Westminster Sermons

These words are true of all nature; and specially true, it seems to me, of our outward senses and faculties; true of sight, hearing, speech.  The wonder, I think, with the wise man will be, not that there are deaf and dumb persons to be found here and there among us: but that the average, nay, the majority of mankind, are not deaf and dumb.  Paradoxical as this assertion may seem at first, a little thought I believe will prove it to be reasonable.

Whatever view you take of the origin of sight, hearing, voice, the wonder to a thoughtful mind is just the same; how, under the storm of circumstances, and through the lapse of ages, those faculties have not been lost again and again, by countless individuals, nay, by the whole species.  For we must confess that those faculties are gradually developed in each individual; that every animal and every human being which is born into the world, has built up, unconsciously, involuntarily, and as it were out of nothing, those delicate and complex organs, by which he afterwards learns to see, hear, and utter sounds.  Is not the wonder, that he should, in the majority of cases, succeed without any effort of his own?

And if I am answered, that the success is owing to hereditary tendencies, and to the laws by which the offspring resembles the parents, I answer: Is not that a greater wonder still?  A wonder which all the discoveries of the scalpel and the microscope have been as yet unable, and will be, I believe, to the last unable, to unravel, even to touch?  A wonder which can be explained by no theories of vibratory atoms, vital forces, plastic powers of nature, or other such phrases, which are but metaphysical abstractions, having no counterpart in fact, and only hiding from us our ignorance of the vast and venerable unknown.  The physiologist, when he considers the manifold combination of innumerable microscopic circumstances which are required to bring any one creature into the world with a perfectly hearing ear, ought to confess that the chances—if the world were governed by chance—are infinitely greater in favour of a child’s being born with an imperfect ear rather than with a perfect one.  And if he should evade the difficulty; and try to explain the usual success by saying that nature is governed by law: I answer—What is nature?  What is law?  You never saw nature nor law either under the microscope.  They too are metaphysical abstractions, necessary notions and conceptions of your own brain.  You have seen nothing but the fact and the custom; and all you can do, if you be strictly rational, is with a certain modern school to say, with a despairing humility, which I deplore while I respect—deploring it because it is needless despair, and yet respecting it because it is humility, which is the path out of despair and darkness into hope and light—to say with them, “Man can know nothing of causes, he can only register positive facts.”  This, I say, is one path—one which I trust none here will tread.  The only other path, I believe, is, to go back to the lessons which we ought to have learnt in our childhood, for those to whom the human race owes most learnt them thousands of years ago; and to ascribe the ever successful miracles of nature to a Will, to a Mind, to a Providence so like that which each of us exercises in his own petty sphere, that we are not only able to understand in part the works of God, but to know from the very fact of being able to understand them—as one of our greatest astronomers has so well said lately—that we are made in the image of God.  To say with the old Psalmist, that the universe is governed by “a law which cannot be broken:” but why?  Because God has given it that law.  To say “All things continue as they were at the beginning:” but why?  Because all things serve Him in whom we live and move and have our being.  To confess the mystery and miracle of our mortal bodies, and say with David, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made; such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me, I cannot attain unto it:” but to add the one only rational explanation of the mystery which, thank God, common sense has taught, though it may be often in confused and defective forms, to the vast majority of the human race in all times and all lands—that He who grasps the mystery and works the miracle is God; that “His eye sees our substances yet being imperfect; and in His book are all our members written, which day by day were fashioned, when as yet there were none of them.”

And then to go forward with the Psalmist, and with the common sense of humanity; to conclude that if there be a Creator, there must also be a Providence; that that life-giving Spirit which presided over the creation of each organism presides also over its growth, its circumstances, its fortunes; and to say with David, “Whither shall I go then from Thy Spirit, or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?  If I climb up to heaven, Thou art there.  If I go down to hell, Thou art there also.  If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there Thy hand shall lead me; Thy right hand shall hold me still.”

