
+righteousness and freedom, and rule your own households, or
+whatsoever God has set you to do, in judgment.  So you will see
+things in their true light, as God sees them, and be ready and
+willing to hear good advice, and understand your way in this life,
+and be able to speak your hearts out in prayer to God, as to a loving
+and merciful Father.  And in all your afflictions, let them be what
+they will, you will have a comfort, and a sure hope, and a wellspring
+of peace, and a hiding-place from the tempest, even The Man Christ
+Jesus, who said:  "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you;
+let not your heart be troubled, neither be ye afraid."  The Man
+Christ Jesus, at whose birth the angels sang:  "Glory to God in the
+Highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men."
+
+Now to Him who on this day was born of the blessed virgin, man of the
+substance of His mother, yet God the Son of God, be ascribed, with
+the Father and the Spirit, all power, glory, majesty, and dominion,
+both now and for ever.  Amen.
+
+
+
+XXXV--NEW YEAR'S DAY
+
+
+
+(1853.)
+
+But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and He that
+formed thee, O Israel, Fear not:  for I have redeemed thee, I have
+called thee by thy name; thou art mine.  When thou passest through
+the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall
+not overflow thee:  when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt
+not be burnt; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.  For I am the
+Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour:  I gave Egypt for
+thy ransom, Ethiopia and Seba for thee.  Since thou wast precious in
+my sight, thou hast been honourable, and I have loved thee:
+therefore will I give men for thee, and peoples for thy life.--ISAIAH
+xliii. 1-4.
+
+The New Year has now begun; and I am bound to wish you all a happy
+New Year.  But I am sent here to do more than that; to teach you how
+you may make your own New Year a happy one; or, if not altogether a
+happy one--for sorrows may and must come in their turn--yet still
+something better than a happy year, namely, a blessed year; a year on
+which you will be able to look back this day twelvemonths, and thank
+God for it; thank God for the tears which you have shed in it, as
+well as for the joy which you have felt; thank God for the dark days
+as well as for the light; thank God for what you have lost, as well
+as what you have found; and be able to say, "Well, this last year, if
+it has not been a happy year for me, at least it has been a blessed
+one for me.  It has left me a stronger, soberer, wiser, godlier,
+better man than it found me."
+
+How, then, can you make the New Year a blessed one for yourselves?  I
+know but one way, my friends.  The ancient way.  The Bible way.  The
+way by which Abraham, and Jacob, and David, and all the holy men of
+old, and all the saints, and martyrs, and righteous and godly among
+men, made their lives blessed among themselves, in spite of sorrow,
+and misfortune, and distress, and persecution, and torture, and death
+itself; the one only old way of being blessed, which was from the
+beginning, and will last for ever and ever, through all worlds and
+eternities; the way of the old saints, which St. Paul sets forth in
+the eleventh chapter of the Hebrews; and that is, FAITH.  Faith,
+which is the substance of what we hope for, the evidence of things
+not seen.  Faith, of which it is written, that the just shall live by
+his faith.
+
+But how can faith give you a blessed New Year?  In the same way in
+which it gave the old saints blessed years all their lives through,
+and is giving them a blessed eternity now and for ever before the
+face of the Lord Jesus Christ, to which may God in His mercy bring us
+all likewise.
+
+They trusted in God.  They had faith, not in themselves, like too
+many; not in their own good works, like too many; not in their own
+faith, in their own frames, and feelings, and assurances, like too
+many; but they had faith in God.  It was faith in God which made one
+of them, the great prophet Isaiah, write the glorious words which I
+have chosen for my text this day, to show his countrymen the Jews,
+even while they were in the very lowest depths of shame, and poverty,
+and misfortune, that God had not forgotten them; that for those who
+trusted in Him, a blessed time was surely coming.
+
+And it was faith in God, too, which put it into the minds of the good
+men who choose these Sunday lessons out of the Bible, to appoint such
+chapters as these to be read year by year, at the coming in of the
+new year, for ever.  Faith in God, I say, put that into their minds.
+For those good men trusted in God, that He would not change; that
+hundreds and thousands of years would make no difference in His love;
+that the promises made by His Holy Spirit to Isaiah the prophet would
+stand true for ever and ever.  And they trusted in God, too, that
+what He had spoken by the mouth of His holy apostles was true; that
+after the blessed Lord came down on earth, there was to be no
+difference between Jews and Gentiles; that the great and precious
+promises made by God to the Jews were made also to all the nations of
+the earth; that all things written in the Old Testament, from the
+first chapter of Genesis to the last of Malachi, were written not for
+the Jews only, but for English, French, Italians, Germans, Russians--
+for all the nations of the world; that we English were God's people
+now, just as much, ay, far more, than the old Jews were, and that,
+therefore, the Old Testament promises, as well as the New Testament
+ones, were part of our inheritance as members of Christ's Church.
+And therefore they appointed Old Testament lessons to be read in
+church, to show us English what our privileges were, what God's
+covenant and promise to us were.  We, as much as the Jews, are called
+by the name of the Lord who created us.  Were we not baptised into
+His name at that font?  Has He not loved us?  Has He not heaped us
+English, for hundreds of years past, with blessings such as He never
+bestowed on any nation?  Has He not given men for us, and nations for
+our life?  While all the nations of the world have been at war,
+slaying and being slain, has He not kept this fair land of England
+free and safe from foreign invaders for more than eight hundred
+years?  Since the world was made, perhaps, such a thing was never
+heard of, such a mercy shown to any nation; that a great and rich
+country like this should be preserved for eight hundred years from
+invasion of foreign armies, and all the horrors and miseries of war,
+which have swept, from time to time, every other nation in the world
+with the besom of desolation.
+
+Ay, and but sixty years ago, in the time of the French war, when
+almost every other nation in Europe was made desolate with fire, and
+sword, and war, did not God preserve this land of England, as He
+never preserved country before, from all the miseries which were
+sweeping over other nations?  Oh, strange and wonderful mercy of God,
+that at the very time that the gospel was dying out all over Europe,
+it was being lighted again in England; and that while the knowledge
+of God was failing elsewhere, it was increasing here!  Oh, strange
+and wonderful mercy of God, who has given to us English, now for one
+hundred and sixty years and more, those very equal laws, and freedom,
+and rights of conscience, for which so many other nations of Europe
+are still crying and struggling in vain, amid slavery, and
+oppression, and injustice, and heavy burdens, such as we here in
+England should not endure a week!  Oh, strange and wonderful mercy of
+God, who but three years ago, when all the other nations of Europe
+were shaken with wars, and riots, and seditions, every man's hand
+against his neighbour, kept this land of England in perfect peace and
+quiet by those just laws and government, proving to us the truth of
+His own promises, that those who seek peace by righteous dealings,
+shall find it, and that, as Isaiah says, the fruit of justice is
+quietness and assurance for ever!  And last, but not least, my
+friends, is it not a sign, a sign not to be mistaken, of God's good-
+will and mercy to us, that now, at this very time of all others, when
+almost every country in Europe is going to wrack and ruin through the
+folly and wickedness of their kings and rulers, He should have given
+us here in England a Queen who is a pattern of goodness and purity,
+in ruling not only the nation, but her own household, to every wife
+and mother, from the highest to the lowest; and a Prince whose whole
+heart seems set on doing good, and on helping the poor, and improving
+the condition of the labourers?  My friends, I say that we are
+unthankful and unfaithful.  We do not thank God a hundredth part
+enough for the blessings which He has given us.  We do not trust Him
+a hundredth part enough for the blessings which He has in store for
+us.  If some of us here could but see and feel for a single month how
+people are off abroad; if they could change places with a French, an
+Italian, a Russian labourer, it would teach them a lesson about God's
+goodness to England which they would not soon forget.  May God grant
+that we may never have to learn that lesson in that way!  God grant
+that we may never, to cure us of our unthankfulness and want of
+faith, and godless and unmanly grumbling and complaining, be brought,
+for a single week, into the same state as some hundred millions of
+our fellow-creatures are in foreign parts!  Oh, my friends, let us
+thank God for the mercies of the past year!  Most truly He has
+fulfilled to England his promise given by the mouth of the prophet
+Isaiah:  "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee;
+and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.  For I am the
+Lord thy God, the Holy One, thy Saviour.  Thou hast been precious in
+my sight, and I have loved thee:  therefore will I give men for thee,
+and peoples for thy life."
+
+Away, then, with discontent and anxiety for the coming year.  Or
+rather, let us be only discontented with ourselves.  Let us only be
+anxious about our own conduct.  God cannot change.  If anything goes
+wrong, it will be not because He has left us, but because we have
+left Him.  Is it not written that all things work together for good
+to those who love God?  Then if things do not work together for good
+in this coming year, it will be because we do not love God.  Do not
+let us say, "I am righteous, but my neighbours are wicked, and
+therefore I must be miserable;" neither let us lay the blame of our
+misfortunes on our rulers; let us lay it on ourselves.
+
+What was the word of the Lord to the Jews in a like case:  "What
+means this proverb which you take up, saying, The fathers have eaten
+sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge?  It is not so,
+O house of Israel.  The son shall not die for the iniquity of his
+father, nor the father for the iniquity of the son.  The soul that
+sinneth, it shall die, saith the Lord."
+
+Oh, my friends, take this to heart solemnly, in the year to come.
+Our troubles, more of them at least than we fancy, are our own fault,
+and not our neighbours', or the government's, or anyone's else.  And
+those which are not our own fault directly are so in this way, that
+they are sent as sharp and wholesome lessons to us; and if we were
+what we ought to be, we should not want those lessons.  Do not fancy
+that that is a sad and doleful thought to begin the new year with.
+God forbid!  It would be doleful and sad indeed if any one of us, in
+spite of all his right-doing, might be plunged into any hopeless
+misery, through the fault of other people, over whom he has no
+control.  But thanks be to the Lord, it is not so.  We are His
+children, and He cares for each and every one of us separately.  Each
+and every one of us has to answer for himself alone, face to face
+with his God, day by day; every man must bear his own burden; and to
+every one of us who love God, all things will work together for good.
+It is, and was, and always will be, as Abraham well knew, far from
+God to punish the righteous with the wicked.  The Judge of all the
+earth will do right.  None of us who repents and turns from the sins
+he sees round him and in him; none of us who prays for the light and
+guiding of God's Spirit; none of us who struggles day by day to keep
+himself unspotted from this evil world, and live as God's son,
+without scandal or ill-name in the midst of a sinful and perverse
+generation; none of us who does that, but God's blessing will rest on
+him.  What ruins others will only teach and strengthen him; what
+brings others to shame, will only bring him to honour, and make his
+righteousness plain to be seen by all, that God may be glorified in
+His people.  Let the coming year be what it may; to the holy, the
+humble, the upright, the godly, it will be a blessed year, fulfilling
+the blessed promises of the Lord, that those who trust in Him shall
+never be confounded.
+
+Oh, my friends, consider but this one thing, that the Almighty God,
+who made all heaven and earth, has bid us trust in Him.  And when He
+bids us, is it not a sin, an insult to Him, not to trust Him--not to
+believe His words to us?  "Put thou thy trust in the Lord, and be
+doing good; dwell in the land," working where He has set thee, "and
+verily thou shalt be fed."  "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror
+by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.  A thousand shall
+fall by thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand:  but it shall
+not come nigh thee.  Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see
+the reward of the wicked.  Because thou hast made the Lord thy
+refuge, no plague shall come nigh thy dwelling.  Thou shalt call upon
+me, I will answer thee.  Because thou hast set thy love on me, I will
+deliver thee; with long life will I satisfy thee, and show thee my
+salvation."
+
+My friends, these words are in the book of Psalms.  Either they are
+the most cruel words that ever were spoken on earth to tempt poor
+wretches into vain security and fearful disappointment, or they are--
+what are they?--the sure and everlasting promise of our Father in
+heaven to us His children.  We have only to ask for them, and we
+shall receive them; to claim them, and they will be fulfilled to us.
+"For He who spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him for us, will
+He not with Him likewise freely give us all things," and make, by His
+fatherly care, and providence, and education, all our new years
+blessed new years, whether or not they are happy ones?
+
+
+
+XXXVI--THE DELUGE
+
+
+
+My spirit shall not always strive with man.--GENESIS vi. 3.
+
+Last Sunday we read in the first lesson of the fall.  This Sunday we
+read of the flood, the first-fruits of the fall.
+
+It is an awful and a fearful story.  And yet, if we will look at it
+by faith in God, it is a most cheerful and hopeful story--a gospel--a
+good news of salvation--like every other word in the Bible, from
+beginning to end.  Ay, and to my mind, the most hopeful words of all
+in it, are the very ones which at first sight look most terrible, the
+words with which my text begins:  "And the Lord said, My Spirit shall
+not always strive with man."
+
+For is it not good news--the good news of all news--the news which
+every poor soul who is hungering and thirsting after righteousness,
+longs to hear; and when they hear it, feel it to be the good news--
+the only news which can give comfort to fallen and sorrowful men,
+tied and bound with the chain of their sins, that God's Spirit does
+strive at all with man?  That God is looking after men?  That God is
+yearning over sinners, as the heart of a father yearns over his
+rebellious child, as the heart of a faithful and loving husband
+yearns after an unfaithful wife?  That God does not take a disgust at
+us for all our unworthiness, but wills that none should perish, but
+that all should come to repentance?  Oh joyful news!  Man may be, as
+the text says that he was in the time of Noah, so low fallen that he
+is but flesh like the brutes that perish; the imaginations of his
+heart may be only evil continually; his spirit may be dead within
+him, given up to all low and fleshly appetites and passions, anger,
+and greediness, and filth; and yet the pure and holy Spirit of God
+condescends to strive and struggle with him, to convince him of sin,
+and make him discontented and ashamed at his own brutishness, and
+shake and terrify his soul with the wholesome thought:  "I am a
+sinner--I am wrong--I am living such a life as God never meant me to
+live--I am not what I ought to be--I have fallen short of what God
+intended me to be.  Surely some evil will come to me from this."
+Then the Holy Spirit convinces man of righteousness.  He shows man
+that what he has fallen short of is the glory of God; that man was
+meant to be, as St. Paul says, the likeness and glory of God; to show
+forth God's glory, and beauty, and righteousness, and love in his own
+daily life; as a looking-glass, though it is not the sun, still gives
+an image and likeness of the sun, when the sun shines on it, and
+shows forth the glory of the sunbeams which are reflected on it.
+
+And then, the Holy Spirit convinces man of judgment.  He shows man
+that God cannot suffer men, or angels, or any other rational spirits
+and immortal souls, to be unlike Himself; that because He is the only
+and perfect good, whatsoever is unlike Him must be bad; because He is
+the only and perfect love, who wills blessings and good to all,
+whatsoever is unlike Him must be unloving, hating, and hateful--a
+curse and evil to all around it; because He is the only perfect Maker
+and Preserver, whatsoever is unlike Him must be in its very nature
+hurtful, destroying, deadly--a disease which injures this good world,
+and which He will therefore cut out, burn up, destroy in some way or
+other, if it will not submit to be cured.  For this, my friends, is
+the meaning of God's judgments on sinners; this is why He sent a
+flood to drown the world of the ungodly; this is why He destroyed
+Sodom and Gomorrah; this is why He swept away the nations of Canaan;
+this is why He destroyed Jerusalem, His own beloved city, and
+scattered the Jews over the face of the whole earth unto this day;
+this is why He destroyed heathen Rome of old, and why He has
+destroyed, from time to time, in every age and country, great nations
+and mighty cities by earthquake, and famine, and pestilence, and the
+sword; because He knows that sin is ruin and misery to all; that it
+is a disease which spreads by infection among fallen men; and that He
+must cut off the corrupt nation for the sake of preserving mankind,
+as the surgeon cuts off a diseased limb, that his patient's whole
+body may not die.  But the surgeon will not cut off the limb as long
+as there is a chance of saving it:  he will not cut it off till it is
+mortified and dead, and certain to infect the whole body with the
+same death, or till it is so inflamed that it will inflame the whole
+body also, and burn up the patient's life with fever.  Till then he
+tends it in hope; tries by all means to cure it.  And so does the
+Lord, the Lord Jesus, the great Physician, whom His Father has
+appointed to heal and cure this poor fallen world.  As long as there
+is hope of curing any man, any nation, any generation of men, so long
+will his Spirit strive lovingly and hopefully with man.  For see the
+blessed words of the text:  "My Spirit shall not always strive with
+man.  This must end.  This must end at some time or other.  This
+battle between my Spirit and the wicked and perverse wills of these
+sinners; this battle between the love and the justice and the purity
+which I am trying to teach them, and the corruption and the violence
+with which they are filling the earth."  But there is no passion in
+the Lord, no spite, no sudden rage, like the brute passionate anger
+of weak man.  Our anger, if we are not under the guiding of God's
+Spirit, conquers our wills, carries us away, makes us say and do on
+the moment--God forgive us for it--whatsoever our passion prompts us.
+The Lord's anger does not conquer Him.  It does not conquer His
+patience, His love, His steadfast will for the good of all.  Even
+when it shows itself in the flood and the earthquake; even though it
+break up the fountains of the great deep, and destroy from off the
+earth both man and beast, yet it is, and was, and ever will be, the
+anger of The Lamb--a patient, a merciful, and a loving anger.
+
+Therefore the Lord says:  "Yet his days shall be one hundred and
+twenty years."  One hundred and twenty years more he would endure
+those corrupt and violent sinners, in the hope of correcting them.
+One hundred and twenty years more would God's Spirit strive with men.
+One hundred and twenty years more the long-suffering of God, as St.
+Peter says, would wait, if by any means they would turn and repent.
+Oh, wonderful love and condescension of God!  God waits for man!  The
+Holy One waits for the unholy!  The Creator waits for the work of His
+own hands!  The wrathful God, who repents that He has made man upon
+the earth, waits one hundred and twenty years for the very creatures
+whom He repents having made!  Does this seem strange to us--unlike
+our notions of God?  If it is strange to us, my friends, its being
+strange is only a proof of how far we have fallen from the likeness
+of God, wherein man was originally created.  If we were more like
+God, then the accounts of God's long-suffering, and mercy, and
+repentance, which we read in the Bible, would not be so strange to
+us.  We should understand what God declares of Himself, by seeing the
+same feelings working in ourselves, which He declares to be working
+in Himself.  And if we were more righteous and more loving, we should
+understand more how God's will was a loving and a righteous will; how
+His justice was His mercy, and His mercy His justice, instead of
+dividing His substance, who is one God, by fancying that His mercy
+and His justice are two different attributes, which are at times
+contrary the one to the other.
+
+We read nothing here about God's absolute purposes, and fixed
+decrees, whereof men talk so often, making a god in their own fallen
+image, after their own fallen likeness.  The Lord, the Word of God,
+of whom the Bible tells us, does not think it beneath his dignity to
+say:  "It repenteth me that I have made man."  Different, truly, from
+that false god which man makes in his own image.  Man is proud, and
+he fancies that God is proud; man is self-willed and selfish, and he
+fancies that God is self-willed and selfish; man is arbitrary and
+obstinate, and determined to have his own way just because it is his
+own way; and then he fancies that God is arbitrary and obstinate, and
+determines to have His own way and will, just because it is His own
+way and will.  But wilt thou know, oh vain man, why God will have His
+own way and will?  Because His way is a good way, and His will a
+loving will; because the Lord knows that His way is the only path of
+life, and joy, and blessing to man and beast, yes, and to the very
+hairs of our head, which are all numbered, and to the sparrows,
+whereof not one falls to the ground without our Father's knowledge;
+because His will is a loving will, which wills that none should
+perish, but that all should come and be saved in body, soul, and
+spirit.  He will have His own will done, not because it is His own
+will, but because it is good, good for men.  And if men will change
+and repent, then will He change and repent also.  If man will resist
+the striving of God's Spirit with him, then will the Lord say:  "It
+repenteth me that I have made that man."  But if a man will repent
+him of the evil, then God will repent Him of the evil also.  If a man
+will let God's Spirit convince him, and will open his ears and hear,
+and open his eyes and see, and open his heart to take in the loving
+thoughts and the right thoughts, and the penitent and humble
+thoughts, which do come to him--you know they do come to you all at
+times--then the Lord will repent also, as he repents, and repent
+concerning the evil which He has declared concerning that man.  So
+said the Lord, who cannot change, the same yesterday, to-day, and for
+ever, the same now that He was in the days of the flood, to Jeremiah
+the prophet, when He moved him to go down to the potter's house, and
+watch him there at his work.
+
+And the potter made a vessel--something which would be useful and
+good for a certain purpose--but the clay was marred in the hand of
+the potter.  He was good and skilful; but there was a fault in the
+clay.  What did he do?  Throw the clay away as useless?  No.  He made
+it again another vessel.  He was determined to make, not anything,
+but something useful and good.  And if the clay, being faulty, failed
+him once, he would try again.  He would change his purpose and plan,
+but not his right will to make good and useful vessels; them he WOULD
+make, if not by one way, then by another.  And Jeremiah watched him;
+and as he watched, the Spirit of the Lord came on him, and taught him
+that that poor potter's way of working with his clay, was a pattern
+and likeness of the Lord's work on earth.  Oh shame, that this great
+parable should have been twisted by men to make out that God is an
+arbitrary tyrant, who works by a brute necessity!  It taught Jeremiah
+the very opposite.  It taught him what it ought to teach us, that God
+does change, because man changes, that God's steadfast will is the
+good of men, and therefore because men change their weak self-willed
+course, and fall, and seek out many inventions, therefore God changes
+to follow them, like a good shepherd, tracking and following the lost
+and wandering sheep up and down, right and left, over hill and dale,
+if by any means He may find him, and bring him home on His shoulders
+to the fold, calling upon the angels of God:  "Rejoice with me, for I
+have found my sheep which I had lost."
+
+This is the likeness of God.  The good and loving will of a Father
+following his wandering children.  The likeness of a loving Father
+repenting that He hath brought into the world sinful children, to be
+a misery to themselves and all around them, and yet for the same
+reason loving those children, striving with their wicked wills to the
+very last, giving them one last chance and time for repentance; as
+the Lord did to those evil men of the old world, sending to them
+Noah, a preacher of righteousness, if by any means they would turn
+from their sins and be saved.  Ay, not only preaching to their ears
+by Noah, but to their hearts by His Spirit; as St. Peter tells us, He
+Himself, Christ the Lord, went Himself by His Spirit to those very
+sinners before the flood, and strove to bring them to their reason
+again.  By His Spirit; by the very same one and only Holy Spirit of
+God, St. Peter says, by which Christ Himself was raised from the
+dead, did He try to raise the souls of those sinners before the
+flood, from the death of sin to the life of righteousness:  but they
+would not.  They were disobedient.  Their wills resisted His will to
+the last; and then the flood came, and swept them all away.
+
+And so the first work of the heavenly Workman was marred in the
+making by no fault of His, but by the fault of what He made.  He made
+men persons, rational beings with wills, that they might be willingly
+like Him:  but they used those wills to be unlike Him, to rebel
+against Him, and to fill the earth with violence and corruption.  And
+so, for the good of all mankind to come, He had to sweep them all
+away.  But of that same sinful clay He made another vessel, as it
+seemed good to Him; even Noah and his Sons, whom He saved that He
+might carry on the race of the Sons of God unto this day.
+
+And after that again, my friends, in a day more dark and evil still,
+when the earth was again corrupt before God, and filled with
+violence; when all flesh had corrupted His way upon the earth, so
+that, as St. Paul said of them, there was none that did good, no not
+one:  then the same Lord, when He saw that all the world lay in
+wickedness, and that the clay of human-kind was marred in the hands
+of the potter, then did He cast away that clay as reprobate and
+useless, and destroy mankind off the face of the earth?  Not so.
+Then, when there was none to help, His own arm brought salvation, and
+His own righteousness sustained Him; He trod the wine-press alone,
+and of the people there was none with Him.  His own righteousness
+sustained Him.  His perfectly good and righteous will never failed
+Him for a moment; man He would save, and man He saved.  If none else
+could do it, He would do it Himself.  He would bring salvation with
+His own arm.  He would fulfil His Father's will, which is that none
+should perish; He would be made flesh, and dwell among men, that man
+might behold the likeness of God the Father, full of grace and truth,
+and see what they were meant to be.  Then, in Him, in Jesus who wept
+over Jerusalem, was fully revealed and shown the likeness and glory
+of the Lord; the Lord in whose image man was made; who walked and
+spoke with Adam in the garden; who was not ashamed to say that it
+repented Him that He had made man; whom Ezekiel saw upon His throne,
+and as it were upon the throne the appearance of the likeness of a
+man; whom Daniel saw, and knew him to be the Son of Man.  Not a man,
+then, of flesh and blood; but the Eternal Word of God, in whose image
+man was made, who could be loving and merciful, long-suffering and
+repenting Him of the evil, but never of the good.  He came, and He
+swept away, as He had told the Apostles that He would do, by such
+afflictions as man had never seen since the beginning of the world
+until then, that Roman world with all its devilish systems and
+maxims, whereby the nations were kept down in slavery and sin; and He
+founded a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwell righteousness,
+even this Holy Catholic Church, to which we all belong this day.
+
+Yes, my friends, this is our gospel, our good news, that there is a
+God whose Spirit strives with sinners to change them into His own
+likeness.  A God who is no dark, obstinate, inexorable Fate, whose
+arbitrary decrees must come to pass; but a loving and merciful God,
+long-suffering, and who repenteth Him of the evil; who repents Him of
+the evil which is in man, and hates it, and has sworn to Himself to
+fight against it, till He has put all enemies under His foot, and
+cast out of His kingdom all things which offend.  Who repents Him of
+the evil in man:  but who will never again repent Him of having made
+man, for then He would repent of having become man; He would repent
+of having been conceived of the Holy Ghost; He would repent of having
+been born of the Virgin Mary; He would repent of having been
+crucified, dead, and buried; He would repent of having risen from the
+dead, and ascended up into heaven in His man's body, and soul, and
+spirit; He would repent of sitting on the right hand of God; He would
+repent of coming to judge the quick and the dead; He would repent of
+having done His Father's will on earth, even as He did it from all
+eternity in the bosom of the Father.  For He is a man; and even as
+the reasonable soul and body are one man, so God and man are one
+Christ.  As man, He did His Father's will in Judaea of old; as man,
+He will judge the world; as man He rules it now; as man, St. John saw
+Him fifty years after He ascended to heaven, and His eyes were like a
+flame of fire, and His hair like fine wool, and He was girt under the
+bosom with a golden girdle, and His voice was like the sound of many
+waters; as man, He said:  "Fear not:  I am the first and the last; I
+am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for
+evermore, Amen; and have the keys of death and hell."  Yes.  This is
+the gospel, the good news for fallen man, that there is a Man in the
+midst of the throne of God, to whom all power is given in heaven and
+earth; that the fate of the world, and all that is therein--the fate
+of suns and stars--the fate of kings and nations--the fate of every
+publican and harlot, and heathen and outcast--the fate of all who are
+in death and hell, depends alike upon the sacred heart of Jesus; the
+heart which groaned at the tomb of Lazarus His friend; the heart
+which wept over Jerusalem; the heart which said to the blessed
+Magdalene, the woman who was a sinner:  "Go in peace; thy sins are
+forgiven thee;" the heart which now yearns after every sinful and
+wandering soul in His church, and all over the earth of God, crying
+to you all:  "Why will ye die?  Have I any pleasure in the death of
+him that dieth, saith the Lord, and not rather that he should turn
+from his wickedness and live?  Come unto me, all ye that are weary
+and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest."  Oh, my friends,
+wonderful as my words are--as wonderful to me who speak them as they
+can be to you who hear them--yet they are true.  True; for on that
+table stand the bread and wine whereof He Himself said, standing upon
+this very earth which He Himself had made:  "This is my body which is
+given for you; this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which I will
+give for the life of the world."
+
+
+
+XXXVII--THE KINGDOM OF GOD
+
+
+
+The kingdom of God is within you.--LUKE xvii. 21.
+
+These words are in the second lesson for this morning's service.  Let
+us think a little about them.
+
+What they mean must depend on what the kingdom of God means; for that
+is the one thing about which they speak.
+
+Now, the kingdom of God is very often spoken of in the New Testament.
+Indeed, it is the thing it speaks of above all others.  It was the
+thing which our Lord went about preaching.  It was the thing of which
+He spoke in His parables, likening the kingdom of God first to one
+thing, then to another, that He might make men understand what it was
+like.
+
+Now, it is worth remarking that we--I mean even religious people--
+speak very little about the kingdom of God nowadays.  One hears less
+about it than about any other words, almost, which stand in the New
+Testament.  Both in sermons and in religious books, and in the talk
+of godly people, one hears the kingdom of God spoken of very seldom.
+One hears words about the Church, which are very good and true; but
+very little, if anything, about the kingdom of God, though both St.
+Paul, and St. John, and the blessed Lord Himself, speak of the two
+together, as if they could not be parted; as if one could not think
+of the one without thinking of the other.  And we hear words about
+the gospel, too, some of them very good and true, and others, I am
+sorry to say, very bad and false:  but, true or false, they are not
+often joined now in men's minds, or mouths, or books, with the
+kingdom of God.  But the New Testament joins them almost always.  It
+says that gospel must be good news.  Therefore the gospel must be
+good news about something.  But about what?  We hear all manner of
+answers nowadays; but we hear the right one very seldom.  People talk
+of the gospel as if it only meant the good news that one man can be
+saved here, and another man can be saved there.  And that is good
+news, certainly.  It is good and blessed news to hear that any one
+poor sinner can be saved from sin, and from the wages of sin.  But
+the holy scriptures, when they talk of the gospel, call it the gospel
+of the kingdom of God.  And I think it best and wisest to call it
+oftenest, what the holy scripture calls it oftenest, and to try and
+understand, first of all, what that means, what the good news of the
+kingdom of God is:  and to understand that, we must first understand
+what the kingdom of God is.
+
+But some may answer, holy scripture speaks of the gospel of
+salvation.  True, it does, once or twice.  But what does that show?
+Is that a different gospel from the gospel of the kingdom of God?
+Are there two gospels?  Surely not.  Else why would holy scripture
+speak so often of "the gospel"--"the good news," by itself, without
+any word after to show what it was about?  It says often simply "the
+gospel;" because there is but one gospel; and, as St. Paul says, if
+any man or angel preach any other than that one, "Let him be
+anathema."
+
+Therefore the gospel of salvation must be the same as the gospel of
+the kingdom of God; and, therefore, it seems to me, that salvation
+and the kingdom of God must be one and the same thing.
+
+Now, do you think so?  When I say "The kingdom of God is salvation,"
+do you think it is?  Have you even any clear notion of what I mean
+when I say it?  Some of you have not, I am afraid; you cannot see at
+first sight what salvation and the kingdom of God have to do with
+each other.  And why?  You think salvation means being saved from
+hell, and going to heaven, when you die.  And so it does:  but I
+trust in God and in God's holy scripture, that it means a great deal
+more; for I think it means being unfit for hell, and fit for heaven,
+before we die.  At least, so says the Church Catechism, which teaches
+every little child to thank his Heavenly Father for having brought
+him into such a state of salvation in this life, even while he is
+young.  Thanks be to The Spirit of God which taught our fore-fathers
+to put these precious words into the Church Catechism, to guard us
+against falling into the very same mistake as the Pharisees of old
+fell into, when they asked our Lord when the kingdom of God was to
+come.  And, believe me, it is easy enough and common enough to fall
+into the same mistake.
+
+For what was their mistake?  They fancied that the kingdom of God was
+not yet come.  And do not most of you think the same?  They did not
+deny, of course, that God was almighty, and could rule and govern all
+mankind if He chose so to do.  But they did not believe that He was
+ruling and governing all mankind then, because they did not know what
+His rule and government were like.  Now, St. Paul tells us what God's
+kingdom is like.  The kingdom of God, he says, is righteousness, and
+peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.  So wherever there is
+righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, there the
+kingdom of God is.  But His kingdom over what?  Over dumb animals, or
+over men?  Over men, certainly; for dumb animals cannot have
+righteousness, or joy in the Holy Spirit.  But over what part of a
+man?  Over his body or over his spirit, as we call it nowadays?  Over
+his spirit, certainly; for it is only our spirits which can be
+righteous, or peaceful, or joyful in God's Spirit.  Therefore God's
+kingdom, of which St. Paul speaks, is a kingdom, a government over
+the souls, the spirits of men.  Now, are our spirits the inward part
+of us, or our bodies?  Our spirits, certainly.  We all say, and say
+rightly, that our bodies are the outward part of us, and that our
+spirits are within us.  Now, do you not see how that agrees exactly
+with the blessed Lord's saying in the text, "Behold, the kingdom of
+God is within you"--that is, in your spirits, because it is
+righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit; and these are
+things which only our souls, not our bodies at all, can have.
+
+But these Pharisees were not righteous; they were wicked and
+hypocritical men.  Was the kingdom of God within them?  The blessed
+Lord said plainly that it was.  He said not, "The kingdom of God is
+within some people's hearts;" or, "The kingdom of God is within the
+hearts of believers;" or, "The kingdom of God might be within you if
+you liked."  But He said that the kingdom of God was then and there
+within the hearts of those wicked and unbelieving Pharisees.
+
+Now, how could that be?  In the same way that some time before that,
+as St. Luke tells us, the power of the Lord was present to heal those
+same Pharisees; and they were for the time amazed, and glorified God,
+and were filled with fear at His mighty works; but not healed.  Their
+souls were not cured of their sin and folly by any means; for we find
+in the very next chapter, that because Jesus cured a palsied man on
+the Sabbath-day they were filled with madness, and consulted together
+how to kill Him.
+
+For, my friends, as it was with them, so it is with us.  God's
+kingdom is within every one of us; but it may make us worse, as well
+as make us better.  It may fill us with righteousness, and peace, and
+joy in the Holy Spirit; or it may fill us, as it filled the
+Pharisees, with madness, and hatred of religion and of goodness; as
+it is written, that the gospel may be a savour of death unto death to
+us, as well as a savour of life unto life.  And it depends on us
+which it shall be.
+
+This is what I mean:  God's kingdom is within each of us.  God is the
+King of our hearts and souls; our baptism tells us so; and it tells
+us truly.  And because God is the King of each of our hearts, He
+comes everlastingly to take possession of our hearts, and continues
+claiming our souls for His own.  He speaks in our hearts day and
+night; whenever we have a good thought, He speaks in our hearts, and
+says to us:  "I am the King of your spirit.  It must obey me.  I put
+this good thought into your hearts, and you are bound to follow that
+good thought, because it is a law of my kingdom."  Or again, God
+speaks in our hearts, and says to us:  "You have done this wrong
+thing.  You know that it is wrong.  You know that it is an offence
+against my law.  Why have you rebelled against me?"  Or again, when
+we see anyone do a good, a loving, or a noble action; or when we read
+of the lives of good and noble men and women; above all, when we read
+or hear of the character and doings of the blessed Lord Jesus, then
+and there God speaks in our hearts, and stirs us up to love and
+admire these noble and blessed examples, and says to us:  "That is
+right.  That is beautiful.  That is what men should do.  That is what
+you should do.  Why are you not like that man?  Why are you not like
+my saints?  Why are you not like me, the Lord Jesus Christ?"
+
+You all surely know what I mean.  You know that I do not mean that
+you hear a voice speaking to your ears, but that thoughts and
+feelings come into your heart, without you putting them there:  ay,
+often enough, in spite of your trying to drive them away.  Now, those
+right thoughts are the kingdom of God within you.  They are the voice
+of the Lord Jesus Christ speaking by His Holy Spirit to your spirit,
+and telling you that He is your King, and that you ought to obey Him;
+and that obeying Him means being righteous and good, as He is
+righteous and good; and calling on you to give up your own wills and
+fancies, and to do His will, and let Him make you holy, even as He is
+holy.  That, I say, is the kingdom of God showing itself within you,
+telling you that God is your King, and telling you how to obey Him.
+
+But what if a man will not hear that voice?  What if a man rebels
+proudly against the good thoughts that rise in his mind, and tries to
+forget them, and grows angry with them, angry with the preacher, the
+Church Service, the Bible itself, because they WILL go on reminding
+him of what he knows in his heart to be right?  What if those good
+thoughts only make him the more stubborn and determined to do his own
+pleasure, and follow his own interests, and do his own will?
+
+Do you not see that to that man God's kingdom over his heart is a
+savour of death unto death--that his finding out that God is his Lord
+only makes him more rebellious--that God's Spirit striving with his
+heart to bring it right, only stirs up his stubbornness and self-
+will, and makes him go the more obstinately wrong?
+
+Oh, my friends, this is a fearful thought!  That man can become worse
+by God's loving desire to make him better!  But so it is.  So it was
+with Pharaoh of old.  All God's pleading with him by the message of
+Moses and Aaron, by the mighty plagues which God sent on Egypt, only
+hardened Pharaoh's heart.  The Lord God spoke to him, and his message
+only lashed Pharaoh's proud and wicked will into greater fury and
+rebellion, as a vicious horse becomes the more unmanageable the more
+you punish it.  Therefore, it is said plainly in scripture, that THE
+LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart; not as some fancy, that the Lord's
+will was to make Pharaoh hard-hearted and wicked.  God forbid.  The
+Lord is the fountain of good only, and not He, but we and the devil,
+make evil.  But the more the Lord pleaded with Pharaoh, and tried to
+bend his will, the more self-willed he became.  The more the Lord
+showed Pharaoh that the Lord was King, the more he hated the kingdom
+and will of God, the more he determined to be king himself, and to
+obey no law but his own wicked fancies and pleasures, and asked:
+"Who is the Lord, that I should obey Him?"
+
+And so it was with the Pharisees.  When they found out that the
+kingdom of God was within them, that God was the King of their hearts
+and minds, and was trying to change their feelings and alter their
+opinions, it only maddened them.  They were determined not to change.
+They were determined not to confess that they had been wrong, and had
+mistaken the meaning of holy scripture.  They were too proud to
+confess what Jesus told them, that they were no better than the poor
+ignorant common people whom they despised.  And yet they knew in
+their hearts that He was right.  When the Lord told them the parable
+of the vineyard, they answered, "God forbid!" they felt at once that
+the parable had to do with them--that they were the wicked husbandmen
+on whom He said their master would take vengeance:  but that only
+maddened them the more, till they ended by crucifying the Lord of
+Glory, upon a pretence which they knew was a false and lying one; and
+when Judas Iscariot said, "I have betrayed the innocent blood," they
+did not deny that the Lord Jesus was innocent; all they answered was,
+"What is that to us?"  They were determined to have their own way
+whether He was innocent or not.  They had seen God's likeness.  They
+had seen what God was like, by seeing the conduct of His only
+begotten Son Jesus Christ.  And when they saw God's likeness they
+hated it, because it was not like themselves.  And the more God
+strove with their hearts, and tried to make them obey Him, the more,
+in short, they felt His kingdom within them, the more they hated that
+kingdom of God within them, because it reproved them, and convinced
+them of sin.  Oh, my friends, young people especially, beware; beware
+lest you fall into the same miserable state of mind.  The kingdom of
+God is within you.  The Holy Spirit, by which you were regenerate in
+holy baptism, is stirring and pleading with your hearts, making you
+happy when you do right, unhappy when you do wrong.  Oh, listen to
+those good thoughts and feelings within you!  Never fancy that they
+are your own thoughts and feelings:  else you will fancy that you can
+put them away and take them back again when you choose to change and
+become religious.  Do not let the devil deceive you into that notion.
+These good thoughts and feelings are the Spirit of God.  They are the
+signs that the kingdom of God is within you; that God is King and
+Master of your hearts and minds; and that you cannot keep Him out of
+them:  but that He can enter into them when He likes, and put right
+thoughts into them.  But though you cannot prevent God and His
+kingdom entering into you, you can refuse to enter into it.  Alas!
+alas! how many of you shut your ears to God's voice:  try to drive
+God's Spirit out of your own hearts; try to forget what is right,
+because it is unpleasant to remember it, and say to yourselves, "I
+will have my own way.  I will try and forget what the clergyman said
+in his sermon, or what I learnt at school.  I am grown up now, and I
+will do what I like."  Oh, my friends, is it a wise or a hopeful
+battle to fight against the living God?  Grieve not the Holy Spirit
+of God, whereby ye are sealed to the day of redemption, lest He go
+away from you and leave you to yourselves, spiritually dead, twice
+dead, plucked up by the roots, whose end is to be burned.  Grieve Him
+not, lest He depart, and with Him both the Father and the Son.  And
+then you will not know right from wrong, because God the Holy Spirit,
+the Spirit of right, has left you.  You will not know what a man
+ought to be or do, because the Son of Man, the perfect likeness of
+God, and therefore the pattern of man, has left you.  You will not
+know that God the Father is your Father, but only fancy him a stern
+taskmaster, reaping where He has not sown, and requiring of you more
+than you are bound to pay, because God the Father has left you.
+
+You may, indeed, keep out ugly thoughts for a time.  You may go on
+wantonly in sin, and worldliness, and self-will.  And then, by way of
+falling deeper still, you may take up with some false sort of
+religion, which makes people fancy that they know God, and are one of
+His elect, while in works they deny Him, and their sinful heart is
+unchanged.  Then your mouth indeed may be full of second-hand talk
+about the gospel.  But what gospel?  I call that a devil's gospel,
+and not God's gospel, which makes men fancy that they may continue in
+sin that grace may abound.  I call any grace which leaves men in
+their sins the devil's grace, and not God's grace.  Certainly it is
+not the gospel of the kingdom of God; for if it was, it would produce
+in men the fruits of that kingdom, righteousness, and peace, and joy
+in the Holy Spirit, instead of the fruits which we see too often,
+bigotry and self-conceit, bitterness, evil-speaking, and hard
+judgments, and joy in a most unholy and damnable spirit, not to
+mention covetousness and deceitfulness, or even in some cases
+wantonness and lust.  And yet such men will often fancy that they
+belong especially to God, and doubt whether He will have mercy on any
+who do not exactly agree with them; while in reality God and His
+kingdom have utterly left their hearts, and they are as blind and
+dark as the beasts which perish.  May God preserve us from that
+second death which comes on sinners, when, after a sinful youth,
+their terrified souls begin to cry out in fear at the sight of their
+sins; and they, instead of casting away their sins, keep their sins,
+or change old sins for more respectable and safe new ones, and drug
+their souls with false doctrines, as foolish nurses quiet children's
+crying by giving them poisonous medicines.  I know men who have
+fallen, I really fear at times, into that state of mind, and are like
+those Pharisees of whom our Lord said:  "Ye serpents, ye generation
+of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"  Even for them
+it is not too late:  but, let them recollect, if the kingdom of God
+is within them, if they have any feelings of right and wrong left in
+them, that their covetousness, and lying, and slandering, and
+conceit, is fighting against God; that these are just what God
+desires to cast out of them; and that unless they give up their
+hearts to God, and let Him cast out their sins, and be converted, and
+become like little children, gentle, humble, teachable, friendly, and
+kind-hearted, obedient to their heavenly Father, God will cast them
+out of His kingdom among the things which offend, and bring a bad
+name on religion; among those very profligate and open sinners whom
+they are so ready to despise and curse.
+
+
+
+XXXVIII--THE LIGHT
+
+
+
+But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light:  for
+whatsoever doth make manifest is light.  Wherefore He saith, Awake
+thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give
+thee light.--EPHESIANS v. 13, 14.
+
+St. Paul has been telling the Ephesians who they are; that they are
+God's dear children.  To whom they belong; to Christ who has given
+Himself for them.  What they ought to do; to follow God's likeness,
+and live in love.  That they are light in the Lord; and are to walk
+as children of the light; and have no fellowship with the unfruitful
+works of darkness, but rather reprove them.  As much as to say:  Do
+not believe those who tell you that there is no harm in young people
+going wrong together before marriage, provided they intend to marry
+after all.  Do not believe those who tell you that there is no harm
+in filthy words, provided you do not do filthy things; and no harm in
+swearing, provided you do not mean the curses which you speak.  Do
+not believe those who tell you there is no harm in poaching another
+man's game, provided you do not steal his poultry, or anything except
+his game.  Do not believe those who tell you that there is no harm in
+being covetous, provided you do not actually cheat your neighbours;
+and that the sin lies, not in being covetous at all, but in being
+more covetous than the law will let you be.
+
+Do not believe those who say to you that you may keep dark thoughts,
+spite, suspicion, envy, cunning, covetousness in your hearts day
+after day, year after year, provided you do not openly act on them so
+as to do your neighbours any great and notorious injury.
+
+Plenty of people will tell you so, and try to deceive you with vain
+words, and give you arguments, and texts of scripture perhaps, to
+prove that sin is not sin, and that the children of light may do the
+works of darkness.  But do not believe them, says St. Paul.  They are
+deceivers, and their words are vain.  These are the very things which
+bring down God's wrath on His disobedient children.  These are the
+bad ways which make young people, when they are married, despise, and
+distrust, and quarrel with each other, and live miserable lives
+together, as children of wrath, peevish, and wrathful, and
+discontented with each other, because they feel that God is angry
+with them, just as Adam in the garden, when he felt that he had
+sinned, and that God was wroth with him, laid the blame on his wife,
+and accused her, whom he ought to have loved, and protected, and
+excused.
+
+These are the bad ways which make people ashamed when they meet a
+good and a respectable person, make them afraid of being overheard,
+afraid of being found out, fond of haunting low and out-of-the-way
+places where they will not be seen; fond of prowling and lurching out
+at night after their own sinful pleasures, because the darkness hides
+them from their neighbours, and seems to hide them from themselves,
+though it cannot hide them from God.  These are the sins which make
+men silent, cunning, dark, sour, double-tongued, afraid to look
+anyone full in the face, unwilling to make friends, afraid of opening
+their minds to anyone, because they have something on their minds
+which they dare not tell their neighbours, which they dare not even
+tell themselves, but think about as little as they can help.  Do you
+not know what I mean?  Do you not often see it in others?  Have you
+never felt it in yourselves when you have done wrong, that dark
+feeling within which shows itself in dark looks?  You talk of a
+"dark-looking man," or a "dark sort of person;" and you mean, do you
+not, a man whom you cannot make out, who does not wish you to make
+him out; who keeps his thoughts and his feelings to himself, and is
+never frank or free, except with bad companions, when the world
+cannot see him; who goes about hanging down his head, and looking out
+of the corners of his eyes, as if he were afraid of the very
+sunshine--afraid of the light.  We know that such a man has something
+dark on his mind.  We call him a "dark sort of man."  And we are
+right.  We say of him what St. Paul says of him in this very epistle,
+when he says, that sin is darkness, and sinful works the deeds of
+darkness; and that goodness, and righteousness, and truth, are light,
+the very light of God and the Spirit of God.  Our reason, our common
+sense, which is given us by God's Spirit, the Spirit of light, makes
+us use the right words, the same words as St. Paul does, and call sin
+darkness.
+
+But rather reprove these dark works, says St Paul; that is, look at
+them, and see that they are utterly worthless and damnable.  And how?
+"All things that are reproved," he says, "are made manifest by the
+light.  For whatsoever makes manifest is light."  Whatsoever makes
+manifest, that is, makes plain and clear.  Whatsoever makes you see
+anything or person in heaven or earth as it really is; whatsoever
+makes you understand more about anything; whatsoever shows you more
+what you are, where you are, what you ought to do; whatsoever teaches
+you any single hint about your duty to God, or man, or the dumb
+beasts which you tend, or the soil which you till, or the business
+and line of life which you ought to follow; whatsoever shows you the
+right and the wrong in any matter, the truth and the falsehood in any
+matter, the prudent course and the imprudent course in any matter; in
+a word, whatsoever makes your mind more clear about any single thing
+in heaven or earth, is light.  For, mind, St. Paul does not say,
+whatsoever is light makes things plain; but whatsoever makes things
+plain is light.  That is saying a great deal more, thank God; for if
+he had said, whatsoever is light makes things clear, we should have
+been puzzled to know what was light; we should have been tempted to
+settle for ourselves what was light.  And, God knows, people in all
+ages, and people of all religions, Christians as well as heathens,
+have been tempted to say so, and to misread this text, till they
+said:  "Whatsoever agrees with our doctrine is light, of course, but
+all other teaching is darkness, and comes from the devil;" and so
+they oftentimes blasphemed against God's Holy Spirit by calling good
+actions bad ones, just because they were done by people who did not
+agree with them, and fell into the same sin as the Pharisees of old,
+who said that the Lord cast out devils by Beelzebub the prince of the
+devils.
+
+But St. Paul says, whatsoever makes anything clearer to you, is
+light.  There is the gospel, and there is the good news of salvation
+again, coming out, as it does all through St. Paul's epistles, at
+every turn, just where poor, sinful, dark man least expects it.  For,
+what does St. Paul say in the very next verse?  "Wherefore," he says,
+"arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light."  "Christ
+shall give thee light!"  Oh blessed news!  CHRIST gives us the light,
+and therefore we need not be afraid of it, but trust it, and welcome
+it.  And Christ GIVES us the light, therefore we have not to hunt and
+search after it; for He will give it us.  Let us think over these two
+matters, and see whether there is not a gospel and good news in them
+for all wretched, ignorant, sinful, dark souls, just as much as for
+those who are learned and wise, or bright and full of peace.
+
+Christ gives us the light.  This agrees with what St. John says, that
+"He is the light who lights every man who comes into the world."  And
+it agrees also with what St. James says:  "Be not deceived, my
+beloved brethren.  Every good gift and every perfect gift is from
+above, and cometh down from God, the Father of lights, with whom is
+no variableness, nor shadow of turning."  And it agrees also with
+what the prophet says, that it is the Spirit of God which gives man
+understanding.  And it agrees also with what the Lord Himself
+promised us when He was on earth, that He would send down on us the
+Spirit of God--the Spirit which proceeds alike from Him and from His
+Father, to guide us into all truth.  Ay, my friends, if we really
+believe this, what a solemn and important thing education would seem
+to us!  If we really believed that all light, all true understanding
+of any matter, came from the Lord Jesus Christ:  and if we remember
+what the Lord Jesus' character was; how He came to do good to all; to
+teach not merely the rich and powerful, but the poor, the ignorant,
+the outcast, the sinful:  should we not say to ourselves, then:  "If
+knowledge comes from Christ, who never kept anything to Himself, how
+dare we keep knowledge to ourselves?  If it comes from Him who gave
+Himself freely for all, surely He means that knowledge should be
+given freely to all.  If He and His Father, and our Father, will that
+all should come to the knowledge of the truth, how dare we keep the
+truth from anyone?"  So we should feel it the will of our heavenly
+Father, the solemn command of our blessed Saviour, that our children,
+and not only they, but every soul around us, young and old, should be
+educated in the best possible way, and in any way whatsoever, rather
+than in none at all.  The education of the poor would be, in our
+eyes, the most sacred duty.  A school would be, in our eyes, as
+necessary and almost as sacred a thing as a church.  And to neglect
+sending our children to school, or to leave our servants or work-
+people in ignorance, would seem to us an awful sin against the Father
+of lights; a rebellion against the Lord Jesus, who lights every man
+who comes into the world, and against our Father in heaven, who
+willeth not that one of these little ones should perish.
+
+And this is made still more plain and certain by the next word in the
+text:  "Christ shall GIVE thee light:" not sell thee light, or allow
+thee to find light after great struggles, and weary years of study:
+but, GIVE thee light.  Give it thee of His free grace and generosity.
+We might have expected that, merely from remembering to whom the
+light belongs.  The mere fact that light belongs to the Lord Jesus
+Christ, who is the express likeness of His Father, might have made us
+sure that He would give His light freely to the unthankful and to the
+evil, just as His Father makes His sun to shine alike on the evil and
+on the good.  Therefore this text does not leave us to find out the
+good news for ourselves.  It declares to us plainly that He will give
+it us, as freely as He gives us all things richly to enjoy.
+
+But, someone will say:  You surely cannot mean that we shall have
+understanding without study?
+
+You cannot mean that we are to become wise without careful thought,
+or that we are to understand books without learning to read?  Of
+course not, my friends.  The text does not say:  "Christ will give
+thee eyes; Christ will give thee sense:" but, "Christ will give thee
+light." . . .  Do you not see the difference?  Of what use would your
+eyes be without light?  And of what use would light be if your eyes
+were shut, and you asleep?  In darkness you cannot see.  Your eyes
+are there, as good as ever; the world is there, as fair as ever:  but
+you cannot see it, because there is no light.  You can only feel it,
+by groping about with your hands, and laying hold of whatsoever
+happens to be nearest you.  And do you think that though your bodily
+eyes cannot see, unless God puts His light in the sky, to shine on
+everything, and show it you, yet your minds and souls can see without
+any light from God?  Not so, my friends.  What the sun is to this
+earth, that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is to the spirit--
+that is, the reason and conscience--of every man who comes into the
+world.  Now, the good news of holy baptism is, that the light is
+here; that God's Spirit is with us, to teach us the truth about
+everything, that we may see it in its true light, as it is, as God
+sees it; that the day-spring from on high has visited us, to give
+light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to
+guide our feet into the way of peace; and that we are children of the
+light and of the day.  But what if those who sit in darkness like the
+darkness; and wilfully shut their eyes tight that they may not see
+the day-spring from on high, and the light which God has sent into
+the world?  Then the light will not profit them, but they will walk
+on still in darkness, not knowing whither they are going.
+
+But some may say, wicked men are very wise; although they rebel
+against God's Spirit, and do not even believe in God's Spirit, but
+say that man's mind can find out everything for itself, without God's
+help, yet they are very wise.  Are they?  The Bible tells us again
+and again that the wisdom of such men is folly; that God takes such
+wise men in their own craftiness.  And the Bible speaks truth.  If
+there is one thing of which I am more certain than another, my
+friends, it is that, just in proportion as a man is bad, just in
+proportion as he does not believe in a good Spirit of God who wills
+to teach him, and gives him light, he is a fool.  If there is one
+thing more than another which such men's books have taught me, it is
+that they are in darkness, when they fancy they are in the brightest
+light; that they make the greatest mistakes when they intend to say
+the cleverest things; and when they least fancy it, fall into
+nonsense and absurdities, not merely on matters of religion, but on
+points which they profess to have studied, and in cases where, by
+their own showing, they ought to have known better.  But our business
+is rather with ourselves.  Our business, in this time of Lent, is to
+see whether we have been shutting our eyes; whether we have been
+walking in darkness, while God's light is all around us.  And how
+shall we know that?  Let St. John tell us:  "He that saith he is in
+the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness until now, and
+knoweth not whither he goeth, because darkness has blinded his eyes."
+Hating our brother.  Covetousness, which is indeed hating our
+brother, for it teaches us to prefer our good to our neighbour's
+good, to fatten ourselves at our neighbour's expense, to get his
+work, his custom, his money, away from him to ourselves; bigotry,
+which makes men hate and despise those who differ from them in
+religion; spite and malice against those who have injured us;
+suspicions and dark distrust of our neighbours, and of mankind in
+general; selfishness, which sets us always standing on our own
+rights, makes us always ready to take offence, always ready to think
+that people mean to insult us or injure us, and makes us moody, dark,
+peevish, always thinking about ourselves, and our plans, or our own
+pleasures, shut up as it were within ourselves--all these sins, in
+proportion as anyone gives way to them, darken the eyes of a man's
+soul.  They really and actually make him more stupid, less able to
+understand his neighbours' hearts and minds, less able to take a
+reasonable view of any matter or question whatsoever.  You may not
+believe me.  But so it is.  I know it by experience to be true.  I
+warn you that you will find it true one day; that all spite, passion,
+prejudice, suspicion, hard judgments, contempt, self-conceit, blind a
+man's reason, and heart, and soul, and make him stumble and fall into
+mistakes, even in worldly matters, just as surely as shutting our
+eyes makes us stumble in broad daylight.  He who gives way to such
+passions is asleep, while he fancies himself broad awake.  His life
+is a dream; and like a dreamer, he sees nothing really, only
+appearances, fancies, pictures of things in his own selfish brain.
+Therefore it is written:  "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from
+the dead, and Christ shall give thee life."  You may say:  Can I
+awaken myself?  Perhaps not, unless someone calls you.  And therefore
+Christ calls on you to awake.  He says by my mouth:  Awake, thou
+sleeper, and I will give thee light; awake, thou dreamer, who
+fanciest that the sinful works of darkness can give thee any real
+profit, any real pleasure; awake, thou sleep-walker, who art going
+about the world in a dream, groping thy way on from day to day and
+year to year, only kept from fall and ruin by God's guiding and
+preserving mercy.  Open thine eyes, and let in the great eternal
+loving light, wherein God beholds everything which He has made, and
+behold it is very good.  Open thine eyes, for it is day.  The light
+is here if thou wilt but use it.  "I will guide thee," saith the
+Lord, "and inform thee with mine eye, and teach thee in the way
+wherein thou shalt go."  Only believe in the light.  Believe that all
+knowledge comes from God.  Expect and trust that He will give thee
+knowledge.  Pray to Him boldly to give thee knowledge, because thou
+art sure that He wishes thee to have knowledge.  He wishes thee to
+know thy duty.  He wishes thee to see everything as He sees it.  "If
+any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all liberally
+and upbraideth not, and he shall receive it."  And when thou hast
+prayed for knowledge, expect it to come; as it is written:  When thou
+prayest for anything, believe that thou wilt receive it, and thou
+wilt receive it.  If thou dost not believe that thou wilt have it, of
+course thou wilt not have it.  And why?  Because thou wilt pass by it
+without seeing it.  It will be there ready for thee in thy daily
+walks; Wisdom will cry to thee at the head of every street; God will
+not deny Himself or break His promise:  but thou wilt go past the
+place where wisdom is, and miss the lessons which God is strewing in
+thy path, because thou art not looking for them.  Wisdom is here, my
+friends, and understanding is here, and the Spirit of God is here, if
+our eyes were but open to see them.  Oh my friends, of all the sins
+of which we have to repent in this time of Lent, none ought to give
+us more solemn and bitter thoughts of shame than the way in which we
+overlook the teaching of God's Spirit, and shut our eyes to His
+light, times without number, every day of our lives.  My friends, if
+our hearts were what they ought to be, if we had humble, loving,
+trustful hearts, full of faith and hope in God's promise to lead us
+into all truth, I believe that every joy and every sorrow which
+befell us, every book which we opened, every walk which we took upon
+the face of God's earth, ay, every human face into which we looked,
+would teach us some lesson, whereby we should be wiser, better, more
+aware of where we are and what God requires of us as human beings,
+neighbours, citizens, subjects, members of His church.  All things
+would be clear to us; for we should see them in the light of God's
+Spirit.  All things would look bright to us, for we should see them
+in the light of God's love.  All things would work together for good
+to us, for we should understand each thing as it came before us, and
+know what it was, and what God meant it for, and how we were to use
+it.  And knowing and seeing what was right, we should see how
+beautiful it was, and love it, and take delight in doing it, and so
+we should walk in the light.  Dark thoughts would pass away from our
+minds, dark feelings from our hearts, dark looks from our faces.  We
+should look our neighbours cheerfully and boldly in the face; for our
+consciences would be clear of any ill-will or meanness toward them.
+We should look cheerfully and boldly up to God our Father; for we
+should know that He was with us, guiding and teaching us, well-
+pleased with all our endeavours to see things as He sees them, and to
+live and work on earth after His image, and in His likeness.  We
+should look out cheerfully and boldly on the world around us, trying
+to get knowledge from everything we see, expecting the light, and
+welcoming it, and trusting it, because we know that it comes from Him
+who is true and cannot lie, Him who is love and cannot injure, Him
+who is righteous and cannot lead us into temptation:  Jesus Christ,
+the Light who lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
+
+
+
+XXXIX--THE UNPARDONABLE SIN
+
+
+
+Wherefore I say unto you:  All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be
+forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall
+not be forgiven unto men.  And whosoever speaketh a word against the
+Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh a word
+against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this
+world, or in the world to come.--MATTHEW xii. 31, 32.
+
+These awful words were the Lord's answer to the Pharisees, when they
+said of Him:  "He casts out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the
+devils."
+
+What was it now which made this speech of the Pharisees so terrible a
+sin, past all forgiveness?
+
+Of course we all feel that they were very sinful; we shrink with
+horror from their words as we read them.  But why ought they to have
+done the same?  We know, thank God, who Jesus Christ was.  But they
+did not; at that time, when He was first beginning to preach, they
+hardly could have known.  And mind, we must not say:  "They ought to
+have known that He was the Son of God by His having the POWER of
+casting out devils;" for the Lord Himself says that the sons of these
+Pharisees used to cast them out also, or that the Pharisees believed
+that they did; and only asks them:  "Why do you say of my casting out
+devils, what you will not say of your sons' casting them out?"  Pray
+bear this in mind; for if you do not--if you keep in your mind the
+vulgar and unscriptural notion that the Pharisees' sin was not being
+convinced by the great power of Christ's miracles, you will never
+understand this story, and you will be very likely to get rid of it
+altogether as speaking of a sin which does not concern you, and a sin
+which you cannot commit.  Now, if the Pharisees did not know that
+Jesus was the Son of God, the Maker and King of the world, as we do,
+why were they so awfully wicked in saying that He cast out devils by
+the prince of the devils?  Was it anything more than a mistake of
+theirs?  Was it as wicked as crucifying the Lord?  Could it be a
+worse sin to make that one mistake, than to murder the Lord Himself?
+And yet it must have been a worse sin.  For the Lord prayed for his
+murderers:  "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
+And these Pharisees, they knew not what they did:  and yet the Lord,
+far from praying for them, told them that even He did not see how
+such serpents, such a generation of vipers, could escape the
+damnation of hell.
+
+It is worth our while to think over this question, and try and find
+out what made the Pharisees' sin so great.  And to do that, it will
+be wiser for us, first, to find out what the Pharisees' sin was; lest
+we should sit here this morning, and think them the most wicked
+wretches who ever trod the earth; and then go away, and before a week
+is over, commit ourselves the very same sin, or one so fearfully like
+it, that if other people can see a difference between them, I confess
+I cannot.  And to commit such a sin, my good friends, is a far easier
+thing to do than some people fancy, especially here in England now.
+
+Now, the worst part of the Pharisees' sin was not, as we are too apt
+to fancy, their insulting the Lord:  but their insulting the Holy
+Spirit.  For what does the Lord Himself say?  That all manner of
+blasphemy as well as sin should be forgiven; that whosever spoke a
+word against Him, the Son of Man, should be forgiven:  but that the
+unpardonable part of their offence was, that they had blasphemed the
+Holy Spirit.
+
+And who is the Holy Spirit?  The Spirit of holiness.  And what is
+holiness?  What are the fruits of holiness?  For, as the Lord told
+the Pharisees on this very occasion, the tree is known by its fruit.
+What says St. Paul?  The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,
+long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, temperance.  Those
+who do not show these fruits have not God's Spirit in them.  Those
+who are hard, unloving, proud, quarrelsome, peevish, suspicious,
+ready to impute bad motives to their neighbours, have not God's
+Spirit in them.  Those who do show these fruits; who are gentle,
+forgiving, kind-hearted, ready to do good to others, and believe good
+of others, have God's Spirit in them.  For these are good fruits,
+which, as our Lord tells us, can only spring from a good root.  Those
+who have the fruit must have the root, let their doctrines be what
+they may.  Those who have not the fruit cannot have the root, let
+their doctrines be what they may.
+
+That is the plain truth; and it is high time for preachers to
+proclaim it boldly, and take the consequences from the Scribes and
+Pharisees of this generation.  That is the plain truth.  Let
+doctrines be what they will, the tree is known by its fruit.  The man
+who does wrong things is bad, and the man who does right things is
+good.  It is a simple thing to have to say, but very few believe it
+in these days.  Most fancy that the men who can talk most neatly and
+correctly about certain religious doctrines are good, and that those
+who cannot are bad.  That is no new notion.  Some people thought so
+in St. John's time; and what did he say of them?  "Little children,
+let no man deceive you; it is he that doeth righteousness who is
+righteous, even as God is righteous."  And again:  "He who says, I
+know God, and keeps not His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is
+not in him."  St. John was the apostle of love.  He was always
+preaching the love of God to men, and entreating men to love one
+another.  His own heart was overflowing with love.  Yet when it came
+to such a question as that; when it came to people's pretending to be
+religious and orthodox, and yet neither obeying God nor loving their
+neighbours, he could speak sternly and plainly enough.  He does not
+say:  "My dear friends, I am sorry to have to differ from you, but I
+am afraid you are mistaken;" he says:  "You are liars, and there is
+no truth in you."
+
+Now this was just what the Pharisees had forgotten.  They had got to
+think, as too many have nowadays, that the sign of a man's having
+God's Spirit in him, was his agreeing with them in doctrine.  But if
+he did not agree with them; if he would not say the words which they
+said, and did not belong to their party, and side with them in
+despising every one who differed from them, it was no matter to them,
+as they proved by their opinion of Jesus Himself, how good he might
+be, or how much good he might do; how loving, gentle, patient,
+benevolent, helping, and caring for poor people; in short, how like
+God he was; all that went for nothing if he was not of their party.
+For they had forgotten what God was like.  They forgot that God was
+love and mercy itself, and that all love and mercy must come from
+God; and, that, therefore, no one, let his creed or his doctrine be
+what it might, could possibly do a loving or merciful thing, but by
+the grace and inspiration of God, the Father of mercies.  And yet
+their own prophets of the Old Testament had told them so, when they
+ascribed the good deeds of heathens to the inspiration of God, just
+as much as the good deeds of Jews, and agreed, as they do in many a
+text, with what St. James, himself a Jew, said afterwards:  "Be not
+deceived; every good gift, and every perfect gift is from above, and
+cometh down from the Father of lights."  But the Pharisees, like too
+many nowadays, did not think so.  They thought that good and perfect
+gifts might some of them very well come from below, from the father
+of darkness and cruelty.  They saw the Lord Jesus Christ doing good
+things; driving out evil, and delivering men from the power of it;
+healing the sick, cleansing the leper, curing the mad, preaching the
+gospel to the poor:  and yet they saw in that no proof that God's
+Spirit was working in Him.  Of course, if He had been one of their
+own party, and had held the same doctrines as they held, they would
+have praised Him loudly enough, and held Him up as a great saint of
+their school, and boasted of all His good deeds as proofs of how good
+their party was, and how its doctrines came from God.  But as long as
+He was not one of them, His good works went for nothing.  They could
+not see God's likeness in that loving and merciful character.  All
+His charity and benevolence made them only hate Him the more, because
+it made them the more afraid that He would draw the people away from
+them.  "And of course," they said to themselves, "whosoever draws
+people away from us, must be on the devil's side.  We know all God's
+law and will.  No one on earth has anything to teach us.  And
+therefore, as for any one who differs from us, if he cast out devils,
+it must be because the devil is helping him, for his own purposes, to
+do it."
+
+In one word, then, the sin of these Pharisees, the unpardonable sin,
+which ruins all who give themselves up to it, was bigotry; calling
+right wrong, because it did not suit their party prejudices to call
+it right.  They were fancying themselves very religious and pious,
+and all the while they did not know right when they saw it; and when
+the Lord came doing right, they called it wrong, because He did not
+agree with their doctrines.  They fancied they were the only people
+on earth who knew how to worship God perfectly; and yet while they
+pretended to worship Him, they did not know what He was like.  The
+Lord Jesus came down, the perfect likeness of God's glory, and the
+express pattern of His character, helping, and healing, and
+delivering the souls and bodies of all poor wretches whom He met; and
+these Pharisees could not see God's Spirit in that; and because it
+was certainly not their own spirit, called it the spirit of a devil,
+and blasphemed against the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Right and Love.
+
+This was bigotry, the flower and crown of all sins into which man can
+fall; the worst of all sins, because a man may keep from every other
+sin with all his might and main, as the Pharisees did, and yet be led
+by bigotry into almost every one of them without knowing it; into
+harsh and uncharitable judgment; into anger, clamour, and railing;
+into misrepresentation and slander; and fancying that the God of
+truth needs the help of their lying; perhaps, as has often happened,
+alas! already, into devilish cruelty to the souls and bodies of men.
+The worst of all sins; because a man who has given up his heart to
+bigotry can have no forgiveness.  He cannot; for how can a man be
+forgiven unless he repent? and how can a bigot repent? how can he
+confess himself in the wrong, while he fancies himself infallibly in
+the right?  As the Lord said to these very Pharisees:  "If ye had
+been blind, ye had had no sin:  but now ye say We see; therefore your
+sin remaineth."
+
+How can the bigot repent? for repenting is turning to God; and how
+can a man turn to God who does not know where to look for God, who
+does not know who God is, who mistakes the devil for God, and fancies
+the all-loving Father to be a taskmaster, and a tyrant, and an
+accuser, and a respecter of persons, without mercy or care for
+ninety-nine hundredths of the souls which He has made?  How can he
+find God?  He does not know whom to look for.
+
+How can the bigot repent? for to repent means to turn from wrong to
+right; and he has lost the very notion of right and wrong, in the
+midst of all his religion and his fine doctrines.  He fancies that
+right does not mean love, mercy, goodness, patience, but notions like
+his own; and that wrong does not mean hatred, and evil-speaking, and
+suspicion, and uncharitableness, and slander, and lying, but notions
+unlike his own.  What he agrees with he thinks is heavenly, and what
+he disagrees with is of hell.  He has made his own god for himself
+out of himself.  His own prejudices are his god, and he worships them
+right worthily; and if the Lord were to come down on earth again, and
+would not say the words which he is accustomed to say, it would go
+hard but he would crucify the Lord again, as the Pharisees did of
+old.
+
+My friends, there is too much of this bigotry, this blasphemy against
+God's Spirit, abroad in England now.  May God keep us all from it!
+Pray to Him night and day, to give you His Spirit, that you may not
+only be loving, charitable, full of good works yourselves, but may be
+ready to praise and enjoy a good, and loving, and merciful action,
+whosoever does it, whether he be of your religion or not; for nothing
+good is done by any living man without the grace of Christ, and the
+inspiration of the Spirit of God, the Father of lights, from whom
+comes down every good and perfect gift.  And whosoever tries to
+escape from that great truth, when he sees a man whose doctrines are
+wrong doing a right act, by imputing bad motives to him, or saying:
+"His actions must be evil, however good they may look, because his
+doctrines are wrong,"--that man is running the risk of committing the
+very same sin as the Pharisees, and blaspheming against the Holy
+Spirit, by calling good evil.  And be sure, my friends, that
+whosoever indulges, even in little matters, in hard judgments, and
+suspicions, and hasty sneers, and loud railing, against men who
+differ from him in religion, or politics, or in anything else, is
+deadening his own sense of right and wrong, and sowing the seeds of
+that same state of mind, which, as the Lord told the Pharisees, is
+utterly the worst into which any human being can fall.
+
+
+
+XL--THE SPIRIT OF BONDAGE
+
+
+
+For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye
+have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father.--
+ROMANS viii. 15.
+
+Some of you here may not understand this text at all.  Some of you,
+perhaps, may misunderstand it; for it is not an easy one.  Let us,
+then, begin, by finding out the meaning of each word in it; and, let
+us first see what is the meaning of the spirit of bondage unto fear.
+Bondage means slavery; and the spirit of bondage means the spirit
+which makes men look up to God as slaves do to their taskmaster.
+Now, a slave obeys his master from fear only; not from love or
+gratitude.  He knows that his master is stronger than he is, and he
+dreads being beaten and punished by him; and therefore, he obeys him
+only by compulsion, not of his own good will.  This is the spirit of
+bondage; the slavish, superstitious spirit in religion, into which
+all men fall, in proportion as they are mean, and sinful, and carnal,
+fond of indulging themselves, and bearing no love to God or right
+things.  They know that God is stronger than they; they are afraid
+that God will take away comforts from them if they offend Him; they
+have been taught that He will cast them into endless torment if they
+offend Him; and, therefore, they are afraid to do wrong.  They love
+what is wrong, and would like to do it; but they dare not, for fear
+of God's punishment.  They do not really fear God; they only fear
+punishment, misfortune, death, and hell.  That is better, perhaps,
+than no religion at all.  But it is not the faith which WE ought to
+have.
+
+In this way the old heathens lived:  loving sin and not holiness, and
+yet continually tormented with the fear of being punished for the
+very sins which they loved; looking up to God as a stern taskmaster;
+fancying Him as proud, and selfish, and revengeful as themselves;
+trying one day to quiet that wrath of His which they knew they
+deserved, by all sorts of flatteries and sacrifices to Him; and the
+next day trying to fancy that He was as sinful as themselves, and was
+well-pleased to see them sinful too.  And yet they could not keep
+that lie in their hearts; God's light, which lights every man who
+comes into the world, was too bright for them, and shone into their
+consciences, and showed them that the wages of sin was death.  The
+law of God, St. Paul tells us, was written in their hearts; and how
+much soever, poor creatures, they might try to blot it out and forget
+it, yet it would rise up in judgment against them, day by day, night
+by night, convincing them of sin.  So they in their terror sold
+themselves to false priests, who pretended to know of plans for
+helping them to escape from this angry God, and gave themselves up to
+superstitions, till they even sacrificed their sons and their
+daughters to devils, in some sort of confused hope of buying
+themselves off from misery and ruin.
+
+And in the same way the Jews lived, for the most part, before the
+Lord Jesus came in the flesh of man.  Not so viciously and wickedly,
+of course, because the law of Moses was holy, and just, and good; the
+law which the Lord Himself had given them, because it was the best
+for them then; because they were too sinful, and slavish, and stupid,
+for anything better.  But, as St. Paul says, Moses's law could not
+give them life, any more than any other law can.  That is, it could
+not make them righteous and good; it could not change their hearts
+and lives; it could only keep them from outward wrong-doing by
+threats and promises, saying:  "Thou shalt not."  It could, at best,
+only show them how sinful their own hearts were; how little they
+loved what God commanded; how little they desired what He promised;
+and so it made them feel more and more that they were guilty,
+unworthy to look up to a holy God, deserving His anger and
+punishment, worthy to die for their sins; and thus by the law came
+the knowledge of sin, a deeper feeling of guilt, and shame, and
+slavish dread of God, as St. Paul sets forth, with wonderful wisdom,
+in the seventh chapter of Romans.
+
+Now, let us consider the latter half of the text.  "But ye have
+received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father."
+
+What is this adoption?  St. Paul tells us in the beginning of the
+fourth chapter of his epistle to the Galatians.  He says:  As long as
+a man's heir is a child, and under age, there is no difference in law
+between him and a slave.  He is his father's property.  He must obey
+his father, whether he chooses or not; and he is under tutors and
+governors, until the time appointed by his father; that is, until he
+comes of age, as we call it.  Then he becomes his own master.  He can
+inherit and possess property of his own after that.  And from that
+time forth the law does not bind him to obey his father; if he obeys
+him it is of his own free will, because he loves, and trusts, and
+reverences his father.
+
+Now, St. Paul says, this is the case with us.  When we were infants,
+we were in bondage under the elements of the world; kept straight, as
+children are, by rules which they cannot understand, by the fear of
+punishment which they cannot escape, with no more power to resist
+their father than slaves have to resist their master.  But when the
+fulness of time was come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman,
+born under a law, that He might redeem those who were under a law,
+that we might receive the adoption of sons.
+
+As much as to say:  You were God's CHILDREN all along:  but now you
+are more; you are God's sons.  You have arrived at man's estate; you
+are men in body and in mind; you are to be men in spirit, men in
+life.  You are to look up to the great God who made heaven and earth,
+and know, glorious thought! that He is as truly your Father as the
+men whose earthly sons you call yourselves.  And if you do this, He
+will give you the Spirit of adoption, and you shall be able to call
+Him Father with your hearts, as well as with your lips; you shall
+know and feel that He is your Father; that He has been loving,
+watching, educating, leading you home to Him all the while that you
+were wandering in ignorance of Him, in childish self-will, and
+greediness after pleasure and amusement.  He will give you His Spirit
+to make you behave like His sons, to obey Him of your own free will,
+from love, and gratitude, and honour, and filial reverence.  He will
+make you love what He loves, and hate what He hates.  He will give
+you clear consciences and free hearts, to fear nothing on earth or in
+heaven, but the shame and ingratitude of disobeying your Father.
+
+The Spirit of adoption, by which you look up to God as your Father,
+is your right.  He has given it to you, and nothing but your own want
+of faith, and wilful turning back to cowardly superstition, and to
+the wilful sins which go before superstition, and come after it, can
+take it from you.  So said St. Paul to the Romans and the Galatians,
+and so I have a right, ay, and a bounden duty, to say to every man
+and woman in this church this day.
+
+For, my dear friends, if you ask me, what has this to do with us?
+Has it not everything to do with us?  Whether we are leading good
+lives, or middling lives, or utterly bad worthless lives, has it not
+everything to do with us?  Who is there here who has not at times
+said to himself:  "God so holy, and pure, and glorious; while I am so
+unjust, and unclean, and mean!  And God so great and powerful; while
+I am so small and weak!  What shall I do?  Does not God hate and
+despise me?  Will He not take from me all which I love best?  Will He
+not hurl me into endless torment when I die?  How can I escape from
+Him?  Wretched man that I am, I cannot escape from Him!  How, then,
+can I turn away His hate?  How can I make Him change His mind?  How
+can I soothe Him and appease Him?  What shall I do to escape hell-
+fire?"
+
+Did you ever have such thoughts?  But, did you find those thoughts,
+that slavish terror of God's wrath, that dread of hell, made you any
+BETTER men?  I never did.  I never saw them make any human being
+better.  Unless you go beyond them--as far beyond them as heaven is
+beyond hell, as far above them as a free son is above a miserable
+crouching slave, they will do you more harm than good.  For this is
+all that I have seen come of them:  That all this spirit of bondage,
+this slavish terror, instead of bringing a man nearer to God, only
+drove him further from God.  It did not make him hate what was wrong;
+it only made him dread the punishment of it.  And then, when the
+first burst of fear cooled down, he began to say to himself:  "I can
+never atone for my sins.  I can never win back God to love me.  What
+is done, is done.  If I cannot escape punishment, let me be at least
+as happy as I can while it lasts.  If it does not come to-day, it
+will come to-morrow.  Let me alone, thou tormenting conscience.  Let
+me eat and drink, for to-morrow I die!"  And so back rushed the poor
+creature into all his wrong-doing again, and fell most probably
+deeper than ever into the mire, because a certain feeling of
+desperation and defiance rose up in him, till he began to fancy that
+his terror was all a dream--a foolish accidental rising up of old
+superstitious words which he learnt from his mother or his nurse; and
+he tried to forget it all, and did forget it--God help him!--and his
+latter end was worse than his first.
+
+How then shall a man escape shame and misery, and an evil conscience,
+and rise out of these sins of his?  For do it he must.  The wages of
+sin is death--death to body and soul; and from sin he must escape.
+
+There is but one way, my friends.  There never was but one way.
+Believe the text, and therefore believe the warrant of your Baptism.
+Believe the message of your Confirmation.
+
+Your baptism says to you, God does NOT hate you, be you the greatest
+sinner on earth.  He does not hate you.  He loves you; for you are
+His child.  He hateth nothing that He hath made.  He willeth not the
+death of a sinner, but that ALL should come to be saved.  And your
+baptism is the sign of that to you.  But God hates everything that He
+has not made; for everything which He has not made is bad; and He has
+made all things but sin; and therefore He hates sin, and, loving you,
+wishes to raise you out of sin; and baptism is the sign of that also.
+Man was made originally in the image and likeness of God, and of
+Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, the express image of God the Father;
+and therefore everything which is sinful is unmanly, and everything
+which is truly manful, and worthy of a man, is like Jesus Christ; and
+God's will is, that you should rise out of all these unmanly sins, to
+a truly manful life--a life like the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of
+Man.  And baptism is God's sign of this also.  That is the meaning of
+the words in the Baptism Service which tell you that you were
+baptised into Jesus Christ, that you might put off the old man--the
+sinful, slavish, selfish, unmanly pattern of life, which we all lead
+by nature; and put on the new man--the holy and noble, righteous and
+loving pattern of life, which is the likeness of the Lord Jesus.
+That is the message of your baptism to you; that you are God's
+children, and that God's will and wish is that you should grow up to
+become His SONS, to serve Him lovingly, trustingly, manfully; and
+that He can and will give you power to do so--ay, that He has given
+you that power already, if you will but claim it and use it.  But you
+must claim it and use it, because you are meant not merely to be
+God's wilful, ignorant, selfish children, obeying Him from mere fear
+of the rod; but to be His willing, loving, loyal sons.  And that is
+the message which Confirmation brings you.  Baptism says:  You are
+God's child, whether you know it or not.  Confirmation says:  Yes;
+but now you are to know it, and to claim your rights as His sons, of
+full age, reasonable and self-governing.
+
+Baptism says:  You are regenerated and born from above, by water and
+the Holy Spirit.  Confirmation answers:  True, most true; but there
+is no use in a child's being born, if it never comes to man's estate,
+but remains a stunted idiot.
+
+Baptism says:  You may and ought to become more or less such a man as
+the Lord Jesus was.  Confirmation says:  You can become such; for you
+are no longer children; you are grown to man's estate in body, you
+can grow to man's estate in soul if you will.  God's Spirit is with
+you, to show you all things in their true light; to teach you to
+value them or despise them as you ought; to teach you to love what He
+loves, and hate what He hates.  God wishes you no longer to be merely
+His children, obeying Him you know not why; still less His slaves,
+obeying Him from mere brute coward fear, and then breaking loose the
+moment that you forget Him, and fancy that His eye is not on you:
+but He wishes you to be His sons; to claim the right and the power
+which He has given you to trample your sins under foot; to rise up by
+the strength which God your Father will surely give to those who ask
+Him; and so to be new men, free men, true men, who do look boldly up
+to God, knowing that, however wicked they may have been, and however
+weak they are still, God's love belongs to them, God's help belongs
+to them, and that those who trust in Him shall never be confounded,
+but shall go on from strength to strength to the measure of the
+stature of a perfect man, to the noble likeness of the Lord Jesus
+Christ Himself.
+
+For this is the message of the blessed sacrament of the body and
+blood of Christ, to which you have been all called this day.  That
+sacrament tells you that in spite of all your daily sins and
+failings, you can still look up to God as your Father; to the Lord
+Jesus Christ as your life; to the Holy Spirit as your guide and your
+inspirer; that though you be prodigal sons, your Father's house is
+still open to you, your Father's eternal love ready to meet you afar
+off, the moment that you cry from your heart:  "Father, I have
+sinned;" and that you must be converted and turn back to God your
+Father, not merely once for all at Confirmation, or at any other
+time, but weekly, daily, hourly, as often as you forget and disobey
+Him; and that he will receive you.  This is the message of the
+blessed sacrament, that though you cannot come there trusting in your
+own righteousness, you can come trusting in His manifold and great
+mercies; that though you are not worthy so much as to gather up the
+crumbs under His table, yet He is the same Lord whose property is
+ever to have mercy; that He will, as surely as He has appointed that
+sign of the bread and wine, grant you so to eat and drink that
+spiritual flesh and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the life
+of the world, that your sinful bodies may be made clean by His body,
+and your souls washed in His most precious blood, and that you may
+dwell in Him, and He in you, for ever.
+
+
+
+XLI--THE FALL
+
+
+
+As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so
+death passed on all men, for that all have sinned.--ROMANS v. 12.
+
+We have been reading the history of Adam's fall.  With that fall we
+have all to do; for we all feel the fruits of it in the sinful
+corruptions which we bring into the world with us.  And more, every
+fall which we have is like Adam's fall:  every time we fall into
+wilful sin, we do what Adam did, and act over again, each of us many
+times in our lives, that which he first acted in the garden of
+Paradise.  At least, all mankind suffer for something.  Look at the
+sickness, death, bloodshed, oppression, spite, and cruelty, with
+which the world is so full now, of which it has been full, as we know
+but too well from history, ever since Adam's time.  The world is full
+of misery, there is no denying that.  How did that come?  It must
+have come somehow.  There must be some reason for all this sorrow.
+The Bible tells us a reason for it.  If anyone does not like the
+Bible reason, he is bound to find a better reason.  But what if the
+Bible reason, the story of Adam's fall, be the only rational and
+sensible explanation which ever has been, or ever will be given, of
+the way in which death and misery came among men?
+
+Some people will say:  What puzzle is there in it?  All animals die,
+why should not man?  All animals fight and devour each other, why
+should not man do so too?  But why need we suppose that man is
+fallen?  Why should he not have been meant by nature to be just what
+he is?  Some scholars who fancy themselves wise, and think that they
+know better than the Bible, will say that now, and pride themselves
+on having said a very fine thing; ignorant men, too, often are led
+into the same mistake, and are willing enough to say:  "What if we
+are brutish, and savage, and ignorant, and spiteful, indulging
+ourselves, hating and quarrelling with each other?  God made us what
+we are, and we cannot help it."  But there is a voice in the heart of
+every man, and just in proportion as a man is a man, and not a beast
+and a savage, that voice cries in his heart more loudly:  No; God did
+not make you what you are.  You are not meant to be what you are, but
+something better.  You are not meant to fight and devour each other
+as the animals do; for you are meant to be better than they.  You are
+not meant to die as the animals do; for you feel something in you
+which cannot die, which hates death.  You may try to be a mere savage
+and a beast, but you cannot be content to be so.  And yet you feel
+ready to fall lower, and get more and more brutish.  What can be the
+reason?  There must be something wrong about men, something diseased
+and corrupt in them, or they would not have this continual discontent
+with themselves for being no better than they are; this continual
+hankering and longing after some happiness, some knowledge, some good
+and noble state which they do not see round them, and never have felt
+in themselves.  Man must have fallen, fallen from some good and right
+state into which he was put at first, and for which he is hankering
+and craving now.  There must be an original sin in him; that is, a
+sin belonging to his origin, his race, his breed, as we say, which
+has been handed down from father to son; an original sin as the
+church calls it.  And I believe firmly that the heart of man, even
+among savages, bears witness to the truth of that doctrine, and
+confesses that we are fallen beings, let false philosophers try as
+they will to persuade us that we are not.
+
+Then, again, there are another set of people, principally easy, well-
+to-do, respectable people, who run into another mistake, the same
+into which the Pelagians did in old time.  They think:  "Man is not
+fallen.  Every man is born into the world quite good enough, if he
+chose to remain good.  Every man can keep God's laws if he likes, or
+at all events keep them well enough."  As for his having a sinful
+nature which he got from Adam, they do not believe that really,
+though often they might not like to say so openly.  They think:
+"Adam fell, and he was punished; and if I fall I shall be punished;
+but Adam's sin is nothing to me, and has not hurt me.  I can be just
+as good and right as Adam was, if I like."  That is a comfortable
+doctrine enough for easy-going well-to-do folks, who have but few
+trials, and few temptations, and who love little because little has
+been forgiven them.  But what comfort is there in that for poor
+sinners, who feel sinful and base passions dragging them down, and
+making them brutish and miserable, and yet feel that they cannot
+conquer their sins of themselves, cannot help doing wrong, all the
+while they know that it is wrong?  They feel that they have something
+more in them than a will and power to do what they choose.  They feel
+that they have a sinful nature which keeps their will and reason in
+slavery, and makes sin a hard bondage, a miserable prison-house, from
+which they cannot escape.  In short, they feel and know that they are
+fallen.  Small comfort, too, to every thinking man, who looks upon
+the great nations of savages, which have lived, and live still, upon
+God's earth, and sees how, so far from being able to do right if they
+choose, they go on from father to son, generation after generation,
+doing wrong, more and more, whether they like or not; how they become
+more and more children of wrath, given up to fierce wars, and cruel
+revenge, and violent passions, all their thought, and talk, and
+study, being to kill and to fight; how they become more and more
+children of darkness, forgetting more and more the laws of right and
+wrong, becoming stupid and ignorant, until they lose the very
+knowledge of how to provide themselves with houses, clothes, fire, or
+even to till the ground, and end in feeding on roots and garbage,
+like the beasts which perish.  And how, too, long before they fall
+into that state, death works in them.  How, the lower they fall, and
+the more they yield to their original sin and their corrupt nature,
+they die out.  By wars with each other; by murdering their own
+children, to avoid the trouble of rearing them; by diseases which
+they know not how to cure, and which they too often bring on
+themselves by their own brutishness; by bad food, and exposure to the
+weather, they die out, and perish off the face of the earth,
+fulfilling the Lord's words to Adam:  "Thou shalt surely die."  I do
+not say that their souls go to hell.  The Bible tells us nothing of
+where they go to.  God's mercy is boundless.  And the Bible tells us
+that sin is not imputed where there is no law, as there is none among
+them.  So we may have hope for them, and leave them in God's hand.
+But what can we hope for them who are utterly dead in trespasses and
+sins?  Well for them, if, having fallen to the likeness of the
+brutes, they perish with the brutes.  I fancy if you, as some may,
+ever go to Australia, and there see the wretched black people, who
+are dying out there, faster and faster, year by year, after having
+fallen lower than the brutes, then you will understand what original
+sin may bring a man to, what it would have brought us to, had not God
+in His mercy raised us and our forefathers up from that fearful down-
+hill course, when we were on it fifteen hundred years ago.
+
+And another thing which shows that these poor savages are not as God
+intended them to be, but are falling, generation after generation, by
+the working of original sin, is, that they, almost all of them, show
+signs of having been better off long ago.  Many, like the South Sea
+Islanders, have curious arts remaining among them in spite of their
+brutish ignorance, which they could only have learned when they were
+far more clever and civilised than they are now.  And almost all of
+them have some sad remembrance, handed down from father to son, kept
+up in songs and foolish tales, of having been richer, and more
+prosperous, and more numerous, a long while ago.  They will confess
+to you, if you ask them, that they are worse than their fathers--that
+they are going down, dying out--that the gods are angry with them, as
+they say.  The Lord have mercy upon them!  But what is, to my mind,
+the most awful part of the matter remains yet to be told--and it is
+this:  That man may actually fall by original sin too low to receive
+the gospel of Jesus Christ, and be recovered again by it.  For the
+negroes of Africa and the West Indies, though they have fallen very
+low, have not fallen too low for the gospel.  They have still
+understanding left to take it in, and conscience, and sense of right
+and wrong enough left to embrace it; thousands of them do embrace it,
+and are received unto righteousness, and lead such lives as would
+shame many a white Englishman, born and bred under the gospel.
+
+But the black people in Australia, who are exactly of the same race
+as the African negroes, cannot take in the gospel.  They seem to have
+become too stupid to understand it; they seem to have lost the sense
+of sin and of righteousness too completely to care about it.  All
+attempts to bring them to a knowledge of the true God have as yet
+failed utterly.  God's grace is all-powerful; He is no respecter of
+persons; and He may yet, by some great act of His wisdom, quicken the
+dead souls of these poor brutes in human shape.  But, as far as we
+can see, there is no hope for them:  but, like the Canaanites of old,
+they must perish off the face of the earth, as brute beasts.
+
+I have said so much to show you that man is fallen; that there is
+original sin, an inclination to sin and fall, sink down lower and
+lower, in man.  Now comes the question:  What is this fall of man?  I
+said that the Bible tells us rationally enough.  And I have also made
+use several times of words, which may have hinted to some of you
+already what Adam's fall was.  I have spoken of the likeness of the
+beasts, and of men becoming like beasts by original sin.  And this is
+why I said it.
+
+If you want to understand what Adam's fall was, you must understand
+what he fell from, and what he fell to.  That is plain.
+
+Now, the Bible tells us, that he fell from God's grace to nature.
+
+What is nature?  Nature means what is born, and lives, and dies, and
+is parted and broken up, that the parts of it may go into some new
+shape, and be born and live, and die again.  So the plants, trees,
+beasts, are a part of nature.  They are born, live, die; and then
+that which was them goes into the earth, or into the stomachs of
+other animals, and becomes in time part of that animal, or part of
+the tree or flower, which grows in the soil into which it has fallen.
+So the flesh of a dead animal may become a grain of wheat, and that
+grain of wheat again may become part of the body of an animal.  You
+all see this every time you manure a field, or grow a crop.  Nature
+is, then, that which lives to die, and dies to live again in some
+fresh shape.  And, in the first chapter of Genesis, you read of God
+creating nature--earth, and water, and light, and the heavens, and
+the plants and animals each after their kind, born to die and change,
+made of dust, and returning to the dust again.  But after that we
+read very different words; we read that when God created man, He
+said:
+
+"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have
+dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
+over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping
+thing that creepeth upon the earth."  He was made in God's likeness;
+therefore he could only be right in as far as he was like God.  And
+he could not be like God if he did not will what God willed, and wish
+what God wished.  He was to live by faith in God; he was justified by
+faith in God, and by that only.
+
+Never fancy that Adam had any righteousness of his own, any goodness
+of which he could say:  "This is mine, part of me; I may pride myself
+on it."  God forbid.  His righteousness consisted, as ours must, in
+looking up to God, trusting Him utterly, believing that he was to do
+God's will, and not his own.  His spirit, his soul, as we call it,
+was given to him for that purpose, and for none other, that it might
+trust in God and obey God, as a child does his father.  He had a free
+will; but he was to use that will as we must use our wills, by giving
+up our will to God's will, by clinging with our whole hearts and
+souls to God.
+
+Adam fell.  He let himself be tempted by a beast, by the serpent.
+How, we cannot tell:  but so we read.  He took the counsel of a brute
+animal, and not of God.  He chose between God and the serpent, and he
+chose wrong.  He wanted to be something in himself; to have a
+knowledge and power of his own, to use it as he chose.  He was not
+content to be in God's likeness; he wanted to be as a god himself.
+And so he threw away his faith in God, and disobeyed Him.  And
+instead of becoming a god, as he expected, he became an animal; he
+put on the likeness of the brutes, who cannot look up to God in trust
+and love, who do not know God, do not obey Him, but follow their own
+lusts and fancies, as they may happen to take them.  Whether the
+change came on him all at once, the Bible does not say:  but it did
+come on him; for from him it has been handed down to all his children
+even to this day.  Then was fulfilled against him the sentence, In
+the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.  Not that he died
+that moment; but death began to work in him.  He became like the
+branch of a tree cut off from the stem, which may not wither at the
+instant it is cut off, but it is yet dead, as we find out by its soon
+decaying.  He had come down from being a son of God, and he had taken
+his place in nature, among the things which grow only to die; and
+death began to work in him, and in his children after him.  He handed
+down his nature to his children as the animals do; his children
+inherited his faults, his weaknesses, his diseases, the seed of death
+which was in him, just as the animals pass down to their breed, their
+defects, and diseases, and certainty of dying after their appointed
+life is past.
+
+For this, my friends, is the lesson which Adam's fall teaches us,
+that in God alone is the life of immortal souls, whether of men, or
+of angels, or of archangels; and in God alone is righteousness; in
+God alone is every good thing, and all good in men or angels comes
+from Him, and is only His pattern, His likeness; and that the moment
+either man or angel sets up his will against God's, he falls into
+sin, a lie, and death.  That He has given us reasonable souls for
+that one purpose, that with our souls we may look up to Him, with our
+souls we may cling to Him, with our souls we may trust in Him, with
+our souls we may understand His will, and see that it is a good, and
+a right, and a loving will, and delight in it, and obey it, and find
+all our delight and glory, even as the Lord Jesus, the Son of Man,
+the New Adam, did, in doing not our own will, but the will of our
+Father.
+
+For, as St. Augustine says, man may live in two ways, either
+according to himself, or according to God; by self-will or by faith.
+He may determine to do his own will or to do God's will, to be his
+own master or to let God be his master, to seek his own glory, and
+try to be something fine and grand in himself:  or he may seek God's
+glory and obey Him, believing that what God commands is the only good
+for him, what makes God to be honoured in the eyes of his neighbours
+is the only real honour for him.
+
+But, says St. Augustine, if he tries to live according to himself, he
+falls into misery, because he was meant to live according to God.  So
+he puts himself into a lie, into a false and wrong state; and because
+he has cut himself off from God he falls below what a man should be;
+and puts on more and more of the likeness of the beast, and is more
+and more the slave of his own lusts, and passions, and fancies, as
+the dumb animals are.  And, as St. Paul says, the animal man, the
+carnal man, understands not the things of God.  And we need no one to
+tell us that this is the state of nature which we bring into the
+world with us.  We feel it; from our very childhood, from the
+earliest time we can recollect, have we not had the longing to do
+what we liked? to please ourselves, to pride ourselves on ourselves,
+to set up our own wills against our parents, against what we learnt
+out of the Bible?  Ay, has not this wilful will of ours been so
+strong, that often we would long after a thing, we would determine to
+have it, only because we were forbidden to have it; we might not care
+about the thing when we had it, but we would have our own way just
+because it was our own way.  In short, like Adam, we would be as
+gods, knowing good and evil, and choosing for ourselves what we
+should call good and what we shall call evil.  And, my dear friends,
+consider:  did not every wrong that we ever did come from this one
+root of all sin--determining to have our own way?  That root-sin of
+self-will first brought death and misery among mankind; that sin of
+self-will keeps it up still:  that sin of self-will it is which
+hinders sinners from giving themselves up to God; and that sin must
+be broken through, or religion is a mockery and a dream.
+
+Oh my friends, say to yourselves once for all, I was made in God's
+likeness; and therefore His will, and not my own, I must do.  I have
+no wisdom of my own, no strength of mind of my own, no goodness of my
+own, no lovingness of my own.  God has them all; God, who is wisdom,
+strength, goodness, love; and I have none.  And then, when the
+fearful thought comes over you:  "I have no goodness, and I cannot
+have any.  I cannot do right.  There is no use struggling and trying
+to be better.  My passions, my lusts, my fancies are too strong for
+me.  If I am brutish and low, brutish and low I must remain.  If I
+have fallen in Adam, I must lie in the mire till I die--"
+
+Then, then, my friends, answer yourselves:  "No!  Not so.  Man fell
+in the first Adam:  but man rose again in the second Adam, the Lord
+Jesus Christ.  I belong no more to the old Adam, who fell in
+Paradise.  I belong to the New Adam, who was conceived without sin,
+and born of a pure virgin, who lived by perfect faith, in perfect
+obedience, doing His Father's will only, even to the death upon the
+cross, wherein He took away the sins of the whole world.  And now for
+His sake my original sin, my fallen, brutish nature, is forgiven me.
+God does not hate me for it.  He loves me, because I belong to His
+Son.  My baptism is a witness and a warrant, a sign and a covenant
+between me and God, that I belong not to old Adam of Paradise, but to
+the Lord Jesus Christ, who sits at God's right hand.  The cross which
+was signed on my forehead when I was baptised is God's sign to me
+that I am to sacrifice myself and give up my own will to do God's
+will, even as the Lord Jesus did when He gave Himself to die, because
+it was His Father's will.  And because I belong to Jesus Christ,
+because God has called me to be His child, therefore He will help me.
+He will help me to conquer this low, brutish nature of mine.  He will
+put His Spirit into me, the Spirit of His Son Jesus Christ, that I
+may trust Him, cry to Him, My Father! that I may love Him; understand
+His will, and see how good, and noble, and beautiful, and full of
+peace and comfort it is; delight in obeying Him; glory in sacrificing
+my own fancies and pleasures for His sake; and find my only honour,
+my only happiness, in doing His will on earth as saints and angels do
+it in heaven.
+
+
+
+XLII--GOD'S COVENANTS
+
+
+
+I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a
+covenant between me and the earth.--GENESIS ix. 13.
+
+The text says that God made a covenant with Noah, and with his seed
+after him--that is, with all mankind; with us who sit here, and our
+children after us, and with all human beings who will ever live upon
+the face of the earth.  God made a covenant with them.  Now, what is
+a covenant?  We say that two men make a covenant with each other when
+they make a bargain, an agreement; in this way:  If you will do this
+thing, then I will do that; but if you will not do this thing, I will
+not do that.  If you do not keep to our agreement, I am free of it.
+If I do not do my part of the agreement, you are free.  Is not that
+what we call a covenant--a bargain between two parties, which, if
+either party breaks it, becomes null and void, and binds neither?
+Let us see whether God's covenants with man are of this kind.
+
+Does God say to Noah:  "If you and your children are righteous, I
+will look upon the rainbow, and remember my covenant:  but if you and
+your children are unrighteous, I will not look on the rainbow, and I
+will break my covenant because you have broken it?"  We read no such
+words; God made no conditions with Noah and his sons.  Whether they
+forgot the covenant or not, God would remember it.  It was a covenant
+of free grace, even as all God's covenants are.  Not a bargain, but a
+promise.  "By Myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, that I will not
+fail David."  By Himself He sware to Abraham:  "Surely blessing I
+will bless thee, and multiplying I will multiply thee."  That is the
+form of God's covenants.  God swears by Himself--by God who cannot
+change.  If God can change, then His covenant can change.  If God can
+fail Himself, then can He fail His covenant to which He has sworn by
+Himself.  If it had been a mere bargain, like men's bargains, and not
+a promise out of His absolute love, His free grace, His boundless
+mercy, would He have sworn by Himself?  Nay, rather, He would have
+sworn by Abraham:  "By thy obedience or disobedience I swear to bless
+thee or curse thee."  But He swore by Himself, the absolute, the
+unchangeable, the Giver whose name is Love.
+
+Consider now the token of the covenant which God gave to Noah.  It
+was the rainbow.  What is the rainbow?  Sunlight turned back to our
+eye, through drops of falling rain.  What sign could be more simple?
+And yet what sign could be more perfect?  Noah's sons would fear that
+another flood was coming, perhaps flood after flood.  The token of
+the rainbow said to them, No.  Floods and rain are not to be the
+custom of this earth.  Sunshine is to be the custom of it.  Do not
+fear the clouds and storm and rain; look at the bow in the cloud, in
+the very rain itself.  That is a sign that the sun, though you cannot
+see it, is shining still.  That up above, beyond the cloud, is still
+sunlight, and warmth, and cloudless blue sky.  Believe in God's
+covenant.  Believe that the sun will conquer the clouds, warmth will
+conquer cold, calm will conquer storm, fair will conquer foul, light
+will conquer darkness, joy will conquer sorrow, life conquer death,
+love conquer destruction and the devouring floods; because God is
+light, God is love, God is life, God is peace and joy eternal and
+without change, and labours to give life, and joy, and peace, to man
+and beast and all created things.  This was the meaning of the
+rainbow.  Not a sudden or strange token, a miracle, as men call it,
+like as some voice out of the sky, or fiery comet, might have been;
+but a regular, orderly, and natural sign, to witness that God is a
+God of order.  Whenever there was a rainy day there might be a
+rainbow.  It came by the same laws by which everything else comes in
+the world.  It was a witness that God who made the world is the
+friend and preserver of man; that His promises are like the
+everlasting sunshine which is above the clouds, without spot or
+fading, without variableness or shadow of turning.
+
+And do you fancy, my friends, that the new covenant, the covenant
+which God made with all mankind in the blood of His only-begotten
+Son, is narrower or weaker than the covenant which He made with Noah,
+Abraham, and David?  He asked no conditions from them.  Do you think
+He asks them from us?  He called them by free grace.  Do you think He
+calls us by anything less?  He swore by Himself to them.  How much
+more has He sworn by Himself to us?  He who was born, and died, and
+rose again for us, who now sits at the right hand of the Father, very
+Man of the substance of a human mother, yet very God of very God
+begotten.
+
+His covenants of old stood true and faithful, however disobedient and
+unfaithful men might be; as it is written:  "I have sworn once for
+all by my holiness, that I will not fail David."  And those words,
+the New Testament declares to us, again and again, are true of the
+new covenant, and fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ, into whose name
+we are baptized.  Yes; into whose name we are baptized.  There is the
+sign of the new covenant; of a covenant of free grace.  Therefore we
+can bring our children to be baptized as we were baptized ourselves,
+before they have done either good or evil, for a sign that God's love
+is over them, God's kingdom is their inheritance, God's love their
+everlasting portion.
+
+But we may fall from grace; and then what good will our baptism be to
+us?  We shall be lost, just as if we had never been baptized.
+
+My friends, if, though the sun was shining in the sky, you shut your
+eyes close, and kept out the light, what use would the sunlight be to
+you?  You would stumble, and fall, and come to harm, as certainly as
+in the darkest night.  But would the sun go out of the sky, my
+friends, because you were unwise enough to shut your eyes to it?  The
+sun would still be there, shining as bright as ever.  You would have
+only to be reasonable and to open your eyes, and you would see your
+way again as well as ever.
+
+So it is with holy baptism.  In it we were made members of Christ,
+children of God, inheritors of the kingdom of heaven.  God's love is
+above us and around us, like a warm, bright, life-giving sun.  We may
+shut our eyes to it, but it is there still.  We may disbelieve our
+baptism covenant, but it is true still.  We are children of God; and
+nothing that we can do, no sin, no unfaithfulness of ours, can make
+us anything else.  We can no more become not God's children, than a
+child can become not his own father's son.  But this we can do by
+sinning, by disbelieving that we are God's children, by behaving as
+the devil's children when we are God's; we can believe ourselves not
+God's children when we are; we can try to be what we are not; we can
+enter into a lie, and into the misery to which all lies lead; we can
+walk in darkness, and stumble, and fall, when all the while we are
+children of the light, and have only to open our eyes to walk in the
+light.  Ay, we can shut our eyes to the light so long, that at last
+we forget that there is any light at all; and that is the gate of
+hell.  We may wrap ourselves up in our selfishness, in selfish
+pleasures, selfish cunning, selfish covetousness, and selfish pride,
+till we forget that there is anything better for us than selfishness,
+till we forget that God is love, and that we His children are meant
+to be loving even as He is loving; and that also is the gate of hell.
+And worst and darkest of all, when in that stupid, sinful, loveless
+state of mind, God's loving Spirit still strives and pleads with us,
+and tries to awaken us, and terrify us with the sight of the
+everlasting misery and ruin into which we have thrown ourselves, we
+may turn those pleadings of God's Spirit, by our own evil wills, into
+a darker curse than all which have gone before.  We may refuse to
+believe that God is love, and fancy Him as hard, and cruel, and
+proud, and spiteful, and unloving as we ourselves are.  We may
+refuse, though Scripture, Prayer-book, sacraments, preachers, assure
+us of it, that God is our Father still; and deny His covenant of
+baptism, and blaspheme His holy name, by fancying Him our tyrant and
+taskmaster, who hates us, and willeth the death of a sinner, and has
+pleasure in the death of him that dieth.  And then we may behave
+according to the lie which we ourselves have invented, and all sorts
+of inventions of our own to escape God's wrath, when, in reality, it
+is He who is wishing to turn His wrath away from us; and to win back
+His favour, when, in reality, it is not we who are out of favour with
+Him, but He who is out of favour with us, who dread Him and shrink
+from Him; we may try to deliver ourselves from Him, when all the
+while it is He, the very God whom we are dreading and flying from,
+who alone is able and willing to deliver us; and with all our fears,
+and self-tormentings, and faithless terrors, and blasphemings of God
+by fancying Him the very opposite to what He has declared Himself, we
+shall get no peace of conscience, no deliverance from sins, or from
+the fear of punishment, but only a fearful and fiery looking forward
+to judgment, which is hell.  That is superstition; hell on earth;
+when men have so utterly forgotten the likeness of God, which He
+manifested in His Son Jesus Christ, that they look on Him as a stern
+and dreadful taskmaster, a tyrant, and not a deliverer.  Hell on
+earth, which may and must lead to hell hereafter; a hell of fear, and
+doubt, and hatred of Him who is all lovely; the hell whereof it is
+written, that its worst torment is being cast out from the sight of
+God:  unless the hapless sinner opens his eye and believes the
+covenant of his baptism, and sees that God cannot lie, God cannot
+change, cannot break His covenant, cannot alter His love; that though
+he have left his Father's house, and wandered into far countries, and
+wasted his Father's substance in riotous living, he is still his
+Father's son, his Father's house is still where it was from the
+beginning, his Father's heart still what it was from the beginning;
+and so arises and goes back to his Father's house, confessing that he
+is no more worthy to be called His son, willing to be only as one of
+His hired servants; and then--sees not the stern countenance, the
+cruel punishments which he dreaded:  but--"While he was yet afar off,
+his Father saw him, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him!"
+
+And if, in our sins, our only hope of comfort, and peace, and
+strength, lies in remembering our baptismal covenant, and being sure
+and certain that though we have changed, God has not; that though we
+are dark, God's love shines bright and clear for ever, how much more
+when the dark day of affliction comes?  Why should I speak of this
+and that affliction?  Each heart knows its own bitterness; each soul
+has its own sorrow; each man's life has its dark days of storm and
+tempest, when all his joys seem flown away by some sudden blast of
+ill-fortune, and the desire of his eyes is taken from him, and all
+his hopes and plans, all which he intended to do or to enjoy, are hid
+with blinding mist, so that he cannot see his way before him, and
+knows not whither to go, and whither to flee for help; when faith in
+God seems broken up for the moment, when he feels no strength, no
+will, no purpose, and knows not what to determine, what to do, what
+to believe, what to care for; when the very earth seems reeling under
+his feet, and the fountains of the abyss are broken up:  then let him
+think of God's covenant, and take heart; let him think of his
+baptism, and be at peace.  Is the sun's warmth perished out of the
+sky, because the storm is cold with hail and bitter winds?  Is God's
+love changed, because we cannot feel it in our trouble?  Is the sun's
+light perished out of the sky, because the world is black with cloud
+and mist?  Has God forgotten to give light to suffering souls,
+because we cannot see our way for a few short days of perplexity?
+
+For this is the gospel, this is the message which we have received
+from God, to preach to every sad and desolate heart on earth, that
+God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.  That God is love,
+and in Him there is no cruelty at all.  That God is one, and in Him
+there is no change at all.  And therefore, we all, the most ignorant
+of us as well as the wisest, the most sinful of us as well as the
+holiest, the saddest and most wretched of us as well as the happiest,
+have a right to join in that Litany which is offered up here thrice
+every week during the time of Lent, and to call upon God to deliver
+us and all mankind, not merely because we wish to be delivered from
+evil, but because God wishes to deliver us from evil.  If we pray
+that Litany in any dark dread of God, in doubt of His love and
+goodwill towards us, like terrified slaves crying out to a hard
+taskmaster, and entreating him not to torment them, we do not pray
+that Litany aright; we do not pray it at all.  For it asks God not to
+leave us alone, but to come to us; not to stop punishing us, but
+actually Himself to deliver us, to defend us, to set us free.
+Therefore it begins by calling on God the Father, because He is our
+Father; on God the Son, because He has already redeemed and bought us
+for His own; on God the Holy Spirit, because He has been striving
+with our wilful hearts from our youth up till now, lovingly desiring
+to teach us, to change us, to sanctify us.  Therefore it calls on the
+holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, three Persons and one God,
+because the Son does not love us better than the Father does, or than
+the Holy Spirit does, but in the life and death of the Man Christ
+Jesus, whom we call on to deliver us by His birth, His baptism, His
+death, His resurrection, by all that His manhood did and suffered
+here on earth, in His life and death, I say, were shown forth bodily
+the glory, and condescension, and love, and goodwill of the fulness
+of the Godhead, of all three Persons of the one and undivided
+Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Therefore we may pray boldly
+to Him to spare us, because we know that we are already His people,
+already redeemed with his most precious blood, already declared by
+holy baptism to be bound to Him in an everlasting covenant.
+Therefore we may pray boldly to Him not to be angry with us for ever,
+because we know that He desires to bless us for ever, if we will only
+let Him; if we will only let His love have free course, and not shut
+our hearts to it, and turn our backs upon it.  Therefore we can ask
+Him to deliver us in all time of our tribulation and misery; in all
+time of the still more dangerous temptations which wealth and
+prosperity bring with them; in the hour of death, whether of our own
+death or the death of those we love; in the day of judgment, whereof
+it is written:  "It is God who justifieth us, who is he that
+condemneth?  It is Christ who died, yea rather who is risen again,
+who even now maketh intercession for us."  To that boundless love of
+God which He showed forth in the life of Christ Jesus; to that utter
+and perfect will to deliver us, which God showed forth in the death
+of Christ Jesus, when the Father spared not His only-begotten Son,
+but freely gave Him for us; to that boundless love we may trust
+ourselves, our fortunes, our families, our bodies, our souls, the
+souls of those we love.  Trusting in that great love, we may pray in
+that Litany for deliverance; to be delivered from distress and
+accidents, from all sins which drag us down, and make us miserable,
+ashamed, confused, terrified, selfish, hateful, and hating each
+other.  We may pray to be delivered from evil, because God is
+righteousness, and hates evil.  We may pray to be delivered from our
+sins, because God is righteousness, and hates our sins.  We may pray
+for the Queen, her ministers, her parliament, because God's love and
+care is over them; for all orders and ranks of men, whether laymen or
+clergymen, high or low, in God's holy church; for all who are
+afflicted and desolate; for all who are wandering in ignorance, and
+mistakes, and sin; ay, for all mankind, for God loves them all, the
+Son of God has bought them all with His most precious blood.  And
+however dark, and sad, and sinful the world may seem around us;
+however dark, and sad, and sinful our own hearts may be within us, we
+may find comfort in that Litany, and pour out in it our sorrows and
+our fears, if we begin only as it begins, with the thought of God who
+is righteousness, God who is love, God who is the Deliverer.  And
+then, as the rainbow reflects the sunbeams for a sign and token that
+the sun is shining, though we see it not; so will that blessed
+Litany, with its sacred name of God, its calls to Him who was born of
+the Virgin Mary, and crucified under Pontius Pilate; its entreaties
+to God to deliver us, because He is a deliverer; to hear us, and send
+us good, because He is a good Lord Himself; its remembrances of the
+noble works which God did in our fathers' days, and in the old time
+before them; its noble declaration that God does not despise the
+sighing of a contrite heart, nor the desire of a humble spirit, and
+that it is the very glory of His name to turn from us those evils
+which we most justly have deserved--that Litany, I say, will be like
+a rainbow declaring to our dark and stormy hearts that the sun is
+shining still above the clouds; that over and above us, and all
+mankind, and all the changes and chances of this mortal life, is the
+still bright sunshine, the life-giving warmth of the Sun of
+Righteousness, the absolute eternal love of our Father who is in
+heaven, who, as he has declared by the mouth of His only-begotten
+Son, is perfect in this, that He does not deal with us after our
+sins, nor reward us according to our iniquities, but is good to the
+unthankful and the evil, sending His rain alike upon the just and on
+the unjust, and making His sun to shine alike upon the evil and the
+good.
+
+
+
+XLIII--THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS
+
+
+
+Great is the mystery of godliness:  God was manifest in the flesh,
+justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached to the Gentiles,
+believed on in the world, received up into glory.--1 TIMOTHY iii. 16.
+
+St. Paul here sums up in one verse the whole of Christian truth.  He
+gives us in a few words what he says is the great mystery of
+godliness.
+
+Now, men had been inventing for themselves all kinds of mysteries of
+godliness; all sorts of mysterious and wonderful notions about God;
+all sorts of mysterious and strange ceremonies, and ways of pleasing
+God, or turning away His anger.
+
+And Christian men are apt to do so also, as well as those old
+heathens.  They feel that they are very mysterious and wonderful
+beings themselves, simply because they are men.  They say to
+themselves:  "How strange that I should have a body of flesh and
+blood, and appetites and passions, like the animals, and yet that I
+should have an immortal spirit in me.  How strange this notion of
+duty which I have, and which the other animals have not; this notion
+of its being right to do some things, and wrong to do others!  From
+whence did that notion come?  And again, this strange notion which I
+have, and cannot help having, that I ought to be like God:  and yet I
+do not know what God is like.  From whence did that notion come?"
+
+Again:  "I fancy that God ought to be good.  But how do I know that
+He really is good?  I see the world full of injustice, and misery,
+and death.  How do I know that this is not God's doing, God's fault
+in some way?"
+
+Again, says a man to himself:  "I have a fair right to believe that
+mankind are not the only persons in the universe--that there are
+other beings beside God whom I cannot see.  I call them angels.  I
+hardly know what I mean by that.  The really important question about
+them to me is:  Will they do me harm?  Can they do me good?  Are they
+stronger than I?--Ought I not to fear them, to try to please them, to
+keep them favourable to me?"
+
+Again, he asks:  "Does God care whether I know what is right?  Does
+God care to teach me about Himself?  Is God desirous that I should do
+my duty?  For if He does not care about my being good, why should I
+care about it?"
+
+Again, he asks:  "But if I knew my duty, might I not find it
+something too far-fetched, too difficult, for poor simple folk to do:
+so that I should be forced to leave a right life to great scholars,
+and to rich people, or to people of a very devout delicate temper of
+mind, who have a natural turn that way?"
+
+And last of all:  "Even if I did struggle to do right; even if I gave
+up everything for the sake of doing right; how do I know that it will
+profit me to do so?  I shall die as every man dies, and then what
+will become of me?  Shall I be a man still, or only--horrible
+thought!--some sort of empty ghost, a spirit without body, of which I
+dream, and shudder while I dream of it?"
+
+Men in all ages, heathens and Christians, have been puzzled by such
+thoughts as these, as soon as they began to feel that there was a
+world which they could not see, as well as a world which they could
+see; a spiritual world, wherein God the Spirit, and their own
+spirits, and spiritual things, such as right, wrong, duty, reason,
+love, dwell for ever; and a strange hidden duty on all men to obey
+that unseen God, and the laws of that spiritual world; in short a
+mystery of godliness.
+
+Then they have tried to answer these questions for themselves; and
+have run thereby into all manner of follies and superstitions, and
+often, too, into devilish cruelties, in the hope of pleasing God
+according to some mystery of godliness of their own invention.
+
+But to each of these puzzles St. Paul gives an answer in the text.
+Let us take them each in its order, and you will see what I mean.
+
+The first puzzle was:  How is it that while I am like the animals in
+some things, and yet feel as if I ought to be, and can be, like God
+in other things?  How is it that I feel two powers in me; one
+dragging me downward to make me lower than the beasts, the other
+lifting me upwards--I dare not think whither?  It seems to me to be
+my body, my bodily appetites and tempers which drag me down.  Is my
+body me, part of me, or a thing I should be ashamed of, and long to
+be rid of?  I fancy that I can be like God.  But can my body be like
+God?  Must I not crush it, neglect it, get rid of it before I can
+follow the good instinct which draws me upward?
+
+To which St. Paul told Timothy to answer:  God was manifest in the
+flesh.  God sent down His only-begotten Son, co-equal and co-eternal
+with Himself, very God of very God, the very same person who had been
+putting into men's minds those two notions of which we spoke, that
+there is a right and a wrong, and that men ought to be like God; Him
+the Father sent into the world that He might be born, and live, and
+die, and rise again, as a man; that so men might see from His
+example, manifestly and plainly, what God was like, and what man
+ought to be like.  And so Jesus Christ was God, manifested in the
+flesh.
+
+Now we do know what God is like.  We know that He is so like man,
+that He can take upon Him man's flesh and blood without changing, or
+lowering, or defiling Himself.  That proves that man must have been
+originally made in God's likeness; that man's being fallen, means
+man's falling from the likeness of God, and taking up instead with
+the likeness of the brutes which perish; that the fault cannot be in
+our bodies, but in our spirits which have yielded to our bodies, and
+become their slaves instead of their masters, as Christ's Spirit was
+master of His body.  But the Son of God, by being born and living as
+a man, showed us that we are not fallen past hope, not fallen so low
+that we cannot rise again.  He showed that though mankind are sinful,
+yet they need not be sinful; for He was a man as exactly, and
+perfectly, and entirely as we are, and yet in Him was no sin.  So He
+showed that brutishness and sinfulness is not our proper state, but
+our disease and our fall; and a disease of which we can be cured, a
+fall out of which we can rise and be renewed into the true and real
+pattern of mankind, the new Adam, Jesus the sinless Son of Man and
+Son of God.
+
+The next question, I said, that rose in men's mind was:  "How do I
+know that God is good, as I fancy sometimes that He must be?  I see
+the world full of sin, and injustice, and misery, and death.  Perhaps
+that is God's doing, God's fault."  That is a common puzzle enough,
+and a sad and fearful one.  The sin and the misery and the death are
+here.  If God did not bring it here, yet why did He let it come here?
+He could have stopped if He would, and kept out all this
+wretchedness:  why did He not?  Was He just or loving in letting sin
+into the world?
+
+To all which St. Paul answers:  "God was justified in the Spirit."
+
+You do not see what that has to do with it?  Then let me show you.
+
+To be justified means to be shown and proved to be just, righteous.
+Now what justified God to man was the Spirit of God, as He showed
+Himself in the Lord Jesus Christ.  For when God became man and dwelt
+among men, what sort of works were His?  What was His conduct, His
+character; of what sort of spirit did He show Himself to be?  He
+went, we read, doing good, for God was with Him.  Not of His own
+will, but to do His Father's will, and because He was filled without
+measure by the Spirit of God, He did good, He healed the sick, He
+rebuked the proud and self-conceited hypocrite, He proclaimed pardon
+and mercy to the broken-hearted sinner, wearied and worn out by the
+burden of his sins.  Thus, in every action of His life, He was
+fighting against evil and misery, and conquering it; and so showing
+that God hates evil and misery, and that the evil and the misery in
+the world are here against God's will.  Strange as it may seem to
+have to say it, so it is.  Jesus Christ showed that howsoever sin and
+sorrow came into the world, it is God's will and purpose to root them
+out of the world, and that He is righteous, He is loving, He is
+merciful, He does and will fight against evil, for those who are
+crushed by it; and help poor sufferers always when they call upon
+Him, and often, often, of His most undeserved condescension and free
+grace, when they are forgetting and disobeying Him.  And so by the
+good, and loving, and just spirit which Jesus showed, God was
+justified before men, and showed to be a God of goodness and justice.
+
+The next puzzle, I said, was about angels and spirits, whether we
+need to pray to them to help us, and not to hurt us.  St. Paul
+answers:  God, when He was manifested in the flesh of a man, was seen
+by these angels.  And that is enough for us.  They saw the Lord God
+condescend to be born in a stable, to live as a poor man, to die on
+the cross.  They saw that His will to man was love.  And they do His
+will.  And therefore they love men, they help men, they minister to
+men, because they follow the Lord's example, and do the will of their
+Father in Heaven, even as we ought to do it on earth.  Therefore we
+have no need to fear them, for they love us already.  And, on the
+other hand, we have no need to pray to them to help us, for they know
+already that it is their duty to help us.  They know that the Son of
+God has put on us a higher honour than He ever put on them; for He
+took not on Him the nature of angels, He took on Him the nature of
+man; and thus, though man was made a little lower than the angels,
+yet by Christ's taking man's nature, man is crowned with a glory and
+honour higher than the angels.  Know ye not, says St. Paul, that we
+shall judge angels?  And the angels, as they told St. John, are our
+fellow-servants, not our masters; and they know that; for they saw
+the Son of God doing utterly His Father's will, and therefore they
+know that their duty is to do their Father's will also; not to do
+their own wills, and set themselves up as our masters, to be pleaded
+with by us.  They saw the Son of God take our nature on Him, when
+they sang to the shepherds on the first Christmas night:  "Peace on
+earth, and good-will toward men;" and therefore they look on us with
+love and honour, because we wear the human nature which Christ their
+Master wore, and are partakers of the Holy Spirit of God, even as
+they are.  For no angel or archangel could do a right thing, any more
+than we, except by the Holy Spirit of God.  And that Holy Spirit is
+bestowed on the poorest man who asks for it, as freely as upon the
+highest of the heavenly host.
+
+And this leads us on to the next puzzle of which I spoke:  Men were
+apt, and are apt now, to say to themselves:  Does God care whether I
+know what is right?  Does God care to teach me about Himself?  Is God
+desirous that I should do my duty?  For if He does not care about my
+being good, why should I care about it?
+
+To this St. Paul answers:  "God, who was manifest in the flesh, was
+preached to the Gentiles."
+
+God does care that men should know about God; for He loves them.  He
+yearns after them as a father after his children, and He knows that
+to know God, to know the truth about God, is the beginning of all
+wisdom, the root of all safety and honour and happiness.  He willeth
+not that any should perish, but that all should come to the knowledge
+of the truth.  And, therefore, when the Son of God died for our sins,
+He did not stop at that great deed of love; but He ordained Apostles,
+and put upon them especially and above all men, His Holy Spirit, that
+they might go and preach to all nations the good news that God had
+become flesh, and dwelt among men, and borne their sorrows and
+infirmities, and to baptize them into the very name of God itself,
+into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost;
+that so, instead of fancying now that God did not care for them, they
+might be sure that God so longed to teach them, that He called every
+child, even from its cradle, to come into His kingdom, and be taught
+the whole mystery of godliness.
