Westminster Sermons

“O Lord, in thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded”?

Now it is difficult to tell men what being confounded means; difficult and almost needless; for there are those who know what it means without being told; and those who do not know what it means without being told, are not likely to know by my telling, or any man’s telling.  No, not if an angel from heaven came and told them what being confounded meant would they understand him, at least till they were confounded themselves; and then they would know by bitter experience—perhaps when it was too late.

And who are they?  What sort of people are they?

First, silly persons; whom Solomon calls fools—though they often think themselves refined and clever enough—luxurious and “fashionable” people, who do not care to learn, who think nothing worth learning save how to enjoy themselves; who call it “bad form” to be earnest, and turn off all serious questions with a jest.  These are they of whom Wisdom says—“How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity, and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?  I also will laugh at your calamity, and mock when your fear cometh.”

Next, mean and truly vulgar persons; who are shameless; who do not care if they are caught out in a lie or in a trick.  These are they of whom it is written that outside of God’s kingdom, in the outer darkness wherein are weeping and gnashing of teeth, are dogs, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

And next, and worst of all, self-conceited people.  These are they of whom Solomon says, “Seest thou a man who is wise in his own conceit?  There is more hope of a fool than of him.”  They are the people who will not see when they are going wrong; who will not hear reason, nor take advice, no, nor even take scorn and contempt; who will not see that they are making fools of themselves, but, while all the world is laughing at them, walk on serenely self-satisfied, certain that they, and they only, know what the world is made of, and how to manage the world.  These are they of whom it is written—“He that being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.”  Then they will learn, and with a vengeance, what being confounded means by being confounded themselves, and finding themselves utterly wrong, where they thought themselves utterly right.  Yet no.  I do not think that even that would cure some people.  There are those, I verily believe, who would not confess that they were in the wrong even in the bottomless pit, but, like Satan and his fallen angels in Milton’s poem, would have excellent arguments to prove that they were injured and ill-used, deceived and betrayed, and lay the blame of their misery on God, on man, on anything but their own infallible selves.

Who, then, are the people who know what being confounded means; who are afraid, and terribly afraid, of being brought to shame and confusion efface?

I should say, all human beings in proportion as they are truly human beings, are not brutal; in proportion, that is, as they are good or have the capacity of goodness in them; that is, in proportion as the Spirit of God is working in them, giving them the tender heart, the quick feelings, the earnestness, the modesty, the conscientiousness, the reverence for the good opinion of their fellow-men, which is the beginning of eternal life.  Do you not see it in the young?  Modesty, bashfulness, shame-facedness—as the good old English word was—that is the very beginning of all goodness in boys and girls.  It is the very material out of which all other goodness is made; and those who laugh at, or torment, young people for being modest and bashful, are doing the devil’s work, and putting themselves under the curse which God, by the mouth of Solomon the wise, pronounced against the scorners who love scorning, and the fools who hate knowledge.

This is the rule with dumb animals likewise.  The more intelligent, the more high-bred they are, the more they are capable of feeling shame; and the more they are liable to be confounded, to lose their heads, and become frantic with doubt and fear.  Who that has watched dogs does not know that the cleverer they are, the more they are capable of being actually ashamed of themselves, as human beings are, or ought to be?  Who that has trained horses does not know that the stupid horse is never vicious, never takes fright?  The failing which high-bred horses have of becoming utterly unmanageable, not so much from bodily fear, as from being confounded, not knowing what people want them to do—that is the very sign, the very effect, of their superior organization: and more shame to those who ill-use such horses.  If God, my friends, dealt with us as cruelly and as clumsily as too many men deal with their horses, He would not be long in driving us mad with terror and shame and confusion.  But He remembers our frame; He knoweth whereof we are made, and remembereth that we are but dust: else the spirit would fail before Him, and the souls which He hath made.  And to Him we can cry, even when we know that we have made fools of ourselves—Father who made me, Christ who died for me, Holy Spirit who teachest me, have patience with my stupidity and my ignorance.  Lord, in thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded.

But some will tell us—It is a sign of weakness to feel shame.  Why should you care for the opinion of your fellow-men?  If you are doing right, what matter what they say of you?

Yes, my friends, if you are doing right.  But if you are not doing right—What then?

If you have only been fancying that you are doing right, and suspect suddenly that you have been very likely doing wrong—What then?

When a man tells me that he does not care what people think of him; that they cannot shame him: in the first place, I do not quite believe that he is speaking truth; and in the next place, I hope he is not speaking truth.  I hope—for his own sake—that he does care what people think of him: or else I must suspect him of being very dull or very conceited.

