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BX 5133 .L5 P3 1891
Liddon, Henry Parry, 1829-
1890.

Passiontide sermons

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PASSIONTiDE SERMONS

3Pas0tontilie Sermons

By H. p. LIDDON, D.D., D.C.L, LL.D.

LATE CANON AND CHANCELLOR OF ST. PAULS

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

AND NEW YORK : 15 EAST i6th STREET
1891

(

MONG the papers left by Dr. Liddon was a collec-

tion of Passiontide Sermons, which he is known to
have intended for publication. It has seemed to his
literary executors that no time should be lost in carry-
in" out his intention with regard to these Sermons.
They have added to them two (iv. and xiv.) also preached
in Passiontide, two others (xvi, and xvii.) preached in
Lent, and four short Sermons (xviii.-xxi.) on the first four
Penitential Psalms, preached by Dr. Liddon on Wednes-
days in Lent, in his turn as Chancellor of St. Paul's
Cathedral. The Sermons are arranged according to their
subjects; and it has been thought best to print them in
their entirety, although some repetition of doctrinal
statements is necessarily involved in this course.

St. Andrew's Eve,
1890.

CONTENTS

SEEMON I.

THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHRIST.
St. John viii. 46.

PAGE

Which of you convincelh Me of sin? ...... I

i9t£arf)tlJ at iije (Cftaptl ISogal, SJil^ittijall, on JJassion StinSag, fflattii 26, 1871.

SEEMON II.

THE HUMILIATION OF THE ETERNAL SON.
Phil. ii. 5-8.

Let this mind be in you, ivhich was also in Christ Jesus: Who,
being in the form of Ood, Ihoiujht it not robbery to be equal with
God : but made Himself of no reputation, and took up07i Him
the form of a servant, and tras made in the likeness of men :
and beinij found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself,
and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross . 18

iPttacJicU at St. i^aul's on 3|alm Sunuag, apvil 2, 1871.

SEEMON III.

THE PERSON OF THE CRUCIFIED.
I Cor. i. 13.

Was Pa^d crucified for you 34
^Imcftrt) at St. lOaul's aw ^jJahn iunOau, '^pril 6, 1884.

viii

Contents.

SEEMON IV.

THE ACCEPTED OFFERING.
Hkb. X. 5, 6, 7.

PAGL

WhArefort whtn He cometh into the woi'ld, He saith, Sacrifice and
offering Thou ivouldest not, but a body hast Thou prepared Me:
in burnt-ojerings and sacrifices for sin Thou hast had no
pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come to do Thy will ... 50

iBuacbcS at tijc CTijapcI Uoual, Jjatiiltljall, on ^lassion sunSag, fHattfj 30, 1873.

SEEMON V.

THE CLEANSING BLOOD.
Heb. ix. 13, 14.

For if the blood of bulla and of goats, and (he ashes of an heifer
sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh :
how much more shall the Blood of Christ, Who through the
Eterna l Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your
conscitnrc from dead luorks to serve the living God ? . . ■ 69

iPrcacijeS at St. Jpaul's on JJassion Sunbag, Spnl 7, 1878.

SEEMON VI.

THE CONQUEROR OF SATAN.
Heb. ii. 14.

That through death He might destroy him that had the power of
death, that is, the devil ........ 83

"^xta^ea at St. ^Paul's on passion &untiag, Spril 2, 1876.

Contents.

SERMON VII.

THE CORN OF WHEAT.
St. John xii. 24.

PAGE

Verily, verily, 1 say unto you. Except a corn of icheat fall into the
rjroimd and die, it abideth alone ; hut if it die, it bringeth fm-th
rniich fruit ....... ... 100

3)3rtacftElJ at St. IJaul's on ffiooD Jriljap, april 11, 1873.

SERMON VIII.

THE APPEAL OF THE CRUCIFIED .JESUS.
Rom. X. 21.

Bat to Israel He saith, All day lonrj I have stretched forth My

hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people , . . 119

i3teact)eti at 5t. Jpaul's on JPalm SunBag, Slpril 9, 1876.

SERMON IX.

THE SOLITUDES OF THE PASSION.
Psalm xxii. 11.

0 go not from Me, for trouble is hard at hand, and there is none
to help Me 1 38

^Prtacbct) at St. ^jJaul'a on 53alm SunDag, 'Spril 14, 1878.

SERMON X.

THE SILENCE OF JESUS.

St, John xix. 9.

Pilate saith unto Jesus, Whence art Thou ? But Jesus gave him
no answer . . . . . . . . . -153

i^KBcfteli at St. ITauI's on iPasston SunDan, april 3, 1881.

Contents.

SEEMON XI.

THE ASS AND THE FOAL.
St. Matt. xxi. 3.

PAGE

And if any man say ovgJU unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath
need 0/ them 167

53rcact)ft) at *t. JlJaura on Jpassion SunJing, a^jril 2, 1882.

SEEMON XII.

POPULAR RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM.

St. John xii. 12, 13.

Much i)eople that were come to the feast, when they heard that
Jesus was cominr/ to Jerumlem, took branches of j)alm trees, and
•went forth to meet Him, and cried, Hosanna : Blessed is the
King of hrael That comelh in the Name of the Lord . . 182

Prtadjcti at St. TPauI's on Passion Sunijao, Spril 6, 1879,

SEEMON XIII.

RELIGIOUS EMOTION.

St. M.\rT. xxi. 9.

And the multitudes thai went before, and that followed, cried,
saying, Hosanna to the Son of David : Blessed is He That comelh
in the Name of the Lord ; Hosanna in the Highest . . . 196

IBrracijrli at St. JPaul's on Passion SunSag, april 11, 1881.

SEEMON XIV.

THE TRAITOR-APOSTLE.

St. Matt. xxvi. 24.

It had been good for that man if he had not been born .

Ptcadjetj at St. Paul's on palm SunCrH, ^pril 16, 1889.

Contents.

SERMON XV.

THE ECONOMY OF RELIGIOUS ART.
St. Matt. xxvi. 8, 9, 10.

PAGE

But whta His disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying. To
what jmrpose is this imste ? For this ointment might have been
sold for much, and given to the poor. When Jesus understood
it, He said unto them. Why trouhle ye the woman ? for she

hath wrought a good xi:orh upon Me 227

33tfact)cB at St.ilaul's on ^^alm Sunljag, apvil 6, 1873.

SEEMON XVI.

THE LIVING WATER.

St. John iv. 13, 14, 15.

Jesus ansivered and said unto her. Whosoever drinketh of this
water shall thirst again: hut whosoever drinketh of the v:ater
that I shall give him shall never thirst ; but the water that I
shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into
everlasting life. The woman sailh unto Him, Sir, give me this
water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw . . 244
JPteactcU at St. ^nuVz on ti)c JTourtlj SunUag in Itnt, fBarcb 19, 1871.

SEEMON XVII.

THE TRUE LIFE OF MAN.
St. Luke xii. 15.
A tnaii's life consistelh not in the abundance of the things which he

259

3|rtac[)el) at (Cbrist Cljurci] on tijc Setonti !SH«6ncBlaj! in llent, JTtb. 14, 1883.

SEEMON XVIII.

THE DEATH OF THE SOUL.
Psalm vi. 5.

For in death no man remembereth Thee : and who will give Thee

thanks in the pit ? 276

53rcatf)eB at St. ^aul'a on tfje JFift^ OTeUnEBSas in %cni, fflarcf) 23, 1887.

Xll

Contents.

SERMON XIX.

GUIDANCE OF THE PENITENT.
Psalm xxxii. 9.

PAGE

/ will inform thee, and leach thee in the way wherein thou .shall
go : and I will guide thee with Mine Eye . . . . .281
iPrtacheU at St. i^aul's on tijc f iftb SSSelmcBUag in Ucnt, fflatcl) 14, 1888.

SERMON XX.

DISAPPROVAL Of FRIENDS.

P.SALM xxxviii. II.

My lovers and my neighbours did stand looking upon my trouble :
and my kinsmen stood afar off . . . . . . . 287

39rfacl)cli at St. ^anl'g on tjie Jiftlj JSHtOntstiaiJ in %tnt, Slpril 3, 1889.

SERMON XXI.

THE IDEA OF SIN.
Psalm li. 4.

Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in
Thy sight ; that Thou mightest be justified when Thou speakest,
and be clear when Thou jiidgest ...... 294

^9reaci)£B at St. ^Paul's on tfjt Jiftb JJSatCntsSas in Ulcnt, fHarclj 19, 1890.

SERMON L

THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS CHEIST.

St. John viii. 46.

Which of you convinceth Me of sin 1

IT has sometimes been inferred from the context of these
words that the word " sin " really means here intel-
lectual rather than moral failure. " Which of you con-
vinceth Me of error ? And if I say the truth, why do ye
not believe Me ?" The second question is thus made to
repeat its meaning into the translation of the first. But
the word translated " sin " means moral failure throuohout
the New Testament ; and our Lord is arguing — if we may
dare to apply our classifications of human ai'guments to
His profound and sacred words — from the genus to the
species, from the absence of moral evil in Him generally
to the absence of a specific form of moral evil, namely,
falsehood. He is maintaining that as they cannot detect
in Him any kind of sin, they ought not by their disbelief
to credit Him practically with falsehood, or, at least,
indifference to truth, and His own means of attaining and
proclaiming it.

It has also been thought that our Lord here only chal-
lenges the detective power of His Jewish opponents, and
that He does not literally imply His Sinlessness. As
though He had said : " You at least cannot point to any
sin against veracity or some other virtue on My part
\vhich ought to forfeit your confidence. And as you know
no moral reason for disbelieving Me, you ought to believe

/ A

The Sinlessness of Jestis Christ.

[Serm.

Me." But such a meaning would be strangely at variance
with the general tenor of our Lord's teaching — with His
repeated contrast between the deceptiveness of outward
appearances and the inward truths and facts of human
life. If indeed this had been His meaning, the Jews
might have retorted that the Lord Himself taught them
to distrust the outside appearance of goodness, and to
account that only worth respect which is beyond the
ken of human sight, and is known to the Father Which
seeth in secret.^

Besides which the challenge would hardly have been
offered unless the Speaker had been conscious of some-
thing more than guiltlessness of public acts which might
be pointed to as in some sense sinful. Sin, like holiness,
is not merely a series of facts which may be measured and
dated : it is a particular condition of the will, it is a moral
atmosphere. The presence of sin is perceptible where
there is no act of sin : it is breathed, it is implied, it is
felt, it is responded to by sympathetic instincts when
there is almost no visible or audible sign of its presence.

"The Powers of 111 have mysteries of their own,
Their Sacramental signs and prayers,
Their choral chants in man)- a winning tone,
Their watchwords, seals, processions, known
Far off to friend and foe ; their lights and perfnm'd airs.

And even as men, where wanting hosts abide,

By faint and silent tokens learn
At distance w-hom to trust, from whom to hide,
So round ns set on every side

The aerial sentinels onr good and ill discern.

The lawless wish, the unaverted eye,

Are as a taint upon the breeze
To lure foul spirits : haughty brows and high
Are signals to invite him nigh.

Whose onset ever Saints await on bended knees." -

Our Lord claims, then, to be sinless in a very different
sense from tliat in which a man might defy an opponent

1 St. Matt. vi. 1-18. - Lyr, Inn. i\ . 8.

The Sinlessness of J esus Christ.

to prove against him a specific form of wrongdoing in a
court of law. We are here in the atmosphere not of
law but of morality ; and morality is a question not of
external facts merely, but of internal motives, postures
of will, dispositions of affection.

But the question arises whether sinlessness is abstract-
edly possible. It has been argixed that our experience
goes to deny its possibility. To be human, so far as we
individually come in contact with human life, is to be
sinful — in very varying degrees, yet at least in some
degree, sinful. In one individual and class, sin is out-
rageous, shocking, gross ; in another, it is refined, and more
or less attractive. But the essence of the thing — the con-
tradiction between the free moral will and that Will of
God which is the moral rule or order of the universe — is
the same. " There is none righteous, no, not one," ^ is as
true now as in the days of the Psalmist and of St. Paul.
" If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and
the truth is not in us," - applies as certainly to Christians
of the nineteenth century as to Christians of the first.
But this general experience is not really at variance with
the existence of an exception to it : and our faith in
humanity, in man's proved capacity for moral improve-
ment, in his experienced power of passing from one level
of moral attainment to another, leads us up to the idea of
One Who has reached the summit, or Who has always
occupied it. Faith in humanity here coincides with faith
in CJod. That God should have given man the capacities
which he actually possesses for almost indefinite improve-
ment, points to a purpose in the Divine Mind of which we
sliould expect to see some typical realisation. These
lines of thought are only interrupted by moral scepticism,
expressing itself in such cynical proverbs as that " Every
man has his price, if you only know it," and that " No

1 Ps. xiv. 3 ; Rom. iii. lo. 2 i f^t. .Jolm i. 8.

4 The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ. [Serm.

man's character should be taken for granted until you
have cross-questioned his valet," Moral scepticism, which
claims to be a very far-sighted common-sense, which
repudiates all untenable ideals, and sits in judgment on
human nature in a spirit of lofty impartiality, is in reality
based not on experience, but on mistrust. It begins with
mistrust, it does not merely end with it ; and such mis-
trust blights within us fatally all the generous impulses
of faith and love, — all the power we have of making self-
sacrificing efforts for God's glory and the welfare of
our fellow-men. This mistrust once recognised and con-
quered, we shall not mistake either the nature or the wide
dominion of evil, but we shall see in men, struggling with
imperfection and against it, reasons for faith in humanity.
We shall have, at the bottom of our thoughts, no insuper-
able bar to believing — upon sufficient evidence — that one
Being has actually appeared upon the stage of history,
in Whom evil found no place at all.

All that we know about our Lord goes to show that
He was Sinless. If certain portions of the text of the
Gospels should be — for the sake of the argument, and in
no other sense — admitted to be of inferior or no authority,
whatever might remain, enough would remain to sustain
the impression of the Sinlessness of Christ. This impres-
sion was produced most strongly on those who were
brought into the closest contact with Him. Take St. Peter.
After the miraculous draught of fishes, St. Peter's excla-
mation is noteworthy : " Depart from me, for I am a sinful
man, 0 Lord. ' ^ St. Peter does not say, " I am a weak and
failing," but " I am a sinful man, 0 Lord." He feels the
interval that separates him from the wonder-working

1 St. Luke V. 8.

The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ.

Christ : but it is not his Lord's power over nature, but His
sanctity, which awes and distresses St. Peter. In the
same way, when St. Peter had denied our Lord, a look
from Jesus sufficed to produce in the soul of the apostle
the extremest anguish : he " went out, and wept bitterly." ^
Why should our Lord's "look" have had this power?
Had St. Peter associated with the character of his Master
any one trait of selfishness, or ambition, or unveracity, or
heartlessness, he might have felt, in the tragic catastrophe
which led to the Passion, the presence of something like
a retributive justice. It was the absence of this, it was
his conviction of the absolute purity of Christ's character,
which filled him with remorse at the thought that he had
borne a part in betraying Him. This impression of
Christ's character is observable in the worldly judge who
yielded to the wishes of Christ's enemies, while he
admitted the innocence of their Victim ; ^ in the restless
anxiety of the wife of Pilate, haunted in her dreams by
the thought that the blood of " that Just Person " might
be visited on her husband ; ^ in the lower sense of the
pregnant declaration made by the centurion at the cross
— " Truly this was the Son of God ; " * above all, in tlie
remorse of Judas. Judas, who had known Christ as
Peter had known Him for three years of intimate com-
panionship ; Judas, who would gladly, had it been possible,
have justified his treachery to himself by any flaw that
he could dwell on in his Master's character, was forced to
confess that the " blood " which he had betrayed was
" innocent," ^ and was so burdened with his sense of guilt
that he sought refuge from tlie agonies of thought and
shame, in that which only makes shame and guilty
thought irreversible — in suicide. In the hatred of the
Sanhedrists, as described particularly in St. John's Gospel,*^

1 St. Matt. xxvi. 75. 2 st. John xix. 4, 6, 16.

3 St. Matt, xxvii. 19. •< Ih. 54. -5 lb. 4, 5.

^ St. Joliu xi. 47-57 ; xii. 10, 11 ; xviii. 3 ; .\ix. 6, 7.

6 The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ. [Serm,

the purity and force of Christ's character is not less discern-
ible. It is the high prerogative of goodness, as of truth, in
their loftier forms, that tliey can never be approached in
a spirit of neutrality or indifference ; they must perforce
create a decided repulsion when they do not decidedly
attract. The Pharisees would have treated an opposing
teacher, in whom any moral flaw was really discernible,
with contemptuous indifference : the sinless Jesus of
Nazareth provoked their irreconcilable, implacable hostility.

The Sinlessness of Christ is dwelt upon in the writings
of the Apostles as a very important feature of the message
about Him which it was their business to deliver to the
world. St. Peter's earliest sermons dwell on the subject.
Addressing the wondering multitude which had run
together to witness the miracle performed by the two
Apostles at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, St. Peter
tells them that He Whom they had denied in the presence
of Pilate was " the Holy One and the Just." ^ The climax
of St. Stephen's indictment against his judges, which led
to their violent interruption and his own immediate
death, was that they had been the betrayers and murderers
of " the Just One." ^ The title by which Ananias announces
Christ as the future Master of his destiny to the converted
but still blinded Saul of Tarsus, is "that Just One" —
Whose will the convert should know, the voice of Whose
mouth he should hearken to, Whom indeed, in inward
spirit as in outward vision, he should see.^ The absolute
holiness of Christ is equally assumed in the Epistles of
each of the three great Apostles. St. Paul is careful to
say that God sent His Son in the likeness only of sinful
flesh* — in true human nature, that is, without its sin.
St. Peter dwells on our Lord's sinlessness in its bearing
both on His example and His atoning Death : the precious
blood of Christ with which Christians are redeemed is, he

1 Acts iii. 14. - Ih. vii. 52. ^ 76. xxii. 14. < Rom. viii. 3.

The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ.

says, the blood of a Lamb "without blemish, and imma-
ciilate;^ the suffering Christ Who left all Christians, but
particularly ill-treated slaves, an example that they should
follow His steps. Himself " did no sin, neither was guile
found in His mouth." ^ In St. John, Christ's sinlessness
is connected sometimes with His intercession : " We have
an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;"^
— sometimes with His regenerating power : " If ye know
that He is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth
righteousness is born of Him ; " * — sometimes with the
real moral force of His example : " Let no man deceive
you ; he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as He
is righteous." ^ Especially is the spotless sanctity of Christ
connected in the Epistle to the Hebrews with Christ's
priestly office. Although the High Priest of Christendom
was "tempted in all points like as we are," yet is He
" without sin." " Holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from
sinners," in His moral elevation not less than in His
actual ascension. He needeth not daily, as did the priests
of the old covenant, to offer up sacrifice, first for His own
sins and then for the people's ; ^ and His unsoiled robe of
sanctity it is which makes His offering of Himself so
perfectly acceptable to the Eternal Father.

The Sinlessness of our Lord has been supposed to be
compromised, sometimes by the conditions of the develop-
ment of His life as man, sometimes by particular acts and
sayings which are recorded of Him. When, for instance,
we are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews that our Lord
"learned obedience by the things that He suffered," ^ this, it
is argued, means progress from moral deficiency to moral

1 I St. Pet. i. 19. - Ih. ii. 21, 22. ^ i St. .John ii. i.

< I St. John ii. 29. Ih. iii. 7. « Heb. iv. 15.

7 Heb. vii. 26, 27. « Ih. v. 8.

The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ.

[Serm.

suflficiency ; and, as a consequence, it implies in Him a
time when He was morally imperfect. But although the
growth of our Lord's moral Nature as Man implies that as
a truly human nature it was finite, it does not by any
means follow that such a growth involved sin as its start-
ing-point. A moral development may be perfectly pure
and yet be a development ; a progress from a less to a
more expanded degree of perfection is not to be con-
founded with a progress from sin to holiness. In the
latter case there is an element of antagonism within the
will which is wholly wanting in the former.

Nor is there any reason for denying His moral Perfection
on the ground that a change in His conception of His work
is observable as having taken place between His earlier
and His later ministry in consequence of disappointment.
This theory makes Him the slave, not the master of cir-
cumstances, since it maintains that He only reached the
idea of a purely spiritual kingdom of God when His earlier
aims, which had, according to the hypothesis, a mere
political element in them, had been proved to be im-
practicable by the national hostility which they aroused.
Against this whole theory we have to set the broad fact
that the earliest allusions which our Lord made to His
kingdom were as entirely indicative of its spiritual,
heavenly, non-political character as the latest ; and that
the whole idea of a change of plan imposed upon Christ
by the force of events is imported on purely a 'priori
grounds into the history of the Gospels, and finds no
support in the Sacred Text.

A more formidable difficulty, it has been urged, is
presented by the Temptation. A &ona fide temptation
implies, it has been contended, at least a minimum of
sympathy with evil, which is incompatible with perfect
sinlessness. Either Jesus was not really tempted, in
which case He fails as our example ; or the reality of

I] The Sildessness of Jesus Christ. g

His temptation is fatal to His literal Siulessuess. That
this dilemma would not have been admitted by the
Apostolic writers is plain from the statement in the
I'^pistle to the Hebrews, that " He was in all points tempted
like as we are, yet without sin." ^ It will be asked how
this is possible. What, my brethren, is temptation ? It
is an influence by which a personal being on probation
may receive a momentum in the direction of evil. It
may be an evil inclination in the man's own soul ; it may
1(0 a motive presented from without. The former, a
corrupt inward inclination, was, we are maintaining, im-
possible in the case of Jesus Christ ; but the motive from
^vithout could only have become a real temptation by
making a place for itself in thought or in imagination.
How was this practicable while leaving the Sinlessness of
Christ intact ? The answer is that an impression upon
thought or imagination or sense is very possible indeed in
very varying degrees short of producing a distinct deter-
mination of the will towards evil, and it is only when
such a determination is produced that sinlessness is com-
promised by the presence of temptation. So long as the
will is not an accomplice, the impressions of the tempter
upon our intellectual or sentient life do not touch the

1 moral being itself ; and whether we examine the tempta-
tions to which our Lord was exposed from without in the
wilderness,- or the temptations to which He was exposed

i from within in the struggle in Gethsemane,^ it is perfectly
clear that deep as was the impression and reality of the
trial in each case, in each case also the will maintained
an attitude of resistance — here to external solicitations,
there to internal shrinking from suffering. Nothing could

i be more certain than the reality of His trial, except the
fact that He passed it unscathed-

Among particular acts which have been insisted on as

1 Heb. iv. 15. St. Matt. iv. i-ii. 3 st. Luke xxii. 40-46.

I o The Sinlessness of J estis Christ. [Serm.

incompatible with perfect sinlessness is His cursing the
barren fig-tree.^ Here the idea that our Lord betrayed
something like irritation could only be entertained when
the nature of a prophetical act had been altogether lost
sight of : the fig-tree was a symbol of the Jewish people,
doomed, on account of its unfruitfulness, to a swift de-
struction. In driving the buyers and sellers from the
Temple,- He was acting, not under the influence of any
sudden personal passion, as has been imagined, but strictly
in His prophetical character : the conscience of the
traffickers ratified the strict justice of His act. When it
is urged that His driving the devils into the swine in the
country of the Gadarenes ^ involved an interference with
the rights of property, it must here be admitted that the
act seems indefensible, unless it be perceived that Jesus,
as Man, is God's Plenipotentiary, and that the act must be
explained not simply with reference to the ordinary rules
of human conduct, but by the laws of God's government
of the universe. In that government material interests
are strictly subordinated to moral interests, because in the
view of the Self-Existent Moral Being the material universe
is of less accoimt than the moral. God does indeed,- for
great and sufficient ends, inflict keen loss upon individuals
and nations; the individual suffering can only be accounted
for as forming part of a scheme of government which ex-
tends beyond our view. This applies no less to our Lord's
relation to Judas. The supposition that He did not know
what Judas was and would become is inconsistent with
Christ's moral penetration, to say nothing of His higher
Superhuman Knowledge. But, if our Lord had this Know-
ledge, why did He enrol Judas among the Apostles ?
No satisfactory answer can be given, except that here too
He was acting as God acts in providence, — not only per-

1 St. Matt. xxi. i8, 19. - St. John ii. 13-17 ; St. Mutt. xsi. 12, 13.

3 St. Mark v. 1-16.

1] The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ. 1 1

luitting evil, but overruliug even its worst excesses for
good — comprehending its whole destined range and
history, yet making it serve His purposes of grace and
mercy in the end.

Once indeed He used words which, taken at first sight,
might seem to imply that He admitted moral imperfection
in Himself. He rebuked the young man who addressed
Him as "Good Master" on the ground that "there was none
good save One, that is, God." ^ But if we examine the
moral condition of the young man, we shall conclude
that no inference of this kind can be drawn from
our Lord's expression. The young man's question

j betrays the levity of a shallow self-complacency. He

' addressed our Lord as " good " in the way of ofF-hand
compliment, without meaning his words. It was not to
such a soul that Jesus would reveal Himself ; and when
He rebukes the young man for his use of the epithet
" good," He is addressing Himself to the young man's
views and grasp of truth. He is not describing truth as it

' was present to Himself. God alone is good ; but the
Divinity of Jesus is a truth too high, as even the moral

' perfection of His Manhood is too high, for mastery by one
whose eyes are not yet turned away from beholding
vanity .2 Christ does not forget His own warning against
casting pearls before swine.^

On one side, indeed, our Lord's language is inconsistent

\ with human perfectness, imless He is something more

I than man. His reiterated self-assertion, — His insistincc
that all should come to Him, cling to Him, listen to Him,
love Him, — would not be human virtue in you or me. It

I would not be virtue in a sinless man. It implies a claim
to the love and homage of humanity which is unjustifiable,
unless the Speaker stand in a higher relation to mazi than
is possible for any who is merely human. But then,

1 St. Matt. .xix. i6, 17. Ps. cxix. 37. 3 St. Matt. vii. 6.

12 The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ. [Serm.

granting this, the Life of Jesus as a sinless whole sustains
the implication of this apparent exception to His general
bearing. If we deny that He was more than man, we are
likely to proceed, with an English deist, to accuse Him of
"vanity and incipient sacerdotalism;"^ but then, the
absence of dependence in Him, the absence of localising
and narrowing elements in His character, of any traceable
conflict between flesh and spirit, between the intellectual
and the moral life, above all, the purity and intensity
of love in Him, — are, apart from His miracles and the
mysteries of His Life, in perfect harmony with His state-
ments about Himself.

His Life is a revelation of the Moral Life of God, com-
pleting all previous revelations, not merely teaching us
what God is in formula addressed to our understanding,
but showing us what He is in characters which may be
read by sense, and take possession of the heart. " The
Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," cried an
Apostle, " and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the Only
Begotten of the Father, full of Grace and Truth." " He
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." ^

in.

I. The Sinless Christ satisfies a deep want of the soul
of man — the want of an ideal. No artist can attempt a
painting, a statue, a building, without some ideal in view ;
and an ideal is not more necessary in art than in conduct.
If men have not worthy ideals before their mind's eye,
they furnish themselves with unworthy ones. Few things
are more piteous in the recent history of mankind than
the consideration that a character such as that of the first
Napoleon should have been the ideal of three generations
of a race so generous, so impulsive, so capable beyond

3 Mr. F. W. Newman, Phases of Faith, pj). 153, 154.
2 St. John i. 14. ^ lb. xiv. 9.

I] The Sinlessness of Jestis Christ.

other peoples of tlie heights of heroic virtue and of the
depths of self-abasement as the French. Only now, if
now, is that false ideal displaying itself, in its true historic
outlines, before the eyes of a population disenchanted by
unexampled suffering ; and it will be well if no new
master of all the sublime atrocities of government and
war appeals to the imagination which has just unlearnt
the lesson of three quarters of a century. There is
ground, too, for the apprehension lest Frederick the
Great — the highest embodiment, perhaps, in modern
Europe, of successful brutality — whose memory was for
a while buried at Jena, but who has risen in his successors
with greater splendour than before, should again become
the ideal monarch of North Germany. As each nation
has its ideals, so has each city, each family, each profes-
sion, each school of thought, and how powerfully these
energetic phantoms of the past control and modify the
present is obvious to all who observe and think. There
is no truer test of a man's character than the ideals which
excite his genuine enthusiasm : there is no surer measure
of what he will become than a real knowledge of what he
heartily admires. And like other societies, other families,
other schools of thought, other centres of enthusiasm,
Christendom has had its ideals, many and various, — some
of them looked up to by a generation, some by centuries ;
some of them the inheritance of a village, a city, a coun-
try ; some the common glories of all who acknowledge the
Name of Jesus Christ. But these ideals, great as they
are in their several ways, iall short of perfection in some
particular, on some side, when we scan them closely, how-
ever reverently we scan them ; there is One beyond them
— only One — "Who does not fail. They, standing beneath
His throne, say each one of them to us, with St. Paul,
" Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ." ^

' I Cor. xi. I.

14 The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ. [Serm.

But He, above them all, asks each generation of worship-
pers, each generation of critics, that passes beneath His
throne, " Which of you conviuceth Me of sin ? " It is
true that here and there a voice is raised which for a
moment seems to attempt to fix on Him some flaw or
stain that shall forfeit the homage of Christendom : but it
dies away, that voice, into the silence of neglect, or amid
the murmurs of indignation, and Christ remains in Chris-
tian thought, as in actual fact, alone on His throne of
unassailable Perfection. " Thou only art holy ; Thou only
art the Lord ; Thou only, 0 Christ, with the Holy Ghost,
art most high in the glory of God the Father." ^

2. The Sinless Christ is also the true Eeconciler between
God and man. Our Lord did not leave it to His Apostles
to insist upon the importance of His Death and Sufferings
to the world. He spoke of His Death as an indispensable
part of His work. The corn of wheat. He says, must fall
into the earth and die, if it is not to abide alone, if it is
to bring forth much fruit.- As of old Moses lifted up the
serpent in the wilderness for the healing of the people, so
must the Son of Man be lifted up upon the cross, and the
effect of this will be that all who believe on Him will not
perish, but have everlasting life.^ The Good Shepherd,
when the hireling flees from the invading wolf, will lay
down His life for the sheep:* He will give His life a
ransom for many.^ His life-blood is the Blood of the New
Covenant; by being shed it will procure remission of
sins.*^ This language falls hallowed and familiar on
Christian ears, and it introduces us to the more explicit
statements of the Apostolic Epistles. But like these state-
ments it presupposes the absolute Sinlessness of Christ,
if it is to be even tolerable. Let us conceive (if we may

1 TJie Gloria in Excelxis in the Holy Coniinunion Service.

- St. Johu xii. 24. 3 2b. iii. 14, 15. ^ H>. x. 11-15.

5 St. Matt. XX. 28. 6 lb. xxvi. 28.

The Sinlessness of J esiis Christ. 1 5

without irreverence) that some one single sin, untruthful-
ness, or vanity, or cruelty, could be really charged on Him,
and what becomes of the atoning character of His Death ?
I do not ask what becomes of its efficacy, but how is it
conceivable that He should have willed to die for a guilty
world ? For while, if we look at it on one side, His Death
appears to have been determined by circumstances, on the
other, it was as certainly the result of His own liberty of
action. " No man taketh My life from Me, but I lay it
down of Myself : I have power to lay it down, and I have
power to take it again." ^ At once Priest and Sacrifice, Christ
is represented in the Epistle to the Hebrews as " offer-
ing Himself without spot to God." ^ It was the crowning
act of a life which was throughout sacrificial ; but had He
I been conscious of any inward stain, how could He have
ij desired to offer Himself in sacrifice to free a world from
j sin ? Had there been in Him any personal evil to purge
away, His Death might have been endured on account of
His own guilt : it is His absolute Sinlessness which makes
it certain that He died for others.

3. Thus, as our Ideal and our Redeemer from sin
I and death. He is the heart and focus of the life
of Christendom. Christendom is Christian so far as
it lives consciously in companionship with Christ ;
j not merely with Christ as a memory of the past depicted
in its annals, but with Christ as a livinf; Being —
I unseen, yet energetic — seeing all, comprehending all,
I forming a judgment upon all that passes in His Church
; at large day by day, and in each separate life that com-
poses it. There is, alas ! too much to wound Him — too
much to compel those who know little or nothing of His
real secret empire over souls to pronounce His work in the
world at large a failure. Often, too, it happens that men
who are one in their love and devotion to Him differ,

1 St. John X. 18. 3 iifb. ix. 14.

1 6 The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ. [Serm.

inevitably it may be, as to the line of duty which, under a
given set of circumstances, that devotion prescribes : so
that their loyalty to Him is the very measure of their
opposition to each other. The distracting controversies
which agitate the Chxirch, and in which some of us, it
may be sorely against our wills, are forced to take part
by circumstances which we can neither explain nor con-
trol, are at this moment only too present to the minds of
most men who take any interest in such questions at all.
Not that these controversies are peculiar to Anglicanism,
distracted as it is said to be by divisions, which are
pointed to as the logical consequence of its original separa-
tion from the See which claims to be the normal centre
of unity. They exist no less within the Eoman unity
itself — equal in point of intensity, although differing in
their direction and their form. Even at this moment, the
one theologian on the Continent to whose every utterance
Europe, whether Catholic or Protestant, listens with a
respect that is granted to no other — the great and noble
Dollinger, — has but a few days left him to decide whether,
in accepting the equal infallibility of a long line of self-
contradicting Popes, he will renounce the highest certain-
ties of history — of that history which furnishes the Gospel
itself with the fundamental evidence of its truth — or
accept the alternative ecclesiastical suspension and dis-
grace. To attempt to close questions, whether of doctrine
or practice, which are, and have been, at least, open for
centuries, is to inflict upon the Church as fatal an injury
as to open questions which Eevelation has closed. No
such enterprises can be really carried out with impunity ;
and whether the Vatican or Exeter Hall be bent upon its
project of proscription — here in the interests of a usurping
ecclesiastical autocracy, there of a narrow and illiterate
theory — the result is necessarily and equally disastrous ;
since such proscription invites opposition, suffering, divi-

The Sinlessness of Jesus Christ.

sion, weakness — weakness in all that Christ's true servants
would fain see united and strong. It may indeed be
impossible to agree altogether as to questions of Church
order or questions of duty — now and here — during our
brief day of life, without some sacrifice of that perfect sin-
cerity which is one of the soul's most precious jewels.
Our controversies belong to an imperfect vision of truth :
but they are likely to be tempered in such proportion
as loyalty to our Sinless and Divine Lord, and not any
one of the subtle forms of self-assertion which are so apt
to beset us, is our real governing motive when we take
part in them. In looking to Him, all Christians who
merit the name meet and are one : just as men who are
separated by seas and continents gaze on the same sun in
the material heavens, and bask in his warmth and light.
Whatever criticisms we may level at each other, or may
deserve at each other's hands — and none of us can suppose
that we are not open to some, nay, rather to much, just
criticism — we turn our eyes upwards towards the heavens,
and fix them on Him Whom none has yet convinced of
sin, even of the slightest — in Whose life on earth there
was seen, eighteen centuries ago, as now on His throne in
heaven, a perfect harmony between a human will and the
moral law of the universe. In His Light we shall see
light.^ The heaviness of our misunderstandings and our
controversies may endure for a night : the joy of union
will come with the eternal Morning.^

1 Ps. xxxvi. g. - lb. XXX. 5.

SERMON II.

THE HUMILIATION OF THE ETERNAL SON.

Phil. ii. 5-8.

Let tlus 'iiiind he in ijou, whieh was also in Christ Jesus : ^Vho, being in the
form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Him-
self of no reputation, and took upon Iliin the form of a servant, and vms
made in the likeness of inen : and being found in fashion as a man.
He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death if
the cross.

IN no passage of his writings does St. Paul carry us
more into the heights and depths of Christian doc-
trine than in these words. Yet his object is a moral and
practical one. Human nature was, under the eyes of the
Apostles, and within the Church, what it is now within
the Church and under our eyes. Christian Philippi was
distracted by divisions, not of a doctrinal or theological,
but of a social and personal character. One feud, in par-
ticular, there was between two ladies of consideration,
Euodias and Syntyche, which the Apostle was particularly
anxious to heal ; ^ but it was probably only one feud among
many. Small as it was, the church of Philippi' already
contained within its borders representatives of each of the
three great divisions in race of the Roman world. The
purple-dealer from Thyatira ; ^ the slave-girl, who was a
Macedonian, and apparently born on the spot, and who
was, on account of her powers of divination, so profitable
a possession to her owner : ^ the Roman colonist, who had

1 Phil. iv. 2. - Acts xvi. 14, 15. 3 yj. 16-18.

The HtunUiation of the Eternal Son. 19

charge of the public prison ^ — all became converts to the
faith. Here we have an important branch of commerce
represented; there the vast numbers of people, who in
very various grades made their livelihood in official
positions under government ; while the divining-girl was
i a member of that vast and unhappy class to whom the
! Gospel brought more relief than to any othe;- — in whose
persons the rights of human nature were as completely
ignored as if they had been altogether extinguished : the
slave popiilation of the Empire. He Who represented
humanity as a whole spoke tlirough His messengers to
every class in the great human family ; since " there was
to be neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female,
Ijarbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, but all were one
in Christ Jesus."

And yet, human nature being what it is, this very
diversity of elements within the small community which
believed on and worshipped Jesus Christ at Pliilippi, was
likely, at least occasionally, to foster disagreements : the
serpent of the old Pagan pride in human nature had been
scotched rather than killed. Jealousies which were natural,
and even admirable, in heathen eyes, were intolerable in
Christendom, kneeling beneath the Eedeemer's Cross. St.
Paul insists iipon the duties of social unity. He begs
the Philippian Christians to " be steadfast in one spirit,"
to " strive together with one mind for the faith of the
Gospel," ■* to " do nothing through strife or vain-glory." ^
For himself, he protests he has no partialities to indulge :
i he prays to God for all ; he thanks God for graces be-
! stowed on them all ; he has bright hopes and anticipations
I about them all ; they are all of them, he says, his com-
i panions in grace ; his companions — though severed by
seas and countries — in suffering ; he yearns after them all

1 Acts xvi. 25-34. ^ Col. iii. ii. s Phil. i. 27.

* Phil. i. 27. 5 lb. ii. 3.

The Htimiiiation of

[Serm.

— it is a most beautiful and suggestive expression — in the
Heart of Jesus Christ.^

It is to the Incarnation and Cross of Jesus Christ that
St. Paul points in order to justify his advice and to ex-
plain his meaning. " Let this mind be in you, which was
also in Christ Jesus." What mind 1 That question can
only be answered by a somewhat close examination of the
passage before us.

I. In looking into these words we observe, first of all,
that St. Paul clearly asserts Jesus Christ to have existed
before His Birth into the world. You and I, my brethren,
it is unnecessary to say, had no existence before our
natural birth ; our immaterial nature is no older than our
bodily nature ; it was brought into existence contempo-
raneously with our bodies, by a special act of God's
creative power. Jesus Christ too had a Human Soul,
which was created contemporaneously with His Human
Body ; but before He had either the body or soul of man.
He already existed. " Let this mind be in you, which was
also in Christ Jesus : Who, existing (so it should be
rendered) in the form of Grod." The structure of the
language here makes it certain that the Apostle is speak-
ing of a point of time, not merely earlier than that at
which our Lord commenced His ministry, but altogether
antecedent to His taking human nature on Him. Being
in the " form " of God. What is here meant by " form " ?
The word which is here translated " form," ^ when applied
to objects of sense, means all those sensible qualities
which strike the eye of an observer, and so lead us to see
that a thing is what it is. Our English word " form " is
mainly restricted in its application to objects of sense,
so that we know at once what is meant by the " form " of

1 Phil. i. 3-8. ^ A">/"^'^-

IL]

the Eternal Son.

a man or of a public building. But the Greek word was
applied quite commonly to immaterial objects, in which
there was nothing to strike the bodily eye ; the Greeks
spoke of the " form " of an abstract idea just as naturally
as we speak of the " form " of a house ; and thus, the
original drift of the word being exactly retained when it
is applied to an abstract idea, the " collective qualities "
of the idea which is before the mind's eye of the speaker
are termed the " form " of that idea. Thus the " form " of
justice would mean those qualities and capacities in
man which go to make up the complete idea of justice.
God, we know, is a Pure Spirit, without body or parts, —
without any qualities that address themselves to sense,
— the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible.^ The " Form "
of God would have meant, in St. Paul's mouth and St.
Paul's thought, all those attributes which belong to the
Eeality and Perfection of the One Supreme Self-existent
Being. By saying then that Jesus Christ existed in the
Form of God, before " He took on Him the form of a
slave," St. Paul would have been understood by any one
who read him in his own language to mean that, when as
yet Christ had no human body or human soul. He was
properly and literally God, because He existed in the
" Form," and so possessed all the proper attributes, of God.

2. St. Paul goes on to say that being God, Christ Jesus
"thought it not robbery to be equal with God." This
sentence would be more closely and clearly rendered,
Christ " did not look on His equality with God as a prize
to be jealously set store by." Men who are new to great
positions are apt to think more of them than those who
have always enjoyed them ; a crown sits more naturally
on hereditary monarchs than on soldiers or statesmen
who have forced their way up the steps of the throne ; and
some thought of this kind, derived from the things of

1 I Tim. i. 17.

The Htimiliatio7i of [Serm.

earth, colours the Apostle's language in describing by con-
trast those mysteries of heaven. Christ, Who was God
from everlasting, laid no stress on this His Eternal Great-
ness : He made Himself of no reputation, or rather He
emptied Himself (that is the exact word) of His Divine
prerogatives or glory. Of His Divine Nature He could
not divest Himself ; but He could shroud It altogether
from the eyes of His creatures : He could become a
" worm, and no man, a very scorn of men, and the out-
cast of the people."^

3. Of this self-humiliation St. Paul traces three distinct
stages. The first consists in Christ's taking on Him the
form — that is, here as before, the essential qualities which
make up the reality — of a servant or slave. By this
expression St. Paul means human nature. Without ceas-
ing to be what He was, what He could not but be. He
wrapped around Himself a created form, through which
He would hold converse with men, in which He would
suffer, in which He would die.

" The form of a servant." Service is the true business
of human nature ; man, as such, is God's slave. There are
created natures higher than our own — who, like ourselves,
are bound to yield a free service to their Maker, and
who, unlike ourselves, yield it perfectly, — Intelligences
far vaster and stronger than any among the sons of men ;
Hearts burning with the fire of a love which, in its purity
and its glow, surpasses anything that man can feel;
Wills which in their freedom and their determination are
more majestic than any which rules among the sons of men.
Cherubim and Seraphim, Angels and Archangels, Thrones,
Virtues, Dominions, Powers, Principalities — Christ sur-
veyed them all, and passed them all by : He refused
the elder born, and the nobler, the stronger of creation,
and chose the younger, and the meaner, and the weaker.

1 Ps. xxii. 6.

11]

the Eternal Son.

He took not on Him, St. Paul says, angels, but He took
on Him the seed of Abraham.^ He was made Man. By
taking our nature upon Him, Christ deigned to forfeit
His liberty of action : He placed Himself under restraints
and obligations ; He entered into human society, and at
that end of it where obedience to the will of others is the
law which all must obey. " Even Christ pleased not
Himself : " ^ the Master of all became the Slave of all.

The second stage of this humiliation is that Christ did not
merely take human nature on Him : He became obedient
to death. St. Paul here implies that it might have been
otherwise ; that Christ might conceivably have taken on
Him a human form, and have ascended into heaven in it,
without dying on the Cross or rising from the grave.
Death is the penalty of sin ; ^ it is the brand of physical
evil set upon the universal presence of moral evil. How
then should the Sinless One die ? St. Paul implies that He
was not subject to the law of death ; and tliat He sub-
mitted to it, after becoming Man, by a distinct effort of
His Free Will. " He became obedient unto death." This
was indeed, it is distinctly stated as a matter of fact, His
object in becoming Incarnate : — " Forasmuch then as the
children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Him-
self likewise took part of the same ; that through death He
might destroy him that had the power of death, that is,
the devil ; and deliver them who through fear of death
were all their lifetime subject to bondage." * It was for
our sakes, then, that He died : we die because we cannot
help it : " it is appointed unto all men once to die."

Death is a tyrant who sooner or later claims the homage
of all of us : Clirist alone might have defied him, yet He
freely submitted to his sway. As He Himself said : " No
man taketh My life from Me, but I lay it down of Myself :

1 Heb. ii. 16. 2 Koni. xv. 3.

* Rom. V. 12 ; vi. 23 ; St. James i. 15. •* Heb. ii. 14, 15.

The Htimiliatio7i of [Serm.

I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it
again." ^

The third stage in this humiliation is that when all modes
of death were open to Him, He chose that which would
bring with it the greatest share of pain and shame. " He
became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."
The cross was the death of the slaves and malefactors. St.
Paul himself no doubt reflected that in this he could not,
if he would, rival the humiliation of his Master, as he
could not, much more, rival his Master's glories. St. Paul
knew that, as a Eoman freeman, he would be beheaded
if condemned to die. Upon this death upon the cross
the Jewish law, as St. Paul reminded the Galatians, utters
a curse ; ^ and that Christ should thus have died seemed
to present to each section of the ancient Eastern world
especial difficulties. Christ crucified was to the Jews a
stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness.^ And
yet Christ " endured the cross, despising the shame." *
He was bent upon drinking to the dregs the cup of self-
humiliation ; and God does not do what He does by
halves : He is as Infinite in His condescensions as He is
in His Majesty. He laid not stress on His Divine prero-
gatives. If He willed to die, why should He not embrace
death in all the intensity of the idea, surrounded by
everything that could protract the inevitable suffering
and enhance the inevitable humiliation ? If He willed to
become Incarnate at all, why should He exempt Himself
from any conditions of creaturely existence % why not in all
things be made like unto His brethren,^ sin only except ?
While on the cross of shame He endures " the sharpness
of death," He is only completing that emptying Himself
of His Glory which began when, " taking upon Himself
to deliver man. He did not abhor the Virgin's womb." ^

1 St. John X. i8,
* Heb. xii. 2.

2 Gal. iii. 13.
5 Tb. ii. 17.

I Cor. i. 23.
" Te Deum Laudamus.

11]

the Eternal Son.

Thus, as we read the passage over, we see the successive
stages of the humiliation of the Eternal Son. Existing in
the real Nature of God, He set not store upon His Equality
with God, but emptied Himself of His Glory by taking on
Him the real nature of a slave, and being made in the
likeness of man — that is the first step in the descent —
and being found in outward appearance as a man He
humbled Himself among men, and became obedient unto
death — that is the second ; but when all forms of death
were open to Him He chose to die in the manner which
was most full of ignominy in the eyes of men — He be-
came obedient to the death of the Cross— that is the
third.

II.

Why may we suppose, my brethren, that God, by His
providence acting in His Church, places before our eyes
this most suggestive passage of Holy Scripture on this
particular Sunday ? ^ We may, I think, answer that

I question without much difficulty.

I. We stand to-day on the threshold of the Great
Week, which in tlie thought of a well-instructed Christian,
whose heart is in its right place, is beyond all comparison
the most solenm week in the whole year. It is the Holy
Week, so called because it is consecrated to the particular

j consideration of our Lord's Sufferings and Death. Day by
day in the Gospels, which are specially appointed, and in
the Proper Lessons, the whole story of Christ's bitter and
tragical Passion is unfolded step by step before our eyes,
first in the language of one Evangelist, then in that of
another, until every recorded incident has been placed
before us. Now, if we are to profit by this most solemn and
instructive Narrative, it is of the first importance that we
should answer clearly to ourselves this primary question :

1 Phil. ii. 5-11 forms the Epistle for tlie ''Sunday next before Easter."

The Htimiliation of [Serm.

" Who is the Sufferer ? " and that we should keep the
answer well in the forefront of our thoughts throujjhout
the week. Even in everyday history we look upon exactly
the same misfortunes in the case of different persons with
very different eyes when we take into account the moral
excellence or even the personal rank of the sufferers. Of
the many persons in high rank who had their heads cut
off in the Tudor period of English history, people like
Sir Thomas More and Lady Jane Grey attract particular
interest on account of the lustre of sincerity and goodness
which attaches to their characters. Of the many innocent
victims of the first French Eevolution, Louis xvi. and
his queen, Marie Antoinette, will always command a
predominant share of sympathy and interest, from the
mere fact that each was born of a race of kings, born to
an inheritance of luxury and splendour which contrasts
so tragically with the last hours and scenes in the prison
and on the public scaffold. It will be said, perhaps, that,
so far as suffering goes, a peasant may suffer as acutely
as a king, and that one man's life is as good as the life
of another. True. But, for all that, it is felt that the
destiny to which the king was born of itself makes his
tragical end more tragical than it could else have been ;
if the amount of physical agony be no greater than in
the case of the peasant, at least there is room for a greater
degree of mental agony. When we apply this principle
to our Lord, and in the light of the great doctrine which
St. Paul teaches the Philippians in the text about Christ's
Person, how new and awful a meaning does it give to the
whole story of our Lord's Betrayal and Trial, — of the
insults, humiliations, and sufferings to which He was
subjected, — of the various particulars of His Death upon
the Cross ! Had He been merely man, the story of His
Death would have roused deep human fellow-feelings
within us ; it is said on one occasion to have moved a

11]

the Eternal Son.

multitude of heathen savages to tears by the mere force
of its pathetic beauty. What they felt was the innocence
of the Sufferer ; that He did no sin, neither was guile
found in His mouth ; that when He was reviled He
reviled not again ; ^ that the blood which He shed was
precious, as being that, as St. Peter says, of a Lamb
without blemish, and immaculate.- Doubtless the sinless
innocence of Christ does pour a flood of moral meaning
on the history of His Death. If He had no sins to
expiate He could not have died for Himself ; and we, as
we look into our guilty consciences, can onlj^ exclaim with
the Apostle, that " such an High Priest became us, holy,
harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners." ^ But that
which gives to the Passion and Death of our Lord its
real value is the fact that the Sufferer is more than man ;
that, although He suffers in and through a created nature,
He is Personally God. This fact was part of that hidden
wisdom or philosophy of which St. Paul writes to the
Corinthians, when he tells them that " if the princes of
this world had known it, they would not have crucified
the Lord of glory." * This fact is the key-note to a true
Christian understanding of the story of the Passion ; at
each step the Christian asks himself, " Who is this that
cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah ? " ^
Who is this betrayed, insulted, beaten, bound, reviled
One ? Who is this arrayed as a mock monarch, with
fancy robe and fancy sceptre — Whose Brow is pressed with
that crown of thorns — W^hose Shoulders are laden with
that sharp and heavy cross ? Whom do they buffet —
upon Whose Face do they spit — into Wliose Hands do
they drive the nails — to Whose parched Mouth do they
lift the hyssop ? St. Paul answers that question as the
centurion answered it beneath the cross : it was not

1 I St. Pet. ii. 22, 23. - Ih. i. 19. Heb. vii. 26.

^ I Cor. ii. 8. 5 jsa. Ixiii. i.

The Humiliation of [Serm.

one of tlie sons of men upon whom His fellows were
thus venting their scorn and hate ; it was He Who,
" existing in the true nature or form of God, did not set
store by His equality with God, but emptied Himself of
His Divine prerogatives, and took on Him the form of a
servant, and was made in the likeness of men."

And it is this consideration which enables us to enter
into all that the Apostles, and especially St. Paul, teach
us as to the effects of the Death of Jesus Christ. Their
language seems very exaggerated to those who believe
Him to have been only man, and such persons con-
sistently endeavour to empty it of its force by resolving
it all into metaphor. There can be no reason for suppos-
ing that the death of any mere man would have had the
effects which the Apostles attribute to the Death of Jesus
Christ. They tell us that Jesus dying is a propitiation
for our sins ; ^ that He is our redemption from sin ; ^ that
by His Blood we who were far off were made nigh to God ; ^
that His Blood cleanseth from all sin.* They thus teach
us that we are, apart from Christ, exiles from our
Father's home, captives who have to be brought back
from bondage, sinners whose guilt must be expiated
before the justice of God ; and that this restoration, this
reconciliation, this expiation, is the work of our Lord and
Saviour, more particularly in His Death.

If it be asked why His Death should have such effects,
there are two questions to be separately considered.
First, Why should His Death affect us at all ? That a great
act of self-sacrifice should be a blessing to a man himself,
to those immediately in contact with him who have had
opportunities of witnessing it, this we can understand.
But how is its effect to be transferred to other persons,
belonging to distant countries and distant times ? The

1 Rom. iii. 25 ; i St. Joliu ii. 2. " Col. i. 14 ; Heb. ix. 15.

3 Eph. ii. 13-16 ; 2 Cor. v. 18. * i St. John i. 7.

the Eternal Son.

answer is that our Lord stands to the whole human race
in the position of its Eepresentative. We know what is
meant by a representative man ; a man who represents a
country, a class, a line of thought, a political or social
aspiration. England abounds in representative men in
this lower sense of the term. But Christ represents human
nature, as Adam represented it ; He is, according to St.
Paul, the Second Adam,i "Wlio stands out from among all
other members of the human family, as occupying a
position corresponding to that of the first Adam, — a
position which gives His Personality a relationship to all.
In the first Adam the whole human family lived by in-
clusion; and his acts compromised all his descendants by
the same law as that which at the present day makes the
good or bad character of a father, or a father's bodily con-
stitution, rendered healthy by sober living, or enfeebled by
vice, as the case may be, the inheritance of his child.
Between us and the first Adam the connection is natural
and necessary : between us and the Second Adam it
depends upon our being brought into real contact with
Him by faith and love on our part, by the grace which
comes from Him through the Sacrament of our New
Birth and otherwise, on His. We have, in short, to claim
from Him His representative relationship, and what it
involves ; but when this claim has been made, the acts of
Christ become our acts, the sufferings of Christ our
sufferings, the self-sacrifice of Christ ours. Thus He bears
our sins in His own Body on the tree ; - thus as by one
man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the
obedience of One many were made righteous ; ^ thus " as in
Adam ail die, even so in Christ " may " all be made alive." *
Christ's Death then does afiect us, — not by any
•arbitrary or capricious arrangement, but because He

1 I Cor. XV. 45, I St. Pet. ii. 24.

^ Roin. V. 19. ■* I Cor. xv. 22.

The Httmiliation of

[Seem.

took ou Himself that human nature in which we all
claim a share. But what is it that gives His Death its
power and significance ? It is that He Who dies is more
than man. The reason which makes the history of the
Passion so interesting and so awful is the same reason
which makes its effects of such unspeakable significance.
It is the " priceless worth of the person of the Son of God "
— to use Hooker's language — " which wives such force and
effect to aU that He does and suffers." ^ What that force
and effect would be we could not guess beforehand with-
out a revelation from Heaven. We could only be sure
of tliis, that the Death as well as the Life of such an One
as Jesus Christ must, from the nature of the case, be very
different, in point of spiritual result, from that of any mere
man. The Apostles tell us in what that difference con-
sists, when they enumerate the several elements and
consequences of what we call the Atonement ; when they
tell us that by it God and man are reconciled, that ;i
propitiation for man's sin is offered to God, that man is
brought back from captivity in the realm of death. The
wonder is — if there be room for wonder — not that so
much follows from such a cause, but that, so far as we are
told, so little follows from it. Doubtless the Passion of
the Son of God has had results in spheres of being
of which we know nothing, and of which, since nothing
has been told us, it would not profit us to know. But it
is natural to ask with St. Paul, " If God spared not His
own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all, how shall He
not with Him also freely give us all things?"^ The pro- jj
raise is more than equal to sustain any conclusion which
the Apostles actually draw from it.

2. But besides this, it is well that we should take to heart
the particular lesson which St. Paul draws for the benefit
of the Philippiaus from the consideration of the Incarnation

1 Eccl. Pol. V. 52. 3. 2 Rom. viii. 32.

11]

the Eternal Son.

and Passion of the Son of God. It is a lesson which is as
valuable to us as members of civil society as it is valuable
to members of the Church of Christ. What is the main
source of the dangers which threaten the wellbeing; of
civil society from very opposite directions ? It is the
assertion of individual self-interest, real or supposed,
pushed to a point at which it becomes incompatible with
the interests of the community. The real enemy of
human society is individual self-assertion, — intolerant
of wealth, reputation, power, in others, — intolerant of
any supremacy except the supremacy of self, of any
glory except the glory of self, of any aggrandisement
except the aggrandisement of self. This assertion
becomes sometimes a despotism, which sacrifices the
liberties of an entire nation to the supremacy of a single
man ; sometimes, as we see in that beautiful and hapless
city across the Channel, at this moment a revolutionary
chaos, in which a thousand aspirants for power and wealth
are talking of nothing more and thinking of nothing
less than the real good of their country. And the source
of this mischief lies in a false ideal of human excellence ;
in the notion that it consists in self-assertion rather than
in self-repression; in making the most of life for self,
rather than in spending it for others. Now here St. Paul
teaches us that Christ Incarnate and Crucified is the true
model for Christians — for mankind. If He did not set
store on glory which was rightfully, inalienably His, why
should we? If He shrouded it, buried it away out of
sight, lived amongst men as if it had no existence, took
on Him the form of a servant, why should we do other-
1 wise ? If when He might have humbled Himself without
I suffering, if, when two roads of sacrifice were open to Him,
He chose the most exacting and the most painful, does
this say nothing to us ? Surely, brethren, we see here,
perhaps more clearly than in any other place of Holy

The Hwniliatio7i of

[Serm.

Scripture, how closely the moral teaching of Christianity
is bound up with its doctrine. As Doddridge says in his
noble hymn —

^\^len I survey the wonrtrous cross

Ou which the Prince of Glory died,
My chiefest gain I count but loss,

And pour contempt on all my pride."