+
+The next puzzle I mentioned was:  "But this right life, this mystery
+of godliness, is it not something very strange and difficult, and
+past the understanding of simple men who are not extraordinarily
+clever and learned scholars or deep philosophers?"  To that St. Paul
+answers:  No.  It is not past any man.  It is not too deep or too
+difficult for the simplest, the most unlearned countryman.  For, says
+St. Paul in the text, we Apostles have had proof of that; we have
+tried it; we Apostles preached the mystery of godliness, and it was
+believed on in the world.  People of the world, plain working men and
+women going about their worldly business, who had no time to be great
+readers, or great thinkers, or to shut themselves up in monasteries
+to meditate on heavenly things, but had to live and work in the
+commonplace, busy, workday world--they believed our message.  We
+Apostles told them that the Son of God had showed Himself in the
+likeness of man, and called on every man to repent, and to be such a
+man as He was.  And worldly people believed us, and tried, and found
+that without giving up their worldly work, or deserting the station
+in which God had put them, they could live godlike lives, and become
+the sons of God without rebuke.  They saw that scholarship was not
+wanted, leisure was not wanted, but only the humble heart which
+hungers and thirsts after righteousness.  About their daily work, by
+their cottage firesides, among their poor neighbours, the Spirit of
+Almighty God gave them strength to live as Jesus their pattern lived;
+He filled them with all holy, pure, noble, brave, loving thoughts and
+feelings, fit for angels and archangels.  He enabled them to rise out
+of their sins, to trample their temptations under foot, to leave
+their old low brutish sinful way of life behind them, and become new
+men, and persevere in every word, and thought, and action, in virtues
+such as the greatest heathen sages could not copy; ay, even to shed
+their life-blood freely and boldly in martyrdom, for the sake of God
+and the truth of God.  They, these plain simple people, living in the
+world, could still live the life of God, and die like heroes for the
+sake of God.
+
+And this again brings us to the last puzzle of which I spoke:  "But
+what became of those holy and godlike people when they died?  What
+reward did they receive for all they had done, and given up, and
+suffered?  What will become of us after we die?  What will the next
+world be like?  What is heaven like?  Shall I be able to enjoy it?
+Shall I be a man there, or only a ghost, a spirit without a body?"
+
+To this St. Paul answers:  That Christ, the Son of God, after He was
+manifested in the flesh, was received up into glory.  He does not
+tell us what heaven is like; for though he had been caught up into
+the third heaven, yet what he saw there, he says, was unspeakable.
+He neither ought to tell, or could tell, what he saw.  Neither does
+St. Paul tell us what the next life will be like; for as far as we
+can find, God had not told him.  All he says is:  The man Christ
+Jesus, who walked this earth like other men, was received up into
+glory; and He did not leave His man's mind, His man's heart, even His
+man's body, behind Him.  He carried up into heaven with Him His whole
+manhood, spirit, soul, and body, even to the print of the nails in
+His hands and in His most holy feet, and the wound of the spear in
+His most holy side.  And that is enough for us.  Because the man
+Christ Jesus is in heaven, we as men may ascend to heaven.  Where He
+is we shall be.  And what He is, in as far as He is man, we shall be.
+What we shall be we know not; but this we know, that we shall be like
+Him, for we shall see Him as He is.  And He is a man still; for it is
+written:  "There is one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ
+Jesus."  And He will be a man at the day of judgment; for it is
+written that:  "God hath ordained a day in which He will judge the
+world by a man whom He hath chosen."  And He will be a man for ever;
+for it is written:  "This man abideth for ever."  And He Himself said
+to His disciples:  "I will not drink of this fruit of the vine, till
+I drink it new with you in the kingdom of my Father."  And again He
+declared, even when he was on earth, that He was the Son of Man who
+is in heaven.  And in heaven nothing can grow less.  But if Christ
+were not man for ever as well as God, He would become less; for He is
+now God and man also at once; but if He laid down His manhood, and so
+became not man any more, but God only, He would become less, which is
+not to be believed of Him of whom it is written:  That Jesus Christ
+is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.  For, as the Athanasian
+creed teaches us, He is not God alone, nor man alone, but God and man
+is one Christ; and therefore, when St. John declares that Christ
+shall reign for ever and ever, he declares that He shall reign not
+only as God, but as man also.  Therefore whatever we do not know
+about the next life, we know this, that we shall be men there; not
+sinful, weak, and mortal, as we are here, but holy, strong, immortal,
+after the likeness of our Lord, the firstborn from the dead, who has
+ascended up on high and raised our human nature to the heaven of
+heavens, and is gone to prepare a place for us, into which we too
+shall enter in that day when He shall change these mortal and fallen
+bodies which we now wear, the bodies of our humiliation, the bodies
+by wearing which we are now a little lower than the angels; them the
+Lord will change, that they may be made like unto His glorious body,
+according to the mighty working whereby He subdueth all things unto
+Himself, that we may see Him face to face, and dwell with Him in the
+glory of God the Father for ever.
+
+Oh my friends, who is sufficient for these things?  What shall we say
+of man?  Is he not indeed fearfully and wonderfully made?  Here we
+are, weak creatures, more liable to disease and death than the dumb
+beasts round us; full of poverty, and adversity, and longings which
+are never satisfied; our minds full of mistakes, our hearts full of
+false conceit, full of spite and folly, struggles, murmurings,
+quarrellings; our consciences full of the remembrance of sins without
+number.  The greatest of all heathen poets said, that there was not a
+more miserable and pitiable animal upon the earth than man.  He knew
+no better.  He could not know better.  How could he, when God had not
+yet been manifest in the flesh?  How could he dream that the Lord God
+would condescend to be made flesh, and dwell among us, and show man
+His glory, the glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of
+grace and truth--how could he dream that?  And more than all, how
+could he dream that God, instead of throwing away our human nature
+when He rose again, as if it was too great a degradation for Him to
+be a man one moment more, should condescend to take up His human
+nature, His man's body, soul, and spirit, with Him into everlasting
+glory, that He might feed with it for ever the bodies and souls of
+those who trust in Him, so as to make them fit for us at the last
+day, to share in His everlasting life?  The old heathen poet knew as
+well as you or I that there was an everlasting life beyond the grave;
+that men's souls were immortal, and could not die:  but the thought
+of it was all dark, and dreary, and uncertain to him and to all
+mankind, till the Son of God brought life and immortality to light,
+when He was manifest in the flesh.
+
+Wonderful mystery of godliness!  Wonderful love of God to man!
+Wonderful condescension of God to man!  Still more wonderful patience
+of God to man!
+
+Oh you who live still in sin, when the Son of God died and rose again
+to make you righteous; you who defile your bodies with sins worse
+than the brutes, when the Son of God offers to raise those bodies of
+yours to be equal with the angels; how shall you escape if you
+neglect so great salvation; if you despise this unspeakable love; if
+you trample under foot, like swine, the everlasting glory and
+happiness which God offers you freely, without fee or price, for the
+sake of His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who died to buy them for
+you?
+
+
+
+XLIV--THE WORK OF GOD'S SPIRIT
+
+
+
+If I go not away, the comforter will not come unto you; but if I
+depart, I will send Him unto you.  And when He is come, He will
+reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:  of
+sin, because they believe not on me:  of righteousness, because I go
+to my Father, and ye see me no more:  of judgment, because the prince
+of this world is judged.--JOHN xvi. 7-11.
+
+I no not pretend to be able to explain to you the whole meaning of
+this text, or even more than a very small part of it.  For it speaks
+of God; of God the Holy Spirit.  And God is boundless; and,
+therefore, every text which speaks of God is boundless too, as God
+is.  No man can ever see the whole meaning of it, or do more than
+understand dimly a little of its truth.  But what we can see, we must
+think over and make use of.  What can we see, now, from this text?
+First, we may see that the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost, the
+Comforter, is a person.  Not a mere thing, or a state of our own
+hearts, or a feeling in us, or a power, like the powers and laws by
+which the trees and plants grow, and the sun and moon move in their
+courses; but a person, just as each of us is a person.  He, the Holy
+Spirit, gives life to trees and plants, sun and moon:  but He is not
+their life.  He gives them their life; and, therefore, that life of
+theirs is not He, or He could not give it; for you can only give
+something which is not you.
+
+The Scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit, not as it, but as He; as a
+person, and not as a thing; as a person who can speak to men's souls,
+guide and teach them.
+
+"When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all
+truth; for He shall not speak of Himself."
+
+But we may see also that the Holy Spirit is neither God the Father,
+nor the Lord Jesus Christ.  For the Lord speaks of Him, the Holy
+Spirit, as a different person either from Him or from the Father.
+"The Spirit," He says, "shall glorify me; for He shall receive of
+mine, and shall show it unto you."
+
+But we may see also that there is no difference in will, or opinion,
+or love, between the Holy Spirit and the Father and the Son.  For the
+Spirit does not speak of Himself; there is no self-will in Him.
+There is not one will of the Father, and another of the Son, and
+another of the Holy Ghost; or, one love of the Father, another love
+of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost; or, one righteousness of
+the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Ghost:  or, one
+mercy and grace of the Father, another of the Son, another of the
+Holy Ghost.  For then there would be three Gods and three Lords; and
+the substance of God would be divided.  But they have all one will,
+and one love, and one righteousness, and one mercy.  And such as the
+Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.
+
+And remember always, that the Holy Spirit is very and indeed God.
+For He is the Spirit of holiness itself, of righteousness itself, of
+goodness itself, of love itself, of truth itself; and, therefore, He
+is the Spirit of God, who is the perfect holiness, and righteousness,
+and truth, and love.  All other holiness, and righteousness, and
+truth, and love, are only pictures and patterns of God, just as the
+sun's reflection in water, or in a glass, is a picture and pattern of
+the sun.  As the Epistle for to-day tells us:  "Every good gift and
+every perfect is from above, and cometh down from the Father of
+lights."
+
+But the Spirit of God must be God.  For else what do the words mean?
+Is not the spirit of a man, a man?  Is not your spirit, what you call
+your soul, you?  Is not your soul you, just as much as your body is
+you; ay, a hundred times more?  Just so, the Spirit of God is God,
+God Himself; and the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, of the Holy
+Ghost, is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.
+
+This, then, is the glorious promise made to you, and to me, and to
+all who believe and are baptized into the name of the Father, the
+Son, and the Holy Spirit; that that Spirit will come to us, and take
+charge of our spirits, and work in them, and teach them.  We cannot
+see Him with our eyes, or hear Him with our ears; we cannot even feel
+Him at work in our hearts and thoughts.  For He is a Spirit; and His
+likeness, the thing in this world which is a pattern of Him, is the
+wind; as indeed the name Spirit means.  You cannot see the wind, you
+cannot even really feel the wind or hear it:  you only know it by its
+effects, by what it does:  by the noise among the branches, the force
+against your faces, the bending boughs, and flying dust.  The Spirit
+bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but
+canst not tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth; even so is
+every one who is born of the Spirit.  On him the Spirit of God will
+work unseen, and unfelt, only to be discovered by the change which He
+makes in the man's heart and thoughts; and first by the way in which
+He convinces him of sin, because men believe not on Jesus Christ.
+
+The Holy Spirit shows men that the sins of the world, the sin of all
+sins, the sin which is the root of all other sins, is not believing
+on the Lord Jesus Christ; that it was because they would not believe
+on the Lord Jesus Christ, that they had been falling into every other
+sort of sin.
+
+But you may say:  "How could they believe on Him before He came, and
+was born in Judaea of the Virgin Mary?  How could they believe on Him
+when He was not there?"  Ah! my friends, who told you that the Lord
+Jesus Christ was not there in the world all along?  Not the Bible,
+certainly.  For the Bible tells us that He is the Light who lights
+every man who cometh into the world; that from Him came, and have
+come, all the right thoughts and feelings which ever arose in the
+heart of every human being.  The Bible tells us that when God created
+the world, He was daily rejoicing in the habitable parts of the
+earth, and His delights were with the sons of men.  The Bible tells
+us that He was in the world, and the world knew Him not; that all
+along, through the dark times of heathendom, the Lord Jesus Christ
+was a light shining in darkness, which the darkness could not close
+round, and hide and quench.
+
+Not merely to the Jews, but to all heathens who hungered and thirsted
+after righteousness, did the Lord Jesus show something of His truth;
+as it is written, God is no acceptor of persons; that is, no shower
+of partiality, or unjust favour:  but in every nation, he that
+feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him.
+
+But at the time that the Lord Jesus sent down His Holy Spirit, men
+were not working righteousness.  There was not one who did good, no
+not one.  For men had forgotten what righteousness was like, what a
+righteous man ought to do and be.  Men are ready to forget it every
+day.  You and I are ready to forget it, and invent some false
+righteousness of our own, not like Jesus Christ, but like what we in
+our private fancies think is most graceful, or most agreeable, or
+most easy; or most grand, and far-fetched, and difficult.  But the
+Holy Spirit came to convince men of righteousness; to show them what
+true righteousness was like.
+
+And how?  In the same way that He must convince us of righteousness,
+if we are ever to know what righteousness is, or are ever to be
+righteous ourselves.  He must show us goodness; or we shall never see
+it, or receive it, or copy it.
+
+And where is this righteousness, this perfect goodness of which the
+Holy Spirit will convince us?  Where, but in the Lord Jesus Christ?
+In the Lord Jesus's character, the Lord Jesus's good works; His love,
+His patience, His perfect obedience, His life, His death.  The Holy
+Spirit, if we give up our hearts to be taught by Him, will make us
+believe, and be sure, and feel in our very inmost hearts, how noble,
+how beautiful, how holy, how perfectly Godlike, was He who was born
+of a poor virgin, who walked this earth for thirty-three years in
+toil and sorrow, who gave His back to the smiters, and His cheeks to
+them that plucked off the hair, and hid not His face from shame and
+spitting, who died upon a cross between two thieves.  And the Holy
+Spirit will convince us of righteousness, by making us feel what the
+Lord Jesus's righteousness consisted in; what was the root of all His
+goodness and holiness, namely His perfect obedience to His Father and
+our Father in heaven.  That is the righteousness, which is not our
+own, but God's; the righteousness which comes by faith; not to trust
+in ourselves, but in God; not to please ourselves, but God; not to do
+our own will, but God's will.  That is the righteousness of Jesus
+Christ, which God set His seal on and approved, when He exalted Him
+far above all principality and powers, and set Him at His own right
+hand for a sign to all men, and angels, and archangels; that
+righteousness means to trust and to obey God even to the death.
+
+3.  Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.
+
+This may seem a puzzling speech at first.  We shall understand it
+best, I think, by considering who the prince of this world was in our
+Lord's time, and what he was like.  A little before our Lord's time
+the Roman emperor had conquered almost the whole world which was then
+known, and kept all nations in slavery, careless about their doing
+right, provided they obeyed him and paid him tribute; nay, forcing
+them and tempting them into all brutal and foul sin and ignorance,
+that he might keep up his own power over man.
+
+But now the Lord of all the earth, and the Prince of men's hearts and
+thoughts, was come to visit that poor enslaved and sinful world.  He
+came; the princes of this world knew Him not, and crucified the Lord
+of Glory.  They crucified the righteous and the just One; and so they
+were judged.  They judged themselves; they condemned themselves.  For
+they showed that what they admired and what they wanted was not
+righteousness and love, but wealth and power.  They showed that no
+doing of good, no healing of the sick, or giving of sight to the
+blind, or preaching the gospel to the poor, no holiness, no love, not
+the perfect likeness of God's own goodness, which shone forth in the
+spotless Jesus, was anything to them; was any reason why they should
+not put Him to death with the most cruel torments, because they were
+afraid of His taking away their power.  He said He was a King; and
+therefore they crucified Him, lest His kingdom should interfere with
+theirs; and for the same reason these same Roman emperors and their
+magistrates, for hundreds of years afterwards, persecuted the
+Christians, and hunted them down like wild beasts, and put them to
+death by all horrible tortures, for the same reason that Cain slew
+Abel; became his brother's deeds were righteous, and his own wicked.
+
+So these Roman emperors, and their magistrates and generals were
+judged.  They had shown what was in their evil hearts.  They had been
+tried in God's balances, and found wanting.  The sentence of the Lord
+God had gone forth against them.  The man Christ Jesus, whom they
+rejected, God accepted, and raised to His own right hand.  They
+crucified Him; but God gave Him all power in heaven and earth:  and
+the Lord Jesus used His power; yea, and uses it still.  He gave His
+saints and martyrs strength to defy those Roman tyrants, and to
+witness to all the earth that the righteous Son of God was the King
+of heaven and earth, and that the princes of this world, who wished
+to break His yoke off their necks, and crush all nations to powder
+for their own pleasure, and fatten themselves upon the plunder of all
+the earth, would surely come to naught, as it is written in the
+second Psalm:  "The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers
+take counsel together, against the Lord and His Anointed.  Yet have I
+set my King upon my holy hill of Zion.  Thou shalt break them with a
+rod of iron:  thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."
+
+And they did come to naught.  That great Roman empire rotted away
+miserably after years of such distress as had never been seen on the
+earth before; and the emperors came, one after another, to shameful
+or dreadful deaths.  And all the while the gospel spread, and the
+Church grew, till all the kingdoms of the Roman empire had become the
+kingdoms of God and of His Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit
+working in men's hearts, and showing them, as our Lord said He would,
+that Jesus of Nazareth was both Lord and King.  And so was fulfilled
+the Lord's words in the gospel for to-day:  "The Holy Spirit shall
+glorify me, for He shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you.
+All things that the Father hath are mine; therefore said I that He
+should take of mine, and show it unto you."
+
+Oh my friends, pray for yourselves, and join me while I pray for you,
+that the holy and righteous Spirit of God may convince you, and me,
+and all mankind, more and more, day by day, of sin, of righteousness,
+and of judgment.
+
+Pray to that Holy Spirit to convince you of sin day by day,
+whensoever you do the least wrong thing.  Pray to Him to keep your
+consciences tender and quick, that you may feel instantly, and lament
+deeply, every wrong thing you do.
+
+Pray to Him to give you, every time you do wrong, that godly sorrow
+which brings peace and health, that heart-repentance never to be
+repented of.  Pray to Him to convince you more and more, as you grow
+older, that all sin comes from not believing in Jesus Christ, not
+believing that He is near you, with you, in you, putting into your
+hearts all right thoughts and good desires, and willing, if you will,
+to help you to put those thoughts and desires into good practice.
+
+Pray to the Holy Spirit to convince you more and more of
+righteousness; to make you see what righteousness is; that it is the
+very character and likeness of God the Father, because it is the
+character and likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ, who was the
+brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of His
+person.  Pray to Him to make you see the beauty of holiness:  how
+fair, and noble, and glorious a thing goodness is; how truly Solomon
+says:  "that all the things that may be desired are not to be
+compared to it."
+
+Pray to the Holy Spirit to convince you more and more of judgment,
+and to make you sure that the Lord is King, a righteous Judge, of
+purer eyes than to behold iniquity, whose fan is in His hand, who
+thoroughly purges His floor, who comes quickly, and His reward is
+with Him, and who surely casts out of His kingdom, sooner or later,
+all things that offend, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.  Pray
+to Him to make you sure by faith, though you cannot see it, that the
+prince of this world is judged; that evil doing, oppression, tyranny,
+injustice, cheating, neglect of man by man, cannot and will not
+prosper upon the face of God's earth; for the everlasting sentence
+and wrath of God is revealed forth every moment against all
+unrighteousness of men, which He will surely punish, yea, and does
+hourly punish by Him by whom He judges the world, Jesus Christ, the
+Lord, who is exalted high above all principalities and powers, and
+has all power given to Him in heaven and earth, which He uses, as He
+used it in Judaea of old, utterly and always for the good of all
+mankind, whom He hath redeemed with His most precious blood.
+
+
+
+XLV--THE GOSPEL
+
+
+
+Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached
+unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which
+also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you,
+unless ye have believed in vain:  for I delivered unto you first of
+all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins
+according to the scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose
+again the third day according to the scriptures.--1 CORINTHIANS xv.
+1-4.
+
+This is St. Paul's account of the gospel; the good news which he
+preached to the sinful and profligate Corinthians, when they were
+sunk lower than the beasts which perish.  And because they believed
+this good news, he said, they were saved then and there, and would be
+safe only as long as they believed that good news, and kept it in
+their memories.  Now, from what did this good news save them?  From
+their sins.  There was something in St. Paul's good news which made
+them hate their sins, and repent of them, and throw them away, and
+rise up to be new men and women, living new lives in godliness and
+purity and justice, such as they had never lived before.  Now mind,
+it was not bad news which made the Corinthians repent of their sins;
+it was good news.  It was not that St. Paul told them that God was
+going to cast them into endless torment for their sins, and that
+therefore they were terrified and afraid, and so repented.  Doubtless
+St. Paul told them, as he told other heathens, that the wrath of God
+was revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness; that
+tribulation and anguish was laid up in store for every soul of man
+who worketh evil.  But still, St. Paul says plainly here, that what
+saved the Corinthians was not that or any other fearful and
+terrifying news, but a gospel--good news.  And he says that this good
+news did not merely, as some would wish it to do, make them
+comfortable in their minds while they went on in their old wicked
+ways.  No.  He says that it made them stand.  That is, made them
+upright, strong-minded, righteous, self-restraining people; and that
+they were saved by it from those sins which had been dragging them
+down, and keeping them diseased in soul, weak, miserable, the slaves
+of their own passions and foul pleasures.
+
+What wonderful good news was this, then, which could work so strange
+a change in these poor heathens, and how could it change them?
+
+Let us see, first, what it was.
+
+"That Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, and that
+He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the
+scriptures; and that He was seen of Peter, then of the twelve; after
+that He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the
+greater part remained unto this day, but some are fallen asleep.
+After that He was seen of James, then of all the Apostles.  And last
+of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time."
+
+You see here, that St. Paul, for some good reason, says much more
+about the Lord's rising again than even about His most precious death
+and passion on the cross, while about His ascending into heaven he
+says nothing.  And you will find in the New Testament that the
+Apostles often did the same.  They spoke of the Lord rising again as
+if that was the great wonder, the great glory, the great good news;
+and as if His most precious death was not perfect without that.  They
+said that the especial office for which the Lord had ordained them,
+was to be witnesses of His resurrection.  They said that the Lord
+rose again for our justification.  They said:  "If thou shalt confess
+with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thy heart that
+God has raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved."  Here again,
+just as in the text, believing in the Lord's resurrection is made the
+great article of faith.  Why is this?  Because that last verse which
+I quoted may tell us, if we consider it carefully.
+
+What does confessing the Lord Jesus with our mouth mean?  It means
+what we ought to mean when we say, in the Apostles' Creed, I believe
+in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.  Not merely, I believe that
+there is an only Son of God:  but I believe in a certain man, with a
+certain character, who is that only Son of God.
+
+And what, you will ask, does that mean?
+
+To know that, I fear, we must go back many many hundred years, to the
+times when the old martyrs confessed the Lord Jesus Christ before the
+heathen.  Those were times in which it was not enough to say the
+Apostles' Creed in church.  Men, ay, and tender women, and little
+children, had to stand by it through terror and shame, and to die in
+torments unspeakable, because they chose to say:  "I believe in Jesus
+Christ, our Lord."  Now, what was it which made the heathen hate and
+persecute and torture, and murder them for saying that?  What was
+there in those plain words of the Apostles' Creed which made the
+great heathen emperors of Rome, and their officers and judges hunt
+the Christians down like wild beasts for 300 years, and declare that
+they were not fit to live?  I will tell you.  When the Christians
+were brought before the emperor's judges for being Christians, they
+did not merely say:  "I believe that Jesus Christ's blood will save
+my soul after death."  They said that:  but they said a great deal
+more than that.  If that had been all that the Christians said, the
+judge would have answered:  "What care I for your souls, or for your
+notions about what will happen to them when you are dead?  Go your
+way.  You may be of what religion you like, and talk and think about
+your own souls as much as you like, provided you do not trouble the
+Roman emperor's power."  But the heathen judge did not make that
+answer; because he knew well enough that what the Christians believed
+was not a mere religion about what would happen to their souls after
+death; but something which, if it gained ground, would utterly
+destroy the Roman emperor's power.  He used generally to say to the
+Christians only this:  "Will you burn those few grains of incense in
+honour of the emperor of Rome?"  And he knew, and the Christians knew
+well enough, that those words meant:  "Will you confess with your
+mouth the emperor of Rome?  Will you confess that he is the only lord
+and king of this whole earth, and of your bodies and souls, and that
+there is no power or authority but of him, for the gods have
+delivered all things into his hands?"  And then came out what
+confessing the Lord Jesus really means.  For the Christians used to
+answer:  "No.  The emperor of Rome is the lord and master of our
+bodies, and we will obey his laws so far as we can without doing
+wrong:  but we cannot obey them when they are contrary to the laws of
+our Lord and Master Jesus Christ.  For the Lord Jesus Christ, who was
+crucified and rose again the third day, He, and not the emperor of
+Rome at all, is the Lord and King of the whole earth, and of our
+bodies and souls; and we must obey Him before we obey anyone else.
+Power and authority come not from the emperor of Rome, but from the
+Lord Jesus Christ; and the emperor is only His servant and steward,
+and must obey Him just as much as we, or the Lord will punish him as
+surely and easily as He will the meanest slave.  For God has
+delivered all things, and the emperor of Rome among the rest, into
+the hand of His Son Jesus Christ, who sits a King over all, God
+blessed for ever."  That was confessing Christ.
+
+And to that the heathen judges used to make but one answer--for there
+was but one to make.  Those heathen judges' guilty consciences, as
+well as their worldly cunning, told them plainly enough exactly what
+St. Paul told the Christians; that those Christians, by confessing
+Christ, were not fighting against flesh and blood, and setting up
+their selfish interests against other people's selfish interests:
+but that the battle they were fighting was a much deeper and more
+terrible one; that by saying that One who had walked the earth as a
+poor man, and yet a perfectly righteous and loving man, doing nothing
+but good, and sacrificing Himself utterly for poor fallen creatures,
+they were fighting against the whole state of things all over the
+world; against the government, and principles, and religion of that
+whole unjust and tyrannical Roman empire, and all its rulers, and
+generals, and judges; against principalities, against powers, against
+the world-rulers of the darkness of those times; against spiritual
+wickedness in heavenly things.  For if Jesus Christ's life was the
+right life, those rulers must be utterly wrong; for it was exactly
+opposite to His.
+
+If Jesus Christ was really the Governor of the earth, there was no
+hope for them; for their way of governing was exactly opposite to
+His.  So as I say, they made but one answer; because there was but
+one to make:  "You say that Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of
+lords.  I say the emperor of Rome is.  You say you must obey Christ
+first, and the emperor of Rome afterwards.  I say that you must obey
+the emperor first, and Christ afterwards.  At all events, if you do
+not, you have no right on this earth of the emperor's; either the
+emperor's power must fall, or your notion about Jesus Christ's power
+must.  And we will see whether your heavenly King of whom you talk
+can deliver you out of the emperor's hand."  And then came the
+scourge, and the red-hot iron, and the wild beasts, and the cross,
+and all devilish tortures which man's evil will could invent, brought
+to bear without shame or mercy upon aged men, and tender girls, and
+even little children, just to make them say that the earth belonged
+to the emperor, and not to Jesus Christ.  Those who died bravely
+under those tortures without denying Christ were called martyrs,
+which means witnesses--people who bore witness before God and man
+that Jesus Christ was King and Lord.  Those who did not die under the
+tortures, but escaped after all, were called confessors--people who
+had confessed with their mouths that Jesus Christ was King and Lord,
+in spite of their terror and agony. . . .  That was what confessing
+Jesus Christ meant in the old times.  And that was what it ought to
+mean now, even though there is no persecution or torture for
+Christians in these happier times.
+
+And now, we may see perhaps why St. Paul spoke so much of our Lord's
+rising again as the most important part of the gospel.
+
+Because he wanted Christians to believe, not merely in a Christ who
+once died, but in Him who died and is alive for evermore; in a Christ
+who rose again, body, soul, and spirit, and sat at God's right hand,
+praying for poor creatures when they were tempted, and persecuted,
+and tormented for righteousness' sake.  St. Paul knew well that such
+fearful times as those of which I have been speaking were coming on
+the people to whom he wrote.  And he knew equally well that the only
+thought which could save them, when the heathen judges commanded them
+to deny the Lord Jesus, was the thought that He was really risen.
+The only thought which could make them bold enough to face all the
+horrors of death, was the thought that the Lord Jesus had not merely
+tasted death, but conquered it, and risen again from it.  And
+therefore it is that St. Paul speaks so often of Christ's
+resurrection, and that in the text he takes so much pains to prove
+that Christ had really risen, by telling them how many persons, well
+known to him who wrote to them, had seen the Lord Jesus Christ after
+He rose, and talked with Him, and were sure that He was the very same
+person still, with the same countenance, and body, and soul, and
+spirit, as He had when He was nailed to the cross, and laid in the
+sepulchre.
+
+What a thought for a poor creature in the last agony of fear and
+shame, expecting presently to be torn in pieces, or burnt alive:
+"Death, this horrible death, cannot conquer me, weak and fearful as I
+am; for my Lord and Master, for whom I am going to suffer, has
+conquered death, and He will not let it conquer me.  He is stronger
+than death and hell, and He will not suffer me at my last hour for
+any pains of death to fall from Him.  He is King of heaven and earth,
+and He will take care of His own!"  What a comfortable thought to be
+able to say:  "Ay, I am torn from wife and child, and all which I
+love on earth.  But not for ever, not for ever.  For Christ rose from
+the dead.  And I who belong to Christ, shall rise as He did.  This
+poor flesh of mine may be burnt in flames, devoured by ravenous
+beasts.  What matter?  Christ the King of men, has risen from the
+dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept.  That same
+Spirit of His, which brought back His body from the grave and hell,
+will bring our bodies also from the grave and hell, to a nobler,
+happier life with Him in glory unspeakable.  Christ is risen, and I
+shall rise with Him at the last day.  Christ sits at God's right
+hand, watching me, pitying me, and blessing me, holding out to me a
+crown of glory which shall never fade away!"  That was the thought
+which gave Stephen courage to confess the Lord Jesus Christ, amid to
+die in peace and the murderous blows of the Jews.  For by faith he
+saw, as he said, the heavens opened, and Jesus sitting at the right
+hand of God.  He knew that his Lord was risen, and that He would hear
+his dying cry:  "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit."
+
+And so with us, my friends; we have no martyrdom to go through, thank
+God; but it is just as true of us as it was of the blessed martyrs
+and confessors, that there is no other name under heaven by which we
+can be saved but the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Saved; not only
+from hell, but from sin, from giving way to temptation, from denying
+Christ.  Oh, pray for faith.  Pray for faith.  Pray to be able really
+to confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus.  Pray to believe with your
+hearts that God has raised Him from the dead.  Then when you are
+tempted to do wrong, you, like Stephen, will see, not with your
+bodily eyes, but by faith, the Lord Jesus sitting at God's right
+hand, and be able to say to Him:  "Lord Jesus, who hast conquered all
+temptation, help me to conquer this.  Thine eye is on me; how can I
+do this great wickedness and sin against Thee?"  When you are in
+terror, and trouble, and affliction, and know not where to turn, that
+same blessed thought--"Christ is risen from the dead"--will be a
+shield and a strength to you which no other thought can give.  "My
+Lord is risen; He is here still--a man, with His man's body, and His
+man's spirit--His man's love and tenderness; He has taken them all up
+to heaven with Him.  He is a man still, though He is very God of very
+God.  He rose from the dead as a man, and therefore He can understand
+me, and feel for me still, now, here in England in this very year,
+1852, just as much as He could when He was walking upon earth in
+Judaea of old."
+
+Ay, and in the black jaws of death, when this world is vanishing from
+our eyes, and we are going we know not whither, leaving behind us all
+we know, and love, and understand; then that thought of all thoughts--
+"Christ is risen from the dead"--is the only one which will save us
+from dark sad thoughts, from fear and despair, or from stupid
+carelessness, and the death of a brute beast, such as too many die.
+"Christ is risen and I shall rise.  Christ has conquered death for
+Himself, and He will conquer it for me.  Christ took His man's body
+and soul with Him from the tomb to God's right hand, and He will
+raise my man's body and soul at the last day, that I may be with Him
+for ever, and see Him where He is."  In life and in death this is the
+only thing which shall save us from sin, from terror, and from the
+dread of death; the same good news which St. Paul preached to the
+Corinthians; the same good news which made St. Stephen, and the
+martyrs and confessors of old brave to endure all misery for the sake
+of the good and blessed news, that God had raised His Son Jesus from
+the dead.
+
+
+
+XLVI--GOD'S WAY WITH MAN
+
+
+
+And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have wrought with you
+for my name's sake, not according to your wicked ways, nor according
+to your corrupt doings, O ye house of Israel, saith the Lord God.--
+EZEKIEL xx. 44.
+
+In this chapter the prophet Ezekiel argues with his sinful and
+rebellious countrymen, and puts them in mind of all that God has done
+for them and with them, from the time when He brought them out of
+Egypt to that day.
+
+And now comes the old question, What has this to do with us!  St.
+Paul tells us that all things which happened to the old Jews happened
+for our example.  What example can we learn from this chapter?
+
+This, I think, we may learn:  Is not the way in which God taught
+these Jews the same way in which He teaches many a man--perhaps every
+man?  Which of us, when we were young, has not had his teaching from
+God?  The old Catechism which our mothers taught us, was not that a
+word from God Himself to us?  The voice of conscience, which made us
+happy when we had done right, and uneasy and ashamed when we had gone
+wrong; was not that a word from God to us?  Yes, my friends, those
+child's feelings of ours about right and wrong, were none other than
+the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the Light which
+lightens every man who comes into the world.  I tell you, every right
+thought and wish, every longing to be better than you were, which
+ever came into any one of your hearts, came from Him, the Lord Jesus.
+It was His word, His voice, His Spirit, speaking to your spirit, just
+as really as He spoke to His prophet Ezekiel, of whom we have been
+reading.  Think of that.  Recollect, never, never forget, that all
+your good thoughts and feelings are not your own, not your own at
+all, but the Lord's; that without His light your hearts are nothing
+but darkness, blind ignorance, and blind selfishness, and blind
+passions and lusts; that it is He, he Himself, who has been fighting
+against the darkness in you all your life long.  Oh think, then, what
+your sin has been in putting aside those good thoughts and longings!
+You were turning your back, you were shutting your doors to the Lord
+God Himself, very God of very God begotten, by whom all things were
+made.  The Creator came to visit His creature, and His creature shut
+Him out.  The Almighty God pleaded with mortal man, and mortal man
+bade God go, and come back at a more convenient season!  A voice in
+your heart seemed to say:  "Oh, if I could but be a better man!  How
+I wish that I could but give up these bad habits, and mend!  I hate
+and despise myself for being so bad."  And then you fancied that that
+voice was your own voice, that those good thoughts were your own
+thoughts.  If you had really known whose they were; if you had really
+known, as the Bible tells you, that they were the Word of the Lord,
+the only-begotten Son of the Father, speaking to your heart, I hardly
+think that you would have been so ready to say yourself:  "Well,
+then, I will mend; but not just now:  some day or other; somehow or
+other, I hope, I shall be a better man.  It will be time enough to
+make my peace with God when I am growing old."  You would not have
+dared to thrust away the good thoughts, and keep them waiting, while
+you took your pleasure in a few more years' sin; if you had guessed
+WHOM you were thrusting away; if you had guessed whom you were
+keeping waiting.
+
+And, my good friends, has not God been saying to us many a time from
+our youth up, as He did to the Jews of old:  "Do not walk in the
+statutes of your fathers, nor defile yourselves with their idols?"
+Do you ask me how?  Why, thus.  Have you never said to yourself:
+"How ill my father prospered, because he would do wrong!"  Or, again:
+"See how evil doing brings its own punishment.  There is so and so
+growing rich, by his cheating and his covetousness, and yet, for all
+his money, I would not change places with him.  God forbid that I
+should have on my mind what he has on his mind!" Why should I make a
+long story of so simple a matter?  Which of us has not felt at times
+that thought?  How much misery has come in this very parish from the
+ill-doing of the generation who are gone to their account, and from
+the ill-training which they gave their children?
+
+And what was that but the Word of the Lord Himself speaking to our
+hearts, and saying to us:  "Do not defile yourselves with their
+idols; do not hurt your souls by hunting after the things which they
+loved better than they loved Me:  money, pleasure, drink, fighting,
+smuggling, poaching, wantonness, and lust; I am the Lord your God?"
+
+And yet, young people will not listen to that warning voice of God.
+They see other people, even their own fathers and mothers, punished
+for their sins; perhaps made poor by their sins, perhaps made
+unhealthy by their sins, perhaps made miserable and ill-tempered by
+their sins:  and yet they go and fall into, or rather walk open-eyed
+into, the very same sins which made their parents wretched.  Oh, how
+many a young person sees their home made a complete hell on earth by
+ungodliness, and the ill-temper and selfishness which come from
+ungodliness; and, then, as soon as they have a home of their own, set
+to work to make their own family as miserable as their father's was
+before them.
+
+But people say often:  "How could we help it?  We had no chance; we
+were brought up in bad ways; we had a bad example set us; how can you
+expect us to be better than our fathers and mothers, and our elder
+brothers and sisters?  If we had had a fair chance, we might have
+been different:  but we had none; and we could not help going the bad
+way, for we were set in it the day we were born."
+
+Well, my dear friends, God shall judge you, not I.  If little is
+given to a man little is required of him.  But not nothing at all;
+because more than nothing was given him.  A little is given to every
+man; and, therefore, a little is required of every man.  And so, he
+who knew not his Master's will shall be beaten with few stripes.  But
+he will be beaten with some stripes, because he ought to have known
+something, at least of his Master's will.  If you were dumb animals,
+which can only follow their own lusts and passions, and must be what
+nature has made them, then your excuse would be good enough; but your
+excuse is not good now, just because you are men and women, and not
+dumb beasts, and, therefore, can rise above your natures, and conquer
+your lusts and passions, as they cannot, and can do what you do not
+like, because, though you dislike it, you know that it is right.
+And, therefore, God does not take that excuse which sinners make,
+that they have had no teaching.  But what does he do to them?
+
+Suppose, now, that you had a dog which would not be taught, or broken
+in, or cured of biting, or made useful, or bearable in any way, what
+would you do to that dog?  I suppose that you would kill it; you
+would say:  "It is an ill-conditioned animal, and there is no making
+it any better; so the only thing is to put it out of the way, and not
+let it eat food which might be better spent."  Now, does God deal so
+with sinners?  When young people rush headlong into sin, and become a
+nuisance to themselves and their neighbours, does God kill them at
+once, that better men may step into their place?  No.  And why?  Just
+because they are not dumb animals, which cannot be made better, but
+God's children, who can be made better.  If there were really no hope
+of a sinner repenting and amending, I think God would not leave him
+long alive to cumber the ground.  But there is hope for every one;
+because God the Father loves all; the loving heart of the Lord Jesus
+Christ yearns after all; the Holy Spirit, which proceeds from the
+Father and the Son, strives with the hearts of all; therefore God, in
+His patience and tender mercy, tries to bring his foolish children to
+their senses.  And how?  Often in the very same way, in which Ezekiel
+says He tried to bring the Jews to their senses, by letting them go
+on in the road of sin, till they see what an ugly pit that same road
+ends in.  If your child would not believe you when you warned and
+assured him that the fire would burn him, would it not be the very
+best way of bringing him to his senses, to tell him:  "Very well; go
+your own way; put your hand into the fire, and see what comes of it;
+you will not believe me; you will believe your own feelings, when
+your hand is burnt."  So did the Lord to those rebellious Jews when
+they would go after their fathers' sins.  He gave them statutes which
+were not good, and judgments by which they could not live, to the end
+that they might know that He was the Lord.  God did not make them
+commit any sins.  God forbid!  He only took away His Spirit, His
+light and teaching, from them, and let them go on in the light of
+their own foolish and bewildered hearts, till their sin bred misery
+and shame to them, and they were filled with the fruit of their own
+devices.  Then, after all their wealth was gone, and their land was
+wasted by cruel enemies, and they themselves were carried away
+captive into Babylon, they began to awake, and say to themselves:
+"We were wrong after all, and the Lord was right.  He knew what was
+really good for us better than we did.  We thought that we could do
+without Him, disobey Him.  But He is the Lord after all.  He has been
+too strong for us; He has punished us.  If we had listened to His
+warnings years ago, we might have been saved all this misery."
+
+Ah, how many a poor foolish creature, in misery and shame, with a
+guilty conscience and a sad heart, sits down, like the prodigal son,
+among the swinish bad company into which his sins have brought him,
+longing to fill his belly with the husks which the swine eat! but he
+cannot.  He tries to forget his sorrow by drinking, by bad company,
+by gambling, by gossiping, like the fools around him:  but he cannot.
+He finds no more pleasure in sin.  He is sick and tired of it.  He
+has had enough of it and too much.  He is miserable, and he hardly
+knows why.  But miserable he is.  There is a longing, and craving,
+and hunger at his heart after something better; at least after
+something different.  Then he begins to remember his heavenly
+Father's house.  Old words which he learnt at his mother's knee, good
+old words out of his Catechism and his Bible, start up strangely in
+his mind.  He had forgotten them, laughed at them, perhaps, in his
+wild days.  But now they come up, he does not know where from, like
+beautiful ghosts gliding in.  And he is ashamed of them; they
+reproach him, the dear old lessons; and yet they seem pleasant to
+him, though they make him blush.  And at last he says to himself:
+"Would God that I were a little child again; once more an innocent
+little child at my mother's knee!  I thought myself clever and
+cunning.  I thought I could go my own way and enjoy myself.  But I
+cannot.  Perhaps I have been a fool; and the old Sunday books were
+right after all.  At least I am miserable.  I thought I was my own
+master.  But perhaps He about whom I used to read in the Sunday books
+is my Master after all.  At least I am not my own master; I am a
+slave.  Perhaps I have been fighting against Him, against the Lord
+God, all this time, and now He has shown me that He is the stronger
+of the two. . . .  And so the poor man learns in trouble and shame to
+know, like the Jews of old, who is the Lord.
+
+And when the Lord has drawn a man thus far, does He stop?  Not so.
+He does not leave His work half done.  If the work is half done, it
+is that we stop, not that He stops.  Whosoever comes to Him,
+howsoever confusedly, or clumsily, or even lazily they may come, He
+will in no wise cast out.  He may afflict them still more to cure
+that confusion and laziness; but He is a physician who never sends a
+willing patient away, or keeps him waiting for a single hour.
+
+How then does the Lord deal with such a man?  Does He drive him
+further?  Not if he will go without being driven.  You would call it
+cruel to drive a beast on with blows, when it was willing to be led
+peaceably.  And be sure God is not more cruel than man.  As soon as
+we are willing to be led, He will take His rod off from us, and lead
+us tenderly enough.  For I have known God do this to a man, and a
+sinful man as ever trod this earth.  I have known such a man brought
+into utter misery and shame of heart, and heavy affliction in outward
+matters, till his spirit was utterly broken, and he was ready to say:
+"I am a beast and a fool.  I am not worth the bread I eat.  Let me
+lie down and die."  And then, when the Lord had driven that man so
+far, I have seen, I who speak to you now, how the Lord turned and
+looked on that man as he turned and looked on Peter, and brought his
+poor soul to life again, as He brought Peter's, by a loving smile,
+and not an angry frown.  I have seen the Lord heap that man with all
+manner of unexpected blessings, and pay him back sevenfold for all
+his affliction, and raise him up, body and soul, and satisfy him with
+good things, so that his youth was renewed like the eagle's.  And so
+the man's conversion to God, though it was begun by God's
+chastisements and afflictions, was brought to perfection by God's
+mercy and bounty; and it happened to that man, as Ezekiel prophesied
+that it would happen to the Jews, that not fear and dread, but
+honour, gratitude, and that noble shame of which no man need be
+ashamed, brought him home to God at last.  "And you shall remember
+your ways, and all your doings wherein ye have been defiled:  and you
+shall loathe yourselves in your own sight for all the evils which you
+have committed.  And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I have
+wrought with you for my name's sake, not according to your wicked
+ways, nor according to your corrupt doings, O house of Israel, saith
+the Lord God."
+
+You see that God's mercy to them would not make them conceited or
+careless.  It would increase their shame and confusion when they
+found out what sort of a Lord He was against whom they had been
+rebellious; long-suffering and of tender mercy, returning good for
+evil to His disobedient children.  That feeling would awake in them
+more shame and more confusion than ever:  but it would be a noble
+shame, a happy confusion, and tears of joy and gratitude, not of
+bitterness.  Such a shame, such a confusion, such tears, as the
+blessed Magdalene's when she knelt at the Lord's feet, and found
+that, instead of bating her and thrusting her away for all her sins,
+He told her to go in peace, pardoned and happy.  Then she knew the
+Lord; she found out His character--His name; for she found out that
+His name was love.  Oh, my friends, this is the great secret; the
+only knowledge worth living for, because it is the only knowledge
+which will enable you to live worthily--to know the Lord.  That
+knowledge will enable you to live a life which will last, and grow,
+and prosper for ever, beyond the grave, and death, and judgment, and
+eternities of eternities.  As the Lord Himself said, when He was upon
+earth, "This is eternal life, to know Thee, the only true God, and
+Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."  Therefore there is no use my
+warning you against sin, and telling you, do not do this, and do not
+do that, unless I tell you at the same time who is the Lord.  For
+till you know that The Good God is the Lord, you will have no real,
+sound, heartfelt reason for giving up your sins; and what is more,
+you will not be able to give them up.  You may alter your sort of
+sins from fear of this and that; but the root of sin will be there
+still; and if it cannot bear one sort of fruit it will bear another.
+If you dare not drink or riot, you may become covetous and griping;
+if you dare not give way to young men's sins, you will take to old
+men's sins instead; if you dare not commit open sins you will commit
+secret ones in your thoughts.  Sin is much too stout a plant to be
+kept from bearing some sort of fruit.  As long as it is not rooted up
+the root will breed death in you of some sort or other; and the only
+feeling which can root up sin is to know that Jesus Christ, the Son
+of God, is your Lord, and that your Lord condescended to die upon the
+cross for you; that you must be the Lord's, and are not your own, but
+bought with the price of His most precious blood, that you may
+glorify God with your body and your soul, which are His.
+
+Just so, the blessed St. Augustine found that he could never conquer
+his own sins by arguing with himself, or by any other means, till he
+got to know God, and to see that God was the Lord.  And when his
+spirit was utterly broken; when he saw himself, in spite of all his
+wonderful cleverness and learning, to have been a fool and blind all
+along, though people round him were flattering him, and running after
+him to hear his learning; then the old words which he learnt at his
+mother's knee came up in his mind, and he knew that God was the Lord
+after all, and that God had been watching him, guiding him, letting
+him go wrong only to show him the folly of going wrong, caring for
+him even when He left him to himself and his sins, and the sad ways
+of his sins; bearing with him, pleading with his conscience, alluring
+him back to the only true happiness, as a loving father with a
+rebellious and self-willed child.  And then, when St. Augustine had
+found out at last that God was his Lord, who had been taking the
+charge of him all through his heathen youth, he became a changed man.
+He was able to conquer his sins; for God conquered them for him.  He
+was able to give up the profligate life which he had been leading;
+not from fear of punishment, but from the Spirit of God--the spirit
+of gratitude, honour, trust, and love toward God, which made him
+abide in God, and God abide in him.  To that blessed state may God of
+His great mercy bring us all.  To it He will bring us all unless we
+rebel and set up our foolish and selfish will against His loving and
+wise will.  And if He does bring us to it, it is little matter
+whether He brings us to it through joy or through sorrow, through
+honour or through shame, through the garden of Eden, or through the
+valley of the shadow of death.  For, my dear friends, what matter how
+bitter the medicine is, if it does but save our lives?
+
+
+
+XLVII--THE MARRIAGE AT CANA
+
+
+
+There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was
+there.  And both Jesus was called, and His disciples, to the
+marriage.--JOHN ii. 1, 2.
+
+It is, I think, in the first place, an important, as well as a
+pleasant thing, to know that the Lord's glory, as St. Paul says, was
+first shown forth at a wedding, at a feast.  Not at a time of sorrow,
+but of joy.  Not about some strange affliction or disease, such as is
+the lot of very few, but about a marriage, that which happens in the
+ordinary lot of all mankind.  Not in any fearful judgment or
+destruction of sinners, but in blessing wedlock, by which, whether
+among saints or sinners, mankind is increased.  Not by helping some
+great philosopher to think more deeply, or some great saint to
+perform more wonderful acts of holiness, but in giving the simple
+pleasure of wine to simple commonplace people, of whom we neither
+read that they were rich or righteous.  We do not even read whether
+the master of the feast ever found out that Jesus had worked a
+miracle, or whether any of the company ever believed in Him, on the
+strength of that miracle, except His mother and the disciples, and
+the servants, who were probably the poor slaves of people in a low or
+middling class of life.  But that is the way of the Lord.  He is no
+respecter of persons.  Rich and poor are alike in His sight; and the
+poor need Him most, and therefore He began his work with the poor in
+Cana, as He did in St. James's time, when the poor of this world were
+rich in faith, and the rich of this world were oppressors and
+taskmasters.  So He does in every age.  Though no one else cares for
+the poor, He cares for them.  With their hearts He begins His work,
+even as He did in England sixty years ago, by the preaching of
+Whitfield and Wesley.  Do you wish to know if anything is the Lord's
+work?  See if it is a work among the poor.  Do you wish to know
+whether any preaching is the true gospel of the Lord?  See whether it
+is a gospel, a good news to the poor.  I know no other test than
+that.  By doing that, by preaching the gospel to the poor, by working
+miracles for the poor, He has showed forth His glory, and proved
+Himself the true, and just, and loving Lord of all.
+
+But again, the Lord is a giver, and not a taskmaster.  He does not
+demand from us:  He gives to us.  He had been giving from the
+foundation of the world.  Corn and wine, rain and sunshine, and
+fruitful seasons had been his sending.  And now He was come to show
+it.  He was come to show men who it was who had been filling their
+heart with joy and gladness; who had been bringing out of the earth
+and air, by His unseen chemistry, the wine which maketh glad the
+heart of man.  In every grape that hangs upon the vine, water is
+changed into wine, as the sap ripens into rich juice.  He had been
+doing that all along in every vineyard and orchard; and that was His
+glory.  Now He was come to prove that; to draw back the veil of
+custom and carnal sense, and manifest Himself.  Men had seen the
+grapes ripen on the tree; and they were tempted to say, as every one
+of us is tempted now:  "It is the sun and the air, the nature of the
+vine, and the nature of the climate, which makes the wine."  Jesus
+comes and answers:  "Not so.  I make the wine; I have been making it
+all along.  The vines, the sun, the weather, are only my tools
+wherewith I worked, turning rain and sap into wine; and I am greater
+than they; I made them; I do not depend on them; I can make wine from
+water without vines or sunshine.  Behold, and drink, and see my glory
+WITHOUT the vineyard, since you had forgotten how to see it IN the
+vineyard!  For I am now, even as I was in Paradise, The Word of the
+Lord God; and now, even as in Paradise, I walk among the trees of the
+garden, and they know me and obey me, though the world knows me not.
+I have been all along in the world, and the world knows me not.  Know
+me now, lest you lose the knowledge of me for ever!"
+
+Those of the Jews who received that message, as the disciples did,
+found out their ancient Lord, and clung to Him, and know now, in the
+world of spirits, that His message was indeed a true one.  Those who
+did not, lost sight of Him; to this day their eyes are blinded; to
+this day they have utterly forgotten that they have a Lord and Ruler,
+who is the Word and Son of God.  Their faith is no more like the
+faith of David than their understanding of the Scriptures is like
+his.  The Bible is a dead letter to them.  The kingdom and government
+of God is forgotten by them.  Of all God-worshipping people in the
+world, the Jews are the least godly, the most given up to the worship
+of this world, and the things which they can see, and taste, and
+handle, and, therefore, to covetousness, cheating, lying, tyranny,
+and all the sins which spring from forgetting that this world belongs
+to the Lord and that He rules and guides it, that its blessings are
+His gifts, and we His stewards, to use them for the good of all.  May
+God help, and forgive, and convert them!  Doubt not that He will do
+so in His good time.  But let us beware, my friends, lest we fall
+into the same sin.  Do not fancy that we are not in just the same
+danger.  It would be a cowardly thing of a preacher to call Jews, or
+heathens, or any other absent persons hard names, unless their
+mistakes and their sins were such as his own people wanted warnings
+against, ay, perhaps, had the very root of them in their hearts
+already.  And we have the root of the Jews' sin in our own hearts.
+Why is this one miracle read in our churches to this day, if we do
+not stand just as much in need of the lesson as those for whom it was
+first worked?  We, as well as they, are in danger of forgetting who
+it is that sends us corn and wine, and fruitful seasons, love and
+marriage, and all the blessings of this life.  We, as well as the
+Jews, are continually fancying that these outward earthly things, as
+we call them in our shallow carnal conceits, have nothing to do with
+Jesus or His kingdom, but that we may compete, and scrape, even cheat
+and lie to get them, and when we have them, misuse them selfishly, as
+if they belonged to no one but ourselves, as if we had no duty to
+perform about them, as if we owed God no service for them.
+
+And again, we are, just as much as the Jews were, in danger of
+spiritual pride; in danger of fancying that because we are religious,
+and have, or fancy we have, deep experiences and beautiful thoughts
+about God and Christ and our own souls, therefore we can afford to
+despise those who do not know as much as ourselves; to despise the
+common pleasures and petty sorrows of poor creatures, whose souls and
+bodies are grovelling in the dust, busied with the cares of this
+world, at their wits' end to get their daily bread; to despise the
+merriment of young people, the play of children, and all those
+everyday happinesses which, though we may turn from them with a
+sneer, are precious in the sight of Him who made heaven and earth.
+All such proud thoughts, all such contempt of those who do not seem
+as spiritual as we fancy ourselves, is evil.  It is from the devil,
+and not from God.  It is the same vile spirit which made the
+Pharisees of old say:  "This people--these poor worldly drudging
+wretches--who know not the law, are accursed."  And mind, this is not
+a sin of rich, and learned, and highborn men only.  They may be more
+tempted to it than others; but poor men, when they become, by the
+grace of God, wiser, more spiritual, more holy than others, are
+tempted, just as much as the rich, to despise their poor neighbours
+to whom God has not given the same light as themselves; and surely in
+them it shows ugliest of all.  A learned and high-born man may be
+excused for looking down upon the sinful poor, because he does not
+understand their temptations, because he never has been ignorant and
+struggling as they are.  But a poor man who despises the poor--he has
+no excuse.  He ought above all men to feel for them, for he has been
+tempted even as they are.  He knows their sorrows; he has been
+through their dark valley of bad food, bad lodging, want of work,
+want of teaching, low cares which drag the soul to earth.  Surely a
+poor man who has tasted God's love and Christ's light, ought, above
+all others, instead of turning his back on his class, to pity them,
+to make common cause with them, to teach them, guide them, comfort
+them, in a way no rich man can.  Yes; after all, it is the poor must
+help the poor; the poor must comfort the poor; the poor must teach
+and convert the poor.
+
+See, in the epistle for this day, St. Paul makes no distinction
+between rich and poor.  This epistle is joined with the gospel for
+the day, to show us what ought to be the conduct of Christians, who
+believe in the miracle of Cana; what men should do who believe that
+they have a Lord in heaven, by whose command suns shine, fruits
+ripen, men enjoy the blessings of harvest, of marriage, of the
+comforts which the heathen and the savage, as well as the Christian
+man, partake; what men should do who believe that they have a Lord in
+heaven who entered into the common joys and sorrows of lowly men, who
+was once Himself a poor villager, who ate with publicans and sinners,
+who condescended to join in a wedding feast, and increase the mere
+animal enjoyment of the guests.  And what is St. Paul's command to
+poor as well as rich?  Read the epistle for this day and see.
+
+You see at once that this epistle is written in the same spirit as
+our Lord's words:  by God's Spirit, in short; the Spirit which
+brought the Lord Jesus so condescendingly to the wedding feast; the
+Spirit which made Him care so heartily for the common pleasures of
+those around Him.  My friends, these are not commands to one class,
+but to all.  Poor as well as rich may show mercy with cheerfulness,
+and love without dissimulation.  Poor as well as rich may minister to
+others with earnestness, and condescend to those of low estate.  Not
+a word in this whole epistle which does not apply equally to every
+rank, and sex, and age.
+
+Neither are these commands to each of us by ourselves, but to all of
+us together, as members of a family.  If you will look through them
+they are not things to be done to ourselves, but to our neighbours;
+not experiences to be felt about our own souls:  but rules of conduct
+to our fellow-men.  They are all different branches and flowers from
+that one root:  "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
+
+Do we live thus, rich or poor?  Can we look each other in the face
+this afternoon and say, each man to his neighbour:  "I have behaved
+like a brother to you.  I have rejoiced at your good fortune, and
+grieved at your sorrow.  I have preferred you to myself.  I have
+loved you without dissimulation.  I have been earnest in my place and
+duty in the parish for the sake of the common good of all.  I have
+condescended to those of lower rank than myself.  I have--"  Ah, my
+dear friends, I had better not go on with the list.  God forgive us
+all!  The less we try to justify ourselves on this score the better.
+Some of us do indeed try to behave like brothers and sisters to their
+neighbours; but how few of us; and those few how little!  And yet we
+are brothers.  We are members of one family, sons of one Father,
+joint-heirs with one Lord, the poor Man who sat eating and drinking
+at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, and mixed freely in the joys
+and the sorrows of the poorest and meanest.  Joint-heirs with Christ;
+yet how unlike Him!  My friends, we need to repent and amend our
+ways; we need to confess, every one of us, rich and poor, the pride,
+the selfishness, the carelessness about each other, which keeps us so
+much apart, knowing so little of each other, feeling so little for
+each other.  Oh confess this sin to God, every one of you.  Those who
+have behaved most like brothers, will be most ready to confess how
+little they have behaved like brothers.  Confess:  "Father, I have
+sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be
+called thy son, for I have not loved, cared for, helped my brothers
+and sisters round, who are just as much thy children as I am."  Pray
+for the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of condescension, love, fellow-
+feeling; that spirit which rejoices simply and heartily with those
+who are happy, and feels for another's sorrows as if they were its
+own.  Pray for it; for till it comes, there will be no peace on
+earth.  Pray for it; for when it comes and takes possession of your
+hearts, and you all really love and live like brothers, children of
+one Father, the kingdom of God will be come indeed, and His will be
+done on earth as it is in heaven.
+
+
+
+XLVIII--PARABLE OF THE LOWEST PLACE
+
+
+
+And He put forth a parable to those which were bidden, when He marked
+how they chose out the chief rooms; saying unto them, when thou art
+bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room,
+lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him; and he that
+bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou
+begin with shame to take the lowest room.  But when thou art bidden,
+go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee
+cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher:  then shalt thou
+have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.  For
+whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth
+himself shall be exalted.--LUKE xiv. 7-11.
+
+We heard in the gospel for to-day how the Lord Jesus put forth a
+parable to those who were invited to a dinner with Him at the
+Pharisee's house.  A parable means an example of any rules or laws; a
+story about some rule, by hearing which people may see how the rule
+works in practice, and understand it.  Now, our Lord's parables were
+about the kingdom of God.  They were examples of the rules and laws
+by which the kingdom of God is governed and carried on.  Therefore He
+begins many of His parables by saying, The kingdom of God is like
+something--something which people see daily, and understand more or
+less.  "The kingdom of God is like a field;" "The kingdom of God is
+like a net;" "The kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed;"
+and so forth.  And even where He did not begin one of His parables by
+speaking of the kingdom of God, we may be still certain that it has
+to do with the kingdom of God.  For the one great reason why the Lord
+was made flesh and dwelt among us, was to preach the kingdom of God,
+His Father and our Father, and to prove to men that God was their
+King, even at the price of his most precious blood.  And, therefore,
+everything which He ever did, and everything which He ever spoke, had
+to do with this one great work of His.  This parable, therefore,
+which you heard read in the gospel for to-day, has to do with the
+kingdom of God, and is an example of the laws of it.
+
+Now, what is the kingdom of God?  It is worth our while to consider.
+For at baptism we were declared members of the kingdom of God; we
+were to renounce the world, and to live according to the kingdom of
+God.  The kingdom of God is simply the way in which God governs men;
+and the world is the way in which men try to manage without God's
+help or leave.  That is the difference between them; and a most awful
+difference it is.  Men fancy that they can get on well enough without
+God; that the ways of the world are very reasonable, and useful, and
+profitable, and quite good enough to live by, if not to die by.  But
+all the while God is King, let them fancy what they like; and this
+earth, and everything on it, from the king on his throne to the gnat
+in the sunbeam, is under His government, and must obey His laws or
+die.  We are in God's kingdom, my good friends, every one of us,
+whether we like it or not, and we shall be there for ever and ever.
+And our business is, therefore, simply to find out what are the laws
+of that kingdom, and obey those laws as speedily as possible, and
+live for ever thereby, lest, if we break them, and get in their way,
+they should grind us to powder.
+
+Now, here is one of the laws of God's kingdom:  "Whosoever exalteth
+himself shall be abased; and whosoever abaseth himself shall be
+exalted."  That is, whosoever, in any way whatsoever, sets himself
+up, will be pulled down again:  while he who is contented to keep
+low, and think little of himself, will be raised up and set on high.
+Now the world's rule is the exact opposite of this.  The world says,
+Every man for himself.  The way of the world is to struggle and
+strive for the highest place; to be a pushing man, and a rising man,
+and a man who will stand stiffly by his rights, and give his enemy as
+good as he brings, and beat his neighbour out of the market, and show
+off himself to the best advantage, and try to make the most of
+whatever wit or money he has to look well in the world, that people
+may look up to him and flatter him and obey him; and so the world has
+no objection to people's pretending to be better than they are.
+Every man must do the best he can for himself, the world says, and
+never mind his neighbours:  they must take care of themselves; and if
+they are foolish enough to be taken in, so much the worse for them.
+So the world thinks that there is no harm in a man, when he has
+anything to sell, making it out better than it really is, and hiding
+the fault in it as far as he can.  When a tradesman or manufacturer
+sends about "puffs" of his goods, and pretends that they are better
+and cheaper than other people's, just to get custom by it, the world
+does not call that what it is--boasting and lying.  It says:  "Of
+course a man must do the best he can for himself.  If a man does not
+praise himself, nobody else will praise him; he cannot expect his
+neighbours to take him for better than his own words."  So again, if
+a man wants a place or situation, the world thinks it no harm if he
+gives the most showy character of himself, and gets his friends to
+say all the good of him they can, and a great deal more, and to say
+none of the harm--in short, to make himself out a much better, or
+shrewder, or worthier man than he really is.  The world does not call
+that either what it is--boasting, and lying, and thrusting oneself
+into callings to which God has not called us.  The world says:  "Of
+course a man must turn his best side outwards.  You cannot expect a
+man to tell tales on himself."
+
+And, my friends, the world would be quite right, and reasonable, and
+prudent, in telling us to push, and boast, and lie, and puff
+ourselves and our goods, if it were not for one thing which the
+foolish blind world is always forgetting, and that is, that there is
+a God who judges the earth.  If God were not our King; if He took no
+care of us men and our doings; if mankind had it all their own way on
+earth, and were forced to shift for themselves without any laws of
+God to guide them, then the best thing every man could do would be to
+fight for himself; to get all he could for himself, and leave as
+little as he could for his neighbours; to make himself out as great,
+and wise, and strong, as he could, and try to make his neighbours buy
+him at his own price.  That would be the best plan for every man, if
+God was not King; and therefore the world says that that is the best
+plan for every man, because the world does not believe that God is
+King, and hates the notion that God is King, and laughs at and
+persecutes, as Jesus Christ said it would, those who preach the
+kingdom of God, and tell men, as I tell you in God's name:  "You were
+not made to be selfish; you were not meant to rise in the world by
+boasting and pushing down and deceiving your neighbours.  For you are
+subjects of God's kingdom; and to do so is to break his laws, and to
+put yourselves under His curse; and however worldly-wise all this
+selfishness and boasting may seem, it is sin, whose wages are death
+and ruin."
+
+For, my friends, let the world try to forget God as it will, He does
+not forget the world.  Let men try to make rules and laws for
+themselves, rules about religion, rules about government, rules about
+trade, rules about morals and what they fancy is just and fair; let
+them make as many rules as they like, they are only wasting their
+time; for God has made His rules already, and revealed them to us in
+the Bible, and told us that the earth and mankind are governed in His
+way, and not in ours, and that He will not alter His everlasting
+rules to suit our new ones.  As David says:  "Let the people be never
+so unquiet, still the Lord is King."
+
+Ah, my friends, it is very easy to say all this, but it is not so
+easy to believe it.  Every one, every respectable person at least, is
+ready enough to talk about God, and God's will, and so forth.  But
+when it comes to practice; when it comes to doing God's will, and not
+our own; when it comes to obeying His direct and plain commands, and
+not the fashions and maxims which men have invented for themselves;
+when it comes to giving up what we long for, because He has said that
+if we try after it in our own way, and not in His, we shall never
+have it at all, then comes the trial; then comes the time to see
+whether we believe that God is the King of the earth or not; then
+comes the time to see whether we have renounced the world, and
+determined to live as God's sons in God's kingdom, or whether our
+religion is some form of words, or way of thinking and feeling which
+we hope may save our souls from hell, but which has nothing to do
+with our daily life and conduct, and leaves us just as worldly as any
+heathen, in all our dealings with our fellow-men, from Monday morning
+to Saturday night.  Then comes the time to try our faith in God.
+
+And then, alas! it comes out, in these evil, and godless, and
+hypocritical times in which we live, that many a man who fancies
+himself religious, and respectable, and blameless, and what not, no
+more really believes that he is living in God's kingdom than the
+heathen do.  And if you ask him, you will find out most probably that
+he fancies that God's kingdom is not on earth now, but that it will
+be on earth some day.  A cunning delusion of the devil, that, my
+friends!  To make us go his way while we fancy that we are going our
+own way.  To make us say to ourselves:  "Ah! it is very unfortunate
+that God is not King of the earth now.  Of course He will be after
+the resurrection, in the new heaven and the new earth, where there
+will be no sin.  But He is not King now; this world is given over to
+sin and the devil, so fallen and ruined and corrupt that--that--that,
+in short, we cannot be expected to behave like God's children in it,
+but must just follow the ways of the world, and live by ambition, and
+selfishness, and cunning, and boasting, and competing in this life; a
+life of love, and justice, and humbleness, and fellow-help, and
+mercy, and self-sacrifice is impossible in such a world as this; we
+cannot live like angels, till we get to heaven!"  So say nine people
+out of ten; the devil deceiving them, and their own hearts, alas!
+being but too glad to catch at the excuse for sin which the devil
+gives them, when he tells them that this present earth is not God's
+kingdom; and so they go and act accordingly, selfish, grudging,
+pushing, boastful, every man's hand against his neighbour and for
+himself, till they succeed too often in making this earth as
+fearfully like the devil's kingdom as it is possible for God's
+kingdom to be made.
+
+But what, some may ask, has all this to do with the text that he who
+sets himself up shall be brought low, he who keeps himself low shall
+be set up?  What has it to do with the text?  It has everything to do
+with the text.  If people really believed that they were God's
+subjects and children in God's kingdom, they would not need to ask
+that question long.
+
+If God is really the King of the earth, there can be no use in anyone
+setting up himself.  If God is really the King of the earth, those
+who set up themselves must be certain to be brought down from their
+high thoughts and high assumptions sooner or later.  For if God is
+really the King of the earth, He must be the one to set people up,
+and not they themselves.  Look again at the parable.  The man who
+asks the guests to dine with him has surely a right to place each of
+them where he likes.  The house is his, the dinner is his.  He has a
+right to invite whom he likes; and he has a right to settle where
+they shall sit.  If they choose their own places--if any guest takes
+upon himself to seat himself at the head of the table, because he
+thinks it his right, he offends against all rules of right feeling
+and propriety toward the man who has invited him.  All he has a right
+to expect is, that his host will not put him in the wrong place, that
+he will settle all places at his table according to people's real
+rank and deserts, and as our Testaments say, put "the worthiest man
+in the highest room."  And if people really believed in God, which
+very few do, they would surely expect no less of God.  What
+gentleman, farmer, or labourer is there, with common sense and good
+feeling, who would not show most respect to the most respectable
+persons who came into his house, and send his best and trustiest
+workmen about his most important errands?  True, he might make
+mistakes, and worse.  Being a weak man, he might be tempted to put
+the rich sinner in a higher place than the poor saint:  or he might,
+from private fancy, be blinded about his workmen's characters, and so
+send a worse man, because he was his favourite, to do what another
+man whom he did not fancy as well might do a great deal better.  But
+you cannot suspect God of that.  He is no respecter of persons--
+whether a man be rich or poor, no matter to God:  all which He
+inquires into is--Is he righteous or unrighteous, wise or foolish,
+able to do his work or unable?  And God can make no mistakes about
+people's characters.  As St. Paul says of the Lord Jesus:  "The Word
+of God is sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing through to the
+dividing of the very joints and marrow, so that all things are naked
+and open in the sight of Him with whom we have to do."  There is no
+blinding God, no hiding from God, no cheating God, just as there is
+no flattering God.  He knows what each and every one of us is fit
+for.  He knows what each and every one of us is worth; and what is
+more, He knows what we ought to know, that each and every one of us
+is worth nothing without Him.  Therefore there is no use pretending
+to be better than we are.  God knows just how good we are, and will
+reward us, even in this life only according as we deserve, in spite
+of all our boasting.  There is no use pretending to be wiser than we
+are.  For all the wisdom we have comes from God; and if we pretend to
+have more than we have, and by that greatest act of folly, show that
+we have no wisdom at all, He will take from us even what we have, and
+make all our cunning plans come to nothing, and prove us fools, just
+when we fancy ourselves most clever.  There is no use being ambitious
+and pushing, and trying to scramble up on our neighbours' shoulders.
+For we were not sent into this world to do what we like, but what God
+likes; not to work for ourselves, but to work for God; and God knows
+exactly how much good each of us can do, and what is the best place
+for us to do it in, and how to teach and enable us to do it; and if
+we choose to be taught, He will teach us; and if we choose to go His
+way, and do His work, He will help us to it.  But if we will not have
+his way, He will not let us have our own way--not at first, at least.
+He will bring our plans to nothing, and let us make fools of
+ourselves, and bring in sudden accidents of which we never dreamed,
+just to show us that we are not our own masters, and cannot cut out
+our own roads through life.  And if we take His lesson, and go to Him
+to teach and strengthen us--well:  and if not--then perhaps--which is
+the most awful misery which can happen to any man in earth--God may
+give up teaching us during this life, and let us have our own way,
+and be filled with the fruit of our own devices; from which worst of
+punishments may He in His mercy, save you, and me, and all belonging
+to us, in this life and in the life to come.
+
+But some of you may say:  "We understand the first half of the text
+very well, and like it very well; we all think it just that those who
+set themselves up should have a fall, and we are very glad to see
+them have a fall:  but we do not see why he who abases himself should
+have any right to be exalted."  Ah, my friends, it is much easier,
+and needs much less knowledge of God, and much less of the likeness
+of Christ, to see what is wrong, than to see what is right.  Every
+man knows when a bone is broken, but it is not every one who can set
+it again.  Nevertheless, there is a sort of left-handed reason in
+that argument.  For a man has no more right to make himself out worse
+than he is, than he has to make himself out better than he is.  A man
+should confess to being just what he is, neither more nor less.
+Nevertheless, he who humbles himself shall be exalted.
+
+Of course I do not mean those who, like some I know, make a fawning
+humble way of talking a cloak for their own self-conceit; who call
+themselves miserable sinners all the time that they are fancying that
+they are almost the only people in the world who are sure of being
+saved, whatever they do; who, as some do, actually pride themselves
+on their own convictions of sin, and glory in their own shame, and
+despise those who will not slander themselves as they do.
+
+They are equally hateful to God and to God's enemies.  If you and I
+are disgusted at such hypocritical self-conceit, be sure the Lord
+Jesus is far more pained at it than we are; for as a wise man says:
+"The devil's darling sin is the pride that apes humility."
+
+But let a man really be convinced of sin; let a man really believe in
+the Lord Jesus Christ's atonement; let a man really believe in the
+Holy Spirit; and that man will have little need to ask why he should
+humble himself more than he deserves, and little wish to boast of
+himself, and push himself forward, and get praise, or riches, or
+power in the world.  For that man would say to himself:  "I, sinner
+as I am; I, who know that I do so many wrong things daily; things so
+wrong that it required the blood of the Son of God to wash out the
+guilt of them--who am I to set myself up?  I cannot be faithful in a
+little--why should I try to be ruler over much?  I cannot use
+properly the blessings and the power which God does give me--must I
+not take for granted that, if I had more riches, more power, I should
+use them still worse?  I know well enough of a thousand sins, and
+weaknesses and ignorances in myself which my neighbours never see.  I
+believe, therefore, my neighbours have much too good an opinion of
+me, and not too bad a one; and therefore I am not going to boast or
+puff myself to them.  I can only thank God they do not see the inside
+of this foolish heart of mine as well as He does!  In short, I am not
+going to set myself up, and try to get a higher place among men than
+I have already, because I am certain that I have already a ten times
+better one than I deserve."
+
+Or again, if a man really believed in the Holy Ghost, which is much
+the same as really believing in the kingdom of God; if he really
+believed that God was the King and Master of his heart and soul; if
+he really believed that everything good, and right, and wise in him
+came from God's Holy Spirit, and that everything wrong and foolish in
+him came from himself and the devil; then he would surely say to
+himself:  "Who am I to try to set myself up above my neighbours, and
+get power over them; what have I that I did not receive?  Whatever
+money, or station, or cleverness, or power of mind I have, God has
+given me, and without Him I should be nothing.  Therefore, He only
+gave me these talents to use for Him, and if I use them for my own
+ends, I shall be misusing them, and trying to rob God of His own.  I
+am His child, His subject, His steward; He has put me just in that
+place in His earth which is most fit for me, and my business is, not
+to try to desert my post, and to wander out of the place here He has
+put me, but to see that I do the duty which lies nearest me, so that
+I shall be able to give an account to Him.  It is only if I am
+faithful in a few things, that I can expect God to make me ruler over
+many things."  Ah, my friends, if we could but see ourselves, not as
+we fancy we are, nor as others fancy we are, but just as we really
+are, then, instead of pushing, and boasting, and standing stiffly by
+our rights, and fancying that God and man are unjust to us, we should
+be crying out all day long with the prodigal son:  "Father, I have
+sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be
+called thy son."  We should say with St. Paul--who, after all,
+remember, was the wisest, and most learned, and noblest-hearted of
+all the Apostles--that we are at best the chief of sinners.  We
+should feel like the dear and blessed Magdalene of old, the pattern
+for ever of all true penitents, that it was quite honour enough to be
+allowed to wash Christ's feet with our tears, while every one round
+us sneered at us and looked down upon us--as, after all, we deserve.
+And so, believe me, we should be exalted.  It would pay us, if
+payment is what we want.  For so we should be in a more right, more
+true, more healthy, more wise, more powerful state of mind; more like
+Jesus Christ, and therefore more likely to be sent to do Christ's
+work, and share Christ's reward.  For this is the great law of the
+kingdom of God in which we live, that man is nothing, and God is
+everything; and that we are strong and wise, and something, only when
+we find out that we are weak and foolish, and nothing, and go to our
+Father in heaven for strength, and wisdom, and spiritual eternal
+life.  And then we find out how true it is that he who humbles
+himself, as he deserves, will be raised up; how he who loses his life
+will save it; how blessed are the poor in spirit, those who feel that
+they have nothing but what God chooses to give them; for theirs is
+the kingdom of heaven!  How blessed are those who hunger and thirst
+after righteousness; who feel that they are not doing right, and yet
+cannot rest till they do right; for they shall be filled!  How
+blessed are the meek, who do not set up themselves, or try to fight
+their own battles, and compete with their neighbours in the great
+scramble and struggle of this world; for they--just the last persons
+whom the world would expect to do it--shall inherit the earth!
+Choose, my friends, choose!  The world says:  "Push upwards, praise
+yourself, help yourself, put your best side outwards."  The great God
+who made heaven and earth says:  "Know that you are weak, and
+foolish, and sinful in yourself.  Know that whatever wisdom you have,
+I the Lord lent you; and I the Lord expect the interest of my loan.
+Know that you are my child in my Kingdom.  Stay where I have put you,
+and when I want you for something better, I will call you; and if you
+try to rise without my calling you, I will only drive you back again.
+So the only way to be ruler over much, is first to be faithful in a
+little.  My friends, which of the two do you think is likely to know
+best, man or God?
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{217}  In 1848-49.
+
+
+
+
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+<title>Sermons on National Subjects</title>
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+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">Sermons on National Subjects, by Charles Kingsley</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sermons on National Subjects, by Charles Kingsley
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+Title: Sermons on National Subjects
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+Release Date: June, 2005  [EBook #8202]
+[This file was first posted on July 1, 2003]
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+<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
+<p>Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h1>SERMONS ON NATIONAL SUBJECTS</h1>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>I&mdash;THE KING OF THE EARTH</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT.<br />[<i>Preached in</i> 1849.]</p>
+<p>Behold, thy King cometh unto thee.&mdash;MATTHEW xxi. 4.</p>
+<p>This Sunday is the first of the four Sundays in Advent.&nbsp; During
+those four Sundays, our forefathers have advised us to think seriously
+of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ&mdash;not that we should neglect
+to think of it at all times.&nbsp; As some of you know, I have preached
+to you about it often lately.&nbsp; Perhaps before the end of Advent
+you will all of you, more or less, understand what all that I have said
+about the cholera, and public distress, and the sins of this nation,
+and the sins of the labouring people has to do with the coming of our
+Lord Jesus Christ.&nbsp; But I intend, especially in my next four sermons,
+to speak my whole mind to you about this matter as far as God has shown
+it to me; taking the Collect, Epistle, and Gospels, for each Sunday
+in Advent, and explaining them.&nbsp; I am sure I cannot do better;
+for the more I see of those Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, and the
+way in which they are arranged, the more I am astonished and delighted
+at the wisdom with which they are chosen, the wise order in which they
+follow each other, and fit into each other.&nbsp; It is very fit, too,
+that we should think of our Lord&rsquo;s coming at this season of the
+year above all others; because it is the hardest season&mdash;the season
+of most want, and misery, and discontent, when wages are low, and work
+is scarce, and fuel is dear, and frosts are bitter, and farmers and
+tradesmen, and gentlemen, too, are at their wits&rsquo; end to square
+their accounts, and pay their way.&nbsp; Then is the time that the evils
+of society come home to us&mdash;that our sins, and our sorrows, which,
+after all, are the punishment of our sins, stare us in the face.&nbsp;
+Then is the time, if ever, for men&rsquo;s hearts to cry out for a Saviour,
+who will deliver them out of their miseries and their sins; for a Heavenly
+King who will rule them in righteousness, and do justice and judgment
+on the earth, and see that those who are in need and necessity have
+right; for a Heavenly Counsellor who will guide them into all truth&mdash;who
+will teach them what they are, and whither they are going, and what
+the Lord requires of them.&nbsp; I say the hard days of winter are a
+fit time to turn men&rsquo;s hearts to Christ their King&mdash;the fittest
+of all times for a clergyman to get up in his pulpit, as I do now, and
+tell his people, as I tell you, that Jesus Christ your King has not
+forgotten you&mdash;that He is coming speedily to judge the world, and
+execute justice and judgment for the meek of the earth.</p>
+<p>Now do not be in a hurry, and fancy from what I have just said, that
+I am one of those who think the end of the world is at hand.&nbsp; It
+may be, for aught I know.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of that day and that hour knoweth
+no man, not even the angels of God, nor the Son, but the Father only.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+If you wish for my own opinion, I believe that what people commonly
+call the end of the world, that is, the end of the earth and of mankind
+on it, is not at hand at all.&nbsp; As far as I can judge from Scripture,
+and from the history of all nations, the earth is yet young, and mankind
+in its infancy.&nbsp; Five thousand years hence, our descendants may
+be looking back on us as foolish barbarians, in comparison with what
+they know: just as we look back upon the ignorance of people a thousand
+years ago.&nbsp; And yet I believe that the end of this world, in the
+real Scripture sense of the word &ldquo;world,&rdquo; is coming very
+quickly and very truly&mdash;The end of this system of society, of these
+present ways in religion, and money-making, and conducting ourselves
+in all the affairs of life, which we English people have got into nowadays.&nbsp;
+The end of it is coming.&nbsp; It cannot last much longer; for it is
+destroying itself.&nbsp; It will not last much longer; for Christ and
+not the devil is the King of the earth.&nbsp; As St. Paul said to his
+people, so say I to you, &ldquo;The night is far spent, the day is at
+hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These may seem strange words, but almost every one is saying them,
+in his own way.&nbsp; One large party among religious people in these
+days is complaining that Christ has left His Church, and that the cause
+of Christianity will be ruined and lost, unless some great change takes
+place.&nbsp; Another large party of religious people say, that the prophecies
+are on the point of being all fulfilled that the 1260 days, spoken of
+by the prophet Daniel, are just coining to an end; and that Christ is
+coming with His saints, to reign openly upon earth for a thousand years.&nbsp;
+The wisest philosophers and historians of late years have been all foretelling
+a great and tremendous change in England, and throughout all Europe;
+and in the meantime, manufacturers and landlords, tradesmen and farmers,
+artisans and labourers, all say, that there <i>must</i> be a change
+and will be a change.&nbsp; I believe they are all right, every one
+of them.&nbsp; They put it in their words; I think it better to put
+it in the Scripture words, and say boldly, &ldquo;Jesus Christ, the
+King of the earth, is coming.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But you will ask, &ldquo;What right have you to stand up and say
+anything so surprising?&rdquo;&nbsp; My friends, the world is full of
+surprising things, and this age above all ages.&nbsp; It was not sixty
+years ago, that a nobleman was laughed at in the House of Lords for
+saying that he believed that we should one day see ships go by steam;
+and now there are steamers on every sea and ocean in the world.&nbsp;
+Who expected twenty years ago to see the whole face of England covered
+with these wonderful railroads?&nbsp; Who expected on the 22nd of February
+last year, that, within a single month, half the nations of Europe,
+which looked so quiet and secure, would be shaken from top to bottom
+with revolution and bloodshed&mdash;kings and princes vanishing one
+after the other like a dream&mdash;poor men sitting for a day as rulers
+of kingdoms, and then hurled down again to make room for other rulers
+as unexpected as themselves?&nbsp; Can anyone consider the last fifty
+years?&mdash;can anyone consider that one last year, 1848, and then
+not feel that we do live in a most strange and awful time? a time for
+which nothing is too surprising&mdash;a time in which we all ought to
+be prepared, from the least to the greatest, to see the greatest horrors
+and the greatest blessings come suddenly upon us, like a thief in the
+night?&nbsp; So much for Christ&rsquo;s coming being too wonderful a
+thing to happen just now.&nbsp; Still you are right to ask: &ldquo;What
+do you mean by Christ&rsquo;s being our King? what do you mean by His
+coming to us?&nbsp; What reason have you for supposing that He is coming
+<i>now</i>, rather than at any other time?&nbsp; And if He be coming,
+what are we to do?&nbsp; What is there we ought to repent of? what is
+there we ought to amend?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Well, my friends&mdash;it is just these very questions which I hope
+and trust God will help me to answer to you, in my next few sermons&mdash;I
+am perfectly convinced that we must get them answered and act upon them
+speedily.&nbsp; I am perfectly convinced that if we go on as most of
+us are going in England now, the Lord of us all will come in an hour
+when we are not aware, and cut us asunder in the deepest and most real
+sense, as He came and cut asunder France, Germany, and Austria only
+last year, and appoint us our portion with the unbelievers.&nbsp; And
+I believe that our punishment will be seven times as severe as that
+of either France, Germany, or Austria, because we have had seven times
+their privileges and blessings, seven times their Gospel light and Christian
+knowledge, seven times their freedom and justice in laws and constitution;
+seven times their wealth, and prosperity, and means of employing our
+population.&nbsp; Much has been given to England, and of her much will
+be required.&nbsp; And if you could only see the state of mankind over
+the greatest part of the globe, how infinitely fewer opportunities they
+have of knowing God&rsquo;s will than you have, you would feel that
+to you, poor and struggling as some of you are&mdash;to you much has
+been given, and of you much will be required.</p>
+<p>Now first, what do I mean by Christ being our king?&nbsp; I daresay
+there are some among you who are inclined to think that, when we talk
+of Christ being a king, that the word king means something very different
+from its common meaning&mdash;and, God knows, that that is true enough.&nbsp;
+Our blessed Lord took care to make people understand that&mdash;how
+He was not like one of the kings of the nations, how His kingdom was
+not of this world.&nbsp; But yet the Bible tells us again and again
+that all good kings, all real kings, are patterns of Christ; and, therefore,
+that when we talk of Christ being a king, we mean that He is a king
+in everything that a king ought to be; that He fulfils perfectly all
+the duties of a king; that He is the pattern which all kings ought to
+copy.&nbsp; Kings have been in all ages too apt to forget that, and,
+indeed, so have the people too.&nbsp; We English have forgotten most
+thoroughly in these days, that Christ is our king, or even a king at
+all.&nbsp; We talk of Christ being a &ldquo;spiritual&rdquo; king, and
+then we say that that merely means that He is king of Christians&rsquo;
+hearts.&nbsp; And when anyone asks what that means, it comes out, that
+all we mean is, that Christ has a very great influence over the hearts
+of believing Christians&mdash;when He can obtain it; or else that it
+means that He is king of a very small number of people called the elect,
+whom He has chosen out, but that He has absolutely nothing to do with
+the whole rest of the world.&nbsp; And then, when anyone stands up with
+the Bible in his hand, and says, in the plain words of Scripture: &ldquo;Christ
+is not only the king of believers, He is the king of the whole earth;
+the king of the clouds and the thunder, the king of the land and the
+cattle, and the trees, and the corn, and to whomsoever He will He giveth
+them.&nbsp; Christ is not only the king of believers&mdash;He is the
+king of all&mdash;the king of the wicked, of the heathen, of those who
+do not believe Him, who never heard of Him.&nbsp; Christ is not only
+the king of a few individual persons, one here and one there in every
+parish, but He is the king of every nation.&nbsp; He is the king of
+England, by the grace of God, just as much as Queen Victoria is, and
+ten thousand times more.&rdquo;&nbsp; If any man talks in this way,
+people stare&mdash;think him an enthusiast&mdash;ask him what new doctrine
+this is, and call his words unscriptural, just because they come out
+of Scripture and not out of men&rsquo;s perversions and twistings of
+Scripture.&nbsp; Nevertheless Christ is King; really and truly King
+of Kings and Lord of Lords; and He will make men know it.&nbsp; What
+He was, that He is and ever will be; there is no change in Him; His
+kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and His dominion endureth throughout
+all ages, and woe unto those, small or great, who rebel against Him!</p>
+<p>But what sort of a king is He?&nbsp; He is a king of law, and order,
+and justice.&nbsp; He is not selfish, fanciful, self-willed.&nbsp; He
+said himself that He came not to do His own will, but His Father&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+He is a king of gentleness and meekness too: but do not mistake that.&nbsp;
+There is no weak indulgence in Him.&nbsp; A man may be very meek, and
+yet stern enough and strong enough.&nbsp; Moses was the meekest of men,
+we read, and yet He made those who rebelled against him feel that he
+was not to be trifled with.&nbsp; Korah, Dathan, and Abiram found that
+to their cost.&nbsp; He would not even spare his own brother Aaron,
+his own sister Miriam, when they rebelled.&nbsp; And he was right.&nbsp;
+He showed his love by it; indulgence is not love.&nbsp; It is no sign
+of meekness, but only of cowardice and carelessness, to be afraid to
+rebuke sin.&nbsp; Moses knew that he was doing God&rsquo;s work, that
+he was appointed to make a great nation of those slavish besotted Jews,
+his countrymen; that he was sent by God with boundless blessings to
+them; and woe to whoever hindered him from that.&nbsp; Because he loved
+the Jews, therefore he dared punish those who tempted them to forget
+the promised land of Canaan, or break God&rsquo;s covenant, in which
+lay all their hope.</p>
+<p>And such a one is our King, my friends; Jesus Christ the Son of God.&nbsp;
+Like Moses, says St. Paul, He is faithful in all His office.&nbsp; Therefore
+He is severe as well as gentle.&nbsp; He was so when on earth.&nbsp;
+With the poor, the outcast, the neglected, those on whom men trampled,
+who was gentler than the Lord Jesus?&nbsp; To the proud Pharisee, the
+canting Scribe, the cunning Herodian, who was sterner than the Lord
+Jesus?&nbsp; Read that awful 23rd chapter of St. Matthew, and then see
+how the Saviour, the lamb dumb before His shearers, He of whom it was
+said &ldquo;He shall not strive nor cry, nor shall His voice be heard
+in the streets&rdquo;&mdash;how He could speak when He had occasion.
+. . . &ldquo;Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation
+of hell?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>My friends, those were the words of our King; of Him in whom was
+neither passion nor selfishness; who loved us even to the death, and
+endured for us the scourge, the cross, the grave.&nbsp; And believe
+me, such are His words now; though we do not hear Him, the heaven and
+the earth hear Him and obey Him.&nbsp; His message is pardon, mercy,
+deliverance to the sorrowful, and the oppressed, and the neglected;
+and to the proud, the tyrannical, the self-righteous, the hypocritical,
+tribulation and anguish, shame and woe.</p>
+<p>Because He is the Saviour, therefore He is a consuming fire to all
+those who try to hinder Him from saving men.&nbsp; Because He is the
+Son of God, He will sweep out of His Father&rsquo;s kingdom all who
+offend, and whosoever maketh and loveth a lie.&nbsp; Because He is boundless
+mercy and love, therefore He will show no mercy to those who try to
+stop His purposes of love.&nbsp; Because He is the King of men, the
+enemies of mankind are His enemies; and He will reign till He has put
+them all under His feet.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>II&mdash;HOLY SCRIPTURE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT.</p>
+<p>Whatsoever things were written aforetime, were written for our example,
+that we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have
+hope.&mdash;ROMANS xv. 4.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whatsoever was written aforetime.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is no
+doubt, I think, that by these words St. Paul means the Bible; that is,
+the Old Testament, which was the only part of the Bible already written
+in his time.&nbsp; For it is of the Psalms which he is speaking.&nbsp;
+He mentions a verse out of the 69th Psalm, &ldquo;The reproaches of
+Him that reproached thee fell on me;&rdquo; which, he says, applies
+to Christ just as much as it did to David, who wrote it.&nbsp; Christ,
+he says, pleased not Himself any more than David, but suffered willingly
+and joyfully for God&rsquo;s sake, because He knew that He was doing
+God&rsquo;s work.&nbsp; And we, he goes on to say, must do the same;
+do as Christ did; we must not please ourselves, but every one of us
+please our brother for his good and edification; that is, in order to
+build him up, strengthen him, make him wiser, better, more comfortable.&nbsp;
+For, he says, Christ pleased not Himself, but like David, lived only
+to help others; and therefore this verse out of David&rsquo;s Psalms,
+&ldquo;The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me,&rdquo;
+is a lesson to us; a pattern of what we ought to feel, and do, and suffer.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;For whatsoever was written aforetime,&rdquo; all these ancient
+psalms and prophets, and histories of men and nations who trusted in
+God, &ldquo;were written for our example, that we, through patience
+and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Yes, my friends, this is true; and the longer you live a life of
+faith and godliness, the longer you read and study that precious Book
+of books which God has put so freely into your hands in these days,
+the more true you will find it.&nbsp; And if it was true of the Old
+Testament, written before the Lord came down and dwelt among men, how
+much more must it be true of the New Testament, which was written after
+His coming by apostles and evangelists, who had far fuller light and
+knowledge of the Lord than ever David or the old prophets, even in their
+happiest moments, had.&nbsp; Ah, what a treasure you have, every one
+of you, in those Bibles of yours, which too many of you read so little!&nbsp;
+From the first chapter of Genesis to the last of Revelations, it is
+all written for our example, all profitable for teaching, for reproof,
+for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God
+may be perfect, thoroughly furnished for all good works.&nbsp; Ah! friends,
+friends, is not this the reason why so many of you do not read your
+Bibles, that you do not wish to be furnished for good works?&mdash;do
+not wish to be men of God, godly and godlike men, but only to be men
+of the world, caring only for money and pleasure?&mdash;some of you,
+alas! not wishing to be men and women at all, but only a sort of brute
+beasts with clothes on, given up to filth and folly, like the animals
+that perish, or rather worse than the animals, for they could be no
+better if they tried, but you might be.&nbsp; Oh! what might you not
+be, what are you not already, if you but knew it!&nbsp; Members of Christ,
+children of God, heirs of the kingdom of heaven, heirs of a hope undying,
+pure, that will never fade away, having a right given you by the promise
+and oath of Almighty God himself, to hope for yourselves, for your neighbours,
+for this poor distracted world, for ever and ever; a right to believe
+that there is an everlasting day of justice, and peace, and happiness
+in store for the whole world, and that you, if you will, may have your
+share in that glorious sunrise which shall never set again.&nbsp; You
+may have your share in it, each and every one of you; and if you ask
+why, go to the Scriptures, and there read the promises of God, the grounds
+of your just hope, for all heaven and earth.</p>
+<p>First, of hope for yourselves.&mdash;I say first for yourselves,
+not because a man is right in being selfish, and caring only for his
+own soul, but because a man must care for his own soul first, if he
+ever intends to care for others; a man must have hope for himself first,
+if he is to have hope for others.&nbsp; He may stop there, and turn
+his religion into a selfish superstition, and spend his life in asking
+all day long, &ldquo;Shall I be saved, shall I be damned?&rdquo; or
+worse still, in chuckling over his own good fortune, and saying to himself,
+&ldquo;I shall be saved, whoever else is damned;&rdquo; but whether
+he ends there or not, he must begin there; begin by trying to get himself
+saved.&nbsp; For if he does not know what is right and good for himself,
+how can he tell what is right and good for others?&nbsp; If he wishes
+to bring his neighbours out of their sins, he must surely first have
+been brought out of his own sins, and so know what forgiveness and sanctification
+means.&nbsp; If he wishes to make others at peace with God, he must
+first be at peace with God himself, to know what God&rsquo;s peace is.&nbsp;
+If he wants to teach others their duty, he must first know his own duty,
+for all men&rsquo;s duty is one and the same.&nbsp; If he wishes to
+have hope for the world, he must first have hope for himself, for he
+is in the world, a part of it, and he must learn what blessings God
+intends for him, and they will teach him what blessings God has in store
+for the earth.&nbsp; Faith and hope, like charity, must begin at home.&nbsp;
+By learning the corruption of our own hearts, we learn the corruption
+of human nature.&nbsp; By learning what is the only medicine which can
+cure our own sick hearts, we learn what is the only medicine which can
+cure human nature.&nbsp; We learn by our own experience, that God is
+all-forgiving love; that His peace shines bright upon the soul which
+casts itself utterly on Jesus Christ the Lord for pardon, strength,
+and safety; that God&rsquo;s Spirit is ready and able to raise us out
+of all our sin, and sottishness, and weakness, and wilfulness, and selfishness,
+and renew us into quite new men, different characters from what we used
+to be; and so, by having hope for ourselves, we learn step by step and
+year by year to have hope for our friends, for our neighbours, and for
+the whole world.</p>
+<p>For that is another great lesson which the Bible teaches us&mdash;hope
+for the world.&nbsp; Men say to us, &ldquo;This world has always gone
+on ill, and will always go on so.&nbsp; Tyrants and knaves and hypocrites
+have always had the power in it; idlers have always had the enjoyment
+of it; while the humble, and industrious, and godly, who would not foul
+their hands with the wicked ways of the world, have been always laughed
+at, neglected, oppressed, persecuted.&nbsp; The world,&rdquo; they say,
+&ldquo;is very bad, and we cannot live in it without giving way a little
+to its badness, and going the old road.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But he who, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, has hope,
+can answer &ldquo;Yes&mdash;and yet no.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes&mdash;we
+agree that the world has gone on badly enough: perhaps we think the
+world worse than it thinks itself; for God&rsquo;s Spirit has taught
+us to see sin, and shame, and ruin, in many a thing which the world
+thinks right and reasonable.&nbsp; And yet,&rdquo; says the true Christian
+man, &ldquo;although we think the world worse than anyone else thinks
+it, and are more unhappy than anyone else about all the sin, and injustice,
+and misery we see in it, we have the very strongest faith&mdash;we are
+perfectly certain&mdash;we are as sure as if we saw it coming to pass
+here before us, that the world will come right at last.&nbsp; For the
+Bible tells us that the Son of God is the king of the world; that He
+has been the master and ruler of it from the beginning.&nbsp; He, the
+Bible tells us, condescended to come down on earth and be born in the
+likeness of a poor man, and die on the cross for this poor world of
+His, that He might take away the sins of it.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Behold
+the Lamb of God,&rdquo; said John the Baptist, &ldquo;who takes away
+the sin of the world.&rdquo;&nbsp; How dare we, who call ourselves Christians,
+we who have been baptized into His name, we who have tasted of His mercy,
+we who know the might of His love, the converting and renewing power
+of His Spirit&mdash;how dare we doubt but that He <i>will</i> take away
+the sins of the world?&nbsp; Ay; step by step, nation by nation, year
+by year, the Lord shall conquer; love, and justice, and wisdom shall
+spread and grow; for He must reign till He has put all enemies under
+His feet.&nbsp; He has promised to take away the sins of the world,
+and He is God, and cannot lie.&nbsp; There is the Christian&rsquo;s
+hope: let him leave infidels to say &ldquo;The world always was bad,
+and it must remain so to the end;&rdquo; the Christian ought to be able
+to answer, &ldquo;The world was bad, and is bad; but for that very reason
+it will <i>not</i> remain so to the end: for the Lord and king of the
+earth is boundless love, justice, goodness itself, and He will thoroughly
+purge His floor, and cast out of His kingdom all things that offend,
+and make in His good time the kingdoms of this world, the kingdoms of
+God and of His Christ.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah but,&rdquo; someone may say, &ldquo;that, if it ever happens
+at all, will not happen till we are dead, and what part or lot shall
+<i>we</i> have in it? we who die in the midst of all this sin, and injustice,
+and distress?&rdquo;&nbsp; There again the Bible gives us hope: &ldquo;I
+believe,&rdquo; says the Creed, &ldquo;in the resurrection of the flesh.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The Bible teaches us to believe, that we, each of us, as human beings,
+men and women, shall have a share in that glorious day; not merely as
+ghosts, and disembodied spirits&mdash;of which the Bible, thanks be
+to God, says little or nothing, but as real live human beings, with
+new bodies of our own, on a new earth, under a new heaven.&nbsp; &ldquo;Therefore,&rdquo;
+says David, &ldquo;my flesh shall rest in hope;&rdquo; not merely my
+soul, my ghost, but my flesh.&nbsp; For the Lord, who not only died,
+but rose again with His body, shall raise our bodies, according to the
+mighty working by which He subdues all things to Himself; and then the
+whole manhood of each of us, body, soul, and spirit, shall have one
+perfect consummation and bliss, in His eternal and everlasting glory.&mdash;That
+is our hope.&nbsp; If that is not a gospel, and good news from heaven
+to poor distressed creatures in hovels, and on sick beds, to people
+racked with life-long pain and disease, to people in crowded cities,
+who never from week&rsquo;s end to week&rsquo;s end look on the green
+fields and bright sky&mdash;if that is not good news, and a dayspring
+of boundless hope from on high for them, what news can be?</p>
+<p>But how are we to get this hope?&nbsp; The text tells us; through
+comfort of the Scriptures; through the strengthening and comforting
+promises, and examples, and rules of God&rsquo;s gracious dealings which
+we find therein.&nbsp; Through comfort of the Scriptures, but also through
+patience.&nbsp; Ah, my friends, of that too we must think; we must,
+as St. James says, &ldquo;let patience have her perfect work,&rdquo;
+or else we shall not be perfect ourselves.&nbsp; If we are hasty, self-conceited,
+covetous, ready to help ourselves by the first means that come to hand;
+if we are full of hard judgments about our neighbours, and doubts about
+God&rsquo;s good purpose toward the world; in short, if we are not <i>patient</i>,
+the Bible will teach us little or nothing.&nbsp; It may make us superstitious,
+bigoted, fanatical, conceited, pharisaical, but like Jesus Christ the
+Lord it will not make us, unless we have patience.</p>
+<p>And where are we to get patience?&nbsp; God knows it is hard in such
+a world as this for poor creatures to be patient always.&nbsp; But faith
+can breed patience, though patience cannot breed itself;&mdash;and faith
+in whom?&nbsp; Faith in our Father in heaven, even in the Almighty God
+Himself.&nbsp; He calls Himself &ldquo;the God of Patience and Consolation.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Pray for His Holy Spirit, and He will make you patient; pray for His
+Holy Spirit, and He will console and comfort you.&nbsp; He has promised
+That Spirit of His, The Spirit of love, trust, and patience&mdash;The
+Comforter&mdash;to as many as ask Him.&nbsp; Ask Him now, this day&mdash;come
+to His holy table this day, and ask Him to make you patient; ask Him
+to take all the hastiness, and pride, and ill-temper, and self-will,
+and greediness out of you, and to change your wills into the likeness
+of His will.&nbsp; Then your eyes will be opened to understand His law.&nbsp;
+Then you will see in the Scriptures a sure promise of hope and glory
+and redemption for yourself and all the world.&nbsp; Then you will see
+in the blessed sacrament of the Lord&rsquo;s body and blood, a sure
+sign and warrant, handed down from land to land, and age to age, from
+year to year, and from father to son, that these promises shall come
+true; that hope shall become fact; that not one of the Lord&rsquo;s
+words shall fail, or pass away, till all be fulfilled.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>III&mdash;THE KINGDOM OF GOD</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>THIRD SUNDAY IN ADVENT.</p>
+<p>The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me
+to preach good tidings to the meek; He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,
+to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to
+them that are bound.&mdash;ISAIAH lxi. 1.</p>
+<p>My friends, I do entreat those of you who wish to get any real good
+from this sermon, to listen to me carefully all through it.&nbsp; Not
+that I have to complain of you in general for not attending to me.&nbsp;
+I thank God, and thank you, that you do listen to what is said in this
+pulpit.&nbsp; But there are many people who have a bad trick of minding
+the preacher carefully enough for a minute or two, and then letting
+their wits wander, and think about something else; and then if any word
+in the sermon strikes them, waking up suddenly, and thinking again for
+a little, and then letting their thoughts run wild again; and so on.&nbsp;
+Whereby it happens that they only recollect a few scraps of the sermon,
+a word here, and a sentence there, and get into their heads all sorts
+of mistakes and false notions about the preacher&rsquo;s meaning.</p>
+<p>That is not right; that is not worthy of reasonable grown men: that
+is only pardonable in little scatter-brained children.&nbsp; Men and
+women should listen steadily, reverently throughout; so, and so only,
+will they be able to judge of the message which the preacher brings
+them.&nbsp; Listen to me, therefore, all through this sermon, and may
+God give you grace to understand it and lay it to heart, for it is the
+good news of the kingdom of God.</p>
+<p>You recollect, I hope, that I have often told you, that the Lord
+Jesus Christ&rsquo;s words would never pass away; that His prophecies
+are continually coming true, and being fulfilled over and over again.&nbsp;
+Now this text is not one of His prophecies, but it is a prophecy about
+Him; one which He fulfilled, and which He has been fulfilling again
+and again.&nbsp; He is fulfilling it, as I believe, more than ever,
+now in these very days.</p>
+<p>If you will look at the 61st chapter of Isaiah, you will find this
+prophecy; and you will find, too, what will surprise you at first, that
+Isaiah was speaking of himself.&nbsp; He says, &ldquo;That the Spirit
+of the Lord was upon <i>him</i>&rdquo;&mdash;Isaiah&mdash;&ldquo;because
+the Lord had appointed <i>him</i> to preach good tidings to the meek,
+to bind up the broken-hearted, and deliverance to the captives, to preach
+the acceptable year of the Lord.&rdquo;&nbsp; Isaiah must have spoken
+truly about himself.&nbsp; He could not have meant to tell a falsehood,
+to say a thing was true of himself which was only true of Jesus, who
+did not come till 800 years afterwards.&nbsp; And he did speak the truth:
+you cannot read his prophecies without seeing that the Spirit of the
+Lord was indeed upon him; that the words which he spoke must have comforted
+all those who were sorrowing for their sins and the sins of the nation
+in their time.&nbsp; We know, for a fact, that his prophecies came true;
+that the Jewish captives were delivered and brought back out of Jud&aelig;a
+to Jerusalem again, and that Jerusalem was rebuilt as Isaiah prophesied,
+and the Jewish nation raised to far greater holiness, and prosperity,
+and happiness than it had ever been in before.&nbsp; And yet 800 years
+afterwards the Lord took those very same words to Himself, and said,
+that <i>He</i> fulfilled them.&nbsp; He read them aloud once in a Jewish
+synagogue, out of the book of the prophet Isaiah; and then told the
+congregation, &ldquo;This day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And again, as we read in the Gospel for this day, when John the Baptist
+sent to ask Him if He was really the Christ, He made use of another
+prophecy of Isaiah, and told John&rsquo;s disciples that He <i>was</i>
+the Christ, because He was fulfilling that prophecy; because He <i>was</i>
+making the deaf hear, and the blind see, and preaching the gospel to
+the poor.&nbsp; Now, how is that?&nbsp; Could Isaiah be right in applying
+those words to himself, and yet Christ be right in applying them to
+Himself?&nbsp; Can a prophecy be fulfilled twice over?</p>
+<p>No doubt it can, my friends, and two hundred times over.&nbsp; No
+prophecy of Scripture is of private interpretation, says St. Peter.&nbsp;
+That is, it does not apply to any one private, particular thing that
+is to happen.&nbsp; Every prophecy of Scripture goes on fulfilling itself
+more and more, as time rolls on and the world grows older.&nbsp; St.
+Peter tells us the reason why.&nbsp; No prophecy of Scripture is of
+private interpretation; because it does not come from the will of man,
+from any invention or discovery of poor short-sighted human beings,
+who can only judge by what they see around them in their own times:
+but holy men of old spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.&nbsp;
+And who is the Holy Spirit?&nbsp; The Spirit of God; the everlasting
+Spirit; the Spirit who cannot change, for He <i>is</i> God.&nbsp; The
+Spirit who searcheth the deep things of God, and teaches them to men.&nbsp;
+And what are the deep things of God?&nbsp; They are eternal as God is.&nbsp;
+Eternal laws; everlasting rules which cannot alter.&nbsp; That is the
+meaning of it all.&nbsp; The Spirit of God is the Spirit which teaches
+men the laws of God; the unchangeable rules and ordinances by which
+He governs all heaven and earth, and men, and nations; the laws which
+come into force, not once only, but always; the laws of God which are
+working round us now, just as much as they were eighteen hundred years
+ago, just as much as they were in Isaiah&rsquo;s time.&nbsp; Therefore
+it is, that I said that these old Jewish prophecies, which were inspired
+by the Holy Spirit, are coming true now, and will keep on coming true,
+time after time, in their proper place and order, and whensoever the
+times are fit for them, even to the end of the world.</p>
+<p>But again, we read that the Spirit of God takes of the things of
+Christ, and shows them unto us.&nbsp; And what are the things of Christ?&nbsp;
+They must be eternal things, unchangeable things, for Christ is unchangeable&mdash;Jesus
+Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.&nbsp; He is over all,
+God blessed for ever.&nbsp; To Him all power is given in heaven and
+earth.&nbsp; He reigns, and He will reign.&nbsp; Do you think He is
+less a Saviour now, than He was when He spoke those things to John&rsquo;s
+disciples?&nbsp; Do you think He is less able to hear and to help than
+He was in John&rsquo;s time?&nbsp; Do you think He used to care about
+people&rsquo;s bodies then, but that He only cares about their souls
+now?&nbsp; Do you think that He is less compassionate, and less merciful,
+as well as less powerful, than He was when He made the blind see, and
+the lame walk, and the deaf hear, in Jud&aelig;a of old?</p>
+<p>Less powerful! less compassionate!&nbsp; One would have expected
+that Christ was <i>more</i> powerful, <i>more</i> compassionate, if
+that were possible.&nbsp; At least one would expect that His power and
+compassion would show itself more and more, and make itself felt more
+and more, year by year, and age by age; more and more healing disease;
+more and more comforting sorrow; more and still more casting out cunning
+and evil spirits, till He had put all under His feet.&nbsp; He Himself
+said it should be so.&nbsp; He always spoke of His own kingdom as a
+thing which was to grow and increase by laws of its own, men knew not
+how, but He knew.&nbsp; Like seed cast into the ground, His kingdom
+was, He said, at first the smallest of all seeds; but it was to grow,
+and take root, and spread into a mighty tree, He said, till the very
+birds in the air lodged in the branches of it; and David&rsquo;s words
+should be fulfilled, &ldquo;Thou, Lord, shalt save both man and beast.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And does not St. Paul speak of His kingdom in the same way, as a kingdom
+which should grow? that He was to reign till He had put all enemies
+under His feet? that He would deliver at last the whole creation? the
+earth on which we stand, the dumb animals around us?&nbsp; For, as St.
+Paul says, the whole creation is groaning in labour-pangs, waiting to
+be raised into a higher state.&nbsp; And it shall be raised.&nbsp; The
+whole creation shall be set free into the glorious liberty of the children
+of God.</p>
+<p>What does that mean?&nbsp; How can I tell you?</p>
+<p>This I can tell you, that it cannot mean that Jesus Christ was merciful
+enough to heal people&rsquo;s bodies at first, but that He has given
+up doing it now, and will never do it again.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, but,&rdquo;
+some would say, &ldquo;what does all this come to?&nbsp; You are merely
+telling us what we knew before&mdash;that if any of us are cured from
+disease, or raised up from a sick bed, it is all the Lord&rsquo;s doing.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+If you do believe that, really, my friends, happy are you!&nbsp; Many
+of you, I think, do believe it.&nbsp; The poor are more inclined to
+believe it, I think, than the rich.&nbsp; But even in the mouths of
+the poor one often hears words which make one suspect that they do <i>not</i>
+believe it.&nbsp; I am very much afraid that a great many have got into
+the trick of saying that it was God&rsquo;s mercy that they were cured,
+and that it pleased the Lord to raise them up from a sick bed, very
+much as a piece of cant.&nbsp; They say the words by rote, because they
+have been accustomed to hear them said by others, without thinking of
+the meaning of them; just as, on the other hand, a great many people
+curse and swear without thinking of the awful oaths they use.&nbsp;
+Ay, and often enough the very same persons will say that it was the
+Lord&rsquo;s mercy they were cured of their sickness; and then, if they
+get into a passion, pray the very same Lord to do that to the bodies
+and souls of their neighbours which it is a shame to speak of here.&nbsp;
+Out of the same mouth proceed blessings and cursings: showing that whether
+or not they are in earnest in cursing, they are not earnest in blessing.</p>
+<p>Again: If people really believed that it was the Lord Jesus Christ
+who cured their sicknesses for them, they would behave, when they got
+well, more as the Lord Jesus Christ would wish them to behave.&nbsp;
+They would show forth their thankfulness not only with their lips, but
+in their lives.&nbsp; You who believe&mdash;you who say&mdash;that Christ
+has cured your sicknesses, show your faith by your works.&nbsp; Live
+like those who are alive again from the dead; who are not your own,
+but bought with a price, and bound to work for God with your bodies
+and your spirits, which are His&mdash;then, and then only, can either
+God or man believe you.</p>
+<p>Again: There is a third reason which makes one suspect that people
+do not mean what they say about this matter.&nbsp; I think too many
+say, &ldquo;It has pleased God,&rdquo; merely as an empty form of words,
+when all they mean is, &ldquo;What must be, must, and it cannot be helped.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Else, why do they say, &ldquo;It has pleased the Lord to send me sickness?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+What is the use of saying, &ldquo;It has pleased the Lord to cure me,&rdquo;
+when you say in the same breath, &ldquo;It has pleased the Lord to make
+me ill?&rdquo;&nbsp; I know you will say that, &ldquo;Of course, whatever
+happens must be the Lord&rsquo;s will; if it did not please Him it would
+not happen.&rdquo;&nbsp; I do not care for such words; I will have nothing
+to do with them.&nbsp; I will neither entangle you nor myself in those
+endless disputings and questions about freewill and necessity, which
+never yet have come to any conclusion, and never will, because they
+are too deep for poor short-sighted human beings like us.&nbsp; &ldquo;To
+the law and to the testimony,&rdquo; say I.&nbsp; I will hold to the
+words of the Bible; what it says, I will say; what it does not say I
+will not say, to please any man&rsquo;s system of doctrines.&nbsp; And
+I say from the Bible that we have no more right to say, &ldquo;It has
+pleased the Lord to make me sick,&rdquo; than, &ldquo;It has pleased
+the Lord to make me a sinner.&rdquo;&nbsp; Scripture everywhere speaks
+of sickness as a real evil and a curse&mdash;a breaking of the health,
+and order, and strength, and harmony of God&rsquo;s creation.&nbsp;
+It speaks of madmen as possessed with evil spirits; did <i>that</i>
+please God?&nbsp; The woman who was bowed with a spirit of infirmity,
+and could not lift herself up&mdash;did our Lord say that it had pleased
+God to make her a wretched cripple?&nbsp; No; he spoke of her as this
+daughter of Israel, whom Satan had bound, and not God, this eighteen
+years; and that was His reason for healing her, even on the sabbath-day,
+because her disease was not the work of God, but of the cruel, disordering,
+destroying evil spirit which is at enmity with God.&nbsp; That was why
+Christ cured her.&nbsp; And <i>that</i>&mdash;for this is the point
+I have been coming to, step by step&mdash;that was the reason why, when
+John the Baptist sent to ask if Jesus was the Christ, our Lord answered:
+&ldquo;Go and show John again those things which ye do see and hear:
+the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed,
+and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel
+preached to them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Do not be in a hurry, my friends, and suppose that our Lord meant
+merely: &ldquo;Tell John what wonderful miracles I am working.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+If He had meant that why would He have put in as the last proof that
+He was the Christ, that He was preaching the gospel to the poor?&nbsp;
+What wonderful miracle was there in <i>that</i>?&nbsp; No: it was as
+if He had said: &ldquo;Go and tell John that I am the Christ, because
+I am the great physician, the healer and deliverer of body and soul:
+one who will and can cure the loathsome diseases, the uselessness, the
+misery, the ignorance of the poorest and meanest.&rdquo;&nbsp; He has
+proved Himself the Christ by showing not only His boundless power, but
+His boundless love and mercy; and <i>that</i>, not only to men&rsquo;s
+souls, but to their bodies also.&nbsp; To prove Himself the Christ by
+wonderful and astonishing miracles was exactly what He would not do.&nbsp;
+He refused, when the Scribes and Pharisees came and asked of Him a sign
+from heaven to prove that He was Christ&mdash;wanting Him, I suppose,
+to bring some apparition, or fiery comet, or great voice out of the
+sky, to astonish them with His power; He told them peremptorily that
+He would give them no such thing: and yet He said that His mighty works
+did prove Him to be Christ; He pronounced woe against Chorazin and Bethsaida
+for not believing Him on account of His mighty works: He told the Scribes
+and Pharisees that they ought to believe on Him merely for His works&rsquo;
+sake.&nbsp; And why would they not believe on Him?&nbsp; Just because
+they could not see that God&rsquo;s power was shown more in healing
+and delivering sufferers, than in astonishing and destroying.&nbsp;
+They could not see that God&rsquo;s perfect likeness shone out in Christ&mdash;that
+He was the express image of the Father, just because He went about doing
+good, and healing all manner of sicknesses and all manner of infirmities
+among the people.&nbsp; But so it is, my friends!&nbsp; Jesus is the
+Saviour, the deliverer, the great physician, the healer of soul and
+body.&nbsp; Not a pang is felt or a tear shed on earth, but He sorrows
+over it.&nbsp; Not a human being on earth dies young, but He, as I believe,
+sorrows over it.&nbsp; What it is which prevents Him healing every sickness,
+soothing every sorrow, wiping away every tear <i>now</i>, we cannot
+tell.&nbsp; But this we can tell, that it is His will that none should
+perish.&nbsp; This we <i>can</i> tell; that He is willing as ever to
+heal the sick, to cleanse the leper, to cast out devils, to teach the
+ignorant, to bind up the broken-hearted.&nbsp; This we <i>can</i> tell;
+that He will go on doing so more and more, year by year, and age by
+age.&nbsp; This we <i>can</i> tell, from Scripture, that Christ is stronger
+than the devil.&nbsp; This we can tell; that Christ, and all good men,
+the spirits of just men made perfect, the wise and the great in God&rsquo;s
+sight, who have left us their books, their sayings, their writings,
+as precious health-giving heirlooms&mdash;have been fighting, and are
+fighting, and will fight to the end against the devil, and sin, and
+oppression, and misery, and disease, and everything which spoils and
+darkens the face of God&rsquo;s good earth.&nbsp; And this we <i>can</i>
+tell; that they will conquer at the last, because Christ is stronger
+than the devil; good is stronger than evil; light is stronger than darkness;
+God&rsquo;s Spirit, the giver of life, and health, and order, is stronger
+than all the evil customs, and ignorance, and carelessness, and cruelty,
+and superstition, which makes miserable the lives and, as far as we
+can see, destroys the souls of thousands.&nbsp; Yes, I say, Christ&rsquo;s
+kingdom is a kingdom of health and deliverance for body and soul; and
+it will conquer, and it will spread, and it will grow, till the nations
+of the world have become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ.&nbsp;
+Christ reigns, and Christ will reign till He has put all His enemies
+under His feet; and the last of His enemies which shall be destroyed
+is <i>Death</i>.&nbsp; Death is His enemy.&nbsp; He has conquered death
+by rising from the dead.&nbsp; And the day will come when death will
+be no more&mdash;when sickness and sorrow shall be unknown, and God
+shall wipe away tears from all eyes.&nbsp; I say it again&mdash;never
+forget it&mdash;Christ is King, and His kingdom is a kingdom of health,
+and life, and deliverance from all evil.&nbsp; It always has been so,
+from the first time our Lord cured the leper in Galilee; it will be
+so to the end of the world.&nbsp; And, therefore&mdash;to come back
+to the very place from which I started at the beginning of my sermon&mdash;therefore,
+whenever one of the days of the Lord is at hand, whenever God&rsquo;s
+kingdom makes a great step forward, this same prophecy in our text is
+fulfilled in some striking and wonderful way.&nbsp; And I say it is
+fulfilled now in these days more than it ever has been.&nbsp; Christ
+is healing the sick, cleansing the leper, giving sight to the blind,
+raising the dead, and preaching the gospel to the poor, seven times
+more in these days in which we live than He did when He walked upon
+earth in Jud&aelig;a.</p>
+<p>Do you doubt my words?&nbsp; At all events you confess that the cure
+of all diseases comes from Christ.&nbsp; Then consider, I beseech you,
+how many more diseases are cured now than were formerly.&nbsp; One may
+say that the knowledge of medicine is not one hundred years old.&nbsp;
+Nothing, my friends, makes me feel more strongly what a wonderful and
+blessed time we live in, and how Christ is showing forth mighty works
+among us, than this same sudden miraculous improvement in the art of
+healing, which has taken place within the memory of man.&nbsp; Any country
+doctor now knows more, thank God, or ought to know, than the greatest
+London physicians did two generations ago.&nbsp; New cures for deafness,
+blindness, lameness, every disease that flesh is heir to, are being
+discovered year by year.&nbsp; Oh, my friends! you little know what
+Christ is doing among you, for your bodies as well as for your souls.&nbsp;
+There is not a parish in England now in which the poorest as well as
+the richest are not cured yearly of diseases, which, if they had lived
+a hundred years ago, would have killed them without hope or help.&nbsp;
+And then, when one looks at these great and blessed plans for what is
+called sanitary reform, at the sickness and the misery which has been
+done away with already by attending to them, even though they have only
+just begun to be put in practice&mdash;our hearts must be hard indeed
+if we do not feel that Christ is revealing to us the gifts of healing
+far more bountifully and mercifully than even He did to the first apostles.</p>
+<p>But you will say, perhaps, the dead are not raised in these days.&nbsp;
+Oh, my friends! which shows Christ&rsquo;s mercy most, to raise those
+who are already dead, or to save those alive who are about to die?&nbsp;
+Those in this church who have read history know as well as I, how in
+our forefathers&rsquo; time people died in England by thousands of diseases
+which are scarcely ever deadly now; ay, of diseases which have now actually
+vanished out of the land, before the new light of medicine and of civilisation
+which Christ has revealed to us in these days.&nbsp; For one child who
+lived and grew up in old times, two live and grow up now.&nbsp; In London
+alone there are not half as many deaths in proportion to the number
+of people as there were a hundred years ago.&nbsp; And is not that a
+mightier work of Christ&rsquo;s power and love than if He had raised
+a few dead persons to life?</p>
+<p>And now for the last part of our Lord&rsquo;s witness about Himself.&nbsp;
+To the poor the gospel is preached.&nbsp; Oh! my friends, is not <i>that</i>
+coming true in our days as it never came true before?&nbsp; Look back
+only fifty years, and consider the difference between the doctrines
+which were preached to the poor and the doctrines which are preached
+to them now.&nbsp; Look round you and see how everywhere earnest and
+godly ministers have sprung up, of all sects and opinions, as well as
+of the Church of England, not only to preach the gospel in the pulpit,
+but to carry it to the sick bedside of the lonely cottage, to the prison,
+and to those fearful sties, worse than prisons, where in our great cities
+the heathen poor live crowded together.&nbsp; Look at the teaching which
+the poor man can get now, compared to what he used to&mdash;the sermons,
+the Bibles, the tracts, the lending libraries, the schools&mdash;just
+consider the hundreds of thousands of pounds which are subscribed every
+year to educate the children of the poor, and then say whether Christ
+is not working a mighty work among us in these days.&nbsp; I know that
+not half as much is done as ought to be done in that way; not half as
+much as will be done; and what is done will have to be done better than
+it has been done yet; but still, can anyone in this church who is fifty
+years old deny that there is a most enormous and blessed improvement
+which is growing and spreading every year?&nbsp; Can anyone deny that
+the gospel is preached to the poor now in a way that it never was before
+within the memory of man?</p>
+<p>Now, recollect that this is an Advent sermon&mdash;a sermon which
+proclaims to you that Christ is <i>come</i>; yes, He is come&mdash;come
+never to leave mankind again!&nbsp; Christ reigns over the earth, and
+will reign for ever.&nbsp; At certain great and important times in the
+world&rsquo;s history, like this present time, times which He Himself
+calls &ldquo;days of the Lord,&rdquo; He shows forth His power, and
+the mightiness and mercy of His kingdom, more than at others.&nbsp;
+But still He is always with us; we have no need to run up and down to
+look for Christ: to say, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring Him down?&nbsp;
+Who shall descend into the deep to bring Him up?&nbsp; For the kingdom
+of God, as He told us Himself, is among us, and within us.&nbsp; Yes,
+within us.&nbsp; All these wonderful improvements and discoveries, all
+things beneficial to men which are found out year by year, though they
+seem to be of men&rsquo;s invention, are really of Christ&rsquo;s revealing,
+the fruits of the kingdom of God within us, of the Spirit of God, who
+is teaching men, though they too often will not believe it; though they
+disclaim God&rsquo;s Spirit and take all the glory to themselves.&nbsp;
+Truly Christ is among us; and our eyes are held, and we see Him not.&nbsp;
+That is our English sin&mdash;the sin of unbelief, the root of every
+other sin.&nbsp; Christ works among us, and we will not own Him.&nbsp;
+Truly, Jesus Christ may well say of us English at this day, There were
+ten cleansed, but where are the nine?&nbsp; How few are there, who return
+to give glory to God!&nbsp; Oh, consider what I say; the kingdom of
+God is among us now; its blessings are growing richer, fuller among
+us every day.&nbsp; Beware, lest if we refuse to acknowledge that kingdom
+and Christ the King of it, it be taken away from us, and given to some
+other nation, who will bring forth the fruits of it, fellow-help and
+brotherly kindness, purity and sobriety, and all the fruits of the Spirit
+of God.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>IV&mdash;A PREPARATION FOR CHRISTMAS</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT.</p>
+<p>Rejoice in the Lord always.&mdash;PHILIPPIANS iv. 4.</p>
+<p>This is the beginning of the Epistle for to-day, the Sunday before
+Christmas.&nbsp; We will try to find out why it was chosen for to-day,
+and what lesson we may learn from it.</p>
+<p>Now Christmas-time was always a time of rejoicing among many heathen
+nations, and long before the Lord Jesus Christ came.&nbsp; That was
+natural and reasonable enough, if you will consider it.&nbsp; For now
+the shortest day is past.&nbsp; The sun is just beginning to climb higher
+and higher in the sky each day, and bring back with him longer sunshine,
+and shorter darkness, and spring flowers, and summer crops, and a whole
+new year, with new hopes, new work, new lessons, new blessings.&nbsp;
+The old year, with all its labours and all its pleasures, and all its
+sorrows and all its sins, is dying, all but gone.&nbsp; It lies behind
+us, never to return.&nbsp; The tears which we shed, we never can shed
+again.&nbsp; The mistakes we made, we have a chance of mending in the
+year to come.&nbsp; And so the heathens felt, and rejoiced that another
+year was dying, another year going to be born.</p>
+<p>And Christmas was a time of rejoicing too, because the farming work
+was done.&nbsp; The last year&rsquo;s crop was housed; the next year&rsquo;s
+wheat was sown; the cattle were safe in yard and stall; and men had
+time to rest, and draw round the fire in the long winter nights, and
+make merry over the earnings of the past year, and the hopes and plans
+of the year to come.&nbsp; And so over all this northern half of the
+world Christmas was a merry time.</p>
+<p>But the poor heathens did not know the Lord.&nbsp; They did not know
+who to thank for all their Christmas blessings.&nbsp; And so some used
+to thank the earth for the crops, and the sun for coming back again
+to lengthen the days, as if the earth and sun moved of themselves.&nbsp;
+And some used to thank false gods and ancient heroes, who, perhaps,
+never really lived at all.&nbsp; And some, perhaps the greater number,
+thanked nothing and no one, but just enjoyed themselves, and took no
+thought, as too many do now at Christmas-time.&nbsp; So the world went
+on, Christmas after Christmas; and the times of that ignorance, as St.