Yes.  To this—to faith and adoration—ought right and reason to lead the physical philosopher.  And to what ought it to lead us, who are most of us, I presume, not physical philosophers?  To gratitude, surely, not unmixed with fear and trembling; till we say to ourselves—Who am I, to boast?  Who am I, to pride myself on possessing a single faculty which one of my neighbours may want?  What have I, that I did not receive?  Considering the endless chances of failure, if the world were left to chance; and I may say, the absolute certainty of failures, if the world were left to the blind competition of merely physical laws, is it not only of the Lord’s mercies that we are not failures too? that we have not been born crippled, blind, deaf, dumb—what not?—by the effect of circumstances over which we have had no control; which have been working, it may be, for generations past, in the organizations of our ancestors?

But what shall we say of those who have not received what we have received?  What shall we say of those who, like the deaf and dumb, are, in some respects at least, failures—instances in which the laws which regulate our organization have not succeeded in effecting a full development?

We can say this, at least, without entangling and dazzling ourselves in speculations about final causes; without attempting to pry into the mystery of evil.

We can say this: That if there be a God—as there is a God—these failures are not according to His will.  The highest reason should teach us that; for it must tell us that in the work of the Divine Artist, as in the work of the human, imperfection, impotence, disorder of any kind, must be contrary to the mind and will of the Creator.  The highest reason, I say, teaches us this.  And Scripture teaches it like wise.  For if we believe our Lord to have been as He was—the express image of the Almighty Father; if we believe that He came—as He did come—to reveal to men His Father’s will, His Father’s mind, His Father’s character: then we must believe that He acted according to that will and according to that character, when He made the healing of disease, and the curing of imperfections of this very kind, an important and an integral part of His work on earth.

“And they brought unto Jesus one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech, and besought Him to put His hand upon him.  And Jesus took him aside from the multitude, and put His fingers into his ears; and He spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.  And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain . . . And they were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: He maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.”

Consider this story awhile.  He healed the man miraculously, by means at which we cannot guess, which we cannot even conceive.  But the healing signified at least two things—that the man could be healed, and that the man ought to be healed; that his bodily defect—the retribution of no sin of his own—was contrary to the will of that Father in Heaven, who willeth not that one little one should perish.

But Jesus sighed likewise.  There was in Him a sorrow, a compassion, most human and most divine.

It may have been—may He forgive me if I dare rashly to impute motives or thoughts to Him—that there was something too of a divine weariness—I dare not say impatience, seeing how patient He was then and how patient He has been since for more than 1800 years—of the folly and ignorance of man, who brings on himself and on his descendants these and a hundred other preventible miseries, simply because he will not study and obey the physical laws of the universe; simply because he will not see that those laws which concern the welfare of his body, are as surely the will of God as those which concern the welfare of his soul; and that therefore it is not merely his interest but his solemn duty to study and to obey them, lest he bear the punishment of his own neglect and disobedience.

It is not for man even to guess what thoughts may have passed through the mind of Christ when He sighed over the very defect which He was healing.  But it is surely not irreverent in us to say that our Lord had cause enough to sigh, if He foresaw the follies of mankind during an age which was too soon to come.—How men, instead of taking the spirit of His miracles and acting on it, would counterfeit the mere outward signs of them, to feed the vanity or the superstition of a few devotees.  How, instead of looking on His miracles as rebukes to their own ignorance and imbecility; instead of perceiving that their bodily afflictions were contrary to the will of God, and therefore curable; instead of setting themselves to work manfully, in the light of God, and by the help of God, to discover and correct the errors which produced them, mankind would idle away precious centuries in barbaric wonder at seeming prodigies and seeming miracles, and would neglect utterly the study of those far more wondrous laws of nature which Christ had proved to be under His government and His guidance, and had therefore proved to be working for the good of those for whom He came to die.  Christ had indeed sown good seed in His field.  He had taught men by His miracles, as He had taught them by His parables, to Whom nature belonged, and Whose laws nature obeyed.  And the cessation of miracles after the time of Christ and His Apostles had taught, or ought to have taught, mankind a further lesson; the lesson that henceforth they were to carry on for themselves, by the faculties which God had given them, that work of healing and deliverance which He had begun.  Miracles, like prophecies, like tongues, like supernatural knowledge, were to cease and vanish away: but charity, charity which devotes itself for the welfare of the human race, was to abide for ever.