Humility is so beautiful in Christian eyes because Christ
was humble : self-sacrifice — even to death — is so glorious,
because He is its conspicuous Example. He has settled
the question of what high excellence in life really consists
in, for all time : and it can never be re-opened. Pagans
mi"ht admu'B self-assertion ; the making the most of a
position for personal and selfish ends ; the clinging
anxiously to the poor shreds of reputation, or wealth, or
power which it may confer on a possessor. Yet they too
knew that all this ended with the grave : and they could
only bid men make the best of the fleeting hour, and shut
their eyes to its inevitable close. Christ has taught us
Christians a better way, not by precept merely, but by ex-
ample. He has taught us that the true force and glory of our
human life consists not in self-advertisement, but in self-
repression ; not in enjoyment, but in sacrifice of self. The
principle which was to heal the divisions of the little
Christian society at Philippi is the only principle which
can save society, imperilled as it is in so many ways in
the Europe of our day. All who have lived for others
rather than for themselves in His Church, — all who have,
at the call of duty, laid aside wealth, honour, credit, and
embraced ignominy and suffering, have been true to Him
— true to the spirit of His Incarnation and His Death,
true to what St. Paul calls " the mind that was in Christ
Jesus." And the true saviours of society are the men who
care more for labour than for honour, more for doing good
to others than for high place and name, more for the inner

11]

the Eternal Son.

peace winch self-sacrifice brings with it than for the out-
ward decorations which are the reward of self-assertion.
Such there are in every generation ; and they are in a line
with, or rather they are pale reflections of the Saviour of
the world. Still more certain is it that the Mind of Christ
in saving us is the only mind which enables us individu-
ally to accept His salvation. St. Paul describes the Jews
as " being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about
to establish their own righteousness, and so not submitting
themselves to the righteousness of God." ^ The most fatal
thing in religion, next to insincerity, is that confidence in
self which makes much of what we are, and forgets what,
by God's grace, we might have been, — which thinks much
of the good opinion of friends and little of the accusing voice
of conscience, — which is fully alive to personal excellencies,
and blind to that vast mass of evil which the Holy God,
and the pure beings who surround His throne, see in us.
May He teach us, at least, to be true. The self-deceit
which makes us think much of self is impossible when a
man's eyes have been opened to see what God really Is in
His Awful Sanctity : " Now mine eye seeth Thee," he cries,
" wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." -
Only penitent and broken hearts have any rightful place
at the foot of the Eedeemer's Cross ; but there is no reason
why any or all of us should not, by God's grace, in this
our brief day of life, and especially at this blessed season,
learn true penitence and contrition. It is the moral
rather than the intellectual eye which discerns the true
majesty of the Humiliation of the Son of God ; it is the
manwho has emptied Himself of self-complacency who finds
in the Eedeemer, disfigured with wounds and robed in shame
upon His Cross, " an hiding-place from the winds of life, and
a covert from the tempest ; and a river of water in a dry
place, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." ^

' Koiii. X. 3. - Job xlii. s, 6. " Isa. xxxii. 2.

SERMON III.

THE PERSON OE THE CRUCIEIED.

I Coit. i. 13.

Was Paid crucified for you ?

HEN a question is asked whicli can only be answered

* ' in one way, it is asked, not in order to extract
information, but to set people thinking. And this is
plainly the object of the question which the Apostle puts
to the Corinthians. The Apostle knew, and the Corinth-
ians knew, Who really had been crucified for them. Why
then does the Apostle ask the question, to which one
answer only was possible ? Why does he ask them,
" Was Paul crucified for you i " If they reflected, the
Corinthians must have felt that they — or some of them —
were acting as if Paul had been crucified for them. For
what were they doing ? They were breaking up the
church of Christ at Corinth into divisions, Avhich they
named in three cases after human teachers ; in one (but
from a motive which was at least as bad as that of the
rest) after our Lord Jesus Christ. One saith, I am of
Paul; and another, I of ApoUos, and I of Cephas, and
I of Christ.^ This was natural enough in the Greek schools
of philosophy, where every teacher had his private specu-
lation, and where nothing more soHd and helpful than a
speculation was, in the last resort, to be had at all. And

' I Cor. i. 12.

The Person of the Crucified.

the Corinthians, who had all their lives been accustomed
to the ways of the philosophers, were now bringing their
old Pagan habits inside the Church. They could only be
brought to reason by a question which should place the
real import of their act in a startling light, by showing
them that, in thus ranging themselves under a human
teacher, they were forgetting whatwas due to the Author and
Finisher of their faith. ^ And such a question was this :
" Was Paul crucified for you ? " Let us pause to observe
that there is courage, and courage of a rare quality, in this
question of the Apostle's. Many a man is physically
courageous who is wholly lacking in moral courage ; and
many a man who has moral courage is incapable of that
high exercise of it which is before us in the text. The
Apostle does not begin by addressing himself to those who
used in different senses the names of other teachers in
rivalry to his own. He does not ask, Was Apollos, was
Cephas crucified for you ? No, his question is addressed
to the very persons with whom an ordinary leader or
teacher of men finds it most difficult to be perfectly frank
and honest. It is addressed to his especial friends at
Corinth, to those who generously took his part, who, with
sincerity and enthusiasm made much of his name and
his authority, and on whose sympathy and co-operation,
humanly speaking, he had largely to rely.

My brethren, it is not difficult to find fault with those
who oppose us : they are reputed fair game for criticism.
Our self-love whispers to us that if they were not wrong
they could not be our opponents ; and our best and most
serious convictions often reinforce what is thus whispered
by our self-love. So they are told the hard truth, or
what we take to be the hard truth, with an unshrinkiu"
frankness ; and the operation costs us little effort, and it
causes them no great surprise, since it is only what they

' l[e^. xii. 2.

The Person of the Crucified. [Serm.

have to expect at our liands. So it is with human par-
ties : we see it every day in this or that department of
national and public life. But what we do not witness
often is the spectacle of a leader of men who dares to teU
the truth to his own friends. He may feel that there are
truths which they ought to be told ; tliat his silence may
be misconstrued into an approval Avhich he does not mean ;
that a true disinterestedness would risk much rather than
be so misconstrued. But, notwithstanding, he reflects
that he depends on them ; he apprehends that plain
speaking would breed divisions ; that at least it would
hinder hearty co-operation, and would tend to break up
the party with which he acts. So he is silent, stifling
regrets at that which he does not venture to criticise, and
thus letting his friends take their erring or mischievous
course, without interference or warning. So it was with
Eli : he could not bear to be true with his own family,
and thus, while Ms sons discredited the priesthood of
Israel, he was silent.^ So it was with some early Christian
bishops, and more than one early Christian Emperor ; the
Emperor's assistance was too valuable to be endangered
by plain speaking ; it was not every bishop who, like St.
Ambrose, would rebuke a Theodosius after the slaughter
of Thessalouica. So it was with Luther. He could not
afford to break \vith the Elector Frederick, and so he
invented a sanction for bigamy which no man would
have condemned more fiercely, than he in a theological
opponent. This is human weakness.

St. Paul was — God's grace had made him — strong and
tender enough to begin his task of telhng unwelcome truth,
by telling it to his own devoted friends ; to ask the men
who showed such affection for him, but so mistakenly,
" Was Paul crucified for you ?" What, then, is the import
of the question ?

^ I Sam. iii. 13.

The Person of the Crucified. 37

It might seem to appeal, first of all, and on the surface
of the words, to the sense of historic absurdity : " Was
Paul crucified for you V

Was not this Paul tlie very writer of the letter which
asks the question ? How, then, could he have died upon
a cross for the benefit of those who were quietly reading
his words at Corinth ? The question is not whether what
might have liappened but did not happen, had happened.
It is whether that which could not have happened,
which could not be seriously thought of as having
happened, had happened. Such a question was, of course,
in a high degree provocative ; it was deliberately cal-
culated, as we have seen, to provoke self-questioning,
self-distrust, self-reproach, self-correction, by asking that
which could only be answered in one way, and impatiently,
and which never would have been asked at all unless
things had been very much amiss with those to whom it
was addressed.

But this was not all. The question whether Paul was
crucified suggests the thought, AVho then was crucified ?
It suggests, first of all, the separateness, the deep impass-
able chasm, which yawns between any two personal
existences. No one of us can possibly be another. Each
personal being, whether created or Divine, whether man or
angel, has his own niche to fill, his own work to do, his
own particular destiny to accomplish. Other beings may
nearly resemble, — they cannot be and do what he is and
does. In the world of fact, and before the Divine Eye,
each of us differs from all besides. The starting-point, the
outset, the career, the characteristic acts, the efforts, the
sufferings, the time and manner of the end, all are different.
"Was Paul crucified for you?" Without for the moment
going further, the question suggests, on the very threshold

The Person of the Crucified. [Serm.

of the subject, the difference which parted the career of
the Apostle from that of his ]\Iaster. And in doing this
it also pointed to a truth beyond : our Divine Master's
isolation, — His awful, unapproachable isolation on the
Cross. My brethren, we can understand something of
the secret of this from what is passing just now before our
eyes. At this moment the shadow of a great sorrow rests
upon the Throne of this Empire. A life, still young, with
energy and capacity and disposition such as would in any
station have been held to promise a future of usefulness
and success, and with opportunities such as can fall to a
very few men in a century, has been suddenly cut short.^
A widow with her orphan child — a mother mourning the
loss of her youngest son: these are the figures on which the
country is bending its profoundly sympathising gaze with
a genuineness of anxious interest which provokes the
wonder of foreigners. And it may here perhaps be asked
whether such spectacles of human bereavement are not to
be found by hundreds every day, in the streets of this
^Metropolis, and whether there is not something morbid in
this lavish bestowal of consideration and sympathy on the
sorrows of Koyalty ? Certainly, trouble is no monopoly of
the great ; the human heart is as tender and as exacting
in the poorest hovels of the labouring man as in the
palaces of kings. And yet it is a true human instinct
which draws us with affectionate sympathy to the foot of
the Throne at times like this, since we are really influ-
enced, perhaps only half-consciously, by a sense of the
isolation of the pathetic sufferer. Yes ! that *is one of the
heaviest demands that are made upon earthly greatness :
its owners inevitably live apart ; they are denied all that
human consolation and support which perfect reciprocity
of thought and feeling ensures in the humbler walks of
life, and which is ill replaced by the fixed proprieties of

1 His Royal Highness the Duke of Albany (lied March 28, 1884.

Ill]

courtly deference : they are like those loftiest peaks in a
chain of mountains, which earn their elevation at the cost
of solitary exposure to the icy blasts, which no rival
summit intercepts, that it may rob them of some elements
of their pitiless severity. The isolation of the Throne !
Yes, that is one special reason why its occupant has, at all
times, but especially at times like this, an especial claim
on the prayers of the Church of Christ — a claim which,
it may be feared, we Christians too often fail adequately
to recognise. But we may not dwell longer on any merely
human sorrow, however august the scene, on the Sunday
in the year which, of all Sundays, is closest to the Passion
of the Son of God, — to an anguish besides which any
earthly anguish is but a passing sense of discomfort. In
His case, the isolation of ( Jethsemane was only outdone
by the isolation of Calvary : He too was the occupant of
a throne, but His throne was a scaffold. He was alone
with His load of sin and suffering at every step of the
I'assion, though He moved forward to His death amid the
ostentatious noise and bustle of a multitude ; " I have
trodden the winepress alone, and of the people there was
none beside Me," ^ was the predestined and the actual lan-
guage of His Soul : and with his eye upon this awful
solitariness of his suffering Master, the Apostle asks the
Corinthians, " Was I'aul crucified for you 1 "

•' Was Paul crucified for you ? "

The question implies, secondly, the unique efficacy of
the Death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let us note that in this question the Apostle fixes on our
Lord's Death in shame and torture as the most character-
istic feature of His earthly career. Many a Christian,

• Tsa. Ixiii. 3.

40 The Person of the Crucified. [Serm.

ancient or modern, having the Apostle's object in view,
would have asked a different question. Of old, men
would perhaps have asked. Was Paul transfigured on the
mount ? Did Paul raise Lazarus from the dead ? Did
Paul rise from the dead the third day ? And in modern
times, too, many would have asked, Did Paul preach the
Sermon on the Mount ? In the Apostle's eyes our Lord's
Teaching was of less account than His Death : nay, the
glory with which His Manhood was invested, His power
to raise the dead, and to rise from death, counted for less
than the fact that He was crucified. Not in this passage
only are these points thrust by comparison into the back-
ground, while His Death is treated as the prominent
feature in His manifestation to the world. " 0 foolish
Galatians," the Apostle cries, " before whose ej'es Jesus
Christ has been evidently set forth crucified." ^ " I deter-
mined not to know anything among you," he tells the
Corinthians, " save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." -
" God forbid that I should glory," he writes again to
the Galatians, " save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus
Christ." ^ St. Paul plainly feels that the full meaning of
Christ's work emerges in His Death ; that His Death, and
not His Teaching, is the climax of His self-manifestation
to mankind ; that the gift of Inspiration might conceiv-
ably have enabled an Apostle to teach side by side with
the Master — that Divine Power might robe a purely
human form with glory, might enable a mere man to raise
the dead, or might Itself raise another Lazarus from death ;
but that no being of whom we know, no being, whether in
earth or heaven, could possibly have taken the Eedeemer's
place upon the Cross of Calvary. For, indeed, the Corin-
thian Christians had been taught that when Jesus Christ
was crucified. His Death had a virtue, was followed by
results, which no other death had ever had since the world

1 Gal. iii. i. - i Cor. ii. 2. " " Gal. vi. 14.

Ill] The Person of the Crucified. 4 1

began. Christians were then taught that this Death was,
first of all, a I'ropitiation for sin, a l*ropitiation, real and
literal, offered on earth, accepted in heaven — a Propitiation
of which the offerings on the Day of Atonement in the
ancient Tabernacle were but a faint shadow and presenti-
ment. Thus St. Paul says that Jesus Christ was set
forth as a Propitiation, where the word means a propi-
tiating victim,^ throuoh faith in His Blood : that is. He
becomes this to us when we believe in the efficacy
of this sacrifice of His Life ; and St. John twice -
calls our Lord Jesus Christ a Propitiation, using a word
which means practically one who effects a propitiation
for our sins, "and not for ours only, but also for the
sins of the whole world." Again, Christians were taught
that the Death of our Lord was a redemption from
the guilt and penalty of sin ; that it was an enfran-
chisement, purchased at a costly price, and that this
price was none other than the Blood, that is, the symbol
and also the essential element of the Life of Jesus
Christ. Thus the Apostle tells the Ephesians that when
members of Christ "we have redemption through His
Blood, even the forgiveness of sins;"^ and the Colossians,
that in the Son of God's love we have our redemption,
which is again explained to mean the forgiveness of our
sins.^ To this our Lord Himself referred when, on the
occasion of the demand of the sons of Zebedee to sit on His
right Hand and on His left in His kingdom. He told His
disciples that the Son of Man had come not to be minis-
tered unto, but to minister, and to give His Life a ransom,
or price paid down, for niany.^ Once more. Christians were
taught tliat the Death of our Lord, having this propitiatory
and redemptive virtue, was thus a Reconciliation or Atone-
ment between God and man. " We ]-ejoice in God," he

1 iXaaTripiov, Rom. iii. 25. -' iXacr/^os, i St. John ii. 2 ; iv. 10.

^ Epli. i. 7. * Col. i. 14. St. Matt. x.\. 28.

42 The Person of the Crticified. [Serm.

tells the Eomans, " through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through Whom we have now received the reconciliation." ^
God, he tells the Corinthians, " has reconciled us to Him-
self throu"h Christ. . . . God was in Christ reconcilino- the
world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto
them ; " and this reconciliation was effected in the Garden
of Gethsemane and on the Cross, when " Him Who knew
no sin, He made to be sin on our' behalf, that we might
be made the Eighteousness of God in Him." -

Thus the Death of our Lord is stated in the New Tes-
tament to be a Propitiation for sin, a Price paid to buy
our freedom from sin's penalty, and an Act which reconciled
sinful but penitent man with a holy God. It is open to
people to say that they do not believe the Apostle's teach-
ing ; but what is hardly open to them, consistently with
honest dealing with language, is to suggest that on so
serious a sixbject the Apostle did not mean what he says,
and was only using the phrases of poetry and metaphor.
At this rate language ceases to be an instrument for the
transmission of thought ; if it has not become, as Talley-
rand cynically put it, a means for concealing thought.
The Death of our Lord is in the New Testament plainly
credited with effects which are attributed to no other
death in human history ; and it is to this solitary efficacy
of Christ's Death that St. Paul tacitly refers in the ques-
tion, " Was Paul crucified for you ? "

No doubt, already the Apostle himself had undergone
much for the sake of that Faith by which he hoped to
promote the highest happiness of mankind, and, in this
sense, he too suffered for his converts. Not long after he
could write : " Of the Jews five times received I forty
stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once
was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and
a day I have been in the deep ; in journeyings often,

Ill] The Person of the Crucified. 43

in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils from
mine own countrymen, in perils from the heathen, in
perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils
in the sea, in perils among false brethren ; in . . .
hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and naked-
ness." ^ And although in the end he was not crucified,
yet the day came when, in his own words, he was ready
to be offered, and the time of his departure was at hand,-
and he was led out beyond the Ostian gate at Eome to die
by the hand of the executioner.

And yet, what was the effect of the prolonged sufferings
and final martyrdom of St. Paul ? They were a proof of
his devoted love of his Crucified Lord ; they were a wit-
ness to his profound belief in the truth of Christianity, as
a creed worth living for, worth dying for. They thus
enriched the Church of his generation, the Church of all
succeeding ages, with an example which goes on, even
now, drawing, kindling, invigorating souls in the service
of their Eedeemer. But did St. Paul's death act as a pro-
pitiation before God ? Did it buy men back from the
guilt and penalties of sin \ Did it reconcile God and
man ? Did it, in fact, establisli new relations between
earth and heaven ? No ! the Death of our Lord Jesus
Christ was followed by consequences which differ, not
in degree merely, but in kind, from those which have
followed the death of any of His servants ; and St. Paul
suggests this to the Corinthians by asking them, " Was
Paul crucified for you ?"

in.

If it be asked, why this should be so, we have only
to shift the accent, as we ask the qiiestion, and it will
answer itself.

' 2 Cor. xi. 24-27.

- 2 Tim. iv. 6.

The Person of the Crucified. [SEE:Nr.

" Was Pavl crucified for you ?"

For it suggests, this question, thirdly, the unique dig
nity of the Divine Eedeenier. It is because He is what
He is, that His Eedemptive Death has this efficacy that is
all its own. Observe here, that even our Lord's Nature as
Man was in two respects unique.

First of all, it was Sinless. That taint of evil, which we
all of us inherit from our first parent, and which, though
its stain and degradation is removed in Baptism, yet
hangs about our life, like au atmosphere charged with the
possibilities of moral mischief, had no place in Him
Alone of the children of Eve, His was truly an Immaculate
Conception, cutting off the entail of inherited corruption
and making Him all that the first father of the race had
been before his fall. Still more certainly was He preserved
from actual siu : although the darts of the tempter lighted
again and again on the surface of His Human Soul, on His
life of thought and feeling, and, we may dare say, of pas-
sion, yet in Him they found no response, however faint
they glanced off as from a polished surface which
afforded them no lodgment. Thus He could address to
His contemporaries a challenge which no other in human
form ever could utter with impunity : " "Which of you
convinceth Me of sin And His Apostle could proclaim
" that He was made to be sin for us, "Who knew no siu
that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him."-
It was this Sinless Nature which, representing a world of
sinners, hung in death upon the Cross ; and the Apostle's
consciousness that he himself had been " sold under sin,"*
and that he was parted by an immeasurable interval from
the Sinless Eedeemer, "Who had bought him with the price
of His Blood — this consciousness underlies his question
" "\i\'^as Paul crucified for you ?"

Next, our Lord's Human Nature, being thus Sinless, was

' St. John viii. 46. - 2 Cor. v. 21. Rom. vii. 14.

Ill] The Person of the Crucified. 4 5

also representative of the race. It has been said, with
truth, that when the Eternal Word, or Son of God, was
made flesh, He united Himself, not to a human person,
but to human nature. His Humanity had nothing about
it that was local, particular, appropriate only to a single
historical epoch, to a country, to a race. He was born in
Palestine, and of a Jewish mother, yet He was without
the narrowing characteristics of the Jew ; He was born a
member of a down-trodden and conquered race, when the
Eoman empire had reached the zenith of its fortunes, yet
in Mind and Character He might have belonged as well to
the race of the conquerors, or to any other epoch in the
history of mankind. All races, all countries, all ages had
a share in Him, yet He could be claimed as an exclusive
possession by none.

This representative character of our Lord's Manhood is
insisted on by St. Paul, when he calls Jesus Christ the
Second Adam.^ As the first Adam represented the whole
human family by being the common ancestor, from whom
all human beings derived the gift of physical life, so that
his blood flowed in their veins, and their several lives, what-
ever their individual characteristics may be, are traceable
to and meet in him ; so the Second Adam was to represent
the human family, not as the common source of bodily life,
but as the parent of a moral and spiritual existence, which
those children of the first Adam who would, might receive
from Him. The Second Adam was, says the Apostle, a
Quickening Spirit : He held towards the spiritual and
higher life of mankind a relation as intimate, and, in its
purpose, as universal as the first Adam had held to man's
uatural life.

Now, in this representative character of our Lord's
Human Nature we see the explanation of that which often
embarrasses thoughtful readers of the Bible and the early

' 1 Cor. XV. 45. - Ih.

46 The Person of the Crticif ed. [Serm.

Christian writers. Why, they ask, should the great men
of the old Jewish history be constantly represented as
types of Christ ? Why should there be any traceable
correspondence between Abraham, or Joseph, or ]\Ioses,
or Joshua, or David, or Solomon, and the Lord Jesus ?
The whole idea seems at first sight arbitrary ; as though
anybody might be a type, in the hands of a fanciful writer,
of anybody else. Yet, brethren, it is not so in reality. Be-
cause Christ's Manhood is representative of all that is ex-
cellent in man, therefore each excellence of the ancient
saints foreshadowed something that was to have a place
in Him : therefore Abraham, and Joseph, and Moses, and
Joshua, and David, and Solomon, reappeared, all of them,
but without their attendant weakness, in the Son of Mary.
Nay, it well may be that whatever was pure, and lofty,
and noble in the liuman family beyond the favoured
families of the chosen race, in Greece or India — mere
natural excellencies, imperfect, but struggling,— was a
true anticipation of the Perfect and Eepresentative Man.
He belonged to each, He infinitely transcended each, He
summarised and recapitulated in Himself all that was
true and great in all that had pi-eceded Him ; and as His
Nature was thus comprehensively representative, His
Acts and Sufferings were representative too. If -He died,
human nature at its best died in Him ; and those who
have, by gifts from Him, and by the voluntary and moral
association of faith, a share in this typically Perfect
Nature are vitally associated with His Death, and, by no
arbitrary fiction, but as a matter of justice, share in its
deserts and in its vast and beneficial consequences. Thus
" if any man be in Christ, he is the new creation : old
things are passed away, behold, all things are become
new." ^ Thus Christians are " accepted in the Beloved," -'
by actually sharing that new and representative Nature

1 2 Cor. V. 17. - Eph. i. 6.

Ill] The Person of the Criicified. 47

which the Son of God made His own, that it might
be " obedient unto death." ^ But what of the Apostle ?
Paul was by the grace of God an Apostle and a Saint ;
but he had no pretensions to represent the Jewish people,
much less the human family. He was a man of his
time, deeply indented with strong individual traits, a man
of whom few would have said, " Here is a representative
nature, in which I trace, along with much besides, the
lineaments of my own being and character." No ! One
only has ever represented the race at large by the very con-
stitution of His Nature ; and, conscious of this, the Apostle
asks the Corinthians, " Was Paul crucified for you i "

But our Lord, although His Manhood was thus Sinless
and Eepresentative, was much more than man. In truth,
His Manhood was but a robe which He had folded around
His Person when He condescended to come among us ; in
the true seat of His Being He was much more than man :
He was, as His Apostle says, " God over all. Blessed for
ever." ^ When His Passion was approaching, and the first
drops of the great storm that broke upon Him had begun
to fall. He partly lifted the veil, as, in the tremendous
words of last Sunday's Gospel, " Before Abraham was,
I am." ^ When they were nailing Him to the Cross, He
hinted at the solemn truth in the prayer, " Pather, forgive
them, for they know not what they do." * When the poor
thief turned to Him in the penitence and faith of his
dying agonies, He replied, in words which would have
been absurd or blasphemous had He not been the true
Lord of souls, and Lord of the abode of souls in the land
beyond the veil, " To-day shalt thou be with Me iu
Paradise." ^ When He gave up the ghost, nature around
was visibly troubled ; the earth did quake, and the rocks
were rent, and many bodies of holy Jews which slept
arose, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto

I Will. ii. 8. - Koiii, 5.

* St. Luke xxiii. 34.

•■ St. Jolin viii. 58.
■'' St. Luke xxiii. 43.

The Person of the Criicified. [Serm.

many.^ When all was over, the centuriou, Pagan as he
was, could not but feel the radiation of the great truth
which gives the Passion its most solemn meaning, " Truly
this was the Son of God ! " -

Yes, this is the point which we Christians must never
for a moment lose sight of as year by year we traverse
the history of the Sufferings which our Kedeemer under-
went on our behalf. The solemn truth which gives
each separate event its astonishing elevation is the truth
that the Sufferer is God, Who, that He might suffer,
has taken a nature in which suffering becomes possible.
The flesh which is scourged is the Flesh of God ; the hands
which are pierced are the Hands of God ; the brow which
is crowned with thorns, the face which is buffeted and
spat upon, — these are the Brow and the Pace of God.
The Blood which flows from His Pive Wounds is riQ;htlv
credited with Its cleansing power ; It is no mere physical
humour that is draining away the life of a human body ;
as the Apostle told the presbyters of Ephesus on the
beach at Miletus, — it is the Blood of God.^

Who could have said beforehand what the Death of such
a Being would or would not effect ? In such a sphere
human reason is altogether at fault; it can neither
anticipate nor can it criticise the truth. It can but
listen for what Picvelation may say ; and when Eevelation
tells us that this tremendous event has been a Propitiation
for human sin, and has brought men out of captivity to
sin's penalties, into freedom and peace, and has reconciled
a Holy God and His erring creatures, we can only listen
and believe. Certainly this was the Crucifixion as St.
Paul thought of it ; He thought of it as the decisive
moment of the world's Kedemption, because the Eedeemer
was indisputably Divine.

What then must have been the feeling of the adoring
Apostle, when his mind rested for an instant on the idea,

1 St. Matt, x.wii. 51-53. - Ih. 54. Acts xx. 17, 28.

Ill] The Person of the Crucified. 49

that human souls had thrust hiiu unwittingly on the
throne of the Uncreated, when he asked the question,
" Was Paul crucified for you ? "

One point in conclusion. Surely our Crucified Saviour
should have a first place in the thought and heart of the
Church at lai'ge, and of each of His redeemed servants.
Xo other, be he man or angel, has remotely comparable
claims. No religious teacher, in past ages or in recent
times, has been crucified for us ; no friend, or parent, or
wife, or child, has or can for us overcome the sharpness of
death, with the effect of opening the kingdom of heaven to
our faith and love. Only when we gaze upon the Cruci-
fied do we behold the fullest unveiling of the Heart of
God, face to face with the sin and suffering of human life.
Only when we gaze upon the Crucified do we behold the
Fountain and Source from Which flow all the streams that
refresh and invigorate the great garden of souls — the
Christian Church. Only when we gaze upon the Crucified
do we behold the Source of pardon for sinners — for each
one of ourselves,— and the standard of obedience and love
for saints. Here is the true article of a standing or falling
Church, — not how much we make of the poor thin
emotions of the sinful soul, but how much, forgetting our-
selves, we can prize the transcendent Sufferings of the
Divine Kedeemer. Be this our work, during the coming
Week of penitence and grace, to erect in each heart a
throne for the Crucified, to expel all rival affections that
would usurp what should belong only to Him, and thus
by His Cross and Passion as our Hope and Eefuge, to
be brought to the Glory of His Kesurrection.

0 let my heart no further roam,
"Pis Tliiiie by vows, and hopes, ami fears.
Long since ; 0 call Thy wanderer hnnir
To that dear home, sale in Thy wounded Side,
Where only hroken hearts their sin and shame may hide." '

' Tlie Christian Year. Hymn for (iond Kiiihiy.
D

SERMON lY.

THE ACCEPTED OFFEEIXG.

Hkb. X. 5, 6, 7.

^nt^■|•e/ore ichen He cometh into the icorld. He stdlli. iSficri/iVf and offerin .
Thou icouldest not, but a body hast Thou prepared Me : in burnt-ojferimj.^
and sacrijices for sin Thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come
to do Thy will.

IX the old Litiu-gies aud iu old English diAines this
Sunday, the fifth in Lent and the second before
Easter, is often called Passion Sunday. The name has
disappeared from the pages of our Prayer- Books, but
enough, or more than enough, remains in them to justify
it. The Sendee for the day looks onward to Good Friday.
The Gospel ^ describes that climax of the struggle between
our Lord and the adversaries at Jerusalem which made
all that followed — humanly speaking — ine^dtable, and
which revealed to His murderers, in language which they
well understood, the awful claims of their Victim. The
Epistle - looks at the result in the light of Christian experi-
ence and Christian history : it speaks of the power of an
Atoning Blood, the Blood of One "VVlio is both Priest and
Victim, in contrast with the impotent and fruitless blood-
shedding of bulls and goats slain at the altar of the
Jewish temple. Thus we see the note of the Passion is
already sounded ; the subject is approached on its histori-
cal as well as on its practical and experimental side, and
accordingly, under the guidance of the text, we do well.

1 St. John viii. 46-59. •■' Heb. 11-15.

The Accepted Offering.

though at a distance, to staud this afternoon in view of
the Cross, and reflect upon one element of its awful
meaning.

" When He cometh into the world He saitli, Sacriflce
and offering Thou wouldest not, but a body hast Thou
prepared jMe." Here is a Speaker and His utterance — a
Speaker Who can be only One, and a quotation of some
words very familiar, I should suppose, to most of us. Let
us, for the sake of clearness, reverse the order of ideas in
the te.xt. Let us first of all examine the drift and mean-
ing of the passage quoted, and then the use which is made
of it by the speaker in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

I. /^rt^c

Now, the passage quoted occurs in the fortieth Psalm,
which, no doubt, simply because it contains this very
passage, is used on the morning of Good Friday. The
fortieth Psalm is traceable, as botli the language and the
allusions would lead us to believe, to the age and hand of
David. To argue that the reference to the " roll of the
book " ' is an indication of its having been written about
the time of Josiah's reformation, is as prudent as it would
be to argue that an old English writer, referring to the
privileges of Parliament, could not have written before
the reign of Charles I., on the. ground that Parliamentary
privilege was then undoubtedly a matter of very general
discussion. Tlie language is, in point of form and struc-
ture, suited to the age of David : the circumstances are
those of the close of the sad and suffering years when
David was still persecuted by Saul, but already knew that
his rescue and his triumph could not be long deferred.
Like two other Psalms of the period,^ this is a Psalm at
once of praise and of complaint — complaint that there was

1 Ps. xl. 10, - Pss, xxxi. ami Ixix.

The Accepted Offering.

[Serm.

still much to apprehend, praise that so much had been
done so mercifully. David can only compare the miseries
of the past to a deep morass, where there was no resting-
place for his feet, and in which he felt himself sinking,
until God " brought him out of this horrible pit, out of
the mire and clay, and set his feet upon a rock." ^ God
had, moreover, put a new song in his mouth — had given
him a heart and a tongue for praise, and for the encourage-
ment of his brethren and dependants; and he sincerely
feels tliat God's mercies to him have been so many and so
vast, that if he " should declare them and speak of them
they w'ould be more than he is able to express." - How
shall he express, if he can express, his gratitude, and the
sorrow for past wrong, and the hearty self-devotion which
true gratitude calls forth ? It would be natural for him
to think — and for a moment he does think — of the regular
provisions for expressing the needs and moods of the
human soul which were afforded by the Jewish ritual.
There were sacrifices of slain beasts, and bloodless offer-
ings of fine flour : the burnt-offering to obtain the Divine
favour ; the sin-offering to make propitiation for wrong.
But no, it will not do ; the Psalmist's mind rests upon these
ancient rites only to set them aside. In his deep trouble,
it seems, he has been permitted to catch sight of the out-
line of a higher Ilevelation than that of Moses, and to learn,
that wliatever might be their provisional use and import,
these slaughtered bulls and goats, these burnt-offerings
and sin-offerings, could not really affect man's relations
■with God.

" Sacrifice and Mincliali Thou woiilJest not,
But mine ears hast Thou pierced ;
Burnt-otfering and sin-oifering Thou reijuiredst not.
Then said I : Behold, I come

With the roll of the Book -which is written conceniing me,
To do Thy will, 0 God." s

I Ps. Xl, 2.

-• Ih. 3-7-

« Ih. 8-IO.

IV]

The Accepted Offering.

David will not, then, offer the old sacrifices ; at any
rate, he will not offer them as the best he has to give ; he
will bring to God's Footstool something else, something
better. What is it? "Mine ears hast Thou pierced,"
says the Hebrew text of the Psalm. " A body hast Thou
prepared me," says the passage as quoted in the Epistle
from the Greek LXX. translation of the Psalm. How shall
we reconcile the discrepancy ? Not to detain you with
explanations which I could only mention to set aside, let
us observe that in many cases the old Greek translation
of the Hebrew Scriptures, which the New Testament
writers so frequently quote, is, like all good translations,
not always a literal rendering, but a parajjhrase, especially
in places where to render literally would be to be un-
intelligible. The Greek reader would never have under-
stood all that the Hebrew poet meant by " piercing the
ears." David meant to express very vividly that God had
given him a sense and power of obeying His recognised
Will ; and in order to make this full meaning obvious to
his readers — obvious to the utmost range of its applica-
bility— the Greek translator of David renders, "a body hast
Thou prepared me : " a body wherewith to render Thee
a perfect, unstinted service. The idea of entire willing-
ness to acknowledge and obey the Will of God is expanded
into the idea of a body prepared for absolute surrender to
that Will. It is, no doubt, a very free paraphrase ; yet, on
that very account, it is an admirable translation of the
thought, if not of the language ; the thought, the mean-
ing, is plain enough. Peal self-surrender to the Will of
God is surrender of the life, of the body, of that which is
outward and belongs to sense, as well as of that which is
inward and belongs to spirit ; it is surrender of the life,
as distinct from any of its accessories, to that Perfect Will
AVhich rules the universe.

Wlien David proposes to express his thankfulness in

The Accepted Offering

[Serm.

this way, it is plain that he thinks of God as a Person.
This would be a trite remark to make under ordinary cir-
cumstances ; but it is not, perhaps, altogether superfluous
just now, when a brilliant and light-hearted essayist, airily
discussing tlie relations which he presumes to exist
between the Bible considered as literature and the great
truths of Christianity, has recently gone so far as to say
that the God Whom Israel served was not a Person at all ;
that He was in the belief of Israel only " an abstract, an
eternal Power, or only a stream of tendency, not ourselves,
and making for righteousness." ^ By this novel and cir-
cuitous expression the writer hopes, when speaking of
God, to escape the necessity of using a metaphysical term
like Person. He has a great dread of what he calls meta-
physics, and a corresponding impatience of all that side
of Divine lievelation whicli belongs to the sphere of the
supersensuous, and which can only be brought home to
the human understanding in language which inspired
writers like St. John and St. Paul, or great Church assem-
blies and teachers have borrowed from the philosophy of
abstract being. He is acute enough to see, and honest
enough to admit, that to profess belief in a Personal God
is to be just as deeply committed to a metaphysical
doctrine as to profess belief in the Holy Trinity, or in the
Consubstantiality of the Son; he sees that St. John and
St. Paul were not less really metaphysicians in their way
of speaking about God and our Lord than were Councils
and Pathers ; and that to talk of a Person carries us at
once into the very heart of metaphysics. So, to go to the
root of the matter, and get rid of what he so much dis-
likes, he would call God a Power or a Tendency — as dis-
tinct from a Person, — and he even persuades himself that
the early writers in the Bible thought of God in this way
too. They were not, he says, metaphysicians ; and when

' .Matthew Arnold, Lileralure and Ihnjma, cluip. i.

IV]

The Accepted Offering.

we talk of a Personal Cause and Euler of the universe,
we are using language which is strange to them. Now
certainly, if it be meant that the idea of Personality, as it
is elaborated, for instance, in Bishop Butler,^ is not
presented to us thus sharply and consciously in the
Hebrew or Christian Scriptures, there is no room for
controversy. But the point to observe is that although
the idea of a Person is not philosophically drawn out
in Scripture, it is irresistibly implied in the entire
Scriptural account of God. If a person, — unless when
used in a narrower, exceptional sense of the glorious
Three Who co-exist everlastingly within the Unity of
God, — if, I say, a person ordinarily means a separate
consciousness, will, and character, these three things are
found from the very first in the God revealed by the
Hebrew Scriptures, whether the word which collects and
implies them in later language be there or not. Who can
go through the Psalter and seriously imagine that the
Being to Whom all that praise, that penitence, those
tender expostulations, those passionate assurances, those
earnest deprecations and entreaties, are addressed, was
conceived of by the hearts which sought Him in Israel
as only " an abstract Eternal Power or stream of tendency,
not ourselves, makiii" for righteousness " ? Put this defini-
tion in each of the places in the Psalter — in the fifty-first
Psalm, or in this fortieth Psalm, where the word GoD
occurs — and see what will be the moral and, I may add,
the literary result. Certainly if I say, " Lo, I come to do
Thy will, 0 God !" I do not, I cannot, conceive myself as
addressing any mere Power or tendency ; — who would
protest his readiness to do its will to a magnetic current,
or to a political enthusiasm, or to a force which it would
be metaphysical, and therefore wrong, to think of as
conscious, or as having a real will or character at all ?

' Butkr, Dissertation I. : Of Personal Identity.

The Accepted Offering. [Serm.

Depend upon it, my brethren, in this matter the common
sense of mankind at large may very fairly be trusted. A
real God is necessarily a Personal God ; to talk of God
and deny His Personality is to play tricks with language ;
there is no real room beyond belief in a Personal God
for anything but atheism.

Yes ! it was in entire self-surrender to the Holy Will
of the Personal God that David learnt a higher service
than that of the mass of his countrymen. He learnt to
think less highly of the material than of the moral, of the
outward than of the inward, of the partial than of the
complete. No doubt, to many an Israelite the series of
Temple sacrifices appeared in the light of a regular tariff,
by complying with which, under varying circumstance^.
His worshippers set themselves right with God in a
business-like way. So much tine flour, so many heifers,
bulls, or goats, such and such expenditure, and all would
be settled. Doubtless there were numbers who rose far
higher than this, who read in the Jewish ritual its inherent
and intentional imperfection, and something perhaps of
what was to succeed it. But when David sings, as in tliis
fortieth Psalm, he is like one of those higher Alps which
the beams of the rising sun have lit up while the valleys
at its feet are still wellnigh in twilight. Yet he was not
alone or the first in this his early illumination. Probably
he was himself thinking of Samuel's remonstrance with
Saul, when, after the conquest of Amalek, the latter would
have compounded for moral disobedience by animal sacri-
fices. " Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt-offerings
and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord ? Be-
hold, to obey is better than sacrifice."' ^ Probably he had
heard of that famous reply of Balaam to the king of Moab,
which was referred to by Micah in a later age for the
benefit of degenerate Israel. To the question—

IV]

The Accepted Offering.

" Wherewith shall 1 come before the Loril,
And bow myself before the High God ?
Shall I come before Him with burnt-ofterings,
With calves of a j ear old ?

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
Or with ten thousands of rivers of oil ?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my so\d '

the reply ran thus : —

" He hath showed thee, 0 man, what is gooil :
And what doth tlie Lord reiiuire of thee,
But to do justly, and to love mercj',
And to walk humbly with thy God ?" -

Aud in his later life, when in his deep repentance for his
darkest sin, a flood of light had again broken upon his
soul, David himself again cries, " Thou desirest no sacri-
fice, else would I give it Thee : but Thou delightest not
in burnt-offerings. The sacrifice of (lod is a troubled
spirit : a broken and contrite heart, 0 God, Thou wilt not
despise."^ It is in the same sense that Asaph, in his
vision of God's judgment of Israel, hears Him say, " I
j will not reprove thee for the sacrifices of thy burnt-
offerings, because they were not always before Me. . . .
Thinkest thou that I will eat bulls' flesh, or dritik the
blood of goats?"'' It is thus, too, that God expostulates
with Judah by the mouth of Isaiah : " To what purpose is
the multitude of your sacrifices ? saith the Lord ; I am full
of the burnt-off'erinc'S of rams, and the fat of fed beasts :
I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of
he-goats." ^ It is in this sense that He asks later by
Jeremiali : " To what purpose cometh there to Me incense
from Slieba ? or tlie sweet cane from a far country ? Your
burnt-offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet
unto Me." ^ "I desired mercy," He says by Hosea, " and
not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt-

1 Micah vi. 7. Ih. 8. » Ps. li. 16, 17.

•* Ps. 1. 8, 13. ■• Isa. i. II. « Jer. vi, 20

The Accepted Offering.

[Serm.

offerings." ^ Tlie contrast runs in a deeper note in Amos :
" I hate, I despise your feast days : I will not smell in your
solemn assemblies. Though ye offer Me burnt-offerings
and meat-offerings, I will not accept them ; neither will
I regard the peace-offerings of your fat beasts. Take
away from Me the noise of thy songs : I will not hear the
melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as
waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." -

The common drift of all these passages is — not that the
Old Testament sacrifices were worthless ; ( rod Himself
had appointed them, and, as the Apostle says, they
" sanctified to the purifying of the flesh that is to say,
they did all that was necessary in an outward system to
preserve the covenant relation between the Israelites and
God. But these passages do assert with vivid energy^
with tremendous force, that in the service of the Perfect
Moral Being the material and outward is worthless, or
worse, if it be not promoted, inspired, by the moral and the
inward ; that no sacrifice, however costly — which is after
all only a tax upon property, or time, or strength — can
take the pilace of that gift of itself by a conscious and
immortal spirit, which is the one true homage it can yield
to the Perfect Author and Sustainer of its being. What
God will have is a broken heart, according to Da^•id ; it is
justice, mercy, humility, according to Balaam and Micali
it is streams of judgment and of righteousness, according
to Amos ; it is the piercing of the ears to hear, the
offering of the body to express obedience, the coming to
do One Will — and only One ; again, according to David,
it is the gift of the inmost life by His sincere penitent,
by His accepted servant.

It is easy enough to mis-state and pervert this, as well
as all other truths. If the Jewish sacrifices had their
uses, although they could not confer grace, much more

1 Hos. \ i. 6. - Amos v. 21-24. "* il^'-- '3-

IV]

The Accepted Offering.

have Christian works of mercy, Christian offerings of
time, money, work, devotion, their place in every true
Christian life. Nay, they cannot be dispensed with ; but
they are useless if they do not proceed from that greater
all-including gift of self to the Perfect Will which God
really values. They can never be substituted for this gift
of gifts : tliis gift of the personality, of the life, of the
inmost being, to the Author of our existence.

God has made us free ; He has endowed us with the
majestic and awful distinction of a freedom which is
independent of circumstances ; He has given lUS, as a
necessary element of that freedom, the power of setting
Him, the Master of the universe, aside, and of choosing
the service of His enemy ; and we can only use this His
great gift aright in one way, viz., by deliberately giving
ourselves to Him. To give income to any amount with-
out this gift of self; time, trouble, health, without this gift
of self ; obedience to religious rules and scrupulous use
of religious ordinances without this gift of self, is to give
that which He will not accept. Our religion must begin
from within; it must begin with' the surrender of that
which is most properly ours to give ; it must begin with
the gift which includes all else as opportunity or
prudence shall dictate, or it is on a wrong tack, and will
get us into trouble. Even of our spiritual nature -we
cannot safely offer fragments ; faith, hope, feelings, aspira-
tions, assurances, are not trustworthy if they do not
involve and issue from a conscious self-abandonment to
the claims of God ; if they do not eclio, with its Christian
paraphrase, the language : —

" Sacrifice and ottering Tliou wonkiest not,
But a boily liast Thou prepared me.
Burnt-ofl'erings and sin-oflcrings Tliou reqnireilst not—
Tlien said I, Lo, I coimc to do Thy will !"

•' I come to do Thy will, (J God." There are times in

The Accepted Offering.

[Serm.

(ivevy earnest life when these words express — or seem to
express — the deepest feeling of the heart. " It is for no-
thing outward, 0 my God ; for nothing that passes ; for no
human heart, for no human will, that I will hencefortli
live : but only for Thee. Tliere is nothing that I can
offer Thee that is not Thine already ; I offer Thee that
which alone I can refuse — myself. The times past of life
may suflfice for the rebellious sins, for the formal sacrifices,
for the double-mindedness which has made me hitherto
unstable in all my ways. I seek Thee now with my xrliolc
heart ; I come to do Thy will." Alas ! who of us that has
ever felt thus does not know, by a humbling experience,
what has followed. Again and again, how the fervour has
died away, and the old material sacrifices which would buy
God off have been offered in place of the moral sacrifice
which gives Him everything ; how human wills, human
jurisdictions, have disputed the supremacy of the Divine
Will within the soul, till the protestation of our first
devotion has become insincere and meaningless. Nay, let
us each one think over what has passed within him this
very day, — since we rose from our beds, — and see how far
One Will has ruled words, actions, thoughts ; how far, if
this obedience of ours is all that we can trust to, we can
hope for acceptance with the Eternal God. Surely
this language, to be realised as well as used, to be
expressed in undeviating obedience as well as on the lips,
must belong to a stronger and more direct will than yours
or mine, — to a Will which may encourage us to hope, if
it humbles us when we attempt to imitate.

II.

And this brings me to the question : How is the
passage applied in the Epistle to the Hebrews ? It
is taken out of its original, historical setting ; and it is

IV]

The Accepted Offering-.

connected with a new set of circumstances. It is talcen
from David's self-consecration in view of the throne
which awaited him, and is appHed to Jesus Christ as the
High Priest of humanity, " taking upon Him to deliver
man " ^ by His Incarnation and Death. " When He conieth
into the world. He saith, Sacrihce and offering Thou
wouldest not, but a body hast Thou prepared Me : in
burnt-offerings and sin-offerings Thou delightest not ; then
said I, Lo, I come to do Thy will." Thus it is a motto of
the Divine Incarnation ; an authoritative announcement
of its spirit, its drift, its purpose ; and it proclaims that
repudiation of the sacrifices and priesthood of the Jewisli
Law which the Gospel involved, and which is explained
and justified at length in this Epistle. Now, how can
this transfer of language be accounted for ? Does it rest
only on a shadowy coincidence, such as may be found, if
we look for it, between any two periods, any two sets of
circumstances, any two lives ? Is it a quotation like
those quotations which eloquent speakers in Parliament
make from Virgil and Horace, — the embellishment and
decoration of an idea which would else have had to be
expressed in a mere commonplace and prosaic way Or
is it something more serious than tliis, and altogether
different ? Does it depend, in a word, in any real sense
upon a principle, — upon a principle wliich can be ascer-
tained and stated ?

Observe, then, my brethren, that the Apostle makes
this quotation in the very heart of an argument, and with
a view to making it good. He is showing that the High-
Priestly Service offered by Jesus Christ is unspeakably
greater and more real than that offered by the sons of
Aaron. He makes the Old Testament, — here as else-
where,— witness against itself, or rather against that false
notion about its containing a final revelation and system

' Te Deuw Laudamus.

The Accepted Offering.

[Serm.

of worship which the Jews claimed for it. If this quota-
tion from David had beeu, I will not say inapplicable,
but fanciful or arbitrary, an opponent would naturally
have rejoined that the argument of the Epistle broke down
at a critical point ; that language which was David's, and
appropriate only to David, could not be placed in the
mouth of Jesus Christ so as to sustain a grave inference
as to the drift and character of His Incarnation. The
writer then, we may be sure, meant that the language of
the quotation really belonged to Jesus Christ. But the
question still remains — how ?

Here we must dismiss the idea that the fortieth Psalm is
Messianic in such a sense as the twenty-second ; that is to
say, that it has no original historical references, no ascertain-
able backgro^^nd in the history of Israel or of the Psalmist,
and is throughout a prediction of the coming Person to
"Whom Israel looked forward. Xothing in Jewish history
before the Passion of Christ our Lord corresponds with the
description of the Ideal Sufferer of Psalm xxii. : but there
is no difficulty in pointing to the circumstances in David's
own life which correspond to the language of PsaLm xl.,
while in this Psalm there are also expressions and thoughts
which certainly are not Messianic. The Psalm was really
David's : it describes a great crisis in David's life ; how
then does its language belong to the Christ coming into
the world at His Incarnation ? The answer to this must
be found in the relation in which our Lord, as the Eepre-
sentative or Ideal Man, stands to the whole human famil)'
and to its noblest members. "When St. Paul speaks of our
Lord as the "Second Adam," or the "last Adam,"^ he
must mean that our Lord stood to the human race in a
relation which corresponded, in some waj', to that in
which our first parent stood towards all his descendants.
The text of the Book of Genesis imphes that our first

' I Cor. xv. 45.

IV]

The Accepted Offering.

parent, as the man, was the antitypal head and represen-
tative of all later generations of men. And the Second
Adam corresponded to the first in this : He too was to
be the Type and Pattern of man, of renewed man, as the
first Adam had been of the first creation. In a different
manner, yet as really. He became representative of the
race. He represented it, not as it was, but as it had been
meant to be ; He represented possible and ideal humanity,
not actual, historical, fallen humanity. Therefore, in Him
as " the First-born of every creature," ^ the " Beginning of
the creation of God," ^ all that was noblest, truest, purest,
best, in the thought and language of His predecessors, met
and was realised. All the mysterious yearnings of poets
and thinkers after an indefinable perfection, all the vague
aspirations after an ideal which was ever floating indis-
tinctly before the eyes of men in their higher moments,
yet ever eluding them, — all the cravings for reconciliation
between antagonistic elements and tendencies in our
fallen nature were satisfied at last in this Unique Sample
of Humanity, Which included all the perfections to which
men had aspired, "Which excluded all the weakness and
wrong to which man was liable. Everything that was
best in human history was an unconscious prophecy of the
Perfect One ; and the noblest things that could be said
of man conceived of ideally, or as he had issued from the
hand of his Maker, were said of the New Head of our
race with literal exactness. Thus, when the Psalmist
proclaims that God had "made man to have dominion
over the works of His Hands, and had put all things under
his feet," ^ St. Paul, seeing how, as a matter of fact, this
ideal description is checked by the facts of man's perpetual
struggle with the forces of savage nature, — with the
elements, with disease, with death, — refers it at once to
the Second Adam triumphing over the whole world of

' Col. i. 15. i Rev. iii. 14. 3 p^. viii, 6.

The Accepted Offering.

[Serm,

sense in His unrivalled moral elevation, as in His Eesur-
rection and Ascension ijito heaven.^ And so when in the
text David says, " Lo, I come to do Thy Will," it is in
David's mouth the language of hope and intention ; but
in the mouth of Christ it is the prediction of a Moral
Career which could not be other or less perfect than this.
David no doubt meant to be perfectly true ; but he used
language which, strictly pressed, was applicable only to a
strictly Holy Being ; just as pure and noble-minded chil-
dren, in their enthusiasm, often say things with entire
sincerity, which, as older persons see, involve more than
they contemplate or bargain for. David said, " Lo, I come
to do Thy Will, — mine ears hast Thou opened." Yet he
lived to become the murderer of Uriah and the paramour
of Bathsheba ; he lived to rise out of the profound misery
of his moral degradation, as the typical penitent of Psalm
li. But his higher aspirations were not lost ; they
belonged, in all their literal force and beauty, to the Eeal
King of humanity, Who was to come of the loins of David
in a later age. " When He cometh into the world. He
saith, Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, — a body
hast Thou prepared Me : I come to do Thy Will, 0 God."

And this is one of the many points of view under whicli
our Lord's Death upon the Cross may and ought to be
considered : it was the last and consummate expression of
a perfectly obedient Will. In this He stood alone when
all else had failed; He was faultless. We are told, indeed,
that He, too, as ]\Ian, " learned obedience " by the road of
experience, although this does not imply that He ever was
disobedient, but only that " the things which He suffered "
led Him as Man from one to another stage of moral inten-
sity. "I do always," He said, "such things as please Him."^
" My meat is to do the will of Him That sent Me." *

1 I Cor. XV. 27.
St. John viii. 29.

- Heb. V. 8.
-i Ih. iv. 34.

IV] The Accepted Offering. 65

Throughout His human Life — in childhood and in man-
hood ; in privacy, and in public ; among multitudes, or in
the retreat of the desert; when speaking, or on His knees ;
when acting, or in repose ; in hunger, or at the wedding
feast ; the idol of popular enthusiasm, or the scorn of
men and the outcast of the people ^ — He was true to this
one unchanging law. He obeyed it to the last extremity:
He was, as St. 'Paul says, " obedient unto death, even the
death of the Cross." - " Therefore," He said Himself, " doth
My Father love Me, because I lay down My Life, that I
may take it again. No man taketh it from Me ; but I lay
it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down : and 1
have power to take it again. This commandment have I
received from My Father." ^ Not that the tearing of soul
and body asunder by a violent death ; not that the mental
anguish which He embraced in its immediate prospect
cost Him nothing: He was truly human. "What shall
I say ? Father, save Me from this hour : yet for this
cause came I unto this hour."* " Eemove this cup from
Me : nevertheless, not My will, but Thine, be done." ^

This is what gives to every incident of the Passion, as
described by the Evangelists, such transcendent interest :
each insult that is endured, each pang that is accepted,
each hour, each minute, of the protracted agony, is the
deliberate offering of a Perfect Will, which might conceiv-
ably have declined the trial. " Thinkest thou that I cannot
now pray to My Father, and He will presently send Me more
than twelve legions of angels ? " And so when the suffering
was over. He said, " It is finished," just as at the close of
His ministerial life, and on the threshold of His Agony,
He had said, " I have glorified Thee on the earth ; I have
finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do."^ His Life

1 Pa. xxii. 6. 2 phil. ii. 8. » St. John .x. 17, 18.

■* St. Jobn xii. 27. ^ St. Luke xxii. 42. « St. Matt. xxvi. 53.

' St. Jolin xix. 30. 8 /j_ xxni. 4.

The Accepted Offering.

[Serm.

and His Death were a long commentary upon the words,
" Lo, I come to do Thy Will, O God ; " and He might seem
to be expanding those words in reference to Himself, " I
came down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the
will of Him That sent Me." ^

It is true, indeed, that it is our Lord's Higher and Eternal
Nature which sheds over His Passion, as over all that He
did and underwent here below, such extraordinary and
inappreciable meaning and power. It is His Divinity
Which makes His Blood so much more than that of a mere
man ; which gives its full meaning to the question, " If
God spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him up for
us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all
things ?" 2 But that which was accepted in Christ, living
and dying, acting and suffering, was Humanity — Humanity
true to its Ideal — Humanity absolutely conformed to that
Perfect Will Which rules the universe. Standing by the
very terms of His Incarnation in the relation of a Repre-
sentative to the human race, Christ dying in agony to
express entire devotion to the Perfect Will, dies in inten-
tion for all of us, dies actually, and, if we will, effectively,
for each of us.

" He loved me, and gave Himself for me."^ His might
be justly described as an arbitrary substitution of the inno-
cent for the guilty, if our Lord had been only a common
specimen of the race for which He died, or if He had died
against His will. He was, in fact, as the Head of our race,
as qualified by natural law to represent us, as a father is
to act on behalf of his own children ; since in Him man-
hood was set forth in its widest and most universal
character. And He freely made the most — if we may
reverently so speak — of this His representative relation to
the race ; He did the utmost and the best for it with a
generosity and love that knew no bounds. Thus He is

1 St. Jolin vi. 38. ~ Rom. viii. 32. ^ Gal. ii. 20.

IV]

The Accepted Offering.

" the Propitiation tor our sins, and not for ours only, but
also for the sins of the whole world," ^ because He was, by
the very terms of His Being, qualified to represent a sinful
race, He freely suffered what was due to its accumulated
transgressions. As Isaiah says, " the chastisement of our
peace was upon Him ; " ' and St. Paul, that He hath
" redeemed us from the curse of the law," that is, the curse
incurred by breaking it, " being made a curse for us ; " ^
and that He has " made peace through the Blood of His
Cross ;"* and He Himself, that He "came to give His life
a ransom instead of many." ^

Brethren, if we know, indeed, how far above us it is to
make the words " I come to do Thy Will " our own, we
know the great life-business for a Christian is to see that
ere he dies he is " sanctified through the offering of the
Body of Jesus Christ once for all," ^ that he is " sprinkled
with the Blood of Atonement," that he is "accepted in the
Beloved." We do not need this priceless blessing less
than did our fathers. The face of the world, its public
buildings, its political parties, its social divisions and sub-
divisions, its science, its systems of thought, its literature,
its very language, are perpetually changing, and with
this perpetual change there is the fascination for active
minds of interest — various, keen, absorbing interest. The
face of the world changes from generation to genera-
tion, almost from year to yeur, with the ever quickening
march of our modern civilisation ; we live, it is often
said, at a much faster rate than did our fathers.
But human nature, with its splendid aspirations and its
practical impotence ; with its burden of needs and
woes, of shortcomings and uncertainties : the human soul
with its strong temptations, with its facile dispositions,
with its terrible pollutions, with its awful capacities,

' I St. Jolm ii. 2. - Isa. liii. 5. •' Gal. iii. 13. ■* Col. i. 20.

s St. Matt. XX. 28. « Heb. x. 10. " Eph. i. 6.

The Accepted Offering.

presentiments, destinies — these do not change. They
are what they were when our rude forefathers struggled
with nature on the soil of England, under Plantagenet or
Saxon kings ; they are what they were when the Eternal
Christ, eighteen centuries ago, reddened the soil of Palestine
with His precious Blood. Human nature does not change
with the changes — social, intellectual, political, festhetic
— which take place around us : it remains a weak and
defiled thing, nor can the tinsel of our life disguise its
defilement or invigorate its weakness. It remains ; and
the eternal realities in which alone it can find purity and
strength remain also. Think not that some of our
modern philosophies have changed all that ; as well might
you suppose that the clouds and fogs of the past winter
had annihilated the sun, as dream that Christ our Saviour,
God and Man, is less than of yore our only Mediator, or
we less than our predecessors entirely dependent upon
His Eedemptive work. To union with Him — with this
one Perfect Life, this unfaltering obedience expressed in
Death, with this accepted Head and Eepresentative of our
kind — all faith, all sacraments, all Christian instruction
and Christian effort, must ever and increasingly tend ; in
the conviction that all sacrifices and offerings which are
merely our own are worthless, but that His obedience
unto Death, which we may share if we will, is the mighty
earnest of our acceptance with the Father, and of our
endless peace.

SERMON V.

THE CLEANSING BLOOD.

Heb. ix. 13, 14.

Ftyf if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling
the unclean, sanctijieth to t!ie purifying of the flesh : how much more shall
the Blood of Christ, Who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without
spot to God, purge your conscience from dead ivorks tn serve the living
God ?

rpO-DAY we pass the line which parts the first live
weeks in Lent from that last fortnight which is
especially devoted to contemplating the Sufferings and
Death of our Lord Jesus Christ. And accordingly, the
Gospel ^ tells us of the attempt of the Jews to stone Him
in the Temple — one of the first drops (as it has been well
termed) of that storm which burst in all its fury upon
Calvary.