+Paul says, God winked at.&nbsp; But when the fulness of time was come,
+He sent forth His Son, made of a woman, to be the judge and ruler of
+the world; and commanded all men everywhere to repent, and turn from
+all their vanities to serve the living God, who had made heaven and
+earth, and all things in them.</p>
+<p>He did not wish them to give up their Christmas mirth.&nbsp; No:
+all along He had been trying to teach them by it about His love to them.&nbsp;
+As St. Paul told them once, God had not left Himself without witness,
+in that He gave them rain and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts
+with joy and gladness.</p>
+<p>God did not wish them, or us, to give up Christmas mirth.&nbsp; The
+apostles did not wish it.&nbsp; The great men, true followers of the
+apostles, who shaped our Prayer-book for us, and sealed it with their
+life-blood, did not wish it.&nbsp; They did not wish farmers, labourers,
+servants, masters, to give up one of the old Christmas customs; but
+to remember who made Christmas, and its blessings; in short, to rejoice
+in The Lord.&nbsp; Our forefathers had been thanking the wrong persons
+for Christmas.&nbsp; Henceforward we were to thank the right person,
+The Lord, and rejoice in Him.&nbsp; Our forefathers had been rejoicing
+in the sun, and moon, and earth; in wise and valiant kings who had lived
+ages before; in their own strength, and industry, and cunning.&nbsp;
+Now they were to rejoice in Him who made sun, and moon, and earth; in
+Him who sent wise and valiant kings and leaders; in Him who gives all
+strength, and industry, and cunning; by whose inspiration comes all
+knowledge of agriculture, and manufacture, and all the arts which raise
+men above the beasts that perish.&nbsp; So their Christmas joys were
+to go on, year by year while the world lasted: but they were to go on
+rightly, and not wrongly.&nbsp; Men were to rejoice in The Lord, and
+then His blessing would be on them, and the thanks and praise which
+they offered Him, He would return with interest, in fresh blessings
+for the coming year.</p>
+<p>Therefore, I think, this Epistle was chosen for to-day, the Sunday
+before Christmas, to show us in whom we are to rejoice; and, therefore,
+to show us how we are to rejoice.&nbsp; For we must not take the first
+verse of the Epistle and forget the rest.&nbsp; That would neither be
+wise nor reverent toward St. Paul, who wrote the whole, and meant the
+whole to stand together as one discourse; or to the blessed and holy
+men who chose it for our lesson on this day.&nbsp; Let us go on, then,
+with the Epistle, line by line, throughout.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+As much as to say, you cannot rejoice too much, you cannot overdo your
+happiness, thankfulness, merriment.&nbsp; You do not know half&mdash;no,
+not the thousandth part of God&rsquo;s love and mercy to you, and you
+never will know.&nbsp; So do not be afraid of being too happy, or think
+that you honour God by wearing a sour face, when He is heaping blessings
+on you, and calling on you to smile and sing.&nbsp; But &ldquo;let your
+moderation be known unto all men.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is a right and
+a wrong way of being merry.&nbsp; There is a mirth, which is no mirth;
+whereof it is written, in the midst of that laughter there is a heaviness,
+and the end thereof is death.&nbsp; Drunkenness, gluttony, indecent
+words and jests and actions, these are out of place on Christmas-day,
+and in the merriment to which the pure and holy Lord Jesus calls you
+all.&nbsp; They are rejoicing in the flesh and the devil, and not in
+the Lord at all; and whosoever indulges in them, and fancies them merriment,
+is keeping the devil&rsquo;s Christmas, and not Jesus Christ&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+So let your moderation be known to all men.&nbsp; Be <i>merry and wise</i>.&nbsp;
+The fool lets his mirth master him, and carry him away, till he forgets
+himself, and says and does things of which he is ashamed when he gets
+up next morning, sick and sad at heart.&nbsp; The wise man remembers
+that, let the occasion be as joyful a one as it may, &ldquo;the Lord
+is at hand.&rdquo;&nbsp; Christ&rsquo;s eye is on him, while he is eating,
+and drinking, and laughing.&nbsp; He is not afraid of Christ&rsquo;s
+eye, because, though it is Divine it is a human, loving, smiling eye;
+rejoicing in the happiness of His poor, hard-worked brothers here below.&nbsp;
+But he remembers that it is a holy eye, too; an eye which looks with
+sadness and horror on anything which is wrong; on all drunkenness, quarrelling,
+indecency; and so on in all his merriment, he is still master of himself.&nbsp;
+He remembers that his soul is nobler than his body; that his will must
+be stronger than his appetite; and so he keeps himself in check; he
+keeps his tongue from evil, and his stomach from sottishness, and though
+he may be, and ought to be, the merriest of the whole party, yet he
+takes care to let his moderation, his sobriety, be known and plain to
+everyone, remembering that the Lord is at hand.</p>
+<p>And that man&mdash;I will stand surety for him&mdash;will be the
+one who will rise from his bed next morning, best able to carry out
+the next verse of the Epistle, and &ldquo;be careful for nothing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now that is no easy matter here in England; to rich and poor, Christmas
+is the time for settling accounts and paying debts.&nbsp; And therefore
+in England, where living is dear, and everyone, more or less, struggling
+to pay his way, Christmas is often a very anxious, disturbing time of
+year.&nbsp; Many a family, for all their economy, cannot clear themselves
+at the year&rsquo;s end; and though they are able to forget that now
+and then, thank God, through great part of the year, yet they cannot
+forget it at Christmas.&nbsp; But, as I said, the man who at Christmas-time
+will be most able to be careful for nothing, will be the man whose moderation
+has been known to everyone; for he will, if he has lived the year through
+in the same temper in which he has spent Christmas, have been moderate
+in his expenses; he will have kept himself from empty show, and pretending
+to be richer than he is.&nbsp; He will have kept himself from throwing
+away his money in drink, and kept his daughters from throwing away money
+in dress, which is just what too many, in their foolish, godless, indecent
+hurry to get rid of their own children off their hands do not do.</p>
+<p>And he will be the man who will be in the best humour, and have the
+clearest brain, to kneel down when he gets up to his daily work, and
+&ldquo;in everything, by prayer and supplication, make his requests
+known to God.&rdquo;&nbsp; And then, whether he can make both ends meet
+or not, whether he can begin next year free from debt or not, still
+&ldquo;the peace of God will keep his heart.&rdquo;&nbsp; He may be
+unable to clear himself, but still he will know that he has a loving
+and merciful Father in heaven, who has allowed distress and difficulty
+to come on him only as a lesson and an education.&nbsp; That this distress
+came because God chose, and that when God chooses it will go away&mdash;and
+that till then&mdash;considering that the Lord God sent it&mdash;it
+had better <i>not</i> go away.&nbsp; He will believe that God&rsquo;s
+gracious promises stand true&mdash;that the Lord will never let those
+who trust in Him be confounded and brought to shame&mdash;that He will
+let none of us be tempted beyond what we are able, but will always with
+the temptation make a way for us to escape, that we may be able to bear
+it.&nbsp; And so the peace of God which passes understanding, will keep
+that man&rsquo;s mind.&nbsp; And in whom?&nbsp; &ldquo;In Jesus Christ.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Now what did St. Paul mean by putting in the Lord Jesus Christ&rsquo;s
+name there? what is the meaning of &ldquo;in Jesus Christ&rdquo;?&nbsp;
+This is what it means; it means what Christmas-day means.&nbsp; A man
+may say, &ldquo;Your sermon promises fine things, but I am miserable
+and poor; it promises a holy and noble rejoicing to everyone, but I
+am unholy and mean.&nbsp; It promises peace from God, and I am sure
+I am not at peace: I am always fretting and quarrelling; I quarrel with
+my wife, my children, and my neighbours, and they quarrel with me; and
+worst of all,&rdquo; says the poor man, &ldquo;I quarrel with myself.&nbsp;
+I am full of discontented, angry, sulky, anxious, unhappy thoughts;
+my heart is dark and sad and restless within me&mdash;would God I were
+peaceful, but I am not: look in my face and see!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>True, my friend, but on Christmas-day the Son of God was born into
+the world, a man like you.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; says the poor man, &ldquo;but what has that to
+do with my anxiety and my ill-temper?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It would take the whole year through, my friend, to show you all
+that it has to do with you and your unhappiness.&nbsp; All the Lessons,
+Epistles, and Gospels of the year are set out to show you what it has
+to do with you.&nbsp; But in the meanwhile, before Christmas-day comes,
+consider this one thing: Why are you anxious?&nbsp; Because you do not
+know what is to happen to you?&nbsp; Then Christmas-day is a witness
+to you, that whatsoever happens to you, happens to you by the will and
+rule of Jesus Christ, The perfect man; think of that.&nbsp; <i>The perfect
+man</i>&mdash;who understands men&rsquo;s hearts and wants, and all
+that is good for them, and has all the wisdom and power to give us what
+is good, which we want ourselves.&nbsp; And what makes you unhappy,
+my friends?&nbsp; Is it not at heart just this one thing&mdash;you are
+unhappy because you are not pleased with yourselves?&nbsp; And you are
+not pleased with yourselves because you know you ought not to be pleased
+with yourselves; and you know you ought not to be pleased with yourselves,
+because you know, in the bottom of your hearts, that God is not pleased
+with you?&nbsp; What cure, what comfort for such thoughts can we find?&mdash;This.</p>
+<p>The child who was born in a manger on Christmas-day, and grew up
+in poverty, and had not where to lay his head, went through all shame
+and sorrow to which man is heir.&nbsp; He, Jesus, the poor child of
+Bethlehem, is Lord and King of heaven and earth.&nbsp; He will feel
+for us; He will understand our temptations; He has been poor himself,
+that He might feel for the poor; He has been evil spoken of, that He
+might feel for those whose tempers are sorely tried.&nbsp; He bore the
+sins and felt the miseries of the whole world, that He might feel for
+us when we are wearied with the burden of life, and confounded by the
+remembrance of our own sins.</p>
+<p>Oh, my friends, consider only Who was born into the world on Christmas-day;
+and that thought alone will be enough to fill you with rejoicing and
+hope for yourselves and all the world, and with the peace of God which
+passes understanding, the peace which the angels proclaimed to the shepherds
+on the first Christmas night&mdash;&ldquo;On earth peace, and good will
+toward men&rdquo;&mdash;and if God wills us good, my friend; what matter
+who wishes us evil?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>V&mdash;CHRISTMAS-DAY</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>He made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a
+slave.&mdash;PHILIPPIANS ii. 7.</p>
+<p>On Christmas-day, 1851 years ago, if we had been at Rome, the great
+capital city, and mistress of the whole world, we should have seen a
+strange sight&mdash;strange, and yet pleasant.&nbsp; All the courts
+of law were shut; no war was allowed to be proclaimed, and no criminals
+punished.&nbsp; The sorrow and the strife of that great city had stopped,
+in great part, for three days, and all people were giving themselves
+up to merriment and good cheer&mdash;making up quarrels, and giving
+and receiving presents from house to house.&nbsp; And we should have
+seen, too, a pleasanter sight than that.&nbsp; For those three days
+of Christmas-time were days of safety and merriment for the poor slaves&mdash;tens
+of thousands of whom&mdash;men, women, and children&mdash;the Romans
+had brought out of all the countries in the world&mdash;many of our
+forefathers and mothers among them&mdash;and kept them there in cruel
+bondage and shame, worked and fed, bought and sold, like beasts, and
+not like human beings, not able to call their lives or their bodies
+their own, forced to endure any shame or sin which their tyrants required
+of them, and liable any moment to be beaten, tortured, or crucified
+at the mercy of cruel and foul masters and mistresses.&nbsp; But on
+that Christmas-day, according to an old custom, they were allowed for
+once in the whole year to play at being free, to dress in their masters&rsquo;
+and mistresses&rsquo; clothes, to say what they thought of them boldly,
+without fear of punishment, and to eat and drink at their masters&rsquo;
+tables, while their masters and mistresses waited on them.&nbsp; It
+was an old custom, that, among the heathen Romans, which their forefathers,
+who were wiser and better than they, had handed down to them.&nbsp;
+They had forgotten, perhaps, what it meant: but still we may see what
+it must have meant: That the old forefathers of the Romans had intended
+to remind their children every year by that custom, that their poor
+hard-worked slaves were, after all, men and women as much as their masters;
+that they had hearts and consciences, and sense in them, and a right
+to speak what they thought, as much as their masters; that they, as
+much as their masters, could enjoy the good things of God&rsquo;s earth,
+from which man&rsquo;s tyranny had shut them out; and to remind those
+cruel masters, by making them once every year wait on their own slaves
+at table, that they were, after all, equal in the sight of God, and
+that it was more noble for those who were rich, and called themselves
+gentlemen, to help others, than to make others slave for them.</p>
+<p>I do not mean, of course, that those old heathens understood all
+this clearly.&nbsp; You will see, by the latter part of my sermon, why
+they could not understand it clearly.&nbsp; But there must have been
+some sort of dim, confused suspicion in their minds that it was wrong
+and cruel to treat human beings like brute beasts, which made them set
+up that strange old custom of letting their slaves play at being free
+once every Christmas-tide.</p>
+<p>But if on this same day, 1851 years ago, instead of being in the
+great city of Rome, we had been in the little village of Bethlehem in
+Jud&aelig;a, we might have seen a sight stranger still; a sight which
+we could not have fancied had anything to do with that merrymaking of
+the slaves at Rome, and yet which had everything to do with it.</p>
+<p>We should have seen, in a mean stable, among the oxen and the asses,
+a poor maiden, with her newborn baby laid in the manger, for want of
+any better cradle, and by her her husband, a poor carpenter, whom all
+men thought to be the father of her child. . . .&nbsp; There, in the
+stable, amid the straw, through the cold winter days and nights, in
+want of many a comfort which the poorest woman, and the poorest woman&rsquo;s
+child would need, they stayed there, that young maiden and her newborn
+babe.&nbsp; That young maiden was the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that
+poor baby was the Son of God.&nbsp; The Son of God, in whose likeness
+all men were made at the beginning; the Son of God, who had been ruling
+the whole world all along; who brought the Jews out of slavery, a thousand
+years before, and destroyed their cruel tyrants in the Red Sea; the
+Son of God, who had been all along punishing cruel tyrants and oppressors,
+and helping the poor out of misery, whenever they called on Him.&nbsp;
+The Light which lightens every man who comes into the world, was that
+poor babe.&nbsp; It was He who gives men reason, and conscience, and
+a tender heart, and delight in what is good, and shame and uneasiness
+of mind when they do wrong.&nbsp; It was He who had been stirring up,
+year by year, in those cruel Romans&rsquo; hearts, the feeling that
+there was something wrong in grinding down their slaves, and put into
+their minds the notion of giving them their Christmas rest and freedom.&nbsp;
+He had been keeping up that good old custom for a witness and a warning
+that all men were equal in His sight; that all men had a right to liberty
+of speech and conscience; a right to some fair share in the good things
+of the earth, which God had given to all men freely to enjoy.&nbsp;
+But those old Romans would not take the warning.&nbsp; They kept up
+the custom, but they shut their eyes to the lesson of it.&nbsp; They
+went on conquering and oppressing all the nations of the earth, and
+making them their slaves.&nbsp; And now He was come&mdash;He Himself,
+the true Lord of the earth, the true pattern of men.&nbsp; He was come
+to show men to whom this world belonged: He was come to show men in
+what true power, true nobleness consisted&mdash;not in making others
+minister to us, but in ministering to them: He was come to set a pattern
+of what a man should be; He was the Son of Man&mdash;THE MAN of all
+men&mdash;and therefore He had come with good news to all poor slaves,
+and neglected, hard-worked creatures: He had come to tell them that
+He cared for them; that He could and would deliver them; that they were
+God&rsquo;s children, and His brothers, just as much as their Roman
+masters; and that He was going to bring a terrible time upon the earth&mdash;&ldquo;days
+of the Son of Man,&rdquo; when He would judge all men, and show who
+were true men and who were not&mdash;such a time as had never been before,
+or would be again; when that great Roman empire, in spite of all its
+armies, and its cunning, and its riches, plundered from every nation
+under heaven, would crumble away and perish shamefully and miserably
+off the face of the earth, before tribes of poor, untaught, savage men,
+the brothers and countrymen of those very slaves whom the Romans fancied
+were so much below them, that they had a right to treat them like the
+beasts which perish.</p>
+<p>That was the message which that little child lying in the manger
+there at Bethlehem, had been sent out from God to preach.&nbsp; Do you
+not see now what it had to do with that strange merrymaking of the poor
+slaves in Rome, which I showed you at the beginning of my sermon?</p>
+<p>If you do not, I must remind you of the song, which, St. Luke says,
+the shepherds in Jud&aelig;a heard the angels sing, on this night 1851
+years ago.&nbsp; That song tells us the meaning of that babe&rsquo;s
+coming.&nbsp; That song tells us what that babe&rsquo;s coming had to
+do with the poor slaves of Rome, and with all poor creatures who have
+suffered and sorrowed on this earth, before or since.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Glory to God in the highest,&rdquo; they sang, &ldquo;and
+on earth peace, good will to men.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Glory to God in the highest.&nbsp; That little babe, lying in the
+manger among the cattle, was showing what was the very highest glory
+of the great God who had made heaven and earth.&nbsp; Not to show His
+power and His majesty, but to show His condescension and His love.&nbsp;
+To stoop, to condescend, to have mercy, to forgive, that is the highest
+glory of God.&nbsp; That is the noblest, the most Godlike thing for
+God or man.&nbsp; And God showed that when He sent down His only-begotten
+Son&mdash;not to strike the world to atoms with a touch, not to hurl
+sinners into everlasting flame, but to be born of a village maiden,
+to take on Himself all the shame and weakness and sorrow, to which man
+is heir, even to death itself; to make Himself of no reputation, and
+take on Himself the form of a slave, and forgive sinners, and heal the
+sick, and comfort the outcast and despised, that He might show what
+God was like&mdash;show forth to men, as a poor maiden&rsquo;s son,
+the brightness of God&rsquo;s glory, and the express likeness of His
+person.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And on earth peace&rdquo; they sang.&nbsp; Men had been quarrelling
+and fighting then, and men are quarrelling and fighting now.&nbsp; That
+little babe in the manger was come to show them how and why they were
+all to be at peace with each other.&nbsp; For what causes all the war
+and quarrelling in the world, but selfishness?&nbsp; Selfishness breeds
+pride, passion, spite, revenge, covetousness, oppression.&nbsp; The
+strong care for themselves, and try to help themselves at the expense
+of the weak, by force and tyranny; the weak care for themselves in their
+turn, and try to help themselves at the expense of the strong, by cunning
+and cheating.&nbsp; No one will condescend, give way, sacrifice his
+own interest for his neighbour&rsquo;s, and hence come wars between
+nations, quarrels in families, spite and grudges between neighbours.&nbsp;
+But in the example of that little child of Bethlehem, Jesus Christ the
+Lord, God was saying to men, &ldquo;Acquaint yourselves with Me, and
+be at peace.&rdquo;&nbsp; God is not selfish; it is our selfishness
+which has made us unlike God.&nbsp; God so loved the sinful world, that
+He gave His only-begotten Son for it.&nbsp; Is that an action like ours?&nbsp;
+The Son of God so obeyed His Father, and so loved this world, that He
+made Himself of no reputation, and took on Him the likeness of a slave,
+and became obedient to death, even to the most fearful and shameful
+of all deaths, the death of the cross; not for Himself, but for those
+who did not know Him, hated Him, killed Him.&nbsp; In short, He sacrificed
+Himself for us.&nbsp; That is God&rsquo;s likeness.&nbsp; Self-sacrifice.&nbsp;
+Jesus Christ, the babe of Bethlehem, proved Himself the Son of God,
+and the express likeness of the Father, by sacrificing Himself for us.&nbsp;
+Sacrifice yourselves then for each other!&nbsp; Give up your own pride,
+your own selfishness, your own interest for each other, and you will
+be all at peace at once.</p>
+<p>But the angels sang, &ldquo;Good will toward men.&rdquo;&nbsp; Without
+that their song would not have been complete.&nbsp; For we are all ready
+to say, at such words as I have been speaking, &ldquo;Ah! pleasant enough,
+and pretty enough, if they were but possible; but they are not possible.&nbsp;
+It is in the nature of man to be selfish.&nbsp; Men have gone on warring,
+grudging, struggling, competing, oppressing, cheating from the beginning,
+and they will do so to the end.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Yes, it is not in the <i>nature</i> of man to do otherwise.&nbsp;
+In as far as man yields to his nature, and is like the selfish brute
+beasts, it is not possible for him to do anything but go on quarrelling,
+and competing, and cheating to the last.&nbsp; But what man&rsquo;s
+nature cannot do, God&rsquo;s grace can.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s good will
+is toward you.&nbsp; He loves you, He wills&mdash;and if He wills, what
+is too hard for Him?&mdash;He wills to raise you out of this selfish,
+quarrelsome life of sin, into a loving, brotherly, peaceful life of
+righteousness.&nbsp; His spirit, the spirit of love by which He made
+and guides all heaven and earth, the spirit of love in which He gave
+His only Son for you, the spirit of love in which His Son Jesus Christ
+sacrificed Himself for you, and took on Himself a meaner state than
+any of you can ever have&mdash;the likeness of a slave&mdash;that spirit
+is promised to you, and ready for you.&nbsp; That little baby in the
+manger at Bethlehem&mdash;God sacrificing Himself for you in the spirit
+of love&mdash;is a sign that that spirit of love is the spirit of God,
+and therefore the only right spirit for you and me, who are men and
+women made in the image of God.&nbsp; That babe in the manger at Bethlehem
+is a sign to you and me, that God will freely give us that spirit of
+love if we ask for it.&nbsp; For He would not have set us that example,
+if He had not meant us to follow it, and He would not ask us to follow
+it, if He did not intend to give us the means of following it.&nbsp;
+Therefore, my friends, it is written, Ask and ye shall receive.&nbsp;
+If your heavenly Father spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him
+for you, will He not with Him likewise freely give you all things?&nbsp;
+Oh! ask and you shall receive.&nbsp; However poor, ignorant, sinful
+you may be, God&rsquo;s promises are ready for you, signed and sealed
+by the bread and wine on that table, the memorial of Jesus, the babe
+of Bethlehem.&nbsp; Ask, and you shall receive!&nbsp; Comfort from sorrow,
+peaceful assurance of God&rsquo;s good will toward you, deliverance
+from your sins, and a share in the likeness of Him who on this day made
+Himself of no reputation, and took on Him the form of a slave.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>VI&mdash;TRUE ABSTINENCE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT.</p>
+<p>I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection.&mdash;1 COR.
+ix. 27.</p>
+<p>In the Collect for this day we have just been praying to God, to
+give us grace to use such abstinence, that our flesh being subdued to
+our spirit, we may follow His godly motions.</p>
+<p>Now we ought to have meant something when we said these words.&nbsp;
+What did we mean by them?&nbsp; Perhaps some of us did not understand
+them.&nbsp; They could not be expected to mean anything by them.&nbsp;
+But it is a sad thing, a very sad thing, that people will come to church
+Sunday after Sunday, and repeat by rote words which they do not understand,
+words by which they therefore mean nothing, and yet never care or try
+to understand them.</p>
+<p>What are the words there for, except to be understood?&nbsp; All
+of you call people foolish, who submit to have prayers read in their
+churches in a foreign language, which none, at least of the poor, can
+understand.&nbsp; But what right have you to call them foolish, if you,
+whose Prayer-books are written in English, take no trouble to find out
+the meaning of them?&nbsp; Would to Heaven that you would try to find
+out the meaning of the Prayer-book!&nbsp; Would to Heaven that the day
+would come, when anyone in this parish who was puzzled by any doctrine
+of religion, or by any text in the Bible, or word in the Prayer-book,
+would come confidently to me, and ask me to explain it to him!&nbsp;
+God knows, I should think it an honour and a pleasure, as well as a
+duty.&nbsp; I should think no time better spent than in answering your
+questions.&nbsp; I do beseech you to ask me, every one of you, when
+and where you like, any questions about religion which come into your
+minds.&nbsp; Why am I put in this parish, except to teach you? and how
+can I teach you better, than by answering your questions?&nbsp; As it
+is, I am disheartened, and all but hopeless, at times, about the state
+of this parish, and the work I am trying to do here; because, though
+you will come and hear me, thank God, willingly enough, you do not seem
+yet to have gained confidence enough in me, or to have learnt to care
+sufficiently about the best things, to ask questions of me about them.&nbsp;
+My dear friends, if you wanted to get information about anything you
+really cared for, you would ask questions enough.&nbsp; If you wanted
+to know some way to a place on earth you would ask it; why not ask your
+way to things better than this earth can give?&nbsp; But whether or
+not you will question me I must go on preaching to you, though whether
+or not you care to listen is more, alas! than I can tell.</p>
+<p>But listen to me, now, I beseech you, while I try to explain to you
+the meaning of the words which you have been just using in this Collect.&nbsp;
+You have asked God to give you grace to use abstinence.&nbsp; Now what
+is the meaning of abstinence?&nbsp; Abstinence means abstaining, refraining,
+keeping back of your own will from doing something which you might do.&nbsp;
+Take an example.&nbsp; When a man for his health&rsquo;s sake, or his
+purse&rsquo;s sake, or any other good reason, drinks less liquor than
+he might if he chose, he abstains from liquor.&nbsp; He uses abstinence
+about liquor.&nbsp; There are other things in which a man may abstain.&nbsp;
+Indeed, he may abstain from doing anything he likes.&nbsp; He may abstain
+from eating too much; from lying in bed too long; from reading too much;
+from taking too much pleasure; from making money; from spending money;
+from right things; from wrong things; from things which are neither
+right nor wrong; on all these he may use abstinence.&nbsp; He may abstain
+for many reasons; for good ones, or for bad ones.&nbsp; A miser will
+abstain from all sorts of comforts to hoard up money.&nbsp; A superstitious
+man may abstain from comforts, because he thinks God grudges them to
+him, or because he thinks God is pleased by the unhappiness of His creatures,
+or because he has been taught, poor wretch, that if he makes himself
+uncomfortable in this life, he shall have more comfort, more honour,
+more reason for pride and self-glorification, in the life to come.&nbsp;
+Or a man may abstain from one pleasure, just to be able to enjoy another
+all the more; as some great gamblers drink nothing but water, in order
+to keep their heads clear for cheating.&nbsp; All these are poor reasons;
+some of them base, some of them wicked reasons for abstaining from anything.&nbsp;
+Therefore, abstinence is not a good thing in itself; for if a thing
+is good in itself, it can never be wrong.&nbsp; Love is good in itself,
+and, therefore, you cannot love anyone for a bad reason.&nbsp; Justice
+is good in itself, pity is good in itself, and, therefore, you can never
+be wrong in being just or pitiful.</p>
+<p>But abstinence is not a good thing in itself.&nbsp; If it were, we
+should all be bound to abstain always from everything pleasant, and
+make ourselves as miserable and uncomfortable as possible, as some superstitious
+persons used to do in old times.&nbsp; Abstinence is only good when
+it is used for a good reason.&nbsp; If a man abstains from pleasure
+himself, to save up for his children; if he abstains from over eating
+and over drinking, to keep his mind clear and quiet; if he abstains
+from sleep and ease, in order to have time to see his business properly
+done; if he abstains from spending money on himself, in order to spend
+it for others; if he abstains from any habit, however harmless or pleasant,
+because he finds it lead him towards what is wrong, and put him into
+temptation; then he does right; then he is doing God&rsquo;s work; then
+he may expect God&rsquo;s blessing; then he is trying to do what we
+all prayed God to help us to do, when we said, &ldquo;Give us grace
+to use such abstinence;&rdquo; then he is doing, more or less, what
+St. Paul says he did, &ldquo;Keeping his body under, and bringing it
+into subjection.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For, see, the Collect does not say, &ldquo;Give us grace to use abstinence,&rdquo;
+as if abstinence were a good thing in itself, but &ldquo;to use such
+abstinence, that&rdquo;&mdash;to use a certain kind of abstinence, and
+that for a certain purpose, and that purpose a good one; such abstinence
+that our flesh may be subdued to our spirit; that our flesh, the animal,
+bodily nature which is in us, loving ease and pleasure, may not be our
+master, but our servant; so that we may not follow blindly our own appetites,
+and do just what we like, as brute beasts which have no understanding.&nbsp;
+And our flesh is to be subdued to our spirit for a certain purpose;
+not because our flesh is bad, and our spirit good; not in order that
+we may puff ourselves up and admire ourselves, and say, as the philosophers
+among the heathen used, &ldquo;What a strong-minded, sober, self-restraining
+man I am!&nbsp; How fine it is to be able to look down on my neighbours,
+who cannot help being fond of enjoying themselves, and cannot help caring
+for this world&rsquo;s good things.&nbsp; I am above all that.&nbsp;
+I want nothing, and I feel nothing, and nothing can make me glad or
+sorry.&nbsp; I am master of my own mind, and own no law but my own will.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The Collect gives us the true and only reason, for which it is right
+to subdue our appetites; which is, that we may keep our minds clear
+and strong enough to listen to the voice of God within our hearts and
+reasons; to obey the motions of God&rsquo;s Spirit in us; not to make
+our bodies our masters, but to live as God&rsquo;s servants.</p>
+<p>This is St. Paul&rsquo;s meaning, when he speaks of keeping under
+his body, and bringing it into subjection.&nbsp; The exact word which
+he uses, however, is a much stronger one than merely &ldquo;keeping
+under;&rdquo; it means simply, to beat a man&rsquo;s face black and
+blue; and his reason for using such a strong word about the matter is,
+to show us that he thought no labour too hard, no training too sharp,
+which teaches us how to restrain ourselves, and keep our appetites and
+passions in manful and godly control.</p>
+<p>Now, a few verses before my text, St. Paul takes an example from
+foot-racers.&nbsp; &ldquo;These foot-racers,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;heathens
+though they are, and only trying to win a worthless prize, the petty
+honour of a crown of leaves, see what trouble they take; how they exercise
+their limbs; how careful and temperate they are in eating and drinking,
+how much pain and fatigue they go through to get themselves into perfect
+training for a race.&nbsp; How much more trouble ought we to take to
+make ourselves fit to do God&rsquo;s work?&nbsp; For these foot-racers
+do all this only to gain a garland which will wither in a week; but
+we, to gain a garland which will never fade away; a garland of holiness,
+and righteousness, and purity, and the likeness of Jesus Christ.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The next example of abstinence which St. Paul takes, is from the
+prize-fighters, who were very numerous and very famous, in the country
+in which the Corinthians lived.&nbsp; &ldquo;I fight,&rdquo; he says,
+&ldquo;not like one who beats the air;&rdquo; that is, not like a man
+who is only brandishing his hands and sparring in jest, but like a man
+who knows that he has a fight to fight in hard earnest; a terrible lifelong
+fight against sin, the world, and the devil; &ldquo;and, therefore,&rdquo;
+he says, &ldquo;I do as these fighters do.&rdquo;&nbsp; They, poor savage
+and brutal heathens as they are, go through a long and painful training.&nbsp;
+Their very practice is not play; it is grim earnest.&nbsp; They stand
+up to strike, and be struck, and are bruised and disfigured as a matter
+of course, in order that they may learn not to flinch from pain, or
+lose their tempers, or turn cowards, when they have to fight.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And so do I,&rdquo; says St. Paul; &ldquo;they, poor men, submit
+to painful and disagreeable things to make them brave in their paltry
+battles.&nbsp; I submit to painful and disagreeable things, to make
+me brave in the great battle which I have to fight against sin, and
+ignorance, and heathendom.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Therefore,&rdquo; he
+says, in another place, &ldquo;I take pleasure in afflictions, in persecutions,
+in necessities, in distresses;&rdquo; and that not because those things
+were pleasant, they were just as unpleasant to him as to anyone else;
+but because they taught him to bear, taught him to be brave; taught
+him, in short, to become a perfect man of God.</p>
+<p>This is St. Paul&rsquo;s account of his own training: in the Epistle
+for to-day we have another account of it; a description of the life
+which he led, and which he was content to lead&mdash;&ldquo;in much
+suffering, in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labours, in
+watching, in fastings&rdquo;&mdash;and an account, too, of the temper
+which he had learnt to show amid such a life of vexation, and suffering,
+and shame, and danger&mdash;&ldquo;approving himself in all things the
+minister of God, by pureness, by wisdom, by longsuffering, by kindness,
+by the spirit of holiness, by love unfeigned;&rdquo; &ldquo;as dying,
+and behold we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet
+always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing,
+yet possessing all things.&rdquo;&mdash;In all things proving himself
+a true messenger from God, by being able to dare and to endure for God&rsquo;s
+sake, what no man ever would have dared and endured for his own sake.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But&rdquo;&mdash;someone may say&mdash;&ldquo;St. Paul was
+an apostle; he had a great work to do in the world; he had to turn the
+heathen to God; and it is likely enough that he required to train himself,
+and keep strict watch over all his habits, and ways of thinking and
+behaving, lest he should grow selfish, lazy, cowardly, covetous, fond
+of ease and amusement.&nbsp; He had, of course, to lead a life of strange
+suffering and danger; and he had therefore to train himself for it.&nbsp;
+But what need have we to do as St. Paul did?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Just as much need, my good friends, if you could see it.</p>
+<p>Which of us has not to lead a life of suffering?&nbsp; We shall each
+and all of us, have our full share of trouble before we die, doubt it
+not.</p>
+<p>And which of us has not to lead a life of danger?&nbsp; I do not
+mean bodily danger; of that, there is little enough&mdash;perhaps too
+little&mdash;in England now; but of danger to our hearts, minds, characters?&nbsp;
+Oh, my friends, I pity those who do not think themselves in danger every
+day of their lives, for the less danger they see around them, the more
+danger there is.&nbsp; There is not only the common danger of temptation,
+but over and above it, the worse danger of not knowing temptation when
+it comes.&nbsp; Who will be most likely to walk into pits and mires
+upon the moor&mdash;the man who knows that they are there around him,
+or the man who goes on careless and light of heart, fancying that it
+is all smooth ground?&nbsp; Woe to you, young people, if you fancy that
+you are to have no woe!&nbsp; Danger to you, young people, if you fancy
+yourselves in no danger!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is sad and dreary news&rdquo;&mdash;some of you may say.&nbsp;
+Ay, my friends, it would be sad and dreary news indeed; and this earth
+would be a very sad and dreary place; and life with all its troubles
+and temptations, would not be worth having, if it were not for the blessed
+news which the Gospel for this day brings us.&nbsp; That makes up for
+all the sadness of the Epistle; that gives us hope; that tells us of
+one who has been through life, and through death too, yet without sin.&nbsp;
+That tells us of one who has endured a thousand times more temptation
+than we ever shall, a thousand times more trouble than we ever shall,
+and yet has conquered it all; and that He who has thus been through
+all our temptations, borne all our weaknesses, is our King, our Saviour,
+who loves us, who teaches us, who has promised us His Holy Spirit, to
+make us like Himself, strong, brave, and patient, to endure all that
+man or devil, or our own low animal tempers and lusts, can do to hurt
+us.&nbsp; The Gospel for this day tells us how He went and was alone
+in the wilderness with the wild beasts, and yet trusted in God, His
+Father and ours, to keep Him safe.&nbsp; How He went without food forty
+days and nights, and yet in His extreme hunger, refused to do the least
+self-willed or selfish thing to get Himself food.&nbsp; Is that no lesson,
+no message of hope for the poor man who is tempted by hunger to steal,
+or tempted by need to do a mean and selfish thing, to hear that the
+Lord Jesus Christ, who bore need and hunger far worse than his, understands
+all his temptations, and feels for him, and pities him, and has promised
+him God&rsquo;s Spirit to make him strong, as He himself was?</p>
+<p>Is it no comfort to young people who are tempted to vanity, and display,
+and self-willed conceited longings, tempted to despise the advice of
+their parents and elders, and set up for themselves, and choose their
+own way&mdash;Is it no good news, I say, for them to hear that their
+Lord and Saviour was tempted to it also, and conquered it?&mdash;That
+He will teach them to answer the temptation as He did, when He refused
+even to let angels hold Him over the temple, up between earth and heaven,
+for a sign and a wonder to all the Jews, because God His Father had
+not bidden Him to do it, and therefore He would not tempt the Lord His
+God?</p>
+<p>Is it no good news, again, to those who are tempted to do perhaps
+one little outward wrong thing, to yield on some small point to the
+ways of the world, in order to help themselves on in life, to hear that
+their Lord and Saviour conquered that temptation too?&mdash;That he
+refused all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, when the
+devil offered them, because he knew that the devil could not give them
+to Him; that all wealth, and power, and glory belonged to God, and was
+to be got only by serving Him?</p>
+<p>Oh do you all, young people especially, think of this.&nbsp; As you
+grow up and go out into life, you will be tempted in a hundred different
+ways, by things which are pleasant&mdash;everyone knows that they are
+pleasant enough&mdash;but wrong.&nbsp; One will be tempted to be vain
+of dress; another to be self-conceited; another to be lazy and idle;
+another to be extravagant and roving; another to be over fond of amusement;
+another to be over fond of money; another to be over fond of liquor;
+another to go wrong, as too many young men and young women do, and bring
+themselves, and those with whom they keep company, and whom they ought,
+if they really love them, to respect and honour, down into sin and shame.&nbsp;
+You will all be tempted, and you will all be troubled; one by poverty,
+one by sickness, one by the burden of a family, one by being laughed
+at for trying to do right.&nbsp; But remember, oh remember, whenever
+a temptation comes upon you, that the blessed Jesus has been through
+it all, and conquered all, and that His will is, that you shall be holy
+and pure like Him, and that, therefore, if you but ask Him, He will
+give you strength to keep pure.&nbsp; When you are tempted, pray to
+Him: the struggle in your own minds will, no doubt, be very great; it
+will be very hard work for you&mdash;sin looks so pleasant on the outside!&nbsp;
+Poor souls, it is a sad struggle for you!&nbsp; Many a poor young fellow,
+who goes wrong, deserves rather to be pitied than to be punished.&nbsp;
+Well then, if no man else will pity him, Jesus, the Man of all men,
+will.&nbsp; Pray to Him!&nbsp; Cry aloud to Him!&nbsp; Ask Him to make
+you stout-hearted, patient, really manful, to fight against temptation.&nbsp;
+Ask Him to give you strength of mind to fight against all bad habits.&nbsp;
+Ask Him to open your eyes to see when you are in danger.&nbsp; Ask Him
+to help you to keep out of the way of temptation.&nbsp; Ask Him, in
+short, to give you grace to use such abstinence that your flesh may
+be subdued to your spirit.&nbsp; And then you will not follow, as the
+beasts do, just what seems pleasant to your flesh; no, you will be able
+to obey Christ&rsquo;s godly motions, that is, to do, as well as to
+love, the good desires which He puts into your hearts.&nbsp; You will
+do not merely what is pleasant, but what is right; you will not be your
+own slaves, you will be your own masters, and God&rsquo;s loyal and
+obedient sons; you will not be, as too many are, mere animals going
+about in the shape of men, but truly men at heart, who are not afraid
+of pain, poverty, shame, trouble, or death itself, when they are in
+the right path, about the work to which God has called them.</p>
+<p>But if you ask Christ to make true men and women of you, you must
+believe that He will give you what you ask; if you ask Him to help you,
+you must believe that He will and does help you&mdash;you must believe
+that it is He Himself who has put into your hearts the very desire of
+being holy and strong at all; and therefore you must believe that you
+can help yourselves.&nbsp; Help yourselves, and He will help you.&nbsp;
+If you ask for His help, He will give it.&nbsp; But what is the use
+of His giving it, if you do not use it?&nbsp; To him who has shall be
+given, and he shall have more; but from him who has not shall be taken
+away even what he seems to have.&nbsp; Therefore do not merely pray,
+but struggle and try <i>yourselves</i>.&nbsp; Train yourselves as St.
+Paul did; train yourselves to keep your temper; train yourselves to
+bear unpleasant things for the sake of your duty; train yourselves to
+keep out of temptation; train yourselves to be forgiving, gentle, thrifty,
+industrious, sober, temperate, cleanly, as modest as little children
+in your words, and thoughts, and conduct.&nbsp; And God, when He sees
+you trying to be all this, will help you to be so.&nbsp; It may be hard
+to educate yourselves.&nbsp; Life is a hard business at best&mdash;you
+will find it a thousand times harder, though, if you are slaves to your
+own fleshly sins.&nbsp; But the more you struggle against sin, the less
+hard you will find it to fight; the more you resist the devil, the more
+he will flee from you; the more you try to conquer your own bad passions,
+the more God will help you to conquer them; it may be a hard battle,
+but it is a sure one.&nbsp; No fear but that everyone can, if he will,
+work out his own salvation, for it is God Himself who works in us to
+will and to do of His good pleasure.&nbsp; All you have to do is to
+give yourselves up to Him, to study His laws, to labour as well as long
+to keep them, and He will enable you to keep them; He will teach you
+in a thousand unexpected ways; He will daily renew and strengthen your
+hearts by the working of His Spirit, that you may more and more know,
+and love, and do, what is right; and you will go on from strength to
+strength, to the height of perfect men, to the likeness of Jesus Christ
+the Lord, who conquered all human temptations for your sake, that He
+might be a high-priest who can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities,
+because He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>VII&mdash;GOOD FRIDAY</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence
+saved them.&nbsp; In His love and in His pity He redeemed them; and
+He bare them and carried them all the days of old.&mdash;ISAIAH lxiii.
+9.</p>
+<p>On this very day, at this very hour, 1817 years ago, hung one nailed
+to a cross; bruised and bleeding, pierced and naked, dying a felon&rsquo;s
+death between two thieves; in perfect misery, in utter shame, mocked
+and insulted by all the great, the rich, the learned of His nation;
+one who had grown up as a man of low birth, believed by all to be a
+carpenter&rsquo;s son; without scholarship, money, respectability; even
+without a home wherein to lay His head&mdash;and here was the end of
+His life!&nbsp; True, He had preached noble words, He had done noble
+deeds: but what had they helped Him?&nbsp; They had not made the rich,
+the learned, the respectable, the religious believe on Him; they had
+not saved Him from persecution, and insult, and death.&nbsp; The only
+mourners who stood by to weep over His dying agonies were His mother,
+a poor countrywoman; a young fisherman; and one who had been a harlot
+and a sinner.&nbsp; There was an end!</p>
+<p>Do you know who that Man was?&nbsp; He was your King; the King of
+rich and poor; and He was your King, not in spite of His suffering all
+that shame and misery, but just because He suffered it; because He chose
+to be poor, and miserable, and despised; because He endured the cross,
+despising the shame; because He took upon Himself to fulfil His Father&rsquo;s
+will, all ills which flesh is heir to&mdash;therefore He is now your
+King, the Saviour of the world, the poor man&rsquo;s friend, the Lord
+of heaven and earth.&nbsp; Is He such a King as <i>you</i> wish for?</p>
+<p>Is He the sort of King you want, my friends?&nbsp; Does He fulfil
+your notions of what the poor man&rsquo;s friend should be?&nbsp; Do
+you, in your hearts, wish He had been somewhat richer, more glorious,
+more successful in the world&rsquo;s eyes&mdash;a wealthy and prosperous
+man, like Solomon of old?&nbsp; Are any of you ready to say, as the
+money-blinded Jews said, when they demanded their true King to be crucified,
+&ldquo;We have no king but C&aelig;sar?&mdash;Provided the law-makers
+and the authorities take care of our interests, and protect our property,
+and do not make us pay too many rates and taxes, that is enough for
+us.&rdquo;&nbsp; Will you have no king but C&aelig;sar?&nbsp; Alas!
+those who say that, find that the law is but a weak deliverer, too weak
+to protect them from selfishness, and covetousness, and decent cruelty;
+and so C&aelig;sar and the law have to give place to Mammon, the god
+of money.&nbsp; Do we not see it in these very days?&nbsp; And Mammon
+is weak, too.&nbsp; This world is not a shop, men are not merely money-makers
+and wages-earners.&nbsp; There are more things in heaven and earth than
+are dreamt of in that sort of philosophy.&nbsp; Self-interest and covetousness
+cannot keep society orderly and peaceful, let sham philosophers say
+what they will.&nbsp; And then comes tyranny, lawlessness, rich and
+poor staining their hands in each other&rsquo;s blood, as we saw happen
+in France two years ago; and so, after all, Mammon has to give place
+to Moloch, the fiend of murder and cruelty; and woe to rich and poor
+when he reigns over them!&nbsp; Ay, woe&mdash;woe to rich and poor when
+they choose anyone for their king but their real and rightful Lord and
+Master, Jesus, the poor man, afflicted in all their afflictions, the
+Man of sorrows, crucified on this day.</p>
+<p>Is He the kind of King you like?&nbsp; Make up your minds, my friends&mdash;make
+up your minds!&nbsp; For whether you like Him or not, your King He was,
+your King He is, your King He will be, blessed be God, for ever.&nbsp;
+Blessed be God, indeed!&nbsp; If He were not our King; if anyone in
+heaven or earth was Lord of us, except the Man of sorrows, the Prince
+of sufferers, what hope, what comfort would there be?&nbsp; What a horrible,
+black, fathomless riddle this sad, diseased, moaning world would be!&nbsp;
+No king would suit us but the Prince of sufferers&mdash;Jesus, who has
+borne all this world&rsquo;s griefs, and carried all its sorrows&mdash;Jesus,
+who has Himself smarted under pain and hunger, oppression and insult,
+treachery and desertion, who knows them all, feels for them all, and
+will right them all, in His own good time.</p>
+<p>Believing in Jesus, we can travel on, through one wild parish after
+another, upon English soil, and see, as I have done, the labourer who
+tills the land worse housed than the horse he drives, worse clothed
+than the sheep he shears, worse nourished than the hog he feeds&mdash;and
+yet not despair: for the Prince of sufferers is the labourer&rsquo;s
+Saviour; He has tasted hunger, and thirst, and weariness, poverty, oppression,
+and neglect; the very tramp who wanders houseless on the moorside is
+His brother; in his sufferings the Saviour of the world has shared,
+when the foxes had holes, and the birds of the air had nests, while
+the Son of God had not where to lay His head.&nbsp; He is the King of
+the poor, firstborn among many brethren; His tenderness is Almighty,
+and for the poor He has prepared deliverance, perhaps in this world,
+surely in the world to come&mdash;boundless deliverance, out of the
+treasures of His boundless love.</p>
+<p>Believing in Jesus, we can pass by mines, and factories, and by dungeons
+darker and fouler still, in the lanes and alleys of our great towns
+and cities, where thousands and tens of thousands of starving men, and
+wan women, and children grown old before their youth, sit toiling and
+pining in Mammon&rsquo;s prison-house, in worse than Egyptian bondage,
+to earn such pay as just keeps the broken heart within the worn-out
+body;&mdash;ay, we can go through our great cities, even now, and see
+the women, whom God intended to be Christian wives and mothers, the
+slaves of the rich man&rsquo;s greed by day, the playthings of his lust
+by night&mdash;and yet not despair; for we can cry, No! thou proud Mammon,
+money-making fiend!&nbsp; These are not thine, but Christ&rsquo;s; they
+belong to Him who died on the cross; and though thou heedest not their
+sighs, He marks them all, for He has sighed like them; though there
+be no pity in thee, there is in Him the pity of a man, ay, and the indignation
+of a God!&nbsp; He treasures up their tears; He understands their sorrows;
+His judgment of their guilt is not like thine, thou Pharisee!&nbsp;
+He is their Lord, who said, that to those to whom little was given,
+of them shall little be required.&nbsp; Generation after generation,
+they are being made perfect by sufferings, as their Saviour was before
+them; and then, woe to thee!&nbsp; For even as He led Israel out of
+Egypt with a mighty hand, and a stretched-out arm, and signs and wonders,
+great and terrible, so shall He lead the poor out of their misery, and
+make them households like a flock of sheep; even as He led Israel through
+the wilderness, tender, forbearing, knowing whereof they were made,
+having mercy on all their brutalities, and idolatries, murmurings, and
+backslidings, afflicted in all their afflictions&mdash;even while He
+was punishing them outwardly, as He is punishing the poor man now&mdash;even
+so shall He lead this people out in His good time, into a good land
+and large, a land of wheat and wine, of milk and honey; a rest which
+He has prepared for His poor, such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,
+nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.&nbsp; He can
+do it; for the Almighty Deliverer is His name.&nbsp; He will do it;
+for His name is Love.&nbsp; He knows how to do it; for He has borne
+the griefs, and carried the sorrows of the poor.</p>
+<p>Oh, sad hearts and suffering!&nbsp; Anxious and weary ones!&nbsp;
+Look to the cross this day!&nbsp; There hung your king!&nbsp; The King
+of sorrowing souls, and more, the King of sorrows.&nbsp; Ay, pain and
+grief, tyranny and desertion, death and hell, He has faced them one
+and all, and tried their strength, and taught them His, and conquered
+them right royally!&nbsp; And, since He hung upon that torturing cross,
+sorrow is divine, god-like, as joy itself.&nbsp; All that man&rsquo;s
+fallen nature dreads and despises, God honoured on the cross, and took
+unto Himself, and blessed, and consecrated for ever.&nbsp; And now,
+blessed are the poor, if they are poor in heart, as well as purse; for
+Jesus was poor, and theirs is the kingdom of heaven.&nbsp; Blessed are
+the hungry, if they hunger for righteousness as well as food; for Jesus
+hungered, and they shall be filled.&nbsp; Blessed are those who mourn,
+if they mourn not only for their afflictions, but for their sins, and
+for the sins they see around them; for on this day, Jesus mourned for
+our sins; on this day He was made sin for us, who knew no sin; and they
+shall be comforted.&nbsp; Blessed are those who are ashamed of themselves,
+and hate themselves, and humble themselves before God this day; for
+on this day Jesus humbled Himself for us; and they shall be exalted.&nbsp;
+Blessed are the forsaken and the despised.&mdash;Did not all men forsake
+Jesus this day, in His hour of need? and why not thee, too, thou poor
+deserted one?&nbsp; Shall the disciple be above his Master?&nbsp; No;
+everyone that is perfect, must be like his master.&nbsp; The deeper,
+the bitterer your loneliness, the more are you like Him, who cried upon
+the cross, &ldquo;My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He knows what that grief, too, is like.&nbsp; He feels for thee, at
+least.&nbsp; Though all forsake thee, He is with thee still; and if
+He be with thee, what matter who has left thee for a while?&nbsp; Ay,
+blessed are those that weep now, for they shall laugh.&nbsp; It is those
+whom the Lord loveth that He chasteneth.&nbsp; And because He loves
+the poor, He brings them low.&nbsp; All things are blessed now, but
+sin; for all things, excepting sin, are redeemed by the life and death
+of the Son of God.&nbsp; Blessed are wisdom and courage, joy, and health,
+and beauty, love and marriage, childhood and manhood, corn and wine,
+fruits and flowers, for Christ redeemed them by His life.&nbsp; And
+blessed, too, are tears and shame, blessed are weakness and ugliness,
+blessed are agony and sickness, blessed the sad remembrance of our sins,
+and a broken heart, and a repentant spirit.&nbsp; Blessed is death,
+and blessed the unknown realms, where souls await the resurrection day,
+for Christ redeemed them by His death.&nbsp; Blessed are all things,
+weak, as well as strong.&nbsp; Blessed are all days, dark, as well as
+bright, for all are His, and He is ours; and all are ours, and we are
+His, for ever.</p>
+<p>Therefore sigh on, ye sad ones, and rejoice in your own sadness;
+ache on, ye suffering ones, and rejoice in your own sorrows.&nbsp; Rejoice
+that you are made free of the holy brotherhood of mourners, that you
+may claim your place, too, if you will, among the noble army of martyrs.&nbsp;
+Rejoice that you are counted worthy of a fellowship in the sufferings
+of the Son of God.&nbsp; Rejoice and trust on, for after sorrow shall
+come joy.&nbsp; Trust on; for in man&rsquo;s weakness God&rsquo;s strength
+shall be made perfect.&nbsp; Trust on, for death is the gate of life.&nbsp;
+Endure on to the end, and possess your souls in patience for a little
+while, and that, perhaps, a very little while.&nbsp; Death comes swiftly;
+and more swiftly still, perhaps, the day of the Lord.&nbsp; The deeper
+the sorrow, the nearer the salvation:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>The night is darkest before the dawn;<br />When the pain is sorest
+the child is born;<br />And the day of the Lord is at hand.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Ay, if the worst should come; if neither the laws of your country
+nor the benevolence of the righteous were strong enough to defend you;
+if one charitable plan after another were to fail; if the labour-market
+were getting fuller and fuller, and poverty were spreading wider and
+wider, and crime and misery were breeding faster and still faster every
+year than education and religion; all hope for the poor seemed gone
+and lost, and they were ready to believe the men who tell them that
+the land is over-peopled&mdash;that there are too many of us, too many
+industrious hands, too many cunning brains, too many immortal souls,
+too many of God&rsquo;s children upon God&rsquo;s earth, which God the
+Father made, and God the Son redeemed, and God the Holy Spirit teaches:
+then the Lord, the Prince of sufferers, He who knows your every grief,
+and weeps with you tear for tear, He would come out of His place to
+smite the haughty ones, and confound the cunning ones, and silence the
+loud ones, and empty the full ones; to judge with righteousness for
+the meek of the earth, to hearken to the prayer of the poor, whose heart
+he has been preparing, and to help the fatherless and needy to their
+right, that the man of the world may be no more exalted against them.</p>
+<p>In that day men will find out a wonder and miracle.&nbsp; They will
+see many that are first last, and many that are last first.&nbsp; They
+will find that there were poor who were the richest after all; the simple
+who were wisest, and gentle who were bravest, and weak who were strongest;
+that God&rsquo;s ways are not as men&rsquo;s ways, nor God&rsquo;s thoughts
+as men&rsquo;s thoughts.&nbsp; Alas, who shall stand when God does this?&nbsp;
+At least He who will do it is Jesus, who loved us to the death; boundless
+love and gentleness, boundless generosity and pity; who was tempted
+even as we are, who has felt our every weakness.&nbsp; In that thought
+is utter comfort, that our Judge will be He who died and rose again,
+and is praying for us even now, to His Father and our Father.&nbsp;
+Therefore fear not, gentle souls, patient souls, pure consciences and
+tender hearts.&nbsp; Fear not, you who are empty and hungry, who walk
+in darkness and see no light; for though He fulfil once more, as He
+has again and again, the awful prophecy before the text; though He tread
+down the people in His anger, and make them drunk in His fury, and bring
+their strength to the earth; though kings with their armies may flee,
+and the stars which light the earth may fall, and there be great tribulation,
+wars, and rumours of wars, and on earth distress of nations with perplexity&mdash;yet
+it is when the day of His vengeance is at hand, that the year of His
+redeemed is come.&nbsp; And when they see all these things, let them
+rejoice and lift up their heads, for their redemption draweth nigh.</p>
+<p>Do you ask how I know this?&nbsp; Do you ask for a sign, for a token
+that these my words are true?&nbsp; I know that they are true.&nbsp;
+But, as for tokens, I will give you but this one, the sign of that bread
+and that wine.&nbsp; When the Lord shall have delivered His people out
+of all their sorrows, they shall eat of that bread and drink of that
+wine, one and all, in the kingdom of God.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>VIII&mdash;EASTER-DAY</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,
+where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God&mdash;COLOSSIANS iii.
+1.</p>
+<p>I know no better way of preaching to you the gospel of Easter, the
+good news which this day brings to all men, year after year, than by
+trying to explain to you the Epistle appointed for this day, which we
+have just read.</p>
+<p>It begins, &ldquo;If ye then be risen with Christ.&rdquo;&nbsp; Now
+that does not mean that St. Paul had any doubt whether the Colossians,
+to whom he was speaking, were risen with Christ or not.&nbsp; He does
+not mean, &ldquo;I am not sure whether you are risen or not; but perhaps
+you are not; but if you are, you ought to do such and such things.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He does not mean that.&nbsp; He was quite sure that these Colossians
+were risen with Christ.&nbsp; He had no doubt of it whatsoever.&nbsp;
+If you look at the chapter before, he says so.&nbsp; He tells them that
+they were buried with Christ in baptism, in which also they were risen
+with Christ, through faith of the operation of God, who has raised Him
+from the dead.</p>
+<p>Now what reason had St. Paul to believe that these Colossians were
+risen with Jesus Christ?&nbsp; Because they had given up sin and were
+leading holy lives?&nbsp; That cannot be.&nbsp; The Epistle for this
+day says the very opposite.&nbsp; It does not say, &ldquo;You are risen,
+because you have left off sinning.&rdquo;&nbsp; It says, &ldquo;You
+must leave off sinning, because you are risen.&rdquo;&nbsp; Was it then
+on account of any experiences, or inward feeling of theirs?&nbsp; Not
+at all.&nbsp; He says that these Colossians had been baptized, and that
+they had believed in God&rsquo;s work of raising Jesus Christ from the
+dead, and that therefore they were risen with Christ.&nbsp; In one word,
+they had believed the message of Easter-day, and therefore they shared
+in the blessings of Easter-day; as it is written in another place, &ldquo;If
+thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus Christ, and believe
+in thy heart that God has raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now these seem very wide words, too wide to please most people.&nbsp;
+But there are wider words still in St. Paul&rsquo;s epistles.&nbsp;
+He tells us again and again that God&rsquo;s mercy is a free gift; that
+He has made to us a free present of His Son Jesus Christ.&nbsp; That
+He has taken away the effect of all men&rsquo;s sin, and more than that,
+that men are God&rsquo;s children; that they have a right to believe
+that they are so, because they are so.&nbsp; For, He says, the free
+gift of Jesus Christ is not like Adam&rsquo;s offence.&nbsp; It is not
+less than it, narrower than it, as some folks say.&nbsp; It is not that
+by Adam&rsquo;s sin all became sinners, and by Jesus Christ&rsquo;s
+salvation an elect few out of them shall be made righteous.&nbsp; If
+you will think a moment, you will see that it cannot be so.&nbsp; For
+Jesus Christ conquered sin and death and the devil.&nbsp; But if, as
+some think, sin and death and the devil have destroyed and sent to hell
+by far the greater part of mankind, then they have conquered Christ,
+and not Christ them.&nbsp; Mankind belonged to Christ at first.&nbsp;
+Sin and death and the devil came in and ruined them, and then Christ
+came to redeem them; but if all that He has been able to do is to redeem
+one out of a thousand, or even nine out of ten, of them, then the devil
+has had the best of the battle.&nbsp; He, and not Christ, is the conqueror.&nbsp;
+If a thief steals all the sheep on your farm, and all that you can get
+back from him is a part of the whole flock, which has had the best of
+it, you or the thief?&nbsp; If Christ&rsquo;s redemption is meant for
+only a few, or even a great many elect souls out of all the millions
+of mankind, which has had the best of it, Christ, the master of the
+sheep, or the devil, the robber and destroyer of them?&nbsp; Be sure,
+my friends, Christ is stronger than that; His love is deeper than that;
+His redemption is wider than that.&nbsp; How strong, how deep, how wide
+it is, we never shall know.&nbsp; St. Paul tells us that we never shall
+know, for it is boundless; but that we shall go on knowing more and
+more of its vastness for ever, finding it deeper, wider, loftier than
+our most glorious dreams could ever picture it.&nbsp; But this, he says,
+we do know, that we have gained more than Adam lost.&nbsp; For if by
+one man&rsquo;s offence many were made sinners, much more shall they
+who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign
+in life by one even Jesus Christ.&nbsp; For, he says, where sin abounded,
+God&rsquo;s grace and free gift has much more abounded.&nbsp; Therefore,
+as by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation,
+even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men
+to justification of life.&nbsp; Upon all men, you see.&nbsp; There can
+be no doubt about it.&nbsp; Upon you and me, and foreigners, and gipsies,
+and heathens, and thieves, and harlots&mdash;upon all mankind, let them
+be as bad or as good, as young or as old, as they may, the free gift
+of God has come to justification of life; they are justified, pardoned,
+and beloved in the sight of Almighty God; they have a right and a share
+to a new life; a different sort of life from what they are inclined
+to lead, and do lead, by nature&mdash;to a life which death cannot take
+away, a life which may grow, and strengthen, and widen, and blossom,
+and bear fruit for ever and ever.&nbsp; They have a share in Christ&rsquo;s
+resurrection, in the blessing of Easter-day.&nbsp; They have a share
+in Christ, every one of them whether they claim that share or not.&nbsp;
+How far they will be punished for not claiming it, is a very different
+matter, of which we know nothing whatsoever.&nbsp; And how far the heathen
+who have never heard of Christ, or of their share in Him, will be punished,
+we know not&mdash;we are not meant to know.&nbsp; But we know that to
+their own Master they stand or fall, and that their Master is our Master
+too, and that He is a just Master, and requires little of him to whom
+He gives little; a just and merciful Master, who loved this sinful world
+enough to come down and die for it, while mankind were all rebels and
+sinners, and has gone on taking care of it, and improving it, in spite
+of all its sin and rebellion ever since, and that is enough for us.</p>
+<p>St. Paul knew no more.&nbsp; It was a mystery, he says, a wonderful
+and unfathomable matter, which had been hidden since the foundation
+of the world, of which he himself says that he saw only through a glass
+darkly; and we cannot expect to have clearer eyes than he.&nbsp; But
+this he seems to have seen, that the Lord, when He rose again, bought
+a blessing even for the dumb beasts and the earth on which we live.&nbsp;
+For he says, the whole creation is now groaning in the pangs of labour,
+being about to bring forth something; and the whole creation will rise
+again; how, and when, and into what new state, we cannot tell.&nbsp;
+But St. Paul seems to say that when the Lord shall destroy death, the
+last of his enemies, then the whole creation shall be renewed, and bring
+forth another earth, nobler and more beautiful than this one, free from
+death, and sin, and sorrow, and redeemed into the glorious liberty of
+the children of God.</p>
+<p>But this, on the other hand, St. Paul did see most clearly, and preached
+it to all to whom he spoke, that the ground and reason of this great
+and glorious mystery was the thing which happened on the first Easter-day,
+namely, the Lord Jesus rising from the dead.&nbsp; About that, at least,
+there was no doubt at all in his mind.&nbsp; We may see it by the Easter
+anthem, which we read this morning, taken out of the fifteenth chapter
+of his first epistle to the Corinthians:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Christ is risen from the dead, and become the first fruits
+of them that slept.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection
+of the dead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made
+alive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now he is not talking here merely of the rising again of our bodies
+at the last day.&nbsp; That was in his mind only the end, and outcome,
+and fruit, and perfecting, of men&rsquo;s rising from the dead in this
+life.&nbsp; For he tells these same Corinthians, and the Colossians,
+and others to whom he wrote, that life, the eternal life which would
+raise their bodies at the last day, was even then working in them.</p>
+<p>Neither is he speaking only of a few believers.&nbsp; He says that,
+owing to the Lord&rsquo;s rising on this day, all shall be made alive&mdash;not
+merely all Christians, but all men.&nbsp; For he does not say, as in
+Adam all Christians die, but all men; and so he does not say, all Christians
+shall be made alive, but all men.&nbsp; For here, as in the sixth chapter
+of Romans, he is trying to make us understand the likeness between Adam
+and Jesus Christ, whom he calls the new Adam.&nbsp; The first Adam,
+he says, was only a living soul, as the savages and heathens are; but
+the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, the true pattern of men, is a
+quickening, life-giving spirit, to give eternal life to every human
+being who will accept His offer, and claim his share and right as a
+true man, after the likeness of the new Adam, Jesus Christ.</p>
+<p>We then, every one of us who is here to-day, have a right to believe
+that we have a share in Christ&rsquo;s eternal life: that our original
+sin, that is, the sinfulness which we inherited from our forefathers,
+is all forgiven and forgotten, and that mankind is now redeemed, and
+belongs to the second Adam, the true and original head and pattern of
+man, Jesus Christ, in whom was no sin; and that because mankind belongs
+to him, God is well pleased with them, and reconciled to them, and looks
+on them not as a guilty, but as a pardoned and beloved race of beings.</p>
+<p>And we have a right to believe also, that because all power is given
+to Christ in heaven and earth, there is given to Him the power of making
+men what they ought to be&mdash;like His own blessed, and glorious,
+and perfect self.&nbsp; Ask him, and you shall receive; knock at the
+gate of His treasure-house, and it shall be opened.&nbsp; Seek those
+things that are above, and you shall find them.&nbsp; You shall find
+old bad habits die out in you, new good habits spring up in you; old
+meannesses become weaker, new nobleness and manfulness become stronger;
+the old, selfish, covetous, savage, cunning, cowardly, brutal Adam dying
+out, the new, loving, brotherly, civilised, wise, brave, manful Adam
+growing up in you, day by day, to perfection, till you are changed from
+grace to grace, and glory to glory into the likeness of the Lord of
+men.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;These are great promises,&rdquo; you may say, &ldquo;glorious
+promises; but what proof have you that they belong to us?&nbsp; They
+sound too good to be true; too great for such poor creatures as we are;
+give us but some proof that we have a right to them; give us but a pledge
+from Jesus Christ; give us but a sign, an assurance from God, and we
+may believe you then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>My friends, I am certain&mdash;and the longer I live I am the more
+certain&mdash;that there is no argument, no pledge, no sign, no assurance,
+like the bread and the wine upon that table.&nbsp; Assurances in our
+own hearts and souls are good, but we may be mistaken about them; for,
+after all, they are our own thoughts, notions in our own souls, these
+inward experiences and assurances; delightful and comforting as they
+are at times, yet we cannot trust them&mdash;we cannot trust our own
+hearts, they are deceitful above all things, who can know them?&nbsp;
+Yes: our own hearts may tell us lies; they may make us fancy that we
+are pleasing God, when we are doing the things most hateful to Him.&nbsp;
+They have made thousands fancy so already.&nbsp; They may make us fancy
+we are right in God&rsquo;s sight, when we are utterly wrong.&nbsp;
+They have made thousands fancy so already.&nbsp; These hearts of ours
+may make us fancy that we have spiritual life in us; that we are in
+a state higher and nobler than the sinners round us, when all the while
+our spirits are dead within us.&nbsp; They made the Pharisees of old
+fancy that their souls were alive, and pure, and religious, when they
+were dead and damned within them; and they may make us fancy so too.&nbsp;
+No: we cannot trust our hearts and inward feelings; but that bread,
+that wine, we can trust.&nbsp; Our inward feelings are a sign from man;
+that bread and wine are a sign from God.&nbsp; Our inward feelings may
+tell us what we feel toward God: that bread, that wine, tell us something
+ten thousand times more important; they tell us what God feels towards
+us.&nbsp; And God must love us before we can love Him; God must pardon
+us before we can have mercy on ourselves; God must come to us, and take
+hold of us, before we can cling to Him; God must change us, before we
+can become right; God must give us eternal life in our hearts before
+we can feel and enjoy that new life in us.&nbsp; Then that bread, that
+wine, say that God has done all that for us already; they say: &ldquo;God
+does love you; God has pardoned you; God has come to you; God is ready
+and willing to change and convert you; God has given you eternal life;
+and this love, this mercy, this coming to find you out while you are
+wandering in sin, this change, this eternal life, are all in His Son
+Jesus Christ; and that bread, that wine, are the signs of it.&nbsp;
+It is for the sake of Jesus&rsquo; blood that God has pardoned you,
+and that cup is the new covenant in His blood.&nbsp; Come and drink,
+and claim your pardon.&nbsp; It is simply because Jesus Christ was man,
+and you, too, are men and women, wearing the flesh and blood which Christ
+wore; eating and drinking as Christ ate and drank, and not for any works
+or faith of your own, that God loves you, and has come to you, and called
+you into His family.&nbsp; This is the Gospel, the good news of Christ&rsquo;s
+free grace, and pardon, and salvation; and that bread, that wine, the
+common food of all men, not merely of the rich, or the wise, or the
+pious, but of saints and penitents, rich and poor.&nbsp; Christians
+and heathens, alike&mdash;that plain, common, every-day bread and wine&mdash;are
+the signs of it.&nbsp; Come and take the signs, and claim your share
+in God&rsquo;s love, in God&rsquo;s family.&nbsp; And it is in Jesus
+Christ, too, that you have eternal life.&nbsp; It is because you belong
+to Jesus Christ, to mankind, of which He is the head and king, that
+God will change you, strengthen your soul to rise above your sins, raise
+you up daily more and more out of spiritual death, out of brutishness,
+and selfishness, and ignorance, and malice, into an eternal life of
+wisdom, and love, and courage, and mercifulness, and patience, and obedience;
+a life which shall continue through death, and beyond death, and raise
+you up again for ever at the last day, because you belong to Christ&rsquo;s
+body, and have been fed with Christ&rsquo;s eternal life.&nbsp; And
+that bread, that wine are the signs of it.&nbsp; &ldquo;Take, eat,&rdquo;
+said Jesus, &ldquo;this is my body; drink, this is my blood.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Those are the signs that God has given you eternal life, and that this
+life is in His Son.&nbsp; What better sign would you have?&nbsp; There
+is no mistaking their message; they can tell you no lies.&nbsp; And
+they can, and will, bring your own Gospel-blessings to your mind, as
+nothing else can.&nbsp; They will make you feel, as nothing else can,
+that you are the beloved children of God, heirs of all that your King
+and Head has bought for you, when He died, and rose again upon this
+day.&nbsp; He gave you the Lord&rsquo;s Supper for a sign.&nbsp; Do
+you think that He did not know best what the best sign would be?&nbsp;
+He said: &ldquo;Do this in remembrance of me.&rdquo;&nbsp; Do you think
+that He did not know better than you, and me, and all men, that if you
+did do it, it would put you in remembrance of Him?</p>
+<p>Oh! come to His table, this day of all days in the year; and claim
+there your share in His body and His blood, to feed the everlasting
+life in you; which, though you see it not now, though you feel it not
+now, will surely, if you keep it alive in you by daily faith, and daily
+repentance, and daily prayer, and daily obedience, raise you up, body
+and soul, to reign with Him for ever at the last day.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>IV&mdash;THE COMFORTER</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EASTER.</p>
+<p>If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I
+depart, I will send Him unto you&mdash;JOHN xvi. 7.</p>
+<p>We are now coming near to two great days, Ascension-day and Whit-Sunday,
+which our forefathers have appointed, year by year, to put us continually
+in mind of two great works, which the Lord worked out for us, His most
+unworthy subjects, and still unworthier brothers.</p>
+<p>On Ascension-day He ascended up into Heaven, and received gifts for
+men, even for His enemies, that the Lord God might dwell among them;
+and on Whit-Sunday, He sent down those gifts.&nbsp; The Spirit of God
+came down to dwell in the hearts of men, to be the right of everyone
+who asks for it, white or black, young or old, rich or poor, and never
+to leave this earth as long as there is a human being on it.&nbsp; And
+because we are coming near to these two great days, the Prayer-book,
+in the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, tries to put us in mind of those
+days, and to make us ready to ask for the blessings of which they are
+the yearly signs and witnesses.&nbsp; The Gospel for last Sunday told
+us how the Lord told His disciples just before His death, that for a
+little while they should not see Him; and again a little while and they
+should see Him, because he was going to the Father, and that they should
+have great sorrow, but that their sorrow should be turned into joy.&nbsp;
+And the Gospel for to-day goes further still, and tells us why He was
+going away&mdash;that He might send to them the Comforter, His Holy
+Spirit, and that it was expedient&mdash;good for them, that He should
+go away; for that if He did not, the Comforter would not come to them.&nbsp;
+Now, in these words, I do not doubt He was speaking of Ascension-day,
+and of Whit-Sunday; and therefore it is that these Gospels have been
+chosen to be read before Ascension-day and Whit-Sunday; and in proportion
+as we attend to these Gospels, and take in the meaning of them, and
+act accordingly, Ascension-day and Whit-Sunday will be a blessing and
+a profit to us; and in proportion as we neglect them, or forget them,
+Ascension-day and Whit-Sunday will be witnesses against our souls at
+the day of judgment, that the Lord Himself condescended to buy for us
+with His own blood, blessings unspeakable, and offer them freely unto
+us, in spite of all our sins, and yet we would have none of them, but
+preferred our own will to God&rsquo;s will, and the little which we
+thought we could get for ourselves, to the unspeakable treasures which
+God had promised to give us, and turned away from the blessings of His
+kingdom, to our own foolish pleasure and covetousness, like &ldquo;the
+dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the
+mire.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I said that God had promised to us an unspeakable treasure: and so
+He has; a treasure that will make the poorest and weakest man among
+us, richer than if he had all the wealth gathered from all the nations
+of the world, which everyone is admiring now in that Great Exhibition
+in London, and stronger than if he had all the wisdom which produced
+that wealth.&nbsp; Let us see now what it is that God has promised us&mdash;and
+then those to whom God has given ears to hear, and hearts to understand,
+will see that large as my words may sound, they are no larger than the
+truth.</p>
+<p>Christ said, that if He went away, He would send down the Comforter,
+the Holy Spirit of God.&nbsp; The Nicene Creed says, that the Holy Spirit
+of God is the Lord and Giver of life; and so He is.&nbsp; He gives life
+to the earth, to the trees, to the flowers, to the dumb animals, to
+the bodies and minds of men; all life, all growth, all health, all strength,
+all beauty, all order, all help and assistance of one thing by another,
+which you see in the world around you, comes from Him.&nbsp; He is the
+Lord and Giver of life; in Him, the earth, the sun and stars, all live
+and move and have their being.&nbsp; He is not them, or a part of them,
+but He gives life to them.&nbsp; But to men He is more than that&mdash;for
+we men ourselves are more than that, and need more.&nbsp; We have immortal
+spirits in us&mdash;a reason, a conscience, and a will; strange rights
+and duties, strange hopes and fears, of which the beasts and the plants
+know nothing.&nbsp; We have hearts in us which can love, and feel, and
+sorrow, and be weak, and sinful, and mistaken; and therefore we want
+a Comforter.&nbsp; And the Lord and Giver of life has promised to be
+our Comforter; and the Father and the Son, from both of whom He proceeds,
+have promised to send Him to us, to strengthen and comfort us, and give
+our spirits life and health, and knit us together to each other, and
+to God, in one common bond of love and fellow-feeling even as He the
+Spirit knits together the Father and the Son.</p>
+<p>I said that we want a Comforter.&nbsp; If we consider what that word
+Comforter means, we shall see that we do want a Comforter, and that
+the only Comforter which can satisfy us for ever and ever, must be He,
+the very Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of life.</p>
+<p>Now Comforter means one who gives comfort; so the meaning of it will
+depend upon what comfort means.&nbsp; Our word comfort, comes from two
+old Latin words, which mean <i>with</i> and <i>to strengthen</i>.&nbsp;
+And, therefore, a Comforter means anyone who is with us to strengthen
+us, and do for us what we could not do for ourselves.&nbsp; You will
+see that this is the proper meaning of the word, when you remember what
+bodily things we call comforts.&nbsp; You say that a person is comfortable,
+or lives in comfort, if he has a comfortable income, a comfortable house,
+comfortable clothes, comfortable food, and so on.&nbsp; Now all these
+things, his money, his house, his clothes, his food, are not himself.&nbsp;
+They make him stronger and more at ease.&nbsp; They make his life more
+pleasant to him.&nbsp; But they are not <i>him</i>; they are round him,
+with him, to strengthen him.&nbsp; So with a person&rsquo;s mind and
+feelings; when a man is in sorrow and trouble, he cannot comfort himself.&nbsp;
+His friends must come to him and comfort him; talk to him, advise him,
+show their kind feeling towards him, and in short, be with him to strengthen
+him in his afflictions.&nbsp; And if we require comfort for our bodies,
+and for our minds, my friends, how much more do we for our spirits&mdash;our
+souls, as we call them!&nbsp; How weak, and ignorant, and self-willed,
+and perplexed, and sinful they are&mdash;surely our souls require a
+comforter far more than our bodies or our minds do!&nbsp; And to comfort
+our spirits, we require a spirit; for we cannot see our own spirits,
+our own souls, as we can our bodies.&nbsp; We cannot even tell by our
+feelings what state they are in.&nbsp; We may deceive ourselves, and
+we do deceive ourselves, again and again, and fancy that our souls are
+strong when they are weak&mdash;that they are simple and truthful when
+they are full of deceit and falsehood&mdash;that they are loving God
+when they are only loving themselves&mdash;that they are doing God&rsquo;s
+will when they are only doing their own selfish and perverse wills.&nbsp;
+No man can take care of his own spirit, much less give his own spirit
+life; &ldquo;no man can quicken his own soul,&rdquo; says David, that
+is, no man can give his own soul life.&nbsp; And therefore we must have
+someone beyond ourselves to give life to our spirits.&nbsp; We must
+have someone to teach us the things that we could never find out for
+ourselves, someone who will put into our hearts the good desires that
+could never come of themselves.&nbsp; We must have someone who can change
+these wills of ours, and make them love what they hate by nature, and
+make them hate what they love by nature.&nbsp; For by nature we are
+selfish.&nbsp; By nature we are inclined to love ourselves, rather than
+anyone else; to take care of ourselves, rather than anyone else.&nbsp;
+By nature we are inclined to follow our own will, rather than God&rsquo;s
+will, to do our own pleasure, rather than follow God&rsquo;s commandments,
+and therefore by nature our spirits are dead; for selfishness and self-will
+are <i>spiritual death</i>.&nbsp; Spiritual life is love, pity, patience,
+courage, honesty, truth, justice, humbleness, industry, self-sacrifice,
+obedience to God, and therefore to those whom God sends to teach and
+guide us.&nbsp; <i>That</i> is spiritual life.&nbsp; That is the life
+of Jesus Christ; His character, His conduct, was like that&mdash;to
+love, to help, to pity, all around&mdash;to give up Himself even to
+death&mdash;to do His Father&rsquo;s will and not His own.&nbsp; That
+was His life.&nbsp; Because He was the Son of God He did it.&nbsp; In
+proportion as we live like Him, we shall he living like sons of God.&nbsp;
+In proportion as we live like Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our spirits
+will be alive.&nbsp; For he that hath Jesus Christ the Son of God in
+him, hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God, hath not life,
+says St. John.&nbsp; But who can raise us from the death of sin and
+selfishness, to the life of righteousness and love?&nbsp; Who can change
+us into the likeness of Jesus Christ?&nbsp; Who can even show us what
+Jesus Christ&rsquo;s likeness is, and take the things of Christ and
+show them to us; so that by seeing what He was, we may see what we should
+be?&nbsp; And who, if we have this life in us, will keep it alive in
+us, and be with us to strengthen us?&nbsp; Who will give us strength
+to force the foul and fierce and false thoughts out of our mind, and
+say, &ldquo;Get thee behind me, Satan?&rdquo;&nbsp; Who will give our
+spirits life? and who will strengthen that life in us?</p>
+<p>Can we do it for ourselves?&nbsp; Oh! my friends, I pity the man
+who is so blind and ignorant, who knows so little of himself, upon whom
+the lessons which his own mistakes, and sins, and failings should have
+taught him, have been so wasted that he fancies that he can teach and
+guide himself without any help, and that he can raise his own soul to
+life, or keep it alive without assistance.&nbsp; Can his body do without
+its comforts?&nbsp; Then how can his spirit?&nbsp; If he left his house,
+and threw away his clothes, and refused all help from his fellow-men,
+and went and lived in the woods like a wild beast, we should call him
+a madman, because he refused the help and comfort to his body which
+God has made necessary for him.&nbsp; But just as great a madman is
+he who refuses the help and the strengthening which God has made necessary
+for his spirit&mdash;just as great a madman is he who fancies that his
+soul is any more able than his body is, to live without continual help.&nbsp;
+It is just because man is nobler than the beast that he requires help.&nbsp;
+The fox in the wood needs no house, no fire; he needs no friends; he
+needs no comforts, and no comforters, because he is a beast&mdash;because
+he is meant to live and die selfish and alone; therefore God has provided
+him in himself with all things necessary to keep the poor brute&rsquo;s
+selfish life in him for a few short years.&nbsp; But just because man
+is nobler than that; just because man is not intended to live selfish
+and alone; just because his body, and his mind, and his spirit are beautifully
+and delicately made, and intended for all sorts of wonderful purposes,
+therefore God has appointed that from the moment he is born to all eternity
+he cannot live alone; he cannot support himself; he stands in continual
+need of the assistance of all around him, for body, and soul, and spirit;
+he needs clothes, which other men must make; houses, which other man
+must build; food, which other men must produce; he has to get his livelihood
+by working for others, while others get their livelihood in return by
+working for him.&nbsp; As a child he needs his parents to be his comforters,
+to take care of him in body and mind.&nbsp; As he grows up he needs
+the care of others; he cannot exist a day without his fellow-men: he
+requires school-masters to educate him; books and masters to teach him
+his trade; and when he has learnt it, and settled himself in life, he
+requires laws made by other men, perhaps by men who died hundreds of
+years before he was born, to secure to him his rights and property,
+to secure to him comforts, and to make him feel comfortable in his station;
+he needs friends and family to comfort him in sorrow and in joy, to
+do for him the thousand things which he cannot do for himself.&nbsp;
+In proportion as he is alone and friendless he is pitiable and miserable,
+let him be as rich as Solomon himself.&nbsp; From the moment, I say,
+he is born, he needs continual comforts and comforters for his body,
+and mind, and heart.&nbsp; And then he fancies that, though his body
+and his mind cannot exist safely, or grow up healthily, without the
+continual care and comforting of his fellow-men, that yet his soul,
+the part of him which is at once the most important and the most in
+danger; the part of him of which he knows least; the part of him which
+he understands least; the part of him of which his body and mind cannot
+take care, because it has to take care of them, can live, and grow,
+and prosper without any help whatsoever!</p>
+<p>And if we cannot strengthen our own souls no man can strengthen them
+for us.&nbsp; No man can raise our bodies to life, much less can he
+raise our souls.&nbsp; The physician himself cannot cure the sicknesses
+of our bodies; he can only give us fit medicines, and leave them to
+cure us by certain laws of nature, which he did not make, and which
+he cannot alter.&nbsp; And though the physician can, by much learning,
+understand men&rsquo;s bodies somewhat, who can understand men&rsquo;s
+souls?&nbsp; We cannot understand our own souls; we do not know what
+they are, how they live; whence they come, or whither they go.&nbsp;
+We cannot cure them ourselves, much less can anyone cure them for us.&nbsp;
+The only one who can cure our souls is He that made our souls; the only
+one who can give life to our souls is He who gives life to everything.&nbsp;
+The only one who can cure, and strengthen, and comfort our spirits,
+is He who understands our spirits, because He himself is the Spirit
+of all spirits, the Spirit who searcheth all things, even the deep things
+of God; because He is the Spirit of God the Father, who made all heaven
+and earth, and of Jesus Christ the Son, who understands the heart of
+man, who can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, and hath
+been tempted in all things, just as we are, yet without sin.</p>
+<p>He is the Comforter which God has promised to our spirits, the only
+Comforter who can strengthen our spirits; and if we have Him with us,
+if He is strengthening us, if He is leading us, if He is abiding with
+us, if He is changing us day by day, more and more into the likeness
+of Jesus Christ, are we not, as I said at the beginning of my sermon,
+richer than if we possessed all the land of England, stronger than if
+we had all the armies of the world at our command?&nbsp; For what is
+more precious than&mdash;God Himself?&nbsp; What is stronger than&mdash;God
+Himself?&nbsp; The poorest man in whom God&rsquo;s Spirit dwells is
+greater than the greatest king in whom God&rsquo;s Spirit does not dwell.&nbsp;
+And so he will find in the day that he dies.&nbsp; Then where will riches
+be, and power?&nbsp; The rich man will take none of them away with him
+when he dieth, neither shall his pomp follow him.&nbsp; Naked came he
+into this world, and naked shall he return out of it, to go as he came,
+and carry with him none of the comforts which he thought in this life
+the only ones worth having.&nbsp; But the Spirit of God remains with
+us for ever; that treasure a man shall carry out of this world with
+him, and keep to all eternity.&nbsp; That friend will never forsake
+him, for He is the Spirit of Love, which abideth for ever.&nbsp; That
+Comforter will never grow weak, for He is Himself the very eternal Lord
+and Giver of Life; and the soul that is possessed by Him must live,
+must grow, must become nobler, purer, freer, stronger, more loving,
+for ever and ever, as the eternities roll by.&nbsp; That is what He
+will give you, my friends; that is His treasure; that is the Spirit-life,
+the true and everlasting life, which flows from Him as the stream flows
+from the fountain-head.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>X&mdash;WHIT-SUNDAY</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness,
+goodness, faith, meekness, temperance&mdash;against such there is no
+law.&mdash;GALATIANS v. 22, 23.</p>
+<p>In all countries, and in all ages, the world has been full of complaints
+of Law and Government.&nbsp; And one hears the same complaints in England
+now.&nbsp; You hear complaints that the laws favour one party and one
+rank more than another, that they are expensive, and harsh, and unfair,
+and what not?&mdash;But I think, my friends, that for us, and especially
+on this Whit-Sunday, it will be much wiser, instead of complaining of
+the laws, to complain of ourselves, for needing those laws.&nbsp; For
+what is it that makes laws necessary at all, except man&rsquo;s sinfulness?&nbsp;
+Adam required no laws in the garden of Eden.&nbsp; We should require
+no laws if we were what we ought to be&mdash;what God has offered to
+make us.&nbsp; We may see this by looking at the laws themselves, and
+considering the purposes for which they were made.&nbsp; We shall then
+see, that, like Moses&rsquo; Laws of old, the greater part of them have
+been added because of transgressions.&mdash;In plain English&mdash;to
+prevent men from doing things which they ought not to do, and which,
+if they were in a right state of mind, they would not do.&nbsp; How
+many laws are passed, simply to prevent one man, or one class, from
+oppressing or ill-using some other man or class?&nbsp; What a vast number
+of them are passed simply to protect property, or to protect the weak
+from the cruel, the ignorant from the cunning!&nbsp; It is plain that
+if there was no cruelty, no cunning, no dishonesty, these laws, at all
+events, would not be needed.&nbsp; Again, one of the great complaints
+against the laws and the government, is that they are so expensive,
+that rates and taxes are heavy burdens&mdash;and doubtless they are:
+but what makes them necessary except men&rsquo;s sin?&nbsp; If the poor
+were more justly and mercifully treated, and if they in their turn were
+more thrifty and provident, there would be no need of the expenses of
+poor rates.&nbsp; If there was no love of war and plunder, there would
+be no need of the expense of an army.&nbsp; If there was no crime, there
+would be no need of the expense of police and prisons.&nbsp; The thing
+is so simple and self-evident, that it seems almost childish to mention
+it.&nbsp; And yet, my friends, we forget it daily.&nbsp; We complain
+of the laws and their harshness, of taxes and their expensiveness, and
+we forget all the while that it is our own selfishness and sinfulness
+which brings this expense upon us, which makes it necessary for the
+law to interfere and protect us against others, and others against us.&nbsp;
+And while we are complaining of the government for not doing its work
+somewhat more cheaply, we are forgetting that if we chose, we might
+leave government very little work to do&mdash;that every man if he chose,
+might be his own law-maker and his own police&mdash;that every man if
+he will, may lead a life &ldquo;against which there is no law.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I say again, that it is our own fault, the fault of our sinfulness,
+that laws are necessary for us.&nbsp; In proportion as we are what Scripture
+calls &ldquo;natural men,&rdquo; that is, savage, selfish, divided from
+each other, and struggling against each other, each for his own interest;
+as long as we are not renewed and changed into new men, so long will
+laws, heavy, severe, and burdensome, be necessary for us.&nbsp; Without
+them we should be torments to ourselves, to our neighbours, to our country.&nbsp;
+But these laws are only necessary as long as we are full of selfishness
+and ungodliness.&nbsp; The moment we yield ourselves up to God&rsquo;s
+law, man&rsquo;s laws are ready enough to leave us alone.&nbsp; Take,
+for instance, a common example; as long as anyone is a faithful husband
+and a good father, the law does not interfere with his conduct towards
+his wife and children.&nbsp; But it is when he is unfaithful to them,
+when he ill-treats them, or deserts them, that the law interferes with
+its &ldquo;Thou shalt not,&rdquo; and compels him to behave, against
+his will, in the way in which he ought to have behaved of his own will.&nbsp;
+It was free to the man to have done his duty by his family, without
+the law&mdash;the moment he neglects his duty, he becomes amenable to
+it.</p>
+<p>But the law can only force a man&rsquo;s actions: it cannot change
+his heart.&nbsp; In the instance which I have been just mentioning,
+the law can say to a man, &ldquo;You shall not ill-treat your family;
+you shall not leave them to starve.&rdquo;&nbsp; But the law cannot
+say to him &ldquo;You shall love your family.&rdquo;&nbsp; The law can
+only command from a man outward obedience; the obedience of the heart
+it cannot enforce.&nbsp; The law may make a man do his duty, it cannot
+make a man <i>love</i> his duty.&nbsp; And therefore laws will never
+set the world right.&nbsp; They can punish persons after the wrong is
+done, and that not certainly nor always: but they cannot certainly prevent
+the wrongs being done.&nbsp; The law can punish a man for stealing:
+and yet, as we see daily, men steal in the face of punishment.&nbsp;
+Or even if the law, by its severity, makes persons afraid to commit
+certain particular crimes, yet still as long as the sinful heart is
+left in them unchanged, the sin which is checked in one direction is
+sure to break out in another.&nbsp; Sin, like every other disease, is
+sure, when it is driven onwards, to break out at a fresh point, or fester
+within some still more deadly, because more hidden and unsuspected,
+shape.&nbsp; The man who dare not be an open sinner for fear of the
+law, can be a hypocrite in spite of it.&nbsp; The man who dare not steal
+for fear of the law, can cheat in spite of it.&nbsp; The selfish man
+will find fresh ways of being selfish, the tyrannical man of being tyrannical,
+however closely the law may watch him.&nbsp; He will discover some means
+of evading it; and thus the law, after all, though it may keep down
+crime, multiplies sin; and by the law, as St. Paul says, is the knowledge
+of sin.</p>
+<p>What then will do that for this poor world which the law cannot do&mdash;which,
+as St. Paul tells us, not even the law of God given on Mount Sinai,
+holy, just, good as it was, could do, because no law can give life?&nbsp;
+What will give men a new heart and a new spirit, which shall love its
+duty and do it willingly, and not by compulsion, everywhere and always,
+and not merely just as far as it commanded?&nbsp; The text tells us
+that there is a Spirit, the fruit of which is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
+gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance; a character such
+as no laws can give to a man, and which no law dare punish in a man.&nbsp;
+Look at this character as St. Paul sets it forth&mdash;and then think
+what need would there be of all these burdensome and expensive laws,
+if all men were but full of the fruits of that Spirit which St. Paul
+describes?</p>
+<p>I know what answer will be ready, in some of your minds at least,
+to all this.&nbsp; You will be ready to reply, almost angrily, &ldquo;Of
+course if everyone was perfect, we should need no laws: but people are
+not perfect, and you cannot expect them to be.&rdquo;&nbsp; My friends,
+whether or not <i>we</i> expect baptized people, living in a Christian
+country, to be perfect, God expects them to be perfect; for He has said,
+by the mouth of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, &ldquo;Be ye therefore
+perfect, as our Father which is in heaven is perfect.&rdquo;&nbsp; And
+He has told us what being perfect is like; you may read it for yourselves
+in His sermon on the Mount; and you may see also that what He commands
+us to do in that sermon, from the beginning to the end, is the exact
+opposite and contrary of the ways and rules of this world, which, as
+I have shown, make burdensome laws necessary to prevent our devouring
+each other.&nbsp; Now, do you think that God would have told us to be
+perfect, if He knew that it was impossible for us?&nbsp; Do you think
+that He, the God of truth, would have spoken such a cruel mockery against
+poor sinful creatures like us, as to command us a duty without giving
+us the means of fulfilling it?&nbsp; Do you think that He did not know
+ten thousand times better than I what I have been just telling you,
+that laws could not change men&rsquo;s hearts and wills; that commanding
+a man to love and like a thing will not make him love and like it; that
+a man&rsquo;s heart and spirit must be changed in him from within, and
+not merely laws and commandments laid on him from without?&nbsp; Then
+why has He commanded us to love each other, ay, to love our enemies,
+to bless those who curse us, to pray for those who use us spitefully?&nbsp;
+Do you think the Lord meant to make hypocrites of us; to tell us to
+go about, as some who call themselves religious do go about, with their
+lips full of meek, and humble, and simple, and loving words, while their
+hearts are full of pride, and spite, and cunning, and hate, and selfishness,
+which are all the more deadly for being kept in and plastered over by
+a smooth outside?&nbsp; God forbid!&nbsp; He tells us to love each other,
+only because He has promised us the spirit of love.&nbsp; He tells us
+to be humble, because He can make us humble-hearted.&nbsp; He tells
+us to be honest, because He can make us love and delight in honesty.&nbsp;
+He tells us to refrain ourselves from foul thoughts as well as from
+foul actions, because He can take the foul heart out of us, and give
+us instead the spirit of purity and holiness.&nbsp; He tells us to lead
+new lives after the new pattern of Himself, because He can give us new
+hearts and a new spring of life within us; in short, He bids us behave
+as sons of God should behave, because, as He said Himself, &ldquo;If
+we, being evil, know how to give our children what is good for them,
+much more will our heavenly Father give His Holy Spirit to those who
+ask him.&rdquo;&nbsp; If you would be perfect, ask your Father in heaven
+to make you perfect.&nbsp; If you feel that your heart is wrong, ask
+Him to give you a new and a right heart.&nbsp; If you feel yourselves&mdash;as
+you are, whether you feel it or not&mdash;too weak, too ignorant, too
+selfish, to guide yourselves, ask Him to send His Spirit to guide you;
+ask for the Spirit from which comes all love, all light, all wisdom,
+all strength of mind.&nbsp; Ask for that Spirit, and you <i>shall</i>
+receive it; seek for it, and you shall find it; knock at the gate of
+your Father&rsquo;s treasure-house, and it shall be surely opened to
+you.</p>
+<p>But some of you, perhaps, are saying to yourselves, &ldquo;How will
+my being changed and renewed by the Spirit of God, render the laws less
+burdensome, while the crime and sin around me remain unchanged?&nbsp;
+It is others who want to be improved as much, and perhaps more than
+I do.&rdquo;&nbsp; It may be so, my friends; or, again, it may not;
+those who fancy that others need God&rsquo;s Spirit more than they do,
+may be the very persons who need it really the most; those who say they
+see, may be only proving their blindness by so saying; those who fancy
+that their souls are rich, and are full of all knowledge, and understand
+the whole Bible, and want no further teaching, may be, as they were
+in St. John&rsquo;s time, just the ones who are wretched, and miserable,
+and poor, and blind, and naked in soul, and do not know it.&nbsp; But
+at all events, if you think others need to be changed by God&rsquo;s
+Spirit, <i>pray</i> that God&rsquo;s Spirit may change them.&nbsp; For
+believe me, unless you pray for God&rsquo;s Spirit for each other, ay,
+for the whole world, there is no use asking for yourselves.&nbsp; This,
+I believe, is one of the reasons, perhaps the chief reason, why the
+fruits of God&rsquo;s Spirit are so little seen among us in these days;
+why our Christianity is become more and more dead, and hollow, and barren,
+while expensive and intricate laws and taxes are becoming more and more
+necessary every year; because our religion has become so selfish, because
+we have been praying for God&rsquo;s Spirit too little for each other.&nbsp;
+Our prayers have become too selfish.&nbsp; We have been looking for
+God&rsquo;s Spirit not so much as a means to enable us to do good to
+others, but as some sort of mysterious charm which was to keep us ourselves
+from the punishment of our sins in the next life, or give us a higher
+place in heaven; and, therefore, St. James&rsquo;s words have been fulfilled
+to us, even in our very prayers for God&rsquo;s Spirit, &ldquo;Ye ask
+and have not, because ye ask amiss, to consume it upon your lusts&rdquo;&mdash;save
+our selfish souls from the pains of hell; to give our selfish souls
+selfish pleasures and selfish glorification in the world to come: but
+not to spread God&rsquo;s kingdom upon earth, not to make us live on
+earth such lives as Christ lived; a life of love and self-sacrifice,
+and continual labour for the souls of others.&nbsp; Therefore it is,
+that God&rsquo;s Spirit is not poured out upon us in these days; for
+God&rsquo;s Spirit is the spirit of love and brotherhood, which delivers
+a man from his selfishness; and if we do not desire to be delivered
+from our selfishness, we do not desire the Spirit of God, and the Spirit
+of God will not be bestowed upon us.&nbsp; And no man desires to be
+delivered from his own selfishness, who in his very prayers, when he
+ought to be thinking least about himself alone, is thinking about himself
+most of all, and forgetting that he is the member of a family&mdash;that
+all mankind are his brethren&mdash;that he can claim nothing for himself
+to which every sinner around him has an equal right&mdash;that nothing
+is necessary for him, which is not equally necessary for everyone around
+him; that he has all the world besides himself to pray for, and that
+his prayers for himself will be heard only according as he prays for
+all the world beside.&nbsp; Baptism teaches us this, when it tells us
+that our old selfish nature is to be washed away, and a new character,
+after the pattern of Christ, is to live and grow up in us; that from
+the day we are baptized, to the day of our death, we should live not
+for ourselves, but for Jesus, in whom was no selfishness; when it teaches
+us that we are not only children of God, but members of Christ&rsquo;s
+Family, and heirs of God&rsquo;s kingdom, and therefore bound to make
+common cause with all other members of that Family, to live and labour
+for the common good of all our fellow-citizens in that kingdom.&nbsp;
+The Lord&rsquo;s prayer teaches us this, when He tells us to pray, not
+&ldquo;My Father,&rdquo; but &ldquo;Our Father;&rdquo; not &ldquo;my
+soul be saved,&rdquo; but &ldquo;Thy kingdom come;&rdquo; not &ldquo;give
+<i>me</i>,&rdquo; but &ldquo;give <i>us</i> our daily bread;&rdquo;
+not &ldquo;forgive <i>me</i>,&rdquo; but &ldquo;forgive <i>us</i> our
+trespasses,&rdquo; and that only as we forgive others; not &ldquo;lead
+<i>me</i> not,&rdquo; but &ldquo;lead <i>us</i> not into temptation;&rdquo;
+not &ldquo;deliver <i>me</i>,&rdquo; but &ldquo;deliver <i>us</i> from
+evil.&rdquo;&nbsp; After <i>that</i> manner the Lord told us to pray;
+and, in proportion as we pray in that manner, asking for nothing for
+ourselves which we do not ask for everyone else in the whole world,
+just so far and no farther will God <i>hear</i> our prayers.&nbsp; He
+who asks for God&rsquo;s Spirit for himself only, and forgets that all
+the world need it as much as he, is not asking for God&rsquo;s Spirit
+at all, and does not know even what God&rsquo;s Spirit is.&nbsp; The
+mystery of Pentecost, too, which came to pass on this day 1818 years
+ago, teaches us the same thing also.&nbsp; Those cloven tongues of fire,
+the tokens of God&rsquo;s Spirit, fell not upon one man, but upon many;
+not when they were apart from each other, but when they were together;
+and what were the fruits of that Spirit in the Apostles?&nbsp; Did they
+remain within that upper room, each priding himself upon his own gifts,
+and trying merely to gain heaven for his own soul?&nbsp; If they had
+any such fancies, as they very likely had before the Spirit fell upon
+them, they had none such afterwards.&nbsp; The Spirit must have taken
+all such thoughts from them, and given them a new notion of what it
+was to be devout and holy: for instead of staying in that upper room,
+they went forth instantly into the public place to preach in foreign
+tongues to all the people.&nbsp; Instead of keeping themselves apart
+from each other in silence, and fancying, as some have done, and some
+do now, that they pleased God by being solitary, and melancholy, and
+selfish&mdash;what do we read? the fruit of God&rsquo;s Spirit was in
+them; that they and the three thousand souls who were added to them,
+on the first day of their preaching, &ldquo;were all together, and had
+all things common, and sold their possessions, and goods, and parted
+them to all men, as every man had need, and continuing daily with one
+accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat
+their bread in gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having
+favour with all the people.&rdquo;&nbsp; Those were the fruits of God&rsquo;s
+Spirit in <i>them</i>.&nbsp; Till we see more of that sort of life and
+society in England, we shall not be able to pride ourselves on having
+much of God&rsquo;s Spirit among us.</p>
+<p>But above all, if anything will teach us that the strength of God&rsquo;s
+Spirit is not a strength which we must ask for for ourselves alone;
+that the blessings of God&rsquo;s kingdom are blessings which we cannot
+have in order to keep them to ourselves, but can only enjoy in as far
+as we share them with those around us; if anything, I say, ought to
+teach us that lesson, it is the Sacrament of the Lord&rsquo;s Supper.&nbsp;
+Just consider a moment, my friends, what a strange thing it is, if we
+will think of it, that the Lord&rsquo;s Supper, the most solemn and
+sacred thing with which a man can have to do upon earth, is just a thing
+which he cannot transact for himself, or by himself.&nbsp; Not alone
+in secret, in his chamber, but, whether he will or not, in the company
+of others, not merely in the company of his own private friends, but
+in the company of any or everyone, rich or poor, who chooses to kneel
+beside him; he goes with others, rich and poor alike, to the Lord&rsquo;s
+Table, and there the same bread, and the same wine, is shared among
+all by the same priest.&nbsp; If that means anything, it means this&mdash;that
+rich and poor alike draw life for their souls from the same well, not
+for themselves only, not apart from each other, but all in common, all
+together, because they are brothers, members of one family, as the leaves
+are members of the same tree; that as the same bread and the same wine
+are needed to nourish the bodies of all, the same spirit of God is needed
+to nourish the souls of all; and that we cannot have this spirit, except
+as members of a body, any more than a man&rsquo;s limb can have life
+when it is cut off and parted from him.&nbsp; This is the reason, and
+the only reason, why Protestant clergymen are forbidden, thank God!
