Sermons on National Subjects

There is a deep lesson for us, my friends, in all this.  And that is, that God’s gifts are not fit for us, unless we are more or less fit for them.  That to him that makes use of what he has, more shall be given; but from him who does not, will be taken away even what he has.  And so even the inestimable gift of freedom is no use unless men have free hearts in them.  God sets a man free from his sins by faith in Jesus Christ; but unless that man uses His grace, unless he desires to be free inwardly as well as outwardly—to be free not only from the punishment of his sins, but from the sins themselves; unless he is willing to accept God’s offer of freedom, and go boldly to the throne of grace, and there plead his cause with his heavenly Father face to face, without looking to any priest, or saint, or other third person to plead for him; if, in short, a man has not a free spirit in him, the grace of God will become of no effect in him, and he will receive the spirit of bondage (of slavery, that is), again to fear.  Perhaps he will fall back more or less into popery and half-popish superstitions; perhaps, as we see daily round us, he will fall back again into antinomianism, into the slavery of those very sins from which God once delivered him.  And just the same is it with a nation.  When God has given a nation freedom, then, unless there be a free heart in the people and true independence, which is dependence on God and not on man; unless there be a spirit of justice, mercy, truth, trust of God in them, their freedom will be of no effect; they will only fall back into slavery, to be oppressed by fresh tyrants.

So it was with the great Spanish colonies in South America a few years ago.  God gave them freedom from the tyranny of Spain; but what advantage was it to them?  Because there was no righteousness in them; because they were a cowardly, profligate, false, and cruel people, therefore they only became the slaves of their own lusts; they turned God’s great grace of freedom into licentiousness, and have been ever since doing nothing but cutting each other’s throats; every man’s hand against his own brother; the slaves of tyrants far more cruel than those from whom they had escaped.

Look at the French people, too.  Three times in the last sixty years has God delivered them from evil rulers, and given them a chance of freedom; and three times have they fallen back into fresh slavery.  And why?  Because they will not be righteous; because they will be proud, boastful, lustful, godless, cruel, making a lie and loving it.  God help them!  We are not here to judge them, but to take warning ourselves.  Now there is no use in boasting of our English freedom, unless we have free and righteous hearts in us; for it is not constitutions, and parliaments, and charters which make a nation free; they are only the shell, the outside of freedom.  True freedom is of the heart and spirit, and comes down from above, from the Spirit of God; for where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty, and there only.  Oh, every one of you! high and low, rich and poor, pray and struggle to get your own hearts free; free from the sins which beset us Englishmen in these days; free from pride, prejudice, and envy; free from selfishness and covetousness; free from unchastity and drunkenness; free from the conceit that England is safe, while all the rest of the world is shaking.  Be sure that the spirit of freedom, like every other good and perfect gift, is from above, and comes down from God, the Father of lights; and that to keep that spirit with us, we must keep ourselves worthy of it, and not expect to remain free if we indulge ourselves in mean and slavish sins.

So the Jews got the king they wanted—a king to look at and be proud of.  Saul was, we read, a head taller than all the rest of the people, and very handsome to look at.  And he was brave enough, too, in mere fighting, when he was awakened and stirred up to act now and then; but there was no wisdom in him; no real trust in God in him.  He took God for an idol, like the heathens’ false gods, which had to be pleased and kept in good humour by the smell of burnt sacrifices; and not for a living, righteous Person, who had to be obeyed.  We read of Saul’s misconduct in these respects, in the thirteenth and fifteenth chapters of the First Book of Samuel.  That was only the beginning of his wickedness.  The worst points in his character, as I shall show in my next sermon, came out afterwards.  But still, his disobedience was enough to make God cast him off, and leave him to go his own way to ruin.

But God was not going to cast off His people whom He loved.  He deals not with mankind after their sins, neither rewards them according to their iniquities; and so he chose out for them a king after His own heart—a true king of God’s making, not a mere sham one of man’s making.  You may think it strange why God should have given them a second king; why, as soon as Saul died, He did not let them return back to their old freedom.  But that is not God’s way.  He brings good out of evil in His great mercy.  But it is always by strange winding paths.  His ways are not as our ways.  First, God gives man what is perfectly proper for him at that time; sets man in his right place; and then when man falls from that, God brings him, not back to the place from which he fell, but on forward into something far higher and better than what he fell from.  He put Adam into Paradise.  Adam fell from it, and God made use of the fall to bring him into a state far better than Paradise—into the kingdom of God—into everlasting life—into the likeness of Christ, the new Adam, who is a quickening, life-giving spirit, while the old Adam was, at best, only a living soul.

So with the church of Christian men.  After the apostles’ time, and even during the apostles’ time, as we read from the Epistle to the Galatians, they fell away, step by step, from the liberty of the gospel, till they sunk entirely into popish superstition.  And yet God brought good out of that evil.  He made that very popery a means of bringing them back at the Reformation into clearer light than any of the first Christians ever had had.  He is going on step by step still, bringing Christians into a clearer knowledge of the gospel than even the Reformers had.

And so with the Jews.  They fell from their liberty and chose a king.  And yet God made use of those kings of theirs, of David, of Solomon, of Josiah, and Hezekiah, to teach them more and more about Himself and His law, and to teach all nations, by their example, what a nation should be, and how He deals with one.