And the Epistle - teaches us how to think about Him in
the whole course of these His sufferings. He is not only
a good man weighed down by so much pain of body and
mind; He is the High Priest of the human race, Who is offer-
ing a victim in expiation of human sin, and that victim is
Himself ; He is the one real Sacrificer, of whom all the
Jewish priests had, for long centuries, been only shadows;
and His sacrifice is the One Offering whicli throughout all
ages has power in heaven. And so, as He passes within
the veil of the Sanctuary above, He is opening a way for

1 The Gospel for the Fifth Sunday in Lent is from St. John viii. 46-59.
The Epistle is from Heb. ix. 11-15.

The Cleansing Blood. [Seem.

us, if we will only follow, to an eternal home in the very
Heart of God. " Christ being come an High Priest of
good things to come, ... by His Own blood entered
in once into the Holy Place, having obtained eternal
redemption for us." ^

That which must strike all careful readers of the Bible,
in the passages which refer to the Sufferings and Death
of Jesus Christ, is the stress which is laid upon His Blood.
A long course of violent treatment, ending in such a
death as that of crucifixion, must involve, we know
from the nature of the case, the shedding the blood of
the sufferer. But our modern feeling would probably
have led us to treat this as an accidental or subordinate
feature of His Death. We, if we had had with our human
feelings to write the books which are the title-deeds of
Christendom, should either not refer to it, or we should
pass lightly and quickly over it ; we should throw it into
the background of our description. We should give the
outline, and let the details be taken for granted. We
should trust to the imaginations of our readers to fill up
the blank ; we should shrink from stimulating their sen-
sibilities to pain, from harrowing their feelings by
anything beyond. Does it not seem as if we carried
into modern life that rule of the old Greek tragedians
that if possible, nothing tragic or violent, that spoils and
gives pain, should meet the eye ? If a deed of violence
takes place in our streets or homes, do we not remove all
traces of it as quickly as may be ? Has it not been urged
as a reason for putting criminals to death by hanging,
instead of adopting some more rapid and certain mode of
destroying life, that it is desirable to spare the bystanders
the sight of blood ?

' Hell. ix. II, 12,

The Cleansing Blood.

This modern feeling is far from being mere unliealtli}-
sentimentalism ; it arises from that honourable sympathy
with and respect for human nature which draws a veil
over its miseries or its wounds. But the New Testament,
in its treatment of the Passion of Christ, is, we cannot but
observe, strangely and strongly in contrast with such n
feeling. The four Evangelists, who differ so much in their
accounts of our Lord's Birth and public Ministry, seem to
meet around the foot of the Cross, and to agree, if not in
relating the same incidents, yet certainly in the minute-
ness and detail of their narratives. In the shortest of the
Gospels, when we reach the Passion, the occurrences of a
day take up as much space as had previously been assigned
to years. From the Last Supper to the Burial in the grave
of Joseph of Arimathea, we have a very complete account
of what took place ; each incident that added to pain or
shame, each bitter word, each insulting act, each outrage
upon justice or mercy, of which the Divine Sufferer was
a victim, is carefully recorded. But, especially, the Agony
and Bloody Sweat, the public Scourging, the Crowning
with thorns, the nailing to the wood of the Cross, the
opening the Side with a spear, are described by the Evan-
gelists,— incidents, each one of them, be it observed,
which must have involved the shedding of Christ's Blood.
And in the writings of the Apostles to their first con-
verts more is said of the Blood of Christ than of any-
thing else connected with His Death — more even than of
the Cross. As we read them we might almost think that
the sliedding of His Blood was not so niucli an accom-
paniment of His Death as its main purpose. Thus St.
Paul tells the Romans that Christ is set forth to be a
" propitiation through faith in His Blood; " ^ that they are
" justified " by Christ's Blood.- He writes to the Ephesians
that they have " redemption through Christ's Blood ; "

' Iloirj. iii. 25. 2 //,, V. 9, Eplu i. 7,

The Cleansing Blood. [Serm.

to the Colossians that our Lord has " made peace through
the Blood of His Cross ; " ^ to the Corinthians that the
Holy Sacrament is so solemn a rite because it is " the
communion of the Blood of Christ." " Thus St. Peter
contrasts the slaves whose freedom from captivity was
purchased with corruptible things such as silver and gold
with the case of Christians redeemed by "the precious
Blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish, and im-
maculate." ^ Thus St. John exclaims that " the Blood of
Jesus Christ the Son of God cleanseth us from all sin." *
In the Epistle to the Hebrews this Blood is referred to as
" the Blood of the Covenant wherewith Christians are
sanctified," ^ as " the Blood of the Everlasting Covenant," ^
as " the Blood of sprinkling " which pleads for mercy,
and so is contrasted with the blood of Abel that cries
for vengeance.'^ And in the last book of the New
Testament the beloved Disciple gives at the very outset
thanks and praise to " Him That has washed us from our
sins in His own Blood ; " ^ and the blessed in heaven sing
that He has " redeemed them to God by His Blood ;" ^ and
the saints " have washed their robes and made them white
in the Blood of the Lamb ; " and they have overcome
their foe, not in their own might, but by " the Blood of
the Lamb ; " " and He Whose Name is called " the Word of
God," and Who rides on a white horse, and on Whose
head are many crowns, is " clothed in a vesture dipped in
blood." 12

Much more might be said on the subject ; but enough
has been said to show that, in the New Testament, the
Blood of Christ is treated as no mere accident of His
Death, but as a very important feature of it ; nay, as
having a substantive value, of whatever kind, which is

1 Col. i. 2c. - 1 Cor. X. i6. ' i St. Pet. i. 19.

^ I St. John i. 7. 5 Heb. x. 29. o Ih. xiii. 20.

? Heb. xii. 24. « Rev. i. 5. " lb. v. 9.

1" Rev. vii. 14. " 76. xii. ii. 12 /j. xix. 11-13.

The Cleansing Blood.

all its own. And the question is, How are we to account
for the prominence which is thus assigned to it ?

II.

This question is sometimes answered by saying that
the language of the Apostles about the Blood of Christ
is, after all, only the language of metaphor and symbol.
The Apostles, we are told, found in the Old Testament a
stock of poetic illustration and imagery ready to their
hands, and although it had reference to the ideas and
usages of a dying system, they employed it freely for
their own purposes, much as cultivated gentlemen of a
past generation used to quote the Greek and Latin poets
in Parliament or in society by way of decorating new ideas
with the phrases of a literature which had passed away.

This is what has been urged by some modern writers.
But any such account of the Apostolic language about the
Preciousness and Power of the Blood of Jesus Christ, is
unworthy at once of the seriousness of the men and of
the seriousness of the subject. Unworthy of the serious-
ness of the men ; for, after all, the Apostles and Apostolic
writers were not mere retailers of splendid phrases, but
teachers of a truth which they believed to have come
from heaven, and for which they were prepared to die.
And unworthy of the seriousness of the subject ; for surely
the deepest truths that can move the hearts and wills of
men, are not fit subjects for mere antiquarian or literary
display ; they would be better avoided, if they are not set
forth in the clearest and plainest language which those
who profess to teach them can command. If the Apostles
used the language of the Old Testament about the Jewish
sacrifices in order to describe their own faith about the
Atoning work of Christ, this was because, in the belief of
the Apostles, a real relation already existed between the

The Cleansmg Blood. [Serm.

two things ; the Jewish sacrifices were predestined types
and shadows of the Sacrificed Son of God.

In the passage before us the Day of Atonement and its
characteristic rites are throughout present to the mind of
the sacred writer ; and of those rites the sprinkling the
blood of the victims was a prominent feature. But the
question still remains, "Why should this effusion of blood
have been a prominent feature on the Jewish Day of
Atonement ? Why should it have been allowed so largely
to colour the thought and words of the Apostles ? Why
should the Blood of the Eedeemer, rather than His pierced
Hands, or His thorn-crowned Head, or His bruised and
mangled Body, or His Face with its Divine Piadiance
shining through the tears and the shame, be dwelt on in
the Apostolic writings as the chosen symbol of His
Passion and Death ?

Certainly, in all the languages of the world, blood is the
proof and warrant of affection and of sacrifice. To shed
blood voluntarily for another is to give the best that man
can give ; it is to give a sensible proof of, almost a bodily
form to, love. This one human instinct is common to all
ages, to all civilisations, to all religions. The blood of the
soldier who dies for duty, the blood of the martyr who dies
for truth, the blood of the man who dies that another may
live — blood like this is the embodiment of the highest
moral powers in human life, and those powers were all
represented in the Blood which flowed from the Wounds
of Christ on Calvary. And yet in saying this we have
not altogether accounted for the Apostolic sayings about
the Blood of Christ. It involves something more than
any of these moral triumphs ; it is more than all of them
taken together.

Observe, my brethren, the peculiar and deep significance
which is ascribed to blood in the earliest books in the
Bible — the Books of Moses. There we are taught that

V] The Cleansing Blood. 75

between the blood, whether of man or animal, and the life-
principle or soul, there is a certain and intimate connection.
In those primal laws which were given to Noah after the
Flood, man was authorised to eat the flesh, but not the
blood of tlie animals around him. Why was this ? Be-
cause the blood is the life or soul of the animal. " Flesh,
with the blood thereof, which is the life thereof, shall ye
not eat." ^ The Laws of Moses go further : the man,
whether Israelite or stranger, who eats any manner of
blood, is to be destroyed ; and the reason is repeated :
" The soul of the flesh," i.e. of the nature living in
the flesh, " is in the blood." ^ This is why the blood of
the sacrificial animals is shed by way of atonement for
sin ; the blood atones — this is the strict import of the
original language — by means of the soul that is in it.
Once more, in the Fifth Book of Moses, permission is
given to the Israelites to kill and eat the sacrificial ani-
mals just as freely as the roebuck or the hart, which were
not used for sacrifice. But, again, there follows the cau-
tion : " Only be sure that thou eat not the blood;" and
the reason for the caution : " the blood is the soul ; and
thou mayest not eat the soul with the flesh. Thou shalt
not eat of it ; thou shalt pour it upon the earth like water."^
Tlie thrice-repeated precept — not to touch animal blood
— has passed away, together with much else in the ancient
Law. True ; it was enforced by prophets, who insisted
little or not at all on the ceremonial provisions of the
Mosaic code ; it was upheld for a while even by Apostles,
as binding upon the first converts from heathendom; it
was adhered to, not indeed universally, but with much
tenacity in the primitive Christian Church. But it has
gone the way of the ceremonial system, of which it formed
a part, and which was only fulfilled to disappear.
Yet the reason of the precept remains, as a matter of

' Gen. ix. 4-6. - Lev. xvii. 11. Deut. xii. 23, 24.

The Cleansing Blood. [Serm.

lasting interest; the reason, namely, that blood is that
element of our animal existence which is most closely
associated with the principle of life.

What life is in itself — whether in tree or animal,
whether in man or angel — who shall say ? It is a mysteiy
ever close to us, yet ever eluding our inquisitive research.
We associate intelligence with the brain ; we trace the
unspoken language of the soul in the movements or
motionlessness of the countenance, in the expression of
the eye, in the gesture of the hand, even in the gait or
sway of the body. Of this we find little in Scripture
which, without denying the relation of the soul to other
parts of our bodily frame, does, unquestionably, so far as
the soul is the principle of life, feeling, and growth, asso-
ciate it with the blood.

The question may be fairly asked, whether this Scrip-
ture doctrine of the intimate relation of the soul or life-
power to the blood is borne out by independent inquiry.
It is obvious, first of all, that the strength of the body
depends on the quantity of the blood ; that with the loss
of blood, feeling, power of movement, all the bodily acti-
vities, are lost also. The blood, then, is the basis or sup-
port of bodily life. But it is more : it is also the material
from which the body and its various secretions arise : it is
the substance out of which the animal life in all its forms
is developed. Whether the various kinds of material
which make up the human body are contained in the
blood in a state of actual diversity, or whether they exist
in it only in potency, and are drawn out of it by the func-
tional powers of the bodily organs, is a matter of contro-
versy ; but it is agreed, by high authorities on such subjects,
that they do thus pre-exist in the blood, which is thus
the principle, not merely of bodily life, but of bodily
growth and formation.

This, then, is what is assumed when Scripture speaks of

The Cleansing Blood. 7 7

the blood as the life or soul of a man or animal. But, as
a Jewish writer has observed/ the soul in question is only
the sensitive soul, which man possesses in common with
animals : it is not the thinking, intelligent, self-con-
scious being — the spirit — which proceeds immediately
from God, and is encased in the sensitive soul as the
apple of an eye is in the eye. The spirit of man is only
so far resident in the blood as it is resident in the sensi-
tive soul, which is in the blood ; the existence of the
spirit of man is strictly independent of any element of
his bodily life, and, as we know, will survive it.

But in Christ our Lord there was something more than
body and soul and spirit ; since in Him dwelt " all the ful-
ness of the Godhead."" As man differs from the animals in
possessing an undying spirit, as well as, and together with,
a sensitive soul or life ; so in Christ our Lord were joined,
by an intimate and indissoluble union, not merely a
human soul and spirit, but also, and above these, that
Divine Nature which was " begotten of the Father before
all worlds." ^ Nay, rather, it was this. His Eternal Person
Which owned all else in Him, in Which all else centred, to
Which all else attached itself. When He Who had already
existed from all eternity vouchsafed to enter into the
sphere of time. He wrapped around Him in its complete-
ness, but without its stains, that human nature which then
He made His own ; He took it upon Him, not as a gar-
ment which He might lay aside, but as that which was
from the moment of His Incarnation, and for ever, to form
part of His Being. And therefore the Blood which flowed
in His veins, and which He shed at His Circumcision and
in His mental Agony, not less than in His Scourging, and
on the Cross, was the Blood, not merely of the Son of
Mary, but of the Infinite and Eternal Being thus conde-
scendingly united to a created form ; — it is an Apostle who

1 Philo, Op. ed. Mangey, i. 206, 207. 2 Col. ii. 9. ^ Nicene Creed.

The Cleansmg Blood. [Serm.

bids tlie pastors of the church of Ephesus " feed the
Church of God, which He hath purchased with His own
Blood." 1

This, then, is what is meant in the text, when it con-
rasts the Atoning power of the Blood of Christ with that
of the blood of bulls and goats. The blood of the sacri-
ficed animal had a certain value, because, as we have seen,
it was so intimately connected with the life or sensitive
soul of the animal ; as the Apostle puts it, it did, and by
Divine appointment, sanctify to the purifying of the flesh.
By the " flesh " is here meant the natural, outward, and
earthly life of man ; especially all that bore in the way of
outward conduct and condition upon his membership of
the commonwealth of Israel. The sacrifices on the Day of
Atonement, and especially the sprinkling of the blood ot
the red heifer, towards the tabernacle, did signify the sub-
stitution of life for life, and were at any rate accepted as
establishing the outward religious position of those for
whom they were offered. That they could do more was
impossible : the nature of things was opposed to it : " it was
not possible that the blood of bulls and goats should take
away sins." The blood of these animals could not operate
in the proper sphere of spiritual natures. But then it fore-
shadowed nothing less than the Blood of Christ. It was
His Blood, Who through His Eternal Spiritiial Being (it is
not the Holy Ghost Who is here meant, but the Divine
Nature of the Incarnate Christ) offered Himself without
spot to God. The Eternal Spiritual Xature of Christ, vi\a-
fying the Blood of Christ, is contrasted in the Apostle's
thought with the perishable life of the sacrificed animal
resident in the blood of the animal ; and so the value of
the sacrifices, the power of the blood to cleanse or save,
varies with the dignity of the life which it represents —
in one case that of the creature, not even endowed with

1 Acts XX. 28. - Heb. x. 4.

The Cleansing Blood.

reason or immortality ; in the other that of the Infinite
and Eternal Being Who for us men, and for oiir salvation,
has come down from heaven.

"How much more shall the Blood of Christ !"

At length we see, then, what it is that the sacred writer
really means. He says in effect to his readers, " You
have no doubt that, under the old Jewish dispensation,
the sacrifices on the Day of Atonement, the blood of the
slaughtered goat and red heifer, could restore the Israelite
who had done wrong to his place and his privileges in the
sacred nation. It sanctified to the purifying of the flesh.
But here is the Blood — not of a sacrificial animal, not of a
mere man, not even of the best of men, but of One Who
was God " manifest in the flesh." ^ Who shall calculate the
effects of His self-sacrifice ? Who shall limit the power of
His voluntary death ? Who shall say what His outpoured
Blood may or may not achieve on earth or elsewhere ?
Plainly we are here in the presence of an agency which
altogether distances and rebukes the speculations of rea-
son ; we can but listen for some voice that shall speak
with authority, and from beyond the veil : we can but be
sure of this, that the Blood of the eternal Christ must
infinitely transcend in its efficacy that of the victims slain
on the Temple altars ; It must be much more than equal
to redress the woes, to efface the transgressions, of a guilty
world. V

This, indeed, is what the argument invites, — the
absolutely limitless power of the Precious Blood. But
the sacred writer puts, as it were, a restraint upon him-
self, and contents himself with pointing to a single result.
"How much more shall the Blood of Christ purge your
conscience from dead works to serve the living God ? "

III.

1 I 'rim. Hi. i6.

The Cleansing Blood [Serm.

" Dead works : " works that are not good, in that their
motive is good, nor bad, in that their motive is bad, but
dead in that they have no motive at all — in that they are
merely outward and mechanical, — affairs of propriety,
routine, and form, to which the heart and spirit contribute
nothing. "Dead works:" to how much of our lives, ay, of
the better and religious side of our lives, may not this
vivid and stern expression justly apply ! How many acts
in the day are gone through without intention, without
deliberation, without effort, to consecrate them to God,
without any reflex effect upon the faith and love of the
doer ! How many prayers, and words, and deeds are of
this character ; and, if so, how are they wrapping our
spirits round with bandages of insincere habit, on which
already the avenging angels may have traced the motto,
'• Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead " ! ^ The
Blood of Christ delivers from much else ; but especially
from those dead works. For as the blood of the slain
animal means the life of the animal, so the Blood of
Christ crucified means the Life of Christ, — His Life Who
is eternal Truth and eternal Charity. And thus, when a
Christian man feels Its Eedemptive touch within him, he
has a motive — varying in strength, but always powerful
— for being genuine. He means his deeds, his words, his
prayers. He knows that life is a solemn thing, and has
tremendous issues ; he measures these issues by the value
of the Eedeeming Blood. If Christ has shed His Blood,
surely life is well worth living ; it is worth saving. A
new energy is thrown into everything; a new interest
lights up all the surrounding circumstances — the incidents
of life, its opportunities, its trials, its failures, its successes,
— the character and disposition of friends, the public
occurrences of the time, and the details of the home, — are
looked at with eyes which see nothing that is indifferent ;

1 Rev. iii. i.

The CleausiHg Blood.

and when all is meant for God's glory, though there may
and must be much weakness and inconsistency, the con-
science is practically purged from dead works to serve
the living God.

The Blood of Christ ! It was shed on Calvary eighteen
liundred years ago : but It flows on throughout all time. It
belongs now, not to the physical but to the spiritual world.
It washes souls, not bodies ; It is sprinkled not on altars
but on consciences. But, although invisible, It is not for all
that the less real and energetic ; It is the secret power of
all that purifies or that invigorates souls in Christendom.
Do we believe in " one Baptism for the remission of sins " ? ^
It is because Christ's Blood tinges the waters of the font
to the eyes of faith. Do we believe that God " hath given
power and commandment to His ministers to declare and
pronounce to His people, being penitent, the Absolution
and Remission of their sins"?- It is because the Blood
of Christ, applied to the conscience by the Holy Spirit,
makes this declaration an effective reality. Do we find
in the Bible more than an ancient literature, — in Christian
instruction more than a mental exercise, — in the life of
thought about the unseen and the future more than food
for speculation ? This is because we know that the deepest
of all questions is that which touclies our moral state
before God ; and that, as sinners, we are above all things
interested in the "Fountain opened for sin and for unclean-
ness" in the Blood of Christ.^ Do we look to our successive
Comnmnions for the strengthening and refreshing of our
souls 1 This, is because the Blood of our Lord Jesus
Christ, Which was shed for us of old, and is given us now,
can "preserve our bodies and souls unto everlasting life."*
Does even a single prayer, offered in entire sincerity of

' Nicene Creed.

- From the Form cf Ah.soluliou in tlie Order Ibr Morning Prayer.
" Zeeh. xiii. 1.

* Words of Administration in the Service of Holy Comnmnion.
F

The Cleansing Blood.

purpose, avail to save a despairing soul ? It is because
" we have boldness to enter into the holiest by the Blood of
Jesus.'" 1 The Blood of Christ ! Who of us does not need
to be sprinkled with it ? Christians as we are, what are
our lives, our habits, our daily thoughts, the whole course
of our existence, as they lie spread out before the Eyes of
the All-seeing Judge ? The works from which we need to
be purged are, it may be, not merely soulless and dead, but
actively evil ! The prayer which befits us, kneeling be-
fore our Crucified Master, is not merely, " Purge my
conscience from dead works to serve the liviug God," but,
" Wash me throughly from my wickedness, and cleanse
me from my sin." - Let one or both of these prayers, my
brethren, be ours during this ensuing sacred season. If
they are oflPered earnestly they will not be unheard ; for
the Eternal Spirit is here, to sprinkle all souls that seek
purification or pardon with the Precious Blood. And the
old promise made to Israel in Egypt still holds good, and
may be claimed in a far higher sense by the Israel of God,
whether in life or in death : " When I see the Blood I will
pass over ; and the plague shall not be upon you."^

' Heb. X. 19. - Ps. li. 2. ^ Exod. xii. 13.

SERMON VL

THE CONQUEROIi OF SATAN.

Heb. ii. 14.

Thai throuijh deatli lie might destroy him that had the povjer of death ^
that is, the devil.

TN his Eationale of the Book of Common Prayer, Bishop
Sparrow tells us that the fifth Suuday in Lent is
called Passion- Suuday ; " For now," he says, " begins the
commemoration of the Passion of our Lord." ^ And in
truth, on this day, we pass a frontier-line in the sacred
season of Lent ; we enter upuu the last and most solemn
portion of it. In the Christian year, Easter answers to
the Passover among the Jews much as the reality answers
to the shadow. And as the Jews numbered fourteen
days in the month before the Passover-feast came, so do
we Christians in our reckoning of the days before Easter.
To quote Bishop Sparrow again, — the Epistle and Gospel
for to-day both speak of the Passion of our Lord. The
Epistle'^ tells us how He gave His Life, both as Priest and
Victim, for the sins of men. And the GospeP describes the
insult and violence to which He was exposed in the
temple, when He told the Jews that before Abraliam was
born, He was Himself already existing — existing eternally.
That scene was a first drop which announced the approach-

' Sparrow's Rationale, p. 98 ; ed. 1722.

2 Heb, ix. 11-15. * St. John viii. 46-59.

The Conqueror of Satan.

[Serm.

ing storm ; and so from to-day onwards, throughout the
next fortnight, and more particularly during the latter
part of it, good Christians will try, as much as they can,
to put all other thoughts aside, save those thoughts of their
own sinfulness and misery which have hitherto occupied
them from the beginning of Lent, — and to devote them-
selves, heart and soul, in such leisure time as they can
command, to considering that wonderful proof of the Love
and of the Holiness of God, — the Sufferings and Death of
His Only -begotten Son.

And in the text we are reminded of one effect of this
great event, which at all times, and especially at the
present time, for reasons to which I need not more par-
ticularly refer, it is well to bear in mind. Through death,
the Apostle says, Christ intended to destroy, that is, not to
annihilate but to subdue and render ineffective, powerless,
him that had the power of death, that is, the devil. This
was one reason why the Son of God took on Him our
nature. He took part in our flesh and blood, — so says the
Apostle, — that He might put Himself into circumstances
where death was possible ; in order that thus, by dying.
He might free us from our old enemy. He has won His
victory ; and now that He has died, it is our fault, not His,
if we are not free. This is the plain meaning of the
passage ; and the subject is practical enough to deserve
close attention.

And here our thoughts turn towards the being who,
the Apostle tells us, was to be reduced to impotence by
the Death of Jesus Christ. Who and what is he ? what
do we really know about him, about his history, his
character, his power of affecting ourselves and our destiny ?
There are two considerations among others which make a
great many persons unwilling to approach this subject.

VI]

The Conqueror of Satan.

1. First, say they, it is an unpleasant subject. If the
world and human life are, haunted by such a being as the
Evil One, we would rather, if we can, think of them with-
out him. We like the bright side of religion, as we like the
bright side of life. Tell us of heaven, of virtue, of Jesus
Christ, of good men; if there is a dark side to the picture,
we would rather not see it ; if there is a devil, we would
rather forget him, or think of him as seldom as we can.

Thus speaks the religion of feeling or of taste, as dis-
tinct from the religion of simple truth. True religion
must base itself on truth ; must desire to see truth all
round ; must welcome disaoreeable truth not less than
truth which brings consolation and strength ; must desire,
like the old Greek poet, if need be, to perish in the light,^
but to know all that can be known, and at all costs.
Nothing is gained and much is lost by shrinking from
fat;t because it is disagreeable. There are some animals
which close their eyes at the approach of the creature
which preys upon them; but this precaution does nothing
to avert their fate. Eeligion, beyond anything else,
should have the courage to look truth in the face, from a
conviction that whatever may be the anxiety or anguish
of the moment, she can more than afford to do so, and that
not to do so is to cease to be herself.

2. Secondly, some men suggest that the devil is an un-
profitable subject for discussion : they do not think that
much practically depends on our believing in him or not.
If, they say, a man does what he knows to be good, so far
as he can, and resists what he knows to be evil, so far as
he can, it does not much concern him whether evil is or
is not represented by a powerful invisible being, who
makes it his business to administer and to promote it.
The whole question, we are told in the phrase of the day,
belongs to speculation ratlier than to practice ; and spccula-

' Homer, Iliad xvii. 647.

The Conqiceror of Satan. [Serm.

tion, however interesting to those who have time and taste
for it, cannot touch the eternal weal of a being like man.

This kind of language appeals forcibly to our national
character. We English are, before all things, practical.
But is the question in hand so purely speculative, so
remote from practical interests, as is here implied ? Does
it really make no difference whether a man believes only
in a vague something, which he calls an " evil principle,"
or in an intelligent and working, i.e. a personal devil ?
Surely, in ordinary matters, it makes all the difference in
the world to a man whether he supposes himself to be
dealing with an abstract idea or tendency, or with a living
will. We should cease to be human if it were not so ; if
we were not far more profoundly affected by feeling our-
selves close to a living being than by feeling ourselves
under the vaguer and more intangible influence, termed
provisionally a principle, especially of an evil, that is To
say, a negative principle. This, indeed, is true whether
the principle be good or evil ; and the reason is because
we know tliat an abstract principle only affects us so far
as we assent to it. It has not independent vital force in
itself to propagate and enforce itself, and extend its sway,
unless in the language of poetry and metaphor. Apart
from human intelligences and human wills, it is an inert
thing, not even having any independent existence, as a
cloud or a gas has independent existence. It affects us
just so far as it is apprehended ; it has no real range or
play beyond the intelligences which it sways. But let
it be represented — let it be embodied — in a living intelli-
gence, in a living will, and the case is very different.
Then it may act upon us whether we are thinking of it or
not ; then it is dependent, not on our discretion, but on
its own. An abstract evil principle, indeed 1 Why, any
abstract principle, good or evil, without a living repre-
sentative or embodiment, is like a philanthropic or political

VI]

The Conqueror of Satan.

enterprise wliich has not yet found a good working secre-
tary, and which as yet exists only upon paper. It may
have much to say for itself in the way of argument ; but
it does not make much way to men's hearts and purses
until somebody takes it up, and, as we say, pushes it. A
doctrine in political economy, sound or mistaken, is of
little account to the world, while it only exists in a
treatise on the shelves of a library ; but let a powerful
finance minister adopt it, and set himself to give it practi-
cal expression, and it may save or ruin a great country.
A vision of national unity or of national aggrandisement
may for centuries haunt the imagination and inspire the
poetry of a race ; but until the man has appeared who
gathers up into himself all this vague and floating senti-
ment, and gives it the dignity and force of ardent con-
viction and determined will — until the abstraction has
become identified with the brain, the passion, the purpose,
of a Napoleon or a Bismarck — there is before us only a
patriotic or literary dream, which makes the fortune of a
few publicists or poets, but leaves no trace upon the
world. Do you suppose that goodness would still exert
the strong attraction which it has for all good men if
they believed in no Being Whose Nature it is — Who, as
being what He is, embodies and represents it ? Doubt-
less it is true that we fallen men have a bias or warp in
the direction of evil ; that, in order to assert its empire
over us, evil does not require such energetic measures as
goodness and truth. But the question here is whether
a man's own sense of the power of evil, of the manner
in whicli it is brought to bear on him, of the precautions
which he must take against it, of the resistance which he
must oppose to it, is unaffected by his belief in its pro-
pagation by a powerful, clever, and active being, who
devotes himself unremittingly to the occupation'? My
brethren, if anything in the way of opinion is unpractical.

The Conqueror of Satan.

[Serm.

it is the refusal to recognise tlie immeuse practical im-
portance of the presence or absence of belief in the
personal reality of the devil to the deepest interests of
human life.

But further, when men discard the old teaching of the
Bible and the Christian Church about the Evil One, and
talk vaguely about an " evil principle," it is well to ask.
What do they exactly mean by this imposing phrase ?
How can evil itself be, strictly speaking, a principle?
The essence of evil is absence of principle, principle being
something positive. Evil is contradiction to positive prin-
ciple : every sin is in its essence a contradiction of one of
those positive moral laws which are part of the necessary
Nature of God, and by which He wills to rule the universe.
Evil is a perverted, selfish quality of the will of an already
existing, personal creature. Evil could not exist apart
from sucli a creature, or unless the will of such a creature
was free. Evil has no body or substance in itself : it is
only that twist or warp in a created will which makes the
creature refuse — not merely in opposition to God, but in
opposition to the best instincts of its own being — to own
God as its Lord, and to make itself conform to Him.
But if this be the case, and it is, I believe, the substance
of what the greatest Christian thinkers have always said
on the subject, the phrase " an evil principle " melts
away before our eyes as a mere mist of the imagination.
On the other hand, it is plain that in some way or other
evil does operate most disastrously ; its desolating ravages
are a mere matter of experience, and the alternative sup-
position is that this weird negation of good has found, at
some time and somewhere, an invisible but energetic
secretary, — that it is propagated in every possible manner
by a person of the highest intelligence and of very
resolute will.

But I am asked in turn. What do vou mean bv a

VI]

The Conqueror of Satan.

person ? This question has been at least in part already
answered ; but it is of importance to be as clear as may
be. Since it first entered into the speech of the Western
world, the word " person " has had an eventful liistory.
It meant at first the mask or disguise by which the
face or figure of an historical character was represented
on the stage ; and in this sense men spoke of a great or
of an insignificant person. But it was soon felt that that
which marks off one man from another is not the counten-
ance so much as the character ; not the bodily form so
much as the invisible soul or spirit. Accordingly the
word " person " was transferred from the mask to tlie
supposed bearer ; from that which meets the eye to that
which is beyond the ken of sense, and which belongs
to spirit. And thus, in modern language, personality
means the very central essential being of man ; his
conscious intelligence, his self-determining will. In this
sense " person " is commonly opposed to " thing." The
mineral, the vegetable, nay, the mere animal are " things."
Man is a person ; but man is not alone in personality.
God, the All-surveying Intelligence, the absolutely Free,
Who does what He ordains, and is liound l)y no law save
His own Perfections, — God is the First of Persons, uttei'ly
distinct from the created things with which He has
surrounded Himself, both in that they are created, and in
that they lack personality. And good angels, whose exist-
ence and capacities are revealed to us, are persons, — possess-
ing as they do, probably in very varying degrees of range
and intensity, self-conscious intellect and self-determining
will. If then we speak of the personality of Satan, we
mean that he too is an Intelligence capable of reflecting
on his own existence, and a Will which has had the power
'of determining its destiny ; he possesses the very pro-
perties which are the essence of our manhood, only on a
much larger scale than we.

The Conqueror of Satan.

[Serm.

II.

Now, whether an invisible person like Satan exists or
not is one of those questions which cannot be really
settled by the senses. Only the Author of this universe
can tell us about portions of it which are so entirely be-
yond the reach of our observation ; and Christians believe
Him to have done so in Holy Scripture. When a modern
writer compares Satan to Tisiphone, and says that " they
are alike not real persons, but shadows thrown by man's
guilt and terrors," ^ he really assumes that the Bible is a
mere reflex of human weakness and human passion
instead of a Revelation of the Will of God. For all who
believe the Bible to be a trustworthy source of informa-
tion on such subjects, there is no real room for question
as to the existence of a personal evil spirit. You must
deliberately expunge a great many passages from the
Bible if you would get rid of the belief. All that implies
personality is attrilouted to Satan in Holy Scripture as
distinctly as it is attributed to God. Read the description
of Eve's temptation at the beginning of Genesis;'^ or the
account of the origin of the trials of Job f or the explana-
tion of the pestilence which followed David's numbering
the people as given in the Book of Chronicles or the still
more vivid picture of Satan's resistance to Joshua in
Zechariah.^ In these histories you have before you a
being who gives every evidence of self-conscious thought
and determined purpose. And in the New Testament this
representation is much fuller and more sustained. Not
to dwell on what St. Paul teaches as to the various ranks
of energetic evil spirits with whom Christians wrestle — as
principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world;*'
or on his description of their chief as " the prince of the

1 M. Arnold, God and tlie Bible, pref. p. 25. 2 Qen. iii. 1-6.

3 Job i. 1-12. ^ I Clir. xxi. 1-12. = Zecli. iii. 1, 2. ^ Epli. vi. 12.

•VI]

The Conqueror of Satan.

power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the chil-
dren of disobedience;" ^ or on his warning to tlie Ephesians
against the " wiles " of Satan ; or to the Corinthians
against his " devices;" ^ or to Timothy, three times, against
his "snare;"* not to dwell on St. Peter's account of him
as " a roaring lion, going about seeking whom he may
devour;"^ or on St. John's vision of his struggle with St.
Michael and the good angels ;^ or on St. James's warrant,
that if even we resist him, he will flee from us ; — let us
consider what Jesus Christ, our Lord and Master, has
said upon the subject. How significant is His warning
in the parable of the Sower against the Evil One which
takes away the Divine seed sown in the heart of man f
and in the parable of the Tares against the " enemy " who
sows them along with the wheat : ^ thus representing him
first as destroying good, and next as introducing evil
within the range of his influence ! How full of meaning is
the announcement, " The prince of this world cometh,
and hatli nothing in Me;"^" the declaration, "I beheld
Satan as lightning fall from heaven ;"^^ the warning to
St. Peter, " Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you
that he may sift you as wheat ;"^'' the saying about Judas,
" One of you is a devil" a judgment which would be
pointless enough if no such being existed to which Judas
was already self-assiniilated ; the literal reality which is
attributed to Beelzebub, the prince of the devils, associated
historically with a form of neighbouring idolatry ; ^* the
tremendous denunciation to the Jews, " Ye are of your
father the devil, and the works of your father will ye do.
He was a murderer from tlie beginning. . . . When he
speaketli of a lie, lie speaketh of liis own, for lie is a liar,

' Kpli. ii. 2. - Ih. vi. II. 3 2 Cor. ii. 11.

^ I Tim. iii. 7 ; vi. 9 ; 2 Tim. ii. 26. ■"' 1 St. Pet. v. 8.

* Rev. xii. 7-9. ' St. James iv. 7. " St. Matt. xiii. 3-8, 18, 19.

" St. Matt. xiii. 24, 25. St. John xiv. 30. " St. Luke x. 18.

'2 St. Luke xxii. 31. 1* St. John vi. 70. St. Matt. xii. 24 27.

The Conqueror of Satan.

[Serm.

and the father of it;" ^ the prayer bequeathed to Christians
for all time, " Deliver us " — not from evil, but, as it sliould
be rendered — " from the evil one." ^

It has, I know, been said that this language of Jesus
Christ must not be pressed closely, because He is only
adapting Himself to the belief and intelligence of the
men of His day. His own knowledge, it is patronisingly
hinted, was in advance of such beliefs ; but He accommo-
dated Himself to them in the hope of doing such good
as was ])ossible among a superstitions people like the
Jews.

It is difficult to understand how such a method of
dealing with our Lord's teaching can possibly be adopted
by any one who respects Him, I will not say as a Divine,
but even as a human teacher. For what is the necessary
inference as to Himself if the current faith about the Evil
Spirit to which He so solemnly and so repeatedly set the
seal of His approval is really false ? He either knew it to
be false, or He did not. If He did not, then in the eyes
of those persons who now reject it He was Himself the
victim (jf a stupid superstition. If He did know it to be
false, and yet sanctioned and reaffirmed it, He was guilty
of a much graver fault in a religious teacher than ignor-
ance. Yes ! it must l)e said. He encouraged acquiescence
in known falsehood. What would you say, my brethren,
of us, His ministers, if you had reason to suspect, that in
order to uphold existing institutions, or to conciliate
sympatliies which would be otherwise irreconcilable, we
were, not simply to connive at what we knew to be untrue,
but, to reaffirm it — to enforce it with all the solemnity
which belongs to an utterance in the Name of God ? What
is the condemnation which the human conscience has
pronounced, in all countiies and in all ages, on this crime
against known truth, but the sternest that could be

1 St. John viii. 44. - St. Matt. vi. 13.

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The Conqueror of Satan.

uttered ? And how is it possible for any but His
bitterest enemies to dare to impute even the shadow of
such an oftence to Him Who spake — the world itself being
witness — as never man spake ? ^

No ; our Lord Jesus Christ has identified the truth of
this doctrine of a personal evil spirit with His own
character as an honest Teacher of the highest truth. We
cannot consistently deny the doctrine and continue to
revere the Teacher Who reaffirmed it so solemnly ; we
cannot exculpate Him as if He were some Pagan philoso-
pher, who had a secret truth for his chosen friends, while
he patronised the current superstitions of the vulgar as
being all that they were equal to. This contempt for
humanity, blended with an equal contempt for truth, is
utterly at variance with the Character and Mission of Him
Who said on the eve of His death, " To this end was I
born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I
might bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of
the truth heareth My Voice." ^

And do not the facts of human life, when we have once
learnt to do them justice, bear out what we learn on this
subject from the Christian Eevelatiou ? On the one hand
we see great efforts for good produced upon men's cha-
racters and upon human society, at this or that period of
the world's history ; we see sudden and inexplicable con-
versions, like those of St. Paul or St. Augustine ; we see
immense efforts unaccountably made by bodies of men for
such truth and virtue as they know of: and we say,
" This is not only or simply human nature ; here is another
Agent at work ; who is the real author of this momentum ?
we know what human nature is when left to its own
resources ; here is the Finger, the Spirit of God." But,
on the other hand, when we see, as we do see, individuals
and communities pursuing evil with deliberation, although

' St. .John vii. 46. '- lb. xviii. 37.

The Conqueror of Satan.

[Serm.

they know from experience, and without reference to a
future state, that evil on the whole means misery ; when
we study characters and movements, ancient and modern,
which have astonished even a bad world by their enthu-
siasm for pure unrighteousness ; when we mark how
much sin lies, so to speak, off the highway of nature, and
is contradictory to nature ; how the abandonment or
murder of young children, cruelty to wives, dishonour
and insult to parents, are matters of daily occurrence in
the life of this vast hive of human beings ; nay, when we
who are in this Church look each and all of us within
ourselves — all of us, of all classes, noble and humble, rich
and poor, the aged and the young, clergy and laymen, — and
find that we too have to repeat after the Apostle the para-
doxical confession, " The good that I would I do not, but
the evil that I would not that I do," ^ — is it not reasonable
to say, " Here, too, there is a personal agent at work of
another kind ; acting upon the propensities, the weak-
nesses, the passions of man ; nature, we know, has a bad
hereditary twist, but even depraved nature is ruled, when
left to itself, in some degree by common sense " ? And
common sense, if it were alone and could have its way —
common sense, gathering up man's accumulated experience
of the results of moral evil — would surely counsel us to
guard against evil as against an epidemic, to exterminate
evil like a ferocious wild animal. This enthusiasm for
evil as such which is to be observed in the actions, the
conversation, the writings of no inconsiderable portion of
mankind, is reasonably to be explained by the Christian
doctrine, that in dealing with evil we have to do not with
an impalpable abstraction, but with a living person of
great experience and accomplishments ; whose malignant
action,within a smaller area, tells its own story as the action
of a living person, just as truly as, on a larger scale, and in

^ Rom. vii. 19.

VI]

Thd Conqueror of Satan.

an opposite direction, does the action of the Merciful and
All-good God.

III.

There are two points in the Christian representation
of the Evil One to which attention should especially be
given.

r. The Satan or devil of Scripture was not always what
he is now. He was once a glorious archangel : he became
what he is by his own act and deed. Observe the import-
ance of this, as sharply marking off the Christian belief
from that Zoroastrian doctrine of an eternal evil principle,
with which it is mistakenly confounded, and from which
more mistakenly still, it is sometimes said to be derived.
The difference is vital. The Oriental Ahriman is nothing
less than an original anti-god ; the existence of such a
being is inconsistent with that of a Supreme and All-good
God. It is inconsistent too witli the fact that evil cannot
be personal in any being in the sense in which good is
personal in God. Evil cannot be personal in or of itself ;
it can only obtain the advantages of personal embodiment
and action by being accepted by an already existing
creature, endowed with will — a creature which freely
determines implicitly to accept it by rejecting good. And
therefore the Bible always represents Satan — not as a self-
existing evil being — but as a fallen and apostate angel.

St. Peter speaks of the angels who sinned, and who
were cast down to hell ; ^ St. Jude of the " aneels which
kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation;" ^
St. Paul of the " condemnation of the devil," as resembling
that of a novice among men " lifted up with pride." ^ In
Satan evil has become dominant and fixed as in a pre-
viously existing personal being ; there was no such thing
in the universe of the Almighty and All-good God as a
self-existing or originally created devil.

' 2 St. Pet. ii. 4. Jude 6. s i Tim. iii. 6.

The Conqueror of Satan. [Serm.

2. The Satan of Scripture has limited, although exten-
sive, powers. It is necessary to remember that Milton's
Satan is an audacious creation of poetry ; invested with
more than one false title to interest which the Satan of
Scripture and of fact does not possess. It is a mistake to
think of him as omnipresent ; he is often enough in the
way, but not always or everywhere. It is a still greater
mistake to deem him omnipotent, or in any sense a rival,
after the fashion of the Eastern Ahrimau, to the All-good
God. He is like a rebel chieftain who maintains a de-
structive warfare for a given period, but who might, and
will eventually, be crushed.

" Why boastest thou thyself, thou tyrant, that thou
canst do mischief?

" "Whereas the goodness of God endureth yet daily. Thy
tongue imagineth wickedness, and with lies thou cuttest
like a sharp razor.

" Thou hast loved unrighteousness more than goodness,
and to talk of lies more than righteousness. Thou hast
loved to speak all words that may do hurt, 0 thou false
tongue ! Therefore shall God destroy thee for ever." ^

The evil principle of the East is practically invincible ;
he defies the Goodness and the Empire of God. Satan is
only tolerated ; " the devil," says the Divine Book, " is
come down having great wrath, because he knoweth that
he hath but a short time." -

And if the question is asked, " How can you reconcile
the continued toleration by God of such a being as the
Evil One with God's attributes of Goodness and Almighti-
ness?" — it must be answered that the full explanation
must lie beyond our present range of vision. Only
observe that the difiiculty, if greater in degree, is the
same in kind as that which we feel at the spectacle of a
human being of the character and in the position of the

' Ps. lii. 1-6. - Rev. 12.

VI]

The Conqueror of Satan.

Koman Emperor Nero, who may be regarded, like all very
bad men, as a serious approximation towards being a
visible Satan. Here is a man invested with absolute
power over millions of his fellow-creatures, and who
employs that power after a fashion which entails the
execration of the world, who contrives to do, within the
range of his action, an amount of moral and physical
mischief which it is appalling to contemplate. His reign
comes to an end in time ; but the question, why he is
allowed to be where and what he is, during the few short
years of empire, is the same question — different in scale,
but the same in principle — as that about the toleration of
the devil in the invisible world. Why are either of them,
the devil, or Nero, tolerated even for a while, by such a
Being as God ? It is one department of that supreme
mystery, the existence of evil, in a universe controlled by
a Being who is All-powerful and All-good. We can only
say that the Master of this Universe sees further than we
do ; and will one day, perhaps, enable us to understand
in a measure those rules of His government which per-
plex us now. Meanwhile, experience comes here, as so
often, to the aid of faith ; and the facts and history of this
visible world in which we live present exactly the same
problems to our thoughts respecting the ways of God as
that invisible world, the inhabitants of which are known
to us only by Divine Eevelation.

Above all, let us, as we take leave of the subject, fix in
our minds the words and the lesson of the text. Christ
came that He might render powerless him that had the
power of death, that is, the devil. And He has done
this : He has done it, when we might have least expected
it, at that which, to the eye of sense, might have seemed
the climax of His own humiliation and shame. Satan, the
Apostle tells us, had the power of death. Like those
brigand chiefs who ply their dark trade upon a mountain

The Conqtieror of Satan.

[Seem.

frontier or on a lonely road, so the Evil One had established
a kind of recognised, though illegal, jurisdiction along the
indistinct and mysterious boundary-line which parts the
world of sense from the world of spirit. In addition to
the physical anguish of dissolution there was present to
the minds of generations of the dying the sense that in
that dark hour something worse than bodily weakness or
agony was to be apprehended : nothing less than the
subtle and malignant onset of an invisible spirit, the soul's
enemy and the enemy of God. Sin was the weapon by
which he made death so terrible ; " the sting of death is
sin." ^ And it is from this apprehension that the faithful
are freed by the Death of Jesus Christ. By dying, the
Apostle tells us, our Lord, as Man, invaded this region of
human experience and conquered for Himself and for us
its old oppressor. When He seemed to the eye of sense
to be Himself gradually sinking beneath the agony and
exhaustion of the Cross, He was really, in the Apostle's
enraptured vision, like one of those Koman generals
whose victories were celebrated by the most splendid
ceremonies known to the capital of the ancient world, —
He was the spoiler of principalities and powers, making a
show of them openly, triumphing over them in His Cross.^
The Day of Calvary ranked in St. Paul's eyes, in virtue of
this one out of its many results, far above the great battle-
fields which a generation before had settled, for four cen-
turies as it proved, the destinies of the world, — Pharsalia,
Pliilippi, Actium. Satan was conquered by the Son of
Man ; because the sting of death — sin — had been extracted
and pardoned ; because it was henceforth possible, for all
who would clasp the pierced Hands of the Crucified, to
pass through that region of shadows as more than con-
queror through Him That loved them.^

Here, brethren, we can only follow the guidance of

1 I Cor. XV. 56. - Col, ii. 14, 15. ^ Roni. viii. 37.

VI]

The Conqneror of Satan.

faith. That there is an evil being who is at work in the
world, — at work around, it may be upon or within our-
selves,— is what we should naturally infer from what we
see. Evil, like good, organises itself, propagates itself, forces
its way, as if it could bring happiness and blessing to
mankind, with a consistency and a vigour that, on its
more limited scale, rivals the working and directing
Providence of God, and betrays the scarcely concealed
presence of a practised hand and an indomitable will. Do
not let us refuse to recognise it ; do not let us try to
explain it or any other fact away ; do not let us afford to
our enemy a fresh proof of his practised genius and adroit-
ness by ceasing, if we can cease, to believe in his exist-
ence. But, also, do not let us fear him ; since for
Christians he has ceased to be formidable. Such is the
grace and mercy of our Lord, that all these evils which
the craft and subtlety of the devil worketh against us will
be brought to nought, and by the providence of Christ's
goodness will be dispersed.^ Such is Christ's grace, I say,
that, in answer to prayer, it will please Him to beat down
Satan under the feet ^ of the weakest of His true servants.
When we are tempted to break any one of the known
laws of God, to disown or contradict any portion of God's
truth, we know who is near, luring us on, if he only can,
to our failure or our ruin. But we know also Who is
nearer still, his Ancient Conqueror and our own Best and
Wisest Friend ; and one aspiration to Jesus Christ from a
believing soul will place all His grace and strength at our
disposal. The results of Calvary do not really lessen with
the lapse of time ; and among these not the least blessed
is the enfeeblement of Satan, and the deliverance of those
who, through fear of death, would else be all their life-
time subject to bondage.

' Cf. Prayer in the Litany. '-' Ih.

SERMON VII.

THE COEN OF WHEAT.
St. John xii. 24.

Verily, verily, I say unto yon. Except a com of wTieat fall into tlie ground
and die, it abideth alone j hid if it die, it hringeth forth much fruit.

THIS is one of our Lord's own ways of speaking about
His own Death. He had made His triumphal entry
on Palm Sunday into Jerusalem, and certain Greeks,
proselytes of the gate it would seem, asked an Apostle to
let them see Him. There was no difficulty about this : the
Greeks came to Jesus, and He told them that the hour for
His glorification had corae.^ They were very likely to
misunderstand this expression ; they would probably
think of some pageant of earthly splendour, or at least of
some social or spiritual victory which would conquer all
opposition at once and for good. Our Lord, as we Chris-
tians know, when He spoke of His being glorified, really
meant that He would die in the course of four days upon
a cross. He knew too that if the Greeks remained on in
Jerusalem and saw Him die in this way, they would be
greatly perplexed and shocked ; and He, therefore, gives
them a reason for His Death, couched in the language of
parable : " Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground
and die, it abideth alone ; but if it die, it bringeth forth
much fruit."

1 St. John xii. 2-3.

100

The Corn of Wheat.

lOI

Here we learn from His own lips that it was necessary
that our Lord Jesus Christ should die. We know that
before His Death, and even after it, men who loved Him
and who trusted Him had great difficulty in understanding
this. Death to them seemed to have plainly stamped
upon it the mark of weakness, failure, incapacity, or even
guilt. Great saints of God in earlier ages had been
exempted from submission to the law of death : if an
Enoch was " taken," ^ if an Elijah went up to heaven in a
chariot of fire,- was He, of Whom these men were only
shadows, in very deed to die ? Was the one Perfect
Human Life to which all the ages were pointing forward
to be veiled at the last, like that of any sinner among us,
in the humiliation and weakness which come in the train
of death ? Why call Him the Second Adam,^ if He does
not share the original immortality of the first Adam ?
How look to Him as the Saviour of men, if He must Him-
self pay tribute to man's last enemy ? ^ These questions at
first sight were natural enough. When the Jews saw
Him nailed to the Cross — as it seemed, in the power of
His enemies, and in the stern grip of death — they held
that the question of His claims was practically settled.
They that passed by, as they looked up and saw His Eyes
closing in death, " reviled Him, wagging their heads and
saying. He saved others. Himself He cannot save. If He
be the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the
cross, and we will believe Him." ^ And the feeling which
prompted these sarcasms at the foot of the Cross was not
altogether unshared, both before and after, by disciples of
the Crucified. When our Lord predicted His Sufferings at
Caesarea-Philippi to St. Peter, the Apostle indignantly ex-

1 Gen. V. 24. - 2 Kings ii. 11. 3 j Cor. xv. 45.

■* I Cor. XV. 26. •'' St. Matt, .\-\vii. 39-42.

102

The Corn of Wheat.

[Serm.

claimed, " Be it far from Thee, Lord : this shall not happen
unto Thee." ^ When the two disciples on the day of the
Eesurrection were joined on the Emmaus road by the
Stranger 'Wliom as yet they knew not, they confided to Him
the bitterness of their disappointment. " We trusted that
it had been He That should have redeemed Israel : " ^ His
Death had shattered their hopes. When St. Paul would
describe the effect of the preaching of the Crucifixion upon
the two divisions of the ancient world among which he
laboured, he says that it presented itself to the Jews as a
scandal, that is, a stumbling-block in the way of their
receiving faith, and to the Greeks as a folly, the exact
reverse of everything they thought wisdom.^ When the
Ej)istle to the Hebrews was written, Christians were still
raising difficulties about the Death of Christ ; and Jews
were tauntins; them with it, not without the effect of
making them uncomfortable. Our Lord foresaw all this
and much more, and He, therefore, sets His Death before
the Greek visitors at Jerusalem, and before His disciples
to the very end of time, in words which will be helpful to
us, my brethren, I trust, on this evening of the most
solemn day in the year to every believing Christian.
" Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it
abideth alone : but if it die, it bringth forth much fruit."

How then does He explain His approaching Death ?
Had He been speaking to born Jews, He would have said,
as He did to the two disciples, that prophecy, properly
understood, made it strictly necessary for any who claimed
to be the true Messiah.^ Had he been instructing Chris-
tians, like those addressed in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
who believed that He was the true Eepresentative of the
Eace, the Pattern or Ideal Man, He would have insisted, as
did His Apostle, that as man He must submit to the law

1 St. Matt. xvi. 22.
3 I Cor. i. 23.

- St. Luke xxiv. 21.
■* St. Luke xxiv. 25-27.

VII]

The Corn of Wheat.

103

of Humanity ; that, as it is appointed unto all men once to
die, so Christ must once be offered/ though with results
altogether transcending those of any ordinary human death.
But speaking as He is to Greeks, who would have known
little or nothing of prophecy or of His own relation to the
race, but who were by taste and habit observers of the
changes and forms of nature. He points to a great truth
written on the face of nature by the Finger of God. Nature
is one of God's two Books: the invisible things of God,
says St. Paul, are seen in it by those who do not destroy
their eyesight by disobedience to known Truth.^ Nature,
looked at superficially, seems to say that death is ruin, the
ruin and end of all that is strong and beautiful in life :
this mournful idea of death appears again and again in
the poetry of the Greeks. Nature, scanned more pene-
tratingly, more profoundly, shows that death is the pre-
cursor of new and vigorous life. The caterpillar forfeits
its form to become the butterfly. The seed decomposes
to become the plant. If the corn of wheat does not fall
into the ground and die, it abides alone — intact, but dry,
shrivelled, unproductive. If it dies, it forthwith becomes
a principle of life : it bringeth forth much fruit.

The fruitfulness of death ! Do we not see tlie truth of
it every day of our lives in the world of thought and the
world of action ? God raises up some one man in a
generation, the herald of a forgotten truth, or the apostle
of a great discovery. He speaks ; he writes ; he warns ;
he entreats ; but men shrug their shoulders, with a pass-
ing remark, at his well-meant enthusiasm, at his waste of
energy. He perseveres, nevertheless, amid discouragement
and coldness ; he perseveres, it may be, in the teeth of
interested opposition ; he perseveres, until at last he feels
that his strength is failin", and that his work will soon be
done, — done, as it seems, to no'purpose. He lies down to

1 Heb. ix. 27, 28. 2 Rom. i. 20.

I04

The Corn of Wheat.

[Serm.

die, it may be, without any hopes for the future, it may be
with a presentiment that the hour of his death will be
that of his victory. And so in the event it is. When he
is really gone ; when the reiterated entreaties, appeals,
warnings have ceased, men feel the silence, though they
heeded not the voice, and are willing to believe a doctrine
whose teacher is no more. The fact is, death makes his
life more or less sublime ; it refines our recollections of it ;
it puts the personal feelings, competitions, jealousies, which j
prevented justice to him, utterly and for ever aside ; and
as he speaks now, not in fact but in our memories, not in
this, but, as it seems, from another world, we are willing, we
are constrained to listen. Had he Kved on, he would still
have been impotent : his death has ennobled his work and
made it fruitful. The grain of wheat would have done no-
thing for humanity, had it not fallen into the soil, and died.

Such is the law. Death, even when it comes only in
the order of nature, has, not seldom, a fructifying power.
The departed parent, the departed pastor, the true friend,
whose voice was for so long unheeded, wields after death a
power over hearts and wills which was denied him in life.
But when death is freely accepted, as a sacrifice to truth
or to duty, its fructifying power is enormously enhanced.
And our Lord, of course, was contemplating His Death as
an issue freely accepted by Himself, an issue which He
might — as far as His power went — have declined. My
brethren, if any one of the laws by which the moral world
is governed is certain, this is certain : that to do real good
in life is, sooner or later, costly and painful to the doer.
It has ever been so. All the great truths which have
illuminated human thought ; all the lofty examples which
have inspired and invigorated human effort — all have been
more or less dearly paid for, by moral, or mental, or phy-
sical suffering. Each truth has had its martyr, unseen, it
may be, and unsuspected, yet known to God. Here it is

VII]

The Corn of Wheat.

a violent death ; there the gradual wasting away produced
by exhausting labours : but the reality is the same. Here
it is the soldier who saves a lost cause by his self-devotion ;
there it is a statesman who resigns power, influence, even
personal safety, rather than retain them at the cost of his
country. Elsewhere it is a teacher who throws his popu-
larity to the winds, when, to keep it, he must echo some
prejudice which he inwardly despises, or denounce some
truth or creed which he heartily reveres. Like the legal
impurities of the old tabernacle, the errors and miseries of
the world are purged with blood : everywhere in the great
passages of human history we are on the track of sacrifice ;
and sacrifice, meet it where we may, is a moral power of
incalculable force.

Do we think sometimes that Jesus Christ might have
saved us in some less costly way than by shedding His
Blood ? Might He not have saved us, by putting forth
His miraculous power, by showing among men His gracious
presence. His severe purity, His inimitable tenderness ?
Might He not have sat, like the Greek teachers before
Him, in some porch or garden, where the enterprise and
intelligence of the world might have sought and found
the Wisdom that would save it % So, perhaps, we think ;
and if Jesus had been only a Teacher of men, and had
taught none but popular truths, so it might have been.
As it was, to bring man close to God was a different task
from any attempted by any old-world philosopher. Such
deep work as Christ had to do — forcing the human con-
science to stand face to face with the sternest and most
unwelcome sides of truth ere He disclosed His Divine
Eemedy — could not be done without sacrifice, unless the
existing conditions of human life were to be changed.
And our Lord came, not to make a new world, but, at
whatever cost, to redeem and invigorate an old one.

J Heh. ix. 22.

io6

The Corn of Wheat.

[Serm.

II.

Our Lord's Death, then, is fruitful. And, first, as a
moral example of extraordinary power.

We all of us know the difference between precept and
example. Precept is the easy part of teaching ; example
the difficult. Precept is the measure of the teacher's
ability : example of his sincerity. Precept may lay bur-
dens on others which the teacher does not touch with
one of his fingers ; ^ example gives precepts in the most
persuasive way, and something into the bargain. Pre-
cept is the father who says to his boy, " Climb that moun-
tain." Example is the father who says, " Follow me ; see
where I tread ; put your foot where I put mine : lay hold
on this rock, on that branch, just as I do ; and we shall
reach the top at last."

Now our Lord Jesus Christ taught men by precept.
The Gospels are full of precepts which He gave. The
Sermon on the Mount is a collection of them ; there is no
other code of precepts like it in the world. But His pre-
cepts— even His, we may dare to say, — would have died
away upon the breeze, if they had not been enforced by
His Example. And He gave that example in its fulness,
when He became obedient unto death.^

The collect for Palm Sunday speaks of two forms of
excellence, as taught us more especially by our Lord and
Saviour. Of these the first is humility : He took on Him
our flesh, and suffered deatli upon the cross that all man-
kind should follow the example of His great humility.
Jesus had taught men by precept to be humble. They
were to look on themselves as being what they are —
nothing before God, or worse than nothing. They were to
confess themselves unprofitable servants when they had
done all that was required.^ They were not to do their

1 St. L\ike xi. 46. - Phil. ii. 8. » st. Luke xvii. 10.

VII]

The Corn of Wheat.