+to give the Holy Sacrament of the Lord&rsquo;s Supper, to any one person
+singly.&nbsp; If a clergyman were to administer the Lord&rsquo;s Supper,
+to himself in private, without any congregation to partake with him,
+it would not be the Lord&rsquo;s Supper, it would be nothing, and worse
+than nothing; it would be a sham and a mockery, and, I believe, a sin.&nbsp;
+I do not believe that Christ would be present, that God&rsquo;s Spirit
+would rest on that man.&nbsp; For our Lord says, that it is where two
+or three are gathered together in His name, that He is in the midst
+of them.&nbsp; And it was at a supper, at a feast, where all the Apostles
+were met together, that our Lord divided the bread amongst them, and
+told them to share the cup amongst themselves, just as a sign that they
+were all members of one body&mdash;that the welfare of each of them
+was bound up in the welfare of all the rest that God&rsquo;s blessing
+did not rest upon each singly, but upon all together.&nbsp; And it is
+just because we have forgotten this, my friends&mdash;because we have
+forgotten that we are all brothers and sisters, children of one family,
+members of one body&mdash;because in short, we have carried our selfishness
+into our very religion, and up to the altar of God, that we neglect
+the Lord&rsquo;s Supper as we do.&nbsp; People neglect the Lord&rsquo;s
+Supper because they either do not know or do not like that, of which
+the Lord&rsquo;s Supper is the token and warrant.&nbsp; It is not merely
+that they feel themselves unfit for the Lord&rsquo;s Supper, because
+they are not in love and charity with all men.&nbsp; Oh! my dear friends,
+do not some of your hearts tell you, that the reason why you stay away
+from the Lord&rsquo;s Supper is because you do not <i>wish</i> to be
+fit for the Lord&rsquo;s Supper&mdash;because you do not like to be
+in love and charity with all men&mdash;because you do not wish to be
+reminded that you are equals in God&rsquo;s sight, all equally sinful,
+all equally pardoned&mdash;and to see people whom you dislike or despise,
+kneeling by your side, and partaking of the same bread and wine with
+you, as a token that God sees no difference between you and them; that
+God looks upon you all as brothers, however little brotherly love or
+fellow-feeling there may be, alas! between you?&nbsp; Or, again, do
+not some of you stay away from the Lord&rsquo;s Supper, because you
+see no good in going? because it seems to make those who go no better
+than they were before?&nbsp; Shall I tell you the reason of that?&nbsp;
+Shall I tell you why, as is too true, too many do come to the Lord&rsquo;s
+Supper, and so far from being the better for it, seem only the worse?&nbsp;
+Because they come to it in selfishness.&nbsp; We have fallen into the
+same false and unscriptural way of looking at the Lord&rsquo;s Supper,
+into which the Papists have.&nbsp; People go to the Lord&rsquo;s Supper
+nowadays too much to get some private good for their own souls, and
+it would not matter to many of them, I am afraid, if not another person
+in the parish received it, provided they can get, as they fancy, the
+same blessing from it.&nbsp; Thus they come to it in an utterly false
+and wrong temper of mind.&nbsp; Instead of coming as members of Christ&rsquo;s
+body, to get from Him life and strength, to work, in their places, as
+members of that body, they come to get something for themselves, as
+if there was nobody else&rsquo;s soul in the world to be saved but their
+own.&nbsp; Instead of coming to ask for the Spirit of God to deliver
+them from their selfishness, and make them care less about themselves,
+and more about all around them, they come to ask for the Spirit of God
+because they think it will make themselves higher and happier in heaven.&nbsp;
+And of course they do not get what they come for, because they come
+for the wrong thing.&nbsp; Thus those who see them, begin to fancy that
+the Lord&rsquo;s Supper is not, after all, so very important for the
+salvation of their souls; and not finding in the Bible actually written
+these words, &ldquo;Thou shalt perish everlastingly unless thou take
+the Lord&rsquo;s Supper,&rdquo; they end by staying away from it, and
+utterly neglecting it, they and their children after them; preferring
+their own selfishness, to God&rsquo;s Spirit of love, and saying, like
+Esau of old, &ldquo;I am hungry, and I must live.&nbsp; I must get on
+in this selfish world by following its selfish ways; what is the use
+of a spirit of love and brotherhood to me?&nbsp; If I were to obey the
+Gospel, and sacrifice my own interest for those around me, I should
+starve; what good will my birthright do me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Oh! my friends, I pray God that some of you, at least, may change
+your mind.&nbsp; I pray God that some of you may see at last, that all
+the misery and the burdens of this time, spring from one root, which
+is selfishness; and that the reason why we are selfish, is because we
+have not with us the Spirit of God, which is the spirit of brotherhood
+and love.&nbsp; Let us pray God now, and henceforth, to take that selfishness
+out of all our hearts.&nbsp; Let us pray God now, and henceforth, to
+pour upon us, and upon all our countrymen, ay, and upon the whole world,
+the spirit of friendship and fellow-feeling, the spirit which when men
+have among them, they need no laws to keep them from supplanting, and
+oppressing, and devouring each other, because its fruits are love, cheerfulness,
+peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, honesty, meekness, temperance
+Then there will be no need, my friends, for me to call you to the Supper
+of the Lord.&nbsp; You will no more think of staying away from it, than
+the Apostles did, when the Spirit was poured out on them.&nbsp; For
+what do we read that they did after the first Whit-Sunday?&nbsp; That
+altogether with one accord, they broke bread daily; that is, partook
+of the Lord&rsquo;s Supper every day, from house to house.&nbsp; They
+did not need to be told to do it.&nbsp; They did it, as I may say, by
+instinct.&nbsp; There was no question or argument about it in their
+minds.&nbsp; They had found out that they were all brothers, with one
+common cause in joy and sorrow&mdash;that they were all members of one
+body&mdash;that the life of their souls came from one root and spring,
+from one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the light and the life of men,
+in whom they were all one, members of each other; and therefore, they
+delighted in that Lord&rsquo;s Supper, just because it brought them
+together; just because it was a sign and a token to them that they did
+belong to each other, that they had one Lord, one faith, one interest,
+one common cause for this life, and for all eternity.&nbsp; And therefore
+the blessing of that Lord&rsquo;s Supper did come to them, and in it
+they did receive strength to live like children of God and members of
+Christ, and brothers to each other and to all mankind.&nbsp; They proved
+by their actions what that Communion Feast, that Sacrament of Brotherhood,
+had done for them.&nbsp; They proved it by not counting their own lives
+dear to them, but going forth in the face of poverty and persecution,
+and death itself, to preach to the whole world the good news that Christ
+was their King.&nbsp; They proved it by their conduct to each other
+when they had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods,
+and parted them to all, as every man had need.&nbsp; They proved it
+by needing no laws to bind them to each other from without, because
+they were bound to each other from within, by the love which comes down
+from God, and is the very bond of peace, and of every virtue which becomes
+a man.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XI&mdash;ASCENSION-DAY</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>And Jesus led them out as far as to Bethany; and he lifted up his
+hands and blessed them.&nbsp; And it came to pass while he blessed them,
+he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.&nbsp; And they
+worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem, with great joy; and were continually
+in the temple, praising and blessing God&mdash;LUKE xxiv. 50-53.</p>
+<p>On this day it is fit and proper for us&mdash;if we have understood,
+and enjoyed, and profited by the wonder of the Lord&rsquo;s Ascension
+into Heaven&mdash;to be in the same state of mind as the Apostles were
+after His Ascension: for what was right for them is right for us and
+for all men; the same effects which it produced on them it ought to
+produce on us.&nbsp; And we may know whether we are in the state in
+which Christian men ought to be, by seeing how far we are in the same
+state of mind as the Apostles were.&nbsp; Now the text tells us in what
+state of mind they were; how that, after the Lord Jesus was parted from
+them, and carried up into Heaven, they worshipped Him, and returned
+to Jerusalem, with great joy, and were continually in the temple, praising
+and blessing God.&nbsp; It seems at first sight certainly very strange
+that they should go back with great joy.&nbsp; They had just lost their
+Teacher, their Master&mdash;One who had been more to them than all friends
+and fathers could be; One who had taken them, poor simple fishermen,
+and changed the whole course of their lives, and taught them things
+which He had taught to no one else, and given them a great and awful
+work to do&mdash;the work of changing the ways and thoughts and doings
+of the whole world.&nbsp; He had sent them out&mdash;eleven unlettered
+working men&mdash;to fight against the sin and the misery of the whole
+world.&nbsp; And He had given them open warning of what they were to
+expect; that by it they should win neither credit, nor riches, nor ease,
+nor anything else that the world thinks worth having.&nbsp; He gave
+them fair warning that the world would hate them, and try to crush them.&nbsp;
+He told them, as the Gospel for to-day says, that they should be driven
+out of the churches; that the religious people, as well as the irreligious,
+would be against them; that the time would come when those who killed
+them would think that they did God service; that nothing but labour,
+and want, and persecution, and slander, and torture, and death was before
+them&mdash;and now He had gone away and left them.&nbsp; He had vanished
+up into the empty air.&nbsp; They were to see His face, and hear His
+voice no more.&nbsp; They were to have no more of His advice, no more
+of His teaching, no more of His tender comfortings; they were to be
+alone in the world&mdash;eleven poor working men, with the whole world
+against them, and so great a business to do that they would not have
+time to get their bread by the labour of their hands.&nbsp; Is it not
+wonderful that they did not sit down in despair, and say, &ldquo;What
+will become of us?&rdquo;&nbsp; Is it not wonderful that they did not
+give themselves up to grief at losing the Teacher who was worth all
+the rest of the world put together?&nbsp; Is it not wonderful that they
+did not go back, each one to his old trade, to his fishing and to his
+daily labour, saying, &ldquo;At all events we must eat; at all events
+we must get our livelihood;&rdquo; and end, as they had begun, in being
+mere labouring men, of whom the world would never have heard a word?&nbsp;
+And instead of that we read that they went back with great joy not to
+their homes but to Jerusalem, the capital city of their country, and
+&ldquo;were continually in the temple blessing and praising God.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Well, my friends, and if it is possible for one man to judge what another
+man would have done&mdash;if it is possible to guess what we should
+have done in their case&mdash;common-sense must show us this, that if
+He was merely their Teacher, they would have either given themselves
+up to despair, or gone back, some to their plough, some to their fishing-nets,
+and some, like Matthew, to their counting-houses, and we should never
+have heard a word of them.&nbsp; But if you will look in your Bibles,
+you will find that they thought Him much more than a teacher&mdash;that
+they thought Him to be the Lord and King of the whole world; and you
+will find that the great joy with which the disciples went back, after
+He ascended into heaven, came from certain very strange words that He
+had been speaking to them just before He ascended&mdash;words about
+which they could have but two opinions: either they must have thought
+that they were utter falsehood, and self-conceit, and blasphemy; and
+that Jesus, who had been all along speaking to them such words of wisdom
+and holiness as never man spake before, had suddenly changed His whole
+character at the last, and become such a sort of person as it is neither
+fit for me to speak of, or you to hear me speak of, in God&rsquo;s church,
+and in Jesus Christ&rsquo;s hearing, even though it be merely for the
+sake of argument; or else they must have thought <i>this</i> about His
+words, that they were the most joyful and blessed words that ever had
+been spoken on the earth; that they were the best of all news; the most
+complete of all Gospels for this poor sinful world; that what Jesus
+had said about Himself was true; and that as long as it was true, it
+did not matter in the least what became of them; it did not matter in
+the least what difficulties stood in their way, for they would be certain
+to conquer them all; it did not matter in the least how men might persecute
+and slander them, for they would be sure to get their reward; it did
+not matter in the least how miserable and sinful the world might be
+just then, for it was certain to be changed, and converted, and brought
+to God, to righteousness, to love, to freedom, to light, at last.</p>
+<p>If you look at the various accounts, in the four gospels, of the
+Lord&rsquo;s last words on earth, you will see, surely, what I mean.&nbsp;
+Let us take them one by one.</p>
+<p>St. Matthew tells us that, a few days before the Lord&rsquo;s ascension,
+He met His disciples on a mountain in Galilee, where he had appointed
+them to await him; and there told them, that all power was given to
+Him in heaven and earth.&nbsp; Was not that blessed news&mdash;was not
+that a gospel?&nbsp; That all the power in heaven and earth belonged
+to <i>Him</i>?&nbsp; To Him, who had all His life been doing good?&nbsp;
+To Him, in whom there had never been one single stain of tyranny or
+selfishness?&nbsp; To Him, who had been the friend of publicans and
+sinners?&nbsp; To Him, who had rebuked the very richest, and loved the
+very poorest?&nbsp; To him, who had shown that He had both the power
+and the will to heal every kind of sickness and disease?&nbsp; To Him,
+who had conquered and driven out, wherever He met them, all the evil
+spirits which enslave and torment poor sinful men?&nbsp; To Him, who
+had shown by rising from the dead, that He was stronger than even death
+itself?&nbsp; To Him, who had declared that He was the Son of God the
+Father, that the great God who had made heaven and earth, and all therein,
+was perfectly pleased and satisfied with Him, that He was come to do
+His Father&rsquo;s will, and not His own; that He was the ancient Lord
+of the earth, the I AM who was before Abraham?&nbsp; And He was now
+to have all power in heaven and earth!&nbsp; Everything which was done
+right in the world henceforth, was to be His doing.&nbsp; The kingdom
+and rule over the whole universe, was to be His.&nbsp; So He said; and
+His disciples believed Him; and if they believed Him, how could they
+but rejoice?&nbsp; How could they but rejoice at the glorious thought
+that He, the son of the village maiden, the champion of the poor and
+the suffering, was to have the government of the world for ever?&nbsp;
+That He, who all the while He had been on earth had showed that He was
+perfect justice, perfect love, perfect humanity, was to reign till He
+had put all His enemies under His feet?&nbsp; How could the world but
+prosper under such a King as that?&nbsp; How could wickedness triumph,
+while He, the perfectly righteous one, was King?&nbsp; How could misery
+triumph, while He, the perfectly merciful one, was King?&nbsp; How could
+ignorance triumph, while He, the perfectly wise one, who had declared
+that God the Father hid nothing from Him, was King?&nbsp; Unless the
+disciples had been more dull and selfish than the dumb beasts around
+them, what could they do but rejoice at that news?&nbsp; What matter
+to them if Jesus were taken out of their sight, as long as all power
+was given to Him in heaven and earth?</p>
+<p>But He had told them more.&nbsp; He had told them that they were
+not to keep this glorious secret to themselves.&nbsp; No: they were
+to go forth and preach the gospel of it, the good news of it, to every
+creature&mdash;to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God.&nbsp; The
+good news that God was the King of men, after all; that cruel tyrants
+and oppressors, and conquerors, were not their kings; that neither the
+storms over their heads, nor the earth under their feet, nor the clouds
+and the rivers whom the heathens used to worship in the hope of persuading
+the earth and the weather to be favourable to them, and bless their
+harvests, were their kings; that idols of wood and stone, and evil spirits
+of lust, and cruelty, and covetousness, were not their kings; but that
+God was their King; that He loved them, He pitied them in spite of all
+their sins; that He had sent His only begotten Son into the world to
+teach them, to live for them&mdash;to die for them&mdash;to claim them
+for His own.&nbsp; And, therefore, they were to go and baptize all nations,
+as a sign that they were to repent, and change, and put away all their
+old false and evil heathen life, and rise to a new life, they and their
+children after them, as God&rsquo;s children, God&rsquo;s family, brothers
+of the Son of God.&nbsp; And they were to baptize them into a name;
+showing that they belonged to those into whose name they were baptized;
+into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.&nbsp;
+They were to be baptized into the name of the Father, as a sign that
+God was their Father, and they His children.&nbsp; They were to be baptized
+into the name of the Son, as a sign that the Son, Jesus Christ, was
+their King and head; and not merely their King and head, but their Saviour,
+who had taken away the sin of the world, and redeemed it for God, with
+His own most precious blood; and not merely their Saviour, but their
+pattern; that they might know that they were bound to become as far
+as is possible for mortal man such sons of God as Jesus himself had
+been, like Him obedient, pure, forgiving, brotherly, caring for each
+other and not for themselves, doing their heavenly Father&rsquo;s will
+and not their own.&nbsp; And they were to baptize all nations into the
+name of the Holy Spirit, for a sign that God&rsquo;s Spirit, the Lord
+and giver of life, would be with them, to give them new life, new holiness,
+new manfulness; to teach, and guide, and strengthen them for ever.&nbsp;
+That was the gospel which they had to preach.&nbsp; The good news that
+the Son of God was the King of men.&nbsp; That was the name into which
+they were to baptize all nations&mdash;the name of children of God,
+members of Christ, heirs of a heavenly and spiritual kingdom, which
+should go on age after age, for ever, growing and spreading men knew
+not how, as the grains of mustard-seed, which at first the least of
+all seeds, grows up into a great tree, and the birds of the air come
+and lodge in the branches of it&mdash;to go on, I say, from age to age,
+improving, cleansing, and humanising, and teaching the whole world,
+till the kingdoms of the earth became the kingdoms of God and of His
+Christ.&nbsp; That was the work which the Apostles had given them to
+do.&nbsp; Do you not see, friends, that unless those Apostles had been
+the most selfish of men, unless all they cared for was their own gain
+and comfort, they must have rejoiced?&nbsp; The whole world was to be
+set right&mdash;what matter what happened to them?&nbsp; And, therefore,
+I said at the beginning of my sermon, that a sure way to know whether
+our minds were in a right state, was to see whether we felt about it
+as the Apostles felt.&nbsp; The Bible tells us to rejoice always, to
+praise and give thanks to God always.&nbsp; If we believe what the Apostles
+believed, we shall be joyful; if we do not, we shall not be joyful.&nbsp;
+If we believe in the words which the Lord spoke before He ascended on
+high, we shall be joyful.&nbsp; If we believe that all power in heaven
+and earth is His, we shall be joyful.&nbsp; If we believe that the son
+of the village maiden has ascended up on high, and received gifts for
+men, we shall be joyful.&nbsp; If we believe that, as our baptism told
+us, God is our Father, the Son of God our Saviour, the Spirit of God
+ready to teach and guide us, we shall be joyful.&nbsp; Do you answer
+me, &ldquo;But the world goes on so ill; there is so much sin, and misery,
+and folly, and cruelty in it; how can we be joyful?&rdquo;&nbsp; I answer:
+There was a hundred times as much sin, and misery, and folly, and cruelty,
+in the Apostles&rsquo; time, and yet they were joyful, and full of gladness,
+blessing and praising God.&nbsp; If you answer, &ldquo;But we are so
+slandered, and neglected, and misunderstood, and hard-worked, and ill-treated;
+we have no time to enjoy ourselves, or do the things which we should
+like best.&nbsp; How can we be joyful?&rdquo; I answer: So were the
+Apostles.&nbsp; They knew that they would be a hundred times as much
+slandered, and neglected, and misunderstood, as you can ever be; that
+they would have far less time to enjoy themselves, far less opportunity
+of doing the things which they liked best, than you can ever have; they
+knew that misery, and persecution, and a shameful death were before
+them, and yet they were joyful and full of gladness, blessing and praising
+God.&nbsp; And why should you not be?&nbsp; For what was true for them
+is true for you.&nbsp; They had no blessing, no hope, but what you have
+just as good a right to as they had.&nbsp; They were joyful, because
+God was their Father, and God is your Father.&nbsp; They were joyful
+because they and all men belonged to God&rsquo;s family; and you belong
+to it.&nbsp; They were joyful, because God&rsquo;s Spirit was promised
+to them, to make them like God; and God&rsquo;s Spirit was promised
+to you.&nbsp; They were joyful, because a poor man was king of heaven
+and earth; and that poor man, Jesus Christ, who was born at Bethlehem,
+is as much your King now as He was theirs then.&nbsp; They were joyful,
+because the whole world was going to improve under His rule and government;
+and the whole world is improving, and will go on improving for ever.&nbsp;
+They were joyful, because Jesus, whom they had known as a poor, despised,
+crucified man on earth, had ascended up to heaven in glory; and if you
+believe the same, you will be joyful too.&nbsp; In proportion as you
+believe the mystery of Ascension-day; if you believe the words which
+the Lord spoke before He ascended, you will have cheerful, joyful, hopeful
+thoughts about yourselves, and about the whole world; if you do not,
+you will be in continual danger of becoming suspicious and despairing,
+fancying the world still worse than it is, fancying that God has neglected
+and forgotten it, fancying that the devil is stronger than God, and
+man&rsquo;s sins wider than Christ&rsquo;s redemption till you will
+think it neither worth while to do right yourselves, nor to make others
+do right towards you.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XII&mdash;THE FOUNT OF SCIENCE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>(<i>A Sermon Preached at St. Margaret&rsquo;s Church, Westminster,
+May 4th</i>, 1851<i>, in behalf of the Westminster Hospital</i>.)</p>
+<p>When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and received
+gifts for men, yea, even for his enemies, that the Lord God might dwell
+among them.&mdash;PSALM lxviii. 18, and EPHESIANS iv. 8.</p>
+<p>If, a thousand years ago, a congregation in this place had been addressed
+upon the text which I have chosen, they would have had, I think, little
+difficulty in applying its meaning to themselves, and in mentioning
+at once innumerable instances of those gifts which the King of men had
+received for men, innumerable signs that the Lord God was really dwelling
+amongst them.&nbsp; But amongst those signs, I think, they would have
+mentioned several which we are not now generally accustomed to consider
+in such a light.&nbsp; They would have pointed not merely to the building
+of churches, the founding of schools, the spread of peace, the decay
+of slavery; but to the importation of foreign literature, the extension
+of the arts of reading, writing, painting, architecture, the improvement
+of agriculture, and the introduction of new and more successful methods
+of the cure of diseases.&nbsp; They might have expressed themselves
+on these points in a way that we consider now puerile and superstitious.&nbsp;
+They might have attributed to the efficacy of prayer, many cures which
+we now attribute&mdash;shall I say? to no cause whatsoever.&nbsp; They
+may have quoted as an instance of St. Cuthbert&rsquo;s sanctity, rather
+than of his shrewd observations, his discovery of a spring of water
+in the rocky floor of his cell, and his success in growing barley upon
+the barren island where wheat refused to germinate; and we might have
+smiled at their superstition, and smiled, too, at their seeing any consequence
+of Christianity, any token that the kingdom of God was among them, in
+Bishop Wilfred&rsquo;s rescuing the Hampshire Saxons from the horrors
+of famine, by teaching them the use of fishing-nets.&nbsp; But still
+so they would have spoken&mdash;men of a turn of mind no less keen,
+shrewd, and practical than we, their children; and if we had objected
+to their so-called superstition that all these improvements in the physical
+state of England were only the natural consequences of the introduction
+of Roman civilisation by French and Italian missionaries, they would
+have smiled at us in their turn, not perhaps without some astonishment
+at our stupidity, and asked: &ldquo;Do you not see, too, that <i>that</i>
+is in itself a sign of the kingdom of God&mdash;that these nations who
+have been for ages selfishly isolated from each other, except for purposes
+of conquest and desolation, should be now teaching each other, helping
+each other, interchanging more and more, generation by generation, their
+arts, their laws, their learning becoming fused down under the influence
+of a common Creed, and loyalty to one common King in Heaven, from their
+state of savage jealousy and warfare, into one great Christendom, and
+family of God?&rdquo;&nbsp; And if, my friends, as I think, those forefathers
+of ours could rise from their graves this day, they would be inclined
+to see in our hospitals, in our railroads, in the achievements of our
+physical Science, confirmation of that old superstition of theirs, proofs
+of the kingdom of God, realisations of the gifts which Christ received
+for men, vaster than any of which they had ever dreamed.&nbsp; They
+might be startled at God&rsquo;s continuing those gifts to us, who hold
+on many points a creed so different from theirs.&nbsp; They might be
+still more startled to see in the Great Exhibition of all Nations, which
+is our present nine-days&rsquo; wonder, that those blessings were not
+restricted by God even to nominal Christians, but that His love, His
+teaching, with regard to matters of civilisation and physical science,
+were extended, though more slowly and partially, to the Mahometan and
+the Heathen.&nbsp; And it would be a wholesome lesson to them, to find
+that God&rsquo;s grace was wider than their narrow theories; perhaps
+they may have learnt it already in the world of spirits.&nbsp; But of
+its <i>being</i> God&rsquo;s grace, there would be no doubt in their
+minds.&nbsp; They would claim unhesitatingly, and at once, that great
+Exhibition established in a Christian country, as a point of union and
+brotherhood for all people, for a sign that God was indeed claiming
+all the nations of the world as His own&mdash;proving by the most enormous
+facts that He had sent down a Pentecost, gifts to men which would raise
+them not merely spiritually, but physically and intellectually, beyond
+anything which the world had ever seen, and had poured out a spirit
+among them which would convert them in the course of ages, gradually,
+but most surely and really, from a pandemonium of conquerors and conquered,
+devourers and devoured, into a family of fellow-helping brothers, until
+the kingdoms of the world became the kingdoms of God and of His Christ.</p>
+<p>But I think one thing, if anything, would stagger their simple old
+Saxon faith; one thing would make them fearful, as indeed it makes the
+preacher this day, that the time of real brotherhood and peace is still
+but too far off; and that the achievements of our physical science,
+the unity of this great Exhibition, noble as they are, are still only
+dim forecastings and prophecies, as it were, of a higher, nobler reality.&nbsp;
+And they would say sadly to us, their children: &ldquo;Sons, you ought
+to be so near to God; He seems to have given you so much and to have
+worked among you as He never worked for any nation under heaven.&nbsp;
+How is it that you give the glory to yourselves, and not to Him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For do we give the glory of our scientific discoveries to God, in
+any real, honest, and practical sense?&nbsp; There may be some official
+and perfunctory talk of God&rsquo;s blessing on our endeavours; but
+there seems to be no real belief in us that God, the inspiration of
+God, is the very fount and root of the endeavours themselves; that He
+teaches us these great discoveries; that He gives us wisdom to get this
+wondrous wealth; that He works in us to will and to do of his good pleasure.&nbsp;
+True, we keep up something of the form and tradition of the old talk
+about such things; we join in prayer to God to bless our great Exhibition,
+but we do not believe&mdash;we do not believe, my friends&mdash;that
+it was God who taught us to conceive, build, and arrange that Great
+Exhibition; and our notion of God&rsquo;s blessing it, seems to be God&rsquo;s
+absence from it; a hope and trust that God will leave it and us alone,
+and not &ldquo;visit&rdquo; it or us in it, or &ldquo;interfere&rdquo;
+by any &ldquo;special providences,&rdquo; by storms, or lightning, or
+sickness, or panic, or conspiracy; a sort of dim feeling that we could
+manage it all perfectly well without God, but that as He exists, and
+has some power over natural phenomena, which is not very exactly defined,
+we must notice His existence over and above our work, lest He should
+become angry and &ldquo;visit&rdquo; us . . . And this in spite of words
+which were spoken by one whose office it was to speak them, as the representative
+of the highest and most sacred personage in these realms; words which
+deserve to be written in letters of gold on the high places of this
+city; in which he spoke of this Exhibition as an &ldquo;approach to
+a more complete fulfilment of the great and sacred mission which man
+has to perform in the world;&rdquo; when he told the English people
+that &ldquo;man&rsquo;s reason being created in the image of God, he
+has to discover the laws by which Almighty God governs His creations,
+and by making these laws the standard of his action, to conquer nature
+to his use, himself a divine instrument;&rdquo; when he spoke of &ldquo;thankfulness
+to Almighty God for what he has already <i>given</i>,&rdquo; as the
+first feeling which that Exhibition ought to excite in us; and as the
+second, &ldquo;the deep conviction that those blessings can only be
+realised in proportion to&rdquo;&mdash;not, as some would have it, the
+rivalry and selfish competition&mdash;but &ldquo;in proportion to the
+<i>help</i> which we are prepared to render to each other; and, therefore,
+by peace, love, and ready assistance, not only between individuals,
+but between all nations of the earth.&rdquo;&nbsp; We read those great
+words; but in the hearts of how few, alas! to judge from our modern
+creed on such matters, must the really important and distinctive points
+of them find an echo!&nbsp; To how few does this whole Exhibition seem
+to have been anything but a matter of personal gain or curiosity, for
+national aggrandisement, insular self-glorification, and selfish&mdash;I
+had almost said, treacherous&mdash;rivalry with the very foreigners
+whom we invited as our guests?</p>
+<p>And so, too, with our cures of diseases.&nbsp; We speak of God&rsquo;s
+blessing the means, and God&rsquo;s blessing the cure.&nbsp; But all
+we really mean by blessing them, is permitting them.&nbsp; Do not our
+hearts confess that our notion of His blessing the means, is His leaving
+the means to themselves and their own physical laws&mdash;leaving, in
+short, the cure to us and not preventing our science doing its work,
+and asserting His own existence by bringing on some unexpected crisis,
+or unfortunate relapse&mdash;if, indeed, the old theory that He does
+bring on such, be true?</p>
+<p>Our old forefathers, on the other hand, used to believe that in medicine,
+as in everything else, God taught men all that they knew.&nbsp; They
+believed the words of the Wise Man when he said that &ldquo;the Spirit
+of God gives man understanding.&rdquo;&nbsp; The method by which Solomon
+believed himself to have obtained all his physical science and knowledge
+of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop which groweth on the
+wall, was in their eyes the only possible method.&nbsp; They believed
+the words of Isaiah when he said of the tillage and the rotation of
+crops in use among the peasants of his country, that their God instructed
+them to discretion and taught them; and that even the various methods
+of threshing out the various species of grain came &ldquo;forth from
+the Lord of hosts, who is excellent in counsel, and wonderful in working.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Such a method, you say, seems to you now miraculous.&nbsp; It did
+not seem to our forefathers miraculous that God should teach man; it
+seemed to them most simple, most rational, most natural, an utterly
+every-day axiom.&nbsp; They thought it was because so few of the heathen
+were taught by God that they were no wiser than they were.&nbsp; They
+thought that since the Son of God had come down and taken our nature
+upon Him, and ascended up on high and received gifts for men, that it
+was now the right and privilege of every human being who was willing
+to be taught of God, as the prophet foretold in those very words; and
+that baptism was the very sign and seal of that fact&mdash;a sign that
+for every human being, whatever his age, sex, rank, intellect, or race,
+a certain measure of the teaching of God and of the Spirit of God was
+ready, promised, sure as the oath of Him that made heaven and the earth,
+and all things therein.&nbsp; That was Solomon&rsquo;s belief.&nbsp;
+We do not find that it made him a fanatic and an idler, waiting with
+folded hands for inspiration to come to him he knew not how nor whence.&nbsp;
+His belief that wisdom was the revelation and gift of God did not prevent
+him from seeking her as silver, and searching for her as hid treasures,
+from applying his heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning
+all things that are done under heaven; and we do not find that it prevented
+our forefathers.&nbsp; Ceadmon&rsquo;s belief that God inspired him
+with the poetic faculty, did not make him the less laborious and careful
+versifier.&nbsp; Bishop John&rsquo;s blessing the dumb boy&rsquo;s tongue
+in the name of Him whom he believed to be Word of God and the Master
+of that poor dumb boy, did not prevent his anticipating some of the
+discoveries of our modern wise men, in setting about a most practical
+and scientific cure.&nbsp; Alfred&rsquo;s continual prayers for light
+and inspiration made him no less a laborious and thoughtful student
+of war and law, of physics, language, and geography.&nbsp; These old
+Teutons, for all these superstitions of theirs, were perhaps as businesslike
+and practical in those days as we their children are in these.&nbsp;
+But that did not prevent their believing that unless God showed them
+a thing, they could not see it, and thanking Him honestly enough for
+the comparative little which He did show them.&nbsp; But we who enjoy
+the accumulated teaching of ages&mdash;we to whose researches He is
+revealing year by year, almost week by weeks wonders of which they never
+dreamed&mdash;we whom He has taught to make the lame to walk, the dumb
+to speak, the blind to see, to exterminate the pestilence and defy the
+thunderbolt, to multiply millionfold the fruits of learning, to annihilate
+time and space, to span the heavens, and to weigh the sun&mdash;what
+madness is this which has come upon us in these last days, to make us
+fancy that we, insects of a day, have found out these things for ourselves,
+and talk big about the progress of the species, and the triumphs of
+intellect, and the all-conquering powers of the human mind, and give
+the glory of all this inspiration and revelation, not to God, but to
+ourselves?&nbsp; Let us beware, beware&mdash;lest our boundless pride
+and self-satisfaction, by some mysterious yet most certain law, avenge
+itself&mdash;lest like the Assyrian conqueror of old, while we stand
+and cry, &ldquo;Is not this great Babylon which I have built?&rdquo;
+our reason, like his, should reel and fall beneath the narcotic of our
+own maddening self-conceit, and while attempting to scale the heavens
+we overlook some pitfall at our feet, and fall as learned idiots, suicidal
+pedants, to be a degradation, and a hissing, and a shame.</p>
+<p>However strongly you may differ from these opinions of our own forefathers
+with regard to the ground and cause of physical science, and the arts
+of healing, I am sure that the recollection of the thrice holy ground
+upon which we stand, beneath the shadow of venerable piles, witnesses
+for the creeds, the laws, the liberties, which those our ancestors have
+handed down to us, will preserve you from the temptation of dismissing
+with hasty contempt their thoughts upon any subject so important; will
+make you inclined to listen to their opinion with affection, if not
+with reverence; and save, perhaps, the preacher from a sneer when he
+declares that the doctrine of those old Saxon men is, in his belief,
+not only the most Scriptural, but the most rational and scientific explanation
+of the grounds of all human knowledge.</p>
+<p>At least, I shall be able to quote in support of my own opinion a
+name from which there can be no appeal in the minds of a congregation
+of educated Englishmen&mdash;I mean Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, the
+spiritual father of the modern science, and, therefore, of the chemistry
+and the medicine of the whole civilised world.&nbsp; If there is one
+thing which more than another ought to impress itself on the mind of
+a careful student of his works, it is this&mdash;that he considered
+science as the inspiration of God, and every separate act of induction
+by which man arrives at a physical law, as a revelation from the Maker
+of those laws; and that the faith which gave him daring to face the
+mystery of the universe, and proclaim to men that they could conquer
+nature by obeying her, was his deep, living, practical belief that there
+was One who had ascended up on high and led captive in the flesh and
+spirit of a man those very idols of sense which had been themselves
+leading men&rsquo;s minds captive, enslaving them to the illusions of
+their own senses, forcing them to bow down in vague awe and terror before
+those powers of Nature, which God had appointed, not to be their tyrants,
+but their slaves.&nbsp; I will not special-plead particulars from his
+works, wherein I may consider that he asserts this.&nbsp; I will rather
+say boldly that the idea runs through every line he ever wrote; that
+unless seen in the light of that faith, the grounds of his philosophy
+ought to be as inexplicable to us, as they would, without it, have been
+impossible to himself.&nbsp; As has been well said of him: &ldquo;Faith
+in God as the absolute ground of all human as well as of all natural
+laws; the belief that He had actually made Himself known to His creatures,
+and that it was possible for them to have a knowledge of Him, cleared
+from the phantasies and idols of their own imaginations and understandings;
+this was the necessary foundation of all that great man&rsquo;s mind
+and speculations, to whatever point they were tending, and however at
+times they might be darkened by too close a familiarity with the corruptions
+and meannesses of man, or too passionate an addiction to the contemplation
+of Nature.&nbsp; Nor should it ever be forgotten that he owed all the
+clearness and distinctness of his mind to his freedom from that Pantheism
+which naturally disposes to a vague admiration and adoration of Nature,
+to the belief that it is stronger and nobler than ourselves; that we
+are servants, and puppets, and portions of it, and not its lords and
+rulers.&nbsp; If Bacon had in anywise confounded Nature with God&mdash;if
+he had not entertained the strongest practical feeling that men were
+connected with God through One who had taken upon Him their nature,
+it is impossible that he could have discovered that method of dealing
+with physics which has made a physical science possible.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>No really careful student of his works, but must have perceived this,
+however glad, alas! he may have felt at times to thrust the thought
+of it from him, and try to think that Francis Bacon&rsquo;s Christianity
+was something over and above his philosophy&mdash;a religion which he
+left behind him at the church-door&mdash;or only sprinkled up and down
+his works so much of it as should shield him in a bigoted age from the
+suspicion of materialism.&nbsp; A strange theory, and yet one which
+so determined is man to see nothing, whether it be in the Bible or in
+the Novum Organum, but what each wishes to see, has been deliberately
+put forth again and again by men who fancy, forsooth, that the greatest
+of English heroes was even such an one as themselves.&nbsp; One does
+not wonder to find among the general characteristics of those writers
+who admire Bacon as a materialist, the most utter incapacity of philosophising
+on Bacon&rsquo;s method, the very restless conceit, the hasty generalisation,
+the hankering after cosmogonic theories, which Bacon anathematises in
+every page.&nbsp; Yes, I repeat it, we owe our medical and sanitary
+science to Bacon&rsquo;s philosophy; and Bacon owed his philosophy to
+his Christianity.</p>
+<p>Oh! it is easy for us, amid the marvels of our great hospitals, now
+grown commonplace in our eyes from very custom, to talk of the empire
+of mind over matter; for us&mdash;who reap the harvest whereof Bacon
+sowed the seed.&nbsp; But consider, how great the faith of that man
+must have been, who died in hope, not having received the promises,
+but seeing them afar off, and haunted to his dying day with glorious
+visions of a time when famine and pestilence should vanish before a
+scientific obedience&mdash;to use his own expression&mdash;to the will
+of God, revealed in natural facts.&nbsp; Thus we can understand how
+he dared to denounce all that had gone before him as blind and worthless
+guides, and to proclaim himself to the world as the one restorer of
+true physical philosophy.&nbsp; Thus we can understand how he, the cautious
+and patient man of the world, dared indulge in those vast dreams of
+the scientific triumphs of the future.&nbsp; Thus we can understand
+how he dared hint at the expectation that men would some day even conquer
+death itself; because he believed that man had conquered death already,
+in the person of its King and Lord&mdash;in the flesh of Him who ascended
+up on high, and led captivity captive, and received gifts for men.&nbsp;
+The &ldquo;empire of mind over matter?&rdquo;&nbsp; What practical proof
+had he of it amid the miserable alternations of empiricism and magic
+which made up the pseudo-science of his time; amid the theories and
+speculations of mankind, which, as he said, were &ldquo;but a sort of
+madness&mdash;useless alike for discovery or for operation.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+What right had he, more than any other man who had gone before him,
+to believe that man could conquer and mould to his will the unseen and
+tremendous powers which work in every cloud and every flower? that he
+could dive into the secret mysteries of his own body, and renew his
+youth like the eagle&rsquo;s?&nbsp; This ground he had for that faith&mdash;that
+he believed, as he says himself, that he must &ldquo;begin from God;
+and that the pursuit of physical science clearly proceeds from Him,
+the Author of good, and Father of light.&rdquo;&nbsp; This gave him
+faith to say that in this as in all other Divine works, the smallest
+beginnings lead assuredly to some result, and that the &ldquo;remark
+in spiritual matters, that the kingdom of God cometh without observation,
+is also found to be true in every great work of Divine Providence; so
+that everything glides on quietly without confusion or noise, and the
+matter is achieved before men either think or perceive that it is commenced.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+This it was which gave him courage to believe that his own philosophy
+might be the actual fulfilment of the prophecy, that in the last days
+many should run to and fro, and knowledge should be increased&mdash;words
+which, like hundreds of others in his works, sound like the outpourings
+of an almost blasphemous self-conceit, till we recollect that he looked
+on science only as the inspiration of God, and man&rsquo;s empire over
+nature only as the consequence of the redemption worked out for him
+by Christ, and begin to see in them the expressions of the deepest and
+most divine humility.</p>
+<p>I doubt not that many here will be far more able than I am practically
+to apply the facts which I have been adducing to the cause of the hospital
+for which I am pleading.&nbsp; But there is one consequence of them
+to which I must beg leave to draw attention more particularly, especially
+at the present era of our nation.&nbsp; If, then, these discoveries
+of science be indeed revelations and inspirations from God, does it
+not follow that all classes, even the poorest and the most ignorant,
+the most brutal, have an equal right to enjoy the fruits of them?&nbsp;
+Does it not follow that to give to the poor their share in the blessings
+which chemical and medical science are working out for us, is not a
+matter of charity or benevolence, but of <i>duty</i>, of indefeasible,
+peremptory, immediate duty?&nbsp; For consider, my friends; the Son
+of God descends on earth, and takes on Him not only the form, but the
+very nature, affections, trials, and sorrows of a man.&nbsp; He proclaims
+Himself as the person who has been all along ruling, guiding, teaching,
+improving men; the light who lighteth every man who cometh into the
+world.&nbsp; He proclaims Himself by acts of wondrous power to be the
+internecine foe and conqueror of every form of sorrow, slavery, barbarism,
+weakness, sickness, death itself.&nbsp; He proclaims Himself as One
+who is come to give His life for His sheep&mdash;One who is come to
+restore to men the likeness in which they were originally created, the
+likeness of their Father in Heaven, who accepteth the person of no man&mdash;who
+causeth His sun to shine on the evil and on the good, who sendeth His
+rain on the just and on the unjust, in whose sight the meanest publican,
+if his only consciousness be that of his own baseness and worthlessness,
+is more righteous than the most learned, respectable, and self-satisfied
+pharisee.&nbsp; He proclaims Himself the setter-up of a kingdom into
+which the publican and the harlot will pass sooner than the rich, the
+mighty, and the noble; a kingdom in which all men are to be brothers,
+and their bond of union loyalty to One who spared not His own life for
+the sheep, who came not to do His own, but the will of the Father who
+had sent Him, and who showed by His toil among the poor, the outcast,
+the ignorant, and the brutal, what that same will was like.&nbsp; With
+His own life-blood He seals this Covenant between God and man.&nbsp;
+He offers up His own body as the first-fruits of this great kingdom
+of self-sacrifice.&nbsp; He takes poor fishermen and mechanics, and
+sends them forth to acquaint all men with the good news that God is
+their King, and to baptize them as subjects of that kingdom, bound to
+rise in baptism to a new life, a life of love, and brotherhood, and
+self-sacrifice, like His own.&nbsp; He commands them to call all nations
+to that sacred Feast wherein there is neither rich nor poor, but the
+same bread and the same wine are offered to the monarch and to the slave,
+as signs of their common humanity, their common redemption, their common
+interest&mdash;signs that they derive their life, their health, their
+reason, their every faculty of body, soul, and spirit, from One who
+walked the earth as the son of a poor carpenter, who ate and drank with
+publicans and sinners.&nbsp; He sends down His Spirit on them with gifts
+of language, eloquence, wisdom, and healing, as mere earnests and first-fruits;
+so they said, of that prophecy that He would pour out His Spirit upon
+all flesh, even upon slaves and handmaids.&nbsp; And these poor fishermen
+feel themselves impelled by a divine and irresistible impulse to go
+forth to the ends of the world, and face persecution, insult, torture,
+and death&mdash;not in order that they may make themselves lords over
+mankind, but that they may tell them that One is their Master, even
+Jesus Christ, both God and man&mdash;that <i>He</i> rules the world,
+and will rule it, and <i>can</i> rule it, that in His sight there is
+no distinction of race, or rank, or riches, neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian,
+Scythian, bond or free.&nbsp; And, as a fact, their message has prevailed
+and been believed; and in proportion as it has prevailed, not merely
+individual sanctity or piety, but liberty, law, peace, civilisation,
+learning, art, science, the gifts which he bought for men with His blood,
+have followed in its train: while the nations who have not received
+that message that God was their King, or having received it have forgotten
+it, or perverted it into a superstition and an hypocrisy, have in exactly
+that proportion fallen back into barbarism and bloodshed, slavery and
+misery.&nbsp; My friends, if this philosophy of history, this theory
+of human progress, or as I should call it, this Gospel of the Kingdom
+of God mean anything&mdash;does it not mean this? this which our forefathers
+believed, dimly and inconsistently perhaps, but still believed it, else
+we had not been here this day&mdash;that we are not our own, but the
+servants of Jesus Christ, and brothers of each other&mdash;that the
+very constitution and ground-law of this human species which has been
+redeemed by Christ, is the self-sacrifice which Christ displayed as
+the one perfection of humanity&mdash;that all rank, property, learning,
+science, are only held by their possessors in trust from that King who
+has distributed them to each according as He will, that each might use
+them for the good of all, certain&mdash;as certain as God&rsquo;s promise
+can make man&mdash;that if by giving up our own interest for the interest
+of others, we seek first the kingdom of God, and the righteousness between
+man and man, which we call <i>mercy</i>, according to which it is constituted,
+all other things, health, wealth, peace, and every other blessing which
+humanity can desire, shall be added unto us over and above, as the natural
+and necessary fruits of a society founded according to the will of God,
+and declared in his Son Jesus Christ, and therefore according to those
+physical laws, whereof He is at once the Creator, the Director, and
+the Revealer?</p>
+<p>This was the faith of our forefathers, both laity and clergy&mdash;that
+the Lord was King, be the people never so unquiet; that men were His
+stewards and His pupils only, and not His vicars; that they were equal
+in His sight, and not the slaves and tyrants of each other; and that
+the help that was done upon earth, He did it all Himself.&nbsp; Dimly,
+doubtless, they saw it, and inconsistently: but they saw it, and to
+their faith in that great truth we owe all that has made England really
+noble among the nations.&nbsp; Of the fruits of that faith every venerable
+building around us should remind us.&nbsp; To that faith in the laity,
+we owe the abolition of serfdom, the freedom of our institutions, the
+laws which provide equal justice between man and man; to that faith
+in the clergy, and especially in the monastic orders, we owe the endowment
+of our schools and universities, the improvement of agriculture, the
+preservation and the spread of all the liberal arts and sciences, as
+far as they were then discovered; so that every one of those abbeys
+which we now revile so ignorantly, became a centre of freedom, protection,
+healing, and civilisation, a refuge for the oppressed, a well-spring
+of mercy for the afflicted, a practical witness to the nation that property
+and science were not the private and absolute possession of men, but
+only held in trust from God for the benefit of the common weal: and
+just in proportion as in the 14th and 15th centuries those institutions
+fell from their first estate, and began to fancy that their wealth and
+wisdom was their own, acquired by their own cunning, to be used for
+their own aggrandizement, they became an imposture and imbecility, an
+abomination and a ruin.&nbsp; And it was this faith, too, in a still
+nobler and clearer form, which at the Reformation inspired the age which
+could produce a Ridley, a Latimer, an Elizabeth, a Shakspeare, a Spenser,
+a Raleigh, a Bacon, and a Milton; which knit together, in spite of religious
+feuds and social wrongs, the nation of England with a bond which all
+the powers of hell endeavoured in vain to break.&nbsp; Doubtless, there
+too there was inconsistency enough.&nbsp; Elizabeth may have mixed up
+ambitious dynastic dreams with her intense belief that God had given
+her her wisdom, her learning, her mighty will, only to be the servant
+of His servants and defender of the faith.&nbsp; Men like Drake and
+Raleigh, while they were believing that God had sent them forth to smite
+with the sword of the Lord the devourers of the earth, the destroyers
+of religion, freedom, civilisation, and national life, may have been
+unfaithful to what they believed their divine mission, and fancied that
+they might use their wisdom and valour that God gave them for their
+selfish ends, till they committed (as some say) acts of rapacity and
+cruelty worthy of the merest buccaneer.&nbsp; But <i>that</i> was not
+what made them conquer&mdash;that was not what made the wealth and the
+might of Spain melt away before their little bands of heroes; but the
+same old faith, shining out in all their noblest acts and words, that
+&ldquo;the Lord <i>was</i> King, and that the help that was done upon
+earth, He did it all Himself?&rdquo;&nbsp; So again, Bacon may have
+fancied, and did fancy in his old age, that he might use his deep knowledge
+of mankind for his own selfish ends&mdash;that he might indulge himself
+in building himself up a name that might fill all the earth, that he
+who had done so much for God and for mankind, might be allowed to do
+at last somewhat for himself, and tempted, by a paltry bribe, fall for
+awhile, as David did before him, that God, and not he, might have the
+glory of all his wisdom.&nbsp; But then he was less than himself; then
+he had but lost sight of his lode-star.&nbsp; Then he had forgotten,
+but only for awhile, that he owed all to the teaching of that God who
+had given to the young and obscure advocate the mission of affecting
+the destinies of nations yet unborn.</p>
+<p>And believe me, my friends, even as it has been with our forefathers,
+so it will be with us.&nbsp; According to our faith will it be unto
+us, now as it was of old.&nbsp; In proportion as we believe that wealth,
+science, and civilisation are the work and property of man, in just
+that proportion we shall be tempted to keep them selfishly and exclusively
+to ourselves.&nbsp; The man of science will be tempted to hide his discoveries,
+though men may be perishing for lack of them, till he can sell them
+to the highest bidder; the rich man will be tempted to purchase them
+for himself, in order that he may increase his own comfort and luxury,
+and feel comparatively lazy and careless about their application to
+the welfare of the masses; he will be tempted to pay an exorbitant price
+for anything that can increase his personal convenience, and yet when
+the question is about improving the supply of necessaries to the poor,
+stand haggling about considerations of profitable investment, excuse
+himself from doing the duty which lies nearest to him by visions of
+distant profit, of which a thousand unexpected accidents may deprive
+him after all, and make his boasted scientific care for the wealth of
+the nation an excuse for leaving tens of thousands worse housed and
+worse fed than his own beasts of burden.&nbsp; The poor man will be
+tempted franctically to oppose his selfishness and unbelief to the selfishness
+and unbelief of the rich, and clutch from him by force the comfort which
+really belong to neither of them, in order that he may pride himself
+in them and misuse them in his turn; and the clergy will be tempted,
+as they have too often been tempted already, to fancy that reason is
+the enemy, and not the twin sister of faith; to oppose revelation to
+science, as if God&rsquo;s two messages could contradict each other;
+to widen the Manich&aelig;an distinction between secular and spiritual
+matters, so pleasant to the natural atheism of fallen man; to fancy
+that they honour God by limiting as much as possible His teaching, His
+providence, His wisdom, His love, and His kingdom, and to pretend that
+they are defending the creeds of the Catholic Church, by denying to
+them any practical or real influence on the economic, political, and
+physical welfare of mankind.&nbsp; But in proportion as we hold to the
+old faith of our forefathers concerning science and civilisation, we
+shall feel it not only a duty, but a glory and a delight, to make all
+men sharers in them; to go out into the streets and lanes of the city
+and call in the maimed, and the halt, and the blind, that they may sit
+down and take their share of the good things which God has provided
+in His kingdom for those who obey Him.&nbsp; Every new discovery will
+be hailed by us as a fresh boon from God to be bestowed by the rain
+and the sunshine freely upon us all.&nbsp; The sight of every sufferer
+will make us ready to suspect and to examine ourselves lest we should
+be in some indirect way the victim of some neglect or selfishness of
+our own.&nbsp; Every disease will be a sign to us that in some respect
+or other, the physical or moral laws of human nature have been overlooked
+or broken.&nbsp; The existence of an unhealthy locality, the recurrence
+of an epidemic, will be to us a subject of public shame and self-reproach.&nbsp;
+Men of science will no longer go up and down entreating mankind in vain
+to make use of their discoveries; the sanitary reformer will be no longer
+like Wisdom crying in the streets and no man regarding her; and in every
+ill to which flesh is heir we shall see an enemy of our King and Lord,
+and an intruder into His Kingdom, against which we swore at our baptism
+to fight with an inspiring and delicious certainty that God will prosper
+the right; that His laws cannot change; that nature, and the disturbances
+and poisons, and brute powers thereof, were meant to be the slaves,
+and not the tyrants of a race whose head has conquered the grave itself.</p>
+<p>This is no speculative dream.&nbsp; The progress of science is daily
+proving it to be an actual truth; proving to us that a large proportion
+of diseases&mdash;how large a proportion, no man yet dare say&mdash;are
+preventible by science under the direction of that common justice and
+mercy which man owes to man.&nbsp; The proper cultivation of the soil,
+it is now clearly seen, will exterminate fevers and agues, and all the
+frightful consequences of malaria.&nbsp; An attention to those simple
+decencies and cleanlinesses of life of which even the wild animals feel
+the necessity, will prevent the epidemics of our cities, and all the
+frightful train of secondary diseases which follow them, or supply their
+place.&nbsp; The question which is generally more and more forcing itself
+on the minds of scientific men is not how many diseases are, but how
+few are not, the consequences of man&rsquo;s ignorance, barbarism, and
+folly.&nbsp; The medical man is felt more and more to be as necessary
+in health as he is in sickness, to be the fellow-workman not merely
+of the clergyman, but of the social reformer, the political economist,
+and the statesman; and the first object of his science to be prevention,
+and not cure.&nbsp; But if all this be true, as true it is, we ought
+to begin to look on hospitals as many medical men I doubt not do already,
+in a sadder though in a no less important light.&nbsp; When we remember
+that the majority of cases which fill their wards are cases of more
+or less directly preventible diseases, the fruits of our social neglect,
+too often of our neglect of the sufferers themselves, too often also
+our neglect of their parents and forefathers; when we think how many
+a bitter pang is engendered and propagated from generation to generation
+in the noisome alleys and courts of this metropolis, by foul food, foul
+bedrooms, foul air, foul water, by intemperance, the natural and almost
+pardonable consequence of want of water, depressing and degrading employments,
+and lives spent in such an atmosphere of filth as our daintier nostrils
+could not endure a day: then we should learn to look upon these hospitals
+not as acts of charity, supererogatory benevolences of ours towards
+those to whom we owe nothing, but as confessions of sin, and worthy
+fruits of penitence; as poor and late and partial compensation for misery
+which we might have prevented.&nbsp; And when again, taking up scientific
+works, we find how vast a proportion of the remaining cases of disease
+are produced directly or indirectly by the unhealthiness of certain
+occupations, so certainly that the scientific man can almost prophesy
+the average shortening of life, and the peculiar form of disease, incident
+to any given form of city labour&mdash;when we find, to quote a single
+instance, that a large proportion&mdash;one half, as I am informed&mdash;of
+the female cases in certain hospitals, are those of women-servants suffering
+from diseases produced by overwork in household labour, especially by
+carrying heavy weights up the steep stairs of our London houses&mdash;when
+we consider the large proportion of accident cases which are the result,
+if not always of neglect in our social arrangements, still of danger
+incurred in labouring for us, we shall begin to feel that our debts
+towards the poorer classes, for whom this and other hospitals are instituted,
+swells and mounts up to a burden which ought to be and would be intolerable
+to us, if we had not some such means as this hospital affords of testifying
+our contrition for neglect for which we cannot atone, and of practically
+claiming in the hospital our brotherhood with those masses whom we pass
+by so carelessly in the workshop and the street.&nbsp; What matters
+it that they have undertaken a life of labour from necessity, and with
+a full consciousness of the dangers they incur in it?&nbsp; For whom
+have they been labouring, but for us?&nbsp; Their handiwork renders
+our houses luxurious.&nbsp; We wear the clothes they make.&nbsp; We
+eat the food they produce.&nbsp; They sit in darkness and the shadow
+of death that we may enjoy light and life and luxury and civilisation.&nbsp;
+True, they are free men, in name, not free though from the iron necessity
+of crushing toil.&nbsp; Shall we make their liberty a cloak for our
+licentiousness? and because they are our brothers and not our slaves,
+answer with Cain, &ldquo;Am I my brother&rsquo;s keeper?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+What if we have paid them the wages which they ask?&nbsp; We do not
+feed our beasts of burden only as long as they are in health, and when
+they fall sick leave them to cure themselves and starve&mdash;and these
+are not our beasts of burden; they are members of Christ, children of
+God, inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven.&nbsp; Prove it to them, then,
+for they are in bitter danger of forgetting it in these days.&nbsp;
+Prove to them, by helping to cure their maladies, that they are members
+of Christ, that they do indeed belong to Him who without fee or payment
+freely cured the sick of Jud&aelig;a in old time.&nbsp; Prove to them
+that they are children of God by treating them as such&mdash;as children
+of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, children of Him
+whose love is over all His works, children of Him who defends the widow
+and the fatherless, and sees that those who are in need or necessity
+have right, and who maketh inquiry for the blood of the innocent.&nbsp;
+Prove to them that they are inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven, by
+proving to them first of all that the Kingdom of Heaven exists, that
+all, rich and poor alike, are brothers, and One their Master, He who
+ascended up on high and led captivity captive, and received gifts for
+men, the gifts of healing, the gifts of science, the gifts of civilisation,
+the gifts of law, the gifts of order, the gifts of liberty, the gifts
+of the spirit of love and brotherhood, of fellow-feeling and self-sacrifice,
+of justice and humility, a spirit fit for a world of redeemed and pardoned
+men, in which mercy is but justice, and self-sacrifice the truest self-interest;
+a world, the King and Master of which is One who poured out his own
+life-blood for the sake of those who hated him, that men should henceforth
+live not for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again, and ascended
+up on high and received gifts for men, that the Lord God might dwell
+among them.</p>
+<p>And because all general truths can only be verified in particular
+instances, verify your general faith in that Christianity which you
+profess in this particular instance, by doing the duty which lies nearest
+to you, and <i>giving</i>, <i>as it is called</i>, to this hospital
+for which I now plead.</p>
+<p>Thanks to the spirit and the attainments of the average of English
+medical men and chaplains, to praise the management of any hospital
+which is under their care, is a needless impertinence.&nbsp; Do you
+find funds, there will be no fear as to their being well employed; and
+no fear, alas! either of their services being in full demand, while
+the sanitary state of vast streets of South London, lying close to this
+hospital, are in a state in which they are, and in which private cupidity
+and neglect seem willing to compel them to remain.&nbsp; It is on account
+of its contiguity to these neglected, destitute, and poisonous localities,
+that this hospital seems to me especially valuable.&nbsp; But though
+situated in a part of London where its presence is especially needed,
+it has not, from various causes which have arisen from no fault of its
+own, attracted as much public notice as some other more magnificent
+foundations; while it possesses one feature, peculiar I believe to it,
+among our London hospitals, which seems to me to render it especially
+deserving of support: I speak of the ward for incurable patients, in
+which, instead of ending their days in the melancholy wards of a workhouse,
+or amid those pestilential and crowded dwellings which have perhaps
+produced their maladies, and which certainly will aggravate them, they
+may have their heavy years of hopeless suffering softened by a continued
+supply of constant comforts, and constant medical solicitude, such as
+the best-conducted workhouse, or the most laborious staff of parish
+surgeons, and district visitors, ay, not even the benevolence and self-sacrifice
+of friends and relations, can possibly provide.&nbsp; I beseech you,
+picture to yourselves the amount of mere physical comfort, not to mention
+the higher blessings of spiritual teaching and consolation, accruing
+to some poor tortured cripple, in the wards of this hospital; compare
+it with the very brightest lot possible for him in the dwellings of
+the lower, or even of the middle classes of the metropolis; then recollect
+that these hospital luxuries, which would be unattainable by him elsewhere,
+are but a tithe of those which you, in his situation, would consider
+absolute necessaries, without which a life of suffering, ay, even of
+health, were intolerable&mdash;and do unto others this day, as you would
+that others should do unto you!</p>
+<p>I might have taken some other and more popular method of drawing
+your attention to this institution.</p>
+<p>I might have tried to excite your feelings and sympathies by attempts
+at pathetic or picturesque descriptions of suffering.&nbsp; But the
+minister of a just God is bound to proclaim that God demands not <i>sentiment</i>,
+but <i>justice</i>.&nbsp; The Bible knows nothing of the &ldquo;religious
+sentiments and emotions,&rdquo; whereof we hear so much talk nowadays.&nbsp;
+It speaks of <i>duty</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;Beloved, if God so loved us,
+we <i>ought</i> to love one another.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I might also have attempted to flatter you into giving, by representing
+this as a &ldquo;<i>good work</i>,&rdquo; a work of charity and piety,
+well pleasing to God; a sort of work of Protestant supererogation, fruits
+of faith which we may show, if we like, up to a certain not very clearly
+defined point of benevolence, but the absence of which probably will
+not seriously affect our eternal salvation, still less our right to
+call ourselves orthodox, Protestants, churchmen, worthy, kind-hearted,
+respectable, blameless.&nbsp; The Bible knows nothing of such a religion;
+it neither coaxes nor flatters, it <i>commands</i>.&nbsp; It demands
+mercy, because mercy is justice; and declares with what measure we mete
+to others, it shall be surely measured to us again.&nbsp; If therefore
+my words shall seem to some here, to be not so much a humble request
+as a peremptory demand, I cannot help it.&nbsp; I have pleaded the cause
+of this hospital on the only solid ground of which I am aware, for doing
+anything but evil to everyone around us who is not a private friend,
+or a member of one&rsquo;s own family.&nbsp; I ask you to help the poor
+to their share in the gifts which Christ received for men, because they
+are His gifts, and neither ours nor any man&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Among these
+venerable buildings, the signs and witnesses of the Kingdom of God,
+and the blessings of that Kingdom which for a thousand years have been
+spreading and growing among us&mdash;I ask it of you as citizens of
+that Kingdom.&nbsp; Prove your brotherhood to the poor by restoring
+to them a portion of that wealth which, without their labour, you could
+never have possessed.&nbsp; Prove your brotherhood to them in a thousand
+ways&mdash;in every way&mdash;in this way, because at this moment it
+happens to be the nearest and the most immediate, and because the necessity
+for it is nearer, more immediate, to judge by the signs of the times,
+and most of all by their self-satisfied unconsciousness of danger, their
+loud and shallow self-glorification, than ever it was before.&nbsp;
+Work while it is called to-day, lest the night come wherein no man can
+work, but only take his wages.</p>
+<p>Again I say, I may seem to some here to have pleaded the cause of
+this hospital in too harsh and peremptory a tone. . . .&nbsp; And yet
+I have a ground of hope, in the English love of simple justice, in the
+noble instances of benevolence and self-sacrifice among the wealthy
+and educated, which are, thank God! increasing in number daily, as the
+need of them increases&mdash;in these, I say, I have a ground of hope
+that there are many here to-day who would sooner hear the language of
+truth than of flattery; who will be more strongly moved toward a righteous
+deed by being told that it is their duty toward God, their country,
+and their fellow-citizens, than by any sentimental baits for personal
+sympathy, or for the love of Pharisaic ostentation.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XIII&mdash;FIRST SERMON ON THE CHOLERA</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>(<i>Sunday Morning</i>, <i>September</i> 27th, 1849.)</p>
+<p>God&rsquo;s judgments are from above, out of the sight of the wicked.&mdash;PSALM
+X. 5.</p>
+<p>We have just been praying to God to remove from us the cholera, which
+we call a judgment of God, a chastisement; and God knows we have need
+enough to do so.&nbsp; But we can hardly expect God to withdraw His
+chastisement unless we correct the sins for which He chastised us, and
+therefore unless we find out what particular sins have brought the evil
+on us.&nbsp; For it is mere cant and hypocrisy, my friends, to tell
+God, in a general way, that we believe He is punishing us for our sins,
+and then to avoid carefully confessing any particular sin, and to get
+angry with anyone who tells us boldly <i>which</i> sin God is punishing
+us for.&nbsp; But so goes the world.&nbsp; Everyone is ready to say,
+&ldquo;Oh! yes, we are all great sinners, miserable sinners!&rdquo;
+and then if you charge them with any particular sin, they bridle up
+and deny <i>that</i> sin fiercely enough, and all sins one by one, confessing
+themselves great sinners, and yet saying that they don&rsquo;t know
+what sins they have committed.&nbsp; No man really believes himself
+a sinner, no man really confesses his sins, but the man who can honestly
+put his finger on <i>this</i> sin or <i>that</i> sin which he has committed,
+and is not afraid to confess to God, &ldquo;<i>This</i> sin and <i>that</i>
+sin have I done&mdash;<i>this</i> bad habit and <i>that</i> bad habit
+have I cherished within me.&rdquo;&nbsp; Therefore, I say, it is no
+use for us Englishmen to dream that we can flatter and persuade the
+great God of Heaven and earth into taking away the cholera from us,
+unless we find out and confess openly what we have done to bring on
+the cholera, and unless we repent and bring forth fruits worthy of repentance,
+by amending our habits on that point, and doing everything for the future
+which shall not bring on the cholera, but keep it off.</p>
+<p>Do not let us believe this time, my friends, in the pitiable, insincere
+way in which all England believed when the cholera was here sixteen
+years ago.&nbsp; When they saw human beings dying by thousands, they
+all got frightened, and proclaimed a Fast and confessed their sins and
+promised repentance in a general way.&nbsp; But did they repent of and
+confess those sins which had caused the cholera?&nbsp; Did they repent
+of and confess the covetousness, the tyranny, the carelessness, which
+in most great towns, and in too many villages also, forces the poor
+to lodge in undrained stifling hovels, unfit for hogs, amid vapours
+and smells which send forth on every breath the seeds of rickets and
+consumption, typhus and scarlet fever, and worse and last of all, the
+cholera?&nbsp; Did they repent of their sin in that?&nbsp; Not they.&nbsp;
+Did they repent of the carelessness and laziness and covetousness which
+sends meat and fish up to all our large towns in a half-putrid state;
+which fills every corner of London and the great cities with slaughter-houses,
+over-crowded graveyards, undrained sewers?&nbsp; Not they.&nbsp; To
+confess their sins in a general way cost them a few words; to confess
+and repent of the real particular sins in themselves, was a very different
+matter; to amend them would have touched vested interests, would have
+cost money, the Englishman&rsquo;s god; it would have required self-sacrifice
+of pocket, as well as of time.&nbsp; It would have required manful fighting
+against the prejudices, the ignorance, the self-conceit, the laziness,
+the covetousness of the wicked world.&nbsp; So they could not afford
+to repent and amend of all <i>that</i>.&nbsp; And when those great and
+good men, the Sanitary Commissioners, proved to all England fifteen
+years ago, that cholera always appeared where fever had appeared, and
+that both fever and cholera always cling exclusively to those places
+where there was bad food, bad air, crowded bedrooms, bad drainage and
+filth&mdash;that such were the laws of God and Nature, and always had
+been; they took no notice of it, because it was the poor rather than
+the rich who suffered from those causes.&nbsp; So the filth of our great
+cities was left to ferment in poisonous cesspools, foul ditches and
+marshes and muds, such as those now killing people by hundreds in the
+neighbourhood of Plymouth; for one house or sewer that was improved,
+a hundred more were left just as they were in the first cholera; as
+soon as the panic of superstitious fear was past, carelessness and indolence
+returned.&nbsp; Men went back, the covetous man to his covetousness,
+and the idler to his idleness.&nbsp; And behold! sixteen years are past,
+and the cholera is as bad as ever among us.</p>
+<p>But you will say, perhaps, it is presumptuous to say that Englishmen
+have brought the cholera on themselves, that it is God&rsquo;s judgment,
+and that we cannot explain His inscrutable Providence.&nbsp; Ah! my
+friends, that is a poor excuse and a common one, for leaving a great
+many sins as they are!&nbsp; When people do not wish to do God&rsquo;s
+will, it is a very pleasant thing to talk about God&rsquo;s will as
+something so very deep and unfathomable, that poor human beings cannot
+be expected to find it out.&nbsp; It is an old excuse, and a great favourite
+with Satan, I have no doubt.&nbsp; Why cannot people find out God&rsquo;s
+will?&mdash;Because they do not <i>like</i> to find it out, lest it
+should shame them and condemn them, and cost them pleasure or money&mdash;because
+their eyes are blinded with covetousness and selfishness, so that they
+cannot see God&rsquo;s will, even when they <i>do</i> look for it, and
+then they go and cant about God&rsquo;s judgments; while those judgments,
+as the text says, are far above out of their mammon-blinded and prejudice-blinded
+sight.&nbsp; What do they mean by that word?&nbsp; Come now, my friends!
+let us face the question like men.&nbsp; What do you mean really when
+you call the cholera, or fever, or affliction at all, God&rsquo;s judgment?&nbsp;
+Do you merely mean that God is punishing you, you don&rsquo;t know for
+what, and you can&rsquo;t find out for what? but that all which He expects
+of you is to bear it patiently, and then go and do afterwards just what
+you did before?&nbsp; Dare anyone say that who believes that God is
+a God of justice, much less a God of love?&nbsp; What would you think
+of a father who punished his children, and then left them to find out
+as they could what they were punished for?&nbsp; And yet that is the
+way people talk of pestilence and of great afflictions, public and private.&nbsp;
+They are not ashamed to accuse God of a cruelty and an injustice which
+they would be ashamed to confess themselves!&nbsp; How can men, even
+religious men often, be so blasphemous?&nbsp; Mainly, I think, because
+they do not really believe in God at all, they only believe about Him&mdash;they
+believe that they ought to believe in Him.&nbsp; They have no living
+personal faith in God or Christ; they do not know God; they do not know
+God&rsquo;s character, and what to believe of Him, and what to expect
+of Him; or what they ought to say of Him; because they do not know,
+they have not studied, they have not loved the character of Christ,
+who is the express image and likeness of God.&nbsp; Therefore God&rsquo;s
+judgments are far away out of their sight; therefore they make themselves
+a God in their own image and after their own likeness, lazy, capricious,
+revengeful; therefore they are not afraid or ashamed to say that God
+sends pestilence into a country without showing that country why it
+is sent.&nbsp; But another great reason, I believe, why God&rsquo;s
+judgments in this and other matters are far above out of our sight,
+is the careless, insincere way of using words which we English have
+got into, even on the most holy and awful matters.&nbsp; I suppose there
+never was a nation in the world so diseased through and through with
+the spirit of cant, as we English are now: except perhaps the old Jews,
+at the time of our Lord&rsquo;s coming.&nbsp; You hear men talking as
+if they thought God did not understand English, because they cling superstitiously
+to the letter of the Bible in proportion as they lose its spirit.&nbsp;
+You hear men taking words into their mouths which might make angels
+weep and devils tremble, with a coolness and oily, smooth carelessness
+which shows you that they do not feel the force of what they are saying.&nbsp;
+You hear them using the words of Scripture, which are in themselves
+stricter and deeper than all the books of philosophy in the world, in
+such a loose unscriptural way, that they make them mean anything or
+nothing.&nbsp; They use the words like parrots, by rote, just because
+their forefathers used them before them.&nbsp; They will tell you that
+cholera is a judgment for our sins, &ldquo;in a sense,&rdquo; but if
+you ask them for what sins, or in what sense, they fly off from that
+<i>home</i> question, and begin mumbling commonplaces about the inscrutable
+decrees of Providence, and so on.&nbsp; It is most sad, all this; and
+most fearful also.</p>
+<p>Therefore, I asked you, my friends, what is the meaning of that word
+judgment?&nbsp; In common talk, people use it rightly enough, but when
+they begin to talk of God&rsquo;s judgments, they speak as if it merely
+meant punishments.&nbsp; Now judgment and punishment are two things.&nbsp;
+When a judge gives judgment, he either acquits or condemns the accused
+person; he gives the case for the plaintiff, or for the defendant: the
+punishment of the guilty person, if he be guilty, is a separate thing,
+pronounced and inflicted afterwards.&nbsp; His judgment, I say, is his
+<i>opinion</i> about the person&rsquo;s guilt, and even so God&rsquo;s
+judgments are the expression of His opinion about our guilt.&nbsp; But
+there is this difference between man and God in this matter&mdash;a
+human judge gives his opinion in words, God gives His in events: therefore
+there is no harm for a human judge when he has told a person why he
+must punish, to punish him in some way that has nothing to do with his
+crime&mdash;for instance, to send a man to prison because he steals,
+though it would be far better if criminals could be punished in kind,
+and if the man who stole could be forced either to make restitution,
+or work out the price of what he stole in hard labour.&nbsp; For this
+is God&rsquo;s plan&mdash;God always pays sinners back in kind, that
+He may not merely punish them, but <i>correct</i> them; so that by the
+kind of their punishment, they may know the kind of their sin.&nbsp;
+God punishes us, as I have often told you, not by His caprice, but by
+His laws.&nbsp; He does not <i>break His laws</i> to harm us; the laws
+themselves harm us, when we break them and get in their way.&nbsp; It
+is always so, you will find, with great national afflictions.&nbsp;
+I believe, when we know more of God and His laws, we shall find it true
+even in our smallest private sorrows.&nbsp; God is unchangeable; He
+does not lose His temper, as heathens and superstitious men fancy, to
+punish us.&nbsp; He does not change His order to punish us.&nbsp; <i>We</i>
+break His order, and the order goes on in spite of us and crushes us:
+and so we get God&rsquo;s judgment, God&rsquo;s opinion of our breaking
+His laws.&nbsp; You will find it so almost always in history.&nbsp;
+If a nation is laid waste by war, it is generally their own fault.&nbsp;
+They have sinned against the law which God has appointed for nations.&nbsp;
+They have lost courage and prudence, and trust in God, and fellow-feeling
+and unity, and they have become cowardly and selfish and split up into
+parties, and so they are easily conquered by their own fault, as the
+Bible tells us the Jews were by the Chaldeans; and their ruin is God&rsquo;s
+judgment, God&rsquo;s opinion plainly expressed of what He thinks of
+them for having become cowardly and selfish, and factious and disinterested.&nbsp;
+So it is with famine again.&nbsp; Famines come by a nation&rsquo;s own
+fault&mdash;they are God&rsquo;s plainly spoken opinion of what <i>He</i>
+thinks of breaking His laws of industry and thrift, by improvidence
+and bad farming.&nbsp; So when a nation becomes poor and bankrupt, it
+is its own fault; that nation has broken the laws of political economy
+which God has appointed for nations, and its ruin is God&rsquo;s judgment,
+God&rsquo;s plain-spoken opinion again of the sins of extravagance,
+idleness, and reckless speculation.</p>
+<p>So with pestilence and cholera.&nbsp; They come only because we break
+God&rsquo;s laws; as the wise poet well says:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Voices from the depths <i>of Nature</i> borne<br />Which vengeance
+on the guilty head proclaim.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&mdash;&ldquo;Of nature;&rdquo; of the order and constitution which
+God has made for this world we live in, and which if we break them,
+though God in his mercy so orders the world that punishment comes but
+seldom even to our worst offences, yet surely do bring punishment sooner
+or later if broken, in the common course of nature.&nbsp; Yes, my friends,
+as surely and naturally as drunkenness punishes itself by a shaking
+hand and a bloated body, so does filth avenge itself by pestilence.&nbsp;
+Fever and cholera, as you would expect them to be, are the expression
+of God&rsquo;s judgment, God&rsquo;s opinion, God&rsquo;s handwriting
+on the wall against us for our sins of filth and laziness, foul air,
+foul food, foul drains, foul bedrooms.&nbsp; Where they are, there is
+cholera.&nbsp; Where they are not, there is none, and will be none,
+because they who do not break God&rsquo;s laws, God&rsquo;s laws will
+not break them.&nbsp; Oh! do not think me harsh, my friends; God knows
+it is no pleasant thing to have to speak bitter and upbraiding words;
+but when one travels about this noble land of England, and sees what
+a blessed place it might be, if we would only do God&rsquo;s will, and
+what a miserable place it is just because we will not do God&rsquo;s
+will, it is enough to make one&rsquo;s soul boil over with sorrow and
+indignation; and then when one considers that other men&rsquo;s faults
+are one&rsquo;s own fault too, that one has been adding to the heap
+of sins by one&rsquo;s own laziness, cowardice, ignorance, it is enough
+to break one&rsquo;s heart&mdash;to make one cry with St. Paul, &ldquo;Oh
+wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Ay, my friends, the state of things in England now is enough to drive
+an earnest man to despair, if one did not know that all our distresses,
+and this cholera, like the rest, are indeed <i>God&rsquo;s</i> judgments;
+the judgments and expressed opinions, not of a capricious tyrant, but
+of a righteous and loving Father, who chastens us just because He loves
+us, and afflicts us only to teach us His will, which alone is life and
+happiness.&nbsp; Therefore we may believe that this very cholera is
+meant to be a blessing; that if we will take the lesson it brings, it
+will be a blessing to England.&nbsp; God grant that all ranks may take
+the lesson&mdash;that the rich may amend their idleness and neglect,
+and the poor amend their dirt and stupid ignorance; then our children
+will have cause to thank God for the cholera, if it teaches us that
+cleanliness is indeed next to holiness, if it teaches us, rich and poor,
+to make the workman&rsquo;s home what it ought to be.&nbsp; And believe
+me, my friends, that day will surely come; and these distresses, sad
+as they are for the time, are only helping to hasten it&mdash;the day
+when the words of the Hebrew prophets shall be fulfilled, where they
+speak of a state of comfort and prosperity, and civilisation, such as
+men had never reached in their time&mdash;how the wilderness shall blossom
+like the rose, and there shall be heaps of corn high on the mountain-tops,
+and the cities shall be green as grass on the earth, instead of being
+the smoky, stifling hot-beds of disease which they are now&mdash;and
+how from the city of God streams shall flow for the healing of the nations:
+strange words, those, and dim; too deep to be explained by any one meaning,
+or many meanings, such as our small minds can give them; but full of
+blessed cheering hope.&nbsp; For of whatever they speak, they speak
+at least of this&mdash;of a time when all sorrow and sighing shall be
+done away, when science and civilisation shall go hand in hand with
+godliness&mdash;when God shall indeed dwell in the hearts of men, and
+His kingdom shall be fulfilled among them, when &ldquo;His ways shall
+be known upon earth at last, and His saving health among all nations&rdquo;&mdash;of
+a time when all shall know Him, from the least unto the greatest, and
+be indeed His children, doing no sin, because they will have given up
+themselves, their selfishness and cruelty and covetousness, and stupidity
+and laziness, to be changed and renewed into God&rsquo;s likeness.&nbsp;
+Then all these distresses and pestilences, which, as I have shown you,
+come from breaking the will of God, will have passed away like ugly
+dreams, and all the earth shall be blessed, because all the earth shall
+at last be fulfilling the words of the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer, and God&rsquo;s
+will shall be done on earth, even as it is done in heaven.&nbsp; Oh!
+my friends, have hope.&nbsp; Do you think Christ would have bid us pray
+for what would never happen?&nbsp; Would He have bid us all to pray
+that God&rsquo;s will might be done unless He had known surely that
+God&rsquo;s will would one day be done by men on earth below even as
+it is done in heaven?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XIV&mdash;SECOND SERMON ON THE CHOLERA</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.&mdash;EXODUS
+xx. 5.</p>
+<p>In my sermon last Sunday I said plainly that cholera, fever, and
+many more diseases were man&rsquo;s own fault, and that they were God&rsquo;s
+judgments just because they were man&rsquo;s own fault, because they
+were God&rsquo;s plainspoken opinion of the sin of filth and of habits
+of living unfit for civilised Christian men.</p>
+<p>But there is an objection which may arise in some of your minds,
+and if it has not risen in <i>your</i> minds, still it has in other
+people&rsquo;s often enough; and therefore I will state it plainly,
+and answer it as far as God shall give me wisdom.&nbsp; For it is well
+to get to the root of all matters, and of this matter of Pestilence
+among others; for if we do believe this Pestilence to be God&rsquo;s
+judgment, then it is a spiritual matter most proper to be spoken of
+in a place like this church, where men come as spiritual beings to hear
+that which is profitable for their souls.&nbsp; And it <i>is</i> profitable
+for their souls to consider this matter; for it has to do, as I see
+more and more daily, with the very deepest truths of the Gospel; and
+accordingly as we believe the Gospel, and believe really that Jesus
+Christ is our Saviour and our King, the New Adam, the firstborn among
+many brethren, who has come down to proclaim to us that we are all brothers
+in Him&mdash;in proportion as we believe <i>that</i>, I say, shall we
+act upon this very matter of public cleanliness.</p>
+<p>The objection which I mean is this: people say it is very hard and
+unfair to talk of cholera or fever being people&rsquo;s own fault, when
+you see persons who are not themselves dirty, and innocent little children,
+who if they are dirty are only so because they are brought up so, catch
+the infection and die of it.&nbsp; You cannot say it is their fault.&nbsp;
+Very true.&nbsp; I did not say it was their fault.&nbsp; I did not say
+that each particular person takes the infection by his own fault, though
+I do say that nine out of ten do.&nbsp; And as for little children,
+of course it is not their fault.&nbsp; But, my friends, it must be someone&rsquo;s
+fault.&nbsp; No one will say that the world is so ill made that these
+horrible diseases must come in spite of all man&rsquo;s care.&nbsp;
+If it was so, plagues, pestilences, and infectious fevers would be just
+as common now in England, and just as deadly as they were in old times;
+whereas there is not one infectious fever now in England for ten that
+there used to be five hundred years ago.&nbsp; In ancient times fevers,
+agues, plague, smallpox, and other diseases, whose very names we cannot
+now understand, so completely are they passed away, swept England from
+one end to the other every few years, killing five people where they
+now kill one.&nbsp; Those diseases, as I said, have many of them now
+died out entirely; and those which remain are becoming less and less
+dangerous every year.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp; Simply because people are
+becoming more cleanly and civilised in their habits of living; because
+they are tilling and draining the land every year more and more, instead
+of leaving it to breed disease, as all uncultivated land does.&nbsp;
+It is not merely that doctors are becoming wiser: we ourselves are becoming
+more reasonable in our way of living.&nbsp; For instance, in large districts
+both of Scotland and of the English fens, where fever and ague filled
+the country and swept off hundreds every spring and fall thirty years
+ago, fever and ague are now almost unknown, simply because the marshes
+have all been drained in the meantime.&nbsp; So you see that people
+can prevent these disorders, and therefore it must be someone&rsquo;s
+fault if they come.&nbsp; Now, whose fault is it?&nbsp; You dare not
+lay the blame on God.&nbsp; And yet you do lay the fault on God if you
+say that it is no <i>man&rsquo;s</i> fault that children die of fever.&nbsp;
+But I know what the answer to that will be: &ldquo;We do not accuse
+God&mdash;it is the fault of the fall, Adam&rsquo;s curse which brought
+death and disease into the world.&rdquo;&nbsp; That is a common answer,
+and the very one I want to hear.&nbsp; What? is it just to say, as many
+do, that all the diseases which ever tormented poor little innocent
+children all over the world, came from Adam&rsquo;s sinning six thousand
+years ago, and yet that it is unfair to say that one little child&rsquo;s
+fever came from his parents&rsquo; keeping a filthy house a month ago?&nbsp;
+That is swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat&mdash;that God should
+be just in punishing all mankind for Adam&rsquo;s sin, and yet unjust
+in punishing one little child for its parents&rsquo; sin.&nbsp; If the
+one is just the other must be just too, I think.&nbsp; If you believe
+the one, why not believe the other?&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Because Adam&rsquo;s
+curse and &ldquo;original&rdquo; sin, as people call it, is a good and
+pleasant excuse for laying our sins and miseries at Adam&rsquo;s door;
+but the same rule is not so pleasant in the case of filth and fever,
+when it lays other people&rsquo;s miseries at our door.</p>
+<p>I believe that all the misery in the world sprung from Adam&rsquo;s
+disobedience and falling from God.&nbsp; &ldquo;By one man sin entered
+the world, and death by sin, and so death passed on all men, even on
+those who had not sinned after the likeness of Adam&rsquo;s transgression.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+So says the Bible, and I believe it says so truly.&nbsp; For this is
+the law of the earth, God&rsquo;s law which He proclaimed in the text.&nbsp;
+He does visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third
+and fourth generation of those who hate Him.&nbsp; It is so.&nbsp; You
+see it around you daily.&nbsp; No one can deny it.&nbsp; Just as death
+and misery entered into the world by one man, so we see death and misery
+entering into many a family.&nbsp; A man or woman is a drunkard, or
+a rogue, or a swearer: how often their children grow up like them!&nbsp;
+We have all seen that, God knows, in this very parish.&nbsp; How much
+more in great cities, where boys and girls by thousands&mdash;oh, shame
+that it should be so in a Christian land!&mdash;grow up thieves from
+the breast, and harlots from the cradle.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp; Why are
+there, as they say, and I am afraid say too truly, in London alone upwards
+of 10,000 children under sixteen who live by theft and harlotry?&nbsp;
+Because the parents of these children are as bad as themselves&mdash;drunkards,
+thieves, and worse&mdash;and they bring up their children to follow
+their crimes.&nbsp; If that is not the fathers&rsquo; sins being visited
+on the children, what is?</p>
+<p>How often, again, when we see a wild young man, we say, and justly:
+&ldquo;Poor fellow! there are great excuses for him, he has been so
+badly brought up.&rdquo;&nbsp; True, but his wildness will ruin him
+all the same, whether it be his father&rsquo;s fault or his own that
+he became wild.&nbsp; If he drinks he will ruin his health; if he squanders
+his money he will grow poor.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s laws cannot stop for
+him; he is breaking them, and they will avenge themselves on him.&nbsp;
+You see the same thing everywhere.&nbsp; A man fools away his money,
+and his innocent children suffer for it.&nbsp; A man ruins his health
+by debauchery, or a woman hers by laziness or vanity or self-indulgence,
+and her children grow up weakly and inherit their parents&rsquo; unhealthiness.&nbsp;
+How often again, do we see passionate parents have passionate children,
+stupid parents stupid children, mean and lying parents mean and lying
+children; above all, ignorant and dirty parents have ignorant and dirty
+children.&nbsp; How can they help being so?&nbsp; They cannot keep themselves
+clean by instinct; they cannot learn without being taught: and so they
+suffer for their parents&rsquo; faults.&nbsp; But what is all this except
+God&rsquo;s visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children?&nbsp;
+Look again at a whole parish; how far the neglect or the wickedness
+of one man may make a whole estate miserable.&nbsp; There is one parish
+in this very union, and the curse of the whole union it is, which will
+show us that fearfully enough.&nbsp; See, too, how often when a good
+and generous young man comes into his estate, he finds it so crippled
+with debts and mortgages by his forefathers&rsquo; extravagance, that
+he cannot do the good he would to his tenants, he cannot fulfil his
+duty as landlord where God has placed him, and so he and the whole estate
+must suffer for the follies of generations past.&nbsp; If that is not
+God visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, what is it?</p>
+<p>Look again at a whole nation; the rulers of two countries quarrel,
+or pretend to quarrel, and go to war&mdash;and some here know what war
+is&mdash;just because there is some old grudge of a hundred years standing
+between two countries, or because rulers of whose names the country
+people, perhaps, never heard, have chosen to fall out, or because their
+forefathers by cowardice, or laziness, or division, or some other sin,
+have made the country too weak to defend itself; and for that poor people&rsquo;s
+property is destroyed, and little infants butchered, and innocent women
+suffer unspeakable shame.&nbsp; If that is not God visiting the sins
+of the fathers on the children, what is it?</p>
+<p>It is very awful, but so it is.&nbsp; It is the law of this earth,
+the law of human kind, that the innocent often suffer for other&rsquo;s
+faults, just as you see them doing in cholera, fever, ague, smallpox,
+and other diseases which man can prevent if he chooses to take the trouble.&nbsp;
+There it is.&nbsp; We cannot alter it.&nbsp; Those who will may call
+God unjust for it.&nbsp; Let them first see, whether He is not only
+most just, but most merciful in making the world so, and no other way.&nbsp;
+I do not merely mean that whatever God does must be right.&nbsp; That
+is true, but it is a poor way of getting over the difficulty.&nbsp;
+God has taught us what is right and wrong, and He will be judged by
+His own rules.&nbsp; As Abraham said to Him when Sodom was to be destroyed:
+&ldquo;That be far from Thee, to punish the righteous with the wicked.&nbsp;
+Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?&rdquo;&nbsp; Abraham
+knew what was right, and he expected God not to break that law of right.&nbsp;
+And we may expect the same of God.&nbsp; And I may be able, I hope,
+in my sermon next Sunday, to show you that in this matter God does break
+the law of right.&nbsp; Nevertheless, in the meantime, this is His way
+of dealing with men.&nbsp; When Sodom was destroyed He brought righteous
+Lot out of it.&nbsp; But Sodom was destroyed, and in it many a little
+infant who had never known sin.&nbsp; And just so when Lisbon was swallowed
+up by an earthquake, ninety years ago, the little children perished
+as well as the grown people&mdash;just as in the Irish famine fever
+last year, many a doctor and Roman Catholic priest, and Protestant clergyman,
+caught the fever and died while they were piously attending on the sick.&nbsp;
+They were acting like righteous men doing their duty at their posts;
+but God&rsquo;s laws could not turn aside for them.&nbsp; Improvidence,
+and misrule, which had been working and growing for hundreds of years,
+had at last brought the famine fever, and even the righteous must perish
+by it.&nbsp; They had their sins, no doubt, as we all have; but then
+they were doing God&rsquo;s work bravely and honestly enough, yet the
+fever could not spare them any more than it could spare the children
+of the filthy parents, though they had not kept pigsties under their
+windows, nor cesspools at their doors.&nbsp; It could not spare them
+any more than it can spare the tenants of the negligent or covetous
+house-owner, because it is his fault and not theirs that his houses
+are undrained, overcrowded, destitute&mdash;as whole streets in many
+large towns are&mdash;of the commonest decencies of life.&nbsp; It may
+be the landlord&rsquo;s fault, but the tenants suffer.&nbsp; God visits
+the sins of the fathers upon the children, and landlords ought to be
+fathers to their tenants, and must become fathers to them some day,
+and that soon, unless they intend that the Lord should visit on them
+all their sins, and their forefathers&rsquo; also, even unto the third
+and fourth generation.</p>
+<p>For do not fancy that because the innocent suffer with the guilty
+that therefore the guilty escape.&nbsp; Seldom do they escape in this
+world, and in the world to come never.&nbsp; The landlord who, as too
+many do, neglects his cottages till they become man-sties, to breed
+pauperism and disease&mdash;the parents whose carelessness and dirt
+poison their children and neighbours into typhus and cholera&mdash;their
+brother&rsquo;s blood will cry against them out of the ground.&nbsp;
+It will be required at their hands sooner or later, by Him who beholds
+iniquity and wrong, and who will not be satisfied in the day of His
+vengeance by Cain&rsquo;s old answer, &ldquo;Am I my brother&rsquo;s
+keeper?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We are every one of us our brother&rsquo;s keeper; and if we do not
+choose to confess that, God will prove it to us in a way that we cannot
+mistake.&nbsp; A wise man tells a story of a poor Irish widow who came
+to Liverpool and no one would take her in or have mercy on her, till,
+from starvation and bad lodging, as the doctor said, she caught typhus
+fever, and not only died herself, but gave the infection to the whole
+street, and seventeen persons died of it.&nbsp; &ldquo;See,&rdquo; says
+the wise man, &ldquo;the poor Irish widow was the Liverpool people&rsquo;s
+sister after all.&nbsp; She was of the same flesh and blood as they.&nbsp;
+The fever that killed her killed them, but they would not confess that
+they were her brothers.&nbsp; They shut their doors upon her, and so
+there was no way left for her to prove her relationship, but by killing
+seventeen of them with fever.&rdquo;&nbsp; A grim jest that, but a true
+one, like Elijah&rsquo;s jest to the Baal priests on Carmel.&nbsp; A
+true one, I say, and one that we have all need to lay to heart.</p>
+<p>And I do earnestly trust in you that you will lay it to heart.&nbsp;
+We have had our fair warning here.&nbsp; We have had God&rsquo;s judgment
+about our cleanliness; His plain spoken opinion about the sanitary state
+of this parish.&nbsp; We deserve the fever, I am afraid; not a house
+in which it has appeared but has had some glaring neglect of common
+cleanliness about it; and if we do not take the warning God will surely
+some day repeat it.&nbsp; It will repeat itself by the necessary laws
+of nature; and we shall have the fever among us again, just as the cholera
+has reappeared in the very towns, and the very streets, where it was
+seventeen years ago, wherever they have not repented of and amended
+their filth and negligence.&nbsp; And I say openly, that those who have
+escaped this time may not escape next.&nbsp; God has made examples,
+and by no means always of the worst cottages.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s plan
+is to take one and leave another by way of warning.&nbsp; &ldquo;It
+is expedient that one man should die for the people, and that the whole
+nation perish not&rdquo; is a great and a sound law, and we must profit
+by it.&nbsp; So let not those who have escaped the fever fancy that
+they must needs be without fault.&nbsp; &ldquo;Think ye that those sixteen
+on whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, were sinners above all
+those that dwelt at Jerusalem?&nbsp; I say unto you, Nay, but except
+ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And I say again, as I said last Sunday, that this is a spiritual
+question, a Gospel sermon; for by your conduct in this matter will your
+faith in the Gospel be proved.&nbsp; If you really believe that Jesus
+Christ came down from heaven and sacrificed Himself for you, you will
+be ready to sacrifice yourselves in this matter for those for whom He
+died; to sacrifice, without stint, your thought, your time, your money,
+and your labour.&nbsp; If you really believe that He is the sworn enemy
+of all misery and disease, you will show yourselves too the sworn enemies
+of everything that causes misery and disease, and work together like
+men to put all pestilential filth and damp out of this parish.&nbsp;
+If you really believe that you are all brothers, equal in the sight
+of God and Christ, you will do all you can to save your brothers from
+sickness and the miseries which follow it.&nbsp; If you really believe
+that your children are God&rsquo;s children, that at baptism God declares
+your little ones to be His, you will be ready to take any care or trouble,
+however new or strange it may seem, to keep your children safe from
+all foul smells, foul food, foul water, and foul air, that they may
+grow up healthy, hearty, and cleanly, fit to serve God as christened,
+free, and civilised Englishmen should in this great and awful time,
+the most wonderful time that the earth has ever seen, into which it
+has pleased God of His great mercy to let us all be born.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XV&mdash;THIRD SERMON ON THE CHOLERA</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
+Fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them
+that hate me.&mdash;EXODUS xx. 6.</p>
+<p>Many of you were perhaps surprised and puzzled by my saying in my
+last sermon that God&rsquo;s visiting the sins of the fathers on the
+children, and letting the innocent suffer for the guilty, was a blessing
+and not a curse&mdash;a sign of man&rsquo;s honour and redemption, not
+of his shame and ruin.&nbsp; But the more I have thought of those words,
+the more glad I am that I spoke them boldly, the more true I find them
+to be.</p>
+<p>I say that there is in them the very deepest and surest ground for
+hope.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; some of you may say, &ldquo;to be sure
+when we see the innocent suffering for the guilty, it is a plain proof
+that another world must come some day, in which all that unfairness
+shall be set right.&rdquo;&nbsp; Well, my friends, it does prove that,
+but I should be very sorry if it did not prove a great deal more than
+that&mdash;this suffering of the innocent for the guilty.&nbsp; I have
+no heart to talk to you about the next life, unless I can give you some
+comfort, some reason for trusting in God in this life.&nbsp; I never
+saw much good come of it.&nbsp; I never found it do my own soul any
+good, to be told: &ldquo;<i>This</i> life and <i>this</i> world in which
+you now live are given up irremediably to misrule and deceit, poverty
+and pestilence, death and the devil.&nbsp; You cannot expect to set
+this world right&mdash;you must look to the next world.&nbsp; Everything
+will be set right there.&rdquo;&nbsp; That sounds fine and resigned;
+and there seems to be a great deal of trust in God in it; but, as I
+think, there is little or none; and I say so from the fruits I see it
+bear.&nbsp; If people believe that this world is the devil&rsquo;s world,
+and only the next world God&rsquo;s, they are easily tempted to say:
+&ldquo;Very well, then, we must serve the devil in this world, and God
+in the next.&nbsp; We must, of course, take great care to get our souls
+saved when we die, that we may go to heaven and live for ever and ever;
+but as to this world and this life, why, we must follow the ways of
+the world.&nbsp; It is not our fault that they have nothing to do with
+God.&nbsp; It is not our fault that society and the world are all rotten
+and accursed; we found them so when we were born, and we must make the
+best of a bad matter and sail as the world does, and be covetous and
+mean and anxious&mdash;how can we help it?&mdash;and stand on our own
+rights, and take care of number one; and even do what is not quite right
+now and then&mdash;for how can we help it?&mdash;or how else shall we
+get on in this poor lost, fallen, sinful world!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And so it comes, my friends, that you see people professing&mdash;ay,
+and believing, Gospel doctrines, and struggling and reading, and, as
+they fancy, praying, morning, noon, and night, to get their own souls
+saved&mdash;who yet, if you are to judge by their conduct, are little
+better than rogues and heathens; whose only law of life seems to be
+the fear of what people will say of them; who, like Balaam the son of
+Bosor, are trying daily to serve the devil without God finding it out,
+worshipping the evil spirit, as that evil spirit wanted our blessed
+Lord to do, because they believed his lie, which Christ denied&mdash;that
+the glory of this world belongs to the evil one; and then comforting
+themselves like Balaam their father, in the hope that they shall die
+the death of the righteous, and their last end be like his.</p>
+<p>Now I say my friends that this is a lie, and comes from the father
+of lies, who tempts every man, as he tempted our Lord, to believe that
+the power and glory of this world are his, that man&rsquo;s flesh and
+body, if not his soul, belongs to him.&nbsp; I say, it is no such thing.&nbsp;
+The world is God&rsquo;s world.&nbsp; Man is God&rsquo;s creature, made
+in God&rsquo;s image, and not in that of a beast or a devil.&nbsp; The
+kingdom, the power, and the glory, <i>are</i> God&rsquo;s now.&nbsp;
+You say so every day in the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer&mdash;believe it.&nbsp;
+St. James tells you not to curse men, because they are made in the likeness
+of God now&mdash;not <i>will</i> be made in God&rsquo;s likeness after
+they die.&nbsp; Believe that; do not be afraid of it, strange as it
+may seem to understand.&nbsp; It is in the Bible, and you profess to
+believe that what is in the Bible is true.&nbsp; And I say that this
+suffering of the innocent for the guilty is a proof of that.&nbsp; If
+man was not made so that the innocent could suffer for the guilty, he
+could not have been redeemed at all, for there would have been no use
+or meaning in Christ&rsquo;s dying for us, the just for the unjust.&nbsp;
+And more, if the innocent could not suffer for the guilty we should
+be like the beasts that perish.</p>
+<p>Now, why?&nbsp; Because just in proportion as any creature is low&mdash;I
+mean in the scale of life&mdash;just in that proportion it does without
+its fellow-creatures, it lives by itself and cares for no other of its
+kind.&nbsp; A vegetable is a meaner thing than an animal, and one great
+sign of its being meaner is, that vegetables cannot do each other any
+good&mdash;cannot help each other&mdash;cannot even hurt each other,
+except in a mere mechanical way, by overgrowing each other or robbing
+each other&rsquo;s roots; but what would it matter to a tree if all
+the other trees in the world were to die?&nbsp; So with wild animals.&nbsp;
+What matters it to a bird or a beast, whether other birds and beasts
+are ill off or well off, wise or stupid?&nbsp; Each one takes care of
+itself&mdash;each one shifts for itself.&nbsp; But you will say &ldquo;Bees
+help each other and depend upon each other for life and death.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+True, and for that very reason we look upon bees as being more wise
+and more wonderful than almost any animals, just because they are so
+much like us human beings in depending on each other.&nbsp; You will
+say again, that among dogs, a riotous hound will lead a whole pack wrong&mdash;a
+staunch and well-broken hound will keep a whole pack right; and that
+dogs do depend upon each other in very wonderful ways.&nbsp; Most true,
+but that only proves more completely what I want to get at.&nbsp; It
+is the <i>tame</i> dog, which man has taken and broken in, and made
+to partake more or less of man&rsquo;s wisdom and cunning, who depends
+on his fellow-dogs.&nbsp; The wild dogs in foreign countries, on the
+other hand, are just as selfish, living every one for himself, as so
+many foxes might be.&nbsp; And you find this same rule holding as you
+rise.&nbsp; The more a man is like a wild animal, the more of a <i>savage</i>
+he is, so much more he depends on himself, and not on others&mdash;in
+short, the less civilised he is; for civilised means being a citizen,
+and learning to live in cities, and to help and depend upon each other.&nbsp;
+And our common English word &ldquo;civil&rdquo; comes from the same
+root.&nbsp; A man is &ldquo;civil&rdquo; who feels that he depends upon
+his neighbours, and his neighbours on him; that they are his fellow-citizens,
+and that he owes them a duty and a friendship.&nbsp; And, therefore,
+a man is truly and sincerely civil, just in proportion as he is civilised;
+in proportion as he is a good citizen, a good Christian&mdash;in one
+word, a <i>good man.</i></p>
+<p>Ay, that is what I want to come to, my friends&mdash;that word <i>man</i>,
+and what it means.&nbsp; The law of man&rsquo;s life, the constitution
+and order on which, and on no other, God has made man, is <i>this</i>&mdash;to
+depend upon his fellow-men, to be their brothers, in flesh and in spirit;
+for we are brothers to each other.&nbsp; God made of one blood all nations
+to dwell on the face of the earth.&nbsp; The same food will feed us
+all alike.&nbsp; The same cholera will kill us all alike.&nbsp; And
+we can give the cholera to each other; we can give each other the infection,
+not merely by our touch and breath, for diseased beasts can do that,
+but by housing our families and our tenants badly, feeding them badly,
+draining the land around them badly.&nbsp; This is the secret of the
+innocent suffering for the guilty, in pestilences, and famines, and
+disorders, which are handed down from father to child, that we are all
+of the same blood.&nbsp; This is the reason why Adam&rsquo;s sin infected
+our whole race.&nbsp; Adam died, and through him all his children have
+received a certain property of sinfulness and of dying, just as one
+bee transmits to all his children and future generations the property
+of making honey, or a lion transmits to all its future generations the
+property of being a beast of prey.&nbsp; For by sinning and cutting
+himself off from God Adam gave way to the lower part of him, his flesh,
+his animal nature, and therefore he died as other animals do.&nbsp;
+And we his children, who all of us give way to our flesh, to our animal
+nature, every hour, alas! we die too.&nbsp; And in proportion as we
+give way to our animal natures we are liable to die; and the less we
+give way to our animal natures, the less we are liable to die.&nbsp;
+We have all sinned; we have all become fleshly animal creatures more
+or less; and therefore we must all die sooner or later.&nbsp; But in
+proportion as we become Christians, in proportion as we become civilised,
+in short, in proportion as we become true men, and conquer and keep
+in order this flesh of ours, and this earth around us, by the teaching
+of God&rsquo;s spirit, as we were meant to do, just so far will length
+of life increase and population increase.&nbsp; For while people are
+savages, that is, while they give themselves up utterly to their own
+fleshly lusts, and become mere animals like the wild Indians, they cannot
+increase in number.&nbsp; They are exposed, by their own lusts and ignorance
+and laziness, to every sort of disease; they turn themselves into beasts
+of prey, and are continually fighting and destroying each other, so
+that they, seldom or never increase in numbers, and by war, drunkenness,
+smallpox, fevers, and other diseases too horrible to mention, the fruit
+of their own lusts, whole tribes of them are swept utterly off the face
+of the earth.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp; They are like the beasts, and like
+the beasts they perish.&nbsp; Whereas, just in proportion as any nation
+lives according to the spirit and not according to the flesh; in proportion
+as it conquers its own fleshly appetites which tempt it to mere laziness,
+pleasure, and ignorance, and lives according to the spirit in industry,
+cleanliness, chaste marriage, and knowledge, earthly and heavenly, the
+length of life and the number of the population begin to increase at
+once, just as they are doing, thank God! in England now; because Englishmen
+are learning more and more that this earth is God&rsquo;s earth, and
+that He works it by righteous and infallible laws, and has put them
+on it to till it and subdue it; that civilisation and industry are the
+cause of Christ and of God; and that without them His kingdom will not
+come, neither will His will be done on earth.</p>
+<p>But now comes a very important question.&nbsp; The beasts are none
+the worse for giving way to their flesh and being mere animals.&nbsp;
+They increase and multiply and are happy enough; whereas men, if they
+give way to their flesh and become animals, become fewer and weaker,
+and stupider, and viler, and more miserable, generation after generation.&nbsp;
+Why?&nbsp; Because the animals are meant to be animals, and men are
+not.&nbsp; Men are meant to be men, and conquer their animal nature
+by the strength which God gives to their spirits.&nbsp; And as long
+as they do not do so; as long as they remain savage, sottish, ignorant,
+they are living in a lie, in a diseased wrong state, just as God did
+<i>not</i> mean them to live; and therefore they perish; therefore these
+fevers, and agues, and choleras, war, starvation, tyranny, and all the
+ills which flesh is heir to, crush them down.&nbsp; Therefore they are
+at the mercy of the earth beneath their feet, and the skies above their
+head; at the mercy of rain and cold; at the mercy of each other&rsquo;s
+selfishness, laziness, stupidity, cruelty; in short, at the mercy of
+the brute material earth, and their own fleshly lusts and the fleshly
+lusts of others, because they love to walk after the flesh and not after
+the spirit&mdash;because they like the likeness of the old Adam who
+is of the earth earthy, better than that of the new Adam who is the
+Lord from heaven&mdash;because they like to be animals, when Christ
+has made them in his own image, and redeemed them with His own blood,
+and taught them with His own example, and made them men.&nbsp; He who
+will be a man, let him believe that he is redeemed by Christ, and must
+be like Christ in everything he says and does.&nbsp; If he would carry
+that out, if he would live perfectly by faith in God, if he would do
+God&rsquo;s will utterly and in all things he would soon find that those
+glorious old words still stood true: &ldquo;Thou shalt not be afraid
+of the arrow by night, nor of the pestilence which walketh in the noonday;
+a thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand,
+but it shall not come nigh thee.&rdquo;&nbsp; For such a man would know
+how to defend himself against evil; God would teach him not only to
+defend himself, but to defend those around him.&nbsp; He would be like
+his Lord and Master, a fountain of wisdom and healing and safety to
+all his neighbours.&nbsp; We might any one of us be that.&nbsp; It is
+everyone&rsquo;s fault more or less that he is not.&nbsp; Each of us
+who is educated, civilised, converted to the knowledge and love of God,
+it is his sin and shame that he is <i>not</i> that.&nbsp; Above all,
+it is the clergyman&rsquo;s sin and shame that he is not.&nbsp; Ay,
+believe me, when I blame you, I blame myself ten thousand times more.&nbsp;
+I believe there is many a sin and sorrow from which I might have saved
+you here, if I had dealt with you more as a man should deal who believes
+that you and I are brothers, made in the same image of God, redeemed
+by the same blood of Christ.&nbsp; And I believe that I shall be punished
+for every neglect of you for which I have been ever guilty.&nbsp; I
+believe it, and I thank God for it; for I do not see how a clergyman,
+or anyone else, can learn his duty, except by God&rsquo;s judging him,
+and punishing him, and setting his sins before his face.</p>
+<p>Yes, my friends, it is good for us to be afflicted, good for us to
+suffer anything that will teach us this great truth, that we are our
+brother&rsquo;s keepers; that we are all one family, and that where
+one of the members suffers, all the other members suffer with it; and
+that if one of the members has cause to rejoice, all the others will
+have cause to rejoice with it.&nbsp; A blessed thing to know, is that&mdash;though
+whether we know it or not, we shall find it true.&nbsp; If we give way
+to our animal nature, and try to live as the beasts do, each one caring
+for his own selfish pleasure&mdash;still we shall find out that we cannot
+do it.&nbsp; We shall find out, as those Liverpool people did with the
+Irish widow, that our fellow-men <i>are</i> our brothers&mdash;that
+what hurts them will be sure in some strange indirect way to hurt us.&nbsp;
+Our brothers here have had the fever, and we have escaped; but we have
+felt the fruits of it, in our purses&mdash;in fear, and anxiety, and
+distress, and trouble&mdash;we have found out that they could not have
+the fever without our suffering for it, more or less.&nbsp; You see
+we are one family, we men and women; and our relationship will assert
+itself in spite of our forgetfulness and our selfishness.&nbsp; How
+much better to claim our brotherhood with each other, and to act upon
+it&mdash;to live as brothers indeed.&nbsp; That would be to make it
+a blessing, and not a curse; for as I said before, just because it is
+in our power to injure each other, therefore it is in our power to help
+each other.&nbsp; God has bound us together for good and for evil, for
+better for worse.&nbsp; Oh! let it be henceforward in this parish for
+better, and not for worse.&nbsp; Oh! every one of you, whether you be
+rich or poor, farmer or labourer, man or woman, do not be ashamed to
+own yourselves to be brothers and sisters, members of one family, which
+as it all fell together in the old Adam, so it has all risen together
+in the new Adam, Jesus Christ.&nbsp; There is no respect of persons
+with God.&nbsp; We are all equal in His sight.&nbsp; He knows no difference
+among men, except the difference which God&rsquo;s Spirit gives, in
+proportion as a man listens to the teaching of that Spirit&mdash;rank
+in godliness and true manhood.&nbsp; Oh! believe that&mdash;believe
+that because you owe an infinite debt to Christ and to God&mdash;His
+Father and your Father&mdash;therefore you owe an infinite debt to your
+neighbours, members of Christ and children of God just as you are&mdash;a
+debt of love, help, care, which you <i>can</i>, pay, just because you
+are members of one family; for because you are members of one family,
+for that very reason every good deed you do for a neighbour does not
+stop with that neighbour, but goes on breeding and spreading, and growing
+and growing, for aught we know, for ever.&nbsp; Just as each selfish
+act we do, each bitter word we speak, each foul example we set, may
+go on spreading from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart, from parent
+to child, till we may injure generations yet unborn; so each noble and
+self-sacrificing deed we do, each wise and loving word we speak, each
+example we set of industry and courage, of faith in God and care for
+men, may and will spread on from heart to heart, and mouth to mouth,
+and teach others to do and be the like; till people miles away, who
+never heard of our names, may have cause to bless us for ever and ever.&nbsp;
+This is one and only one of the glorious fruits of our being one family.&nbsp;
+This is one and only one of the reasons which make me say that it was
+a good thing mankind was so made that the innocent suffer for the guilty.&nbsp;
+For just as the innocent are injured by the guilty in this world, even
+so are the guilty preserved, and converted, and brought back again by
+the innocent.&nbsp; Just as the sins of the fathers are visited on the
+children, so is the righteousness of the fathers a blessing to the children;
+else, says St. Paul, our children would be unclean, but now they are
+holy.&nbsp; For the promises of God are not only to us, but to our children,
+even to as many as the Lord our God shall call.&nbsp; And thus each
+generation, by growing in virtue and wisdom and the knowledge of God,
+will help forward all the generations which follow it to fuller light
+and peace and safety; and each parent in trying to live like a Christian
+man himself, will make it easier for his children to live like Christians
+after him.&nbsp; And this rule applies even in the things which we are
+too apt to fancy unimportant&mdash;every house kept really clean, every
+family brought up in habits of neatness and order, every acre of foul
+land drained, every new improvement in agriculture and manufactures
+or medicine, is a clear gain to all mankind, a good example set which
+is sure sooner or later to find followers, perhaps among generations
+yet unborn, and in countries of which we never heard the name.</p>
+<p>Was I not right then in saying that this earth is not the devil&rsquo;s
+earth at all, but a right good earth, of God&rsquo;s making and ruling,
+wherein no good deed will perish fruitless, but every man&rsquo;s works
+will follow him&mdash;a right good earth, governed by a righteous Father,
+who, as the psalm says &ldquo;is merciful,&rdquo; just &ldquo;because
+He rewards every man according to his work.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XVI&mdash;ON THE DAY OF THANKSGIVING</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>(Nov. 15th, 1849.)</p>
+<p>God hath visited his people.&mdash;LUKE vii. 16.</p>
+<p>We are assembled this day to thank God solemnly for the passing away
+of the cholera from England; and we must surely not forget to thank
+Him at the same time for the passing away of the fever, which has caused
+so much expense, sorrow, and death among us.&nbsp; Now I wish to say
+a very few words to you on this same matter, to show you not only how
+to be thankful to God, but what to be thankful for.&nbsp; You may say:
+It is easy enough for us to know what to thank God for in this case.&nbsp;
+We come to thank Him, as we have just said in the public prayers, for
+having withdrawn this heavy visitation from us.&nbsp; If so, my friends,
+what we shall thank Him for depends on what we mean by talking of a
+visitation from God.</p>
+<p>Now I do not know what people may think in this parish, but I suspect
+that very many all over England do <i>not</i> know what to thank God
+for just now; and are altogether thanking him for the wrong thing&mdash;for
+a thing which, very happily for them, He has <i>not</i> done for them,
+and which, if He had done it for them, would have been worse for them
+than all the evil which ever happened to them from their youth up until
+now.&nbsp; To be plain then, many, I am afraid, are thanking God for
+having gone away and left them.&nbsp; While the cholera was here, they
+said that God was visiting them; and now that the cholera is over, they
+consider that God&rsquo;s visit is over too, and are joyful and light
+of heart thereat.&nbsp; If God&rsquo;s visit is over, my friends, and
+He is gone away from us; if He is not just as near us now as He was
+in the height of the cholera, the best thing we can do is to turn to
+Him with fasting, and weeping, and mourning, and roll ourselves in the
+dust, and instead of thanking our Father for going away, pray to Him,
+of his infinite mercy, to condescend to come back again and visit us,
+even though, as superstitious and ignorant men believe, God&rsquo;s
+visiting us were sure to bring cholera, or plague, or pestilence, or
+famine, or some other misery.&nbsp; For I read, that in His presence
+is life and not death&mdash;at His right hand is fulness of joy, and
+not tribulation and mourning and woe; but if not, it were better to
+be with God in everlasting agony, than to be in everlasting happiness
+without God.</p>
+<p>Here is a strange confusion&mdash;people talking one moment like
+St. Paul himself, desiring to be with Christ and God for ever, and then
+in the same breath talking like the Gadarenes of old, when, after Christ
+had visited them, and judged their sins by driving their unlawful herd
+of swine into the sea, they answered by beseeching Him to depart out
+of their coasts.</p>
+<p>Why is this confusion?&mdash;Because people do not take the trouble
+to read their Bibles; because they bring their own loose, careless,
+cant notions with them when they open their Bibles, and settle beforehand
+what the Bible is to tell them, and then pick and twist texts till they
+make them mean just what they like and no more.&nbsp; There is no folly,
+or filth, or tyranny, or blasphemy, which men have not defended out
+of the Bible by twisting it in this way.&nbsp; The Bible is better written
+than that, my friends.&nbsp; He that runs may read, if he has sense
+to read.&nbsp; The wayfaring man, though simple, shall make no such
+mistake therein, if he has God&rsquo;s Spirit in him&mdash;the spirit
+of faith, which believes that the Bible is God&rsquo;s message to men&mdash;the
+humble spirit, which is willing to listen to that message, however strange
+or new it may seem to him&mdash;the earnest spirit, which reads the
+Bible really to know what a man shall do to be saved.&nbsp; Look at
+your Bibles thus, my friends, about this matter.&nbsp; Read all the
+texts which speak of God&rsquo;s visiting and God&rsquo;s visitation,
+and you will find all the confusion and strangeness vanish away.&nbsp;
+For see!&nbsp; The Bible talks of the Lord visiting people in His wrath&mdash;visiting
+them for their sins&mdash;visiting them with sore plagues and punishments,
+about forty times.&nbsp; But the Bible speaks very nearly as often of
+God&rsquo;s visiting people to bring them blessings and not punishments.&nbsp;
+The Bible says God visited Sarah and Hannah to give them what they most
+desired&mdash;children.&nbsp; God visited the people of Israel in Egypt
+to deliver them out of slavery.&nbsp; In the book of Ruth we read how
+the Lord visited His people in giving them bread.&nbsp; The Psalmist,
+in the captivity at Babylon, <i>prays</i> God to visit him with His
+salvation.&nbsp; The prophet Jeremiah says that it was a sign of God&rsquo;s
+anger against the Jews that He had not visited them; and the prophets
+promised again and again to their countrymen, how, after their seventy
+years&rsquo; captivity in Babylon, the Lord would visit them, and what
+for?&mdash;To bring them back into their own land with joy, and heap
+them with every blessing&mdash;peace and wealth, freedom and righteousness.&nbsp;
+So it is in the New Testament too.&nbsp; Zacharias praised God: &ldquo;Blessed
+be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His people;
+through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the day-spring from on
+high hath visited us.&rdquo;&nbsp; And that was the reason why I chose
+Luke vii. 16, for my text&mdash;only because it is an example of the
+same thing.&nbsp; The people, it says, praised God, saying: &ldquo;A
+great Prophet is risen up among us, and God hath visited His people.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And in the 14th of Acts we read how God visited the Gentiles, not to
+punish them, but to take out of them a people for His name, namely,
+Cornelius and his household.&nbsp; And lastly, St. Peter tells Christian
+people to glorify God in the day of visitation, as I tell you now&mdash;whether
+His visitation comes in the shape of cholera, or fever, or agricultural
+distress; or whether it comes in the shape of sanitary reform, and plenty
+of work, and activity in commerce; whether it seems to you good or evil,
+glorify God for it.&nbsp; Thank Him for it.&nbsp; Bless Him for it.&nbsp;
+Whether His visitation brings joy or sorrow, it surely brings a blessing
+with it.&nbsp; Whether God visits in wrath or in love, still God visits.&nbsp;
+God shows that He lives; God shows us that He has not forgotten us;
+God shows us that He is near us.&nbsp; Christ shows us that His words
+are true: &ldquo;Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That is a hard lesson to learn and practise, though not a very difficult
+one to understand.&nbsp; I will try now to make you understand it&mdash;God
+alone can teach you to practise it.&nbsp; I pray and hope, and I believe
+too, that He will&mdash;that these very hard times are meant to teach
+people <i>really</i> to believe in God and Jesus Christ, and that they
+<i>will</i> teach people.&nbsp; God knows we need, and thanks be to
+Him that He <i>does</i> know that we need, to be taught to believe in
+Him.&nbsp; Nothing shows it to me more plainly than the way we talk
+about God&rsquo;s visitations, as if God was usually away from us, and
+came to us only just now and then&mdash;only on extraordinary occasions.&nbsp;
+People have gross, heathen, fleshly, materialist notions of God&rsquo;s
+visitations, as if He was some great earthly king who now and then made
+a journey about his dominions from place to place, rewarding some and
+punishing others.&nbsp; God is not in any place, my friends.&nbsp; God
+is a Spirit.&nbsp; The heaven and the heaven of heavens could not contain
+Him if He wanted a place to be in, as, glory be to His name, He does
+not.&nbsp; If He is near us or far from us, it is not that He is near
+or far from our bodies, as the Queen might be nearer to us in London
+than in Scotland, which is most people&rsquo;s notion of God&rsquo;s
+nearness.&nbsp; He is near, not our bodies, but our spirits, our souls,
+our hearts, our thoughts&mdash;as it is written, &ldquo;The kingdom
+of God is <i>within</i> you.&rdquo;&nbsp; Do not fancy that when the
+cholera was in India, God was nearer India than He was to England, and
+that as the cholera crawled nearer and nearer, God came nearer and nearer
+too; and that now the cholera is gone away somewhere or other, God is
+gone away somewhere or other too, to leave us to our own inventions.&nbsp;
+God forbid a thousand times!&nbsp; As St. Paul says: &ldquo;He is not
+far from any one of us.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;In Him we live and move
+and have our being,&rdquo; cholera or none.&nbsp; Do you think Christ,
+the King of the earth, is gone away either&mdash;that while things go
+on rightly, and governments, and clergy, and people do right, Christ
+is there then, filling them all with His Spirit and guiding them all
+to their duty; but that when evil times come, and rulers are idle, and
+clergy dumb dogs, and the rich tyrannous, and the poor profligate, and
+men are crying for work and cannot get it, and every man&rsquo;s hand
+is against his fellow, and no one knows what to do or think; and on
+earth is distress of nations with perplexity, men&rsquo;s hearts failing
+them for fear, and for dread of those things which are coming on the
+earth&mdash;do you think that in such times as those, Christ is the
+least farther off from us than He was at the best of times?&mdash;The
+least farther off from us now than He was from the apostles at the first
+Whitsuntide?&nbsp; God forbid!&mdash;God forbid a thousand times!&nbsp;
+He has promised Himself, He that is faithful and true, He that will
+never deny Himself, though men deny Him, and say He is not here, because
+their eyes are blinded with love of the world, and covetousness and
+bigotry, and dread lest He, their Master, should come and find them
+beating the men-servants and maid-servants, and eating and drinking
+with the drunken in the high places of the earth, and saying: &ldquo;Tush!&nbsp;
+God hath forgotten it&rdquo;&mdash;ay, though men have forgotten Him
+thus, and&mdash;worse than thus, yet He hath said it&mdash;&ldquo;Lo,
+I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.&rdquo;&nbsp; Why,
+evil times are the very times of which Christ used to speak as the &ldquo;days
+of the Lord,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;days of the Son of man.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Times when we hear of wars and rumours of wars, and on earth distress
+of nations with perplexity&mdash;what does He tell men to do in them?&nbsp;
+To go whining about, and say that Christ has left His Church?&nbsp;
+No!&nbsp; &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; He says, &ldquo;when all these things
+come to pass, then rejoice and lift up your heads, for your redemption
+draweth nigh.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And yet the Scripture does most certainly speak of the Lord&rsquo;s
+coming out of His place to visit&mdash;of the Son of Man coming, and
+not coming to men&mdash;of His visiting us at one time and not at another.&nbsp;
+How does that agree with what I have just said?&nbsp; My dear friends,
+we shall see that it agrees perfectly with what I have said, if we will
+only just remember that we are not beasts, but men.&nbsp; It may seem
+a strange thing to have to remind people of, but it is just what they
+are always forgetting.&nbsp; My friends, we are not animals, we are
+not spiders to do nothing but spin, or birds only to build nests for
+ourselves, much less swine to do nothing but dig after roots and fruits,
+and get what we can out of the clods of the ground.&nbsp; We are the
+children of the Most High God; we have immortal souls within us; nay,
+more, we are our souls: our bodies are our husk&mdash;our shell&mdash;our
+clothes&mdash;our house&mdash;changing day by day, and year by year
+upon us, one day to drop off us till the Resurrection.&nbsp; But <i>we</i>
+are our <i>souls</i>, and when God visits, it is our souls He visits,
+not merely our bodies.&nbsp; There is the whole secret.&nbsp; People
+forget God, and therefore they are glad to fancy that He has forgotten
+them, and has nothing to do with this world of His which they are misusing
+for their own selfish ends; and then God in His mercy visits them.&nbsp;
+He knocks at the door of their hearts, saying: &ldquo;See!&nbsp; I was
+close to you all the while.&rdquo;&nbsp; He forces them to see Him and
+to confess that He is there whether they choose or not.&nbsp; God is
+not away from the world.&nbsp; He is away from people&rsquo;s hearts,
+because He has given people free wills, and with free wills the power
+of keeping Him out of their hearts or letting Him in.&nbsp; And when
+God visits He forces Himself on our attention.&nbsp; He knocks at the
+door of our hard hearts so loudly and sharply that He forces all to
+confess that He is there&mdash;all who are not utterly reprobate and
+spiritually dead.&nbsp; In blessings as well as in curses, God knocks
+at our hearts.&nbsp; By sudden good fortune, as well as by sudden mishap;
+by a great deliverance from enemies, by an abundant harvest, as well
+as by famine and pestilence.&nbsp; Therefore this cholera has been a
+true visitation of God.&nbsp; The poor had fancied that they might be
+as dirty, the rich had fancied that they might be as careless, as they
+chose; in short, that they might break God&rsquo;s laws of cleanliness
+and brotherly care without His troubling Himself about the matter.&nbsp;
+And lo! He has visited us; and shown us that He does care about the
+matter by taking it into His own hands with a vengeance.&nbsp; He who
+cannot see God&rsquo;s hand in the cholera must be as blind&mdash;as
+blind as who?&mdash;as blind as he that cannot see God&rsquo;s hand
+when there is no cholera; as blind as he who cannot see God&rsquo;s
+hand in every meal he eats, and every breath he draws; for that man
+is stone blind&mdash;he can be no blinder.&nbsp; The cholera came; everyone
+ought to see that it did not come by blind chance, but by the will of
+some wise and righteous Person; for in the first place God gave us fair
+warning.&nbsp; The cholera came from India at a steady pace.&nbsp; We
+knew to a month when it would arrive here.&nbsp; And it came, too, by
+no blind necessity, as if it was forced to take people whether it liked
+or not.&nbsp; Just as it was in the fever here, so it was in the cholera,
+&ldquo;One shall be taken and another left.&rdquo;&nbsp; It took one
+of a street and left another; took one person in a family and left another:
+it took the rich man who fancied he was safe, as well as the poor man
+who did not care whether he was safe or not.&nbsp; The respectable man
+walking home to his comfortable house, passed by some untrapped drain,
+and then poisonous gas struck him and he died.&nbsp; The rich physician
+who had been curing others, could not save himself from the poison of
+the crowded graveyard which had been allowed to remain at the back of
+his house.&nbsp; By all sorts of strange and unfathomable judgments
+the cholera showed itself to be working, not by a blind necessity, but
+at the will of a thinking Person, of a living God, whose ways are not
+as our own ways, and His paths are in the great deep.&nbsp; And yet
+the cholera showed&mdash;and this is what I want to make you feel&mdash;that
+it was working at the will of the same God in whom we live and move
+and have our being, who sends the food we eat, the water in which we
+wash, the air we breathe, and who has ordained for all these things
+natural laws, according to which they work, and which He never breaks,
+nor allows us to break them.&nbsp; For every case of cholera could be
+traced to some breaking of these laws&mdash;foul air&mdash;foul food&mdash;foul
+water, or careless and dirty contact with infected persons; so that
+by this God showed that He and not chance ruled the world, and that
+he was indeed the living and willing God.&nbsp; He showed at the same
+time that He was the wise God of order and of law; and that gas and
+earth, wind and vapour, fulfil His word, without His having to break
+His laws, or visit us by moving, as people fancy, out of a Heaven where
+He was, down to an earth, where He was not.</p>
+<p>But, lastly, remember what I told you before, that the cholera being
+a visitation means that God, by it, has been visiting our hearts, knocking
+loudly at them that He may awaken us, and teach us a lesson.&nbsp; And
+be sure that in the cholera, and this our own parish fever, there is
+a lesson for each and every one of us if we will learn it.&nbsp; To
+the simple poor man, first and foremost, God means by the cholera to
+teach the simple lesson of cleanliness; to the house-owner He means
+to teach that each man is his brother&rsquo;s keeper, and responsible
+for his property not being a nest of disease; to rulers it is intended
+to teach the lesson that God&rsquo;s laws cannot be put off to suit
+their laziness, cowardice, or party squabbles.&nbsp; But beside that,
+to each person, be sure such a visitation as this brings some private
+lesson.&nbsp; Perhaps it has taught many a widow that she has a Friend
+stronger and more loving than even the husband whom she has lost by
+the pestilence&mdash;the God of the widow and the fatherless.&nbsp;
+Perhaps it has taught many a strong man not to trust in his strength
+and his youth, but in the God who gave them to him.&nbsp; Perhaps it
+has taught many a man, too, who has expected public authorities to do
+everything for him, &ldquo;not to put his trust in princes, nor in any
+child of man, for there is no help in them,&rdquo; but to hear God&rsquo;s
+advice, &ldquo;Help thyself and God will help thee.&rdquo;&nbsp; Perhaps
+it has stirred up many a benevolent man to find out fresh means for
+rooting out the miseries of society.&nbsp; Perhaps it has taught many
+a philosopher new deep truths about the laws of God&rsquo;s world, which
+may enable him to enlighten and comfort ages yet unborn.&nbsp; Perhaps
+it has awakened many a slumbering heart, and brought many a careless
+sinner (for the first time in his life) face to face with God and his
+own sins.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s judgments are manifold; they are meant to
+work in different ways on different hearts.&nbsp; But oh! believe and
+be sure that they are meant to work upon all hearts&mdash;that they
+are not the punishments of a capricious tyrant, but the rod of a loving
+Father, who is trying to drive us home into His fold, when gentle entreaties
+and kind deeds have failed to allure us home.&nbsp; Oh my friends! if
+you wish really to thank God for having preserved you from these pestilences,
+show your thankfulness by learning the lesson which they bring.&nbsp;
+God&rsquo;s love has spoken of each and every one of us in the cholera.&nbsp;
+Be sure He has spoken so harshly only because a gentler tone of voice
+would have had no effect upon us.&nbsp; Thank Him for His severity.&nbsp;
+Thank Him for the cholera, the fever.&nbsp; Thank Him for anything which
+will awaken us to hear the Word of the Lord.&nbsp; But till you have
+learnt the lessons which these visitations are meant to teach you, there
+is no use thanking Him for taking them away.&nbsp; And therefore I beseech
+you solemnly, each and all, before you leave this church, now to pray
+to God to show you what lesson He means to teach you by this past awful
+visitation, and also by sparing you and me who are here present, not
+merely from cholera and fever, but from a thousand mishaps and evils,
+which we have deserved, and from which only His goodness has kept us.&nbsp;
+Oh may God stir up your hearts to ask advice of Him this day! and may
+He in His great mercy so teach us all His will on this day of joy, that
+we may not need to have it taught us hereafter on some day of sorrow.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XVII&mdash;THE COVENANT</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The Lord hath chosen Jacob unto himself, and Israel for his own possession.&nbsp;
+For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord is above all gods.&nbsp;
+Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven and earth, and in
+the sea, and in all deep places.&mdash;PSALM cxxxv. 4, 5, 6.</p>
+<p>Were you ever puzzled to find out why the Psalms are read every Sunday
+in Church, more read, indeed, than any other part of the Bible?&nbsp;
+If any of you say, No, I shall not think you the wiser.&nbsp; It is
+very easy not to be puzzled with a deep matter, if one never thinks
+about it at all.&nbsp; But when a man sets his mind to work seriously,
+to try to understand what he hears and sees around him, then he will
+be puzzled, and no shame to him; for he will find things every day of
+his life which will require years of thought to understand, ay, things
+which, though we see and know that they are true, and can use and profit
+by them, we can never understand at all, at least in this life.</p>
+<p>But I do not think that God meant it to be so with these Psalms.&nbsp;
+He meant the Bible for a poor man&rsquo;s book: and therefore the men
+who wrote the Bible were almost all of them poor men, at least at one
+time or other of their life; and therefore we may expect that they would
+write as poor men would write, and such things as poor men may understand,
+if they are fairly and simply explained.&nbsp; Therefore I do not think
+you need be puzzled long to find out why these Psalms are read every
+Sunday.&nbsp; For the men who wrote them had God&rsquo;s spirit with
+them; and God&rsquo;s spirit is the spirit in which God made and governs
+this world, and just as God cannot change, so God&rsquo;s spirit cannot
+change; and therefore the rules and laws according to which the world
+runs on cannot change; and therefore these rules about God&rsquo;s government
+of the world, which God&rsquo;s spirit taught the old Hebrew Psalmists,
+are the very same rules by which He governs it now; and therefore all
+the rules in these Psalms, making allowance for the difference of circumstances,
+have just as much to do with France, and Germany, and England now, as
+they had with the Jews, and the Canaanites, and the Babylonians then.</p>
+<p>St. Paul tells us so.&nbsp; He tells us that all that happened to
+the old Jews was written as an example to Christians, to the intent
+that they might not sin as the Jews did, and so (God&rsquo;s laws and
+ways being the same now as then) be punished as the Jews were.&nbsp;
+Moreover, St. Paul says, that Christians now are just as much God&rsquo;s
+chosen people as the Jews were.&nbsp; God told the Jews that they were
+to be a nation of kings and priests to Him.&nbsp; And St. John opens
+the Revelations by saying: &ldquo;Unto Him that loved us and washed
+us from our sins in His own blood, and hath made us kings and priests
+unto God and His Father, to Him be glory.&rdquo;&nbsp; St. Paul tells
+the Ephesians, who had not a drop of Jewish blood in their veins, that
+through Jesus Christ both Jews and Gentiles had &ldquo;access by one
+Spirit unto the Father.&nbsp; Now, therefore,&rdquo; he goes on, &ldquo;ye
+are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints,
+and of the household of God.&rdquo;&nbsp; In fact, he tells the Christians
+of every country to which he writes, that all the promises which God
+made to the Jews belonged to them just as much, that there was no more
+any difference between Jew and Gentile, that the Lord Jesus Christ was
+just as really among them, and with them, ruling and helping each people
+in their own country, as He was in Jerusalem when Isaiah saw His glory
+filling the Temple, and when Zion was called the place of His inheritance.&nbsp;
+Indeed, the Lord Jesus said the same thing Himself, for He said that
+all power was given to Him in heaven and earth; that He was with His
+churches (that is, with all companies of Christian people, such as England)
+even to the end of the world; that wherever two or three were gathered
+together in His name, He would be in the midst of them; and if those
+blessed words and good news be true, we Englishmen have a right to believe
+firmly that we belong to Him just as much as the old Jews did; and when
+we read these Psalms, to take every word of their good news&mdash;and
+their warnings also&mdash;to ourselves, and to our own land of England.&nbsp;
+And when we read in the text, that the Lord chose Jacob unto Himself
+and Israel for His own possession, we have a right to say: &ldquo;And
+the Lord has chosen also England unto himself, and this favoured land
+of Britain for his own possession.&rdquo;&nbsp; When we say in the Psalm:
+&ldquo;The Lord did what He pleased in heaven, and earth, and sea,&rdquo;
+to educate and deliver the people of the Jews, we have a right to say
+just as boldly: &ldquo;And so He has done for England, for us, and for
+our forefathers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This then is the reason, the chief reason, why these Psalms are appointed
+to be read every Sunday in church, and every morning and evening where
+there is daily service&mdash;to teach us that the Lord takes care not
+only of one man&rsquo;s soul here, and another woman&rsquo;s soul there,
+but of the whole country of England; of its wars and its peace; of its
+laws and government, its progress and its afflictions; of all, in short,
+that happens to it as a nation, as one body of men, which it is.&nbsp;
+It must be so, my good friends, else we should be worse off than the
+old Jews, and not better off, as all the New Testament solemnly assures
+us a thousand times over that we are.</p>
+<p>For in the covenant which God made with the Jews, and in the strange
+events, good and bad, which He caused to happen to their nation, not
+only the great saints among them were taken care of, but all classes,
+and all characters, good and bad, even those who had not wisdom or spiritual
+life enough to seek God for themselves, still had their share in the
+good laws, in the teaching and guiding, and in the national blessings
+which He sent on the whole nation.&nbsp; They had a chance given them
+of rising, and improving, and prospering, as the rest of their countrymen
+rose, and improved, and prospered.&nbsp; And when the Lord came to visit
+Jud&aelig;a in flesh and blood, we find that He went on the same method.&nbsp;
+He did not merely go to such men as Philip and Nathaniel, to the holy
+and elect ones among the Jews, but to the whole people; to the <i>lost</i>
+sheep, as well as to those who were not lost.&nbsp; He did not part
+the good from the bad before he healed their sicknesses, and fed them
+with the loaves and fishes.&nbsp; It was enough for Him that they were
+Jews, citizens of the Jewish nation.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s promises belonged
+not to one Jew or another, but to the Jewish nation; and even the ignorant
+and the sinful had a share in the blessings of the covenant, great or
+small in proportion as they chose to live as Jews ought, or to forget
+and deny that they belonged to God&rsquo;s people.</p>
+<p>Now, surely the Lord cannot be less merciful now than He was then.&nbsp;
+He cannot care less for poor orphans, and paupers, and wild untaught
+creatures, in England now, than he cared for them in Jud&aelig;a of
+old.&nbsp; And we see that in fact He does not.&nbsp; For as the wealth
+of England improves, and the laws improve, and the knowledge of God
+improves, the condition of all sorts of poor creatures improves too,
+though they had no share in bringing about the good change.&nbsp; But
+we are all members of one body, from the Queen on her throne to the
+tramper under the hedge; and as St. Paul says: &ldquo;If one member
+suffers, all the members suffer with it, and if one member rejoices,
+all the others&rdquo; sooner or later &ldquo;rejoice with it.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+For we, too, are one of the Lord&rsquo;s nations.&nbsp; He has made
+us one body, with one common language, common laws, common interest,
+common religion for all; and what He does for one of us He does for
+all.&nbsp; He orders all that happens to us; whether it be war or peace,
+prosperity or dearth, He orders it all; and He orders things so that
+they shall work for the good, not merely of a few, but of as many as
+possible&mdash;not merely for His elect, but for those who know Him
+not.&nbsp; As He has been from the beginning, when He heaped blessings
+on the stiff-necked and backsliding Israelites&mdash;as He was when
+He endured the cross for a world lying not in obedience, but in wickedness;
+so is He now; the perfect likeness of His father, who is no respecter
+of persons, but causes &ldquo;His sun to shine alike on the evil on
+the good, and His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But now, there is one thing against which I have to warn you most
+solemnly, and especially in such days as these.&nbsp; You may believe
+my words to your own ruin, or to your own salvation.&nbsp; They are
+&ldquo;the Gospel,&rdquo; &ldquo;the good news of the Kingdom of God&rdquo;&mdash;that
+is, the good news that God has condescended to become our King, to govern
+and guide us, to order all things for our good.&nbsp; But as St. Paul
+says, the Gospel may be a savour of death unto death, as well as a savour
+of life unto life.&nbsp; And I will tell you now; that you have only
+to do what the Jews just before the coming of our Lord did, and give
+way to the same thoughts as they, and then, like them, it were better
+for you that you had never heard of God, and been like the savages,
+to whom little or no sin is imputed, because they are all but without
+law.&nbsp; How is this?</p>
+<p>As I said before&mdash;take your covenant privileges as the Pharisees
+took theirs, and they will turn you into devils while you are fancying
+yourselves God&rsquo;s especial favourites.&nbsp; Now this was what
+happened to the Pharisees: they could not help knowing that God had
+shown especial favour to them; and that He had taught them more about
+God than He had taught the heathen.&nbsp; But instead of feeling all
+the more humble and thankful for this, and of remembering day and night
+that because much had been given to them much would be required of them,
+they thought more about the honour and glory which God had put on them.&nbsp;
+They forgot what God had declared, namely, that it was not for their
+own goodness that He had taught them, for that they were in themselves
+not a whit better than the heathen around them.&nbsp; They forgot that
+the reason why He taught them was, that they were to do His work on
+earth, by witnessing for His name, and telling the heathen that God
+was their Lord, as well as Lord of the Jews.&nbsp; Now David, and the
+old Psalmists and Prophets, did not forget this.&nbsp; Their cry is:
+&ldquo;Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Worship the Son of God, ye kings of the earth, and make your
+peace with Him lest He be angry.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;It was in vain,&rdquo;
+he told the heathen kings, &ldquo;to try to cast away God&rsquo;s government
+from them, and break His bonds from off them,&rdquo; for &ldquo;the
+Lord was King, let the nations be never so unquiet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But the Jews gradually forgot this, and their daily boast was, that
+God had nothing to do with the heathen; that He did not care for them,
+and actually hated them; that they, as it were, had the true God all
+to themselves for their own private property; and that He had neither
+love nor mercy, except for them and their proselytes, that is, the few
+heathens whom they could persuade and entice not to worship the true
+God after the customs of their own country&mdash;that would not have
+suited the Jews&rsquo; bigotry and pride&mdash;but to turn Jews, and
+forget their own people among whom they were born, and ape them in everything.&nbsp;
+And so, as our Lord told them, after compassing sea and land to make
+one of these proselytes, they only made him after all twice as much
+the child of hell as themselves.&nbsp; For they could not teach the
+heathen anything worth knowing about God, when they had forgotten themselves
+what God was like.&nbsp; They could tell them that there was one God,
+and not two&mdash;but what was the use of that?&nbsp; As St. James says,
+the devils believe as much as that, and yet the knowledge does not make
+them holy, but only increases their fear and despair.&nbsp; And so with
+these Pharisees.&nbsp; They had forgotten that God was love.&nbsp; They
+had forgotten that God was merciful.&nbsp; They had forgotten that God
+was just.&nbsp; And therefore, while they were talking of God and pretending
+to worship God, they knew nothing of God, and they did not do God&rsquo;s
+will, and act like God; for (as we find from the Gospels) they were
+unjust, tyrannous, proud, conceited, covetous themselves; and while
+they were looking down on the poor heathens, these very heathens, the
+Lord told them, would rise up in judgment against them: for they, knowing
+little, acted up to the light which they had, better than the Pharisees
+who knew so much.&nbsp; And so it will be with us, my friends, if we
+fancy that God&rsquo;s great favours to us are a reason for our priding
+ourselves on them, and despising papists and foreigners instead of remembering
+that just because God has given us so much, He will require more of
+us.&nbsp; It is true, we do know more of the Gospel than the papists,
+how, though they believe in Jesus Christ, worship the Virgin Mary and
+the Saints, and idols of wood and stone.&nbsp; But if they, who know
+so little of God&rsquo;s will, yet act faithfully up to what they do
+know, will they not rise up in judgment against us, who know so much
+more, if we act worse than they?&nbsp; Instead of despising them, we
+had better despise ourselves.&nbsp; Instead of fancying that God&rsquo;s
+love is not over them, and so sinning against God&rsquo;s Holy Spirit
+by denying and despising the fruits of God&rsquo;s Holy Spirit in them,
+we had much better, we Protestants, be repenting of our own sins.&nbsp;
+We had better pray God to open our eyes to our own want of faith, and
+want of love, and want of honesty, and want of cleanly and chaste lives;
+lest God in His anger should let us go on in our evil path, till we
+fall into the deep darkness of mind of the Pharisees of old.&nbsp; For
+then while we were boasting of England as the most Christian nation
+in the world, we might become the most unchristian, because the most
+unlike Christ; the most wanting in love and fellow-feeling, and self-sacrifice,
+and honour, and justice, and honesty; wanting, in short, in the fruits
+of the Spirit.&nbsp; And without them there is no use crying: &ldquo;We
+are God&rsquo;s chosen people, He Has put His name among us, we alone
+hate idols, we alone have the pure word of God, and the pure sacraments,
+and the pure doctrine;&rdquo; for God may answer us, as he answered
+the Jews of old: &ldquo;Think not to say within yourselves, We have
+Abraham for our father: Verily, I say unto you, God is able of these
+stones to raise up children to Abraham.&rdquo;&nbsp; . . .&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+Kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing
+forth the fruits thereof.&rdquo;&nbsp; Oh! my friends, let us pray,
+one and all, that God will come and help us, and with great might succour
+us, &ldquo;that whereas through our sins and wickedness we are sore
+let and hindered in running the race set before us, God&rsquo;s bountiful
+grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us,&rdquo; and enable
+us to live faithfully up to the glorious privileges which He has bestowed
+on us, in calling us &ldquo;members of Christ, children of God, and
+inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven;&rdquo; in giving us His Bible,
+in allowing us to be born into this favoured land of England, in preserving
+us to this day, in spite of all that we have thought, and said, and
+done, unworthy of the name of Christians and Englishmen.</p>
+<p>And then we may be certain that God will also fulfil to us the glorious
+promises which we find in another Psalm: &ldquo;If thy children will
+keep my covenant and my testimonies, which I shall learn them, this
+land shall be my rest for ever.&nbsp; Here will I dwell, for I have
+a delight therein.&nbsp; I will bless her victuals with increase, and
+satisfy her poor with bread.&nbsp; I will deck her priests with health,
+and her holy people shall rejoice and sing.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XVIII&mdash;NATIONAL REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>And that which cometh into your mind shall not be at all; that ye
+say, We will be as the heathen, as the families of the countries, to
+serve wood and stone.&nbsp; As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with
+a mighty hand, and with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out,
+will I rule over you. . . .&nbsp; And ye shall know that I am the Lord.&mdash;EZEKIEL
+xx. 32, 33, 38.</p>
+<p>A father has two ways of showing his love to his child&mdash;by caressing
+it and by punishing it.&nbsp; His very anger may be a sign of his love,
+and ought to be.&nbsp; Just because he loves his child, just because
+the thing he longs most to see is that his child should grow up good,
+therefore he must be, and ought to be, angry with it when it does wrong.&nbsp;
+Therefore anger against sin is a part of God&rsquo;s likeness in us;
+and he who does not hate sin is not like God.&nbsp; For if sin is the
+worst evil&mdash;perhaps the only real evil in the world&mdash;and the
+end of all sin is death and misery, then to indulge people in sin is
+to show them the very worst of cruelty.</p>
+<p>To sit by and see iniquity going on without trying to stop it, is
+mere laziness.&nbsp; The parent, when his child does wrong, does not
+show his love to the child by indulging it, all he shows is, that he
+himself is carnal and fleshly; that he does not like to take the trouble
+of punishing it, or does not like to give himself the pain of punishing
+it; that, in short, he had sooner let his child grow up in bad habits,
+which must lead to its misery and ruin for years and years, if not for
+ever, than make himself uncomfortable by seeing it uncomfortable for
+a few minutes.&nbsp; That is not love, but selfishness.&nbsp; True love
+is as determined to punish the sin as it is to forgive the sinner.&nbsp;
+Therefore, St. Paul tells us, that we can be angry without sinning;
+that is that there is an anger which comes from hatred of sin and love
+to the sinner.&nbsp; Therefore, Solomon tells us to punish our children
+when they do wrong, and not to hold our hands for their crying.&nbsp;
+It is better for them that they should cry a little now, than have long
+years of shame and sorrow hereafter.&nbsp; Therefore, in all countries
+which are properly governed, the law punishes in the name of God those
+who break the laws of God, and punishes them even with death, for certain
+crimes; because it is expedient that one man die for the people, and
+that the whole nation perish not.</p>
+<p>And this is God&rsquo;s way of dealing with each and every one of
+us.&nbsp; This is God&rsquo;s way of dealing with Christian nations,
+just as it was His way of dealing with the Jews of old.&nbsp; He never
+allowed the Jews to prosper in sin.&nbsp; He punished them at once,
+and sternly, whenever they rebelled against Him; not because He hated
+them, but because He loved them.&nbsp; His love to them showed itself
+whenever they went well with Him, in triumphs and blessings; and when
+they rebelled against Him, and broke His laws, He showed that very same
+love to them in plague, and war, and famine, and a mighty hand, and
+fury poured out.&nbsp; His love had not changed&mdash;they had changed;
+and now the best and only way of showing His love to them, was by making
+them feel His anger; and the best and only way of being merciful to
+them, was to show them no indulgence.</p>
+<p>Now the wish of the Jews all along, and especially in Ezekiel&rsquo;s
+time, was to be like the heathen&mdash;like the nations round them.&nbsp;
+They said to themselves: &ldquo;These heathen worship idols, and yet
+prosper very well.&nbsp; Their having gods of wood and stone, and their
+indulging their passions, and being profligate and filthy, covetous,
+unjust, and tyrannical, does not prevent their being just as happy as
+we are&mdash;ay, and a great deal happier.&nbsp; They have no strict
+law of Moses, as we have threatening us and keeping us in awe, and making
+us uncomfortable, and telling us at every turn, &lsquo;Thou shalt not
+do this pleasant thing, and thou shalt not do that pleasant thing.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And yet God does not punish them, as Moses&rsquo; law says He will punish
+us.&nbsp; These Assyrians and Babylonians above all&mdash;they are stronger
+than we, and richer, and better clothed, and cleverer; they have horses
+and chariots, and all sorts of luxuries and comforts which we Jews cannot
+get.&nbsp; Instead of being like us, in continual trouble from earthquakes,
+and drought, and famine, and war, attacked, plundered by all the nations
+round us, one after another, they go on conquering, and spreading, and
+succeeding in all they lay their hand to.&nbsp; Look at Babylon,&rdquo;
+said these foolish Jews, perhaps, to themselves; &ldquo;a few generations
+ago it was nothing of a city, and now it is the greatest, richest, and
+strongest nation in the whole world.&nbsp; God has not punished it for
+worshipping gods of wood and stone, why should He punish us?&nbsp; These
+Babylonians have prospered well enough with their gods, why should not
+we?&nbsp; Perhaps it is these very gods of wood and stone who have helped
+them to become so great.&nbsp; Why should they not help us?&nbsp; We
+will worship them, then, and pray to them.&nbsp; We will not give up
+worshipping our own God, of course, lest we should offend Him; but we
+will worship Him and the Babylonian idols at the same time; then we
+shall be sure to be right if we have Jehovah and the idols both on our
+side.&rdquo;&nbsp; So said the Jews to themselves.&nbsp; But what did
+Ezekiel answer them?&nbsp; &ldquo;Not so, my foolish countrymen,&rdquo;
+said he, &ldquo;God will not have it so.&nbsp; He has taught you that
+these Babylonian idols are nothing and cannot help you; He has taught
+you that He can and will help you, that He can and will be everything
+to you; He has taught you that He alone is God, who made heaven and
+earth, who orders all things therein, who alone gives any people power
+to get wealth; and He will not have you go back and fall from that for
+any appearances or arguments whatsoever, because it is true.&nbsp; He
+has chosen you to witness to these heathen about Him, to declare His
+name to them, that they may give up their idols and serve the true God,
+in whom alone is strength.&nbsp; He chose you to be these heathens&rsquo;
+teachers, and He will not let you become their scholars.&nbsp; He meant
+the heathen to copy you, and He will not let you copy them.&nbsp; If
+He does, in His love and mercy, let these poor heathen prosper in spite
+of their idols, what is that to you?&nbsp; It is still the Lord who
+makes them prosper, and not the idols, whether they know it or not.&nbsp;
+They know no better, and He will not impute sin to them where He has
+given them no law.&nbsp; But you do know better; by a thousand mighty
+signs and wonders and deliverances, the Lord has been teaching you ever
+since you came up through the Red Sea, that He is all-sufficient for
+you, that all power is His in heaven and earth.&nbsp; He has promised
+to you, and sworn to you by Himself, that if you keep His law and walk
+in His commandments, you shall want no manner of good thing; that you
+shall have no cause to envy these heathen their riches and prosperity,
+for the Lord will bless you in house and land, by day and night, at
+home and abroad, with every blessing that a nation can desire.&nbsp;
+Moses&rsquo; law tells you this, God&rsquo;s prophets have been telling
+you this, God&rsquo;s wonderful dealings with you have been telling
+you this, that the Lord God is enough for you.&nbsp; And if you, who
+are meant to be a nation of kings and priests to God, to teach all nations
+and serve solely Him, fancy that you will be allowed to throw away the
+high honour which God has put upon you, and lower yourselves to the
+follies and sins of these heathen round you, you are mistaken.&nbsp;
+You were meant to be above such folly, you can be above it; and you
+shall not prosper by serving God and idols at once; you shall not even
+prosper by serving idols alone.&nbsp; God will visit you with a mighty
+hand, and with fury poured out, and you shall know that He is the Lord.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Well, my friends, and what has this to do with us?&nbsp; This it
+has to do with us&mdash;that if God taught the Jews about Himself, He
+has taught us still more.&nbsp; If he has shown signs and wonders of
+His love, and wrought mightily for the Jews, He has wrought far more
+mightily for us; for He spared not His own Son, but gave Him freely
+for us.&nbsp; If He promised to teach the Jews, He has promised still
+more to teach us; for He has promised His Holy Spirit freely to young
+and old, rich and poor, to as many as ask Him, to guide us into all
+truth.&nbsp; If he expected the Jews to set an example to all the nations
+around, He expects us to do so still more.&nbsp; And if He punished
+the Jews, and drove them back again by shame, and affliction, and disappointment,
+whenever they went after other gods, and tried to be like the heathen
+around, and despised their high calling, and their high privileges,
+He will punish us, and drive us back again still more fiercely, and
+still more swiftly.&nbsp; God has called us to be a nation of Christians,
+and He will not let us be a nation of heathens.&nbsp; We are longing
+to do in these days very much as the Jews did of old; we are all too
+apt to say to ourselves: &ldquo;Of course we must love God, or He might
+be angry with us; and besides, how else should we get our souls saved?&nbsp;
+But the old heathen nations, and a great many nations now, and a great
+many rich and comfortable people in England now, too, get on very well
+without God, by just worshipping selfishness, and money, and worldly
+cunning, and why should not we do the same?&mdash;why should we not
+worship God and Mammon at once, and serve God on Sundays, and the selfish
+ways of the world all the week?&nbsp; Surely then we should be doubly
+safe; we should have God and the world on our side both at once.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now, my friends, God will not allow us to succeed on that plan.&nbsp;
+We are members of His Church, whose head is Jesus, who gave Himself
+for sinners; whose members are all brothers of His Church, which is
+held together by self-sacrifice and fellow-help.&nbsp; If we try to
+be like the heathens, and fancy that we can succeed by selfishness,
+and cunning, and covetousness, God will not let us fall from the honour
+which He has put on us, and trample our blessings under foot.&nbsp;
+He will bring our plans to nought.&nbsp; Whomsoever he may let prosper
+in sin, He will not let those who have heard the message prosper in
+it.&nbsp; Whatever nation He may let become great by covetousness, and
+selfish competing and struggling of man against man, He will not let
+England grow great by it.&nbsp; He loves her too well to let her fall
+so, and cast away her high honour of being a Christian nation.&nbsp;
+By great and sore afflictions, by bringing our cleverest plans to nothing,
+He will teach us that we cannot worship God and Mammon at once; that
+the sure riches, either for a man or for a nation, are not money, but
+righteousness love, justice, wisdom; that this new idol of selfish competition
+which men worship nowadays, and fancy that it is the secret cause of
+all plenty, and cheapness, and civilisation, has no place in the church
+of Jesus Christ, who gave up His own life for those who hated Him, and
+came not to do His own will, but the will of His Father; not to enable
+men to go to heaven after a life of selfishness here; but by the power
+of His Spirit&mdash;the spirit of love and fellowship to sweep all selfishness
+off the face of God&rsquo;s good earth.&nbsp; By sore trials and afflictions
+will God in His mercy teach this to England, and to every man in England
+who is deluded into fancying that he can serve God, and selfishness
+at once, till we learn once more, as our forefathers did of old, that
+He is the Lord.&nbsp; Because we are His children God will chasten us;
+because He receives us, He will scourge us back to Him; because He has
+prepared for us things such as eye hath not seen, He will not let us
+fill our bellies with the husks which the swine eat, and like the dumb
+beasts, snarl and struggle one against the other for a place at His
+table, as if it were not wide enough for all His creatures, and for
+ten times as many more, forgetting that He is the giver, and fancying
+that we are to be the takers, and spoiling the gift itself in our hurry
+to snatch it out of our neighbours&rsquo; hands.&nbsp; In one word,
+God will not give us false prosperity, as the children of the world,
+the flesh, and the devil, because he wishes to give us real prosperity
+as the sons of God, in the kingdom of his Son Jesus Christ, who died
+on the cross for us.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XIX&mdash;THE DELIVERANCE OF JERUSALEM</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>And it came to pass that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote
+in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred and eighty five thousand: and
+when they arose in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.&mdash;2
+KINGS xix. 35.</p>
+<p>You heard read in the first lesson last Sunday afternoon, the threats
+of the king of Assyria against Jerusalem, and his defiance of the true
+Lord whose temple stood there.&nbsp; In the first lesson for this morning&rsquo;s
+service, you heard of king Hezekiah&rsquo;s fear and perplexity; of
+the Lord&rsquo;s answer to him by Isaiah, and of the great and wonderful
+destruction of the Assyrian army, of which my text tells you.&nbsp;
+Of course you have a right to ask: &ldquo;This which happened in a foreign
+country more than two thousand years ago, what has it to do with us?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And, of course, my preaching about it will be of no use whatsoever,
+unless I can show you what it has to do with us; what lesson we English
+here, in the year 1851, are to draw, from the help which God sent the
+Jews.</p>
+<p>But to find out that, we must hear the whole story.&nbsp; Before
+we can find out why God drove the Assyrians out of Jud&aelig;a, we must
+find out, it seems to me, why He sent them, or allowed them to come
+into Jud&aelig;a; and to find out that, we must first see how the Jews
+were behaving in those times, and what sort of state their country was
+in; and we must find out, too, what sort of a man this great king of
+Assyria was, and what sort of thoughts were in his heart.</p>
+<p>Now, by the favour of God, we can find out this.&nbsp; You will see,
+in the first thirty-seven chapters of Isaiah&rsquo;s prophecies, a full
+account of the ways of the Jews in that time, and the reasons why God
+allowed so fearful a danger to come upon them.&nbsp; The whole first
+thirty-five chapters belong to each other, and are, so to speak, a spiritual
+history of the Jews, and the Assyrians, and all the nations round them,
+for many years.&nbsp; A spiritual history&mdash;that is, not merely
+a history of what they did, but of what they were, what was in their
+inmost hearts, and thoughts, and spirits; a spiritual history&mdash;that
+is, not merely of what they thought they were doing, but of what God
+saw that they were doing&mdash;a history of God&rsquo;s mind about them
+all.&nbsp; Isaiah had God&rsquo;s spirit on him; and so he saw what
+was going on round him in the same light in which God saw it, and hated
+it, or praised it, only according as it was good, and according to the
+good Spirit of God, or bad, and contrary to that Spirit.&nbsp; So Isaiah&rsquo;s
+history of his own nation, and the nations around him, was very unlike
+what they would have written for themselves; just as I am afraid he
+would write a very different history of England now, from what we should
+write, if we were set to do it.&nbsp; Now what Isaiah thought of the
+doings of his countrymen, the Jews, I must tell you in another sermon,
+next Sunday.&nbsp; It will be enough this morning to speak of the king
+of Assyria.</p>
+<p>These kings of Assyria thought themselves the greatest and strongest
+beings in the world; they thought that their might was right, and that
+they might conquer, and ravage, and plunder and oppress every country
+round them for thousands of miles, without being punished.&nbsp; They
+thought that they could overcome the true God of Jud&aelig;a, as they
+had conquered the empty idols and false gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and
+Iva.&nbsp; But Isaiah saw that they were wrong.&nbsp; He told his countrymen:
+&ldquo;These Assyrian kings are strong, but there is a stronger King
+than they, Jehovah the Lord of all the earth.&nbsp; It is He who sent
+them to punish nation after nation, Sennacherib is the rod of Jehovah&rsquo;s
+anger; but he is a fool after all; for all his cunning, for all his
+armies, he is a fool rushing on his ruin.&nbsp; He may take Tyre, Damascus,
+Babylon, Egypt itself, and cast their gods into the fire, for they are
+no gods, but the work of men&rsquo;s hands, wood and stone; but let
+him once try his strength against the real living God; let the axe once
+begin to boast itself against Him that hews therewith; and he will find
+out that there is one stronger than he, one who has been using him as
+a &lsquo;tool, and who will crush him like a moth the moment he rebels.&nbsp;
+His father destroyed Samaria and her idols, but he shall not destroy
+Jerusalem.&nbsp; He may ravage Ephraim, and punish the gluttony and
+drunkenness, and oppression of the great landlords of Bashan; he may
+bring misery and desolation through the length and breadth of the land:
+there is reason, and reason but too good for that: but Jerusalem, the
+place where God&rsquo;s honour dwells, the temple without idols, which
+is the sign that Jehovah is a living God, against it he shall not cast
+up a bank, or shoot an arrow into it.&rsquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;I know,&rdquo;
+said Isaiah, &ldquo;what he is saying of himself, this proud king of
+Assyria: but this is what God says of him, that he is only a puppet,
+a tool in the hand of God, to punish these wicked nations whom he is
+conquering one by one, and us Jews among the rest.&nbsp; He, this proud
+king of Assyria, thinks that he is the chosen favourite of the sun,
+and the moon, and the stars, whom, in his folly, he worships as gods.&nbsp;
+He will find out who is the real Lord of the earth; he will find out
+that this great world is ruled by that very God of Israel whom he despises.&nbsp;
+He will find that there is something in this earth, of which he fancies
+himself lord and master, which is too strong for him, which will obey
+God, and not him.&nbsp; God rules the earth, and God rules Tophet, and
+the great fire-kingdoms which boil and blaze for ever in the bowels
+of the earth, and burst up from time to time in earthquakes and burning
+mountains; and God has ordained that they shall conquer this proud king
+of Assyria, though we Jews are too weak and cowardly, and split up into
+parties by our wickedness, to make a stand against him.&rdquo; . . .</p>
+<p>This great eruption or breaking out of burning mountains, which would
+destroy the king of Assyria&rsquo;s army, was to happen, Isaiah says,
+close to Jerusalem, nay, it was to shake Jerusalem itself.&nbsp; Jerusalem
+was to be brought to great misery by everlasting burnings, as well as
+by being besieged by the Assyrians; and yet the very shaking of the
+earth and eruption of fire which was nearly to destroy it, was to be
+the cause of its deliverance.&nbsp; So Isaiah prophesied, and we cannot
+doubt his words came true.&nbsp; For this may explain to us the way
+in which the king of Assyria&rsquo;s army was destroyed.&nbsp; The text
+says, that when they encamped near Jerusalem the messenger of the Lord
+went out, and slew in one night one hundred and eighty thousand of them,
+who were all found dead in the morning.&nbsp; How they were killed we
+cannot exactly tell, most likely by a stream of poisonous vapour, such
+as often comes forth out of the ground during earthquakes and eruptions
+of burning mountains, and kills all men and animals who breathe it.&nbsp;
+That this was the way that this great army was destroyed, I have little
+doubt, not only on account of what Isaiah says in his prophecies of
+God&rsquo;s &ldquo;sending a blast&rdquo; upon the king of Assyria,
+but because it was just like the old lesson which God had been teaching
+the Jews all along, that the earth and all in it was His property, and
+obeyed Him.&nbsp; For what could teach them that more strongly than
+to see that the earthquakes and burning mountains, of all things on
+earth the most awful and most murderous, the very things against which
+man has no defence, obeyed God; burst forth when He chose, and did His
+work as He willed?&nbsp; For man can conquer almost everything in the
+world except these burning mountains and earthquakes.&nbsp; He can sail
+over the raging sea in his ships; he can till the most barren soils;
+he can provide against famine, rain, and cold, ay, against the thunder
+itself: but the earthquakes alone are too strong for him.&nbsp; Against
+them no cunning or strength of man is of any use.&nbsp; Without warning,
+they make the solid ground under his feet heave, and reel, and sink,
+hurling down whole towns in a moment, and burying the inhabitants under
+the ruins, as an earthquake did in Italy only a month ago.&nbsp; Or
+they pour forth streams of fire, clouds of dust, brimstone, and poisonous
+vapour, destroying for miles around the woods and crops, farms and cities,
+and burying them deep in ashes, as they have done again and again, both
+in Italy and Iceland, and in South America, even during the last few
+years.&nbsp; How can man stand against them?&nbsp; What greater warning
+or lesson to him than they, that God is stronger than man; that the
+earth is not man&rsquo;s property, and will not obey him, but only the
+God who made it?&nbsp; Now that was just what God intended to teach
+the Jews all along; that the earth and heaven belonged to Him and obeyed
+Him; that they were not to worship the sun and stars, as the Assyrians
+and Canaanites did, nor the earth and the rivers as the Egyptians did:
+but to worship the God who made sun and stars, earth and rivers, and
+to put their trust in Him to guide all heaven and earth aright; and
+to make all things, sun, earth, and weather, ay, and the very burning
+mountains and earthquakes, work together for good for them if they loved
+God.&nbsp; Therefore it was that God gave His law to Moses on the burning
+mountain of Sinai, amid thunders, and lightnings, and earthquakes, to
+show them that the lightnings and the mountains obeyed Him.&nbsp; Therefore
+it was that the earthquake opened the ground and swallowed up Korah,
+Dathan, and Abiram, who rebelled against Moses.&nbsp; Therefore it was
+that God once used an earthquake and eruption to preserve David from
+his enemies, as we read in the eighteenth Psalm.&nbsp; And all through
+David&rsquo;s Psalms we find how well he had learnt this great lesson
+which God had taught him.&nbsp; Again and again we find verses which
+show that he knew well enough who was the Lord of all the earth.</p>
+<p>In Isaiah&rsquo;s time, it seems, God taught the Jews once more the
+same thing.&nbsp; He taught them, and the proud king of Assyria, once
+and for all, that He was indeed the Lord&mdash;Lord of all nations,
+and King of kings, and also Lord of the earth, and all that therein
+is.&nbsp; He taught it to the poor oppressed Jews by that miraculous
+deliverance.&nbsp; He taught it to the cruel invading king by that miraculous
+destruction.&nbsp; Just in the height of his glory, after he had conquered
+almost every nation in the east, and overcome the whole of Jud&aelig;a,
+except that one small city of Jerusalem, Sennacherib&rsquo;s great army
+was swept away, he neither knew how nor why, in a single night, and
+utterly disheartened and abashed, he returned to his own land; and even
+there he found that the God of Israel had followed him&mdash;that the
+idols whom he worshipped could not save him from the wrath of that God
+to whom Assyria, just as much as Jerusalem, belonged.&nbsp; For as he
+was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, his two sons smote
+him with the sword, and there was an end of all his pride and conquests.