But now let us see what this true king, David, was like, whom God chose, that He might raise, by his means, the Jews higher than they ever yet had been, even in their days of freedom.  Now remark, in the first place, that David was not the son of any very great man.  His father seems to have been only a yeoman.  He was not bred up in courts.  We find that when Samuel was sent to anoint David king, he was out keeping his father’s sheep in the field.  And though, no doubt, he had shown signs of being a very remarkable youth from the first, yet his father thought so little of him, that he was going to pass him over, and caused all his seven elder sons to pass before Samuel for his choice first, though there seems to have been nothing particular in them, except that some of them were fine men and brave soldiers.  So David seems to have been overlooked, and thought but little of in his youth—and a very good thing for him.  It is a good thing for a young man to bear the yoke in his youth, that he may be kept humble and low; that he may learn to trust in God, and not in his own wit.  And even when Samuel anointed David, he anointed him privately.  His brothers did not know what a great honour was in store for him; for we find, in the lesson which we have just read, that when David came down to the camp, his elder brother spoke contemptuously to him, and treated him as a child.  “I know thy pride,” he said, “and the naughtiness of thy heart.  Thou art come down to see the battle.”  While David answers humbly enough: “What have I done? is there not a cause?” feeling that there was more in him than his brother gave him credit for; though he dare not tell his brother, hardly, perhaps, dare believe himself, what great things God had prepared for him.  So it is yet—a prophet has no honour in his own country.  How many a noble-hearted man there is, who is looked down upon by those round him!  How many a one is despised for a dreamer, or for a Methodist, by shallow worldly people, who in God’s sight is of very great price!  But God sees not as man sees.  He makes use of the weak people of this world to confound the strong.  He sends about His errands not many noble, not many mighty; but the poor man, rich in faith, like David.  He puts down the mighty from their seat, and exalts the humble and meek.  He takes the beggar from the dunghill, that He may set him among the princes of His people.  So He has been doing in all ages.  So He will do even now, in some measure, with everyone like David, let him be as low as he will in the opinion of this foolish world, who yet puts his trust utterly in God, and goes about all his work, as David did, in the name of the Lord of hosts.  Oh! if a poor man feels that God has given him wit and wisdom—feels in him the desire to rise and better himself in life, let him be sure that the only way to rise is David’s plan—to keep humble and quiet till God shall lift him up, trusting in God’s righteousness and love to raise him, and deliver him, and put him in that station, be it high or low, in which he will be best able to do God’s work, or serve God’s glory.

And now for the chapter from which the text is taken, which relates to us David’s first great public triumph—his victory over Goliath the giant.  I will not repeat it to you, because everyone here who has ears to hear or a heart to feel ought to have been struck with every word in that glorious story.  All I will try to do is, to show you how the working of God’s Spirit comes out in David in every action of his on that glorious day.  We saw just now David’s humbleness and gentleness, the fruits of God’s Spirit in him, in his answer to his proud and harsh brother.  Look next at David’s spirit of trust in God, which, indeed, is the key to his whole life; that is the reason why he was the man after God’s own heart—not for any virtues of his own, but for his unshaken continual faith in God.  David saw in an instant why the Israelites were so afraid of the giant; because they had no faith in God.  They forgot that they were the armies of the living God.  David did not: “Who is this uncircumcised, that he shall defy the armies of the living God?”  And therefore, when Saul tried to dissuade him from attacking the Philistine, his answer is still the same—full of faith in God.  He knew well enough what a fearful undertaking it was to fight with this giant, nearly ten feet high, armed from head to foot with mail, which perhaps no sword or spear which he could use could pierce.  It was no wonder, humanly speaking, that all the Jews fled from him—that his being there stopped the whole battle.  In these days, fifty such men would make no difference in a battle; bullets and cannon-shot would mow down them like other men: but in those old times, before firearms were invented, when all battles were hand-to-hand fights, and depended so much on each man’s strength and courage, that one champion would often decide the victory for a whole army, the amount of courage which was required in David is past our understanding; at least we may say, David would not have had it but for his trust in God, but for his feeling that he was on God’s side, and Goliath on the devil’s side, unjustly invading his country in self-conceit, and cruelty, and lawlessness.  Therefore he tells Saul of his victory over the lion and the bear.  You see again, here, the Spirit of God showing in his modesty.  He does not boast or talk of his strength and courage in killing the lion and the bear; for he knew that that strength and courage came from God, not from himself; therefore he says that the Lord delivered him from them.  He knew that he had been only doing his duty in facing them when they attacked his father’s sheep, and that it was God’s mercy which had protected him in doing his duty.  He felt now, that if no one else would face this brutal giant, it was his duty, poor, simple, weak youth as he was, and therefore he trusted in God to bring him safe through this danger also.  But look again how the Spirit of God shows in his prudence.  He would not use Saul’s armour, good as it might be, because he was not accustomed to it.  He would use his own experience, and fight with the weapons to which he had been accustomed—a sling and stone.  You see he was none of those presumptuous and fanatical dreamers who tempt God by fancying that He is to go out of His way to work miracles for them.  He used all the proper and prudent means to kill the giant, and trusted to God to bless them.  If he had been presumptuous, he might have taken the first stone that came to hand, or taken only one, or taken none at all, and expected the giant to fall down dead by a miracle.  But no; he chooses five smooth stones out of the brook.  He tried to get the best that he could, and have more ready if his first shot failed.  He showed no distrust of God in that; for he trusted in God to keep him cool, and steady, and courageous in the fight, and that, he knew, God alone could do.  The only place, perhaps, where he could strike Goliath to hurt him was on the face, because every other part of him was covered in metal armour.  And he knew that, in such danger as he was, God’s Spirit only could keep his eye clear and his hand steady for such a desperate chance as hitting that one place.