Christ, as I said, had sown good seed: but an enemy—we know not whence or when—certainly within the three first centuries of the Church—came and sowed tares among that wheat.  Then began men to believe that devils, and not their Father in Heaven, were, to all practical intents, the lords of nature.  Then began they to believe that man’s body was the property of Satan, and his soul only the property of God.  Then began they to fancy that man was to be delivered from his manifold earthly miseries, not by purity and virtue, reason and knowledge, but by magic, masked under the sacred name of religion.  No wonder if, in such a temper of mind, the physical amelioration of the human race stood still.  How could it be otherwise, while men refused to see in facts the acted will of God; and sought not in God’s universe, but in the dreams of their own brains, for glimpses of that divine and wonderful order by which The eternal Father and The eternal Son are working together for ever through The eternal Spirit for the welfare of the universe?

We boast, my friends, at times, of the rapid triumphs of modern science.  Were we but aware of the vast amount of preventible misery around us, and of the vast possibility of removing it, which lies in the little science which we know already, we should rather bewail the slow departure of modern barbarism.

There has been no period of the world for centuries back, I believe, in which man might not have been infinitely healthier, happier, more prosperous, more long-lived than he has been, if he had only believed that disease, misery, and premature death were not the will of God and of Christ; and that God had endowed him with an intellect which could understand the laws of the universe, in order that he might use those laws for his own health, wealth, and life.  Very late is society in commencing that rational course on which it ought to have entered centuries ago; and therefore very culpable.  And it is not too much to say, that to the average of persons suffering under preventible disease or defect, even though it be hereditary, society owes a sacred debt, which it is bound to pay by making those innocent sufferers from other’s sins as happy as possible; where it has not yet learnt—as it will learn, please God, some day—to cure them.

There is, thank God, a healthier feeling than of old abroad of late upon this point.  Men are learning more and more to regard such sufferers not as the victims of God’s wrath, but of human ignorance, vice, or folly.  And it was with deep satisfaction that I read in the last Report of the Schools for the Deaf and Dumb a statement of what were considered the most probable physical causes of deafness and dumbness, and a hope that it would be possible, hereafter, to prevent as well as cure those diseases.

Whether the causes assigned in that Report are the true ones, is a point of inferior importance for the moment.  The really important point is, that the principle should be allowed, the question raised, by a society, composed of religious men, and teaching to those poor deaf and dumb as almost their primary work that true religion which they are just as capable of receiving as we.  The right path has been entered—the path which is certain in due time to lead to success.  And meanwhile our duty is, while we confess that it is the fault of society and not of God, that these afflicted ones exist among us—it is our duty, I say, to cultivate and to develop to the highest every faculty, instinct, and power, in them which God’s order has preserved from the effects of man’s disorder; to feed the eye with fair and noble sights, though the ear be shut to soothing and inspiring sounds; to cultivate the intellect to such a pitch that it may be able to perform practical work, and if possible to earn a sufficient livelihood, even though the want of speech makes it impossible for them, deaf and dumb, to compete on equal terms with their fellow-men; to awaken in them, by religious training, teaching and worship, those purer and more unselfish emotions by which their hearts may become a field ready and prepared for God’s grace.  To do this; and to regard them, whenever we come in contact with them; not merely with pity, while we remember how much their intellects lose, in losing the whole world of sound; but with hope, when we see that through the one sense which is left they take in fully not only the meaning of the voluble hands which teach them, but more, the meaning of that meaning—the spiritual truths and feelings which signs express; with wonder, not at the defect, but at the innate health which almost compensates for the want of hearing by concentrating its powers upon the sight; and lastly, with admiration for that humanity which, as it were imprisoned, fettered, maimed, yet can, by the God-given force of the immortal spirit, so burst its prison-bars, and rise, through hindrances which seem to us impassable, to the tenderest, the noblest, the purest, and most devout emotions.