+. . . Now Nisroch was the name of a star&mdash;the star which we call
+the planet Saturn; and the Assyrians fancied in their folly, that whosoever
+worshipped any particular star, that star would protect and help him.
+. . .&nbsp; But, alas for the king of Assyria, there was One above who
+had made the stars, and from whose vengeance the stars could not save
+him; and so even while he was worshipping, and praying to, this favourite
+star of his which could not hear him, he fell dead, a murdered man,
+and found out too late how true were the great words of Isaiah when
+he prophesied against him.</p>
+<p>Yes, my friends, this is the lesson which the Jews had to learn,
+and which the king of Assyria had to learn, and which we have to learn
+also; and which God will, in His great mercy, teach us over and over
+again by bitter trials whensoever we forget it; that The Lord is King;
+that He is near us, living for ever, all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving;
+that those who really trust in Him shall never be confounded; that those
+who trust in themselves are trying their paltry strength against the
+God who made heaven and earth, and will surely find out their own weakness,
+just when they fancy themselves most successful.&nbsp; So it was in
+Hezekiah&rsquo;s time; so it is now, hard as it may be to us to believe
+it.&nbsp; The Lord Jehovah, Jesus Christ, who saved Jerusalem from the
+Assyrians, He still is King, let the earth be never so unquiet.&nbsp;
+And all men, or governments, or doctrines, or ways of thinking and behaving,
+which are contrary to His will, or even pretend that they can do without
+Him, will as surely come to nought as that great and terrible king of
+Assyria.&nbsp; Though man be too weak to put them down, Christ is not.&nbsp;
+Though man neglect to put them down, Christ will not.&nbsp; If man dare
+not fight on the Lord&rsquo;s side against sin and evil, the Lord&rsquo;s
+earth will fight for Him.&nbsp; Storm and tempest, blight and famine,
+earthquakes and burning mountains, will do His work, if nothing else
+will.&nbsp; As He said Himself, if man stops praising Him, the very
+stones will cry out, and own Him as their King.&nbsp; Not that the blessed
+Lord is proud, or selfish, or revengeful; God forbid!&nbsp; He is boundless
+pity, and love, and mercy.&nbsp; But it is just because He is perfect
+love and pity that He hates sin, which makes all the misery upon earth.&nbsp;
+He hates it, and he fights against it for ever; lovingly at first, that
+He may lead sinners to repentance; for He wills the death of none, but
+rather that all should come to repentance.&nbsp; But if a man will not
+turn, He will whet his sword; and then woe to the sinner.&nbsp; Let
+him be as great as the king of Assyria, he must down.&nbsp; For the
+Lord will have none guide His world but Himself, because none but He
+will ever guide it on the right path.&nbsp; Yes&mdash;but what a glorious
+thought, that He will guide it, and us, on that right path.&nbsp; Oh
+blessed news for all who are in sorrow and perplexity!&nbsp; Whatsoever
+it is that ails you&mdash;and who is there, young or old, rich or poor,
+who has not their secret ailments at heart?&mdash;whatsoever ails you,
+whatsoever terrifies you, whatsoever tempts you, trust in the same Lord
+who delivered Jerusalem from the Assyrians, and He will deliver you.&nbsp;
+He will never suffer you to be tempted above that you are able, but
+will with the temptation also make a way for you to escape, that you
+may be able to bear it.&nbsp; This has been His loving way from the
+beginning, and this will be His way until the day when He wipes away
+tears from all eyes.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XX&mdash;PROFESSION AND PRACTICE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Though they say, &ldquo;The Lord liveth,&rdquo; surely they swear
+falsely.&mdash;JEREMIAH v. 2.</p>
+<p>I spoke last Sunday morning of the wonderful way in which the Lord
+delivered the Jews from the Assyrian army, and I promised to try and
+explain to you this morning, the reason why the Lord allowed the Assyrians
+to come into Jud&aelig;a, and ravage the whole country except the one
+small city of Jerusalem.</p>
+<p>My text is taken from the first lesson, from the book of the prophet
+Jeremiah.&nbsp; And it, I think, will explain the reason to us.</p>
+<p>For though Jeremiah lived more than a hundred years after Isaiah,
+yet he had much the same message from God to give, and much the same
+sins round him to rebuke.&nbsp; For the Jews were always, as the Bible
+calls them, &ldquo;a backsliding people;&rdquo; and, as the years ran
+on, and they began to forget their great deliverance from the Assyrians,
+they slid back into the very same wrong state of mind in which they
+were in Isaiah&rsquo;s time, and for which God punished them by that
+terrible invasion.</p>
+<p>Now, what was this?</p>
+<p>One very remarkable thing strikes us at once.&nbsp; That when the
+Assyrians came into Jud&aelig;a, the Jews were <i>not</i> given up to
+worshipping false gods.&nbsp; On the contrary, we find, both from the
+book of Kings and the book of Chronicles, that a great reform in religion
+had taken place among them a few years before.&nbsp; Their king Hezekiah,
+in the very first year of his reign, removed the high places, and cut
+down the groves (which are said to have been carved idols meant to represent
+the stars of heaven), and even broke in pieces the brazen serpent which
+Moses had made, because the Jews had begun to worship it for an idol.&nbsp;
+He trusted in the Lord God, and obeyed Him, more than any king of Judah.&nbsp;
+He restored the worship of the true God in the temple, according to
+the law of Moses, with such pomp and glory as had never been seen since
+Solomon&rsquo;s time.&nbsp; And not only did he turn to the true God,
+but his people also.&nbsp; From the account which we find in Chronicles,
+they seemed to have joined him in the good work.&nbsp; They offered
+sin-offerings as a token of the wickedness of which they have been guilty,
+in leaving the true God for idols; and all other kinds of offerings
+freely and willingly.&nbsp; &ldquo;And Hezekiah rejoiced, and all the
+people that God had prepared the people.&nbsp; Moreover, Hezekiah called
+all the men in Jud&aelig;a up to Jerusalem, to keep the passover according
+to the law of Moses,&rdquo; which they had neglected to do for many
+years, and the people answered his call and &ldquo;came, and kept the
+feast at Jerusalem seven days, with joy and great gladness, offering
+peace-offerings, and making confession to the God of their fathers.&nbsp;
+So there was great joy in Jerusalem; for since the time of Solomon there
+was not the like in Jerusalem.&nbsp; Then the priests and the Levites
+arose, and blessed the people, and their voice was heard, and their
+prayer came up to the Lord&rsquo;s holy dwelling, even to heaven.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And when it was all finished, the people went out of their own accord,
+and destroyed utterly all the idols, and high places, and altars throughout
+the land, and returned to their houses in peace.</p>
+<p>Now does not all this sound very satisfactory and excellent?&nbsp;
+What better state of mind could people be in?&nbsp; What a wonderful
+reform, and spread of true religion!&nbsp; The only thing like it, that
+we know, is the wonderful reform and spread of religion in England in
+the last sixty years, after all the ungodliness and wickedness that
+went on from the year 1660 to the time of the French war; the building
+of churches, the founding of schools, the spread of Bibles, and tracts,
+and the wonderful increase of gospel preachers, so that every old man
+will tell you, that religion is talked about and written about now,
+a thousand times more than when he was a boy.&nbsp; Indeed, unless a
+man makes a profession of some sort of religion or other, nowadays,
+he can hardly hope to rise in the world, so religious are we English
+become.</p>
+<p>Now let us hear what Isaiah thought of all that wonderful spread
+of true religion in his time; and then, perhaps, we may see what he
+would think of ours now, if he were alive.&nbsp; His opinion is sure
+to be the right one.&nbsp; His rules can never fail, for he was an inspired
+prophet, and saw things as they are, as God sees them; and therefore
+his rules will hold good for ever.&nbsp; Let us see what they were.</p>
+<p>The first chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah is called &ldquo;The
+vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and
+Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Now this is one prophecy by itself, in the shape of a poem; for in the
+old Hebrew it is written in regular verses.&nbsp; The second chapter
+begins with another heading, and is the beginning of a different poem;
+so that this first chapter is, as it were, a summing up of all that
+he is going to say afterwards; a short account of the state of the Jews
+for more than forty years.&nbsp; And what is more, this first chapter
+of Isaiah must have been written in the reign of Hezekiah, in those
+very religious days of which I was just speaking; for it says that the
+country was desolate, and Jerusalem alone left.&nbsp; And this never
+happened during Isaiah&rsquo;s lifetime, till the fourteenth year of
+Hezekiah, that is, till this great spread of the true religion had been
+going on for thirteen years.&nbsp; Now what was Isaiah&rsquo;s vision?&nbsp;
+What did he, being taught by God&rsquo;s Spirit, <i>see</i> was God&rsquo;s
+opinion of these religious Jews?&nbsp; Listen, my friends, and take
+it solemnly to heart!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto
+the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.&nbsp; To what purpose is
+the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord: I am full
+of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts: and I delight
+not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.&nbsp; When
+ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to
+tread my courts?&nbsp; Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination
+unto me; the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot
+away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.&nbsp; Your new moons
+and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me;
+I am weary to bear them.&nbsp; And when ye spread forth your hands,
+I will hide my eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will
+not hear: your hands are full of blood.&nbsp; Wash you, make you clean;
+put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do
+evil; learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge
+the fatherless, plead for the widow. . . .&nbsp; How is the faithful
+city become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged
+in it; but now murderers.&nbsp; Thy silver is become dross, thy wine
+mixed with water; thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves;
+every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not
+the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.&nbsp;
+Therefore, saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts, the mighty one of Israel,
+Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies.&rdquo;
+. . .</p>
+<p>Again, I say, my friends, listen to it, and take it solemnly to heart!&nbsp;
+That is God&rsquo;s opinion of religion, even the truest and soundest
+in worship and doctrine, when it is without godliness, without holiness;
+when it goes in hand with injustice, and covetousness, and falsehood,
+and cheating, and oppression, and neglect of the poor, and keeping company
+with the wicked, because it is profitable; in short, when it is like
+too much of the religion which we see around us in the world at this
+day.</p>
+<p>Yes&mdash;it was of no use holding to the letter of the law while
+they forgot its spirit.&nbsp; God had commanded church-going, and woe
+to those, then or now, who neglect it.&nbsp; Yet the Lord asks, &ldquo;Who
+hath required this at your hands, to tread my courts?&rdquo;. . .&nbsp;
+He had commanded the Sabbath-day to be kept holy; and woe to those,
+then or now, who neglect it.&nbsp; Yet He says, &ldquo;Your Sabbaths
+I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The Lord had appointed feasts: and yet He says that His soul hated them;
+they were a trouble to Him; He was weary to bear them.&nbsp; The Lord
+had commanded prayer; and woe to those, then or now, in England, as
+in Jud&aelig;a, who neglect to pray.&nbsp; And yet He says: &ldquo;When
+ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when
+ye make many prayers, I will not hear.&rdquo;&nbsp; And why?&mdash;He
+himself condescends to tell them the reason, which they ought to have
+known for themselves: &ldquo;Because,&rdquo; He says, &ldquo;your hands
+are full of blood.&rdquo;&nbsp; This was the reason why all their religiousness,
+and orthodoxy, and church-going, and praying, was only disgusting to
+God; because there was no righteousness with it.&nbsp; Their faith was
+only a dead, rotten, sham faith, for it brought forth no fruits of justice
+and love; and their religion was only hypocrisy, for it did not make
+them holy.&nbsp; No doubt they thought themselves pious and sincere
+enough; no doubt they thought that they were pleasing God perfectly,
+and giving Him all that He could fairly ask of them; no doubt they were
+fiercely offended at Isaiah&rsquo;s message to them; no doubt they could
+not understand what he meant by calling them a hypocritical nation,
+a second Sodom and Gomorrah, while they were destroying idols, and keeping
+the law of Moses, and worshipping God more earnestly than He had been
+worshipped since Solomon&rsquo;s time.&nbsp; But so it was.&nbsp; That
+was the message of God to them; that was the vision of Isaiah concerning
+them; that there was no soundness in the whole of the nation, &ldquo;from
+the sole of the foot to the crown of the head, nothing but wounds, and
+bruises, and putrefying sores&rdquo;&mdash;that is, that the whole heart
+and conscience, and ways of thinking, were utterly rotten, and abominable
+in the sight of God, even while they were holding the true doctrines
+about them, and keeping up the pure worship of Him.&nbsp; This, says
+the Lord, is not the way to please me.&nbsp; &ldquo;He hath showed thee,
+oh man, what is good.&nbsp; And what doth the Lord require of thee,
+but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+To do justly, to love mercy, and then to walk humbly, sure that when
+you seem to have done all your duty, you have left only too much of
+it undone; even as St. Paul felt when he said, that though he knew nothing
+against himself; though he could not recollect a single thing in which
+he had failed of his duty to the Corinthians, yet that did not justify
+him.&nbsp; &ldquo;For he that judgeth me,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;is
+the Lord.&rdquo;&nbsp; He sees deeper than I can; and He, alas! may
+take a very different view of my conduct from what I do; and this life
+of mine, which looks to me, from my ignorance, so spotless and perfect,
+may be, in His eyes, full of sins, and weakness, and neglects, and shameful
+follies.&nbsp; &ldquo;To walk humbly with God.&rdquo;&nbsp; Not to believe
+that because you read the Bible, and have heard the gospel, and are
+sharp at finding out false doctrine in preachers, and belong to the
+Church of England, that therefore you know all about God, and can look
+down upon poor papists, and heathens, and say: &ldquo;This people, which
+knoweth not the law, is accursed: but <i>we</i> are enlightened, we
+understand the whole Bible, we know everything about God&rsquo;s will,
+and man&rsquo;s duty; and whosoever differs from us, or pretends to
+teach us anything new about God, must be wrong.&rdquo;&nbsp; Not to
+do so, my friends, but to believe what St. Paul tells us solemnly, &ldquo;That
+if any man think that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he
+ought to know&rdquo;&mdash;to believe that the Great God, and the will
+of God, and the love of God, and the mystery of Redemption, and the
+treasures of wisdom which are in His Bible, are, as St. Paul told you,
+boundless, like a living well, which can never be fathomed, or drawn
+dry, but fills again with fresh water as fast as you draw from it.&nbsp;
+That is walking humbly with God; and those who do not do so, but like
+the Pharisees of old, believe that they have all knowledge, and can
+understand all the mysteries of the Bible, and go through the world,
+despising and cursing all parties but their own&mdash;let them beware,
+lest the Lord be saying of them, as He said of the church of Sardis,
+of old: &ldquo;Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and
+have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable,
+and poor, and blind, and naked.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How is this?&nbsp; What is this strange thing, without which even
+the true knowledge of doctrine is of no use; which, if a man, or a nation
+has not, he is poor, and blind, and wretched, and naked in soul, in
+spite of all his religion?&nbsp; Isaiah will tell us&mdash;What did
+he say to the Jews in his day?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings
+from before my eyes.&nbsp; Do justice to the fatherless, and relieve
+the widow!&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Do that,&rdquo; says the Lord, &ldquo;and
+then your repentance will be sincere.&nbsp; Church building and church
+going are well&mdash;but they are not repentance&mdash;churches are
+not souls.&nbsp; I ask you for your hearts, and you give me fine stones
+and fine words.&nbsp; I want souls&mdash;I want <i>your</i> souls&mdash;I
+want you to turn to me.&nbsp; And what am I? saith the Lord.&nbsp; I
+am justice, I am love, I am the God of the oppressed, the fatherless,
+the widow.&mdash;That is my character.&nbsp; Turn to justice, turn to
+love, turn to mercy; long to be made just, and loving, and merciful;
+see that your sin has been just this, and nothing else, that you have
+been unjust, unloving, unmerciful.&nbsp; Repent for your neglect and
+cruelty, and repent in dust and ashes, when you see what wretched hypocrites
+you really are.&nbsp; And then, my boundless mercy and pardon shall
+be open to you.&nbsp; As you wish to be to me, so will I be to you;
+if you wish to become merciful, you shall taste my mercy; if you wish
+to become loving to others, you shall find that I love you; if you wish
+to become just, you shall find that I am just, just to deal by you as
+you deal by others; faithful and just to forgive you your sins, and
+to cleanse you from all unrighteousness.&nbsp; And then, all shall be
+forgiven and forgotten; &ldquo;though your sins be as scarlet, they
+shall be white as snow: though they be red like crimson, they shall
+be as wool.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Surely, my friends, these things are worth taking to heart; for this
+is the sin which most destroys all men and nations&mdash;high religious
+profession with an ungodly, covetous, and selfish life.&nbsp; It is
+the worst and most dangerous of all sins; for it is like a disease which
+eats out the heart and life without giving pain; so that the sick man
+never suspects that anything is the matter with him, till he finds himself,
+to his astonishment, at the point of death.&nbsp; So it was with the
+Jews, three times in their history.&nbsp; In the time of Isaiah, under
+King Hezekiah; in the time of Jeremiah, under King Josiah; and last
+and worst of all, in the time of Jesus Christ.&nbsp; At each of these
+three times the Jews were high religious professors, and yet at each
+of these three times they were abominable before God, and on the brink
+of ruin.&nbsp; In Isaiah&rsquo;s time their eyes seemed to have been
+opened at last to their own sins.&nbsp; Their fearful danger, and wonderful
+deliverance from the Assyrians of which you heard last Sunday, seem
+to have done that for them; as God intended it should.&nbsp; During
+the latter part of Hezekiah&rsquo;s reign they seemed to have turned
+to God with their hearts, and not with their lips only; and Isaiah can
+find no words to express the delight which the blessed change gives
+him.&nbsp; Nevertheless, they soon fell back again into idolatry; and
+then there was another outward lip-reformation under the good King Josiah;
+and Jeremiah had to give them exactly the same warning which Isaiah
+had given them nearly a hundred years before.&nbsp; But that time, alas!
+they would not take the warning; and then all the evil which had been
+prophesied against them came on them.&nbsp; From hypocritical profession,
+they fell back again into their old idolatry; their covetousness, selfishness,
+party-quarrels, and profligate lives made them too weak and rotten to
+stand against Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, when he attacked them;
+and Jerusalem was miserably destroyed, the temple burnt, and the Jews
+carried captives to Babylon.&nbsp; There they repented in bitter sorrow
+and slavery; and God allowed them after seventy years to return to their
+own land.&nbsp; Then at first they seemed to be a really converted people,
+and to be worshipping God in spirit and in truth.&nbsp; They never again
+fell back into the idolatry of the heathen.&nbsp; So far from it, they
+became the greatest possible haters of it; they went on keeping the
+law of God with the utmost possible strictness, even to the day when
+the Lord Jesus appeared among them.&nbsp; Their religious people, the
+Scribes and Pharisees, were the most strict, moral, devout people of
+the whole world.&nbsp; They worshipped the very words and letters of
+the Bible; their thoughts seemed filled with nothing but God and the
+service of God: and yet the Lord Jesus told them that they were in a
+worse state, greater sinners in the sight of God, than they had ever
+been; that they, who hated idolatry, were filling up the measure of
+their idolatrous forefathers&rsquo; iniquity; that the guilt of all
+the righteous blood shed on earth was to fall on them; that they were
+a race of serpents, a generation of vipers; and that even He did not
+see how they could escape the damnation of hell.&nbsp; And they proved
+how true His words were, by crucifying the very Lord of whom their much-prized
+Scriptures bore witness, whom they pretended to worship day and night
+continually; and received the just reward of their deeds in forty years
+of sedition, bloodshed, and misery, which ended by the Romans coming
+and sweeping the nation of the Jews from off the face of the earth.</p>
+<p>So much for profession without practice.&nbsp; So much for true doctrine
+with dishonest and unholy lives.&nbsp; So much for outward respectability
+with inward sinfulness.&nbsp; So much for hating idolatry, while all
+the while men&rsquo;s hearts are far from God!</p>
+<p>Oh! my friends, let us all search our hearts carefully in these times
+of high profession and low practice; lest we be adding our drop of hypocrisy
+to the great flood of it which now stifles this land of England, and
+so fall into the same condemnation as the Jews of old, in spite of far
+nobler examples, brighter and wider light, and more wonderful and bounteous
+blessings.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXI&mdash;THE UNFAITHFUL SERVANT</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>But and if that servant say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming;
+and shall begin to beat the men servants and the maid servants, and
+to eat and drink and to be drunken; the lord of that servant will come
+in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour when he is not
+aware, and will cut him asunder, and will appoint him his portion with
+the unbelievers.&mdash;LUKE xii. 45, 46.</p>
+<p>But why with the unbelievers?&nbsp; The man had not disbelieved that
+he had any Lord at all; he had only believed that his Lord delayed his
+coming.&nbsp; And why was he to be put with those who do not believe
+in him at all?&nbsp; This is a very fearful question, friends, for us,
+when we think how it is the fashion among us now, to believe that our
+Lord delays His coming.&mdash;And surely most of us do believe that?&nbsp;
+For is it not our notion that, when the Lord Jesus ascended up to heaven,
+He went away a great distance off, perhaps millions of miles beyond
+the stars; and that He will not come back again till the last&mdash;which,
+for aught we know, and as we rather expect, may not happen for hundreds
+or thousands of years to come?&nbsp; Is not that most people&rsquo;s
+notion, rich as well as poor?&nbsp; And if that is not believing that
+our Lord delays His coming, what is?</p>
+<p>But, you may answer, the Creed says plainly, that He ascended into
+heaven and sits at the right hand of God.&nbsp; Ah! my friends, those
+great words of the Creed which you take into your lips every Sunday,
+mean the very opposite to what most people fancy.&nbsp; They do not
+say, &ldquo;The Lord Jesus has left this poor earth to itself and its
+misery:&rdquo; but they say, &ldquo;Lo, He is with you, even to the
+end of the world.&rdquo;&nbsp; True, He is ascended into heaven.&nbsp;
+And how far off is heaven?&mdash;for so far off is the Lord Jesus, and
+no farther.&nbsp; Not so far off, my friends, after all, if you knew
+where to find it.&nbsp; Truly said the great and good poet, now gone
+home to his reward:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Heaven lies about us in our infancy.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>And if we lose sight of it as we grow up to be men and women, it
+is not because heaven goes farther off, but because we grow less heavenly.&nbsp;
+Even now, so close is heaven to us, that any one of us might enter into
+heaven this moment, without stirring from his seat.&nbsp; One real cry
+from the depths of your heart&mdash;&ldquo;Father, forgive thy sinful
+child!&rdquo;&mdash;one real feeling of your own worthlessness, and
+weakness, and emptiness, and of God&rsquo;s righteousness, and love,
+and mercy, ready for you&mdash;and you are in heaven there and then,
+as near the feet of the blessed Lord Jesus, as Mary Magdalen was, when
+she tried to clasp them in the garden.&nbsp; I am serious, my friends;
+I am not given to talk fine figures of poetry; I am talking sober, straightforward,
+literal truth.&nbsp; And the Lord sits at God&rsquo;s right hand too?
+you believe that?&nbsp; Then how far off is God?&mdash;for as far off
+as God is, so far off is the Lord Jesus, and no farther.&nbsp; What
+says St. Paul?&nbsp; That &ldquo;God is not far off from any one of
+us&mdash;for in Him we live, and move, and have our being&rdquo; . .
+. IN Him . . . .&nbsp; How far off is that?&nbsp; And is not God everywhere,
+if indeed we can say that He is any where?&nbsp; Then the Lord Jesus,
+who is at God&rsquo;s right hand, is everywhere also&mdash;here, now,
+with us this day.&nbsp; One would have thought that there was no need
+to prove that by argument, considering that His own blessed lips told
+us: &ldquo;Lo, I am with you, even to the end of the world;&rdquo; and
+again: &ldquo;Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name,
+there am I in the midst of them.&rdquo;&nbsp; And this is the Lord whom
+people fancy is gone away far above the stars, till the end of time!&nbsp;
+Oh, my friends, rather bow your heads before Him here this moment.&nbsp;
+For here He is among us now, listening to every thought of our poor
+sinful hearts. . . .&nbsp; He is where God is&mdash;God <i>in</i> whom
+we live, and move, and have our being&mdash;and that is everywhere.&nbsp;
+Do you wish Him to be any nearer, my friends?&nbsp; Or do you&mdash;do
+you&mdash;take care what your hearts answer, for He is watching them&mdash;do
+you in the depth of your hearts wish that He were a little farther off?&nbsp;
+Does the notion of His being here on this earth, watching and interfering
+(as we call it nowadays in our atheism) with us and everything, seem
+unpleasant and burdensome?&nbsp; Is it more comfortable to you to think
+that He is away far up beyond the stars?&nbsp; Do you feel the lighter
+and freer for fancying that He will not visit the earth for many a year
+to come?&nbsp; In short, is it in your <i>hearts</i> that you are saying,
+The Lord delays His coming?</p>
+<p>That is a very important question.&nbsp; For mind, a pious man might
+be, as many a pious man has been in these days, deceived by bad teaching
+into the notion that Jesus Christ was gone far away.&nbsp; But if he
+were a truly pious man, if he truly loved the Lord, that would be a
+painful thought&mdash;as I should have fancied, an unbearable thought&mdash;to
+him, when he looked out upon this poor miserable, confused world.&nbsp;
+He would be crying night and day: &ldquo;Oh, that thou wouldest rend
+the heavens and come down!&rdquo;&nbsp; He would be in an agony of pity
+for this poor deserted earth, and of longing for the Saviour of it to
+come back and save it.&nbsp; He would never have a moment&rsquo;s peace
+of mind till he had either seen the Lord come back again in His glory,
+or till he had found out&mdash;what I am sure the blessed Lord would
+teach him as a reward for his love&mdash;that it was all a dream and
+a nightmare, and that the Lord of the earth was in the earth, and close
+to him, all along; only that his weak eyes were held so that he did
+not know the Lord and the Lord&rsquo;s works when he saw them.</p>
+<p>But that was not the temper of this servant in the Lord&rsquo;s parable.&nbsp;
+I am afraid it is by no means the temper of many of us nowadays.&nbsp;
+The servant said <i>in his heart</i>, that his master would be long
+away.&nbsp; It was his heart put the thought into his head.&nbsp; He
+took to the notion <i>heartily</i>, as we say, because he was glad to
+believe it was true; glad to think that his master would not come to
+&ldquo;interfere&rdquo; with him; and that in the meantime he might
+be lord and master himself, and treat everyone in the house as if he
+himself was the owner of it, and tyrannise over his fellow-servants,
+and enjoy himself in luxury and good living.&nbsp; So says David of
+the fool: &ldquo;The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God;&rdquo;
+his heart puts that thought into his head.&nbsp; He wishes to believe
+that there is no God; and when there is a will there is a way; and he
+soon finds out reasons and arguments enough to prove what he is so very
+anxious to prove.</p>
+<p>Now, my friends, I am afraid that there is not so much difference
+as people fancy, between the fool who says in his heart, &ldquo;There
+is no God,&rdquo; and the fool who says in his heart, &ldquo;My master
+delays His coming.&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;God has left the world to us,
+and we must shift for ourselves in it.&rdquo;&nbsp; The man who likes
+to be what St. Paul calls &ldquo;without God in the world,&rdquo; is
+he so very much wiser than the man who likes to have no God at all?&nbsp;
+St. James did not think so; for what does he say: &ldquo;Thou believest
+that there is one God?&nbsp; Thou doest well&mdash;the devils also believe
+and tremble.&rdquo;&nbsp; They know as much as that; but it does them
+no good&mdash;only increases their fear.&nbsp; &ldquo;But wilt thou
+know, oh! vain man, that faith without works,&rdquo; believing without
+doing, &ldquo;is dead?&rdquo;&nbsp; And are not too many, as I said
+just now, afraid of the thought of God; so afraid of it that they wish
+to allow the Son of God as little share as possible in the management
+of this world?&nbsp; Have not too many a belief without works; a mere
+belief that there is one God and not two, which hardly, from one year&rsquo;s
+end to another, makes them do one single thing which they would not
+have done if they had believed that there was no God at all?&nbsp; Fear
+of the law, fear of the policeman, fear of losing their work or their
+custom; fear of losing their neighbour&rsquo;s good word&mdash;that
+is what keeps most people from breaking loose.&nbsp; There is not much
+of the fear of God in that, or the love of God either as far as I can
+see.&nbsp; They go through life as if they had made a covenant with
+God, that He should have his own way in the world to come, if He would
+only let them have their way in this world.&nbsp; Oh! my friends, my
+friends, do you think God is God of the next world and not of this also?&nbsp;
+Do you think the kingdom, and the power, and the glory will be His a
+great many hundreds of years hence, in what you call heaven; and will
+not see what every page of Scripture tells you, what you yourself say
+every time you repeat the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer, that the Kingdom, and
+the Power and the Glory are His now, here in this life, and that He
+has committed all things to His Son Jesus Christ and given the power
+into His hand, that He may rule this earth in righteousness now, here,
+in this life, and conquer back for God one by one, if it be possible,
+every creature upon earth?&nbsp; So says the Bible&mdash;and people
+profess nowadays to believe their Bibles.&nbsp; My friends, too many,
+nowadays, while they profess very loudly to believe what the Bible says,
+only believe what their favourite teachers tell them that the Bible
+says.&nbsp; If they really read their Bibles for themselves, and took
+God at His word, there would be less tyrannising of one man over another,
+less grinding down of men by masters, and of men by each other&mdash;for
+the poor are often very hard on each other in England, now, my friends&mdash;very
+envious and spiteful, and slanderous about each other.&nbsp; They say
+that dog won&rsquo;t eat dog&mdash;yet how many a poor man grudges and
+supplants his neighbour, and tries to get into his place and beat him
+down in his wages?&nbsp; And there are those who call themselves learned
+men, who tell the poor that that is God&rsquo;s will, and the way by
+which God intends them to prosper.&nbsp; If those men believed their
+Bibles, they would be repenting in sackcloth and ashes for having preached
+such a devil&rsquo;s sermon to God&rsquo;s children.&nbsp; If men really
+read their Bibles, there would be less eating and drinking with the
+drunken; less idleness and luxury among the rich; less fancying that
+a man has a right to do what he likes with his own, because all men
+would know that they were only the Lord&rsquo;s stewards, bound to give
+an account to him of the good which they had done with what he has lent
+them.&nbsp; There would be fewer parents fancying that they can tyrannise
+over their children, bringing them up as heathens for the sake of the
+few pence they earn; using bad language, and doing shameful things before
+them, which they dared not do if they recollected that the Lord was
+looking on; beating and scolding them as if they were brutes or slaves,
+to save themselves the trouble of teaching them gently what the poor
+little creatures cannot know without being taught: and most shameful
+of all, robbing the poor children of their little earnings to spend
+it themselves in drunkenness.&nbsp; Ah, blessed Lord! if people did
+but know how near Thou wert to them, all that would vanish out of England,
+as the night clouds vanish away before the sun!</p>
+<p>And He is near, my friends: He is watching; He is governing; He is
+at hand: and in this life or in the life to come, forget Him as we choose,
+He will make us know plain enough, and without any doubt whatsoever,
+that He is the Lord.</p>
+<p>He has fulfilled this awful parable of his about the unfaithful servant
+already; many a time, against many a man, many a great king, and prince,
+and nation; and he will fulfil it against each and every man, from the
+nobleman in his castle to the labourer in his cottage, who says in his
+heart, &ldquo;My Lord delays his coming,&rdquo; and begins to tyrannise
+over those who are weaker than himself, and to enjoy himself as he likes,
+and forget that he is not his own, but bought with the price of Christ&rsquo;s
+blood, and bound to work for Christ&rsquo;s kingdom and glory.</p>
+<p>So he punished the popes of Rome, three hundred years ago.&nbsp;
+When all the nations in Europe were listening to them and obeying them,
+and they had put into their hands by God a greater power of doing good
+than He ever gave to any human being before or since, what did they
+do?&nbsp; Instead of using their power for Christ, they used it for
+themselves.&nbsp; Instead of preaching to all nations the good news
+that Christ the Son of God was their King, they said: &ldquo;I, the
+pope, am your king.&nbsp; Christ is gone far away into heaven, and has
+committed all power on earth to us; we are Christ&rsquo;s vicars; we
+are in Christ&rsquo;s place; He has entrusted to our keeping all the
+treasures of His merits and His grace, and no one can get any blessing
+from Christ, unless we choose to give it him.&rdquo;&nbsp; So they said
+in their hearts just what the foolish servant in the parable said: and
+fancying that they were lords and masters, naturally enough went on
+to behave as such; to beat the men-servants and maid-servants, that
+is, to oppress and tyrannise over the bodies and minds and consciences
+of men, and women too, God knows; and to eat and drink with the drunken,
+to live in riot and debauchery.&nbsp; But the Lord was not so far off
+as those foolish popes fancied.&nbsp; And in an hour when they were
+not aware, He came and cut them asunder.&nbsp; He snatched from them
+one-half of the nations of Europe, and England among the rest; He punished
+them by doubt, ignorance, confusion, and utter blindness, and appointed
+them their portion among the unbelievers in such terrible earnest, that
+to this very day, to judge by the things which they say and do, it is
+difficult to persuade ourselves that the popes really believe in any
+God at all.</p>
+<p>So He did, only three years ago, to many kings and princes on the
+Continent. <a name="citation217"></a><a href="#footnote217">{217}</a>&nbsp;
+They professed to be Christians; but they had forgotten that they were
+Christ&rsquo;s stewards, that all their power came from Him, and that
+he had given it them only to use for the good of their subjects.&nbsp;
+And they too went on saying:&nbsp; &ldquo;The Lord delays His coming,
+we are rulers in this world, and God is ruler in the world to come.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+So they, too, oppressed their subjects, and lived in ease on what they
+wrung out of the poor wretches below them.&nbsp; But the Lord was nearer
+them, too, than they fancied; and all at once&mdash;as they were fancying
+themselves all safe and prosperous, and saying, &ldquo;We are those
+who ought to speak, who is Lord over us?&rdquo;&mdash;their fool&rsquo;s
+paradise crumbled from under their feet.&nbsp; A few paltry mobs of
+foolish starving people, without weapons, without leaders, without good
+counsel to guide them, rose against them.&nbsp; And what did they do?&nbsp;
+They might have crushed down the rebels most of them, in a week, if
+they had had courage.&nbsp; And in the only country where the rebels
+were really strong, that is, in Austria, all might have been quiet again
+at once, if the king had only had the heart to do common justice, and
+keep his own solemn oaths.&nbsp; But no&mdash;the terror of the Lord
+came upon them.&nbsp; He most truly cut them in sunder.&nbsp; They were
+every man of a different mind, and none of them in the same mind a day
+together; they became utterly conscience-stricken, terrified, perplexed,
+at their wit&rsquo;s end, not having courage or determination to do
+anything, or even to do nothing, and fled shamefully away one after
+another, to their everlasting disgrace.&nbsp; And those of them who
+have got back their power since are showing sadly enough, by their obstinate
+folly and wickedness, that the Lord has appointed them their portion
+with the unbelievers, and left them to fill up the measure of their
+iniquity, and drink deep the cup of wrath which is in His hand, full
+and mixed for those who forget God.</p>
+<p>Oh! my friends, let us lay these things solemnly to heart.&nbsp;
+Do not fancy that the Lord will punish the wicked great, and forget
+the wicked small.&nbsp; In His sight there is neither great nor small;
+all are small enough for Him to crush like the moth; and all are too
+great to be overlooked, or forgotten by Him, without whom not a sparrow
+falls to the ground.&nbsp; Again I say, my friends, let us lay His parable
+to heart.&nbsp; Let us who have property, and station, and education,
+never forget who has given it us, and for whom we must use it.&nbsp;
+Let us never forget that to whom much is given, of them will much be
+required.&nbsp; Let us pray to the Lord daily to write upon our inmost
+hearts those solemn words: &ldquo;Who made thee to differ from another;
+and what hast thou which thou didst not receive?&rdquo;&nbsp; Let us
+look on our servants, our labourers, on every human being over whom
+we have any influence, as weaker brothers whom God has commanded us
+to help, teach, and guide in body, mind, and spirit, not that we may
+make them our slaves, but make them free, manful, self-helping, and
+in due time independent of us and of everyone except God.</p>
+<p>And you young people, who have no authority over anyone, but over
+your own bodies; to whom the Lord has given little or nothing to manage
+and take care of except your own health and strength&mdash;do not let
+the devil tempt you to believe that that health and strength is your
+own property, to do what you like with.&nbsp; It belongs to the Lord
+who died for you, and He will require an account from you how you have
+used it.&nbsp; Do not let the devil tempt you to believe that the Lord
+delays His coming to you&mdash;that you may do what you like now, in
+the prime of your years, and that it will be time enough to think about
+God and religion when God visits you with cares, and sickness, and old
+age.&nbsp; That is the fancy of too many; but it will surely turn out
+to be a mistake.&nbsp; Those who misuse their youth, and health, and
+strength, in tyrannising over those who are weaker than themselves,
+and laughing at those who are not as clever as themselves, and eating
+and drinking with the drunken&mdash;the Lord will come to them in an
+hour when they are not aware, and cut them asunder, in some way or other,
+by loss of work, or poverty, or sickness, or doubt and confusion, and
+bitter shame and perplexity of mind; till they find out, poor things,
+that they have been living like the unbelievers all their youth, without
+God in the world, while God&rsquo;s love and God&rsquo;s teaching, and
+God&rsquo;s happiness was ready for them; and have to go back again
+to their Father and their Lord, and cry: &ldquo;Father, we have sinned
+against heaven and before Thee, and are no more worthy to be called
+Thy children!&rdquo;&nbsp; Oh, you who have been fancying that the Lord
+was gone far away, and that you had a right to do what you liked with
+the powers which He has given you, go back to Him, now at once, and
+confess that you, and all belonging to you, belong to Him, and ask Him
+to teach you how to use it aright.&nbsp; Ask Him to teach you how to
+please Him with it, and not yourselves only.&nbsp; Ask Him to teach
+you how to do good to all around you, and not merely to do what you
+like.&nbsp; Ask Him to show you how to do your duty to Him, and to your
+neighbours, for whom He died on the cross, in that station of life to
+which He has called you.&nbsp; Ask Him to show you how to use your property,
+your knowledge, your business, your strength, your health, so that you
+may be a blessing and a help to those whom He blesses and helps, and
+who, He wishes, should bless and help each other.&nbsp; Go back to Him
+at once, my friends.&nbsp; You will not have far to go, seeing that
+He is now even among us here hearing my clumsy words; and I do hope,
+and trust, and pray, bringing them home to some of your hearts with
+that spirit and power of His, which is like a two-edged sword, piercing
+to the very depths of a man&rsquo;s heart, and showing him how ugly
+it is&mdash;and how noble the Lord will make it, if he will but repent
+and pray to Him who never cast out any that came to Him.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXII&mdash;THE WAY TO WEALTH</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He
+is near: let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his
+thoughts and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon
+him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.&mdash;ISAIAH lv.
+6, 7.</p>
+<p>Some of you, surely, while the first lesson was being read this morning,
+must have felt the beauty of it; and if you were thoughtful, perplexed,
+weary, sad at heart, perhaps you felt that it was more than beautiful&mdash;that
+it was full of comfort.&nbsp; And so it should be full of comfort to
+you, my friends.&nbsp; God meant it to give you comfort.&nbsp; For though
+it was written and spoken by a man of like passions with ourselves,
+it was just as truly written and spoken by God, who made heaven and
+earth.&nbsp; It is true and everlasting, the message which it brings,
+and like all true and everlasting words, it is the voice of God who
+cannot change; who makes no difference between Jew and Gentile, between
+us in England here, and nations which perished hundreds of years ago.</p>
+<p>And what is its message?&nbsp; What was God&rsquo;s word to the old
+Jews, among all their sin, and sorrow, and labour?</p>
+<p>Is it the message of a stern judge, saying: &ldquo;Pay me that thou
+owest, to the uttermost farthing; and if you cannot do that, fret and
+torment yourselves in shame and terror here on earth, for all your sins,
+if, possibly, you may chance to change my mind, and find forgiveness
+at the last day?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Is it the message of a proud tyrant, saying: &ldquo;If you are miserable,
+and fallen, and sinful, what is that to me?&nbsp; I am perfect, blest,
+contented with myself, alone in my glory, far away beyond the sight
+of men, beyond the sun and stars&mdash;what are you worms of earth to
+me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Or is it the voice of a loving Father, calling to his self-willed
+children who have gone proudly and boldly away from their Father&rsquo;s
+house, and thrown off their Father&rsquo;s government, and said in their
+conceit: &ldquo;We are men.&nbsp; Do not we know good and evil?&nbsp;
+Do we not know what is our interest?&nbsp; Cannot we judge for ourselves,
+and shift for ourselves, and take care of ourselves?&nbsp; Why are we
+to be barred from pleasant things here, and profitable things there?&nbsp;
+We will be our own masters.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To self-willed children who have said thus, and done thus in their
+foolish hearts, and have found all their conceit, and shrewdness, only
+lead them into sorrow, and perplexity, and distress.&mdash;Who have
+found that with all their cleverness they could not get the very good
+things for which they left their Father&rsquo;s house; or if they get
+them, find no enjoyment in them, but only discontent, and shame, and
+danger, and a sad self-accusing heart&mdash;spending their money for
+that which does not feed them after all, and labouring hard for things
+which do not satisfy them; always longing for something more&mdash;always
+finding the pleasure, or the profit, or the honour which a little way
+off looked so fine, looked quite ugly and worthless, when they come
+up to it and get hold of it&mdash;finding all things full of labour;
+the eye never satisfied with seeing, or the ear with hearing; the same
+thing coming over and over again.&nbsp; Each young man starting with
+gay hopes, as if he were the first man that ever was born, and he was
+going to do out of hand such fine things as man never did before, and
+make his own fortune, and set the world to right at once; and then as
+he grows older, falling into the same weary ruts as his forefathers
+went dragging on it, every fresh year bringing its own labour and its
+own sorrow; and dying like them, taking nothing away with him of all
+he has earned, and crying with his last breath: &ldquo;That which is
+crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be
+numbered.&nbsp; What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh
+under the sun, for all is vanity and vexation of spirit?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To self-willed children, who have tried their own way ever since
+they were born, they and their fathers before them, and found it go
+round in a ring and leave them just where they started in heart and
+soul, and, on their death-beds, in purse and power also&mdash;</p>
+<p>To such struggling, dissatisfied beings&mdash;such as nine-tenths
+of the men and women on this earth, alas! are still&mdash;comes the
+word of this loving Father:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters! and he
+that hath no money, come, buy and eat.&nbsp; Yea, come, buy wine and
+milk without money, and without price.&rdquo;&nbsp; Why do you fancy
+that money can give you all you want?&nbsp; Why this labouring and straining
+after money, as if it was God, as if it made heaven and earth, and all
+therein?&nbsp; Is money a God? or money&rsquo;s worth? &ldquo;I am God,&rdquo;
+saith the Lord, &ldquo;and beside me there is none else.&nbsp; It is
+I who give, and not money.&nbsp; It is I who save men, and not money.&nbsp;
+And I do save, and I do give freely to all.&nbsp; Come, and try my mercy,
+and see if my word be not true.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This struggling and snarling, like dogs over a bone&mdash;what profit
+comes of it? are you happier? are you wiser? are you better? are you
+more at peace with your neighbours; more at peace with your own hearts
+and consciences?&nbsp; If you are, money has not made you so, nor plotting,
+and scraping, and struggling, and pushing your neighbour down, that
+you may rise a few inches on his shoulders.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; Hear what
+the voice of your Father says is the true way to wealth and comfort,
+after which you all struggle and labour so hard in vain.&mdash;&ldquo;Hearken
+diligently unto me, and you shall eat that which is good, and your soul
+shall delight itself in fatness.&nbsp; Incline your ear and come unto
+me.&nbsp; Hear, and your soul shall live.&nbsp; And I will make an everlasting
+covenant with you, even the sure mercies,&rdquo; or rather &ldquo;the
+faithful oath which I sware unto David?&rdquo;&nbsp; And what is this
+faithful oath which God sware to David.&mdash;&ldquo;Of the fruit of
+thy body, I will set on thy seat.&rdquo;&nbsp; A promise of a righteous
+king who should arise in David&rsquo;s family.&nbsp; How far David understood
+the full meaning of that glorious promise we cannot tell.&nbsp; He thought
+most probably, at first, that Solomon, his son, was to be the king who
+would fulfil it.&nbsp; But all through many of his psalms, there are
+deep and great words about some nobler and more perfect king than Solomon&mdash;about
+one who, as Isaiah says here, would perfectly witness to the people
+that God was their King; one who would be a perfect leader and commander
+of the people; a holy one of Israel, who would sit on God&rsquo;s right
+hand; to hear the good news of whom, the Jews would call nations whom
+they then did not know of, and for whose sake nations who did not know
+them would run to them.&nbsp; And dimly David did see this, that God
+would raise up a true Christ, that is, one truly anointed by God, chosen
+and sent out by God, to sit on his throne, and be perfectly what David
+was only in part; a King made perfect by suffering, a King of poor men,
+a King who bore the sins and carried the iniquities of all His people,
+from the highest to the lowest.&nbsp; We know who that was.&nbsp; We
+know clearly what David only knew dimly, what Isaiah only knew a little
+more clearly.&nbsp; We know who was born of the Virgin Mary, crucified
+under Pontius Pilate, ascended into heaven, and now sits at the right
+hand of God, ever praying for us, ruling the world in righteousness,
+Jesus the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, to whom all power is given in
+heaven and earth.</p>
+<p>But Isaiah, though he knew Him only dimly, still knew Him.&nbsp;
+He did not know that the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, would take on
+Himself the form of a poor man, and be called the son of the carpenter.&nbsp;
+Such boundless love and condescension in the Son of God he never could
+have fancied for himself, and God had not chosen to reveal it to him;
+or to anyone else in those days.&nbsp; But this he did see, that the
+Lord Jesus, He whom he calls the Holy One of Israel, was near the Jews
+in his time; that He was watching over them, mourning over their sins,
+arguing with them, and calling them to return to Him with most human
+love and tenderness, as a husband to the woman whom he loves in spite
+of her unfaithfulness to him.&nbsp; As he says to his sinful and distressed
+country in the chapter before this: &ldquo;Thy Maker is thy husband:
+the Lord of Hosts is His name, and thy Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel,
+the Lord of the whole earth shall He be called.&nbsp; For the Lord hath
+called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit.&nbsp; For a small
+moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee.&nbsp;
+In a little anger I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting
+kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This, then, Isaiah knew&mdash;that the heart of the Holy Lord pitied
+and yearned after those poor sinful Jews, as a husband&rsquo;s after
+a foolish and sinful wife.&nbsp; And how much more should we believe
+the same, how much more should we believe that His heart pities and
+yearns for all foolish and sinful people here in England now!&nbsp;
+We who know a thousand times more than Isaiah knew of His love, His
+pity, His condescension, which led Him to sacrifice Himself upon the
+cross for us?&nbsp; Surely, surely, if Isaiah had a right to say to
+those Jews, &ldquo;Seek the Lord while He may be found,&rdquo; I have
+a thousand times as much right to say it to you.&nbsp; If Isaiah had
+a right to say to those Jews, &ldquo;Let the wicked forsake his ways
+and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord,
+and He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly
+pardon,&rdquo; then I have a right to say it to you.</p>
+<p>Free mercy, utter pardon, pardon for all, even for the worst.&nbsp;
+And what is the argument which Isaiah uses to make his countrymen repent?&nbsp;
+Is it &ldquo;Repent, or you shall be damned: Repent because God&rsquo;s
+wrath and curse is against you.&nbsp; The Lord hates you and despises
+you, and you must crawl to His feet like beaten hounds, and entreat
+Him not to strike you into hell as He intends&rdquo;?&nbsp; Not so;
+it was because God loved the Jews, that they were to repent.&nbsp; It
+is because God loves you that you must repent.&nbsp; &ldquo;Incline
+your ear,&rdquo; saith the Lord, &ldquo;and come unto me, hear, and
+your soul shall live; and you shall eat that which is good, and your
+soul shall delight itself in fatness.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yes, God is love.&nbsp;
+God&rsquo;s delight and glory is to give; in spite of all our sins He
+gives and gives, sending rain and fruitful seasons to just and unjust,
+to fill their hearts with joy and gladness; and all the while men fancy
+that it is not God that gives, but they who take.&nbsp; God has not
+left Himself, as St. Paul says, without a witness; every fruitful shower
+and quickening gleam of sunshine cries to us&mdash;See! God is love:
+He is the giver.&nbsp; And men will not hear that voice.&nbsp; They
+say in their hearts, &ldquo;The Lord is far away above the skies; He
+does not care for us: we must help ourselves, each man to what he can
+get off this earth; nay, even, when we are hard put to it for a living,
+we must break God&rsquo;s laws to keep ourselves alive, and so steal
+from God&rsquo;s table the very good things which He offers us freely.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But some will say: &ldquo;He does not give freely; we must work and
+struggle.&nbsp; Why do you mock poor hard-worked creatures with such
+words as these?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ask that question of God, my friends, and not of me.&nbsp; Isaiah
+said that those who hearkened to God diligently should eat what is good.&nbsp;
+The Lord Jesus Christ Himself said the same&mdash;that if we seek first
+the kingdom of God and His justice, all other things should be added
+to them.&nbsp; He did not mean us to be idle, God forbid! but this He
+meant, that if we, each in his business and calling, put steadily before
+ourselves what is right, what God would wish us, His subjects, to be
+in His Kingdom&mdash;if instead of making our first thought in every
+business we take in hand, &ldquo;What will suit my interest best, what
+will raise most money, what will give me most pleasure?&rdquo; we said
+to ourselves all day long, &ldquo;What will be most right, and just,
+and merciful for us to do; what will be most pleasing to a God who is
+love and justice itself? what will do most good to my neighbour as well
+as myself?&rdquo; then all things would go well with us.&nbsp; Then
+we should be prosperous and joyful.&nbsp; Then our plans would succeed
+and our labour bring forth real profit to us, because they would be
+according to the will of God: we should be fellow-workers with Jesus
+Christ in the great work of doing good to this poor distracted world,
+and His help and blessing would be with us.</p>
+<p>And if you ask me, how can this come to pass, I must answer, as Isaiah
+does in this same chapter: &ldquo;The Lord&rsquo;s ways are not as our
+ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts, but higher than ours, as the
+heavens are above the earth.&rdquo;&nbsp; But if we do turn to God,
+and repent each man of us of his selfishness, his unfaithfulness, his
+hard-heartedness, his covetousness, his self-will, his ungodliness&mdash;then
+God&rsquo;s blessing, as Isaiah says, will come down on us, and spring
+up among us, we know not how or whence, like the rain and snow, which
+comes down from heaven and waters the earth, and makes it bud and bring
+forth to give seed to the sower and bread to the eater.&nbsp; So shall
+be the Lord&rsquo;s word, which goes out of His mouth; it will not return
+to Him void, but will accomplish what He pleases, and prosper in that
+whereto He sends it.&nbsp; He will teach us and guide us in the right
+way.&nbsp; He will put His word into the mouths of true teachers to
+show us our duty.&nbsp; He will pour out His spirit upon us, to make
+us love our duty.&nbsp; In one way and another, we know not how, we
+shall be taught what is good for England, good for each parish, good
+for each family.&nbsp; And wealth, peace, and prosperity for rich and
+poor will be the fruit of obeying the word of God, and giving up our
+hearts to be led by His spirit.&nbsp; As it was to be in Jud&aelig;a,
+of old, if they repented, so will it be with us.&nbsp; They should go
+forth with joy and do their work in peace.&nbsp; The hills should break
+before them into singing, and all the trees of the field should clap
+their hands; instead of thorns should come up timber-trees: instead
+of briers, garden-shrubs.&nbsp; The whole cultivation of the country
+was to improve, and be to the Lord for a name, and a sign for ever that
+the true way to wealth and prosperity is the way of God, justice, mercy
+to each other, and obedience to the will of Him who made heaven and
+earth, trees and fruitful fields, rain and sunshine, and gives the blessings
+of them freely to His children of mankind, in proportion as they look
+up to Him as a loving Father, and return to him day by day, with childlike
+repentance, and full desire to amend their lives according to His holy
+word.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXIII&mdash;THE LOVE OF CHRIST</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that
+if one died for all, then were all dead.&nbsp; And that He died for
+all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves,
+but unto Him which died for them, and rose again.&mdash;2 COR. v. 14,
+15.</p>
+<p>What is the use of sermons?&mdash;what is the use of books?&nbsp;
+Here are hundreds and thousands of people hearing weekly and daily what
+is right, and how many <i>do</i> what is right?&mdash;much less <i>love</i>
+what is right?&nbsp; What can be the reason of this, that men should
+know the better and choose the worse?&nbsp; What motive can one find
+out?&mdash;what reason or argument can one put before people, to make
+them do their duty?&nbsp; How can one stir them up to conquer themselves;
+to conquer their own love of pleasure, laziness, cowardice, conceit,
+above all their own selfishness, and do simply what is right, morning,
+noon, and night?&nbsp; That is a question worth asking and considering,
+for there ought to be some use in sermons and in books; and there ought
+to be some use in every one of us too.&nbsp; Woe to the man who is of
+no use!&nbsp; The Lord have mercy on his soul; for he needs it!&nbsp;
+It is, indeed, worth his while to take any trouble which will teach
+him a motive for being useful; in plain words, stir him up to do his
+duty, to do his rights; for a man&rsquo;s rights are not, as the world
+thinks, what is right others should do to him, but what is right he
+should do to others.&nbsp; Our duty is our right, the only thing which
+is right for us.&nbsp; What motive will constrain us, that is, bind
+us, and force us to do that?</p>
+<p>Will self-interest?&nbsp; Will a man do right because you tell him
+it is his interest, it will pay him to do it?&nbsp; Look round you and
+see.&mdash;The drunkard knows that drinking will ruin him, and yet he
+gets drunk.&nbsp; The spendthrift knows that extravagance will ruin
+him, and yet he throws away his money still.&nbsp; The idler knows that
+he is wasting his only chance for all eternity, and yet he puts the
+thought out of his head, and goes on idling.&nbsp; The cheat knows that
+he is in danger of being almost certainly found out sooner or later;
+he knows too that he is burdening his own conscience with the curse
+of inward shame and self-contempt; and yet he goes on cheating.&nbsp;
+The hard master knows, or ought to know (for there is quite enough to
+prove it to him) that it would pay him better in the long run to be
+more merciful, and less covetous; that by grinding those whom he employs
+down to the last farthing, he degrades them till they become burdens
+on him and curses to him; that what he gains by high prices, he will
+lose in the long run by bad debts; that what he saves in low wages,
+he will pay in extra poor-rates; and that even if he does make money
+out of the flesh and bones of those beneath him, that money ill gotten
+is sure to be ill spent, that there is a curse on it, that it brings
+a curse in the gnawing of a man&rsquo;s own conscience, and a curse
+too in the way it flows away from his family as fast as it flowed to
+them.&nbsp; &ldquo;He that by usury and unjust gain increases his wealth,
+shall gather for him that will pity the poor.&rdquo;&nbsp; So said Solomon
+of old.&nbsp; And men who worship Mammon find it come true daily, and
+see that, taking all things together, a man&rsquo;s life does not consist
+in the abundance of the things which he possesses, and that those who
+make such haste to be rich, fall, as the apostle says, &ldquo;into temptation
+and a snare, and pierce themselves through with many sorrows.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Such a man sees his neighbours making money, and making themselves more
+unhappy, anxious, discontented by it; he sees, in short, that it is
+not his interest to do nothing but make money and save money: and yet
+in spite of that, he thinks of nothing else.&nbsp; Self-interest cannot
+keep him from that sin.&nbsp; I do not believe that self-interest ever
+kept any man from any <i>sin</i>, though it may keep him from many an
+imprudence.&nbsp; Self-interest may make many a man respectable, but
+whom did it ever make good?&nbsp; You may as well make house-walls of
+paper, or take a rush for a walking-stick, as take self-interest to
+keep you upright, or even prudent.&nbsp; The first shake&mdash;and the
+rush bends, and the paper wall breaks, and a man&rsquo;s selfish prudence
+is blown to the winds.&nbsp; Let pleasure tempt him, or ambition, or
+the lust of making money by speculation; let him take a spite against
+anyone; let him get into a passion; let his pride be hurt; and he will
+do the maddest things, which he knows to be entirely contrary to his
+own interest, just to gratify the fancy of the moment.&nbsp; Those who
+call themselves philosophers, and fancy that men&rsquo;s self-interest,
+if they can only feel it strong enough, would make all men just and
+merciful to each other, know as little of human nature as they do of
+God or the devil.</p>
+<p>What <i>will</i> make a man to do his duty?&nbsp; Will the hope of
+heaven?&nbsp; That depends very much upon what you mean by heaven.&nbsp;
+But what people commonly mean by going to heaven, is&mdash;not going
+to hell.&nbsp; They believe that they must go to either one place or
+the other.&nbsp; They would much sooner of course stay on earth for
+ever, because their treasure is here, and their heart too.&nbsp; But
+that cannot be, and as they have no wish to go to hell, they take up
+with heaven instead, by way of making the best of a bad matter.</p>
+<p>I ask you solemnly, my friends, each one of you, which would you
+sooner do&mdash;stay here on earth, or go to heaven?&nbsp; You need
+not answer <i>me</i>.&nbsp; I am afraid many of you would not dare answer
+me as you really felt, because you would be ashamed of not liking to
+go to heaven.&nbsp; But answer God.&nbsp; Answer yourselves in the sight
+of God.&nbsp; When you keep yourselves back from doing a wrong thing,
+because you know it is wrong, is it for love of heaven, or for mere
+fear of being punished in hell?&nbsp; Some of you will answer boldly
+at once: &ldquo;For neither one nor the other; when we keep from wrong,
+it is because we hate and despise what is wrong: when we do right it
+is because it is right and we ought to do it.&nbsp; We can&rsquo;t explain
+it, but there is something in us which tells us we ought to do right.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Very good, my friends, I shall have a word to say to you presently;
+but in the meantime there are some others who have been saying to themselves:
+&ldquo;Well, I know we do right because we are afraid of being punished
+if we do not do it, but what of that? at all events we get the right
+thing done, and leave the wrong thing undone, and what more do you want?&nbsp;
+Why torment us with disagreeable questions as to <i>why</i> we do it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now, my friends, to make the matter simpler, I will take you at your
+words, for the sake of argument.&nbsp; Suppose you do avoid sin from
+the fear of hell, does that make what you do <i>right</i>?&nbsp; Does
+that make <i>you</i> right?&nbsp; Does that make your heart right?&nbsp;
+It is a great blessing to a man&rsquo;s neighbours, certainly, if he
+is kept from doing wrong any how&mdash;by the fear of hell, or fear
+of jail, or fear of shame, or fear of ghosts if you like, or any other
+cowardly and foolish motive&mdash;a great blessing to a man&rsquo;s
+neighbours: but no blessing, that I can see, to the man himself.&nbsp;
+He is just the same; his heart is not changed; his heart is no more
+right in the sight of God, or in the sight of any man of common sense
+either, than it would be if he did the wrong thing, which he loves and
+dare not do.&nbsp; You feel that yourselves about other people.&nbsp;
+You will say &ldquo;That man has a bad heart, for all his respectable
+outside.&nbsp; He would be a rogue if he dared, and therefore he <i>is</i>
+a rogue.&rdquo;&nbsp; Just so, I say, my friends, take care lest God
+should say of you, &ldquo;He would be a sinner if he dared, and therefore
+he is a sinner.</p>
+<p>How can the hope of heaven, or the fear of hell, make a man do right?&nbsp;
+The right thing, the true thing for a man, is to be loving, and do loving
+things; and can fear of hell do that, or hope of heaven either?&nbsp;
+Can a man make himself affectionate to his children because he fancies
+he shall be punished if he is not so, and rewarded if he is so?&nbsp;
+Will the hope of heaven send men out to feed the hungry, to clothe the
+naked, visit the sick, preach the gospel to the poor?&mdash;The Papists
+say it will.&nbsp; I say it will not.&nbsp; I believe that even in those
+who do these things from hope of heaven and fear of hell, there is some
+holier, nobler, more spiritual motive, than such everlasting selfishness,
+such perfect hypocrisy, as to do loving works for others, for the sake
+of one&rsquo;s own self-love.</p>
+<p>What feeling then is there left which will bind a man to do good,
+not once in a way, but always and habitually? to do good, not only to
+himself, but to all around him?&nbsp; I know but of one, my friends,
+and that is Love.&nbsp; There are many sides to love&mdash;admiration,
+reverence, gratitude, pity, affection&mdash;they are all different shapes
+of that one great spirit of love.&nbsp; Surely all of you have felt
+its power more or less; how wonderfully it can conquer a man&rsquo;s
+whole heart, change his whole conduct.&nbsp; For love of a woman; for
+pity to those in distress; for admiration for anyone who is nobler and
+wiser than himself; for gratitude to one who has done him kindness;
+for loyalty to one to whom he feels he owes a service&mdash;a man will
+dare to do things, and suffer things, which no self-interest or fear
+in the world could have brought him to.&nbsp; Do you not know it yourselves?&nbsp;
+Is it not fondness for your wives and children, that will make you slave
+and stint yourselves of pleasure more than any hope of gain could ever
+do?&nbsp; But there is no one human being, my friends, whom we can meet
+among us now, for whom we can feel all these different sorts of love?&nbsp;
+Surely not: and yet there must be One Person somewhere for whom God
+intends us to feel them all at once; or else He would not have given
+all these powers to us, and made them all different branches of one
+great root of love.&nbsp; There must be One Person somewhere, who can
+call out the whole love in us&mdash;all our gratitude; all our pity;
+all our admiration; all our loyalty; all our brotherly affection.&nbsp;
+<i>And there is One</i>, my friends.&nbsp; One who has done for us more
+than ever husband or father, wife or brother, can do to call out our
+gratitude.&nbsp; One who has suffered for us more than the saddest wretch
+upon this earth can suffer, to call out our pity.&nbsp; One who is nobler,
+purer, more lovely in character than all others who ever trod this earth,
+to call out our admiration.&nbsp; One who is wiser, mightier than all
+rulers and philosophers, to call out all our reverence.&nbsp; One who
+is tenderer, more gentle, more feeling-hearted, than the kindest woman
+who ever sat by a sick bed, to call out all our love.&nbsp; Of whom
+can I be speaking?&nbsp; Of whom but of Jesus; He who for us stooped
+out of the heaven of heavens; for us left His eternal glory in the bosom
+of the Father; for us took upon Him the form of a servant, and was born
+of a village maiden, and was called the son of a carpenter; for us wandered
+this earth for thirty years in sorrow and shame; for us gave His back
+to the scourge, and His face to shameful spitting; for us hung upon
+the cross and died the death of the felon and the slave.&nbsp; Oh! my
+friends, if that story will not call out our love, what will?&nbsp;
+If we cannot admire Christ, whom can we admire?&nbsp; If we cannot be
+grateful to Christ, to whom can we be grateful?&nbsp; If we cannot pity
+Christ, whom can we pity?&nbsp; If we cannot feel bound in honour to
+live for Christ, to work for Christ, to delight in talking of Christ,
+thinking of Christ, to glory in doing Christ&rsquo;s commandments to
+the very smallest point, to feel no sacrifice too great, no trouble
+too petty, if we can please Christ by it and help forward Christ&rsquo;s
+kingdom upon earth&mdash;if we cannot feel bound in honour to do that
+for Christ, what honour is there in us?&nbsp; Again, I say, if we cannot
+love Christ, whom can we love?&nbsp; If the remembrance of what He has
+worked for us will not stir us up to work for Him, what will stir us
+up?</p>
+<p>I say it again, we are bound by every tie, by every feeling that
+can bind man to man, to devote ourselves to Christ, the Man of all men.&nbsp;
+I say this is no dream or fancy, it is an actual fact which thousands
+and hundreds of thousands on this earth have felt.&nbsp; Nothing but
+love to Christ, nothing but loving Him because He first loved us, can
+constrain and force a man as with a mighty feeling which he cannot resist,
+to labour day and night for Christ&rsquo;s sake, and therefore for the
+sake of God the Father of Christ.&nbsp; What else do you suppose it
+was which could have stirred up the apostles&mdash;above all, that wise,
+learned, high-born, prosperous man, St. Paul, to leave house and home,
+and wander in daily danger of his life?&nbsp; What does St. Paul say
+himself?&nbsp; &ldquo;The love of Christ constraineth us, because we
+thus judge, and if one died for all then were all dead, and that He
+died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves,
+but unto Him who died for them.&rdquo;&nbsp; And what else could have
+kept St. Paul through all that labour and sorrow of his own choosing,
+of which he speaks in the chapter before?&mdash;&ldquo;We are troubled
+on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;
+persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing
+about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of
+Jesus might be made manifest in our body; for we which live are alway
+delivered unto death for Jesus&rsquo; sake, that the life also of Jesus
+might be made manifest in our body.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We may say that St. Paul was an exceedingly benevolent man, and <i>that</i>
+made him do it; or that he had found out certain new truths and opinions
+which delighted him very much, and therefore he did it.&nbsp; But St.
+Paul gives no such account of himself: and we have no right to take
+anyone&rsquo;s account but his own.&nbsp; He knew his own heart best.&nbsp;
+He does not say that he came to preach a scheme of redemption, or opinions
+about Christ.&nbsp; He says he came to preach nothing but Christ Himself&mdash;Christ
+crucified&mdash;to tell people about the Lord he loved, about the Lord
+who loved him, certain that when they had heard the plain story of Him,
+their hearts, if they were simple, and true, and loving, would leap
+up in answer to his words, and find out, as by instinct, what Christ
+had done for them, what they were to do for Christ.&nbsp; Ay, I believe,
+my friends&mdash;indeed I am certain&mdash;from my own reading, that
+in every age and country, just in proportion as men have loved Christ
+personally as a man would love another man, just in that proportion
+have they loved their neighbours, worked for their neighbours, sacrificed
+their time, their pleasure, their money, to do good to all, for the
+sake of Him who commanded: &ldquo;If ye love <i>ME</i>, keep my commandments;
+and my commandment is this, that ye should love one another as I have
+loved you.&rdquo;&nbsp; That is the only sure motive.&nbsp; All other
+motives for doing good or being good, will fail in one case or another
+case, because they do not take possession of a man&rsquo;s whole heart,
+but only of some part of his heart.&nbsp; Love&mdash;love to Christ,
+can alone sweep away a man&rsquo;s whole heart and soul with it, and
+renew it, and transfigure it, and make it strong instead of weak, pure
+instead of foul, gentle instead of fierce, brave instead of being vain
+and cowardly, and fearing what everyone will say of him.&nbsp; Only
+love for Christ, who loved all men unto the death, will make us love
+all men too: not only one here and there who may agree with us or help
+us; but those who hate us, those who misunderstand us, those who thwart
+us, ay, even those who disobey and slight not only us, but Jesus Christ
+Himself.&nbsp; <i>That</i> is the hardest lesson of all to learn; but
+thousands have learnt it; everyone ought to learn it.&nbsp; In proportion
+as a man loves Christ, he will learn to love those who do not love Christ.&nbsp;
+For Christ loves them whether they know it or not; Christ died for them
+whether they believe it or not; and we must love them because our Saviour
+loves them.</p>
+<p>Oh! my friends, why do so few love Christ?&nbsp; Why do so few live
+as those who are not their own, but bought with the price of His precious
+blood and bound to devote themselves, body and soul, to His cause?&nbsp;
+Why do so many struggle against their sins, while yet they cannot break
+off those sins, but go struggling and sinning on, hating their sins
+and yet unable to break through their sins, like birds beating themselves
+to death against the wires of their cage?&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Because they
+do not know Christ.&nbsp; And how can they know Him, unless they read
+their Bibles with simple, childlike hearts, determined to let the Bible
+tell its own story: believing that those who walked with Christ on earth,
+must know best what He was like?&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Because they will
+not ask Christ to come and show Himself to them, and make them see Him,
+and love Him, and admire Him, whether they will or not.&nbsp; Oh! remember,
+if Christ be the Son of God, the Lord of heaven and earth, we cannot
+go to Him, poor, weak, ignorant creatures as we are.&nbsp; We cannot
+ascend up into heaven to bring Christ down.&nbsp; He must come down
+out of His own great love and condescension, and dwell in our hearts
+as He has promised to do, if we do but love Him.&nbsp; He must come
+down and show Himself to us.&nbsp; Oh! read your Bibles&mdash;read the
+story of Christ, and if that does not stir up in you some love for Him,
+you must have hearts of stone, not flesh and blood.&nbsp; And then go
+to Him; pray to Him, whether you believe in Him altogether or not, upon
+the mere chance of His being able to hear you and help you.&nbsp; You
+would not throw away a chance on earth; will you throw away such a chance
+in heaven as having the Son of God to help you?&nbsp; Oh, cry to Him;
+say out of the depths of your heart: &ldquo;Thou most blessed and glorious
+Being who ever walked this earth, who hast gone blameless through all
+sorrow and temptation that man can feel; if Thou dost love anyone, if
+Thou canst hear anyone, hear me!&nbsp; If thou canst not help me, no
+one can.&nbsp; I have a hundred puzzling questions which I cannot answer
+for myself, a hundred temptations which I cannot conquer for myself,
+a hundred bad habits which I cannot shake off of myself; and they tell
+me that Thou canst teach me, Thou canst guide me, Thou canst strengthen
+me, Thou canst take out of my heart this shame and gnawing of an evil
+conscience.&nbsp; If Thou be the Son of God, make me clean!&nbsp; If
+it be true that Thou lovest all men, show Thy love to me!&nbsp; If it
+be true that Thou canst teach all men, teach me!&nbsp; If it be true
+that Thou canst help all men, help my unbelief, for if Thou dost not,
+there is no help for me in heaven or earth!&rdquo;&nbsp; You, who are
+sinful, distracted, puzzled, broken-hearted, cry to Christ in that way,
+if you have no better way, and see if He does not hear you.&nbsp; He
+is not one to break the bruised reed, or quench the smoking flax.&nbsp;
+He will hear you, for He has heard all who have ever called on Him.&nbsp;
+Cry to Him from the bottom of your hearts.&nbsp; Tell Him that you do
+<i>not</i> love Him, and that yet you <i>long</i> to love Him.&nbsp;
+And see if you do not find it true that those who come to Christ, He
+will in no wise cast out.&nbsp; He may not seem to answer you the first
+time, or the tenth time, or for years; for Christ has His own deep,
+loving, wise ways of teaching each man, and for each man a different
+way.&nbsp; But try to learn all you can of Him.&nbsp; Try to know Him.&nbsp;
+Pray to know, and understand Him, and love Him.&nbsp; And sooner or
+later you will find His words come true, &ldquo;If a man love me, I
+and my Father will come to him, and take up our abode with him.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And then you will feel arise in you a hungering and a thirsting after
+righteousness, a spirit of love, and a desire of doing good, which will
+carry you up and on, above all that man can say or do against you&mdash;above
+all the laziness, and wilfulness, and selfishness, and cowardice which
+dwells in the heart of everyone.&nbsp; You will be able to trample it
+all under foot for the sake of being good and doing good, in the strength
+of that one glorious thought, &ldquo;Christ lived and died for me, and,
+so help me God, I will live and die for Christ.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXIV&mdash;DAVID&rsquo;S VICTORY</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield:
+but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of armies, the God of Israel,
+whom thou hast defied.&mdash;1 SAMUEL xvii. 45.</p>
+<p>We have been reading to-day the story of David&rsquo;s victory over
+the Philistine giant, Goliath.&nbsp; Now I think the whole history of
+David may teach us more about the meaning of the Old Testament, and
+how it applies to us, than the history of any other single character.&nbsp;
+David was the great hero of the Jews; the greatest, in spite of great
+sins and follies, that has ever been among them; in every point the
+king after God&rsquo;s own heart.&nbsp; Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself
+did not disdain to be called especially the Son of David.&nbsp; David
+was the author, too, of those wonderful psalms which are now in the
+mouths and the hearts of Christian people all over the world; and will
+last, as I believe, till the world&rsquo;s end, giving out fresh depths
+of meaning and spiritual experience.</p>
+<p>But to understand David&rsquo;s history, we must go back a little
+through the lessons which have been read in church the last few Sundays.&nbsp;
+We find in the eighth and in the twelfth chapters of this same book
+of Samuel, that the Jews asked Samuel for a king&mdash;for a king like
+the nations round them.&nbsp; Samuel consulted God, and by God&rsquo;s
+command chose Saul to be their king; at the same time warning them that
+in asking for a king they had committed a great and fearful sin, for
+&ldquo;the Lord their God was their king.&rdquo;&nbsp; And the Lord
+said unto Samuel, that in asking for a king they had rejected God from
+reigning over them.&nbsp; Now what was this sin which the Jews committed?
+for the mere having a king cannot be wrong in itself; else God would
+not have anointed Saul and David kings, and blessed David and Solomon;
+much less would He have allowed the greater number of Christian nations
+to remain governed by kings unto this day, if a king had been a wrong
+thing in itself.&nbsp; I think if we look carefully at the words of
+the story we shall see what this great sin of the Jews was.&nbsp; In
+the first place, they asked Samuel to give them a king&mdash;not God.&nbsp;
+This was a sin, I think; but it was only the fruit of a deeper sin&mdash;a
+wrong way of looking at the whole question of kings and government.&nbsp;
+And that deeper sin was this: they were a free people, and they wanted
+to become slaves.&nbsp; God had made them a free people; He had brought
+them up out of the land of Egypt, out of slavery to Pharaoh.&nbsp; He
+had given them a free constitution.&nbsp; He had given them laws to
+secure safety, and liberty, and equal justice to rich and poor, for
+themselves, their property, their children; to defend them from oppression,
+and over-taxation, and all the miseries of misgovernment.&nbsp; And
+now they were going to trample under foot God&rsquo;s inestimable gift
+of liberty.&nbsp; They wanted a king like the nations round them, they
+said.&nbsp; They did not see that it was just their glory <i>not</i>
+to be like the nations round them in that.&nbsp; We who live in a free
+country do not see the vast and inestimable difference between the Jews
+and the other nations.&nbsp; The Jews were then, perhaps, so far as
+I can make out, the only free people on the face of the earth.&nbsp;
+The nations round them were like the nations in the East, now governed
+by tyrants, without law or parliament, at the mercy of the will, the
+fancy, the lust, the ambition, and the cruelty of their despotic kings.&nbsp;
+In fact, they were as the Eastern people now are&mdash;slaves governed
+by tyrants.&nbsp; Samuel warned the Jews that it would be just the same
+with them; that neither their property, their families, nor their liberty
+would be safe under the despots for whom they wished.&nbsp; And yet,
+in spite of that warning, they would have a king.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp;
+Because they did not like the trouble of being free.&nbsp; They did
+not like the responsibility and the labour of taking care of themselves,
+and asking counsel of God as to how they were to govern themselves.&nbsp;
+So they were ready to sell themselves to a tyrant, that he might fight
+for them, and judge for them, and take care of them, while they just
+ate and drank, and made money, and lived like slaves, careless of what
+happened to them or their country, provided they could get food, and
+clothes, and money enough.&nbsp; And as long as they got that, if you
+will remark, they were utterly careless as to what sort of king they
+had.&nbsp; They said not one word to Samuel about how much power their
+king was to have.&nbsp; They made not the slightest inquiry as to whether
+Saul was wise or foolish, good or bad.&nbsp; They did not ask God&rsquo;s
+counsel, or trouble themselves about God; so they proved themselves
+unworthy of being free.&nbsp; They turned, like a dog to his vomit,
+and the sow to her wallowing in the mire, cowardly back again into slavery;
+and God gave them what they asked for.&nbsp; He gave them the sort of
+king they wanted; and bitterly they found out their mistake during several
+hundred years of continually increasing slavery and misery.</p>
+<p>There is a deep lesson for us, my friends, in all this.&nbsp; And
+that is, that God&rsquo;s gifts are not fit for us, unless we are more
+or less fit for them.&nbsp; That to him that makes use of what he has,
+more shall be given; but from him who does not, will be taken away even
+what he has.&nbsp; And so even the inestimable gift of freedom is no
+use unless men have free hearts in them.&nbsp; God sets a man free from
+his sins by faith in Jesus Christ; but unless that man uses His grace,
+unless he desires to be free inwardly as well as outwardly&mdash;to
+be free not only from the punishment of his sins, but from the sins
+themselves; unless he is willing to accept God&rsquo;s offer of freedom,
+and go boldly to the throne of grace, and there plead his cause with
+his heavenly Father face to face, without looking to any priest, or
+saint, or other third person to plead for him; if, in short, a man has
+not a free spirit in him, the grace of God will become of no effect
+in him, and he will receive the spirit of bondage (of slavery, that
+is), again to fear.&nbsp; Perhaps he will fall back more or less into
+popery and half-popish superstitions; perhaps, as we see daily round
+us, he will fall back again into antinomianism, into the slavery of
+those very sins from which God once delivered him.&nbsp; And just the
+same is it with a nation.&nbsp; When God has given a nation freedom,
+then, unless there be a free heart in the people and true independence,
+which is dependence on God and not on man; unless there be a spirit
+of justice, mercy, truth, trust of God in them, their freedom will be
+of no effect; they will only fall back into slavery, to be oppressed
+by fresh tyrants.</p>
+<p>So it was with the great Spanish colonies in South America a few
+years ago.&nbsp; God gave them freedom from the tyranny of Spain; but
+what advantage was it to them?&nbsp; Because there was no righteousness
+in them; because they were a cowardly, profligate, false, and cruel
+people, therefore they only became the slaves of their own lusts; they
+turned God&rsquo;s great grace of freedom into licentiousness, and have
+been ever since doing nothing but cutting each other&rsquo;s throats;
+every man&rsquo;s hand against his own brother; the slaves of tyrants
+far more cruel than those from whom they had escaped.</p>
+<p>Look at the French people, too.&nbsp; Three times in the last sixty
+years has God delivered them from evil rulers, and given them a chance
+of freedom; and three times have they fallen back into fresh slavery.&nbsp;
+And why?&nbsp; Because they will not be righteous; because they will
+be proud, boastful, lustful, godless, cruel, making a lie and loving
+it.&nbsp; God help them!&nbsp; We are not here to judge them, but to
+take warning ourselves.&nbsp; Now there is no use in boasting of our
+English freedom, unless we have free and righteous hearts in us; for
+it is not constitutions, and parliaments, and charters which make a
+nation free; they are only the shell, the outside of freedom.&nbsp;
+True freedom is of the heart and spirit, and comes down from above,
+from the Spirit of God; for where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty,
+and there only.&nbsp; Oh, every one of you! high and low, rich and poor,
+pray and struggle to get your own hearts free; free from the sins which
+beset us Englishmen in these days; free from pride, prejudice, and envy;
+free from selfishness and covetousness; free from unchastity and drunkenness;
+free from the conceit that England is safe, while all the rest of the
+world is shaking.&nbsp; Be sure that the spirit of freedom, like every
+other good and perfect gift, is from above, and comes down from God,
+the Father of lights; and that to keep that spirit with us, we must
+keep ourselves worthy of it, and not expect to remain free if we indulge
+ourselves in mean and slavish sins.</p>
+<p>So the Jews got the king they wanted&mdash;a king to look at and
+be proud of.&nbsp; Saul was, we read, a head taller than all the rest
+of the people, and very handsome to look at.&nbsp; And he was brave
+enough, too, in mere fighting, when he was awakened and stirred up to
+act now and then; but there was no wisdom in him; no real trust in God
+in him.&nbsp; He took God for an idol, like the heathens&rsquo; false
+gods, which had to be pleased and kept in good humour by the smell of
+burnt sacrifices; and not for a living, righteous Person, who had to
+be obeyed.&nbsp; We read of Saul&rsquo;s misconduct in these respects,
+in the thirteenth and fifteenth chapters of the First Book of Samuel.&nbsp;
+That was only the beginning of his wickedness.&nbsp; The worst points
+in his character, as I shall show in my next sermon, came out afterwards.&nbsp;
+But still, his disobedience was enough to make God cast him off, and
+leave him to go his own way to ruin.</p>
+<p>But God was not going to cast off His people whom He loved.&nbsp;
+He deals not with mankind after their sins, neither rewards them according
+to their iniquities; and so he chose out for them a king after His own
+heart&mdash;a true king of God&rsquo;s making, not a mere sham one of
+man&rsquo;s making.&nbsp; You may think it strange why God should have
+given them a second king; why, as soon as Saul died, He did not let
+them return back to their old freedom.&nbsp; But that is not God&rsquo;s
+way.&nbsp; He brings good out of evil in His great mercy.&nbsp; But
+it is always by strange winding paths.&nbsp; His ways are not as our
+ways.&nbsp; First, God gives man what is perfectly proper for him at
+that time; sets man in his right place; and then when man falls from
+that, God brings him, not back to the place from which he fell, but
+on forward into something far higher and better than what he fell from.&nbsp;
+He put Adam into Paradise.&nbsp; Adam fell from it, and God made use
+of the fall to bring him into a state far better than Paradise&mdash;into
+the kingdom of God&mdash;into everlasting life&mdash;into the likeness
+of Christ, the new Adam, who is a quickening, life-giving spirit, while
+the old Adam was, at best, only a living soul.</p>
+<p>So with the church of Christian men.&nbsp; After the apostles&rsquo;
+time, and even during the apostles&rsquo; time, as we read from the
+Epistle to the Galatians, they fell away, step by step, from the liberty
+of the gospel, till they sunk entirely into popish superstition.&nbsp;
+And yet God brought good out of that evil.&nbsp; He made that very popery
+a means of bringing them back at the Reformation into clearer light
+than any of the first Christians ever had had.&nbsp; He is going on
+step by step still, bringing Christians into a clearer knowledge of
+the gospel than even the Reformers had.</p>
+<p>And so with the Jews.&nbsp; They fell from their liberty and chose
+a king.&nbsp; And yet God made use of those kings of theirs, of David,
+of Solomon, of Josiah, and Hezekiah, to teach them more and more about
+Himself and His law, and to teach all nations, by their example, what
+a nation should be, and how He deals with one.</p>
+<p>But now let us see what this true king, David, was like, whom God
+chose, that He might raise, by his means, the Jews higher than they
+ever yet had been, even in their days of freedom.&nbsp; Now remark,
+in the first place, that David was not the son of any very great man.&nbsp;
+His father seems to have been only a yeoman.&nbsp; He was not bred up
+in courts.&nbsp; We find that when Samuel was sent to anoint David king,
+he was out keeping his father&rsquo;s sheep in the field.&nbsp; And
+though, no doubt, he had shown signs of being a very remarkable youth
+from the first, yet his father thought so little of him, that he was
+going to pass him over, and caused all his seven elder sons to pass
+before Samuel for his choice first, though there seems to have been
+nothing particular in them, except that some of them were fine men and
+brave soldiers.&nbsp; So David seems to have been overlooked, and thought
+but little of in his youth&mdash;and a very good thing for him.&nbsp;
+It is a good thing for a young man to bear the yoke in his youth, that
+he may be kept humble and low; that he may learn to trust in God, and
+not in his own wit.&nbsp; And even when Samuel anointed David, he anointed
+him privately.&nbsp; His brothers did not know what a great honour was
+in store for him; for we find, in the lesson which we have just read,
+that when David came down to the camp, his elder brother spoke contemptuously
+to him, and treated him as a child.&nbsp; &ldquo;I know thy pride,&rdquo;
+he said, &ldquo;and the naughtiness of thy heart.&nbsp; Thou art come
+down to see the battle.&rdquo;&nbsp; While David answers humbly enough:
+&ldquo;What have I done? is there not a cause?&rdquo; feeling that there
+was more in him than his brother gave him credit for; though he dare
+not tell his brother, hardly, perhaps, dare believe himself, what great
+things God had prepared for him.&nbsp; So it is yet&mdash;a prophet
+has no honour in his own country.&nbsp; How many a noble-hearted man
+there is, who is looked down upon by those round him!&nbsp; How many
+a one is despised for a dreamer, or for a Methodist, by shallow worldly
+people, who in God&rsquo;s sight is of very great price!&nbsp; But God
+sees not as man sees.&nbsp; He makes use of the weak people of this
+world to confound the strong.&nbsp; He sends about His errands not many
+noble, not many mighty; but the poor man, rich in faith, like David.&nbsp;
+He puts down the mighty from their seat, and exalts the humble and meek.&nbsp;
+He takes the beggar from the dunghill, that He may set him among the
+princes of His people.&nbsp; So He has been doing in all ages.&nbsp;
+So He will do even now, in some measure, with everyone like David, let
+him be as low as he will in the opinion of this foolish world, who yet
+puts his trust utterly in God, and goes about all his work, as David
+did, in the name of the Lord of hosts.&nbsp; Oh! if a poor man feels
+that God has given him wit and wisdom&mdash;feels in him the desire
+to rise and better himself in life, let him be sure that the only way
+to rise is David&rsquo;s plan&mdash;to keep humble and quiet till God
+shall lift him up, trusting in God&rsquo;s righteousness and love to
+raise him, and deliver him, and put him in that station, be it high
+or low, in which he will be best able to do God&rsquo;s work, or serve
+God&rsquo;s glory.</p>
+<p>And now for the chapter from which the text is taken, which relates
+to us David&rsquo;s first great public triumph&mdash;his victory over
+Goliath the giant.&nbsp; I will not repeat it to you, because everyone
+here who has ears to hear or a heart to feel ought to have been struck
+with every word in that glorious story.&nbsp; All I will try to do is,
+to show you how the working of God&rsquo;s Spirit comes out in David
+in every action of his on that glorious day.&nbsp; We saw just now David&rsquo;s
+humbleness and gentleness, the fruits of God&rsquo;s Spirit in him,
+in his answer to his proud and harsh brother.&nbsp; Look next at David&rsquo;s
+spirit of trust in God, which, indeed, is the key to his whole life;
+that is the reason why he was the man after God&rsquo;s own heart&mdash;not
+for any virtues of his own, but for his unshaken continual faith in
+God.&nbsp; David saw in an instant why the Israelites were so afraid
+of the giant; because they had no faith in God.&nbsp; They forgot that
+they were the armies of the living God.&nbsp; David did not: &ldquo;Who
+is this uncircumcised, that he shall defy the armies of the living God?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And therefore, when Saul tried to dissuade him from attacking the Philistine,
+his answer is still the same&mdash;full of faith in God.&nbsp; He knew
+well enough what a fearful undertaking it was to fight with this giant,
+nearly ten feet high, armed from head to foot with mail, which perhaps
+no sword or spear which he could use could pierce.&nbsp; It was no wonder,
+humanly speaking, that all the Jews fled from him&mdash;that his being
+there stopped the whole battle.&nbsp; In these days, fifty such men
+would make no difference in a battle; bullets and cannon-shot would
+mow down them like other men: but in those old times, before firearms
+were invented, when all battles were hand-to-hand fights, and depended
+so much on each man&rsquo;s strength and courage, that one champion
+would often decide the victory for a whole army, the amount of courage
+which was required in David is past our understanding; at least we may
+say, David would not have had it but for his trust in God, but for his
+feeling that he was on God&rsquo;s side, and Goliath on the devil&rsquo;s
+side, unjustly invading his country in self-conceit, and cruelty, and
+lawlessness.&nbsp; Therefore he tells Saul of his victory over the lion
+and the bear.&nbsp; You see again, here, the Spirit of God showing in
+his <i>modesty</i>.&nbsp; He does not boast or talk of his strength
+and courage in killing the lion and the bear; for he knew that that
+strength and courage came from God, not from himself; therefore he says
+that the Lord <i>delivered him</i> from them.&nbsp; He knew that he
+had been only doing his duty in facing them when they attacked his father&rsquo;s
+sheep, and that it was God&rsquo;s mercy which had protected him in
+doing his duty.&nbsp; He felt now, that if no one else would face this
+brutal giant, it was <i>his</i> duty, poor, simple, weak youth as he
+was, and therefore he trusted in God to bring him safe through this
+danger also.&nbsp; But look again how the Spirit of God shows in his
+prudence.&nbsp; He would not use Saul&rsquo;s armour, good as it might
+be, because he was not accustomed to it.&nbsp; He would use his own
+experience, and fight with the weapons to which he had been accustomed&mdash;a
+sling and stone.&nbsp; You see he was none of those presumptuous and
+fanatical dreamers who tempt God by fancying that He is to go out of
+His way to work miracles for them.&nbsp; He used all the proper and
+prudent means to kill the giant, and trusted to God to bless them.&nbsp;
+If he had been presumptuous, he might have taken the first stone that
+came to hand, or taken only one, or taken none at all, and expected
+the giant to fall down dead by a miracle.&nbsp; But no; he <i>chooses
+five smooth</i> stones out of the brook.&nbsp; He tried to get the best
+that he could, and have more ready if his first shot failed.&nbsp; He
+showed no distrust of God in that; for he trusted in God to keep him
+cool, and steady, and courageous in the fight, and that, he knew, God
+alone could do.&nbsp; The only place, perhaps, where he could strike
+Goliath to hurt him was on the face, because every other part of him
+was covered in metal armour.&nbsp; And he knew that, in such danger
+as he was, God&rsquo;s Spirit only could keep his eye clear and his
+hand steady for such a desperate chance as hitting that one place.</p>
+<p>So he went; and as he went his courage rose higher and higher; for
+unto him that hath shall more be given; and so he began to boast too&mdash;but
+not of himself, like the giant.&nbsp; He boasted of the living God,
+who was with him.&nbsp; He ran boldly up to the Philistine, and at the
+first throw, struck on the forehead, and felled him dead.</p>
+<p>So it is; many a time the very blessing which we expect to get only
+with great difficulty, God gives us at our first trial, to show that
+He is the Giver, to cheer up our poor doubting hearts, and show us that
+He is able, and willing too, to give exceeding abundantly more than
+we can ask or think.</p>
+<p>So David triumphed: and yet that triumph was only the beginning of
+his troubles.&nbsp; Sad and weary years had he to struggle on before
+he gained the kingdom which God had promised him.&nbsp; So it is often
+with God&rsquo;s elect.&nbsp; He gives them blessings at first, to show
+them that He is really with them; and then He lets them be evil-entreated
+by tyrants, and suffer persecution, and wander out of the way in the
+wilderness, that they may be made perfect by suffering, and purified,
+as gold is in the refiner&rsquo;s fire, from all selfishness, conceit,
+ambition, cowardliness, till they learn to trust God utterly, to know
+their own weakness, and His strength, and to work only for Him, careless
+what becomes of their own poor worthless selves, provided they can help
+His kingdom to come, and get His will to be done on earth as it is in
+heaven.</p>
+<p>And now, my friends, surely there is a lesson in all this for you.&nbsp;
+Do you wish to rise like David?&nbsp; Of course not one in ten thousand
+can rise as high, but we may all rise somewhat, if not in rank, yet
+still, what is far better, in spirit, in wisdom, in usefulness, in manfulness.&nbsp;
+Do you wish to rise so? then follow David&rsquo;s example.&nbsp; Be
+truly brave, be truly modest, and in order to be truly brave and truly
+modest, that is, be truly manly, be truly godly.&nbsp; Trust in God;
+trust in God; that is the key to all greatness.&nbsp; Courage, modesty,
+truth, honesty, and gentleness; all things, which are noble, lovely,
+and of good report; all things, in short, which will make you men after
+God&rsquo;s own heart, are all only the different fruits of that one
+blessed life-giving root&mdash;FAITH IN GOD.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXV&mdash;DAVID&rsquo;S EDUCATION</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Made perfect through sufferings.&mdash;HEBREWS ii. 10.</p>
+<p>That is my text; and a very fit one for another sermon about David,
+the king after God&rsquo;s own heart.&nbsp; And a very fit one too,
+for any sermon preached to people living in this world now or at any
+time.&nbsp; &ldquo;A melancholy text,&rdquo; you will say.&nbsp; But
+what if it be melancholy?&nbsp; That is not the fault of me, the preacher.&nbsp;
+The preacher did not make suffering, did not make disappointment, doubt,
+ignorance, mistakes, oppression, poverty, sickness.&nbsp; There they
+are, whether we like it or not.&nbsp; You have only to go on to the
+common here, or any other common or town in England, to see too much
+of them&mdash;enough to break one&rsquo;s heart if&mdash;, but I will
+not hurry on too fast in what I have to say.&nbsp; What I want to make
+you recollect is, that misery is here round us, <i>in</i> us.&nbsp;
+A great deal which we bring on ourselves; and a great deal more misery
+which we do not, as far as we can see, bring on ourselves; but which
+comes, nevertheless, and lets us know plainly enough that it is close
+to us.&nbsp; Every man and woman of us have their sorrows.&nbsp; There
+is no use shutting our eyes just when we ourselves happen to feel tolerably
+easy, and saying, as too many do, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see so very much
+sorrow; I am happy enough!&rdquo;&nbsp; Are you, friend, happy enough?&nbsp;
+So much the worse for you, perhaps.&nbsp; But at all events your neighbours
+are not happy enough; most of them are only too miserable.&nbsp; It
+is a sad world.&nbsp; A sad world, and full of tears.&nbsp; It is.&nbsp;
+And you must not be angry with the preacher for reminding you of what
+is.</p>
+<p>True; you would have a right to quarrel with the preacher or anyone
+else who made you sorrowful with the thoughts of the sorrow round you,
+and then gave you no explanation of it&mdash;told you of no use, no
+blessing in it, no deliverance from it.&nbsp; That would be enough to
+break any man&rsquo;s heart, if all the preacher could say was: &ldquo;This
+wretchedness, and sickness, and death, must go on as long as the world
+lasts, and yet it does no good, for God or man.&rdquo;&nbsp; That thought
+would drive any feeling man to despair, tempt him to lie down and die,
+tempt him to fancy that God was not God at all, not the God whose name
+is Love, not the God who is our Father, but only a cruel taskmaster,
+and Lord of a miserable hell on earth, where men and women, and worst
+of all, little children, were tortured daily by tens of thousands without
+reason, or use, or hope of deliverance, except in a future world, where
+not one in ten of them will be saved and happy.&nbsp; That is many people&rsquo;s
+notion of the world&mdash;religious people&rsquo;s even.&nbsp; How they
+can believe, in the face of such notions, &ldquo;that God is love;&rdquo;
+how they can help going mad with pity, if that is all the hope they
+have for poor human beings, is more than I can tell.&nbsp; Not that
+I judge them&mdash;to their own master they stand or fall: but this
+I do say, that if the preacher has no better hope to give you about
+this poor earth, then I cannot tell what right he has to call himself
+a preacher of the gospel&mdash;that is, a preacher of good news; then
+I do not know what Jesus Christ&rsquo;s dying to take away the sins
+of the world means; then I do not know what the kingdom of God means;
+then I do not know why the Lord taught us to pray, &ldquo;Thy kingdom
+come, Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven,&rdquo; if the only
+way in which that can be brought about is by His sending ninety-nine
+hundredths of mankind to endless torture, over and above all the lesser
+misery which they have suffered in this life.&nbsp; What will be the
+end of the greater part of mankind we do not know; we were not intended
+to know.&nbsp; God is love, and God is justice, and His justice is utterly
+loving, as well as His love utterly just; so we may very safely leave
+the world in the hands of Him who made the world, and be sure that the
+Judge of all the earth will do right, and that what is right is certain
+never to be cruel, but rather merciful.&nbsp; But to every one of you
+who are here now, a preacher has a right, ay, and a bounden duty, to
+say much more than that.&nbsp; He is bound to tell you good news, because
+God has called you into His church, and sent you here this day, to hear
+good news.&nbsp; He has a right to tell you, as I tell you now, that,
+strange as it may seem, whatsoever sufferings you endure are sent to
+make you perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect; even as
+the blessed Lord, whom may you all love, and trust, and worship, for
+ever and ever, was made perfect by sufferings, even though He was the
+sinless Son of God.&nbsp; Consider that.&nbsp; &ldquo;It behoved Him,&rdquo;
+says St. Paul, &ldquo;the Captain of our salvation, to be made perfect
+through sufferings.&rdquo;&nbsp; And why?&nbsp; &ldquo;Because,&rdquo;
+answers St. Paul, &ldquo;it was proper for Him to be made in all things
+like His brothers&rdquo;&mdash;like us, the children of God&mdash;&ldquo;that
+He might be a faithful and merciful high priest;&rdquo; for, just &ldquo;because
+He has suffered being tempted, He is able to succour us who are tempted.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+A strange text, but one which, I think, this very history of David&rsquo;s
+troubles will help us to understand.&nbsp; For it was by suffering,
+long and bitter, that God trained up David to be a true king, a king
+over the Jews, &ldquo;after God&rsquo;s own heart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>You all know, I hope, something at least of David&rsquo;s psalms.&nbsp;
+Many of them, seven of them at least, were written during David&rsquo;s
+wanderings in the mountains, when Saul was persecuting him to kill him,
+day after day, month after month, as you may read in the First Book
+of Samuel, from chapters xix. to xxviii.&nbsp; Bitter enough these troubles
+of David would have been to any man, but what must have made them especially
+bitter and confusing to him was, that they all arose out of his righteousness.&nbsp;
+Because he had conquered the giant, Saul envied him&mdash;broke his
+promise of giving David his daughter Merab&mdash;put his life into extreme
+danger from the Philistines, before he would give him his second daughter
+Michal; the more he saw that the Lord was with David, and that the young
+man won respect and admiration by behaving himself wisely, the more
+afraid of him Saul was; again and again he tried to kill him; as David
+was sitting harmless in Saul&rsquo;s house, soothing the poor madman
+by the music of his harp, Saul tries to stab him unawares; and not content
+with that proceeds deliberately to hunt him down, from town to town,
+and wilderness to wilderness; sends soldiers after him to murder him;
+at last goes out after him himself with his guards.&nbsp; Was not all
+this enough to try David&rsquo;s faith?&nbsp; Hardly any man, I suppose,
+since the world was made, had found righteousness pay him less; no man
+was ever more tempted to turn round and do evil, since doing good only
+brought him deeper and deeper into the mire.&nbsp; But no, we know that
+he did not lose his trust in God; for we have seven psalms, at least,
+which he wrote during these very wanderings of his; the fifty-second,
+when Doeg had betrayed him to Saul; the fifty-fourth, when Ziphim betrayed
+him; the fifty-sixth, when the Philistines took him in Gath; the fifty-seventh,
+&ldquo;when he fled from Saul in the cave;&rdquo; the fifty-ninth, &ldquo;when
+they watched the house to kill him;&rdquo; the sixty-third, &ldquo;when
+he was in the wilderness of Judah;&rdquo; the thirty-fourth, &ldquo;when
+he was driven away by Abimelech;&rdquo; and several more which appear
+to have been written about the same time.</p>
+<p>Now, what strikes us first, or ought to strike us, in these psalms,
+is David&rsquo;s utter faith in God.&nbsp; I do not mean to say that
+David had not his sad days, when he gave himself up for lost, and when
+God seemed to have forsaken him, and forgotten his promise.&nbsp; He
+was a man of like passions with ourselves; and therefore he was, as
+we should have been, terrified and faint-hearted at times.&nbsp; But
+exactly what God was teaching and training him to be, was not to be
+fainthearted&mdash;not to be terrified.&nbsp; He began in his youth
+by trusting God.&nbsp; That made him the man after God&rsquo;s own heart,
+just as it was the want of trust in God which made Saul not the man
+after God&rsquo;s own heart, and lost him his kingdom.&nbsp; In all
+those wanderings and dangers of David&rsquo;s in the wilderness, God
+was training, and educating, and strengthening David&rsquo;s faith according
+to His great law: To whomsoever hath shall be given, and he shall have
+more abundantly; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even
+that which he seems to have.&nbsp; And the first great fruit of David&rsquo;s
+firm trust in God was his patience.</p>
+<p>He learned to wait God&rsquo;s time, and take God&rsquo;s way, and
+be sure that the same God who had promised that he should be king, would
+make him king when he saw fit.&nbsp; He knew, as he says himself, that
+the Strength of Israel could not lie or repent.&nbsp; He had sworn that
+He would not fail David.&nbsp; And he learned that God had sworn by
+His holiness.&nbsp; He was a holy, just, righteous God; and David and
+David&rsquo;s country now were safe in His hands.&nbsp; It was his firm
+trust in God which gave him strength of mind to use no unfair means
+to right himself.&nbsp; Twice Saul, his enemy, was in his power.&nbsp;
+What a temptation to him to kill Saul, rid himself of his tormentor,
+and perhaps get the kingdom at once!&nbsp; But no.&nbsp; He felt: &ldquo;This
+Saul is a wicked, devil-tormented murderer, a cruel tyrant and oppressor;
+but the same God who chose me to be king next, chose him to be king
+now.&nbsp; He is the Lord&rsquo;s anointed.&nbsp; God put him where
+he is, and leaves him there for some good purpose; and when God has
+done with him, God will take him away, and free this poor oppressed
+people; and in the meantime, I, as a private man, have no right to touch
+him.&nbsp; I must not do evil that good may come.&nbsp; If I am to be
+a true king, a true man at all hereafter, I must keep true now; if I
+am to be a righteous lawgiver hereafter, I must respect and obey law
+myself now.&nbsp; The Lord be judge between me and Saul; for He is Judge,
+and He will right me better than I can ever right myself.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And thus did trust in God bring out in David that true respect for law,
+without which a king, let him be as kind-hearted as he will, is but
+too likely to become at last a tyrant and an oppressor.</p>
+<p>But another thing which strikes any thinking man in David&rsquo;s
+psalms, is his strong feeling for the poor, and the afflicted, and the
+oppressed.&nbsp; That is what makes the Psalms, above all, the poor
+man&rsquo;s book, the afflicted man&rsquo;s book.&nbsp; But how did
+he get that fellow-feeling for the fallen?&nbsp; By having fallen himself,
+and tasted affliction and oppression.&nbsp; That was how he was educated
+to be a true king.&nbsp; That was how he became a picture and pattern&mdash;a
+&ldquo;type,&rdquo; as some call it, of Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows.&nbsp;
+That is why so many of David&rsquo;s psalms apply so well to the Lord;
+why the Lord fulfilled those psalms when He was on earth.&nbsp; David
+was truly a man of sorrows; for he had not only the burden of his own
+sorrows to bear, but that of many others.&nbsp; His parents had to escape,
+and to be placed in safety at the court of a heathen prince.&nbsp; His
+friend Abimelech the priest, because he gave David bread when he was
+starving, and Goliath&rsquo;s sword&mdash;which, after all, was David&rsquo;s
+own&mdash;was murdered by Saul&rsquo;s hired ruffians, at Saul&rsquo;s
+command, and with him his whole family, and all the priests of the town,
+with their wives and children, even to the baby at the breast.&nbsp;
+And when David was in the mountains, everyone who was distressed, and
+in debt, and discontented, gathered themselves to him, and he became
+their captain; so that he had on him all the responsibility, care, and
+anxiety of managing all those wild, starving men, many of them, perhaps,
+reckless and wicked men, ready every day to quarrel among themselves,
+or to break out in open riot and robbery against the people who had
+oppressed them; for&mdash;(and this, too, we may see from David&rsquo;s
+psalms, was not the smallest part of his anxiety)&mdash;the nation of
+the Jews seems to have been in a very wretched state in David&rsquo;s
+time.&nbsp; The poor seem in general to have lost their land, and to
+have become all but slaves to rich nobles, who were grinding them down,
+not only by luxury and covetousness, but often by open robbery and bloodshed.&nbsp;
+The sight of the misrule and misery, as well as of the bloody and ruinous
+border inroads which were kept up by the Philistines and other neighbouring
+tribes, seems for years to have been the uppermost, as well as the deepest
+thought in David&rsquo;s mind, if we may judge from those psalms of
+his, of which this is the key-note; and it was not likely to make him
+care and feel less about all that misery when he remembered (as we see
+from his psalms he remembered daily) that God had set him, the wandering
+outlaw, no less a task than to mend it all; to put down all that oppression,
+to raise up that degradation, to train all that cowardice into self-respect
+and valour, to knit into one united nation, bound together by fellow-feeling
+and common faith in God, that mob of fierce, and greedy, and (hardest
+task of all, as he himself felt) utterly deceitful men.&nbsp; No wonder
+that his psalms begin often enough with sadness, even though they may
+end in hope and trust.&nbsp; He had a work around him and before him
+which ought to have made his heart sad, which was a great part of his
+appointed education, and helped to make him perfect by sufferings.</p>
+<p>And so, upon the bare hill-side, in woods and caves of the earth,
+in cold and hunger, in weariness and dread of death, did David learn
+to be the poor man&rsquo;s king, the poor man&rsquo;s poet, the singer
+of those psalms which shall endure as long as the world endures, and
+be the comfort and the utterance of all sad hearts for evermore.&nbsp;
+Agony it was, deep and bitter, and for the moment more hopeless than
+the grave itself, which crushed out of the very depths of his heart
+that most awful and yet most blessed psalm, the twenty-second, which
+we read in church every Good Friday.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Hind of the Morning&rdquo;
+is its title; some mournful air to which David sang it, giving, perhaps,
+the notion of a timorous deer roused in the morning by the hunters and
+the hounds.&nbsp; We read that psalm on Good Friday, and all say that
+our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled it.&nbsp; What do we mean hereby?</p>
+<p>We mean hereby, that we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled
+all sorrows which man can taste.&nbsp; He filled the cup of misery to
+the brim, and drained it to the dregs.&nbsp; He was afflicted in all
+David&rsquo;s afflictions, in the afflictions of all mankind.&nbsp;
+He bare all their sicknesses, and carried all their infirmities; and
+therefore we read this psalm upon Good Friday, upon the day in which
+He tasted death for every man, and went down into the lowest depths
+of terror, and shame, and agony, and death; and, worst of all, into
+the feeling that God had forsaken Him, that there was no help or hope
+for Him in heaven, as well as earth&mdash;no care or love in the great
+God, whose Son He was&mdash;went down, in a word, into hell; that hell
+whereof David and Heman, and Hezekiah after them, had said, &ldquo;Shall
+the dust give thanks unto thee? and shall it declare thy truth?&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Thou
+wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One
+to see corruption.&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;My life draweth nigh unto hell.