107

alms before men ; ^ they were not to be called Eabbi ; - they
must be converted, and become as little children, or they
would not enter heaven ; they must not be as the kings
of the Gentiles, exercising authority for its own sake; the
greatest must be first in service, lowliest in personal aim.^
Knowing themselves to be sinners, they must rejoice if
men thought of them, spoke of them, acted towards them, as
being what they were. They must " rejoice," even if men
said all manner of evil against them falsely ; * if those par-
ticular charges were not deserved, others, they must know,
were. The great thing was, never to forget what it is for
a sinner to stand before the face of the Most Holy.

Such was the teaching of Jesus on this head. Our con-
science tells us that it is true. Our wills tell us that it is
very hard. Pride, we feel, in a coarser or more subtle form,
has taken possession of the energies, poisoned the very
springs, of our life.

Are we not constantly thinking of our good qualities ;
ranking ourselves higher than others ; feeling annoyed
when others are highly spoken of; defending our own
opinion, even in indifferent matters, with obstinacy; assuin-
ing a quiet air of superiority in conversation, as if there
could be no doubt about our right to assume it ; despond-
ing when our efforts do not succeed, as if we had a natural
right to command success ; rejoicing in showy work which
attracts general admiration, rather than in quiet unostenta-
tious work, known only to God and His angels; anxious that
men should see and remark our good qualities ; anxious
perhaps to improve and become virtuous, not because
God wills it and to promote His glory, but simply that in
the contemplation of our attainments our vanity may
have more to feed upon ? It is hard, no doubt, to be really
humble.

1 St. Matt. vi. I, 2.
3 St. Matt. XX. 25-27.

2 Ih. xxiii. 8.
^ Ih. V. II, 12.

io8

The Corn of Wheat.

[Serm.

This is what we feel : and Jesus, Who, as the Sinless
One, cannot have the reasons for humility that we have,
yet teaches us by example, what He has taught by pre-
cept. He was robed in humility from the first. The
accessories of His birth, the employments of His youth
and early Manhood, His relation to His parents. His
choice of His disciples, His stern refusal of human praise
and human honour : the silence which He enjoined about
His miracles ; the rebuke which He administered to the
flatterer who, supposing Him to be only human, called
Him " good " ^ — these, and much else, were His methods
of teaching us humility.

But it was in His Passion that He taught this grace
most persuasively. Then, of His own will, He was
arraigned as an impostor, as a seducer of the people, as a
blasphemer, as the enemy of God. He was arrested as if
He were a thief. He was dressed in mockery by Herod as
an idiot ; He was buffeted as if He had been guilty of
some gross insolence ; He was scourged as a slave of the
worst character ; He was condemned to the shameful and
cruel death reserved for the most desperate criminals ; He
was crucified between two thieves, as if He was the chief of
them. He, the Uncreated Sanctity, the Eternal Wisdom,
was, of His own free will, trodden down beneath the feet of
His creatures as a sinner and a fool, that He might teach
them at least one virtue — Humility.

And He has succeeded. It is not the precepts of
Jesus : it is the figure of Jesus Incarnate and dying which
has sunk deepest into the heart of Christendom. " Let this
mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, Who,
being in the Form of God, thought it not robbery to be
equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, and
took upon Him the form of a slave, and was made in the
likeness of man : and being found in fashion as a man,

I St. Matt. xix. i6, 17.

VII]

The Corn of Wheat.

109

He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross." ^ Wherever Christians have
learned the greatness of humility, it has been by gazing
on the Crucified. All the moral glories of self-renounce-
ment in its higher and more splendid forms ; all the noble
ambitions to do great works for God, and to be misunder-
stood or undervalued or forgotten in doing tliem ; all these
passive virtues which really subdue the world, and which
have their root in humility, show that the Corn of Wheat
Which fell into the ground and died eighteen centuries
ago has not died in vain.

Or take the other grace mentioned in the Collect, the
grace of patience, the power of bearing resignedly and
cheerfully the trials which come to us in the course of
God's Providence, or at the hands of our fellow-creatures.
Our Lord constantly insists on the need of this. If our
Lord says that the mourners are blessed ; ^ that the
" persecuted for righteousness' sake " are blessed ; ^ that
His disciples are to account themselves blessed, when
they are reviled, wronged, defamed ; ^ why is this but
because these are opportunities for the exercise of patience ?
" If any man strike thee on the right cheek, turn to
him the other also." " Do good to them that hate you,
pray for them that despitefully use you : and ye shall be
the children of your Father Which is in heaven."" The
disciples who would call down fire from heaven know not
" what spirit they are of." ^ The man who says to his
brother " Thou fool " is guilty of hell fire.^ The faithful
will bring forth fruit with patience ; in the dark days that
will come upon the world they will have the true mastery
who in patience possess their souls.^"

I Phil. ii. 5-8.
" St. Matt. V. n.
^ St. Luke ix. 54, 55.

2 St. Matt. V. 4.
' Ih. 39.

8 St. Matt. V. 22.
10 St. Luke x.xi. 8-19.

» Ih. 10.

« Ih. 44, 45.

3 St. Luke viii. 15.

I lo The Corn of Wheat. [Serm.

This is our Lord's teaching : these His very words.
Our conscience — that deep ineradicable sense of right
which He has given us — echoes this teaching. "We see
that it is right intuitively as soon as He utters it. But
is it not hard to follow ? we ask. We think, perhaps,
that it is ideal only, impracticable, exaggerated.

" Very well, then," He says to us, " look at Me. Take
up your crosses and follow j\Ie." Forthwith He leads to
Calvary. "We follow Him from the Supper-room to the
Garden ; from the Garden to the Hall of Judgment ; from
the tribunal, along the "Way of Sorrows, to the Cross.
We note the delicacy, the exquisite sensitiveness, of His
Body. If creatures are capable of pain in proportion to
their place in the scale of being, what must have been the
capacity of Jesus for suffering ? We note the variety
of pains to which He submitted. No one of His senses,
no part of His Body, was exempt from its peculiar pain.
We observe that some of the tortures, such as that
produced by the crown of thorns, or by the scourging,
or by the raising the Cross into the socket, must have
been exceptionally painful ; that His Sufferings were con-
tinuous ; that there was no moment of reprieve through-
out His Passion ; and that, as when He refused the
hyssop. He resolutely denied Himself any means of
alleviation. Then we reflect that on the Cross as in tlie
Garden His Human Soul is the scene of keener agony
than that which afflicts His Body : the Agony produced not
merely by the clear consciousness and detailed anticipa-
tion of physical suffering, but, in the case of the Sinless
One, by the dreadful sight of the sins of a world which
He had taken upon Himself, and which He was expiating.
He says enough to show what He suffers : " My God,
jMy God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? " ^ He does not say
one word which impairs His patience. The prophet had

1 St. Matt, .xxvii. 46.

VII]

The Corn of Wheat.

1 1 1

said of Him, " He is led as a sheep to the slaughter ; and
as a lamb before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not
His mouth." ^ The Apostle records of Him that " when He
was reviled He reviled not again, when He suffered He
threatened not." - The motto of the Passion is, " The cup
which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it ? " *
And here, too, He has not died in vain. Think of the
hundreds of thousands throughout Christendom who are
lying in pain, — who are drawing nearer moment by
moment to their last agony — or who are in the pains of
death. If they can lie still ; if they have the great grace
to suffer uncomplainingly, brightly ; if they irradiate the
last sad scenes of our frail humanity with a radiance
streaming from another world, what is the secret of their
power ? It is that they have been gazing steadily on
Jesus Christ Crucified ; that His patience has won them,
and they have had an eye unto Him and have been
lightened ; * that they have said to themselves with one
great sufferer, " If He could endure that for me, how little
is this to suffer with Him ! "

Not, my brethren, that humility and patience were
the only lessons taught us by our Lord from His Cross.
They are but samples of that vast circle of teaching upon
which from that day to this Christians have earnestly
dwelt, and the full import of which they are as far as ever
from having exhausted. But although Jesus Christ
crucified teaches "the world the truths and duties which it
most needs to know, He does much more than this ; and
to limit the fruitfulness of His Death to this would be to
do you and to do Him a grievous wrong. If in dying
Jesus had only shown us His own teaching in practice,

III.

1 Isa. liii. 7.

3 St. John xviii. 11.

2 I St. Pet. ii. 23.
* Ps. xxxiv. 5.

112

The Corn of Wheat.

[Serm.

He would have left us in despair. Like the Jewish law,
but on a greater scale, He would have convinced us of sin
and shortcoming, without providing a remedy. As it is,
while He hung upon the Cross, He showed us that His
Death would have results of quite a different kind from
the death of the martyr to truth or to duty : effects which
flow directly from His Eepresentative relation to the human
family, and from His Higher and Eternal Nature, and
which are, in truth, all its own.

Three were crucified on Mount Calvary : the Most
Holy in the midst, and a thief on either side. Two
Evangelists tell us that the thieves joined with the mob in
reviling their fellow-sufferer.^ All classes, all interests,
Herod and Pilate, Jews and Eomans, nobles and the
people, Pharisees and Sadducees, and even the victims
with their executioners, were banded in one grand con-
spiracy against the Holiness of God revealed in Jesus.
Why should they all hate Him, we ask ? Ask why it is
that the sunlight which gladdens nature, which invigor-
ates healthy life, is torture to a diseased eyesight ? It is
not that the light is less beneficent, but the organ is
diseased, and therefore the light brings irritation, discom-
fort, pain, and no effort is too great to escape it. The
light of lofty sanctity is just as painful to diseased souls :
in its highest and perfect form as manifested in Jesus, it
goads them to madness : in its broken and imperfect
forms, as we see it in Christians, it provokes dislike, —
secret it may be, but strong, and only waiting its oppor-
tunity for speech or action.

It is easily explained, but, in the case of the dying
thieves, the blasphemy of Jesus is especially dreadful.
They know that life is ebbing from them, that all will
soon be over; that this world has nothing more in reserve in
the way of adventure or excitement, yet they blaspheme.

1 St. Matt, xxvii. 44 ; St Maik xv. 32.

VII]

The Corn of Wheat.

Misfortune generally creates a certain sympathy between
its victims ; but for J esus the thieves feel only hatred.
Pain is God's own instrument for breaking hard hearts,
for softening harsh characters, for teaching men to think
tenderly of others, sternly of themselves. Alas ! one of
the most terrible spectacles in the moral world is the
miscarriage and failure of this ministry of pain ; most
clergymen of any experience have seen it on deathbeds :
and it was exhibited upon two out of the three crosses on
Calvary. If pain does not soften, it scars ; it burns up all
that remains of tenderness, and almost of humanity ; it
scorches each finer sensibility of the soul, and leaves it
hard, fierce, brutal, beyond any previous experience.

And yet, while that chorus of defiance and hate was
being chanted around the dying Jesus, by the mob and
by the thieves, one of the latter became silent. He had
looked on the Face of the Divine Sufferer, — besmeared as
It now was with tears and blood, — and he had seen traced
beneath a Dignity, a Love, a Sanctity, which were utterly
new to him. Probably his ear had caught the faint
prayer, just as the Cross was being raised : " Father, for-
give them, for they know not what they do." ^ It was a
moment unlike any previous moment in his life : he felt
a new movement in his soul, he was face to face with
Truth, with Sanctity. The revelation of holiness is the
revelation of sin. As he gazes on J esus, he learns the
truth about himself : he will make no excuses, such as we
might make for him on the score of ignorance or lack of
opportunity : he is not playing at penitence ; his heart is
broken. The Crucified Truth at his side has made all
plain to him. " We indeed suffer justly," he cries ; " for we
receive the due reward of our deeds : but this Man hatli
done nothing amiss." ^ Nor is this all. His faith is even
more striking than his repentance. By one of those rapid

1 St. Luke xxiii. 34. - Ih. 41.

114

The Corn of Wheat. [Serm.

glances into the depths of truth which are vouchsafed to
souls in moments of exceptional illumination or agony, he
sees that the Sufferer at his side, Who has revealed Him-
self to him, must be able to help him, even in his last
terrible extremity. The life of souls, in these supreme
moments, cannot be measured by the clock or the
almanac ; a lifetime may be compressed into a few
minutes : there is no real relation between what passes
and the lapse of time. And so the poor thief breathes a
prayer which might have come at the end of a long life
of labour from a martyred Apostle : " Lord, remember me
— remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom." ^
It was enough : " To-day shalt thou be with Me in Para-
dise."^ To-day : what readiness to receive him ! With
Me : what Companionship for a criminal ! In Paradise :
what a vision of repose !

He had yet to die in agony, it is true ; but death was
tolerable enough — it was even welcome — now. He had
to linger on in agony ; but pain, tlie worst pain, had been
transfigured for him ; he could more than bear it. He
had to witness the last hour, to liear the last cry, " Into
Thy hands I commend My spirit,"^ uttered by His crucified
Friend : he knows that that cry means for him the open-
ing of the gates of Paradise. In these last hours of his
agony he is a type of the dying Christian to the end of
time ; he is the first believer who enters the kingdom
of heaven when the King had overcome the sharpness of
death : he is the first sample of that mighty harvest of
souls which was to be the fruit of the death of the Son
of God.

IV.

Any man, my brethren, who seriously believes that
Jesus Christ is the Eternal Sou of God umst feel that

1 St. Luke xxiii. 42. - lb. 43. ^ Tb. 46.

VII]

The Corn of Wheat.

115

such an event as His Death in human form must be
attended by consequences altogether beyond those which
would follow on the death of the best or wisest of the
sons of men. What those consequences would be we
could not reasonably conjecture : but here Eevelation comes
to our assistance. It sets the Death of Jesus Christ before
us in three aspects : by It sin is atoned for ; by It we are
redeemed from the penalty of sin ; by It sinful man and
the All-holy God are reconciled. " Christ," says St.
John, "is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours
only, but also for the sins of the whole world." ^ " Christ,"
says St. Paul, " hath redeemed us from the curse of the
law ; being made a curse for us." - " We have redemption
through His Blood," ^ and, as a consequence, " we are recon-
ciled to God," says St. Paul, " by the death of His Sou.'" *
How, we ask, does His Death thus propitiate, redeem, re-
concile ? " Because," reply the Apostles, " He was made to
be sin for us Who knew no sin, that we might be made
the righteousness of God in Him ; " ^ and so He " bare our
sins in His own Body on the tree." ^ How, we ask again,
could this transfer of guilt, of responsibility, have taken
place ? Is there not a contradiction here with our sense of
natural justice ; with the Divine rule that " no man can
deliver his brother, or make agreement unto God for him"?^
No ; there is no contradiction ; and for two reasons. Pirst,
Jesus is not merely a common or single specimen of the
race. He is the Second Adam;^ that is, like our first
parent. He represents in some way all other men : He is
human nature by Piepresentation. So He loved to call
Himself " the Son of Man," " meaning, among other things,
that He was the Eepresentative, Ideal, Pattern Man, Who

1 I St. John ii. 2. Gal. iii. 13. 3 Eph. i. 7.

4 Rom. V. 10. 5 2 Cor. v. 21. 6 j gt. Pet. ii. 24.

7 Ps. xlix. 7. 8 1 Cor. XV. 45.

» St. Matt. X. 23 ; xii. 8, 32 ; xvi. 13 ; St. John v. 27 ; vi. 53, etc.

ii6

The Corn of Wheat.

[Serm.

had relations to all others, and in Whom all others had a
share, if they would. In Him the Eternal Father beheld
not merely an individual, but the human race; the
human race corresponding for once to the Ideal in the
Divine Mind ; the human race embodied in a Eepresenta-
tive to Whom it was said from heaven, "This is My
Beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased." ^ Jesus repre-
sents the race, not as a member of parliament who is
elected by his constituents, but as a parent represents his
children. No one would deny the right of a parent to act
for his young family on a critical occasion : and Jesus,
dying on the Cross, is acting for those whom He already
and naturally represents. And this leads me to the
second reason for there being no injustice in the idea of
the Atonement ; namely, that Jesus, being thus by nature
representative of us all, freely willed to die for us. We
may dare to say it: His Kfe was not taken from Him
whether He would or not, like the lives of the victims
slain at Jewish altars. " No one taketh My life from Me,"
He said, " but I lay it down of Myself ; I have power to
lay it down, and I have power to take it again." - He
willed, in His love and in His pity,^ to bear the burden
which was really ours. He could bear it, because He
already, by the terms of His Nature, represented us ; and
there was no injustice in accepting what was so generously,
so freely offered. And if it be asked why Holy
Scripture connects this salvation so particularly with the
Death of Christ — why His Death has this Expiatory and
Eedemptive power — the answer is, that His Death is the
highest expression of His perfect Obedience; it is His
Obedience triumphing over the strongest motive which
can urge men to disobey — the instinct of self-preservation.
As St. Paul says emphatically. He was "obedient unto
death."* And that which gave this obedience its literally

1 St. Matt. iii. 17. 2 st. John x. 18. ^ jga. liii. 9. 4 phii. ii. 8,

VII]

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117

infinite value was the Person of the Sufferer. " If God
spared] not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us
all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all
things ? " 1

Yes ! the Corn of seed has indeed brought forth much
fruit by falling into the ground to die ; like Samson,
they whom Christ slew at His Death were more than they
whom He slew in His life.^ The power of death, the
power of sin, the power of Satan, — these, if we will, are
gone. All the agencies of restoration and grace which
we find in the Church of God flow down from the Wounds
of the Crucified. If Sacraments have power, if prayer pre-
vails, if the Spirit is given to guide and to purify us, if
consciences are clear, and hearts buoyant, and wills in-
vigorated ; if life's burdens are borne cheerfully, and death
is looked forward to, not without awe, but without appre-
hension; this is because Jesus Christ has died. " If it die,
it bringeth forth much fruit." Ever since His Ascension
the store has been accumulating above ; not a year, not a
week, not a day passes without some addition to the com-
pany of the Eedeemed who are gathered around the
Throne of the Immaculate Lamb, to sing unweariedly,
" Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us unto God by Thy
Blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and
nation." ^

My brethren, how utterly insignificant is any other
question that we can ask ourselves compared with this :
Shall I ever join that company? Will the Divine Eedeemer
own me as one of the fruits of His Death ? Alas if any
one of us should have hereafter to reflect, " He died, the
Everlasting Son of God ; but, as far as I am concerned, it
was in vain." God's grace is not bound to great agencies
or great occasions ; the Eternal Spirit acts through the
humblest means. A German nobleman was converted

1 Rom. viii. 32. - Judg. xvi. 30. ' Rev. v. 9.

ii8

The Corn of Wheat.

from a life of careless indifference by seeing in a gallery a
painting of our Saviour's . Head crowned with thorns, with
the words traced under,

" This have I Isorne for thee ;
What wiliest thou for Me ? "

God grant that the scenes of the Passion, which have
passed before us this day^ in the pages of the blessed
Evangelists, may haunt us too, till we yield ourselves
entirely and for good to God. There is no repentance in
the grave, or pardon offered to the dead ; and there is no
name under heaven given among men whereby we may
be saved,' but the Name of Jesus, our Crucified Saviour,
and He, in His Love and in His Pity, is willing to save
us to the uttermost.

1 Good Friday.

- Acts iv. 12.

SERMON yill.

THE APPEAL OF THE CRUCIFIED JESUS.

KOM. X. 21.

But to Israel He saith, A II day long I have stretched forth My hands imto
a disobedient and fjainsa,ying people.

ST. PAUL is quoting the prophet Isaiah ; and Isaiah is
speaking to Israel in the name of God. " But unto
Israel He saith, All daj^ long have I stretched out Mine
Hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people." The
Hebrew word compares Israel to a refractory animal;
and St. Paul dissolves this expression, or the translation
which he uses, into the two words "disobedient" and
"gainsaying." To this people, which knew not how to
obey God, and which continually criticised Him, God
condescends to say that He stretched out His hands.
As applied to a Being without body, parts, or passions,^
this language cannot of course be explained by what it
means in man. The gesture of stretching out the hands
is everywhere understood by human beings ; the phrase is
natural to aU human language. To stretch out the hands
is to make appeal or entreaty with silent imploring
earnestness ; and this appeal God made to His disobedient
and gainsaying people — so says the prophet in substance,
so echoes the apostle — all the day long.

1 Article I.

119

I20

The Appeal of

[Serm.

All the day long ! It is a pregnant expression,
which may well have enlarged its scope with the lapse of
time. It opens one vista to a Jewish prophet ; and an-
other to a Christian Apostle ; and another, it may be, in
practice to iis of to-day.

(a) All the day long ! It was a long day, which lasted
from the work of the great lawgiver in the desert to the
captivity in Babylon: some nine centuries at the least.
They were centuries marked by vicissitudes of success
and failure, of depression and buoyancy ; and as they
passed, one after another, they developed, with new
circumstances, new features in the national character. The
Jew of the later monarchy was in many respects a differ-
ent man from his ancestor who had first crossed the
Jordan. But so far as his resistance to God's will and
contradiction of God's servants went, he was entirely
iinchanged. A later Psalmist could sing : " To-day if
ye hear His voice, harden not your hearts, as in the
provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the
wilderness. When your fathers tempted Me, proved Me,
and saw My work. Forty years long was I grieved with
this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in
their heart, and they have not known My ways." ^ Such
was Israel in the desert, under the eye and guidance of
the great lawgiver ; fresh from the deliverance from the
Egyptian bondage ; fresh from the wonders of Sinai. Such
too was Israel in the Land of Promise, first under the
judges, and then under the kings. The history of this
people viewed from a moral, as distinct from a merely
political standpoint, is a long paroxysm of rebellious
folly. It frivolously threw aside its Divinely appointed

1 Ps. xcv. 8-10.

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government, in order to keep pace with the political
fashions of the Pagan nations around. It drove for a while
the greatest of its monarchs from his throne and capital :
and ten tribes rose in successful insurrection against his
son. It broke up the unity of the covenant race ; and "
then it broke away, first in this direction and then in that,
from the religion of the Covenant. No idolatry seemed to ^
be unwelcome to a race which had learnt the awful Unity
and Spirituality of God. The hateful nature-worship (for
such it was) which Jezebel had imported from Tyre ; the
cruel rites of Moloch, the imposing falsehoods, half
myths, half philosophies, which were popular among the
ruling races on the Euphrates and the Tigris, were pressed
to the heart of the people of revelation ; and at last the
end came. But during all those centuries the God of
Israel had stretched out His Hands in loving entreaty
to the nation which requited Him with disobedience
and contradiction. Sometimes by prophets, sometimes by
great rulers, sometimes by splendid successes, sometimes
by tragical reverses, He bade them feel that He was there,
behind the clouds which seemed to hide Him from them,
— a Providence of unwearied, watchful compassion.

In later ages — when this first day of their history was
over — Israel could bear to be told the truth about its own
ancient perverseness, and the loving and repeated appeals
of God. Eead such a Psalm as the 106th, written
probably by a psalmist of the date of the Captivity, who
has learnt spiritual wisdom in a hard personal experience.
It is little more than a catalogue of alternate sins and
mercies — the sins of Israel, the mercies of God. After an
exulting description of the great deliverance from Egypt,
each offence of Israel in those early days shapes a separate
stanza in the poem ; each offence is graver than the pre-
ceding. They follow in a tragic series : the demand for
quails, the rebellion of Korah, the worship of the golden

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The Appeal of [Serm,

calf, the contempt for the report of the land of promise,
the degrading Baal-peor worship, the friendly rela-
tions with the accursed races of Canaan ; ending in the
guilt of even human sacrifices. And then the history is
summarised ;

"Their enemies oppressed tbem :
And had them in subjection ;
Many a time did He deliver them,

But they rebelled against Him with their own inventions

And were brought down in their wckedness.

Nevertheless, when He saw their adversity,

He heard their complaint.

He thought upon His covenant, and pitied them

According unto the multitude of His mercies :

Yea, He made all those that led them away captive to pity them. " i

And towards the close of the period the inexhaustible
tenderness of God for Israel is nowhere more fully un-
veiled than in Hosea, the prophet who describes the sins
of the ten tribes with such unsparing accuracy :

" How shall I give thee up, Ephraim ? how shall I
deliver thee, Israel ? how shall I make thee as Admah ?
how shall I set thee as Zeboim ? Mine heart is turned
within me. My repentings are kindled together. I will •
not execute the firmness of j\Iiue anger. I will not return
to destroy Ephraim : for I am God, and not man ; the Holy |
One of Israel in the midst of thee." ^

So it was throughout : Israel's sin, followed by God's
pleading love and pardoning mercy — not once or twice,
but again and again, until at last the very flower of the
nation was drafted away for a while into the dark prison
of Babylon ; and here once more, on a greater scale than
ever, the same cycle of sin, warning, pardon, and deliver-
ance was re-enacted. " All the day long have I stretched
out My Hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people."

(yS) All the day long ! The briefer dark day of the
Capti\aty was perhaps more present to the thoughts of

1 Ps. cvi. 41-44. " Hos. xi, 8, 9. I

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123

Isaiah than the long day of Israel's earlier history of
mingled triumphs and reverses. If Isaiah is glancing
backwards he is looking forward too. In the last twenty-
seven chapters of his prophecy he has his eye upon all
that will pass in Babylon long after he himself has been
gathered to his fathers. Across the increasing degrada-
tion and final catastrophe of the intervening period, he
sees the captives at home in the great heathen city.
Some indeed may sit down and weep by its waters when
they remember Zion ; hanging up their harps upon the
trees that are therein, and refusing to charm the ear of the
conqueror with the songs of Zion, — the Lord's song, in a
strange land.^ Some may say, with that great captive who
wrote Psalm cxix., " It is good for me that I have been
in trouble, that I may learn Thy statutes." ^ But with a
large majority it is otherwise. They are thoroughly at
their ease in this metropolis of Pagan magnificence and
crime ; accommodating themselves with facile readiness
to the habits and morals of their masters ; forgetting
Jerusalem ; forgetting the faith of their forefathers. Isaiah,
as he gazes into the future, descries

" A people that provoketh Me to anger continually to My face ;
That sacriflceth in gardens,
And burneth incense upon altars of brick ;
Which remain among the graves,
And lodge in the monuments ;
Which eat swine's flesh,

And broth of abominable things is in their vessels :
Which say, Stand by thyself, come not near to me ;
For I am holier than thou."^

God has been stretching out His Hands to these men,
in judgments which, hard as they were, were an earnest
of mercy ; but suffering seems to have said as little to
Israel as its brighter day of glory and success. God has
other appeals in store ; prophets like Daniel, statesmen

J Ps. cxxxvii. 1-4. 2 2b. cxix. 71. ^ Isa. Ixv. 3-5.

124

The Appeal of

[Serm.

like Ezra, will speak in His Name : immense political
catastrophes, like that which made the Persian kings
masters of the East, will be a stretching out of the Hands
of God to Israel. But Israel has retained or recovered
little of its ancient self : nothing, it would almost seem,
except its self-righteousness. It has no reverence for the
Divine Law, no submissive silence with which to listen to
the Divine Voice. The prophet exclaims, almost in de-
spair, in his Master's Name, "All the day long have I
stretched out My Hands to a disobedient and gainsaying
people."

(7) All the day long ! St. Paul finds the expression
ready to his hand in the page of Isaiah ; and for St. Paul
it means that new epoch which, when he writes, has
already opened upon the world. " The day," in St. Paul's
sense, is the day or age of the Messiah ; the years which
have passed since Christ and His Apostles have spoken
to Israel. When St. Paul writes, indeed, a generation of
Jews has already grown up to manhood since the Eesur-
rection and Ascension of Jesus Christ : a generation of
those lost sheep of the House of Israel, to whom alone
our Lord proclaimed He was, in the first instance, sent.^
What has become of this generation, or of their immediate
predecessors — what, I ask, has become of it — as it listens
to the Divine Message, as it gazes on the outstretched
Hands of God ? " There is a remnant," says the Apostle
in reply, like that in Elijah's day, saved " according to
the election of grace. But of the great majority he adds:
" The rest were blinded, or hardened;"^ they repeat under
new circumstances the obduracy of the Egyptian Pharaoh.
They have seen or heard of the miracles of Christ ; they
have felt the force of His appeal to prophecy, to history,
to conscience. That Loving Providence, Who has watched
so forbearingly over centuries of disobedience and scorn,

1 St. Matt. XV. 24. - Rom. xi. 2-5. ^ R. -j.

VIII]

the Crucified Jesus.

has at last taken Flesh and become visible, and exchanged
the secret appeal of ages for the tones of a human Voice :
" 0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killest the prophets, and
stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I
have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather
her chickens iinder her wings, but ye would not ! " And
then He adds : " Behold, your house is left unto you
desolate." ^ He again comes to His own, and His own
receive Him not.- Throughout the day of His ministerial
life He stretches out the hands of compassion and entreaty
to a disobedient and gainsaying people. They disobey
and they malign Him ; He is in league (they say) with
Beelzebub ; ^ He is a Samaritan, and has a devil.^ And
when He is gone it fares with the servants as it had fared
with the Master. Stephen, before his Jewish judges,
exclaims that Israel is at least true to its history : it is
rebellious and gainsaying to the end. " Ye stiff-necked
and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist
the Holy Ghost : as your fathers did, so do ye. Which
of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted ? and
they have slain them which shewed before of the coming
of the Just One ; of Whom ye have been now the
betrayers and murderers."^ After His conversion, after
those rude experiences of Jewish bitterness and violence
which he encountered in almost every city where he
preached the Faith of Christ — and which he describes so
vividly in his first letter to the Thessalonian Church — St.
Paul saw that Isaiah's words had not yet lost their force ;
that it was still true that God was stretching out His
hands more earnestly, more persuasively, than ever before,
and to a people which was fixed, as it seemed, for the
most part, and fixed determinedly, in disobedience and
contradiction.

1 St. Matt, xxiii. 37, 38. = St. .John i. 11. 3 gt. Matt. xii. 24.
■» St. John viii. 48. ^ ^.^ts vii. 51, 52.

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The Appeal of [Serm.

(S) All the day long ! There was oue day, of twenty-
four hours, withm this last period, unlike any other before
or since, and it is more than probable that St. Paul had
this day in his mind when he quoted the words of Isaiah.
You know, brethren, what I mean : the day of the Passion;
the day of Calvary. Prom the first moment of our
Lord Jesus Christ's mental Agony in the Garden on the
preceding evening begins this supreme appeal to the heart
and conscience of Israel and of the world; and it lasts until
He has bowed His Head at three o'clock in the afternoon,
and given up the Ghost. It lasts through the Agony and
Bloody Sweat, through the treason of the false apostle,
through the details of the arrest by the armed mob ; it is
eloquent for all who have ears to hear, as the Divine
Prisoner is brought before Annas and Caiaphas ; as He is
spat upon and buffeted in the palace of the High Priest ;
as, denied by the first Apostle, He is led away to Pilate,
and sent from Pilate to Herod, and mocked by Herod, as
if He, the Eternal Wisdom, were a fool, and sent back to
Pilate. This appeal, I say, becomes more and more urgent
and impassioned, as He Who makes it is rejected in favour
of the robber Barabbas, is publicly scourged by the Pagan
magistrate, is crowned with thorns, robed in purple rags,
and invested with a reed for His sceptre, and shown,
already covered with wounds and blood, to the angry
populace. Nor does it cease as He is condemned to die; as
He carries His Cross along the Way of Sorrows to the place
of death ; as they nail Him to it, and Lift Him up on it be-
tween earth and heaven. Nay, rather, as early teachers of
His Church have felt — it may suffice to name Origen and
Augustine — at that moment, and for the three hours
which follow, Isaiah's words are fulfilled as never before.
For now these Hands — the Hands of Providence and
Compassion — are literally stretched forth upon the Cross ;
the Divine Attributes which have watched over Israel's

VIII] the Crucified Jesus.

127

destinies are become visible in the Incarnate Son. God's
relations with the human history of fifteen hundred years,
and of the centuries whicli are to follow, are epitomised into
a short day. Now, as before, He stretches out His Hands ;
it is His own act, though others are empowered to carry it
out. Others nail Him to the Cross, and yet He can say,
" No man taketh My life from Me, but I lay it down of
Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power
to take it again." ^ Now, as before, His Hands, outstretched
in anguish and death, appeal mutely to a people of dis-
obedience and contradiction. True ! there is the little
group of faithful ones : the Mother in her agony, the beloved
Disciple, the thief who prays for a remembrance at tlie
gate of Paradise, the centurion who owns the Son of God.
But the multitude rage around in coarse, visible, audible
rebellion and blasphemy ; alas ! true to their ancestral
spirit. The chief priests and the people vie with each other
in the insults which they offer. " Thou that destroyest
the temple, and buildest it in three days, save Thyself.""^
"He saved others. Himself He cannot save."^ His
dying Eye looked down upon a surging mass of rebellion
and contradiction. Israel at the foot of the Cross was what
Israel had been throughout the ages ; in the wilderness,
in Babylon : and over this unhappy race tlie Divine Sufferer
must cry, " All day long have I stretched out My hands
to a disobedient and gainsaying people."

And we too, brethren, have our place, whatever it
be, somewhere on Mount Calvary. As St. Paul told the
Galatians, many years after the event, " Before your eyes
Jesus Christ is evidently set forth crucified, among you." *

1 St. John X. 18.
3 St. Mark xv. 31.

• St. Mark xv. 29, 30.
Gal. iii. i.

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The Appeal of [Serm.

Christ crucified belongs to no one age or place. For true
Christian faith time and place are not of much account.
Faith bridges over the intervening lands and seas, and
lives on the holy sites where Jesus was born, and died,
and rose, and ascended into Heaven. Faith leaps across
the centuries at a bound ; the modern period, the middle
ages, the primitive times. Faith sees and experiences over
again all that the Apostles saw and experienced. Then
faith detaches Christ crucified, if I may so say, from^eo-
_graphy and from chronology, and thrones Him in the
Christian consciousness where He is independent of the
local associations of space and of the sequence of time ;
where He hangs, as it were, for all time between earth and
heaven on the Tree of shame, in awful but glorious isola-
tion, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.^
What then is the appeal which Jesus Christ makes, with
His Hands stretched forth upon the Cross, to the hearts of
us Christians ? It is twofold.

(a) It is an appeal addressed to our moral sense on be-
half of God's standard of holiness as against the laxity or
sin of man. And He makes this appeal to us by the force
of His own Example. Brethren, there are two methods
of teaching duty : by word of mouth or precept, and by
personal conduct or example.

The first is necessary, indispensable ; but the second
is more effective than the first. Teaching by precept is
a method common to the saints and the philosophers.
Teaching by example is a high prerogative of the saints.
Teaching by precept begins with the understanding, and
may or may not reach the heart. Teaching by example
begins with the heart, and the understanding cannot
fail to learn its lesson at a glance.

Now Jesus Christ our Lord used both methods. Be-
tween the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Discourse

1 Rev. xiii. 8.

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129

in the Supper-Room He was continually teaching by
word of mouth ; sometimes multitudes, sometimes single
souls ; sometimes His disciples, sometimes the Jews ; now
those who listened, and again those who refused to listen.
" Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, and
there a little,"^ as men could bear the light of Heaven —
this was His method. But side by side with the method
of precept He employed the method of example. All
through His life He reinforced His precepts by the
eloquence of His conduct ; but He gathered up all these
lessons, or the most difficult of them, into one supreme
appeal to the dormant moral sense in man, when He
raised Himself on the Cross and stretched out His Arms
to die.

And what are the excellencies upon which this Cruci-
fied Teacher lays most stress ? They are chiefly, brethren,
what we call the passive virtues. Not that He would
depreciate the active virtues which Pagans admired and
practised; temperance, justice, courage, generosity. But
there were other virtues which the old heathen world did
not deem virtues at all, but only half-vices, only poor-
spiritedness and weakness, and of the beauty of which
the Jews themselves made small account. Such are the
two which the Collect of to-day mentions as especially
taught us by the Passion of Christ, humility and patience.
Yes, humility, so hard for us to learn, is taught us by
Him Who, being in the Form of God, did not claim other
than His own in claiming equality with God, " yet made
Himself of no reputation, and took on Him the form of a
slave, and was made in the likeness of man, and bein"-
found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and
became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."-
And patience — so necessary, sooner or later, for all of us,
if we would be " perfect and entire, wanting nothing " ^ —

1 Isa. x.vviii. 11. - Pliil. ii. 6-8. » St. James i. 4.

I30

The Appeal of

[Serm.

when He Who might have prayed to His Father, and pre-
sently been sent more than twelve legions of angels,^
" was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before
his shearers is dumb, so He opened not His mouth : " ^
when He, the alone Immaculate, when He was reviled,
reviled not again, when He suffered, threatened not, but
committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously.^
And, closely akin to this, resignation to the Divine Will.
The words in the garden, " Not My will but Thine be
done,"* answer to the words of prophecy : " In the volume
of the book it is written of Me, that I should fulfil Thy
Will, 0 my God ; I am content to do it and thus all is
surrendered without reserve — reputation, friends, comfort,
life. Not, as I have hinted, that Christ on the Cross
teaches only passive virtue. Of the Seven last Words,
one teaches us to work and pray for our enemies ; ^ a
second, to be considerate towards those who go wrong ;^ a
third, to be dutiful to our parents a fourth, to thirst for
the salvation of others ; ^ a fifth, to pray fervently when
under a sense of desolation a sixth, to persevere till we
have finished what God has given us to do in life ; and
the last, to commit ourselves, by a conscious act, both in
life and death, into the Hands of God.^^

(P) Secondly, Jesus Christ, with His Hands stretched
forth upon the Cross, makes an appeal to our sense of
what He has done for us.

Why is He there ? Not for any demerit of His own ;
not only, or chiefly, to teach us virtue. He is tliere because
otherwise we are lost ; because we must be " reconciled
to God by the Death of His Son." He is there because
He has first, by taking our nature, made Himself our

1 St. Matt. xxvi. 53. - Isa. liii. 7. 3 j gt. Pet. ii. 23.

St. Luke xxii. 42. » Ps. xl. 10. " St. Luke xxiii. 34.

7 St. Luke xxiii. 43. « St. John xix. 26, 27. f R. 28.
10 St. Mark xv. 34. n St. John xix. 30.

12 St. Luke xxiii. 46. is Rom. v. 10.

VIII] the Crucified Jesus.

Representative, and then, in this capacity, is bearing a
penalty which, in virtue of those moral laws whereby
the universe is governed, is due to our sins. It is no
arbitrary or capricious substitution, whereby He thus
suffers, " the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us
to God." ^ For He already represents our human nature,
just as Adam represented it : He acts for us as a parent
might act for a young family : He suffers for us as a
parent would suffer for his child. We claim our share in
this His representative Nature by that act of adhesion
which we call faith ; and He answers and ratifies our
claim by His gifts of grace through the Christian Sacra-
ments. Thus when He suffers, we too suffer by implica-
tion ; when He dies, we share His Death ; when He
makes satisfaction to the eternal moral laws for the mis-
deeds of that nature which He has assumed, we who
wear it, and have been the real culprits, make satisfac-
tion too. " God made Him to be sin for us. Who knew
no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God
in Him." 2 And thus we are "justified freely by His
grace, through the redemption that is in Christ .Jesus,
Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation, through
faith in His blood."

This is that unveiling of the inmost Heart of the All-
merciful — the mystery of the Atonement for sin. It is
as opening this mystery to the eyes of Christians — as
inviting them all and each to come and share it — that
Jesus Christ stretches forth His Hands upon the Cross.
" Come unto Me," He says, by this silent but expressive
action, " all ye that labour and are heavy laden with your
sins, and I will give you rest." * It is the appeal of love :
love the most tender, the most practical, the most dis-
interested. The most tender : for surely greater love hath

' I St. Pet, iii. i8.
Koiii. iii. 24, 25.

- 2 Cor. V. 2T.
^ St. Matt. xi. 28.

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The Appeal of

[Serm.

no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends^ — especially considering that " when we were yet
sinners, Christ died for ns."^ The most practical: since it
was " love not in word, but in deed and in truth ; " ^ not
merely profession, or merely feeling, but after the fashion
of true love, the gift of self ; and the gift of the best that
self can give, the gift of life. The most disinterested ;
for we could offer nothing to provoke, nothing to reward
it ; we could and can give nothing that He has not first
given us. It is to our sense of this love, so strong, so
practical, so disinterested, that He appeals : can He appeal
in vain ?

Surely, when we review our lives seriously, that which
must chiefly strike most men is God's persevering, over-
shadowing, ever-pleading mercy. Why has He given us
life at all ? Why has He, by His free grace, made us,
when we could do nothing for ourselves, members of
Christ, children of God, heirs of the kingdom of heaven ?*
Why should we have been taught to repeat the Creed of
His Cliurch, to read His Word, to think about Him as an
Example and a Saviour, while we were young ? Or, if it
has been otlierwise with us, and we have only known
Him at all in later life, and are only beginning to know
Him now, why has He singled us out for this distinguish-
ing mercy ; roused us suddenly and sharply from some
dream of worldliness or sin ; struck down some near
relation, wife or child ; cut off utterly some source of gain
or amusement ; bid us see the lightning of His judg-
ments scorch some sinner at our side who was no worse
than we ; bid us gaze on some servant of His own, already
bright with the lustre of His glory, who has had no
greater advantages than we, or has had fewer or less ; or
lias guided us, like Augustine, to some one verse in His

1 St. .Toliii XV. 13.
- I St. John iii. 18.

- Roin, V. 8.
The Church Catechism.

VIII] the Crucified Jestis.

133

Word ; or has spoken to us by the voice of a friend,
who little knew the full meaning of his utterance, some
word which has pierced to the depths of our souls, and
made life already a different thing to us ? What is all
this but the perpetual stretching forth of the Hands of
the Crucified during all the past years of life, as we look
back on it — the incessant appeal of the Uncreated Mercy ?
And how has it found, how has it left, us ? It is still
true of us, as of the Jews of old, that all the long day of
life Christ has stretched out His Hands to Christians who
bear His Name, but who, like their Jewish predecessors,
are a disobedient and gainsaying people.

III.

In conclusion, there are two lessons which we may
endeavour to make our own.

1. One is particular. Jesus Christ stretching out His
Hands in patient compassion on the Cross is a model for
all Christians who are in any position of authority. Not
only for monarchs, or statesmen, or great officials, but for
that large number of us who, in various ways, have others
dependent on us, or under our government and influence.
Some of us are parents, and liave the most sacred duty of
bringing up our children ; others arc schoolmasters, and
have volmitarily undertaken to share that duty; others
are heads of " houses of business," and have many clerks
and young people under their control ; others are masters
or mistresses of families, and have domestic servants
about them. Like the centurion in the Gospel, a great
number of Christians are between the two extremes of
society, between those who do nothing but command, and
those who do nothing but obey ; they are men under
authority, having others under them, and they say to this
one. Go, and he goeth, and to another. Come, and he cometh,

134

The Appeal of

[Serm.

and to their servant. Do this, and he doeth it.^ It may be
but a little brief authority in which we are dressed, but it
is authority; and as such, like that of the Queen upon her
earthly throne, it is ennobled as a radiation from that
Divine Authority which reigns on the Throne of Heaven.
It may be little enough in itself, as measured by our
social scales of greatness, but be it little or great, it is
charged with responsibility ; it has a bearing — more or
less direct and intimate — upon the eternal destinies of
human beings with whom God, in His providence, has
thrown us thus into contact. And here, I say, the model
for Christian parents, masters, employers, governors, is
rather Christ upon His Cross, in anxious pain, stretching
out the arms of entreaty and compassion, than Christ
upon His Throne finally dispensing the awards of judgment.
Mere right, mere " law," mere insistance upon mcum and
tuuvi, may be all very well for a man of the world, now
as in the days of Paganism. The children of the Crucified
have caught sight, or ought to have caught sight, of a
higher ideal. The love which will not take account of
dulness or stupidity, not even of stubbornness and perverse-
ness ; the love which anticipates the disobedience and the
gainsaying, yet stretches out its hands persistently in
tender and incessant invitation ; the love which is not
baulked and chilled by one failure or by two, but which
goes on as if it had not failed at all, stretching out its
hands in acts of kindness and consideration; the love
which gets no interest for its outlay of pain, and grief,
and care, which yet shrouds its disappointment as it
whispers after the Apostle, " The n)ore abundantly I love
you the less I am loved : " '-^ this is what Christians in any
position of authority should aim at in dealing with those
who depend on them. If all their efforts seem failures ;
if their exertions and their self-denials seem to bring in

1 St. Matt. viii. 8, 9. -2 Cor. xii. 15.

VIII] the Crucified Jesus.

135

nothing but a fresh measure of misunderstanding and
scorn; what is this but association with the Divine Sufferer
on the hill of Calvary, stretching out His Hands through
the long hours of His Passion to a disobedient and gain-
saying people ? Between His case and theirs there is
indeed one point of difference, the importance of which is
incalculable. Full as His Heart was of tenderness towards
His murderers, He needed no mercy for Himself; the
thought never could have occurred to His Human Soul
that He too would be judged by the measure which He
dealt out to others. With us — with the highest and the
best — how utterly otherwise is it ! How certain is it that
" with what measure we mete it shall be measured iinto us
again " !^ For a Christian to be forbearing and considerate
is hardly disinterested, for, if he be other than this, he
cannot hope for the merciful forbearance of God.

2. The other lesson is general. Jesus Christ stretch-
ing out His Hands upon the Cross is surely a warn-
ing to us at all times, but especially at a season like
this. Here we are, on Palm Sunday, at the very
gate of the most solemn Week in the whole year !
How many Christians who spent this Week with us last
year before the Cross of Christ, have since then passed
into the eternal world ' How many of ourselves, it may
be, will never live to see another Holy Week ; will look
back from their place in eternity, — be it what it may, —
upon this very week as an opportunity which will then
have gone for ever. Who knows how it will be with each
one of us ? Brethren, Christ crucified does indeed
stretch His Hands in entreaty and compassion, ready and
able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by
Him ,2 all the long day of life. While there is life, there is
hope, there is opportunity, there is heaven and happiness
within reach of faith, of seriousness of purpose, of

1 St. Matt. vii. 2. 2 Heb. vii, 25.

136 The Appeal of [Serm.

simpleuess of heart. But the longest day has its evening;
and after the evening comes the darkness of the night.
Christ crucified, it has been said, has no Kedemptive
relations with the dead : He has either redeemed them, or
they are beyond the reach of Eederaption. As the soul
passes the gate of eternity, the Pierced Hands of Christ,
Which during the long day of life have been outstretched
^ upon the Cross, seem to detach themselves, and to fold
together as if for judgment.

' ' There is no repentance in the grave,
Nor pardon offer'd to the dead."

Carry this thought, I pray you, into the solemnities of
the coming Week. Begin now, on Palm Sunday, and
accompany your Saviour through each stage of His bitter
Passion, with the thought of eternity clearly before your
souls. If the exhortations to which you listen from
human teachers rouse conscience during these sacred
hours into activity ; if the scenes on which you dwell, — the
scenes of woe and of victory, the Words, the Wounds, the
darkened sky, the awful silence, — speak to your souls as
if there had come over them some breath from another
and a distant world ; if, as on Tuesday next,^ human art
gives guidance or impetus to hallowed feeling, and, for a
while, you lose sight of the material and transient present,
in the keener sight of that world which is beyond sense,
and which does not pass away, — 0 pray that these higher
glimpses, emotions, convictions, may not die away like the
vast array of unfruitful feelings which make up so large
a part of life ; pray that they may become resolutions,
starting-points for a new, a changed, a higher level of
existence, the reverse of past years of disobedience and
contradiction. AVhat will it avail to have thought much,
felt much, hoped for much, in Passion-tide, if at Easter

1 The reference is to the special service hehl in St. Paul's Cathedral on the
Tuesday Evening of Holy Week, when Bach's " Passiou-Music " is rendered.

VIII]

the Crucified Jesus.

137

all, or nearly all, is forfeited, — if we disobey the Will and
gainsay the Truth of our Crucified Master, just as before ?
Why should He, the dying Son of God, almost year by
year, have to repeat the complaint of centuries over
Christendom, over Christian souls, over your soul and
mine, " All the day long have I stretched out My hands
unto a disobedient and gainsaying people " I It need not
be so, since He is more than willing to help us ; it
must not be so, unless all is to be irretrievably lost.

SERMON IX.

THE SOLITUDES OF THE PASSION.

Ps. xxii. II.

0 (JO nut from Me, for trouble is hard at hand, and there is none to help Me.

rpHIS is one of the cries of the Ideal or Superhuman
-»- Sufferer, of Whose agonies, both of mind and body,
we have so complete a picture in Psalm xxii. Many
attempts have been made to explain this Psalm by some
of the circumstances of the life of David, or the life of
Hezekiah, or of other persons in Jewish history who have
combined eminent piety with great misfortunes. But
these attempts, one and all, have been unsuccessful.
The Psalm describes a kind and degree of suffering of
which we have no records in the Old Testament, and to
which, most assuredly, nothing in the known life of
David at all corresponds. Yet there is no doubt whatever
— as the best scholars agree — that the Psalm is from
David's own hand ; and the question is how David could
have ever brought himself to write as though he were
himself feeling and thinking as he here describes. The
answer is that the picture of a Great Sufferer presented
itself to David's soul ; took possession of it — such entire
possession that (as in the highest natural poetry may
sometimes happen) the writer forgot himself, and lost
himself in the subject which possessed him. The words
were David's words, but the thoughts, the experiences, the

13S

The Solitudes of the Passion. 139

hopes, the fears, the anguish, the exultation, were those
of another and a higher than David. David was but a
copyist ; David was writing down, for the good of the
times to come, what, in his illuminated spirit, he saw
with his eyes and heard with his ears. His picture of an
Ideal Sufferer was laid xxp among the sacred writings of
Israel ; but many centuries had to pass before men could
know what it meant, and to Whom it referred.

When Jesus, our Divine Lord, hung dying upon the
Cross, He interpreted this Psalm of Himself by using its
first verse as the fourth of those Seven last Words which
He uttered in those solemn hours : " Eli, Eli, lama
sabachthani ? " " My God, My God, why hast Thou for-
saken Me ? " as uttered by the Redeemer in the darkest
hour of His Sufferings, give the key to all that follows.
Henceforth we Christians read the Psalm as if repeated
throughout by Jesus in His Passion or by Jesus on the
Cross. As His dying Eye surveys the multitude of human
beings, in whom an unreasoning hate of truth and goodness
had for the time quelled all other thoughts and emotions,
in whom the wild beast that is latent in human nature
had asserted his sway with frightful power, Jesus might
say, " Many oxen are come about Me : fat bulls of Bashan
close Me in on every side. They gape upon Me with their
mouths, as it were a ramping and a roaring lion. Many
dogs are come about Me ; and the council of the wicked
layeth siege against Me." ^ As He glances down at His
mangled Body, His pierced Hands and Feet; as He feels
the parching thirst, the inward collapse, the exhaustion of
approaching death ; He murmurs, " I am poured out like
water, and all My bones are out of joint : My heart also
in the midst of My body is even like melting wax. My
strength is dried up like a potsherd, and My tongue
cleaveth to My gums : and Thou shalt bring Me into

' Ps. xxii. 12, 13, 16.

140 The Solitudes of the Passion. [Serm.

the dust of death. . . . They pierced My hands and
My feet ; I may tell all My bones." ^ As He listens to the
taxmts which fall upon His ear ; as He watches the doings
of the men who crowd around the foot of the Cross on
which He hangs ; He complains, " They that see Me laugh
Me to scorn ; they shoot out their lips, and shake their
heads, saying, He trusted in God, that He would deliver
Him : let Him deliver Him, if He will have Him. . . .
They stand staring and looking upon Me ; they part My
garments among them, and cast lots upon My vesture."
As He strains the Eye of His Human Soul to gaze into
futurity, to pierce the veil which parts the agony and
desolation of the moment from the triumph and the peace
beyond ; He cries, " The Lord hath not despised, nor
abhorred, the low estate of the poor ; He hath not hid His
face from Him, but when He called unto Him, He heard
Him. My praise is of Thee in the great congregation ;
. . . all the ends of the world shall remember them-
selves, and be turned unto the Lord. . . . My seed
shall serve Him : they shall be counted unto the Lord for
a generation." ^ The Psalm is throughout written, as if to
order, to describe, as from within, the Sufferings of our
Divine Lord upon the Cross; nowhere else in the Old
Testament does the Holy Spirit more vividly, in a single
composition, " testify beforehand the sufferiugs of Christ,
and the glory that should follow." *

In this Psalm there is one feature of our Lord's Suffer-
ings upon which particular stress is laid ; I mean His
desolation or solitude. It is the keynote of the Psalm ;
the very first words of which complain, " My God, My God,
why hast Thou forsaken Me ? " And it finds expression
again and again ; nowhere, perhaps, more pathetically
than in the cry, " 0 go not from Me, for trouble is hard

Ps. xxii. 14, 15, 17.
Ps. xxii. 24, 25, 27, 31.

- Ih. 7, 8, 17, 18.
•> I St. Peter i. 11.

IX] The Solitttdes of the Passion. 1 4 1

at hand, and there is none to help Me." Some centuries
after David a Figure passed before the soul of the greatest
of the prophets, that shadowed out the same aspect of a
superhuman suffering, but from another point of view. It
was the form of One coming as from Edom, coming with
garments dyed in the vintage of Bozrah — emblems of a
struggle which meant wounds and blood — glorious in His
apparel, His moral apparel of righteousness and mercy,
and travelling in the greatness of His strength.^ And
when the seer gazed intently at this Figure, and asked
who He was, the reply came, " I that speak in righteous-
ness, mighty to save." ^ And when a further question was
ventured, " Why art Thou red in Thine apparel, and Thy
garments like him that treadeth in the winefat?"- it was
answered — as though this was of the essence of the con-
flict— " I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the
people there was none beside Me."^ Yes, in His Sufferings
Jesus was alone ; alone in spirit, though encompassed by
a multitude. In His Passion He experienced a threefold
solitude : the solitude of greatness, the solitude of sorrow,
and the solitude of death.

The loneliness of the great is one of the ironies of
human life. The great are lonely because they are great ;
had tliey peers and companions they would cease to be
what they are in relation to those around them. This
holds good of greatness in all its forms, whether greatness
of station, or greatness of genius, or greatness of character.

(a) Take the word " great " in its most popular but least
warrantable sense. What is the case of the " great " in
station ? The solitude of the throne is proverbial. Not
that the monarch is without companions ; from the

' Isa. Ixiii. I. •-' Ih. 2, 3 11 2.

142

The Solitiides of the Passion.

[Serm.

nature of the case the monarch can command companions
as can no other person in the realm. Xo court in the
world is wanting in deferential ministers of the Eoyal
will, whose business it is to furnish companionship to
Eoyaltj, whose hourly effort is to carry out the wishes of
the Sovereign, and to thwart or screen from his sight all
that may traverse his passing inclinations. But com-
panionship such as this is perfectly compatible with soli-
tude. That free, buoyant intercourse of mind with mind,
of heart with heart, that entire reciprocity of sympathies
which knows no limits save those which are imposed
by truth and charity, is banned by the exacting etiquette
of a court ; is hardly, if at all, possible for the occupants of
a throne. The " divinity which doth hedge a king " has
its drawbacks, and is costly. A monarch is alwaj's more
or less of a solitary ; alone in his joys, alone in his
sorrows ; reverence and envy conspire to deprive him of
his rightful share in the hearts of men around him. And
this solitude of the throne — let us not forget it — is one
reason for the claim of its occupants upon the prayers and
charity of the Church ; this tribute of the best sympathy is
one means of redressing the privations and of lessening the
dangers of a great position, occupied for the public benefit.

Then, again, there is the greatness of genius. Even
when genius unbends, and is fruitful and popular, even
when it ministers to the enjoyment and instruction of
millions, it is by instinct solitary; it lives apart. The
mountain peaks which are the crowning beauty of a vast
and fertile plain purchase theii" prerogative elevation at a
great cost ; they are cold, bleak, inaccessible. Genius
lives in distant realms of thought ; genius lives amidst
flashes and ^aspirations which do not exist for others ; in
the presence of these, it is alone. We may be sure that
a man like Shakespeare was familiar with much which
he never thought of communicating to the quiet, sensible,

IX] The Solitudes of the Passion.

143

commonplace people among whom, for the most part, he
passed his days. In his highest and deepest thought he
was, from the nature of the case, a solitary.

(7) Then there is greatness of character. This is the most
legitimate use of the word ; and this true greatness might
seem at first sight to be very far from solitary, — to be, on
the contrary, unselfish, communicative, beneficent. Un-
doubtedly such greatness draws to itself human hearts,
and wins human interest.

Yet how often are there features in a really noble
character which, when they become plain to the mass of
mankind, repel rather than attract. The unswerving
adherence to known truth ; the resolute sacrifice of im-
mediate advantage to the claims of principle ; the flashes
of severity which radiate from the purest and highest
love, — these are not popular qualities.

History is full of examples of men whose benevolence
and kindliness and activity have at first won general
applause and admiration, but who have been deserted,
hated, denounced, perhaps even put to death, when the
real character of their greatness was discovered. Such
a man was Savonarola. His story has been made familiar
to Englishmen — we may well and gratefully remem-
ber in this place — by the pen of Dean Milman. Savon-
arola, amid imperfections which are inseparable from
our human weakness, was one of the greatest religious
teachers that the world has seen. He aimed, as all
sincerely Christian minds must aim, at carrying Chris-
tian principles into the public and social life of man.
He held that politics might be no less Christian than
personal conduct. The people which had welcomed his
teaching with passionate enthusiasm assisted at his cruel
and ignominious death. Savonarola was too great even
for Florence. And there have been few ages in the
world's history where this lesson has not repeated itself ;

144 The Solitudes of the Passion. [Seem.

aud where integrity of character and elevation of aim
have not experienced the alternate vicissitudes of popular
favour and popular dislike, or even violence. Certainly
our own age and country are not exceptions to the rule.

Now our Lord in His Passion was great in these various
ways. He was indeed, as it seemed, " a worm, and no
man ; a very scorn of men, and the outcast of the
people ; " ^ and yet, as He said before Pilate, He was a
King ; - and He felt, as no other can have felt, the isolation
of His Eoyalty. Then His mental Eye took in vaster
horizons than were even suspected to exist by any around
Him ; He had meat to eat that they knew not of,^ in this
as in so many other ways ; He lived in a sphere of
thought which was for them impossible. And above all,
in character He was not merely courageous, true, dis-
interested, loving — and this in a degree which distanced
the highest excellence around Him — He was that
which no other in human form has been before or
since : He was Sinless. Thus, as He went forth to die.
He was in a solitude created by the very prerogatives of
His Being ; His elevation above His fellows itself cut
Him off from that sympathy which equals can most
effectively give ; and hence one motive of the prayer of
His Human Soul to the Father, " 0 go not from Me, for
trouble is hard at hand, and there is none to help Me."

11.

