Sermons on National Subjects

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.