+. .&nbsp; I am like one stript among the dead, like the slain that lie
+in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more; and they are cut off from
+thy hand. . . .&nbsp; Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? and shall
+the dead arise and praise thee?&nbsp; Shall thy wonders be known in
+the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of destruction?&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;For
+the grave cannot praise thee; death cannot celebrate thee: they that
+go down to the pit cannot hope for thy truth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Even into that lowest darkness, where man feels, even for one moment,
+that God is nothing to him, and he is nothing to God&mdash;even into
+that Jesus condescended to go down for us.&nbsp; That worst of all temptations,
+of which David only tasted a drop when he cried out, &ldquo;My God,
+my God, why hast thou forsaken me?&rdquo;&nbsp; Jesus drained to the
+very dregs for us.&mdash;He went down into hell for us, and conquered
+hell and death, and the darkness of the unknown world, and rose again
+glorious from them, that He might teach us not to fear death and hell;
+that He might know how to comfort us in the hour of death: and in the
+day of judgment, when on our sick bed, or in some bitter shame and trouble,
+the lying devil is telling us that we are damned and lost, and forsaken
+by God, and every sin we ever did rises up and stares us in the face.</p>
+<p>Truly He is a king!&mdash;a king for rich and poor, young and old,
+Englishmen and negro; all alike He knows them, He feels for them, He
+has tasted sorrow for them, far more than David did for those poor,
+oppressed, sinful Jews of his.&nbsp; Read those Psalms of David; for
+they speak not only of David, now long since dead and gone, but of the
+blessed Jesus, who lives and reigns over us now at this very moment.&nbsp;
+Read them, for they are inspired; the honest words of a servant of God
+crying out to the same God, the same Saviour and Deliverer as we have.&nbsp;
+And His love has not changed.&nbsp; His arm is not shortened that He
+cannot save.&nbsp; Your words need not change.&nbsp; The words of those
+psalms in which David prayed, in them you and I may pray.&nbsp; Right
+out of the depths of his poor distracted heart they came.&nbsp; Let
+them come out of our hearts too.&nbsp; They belong to us more than even
+they did to the Jews, for whom David wrote them&mdash;more than even
+they did to David himself; for Jesus has fulfilled them&mdash;filled
+them full&mdash;given them boundlessly more meaning than ever they had
+before, and given us more hope in using them than ever David had: for
+now that love and righteousness of God, in which David only trusted
+beforehand, has come down and walked on this earth in the shape of a
+poor man, Jesus Christ, the Son of the maiden of Bethlehem.</p>
+<p>Oh, you who are afflicted, pray to God in those psalms; not merely
+in the words of them, but in the spirit of them.&nbsp; And to do that,
+you must get from God the spirit in which David wrote them&mdash;the
+Spirit of God.&nbsp; Pray for that Spirit; for the spirit of patience,
+which made David wait God&rsquo;s good time to right him, instead of
+trying, as too many do, to right himself by wrong means; for the spirit
+of love, which taught David to return good for evil; for the spirit
+of fellow-feeling, which taught David to care for others as well as
+himself; and in that spirit of love, do you pray for others while you
+are praying for yourself.&nbsp; Pray for that Spirit which taught David
+to help and comfort those who were weaker than himself, that you in
+your time may be able and willing to comfort and help those who are
+weaker than yourselves.&nbsp; And above all, pray for the Spirit of
+faith, which made David certain that oppression and wrong-doing could
+not stand; that the day must surely come when God would judge the world
+righteously, and hear the cry of the afflicted, and deliver the outcast
+and poor, that the man of the world might be no more exalted against
+them.&nbsp; Pray, in short, for the Spirit of Christ; and then be sure
+He will hear your prayers, and answer them, and show Himself a better
+friend, and a truer King to you, than ever David showed himself to those
+poor Jews of old.&nbsp; He will deliver you out of all your troubles&mdash;if
+not in this life, yet surely in the life to come; and though you walk
+through the valley of the shadow of death, yet the peace of God shall
+keep your hearts and minds in Him who loved you, and gave Himself for
+you, that you might inherit all heaven and earth in Him.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXVI&mdash;THE VALUE OF LAW</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.&nbsp; For there
+is no power but of God.&nbsp; The powers that be are ordained of God.&mdash;ROMANS
+xiii. 1.</p>
+<p>What is the difference between a civilised man and a savage?&nbsp;
+You will say: A civilised man can read and write; he has books and education;
+he knows how to make numberless things which makes his life comfortable
+to him.&nbsp; He can get wealth, and build great towns, sink mines,
+sail the sea in ships, spread himself over the face of the earth, or
+bring home all its treasures, while the savages remain poor, and naked,
+and miserable, and ignorant, fixed to the land in which they chance
+to have been born.</p>
+<p>True: but we must go a little deeper still.&nbsp; Why does the savage
+remain poor and wretched, while the civilised people become richer and
+more prosperous?&nbsp; Why, for instance, do the poor savage gipsies
+never grow more comfortable or wiser&mdash;each generation of them remaining
+just as low as their forefathers were, or, indeed, getting lower and
+fewer? for the gipsies, like all savages, are becoming fewer and fewer
+year by year, while, on the other hand, we English increase in numbers,
+and in wealth, and knowledge; and fresh inventions are found out year
+by year, which give fresh employment and make life more safe and more
+pleasant.</p>
+<p>This is the reason: That the English have laws and obey them, and
+the gipsies have none.&nbsp; This is the whole secret.&nbsp; This is
+why savages remain poor and miserable, that each man does what he likes
+without law.&nbsp; This is why civilised nations like England thrive
+and prosper, because they have laws and obey them, and every man does
+not do what he likes, but what the law likes.&nbsp; Laws are made not
+for the good of one person here, or the other person there, but for
+the good of all; and, therefore, the very notion of a civilised country
+is, a country in which people cannot do what they like with their own,
+as the savages do.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not do what he likes with his own?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Certainly not; no one can or does.&nbsp; If you have property, you cannot
+spend it all as you like.&nbsp; You have to pay a part of it to the
+government, that is, into the common stock, for the common good, in
+the shape of rates and taxes, before you can spend any of it on yourself.&nbsp;
+If you take wages, you cannot spend them all upon yourself and do what
+you like with them.&nbsp; If you do not support your wife and family
+out of them, the law will punish you.&nbsp; You cannot do what you like
+with your own gun, for you may not shoot your neighbour&rsquo;s cattle
+or game with it.&nbsp; You cannot do what you like with your own hands,
+for the law forbids you to steal with them.&nbsp; You cannot do what
+you like with your own feet, for the law will punish you for trespassing
+on your neighbour&rsquo;s ground without his leave.&nbsp; In short,
+you can only do with your own what will not hurt your neighbour, in
+such matters as the law can take care of.&nbsp; And more, in any great
+necessity the law may actually hurt you for the good of the nation at
+large.&nbsp; The law may compel you to sell your land, to your own injury,
+if it is wanted for a railroad.&nbsp; The law may compel you, as it
+did fifty years ago, to serve as a soldier in the militia, to your own
+injury, if there is a fear of foreign invasion; so that the law is above
+each and all of us.&nbsp; Our own wills are not our masters.&nbsp; No
+man is his own master.&nbsp; The law is the master of each and all of
+us, and if we will not obey it willingly, it can make us obey unwillingly.</p>
+<p>Can make us?&nbsp; Ay, but ought it to make us?&nbsp; Is it right
+that the law should over-ride our own free wills, and prevent our doing
+what we like with our own?</p>
+<p>It is right&mdash;absolutely right.&nbsp; St. Paul tells us what
+gives law this authority: &ldquo;There is no power but of God.&nbsp;
+The powers that be are ordained of God.&rdquo;&nbsp; And he tells us
+also why this authority is given to the law.&nbsp; &ldquo;Rulers,&rdquo;
+he says, &ldquo;are not a terror to good works, but to evil.&nbsp; Wilt
+thou then not be afraid of those who administer the law?&nbsp; Do that
+which is good, and thou shalt have praise from them, for they are God&rsquo;s
+ministers to thee for good.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For good, you see.&nbsp; For the good of mankind it was, that God
+put into their hearts and reasons, that notion of making laws, and appointing
+kings and magistrates to see that those laws are obeyed.&nbsp; For our
+good.&nbsp; For without law no man&rsquo;s life, or family, or property
+would be safe.&nbsp; Every man&rsquo;s private selfishness, and greediness,
+and anger, would struggle without check to have its way, and there would
+be no bar or curb to keep each and every man from injuring each and
+every man else; so the strong would devour the weak, and then tear each
+other in pieces afterwards.&nbsp; So it is among the savages.&nbsp;
+They have little or no property, for they have no laws to protect property;
+and therefore every man expects his neighbour to steal from him, and
+finds it his shortest plan to steal from his neighbour, instead of settling
+down to sow corn which he will have no chance of eating, or build houses
+which may be taken from him at night by some more strong and cunning
+savage.&nbsp; There is no law among savages to protect women and children
+against the men, and therefore the women are treated worse than beasts,
+and the children murdered to save the trouble of rearing them.&nbsp;
+Every man&rsquo;s hand is against his neighbour.&nbsp; No one feels
+himself safe, and therefore no one thinks it worth while to lay up for
+the morrow.&nbsp; No one expects justice and mercy to be done to him,
+and therefore no one thinks it worth while to do justice and mercy to
+others.&nbsp; And thus they live in continual fear and quarrelling,
+feeding like wild animals on game or roots, often, when they have bad
+luck in their hunting, on offal which our dogs would refuse, and dwindle
+away and become fewer and wretcheder year by year; in this way do the
+savages in New South Wales live to this day, for want of law.</p>
+<p>It is for our good, then, that God has put into the heart of man
+to make laws, and to obey them as sacred and divine things.&nbsp; For
+our good, in order to save us from sinking down into the same state
+of poverty and misery in which the savages are.&nbsp; For our good,
+because we are fallen creatures, with selfish and corrupt wills, continually
+apt to break loose, and please ourselves at the expense of our neighbours.&nbsp;
+For our good, because, however fallen we are, we are still brothers,
+members of God&rsquo;s family, bound to each other by duty and relationship,
+if not by love.</p>
+<p>Just as in a family, if parents, brothers, and sisters will not do
+their duty to each other lovingly and of their free will, the law interferes,
+and the custom of the country interferes, and the opinion of neighbours
+interferes, and says: &ldquo;You may not love your parents: but you
+have no right to leave them to starve.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;You may not
+love your brothers: but if you try to injure and slander them, you are
+doing an unnatural and hateful thing, abhorred by God and man, and you
+must expect us to treat you accordingly, as a wild beast who does not
+feel the common laws of nature and right and wrong.&rdquo;&nbsp; So
+with the law of the land.&nbsp; The law is meant to remind us more or
+less that we are brothers, members of one body; that we owe a duty to
+each other; that we are all equal in God&rsquo;s sight, who is no respecter
+of persons, or of rank, or of riches, any more than the law is when
+it punishes the greatest nobleman as severely as the poorest labourer.&nbsp;
+The law is meant to remind us that God is just; that when we injure
+each other, we sin against God; that God&rsquo;s rule and law is, that
+each transgression should receive its just reward, and that, therefore,
+because man is made in the likeness of God, man is bound, as far as
+he can, to visit every offence with due and proportionate punishment.&nbsp;
+And the law punishes, as St. Paul says, in God&rsquo;s name, and for
+God&rsquo;s sake.&nbsp; The magistrate is a witness for God&rsquo;s
+righteous government of the world, the minister of God&rsquo;s vengeance
+against evil-doers, to remind all continually that evil-doing has no
+place, and cannot prosper, and must not be allowed, upon this God&rsquo;s
+earth whereon we live.</p>
+<p>But what if the laws are unfair, and punish only some sorts of evil-doers
+and not others?&nbsp; What if they are like spiders&rsquo; webs, which
+catch the little flies, and let the great wasps break through?&nbsp;
+What if they punish poor and weak offenders, and let the rich and powerful
+sinners escape?&nbsp; &ldquo;Obey them still,&rdquo; says St. Paul.&nbsp;
+In his time and country the laws were as unfair in that way as laws
+ever were, and yet he tells Christians to obey them for conscience&rsquo;s
+sake.&nbsp; Thank God that they do punish weak offenders.&nbsp; Pray
+God that the time may come when they may be strong enough to punish
+great offenders also.&nbsp; But, in the meantime, see that they have
+not to punish you.&nbsp; As far as the laws go, they are right and good.&nbsp;
+As far as they keep down any sort of wrong-doing whatsoever, they are
+God&rsquo;s ordinances, and you must obey them for God&rsquo;s sake.</p>
+<p>But what if the laws are not only unfair and partial, but also unjust
+and wrong?&nbsp; Are we to obey them then?&nbsp; Obey them still, says
+St. Paul.&nbsp; Of course, if they command you to do a clearly wrong
+thing; if, for instance, the law commanded you to worship idols, or
+to commit adultery, there is no question then; such laws cannot be God&rsquo;s
+ordinance.&nbsp; The laws can only be God&rsquo;s ordinance as far as
+they agree with what we know of God&rsquo;s will written in our hearts,
+and written in His holy Bible.&nbsp; Then a man must resist the law
+to the death, if need be, as the old martyrs did, dying as witnesses
+for God&rsquo;s righteous and eternal law, against man&rsquo;s false
+and unrighteous law.&nbsp; It is a very difficult thing, no doubt, to
+tell where to draw the line in such matters.&nbsp; But we, thank God,
+here in England now, have no need to puzzle our heads with such questions.&nbsp;
+Every man&rsquo;s conscience is free here, and he has full liberty to
+worship God as he thinks best, provided that by so doing he does not
+interfere with his neighbour&rsquo;s character, or property, or comfort.&nbsp;
+There is no single law in England now, that I know of, which a man has
+any need to refuse to obey, let his conscience be as tender as it may.&nbsp;
+And as for laws which we think hurtful to the country, or hurtful to
+any particular class in the country, our thinking them hurtful is no
+reason that we should not obey them.&nbsp; As long as they are law,
+they are God&rsquo;s ordinance, and we have no right to break them.&nbsp;
+They may be useful after all.&nbsp; Or even if they are hurtful in some
+way, still God may be bringing good out of them in some other way, of
+which we little dream, as He has often done out of laws and customs
+which seem at first sight most foolish and hurtful, and yet which He
+endured and winked at, for the sake of bringing good out of evil.&nbsp;
+At all events, whatsoever laws are here in England, are made by the
+men whom we English have chosen, as the men most fit and wise to make
+them, and we are bound to abide by them.&nbsp; If Parliament is not
+wise enough to make perfectly good laws, that is no one&rsquo;s fault
+but our own; for if we were wise, we should choose wise law-makers,
+and we must be filled with the fruit of our own devices.&nbsp; As long
+as these laws have been made and passed, by Commons, Lords, and Queen,
+according to the ancient forms and constitution which God has taught
+our forefathers from time to time for more than a thousand years, and
+which have had God&rsquo;s blessing and favour on them, and made us,
+from the least of all nations, the greatest nation on the earth; in
+short, as long as those laws are made according to law, so long we are
+bound to believe them to be God&rsquo;s ordinance, and obey them.&nbsp;
+But understand; that is no reason why we should not try to get them
+improved; for when they are changed and done away according to the same
+law which made them, that will be a sign that they are God&rsquo;s ordinances
+no longer; that God thinks we have no more need for them, and does not
+require us to keep them.&nbsp; But as long as any law is what St. Paul
+calls &ldquo;the powers that be,&rdquo; obeyed it must be, not only
+for wrath, but for conscience&rsquo;s sake.</p>
+<p>That is a very important part of the matter.&nbsp; Obey the law,
+St. Paul says, not only for wrath, that is, not only for fear of punishment,
+but for conscience&rsquo;s sake.&nbsp; Even if you do not expect to
+be punished; even if you think no one will ever find out that you have
+broken the law, remember it is God&rsquo;s ordinance.&nbsp; He sees
+you.&nbsp; Do not hurt your own conscience, and deaden your own sense
+of right and wrong, by breaking the least or the most unjust law in
+the slightest point.</p>
+<p>For instance: some people think the income-tax is very unfair; and
+therefore they think there is no harm in cheating the revenue a little,
+by making out their income less than it is.&nbsp; Others, again, think
+the laws against smuggling unjust and harsh; and therefore they see
+no harm in trying to avoid paying duty on goods which they bring home,
+whenever they have an opportunity, or buying cheap goods, which they
+must know from their price are smuggled.&nbsp; Others, again, think
+the game laws are unfair, and therefore see no harm in going out shooting
+on their own lands without a licence; while many see no harm, or say
+they see no harm, in poaching on other people&rsquo;s grounds, and killing
+game contrary to law wherever they can.&nbsp; That it is wrong to break
+the law in these two first cases, you all know in your own hearts.&nbsp;
+On the matter of poaching, some of you, I know, have many very mistaken
+notions.&nbsp; But, my friends, I ask you only to look at the sin and
+misery which poaching causes, if you want to see that those who break
+the law do indeed break the ordinance of God, and that God&rsquo;s laws
+avenge themselves.&nbsp; Look at the idleness, the untidiness, the deceit,
+the bad company, the drunkenness, the misery and sin, to man, woman,
+and child, which that same poaching brings about, and then see how one
+little sin brings on many great ones; how a man, by despising the authority
+of law, and fancying that he does no harm in disobeying the laws, from
+his own fancy about poaching being no harm, falls into temptation and
+a snare, and pierces himself through with many sorrows.&nbsp; My young
+friends, believe my words.&nbsp; Avoid poaching, even once in a way.&nbsp;
+The beginning of sin is like the letting out of water; no one can tell
+where it will stop.&nbsp; He who breaks the law in little things will
+be tempted to go on and break it in greater and greater things.&nbsp;
+He who begins by breaking man&rsquo;s law, which is the pattern of God&rsquo;s
+law, will be tempted to go on and break God&rsquo;s law also.&nbsp;
+Is it not so?&nbsp; There is no use telling me, &ldquo;The game is no
+one&rsquo;s; there is no harm in taking it.&rdquo;&nbsp; Light words
+of that kind will not do to answer God with.&nbsp; You know there is
+harm in taking it; for you know, as well as I do, that you cannot go
+after game without neglecting your work to get it; or without going
+to the worst of public-houses, among the worst of company, to sell it.&nbsp;
+You know, as well as I do, that hand in hand with poaching go lying,
+and idling, and sneaking, and fear, and boasting, and swearing, and
+drinking, and the company of bad men and bad women.&nbsp; And then you
+say there is no harm in poaching.&nbsp; Do you suppose that I do not
+know, as well as any one of you here, what goes to the snaring of a
+hare, and the selling of a hare, and the spending of the ill-got price
+of a hare?&nbsp; My dear young men, I know that poaching, like many
+other sins, is tempting: but God has told us to flee from temptation&mdash;to
+resist the devil, and he will flee from us.&nbsp; If we are to give
+up ourselves without a struggle to every pleasant thing which tempts
+us, we shall soon be at the devil&rsquo;s door.&nbsp; We were sent into
+the world to fight against temptation and to conquer it.&nbsp; We were
+sent into the world to do what God likes, not what we like; and therefore
+we were sent into the world to obey the laws of the land wherein we
+live, be they better or worse; because if we break one law because we
+don&rsquo;t like it, our neighbour may break another because he don&rsquo;t
+like that, and so forth; till there is neither law, nor peace, nor safety,
+but every man doing what is right in his own eyes, which is sure to
+end by every man&rsquo;s doing what is right in the devil&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp;
+We were sent into the world to live as brothers, under laws which make
+us give up our own wills and selfish lusts for the common good.&nbsp;
+And if we find it difficult to keep the laws, if we are tempted to break
+the laws, God has promised His Spirit to those who ask Him.&nbsp; God
+has promised His Spirit to us.&nbsp; If we pray for that Spirit night
+and morning, He will make it easy for us to keep the laws.&nbsp; He
+will make us what our Lord was before us, humble, patient, loving, manful
+and strong enough to restrain our fancies and appetites, and to give
+up our wills for the good of our neighbours, anxious and careful to
+avoid all appearance of evil, trusting that because God is just, and
+God is King, all laws which are not wicked are His ordinance, and therefore
+being obedient to every ordinance of man for the Lord&rsquo;s sake,
+even as Jesus Christ Himself was, who, though He was Lord of all, paid
+taxes and tribute money to the Roman government, like the rest of the
+Jews, and kept the law of Moses perfectly, and was baptised with John&rsquo;s
+baptism, to show that in all just and reasonable things we are to obey
+the laws and customs of our forefathers, in the country to which it
+has pleased the Lord that we should belong.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXVII&mdash;THE SOURCE OF LAW</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.&nbsp; For there
+is no power but of God.&nbsp; The powers that be are ordained of God.&mdash;ROMANS
+xiii. 1.</p>
+<p>In this chapter, which we read for the second lesson for this afternoon&rsquo;s
+service, St. Paul gives good advice to the Romans, and equally good
+advice to us.</p>
+<p>Of course what he says must be equally good for us, and for all people,
+at all times, in all countries, as long as time shall last; because
+St. Paul spoke by the Spirit of God, who is God eternal, and therefore
+cannot change His mind, but lays down, by the mouth of His apostles
+and prophets, the everlasting laws of right and wrong, which are always
+equally good for all.</p>
+<p>But there is something in this lesson which makes it especially useful
+to us; because we English are in some very important matters very like
+the Romans to whom St. Paul wrote; though in others, thanks to Almighty
+God, we are still very unlike them.</p>
+<p>Now, these old Romans, as I have often told you, had risen to be
+the greatest and mightiest people in the world, and to conquer many
+foreign countries, and set up colonies of Romans in them, very much
+as the English have done in India, and North America, and Australia:
+so that the little country of Italy, with its one great city of Rome,
+was mistress of vast lands far beyond the seas, ten times as large as
+itself, just as this little England is.</p>
+<p>But it is not so much this which I have to speak to you about now,
+as how this Rome became so great; for it was at first nothing but a
+poor little country town, without money, armies, trade, or any of those
+things which shallow-minded people fancy are the great strength of a
+nation.&nbsp; True, all those things are good; but they are useless
+and hurtful&mdash;and, what is more, they cannot be got&mdash;without
+something better than them; something which you cannot see nor handle;
+something spiritual, which is the life and heart of a country or nation,
+and without which it can never become great.&nbsp; This the old Romans
+had; and it made them become great.&nbsp; This we English have had for
+now fifteen hundred years; even when our forefathers were heathens,
+like the Romans, before we came into this good land of England, while
+we were poor and simple people, living in the barren moors of Germany,
+and the snowy mountains of Norway; even then we had this wonderful charm,
+by which nations are sure to become great and powerful at last; and
+in proportion as we have remembered and acted upon it, we English have
+thriven and spread; and whenever we have forgotten it and broken it,
+we have fallen into distress, and poverty, and shame, over the whole
+land.</p>
+<p>Now, what is this wonderful charm which made the old Romans and we
+English great, which is stronger than money, and armies, and trade,
+and all the things which we can see and handle?</p>
+<p>St. Paul tells us in the text: &ldquo;Let every soul be subject to
+the higher powers.&nbsp; For there is no power but of God.&nbsp; The
+powers that be are ordained of God.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To respect the law; to believe that God wills men to live according
+to law; and that He will teach men right and good laws; that magistrates
+who enforce the laws are God&rsquo;s ministers, God&rsquo;s officers
+and servants; that to break the laws is to sin against God;&mdash;that
+is the charm which worked such wonders, and will work them to the end
+of time.</p>
+<p>So you see it was a very proper thing for St. Paul, when he wrote
+to these Romans after they became Christians, to speak to them as he
+does in this chapter.&nbsp; They might have fancied, and many did fancy,
+that because they were Jesus Christ&rsquo;s servants now, they need
+not obey their heathen rulers and laws any more.&nbsp; But St. Paul
+says: &ldquo;No; Jesus Christ&rsquo;s being King of Kings, is only the
+strongest possible reason for your obeying these heathen rulers.&nbsp;
+For if He is King of all the earth, He is King of Rome also, and of
+all her colonies; and therefore you may be sure that He would not leave
+these Roman rulers, and laws here if He did not think it right and fitting.&nbsp;
+If Jesus Christ is Lord of lords He is Lord of these Roman rulers, and
+they are His ministers and stewards; and you must obey them, and pay
+taxes to them for conscience&rsquo;s sake, as unto the Lord, and not
+unto man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So you see that St. Paul gave these Roman Christians no new commandment
+on these matters; nothing different from what their old heathen forefathers
+had believed.&nbsp; For the law which he mentions in verse 9, &ldquo;Thou
+shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal,&rdquo; etc., had been for centuries
+past part of the old Roman law, as well as of Moses&rsquo; law.</p>
+<p>Those old heathen Romans believed, and rightly, that all law and
+order came from the great God of gods, whom they called in their tongue
+Jupiter, that is, the Heavenly Father.&nbsp; They believed that He would
+bless those who kept the laws; who kept their oaths and agreements,
+and the laws about government, about marriage, about property, about
+inheritance; and that He would surely punish those who broke the laws,
+who defrauded their neighbours of their rights, who swore falsely against
+their neighbour, or broke their agreements, who were unfaithful to their
+wives and husbands, or in any way offended against justice between man
+and man.&nbsp; And they believed too, and rightly, that as long as they
+kept the laws, and lived justly and orderly by them, the great Heavenly
+Father would protect and prosper their town of Rome, and make it grow
+great and powerful, because they were living as He would have men live;
+not doing each what was right in the sight of his own eyes, but conquering
+their own selfish wills and private fancies, for the sake of their neighbour&rsquo;s
+good, and the good of his country, that they might all help and trust
+each other, as fellow-citizens of one nation.</p>
+<p>Only St. Paul had told them: Your forefathers were right in fancying
+that law and right came from the great God of gods: but they knew hardly
+anything, or rather, in time they forgot almost everything, about that
+Heavenly Father.&nbsp; In their ignorance they mixed up the belief in
+the one great almighty and good God, which dwells in the hearts of all
+men, with filthy fables and superstitions till they came to fancy that
+there were many gods and not one, and that these many gods were sinful,
+foul, proud, and cruel, as fallen men.&nbsp; But you have been brought
+back to the knowledge of the one true, and righteous, and loving God,
+which your forefathers lost.&nbsp; He has revealed and shown Himself,
+and what He is like, in His Son Jesus Christ.&nbsp; He is love, and
+wisdom, and justice, and order itself; and, therefore, you must be sure,
+even more sure than your old heathen forefathers, that He cares for
+a nation being at peace and unity within itself, governed by wise laws,
+doing justice between man and man, and keeping order throughout all
+its business, that every man may do his work and enjoy his wages without
+hindrance, or confusion, or fear, or robbery and oppression from those
+who are stronger than he.</p>
+<p>And so St. Paul says to them: &ldquo;You must believe that power
+and law come from God, far more firmly and clearly than ever your heathen
+forefathers did.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now that St. Paul was right in this we may see from the Old Testament.&nbsp;
+In the first lesson for this afternoon&rsquo;s service, we read how
+Jeremiah was sent with the most awful warnings to the king, and the
+queen, and the crown prince of his country.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp; Because
+they had broken the laws; because, in a word, they had been unfaithful
+stewards and ministers of the Lord God, who had given them their power
+and kingdom, and would demand a strict account of all which He had committed
+to their charge.&nbsp; But in the same book of the prophet Jeremiah
+we read more than this; we read exactly what St. Paul says about the
+heathen Roman governors: for the Lord God, who is the Lord Jesus Christ,
+sent Jeremiah with a message to all the heathen kings round about, to
+tell them that He was their Lord and Master, that He had given them
+their power, heathens as they were, because it seemed fit to Him, and
+that now, for their sins, He was going to deliver them over into the
+hand of another heathen, His servant Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon;
+and that whosoever would not serve Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord God would
+punish him with sword, and famine, and pestilence till he had consumed
+them.&nbsp; And the first four chapters of the book of Daniel, noble
+and wonderful as they are, seem to me to have been put into the Bible
+simply to teach us this one thing, that heathen rulers, as well as Christians,
+are the Lord&rsquo;s servants, and that their power is ordained by God.&nbsp;
+For these chapters are entirely made up of the history, how God, by
+His prophet Daniel, taught the heathen king Nebuchadnezzar that he was
+God&rsquo;s minister and steward.&nbsp; And the latter part of the book
+of Daniel is the account of his teaching the same thing to another heathen,
+Cyrus the great and good king of Persia.&nbsp; And here St. Paul teaches
+the Christian Romans just the same thing about their heathen governors
+and heathen laws, that they are the ministers and the ordinance of God.</p>
+<p>Now, our own English forefathers, as I said before, believed this
+same thing; and if I had time, I could show you, I think, plainly enough
+from God&rsquo;s dealings with England, how He has blest and prospered
+us whensoever we have acted up to it.&nbsp; But whether we have believed
+it or not, there is enough in our English laws, and in our English Prayer
+Book too, to witness for it and remind us of it.</p>
+<p>The very title which we give the Queen, &ldquo;Queen by the grace
+of God;&rdquo; the solemn prayers for her when she is crowned and anointed,
+not in her own palace, or in the House of Parliament, but in the Church
+of God at Westminster; the prayers which we have just offered up for
+the Queen, for the government, and for the magistrates&mdash;these are
+all so many signs and tokens to us that they are God&rsquo;s stewards,
+called to do God&rsquo;s work, and that we must pray for God&rsquo;s
+grace to help them to fulfil their calling.&nbsp; And are not those
+ten commandments which stand in every church, a witness of the same
+thing?&nbsp; They are the very root of all law whatsoever.&nbsp; And
+more, the solemn oath which a witness takes in the court of justice,
+what is it but a sign of the same thing, that our forefathers, who appointed
+these forms, believed that law and justice were holy things, and that
+he who goes into a court of law goes into the presence of God Himself,
+and confesses, when he promises to speak the truth, so help him God,
+that God is the protector and the avenger of law and justice?</p>
+<p>But some people, and especially young and light-hearted persons,
+are ready to say: &ldquo;Obey the powers that be, whosoever they may
+be, good or bad, and believe that to break their laws is to sin against
+God?&nbsp; We might as well be slaves at once.&nbsp; A man has a right
+to his own opinion; and if he does not think a law good, how can he
+be bound to obey it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>You will often hear such words as those when you go out into the
+world, into great towns, where men meet together much.&nbsp; Let me
+give you, young people, a little advice about that beforehand; for,
+fine as it sounds, it is hollow and false at root.</p>
+<p>If you wish to be really free, and to do what you like, like what
+is right; and do that, says St. Paul, and then the law will not interfere
+with you: &ldquo;For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the
+evil.&nbsp; Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power?&nbsp; Do that
+which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: for he is the
+minister of God to thee for good.&nbsp; But if thou do that which is
+evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the
+minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And then he sums up what doing right is, in one short sentence: &ldquo;Love
+thy neighbour as thyself; for love is the fulfilling of the law.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+All that the laws want to make you do, is to behave like men who do
+love their neighbours as themselves, and therefore do them no harm&mdash;to
+behave like men who are ready to give up their own private wills and
+pleasures, and even their own private property, if wanted, for the good
+of their neighbours and their country.&nbsp; Therefore the law calls
+on you to pay rates and taxes, which are to be spent for the good of
+the nation at large.&nbsp; And if you love your neighbour as yourself,
+and have the good of everyone round you at heart, you will no more grudge
+paying rates and taxes for their benefit than you will grudge spending
+money to support and educate your own children.&nbsp; And so you will
+be free, free to do what you like, because you like, from the fear and
+love of God, to do those right things which the law is set to make you
+do.</p>
+<p>But some may say: &ldquo;That is not what we mean by being free.&nbsp;
+We mean having a share in choosing Members of Parliament, and so in
+making the laws and governing the country.&nbsp; When people can do
+that the country is a free country.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Well, my friends, and it is a strange thing, or rather not a strange
+thing, if we will but study our Bibles, that a country cannot be free
+in that way, unless the people of it do really believe that the powers
+that be are ordained of God.&nbsp; Instead of that faith making the
+old Romans slavish, or careless what laws were made, or how they were
+governed, as some fancy it would make a people, they were as free a
+people, and freer almost than we English now.&nbsp; They chose their
+own magistrates, and they made their own laws, and prospered by so doing.&nbsp;
+And why?&nbsp; Because they believed that laws came from God; and, therefore,
+they not only obeyed the laws when they were made, but they had heart
+and spirit to help to make them, because they trusted that The Heavenly
+Father, who loved justice, would teach them to be just, and that The
+God who protected laws and punished law-breakers, would put into their
+minds how to make the laws well; and so they were not afraid to govern
+themselves, because they believed that God would enable them to govern
+themselves well, and therefore they were free.&nbsp; And so far from
+their having a slavish spirit in them, they were the most bold and independent
+people of the whole earth.&nbsp; Their soldiers conquered almost every
+nation against whom they fought, because they always obeyed their officers
+dutifully and faithfully, believing that it was their duty to God to
+obey, and to die, if need was, for their country.&nbsp; Old history
+is full of tales, which will never be forgotten, I trust, till the world&rsquo;s
+end, of the noble deeds of their men, ay, and even of their women, who
+counted their own lives worthless in comparison with the good of their
+country, and died in torments rather than break the laws, or do what
+they knew would injure the people to whom they belonged.</p>
+<p>And so with us English.&nbsp; For hundreds of years we have been
+growing more and more free, and more and more well-governed, simply
+because we have been acting on St. Paul&rsquo;s doctrine&mdash;obeying
+the powers that be, because they are ordained by God.&nbsp; It is the
+Englishman&rsquo;s respect for law, as a sacred thing, which he dare
+not break, which has made him, sooner or later, respected and powerful
+wherever he goes to settle in foreign lands; because foreigners can
+trust us to be just, and to keep our promises, and to abide by the laws
+which we have laid down.&nbsp; It is the English respect for law, as
+a sacred thing, which has made our armies among the bravest and the
+most successful on earth; because they know how to obey their officers,
+and are therefore able to fight and to endure as men should do.&nbsp;
+And as long as we hold to that belief we shall prosper at home and abroad,
+and become more and more free, and more and more strong; because we
+shall be united, helping each other, trusting each other, knowing what
+to expect of each other, because we all honour and obey the same laws.</p>
+<p>And, on the other hand, have we not close to us, in France, a fearful
+sign and proof from God that without the fear of God no people can be
+free?&nbsp; Three times in the last sixty years have the French risen
+up against evil rulers, and driven them out.&nbsp; And have they been
+the better for it?&nbsp; They are at this very moment in utter slavery
+to a ruler more lawless than ever oppressed them before.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp;
+Because they did not believe that law came from God, and that the powers
+that be are ordained by Him.&nbsp; Therefore, whenever they were oppressed,
+they did not try to right themselves by lawful ways, according to the
+old English God-fearing custom, but to break down the old law by riot
+and bloodshed, and then to set up new laws of their own.&nbsp; But those
+new laws would never stand.&nbsp; They made them, but they would not
+obey them when they were made, and they could not make others obey them;
+because they had no real reverence for law, and did not believe that
+law came from God, or that His Spirit would give them understanding
+to make good laws.&nbsp; They talked loud about the power and rights
+of the people, and that whatever the people willed was right: but they
+said nothing about the power and rights of the Lord God; they forgot
+that it is only what God has willed from everlasting that is right;
+and so they made laws in the strength of their own hearts, according
+to what was right in the sight of their own eyes, to please themselves.&nbsp;
+How could they respect the laws, when the laws were only copies of their
+own selfish fancies?&nbsp; So, because they made them to please themselves,
+they soon broke them to please themselves.&nbsp; And so came more lawlessness
+and riot, and confusion worse confounded, till, of course, the strongest,
+and cunningest, and most shameless got the upper hand; and they were
+plunged, poor creatures! into the same pit of misery out of which they
+had been trying to deliver themselves in their own strength, for a sign
+and an example that the Lord is King, and not man at all, and that the
+fear of the Lord is the only beginning of wisdom.</p>
+<p>And very much the same sad fate had happened to the Romans a little
+before St. Paul&rsquo;s time.&nbsp; They gave up their ancient respect
+for law; they broke the laws, and ran into all kinds of violence, and
+riot, and filthy sin; and therefore God took away their freedom from
+them, because they were not fit for it, and delivered them over into
+the hand of one cruel tyrant after another; and perhaps the cruellest
+of them all was the man who was emperor of Rome in St. Paul&rsquo;s
+time.&nbsp; Therefore it was that St. Paul says to them: Love each other,
+and obey the laws, &ldquo;knowing the time, that now it is high time
+to awake out of sleep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As much as to say: &ldquo;Your souls have fallen asleep; you have
+been in a dark night, not seeing that God would avenge you of all these
+sins of yours; that God&rsquo;s eye was on them: you have fallen asleep
+and forgotten your forefathers&rsquo; belief, that God loves law, and
+order, and justice, and will punish those who break through them.&nbsp;
+But now the Lord Jesus, the light of the world, is come to awaken you,
+and to open your eyes to see the truth about this, and to show you that
+you are in God&rsquo;s kingdom, and that God commands you to repent,
+and to obey Him, and do justly and righteously.&nbsp; Therefore awake
+out of your sleep; give up the works of darkness, those mean and wicked
+habits which were contrary to the good old laws of your forefathers,
+and which you were at heart ashamed of, and tried to hide even while
+you indulged in them.&nbsp; Open your eyes, and see that God is near
+you, your Judge, your King, seeing through and through your souls, keen
+and sharp to discern the secret thoughts and intents of the heart, so
+that all things are naked and open in the sight of Him with whom we
+have to do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And so I may say to you, my friends, it is high time for us to awake
+out of sleep.&nbsp; The people in England, religious as well as others,
+have fallen asleep of late years too much about this matter.&nbsp; They
+have forgotten that God is King, that magistrates are God&rsquo;s ministers.&nbsp;
+They talk as if laws were meant to be only the device of man&rsquo;s
+will, to serve men&rsquo;s private interests and selfishness; and therefore
+they have lost very much of their respect for law, and their care to
+make good laws for the future.&nbsp; And it is high time for us, while
+all the nations of Europe are tottering and crumbling round us, to awake
+out of sleep on this matter.&nbsp; We must open our eyes and see where
+we are.&nbsp; For we are in God&rsquo;s kingdom.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s Bible,
+God&rsquo;s churches, God&rsquo;s commandments, and all the solemn old
+law forms of England witness to us that God is King, set in the throne
+which judges right; that order and justice, fellow-feeling and public
+spirit, are His gifts, His likeness, on which He looks down with loving
+care and protection; and that if we forget that, and begin to fancy
+that law stands merely by the will of the many, or by the will of the
+stronger, or even by the will of the wiser&mdash;by any will of man
+in short; we shall end by neither being able to make just laws any more,
+nor to obey those which we have, by the blessing of God, already.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXVIII&mdash;THE EDUCATION OF A HEATHEN</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise, and extol, and honour the King of heaven,
+all whose works are truth, and His ways judgment; and those that walk
+in pride He is able to abase.&mdash;DANIEL iv. 37.</p>
+<p>We read for the first lesson to-day two chapters out of the book
+of Daniel.&nbsp; Those who love to study their Bibles, have read often,
+of course, not only these two chapters, but the whole book.</p>
+<p>And I would advise all of you who wish to understand God&rsquo;s
+dealings with mankind, to study this book of Daniel, and especially
+at this present time.</p>
+<p>I do not wish you to study it merely on account of those prophecies
+in it, which many wise and good men think foretell the dates of our
+Lord&rsquo;s first and second comings, and of the end of the world.&nbsp;
+I am not skilled, my friends, in that kind of wisdom.&nbsp; I cannot
+tell you what God will do hereafter.&nbsp; But I think that the book
+of Daniel like the other prophets, tells us what God is always doing
+on earth, and so gives us certain and eternal rules by which we may
+understand strange and terrible events, wars, distress of nations, the
+fall of great men, and the suffering of innocent men, when we see them
+happen, as we may see any day&mdash;perhaps very soon indeed.</p>
+<p>The great lesson, I think, that this book of Daniel teaches us is,
+that God is not the Lord of the Jews only, or of Christians only, but
+of the whole earth; that the heathens are under His moral law and government,
+as well as we; and that, as St. Peter says, God is no respecter of persons:
+but in every nation, he that feareth God, and worketh righteousness,
+is accepted of him.&nbsp; For the history of Nebuchadnezzar seems to
+me to be the history of God&rsquo;s educating a heathen and an idolater
+to know Him.&nbsp; And we must always remember, that as far as we can
+see, it was because Nebuchadnezzar was faithful to the light which he
+had, that God gave him more.&nbsp; Of course he had his sins; the Bible
+tells us what they were; just the sins which one would expect of a man
+brought up a heathen and an idolater; of one who was a great conqueror,
+and had gained many bloody battles, and learned to hold men&rsquo;s
+lives very cheap; of one who was an absolute emperor, with no law but
+his own will, furious at any contradiction; of a man of wonderful power
+of mind&mdash;confident in himself, his own power, his own cunning.&nbsp;
+But he seems not to have been a bad man, considering his advantages.&nbsp;
+The Bible never speaks harshly of him, though he carried away the Jews
+captive to Babylon.&nbsp; In all that fearful war, Nebuchadnezzar was
+in the right, and the Jews in the wrong; so at least Jeremiah the prophet
+declared.&nbsp; Nebuchadnezzar saved and respected Jeremiah; and Daniel
+seems to have regarded the great conqueror with real respect and affection.&nbsp;
+When Daniel says to him, &ldquo;O king, live for ever,&rdquo; and tells
+him that he is the head of gold, and prays that his fearful dream may
+come true of his enemies and not of him, I cannot believe that the prophet
+was using mere empty phrases of court-flattery.&nbsp; He really felt,
+I doubt not, that Nebuchadnezzar was a great and good king, as kings
+went then, and his government a gain (as it easily might be) to the
+nations whom he had conquered, and that it was good that he should reign
+as long as possible.</p>
+<p>And we may well believe Daniel&rsquo;s interest in this great king,
+when we consider how teachable Nebuchadnezzar showed himself under God&rsquo;s
+education of him, so proving that there was in him the honest and good
+heart, which, when The Word is sown in it, will bring forth fruit, thirty-fold
+or a hundred-fold, according to the talents which God has bestowed on
+each man.</p>
+<p>This first lesson we read in the first chapter of Daniel.&nbsp; He
+dreamt a dream.&nbsp; He felt that it was a very wonderful one: but
+he forgot what it was.&nbsp; None of the magicians of Babylon could
+tell him.&nbsp; A young Jew, named Daniel, told him the dream and its
+meaning, and declared at the same time that he had found it out by no
+wisdom of his own, but God had revealed it to him.&nbsp; Nebuchadnezzar
+learned his lesson, and confessed Daniel&rsquo;s God to be a God of
+gods and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing that Daniel
+could reveal that secret; and forthwith, like a wise prince, advanced
+Daniel and his companions to places of the highest authority and trust.</p>
+<p>But Nebuchadnezzar required another lesson.&nbsp; He had learned
+that the God of the Jews was wiser than all the planets and heavenly
+lords and gods whom the Babylonian magicians consulted; he had not learned
+that that same God of the Jews was the Creator and Lord of heaven and
+earth.&nbsp; He had learned that the God of heaven favoured him, and
+had helped him toward his power and glory; but he thought that for that
+very reason the power and glory were his own&mdash;that he had a right
+over the souls and consciences of his subjects, and might make them
+worship what he liked, and how he liked.</p>
+<p>Three Jews, whom he had set over the affairs of Babylon, refused
+to worship the golden image which he had set up, and were cast into
+a fiery furnace, and forthwith miraculously delivered, and beheld by
+Nebuchadnezzar walking unhurt and loose in the midst of the furnace,
+and with them a fourth, whose form was like the form of the Son of God.</p>
+<p>So Nebuchadnezzar was taught that this God of the Jews was the Lord
+of men&rsquo;s souls and consciences; that they were to obey God rather
+than man.&nbsp; So he was taught that the God of the Jews was no mere
+star or heavenly influence who could help men&rsquo;s fortunes, or bestow
+on them a certain fixed destiny; but a living person, the Lord and Master
+of the fire, and of all the powers of the earth, who could change and
+stop those powers at His will, to deliver those who trusted in Him and
+obeyed Him.</p>
+<p>And this lesson, too, Nebuchadnezzar learned.&nbsp; He confessed
+his mistake upon the spot, just in the way in which we should have expected
+a great Eastern king to do, though not in the most enlightened or merciful
+way.&nbsp; He &ldquo;blessed the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,
+who hath sent His angel, and delivered His servants who trusted in Him.&nbsp;
+Therefore I make a decree, that every people, nation, and language,
+which speak anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and
+Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses be made a dunghill:
+because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But there was still one deep mistake lying in the great king&rsquo;s
+heart which required to be rooted out.&nbsp; He had learnt that Jehovah,
+the God of the Jews, was a revealer of secrets, a master of the fire,
+a deliverer of those who trusted in Him, a living personal Lord, wise,
+just, and faithful, very different from any of his star gods or idols.&nbsp;
+But he looked upon Jehovah only as the God of the Jews, as Daniel&rsquo;s
+God.&nbsp; He had not yet learnt that God was <i>his</i> God as well
+as Daniel&rsquo;s; that Jehovah was very near his heart and mind, and
+had been near him all his life; that from Jehovah came all his wisdom,
+his strength of mind, his success, and all which made him differ, not
+only from his fellow-men, but from the beast; that Jehovah, in a word,
+was the light and the life of the world, who fills all things and by
+whom all things consist, deserted by whose inward light, even for a
+moment, man becomes as one of the beasts which perish.&nbsp; In his
+own eyes Nebuchadnezzar was still the great self-dependent, self-sufficing
+conqueror, wiser and stronger than all the men around him.&nbsp; He
+thought, most probably, that on account of his wisdom, and courage,
+and royalty of soul, the God of heaven had become fond of him and favoured
+him.&nbsp; In short, he was swollen with pride.</p>
+<p>God sent him again a strange dream, which made him troubled and afraid.&nbsp;
+He told it to his old counsellor Daniel; and Daniel, at the danger of
+his life, interpreted it for him; and a very awful meaning it had.&nbsp;
+A fearful and shameful downfall was to come upon the king; no less than
+the loss of his reason, and with it, of his throne.&nbsp; But whether
+this came to pass or not, depended, like all God&rsquo;s everlasting
+promises and threats, on Nebuchadnezzar&rsquo;s own behaviour.&nbsp;
+If he repented, and broke off his sins by righteousness, and his iniquities
+by showing mercy to the poor, there was good reason to hope that so
+his tranquillity might be lengthened.</p>
+<p>But the lesson was too hard for the proud conqueror; he did not take
+the warning.&nbsp; He could not believe that the Most High ruled in
+the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.&nbsp; He still
+fancied that he, and such as he, were the lords of the world, and took
+from others by their own power and cunning whatsoever they would.&nbsp;
+He does not seem to have been angry, however, with Daniel for his plain
+speaking.&nbsp; Most Eastern kings like Nebuchadnezzar would have put
+Daniel to a cruel death on the spot as the bearer of evil news, speaking
+blasphemy against the king; and no one in those times and countries
+would have considered him wicked and cruel for so doing; but Nebuchadnezzar
+seems to have learnt too much already so to give way to his passion.</p>
+<p>Yet, as I said before, he had not learned enough to take God&rsquo;s
+warning.&nbsp; The lesson that he was nothing, and that God is all in
+all, was too hard for him.&nbsp; And, alas! my friends, for whom of
+us is it not a hard lesson?&nbsp; And yet it is the golden lesson, the
+first and the last which man has to learn on earth, ay, and through
+all eternity: &ldquo;I am nothing; God is all in all.&rdquo;&nbsp; All
+in us which is worth calling anything; all in us which is worth having,
+or worth being; all in us which is not disobedience and shortcoming,
+failure and mistake, ignorance and madness, filthiness and fierceness,
+as of the beasts which perish; all strength in us, all understanding,
+all prudence, all right-mindedness, all purity, all justice, all love;
+all in us which is worth living for, all in us which is really alive,
+and not mere death in life, the death of sin and the darkness of the
+pit&mdash;all is from God the Father of lights, and from Jesus Christ
+the life and the light, who lighteth every man who cometh into the world,
+shining for ever in the darkness of our spirits, though that darkness,
+alas! too often cannot comprehend, and embrace, and confess Him who
+is striving to awake it from the dead and give it light.&nbsp; Hardest
+of all lessons!&nbsp; Most blessed of all lessons!&nbsp; So blessed,
+that if we will not let God teach it us in any other way, it would be
+good and advantageous to us for Him to teach it us as He taught it to
+Nebuchadnezzar&mdash;good for us to become with him for awhile like
+the beasts that perish, that we might learn with him to lift up our
+eyes to heaven, and so have our understandings return to us, and learn
+to bless the Most High, and not our own wit, and cunning, and prudence;
+and praise and honour Him that liveth for ever, instead of praising
+and honouring our own pitiful paltry selves, who are in death in the
+midst of life, who come up and are cut down like the flower, and never
+continue in one stay.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All this came upon the King Nebuchadnezzar.&rdquo;&nbsp; It
+seems that after he or his father had destroyed the old Babylon, the
+downfall of which Isaiah had prophesied, he built a great city, after
+the fashion of Eastern conquerors, near the ruins of the old one; and
+&ldquo;at the end of twelve months he walked in the palace of the kingdom
+of Babylon.&nbsp; The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon,
+that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power,
+and for the honour of my majesty?&nbsp; While the word was in the king&rsquo;s
+mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar,
+to thee it is spoken, The kingdom is departed from thee.&nbsp; And they
+shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts
+of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times
+shall pass over thee, until thou know that the Most High ruleth in the
+kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.&nbsp; The same
+hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>What a lesson!&nbsp; The great conqueror of all the East now a brutal
+madman, hateful and disgusting to all around him&mdash;a beast feeding
+among the beasts: and yet a cheap price&mdash;a cheap price&mdash;to
+pay for this golden lesson.</p>
+<p>Seven times past over him in his madness.&nbsp; What those seven
+times were we do not know.&nbsp; They may have been actual years: or
+they may have been, as I am inclined to think, changes in his own soul
+and state of mind.&nbsp; But, at the end of the days, the truth dawned
+on him.&nbsp; He began to see what it all meant.&nbsp; He saw what he
+was, and why he was so; and he lifted up his eyes to heaven; and from
+that moment his madness past.&nbsp; He lifted up his eyes to heaven.&nbsp;
+That is no mere figure of speech: it is an actual truth.&nbsp; Most
+madmen, if you watch them, have that down look, or rather that inward
+look, as if their eyes were fixed only on their own fancies.&nbsp; They
+are thinking only of themselves, poor creatures&mdash;of their own selfish
+and private suspicions and wrongs&mdash;of their own selfish superstitious
+dreams about heaven or hell&mdash;of their own selfish vanity and ambition&mdash;sometimes
+of their own frantic self-conceit, or of their selfish lusts and desires&mdash;of
+themselves, in short.&nbsp; They have lost the one Divine light of reason,
+and conscience, and love, which binds men to each other, and are parted
+for a while from God and from their kind&mdash;alone in their own darkness.&nbsp;
+So was Nebuchadnezzar.</p>
+<p>At last he looked up, as men do when they pray; up from himself to
+One greater than himself; up from the earth to heaven; up from the natural
+things which we do see, which are temporal and born to die, to moral
+and spiritual things which we do not see, which are real and eternal
+in the heavens; up from his own lonely darkness, looking for the light
+and the guidance of God; for now he began to see that all the light
+which he had ever had, all his wisdom, and understanding, and strength
+of will, had come from God, however he might have misused them for his
+own selfish ambition; that it was because God had taken from him His
+light, who is the Word of God, that he had become a beast.&nbsp; And
+then his reason returned to him, and he became again a man, a rational
+being, made, howsoever fallen and sinful, in the likeness of God; then
+he blessed and praised God.&nbsp; It was not merely that he confessed
+that God was strong, and he weak; righteous, and he sinful; wise, and
+he foolish; but he blessed and praised God; he felt and confessed that
+God had done him a great benefit, and taught him a great lesson&mdash;that
+God had taught him what he was in himself and without God, that he might
+see what he was with God in its true light, and honour and obey Him
+from whom his reason and understanding, as well as his power and glory,
+came, that so it might be fulfilled which the prophet says: &ldquo;Let
+not the wise man glory in his wisdom, nor the mighty man in his might,
+nor the rich man in his riches: but let him that glorieth glory in this,
+that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise
+loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness <i>in the earth</i>; for
+in these things I delight, saith the Lord.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And so was Nebuchadnezzar&rsquo;s soul brought to utter, in his own
+way, the very same glorious song which, or something like it, is said
+to have been sung by the three men whom, years before, he had seen delivered
+from the fiery furnace, which calls on all the works of the Lord, angels
+and heaven, sun and stars, seas and winds, mountains and hills, fowls
+and cattle, priests and laymen, spirits and souls of the righteous,
+to bless the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.</p>
+<p>And so ends Nebuchadnezzar&rsquo;s history.&nbsp; We read no more
+of him.&nbsp; He had learnt the golden lesson.&nbsp; May God grant that
+we may learn it also!</p>
+<p>But who tells the story of his madness?&nbsp; He himself.&nbsp; The
+whole account is in the man&rsquo;s own words.&nbsp; It seems to be
+some public letter or proclamation, which he either sent round his empire,
+or commanded to be laid up among his records; having, as it seems, set
+Daniel to write it down from his mouth.&nbsp; This one fact, I think,
+justifies me in all that I have said about Nebuchadnezzar&rsquo;s nobleness,
+and Daniel&rsquo;s affection for him.&nbsp; He does not try to smooth
+things over; to pretend that he has not been mad; to find excuses for
+himself; to lay any blame on any human being.&nbsp; He repents openly,
+confesses openly.&nbsp; Shameful as it may be to him, he tells the whole
+story.&nbsp; He confesses that he had fair warning, that all was his
+own fault.&nbsp; He justifies God utterly.&nbsp; My friends, we may
+read, thank God, many noble, and brave, and righteous speeches of kings
+and great men: but never have I read one so noble, so brave, so righteous
+as this of the great king of Babylon.</p>
+<p>And therefore it is; because this letter of his, in the fourth chapter
+of the book of Daniel, is indeed full of the eternal Holy Spirit of
+God; therefore it is, I say, that it forms part of the Bible, part of
+holy scripture to this day,&mdash;a greater honour to Nebuchadnezzar
+than all his kingdom; for what greater honour than to have been inspired
+to write one chapter, yea, one sentence, of the Book of Books?</p>
+<p>My friends, every one of you here is in God&rsquo;s school-house,
+under God&rsquo;s teaching, far more than Nebuchadnezzar was.&nbsp;
+You are baptised men, knowing that blessed name of Father, Son, and
+Holy Spirit, which Nebuchadnezzar only saw dimly, and afar off.&nbsp;
+Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is striving with your hearts, giving
+to them whatsoever light and life they have.&nbsp; You have been taught
+from childhood to look up to Him as your King and Deliverer; to His
+Father as your Father, to His Holy Spirit as your Inspirer.&nbsp; Take
+heed how you listen to His voice within your hearts.&nbsp; Take heed
+how you learn God&rsquo;s lessons; for God is surely educating you,
+and teaching you far more than He taught the king of Babylon in old
+time.&nbsp; As you learn or despise these lessons of God&rsquo;s, will
+be your happiness or your misery now and for ever.&nbsp; Unto the king
+of Babylon little was given, and of him was little required.&nbsp; To
+you and me much has been given; of you and me will much be required.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXIX&mdash;JEREMIAH&rsquo;S CALLING</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David
+a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute
+judgment and justice in the earth.&mdash;JEREMIAH xxiii. 5.</p>
+<p>At the time when Jeremiah the prophet spoke those words to the Jews,
+nothing seemed more unlikely than that they would ever come true.&nbsp;
+The whole Jewish nation was falling to pieces from its own sins.&nbsp;
+Brutish and filthy idolatry in high and low&mdash;oppression, violence,
+and luxury among the court and the nobility&mdash;shame, and poverty,
+and ignorance among the lower classes&mdash;idleness and quackery among
+the priesthood&mdash;and as kings over all, one fool and profligate
+after another, set on the throne by a foreign conqueror, and pulled
+down again by him at his pleasure.&nbsp; Ten out of the twelve tribes
+of Israel had been carried off captive, young and old, into a distant
+land.&nbsp; The small portion of country which still remained inhabited
+round Jerusalem, had been overrun again and again by cruel armies of
+heathens.&nbsp; Without Jerusalem was waste and ruins, bloodshed and
+wretchedness; within every kind of iniquity and lies, division and confusion.&nbsp;
+If ever there was a miserable and contemptible people upon the face
+of the earth, it was the Jewish nation in Jeremiah&rsquo;s time.&nbsp;
+Jeremiah makes no secret of it.&nbsp; His prophecies are full of it&mdash;full
+of lamentation and shame: &ldquo;Oh that my head were a fountain of
+tears, to weep for the sins of my people!&rdquo;&nbsp; He feels that
+God has sent him to rebuke those sins, to warn and prophesy to his fellow-countrymen
+the certain ruin into which they are rushing headlong; and he speaks
+God&rsquo;s message boldly.&nbsp; From the poor idol-ridden labourer,
+offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven to coax her into sending him a
+good harvest, to the tyrant king who had built his palace of cedar and
+painted it with vermilion, he had a bitter word for every man.&nbsp;
+The lying priest tried to silence him; and Jeremiah answered him, that
+his wife should be a harlot in the city, and his children sold for slaves.&nbsp;
+The king tried to flatter him into being quiet; and he told him in return,
+that he should be buried with the burial of an ass, dragged out and
+cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.&nbsp; The luxurious queen,
+who made her nest in the cedars, would be ashamed and confounded, he
+said, for her wickedness.&nbsp; The crown prince was a despised broken
+idol&mdash;a vessel in which was no pleasure; he should be cast out,
+he and his children, into slavery in a land which he knew not.&nbsp;
+The whole royal family, he said, would perish; none of them should ever
+again prosper or sit upon the throne of David.&nbsp; This was his message;
+shame and confusion, woe and ruin, to high and low; every human being
+he passed in the street was a doomed man.&nbsp; For the day of the Lord
+was at hand, and who should be able to escape it?</p>
+<p>A sad calling, truly, to have to work at; and all the more sad because
+Jeremiah had no pride, no steadfast opinion of his own excellence to
+keep him up.&nbsp; He hates his calling of prophet.&nbsp; At the very
+moment he is foretelling woe, he prays God that his prophecy may not
+come true; he tries every method to prevent its coming true, by entreating
+his countrymen to repent.&nbsp; There runs through all his awful words
+a vein of tenderness, and pity, and love unspeakable, which to me is
+the one great mark of a true prophet; a sign that Jeremiah spoke by
+the Spirit of God; a sign that too many writers nowadays do not speak
+by the Spirit of God.&nbsp; If they rebuke the rich and powerful, they
+do it generally in a very different spirit from Jeremiah&rsquo;s&mdash;in
+a spirit of bitterness and insolence, not very easy to describe, but
+easy enough to perceive.&nbsp; They seem to rejoice in evil, to delight
+in finding fault, to be sorry, and not glad, when their prophecies of
+evil turn out false; to try to set one class against another, one party
+against another, as if we were not miserably enough split up already
+by class interests and party spirit.&nbsp; They are glad enough to rebuke
+the wicked great; but not to their face, not to their own danger and
+hurt like Jeremiah.&nbsp; Their plan is to accuse the rich to the poor,
+on their own platform, or in their own newspaper, where they are safe;
+and, moreover, to make a very fair profit thereby; to say behind the
+back of authorities that which they dare not say to their face, and
+which they soon give up saying when they have worked their own way into
+office; and meanwhile take mighty credit to themselves for seeing that
+there is wrong and misery in the world; as if the spirits in hell should
+fancy themselves righteous, because they hated the devil!&nbsp; No,
+my friends, Jeremiah was of a very different spirit from that.&nbsp;
+If he ever was tempted to it when he was young, and began to fancy himself
+a very grand person, who had a right to look down on his neighbours,
+because God had called him and set him apart to be a prophet from his
+mother&rsquo;s womb, and revealed to him the doom of nations, and the
+secrets of His providence&mdash;if he ever fancied that in his heart,
+God led him through such an education as took all the pride out of him,
+sternly and bitterly enough.&nbsp; He was commissioned to go and speak
+terrible words, to curse kings and nobles in the name of the Lord: but
+he was taught, too, that it was not a pleasant calling, or one which
+was likely to pay him in this life.&nbsp; His fellow-villagers plotted
+against his life.&nbsp; His wife deserted him.&nbsp; The nobles threw
+him into a dungeon, into a well full of mire, whence he had to be drawn
+up again with ropes to save his life.&nbsp; He was beaten, all but starved,
+kept for years in prison.&nbsp; He had neither child nor friend.&nbsp;
+He had his share of all the miseries of the siege of Jerusalem, and
+all the horrors of its storm; and when he was set free by Nebuchadnezzar,
+and clung to his ruined home, to see if any good could still be done
+to the remnant of his countrymen, he was violently carried off into
+a heathen land, and at last stoned to death, by those very countrymen
+of his whom he had been trying for years to save.&nbsp; In everything,
+and by everything, he was taught that he was still a Jew, a brother
+to his sinful brothers; that their sorrows were his sorrows, their shame
+his shame, their ruin his ruin.&nbsp; In all their afflictions he was
+afflicted, even as his Lord was after him.</p>
+<p>He struggled, we find, again and again against this strange and sad
+calling of a prophet.&nbsp; He cried out in bitter agony that God had
+deceived him; had induced him to become a prophet, and then repaid him
+for speaking God&rsquo;s message with nothing but disappointment and
+misery.&nbsp; And yet he felt he must speak; God, he said, was stronger
+than he was, and forced him to it.&nbsp; He said: &ldquo;I will speak
+no more words in His name; but the Word of the Lord was as fire within
+his bones, and would not let him rest;&rdquo; and so, in spite of himself,
+he told the truth, and suffered for it; and hated to have to tell it,
+and pitied and loved the very country which he rebuked till he cursed
+&ldquo;the day in which he saw the light, and the hour in which it was
+said to his father, there is a man-child born.&rdquo;&nbsp; You who
+fancy that it is a fine thing, and a paying profession, to be a preacher
+of righteousness and a rebuker of sin, look at Jeremiah, and judge!&nbsp;
+For as surely as you or any other man is sent by God to do Jeremiah&rsquo;s
+work, so surely he must expect Jeremiah&rsquo;s wages.</p>
+<p>Do you think, then, that Jeremiah was a man only to be pitied?&nbsp;
+Pitiable he was indeed, and sad.&nbsp; There was One hung on a cross
+eighteen hundred years ago, more pitiable still: and yet He is the Lord
+of heaven and earth.&nbsp; Yes; Jeremiah had a sad life to live, and
+a sad task to work out; and yet, my friends, was not that a cheap price
+to pay for the honour and glory of being taught by God&rsquo;s Spirit,
+and of speaking God&rsquo;s words?&nbsp; I do not mean the mere honour
+of having his fame and name spread over all Christ&rsquo;s kingdom;
+the honour of having his writings read and respected by the wisest and
+the holiest to the end of time; that mere earthly fame is but a slight
+matter.&nbsp; I mean the real honour, the real glory, of knowing what
+was utterly right and true, and therefore of knowing Him who is utterly
+right and true; of knowing God; of knowing what God&rsquo;s character
+is: that he is a living God, and not a dead one; a God who is near and
+not absent at all, loving and merciful, just and righteous, strong and
+mighty to save.&nbsp; Ay, my friends, this is the lesson which God taught
+Jeremiah; to know the Lord of heaven and earth, and to see His hand,
+His rule, in all that was happening to his fellow-countrymen, and himself;
+to know that from the beginning the Lord, the Saviour-God, Jehovah,
+the messenger of the covenant, He who brought up the Jews out of Egypt,
+was the wise and just and loving King of the Jews, and of all the nations
+upon earth; and that some day or other He must and would conquer all
+the sinfulness, and misery, and tyranny, and idolatry in the world,
+and show Himself openly to men, and fulfil all the piteous longings
+after a just and good king which poor wretches had ever felt, and all
+the glorious promises of a just and good king which God had made to
+the wise men of old time; and, therefore, in the midst of shame and
+persecution, despair and ruin, Jeremiah could rejoice.&nbsp; Jehoiakim,
+the wicked king, and all his royal house, might be driven out into slavery;
+Jerusalem might become a heap of ruins and corpses; the fair land of
+Jud&aelig;a, and the village where he was bred, might become thorns,
+and thistles, and heaps of stones; the vineyard which he loved, the
+little estate at Anathoth which had belonged to him, might be trodden
+down by the stranger, and he himself die in a foreign land; around him
+might be nothing but sin and decay, before him nothing but despair and
+ruin: yet still there was hope, joy, everlasting certainty for that
+poor, childless, captive old man; for he had found out that the Lord
+still lived, the Lord still reigned.&nbsp; He could not lie; he could
+not forget his people.&nbsp; Could a mother forget her sucking child?&nbsp;
+No.&nbsp; When the Jews turned to Him, He would still have mercy.&nbsp;
+His punishment of them was a sign that he still cared for them.&nbsp;
+If He had forgotten them, He would have let them go on triumphant in
+their iniquity.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; All these afflictions were meant to
+chasten them, teach them, bring them back to Him.&nbsp; It would be
+good for them, an actual blessing to them, to be taken away into captivity
+in Babylon.&nbsp; It might be hard to believe, but it must be true.&nbsp;
+The Lord of Israel, the Saviour-God, who had been caring for them so
+long, rising up early and sending His prophets to them, pleading with
+them as a father with his child, He would have mercy; He would teach
+them, in sorrow and slavery, the lesson they were too rebellious and
+hard-hearted to learn in prosperity and freedom: that the Lord was their
+righteousness, and that there was no other name under heaven which could
+save them from the plague, and from the famine, from the swords of the
+Chaldeans, or from the division, and oppression, and brutishness, and
+manifold wickedness, which was their ruin.&nbsp; And then Jeremiah saw
+and felt&mdash;how we cannot tell&mdash;but there his words, the words
+of this text, stand to this day, to show that he did see and feel it,
+that some day or other, in God&rsquo;s good time, the Jews would have
+a true King&mdash;a very different king from Jehoiakim the tyrant&mdash;a
+son of David in a very different sense from what Jehoiakim was; that
+He would come, and must come, sooner or later, The unseen King, who
+had all along been governing Jews and heathens, and telling his prophets
+that Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, the Chaldee and the Persian, were his
+servants as well as they, and that all the nations of the earth could
+do but what he chose.&nbsp; &ldquo;Behold the days come, saith the Lord,
+that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign
+and prosper, and shall execute justice and judgment on the earth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was the blessed knowledge which God gave Jeremiah in return
+for all the misery he had to endure in warning his countrymen of their
+sins.&nbsp; And this same blessed knowledge, the knowledge that the
+earth is the Lord&rsquo;s, that to Jesus Christ is given, as He said
+Himself, all power in heaven and earth, and that He is reigning, and
+must reign, and conquer, and triumph till He has put all His enemies
+under His feet, God will surely give to everyone, high or low, who follows
+Jeremiah&rsquo;s example, who boldly and faithfully warns the sinner
+of his way, who rebukes the wickedness which he sees around him: only
+he must do it in the spirit of Jeremiah.&nbsp; He must not be insolent
+to the insolent, or proud to the proud.&nbsp; He must not be puffed
+up, and fancy that because he sees the evil of sin, and the certain
+ruin which is the fruit of it, that he is therefore to keep apart from
+his fellow-countrymen, and despise them in Pharisaic pride.&nbsp; No.&nbsp;
+The truly Christian man, the man who, like Jeremiah, has the Spirit
+of God in him, will feel the most intense pity and tenderness of sinners.&nbsp;
+He will not only rebuke the sins of his people, but mourn for them;
+he will be afflicted in all their affliction.&nbsp; However harshly
+he may have to speak, he will never forget that they are his countrymen,
+his brothers, children of the same Father, to be judged by the same
+Lord.&nbsp; He will feel with shame and fear that he has in himself
+the root of the very same sins which he sees working death around him&mdash;that
+if others are covetous, he might be so too&mdash;if they be profligate,
+and deceitful, and hypocritical, without God in the world, he might
+be so too.&nbsp; And he must feel not only that he might be as bad as
+his neighbours, but that he actually would be, if God withdrew His Spirit
+from him for a moment, and allowed him to forget the only faith which
+saves him from sin, loyalty to his unseen Saviour, the righteous King
+of kings.&nbsp; Therefore he will not only rebuke his sinful neighbours;
+but he will tell them, as Jeremiah told his countrymen, that all their
+sin and misery proceed from this one thing, that they have forgotten
+that the Lord is their King.&nbsp; He will pray daily for them, that
+the Lord their King may show Himself to their hearts and thoughts, and
+teach them all that He has done for them, and is doing for them; and
+may convert them to Himself that they may be truly His people, and His
+way may be known upon earth, His saving health among all nations.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXX&mdash;THE PERFECT KING</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh to thee, meek,
+and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.&mdash;MATTHEW
+xxi. <i>5.</i></p>
+<p>You all know that this Sunday is called the First Sunday in Advent.&nbsp;
+You all know, I hope, that Advent means coming, and that these four
+Sundays before Christmas, as I have often told you, are called Advent
+Sundays, because upon them we are called to consider the coming of our
+King and Saviour Jesus Christ.&nbsp; If you will look at the Collects,
+Epistles, and Gospels for these next four Sundays, you will see at once
+that they all bear upon our Lord&rsquo;s coming.&nbsp; The Gospels tell
+us of the prophecies about Christ which He fulfilled when He came.&nbsp;
+The Epistles tell us what sort of men we ought to be, both clergy and
+people, because He has come and will come again.&nbsp; The Collects
+pray that the Spirit of God would make us fit to live and die in a world
+into which Christ has come, and in which He is ruling now, and to which
+He will come again.&nbsp; The text which I have taken this morning,
+you just heard in this Sunday&rsquo;s Gospel.&nbsp; St. Matthew tells
+you that Jesus Christ fulfilled it by riding into Jerusalem in state
+upon an ass&rsquo;s colt; and St. Matthew surely speaks truth.&nbsp;
+Let us consider what the prophecy is, and how Jesus Christ fulfilled
+it.&nbsp; Then we shall see and believe from the Epistle what effect
+the knowledge of it ought to have upon our own souls, and hearts, and
+daily conduct.</p>
+<p>Now this prophecy, &ldquo;Behold, thy king cometh unto thee,&rdquo;
+etc., you will find in your Bibles, in the ninth verse of the ninth
+chapter of the book of Zechariah.&nbsp; But I do not think that Zechariah
+wrote it.&nbsp; St. Matthew does not say he wrote it; he merely calls
+it that which was spoken by the prophet, without mentioning his name.&nbsp;
+Provided it is an inspired word from God, which it is, it perhaps does
+not matter to us so much who wrote it: but I think it was written by
+the prophet Jeremiah, perhaps in the beginning of the reign of the good
+king Josiah; for the chapter in which this text is, and the two or three
+chapters which follow, are not at all like the rest of Zechariah&rsquo;s
+writings, but exactly like Jeremiah&rsquo;s.&nbsp; They certainly seem
+to speak of things which did not happen in Zechariah&rsquo;s time, but
+in the time of Jeremiah, nearly ninety years before.&nbsp; And, above
+all, St. Matthew himself seems plainly to have thought that some part,
+at least, of those chapters was Jeremiah&rsquo;s writing; for in the
+twenty-seventh chapter of St. Matthew&rsquo;s Gospel, and in the ninth
+verse, you will find a prophecy about the potter&rsquo;s field, which
+St. Matthew says was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet.&nbsp; Now, those
+words are not in the book of Jeremiah as it stands in our Bibles: but
+they are in the book of Zechariah, in the eleventh chapter, twelfth
+and thirteenth verses, coming shortly after my text, and making a part
+of the same prophecy.&nbsp; This has puzzled Christians very much, because
+it seemed as if St. Matthew has made a mistake, and miscalled Zechariah
+Jeremiah.&nbsp; But I believe firmly that, as we are bound to expect,
+St. Matthew made no mistake whatsoever, and that Jeremiah did write
+that prophecy as St. Matthew said, and the two chapters before it, and
+perhaps the two after it, and that they were probably kept and preserved
+by Zechariah during the troublous times of the Babylonish captivity,
+and at last copied by Nehemiah into Zechariah&rsquo;s book of prophecy,
+where they stand now; and I think it is a comfort to know this, and
+to find that the evangelist St. Matthew has not made a mistake, but
+knew the Scriptures better than we do.</p>
+<p>But I think Jeremiah having written this prophecy in my text, which
+I believe he did, is also very important, because it will show us what
+the prophet meant when he spoke it, and how it was fulfilled in his
+time; and the better we understand that, the better we shall understand
+how our blessed Lord fulfilled it afterwards.</p>
+<p>Now, when Jeremiah was a young man, the Jews and their king Amon
+were in a state of most abominable wickedness.&nbsp; They were worshipping
+every sort of idol and false god.&nbsp; And the Bible, the book of God&rsquo;s
+law, was utterly unknown amongst them; so that Josiah the king, who
+succeeded Amon, had never seen or heard the book of the law of Moses,
+which makes part of our Old Testament, till he had reigned eighteen
+years, as you will find if you refer to 2 Kings xxii. 3.&nbsp; But this
+Josiah was a gentle and just prince, and finding the book of the law
+of God, and seeing the abominable forgetfulness and idolatry into which
+his people had fallen, utterly breaking the covenant which God had made
+with their forefathers when he brought them up out of Egypt&mdash;when
+he found the book of the law, I say, and all that he and his people
+should have done and had not done, and the awful curses which God threatened
+in that book against those who broke His law, &ldquo;he humbled himself
+before God, because his heart was tender, and turned to the Lord, as
+no king before him had ever turned,&rdquo; says the scripture, &ldquo;with
+all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might; so that
+there was no such king before him, or either after him.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The history of the great reformation which this great and good king
+worked, you may read at length in 2 Kings xxii. xxiii. and 2 Chron.
+xxxiv. xxxv. which I advise you all to read.</p>
+<p>And it appears to me that this prophecy in the text first applies
+to the gentle and holy king Josiah, the first true and good king the
+Jews had had for years, and the best they were ever to have till Christ
+came Himself; and that it speaks of Josiah coming to Jerusalem to restore
+the worship of God, not with pomp and show, like the wicked kings both
+before and after him, but in meekness and humbleness of heart, for all
+the sins of his people, as the prophetess said of him in 2 Kings xxii.
+19, &ldquo;that his heart was tender and humble before the Lord;&rdquo;
+neither coming with chariots and guards, like a king and conqueror,
+but riding upon an ass&rsquo;s colt; for that was, in those countries,
+the ancient sign of a man&rsquo;s being a man of peace, and not of war;
+a magistrate and lawgiver, and not a soldier and a conqueror.&nbsp;
+Various places of holy scripture show us that this was the meaning of
+riding upon an ass in Jud&aelig;a, just as it is in Eastern countries
+now.</p>
+<p>But some may say, How then is this a prophecy?&nbsp; It merely tells
+us what good king Josiah was, and what every king ought to be.&nbsp;
+Well, my friends, that is just what makes it a prophecy.&nbsp; If it
+tells you what ought to be, it tells you what will be.&nbsp; Yes, never
+forget that; whatever ought to be, surely will be; as surely as this
+is God&rsquo;s earth and Christ&rsquo;s kingdom, and not the devil&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>Now, it does not matter in the least whether the prophet, when he
+spoke these words, knew that they would apply to the Lord Jesus Christ.&nbsp;
+We have no need whatsoever to suppose that he did: for scripture gives
+us no hint or warrant that he did; and if we have any real or honest
+reverence for scripture, we shall be careful to let it tell its own
+story, and believe that it contains all things necessary for salvation,
+without our patching our own notions into it over and above.&nbsp; Wise
+men are generally agreed that those old prophets did not, for the most
+part, comprehend the full meaning of their own words.&nbsp; Not that
+they were mere puppets and mouthpieces, speaking what to them was nonsense&mdash;God
+forbid!&mdash;But that just because they did thoroughly understand what
+was going on round them, and see things as God saw them, just because
+they had God&rsquo;s Eternal Spirit with them, therefore they spoke
+great and eternal words, which will be true for ever, and will go on
+for ever fulfilling themselves for more and more.&nbsp; For in proportion
+as any man&rsquo;s words are true, and wide, and deep, they are truer,
+and wider, and deeper than that man thinks, and will apply to a thousand
+matters of which he never dreamt.&nbsp; And so in all true and righteous
+speech, as in the speeches of the prophets of old, the glory is not
+man&rsquo;s who speaks them, but God&rsquo;s who reveals them, and who
+fulfils them again and again.</p>
+<p>It is true, then, that this text describes what every king should
+be&mdash;gentle and humble, a merciful and righteous lawgiver, not a
+self-willed and capricious tyrant.&nbsp; But Josiah could not fulfil
+that.&nbsp; He was a good king: but he could not be a perfect one; for
+he was but a poor, sinful, weak, and inconsistent man, as we are.&nbsp;
+But those words being inspired by the Holy Spirit, must be fulfilled.&nbsp;
+There ought to be a perfect king, perfectly gentle and humble, having
+a perfect salvation, a perfect lawgiver; and therefore there must be
+such a king; and therefore St. Matthew tells us there came at last a
+perfect king&mdash;one who fulfilled perfectly the prophet&rsquo;s words&mdash;one
+who was not made king of Jerusalem, but was her King from the beginning;
+for that is the full meaning of &ldquo;Thy King cometh to thee.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+To Jerusalem He came, riding on the ass&rsquo;s colt, like the peaceful
+and fatherly judges of old time, for a sign to the poor souls round
+Him, who had no lawgivers but the proud and fierce Scribes and Pharisees,
+no king but the cruel and godless C&aelig;sar, and his oppressive and
+extortionate officers and troops.&nbsp; Meek and lowly He came; and
+for once the people saw that He was the true Son of David&mdash;a man
+and king, like him, after God&rsquo;s own heart.&nbsp; For once they
+felt that He had come in the name of the Lord the old Deliverer who
+brought them out of the land of Egypt, and made them into a nation,
+and loved and pitied them still, in spite of all their sins, and remembered
+His covenant, which they had forgotten.&nbsp; And before that humble
+man, the Son of the village maiden, they cried: &ldquo;Hosanna to the
+Son of David.&nbsp; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.&nbsp;
+Hosanna in the Highest.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And do you think He came, the true and perfect King, only to go away
+again and leave this world as it was before, without a law, a ruler,
+a heavenly kingdom?&nbsp; God forbid!&nbsp; Jesus is the same yesterday,
+to-day, and for ever.&nbsp; What He was then, when He rode in triumph
+into Jerusalem, that is He now to us this day&mdash;a king, meek and
+lowly, and having salvation; the head and founder of a kingdom which
+can never be moved, a city which has foundations, whose builder and
+maker is God.&nbsp; To that kingdom this land of England now belongs.&nbsp;
+Into it we, as Englishmen, have been christened.&nbsp; And the unchristened,
+though they know not of it, belong to it as well.&nbsp; What God&rsquo;s
+will, what Christ&rsquo;s mercies may be to them, we know not.&nbsp;
+That He has mercy for them, if their ignorance is not their own fault,
+we doubt not; perhaps, even if their ignorance be their own fault, we
+need not doubt that He has mercy for them, considering the mercy which
+He has shown to us, who deserved no more than they.&nbsp; But His will
+to us we do know; and His will is this&mdash;our holiness.&nbsp; For
+He came not only to assert His own power, to redeem his own world, but
+to set His people, the children of men, an example, that they should
+follow in His steps.&nbsp; Herein, too, He is the perfect king.&nbsp;
+He leads His subjects, He sets a perfect example to His subjects, and
+more, He inspires them with the power of following that example, as,
+if you will think, a perfect ruler ought to be able to do.&nbsp; Josiah
+set the Jews an example, but he could not make them follow it.&nbsp;
+They turned to God at the bidding of their good king, with their lips,
+in their outward conduct; but their hearts were still far from Him.&nbsp;
+Jeremiah complains bitterly of this in the beginning of his prophecies.&nbsp;
+He complains that Josiah&rsquo;s reformation was after all empty, hollow,
+hypocritical, a change on the surface only, while the wicked root was
+left.&nbsp; They had healed, he said, the hurt of the daughter of his
+people slightly, crying, &ldquo;Peace, peace, when there was no peace.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+But Jesus, the perfect King, is King of men&rsquo;s spirits as well
+as of their bodies.&nbsp; He can turn the heart, He can renew the soul.&nbsp;
+None so ignorant, none so sinful, none so crushed down with evil habits,
+but the Lord will and can forgive him, raise him up, enlighten him,
+strengthen him, if he will but claim his share in his King&rsquo;s mercy,
+his citizenship in the heavenly kingdom, and so put himself in tune
+again with himself, and with heaven, and earth, and all therein.</p>
+<p>Keeping in mind these things, that Jesus, because He is our perfect
+King, is both the example and the inspirer of our souls and characters,
+we may look without fear at the epistle for the day, where it calls
+on us to be very different persons from what we are, and declares to
+us our duty as subjects of Him who is meek and lowly, just and having
+salvation.&nbsp; It is no superstitious, slavish message, saying: &ldquo;You
+have lost Christ&rsquo;s mercy and Christ&rsquo;s kingdom; you must
+buy it back again by sacrifices, and tears, and hard penances, or great
+alms-deeds and works of mercy.&rdquo;&nbsp; No.&nbsp; It simply says:
+&ldquo;You belong to Christ already, give up your hearts to Him and
+follow His example.&nbsp; If He is perfect, His is the example to follow;
+if he is perfect, His commandments must be perfect, fit for all places,
+all times, all employments; if He is the King of heaven and earth, His
+commandments must be in tune with heaven and earth, with the laws of
+nature, the true laws of society and trade, with the constitution, and
+business, and duty, and happiness of all mankind, and for ever obey
+Him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Owe no man anything save love, for He owed no man anything.&nbsp;
+He gave up all, even His own rights, for a time, for His subjects.&nbsp;
+Will you pretend to follow Him while you hold back from your brothers
+and fellow-servants their just due?&nbsp; One debt you must always owe;
+one debt will grow the more you pay it, and become more delightful to
+owe, the greater and heavier you feel it to be, and that is love; love
+to all around you, for all around you are your brothers and sisters;
+all around you are the beloved subjects of your King and Saviour.&nbsp;
+Love them as you love yourself, and then you cannot harm them, you cannot
+tyrannise over them, you cannot wish to rise by scrambling up on their
+shoulders, taking the bread out of their mouths, making your profit
+out of their weakness and their need.&nbsp; This, St. Paul says, was
+the duty of men in his time, because the night of heathendom was far
+spent, the day of Christianity and the Church was at hand.&nbsp; Much
+more is it our duty now&mdash;our duty, who have been born in the full
+sunshine of Christianity, christened into His church as children, we
+and our fathers before us, for generations, of the kingdom of God.&nbsp;
+Ay, my friends, these words, that kingdom, that King, witness this day
+against this land of England.&nbsp; Not merely against popery, the mote
+which we are trying to take out of the foreigner&rsquo;s eye, but against
+Mammon, the beam which we are overlooking in our own.&nbsp; Owe no man
+anything save love.&nbsp; &ldquo;Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+That is the law of your King, who loved not Himself or His own profit,
+His own glory, but gave Himself even to death for those who had forgotten
+Him and rebelled against Him.&nbsp; That law witnesses against selfishness
+and idleness in rich and poor.&nbsp; It witnesses against the employer
+who grinds down his workmen; who, as the world tells him he has a right
+to do, takes advantage of their numbers, their ignorance, their low
+and reckless habits, to rise upon their fall, and grow rich out of their
+poverty.&nbsp; It witnesses against the tradesman who tries to draw
+away his neighbour&rsquo;s custom.&nbsp; It witnesses against the working
+man who spends in the alehouse the wages which might support and raise
+his children, and then falls back recklessly and dishonestly on the
+parish rates and the alms of the charitable.&nbsp; Against them all
+this law witnesses.&nbsp; These things are unfit for the kingdom of
+Christ, contrary to the laws and constitution thereof, hateful to the
+King thereof; and if a nation will not amend these abominations, the
+King will arise out of His place, and with sore judgments and terrible
+He will visit His land and purify His temple, saying: &ldquo;My Father&rsquo;s
+house should be a house of prayer, and ye have made it a den of thieves.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Ay, woe to any soul, or to any nation, which, instead of putting on
+the Lord Jesus Christ, copying His example, obeying His laws, and living
+worthy of His kingdom, not only in the church, but in the market, the
+shop, the senate, or the palace, give themselves up to covetousness,
+which is idolatry; and care only to make provision for the flesh, to
+fulfil the lusts thereof.&nbsp; Woe to them; for, let them be what they
+will, their King cannot change.&nbsp; He is still meek and lowly; He
+is still just and having salvation; and He will purge out of His kingdom
+all that is not like Himself, the unchaste and the idle, the unjust
+and the unmerciful, and the covetous man, who is an idolater, says the
+scripture, though he may call himself seven times a Protestant, and
+rail at the Pope in public meetings, while he justifies greediness and
+tyranny by glib words about the necessities of business and the laws
+of trade, and by philosophy falsely so called, which cometh not from
+above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish.&nbsp; Such a man loves and
+makes a lie, and the Lord of truth will surely send him to his own place.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXXI&mdash;GOD&rsquo;S WARNINGS</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I
+purpose to do unto them; that they may return every man from his evil
+way; that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin.&mdash;JEREMIAH
+xxxvi. 3.</p>
+<p>The first lesson for this evening&rsquo;s service tells us of the
+wickedness of Jehoiakim, king of Judah.&nbsp; How, when Jeremiah&rsquo;s
+prophecies against the sins of Jehoiakim and his people were read before
+him, he cut the roll with a penknife, and threw it into the fire.&nbsp;
+Now, we must not look on this story as one which, because it happened
+among the Jews many hundred years ago, has nothing to do with us; for,
+as I continually remind you, the history of the Jews, and the whole
+Old Testament, is the history of God&rsquo;s dealings with man&mdash;the
+account of God&rsquo;s plan of governing this world.&nbsp; Now, God
+cannot change; but is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and
+therefore His plan of government cannot change: but if men do as those
+did of whom we read in the Old Testament, God will surely deal with
+them as He dealt with the men of the Old Testament.&nbsp; This St. Paul
+tells us most plainly in the tenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, where he
+says that the whole history of the Jews was written for our example&mdash;that
+is for the example of those Christian Corinthians, who were not Jews
+at all, but Gentiles as we are; and therefore for our example also.</p>
+<p>He tells them, that it was Christ Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ,
+who fed and guided the old Jews in the wilderness, and that the Lord
+will deal with us exactly as He dealt with the old Jews.</p>
+<p>Therefore it is a great and fearful mistake, to suppose that because
+the Jews were a peculiar people and God&rsquo;s chosen nation, that
+therefore the Lord&rsquo;s way of governing them is in any wise different
+from His way of governing us English at this very day; for that fancy
+is contrary to the express words of Holy Scripture, in a hundred different
+places; it is contrary to the whole spirit of our Prayer Book, which
+is written all through on the belief that the Lord deals with us just
+as He did with the Jewish nation, and which will not even make sense
+if it be understood in any other way; and besides, it is most dangerous
+to the souls and consciences of men.&nbsp; It is most dangerous for
+us to fancy that God can change; for if God can change, right and wrong
+can change; for right is the will of God, and wrong is what is against
+His will; and if we once let into our hearts the notion that God can
+change His laws of right, our consciences will become daily dimmer and
+more confused about right and wrong, till we fall, as too many do, under
+the prophet&rsquo;s curse, &ldquo;Woe to them who call good evil, and
+evil good; who put sweet for bitter, and bitter for sweet,&rdquo; and
+fancy, like Ezekiel&rsquo;s Jews, that God&rsquo;s ways are unequal;
+that is, unlike each other, changeable, arbitrary, and capricious, doing
+one thing at one time, and another at another.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; It is
+sinful man who is changeable; it is sinful man who is arbitrary.&nbsp;
+But The Lord is not a man, that He should lie or repent; for He is the
+only-begotten Son, and therefore the express likeness, of The Everlasting
+Father, in whom is no variableness, nor shadow of turning.</p>
+<p>But some may say, Is not that a gloomy and terrible notion of God,
+that He cannot change His purpose?&nbsp; Is not that as much as to say
+that there is a dark necessity hanging over each of us; that a man must
+just be what God chooses, and do just what He has ordained to do, and
+go to everlasting happiness or misery exactly as God has foreordained
+from all eternity, so that there is no use trying to do right, or not
+to do wrong?&nbsp; If I am to be saved, say such people, I shall be
+saved whether I try or not; and if I am to be damned, I shall be damned
+whether I try or not.&nbsp; I am in God&rsquo;s hands like clay in the
+hands of the potter; and what I am like is therefore God&rsquo;s business,
+and not mine.</p>
+<p>No, my friends, the very texts in the Bible which tell us that God
+cannot change or repent, tell us what it is that He cannot change in&mdash;in
+showing loving-kindness and tender mercy, long-suffering, and repenting
+of the evil.&nbsp; Whatsoever else He cannot repent of, He cannot repent
+of repenting of the evil.</p>
+<p>It is true, we are in His hand as clay in the hand of the potter.&nbsp;
+But it is a sad misreading of scripture to make that mean that we are
+to sit with our hands folded, careless about our own way and conduct;
+still less that we are to give ourselves up to despair, because we have
+sinned against God; for what is the very verse which follows after that?&nbsp;
+Listen.&nbsp; &ldquo;O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this
+potter? saith the Lord.&nbsp; Behold, as the clay is in the hand of
+the potter, so are ye in my hand, O house of Israel.&nbsp; At what instant
+I shall speak concerning a kingdom, to pull down and destroy it; if
+that nation against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I
+will repent of the evil which I thought to do to them.&nbsp; And at
+what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom,
+to build and to plant it; if it do evil in my sight, that it obey not
+my voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said I would benefit
+them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So that the lesson which we are to draw from the parable of the potter&rsquo;s
+clay is just the exact opposite which some men draw.&nbsp; Not that
+God&rsquo;s decrees are absolute: but that they are conditional, and
+depend on our good or evil conduct.&nbsp; Not that His election or His
+reprobation are unalterable, but that they alter &ldquo;at that instant&rdquo;
+at which man alters.&nbsp; Not that His grace and will are irresistible,
+as the foolish man against whom St. Paul argues fancies: but that we
+can resist God&rsquo;s will, and that our destruction comes only by
+resisting His will; in short, that God&rsquo;s will is no brute material
+necessity and fate, but the will of a living, loving Father.</p>
+<p>And the very same lesson is taught us in Ezek. xviii., of which I
+spoke just now; for if we read that chapter we shall find that the Jews
+had a false notion of God that He had changed His character, and had
+become in their time unmerciful and unjust.&nbsp; They fancied that
+God was, if I may so speak, obstinate&mdash;that if His anger had once
+arisen, there was no turning it away, but that He would go on without
+pity, punishing the innocent children for their father&rsquo;s sin;
+and therefore they fancied God&rsquo;s ways were unfair, self-willed,
+and arbitrary, without any care of what sort of person He afflicted;
+punishing the righteous as well as the wicked, after He had promised
+in His law to reward the righteous and punish the wicked.&nbsp; They
+fancied that His way of governing the world had changed, and that He
+did not in their days make a difference between the bad and the good.&nbsp;
+Therefore Ezekiel says to them: &ldquo;When the righteous man turneth
+away from his righteousness, he shall die.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;When
+the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness, he shall live.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith
+the Lord God, and not that he should return from his ways, and live?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This, then, is the good news, that God is love; love when He punishes,
+and love when He forgives; very pitiful, and full of long-suffering
+and tender mercy and repenting Him, never of the good, but only of the
+evil which He threatens.</p>
+<p>Both Jeremiah, therefore, and Ezekiel, give us the same lesson.&nbsp;
+God does not change, and therefore He never changes His mercy and His
+justice: for He is merciful because He is just.&nbsp; If we confess
+our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.&nbsp; That
+is His everlasting law, and has been from the beginning: Punishment,
+sure and certain, for those who do not repent; and free forgiveness,
+sure and certain also, for those who do repent.</p>
+<p>So He spoke to Jeremiah in the time of Jehoiakim: &ldquo;It may be
+that the house of Judah will hear all the evil that I purpose to do
+to them; that I may forgive them their iniquity and their sin.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The Lord, you see, wishes to forgive&mdash;longs to forgive.&nbsp; His
+heart yearns over sinful men as a father&rsquo;s over his rebellious
+child.&nbsp; But if they will still rebel, if they will still turn their
+wicked wills away from Him, He must punish.&nbsp; Why we know not; but
+He knows.&nbsp; Punish He must, unless we repent&mdash;unless we turn
+our wills toward His will.&nbsp; And woe to the stiff-necked and stout-hearted
+man who, like the wicked king Jehoiakim, sets his face like a flint
+against God&rsquo;s warnings.&nbsp; How many, how many behave for years,
+Sunday after Sunday, just as king Jehoiakim did!&nbsp; When he heard
+that God had threatened him with ruin for his sins, he heard also that
+God offered him free pardon if he would repent.&nbsp; Jeremiah gave
+him free choice to be saved or to be ruined; but his heart and will
+were hardened.&nbsp; Hearing that he was wrong only made him angry.&nbsp;
+His pride and self-will were hurt by being told that he must change
+and alter his ways.&nbsp; He had chosen his way, and he would keep to
+it; and he cared nothing for God&rsquo;s offers of forgiveness, because
+he could not be forgiven unless he did what he was too proud to do,
+confess himself to be in the wrong, and openly alter his conduct.&nbsp;
+And how many, as I first said, are like him!&nbsp; They come to church;
+they hear God&rsquo;s warnings and threats against their evil ways;
+they hear God&rsquo;s offers of free pardon and forgiveness; but being
+told that they are in the wrong makes them too angry to care for God&rsquo;s
+offers of pardon.&nbsp; Pride stops their cars.&nbsp; They have chosen
+their own way, and they will keep it.&nbsp; They would not object to
+be forgiven, if they might be forgiven without repenting.&nbsp; But
+they do not like to confess themselves in the wrong.&nbsp; They do not
+like to face their foolish companions&rsquo; remarks and sneers about
+their changed ways.&nbsp; They do not like even good people to say of
+them: &ldquo;You see now that you were in the wrong after all; for you
+have altered your mind and your doings yourself, as we told you you
+would have to do.&rdquo;&nbsp; No; anything sooner than confess themselves
+in the wrong; and so they turn their backs on God&rsquo;s mercy, for
+the sake of their own carnal pride and self-will.</p>
+<p>But, of course, they want an excuse for doing that; and when a man
+wants an excuse, the devil will soon fit him with a good one.&nbsp;
+Then, perhaps, the foolish sinner behaves as Jehoiakim did.&nbsp; He
+tries to forget God&rsquo;s message in the man who brings it.&nbsp;
+He grows angry with the preacher, or goes out and laughs at the preacher
+when service is over, as if it was the preacher&rsquo;s fault that God
+had declared what he has; as if it was the preacher&rsquo;s doing that
+God has revealed His anger against all sin and unrighteousness.&nbsp;
+So he acts like Jehoiakim, who tried to take Jeremiah the prophet and
+punish <i>him</i>, for what not he but the Lord God had declared.&nbsp;
+Nay, they will often peevishly hate the very sight of a good book, because
+it reminds them of the sins of which they do not choose to be reminded,
+just as the young king Jehoiakim was childish enough to vent his spite
+on Jeremiah&rsquo;s book of prophecies, by cutting the roll on which
+it was written with a penknife, and throwing it into the fire.&nbsp;
+So do sinners who are angry with the preacher who warns them, or hate
+the sight of good books.&nbsp; But let such foolish and wilful sinners,
+such full-grown children&mdash;for, after all, they are no better&mdash;hear
+the word of the Lord which came to Jehoiakim: &ldquo;As it is written,
+he that despiseth Me shall be despised, saith the Lord.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And let them not fancy that their shutting their ears will shut the
+preacher&rsquo;s mouth, still less shut up God&rsquo;s everlasting laws
+of punishment for sin.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s word stands true,
+and it will happen to them as it did to Jehoiakim.&nbsp; His burning
+Jeremiah&rsquo;s book did not rid him of the book, or save him from
+the woe and ruin which was prophesied in it; for we have Jeremiah&rsquo;s
+book here in our Bibles to this day, as a sign and a warning of what
+happens to men, be they young or old, be they kings or labouring men,
+who fight against God.&nbsp; Jeremiah&rsquo;s words were not lost after
+all; they were all re-written, and there were added to them also many
+more like words; for Jehoiakim, by refusing the Lord&rsquo;s offer of
+pardon, had added to his sins, and therefore the Lord added to his punishment.</p>
+<p>Perhaps, again, the devil finds the wilful sinner another excuse,
+and the man says to himself, as the Jews did in Ezekiel&rsquo;s time:
+&ldquo;The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children&rsquo;s
+teeth are set on edge.&nbsp; It is not my own fault that I am living
+a bad life, but other people&rsquo;s.&nbsp; My parents ought to have
+brought me up better.&nbsp; I have had no chance.&nbsp; My companions
+taught me too much harm.&nbsp; I have too much trouble to get my living;
+or, I was born with a bad temper; or, I can&rsquo;t help running after
+pleasure.&nbsp; Why did God make me the sort of man I am, and put me
+where I am?&nbsp; God is hard upon me; He is unfair to me.&nbsp; His
+ways are unequal; He expects as much of me as He does of people who
+have more opportunities.&nbsp; He threatens to punish me for other people&rsquo;s
+sins.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then comes another and a darker temptation over the man, and
+the devil whispers to him such thoughts as these: &ldquo;God does not
+care for me; God hates me.&nbsp; Luck, and everything else is against
+me.&nbsp; There seems to be some curse upon me.&nbsp; Why should I change?&nbsp;
+Let God change first to me, and then I will change toward Him.&nbsp;
+But God will not change; He is determined to have no mercy on me.&nbsp;
+I can see that; for everything goes wrong with me.&nbsp; Then what use
+in my repenting?&nbsp; I will just go my own way, and what must be must.&nbsp;
+There is no resisting God&rsquo;s will.&nbsp; If I am to be saved, I
+shall be; if I am to be damned, I shall be.&nbsp; I will put all melancholy
+thoughts out of my head, and go and enjoy myself and forget all.&nbsp;
+At all events, it won&rsquo;t last long: &lsquo;Let me eat and drink,
+for to-morrow I die.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Oh, my dear friends, have not some of you sometimes had such thoughts?&nbsp;
+Then hear the word of the Lord to you: &ldquo;When&mdash;whensoever&mdash;whensoever
+the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness which he hath committed,
+and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Have I any pleasure in the death of him that dieth? saith the
+Lord, and not rather that he should be converted, and live?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+True, most true, that the Lord is unchangeable: but it is in love and
+mercy.&nbsp; True, that God&rsquo;s will and law cannot alter: but what
+is God&rsquo;s will and law?&nbsp; The soul that sinneth, it shall die?&nbsp;
+Yes.&nbsp; But also, the soul that turneth away from its sin, it shall
+live.&nbsp; Never believe the devil when he tells you that God hates
+you.&nbsp; Never believe him when he tells you that God has been too
+hard on you, and put you into such temptation, or ignorance, or poverty,
+or anything else, that you cannot mend.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; That font there
+will give the devil the lie.&nbsp; That font says: &ldquo;Be you poor,
+tempted, ignorant, stupid, be you what you will, you are God&rsquo;s
+child&mdash;your Father&rsquo;s love is over you, His mercy is ready
+for you.&rdquo;&nbsp; You feel too weak to change; ask God&rsquo;s Spirit,
+and He will give you a strength of mind you never felt before.&nbsp;
+You feel too proud to change; ask God&rsquo;s Spirit, and He will humble
+your proud heart, and soften your hard heart; and you will find to your
+surprise, that when your pride is gone, when you are utterly ashamed
+of yourself, and see your sins in their true blackness, and feel not
+worthy to look up to God, that then, instead of pride, will come a nobler,
+holier, manlier feeling&mdash;self-respect, and a clear conscience,
+and the thought that, weak and sinful as you are, you are in the right
+way; that God, and the angels of God, are smiling on you; that you are
+in tune again with all heaven and earth, because you are what God wills
+you to be&mdash;not His proud, peevish, self-willed child, fancying
+yourself strong enough to go alone, when in reality you are the slave
+of your own passions and appetites, and the plaything of the devil:
+but His loving, loyal son, strong in the strength which God gives you,
+and able to do what you will, because what you will God wills also.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXXII&mdash;PHARAOH&rsquo;S HEART</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>And the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and he did not let the people
+go.&mdash;Exodus ix. 17.</p>
+<p>What lesson, now, can we draw from this story?&nbsp; One, at least,
+and a very important one.&nbsp; What effect did all these signs and
+wonders of God&rsquo;s sending, have upon Pharaoh and his servants?&nbsp;
+Did they make them better men or worse men?&nbsp; We read that they
+made them worse men; that they helped to harden their hearts.&nbsp;
+We read that the Lord hardened Pharaoh&rsquo;s heart, so that he would
+not let the children of Israel go.&nbsp; Now, how did the Lord do that?&nbsp;
+He did not wish and mean to make Pharaoh more hard-hearted, more wicked.&nbsp;
+That is impossible.&nbsp; God, who is all goodness and love, never can
+wish to make any human being one atom worse than he is.&nbsp; He who
+so loved the world that He came down on earth to die for sinners, and
+take away the sins of the world, would never make any human being a
+greater sinner than he was before.&nbsp; That is impossible, and horrible
+to think of.&nbsp; Therefore, when we read that the Lord hardened Pharaoh&rsquo;s
+heart, we must be certain that that was Pharaoh&rsquo;s own fault; and
+so, we read, it was Pharaoh&rsquo;s own fault.&nbsp; The Lord did not
+bring all these plagues on Egypt without giving Pharaoh fair warning.&nbsp;
+Before each plague, He sent Moses to tell Pharaoh that the plague was
+coming.&nbsp; The Lord told Pharaoh that He was his Master, and the
+Master and Lord of the whole earth; that the children of Israel belonged
+to Him, and the Egyptians too; that the river, light and darkness, the
+weather, the crops, and the insects, and the locusts belonged to Him;
+that all diseases which afflict man and beast were in His power.&nbsp;
+And the Lord proved that His words were true, in a way Pharaoh could
+not mistake, by changing the river into blood, and sending darkness,
+and hailstones, and plagues of lice and flies, and at last by killing
+the firstborn of all the Egyptians.&nbsp; The Lord gave Pharaoh every
+chance; He condescended to argue with him as one man would with another,
+and proved His word to be true, and proved that He had a right to command
+Pharaoh.&nbsp; And therefore, I say, if Pharaoh&rsquo;s heart was hardened,
+it was his own fault, for the Lord was plainly trying to soften it,
+and to bring him to reason.&nbsp; And the Bible says distinctly that
+it was Pharaoh&rsquo;s own fault.&nbsp; For it says that Pharaoh hardened
+his own heart, he and his servants, and therefore they would not let
+the children of Israel go.&nbsp; Now how could Pharaoh harden his own
+heart, and yet the Lord harden it at the same time?</p>
+<p>Just in the same way, my friends, as too many of us are apt to make
+the Lord harden our hearts by hardening them ourselves, and to make,
+as Pharaoh did, the very things which the Lord sends to soften us, the
+causes of our becoming more stubborn; the very things which the Lord
+sends to bring us to reason, the means of our becoming more mad and
+foolish.&nbsp; Believe me, my friends, this is no old story with which
+we have nothing to do.&nbsp; What happened to Pharaoh&rsquo;s heart
+may happen to yours, or mine, or any man&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Alas! alas!