So he went; and as he went his courage rose higher and higher; for unto him that hath shall more be given; and so he began to boast too—but not of himself, like the giant.  He boasted of the living God, who was with him.  He ran boldly up to the Philistine, and at the first throw, struck on the forehead, and felled him dead.

So it is; many a time the very blessing which we expect to get only with great difficulty, God gives us at our first trial, to show that He is the Giver, to cheer up our poor doubting hearts, and show us that He is able, and willing too, to give exceeding abundantly more than we can ask or think.

So David triumphed: and yet that triumph was only the beginning of his troubles.  Sad and weary years had he to struggle on before he gained the kingdom which God had promised him.  So it is often with God’s elect.  He gives them blessings at first, to show them that He is really with them; and then He lets them be evil-entreated by tyrants, and suffer persecution, and wander out of the way in the wilderness, that they may be made perfect by suffering, and purified, as gold is in the refiner’s fire, from all selfishness, conceit, ambition, cowardliness, till they learn to trust God utterly, to know their own weakness, and His strength, and to work only for Him, careless what becomes of their own poor worthless selves, provided they can help His kingdom to come, and get His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And now, my friends, surely there is a lesson in all this for you.  Do you wish to rise like David?  Of course not one in ten thousand can rise as high, but we may all rise somewhat, if not in rank, yet still, what is far better, in spirit, in wisdom, in usefulness, in manfulness.  Do you wish to rise so? then follow David’s example.  Be truly brave, be truly modest, and in order to be truly brave and truly modest, that is, be truly manly, be truly godly.  Trust in God; trust in God; that is the key to all greatness.  Courage, modesty, truth, honesty, and gentleness; all things, which are noble, lovely, and of good report; all things, in short, which will make you men after God’s own heart, are all only the different fruits of that one blessed life-giving root—Faith in God.

XXV.

DAVID’S EDUCATION

Made perfect through sufferings.—Hebrews ii. 10.

That is my text; and a very fit one for another sermon about David, the king after God’s own heart.  And a very fit one too, for any sermon preached to people living in this world now or at any time.  “A melancholy text,” you will say.  But what if it be melancholy?  That is not the fault of me, the preacher.  The preacher did not make suffering, did not make disappointment, doubt, ignorance, mistakes, oppression, poverty, sickness.  There they are, whether we like it or not.  You have only to go on to the common here, or any other common or town in England, to see too much of them—enough to break one’s heart if—, but I will not hurry on too fast in what I have to say.  What I want to make you recollect is, that misery is here round us, in us.  A great deal which we bring on ourselves; and a great deal more misery which we do not, as far as we can see, bring on ourselves; but which comes, nevertheless, and lets us know plainly enough that it is close to us.  Every man and woman of us have their sorrows.  There is no use shutting our eyes just when we ourselves happen to feel tolerably easy, and saying, as too many do, “I don’t see so very much sorrow; I am happy enough!”  Are you, friend, happy enough?  So much the worse for you, perhaps.  But at all events your neighbours are not happy enough; most of them are only too miserable.  It is a sad world.  A sad world, and full of tears.  It is.  And you must not be angry with the preacher for reminding you of what is.

True; you would have a right to quarrel with the preacher or anyone else who made you sorrowful with the thoughts of the sorrow round you, and then gave you no explanation of it—told you of no use, no blessing in it, no deliverance from it.  That would be enough to break any man’s heart, if all the preacher could say was: “This wretchedness, and sickness, and death, must go on as long as the world lasts, and yet it does no good, for God or man.”  That thought would drive any feeling man to despair, tempt him to lie down and die, tempt him to fancy that God was not God at all, not the God whose name is Love, not the God who is our Father, but only a cruel taskmaster, and Lord of a miserable hell on earth, where men and women, and worst of all, little children, were tortured daily by tens of thousands without reason, or use, or hope of deliverance, except in a future world, where not one in ten of them will be saved and happy.  That is many people’s notion of the world—religious people’s even.  How they can believe, in the face of such notions, “that God is love;” how they can help going mad with pity, if that is all the hope they have for poor human beings, is more than I can tell.  Not that I judge them—to their own master they stand or fall: but this I do say, that if the preacher has no better hope to give you about this poor earth, then I cannot tell what right he has to call himself a preacher of the gospel—that is, a preacher of good news; then I do not know what Jesus Christ’s dying to take away the sins of the world means; then I do not know what the kingdom of God means; then I do not know why the Lord taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven,” if the only way in which that can be brought about is by His sending ninety-nine hundredths of mankind to endless torture, over and above all the lesser misery which they have suffered in this life.  What will be the end of the greater part of mankind we do not know; we were not intended to know.  God is love, and God is justice, and His justice is utterly loving, as well as His love utterly just; so we may very safely leave the world in the hands of Him who made the world, and be sure that the Judge of all the earth will do right, and that what is right is certain never to be cruel, but rather merciful.  But to every one of you who are here now, a preacher has a right, ay, and a bounden duty, to say much more than that.  He is bound to tell you good news, because God has called you into His church, and sent you here this day, to hear good news.  He has a right to tell you, as I tell you now, that, strange as it may seem, whatsoever sufferings you endure are sent to make you perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect; even as the blessed Lord, whom may you all love, and trust, and worship, for ever and ever, was made perfect by sufferings, even though He was the sinless Son of God.  Consider that.  “It behoved Him,” says St. Paul, “the Captain of our salvation, to be made perfect through sufferings.”  And why?  “Because,” answers St. Paul, “it was proper for Him to be made in all things like His brothers”—like us, the children of God—“that He might be a faithful and merciful high priest;” for, just “because He has suffered being tempted, He is able to succour us who are tempted.”  A strange text, but one which, I think, this very history of David’s troubles will help us to understand.  For it was by suffering, long and bitter, that God trained up David to be a true king, a king over the Jews, “after God’s own heart.”