And if he tells me that the old prophets, and holy, and just, and heroic men in all ages, never cared for people’s laughing at them and despising them, provided they were doing right according to their own conscience: I answer—That he knows nothing about the matter; that he has not honestly read the writings of these men.  I say that the Psalmist who wrote Ps. 119, was a man, on his own shewing, intensely open to the feeling of shame, and felt intensely what men said of him; felt intensely slander and insult.  We talk of independent and true patriots now-a-days.  I will tell you of four of the noblest patriots the world ever saw, who were men of that stamp.  I say that Isaiah was such a man; that Jeremiah was such a man; that Ezekiel was such a man; that their writings shew that they felt intensely the rebukes and the contempt which they had to endure from those whom they tried to warn and save.  I say again that St Paul, as may be seen from his own epistles, was such a man; a man who was intensely sensitive of what men thought and said of him; yearning after the love and approbation of his fellow-men, and above all of his fellow-countrymen, his own flesh and blood; and that that feeling in him, which may have been hurtful to him before he was converted, was of the greatest use to him after his conversion; that it enabled him to win all hearts, because he felt with men and for men; and gained him over the hearts of men such a power as no mere human being ever had before or since.

And I say that of all men the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, had that feeling; that longing for the love and appreciation of men—and above all, for the love and appreciation of His countrymen according to the flesh, the Jews, He had—strange as it may seem, yet there it is in the Gospels, written for ever and undeniable—that capacity of shame which is the mark of true nobleness of soul.

He endured the cross, despising the shame.  Yes: but there are too many on earth who endure shame with brazen faces, just because they do not feel it.  If He had not felt the shame, what merit in despising it?  It was His glory that He felt the shame; and yet conquered the shame, and crushed it down by the might of His love for fallen man.

Do you fancy that in His agony in the garden, when His sweat was as great drops of blood, that it was only bodily fear of pain and death which crushed Him for the moment?  He felt that, I doubt not; as He had to taste death for every man, and feel all human weakness, yet without sin.  But it was a deeper, more painful, and yet more noble feeling than mere fear which then convulsed His sacred heart; even the feeling of shame—the mockery of the crowd—the—But I dare not enlarge on anything so awful; at least I will say this—That he had to cry as none ever cried before or since, “O God, in thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded;” for he had, it seems, actually, at one supreme moment, to feel confounded; and to say, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  That was the highest and most precious jewel of all his self-sacrifice.  Of it let us only say—

Our Lord and Saviour stooped to be confounded for a moment, that we might not be confounded to all eternity.

And therefore our blessed Lord is to us an example.  As he did, so must we try to do.  He entered into glory, by suffering shame, and yet despising it.  He submitted to be confounded before men, that He might not be confounded in the sight of God His Father.  And so must we, sometimes, at least.  Every man who makes up his mind to do right and to be good, must expect ridicule now and then.  Rich or poor, boy or man, if you try to keep your hands clean, and your path straight, the world will think you a fool, and will be ready enough to tell you so; for it is cruel and insolent enough.  And the more tender your heart; the more you wish for the love and approbation of your fellow-men; the more of noble and modest self-distrust there is in you, the more painful will that be to you; the more you will be tempted to obey man, and not God, and to follow after the multitude to do evil, merely to keep the peace, and live a quiet life, and not be laughed at and tormented.  And thus the fear of man brings a snare; and naught can deliver you out of that snare, save the opposite fear—the fear of God, which is the same as trust in God.

Joseph of old feared God when he was tempted; and said, “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?”  But I doubt not there were plenty in Egypt who would have called him a fool for his pains.  There are hundreds of gay youths in any great city—there may be a few in this Abbey now for aught I know—who would have laughed loudly enough at Joseph for throwing away the opportunity of what certain foolish French have learnt to call, as its proper name, a “bonne fortune”—a piece of good luck.—As if breaking the 7th Commandment could be aught but bad fortune, and the cause of endless miseries in this life and the life to come.

And it may be, as Joseph was all but confounded and brought to shame, at least from man, when he found that all that he gained by fearing God was—a false accusation, the very shame and contempt from which he most shrank, danger of death, imprisonment in a dungeon.

But he was true to God, and God was true to him.  He trusted in God; and therefore he feared God: for he trusted that God’s laws were just and good, and worth obeying; and therefore he was afraid to break them.  He trusted in God; and therefore he hoped in God; for he trusted that God was strong enough and good enough to deliver him out of prison, and make his righteousness as clear as the light and his just dealing as the noonday.  He cried out of his prison, doubt it not, many a time and oft—“O God, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded.”