+it does happen to many a man&rsquo;s and woman&rsquo;s heart every day&mdash;and
+may the Lord have mercy on them before it be too late,&mdash;and yet
+how can the Lord have mercy on those who will not let Him have mercy
+on them?</p>
+<p>What do I mean?&nbsp; This is what I mean, my friends; Oh, listen
+to it, and take it solemnly to heart, you who are living still in sin;
+take it to heart, lest you, like Pharaoh, die in your sins, and your
+latter end will be worse than your beginning.</p>
+<p>Suppose a man to be going on in some sinful habit; cheating his neighbours,
+grinding his labourers, or getting tipsy, or living with a woman without
+being married to her.&nbsp; He comes to church, and there he hears the
+word of the Lord, by the Bible, or in sermons, telling him that God
+commands him to give up his sin, that God will certainly punish him
+if he does not repent and amend.&nbsp; God sends that message to him
+in love and mercy, to soften his heart by the terrors of the law, and
+turn him from his sin.&nbsp; But what does the man feel?&nbsp; He feels
+angry and provoked; angry with the preacher; ay, angry with the Bible
+itself, with God&rsquo;s words.&nbsp; For he hates to hear the words
+which tell him of his sin; he wishes they were not in the Bible; he
+longs to stop the preacher&rsquo;s mouth; and, as he cannot do that,
+he dislikes going to church.&nbsp; He says: &ldquo;I cannot, and what
+is more, I will not, give up my sinful ways, and therefore I shall not
+go to church to be told of them.&rdquo;&nbsp; So he stops away from
+church, and goes on in his sins.&nbsp; So that man&rsquo;s heart is
+hardened, just as Pharaoh&rsquo;s was.&nbsp; Yet the Lord has come and
+spoken to that sinful man in loving warnings: though all the effect
+it has had is that the Lord&rsquo;s message has made him worse than
+he was before, more stubborn, more godless, more unwilling to hear what
+is good.&nbsp; But men may fall into a still worse state of mind.&nbsp;
+They may determine to set the Lord at naught; to hear Him speaking to
+their conscience, and know that He is right and they wrong, and yet
+quietly put the good thoughts and feelings out of their way, and go
+in the course which they know to be the worst.&nbsp; How many a man
+in business or the world says to himself, ay, and in his better moments
+will say to his friend: &ldquo;Ah, yes, if one could but be what one
+would wish to be. . . .&nbsp; What one&rsquo;s mother used to say one
+might be. . . .&nbsp; But for such a world as this, the gospel ideal
+is somewhat too fine and unpractical.&nbsp; One has one&rsquo;s business
+to carry on, or one&rsquo;s family to provide for, or one&rsquo;s party
+in politics to serve; one must obey the laws of trade, the usages of
+society, the interests of one&rsquo;s class;&rdquo; and so forth.&nbsp;
+And so an excuse is found for every sin, by those who know in their
+hearts that they are sinning; for every sin; and among others, too often,
+for that sin of Pharaoh&rsquo;s, of &ldquo;<i>not letting the people
+go</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And how many, my friends, when they come to church, harden their
+hearts in the same quiet, almost good-humoured way, not caring enough
+for God&rsquo;s message to be even angry with it, and take the preacher&rsquo;s
+warnings as they would a shower of rain, as something unpleasant which
+cannot be helped; and which, therefore, they must sit out patiently,
+and think about it as little as possible?&nbsp; And when the sermon
+is over, they take their hats and go out into the churchyard, and begin
+talking about something else as quickly as possible, to drive the unpleasant
+thoughts, if there are a few left, out of their heads.&nbsp; And thus
+they let the Lord&rsquo;s message to them harden their hearts.&nbsp;
+For it does harden them, my friends, if it be taken in this temper.&nbsp;
+Every time anyone sits through the service or the sermon in this stupid
+and careless mood, he dulls and deadens his soul, till at last he is
+able coolly to sit through the most awful warnings of God&rsquo;s judgment,
+the most tender entreaties of God&rsquo;s love, as if he were a brute
+animal without understanding.&nbsp; Ay, he is able to make the responses
+to the commandments, and join in the psalms, and so with his own mouth,
+before the whole congregation, confess that God&rsquo;s curse is on
+his doings, with no more sense or care of what the words mean, and of
+what a sentence he is pronouncing against himself, than if he were a
+parrot taught to speak by rote words which he does not understand.&nbsp;
+And so that man, by hardening his own heart, makes the Lord harden it
+for him.</p>
+<p>But there is a third way, and a worse way still, in which people&rsquo;s
+hearts are hardened by the Lord&rsquo;s speaking to them.&nbsp; A man
+is warned of his sins by the preacher; and he says to himself: &ldquo;If
+the minister thinks that he is going to frighten me away from church,
+he is very much mistaken.&nbsp; He may go his way, and I shall go mine.&nbsp;
+Let him preach at me as much as he will; I shall go to church all the
+more for that, to show him that I am not afraid.&rdquo;&nbsp; And so
+the Lord&rsquo;s warnings harden his heart, and provoke him to set his
+face like a flint, and become all the more proud and stubborn.</p>
+<p>Now, young people, I speak openly to you as man to man.&nbsp; Will
+you tell me that this was not the very way in which some of you took
+my sermon last Sunday afternoon, in which I warned you of the misery
+which your sinful lives would bring upon you?&nbsp; Was there not more
+than one of you, who, as soon as he got outside the church, began laughing
+and swaggering, and said to the lad next him: &ldquo;Well, he gave it
+us well in his sermon this afternoon, did he not?&nbsp; But I don&rsquo;t
+care; do you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To which the other foolish fellow answered: &ldquo;Not I.&nbsp; It
+is his business to talk like that; he is paid for it, and I suppose
+he likes it.&nbsp; So if he does what he likes, we shall do what we
+like.&nbsp; Come along.&rdquo;&nbsp; And at that all the other foolish
+fellows round burst out laughing, as if the poor lad had said a very
+clever thing; and they all went off together, having their hearts hardened
+by the Lord&rsquo;s warning to them, as Pharaoh&rsquo;s was.</p>
+<p>And they showed, I am afraid, that very evening that their hearts
+were hardened.&nbsp; For out of a sort of spite and stubbornness they
+took a delight in doing what was wrong, just because they had been told
+that it was wrong, and because they were determined to show that they
+would not be frightened or turned from what they chose.</p>
+<p>And all the while they knew that it was wrong, did those poor foolish
+lads.&nbsp; If you had asked one of them openly, &ldquo;Do you not know
+that God has forbidden you to do this?&rdquo; they would have either
+been forced to say, &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; or else they would have tried
+to laugh the matter off, or perhaps held their tongues and looked silly,
+or perhaps again answered insolently; showing by each and all of these
+ways of taking it, that the Lord&rsquo;s message had come home to their
+consciences, and convinced them of their sin, though they were determined
+not to own it or obey it.&nbsp; And the way they would have put the
+matter by and excused themselves to themselves would have been just
+the way in which Pharaoh did it.&nbsp; They would have tried to forget
+that the Lord had warned them, and tried to make out to themselves that
+it was all the preacher&rsquo;s doing, and to make it a personal quarrel
+between him and them.&nbsp; Just so Pharaoh did when he hardened his
+heart.&nbsp; He made the Lord&rsquo;s message a ground for hating and
+threatening Moses and Aaron, as if it was any fault of theirs.&nbsp;
+He knew in his heart that the Lord had sent them; but he tried to forget
+that, and drove them out from his presence, and told them that if they
+dared to appear before him again they should surely die.&nbsp; And just
+so, my friends, people will be angry with the preacher for telling them
+unpleasant truths, as if it was any more pleasure to him to speak than
+for them to hear.&nbsp; Oh, why will you forget that the words which
+I speak from this pulpit are not my words, but God&rsquo;s?&nbsp; It
+is not I who warn you of what you are bringing on yourselves by your
+sins, it is God Himself.&nbsp; There it is written in His Bible&mdash;judge
+for yourselves.&nbsp; Read your Bibles for yourselves, and you will
+see that I am not speaking my own thoughts and words.&nbsp; And as for
+being angry with me for telling you truth, read the ordination service
+which is read whenever a clergyman is ordained, and judge for yourselves.&nbsp;
+What is a clergyman sent into the world for at all, but to say to you
+what I am saying now?&nbsp; What should I be but a hypocrite and a traitor
+to the blessed Lord who died for me, and saved me from my sins, and
+ordained me to preach to sinners, that they too may be saved from their
+sins,&mdash;what should I be but a traitor to Him, if I did not say
+to you, whenever I see you going wrong:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O come, let us worship, and fall down and kneel before the
+Lord our Maker.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For He is the Lord our God; and we are the people of His pasture,
+and the sheep of His hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To-day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lest He sware in His wrath that you shall not enter into His
+rest!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And now, my friends, I will tell you what will happen to you.&nbsp;
+You see that I know something, without having been told of what has
+been going on in your hearts.&nbsp; I beseech you, believe me when I
+tell you what will go on in them.&nbsp; God will chastise you for your
+sins.&nbsp; He will; just because He loves you, and does not hate you;
+just because you are His children, and not dumb animals born to perish.&nbsp;
+Troubles will come upon you as you grow older.&nbsp; Of what sort they
+will be I cannot tell; but that they will come, I can tell full well.&nbsp;
+And when the Lord sends trouble to you, shall it harden your hearts
+or soften them?&nbsp; It depends on you, altogether on you, whether
+the Lord hardens your hearts by sending those sorrows, or whether He
+softens and turns them and brings them back to the only right place
+for them&mdash;home to Him.&nbsp; But your trouble may only harden your
+heart all the more.&nbsp; The sorrows and sore judgments which the Lord
+sent Pharaoh only hardened his heart.&nbsp; It all depends upon the
+way in which you take these troubles, my friends.&nbsp; And that not
+so much when they come as after they come.&nbsp; Almost all, let their
+hearts be right with God or not, seem to take sorrow as they ought,
+while the sorrow is on them.&nbsp; Pharaoh did so too.&nbsp; He said
+to Moses and Aaron: &ldquo;I have sinned this time.&nbsp; The Lord is
+righteous, and I and my people are wicked.&nbsp; Entreat the Lord that
+there be no more mighty thunderings and hail; and I will let you go.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+What could be more right or better spoken?&nbsp; Was not Pharaoh in
+a proper state of mind then?&nbsp; Was not his heart humbled, and his
+will resigned to God?&nbsp; Moses thought not.&nbsp; For while he promised
+Pharaoh to pray that the storm might pass over, yet he warned him: &ldquo;But
+as for thee and thy servants, I know that ye will not yet fear the Lord
+your God.&rdquo;&nbsp; And so it happened; for, &ldquo;when Pharaoh
+saw that the rain, and hail, and thunder had ceased, he sinned yet more,
+and hardened his heart, he and his servants.&nbsp; Neither would he
+let the children of Israel go.&rdquo; . . .&nbsp; And so, alas! it happens
+to many a man and woman nowadays.&nbsp; They find themselves on a sick-bed.&nbsp;
+They are in fear of death, in fear of poverty, in fear of shame and
+punishment for their misdeeds.&nbsp; And then they say: &ldquo;It is
+God&rsquo;s judgment.&nbsp; I have been very wicked.&nbsp; I know God
+is punishing me.&nbsp; Oh, if God will but raise me up off this sick-bed;
+if He will but help me out of this trouble, I will give up all my wicked
+ways.&nbsp; I will repent and amend.&rdquo;&nbsp; So said Pharaoh; and
+yet, as soon as he was safe out of his distress, he hardened his heart.&nbsp;
+And so does many a man and woman, who, when they get safe through their
+troubles, never give up one of their sins, any more than Pharaoh did.&nbsp;
+They really believe that God has punished them.&nbsp; They really intend
+to amend, while they are in the trouble: but as soon as they are out
+of it, they try to persuade themselves that it was not God who sent
+the sorrow, that it came &ldquo;by accident,&rdquo; or that &ldquo;people
+must have trouble in this life,&rdquo; or that &ldquo;if they had taken
+better care, they might have prevented it.&rdquo;&mdash;All of them
+excuses to themselves for forgetting God in the matter, and, therefore,
+for forgetting what they promised to God in trouble; and so, after all,
+they go on just as they went on before.&nbsp; And yet not as they went
+on before.&nbsp; For every such sin hardens their hearts; every such
+sin makes them less able to see God&rsquo;s hand in what happens to
+them; every such sin makes them more bold and confident in disobeying
+God, and saying to themselves: &ldquo;After all, why should I be so
+frightened when I am in trouble, and make such promises to amend my
+life?&nbsp; For the trouble goes away, whether I mend my life or not;
+and nothing happens to me; God does not punish me for not keeping my
+promises to Him.&nbsp; I may as well go on in my own way, for I seem
+not the worse off in body or in purse for so doing.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus
+do people harden their hearts after each trouble, as Pharaoh did; so
+that you will see people, by one affliction after another, one loss
+after another, all their lives through, warned by God that sin will
+not prosper them; and confessing that their sins have brought God&rsquo;s
+punishment on them: and yet going on steadily in the very sins which
+have brought on their troubles, and gaining besides, as time runs on,
+a heart more and more hardened.&nbsp; And why?</p>
+<p>Because they, like Pharaoh, love to have their own way.&nbsp; They
+will not submit to God, and do what He bids them, and believe that what
+He bids them must be right&mdash;good for them, and for all around them.</p>
+<p>They promised to mend.&nbsp; But they promised as Pharaoh did.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;If God will take away this trouble, then I will mend&rdquo;&mdash;meaning,
+though they do not dare to say it: &ldquo;And if God will not take away
+this trouble, of course He cannot expect me to mend.&rdquo;&nbsp; In
+plain English&mdash;If God will not act toward them as they like, then
+they will not act toward Him as He likes.&nbsp; My friends, God does
+not need us to bargain with Him.&nbsp; We must obey Him whether we like
+it or not; whether it seems to pay us or not; whether He takes our trouble
+off us or not; we must obey, for He is the Lord; and if we will not
+obey, He will prove His power on us, as He did on Pharaoh, by showing
+plainly what is the end of those who resist His will.</p>
+<p>What, then, are we to do when our sins bring us, as they certainly
+will some day bring us, into trouble?</p>
+<p>What we ought to have done at first, my friends.&nbsp; What we ought
+to have done in the wild days of youth, and so have saved ourselves
+many a dark day, many a sleepless night, many a bitter shame and heartache.&nbsp;
+To open our eyes, and see that the only thing for men and women, whom
+God has made, is to obey the God who has made them.&nbsp; He is the
+Lord.&nbsp; He has made us.&nbsp; He will have us do one thing.&nbsp;
+How can we hope to prosper by doing anything else?&nbsp; It is ill fighting
+against God.&nbsp; Which is the stronger, my friends, you or God?&nbsp;
+Make up your minds on that.&nbsp; It surely will not take you long.</p>
+<p>But someone may say: &ldquo;I do wish and long to obey God; but I
+am so weak, and my sins have so entangled me with bad company, or debts,
+or&mdash;, or&mdash;.&rdquo;&nbsp; We all know, alas! into what a net
+everyone who gives way to sin gets his feet: &ldquo;And therefore I
+cannot obey God.&nbsp; I long to do so.&nbsp; I feel, I know, when I
+look back, that all my sin, and shame, and unhappiness, come from being
+proud and self-willed, and determined to have my own way, and do what
+I choose.&nbsp; But I cannot mend.&rdquo;&nbsp; Do not despair, poor
+soul!&nbsp; I had a thousand times sooner hear you say you cannot mend,
+than that you can.&nbsp; For those who say they can mend, are apt to
+say: &ldquo;I can mend; and therefore I shall mend when I choose, and
+no sooner.&rdquo;&nbsp; But those who really feel they cannot mend&mdash;those
+who are really weary and worn out with the burden of their sins&mdash;those
+who are really tired out with their own wilfulness, and feel ready to
+lie down and die, like a spent horse, and say: &ldquo;God, take me away,
+no matter to what place; I am not fit to live here on earth, a shame
+and a torment to myself day and night&rdquo;&mdash;those who are in
+that state of mind, are very near&mdash;very near finding out glorious
+news.</p>
+<p>Those who cannot mend themselves and know it, God will mend.&nbsp;
+God will mend your lives for you.&nbsp; He knows as well as you what
+you have to struggle against; ay, a thousand times better.&nbsp; He
+knows&mdash;what does He not know?&nbsp; Pray to Him, and try what He
+does not know.&nbsp; Cry to Him to rid you of your bad companions; He
+will find a way of doing it.&nbsp; Cry to Him to bring you out of the
+temptations you feel too strong for you; He will find a way for doing
+it.&nbsp; Cry to Him to teach you what you ought to do, and He will
+send someone, and that the right person, doubt it not, to teach you
+in His own good time.&nbsp; Above all, cry and pray to Him to conquer
+the pride, and self-conceit, and wilfulness in your heart; to take the
+hard proud heart of stone out of you, and give you instead a heart of
+flesh, loving, and tender, and kindly to every human creature; and He
+will do it.&nbsp; Cry to Him to make your will like His own will, that
+you may love what He loves, and hate what He hates, and do what He wishes
+you to do.&nbsp; And then you will surely find my words come true: &ldquo;Those
+who long to mend, and yet know that they cannot mend themselves, let
+them but pray, and God will mend them.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXXIII&mdash;THE RED SEA TRIUMPH</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p><i>Preached Easter-day Morning</i>, 1852.</p>
+<p>This is a night to be much observed unto the Lord, for bringing the
+children of Israel out of the land of Egypt.&mdash;EXODUS xii. 42.</p>
+<p>You all, my friends, know what is the meaning of Easter-day&mdash;that
+it is the Day on which The Lord rose again from the dead.&nbsp; You
+must have seen that most of the special services for this day, the Collect,
+Epistle, and Gospel, and the second lessons, both morning and evening,
+reminded you of Christ&rsquo;s rising again; and so did the proper Psalms
+for this day, though it may seem at first sight more difficult to see
+what they have to do with the Lord&rsquo;s rising again.</p>
+<p>Now the first lessons, both for the morning and evening services,
+were also meant to remind us of the very same thing, though it may seem
+even more difficult still, at first sight, to understand how they do
+so.</p>
+<p>Let us see what these two first lessons are about.&nbsp; The morning
+one was from the twelfth chapter of Exodus, and told us what the Passover
+was, and what it meant.&nbsp; The first lesson for this afternoon was
+the fourteenth chapter of Exodus.&nbsp; Surely you must remember it.&nbsp;
+Surely the most careless of you must have listened to that glorious
+story, how the Jews went through the Red Sea as if it had been dry land,
+while Pharaoh and the Egyptian army, trying to follow them, were overwhelmed
+in the water.&nbsp; Surely you cannot have heard how the poor Jews looked
+back from the farther shore, and hardly believed their own eyes for
+joy and wonder, when they saw their proud masters swept away for ever,
+and themselves safe and free out of the hateful land where they had
+been slaves for hundreds of years.&nbsp; You cannot surely, my friends,
+have heard that glorious story, and forgotten it again already.&nbsp;
+I hope not; for God knows, that tale of the Jews coming safe through
+the Red Sea has a deep and blessed meaning enough for you, if you could
+but see it.</p>
+<p>But some of you may be saying to yourselves: &ldquo;No doubt it is
+a very noble story; and a man cannot help rejoicing at the poor Jews&rsquo;
+escape, and at the downfall of those cruel Egyptians.&nbsp; It is a
+pleasant thought, no doubt, that if it were but for that once, God interfered
+to help poor suffering creatures, and rid them of their tyrants.&nbsp;
+But what has that to do with Easter Day and Christ&rsquo;s rising again?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I will try to show you, my friends.&nbsp; The Jews&rsquo; Passover
+is the same as our Easter-day, as you know already.&nbsp; But they are
+not merely alike in being kept on the same day.&nbsp; They are alike
+because they are both of them remembrances and tokens of the Lord Jesus
+Christ&rsquo;s delivering men out of misery and slavery.&nbsp; For never
+forget&mdash;though, indeed, in these strange times, I ought rather
+to say, I beseech you to read your Bibles and see&mdash;that it was
+Jesus Christ Himself who brought the Jews out of Egypt.&nbsp; St. Paul
+tells us so positively, again and again.&nbsp; In 1 Cor. x. 4 he tells
+us that it was Christ who followed them through the wilderness.&nbsp;
+In verse 9 of the same chapter, he says that it was Christ Himself whom
+they tempted in the wilderness.&nbsp; He was the Angel of the Covenant
+who went with them.&nbsp; He was the God of Israel whom the elders of
+the Jews saw, a few weeks afterwards, on Mount Sinai, and under His
+feet a pavement like a sapphire stone.&nbsp; True, the Lord did not
+take flesh upon Him till nearly two thousand years after.&nbsp; But
+from the very beginning of all things, while He was in the bosom of
+the Father, He was the King of men.&nbsp; Man was made in His image,
+and therefore in the image of the Father, whose perfect likeness He
+is&mdash;&ldquo;the brightness of His glory, and the express image of
+His person.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was He who took care of men, guided and
+taught them, and delivered them out of misery, from the very beginning
+of the world.&nbsp; St. Paul says the same thing, in many different
+ways, all through the epistle to the Hebrews.&nbsp; He says, for instance,
+that Moses, when he fled from Pharaoh&rsquo;s court in Egypt, esteemed
+the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for
+he endured as seeing Him who is invisible.&nbsp; The Lord said the same
+thing of Himself.&nbsp; He said openly that He was the person who is
+called, all through the Old Testament, &ldquo;The Lord.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He asked the Pharisees: &ldquo;What think ye of Christ? whose son is
+He?&nbsp; They say unto Him, David&rsquo;s son.&nbsp; Christ answered,
+How then does David in spirit call him Lord, saying, the Lord said unto
+my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+So did Christ declare, that He Himself, who was standing there before
+them, was the Lord of David, who had died hundreds of years before.&nbsp;
+He told them again that their father Abraham rejoiced to see His day,
+and saw it and was glad; and when they answered, in anger and astonishment,
+&ldquo;Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Jesus said, &ldquo;Verily I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I am.&nbsp; The Jews had no doubt whom He meant; and we ought to have
+none either.&nbsp; For that was the very name by which God had told
+Moses to call Him, when he was sent to the Jews: &ldquo;Thou shalt say
+unto them, I AM hath sent me to you.&rdquo;&nbsp; The Jews, I say, had
+no doubt who Jesus said that He was; that He meant them to understand,
+once and for all, that He whom they called the carpenter&rsquo;s son
+of Nazareth, was the Lord God who brought their forefathers up out of
+the land of Egypt, on the night of the first Passover.&nbsp; So they,
+to show how reverent and orthodox they were, and how they honoured the
+name of God, took up stones to stone Him&mdash;as many a man, who fancies
+himself orthodox and reverent, would now, if he dared, stone the preachers
+who declare that the Lord Jesus Christ is not changed since then; that
+He is as able and as willing as ever to deliver the poor from those
+who grind them down, and that He will deliver them, whenever they cry
+to Him, with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm, and that Easter-day
+is as much a sign of that to us as the Passover was for the Jews of
+old.</p>
+<p>But, my friends, if Christ the Lord showed His love and power in
+behalf of poor oppressed wretches on that first Passover, surely He
+showed it a thousand times more on that first Easter-day.&nbsp; His
+great love helped the Jews out of slavery; and that same great love
+of His at this Easter-tide, moved Him to die and rise again for the
+sins of the whole world.&nbsp; In that first Passover He delivered only
+one people.&nbsp; On the first Easter He delivered all mankind.&nbsp;
+The Jews were under cruel tyrants in the land of Egypt.&nbsp; So were
+all mankind over the world, when Jesus came.&nbsp; The Jews in Egypt
+were slaves to worse things than the whip of their task-masters; they
+had slaves&rsquo; hearts, as well as slaves&rsquo; bodies.&nbsp; They
+were kept down not only by the Egyptians, but by their own ignorance,
+and idolatry, and selfish division, and foul sins.&nbsp; They were spiritually
+dead&mdash;without a noble, pure, manful feeling left in them.&nbsp;
+Their history makes no secret of that.&nbsp; The Bible seems to take
+every care to let us see into what a miserable and brutal state they
+had fallen.&nbsp; Christ sent Moses to raise them out of that death;
+to take them through the Red Sea, as a sign that all that was washed
+away, to be forgiven of God and forgotten by them, and that from the
+moment they landed, a free people, on the farther shore, they were to
+consider all their old life past and a new one begun.&nbsp; So they
+were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, as St. Paul says.&nbsp;
+And now all was to be new.&nbsp; They had been fancying that they belonged
+to the Egyptians.&nbsp; Now they had found out, and had it proved to
+them by signs and wonders which they could not mistake, that they belonged
+to the Lord.&nbsp; They had been brutal sinners.&nbsp; The Lord began
+to teach them that they were to rise above their own appetites and passions.&nbsp;
+They had been worshipping only what they could see and handle.&nbsp;
+The Lord began to teach them to worship Him&mdash;a person whom they
+could not see, though He was always near them, and watching over them.&nbsp;
+They had been living without independence, fellow-feeling, the sense
+of duty, or love of order.&nbsp; The Lord began to teach them to care
+for each other, to help each other, to know that they had a duty to
+perform towards each other, for which they were accountable to Him.&nbsp;
+They had owned no master except the Egyptians, whom they feared and
+obeyed unwillingly.&nbsp; The Lord began to teach them to obey Him loyally,
+from trust, and gratitude, and love.&nbsp; They had been willing to
+remain sinners, and brutes, and slaves, provided they could get enough
+to eat and drink.&nbsp; The Lord began to teach them that His favour,
+His protection, were better than the flesh-pots of Egypt, and that He
+was able to feed them where it seemed impossible to men; to teach them
+that &ldquo;man does not live by bread alone&mdash;cheap or dear, my
+friends&mdash;not by bread alone, but by <i>every</i> word that proceeds
+out of the mouth of God, does man live.&rdquo;&nbsp; That was the meaning
+of their being baptized in the cloud and in the sea.&nbsp; That was
+the meaning, and only a very small part of the meaning, of their Passover.&nbsp;
+Would you not think, my friends, that I had been speaking rather of
+our own Baptism, and of our own Supper of the Lord, to which you have
+been all called to-day, and that I had been telling you the meaning
+of them?</p>
+<p>For when Jesus, the Lord, and King, and Head of mankind, died and
+rose again, He took away the sin of the world.&nbsp; He was the true
+Passover, the Lamb without spot, slain, as the scripture tells us, for
+the sins of the whole world.&nbsp; In the Jews&rsquo; Passover, when
+the angel saw the lamb&rsquo;s blood on the door of the house, he passed
+by, and spared everyone in it.&nbsp; So now.&nbsp; The blood of Jesus,
+the Lamb of God, is upon us; and for His sake, God is faithful and just
+to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.</p>
+<p>But the Lord rose again this day.&nbsp; And when He, the Lord, the
+King, and Head of all men, rose, all men rose in Him.&nbsp; &ldquo;As
+in Adam all die,&rdquo; says St. Paul, &ldquo;even so in Christ shall
+all be made alive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Baptism is a sign of that to us, as the going through the Red Sea,
+and being baptized to Moses in it, was to the Jews.&nbsp; The passing
+of the Red Sea said to the Jews: &ldquo;You have passed now out of your
+old miserable state of slavery into freedom.&nbsp; The sins which you
+committed there are blotted out.&nbsp; You are taken into covenant with
+God.&nbsp; You are now God&rsquo;s people, and nothing can lose you
+this love and care, except your own sins, your own unfaithfulness to
+Him, your own wilful falling back into the slavish and brutal state
+from which He has delivered you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And just so, baptism says to us: &ldquo;Your sins are forgiven you.&nbsp;
+You are taken into covenant with God.&nbsp; You are God&rsquo;s people,
+God&rsquo;s family.&nbsp; You must forget and cast away the old Adam,
+the old slavish and savage pattern of man, which your Lord died to abolish,
+the guilt of which He bore for you on His cross; and you must rise to
+the new Adam, the new pattern of man, which is created after God in
+righteousness and true holiness, which the Lord showed forth in His
+life, and death, and rising again.&nbsp; For now God looks on you not
+as a guilty and condemned race of beings, but as a redeemed race, His
+children, for the sake of Jesus Christ the Lamb of God, who takes away
+the sins of the world.&nbsp; You have a right to believe that, as human
+beings, you are dead with Christ to the old Adam, the old sinful, brutal
+pattern of man.&nbsp; Baptism is the sign of it to you.&nbsp; Every
+child, let it or its parents be who they may, is freely baptized as
+a sign that all that old pattern of man is washed away, that they can
+and must have nothing to do with it hence-forward, that it is dead and
+buried, and they must flee from it and forget it, as they would a corpse.</p>
+<p>And the Lord&rsquo;s Supper also is a sign to us that, as human beings,
+we are risen with Christ, to a new life.&nbsp; A new life is our birthright.&nbsp;
+We have a right to live a new life.&nbsp; We have a duty to live a new
+life.&nbsp; We have a power, if we will, to live a new life; such a
+life as we never could live if we were left to ourselves; a noble, just,
+godly, manful, Christlike, Godlike life, bred and nourished in us by
+the Spirit of Christ.&nbsp; That is our right; for we belong to Him
+who lived that life Himself, and bought us our share in it with His
+own death and resurrection.&nbsp; That is our duty; for if we share
+the Lord&rsquo;s blessings, it can only be in order that we may become
+like the Lord.&nbsp; Do you fancy that He died to leave us all no better
+than we are?&nbsp; His death would have had very little effect if that
+was all.&nbsp; No, says St. Paul; if you have a share in Christ, prove
+that you believe in your own share by becoming like Christ.&nbsp; You
+belong to His kingdom, and you must live as His subjects.&nbsp; He has
+bought for you a new and eternal life, and you must use that life.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things that are above.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+. . .&nbsp; And what are they?&nbsp; Love, peace, gentleness, mercy,
+pity, truth, faithfulness, justice, patience, courage, order, industry,
+duty, obedience. . . .&nbsp; All, in short, which is like Jesus Christ.&nbsp;
+For these are heavenly things.&nbsp; These are above, where Christ sits
+at God&rsquo;s right hand.&nbsp; These are the likeness of God.&nbsp;
+That is God&rsquo;s character.&nbsp; Let it be your character likewise.</p>
+<p>But again; if it is our right and our duty to be like that, it is
+also in our power.&nbsp; God would not have commanded us to be, what
+He had not given us the power to be.&nbsp; He would not have told us
+to seek those things which are above, if He had not intended us to find
+them.&nbsp; Wherefore it is written: &ldquo;Ask, and ye shall receive;
+seek, and ye shall find; for if ye, being evil, know how to give good
+gifts to your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give
+His Holy Spirit to those who ask him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This is the meaning of that text; namely, that God will give us the
+power of living this new and risen life, which we are bound to live.&nbsp;
+This is one of the gifts for men, which the scripture tells us that
+Christ received when He rose from the dead, and ascended up on high.&nbsp;
+This is one of the powers of which He spoke, when after His resurrection
+He said, &ldquo;That all power was given to Him in heaven and earth.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The Lord&rsquo;s Supper is at once a sign of who will give us that gift,
+and a sign that He will indeed give it us.&nbsp; The Lord&rsquo;s Supper
+is the pledge and token to us that we all have a share in the likeness
+of Christ, the true pattern of man; and that if we come and claim our
+share, He will surely bestow it on us.&nbsp; He will renew, and change,
+and purify our hearts and characters in us, day by day, into the likeness
+of Himself.&nbsp; He who is the eternal life of men will nourish us,
+body, soul, and spirit, with that everlasting life of His, even as our
+bodies are nourished by that bread and wine.&nbsp; And if you ask me
+how?&nbsp; When you can tell me why a wheat grain cannot produce an
+oak, or an acorn a wheat plant; when you can tell me why our bodies
+are, each of them, the very same bodies which they were ten years ago,
+though every atom of flesh, and blood, and bone in them has been changed;
+when, in short, you, or any other living man, can tell me the meaning
+of those three words, body, life, and growth, then it will be time to
+ask that question.&nbsp; In the meantime let us believe that He who
+does such wonders in the life and growth of every blade of grass, can
+and will do far greater wonders for the life and growth of us, immortal
+beings, made in His own likeness, redeemed by His blood, and so believe,
+and thank, and obey, and wait till another and a nobler life to understand.&nbsp;
+And if we never understand at all&mdash;what matter, provided the thing
+be true?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<h2>XXXIV&mdash;CHRISTMAS-DAY</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government
+shall be on His shoulder: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
+The Mighty God, The Father of an Everlasting age, The Prince of Peace.&nbsp;
+Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end, upon
+the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish
+it with judgment and with justice henceforth even forever.&mdash;ISAIAH
+ix. 6, 7.</p>
+<p>In the time when the prophet Isaiah wrote this prophecy, everything
+round him was exactly opposite to his words.&nbsp; The king of Jud&aelig;a,
+the prophet&rsquo;s country, was not reigning in righteousness.&nbsp;
+He was an unrighteous and wicked governor.&nbsp; The princes and great
+men were not ruling in judgment.&nbsp; They were unjust and covetous;
+they took bribes, and sold justice for money.&nbsp; They were oppressors,
+grinding down the poor, and defrauding those below them.&nbsp; So that
+the weak, and poor, and needy had no one to right them, no one to take
+their part.&nbsp; There was no man to feel for them, and defend them,
+and be a hiding-place and a covert for them from their cruel tyrants;
+no man to comfort and refresh them as rivers of water refresh a dry
+place, or the shadow of a great rock comforts the sunburnt traveller
+in the weary deserts.</p>
+<p>Neither were these very poor oppressed people of the Jews in a right
+state of mind.&nbsp; They were ignorant and stupid, given to worship
+false gods.&nbsp; They had eyes, and yet could not use them to see that,
+as the psalm told us this morning, the heavens declared the glory of
+God, and the firmament showed His handiwork.&nbsp; They were worshipping
+the sun, and moon, and stars, in stead of the Lord God who made them.&nbsp;
+They were brutish too, and would not listen to teaching.&nbsp; They
+had ears, and yet would not hearken with them to God&rsquo;s prophets.&nbsp;
+They were rash, too, living from hand to mouth, discontented, and violent,
+as ignorant poor people will be in evil times.&nbsp; And they were stammerers&mdash;not
+with their tongue, but with their minds and thoughts.&nbsp; They were
+miserable; but they could not tell why.&nbsp; They were full of discontent
+and longings; but they could not put them into words.&nbsp; They did
+not know how to pray, how to open their hearts to God or to man.&nbsp;
+They knew of no one who could understand them and their sorrows; they
+could not understand them themselves, much less put them into words.&nbsp;
+They were altogether confused and stupefied; just in the same state,
+in a word, as the poor negro slaves in America, and the heathens ay,
+and the Christians too, are in, in all the countries of the world which
+do not know the good news of Christmas-day or have forgotten it and
+disobeyed it.</p>
+<p>But Isaiah had God&rsquo;s Spirit with him; the Holy Spirit, the
+Spirit of holiness, righteousness, justice.&nbsp; And that Holy Spirit
+convinced him of sin, and of righteousness and of judgment, as He convinces
+every man who gives himself up humbly to God&rsquo;s teaching.</p>
+<p>First, the Spirit convinced Isaiah of sin.&nbsp; He made him feel
+that the state of his country was wrong.&nbsp; And He made him feel
+why it was wrong; namely, because the men in it were wrong; because
+they were thinking wrong notions, feeling wrong feelings, doing wrong
+things; and that wrong was sin; and that sin was falling short of being
+what a man was made, and what every man ought to be, namely, the likeness
+and glory of God; and that so his countrymen the Jews, one and all,
+had sinned and come short of the glory of God.</p>
+<p>Next, He convinced Isaiah of righteousness.&nbsp; He made Isaiah
+feel and be sure that God was righteous; that God was no unjust Lord,
+like the wicked king of the Jews; that such evil doings as are going
+on were hateful to Him; that all that covetousness, oppression, taking
+of bribes, drunkenness, deceit, ignorance, stupid rashness and folly,
+of which the land was full, were hateful to God.&nbsp; He must hate
+them, for He was a righteous and a good God.&nbsp; They ought not to
+be there.&nbsp; For man, every man from the king on his throne to the
+poor labourer in the field, was meant to be righteous and good as God
+is.&nbsp; &ldquo;But how will it be altered?&rdquo; thought Isaiah to
+himself.&nbsp; &ldquo;What hope for this poor miserable sinful world?&nbsp;
+People are meant to be righteous and good: but who will make them so?&nbsp;
+The king and his princes are meant to be righteous and good, but who
+will set them a pattern?&nbsp; When will there be a really good king,
+who will be an example to all in authority; who will teach men to do
+right, and compel and force them not to do wrong?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then the Holy Spirit of God answered that anxious question of
+Isaiah&rsquo;s, and convinced him of judgment.</p>
+<p>Yes, he felt sure; he did not know why he felt so sure: but he did
+feel sure; God&rsquo;s Spirit in his heart made him feel sure, that
+in some way or other, some day or other, the Lord God would come to
+judgment, to judge the wicked princes and rulers of this world, and
+cast them out.&nbsp; It must be so.&nbsp; God was a righteous God.&nbsp;
+He would not endure these unrighteous doings for ever.&nbsp; He was
+not careless about this poor sinful world, and about all the sinful
+down-trodden ignorant men, and women, and children in it.&nbsp; He would
+take the matter into His own hands.&nbsp; He would show that He was
+Lord and Master.&nbsp; If kings would not reign in righteousness, He
+would come and reign in righteousness Himself.&nbsp; He would appoint
+princes under Him, who would rule in judgment.&nbsp; And He would show
+men what true righteousness was; what the pattern of a true ruler was;
+namely, to be able to feel for the poor, and the afflicted, and the
+needy, to understand the wants, and sorrows, and doubts, and fears of
+the lowest and the meanest; in short, to be a man, a true, perfect man,
+with a man&rsquo;s heart, a man&rsquo;s pity, a man&rsquo;s fellow-feeling
+in Him.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; The Lord God would show Himself.&nbsp; He would
+set His righteous King to govern.&nbsp; And yet Isaiah did not know
+how, but he saw plainly that it must be so, that same righteous King,
+who was to set the world right, would be a <i>man</i>.&nbsp; It would
+be a man who was to be a hiding-place from the storm and a covert from
+the tempest.&nbsp; A man who would understand man, and teach men their
+duty.</p>
+<p>Then the eyes of the blind would see, and the ears of those who heard
+should hearken; for they would hear a loving human voice, the voice
+of One who knew what was in man, who could tell them just what they
+wanted to know, and put His teaching into the shape in which it would
+sink most easily and deeply into their hearts.&nbsp; And then the hearts
+of the rash would understand knowledge; and the tongue of the stammerers
+would speak plainly.&nbsp; There will be no more confused cries from
+poor ignorant brutish oppressed people, like the cries of dumb beasts
+in pain; for He who was coming would give them words to utter their
+sorrows in.&nbsp; He would teach them how to speak to man and God.&nbsp;
+He would teach them how to pray, and when they prayed to say, &ldquo;Our
+Father which art in heaven.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then the vile person would be no more called bountiful, or the churl
+called liberal: flattery and cringing to the evil great would be at
+an end.&nbsp; The people would have sense to see the truth about right
+and wrong, and courage to speak it.&nbsp; Men would then be held for
+what they really were, and honoured and despised according to their
+true merits.&nbsp; Yes, said Isaiah, we shall be delivered from our
+wicked king and princes, from the heathen Assyrian armies, who fancy
+that they are going to sweep us out of our own land with fire and sword;
+from our own sins, and ignorance, and infidelity, and rashness.&nbsp;
+We shall be delivered from them all, for The righteous King is coming.&nbsp;
+Nay, He is here already, if we could but see.&nbsp; His goings-forth
+have been from everlasting.&nbsp; He is ruling us now&mdash;this wondrous
+Child, this Son of God.&nbsp; Unto us a Child is born already, unto
+us a Son is given already.&nbsp; But one day or other He will be revealed,
+and made manifest, and shown to men as a man; and then all the people
+shall know who He is; and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
+the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.</p>
+<p>Ah, my friends, Isaiah saw all this but dimly and afar off.&nbsp;
+He saw as through a glass darkly.&nbsp; He perhaps thought at times&mdash;indeed
+we can have little doubt that he thought&mdash;that the good young Prince
+Hezekiah, &ldquo;The might of God,&rdquo; as his name means, who was
+growing up in his day to be a deliverer and a righteous king over the
+Jews, was to set the world right.&nbsp; No doubt he had Hezekiah in
+his mind when he said that a Child was born to the Jews, and a Son given
+to them; just as, of course, he meant his own son, who was born to him
+by the virgin prophetess, when he called his name Emmanuel, that is
+to say, God with us.&nbsp; But he felt that there was more in both things
+than that.&nbsp; He felt that his young wife&rsquo;s conceiving and
+bearing a son, was a sign to him that some day or other a more blessed
+virgin would conceive and bear a mightier Son.&nbsp; And so he felt
+that whether or not Hezekiah delivered the Jews from their sin, and
+misery, and ignorance, God Himself would deliver them.&nbsp; He knew,
+by the Spirit of God, that his prophecy would come true, and remain
+true for ever.&nbsp; And so he died in faith, not having received the
+promises, God having prepared some better King for us, and having fulfilled
+the words of His prophet in a way of which, as far as we can see, he
+never dreamed.</p>
+<p>Yes.&nbsp; Hezekiah failed to save the nation of the Jews.&nbsp;
+Instead of being the &ldquo;father of an everlasting age,&rdquo; and
+having &ldquo;no end of his family on the throne of David,&rdquo; his
+great-grandchildren and the whole nation of the Jews were swept away
+into captivity by the Babylonians, and no man of his house, as Jeremiah
+prophesied, has ever since prospered or sat on the throne of David.&nbsp;
+But still Isaiah&rsquo;s prophecy was true.&nbsp; True for us who are
+assembled here this day.</p>
+<p>For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; even the Babe
+of Bethlehem, Jesus Christ the Lord.&nbsp; The government shall indeed
+be upon His shoulder; for it has been there always.&nbsp; For the Father
+has committed all things to the Son, that he may be King of kings and
+Lord of lords for ever.&nbsp; His name is indeed Wonderful; for what
+more wondrous thing was ever seen in heaven or in earth, than that great
+love with which He loved us?&nbsp; He is not merely called &ldquo;The
+might of God,&rdquo; as Hezekiah was,&mdash;for a sign and a prophecy;
+for He is the mighty God Himself.&nbsp; He is indeed the Counsellor;
+for He is the light who lighteth every man who comes into the world.&nbsp;
+He is &ldquo;the Father of an everlasting age.&rdquo;&nbsp; There were
+hopes that Hezekiah would be so; that he would raise the nation of the
+Jews again to a reform from which it would never fall away: but these
+hopes were disappointed; and the only one who fulfilled the prophecy
+is He who has founded His Church for ever on the rock of everlasting
+ages, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.&nbsp; Hezekiah
+was to be the prince of peace for a few short years only.&nbsp; But
+the Child who is born to us, the Son who is given to us, is He who gave
+eternal peace to all who will accept it; peace which this world can
+neither give nor take away; and who will make that peace grow and spread
+over the whole earth, till men shall beat their swords into plough-shares,
+and their spears into pruning-hooks, and the nations shall not learn
+war any more.&nbsp; Of the increase of His government and of His peace
+there shall be no end, till the earth be full of the knowledge of the
+Lord, as the waters cover the sea, and the spirit of God be poured out
+on all flesh, to teach kings to reign in righteousness, after the pattern
+of the King of kings, the Babe of Bethlehem; to make the rich and powerful
+do justice, to teach the ignorant, to give the rich wisdom, to free
+the oppressed, to comfort the afflicted, to proclaim to all mankind
+the good news of Christmas Day, the good news that there was a man born
+into the world on this day who will be a hiding-place from the storm,
+a covert from the tempest, like rivers of water in a dry place, like
+the shadow of a great rock in a weary land; even the man Christ Jesus,
+who is able and willing to save to the uttermost those who come to God
+through Him, seeing that he has been tempted in all things like as we
+are, yet without sin.</p>
+<p>Yes, my friends, on that holy table stands the everlasting sign that
+Isaiah&rsquo;s prophecy has been fulfilled to the uttermost.&nbsp; That
+bread and that wine declare to us, that to us a Child is born, to us
+a Son is given.&nbsp; They declare to us, in a word, that on this blessed
+day God was made man, and dwelt among men, and we beheld His glory,
+the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.</p>
+<p>Oh, come to that table this day, and there claim your share in the
+most precious body and blood of the Divine Child of Bethlehem.&nbsp;
+Come and ask Him to pour out on you His Spirit, the Spirit which He
+poured on Hezekiah of old, &ldquo;that he might fulfil his own name
+and live in the might of God.&rdquo;&nbsp; So will you live in the might
+of God.&nbsp; So you will be able to govern yourselves, and your own
+appetites, in righteousness and freedom, and rule your own households,
+or whatsoever God has set you to do, in judgment.&nbsp; So you will
+see things in their true light, as God sees them, and be ready and willing
+to hear good advice, and understand your way in this life, and be able
+to speak your hearts out in prayer to God, as to a loving and merciful
+Father.&nbsp; And in all your afflictions, let them be what they will,
+you will have a comfort, and a sure hope, and a wellspring of peace,
+and a hiding-place from the tempest, even The Man Christ Jesus, who
+said: &ldquo;Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you; let not
+your heart be troubled, neither be ye afraid.&rdquo;&nbsp; The Man Christ
+Jesus, at whose birth the angels sang: &ldquo;Glory to God in the Highest,
+and on earth peace, good-will toward men.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now to Him who on this day was born of the blessed virgin, man of
+the substance of His mother, yet God the Son of God, be ascribed, with
+the Father and the Spirit, all power, glory, majesty, and dominion,
+both now and for ever.&nbsp; Amen.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXXV&mdash;NEW YEAR&rsquo;S DAY</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>(1853.)</p>
+<p>But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and He that
+formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called
+thee by thy name; thou art mine.&nbsp; When thou passest through the
+waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not
+overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be
+burnt; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.&nbsp; For I am the
+Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour: I gave Egypt for
+thy ransom, Ethiopia and Seba for thee.&nbsp; Since thou wast precious
+in my sight, thou hast been honourable, and I have loved thee: therefore
+will I give men for thee, and peoples for thy life.&mdash;ISAIAH xliii.
+1-4.</p>
+<p>The New Year has now begun; and I am bound to wish you all a happy
+New Year.&nbsp; But I am sent here to do more than that; to teach you
+how you may make your own New Year a happy one; or, if not altogether
+a happy one&mdash;for sorrows may and must come in their turn&mdash;yet
+still something better than a happy year, namely, a blessed year; a
+year on which you will be able to look back this day twelvemonths, and
+thank God for it; thank God for the tears which you have shed in it,
+as well as for the joy which you have felt; thank God for the dark days
+as well as for the light; thank God for what you have lost, as well
+as what you have found; and be able to say, &ldquo;Well, this last year,
+if it has not been a happy year for me, at least it has been a blessed
+one for me.&nbsp; It has left me a stronger, soberer, wiser, godlier,
+better man than it found me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How, then, can you make the New Year a blessed one for yourselves?&nbsp;
+I know but one way, my friends.&nbsp; The ancient way.&nbsp; The Bible
+way.&nbsp; The way by which Abraham, and Jacob, and David, and all the
+holy men of old, and all the saints, and martyrs, and righteous and
+godly among men, made their lives blessed among themselves, in spite
+of sorrow, and misfortune, and distress, and persecution, and torture,
+and death itself; the one only old way of being blessed, which was from
+the beginning, and will last for ever and ever, through all worlds and
+eternities; the way of the old saints, which St. Paul sets forth in
+the eleventh chapter of the Hebrews; and that is, <i>faith</i>.&nbsp;
+Faith, which is the substance of what we hope for, the evidence of things
+not seen.&nbsp; Faith, of which it is written, that the just shall live
+by his faith.</p>
+<p>But how can faith give you a blessed New Year?&nbsp; In the same
+way in which it gave the old saints blessed years all their lives through,
+and is giving them a blessed eternity now and for ever before the face
+of the Lord Jesus Christ, to which may God in His mercy bring us all
+likewise.</p>
+<p>They trusted in God.&nbsp; They had faith, not in themselves, like
+too many; not in their own good works, like too many; not in their own
+faith, in their own frames, and feelings, and assurances, like too many;
+but they had faith in God.&nbsp; It was faith in God which made one
+of them, the great prophet Isaiah, write the glorious words which I
+have chosen for my text this day, to show his countrymen the Jews, even
+while they were in the very lowest depths of shame, and poverty, and
+misfortune, that God had not forgotten them; that for those who trusted
+in Him, a blessed time was surely coming.</p>
+<p>And it was faith in God, too, which put it into the minds of the
+good men who choose these Sunday lessons out of the Bible, to appoint
+such chapters as these to be read year by year, at the coming in of
+the new year, for ever.&nbsp; Faith in God, I say, put that into their
+minds.&nbsp; For those good men trusted in God, that He would not change;
+that hundreds and thousands of years would make no difference in His
+love; that the promises made by His Holy Spirit to Isaiah the prophet
+would stand true for ever and ever.&nbsp; And they trusted in God, too,
+that what He had spoken by the mouth of His holy apostles was true;
+that after the blessed Lord came down on earth, there was to be no difference
+between Jews and Gentiles; that the great and precious promises made
+by God to the Jews were made also to all the nations of the earth; that
+all things written in the Old Testament, from the first chapter of Genesis
+to the last of Malachi, were written not for the Jews only, but for
+English, French, Italians, Germans, Russians&mdash;for all the nations
+of the world; that we English were God&rsquo;s people now, just as much,
+ay, far more, than the old Jews were, and that, therefore, the Old Testament
+promises, as well as the New Testament ones, were part of our inheritance
+as members of Christ&rsquo;s Church.&nbsp; And therefore they appointed
+Old Testament lessons to be read in church, to show us English what
+our privileges were, what God&rsquo;s covenant and promise to us were.&nbsp;
+We, as much as the Jews, are called by the name of the Lord who created
+us.&nbsp; Were we not baptised into His name at that font?&nbsp; Has
+He not loved us?&nbsp; Has He not heaped us English, for hundreds of
+years past, with blessings such as He never bestowed on any nation?&nbsp;
+Has He not given men for us, and nations for our life?&nbsp; While all
+the nations of the world have been at war, slaying and being slain,
+has He not kept this fair land of England free and safe from foreign
+invaders for more than eight hundred years?&nbsp; Since the world was
+made, perhaps, such a thing was never heard of, such a mercy shown to
+any nation; that a great and rich country like this should be preserved
+for eight hundred years from invasion of foreign armies, and all the
+horrors and miseries of war, which have swept, from time to time, every
+other nation in the world with the besom of desolation.</p>
+<p>Ay, and but sixty years ago, in the time of the French war, when
+almost every other nation in Europe was made desolate with fire, and
+sword, and war, did not God preserve this land of England, as He never
+preserved country before, from all the miseries which were sweeping
+over other nations?&nbsp; Oh, strange and wonderful mercy of God, that
+at the very time that the gospel was dying out all over Europe, it was
+being lighted again in England; and that while the knowledge of God
+was failing elsewhere, it was increasing here!&nbsp; Oh, strange and
+wonderful mercy of God, who has given to us English, now for one hundred
+and sixty years and more, those very equal laws, and freedom, and rights
+of conscience, for which so many other nations of Europe are still crying
+and struggling in vain, amid slavery, and oppression, and injustice,
+and heavy burdens, such as we here in England should not endure a week!&nbsp;
+Oh, strange and wonderful mercy of God, who but three years ago, when
+all the other nations of Europe were shaken with wars, and riots, and
+seditions, every man&rsquo;s hand against his neighbour, kept this land
+of England in perfect peace and quiet by those just laws and government,
+proving to us the truth of His own promises, that those who seek peace
+by righteous dealings, shall find it, and that, as Isaiah says, the
+fruit of justice is quietness and assurance for ever!&nbsp; And last,
+but not least, my friends, is it not a sign, a sign not to be mistaken,
+of God&rsquo;s good-will and mercy to us, that now, at this very time
+of all others, when almost every country in Europe is going to wrack
+and ruin through the folly and wickedness of their kings and rulers,
+He should have given us here in England a Queen who is a pattern of
+goodness and purity, in ruling not only the nation, but her own household,
+to every wife and mother, from the highest to the lowest; and a Prince
+whose whole heart seems set on doing good, and on helping the poor,
+and improving the condition of the labourers?&nbsp; My friends, I say
+that we are unthankful and unfaithful.&nbsp; We do not thank God a hundredth
+part enough for the blessings which He has given us.&nbsp; We do not
+trust Him a hundredth part enough for the blessings which He has in
+store for us.&nbsp; If some of us here could but see and feel for a
+single month how people are off abroad; if they could change places
+with a French, an Italian, a Russian labourer, it would teach them a
+lesson about God&rsquo;s goodness to England which they would not soon
+forget.&nbsp; May God grant that we may never have to learn that lesson
+in that way!&nbsp; God grant that we may never, to cure us of our unthankfulness
+and want of faith, and godless and unmanly grumbling and complaining,
+be brought, for a single week, into the same state as some hundred millions
+of our fellow-creatures are in foreign parts!&nbsp; Oh, my friends,
+let us thank God for the mercies of the past year!&nbsp; Most truly
+He has fulfilled to England his promise given by the mouth of the prophet
+Isaiah: &ldquo;When thou passest through the waters, I will be with
+thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.&nbsp; For
+I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One, thy Saviour.&nbsp; Thou hast been
+precious in my sight, and I have loved thee: therefore will I give men
+for thee, and peoples for thy life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Away, then, with discontent and anxiety for the coming year.&nbsp;
+Or rather, let us be only discontented with ourselves.&nbsp; Let us
+only be anxious about our own conduct.&nbsp; God cannot change.&nbsp;
+If anything goes wrong, it will be not because He has left us, but because
+we have left Him.&nbsp; Is it not written that all things work together
+for good to those who love God?&nbsp; Then if things do not work together
+for good in this coming year, it will be because we do not love God.&nbsp;
+Do not let us say, &ldquo;I am righteous, but my neighbours are wicked,
+and therefore I must be miserable;&rdquo; neither let us lay the blame
+of our misfortunes on our rulers; let us lay it on ourselves.</p>
+<p>What was the word of the Lord to the Jews in a like case: &ldquo;What
+means this proverb which you take up, saying, The fathers have eaten
+sour grapes, and the children&rsquo;s teeth are set on edge?&nbsp; It
+is not so, O house of Israel.&nbsp; The son shall not die for the iniquity
+of his father, nor the father for the iniquity of the son.&nbsp; The
+soul that sinneth, it shall die, saith the Lord.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Oh, my friends, take this to heart solemnly, in the year to come.&nbsp;
+Our troubles, more of them at least than we fancy, are our own fault,
+and not our neighbours&rsquo;, or the government&rsquo;s, or anyone&rsquo;s
+else.&nbsp; And those which are not our own fault directly are so in
+this way, that they are sent as sharp and wholesome lessons to us; and
+if we were what we ought to be, we should not want those lessons.&nbsp;
+Do not fancy that that is a sad and doleful thought to begin the new
+year with.&nbsp; God forbid!&nbsp; It would be doleful and sad indeed
+if any one of us, in spite of all his right-doing, might be plunged
+into any hopeless misery, through the fault of other people, over whom
+he has no control.&nbsp; But thanks be to the Lord, it is not so.&nbsp;
+We are His children, and He cares for each and every one of us separately.&nbsp;
+Each and every one of us has to answer for himself alone, face to face
+with his God, day by day; every man must bear his own burden; and to
+every one of us who love God, all things will work together for good.&nbsp;
+It is, and was, and always will be, as Abraham well knew, far from God
+to punish the righteous with the wicked.&nbsp; The Judge of all the
+earth will do right.&nbsp; None of us who repents and turns from the
+sins he sees round him and in him; none of us who prays for the light
+and guiding of God&rsquo;s Spirit; none of us who struggles day by day
+to keep himself unspotted from this evil world, and live as God&rsquo;s
+son, without scandal or ill-name in the midst of a sinful and perverse
+generation; none of us who does that, but God&rsquo;s blessing will
+rest on him.&nbsp; What ruins others will only teach and strengthen
+him; what brings others to shame, will only bring him to honour, and
+make his righteousness plain to be seen by all, that God may be glorified
+in His people.&nbsp; Let the coming year be what it may; to the holy,
+the humble, the upright, the godly, it will be a blessed year, fulfilling
+the blessed promises of the Lord, that those who trust in Him shall
+never be confounded.</p>
+<p>Oh, my friends, consider but this one thing, that the Almighty God,
+who made all heaven and earth, has bid us trust in Him.&nbsp; And when
+He bids us, is it not a sin, an insult to Him, not to trust Him&mdash;not
+to believe His words to us?&nbsp; &ldquo;Put thou thy trust in the Lord,
+and be doing good; dwell in the land,&rdquo; working where He has set
+thee, &ldquo;and verily thou shalt be fed.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Thou
+shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that
+flieth by day.&nbsp; A thousand shall fall by thy side, and ten thousand
+at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee.&nbsp; Only with
+thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.&nbsp;
+Because thou hast made the Lord thy refuge, no plague shall come nigh
+thy dwelling.&nbsp; Thou shalt call upon me, I will answer thee.&nbsp;
+Because thou hast set thy love on me, I will deliver thee; with long
+life will I satisfy thee, and show thee my salvation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>My friends, these words are in the book of Psalms.&nbsp; Either they
+are the most cruel words that ever were spoken on earth to tempt poor
+wretches into vain security and fearful disappointment, or they are&mdash;what
+are they?&mdash;the sure and everlasting promise of our Father in heaven
+to us His children.&nbsp; We have only to ask for them, and we shall
+receive them; to claim them, and they will be fulfilled to us.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;For He who spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him for us,
+will He not with Him likewise freely give us all things,&rdquo; and
+make, by His fatherly care, and providence, and education, all our new
+years blessed new years, whether or not they are happy ones?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXXVI&mdash;THE DELUGE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>My spirit shall not always strive with man.&mdash;GENESIS vi. 3.</p>
+<p>Last Sunday we read in the first lesson of the fall.&nbsp; This Sunday
+we read of the flood, the first-fruits of the fall.</p>
+<p>It is an awful and a fearful story.&nbsp; And yet, if we will look
+at it by faith in God, it is a most cheerful and hopeful story&mdash;a
+gospel&mdash;a good news of salvation&mdash;like every other word in
+the Bible, from beginning to end.&nbsp; Ay, and to my mind, the most
+hopeful words of all in it, are the very ones which at first sight look
+most terrible, the words with which my text begins: &ldquo;And the Lord
+said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For is it not good news&mdash;the good news of all news&mdash;the
+news which every poor soul who is hungering and thirsting after righteousness,
+longs to hear; and when they hear it, feel it to be the good news&mdash;the
+only news which can give comfort to fallen and sorrowful men, tied and
+bound with the chain of their sins, that God&rsquo;s Spirit does strive
+at all with man?&nbsp; That God is looking after men?&nbsp; That God
+is yearning over sinners, as the heart of a father yearns over his rebellious
+child, as the heart of a faithful and loving husband yearns after an
+unfaithful wife?&nbsp; That God does not take a disgust at us for all
+our unworthiness, but wills that none should perish, but that all should
+come to repentance?&nbsp; Oh joyful news!&nbsp; Man may be, as the text
+says that he was in the time of Noah, so low fallen that he is but flesh
+like the brutes that perish; the imaginations of his heart may be only
+evil continually; his spirit may be dead within him, given up to all
+low and fleshly appetites and passions, anger, and greediness, and filth;
+and yet the pure and holy Spirit of God condescends to strive and struggle
+with him, to convince him of sin, and make him discontented and ashamed
+at his own brutishness, and shake and terrify his soul with the wholesome
+thought: &ldquo;I am a sinner&mdash;I am wrong&mdash;I am living such
+a life as God never meant me to live&mdash;I am not what I ought to
+be&mdash;I have fallen short of what God intended me to be.&nbsp; Surely
+some evil will come to me from this.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then the Holy Spirit
+convinces man of righteousness.&nbsp; He shows man that what he has
+fallen short of is the glory of God; that man was meant to be, as St.
+Paul says, the likeness and glory of God; to show forth God&rsquo;s
+glory, and beauty, and righteousness, and love in his own daily life;
+as a looking-glass, though it is not the sun, still gives an image and
+likeness of the sun, when the sun shines on it, and shows forth the
+glory of the sunbeams which are reflected on it.</p>
+<p>And then, the Holy Spirit convinces man of judgment.&nbsp; He shows
+man that God cannot suffer men, or angels, or any other rational spirits
+and immortal souls, to be unlike Himself; that because He is the only
+and perfect good, whatsoever is unlike Him must be bad; because He is
+the only and perfect love, who wills blessings and good to all, whatsoever
+is unlike Him must be unloving, hating, and hateful&mdash;a curse and
+evil to all around it; because He is the only perfect Maker and Preserver,
+whatsoever is unlike Him must be in its very nature hurtful, destroying,
+deadly&mdash;a disease which injures this good world, and which He will
+therefore cut out, burn up, destroy in some way or other, if it will
+not submit to be cured.&nbsp; For this, my friends, is the meaning of
+God&rsquo;s judgments on sinners; this is why He sent a flood to drown
+the world of the ungodly; this is why He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah;
+this is why He swept away the nations of Canaan; this is why He destroyed
+Jerusalem, His own beloved city, and scattered the Jews over the face
+of the whole earth unto this day; this is why He destroyed heathen Rome
+of old, and why He has destroyed, from time to time, in every age and
+country, great nations and mighty cities by earthquake, and famine,
+and pestilence, and the sword; because He knows that sin is ruin and
+misery to all; that it is a disease which spreads by infection among
+fallen men; and that He must cut off the corrupt nation for the sake
+of preserving mankind, as the surgeon cuts off a diseased limb, that
+his patient&rsquo;s whole body may not die.&nbsp; But the surgeon will
+not cut off the limb as long as there is a chance of saving it: he will
+not cut it off till it is mortified and dead, and certain to infect
+the whole body with the same death, or till it is so inflamed that it
+will inflame the whole body also, and burn up the patient&rsquo;s life
+with fever.&nbsp; Till then he tends it in hope; tries by all means
+to cure it.&nbsp; And so does the Lord, the Lord Jesus, the great Physician,
+whom His Father has appointed to heal and cure this poor fallen world.&nbsp;
+As long as there is hope of curing any man, any nation, any generation
+of men, so long will his Spirit strive lovingly and hopefully with man.&nbsp;
+For see the blessed words of the text: &ldquo;My Spirit shall not always
+strive with man.&nbsp; This must end.&nbsp; This must end at some time
+or other.&nbsp; This battle between my Spirit and the wicked and perverse
+wills of these sinners; this battle between the love and the justice
+and the purity which I am trying to teach them, and the corruption and
+the violence with which they are filling the earth.&rdquo;&nbsp; But
+there is no passion in the Lord, no spite, no sudden rage, like the
+brute passionate anger of weak man.&nbsp; Our anger, if we are not under
+the guiding of God&rsquo;s Spirit, conquers our wills, carries us away,
+makes us say and do on the moment&mdash;God forgive us for it&mdash;whatsoever
+our passion prompts us.&nbsp; The Lord&rsquo;s anger does not conquer
+Him.&nbsp; It does not conquer His patience, His love, His steadfast
+will for the good of all.&nbsp; Even when it shows itself in the flood
+and the earthquake; even though it break up the fountains of the great
+deep, and destroy from off the earth both man and beast, yet it is,
+and was, and ever will be, the anger of The Lamb&mdash;a patient, a
+merciful, and a loving anger.</p>
+<p>Therefore the Lord says: &ldquo;Yet his days shall be one hundred
+and twenty years.&rdquo;&nbsp; One hundred and twenty years more he
+would endure those corrupt and violent sinners, in the hope of correcting
+them.&nbsp; One hundred and twenty years more would God&rsquo;s Spirit
+strive with men.&nbsp; One hundred and twenty years more the long-suffering
+of God, as St. Peter says, would wait, if by any means they would turn
+and repent.&nbsp; Oh, wonderful love and condescension of God!&nbsp;
+God waits for man!&nbsp; The Holy One waits for the unholy!&nbsp; The
+Creator waits for the work of His own hands!&nbsp; The wrathful God,
+who repents that He has made man upon the earth, waits one hundred and
+twenty years for the very creatures whom He repents having made!&nbsp;
+Does this seem strange to us&mdash;unlike our notions of God?&nbsp;
+If it is strange to us, my friends, its being strange is only a proof
+of how far we have fallen from the likeness of God, wherein man was
+originally created.&nbsp; If we were more like God, then the accounts
+of God&rsquo;s long-suffering, and mercy, and repentance, which we read
+in the Bible, would not be so strange to us.&nbsp; We should understand
+what God declares of Himself, by seeing the same feelings working in
+ourselves, which He declares to be working in Himself.&nbsp; And if
+we were more righteous and more loving, we should understand more how
+God&rsquo;s will was a loving and a righteous will; how His justice
+was His mercy, and His mercy His justice, instead of dividing His substance,
+who is one God, by fancying that His mercy and His justice are two different
+attributes, which are at times contrary the one to the other.</p>
+<p>We read nothing here about God&rsquo;s absolute purposes, and fixed
+decrees, whereof men talk so often, making a god in their own fallen
+image, after their own fallen likeness.&nbsp; The Lord, the Word of
+God, of whom the Bible tells us, does not think it beneath his dignity
+to say: &ldquo;It repenteth me that I have made man.&rdquo;&nbsp; Different,
+truly, from that false god which man makes in his own image.&nbsp; Man
+is proud, and he fancies that God is proud; man is self-willed and selfish,
+and he fancies that God is self-willed and selfish; man is arbitrary
+and obstinate, and determined to have his own way just because it is
+his own way; and then he fancies that God is arbitrary and obstinate,
+and determines to have His own way and will, just because it is His
+own way and will.&nbsp; But wilt thou know, oh vain man, why God will
+have His own way and will?&nbsp; Because His way is a good way, and
+His will a loving will; because the Lord knows that His way is the only
+path of life, and joy, and blessing to man and beast, yes, and to the
+very hairs of our head, which are all numbered, and to the sparrows,
+whereof not one falls to the ground without our Father&rsquo;s knowledge;
+because His will is a loving will, which wills that none should perish,
+but that all should come and be saved in body, soul, and spirit.&nbsp;
+He will have His own will done, not because it is His own will, but
+because it is good, good for men.&nbsp; And if men will change and repent,
+then will He change and repent also.&nbsp; If man will resist the striving
+of God&rsquo;s Spirit with him, then will the Lord say: &ldquo;It repenteth
+me that I have made that man.&rdquo;&nbsp; But if a man will repent
+him of the evil, then God will repent Him of the evil also.&nbsp; If
+a man will let God&rsquo;s Spirit convince him, and will open his ears
+and hear, and open his eyes and see, and open his heart to take in the
+loving thoughts and the right thoughts, and the penitent and humble
+thoughts, which do come to him&mdash;you know they do come to you all
+at times&mdash;then the Lord will repent also, as he repents, and repent
+concerning the evil which He has declared concerning that man.&nbsp;
+So said the Lord, who cannot change, the same yesterday, to-day, and
+for ever, the same now that He was in the days of the flood, to Jeremiah
+the prophet, when He moved him to go down to the potter&rsquo;s house,
+and watch him there at his work.</p>
+<p>And the potter made a vessel&mdash;something which would be useful
+and good for a certain purpose&mdash;but the clay was marred in the
+hand of the potter.&nbsp; He was good and skilful; but there was a fault
+in the clay.&nbsp; What did he do?&nbsp; Throw the clay away as useless?&nbsp;
+No.&nbsp; He made it again another vessel.&nbsp; He was determined to
+make, not anything, but something useful and good.&nbsp; And if the
+clay, being faulty, failed him once, he would try again.&nbsp; He would
+change his purpose and plan, but not his right will to make good and
+useful vessels; them he <i>would</i> make, if not by one way, then by
+another.&nbsp; And Jeremiah watched him; and as he watched, the Spirit
+of the Lord came on him, and taught him that that poor potter&rsquo;s
+way of working with his clay, was a pattern and likeness of the Lord&rsquo;s
+work on earth.&nbsp; Oh shame, that this great parable should have been
+twisted by men to make out that God is an arbitrary tyrant, who works
+by a brute necessity!&nbsp; It taught Jeremiah the very opposite.&nbsp;
+It taught him what it ought to teach us, that God does change, because
+man changes, that God&rsquo;s steadfast will is the good of men, and
+therefore because men change their weak self-willed course, and fall,
+and seek out many inventions, therefore God changes to follow them,
+like a good shepherd, tracking and following the lost and wandering
+sheep up and down, right and left, over hill and dale, if by any means
+He may find him, and bring him home on His shoulders to the fold, calling
+upon the angels of God: &ldquo;Rejoice with me, for I have found my
+sheep which I had lost.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This is the likeness of God.&nbsp; The good and loving will of a
+Father following his wandering children.&nbsp; The likeness of a loving
+Father repenting that He hath brought into the world sinful children,
+to be a misery to themselves and all around them, and yet for the same
+reason loving those children, striving with their wicked wills to the
+very last, giving them one last chance and time for repentance; as the
+Lord did to those evil men of the old world, sending to them Noah, a
+preacher of righteousness, if by any means they would turn from their
+sins and be saved.&nbsp; Ay, not only preaching to their ears by Noah,
+but to their hearts by His Spirit; as St. Peter tells us, He Himself,
+Christ the Lord, went Himself by His Spirit to those very sinners before
+the flood, and strove to bring them to their reason again.&nbsp; By
+His Spirit; by the very same one and only Holy Spirit of God, St. Peter
+says, by which Christ Himself was raised from the dead, did He try to
+raise the souls of those sinners before the flood, from the death of
+sin to the life of righteousness: but they would not.&nbsp; They were
+disobedient.&nbsp; Their wills resisted His will to the last; and then
+the flood came, and swept them all away.</p>
+<p>And so the first work of the heavenly Workman was marred in the making
+by no fault of His, but by the fault of what He made.&nbsp; He made
+men persons, rational beings with wills, that they might be willingly
+like Him: but they used those wills to be unlike Him, to rebel against
+Him, and to fill the earth with violence and corruption.&nbsp; And so,
+for the good of all mankind to come, He had to sweep them all away.&nbsp;
+But of that same sinful clay He made another vessel, as it seemed good
+to Him; even Noah and his Sons, whom He saved that He might carry on
+the race of the Sons of God unto this day.</p>
+<p>And after that again, my friends, in a day more dark and evil still,
+when the earth was again corrupt before God, and filled with violence;
+when all flesh had corrupted His way upon the earth, so that, as St.
+Paul said of them, there was none that did good, no not one: then the
+same Lord, when He saw that all the world lay in wickedness, and that
+the clay of human-kind was marred in the hands of the potter, then did
+He cast away that clay as reprobate and useless, and destroy mankind
+off the face of the earth?&nbsp; Not so.&nbsp; Then, when there was
+none to help, His own arm brought salvation, and His own righteousness
+sustained Him; He trod the wine-press alone, and of the people there
+was none with Him.&nbsp; His own righteousness sustained Him.&nbsp;
+His perfectly good and righteous will never failed Him for a moment;
+man He would save, and man He saved.&nbsp; If none else could do it,
+He would do it Himself.&nbsp; He would bring salvation with His own
+arm.&nbsp; He would fulfil His Father&rsquo;s will, which is that none
+should perish; He would be made flesh, and dwell among men, that man
+might behold the likeness of God the Father, full of grace and truth,
+and see what they were meant to be.&nbsp; Then, in Him, in Jesus who
+wept over Jerusalem, was fully revealed and shown the likeness and glory
+of the Lord; the Lord in whose image man was made; who walked and spoke
+with Adam in the garden; who was not ashamed to say that it repented
+Him that He had made man; whom Ezekiel saw upon His throne, and as it
+were upon the throne the appearance of the likeness of a man; whom Daniel
+saw, and knew him to be the Son of Man.&nbsp; Not a man, then, of flesh
+and blood; but the Eternal Word of God, in whose image man was made,
+who could be loving and merciful, long-suffering and repenting Him of
+the evil, but never of the good.&nbsp; He came, and He swept away, as
+He had told the Apostles that He would do, by such afflictions as man
+had never seen since the beginning of the world until then, that Roman
+world with all its devilish systems and maxims, whereby the nations
+were kept down in slavery and sin; and He founded a new heaven and a
+new earth, wherein dwell righteousness, even this Holy Catholic Church,
+to which we all belong this day.</p>
+<p>Yes, my friends, this is our gospel, our good news, that there is
+a God whose Spirit strives with sinners to change them into His own
+likeness.&nbsp; A God who is no dark, obstinate, inexorable Fate, whose
+arbitrary decrees must come to pass; but a loving and merciful God,
+long-suffering, and who repenteth Him of the evil; who repents Him of
+the evil which is in man, and hates it, and has sworn to Himself to
+fight against it, till He has put all enemies under His foot, and cast
+out of His kingdom all things which offend.&nbsp; Who repents Him of
+the evil in man: but who will never again repent Him of having made
+man, for then He would repent of having become man; He would repent
+of having been conceived of the Holy Ghost; He would repent of having
+been born of the Virgin Mary; He would repent of having been crucified,
+dead, and buried; He would repent of having risen from the dead, and
+ascended up into heaven in His man&rsquo;s body, and soul, and spirit;
+He would repent of sitting on the right hand of God; He would repent
+of coming to judge the quick and the dead; He would repent of having
+done His Father&rsquo;s will on earth, even as He did it from all eternity
+in the bosom of the Father.&nbsp; For He is a man; and even as the reasonable
+soul and body are one man, so God and man are one Christ.&nbsp; As man,
+He did His Father&rsquo;s will in Jud&aelig;a of old; as man, He will
+judge the world; as man He rules it now; as man, St. John saw Him fifty
+years after He ascended to heaven, and His eyes were like a flame of
+fire, and His hair like fine wool, and He was girt under the bosom with
+a golden girdle, and His voice was like the sound of many waters; as
+man, He said: &ldquo;Fear not: I am the first and the last; I am He
+that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen;
+and have the keys of death and hell.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; This is
+the gospel, the good news for fallen man, that there is a Man in the
+midst of the throne of God, to whom all power is given in heaven and
+earth; that the fate of the world, and all that is therein&mdash;the
+fate of suns and stars&mdash;the fate of kings and nations&mdash;the
+fate of every publican and harlot, and heathen and outcast&mdash;the
+fate of all who are in death and hell, depends alike upon the sacred
+heart of Jesus; the heart which groaned at the tomb of Lazarus His friend;
+the heart which wept over Jerusalem; the heart which said to the blessed
+Magdalene, the woman who was a sinner: &ldquo;Go in peace; thy sins
+are forgiven thee;&rdquo; the heart which now yearns after every sinful
+and wandering soul in His church, and all over the earth of God, crying
+to you all: &ldquo;Why will ye die?&nbsp; Have I any pleasure in the
+death of him that dieth, saith the Lord, and not rather that he should
+turn from his wickedness and live?&nbsp; Come unto me, all ye that are
+weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.&rdquo;&nbsp; Oh, my
+friends, wonderful as my words are&mdash;as wonderful to me who speak
+them as they can be to you who hear them&mdash;yet they are true.&nbsp;
+True; for on that table stand the bread and wine whereof He Himself
+said, standing upon this very earth which He Himself had made: &ldquo;This
+is my body which is given for you; this cup is the new covenant in my
+blood, which I will give for the life of the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXXVII&mdash;THE KINGDOM OF GOD</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The kingdom of God is within you.&mdash;LUKE xvii. 21.</p>
+<p>These words are in the second lesson for this morning&rsquo;s service.&nbsp;
+Let us think a little about them.</p>
+<p>What they mean must depend on what the kingdom of God means; for
+that is the one thing about which they speak.</p>
+<p>Now, the kingdom of God is very often spoken of in the New Testament.&nbsp;
+Indeed, it is the thing it speaks of above all others.&nbsp; It was
+the thing which our Lord went about preaching.&nbsp; It was the thing
+of which He spoke in His parables, likening the kingdom of God first
+to one thing, then to another, that He might make men understand what
+it was like.</p>
+<p>Now, it is worth remarking that we&mdash;I mean even religious people&mdash;speak
+very little about the kingdom of God nowadays.&nbsp; One hears less
+about it than about any other words, almost, which stand in the New
+Testament.&nbsp; Both in sermons and in religious books, and in the
+talk of godly people, one hears the kingdom of God spoken of very seldom.&nbsp;
+One hears words about the Church, which are very good and true; but
+very little, if anything, about the kingdom of God, though both St.
+Paul, and St. John, and the blessed Lord Himself, speak of the two together,
+as if they could not be parted; as if one could not think of the one
+without thinking of the other.&nbsp; And we hear words about the gospel,
+too, some of them very good and true, and others, I am sorry to say,
+very bad and false: but, true or false, they are not often joined now
+in men&rsquo;s minds, or mouths, or books, with the kingdom of God.&nbsp;
+But the New Testament joins them almost always.&nbsp; It says that gospel
+must be good news.&nbsp; Therefore the gospel must be good news about
+something.&nbsp; But about what?&nbsp; We hear all manner of answers
+nowadays; but we hear the right one very seldom.&nbsp; People talk of
+the gospel as if it only meant the good news that one man can be saved
+here, and another man can be saved there.&nbsp; And that is good news,
+certainly.&nbsp; It is good and blessed news to hear that any one poor
+sinner can be saved from sin, and from the wages of sin.&nbsp; But the
+holy scriptures, when they talk of the gospel, call it the gospel of
+the kingdom of God.&nbsp; And I think it best and wisest to call it
+oftenest, what the holy scripture calls it oftenest, and to try and
+understand, first of all, what that means, what the good news of the
+kingdom of God is: and to understand that, we must first understand
+what the kingdom of God is.</p>
+<p>But some may answer, holy scripture speaks of the gospel of salvation.&nbsp;
+True, it does, once or twice.&nbsp; But what does that show?&nbsp; Is
+that a different gospel from the gospel of the kingdom of God?&nbsp;
+Are there two gospels?&nbsp; Surely not.&nbsp; Else why would holy scripture
+speak so often of &ldquo;the gospel&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;the good news,&rdquo;
+by itself, without any word after to show what it was about?&nbsp; It
+says often simply &ldquo;the gospel;&rdquo; because there is but one
+gospel; and, as St. Paul says, if any man or angel preach any other
+than that one, &ldquo;Let him be anathema.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Therefore the gospel of salvation must be the same as the gospel
+of the kingdom of God; and, therefore, it seems to me, that salvation
+and the kingdom of God must be one and the same thing.</p>
+<p>Now, do you think so?&nbsp; When I say &ldquo;The kingdom of God
+is salvation,&rdquo; do you think it is?&nbsp; Have you even any clear
+notion of what I mean when I say it?&nbsp; Some of you have not, I am
+afraid; you cannot see at first sight what salvation and the kingdom
+of God have to do with each other.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp; You think salvation
+means being saved from hell, and going to heaven, when you die.&nbsp;
+And so it does: but I trust in God and in God&rsquo;s holy scripture,
+that it means a great deal more; for I think it means being unfit for
+hell, and fit for heaven, before we die.&nbsp; At least, so says the
+Church Catechism, which teaches every little child to thank his Heavenly
+Father for having brought him into such a state of salvation in this
+life, even while he is young.&nbsp; Thanks be to The Spirit of God which
+taught our fore-fathers to put these precious words into the Church
+Catechism, to guard us against falling into the very same mistake as
+the Pharisees of old fell into, when they asked our Lord when the kingdom
+of God was to come.&nbsp; And, believe me, it is easy enough and common
+enough to fall into the same mistake.</p>
+<p>For what was their mistake?&nbsp; They fancied that the kingdom of
+God was not yet come.&nbsp; And do not most of you think the same?&nbsp;
+They did not deny, of course, that God was almighty, and could rule
+and govern all mankind if He chose so to do.&nbsp; But they did not
+believe that He was ruling and governing all mankind then, because they
+did not know what His rule and government were like.&nbsp; Now, St.
+Paul tells us what God&rsquo;s kingdom is like.&nbsp; The kingdom of
+God, he says, is righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.&nbsp;
+So wherever there is righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit,
+there the kingdom of God is.&nbsp; But His kingdom over what?&nbsp;
+Over dumb animals, or over men?&nbsp; Over men, certainly; for dumb
+animals cannot have righteousness, or joy in the Holy Spirit.&nbsp;
+But over what part of a man?&nbsp; Over his body or over his spirit,
+as we call it nowadays?&nbsp; Over his spirit, certainly; for it is
+only our spirits which can be righteous, or peaceful, or joyful in God&rsquo;s
+Spirit.&nbsp; Therefore God&rsquo;s kingdom, of which St. Paul speaks,
+is a kingdom, a government over the souls, the spirits of men.&nbsp;
+Now, are our spirits the inward part of us, or our bodies?&nbsp; Our
+spirits, certainly.&nbsp; We all say, and say rightly, that our bodies
+are the outward part of us, and that our spirits are within us.&nbsp;
+Now, do you not see how that agrees exactly with the blessed Lord&rsquo;s
+saying in the text, &ldquo;Behold, the kingdom of God is within you&rdquo;&mdash;that
+is, in your spirits, because it is righteousness, and peace, and joy
+in the Holy Spirit; and these are things which only our souls, not our
+bodies at all, can have.</p>
+<p>But these Pharisees were not righteous; they were wicked and hypocritical
+men.&nbsp; Was the kingdom of God within them?&nbsp; The blessed Lord
+said plainly that it was.&nbsp; He said not, &ldquo;The kingdom of God
+is within some people&rsquo;s hearts;&rdquo; or, &ldquo;The kingdom
+of God is within the hearts of believers;&rdquo; or, &ldquo;The kingdom
+of God might be within you if you liked.&rdquo;&nbsp; But He said that
+the kingdom of God was then and there within the hearts of those wicked
+and unbelieving Pharisees.</p>
+<p>Now, how could that be?&nbsp; In the same way that some time before
+that, as St. Luke tells us, the power of the Lord was present to heal
+those same Pharisees; and they were for the time amazed, and glorified
+God, and were filled with fear at His mighty works; but not healed.&nbsp;
+Their souls were not cured of their sin and folly by any means; for
+we find in the very next chapter, that because Jesus cured a palsied
+man on the Sabbath-day they were filled with madness, and consulted
+together how to kill Him.</p>
+<p>For, my friends, as it was with them, so it is with us.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s
+kingdom is within every one of us; but it may make us worse, as well
+as make us better.&nbsp; It may fill us with righteousness, and peace,
+and joy in the Holy Spirit; or it may fill us, as it filled the Pharisees,
+with madness, and hatred of religion and of goodness; as it is written,
+that the gospel may be a savour of death unto death to us, as well as
+a savour of life unto life.&nbsp; And it depends on us which it shall
+be.</p>
+<p>This is what I mean: God&rsquo;s kingdom is within each of us.&nbsp;
+God is the King of our hearts and souls; our baptism tells us so; and
+it tells us truly.&nbsp; And because God is the King of each of our
+hearts, He comes everlastingly to take possession of our hearts, and
+continues claiming our souls for His own.&nbsp; He speaks in our hearts
+day and night; whenever we have a good thought, He speaks in our hearts,
+and says to us: &ldquo;I am the King of your spirit.&nbsp; It must obey
+me.&nbsp; I put this good thought into your hearts, and you are bound
+to follow that good thought, because it is a law of my kingdom.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Or again, God speaks in our hearts, and says to us: &ldquo;You have
+done this wrong thing.&nbsp; You know that it is wrong.&nbsp; You know
+that it is an offence against my law.&nbsp; Why have you rebelled against
+me?&rdquo;&nbsp; Or again, when we see anyone do a good, a loving, or
+a noble action; or when we read of the lives of good and noble men and
+women; above all, when we read or hear of the character and doings of
+the blessed Lord Jesus, then and there God speaks in our hearts, and
+stirs us up to love and admire these noble and blessed examples, and
+says to us: &ldquo;That is right.&nbsp; That is beautiful.&nbsp; That
+is what men should do.&nbsp; That is what you should do.&nbsp; Why are
+you not like that man?&nbsp; Why are you not like my saints?&nbsp; Why
+are you not like me, the Lord Jesus Christ?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>You all surely know what I mean.&nbsp; You know that I do not mean
+that you hear a voice speaking to your ears, but that thoughts and feelings
+come into your heart, without you putting them there: ay, often enough,
+in spite of your trying to drive them away.&nbsp; Now, those right thoughts
+are the kingdom of God within you.&nbsp; They are the voice of the Lord
+Jesus Christ speaking by His Holy Spirit to your spirit, and telling
+you that He is your King, and that you ought to obey Him; and that obeying
+Him means being righteous and good, as He is righteous and good; and
+calling on you to give up your own wills and fancies, and to do His
+will, and let Him make you holy, even as He is holy.&nbsp; That, I say,
+is the kingdom of God showing itself within you, telling you that God
+is your King, and telling you how to obey Him.</p>
+<p>But what if a man will not hear that voice?&nbsp; What if a man rebels
+proudly against the good thoughts that rise in his mind, and tries to
+forget them, and grows angry with them, angry with the preacher, the
+Church Service, the Bible itself, because they <i>will</i> go on reminding
+him of what he knows in his heart to be right?&nbsp; What if those good
+thoughts only make him the more stubborn and determined to do his own
+pleasure, and follow his own interests, and do his own will?</p>
+<p>Do you not see that to that man God&rsquo;s kingdom over his heart
+is a savour of death unto death&mdash;that his finding out that God
+is his Lord only makes him more rebellious&mdash;that God&rsquo;s Spirit
+striving with his heart to bring it right, only stirs up his stubbornness
+and self-will, and makes him go the more obstinately wrong?</p>
+<p>Oh, my friends, this is a fearful thought!&nbsp; That man can become
+worse by God&rsquo;s loving desire to make him better!&nbsp; But so
+it is.&nbsp; So it was with Pharaoh of old.&nbsp; All God&rsquo;s pleading
+with him by the message of Moses and Aaron, by the mighty plagues which
+God sent on Egypt, only hardened Pharaoh&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; The Lord
+God spoke to him, and his message only lashed Pharaoh&rsquo;s proud
+and wicked will into greater fury and rebellion, as a vicious horse
+becomes the more unmanageable the more you punish it.&nbsp; Therefore,
+it is said plainly in scripture, that <i>The Lord</i> hardened Pharaoh&rsquo;s
+heart; not as some fancy, that the Lord&rsquo;s will was to make Pharaoh
+hard-hearted and wicked.&nbsp; God forbid.&nbsp; The Lord is the fountain
+of good only, and not He, but we and the devil, make evil.&nbsp; But
+the more the Lord pleaded with Pharaoh, and tried to bend his will,
+the more self-willed he became.&nbsp; The more the Lord showed Pharaoh
+that the Lord was King, the more he hated the kingdom and will of God,
+the more he determined to be king himself, and to obey no law but his
+own wicked fancies and pleasures, and asked: &ldquo;Who is the Lord,
+that I should obey Him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And so it was with the Pharisees.&nbsp; When they found out that
+the kingdom of God was within them, that God was the King of their hearts
+and minds, and was trying to change their feelings and alter their opinions,
+it only maddened them.&nbsp; They were determined not to change.&nbsp;
+They were determined not to confess that they had been wrong, and had
+mistaken the meaning of holy scripture.&nbsp; They were too proud to
+confess what Jesus told them, that they were no better than the poor
+ignorant common people whom they despised.&nbsp; And yet they knew in
+their hearts that He was right.&nbsp; When the Lord told them the parable
+of the vineyard, they answered, &ldquo;God forbid!&rdquo; they felt
+at once that the parable had to do with them&mdash;that they were the
+wicked husbandmen on whom He said their master would take vengeance:
+but that only maddened them the more, till they ended by crucifying
+the Lord of Glory, upon a pretence which they knew was a false and lying
+one; and when Judas Iscariot said, &ldquo;I have betrayed the innocent
+blood,&rdquo; they did not deny that the Lord Jesus was innocent; all
+they answered was, &ldquo;What is that to us?&rdquo;&nbsp; They were
+determined to have their own way whether He was innocent or not.&nbsp;
+They had seen God&rsquo;s likeness.&nbsp; They had seen what God was
+like, by seeing the conduct of His only begotten Son Jesus Christ.&nbsp;
+And when they saw God&rsquo;s likeness they hated it, because it was
+not like themselves.&nbsp; And the more God strove with their hearts,
+and tried to make them obey Him, the more, in short, they felt His kingdom
+within them, the more they hated that kingdom of God within them, because
+it reproved them, and convinced them of sin.&nbsp; Oh, my friends, young
+people especially, beware; beware lest you fall into the same miserable
+state of mind.&nbsp; The kingdom of God is within you.&nbsp; The Holy
+Spirit, by which you were regenerate in holy baptism, is stirring and
+pleading with your hearts, making you happy when you do right, unhappy
+when you do wrong.&nbsp; Oh, listen to those good thoughts and feelings
+within you!&nbsp; Never fancy that they are your own thoughts and feelings:
+else you will fancy that you can put them away and take them back again
+when you choose to change and become religious.&nbsp; Do not let the
+devil deceive you into that notion.&nbsp; These good thoughts and feelings
+are the Spirit of God.&nbsp; They are the signs that the kingdom of
+God is within you; that God is King and Master of your hearts and minds;
+and that you cannot keep Him out of them: but that He can enter into
+them when He likes, and put right thoughts into them.&nbsp; But though
+you cannot prevent God and His kingdom entering into you, you can refuse
+to enter into it.&nbsp; Alas! alas! how many of you shut your ears to
+God&rsquo;s voice: try to drive God&rsquo;s Spirit out of your own hearts;
+try to forget what is right, because it is unpleasant to remember it,
+and say to yourselves, &ldquo;I will have my own way.&nbsp; I will try
+and forget what the clergyman said in his sermon, or what I learnt at
+school.&nbsp; I am grown up now, and I will do what I like.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Oh, my friends, is it a wise or a hopeful battle to fight against the
+living God?&nbsp; Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are
+sealed to the day of redemption, lest He go away from you and leave
+you to yourselves, spiritually dead, twice dead, plucked up by the roots,
+whose end is to be burned.&nbsp; Grieve Him not, lest He depart, and
+with Him both the Father and the Son.&nbsp; And then you will not know
+right from wrong, because God the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of right,
+has left you.&nbsp; You will not know what a man ought to be or do,
+because the Son of Man, the perfect likeness of God, and therefore the
+pattern of man, has left you.&nbsp; You will not know that God the Father
+is your Father, but only fancy him a stern taskmaster, reaping where
+He has not sown, and requiring of you more than you are bound to pay,
+because God the Father has left you.</p>
+<p>You may, indeed, keep out ugly thoughts for a time.&nbsp; You may
+go on wantonly in sin, and worldliness, and self-will.&nbsp; And then,
+by way of falling deeper still, you may take up with some false sort
+of religion, which makes people fancy that they know God, and are one
+of His elect, while in works they deny Him, and their sinful heart is
+unchanged.&nbsp; Then your mouth indeed may be full of second-hand talk
+about the gospel.&nbsp; But what gospel?&nbsp; I call that a devil&rsquo;s
+gospel, and not God&rsquo;s gospel, which makes men fancy that they
+may continue in sin that grace may abound.&nbsp; I call any grace which
+leaves men in their sins the devil&rsquo;s grace, and not God&rsquo;s
+grace.&nbsp; Certainly it is not the gospel of the kingdom of God; for
+if it was, it would produce in men the fruits of that kingdom, righteousness,
+and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, instead of the fruits which we
+see too often, bigotry and self-conceit, bitterness, evil-speaking,
+and hard judgments, and joy in a most unholy and damnable spirit, not
+to mention covetousness and deceitfulness, or even in some cases wantonness
+and lust.&nbsp; And yet such men will often fancy that they belong especially
+to God, and doubt whether He will have mercy on any who do not exactly
+agree with them; while in reality God and His kingdom have utterly left
+their hearts, and they are as blind and dark as the beasts which perish.&nbsp;
+May God preserve us from that second death which comes on sinners, when,
+after a sinful youth, their terrified souls begin to cry out in fear
+at the sight of their sins; and they, instead of casting away their
+sins, keep their sins, or change old sins for more respectable and safe
+new ones, and drug their souls with false doctrines, as foolish nurses
+quiet children&rsquo;s crying by giving them poisonous medicines.&nbsp;
+I know men who have fallen, I really fear at times, into that state
+of mind, and are like those Pharisees of whom our Lord said: &ldquo;Ye
+serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of
+hell?&rdquo;&nbsp; Even for them it is not too late: but, let them recollect,
+if the kingdom of God is within them, if they have any feelings of right
+and wrong left in them, that their covetousness, and lying, and slandering,
+and conceit, is fighting against God; that these are just what God desires
+to cast out of them; and that unless they give up their hearts to God,
+and let Him cast out their sins, and be converted, and become like little
+children, gentle, humble, teachable, friendly, and kind-hearted, obedient
+to their heavenly Father, God will cast them out of His kingdom among
+the things which offend, and bring a bad name on religion; among those
+very profligate and open sinners whom they are so ready to despise and
+curse.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXXVIII&mdash;THE LIGHT</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light:
+for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.&nbsp; Wherefore He saith,
+Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall
+give thee light.&mdash;EPHESIANS v. 13, 14.</p>
+<p>St. Paul has been telling the Ephesians who they are; that they are
+God&rsquo;s dear children.&nbsp; To whom they belong; to Christ who
+has given Himself for them.&nbsp; What they ought to do; to follow God&rsquo;s
+likeness, and live in love.&nbsp; That they are light in the Lord; and
+are to walk as children of the light; and have no fellowship with the
+unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.&nbsp; As much
+as to say: Do not believe those who tell you that there is no harm in
+young people going wrong together before marriage, provided they intend
+to marry after all.&nbsp; Do not believe those who tell you that there
+is no harm in filthy words, provided you do not do filthy things; and
+no harm in swearing, provided you do not mean the curses which you speak.&nbsp;
+Do not believe those who tell you there is no harm in poaching another
+man&rsquo;s game, provided you do not steal his poultry, or anything
+except his game.&nbsp; Do not believe those who tell you that there
+is no harm in being covetous, provided you do not actually cheat your
+neighbours; and that the sin lies, not in being covetous at all, but
+in being more covetous than the law will let you be.</p>
+<p>Do not believe those who say to you that you may keep dark thoughts,
+spite, suspicion, envy, cunning, covetousness in your hearts day after
+day, year after year, provided you do not openly act on them so as to
+do your neighbours any great and notorious injury.</p>
+<p>Plenty of people will tell you so, and try to deceive you with vain
+words, and give you arguments, and texts of scripture perhaps, to prove
+that sin is not sin, and that the children of light may do the works
+of darkness.&nbsp; But do not believe them, says St. Paul.&nbsp; They
+are deceivers, and their words are vain.&nbsp; These are the very things
+which bring down God&rsquo;s wrath on His disobedient children.&nbsp;
+These are the bad ways which make young people, when they are married,
+despise, and distrust, and quarrel with each other, and live miserable
+lives together, as children of wrath, peevish, and wrathful, and discontented
+with each other, because they feel that God is angry with them, just
+as Adam in the garden, when he felt that he had sinned, and that God
+was wroth with him, laid the blame on his wife, and accused her, whom
+he ought to have loved, and protected, and excused.</p>
+<p>These are the bad ways which make people ashamed when they meet a
+good and a respectable person, make them afraid of being overheard,
+afraid of being found out, fond of haunting low and out-of-the-way places
+where they will not be seen; fond of prowling and lurching out at night
+after their own sinful pleasures, because the darkness hides them from
+their neighbours, and seems to hide them from themselves, though it
+cannot hide them from God.&nbsp; These are the sins which make men silent,
+cunning, dark, sour, double-tongued, afraid to look anyone full in the
+face, unwilling to make friends, afraid of opening their minds to anyone,
+because they have something on their minds which they dare not tell
+their neighbours, which they dare not even tell themselves, but think
+about as little as they can help.&nbsp; Do you not know what I mean?&nbsp;
+Do you not often see it in others?&nbsp; Have you never felt it in yourselves
+when you have done wrong, that dark feeling within which shows itself
+in dark looks?&nbsp; You talk of a &ldquo;dark-looking man,&rdquo; or
+a &ldquo;dark sort of person;&rdquo; and you mean, do you not, a man
+whom you cannot make out, who does not wish you to make him out; who
+keeps his thoughts and his feelings to himself, and is never frank or
+free, except with bad companions, when the world cannot see him; who
+goes about hanging down his head, and looking out of the corners of
+his eyes, as if he were afraid of the very sunshine&mdash;afraid of
+the light.&nbsp; We know that such a man has something dark on his mind.&nbsp;
+We call him a &ldquo;dark sort of man.&rdquo;&nbsp; And we are right.&nbsp;
+We say of him what St. Paul says of him in this very epistle, when he
+says, that sin is darkness, and sinful works the deeds of darkness;
+and that goodness, and righteousness, and truth, are light, the very
+light of God and the Spirit of God.&nbsp; Our reason, our common sense,
+which is given us by God&rsquo;s Spirit, the Spirit of light, makes
+us use the right words, the same words as St. Paul does, and call sin
+darkness.</p>
+<p>But rather reprove these dark works, says St Paul; that is, look
+at them, and see that they are utterly worthless and damnable.&nbsp;
+And how?&nbsp; &ldquo;All things that are reproved,&rdquo; he says,
+&ldquo;are made manifest by the light.&nbsp; For whatsoever makes manifest
+is light.&rdquo;&nbsp; Whatsoever makes manifest, that is, makes plain
+and clear.&nbsp; Whatsoever makes you see anything or person in heaven
+or earth as it really is; whatsoever makes you understand more about
+anything; whatsoever shows you more what you are, where you are, what
+you ought to do; whatsoever teaches you any single hint about your duty
+to God, or man, or the dumb beasts which you tend, or the soil which
+you till, or the business and line of life which you ought to follow;
+whatsoever shows you the right and the wrong in any matter, the truth
+and the falsehood in any matter, the prudent course and the imprudent
+course in any matter; in a word, whatsoever makes your mind more clear
+about any single thing in heaven or earth, is light.&nbsp; For, mind,
+St. Paul does not say, whatsoever is light makes things plain; but whatsoever
+makes things plain is light.&nbsp; That is saying a great deal more,
+thank God; for if he had said, whatsoever is light makes things clear,
+we should have been puzzled to know what was light; we should have been
+tempted to settle for ourselves what was light.&nbsp; And, God knows,
+people in all ages, and people of all religions, Christians as well
+as heathens, have been tempted to say so, and to misread this text,
+till they said: &ldquo;Whatsoever agrees with our doctrine is light,
+of course, but all other teaching is darkness, and comes from the devil;&rdquo;
+and so they oftentimes blasphemed against God&rsquo;s Holy Spirit by
+calling good actions bad ones, just because they were done by people
+who did not agree with them, and fell into the same sin as the Pharisees
+of old, who said that the Lord cast out devils by Beelzebub the prince
+of the devils.</p>
+<p>But St. Paul says, whatsoever makes anything clearer to you, is light.&nbsp;
+There is the gospel, and there is the good news of salvation again,
+coming out, as it does all through St. Paul&rsquo;s epistles, at every
+turn, just where poor, sinful, dark man least expects it.&nbsp; For,
+what does St. Paul say in the very next verse?&nbsp; &ldquo;Wherefore,&rdquo;
+he says, &ldquo;arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Christ shall give thee light!&rdquo;&nbsp; Oh blessed news!&nbsp;
+<i>Christ</i> gives us the light, and therefore we need not be afraid
+of it, but trust it, and welcome it.&nbsp; And Christ <i>gives</i> us
+the light, therefore we have not to hunt and search after it; for He
+will give it us.&nbsp; Let us think over these two matters, and see
+whether there is not a gospel and good news in them for all wretched,
+ignorant, sinful, dark souls, just as much as for those who are learned
+and wise, or bright and full of peace.</p>
+<p>Christ gives us the light.&nbsp; This agrees with what St. John says,
+that &ldquo;He is the light who lights every man who comes into the
+world.&rdquo;&nbsp; And it agrees also with what St. James says: &ldquo;Be
+not deceived, my beloved brethren.&nbsp; Every good gift and every perfect
+gift is from above, and cometh down from God, the Father of lights,
+with whom is no variableness, nor shadow of turning.&rdquo;&nbsp; And
+it agrees also with what the prophet says, that it is the Spirit of
+God which gives man understanding.&nbsp; And it agrees also with what
+the Lord Himself promised us when He was on earth, that He would send
+down on us the Spirit of God&mdash;the Spirit which proceeds alike from
+Him and from His Father, to guide us into all truth.&nbsp; Ay, my friends,
+if we really believe this, what a solemn and important thing education
+would seem to us!&nbsp; If we really believed that all light, all true
+understanding of any matter, came from the Lord Jesus Christ: and if
+we remember what the Lord Jesus&rsquo; character was; how He came to
+do good to all; to teach not merely the rich and powerful, but the poor,
+the ignorant, the outcast, the sinful: should we not say to ourselves,
+then: &ldquo;If knowledge comes from Christ, who never kept anything
+to Himself, how dare we keep knowledge to ourselves?&nbsp; If it comes
+from Him who gave Himself freely for all, surely He means that knowledge
+should be given freely to all.&nbsp; If He and His Father, and our Father,
+will that all should come to the knowledge of the truth, how dare we
+keep the truth from anyone?&rdquo;&nbsp; So we should feel it the will
+of our heavenly Father, the solemn command of our blessed Saviour, that
+our children, and not only they, but every soul around us, young and
+old, should be educated in the best possible way, and in any way whatsoever,
+rather than in none at all.&nbsp; The education of the poor would be,
+in our eyes, the most sacred duty.&nbsp; A school would be, in our eyes,
+as necessary and almost as sacred a thing as a church.&nbsp; And to
+neglect sending our children to school, or to leave our servants or
+work-people in ignorance, would seem to us an awful sin against the
+Father of lights; a rebellion against the Lord Jesus, who lights every
+man who comes into the world, and against our Father in heaven, who
+willeth not that one of these little ones should perish.</p>
+<p>And this is made still more plain and certain by the next word in
+the text: &ldquo;Christ shall <i>give</i> thee light:&rdquo; not sell
+thee light, or allow thee to find light after great struggles, and weary
+years of study: but, <i>give</i> thee light.&nbsp; Give it thee of His
+free grace and generosity.&nbsp; We might have expected that, merely
+from remembering to whom the light belongs.&nbsp; The mere fact that
+light belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the express likeness
+of His Father, might have made us sure that He would give His light
+freely to the unthankful and to the evil, just as His Father makes His
+sun to shine alike on the evil and on the good.&nbsp; Therefore this
+text does not leave us to find out the good news for ourselves.&nbsp;
+It declares to us plainly that He will give it us, as freely as He gives
+us all things richly to enjoy.</p>
+<p>But, someone will say: You surely cannot mean that we shall have
+understanding without study?</p>
+<p>You cannot mean that we are to become wise without careful thought,
+or that we are to understand books without learning to read?&nbsp; Of
+course not, my friends.&nbsp; The text does not say: &ldquo;Christ will
+give thee eyes; Christ will give thee sense:&rdquo; but, &ldquo;Christ
+will give thee light.&rdquo; . . .&nbsp; Do you not see the difference?&nbsp;
+Of what use would your eyes be without light?&nbsp; And of what use
+would light be if your eyes were shut, and you asleep?&nbsp; In darkness
+you cannot see.&nbsp; Your eyes are there, as good as ever; the world
+is there, as fair as ever: but you cannot see it, because there is no
+light.&nbsp; You can only feel it, by groping about with your hands,
+and laying hold of whatsoever happens to be nearest you.&nbsp; And do
+you think that though your bodily eyes cannot see, unless God puts His
+light in the sky, to shine on everything, and show it you, yet your
+minds and souls can see without any light from God?&nbsp; Not so, my
+friends.&nbsp; What the sun is to this earth, that the Lord Jesus Christ,
+the Word of God, is to the spirit&mdash;that is, the reason and conscience&mdash;of
+every man who comes into the world.&nbsp; Now, the good news of holy
+baptism is, that the light is here; that God&rsquo;s Spirit is with
+us, to teach us the truth about everything, that we may see it in its
+true light, as it is, as God sees it; that the day-spring from on high
+has visited us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the
+shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace; and that we
+are children of the light and of the day.&nbsp; But what if those who
+sit in darkness like the darkness; and wilfully shut their eyes tight
+that they may not see the day-spring from on high, and the light which
+God has sent into the world?&nbsp; Then the light will not profit them,
+but they will walk on still in darkness, not knowing whither they are
+going.</p>
+<p>But some may say, wicked men are very wise; although they rebel against
+God&rsquo;s Spirit, and do not even believe in God&rsquo;s Spirit, but
+say that man&rsquo;s mind can find out everything for itself, without
+God&rsquo;s help, yet they are very wise.&nbsp; Are they?&nbsp; The
+Bible tells us again and again that the wisdom of such men is folly;
+that God takes such wise men in their own craftiness.&nbsp; And the
+Bible speaks truth.&nbsp; If there is one thing of which I am more certain
+than another, my friends, it is that, just in proportion as a man is
+bad, just in proportion as he does not believe in a good Spirit of God
+who wills to teach him, and gives him light, he is a fool.&nbsp; If
+there is one thing more than another which such men&rsquo;s books have
+taught me, it is that they are in darkness, when they fancy they are
+in the brightest light; that they make the greatest mistakes when they
+intend to say the cleverest things; and when they least fancy it, fall
+into nonsense and absurdities, not merely on matters of religion, but
+on points which they profess to have studied, and in cases where, by
+their own showing, they ought to have known better.&nbsp; But our business
+is rather with ourselves.&nbsp; Our business, in this time of Lent,
+is to see whether we have been shutting our eyes; whether we have been
+walking in darkness, while God&rsquo;s light is all around us.&nbsp;
+And how shall we know that?&nbsp; Let St. John tell us: &ldquo;He that
+saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness until
+now, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because darkness has blinded
+his eyes.&rdquo;&nbsp; Hating our brother.&nbsp; Covetousness, which
+is indeed hating our brother, for it teaches us to prefer our good to
+our neighbour&rsquo;s good, to fatten ourselves at our neighbour&rsquo;s
+expense, to get his work, his custom, his money, away from him to ourselves;
+bigotry, which makes men hate and despise those who differ from them
+in religion; spite and malice against those who have injured us; suspicions
+and dark distrust of our neighbours, and of mankind in general; selfishness,
+which sets us always standing on our own rights, makes us always ready
+to take offence, always ready to think that people mean to insult us
+or injure us, and makes us moody, dark, peevish, always thinking about
+ourselves, and our plans, or our own pleasures, shut up as it were within
+ourselves&mdash;all these sins, in proportion as anyone gives way to
+them, darken the eyes of a man&rsquo;s soul.&nbsp; They really and actually
+make him more stupid, less able to understand his neighbours&rsquo;
+hearts and minds, less able to take a reasonable view of any matter
+or question whatsoever.&nbsp; You may not believe me.&nbsp; But so it
+is.&nbsp; I know it by experience to be true.&nbsp; I warn you that
+you will find it true one day; that all spite, passion, prejudice, suspicion,
+hard judgments, contempt, self-conceit, blind a man&rsquo;s reason,
+and heart, and soul, and make him stumble and fall into mistakes, even
+in worldly matters, just as surely as shutting our eyes makes us stumble
+in broad daylight.&nbsp; He who gives way to such passions is asleep,
+while he fancies himself broad awake.&nbsp; His life is a dream; and
+like a dreamer, he sees nothing really, only appearances, fancies, pictures
+of things in his own selfish brain.&nbsp; Therefore it is written: &ldquo;Awake
+thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee
+life.&rdquo;&nbsp; You may say: Can I awaken myself?&nbsp; Perhaps not,
+unless someone calls you.&nbsp; And therefore Christ calls on you to
+awake.&nbsp; He says by my mouth: Awake, thou sleeper, and I will give
+thee light; awake, thou dreamer, who fanciest that the sinful works
+of darkness can give thee any real profit, any real pleasure; awake,
+thou sleep-walker, who art going about the world in a dream, groping
+thy way on from day to day and year to year, only kept from fall and
+ruin by God&rsquo;s guiding and preserving mercy.&nbsp; Open thine eyes,
+and let in the great eternal loving light, wherein God beholds everything
+which He has made, and behold it is very good.&nbsp; Open thine eyes,
+for it is day.&nbsp; The light is here if thou wilt but use it.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I will guide thee,&rdquo; saith the Lord, &ldquo;and inform thee
+with mine eye, and teach thee in the way wherein thou shalt go.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Only believe in the light.&nbsp; Believe that all knowledge comes from
+God.&nbsp; Expect and trust that He will give thee knowledge.&nbsp;
+Pray to Him boldly to give thee knowledge, because thou art sure that
+He wishes thee to have knowledge.&nbsp; He wishes thee to know thy duty.&nbsp;
+He wishes thee to see everything as He sees it.&nbsp; &ldquo;If any
+man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all liberally and
+upbraideth not, and he shall receive it.&rdquo;&nbsp; And when thou
+hast prayed for knowledge, expect it to come; as it is written: When
+thou prayest for anything, believe that thou wilt receive it, and thou
+wilt receive it.&nbsp; If thou dost not believe that thou wilt have
+it, of course thou wilt not have it.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp; Because thou
+wilt pass by it without seeing it.&nbsp; It will be there ready for
+thee in thy daily walks; Wisdom will cry to thee at the head of every
+street; God will not deny Himself or break His promise: but thou wilt
+go past the place where wisdom is, and miss the lessons which God is
+strewing in thy path, because thou art not looking for them.&nbsp; Wisdom
+is here, my friends, and understanding is here, and the Spirit of God
+is here, if our eyes were but open to see them.&nbsp; Oh my friends,
+of all the sins of which we have to repent in this time of Lent, none
+ought to give us more solemn and bitter thoughts of shame than the way
+in which we overlook the teaching of God&rsquo;s Spirit, and shut our
+eyes to His light, times without number, every day of our lives.&nbsp;
+My friends, if our hearts were what they ought to be, if we had humble,
+loving, trustful hearts, full of faith and hope in God&rsquo;s promise
+to lead us into all truth, I believe that every joy and every sorrow
+which befell us, every book which we opened, every walk which we took
+upon the face of God&rsquo;s earth, ay, every human face into which
+we looked, would teach us some lesson, whereby we should be wiser, better,
+more aware of where we are and what God requires of us as human beings,
+neighbours, citizens, subjects, members of His church.&nbsp; All things
+would be clear to us; for we should see them in the light of God&rsquo;s
+Spirit.&nbsp; All things would look bright to us, for we should see
+them in the light of God&rsquo;s love.&nbsp; All things would work together
+for good to us, for we should understand each thing as it came before
+us, and know what it was, and what God meant it for, and how we were
+to use it.&nbsp; And knowing and seeing what was right, we should see
+how beautiful it was, and love it, and take delight in doing it, and
+so we should walk in the light.&nbsp; Dark thoughts would pass away
+from our minds, dark feelings from our hearts, dark looks from our faces.&nbsp;
+We should look our neighbours cheerfully and boldly in the face; for
+our consciences would be clear of any ill-will or meanness toward them.&nbsp;
+We should look cheerfully and boldly up to God our Father; for we should
+know that He was with us, guiding and teaching us, well-pleased with
+all our endeavours to see things as He sees them, and to live and work
+on earth after His image, and in His likeness.&nbsp; We should look
+out cheerfully and boldly on the world around us, trying to get knowledge
+from everything we see, expecting the light, and welcoming it, and trusting
+it, because we know that it comes from Him who is true and cannot lie,
+Him who is love and cannot injure, Him who is righteous and cannot lead
+us into temptation: Jesus Christ, the Light who lighteth every man that
+cometh into the world.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XXXIX&mdash;THE UNPARDONABLE SIN</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Wherefore I say unto you: All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be
+forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not
+be forgiven unto men.&nbsp; And whosoever speaketh a word against the
+Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh a word
+against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this
+world, or in the world to come.&mdash;MATTHEW xii. 31, 32.</p>
+<p>These awful words were the Lord&rsquo;s answer to the Pharisees,
+when they said of Him: &ldquo;He casts out devils by Beelzebub, the
+prince of the devils.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>What was it now which made this speech of the Pharisees so terrible
+a sin, past all forgiveness?</p>
+<p>Of course we all feel that they were very sinful; we shrink with
+horror from their words as we read them.&nbsp; But why ought they to
+have done the same?&nbsp; We know, thank God, who Jesus Christ was.&nbsp;
+But they did not; at that time, when He was first beginning to preach,
+they hardly could have known.&nbsp; And mind, we must not say: &ldquo;They
+ought to have known that He was the Son of God by His having the <i>power</i>
+of casting out devils;&rdquo; for the Lord Himself says that the sons
+of these Pharisees used to cast them out also, or that the Pharisees
+believed that they did; and only asks them: &ldquo;Why do you say of
+my casting out devils, what you will not say of your sons&rsquo; casting
+them out?&rdquo;&nbsp; Pray bear this in mind; for if you do not&mdash;if
+you keep in your mind the vulgar and unscriptural notion that the Pharisees&rsquo;
+sin was not being convinced by the great power of Christ&rsquo;s miracles,
+you will never understand this story, and you will be very likely to
+get rid of it altogether as speaking of a sin which does not concern
+you, and a sin which you cannot commit.&nbsp; Now, if the Pharisees
+did not know that Jesus was the Son of God, the Maker and King of the
+world, as we do, why were they so awfully wicked in saying that He cast
+out devils by the prince of the devils?&nbsp; Was it anything more than
+a mistake of theirs?&nbsp; Was it as wicked as crucifying the Lord?&nbsp;
+Could it be a worse sin to make that one mistake, than to murder the
+Lord Himself?&nbsp; And yet it must have been a worse sin.&nbsp; For
+the Lord prayed for his murderers: &ldquo;Father, forgive them, for
+they know not what they do.&rdquo;&nbsp; And these Pharisees, they knew
+not what they did: and yet the Lord, far from praying for them, told
+them that even He did not see how such serpents, such a generation of
+vipers, could escape the damnation of hell.</p>
+<p>It is worth our while to think over this question, and try and find
+out what made the Pharisees&rsquo; sin so great.&nbsp; And to do that,
+it will be wiser for us, first, to find out what the Pharisees&rsquo;
+sin was; lest we should sit here this morning, and think them the most
+wicked wretches who ever trod the earth; and then go away, and before
+a week is over, commit ourselves the very same sin, or one so fearfully
+like it, that if other people can see a difference between them, I confess
+I cannot.&nbsp; And to commit such a sin, my good friends, is a far
+easier thing to do than some people fancy, especially here in England
+now.</p>
+<p>Now, the worst part of the Pharisees&rsquo; sin was not, as we are
+too apt to fancy, their insulting the Lord: but their insulting the
+Holy Spirit.&nbsp; For what does the Lord Himself say?&nbsp; That all
+manner of blasphemy as well as sin should be forgiven; that whosever
+spoke a word against Him, the Son of Man, should be forgiven: but that
+the unpardonable part of their offence was, that they had blasphemed
+the Holy Spirit.</p>
+<p>And who is the Holy Spirit?&nbsp; The Spirit of holiness.&nbsp; And
+what is holiness?&nbsp; What are the fruits of holiness?&nbsp; For,
+as the Lord told the Pharisees on this very occasion, the tree is known
+by its fruit.&nbsp; What says St. Paul?&nbsp; The fruit of the Spirit
+is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness,
+temperance.&nbsp; Those who do not show these fruits have not God&rsquo;s
+Spirit in them.&nbsp; Those who are hard, unloving, proud, quarrelsome,
+peevish, suspicious, ready to impute bad motives to their neighbours,
+have not God&rsquo;s Spirit in them.&nbsp; Those who do show these fruits;
+who are gentle, forgiving, kind-hearted, ready to do good to others,
+and believe good of others, have God&rsquo;s Spirit in them.&nbsp; For
+these are good fruits, which, as our Lord tells us, can only spring
+from a good root.&nbsp; Those who have the fruit must have the root,
+let their doctrines be what they may.&nbsp; Those who have not the fruit
+cannot have the root, let their doctrines be what they may.</p>
+<p>That is the plain truth; and it is high time for preachers to proclaim
+it boldly, and take the consequences from the Scribes and Pharisees
+of this generation.&nbsp; That is the plain truth.&nbsp; Let doctrines
+be what they will, the tree is known by its fruit.&nbsp; The man who
+does wrong things is bad, and the man who does right things is good.&nbsp;
+It is a simple thing to have to say, but very few believe it in these
+days.&nbsp; Most fancy that the men who can talk most neatly and correctly
+about certain religious doctrines are good, and that those who cannot
+are bad.&nbsp; That is no new notion.&nbsp; Some people thought so in
+St. John&rsquo;s time; and what did he say of them?&nbsp; &ldquo;Little
+children, let no man deceive you; it is he that doeth righteousness
+who is righteous, even as God is righteous.&rdquo;&nbsp; And again:
+&ldquo;He who says, I know God, and keeps not His commandments, is a
+liar, and the truth is not in him.&rdquo;&nbsp; St. John was the apostle
+of love.&nbsp; He was always preaching the love of God to men, and entreating
+men to love one another.&nbsp; His own heart was overflowing with love.&nbsp;
+Yet when it came to such a question as that; when it came to people&rsquo;s
+pretending to be religious and orthodox, and yet neither obeying God
+nor loving their neighbours, he could speak sternly and plainly enough.&nbsp;
+He does not say: &ldquo;My dear friends, I am sorry to have to differ
+from you, but I am afraid you are mistaken;&rdquo; he says: &ldquo;You
+are liars, and there is no truth in you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now this was just what the Pharisees had forgotten.&nbsp; They had
+got to think, as too many have nowadays, that the sign of a man&rsquo;s
+having God&rsquo;s Spirit in him, was his agreeing with them in doctrine.&nbsp;
+But if he did not agree with them; if he would not say the words which
+they said, and did not belong to their party, and side with them in
+despising every one who differed from them, it was no matter to them,
+as they proved by their opinion of Jesus Himself, how good he might
+be, or how much good he might do; how loving, gentle, patient, benevolent,
+helping, and caring for poor people; in short, how like God he was;
+all that went for nothing if he was not of their party.&nbsp; For they
+had forgotten what God was like.&nbsp; They forgot that God was love
+and mercy itself, and that all love and mercy must come from God; and,
+that, therefore, no one, let his creed or his doctrine be what it might,
+could possibly do a loving or merciful thing, but by the grace and inspiration
+of God, the Father of mercies.&nbsp; And yet their own prophets of the
+Old Testament had told them so, when they ascribed the good deeds of
+heathens to the inspiration of God, just as much as the good deeds of
+Jews, and agreed, as they do in many a text, with what St. James, himself
+a Jew, said afterwards: &ldquo;Be not deceived; every good gift, and
+every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of
+lights.&rdquo;&nbsp; But the Pharisees, like too many nowadays, did
+not think so.&nbsp; They thought that good and perfect gifts might some
+of them very well come from below, from the father of darkness and cruelty.&nbsp;
+They saw the Lord Jesus Christ doing good things; driving out evil,
+and delivering men from the power of it; healing the sick, cleansing
+the leper, curing the mad, preaching the gospel to the poor: and yet
+they saw in that no proof that God&rsquo;s Spirit was working in Him.&nbsp;
+Of course, if He had been one of their own party, and had held the same
+doctrines as they held, they would have praised Him loudly enough, and
+held Him up as a great saint of their school, and boasted of all His
+good deeds as proofs of how good their party was, and how its doctrines
+came from God.&nbsp; But as long as He was not one of them, His good
+works went for nothing.&nbsp; They could not see God&rsquo;s likeness
+in that loving and merciful character.&nbsp; All His charity and benevolence
+made them only hate Him the more, because it made them the more afraid
+that He would draw the people away from them.&nbsp; &ldquo;And of course,&rdquo;
+they said to themselves, &ldquo;whosoever draws people away from us,
+must be on the devil&rsquo;s side.&nbsp; We know all God&rsquo;s law
+and will.&nbsp; No one on earth has anything to teach us.&nbsp; And
+therefore, as for any one who differs from us, if he cast out devils,
+it must be because the devil is helping him, for his own purposes, to
+do it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In one word, then, the sin of these Pharisees, the unpardonable sin,
+which ruins all who give themselves up to it, was bigotry; calling right
+wrong, because it did not suit their party prejudices to call it right.&nbsp;
+They were fancying themselves very religious and pious, and all the
+while they did not know right when they saw it; and when the Lord came
+doing right, they called it wrong, because He did not agree with their
+doctrines.&nbsp; They fancied they were the only people on earth who
+knew how to worship God perfectly; and yet while they pretended to worship
+Him, they did not know what He was like.&nbsp; The Lord Jesus came down,
+the perfect likeness of God&rsquo;s glory, and the express pattern of
+His character, helping, and healing, and delivering the souls and bodies
+of all poor wretches whom He met; and these Pharisees could not see
+God&rsquo;s Spirit in that; and because it was certainly not their own
+spirit, called it the spirit of a devil, and blasphemed against the
+Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Right and Love.</p>
+<p>This was bigotry, the flower and crown of all sins into which man
+can fall; the worst of all sins, because a man may keep from every other
+sin with all his might and main, as the Pharisees did, and yet be led
+by bigotry into almost every one of them without knowing it; into harsh
+and uncharitable judgment; into anger, clamour, and railing; into misrepresentation
+and slander; and fancying that the God of truth needs the help of their
+lying; perhaps, as has often happened, alas! already, into devilish
+cruelty to the souls and bodies of men.&nbsp; The worst of all sins;
+because a man who has given up his heart to bigotry can have no forgiveness.&nbsp;
+He cannot; for how can a man be forgiven unless he repent? and how can
+a bigot repent? how can he confess himself in the wrong, while he fancies
+himself infallibly in the right?&nbsp; As the Lord said to these very
+Pharisees: &ldquo;If ye had been blind, ye had had no sin: but now ye
+say We see; therefore your sin remaineth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How can the bigot repent? for repenting is turning to God; and how
+can a man turn to God who does not know where to look for God, who does
+not know who God is, who mistakes the devil for God, and fancies the
+all-loving Father to be a taskmaster, and a tyrant, and an accuser,
+and a respecter of persons, without mercy or care for ninety-nine hundredths
+of the souls which He has made?&nbsp; How can he find God?&nbsp; He
+does not know whom to look for.</p>
+<p>How can the bigot repent? for to repent means to turn from wrong
+to right; and he has lost the very notion of right and wrong, in the
+midst of all his religion and his fine doctrines.&nbsp; He fancies that
+right does not mean love, mercy, goodness, patience, but notions like
+his own; and that wrong does not mean hatred, and evil-speaking, and
+suspicion, and uncharitableness, and slander, and lying, but notions
+unlike his own.&nbsp; What he agrees with he thinks is heavenly, and
+what he disagrees with is of hell.&nbsp; He has made his own god for
+himself out of himself.&nbsp; His own prejudices are his god, and he
+worships them right worthily; and if the Lord were to come down on earth
+again, and would not say the words which he is accustomed to say, it
+would go hard but he would crucify the Lord again, as the Pharisees
+did of old.</p>
+<p>My friends, there is too much of this bigotry, this blasphemy against
+God&rsquo;s Spirit, abroad in England now.&nbsp; May God keep us all
+from it!&nbsp; Pray to Him night and day, to give you His Spirit, that
+you may not only be loving, charitable, full of good works yourselves,
+but may be ready to praise and enjoy a good, and loving, and merciful
+action, whosoever does it, whether he be of your religion or not; for
+nothing good is done by any living man without the grace of Christ,
+and the inspiration of the Spirit of God, the Father of lights, from
+whom comes down every good and perfect gift.&nbsp; And whosoever tries
+to escape from that great truth, when he sees a man whose doctrines
+are wrong doing a right act, by imputing bad motives to him, or saying:
+&ldquo;His actions must be evil, however good they may look, because
+his doctrines are wrong,&rdquo;&mdash;that man is running the risk of
+committing the very same sin as the Pharisees, and blaspheming against
+the Holy Spirit, by calling good evil.&nbsp; And be sure, my friends,
+that whosoever indulges, even in little matters, in hard judgments,
+and suspicions, and hasty sneers, and loud railing, against men who
+differ from him in religion, or politics, or in anything else, is deadening
+his own sense of right and wrong, and sowing the seeds of that same
+state of mind, which, as the Lord told the Pharisees, is utterly the
+worst into which any human being can fall.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XL&mdash;THE SPIRIT OF BONDAGE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but
+ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father.&mdash;ROMANS
+viii. 15.</p>
+<p>Some of you here may not understand this text at all.&nbsp; Some
+of you, perhaps, may misunderstand it; for it is not an easy one.&nbsp;
+Let us, then, begin, by finding out the meaning of each word in it;
+and, let us first see what is the meaning of the spirit of bondage unto
+fear.&nbsp; Bondage means slavery; and the spirit of bondage means the
+spirit which makes men look up to God as slaves do to their taskmaster.&nbsp;
+Now, a slave obeys his master from fear only; not from love or gratitude.&nbsp;
+He knows that his master is stronger than he is, and he dreads being
+beaten and punished by him; and therefore, he obeys him only by compulsion,
+not of his own good will.&nbsp; This is the spirit of bondage; the slavish,
+superstitious spirit in religion, into which all men fall, in proportion
+as they are mean, and sinful, and carnal, fond of indulging themselves,
+and bearing no love to God or right things.&nbsp; They know that God
+is stronger than they; they are afraid that God will take away comforts
+from them if they offend Him; they have been taught that He will cast
+them into endless torment if they offend Him; and, therefore, they are
+afraid to do wrong.&nbsp; They love what is wrong, and would like to
+do it; but they dare not, for fear of God&rsquo;s punishment.&nbsp;
+They do not really fear God; they only fear punishment, misfortune,
+death, and hell.&nbsp; That is better, perhaps, than no religion at
+all.&nbsp; But it is not the faith which <i>we</i> ought to have.</p>
+<p>In this way the old heathens lived: loving sin and not holiness,
+and yet continually tormented with the fear of being punished for the
+very sins which they loved; looking up to God as a stern taskmaster;
+fancying Him as proud, and selfish, and revengeful as themselves; trying
+one day to quiet that wrath of His which they knew they deserved, by
+all sorts of flatteries and sacrifices to Him; and the next day trying
+to fancy that He was as sinful as themselves, and was well-pleased to
+see them sinful too.&nbsp; And yet they could not keep that lie in their
+hearts; God&rsquo;s light, which lights every man who comes into the
+world, was too bright for them, and shone into their consciences, and
+showed them that the wages of sin was death.&nbsp; The law of God, St.
+Paul tells us, was written in their hearts; and how much soever, poor
+creatures, they might try to blot it out and forget it, yet it would
+rise up in judgment against them, day by day, night by night, convincing
+them of sin.&nbsp; So they in their terror sold themselves to false
+priests, who pretended to know of plans for helping them to escape from
+this angry God, and gave themselves up to superstitions, till they even
+sacrificed their sons and their daughters to devils, in some sort of
+confused hope of buying themselves off from misery and ruin.</p>
+<p>And in the same way the Jews lived, for the most part, before the
+Lord Jesus came in the flesh of man.&nbsp; Not so viciously and wickedly,
+of course, because the law of Moses was holy, and just, and good; the
+law which the Lord Himself had given them, because it was the best for
+them then; because they were too sinful, and slavish, and stupid, for
+anything better.&nbsp; But, as St. Paul says, Moses&rsquo;s law could
+not give them life, any more than any other law can.&nbsp; That is,
+it could not make them righteous and good; it could not change their
+hearts and lives; it could only keep them from outward wrong-doing by
+threats and promises, saying: &ldquo;Thou shalt not.&rdquo;&nbsp; It
+could, at best, only show them how sinful their own hearts were; how
+little they loved what God commanded; how little they desired what He
+promised; and so it made them feel more and more that they were guilty,
+unworthy to look up to a holy God, deserving His anger and punishment,
+worthy to die for their sins; and thus by the law came the knowledge
+of sin, a deeper feeling of guilt, and shame, and slavish dread of God,
+as St. Paul sets forth, with wonderful wisdom, in the seventh chapter
+of Romans.</p>
+<p>Now, let us consider the latter half of the text.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>What is this adoption?&nbsp; St. Paul tells us in the beginning of
+the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Galatians.&nbsp; He says: As
+long as a man&rsquo;s heir is a child, and under age, there is no difference
+in law between him and a slave.&nbsp; He is his father&rsquo;s property.&nbsp;
+He must obey his father, whether he chooses or not; and he is under
+tutors and governors, until the time appointed by his father; that is,
+until he comes of age, as we call it.&nbsp; Then he becomes his own
+master.&nbsp; He can inherit and possess property of his own after that.&nbsp;
+And from that time forth the law does not bind him to obey his father;
+if he obeys him it is of his own free will, because he loves, and trusts,
+and reverences his father.</p>
+<p>Now, St. Paul says, this is the case with us.&nbsp; When we were
+infants, we were in bondage under the elements of the world; kept straight,
+as children are, by rules which they cannot understand, by the fear
+of punishment which they cannot escape, with no more power to resist
+their father than slaves have to resist their master.&nbsp; But when
+the fulness of time was come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman,
+born under a law, that He might redeem those who were under a law, that
+we might receive the adoption of sons.</p>
+<p>As much as to say: You were God&rsquo;s <i>children</i> all along:
+but now you are more; you are God&rsquo;s sons.&nbsp; You have arrived
+at man&rsquo;s estate; you are men in body and in mind; you are to be
+men in spirit, men in life.&nbsp; You are to look up to the great God
+who made heaven and earth, and know, glorious thought! that He is as
+truly your Father as the men whose earthly sons you call yourselves.&nbsp;
+And if you do this, He will give you the Spirit of adoption, and you
+shall be able to call Him Father with your hearts, as well as with your
+lips; you shall know and feel that He is your Father; that He has been
+loving, watching, educating, leading you home to Him all the while that
+you were wandering in ignorance of Him, in childish self-will, and greediness
+after pleasure and amusement.&nbsp; He will give you His Spirit to make
+you behave like His sons, to obey Him of your own free will, from love,
+and gratitude, and honour, and filial reverence.&nbsp; He will make
+you love what He loves, and hate what He hates.&nbsp; He will give you
+clear consciences and free hearts, to fear nothing on earth or in heaven,
+but the shame and ingratitude of disobeying your Father.</p>
+<p>The Spirit of adoption, by which you look up to God as your Father,
+is your right.&nbsp; He has given it to you, and nothing but your own
+want of faith, and wilful turning back to cowardly superstition, and
+to the wilful sins which go before superstition, and come after it,
+can take it from you.&nbsp; So said St. Paul to the Romans and the Galatians,
+and so I have a right, ay, and a bounden duty, to say to every man and
+woman in this church this day.</p>
+<p>For, my dear friends, if you ask me, what has this to do with us?&nbsp;
+Has it not everything to do with us?&nbsp; Whether we are leading good
+lives, or middling lives, or utterly bad worthless lives, has it not
+everything to do with us?&nbsp; Who is there here who has not at times
+said to himself: &ldquo;God so holy, and pure, and glorious; while I
+am so unjust, and unclean, and mean!&nbsp; And God so great and powerful;
+while I am so small and weak!&nbsp; What shall I do?&nbsp; Does not
+God hate and despise me?&nbsp; Will He not take from me all which I
+love best?&nbsp; Will He not hurl me into endless torment when I die?&nbsp;
+How can I escape from Him?&nbsp; Wretched man that I am, I cannot escape
+from Him!&nbsp; How, then, can I turn away His hate?&nbsp; How can I
+make Him change His mind?&nbsp; How can I soothe Him and appease Him?&nbsp;
+What shall I do to escape hell-fire?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Did you ever have such thoughts?&nbsp; But, did you find those thoughts,
+that slavish terror of God&rsquo;s wrath, that dread of hell, made you
+any <i>better</i> men?&nbsp; I never did.&nbsp; I never saw them make
+any human being better.&nbsp; Unless you go beyond them&mdash;as far
+beyond them as heaven is beyond hell, as far above them as a free son
+is above a miserable crouching slave, they will do you more harm than
+good.&nbsp; For this is all that I have seen come of them: That all
+this spirit of bondage, this slavish terror, instead of bringing a man
+nearer to God, only drove him further from God.&nbsp; It did not make
+him hate what was wrong; it only made him dread the punishment of it.&nbsp;
+And then, when the first burst of fear cooled down, he began to say
+to himself: &ldquo;I can never atone for my sins.&nbsp; I can never
+win back God to love me.&nbsp; What is done, is done.&nbsp; If I cannot
+escape punishment, let me be at least as happy as I can while it lasts.&nbsp;
+If it does not come to-day, it will come to-morrow.&nbsp; Let me alone,
+thou tormenting conscience.&nbsp; Let me eat and drink, for to-morrow
+I die!&rdquo;&nbsp; And so back rushed the poor creature into all his
+wrong-doing again, and fell most probably deeper than ever into the
+mire, because a certain feeling of desperation and defiance rose up
+in him, till he began to fancy that his terror was all a dream&mdash;a
+foolish accidental rising up of old superstitious words which he learnt
+from his mother or his nurse; and he tried to forget it all, and did
+forget it&mdash;God help him!&mdash;and his latter end was worse than
+his first.</p>
+<p>How then shall a man escape shame and misery, and an evil conscience,
+and rise out of these sins of his?&nbsp; For do it he must.&nbsp; The
+wages of sin is death&mdash;death to body and soul; and from sin he
+must escape.</p>
+<p>There is but one way, my friends.&nbsp; There never was but one way.&nbsp;
+Believe the text, and therefore believe the warrant of your Baptism.&nbsp;
+Believe the message of your Confirmation.</p>
+<p>Your baptism says to you, God does <i>not</i> hate you, be you the
+greatest sinner on earth.&nbsp; He does not hate you.&nbsp; He loves
+you; for you are His child.&nbsp; He hateth nothing that He hath made.&nbsp;
+He willeth not the death of a sinner, but that <i>all</i> should come
+to be saved.&nbsp; And your baptism is the sign of that to you.&nbsp;
+But God hates everything that He has not made; for everything which
+He has not made is bad; and He has made all things but sin; and therefore
+He hates sin, and, loving you, wishes to raise you out of sin; and baptism
+is the sign of that also.&nbsp; Man was made originally in the image
+and likeness of God, and of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, the express
+image of God the Father; and therefore everything which is sinful is
+unmanly, and everything which is truly manful, and worthy of a man,
+is like Jesus Christ; and God&rsquo;s will is, that you should rise
+out of all these unmanly sins, to a truly manful life&mdash;a life like
+the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.&nbsp; And baptism is God&rsquo;s
+sign of this also.&nbsp; That is the meaning of the words in the Baptism
+Service which tell you that you were baptised into Jesus Christ, that
+you might put off the old man&mdash;the sinful, slavish, selfish, unmanly
+pattern of life, which we all lead by nature; and put on the new man&mdash;the
+holy and noble, righteous and loving pattern of life, which is the likeness
+of the Lord Jesus.&nbsp; That is the message of your baptism to you;
+that you are God&rsquo;s children, and that God&rsquo;s will and wish
+is that you should grow up to become His <i>sons</i>, to serve Him lovingly,
+trustingly, manfully; and that He can and will give you power to do
+so&mdash;ay, that He has given you that power already, if you will but
+claim it and use it.&nbsp; But you must claim it and use it, because
+you are meant not merely to be God&rsquo;s wilful, ignorant, selfish
+children, obeying Him from mere fear of the rod; but to be His willing,
+loving, loyal sons.&nbsp; And that is the message which Confirmation
+brings you.&nbsp; Baptism says: You are God&rsquo;s child, whether you
+know it or not.&nbsp; Confirmation says: Yes; but now you are to know
+it, and to claim your rights as His sons, of full age, reasonable and
+self-governing.</p>
+<p>Baptism says: You are regenerated and born from above, by water and
+the Holy Spirit.&nbsp; Confirmation answers: True, most true; but there
+is no use in a child&rsquo;s being born, if it never comes to man&rsquo;s
+estate, but remains a stunted idiot.</p>
+<p>Baptism says: You may and ought to become more or less such a man
+as the Lord Jesus was.&nbsp; Confirmation says: You can become such;
+for you are no longer children; you are grown to man&rsquo;s estate
+in body, you can grow to man&rsquo;s estate in soul if you will.&nbsp;
+God&rsquo;s Spirit is with you, to show you all things in their true
+light; to teach you to value them or despise them as you ought; to teach
+you to love what He loves, and hate what He hates.&nbsp; God wishes
+you no longer to be merely His children, obeying Him you know not why;
+still less His slaves, obeying Him from mere brute coward fear, and
+then breaking loose the moment that you forget Him, and fancy that His
+eye is not on you: but He wishes you to be His sons; to claim the right
+and the power which He has given you to trample your sins under foot;
+to rise up by the strength which God your Father will surely give to
+those who ask Him; and so to be new men, free men, true men, who do
+look boldly up to God, knowing that, however wicked they may have been,
+and however weak they are still, God&rsquo;s love belongs to them, God&rsquo;s
+help belongs to them, and that those who trust in Him shall never be
+confounded, but shall go on from strength to strength to the measure
+of the stature of a perfect man, to the noble likeness of the Lord Jesus
+Christ Himself.</p>
+<p>For this is the message of the blessed sacrament of the body and
+blood of Christ, to which you have been all called this day.&nbsp; That
+sacrament tells you that in spite of all your daily sins and failings,
+you can still look up to God as your Father; to the Lord Jesus Christ
+as your life; to the Holy Spirit as your guide and your inspirer; that
+though you be prodigal sons, your Father&rsquo;s house is still open
+to you, your Father&rsquo;s eternal love ready to meet you afar off,
+the moment that you cry from your heart: &ldquo;Father, I have sinned;&rdquo;
+and that you must be converted and turn back to God your Father, not
+merely once for all at Confirmation, or at any other time, but weekly,
+daily, hourly, as often as you forget and disobey Him; and that he will
+receive you.&nbsp; This is the message of the blessed sacrament, that
+though you cannot come there trusting in your own righteousness, you
+can come trusting in His manifold and great mercies; that though you
+are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under His table, yet
+He is the same Lord whose property is ever to have mercy; that He will,
+as surely as He has appointed that sign of the bread and wine, grant
+you so to eat and drink that spiritual flesh and blood of the Lord Jesus
+Christ, which is the life of the world, that your sinful bodies may
+be made clean by His body, and your souls washed in His most precious
+blood, and that you may dwell in Him, and He in you, for ever.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XLI&mdash;THE FALL</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so
+death passed on all men, for that all have sinned.&mdash;ROMANS v. 12.</p>
+<p>We have been reading the history of Adam&rsquo;s fall.&nbsp; With
+that fall we have all to do; for we all feel the fruits of it in the
+sinful corruptions which we bring into the world with us.&nbsp; And
+more, every fall which we have is like Adam&rsquo;s fall: every time
+we fall into wilful sin, we do what Adam did, and act over again, each
+of us many times in our lives, that which he first acted in the garden
+of Paradise.&nbsp; At least, all mankind suffer for something.&nbsp;
+Look at the sickness, death, bloodshed, oppression, spite, and cruelty,
+with which the world is so full now, of which it has been full, as we
+know but too well from history, ever since Adam&rsquo;s time.&nbsp;
+The world is full of misery, there is no denying that.&nbsp; How did
+that come?&nbsp; It must have come somehow.&nbsp; There must be some
+reason for all this sorrow.&nbsp; The Bible tells us a reason for it.&nbsp;
+If anyone does not like the Bible reason, he is bound to find a better
+reason.&nbsp; But what if the Bible reason, the story of Adam&rsquo;s
+fall, be the only rational and sensible explanation which ever has been,
+or ever will be given, of the way in which death and misery came among
+men?</p>
+<p>Some people will say: What puzzle is there in it?&nbsp; All animals
+die, why should not man?&nbsp; All animals fight and devour each other,
+why should not man do so too?&nbsp; But why need we suppose that man
+is fallen?&nbsp; Why should he not have been meant by nature to be just
+what he is?&nbsp; Some scholars who fancy themselves wise, and think
+that they know better than the Bible, will say that now, and pride themselves
+on having said a very fine thing; ignorant men, too, often are led into
+the same mistake, and are willing enough to say: &ldquo;What if we are
+brutish, and savage, and ignorant, and spiteful, indulging ourselves,
+hating and quarrelling with each other?&nbsp; God made us what we are,
+and we cannot help it.&rdquo;&nbsp; But there is a voice in the heart
+of every man, and just in proportion as a man is a man, and not a beast
+and a savage, that voice cries in his heart more loudly: No; God did
+not make you what you are.&nbsp; You are not meant to be what you are,
+but something better.&nbsp; You are not meant to fight and devour each
+other as the animals do; for you are meant to be better than they.&nbsp;
+You are not meant to die as the animals do; for you feel something in
+you which cannot die, which hates death.&nbsp; You may try to be a mere
+savage and a beast, but you cannot be content to be so.&nbsp; And yet
+you feel ready to fall lower, and get more and more brutish.&nbsp; What
+can be the reason?&nbsp; There must be something wrong about men, something
+diseased and corrupt in them, or they would not have this continual
+discontent with themselves for being no better than they are; this continual
+hankering and longing after some happiness, some knowledge, some good
+and noble state which they do not see round them, and never have felt
+in themselves.&nbsp; Man must have fallen, fallen from some good and
+right state into which he was put at first, and for which he is hankering
+and craving now.&nbsp; There must be an original sin in him; that is,
+a sin belonging to his origin, his race, his breed, as we say, which
+has been handed down from father to son; an original sin as the church
+calls it.&nbsp; And I believe firmly that the heart of man, even among
+savages, bears witness to the truth of that doctrine, and confesses
+that we are fallen beings, let false philosophers try as they will to
+persuade us that we are not.</p>
+<p>Then, again, there are another set of people, principally easy, well-to-do,
+respectable people, who run into another mistake, the same into which
+the Pelagians did in old time.&nbsp; They think: &ldquo;Man is not fallen.&nbsp;
+Every man is born into the world quite good enough, if he chose to remain
+good.&nbsp; Every man can keep God&rsquo;s laws if he likes, or at all
+events keep them well enough.&rdquo;&nbsp; As for his having a sinful
+nature which he got from Adam, they do not believe that really, though
+often they might not like to say so openly.&nbsp; They think: &ldquo;Adam
+fell, and he was punished; and if I fall I shall be punished; but Adam&rsquo;s
+sin is nothing to me, and has not hurt me.&nbsp; I can be just as good
+and right as Adam was, if I like.&rdquo;&nbsp; That is a comfortable
+doctrine enough for easy-going well-to-do folks, who have but few trials,
+and few temptations, and who love little because little has been forgiven
+them.&nbsp; But what comfort is there in that for poor sinners, who
+feel sinful and base passions dragging them down, and making them brutish
+and miserable, and yet feel that they cannot conquer their sins of themselves,
+cannot help doing wrong, all the while they know that it is wrong?&nbsp;
+They feel that they have something more in them than a will and power
+to do what they choose.&nbsp; They feel that they have a sinful nature
+which keeps their will and reason in slavery, and makes sin a hard bondage,
+a miserable prison-house, from which they cannot escape.&nbsp; In short,
+they feel and know that they are fallen.&nbsp; Small comfort, too, to
+every thinking man, who looks upon the great nations of savages, which
+have lived, and live still, upon God&rsquo;s earth, and sees how, so
+far from being able to do right if they choose, they go on from father
+to son, generation after generation, doing wrong, more and more, whether
+they like or not; how they become more and more children of wrath, given
+up to fierce wars, and cruel revenge, and violent passions, all their
+thought, and talk, and study, being to kill and to fight; how they become
+more and more children of darkness, forgetting more and more the laws
+of right and wrong, becoming stupid and ignorant, until they lose the
+very knowledge of how to provide themselves with houses, clothes, fire,
+or even to till the ground, and end in feeding on roots and garbage,
+like the beasts which perish.&nbsp; And how, too, long before they fall
+into that state, death works in them.&nbsp; How, the lower they fall,
+and the more they yield to their original sin and their corrupt nature,
+they die out.&nbsp; By wars with each other; by murdering their own
+children, to avoid the trouble of rearing them; by diseases which they
+know not how to cure, and which they too often bring on themselves by
+their own brutishness; by bad food, and exposure to the weather, they
+die out, and perish off the face of the earth, fulfilling the Lord&rsquo;s
+words to Adam: &ldquo;Thou shalt surely die.&rdquo;&nbsp; I do not say
+that their souls go to hell.&nbsp; The Bible tells us nothing of where
+they go to.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s mercy is boundless.&nbsp; And the Bible
+tells us that sin is not imputed where there is no law, as there is
+none among them.&nbsp; So we may have hope for them, and leave them
+in God&rsquo;s hand.&nbsp; But what can we hope for them who are utterly
+dead in trespasses and sins?&nbsp; Well for them, if, having fallen
+to the likeness of the brutes, they perish with the brutes.&nbsp; I
+fancy if you, as some may, ever go to Australia, and there see the wretched
+black people, who are dying out there, faster and faster, year by year,
+after having fallen lower than the brutes, then you will understand
+what original sin may bring a man to, what it would have brought us
+to, had not God in His mercy raised us and our forefathers up from that
+fearful down-hill course, when we were on it fifteen hundred years ago.</p>
+<p>And another thing which shows that these poor savages are not as
+God intended them to be, but are falling, generation after generation,
+by the working of original sin, is, that they, almost all of them, show
+signs of having been better off long ago.&nbsp; Many, like the South
+Sea Islanders, have curious arts remaining among them in spite of their
+brutish ignorance, which they could only have learned when they were
+far more clever and civilised than they are now.&nbsp; And almost all
+of them have some sad remembrance, handed down from father to son, kept
+up in songs and foolish tales, of having been richer, and more prosperous,
+and more numerous, a long while ago.&nbsp; They will confess to you,
+if you ask them, that they are worse than their fathers&mdash;that they
+are going down, dying out&mdash;that the gods are angry with them, as
+they say.&nbsp; The Lord have mercy upon them!&nbsp; But what is, to
+my mind, the most awful part of the matter remains yet to be told&mdash;and
+it is this: That man may actually fall by original sin too low to receive
+the gospel of Jesus Christ, and be recovered again by it.&nbsp; For
+the negroes of Africa and the West Indies, though they have fallen very
+low, have not fallen too low for the gospel.&nbsp; They have still understanding
+left to take it in, and conscience, and sense of right and wrong enough
+left to embrace it; thousands of them do embrace it, and are received
+unto righteousness, and lead such lives as would shame many a white
+Englishman, born and bred under the gospel.</p>
+<p>But the black people in Australia, who are exactly of the same race
+as the African negroes, cannot take in the gospel.&nbsp; They seem to
+have become too stupid to understand it; they seem to have lost the
+sense of sin and of righteousness too completely to care about it.&nbsp;
+All attempts to bring them to a knowledge of the true God have as yet
+failed utterly.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s grace is all-powerful; He is no respecter
+of persons; and He may yet, by some great act of His wisdom, quicken
+the dead souls of these poor brutes in human shape.&nbsp; But, as far
+as we can see, there is no hope for them: but, like the Canaanites of
+old, they must perish off the face of the earth, as brute beasts.</p>
+<p>I have said so much to show you that man is fallen; that there is
+original sin, an inclination to sin and fall, sink down lower and lower,
+in man.&nbsp; Now comes the question: What is this fall of man?&nbsp;
+I said that the Bible tells us rationally enough.&nbsp; And I have also
+made use several times of words, which may have hinted to some of you
+already what Adam&rsquo;s fall was.&nbsp; I have spoken of the likeness
+of the beasts, and of men becoming like beasts by original sin.&nbsp;
+And this is why I said it.</p>
+<p>If you want to understand what Adam&rsquo;s fall was, you must understand
+what he fell from, and what he fell to.&nbsp; That is plain.</p>
+<p>Now, the Bible tells us, that he fell from God&rsquo;s grace to nature.</p>
+<p>What is nature?&nbsp; Nature means what is born, and lives, and dies,
+and is parted and broken up, that the parts of it may go into some new
+shape, and be born and live, and die again.&nbsp; So the plants, trees,
+beasts, are a part of nature.&nbsp; They are born, live, die; and then
+that which was them goes into the earth, or into the stomachs of other
+animals, and becomes in time part of that animal, or part of the tree
+or flower, which grows in the soil into which it has fallen.&nbsp; So
+the flesh of a dead animal may become a grain of wheat, and that grain
+of wheat again may become part of the body of an animal.&nbsp; You all
+see this every time you manure a field, or grow a crop.&nbsp; Nature
+is, then, that which lives to die, and dies to live again in some fresh
+shape.&nbsp; And, in the first chapter of Genesis, you read of God creating
+nature&mdash;earth, and water, and light, and the heavens, and the plants
+and animals each after their kind, born to die and change, made of dust,
+and returning to the dust again.&nbsp; But after that we read very different
+words; we read that when God created man, He said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let
+them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
+air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping
+thing that creepeth upon the earth.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was made in God&rsquo;s
+likeness; therefore he could only be right in as far as he was like
+God.&nbsp; And he could not be like God if he did not will what God
+willed, and wish what God wished.&nbsp; He was to live by faith in God;
+he was justified by faith in God, and by that only.</p>
+<p>Never fancy that Adam had any righteousness of his own, any goodness
+of which he could say: &ldquo;This is mine, part of me; I may pride
+myself on it.&rdquo;&nbsp; God forbid.&nbsp; His righteousness consisted,
+as ours must, in looking up to God, trusting Him utterly, believing
+that he was to do God&rsquo;s will, and not his own.&nbsp; His spirit,
+his soul, as we call it, was given to him for that purpose, and for
+none other, that it might trust in God and obey God, as a child does
+his father.&nbsp; He had a free will; but he was to use that will as
+we must use our wills, by giving up our will to God&rsquo;s will, by
+clinging with our whole hearts and souls to God.</p>
+<p>Adam fell.&nbsp; He let himself be tempted by a beast, by the serpent.&nbsp;
+How, we cannot tell: but so we read.&nbsp; He took the counsel of a
+brute animal, and not of God.&nbsp; He chose between God and the serpent,
+and he chose wrong.&nbsp; He wanted to be something in himself; to have
+a knowledge and power of his own, to use it as he chose.&nbsp; He was
+not content to be in God&rsquo;s likeness; he wanted to be as a god
+himself.&nbsp; And so he threw away his faith in God, and disobeyed
+Him.&nbsp; And instead of becoming a god, as he expected, he became
+an animal; he put on the likeness of the brutes, who cannot look up
+to God in trust and love, who do not know God, do not obey Him, but
+follow their own lusts and fancies, as they may happen to take them.&nbsp;
+Whether the change came on him all at once, the Bible does not say:
+but it did come on him; for from him it has been handed down to all
+his children even to this day.&nbsp; Then was fulfilled against him
+the sentence, In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.&nbsp;
+Not that he died that moment; but death began to work in him.&nbsp;
+He became like the branch of a tree cut off from the stem, which may
+not wither at the instant it is cut off, but it is yet dead, as we find
+out by its soon decaying.&nbsp; He had come down from being a son of
+God, and he had taken his place in nature, among the things which grow
+only to die; and death began to work in him, and in his children after
+him.&nbsp; He handed down his nature to his children as the animals
+do; his children inherited his faults, his weaknesses, his diseases,
+the seed of death which was in him, just as the animals pass down to
+their breed, their defects, and diseases, and certainty of dying after
+their appointed life is past.</p>
+<p>For this, my friends, is the lesson which Adam&rsquo;s fall teaches
+us, that in God alone is the life of immortal souls, whether of men,
+or of angels, or of archangels; and in God alone is righteousness; in
+God alone is every good thing, and all good in men or angels comes from
+Him, and is only His pattern, His likeness; and that the moment either
+man or angel sets up his will against God&rsquo;s, he falls into sin,
+a lie, and death.&nbsp; That He has given us reasonable souls for that
+one purpose, that with our souls we may look up to Him, with our souls
+we may cling to Him, with our souls we may trust in Him, with our souls
+we may understand His will, and see that it is a good, and a right,
+and a loving will, and delight in it, and obey it, and find all our
+delight and glory, even as the Lord Jesus, the Son of Man, the New Adam,
+did, in doing not our own will, but the will of our Father.</p>
+<p>For, as St. Augustine says, man may live in two ways, either according
+to himself, or according to God; by self-will or by faith.&nbsp; He
+may determine to do his own will or to do God&rsquo;s will, to be his
+own master or to let God be his master, to seek his own glory, and try
+to be something fine and grand in himself: or he may seek God&rsquo;s
+glory and obey Him, believing that what God commands is the only good
+for him, what makes God to be honoured in the eyes of his neighbours
+is the only real honour for him.</p>
+<p>But, says St. Augustine, if he tries to live according to himself,
+he falls into misery, because he was meant to live according to God.&nbsp;
+So he puts himself into a lie, into a false and wrong state; and because
+he has cut himself off from God he falls below what a man should be;
+and puts on more and more of the likeness of the beast, and is more
+and more the slave of his own lusts, and passions, and fancies, as the
+dumb animals are.&nbsp; And, as St. Paul says, the animal man, the carnal
+man, understands not the things of God.&nbsp; And we need no one to
+tell us that this is the state of nature which we bring into the world
+with us.&nbsp; We feel it; from our very childhood, from the earliest
+time we can recollect, have we not had the longing to do what we liked?