You all know, I hope, something at least of David’s psalms.  Many of them, seven of them at least, were written during David’s wanderings in the mountains, when Saul was persecuting him to kill him, day after day, month after month, as you may read in the First Book of Samuel, from chapters xix. to xxviii.  Bitter enough these troubles of David would have been to any man, but what must have made them especially bitter and confusing to him was, that they all arose out of his righteousness.  Because he had conquered the giant, Saul envied him—broke his promise of giving David his daughter Merab—put his life into extreme danger from the Philistines, before he would give him his second daughter Michal; the more he saw that the Lord was with David, and that the young man won respect and admiration by behaving himself wisely, the more afraid of him Saul was; again and again he tried to kill him; as David was sitting harmless in Saul’s house, soothing the poor madman by the music of his harp, Saul tries to stab him unawares; and not content with that proceeds deliberately to hunt him down, from town to town, and wilderness to wilderness; sends soldiers after him to murder him; at last goes out after him himself with his guards.  Was not all this enough to try David’s faith?  Hardly any man, I suppose, since the world was made, had found righteousness pay him less; no man was ever more tempted to turn round and do evil, since doing good only brought him deeper and deeper into the mire.  But no, we know that he did not lose his trust in God; for we have seven psalms, at least, which he wrote during these very wanderings of his; the fifty-second, when Doeg had betrayed him to Saul; the fifty-fourth, when Ziphim betrayed him; the fifty-sixth, when the Philistines took him in Gath; the fifty-seventh, “when he fled from Saul in the cave;” the fifty-ninth, “when they watched the house to kill him;” the sixty-third, “when he was in the wilderness of Judah;” the thirty-fourth, “when he was driven away by Abimelech;” and several more which appear to have been written about the same time.

Now, what strikes us first, or ought to strike us, in these psalms, is David’s utter faith in God.  I do not mean to say that David had not his sad days, when he gave himself up for lost, and when God seemed to have forsaken him, and forgotten his promise.  He was a man of like passions with ourselves; and therefore he was, as we should have been, terrified and faint-hearted at times.  But exactly what God was teaching and training him to be, was not to be fainthearted—not to be terrified.  He began in his youth by trusting God.  That made him the man after God’s own heart, just as it was the want of trust in God which made Saul not the man after God’s own heart, and lost him his kingdom.  In all those wanderings and dangers of David’s in the wilderness, God was training, and educating, and strengthening David’s faith according to His great law: To whomsoever hath shall be given, and he shall have more abundantly; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he seems to have.  And the first great fruit of David’s firm trust in God was his patience.

He learned to wait God’s time, and take God’s way, and be sure that the same God who had promised that he should be king, would make him king when he saw fit.  He knew, as he says himself, that the Strength of Israel could not lie or repent.  He had sworn that He would not fail David.  And he learned that God had sworn by His holiness.  He was a holy, just, righteous God; and David and David’s country now were safe in His hands.  It was his firm trust in God which gave him strength of mind to use no unfair means to right himself.  Twice Saul, his enemy, was in his power.  What a temptation to him to kill Saul, rid himself of his tormentor, and perhaps get the kingdom at once!  But no.  He felt: “This Saul is a wicked, devil-tormented murderer, a cruel tyrant and oppressor; but the same God who chose me to be king next, chose him to be king now.  He is the Lord’s anointed.  God put him where he is, and leaves him there for some good purpose; and when God has done with him, God will take him away, and free this poor oppressed people; and in the meantime, I, as a private man, have no right to touch him.  I must not do evil that good may come.  If I am to be a true king, a true man at all hereafter, I must keep true now; if I am to be a righteous lawgiver hereafter, I must respect and obey law myself now.  The Lord be judge between me and Saul; for He is Judge, and He will right me better than I can ever right myself.”  And thus did trust in God bring out in David that true respect for law, without which a king, let him be as kind-hearted as he will, is but too likely to become at last a tyrant and an oppressor.