SERMON VI.  THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT

St John iii. 8,

The wind bloweth whither it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

It is often asked—men have a right to ask—what would the world have been by now without Christianity? without the Christian religion? without the Church?

But before these questions can be answered, we must define, it is discovered, what we mean by Christianity, the Christian religion, the Church.

And it is found—or I at least believe it will be found—more safe and wise to ask a deeper and yet a simpler question still: What would the world have been without that influence on which Christianity, and religion, and the Church depend?  What would the world have been without the Holy Spirit of God?

But some will say: This is a more abstruse question still.  How can you define, how can you analyse, the Spirit of God?  Nay, more, how can you prove its existence?—Such questioners have been, as it were, baptized unto John’s baptism.  They are very glad to see people do right, and not do wrong, from any well-calculated motives, or wholesome and pleasant emotions.  But they have not as yet heard whether there be any Holy Spirit.

We can only answer, Just so.  This Holy Spirit in Whom we believe defies all analysis, all definition whatsoever.  His nature can be brought under no terms derived from human emotions or motives.  He is literally invisible; as invisible to the conception of the brain as He is to the bodily eye.  His presence is proved only by its effects.  The Spirit bloweth whither it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but thou canst not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth.

Such words must sound as dreams to those analytical philosophers who allow nothing in man below the sphere of consciousness, actual or possible; who have dissected the human mind till they find in it no personal will, no indestructible and spiritual self, but a character which is only the net result of innumerable states of consciousness; who hold that man’s outward actions, and also his inmost instincts, are all the result either of calculations about profit and loss, pleasure and pain, or of emotions, whether hereditary or acquired.  Ignoring the deep and ancient distinction, which no one ever brought out so clearly as St Paul, between the flesh and the spirit, they hold that man is flesh, and can be nothing more; that each person is not really a person, but is the consequence of his brain and nerves; and having thus, by logical analysis, got rid of the spirit of man, their reason and their conscience quite honestly and consistently see no need for, or possibility of, a Spirit of God, to ennoble and enable the human spirit.  Why need there be, if the difference between an animal and a man be one of degree alone, and not of kind?

We answer: That there is a flesh in man, brain and nerves, emotions and passions, identical with that of animals, we do not deny.  We should be fools if we did deny it; for the fact is hideously and shamefully patent.  None knew that better than St Paul, who gave a list of the works of the flesh, the things which a man does who is the slave of his own brain and nerves—and a very ugly list it is—beginning with adultery and ending with drunkenness, after passing through all the seven deadly sins.  And neither St Paul nor we deny, that in this fleshly, carnal and animal state the vast majority of the human race has lived, and lives still, to its own infinite misery and confusion; and that it has a perpetual tendency, whenever lifted out of that state, to fall back into it again, and perish.

But St Paul says, and we say: That crushed under this animal nature there is in man a spirit.  We say: That below all his consciousness lies a nobler element; a divine spark, or at least a divine fuel, which must be kindled into life by the divine Spirit, the Spirit of God.  And we say that in proportion as that Spirit of God kindles the spirit of man, he begins to act after a fashion for which he can give no logical reason; that by instinct, and without calculation of profit or loss, pleasure or pain, he begins to act on what he calls duty, honour, love, self-sacrifice.  But what these are he cannot analyse.  Mere words cannot define them.  He can only obey that which prompts him, he knows not what nor whence; and say with Luther of old: “I can do no otherwise.  God help me.”

And we say that such men and women are the salt of the earth, who keep society from rotting; that by such men and women, and by their example and influence, direct and indirect, has Christendom been raised up out of the accursed slough into which Europe and, indeed, the whole known world, had fallen during the early Roman Empire; and that to this influence, and therefore to the Holy Spirit of God alone, and not to any prudential calculations, combined experiences, or so-called philosophies of men, is owing all which keeps Europe from being a hell on earth.  And we say, moreover, that those who deny this, and dream of a morality and a civilization without The Spirit of God, are unconsciously throwing down the ladder by which they themselves have climbed, and sawing off the very bough to which they cling.