+to please ourselves, to pride ourselves on ourselves, to set up our
+own wills against our parents, against what we learnt out of the Bible?&nbsp;
+Ay, has not this wilful will of ours been so strong, that often we would
+long after a thing, we would determine to have it, only because we were
+forbidden to have it; we might not care about the thing when we had
+it, but we would have our own way just because it was our own way.&nbsp;
+In short, like Adam, we would be as gods, knowing good and evil, and
+choosing for ourselves what we should call good and what we shall call
+evil.&nbsp; And, my dear friends, consider: did not every wrong that
+we ever did come from this one root of all sin&mdash;determining to
+have our own way?&nbsp; That root-sin of self-will first brought death
+and misery among mankind; that sin of self-will keeps it up still: that
+sin of self-will it is which hinders sinners from giving themselves
+up to God; and that sin must be broken through, or religion is a mockery
+and a dream.</p>
+<p>Oh my friends, say to yourselves once for all, I was made in God&rsquo;s
+likeness; and therefore His will, and not my own, I must do.&nbsp; I
+have no wisdom of my own, no strength of mind of my own, no goodness
+of my own, no lovingness of my own.&nbsp; God has them all; God, who
+is wisdom, strength, goodness, love; and I have none.&nbsp; And then,
+when the fearful thought comes over you: &ldquo;I have no goodness,
+and I cannot have any.&nbsp; I cannot do right.&nbsp; There is no use
+struggling and trying to be better.&nbsp; My passions, my lusts, my
+fancies are too strong for me.&nbsp; If I am brutish and low, brutish
+and low I must remain.&nbsp; If I have fallen in Adam, I must lie in
+the mire till I die&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then, then, my friends, answer yourselves: &ldquo;No!&nbsp; Not so.&nbsp;
+Man fell in the first Adam: but man rose again in the second Adam, the
+Lord Jesus Christ.&nbsp; I belong no more to the old Adam, who fell
+in Paradise.&nbsp; I belong to the New Adam, who was conceived without
+sin, and born of a pure virgin, who lived by perfect faith, in perfect
+obedience, doing His Father&rsquo;s will only, even to the death upon
+the cross, wherein He took away the sins of the whole world.&nbsp; And
+now for His sake my original sin, my fallen, brutish nature, is forgiven
+me.&nbsp; God does not hate me for it.&nbsp; He loves me, because I
+belong to His Son.&nbsp; My baptism is a witness and a warrant, a sign
+and a covenant between me and God, that I belong not to old Adam of
+Paradise, but to the Lord Jesus Christ, who sits at God&rsquo;s right
+hand.&nbsp; The cross which was signed on my forehead when I was baptised
+is God&rsquo;s sign to me that I am to sacrifice myself and give up
+my own will to do God&rsquo;s will, even as the Lord Jesus did when
+He gave Himself to die, because it was His Father&rsquo;s will.&nbsp;
+And because I belong to Jesus Christ, because God has called me to be
+His child, therefore He will help me.&nbsp; He will help me to conquer
+this low, brutish nature of mine.&nbsp; He will put His Spirit into
+me, the Spirit of His Son Jesus Christ, that I may trust Him, cry to
+Him, My Father! that I may love Him; understand His will, and see how
+good, and noble, and beautiful, and full of peace and comfort it is;
+delight in obeying Him; glory in sacrificing my own fancies and pleasures
+for His sake; and find my only honour, my only happiness, in doing His
+will on earth as saints and angels do it in heaven.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XLII&mdash;GOD&rsquo;S COVENANTS</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant
+between me and the earth.&mdash;GENESIS ix. 13.</p>
+<p>The text says that God made a covenant with Noah, and with his seed
+after him&mdash;that is, with all mankind; with us who sit here, and
+our children after us, and with all human beings who will ever live
+upon the face of the earth.&nbsp; God made a covenant with them.&nbsp;
+Now, what is a covenant?&nbsp; We say that two men make a covenant with
+each other when they make a bargain, an agreement; in this way: If you
+will do this thing, then I will do that; but if you will not do this
+thing, I will not do that.&nbsp; If you do not keep to our agreement,
+I am free of it.&nbsp; If I do not do my part of the agreement, you
+are free.&nbsp; Is not that what we call a covenant&mdash;a bargain
+between two parties, which, if either party breaks it, becomes null
+and void, and binds neither?&nbsp; Let us see whether God&rsquo;s covenants
+with man are of this kind.</p>
+<p>Does God say to Noah: &ldquo;If you and your children are righteous,
+I will look upon the rainbow, and remember my covenant: but if you and
+your children are unrighteous, I will not look on the rainbow, and I
+will break my covenant because you have broken it?&rdquo;&nbsp; We read
+no such words; God made no conditions with Noah and his sons.&nbsp;
+Whether they forgot the covenant or not, God would remember it.&nbsp;
+It was a covenant of free grace, even as all God&rsquo;s covenants are.&nbsp;
+Not a bargain, but a promise.&nbsp; &ldquo;By Myself have I sworn, saith
+the Lord, that I will not fail David.&rdquo;&nbsp; By Himself He sware
+to Abraham: &ldquo;Surely blessing I will bless thee, and multiplying
+I will multiply thee.&rdquo;&nbsp; That is the form of God&rsquo;s covenants.&nbsp;
+God swears by Himself&mdash;by God who cannot change.&nbsp; If God can
+change, then His covenant can change.&nbsp; If God can fail Himself,
+then can He fail His covenant to which He has sworn by Himself.&nbsp;
+If it had been a mere bargain, like men&rsquo;s bargains, and not a
+promise out of His absolute love, His free grace, His boundless mercy,
+would He have sworn by Himself?&nbsp; Nay, rather, He would have sworn
+by Abraham: &ldquo;By thy obedience or disobedience I swear to bless
+thee or curse thee.&rdquo;&nbsp; But He swore by Himself, the absolute,
+the unchangeable, the Giver whose name is Love.</p>
+<p>Consider now the token of the covenant which God gave to Noah.&nbsp;
+It was the rainbow.&nbsp; What is the rainbow?&nbsp; Sunlight turned
+back to our eye, through drops of falling rain.&nbsp; What sign could
+be more simple?&nbsp; And yet what sign could be more perfect?&nbsp;
+Noah&rsquo;s sons would fear that another flood was coming, perhaps
+flood after flood.&nbsp; The token of the rainbow said to them, No.&nbsp;
+Floods and rain are not to be the custom of this earth.&nbsp; Sunshine
+is to be the custom of it.&nbsp; Do not fear the clouds and storm and
+rain; look at the bow in the cloud, in the very rain itself.&nbsp; That
+is a sign that the sun, though you cannot see it, is shining still.&nbsp;
+That up above, beyond the cloud, is still sunlight, and warmth, and
+cloudless blue sky.&nbsp; Believe in God&rsquo;s covenant.&nbsp; Believe
+that the sun will conquer the clouds, warmth will conquer cold, calm
+will conquer storm, fair will conquer foul, light will conquer darkness,
+joy will conquer sorrow, life conquer death, love conquer destruction
+and the devouring floods; because God is light, God is love, God is
+life, God is peace and joy eternal and without change, and labours to
+give life, and joy, and peace, to man and beast and all created things.&nbsp;
+This was the meaning of the rainbow.&nbsp; Not a sudden or strange token,
+a miracle, as men call it, like as some voice out of the sky, or fiery
+comet, might have been; but a regular, orderly, and natural sign, to
+witness that God is a God of order.&nbsp; Whenever there was a rainy
+day there might be a rainbow.&nbsp; It came by the same laws by which
+everything else comes in the world.&nbsp; It was a witness that God
+who made the world is the friend and preserver of man; that His promises
+are like the everlasting sunshine which is above the clouds, without
+spot or fading, without variableness or shadow of turning.</p>
+<p>And do you fancy, my friends, that the new covenant, the covenant
+which God made with all mankind in the blood of His only-begotten Son,
+is narrower or weaker than the covenant which He made with Noah, Abraham,
+and David?&nbsp; He asked no conditions from them.&nbsp; Do you think
+He asks them from us?&nbsp; He called them by free grace.&nbsp; Do you
+think He calls us by anything less?&nbsp; He swore by Himself to them.&nbsp;
+How much more has He sworn by Himself to us?&nbsp; He who was born,
+and died, and rose again for us, who now sits at the right hand of the
+Father, very Man of the substance of a human mother, yet very God of
+very God begotten.</p>
+<p>His covenants of old stood true and faithful, however disobedient
+and unfaithful men might be; as it is written: &ldquo;I have sworn once
+for all by my holiness, that I will not fail David.&rdquo;&nbsp; And
+those words, the New Testament declares to us, again and again, are
+true of the new covenant, and fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ, into
+whose name we are baptized.&nbsp; Yes; into whose name we are baptized.&nbsp;
+There is the sign of the new covenant; of a covenant of free grace.&nbsp;
+Therefore we can bring our children to be baptized as we were baptized
+ourselves, before they have done either good or evil, for a sign that
+God&rsquo;s love is over them, God&rsquo;s kingdom is their inheritance,
+God&rsquo;s love their everlasting portion.</p>
+<p>But we may fall from grace; and then what good will our baptism be
+to us?&nbsp; We shall be lost, just as if we had never been baptized.</p>
+<p>My friends, if, though the sun was shining in the sky, you shut your
+eyes close, and kept out the light, what use would the sunlight be to
+you?&nbsp; You would stumble, and fall, and come to harm, as certainly
+as in the darkest night.&nbsp; But would the sun go out of the sky,
+my friends, because you were unwise enough to shut your eyes to it?&nbsp;
+The sun would still be there, shining as bright as ever.&nbsp; You would
+have only to be reasonable and to open your eyes, and you would see
+your way again as well as ever.</p>
+<p>So it is with holy baptism.&nbsp; In it we were made members of Christ,
+children of God, inheritors of the kingdom of heaven.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s
+love is above us and around us, like a warm, bright, life-giving sun.&nbsp;
+We may shut our eyes to it, but it is there still.&nbsp; We may disbelieve
+our baptism covenant, but it is true still.&nbsp; We are children of
+God; and nothing that we can do, no sin, no unfaithfulness of ours,
+can make us anything else.&nbsp; We can no more become not God&rsquo;s
+children, than a child can become not his own father&rsquo;s son.&nbsp;
+But this we can do by sinning, by disbelieving that we are God&rsquo;s
+children, by behaving as the devil&rsquo;s children when we are God&rsquo;s;
+we can believe ourselves not God&rsquo;s children when we are; we can
+try to be what we are not; we can enter into a lie, and into the misery
+to which all lies lead; we can walk in darkness, and stumble, and fall,
+when all the while we are children of the light, and have only to open
+our eyes to walk in the light.&nbsp; Ay, we can shut our eyes to the
+light so long, that at last we forget that there is any light at all;
+and that is the gate of hell.&nbsp; We may wrap ourselves up in our
+selfishness, in selfish pleasures, selfish cunning, selfish covetousness,
+and selfish pride, till we forget that there is anything better for
+us than selfishness, till we forget that God is love, and that we His
+children are meant to be loving even as He is loving; and that also
+is the gate of hell.&nbsp; And worst and darkest of all, when in that
+stupid, sinful, loveless state of mind, God&rsquo;s loving Spirit still
+strives and pleads with us, and tries to awaken us, and terrify us with
+the sight of the everlasting misery and ruin into which we have thrown
+ourselves, we may turn those pleadings of God&rsquo;s Spirit, by our
+own evil wills, into a darker curse than all which have gone before.&nbsp;
+We may refuse to believe that God is love, and fancy Him as hard, and
+cruel, and proud, and spiteful, and unloving as we ourselves are.&nbsp;
+We may refuse, though Scripture, Prayer-book, sacraments, preachers,
+assure us of it, that God is our Father still; and deny His covenant
+of baptism, and blaspheme His holy name, by fancying Him our tyrant
+and taskmaster, who hates us, and willeth the death of a sinner, and
+has pleasure in the death of him that dieth.&nbsp; And then we may behave
+according to the lie which we ourselves have invented, and all sorts
+of inventions of our own to escape God&rsquo;s wrath, when, in reality,
+it is He who is wishing to turn His wrath away from us; and to win back
+His favour, when, in reality, it is not we who are out of favour with
+Him, but He who is out of favour with us, who dread Him and shrink from
+Him; we may try to deliver ourselves from Him, when all the while it
+is He, the very God whom we are dreading and flying from, who alone
+is able and willing to deliver us; and with all our fears, and self-tormentings,
+and faithless terrors, and blasphemings of God by fancying Him the very
+opposite to what He has declared Himself, we shall get no peace of conscience,
+no deliverance from sins, or from the fear of punishment, but only a
+fearful and fiery looking forward to judgment, which is hell.&nbsp;
+That is superstition; hell on earth; when men have so utterly forgotten
+the likeness of God, which He manifested in His Son Jesus Christ, that
+they look on Him as a stern and dreadful taskmaster, a tyrant, and not
+a deliverer.&nbsp; Hell on earth, which may and must lead to hell hereafter;
+a hell of fear, and doubt, and hatred of Him who is all lovely; the
+hell whereof it is written, that its worst torment is being cast out
+from the sight of God: unless the hapless sinner opens his eye and believes
+the covenant of his baptism, and sees that God cannot lie, God cannot
+change, cannot break His covenant, cannot alter His love; that though
+he have left his Father&rsquo;s house, and wandered into far countries,
+and wasted his Father&rsquo;s substance in riotous living, he is still
+his Father&rsquo;s son, his Father&rsquo;s house is still where it was
+from the beginning, his Father&rsquo;s heart still what it was from
+the beginning; and so arises and goes back to his Father&rsquo;s house,
+confessing that he is no more worthy to be called His son, willing to
+be only as one of His hired servants; and then&mdash;sees not the stern
+countenance, the cruel punishments which he dreaded: but&mdash;&ldquo;While
+he was yet afar off, his Father saw him, and ran, and fell on his neck,
+and kissed him!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And if, in our sins, our only hope of comfort, and peace, and strength,
+lies in remembering our baptismal covenant, and being sure and certain
+that though we have changed, God has not; that though we are dark, God&rsquo;s
+love shines bright and clear for ever, how much more when the dark day
+of affliction comes?&nbsp; Why should I speak of this and that affliction?&nbsp;
+Each heart knows its own bitterness; each soul has its own sorrow; each
+man&rsquo;s life has its dark days of storm and tempest, when all his
+joys seem flown away by some sudden blast of ill-fortune, and the desire
+of his eyes is taken from him, and all his hopes and plans, all which
+he intended to do or to enjoy, are hid with blinding mist, so that he
+cannot see his way before him, and knows not whither to go, and whither
+to flee for help; when faith in God seems broken up for the moment,
+when he feels no strength, no will, no purpose, and knows not what to
+determine, what to do, what to believe, what to care for; when the very
+earth seems reeling under his feet, and the fountains of the abyss are
+broken up: then let him think of God&rsquo;s covenant, and take heart;
+let him think of his baptism, and be at peace.&nbsp; Is the sun&rsquo;s
+warmth perished out of the sky, because the storm is cold with hail
+and bitter winds?&nbsp; Is God&rsquo;s love changed, because we cannot
+feel it in our trouble?&nbsp; Is the sun&rsquo;s light perished out
+of the sky, because the world is black with cloud and mist?&nbsp; Has
+God forgotten to give light to suffering souls, because we cannot see
+our way for a few short days of perplexity?</p>
+<p>For this is the gospel, this is the message which we have received
+from God, to preach to every sad and desolate heart on earth, that God
+is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.&nbsp; That God is love,
+and in Him there is no cruelty at all.&nbsp; That God is one, and in
+Him there is no change at all.&nbsp; And therefore, we all, the most
+ignorant of us as well as the wisest, the most sinful of us as well
+as the holiest, the saddest and most wretched of us as well as the happiest,
+have a right to join in that Litany which is offered up here thrice
+every week during the time of Lent, and to call upon God to deliver
+us and all mankind, not merely because we wish to be delivered from
+evil, but because God wishes to deliver us from evil.&nbsp; If we pray
+that Litany in any dark dread of God, in doubt of His love and goodwill
+towards us, like terrified slaves crying out to a hard taskmaster, and
+entreating him not to torment them, we do not pray that Litany aright;
+we do not pray it at all.&nbsp; For it asks God not to leave us alone,
+but to come to us; not to stop punishing us, but actually Himself to
+deliver us, to defend us, to set us free.&nbsp; Therefore it begins
+by calling on God the Father, because He is our Father; on God the Son,
+because He has already redeemed and bought us for His own; on God the
+Holy Spirit, because He has been striving with our wilful hearts from
+our youth up till now, lovingly desiring to teach us, to change us,
+to sanctify us.&nbsp; Therefore it calls on the holy, blessed, and glorious
+Trinity, three Persons and one God, because the Son does not love us
+better than the Father does, or than the Holy Spirit does, but in the
+life and death of the Man Christ Jesus, whom we call on to deliver us
+by His birth, His baptism, His death, His resurrection, by all that
+His manhood did and suffered here on earth, in His life and death, I
+say, were shown forth bodily the glory, and condescension, and love,
+and goodwill of the fulness of the Godhead, of all three Persons of
+the one and undivided Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.&nbsp; Therefore
+we may pray boldly to Him to spare us, because we know that we are already
+His people, already redeemed with his most precious blood, already declared
+by holy baptism to be bound to Him in an everlasting covenant.&nbsp;
+Therefore we may pray boldly to Him not to be angry with us for ever,
+because we know that He desires to bless us for ever, if we will only
+let Him; if we will only let His love have free course, and not shut
+our hearts to it, and turn our backs upon it.&nbsp; Therefore we can
+ask Him to deliver us in all time of our tribulation and misery; in
+all time of the still more dangerous temptations which wealth and prosperity
+bring with them; in the hour of death, whether of our own death or the
+death of those we love; in the day of judgment, whereof it is written:
+&ldquo;It is God who justifieth us, who is he that condemneth?&nbsp;
+It is Christ who died, yea rather who is risen again, who even now maketh
+intercession for us.&rdquo;&nbsp; To that boundless love of God which
+He showed forth in the life of Christ Jesus; to that utter and perfect
+will to deliver us, which God showed forth in the death of Christ Jesus,
+when the Father spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him
+for us; to that boundless love we may trust ourselves, our fortunes,
+our families, our bodies, our souls, the souls of those we love.&nbsp;
+Trusting in that great love, we may pray in that Litany for deliverance;
+to be delivered from distress and accidents, from all sins which drag
+us down, and make us miserable, ashamed, confused, terrified, selfish,
+hateful, and hating each other.&nbsp; We may pray to be delivered from
+evil, because God is righteousness, and hates evil.&nbsp; We may pray
+to be delivered from our sins, because God is righteousness, and hates
+our sins.&nbsp; We may pray for the Queen, her ministers, her parliament,
+because God&rsquo;s love and care is over them; for all orders and ranks
+of men, whether laymen or clergymen, high or low, in God&rsquo;s holy
+church; for all who are afflicted and desolate; for all who are wandering
+in ignorance, and mistakes, and sin; ay, for all mankind, for God loves
+them all, the Son of God has bought them all with His most precious
+blood.&nbsp; And however dark, and sad, and sinful the world may seem
+around us; however dark, and sad, and sinful our own hearts may be within
+us, we may find comfort in that Litany, and pour out in it our sorrows
+and our fears, if we begin only as it begins, with the thought of God
+who is righteousness, God who is love, God who is the Deliverer.&nbsp;
+And then, as the rainbow reflects the sunbeams for a sign and token
+that the sun is shining, though we see it not; so will that blessed
+Litany, with its sacred name of God, its calls to Him who was born of
+the Virgin Mary, and crucified under Pontius Pilate; its entreaties
+to God to deliver us, because He is a deliverer; to hear us, and send
+us good, because He is a good Lord Himself; its remembrances of the
+noble works which God did in our fathers&rsquo; days, and in the old
+time before them; its noble declaration that God does not despise the
+sighing of a contrite heart, nor the desire of a humble spirit, and
+that it is the very glory of His name to turn from us those evils which
+we most justly have deserved&mdash;that Litany, I say, will be like
+a rainbow declaring to our dark and stormy hearts that the sun is shining
+still above the clouds; that over and above us, and all mankind, and
+all the changes and chances of this mortal life, is the still bright
+sunshine, the life-giving warmth of the Sun of Righteousness, the absolute
+eternal love of our Father who is in heaven, who, as he has declared
+by the mouth of His only-begotten Son, is perfect in this, that He does
+not deal with us after our sins, nor reward us according to our iniquities,
+but is good to the unthankful and the evil, sending His rain alike upon
+the just and on the unjust, and making His sun to shine alike upon the
+evil and the good.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XLIII&mdash;THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh,
+justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached to the Gentiles, believed
+on in the world, received up into glory.&mdash;1 TIMOTHY iii. 16.</p>
+<p>St. Paul here sums up in one verse the whole of Christian truth.&nbsp;
+He gives us in a few words what he says is the great mystery of godliness.</p>
+<p>Now, men had been inventing for themselves all kinds of mysteries
+of godliness; all sorts of mysterious and wonderful notions about God;
+all sorts of mysterious and strange ceremonies, and ways of pleasing
+God, or turning away His anger.</p>
+<p>And Christian men are apt to do so also, as well as those old heathens.&nbsp;
+They feel that they are very mysterious and wonderful beings themselves,
+simply because they are men.&nbsp; They say to themselves: &ldquo;How
+strange that I should have a body of flesh and blood, and appetites
+and passions, like the animals, and yet that I should have an immortal
+spirit in me.&nbsp; How strange this notion of duty which I have, and
+which the other animals have not; this notion of its being right to
+do some things, and wrong to do others!&nbsp; From whence did that notion
+come?&nbsp; And again, this strange notion which I have, and cannot
+help having, that I ought to be like God: and yet I do not know what
+God is like.&nbsp; From whence did that notion come?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Again: &ldquo;I fancy that God ought to be good.&nbsp; But how do
+I know that He really is good?&nbsp; I see the world full of injustice,
+and misery, and death.&nbsp; How do I know that this is not God&rsquo;s
+doing, God&rsquo;s fault in some way?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Again, says a man to himself: &ldquo;I have a fair right to believe
+that mankind are not the only persons in the universe&mdash;that there
+are other beings beside God whom I cannot see.&nbsp; I call them angels.&nbsp;
+I hardly know what I mean by that.&nbsp; The really important question
+about them to me is: Will they do me harm?&nbsp; Can they do me good?&nbsp;
+Are they stronger than I?&mdash;Ought I not to fear them, to try to
+please them, to keep them favourable to me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Again, he asks: &ldquo;Does God care whether I know what is right?&nbsp;
+Does God care to teach me about Himself?&nbsp; Is God desirous that
+I should do my duty?&nbsp; For if He does not care about my being good,
+why should I care about it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Again, he asks: &ldquo;But if I knew my duty, might I not find it
+something too far-fetched, too difficult, for poor simple folk to do:
+so that I should be forced to leave a right life to great scholars,
+and to rich people, or to people of a very devout delicate temper of
+mind, who have a natural turn that way?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And last of all: &ldquo;Even if I did struggle to do right; even
+if I gave up everything for the sake of doing right; how do I know that
+it will profit me to do so?&nbsp; I shall die as every man dies, and
+then what will become of me?&nbsp; Shall I be a man still, or only&mdash;horrible
+thought!&mdash;some sort of empty ghost, a spirit without body, of which
+I dream, and shudder while I dream of it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Men in all ages, heathens and Christians, have been puzzled by such
+thoughts as these, as soon as they began to feel that there was a world
+which they could not see, as well as a world which they could see; a
+spiritual world, wherein God the Spirit, and their own spirits, and
+spiritual things, such as right, wrong, duty, reason, love, dwell for
+ever; and a strange hidden duty on all men to obey that unseen God,
+and the laws of that spiritual world; in short a mystery of godliness.</p>
+<p>Then they have tried to answer these questions for themselves; and
+have run thereby into all manner of follies and superstitions, and often,
+too, into devilish cruelties, in the hope of pleasing God according
+to some mystery of godliness of their own invention.</p>
+<p>But to each of these puzzles St. Paul gives an answer in the text.&nbsp;
+Let us take them each in its order, and you will see what I mean.</p>
+<p>The first puzzle was: How is it that while I am like the animals
+in some things, and yet feel as if I ought to be, and can be, like God
+in other things?&nbsp; How is it that I feel two powers in me; one dragging
+me downward to make me lower than the beasts, the other lifting me upwards&mdash;I
+dare not think whither?&nbsp; It seems to me to be my body, my bodily
+appetites and tempers which drag me down.&nbsp; Is my body me, part
+of me, or a thing I should be ashamed of, and long to be rid of?&nbsp;
+I fancy that I can be like God.&nbsp; But can my body be like God?&nbsp;
+Must I not crush it, neglect it, get rid of it before I can follow the
+good instinct which draws me upward?</p>
+<p>To which St. Paul told Timothy to answer: God was manifest in the
+flesh.&nbsp; God sent down His only-begotten Son, co-equal and co-eternal
+with Himself, very God of very God, the very same person who had been
+putting into men&rsquo;s minds those two notions of which we spoke,
+that there is a right and a wrong, and that men ought to be like God;
+Him the Father sent into the world that He might be born, and live,
+and die, and rise again, as a man; that so men might see from His example,
+manifestly and plainly, what God was like, and what man ought to be
+like.&nbsp; And so Jesus Christ was God, manifested in the flesh.</p>
+<p>Now we do know what God is like.&nbsp; We know that He is so like
+man, that He can take upon Him man&rsquo;s flesh and blood without changing,
+or lowering, or defiling Himself.&nbsp; That proves that man must have
+been originally made in God&rsquo;s likeness; that man&rsquo;s being
+fallen, means man&rsquo;s falling from the likeness of God, and taking
+up instead with the likeness of the brutes which perish; that the fault
+cannot be in our bodies, but in our spirits which have yielded to our
+bodies, and become their slaves instead of their masters, as Christ&rsquo;s
+Spirit was master of His body.&nbsp; But the Son of God, by being born
+and living as a man, showed us that we are not fallen past hope, not
+fallen so low that we cannot rise again.&nbsp; He showed that though
+mankind are sinful, yet they need not be sinful; for He was a man as
+exactly, and perfectly, and entirely as we are, and yet in Him was no
+sin.&nbsp; So He showed that brutishness and sinfulness is not our proper
+state, but our disease and our fall; and a disease of which we can be
+cured, a fall out of which we can rise and be renewed into the true
+and real pattern of mankind, the new Adam, Jesus the sinless Son of
+Man and Son of God.</p>
+<p>The next question, I said, that rose in men&rsquo;s mind was: &ldquo;How
+do I know that God is good, as I fancy sometimes that He must be?&nbsp;
+I see the world full of sin, and injustice, and misery, and death.&nbsp;
+Perhaps that is God&rsquo;s doing, God&rsquo;s fault.&rdquo;&nbsp; That
+is a common puzzle enough, and a sad and fearful one.&nbsp; The sin
+and the misery and the death are here.&nbsp; If God did not bring it
+here, yet why did He let it come here?&nbsp; He could have stopped if
+He would, and kept out all this wretchedness: why did He not?&nbsp;
+Was He just or loving in letting sin into the world?</p>
+<p>To all which St. Paul answers: &ldquo;God was justified in the Spirit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>You do not see what that has to do with it?&nbsp; Then let me show
+you.</p>
+<p>To be justified means to be shown and proved to be just, righteous.&nbsp;
+Now what justified God to man was the Spirit of God, as He showed Himself
+in the Lord Jesus Christ.&nbsp; For when God became man and dwelt among
+men, what sort of works were His?&nbsp; What was His conduct, His character;
+of what sort of spirit did He show Himself to be?&nbsp; He went, we
+read, doing good, for God was with Him.&nbsp; Not of His own will, but
+to do His Father&rsquo;s will, and because He was filled without measure
+by the Spirit of God, He did good, He healed the sick, He rebuked the
+proud and self-conceited hypocrite, He proclaimed pardon and mercy to
+the broken-hearted sinner, wearied and worn out by the burden of his
+sins.&nbsp; Thus, in every action of His life, He was fighting against
+evil and misery, and conquering it; and so showing that God hates evil
+and misery, and that the evil and the misery in the world are here against
+God&rsquo;s will.&nbsp; Strange as it may seem to have to say it, so
+it is.&nbsp; Jesus Christ showed that howsoever sin and sorrow came
+into the world, it is God&rsquo;s will and purpose to root them out
+of the world, and that He is righteous, He is loving, He is merciful,
+He does and will fight against evil, for those who are crushed by it;
+and help poor sufferers always when they call upon Him, and often, often,
+of His most undeserved condescension and free grace, when they are forgetting
+and disobeying Him.&nbsp; And so by the good, and loving, and just spirit
+which Jesus showed, God was justified before men, and showed to be a
+God of goodness and justice.</p>
+<p>The next puzzle, I said, was about angels and spirits, whether we
+need to pray to them to help us, and not to hurt us.&nbsp; St. Paul
+answers: God, when He was manifested in the flesh of a man, was seen
+by these angels.&nbsp; And that is enough for us.&nbsp; They saw the
+Lord God condescend to be born in a stable, to live as a poor man, to
+die on the cross.&nbsp; They saw that His will to man was love.&nbsp;
+And they do His will.&nbsp; And therefore they love men, they help men,
+they minister to men, because they follow the Lord&rsquo;s example,
+and do the will of their Father in Heaven, even as we ought to do it
+on earth.&nbsp; Therefore we have no need to fear them, for they love
+us already.&nbsp; And, on the other hand, we have no need to pray to
+them to help us, for they know already that it is their duty to help
+us.&nbsp; They know that the Son of God has put on us a higher honour
+than He ever put on them; for He took not on Him the nature of angels,
+He took on Him the nature of man; and thus, though man was made a little
+lower than the angels, yet by Christ&rsquo;s taking man&rsquo;s nature,
+man is crowned with a glory and honour higher than the angels.&nbsp;
+Know ye not, says St. Paul, that we shall judge angels?&nbsp; And the
+angels, as they told St. John, are our fellow-servants, not our masters;
+and they know that; for they saw the Son of God doing utterly His Father&rsquo;s
+will, and therefore they know that their duty is to do their Father&rsquo;s
+will also; not to do their own wills, and set themselves up as our masters,
+to be pleaded with by us.&nbsp; They saw the Son of God take our nature
+on Him, when they sang to the shepherds on the first Christmas night:
+&ldquo;Peace on earth, and good-will toward men;&rdquo; and therefore
+they look on us with love and honour, because we wear the human nature
+which Christ their Master wore, and are partakers of the Holy Spirit
+of God, even as they are.&nbsp; For no angel or archangel could do a
+right thing, any more than we, except by the Holy Spirit of God.&nbsp;
+And that Holy Spirit is bestowed on the poorest man who asks for it,
+as freely as upon the highest of the heavenly host.</p>
+<p>And this leads us on to the next puzzle of which I spoke: Men were
+apt, and are apt now, to say to themselves: Does God care whether I
+know what is right?&nbsp; Does God care to teach me about Himself?&nbsp;
+Is God desirous that I should do my duty?&nbsp; For if He does not care
+about my being good, why should I care about it?</p>
+<p>To this St. Paul answers: &ldquo;God, who was manifest in the flesh,
+was preached to the Gentiles.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>God does care that men should know about God; for He loves them.&nbsp;
+He yearns after them as a father after his children, and He knows that
+to know God, to know the truth about God, is the beginning of all wisdom,
+the root of all safety and honour and happiness.&nbsp; He willeth not
+that any should perish, but that all should come to the knowledge of
+the truth.&nbsp; And, therefore, when the Son of God died for our sins,
+He did not stop at that great deed of love; but He ordained Apostles,
+and put upon them especially and above all men, His Holy Spirit, that
+they might go and preach to all nations the good news that God had become
+flesh, and dwelt among men, and borne their sorrows and infirmities,
+and to baptize them into the very name of God itself, into the name
+of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; that so, instead
+of fancying now that God did not care for them, they might be sure that
+God so longed to teach them, that He called every child, even from its
+cradle, to come into His kingdom, and be taught the whole mystery of
+godliness.</p>
+<p>The next puzzle I mentioned was: &ldquo;But this right life, this
+mystery of godliness, is it not something very strange and difficult,
+and past the understanding of simple men who are not extraordinarily
+clever and learned scholars or deep philosophers?&rdquo;&nbsp; To that
+St. Paul answers: No.&nbsp; It is not past any man.&nbsp; It is not
+too deep or too difficult for the simplest, the most unlearned countryman.&nbsp;
+For, says St. Paul in the text, we Apostles have had proof of that;
+we have tried it; we Apostles preached the mystery of godliness, and
+it was believed on in the world.&nbsp; People of the world, plain working
+men and women going about their worldly business, who had no time to
+be great readers, or great thinkers, or to shut themselves up in monasteries
+to meditate on heavenly things, but had to live and work in the commonplace,
+busy, workday world&mdash;they believed our message.&nbsp; We Apostles
+told them that the Son of God had showed Himself in the likeness of
+man, and called on every man to repent, and to be such a man as He was.&nbsp;
+And worldly people believed us, and tried, and found that without giving
+up their worldly work, or deserting the station in which God had put
+them, they could live godlike lives, and become the sons of God without
+rebuke.&nbsp; They saw that scholarship was not wanted, leisure was
+not wanted, but only the humble heart which hungers and thirsts after
+righteousness.&nbsp; About their daily work, by their cottage firesides,
+among their poor neighbours, the Spirit of Almighty God gave them strength
+to live as Jesus their pattern lived; He filled them with all holy,
+pure, noble, brave, loving thoughts and feelings, fit for angels and
+archangels.&nbsp; He enabled them to rise out of their sins, to trample
+their temptations under foot, to leave their old low brutish sinful
+way of life behind them, and become new men, and persevere in every
+word, and thought, and action, in virtues such as the greatest heathen
+sages could not copy; ay, even to shed their life-blood freely and boldly
+in martyrdom, for the sake of God and the truth of God.&nbsp; They,
+these plain simple people, living in the world, could still live the
+life of God, and die like heroes for the sake of God.</p>
+<p>And this again brings us to the last puzzle of which I spoke: &ldquo;But
+what became of those holy and godlike people when they died?&nbsp; What
+reward did they receive for all they had done, and given up, and suffered?&nbsp;
+What will become of us after we die?&nbsp; What will the next world
+be like?&nbsp; What is heaven like?&nbsp; Shall I be able to enjoy it?&nbsp;
+Shall I be a man there, or only a ghost, a spirit without a body?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To this St. Paul answers: That Christ, the Son of God, after He was
+manifested in the flesh, was received up into glory.&nbsp; He does not
+tell us what heaven is like; for though he had been caught up into the
+third heaven, yet what he saw there, he says, was unspeakable.&nbsp;
+He neither ought to tell, or could tell, what he saw.&nbsp; Neither
+does St. Paul tell us what the next life will be like; for as far as
+we can find, God had not told him.&nbsp; All he says is: The man Christ
+Jesus, who walked this earth like other men, was received up into glory;
+and He did not leave His man&rsquo;s mind, His man&rsquo;s heart, even
+His man&rsquo;s body, behind Him.&nbsp; He carried up into heaven with
+Him His whole manhood, spirit, soul, and body, even to the print of
+the nails in His hands and in His most holy feet, and the wound of the
+spear in His most holy side.&nbsp; And that is enough for us.&nbsp;
+Because the man Christ Jesus is in heaven, we as men may ascend to heaven.&nbsp;
+Where He is we shall be.&nbsp; And what He is, in as far as He is man,
+we shall be.&nbsp; What we shall be we know not; but this we know, that
+we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.&nbsp; And He is
+a man still; for it is written: &ldquo;There is one Mediator between
+God and man, the man Christ Jesus.&rdquo;&nbsp; And He will be a man
+at the day of judgment; for it is written that: &ldquo;God hath ordained
+a day in which He will judge the world by a man whom He hath chosen.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And He will be a man for ever; for it is written: &ldquo;This man abideth
+for ever.&rdquo;&nbsp; And He Himself said to His disciples: &ldquo;I
+will not drink of this fruit of the vine, till I drink it new with you
+in the kingdom of my Father.&rdquo;&nbsp; And again He declared, even
+when he was on earth, that He was the Son of Man who is in heaven.&nbsp;
+And in heaven nothing can grow less.&nbsp; But if Christ were not man
+for ever as well as God, He would become less; for He is now God and
+man also at once; but if He laid down His manhood, and so became not
+man any more, but God only, He would become less, which is not to be
+believed of Him of whom it is written: That Jesus Christ is the same
+yesterday, to-day, and for ever.&nbsp; For, as the Athanasian creed
+teaches us, He is not God alone, nor man alone, but God and man is one
+Christ; and therefore, when St. John declares that Christ shall reign
+for ever and ever, he declares that He shall reign not only as God,
+but as man also.&nbsp; Therefore whatever we do not know about the next
+life, we know this, that we shall be men there; not sinful, weak, and
+mortal, as we are here, but holy, strong, immortal, after the likeness
+of our Lord, the firstborn from the dead, who has ascended up on high
+and raised our human nature to the heaven of heavens, and is gone to
+prepare a place for us, into which we too shall enter in that day when
+He shall change these mortal and fallen bodies which we now wear, the
+bodies of our humiliation, the bodies by wearing which we are now a
+little lower than the angels; them the Lord will change, that they may
+be made like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working
+whereby He subdueth all things unto Himself, that we may see Him face
+to face, and dwell with Him in the glory of God the Father for ever.</p>
+<p>Oh my friends, who is sufficient for these things?&nbsp; What shall
+we say of man?&nbsp; Is he not indeed fearfully and wonderfully made?&nbsp;
+Here we are, weak creatures, more liable to disease and death than the
+dumb beasts round us; full of poverty, and adversity, and longings which
+are never satisfied; our minds full of mistakes, our hearts full of
+false conceit, full of spite and folly, struggles, murmurings, quarrellings;
+our consciences full of the remembrance of sins without number.&nbsp;
+The greatest of all heathen poets said, that there was not a more miserable
+and pitiable animal upon the earth than man.&nbsp; He knew no better.&nbsp;
+He could not know better.&nbsp; How could he, when God had not yet been
+manifest in the flesh?&nbsp; How could he dream that the Lord God would
+condescend to be made flesh, and dwell among us, and show man His glory,
+the glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth&mdash;how
+could he dream that?&nbsp; And more than all, how could he dream that
+God, instead of throwing away our human nature when He rose again, as
+if it was too great a degradation for Him to be a man one moment more,
+should condescend to take up His human nature, His man&rsquo;s body,
+soul, and spirit, with Him into everlasting glory, that He might feed
+with it for ever the bodies and souls of those who trust in Him, so
+as to make them fit for us at the last day, to share in His everlasting
+life?&nbsp; The old heathen poet knew as well as you or I that there
+was an everlasting life beyond the grave; that men&rsquo;s souls were
+immortal, and could not die: but the thought of it was all dark, and
+dreary, and uncertain to him and to all mankind, till the Son of God
+brought life and immortality to light, when He was manifest in the flesh.</p>
+<p>Wonderful mystery of godliness!&nbsp; Wonderful love of God to man!&nbsp;
+Wonderful condescension of God to man!&nbsp; Still more wonderful patience
+of God to man!</p>
+<p>Oh you who live still in sin, when the Son of God died and rose again
+to make you righteous; you who defile your bodies with sins worse than
+the brutes, when the Son of God offers to raise those bodies of yours
+to be equal with the angels; how shall you escape if you neglect so
+great salvation; if you despise this unspeakable love; if you trample
+under foot, like swine, the everlasting glory and happiness which God
+offers you freely, without fee or price, for the sake of His only-begotten
+Son, Jesus Christ, who died to buy them for you?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XLIV&mdash;THE WORK OF GOD&rsquo;S SPIRIT</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>If I go not away, the comforter will not come unto you; but if I
+depart, I will send Him unto you.&nbsp; And when He is come, He will
+reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of
+sin, because they believe not on me: of righteousness, because I go
+to my Father, and ye see me no more: of judgment, because the prince
+of this world is judged.&mdash;JOHN xvi. 7-11.</p>
+<p>I no not pretend to be able to explain to you the whole meaning of
+this text, or even more than a very small part of it.&nbsp; For it speaks
+of God; of God the Holy Spirit.&nbsp; And God is boundless; and, therefore,
+every text which speaks of God is boundless too, as God is.&nbsp; No
+man can ever see the whole meaning of it, or do more than understand
+dimly a little of its truth.&nbsp; But what we can see, we must think
+over and make use of.&nbsp; What can we see, now, from this text?&nbsp;
+First, we may see that the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost, the Comforter,
+is a person.&nbsp; Not a mere thing, or a state of our own hearts, or
+a feeling in us, or a power, like the powers and laws by which the trees
+and plants grow, and the sun and moon move in their courses; but a person,
+just as each of us is a person.&nbsp; He, the Holy Spirit, gives life
+to trees and plants, sun and moon: but He is not their life.&nbsp; He
+gives them their life; and, therefore, that life of theirs is not He,
+or He could not give it; for you can only give something which is not
+you.</p>
+<p>The Scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit, not as it, but as He; as
+a person, and not as a thing; as a person who can speak to men&rsquo;s
+souls, guide and teach them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into
+all truth; for He shall not speak of Himself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But we may see also that the Holy Spirit is neither God the Father,
+nor the Lord Jesus Christ.&nbsp; For the Lord speaks of Him, the Holy
+Spirit, as a different person either from Him or from the Father.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The Spirit,&rdquo; He says, &ldquo;shall glorify me; for He shall
+receive of mine, and shall show it unto you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But we may see also that there is no difference in will, or opinion,
+or love, between the Holy Spirit and the Father and the Son.&nbsp; For
+the Spirit does not speak of Himself; there is no self-will in Him.&nbsp;
+There is not one will of the Father, and another of the Son, and another
+of the Holy Ghost; or, one love of the Father, another love of the Son,
+and another of the Holy Ghost; or, one righteousness of the Father,
+another of the Son, another of the Holy Ghost: or, one mercy and grace
+of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Ghost.&nbsp;
+For then there would be three Gods and three Lords; and the substance
+of God would be divided.&nbsp; But they have all one will, and one love,
+and one righteousness, and one mercy.&nbsp; And such as the Father is,
+such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.</p>
+<p>And remember always, that the Holy Spirit is very and indeed God.&nbsp;
+For He is the Spirit of holiness itself, of righteousness itself, of
+goodness itself, of love itself, of truth itself; and, therefore, He
+is the Spirit of God, who is the perfect holiness, and righteousness,
+and truth, and love.&nbsp; All other holiness, and righteousness, and
+truth, and love, are only pictures and patterns of God, just as the
+sun&rsquo;s reflection in water, or in a glass, is a picture and pattern
+of the sun.&nbsp; As the Epistle for to-day tells us: &ldquo;Every good
+gift and every perfect is from above, and cometh down from the Father
+of lights.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But the Spirit of God must be God.&nbsp; For else what do the words
+mean?&nbsp; Is not the spirit of a man, a man?&nbsp; Is not your spirit,
+what you call your soul, you?&nbsp; Is not your soul you, just as much
+as your body is you; ay, a hundred times more?&nbsp; Just so, the Spirit
+of God is God, God Himself; and the Godhead of the Father, of the Son,
+of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.</p>
+<p>This, then, is the glorious promise made to you, and to me, and to
+all who believe and are baptized into the name of the Father, the Son,
+and the Holy Spirit; that that Spirit will come to us, and take charge
+of our spirits, and work in them, and teach them.&nbsp; We cannot see
+Him with our eyes, or hear Him with our ears; we cannot even feel Him
+at work in our hearts and thoughts.&nbsp; For He is a Spirit; and His
+likeness, the thing in this world which is a pattern of Him, is the
+wind; as indeed the name Spirit means.&nbsp; You cannot see the wind,
+you cannot even really feel the wind or hear it: you only know it by
+its effects, by what it does: by the noise among the branches, the force
+against your faces, the bending boughs, and flying dust.&nbsp; The Spirit
+bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst
+not tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth; even so is every one
+who is born of the Spirit.&nbsp; On him the Spirit of God will work
+unseen, and unfelt, only to be discovered by the change which He makes
+in the man&rsquo;s heart and thoughts; and first by the way in which
+He convinces him of sin, because men believe not on Jesus Christ.</p>
+<p>The Holy Spirit shows men that the sins of the world, the sin of
+all sins, the sin which is the root of all other sins, is not believing
+on the Lord Jesus Christ; that it was because they would not believe
+on the Lord Jesus Christ, that they had been falling into every other
+sort of sin.</p>
+<p>But you may say: &ldquo;How could they believe on Him before He came,
+and was born in Jud&aelig;a of the Virgin Mary?&nbsp; How could they
+believe on Him when He was not there?&rdquo;&nbsp; Ah! my friends, who
+told you that the Lord Jesus Christ was not there in the world all along?&nbsp;
+Not the Bible, certainly.&nbsp; For the Bible tells us that He is the
+Light who lights every man who cometh into the world; that from Him
+came, and have come, all the right thoughts and feelings which ever
+arose in the heart of every human being.&nbsp; The Bible tells us that
+when God created the world, He was daily rejoicing in the habitable
+parts of the earth, and His delights were with the sons of men.&nbsp;
+The Bible tells us that He was in the world, and the world knew Him
+not; that all along, through the dark times of heathendom, the Lord
+Jesus Christ was a light shining in darkness, which the darkness could
+not close round, and hide and quench.</p>
+<p>Not merely to the Jews, but to all heathens who hungered and thirsted
+after righteousness, did the Lord Jesus show something of His truth;
+as it is written, God is no acceptor of persons; that is, no shower
+of partiality, or unjust favour: but in every nation, he that feareth
+God and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him.</p>
+<p>But at the time that the Lord Jesus sent down His Holy Spirit, men
+were not working righteousness.&nbsp; There was not one who did good,
+no not one.&nbsp; For men had forgotten what righteousness was like,
+what a righteous man ought to do and be.&nbsp; Men are ready to forget
+it every day.&nbsp; You and I are ready to forget it, and invent some
+false righteousness of our own, not like Jesus Christ, but like what
+we in our private fancies think is most graceful, or most agreeable,
+or most easy; or most grand, and far-fetched, and difficult.&nbsp; But
+the Holy Spirit came to convince men of righteousness; to show them
+what true righteousness was like.</p>
+<p>And how?&nbsp; In the same way that He must convince us of righteousness,
+if we are ever to know what righteousness is, or are ever to be righteous
+ourselves.&nbsp; He must show us goodness; or we shall never see it,
+or receive it, or copy it.</p>
+<p>And where is this righteousness, this perfect goodness of which the
+Holy Spirit will convince us?&nbsp; Where, but in the Lord Jesus Christ?&nbsp;
+In the Lord Jesus&rsquo;s character, the Lord Jesus&rsquo;s good works;
+His love, His patience, His perfect obedience, His life, His death.&nbsp;
+The Holy Spirit, if we give up our hearts to be taught by Him, will
+make us believe, and be sure, and feel in our very inmost hearts, how
+noble, how beautiful, how holy, how perfectly Godlike, was He who was
+born of a poor virgin, who walked this earth for thirty-three years
+in toil and sorrow, who gave His back to the smiters, and His cheeks
+to them that plucked off the hair, and hid not His face from shame and
+spitting, who died upon a cross between two thieves.&nbsp; And the Holy
+Spirit will convince us of righteousness, by making us feel what the
+Lord Jesus&rsquo;s righteousness consisted in; what was the root of
+all His goodness and holiness, namely His perfect obedience to His Father
+and our Father in heaven.&nbsp; That is the righteousness, which is
+not our own, but God&rsquo;s; the righteousness which comes by faith;
+not to trust in ourselves, but in God; not to please ourselves, but
+God; not to do our own will, but God&rsquo;s will.&nbsp; That is the
+righteousness of Jesus Christ, which God set His seal on and approved,
+when He exalted Him far above all principality and powers, and set Him
+at His own right hand for a sign to all men, and angels, and archangels;
+that righteousness means to trust and to obey God even to the death.</p>
+<p>3.&nbsp; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.</p>
+<p>This may seem a puzzling speech at first.&nbsp; We shall understand
+it best, I think, by considering who the prince of this world was in
+our Lord&rsquo;s time, and what he was like.&nbsp; A little before our
+Lord&rsquo;s time the Roman emperor had conquered almost the whole world
+which was then known, and kept all nations in slavery, careless about
+their doing right, provided they obeyed him and paid him tribute; nay,
+forcing them and tempting them into all brutal and foul sin and ignorance,
+that he might keep up his own power over man.</p>
+<p>But now the Lord of all the earth, and the Prince of men&rsquo;s
+hearts and thoughts, was come to visit that poor enslaved and sinful
+world.&nbsp; He came; the princes of this world knew Him not, and crucified
+the Lord of Glory.&nbsp; They crucified the righteous and the just One;
+and so they were judged.&nbsp; They judged themselves; they condemned
+themselves.&nbsp; For they showed that what they admired and what they
+wanted was not righteousness and love, but wealth and power.&nbsp; They
+showed that no doing of good, no healing of the sick, or giving of sight
+to the blind, or preaching the gospel to the poor, no holiness, no love,
+not the perfect likeness of God&rsquo;s own goodness, which shone forth
+in the spotless Jesus, was anything to them; was any reason why they
+should not put Him to death with the most cruel torments, because they
+were afraid of His taking away their power.&nbsp; He said He was a King;
+and therefore they crucified Him, lest His kingdom should interfere
+with theirs; and for the same reason these same Roman emperors and their
+magistrates, for hundreds of years afterwards, persecuted the Christians,
+and hunted them down like wild beasts, and put them to death by all
+horrible tortures, for the same reason that Cain slew Abel; became his
+brother&rsquo;s deeds were righteous, and his own wicked.</p>
+<p>So these Roman emperors, and their magistrates and generals were
+judged.&nbsp; They had shown what was in their evil hearts.&nbsp; They
+had been tried in God&rsquo;s balances, and found wanting.&nbsp; The
+sentence of the Lord God had gone forth against them.&nbsp; The man
+Christ Jesus, whom they rejected, God accepted, and raised to His own
+right hand.&nbsp; They crucified Him; but God gave Him all power in
+heaven and earth: and the Lord Jesus used His power; yea, and uses it
+still.&nbsp; He gave His saints and martyrs strength to defy those Roman
+tyrants, and to witness to all the earth that the righteous Son of God
+was the King of heaven and earth, and that the princes of this world,
+who wished to break His yoke off their necks, and crush all nations
+to powder for their own pleasure, and fatten themselves upon the plunder
+of all the earth, would surely come to naught, as it is written in the
+second Psalm: &ldquo;The kings of the earth set themselves, and the
+rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and His Anointed.&nbsp;
+Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Zion.&nbsp; Thou shalt break
+them with a rod of iron: thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter&rsquo;s
+vessel.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And they did come to naught.&nbsp; That great Roman empire rotted
+away miserably after years of such distress as had never been seen on
+the earth before; and the emperors came, one after another, to shameful
+or dreadful deaths.&nbsp; And all the while the gospel spread, and the
+Church grew, till all the kingdoms of the Roman empire had become the
+kingdoms of God and of His Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit working
+in men&rsquo;s hearts, and showing them, as our Lord said He would,
+that Jesus of Nazareth was both Lord and King.&nbsp; And so was fulfilled
+the Lord&rsquo;s words in the gospel for to-day: &ldquo;The Holy Spirit
+shall glorify me, for He shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto
+you.&nbsp; All things that the Father hath are mine; therefore said
+I that He should take of mine, and show it unto you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Oh my friends, pray for yourselves, and join me while I pray for
+you, that the holy and righteous Spirit of God may convince you, and
+me, and all mankind, more and more, day by day, of sin, of righteousness,
+and of judgment.</p>
+<p>Pray to that Holy Spirit to convince you of sin day by day, whensoever
+you do the least wrong thing.&nbsp; Pray to Him to keep your consciences
+tender and quick, that you may feel instantly, and lament deeply, every
+wrong thing you do.</p>
+<p>Pray to Him to give you, every time you do wrong, that godly sorrow
+which brings peace and health, that heart-repentance never to be repented
+of.&nbsp; Pray to Him to convince you more and more, as you grow older,
+that all sin comes from not believing in Jesus Christ, not believing
+that He is near you, with you, in you, putting into your hearts all
+right thoughts and good desires, and willing, if you will, to help you
+to put those thoughts and desires into good practice.</p>
+<p>Pray to the Holy Spirit to convince you more and more of righteousness;
+to make you see what righteousness is; that it is the very character
+and likeness of God the Father, because it is the character and likeness
+of the Lord Jesus Christ, who was the brightness of the Father&rsquo;s
+glory, and the express image of His person.&nbsp; Pray to Him to make
+you see the beauty of holiness: how fair, and noble, and glorious a
+thing goodness is; how truly Solomon says: &ldquo;that all the things
+that may be desired are not to be compared to it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Pray to the Holy Spirit to convince you more and more of judgment,
+and to make you sure that the Lord is King, a righteous Judge, of purer
+eyes than to behold iniquity, whose fan is in His hand, who thoroughly
+purges His floor, who comes quickly, and His reward is with Him, and
+who surely casts out of His kingdom, sooner or later, all things that
+offend, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.&nbsp; Pray to Him to
+make you sure by faith, though you cannot see it, that the prince of
+this world is judged; that evil doing, oppression, tyranny, injustice,
+cheating, neglect of man by man, cannot and will not prosper upon the
+face of God&rsquo;s earth; for the everlasting sentence and wrath of
+God is revealed forth every moment against all unrighteousness of men,
+which He will surely punish, yea, and does hourly punish by Him by whom
+He judges the world, Jesus Christ, the Lord, who is exalted high above
+all principalities and powers, and has all power given to Him in heaven
+and earth, which He uses, as He used it in Jud&aelig;a of old, utterly
+and always for the good of all mankind, whom He hath redeemed with His
+most precious blood.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XLV&mdash;THE GOSPEL</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached
+unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which
+also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless
+ye have believed in vain: for I delivered unto you first of all that
+which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to
+the scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third
+day according to the scriptures.&mdash;1 CORINTHIANS xv. 1-4.</p>
+<p>This is St. Paul&rsquo;s account of the gospel; the good news which
+he preached to the sinful and profligate Corinthians, when they were
+sunk lower than the beasts which perish.&nbsp; And because they believed
+this good news, he said, they were saved then and there, and would be
+safe only as long as they believed that good news, and kept it in their
+memories.&nbsp; Now, from what did this good news save them?&nbsp; From
+their sins.&nbsp; There was something in St. Paul&rsquo;s good news
+which made them hate their sins, and repent of them, and throw them
+away, and rise up to be new men and women, living new lives in godliness
+and purity and justice, such as they had never lived before.&nbsp; Now
+mind, it was not bad news which made the Corinthians repent of their
+sins; it was good news.&nbsp; It was not that St. Paul told them that
+God was going to cast them into endless torment for their sins, and
+that therefore they were terrified and afraid, and so repented.&nbsp;
+Doubtless St. Paul told them, as he told other heathens, that the wrath
+of God was revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness; that tribulation
+and anguish was laid up in store for every soul of man who worketh evil.&nbsp;
+But still, St. Paul says plainly here, that what saved the Corinthians
+was not that or any other fearful and terrifying news, but a gospel&mdash;good
+news.&nbsp; And he says that this good news did not merely, as some
+would wish it to do, make them comfortable in their minds while they
+went on in their old wicked ways.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; He says that it made
+them stand.&nbsp; That is, made them upright, strong-minded, righteous,
+self-restraining people; and that they were saved by it from those sins
+which had been dragging them down, and keeping them diseased in soul,
+weak, miserable, the slaves of their own passions and foul pleasures.</p>
+<p>What wonderful good news was this, then, which could work so strange
+a change in these poor heathens, and how could it change them?</p>
+<p>Let us see, first, what it was.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures,
+and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according
+to the scriptures; and that He was seen of Peter, then of the twelve;
+after that He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom
+the greater part remained unto this day, but some are fallen asleep.&nbsp;
+After that He was seen of James, then of all the Apostles.&nbsp; And
+last of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>You see here, that St. Paul, for some good reason, says much more
+about the Lord&rsquo;s rising again than even about His most precious
+death and passion on the cross, while about His ascending into heaven
+he says nothing.&nbsp; And you will find in the New Testament that the
+Apostles often did the same.&nbsp; They spoke of the Lord rising again
+as if that was the great wonder, the great glory, the great good news;
+and as if His most precious death was not perfect without that.&nbsp;
+They said that the especial office for which the Lord had ordained them,
+was to be witnesses of His resurrection.&nbsp; They said that the Lord
+rose again for our justification.&nbsp; They said: &ldquo;If thou shalt
+confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thy heart
+that God has raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Here again, just as in the text, believing in the Lord&rsquo;s resurrection
+is made the great article of faith.&nbsp; Why is this?&nbsp; Because
+that last verse which I quoted may tell us, if we consider it carefully.</p>
+<p>What does confessing the Lord Jesus with our mouth mean?&nbsp; It
+means what we ought to mean when we say, in the Apostles&rsquo; Creed,
+I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.&nbsp; Not merely,
+I believe that there is an only Son of God: but I believe in a certain
+man, with a certain character, who is that only Son of God.</p>
+<p>And what, you will ask, does that mean?</p>
+<p>To know that, I fear, we must go back many many hundred years, to
+the times when the old martyrs confessed the Lord Jesus Christ before
+the heathen.&nbsp; Those were times in which it was not enough to say
+the Apostles&rsquo; Creed in church.&nbsp; Men, ay, and tender women,
+and little children, had to stand by it through terror and shame, and
+to die in torments unspeakable, because they chose to say: &ldquo;I
+believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord.&rdquo;&nbsp; Now, what was it which
+made the heathen hate and persecute and torture, and murder them for
+saying that?&nbsp; What was there in those plain words of the Apostles&rsquo;
+Creed which made the great heathen emperors of Rome, and their officers
+and judges hunt the Christians down like wild beasts for 300 years,
+and declare that they were not fit to live?&nbsp; I will tell you.&nbsp;
+When the Christians were brought before the emperor&rsquo;s judges for
+being Christians, they did not merely say: &ldquo;I believe that Jesus
+Christ&rsquo;s blood will save my soul after death.&rdquo;&nbsp; They
+said that: but they said a great deal more than that.&nbsp; If that
+had been all that the Christians said, the judge would have answered:
+&ldquo;What care I for your souls, or for your notions about what will
+happen to them when you are dead?&nbsp; Go your way.&nbsp; You may be
+of what religion you like, and talk and think about your own souls as
+much as you like, provided you do not trouble the Roman emperor&rsquo;s
+power.&rdquo;&nbsp; But the heathen judge did not make that answer;
+because he knew well enough that what the Christians believed was not
+a mere religion about what would happen to their souls after death;
+but something which, if it gained ground, would utterly destroy the
+Roman emperor&rsquo;s power.&nbsp; He used generally to say to the Christians
+only this: &ldquo;Will you burn those few grains of incense in honour
+of the emperor of Rome?&rdquo;&nbsp; And he knew, and the Christians
+knew well enough, that those words meant: &ldquo;Will you confess with
+your mouth the emperor of Rome?&nbsp; Will you confess that he is the
+only lord and king of this whole earth, and of your bodies and souls,
+and that there is no power or authority but of him, for the gods have
+delivered all things into his hands?&rdquo;&nbsp; And then came out
+what confessing the Lord Jesus really means.&nbsp; For the Christians
+used to answer: &ldquo;No.&nbsp; The emperor of Rome is the lord and
+master of our bodies, and we will obey his laws so far as we can without
+doing wrong: but we cannot obey them when they are contrary to the laws
+of our Lord and Master Jesus Christ.&nbsp; For the Lord Jesus Christ,
+who was crucified and rose again the third day, He, and not the emperor
+of Rome at all, is the Lord and King of the whole earth, and of our
+bodies and souls; and we must obey Him before we obey anyone else.&nbsp;
+Power and authority come not from the emperor of Rome, but from the
+Lord Jesus Christ; and the emperor is only His servant and steward,
+and must obey Him just as much as we, or the Lord will punish him as
+surely and easily as He will the meanest slave.&nbsp; For God has delivered
+all things, and the emperor of Rome among the rest, into the hand of
+His Son Jesus Christ, who sits a King over all, God blessed for ever.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+That was confessing Christ.</p>
+<p>And to that the heathen judges used to make but one answer&mdash;for
+there was but one to make.&nbsp; Those heathen judges&rsquo; guilty
+consciences, as well as their worldly cunning, told them plainly enough
+exactly what St. Paul told the Christians; that those Christians, by
+confessing Christ, were not fighting against flesh and blood, and setting
+up their selfish interests against other people&rsquo;s selfish interests:
+but that the battle they were fighting was a much deeper and more terrible
+one; that by saying that One who had walked the earth as a poor man,
+and yet a perfectly righteous and loving man, doing nothing but good,
+and sacrificing Himself utterly for poor fallen creatures, they were
+fighting against the whole state of things all over the world; against
+the government, and principles, and religion of that whole unjust and
+tyrannical Roman empire, and all its rulers, and generals, and judges;
+against principalities, against powers, against the world-rulers of
+the darkness of those times; against spiritual wickedness in heavenly
+things.&nbsp; For if Jesus Christ&rsquo;s life was the right life, those
+rulers must be utterly wrong; for it was exactly opposite to His.</p>
+<p>If Jesus Christ was really the Governor of the earth, there was no
+hope for them; for their way of governing was exactly opposite to His.&nbsp;
+So as I say, they made but one answer; because there was but one to
+make: &ldquo;You say that Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of
+lords.&nbsp; I say the emperor of Rome is.&nbsp; You say you must obey
+Christ first, and the emperor of Rome afterwards.&nbsp; I say that you
+must obey the emperor first, and Christ afterwards.&nbsp; At all events,
+if you do not, you have no right on this earth of the emperor&rsquo;s;
+either the emperor&rsquo;s power must fall, or your notion about Jesus
+Christ&rsquo;s power must.&nbsp; And we will see whether your heavenly
+King of whom you talk can deliver you out of the emperor&rsquo;s hand.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And then came the scourge, and the red-hot iron, and the wild beasts,
+and the cross, and all devilish tortures which man&rsquo;s evil will
+could invent, brought to bear without shame or mercy upon aged men,
+and tender girls, and even little children, just to make them say that
+the earth belonged to the emperor, and not to Jesus Christ.&nbsp; Those
+who died bravely under those tortures without denying Christ were called
+martyrs, which means witnesses&mdash;people who bore witness before
+God and man that Jesus Christ was King and Lord.&nbsp; Those who did
+not die under the tortures, but escaped after all, were called confessors&mdash;people
+who had confessed with their mouths that Jesus Christ was King and Lord,
+in spite of their terror and agony. . . .&nbsp; That was what confessing
+Jesus Christ meant in the old times.&nbsp; And that was what it ought
+to mean now, even though there is no persecution or torture for Christians
+in these happier times.</p>
+<p>And now, we may see perhaps why St. Paul spoke so much of our Lord&rsquo;s
+rising again as the most important part of the gospel.</p>
+<p>Because he wanted Christians to believe, not merely in a Christ who
+once died, but in Him who died and is alive for evermore; in a Christ
+who rose again, body, soul, and spirit, and sat at God&rsquo;s right
+hand, praying for poor creatures when they were tempted, and persecuted,
+and tormented for righteousness&rsquo; sake.&nbsp; St. Paul knew well
+that such fearful times as those of which I have been speaking were
+coming on the people to whom he wrote.&nbsp; And he knew equally well
+that the only thought which could save them, when the heathen judges
+commanded them to deny the Lord Jesus, was the thought that He was really
+risen.&nbsp; The only thought which could make them bold enough to face
+all the horrors of death, was the thought that the Lord Jesus had not
+merely tasted death, but conquered it, and risen again from it.&nbsp;
+And therefore it is that St. Paul speaks so often of Christ&rsquo;s
+resurrection, and that in the text he takes so much pains to prove that
+Christ had really risen, by telling them how many persons, well known
+to him who wrote to them, had seen the Lord Jesus Christ after He rose,
+and talked with Him, and were sure that He was the very same person
+still, with the same countenance, and body, and soul, and spirit, as
+He had when He was nailed to the cross, and laid in the sepulchre.</p>
+<p>What a thought for a poor creature in the last agony of fear and
+shame, expecting presently to be torn in pieces, or burnt alive: &ldquo;Death,
+this horrible death, cannot conquer me, weak and fearful as I am; for
+my Lord and Master, for whom I am going to suffer, has conquered death,
+and He will not let it conquer me.&nbsp; He is stronger than death and
+hell, and He will not suffer me at my last hour for any pains of death
+to fall from Him.&nbsp; He is King of heaven and earth, and He will
+take care of His own!&rdquo;&nbsp; What a comfortable thought to be
+able to say: &ldquo;Ay, I am torn from wife and child, and all which
+I love on earth.&nbsp; But not for ever, not for ever.&nbsp; For Christ
+rose from the dead.&nbsp; And I who belong to Christ, shall rise as
+He did.&nbsp; This poor flesh of mine may be burnt in flames, devoured
+by ravenous beasts.&nbsp; What matter?&nbsp; Christ the King of men,
+has risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept.&nbsp;
+That same Spirit of His, which brought back His body from the grave
+and hell, will bring our bodies also from the grave and hell, to a nobler,
+happier life with Him in glory unspeakable.&nbsp; Christ is risen, and
+I shall rise with Him at the last day.&nbsp; Christ sits at God&rsquo;s
+right hand, watching me, pitying me, and blessing me, holding out to
+me a crown of glory which shall never fade away!&rdquo;&nbsp; That was
+the thought which gave Stephen courage to confess the Lord Jesus Christ,
+amid to die in peace and the murderous blows of the Jews.&nbsp; For
+by faith he saw, as he said, the heavens opened, and Jesus sitting at
+the right hand of God.&nbsp; He knew that his Lord was risen, and that
+He would hear his dying cry: &ldquo;Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And so with us, my friends; we have no martyrdom to go through, thank
+God; but it is just as true of us as it was of the blessed martyrs and
+confessors, that there is no other name under heaven by which we can
+be saved but the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.&nbsp; Saved; not only
+from hell, but from sin, from giving way to temptation, from denying
+Christ.&nbsp; Oh, pray for faith.&nbsp; Pray for faith.&nbsp; Pray to
+be able really to confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus.&nbsp; Pray
+to believe with your hearts that God has raised Him from the dead.&nbsp;
+Then when you are tempted to do wrong, you, like Stephen, will see,
+not with your bodily eyes, but by faith, the Lord Jesus sitting at God&rsquo;s
+right hand, and be able to say to Him: &ldquo;Lord Jesus, who hast conquered
+all temptation, help me to conquer this.&nbsp; Thine eye is on me; how
+can I do this great wickedness and sin against Thee?&rdquo;&nbsp; When
+you are in terror, and trouble, and affliction, and know not where to
+turn, that same blessed thought&mdash;&ldquo;Christ is risen from the
+dead&rdquo;&mdash;will be a shield and a strength to you which no other
+thought can give.&nbsp; &ldquo;My Lord is risen; He is here still&mdash;a
+man, with His man&rsquo;s body, and His man&rsquo;s spirit&mdash;His
+man&rsquo;s love and tenderness; He has taken them all up to heaven
+with Him.&nbsp; He is a man still, though He is very God of very God.&nbsp;
+He rose from the dead as a man, and therefore He can understand me,
+and feel for me still, now, here in England in this very year, 1852,
+just as much as He could when He was walking upon earth in Jud&aelig;a
+of old.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ay, and in the black jaws of death, when this world is vanishing
+from our eyes, and we are going we know not whither, leaving behind
+us all we know, and love, and understand; then that thought of all thoughts&mdash;&ldquo;Christ
+is risen from the dead&rdquo;&mdash;is the only one which will save
+us from dark sad thoughts, from fear and despair, or from stupid carelessness,
+and the death of a brute beast, such as too many die.&nbsp; &ldquo;Christ
+is risen and I shall rise.&nbsp; Christ has conquered death for Himself,
+and He will conquer it for me.&nbsp; Christ took His man&rsquo;s body
+and soul with Him from the tomb to God&rsquo;s right hand, and He will
+raise my man&rsquo;s body and soul at the last day, that I may be with
+Him for ever, and see Him where He is.&rdquo;&nbsp; In life and in death
+this is the only thing which shall save us from sin, from terror, and
+from the dread of death; the same good news which St. Paul preached
+to the Corinthians; the same good news which made St. Stephen, and the
+martyrs and confessors of old brave to endure all misery for the sake
+of the good and blessed news, that God had raised His Son Jesus from
+the dead.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XLVI&mdash;GOD&rsquo;S WAY WITH MAN</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have wrought with you
+for my name&rsquo;s sake, not according to your wicked ways, nor according
+to your corrupt doings, O ye house of Israel, saith the Lord God.&mdash;EZEKIEL
+xx. 44.</p>
+<p>In this chapter the prophet Ezekiel argues with his sinful and rebellious
+countrymen, and puts them in mind of all that God has done for them
+and with them, from the time when He brought them out of Egypt to that
+day.</p>
+<p>And now comes the old question, What has this to do with us!&nbsp;
+St. Paul tells us that all things which happened to the old Jews happened
+for our example.&nbsp; What example can we learn from this chapter?</p>
+<p>This, I think, we may learn: Is not the way in which God taught these
+Jews the same way in which He teaches many a man&mdash;perhaps every
+man?&nbsp; Which of us, when we were young, has not had his teaching
+from God?&nbsp; The old Catechism which our mothers taught us, was not
+that a word from God Himself to us?&nbsp; The voice of conscience, which
+made us happy when we had done right, and uneasy and ashamed when we
+had gone wrong; was not that a word from God to us?&nbsp; Yes, my friends,
+those child&rsquo;s feelings of ours about right and wrong, were none
+other than the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the
+Light which lightens every man who comes into the world.&nbsp; I tell
+you, every right thought and wish, every longing to be better than you
+were, which ever came into any one of your hearts, came from Him, the
+Lord Jesus.&nbsp; It was His word, His voice, His Spirit, speaking to
+your spirit, just as really as He spoke to His prophet Ezekiel, of whom
+we have been reading.&nbsp; Think of that.&nbsp; Recollect, never, never
+forget, that all your good thoughts and feelings are not your own, not
+your own at all, but the Lord&rsquo;s; that without His light your hearts
+are nothing but darkness, blind ignorance, and blind selfishness, and
+blind passions and lusts; that it is He, he Himself, who has been fighting
+against the darkness in you all your life long.&nbsp; Oh think, then,
+what your sin has been in putting aside those good thoughts and longings!&nbsp;
+You were turning your back, you were shutting your doors to the Lord
+God Himself, very God of very God begotten, by whom all things were
+made.&nbsp; The Creator came to visit His creature, and His creature
+shut Him out.&nbsp; The Almighty God pleaded with mortal man, and mortal
+man bade God go, and come back at a more convenient season!&nbsp; A
+voice in your heart seemed to say: &ldquo;Oh, if I could but be a better
+man!&nbsp; How I wish that I could but give up these bad habits, and
+mend!&nbsp; I hate and despise myself for being so bad.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And then you fancied that that voice was your own voice, that those
+good thoughts were your own thoughts.&nbsp; If you had really known
+whose they were; if you had really known, as the Bible tells you, that
+they were the Word of the Lord, the only-begotten Son of the Father,
+speaking to your heart, I hardly think that you would have been so ready
+to say yourself: &ldquo;Well, then, I will mend; but not just now: some
+day or other; somehow or other, I hope, I shall be a better man.&nbsp;
+It will be time enough to make my peace with God when I am growing old.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+You would not have dared to thrust away the good thoughts, and keep
+them waiting, while you took your pleasure in a few more years&rsquo;
+sin; if you had guessed <i>whom</i> you were thrusting away; if you
+had guessed whom you were keeping waiting.</p>
+<p>And, my good friends, has not God been saying to us many a time from
+our youth up, as He did to the Jews of old: &ldquo;Do not walk in the
+statutes of your fathers, nor defile yourselves with their idols?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Do you ask me how?&nbsp; Why, thus.&nbsp; Have you never said to yourself:
+&ldquo;How ill my father prospered, because he would do wrong!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Or, again: &ldquo;See how evil doing brings its own punishment.&nbsp;
+There is so and so growing rich, by his cheating and his covetousness,
+and yet, for all his money, I would not change places with him.&nbsp;
+God forbid that I should have on my mind what he has on his mind!&rdquo;
+Why should I make a long story of so simple a matter?&nbsp; Which of
+us has not felt at times that thought?&nbsp; How much misery has come
+in this very parish from the ill-doing of the generation who are gone
+to their account, and from the ill-training which they gave their children?</p>
+<p>And what was that but the Word of the Lord Himself speaking to our
+hearts, and saying to us: &ldquo;Do not defile yourselves with their
+idols; do not hurt your souls by hunting after the things which they
+loved better than they loved Me: money, pleasure, drink, fighting, smuggling,
+poaching, wantonness, and lust; I am the Lord your God?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And yet, young people will not listen to that warning voice of God.&nbsp;
+They see other people, even their own fathers and mothers, punished
+for their sins; perhaps made poor by their sins, perhaps made unhealthy
+by their sins, perhaps made miserable and ill-tempered by their sins:
+and yet they go and fall into, or rather walk open-eyed into, the very
+same sins which made their parents wretched.&nbsp; Oh, how many a young
+person sees their home made a complete hell on earth by ungodliness,
+and the ill-temper and selfishness which come from ungodliness; and,
+then, as soon as they have a home of their own, set to work to make
+their own family as miserable as their father&rsquo;s was before them.</p>
+<p>But people say often: &ldquo;How could we help it?&nbsp; We had no
+chance; we were brought up in bad ways; we had a bad example set us;
+how can you expect us to be better than our fathers and mothers, and
+our elder brothers and sisters?&nbsp; If we had had a fair chance, we
+might have been different: but we had none; and we could not help going
+the bad way, for we were set in it the day we were born.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Well, my dear friends, God shall judge you, not I.&nbsp; If little
+is given to a man little is required of him.&nbsp; But not nothing at
+all; because more than nothing was given him.&nbsp; A little is given
+to every man; and, therefore, a little is required of every man.&nbsp;
+And so, he who knew not his Master&rsquo;s will shall be beaten with
+few stripes.&nbsp; But he will be beaten with some stripes, because
+he ought to have known something, at least of his Master&rsquo;s will.&nbsp;
+If you were dumb animals, which can only follow their own lusts and
+passions, and must be what nature has made them, then your excuse would
+be good enough; but your excuse is not good now, just because you are
+men and women, and not dumb beasts, and, therefore, can rise above your
+natures, and conquer your lusts and passions, as they cannot, and can
+do what you do not like, because, though you dislike it, you know that
+it is right.&nbsp; And, therefore, God does not take that excuse which
+sinners make, that they have had no teaching.&nbsp; But what does he
+do to them?</p>
+<p>Suppose, now, that you had a dog which would not be taught, or broken
+in, or cured of biting, or made useful, or bearable in any way, what
+would you do to that dog?&nbsp; I suppose that you would kill it; you
+would say: &ldquo;It is an ill-conditioned animal, and there is no making
+it any better; so the only thing is to put it out of the way, and not
+let it eat food which might be better spent.&rdquo;&nbsp; Now, does
+God deal so with sinners?&nbsp; When young people rush headlong into
+sin, and become a nuisance to themselves and their neighbours, does
+God kill them at once, that better men may step into their place?&nbsp;
+No.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp; Just because they are not dumb animals, which
+cannot be made better, but God&rsquo;s children, who can be made better.&nbsp;
+If there were really no hope of a sinner repenting and amending, I think
+God would not leave him long alive to cumber the ground.&nbsp; But there
+is hope for every one; because God the Father loves all; the loving
+heart of the Lord Jesus Christ yearns after all; the Holy Spirit, which
+proceeds from the Father and the Son, strives with the hearts of all;
+therefore God, in His patience and tender mercy, tries to bring his
+foolish children to their senses.&nbsp; And how?&nbsp; Often in the
+very same way, in which Ezekiel says He tried to bring the Jews to their
+senses, by letting them go on in the road of sin, till they see what
+an ugly pit that same road ends in.&nbsp; If your child would not believe
+you when you warned and assured him that the fire would burn him, would
+it not be the very best way of bringing him to his senses, to tell him:
+&ldquo;Very well; go your own way; put your hand into the fire, and
+see what comes of it; you will not believe me; you will believe your
+own feelings, when your hand is burnt.&rdquo;&nbsp; So did the Lord
+to those rebellious Jews when they would go after their fathers&rsquo;
+sins.&nbsp; He gave them statutes which were not good, and judgments
+by which they could not live, to the end that they might know that He
+was the Lord.&nbsp; God did not make them commit any sins.&nbsp; God
+forbid!&nbsp; He only took away His Spirit, His light and teaching,
+from them, and let them go on in the light of their own foolish and
+bewildered hearts, till their sin bred misery and shame to them, and
+they were filled with the fruit of their own devices.&nbsp; Then, after
+all their wealth was gone, and their land was wasted by cruel enemies,
+and they themselves were carried away captive into Babylon, they began
+to awake, and say to themselves: &ldquo;We were wrong after all, and
+the Lord was right.&nbsp; He knew what was really good for us better
+than we did.&nbsp; We thought that we could do without Him, disobey
+Him.&nbsp; But He is the Lord after all.&nbsp; He has been too strong
+for us; He has punished us.&nbsp; If we had listened to His warnings
+years ago, we might have been saved all this misery.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ah, how many a poor foolish creature, in misery and shame, with a
+guilty conscience and a sad heart, sits down, like the prodigal son,
+among the swinish bad company into which his sins have brought him,
+longing to fill his belly with the husks which the swine eat! but he
+cannot.&nbsp; He tries to forget his sorrow by drinking, by bad company,
+by gambling, by gossiping, like the fools around him: but he cannot.&nbsp;
+He finds no more pleasure in sin.&nbsp; He is sick and tired of it.&nbsp;
+He has had enough of it and too much.&nbsp; He is miserable, and he
+hardly knows why.&nbsp; But miserable he is.&nbsp; There is a longing,
+and craving, and hunger at his heart after something better; at least
+after something different.&nbsp; Then he begins to remember his heavenly
+Father&rsquo;s house.&nbsp; Old words which he learnt at his mother&rsquo;s
+knee, good old words out of his Catechism and his Bible, start up strangely
+in his mind.&nbsp; He had forgotten them, laughed at them, perhaps,
+in his wild days.&nbsp; But now they come up, he does not know where
+from, like beautiful ghosts gliding in.&nbsp; And he is ashamed of them;
+they reproach him, the dear old lessons; and yet they seem pleasant
+to him, though they make him blush.&nbsp; And at last he says to himself:
+&ldquo;Would God that I were a little child again; once more an innocent
+little child at my mother&rsquo;s knee!&nbsp; I thought myself clever
+and cunning.&nbsp; I thought I could go my own way and enjoy myself.&nbsp;
+But I cannot.&nbsp; Perhaps I have been a fool; and the old Sunday books
+were right after all.&nbsp; At least I am miserable.&nbsp; I thought
+I was my own master.&nbsp; But perhaps He about whom I used to read
+in the Sunday books is my Master after all.&nbsp; At least I am not
+my own master; I am a slave.&nbsp; Perhaps I have been fighting against
+Him, against the Lord God, all this time, and now He has shown me that
+He is the stronger of the two. . . .&nbsp; And so the poor man learns
+in trouble and shame to know, like the Jews of old, who is the Lord.</p>
+<p>And when the Lord has drawn a man thus far, does He stop?&nbsp; Not
+so.&nbsp; He does not leave His work half done.&nbsp; If the work is
+half done, it is that we stop, not that He stops.&nbsp; Whosoever comes
+to Him, howsoever confusedly, or clumsily, or even lazily they may come,
+He will in no wise cast out.&nbsp; He may afflict them still more to
+cure that confusion and laziness; but He is a physician who never sends
+a willing patient away, or keeps him waiting for a single hour.</p>
+<p>How then does the Lord deal with such a man?&nbsp; Does He drive
+him further?&nbsp; Not if he will go without being driven.&nbsp; You
+would call it cruel to drive a beast on with blows, when it was willing
+to be led peaceably.&nbsp; And be sure God is not more cruel than man.&nbsp;
+As soon as we are willing to be led, He will take His rod off from us,
+and lead us tenderly enough.&nbsp; For I have known God do this to a
+man, and a sinful man as ever trod this earth.&nbsp; I have known such
+a man brought into utter misery and shame of heart, and heavy affliction
+in outward matters, till his spirit was utterly broken, and he was ready
+to say: &ldquo;I am a beast and a fool.&nbsp; I am not worth the bread
+I eat.&nbsp; Let me lie down and die.&rdquo;&nbsp; And then, when the
+Lord had driven that man so far, I have seen, I who speak to you now,
+how the Lord turned and looked on that man as he turned and looked on
+Peter, and brought his poor soul to life again, as He brought Peter&rsquo;s,
+by a loving smile, and not an angry frown.&nbsp; I have seen the Lord
+heap that man with all manner of unexpected blessings, and pay him back
+sevenfold for all his affliction, and raise him up, body and soul, and
+satisfy him with good things, so that his youth was renewed like the
+eagle&rsquo;s.&nbsp; And so the man&rsquo;s conversion to God, though
+it was begun by God&rsquo;s chastisements and afflictions, was brought
+to perfection by God&rsquo;s mercy and bounty; and it happened to that
+man, as Ezekiel prophesied that it would happen to the Jews, that not
+fear and dread, but honour, gratitude, and that noble shame of which
+no man need be ashamed, brought him home to God at last.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+you shall remember your ways, and all your doings wherein ye have been
+defiled: and you shall loathe yourselves in your own sight for all the
+evils which you have committed.&nbsp; And you shall know that I am the
+Lord, when I have wrought with you for my name&rsquo;s sake, not according
+to your wicked ways, nor according to your corrupt doings, O house of
+Israel, saith the Lord God.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>You see that God&rsquo;s mercy to them would not make them conceited
+or careless.&nbsp; It would increase their shame and confusion when
+they found out what sort of a Lord He was against whom they had been
+rebellious; long-suffering and of tender mercy, returning good for evil
+to His disobedient children.&nbsp; That feeling would awake in them
+more shame and more confusion than ever: but it would be a noble shame,
+a happy confusion, and tears of joy and gratitude, not of bitterness.&nbsp;
+Such a shame, such a confusion, such tears, as the blessed Magdalene&rsquo;s
+when she knelt at the Lord&rsquo;s feet, and found that, instead of
+bating her and thrusting her away for all her sins, He told her to go
+in peace, pardoned and happy.&nbsp; Then she knew the Lord; she found
+out His character&mdash;His name; for she found out that His name was
+love.&nbsp; Oh, my friends, this is the great secret; the only knowledge
+worth living for, because it is the only knowledge which will enable
+you to live worthily&mdash;to know the Lord.&nbsp; That knowledge will
+enable you to live a life which will last, and grow, and prosper for
+ever, beyond the grave, and death, and judgment, and eternities of eternities.&nbsp;
+As the Lord Himself said, when He was upon earth, &ldquo;This is eternal
+life, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast
+sent.&rdquo;&nbsp; Therefore there is no use my warning you against
+sin, and telling you, do not do this, and do not do that, unless I tell
+you at the same time who is the Lord.&nbsp; For till you know that The
+Good God is the Lord, you will have no real, sound, heartfelt reason
+for giving up your sins; and what is more, you will not be able to give
+them up.&nbsp; You may alter your sort of sins from fear of this and
+that; but the root of sin will be there still; and if it cannot bear
+one sort of fruit it will bear another.&nbsp; If you dare not drink
+or riot, you may become covetous and griping; if you dare not give way
+to young men&rsquo;s sins, you will take to old men&rsquo;s sins instead;
+if you dare not commit open sins you will commit secret ones in your
+thoughts.&nbsp; Sin is much too stout a plant to be kept from bearing
+some sort of fruit.&nbsp; As long as it is not rooted up the root will
+breed death in you of some sort or other; and the only feeling which
+can root up sin is to know that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is your
+Lord, and that your Lord condescended to die upon the cross for you;
+that you must be the Lord&rsquo;s, and are not your own, but bought
+with the price of His most precious blood, that you may glorify God
+with your body and your soul, which are His.</p>
+<p>Just so, the blessed St. Augustine found that he could never conquer
+his own sins by arguing with himself, or by any other means, till he
+got to know God, and to see that God was the Lord.&nbsp; And when his
+spirit was utterly broken; when he saw himself, in spite of all his
+wonderful cleverness and learning, to have been a fool and blind all
+along, though people round him were flattering him, and running after
+him to hear his learning; then the old words which he learnt at his
+mother&rsquo;s knee came up in his mind, and he knew that God was the
+Lord after all, and that God had been watching him, guiding him, letting
+him go wrong only to show him the folly of going wrong, caring for him
+even when He left him to himself and his sins, and the sad ways of his
+sins; bearing with him, pleading with his conscience, alluring him back
+to the only true happiness, as a loving father with a rebellious and
+self-willed child.&nbsp; And then, when St. Augustine had found out
+at last that God was his Lord, who had been taking the charge of him
+all through his heathen youth, he became a changed man.&nbsp; He was
+able to conquer his sins; for God conquered them for him.&nbsp; He was
+able to give up the profligate life which he had been leading; not from
+fear of punishment, but from the Spirit of God&mdash;the spirit of gratitude,
+honour, trust, and love toward God, which made him abide in God, and
+God abide in him.&nbsp; To that blessed state may God of His great mercy
+bring us all.&nbsp; To it He will bring us all unless we rebel and set
+up our foolish and selfish will against His loving and wise will.&nbsp;
+And if He does bring us to it, it is little matter whether He brings
+us to it through joy or through sorrow, through honour or through shame,
+through the garden of Eden, or through the valley of the shadow of death.&nbsp;
+For, my dear friends, what matter how bitter the medicine is, if it
+does but save our lives?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XLVII&mdash;THE MARRIAGE AT CANA</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus
+was there.&nbsp; And both Jesus was called, and His disciples, to the
+marriage.&mdash;JOHN ii. 1, 2.</p>
+<p>It is, I think, in the first place, an important, as well as a pleasant
+thing, to know that the Lord&rsquo;s glory, as St. Paul says, was first
+shown forth at a wedding, at a feast.&nbsp; Not at a time of sorrow,
+but of joy.&nbsp; Not about some strange affliction or disease, such
+as is the lot of very few, but about a marriage, that which happens
+in the ordinary lot of all mankind.&nbsp; Not in any fearful judgment
+or destruction of sinners, but in blessing wedlock, by which, whether
+among saints or sinners, mankind is increased.&nbsp; Not by helping
+some great philosopher to think more deeply, or some great saint to
+perform more wonderful acts of holiness, but in giving the simple pleasure
+of wine to simple commonplace people, of whom we neither read that they
+were rich or righteous.&nbsp; We do not even read whether the master
+of the feast ever found out that Jesus had worked a miracle, or whether
+any of the company ever believed in Him, on the strength of that miracle,
+except His mother and the disciples, and the servants, who were probably
+the poor slaves of people in a low or middling class of life.&nbsp;
+But that is the way of the Lord.&nbsp; He is no respecter of persons.&nbsp;
+Rich and poor are alike in His sight; and the poor need Him most, and
+therefore He began his work with the poor in Cana, as He did in St.
+James&rsquo;s time, when the poor of this world were rich in faith,
+and the rich of this world were oppressors and taskmasters.&nbsp; So
+He does in every age.&nbsp; Though no one else cares for the poor, He
+cares for them.&nbsp; With their hearts He begins His work, even as
+He did in England sixty years ago, by the preaching of Whitfield and
+Wesley.&nbsp; Do you wish to know if anything is the Lord&rsquo;s work?&nbsp;
+See if it is a work among the poor.&nbsp; Do you wish to know whether
+any preaching is the true gospel of the Lord?&nbsp; See whether it is
+a gospel, a good news to the poor.&nbsp; I know no other test than that.&nbsp;
+By doing that, by preaching the gospel to the poor, by working miracles
+for the poor, He has showed forth His glory, and proved Himself the
+true, and just, and loving Lord of all.</p>
+<p>But again, the Lord is a giver, and not a taskmaster.&nbsp; He does
+not demand from us: He gives to us.&nbsp; He had been giving from the
+foundation of the world.&nbsp; Corn and wine, rain and sunshine, and
+fruitful seasons had been his sending.&nbsp; And now He was come to
+show it.&nbsp; He was come to show men who it was who had been filling
+their heart with joy and gladness; who had been bringing out of the
+earth and air, by His unseen chemistry, the wine which maketh glad the
+heart of man.&nbsp; In every grape that hangs upon the vine, water is
+changed into wine, as the sap ripens into rich juice.&nbsp; He had been
+doing that all along in every vineyard and orchard; and that was His
+glory.&nbsp; Now He was come to prove that; to draw back the veil of
+custom and carnal sense, and manifest Himself.&nbsp; Men had seen the
+grapes ripen on the tree; and they were tempted to say, as every one
+of us is tempted now: &ldquo;It is the sun and the air, the nature of
+the vine, and the nature of the climate, which makes the wine.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Jesus comes and answers: &ldquo;Not so.&nbsp; I make the wine; I have
+been making it all along.&nbsp; The vines, the sun, the weather, are
+only my tools wherewith I worked, turning rain and sap into wine; and
+I am greater than they; I made them; I do not depend on them; I can
+make wine from water without vines or sunshine.&nbsp; Behold, and drink,
+and see my glory <i>without</i> the vineyard, since you had forgotten
+how to see it <i>in</i> the vineyard!&nbsp; For I am now, even as I
+was in Paradise, The Word of the Lord God; and now, even as in Paradise,
+I walk among the trees of the garden, and they know me and obey me,
+though the world knows me not.&nbsp; I have been all along in the world,
+and the world knows me not.&nbsp; Know me now, lest you lose the knowledge
+of me for ever!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Those of the Jews who received that message, as the disciples did,
+found out their ancient Lord, and clung to Him, and know now, in the
+world of spirits, that His message was indeed a true one.&nbsp; Those
+who did not, lost sight of Him; to this day their eyes are blinded;
+to this day they have utterly forgotten that they have a Lord and Ruler,
+who is the Word and Son of God.&nbsp; Their faith is no more like the
+faith of David than their understanding of the Scriptures is like his.&nbsp;
+The Bible is a dead letter to them.&nbsp; The kingdom and government
+of God is forgotten by them.&nbsp; Of all God-worshipping people in
+the world, the Jews are the least godly, the most given up to the worship
+of this world, and the things which they can see, and taste, and handle,
+and, therefore, to covetousness, cheating, lying, tyranny, and all the
+sins which spring from forgetting that this world belongs to the Lord
+and that He rules and guides it, that its blessings are His gifts, and
+we His stewards, to use them for the good of all.&nbsp; May God help,
+and forgive, and convert them!&nbsp; Doubt not that He will do so in
+His good time.&nbsp; But let us beware, my friends, lest we fall into
+the same sin.&nbsp; Do not fancy that we are not in just the same danger.&nbsp;
+It would be a cowardly thing of a preacher to call Jews, or heathens,
+or any other absent persons hard names, unless their mistakes and their
+sins were such as his own people wanted warnings against, ay, perhaps,
+had the very root of them in their hearts already.&nbsp; And we have
+the root of the Jews&rsquo; sin in our own hearts.&nbsp; Why is this
+one miracle read in our churches to this day, if we do not stand just
+as much in need of the lesson as those for whom it was first worked?&nbsp;
+We, as well as they, are in danger of forgetting who it is that sends
+us corn and wine, and fruitful seasons, love and marriage, and all the
+blessings of this life.&nbsp; We, as well as the Jews, are continually
+fancying that these outward earthly things, as we call them in our shallow
+carnal conceits, have nothing to do with Jesus or His kingdom, but that
+we may compete, and scrape, even cheat and lie to get them, and when
+we have them, misuse them selfishly, as if they belonged to no one but
+ourselves, as if we had no duty to perform about them, as if we owed
+God no service for them.</p>
+<p>And again, we are, just as much as the Jews were, in danger of spiritual
+pride; in danger of fancying that because we are religious, and have,
+or fancy we have, deep experiences and beautiful thoughts about God
+and Christ and our own souls, therefore we can afford to despise those
+who do not know as much as ourselves; to despise the common pleasures
+and petty sorrows of poor creatures, whose souls and bodies are grovelling
+in the dust, busied with the cares of this world, at their wits&rsquo;
+end to get their daily bread; to despise the merriment of young people,
+the play of children, and all those everyday happinesses which, though
+we may turn from them with a sneer, are precious in the sight of Him
+who made heaven and earth.&nbsp; All such proud thoughts, all such contempt
+of those who do not seem as spiritual as we fancy ourselves, is evil.&nbsp;
+It is from the devil, and not from God.&nbsp; It is the same vile spirit
+which made the Pharisees of old say: &ldquo;This people&mdash;these
+poor worldly drudging wretches&mdash;who know not the law, are accursed.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And mind, this is not a sin of rich, and learned, and highborn men only.&nbsp;
+They may be more tempted to it than others; but poor men, when they
+become, by the grace of God, wiser, more spiritual, more holy than others,
+are tempted, just as much as the rich, to despise their poor neighbours
+to whom God has not given the same light as themselves; and surely in
+them it shows ugliest of all.&nbsp; A learned and high-born man may
+be excused for looking down upon the sinful poor, because he does not
+understand their temptations, because he never has been ignorant and
+struggling as they are.&nbsp; But a poor man who despises the poor&mdash;he
+has no excuse.&nbsp; He ought above all men to feel for them, for he
+has been tempted even as they are.&nbsp; He knows their sorrows; he
+has been through their dark valley of bad food, bad lodging, want of
+work, want of teaching, low cares which drag the soul to earth.&nbsp;
+Surely a poor man who has tasted God&rsquo;s love and Christ&rsquo;s
+light, ought, above all others, instead of turning his back on his class,
+to pity them, to make common cause with them, to teach them, guide them,
+comfort them, in a way no rich man can.&nbsp; Yes; after all, it is
+the poor must help the poor; the poor must comfort the poor; the poor
+must teach and convert the poor.</p>
+<p>See, in the epistle for this day, St. Paul makes no distinction between
+rich and poor.&nbsp; This epistle is joined with the gospel for the
+day, to show us what ought to be the conduct of Christians, who believe
+in the miracle of Cana; what men should do who believe that they have
+a Lord in heaven, by whose command suns shine, fruits ripen, men enjoy
+the blessings of harvest, of marriage, of the comforts which the heathen
+and the savage, as well as the Christian man, partake; what men should
+do who believe that they have a Lord in heaven who entered into the
+common joys and sorrows of lowly men, who was once Himself a poor villager,
+who ate with publicans and sinners, who condescended to join in a wedding
+feast, and increase the mere animal enjoyment of the guests.&nbsp; And
+what is St. Paul&rsquo;s command to poor as well as rich?&nbsp; Read
+the epistle for this day and see.</p>
+<p>You see at once that this epistle is written in the same spirit as
+our Lord&rsquo;s words: by God&rsquo;s Spirit, in short; the Spirit
+which brought the Lord Jesus so condescendingly to the wedding feast;
+the Spirit which made Him care so heartily for the common pleasures
+of those around Him.&nbsp; My friends, these are not commands to one
+class, but to all.&nbsp; Poor as well as rich may show mercy with cheerfulness,
+and love without dissimulation.&nbsp; Poor as well as rich may minister
+to others with earnestness, and condescend to those of low estate.&nbsp;
+Not a word in this whole epistle which does not apply equally to every
+rank, and sex, and age.</p>
+<p>Neither are these commands to each of us by ourselves, but to all
+of us together, as members of a family.&nbsp; If you will look through
+them they are not things to be done to ourselves, but to our neighbours;
+not experiences to be felt about our own souls: but rules of conduct
+to our fellow-men.&nbsp; They are all different branches and flowers
+from that one root: &ldquo;Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Do we live thus, rich or poor?&nbsp; Can we look each other in the
+face this afternoon and say, each man to his neighbour: &ldquo;I have
+behaved like a brother to you.&nbsp; I have rejoiced at your good fortune,
+and grieved at your sorrow.&nbsp; I have preferred you to myself.&nbsp;
+I have loved you without dissimulation.&nbsp; I have been earnest in
+my place and duty in the parish for the sake of the common good of all.&nbsp;
+I have condescended to those of lower rank than myself.&nbsp; I have&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Ah, my dear friends, I had better not go on with the list.&nbsp; God
+forgive us all!&nbsp; The less we try to justify ourselves on this score
+the better.&nbsp; Some of us do indeed try to behave like brothers and
+sisters to their neighbours; but how few of us; and those few how little!&nbsp;
+And yet we are brothers.&nbsp; We are members of one family, sons of
+one Father, joint-heirs with one Lord, the poor Man who sat eating and
+drinking at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, and mixed freely in
+the joys and the sorrows of the poorest and meanest.&nbsp; Joint-heirs
+with Christ; yet how unlike Him!&nbsp; My friends, we need to repent
+and amend our ways; we need to confess, every one of us, rich and poor,
+the pride, the selfishness, the carelessness about each other, which
+keeps us so much apart, knowing so little of each other, feeling so
+little for each other.&nbsp; Oh confess this sin to God, every one of
+you.&nbsp; Those who have behaved most like brothers, will be most ready
+to confess how little they have behaved like brothers.&nbsp; Confess:
+&ldquo;Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am
+no more worthy to be called thy son, for I have not loved, cared for,
+helped my brothers and sisters round, who are just as much thy children
+as I am.&rdquo;&nbsp; Pray for the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of condescension,
+love, fellow-feeling; that spirit which rejoices simply and heartily
+with those who are happy, and feels for another&rsquo;s sorrows as if
+they were its own.&nbsp; Pray for it; for till it comes, there will
+be no peace on earth.&nbsp; Pray for it; for when it comes and takes
+possession of your hearts, and you all really love and live like brothers,
+children of one Father, the kingdom of God will be come indeed, and
+His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>XLVIII&mdash;PARABLE OF THE LOWEST PLACE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>And He put forth a parable to those which were bidden, when He marked
+how they chose out the chief rooms; saying unto them, when thou art
+bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room, lest
+a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him; and he that bade thee
+and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with
+shame to take the lowest room.&nbsp; But when thou art bidden, go and
+sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he
+may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship
+in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.&nbsp; For whosoever
+exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall
+be exalted.&mdash;LUKE xiv. 7-11.</p>
+<p>We heard in the gospel for to-day how the Lord Jesus put forth a
+parable to those who were invited to a dinner with Him at the Pharisee&rsquo;s
+house.&nbsp; A parable means an example of any rules or laws; a story
+about some rule, by hearing which people may see how the rule works
+in practice, and understand it.&nbsp; Now, our Lord&rsquo;s parables
+were about the kingdom of God.&nbsp; They were examples of the rules
+and laws by which the kingdom of God is governed and carried on.&nbsp;
+Therefore He begins many of His parables by saying, The kingdom of God
+is like something&mdash;something which people see daily, and understand
+more or less.&nbsp; &ldquo;The kingdom of God is like a field;&rdquo;
+&ldquo;The kingdom of God is like a net;&rdquo; &ldquo;The kingdom of
+God is like a grain of mustard seed;&rdquo; and so forth.&nbsp; And
+even where He did not begin one of His parables by speaking of the kingdom
+of God, we may be still certain that it has to do with the kingdom of
+God.&nbsp; For the one great reason why the Lord was made flesh and
+dwelt among us, was to preach the kingdom of God, His Father and our
+Father, and to prove to men that God was their King, even at the price
+of his most precious blood.&nbsp; And, therefore, everything which He
+ever did, and everything which He ever spoke, had to do with this one
+great work of His.&nbsp; This parable, therefore, which you heard read
+in the gospel for to-day, has to do with the kingdom of God, and is
+an example of the laws of it.</p>
+<p>Now, what is the kingdom of God?&nbsp; It is worth our while to consider.&nbsp;
+For at baptism we were declared members of the kingdom of God; we were
+to renounce the world, and to live according to the kingdom of God.&nbsp;
+The kingdom of God is simply the way in which God governs men; and the
+world is the way in which men try to manage without God&rsquo;s help
+or leave.&nbsp; That is the difference between them; and a most awful
+difference it is.&nbsp; Men fancy that they can get on well enough without
+God; that the ways of the world are very reasonable, and useful, and
+profitable, and quite good enough to live by, if not to die by.&nbsp;
+But all the while God is King, let them fancy what they like; and this
+earth, and everything on it, from the king on his throne to the gnat
+in the sunbeam, is under His government, and must obey His laws or die.&nbsp;
+We are in God&rsquo;s kingdom, my good friends, every one of us, whether
+we like it or not, and we shall be there for ever and ever.&nbsp; And
+our business is, therefore, simply to find out what are the laws of
+that kingdom, and obey those laws as speedily as possible, and live
+for ever thereby, lest, if we break them, and get in their way, they
+should grind us to powder.</p>
+<p>Now, here is one of the laws of God&rsquo;s kingdom: &ldquo;Whosoever
+exalteth himself shall be abased; and whosoever abaseth himself shall
+be exalted.&rdquo;&nbsp; That is, whosoever, in any way whatsoever,
+sets himself up, will be pulled down again: while he who is contented
+to keep low, and think little of himself, will be raised up and set
+on high.&nbsp; Now the world&rsquo;s rule is the exact opposite of this.&nbsp;
+The world says, Every man for himself.&nbsp; The way of the world is
+to struggle and strive for the highest place; to be a pushing man, and
+a rising man, and a man who will stand stiffly by his rights, and give
+his enemy as good as he brings, and beat his neighbour out of the market,
+and show off himself to the best advantage, and try to make the most
+of whatever wit or money he has to look well in the world, that people
+may look up to him and flatter him and obey him; and so the world has
+no objection to people&rsquo;s pretending to be better than they are.&nbsp;
+Every man must do the best he can for himself, the world says, and never
+mind his neighbours: they must take care of themselves; and if they
+are foolish enough to be taken in, so much the worse for them.&nbsp;
+So the world thinks that there is no harm in a man, when he has anything
+to sell, making it out better than it really is, and hiding the fault
+in it as far as he can.&nbsp; When a tradesman or manufacturer sends
+about &ldquo;puffs&rdquo; of his goods, and pretends that they are better
+and cheaper than other people&rsquo;s, just to get custom by it, the
+world does not call that what it is&mdash;boasting and lying.&nbsp;
+It says: &ldquo;Of course a man must do the best he can for himself.&nbsp;
+If a man does not praise himself, nobody else will praise him; he cannot
+expect his neighbours to take him for better than his own words.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+So again, if a man wants a place or situation, the world thinks it no
+harm if he gives the most showy character of himself, and gets his friends
+to say all the good of him they can, and a great deal more, and to say
+none of the harm&mdash;in short, to make himself out a much better,
+or shrewder, or worthier man than he really is.&nbsp; The world does
+not call that either what it is&mdash;boasting, and lying, and thrusting
+oneself into callings to which God has not called us.&nbsp; The world
+says: &ldquo;Of course a man must turn his best side outwards.&nbsp;
+You cannot expect a man to tell tales on himself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And, my friends, the world would be quite right, and reasonable,
+and prudent, in telling us to push, and boast, and lie, and puff ourselves
+and our goods, if it were not for one thing which the foolish blind
+world is always forgetting, and that is, that there is a God who judges
+the earth.&nbsp; If God were not our King; if He took no care of us
+men and our doings; if mankind had it all their own way on earth, and
+were forced to shift for themselves without any laws of God to guide
+them, then the best thing every man could do would be to fight for himself;
+to get all he could for himself, and leave as little as he could for
+his neighbours; to make himself out as great, and wise, and strong,
+as he could, and try to make his neighbours buy him at his own price.&nbsp;
+That would be the best plan for every man, if God was not King; and
+therefore the world says that that is the best plan for every man, because
+the world does not believe that God is King, and hates the notion that
+God is King, and laughs at and persecutes, as Jesus Christ said it would,
+those who preach the kingdom of God, and tell men, as I tell you in
+God&rsquo;s name: &ldquo;You were not made to be selfish; you were not
+meant to rise in the world by boasting and pushing down and deceiving
+your neighbours.&nbsp; For you are subjects of God&rsquo;s kingdom;
+and to do so is to break his laws, and to put yourselves under His curse;
+and however worldly-wise all this selfishness and boasting may seem,
+it is sin, whose wages are death and ruin.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For, my friends, let the world try to forget God as it will, He does
+not forget the world.&nbsp; Let men try to make rules and laws for themselves,
+rules about religion, rules about government, rules about trade, rules
+about morals and what they fancy is just and fair; let them make as
+many rules as they like, they are only wasting their time; for God has
+made His rules already, and revealed them to us in the Bible, and told
+us that the earth and mankind are governed in His way, and not in ours,
+and that He will not alter His everlasting rules to suit our new ones.&nbsp;
+As David says: &ldquo;Let the people be never so unquiet, still the
+Lord is King.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ah, my friends, it is very easy to say all this, but it is not so
+easy to believe it.&nbsp; Every one, every respectable person at least,
+is ready enough to talk about God, and God&rsquo;s will, and so forth.&nbsp;
+But when it comes to practice; when it comes to doing God&rsquo;s will,
+and not our own; when it comes to obeying His direct and plain commands,
+and not the fashions and maxims which men have invented for themselves;
+when it comes to giving up what we long for, because He has said that
+if we try after it in our own way, and not in His, we shall never have
+it at all, then comes the trial; then comes the time to see whether
+we believe that God is the King of the earth or not; then comes the
+time to see whether we have renounced the world, and determined to live
+as God&rsquo;s sons in God&rsquo;s kingdom, or whether our religion
+is some form of words, or way of thinking and feeling which we hope
+may save our souls from hell, but which has nothing to do with our daily
+life and conduct, and leaves us just as worldly as any heathen, in all
+our dealings with our fellow-men, from Monday morning to Saturday night.&nbsp;
+Then comes the time to try our faith in God.</p>
+<p>And then, alas! it comes out, in these evil, and godless, and hypocritical
+times in which we live, that many a man who fancies himself religious,
+and respectable, and blameless, and what not, no more really believes
+that he is living in God&rsquo;s kingdom than the heathen do.&nbsp;
+And if you ask him, you will find out most probably that he fancies
+that God&rsquo;s kingdom is not on earth now, but that it will be on
+earth some day.&nbsp; A cunning delusion of the devil, that, my friends!&nbsp;
+To make us go his way while we fancy that we are going our own way.&nbsp;
+To make us say to ourselves: &ldquo;Ah! it is very unfortunate that
+God is not King of the earth now.&nbsp; Of course He will be after the
+resurrection, in the new heaven and the new earth, where there will
+be no sin.&nbsp; But He is not King now; this world is given over to
+sin and the devil, so fallen and ruined and corrupt that&mdash;that&mdash;that,
+in short, we cannot be expected to behave like God&rsquo;s children
+in it, but must just follow the ways of the world, and live by ambition,
+and selfishness, and cunning, and boasting, and competing in this life;
+a life of love, and justice, and humbleness, and fellow-help, and mercy,
+and self-sacrifice is impossible in such a world as this; we cannot
+live like angels, till we get to heaven!&rdquo;&nbsp; So say nine people
+out of ten; the devil deceiving them, and their own hearts, alas! being
+but too glad to catch at the excuse for sin which the devil gives them,
+when he tells them that this present earth is not God&rsquo;s kingdom;
+and so they go and act accordingly, selfish, grudging, pushing, boastful,
+every man&rsquo;s hand against his neighbour and for himself, till they
+succeed too often in making this earth as fearfully like the devil&rsquo;s
+kingdom as it is possible for God&rsquo;s kingdom to be made.</p>
+<p>But what, some may ask, has all this to do with the text that he
+who sets himself up shall be brought low, he who keeps himself low shall
+be set up?&nbsp; What has it to do with the text?&nbsp; It has everything
+to do with the text.&nbsp; If people really believed that they were
+God&rsquo;s subjects and children in God&rsquo;s kingdom, they would
+not need to ask that question long.</p>
+<p>If God is really the King of the earth, there can be no use in anyone
+setting up himself.&nbsp; If God is really the King of the earth, those
+who set up themselves must be certain to be brought down from their
+high thoughts and high assumptions sooner or later.&nbsp; For if God
+is really the King of the earth, He must be the one to set people up,
+and not they themselves.&nbsp; Look again at the parable.&nbsp; The
+man who asks the guests to dine with him has surely a right to place
+each of them where he likes.&nbsp; The house is his, the dinner is his.&nbsp;
+He has a right to invite whom he likes; and he has a right to settle
+where they shall sit.&nbsp; If they choose their own places&mdash;if
+any guest takes upon himself to seat himself at the head of the table,
+because he thinks it his right, he offends against all rules of right
+feeling and propriety toward the man who has invited him.&nbsp; All
+he has a right to expect is, that his host will not put him in the wrong
+place, that he will settle all places at his table according to people&rsquo;s
+real rank and deserts, and as our Testaments say, put &ldquo;the worthiest
+man in the highest room.&rdquo;&nbsp; And if people really believed
+in God, which very few do, they would surely expect no less of God.&nbsp;
+What gentleman, farmer, or labourer is there, with common sense and
+good feeling, who would not show most respect to the most respectable
+persons who came into his house, and send his best and trustiest workmen
+about his most important errands?&nbsp; True, he might make mistakes,
+and worse.&nbsp; Being a weak man, he might be tempted to put the rich
+sinner in a higher place than the poor saint: or he might, from private
+fancy, be blinded about his workmen&rsquo;s characters, and so send
+a worse man, because he was his favourite, to do what another man whom
+he did not fancy as well might do a great deal better.&nbsp; But you
+cannot suspect God of that.&nbsp; He is no respecter of persons&mdash;whether
+a man be rich or poor, no matter to God: all which He inquires into
+is&mdash;Is he righteous or unrighteous, wise or foolish, able to do
+his work or unable?&nbsp; And God can make no mistakes about people&rsquo;s
+characters.&nbsp; As St. Paul says of the Lord Jesus: &ldquo;The Word
+of God is sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing through to the dividing
+of the very joints and marrow, so that all things are naked and open
+in the sight of Him with whom we have to do.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is no
+blinding God, no hiding from God, no cheating God, just as there is
+no flattering God.&nbsp; He knows what each and every one of us is fit
+for.&nbsp; He knows what each and every one of us is worth; and what
+is more, He knows what we ought to know, that each and every one of
+us is worth nothing without Him.&nbsp; Therefore there is no use pretending
+to be better than we are.&nbsp; God knows just how good we are, and
+will reward us, even in this life only according as we deserve, in spite
+of all our boasting.&nbsp; There is no use pretending to be wiser than
+we are.&nbsp; For all the wisdom we have comes from God; and if we pretend
+to have more than we have, and by that greatest act of folly, show that
+we have no wisdom at all, He will take from us even what we have, and
+make all our cunning plans come to nothing, and prove us fools, just
+when we fancy ourselves most clever.&nbsp; There is no use being ambitious
+and pushing, and trying to scramble up on our neighbours&rsquo; shoulders.&nbsp;
+For we were not sent into this world to do what we like, but what God
+likes; not to work for ourselves, but to work for God; and God knows
+exactly how much good each of us can do, and what is the best place
+for us to do it in, and how to teach and enable us to do it; and if
+we choose to be taught, He will teach us; and if we choose to go His
+way, and do His work, He will help us to it.&nbsp; But if we will not
+have his way, He will not let us have our own way&mdash;not at first,
+at least.&nbsp; He will bring our plans to nothing, and let us make
+fools of ourselves, and bring in sudden accidents of which we never
+dreamed, just to show us that we are not our own masters, and cannot
+cut out our own roads through life.&nbsp; And if we take His lesson,
+and go to Him to teach and strengthen us&mdash;well: and if not&mdash;then
+perhaps&mdash;which is the most awful misery which can happen to any
+man in earth&mdash;God may give up teaching us during this life, and
+let us have our own way, and be filled with the fruit of our own devices;
+from which worst of punishments may He in His mercy, save you, and me,
+and all belonging to us, in this life and in the life to come.</p>
+<p>But some of you may say: &ldquo;We understand the first half of the
+text very well, and like it very well; we all think it just that those
+who set themselves up should have a fall, and we are very glad to see
+them have a fall: but we do not see why he who abases himself should
+have any right to be exalted.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ah, my friends, it is much
+easier, and needs much less knowledge of God, and much less of the likeness
+of Christ, to see what is wrong, than to see what is right.&nbsp; Every
+man knows when a bone is broken, but it is not every one who can set
+it again.&nbsp; Nevertheless, there is a sort of left-handed reason
+in that argument.&nbsp; For a man has no more right to make himself
+out worse than he is, than he has to make himself out better than he
+is.&nbsp; A man should confess to being just what he is, neither more
+nor less.&nbsp; Nevertheless, he who humbles himself shall be exalted.</p>
+<p>Of course I do not mean those who, like some I know, make a fawning
+humble way of talking a cloak for their own self-conceit; who call themselves
+miserable sinners all the time that they are fancying that they are
+almost the only people in the world who are sure of being saved, whatever
+they do; who, as some do, actually pride themselves on their own convictions
+of sin, and glory in their own shame, and despise those who will not
+slander themselves as they do.</p>
+<p>They are equally hateful to God and to God&rsquo;s enemies.&nbsp;
+If you and I are disgusted at such hypocritical self-conceit, be sure
+the Lord Jesus is far more pained at it than we are; for as a wise man
+says: &ldquo;The devil&rsquo;s darling sin is the pride that apes humility.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But let a man really be convinced of sin; let a man really believe
+in the Lord Jesus Christ&rsquo;s atonement; let a man really believe
+in the Holy Spirit; and that man will have little need to ask why he
+should humble himself more than he deserves, and little wish to boast
+of himself, and push himself forward, and get praise, or riches, or
+power in the world.&nbsp; For that man would say to himself: &ldquo;I,
+sinner as I am; I, who know that I do so many wrong things daily; things
+so wrong that it required the blood of the Son of God to wash out the
+guilt of them&mdash;who am I to set myself up?&nbsp; I cannot be faithful
+in a little&mdash;why should I try to be ruler over much?&nbsp; I cannot
+use properly the blessings and the power which God does give me&mdash;must
+I not take for granted that, if I had more riches, more power, I should
+use them still worse?&nbsp; I know well enough of a thousand sins, and
+weaknesses and ignorances in myself which my neighbours never see.&nbsp;
+I believe, therefore, my neighbours have much too good an opinion of
+me, and not too bad a one; and therefore I am not going to boast or
+puff myself to them.&nbsp; I can only thank God they do not see the
+inside of this foolish heart of mine as well as He does!&nbsp; In short,
+I am not going to set myself up, and try to get a higher place among
+men than I have already, because I am certain that I have already a
+ten times better one than I deserve.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Or again, if a man really believed in the Holy Ghost, which is much
+the same as really believing in the kingdom of God; if he really believed
+that God was the King and Master of his heart and soul; if he really
+believed that everything good, and right, and wise in him came from
+God&rsquo;s Holy Spirit, and that everything wrong and foolish in him
+came from himself and the devil; then he would surely say to himself:
+&ldquo;Who am I to try to set myself up above my neighbours, and get
+power over them; what have I that I did not receive?&nbsp; Whatever
+money, or station, or cleverness, or power of mind I have, God has given
+me, and without Him I should be nothing.&nbsp; Therefore, He only gave
+me these talents to use for Him, and if I use them for my own ends,
+I shall be misusing them, and trying to rob God of His own.&nbsp; I
+am His child, His subject, His steward; He has put me just in that place
+in His earth which is most fit for me, and my business is, not to try
+to desert my post, and to wander out of the place here He has put me,
+but to see that I do the duty which lies nearest me, so that I shall
+be able to give an account to Him.&nbsp; It is only if I am faithful
+in a few things, that I can expect God to make me ruler over many things.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Ah, my friends, if we could but see ourselves, not as we fancy we are,
+nor as others fancy we are, but just as we really are, then, instead
+of pushing, and boasting, and standing stiffly by our rights, and fancying
+that God and man are unjust to us, we should be crying out all day long
+with the prodigal son: &ldquo;Father, I have sinned against heaven,
+and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+We should say with St. Paul&mdash;who, after all, remember, was the
+wisest, and most learned, and noblest-hearted of all the Apostles&mdash;that
+we are at best the chief of sinners.&nbsp; We should feel like the dear
+and blessed Magdalene of old, the pattern for ever of all true penitents,
+that it was quite honour enough to be allowed to wash Christ&rsquo;s
+feet with our tears, while every one round us sneered at us and looked
+down upon us&mdash;as, after all, we deserve.&nbsp; And so, believe
+me, we should be exalted.&nbsp; It would pay us, if payment is what
+we want.&nbsp; For so we should be in a more right, more true, more
+healthy, more wise, more powerful state of mind; more like Jesus Christ,
+and therefore more likely to be sent to do Christ&rsquo;s work, and
+share Christ&rsquo;s reward.&nbsp; For this is the great law of the
+kingdom of God in which we live, that man is nothing, and God is everything;
+and that we are strong and wise, and something, only when we find out
+that we are weak and foolish, and nothing, and go to our Father in heaven
+for strength, and wisdom, and spiritual eternal life.&nbsp; And then
+we find out how true it is that he who humbles himself, as he deserves,
+will be raised up; how he who loses his life will save it; how blessed
+are the poor in spirit, those who feel that they have nothing but what
+God chooses to give them; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!&nbsp;
+How blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness; who
+feel that they are not doing right, and yet cannot rest till they do
+right; for they shall be filled!&nbsp; How blessed are the meek, who
+do not set up themselves, or try to fight their own battles, and compete
+with their neighbours in the great scramble and struggle of this world;
+for they&mdash;just the last persons whom the world would expect to
+do it&mdash;shall inherit the earth!&nbsp; Choose, my friends, choose!&nbsp;
+The world says: &ldquo;Push upwards, praise yourself, help yourself,
+put your best side outwards.&rdquo;&nbsp; The great God who made heaven
+and earth says: &ldquo;Know that you are weak, and foolish, and sinful
+in yourself.&nbsp; Know that whatever wisdom you have, I the Lord lent
+you; and I the Lord expect the interest of my loan.&nbsp; Know that
+you are my child in my Kingdom.&nbsp; Stay where I have put you, and
+when I want you for something better, I will call you; and if you try
+to rise without my calling you, I will only drive you back again.&nbsp;
+So the only way to be ruler over much, is first to be faithful in a
+little.&nbsp; My friends, which of the two do you think is likely to
+know best, man or God?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Footnotes:</p>
+<p><a name="footnote217"></a><a href="#citation217">{217}</a>&nbsp;
+In 1848-49.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, SERMONS ON NATIONAL SUBJECTS ***</p>
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