But another thing which strikes any thinking man in David’s psalms, is his strong feeling for the poor, and the afflicted, and the oppressed.  That is what makes the Psalms, above all, the poor man’s book, the afflicted man’s book.  But how did he get that fellow-feeling for the fallen?  By having fallen himself, and tasted affliction and oppression.  That was how he was educated to be a true king.  That was how he became a picture and pattern—a “type,” as some call it, of Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows.  That is why so many of David’s psalms apply so well to the Lord; why the Lord fulfilled those psalms when He was on earth.  David was truly a man of sorrows; for he had not only the burden of his own sorrows to bear, but that of many others.  His parents had to escape, and to be placed in safety at the court of a heathen prince.  His friend Abimelech the priest, because he gave David bread when he was starving, and Goliath’s sword—which, after all, was David’s own—was murdered by Saul’s hired ruffians, at Saul’s command, and with him his whole family, and all the priests of the town, with their wives and children, even to the baby at the breast.  And when David was in the mountains, everyone who was distressed, and in debt, and discontented, gathered themselves to him, and he became their captain; so that he had on him all the responsibility, care, and anxiety of managing all those wild, starving men, many of them, perhaps, reckless and wicked men, ready every day to quarrel among themselves, or to break out in open riot and robbery against the people who had oppressed them; for—(and this, too, we may see from David’s psalms, was not the smallest part of his anxiety)—the nation of the Jews seems to have been in a very wretched state in David’s time.  The poor seem in general to have lost their land, and to have become all but slaves to rich nobles, who were grinding them down, not only by luxury and covetousness, but often by open robbery and bloodshed.  The sight of the misrule and misery, as well as of the bloody and ruinous border inroads which were kept up by the Philistines and other neighbouring tribes, seems for years to have been the uppermost, as well as the deepest thought in David’s mind, if we may judge from those psalms of his, of which this is the key-note; and it was not likely to make him care and feel less about all that misery when he remembered (as we see from his psalms he remembered daily) that God had set him, the wandering outlaw, no less a task than to mend it all; to put down all that oppression, to raise up that degradation, to train all that cowardice into self-respect and valour, to knit into one united nation, bound together by fellow-feeling and common faith in God, that mob of fierce, and greedy, and (hardest task of all, as he himself felt) utterly deceitful men.  No wonder that his psalms begin often enough with sadness, even though they may end in hope and trust.  He had a work around him and before him which ought to have made his heart sad, which was a great part of his appointed education, and helped to make him perfect by sufferings.

And so, upon the bare hill-side, in woods and caves of the earth, in cold and hunger, in weariness and dread of death, did David learn to be the poor man’s king, the poor man’s poet, the singer of those psalms which shall endure as long as the world endures, and be the comfort and the utterance of all sad hearts for evermore.  Agony it was, deep and bitter, and for the moment more hopeless than the grave itself, which crushed out of the very depths of his heart that most awful and yet most blessed psalm, the twenty-second, which we read in church every Good Friday.  The “Hind of the Morning” is its title; some mournful air to which David sang it, giving, perhaps, the notion of a timorous deer roused in the morning by the hunters and the hounds.  We read that psalm on Good Friday, and all say that our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled it.  What do we mean hereby?

We mean hereby, that we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled all sorrows which man can taste.  He filled the cup of misery to the brim, and drained it to the dregs.  He was afflicted in all David’s afflictions, in the afflictions of all mankind.  He bare all their sicknesses, and carried all their infirmities; and therefore we read this psalm upon Good Friday, upon the day in which He tasted death for every man, and went down into the lowest depths of terror, and shame, and agony, and death; and, worst of all, into the feeling that God had forsaken Him, that there was no help or hope for Him in heaven, as well as earth—no care or love in the great God, whose Son He was—went down, in a word, into hell; that hell whereof David and Heman, and Hezekiah after them, had said, “Shall the dust give thanks unto thee? and shall it declare thy truth?”—“Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.”—“My life draweth nigh unto hell. . .  I am like one stript among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more; and they are cut off from thy hand. . . .  Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? and shall the dead arise and praise thee?  Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of destruction?”—“For the grave cannot praise thee; death cannot celebrate thee: they that go down to the pit cannot hope for thy truth.”

Even into that lowest darkness, where man feels, even for one moment, that God is nothing to him, and he is nothing to God—even into that Jesus condescended to go down for us.  That worst of all temptations, of which David only tasted a drop when he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  Jesus drained to the very dregs for us.—He went down into hell for us, and conquered hell and death, and the darkness of the unknown world, and rose again glorious from them, that He might teach us not to fear death and hell; that He might know how to comfort us in the hour of death: and in the day of judgment, when on our sick bed, or in some bitter shame and trouble, the lying devil is telling us that we are damned and lost, and forsaken by God, and every sin we ever did rises up and stares us in the face.

Truly He is a king!—a king for rich and poor, young and old, Englishmen and negro; all alike He knows them, He feels for them, He has tasted sorrow for them, far more than David did for those poor, oppressed, sinful Jews of his.  Read those Psalms of David; for they speak not only of David, now long since dead and gone, but of the blessed Jesus, who lives and reigns over us now at this very moment.  Read them, for they are inspired; the honest words of a servant of God crying out to the same God, the same Saviour and Deliverer as we have.  And His love has not changed.  His arm is not shortened that He cannot save.  Your words need not change.  The words of those psalms in which David prayed, in them you and I may pray.  Right out of the depths of his poor distracted heart they came.  Let them come out of our hearts too.  They belong to us more than even they did to the Jews, for whom David wrote them—more than even they did to David himself; for Jesus has fulfilled them—filled them full—given them boundlessly more meaning than ever they had before, and given us more hope in using them than ever David had: for now that love and righteousness of God, in which David only trusted beforehand, has come down and walked on this earth in the shape of a poor man, Jesus Christ, the Son of the maiden of Bethlehem.