Duty, honour, love, self-sacrifice—these are the fruits of The Spirit; unknown to, and unobeyed by, the savage, or by the civilized man who—as has too often happened—as is happening now in too many lands, on both sides of the Atlantic, is sinking back into inward savagery, amid an outward and material civilization.

Moreover—and this appears to us a fair experimental proof that our old-fashioned belief in A Spirit of God, which acts upon the spirit of man, is a true belief—moreover, I say: It is a patent fact, that wherever and whenever there has been a revival of the Christian religion; whenever, that is, amid whatsoever confusions and errors, men have begun to feel the need of the Holy Spirit of God, and to pray for that Spirit, a moral revival has accompanied the religious one.  Men and women have not only become better themselves; and that often suddenly and in very truth miraculously better: but the yearning has awoke in them to make others better likewise.  The grace of God, as they have called it, has made them gracious to their fellow-creatures; and duty, honour, love, self-sacrifice, call it by what name we will, has said to them, with a still small voice more potent than all the thunders of the law: Go, and seek and save that which is lost.

In no case has this instinctive tendency to practical benevolence been more striking, than in the case of that great religious revival throughout England at the beginning of this century, which issued in the rise of the Evangelical school: a school rightly so called, because its members did try to obey the precepts of the Gospel, according to their understanding of them, in spirit and in truth.

The doctrines which they held are a matter not for us, but for God and their own souls.  The deeds which they did are matter for us, and for all England; for they have left their mark on the length and breadth of the land.  They were inspired—cultivated, highborn, and wealthy folk many of them—with a strange new instinct that God had bidden them to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the prisoner and the sick, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to preach good tidings to the meek.  A strange new instinct: and from what cause, save from the same cause as that which Isaiah assigned to his own like deeds?—Because “The Spirit of the Lord was upon him.”

Yes, if those gracious men, those gracious women, did not shew forth the Spirit and grace of God with power, then there is either no Spirit of God, no grace of God; or those who deny to them the name of saints forget the words of Him Who said: By their fruits ye shall know them; of Him Who said, too: That the unpardonable sin, the sin which shewed complete moral perversion, the sin against the Holy Spirit of God, was to attribute good deeds to bad motives, and say: He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils.

Yes, that old Evangelical School may now have passed its prime.  It may now be verging toward old age; and other schools, younger and stronger, with broader and clearer knowledge of dogma, of history, civil and ecclesiastical, of the value of ceremonial, of the needs of the human intellect and emotions, may have passed it in a noble rivalry, and snatched, as it were, from the hands of the old Evangelical School the lamp of truth, to bear it further forward in the race.  But God forbid that the spiritual children should be ungrateful to their spiritual parents, though God may have taught them things which their parents did not know.

And they were our spiritual parents, those old Evangelicals.  No just and well-informed man who has passed middle age, but must confess, that to them we owe whatsoever vital religion exists at this moment in any school or party of the Church of England; that to them we owe the germs at least, and in many cases the full organization and the final success, of a hundred schemes of practical benevolence and practical justice, without which this country, in its haste to grow rich at all risks and by all means, might have plunged itself ere now into anarchy and revolution.  And he must confess, too, if he is one who has seen much of his fellow-creatures and their characters, that that school numbered among its disciples—and, thank God, they are not all yet gone home to their rest—some of the loveliest human souls, whose converse has chastened and ennobled his own soul.  Ah, well—

The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

And new methods and new institutions have arisen, and will yet arise, for seeking and saving that which is lost.  God’s blessing on them all, to whatsoever party, church, or sect they may belong!  Whosoever cast out devils in Christ’s name, Christ has forbidden us to forbid them, whether they follow us or not.  But yet shall we not still honour and love the old Evangelical School, and many an Institution which it has left behind, as heirlooms to some of us, at least, from our mothers, or from women to whom we owed, in long past years, our earliest influences for good, our earliest examples of a practical Christian life, our earliest proofs that there was indeed a Spirit of God, a gracious Spirit, Who gave grace to the hearts, the deeds, the very looks and voices of those in whom He dwelt; Institutions, which are too likely some of them to die, simply from the loss of old friends?