There is the solitude of greatness ; but there is also
the solitude of sorrow. Certainly sorrow is a link of
human fellowship ; sooner or later, all men suffer ; man
is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.* No con-
dition of life, no variety of temperament, can purchase

1 Ps. xxii. 6. - St. John xviii. 27.

^ St. John iv. 32. Job V. 7.

IX] The Solitudes of the Passion. 145

exemption from this universal law of suffering. To some
it comes as the chastening which is necessary to per-
fection ; to others as the penalty which is due to sin ; but
sooner or later, in whatever shape, it comes to all. Yet,
though suffering is universal, no two men suffer exactly
alike. There is the same individuality in the pain which
each man suffers that there is in his thought and character
and countenance ; no two men, since the world began,
among the millions of sufferers, have repeated exactly the
same experience. This is why human sympathy, even at
its best, is never quite perfect : no one merely human
being can put himself exactly, by that act of moral
imagination which we term sympathy, in all the circum-
stances of another. Each sufferer, whether of bodily or
mental pain, pursues a separate path, encounters peculiar
difficulties, shares a common burden, but is alone in his
sorrow.

" Each in liis hidden sphere of joy or woe
Our hermit spirits dwell." i

Especially was Jesus our Lord solitary in His awful Sorrow.
We may well believe that the delicate sensibilities of His
Bodily Frame rendered Him liable to physical tortures
such as rougher natures can never know. But we know
that the mode of His Death was exceptionally painful.
And yet His bodily Sufferings were less terrible (it might
seem) than the Sufferings of His mind. The Agony in
the Garden was of a character which distances alto^rether
human woe. Our Lord advisedly laid Himself open to
the dreadful visitation ; He embraced it by a deliberate
act; He " began to be sorrowful, and very heavy."- He took
upon Him the burden and misery of human sin, — the sin
of all the centuries that had preceded and that would
follow Him — that He might take it to the Cross and

1 The Christian Year. Hyiini for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity.
- St. Matt. xxvi. 37.

146

The SolitiLcles of the Passion.

[Serm.

expiate it iu Death. As the Apostle says, " He bore our
sins in His own Body on the tree." ^ But the touch of
this burden, which to us is so familiar, to Him was Agony ;
and it drew from Him the Bloody Sweat, which fell from
His forehead on the turf of Gethsemaue, hours before
they crowned Him with the thorns or nailed Him to
the Cross.

Ah, brethren, we endeavour to enter into the solitary
sorrows of the Soul of Jesus, but they are quite beyond
us. We may, at some time in our lives, have found our-
selves in a family circle, when a heavy blow has just fallen
on it, and have noted the efiorts of the younger children
to understand the gloom or misery of theu- elders. The
elders know what has happened. They know that all
upon which the family depends for daUy bread is irretriev-
ably lost. Or they know" that some loved one — a father,
a mother, an eldest child — has just been taken away, it
may be by a swift and terrible catastrophe, and they have
no heart to speak. Or they know, worst of all, that some
misery worse than death, some crushing burden of shame
and sorrow, has fallen on the family through the miscon-
duct of one of its members. And so they sit, silent in
their grief; and the young children gaze wistfully up into
their faces, as if trying to make out what is so strange
and so beyond them, as if Avishiug to sympathise with what
is to them an incomprehensible woe. They are doing
their best ; they are concerned at beholding the sorrowing
faces ; they note the subdued tones, the quiet movements,
the hushed sighs, the darkened room : but alas ■ they are
trying to understand what they cannot understand ; they
are but touching the fringe of a sorrow that is above them.
And so it is, brethren, with all of us, in presence of the
Sorrows of Jesus Christ, expiating the sins of a guilty
world. Before Him we are, indeed, but children ; happy if

1 I St. Peter ii. 24.

IX]

The Solitudes of the Passion.

147

we share their simple and free sympathies, but certainly,
like them, unable to do more than watch, with tender and
reverent awe, a mighty burden of misery which we cannot
hope to comprehend. All that we can do is to lay to heart
thewordswhicli sound everywhere in believing souls around
Gethsemane and Calvary : " Is it nothing to you, all ye
tliat pass by ? behold and see, if there be any sorrow like
unto My sorrow ?" 1

III.

Lastly, there is the solitude of death. Death, when-
ever it comes to any, must be an act in which no other
can share. Even if I die at the same moment with
another, I cannot sympathise with him in the act of dying;
I have no solid reason to presume that each of us would
even be conscious of what is happening to the other.
Death strips from a man all that connects him with that
which is without him ; it is an act in which his conscious-
ness is, from the nature of the case, thrown back upon
itself, and absorbed in that which is occurring to itself.
A dying man may be distracted up to the moment, but not
in the moment, of death. Warm-hearted friends may
press around him ; well-remembered objects may be j)laced
before his failing eyes ; at one deathbed, the prayers of
childhood, at another, so it has been, soft strains of
familiar music, may fall upon the ear. But when the soul,
by a wrench which no experience can anticipate, breaks
away from the bodily organism with Avhicli, since its
creation, it has been so intimately linked, it enters upon
a lonely path, which may, indeed, be brightened by the
voices and the smiles of angels, but into which no human
sympathy can follow.

Few things, my brethren, are so tragic as the sharp

' Luiii. i. 12.

148 The Solitudes of the Passion. [Serm.

contrast between the crowd that may surround a dying
man, and the necessary solitude of the soul in death.
When the cholera, many years ago, struck its victims
in a crowded drawing-room, the world was hushed with a
passing awe ; but the same contrast may be found under
more accustomed circumstances. What can be more
pathetic, for instance, than the deathbed of the French
statesman who played so great a part under the Eepublic
and the First Empire, and who lived down into the boy-
hood of those among us who are yet in middle life?
Talleyrand passed the last forty-eight hours of his life
sitting on the side of his bed — he could not bear to lie
down — and leaning forward on two servants, who were
relieved every two hours. In that posture he received,
on the morning of the day on which he died. King Louis
Philippe and his Queen ; and he never for a moment, we are
told, forgot what was due to the etiquette of the Court :
he received his visitors with the distinction and the
attentions to which they were accustomed. Outside his
room, in the antechamber, all that was distinguished in
the society of Paris was assembled ; Talleyrand's death
was viewed as a political and social event of the first
importance. Politicians, old and young, even grey -haired
statesmen, crowded the hearth and talked with animation;
while young men and young women exchanged bright
compliments that formed a painful contrast with the deep
groans of the dying man in the adjoining room. Talley-
rand, who was first a bishop and then an apostate from
Christianity, made some sort of reconciliation with
Heaven : ( rod only knows its real value. But no sooner
had the long agony terminated in death than (to use the
words of the narrative) it might have been supposed that
a flight of rooks was leaving the mansion ; such was the
eagerness with which each rushed away to be the first to
tell the news in the particular circle of which he or she

IX] The Solitudes of the Passion. 149

was the oracle : and the corpse of Talleyrand, lying in
those deserted rooms, was a visible emblem of tlie solitude
of the soul in the act of death.

Nor can we refer to such a subject to-day without
reminding ourselves that only three days since death has
claimed as its own a man whom the Church of England
will always honour with affectionate reverence.^ It is for
those who had the happiness of knowing him intimately
to say, as no doubt they will say, what Bishop Selwyn
was in his private life and conversation ; what were the
thoughts, the enthusiasms, that gave impulse and shape
to such a splendid life. We, who have reverenced him
from afar, can merely note that his was a figure of
Apostolic proportions ; that he was one of that compara-
tively small band of men who reproduce, in our age of
clouded faith and softness of manners, the virtues and the
force by which long centuries ago the Christian Church
was planted on the ruins of heathendom. Surely many
of us have accompanied him with the reverent sympathy
of our prayers, in his last hours of pain and weakness : nor
can we doubt that for him the solitude of death has been
brightened by all that our gracious Master has in store
for those who, by their words and their lives, turn many
to embrace His righteousness and His truth.^

In the Death of our Lord Himself it might be supposed
that this sense of solitude would be escaped. Living in
hourly communion with the Father, and surrounded by
liosts of angel guardians, how, we may ask, could He taste
r)f the solitude of death ? "Was not His Human Nature so
united to His Divinity that even in death the Union was
not forfeited ? And how is this reconcilable with the
supposition that He experienced the loneliness of dying,
as we men experience it ?

' George Augustus Sehvyn, Bishop of Linhtield (and previously Bishop of
New Zealaiul), died April llth, 1878. Dan, .\ii. 3.

1 50 The Solitudes of the Passion. [Serm.

The answer is that our Lord, by a deliberate act, became
" obedient unto death." ^ Whatever might have been the
law of His Being — as Sinless Man, united to a Higher
Nature — He did not, if I may dare so to say, claim its
privileges. He laid Himself open without reserve or stint
to all the ills to which our flesh is heir, without at all
excepting its last and lowest humiliation. He selected
as a mode of dying that which conspicuously involved
most pain and shame ; and He would not most assuredly
defeat His purpose by sparing Himself that accompani-
ment of death, which causes so much apprehension to us
sinful men — its solitariness. He might have prayed to
His Father for twelve legions of angels ; ' but He would be
alone. He might have enjoyed vmceasingly the joy of
those who always behold the Face of the Father in heaven f
but He willed to share the agony of the souls who cry in
their last moments — some, we may be sure, every day that
passes — " My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me
He submitted Himself to all those elements of our nature
which sterner characters affect to scorn ; to its sense of
dependence, to its craving for sympathy, to its conscious-
ness of weakness. " 0 go not from me, for trouble is hard
at hand, and there is none to help me," is the natural
language of the feeblest sufferer in the poorest lodging in
London ; but it was also the language of our Divine
Saviour, contemplating, with true human apprehension,
the loneliness of approaching death.

Yes ! when as on this day He rode in triumph towards
the Holy City, surrounded by a great multitude who
cried " Hosanna," and spread the branches of the palms and
the garments which they wore along the path of His
advance,''' even at this moment of seeming triumph He
was really alone. He knew what was before Him ; the

1 Phil. ii. 8. St. Matt. xxvi. 53. 3 Ih. xviii. 10.

St. Matt, .xxvii. 46. Ih. xxi. 1-9.

IX] The Solitudes of the Passion. 1 5 1

sui'fring multitude around was for Him as if it was not.
We may see men in Cheapside, in the middle of the day,
when it is difficult to force a passage along the footway
from this Cathedral to the Bank, in whose faces some
unconcealed care or some absorbing passion proclaims
their virtual solitude amid the crowd. " Never less alone
than when most alone " is the motto of the soul as it gazes
upwards towards the heavens ; " never more alone than
when least alone " is the motto of the soul when, under
a great stress of pain or doubt, it looks down towards
the earth. The crowds which sang "Hosanna" as Christ
entered Jerusalem, and the crowds which cried " Crucify
Him," as He passed along the Way of Sorrows, touched
but the surface of His awful Solitude, as He rode on, as
He walked on, to die.

This solitude of our Lord in His Passion is surely full
of comfort for us. It shows us first that at the moment of
death, and before it, the best Christians may experience a
desolation of spirit which is no real gauge of their true
condition before God. Many of the best men in the
Christian Church have done so ; and it has been supposed
by those who do not sufficiently reflect upon the teaching
of the Passion that this desolation of the soul must needs
imply its rejection by God. No conclusion can be less
warranted. The confident assumptions of a deathbed
^vhich follows upon a life of disloyalty to known duty or
truth may indeed be onl)' physical illusions : but the
anguish of a saintly soul, which fears, on the threshold of
eternity, that God has left it to itself, is but a token of
conformity to the Divine Saviour.

And, secondly, we see in the solitude of Jesus Christ
crucified a warrant of His sympathy with the dying.
'• In that He Himself has suffered, being tempted. He is
able to succour them that are tempted." ^ Nothing that we

J Hell. ii. 18.

152 The Solitudes of the Passion.

may experience, in His good will, no anguish of soul, no
weariness or torture of body, has been unexplored by Him
Who overcame all the sharpness of death before He opened
the kingdom of heaven to the great company of the faith-
ful. May He take pity upon us. His v/eak and erring
children, and suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains
of death, to fall from Him.^ May He " look upon us with
the eyes of His mercy, give us comfort, and sure confidence
in Him, defend us from the danger of the enemy," - and
so bring us to our eternal home, for His own infinite
merits.

1 Prayer in the Order for the Burial of the Dead.
- Prayer in tlie Order for the Visitation of the Sick.'

SERMON X.

THE SILENCE OF JESUS.

St. John xix. 9.

Pilate ftaith unto Jenus, Whence art Thou 1 Hut Jesux [/are him no answr.

^ Passion of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ ; and
among its various and awful incidents none is more
calculated to rivet our earnest attention than the silence
which He observed at certain times during His trial.
This silence was not by any means unbroken ; but it was
so deliberate — we may dare to say, so peremptory — that it
has clearly a meaning that is all its own. AYe cannot but
recall the contrast which is presented by St. Paul before the
Sanhedrim,^ before Felix,- before Agrippa.-'' To St. Paul,
a trial in which his liberty or his life is at stake is above
all things a great missionary opportunity, which lie im-
proves at once, and to the utmost of his power ; and we
remember liow, as he reasons of "righteousness, temperance,
and judgment to come," the tables are strangely turned,
and Felix, the representative of earthly justice, trembles
before his prisoner.* To us, in our short-sightedness, it may
have seemed that something else than silence might be
looked for from the Divine Master ; from His tender
charity for the souls of men ; from the deep emotion

enter on the nearer consideration of the

' Acts xxiii. 1-9.
A(;ts xxvi. 1-29.

'- lb. xxiv. 1-25.
Ih. xxiv. 25.

154

The Silence of Jesus.

[Serm.

which, as we know from what passed in Gethsemane,
moved the depths of His Human Soul. But no ! He is
sUent. His judge asks Him, \Mience art Thou ? And
instead of regarding the question as affording Him an
opening for proclaiming the momentous truth, Jesus
gave him no answer.

If we try to place ourselves, by an effort of sympa-
thetic imagination, in the position of one of our fellow-
creatures placed on trial for his life, and before judges at
whose hands he had little to look for in the way of con-
sideration or mercy, we can understand that the silence
of a perfectly innocent man might be natural, for more
reasons than one. Our English law does not allow a
prisoner to be cross-questioned ; but the practice of other
countries is different, and the records of the French
Pievolutionary tribunals during the Terror of 1793-94
supply instances of what I mean. Instances, indeed,
might be multiplied to almost any extent : since, both in
its habit of inflicting undeserved suffering, and in its way
of meeting what has to be endured, human nature remains
the same from age to age.

First of all, an innocent prisoner on his trial might be
unable to say anything out of sheer bewilderment. For
the first time in his life he finds himself in a position im-
like any he had ever distinctly pictured to himself before.
He knows that he is in danger, although his conscience
tells him that he is innocent of the alleged crime. He is sur-
rounded by officials who are practised hands at manipulat-
ing e\'idence, whereas he himself is only a novice. He sees
danger everywhere — sees it in quarters where it does not
at all exist ; he loses the control of his judgment, of his
common-sense, of his faculties generally ; his head reels,
he only perceives at intervals what is going on. He

The Silence of Jesus.

155

cannot remember what he would ; he cannot keep his
feelings from intruding themselves boisterously into
matters where clear, cold thought is above all things
wanted ; and so his efforts to think become irregular and
turbid; he cannot think consecutively, or with any ap-
proach to clearness and force ; he tries to think, but all
becomes blurred and confused, and he feels instinctively
that should he endeavour to speak, his speech would only
express and exhibit this inward confusion. So he is
silent — not on principle, or anything like it — but in virtue
of the instinct of bewilderment.

Akin to the silence of bewilderment is the silence of
terror : and this silence, under the circumstances we are
considering, is far from uncommon. Fear is a passion
which has immediate and decisive effects upon the bodily
frame. Even in the lower animals the sense of imminent
danger will not seldom arrest all power of movement.
The sacred writer tells us that, in man's case, fear is " a
betrayal of the succours which reason offereth." ' Under
an overmastering sense of terror, speech becomes impos-
sible : the thought and feeling which prompt man to speak
are directed upon a single object with concentrated inten-
sity ; in this dumb horror nothing is possible, save inarti-
culate expression, if indeed that is possible. Nothing is
more common — in natures of a certain nervous oi'ganisa-
tion and temperament — than this silence of fear.

But when an innocent man keeps liis head clear, and is
so constituted that a new and alarming situation has no
terrors for him, he may yet be silent, from a motive of
mistaken prudence. He knows that skilful adversaries
will take every possible advantage of his words : some
chance expression may escape him which is capable of
being twisted into aspects which had never occurred to
the speaker ; he may say too little, or he may say too

' Wisd. .wii. 12.

156

The Silence of Jesus.

[Serm.

much ; he may so excuse as to accuse himself, or he may-
imply guilt, by saying something without saying enough.
There is a safety he feels in silence ; silence gives no
advantage to the prosecutor which he did not possess
before ; silence, after all, is silence, and there is no more
to be said of it. Pilate seems to have thought that this was
our Lord's motive, and he tried in his blundering way to
show its practical imprudence, and to reason Jesus out of
it. "Speakest Thou not unto me ? knowest Thou not
that I have power to crucify Thee, and have power to
release Thee ?"^ It was indeed an astonishing miscalcu-
lation; but natural perhaps in a Pagan magistrate, and
under the circumstances.

Once more, there is the silence of disdain. The
prisoner is before judges who represent brute force,
and nothing more ; neither right, nor truth, nor virtue.
He is conscious of his innocence ; he knows that his
innocence is, in their eyes, his crime. Between his
ideas of truth, of honour, of excellence in all its higher
forms, and the world of ideas in which they live and
work, there is no common term. He could speak if he
chose ; he knows not what fear is ; he is in complete
possession of liis faculties ; his thought is clear, and he is
prepared for the worst ; he is convinced that nothing can be
gained by silence. He could, if he so willed, pour forth
into a torrent of burning words the indignation of an
upright character, confronted with official cruelty and
with regulated wrong. But to whom, or rather to what,
would the expostulation be addressed ? Where would be
the moral intelligence to do him justice? where the
living moral sense that he could hope to rouse ? Why
should he expend the strength of his righteous passion
upon those whom vice and time between them have
rendered too stupid or too ^vicked to read its meaning ?
1 St, .John xi.\-. 10,

The Silence of Jestis.

157

No ; he will restrain himself: his is the lofty silence of a
judicial disdain.

II.

None of these motives for silence, it is plain, will
account for that of our Lord before Pilate.

His was not the silence of bewilderment or of fear.
From the moment of His arrest in the garden until the
last of the seven words upon the Cross, our Lord, it is
plain, has His thoughts and His words entirely at com-
mand. If He speaks, it is with the tranquil decision
which marks His language at the marriage feast of Cana,^
or at the raising of Lazarus.'- Every word, if we may
dare thus to speak, tells ; and the force of what He says
lights up the high and solemn meaning of His silence.
As to fear, what room for it was there in One to Whom
Caiaphas and Pilate were but passing ministers of evil ;
and Who, as His eye rested steadily on the invisible
world, would assign to what was greatest or worst in this
its true meed of insignificance ? How much lies in that
saying, on the way to Calvary, " Know ye not that I can
pray to My Father, and He shall presently send Me more
than twelve legions of angels ? " ^

Nor was the silence of our Lord dictated b}'^ a false
prudence. He knew that all things that were written
concerning the Son of Man must be accomplished.'* He
foresaw His Death ; He foresaw the stages through which
He would pass on His way to the Cross and the Sepulchre ;
if, for a moment, the Hesh was weak in Gethsemane, the
spirit was always willing there was no room for prudence
of this kind before Caiaphas or Pilate. Nay, what our
Lord did say, would have appeared to a looker-on highly
imprudent. When Caiaphas asked Him if He were the

' St. .Joliu ii. 1-8. - Ih. xi. 38-44. 3 St. M.itl. xxvi. 53.

St. Luki' .wiii. 31. ■> St. Matt. xxvi. 41.

The Silence of Jesus.

[Serm.

Christ, the Son of God, He answered in words which at
once issued in His condemnation by the Sanhedrim : " I say
unto you. Hereafter shall j'e see the Son of Man sitting
on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of
heaven." ^ When Pilate told Him that he had power to
adjudge Him to Liberty or to death, He ansA\-ered, " Thou
couldest have no power at all against ile, except it were
given thee from above."- Silence would have been more
prudent than such speech as this, if the object had been
to save His life, and we must look elsewhere for the ex-
planation.

Xeed it be added that, in Jesus Christ, silence could
not possibly have expressed disdain ? In Him such a
feeling towards any human soul was impossible. Between
the highest and the best, on' the one hand, and Himself
on the other, the distance was indeed immeasurable. But
He looked out upon all with a boundless pity ; had He
not come to seek and to save that which was lost .? ^ In
His Heart, so warmly human in its sympathy, so Divine
in its comprehensive embrace, there was no less a place
for Caiaphas and Pilate, if they only would take it, than
for the Magdalene, or for Peter, or for St. John. Xo. It
is profanation to suspect disdain in Jesus Christ Scorn,
whether it speaks or is silent, is the certificate of shallow-
ness : and Jesus is the Eternal Wisdom. Scorn, whether
it speaks or is silent, is a note of the supremacy — if only
for the moment — of the pride of self : and Jesus, He is
the Infinite Charity.

III.

These were not the reasons for the silence of ^ Jesus :
l»ut that it had a reason is plain from its dehberate
character. Think over the incidents of the Passion. To
the vain and mocking Herod He would say nothing

^ St. Matt. xxvi. 64. = St. John six. 11. " St. Matt. sviiL 11.

The Silence of Jesus.

159

whatever.^ Of the false witness produced before the San-
hedrim, and before Pilate, He will take no notice — not the
slightest.- But when Caiaphas asks Him, whether He is
the Divine Messiah — Caiaphas, who as High Priest, should
have at once recognised and pointed out to the people the
true Messiah when He came — Jesus speaks. He repeats
that ancient oracle of Daniel, which the Jewish doctors
referred to Messiah as the Judge of the world : and
Caiaphas knew well, only too well, what He meant.^ When
Annas questions Him about His disciples and His doctrine,
He points frankly to the public character of His work : '
and to Pilate himself He explains both the unworldly
character of His kingdom and the prime object of His
appearance among men as a witness to the truth. Only
when Pilate had jestingly asked, "What is truth?" only
when Pilate had prostituted his magisterial sense of
justice to prejudices which he did not affect to respect,
and had scourged Jesus, and brought Him forth crowned
with thorns, and in a robe of purple ; — only then to the
question, half-anxious, half-insolent, "Whence art Tliou %"
Jesus returned no answer. He was silent.
What is silence ?

Silence in a man, in full possession of his faculties, and
in his waking hours, is much more than the absence or
failure of speech ; it has a positive meaning. It is the
deliberate suspension of speech ; it is the substitution of
that which in human life is the exception for that which
is the rule. Surely, brethren, in us men silence is less a
foil to speech than speech to silence.

What is speech ?

It is the display, in a form which strikes upon one of
the senses, of tlie whole complex activity of the soul : of
its thoughts, its feelings, its resolves, its apprehensions.

1 St. Luke xxiii. 8, 9.
^ St. Matt. xxvi. 63, 64.

- St. Matt. .xxvi. 59-63; xxvii. 12-14.
St. -Jolin xviii. 19-21.

i6o

The Silence of Jesus.

[Serm.

Speech is the dress which the inner life of the soul takes
when it would pass into another soul: and if we were
not so familiar with it, we might well be astonished at
this wonderful and almost uninterrupted process whereby
thought and feeling are being all the world over perpetu-
ally embodied in sound, and thus projected from mind
to mind, from soul to soul, so as to establish and maintain
a correspondence, if not a community, of inward life. As
we listen to the most ordinary conversation, we may observe
all the powers and faculties of a soul pass forth before us
arrayed in the dress of language. Thought and reason
appear in the choice and copulation of adjectives and sub-
stantives, in the delicate manipulation of particles and
adverbs, and in all the varied machinery of the sentence :
and will emerges in its imperative moods ; and desire in
optative moods ; and purely animal impulse, it may be, in
interjections. Unconsciously, but most truly, does the soul
reveal itself to our senses in lancjuacre ; and this self-
revelation is an instinct rather than a deliberate efifbrt in
the immense majority of human beings. And thus we
see the sicrnificance of silence. Silence is the arrest of this
almost incessant activity ; and its import consists in this :
that the whole productive force which results in lan-
guage is felt to be still there and at work, although for
the moment advisedly restrained from self-expression.
There is nothing in the silence of that which never spoke
— the silence of a statue, or the silence of an animal ; but
we, most of us, know, that not the least of the solemnities
of gazing on the face of the dead is the thought that those
lips will never again, here in this world, give expression to
the inward life of a soul. And a sudden, resolute, emphatic
silence on the part of a living man has in it something of
this solemnity ; it means at least as much as — probably
much more than — any possible continuance of speech.
And, plainly, this meaning is more and more emphatic as

The Silence of Jesus.

i6i

•we ascend in the scale of minds : it means most in those
men whose qualities of head and heart give them a pre-
eminent right to speak. What then must it mean, when
we pass beyond the frontiers of humanity, and find our-
selves with One in Whom the Eternal Word or Eeason
spoke through human lips — One in Wliom, as His Apostle
says, dwelt all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge ? ^
How shall we dare, as some have dared, to think that we
can at all fully explain His silence, still less that we can
assign it to a single motive ? We can at best understand
it very imperfectly ; but we may endeavour, without
irreverence, to give some account of it, in the liglit of His
own Teaching and His Eternal Person.

I. Our Lord's silence meant first of all a rebuke. Pilate
had asked a question, which it was not for him or for such
as he to ask and to expect an answer.

Most of us know what it is to have made this kind of
mistake, at least once in our lives, if not more than once.
We are in company of a friend whose kindness encourages
us, so that we feel at our ease; we say just what comes
into our head. Conversation flows on, from this topic to
that, easily, listlessly, pleasingly — and at last we ask a
question, when, lo ! there is silence. We have, out of
curiosity, or in sheer thoughtlessness and gaiety of heart,
uttered words which could not be answered, at least then,
and to us. We have touched the nerve of some very
tender feeling ; we have probed to the quick some old and
nearly-forgotten wound ; we have put forth the hand,
which, after a long interval of years, has first essayed to
lift the veil that had long shrouded some secret or some
sorrow, it was hoped, until the end.

There are others, it may be, who might have asked that
question without causing such sharp pain as we ; others
nearer, dearer, more loved and trusted, with more tact and
1 Col. ii. 3.
L

l62

The Silence of Jcstis.

[Serm.

gentleness, more recognised right to enter the precincts of
deep and tender feeling : but we, alas ! must feel that
words have passed our lips which have created a new
relation between us and the heart to which they were
addressed, words which could only be met by silence.

It would, we feel, be a relief to be reproached in words
that we could hear. No words, however severe and cut-
ting, could mean all that is meant by that terrible silence ;
since that silence means that thought has entered upon a
region of wondering pain that is beyond language, and
about which, therefore, nothing can be said. This is what
happens in daily and private life, and it may enable us to
enter into one aspect of our Lord's silence before Pilate.
In itself, Pilate's question was not necessarily a wrong
one ; but it was not a question for Pilate, and under the
circumstances, to ask. Had the scene been the upper
chamber, and St. John the questioner, and the question
the same in substance, yet thrown into such a form as
love and awe would dictate, it would assuredly have been
answered: love always means illumination. Jesus reveals
His secrets to the importunity of love. But when Pilate,
in the confident temper of a highly-placed officer who was
not accustomed to be crossed in his purposes, ventures, in
his crass Pagan ignorance, on ground thus sacred, thus
supremely awful — stands there face to face with the
Infinite and the Eternal, robed and crowned with the
sorrows of a world of sin, and utters his frivolous,
petulant, " Whence art Thou ? " just as if he was talking
to a neighbour who lived in the next street — what was
possible save the rebuke of silence ?

2. For, secondly, our Lord's silence was not merely a
rebuke ; it was very instructive. It was the sort of silence
which, under certain circumstances, tells us much more
than we could learn from speech. Speech will sometimes
fail to say wliat should be said, simply because it cannot

The Silence of Jesus.

163

be said. We are so familiar with the use and the capaci-
ties of God's great gift of speech that we perhaps find it
hard to think tliat speech cannot say anything. Yet the
world of thought and the world of fact are alike greater
than speech can compass. And as the generations pass,
and the languages of men continually enlarge their
resources for recording fact and thought and feeling, they
fail to keep pace with man's progressive discovery that
beyond the utmost reach of language there are regions at
whose existence human language can only hint. All that
is near to us, all that is a matter of direct experience,
whether to the senses or the mind, and much beyond,
which belongs to the realm of abstract reason, or of pure
imagination, can be compassed and described by human
speech. But there are thoughts which just visit the
mind now and then, and which language cannot detain
and shape ; thoughts at which it can only vaguely hint,
if indeed it can do as much as that ; truths and. facts of
whose existence we are only so far cognisant that we
know them to be beyond the compass of language. When
St. Paul was caught up into Paradise he reached a sphere
in which he heard unspeakable words, which it is not law-
ful for a man to utter.^ When the Corinthian Christians
spoke during their religious assemblies in mystic tongues,
they were in reality touching upon the fringe of a district
of spiritual truth which could not submit to the trammels
and limits of the accustomed speech of man. When we
try to pass these limits, language becomes confused and
vague, not because there is no real object to be described,
but because we have no resources at command for the
work of description. Pilate asked our Lord, " Whence art
Thou ? " The Evangelist had replied by anticipation, " In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. All things were made by

1 2 Cor. xii. 4.

The Silence of Jesus. [Serm.

Him ; and without Him was not anything made that was
made. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among
us, and we beheld His glory." ^ And the Christian Church
has echoed this reply, " I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only-Begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father
before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God
of Very God, Begotten, not made, being of One Substance
with the Father, by Whom all things were made. Who for
us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven." -
But does not even this momentous language hint at the
transcendent reality rather than describe it ? Does it not
employ metaphors drawn from human relations, and
words that have had a great place in human philosophies,
to put us on the track of a truth which is really beyond
the tongue of man fully to set forth ? And if this be so
with Christian creeds, after all these centuries of thought
and worship, how was Pilate's "Whence art Thou?" to be
answered in terms which would convey any such a hint
of the tremendous reality as might be possibly suggested,
at least upon reflection, by tlie silence of our Lord ?

3. Once more, our Lord's silence was the silence of charity.
Knowledge is not a blessing where it only adds to the re-
sponsibilities of guilt, or where it is certain to be misused.
We should all of us agree that there are just now people
up and down Europe who are none the better for knowing
something of the properties of dynamite ; and a wise and
kind father would not begin the education of his little
boy by showing him how to fire ofi' a loaded pistol. It is
no disloyalty to the cause of education, or to the ultimate
value of knowledge to all human minds, to say that
certain kinds of knowledge — even the most valuable —
are not blessings to men in particular states of mind.
Before food can do good, we must be sure that it can be
digested : the soil must be prepared before the seed can

1 St. John i. 1, 3, 14. - The Niceiie Creed.

The Silence of Jesus.

165

grow. Why is it that the most precious of all books, the
Bible, only furnishes to many thousands of persons in this
country materials for ribald profanity ? Because it is put
into their hands without any accompanying care to see
that it can be appreciated ; " sown broadcast," as people
say, on all soils alike, and therefore furnishing, to minds
that are at once clever and godless, admirable occasions
for the indulgence of purely irreligious humour.

This was not our Lord's method. He warned His dis-
ciples against giving that which was holy to the dogs,
and against casting pearls before swine.^ He taught upon
a principle of consideration for the mental condition of
His hearers, sometimes plainly, and sometimes in parables.
He taught men, so says His Evangelist, as they were
able to bear it.^

Brethren, and especially you who have in any way to
instruct others, depend on it that to withhold from men
the burden of knowledge which they will certainly abuse,
is the true work of charity. Pilate, though he was ruler
of the land, was, for all religious purposes, a child, if,
indeed, we may say so much as that about him. And
just as you would keep a beautiful and delicate work of
art out of the way of a child, who does not understand
its value, and would certainly pick it to pieces, so would
our Lord not commit a truth which is not fully compre-
hended even by the intelligence of Angels to the half-
indolent, half-insolent curiosity of Pilate. " Whence art
Thou ? " What did Pilate expect to be the reply to that
question ? " Whence art Thou ? " What would Pilate have
made of the true reply to that question ? Surely it was
the same Charity which taught what moral beauty means
in the Sermon on the Mount, and which opened the
spiritual world to the Apostles in the upper chamber,
which, when Pilate asked, "Whence art Thou ? " was silent.

1 St. Matt. vii. 6. - St. John xvi. 12.

The Silence of Jesus.

Surely, as we contemplate our Lord silent before Pilate,
we cannot but feel His incomparable Majesty. He is
crowned and robed in derision; crowned with thorns,
and robed in purple ; but these outward symbols of humi-
liation and shame do but set forth the more the moral
splendours that shine within. Yes, assuredly. Lord
Jesus, not only in the moment of Thy bright Transfigura-
tion before the eyes of Thy Apostles, not only in the hour
of Thy Resurrection triumph, not now only, when Thou
sittest at the Eight Hand of the Father, while all that is
mightiest and wisest in the realms above bows down
before Thee in utter admiration, but also when in Thy
Passion Thou standest — deserted, speechless, dumb — before
Thy human judge. Thou art the Kiug of Glory, 0 Christ,
Tliou art the Everlasting Son of the Father.^

1 Te Deum Laiodamus.

SERMON XL

THE ASS AND THE FOAL.

St. Matt. xxi. 3.

And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, Tlic Lunl liath
need of them.

OU will remember that these words form part of the

X instructions which our Lord addressed to the two
disciples whom He desired to take the necessary measures
for His solemn entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
They were to go into the village over-against them, no
doubt into Bethphage; and there they would "find an
ass tied, and a colt with her;" these they were to loose
and to bring them to our Lord. If any remonstrance
was made, they were to make a reply which, as they were
instructed, would put an end to further resistance or dis-
cussion. " If any man say ought unto you, ye shall say.
The Lord hath need of them ; and straightway he shall
send them."

It may, perhaps, at first occur to some of us, that this
incident is too incidental — too subservient and preparatory
to the Great Entry into Jerusalem itself — rightfully to
occupy a main place in our thoughts on a day like this.
But it will appear, I trust, as we proceed, that this appre-
hension is not well grounded. We are, in fact, no good
judges of the relative importance of words and acts in a
Life so altogether above and beyond us as is that of our
Lord Jesus Christ.

167

The Ass and the Foal.

[Seem.

In such a Life, our commou notions of what is of first
importance, and what only secondary, do not apply, at least
with anything like certainty ; it is safest to assume that,
on this sacred ground, nothing is incidental, nothing sub-
sidiary, nothing unimportant. It is at least possible that
the charge to the disciples, which preceded the public
entry, has as much to teach us as the entry itself; at any
rate, we may observe that of the more obvious lessons
which it suggests, there are three which appear very
markedly to claim attention.

Our Lord's words, then, illustrate, first of all, the deli-
berateness with which He moved forward to His Agony
and Death. When He sent the two disciples for the ass
and the foal, which were tied up in the street of Beth-
phage. He was, as He knew, taking the first step in a
series which would end within a week on Mount Calvary.
Everything accordingly is measured, deliberate, cabn.
He fijst brings into play His power of immediate prophecy,
— of prophecy that is directed upon an object in the near
future, which could not have been anticipated by the
exercise of a man's natural judgment — just as He did a
few days after, when He told the disciples to foUow a man
bearing a pitcher of water, who would show them the way
to the room prepared for the Last Supper. He already
sees the ass and the foal in the street of Bethphage, and
He sends for them. That He should contemplate riding
at all is remarkable; there is no earlier or later notice
in the Gospels of His moving from place to place, Qxcept
by walking — to walk was the symbol of His poverty and
of His independence ! Xow, however, He will ride on an
ass ; and there is a .reason for His doing so. He sends for
the ass and the foal, because the prophet Zechariah had

XI]

The Ass and the Foal.

169

introduced these animals into his description of the
coming of the King of Zion to His own city/ and in a
prophecy which the Jewish interpreters, from the first and
without hesitation, applied to the Messiah. In ancient
days, the sons of the judges rode on white asses the ass
was used by Ziba,^ Shimei,* Mephibosheth,^ Ahitophel,^ by
David's household,''' by the old prophet of Bethel.^ David
himself and the sons of David rode on mules,^ in order to
mark their royal station without altogether deserting the
old tradition ; Absalom in his rebellion introduced chariots
and horses -^^ Solomon brought thousands of horses from
Egypt.ii The appearance of the horse, familiar to the
Assyrians, to the Egyptians, even to the Canaanites, as a
feature to the state and apparatus of the Jewish kings,
marked the rise of a monarchy which aped the fashions,
and would fain have rivalled the power, of the great
Pagan monarchies of the East. The horse is in the
Prophets a symbol of worldly power ; " I will cut off the
chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem," is
a prediction of the fall of the worldly monarchy. The
ass fell into discredit as the new heathen ideal of royal
splendour was increasingly accepted, so that in the last
days of the Jewish monarchy the burial of an ass was a
proverb for a disgraced end.^-^ There was no recorded in-
stance of a king of Judah or Israel riding on an ass. That
the King Messiah should come to Zion riding on an ass,
meant, for the Jewish people, that He was to have a king-
dom not of tliis world ; that He was to be a prophet-king,
whose outward bearing should recall those ancient days in
which the Lord Himself had been Israel's King^* — the
days which preceded the establishment of the monarchy.

1 Zech. ix. g. - Judg. x. 4; xii. 14. ^ 2 Sam. xvi. i.

I Kings ii. 40. ^ 2 Sam. xix. 26. 6 lb. xvii. 23.

^ 2 Sam. xvi. 2. ^ \ Kings xiii. 13, 23, 27. ^ 2 Sam. xiii. 29 ; xviii. 9.

1" 2 Sam. XV. I. 11 I Kings x. 26-28. i- Zecli. ix. 10.
1' Jer. xxii. 19. i Sam. xii. 12.

170

The Ass and the Foal.

[Serm.

Hence the s;reat amount of attention which was fixed on
this passage of Zechariah by the Jews : hence our Lord's
care for its literal fulfilment.

Men have often asked why the two animals were
wanted, and they have observed that St. Mark and St.
Luke speak only of the colt. The answer is, not that the
foal, not yet broken in, might behave more quietly when
its mother was beside it, but that the prophetic passage
of Zechariah, so dear to the memory and imagination of
the Jewish people, might be rendered before their eyes
into a realised picture. Zechariah's redundant language
does plainly speak of two animals, not of one ;^ and there-
fore our Lord sent for two. The two animals were
symbolical ; the disciplined ass under the yoke, and the
wild unbroken colt, each had its meaning. The ass itself,
an unclean, ignoble, debased drudge, as the Jews deemed
it, was a picture of unredeemed man, enslaved to his
errors and his sins ; but then, within the human family,
the Jews had been under the yoke of the law, and were so
far broken in ; the undisciplined heathen were like the
wild unbroken colt.^ It was thus essential to the full
meaning of our Lord's action that He should ride, first on
the one animal, and then the other : while the whole
circumstance of the entry into Zion, on the part of Zion's
king, as conceived of by Zechariah, was preparatory to
\ Zion's deliverance through suffering. When then our
' Lord sent for the ass and the colt, He solemnly entered
on the group of associations which prophecy had traced
around His Passion : it was tlie beginning of the end ;
it was the first step in the procession to the Cross.
" All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was
spoken by the proj)het, saying. Tell ye the daughter of

1 Zech. ix. g.

2 Uf. Gummmtary on the Minor Prophets, by E. B. Pusey, D.D. Zech.
ix. 9. pp. 556-59.

XI] The Ass and the Foal. 1 7 1

Zion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting
upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass."^ With
most men, as we know, it is otherwise. " They think
that their houses shall continue for ever, and that tlieir
dwelling-places shall endure from one generation to an-
other, and call the lands after their own names." ^ During
the years of health and strength, human nature still
whispers to itself, "Tush, I shall never be cast down,
there shall no harm happen unto me."^ And when this is
no longer possible, how often do we put off the thought
of death ! We try to disguise from ourselves its gradual
approach ; we do anything in our power to postpone it :
we diet ourselves, we change the air, we give up, if we
can, our more exacting employments ; we struggle against
the inevitable ; we hope against hope. There have indeed
been, in many, if not in all, generations, noble exceptions
to the rule ; men who, knowing what they were doing,
have gone out to meet death, armed with a strong sense
of duty, or inspired by an heroic resolve. Such was the
old Eoman, whose name was dear to his countrymen for
many a succeeding century, who when he was sent
back as a captive from Carthage to recommend a dis-
creditable peace, and with the knowledge that failure
would entail on him a death of torture, deliberately
advised them to reject the proposed terms.* Such have
been soldiers, who have volunteered for a forlorn hope ;
doctors, who have, perhaps within our own knowledge,
undertaken duties which they knew must cost them
their lives ; Sisters of Mercy, who have nursed cholera
patients, and laid them out for burial, when their nearest
relatives have deserted them. In these and like cases
the moral glory of our Lord's deliberate and voluntary

1 St. Matt. xxi. 4, 5. 2 p.s. xlix. 11. s /i. x. 6.

^ The Embassy of Regulus is beautifully described in Cicero De Officiis,
iii. 27.

172 The Ass and the Foal. [Seem.

suffering rests in its measure on our human weakness ;
the great difference is that, -with Him, there is no trace of
the pressure either of unforeseen outward circumstances, or
of sudden heroic impulse from within. He knows that
He is going to die, and He gives His orders just as
quietly as though He were sitting at the marriage-feast
of Cana. He might at any moment withdraw Himself
from the tempest of insult and agony that will presently
be poured on Him ; but His heart is established and will
not shrink until He see His desire upon those spiritual
enemies^ — sin and death — whom it is His mission to
subdue. The twelve legions of angels are waiting; He
has but to summon them ; - but though He already sees
and feels all that is awaiting Him, He sends into Beth-
phage for the ass and the foal.

It is this deliberateness in His advance to die, this
voluntariness in His sufferings, which, next to the fact of
His true Divinity, gives to the Death of our Lord Jesus
Christ its character of a sacrifice for the sins of the whole
world.^ If it was to be the offering, not merely of an Im-
maculate Body, but of a perfectly resigned and holy Will,
the Victim must say, at eacli stage of it, " A body hast
Thou prepared me ; then said I, Lo ! I come to do Thy
Will, 0 God."* And this is what our Lord does throughout;
it is the motive of His last utterance on the Cross : " Into
Thy hands, 0 Lord, I commend My spirit;"^ it is the
motive of the very first measure He takes, when entering
on the preliminaries of His Sufferings, and sending into
Bethphage, in obedience to Zechariah's prophecy, for the
ass and the colt.

II.

Our Lord's words illustrate, secondly, the exacting
nature of His claims. " If any man say ought unto you,

1 Ps. cxii. 8. - St. Matt. xxvi. 53. ^ j gt. Jolin ii. 2.

^ Heb. x. 5, 7. ■'' St. Luke xxiii. 46.

XI] The Ass and the Foal. 173

ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them." No doubt the
owner of the animals had work for them to do ; in any
case, they were his. Yet here is a demand, at first sight,
not unlike the requisitions, as they are called, of an
invading army, when " might becomes right ; " when the
ordinary rights of property are swept aside at the bidding
of a hostile and superior force ; and men have to furnish
provisions, lodgings, horses and carriages, furniture and
equipages, under pain of suffering the extremities of war,
if they refuse. Here, too, was a requisition in its way :
'• Ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her : loose
them, and bring them unto Me. And if any man say ought
unto you, ye shall say. The Lord hath need of them ; and
straightway he will send them."

What is the justification of this demand ?

A modern German Socialist writer, Weitling, traces here
the right of those who are in want to help themselves out
of the possessions of their well-to-do neighbours, and he
laments the false refinement of our days, when the dis-
ciples would have been at once arrested and charged with
theft before the nearest magistrate. This writer's idea is
that our Lord was really what would now be called a
communist, and that He claimed the ass and the foal as
really belonging to the community of which he was a
member. This account of the matter would ill accord
with our Lord's solemn proclamation, that He came not to
destroy the moral law, but to fulfil it.^ He certainly did
not abrogate "Thou shalt not steal."- Yet the eighth
commandment is unmeaning, unless property, in the sense
of private property, is of moral right ; you cannot steal that
which belongs to nobody in particular, and on which every
one has an equal claim. The community of goods described
in the early part of the Acts of the Apostles ^ was a very
different thing from communism ; it was a fruit of the

' St. Matt. V. 17. - Exod. xx. 15. Acts iv. 32-35.

1/4

The Ass and the Foal.

[Serm.

spontaneous action of Christian charity ; it rested upon
the voluntary surrender of their private rights by the first
Christians. In one of his sermons, three and a half cen-
turies later, St. Augustine describes a very similar state of
things in his own household at Hippo.^ Every one who
entered it voluntarily subscribed a declaration by which
he disposed of his property in favour of a common fund,
which supported them all ; and any one who, after this,
claimed to be the owner of any sort of property, was ex-
pelled from the community. But this, like the life of the
first Christians, was a very different thing from the com-
munism which denounces property as immoral, and which
would confiscate it to public purposes, whether its present
owners would or no. Property, it might be shown, if this
were the time and place to do so, is not an arbitrary or
vicious product of civilisation ; it is an outcome of forces
which are always at work in human nature and life ; it is
a formation or deposit which human industry is always
accumulating; it is an original result of the terms on
which men — at once industrious and free — live together as
members of a society. It has its duties, no doubt, as it
has its rights ; its duties are not really matters of choice,
any more than its rights are matters of sentiment ; but if
property is in any sense imperilled, if commiinism is ever
destined to get the upper hand in modern Europe, it will
be because the holders of property have thought only of
its rights, and have forgotten its duties. Nevertheless,
while its rights may for high moral purposes be surren-
dered voluntarily, they are rights which may be retained
and insisted on ; and they cannot be violated without
doing violence to the nature of things, without breaking
the eighth commandment of the Decalogue.

This then brings us back to the question of the principle
on which our Lord claimed the ass and the colt in the

1 St. Aug. Serm. ccclv. vol. v. p. 1381 (ed. Beu.).

XI]

The Ass and the Foal.

1/5

street of Bethphage. It is a question which cau only be
answered in cue way — namely, that Christ was all along
the true Owner of the ass and the colt, and that the
apparent owner was but His bailiff. " The Lord hath need
of them." How would the owner of the animals have
understood this reply ? We cannot doubt, from the general
tenor of the narrative, that the owner was in some sense a
disciple ; that Christ foresaw not merely the presence of the
ass and the colt in the street of Bethphage, but the state
of mind of the person to whom they belonged, and that by
'■' the Lord " the owner of the ass would have understood
" the Lord Messiah." Not merely Messiah " the Master,"
but Messiah " the Lord " ; not here merely " the Son of
jVIan," His favourite description of Himself, but the Lord,
the word being employed, no doubt, in the original
language which was used of the Lord Jehovah. " The
Lord hath need of them." He claims what He has lent
for a while ; He resumes what has always been His
own ; we hear the voice of the Being to Whom man owes
all that he is and has, " Whose we are, and Whom we
serve." ^

Certainly, my brethren, this claim of our Lord's implies
His Divinity, but it is a very modest claim when compared
with others which He made on those who heard Him. To
ask for a man's cattle is little compared with asking for
his affections, his thoughts, his endeavours, for the sur-
render of his will, for the sacrifice of his liberty, for the
abandonment, if need be, of all earthly happiness, and of
life itself Yet nothing less than this was meant by the
warning that a man may have to hate father and mother,
and wife and children, for His sake and the gospel's
nothing less than this by the stern sentence, " No man
having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit

1 Acts xxvii. 23.

- St. Luke xiv. 26 ; St. Mark viii. 34, 35.

176

The Ass and the Foal.

[Serm.

for the kingdom of God ; " ^ nothing less than this by the
peremptory command, " What is that to thee ? Follow thou
Me."- Christians, at any rate, if they are still Christians,
can only feel and express surprise at our Lord's requiring
the ass and the colt, if they have forgotten what He asks
of themselves as a condition of any serious discipleship,
and how this demand throws any claim upon their pro-
perty entirely into the shade.

At this season, indeed, we think of our Lord's claims
upon us less in the light of His Divine Person than of His
Eedeeming "Work. He has a right to make them, not merely
as our Lord, but as our greatest Benefactor ; not merely as
having created us by His Power, but as having redeemed
us by His Blood. Assuredly, in these solemn days on which
we are entering, He does not claim our service chiefly as
the Infinite and the Eternal, He claims it as the Incarnate
and the Crucified. Has He then no right to some return for
those thirty-three years of humiliation and toil ; for that
long Agony of Soul and Body in which they ended ; for
sufferings so various, so violent, so subtle, so protracted,
above all, so voluntary ; for a tragic Death, each incident
in which seems to plead to the Christian heart,

" This have I borne for thee,
What doest thou for Me 1 "

It is not exaggeration, it is simple Christian feeling, with
its eye on the Cross of the Divine Eedeemer, which sings —

" Were the whole realm of nature mine.
That were an oli'ering far too small ;
Love so amazing, so divine.
Demands my soul, my life, my all."

And if conscience whispers to you or me that He has need
. of something which we have not yet given Him. — of our
substance, of our time, of the work of our hands or of our
brains, is it possible that we can hesitate as to the answer ?

1 St. Luke ix. 62. - St. John xxi. 22.

XI]

The Ass and the Foal.

177

III.

And, thirdly, our Lord's words show how He can make
use of all, even the lowest and the last ; nay, how,
in His condescension, He makes Himself dependent on
them for the fulfilment of His purposes. It was of the
ass and the colt that He Himself said, " The Lord hath
need of them." What was the need ? Was it that He
was too tired at this particular time to ascend the Mount
of Olives on foot, or that He desired, in going to meet the
multitudes who were eagerly waiting for Him, to be raised
above the accompanying crowd of disciples around ?
Tliese were very subordinate elements of the need, if
elements of it at all ; He wanted the ass and the colt, as
we have seen, that He might enact before the eyes of the
people the literal fulfilment of Zechariah's prophecy.
This ass and colt, insiguificant in themselves, had become
necessary to our Lord at one of the great turning-points
of His Life ; they were needed for a service, unique and
incomparable, which has given them a place in sacred
history to the end of time. They were to be conspicuous
in that great Sacrificial Procession (for such it was) in
which He, the Flower and Prince of our race, moved
forward to yield Himself to the wild wills of men, who
to-day can sliout " Hosanna !" as to-morrow^ they will ci-y
" Crucify !"

The needs of God ! It were surely too bold an expres-
sion, if He had not authorised us to use it : we misht
well shrink from implying that anything is necessary to
Him, Who is alone complete in Himself, and is the Source
of all that is. Yet there they stand — the words, " The
Lord hatli need of them." He needed the ass and foal in
the street of Bethphage. We ask, almost with impatience,
Could He not have done without them % In one sense,
— Yes ; in another, — No. He might beforehand have so

178

The Ass and the Foal.

[Serm.

ruled matters as to make their ser^^.ce unnecessary. He
might — so we may reverentially suppose — have originally
inspired His prophet to colour the picture of the future
somewhat differently ; to throw into another form those
predictions, whose behests, in an after age, He would
Himself obey. But when the prophetic word had gone
forth, it could not return to Him empty.^ Prophecy,
being in Zechariah's mouth what it was. the true Messiali
could not but obey it. Prophecy being what it was. He
did need the ass and foal in order to fulfil it ; it was
too late, if we may so speak, to raise the question whether
the lesson which they taught might have been otherwise
rendered into symbol. The ass and the colt might count
for little among the villagers of Bethphage ; but they had
a necessary place marked out for them in the Passion of
Christ — a place and a work on that first Palm Sunday,
which higher, nobler, more intellectual beings cotild not
have supplied or undertaken.

The needs of God ! My brethren, if anything is
necessary to carrying out His purposes, it is because He
has made it so. He gives laws to the world of nature ; and
lo ! there arises some particular physical necessity, as we
call it, that is, to speak plainly, God's necessity that some
condition should be obeyed in order to meet the exigencies
of a particular law. Health, for instance, has its appointed
conditions ; they cannot be set aside, without miracle ;
God has made health depend on food, air, and exercise,
and we may dare to say that ordinarily He needs these
conditions, — in order to secure it to His creatures. In
like manner God has made human society dependent
for its wellbeing and coherence upon the maintenance of
certain principles and rules, and then a state of things
presents itself in which some man, or transaction, or
course of events is necessary, if these are to be maintained

1 Isa. Iv. II.

XI] The Ass and the Foal. 179

aud society is not to go to pieces. Once more, He has
made the strengrth and continuance of the Christian life
depend on an inspired Bible, on an organised Church,
on the preaching of the Faith, on duly administered
Sacraments. Whether any part of this provision might
have been otherwise, consistently with the great purposes
of Eedemption, it is too late now to inquire. God's
declared Will is that they should be necessary, and thus
we find Him, as it seems, constantly in need of poor,
feeble human instruments in order to give effect to His
own high purposes of grace and mercy. " The Lord hath
need of them." Whether it might have been otherwise is
not for us to ask ; our business is to take note of what
is, — of the needs of God, which He Himself points out
to us.

The needs of God. Yes ! And what is much to be
remarked is that He often needs those whom we, as we
think, if we were in His place, could have dispensed with.
We measure Him by our own standard of experience ; we
know that we habitually depend on intellect, on ability, on
wealth, on power, and that we do not want the unintelligent,
the feeble, the poor, the uninfluential. We are, whether
consciously or not, anthropomorphic in our conceptions of
the needs of God : if we had been on the Throne in Heaven
eighteen hundred years ago, we should in our stupid way
have hoped to convert the world by gaining the good
graces of rulers of men like Tiberius and Nero, of literary
men like Seneca or Tacitus, and shordd have taken small
account of the fishermen of Galilee. But with Him it
is otherwise. The difference between the highest intellect
and the narrowest and feeblest is as nothing, because it
is a measurable distance when compared with the dis-
tance between what we call the highest intellect and the
Eternal Mind. The difference between the strongest and
the weakest of beings is as nothing when compared witli

i8o The Ass and the Foal. [Serm.

the distance that parts the strongest from the Almighty
Strength of the Creator. And He constantly reminds us
of this bv exhibiting Himself as needing not the irreat
forces which awe thought, or which direct events, or
which reconstruct or uphold society, but the humble,
feeble, half-perceived, or unseen agencies which are taken
no account of by that ordinary' human estimate of men
and things which passes for wisdom.

Yes ! " The Lord hath need of them." Let none
hereafter say : " '\iVhat can God want of me, a mere unit
among the millions of the human family ? He is not
without resources ; He raises up great men to carry out His
purposes ; but I am too insignificant, too remote from the
scene and the capacity of effective action to contribute
anything to a cause, to a Church, to a world, that is
what it is because He has willed it.'"'

X 0, my brother, the Lord hath need of thee too ;
though thou wilt not believe it. He might, it may be,
originally have dispensed with thee ; He might have left
thee out of the group of influences which were to work His
will in thy day and generation. Thou canst not penetrate
the secrets of His predestination ; but, as things are, He
needs thee ; if it were otherwise, thou wouldest not exist.
He needs thee for some ser\-ice, great or lowly, tri%nal or
magnificent, which none else can do : which will not be
done, at least as He had designed it, if it be not done by
thee. God's abstract power of dispensing with each of
His creatures, or with all of them put together, is one
thing ; His actual plan of governing the world, as expressed
in the series of forces and events amid which we live, is
another. In fact. He does not release Himself, except
upon critical occasions, from the empire of His own rules
or laws ; and if this or that agent, to whom He has assigned
some special work or service, drops out of his place, the
omission is not supplied by miracle ; the work is left

XI] The Ass and the Foal. i8i

undone, the immediate, though not the ultimate, purpose
of the Creator is frustrated.

If this is an awful, it is surely still more a very con-
solatory, thought. Numbers of persons are oppressed by
the conviction that they are of little use to anything or
anybody ; that God has no vi^ork for them to do : that
they belong to the waste of the moral world, not to its
legitimate and productive substance. Let them think,
when these gloomy thoughts take possession of them, of
the ass and the colt on Palm Sunday. For all of us, the
weakest and the humblest, there is a place and time of
special service, to be rendered sooner or later to the Eternal
King, Who condescends not merely to expect, but to need
it. For that hour we have been created ; towards it we
have been tending, consciously or unconsciously, during
the years of life ; and at last it comes ; perhaps it passes ;
perhaps it never repeats itself. Happy we if we are
only ready to give and to be given to Christ when He
deigns to ask for us ; to contribute our little all to His
triumphant advance across the centuries, on His errand
of beneficence and judgment, among the sons of men.

May He enable us all during this Passioutide to under-
stand the freedom of His atoning Suffering for iis ; to
yield what we can in answer to His demands upon our
love ; to be sure that we, too, have some work to do in
His kingdom, which can be done by none other, and which,
if done faithfully, He will own.

SERMOJSr XII.

POPULAE EELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM.

St. John xii. 12, 13.

Much people that were come to the feast, when tliey heard that Jesus was
coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees, o.nd went forth to meet
Him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel That cometh in the
Name of the Lord.

OUE Lord's entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday
was one of the most important events in His whole
earthly life. It was the great public act by which He
entered upon the duties and sufferings of the week in
which He died for the salvation of the world : and by it
He gave notice, if I may so say, to the faithful, and to
mankind at large, of what He was about to do and to
suffer. Palm Sunday is the solemn introduction — if the
I. metaphor is allowable, it is the overture — to the week
which follows ; and it anticipates, bub with due reserve,
the solemn tragedy which it introduces. And so this is
one of the few events in our Lord's Life which is described
by all the four Evangelists. Approaching the Passion from
very different points of view, each Evangelist is alive to
the unique character of the entry into Jerusalem, as a
proceeding which is marked, on the part of our Lord, with
even more deliberation than are His actions, always so
deliberate, on other occasions. Each Evangelist mentions
the animal on which our Lord rode, in fulfilment of pro-
phecy ; each repeats, with but slight variations .from the

1S2

Popular Religious Enthusiasm. 183

rest, the Hymn of praise which was sung by the people
who accompanied Him ; each is careful to note the great
number of persons, some of them disciples, some of them
independent lookers-on, who were present, and who were
led to take a part, more or less pronounced, in this great
demonstration of enthusiastic religious feeling.

The occasion was, indeed, of capital significance in
the Life of our Lord ; and its bearing upon His Work and
Sufferings, and claims upon the faith and homage of man-
kind have been, from the first ages of Christianity, con-
stantly and earnestly recognised. To-day, however, we
may, perhaps with advantage, consider it as affording a
great display of feelings of reverence and love, on the part
of an assembled nmltitude, which our Lord condescended
to sanction and to accept. The governing motive of what
took place on Palm Sunday was religious rather than, for
instance, social or political. No doubt there was a politi-
cal element at work in the popular feeling wliich welcomed
Jesus of Nazareth as the expected Messiah. For some
generations the Jews had read their national hopes and
ambitions into the ancient prophets; and, as a conse-
quence, the idea of the coming Messiah, which the Jews
of that day entertained, was largely political. The Mes-
siah was expected to be a great Captain and Euler of men,
by whose genius and victories Israel would be freed from
the yoke of his western conquerors, and would become the
ruling race in some new and world-wide empire. We
cannot assert that no such feeling as this was entertained
by any who took part in the demonstration on Palm
Sunday ; nor can it be denied that there may have
been a social feeling at work as well as a political
one. Tliose who did not listen attentively to what

1 84

Popular Religious Enthusiasm.