Oh, you who are afflicted, pray to God in those psalms; not merely in the words of them, but in the spirit of them.  And to do that, you must get from God the spirit in which David wrote them—the Spirit of God.  Pray for that Spirit; for the spirit of patience, which made David wait God’s good time to right him, instead of trying, as too many do, to right himself by wrong means; for the spirit of love, which taught David to return good for evil; for the spirit of fellow-feeling, which taught David to care for others as well as himself; and in that spirit of love, do you pray for others while you are praying for yourself.  Pray for that Spirit which taught David to help and comfort those who were weaker than himself, that you in your time may be able and willing to comfort and help those who are weaker than yourselves.  And above all, pray for the Spirit of faith, which made David certain that oppression and wrong-doing could not stand; that the day must surely come when God would judge the world righteously, and hear the cry of the afflicted, and deliver the outcast and poor, that the man of the world might be no more exalted against them.  Pray, in short, for the Spirit of Christ; and then be sure He will hear your prayers, and answer them, and show Himself a better friend, and a truer King to you, than ever David showed himself to those poor Jews of old.  He will deliver you out of all your troubles—if not in this life, yet surely in the life to come; and though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet the peace of God shall keep your hearts and minds in Him who loved you, and gave Himself for you, that you might inherit all heaven and earth in Him.

XXVI.

THE VALUE OF LAW

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.  For there is no power but of God.  The powers that be are ordained of God.—Romans xiii. 1.

What is the difference between a civilised man and a savage?  You will say: A civilised man can read and write; he has books and education; he knows how to make numberless things which makes his life comfortable to him.  He can get wealth, and build great towns, sink mines, sail the sea in ships, spread himself over the face of the earth, or bring home all its treasures, while the savages remain poor, and naked, and miserable, and ignorant, fixed to the land in which they chance to have been born.

True: but we must go a little deeper still.  Why does the savage remain poor and wretched, while the civilised people become richer and more prosperous?  Why, for instance, do the poor savage gipsies never grow more comfortable or wiser—each generation of them remaining just as low as their forefathers were, or, indeed, getting lower and fewer? for the gipsies, like all savages, are becoming fewer and fewer year by year, while, on the other hand, we English increase in numbers, and in wealth, and knowledge; and fresh inventions are found out year by year, which give fresh employment and make life more safe and more pleasant.

This is the reason: That the English have laws and obey them, and the gipsies have none.  This is the whole secret.  This is why savages remain poor and miserable, that each man does what he likes without law.  This is why civilised nations like England thrive and prosper, because they have laws and obey them, and every man does not do what he likes, but what the law likes.  Laws are made not for the good of one person here, or the other person there, but for the good of all; and, therefore, the very notion of a civilised country is, a country in which people cannot do what they like with their own, as the savages do.  “Not do what he likes with his own?”  Certainly not; no one can or does.  If you have property, you cannot spend it all as you like.  You have to pay a part of it to the government, that is, into the common stock, for the common good, in the shape of rates and taxes, before you can spend any of it on yourself.  If you take wages, you cannot spend them all upon yourself and do what you like with them.  If you do not support your wife and family out of them, the law will punish you.  You cannot do what you like with your own gun, for you may not shoot your neighbour’s cattle or game with it.  You cannot do what you like with your own hands, for the law forbids you to steal with them.  You cannot do what you like with your own feet, for the law will punish you for trespassing on your neighbour’s ground without his leave.  In short, you can only do with your own what will not hurt your neighbour, in such matters as the law can take care of.  And more, in any great necessity the law may actually hurt you for the good of the nation at large.  The law may compel you to sell your land, to your own injury, if it is wanted for a railroad.  The law may compel you, as it did fifty years ago, to serve as a soldier in the militia, to your own injury, if there is a fear of foreign invasion; so that the law is above each and all of us.  Our own wills are not our masters.  No man is his own master.  The law is the master of each and all of us, and if we will not obey it willingly, it can make us obey unwillingly.

Can make us?  Ay, but ought it to make us?  Is it right that the law should over-ride our own free wills, and prevent our doing what we like with our own?

It is right—absolutely right.  St. Paul tells us what gives law this authority: “There is no power but of God.  The powers that be are ordained of God.”  And he tells us also why this authority is given to the law.  “Rulers,” he says, “are not a terror to good works, but to evil.  Wilt thou then not be afraid of those who administer the law?  Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise from them, for they are God’s ministers to thee for good.”

For good, you see.  For the good of mankind it was, that God put into their hearts and reasons, that notion of making laws, and appointing kings and magistrates to see that those laws are obeyed.  For our good.  For without law no man’s life, or family, or property would be safe.  Every man’s private selfishness, and greediness, and anger, would struggle without check to have its way, and there would be no bar or curb to keep each and every man from injuring each and every man else; so the strong would devour the weak, and then tear each other in pieces afterwards.  So it is among the savages.  They have little or no property, for they have no laws to protect property; and therefore every man expects his neighbour to steal from him, and finds it his shortest plan to steal from his neighbour, instead of settling down to sow corn which he will have no chance of eating, or build houses which may be taken from him at night by some more strong and cunning savage.  There is no law among savages to protect women and children against the men, and therefore the women are treated worse than beasts, and the children murdered to save the trouble of rearing them.  Every man’s hand is against his neighbour.  No one feels himself safe, and therefore no one thinks it worth while to lay up for the morrow.  No one expects justice and mercy to be done to him, and therefore no one thinks it worth while to do justice and mercy to others.  And thus they live in continual fear and quarrelling, feeding like wild animals on game or roots, often, when they have bad luck in their hunting, on offal which our dogs would refuse, and dwindle away and become fewer and wretcheder year by year; in this way do the savages in New South Wales live to this day, for want of law.