The loss of old friends.  Yes, so it is always in this world.  The old earnest hearts go home one by one to their rest; and the young earnest hearts—and who shall blame them?—go elsewhere; and try new fashions of doing good, which are more graceful and more agreeable to them.  For the religious world, like all other forms of the world, has its fashions; and of them too stands true the saying of the apostle: That this world and the fashion thereof pass away.  Many a good work, which once was somewhat fashionable in its way, has become somewhat unfashionable, and something else is fashionable in its place; and five-and-twenty years hence something else will have become fashionable; and our children will look back on our ways of doing good with pity, if not with contempt, as narrow and unenlightened, just as we are too apt to look back on our fathers’ ways.  And all the while, what can they teach worth teaching, what can we teach worth teaching, save what our fathers and mothers taught, what the Spirit of God taught them, and has taught to all who would listen since the foundation of the world, “shewing man what was good:” and what was that—“What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Ah! why do we, even in religious and moral matters, even in the doing good to the souls and bodies of our fellow-creatures, allow ourselves to be the puppets of fashions?  Of fashions which even when harmless, even beautiful, are but the garments, or rather stage-properties, in which we dress up the high instincts which God’s Spirit bestows on us, in order to make them agreeable enough for our own prejudices, or pretty enough for our own tastes.  How little do we perceive our own danger—so little that we yield to it every day—the danger of mistaking our fashion of doing good for the good done; aye, for the very Spirit of God Who inspires that good; mistaking the garment for the person who wears it, the outward and visible sign for the inward and spiritual grace; and so in our hearts falling actually into that very error of transubstantiation, of which we repudiate the name!

Why, ah why, will we not take refuge from fashions in Him in Whom are no fashions—even in the Holy Spirit of God, Who is unchangeable and eternal as the Father and the Son from Whom He proceeds; Who has spoken words in sundry and divers manners to all the elect of God; Who has inspired every good thought and feeling which was ever thought or felt in earth or heaven; but Whose message of inspiration has been, and will be, for ever the same—“Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with thy God”?

Could we but utterly trust Him, and utterly believe in His presence: then we should welcome all truth, under whatever outward forms of the mere intellect it was uttered; then we should bless every good deed, by whomsoever and howsoever it was done; then we should rise above all party strifes, party cries, party fashions and shibboleths, to the contemplation of the One supreme good Spirit—the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and hold to the One Fashion of Almighty God, which never changes, for it is eternal by the necessity of His own eternal character; namely,—To be perfect, even as our Father in Heaven is perfect; because He causes His sun to shine on the evil and on the good, and His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust.

SERMON VII.  CONFUSION

Psalm cxix. 31

I have stuck unto thy testimonies: O Lord, confound me not.

What is the meaning of this text?  What is this which the Psalmist and prophets call being confounded; being put to shame and confusion of face?  What is it?  It is something which they dread more than death; which they dread as much as hell.  Nay, it seems in the mind of some of them to be part and parcel of hell itself; one of the very worst things which could happen to them after death: for what is written in the Book of the Prophet Daniel?—“Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

And we Christians are excusable if we dread it likewise.  How often does St Paul speak of shame as an evil to be dreaded; just as he speaks, even more often, of glory and honour as a thing to be longed for and striven after.  That one word, “ashamed,” occurs twelve times and more in the New Testament, beside St John’s warning, which alone is enough to prove what I allege, “that we have not to be ashamed before Christ at his coming.”

And how does the Te Deum—the noblest hymn written by man since St John finished his Book of Revelations—how does that end, but with the same old cry as that of the Psalmist in the 119th Psalm—