[Serm.

our Lord said, and did not look below the surface of
His bearing and actions, -would have seen in Jesus
Christ a social reformer of the highest class, as vrell as
a great philanthropist, endowed with extraordinary facul-
ties for giving effect to His benevolence, so that His
earthly presence was a moveable hospital, within whose
precincts every form of human suffering might find relief.
Such a personage would in all ages and under any cir-
cumstances command general interest and devotion.

But when our Lord entered Jerusalem, religious motives
y had more to do with the welcome that greeted Him than
any others. Our Lord addressed Himself to the religious
feeling of the people, as distinct from their political hopes
or their social gratitude, when He entered Jerusalem
riding on an ass. The warrior-politician of Jewish
Messianic fancy would surely have been mounted on
some richly caparisoned charger, surrounded with chariots
and horsemen ; the horse, then, as always, in human esti-
mation, the nobler animal, was already in the book of
Proverbs,^ in Hosea,- and in Jeremiah,^ associated with
the enterprises and triumphs of war — the horse, in the
popular imagination, was ever "prepared against the day
of battle." "WTien our Lord, with such forethought and
deliberation, chose the ass, He was at once setting aside
the foolish political dreams of his countrymen, and was
claiming to fulfil Zechariah's prediction of the Messiah's
entrj' into Jerusalem as the King of peace, " Behold, thy
King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass,
and upon a colt the foal of an ass." *

And the action of a lai^e part of the gathered multi-
tude was no less expressive of religious as distinct from
political or social feeling. This appears from the circum-
stance described by St. John in the text — " Much people

1 Prov. xxi. 31.
^ Jer. xvii. 25.

- Hos. xiv. 3.
* Zecb. ii. 9.

XII] Poptilar Religious Enthusiasm. 185

that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus
was comiug to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees,
and went forth to meet Him." St. Matthew and St. Mark
say that a great multitude cut down branches from the
trees and strewed them in the way ; ^ and this is some-
times carelessly supposed to be what is referred to in
other terms by St. John. In truth — and it is important
to mark this — the acts were different, the agents were
different, and the objects of the acts were different. The
trees by the road-side, whose branches were cut down,
would not have been palms (the leaves of which would
have been out of reach), and were almost certainly olives.
The people who cut them down were coming from
Bethany, and the action does not necessarily mean more
than the bounding joy and reverence for Jesus which was
also expressed by spreading garments along the road of
His progress. But the palms, which St. John alone
mentions, were not cut down on this occasion, but were
brought out of Jerusalem by a multitude which went out
to meet the procession advancing from Bethany. These
palms had been cut in all probability some days before,
and were now festooned with myrtle and otherwise, as
was the custom, in readiness for the approaching Passover.
They were not strewed along the ground, they were
caiTied in the air before our Lord, and their use on this
occasion would have been a proclamation, more or less
conscious, that " He is the very Paschal Lamb Wliich
taketh away the sin of the world." ^ Indeed, it would
seem that the band which advanced from Jerusalem
kindled a new enthusiasm in the pilgrims from Bethany,
and then they joined together in singing the hymn of
praise, " Hosanna, save now, 0 Lord : Blessed is He That
Cometh in tlie Xame of the Lord."^ This was a third

1 St. Matt. xxi. 8 ; St. Mark xi. 8. 3 Ps. cxviii. 25, 26.

2 Prijper Prefare for Easter Day in tlie Order for tlie Holy Communion.

1 86 Popular ReligiotLs EntJmsiasm. [Seem.

circumstance which marked the religious character of the
enthusiasm. The words are from the Psalm cxviii. ; they
had long been used at the Feast of TabernacleS; and at
the Paschal festival ; they were connected in the minds
of pious Jews with the coming of the expected Messiah ;
and so, as the mingled company advanced down the slope
of the Mount of Olives, and towards the gates of the
sacred city, they surrounded Jesus Christ with actions,
and they hymned Him in language, denoting at the very
least deeply moved religious feelings of thankfulness and
love. " Hosanua : Blessed is He That cometh in the
Name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest."

It may be asked how this religious feeling could have
been kindled in so large and mixed a multitude of persons.
It is plain, first of all, that a main impulse proceeded from
the company which came out from Jerusalem, and which
was composed of "people that had come to the feast,"
that is to say, of Jews of the provinces or of the Disper-
sion, who were generally more devout, more attentive to
the guidance of prophecy, and to God's teaching through
events, than the Jews who lived in the sacred city. It
was the conduct of these Jews which drew from the
leading Pharisees the despairing remark, " Perceive ye
how ye prevail nothing ? behold, the world is gone after
him ; " ^ and they would have been likely to influence the
general multitude more powerfully than could the dis-
ciples coming from Bethany. Their homage to Jesus
Christ would have been considered by the nation at large
at once more disinterested and surprising; and to them
probably — among human agencies — must be attributed a
large share in the events of the day.

Of course, in so mixed a multitude on such an occasion,
there would have been very various degrees of conviction
and insight, while nevertheless they all united in recog-

1 St. John sii. 19.

Popular Religious EntJmsiasm. 187

nising in Jesus Christ something higher than was to be
found among the sons of men. On other occasions we
find this recognition in the most dissimilar quarters. It
was an Apostle who cried, " Depart from me, for I am a
sinful man, 0 Lord ; " ^ a demoniac which exclaimed, " We
know Thee Who Thou art, the Holy One of God; "2 a Pagan
soldier who observed, " Truly this was the Son of God ;
a multitude which agreed, "Never man spake like this
Man." * From very different levels of religious existence
it is possible to recognise some elemental truths ; just as
the sun in the heavens is visible in the deepest valleys
not less than on the summits of the Alps. There was
that in Jesus Christ which compelled much religious
recognition. That union of tenderness and strength, of
lowliness and majesty, of sternness and love, of weakness
and power, must have struck many a man who never
asked himself what it really meant, yet as unlike any-
thing he had ever seen on earth. Such a man could not
have explained himself ; but he was not the less under
the empire of the impression produced by our Lord's
Character : and thus, when an opportunity of giving out-
ward vent to his pent-up feelings presented itself, he
would have joined in it, though the words he used went
beyond his present insight. Many a man who little
knew its full import sang on that day no doubt with a
full heart, " Hosanna : Blessed is He That cometh in the
Name of the Lord." The enthusiasm which is created by
a multitude of men in eacli one of the units who compose
it, is a result of the nature which God has given us. He
has made us social beings. He has endowed us with
many qualities and. dispositions which not merely fit us
for companionship with each other, but which require it,
in order to our complete satisfaction and wellbeing.

1 St. Luke V. 8. 2 St. Mark i. 24.

2 St. Matt, xxvii. 54. ^ St. John vii. 46.

1 88 Popidar Religious EiitJmsiasm. [Serm.

When human beings come together in great numbers,
this social side of our nature is brought powerfully into
play, it may be without our knowing it ; instead of think-
ing of ourselves as individuals, we then think of ourselves
as integral parts of a great multitude. There is a con-
tagion of sympathy in great masses of associated men — a
contagion of regulated passion — almost a contagion of
thought. Mind beats in unison with mind, heart with
heart, will with will, under the strain and compulsion of
a common object presented to the view of a gathered
multitude : it is felt that personal traits, eccentricities,
preferences, prejudices are here out of place; what dis-
tinguishes a man from his fellows at other times is for
the moment lost sight of in the overpowering sense of
that which unites him to them ; and thus, like reeds
before the wind, private feelings, and sometimes even
strong resolutions, go down for the moment, and bend in
submission before the imperious ascendancy of this
common enthusiasm ; and a multitude moves as if it were
a single body animated by a single soul, with a simple
directness and intensity of purpose, towards its goal.

This sense of association is the soul of all powerful
corporate action among men. It is the soul of an army :
each soldier sees in his comrade not merely another fight-
ing unit, but a man to whom he is bound by the sympa-
thies inspired by common enterprise and danger. It is
the spirit which gives influence to a public assembly ; since
such a body is less dependent for its usefulness on the
capacity of the orators who may address it than on the
pervading sense among its members of united thoughts,
and hearts, and resolves for the promotion of a common
object. Is it conceivable that when the highest of all
subjects that can forcibly interest human beings is in
question, it should have nothing to say to so fertile and
powerful an influence ? No ; wherever human beings

Popular Religiozis Enthusiasm. 189

have engaged in that noblest of human occupations, tlie
worship of a Higher Power, they have Liid the sense of
association under tribute ; each worshipper feels that he is
not alone, face to face with the Awful Object of worship ;
he knows himself to be engaged in a work to which ail
around him are devoting themselves ; if his thoughts and
affections are first of all directed upon God, they are also
entwined by sympathy with the affections and the thoughts
of his fellow-men around him ; and in this felt communion
of each with all and of all with each lies the strength of
public worship, and to it was granted of old that uncan-
celled irrevocable charter, "Where two or three are gathered
together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them." ^
It was this enthusiasm arising from the sense of associ-
ation amoii" the members of a great assemblage of human
beings, which our Lord took into His service so conspicu-
ously on Palm Sunday. He had had multitudes before
Him not unfrequently before, to instruct, to feed, to bless
them ; but He had withdrawn Himself from their advances,
as when they desired to make Him a King ; ^ He saw
further than those around Him ; He had His own times j
for reserve and for self-abandonment. To-day He yields
Himself to the enthusiasm of the people ; He the Lord of
hearts and wills, Who knew what was in man,^ and could
control it, bids the surging and uncertain currents of feel-
ing in a mixed multitude of men, on this memorable day,
minister to His glory. It is a power called into existence
for all time ; St. Paul will tell the Corinthians that at the
sight of the ordered worship of the Church, a heathen
should fall down and confess that God was in it of a truth; ■*
St. Augustine will leave on record how, as yet uncon-
victed, he was touched by the hymns which were sung by
the assembled faithful in the Church of Milan.'' On all

1 St. Matt, xviii. 20.
^ r Cor. xiv. 1-25.

- St. John vi. 15. ^ Ih. ii. 2:;.

Confessions, Book ix. § [vi.] i^.

igo Popular Religions Enthusias7n, [Seem.

the inouutaius of the world, as of old on the slope of Olivet,
weak and sinful men shall join henceforth with the choirs
of Angels in the worship of Christ's Sacred Manhood — in
the ascription to the Lamb that was slain of that praise
and honour which is everlastingly His due.^

11.

It cannot be denied that the sympathy which is in-
spired by the sense of fellowship with a multitude of our
fellow-creatures may tell in more directions than one.
It may be turned downwards as well as upwards : it may
become an instrument of violence and wrong. Associated
masses of men have at times even achieved gigantic evil.
At the bidding of some malignant genius, multitudes of men
have again and again in the world's history taken leave of
reason and conscience, and have abandoned themselves to
those brutal ferocities which, in the absence of conscience
and reason, occupy the throne of the human soul.

In many an Eastern city, so well-informed travellers
assure us, a chance expression or an unintended gesture,
or a wild suspicion, or a word of order dropped by some
influential dervish, will fall like a spark upon a mass of
inflammable matter ; where but now all was peaceful and
reassuring, an angry crowd has assembled, whose faces
gather blackness, and who threaten or execute some deed
of blood. Nor is the terrific power of conscious associa-
tion for violent crime unknown to our Western civilisation ;
it may be questioned whether any darker examples of it
are to be found than those whicb the first French Eevolu-
tion again and again supplies. Human nature being what
it is, the precept not to follow a multitude to do evil - is
never unneeded.

If, then. Palm Sunday places us face to face with a great
religious enthusiasm, we cannot help thinking of what will

1 Kev. V. II, 12. - Exod. xxiii. 2.

XII] Popular Religious Enthusiasjii. 1 9 1

follow. The foil to Palm Sunday is Good Friday. What
will these people who are strewing the road with their gar-
ments and bearing palms before the advancing Saviour,
and singing Hosannas to His praise — what will they be \/
doing then ? Will none of them be spitting in His Ador-
able Face, or buffeting Him, or smiting Him with the palms
of their hands ? Will none of them join in the brutal
demand that the robber Barabbas shall be preferred before
Him? Will none help to force the Pagan governor to a crime
from which he shrinks, by swelling tlie cry, " Away with
Him! Crucify Him! crucify Him" ?^ Do we not already see
in the tears which Jesus sheds, as He passes the crest of
the hill, and the city comes into full view, that His Eye is
full upon the future ; that He knows wliat is before Him ;
that while the agony and the shame in prospect cannot
touch the calm depths of His Holy Soul, He does not take
what is passing at more than its real worth ; He does not
forget the sad and certain fact that the applause of all but
thoroughly good men is the exact measure of their possible
or probable hostility ? And yet here it is possible to draw
a mistaken inference from the whole scene. Does it not
prove, men go on to ask, the worthlessness of all corporate
religious enthusiasm ? What Avas the outcome, after all,^
of these palms, of that path carpeted with robes and
branches, of that procession of palm-bearers, of those ring-
ing songs of praise ? What did it lead to practically ? Did
it not precede almost immediately the great crime of tlie
Crucifixion ? and may not the condition of popular feeling
that led up to the Crucifixion have been a reaction from
unnatural religious excitement which preceded it ? Is not
religion always a strictly personal relation between man
and his Maker, between God and each single soul ? And
does not a tempest of feeling, like that on Palm Sunday,
tend to obscure this simple and vital truth, and to invest

1 St. John xix. 15.

192 Popular Religious Enthusiasm. [Serm.

what is merely human and almost physical with the sem-
blance of spiritual energy and life ?

It is clear, brethren, that at least no Christian can be
of this opinion. For, on Palm Sunday, it appears that a
like objection was felt by some Pharisees who asked our
Lord to rebuke His disciples who were chanting Hosanna.
And He said unto them, " I tell you, if these should hold
their peace, the stones would immediately cry out." ^

No, brethren ! the religious enthusiasm of a multitude
is not therefore worthless because its worth may be exag-
gerated, or because it may not be lasting, or because it
may be succeeded by an enthusiasm which is not religious.
It is not a profound view of liuman nature which
explains successive moods of human feeling as a series of
reactions, — as though the heart of man must perforce
oscillate like a pendulum in a clock with perpetual exactness,
first to this extreme of feeling and then to that. Eeligious
enthusiasm, however we arrive at it, has ever a certain
value of its own : there is not too much of it in our busy
modern world, where the whole thought and energy of the
majority of men is unreservedly devoted to the passing
but engrossing things of sense and time. Surely it is some-
thing, now and then, to rub off if it be only a little of the
dust which clogs the wings of the human spirit ; surely it
is something to escape, for an hour or two if it must be
no more, from the cold prison-house of matter in which
so much of modern thought, so many modern souls are
strictly imprisoned, into the free warm atmosphere of the
world of spirits, into the rays of the Love of God. Grant
that religious enthusiasm is often misguided, shallow,
unchastened, unpractical ; effervescent, but unproductive ;
rising from the heat of the spirit, and then j)resently
dying away ; yet surely it is better than the total absence
of any thought about, or feeling after, higher things :

1 St. Luke xix. 39, 40.

XII] Popttlar Religious Enthusiasm. 193

better than the uubroken reign of deatli, which continued
forgetfulness of God, on the part of a being made to love
and praise Him everlastingly, must surely mean. An
hour's bright sunshine on a December day is not the
summer : but it reminds us that the sun is there, and it is
better than a cloud-bound sky with the temperature below
freezing.

And if religious enthusiasm be kindled by the sense of
association with a multitude of men who are engaged,
each according to his light and strength, in praising the
Perfect Being, who are we that we should object ? Each
man nowadays has his one narrow prescription for the
spiritual improvement of his fellows ; God, Who has made
us, and Who knows what we are, is more generous and
more considerate.

He is not bound to times and places, to petty pro-
prieties and rules, in His vast action upon the spirit of
man, when He would draw it towards Himself Some-
times He approaches it through the operations of reason,
sometimes through the yearning of the heart after a
Higher Beauty ; sometimes He speaks to it in the mysteries
of nature, sometimes in the solemnities of history, some-
times even through art, such as music or painting, and not
unfrequently, as, in fact, on Palm Sunday, through the felt
sympathies of a multitude of human beings. He has,
indeed, other and more powerful agencies behind, — His
own Holy and Sanctifying Spirit, the Divine and Inspired
Scriptures, an organised and teaching Church, Sacraments
that are channels of grace and power, — but the wind of
His compassion bloweth where it listeth, and its heavenly
action is beyond the scope both of our criticism and our
approval.

But undoubtedly it is better to regard any such warmer
feelings which God may in His mercy give us from time
to time, not as ends in themselves, not as great spiritual

1 94 Popular Religions Enthusiasm. [SER3r.

attainments or accomplishments, but as means to an end
bej ond. The religious feeling w hich at times takes pos-
session of multitudes of men, which raises them above
their ordinary level, and makes them fancy themselves
capable of acts or sacrifices which, in their cooler moments,
would seem to be impossible, is like a fiood-tide — to be
made the most of while it lasts, but not to be counted on
as lasting. Like the tide, it will assuredly recede, and,
therefore, what is to be done by its aid, must he done at
once. What is wanted is not merely hymns and psakns
but the obedience which marks true discipleship, and the
practical resolutions which give to obedience reality and
shape. It is especially desirable to bear this in mind
at this sacred season, when all hearts in which Christian
faith is a living power are stirred to the depths by the
remembrance or the contemplation of the Sufferings of the
Eedeemer of the world. How shall any Christian foUow
the solemn service which wiU be held in this Cathedral
on Tuesda}' evening,^ and not kindle at the thought of
what the Eternal Son has achieved for sinners ? How shall
we listen on Good Friday to the Words of Christ hanging
on His Cross, and not desire to live as men who have been
bought with a price,- even infinite in its value ? If God,
in His mercy, does grant to us such thoughts and desires
as these, will they not be enhanced by the knowledge that
thev are shared, in various degrees, bv thousands at our
side, — shared by millions whom we do not see with our
bodily eyes, but who, tkroughout Christendom, are with
us engaged in thankful remembrance of the Great Sacrifice ?
Sui'ely the risk is, not lest we should be too richly
endowed with such feelings as these ; but lest, having them,
we should let them run to waste instead of turning them
to account ; lest we should sing Hosanna to-day, with

1 The service in St. Paul's Cathedral on Tnesdav in Holy Week, when
Bach's " Passion-Mn.'iic " is rendered. -' i Cor. ri. 20.

XII] Popular Religions Entliusiasni.

195

more or less sincerity, only to cry " Crucify," by relapse
into some old sin a short while hence. What is needed
is resolution taken in the strength of God the Holy Spirit
and after earnest prayer. Eesolution to do, or to give up
doing, that one thing which conscience, having its eye
upon the Cross, may prescribe. If God gives us warmer
feelings, let us humbly and sincerely thank Him ; but let
us also pray with the Psalmist, " Try me, 0 God, and seek
the ground of my heart: prove me, and examine my
thoughts : look well if there be any way of wickedness in
me, and lead me in the way everlasting." ^

1 Ps, txxxix. 23, 24.

SERMOK^ XIII.

KELIGIOUS EMOTIOK

St. Matt. xxi. 9.

And i!ie muliitmks thai icentbcfore, and that folloived, cried, saying, Hosanna
to tlic Son of David : Blessed is He Tliat cometh in the Xante of the Lord ;
Hosanna in the Highest.

IN our Lord's public entrance into Jerusalem on Palm
Sunday, five days before His Crucifixion, two things,
among others, are especially remarkable. The first, the
emotion of the multitude that -welcomed Him. The
second, the practical worthlessness of much of this emo-
tion, as shown by all what followed.

That which calls forth emotion in a multitude of men
is first of all the consciousness of having a common object.
And it is natural to ask ourselves, Why should a multi-
tude of persons have left their homes, and have gone out
to meet our Lord on His Entry into Jerusalem ? If they
had believed all that we Christians know to be the truth
about His Work and Person, it would have been easy
to account for their enthusiasm. But for them He was
merely a new Prophet, with a certain reputation attach-
ing to Him among the peasantry of a northern pro\ince.
London is not generally forward to echo the judgments
of Wales or Northumberland ; and why the approach of

190

Religioits Emotion,

197

the Prophet of Nazareth to the Jewish capital should
have provoked a public demonstration, and have been
the occasion of a great public holiday, is at first sight
unintellimble.

The answer is that the appearance of a new prophet
was an occurrence beyond all others grateful to the Jewish
people, at least in the later times of their history. The
nations of the ancient world, like those of modern times,
liad each of them a specific enthusiasm which was roused
by the occurrence of particular events, or the appearance
of a particular sort of personage. Accordingly, what the
foundation of a new colony was to Carthage, or the con-
quest of a new province to Kome, or the completion of
a masterpiece by a poet or sculptor to Athens — that and^^
more was the appearance of a prophet, or even of a man
who claimed to be so, on the soil of Palestine. For Israel
was the people of Eevelation, just as Carthage was the
home of commercial enterprise, and Rome the seat of
Empire, and Greece the nurse of art and of letters.
Israel knew itself to be the people of Eevelation ; that
was its distinctive glory among the nations of the world ;
and of this Revelation, which had been made not once
for all at the beginning of its history, but gradually
during a long sequence of centuries, in which first this
and then that addition was contributed to it, the prophets
were mainly, and in later times exclusively, the organs.
When a prophet appeared the nation expected to learn /
something that it did not know before about the Will
of God : about His Nature, His Attributes, His Ways ;
about its own destinies and prospects ; about the fortunes
of other nations around it. And especially when the
days of its own national glory had passed, and Palestine
had come to be only a province of the great Empire of
Rome, the Jews fell back with more and more attach-
ment on all that recalled their great religious past, and

198

Religio2is Emotion.

[Serm.

a new prophet received a welcome which would certainly
not have been given him in the days of David or Jehosha-
phat. Often indeed it happened that this public enthu-
siasm was grossly abused, and that the people followed
some worthless adventurer until he led them to the brink
of political catastrophe. But their devotion to the Baptist
was a fair test of the popular temper: ^ once let it be pro-
claimed that " a great prophet hath risen up among us,
and the Lord hath •s^isited His people," - and the heart of
Israel, the depository of God's ancient Eevelations, and
the expectant heir of His Eevelations to come, was at

^ once touched. To look on the prophet's face, to listen

^ to his words, men would leave their occupations and
their homes ; and so universal was this feeling that it was
strong enough to set aside the poor opinion which then,
as now, the inhabitants of a capital commonly entertained
for the judgment of provincials. This was the object

^ which brought the multitude together — the attraction which
the reported appearance of a new prophet always exercised
over the countrymen of Isaiah and Jeremiah — the vague
hope of hearing some new utterance of the Muid of God.

/ The multitude thus came together in quest of a com-
mon object, and then a second soui'ce of emotion came
into play, viz., the sense, which was thus roused in each

^ individual man, that he was one of a multitude. To be a
unit in a multitude, gathered together for a common pur-
pose, stirs the heart and soul of man,- — in some cases
\ consciously and powerfully, in all cases to some extent.
There are faculties and inclinations in each of us — social
instincts we now call them — which are roused into active
conscious self-assertion when we find ourselves surrounded
by a number of our fellow-creatures. While we are alone,
or living only with a few, the social instincts are more or
less dormant in average men : but when a man is brought

1 St. M.itt. iii. 16. 2 St. Luke vii. 16.

XIII]

Religious Emotion.

199

into intimate contact with many others, assembled to-
gether for a common purpose, that which is merely
personal in him falls into the background, and all that
associates him with others comes to the front. We all
know as au abstract truth that we are each of us members
of the great human family spread tliroughout all climes
and countries of the world ; but this conviction is a very
shadowy one until it is in a manner thrown into a visible
and concrete form by our becoming part of a great
assembly of human beings : mind thinking side by side
with mind ; heart throbbing side by side with heart ; will
resolving, struggling, nerving itself side by side with will ;
as thougli individual life had merged itself for the time
being in a common life, or at least that each man in the
multitude were leading two lives at one and the same
time, a personal life and a corporate or social one, while
of these the latter was for the moment by far the more
powerful and constraining.

The emotion which is produced by a sense of belonging
to a great multitude is a force which no reasonable man
will underrate. In all free countries this is shown by tlie
jealousy with which men guard the right of public meet-
ing. Often enough the thought which is produced at a
public meeting is nuich less entitled to real attention,
much less thorough, finished, and true, than that which a
solitary student works out alone in his library. But in '
the meeting there is the element of emotion, which more
than atones for what may be defective or turbid in the
thought, since it is a real source of strength. It is not
only that two men are stronger than one, but each man is
stronger through this fellowship with the rest ; his sense
of brotherhood, thus brought home to him by the presence
of his fellow-men, quickens and enlarges his stock of
power, whether of head or heart : he is more of a man for
being thus in close contact with his lirother men. This

200

Religious Emotion. [Serm.

is the secret of what they call the spirit of the corps in the
army ; this is, in part, though not, by any means, alto-
gether, the secret of the value of public worship. Every
such assembly as that which is gathered here to-day,
invests, or may invest, each person who composes it with
a force which he woixld not have if he were alone : a great
congregation of men, believing in One Lord, and hoping
through His Mercy for a blessed life after death, and
loving Him because He is what He is, and other men for
His sake, is not merely an aggregate of praying souls, but
a great productive source of spiritual sympathy. As we
meet within these walls the pettier aspects of life surely
fall away, and we lose ourselves in the vision of "one
Body and One Spirit, even as we are called in one hope
of our calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God
and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and
in all ; " we see before our eyes an earthly representation
of that great multitude which no man could number, of
all kindreds, and nations, and people, and tongues, standing
before the Tlirone of God and of the Lamb, with palms in
their hands, and singing the new song of the Life Eternal.-
In a great congregation the fire of a sacred brotherhood
passes from soul to soul : it is easy to understand how
much would be lost by forsaking " the assembling of your-
selves together, as the manner of some is." ^ No doubt,
too, on that first Palm Sunday, the Jewish multitude,
because it was a multitude, was conscious of an emotion
all its own, an emotion distinct from that which was
created by the purpose that had drawn it together, and
from that which followed on the common act of homage
to Jesus which it provoked.

To these sources of emotion — the quest of a common
object, and the sense of forming part of a multitude —
a third must be added : a common action. This com-

1 Epli. iv. 4-6, - Rev. vii. o, 10. ^ Hi'b. x. 25.

XIII]

Religious Emotion.

20I

m'on action is the product of previously existing emotion,
and it reacts in greatly increasing it. And the first
common action of a multitude moved by deep feeling
is exclamation. It matters little who supplies the
watchword : it is uttered, it is taken up, and becomes
conmion property. When the Christians of Milan were
in doubt whom to elect for their bishop, and Ambrose,
a layman governor of the city, was present, simply to
keep order, a little child cried out, " Ambrose is Bishop."
So exalted was his character, so obvious was the fit-
ness of the appointment, that the cry was at once
echoed on all sides : " Ambrose is Bishop ! " In ignor-
ance of the real speaker, it was even said to be the
suggestion of an Angel : and in spite of his sincere
resistance, he was within a week ordained and consecrated
Archbishop of Milan. A multitude, having vaguely
before it a common purpose, and animated by that emotion
which the sense of numbers of itself produces, soon finds a
voice. The suggestion may, too easily, come from below.
Who was it that first cried " Crucify Him !" on the day of
Calvary ? Who was it who suggested, at a critical moment,
that the mob of Paris should march on the Tuileries ?
It is sometimes easy to lead, as always to follow, a multi-
tude to do evil. For evil or for good, a multitude finds a
voice ; and then this voice, raised in rude but suljstantial
harmony under the presence of a common body of feeling,
reacts powerfully upon every member of that multitude.
We all of us know the difference between a hymn sung by
a single performer, or by a select choir, and a hymn sung in
unison by four thousand people. In the latter case it is a
sensible embodiment of the feeling of fellowship in a com-
mon object; and public worship is a s])iritual Ijlessing in the
proportion in which it can succeed in appropriating this
great power of common spiritual effort embodied in voice.
The ancient Christians set great store on this. St. Ambrose;

202

Religions Emotion.

[SEE:Nr.

compares the responses of the people, as they sang the
psalms in public worship, to the breaking of the waves at
regular intervals upon the sea-shore : and St. Augustine
lias told us how much the hymns sung by St. Ambrose
and the people of the Church at Milan touched his heart
and drew him up to God, when he was yet some way
from his conversion.-

So no doubt it was at our Lord's entry into Jerusalem.
Perhaps one of the disciples, thronging round our Lord,
gave the signal : from them it spread to the crowd around.
" The multitudes that went before and that followed cried,
saying, Hosanna to the Son of David : Blessed is He That
cometh in the Name of the Lord : Hosanna in the
Highest." It was at once a prayer and an act of praise :
it was vague enough to be used by those who knew least
about the new Prophet, while yet it satisfied those who
knew most about Him : it expressed the twofold feeHng
in the minds of the multitude, who were at once delighted
with a new Ambassador from above, and withal hopeful
that He might brighten their national future. But as it
rose upon the breeze, from the lips of the multitude who
thronged around the advancing Eedeemer, it must have
quickened the emotion that produced it, and raised it to
its highest point of intensity and fervour. Each man who
joined in it felt, as we may feel, how much lies in that
word of the Psalmist's, " My praise is of Thee in the great
congregation." ^

The temper of us Englishmen leads us to regard
emotion with a certain distrust ; and in the last century
there was a school of writers who especially attacked its
connection with religion. The one great object of their
apprehension might have seemed to be religious en-
thu.sia3m. Religion, they said, ought to be based entii'ely

1 St. Amlirose. Hp'.rarm. iii. 9.

Confessinns nfSt. .\ug\istine, Book ix. S[vi.] 14. Ps. xxii. 25.

XIII]

Relio'iojis Emotion.

20.-^

upou reason : and reason is the traditional foe of en-
thiisiasm and all its ways. An English prelate wrote a
work, in which he claimed for the Church of England a
superiority over Methodism on the one hand, and Roman
Catholicism on the other, on trie ground that while these
religious systems encouraged enthusiasm, the Church of .
England was free from it.^ Few good or prudent Church-
men in the present day would think that a very effective
apology for the English or any other Christian Church ;
but it represented the temper of a cold and somewhat
heartless age — a temper, from the prevalence of which
the Church unhappily did not altogether escape. Strange
indeed we must deem it that any Christian with the New
Testament in his hands could bring himself to denounce
religious fervour or emotion, or could regard it as any-
thing but a great and precious gift of God. How can we
read tlie Gospel accounts of the raising of Lazarus,^ or the
description in the Acts of the Apostles of St. Paul's fare-
well to the presbyters at Ephesus on the shore at Miletus,^
without being conscious that the tenderest feelings of our
natures are stirred, much more powerfully than our
reasoning faculty % And if religion undertakes to im-
prove man as a whole, how could she ignore the life of
feeling and address herself exclusively to the life of
thought ? Certainly, emotion is not necessarily religious ;
but the best and highest use of emotion is in the service
of religion, to which, indeed, it contributes some very im-
portant elements. What is it that constitutes the felt
difference between hard morality and really religious
conduct? The presence of emotion. What is it that
makes the mental attitude of us Christians towards the
truths of faith so different from that of a man of science
or of letters towards the conclusions of philosophy ?

' Dissertation on Enthnsiasni. by Dr. Green, Bishop of Lincoln.
Bt. John xi. 1-44. " Acts x.v. 17-38.

204

Religious Emotion.

[Serm.

Emotion. What is it within the soul that speaks to God
in true heart-felt prayer ? Emotion. What is the un-
definable charm which everywhere marks the active opera-
tion of religion on the human heart ? Emotion. What is
it that now and then visits us, we know not how or why,
and for the time makes us better, nobler, truer, than our
wonted selves % Viewed from without, it is emotion.
Surely, brethren, we, most of us, do not live so near to
Heaven that we need nothing to lift us up out of the
earthly nets in which our poor spirits get so often, as it
seems, hopelessly imbedded and fixed ; surely we are too
often bound and chained down to the life of sense and the
life of habit, which is based on and intertwined with
sense : and a lever that can give our hearts and minds a
few hours' liberty to regain something of that air of
Heaven which God created them to breathe must be a
blessing. Eeason, after all, is only a faculty of the soul :
a royal faculty, if you will, but by no means able to do
duty for the whole complex life of man in the matter of
religion : and when men have attempted to base religion
wholly upon reason, religion soon has shrivelled up into
the proportions and likeness of a thin philosophy that has
vainly endeavoured to secure the approbation of a few
coteries of learned critics, at the cost of forfeiting all
claim whatever to touch the heart of the mass of man-
kind. That which swayed the Jewish multitude as they
sang Hosanna before Jesus Christ on Palm Sunday was a
deep emotion ; and, so far as it went, it was assuredly a
great blessing — at least a great possible source of blessing
— for all who took part in it.

II.

Tlie religious value of emotion is beyond question ;
but the circumstances of our Lord's entry into Jerusalem
appear to show that emotion by itself may not be worth

XIII]

Religions Emotion.

205

much ; that it requires other things as well if it is to be
healthy in itself, and if it is to last. For we know that
five days after there was emotion enough of a very
different kind on the other side of Jerusalem ; nor is it
possible to doubt that it was shared in by some of those
who had taken part in the Hosannas of Palm Sunday.
What is it that emotion needs if it is to be retained in
the service of true Eeligion ?

I. First, then, religious emotion must centre in a definite
conviction. Emotion is called out by some fact, whether
it be an event or a person ; but if the emotion is to
last this person or event must be constantly present
to the mind as real and definite. If the emotion is
called out by a momentary impression, which presently
becomes vague and indistinct, and then dies away, the
emotion will share the fate of the impression, and will
accompany it in the process of dissolution. Unless we
Christians have a clear and definite idea about the Divine
Person and Ptedeeming Work of our Lord Jesus Christ,
about the power of His Precious Blood to wash away our
sins, the presence of His Spirit to renew our hearts and
lives, the virtue of His Sacraments to unite us to His
Sacred Manhood in time and for eternity, — a few pulsa-
tions of objectless emotion will not help us long. Here is
the value of the Christian Creeds : they fix in clear out-
line before the soul of the believer the great objects of his
faith, which rouse in him movements of love and awe :
they resist the tendencies of unassisted emotion to lose
itself on what is vague and indistinct : they place before
him God, in His Essential Threefold Nature, and in His
Eedeeming and Sanctifying work, and in this way they
sustain the living emotion of the soul directed towards
God, as revealed by Himself. The Creeds are not a series
of detached propositions : they are a collection of state-
ments which correspond to a living whole. To an un-

2o6

Religious Emotion.

[Serm.

believer a creed ouly suggests the reflection : How many
propositious — dogmas — for a man to believe ! To a
believer, before whose soul's eye the Divine Object

the reflection : How impossible to omit any one of those
elemeuts of a description which the Keality demands !

Now it is at least probable that a great many of the
people who accompanied our Lord on His entry into
Jerusalem had very vague ideas of what — I do not say
He is, or claimed to be, but — even of what His country-
men imagined Him to be. They joined the crowd because
others around them did so : they were carried away by the
impulse of the moment : others cried Hosanna, and they
did : others cut down branches, and they threw them-
selves into the spirit of the moment, and followed the
example. But the day declined, and they re-entered the
Holy City and returned to their homes ; and little re-
mained with them in the way of a definite impression.

^The emotion of Palm Sunday had passed, for this among
other reasons, because it had had no very definite object ;
and they were ready for another emotion — of a very
different character — " when the chief priests would per-
suade the multitude that they should ask for the release
of Barabbas and destroy Jesus." ^
y' 2. Next, religious emotion must not be divorced from
morality and conscience. It is not necessarily connected
with them. In the old Pagan world some pf the most
emotional forms of worship — such as those which came to
Eome from Syria and Egypt — were also most closely allied
with culpable forms of self-indulgence. And in Christen-
dom the transition is easy — only too easy — from ardent
religious emotion to very serious transgressions of the
Divine law. The fact is that the raw material of the two
opposite impulses is sometimes the same : the passion

described in the Creeds is living]

;ly present, a Creed suggests

' St. Mutt, xxvii. 20.

XIII]

Religious Emotion.

207

which w hen .sauctiried by grace pours itself out in adora-
tion of the Eternal Beauty may easily, in its natural and
selfish form, become an instrument of man's deepest
degradation. Our composite nature, half-angel, half-brute,
lives on the frontier of two worlds, and the impulse
which may raise it to the Heaven of heavens is but a
transformed and spiritualised form of the impulse that
may bury it in all that is lowest and foulest on earth.

Tlius from time to time the world is startled by «ome
great misconduct on the part of persons who have shown
more or less devotion to religion ; and men speak as if
what had happened was as wonderful as it is startling.
The explanation probably is that the religion in question
was all emotion, having no relation to conscience and
conduct. Philip li. of Spain, and Louis xiv. of France,
had their times of sincere religious emotion — though we
know what they were at other times too. And many
people in this country who talk of their being justified by
faith, ought, if they spoke quite accurately, to speak of
their being justified by transient emotion. "When St.
Paul teaches us that faith is the condition of our justifica-
tion,^ he means by faith not a mere movement of the
intelligence, not a mere throbbing of the heart, not even
an act of trust, but an adhesion of the whole inward
being of man, of mind and heart, of will and of affection,
to Jesus the I'erfect Moral Being, Who obeyed the Divine
Will even to death for love of us men. This is a very
difi'eient thing from feeling " warmed up," as people
speak, after attending a very exciting service, a]id then
going home to our old habits and states of mind ; a
different thing from bearing branches of palm-trees before
the lledeenier, and going back to Jerusalem to obey the
leading Jews when they are preparing to crucify the
l.ord of Glory.^

' Rom. V. I. •- 1 Cor. ii. 8.

208

Religions E77iotion.

[Serm.

There is much need for thinkiug of this just now, when
we are enterina; the most solemn week in the Christian
year. No man in whom the Christian sense is yet at all
alive can pass through Holy "Week with entire indiffer-
ence ; can be heedless and heartless, while Christendom
is on its knees, throughout the world, before the Cross of
Christ. If anything can touch a man, it is sm-ely God's
" inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our
Lord Jesus Christ," which has placed within our reach " the
means of grace," and which endows us with " the hope of
glory : " 1 it is the long and tragic history of the Passion,
with "its incalculable depths of shame and pain, wiLLingly
undergone for the love of us sinners, each and all. We
may be but as among those who stood at the outer edge
of the crowd on Palm Sunday, yet we must have some
share in the emotion which the Object before us, the
thousands around us, the sacred language of the Church,
so powerfully and variously suggest. It is impossible not
to believe that of the thousands who here in the heart of
London, during this past week, have left their engrossing
occupations to listen for a few minutes to the eloquent
and sincere voice that day. after day has set forth \vith
unaccustomed power the mystery and virtue of the Cross
of Christ, within the walls of the Cathedral, — some have
not felt an enthusiasm to which they had before been
strangers, and have desired to live hereafter more p\irely
for the glory of their Crucified Lord. How important it is
that their feelin!?s should attach themselves to defirdte
con-ST.ctions, and should take shape in some real practical
effort, — in the determination to form a new habit, to re-
nounce a bad practice, to put on in some true way the new
man who after God is created in righteousness and true
holiness.'^ This emotion has not, believe it, dear brethren,

1 The General Thanksgiving ; Book of Common Prayer.
- Eph. iv. 24.

XIII]

ReliHo7is Emotion.

209

been vouchsafed you for nothing ; do not let it die away ;
do not part with it, only to meet it again, as one of your
forgotten responsibilities in the hour of judgment.

Again, on Tuesday evening next, the particular com-
memoration of our Saviour's Sufferings, which has now
become annual in St. Paul's, will take place ;^ and a great
(lerman genius of a past age, set forth by English skill
and genius of the present day, will doubtless, as in former
years, draw numbers within these walls. On these occa-
sions music does her noblest work as the handmaid of
religion ; and many a man, whom sermons fail to reach,
linds his spirit awed and soothed by the language of
liarmonies which carry him far beyond the world of sense
and time. Alas ! how great will be our failure to have
done anything real for God's glory, if those who come here
are thinking only or chiefly of the music, and little of
Him whose Sacred Sufferings it is designed to recall.
How poor and worthless will have been the expenditure
of emotion, if it should lavish itself altogether on the
artistic performance, and never cross the threshold of the
outer chambers of the spiritual world ! Esthetic pleasure
with a beautiful service differs altogether from the joy
and satisfaction of the soul, when really in His presence to
Whom all services should lead : this sort of Hosanna may
always be easily and swiftly followed by " Crucify Him !
crucify Him ! " May our Crucified Lord enable all who
are present on Tuesday evening at the " Passion-music "
to do true and heartfelt honour to His sacred Sufferings :
to turn any warm or tender feelings that He may
graciously vouchsafe to them to some practical account;
and to prepare themselves all the more carefully and
reverently for the solemn hours of agony and silence on
Good Friday, and for the transcendent joys of a good
conscience at the Communion of Easter morning.

1 i.e. The Service at which Bach's " Passion-Music " is rendered.

SERMON XIV.

THE TRAITOE-APOSTLE.

St. Matt. xxvi. 24.

11 had been good for that man if he liad not been horn.

ALM SUNDAY,as it brings before iis our Lord's solemn

JL entry into Jerusalem before His last Passover, sug-
gests a great many subjects for reflection, but none more
entitled to our attention than the great variety of charac-
ters who may be joining, apparently with an absolute
unity of purpose, in the services or the devotions which
are appropriate to a great religious occasion. The narra-
tives of the entry into Jerusalem distinguish between the
parts taken by the Disciples on the one hand, and by the
general population on the other ; but all co-operated to
promote a common purpose — namely, the glory of the Son
of David at His solemn approach to the Holy City. The
conduct of the multitude has often been pointed to as an
illustration of the fickleness of popular opinion ; the
men who to-day cried " Hosanna to the Son of David "
would be shouting five days hence, " Crucify Him !
crucify Him ! " But the Disciples, who could claim
a larger knowledge and a nearer intimacy, who thronged
around their Master as His immediate attendants
or bodyguard, were they altogether secure from any
such infirmity or vacillation of judgment or purpose ?
Was there no risk lest any of them should exchange the

210

The Traitor- Apostle.

2 I I

mood of loyalty and devotion fov a different attitude to-
wards their Master when the hour of trial should come ?
We know, my friends, how that question must be
answered. The time was not far distant when Christ's
first Apostle denied Him ; ^ when, at any rate for the
moment, all His disciples forsook Him and fled ; - when of
the chosen twelve one only in the hour of danger stood
near His IMaster's Cross of shame.^ The fear of man and
the fear of pain and death will account for this weakness
of our Lord's first followers ; but these motives would not
account for a more startling failure of loyalty which was
to be witnessed in the circle that immediately surrounded
Him. Side by side with John, who was to stand beneath
His Cross ; side by side with Peter, who, after denying
Him, would repent with bitter tears ; side by side with
Andrew and James the Greater and the Less, and Thomas
and Bartholomew, and Matthew and Philip, and Simon
and Jude, there was another, who with them had walked
up the long steep road from Jericho, had witnessed the
miracle whereby Lazarus was raised from the dead
at Bethany, and who now, no doubt, waved his palm
branch, and chanted his Hosanna like the rest. Still n
member of the Apostolic College, still in closest intimacy
with the Divine lledeemer, but already within three days
of the Betrayal, — there walked and sang in that solemn
procession advancing towards Jerusalem, Judas Iscariot.

" It had been good for that man if he had not been
born." It has been observed that our Lord Himself says
the sternest as well as the most tender things that are re-
corded in the Gospel. He would not bequeath to a disciple
the responsibility or the odium of proclaiming truths
against which human nature, conscious of its real condi-
tion, will always rebel. He did not leave it to an Apostle
to announce the unrepentant sinner's doom. And He

■ St. .John xviii. 25-27. - St. Matt. xxvi. 56. - St. .John xix. 26,

2 12

The Traitor- Apostle.

[Serm.

described the moral characteristics of men and classes and
populations who came before Him during His ministry.
Chorazin and Bethsaida, though on the sacred soil of Pales-
tine, were, He said, in a worse case than the Pagan cities
of Tyre and Sidon.^ Capernaum, though exalted unto
heaven, would be cast down to hell.- The Scribes and
Pharisees, though sitting in the seat of Moses, were " fools,"
" hypocrites," " whited sepulchres." ^ Herod on his throne
was yet a " fox." * But nothing that our Lord ever said of
any class of men, or any one human being, approached in
its severity this saying about Judas.

They were sitting. He and the Disciples, at the Paschal
meal, as the twilight was deepening towards the night.
They ate almost in silence ; scarce a word was spoken that
was not necessary to the ceremony. Suddenly He broke
in on the stillness with a saying which carried dismay to
the hearts of all present : " One of you shall betray Me." ^
Each, even the most sincere, must have feared lest he
.should be capable of committing the unparalleled sin.
Each was to feel for a moment his liability to a crime of
which another might be guilty. Each by his question, " Lord,
is it I?"^ implied withal his consciousness of innocence.
Then our Lord proceeded to declare solemnly His ap-
proaching self-sacrifice, and the agency by which it would
be brought about. He answered and said, " He that
dippeth his hand with ]\Ie in the dish, the same shall
betrav Me. The Son of ]\Ian goetli as it is ^a-itten of
Him ; but woe unto that man by whom the Son of ]\Ian is
betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been
born. Then J udas, which betrayed Him, answered and said.
Master, is it I ? He saith unto him, Thou hast said."

Concerning no other human being is so stern an utter-

1 St. Matt. si. 21.
^ St. Luke xiii. 32.
6 St. Matt. xxvL 22.

- Ih. 23.

■■• Ih. xxiii. 13-30.

St. Matt. xxvi. 21.
" /&. 23-25.

XIV] The Traitor- Apostle.

213

aiice oil Divine authority placed 011 record. It cannot
be explained — against the whole drift of the passage — as
though our Lord meant that it would have been good for
Himself if Judas had not been born : nor yet as a pro-
verbial saying which should not be taken too literally,
since this is to mistake the profound seriousness of
purpose with which our Lord used the gift of human
speech. Nor does it merely predict that Judas, like such
servants of God as Jeremiah or Job,^ would in a moment
of transient despondency curse the day of his birth, since
Jesus Himself confirms and utters this judgment of the
despairing Judas ; it is the Most Merciful Himself Who
says, " It were good for that man if he had not been
born." As we think over the piercing words, we see how
they close for ever the door of hope : since,, if in some
remotely distant age there were in store for Judas a
restoration of his being to light and peace, beyond that
restoration there would still be an eternity, and the
balance of good would preponderate immeasurably on the
side of having been born. It must be good for every
human being to thank God for his creation, — for the
opportunity of knowing and loving the Author of his
existence, — unless such love and knowledge has been
made, by his own act, for ever impossible.

Now, first of all, observe that there are sayings ab(jul
Judas which might seem to imply that his part in life
was forced on him by an inexorable destiny. St. John
says that Jesus knew from the beginning who should
betray Him.- Our Lord asked the assembled Apostles :
" Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil
In His great Intercession, He thus addresses the Fatlier:

' Jer. XX. 14 ; Jdli iii. 3. -' St. .John \ i. 64. '■• lli. jo.

214

The Traitor- Apostle.

[Seem.

" Those that Thou gavest Me I have kept ; and none of
them is lost, save the son of perdition. ' ^ And at the
election of Matthias, St. Peter points to the destiny ot
Judas as marked out in prophecy : " His bishoprick
let another take : " - and he speaks of Judas as going to
his " own place." ^ This and other language of the kind
has been understood to represent Judas as unable to
avoid his part as the P.etrayer : and the sympathy and
compassion which is thus created for him is likely to
blind us to a true view of his unhappy career.

The truth is that at different times the Bible looks at
human lives from two very different and, indeed, opposite
points of view. Sometimes it regards men merely as
factors in the Divine plan for governing the world — for
bringing about results determined on by the Divine Wis-
dom ; and when this is the case, it speaks of them as
though they had no personal choice or control of their
destiny, and were only counters or instruments in tlie
Hand of the Mighty Euler of the Universe. At other
times Holy Scripti;re regards men as free agents, en-
dowed with a choice between truth and error, between
right and wrong, between a higher and a lower line of
conduct : and then it enables us to trace the connection
between the use they make of their opportunities and
their final destiny. Both ways of looking at life are of
course strictly accurate. On the one hand, it belongs to
the sovereignty of the Almighty and Eternal Being, that
we. His creatures, should be but tools in His Hands : on
the other, it befits His Justice that no moral being, on
probation, should suffer eternal loss save through his own
act and choice. The language of Scripture about Pharaoh
illustrates the two points of view. At one time we are
told that the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart,^ that he would

I St. .lolm xvii. ij.
" Acts i. 25.

- Acts i. 20.

■* E.\()il. ix. \2 ; X. 2.0.

XIV]

The Traitor- Apostle.

215

not let the Children of Israel go ; at another, that Pharaoh
hardened his own heart.^ The same fact is looked at, first
from the point of view of what was needed in order to
bring about the deliverance of Israel ; and next from the
point of view of Pharaoh's personal responsibility. St. Paul
stands at one point of view in the ninth chapter of his
Epistle to the Romans, and at another in the twelfth.
It is no doubt difficult, if not impossible, with our present
limited range of knowledge, to reconcile the Divine
Sovereignty in the moral world with the moral freedom of
each individual man. Some of the great mistakes in Chris-
tian theology are due to an impatience of this difficulty.
Calvin would sacrifice man's freedom to the Sovereignty
of God ; Arminius would sacrifice God's Sovereignty to
the assertion of man's freedom. We cannot hope here to
discover the formula which combines the two parallel
lines of truth, which meet somewhere in the Infinite
beyond our point of vision : but we must hold fast to
each separately, in spite of the apparent contradiction. If
our Lord, looking down upon our life with His Divine
Intelligence, speaks of Judas, once and again, as an instru-
ment whereby the Eedemption of the world was to be
worked out, the Gospel history also supplies us with
materials which go to show that Judas had his freedom
of choice, his opportunities, his warnings, and that he
became the I Jetrayer because he chose to do so.

II.

Secondly, Judas's career illustrates the power of a
single passion to enwrap, enchain, possess, degrade, a
man's whole character.

The most Christian poet of our day contrasts the bliss

' Exod. viii. 15, 32.

The Traitor-Apostle.

[Serm.

of the Mother of the Eedeemer with the sad lot of the
mother of Judas —

" Sure as to Blessed Mary come
The Saints' and Martyrs' host,

To own, with many a thankful strain.

The channel of undying bliss,
The liosom where the Lord hath lain,

The hand that held liy His ;
Sure as lier form for evermore

The glory and the joy shall wear,
That robed her, bending to adore

The Babe her chaste womb bare ; —

So sm-ely throes uublest have been,

And cradles where no kindly star
Look'd down, — no Angel's eye serene

To gleam through years afar."

Then he tells liow

" Christ's Mother mild
Upon that bosom pitying thought.
Where Judas lay, a harmless child,
By gold as yet unljought." '

Judas, we must suppose, had his good poiuts, or he
would never have hecome, by his own act, a disciple of
our Lord Jesus Christ. He was not in the position of
those of us who are born of Christian parents, and are by
Baptism made members of Christ in their infancy, without
being consulted. He chose to follow our Lord, when to
follow Him implied no gain or credit, and at least some risk
of unpopularity or danger. This would seem to show that
he must have had some eye for, or capacity of, understand-
ing excellence ; that he must have had some pleasure in
associating with the good ; that he cannot, at any rate at
one time in his life, have been wanting in moral courage,
self-denial, and a spirit of enterprise for public religious
objects.

Judas had one vice or passion — the love of money, car-
ried to a point which filled his thoughts and controlled the

' Liji'ii IiiiKiccnl iiiDi. ii. 13.

XIV]

The Traitor- Apostle.

uctiou of his will. When this propensity first showed
itself we do not know : the germ of it may have been
already lodged in his soul when he left his home to fol-
low our Lord Jesus Christ. Certainly he had at first no
opportunities for indulging it. Those great operations of
modern finance, by which thousands, or even millions of
money are transferred from hand to hand, or fi'om one
great firm to another, never, it need iiot be said, flitted
before the imagination of this Galilasan peasant; nay,
when he first became an Apostle, the rules under which
the Twelve set to work forbade their providing gold or
silver or brass in their purses, or scrip for their journey.^
At a somewhat later period, when our Lord was joined by
Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, Susanna, and
others, who ministered to Him of their substance,^ a com-
mon fund would seem to have been formed, and, either
because he was thought to have natural aptitudes for the
work, or because he desired it, Judas became the treasurer ;
he had the bag.^ That bag contained, probably, at most a
few of the small copper coins that were struck by the
Roman procurators or by the Herods. But the magnitude
of any passion in the human soul is altogether independent
of the limits of its opportunity for indulgence. Tyranny
is as possible in a cottage as on an Eastern throne ; though
it may have to content itself with more restricted gratifi-
cation. Envy, pride, sensuality, maliciousness, though
they may be gratified on a vast area, and with terrific
results to millions, or within the narrowest limits of a
very humble lot, are, as passions, in the one case what
they are in the other — powers that overshadow and
gradually absorb all else in the soul, and give it through-
out the impress and colour of their own malignity. Just
as there are bodily diseases, which, at first unobtrusive
and unnoticed, and capable of being extirpated if taken

' St. Matt. x. 9, lo. - St. liuke viii. j. •• St. .lolm xii. 6.

2l8

The Traitor- Apostle.

[Serm.

in time, will spread and grow until tirst one and then
another limb or organ is weakened or infected by them, so
that at last the whole body is but a habitation for the
disease which is liurrying it to the grave ; so in the moral
world one unresisted propensity to known wrong may in
time acquire a tyrannical ascendency that will make
almost any crime possible in order to gratify it.

It is a neglect of this truth — a truth which may be veri-
fied by a very little observation of human nature — that
has led some modern writers to attempt a revision of the
account of the character of Judas which is set before us
in Holy Scripture. They think that that account does
not explain so tremendous a fall : that the real reasons for
it must have been graver, or more numerous, or more com-
plex ; that it was profound insincerity from the first ; or
envy of the moral superiority of Jesus ; or resentment
secretly cherished for some warning, or rebuke, or fancied
neglect ; or even a seeming attachment to the Jewish
priesthood, to the Scribes and Pharisees, to the orders of
men who were prominent in the old religious life of the
country. If it was so, it must be a matter of conjecture :
Holy Scripture does not say so. If it was so, we may be
sure that the ruling passion gradually enlisted these other
motives ; drew them up into and assimilated them with
itself, like the raw levies of subject states, which a con-
queror incorporates with his own disciplined forces. Judas
was at bottom, and before all, a man who cared for money
more than he cared for conscience, or for virtue, or for
God ; and it was this fatal propensity which, with or with-
out other contributing causes, but at any rate in the first
instance, determined his ruin.

We see this motive in full energy when Mary anointed
our Lord's Feet at Bethany. Judas could see in her action
no ray of the love which made it so beautiful. He had only
one thouoht, — the money's worth of the box of ointment.

XIV] The Traitor- Apostle. 219

It might have been sold, he said, for three hundred silver
pence and given to the poor.^ Covetousness will often
give itself the airs of a far-sighted philanthropy, which
protests against the waste of money on what it describes
as mere sentiment. Our Lord did not note the fact that
Judas was dishonest, and would have had the price of the
ointment in his keeping had it been sold. He only
observed that Judas would have other opportunities for
befriending the poor, and that Mary had used her one
opportunity of doing honour to His Burial by anticipation.
But Judas understood the rebuke; and no doubt it
quickened the determination he had already formed. If
he could not have the three hundred silver denarii, he at
least might have thirty shekels, about one-fifth of it ; and
his revenge for the scene at Bethany into the bargain.

III.

Thirdly, the history of Judas shows us that great
religious privileges do not of themselves secure any man
against utter spiritual ruin. It would, of course, be
ingratitude to God to deny that such privileges may and
should further our liigliest interests. But religious
privileges only do their intended work when they are re-
sponded to on our part by the dispositions which can
appropriate and make the most of them ; by sincerity of
purpose, by a humble, that is to say a true, estimate of
self, by sorrow for past sin, by watchfulness, by an
especial care not to let any one acquire that pre-
ponderant and supreme place in the sou.1 which may
render all helps to holiness useless, and may forfeit all
prospect of eternal peace.

What religious opportunities could be greater than
tliose which were enjoyed by Judas Iscariot? He was
one of those twelve men who were most closely associated

' St. Joliii xii. 5.

220 The Traitor- Apostle.

[Serm.

with the Eedeemer of the world duriug His Ministry.
He was admitted to an intimacy which was denied to
those of our Lord's first-cousins, " brethren," as they are
called,^ who were not already Apostles ; nay, which, when
His Ministry had once begun, was denied to His Blessed
^Mother. Judas shared a Companionship compared with
which the purest and noblest intimacies that this earth
has known were worthless and deoradin<f. He heard the
very Words, he witnessed the very Works, which are re-
corded in the Gospels. He heard and witnessed many
more which have not been recorded. He received upon
his understanding and his memory, if not within his
heart, the impress of that one incomparable Life revealing
itself insensibly, incessantly, by a thousand rays of Charity
and Wisdom playing all around it.

How often may we have heard men say, " If I had not to
live among the degenerate and inconsistent Christians whom
I see around me, if I had lived eighteen hundred years ago
with Jesus of Nazareth in His own Galilee, I should be a
better man than 1 am." But is it more certain that this
would be so than that the brethren of Dives, who heard
not Moses and the prophets, would have been persuaded
by one rising from the dead ? ^ If anything could have
roused a man to a sense of moral danger we might think
that the teaching of Jesus Christ, to which Judas listened,
would have done so. Judas must have heard our Lord's
warnings about the guilt of unfaithfulness in the " un-
righteous mammon." 3 Judas would have listened to the
Parable of the Sower, and the explanation how the cares
of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the
Word of Truth in the soil of the soul.^ Judas may well
have thought that the saying, " Ye cannot serve God and
mammon ; or the proverb, " It is easier for a camel to go

' St. M.-itt. xii. 47 : xiii. 55.

^ 8t. J.ukc .\vi. II. St. .Mall. xiii. i-^z.

- St. Luke xvi. 31.
■'' Jb. vi. 24.

XIV]

The Traitor- Apostle.

2 2 1

through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter
into the kingdom of heaven," i were meant for him. Judas
was even one of those who asked the question with regard
to this proverb, "Who then can be saved?"- But the
very greatest religious advantages do not compel the
understanding to be sincere, or the conscience to be sensi-
tive, or the affections to be warm and quick, or the will
to be straijfhtforward and vigorous. Judas lived in the
closest intimacy with Jesus ; but this intimate relation
with Jesus did not save Judas from a crime compared
with which that of the Jewish rabble, and the Roman
soldiers, and Pontius Pilate, and the Chief Priests and
Pharisees, was venial : — it did not save him from becoming
the betrayer.