It is for our good, then, that God has put into the heart of man to make laws, and to obey them as sacred and divine things.  For our good, in order to save us from sinking down into the same state of poverty and misery in which the savages are.  For our good, because we are fallen creatures, with selfish and corrupt wills, continually apt to break loose, and please ourselves at the expense of our neighbours.  For our good, because, however fallen we are, we are still brothers, members of God’s family, bound to each other by duty and relationship, if not by love.

Just as in a family, if parents, brothers, and sisters will not do their duty to each other lovingly and of their free will, the law interferes, and the custom of the country interferes, and the opinion of neighbours interferes, and says: “You may not love your parents: but you have no right to leave them to starve.”  “You may not love your brothers: but if you try to injure and slander them, you are doing an unnatural and hateful thing, abhorred by God and man, and you must expect us to treat you accordingly, as a wild beast who does not feel the common laws of nature and right and wrong.”  So with the law of the land.  The law is meant to remind us more or less that we are brothers, members of one body; that we owe a duty to each other; that we are all equal in God’s sight, who is no respecter of persons, or of rank, or of riches, any more than the law is when it punishes the greatest nobleman as severely as the poorest labourer.  The law is meant to remind us that God is just; that when we injure each other, we sin against God; that God’s rule and law is, that each transgression should receive its just reward, and that, therefore, because man is made in the likeness of God, man is bound, as far as he can, to visit every offence with due and proportionate punishment.  And the law punishes, as St. Paul says, in God’s name, and for God’s sake.  The magistrate is a witness for God’s righteous government of the world, the minister of God’s vengeance against evil-doers, to remind all continually that evil-doing has no place, and cannot prosper, and must not be allowed, upon this God’s earth whereon we live.

But what if the laws are unfair, and punish only some sorts of evil-doers and not others?  What if they are like spiders’ webs, which catch the little flies, and let the great wasps break through?  What if they punish poor and weak offenders, and let the rich and powerful sinners escape?  “Obey them still,” says St. Paul.  In his time and country the laws were as unfair in that way as laws ever were, and yet he tells Christians to obey them for conscience’s sake.  Thank God that they do punish weak offenders.  Pray God that the time may come when they may be strong enough to punish great offenders also.  But, in the meantime, see that they have not to punish you.  As far as the laws go, they are right and good.  As far as they keep down any sort of wrong-doing whatsoever, they are God’s ordinances, and you must obey them for God’s sake.

But what if the laws are not only unfair and partial, but also unjust and wrong?  Are we to obey them then?  Obey them still, says St. Paul.  Of course, if they command you to do a clearly wrong thing; if, for instance, the law commanded you to worship idols, or to commit adultery, there is no question then; such laws cannot be God’s ordinance.  The laws can only be God’s ordinance as far as they agree with what we know of God’s will written in our hearts, and written in His holy Bible.  Then a man must resist the law to the death, if need be, as the old martyrs did, dying as witnesses for God’s righteous and eternal law, against man’s false and unrighteous law.  It is a very difficult thing, no doubt, to tell where to draw the line in such matters.  But we, thank God, here in England now, have no need to puzzle our heads with such questions.  Every man’s conscience is free here, and he has full liberty to worship God as he thinks best, provided that by so doing he does not interfere with his neighbour’s character, or property, or comfort.  There is no single law in England now, that I know of, which a man has any need to refuse to obey, let his conscience be as tender as it may.  And as for laws which we think hurtful to the country, or hurtful to any particular class in the country, our thinking them hurtful is no reason that we should not obey them.  As long as they are law, they are God’s ordinance, and we have no right to break them.  They may be useful after all.  Or even if they are hurtful in some way, still God may be bringing good out of them in some other way, of which we little dream, as He has often done out of laws and customs which seem at first sight most foolish and hurtful, and yet which He endured and winked at, for the sake of bringing good out of evil.  At all events, whatsoever laws are here in England, are made by the men whom we English have chosen, as the men most fit and wise to make them, and we are bound to abide by them.  If Parliament is not wise enough to make perfectly good laws, that is no one’s fault but our own; for if we were wise, we should choose wise law-makers, and we must be filled with the fruit of our own devices.  As long as these laws have been made and passed, by Commons, Lords, and Queen, according to the ancient forms and constitution which God has taught our forefathers from time to time for more than a thousand years, and which have had God’s blessing and favour on them, and made us, from the least of all nations, the greatest nation on the earth; in short, as long as those laws are made according to law, so long we are bound to believe them to be God’s ordinance, and obey them.  But understand; that is no reason why we should not try to get them improved; for when they are changed and done away according to the same law which made them, that will be a sign that they are God’s ordinances no longer; that God thinks we have no more need for them, and does not require us to keep them.  But as long as any law is what St. Paul calls “the powers that be,” obeyed it must be, not only for wrath, but for conscience’s sake.

That is a very important part of the matter.  Obey the law, St. Paul says, not only for wrath, that is, not only for fear of punishment, but for conscience’s sake.  Even if you do not expect to be punished; even if you think no one will ever find out that you have broken the law, remember it is God’s ordinance.  He sees you.  Do not hurt your own conscience, and deaden your own sense of right and wrong, by breaking the least or the most unjust law in the slightest point.