And he was not confounded.  He came into Egypt a slave.  He was cast into prison on a shameful accusation: but he came out of prison to be a ruler and a prince, honoured and obeyed by the greatest nation of the old world.  He trusted in God, and he was not confounded for ever; even as the Lord Christ trusted in God and was not confounded for ever; even as we, if we do not wish to be confounded for ever, must trust in God; and instead of being scornful, careless, conceited, must fear Him, and say, “My flesh trembleth because of Thy righteous judgments.”  And then the laughter of fools will end, where it began, in harmless noise, like (says Solomon) the crackling of thorns under a pot.  Then, whosoever may scorn you on earth, the great God in heaven will not scorn you.  You may be confounded for a moment here on earth.  Worldly people may take advantage of your misfortunes, and cry over you—There, there, so would we have it.  Take him and persecute him, for there is none to deliver him; where is now his God?  So it may be with you; for as surely as you fall, many a cur will spring up and bark at you, who dared not open his mouth at you while you stood safe.  Or—worse by far than that—the world may take hold of your really weak points, of your inconsistencies, of your faults and failings; and cry—Fie on thee, fie on thee.  We saw it with our eyes.  For all his high professions, for all his talk of truth and justice, he is no better than the rest of the world.  And that scoff does go very near to confound a man; because he feels that it is half true, half deserved, and is afraid that it may be quite true and quite deserved: and then confounded indeed he would be, by his own conscience and by God, as well as by man.  All he can do is, to cry to God, like him who wrote the 119th Psalm,—I have stuck unto thy testimonies: O Lord, confound me not.  I know I am weak, ignorant, unsuccessful; full of faults too, and failings, which make me ashamed of myself every day of my life.  I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost.  But seek thy servant, O Lord, for I do not forget thy commandments.  I am trying to learn my duty.  I am trying to do my duty.  I have stuck unto thy testimonies: O Lord, confound me not.  Man may confound me.  But do not thou, of thy mercy and pity, O Lord.  Do not let me find, when I die, or before I die, that all my labour has been in vain; that I am not a better man, not a wiser man, not a more useful man after all.  Do not let my grey hairs go down with sorrow to the grave.  Do not let me die with the miserable thought that, in spite of all my struggles to do my duty, my life has been a failure, and I a fool.  Do not let me wake in the next life, like Dives in the torment, to be utterly confounded; to find that I was all wrong, and have nothing left but everlasting disappointment and confusion of face.  O Lord, who didst endure all shame for me, save me from that most utter shame.  O God, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded.

Wake in the next life to find oneself confounded?  Alas! alas!  Many a man wakes in this life to find himself that; and really sometimes by no fault, seemingly, of his own: so that all he can do is to be dumb, and not to open his mouth, for it is God’s doing.  For a man’s worst miseries and sorrows are, too often, caused not by himself, but by those whom he loves.

Consider the one case of vice, or even of mere ingratitude, in those nearest and dearest to a man’s heart; and of being so confounded through them, and by them, in spite of all love, care, strictness, tenderness, teaching, prayers—what not—and all in vain.

No wonder that, under that bitterest blow, valiant and virtuous men, ere now, have never lifted up their heads again, but turned their faces to the wall, and died: and may the Lord have mercy on them.  Confounded they have been in this world; confounded they will not be, we must trust, in the world to come.  The Lord of all pity will pity them, and pour His oil and wine into their aching wounds, and bring them to His own inn, and to His secret dwelling-place, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.

One word more, and I have done.  Do you wish to pray, with hope that you may be heard,—O Lord, confound me not, and bring me not to shame?  Then hold to one commandment of Christ’s.  Do to others as you would they should do to you.  For with what measure you measure to your fellow-men, it shall be measured to you again.  Have charity, have patience, have mercy.  Never bring a human being, however silly, ignorant, or weak, above all any little child, to shame and confusion of face.  Never, by cruelty, by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule, even by selfish and silly haste; never, above all, by indulging in the devilish pleasure of a sneer, crush what is finest, and rouse up what is coarsest in the heart of any fellow-creature.  Never confound any human soul in the hour of its weakness.  For then, it may be, in the hour of thy weakness, Christ will not confound thee.

SERMON VIII.  THE SHAKING OF THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH

Hebrews xii. 26-29

Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven.  And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.  Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: for our God is a consuming fire.