Surely this is a most serious consideration for those
who are already, by God's great goodness and mercy,
privileged to know much of religious truth, and to have
much to do with the duties and privileges that more
especially belong to Eeligion. Especially, as I would
remind myself, does it concern us of the clergy, who are
necessarily associated more closely than other men with
the works, the advantages, and the truths that belong to
Peligion ; who have to use the language of Religion ; and
who may too easily assume that this of itself implies an
immunity from moral and spiritual disaster, that is by no
means assured to us. Who does not know, or may not
easily discover, that this necessary familiarity with holy
things has dangers which are peculiarly its own ; that it
may easily foster a mechanical and formal temper which
robs language of its sincerity, and prayer of its power and
efficacy, and a man's inner life of the strong and pure
motives that alone ennoble it ; that, unless there be great
watchfulness over what is going on within, as well as care
to do and say sincerely what has to be said and done in

1 St. M.itt. xix-, 24. 5 Ih. 25,

222 The Traitor- Apostle. [SER:Nr.

the way of outward duty, almost any measure of spiritual
ruin is only too possible ? And what is true of clergymen
is true of all who have knowledge of and contact with the
things of Religion. To be close to Jesus Christ may be to
be as St. John ; but it may be to be as Judas. Let us,
one and all, not be high-minded, but fear.^

If any one, whose business it may have been to study
the infidel literature of our day, should set himself to
inquire whence have come the most intelligently bitter
and deadly thrusts at the power and work of our Divine
Master, he will not, I think, find that they proceed from
the layman, who has perhaps known nothing of religion
in his early years, and has been kept throughout life by
a thick integument of prejudice from making any real
acquaintance with it in his later life. No ! rather will
they be found to come from men who have been trained,
or even cradled, amid sacred associations : from the
teacher in a Christian school ; from the seminarist who
was looking forward to Ordination; from the Divinity
student who was destined to occupy, or who already
occupied, a professor's chair; from the companions and
associates of those wlio have had most to do with kindling
among their contemporaries the sacred flame of religious
conviction.

In order to betray religion effectively, a man must have
been, in some sense, intrusted with it : he must have
explored and shared its sacred secrets ; he must not only
have studied it from afar ; he must have taken it to his
heart. Everybody does not know enough to be a J udas
— enough to pierce religion in the part which, to the
common apprehension, shall seem to be most vulnerable, or
where the sensitiveness of Christian faith will be most
deeply pained. Every one does not know enough to be
sure where Jesus will be found after dark, — under the

1 Eoin. xi. 20,

XIV]

The Traitor- Apostle.

223

olive-trees in the Garden ; enough to lead a rude company
of followers, all of them indignant, but most of them un-
informed, down across the steep valley of Jehoshaphat, and
up again to the gate of Gethsemane, and then to go
straight to the Object of their search, without hesitation or
error, and utter the " Hail, Master " ^ which is to show
them their intended Victim.

Observe, too, in the betrayal of our Lord, the survival of
religious habit when the convictions and feelings which
make Eeligion real have passed away. Judas betrayed
the Son of Man with a kiss.- The kiss was a customary
expression of mingled affection and reverence on the part
of the disciples when meeting their Master.

To suppose that Judas deliberately selected an action
which was as remote as possible from his true feelings is
an unnecessary supposition. It is more true to human
nature to suppose that he endeavoured to appease what-
ever there may have been in the way of lingering protest
in his conscience, by an act of formal reverence, that was
dictated to liim by long habit, and that served to veil from
himself the full enormity of his crime at the moment of
his committing it. In like manner, brigands in the south
of Europe have been known to accompany deeds of theft,
and even murder, with profuse ejaculations, whether of
piety or superstition : and cases have been known further
north of picking pockets when the thief and his victim
were kneeling or sitting side by side in a Church or
meeting-house. In these instances Eeligion may be em-
ployed, not simply as a blind to an immoral act, but as
a salve to a protesting conscience ; tlie passing thrill of
emotion seems to do something towards reducing the
magnitude of the crime which accompanies it.

The kiss of Judas ! It has become a proverb for all
those procedures whereby, under the semblance of outward

' St. Matt, xxvi, 49. 2 St. Luke xxii. 48.

224

The Traitor- Apostle.

[Serm. j

deference for Eeligiou, or of devotion to its interests, its
substance and reality are sacrificed or betrayed. The
general conscience of mankind is still too alive to the
importance of basing human life on sanctions that are
drawn from a higher world, to welcome, or even to
permit, attacks upon all Eeligion, on the ground of avowed
hostility to it. Accordingly, its opponents generally
assume some garb of discipleship : they commonly profess
an interest in it to which its ordinary professors or
defenders are strangers : if they attack its doctrine, they
are only anxious to remove what they conceive to be
excrescences, and to restore in its purity some creed which
they attribute to the earliest times : if they assail its
discipline, it is in the interests of some theory of personal
liberty which they would have us believe is essentially
bound up with real piety ; if they would confiscate its
material revenues to some secular purposes, they assure
us that what they really liave at heart is the restoration
of the Church to a condition which shall satisfy their
ideal of apostolical poverty.

A religious reason is generally produced for the aban-
donment of any interest, truth, or duty of religion. Eternal
Punishment is set aside out of anxiety to assert God's
]\Iercy : the Pardon of penitent sinners from devotion to
His strict Justice : Sacraments are depreciated under cover
of our profession of lofty spirituality : practical energy is
decried for the honour of some doctrine, certainly not St.
Paul's, of Justification by Faith. Something of the nature
of a kiss is required by public opinion in Christendom in
order to disguise the process of delivering Jesus to His
would-be murderers : so that even the most extreme
forms of infidelity find it necessary to preface an assault
upon fundamental truth, of vital import to the very heart
and life of religion, by an expression of concern for a very
transcendental essence of religion which is to survive.

XIV]

The Traitor- Apostle.

225

and indeed to profit by, the rejection of the particular
truth which is being assailed.

But this affectation of interest in religion on the part
of its opponents belongs only to particular phases of
public opinion. The professed friends of Jesus are always
in danger of betraying Him. The Scribes and Pharisees,
the Roman soldiers, Pilate and Herod, could apprehend,
insult, torture, condemn, crucify our Lord ; but they could
not betray Him. For this it was necessary to be more
or less in His confidence. We Christians can do Him a
more deadly injury tlian can any who know Him not, and
have no part in Him.

Let us put each before himself the misery that it will
be if He, Who made us for Himself, and Who redeemed
us and sanctified us, that we might be His in time and in
Eternity, should pronounce any of us, for such a reason as
this, to be one who had better not have been born. Let us
reflect that it is not impossible for us to incur the sentence
which was uttered over the fallen Apostle by the Most
Merciful. We may be nearer acting the traitor's part
than, in our security, we think : the outward signs of the
gravest effects in the spiritual world are, like the kiss of
Judas, often insignificant enough : a word, a smile, a slight
act performed or omitted, even a shrug of the shoulders,
may leave on another spirit an impression that will last
throughout Eternity. And if we would escape this misery
let us do one thing, — aim at, long for, pray for, a single
aim in the service of God. St. Bernard used often to ask
himself the question which our Lord put to Judas,
" Friend, wherefore art thou come ? " Why hast thou
been created and placed in this world at all ? why hast
thou been made a member of Christ in Baptism ? why hast
thou been led by Providence to this or that state of life ?
Art thou here to do thy own will ; to live without obey-
ing any above thee ; or wouldst tliou indeed serve God,

2 26 The Traitor- Apostle.

and by labour aod suffering prepare for His Everlasting
Presence ? " Frifend, wherefore art thou come ?" ^ If we
would sincerely press that question home, how different
might be the aim and the perfectness of our work through-
out each day ; secular occupation, intercourse with others,
prayers public and private. Communions, — all would
receive a new elevation from the dread lest, through
vanity, or insincerity, or worse, we should after all have
our part with the traitor.

And if we will often ask ourselves this question, it will
make and keep us watchful over what is going on within
our souls. Where this watchfulness is lacking, vices may
spring up, and grow unobservedly, until they have eaten
out love, moral force, spiritual beauty ; leaving only the
external semblance of what once was life, and biding
their time for the occasion which, by one fatal crime, shall
discover to the world and to the conscience itself the
dread reality of an utterly perverse and apostate will.
Nobody ever became very bad indeed all at once ; and to
grapple with tendencies to evil before they have had time
to acquire the strength which can enlist the passions in
their service, and make a home and empire within the
soul, is indeed the part of Christian prudence. Let these
words of our Eedeemer, which fell to no purpose on the
ear of Judas, sink deep into our souls; lest for us too His
Precious Blood should have been shed in Vain. " Try me,
0 God, and seek the ground of my heart : prove me, and
examine my thoughts. Look well if there be any way of
wickedness in me ; and lead me in the way everlasting." -

1 St. Matt. xxvi. 50. - Ps. cxrxix. 23, 24.

SERMON XV.

THE ECONOMY OF EELIGIOUS ART.

St. Matt. xxvi. 8, 9, 10.

Bui when His disciples saw it, they had imliynation, sayiny, To what purpose
is this waste ? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given
to the 2>oor. When Jesus understood it, He said unto them,Why trmdile ye
the woman ? for she hath wrought a good loork upon Me.

IT was on the Saturday before our Lord'.s Death that
He \va.s anoiuted at Bethany. He came to Bethany
on the Friday evening, that He might spend a quiet
Sabbath-day there, before making His entry into Jeru-
salem on what we now call Palm Sunday — that is, to-
day,— and meeting all that was to follow. He rested at
the house of Simon, a leper, it is probable, whom He had
Himself healed, and possibly, although this is far from
certain, related to the family of Lazarus ; but whether ;is
their father, or as the husband of Martha, it is impossible
to determine. When He came, the love and devotion of
those villagers who were His disciples led them to welcome
Him with a public entertainment; it is plain from the
literal force of the text that He was present in the house
of Simon, as a Guest among other guests. There He re-
clined between the two trophies of His power : on this
side was Lazarus, silent, reserved, self-involved, as became
one who had passed the portals of the grave, and had seen
sights at which the living can only guess ; and on that

side was Simon, wlio, by His special grace and mercy, had

227

2 28 The Economy of Re ligioits Art. [Serm.

escaped from the terrible scourge of leprosy. There He
reclined ; and Martha, no doubt, as in her own home,
would have waited on all the guests, but especially on
Him : but where was Mary ? She was absent when the
Feast began ; but on a sudden she appears : St. John names
her;^ St. Matthew and St. Mark call her simply "a woman," -
that they may concentrate the attention of their readers,
not upon who she is, but upon what she does. She enters
with a box or vessel, worked in calcareous spar or alabaster,
and containing the ointment known to the ancient world
as narcl, the most celebrated, probably, of ancient scented
ointments, and as such alluded to, where we should expect
the allusion, in the Song of Solomon.^ She " brake the box,"
says St. Mark ; * that is, she broke the narrow neck of the
vessel, or in some way removed the seal which prevented
the perfume from evaporating ; and then she poured the
contents of the jar or box first upon the Head, and then,
St. John tells us, on the Feet,^ of Jesus. To anoint the head
and clothes on festive occasions, however little in keeping
with modern manners, was the custom of the ancient
world, — Eoman, Greek, Egyptian. In the tombs of Egypt
there may be seen to this day paintings which represent
slaves anointing guests as they arrive at the house of their
entertainers ; and alabaster jars have been found in these
mansions of the dead, retaining traces of the ointment
which once had filled them.

So Naomi desires her daughter-in-law Euth to anoint
herself, by way of getting ready for Boaz ; " and Solomon
bids a man, in his joy of heart, let his garments be always
white, and let his head lack no ointment ; ^ and when he
says further that a good name is better than precious
ointment,^ he says a great deal for a good name, becau.se

1 St. Joliu xii. 3.

■ Song of Sol. i. 3, 12.

^ Rutli iii. 3.

- St. Matt. xxvi. 7 ; St. Mark xiv. 3.
* St. Mark xiv. 3. 5 gt. Jolm xii. 3.
1 Eccl. ix. 8. 8 Ih. vii. i.

XY] The Economy of Religious Art. 229

the use of such ointment was a first requisite of Jewish
respectability. There was nothing extraordinary, then, in
the mark of respect shown to our Lord by pouring oint-
ment on His Head; but St. John says that Mary anointed
the Feet as well as the Head of Jesus. This meant some-
thing more intense, more passionate, than an act of con-
ventional welcome ; and now that the box was opened, and
the scent, as St. John notes, filled the whole house,^ it was
impossible not to be sensible of its delicacy and richness.
If the act had been a common act ; if the ointment had
been common ointment, the incident might have passed
without notice ; but as it was, there were ill-natured eyes
looking on across the table, and unfriendly criticism was
at work, and pretty sure to make itself heard.

My brethren, it is to the observations whicli were
made on this act of Mary, and to the way in which our
Lord treated the critics, that I wish to direct your atten-
tion this afternoon.

I. First of all, what was the criticism? The act of
Mary, it was said, was a wasteful act. " To what purpose
is this waste ? " — or, as it might be rendered, this destruc-
tion ? — " for this ointment might have been sold for much,
and given to the poor." Or, as St. Mark and St. John
report the words : " The ointment might have been sold
for three hundred Komau silver pence or more " — the
denarius was the current silver coin throughout the
Iioman Empire — " and given to the poor." ^ The point of
the criticism was that there had been an outlay of valuable
material for no practical purpose ; that there had been a
culpable indulgence of mere feeling, mere sentiment,
when what there was to give ought to have been given to
the cause of human want and human suffering. There

1 St. John xii. 3. - St. Mark xiv. 5 ; St. John xii. 5.

230 The Economy of Religious Art. [Serm.

was a very poor population at this date in and about
Jerusalem, to which the speaker would have been under-
stood to allude. Xo doubt the criticism was uttered in a
sharp, harsh voice, designed to make Mary thoroughly
uncomfortable at what she had just been doing, and by
provoking our Lord's attention, to get Him, as eminently
a friend of the very poor, to condemn her too.

2. Xext, who were the critics ? St. Mark, for reasons
of his own, does not care to name the speakers : some who
were there, is all that we learn from him. St. Matthew
gives us a nearer view ; he tells us that the speakers were
disciples : " "When His disciples saw it, they had indigna-
tion, saying. To what purpose is tliis waste ? " St. John
brings us into the very scene itself. Everything of the
kind begins with one person, and is taken up by others.
And we should probably be less ready to repeat the ill-
natured stories which go floating about the world, and
"rowing larger and more malicious as thev float on, if we
only knew the weak or wicked source from which in many
cases they originally spring. Xothing is more infectious
than iU-nature ; generally speaking, a very few people sup-
ply the world with the raw material on which it works.

"VMio began to criticise the act of Marv ? St. John tells
us that it was " Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should
betray Him."^ Judas was the first speaker; the other
disciples, overawed by a clever sneer and a strong will,
assented, — they assented, at any rate, by a low murmur of
approval, or by their looks, or by a silence which under
the circumstances could not be mistaken. Practically,
then, whoever spoke or did not speak, the disciples present
were all of them, in different degrees, the critics.

3. Thirdly, what was the real motive of the criticism
on the act of ^Mary ? Xow, as regards Judas, St. John is
very explicit : " This he said, not that he cared for the

1 St. John xii. 4.

XV] The Economy of Religious Art. 231

poor, but because lie was a thief, and had the bag, and
bare what was put therein." ^ Judas was treasurer of the
common fund of alms, out of which our Lord and His
immediate followers supported themselves ; and St. John,
who had every means of knowing the truth, from his in-
timacy with Jesus, says plainly that Judas was dishonest,
and used the common fund for his own purposes. It has
been suggested that the common purse was empty at this
time, from whatever cause. Judas was anyhow annoyed
at what he regarded as the withdrawal of three hundred
silver coins from a fund on which he was accustomed to
draw for private purposes. But, like other dishonest
or sinful people, he felt that it was prudent to affect a
respectable motive ; so, for the time being, he set up
for a large-hearted philanthropist, who had a particular
concern for the sufferings of the poor, and it was in
this capacity that he led the chorus of complaint at what
had been done by Mary, in anointing the Feet and the
Head of our Lord Jesus Christ with so very costly an
ointment.

The motives of the disciples who agreed with Judas
would have been different ; there is not the slightest reason
for suspecting them of insincerity. They were guilty — if
that term may be used — of a want of moral courage, or of
an error in judgment. Of a want of moral courage, if, as
I suggested, Judas overawed them by the sheer force of
bitter and noisy vehemence, and they agreed with him, in
order to avoid a disturbance, just as easy good-natured
people, who have not yet got any very firm hold on
principle, will always do under such circumstances. Of an
error in judgment, if, not yet knowing the real character
of Judas, and thinking that there was something in what
he said, after all, which deserved attention, they begged,
with respectful deference, that an act of too lavish ex-

1 St. John xii. 6. '

232 The Economy of Religious A rt. [Serm.

peaditure might be disowned by their Master, and the
person responsible for it rebuked.

They probably were entirely persuaded that to pour this
very costly preparation upon His Head, and even upon his
Feet, was to be guilty of an unpardonable extravagance.
It might have been turned into bread for the starving
poor ; and when they said so they thought, no doubt, that
they were saying what He, their Master, under ordinary
circumstances, might be expected to say Himself. Was
He not notoriously the friend, the associate, the champion
of the poor ? Was He not the enemy and the denouncer
of selfish luxury, of subtle self-pleasing, of the sacrifice of
duty to sentiment, of the sacrifice of moral obligations to
social or religious or conventional form ? Whatever led
Him to be silent now they at least would speak oiit, in
the firm belief that their view was a sensible one. Criti-
cism of this kind is very plausible ; it may seem at first
sight irresistible, but it is false.

It was set aside very summarily indeed by Jesus, when
they appealed to Him to sanction it. He did not balance
between Mary and her critics ; He did not admit that
there was something in what they said, and that Mary's
zeal had outrun her discretion. He placed Himself be-
tween her and the disciples ; His first care is to make her
cause utterly His own. He is wounded in the wounded
Mary. He is troubled in her perplexity. " Why trouble
ye the woman ? she hath wrought a good work on Me."
He will not make any admission in favour of her judges,
while He acknowledges her act in terms which He never
applied to any other human action during the days of His
flesh. If her act was not wrong, it would at least have
appeared to Mary's critics to be insignificant; but Jesus
has deigned to confer on it an immortality of glory, unlike
any other mentioned in the Gospels — an immortality for
which statesmen and warriors and authors have sighed in

XV] The Economy of Religions A rt.

233

vain. " Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this Gospel
shall be preached throughout the whole world, there shall
also this deed, that this woman hath done, be told for a
memorial of her." ^

II.

"Why does our Lord speak of Mary's act in terms like
these ? He Himself tells us : " She hath wrouofht a "ood
work on Me." Why, we again ask, was the work good ?
He tells us that it was good for two reasons.

I, It was good, first of all, as being a work of faith.
The guests at the feast of Bethany, most of them, notwith-
standing the recent miracle which had summoned Lazarus
from his grave to a seat at that very table, were living as
most men live : they wei'e living in the present, without a
thought of the fixture ; they were living in the visible,
without a thought of the unseen. Mary looked higher
than the world of sense ; deeper into the future than
the passing hour. She knew what Jesus had said
about His Personal claims to be before Abraham,- to be
One with the Father ;^ and she took Him at His word. She
knew that He had foretold His Death,* and Burial,^ and
Eesurrection ; ® and she took Him at His word. As He sat
at that board, eating and talking like every one else, it was
not every soul that could set aside what met the eye of
sense and discern the reality ; not every one who could see
that there was that beneath the form of the Prophet of
Nazareth which is worthy of the most passionate homage
of the soul ; not every one who would reflect that ere many
days had passed, that very Form would be exposed upon a
Cross to the gaze of a brutal multitude, while Life ebbed
slowly away amid overwhelming agony and shame. Mary
did see this. " In that she poured the ointment on My

' St. Matt. xxvi. 13. " St. Johu viii. 58. Ih. .\. 30.

■» St. Mark x. 32-34. ■'' St. Matt. xii. 40. lb. xx. 19.

2 34 ^h,e Economy of Religious Art. [Serm.

Body, she did it for My Burial." " My Burial ! " How the
words must have jarred upon the ears of the company ;
almost as much as would an allusion to death in a speech
at a great City dinner. What an irony there is in the
contrast between this solemn allusion and the festive
scene around ! There they were reclining at the board,
rejoicing at the restoration of their friend Lazarus ; and
lo ' the acknowledged Lord of Life, the Kaiser of Lazarus
from the grave, is discussing the proprieties of His own
Funeral. Well may they have wondered. Mary knew
that all was natural and in order. " My Burial ! " Does
Jesus read into the act of Mary a deeper meaning than
she had made plain to herself, or is He assisting her to
recognise her motives, her real motives, indistinctly
realised though fully acted on ? Probably the latter is the
true account. If in the Judgment Hall and on the Cross
the Messiah was to be before the eyes of men as a worm,
and no man, a scorn of men, and the outcast of the people,^
He was, Isaiah had foretold, to be with the rich in His
Death.2 Nothing that earth could yield would be too
precious to anoint, after the manner of the ancient
world, that Sacred, that Loved Body of Jesus; and if
Mary could not be near Him then, she would anticipate
the dreadful moment while yet she might; she would
see in Him, though He was still among His friends, the
dying Crucified, and she would lavish on Him her very
best. " In that she hath poured this ointment on My
Body, she did it for My Burial."

2. Mary's act was good, our Lord says, for a second
reason. It made the most of an opportunity which
would not recur. The disciples, following the lead of
Judas, pleaded the claims — the sacred claims — of tlie
poor against the act of Mary. Our Lord glanced at the
promise in Deuteronomy that the poor should not perish

XV] The Econo77iy of Religious Art. 235

out of the land : ^ "Ye have the poor always with you."
Certainly He does not deny their claim, — He Who had
said to the rich young man, " Sell what thou hast, and give
to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and
come, follow Me," ^ — He Who on His Judgment-Throne
makes deeds of mercy done to the poor deeds done to
Himself — forgetfulness of the poor forgetfulness of Him-
self.^ But He does say, " Do not plead a duty which is
always pressing, and which can always be discharged,
against the claims of an extraordinary demand upon
faith and love." " Ye have the poor always with you,
but Me ye have not always." Once only would Jesus
die ; once only could He be prepared by loving hands for
Burial ; once only would He sit at that feast in Bethany,
in that solemn, awful stillness which befitted the near
approach of the storm when sin and hate were to do their
worst upon Him — that faith and love might claim their
rights and prepare for the end. It was Mary's happiness
that she knew the preciousness of the moment ; that she
made the most of it.

3. Our Lord gives no other reasons than these, and
they will be sufficient for Christians, as coming from the
King of the moral world. But a utilitarian age will still
aslc a further question : it will ask how an action of
this particular form could be thus in itself a good work
from a spiritual and religious point of view, could be
other than a wasteful expenditure ? If Mary had saved
her ointment, but had said in her enthusiasm that she
believed in the Divinity of Jesus, that she anticipated and
was preparing for His approaching Death, would not this
have been enough ? Might not the same amount of
good have been done, and the price of the ointment given
to the poor at the same time ? Was it not really waste ?
Waste is, of course, a relative term. Before we know

1 Dent. XV. ii. - St. Matt. xix. 21. •* Ih. xsv. 36-45.

236 The Economy of Religious Art. [Seem.

whether a particular action involves waste, we must know
what the agent thinks is best worth aiming at. Those
who are engaged in great enterprises generally appear
wasteful to those who confine themselves to small ones.
Those who think only of sensual enjoyment cannot under-
stand the sacrifices which men will make for intellectual
objects ; they who are happy in a private station cannot
enter into the willingness of public men to give time and
money for unremunerative objects, as they seem ; and in
the same way, the worldly cannot understand the pro-
ceedings of the earnest believer ; and the cold or apathetic
in religion have no key to the meaning of loving devotion.
Men live in worlds of thought and effort so dif!erent,
that the life of one is as unintelligible to the mind of
another as the proceedings of a bird would be to an
observant fish ; and this being so, waste is plainly a
term which is used by hardly any two people in the
same sense. For Mary, Judas's hoard was wasted ; just
as Judas complained of the waste of Mary's ointment.
But was Mary's act really wasteful ? "When our Lord
commended it, was He commending a pointless form,
involving a lavish outlay ? Look closer, and you will
see that Mary illustrates a great law of the moral and
spiritual world; namel}', that truth and goodness are largely
promoted among men by indirect means. \Ve see this in
God's Providence, in His making a way for religion by
the advance of civilisation. Civilisation, as we all know,
is not Eeligion ; it is human life organised and embellished
in the best way, and with a view to the wellbeing, here
in this world, of the greatest number. But civilisation is
frequently a pioneer or a fellow-traveller with Eeligion ;
civilisation needs Eeligion for its own purposes in order to
get motives strong enough to hold and make good the
ground which it has won from animalised savage life ;
and Eeligion, on the other hand, is under obligations to

XV] The Economy of Religiotis Art. 237

civilisation, to the arts and the knowledge which it brings,
and which are all of them helpful to the propagation of
the Faith. And thus it happens sometimes, though not
always, that the attention of men or of races is won for
Eeligion by the march of civilisation ; civilisation is thus,
while it seems to exist for its own sake — it is, I say, as it
were, in the Hand of Providence, the box of precious oint-
ment which is poured on the Head and the Feet of Jesus.
We men are impatient at the process sometimes ; we do
not see the connection between the two things ; we wish
Jesus to be honoured and acknowledged without wastintj
the labour of years, perhaps of centuries, in the slow
travail of social reconstructions, or of material and intel-
lectual progress. We do not see why its railroads, and its
schools, and its new courts of judicature, and its press,
and its inheritance of a new world of ideas, which are
European, no doubt, but not religious, should precede the
conversion of India to the Faith of Jesus Christ. We
think, perhaps, that if we could revise the action of God's
providence it would be different ; we should not allow
this waste of energy upon that which has no traceable
connection with the other world. We have not yet learnt
the value of indirect witness or indirect services to truth ;
Mary, with her precious ointment, was really doing the
same work as St. Paul preaching on the Areopagus at
Athens.i But it takes time and thought to see this.

We may see the same law in Education. If you teach a
child a truth or a duty directly ; if you say, " This is true,"
" That is right," the child may or may not learn the
lesson ; it will depend upon his confidence in or love for
the teacher, upon his docility of temper, upon his power
of being attentive and humble at tlie same time. But
the child is often best taught by an act which only makes
him think, which is unintelligible to him, and excites his

1 Acts xvii. 22-31.

238 The Economy of Religious Art. [Serm.

curiosity, perhaps his indignation, till he has found out
the true reason for it. He sees something quite out of
the way, and, as he thinks, extravagant; the precious
ointment is poured upon the Head of Jesus and upon the
Feet of Jesus too, and the child wants- to know why. He
gets his answer, and the consequence is that he learns his
lesson much more surely than if it was taught him in a
direct way. For his mind is active and not passive in the
process ; he goes out to find truth instead of having it
pressed on him. His reason, as well as his imagination,
is reached, and his memory is tenacious of that which had
excited his surprise when first he witnessed it.

The same principle will explain the use which the
Church of Christ, ay, and the Bible, have made of art.
Art is not religion : it may be profoundly anti-religious
or irreligious ; but it may also be a missionary and an
apostle. Take poetry, — the first and highest of the arts.
How much of the Bible is poetry ! No poetry that ever
was written is more beautiful, as poetry, than Isaiah.
Yet Isaiah might have said what he did say much more
briefly if he had written out what he had to say in prose,
like newspaper paragraphs ; and there are no doubt some
■persons who read him now as they would read an Act of
Parliament, and who would rather not have had to get
at his meaning through his poetry ; who are inclined in
their inmost hearts to say of his incomparable majesty
and pathos : " To what purpose is this waste of words ?
This language might have been economised, and the
surplus saved might have been devoted to some other
useful subject !" And if such advice has not been taken
by anticipation, why is it ? Why, but because He Who
made us knows that, side by side with our sense of truth,
we have a sense of beauty ; and that our sense of beauty
may most persuasively minister to our apprehension of
truth.

XV] The Economy of Religious Art. 239

So, again, witli music, and painting, and sculpture.
Each of these arts is a natural handmaid of religion. The
Psalms were, many of them, intended to be sung to an
instrumental accompaniment by their inspired authors ;
and the fine arts, as we call them, were profusely lavished
under Divine direction upon the Tabernacle and the
Temple. It may be said here too — Why this waste ? Why
could not David have read his Psalms instead of singins;
I them % Why could not Solomon have dispensed with the
I services of Hiram of Tyre, and the skilled workmen?^
The same thing has been said from age to age about the
music and the temples of the Christian Church. " God,"
men have said, "is a Spirit; and they that worship Him
must worship Him in spirit and in truth." ^ Most true :
but the question is not as to what is of the essence of real
accepted worship ; the only Master in the school of prayer
Who can teach to any purpose is God the Holy Ghost ;
but the question is. Whether art may not lead the way to
the school in which He teaches — whether it is not like
the pot of ointment — a witness to the future and the
invisible ? Certainly, for those who see Christ in His
Church, who believe with St. Paul that it is His Body,
the fulness of Him That filleth all in all,^ it is natural, as
it was natural to Mary, to bestow on it our costliest and
our best. Nay, it appears to me that noble souls, fired
with a love of Christ, are at times anxious, like Mary, to
bid defiance to the world by doing Him some public and
extraordinary homage ; there are times when they can no
longer contain the love for Him, the Eternal Beauty, which
consumes them, and they rejoice to ignore the criticisms
of a Judas, or the criticisms of weak-minded disciples
whom Judas misleads. They fall down before Him, and
break the box which contains their all, and pour it, in

' I Kint's V. 2-18 ; vii. 13-51. - St. John iv. a.j.

( •■ Eph. i. 22, 23 ; Col. i. 24.

240 The Economy of Religious Art. [Serm.

their passion, not on His Head merely, but on His Feet
as well, out of their love for Him.

The criticism which our Lord rebukes has not died
away with the age of the Apostles. The false utilitarian-
ism which keeps the bag, and grudges every penny that
does not go into it, constantly asks, " To what purpose is
this waste ? " How often is the cause of the poor at
home pleaded against the cause of Missions ! — as if one
form of charity did not really help another ; as if interest
in the spiritual needs of the heatlien did not really go
hand in hand with interest in the temporal and spiritual
needs of the home poor ; as if the spirit of charity or the
spirit of devotion could be thus divided against itself,
and set one object against another in unnatural rivalry.

" To what purpose is this waste ? "

It was said to me, not very long ago, that it is morally
wrong in us to set about the completion of St. Paul's,
while London, and especially the East End of London,
presents to our view such a mass of poverty and misery.
" When all the poor have good houses to live in, and
plenty to eat ; when pauperism has been absorbed into
the ranks of honest poverty, and poverty is being really
dignified and enriched by well-paid labour, — then, if you
like, you may complete your Cathedral. But until then,"
the critic will go on saying, "these mosaics — those
marbles, that gilding — might have been sold for much
more than three himdred pence and given to the poor."
Who can doubt that if the speaker had been at the feast
in the house of Simon the Leper at Bethany he would
have agreed very energetically with the disciples, and
have denounced Mary and her work ?

To all such criticisms our Lord's words are an eternal
rebuke. He has condemned once and for ever the cold
judgments which a narrow utilitarianism, even though it
may own His Name, would pass upon the generous

The Economy of Religiozis Art. 241

emotions of devout hearts. Their pure feeling has its
language, which is unintelligible to those who do not
share it, but which is read in the skies. If we do not
enter into the enthusiasms of others, let us fear, at least,
to criticise them : they may be very high above ourselves
in the kingdom of grace. If our own service of God is
meted out by a rigid rule, if it is incapable of those
generous outbursts of love such as was Mary's act at
Bethany — this is hardly a cause for self-congratulation.
Our own temperament may be a real element in our
personal responsibility : it can be no safe measure of the
acts of others.

III.

Let me conclude with two particular applications.
On Tuesday next, please God, St. Matthew's account of
the Passion of Jesus Christ, as set to music a century and
a half ago by the German composer, Sebastian Bach, will
be rendered in this Cathedral. There are two ways of
looking at sucli an enterprise as this. One is to regard
it simply as a musical entertainment, with a certain
appropriateness to the time of year and the place, which
is offered to the public by the clergy of St. Paul's. I
have seen it so described ; but if this description were a
true one, you would have a right, my brethren, to ask
the question with some warmth, To what purpose is this
waste ? "Was it then for this — for the mere promotion of
a noble art — that these sacred walls were raised by our
forefathers, and that this church is maintained among
the living millions of this great Metropolis ? Is this an
object which would have been owned by the great Apostle
whose name we bear — the man who determined to know
nothing among his converts save Jesus Christ, and Him
Crucified ? ^ I trow not. From a religious point of view,

' I Cor. ii. 2.

242 The Economy of Religious Art. [Serm.

art which has no object beyond itself — art which has
no ambition higher and nobler than artistic perfection — is
waste : it does nothing for man in his deepest relations
and capacities ; it has no bearing upon the Eternal
world. The only way of looking at such an enterprise
as ours which is compatible with our duties towards you,
my brethren, and towards our Lord and Master, is to
treat it, not as a concert, but as a religious service : as
an effort, through the ministry of sublime and pathetic
music, to bring the successive incidents of oui- Lord's
bitter Passion and Death for us sinners more closely home
to our hearts and feelings. If it does that, it will not be
waste. If it does that it will earn, not merely the good
words of the musical journals, but the acclamations of the
Angels in heaven and the approval of our Lord. If it
does that, for even a few souls out of the multitude, we
shall feel that the box of ointment has not been poured
forth in vain.

There are many persons so constituted that for them
music means nothing ; it is merely a scientific form of
noise. There are others who delight in it, but only as art ;
to whom it suggests nothing beyond itself. Very well,
let them stay away : clearly they will not be helped if
they come here ; a love of music is not necessary to being
in a state of grace : they may go to heaven just as well
without music as others with it. But let them not judge
what they do not understand, after the fashion of narrow
disciples, and at the bidding of a Judas, who wishes no
good to religion at all. What we want in these days
especially is generosity — the generosity which can under-
stand that all characters, all souls, are not framed in one
mould ; which can bear with a fervour higher and intenser
than its own, and proportionately strange in its self-
expression ; which, in any case, can believe and hope the
best when it cannot itself follow.

XV] The Economy of ReligioiLs Art. 243

Lastly, and in any case, with this day begins the most
solemn week for serious Christians in the whole course of
the year, the week which is consecrated, every day of it,
as Good Friday is especially, to the contemplation of our
Saviour's Sufferings and Death. It is a time for being, if
possible, much alone ; for earnest prayer over and above
our usual devotions and the regular Services of the Church ;
for avoiding all the distractions of pleasure and business
that can be avoided ; for getting deeper into our own souls,
closer to our God, in union with His Suffering Son.
There will not be wanting voices around us, whispers in
our own hearts to ask the purpose of this waste of strength
and time : but, brethren in Christ, heed them not. No-
thing is wasted on earth that lays up ever' so little in
heaven ; and if we have any true sense of what is due to
our Crucified Lord, we shall open our hearts to the
influences of the time — to the strength, the tenderness,
the clear-sightedness, the fervour, which come from close
contact with the Cross. And I am mistaken if, to some
at least, there does not come also the desire to join with
Mary in bringing some alabaster-box of ointment of spike-
nard, very precious, ready for the Eedeemer's Burial —
some one generous act, done for His dear sake, to His
Church or to His poor, done to Him in them, done in for-
getfulness of the present, and in the thought and view of
the Eternal Future — done in the conviction that He will
accept and bless what love for Him can offer, and that
His Blessing makes all human judgments a matter of
entire indifference.

SERMON XVI.

THE LIVING WATER.

St. Joh.v. iv. 13, 14, 15.

Jesus answered and said unto htr. Whosoever drinketh of this water shall
thirst again : but ivhosoever drinketh of the water that 1 shall give him
shall never thirst ; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a
well of loater , springing up into everlasting life. The ruoman saith vnto
Him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.

THERE is no scene in oiir Lord's earthly Life in which
it is easier to bring Him vividly before our eyes than
that which gave occasion to these words. He was walk-
ing from Judaea along the great road through Samaria ;
and in the middle of the late autumn day, weary with His
journey, He sat down — the language exactly expresses
His attitude — resting on the edge of, and so leaning over,
a well, at the mouth of the valley which led up to the
ancient city of Shechem. The well is there now at this
very hour, recognised as beyond dispute by the most
sceptical of travellers as the well of Jacob, the well of the
conversation in St. John's Gospel. It is just 9 feet in
diameter, and 105 feet in depth, and in the spring-time
there is commonly about 15 feet of water in it. This
well had a history : it was a relic of the age of the Patri-
archs. It had been dug by Jacob, partly to mark his
possession of the spot, just as in Southern regions of
Palestine Abraham had dug, and Isaac had cleared and
repaired similar wells, partly as a sheer necessity for great
cattle-owners, as were the ancestors of the race of Israel,

244

The Livmg Water.

245

tending their flocks and herds under an Eastern sun.
The Samaritans loved and revered this particular well;
believing themselves, not very accurately, to be the chil-
dren of Jacob and Joseph (they were really converted
heathens with Gentile blood in their veins), they looked
on this well as a connecting link with their presumptive
ancestors. As the disciples left their Master sitting
on the well's brink, and wended their way up the
narrow valley towards the city in which they were
to buy provisions for their remaining journey, down the
same valley there came a Samaritan woman, veiled, and
with a pitcher, to draw water; just as Rebekah, as Eachel,
as Zipporah had drawn it elsewhere in the ages before her.
She came, and the Stranger asked her to give Him a little
water to drink ; and she, marking the dialect or accent of
His speech, and knowing how, for more than four long
centuries, a fierce religious feud had separated the Jews
from the Samaritans, expressed her surprise that He
should claim at her hands a token of neighbourly, almost —
for so the Easterns deemed it — of religious communion.
Our Lord does not answer her question : He had come on
earth not to argue but to teach : He answers not the
inquiry which fell upon His human sense of hearing, but
the deep unexpressed yearnings of the soul of the speaker,
which He could read, when not a word was uttered, in all
its hidden misery. " If thou knewest the gift of God, and
Who it is that saith to thee, Give Me to drink; thou
wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given
thee living water." ^ She knew of no living water but that
which lay just 90 feet beneath them, at the bottom of
the ancient well of Jacob. She could not understand how
the Stranger who had " nothing to draw with " could pro-
mise her the clear spring water out of that well. And if
He was thinking of another well, with living ^water in it,

1 St. John iv. lo.

246

The Living Water.

[Serm.

purer and more refreshing than this, was He claiming to
be greater than the patriarch of the race, — " Our father
Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself,
and his children, and his cattle " ? Again Jesus speaks, —
in answer not directly to her spoken question but to the
questions of her inmost soul, — " Whosoever drinketh of
this water shall thirst again, but whosoever drinketh of
the water that I shall give him shall never thirst : but the
water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water
springing up into everlasting life." What the Speaker
exactly meant the woman of Samaria can only have
vaguely apprehended. But she felt at least that He was
speaking of some water with properties far more exhilarat-
ing and precious than any of which she knew. She knew
that she, for many weary years, had toiled down to that
well of Jacob, and back to the city, day by day, with a
laggard step, and with a heavy heart ; and it seemed to her
as if she might somehow be relieved from her thankless
toil, from her aching sense of misery : " Sir," she cried
eagerly, " give me this water, that I thirst not, neither
come hither to draw."

It will do us good, my brethren, if God gives us His
Blessing, to ask what was this water of which Jesus
spoke, and of which the poor woman so earnestly desired
to drink. We Christians, of course, look at our Lord's
earlier Words iu the light of His later Revelations ; and we
are not reading into them meanings which they will not
bear because we ascribe to Him, and to those whom He
commissioned to speak for Him, a consistency of language
which warrants us in interpreting one utterance by
another, — the earlier by the later, the scanty intimation
by the explicit assertion.

I. Observe, first of all, the nature of this gift of which

XVI] The Living Water. 247

Christ speaks. Our Lord calls it a " well of water," — and
" living water." This expression had already an ascer-
tained sense in the Hebrew Scriptures : it meant pure
water ceaselessly rising from a spring, as opposed to still
or stagnant water. Such was the water — it is the same
expression — which Isaac's servants found when they digged
again the old wells which the Philistines had stopped in
the valley of Gerar : ^ such was the water over which,
according to the Jewish Eitual for the cleansing of the
leper, one of the offered birds was to be killed in an
earthen vessel.- And although the exact expression does
not occur, the idea of water running from a spring as a
source of life and health is prominent in such visions as
those of Ezekiel, who beheld an abundant stream pour
forth under the Gate of the Temple at Jerusalem, and
then flow eastward ;^ or of Joel, who told "how a fountain
, should come (nit of the House of the Lord, and should
water the valley of Shittim ;"* or of Isaiah, seeing deeper
into the future, and exclaiming to the coming generations,
" With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of Salva-
tion." ^ There is much else to the same purpose in the
Old Testament ; and the banished Apostle in vision
gathers up its completed meaning when he tells how the
Angel showed him " a pure river of the water of life, clear
as crystal, proceeding out of the Throne of God and of the
Lamb." «

If the question be asked what it was precisely that owx
Lord meant by the "living water" here, we have to consider
that He, especially in St. John's Gospel, speaks of Himself
as the Life : the Being, that is. Who quickens, upholds, and
invigorates movement and growth in the souls of men.
As the Life, He is. He says, the Food of men ;^ as the Life,

1 Geii. xxvi. 17-19.
Joel iii. 18.

" Lev. xiv. 50-52.
5 Isa. xii. 3.

" St. John vi. 32-34, 48-52.

••t Ezfk. xlvii. I.
" Rev. xxii. i.

248

The Living Water.

[Serm.

He is also the Eesurrection ; ^ as the Life, He claims to
rescue alike from moral and physical death ; " all that are
in the gi'aves shall hear His voice ; " - as the Life, He bids
all who would live indeed to come to Him, cling to Him,
feed on Him.^ Doubtless the figure of water is used
especially in Holy Scripture as a physical likeness of the
cleansing action of the Divine Spirit : but the Spirit of
Christ is so termed because it is His work to graft us into
Christ's Human Nature ; and Christ Himself is termed by
St. Paul a " quickening Spirit," ^ with reference to His thus
becoming an inward gift. Nor in the words " living
water" does there seem to be any clear, or at least
primary, reference either to Baptism, by which Christ's
Life is originally imparted, or to faith, by which it is
received. It is the gift, not the method of its bestowal,
which is here in question : and Christ is His own gift, as
He is His own message. His own Gospel: He has no-
thing higher to announce, nothing better to give iis, than
His Adorable Self. But as we dwell on it, the figure
which our Lord employs suggests vividly to us the charac-
teristics of His gift.

2. A well of living water is, in the first place, always
fresh. It does not stagnate like rain-water, it does not
become brackish or foul ; the new supplies which, minute
by minute, burst upwards from the soil, keep it pure and
clear. So it is with Christ. History is a great store-
house of buried memories, some of which are galvanised
into a momentary life by our antiquarians, but which soon
die away again from the grasp of memory, since they
belong to a past age, and do not answer to our wants or
correspond to our sympathies. But eighteen centuries
ago One appeared Who spoke words which have the same
incisive and trenchant force, the same exquisite and mysteri-

1 St. John xi. 25.

^ St. J ohn vi. 35, 40 ; vii. 37.

- Ih. V. 26-29.
I Cor. XV. 45.

XVI]

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249

ous attraction, as if they were the novelties of yesterday.
His several actions and His life as a whole speak to the
nineteenth century as they spoke to the first, provoking
sharp hostility now as then, but then as now winning
their way to sure empire over true hearts. He is, in short,
ever fresh and young ; and such as He is in history, such
is He also within the sanctuary of the heart. In that
vast treasure-house of the dead — the human soul, — amid
all tliat is stagnant, all that belongs to the irrevocable
past, all that bears on it the marks of advancing change
and corruption, amid the thoughts which pall, the
memories which depress, the forms of feeling which once
(quickened within us the highest and most subtle enjoy-
ment, but which have long ceased to move, or which are
roused now into a momentary life only to create some-
thing like repugnance, — there is, I dare to say it, for
Christians one thought which is ever fresh, one memory
which is ever welcome and invigorating, one train of feel-
ing which kindles within the soul into a burning tide tlie
keenest and purest passion : it is the thought, the
memory, the love of our Lord and Saviour. Just as
literary men have said that if they had to choose one
book in the world which should furnish them, in the
absence of all others, with high interest and enjoyment,
and that unfailingly, they woi;ld choose the Bible ; so
within the soul the thought, the memory of the One
Perfect Being is the one warrant of a continuous refresh-
ment, because He is more than a thought or a memory —
far more ; because He is a living Presence. A Well of
Water — that is His own figure — He lives within regene-
rate souls in His perpetual freshness: as He was guaranteed
against seeing corruption in the tomb,^ so much more, now
that He has risen, is He proof against its ravages ; the
centuries pass, but He renews His youth ; life waxes and

1 Ps. xvi. 10; Acts ii. 24-27.

250

The Living Water.

[Serm,

wanes, but He smiles on its sunset not less refreshingly
than on its springtide. " Thou art the same, and Thy years
shall not fail," i and " With Thee is the Well of Life." 2

3. A spring of water is also in continual motion ; and
herein also Christ is true to His own metaphor. He is
in History, He is in the Soul of Man, ever different and
yet the same. As the sky presents the same outline of
clouds on no two days on which we observe it, and yet is
the same sky ; as the sea, visit it as often as we will,
never looks quite as it looked before, yet is ever the
same ; as the smallest jet of water, whose volume never
varies, yet presents us minute by minute with an in-
finite variety of forms ; so is it in the world of spirits with
the Presence of Christ. He is movement, and yet identity.
He is to us what He was to our forefathers ; yet He is
ever displaying new aspects of His Power and His Perfec-
tions to those who hold communion with Him. He is at
one and the same time Stability and Progress : here pre-
serving the unalterable lines of His One Perfect Eevela-
tion of Himself, there leading us on to new and enriched
perceptions of its range and its significance.

As He is Himself movement, so He is the Source of
movement. He has set the soul of man in motion, and
kept it moving. He has quickened the very intelligence
which would fain drive Him from His throne. For the
truths which He has brought to us have moved the soul
of man to its depths — moved it so profoundly, that
whether men accept these truths or not, they cannot rest
as though they had not heard them. As it is said in the
Gospel of His last entry into Jerusalem, that when He
had entered "all the city was moved," ^ so is it with His
entrance into the soul. Faculties which had been
dormant for years are stirred to meet Him, and He keeps
them in motion, because He Himself is perpetually ex-

1 Ps. cii. 27. lb. xxxvi. 9. ^ gt Matt. xxi. to.

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hibiting new aspects of His Power or His Beauty. It is
said sometimes of the Christian Creed that it ensures the
stagnation of honest thought. Undoubtedly in one sense
it does arrest thought ; it gives a fixed form to our ideas
on subjects of the highest importance ; it fixes them thus
in the Name and with the Authority of the All-Wise.
We Christians are not now discussing the Divine Attri-
butes or the destiny of man as if these were matters upon
which the light of certainty had never been thrown ; but
fixed thought is not the antagonist of active thought, any
more than the wall or rim of the well is hostile to the
movement of the water which springs up within. Those
who have had anything to do with education must know
how often a naturally stupid and dull person has been
quickened into intelligence, at least on one set of subjects,
liy learning to take a deep practical interest in religion.
The vast ideas which the Cliristian Creed contains, when
once they are living realities to the soul, move it to its
very depths — God, Eternity, the past, with the account to
be given of it, the future, with its mighty hopes and fears,
Clirist's love in Kedemption — these things cannot become
more than words to any and leave tlie soul unmoved.

4. And thus a well of springing water fertilises. All
around the edge the green verdure tells the story of its
life-imparting power. And here too Christ is the great
fertiliser of the soul of man. He has made human
thought capable of productions which could not else have
been produced. Dante and Sliakespeare are in their
different ways distinctly His creations. He has fertilised
affection: family life, as we understand it in Europe, is
His work: His Authority is reflected in the Christian
Father, His Tenderness in the Christian Mother, His
lowly Obedience in the Christian Child. Above all, He
has fertilised Will ; He has made it capable of new
measures of self-sacrifice ; of heroism and self-sacrifice,

252

The Living Water. [Serm.

prosaic and unnoticed more often than conspicuous ;
heroism and self-sacrifice which, but for Him, would
never have existed.

Ah ! if by any national infatuation in the years to
come, we should try to do without Him, we should soon
discover even in the matters of this life the magnitude
of our mistake. Wiien human thought has nothing upon
which it can seriously fiix itself beyond the province of
sense ; when human affection is forbidden to spend itself
on any form that is not earthly, palpable, material ;
when the human will is invigorated by no motives that
are drawn from a higher world than this, — human life
will soon become barren and unfruitful : we shall
gradually but surely exchange the civilisation of Europe
for the civilisation of China or Japan. We are so accus-
tomed to tlie sun that we take its light and warmth as
a matter of course ; but we do not rack our imaginations
by thinking what the world's surface would be without
it. Yet be sure that the world would not then be more
forlorn and lifeless to the eye of man than to a spiritual
eye is the soul of a man or a nation which has lost the
Presence of Christ.

IT.

Note, secondly, the seat or scene of this gift. The
water that I shall give him shall be " in him." This is the
claim and the triumph of Jesus Christ ; He does His work
in the very seat and root of man's being. Others have
done great works — have effected vast changes on the
surface of human life. They have founded empires,
imposing the will of a man or of a race upon millions of
reluctant subjects : they have changed " customs and
laws and even languages ; " they have altered the wliole
outward character of a civilisation. Others again have

XVI] The Living Water.

253

penetrated deeper : they have founded empires not of
force, but of ideas : they have so wrought upon and
fashioned the shape and setting of human thought, as to
reign, long after their death, in the thoughts of millions
who never heard their name. But Christ has done more
even than this. He is more than the Founder of a king-
dom : more than the Author of a world-wide philosophy.
He penetrates beyond the sphere of force and the sphere of
thought to the very centre of the soul. A government may
be obeyed, while it is hated : a philosophy may be accepted
while no personal allegiance or love is felt for its author.
Christ reigns, when He reigns, not merely over men's con-
duct, not merely over their ideas, but in their hearts : He
places Himself at the very centre of their souls ; in that
inner sanctuary of consciousness whence thought and
feeling and resolve take their origin, He raises His throne.
He is there not merely as a Monarch, but as a Friend ; not
merely as a Force, but as a Source of Life ; it is not an iron
hand the pressure of which the Christian feels ; it is a sense
of buoyancy, of invigorated power, of kindled affection,
of enlarged and enlarging thought, as though his own
personal being were superseded and another Higher and
Wiser than himself had taken possession, and was making
him that which of and by himself he could not be.

Yes, this gift is really within man : and hence Chris-
tians know, and they only know, the secret of man's
dignity. The old heathen philosophies said much, and
often said it well, about the human soul. Men speculated
on the nature of the soul, the origin of the soul, the con-
nection that subsists between the body and the soul ; the
probabilities for and against a life of the soul after the
death of the body. But they did not really proclaim the
dignity of man as man. Much was said about the dignity
of particular individuals, classes, races of men : to be a
Eoman citizen, to have particular blood in your veins, to

254

The Living Water.

[Seem.

govern a city or a province — this was great according
to the ideas of the ancient world. But nothing was said
about the greatness of conquered races, of women, of
slaves — of slaves who outnumbered the freemen of the
empire, and who were bought and sold and abused and
made much of, simply as a form of personal property with
no rights of their own, no accorded permission to plead
the instincts of humanity, or the claims of justice. Of
their dignity nothing was said : though they too were
men, with warm hearts and keen intellects, and a sense
of what they might be, and a sense of what they
were, not less vivid than their masters'. Jesus Christ
did not do His work at once ; He would not provoke
an uprising of the oppressed populations expressing
their too natural vengeance amid scenes of lire and
blood; He did not talk, as others since have talked, about
the rights of man : but He did more. He placed at the
very centre of the soul, alike of slave and master, the true
sense of its real dignity ; the instinct, the irrepressible
instinct, of communion with the All-Holy, resulting in an
abundant outburst of man's noblest life within ; and He
left this to do its work as the centuries passed, slowlv
but surely, as leaven deposited in the unwieldy mass of
human society. It has wrought, that leaven, from then
till now. It has been lieaving visibly — and with no
trivial results in our own day — beyond the Atlantic ; it
has yet work to do, far and wide and deep, ere the work
of proclaiming man's true greatness as man is complete.
That proclamation will be made in its integrity only
when the preciousness of Christ's inward gift to the
human soul is the creed of the human race.

Christ's great gift is within ; and as this is the secret
of His dignity, so it is the source of His spiritual inde-
pendence. If Christians were dependent on the things
of sense the world might crush out — it might have

XVI]

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255

crushed oi;t long ago — the Christian life. I do not deny
that the Christian life is largely supported by what meets
the eye and the ear. After all, we are what God has made
us — men, not angels. I do not deny that the language of
the written Word, and the grace of the Sacraments can
alone reach the soul through the organs of sense ; so that if
all copies of the Bible could be destroyed, and the admini-
stration of the Sacraments really prevented as well as
forbidden, the ordinary means of grace would be cut off.
But when driven to bay, and in the last resort, the soul
falls back upon a Presence which is independent of sense.
The world could proscribe the Christian worship, and
destroy the Christian Scriptures ; but its legislation is
just as powerless against the Presence of the Divine
Itedeemer in the sanctuary of the soul as against the
clouds and the sunlight. It was this which made bonds,
imprisonment, death easy and welcome to our first fathers
in the faith : they knew that they had not merely in
heaven, but within their breasts. One Who would not leave
them ; One Who was Light when all else was darkness ;
One Who, while all outward aids were denied, was of
Himself a well of water springing up into everlasting
life.

III.

The efiPect of this gift is its last and not its least
characteristic. " Springing up into everlasting life : " to
render it more exactly, springing up unto the higher life
of man, which belongs to the future age of his existence.
This is the real effect of Christ's Gift of His Presence to
the soul. It does much besides ; it makes human thought
and feeling, as we have seen, fresh and active and fertile.
But its true object is to be found not in the present but
in the future ; not in the life of this world but of the next.
The life of love, directed towards its one worthy Object,

256

The Living Water.

[Serm,

begins here, but it does not end here. It is the life of the
blessed beiuos w]io inhabit the Eternal World : and

Christ's gift expands within His people to prepare them
for that world. Without it man would not be happy in
heaven. Heaven would be hell to those in whom the true
Life of the Eternal World has not yet found a place, and
whose whole thought and energy is persistently directed
towards the things of time and sense.

To some who hear me, it may be, it will occur to think
that what has been urged is, as men speak, mystical
language, — intelligible no doubt to minds of a particular
cast, but not suited to the practical matter-of-fact views
of conduct and duty of simple people. You know nothing
then, my brethren, of the inner Well of water springing up
into everlasting life ? It may be there, nevertheless ; like
the sunshine and the atmosphere, without which your
bodily life would be impossible, yet which you do not
note. You know nothing, you say, of this inward gift.
Then trust those who do. In tlie days of ancient Greece
there were African travellers who penetrated so far as to
find that at noonday their shadows turned towards the
south. They returned and reported the fact, and it was
treated by the historian of the day with entire incredulity.
We know that they had simply crossed the Equator ; and
that their experience is shared by the passengers who
crowd every mail-packet that leaves the Cape of Good
Hope. But the reports which Christians bring back from
the land of spiritual experience are not less certain, or
more apparently incredible, than the story of the Greek
travellers. The Well of water springing up to the Eternal
Life only seems mystical until its reality has been practi-
cally ascertained; until, like the Samaritans, men have
heard the Inner Teacher themselves, and " know that this
is indeed the Christ the Saviour of the World." ^

1 St. John iv. 42.

XYI]

The Living Water.

257

To others, again, it will occur to think : This is all very
well for those who have all their way in this life, who
take no thought for the morrow, because the morrow is
probably well provided for ; who occupy themselves with
spiritual experiences, because they have leisure and
abundance at command. But what of the very poor, the
hard-working, the multitudes to whom life is a struggle
for existence, to whom each day is like all other days, a
long mechanical plodding through monotonous work ; to
whom each year is like other years, only that energy is
fainter, and the margin between the struggler and the
dark waters is narrower — those dark waters which are the
only home to which despair can look forward ? Ah ! you
say, this talk of inner refreshment rouses indignation in
presence of the appalling proportions of human suffering :
it is a maudlin substitute for the plain honest duties of
active charity, of better education, of improved sanitary
regulations, of relief administered to bodily want and pain.
If it were so, you would perhaps be right, brethren, in
denouncing it. If it were so, you might well doubt
whether Clirist had really blessed the world by His
Gospel. But as matters stand, look around you, and say
whether, generally speaking, and in the long-run, the
philanthropists and the educators are not also the
Christians : whether the inner Spring of water does not
fertilise this life, as well as spring up into the moral
beauties which prepare for the next. One duty does not
proscribe another : and whether a man be poor or wealthy,
he equally needs tlie inner Source of life ; and if he enjoys
it beyond everything else, it enables him to bear his lot
in this world well, and according to his means to bless his
fellow-creatures.

Indeed, this it is — the presence or absence of this
inward gift — which constitutes the real difference be-
tween man and Jiian. The names or titles we bear, the

The LiviJig Water.

property we inherit or have acquired, the reputation
which follows us, — these things are as little our real selves
as the coat we put on in the morning and take off at
night. That which really belongs to us is within ; it is
part of that imperishable essence which is man's inmost
self, — which does not weaken with disease or die with
death — which lives on, somehow, necessarily and for ever.
It is here that we have or have not that of which Christ
spoke to the Samaritan ; that which will last when all
else is passing, that which will comfort and sustain when
all else is proved of no avail.

To us, too, it may be, Christ comes as He came to her of
Samaria, as a Petitioner : He asks us to aid His poor, or to
support His Church, or to assist in the propagation of His
Gospel ; He would place Himself under an obligation to
lis — " Give Me to drink." And yet it may ba that if we
knew the gift of God, and Who it is That saith unto us.
Give Me to driuk," we should long ago have asked of
Him, aud He would have given us, as He has given to
others, the living water.

It may be that while we are, as was said of a great
Jesuit in a past generation, buttresses of the Church, we
lack that which alone makes the Church worth supporting.
Outward activity and benevolence is no good substitute
for the life of the soul ; and whether the soul shall live
is a question of prayer, of earnest importunate prayer,
addressed to Him Who gave us all that, in nature or in
grace, we have ever received, and "Who only waits for our
petitions to give yet more abundantly. Prayer is a ques-
tion of earnestness : and earnestness is only natural wheu
men have taken the measure of life and death, of the
things which are seen and which are temporal, and of the
things which are not seen and which are eternal.^

1 2 Cor. iv. i8.

SERMON XVII.

THE TEUE LIFE OF MAK

St. Luke xii. 15.