For instance: some people think the income-tax is very unfair; and therefore they think there is no harm in cheating the revenue a little, by making out their income less than it is.  Others, again, think the laws against smuggling unjust and harsh; and therefore they see no harm in trying to avoid paying duty on goods which they bring home, whenever they have an opportunity, or buying cheap goods, which they must know from their price are smuggled.  Others, again, think the game laws are unfair, and therefore see no harm in going out shooting on their own lands without a licence; while many see no harm, or say they see no harm, in poaching on other people’s grounds, and killing game contrary to law wherever they can.  That it is wrong to break the law in these two first cases, you all know in your own hearts.  On the matter of poaching, some of you, I know, have many very mistaken notions.  But, my friends, I ask you only to look at the sin and misery which poaching causes, if you want to see that those who break the law do indeed break the ordinance of God, and that God’s laws avenge themselves.  Look at the idleness, the untidiness, the deceit, the bad company, the drunkenness, the misery and sin, to man, woman, and child, which that same poaching brings about, and then see how one little sin brings on many great ones; how a man, by despising the authority of law, and fancying that he does no harm in disobeying the laws, from his own fancy about poaching being no harm, falls into temptation and a snare, and pierces himself through with many sorrows.  My young friends, believe my words.  Avoid poaching, even once in a way.  The beginning of sin is like the letting out of water; no one can tell where it will stop.  He who breaks the law in little things will be tempted to go on and break it in greater and greater things.  He who begins by breaking man’s law, which is the pattern of God’s law, will be tempted to go on and break God’s law also.  Is it not so?  There is no use telling me, “The game is no one’s; there is no harm in taking it.”  Light words of that kind will not do to answer God with.  You know there is harm in taking it; for you know, as well as I do, that you cannot go after game without neglecting your work to get it; or without going to the worst of public-houses, among the worst of company, to sell it.  You know, as well as I do, that hand in hand with poaching go lying, and idling, and sneaking, and fear, and boasting, and swearing, and drinking, and the company of bad men and bad women.  And then you say there is no harm in poaching.  Do you suppose that I do not know, as well as any one of you here, what goes to the snaring of a hare, and the selling of a hare, and the spending of the ill-got price of a hare?  My dear young men, I know that poaching, like many other sins, is tempting: but God has told us to flee from temptation—to resist the devil, and he will flee from us.  If we are to give up ourselves without a struggle to every pleasant thing which tempts us, we shall soon be at the devil’s door.  We were sent into the world to fight against temptation and to conquer it.  We were sent into the world to do what God likes, not what we like; and therefore we were sent into the world to obey the laws of the land wherein we live, be they better or worse; because if we break one law because we don’t like it, our neighbour may break another because he don’t like that, and so forth; till there is neither law, nor peace, nor safety, but every man doing what is right in his own eyes, which is sure to end by every man’s doing what is right in the devil’s eyes.  We were sent into the world to live as brothers, under laws which make us give up our own wills and selfish lusts for the common good.  And if we find it difficult to keep the laws, if we are tempted to break the laws, God has promised His Spirit to those who ask Him.  God has promised His Spirit to us.  If we pray for that Spirit night and morning, He will make it easy for us to keep the laws.  He will make us what our Lord was before us, humble, patient, loving, manful and strong enough to restrain our fancies and appetites, and to give up our wills for the good of our neighbours, anxious and careful to avoid all appearance of evil, trusting that because God is just, and God is King, all laws which are not wicked are His ordinance, and therefore being obedient to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, even as Jesus Christ Himself was, who, though He was Lord of all, paid taxes and tribute money to the Roman government, like the rest of the Jews, and kept the law of Moses perfectly, and was baptised with John’s baptism, to show that in all just and reasonable things we are to obey the laws and customs of our forefathers, in the country to which it has pleased the Lord that we should belong.

XXVII.

THE SOURCE OF LAW

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.  For there is no power but of God.  The powers that be are ordained of God.—Romans xiii. 1.

In this chapter, which we read for the second lesson for this afternoon’s service, St. Paul gives good advice to the Romans, and equally good advice to us.

Of course what he says must be equally good for us, and for all people, at all times, in all countries, as long as time shall last; because St. Paul spoke by the Spirit of God, who is God eternal, and therefore cannot change His mind, but lays down, by the mouth of His apostles and prophets, the everlasting laws of right and wrong, which are always equally good for all.

But there is something in this lesson which makes it especially useful to us; because we English are in some very important matters very like the Romans to whom St. Paul wrote; though in others, thanks to Almighty God, we are still very unlike them.

Now, these old Romans, as I have often told you, had risen to be the greatest and mightiest people in the world, and to conquer many foreign countries, and set up colonies of Romans in them, very much as the English have done in India, and North America, and Australia: so that the little country of Italy, with its one great city of Rome, was mistress of vast lands far beyond the seas, ten times as large as itself, just as this little England is.

But it is not so much this which I have to speak to you about now, as how this Rome became so great; for it was at first nothing but a poor little country town, without money, armies, trade, or any of those things which shallow-minded people fancy are the great strength of a nation.  True, all those things are good; but they are useless and hurtful—and, what is more, they cannot be got—without something better than them; something which you cannot see nor handle; something spiritual, which is the life and heart of a country or nation, and without which it can never become great.  This the old Romans had; and it made them become great.  This we English have had for now fifteen hundred years; even when our forefathers were heathens, like the Romans, before we came into this good land of England, while we were poor and simple people, living in the barren moors of Germany, and the snowy mountains of Norway; even then we had this wonderful charm, by which nations are sure to become great and powerful at last; and in proportion as we have remembered and acted upon it, we English have thriven and spread; and whenever we have forgotten it and broken it, we have fallen into distress, and poverty, and shame, over the whole land.