This is one of the Royal texts of Scripture.  It is inexhaustible, like the God who inspired it.  It has fulfilled itself again and again, at different epochs.  It fulfilled itself specially and notoriously in the first century.  But it fulfilled itself again in the fifth century; and again at the Crusades; and again at the Reformation in the sixteenth century.  And it may be that it is fulfilling itself at this very day; that in this century, both in the time of our fathers and in our own, the Lord has been shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which can be shaken may be removed, as things that are made, while those things which cannot be shaken may remain.

All confess this to be true, each in his own words.  They talk of this age as one of change; of rapid progress, for good or evil; of unexpected discoveries; of revolutions, intellectual, moral, social, as well as political.  Our notions of the physical universe are rapidly altering, with the new discoveries of science; and our notions of ethics and theology are altering as rapidly.  The era assumes a different aspect to different minds, just as did the first century after Christ, according as men look forward to the future with hope, or back to the past with regret.  Some glory in the nineteenth century as one of rapid progress for good; as the commencement of a new era for humanity; as the inauguration of a Reformation as grand as that of the sixteenth century.  Others bewail it as an age of rapid decay; in which the old landmarks are being removed, the old paths lost; in which we are rushing headlong into scepticism and atheism; in which the world and the Church are both in danger; and the last day is at hand.

Both parties may be right; and yet both may be wrong.  Men have always talked thus, at great crises in the world’s life.  They talked thus in the first century; and in the fifth, and in the eleventh; and again in the sixteenth; and then both parties were partially right and partially wrong; and so they may be now.  What they meant to say, what they wanted to say, what we mean and want to say, has been said already for us in far deeper, wider, and more accurate words, by him who wrote this wonderful Epistle to the Hebrews, when he told the Jews of his time that the Lord was shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which were shaken might be removed, as things that are made—cosmogonies, systems, theories, prejudices, fashions, of man’s invention: while those things which could not be shaken might remain, because they were according to the mind and will of God, eternal as that source from whence they came forth, even the bosom of God the Father.

“Yet once more I shake, not the earth only, but also heaven.”

How has the earth been shaken in our days; and the heaven likewise.  How rapidly have our conceptions of both altered.  How easy, simple, certain, it all looked to our forefathers in the middle age.  How difficult, complex, uncertain, it all looks to us.  With increased knowledge has come—not increased doubt: that I deny utterly.  I deny, once and for all, that this age is an irreverent age.  I say that an irreverent age is one like the age of the Schoolmen; when men defined and explained all heaven and earth by à priori theories, and cosmogonies invented in the cloister; and dared, poor, simple, ignorant mortals, to fancy that they could comprehend and gauge the ways of Him Whom the heaven and the heaven of heavens could not contain.  This, this is irreverence: but it is neither irreverence nor want of faith, if a man, awed by the mystery which encompasses him from the cradle to the grave, shall lay his hand upon his mouth, with Job, and obey the voice which cries to him from earth and heaven—“Be still, and know that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than thy ways, and my thoughts higher than thine.”

But it was all easy, and simple, and certain enough to our forefathers.  The earth, according to the popular notion, was a flat plane; or, if it were, as the wiser held, a sphere, yet antipodes were an unscriptural heresy.  Above it were the heavens, in which the stars were fixed, or wandered; and above them heaven after heaven, each tenanted by its own orders of beings, up to that heaven of heavens in which Deity—and by Him, be it always remembered, the mother of Deity—was enthroned.

And if above the earth was the kingdom of light, and purity, and holiness, what could be more plain, than that below it was the kingdom of darkness, and impurity, and sin?  That was no theory to our forefathers: it was a physical fact.  Had not even the heathens believed as much, and said so, by the mouth of the poet Virgil?  He had declared that the mouth of Tartarus lay in Italy, hard by the volcanic lake Avernus; and after the unexpected eruption of Vesuvius in the first century, nothing seemed more clear than that Virgil was right; and that men were justified in talking of Tartarus, Styx, and Phlegethon as indisputable Christian entities.  Etna, Stromboli, Hecla, were (according to this cosmogony) in like wise mouths of hell; and there were not wanting holy hermits, who had heard, from within those craters, shrieks, and clanking chains, and the howls of demons tormenting the souls of the endlessly lost.

Our forefathers were not aware that, centuries before the Incarnation of our Lord, the Buddhist priests had held exactly the same theory of moral retribution; and that, painted on the walls of Buddhist temples, might be seen horrors identical with those which adorned the walls of many a Christian Church, in the days when men believed in this Tartarology as firmly as they now believe in the results of chemistry or of astronomy.

And now—How is the earth shaken, and the heavens likewise, in that very sense in which the expression is used by him who wrote to the Hebrews?  Our conceptions of them are shaken.  How much of that mediæval cosmogony do educated men believe, in the sense in which they believe that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that if they steal their neighbour’s goods they commit a sin?