A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.

rnHIS is an instance of our Lord's manner of taking
J- occasion, when a particular incident comes before
Him, to proclaim a truth of world-wide import. The
truth is broader and deeper than is needed for the im-
mediate purpose : but then, in the eyes of the Universal
Teacher, the particular case is not only to be considered
in itself ; it furnishes an opportunity for proclaiming
something that shall concern and interest the world.
Our Lord had come to a pause in His public teaching,
when it occurred to a Jew who was listening that a person
of such influence and ascendency might possibly help
him towards attaining a private and domestic object,
which he had greatly at heart. This Jew was a younger
son, who could not easily forgive his elder brother for
enjoying a double share of their father's estate. The
elder brother, it is plain, was also one of our Lord's
hearers, and likely to be, in whatever degree, attracted by
Him ; but, on the other hand, it may be taken for certain
that he had no mind to part with any portion of his
estate, or the appeal against him would not have been
necessary. " Master," cried the younger man, " speak to
my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me." ^

' ^Jt. Luke xii. 13.

259

26o

The true life of man.

[Serm.

Our Lord might, it is clear, have met this appeal by a
direct discussion of its intrinsic merit. But in fact,
placing Himself at the point of view of the speaker, who
could not yet know at all what He Himself really was,
He asks what commission He could be supposed to hold
for deciding such questions at all. " Man, who made Me
a judge or divider over you ? " And then, as if glancing
at both the brothers — the elder, who held so tenaciously
to his legal fortune, and the younger, who was so eager to
share it — He rises into a higher atmosphere, and His
words become at once instructive to all men and for all
time. "Take heed," He said, "and beware of covetousness,"
for one reason among others, but especially for one — that
covetousness involves a radical mistake as to the true
meaning and nature of life : " a man's life consisteth not
in the abundance of the things which he possesseth."
He does not deny that something is needed to sustain
physical life ; but He has His eye upon the tendency to
accumulate a great deal more, and to throw all the energy
of thought and work into this accumulation. Man's life
consists not. He says, in this kind of abundance, which is
made up of things which he possesseth. If we could
forget who the Speaker is, some of us might, at the first
thought, be disposed to say that this is a truism. No
doubt it is. So true is it, that it was a commonplace
among the heathen. We may remember the lines in
which even the light-hearted poet of the Augustan age
tells how " neither house nor farm, nor store of brass and
gold, can banish fever from the ailing body, or care from
the mind."

Understand life as you will, and the Sacred words
correspond with everyday experience, that life is not any-

1 " Non flonius aut fundus, uon aeris acerv\is et auri
Aegroto domini deduxit corpore febres,
Non animo ciiras • "

Hor. I Ep. ii. 47.

XVII] The true life of man. 261

thing external to man. Every invalid knows that his
physical life consists not in the costly medicines or pro-
fessional skill which he can command, but in the renewed
vigour of his bodily frame and its vital functions. Every
student knows that his mental life consists, not in the
books on his shelves — not even in the thoughts of other
men industriously copied into his note-books : but in the
appropriation of these treasures by his memory and his
thinking faculty, in their being interwoven with and
made a part of the texture and system of his mind. And
every Christian knows, or should know, that his spiritual
life consists, not in the possession of a Bible, or in the
near neighbourhood of Churches and Sacraments, or of
Christian friends, or of other religious opportunities, but
in that which is " hid with Christ in God in the incor-
poration with his inmost self of that Truth and Grace of
which religious opportunities, the highest and the lowest,
are but the channels. So obvious is this, that when it is
denied that life — something always and essentially internal
and personal — consists in that which is distinct from and
independent of us, we are at first tempted, if not to ask,
yet to think, "Who ever said that it did?" Yes, the
saying is a truism. But there are truisms and truisms.
There are truisms which are admitted to be such in the
conduct as well as by the speech of men. And there are
truisms which are never questioned in conversation, and
which are rarely acted on. To insist on truisms of the
former class is no doubt an impertinence ; to insist on
truisms of this latter kind again and again, and even with
importunity, is by no means superfluous ; and the saying
of our Lord is undoubtedly a truism of this description.
The distinction which He draws between what a man has
and what he is, is as obvious, when stated, as it is com-
monly overlooked. The saying that life consists not in

1 Col. iii. 3.

262

The true life of man.

[Serm.

what we have but in what we are, is as true as the prac-
tice of making life consist not in wliat we are but in
what we have, is common. Intellectually speaking, the
world did not need these words of our Lord. Practically
speaking, there is no one of His sayings which it could
less dispense with. For just consider the two brothers.
They both knew perfectly that what our Lord said was
true. They had learnt the truth from their own Hebrew
Scriptures, and yet they were acting as if it were an ascer-
tained illusion. The determination to retain the larger
share of the property, the determination to have it divided
if possible, meant that in the practical judgment of both
the brothers life did somehow consist in possessing pro-
perty. All the energy and resolve with which we pursue
that about which we feel most deeply was thrown into
this question of retaining or dividing that bit of property.
Each would have said, no doubt, that his life did not
consist in possessing it. Each certainly acted as if it did.

Truism or truth, there is no mistake as to the im-
portance which our Lord attached to what He then
announced. He taught it in act as well as by word of
mouth. Unlike ourselves. He could determine the circum-
stances in which He would enter this world, and with
which He would surround Himself in it. And what did
He advisedly choose ? A poor home, poor people for His
Mother and Foster-father, poor men for His companions
the foxes had holes, and the birds of the air had nests, but
the Son of Man had not where to lay His Head.^ He would
not accept consideration and position even from the poor :
He would not be made a King or an umpire. And at last
He gave Himself up to be stripped even of His poor
garments and to die in agony on the Cross. " Ye know,"
said His Apostle in after years, " ye know the grace of
our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, though He was rich, yet for

1 St. Matt. viii. 20.

XVII]

The true life of man.

263

your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty
might be rich." ^ And the wealth which He thus earns
for us is largely moral wealth ; it lies above all else in
making our life consist in something else than the things
which we possess.

Certainly, judging from experience, it would seem that\
there is a constant tendency in our fallen nature to run ^
counter to the truth which our Lord proclaims ; to create,
if we may so put it, a new centre of gravity in life, so that
we come to act and speak and think more with reference
to something that is altogether outside us than to the true
centre of our existence. And this tendency is a result of
that momentous event in the earliest history of our race,
which we term the Fall.

For in his fallen state, and so far as he is stripped of
God's supernatural grace, man's solitary self is too thin
and feeble a spirit to persist in independence of the
outer world of matter ; it exerts upon him evidently
and always a fatal and all but resistless attraction ; it
attracts him through that side of his composite nature
which belongs to it ; it lures or draws or drags him down
until his personal self, his spirit, is entangled in and de-
tained by it ; until, victim as he is of its ceaseless and
subtle importunity, he has fallen, at first little by little,
but in the end completely, i;nder its sway, — under the
empire of material nature. Of this fact the Pantheism of
the ancient world, which was at the root of its idolatries,
was an expression ; it was an unconscious attempt, by way
of after-thought, to make man's degradation respectable by
decorating it with' theory. And within the frontiers of
Christendom, wherever the grace of Eegeneration has been
forfeited, the old attraction is at once felt ; modern
civilisation imposes on it some characteristic form ; society
takes the place of wild nature ; and life, still practically

1 2 Cor. viii. 9.

264

The true life of man.

[Serm.

made to consist in that which is external to man, is also
made to consist in that which society prizes most.

Look at our great cities. For millions of human beings
the face of nature scarcely exists ; they live in these vast
centres of population, where man has traced his own
ungraceful inscriptions over the fair handiwork of God ;
and the matter which they extract from the bowels of
the earth or which they collect from its extremities, to
wield, to mould, to refine, to analyse, to reproduce in a
thousand disguises, seems, as they handle it, to thicken
the mental air they breathe ; to bury thought, imagination,
affection, will, in its dull encompassing folds ; to pene-
trate their immaterial being and impregnate it with quali-
ties which might, if possible, even materialise thought;
to make man, undying spirit that he is, forget his true
value and his destiny, and think of himself as though
some grains or nuggets of the matter around him were
more precious than he. What wonder if, where little or
no Light from above illuminates these populations, so con-
ducive by their varied industries to our material prosperity
as a nation, but ministering to it so often at so vast a
cost, — what wonder if there should be forgetfulness of that
wherein man's true life consists : if, when labour is re-
warded by wealth, that life should be sought in something
altogether external ; in the tangible products of his brains
or of his hands ; in the abundance of acres or houses or
railwa}'' shares or other symbols of material wealth of
which he may have succeeded in possessing himself !

It was for men of this temper, though living in an
agricultural district, that our Lord in His condescending
mercy uttered the parable about the man whose fields
brought forth plenteously, and who proposed to pull
down his barns and build greater, and who whispered to
his soul that he should take his ease, eat and drink and
be merry for many a year to come, and to whom God

XVII]

The true life of man.

said, " Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of
thee."

An intellectual society is apt to congratulate itself on
its freedom from the vulgar care for money which is
characteristic of a manufacturing town ; though it may
perhaps be a question whether it is really justified in
doing so. But a man who is careless about money for its
own sake may still make his life consist in works of art
or of literature. The true posture of his mind is to a cer-
tain extent disguised i'rom his conscience, because books
and pictures are associated with ideas rather than with
the money which they will fetch in the market, so in
making idols of them the owner may persuade himself
that he is a purely intellectual or aesthetic enthusiast. But
after all, they are just as much outside him as a heap of
sovereigns, and he must part with them at death. What
a pathetic description is that of Cardinal Mazarin. rousing
himself from his dying bed at Vincennes to take a last
look at the treasures which his long ascendency in the
councils of the French Monarchy had enabled him to
accumulate. When his nurses and doctors were away he
rose from his couch, and with his tall figure, pale and
wasted, closely wrapped in his fur-lined dressing-gown, he
stole into the gallery ; and the Count de Brienne, who re-
ports the scene, hearing the shuffling sound of his slippers
as he dragged his limbs feebly and wearily along, hid him-
self behind the curtains. As, in his extreme weakness,
the Cardinal had to halt almost at each step, he feebly
murmured, " I must leave all this." He crawled on, how-
ever, clinging, so as to support himself, first on one object
and then on another, and as at each pause, exhausted by
pain and weakness, he looked around the splendid room,
he said again, with a deep sigh, " I must leave all this."
Then, at last, he caught sight of Brienne : " Give me your

1 St. Luke xii. 16-20.

266

The trm life of man.

[Serm.

tand," he said, " I am very weak aud helpless, yet I like
to walk, and I have something to do in the library." And
then, leaning on the Count's arm, he again pointed to the
pictures. " Look at that beautiful Correggio, and this
Venus of Titian, and this incomparable Deluge of Antonio
Caracci. Ah ! my poor friend, I must leave all this.
Good-bye, dear pictures, which I have loved so well ! " ^

No doubt the most obvious form of the mistake against
which our Lord guards us is somewhat of this kind ; and
yet there are other things besides gold, and acres, and
pictures, and books, much less tangible and palpable, yet
purely external to man, in which he may make his life
consist. Such is reputation ; such is social, political,
academical, ecclesiastical honour, as the case may be.
Many a man, whose natural instincts are too refined to
allow him to care keenly for property, is even passionately
desirous of honour. Every society has its own standards
and certificates of honour. All the expressions of it which
meet the eye and which fall upon the ear — decorations,
titles, ordered precedence, the delicate and scarcely-
hinted compliment, the tone and posture of calculated
and restrained deference — these we find everywhere in
human life, and not less than elsewhere in the life of a
L'^niversity. The younger of us know the pleasure which
is felt at the cheers which follow an athletic victory,
or a conspicuous service rendered to the college boat on
the river, or a brilliant speech in the Union, or upon the
generous congratulations which are called out by expected
or unexpected success in the schools. And others, whom
years have taught to discipline aud restrain the expression
of feeling, are yet fully alive to the subtle fascinations of
honour, when, perhaps, some post of authority or responsi-
bility is offered them, or some notice taken of them in a

1 MeinrAres inedits de Louis-Henri de Lomenie, Comte de Brienne (Paris,
1828), ii. 114-117.

XVII]

The true life of man.

267

very high quarter, or some little work of theirs is favour-
ably criticised in a German periodical, or some warmth
of commendation from a living friend commonly chary of
his words, and not given to compliments, is indirectly
conveyed to them. We all know how largely we prize
these things ; it is well for us if we do not make our life
consist in them ; for such honour, in all its forms, is no
part of our real selves ; it is just as much external to us as
the coat we wear on our back, or the shillings in our
pocket, — very close to us for the time, but very easily
separable, and very certain to be separated. Well for us
indeed if we deserve it, even in part ; if conscience does
not whisper that in welcoming it we are taking that which
is not our own ; as, indeed, in one sense conscience must
always remind us that there is in the last resort only One
Being Who can deserve, as only One Being Who can confer,
true honour.

" When mortals praise thee, hide tliine eyes,
Nor to thy Master's wrong
Take to thyself His crown and prize ;
Yet more in heart than tongue." '

And anyhow, of all earthly honour, as of wealth, it is true
that a man " shall carry nothing away with him when he
dieth, neither shall his pomp follow him."-

There is a kind of nionuineut more than once still to be
met with in our old English Cathedrals, which was meant
to teach this truth in what would now be called a realistic
way. Above, perhaps, lies the figure of a great Prelate,
arrayed in his full pontificals, with cope, and mitre, and
pastoral staff, possibly raising his right hand as if still in
the act of benediction, and surrounded with all the
symbols of his high order, and his spiritual and temporal
jurisdiction, while carved angels support the broidered
cushion on which he rests his head, and with his feet he
treads upon the young lion and the dragon — the moral, or

1 Lyra Innocentium, iv. 3. 2 ps_ xlix, 17.

268

The true life of man.

[Serm.

social, or political opponents of tlie Church's rule; and
below this figure, so beautiful" in form, so emblazoned
with colour, there lies on a lower ledge another. It is a
well-nigh naked corpse, emaciated almost to a skeleton,
in which the ribs and joints are each articulated with a
painfully literal exactness, while a worm is gnawing the
vitals or protruding from the brain. Above is the Prelate
still swathed and encrusted in the accumulated honours
of high ecclesiastical position. Beneath is the man, lying
as every man sooner or later must lie, stripped of all
earthly decorations, in the nakedness and corruption of
the grave. Do you say that such a conception belongs
to the coarseness of mediaeval art? Do not impair the
force, it may be, of even unwelcome truth by an adjective
conveying a narrow and unwarranted judgment. No,
that portraiture is not merely mediaeval, whatever hands
may first have fashioned it ; it is Christian, it is human,
it is true now, it will be to the end of time, it proclainis
the eternal contrast between the honour which may sur-
round us in life, deservedly or undeservedly, and the for-
feiture of all honour that cometh not from God only,i which
surely awaits us all in death. It is a vivid exhibition
of one aspect of the truth, that " a man's life consisteth
not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth."

And there are others, nobler souls, surely, than these,
whom honour charms not, still less wealth, but who are
the devotees of^nowled^e. If they said out their whole
heart they would say that a man's true life does consist
in the knowledge which he possesseth. And they might
be right if they meant, by the act of knowing, something
more than apprehension by the understanding and reten-
tion by the memory ; and if the Object of their knowledge
were the Infinite and Everlasting God. For " this is life
eternal, to know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ

1 St. John V. 44.

XVII]

The true life of man.

269

Whom Thou hast sent." ^ But then this knowledge which
is Eternal life is something different from that to which
I referred just now; it is, according to the original Bible
language, an adhesion of the whole being, — of will and
affections, no less than of the understanding, — to its Object.
In our ordinary language, knowledge, we know, means
much less than this ; it means the apprehension by the
understanding and reason of man, of those facts about
himself and about the world around him which can be
verified by observation, and which are practically useful
in the conduct of life. This knowledge is sometimes
called, I do not say with wliat reason, positive ; it is
triumphantly contrasted with the science of mind, and
even with Divine Eevelation ; it is presented as solid,
certain, practical ; and an increasing number of minds in
our day devote themselves to it with fresh enthusiasm.
But it too is external to man. He apprehends it ; he
retains it for years ; he carries it about with him; he dis-
penses it to others; it seems for a while to have made a
home at the very centre of his being, and his memory
fondles it, and his reason watches and dissects it, and his
imagination decorates and dresses it up ; but for all that
it is not himself — it is outside his real self, and he will,
one day, part company with it. Necessary truth, indeed,
once ours, is, if we will, ours for ever. Such is the true
knowledge of the Infinite and Eternal God ; such, too, the
knowledge, it may be, of truths which the constitution of
our minds obliges us to recognise as necessary — as, for
instance, the axioms and conclusions of mathematics, or
first principles in morals — and which, as they never can
liave been other than true, cannot have been something
eternally independent of Him Who alone is Eternal
Truth, and must therefore represent, in ways which we
may be allowed to understand hereafter, elements of His

' St. John xvii. 3.

270

The true life oj man.

[Serm.

Eternal Being. But the greater part of what we call
knowledge is very different : it is as variable, contingent,
evanescent, as are its objects ; and this knowledge, as the
Apostle says, shall vanish away ; ^ we shall put it off as the
mere dressing-gown of the soul when we lie down to die.

Nay, of this we have warnings, before we reach the
end, in the change and decay of the mental powers.
Some of us have perhaps known what it is to witness
that solemn and mysterious judgment or dispensation of
God, when a mind, richly endowed with faculties and
resources, and stored with the accumulated knowledge
of a lifetime, suddenly breaks down ; discovers, as in a
moment, that its well-tried machiner}^ is not entirely at
command ; suspects that it no longer sees everything as
it is, and that all is somehow distorted and awry, and so
passes through painful alternations of reason and un-
reason,— just enough of the one to take the measure of the
tragic presence of the other. And then, little by little,
the internal survey of mental wealth, and the power of
marshalling and administering it, becomes less and less
distinct, and the inner chasms open more widely, and the
darkness thickens around until, as far as this world is
concerned, all has closed in night.

No, brethren, a man's life consisteth not in that which
he possesseth. " "Whether there be" prophecies, they shall
fail ; whether there be tongues, they shall cease ; whether
there be knowledge, it shall vanish away." - Knowledge,
honour, wealth, these pass : and man's truest life consists
not in what he has but in what he is, in the relation or
attitude of his will towards the Being who is the Author
and the Last End of his existence. This relation, be
assured, does not change, either for good or evil, as we
pass through the gate of death. If the will be self-wai'ped,
turned awa}^ from the Face of Eternal Righteousness,

1 I Cor. xiii. 8. lb.

XVII]

The true life of man.

what it is, it will remain enduringly, and no store of
material wealth, or earthly honour, or mental accomplish-
ments can relieve this central and fatal deficiency. If,
through the Eedemption and Grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ, Who has bought the inmost self of man back
from slavery by His Precious Blood, and has given it
directness and vigour by acting on it through His Spirit
and His Sacraments, — if man's will has been made thus
true in its aim, and free, and pliant, and vigorous in its
upward movement ; be sure that this, too, is a thing
which lasts : this is life.

Five years before he left us, one who has since his
death been much in men's minds, especially within these
walls, had an illness which was of a very critical charac-
ter.^ For some days he said nothing, and he was supposed
to be quite unconscious. After his recovery he referred,
one day, to this, the presumably unconscious, part of his
illness. " People thought," he said, " that I was uncon-
scious, but the fact was, that although I could not speak
I heard all that went on in the room, and I was well
occupied." To the question, "What were you doing?"
he answered, " By God's mercy, I could remember the
Epistle for the fourth Sunday in Advent, out of the
Philippians, which begins, 'Piejoice in the Lord alway.'
This I made a framework for prayer ; saying the Lord's
Prayer two or three times between each clause, and so
dwelling on the several relations of each clause to each
petition in the Lord's Prayer." How he did this
he explained at some length, and then added, " It lasted
me, I should think, four or five hours." To the question,
" What did you do after that ? " he answered, " I began it
over again. I was very happy : and, had it been God's
will, did not wish to get better."

1 The Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D., Regius Profe.ssor of Hebiew, aud Canon of
Christ Chnrcli, Oxford (where tliis sermon was preaclied).

272

The trtie life of man.

[Serm.

Yes, assuredly, a man's life does not consist in the out-
ward things which he possesseth. Let us, in conclusion,
endeavour to apply this truth to one or two parts in detail.

I. Surely it should shape and control our notions of pro-
gress, civilisation, improvement. What do men really
mean, nine times out of ten, when they employ these
fascinating and attractive terms ? Do they not too often
mean only something that takes place in that which is
outside man, instead of in man's real self, the seat and
centre of his life ? Take an instance. I happen to go down
into a country neighbourhood and meet a person who says
that everything is looking up : that the progress and
improvement are quite astonishing. I ask for an explan-
ation, and he proceeds to say that a new railway has just
been opened ; that they are now only six hours from
London ; that there are now two posts in the day ; that
the farms are well let ; that the squire has been rebuild-
ing his cottages on an improved model ; that it is a great
advantage to have the telegraph, and a Post-office Savings-
bank. Do I say that these things are without their value,
or other than great blessings which God, in His Providence,
has bestowed ? Certainly not : but the question is whether
they are the decisive tests of real improvement, in the life
of a being like man. If man be what the Christian
Eevelation tells us he is, — a spirit with a material form
attached to him, a spirit on probation here for a short
space of years, and with an eternity before him, — how can
that be any true improvement in a town or country
neighbourhood which does not take account of this funda-
mental fact in his existence ?

Surely there are many other questions to be asked and
answered before our Lord Jesus Christ would have said
that that neighbourhood was improved. What are the
statistics of crime ? what the relations of masters and
servants, of parents and children ? how many people say

XYII] The true life of man.

any prayers ? what is the condition of the schools ? what
is taught in them about another life, and how, and by
whom ? what is the public honour paid to God in His
Church or in the use of His Sacraments % what, so far as
we can know, are the average dispositions of the dying ?
These questions go more to the root of the matter ; they
prove the claim to real improvement ; since the true life
of a neighbourhood, as of a man, consists in something
else than the abundance of its material advantages, how-
ever considerable they may be.

2. Again, look at our too common way of estimating the
prosperity of a Church. We count up its sacred build-
ings ; we calculate the amount of its fixed or variable
income ; we survey and value the social consideration, or
political weight accorded to its ministers ; we regard
them as members of a " profession," to be measured by
the same standards of failure or success as any other, — as
officers in the army or members of the bar. For us, too
often, the Church is of the earth earthy, because we see
in it nothing else ; we are so engrossed in the study of
its outer husk that we have no eye for realities within.
Yet a Church is nothing, if it be not a congregation or
home of souls ; and the condition of these souls, their
faith, their hope, their love, their repentance, their power
over the insurgent forces within and the assailing forces
without them, their ability to maintain true communion
with the Invisible Source of life, is the point really worth
thinking of. The Church, whose life, in the judgment of
her members, consisteth in the abundance of outward
things which she possesseth, is in fair way to lose them.
It was not so when Peter said, " Silver and gold have I
none, but such as I have give I thee ;" ^ it will not be so
when the Bride of the Immaculate Lamb is finally sum-
moned to the Eternal Presence-Chamber.

1 Acts iii. 6.
S

2 74 The true life of man. [ISerm.

3. Once more, what is the view we individually take,
of whatever God may have intrusted us with, for a few
brief years, in the way of capital and income ? Do we
let our heart go out into it, thinking only or chiefly of
how we can increase its amount ? or do we bear in mind
that it is utterly outside our real selves, that we dispose
of it for a very short time, and shall have to answer for
our way of doing so ? In the Sermon on the Mount, our
Lord insists on the unselfish and sincere discharge of the
three leading duties of Almsgiving, Prayer, and Fasting ; ^
and of these, assuredly, the first is not the least. Only
when we remember that a man's life consisteth not in
the things which he possesseth, shall we know how to sit
easily to property and to handle it conscientiously. There
are, perhaps, some young men among my hearers who a
few years hence will dispose of considerable fortunes.
Depend on it, brethren, that much even here depends —
nothing, perhaps, less than the safety of the social struc-
ture in this country — on the way in which you will
understand your responsibilities. The strength of com-
munistic theories, here and everywhere else, consists, not
in any solid truth on which they rest, since generally
they do but cover a singular background of tangled fal-
lacies, but in the failure of so many among the wealthier
classes to understand the true relations of property to
life. Lent is a time for getting rid of illusions, and of
this master-illusion among the rest, that there is any
value whatever in property apart from tlie good use which
we can make of it. The communism of the younger
brother in the Gospel, and the resolute selfishness of the
elder are equally persistent and equally deplorable. The
real question for all of us is. What shall we hereafter desire
to have felt about that which God has withheld ? what
shall we desire to have done with that which by His gift

1 St. Matt. vi. 1-18,

XVII] The true life of man.

275

we have, be it much or little ? what shall we desire our-
selves to be, when we know that the end of life is close
upon us ? Most assuredly that question is vital : it cannot
be pondered too often or too carefully ; and in answering
it let us never forget that man's life — that in him which
will not perish at death — " consisteth not in the abund-
ance of the things which he possesseth."

SERMON XVIII.

THE DEATH OF THE SOUL.

Psalm vi. 5.

For in death no man rememhereth Thee : and who vjill give Thee
thanks in tlie pit ?

THE sixth is the first of those seven Psalms which the
Church of Christ has chosen as most fully express-
ing the true and deep feelings and resolves of a sincerely-
penitent soul. The other Penitential Psalms are Psalms
xxxii., xxxviii., li., cii., cxxx., cxliii. There are many
Psalms with aspirations too lofty and thoughts too wide
and deep for many of us to enter at all fully into them.
But if we are not men with high powers of contemplation
and insight, we are all of us sinners ; and, if it is to be
well with us hereafter, we must all, while in this life,
learn the lesson and utter the sincere and heartfelt
language of Christian repentance. And .therefore these
seven penitential Psalms are especially deserving of being
committed to memory : that we may say them to God,
when we are walking alone by day, or lying awake at
night, and so may learn to think and feel as true penitents
should ; that hereafter, through the Merits and Death of
Our Saviour Jesus Christ, we may be accepted, notwith-
standing our sins, in the last great Day.

Now of these seven, the sixth Psalm will be easily under-
stood by any one who has passed sleepless nights in which
temporal anxieties, dangers, or misfortunes have brought

276

The death of the sotd.

277

before him, as such things do, the reality and pressure of
his personal sins. The Psalmist sees that God is judging
him ; he prays that the judgment may be remedial and
not merely penal ; that God will not rebuke him in His
indignation nor chasten him in His sore displeasure.^
Earthly troubles and personal sins are blended in his
view ; they go hand in hand as cause with its swift-
following effect. God has turned away from him, as it
seems : he prays God to turn towards him again and to
rescue him, and he grounds this prayer on his strong
yearning to praise God in the time to come, as he could
no longer praise Him if he should die, for his troubles
are such as to threaten death ; and " in death no man
remembereth Thee : and who will give Thee thanks in
the pit? " Why is this ? Why is God remembered by no
man in death ? What is this " pit " in which no man
gives God thanks ?

It is clear, when we look to the words which David
used, that he means by death bodily death, and by the
" pit " that place of the departed which the Jews called
Sheol, just as it is conceived of and described in the
Jewish Scriptures, and especially in the Psalms. As the
writers of the Psalms think over the destiny of man, they
constantly have in their minds that yawning abyss into
which all that is mortal in the end finds its way — that
great underground meeting-place and abode of all the
dead, to which every earthly grave was, as it were, a gate,
in which all was still and silent, from which were shut
out alike the light of the sun and the Light of God's
Presence. Here no prayers were uttered : hence no praise
would ascend to God : here man still lived ; but it was a
maimed and imperfect and half-paralysed life, in which
all the higher energies of the soul had ceased to work.
This it was to be " among the dead, like unto them that

1 Ps. vi. I.

278

The death of the soul.

[Seem.

are wounded and lie in the grave, who are out of remem-
brance and are cut away from Thy Hand." ^ " For the
dead praise not Thee, 0 Lord : neither all they that go
down into silence." -

The Psalmist, however, knew of a blessed life beyond
SheoL Thus David, speaking in the Person of Christ,
exclaims : Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol, neither
wilt Thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption : Thou
shalt show me the Path of Life : in Thy Presence is the
fulness of Joy, and at Thy Plight Hand there are
pleasures for evermore." ^ Again : " As for me, I shall
behold Thy Presence in Eighteousness, and when I wake
up after Thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it !" * On
the other hand, it is said of men who in this Kfe are in
honour and have no understanding, that they lie in the
liell like sheep, and death gnaweth upon them.*

Here, of course, we must remind ourselves that God's
Pievelation is gradual. As He did not tell the world aU at
once what is His true Nature and what His Attributes :
so He did not tell men all at once, all that He has since
told them, about the destiny which awaits us after death.
Christ our Lord has carried the light of His own Pre-
sence into that dark underworld ; and we Christians know
more of its real character than did our Jewish ancestors
in faith. We know that those who die in a state of grace
enter not heaven as yet, but Paradise — an intermediate
state in which they are gradually becoming more and
more ready for the fully unveiled Beauty of the Most
Holy. We know that just as the lost enter upon a fearful
]' oking-for of judgment and fiery indignation,^ which is
1. it yet the place of punishment : so the saved are in an
a techamber of heaven, the door of which wiU open for
tl m at the last great day. Of this truth the supreme

1 Ps. Ixsxviii. 4. - Tb. crv. 17. s Tb. rvi. 11, 12.

Ps. xvii. 16. 5 7j_ xlix. 12, 14, 20. * Heb. i. 27.

XVIII]

The death of the soul.

279

Eevelation was made by our Lord upon the Cross. " To-
day " (He said to the penitent thief), " to-day shalt thou
be with Me in Paradise ; " ^ and the Paradise of which
He spoke was certainly neither heaven nor yet the place
of punishment. Is it conceivable that the enfranchised
and pardoned soul of the penitent thief was so paralysed
by death as to be unable to praise his Deliverer, or to pray
for others who might yet share in his deliverance ? No ;
the Christian dead, saved and believing, live, we may be
sure, no sterile life in that world of waiting and prepara-
tion: they too cry, " How long? " ^ they pray and they give
praise. They join already in the Eternal Song that rises
uninterruptedly within the Sanctuary of Heaven, though
as yet its echoes only reach them through the chinks
of the golden gates. Of them it cannot be said, that in
death they do not remember God, and that in their place
of waiting they cannot give Him thanks for the mercies of
Eedeeming Love.

When then we Christians use David's words we must
think less of that death of the body with which this life
closes than of the death of the soul, which may take place
while the body is still alive. David's words do not obtrude
this latter sense, but they do not exclude it : and of the
two senses which, like so much in Holy Scripture, they
bear, it is the deeper and more spiritual one. Worse far
than the death of the body is the death of the soul by sin.
Darker and more noisome far than the pit of Sheol, as
the Hebrews thought of it in their twilight of faith, is
the prison-house which even in this life may be tenanted
by a fallen soul, — a prison-house from which, humanly
speaking, a perverse will, and the tyranny of habit,
and repeated violations of tlie known Law of God, seem
to forbid escape. Certainly, in this moral death, no man
remembereth God ; God is, for a soul thus dead, as though

' St. Luke xxiii. 43. 2 Rev. vi. 9, 10.

The death of the soul.

He did not exist; His Power and His Justice, His
Tenderness and His Beauty are alike nothing to it.
Certainly in this pit of corruption a soul has not the
heart and nerve to praise the All-Holy ; it would think of
Him, if at all, with sulky and indolent aversion, as of a
Being whose very Perfections are to it but a grievance
and a reproach.

And yet there are times — while life lasts — when even
such a soul as this may be touched by the Voice and Hand
of the All-Merciful. One look like that which He turned
upon Peter in the Judgment Hall ; ^ one word like that
which Paul heard as he lay in the dust on the road to
Damascus,- may be the starting-point of the change. The
first act of the awakening soul is to pray, " Turn Thee, 0
Lord, and deliver my soul : 0 save me for Thy mercy's
sake. For in death no man remembereth Thee, and who
will give Thee thanks in the pit ? 0 Christ Jesus, AVho
camest into the world to save sinners, stretch forth Thy
pierced Hand in power and compassion ; and save — even
me."

At all times of the year, at all times of life, the great ,
change by which a soul, lost in sin, may, through God's
power, turn and give itself to God, is possible. May He
make this Lent a blessed time, perhaps to some of us
here, perhaps, through our prayers or efforts, to others
whom we know; that thus we may understand the Easter
Song, — ancient, but always new :

" 0 .Jesu, from the death of sin

Save us, we jiray ; so shalt Thou he
The everlasting perfect Joy

Of all the souls new born to Thee."

1 St. Luke xxii. 6i.

- Acts ix. 4.

SERMON XIX.

GUIDANCE OF THE PENITENT.

Psalm xxxii. 9.

/ inform thee and teach thee in the way wherein thou shall go ; and
I will rjuide thee with Mine Eye. — (Prayer-Book Version.)

THi6 promise occurs in the second of the seven Peni-
tential Psalms. The Psalm was written by David soon
after his great sin. The fifty-first Psalm belongs to the
first period of his repentance : in this thirty-second Psalm
David has had time enough to think more fully over his
guilt in the past, and to understand the happiness of being
indeed forgiven. And on this account, perhaps, the Psalm
is chosen by the Jews to be used at the close of the
service on the Day of Atonement; and you would all
remember how, in the Epistle to the Eomans, St. Paul
connects its first verse with that faith in our Lord Jesus
Christ, by which Jew and Gentile alike are justified,
because it brings us into true contact with Him Who is
the Propitiation for our sins.i

Now the words before us are not the Psalmist's words,
they are the immediate words of God, which the Psalmist
hears, as he prays before the Oracle. Up to this eighth verse,
the Psalmist is engaged in reviewing the past. " Blessed
is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered :
blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not
iniquity." 2 He knows the blessedness of the pardoned
soul. He knows, (it is impossible to convey by transla-

1 Rom. iv. 7, 8. 2 Ps. xxxii. i, 2.

281

282

Guidance of the Penitent. [Serm.

tion the exact sense of the Divine original,) he knows the
threefold misery of doing wrong. It is an offence against
God, or " transgression : " it is an inward defilement or
degradation, — " sin:" it is an "iniquity" which clings to the
soul, perhaps through life. Yet the transgression is lifted
from the soul, as though it were a heavy load ; the inward
defilement or sin is covered ; the iniquity, even though it
be not entirely expelled while life lasts, is not imputed.
And how has the Psalmist attained to this happiness?
He has confessed his sins. There was a long interval be-
tween the sin with Bathsheba and the visit of Nathan
the prophet, an interval which was spent in bitter anguish
of soul that had not been without its effects upon the bodily
health of David. " While I held my tongue, my bones
consumed away through my complaining all the day.
For Thy Hand was heavy upon me, by day and by night ;
my vital moisture was turned into the arid drought of
summer."^ Then came the resolution to own his sin in its
threefold aspect. " I acknowledged my sin unto Thee,
and mine iniquity have I not hid : I said, I will confess
my transgressions unto the Lord, and so Thou forgavest
the iniquity of my sin." The same three words in their
deep unchanging meaning are repeated : his wrong-doing
was owned before God, as a transgression of God's law ;
as an inward depravation and defilement ; as an iniquity
which clings to the soul for long years. But to confess
was to be pardoned.

For this happiness of pardon, David exclaims, " Every
one that is godly shall pray to Thee while the day of
acceptance lasts, in a time when Thou mayest be found ;"^
but in the time of great water-floods, of those troubles of life
which overwhelm so many souls, those troubles shall not
really come nigh the true penitent. They may sweep over
his outward life ; they will not touch that which, as St.

1 Ps. xxxii. 3, 4. - Ih. 5, 6. ■* Ih. 7.

XIX]

Gtiidance of the Penitent.

283

Paul has said, — speaking of Christians — is "hid with
Christ in God." ^ And the Psalmist knows this. " Thou,"
he cries, " 0 God, art a place to hide me in : Thou slialt
preserve me from trouble : Thou shalt compass me about
with songs of deliverance." -

Songs of deliverance ! The Psalmist would be thinking
of Miriam's Song after the escape of Israel from Egypt ; ^
of Deborah's song after the deliverance of Israel from the
power of Jabin.* The soul, too, has its escapes and its
deliverances ; and the hymns which celebrate these
great events in the history of Israel are echoed by the
Angels, among whom, we know, on the highest authority,
" there is joy m heaven over one sinner that repentetb."

Here there is a pause in the poem, and presently other
words follow ; not words which David himself utters, but
words which David hears from within the Oracle before
which he is praying. No mere man could well utter such
words ; they are the gracious and reassuring words of
God. "I will inform thee, and teach thee in the way
wherein thou shalt go : and I will guide thee with Mine
eye." They form an answer, these words, to the secret
anxiety which is so natural to all true penitents. " How
shall I know," the penitent asks, "that I may not fall
again ? " Life is so full of pitfalls, the flesh is so weak,
the devil so strong, the way so often doubtful, that it
seems impossible after penitence to start again with a
good hope of persevering. Sin may have been pardoned
as sin, but it remains as weakness; it remains as im-
paired spiritual sight ; it remains, if not as a habit, yet as
a propensity, which must be watched, checked, resisted.
" How hard," the penitent soul murmurs, " this continued,
weary, uphill struggle ; this unending anxiety, conflict,
suspense ! "

1 Col. iii. 3. 2 Ps. xxxii. 8. ^ Exod. xv. 1-21.

■» Judg. V. 1-31. 5 St, Lujjg 7, 10.

284

Guidance of the Penitent. [Seem.

No ; He Who pardons sin does not desert the penitent
sinner. As to Da-\dd before the Oracle, so to Christians
in the Church's Sanctuary, or in the closet at home. He
whispers : — " I will inform thee and teach thee in the
way wherein thou shalt go : and I will guide thee with
Mine Eye."

Xow, why should this promise of Divine Instruction
and Guidance thus follow on the sincere confession i
of sin ? The answer is. Because guidance is given
where it will be followed ; instruction where it will be
listened to. Unless man has a hunger and thirst for
righteousness he will not be filled ; ^ unless he has an
appetite for truth, truth would seem to him unwelcome
and repulsive. And the acknowledgment of sin, painful
and irksome as it is to flesh and blood, proves the exist-
ence of the appetite for righteousness wliich is so neces-
sary. The acknowledgment of sin is the way in which
this appetite expresses itself : it is an effort to be, at any-
rate, true. And this eftbrt is met more than half-way by
the God of Truth. " I will inform thee," He says, " and
teach thee in the way wherein thou shalt go : and I will
guide thee with Mine Eye." In souls which are distracted
by a double purpose, by the insincerities which in the
end deceive conscience itself, by the subterfuges and dis-
guises which obscure and overlie the true facts of life and
conscience, — in these God's Voice is not heard. Other
voices there are ; but they are the voices of self-love, of
self-delusion — voices sometimes loud and shrill, sometimes
soft and persuasive, but not such as to bring lasting peace
and joy to the troubled spirit. It is when a man has
turned a deaf ear to these voices; it is when he has
stripped off the disguises which hide him from himself,
though they cannot hide him from God ; it is when he
had taken his resolution, " I will acknowledge my sin

1 St. ilatt. V. 6.

XIX]

Guidance of the Penitent.

285

unto Thee, and mine unrighteousness have I not hid," ^
that God, Who is Truth, and Who loves truth, blesses this
effort to be true with the encouraging promise : — " Fear
not ; I will inform thee and teach thee in the way wherein
thou shalt go : and I will guide thee with Mine Eye."
Through outward events, and inward thoughts, and the
voice of friends, and a secret control which we feel and
cannot analyse, God does guide His servants.

We will not pursue the Psalm further, through the lines
in which the penitent king warns and encourages his
countrymen in the light of his own bitter and yet joyous
experience. But perhaps we too, if we have been trying
to turn this season of repentance to some account, must
also look a little forward, and ask ourselves whether we
shall be able to keep vv'hat we have won ; whether we can
hope to escape the fate of the man whom our Lord
describes in the Gospel, into whose soul the evil spirit,
that had been cast out, returned, and with seven other
spirits more wicked than himself.'^ Against this unspeak-
able calamity there is no provision save a humble, con-
stant dependence on God; a dependence which is
grounded on a sincere sense of our weakness, and of His
Love and Power ; a dependence which surely will be met
by the gracious promise : " I will inform thee and teach
thee in the way wherein thou shalt go : and I will guide
thee with Mine Eye." Most of God's Servants have been
helped on their road to heaven by particular passages of
Holy Scripture ; and this verse was constantly repeated,
both in his public ministrations and in private conversa-
tion on religious subjects, by Keble, the author of the
Christian Year. And there is reason to think, too, that it
was much in the thoughts of a greater than Keble, St.
Augustine. His biographer, Posidius, who was with him
during the last forty years of his life, tells us that during

1 Ps. xxxii. 5. 2 St. Matt. xii. 43-45.

286

Gtcidance of the Penitent.

the last ten days before he died he would not allow any
to come near him except the physician who visited him
and those who brought him his food, and that he caused
to be written upon the wall opposite his bed in very large
letters, so that his dying eyes might easily read them, the
Seven Penitential Psalms. Can we doubt that in that
last hour the gracious words were a support and encour-
agement to him : "I will inform thee and will teach thee
in the way wherein thou shalt go : and I will guide thee
with Mine Eye " ? May God grant that these words may
help us also through life's journey, and at its close, for
the sake of our only Saviour and Kedeemer, Jesus Christ,
to Whom, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, be all
power and glory !

SERMO^^ XX.

DISAPPEOVAL OF FEIENDS.

Psalm xxxviii. ii.

My lovers and my neighbours did stand looking upon my trouble : and my
kinsmen stood afar off. — (Peayer-Book Version.)

THE thirty-eighth, the third of the seven Penitential
Psalms, belongs to those months of David's life which
preceded the outbreak of Absalom's revolt. David's
conscience had then become fully alive to the deadly
nature of his sin with Bathsheba, involving as it did the
treacherous and cruel plan for the destruction of her
injured husband Uriah the Hittite, when this had also
been followed by the crimes of incest and murder on the
part of David's own children, Amnon and Absalom.
David must have reflected that a parent, of all people,
cannot hope to sin alone: that his example has an
unequalled power; — as for good, so certainly for evil. It
would seem from this Psalm that the remorse which David
felt preyed on his spirits, and even on his bodily health.
" There is no health in my flesh, because of Thy dis-
pleasure : neither is there any rest in my bones, by reason
of my sin. I am brought into so great trouble and misery,
that I go mourning all the day long. For my loins are
filled with a sore disease : and there is no whole part in
my body. I am feeble, and sore smitten ; ... my heart

287

288

Disapproval of Friends. [Serm.

panteth, my strength hath failed me : and the sight of
mine eyes is gone from me."^ This is a description of
extreme nervous depression, which rapidly passes into
active disease, and which, while it lasts, makes a man
unable to hold up his head and address himself to the
business of daily life. Such depression, whatever its
cause, is a heavy punishment, especially to men, like
David, of ardent temperaments. It is hard to bear when
it stands alone, and when everything round a man, the
kind and reassuring words of friends, the stability and
prosperity of outward circumstances,help him to endeavour
to shake it off, or at least to make the best of it. But in
David's case these alleviations were wanting. David had
known what it was to be popular, to be the object of the
enthusiasm of multitudes, and of the devoted affection of
a circle of trusted friends ; and his character was such as
to make him crave for and lean upon these tokens of
general and private attachment. He had been loved and
respected ; but now — he could not mistake it — he was so
no longer. The crimes which he had himself committed,
and the crimes of which his court had been the scene, had
sunk into the minds of his people, even of those among
his subjects who would be naturally well-affected towards
his person and his throne. They could not understand
how the sweet Psalmist of Israel - in the days of Saul, how
the man after God's own heart,^ how the favoured shepherd-
boy, who had been taken by God from following the ewes
that he might feed Jacob His people and Israel His inherit-
ance,* could stand forth in the fierce light which beats
upon an Eastern throne as a vulgar adulterer and mur-
derer : and so, we may be sure, with misgiving, and
reluctance, and pain, and shame, they kept aloof from

1 Ps. xxxviii. 3, 6-8, lo.
' I Sam. xiii. 14.

2 2 Sam. xxiii. i.
•> Ps. Ixxii. 78.

XX] Disappi'oval of Friends. 289

him. In no case, probably, would they have joined an
unfilial adventurer like Absalom, or have exchanged
distance and coldness for any more distinctly hostile
attitude ; but with David they could not be on their old
terms of intimate and effusive loyalty ; king though David
was, they kept at a distance from his court, and David
knew and felt what their estrangement meant. " My
lovers and my neighbours did stand looking upon my
trouble ; and my kinsmen stood afar off." If they who
were nearest to him were thus minded, could he wonder
that others went further ? Could he fail to hear the
mutterings of the rising storm which was to shake his
throne to its foundations, and drive him into temporary
exile, and put him in peril of his life, — the storm which
ever breaks, sooner or later, on kings, and states, as well as
on individual men, when the moral supports of human
life have been shattered by wrong-doing ? " They also
that sought after my life laid snares for me. And they
that went about to do me evil talked of wickedness, and
imagined deceit all the day long." ^

This alienation of David's friends suggests practical re-
flections in connection with the season of the year.

I . Why, you may ask, should David have cared so much
about it ? After all, it may be urged, if a man declines
our intimacy, we may regret it, but there is no more to be
said. Friends are a blessing, no doubt : but it is possible
to exaggerate the value of friendship, and a sensitive and
sympathetic temper is very likely, indeed, to do so.

My brethren, you must admit, on reflection, that this
is not the whole account of the matter. If a friend
represents nothing but a certain measure of personal good-
will towards us, if lie does not represent anything that
we instinctively respect, such as high character, or a holy

' P.s. xxxviii. 12.
T

2go Disapp7'ovaL of Friends. [Serm.

and consistent life, we may not feel keenly about the loss
of his good-will. But if he is a man whom we respect as
well as love, and whom we love because we respect him :
if he is a man who invites oiir confidence by his tender-
ness, his truthfulness, his simplicity, his courage : if we
are as sure of him as we can be of any man that his
intercourse with us is regulated, not by the wish to get
something from us, nor yet by the desire to give us
pleasure, but by a higher principle of duty, which rules
him throughout and consistently : then the withdrawal of
his friendship must be felt to be a serious blow, — nay, a
punishment. For we reflect that such a man as I have
described does not merely represent himself ; that he is a
representative upon earth of a higher Mind and Presence ;
and that when he stands aloof from us, and renounces
intercourse with us, we may already hear, though afar off,
the voice of the Judgment of God.

It is, of course, possible that a good man may withdraw
his friendship in consequence of a mistake. He may have
heard some report about his friend which is a malicious
slander, but the true character of which he has at the time
no means of discovering ; or he may err through an in-
firmity of judgment, to which the best men are from time
to time liable. There have been instances in our own
days, as in former generations, of good men, renouncing
a friendship for utterly insufficient or indeed baseless
reasons on account of an imagined wrong or a trivial
difference of opinion. "Wlien this is the case the object of
the alienation or coldness may fall back on his conscience
and on God. If he really finds nothing within to justify
the withdrawal of the friendship, he may make up his
mind to bear what he cannot help. His true Friend, of
Whose enduring tenderness aU earthly friendships are but
poor and faint shadows, is still with him. A psalmist

XX] Disapproval of Friends. 291

could eveu say, " When my father and my mother forsake
me, the Lord taketh me up." ^

But in David's present case this was impossible.
David's conscience told him that the friends of his person
and his throne who stood aloof from him were right ; that
God was with them, and not with himself; that their action
was a reflection of God's judgment. Conscience makes
cowards at any rate of those sinners who cannot succeed
in silencing its voice ; and the events of the day, and the
words and actions of men around, even when directed by
no distinct purpose, appear, to its sensitive anxiety, to echo
the Divine judgment. David may have even seen in the
estrangement of his friends more than some of them
meant ; his unquiet sense of guilt may have read into
their actions a purpose of which they were very imper-
fectly conscious. But the result was the same : David was
miserable. " ]\Iy lovers and my neighbours did stand
looking upon my trouble : and my kinsmen stood afar off."

2. He Who was of the house and lineage of David —
David's Son, and yet David's Lord,^ — knew in His bitter
Passion w])at it was to be utterly deserted by human
friends. When kind words and reassuring looks would
have been welcome to His Human Soul, all His disciples
forsook Him and fled.* But wliat a contrast between His
case and that of David ! If He suffered on this score, so
that David's words have a prophetic reference to Him,
He suffered only from wounded afi'ections, without any
misgiving or distress of conscience. If He was deserted
by His friends in His hour of darkness, the shame was
not His, but theirs. Their desertion of Him expressed not
God's judgment on sin, but the world's opposition to
sanctity; and Jesus could only think of them with com-

1 P.s. xxvii. 12.

3 St. Mark xii. 35-37.

^ St. liuke ii. 4.

■* St. Matt. xxvi. 56.

292 Disapproval of Friends. [Serm.

passion — never for a moment, as David thought of the
friends who kejDt aloof froin him, with a secret though
mortified reverence, based on a conviction that they were
right.

My brethren, if any one of us has to put up with cold-
ness and aversion, for which he knows there is no real
reason, he may think of and unite himself in spirit to our
Lord Jesus Christ ; praying Him to bless this note of like-
ness to that which He Himself condescended to endure
in His bitter Passion, and to vouchsafe to sanctify this
light affliction by the awful mental Pain which He con-
descended for our sakes to endure.

Human friends may be parted from, though not without
a heartache, when the Friend of friends is still on the
same terms as ever with the conscience and the will. Put
if any of us, like David, have lost friends for what
conscience tells us are good reasons, let us be sure that it
is well for us that we should have lost them. It is better
that all wrong-doing should be punished in this world
rather than in the next, and punished in a manner which
will lead us most surely and swiftly to return to God. To
be far from Him in truth, yet surrounded by kind treat-
ment, which implies that all is with us as it should be, is
to be in danger of living and dying in a perilous illu-
sion.

A rude awakening here on earth is doubtless trying to
flesh and blood; but anything is better than an awakening
deferred until the time when probation shall be over, and
the door of repentance shall be shut. David's bitter soli-
tariness prompted the prayer : " I will confess my wicked-
ness, and be sorry for my sin. Forsake me not, 0 Lord, my
God ; be not Thou far from me." 1 And we Christians know
that if God leaves us in His mercy to ourselves, to our

1 Ps. xxxviii. 18, 21.

XX] Disapproval of Friends. 293

own thoughts of shame and sorrow for acts and words
which He must condenm, and the condemnation of which
we seem to trace in the altered bearin" of those amons
His servants whom we respect and love ; yet that, " if
we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us
our sins," because " the Blood of Jesus Christ His Son
cleanseth from all sin." ^

1 1 St. John i. 7, 8.

SERMON XXI.

THE IDEA OF SIN.

Psalm li. 4.

Apainst Thee, Thee only, have I sinved, and done this evil in Thy sight; that
Thou mightest be jtistified when Thou speakest, and be clear when Thou
judgest.

"VrO one but David could have written this fifty-first

Psalm. The language is David's : the temper is
David's : the circumstances are David's. He must have
written it just after the visit of the prophet Nathan,
which had at once brought him to see the real character
of his sin with Bathsheba, and of his murder of Uriah,
and had left him penitent and forgiven. For in this
Psalm David prays not only or chiefly for cleansing and
forgiveness, but for a restoration of the graces which had
been lost by his sin ; and it is this feature of the Psalm
especially which has made it in all later ages the favourite
of all true penitents. Not only does David exclaim and

" Make me a clean heart, 0 God :
And renew a right sjiirit within me.
Cast me not away from Tliy presenee :
And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
O give me the comfort of Thy help again :
And establish mc with Thy princely Spirit." -

pray—

" Turn Thy face from mj' sins,
And Ijlot out all mine iniquities."'

But he adds

1 Ps. li. 9.

291

- lb. 10-12.

The Idea of Sin.

295

And these prayers presuppose the confession of the text :
" Against Thee only have I sinned."

This confession teaches us several truths ; but there is
one truth in particular which it teaches very plainly : it
teaches how to think of sin.

We employ many words to express the idea of wrong-
doing ; some of them describe it gently, some energetically,
but none of them so vividly and so truly as the word Sin.
When we speak of a mistake, we imply that something
has been done in consequence of a pardonable ignorance ;
when of a fault, we are thinking of what a man owes to
himself, his own standard of right action, which he has
failed to achieve ; when of a crime, we have more or less
distinctly before our minds the law of the land, the acts
by which it is violated, and its methods of asserting its
supremacy. But when we speak of sin — do what we
may — our thoughts turn away from self, away from
human standards of goodness, human law ; and we think
of God. Sin is more than a mistake, more than a fault,
more than a crime, although each of these words may
be labels which we have placed on acts that really
deserve the name of sin. Sin is an act of hostility to
God ; and the sense of sin is that altogether solitary and
unique impression tipon the soul which results from the
commission of such an act.

" Against Thee only have I sinned." David, in his
own Hebrew language, uses these words to describe his
wrong-doing ; but they all enter into what we mean
by Sin. " According to the multitude of Thy mercies,
blot out my transgressions : " here he thinks of sin as
an act which traverses the known law or will of God.
"Wash me throughly from my wickedness" — more literally,
my perversity : here he thinks of sin as a malign force
which has twisted his moral being from the right way.
And " Cleanse me from my sin : " here ho uses a dis-

296

The Idea of Sin.

[Serm,

tinct word from the other two, a word Avhich includes
and goes beyond them, and which describes an act whereby
a man misses the one true aim of action — namely, con-
formity to the Perfect Will. All of these three words
enter into and are expressed by one word, " sin," which
means an act or movement of the will freely directed
against God, and which, as such, transgresses His Will,
perverts man's nature, and misses the true aim and pur-
pose of man's life.

" Against Thee only have I sinned." This is what
every true penitent says in his heart of hearts when he
knows that he has offended God. His act may have
wronged his fellow-creatures, it may have injured himself.
David's did. David murdered a faithful servant ; degraded
a weak woman ; forfeited the old love and loyalty of his
subjects, and prepared the way for Absalom's rebellion.
But in his penitence these aspects and results of his act,
real as they were, are shut out from view. He sees before
him God, only God : God, Whose Power had saved him
from so many dangers : God, Whose Wisdom had guided
him through so many difficulties : God, Whose Goodness
had sustained and brightened his life in innumerable
ways. He had singled out his strongest, wisest, kindest
Friend to treat Him as an enemy. For sin, as I have said,
considered as an act of the will directed against God, is
an act of hostility ; it is an act which would, if possible,
annihilate God. This is not a rhetorical exaggeration, it
is a plain statement of fact. For consider. Sin violates
and defies the Moral Law of God : and what is God's
Moral Law ? Is it a law which, like the laws of nature,
as we call them, might conceivably have been other than
it is ? Certainly not. We can conceive much in nature
being very different from what it is — suns and stars moving
in larger or smaller cycles, men and animals of different
shapes ; the chemistry, the geology, the governing rules of

XXI]

The Idea of Sin.

297

the material universe, quite unlike what they actually are.
CJod's liberty in creating physical beings was in no way
shackled by His own laws, whether of force or matter.
But can we, if we believe in a Moral God, conceive Him
saying, " Thou mayest lie " ? " Thou mayest do murder " ?
We cannot, any more than we can conceive His denying
that things that are equal to the same are equal to one
another. The very mind and soul which He has given us
bears indelibly impressed on it His Moral Truth, just as
much as the first truths of mathematics. But then these
truths must have been always true ; and if always true,
then truths co-eternal with God ; and if co-eternal with
Him, not things outside Him, not independent of Him, for
in that case He would not be the Alone Eternal, but they
must have been essential laws or integral parts of His
Eternal Nature. The Moral Law is not a code which He
might have made other than it is ; it is His own Moral
Nature thrown into a shape which makes it applicable
and intelligible to us His creatures; and therefore in
violating it we are opposing, not something which He has
made, but might have made otherwise, like the laws of
nature, — but Himself. Sin, if it could, would destroy God;
and it is this, its malignant character, which underlies
David's passionate exclamation, " Against Thee only have
I sinned."

And this conviction explains the words that follow. I
make this confession, this protestation, the Psalmist says,
" that Thou mightest be justified when Thou speakest,
and be clear when Tliou judgest." Whatever sentence
God may pronounce must, David sees, be just. Man
must justify God, must admit and acknowledge His
Righteousness, however He may punish man's sin. For
the gravity of sin, when it is disentangled from the lower
conceptions of wrong-doing — mistake, fault, crime — and
seen to be an act of hostility directed against the Being

298

The Idea of Sin.

[Serm.

of God, warrants any penalty that God may impose.
Nothing is due to man but punishment ; nothing can be
hoped for from God but free forgiveness.

One of the most necessary concerns, then, of a serious
Christian at all times should be to accustom himself to
think of his sins in this way ; to free himself from the
false opinions and standards which lead him, in his self-
love, to make little of it. And this is the proper work of
Lent. Think over any offences which you would least wish
those whom you most love and respect on earth to know
you to have been guilty of, and then place them in the
Light of His Countenance, Who has known and knows all
about them, and "Who is much more deeply wronged by
them than any of His creatures. Think of the violent
gusts of anger, which would perhaps have taken the
life of its object if it could ; of the pride which has
ruled the mind and will, it may be for long periods of
time ; of the en\y which has darkened every relation
with others with the shadow of malignant passion ; of
the lies which have gone far to shatter the fundamental
sense of rectitude ; of the sloth, the gluttony, the lust,
which have left the mark of degradation deeply imprinted
on the body, more deeply still upon the immaterial spirit ;
and then reflect that each and all of these were wrongs
aimed at the Author of your life, the Author of all the
happiness with which it has been accompanied from youth
until now, the Being to Whom you are indebted for all
the blessings of these many years, for the means of grace
and for the hope of glory ; your Creator, your Eedeemer,
your Sanctifier.

And if this be done, David's words, like the old Jewish
law, will prove a schoolmaster to bring your soul really
to Christ ; ^ closer to Him perhaps than ever before ; for
the sense of sin discovers a want which He, and He alone,

1 Gal. iii. 24.

XXI]

The Idea of Sin.

299

can relieve. On the Cross of shame He was made to be
sin for us, Who knew no sin ; ^ He blotted out the haud-
writinff that was against us, nailin" it to His Cross : ^ He
is the Propitiation for our sins;'* These words of the
Apostles do not lose their virtue with the lapse of years ;
they are as true now as eighteen centuries ago. Now, as
then, guilty man has nothing that He can plead before
tlie Sanctity of God, save the free Self-sacrifice of the
All-merciful Eedeemer, in looking on Whom the Eternal
Father pardons the sin of the penitent.

" Tliou slialt purge me, 0 my Savioui-, with liyssop, and I sliall bo clean ;
Tliou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Thou sluilt make me hear of joy and gladness,
That the bones whicli Tliou hust broken may rejoice." ^

1 2 Cor. V. 21.
^ I St. John ii. 2.

- Col. ii. 14.
■« Ps. li. 7, 8.

Printed by T. ami A. Constablk, Printers to Her Majesty,
at tlic Eilinburgli University Press.

Date Due

... : 1 '4::

WR29 "51

Mv 1 ^ '5;

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. ^ '4

MAR 2 f 'gf

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