The earth has been shaken for us, more and more violently, as the years have rolled on.  It was shaken when Astronomy told us that the earth was not the centre of the universe, but a tiny planet revolving round a sun in a remote region thereof.

It was shaken when Geology told us that the earth had endured for countless ages, during which continents had become oceans, and oceans continents, again and again.  And even now, it is being shaken by researches into the antiquity of man, into the origin and permanence of species, which—let the result be what it will—must in the meanwhile shake for us theories and dogmas which have been undisputed for 1500 years.

And with the rest of our cosmogony, that conception of a physical Tartarus below the earth has been shaken likewise, till good men have been fain to find a fresh place for it in the sun, or in a comet; or to patronize the probable, but as yet unproved theory of a central fire within the earth; not on any scientific grounds, but simply if by any means they can assign a region in space, wherein material torment can be inflicted on the spirits of the lost.

And meanwhile the heavens, the spiritual world, is being shaken no less.  More and more frequently, more and more loudly, men are asking—not sceptics merely, but pious men, men who wish to be, and who believe themselves to be, orthodox Christians—more and more loudly are such men asking questions which demand an answer, with a learning and an eloquence, as well as with a devoutness and a reverence for Scripture, which—whether rightly or wrongly employed—is certain to command attention.

Rightly or wrongly, these men are asking, whether the actual and literal words of Scripture really involve the mediæval theory of an endless Tartarus.

They are saying, “It is not we who deny, but you who assert, endless torments, who are playing fast and loose with the letter of Scripture.  You are reading into it conceptions borrowed from Virgil, Dante, Milton, when you translate into the formula ‘endless torment’ such phrases as ‘the outer darkness,’ ‘the fire of Gehenna,’ ‘the worm that dieth not;’ which, according to all just laws of interpretation, refer not to the next life, but to this life, and specially to the approaching catastrophe of the Jewish nation; or when you say that eternal death really means eternal life—only life in torture.”

Rightly or wrongly, they are saying this; and then they add, “We do not yield to you in love and esteem for Scripture.  We demand not a looser, but a stricter; not a more metaphoric, but a more literal; not a more contemptuous, but a more reverent interpretation thereof.”

So these men speak, rightly or wrongly.  And for good or for evil, they will be heard.

And with these questions others have arisen, not new at all—say these men—but to be found, amid many contradictions, in the writings of all the best divines, when they have given up for a moment systems and theories, and listened to the voice of their own hearts; questions natural enough to an age which abhors cruelty, has abolished torture, labours for the reformation of criminals, and debates—rightly or wrongly—about abolishing capital punishment.  Men are asking questions about the heaven—the spiritual world—and saying—“The spiritual world?  Is it only another material world which happens to be invisible now, but which may become visible hereafter: or is it not rather the moral world—the world of right and wrong?  Heaven?  Is not the true and real heaven the kingdom of love, justice, purity, beneficence?  Is not that the eternal heaven wherein God abides for ever, and with Him those who are like God?  And hell?  Is it not rather the anarchy of hate, injustice, impurity, uselessness; wherein abides all that is opposed to God?”

And with those thoughts come others about moral retribution—“What is its purpose?  Can it—can any punishment have any right purpose save the correction, or the annihilation, of the criminal?  Can God, in this respect, be at once less merciful and less powerful than man?  Is He so controlled by necessity that He is forced to bring into the world beings whom He knows to be incorrigible, and doomed to endless misery?  And if not so controlled, is not the alternative as to His character even more fearful?  He bids us copy His justice, His love.  Is that His justice, that His love, which if we copied, we should call each other, and deservedly, utterly unjust and unloving?  Can there be one morality for God, and another for man, made in the image of God?  Are these dark dogmas worthy of a Father who hateth nothing that He hath made, and is perfect in this—that He makes His sun shine on the evil and on the good, and His rain fall on the just and on the unjust, and is good to the unthankful and to the evil?  Are they worthy of a Son who, in the fire of His divine charity, stooped from heaven to earth, to toil, to suffer, to die on the Cross, that the world by Him might be saved?  Are they worthy of that Spirit which proceeds from the Father and the Son, even that Spirit of boundless charity, and fervent love, by which the Son offered Himself to the Father, a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world—and surely not in vain?”

So men are asking—rightly or wrongly; and they are guarding themselves, at the same time, from the imputation of disbelief in moral retribution; of fancying God to be a careless, epicurean deity, cruelly indulgent to sin, and therefore, in so far, immoral.